|
|
Chapter 144 – Next MissionAfter dinner, Alex cleaned up and then went and checked her phones and her email and her IM and her Facebook and everything else. Hanna and Cindy had called from Hanna’s not that long ago, so Alex Skyped Hanna.
“Alex, hi!” Cindy was in Hanna’s room with Hanna, and it looked like a lesson on eyeliner was in progress.
Alex wondered, “Should I call back later?”
Cindy shook her head no. “This is great.”
Hanna said, “I just need more practice.”
Cindy said, “It’s so helpful that Hanna doesn’t have a normal blink response, so I can teach her so much more about eyeliner and mascara and false eyelashes.”
Alex asked, “So what’s up?”
Cindy pouted. “Did you know Grover has fangirls?”
“What?” Alex thought she must have heard that wrong.
Hanna explained, “Klar and Action Girl are now officially ‘out’ as superheroes on Team Terawatt, because of the medal ceremony with the President. So now there are Klar fansites. Even though there are no pictures of him.”
Cindy complained, “Apparently, a lot of the Klar fanpages have artwork of what girls think Klar looks like if he wasn’t invisible. And what girls want to do with an invisible man.”
Hanna added, “It never occurred to me that sex in public would be much less of a problem if no one could see your sex partner.”
Cindy groused, “Well, it seems to have occurred to about twenty thousand girls around the world, and a lot of ’em want Klar to come over to their house and screw ’em silly in some public place.”
“Eww!” Alex winced.
Hanna grinned. “Cindy has been taking notes on the really creative ideas.”
Cindy blushed a bright red and hissed, “You weren’t supposed to tell that part.”
“Oh. Sorry. I did not think that included Alex.”
Cindy shrugged. “Well, maybe not.”
Alex said, “Maybe you should talk to Willow about the sex part. She might even have some good ideas about what’s safe and what seems safe but might not be.” She didn’t say that she didn’t want to talk about it, even though she really didn’t.
Cindy pouted. “We probably couldn’t make it work anyway, because when Grover’s not rushing off on a Code Walsh, he’s in the HWAAA labs or on-line taking college courses.”
Ooh, that finally gave Alex the opening she’d been waiting for! She nudged, “Well, you ought to be doing the on-line course thing, too.”
Cindy frowned. “I wasn’t really any good at schoolwork, and besides, I have no idea what I’d want to major in or what classes I’d like, or any of that.”
Alex insisted, “But that’s what college is for! Regular colleges aren’t for people like Grover or Willow. They’re for people like you and me, so we can learn stuff, and find out what we like, and meet lots of people who have the same interests. People like Grover and Willow? They’re made for grad school. Or grad school’s made for them. Normal people? College classes.”
Cindy asked, “How do you know about this?”
Alex confessed, “Because I spent most of my life slacking off because I knew there was no way I could ever compete with my super-brain big sister the biochemistry genius. If I hadn’t gotten superpowers and met people way smarter than me who knew why I should apply myself and go to college, I’d probably still be doing the same thing.”
Cindy shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think there’s any job I could do around here. I’m not the military type, and I’m sure not the science-brain type.”
Alex tried, “You really need to get Jack to come over and talk to you and Grover about what you can do for the SRI if you had the background. I’m seeing a lot of holes in our staffing. Stuff like fashion design majors to help supers with costumes and disguises. Or food tech majors because we already have a lot of people with weird food requirements. Or public relations and marketing, because sooner or later we’re gonna have to convince people that superheroes are a good thing and not a threat to their lives and their health and their jobs. I bet you’d be great at any of those things! And you want to keep growing — I mean mentally and emotionally and like that, not like getting fat or something — so you and Grover will stay compatible as you get older. And being a really good cheerleader isn’t really any different from public relations and marketing for high school, because you’re trying to get some people stoked up about something, and you’re trying to change other people’s minds about it, and you’re trying to ‘sell the product’ even if the product is going to Friday night’s football game, or trying to get the crowd to yell louder while the other team tries to call plays.”
Hanna said, “That is a very good argument. It is no wonder that Colonel Jack says you are much smarter than you think you are.”
Alex felt like she was turning bright red.
Hanna turned to Cindy. “You should take several different introductory classes and see what you like and what you’re good at.”
Cindy looked really uncertain. “Wh-what if I’m not good at anything?”
