|
|
Chapter 136 – A.L. Mack to the Rescue“Oh crud oh crud oh crud!” Alex rushed up to the checkout line with the Time and the Newsweek, stood in line impatiently, and then sprinted to her car as soon as she paid. She didn’t even bother to get her change.
She started the car up and rushed off to school. But she pulled out her tPhone and used her TK to speed-dial Jack and flip it to speakerphone.
“Offices of the HWAAA, Sergeant Harriman speaking.”
She was so stressed out she almost didn’t remember to use her Terawatt voice. “Walter, it’s me. I need to speak to the colonel.”
Jack came on the line in seconds. “Hello, Tera, what a co-inky-dink. I was just looking at a couple magazines that aren’t trashy enough for Klar’s mother to read, even though Walter’s expecting me to do some work one of these days, and I was wondering when you would spot them. You’re not skipping school and hanging around the pool hall to read these things, are you?”
She was so not laughing. “They pegged Willow!”
Jack griped, “They also pegged Finn and Carlson. But they missed Lupo, even though she’s worse at hiding her abilities than anyone since Ben Grimm.”
Alex turned a corner a little sharper than she meant to. “Did they peg Mister Gotham or Miss Hollywood or our wife of a shipping heir?”
“Nope, they’re oh-for-three on that. As for Gotham, even if they had his name, they probably figured they’d better not name a guy who owns enough stock in the parent company to get every one of them fired and the whole magazine closed down. Willow’s really upset, but this is really going to put a crimp in the plans of a bunch of our potential Orphans.”
She pulled into the school parking lot and slammed on the brakes. “I gotta go. I’ll read the whole thing when I can. You call Willow and do something nice to make her feel better.”
Jack snapped like he was answering a four star general. “Yes, sir! I am on that task, sir!”
Okay, Alex figured Jack was never like that with real generals.
She shoved the magazines into her backpack and ran for homeroom. She just barely made it to the door as the bell rang.
“Miss Mack, is there a reason you are very nearly late this morning?”
She fibbed, “My mom wanted me to get a bunch of copies of this week’s Newsweek and I couldn’t get through the twelve-items-or-less line because this little old lady had a huge shopping cart totally full of stuff and wouldn’t go to another line and they wouldn’t make her and she was making them check all the eggs in every carton she had too and it was so frustrating!”
“And why do you need to buy a ‘bunch’ of Newsweeks?”
Alex walked up and showed her a two-page spread of the article on Willow. There were four pictures there, all of them ‘copyright A.L. Mack’. She pointed at one of the bylines.
Mrs. Porter’s eyebrows went nearly up to her dyed hair. “How many pictures do you have in here?”
Alex shrugged. “I sold them a couple dozen, but I doubt they used all of them because of space constraints. That happens all the time in editing.”
During second period, Alex went to the library area and read the two magazines. The Newsweek article and interview were really nice to Willow. The one page article in Time tried to make her look not so nice, even if the most that they had was a guy she dated a couple times in college who pretty much said she was a know-it-all who wouldn’t put out even after he bought her a nice dinner. Wow, what a jerk. And Larry Ellison’s legal people refused to comment on the corporate takeover last year when Oracle ate Red Tree Software and spat her out afterward.
The Time article on Riley tried to make him sound like an evil Orphan, but it came off looking like they were trying to crucify a saint. The worst thing they had on Riley was he didn’t drink beer like the other guys, and when he went to bars with other military guys he always tried to get a Dr. Pepper or a coke. That, and he lived apart from his wife a lot of the time, because she was in Africa saving the lives of little kids as part of Doctors Without Borders, and before that, with the Peace Corps.
The Time article on Sergeant Carlson was pretty great, even though they were trying to be mean. Alex hadn’t known how awesome he was as a soldier, or how amazing a husband he was. She hoped that the reporters didn’t go and be horrible to his poor wife Corinne. She remembered him saying she was grouchy about him going to Korea with hot babes, but she hadn’t had any idea how awful things were for his wife.
