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Chapter 111 – Christmas Baby Please Come HomeBarb sighed. It had taken over an hour to get Shar to sleep once they got back to the motel. And the room really seemed a lot emptier without Alex there with them.
Maybe she could read a little, and then get some sleep, too. She wasn’t sure Shar would be ready to try the next tests if Alex wasn’t back by morning.
And Barb was worried. She tried not to tell Alex how much she worried every time Alex flew off to save the world, or at least chunks of it. But every time there was news coverage of Terawatt, Barb was slapped in the face with the knowledge that her baby girl was doing the most dangerous job on Earth, and there was nothing Barb could do to help. Except be supportive when Alex was home. And now Shar wanted to rush off and fight supervillains and monsters, too. At least Alex was eighteen now, and a lot more responsible and thoughtful than most eighteen-year-olds, at that. But Shar wasn’t even nine! There was no way she was letting Shar rush off and fight supervillains. Working with scientists on a jet-snowboard contraption with a safety harness was about as far as she was willing to go.
Barb had called home and talked with George and Annie. They went out to dinner, instead of fixing something themselves. Naturally. She rolled her eyes again.
All right, Annie had to fly back to school tomorrow morning, so hopefully George was working with Annie on laundry and packing. And whatever chemistry experiments they were doing in the garage with her not home to glare at George about.
She missed Annie, and she missed not being able to see Annie off at the airport. Her children were growing up too fast. Annie was already only coming home for holidays. Alex was jetting around the world doing things Barb couldn’t imagine having the courage to do.
Barb was suddenly seized with an urge to go over and cuddle Shar’s sleeping form.
“ALEX!” Shar was awake, and screaming in terror. “ALEX!”
Barb rushed over and held Shar. “Honey, you’re just having a nightmare.”
Shar hollered, “No! I’m not! Alex is hurt! And she needs our help! RIGHT NOW! I felt it!”
Barb was about to dismiss it all as a nightmare, but she remembered too much. Shar’s parents, who supposedly had telepathy between each other. Shar knowing when the ‘nice bake sale lady’ was lying to Barb about the proceeds. Shar knowing when Alex was on her way home. Shar knowing who Barb was about to call on the phone. Alex using Shar as a psychic lie detector when Marsha came over. Shar knowing what George bought her for Christmas.
Oh, God, what if Shar was right?
She hung onto Shar and grabbed the sheet of phone numbers Captain Miller had given her. She dialed Jack’s cell phone first.
“O’Neill here.”
“Jack, it’s Barb. Shar just woke up certain that Alex is hurt and needs help.”
She was expecting him to brush her off. But he was a lot sharper than he pretended. He carefully asked, “Was this a nightmare, or a real psychic impression?”
She admitted, “I … don’t know. I want to say ‘nightmare’, but Shar’s been demonstrating real psychic abilities, and she does seem to have a connection with Alex …”
Shar was clinging to her, so Shar heard everything. “It was real! There was a monster, a really really big monster, and Alex got hurt, and I think a … a building fell on her, and we have to save her!”
Jack said, “Hang on one sec, okay?” The line went dead.
It wasn’t one second. It was over a minute. And when Jack came back on, he sounded upset. “Acid Burn just lost contact with Terawatt. The Russians had part of their Pacific Fleet in the Petropavlovsk harbor, and armed forces on the ground, and a chopper squadron in the air, and they’ve lost contact with all of them. I think it’s pretty unlikely Shar chose this very second just to have a nightmare. I’ve heard from Burn and Terawatt both about Shar, and somebody who could guess what the fortune in her fortune cookie said before she opened it could very well have picked up something just now.”
Shar insisted, “You need to take me with you!”
Jack said, “Barb, put it on speakerphone.” Once she did, he insisted, “Charlene, there is no way I’m taking an almost-nine-year-old into what’s going to look like a war zone. Even if it’s all over by the time we get there, there’s going to be fires and destruction and dead bodies and stuff that’ll probably make the Shop HQ op look like a square dance.”
Shar begged, “Uncle Jack, I know it’ll be bad. Really bad. But no one’s ever gonna find Alex if you don’t take me!”
Barb wished she hadn’t seen any of those satellite images that Jack had brought to Jo Lupo’s apartment. But she had. And if there were hundreds of crushed buildings in that town, it might take months to dig through all the wreckage to find Alex. And if it took that long, Alex wouldn’t survive.
She couldn’t stop the tears streaming down her face. Was she risking one child to try and save another? Did Alex stand a chance if Shar didn’t go? Would Shar be safe if Jack took her there?