Alex told her, “That’s what I worried about. But then I got some totally amazing help. I can teach you how to write really good papers, and Hanna can help you with languages, and Willow can help you with computer science and sciences and really pretty much anything. But really, if you learn like I did how to organize and write a whole paper in under an hour, that’ll help you with anything. Even science classes, because you have to write up labs and write up projects and stuff.”
Hanna asked, “Will you teach me, too?”
“Sure!” Alex said. “Maybe not right now, but soon.”
Hanna nodded. “Good. I do not know what I want to learn, but I know I want to have a career as Action Girl and have some helpful specialties.”
Alex pointed out, “We’ve already seen that knowing a lot about computers, or physics, or biochem, or genetics, or a couple other things would be a huge help on ops.”
Hanna suggested, “I was thinking about concentrating on foreign languages and international politics. We already have teammates who are excellent in the sciences.”
Alex didn’t say anything, but she thought politics would be a weird fit for Hanna, because Hanna wasn’t really the negotiating-and-organizing type. She was more the ‘agree with me or I will smash your head in’ type. Okay, a lot of political leaders were kind of like that, too. On the other hand, maybe Hanna could learn to be the negotiating type. That could be really good for her.
After they talked for a while about stuff like the importance of eyeliner in getting the ‘smoky eye’ makeup looking just right, Alex let them sign off. After all, Hanna had school tomorrow.
And Willow wanted to Skype, so Alex Skyped with her next.
Willow waved. “Hi! I got news. I mean, none of it is great news, but none of it’s bad, and it’s all stuff you’re gonna want to hear, and Jack even told me to tell you some of this stuff, so I’m with the telling now.”
Alex wondered, “So what’s going on?”
Willow started out, “Well, Samantha Carter’s still really sick, and she’s in quarantine just in case, and it’s at Walter Reed, so Jack can get you in to see her when you’re on the East Coast again. They’re expecting a full recovery, but she really feels crappy right now. And Jack said she’s mad that they won’t let her have enough computing power for some large-scale physics simulations she wants to run.”
“What else?”
“Okay, when Riley and Jo and Sergeant Carlson saved the day in Mexico with Clare Tobias, Riley called in an airstrike on Colonel McNamara, you know, the Shop guy, because he was infected with more of the alien goo, and they dropped like half a dozen Mark 77s on him and his X-37, and the CDC guys haven’t found even a trace of the alien slime-stuff. Or Colonel McNamara. Okay, there wasn’t much of the X-37 left either. It was pretty much incinerated and melted into slag. And they arrested all the guys Riley’s team didn’t shoot or blow up because there was a big firefight, except there were four guys who committed suicide with cyanide capsules, which Jack says is totally ick. Well, he didn’t say ‘ick’. So Jack’s IT team tracked these guys down, and we think they’re all ex-Shop who didn’t turn themselves in like they were supposed to, and Jack thinks that means the NID grabbed a bunch of the rogue Shop agents, which was against federal directives, and if he could prove it, he could put some NID guys behind bars, well more NID guys, because Jack’s pretty happy about Colonel Maybourne going to federal prison. But the NID’s insisting they didn’t do it and it’s not their fault that Colonel Maybourne had a rogue cell doing who knows what and destroying secret NID bases they spent years setting up, and they’ve got some really powerful Beltway people defending them, so they’re probably going to skate on this. But we still don’t even have a count on the number of Shop agents who didn’t turn themselves in, because they were getting paid off the books and they were all routing encrypted messages to and from Shop HQ through a private anonymizer in Trinidad, and we haven’t been able to bust their encryption yet, and we haven’t been able to get at the sysadmin logs for that anonymizer site.”
Alex didn’t think of herself as mean or vindictive, but she was pretty glad to hear about McNamara and Maybourne, even if the NID was getting away with some really bad stuff. With McNamara dead and Maybourne in prison, Shar might even be safe. At a minimum, she was a lot safer than before. “A lot of that stuff sounds pretty good to me.”
“Oh! I almost forgot, and this is super-important, too! Your problem-guy Victor Cready has a hearing tomorrow morning. His public defender got the ‘escape from prison’ charge dropped because nobody believes he actually escaped, and getting kidnapped isn’t a crime. But your local district attorney’s office hit him with a bunch of stuff for what he did when he fought Azure Crush. Umm, lemme see … Affray, arson, assault with a deadly weapon, destruction of private property, destruction of public property, and vandalism. So he turned down a big jury trial and there’s a small judiciary hearing tomorrow morning. Jack got me to juggle the times in the computer for the court calendar so Terawatt could just sort of show up during Alex’s second period and give a little amicus curiae brief. If you want to.”
