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Chapter 156 – On the MarchAlex went silvery and slid into the ductwork, then she zoomed up to the roof. As soon as all the guards were definitely looking out and down, she went straight up in as thin a pole as she could squeeze herself into. At about ten thousand feet, she swung around, flew a couple of miles toward Heathrow, and then soared down out of the skies toward the front of the hotel. As soon as she was low enough to be seen by people on the streets, she started arcing lightning between her hands and around herself.
She zoomed down to the front entry to the hotel and in her best Terawatt voice said, “Good afternoon, gentlemen. I believe I am expected.”
A sergeant major stiffly stepped forward and said, “Welcome to England, Terawatt! If you could accompany me, the meetings are already under way.”
Alex lied, “Thank you. I would have been here yesterday, but I had a small problem in Washington.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
The sergeant major led her to the ballroom, with him marching and her floating six inches off the floor so she was about a head taller than him. She just had to make sure she didn’t get ahead of him and accidentally tip off that she knew where they were going.
Then someone out front must have called someone in the ballroom, because the entire room had stopped arguing about whatever boring stuff they were arguing about, and everyone was facing the doorway waiting for her to fly in.
So she gave it her best shot. She let lightning arc all around her body as she flew Iron Giant-style to the dais in the middle of the room. And she hovered a good foot and a half above the dais so she’d look even taller. She hoped.
She gave everyone a big smile and said, “Thank you for inviting me. I’m sorry I couldn’t schedule this appearance better, but problems just keep surfacing. So far, of the people here, I have only worked with Mister Hendriks and Ms. Granger and General O’Neill’s team, but I am hoping to meet more of you this afternoon. And I am sure many of you have questions, so perhaps we could have some time for that.”
No one paid any attention as Lieutenant Farrell came bustling in once again and had a hurried, quiet conference with General O’Neill before retreating to a chair off to the rear of the American group before once again burying herself in computing chores. Well, no one except Major Kuhlman, who looked concerned, and Lord Giles, who looked perplexed. After Lord Giles spent some time studying Terawatt and also Lieutenant Farrell, he gave up. Or at least, he acted like he did.
So Aart Hendriks spent half an hour introducing Terawatt to everyone in the room. Well, he didn’t bother to introduce her to the Americans, because didn’t Terawatt know all the Americans already?
Alex knew she wouldn’t remember all the names and titles, but she also knew Hermione and Willow could get her pictures of everyone at the conference, with names and titles and roles, and Alex could study that stuff on her own so she could be ready the next time the Europeans called her.
Then they did the Q and A thing. Alex was worried it would go like the thing with the generals at Andrews Air Force Base, but all these guys wanted Terawatt to like them, so they were nicer about stuff. Even the French, because Alex thought French people were supposed to be snobby, even if she didn’t know anyone French except one computer programmer who was kind of a horny jerk but not snobby at all.
And maybe she should stop thinking entire countries of people were all like annoying people in comedies, because there were probably plenty of Europeans who thought all Americans were pushy jerks who had Texas accents and drove cars the size of a bus.
So most of the questions were about the etiquette of calling Terawatt up for help, although they didn’t call it that. And some people wanted to have a whole set of levels of importance for Terawatt calls, in case two or three countries called Terawatt all at once. And some countries wanted to have special Terawatt troops as part of the E.U. Fast Reaction Forces. So most of the questions turned into arguments that had nothing to do with her.
Although one of the Spanish representatives wanted to know if she had been called when the E.U. forces took down the Umbrella Europe operations, since several Spanish soldiers died in their part of the operation. Alex thought that was a really fair question.
She explained, “The liaison office did call me. It was right after I had completed my part of the Davenport op, and hours before the British and Spanish teams launched their ops. I explained in great detail about the threats that might be faced, and I gave some advice on weaponry, and I offered to fly to Europe if I was needed. After some discussion, it was decided that I wasn’t needed, but that the American CDC and General O’Neill of the SRI would also be consulted. We sent several vials of anti-virus via the fastest jet that General O’Neill could use, and those vials were on hand for both ops. I understand that Ms. Granger took part in the British op, and I believe that the people in charge of the Spanish op may have ignored some of my advice.”
But that led to arguing among the Spanish delegates, and then the Italians got in on it, and it was kind of a mess. Poor little Annie Farrell came in and went back out again twice before they stopped for the mid-afternoon break.