She tried not to cry out loud as she asked, “Jack, if you took Shar, would there be any fighting when you got there?”
Jack said, “It’s probably all over already. If we take one of the Cessnas, we’d need hours to get there. We’d end up landing at the start of the rescue effort. Even assuming any runways there are still usable.”
Shar pleaded, “Uncle Jack, I can find her! I know I can!”
Jack carefully explained, “Shar, being able to find her is completely different from being able to get to her. This is the kind of problem rescue operations have all the time after earthquakes, and you have no idea how awful it is, knowing there’s someone down there and knowing you cannot get to them.”
Shar sobbed, “Alex isn’t a regular person. She can squeeze through cracks nobody else can. We can save her. I know it!”
Jack thought it over for long seconds. “Barb, if Shar can get us to the right building, we’ve got a chance. And … Oh, hang on.”
Barb waited impatiently. She had a horrible feeling she was about to have to make a choice that might either save one of her children or doom another one.
Jack came back on. “Elements of the Russian Pacific Fleet outside of Petropavlovsk are on the move right this second, hauling south at their top speed. USPACOM — that’s our Pacific Command — thinks they may be chasing something, but the Russians won’t admit to anything. They just keep telling our guys to ask someone higher up who isn’t under sealed orders. And the higher-ups aren’t talking. Yet.”
Barb asked, “So … the threat’s gone?”
“As far as we know,” Jack said. “I’m not going to lie. There may be after-effects, or smaller threats still in the battle zone, or consequences no one’s even thought about.”
Barb thought about those giant clam monsters down in Santa Monica. Who could possibly handle something like them? Except her younger daughter Alex … and the little girl she was holding in her arms. She decided.
“Jack, if you need Shar along, she can go. But you need to take me, too.”
“Not a chance,” Jack insisted. “I let you come down here because it’s safe, and the snowboard project is a partly-civilian operation you have the clearance to see.”
“I … have clearance?” Barb wondered.
“Barb, you’re part of Team Terawatt. You routinely assist Terawatt and Acid Burn on matters of national defense. Of course I made sure you’re down as having clearance for this kind of stuff. George, too. But you are not cleared to go on any kind of op, no matter what. Pyre has that clearance, even if I’m not going to let her tangle with anything until she’s a hell of a lot older. Action Girl and Terawatt and Klar are already giving me gray hair. More gray hair. You can say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on this for Pyre, but no matter what you say, you are not going!”
She felt like a private who had just been chewed out by a commanding officer. She thought about it while Shar whined, and finally said, “Yes. Shar — Pyre — can go. But she’ll need some winter clothes that fit.”
“Already on it,” Jack told her. “Sergeant Scott will be there to pick her up in ten minutes. Just in case, toss two changes of clothes into a bag. This is not going to be pristine.”
Shar hugged her and asked, “Can I wait outside? Please?”
Barb sighed. “Oh, all right. But don’t leave until I have your go-bag ready. And do everything Uncle Jack says, no matter what, or there are going to be big, big punishments in store for you when you get home.”
Shar hugged her and smiled. “We’ll save Alex and everything will be great! You’ll see!”
Barb started pulling clothes out of the dresser, and she heard the door slam behind her.
* * *
Shar stood in front of the ‘apartment’ where Sergeant Scott would be pulling up in a couple of minutes. She didn’t like what she was about to do, but she was going to do it anyway. And if it didn’t work, she was going to be in so much trouble.
If it did work, she would be in even more trouble, but that would be a lot later.
The Humvee pulled up, and she gave the sergeant her cutest smile. “Hi! Uncle Jack said this stuff has to go in the hold of the jet, and Aunt Barb’s gonna be down any second now with a bag for me. Are you gonna go, too? I really like the clothes you bought me, I wear ’em all the time!”
* * *
Jack was on a Cessna on his way into what had been a battlefield only hours earlier, and he was taking an eight-year-old along. An eight-year-old who all by herself was a WMD, but still an eight-year-old. An eight-year-old who was worried enough that she was curled up in his lap because she couldn’t sleep in her own seat.
Shar was asleep in his arms, and he was pretending to ignore the sly looks from Finn and the sergeants. But he was having second thoughts about the whole ‘no more children’ position he’d taken with Willow. A little Willow-shaped toddler, maybe with bright red hair and more brains than any kid had a right to have, would be the cutest thing this side of My Little Pony.