She did kind of wonder if Frady had really managed to miss Bruce Paine. Maybe Jack was right and the magazine chickened out on pointing at one of their stockholders. Maybe not. But if Frady tried blackmailing Bruce, Alex was sure the Batman would kick Frady’s slimy butt all up and down the East Coast.
Then she was nearly late to third period because half a dozen people from the Photography Club wanted to congratulate her on the Newsweek thing and ask her how she got her big break and get her to be the speaker at the next meeting of the Photography Club, which she was the co-president of anyway.
She made sure to call Willow at lunchtime and make sure Willow was okay. She called from her Alex phone using Willow’s regular number, so she ended up having to get through an automated voicemail system. She figured Willow had to set something like that up to handle all the annoying reporters and creepy callers and stuff.
“Alex? Is that you?”
“Yeah. Are you okay? The Time article tried to make you sound like a badguy. Okay, mainly it made that guy you dated sound like the world’s biggest creepazoid, but they were trying to make every one of their possible Orphans look like a badguy.”
Willow whimpered, “I’m really not okay, and I had to get a copy of the automated answering tree system for my business set up to handle annoying reporters and angry nutcases, and reporters have been calling me nonstop, and there’s three different newsdorks parked in front of my house, and my neighbor Mrs. Madlow is really mad at me because her friend told her I was an evil Orphan who was trying to take over the planet and she’s the head of the neighborhood watch and she doesn’t want me taking over the neighborhood, and I wish Jack was here right now because I could really use a hug, and he can’t come because of all the newsdorks!”
Alex told her, “You should issue a press statement and get the police to get those jerkheads off your property.”
“Well, they’re not on my property, they’re just in the street, and I really should issue a press statement. A.L. Mack needs to drive up here and I’ll talk to her, and she can make sure I don’t look like an evil taking-over-the-world type.”
Alex started to say no way, but then it dawned on her. “Yeah! And then Willow Rosenberg can act like A.L. Mack is a really good friend who came to her rescue!”
“You are a really good friend, and you’ve come to my rescue a ton of times, starting with the day you and Barb picked up my boxes and helped me get home when I was totally of the wrecked.”
Alex thought about it. “Okay. I’ve got to get home and start dinner and pick up Shar and wait until Mom gets home from work, and then I can drive up. I’ll call you when I’m on my way. I want you to put on your ‘made up but looking not made up’ makeup like you wore to Cupertino, and something casual but still professional. We’ll film … I think in your library because it looks cozy and not threatening at all. And we’ll use my GoPro with this awesome sound system that goes with it that I got for my birthday, and I’ll ask you a question, and then you’ll talk, and if we don’t like how it goes, we’ll erase it and do it over, so no matter how much you mess up, we’ll just make it perfect. How’s that sound?”
Willow bubbled, “It sounds totally, totally of the awesomeness!”
Alex asked, “And did you give Hanna lessons on how to talk like a Valley Girl?”
“I think maybe I just Skype too much with her.”
* * *
Alex got home from school in time to start dinner, but her mom came home early. With a stack of maybe fifty copies of Newsweek, and a really excited expression on her face.
“Alex, you don’t need to cook dinner. I’m sure your father’s going to want to take everyone out to dinner.”
Alex pulled out the Time magazine and showed her mom the page on Willow. As her mom skimmed over it with a horrified expression, Alex explained, “Mom, I need to drive up to Willow’s house right after I get Shar home. I’ll have to skip dinner.”
“Wow, this must be an emergency if you’re skipping a meal,” her mom teased.
“Oh, ha-ha. Willow’s really upset, and reporters are bugging her, and they’re camping out in the street in front of her house, and she needs a reporter she can trust to do a really nice interview so she can get these people off her back. So I need to go up there and get the interview and edit it so it looks good for her, and get it sent to KPVC so they’ll run it tonight.”
Her mom worried, “And when will you be home?”
“As soon as I get the interview finished and I drive back. It’s the drive up and back that’ll be the most time, and I have to drive, so all the reporters see me drive up to her house and drive away after.”
