|
|
Chapter 143 – Mission AccomplishedAlex was feeling pretty good. She’d used the maser to turn every bit of alien lifeform in the Atlantis into hot sludge. She knew what ‘denaturing’ was from chemistry class, so she at least felt confident that the individual cells of the thing were all parboiled.
She’d gotten enough to eat. She’d brought some energy bars with her, but the isolation module had several weeks’ worth of space station food. Some of it was worse than bad MREs, but some of it was pretty okay.
The blood tests were already done. Alex was completely clean of the goop. Commander Elliott was clean, although he had a big first-degree burn on his chest, and Lisa thought he might get a rash on the burned area, too. Itchy rash on top of a burn. Eww. Sam was now clean, too, but she had denatured nucleic acids breaking down inside her body, so she was going to be sick for days from that, and she was going to be in a hospital for even longer because she required treatment for first degree burns throughout her insides. Extra eww. But she would be okay in the long run. That was the important thing.
And Commander Elliott was turning out to be an okay guy. Alex could tell he didn’t like Sam, but he was taking care of her like a nurse would, which was not a fun job when Sam was a lousy patient. And he was a hero for letting that lifeform splash on him instead of Lisa or the module, even though he knew what would probably happen to him if he did it. Lisa really, really liked him. That was really obvious. Alex sort of wondered how much privacy they managed to get on the space station, given how many modules it had. Not that she wanted to think about it a ton, even if Vince was years younger than Jack, and Lisa was maybe three or four years older than Willow.
And there was a NASA shuttle coming up to take her back home. It would arrive before another DragonX capsule that was being launched with radio parts and disinfectant and fungicide and a bunch of other stuff Lisa had requested. They were leaving the Atlantis up here for now, just in case, but the ISS would probably have some really good uses for a shuttle they could use as their own. At least, she thought so. Assuming they could figure out how to clean up seven hundred pounds of possibly toxic goo and then get a whole new environmental system installed and then get enough shuttle fuel up here to fill up a space shuttle that had its own massive fuel tank-slash-rockets mounted on its sides.
The new shuttle would be here in a few more hours, because they weren’t going to have to take the time to match speeds and orbits exactly, and then slowly go through the docking procedures. They were just going to get within Terawatt’s range.
Alex looked over and remembered some of the stuff other-Sam and other-Willow had talked about. She asked, “Sam, do you think you’re up for a talk about the quantum foam and alternate dimensions and P.A.M. Dirac’s conjecture about the non-constancy of physical constants over really large changes in time and distance?”
Vince groaned. “Why do I always get stuck with the super-brains?”
Alex rolled her eyes. Boy, did he have the wrong girl.
* * *
Alex was ready to go. The shuttle was almost in position. The ISS was going to orbit past it at a relative speed of about three hundred miles an hour, and the shuttle would be about eight miles closer to Earth. So all Alex had to do was take Sam and follow the new directions on her NASA tablet so she would fly right over to the shuttle. It was really handy that they could use the radio onboard the Atlantis and Commander Elliott was fine with playing ‘radio operator’ now that the Atlantis had atmosphere in it again and the alien was nothing but dead goo. He’d even transferred the new program onto her NASA tablet and had acted really nice about it instead of being all ‘I am the boss and I am too important to do this stuff’.
Sam was feeling really horrible, but Alex had used her TK to slide Sam into one of the bulky spacesuits so she could maintain quarantine just in case.
Alex checked, “Are you okay going on the shuttle and going through re-entry?”
Sam whispered, “No, but anything’s better than having to let Vince help me use the toilet in here. And my period ought to start in about four days, and I can’t imagine anything worse than having to need his help with that.”
Alex glanced over to make sure Commander Elliott was still in the Atlantis and wasn’t listening. “I could stay up here and help you instead.”
Sam looked at her like she was crazy. “You? You’re needed down there to save the day a couple of times a month. You can’t stay up here playing nurse!”