Assuming Willow ever talked to him again if Shar got even a papercut on this op. And he had a pretty good idea how mad at him Alex was going to be, even if Pyre did rescue Terawatt. He knew just how furious he would be in Alex’s position.
Finn quietly said, “Sir, your friend Police Captain Kolokoltsev apparently made a couple of phone calls on your behalf, and we have a surviving police officer on the horn.”
Jack whispered, “You take it.”
Finn nodded and then slipped into pretty fluent Russian. Jack knew from Finn’s files that he spoke pretty good Russian and German from his years growing up in an Iowa farming area that had a huge number of people who were descended from Russian and German immigrants. Finn had picked up Arabic and Farsi while at West Point. He also claimed his wife Samantha spoke Spanish, Portuguese, and more than half a dozen African languages thanks to years in the Peace Corps and Doctors Without Borders. Jack had a feeling that when the Finns had kids, they’d be smart enough to put Bill Lee out of business.
After a few minutes, Finn hung up and reported. “Colonel, they’ve got major problems on the ground. The airport’s intact but has no power, so we’ll have to land at night on a runway lit by oil drum fires. The whole town’s powerless, since whatever it was took out the electrical plant along with everything else. They’ve got oil and gas heating for refugees, but the attack was so fast that not many people in the path got out of their homes to anyplace safe. There are a dozen places where they’ve got massive radiation counts. Whatever it was, it used an attack that was powerful enough that it literally melted tanks and irradiated the surrounding areas. Their docks are one big inferno, and they lost most of their police force and fire department in the attack. The sergeant says that surviving witnesses are making vastly different claims, but it seems to have been some kind of giant monster, maybe hundreds of feet tall, but no one agrees on height, shape, color, any of that.”
Jack just nodded and held onto a sleeping child. A child that only a complete asshole would take into a situation like that. He had no doubt that he was going to hell for this one, but if he could keep Shar safe, and find a way to rescue Terawatt, it would be worth it. The needs of the many outweighed the needs of the Jack O’Neills.
* * *
It was eight in the morning Roswell time when they soared down over the harbor. Jack looked out the window and refused to wince. It was 0200 local time, and the destruction was pretty obvious from all the fires. There was a steep ‘A’ of damage showing where whatever-it-was had come out of the harbor, wiped out everything the Russians could throw at it, then gone straight to that big burned area, and then retreated back to the water.
He really wanted to know what the hell was going on, because every single target city looked like this. If there was some sort of beacon that The Collective planted that attracted the thing inland, then that would explain the damage paths and the level of control they seemed to have over the damn thing. It swims along, senses the beacon that maybe they’ve trained it to hate, it goes right for it, destroys it utterly, and then goes back into the water until it senses the next beacon.
If that was it, then Jack needed to alert every coastal town within a thousand miles, and they needed to find whatever frequency these beacons emitted. But the beacon would have to be phenomenally powerful to attract something maybe hundreds of miles away and underwater. How were people not noticing something like that? Wouldn’t it be hammering everyone’s radios or televisions or shortwave radios?
And something told him Maggie Walsh was behind this mess, too. So far, her monster count made Victor Frankenstein look like a pansy.
Shar stirred in his arms and wiggled. “I gotta go potty!” He helped her into the tiny jet bathroom and waited outside in case she needed help with anything.
She came out a minute later and asked, “Are we there yet?”
He said, “Yeah. We’re about to land. How about sitting in your seat and strapping in tight, because I really have no idea if the runway is clear.”
She hopped to it like a good little soldier. He was such a bastard for bringing her along.
She asked, “Do I need to change into my superheroine uniform, because I brought it along.”
He couldn’t help smiling. “No, I think we’ll be traveling incognito today.”
“In what-neato?”
He told her, “It means we won’t wear our awesomely cool uniforms because we’re being subtle. And we have to make sure we don’t say that out loud, because the locals won’t like it.”
“Okay!”
He smiled to himself. How did Barb and George manage not to just give in every time Shar asked for something? She certainly had Auntie Willow wrapped around her finger.
Finn reported, “Sir, they have a small chopper they’re going to put at our disposal, as long as we don’t need it for too long. They’re limited in what they can do with it until dawn. And they have an old jeep for us, too.”
Jack nodded and said, “Good work, major.” He looked at his tiny psychic and asked, “What do we need to do to find Alex?”
She thought hard and said, “I think we gotta go from the ocean in, where Alex was doing the fighting. If we can ride in that helicopter it oughta be okay.”
Jack had his own thoughts on the matter. If Terawatt was the last thing standing between this thing and its target, then the last area where he could see signs of battle was probably the place to look for Alex.
