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Chapter 112 – Christmas at Ground ZeroJack felt sick. Not that he was going to show it, or admit it. Terawatt was alive and on her feet, but … well, she looked like crap. He wasn’t going to say that out loud, but she did not look like Alex. Normally, Terawatt looked indestructible. You threw her at the canopy of a Blackbird, you let her eject at five hundred miles an hour, and her hair wasn’t even out of place.
Alex looked like she’d been thrown through a concrete wall, then had a building dropped on her head. Without the helmet on, she looked battered and bruised, and underneath her uniform there was probably more of the same.
A lot more. She looked worse than after the explosion in the spider cave. He was a complete and utter bastard, doing this to an eighteen-year-old girl, and then dragging Shar in to do the rescue. Even worse, he knew he’d do it again, simply because he didn’t have any other choices. He was up against an international organization that had to have more money than most entire countries could cough up, and apparently had no qualms about wiping out maybe 99.99% of the world’s population. The Collective wasn’t the IRA or al-Qaeda. They were far worse. They were more like one of those stupid sci-fi alien invasion movies where the bad aliens wanted the entire planet, just without those pesky homo sapiens running around dirtying it up.
He introduced Terawatt to the Russian colonel, and she started explaining. Only it sounded crazy. Well, it would have sounded crazy a few years ago, before he found out there were chemicals that could turn animals into mutant things, and then he found out there were chemicals that could turn people into supervillains, and then he found out there was actually one superheroine out there, and then he found out you could create a giant spider the size of a basketball gym, and then …
So they had another Maggie Walsh Special: a freaking super-dinosaur that was a thousand times the mass of a real dinosaur, and was amphibious, and had a nuclear blast for halitosis, and couldn’t be stopped by conventional weaponry.
And naturally, Colonel Kalenkov didn’t want to believe her.
Finn stepped in. “Sir, we don’t have time to convince Colonel Kalenkov. We need to get moving to Japan. Depending on whether it takes the east or west side of the country, we need to defend Sapporo or Sendai first, and then maybe even Tokyo.”
Jack snorted. “Tokyo. Great. I’ll bet that Watanabe guy can’t wait to see us again.”
Kalenkov asked, “Why would he wait to see you again?”
Jack explained, “It was one of my teams, plus Terawatt, that fought the silicates that nearly broke loose and wiped out Tokyo this past summer.”
Terawatt muttered, “Those things were a headache.”
Jack refrained from pointing out that for everyone else on Earth, they were terrifying, unstoppable nightmares. For Terawatt, they had just been a ‘headache’.
He said, “Come on, Terawatt. Let’s get you to the nice, warm jet, and get some food into you, and get you patched up. Maybe there’s some good news from my IT people.”
* * *
Alex was glad there were some blankets in the jeep, because her extremely awesome insulated suit was shot. It was ripped and busted and just generally hammered. Pretty much like her. She felt bruised all over, and it hurt to sit down, and she had a knot on the back of her head, and her ribs felt sore, and her knees and ankles hurt when she walked.
On the other hand, she’d probably gotten hurt almost as bad when she was eleven and she crashed her bike. She was just being a wimp. Jack had gotten hurt worse in New York, and then had Willow wanting him to make with the humpty dance 24×7 as soon as he got home. Jo had gotten hurt way worse in that cave in Arizona. And Hanna had gotten hurt way, WAY worse, and just not let it stop her in the least.
At least it was warm inside the jet, once they got the door closed. And there were energy bars in her pockets that were squished but still edible, so Alex ate most of them. However, Shar wanted to be right in Alex’s lap, even if Shar’s weight made Alex’s hips and butt hurt even more. Sergeant Scott fixed MREs for everyone, and even found one Shar liked. Alex had three, along with the energy bars. They were pretty tasty when you were starving after being stuck in silvery form for maybe ten hours.
Jack gave her a grin. “We’ve got a gym bag along, so we have a replacement suit, and even a replacement thermal suit to go over it. But I’d kinda like you to let Ol’ Doc Finn here look you over and make sure you’re still in one piece.”
She rolled her eyes. At least that didn’t hurt. “Jack, you know I’m in one piece.”