Okay, so Sam had a point. Alex still said, “Fine. But I’m giving you a phone number for the SRI. If these guys don’t treat you nice, call me through the SRI, and I’ll fly over and help you out.”
Sam groaned. “Why are you being so nice to me? Does this have anything to do with our theoretical discussion about alternate dimensions …?” Her eyes got big. “Oh. Is there an alternate me in that dimension with the dragon?”
Alex explained, “There’s an alternate you in another dimension. You and I and four other women from different dimensions helped a woman in yet another dimension ward off an attack from a real hellgoddess in a hell dimension who was planning on taking over the entire multiverse.”
“Me?” Sam doubted. “You’re a superheroine. I’m just an astrophysicist.”
“You’re a genius astrophysicist who’s an Air Force fighter pilot and a heroine who just saved the planet from invasion by an alien lifeform, which is what alternate-Sam does pretty much a couple times a month. And getting possessed by an alien and beating it and being really sick afterward? Other-Sam told me it happened to her a few years ago, so I know you can beat this and come back as good as new. And then you just saved the Earth from Kessler Syndrome with some spare parts lying around, like Tony Stark or something. And you knew more about my superpowers than anyone else I’ve met. I totally want you helping me out when you feel up to it.” She gave Sam a knowing smile. “And in that other universe, Sam Carter is a major with really cool medals.”
“Why do I get the feeling you know something I don’t?”
Alex grinned. “There’s not a whole lot you don’t know.”
“Of course there is. I don’t know biochemistry and genetics like, say, Margaret Walsh, and I don’t know mathematics like Paul Erdos, and I don’t know computer security like Willow Rosenberg … And what’s so funny?”
Alex smiled. “I know Ms. Rosenberg through her work for the DHS. She’s a big fan of yours. I’ll have to introduce you two.”
Sam pointed out, “You do understand that I’m not this other Sam, right?”
Alex shrugged. “Sure. But that doesn’t mean you’re not a genius, or really courageous, or awesome when you’re in the field. I mean, you just proved that today.”
Sam wondered suspiciously, “And how many other people from alternate dimensions have you contacted here? I assume I’m not the first. And how many ‘successes’ do you have?”
Alex thought it over for a second. “I’ve now contacted four of the six women from that team, and four of their ‘associates’. Assuming you’re okay with this, I’m three for four on teammates and maybe three point five for four on associates.”
Sam gave her a doubting look. “Three point five out of four?”
Alex admitted, “He’s really paranoid about stuff. Okay, he has good reason to be less than trusting. And grumpy. The last time I was at his house, he didn’t even offer me something to drink. But he’s onboard with the ‘saving people’ part.”
“What about the one teammate who’s not okay with things?”
Alex frowned unhappily. “She’s … In that other dimension, she was just a cheerleader and prom queen type, until she was given powers by higher beings, and she had to fight the forces of darkness every night of her life until she died. Growth and maturity, the really hard way. In this dimension, not. She still just wants to be a prom queen type even if she’s in her twenties now. I’m leaving her alone.”
“And the two you didn’t contact?”
Alex really frowned. “First one? No origin event to make her into what she becomes in that other dimension. Second one? In that other dimension, she’s a notorious cat burglar who went straight. In this dimension, I think she’s still engaged in major crime and possibly some international terrorism. I’m not contacting her.”
“It sounds like you’re being fairly rational about this,” Sam admitted.
Alex sighed. “I’m glad you think so. When I tell you the whole story and about the superpowers and such, you’re going to re-think that ‘rational’ part.”
Sam admitted, “What I’m really thinking about right now, besides feeling sick as a dog, is working out some math on the alternate dimension possibility and seeing what it tells me about the quantum foam, and if that yields any predictive capability I can test.”
Alex grinned. “I imagine other-Sam did the same thing. She doesn’t have superpowers, but she does have your brain.” Alex wasn’t quite ready to tell this Sam that other-Sam was the world’s greatest expert on the wormholes of the Stargate network, and she dashed around the galaxy saving the world, so she might have some inside information about this stuff that this-Sam didn’t.