Her mom pursed her lips and thought. “Okay, let’s make some sandwiches for you to eat on the way up, and you can leave right now, and I’ll go get Shar. I’ll tell your father we have to schedule the big celebration dinner out for tomorrow night.”
Alex grinned. “Great! You’re the best mom ever. I gotta get my nice suit into the car, and my makeup kit and my hair stuff, and grab some Diet Cokes.”
She flew up the stairs as her mom said, “Your suit’s in your closet in the plastic bag from the cleaners.”
She grabbed the suit and a pair of matching shoes, even as she realized that she had forgotten to take her suit and her other nice stuff from last week over to the dry cleaner because of everything going on, so her mom had done all that, even though going to and from the dry cleaner was really an Alex job. She used her TK to grab her makeup bag and her hair stuff and her shoes, and toss them into her gym bag. She already had her GoPro in her new camera pack, so she just made sure she got her special sound system clipped on the top it. She put her computer tablet in her gym bag, and she checked that her battery-powered halogen lights and her fold-up reflector were already in the camera pack, along with the other camera gear she might want. Then she rushed downstairs, draped her suit across the back seat of her car, and put the camera bag and the gym bag on the floor in front of the back seat.
Her mom had five hot sliced-chicken sandwiches ready for her, with each one wrapped in a napkin for easier eating in the car, and then wrapped in aluminum foil to stay warm. And she had Alex’s car cooler ready, with ice and Diet Coke and a couple of ice cream bars.
She hugged her mom and said, “You’re the best, and I love you, and I really need to tell you that a lot more.”
Her mom smiled. “I’m just happy you’re rushing off to be A.L. Mack instead of Terawatt today. Even if you took your gym bag.”
Alex said, “I’m just making sure. And all the other reporters would have a ton of stuff for an interview like this: video cameras, lights, reflectors, sound recording equipment, maybe two extra people to operate all the equipment, cables to hook everything up … It’s normally a really big deal. You saw how much gear they used for my little interview at KPVC. I’m gonna try and make do with a lot less. And I’ll be using my TK instead of a big video camera on a steadicam system or on a big tripod set-up.”
“Well, you be careful, and tell Willow we love her and we worry about her.”
* * *
The drive up to Willow’s was pretty easy. Thanks to her mom, she got started way before rush hour, and the traffic she saw was mostly in the southbound lane. She called Willow as soon as she was on the road. It turned out that Jack already had someone from the FBI hassling the reporters on the street, ‘checking’ that they weren’t criminals or Orphans trying to interfere with an important computer security project for the DHS. If Alex hadn’t had a mouthful of hot chicken sandwich, she might have laughed out loud.
Once she was nearing Willow’s neighborhood, she pulled over and parked. Then, after making sure no one was around, she ducked down, puddled into the clothes in the back seat, and came back to the front seat all dressed up. After that, she grabbed her makeup bag and her hair-gel and a brush, and she spent ten minutes adding makeup so she looked more sophisticated but still Alex-y, and getting her pixie cut properly styled with more body than she usually bothered with. Life with TK was just a lot better. She could apply eyeliner and mascara perfectly on the first try by holding her eyelids still, and she could get the clumps out of her mascara as easy as looking at them, and she could style her hair without a hair dryer.
She drove into Willow’s driveway and parked next to the FBI car. She walked right over to the closer FBI agent. “Hi! I’m A.L. Mack. Ms. Rosenberg’s expecting me.”
“Yes, ma’am, she gave us a heads-up. Can I see some ID?”
She pulled out her wallet and showed him her driver’s license. He smiled. “Your ID picture makes you look about fourteen. You might want to do something about that.”
She gave him a smile since he was being nice. “I am only eighteen, so it’s not a problem yet. But thank you. I’m going to do a short interview, and then I’ll be out of your hair.”
“Oh, this is no problem. Dealing with the Woodward and Bernstein wannabes over there? That was a hassle.”
