Chapter 142 – Mission Highly Unlikely

Alex looked at Sam’s monitor. They couldn’t warn anyone on the ground in time to do anything that could help. They couldn’t move the space station out of the way in time. She asked, “Can we crash the shuttle into it?”

Sam frowned. “Only if you want even more mass crashing into the ISS shortly afterward, only with lots of alien contaminant on everything. We don’t have time to maneuver the shuttle in a flanking attack and get enough velocity to also intercept the Envisat, much less knock it off course.”

“Great,” Vince muttered. “The great Samantha Carter finally hits something she can’t think her way out of.”

Lisa snapped, “Vince! Behave!”

Sam froze. She turned and looked at Alex. “Terawatt, have you ever tried using your powers to create a high-powered maser?”

Vince objected, “Even I know you can’t pull that off. You’d need a vacuum chamber, a massive electrical signal, magnetic focusing rings or something like that, and a control system.”

Sam pointed at the space outside the window. “Vacuum chamber.” She pointed at Alex. “Electrical signal.” She pointed at one of the pieces of astrophysics equipment on the far wall. “Magnetic focusing rings.” She pointed at a small rubber-coated computer thing strapped to the wall over the toolbench. “Control system.”

Vince finally sighed. “Shit. You really are fifty times smarter than me.”

Alex gave him a small smile. “Don’t let it bother you. She’s fifty times smarter than me, too.”

Vince frowned. “Why did I have to be the one who got stuck trying to beat out the smartest person on Earth for first at the Academy?”

Alex gave him a bigger smile. “Oh, she may not be the smartest person on Earth. She may be second, behind General O’Neill’s girlfriend.”

Vince looked at her like ‘that makes no sense at all’. Wow, she was turning into another Jack O’Neill. Maybe snarkiness really was contagious.

Sam asked, “Terawatt, can you use your telekinesis to take that magnetometer apart for me and protect the magnetic rings in it?”

“Sure.”

Lisa said, “One thing, Sam. Lightning is not the same thing as an electron pulse.”

Sam smiled. “Oh, Terawatt doesn’t throw plain old lightning.”

*               *               *

Riley Finn used his earbud, rather than letting Tobias hear what General O’Neill was telling him. He listened to all of the general’s plan, and he only said, “Yes, sir.”

He hung up and announced, “We’re changing direction. There’s an X-37 that’s coming in after stealing samples of the alien and shooting at least one of the ISS astronauts. Everybody on Earth’s tracking them, and so we’re pretty sure the X-37’s going to come down over the Chihuahuan or Sonoran Desert somewhere south of Texas or Arizona or New Mexico. The general’s going to get us some support, but we’re the front line if we can get there in time.”

He looked at Sergeant Carlson. “Ms. Tobias gets a full kit, including comms, body armor, a tac vest, and an M203.”

“Yes, sir.”

He looked at Tobias. “You’re part of the team until you try anything, at which point you’re designated as red team.”

She nodded. “Understood.”

He insisted, “You’ll be on point. But if you swing your M203 at any of us, expect some friendly fire.”

She just nodded again.

He told Lupo and Carlson, “It looks like we’ll be siding with Ms. Tobias on this one. It’s the NID and that creep McNamara.”

Lupo added a few choices cursewords of her own.

Tobias said, “Sounds like I’m not Public Enemy Number One around here.”

Riley tried not to growl. “Colonel Roger McNamara used to be with The Shop. We have reason to believe he was party to some things they did that make Maggie Walsh look like Saint Margaret of Scotland. And, just to make matters worse, he and his men shot and killed the Russian cosmonaut on the ISS, so we’re about to have some nasty international consequences, even if we stop the alien lifeform.”

Tobias smirked slightly. “It sounds to me like Dr. Walsh isn’t doing anything different from what every country on Earth is trying to do to each other already.”

He decided that was the best opening he was going to get for a while. “Which would be why she had you try to drop that ‘hate plague’ at that computer conference.”

