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Chapter 166 – If It Happened To YouAlex wrote down what Mr. Hooper was putting on the whiteboard. Whiteboards had that stinky chemical smell from the markers, but at least they didn’t have that awful chalkboard skritch when people didn’t know how to write with chalk.
Her tPhone buzzed in her overalls. She concentrated and let it buzz. Willow had messed with her phone so it had a phonecall buzz, a text buzz, an email buzz, a data download buzz, and this: an SRI buzz that was in Morse code. At least this time it wasn’t an SOS buzz, which would mean another Code Terawatt. And it wasn’t an FYI buzz that she could ignore until she felt like it. This was an L8R buzz that meant she needed to call back later. And the signoff letter wasn’t J for Jack, or R for Riley, or G for Graham or B for Bill Lee, or H for Hanna or K for Klar. It was W for Willow, so now she knew without looking that Willow had sent it, and wanted her to call back later, but it wasn’t an emergency.
Mr. Hooper wrapped up the day’s lecture with some comments on LeChatelier’s principle, which Alex was sure was totally going to be on Friday’s quiz, and would probably come up in the Wednesday lab or next Wednesday’s lab. She glanced over at Wade like ‘look what is coming soon’, and he gave her a quick nod that he agreed.
She made a mental note that she was going to make sure she had one of the best lab partners in every class she ever took that had labs with partners. That would probably be a massive help in college classes, even at Corcoran.
She drove home and flew up to her room before calling Willow. But Willow was on the East Coast, and Alex was calling in the middle of Willow’s dinner which was at Jack’s house with Jack and Charlie. Oops.
An hour later, Willow called back. “Alex, I’m really sorry, but I’m trying to be a good step-mom even if we’re still at the find-the-rabbi-for-the-wedding stage of things.”
Alex insisted, “It’s my fault. I totally forgot you were all East Coast-y now.”
Willow told her, “And Jack keeps making all these really naughty ‘Willow is bi-coastal’ cracks when we’re somewhere I can’t do anything about it.”
Alex rolled her eyes. “I am so totally shocked to hear that.”
Willow giggled, then said, “So anyway, the thing I called you about is the silvery morph deal. I was having a conference call with Sam Carter, who’s back at NASA but preparing to move to the Team Two base. And we were brainstorming about whether you could pick something up from pulling, say, a t-virus victim or a hate plague victim into your morph. And Sam is so totally of the brilliance! And she’s so pretty, too. I don’t get why there isn’t a line of guys that would go all the way around the Pentagon trying to date her. If I wasn’t with Jack and she wasn’t of the strictly het, I would so tap that.”
Alex reminded her, “There weren’t that many guys who wanted to date you, and you’re gorgeous, too. I think it’s this weird guy thing that smart girls intimidate ’em in a way they don’t know how to deal. And powerful girls — and no, I don’t mean like Az — freak ’em out, too. Lots and lots of guys need to be the macho guy who’s stronger and smarter and tougher and makes more money and is more important and all that stuff. Women like you and Sam and Jo Lupo are just kind of too scary to deal with.”
Willow complained, “So we’re just supposed to act stupid and pathetic to get a guy? Who would do that?” Then she paused and added, “Oh, yeah. Tons of us. Like Buffy. And Libby. Ugh.”
Alex pointed out, “And you should see the difference between Donna running the cheer squad like an extra-bossy CEO, and Donna being all flirty and helpless around her boyfriend. We just need to keep looking for good boyfriends for Jo and Sam and some of these other women.”
Willow agreed, “Yeah. And Janet! Guys don’t want to date military, and they don’t want to date someone who’s going to be bossy, like a doctor who’s a Chief Medical Officer, and they sure don’t want to date a mom. Hanna has no idea Janet pretty much put her social life on hold for years when she committed to raising a teenager.”
“Ooh. Right.” Alex was so totally glad she had her mom and dad, because raising Shar without them would be a huge headache. And not being able to go out on a real date with Ray for the next seven years unless she hired a babysitter first? That would be mega-cruddy.