She grabbed her gym bag and camera bag, and hauled them over to the front door like they were really heavy. Willow even stayed behind the front door so the nosy reporters couldn’t take photos of her at all. Willow locked the front door and led Alex into her library room.
It was already prepared. The curtains were closed, but Willow had a couple of bright lights and a huge reflector screen set up in front of the window. Alex didn’t even know Willow had stuff like that, but maybe Willow had bought it to take pictures of herself in her cosplay outfits back when she wasn’t going out of the house in them.
Willow had everything moved off the couch and end tables, and just piled on the floor under the reflector so they were out of the way. And Willow looked perfect, with her hair done and her makeup just right and her ‘casual’ suit looking very cute. She looked lovely and innocent and girl-next-door. And harmless. That was going to be really important, because Alex did not want people hating on Willow.
“So … how do you want to do this?” Willow asked nervously.
Alex explained, “Okay, your lights are great. I’ve got a halogen light and a GoPro I’ll maneuver with my TK. I think I’ll sit at this corner of the couch and you’ll sit at that corner. Then every question and answer will be a separate shot that we’ll cut back and forth on. So we can fix anything. If you get nervous, or say something embarrassing, or whatever, we’ll just cut it out and re-do it. How’s that sound?”
“Excellent. Or as someone likes to say, egggggggcellent.”
Alex broke into a grin.
After she checked her hair and makeup one more time and then checked Willow’s, too, she got Willow seated in a nice position with her arms positioned so her body language pretty much said ‘I am shy and harmless’.
Then Alex sat on the other end of the couch and faced the camera and light where she had them floating. She turned on the GoPro and got it all adjusted with her TK and an occasional hop up to peek at the viewscreen and the adjustments. She started the recording. “I’m A.L. Mack, and I’m here with Willow Rosenberg. Ms. Rosenberg is the CEO of Red Tree Software, and has been programming since she was ten or eleven. She is regarded as one of the top computer and network security gurus in the world. Her firm is currently running a massive review of the computer security for the entire Department of Homeland Security. And she has just been accused of being a member of a terrorist cult, the so-called Kids of the Breslynn Orphanage. Ms. Rosenberg, thank you for inviting me into your home and giving this interview.”
She stopped the recording and turned the camera and light. Then she stood behind the camera to make sure she had Willow all lined up and looking nice. She signaled Willow and started recording. “Thank you for driving up here with no notice. I appreciate it, because I’m really not getting a lot of the support right now except from my boyfriend and my parents.”
Alex moved back to her seat and repositioned everything. “Let me ask a hard question right off the bat. Were you expecting this bombshell?” She adjusted the camera again so it was one Willow.
“I knew it was possible, ever since I received an email that purported to come from the Kids of the Breslynn Orphanage, even though I checked and the return address is not only a forgery, but doesn’t even exist.”
And Alex kept adjusting the camera in between every question and answer. “It doesn’t exist?”
“It is a domain name that no one has ever bought. You can’t go from that name to any IP address on the internet. It was spoofed by a very talented cracker.”
“A cracker? Not a hacker?”
“No, in the computer security world, hackers are top-notch computer programmers. The people who break into computer networks are called ‘crackers’. It’s not our fault that the word ‘hacker’ gets used incorrectly outside our business.”
“But you are one of these ‘orphans’?”
Willow nodded meekly. “I must be. I was adopted from the Breslynn Orphanage as a newborn. Anyone who has seen a photo of my family can tell I’m adopted. They’re all Ashkenazi Jews with curly dark-brown hair and dark brown eyes and … distinctive noses. I look like I’m Irish.”
“But being from an orphanage doesn’t make you a terrorist. So what do you think Joseph Frady is implying?”
“I think he’s pointing out that way too many of these babies are now part of some kind of organization. I think someone a lot older than us must have sought some of these orphans out over the last five or ten years and convinced them they’re part of some sort of genetically superior ‘master race’, which is the kind of thing I personally oppose, as a Jew with a Jewish family which came over from Europe. So someone older than these people is behind all this, and has been providing some sort of organization.”