For Alex’s body. He didn’t like thinking that way, but it was possible that Alex hadn’t survived. Terawatt was tough, but dropping a building on her? Even Terawatt might not be able to survive that. He had his fingers crossed, but he’d had to sign too many death notifications to have any illusions about this. Still, if there was the slightest chance, he was going for it.
Despite his concerns, the jet landed with no trouble. The runway had been bracketed with fires in oil drums, so the pilots were able to land pretty easily. The damage across the town was all at least three miles from the airport. And they weren’t the first jet in. There were two Russian jets already on the tarmac. One was obviously military, so someone was investigating things or else covering up what they had discovered. The other was obviously aid, given the food and supplies being off-loaded.
Jack and Riley Finn stepped off the jet and found a stiff-looking Russian Army officer with a large adjutant who obviously had plenty of concealed weaponry that wasn’t all that concealed. Jack whispered, “Finn, you’re up.”
Finn stepped off the jet and had a nice little chat with a guy who turned out to be named Colonel Kalenkov. Jack just sort of eavesdropped from right outside the jet, which wasn’t hard when the colonel was a little loud. The only hard part was that Jack’s Russian was not good enough to follow absolutely everything they were saying. A wadded-up paper cup hit him in the back. There was no way Scott or Walters would do that. He stepped back to the jet and leaned backward in the open doorway. Shar tugged on Jack’s sleeve and whispered, “He’s really scared. He’s hoping we know what’s going on and we’ll tell him.”
Well, that was handy to know. “Thank you, Shar. You’re a really big help.”
Jack stepped away from the jet and walked over to the colonel and his musclebound adjutant. “Colonel, I’m Colonel O’Neill. I’m hoping your English is better than my Russian.”
“Yes, my English is very well.”
Oh. Well, his English was still probably better than Jack’s Russian. Jack said, “We need to perform a rescue mission. We have reason to believe Terawatt flew in to fight … whatever the hell this was, and she is buried in the rubble of one of the buildings. So we brought a tracker to find Terawatt, and hopefully we can help her free herself without a whole ton of trouble. If we can do that, then she can give us a situation report and we can finally know just what the hell we’re up against.”
“We, colonel?”
Jack gave it his best ‘Minnesota boy’ shrug. “Yeah. We. This is an international crisis, and the U.S. has already lost the USS Cole. We’re in this with you. We’re gonna find out what the hell this thing is, and how to stop it, and we’re gonna do whatever we can to help you out. And if the politicians don’t like that, they can go screw themselves.”
Kalenkov obviously didn’t know whether to take Jack at face value, so Jack said, “We need to take a helicopter up and find our superheroine, and then we need to figure out what it’s going to take to get her out, and then I’m going to want you in on the debriefing when she tells us what came out of the water here. And in six other Russian seacoast towns.”
Kalenkov reacted to that. But Jack had already thought about it, and he figured his best option was to make it clear he knew more than what the Russians wanted known.
Jack told Sergeant Scott, “Get Pyre’s uniform out of the hold and make sure she’s wearing it before she gets off the plane. We’re going to have a witness.” It looked like it was going to be a good thing the little stinker brought her super-suit along. He wondered if she’d had a premonition she’d need it.
While Scott hopped to it, Jack lied, “We have a 54-year-old dwarf who has superpowers, too. She’ll be disguised in a uniform so you can come with us. Okay?”
Kalenkov had a grumpy discussion with his minion, and finally Jack said, “How about your sergeant and my two sergeants take the jeep and follow us around?”
The colonel had another argument with his adjutant, and finally the bulky minion sagged and reluctantly gave in. And really, was it necessary that the sergeant looked like an oversized hitman for a Bond villain? What was the Russian equivalent of ‘Grant’? Jack was pretty sure he knew the Russian word for ‘Jaws’.
Jack climbed into the chopper with Pyre, Finn, and the colonel. Finn got up in the co-pilot’s seat to interact better with the pilot. Then they took off for the harbor.
Finn directed the pilot along the inbound path the thing took, while Kalenkov failed to deal with someone who looked like a little kid. “Are you really fifty-four years old?”
Jack gave Shar a wink, so she played along. In a pretty good imitation of a cranky old lady, she complained, “Fifty-five. The colonel missed my last birthday.” Jack bit the inside of his mouth to keep from grinning.
Shar stared out her window as they flew low over the devastation. Jack really didn’t want to run into whatever could turn a heavy tank squad into molten slag like that. Not that he had much of a chance of avoiding it, when he was actively hunting the damn thing.