Willow segued, “So while we’re talking about getting up close and personal —”
“No sex talk!” Alex squeaked.
“— Sam and I were talking about your morph. And you’ve never once gotten sick from pulling someone into your morph, right?”
Alex agreed, “Right. But I never pulled in a t-virus zombie or a hate plague victim.”
Willow said, “But you should’ve at least gotten someone else’s blood antigens and gotten sick from that, like you got a transfusion of the wrong type blood. And that never happens. Sam and I talked about it. You’re probably putting some sort of telekinetic partition in between you and whoever you’re hauling around.”
Alex hedged, “Okay, maybe, but I don’t really wanna bet my life on that.”
Willow exclaimed, “We thought of that, too! Sam had a thought experiment we talked over, and I had the idea. We pour a bottle of tequila in an NBC bag, seal it shut, and let you carry it around for an hour. Then we’ll check your BAL.”
“What?”
“Blood alcohol level,” Willow explained like it was obvious.
Alex complained, “Mom and Dad’ll kill me! I can’t do that!”
Willow kept going. “And then we’ll check and see if you get a hangover from the congeners.”
“Wow, that sounds even less fun.”
Willow just added, “And we’ll do it out here and maybe we won’t tell anyone.”
Alex groaned. “I don’t like lying to mom and dad. And Shar will pick it out of my head, unless she picks it out of your head first, and then I’ll be totally in trouble. And I’ll be setting a bad example for her.”
Willow said, “Sam suggested a dose of radioactive iodine instead, but I think that’s more likely to have an unexpected side effect.”
“Eww. Can’t we try it with, say, a couple quarts of distilled water?”
Willow pointed out, “Detecting an extra couple parts per trillion of pure H2O in your blood might be pretty much impossible without some pretty hefty quantitative chemistry work and probably a bunch of before and after samples.”
Alex tried again. “How about Diet Coke? You can check for the artificial sweetener. I could just carry a couple two-liter bottles around in my morph for an hour.”
Willow thought it over. “Good idea! That would probably work. Let me ask Bill Lee if he’s got a better suggestion.”
Alex figured anything would be better than a bottle of tequila. She’d never be able to explain that one to her mom. And how would she explain it was Willow’s idea? That would get Willow in all kinds of trouble.
* * *
And then on Tuesday, Alex got to school and Louis showed her the new Time magazine. There was another huge article by Joe Frady, who was still trading on his ‘I am an Orphan and I know more about Orphans than anyone else’ deal.
This time the front page title and his article’s title were both ‘The Evil Empire’. For someone who was supposed to be Mister Well-Informed, he didn’t even know they were called The Collective, and they were split in blocs, and Maggie Walsh was important in the main bloc.
Or maybe he did know but he wasn’t saying so, because he was The Collective’s new mouthpiece, and sooner or later he’d try and tank Terawatt. Or maybe Jack and Willow.
On the upside, Frady pointed the finger at the American Orphans he’d already ID’ed in his previous big articles, plus a couple more the SRI already knew about, like Julia Harrison who had apparently changed her last name and vanished, and the IT guys hadn’t tracked her down yet. And then he really hit on the internationals. He fingered Khan N. Singh and about two dozen of Singh’s minions who were also Orphans. He also pointed at nine other Asians who were part of Jack’s ‘these guys are probably Orphans’ lists that Willow and Jack’s IT people and some other DHS and State Department and CIA experts had put together: he named two Russians, three Chinese, two Japanese, one guy in the Philippines, and one woman in Hong Kong. One of the Russians was some uber-brainy academic named Karenin who Willow said wrote awesome papers and was going to be like the next Nietzsche if no one intervened. Then Frady tagged about a dozen Europeans, including both Ashfords, and a couple of Australians, too. And he called the badguys The Evil Empire or else just ‘the Empire’ so often Alex wondered if he was going to try and trademark the name or something.