He teased, “Are you sure? Your leg’s not gonna fall off if you take your suit off?” Then he got serious. “You got hammered by something the size of a mountain and slammed through a concrete wall, then got an entire building dropped on you. I’d feel a lot better if I knew you weren’t having internal bleeding or something just as serious.”
Riley said, “If you just morph out of the thermal suit and take off the boots, I can check you over. I’d rather have you looked at by a real doctor, but I don’t think we have that option right here.”
The sat phone went off, and Jack answered it. “O’Neill.”
Willow’s AutoTuned voice came through loud and clear. “Is Tera okay? Please tell me she’s okay, I don’t know what I’m gonna do if she’s not okay, and I know she keeps going off to do these things and sometimes she gets hurt, but I’m really worried, and I hardly got any sleep after you told me she might be out there buried under a building or something —”
Captainmal cut in, “And we’re pretty worried, too.”
“She’s right here,” Jack said. “Pyre found her and pretty much burned a building in half to get her out.”
Alex raised her voice a little so Willow would hear her. “I’m right here. And Pyre saved me. She’s a real superheroine, even if she’s too young to get brought here.” She gave Jack a glare.
Shar bounced excitedly, which really hurt Alex, especially right across the thighs and through the hips. “Aunt Barb said I could go.”
Oh, crud. Alex gasped, “We’ve got to call and tell her I’m okay!”
Acid Burn said, “It’s okay. I’m already texting all of Team Terawatt.”
Alex insisted, “I still need to call her and let her know I’m fine and tell her Sh–… Pyre’s great and a real hero.”
Jack nodded. “We’ll do that.” He turned back to the sat phone. “What else you got?”
Captainmal said, “The Russians couldn’t follow the threat, because it was going faster underwater than their fastest surface ships, so they launched a couple of nuclear anti-sub warfare weapons at it.”
Jack groaned. “They launched underwater nukes in a fishing area? Crap!” He glanced over at Shar and said, “I said ‘carp’ okay? If Aunt Barb asks, I said ‘carp’.”
Captainmal said, “The nukes didn’t stop it. USPACOM has some helo-dropped sonar buoys operative across the zone, and they say it’s making about ninety knots and heading due south. That’s going to put it on the east coast of Japan any minute now.”
“Ninety not what?” asked Shar.
Alex hugged her and said, “A knot — which is spelled like the kind of knot you tie in a piece of string — is a special navy word. It’s like a mile an hour.”
Jack explained, “It’s one nautical mile an hour, which is more than a regular mile an hour, so our rampaging super-dinosaur is making a little over a hundred miles an hour underwater.”
“Wow,” murmured Shar.
Alex winced a little. “You didn’t see how huge that tail is. If it can move that tail like an alligator under the water, it ought to be able to go really fast.”
Riley frowned in thought. “I’d like to know what that stolen sub was doing that was controlling the speed and direction for our kaiju.”
“What’s that?” Alex asked at almost the same time Shar did.
Riley explained, “It’s Japanese. It means, well, ‘weird creature’. That’s the best Japanese or Russian word I know for this thing. Youkai isn’t really right, because they’re really more like spirits or mythological beasts. Chudovische is Russian, but it doesn’t really describe this thing.”
Alex had no idea how Riley knew so many languages. Well, he was first in his class at West Point, and she wasn’t even going to be valedictorian of her high school. She wished she was as smart as he was.
“Big dino,” said Jack. He glanced over at Alex and said, “Mega-dino.”
Shar whispered pretty loudly, “Is he teasing you?”
Alex nodded, because she had another mouthful of food. Some of these MREs, like the ham slice and the beef ravioli, were pretty okay, and they were hot, which was extra great. Maybe even mega-great, given she’d been a near-freezing silver puddle for hours and hours. She thought the mac and cheese one was kind of blah, but Shar was wolfing it down like it was Aunt Barb’s special homemade macaroni and cheese.
Jack insisted, “We need to talk to Colonel Kalenkov and the local police, because we’ve got a chance to find out something about Mega-dino’s attack methods, and we’re running out of time.”