Commander Elliott called out from the shuttle, “Terawatt? It’s time for you two to go. The Discovery’s in orbit and we’ll be passing over it in a few minutes.”
Alex said, “Thank you, commander. We’re leaving now.”
Sam moaned, “Thanks, Vince. For everything.”
The commander stuck his head into the shuttle hatch. “Yeah, well, thanks for saving the entire planet and my station and Lisa. Good luck, Sam.”
Alex pulled Sam’s spacesuit into the EVA hatch and whispered, “He called you Sam.”
“Yeah, I noticed. Maybe he’s mellowing as he gets old. Like limburger cheese.”
Alex giggled, even as she went silvery. She just held Sam and the tablet in a telekinetic grip where she could read the tablet and keep a close watch on Sam. The tablet told her where to go, and it also spelled out what Sam said inside her suit: It’s so beautiful. I didn’t think I would live long enough to go home.
It was totally not fair that there were three other shuttle astronauts who would never be going home, not even as something that could be given a decent burial.
Alex was still moving a lot faster than the shuttle, so she had to slow down and let it catch up with her before she swooped down into its EVA hatch with Sam. It wasn’t that hard. It was like slowing down from going three hundred miles an hour to a stop, and she’d done more than that almost every time she took the Blackbird.
She opened the inner hatch door of the shuttle and flew Sam into the shuttle bay.
A grinning guy in a spacesuit without his helmet on waved. “Terawatt! Captain Carter! Welcome to the Discovery. We only have a pilot and me, so there’s room for the two of you to sit in the other chairs in the control cabin.”
Sam sounded really sick, but she said, “Thanks. It’s nice to be in a shuttle with … people again.”
Alex used her TK some more and maneuvered Sam into a chair before buckling her in. Then she asked, “How long before we can start re-entry?”
The smiling co-pilot said, “Not long. Since we didn’t have to do the usual undocking procedures and checks for damage, and we’re already far enough away from the ISS, all we have to do is wait for the right entry window.”
The pilot turned his head and pointed at a monitor. “Thirty-seven minutes and counting down. We should be on the ground at Edwards in under two hours, but we’ll have to wait until they cool us off a bit before we can open a hatch.”
It was really awesome getting to sit in the control cabin of the shuttle for the re-entry. First, they turned around and went down tail-first so they could use their rockets to slow themselves a ton. That gave Alex an amazing view of space above them. Then the shuttle turned and went down belly-first with its nose up. That was pretty spectacular, because things were soon so hot outside the shuttle that looking out the windshield was like looking into a furnace. Then they were past the ‘dangerously hot and fast’ part, and the pilots zoomed down toward Edwards Air Force Base. And that was pretty awesome, because they were just pretty much gliding by then, since they didn’t want to use the rockets to speed up and they didn’t have an easy way to slow down.
The shuttle touched down and rolled down a super-long runway to a gradual stop, and it was still less than an hour after hitting the entry window. Alex was getting hungry. Sam looked as bad as she probably felt. Alex really hoped Sam didn’t urp inside her space suit, which would be totally mega-yucky.
Now they still had to sit and wait until the shuttle was cooled down enough that the hatch could get opened up without roasting everyone except Alex.
* * *
Riley Finn subtly checked as the Mexican Federal Police officers took the remaining NID operatives into custody. They had found four bodies in the ‘warehouse’ building that looked like the guys had taken cyanide rather than be captured. Riley really wanted to know who they were, and what was going on with that.
Meanwhile, half a dozen guys in full hazmat suits who were from the CDC and the Mexican Institute for Public Health were doing careful sampling through the burned remains on the runway. Not that there was much in the way of remains, because those Mark 77s had turned the X-37 into molten slag. And UN forces were flying in to look through the buildings and the underground labs, because the Russians and the EU were still extremely pissed off about the ISS incident, and this was a good way to let it get resolved.
Lupo was keeping an eye on Tobias, but Riley was expecting a chopper to show up and haul Clare back to jail any minute now.
