Chapter 147 – Crazy for You

Alex tried to keep her face calm and impassive. Like Jack’s ‘poker face’ when you couldn’t tell how upset he was, even if he was really worried. Because she was way past ‘upset’ and pretty much somewhere out between ‘totally freaked’ and ‘ready to panic’.

She used her TK to click her earjack, but all she got was an earful of static. Wow, the Collective using signal jammers. What a huge surprise. Not.

She put all her weight on the top of the ‘MRI unit’ so she could use every bit of her TK. It didn’t feel like plastic under her shoes. It felt more like solid steel. Then she used her TK and pressed as hard as she could at the edge between two panels. Nothing. The gooey stuff was some sort of sealant or glue that was probably way stronger than ordinary store-brand crazyglue, so there was no way she could bust it. The clear panels were heavily secured at the ‘floor’ she was standing on, and had slots on the ceiling they had locked into. She could see that the ceiling slots were full of more of the sealant, so she wasn’t getting out that way. And little nozzles around the outside of the box’s base had already sprayed more sealant all around the bottom edge of the box. She doubted those hinge-things would even move anymore. Crud.

Maggie said brightly, “I understand that General O’Neill calls you Tera. Do you mind if I do?”

Alex tried to sound the way she imagined Jack would sound right now. Calm, and collected, and snarky. “Go right ahead … Maggie. Is this the point in the movie where you explain your deathtrap and your evil plan, and then gloat for a ridiculous length of time?”

Maggie smiled coldly. “That would be stupid and trite, wouldn’t it? No, I believe your SRI has already worked out the larger goals of our little group after their chats with Ms. Tobias, so that would be quite redundant. And your little box is hardly escape-proof. I figured out seven different ways you might escape, and I took measures to deal with all seven, but if you have abilities we don’t know about, or if you choose to think outside the box — so to speak — I wouldn’t want you to know which options I prepared for.”

Alex tried to sound calm as she said, “Regardless, my people heard your team’s fake broadcast that lured me in here. Someone will come.”

Maggie’s smile took on a ruthless glint. “Oh, I’m counting on it.”

Alex looked away from the monitor to study the rear doors. There were small metal boxes just above the upper edge of both doors. On either wall beside the rear doors were massive fuel tanks with pumps and sprayheads and measurement systems with little dials. The pumps were spraying a fine mist throughout the trailer, and they ran for several more seconds before the systems turned off.

Gas tanks. Fuel explosions. Crud. This whole trailer was already an enormous fuel-air explosive waiting to go off. All it needed was a spark. If someone opened one of those doors, those little boxes would provide the trigger. If she yanked the boxes off the walls, they might spark. If she tried to pull the boxes apart, they might spark.

Maggie obviously knew what she was thinking, because she smirked while saying, “Go right ahead. Without knowing how the trigger mechanisms work, it should be like playing Russian roulette … in ‘The Deer Hunter’.”

Unfortunately, Alex knew just what Maggie meant, thanks to her dad’s love of old movies. Alex tried to sound calm as she said, “If you just wanted to blow up the triage area, you would have set the bomb off already.”

Maggie nodded. “Exactly. I still don’t understand why Atron thinks you’re stupid. The doctors on Petrie’s Island definitely thought you were the brightest bulb on the entire island. Atron is really remarkably arrogant for someone who probably wasn’t even the third-best biochemist in Paradise Valley. No, I really did want to chat with you, albeit in a way that would prevent you from killing me or tracking me down.”

Not that Alex thought Maggie would disarm everything afterward. No, if Alex didn’t figure out a way out of here really soon, then as soon as Maggie was done milking her for information, there was going to be a fiery explosion that would take out most of the medical efforts and give hundreds of berserkers a chance to attack more people. Oh, and it would probably kill her, too.

Alex tried to think of what to do. She stalled: “So … you didn’t want to just drop me a note on my Facebook wall?”

Maggie seemed to miss the sarcasm. “When we tracked down the plane, we knew what would happen. It seemed obvious to me that anyone with an IQ above room temperature would realize that a portable MRI unit was needed. We just ‘provided’ an extra one, along with a couple of ‘cooperators’ to lure you in. Now, then, why did you choose strontium-90 and radium-228 instead of something safer when you faced my siliceous calcovores?”