“But what about the letter Joseph Frady received? You said you received one as well, right?”
“Right. As soon as I read it and realized what it meant, well, I cried for about twenty minutes straight. My company’s in the middle of a huge audit of DHS computer security. My boyfriend is an Air Force officer working within the DHS. I was terrified.”
“And what did you do?”
“I called my boyfriend and turned myself in, and I helped his project build a ‘profile’ of what these orphans might be like, and I’ve been assisting some computer support people in the Department of Homeland Security in their work on this since then.”
“So the government knows you’re one of these Breslynn orphans, and they’ve cleared you of any wrongdoing, and they’re keeping you on as a security consultant?”
Willow carefully corrected her, “Well, a few small parts of the government know. But yes, I’m not accused of any wrongdoing, and I’ve been defending their computer systems from a variety of really unpleasant attacks, including some that we’re pretty sure are from P$ychon4ut. We’re now fairly sure that P$ychon4ut is also one of these Breslynn orphans, which may explain why he’s so dangerous and so aggressive in his computer attacks.”
“So how do you feel, knowing that you’re one of these orphans?”
Willow sighed, “Partly disturbed, and partly horrified. But I have to admit it, in one way I’m also partly relieved. When I found out that I was adopted, I wondered what was wrong with me that my birth mother and my birth father didn’t want me. Now I have an answer. It wasn’t that some pregnant woman didn’t want me. The ovum and sperm that became me were just part of some crazy genetic experiment.”
“And what do you intend to do now that Joseph Frady has ‘outed’ you?”
Willow shrugged. “Hopefully, the same thing as always. This doesn’t change things at the Department of Homeland Security, since they already knew. I’m a stay-at-home. I like to program, and I like to read, and I like to garden in my back yard. I’ll just keep doing that stuff. It’s not like I used to go out and party, or go on wild dates, or anything like that. I’ll probably have my groceries delivered instead of buying them myself, but that’s about it.”
“Well, good luck, Ms. Rosenberg, and thank you for giving us some of your valuable time.”
She cut the camera and started turning off all the hot lights with her TK. She said, “Okay, now I need to download the footage and do some editing, and then I can send it off to Laura Marsters at KPVC.”
Willow grinned. “Great! I think I’ll heat up some veggie calzones I made yesterday, and then I’m gonna get out of this outfit and take off the makeup. Jack really likes it, but he also likes it when I’m not wearing any. Then we can eat and watch the news. I bet that weasel Glenn Howard’s called a press conference to announce he’s not an Orphan and he’s not adopted and he also isn’t a lying scum-sucking weasel.” She tried a really lame Richard Nixon imitation. “I … am not a crook.”
Alex had to fiddle with the video file in about a dozen places where there was too much lag in between questions and answers, and she centered the video image in some of the shots, and she checked that everything looked good and the sound quality was really great. Then she saved the edited file and used Willow’s wifi to fire it off to Laura with a note that she had Willow’s written permission to film the interview — even if it was incredibly obvious to anybody who saw the footage that Willow was okay with the whole thing — and that she’d be in to sign stuff tomorrow.
The calzones were really good, even if they were a lot smaller than Alex was expecting. Instead of being things half the size of a medium pizza, they were a six-inch circle of dough folded over yummy cooked veggies and sauce. It was really hard to get enough sauce to make everything inside moist and yummy, without making the outside gloopy and gooey, but Willow’s were just right. Willow ate two. Alex had six, but she’d been using her TK a lot during the interview.
And they watched the news.
There was lots more Orphan news, including a press conference by the President, who announced that the Orphan threat was real, and bigger than just Umbrella Corporation and Clare Tobias. He also said that Time magazine was mostly correct, only there were five other orphanages around the world in addition to Breslynn, so the threat wasn’t just Americans. And that the U.S. Government’s secret programs to deal with the threat were now jeopardized by Frady refusing to cooperate with the DHS. And that the U.S. government already knew about the Orphans because Major Riley Finn, one of the heroes of the Korea battle a few days earlier, had come forward as soon as he received his email instead of, say, suppressing it and using it as a story to advance his career as a reporter.