Riley worried, “If it’s moving at ninety knots and it’s reached the east coast of Japan, it ought to be getting near Sendai pretty soon.”
Captainmal said over the sat phone, “USPACOM is already tracking it, and they’ve alerted the Japanese Self-Defense Forces and the entire eastern Japanese coast.”
Jack asked, “Did they put in anything about it only being interested in coastal towns big enough to have something worth rampaging through?”
“Umm, not exactly,” replied jackryanrules. “But we’ll send that by Sergeant Harriman so he can put it in a form the Japanese will accept.”
Acid Burn said, “Well, it can’t strictly be population-based, because the last census had Provideniya at under 2,000 and one of the towns on the Arctic Ocean that got skipped is slightly larger than that.”
Jack muttered, “Well, it’s got to be something.” He told Riley, “Check Alex. Thoroughly. I’m gonna go have a little chit-chat with Colonel Kalenkov.”
Alex asked, “Can I call home while you give me a check-up?”
Jack stepped off the jet, saying, “Yeah, you definitely need to call the Teramom.” He shut the door before Alex could complain.
Riley let Sergeant Scott use the sat phone and Willow’s phone magic to dial Alex’s mom’s cellphone. Alex puddled out of her thermal suit and boots, and sat back down in her seat. Then Riley started checking her abdomen and her lower ribs.
“Hello?” Alex winced when she heard the fear in her mom’s voice.
Alex called out, “Mom! It’s me! And Shar! We’re fine.”
Shar announced, “I saved Terawatt with my superpowers!”
Riley explained, “Mrs. Mack, Pyre found the building for us, and then she cut off one entire end of the building so Terawatt could escape where she was trapped.”
Alex said, “She did great. And I’m fine. Just some bruises and stuff. And I ruined the brand-new winter Terawatt suit they made for me.”
“Oh, thank God,” her mom sobbed. “And you’re sure Shar’s all right?”
“We took good care of her,” Riley said.
Shar fussed, “Major Riley made me wear a harness and all these ropes when he helped me get up the side of the building. But I felt a lot safer having those things on me when I was standing at the edge cutting stuff so Alex could get out.”
“Thank you, major,” Alex’s mom sniffed.
“My pleasure, ma’am. We don’t want either one of your girls to get hurt.”
Alex told on him, “When I finally got out, he was standing way too close to Pyre considering she was cutting up chunks of building with mega-hot fire.”
They talked for several more minutes, with her mom worrying a ton about whatever was loose on their side of the Pacific.
Then Jack came storming in and slammed the jet’s door hard. He looked like he wanted to punch somebody. He growled, “Barb, I’m sorry, but we need to make some phone calls ASAP. Your girls can call you back when we’re all done. Okay?”
“Sure Jack,” her mom said.
Jack had Sergeant Scott dial Acid Burn and the SRI computer guys on a conference call. As soon as everyone was on, he fumed, “Power plants. It’s goddamn power plants. Those big blasted areas our Mega-dino goes to, then goes back to the water? They’re all power plants. That town Mega-dino skipped? It was having a power outage because the thing already took down the power plant the town depended on when it hit the previous city. We’re looking at a couple of oil-burning power plants and a couple of coal-burning power plants, but every one of these towns had a power plant.”
Alex suddenly felt like a lightbulb went off in her head. “Sure! It didn’t like my lightning, but it tracked me every time I used a lightning blast. And it didn’t like the high-voltage power line it hit, but it kept going in a straight line anyway.”
Riley thought out loud, “Every power plant is going to put out a massive wide-bandwidth electromagnetic signal because of the structure of the electrical generators. Maybe the signal makes it feel upset or uncomfortable or even hurt. It hunts down the signal, destroys it, then feels relieved and retreats to the water. That stolen sub could have been carrying a massive signal generator to get the thing to chase it down.” He stopped and thought for a second. “And we have a big problem, sir. The power plant in Sendai? If I’m not mistaken, it’s nuclear.”
Jack just said, “Well, crap.”
Then he looked over at Shar and whispered, “Don’t tell Aunt Barb I said a bad word.”
“Again!” Shar grinned.