*               *               *

Jill Valentine was riding shotgun in the first of the two trucks. Both trucks had a full complement of National Guard troops: two eight-person squads per truck. Mostly men, but there were a few women. Ahead of her was the jeep with Major Baker, who was being a complete asshat just because Jill was a girl. You’d think the guy was still afraid of catching cooties if he let her in his jeep.

The truck’s driver, Private Patterson, was apparently nicknamed ‘Gomer Pyle’ because he was a big, easy-going, dopey-looking kind of guy with a Southern accent. Patterson kept glancing over at her when he didn’t think she was looking. He finally asked, “Captain, ma’am, are you really Delta Force?”

“Yes, private.”

He tried again. “Umm, ma’am, I don’t wanna be nosy or get in trouble or anything, but I thought they didn’t let gir–… umm, women in.”

She’d gotten this before, and usually it was a hell of a lot less polite. “They don’t. They have a PT requirement so they don’t get anything except big, tough, macho guys. I crushed their little PT requirement. They didn’t like that, but they weren’t able to wash me out of training, either. So they didn’t make things friendly for me. That’s why I’m DHS now.”

“Wow. So what’s the deal with you and Easybake? I, uhh, I mean Major Baker!”

She managed not to laugh. “I couldn’t say, private.” Oh, she could say, but she wasn’t going to. She was planning on saving it all up and making a full report to O’Neill and Finn. She had a feeling that the general had a lot of experience in sticking it to people who pissed him off, and one of the easiest ways to piss Jack O’Neill off was to diss his people. She really, really liked that about him.

The truck was moving along at a decent pace behind the jeep, but she opened the cab door and put one booted foot on the step so she could lean out and get a good look at the farm with her night vision goggles. The tinted windshield wasn’t a good idea when they were driving at night into a potential battle zone. Even if Major Baker seemed to think there was nothing a middle-aged farmer and farmwife plus three teenagers could do against several trucks of armed guardsmen.

There wasn’t anything visible, although someone with a good infrared viewer might be able to spot something. She tried, “Major Baker, this is Captain Valentine. Have your people spotted anything with infrared?”

“Valentine, I want radio silence. Got it?”

What a moron. She smelled something rank. Her driver complained, “Damn. I hate pig farms. You can smell that pig shit stink from a mile away.”

She suddenly had a sinking feeling in her stomach. “Major, if they’ve watered their hogs with straight lake water, we may have an even bigger —”

The road abruptly dropped out from underneath the jeep, and someone screamed like a sissy as the jeep dived in headfirst. It looked to her like someone had taken out the supports from a simple wood bridge over a deep creek bed.

“Brakes!” she yelled at her driver, who looked like he was panicking. She lifted her left foot as she slid back into the cab, and she stomped on his right foot, mashing the brake pedal to the floorboards. The truck screeched to a halt about thirty feet short of the drop-off. At least the truck behind her didn’t crash into them.

It sounded like everyone in the jeep was screaming. Several handguns down in the creek bed fired frantically, but the screaming got worse. She yelled into her comms, “Major! Report! Major!”

She grabbed her M203 and made sure her night-vision goggles were in place. Then she leapt out of the cab of the truck.

She commanded into her comms, “Squads one through four. Lock and load. Assemble around the vehicles. Make sure at least one member of each squad is using infrareds at all times. Assume we are facing possible snipers and boobytraps. Squad one, move with me immediately to the jeep.”

She moved forward, even while the squads were still struggling to get their act together and clamber out of the back of the trucks.

There was no more screaming from the creek bed. Just the sound of grunting. And the biggest damn hog she had ever seen in her life came clambering over the edge of the creek bed. It was maybe six feet long and seven hundred pounds, and it had tusks long enough to rip apart even someone Carlson’s size. It went right for her, tusks forward.

Her driver screeched from the truck, “Oh, holy shit!”

She just put a fast grouping into the hog’s face, and it collapsed to the ground.

The troops behind her cursed furiously to cover their fear. Yeah, the farmers were the ones with the shock and awe tactics tonight.

Three more angry hogs came scrambling up over the lip of the creek bed and headed for anyone they could get to.

*               *               *

Hank Marshall was trying to stay out of the way, now that he’d gotten pretty much what he wanted … and pissed off a Guard colonel and a high-ranking CDC bureaucrat in the process. But they already had forty people processed, and over a hundred people waiting for triage.