On the downside, he outed Jill Valentine, which really only helped Frady himself, and maybe The Collective. It sure wasn’t going to help Jill’s work with the Iowa people.
During second period, while she was studying in the school library, her tPhone buzzed in the ‘L8R J’ code that meant Jack wanted her to call later. She peeked at the text he’d sent. Jack wanted a conference call in the middle of her lunch hour. Okay, that was manageable.
She had gotten in the habit of parking far enough out that her car wasn’t in danger of getting dinged or smacked by any of the really bad drivers of the school. That also put her car out where she could change into Terawatt if she needed to, not that she needed to during school hours on a regular basis or anything. But it was far enough out in the parking lots to provide some privacy. So she just asked Ray to eat lunch with her in her car so she could have a cover story. He was good with that, because he was a great boyfriend.
So Ray got a couple of sandwiches and pieces of fruit in the cafeteria line, and they took their lunches out to Alex’s car. She managed to get all of her lunch finished before it was time to call in.
“Terawatt, calling in.” She had her earjack in, so Ray was only going to hear her end of the call.
He still whispered, “It’s so weird hearing her voice coming out of your mouth.”
Meanwhile, Jack was teasing her because she was the last one on the call. Team One, Team Two, Willow, the IT guys that Jack was still calling the Pep Boys, Riley, and Jill Valentine were all on already. Jill was back in Iowa meeting with CDC and National Guard people on Jack’s behalf. Riley was still in the Congo with his Sam.
She lied, “Well, I could have gotten on two minutes earlier, and then you could have listened to me chew my food for a while.”
“Mmm, apples and celery no doubt.” Then Jack got down to business. “This is just a quick FYI. Since that dork Joe Frady is calling our little friends The Empire, I want us to be using that phrase instead of The Collective. That’ll help mask our real level of intel, and make it sound like we’re getting our information second-hand or maybe third-hand. Or we’re watching too much Star Wars. If we can convince even one of these blocs that we’re grubbing our intel from reading old Time magazines, it may help at some point. Having the India bloc underestimating me helped a lot more than I expected. And we’re not spreading this around, but at least five of the Orphans who Frady identified died on the Congo op. The leader of India Team Two and his science officer, and also Kelly, Homolka, and Ross of the primary bloc’s Team Two. I didn’t get a chance to look at the corpses of their Team One people, so there may have been even more Orphans on Frady’s list who went to The Big Gene Splicer In The Sky.”
Alex asked in her Terawatt voice, “Do we know how Frady’s getting all his intel?”
Jack said in a smirky voice, “Nope! But we do have a bunch of DHS types running around pissing themselves because he has intel they don’t, and they don’t know where he’s getting it.”
Alex thought it was pretty obvious. “Someone’s telling him.”
Jack said, “In the immortal words of Homer Simpson, ‘D’oh!’ Frady’s acting like he’s digging it all up through great reporting skills, but he’s got someone feeding him this stuff.”
Riley asked, “Is he aware he’s being used by one of the blocs?”
Jack groused, “I figure he knows because he’s shilling for them. Or else he just doesn’t care, because he’s using them just as much. And we’re not intervening, because if it’s Guess Number One, he’ll shaft us for The Evil Empire, and if it’s Guess Number Two, he’ll still shaft us. A guy like that would gladly step on the corpses of every Orphan in the SRI to get to where he wants.”
“Which is probably a Pulitzer or two and a permanent job as Time magazine’s most important reporter,” Willow tossed in.
“And tons of attention, plus money and babes, unless I miss my guess,” Jack added.
Alex had seen pictures of Joe Frady, so she was figuring he was already knee-deep in babes, because he was Orphan-level handsome and probably Orphan-level aggressive. He probably made Lord Rupert Giles look like a librarian.
Jack then asked, “Okay, thoughts on who in The Empire is giving him the big scoops.”
Willow said, “We can rule out the India bloc. He pointed out a ton of stuff they don’t want pointed at.”
Jill added, “And subtlety doesn’t seem to be one of their strong points.”