* * *
Colonel Watanabe was still standing at attention before his commanding general. The U.S. military had just notified his commander about some sort of giant monstrosity that was even now heading down their eastern coastal waters.
His pager went off. He carefully said, “I will wait until you have finished briefing us, general.”
General Abe frowned at him. “Under these circumstances, you had better check it at once.”
He checked his pager and winced. “It is the American SRI, sir. If they are involved …”
The general glared. “Perhaps you had better answer them at once. While you are still here.”
He did so. He pulled out his cellphone, checked the number, and saw that it was the phone number Captain Miller had given him back in the summer. He dialed and switched to English. “Captain Miller, I believe you were trying to reach me?”
Captain Miller’s voice came through clearly. “Colonel! Good. My people came up with some new intelligence on your problem, and I thought you had better hear it at once. They let me make the call.”
“Thank you. What new information do you have?” He quickly flipped the phone to speakerphone.
“This isn’t like those silicates. This is one extremely large monster. The description we have is that it’s over two hundred feet high, it walks upright, it’s built like a Tyrannosaurus on top and an Iguanodon from the hips down, has a long tail that can knock down a skyscraper, and it can’t be hurt by conventional weaponry. We’re not sure it can be hurt period. Terawatt saw it shrug off fire from several tank formations and heavy weapons brigades. Then it breathed on them. It has some sort of energy blast that can melt a heavy tank, and it apparently irradiated everything it breathed on. Terawatt wasn’t able to do much more than distract it. The Russians hit it with a couple of nuclear anti-sub missiles, and it’s still going. And it’s probably going to be attacking Sendai, any minute now. The SRI has a theory that it’s seeking out power plants and destroying them, probably because it can sense the power plant and something like the electromagnetic field irritates it. Your best bet is to shut down every power plant in Sendai until it is a few hundred miles away.”
Colonel Watanabe protested, “We cannot just shut off power to all of Miyagi Prefecture! It is hovering around freezing there today. We can’t subject over a million people to that kind of weather with no heat!”
Captain Miller insisted, “The alternative is to try and stop it, which will cause more damage, and when it destroys your atomic power plant, there may be a nuclear explosion. That will be a lot more than making a lot of people really cold for several hours.”
“Only a few hours?”
Captain Miller said, “Right. This thing swims at maybe a hundred five miles an hour underwater. Give it two hours once it’s passing Sendai, and you should be able to bring the power plant back up.”
Colonel Watanabe made himself be polite. “Thank you very much, captain. You have helped us tremendously.” He waited until Captain Miller hung up before closing his phone.
General Abe asked, “And these are the people who flew in to deal with those silicates?”
He nodded. “Yes, sir. They are very reliable, even if they have the classic American ‘cowboy’ attitude.”
The general frowned. “What is the American saying? ‘No brag, just fact.’ I think the SRI is worth listening to. I am from Sendai, and I would hate to have it destroyed. But I am more concerned about what will happen after this ‘monster dinosaur’ swims south past Sendai. Tokyo is only three hundred kilometers south of Sendai, and if this thing swims at one hundred miles an hour, then it would be nearing Tokyo only two hours after it passes Sendai.” He turned to another colonel and asked, “What are the TEPCO power plants in and around Tokyo?”
Colonel Sasaki said, “If I remember correctly, TEPCO has three nuclear power stations, all of which have at least four units. There are thirteen fossil fuel burning stations and two geothermal stations. There are five solar powered stations and a number of small wind-powered stations. And there are seven very large hydroelectric stations, plus over a hundred small contributing hydroelectric stations. As far as I know, we can shut down the nuclear stations in seconds and the fossil fuel stations in minutes, but we cannot shut down most of the hydroelectric stations.”
Colonel Watanabe grimaced. “If this thing goes from power station to power station, destroying everything in its path, there will be nothing left of Tokyo by the time it’s done.”
The general frowned. “Do you have any alternative?”
Colonel Watanabe stopped and thought. “If we shut down everything we can, and we put the biggest power generation system we can find onto a ship, perhaps we can lure it away from the city.”
The general nodded sharply. “Very well. Colonel Sasaki, you will shut down every plant in Sendai and Tokyo that you can, and keep my adjutant informed about your progress. Colonel Watanabe, you will implement your plan in any way you see fit.”