“Oh, I want to, all right.” Alex frowned. “I just need to think about what I want to say so I come across like a smart, forceful superheroine they want to listen to.”
“Alex, you are a smart, forceful superheroine they ought to listen to!”
“I don’t always feel like one,” Alex admitted. Okay, she hardly ever felt like one. ‘Smart’ was like Willow or Annie or her dad or Sam or Hermione or Riley or Jo or Batman. Alex knew a ton of people who were way smarter than she was, and she had enemies who were massively smarter than her. And forceful? Not. When had she ever been able to tell people what to do, and they just did it? Pretty much only when she was threatening them with someone way more forceful than her, like General Hammond or the President. Sometimes she didn’t even feel like a real superheroine. She was never going to be like other-Buffy or other-Willow or other-Hermione, much less someone like Wonder Woman.
Well, she didn’t really have to be a super-genius or the world’s most persuasive person for this. She just needed to show up and tell the court that she thought Mr. Cready did the right thing. Even if it would be really handy to be incredibly persuasive, or maybe just incredibly smart so she could write out totally awesome arguments.
* * *
So Friday morning, she drove in to school like usual, but she parked further out than normal so she could park by a good storm drain right by the dry creek bed. She was over by the tennis courts, which were as good as new. Well, really, they were a lot better than new, because Libby’s dad had paid for some really nice stuff so the school wouldn’t sue him and Libby. And all the girls on the tennis team said the surface was like pro tennis court quality now, plus there were nice benches off to the sides for the competitors, and stuff like that. And there were stadium seats on the south side so it was easier for people to come out and watch the matches, and the tennis teams really liked that.
She had already given Ray and Nicole and Louis and Robyn a heads-up that she was sneaking off-campus for second period, and if anyone asked, she was in the library or else in the nearest bathroom. You could get away with a lot of stuff just by saying you were doing something embarrassing, like having the runs, or having to go change your tampon. Selina — well, other-Selina — had told her that, and boy had it turned out to be totally true.
So she walked as casually as she could out to her car so no one would pay any attention to her, and she just hopped in the backseat and lay down. She already had one back window cracked open a good inch.
She went silvery, changed into her uniform, puddled out of the car and into the storm drain, and then rushed off through the water runoff pipes to one of the big outflows in one of the larger empty creek beds around town. She zipped up to a thousand feet in the air and jetted over to the courthouse building. Then she just dived into the HVAC system, slipped a couple of filters out of the way so she could get into the building, and puddled down to the third floor. She came out in an empty office and floated down the hall to the courtroom Willow had told her to go to.
She made sure she was high enough that her hair was almost brushing the top of the doorframe, and she floated into the courtroom.
The room was small. She was expecting to see a huge courtroom with like two hundred people in it, like on TV. It wasn’t like that. There was a judge behind the bench, one woman typing away as people talked, one guy in uniform standing near the judge, and two desks. Mister Cready was at one table with a guy who looked like he was just out of law school and couldn’t afford a good suit yet. There was one guy at the other table, and that guy looked like a Marine who had put on thirty pounds since he left the Corps but still had the same haircut. And on the benches on this side of the railing, there were about a dozen other people sitting in pairs or clumps with one person in a nice suit in each clump, like they were with their lawyers and waiting to do their legal stuff next. She figured you couldn’t get more than about forty people in those benches even if you had a really big shoehorn.
Alex was kind of nervous, but still she floated down the aisle to the little swinging gate in the railing between the court and the watchers. She cleared her throat and asked, “Your Honor, would it be possible for me to speak for a moment as an amicus curiae?”
The judge looked at the attorneys. The prosecuting attorney was good with it, but the defense attorney was going to object until Cready put a hand on the guy’s arm to get him to stop. “Very well, then. I assume this will be brief.”