Riley pointed out, “Sir, most of the Europe Orphans who Frady ID’ed were already known, like the Ashfords, or else just died, like Homolka. Granted, the only people who are going to know that last part are people who have the clearance to read your after-action report … and Walsh’s bloc. So my best guess is that the primary bloc has someone feeding Frady information.”
Jack replied, “And we’d like to know who that is. Big Cheese told me that a certain agency who can legally perform surveillance within the U.S. is sniffing around Frady, trying to find out who that leak might be.”
Jo suggested, “Sir, just playing devil’s advocate here, but we know we didn’t get every one of the America bloc. He didn’t reveal any ‘new’ Americans except two Orphans the DHS already knows about. So maybe it could be someone in what’s left of the America bloc, trying to sabotage the other blocs.”
Jack replied, “Good one, Lupo. Keep thinking those twisty, conniving, scheming thoughts, and you too can be a general one day.”
Alex had to bite the inside of her mouth to keep from giggling. Jack was so naughty! Did other generals know he talked like this about being a general?
* * *
Alex was expecting she was done with Terawatt stuff for the day, but on her way home from school, she got a phone call she couldn’t answer because she was driving. And then right away, her phone buzzed in one of the secret codes: SOS W. Oh, crud.
She pulled over and parked, then called back. She even made sure she was using her Terawatt voice. “Burn, it’s Tera. What’s the crisis?”
Willow’s worry came through the AutoTune. “There’s a hostage crisis at a bank in Salinas! I know they have police and SWAT and stuff, but there’s a lot of crooks, and they already shot one hostage, and they’re going to shoot another one every hour until the police give them what they want, and you only have forty-five minutes until the next shooting!”
Alex pointed out, “There aren’t any direct roads to get over there, and —”
“And you’re Terawatt! You don’t need a road, I can program in a GPS heading to the bank, and it’s like forty-six miles from your current position, so you can make that in half an hour!”
She could do it in less than that, since she’d practiced her flying shapes so much in Davenport. “I think I can do forty-six miles in twenty-three minutes. But I need five more minutes to get home first. Maybe ten, if I hit all the lights wrong.”
Willow pushed, “Okay, great, I’ll have a compass heading and a GPS heading ready, and I’ll make Jack call the Salinas police force and tell them they’re about to get ‘paranormal assistance’ so they don’t have to do anything crazy before the deadline and they just have to give us the details on the badguys and the bank.”
Alex flipped the phone to speakerphone and got back on the road, pushing it as much as she dared when she absolutely could not get stopped for speeding or anything.
Oh, crud, the traffic light up ahead was already green, and it was a long light going the other way, and there was no way she could make it.
The light just stayed green. And stayed green even longer. What?
She drove through the intersection and asked, “Burn? Did you do something I need to know about?”
“Umm … Maybe? Your traffic light grid’s set up for remote control during emergencies or when the mayor’s in a hurry or whatever, so I figured it would be okay to help superheroines get to critical crime scenes …”
So Alex felt really guilty when she made all the lights on the way home. She pulled into the driveway in only three minutes, which never happened.
She dashed into the house with her backpack and her gym bag, flew up to her room, and dropped off her backpack before she flew into her gym bag and changed into Terawatt. She flew down through the garage into the stormwater runoff system, and she went straight up as soon as she got to the big creek. “Okay, which way now?”
But Willow already had a compass heading ready on the tPhone, so Alex jetted off toward Salinas at about five thousand feet above the ground. She just stayed in her fish shape and only popped her tPhone out of her morph a couple of times to make sure she was still on the right heading.
It didn’t take that long to get to the outskirts of Salinas, and the GPS heading pointed her right at the bank. She waited until she was about five thousand feet directly over the building the bank was in. “Burn? I’m here. Situation report, please.”