But once he was able to show the guys butting heads what they were really facing, things had gotten easier. The calm people needed to be tested for prions and given CAT scans or MRIs. The completely insane berserkers just needed to be segregated. Everyone in between needed to be heavily sedated and immediately dosed with the prion-denaturer and then evaluated to see how severe their cerebral lesions were.

One group of Army NCOs had brought a pile of ‘prison chains’ they were slapping on each of the berserkers. It was a chain that locked around your waist, then chains at the sides of the waist that locked your wrists to the waist chain, then a long chain that dangled down to a pair of chains that locked around your ankles so you could only step about ten inches at a time. Once the berserker was chained, they could bite you, but that was about it. Still, it took four guys to hold down one of the berserkers and chain them up and put a gag in their mouth.

The MRI unit that had summoned Terawatt for help was padlocked on the outside with a big hand-written sign saying that the MRI unit was busted until new parts could be driven in from Des Moines. That slowed the processing down even more. At least all the CAT scanners were doing the job.

Over the comms he heard someone saying, “Delta seven. We’ve got a cattle truck barreling right at us.”

Someone said, “They must need our help pretty bad.”

Someone else snapped, “Or else they want to attack us pretty bad.”

Colonel Fanshaw bellowed over the comms, “Men, you know what to do! Signal them to stop short of the fences. If they won’t stop, open fire. Take out the driver, the engine, and the tires. I do not want a truck crashing through our defenses when we have minimal interior defensive capabilities, and a ton of civilians in here!”

Someone complained over the comms, “You can’t do that! They could be innocent victims!”

Colonel Fanshaw coldly said, “They’re all innocent victims. That doesn’t make them harmless.”

“Colonel, I’ll be reporting this!”

Fanshaw snapped, “You do that. My job is to make sure you stay alive long enough to be a pain in my ass.”

“Truck is not stopping. Firing warning shots.”

Hank hurried to the ‘security office’, which was really just a small tent and an armored personnel carrier in the center of the compound. He wasn’t a doctor of medicine or a fully-qualified medic, so the CDC people didn’t want him treating patients. He wasn’t National Guard, so he wasn’t part of Fanshaw’s detail. So he was walking around checking on everything he wanted to check on. And he wanted to check on this.

He ignored the complaints of the two privates outside the APC, and he clambered onto its roof. That gave him a good view of the problem. One very large cattle truck with wooden sides up so there was no way to see how many threats were hiding behind the cab. Shots were being fired, and he looked away from the bright flashes of light. Night vision goggles had a lot of upsides, but they had downsides, too.

And that was why he saw the real crisis. He clicked his comms. “Colonel Fanshaw, this is Professor Marshall.” Fanshaw was the type of colonel who would have ignored him if he’d called himself Lieutenant Marshall. “We have maybe fifty berserkers charging us from the north. It looks like they used a drainage ditch or creek bed to get close, and the truck as a distraction. We may have more attackers coming from other directions, too.”

He flipped to a different comm channel. “SRI to Terawatt, come in please. We have attackers at the medical center, and we could really use a superheroine.”

*               *               *

Alex had already tried cutting through a clear wall and had gotten nowhere fast. She had used her little cutting wheel and her TK, and worked at the bottom of the clear wall facing Maggie’s monitor, so it wasn’t visible from the webcam on top of the flatscreen, but she had just wasted time she couldn’t afford. Whatever the plastic was, it was tough, and it was thick, and if she cut into it hard enough, it got gooey and then it set up again. She had just barely managed to get the cutting wheel back out.

On the other hand, she had managed to get Maggie talking. And boy, did Maggie want to talk.

“At first, I devoted a lot of effort into trying to save individuals. I did some studies on white blood cells and figured out how to improve the performance of telomerase reverse transcriptases. I suddenly had a potential way to slow the aging process and simultaneously reduce the incidence of certain types of cancers. I was already doing a separate study with some different colleagues on retroviruses, and from that research I realized that I had a retroviral delivery system, along with a way of curing several dozen different diseases in utero and reducing the likelihood of certain other genetically-linked diseases. And I realized that I was holding something that would doom the entire planet.