“Yes, Your Honor.” She used her TK to push open the gate, and she floated on over to the judge’s bench. “There are no Good Samaritan laws for situations that are not medical emergencies, but someday we are going to need Good Samaritan laws for people with superpowers. Victor Cready made a conscious decision to try and save this town, and people in this town. He made an immense sacrifice to do so. How many of us would be willing to dive into a roaring furnace to save others? Because that’s basically what he did. If he hadn’t made that sacrifice, we really have no idea how many police officers and EMTs and firemen would have been maimed or killed in Azure Crush’s rampage. I just want the court to extend the same leniency toward him that it has already extended toward me.”
“Are you willing to have this man loose on the streets again?” the prosecutor asked rudely.
Alex nodded. “Yes, I am. In fact, I intend to go to his first parole hearing and speak for him, and I already have a job lined up for him once he is released. The Paradise Valley Chemical plant can use trained security guards, and if he worked there, he’d never have to worry about not getting his regular doses of antidote. It would be a win for everyone.”
The judge frowned a little, but said, “Thank you, Terawatt. I’ll take your suggestions under advisement.”
She turned to leave, but Cready stared at her. “Why are you being so nice to me?”
She insisted, “Because you deserve it. You’ve been trying to do the right thing ever since our aerial battle ended.” She floated out into the hall. As soon as no one was looking, she went silvery and darted into an air conditioning duct, and flew out of the building.
She was back at her car with more than enough time to fix her hair before strolling into the school and walking to calculus class. Which she was totally prepared for already. Some of the rate-of-change story problems were pretty hard, but she was pretty sure she had the right answers for the ones she’d worked on, because Willow had explained how all the rate-of-change problems worked, and that was mega-helpful. As she waited to go into the classroom, she sent Willow another text about rate-of-change problems, and she got back a URL to a webpage that was nothing but formulas for rate-of-change type measurements on objects. Side or area or angles of a triangle, volume or surface area of a sphere, volume and area for all kinds of weird shapes like truncated cones, and stuff like that. She could see how knowing those formulas would help, since just last night she’d needed to know the volume of water in a sphere of radius r if only the bottom h inches had water, and h was less than r. She didn’t think some of this stuff was really useful, but maybe someday she’d need to know some of this stuff.
She figured she’d at least need to know a bunch of the formulas for the midterm and the final. And the AP exam.
* * *
That night, she went and took pictures at their second playoff game. Ray was really great, and so was Jerrold, and Heyward got a bunch of rebounds, and they won pretty easily, even if Jackson took a few shots he really shouldn’t have. He was still cranky that he hadn’t been picked all-conference first team. Alex did actually agree with him that the guy who got picked first team at shooting guard had really great points-per-game numbers mainly because his team fed him the ball a lot more, and that was because they didn’t have any other great offensive weapons. So Jackson got penalized for being on a much better team. That, and he still took shots he really shouldn’t.
But their second win meant that they were now in the final four for the Central Section playoffs, and she was pretty sure that everyone in their final four was also going to go to the state championship. So next Wednesday they’d play a semi-final game, and the winner would be playing for the championship and maybe a really great seed at state.
Alex looked at Heyward, who had really grown a lot over the past year, and Ray, who was definitely quicker and stronger than last year, and Tony, who was healthier than last year, and she just sort of wondered. Were these guys getting a teeny bit of help from some GC-161 exposure? It sure hadn’t helped the football team, which hadn’t come close to winning their conference, and had just barely made the playoffs with a really bad seed, and then they got creamed in their playoff game.
So if they won on Wednesday, they would play next Saturday for the section championship, and then there were the state playoffs afterward. Alex crossed her fingers that she’d get to go to the games, and bad stuff wouldn’t happen.
Okay, she knew bad stuff happened all the time, all over the world, but she couldn’t stop all of it all the time. All she could do was work with Jack and go where he needed her to go. Or where Hermione needed her to go. Or where the President needed her to go. Or where supervillains popped up in Paradise Valley. Or where Willow thought she should go. Or …
Crud, she was already getting carried away, and she knew things would only get worse as Batman started calling her for help, or Colonel Watanabe, or even more people she wanted to connect with.
Still, having more connections had to be good. It had already saved Petrie’s Island and Rome and Tokyo and New York, and that had led to saving Sendai, and it had led to finding the Batman and stopping more supervillains, and some of that had probably led to stopping the North Koreans, which had led to the President trusting her enough to ask her to go to the International Space Station. What shape would the world be in now if she had told that other Hermione ‘no I won’t go with you to some weird dimension’? Still, all that stuff made her sound like she was so ‘all that and a bag of chips’ but she knew she’d been really lucky some of the time, and she had really awesome people around her.