Tobias shrugged. “My cover was already blown and I was on the run. I was asked to do it, to incriminate the America bloc, who hadn’t done jack shit for me once your boss effed up their plan by nailing me with a taser. The goal was Willow Rosenberg. We wanted to either kill her or rip up her support system so we could convert her. We’d win either way.”

Riley guessed, “And then you could use that as a threat against all of us uncooperative Orphans still running around loose.”

Tobias answered, “That’s my guess. I didn’t get the full strategic planning lowdown, and I didn’t need it when I was going to be identified and possibly captured. The NID’s fully aware of the interrogation techniques some of your pals in the CIA pretend they’re not using.”

Lupo suggested, “And if you let a hundred computer company bosses wipe out their own companies with fireaxes, you’d knock out enough of the planet’s computer gurus that your people could control the world’s IT infrastructure. Especially with Rosenberg on your side.”

Riley really didn’t want to consider what the world’s computer infrastructure would look like right now if Willow was wholeheartedly working for The Collective.

*               *               *

Alex tried not to gawk at Sam’s words like she was so stupid she didn’t even know how her own power worked. Even if she apparently was so stupid she didn’t know how her own power worked.

Vince snapped, “Of course Terawatt throws lightning. It’s in her name, for Christ’s sake!”

Sam was typing away on a laptop hooked up to what she was calling a ‘ruggedized portable data recorder’ but she still said, “Terawatt always hits what she aims at. Lightning detours off and hits the closest grounded connections. Terawatt’s hurling electrical wattage along an ionization corridor, and she’s obviously creating the ionization corridor as part of her attack. She’s already most of the way toward being a charged particle-beam weapon all on her own.”

Alex didn’t say anything, but this was totally why she wanted to spend time with Sam, along with Sam being a totally awesome person.

Sam took the field coils Alex had removed from the astrophysics gear, and she clamped them to a six-foot length of steel square tubing. Then she aligned the coils and hooked them up to a big battery she clamped to the tubing, along with a four-foot telescope that she then aligned, too. She hooked wires from her ruggedized computer to the battery and the coils, and she said, “Let’s move. Terawatt, bring your tablet. Vince, you can come if you want. I can use another pair of skilled hands.”

Sam was already in her skinsuit, so she tugged on her helmet with backpack and sealed it around her neck. Then she stepped into the EVA hatch with her makeshift invention.

Alex went silvery and hauled her tablet along as she dived into the EVA hatch just before Sam secured the inner door. Sam spoke over her helmet’s comm system. “Pumping air back into module … now.”

Alex gaped as the words appeared on the tablet. Sam had rigged it up with a dictation program so she could read what Sam said over the comms! Sam was so smart.

Okay, so the tablet said: pumping heir back into mod yule now. Alex could still read it and tell what Sam meant.

Hey, maybe Sam had a speech synthesizer program so it would go the other way, too. Alex typed on the tablet with her TK and the stylus: can you hear this?

Sam nodded and gave Alex a thumbs-up.

Working with geniuses was totally mega-awesome.

They moved out of the hatch into the biggest vacuum chamber in the universe. It was still amazingly pretty, even knowing that a satellite was heading their way at a terrifying speed and was going to cause a planetary disaster if they couldn’t stop it.

Vince came out in his spacesuit. Sam signaled Alex to grab the two of them and move forward enough that they wouldn’t accidentally hit any of the modules. Alex just grabbed them and jetted forward. Micro-gravity was really pretty awesome. She figured it would be a real pain if you were normal and couldn’t fly on your own.

And if this maser weapon worked, it would be the coolest thing ever.

Alex told herself it had to work, because Sam thought it up.

*               *               *

Vince looked through the telescope while Terawatt lined the thing up with telekinesis or whatever she was using. Whatever it was, having someone who could fly without worrying about propulsion packs was damn handy. And she was fast. He was used to moving at only a couple of miles an hour during EVA. She was booking.