“It didn’t take much work to estimate the long-term consequences of those few bits of research. The procreation years could double for most people. The rates of a number of common fatal illnesses could plummet. The average lifespan could double for most countries, or even triple or quadruple for those people in third-world countries. The world’s population would start doubling roughly every eight years instead of every fifty or sixty years, and there would be nowhere for all those people to go, and no way to feed them. I would single-handedly be responsible for destroying the planet. That was when I realized that I was going about this all wrong.”

Alex tried to sound casual as she asked, “So that was why you didn’t take your work on retrovirus therapies to the pharmaceutical companies?”

Maggie nodded. “Exactly. I’m flattered that you read my papers, and impressed that you recognized the potential results. But I needed to reduce the Earth’s population by one or two orders of magnitude, not increase it by the same amount. Once we reduce the planet’s load to something manageable, we’ll be free from overpopulation, starvation, poverty … We can remake this world into a paradise!”

Alex gave it a little bit of Jack O’Neill. “A paradise that you would rule, naturally.”

She had already started trying to cut holes in the white-coated metal she was standing on. And she still had to deal with a fuel-air bomb. Even sparks from the cutting could set that off if she got any farther through the ‘floor’. And she couldn’t breathe that fuel-tainted air, either.

*               *               *

Jill made a swift mental note never to go into hog farming. These things were big and vicious and deadly.

Fortunately, they were not as vicious or as deadly as all the bullets coming from two extremely jittery eight-person squads of National Guard troops.

She wanted to move forward and check out that creek bed herself, but she was now the commanding officer for this motley crew. “Squad one, advance and check out that creek bed. Squad two, move up and support. Medics? Get ready to go down there and check everyone in that jeep. Communications, alert Guard Leader that we’ve hit a boobytrap and lost the major’s jeep. Squad three, get your infrareds and night vision goggles, and check out everything you can see. The road ahead, the farmhouse, the barn, that equipment shed, those fields, everything. Squad four, you’ve got our six, along with the sides. Look for snipers and ambushes with your infrareds. They may know the terrain, but we should have a technological advantage.”

She only liked asymmetric warfare when it favored her.

“Yes, ma’am,” several sergeants answered.

Squad one opened fire on every hog in the creek bed.

“Sergeant Mason to Captain Valentine. We have another twenty pigs moving this way from the west in and beside the creek bed.”

“Valentine to Mason. Engage at range. Remember, these things were lethal even before they got poisoned. With this poison in their systems, they’ll attack anything. They’ve probably slaughtered most of the other farm animals already.”

She listened while Squad One took care of the next threat. She was more concerned with the occupants of the jeep … and what the farm family was up to, assuming they had survived these hogs.

One of the medics scrambled out of the creek bed and hurried over. “Captain? We’ve got three dead and one in desperate need of transport.”

She made a decision. “Get him stabilized and moved into the second truck. You have ten minutes.”

“Are we leaving the farm?”

She replied, “No, corporal, we are doing our job. We’re just not going to take more than ten minutes.”

She commanded over the comms, “Squads one and two, with me. Everyone with infrareds, look for every heat source you can spot, even if it’s a dog or a warm spot on the road. If it’s an animal, shoot it. If it’s a person, give them an opportunity to surrender but do not close unless they disarm and can speak normally. We take down the barn with M203s and mortars first. Then the big equipment shed. That will leave the house and its attached garage, plus anything hidden behind the house. Understood?”

They understood, they just weren’t prepared for the ruthlessness of urban warfare in the middle of Iowa.

She ordered, “I’ll go first. Sergeant Mason, hand me two ropes and two bayonets. Squads one and two, follow once I’ve got ropes in place.”

She took a running jump and cleared the broken part of the bridge. She slammed one bayonet point-first into the hard ground beside the gravel road, tied a firm knot around the bayonet’s handle, and tossed the rest of the rope into the creek bed. She repeated the process on the other side of the road. She clicked her comms. “Squads, move out. Squad three, support from here and get two ropes pinned in place for when we come back. We may be moving in a hurry. Then get the mortar out of the rear truck, and sight it in for the barn, the equipment shed, the house, and thirty yards behind the house.”

Both squads jumped down into the creek bed and clambered up the other side using the ropes. Sergeant Mason looked at her and quietly said, “Ma’am, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it.”

She just told him, “We’ll discuss it later, or you can talk to Colonel Finn, who has full disclosure on me.”

She clicked her comms again. “Form up in a line. I want one night vision and one infrared at the front. Anything the least bit suspicious, and you call it.”