She drove Ray home, and they necked outside his house until way past her curfew, and she just didn’t think about how much pressure was on Terawatt to save the day every single time.
And her mom was waiting up for her and not thrilled about her being out past curfew, even if Alex had already texted her mom about the big win and driving Ray home.
* * *
Special Supervisory Agent Lew Erskine made the phone call he didn’t want to make.
“HWAAA headquarters, Sergeant Harriman speaking. How may we help you?”
He sighed inwardly, but didn’t let it show in his voice. “Sergeant, this is SSA Lewis Erskine of the FBI. Can I speak to General O’Neill?”
“Yes, sir. Let me just get him on the line.”
“O’Neill here. What’s up, Inspector?”
So someone else was doing their homework. He admitted, “I seldom get to use my ‘inspector’ title anymore, now that I’m in the CTU. I was calling to give you a heads-up and ask if you still want to set up a joint operation. We think we’ve found the processing plant.”
O’Neill instantly grew serious. “Yes, I want a joint op. Where are you? How’d you find them? And are you sure this is the right place?”
He wasn’t sure whether he would have preferred the casual smart-ass. O’Neill now sounded like some generals Lew had dealt with before on counter-terrorism operations. The heavy-firepower military approach wasn’t always right for places within the United States. Lew was still a big believer in upholding the rights of citizens and going by the book. And part of that book said that federal espionage agencies and military strikes stayed out of the United States. But O’Neill’s agency was officially DHS and not DOD, so they were technically legal and he had to abide by that rule, too.
He explained, “We gave everything from your IT staff to our IT people and our field agents, and we gave the rest to our forensics staff in Quantico. We were able to come up with traces of dust and pollen inside Tobias’s metal case, only underneath the foam lining, so we have reason to believe the traces were there before she was given the case. That let us focus more heavily on the north-central area of the country. We started with the cities along the I-80 and I-90 corridors that were in that region and met our specs: Milwaukee, Green Bay, Chicago, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, and a few smaller cities. All of them have water treatment plants that would screen out viruses and prions. Most of them don’t have light industrial or heavy industrial areas around their main water treatment facilities. That pointed us at Minneapolis and Milwaukee for our initial efforts. I just flew into Minneapolis. Special Agent Tom Colby’s team found a couple of dozen possible warehouses and processing plants in the light industrial district just downstream of the main outflow. Right now we’re looking at a chemical processing plant that already has a large water line coming into the building, but someone has recently put a line from the south side of the building, a hundred forty yards across their parking lot and under an access road, right to the key outflow pipe from the city’s main water treatment plant. Agent Colby flew a helicopter over the area and got pictures, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to see it. And we’ve quietly checked with the city. This wasn’t a city project, and no one got permits to run that line.” He had worked with Tom for years, and counted him as a good friend. He trusted Tom’s judgment implicitly.
O’Neill agreed, “Yep, that sounds pretty suspicious. We’d better check that out. What do you have on hand to deal with the problem if they release the poison as soon as they spot us?”
He said, “We can’t assume there’s a nice, well-labeled valve to shut off the flow, so Agent Colby brought in the local FBI SWAT and a couple of FBI demolitions experts. They figure there’s probably a sophisticated breaching charge on the outside of the city water pipe but just inside the collar where they welded their pipe onto the water line, so they can blow a hole in the main when they’re ready to release the poison. If the hole was there already, they’d have water pressure backing up into their plant right now, and so far that pipe’s empty. We borrowed a city maintenance truck and worked on the access road so our demolitions men could work on the other side of the access road without being seen from the plant. They dug down to the pipe and rigged it with what they call a ‘crushing charge’. When they set that off, we’ll have steel plates on either side of the pipe get blasted toward each other, so it will pinch the pipe closed. With any luck, it should even weld the pipe shut at that point. And they put a mike on the pipe so we should get a heads-up if the toxin gets released into the pipe.”
O’Neill replied, “That sounds pretty good. Just make sure your men don’t get exposed to this stuff. We have no official antidote. One of my teams has synthesized what they hope is an effective counter-agent, but the counter-agent is toxic, too, so we don’t want to administer it to everyone we see.”
He asked, “Then how can we use it?”