He set up his sat phone and called in. “Catcher to manager, come in please.”
General O’Neill came on. “Manager responding from dugout. Short version first.”
Riley carefully stated, “Mission fully accomplished, no losses, no injuries, Tobias tried to convert us, and McNamara is nothing but carbon.”
“My responses in order: great; great; are you telling me Sergeant Shrapnel-Magnet didn’t get hit this time, boy am I surprised, and Pyre will be sorry she didn’t get the honors.”
Riley didn’t like the idea of kids being pulled into ops like this, even if Terawatt was just eighteen and a half. But McNamara absolutely deserved to get a fireball in the face from Charlene. In his opinion, a couple of Mark 77s were a poor substitute for that. He added, “And we’ve spoiled another secret NID base, even without getting to that Nicaragua site.”
Unsurprisingly, the general did his Arnold Schwarzenegger imitation. “No problemo.” Then he explained, “The U.N. is all over that one already. We’ll let them have it. The Russians will appreciate it.”
Riley continued, “I think we have four guys who took the cyanide route. That probably means they had intel we could use. We need to make sure we ID them and get as much forensics off them as our friends south of the border will allow.”
O’Neill replied, “Walter’s sending that up the line to Jackson’s adjutant as we speak. Anything else?”
“Well, sir, they were pretty heavily armed. The base security had AKs. The fixed emplacements included two XM307s, two M134s, and a solid anti-aircraft battery. They were expecting visitors, and probably Air Force visitors at that.”
O’Neill said, “Could be worse! They might’ve tried serving you some fruitcake. Nothing worse than giving visitors some of those Christmas fruitcakes no one wanted to eat.”
Riley was really unsurprised that the general was making jokes. Jack O’Neill didn’t like sending people into danger and not being able to go along to protect them.
The general added, “So … anything our own little Lucrezia Borgia accidentally spilled?”
Riley reported, “Pinch Hitter was careful not to do anything aggressive, but she did try to convince us The Collective was doing the right thing.”
“I think we called that one, Finn. Who did she try to bring over to the dark side of the force?”
Riley admitted, “All three of us, but I think she was aiming her ‘A’ material at Carlson. He gave her his ‘big dumb guy’ routine, but I think some of her comments about culling the useless members of society really ticked him off. Too bad she didn’t have better intel on all of us.”
“And what did she not mean to tell you that you figured out anyway?”
Riley took a second to collect his thoughts. “Well, sir, she verified what you already guessed about her attack on that computer conference, and she admitted that the main bloc was using her identity as a way of incriminating the remains of the America bloc, so we know there are still problem Orphans loose in the country. Also … The Collective has at least one nuclear device of their own. Their forces aren’t as well armed as the SRI, but someone most likely has a thermonuclear device of some sort. Tobias currently works for Walsh’s group, but Acid Burn said the email went to the prison from India through the same trick as before, so this may have all been a ploy to get us to attack Khan Noonien Singh’s group. The NID concealed some of her file info when they sent it to us. The Collective appears to be a weird blending of ‘master race’ and ‘eco-nut’ movements, or at least it may have a large ecological selling point to sway new Orphans. At least one Collective base probably has S-300 and S-400 systems, so even cruise missiles and Terawatt would have trouble closing. And I believe she thinks she’s doing the right thing. She’s not a villain in her own mind; as far as she’s concerned, she’s the superheroine and we’re deluded pawns of the head villains.”
The general muttered, “That was what I was afraid of. Even if we get lucky and take down Walsh and their central command, we’ll still have loyal Orphans loose and intent on pushing their kill-everyone-else manifesto.”
Riley said, “Sir, I don’t feel comfortable getting that far ahead of ourselves, when we’ve been one step behind them for months.”
O’Neill smirked. “Yeah, but they think we’re four steps behind them, so that means we’re really three steps ahead of them.”
Riley didn’t believe that. And he knew Jack O’Neill didn’t believe it, either.