That was when Alex got to meet some people one-on-one, which was what she really wanted. As she told a bunch of people, ‘we need to know each other and trust each other, so we can exchange information freely and people can call me even when they aren’t sure they have a Code Terawatt yet.’ And the new Italian guy seemed really nice, and not at all like Colonel Stupidetti, even if he had a sexy accent, too.
And when Lord Giles came over, she refused to shake hands with him. She just loomed over him and said, “I heard about you.” She glanced over at Major Kuhlman so he’d be sure what she was talking about. “I am extremely displeased with your actions, and I am even less happy knowing why you chose to do it. Bear in mind that General Baylor will probably make his displeasure known to the Joint Chiefs and maybe to the President, so don’t think this won’t have repercussions. Good day.” She turned her back on him and floated off to talk to the Italian delegation.
Anyway, she figured he was really trying to do something creepy, like get a sample of her DNA for some kind of study or comparison back at SIS. After all, she had four fingertips that weren’t covered by her gloves. And for all she knew, he had a ring with a needle on it that would punch right through a thin leather glove.
When it was about time to wrap up the break and go back to the ballroom, she flew over to Mister Hendriks and thanked him for the opportunity to meet more members of the group. Then she flew out of the room, down the hall, and out the front doors. She even waved at the soldiers who were on duty before she rose and soared off over the buildings until she was lost to their sight.
Then she ducked down to a rooftop, went silvery, and jetted across rooftops in a different direction to get back to the hotel from the back side. She came down at a steep angle and dived into the hotel air intake before any of the guards noticed her. They were all looking down into the streets like they were supposed to, even if one of the guards at the front of the building was pointing off in the direction Terawatt had taken when she left the hotel.
It only took a few seconds to get to her room. But it still took maybe fifteen minutes to put the goop on her cheeks, let it dry properly to get the right look, then slather on the special ‘foundation’ so she looked like Annie Farrell again. Once she had that, she went silvery and poured herself into the padded suit and the uniform blouse and the tie.
Jo arrived right about then. So Jo took off the wig and glasses and uniform jacket and pants and shoes, and Alex put them on. Presto! Instant Lieutenant Farrell. Alex adjusted the wig for a minute, while Jo pulled a bunch of weapons out of the valise. Then Alex headed back down to the ballroom, while Jo said, “I’m just gonna watch TV for a while. Kuhlman left me alone, but Giles tried to give me the ‘suave sexy guy’ routine and I just gave him a nasty glare and hurried out the door.”
Alex had another piece of gum in her mouth before she hurried in and did the whole routine: showing Jack her tablet, which this time had ‘op completed’ in a window for him to spot; huddling in one of the rear chairs to work on her tablet, and then dashing off again.
She came back in time for the breakout sessions, since one of them was computer security for the liaison office, given all the different countries involved and the kinds of computer attacks people were seeing. Willow even came to that one, and wore a really awesome power suit. Nobody else in that session was dressed anywhere near as nice, even if some of them like Alex were in dress uniforms. They argued about stuff until six, then broke for dinner in the meals room with everyone else who was in breakout sessions, and then argued some more until they wrapped up at nine. Alex went right up and had a box of crackers with a weird-tasting brown spread that she wasn’t going to try again and a wheel of a really tasty cheese she’d never had before.
Jo was in her compression suit and had already called to have her gear ready in the women’s locker area, so Alex went silvery, pulled Jo into her morph, and flew her off to RAF Northolt. Alex gave Jo a big hug goodbye before Jo started pulling on her heavy flight suit, and Jo grinned. “You take care of yourself. And make sure the general takes you and Willow sightseeing or shopping. Especially shopping in stores he won’t want to go into. And maybe you could both make him hold your purses while you try things on.”
Alex was back in her hotel room in under ten minutes. Hanna was off having another dinner with the Scandinavian liaison delegates, so Alex just sat and ate a whole box of cookies while reading stuff on her tablet. And then she turned on the TV, because Jack and Willow were really getting carried away and their bed was bumping rhythmically against the wall, and Willow was kind of … exuberant. And loud.
Fortunately, there was an action movie Alex could watch, and she turned up the volume enough, and while she watched, she ate some fruit and then some ‘biscuits’ which were really these yummy cookies.