Willow laughed and clapped at that last bit. She murmured, “I’m really glad now I voted for him.”
With all the stuff about Joe Frady patting himself on the back so hard he was about to dislocate his shoulder, and a bunch of Orphans lying like crazy that they weren’t Orphans, and a bunch of Congressmen holding hearings about the Orphans, and Oswell Spencer being so sick he was in intensive care now, and the aftermath of the Korea thing, there was hardly any time for science news. But at least the newscasters showed a thirty second clip of Samantha Carter smiling at the camera and saying she had tons of cool astrophysics data to analyze, and the other mission specialist had a sample from the comet that contained surprisingly complicated organic molecules that might even be some sort of nucleic acid, and they were really excited about that.
Alex drove home feeling really good about things. Maybe, when Sam Carter got back to Earth, Jack could arrange a meeting and Alex could get some really hefty physics help on stuff like her powers and alternate dimensions. Not that Jack’s people weren’t good, but Sam Carter was going to be awesome. Alex just knew it.
* * *
On Thursday afternoon, Jack called her on the tPhone. “Hey, Tera, whatcha doin’ Saturday afternoon? Can you come out and play?”
She tried not to giggle, because Willow was always saying you shouldn’t encourage him. “Jack, I think you pretty much have my entire schedule written down by now.”
But he was unrepentant.
She was so glad she’d gotten that word-a-day vocab program for her tablet.
Jack was totally unrepentant. “I was kind of hoping you’d fly down to Edwards in your uniform so you’d get there at six ack emma your time, and you’d take Air SRI and come eat lunch with me. Oh, and then the President wants to give you a civilian medal for saving South Korea from freaky supervillains. You, and Hanna, and Grover, and Valentine. Finn and Lupo and Carlson are getting the cool military stuff you civilians don’t get. I think the CinC wants to make a big deal about some Orphans being heroes and saving our butts, so expect some Korean War veterans, and don’t call any of them an old coot.”
“Jack! I would never!”
“Hey, some of them are old coots. And the ones who went into politics are extra coot-y. Never forget: politics comes from the Greek, ‘poly’ meaning ‘many’, and ‘tics’ meaning ‘horrible blood-sucking parasites’.”
Alex giggled so hard she never did get around to telling him that wasn’t where the word came from. He probably knew that anyway.
“And Alex? I really wanted to thank you for what A.L. Mack did for Willow. That interview really helped things. And she was so darn cute in it.” Then he stopped being mushy, and he smirked. “And the looks on those newsleeches’ faces when they found out they’d been scooped and there was already an interview on the airwaves while they were sitting around trying to ambush-interview a nerd! Priceless.”
“You’re welcome. You just take good care of her.”
He griped, “I’d take way better care of her if she’d give in on more of the conflicts on her list. Have you seen that thing? I think there are phone books that are shorter. I’ve gone through and cherry-picked all the easy ones already. By the way, heads up. Conflict number 264: our first daughter has to be named Alexandra and you have to be the godmother. Beats me why she thought that would be a conflict. I mean, I wouldn’t stick a kid with my foster mother’s name if you threatened me with hot pokers.”
Alex felt warm and smug for the rest of the evening.
* * *
On Saturday morning, she was up early so she could shower and zip into her uniform and fly south toward Edwards Air Force Base. She met up with the chopper like usual, and they took her to the usual Cessna. The unusual part was there were already three people onboard, instead of just Jo and Sergeant Carlson.
There was a quite pretty blonde woman with her long hair draped completely over the right side of her face like old pictures of Veronica Lake. She was sitting with her right side against the wall, opposite Sergeant Carlson. And there was a metal cane on the floor beside her.
Oh.