“Perfect.” The coils were aiming right at the lower right-hand corner of the Envisat. Carter had, of course, maneuvered them so they were right in between the ISS and the Envisat, so the Envisat was coming directly at them. They wouldn’t have to keep re-aligning everything once they got her gadget set up right. Assuming they got set up soon enough, and they weren’t crushed in between the station and enough kinetic energy to turn the ISS into pea gravel.

Carter instructed, “Tera, test fire please.”

When did Carter get permission to call the biggest superhero on the planet by a nickname?

A burst of energy jetted right down the middle of the coils and leapt off into the distance, and it felt like the hair on the back of his hands was standing up from static electricity. He tried to ignore the burning sensation on his chest, where the green slime was eating through his uniform shirt and then into his body.

Carter had Terawatt do three more test fires while she twiddled with the magnetic coils, doing whatever super-geniuses do to create impossible shit.

Carter instructed, “Tera, another test fire please.”

And then she screamed. She screamed like she was in agony.

The lightning vanished. Vince snapped, “Carter! Report!”

A robotic voice came over the comms as Terawatt typed on her tablet with her powers. Sam are you okay?

Sam took a shuddering breath.

Vince asked, “Do we need to stop?”

Carter took another breath and gasped, “Hell, no!”

He checked, “Then what’s wrong?”

She stared at him. “Elliot, are you feeling this?”

He frowned. “No, just a really uncomfortable … Holy crap, it’s a burning sensation where the goo got on me!”

Sam insisted, “Terawatt, I need you to not only not stop, but to increase your power while I get closer to the coils.”

The robotic voice from Terawatt came over the comms. Sam, what do you think you are doing?

Carter explained, “It’s a phototropic, photoabsorptive lifeform, but it can’t handle absolutely everything in the E-M spectrum. I think it’s frying as it tries to absorb some of the E-M radiation wavelengths that are going through me, because we’ve found a wavelength that heats up at least one of its key nucleic acids like water in a microwave oven. So it’s heating up and denaturing inside me and Commander Elliott. I think this is going to kill the stuff inside me, or else kill me and I’ll take it with me.”

If a silvery blob could look worried, it did.

Still, Vince had something bigger to worry about than Carter being in pain. She could always hand him the controls and move away if she wanted to. He had a satellite to stop. He said, “We need to fire on that thing.”

Terawatt launched a burst of energy so bright he had to engage the polarization system in his helmet. Carter made a hideous noise like it was taking everything she had not to scream her lungs out. There was a feeling on his chest like the slime was on fire and burning into him. If this was what Carter was feeling in every part of her body, he didn’t know if she could take it. Hell, he didn’t think he could take it.

He tried to ignore the burning pain, and he looked through the telescope again.

Holy shit, the lower right-hand corner of the Envisat was glowing red like hot coals. It was actually working! Carter had invented a fucking death ray out of spare parts just in the time it took him to be an asshole to her. No wonder the Russians had been so scared about that ‘re-director’ proposal she had been pushing.

Terawatt kept firing. And suddenly the pain on his chest started fading. Carter kept trying not to scream. He wondered how much more she could take.

That corner of the Envisat was glowing orange.

Carter scooted even closer to the coils. The ghastly noise coming out of her throat made him want to grab her and throw her to safety. He kept watching the satellite, which was closing far too fast.

The corner of the Envisat was glowing yellow. The rocket in that corner exploded. That whole section of the Envisat exploded. Hot chunks of metal and plastic went flying outward. And the satellite shifted in the opposite direction.

He called out, “Cease fire! It’s moving out of your beam.”

He watched as the satellite drifted up and to the left until he needed to turn the scope to track it.

Carter finally whimpered, “Tera, test fire please.”

He warned her, “We won’t hit it. We need to adjust our target.”

She said, “We’ve missed our window already. This is for me.”

Tera fired again, and the beam tore off into space.

Carter sighed. “I think that’s it. I think we got all the lifeform in me. Now let’s get inside before the Envisat goes past and hits this hyperplane with a few thousand micrometeoroids.”

Shit. Something metallic the size of a pea with a relative velocity of almost a thousand miles an hour might as well be a bullet out of a .38 revolver.