O’Neill explained, “We’re using Army CBW systems. You wear an injection system on your belt. If you get exposed to the prion liquid, you break off the protective cover and slap it. Presto, a big needle jabs you in the hip. And in theory you just get sick, and you don’t turn into an insane berserker. In theory. As far as I know, they have yet to test it on a human being.”
Lew admitted, “I saw that Agent Colby had some local agents who were real go-getters, so I explained in detail about the consequences of getting exposed to this threat, and I think that took the wind out of their sails.”
O’Neill snorted in amusement. “Great. We can have a team at your closest military base in maybe an hour and a half. Email me the data on the plant and pictures, especially the aerial images, and I’ll have a joint operational battle plan for you to look over before my people land. Expect they could have some Orphans on-site. Fighting two heavily-armed Orphans is about the same as running into a platoon of Special Forces, so do not engage unless you have no alternatives.”
He said, “We don’t intend to. Our operational plan is currently covert surveillance only, now that we’ve addressed their weapon system. We’d like to find out if they have other weapon systems, or other means of disseminating the threat. We’ll wait until your team gets here before we move to the next stage.”
“Which is?”
He explained, “Unless you have preferred alternatives, we’ll block their outflow pipe, kill their utilities, and give them the chance to surrender.”
O’Neill pointed out, “If you’re gonna try that, you’d better make sure you have their sewer lines blocked and all local storm drains segregated from the city systems, so they can’t just open the valves on their tanks and let stuff pour everywhere.”
He remained completely calm, even if the general was apparently trying to get a rise out of him. “Yes, general, we do have some experience dealing with CBW threats. We have already addressed both of those, with help from the city’s civil engineers.” The phrase ‘don’t try to teach your granny to suck eggs’ came to mind, but he was not going to say that to a brigadier general. Especially not a brigadier general who had O’Neill’s reputation.
Once O’Neill hung up, he turned to Special Agent Colby. “Tom, who’s your communications specialist?”
Tom pointed out a young woman Lew hadn’t met yet. “That would be Agent Seward.”
He introduced himself with a handshake. “Agent Seward? I’m Supervisory Special Agent Lew Erskine.”
Her eyes grew large as she shook his hand. “Yes, sir! I mean, I know who you are, sir.”
He wondered if Tom or someone else had been telling stories again. He only said, “Agent Seward, I need you to send all of our logistics information to this email address.” He handed her one of the business cards he had gotten from O’Neill’s staff. “All of it. If we have data that are hardcopy only or photographs, scan them and send them, too. If we’re going to be involved in a joint operation with a Homeland Security agency, we need to keep them from complaining about us at least until we catch the badguys.”
“Yes, sir!”
Tom asked, “Lew, we can have that plant surrounded in two minutes. Are we really going to wait until they get here to run an operation like that?”
Lew nodded. “Yes. Absolutely. Not only does Jack O’Neill have enough pull to make our lives miserable, the people I talked to said he knows more about Orphans and these terrorist plots than anyone else on Earth. It was his people who stopped the Umbrella disaster and the North Korean supervillain invasion, and it may have been his people who worked with Terawatt on everything she’s been involved in for the past year. We’re trained to deal with armed people. We’re not equipped to deal with supervillains. And anyway, they say they can get a team here in under two hours. I don’t see any reason we can’t wait for two hours on th–…”
The sound of a Glock firing a three-round grouping came blasting from the other side of the warehouse they were using as a screen. It was answered by what sounded like two AK-47s chattering away.
Tom immediately snapped into his sleeve mike, “Cease fire! Cease fire! Who shot?”
“This is Rogers. It was Daniels, sir. A panel truck tried to drive out through one of the west garage doors, and he over-reacted. They were carrying heavy, and he’s down. I can’t get to him. They backed into the plant and they have that side of the building covered.”
Lew groaned to himself. He kept his voice calm and professional. “Agent Seward, alert the red phone number on that card and give them full details. Give them anything they ask for.”
“Understood, sir.”
He ordered, “Tom, move to next stage. Cut all utilities. Make sure all outflows are secure.” He turned his head, “Demolitions? Fire that crushing charge now.”
From where he was, he could hear a flat crack, and a burst of dirt over the charges flew straight up into the air. That was all the noise a carefully designed high explosive charge would make. One of the demolitions guys gave him a thumbs-up.