And the movie was pretty stupid. Most of the characters were shooting two guns at once and aiming from the hip in two different directions at the same time which never worked in real life, and the badguys had aim so bad they must have trained on the Death Star under Grand Moff Tarkin. And when guys got shot they got blasted across the room like they had gotten punched by Azure Crush, even if they just got shot with a little .25 caliber revolver. And guys were running around with their guns pointing forward and their fingers on the triggers, like they wanted to accidentally shoot each other. And every car crash was a big explosion with a fireball. And at the end, the hero got shot with a .45 in the shoulder and just acted like it was a bee sting, and it didn’t affect his arm movements much at all.
She really would have had a lot more fun watching the movie with Hanna or Jo so they could all make mean comments about how fake it all was and how dumb it looked.
Hanna finally showed up after eleven, but they left the TV on. Alex really could have used at least one of those noise cancellation gadgets like what Hermione had on her windows.
* * *
Samantha Finn walked across the dark night-time compound. She could hear night fauna out there, and she knew some of the more dangerous night fauna didn’t announce their presence first. But there were two vehicles just pulling in, and Frank wanted her to meet with them. That usually meant that they spoke a language Frank didn’t.
It wasn’t a large group, but Frank looked distinctly ill at ease. At least that was what she was assuming from his stiff posture.
She walked closer, and an extremely attractive blonde American type in safari garb stepped out from behind the smaller vehicle.
Sam’s first thought was ‘Orphan!’
Apparently, the blonde thought the same way, because she instantly put a bullet in Sam’s right forearm before Sam could get to her .45 in her hip holster. A second bullet caught Sam in the thigh, and she fell painfully to the hard ground. A burst of automatic fire ripped through poor Frank.
The blonde raced over to Sam and snatched up the .45 before using her boot to push Sam onto her back “Another fucking Collective problem. What are you doing here, bitch?”
“What’s going on? This is unacceptable!” Oh, great, just what they needed. Anthony Michaelis and his ‘I am in charge here’ attitude. The man wasn’t even a good diagnostician.
The blonde grabbed Anthony and shoved the barrel of her handgun against Anthony’s cheek. “Who is she? What’s she doing here? How long has she been here?”
Anthony whimpered, “Please don’t shoot! Oh, my God, you shot Samantha!”
“Who is she?!” The blonde rammed the barrel of the gun hard against his cheek.
“Aaggh! She’s Dr. Samantha Finn! She’s our best surgeon. And she’s been with us and the Peace Corps med group ever since we left America. Two … two and a half years.”
Sam tried to ignore the pain. She asked the blonde, “Why are you doing this? And what’s a collective problem?”
The blonde gaped at her. “You really don’t know? You don’t know what you are? Shit! Well, what’s done is done. No putting the worms back in this can.” She took the gun out of Anthony’s face … and thrust a combat knife up under his ribcage, holding it there while Anthony gasped and writhed for long seconds. She held it there until he sagged in death.
The blonde said to her cohorts, “Round everyone up and lock ’em all in the back of one of the trucks.”
“They might survive in there for two or three days.”
The blonde shrugged. “Rougher for them, easier for us. If we try and shoot everyone in the compound right now, someone’s likely to make a break for it and get away in the dark. We have enough headaches as it is.”
“Okay, Karen. You’re the boss.”
The blonde — Karen — said, “And afterward, wreck their communications in case someone local comes by in the nick of time. We won’t be coming back this way.”
Sam lay there in brutal pain, while Karen stood over her and enjoyed the show. Every time Sam tried to yell out for her friends to run, Karen kicked her in her injured thigh, causing an explosion of agony. Every time Sam tried to grab Karen with her left arm, Karen easily evaded the attack.
That speed told Sam that Karen really was an Orphan. She just had no idea why Orphans might be here in the Congo.
It took less than twenty minutes to round up everyone else in the compound, shove them in the truck they used for the most complicated surgeries, and lock them in. Without power for the air conditioning units, that trailer would become lethally hot tomorrow, and without drinking water, everyone in there would be dead in a day or two.
Sam heard when someone put a couple of bullets into their satellite phone.
Karen loomed over Sam. “Okay, let’s get moving.”
“Yes, Miss Ross.”
Karen looked Sam in the eye and said, “News bulletin. You’re one of these Orphans. Me, too. Your Orphan abilities are why you’re still conscious and not screaming your lungs out. So I’m going to give you a fighting chance. But you’ll have to really want it.”
She shot Sam in the chest.