“Corporal Thomas to Captain Valentine. I’m seeing what looks like a slightly warm rectangle in the middle of the road about fifty yards downrange.”

She groaned inwardly. Probably another boobytrap. “Valentine. Corporal, can you put a mortar shell on top of it?”

“No, ma’am.”

She swapped her night vision goggles for a private’s infrareds and she looked it over. She had three guesses, and none of them were good. She lined up her M203 and put an HE grenade right into it.

The explosion hurled gravel and shrapnel everywhere. Based on the sound, and some of the crap that landed in front of her, she was guessing a bag of ammonium nitrate fertilizer with plenty of fuel oil added, plus jars of nails and screws poured on top. Presto, instant IED. It wouldn’t have mattered if they had driven over it or marched over it, they would have all been fragged. Over the comms, she calmly said, “They’re playing for keeps. Treat this like you just got shipped to Iraq.” She quickly reloaded her grenade launcher.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Valentine to infrareds. Anything visible?”

“Nothing in the barn except some dead animals lying on the ground and cooling off.”

“I’ve got a warm body on top of a hot tractor in the equipment building.”

“I’ve got at least three people in the house, two in separate rooms upstairs.”

Damn. A guy on a tractor that could be towing pretty much anything, with maybe a heavy front-loader scoop to block rifle fire if he had any sense left. And three people in the house, probably all armed. And one person unaccounted for. She clicked the comms and quietly ordered, “I need at least one person at the rear watching our six with infrareds.”

“Already on it, captain. No sign of anything.”

She commanded, “Mortar team. Take down that barn. Now.”

She didn’t look back at the mortar on the other side of the creek. She didn’t need to look, and she didn’t want to lose any more night vision. There was a distinctive pawmp and one side of the barn exploded. Another pawmp, and the front blew. Two more, and there was nothing left but a pile of burning timber.

“Loudhailer.” She put her arm out, and someone handed it to her.

She flipped it on and spoke into it, her voice booming across the farmstead. “This is Captain Valentine with the National Guard. The lake water has been poisoned. We need you to surrender yourselves at once, or we will be forced to treat you as hostiles. You have seen what we can do to an emplacement. If you give us no ch–…”

The tractor came roaring out of the shed. Sure as shit, there was a massive front-loader bucket screening the tractor cab and the guy in it. And the tractor was towing a massive thing that looked like a really wide row of five-foot-high metal disks that would chew a squad to shreds. Soldiers opened fire on the tractor, and she could see the ricochets in the dark as the front-loader bucket held up to rifle fire.

She dropped the loudhailer and carefully aimed the M203. She put a round of HE into the front right tire. The explosion took off the tire and the axle and the fork. The tractor spilled to its right, slamming the cab to the ground. A guy shoved open the cab door, which was now on the side facing upward, and tried to open fire on the squads with a rifle.

Four M4s opened fire on him and dropped him before he could aim at anyone in particular.

At least three rifles opened up on them from the house. Both squads dropped prone and returned fire.

She clicked her comms again. “Mortar team, take out the front of the house, upstairs and downstairs. Then put two in the equipment building.”

The first mortar round fired at the house landed twenty feet short. She managed not to roll her eyes, given these guys were supposed to have sighted in the damn thing with a laser range finder.

It also didn’t stop the rifle fire from the building, but clearly the people in the house couldn’t see much in the darkness and were just firing blindly. The second mortar round took out the right side of the upper story and most of the right side of the front half of the house. The third round did the same to the left side of the house. Two more rounds were enough to tear apart the corrugated steel sides of the equipment building.

She made sure she had a full mag in her M16 with an HE round in her grenade launcher.

A pickup truck came screaming around from behind the house. It was towing what looked like a two-thousand-gallon cylindrical fuel tank mounted on its side atop a boat trailer.

“Take it!” she snapped into her comms.

Her squads opened fire on the pickup, while she and at least two other soldiers launched grenades at the side of the fuel tank. Her grenade was HE, but someone else’s grenade was definitely Willy Pete.

The explosion lit up the farmstead and turned what was left of the house and equipment building into flaming fragments.

She stared at the disaster area and clenched her jaw. She hadn’t wanted it to go this way, but she knew there was no way these people would have gone quietly. “Valentine. We’re done here. Squads one and two, move back across the creek bed and load up. Squads three and four. Return to trucks and get them turned around for exit. Medics, do you have injured on truck two yet?”