“Wow, that was pretty fast. You have fifteen and a half minutes if the badguys are sticking to their schedule. The police think there are six to eight crooks, twenty-four bank employees including the business payroll and loan groups upstairs, and maybe fifteen or twenty bank customers. They don’t know where the badguys are holed up or anything, because the crooks were smart enough to take out the remote feed from all the security cameras except one in the lobby where they go to talk to the police so they’re not out in the open and shootable. Salinas SWAT says they could really use your help pronto.”
Alex frowned. “Gotcha. I guess I’m gonna have to search the whole bank area. What do they have?”
“Big fancy lobby area with a line for up to six tellers. Behind the line area, four desks for bank officers to meet with customers. Four tiny offices on one side for higher-ranking bank people. On the back side of those offices, they’ve got four or five drive-up tellers behind bulletproof glass, and the police say everyone’s been herded out of the drive-up teller area but the security cameras they can see there are still active so they can’t make an assault through there without alerting the badguys. A secure area on the other side of the teller area where they’ve got a big vault and a lot of customer safety deposit boxes. A big stairway or elevator behind the lobby to go up to the payroll and loan offices for their whole city-wide chain. And there’s supposed to be four or five security guards, including one manning a room where they have the security monitors, but SWAT thinks at least one of those guys is probably working for the badguys.”
“Oh, crud.”
Willow added, “And I called someone to take care of picking up someone else who you’d normally be going to pick up pretty soon, so that’s all set.”
“Crud.” Her mom was probably not going to be thrilled about that. She said, “Going in. Give SWAT a heads-up. I’ll call back later.”
She dived down to the roof and found the HVAC unit for the bottom four floors of the building. It was a really good thing someone had big signs posted on all the units for the repair guys. Then she dived in and flew down to the bank’s ductwork.
The ducts were pretty small. Nobody but her and rats could get through these things. Well, Danielle could, but Alex decided she was going to lump Danielle in with the rats.
Not that rats or anything had been through the ducts, because there was dust and mold on everything, and spiderwebs and other yuck. These things were just really blech.
Okay. It looked like everyone was herded into the middle of the loan area. There were four crooks with pump-action shotguns standing there threatening some really scared people. She zoomed through more ducts and found three crooks with semi-automatic rifles behind heavy desks overturned in the lobby, getting ready to shoot any police who came crashing in. There were two more crooks working with power tools in the vault, cutting into people’s safety deposit boxes. And there were two more crooks in the security camera monitoring room. Three security guards were tied up and gagged and dumped on the floor, and one guard was sitting at the monitors pointing out stuff to the crooks.
Great. Tons of crooks, and a crooked security guard. She needed to take these creeps with the monitors out first, so they wouldn’t see what she did in the rest of the bank. Then she could free the guards and let them guard the badguys. The hostages in the loan section would need to be saved next. Then the creeps in the lobby would go down, and the guys in the vault could wait until last, because they wouldn’t hear anything going on in the rest of the bank.
The guard at the monitors murmured, “You promised no one would get hurt.”
The crook wearing the plastic Richard Nixon mask snarled, “Shut up, prick. Or your wife and kids’ll have more holes in ’em than that fuckin’ bank manager.”
Oh, crud! He wasn’t a crooked security guard, he was another victim! How was she supposed to save the day and save the guy’s family, too? And what would have happened to his family if she’d just barged in and clobbered everyone she thought was a crook? She felt sick to her stomach, even if she was a silvery blob and she didn’t really have a stomach at the moment.
She darted through the ducts to another vent into the monitoring room, so she could see the guy’s uniform shirt. His last name was Waldhern. Okay, that might be enough information, given who she had on her side.
She looked at a wall clock. She only had thirteen minutes before the crooks grabbed someone else and shot them. Assuming the clock was right. Or the badguys didn’t jump the gun.
She darted back through the ducts to another floor of the building, and she flew into an empty office. She went normal and checked the time as she called Willow. “Tera here. We have a problem. Eleven crooks, and they have the family of a security guard named Waldhern.”
“Uh-oh.”
Alex asked, “Can you find where he lives and call his house and see if his family’s even there?”