* * *
It took Sam almost half an hour to drag herself around the compound, and now she was at the jeep where they kept the satellite phone. It was a half hour of unbearable pain. The bullet had ripped into her side just below her fifth rib, and had just missed her lung. She could tell from her labored breathing that she had a serious pneumothorax, and without treatment she would die. She might only have hours before she stopped being able to inhale effectively, and she passed out. She had tried dragging herself over to the locked trailer, but that was hopeless: a massive padlock was securing a huge chain that was locking the trailer doors shut. There was no way she could get the air conditioning power for the trailer started: it took two healthy men yanking repeatedly on a starting cord to get the gasoline motor started. Now she was hoping she could get one of the jeep’s doors open and drag herself in, and then be able to repair enough of the damage done to the phone to call for help.
She pulled herself up to a sitting position leaning back against the side of the jeep, and she reached for the door handle. It wouldn’t budge. They had locked the jeep, too. She needed to find a rock, break that window, unlock the door, get inside …
She heard the loud purr. It was getting closer. And closer. She had been outside in the dark for long enough that she caught a glimpse of motion when the leopard began to close in on her.
It was a full-grown leopard. She had no weapons, she couldn’t even stand, and a leopard that big was strong enough to haul a three hundred pound carcass up a tree. It would probably sink its fangs into her throat and bite down hard enough to cut off her air, then just hold her like that until she suffocated. Maybe she could use her good arm to attack its eyes and nose before she died.
That was when she saw two vines swing in the trees overhead.
A chimpanzee dropped to the ground not thirty feet away. A chimp wearing shorts and a striped tank top? And right beside it was … a teenaged girl? Sam instantly wondered if she was hallucinating, and if she was, why she wasn’t seeing Tarzan instead.
The girl strode forward right at the leopard. She opened her mouth, and a noise like a leopard’s growl came out. The hair on the back of Sam’s neck stood at attention like soldiers at boot camp.
The leopard should have attacked her. Instead, it took a step backward and snarled at the girl.
The girl took another step forward. She spoke again, only it was more snarls and growls, with occasional other inhuman sounds.
The leopard stared at her like it was thinking things over. Or like it was considering her as an appetizer before it got back to Sam’s body.
“Go! Go now!” the girl ordered. She growled a couple more times.
The leopard snarled oddly, and then … it slunk away into the darkness. Either the girl had superpowers, or she had balls the size of boulders. Maybe both.
The girl looked at the chimpanzee, who hooted at her. “Yeah, I know. I had to, okay?” Then she hooted back at the chimp in a variety of odd ape-like noises.
The chimpanzee vocalized some more, and took off.
The girl knelt beside Sam and said, “I don’t know how to treat stuff like this, but I’ll stay here with you until help gets here.”
Sam whispered, “I know you. I’ve seen you.”
The girl nodded. “Yeah. You’re the nice lady doctor. I’m Eliza Thornberry.”
* * *
Alex got ready Friday morning as usual, and snagged Jack before Willow even came out of the bedroom. She ate breakfast down in the meals room and checked that Major Kuhlman was doing okay, and then she took two plates of food up to Willow and had some more breakfast while Willow just stretched out on the couch and demonstrated the meaning of the word ‘languid’. And ‘satisfied’. And ‘really smug’.
After that, the meetings actually did something. Each of the breakout groups reported, and explained what they’d gotten done, and what they hadn’t, and who was responsible for finishing up what hadn’t gotten completed, and what their timelines were. Alex was really pretty impressed, because she hadn’t thought a lot of the people in the room would cooperate that much.
Then, after lunch, the people who were still there did wrap-up and did some planning for the next meeting, which had been selected in one of yesterday’s breakout meetings. It would be in Copenhagen in June, which sounded really nice. Maybe Annie Farrell could get invited to that and do some sight-seeing and stuff.
She still had her fingers crossed that Jack would let her do some London sight-seeing tomorrow.
She stood next to Jack like a dutiful adjutant, while Jack and General Baylor negotiated. General Baylor wanted about two hours to go shopping and buy something for his wife and daughter, and then he wanted to fly right home. Jack wanted to stay for the whole weekend. Riley was willing to fly back with General Baylor and get the Cessna turned around so Jack could fly back Sunday night. Major Kuhlman was willing to arrange for a less cushy ride home on a commercial jet if the Cessna needed to stay in London. Alex didn’t really see the problem, since it was the SRI’s jet, wasn’t it?