“Just loading now, captain. You did say ten minutes.”

She checked her watch. It was just going on six and a half minutes since she’d given them that deadline.

She said, “Sergeant Mason, you and I wait here and protect the squads while they cross the creek bed. Then you go. I’m last, because I have no intention of going down into the creek. Understood?”

“Yes, captain.”

“Then let’s move out. And I want everyone with infrareds or night vision gear watching all around us while we drive back to base with our injured man.”

*               *               *

Riley Finn watched as General Hickerson hurried over to where his adjutant had an important report for him. He fixed his comm channel and tapped his earjack. “Finn to SRI. Situation reports, please.”

Marshall snapped, “Med compound under siege from at least two sides. We could use Terawatt but there’s no sign of her.”

Valentine growled, “First farm was a hard target. We lost the major and his entire jeep. Watch out for any animals that have been drinking the water. We’re moving the jeep driver back to Guard medical and picking up more heavy weapons before we move toward Farm Two.”

Riley asked, “No sign of Terawatt?”

“Not even a yelp over the comms.”

Doggone it! He just didn’t see how a couple crazy people could take out Terawatt. No, this was probably something more.

Something really dangerous.

“Keep me apprised. Finn out.”

He hurried over to where the general was looming over a map and having an angry argument with his logistics people. He interrupted, “Excuse me sir, but we have another problem.”

General Hickerson whirled around and glared. “Like I give a crap about your two or three people. I’ve got entire fireteams being ambushed out there!”

Riley interjected, “And the med compound is under attack. And we can’t find Terawatt.”

“I know about the compound. We’re trying to find some squads who can provide support without losing our outside containment, which is more important. And why the hell would I care about your superheroine?”

Riley carefully said, “Because, sir, if there’s something out there that can take down Terawatt before she could warn us, then you do not want your people to run into it.”

*               *               *

Alex watched as Maggie Walsh glared at her like Alex had said something really stupid. Maggie fumed, “Me? Rule a mindless horde of uncooperative idiots? You couldn’t pay me enough. I like research. Hard science … testable hypotheses … creative studies … No, people are so … unreliable and uncooperative and intractable. I like being in a laboratory. I just want to make sure that my work is put to the purposes I intend, not padding the pockets of fat CEOs or condemning billions of people to slow starvation. Unfortunately, there’s no way to achieve my goals without some fairly ruthless steps along the way.”

Alex gave her a raised eyebrow à la Jack. “The ends justify the means? Is that it?”

Maggie gave her a haughty look. “If the means don’t justify themselves, you’re clearly doing things wrong.”

Wow. Alex never thought she’d agree with Maggie Walsh on anything.

She felt the cutting wheel slice again through the ceramic-covered metal she was standing on. That was the sixth hole she’d managed to cut. She had a rough hexagon marked out just behind her boots. Only now she could use her cutting wire too and cut between any two holes. She figured if she could keep Maggie talking for another minute, she could have an exit hole cut in the ‘floor’ of the trap.

She was holding a small, hemispherical forcefield in place under the cutting tools. That way, she didn’t have poisonous air coming up through the cuts, and any sparks wouldn’t have a chance to set off the fuel-air mixture. But she still had to figure out how to handle the fuel ignition problem. After all, she couldn’t decrease the fuel-air ratio without opening the doors first or cutting an exit hole that would make sparks and set off an explosion.

And then it dawned on her. She didn’t have to decrease the fuel-air ratio. It was all chemistry. Gasoline would only burn in a pretty narrow fuel-to-air ratio, and Maggie’s gizmos had deliberately turned off the sprayers, so this fuel would probably do the same thing. She reached out with her TK and turned on the pumps. She used her TK to squeeze all the triggers and drastically increase the fuel-air ratio.

She strained with her wiresaw, and she cut through the first segment in seconds. Then the second and third. The cutting wheel tore through the metal to slice up another section.

She calmly looked at the screen and said, “I agree. If the means don’t justify themselves, you’re clearly doing things wrong. But I consider that anyone being killed horribly automatically indicates that the means don’t justify themselves, because you’re committing murder.”

Maggie rolled her eyes. “Hypocrite. Just how many people did you kill in Korea?”