The general switched to his false-cheerful voice. “But hey, look on the bright side! Maybourne’s behind bars and looking at twenty to life in Leavenworth! All right, I’d be happier if we had all of them, but he’s refusing to rat out his bosses, and he won’t even say he was working for the NID on this. I still think Flagg may have been one of the guys behind some of the NID crap we saw, so watch out for anything out of his office.”
“Yes, sir. Anything else?”
O’Neill said, “Yeah. We need to decide what we’re going to do with PH. Pinch Hitter. Or should that be Poison Hurler? So … what do we do with Madame de Villefort?”
Riley recognized the reference, so he said, “We can put her back in the Chateau d’If, we can ‘let’ her escape in transit, or we can keep her.”
“I’d like to slide another Orphan into our teams, but I don’t think we can trust her. I don’t want to go with the Mission Impossible ‘let ’em escape’ trick, because she’s likely to kill all her guards. I think we put her back in the slammer, but we activate the bug we put in her boot, just in case she manages to escape without our help.”
Riley just told him, “Already done. Did we ever thank the Batman for the tech?”
“I had Acid Burn send him a thank-you card with the names of all the possible Orphans he might want to watch out for. And a classified DOJ memo on the Falcones and who might be moving in on them. She said he was ‘totally of the grouchy’ about it. Anything else?”
Riley declared, “No sir.”
“Good. You just let everyone steal all the hard jobs away from you, like the full searches through whatever underground passages are down there, and hauling badguys off to third world jails, and all that. Once Pretty Poison is hauled off, you three can book. Walter will have the number one Cessna there soon for transport. Drop Carlson and Lupo off and then have some maintenance done on the Cessna there, so you and Miller can drink Dr. Pepper and hang out for a day or two.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you.”
“Meanwhile, I’ve got to go make phone calls and pester the crap out of space agencies, because Terawatt absolutely deserves some civilian medals out of NASA and the ESA and RSA and JASA. O’Neill out.”
* * *
Alex got back home really late that night, but she was back at school on Thursday. The big news was that the high school basketball playoffs were starting, and their team had one of the eight top seeds because they won their conference and had one of the best records in the division. She had missed the first game, which was a home game because of their seed, and they had won by nine. And the conference all-star teams were in the papers, and Ray was the first-team point guard! And Heyward was the first-team power forward, and Jackson was the second-team shooting guard, and Jerrold and Tony made honorable mention.
Also, Donna and her BF were on the outs again, this time because she was flirting with Heyward right in front of a whole bunch of people, and Heyward’s girlfriend was totally cheesed off about it, too. And Nicole was leading a protest because the lunchroom wasn’t using organic fruits and vegetables. And Miss Greene was totally preggers and trying to hide it under really loose muumuus, and it so wasn’t working.
Oh, and there was something in the news about Terawatt flying up to the space station and fighting creepy green aliens or something.
Marsha was pretty cheesed off that a really important thing like Terawatt and outer space and aliens was just being ignored for dumb high school stuff. Even if she wanted to talk about Louis getting his head stuck between the banisters at her parents’ house, and her dad had to smear Crisco all over Louis’ head to get him back out. Louis was complaining that his dad totally teased him about coming home with Crisco all over his head. Marsha complained that her mom teased her when she walked Louis out to his car and came back with Crisco on her face from Louis kissing her goodbye.
Louis grumbled, “That’s the last time I make a bet with her dumb brother.”
Marsha elbowed him. “Who’s the dummy here? He got a ton of entertainment out of it, and it only cost him ten bucks.”
Louis scowled. He looked over. “Hey, Ray, stuff like this doesn’t happen when you go over to Alex’s does it?”
Ray rolled his eyes. “You should’ve asked me that four or five years ago. Some days it was ‘what’s the most insane thing that could possibly happen?’ Now it’s normal. Not counting the time when I went over and Alex was trying to clean up after Shar.”
Alex checked, “Which time?”
He grinned. “Terawatt Barbie vs. the blob.”
“Guh.” She sank her face into her hands. “That was awful.”