Well, wasn’t it? Maybe it wasn’t really the SRI’s private transport.
Since she was really bored with the discussion, she noticed when an officer ran in and talked to Brigadier Brathwaite-Thomson. The guy looked really upset, and was totally not all stiff upper lip like she thought the British officers would all be.
Jack noticed her distraction and called her on it, so she just tilted her head at Brigadier Brathwaite-Thomson and told him, “Sir, maybe we should let them take the Cessna now and send it back, because it looks like Brigadier Brathwaite-Thomson might have a Code Terawatt on his hands.”
General Baylor looked at her, and then looked over at the Brits. He pursed his lips in thought and then told her, “That’s generous of you, but I think if the SRI needs to get involved over here, you might need that Cessna.” He turned his head. “Major, get hold of MAC and get us three seats back to D.C.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jack said, “Then I think we’d better go and stick our noses in, like we’re supposed to or something.”
He tilted his head toward the Brits. Riley and Action Girl instantly reacted and moved, too. Alex had to hurry, because Jack was walking fast. But she stayed right alongside him.
Jack walked right up to Brigadier Brathwaite-Thomson and Captain Arm-Waving, and he interrupted Jack-style. “Ahh, Edward, it seems you’re at it again. What’s happening this time?”
Brigadier Brathwaite-Thomson stared at Jack for maybe half a second before he glanced at Action Girl and asked, “Jack, can you get Terawatt back here?”
Jack pretended to think it over. “Hmm, depending where she is, I might be able to get her here in one to two hours, but that’s assuming she’s not in the middle of another crisis.”
Brigadier Brathwaite-Thomson frowned. “That would be a bloody miracle if you could manage it, because we need to declare a Code Terawatt. As of perhaps two hours ago. And even grabbing a helo at Northolt, it’ll still take us perhaps two hours to load up, get the helo, and get to our destination.”
Riley said, “Sir, we brought our own gear, just in case.”
Jack said, “And Lieutenant Farrell can stay here with Willow and do the C3 and all the Tera-contact tasks.”
Alex calmly said, “Sir, she really doesn’t like it when you call everything Tera-whatever.”
Jack grinned. “That’s what makes it fun.”
The brigadier’s adjutant Captain McGinnis sternly insisted, “Brigadier, you’ll need to stay here as well.”
But the ‘old duffer’ stopped pretending, and he gave the captain a Batman-level glare. “I damn well am going. They depended on me, and I’ve let them down. Now we may have a Terawatt-level crisis in the Midlands. I know you’ve still got my gear at HQ. You will meet us at Northolt with it, and you will have a helo waiting for us, or you will be taking ice samples at the South Pole for the next decade!”
Jack glanced at Riley and Action Girl. Then he told Captain McGinnis, “If you have transport ready out front of the hotel in fifteen minutes, we’ll be ready to go.”
Alex asked, “And will your Fast Reaction Forces be going, too? because we’ll want to coordinate.”
The brigadier scowled. “They already went in, less than two hours ago, as soon as they detected an explosion. About three minutes into the insertion, we abruptly lost comms with them, with no warning. And it wasn’t a signal jammer. They just stopped responding. We still had working GPS on all of them. But as far as we know, they’re all dead. This time, we’ll be using a special squad that’s part SIS.”
Alex figured that probably meant Harry and Ron, and maybe that guy Mike. She didn’t know whether to be pleased to get to see them again, or worried that they might get hurt.
She followed Jack up to his room. Hanna was already in uniform, and just had to put on her shoulder holster and her web belt and her combat knife. But Jack and Riley had to change into the gear Riley had brought along: camo-pattern clothes, combat boots, web belts, tac vests, the whole deal. Plus Riley had handguns and combat knives and M203s and ammo and loads for the web belts and tac vests and pretty much everything except the kitchen sink.
Willow looked panicky. “Jack? What’s happening? Is it in the hotel?”
“Will, we’ve got a little crisis in the Midlands, and we’re going to go help Edward with it. You and Lieutenant Farrell get to stay here and do C3 through our earjacks and the British cellphone system. If Hermione Granger links up, make sure people think Farrell is in here with you.”
Willow frowned. “Edward has a bad heart. His wife was really sweet, but really worried about him. Don’t you let him get hurt!”