One more segment was cut. She sliced through the last segment as she stalled. “Let me see … Oh, yes. Zero. I didn’t kill anyone.”

Maggie insisted, “But your team certainly did. You can’t ignore that. Your team killed or injured well over half the enemy combatants.”

The steel hexagon dropped loose, falling an inch or so onto the forcefield she was still maintaining beneath. Fuel was still spraying into the trailer. She hoped everything was ready.

“But those were combatants. Armed, brainwashed soldiers who were going to kill as many South Koreans as they could. That’s not the same as wiping out innocent women and children.”

Alex used her TK to open the rear doors of the trailer. Both boxes sparked furiously. Nothing happened. Two more boxes she hadn’t even spotted started sparking. Still nothing exploded or caught on fire. Wow, that worked better than she figured.

The doors only opened about an inch before they stopped abruptly. The doors were chained shut from the outside. Crud.

Maggie looked thoughtfully at her. “I didn’t think of that. But you still have to get out of that box.”

Alex went silvery and dived through the hole she had already cut. The fake MRI machine wasn’t jam-packed with magnets and stuff, so she had no trouble forcing her way out through a vent down near the floor. She stayed silvery and darted across the trailer floor to squeeze out through the one-inch gap between the padlocked doors and the floor. Then she used her TK to slam the doors closed again and lock the doors from the inside.

What she really needed now was someone to drive this rolling bomb completely out of the quarantine area and well away from anyone and anything.

*               *               *

Lieutenant Hank Marshall used his comms again. “Truck successfully stopped before front gate, but about thirty berserkers overran the west guard position and are trying to pull down the gate at the fence. North side held off first wave of attackers, but second wave is heavily armed, and has caught most of our forces off-guard. We may lose that stretch of fence, too. We need to fall back to Hut Two.”

Colonel Fanshaw interrupted, “Hell, no! Troops, take the fight to them! Fireteams six and seven, advance on the front gate! Fireteams eight and nine, support the north fence!”

“Fireteam six, advancing.”

“Fireteam nine, moving to sup–…”

Hank could only see one fireteam moving toward the west gate, and he could see a wave of berserkers flooding through the north fence and overwhelming the lone fireteam that got caught unprepared as it moved around one of the hastily assembled huts. He concentrated his fire on the berserkers trying to get through each other to kill fireteam nine. It looked like the berserkers would just shoot or stab or bludgeon whoever was in front of them, whether it was friend or foe. Okay, as far as these berserkers were concerned, probably everyone was a foe, but apparently they would run with anyone who was killing other people.

He fired his grenade into the second wave of berserkers just before they got to the gap in the north fence. Then he took single shots at the berserkers around fireteam nine.

“This is Terawatt. I am moving toward the center of the compound from the east. Can anyone hear me?”

Hank could hardly believe the full-body sensation of pure relief. It was like … Well, it was like a superheroine just told you she was swooping in to save your sorry ass.

“Terawatt! This is Marshall. North side, we’re being overrun.”

“On it. Attention everyone: the last MRI unit — the one that is locked shut — is really a fuel-air bomb. Do not approach except to drive it somewhere way away from anybody.”

And in the time it took her to say that over the comms, she had already flown past him, blasted every berserker around fireteam nine with a couple of bursts of lightning, and then blasted all the berserkers streaming through the hole in the north fence. Her silvery shape would have been pretty much impossible to follow at the speed she was making, except that bolts of lightning kept blasting downward and knocking the shit out of clusters of berserkers.

Lupo and Carlson were pretty freaking impressive in a battle, but Terawatt was in a whole other league.

He leapt off the APC with his weapons and moved swiftly north, checking to make sure that there weren’t any more berserkers breaching the damaged fence. “Marshall to leader. North fence is clear, thanks to Terawatt. We need medics for all of fireteam nine, who got bushwhacked. No sign of fireteam eight. They may be down already.”

Colonel Fanshaw just grumbled, “It’s about time Terawatt bothered to show up and do something.”

Balding incompetent asshole. How about a little ‘oh thank god Terawatt saved our asses so we didn’t lose the entire compound along with all the innocent civilians in triage and huts one through three’ you dork? Hank was going to make sure to put plenty of detail about Fanshaw into his report, just so General O’Neill could know who not to rely on in future.

 
Next Part                Previous Part                 Chapter Index