Now he had a man down, probably no simple way into the plant, a heavily armed enemy on the alert, and God only knew how many thousands of gallons of deadly toxins sitting inside there. If they had the vats or containers wired with explosives, they might be scrambling to deal with the loss of building power right this second. If only there was a clear avenue of approach. But the plant was in the middle of parking lots and open spaces. The minimum distance from any useful position to one of the entries was over a hundred seventy feet, and the building’s defenders had AK-47s and who knew what else.
He didn’t like doing things this way, but it didn’t look like he had a lot of alternatives now. They needed to move. And Tom already had the local FBI office’s Special Weapons and Tactics Team on hand. “Tell SWAT they have a go on both sides.”
Two FBI SWAT vehicles came out from their hiding places and raced up to the chosen entry points. One was a glass door facing the building’s parking lot. The other was a steel garage door large enough to let them drive their armored SWAT van into the building.
He checked that his Glock was ready, and he snatched up the M4 he had set aside just in case Murphy stuck his nose in, as happened way too often. Then he moved out with Tom’s team.
One SWAT team bailed out of the bigger SWAT van as it nosed up to the garage door. Two men used pneumatic jaws to pry the door open from the bottom, while two other men lay on the ground and opened fire at anyone who threatened the first two.
The other SWAT team ran behind their smaller SWAT van toward the entry door, while an FBI sniper put rounds through the glass of the door, forcing any defenders to retreat.
Flashbangs were tossed into the plant through both entries, and SWAT forces streamed in. He could hear the gunfire, but there was a lot less than he was expecting.
He wasn’t expecting a ‘wall’ to swing open like something out of a bad spy movie and a small single-wing prop plane to come speeding out of the plant. It raced onto the main road past the front of the plant and turned away from his group before it began picking up speed. He sprinted toward the road as fast as he could.
He knew that the plane could be carrying hundreds of gallons of the toxin. The Mississippi was close by. Even if that wasn’t the target, there were hundreds of lakes around the area, and the Great Lakes weren’t that far away. He spoke into his mike, “Seward! Get our copter in the air, and then contact the local LEOs and get every one of their copters up, and then call every news station and get their planes and copters up, and then contact O’Neill’s people, and then every military base within two hundred miles. We have a prop plane we need to track, and stop from dumping a possible toxin load.” He ID’ed the plane for her as he ran.
The plane lifted off smoothly from the road. An oncoming truck would have been really handy right then, but he wasn’t getting a lot of luck today.
He threw himself flat on a stretch of grass and tried to line up a shot, even though he was breathing hard after his sprint. The plane had taken off down the road away from the FBI forces, which put it heading due west, even if he figured the most vulnerable target was the river, which was east and south east of them. He watched as the plane turned to its left, probably planning on circling around so it could head at the Mississippi River.
But that left-hand turn put it broadside to him for a couple of seconds. He held his breath and squeezed off three rounds. The plane tilted violently down and to its left, and for a second he thought it would crash into a nearby plastics factory and warehouse.
It straightened out at the last moment and just missed hitting the upper floors of the factory. It passed on the opposite side of the factory, so he didn’t have another shot. It dived down behind the distant factory. And it was out of sight.
“Seward, our target was last seen heading southwest from the light industrial district by the water treatment plant. Notify everyone to track it and put it down if at all possible. One of the pilots may be seriously injured, so they may try for their closest targets.”
“Yes, sir. I’m on it. And I have General O’Neill for you, when you can make it back to the communications van.”
He groaned as he got to his feet. “Thank you Seward. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Tell the general we can still use assistance, especially if any of our people get contaminated by the toxin.”
He absolutely wasn’t looking forward to a ‘chat’ with General Jack O’Neill to explain this one.
Interlude XXVIIThe newest page just posted on Terawatt’s main website by the site webmaster, terafan1:
———
How do I get superpowers?
Lots of people wonder about that. Lots of people have asked me that. Most people figure you drink a secret biochemical and you magically turn into Mister Fantastic. Some people want to drink that secret biochemical and magically turn into Doctor Doom.
It doesn’t work that way.
If you’re really, really lucky, the secret formula doesn’t do anything to you.
The secret biochemical is more likely to poison you, or destroy your liver, or give you a horrific cancer. It could even give you mutations so ghastly no one will be able to stand to look at you. It’s a lot less likely to give you a superpower. Almost anything is more likely than getting a superpower.