Terawatt grabbed everyone and everything in a telekinetic grip and flew all of them back to the isolation module in a few seconds. Then she sent Sam in with the gear, and she stayed outside between him and any incoming danger. The woman had guts. He pulled himself into the EVA hatch with her puddling down near his feet, and he was inside in a matter of seconds.

Carter already had her helmet off. “Lisa, this is Sam. I think the Envisat will clear the ISS easily, but it may leave a trail of micrometeoroids in its wake. Get everyone in the station on the opposite side of the central core, close all module hatches, and make sure everyone’s prepared for possible decompression.”

Lisa replied, “Already done.” Vince noticed that she was already in an EVA suit with the helmet on.

Terawatt said, “If there’s any leaks, tell me where, and I can try to block them with my telekinesis or weld patches over the holes.”

“Thank you,” Lisa told her.

Carter looked awful, but she checked the astrophysics gear again and said, “Twenty seconds to periapsis.”

Only Carter would say that. Normal people would say ‘impact’ or ‘intersection’ or ‘closest point’. Showoffs would say ‘perigee’, even if technically perigee was only for orbits around the earth. Carter was several levels beyond that.

Terawatt asked, “Can I go out and protect the solar panels?”

Carter was sagging pretty badly, but she said, “Not … necessary. They should be … edge-on … and far enough away.”

Vince was keeping an eye out the window with a telescope, and spotted it coming toward them at bullet-like speed. It whizzed by about a thousand yards past level three. Nothing was hitting the isolation module, but he doubted the ISS as a whole was that lucky. He wondered if the station was ringing like a bell with every micro-impact.

The whole station collectively held their breath as they waited for a lethal puncture.

And still nothing hit the isolation module. He wondered if that was because Terawatt was floating at the window concentrating like she was putting up a big telekinetic wall of protection.

Lisa snapped, “Report. Everyone.”

“Clear here.”

“No pressure losses.”

“A couple small objects hit module 10 or 11, but I’m not seeing any signs of penetration, and air pressure is still nominal. We’ll need to do an EVA to check.”

Lisa ordered, “All right, Jun. Wait several hours if you can, just in case there’s much slower wreckage trailing along behind the Envisat. If there’s no sign of any pressure loss in an hour, we’ll see if we can wait until tomorrow.”

Terawatt flew over and gently lowered Carter to a bed that folded out from the wall without her touching it. “Are you okay?” The strap snaked out apparently on its own and secured Carter in the bed.

Carter muttered, “Probably not … The alien nucleic acids are … decomposing inside me … I don’t feel too great.”

Vince turned to the comm monitor. “Lisa! What can I do to help Carter?”

Lisa calmly asked, “Can you take a blood sample and analyze it using the equipment there?”

He scowled. “Maybe. Maybe not. But you’ll have to walk me through every step. Think of me as the world’s worst intern.”

Hans said, “I can facilitate matters with the sampling robot. I believe I found the only trap code in the program. It was a simple override in the password-checking object.”

Vince frowned at the thought of trusting that damn sampler system but said, “Let’s give it a shot.”

Terawatt looked really worried about Sam, but she lifted the makeshift maser with her telekinesis and said, “Do what you can, but don’t break the quarantine. I’ve got some fungus to roast.” She went silvery as she floated into the hatch to the Atlantis, and then she carefully opened the shuttle up to space. Once the interior of the shuttle was a vacuum, she began blasting the maser inside the Atlantis.

*               *               *

Clare checked her carefully-packed chute one more time. Lupo reminded her, “It’s a slightly modified basejumping chute. Great steering control and a low-altitude opening. I’ll be ahead of you, so open your chute when I open mine. Then steer where I steer and try to land near me: this may be enemy territory. The landing will be a bit harder than you’re used to, so make sure you land properly.”

Finn said, “Which reminds me. This time Lupo, don’t break your leg and expect me to carry you.”

Clare noticed that Lupo and Carlson exchanged looks, so there was probably some interesting team history in there. She doubted they’d tell her. Clare was certain that if it was an embarrassing story about Lupo, the woman wouldn’t tell it unless tortured. At length.