“There! That’s the building!” Shar pointed frantically.
Jack looked. It was just past the last of the wide areas of devastation, and after that point, the path of destruction went back to about a hundred fifty feet wide and made straight for the spot where the circle of ruin was. It had been a five or six story building, and now it was a tipped-over pile of rubble. He said, “Finn, have the pilot put us down as close to here as we can manage.” He thought about the devastated areas and added, “And check for radioactivity before landing.”
It turned out that his basic suspicious nature was standing him in good stead, because there were some large areas that were radioactive enough to fry unprotected people. Still, with all the areas that were utterly flattened, the pilot was able to put them down only half a block away, in an area that looked like it had been trampled by some size eight gazillion extra-extra wide feet. Scott came roaring up in his jeep, and the big minion jumped out to check that Jack hadn’t shot Colonel Kalenkov or stabbed him with a poisoned umbrella tip or anything.
They walked through the rubble to where the ex-building was. Jack asked, “Pyre, you’re sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. She’s in there. We gotta get her out.”
Crap. Jack could tell that this was going to be a massive project that the town couldn’t afford to tackle any time soon. That left him with two alternatives, and he didn’t like either. He asked, “Can you do it by yourself?”
She stared hard at the building and finally said, “Yeah. But I’ll need everyone else to stay way back here.”
“Unh-uh,” Jack said. “No way. If you’re going in there, I’m going, too.”
Finn asked, “Pyre, what’s your tactical plan?”
Shar looked puzzled for a second at his words, and then she got it. She said, “I need to get up on top of that stuff and slice off the end facing us. I think she’ll be able to get out if I do that.”
Kalenkov looked more than a little shocked. “She can just … slice off … the side of a building?”
Jack grimaced. “Yeah. And you really do not want to see what she can do when she’s pissed off at you.”
Finn looked down at Shar and said, “Fine.” He turned his head. “Colonel, I’m going to get some climbing rope and a couple of harnesses out of the gear we tossed into the jeep. Then I’ll take Pyre up there and make sure she’s safe when she does the cutting.”
Jack frowned, but said, “Good plan, major.” He didn’t say what he was thinking, namely, ‘what are you going to do to make sure you’re safe when she does the cutting?’
Riley put on his climbing harness, then adjusted the heck out of a second one so it would fit Pyre well enough. He walked her over to a section of the building that was a rough incline, instead of a messy vertical rock climb. Instead of seventy vertical feet of building, it was about eighty feet of forty degree slope. And it was relatively close to the end she wanted to work on. Then he explained, “Okay. I’ll climb till I’m halfway up, and then I’ll help you climb up by pulling on the rope while you walk up the slope. Then you stay put while I do the same thing again.” He gave her a big smile.
“Okay.”
He just knew it was fundamentally wrong to let an eight-year-old do this. Even if she could do this, when no one else on Earth could.
It was also crazy that an eight-year-old had this kind of power. Maggie Walsh was an incredibly evil woman, and he was thankful that the colonel had been sharp enough to turn her down for a job with the SRI, or else they would probably be trapped following Walsh’s directives right this second.
He clambered up easily, found a spot to tie off the rope, and gave Pyre a wave. She hiked right up, hanging onto the rope while he reeled it in. Once he got her situated, she grinned. “That was fun!”
He was just hoping nothing went wrong, and everything stayed ‘fun’.
He repeated the whole thing, and got Pyre up to the top of what was left of the building. Whatever had done this was massively powerful. Knocking over and smashing hundreds of buildings was way out of his weight class. This was more ‘force of nature’ instead of ‘mutated whatever’. He’d seen a hurricane that did less damage than this.
He took the rope that was hooked to her harness and drove a piton into the concrete. He hooked a carabiner to the piton and ran the rope through it. Then he let her walk forward toward the edge. He said, “If something gives way, I’ve got you. Okay? You may fall a foot or two, but that’ll be all, because I’ve got you hooked up to this right back here.”
“Okay.” But she sounded a little less certain.
Smart girl. When he’d taken that course in military mountaineering, the instructor had said, “There are old climbers, and there are bold climbers, but there are no old, bold climbers.” Unlike some of the other soldiers taking that course, Riley could take a hint.
She looked at him and said, “You stay. I go. No following.” After the other day, he recognized the quote. He wasn’t laughing. Then she walked until she was about four feet from a really unstable edge.