Alex floated down the aisle past Jo, and she said, “Sergeant Carlson, it’s good to see you again. I take it this is your wife Corinne?” She looked at the blonde and said, “It’s nice to meet you. I still haven’t met Graham’s girlfriend or Riley’s wife.”
Corinne looked kind of shocked that Terawatt would want to talk to an ordinary person, so Alex added, “It’s okay to shake hands. I won’t shock you or anything.” She put out her left hand, and Corinne nervously shook it with her left.
She didn’t know what else to say, so she flew into the seat across from Jo. “Bet you never thought you’d get a medal from the President.”
Jo admitted, “This is the kind of thing a soldier dreams about. But I’d be a lot happier if I didn’t feel like I’m just being used like a pawn in a really complicated political game.”
Alex kind of felt the same way, but she told Jo, “I think it’s a good kind of pawn, because it’s the President saying you’re a hero, you’re not a terrorist, and not all Orphans are evil take-over-the-world types.”
Mrs. Carlson snorted. Sergeant Carlson whispered, “It’s okay, you can say something.”
Mrs. Carlson whispered back, “But … she’s Terawatt! I can’t!”
Boy, that made Alex feel lousy.
Sergeant Carlson whispered, “You can. She’s nice. She won’t yell at you or anything.”
Mrs. Carlson nervously said, “Well … anyone who thinks Orphans have to be evil terrorists doesn’t know Mark. He’s the nicest guy ever.”
Alex grinned. “I agree. Riley Finn, too.” She looked over at Jo and teased, “But not Jo. She’s not the ‘nice guy’. She’s the ‘tough chick’.”
Jo smiled back. “Damn straight.”
While the Carlsons whispered back and forth, and Jo worked on paperwork, Alex did … schoolwork. She used her TK to pull her tablet out of her gym bag, and then she worked on her first Lit paper for the term. Willow had suggested getting all her reference materials on the tablet or online, and then using the ‘outline’ program she’d loaded onto the tablet, so that was what Alex was doing. It was a lot easier whipping up the outline for the paper that way, but it was just as much work writing the paper, and it was slower than using a full keyboard. Still, she finished the rough draft in under an hour, and then she used a ‘search in this list of files’ program from Willow to check all her quotes and paste the references in at the end of the paper. That was way faster than usual. Then she saved it until she was ready to do the editing pass next week, because it wasn’t due for two weeks.
And this time, she wasn’t going to turn it in super-early, because some of the people in the class were still kind of cheesed off about that. It totally wasn’t her fault that Ms. Walters started fussing at students to get their papers in as soon as the first paper got turned in. She’d wait until Mina or Hal or Ming got their paper in first, and then someone else would get glared at, and she could turn her paper in and be glare-free. She would have a glare deficit!
And then she got started on the book they were reading in Spanish class, only it really was easier to read on the tablet, because she could use Willow’s accelerator and mark a word or a phrase, and get a Spanish-to-English translation right away, even if it was using the sat phone to connect to the internet while she was on the jet. Even better, Willow had managed to get electronic copies of her chem and calc books from the publishers, in an I-am-not-going-to-ask-if-this-is-legal way, so Alex was going to do chem and calc homework on the way back, too, just like she had the textbooks along.
They landed and taxied over to two Hummers. Jo opened the hatch and stopped. “Corinne? Do you need any assistance?”
“I … I’m fine.”
But it was pretty obvious Mrs. Carlson wasn’t fine. She grabbed her cane and limped down the aisle. Even though she was wearing baggy long pants, Alex could tell that her right ‘foot’ wasn’t working like her left foot. And Corinne had a cotton glove on her right hand, and she always tilted her head down so her hair stayed over the right side of her face. Alex just wanted to fly over and give her a hug and tell her it was okay.
Sergeant Carlson hopped out of the doorway first, and then stood there to give his wife a tiny bit of privacy while she struggled with the steps and the not-really-helpful handrail. Then he ushered her into one of the Humvees. He situated her behind Sergeant Walters, who was driving, so her good side was to a window, and he hopped up in the front right seat.