Clare figured she was ready. She wasn’t surprised that the team had body armor and a tac vest in her size. It was probably a backup for Lupo. Clare had the front of her tac vest loaded with magazines and grenades for the M203. She had an earbud and a small comm system. She had a really nice combat knife strapped to her leg, and a sweet little survival kit with emergency rations and full canteen on a web belt. After all, they were jumping into a desert. Her M203 was in a padded ballistic nylon case clipped across her front. She was wearing a motorcycle helmet for the parachute drop, and she had a pair of tinted goggles she would swap for the helmet during the op. It dawned on her that wearing a motorcycle helmet with a facemask meant that she could use her comms while parachuting down. She was ready. Unless one of a hundred things went wrong.

Lupo had an M203 and even more ammo, plus a handgun and a couple of holdouts. Finn had a flat pack on his tac vest under his parachute, and a massive sniper rifle hanging on his front. Carlson had an M240G and an M32 in padded Kevlar cases hanging off his front, plus over a hundred pounds of ammo.

She was still surprised they had let her come along. They had her intel. Maybe they assumed she was holding out on them, and her inside knowledge could come in handy on the ground. Maybe they were going to let her have a ‘friendly fire’ accident. Maybe she had swayed one of them. Or maybe they were expecting a lot more firepower than just a couple of guys with handguns climbing out of an X-37.

Finn said, “Tobias, you will be on point after we land. I will have backstop position so I’ll cover everyone’s six. For purposes of this op, I will be ‘catcher’, you will be ‘pinch hitter’ or ‘PH’, Sergeant Carlson will be ‘first base’, and Lieutenant Lupo will be … ‘shortstop’.”

Lupo scowled. “The general picked the codenames, didn’t he, sir?”

Finn answered, “Yes, he did. Perhaps you shouldn’t have had that argument with him about weak-hitting, good-fielding shortstops vs. better-hitting, worse-fielding ones.”

Lupo mulishly insisted, “It’s not my fault he’s an old Ozzie Smith fan.”

Clare could see how Lupo would dislike a ‘weak hitter’ tag. Clare just couldn’t see a general having a friendly argument about baseball with a lieutenant. Still, O’Neill had a rep as a maverick. A very dangerous maverick who thought outside the box more than most military men.

The co-pilot called out, “Colonel? We’ve got their landing strip spotted. The X-37 is down. You have a go now.” The co-pilot climbed out of his seat and popped the door, even though they were at roughly twenty thousand feet and three hundred mph.

They did a fast exit, with the four of them diving out as quickly after one another as was safe. Clare watched Lupo spread out and fall like a pro. She had some training, but not like Lupo, so she just mimicked the lieutenant.

Finn’s voice came over her earbud. “Long runway, painted to look like the desert. The X-37 is stopped several hundred yards from four buildings. Doesn’t look like they were prepared for it.”

Clare had to pull out her monocular and look. The runway was practically invisible at this distance. Someone had spent a lot of time doing the camo job on it. If the X-37 wasn’t on it, she never would have spotted it. To the south of the runway’s west end were four large buildings arranged in a tight square. One was a hangar large enough for maybe an X-37, a couple of choppers, and also a couple of small jets. One looked like a big, squat warehouse. One looked almost like a motel. One looked oddly like it was too short for its roof: she’d seen that look on largely underground buildings. The hangar had two huge HVAC units in the middle and four smaller ones on the corners, which seemed like overkill to her, but she didn’t live in this weather.

And she could see what Finn meant. The X-37 wasn’t meant to be a truck. You couldn’t drive it around. It took off from a high-altitude launch platform and landed like a glider. You needed a big tow vehicle to haul it in and out of its hangar, and if it was supposed to come down here, they would have had coolant trucks and tow vehicles out and waiting, and it would already be getting hauled into the hangar even though its outside was still ridiculously hot after re-entry.