Ray enjoyed telling everyone at the table, “Shar got her Terawatt Barbies out and she found a perfect blob for them to fight. Alex’s mom’s cherry jello mold that was supposed to be for dinner.” Most of the table groaned. “By the time Alex found Shar, the jello was all over the place. I mean, it was all over Shar, and all over the kitchen floor, and all over the bottoms of the walls and the cabinets and everything. When I got there, Shar was out of the shower and clean, but she and Alex were still cleaning the kitchen, and her mom was totally not happy about it when she got home.”
Alex muttered, “At least she did it on the linoleum, and not in the living room on the good rug. Barbie’s usually in the living room or the bedroom. Oh, and the kitchen smelled like cherry jello for like a week.”
After that, lunch kind of turned into an ‘I can top that’ contest about awful stuff that had gone wrong at their house. Nicole sort of ‘won’ with a story about her little sister changing the baby’s diapers on the good dining room rug with no changing mat or anything and not telling anyone and just leaving the diapers there until her dad came home late and walked through the dining room which didn’t have a light on and he stepped right in it and tracked it all the way back to her parents’ bedroom before he realized what he’d done, and then there was baby poo smushed into the carpet all through the house and it would just not come up out of the carpets. The story was so gross Alex could hardly finish her lunch.
Ray and Louis and Marsha and Robyn and Mina thought it was hysterical. Maybe if it was in a comedy, Alex would have laughed, too, but it just seemed way too close to some of the things that had gone wrong in her life at one time or another. Okay, Robyn and Mina thought it was hysterical and mega-gross, because neither one of them finished their lunch. But it was pretty much impossible to gross out guys. Louis ate all of his lunch and finished off Marsha’s dessert.
Mina’s story was pretty funny, too, what with her grandpa coming to visit and getting bored and deciding to help Mina paint her room a new color, and he just grabbed whatever was in the garage, so he put exterior enamel paint on her walls with old brushes and not using enough dropcloths and everything you could do wrong, and it came out a big mess, so Mina and her dad and her grandpa had to repaint the room and then scrub the floors and put down new varnish, and her mom was so mad at her father-in-law she deliberately fixed everything he hated, like lima beans or mutton or whatever, and Mina’s grandma just said, ‘you deserve it you alte kacker’ which was a bad word in Yiddish, and then he just ate everything and got even with his wife by telling her ‘this is great, maybe you should take cooking lessons from your daughter-in-law’. The way Mina told it was really funny.
Louis had a story that Alex could hardly even believe, even knowing Louis and his dad. Louis claimed that back before they moved to Paradise Valley, when they were sprucing up their old house to sell it, his dad did some touch-up paint in the bathroom and decided to paint the toilet seat and lid too because they were a little chipped, and Louis came home from school and sat down to use the toilet and got glued to the toilet seat by his butt and had to go to the emergency room like that, with his pants still around his ankles. Okay, it was the kind of thing that seemed to happen to Louis, but still …
Alex already knew Robyn’s story about getting drunk with her friends and getting a really awful tattoo on her butt, and then her mom had a cow about it. They all did. Alex hadn’t heard the second part, though, and she hadn’t seen how awful the tat was. When Robyn saved up enough money to get some really cheap laser tattoo removal on it and she went in, the people who were doing the laser thing took one look at her butt tat and broke up laughing because it was so embarrassing. Alex would have died of humiliation if that happened to her. Even Willow would have been embarrassed by the way that tattoo came out.
Robyn frowned. “I totally learned my lesson. Don’t drink too much. Don’t let losers tattoo you or anything like that. Don’t take advice from really drunk friends. Don’t get tats you can’t see from guys you haven’t checked out first. Don’t go to cheap laser tat removal guys, either. And totally don’t get a tat that’s supposed to be a couple pieces of fruit but accidentally looks like a guy’s junk, or misspelled words that make you look like a major perv.”
Nicole said, “I think that’s more than one lesson.”