Alex decided to be pushy. She flew over to the empty seat in the back and asked, “Is this spot free?” She knew perfectly well that Mrs. Carlson wasn’t going to say no to Terawatt. She hoped Corinne didn’t think she was being mean.
“Umm … I … Yes?”
Alex flew into the seat and buckled up. She gave Corinne a smile and asked, “Are you gonna get to eat lunch with us? I mean, you and the sergeant?”
Mark gently said, “Just tell her. She’ll understand.”
Alex said, “You can talk to me. I’m just a regular person. Even if I can do some weird stuff.”
Corinne muttered, “You’re not just a regular person. I mean … You’re a real superhero! Like in the comic books. You fought a spider bigger than our old high school! You fought those creepy silicon things. You fight stuff Mark isn’t allowed to tell me about. I could never be that brave, or that tough.”
Alex insisted, “I’ve seen your husband in action. He’s that brave and tough already. And he wouldn’t have married you if you weren’t special, too.”
Corinne looked uncomfortably at her husband and confessed, “He was way out of my league even before we got married. He just had this stupid crush on me even if he was the big star of our school. Football, basketball, baseball, good grades, the whole deal. I was just some dumb blonde who could do cheers. And I can’t even do that anymore. He was supposed to go to Penn State and be the country’s best college linebacker, and then go be the best linebacker in the NFL, and then I ruined everything.”
“Honey, it wasn’t you,” the sergeant objected.
“He should’ve dumped me on my parents and gone off to Penn State and found Miss Right there. He threw his entire sports career away. For me.”
Alex knew Corinne felt really bad, but she still said, “And I’m glad he did. Not that I’d want anyone to get hurt, but having him on Team Two has maybe made the difference between losing a big chunk of Tokyo to the silicates, and saving the day. Or fighting a nasty battle that was over in minutes, versus having a war between North and South Korea that probably would have dragged a dozen other countries into it.”
Sergeant Carlson disagreed. “I’m pretty sure Terawatt could’ve handled things without me.”
Alex insisted, “You’ve seen how bad some of these things have been. I couldn’t have done half of them without the SRI. I sure couldn’t have saved Rome and Tokyo and New York simultaneously, and there’s no way I could’ve stopped an entire battalion of soldiers and nine supervillains all at the same time. You’re really important, and so are Jo and Riley and Graham and especially Jack.”
Corinne asked unhappily, “So why was a centerfold along?”
Alex explained, “Because she’s like our very own Hulk. She’s stronger than all the rest of us put together. Your husband can throw a person. Azure Crush can throw a Hyundai.”
The sergeant mentioned, “And she tackled an indestructible monster that could probably bench press a building, just to keep it from coming after me, so I owe her one.” He paused a second and added, “And I didn’t tell you that.”
Alex said, “Let’s pretend I told you, so no one gets in trouble.”
“So why isn’t she getting a medal, too?” Corinne wondered.
He shrugged. “Politics, probably. Wouldn’t look good to have the President giving a medal to a woman who spent time being a supervillain before she posed naked for a dirty magazine.”
Alex said, “I’m hoping she’s turning over a new leaf. Because I didn’t enjoy our first fight, and I doubt she’ll make the same mistakes if I have to fight her again.”
He muttered, “I kinda doubt you’ll make the same mistakes, either. From what the captain and the ell-tee say, you just keep getting tougher and tougher, and anyone who can do what you did Monday can take down Babe the Big Blue Oxgirl even if she brings friends. Which reminds me, how did you take down a fire-thrower and an ice-thrower at the same time? Did you just trick ’em into shooting each other?”
She explained, “An ice-caster absorbs heat. She can’t really ‘cast’ ice like the fire-caster can throw fireballs. So hitting her with a fireball won’t hurt her. It might even make her feel better. I tricked her into hitting the fire-caster with ice and knocking him out, and then I telekinetically punched her lights out.”
He grinned. “I’m perfectly happy with a little properly-applied brute force in the right place.”