Alex hadn’t even been sure what Brigadier Brathwaite-Thomson’s first name was, and Willow got to be on a first-name basis with him. And his wife. Maybe those fancy dinners for the important conference people had a purpose after all. Other than letting fancy people eat fancy food in a fancy place.
Jack explained just what he wanted Alex to do, so she went silvery, darted up into the ductwork to get to her own room, and changed into Terawatt. Then she went up to the roof, waited until she was sure none of the guards were looking her way, and jetted up into the sky.
Getting to RAF Northolt was easy. Waiting for Jack and everybody else to get there was the hard part. She watched as a great big Chinook was moved out onto the tarmac, and then someone drove a big Land Rover right up into the back of the thing. She noticed that the Land Rover had a weird thing like a web belt on a couple of straps up on top of it, and a couple more belt-and-straps things on the back of it. She wondered what the heck those were for.
She stayed silvery and flew into the back of the Chinook before they closed it up. Then she just hid underneath the Land Rover and waited a bit more.
The big side door slid open. Mike and a stiff sergeant type tromped in. Then Ron and Harry, both of them kitted out like when they had been on Petrie’s Island. Then Action Girl leapt onboard. Then Captain McGinnis, Riley, Jack, and Brigadier Brathwaite-Thomson. Luckily, one of these big, long Chinook helicopters could hold a lot more than a dozen troops when there was already a Land Rover shoved in the back third of the thing.
Alex just stayed up under the Land Rover, even if she puddled forward until she was just behind the front bumper. It sounded like all the introductions had already been done before they hopped in. Fortunately, she knew everyone except the guy that Mike referred to as Sergeant-Major Moody. And Moody looked like he had the right to be moody. He had a big scar on the left side of his nose, and he had another nasty scar down his forehead through his right eyebrow that looked like it nearly took out his eye.
Brigadier Brathwaite-Thomson cleared his throat uncomfortably. “What I am about to tell you is classified. Thanks to that Fleming rotter, everyone knows there are Double Ohs out there, although most people these days seem to think it was some silly Cold War idea we’ve long abandoned. What is not known outside a very select few is that ever since the early Sixties, we’ve had to maintain a small, specialized force which would be prepared for anything it might run into, no matter how peculiar. I cannot discuss who has served in this force, or what it has run into.”
Jack smoothly interrupted, “But Harry’s on that force right now. As is Sergeant-Major Moody.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny, Jack. Sorry.” The brigadier went on, “Ten years ago, that team got sent out to the middle of Winshire County, to a small town named Midwich. The entire village had gone silent.
“The team found that the village had been isolated, with lorries blocking each of the roads into town, and road signs indicating there was an accident and anyone reading the sign would need to turn around and take an alternate route. When the team got into the town, they found unconscious people everywhere. In their houses and shops, on the streets, everywhere. Some sort of sedative gas had been released throughout the town, and everyone had been sedated for somewhere between fifteen and twenty hours. There was no trace of the perpetrators, and we never did find out who it was, or how they got in and out of the town, or even possibly in and out of the country.
“But the sedation gave us an excuse to give the entire town medical exams. Most of the village had simply been unconscious for fifteen hours. However … every woman in the village who was of child-bearing age and had not had a hysterectomy had small puncture wounds over her abdomen. Within weeks, it was clear that all but a couple of them were pregnant, including several who had thought themselves barren. We made it clear that they had been treated like cattle and we had no idea who had impregnated them or with what, but the women — especially the women who didn’t think they could become pregnant — wanted to keep their children. Only three women opted for abortions. It didn’t occur to the doctors at the scene that the women might have been persuaded, perhaps with hypnosis or subliminal messages or something else. This unfortunately led to some cases of domestic violence and a few divorces.
“But forty weeks after the incident, every one of the pregnant women gave birth to a single child, all within a span of about a hundred hours. That gave us the opportunity to slip a helpful doctor and midwife ‘from a neighboring town’ into the mix and get some blood samples and such. Every one of the children was … not like their parents. Every one of them had golden irises and pale skin that was almost silvery. There were thirty-one boys and thirty girls. And we’ve kept an eye on the town, even though we’re not welcome. We’re certain the ‘children’ have a gestalt intelligence, and we’re pretty certain there is a hive mind for the boys and a separate hive mind for the girls. And they have aged faster than normal humans: they’re all nine, and they look about sixteen. In fact, they look a great deal like Action Girl, except for the eyes and skin color. Thanks to Ms. Granger, we also now know they share some non-human DNA with the DNA of Action Girl that the Germans recovered last year.”