* * *
Alex was glad Riley was done. It wasn’t that Riley was doing anything wrong. No, he was trying really hard not to put his hands anyplace he shouldn’t. But she hurt all over, and now she was more sore than when he’d started. He’d checked that she had full range of motion everywhere, so now her sore ankles and knees and shoulders and hips were achier than they were fifteen minutes ago. And he’d palpated her abdomen to check for ickiness like ruptured organs, she guessed. And he’d checked the big ouchies on the back of her head and on her back and on her butt, from where she got slammed through a concrete wall so hard she was almost surprised she hadn’t gone in one side of the building and out the other.
Okay, if she’d gotten lucky and hit a window instead of that concrete outer wall, she might have gone right through the building, and then out the other side, and maybe not gotten trapped inside it when it fell over. Or things might have been worse, and the entire building might have smashed her into the street and killed her.
Either way, trying to fight that thing was bad. And calling it Mega-dino was just too weird. Especially when he named it that just to tease her. She didn’t know what to do to stop it, even if it turned out that Jack was right about the power plant thing.
* * *
“Come on, Yuki!”
Sato Yuki refused to get upset. She didn’t like getting angry, and it was not proper. She turned to face him and coldly said, “We are colleagues. The lab directors have made it clear that colleagues should not date. I will not go out with you.”
He smirked at her. “I swear, Sato. It’s no wonder you’re named yuki.”
She counted to ten and then calmly said, “I have heard that joke before. About a hundred thousand times.” It was not her fault that her name sounded like yuki, the word for snow. She said, “There must be someone else somewhere in Sendai that you can take to dinner.”
He said, “But how many of them are interested in chemistry? No girl wants to listen to me talk about the stuff I’m interested in.”
She flatly told him, “Maybe if you read manga that wasn’t so pervy, you could find girls who liked it, too.” She had seen the kind of thing he read on the train to work, when he accidentally knocked over his briefcase one day.
He started to say something, but he stopped. He ran to one of the laboratory windows that overlooked the harbor. And he screamed.
She turned and looked, and she suddenly felt like she might faint. It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be …
It was coming out of the harbor, and it was immense. They were on the fifth floor of a ten-story building, and the thing was only half out of the water, and its head was already far higher than the window.
He panicked and ran screaming from the room. The power suddenly went out, and she heard him crashing into things in the dark hallway.
She didn’t know what to do. It couldn’t be real, and yet it was out there. Stalking out of the harbor. Crushing the docks between it and her city. Walking right at her. She watched as it walked right through the three-story building to the east of her. It was walking right at her. It was going to crush her building just like it crushed those dockside warehouses.
And it just … stopped. She tiptoed to the window, even though it was absurd to think it could hear the sound of her footsteps. It was unbelievably massive. And it looked … confused? It turned to walk back into the water …
And its massive tail came tearing through the air. She turned and ran for cover, but there was nowhere to go. She ducked into the lab storeroom.
The mammoth tail hit her building. The impact was worse than the biggest earthquake she had ever felt. She saw the outer wall come apart right in front of her. She saw the liquid oxygen tanks in the lab room being ripped free from their moorings and go flying across the lab, and she dived for cover.
The tanks exploded in the lab room, just on the other side of the wall. The storeroom shelves ejected their contents everywhere, including all over her. She felt herself flying across the room, and then there was blackness.
* * *
Jack looked over when the sat phone buzzed. They were halfway to the Japanese coast, and he was worried they were already too late. “O’Neill here.”
“Acid Burn here! Great news. They got the nuclear power plant in Sendai shut off as soon as Mega-dino started coming out of the harbor and someone realized the national self-defense forces weren’t playing an April Fools prank on them. They still lost maybe twenty boats, a hundred yards of docks, and five or ten blocks of buildings before it went back in the water.”
Jack asked, “And where’s it headed now? East?”
“No such luck, they think it’s headed south. Due south. Right at Tokyo.”
He asked her, “Any chance they can get the whole electrical grid for the Tokyo region totally shut down before Mega-dino decides to destroy everything that’s bugging it?”