But that meant Finn’s team had an opportunity. She didn’t understand why a group that was smart enough to have its own X-37 and launch pad and secret launch site down in Nicaragua, plus a mole already on the ISS, would screw up on something so obvious. If it was her, she would have had her key operatives bail out in parachutes and duck into the hangar before anyone could get a spy satellite or an observation plane overhead, while the X-37 would continue hundreds or thousands of miles downrange until it could crash spectacularly and hide any evidence of what they’d actually done. So something had gone drastically wrong.

“PH to catcher. They should have two coolant trucks lowering the X-37’s outside temp and a tow vehicle hauling it under a roof. Something’s gone wrong with their plans.”

“Shortstop to PH. Most likely scenario to make ’em fall this far off-plan is loss of isolation on the lifeform and someone panicking.”

“Catcher to team. We assume they’ve lost quarantine until we know otherwise. We do not let anyone get to the X-37, and we do not let anyone get away from it, especially not into that building complex, which probably has underground areas. We do not need another Umbrella disaster.”

Oh. Right. Clare reminded herself that these people were about a third of the team that had taken the American bloc’s master plan and crushed it like it was in a trash compactor. They knew how to handle disasters that would make the CDC piss themselves.

Lupo opened her chute, so Clare opened hers and quickly grabbed her control lines. Then she followed Lupo’s maneuvers. Clare could see that Lupo was aiming for a position behind one of the few low rises for miles.

Clare landed and hastily let the air out of her chute. The landing was harder than most that she’d done, but it wasn’t hard enough to injure an Orphan. Finn and Carlson dropped perfectly behind her and had their chutes bundled up before she got hers rolled and tied.

Finn directed her to take point, and the four of them ran about three miles to the last little rise before the open area around the buildings. Clare doubted any normal soldiers could run at nine miles an hour for twenty minutes in this climate, especially if they were carrying all the weight Carlson was packing.

Finn said, “Minimal cover from here on in, so you’re all going to have to move until the X-37 is between you and any potential heavy weaponry. Then run for it. I’ll provide long support. It’s slightly over a mile to the buildings from here, so I think I can clear any heavy threats. But they could have their own snipers. Or something heavier. Maybe even anti-aircraft.”

Clare thought about what she knew, and she volunteered, “They could have Stingers or Strelas, or maybe something high-end like an S-300 or S-400.”

Lupo responded, “They’re NID. They’re more likely to have Patriots or something a little more downscale than that.”

Finn disagreed. “They might be getting their heavy weapons off the black market, so that would make a Patriot pretty unlikely.”

Finn put a ball cap backward on his head so the bill would protect the back of his neck and he could operate his sniper rifle. “Move out, team. I’ll backstop.”

Clare prepped her weapon, trotted over the rise, and moved out. She followed Lupo’s directions and moved slightly northward so the X-37 was screening the three of them as they sprinted in to engage.

A coolant truck finally roared out of the hangar toward the X-37. There was a snap of a bullet breaking the sound barrier, then the boom of a big rifle as the sound caught up to her, and she saw the truck’s windshield had just starred. The truck veered across the runway and into the sand before overturning. Clare made a mental note never to be on the other end of Finn’s sniper scope.

But the enemy was finally reacting. A force of six security men in flak jackets charged their way with AK-47’s. And the two HVAC units she could see atop the hangar popped open to reveal a manned heavy machinegun and a manned automatic grenade launcher. She assumed the far corners of the hangar had similar weaponry.

“Shortstop to catcher. An XM307 and an M134 Minigun at our corners of the hangar roof.”

“Catcher to team. Handle reaction force and then concentrate fire on that roof.”

There was a snap and boom, and the operator of the grenade launcher was knocked backward. Another snap and boom, and one of the men operating the M134 spun backward.

Sergeant Carlson took advantage of the lack of supporting fire for the reaction force to fire off two grenades from his M32, and he dropped both of them right in the midst of the six-man force. No one got back up after the explosions.

Lupo just said, “Shortstop to catcher. First base has handled reaction force. Now hitting hangar roof.” She aimed her M203 and put a grenade just a little behind the Minigun, dropping the two remaining crewmen before they could return fire.