Acid Burn said, “Well, we might have already pulled up lists of bank employees and former employees and security guards for the bank, even if those are supposed to be behind a firewall. Waldhern, Robert Keith … Ooh, this isn’t good … Home address has changed in the last two years, but next of kin is listed as Alicia Waldhern at the old address. Insurance still covers her and two kids. I think we’re looking at a divorced dad. Hang on …”
Alex hung on. She heard a ringing phone, and then a really nervous female voice, “H-hello? Robert?”
Willow went with her perkiest voice ever. “Hi! This is Kathy, with Wonder Cruise Vacations, and we’d like to offer you a five-days six-nights cruise in the beautiful —”
An angry male voice snapped, “Fuck off, bitch!” The phone line went dead.
Willow unhappily said, “I think we know where the badguys have Robert’s fam. I’ve got the address, so I’m giving you a GPS heading. It’s about ten miles away. Even at your speed, getting there and back in time is gonna be cutting it close before those creeps shoot someone else.”
Alex scowled and thought it over for a second. “Call the police and give them a full FYI. I’m taking out the bank robbers here and then heading over there.”
Willow winced. “Okay, if you say so. I’ll have the GPS and compass headings and the street addy and everything else I can think of. Good luck.”
Alex went silvery again and darted into the ducts. She headed straight for the monitoring room.
A fast blast of lightning, and those crooks were down. She flew into the room and used her TK to untie the other guards. She ordered, “Mister Waldhern, I’m stopping these crooks and then flying to your old house to save your family. Whatever you do, don’t call that number. It will put your family at risk.”
Then she flew down the hall. As she zoomed past, she hit the guys in the bank vault with another blast of lightning, dropping them instantly. She darted at ceiling level through the lobby area and used her TK to pinch all those crooks’ carotids closed before they realized something was going on. They keeled over in seconds. She went silvery and dived under the door into the loan area. She came up behind the badguys and hit all of them with lightning bolts before they even knew she was there.
She announced, “We have another hostage crisis. Robert Waldhern’s family. If all of you could just stay put for six minutes, we can save them, too. If any of you run out of the bank or make a phone call or anything, the crooks holding his family hostage might see it on live TV and kill them at once. So please, just stay here for six minutes. That’s all it will take.”
She flew out of the room and went silvery to dive into another vent. Then she flew up to the HVAC system on the roof, and she headed straight up a couple thousand feet before checking her tPhone. She headed off in the direction Willow had programmed into the phone, pushing as fast as she could.
It took very nearly five minutes just to get to the house. It was half of a small duplex, and Alex immediately wondered if she needed to take out both halves of the duplex. She dived down to the roof and puddled down the outside wall before sliding under the Waldherns’ back door.
There was a very frightened woman sitting in the middle of a worn couch with two very frightened children huddled against her. A nasty-looking fat guy was standing over by the phone, while a creepy guy was sitting in the kitchen drinking a beer and watching a tiny TV. Both of them had shotguns, but both of them had the guns pointed at the floor and a tang safety and their fingers way away from the trigger guard. Who knew badguys learned gun safety, too?
She grabbed both badguys by the carotids and ripped the guns out of their hands just in case. They both keeled over as she went normal and flew into the living room. “I’m Terawatt. You’re safe now, and I already rescued Mister Waldhern. Run over to the closest neighbor you can trust.”
The woman whimpered and pointed at the fat guy, “Him! Dick Kerricksen. He lives in the other half of our duplex, and there’s more of ’em over there now.”
Alex carefully said, “I was worried about that. Give me thirty seconds, and then run for a trustworthy neighbor. The police will be here in minutes.”
The little girl looked up from where she was clinging to her mom’s side. “Wow. Terawatt! I wanna be like you when I grow up!”
The little boy nodded. “Me, too!”
The mom smiled unevenly. “I can’t thank you enough.”
Alex said, “Just take care of your family. Your ex-husband is going to need a lot of support, too.”