Burn tried to stall. “Umm, well, maybe that would be a ‘no’. They can shut down the nuclear plants and the oil and coal plants, but they can’t fully shut down all the hydroelectric stations, because they can’t stop the water from flowing, and they have hundreds of ’em in all sizes, and the geothermal plant’s gonna keep bubbling up from below, and the wind generators have wind. Well, that wasn’t what I meant to say, but you know.”
Shar giggled, as Jack winked at her and smiled. “We know.”
Burn tried not to be all embarrassed. “So anyway, Colonel Watanabe is trying to get an uninstalled nuclear power plant unit loaded on a big cargo ship and operational and cranking out enough power to pull Mega-dino off of all of Tokyo, which I kinda think isn’t gonna work, because even if he gets it running, that ship’s only gonna go … what, twenty or thirty knots tops? And our creepy giant friend swims at up to ninety knots or so? It’ll catch up with the ship and eat it in under an hour, and then he’ll go right back at Tokyo.”
Alex said, “Unless I’m on that ship, and when it gets close, they shut down the generator, and I crank up my lightning, and I lead it away from Tokyo for a couple hours.”
Jack objected, “That just puts it out in the Pacific where it might decide to go anywhere. What we need is two ships like that. We get them a hundred miles apart in the middle of the Pacific and take turns lighting up the generators until Mega-dino gets close, and then shut ’em down. It’s a giant game of keep-away.”
Burn hesitated. “I’ll call Colonel Watanabe and tell him, but I kinda doubt they have time to get even one generator on a ship and operational.”
Alex winced. “So it’s up to me, again.”
“If you can distract it,” Jack pointed out. “Once it gets close to Tokyo, there’s going to be, well, terawatts of power running through their power grid, and even you can’t counterbalance that much wattage.”
Burn said, “Their combined wattage from all their plants together can crank out something like nine or ten terawatts. That’s got to be the biggest draw for thousands of miles.”
He looked over, and Alex looked … hopeless. Resigned. That was definitely not good. Or of the good, as a sexy someone liked to say.
* * *
Yuki opened her eyes. Her head hurt. Her chest hurt where she landed on the floor. And she was covered in … ice crystals?
And she was freezing. She was so cold it was all she could do not to shiver.
Where did the ice come from? Why was it so cold? Had the whole building been torn open to the outside air? She was just coated in ice crystals. Had that idiot come back in here and played some kind of prank on her?
She got to her feet, and she realized the ice crystals were all down her front as well. And the floor under her was a sheet of ice. This was getting really disturbing. She steadied herself by putting her hand on a lab table full of broken bottles, being careful not to put her hand on any glass shards.
Ice crystallized under her hand and spread out across the table. Every bottle of liquid turned to ice. A couple of bottles grew so cold that the contents cracked the bottles.
“This is … impossible!” she shrieked. She smacked the surface of the lab table.
The table shattered under her hand, as if she had dipped it first in liquid nitrogen.
She stepped back in shock. “This … this can’t be happening!” It occurred to her that her colleagues would have taunted her and said she was ‘losing her cool’. Right now, she was almost ready to have hysterics. Her first thought was to wash this off and stop whatever was happening to her. She walked over to the emergency shower and the eyewash station. She pulled the handle for the emergency shower, and the water sprayed down.
It didn’t hit her. All the water froze into icicles before it got more than five or six inches from the shower head. Ice suddenly rimed the showerhead, then the pipe to the showerhead.
She put her hand down on the ceramic of the eyewash station, and suddenly it too was covered in rime. The pipe underneath it burst from the cold, but the water that gushed out froze before it could hit the floor.
She wanted to panic. She wanted to scream for help. She wanted …
She wanted to know how she was supposed to live if she couldn’t pick up a glass of water without it turning to ice in her hand. If she was freezing cold, and everything around her was getting cold when she got near it, then … Then she was a living heat sink, in a coastal town that always had moist air, on a day when the temperature was hardly above freezing to start with. How had she not already died of hypothermia?