Jack complained, “Great. It’s another present from Wacky Maggie. What can they do? Superstrength? Telekinesis? Laser beams out of their eyeballs?”
The brigadier confessed, “Psychic powers. Telepathy, mental domination, and a lesser telekinetic power that appears to be mainly defensive.”
Jack groused, “Great.”
“Quite. And, as far as we know, there is no defense against their psychic abilities. Bernard Westcott has been passing on information to us, although we believe the children have made him do so several times to give us disinformation, and have stopped him several times. But from him, and from some spy cameras we managed to plant years ago, we know that the children have defended themselves. More than once. A few years ago, one of the townsmen nearly ran over two of the children. A group of the children stared at him, and he got in his car and drove into a wall, killing himself. Not long ago, a bull got loose and chased several of the children; afterward, it walked into a pond and drowned. And just a couple of days ago, some of the townsmen attempted to burn down the Midwich Grange, where the children now all live and are schooled; the mob turned on itself and the men all attacked each other. We cannot fly planes over the town, because the children can attack anyone they can see, and we have lost every plane we flew over due to ‘pilot error’. The pilots simply returned to their bases and dived their planes into the ground. Fortunately, none of them have carried anything more dangerous than a partial tank of jet fuel.
“Gordon Zellaby, who is an older man who used to be an academic, has been teaching the children since they were little, and he has been trying to instill ethics and morals. He told Bernard that he was going to have to deal with the children in the only way left, since only he could get close enough to the children to do what needed to be done. As soon as Bernard informed us of that decision, we moved a Fast Reaction Force into the area. A few hours ago, there was an explosion in the Grange, and the Force moved in at once. Within a couple of minutes we lost all contact with them, and we have not been able to contact anyone in the town since then. We have to assume that some or all of the children survived, and took immediate steps to defend themselves.”
Jack scowled and briefly glanced at Riley. “Okay, since it’s ‘talking out of school’ day, let me warn everyone. Mental domination is nasty. The only defense we’ve found is constantly reminding yourself of your official guidelines, and checking to see if you’re doing anything you should not be doing. We found this out in Myrhorod. The hard way. If we hadn’t outnumbered our supervillain and maintained a cohesive force, he would have picked us off one at a time, like he did to everyone else in what the Ukrainians called …” He glanced over at Riley.
Riley supplied, “The best translation would be ‘the interdicted zone’. If we hadn’t succeeded, the Russians were prepared to drop a ballistic nuke on the town to solve the problem. You may need to consider something like that, although hopefully smaller and with fewer consequences.”
The brigadier nodded unhappily. “That’s just what we’ve decided. We will land six miles outside of town, just on the far side of a hill so the children cannot see the helo and target it. We’ll take the Land Rover in and move to the Grange as a single squadron. We ascertain how many of the children are still threats, and we move to neutralize those threats. We protect townspeople as much as possible, but this is urban warfare against terrorist threats. Suppressing the threat is more important than rescuing the civilians.” He asked, “Any comments?”
Riley said, “Sir, we have to consider that any members of that Fast Reaction Force who are still alive and conscious may be used as weapons against us. The same goes for any civilians. And, given what you just told us, the same goes for any animals we run into. Mental domination gives you a great many potential weapons, if you’re ruthless enough and creative enough.”
Wow, like this op wasn’t creepy enough already.
* * *
The helicopter landed in a little meadow just behind a hill, with a road only about two hundred feet off to the side. The back of the Chinook opened up, and Captain McGinnis slid into the Land Rover to back it out. Alex stayed under the Land Rover until it was halfway down the ramp, and then she slid out on the side away from the driver, which was the wrong side as far as she was concerned. Why did different countries have to have steering wheels on different sides of the car?
She dashed to the side and back behind the Chinook until she could duck into a little grove of trees, and then she flew about half a mile away, keeping the grove between her and the copter. When she figured everyone except the pilots had gotten out, she went about a hundred feet straight up and flew back toward the meadow like she was coming from somewhere far away.
She went normal and turned so she was vertical. Then she came in at an angle with one leg lifted a little, and she just stepped forward as she landed. She’d been practicing in front of a mirror, so she knew it looked cooler that way. She floated a couple of inches above the grass and just pretended to stride forward. “Brigadier? I believe you requested my assistance?”