She took a deep breath, and suddenly the cold temperatures went away. It was warm up there. Uncomfortably warm. Her hair blew in a breeze that wasn’t natural, and there was a light around her hands that made it look like her whole body was glowing. The heat increased until there was a shimmer in the air around her.
He suddenly knew what had been the very last sight ever for a bunch of Shop security men. It didn’t reassure him.
She took another deep breath, and pointed downward with her hands. Jets of fire poured from her palms and sliced into the concrete.
Riley wondered if Lupo had any idea what firebending was going to look like. If she did, she was even braver than he thought.
The fire jetted from Pyre’s palms in two-inch-wide columns that punched into the concrete like throwing spikes into styrofoam. The phrase ‘a hot knife through butter’ had never seemed more appropriate.
Pyre took a couple of steps to one side, and he fed her a little rope so she wouldn’t come up short. The section she had been cutting simply fell away like she had sliced it until it had nothing holding it to the wall. She slowly moved her hands along the concrete until that section fell away also.
“O’Neill to Finn. It looks like she just hacked off a ten-foot-high slab of wall. Make that two slabs.”
He answered, “Finn to O’Neill. That’s what it looks like from up here.”
“O’Neill to Finn. I can see some cracks and crevices in the under-surface now. Maybe this is gonna work.”
He replied, “Finn to O’Neill. I don’t know what else to try if this doesn’t, sir. We don’t have all that much C-4 in the Cessna.”
“O’Neill. We can get more C-4 if we have to. USPACOM can chopper some in, with some of their SEAL teams, and we can blow the endcap off. I just don’t think the building would appreciate it.”
Pyre sliced off another ten feet, and then another. By then, she had cut a ten-foot-deep channel through about forty horizontal feet of reinforced concrete. He wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t seen it. But that level of control was astonishing. Combined with that level of power, it was pretty frightening.
She started back the way she came, slowly cutting into the concrete that was now ten feet below the edge. The fire was like a two-inch-wide laser beam, so maybe it didn’t matter how far down she needed to cut.
He heard a section of wall collapse, and then another. He just hoped the section of building they were standing on didn’t get undermined by losing that lateral support she was cutting away.
In a few more minutes, she had another complete ten-foot-high swath cut away. He asked, “How are you holding up?”
She groaned. “I’m pretty tired, and it’s real hard to keep it under control. But the next chunk ought to do it.”
She slowly scooted along the edge, slicing back the way she had just come. He could hear a slab fall. Then another. And another.
With a sigh she said, “That oughta do it. Now I just need to make sure she can see there’s a way out.” She casually tossed a fireball down onto the wreckage below.
She walked back over to him, and she looked fairly unsteady. He said, “How about we sit down for a minute and rest? What do you say?”
She sagged, and he grabbed her just in case she was about to fall over. “I could use a nap. Don’t tell Aunt Barb.”
Riley suddenly heard the colonel whoop with excitement. “YES!”
And a silvery form flew up from where Pyre had been cutting. Riley felt an immense sensation of relief.
Brave superheroine Pyre became eight-year-old Shar and burst into tears. “Alex! I was so scared I couldn’t save you, and you were all trapped in a dark creepy crack, and … I was really scared!”
The silvery form turned into normal Terawatt, who flew over and hugged Shar fiercely. Alex stroked Shar’s hair and said, “But you did it. You were a real superheroine, and you saved me, and everything.” She looked up at Riley. “And you, too. Thanks.”
“Thank the colonel. He was the one who believed she had a real psychic event, and not a nightmare, and he was the one who talked your mom into letting him bring her, and he was the one who got us here.”
Alex hugged the little girl and asked, “So why did Pinkie Pie let you wear your uniform?”
Shar sobbed, “The Russian colonel who’s trying to find out what’s going on and he’s trying to be really cranky but really he’s scared.”
Riley clarified, “We have a couple of observers, and the colonel wanted her ID to remain secret, but he needs the Russians to at least cooperate a little bit.”
Alex asked, “Where did it go?”
“Part of the Russian Pacific Fleet headed due south, so we think they’re chasing it,” he told her.
Alex winced. “But isn’t due south … Japan?”
Riley nodded unhappily. “If we can’t stop this thing, it’s likely to be swimming into some major Japanese harbors. If it comes down the east coast of Japan, it’s likely to hit Sendai first. Then Tokyo. Then maybe Nagoya, or even Osaka.”
Alex unhappily said, “I’m not sure we can stop this thing without an Option Failsafe.”
Riley suddenly felt an ice cold shiver run down his spine, How bad did this have to be if sweet, gentle Alex was talking about unleashing a nuclear bomb?