She was going to walk outside and become covered in ice crystals until she was trapped in a solid block of ice. She was already covered in ice crystals, and it was only going to get worse. She was freezing to death already. She was never going to survive being inside a block of ice.
She was a dead woman who was still walking about. It was the fault of that monster. It was some sort of cosmic joke. Yuki, the ‘snow’ girl, the woman called the ‘ice queen’ by her colleagues … had been turned into some kind of Yuki-onna. If she hadn’t been so scared, she might have laughed. Or cried.
As it was, she was scared enough to pee herself. She didn’t think she could do that anymore, given what she did to liquids anywhere near her. Given what she was doing to her surroundings, she was surprised her blood and other fluids hadn’t frozen solid inside her body.
She walked out of the supply room and found herself looking out at the harbor. The east face of the building was just … gone. She stepped over to the hall door and took a look. The hallway had collapsed. She had no way out, unless someone was willing to bring a fire truck with an extremely long ladder over here, and then let her get on the ladder. She thought about what she had done to the lab table, and she realized a fireman’s ladder probably wouldn’t survive her touch.
She hadn’t wanted to date any of the men in the company, and now she was never going to be able to touch anyone ever again. Many men would say this was her punishment. That she deserved this.
She looked at her hands, which were coated in white ice. She walked over to a metal desktop and stared at her reflection. She was coated in white ice crystals. Her hair was white, as if she had been out in a blizzard for hours. There were icicles hanging off her lab coat. And she was so cold it hurt! Whoever thought that controlling cold was a superpower worth having?
She didn’t know what to do. She walked to the edge of the floor and looked down at the five-story drop. What she needed was an ice walkway. Or an ice slide.
She looked at the ice forming at her feet, and she wondered if it was possible. Maybe if she tried to make ice, she could do more than just freeze everything she touched. Maybe, if she was a heat sink, she could pull in more heat and warm herself up and simultaneously make the ice sculpture she needed. She concentrated, and a shape like a children’s slide formed from the concrete edge outward, in a curve that would take her back to the floor below.
Now all she had to do was trust that the ice would hold, and she wouldn’t fall five floors to her death. Not that death sounded so bad right now, given what her life was going to be like for the few days until she died of thirst or hunger, or ice formed over her face while she slept and she suffocated, or this insane power froze the blood in her veins, or …
There were a lot of ways this would probably kill her in short order, and most of them were far worse than falling to her death.
She stepped onto the ice. Her feet didn’t slip, as she was expecting. The ice adhered to her shoes like she was walking on a sticky sidewalk. Her ‘slide’ didn’t crack or break loose. She sort of pushed with her mind, and the ice extended in a smooth curve, carrying her down to the ground.
She really could control ice with her ability! She made an ice column appear to grow out of the ground. Then she made it grow branches, and she made the branches grow ‘leaves’. She made a four-foot disk of ice form under her feet, and she found that she could make it skate across the ground.
And then she suddenly knew what she was going to do with the last hours of her life before she died from this bizarre condition. She made her ice disk lift her a few feet into the air, and she formed an ice ‘slide’ just above the ground. She used her new slide and rushed down to the shambles that had once been lovely docks.
She found a policeman and did what she would never have had the nerve to do before. She interrupted him. “Which way did it go?”
The policeman stared at her in shock. Everyone around her was staring at her in shock. She knew that no one would ever look at her the same way again. The policeman managed to point: “Out of the harbor, and then south. The national self-defense forces fear that it will attack Tokyo next.”
She nodded, and pushed her ice off the docks and onto the surface of the ocean. The salt water froze just as quickly as the moisture in the air. She pushed again, and her ice disk jetted forward along the waves, leaving a trail of ice behind her as she raced toward Tokyo on her own personal jet-powered ice floe.
She knew she was going to die. But she was going to find that thing that did this to her, and she was going to take it with her.
—
A/N: This time, the crossover is with Japanese mythology, in particular the youkai known as the Yuki-onna or ‘snow-woman’. The idea has been used plenty of times in anime and manga, but Yuki is using techniques that suggest maybe she’s spent more time than anyone realizes reading X-Men comics. Unlike Bobby Drake, she legitimately has enough water in the air and ocean around her to make her ice structures.