Clare was slightly discouraged, since she had done the same thing, and her grenade landed a good thirty feet further back.

Carlson used his M240 to hose down the men trying to get the XM307 operating.

“Catcher to team. Nice work. Walk your fire farther back across the hangar roof. They have another XM307 and M134 on the far side, and an anti-aircraft battery in the center.” That was followed by two more snap-then-boom sounds from Finn’s sniper rifle.

Carlson opened fire with his M32 and put all four of his remaining grenades into the center of the roof in about three seconds. Clare and Lupo launched two more while Carlson reloaded. He was about to fire again, when the entire hangar roof collapsed inward. When the roof hit the hangar floor, something else exploded in a nice, big fireball that blew the hangar walls into the other buildings.

“Catcher to stadium. Anti-air is down, reaction force is down, X-37 still closed up, awaiting red team second wave and support.”

Despite the heat coming off the X-37, a hatch opened, and someone jumped out. They were a hundred yards out from the X-37, but Clare could still see the guy was green and walking oddly.

“Shortstop to catcher. It’s McNamara, and he’s infected.”

There was another snap-and-boom. A bullet hit McNamara in the chest and knocked him down. Unbelievably, he began to get back up again.

“Catcher to team. Do not engage except at range. That is not human any longer. Catcher to stadium, are you within range now?”

“Catcher, this is the relief pitchers. We will be within target acquisition distance in less than thirty.”

“Relief pitchers, this is catcher. Please confirm with passphrase.”

“You’re serious? Okay … Passphrase is ‘hey batta-batta-batta hey batta no batter’.”

“Thank you. Can I get strike one?”

“In five.”

Clare looked over at Lupo who told her, “Could be worse. General O’Neill ran the op against the monster of Tromaville using nicknames from the A-Team. Finn was ‘Face’. Klar is still cranky about being tabbed ‘Amy’. Rumor is this op narrowly escaped being named for the Herculoids. You probably would’ve been Gleep.”

Clare made a mental note to ask someone about the Herculoids. It sounded like a TV show. Maybe a comic book.

An F-15 seared overhead as its 20 mm Gatling gun chewed the X-37 to pieces, running a line of fire from the thing’s tail to its nose.

“Catcher to team. Evac at maximal speed.”

Lupo cursed. “Oh, hell. Tobias, run just as fucking fast as you can.” She and Carlson took off like tigers were after them. Clare followed at her best speed.

“Catcher to relief pitchers. Skip strike two and proceed directly to strike three.”

“Roger that, catcher.”

“Tobias, move your candy ass!” Lupo snapped.

Clare glanced over her shoulder and saw half a dozen keg-shaped bombs falling toward the remains of the X-37. Fuck! She slung her M203 over her shoulder and ran as hard as she could.

The Mark 77s hit in a perfect formation on and around the X-37. The firestorm billowed upward and out on all sides. She ran like Terawatt was after her.

Even in the heat of the desert, she could feel the blaze. She ran until Lupo finally slowed up and turned to check the inferno behind them.

Clare jogged up to Lupo and asked her, “How did you know?”

Lupo muttered, “I didn’t break my leg on a parachute drop.”

Fuck, was it possible Finn really had picked up Lupo and run her out of a Mark 77 dropzone? These guys were hardcore.

At that moment, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to talk them around to her point of view, or ask them if she could join up.

A/N: The ISS orbits at 250 miles (400 km) in LEO (low Earth orbit) so it is the perfect height for involvement in Kessler Syndrome. The Envisat really is regarded as one of the prime candidates for ‘patient zero’ in a Kessler Syndrome cascade. It’s about 8.2 metric tons, and in a sun-synchronous polar orbit at an altitude of about 490 miles (currently), so getting it to hit the ISS is tricky but not impossible. The ESA lost contact with it, and it cannot be maneuvered, but it is expected to remain in orbit (and a threat to start an ablation cascade) for another 150 years or so. I wish I was making this part up.

 
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