Robyn added, “Oh, and totally don’t let your mom drag you over to see what tats look like sixty years later when you’re old and wrinkly, because … blech!”
* * *
Then, when Alex picked up Shar from the Boys and Girls Club, Shar was cranky that she didn’t get to go up to outer space and blast alien badguys like on TV.
Alex tried to explain. “It’s not like that. And stuff doesn’t explode like on TV, either. And there wouldn’t be any kapows because there’s no sound in space.”
“No going kapow?” Shar frowned. “Really?”
“Really. No sound, because sound needs something to travel through, like air or water or a wall, and space is like a giant vacuum. And fire needs air, so you wouldn’t get fires in outer space, and it’s too dangerous to use in a space station.”
Shar complained, “Space sounds way more fun on TV. Did they at least have laser guns?”
“Nope. But we did almost get hit by another satellite and squished like bugs.”
Shar winced a little. “That doesn’t sound like fun either.”
Alex admitted, “Lots of it was totally un-fun.”
“Not of the fun?” Shar asked, in a pretty decent imitation of Auntie Willow.
“Not of the fun. But I got to talk physics with Samantha Carter. That was about the best part. Except for looking around in space and seeing the Earth and the stars.”
Shar frowned. “Talking physics doesn’t sound fun, either. Is this like talking computers with Auntie Willow?”
Alex smiled. “What about talking chemistry with Uncle George?”
Shar insisted, “Uncle George is great! And he lets me do really fun experiments! We did this thing in the back yard with a whole big bottle of Diet Coke and a thing of Mentos, and that was so fun, and then we went back and looked at all the things that maybe made it go bloosh and we did a big study with more kinds of soda and candy to find out what worked and what didn’t, and it was so fun, and I think maybe I might want to be a chemist when I grow up.”
Alex just said, “You’d get plenty of help in our family if you wanted to do chemistry.” But just last week Shar had wanted to be a ballerina, and before that it was a cowgirl, and before that it was a rocket scientist, and before that it was a flight attendant. Alex was pretty sure she hadn’t changed her mind that much when she was eight or nine.
Shar thought it over and asked, “Are there chemists who just study candy and soda?”
Alex said, “Umm, maybe? Ask Uncle George, but I’m pretty sure there are food science people who are just chemists that study the chemistry of certain kinds of food.”
“Well, that’s what I wanna be when I grow up! And I’ll invent the best food in the world for Terawatt to eat when she’s flying around the world with Pyre fighting badguys and monsters!”
Alex smiled. “That sounds pretty useful to me.”
Shar grinned. “So you better do whatever I want now, or I’ll make your special Terawatt food taste like lima beans!”
“Oh, nooooooooo!’ Alex squealed in a high-pitched voice until Shar couldn’t stop giggling.
* * *
While they were eating dinner that evening, Alex’s dad asked her, “Did you get to chat with your Samantha Carter? And is she as interesting in person?”
Alex gushed, “She’s totally awesome. She figured out more about my powers than anyone’s ever done. And she used my powers in a maser that we used to save the space station from being hit by an incoming satellite. But she’s really, really sick now. She’s got these denaturing nucleic acids inside her poisoning her, and she’s got first degree burns all through her body, and she may be in a hospital for months. I totally have to find a way to get Jack to fly me out to visit her when she’s well enough for visitors.”
Her mom carefully said, “Just remember, honey. This Sam isn’t the same as that other Sam, no matter how much you want her to be. You have reduced expectations for Willow and Hermione, because our Willow and Hermione don’t have magical powers. But you’re talking like this Sam will be just as skilled and just as trained —”
“And just as eager to go jump into a huge battle,” her dad inserted.
“— as that other Sam. What happened when you went to talk to that other teammate down in L.A. or wherever?”
“Oh. Right.” Alex felt like wilting or something, because the thing with this world’s Buffy had not gone well.
And even if this Sam did want to be part of Team Terawatt, what if this Sam and this Jack really hit it off, and Jack dumped Willow? That would be mega-bad. In a ton of ways.