The North Koreans are suspected of dosing 680,000 of their best people in an attempt to create an army of super-powered soldiers. Over two thirds of a million people! As far as we know, 99% of these people are already dead or are dying horribly of radiation poisoning, biochemical poisoning, horrible cancers from teratogenic side effects, or equally grim effects.
Only about one percent even survived. We have no way of knowing whether the odds of their getting cancers or other terrible diseases have increased, possibly dramatically. We have no way of finding out how many of them now have terrible disabilities or crippling side effects.
Of the one percent who survived, only about one percent of those people got mutations. Most of them didn’t get superpowers so much as horrible transformations of their bodies until they looked more like parts of them had melted like wax, or they looked more like a caveman than a human. If you wanted superpowers so you could get more dates or so you could impress that certain someone, your chances of success just plummeted.
Nine people got high-level superpowers. Nine out of more than two thirds of a million people. Roughly one eighth of one one-hundredth of one one-hundredth of the people who were exposed. Those are not good odds. The lottery has worse odds, but you don’t die slowly and horribly from playing the lottery.
And of those nine, probably none of them would ever be able to pass as a normal human again. One turned into a living pile of mud. One turned into a massive, hairy sasquatch with hardly any higher brain functions. One turned into a half-cheetah monstrosity. One turned into a purple-skinned man with bizarre facial distortions. One grew scales on her face and perhaps all over her body. One grew a strange fin on the top of his head. One turned into a white-skinned, ice-coated cryokinetic like Japan’s Tsurara. One turned into a ninety-foot giantess. And one turned into a pyrokinetic who is constantly surrounded by a corona of fire. How will these people eat, or drink, or sleep, or have a normal life ever again? What good would it do to get superpowers if you could no longer accomplish the goals that were the reasons you wanted to have superpowers in the first place?
And even if you do get a superpower, it may be one that no one wants. Just ask Victor Cready. His superpower was being trapped as a silvery, inhuman blob that was constantly on fire but just resistant enough that his nerve endings never burned away, so he never stopped being in unbearable agony. Think about that. Not just getting a burn, but being on fire from head to toe and in agony from it. Forever.
Even if you get a good superpower, it may ruin your life. Klar is invisible. Forever. He can never be visible again. And he can’t see in what we call the visible light spectrum. He can’t see colors. He can’t watch television or go see a movie. He can’t play videogames. He can’t read most books without assistance. He can’t see the colors on a traffic light, but cars can’t see him when he crosses a street. You can’t imagine what his life is like unless you consciously spend your time thinking every second about what you would be unable to see or to do, or how you would manage with other people not being able to see you in turn.
Or consider Action Girl. She has strength and quickness beyond the ability of normal humans. And it may go with the ability to get horrible diseases that regular people cannot get. She’ll spend her life having to worry about that. She may never be able to have children. She may not live as long as normal humans do. There are so many things we just don’t know about what her DNA may mean.
Even if you get a good superpower, you may not be able to control it. Imagine having my power of lightning, but being unable to turn it off. How would you be able to do anything? What if you couldn’t stop shocking yourself, too?
And if you change the biochemical pathways in your body, how do you keep from changing the biochemical pathways in your brain? Your power might cause you to become insane in any number of unpleasant ways. Even worse, you might lose the ability to recognize what’s happening to your mind. You might lose the part of your mind that is you, leaving nothing but a slavering beast in your place. One of the North Korean supers was turned into a massive, hairy, super-strong proto-human who probably no longer had even the intelligence of a Neanderthal Man.
Maybe you should first ask: why do I want superpowers in the first place? If the answer is not ‘to help other people’ then you are already making a mistake. If the answer is ‘to be popular’ or ‘to get back at the people who are mean to me’ or ‘to get lots of money’ or ‘to get that girl/guy to notice me and like me’ or ‘to hurt people I hate’ then you’re already on the wrong track.
If you want to have superpowers so you can be liked, then ask yourself this question. How will I know they like me for myself and not just because I have cool powers? If that’s all you care about, you would be better off becoming a rock star or a reality TV star or a record producer or a Hollywood movie-maker. You’re a lot more likely to be successful in any of those careers than you are to get a good superpower.
If you want to have superpowers so you can do things that you know are wrong, then think about this. Without superpowers, you will be a common criminal. With superpowers, sooner or later you will have to face ME.
– Terawatt
——