She went silvery and dived under the door into the garage. It was a shared garage. The Waldherns’ half had an old mom car with scratches and dings on the sides. The other half had three expensive motorcycles that looked practically new. Alex figured there was a message there.
She dived under the door into the other half of the duplex, and came up in the kitchen, where a bleached blonde in just her undies was smoking a cigarette and frying up some hamburgers. With her over-teased hair and her bad makeup, she looked like she was trying to be the poster child for white trash criminals. Alex zapped her and made sure the cigarette and the frying pan didn’t burn the woman.
She found two more armed guys on a couch watching TV coverage of the bank robbery. She zapped them before checking the rest of the duplex. No one else.
She called Willow. “Burn, it’s Tera. Five perps on both sides of the Waldherns’ duplex. All five unconscious, but we need police presence ASAP.”
“Already on their way, traveling without sirens.”
Alex said, “Sounds good. Tell the police I’m leaving the front doors open.”
“Roger that.”
Alex glared at the three unconscious crooks. She was figuring that the crooks would have murdered Robert Waldhern’s family and him, too, just to keep from being identified. Jerkheads.
She flew off over the street. Mrs. Waldhern and her kids were waving excitedly at her. She waved back and took off for home.
She even got back soon enough to pick Shar up at Boys and Girls Club. And her mom didn’t say anything about Alex not getting dinner in the oven when she got home from school. And Shar hardly complained at all about not getting to go fight crime with Alex.
* * *
On Thursday, Alex found out that the late-night talk show hosts had all been doing ‘Evil Empire’ jokes. David Letterman had done the Top Ten ‘Signs Your Group Will Be Called The Evil Empire’ and for every number they used a tie-fighter noise. Louis had a YouTube video of it bookmarked for her. Jay Leno had an old clip of Maggie Walsh talking at a conference, and they dubbed in a Darth Vader voice saying ‘I find your lack of faith in genetics disturbing.’ Jimmy Kimmel had an ‘Orphan or celebrity’ bit that ended with Matt Damon pretending to be really mad that no one thought he could be an Orphan. And there was lots of internet humor about the Empire, too. Some of the stuff was really funny.
There was one internet sketch Louis found that was making fun of the Collective, only it was called “The Empire of the Aunts” which Alex knew was a joke about the H.G. Wells story or else the movie that was supposed to be based on it but probably wasn’t. The skit had three old ladies knitting away in rocking chairs and ordering people around and making a mess of things because they were old and hard of hearing and forgetful. “What? What? Speak up, Maggie! What? Blow up a volcano? No, I didn’t sign off on that, I thought you said ‘brew up a mojito’! You need to stop mumbling!” “What? What?” “I said that girl needs to stop mumbling!” “I think she’s got a speech impediment, I can hardly understand a thing she says!” “Now which one of you told that silly girl that you loved dinosaurs? We’ve got a T. rex the size of Sheboygan walking through my dahlias!” “Oh, stop complaining, that dino poo is great for your rhododendrons!” “Which ones? The regular rhododendrons or the man-eating ones Maggie gave me for my birthday?”
Oh, and there was a text from Jack that he wanted Tera on a video conference call at six the next morning, so they could talk with Shaman. Well, at least it wouldn’t mess with her schedule and getting Shar off to school.
* * *
Alex spent almost two hours working on the ‘wall’ for Terawatt’s secret lair. Mainly that meant finding good photographs of file cabinets and bookshelves and chem lab equipment, and making sure they all were lit the same way, and printing the pictures off on her dad’s good printer, and then positioning everything just right on her blue background sheet so she had a fake wall to go behind her when she was being Terawatt on a video call, and it really looked right. And it all folded up neatly and went in her dresser when she wasn’t using it.
So the next morning, she was up before six and changed into Terawatt and ready in the home office with her TK holding her new ‘wall’ up behind her, and she dialed into the call about thirty seconds early, just so she wouldn’t be the one that Jack teased.
“Terawatt here. Anyone else on?”
But she could see screenshots. Jack and Graham and Action Girl and Sergeant Scott were already on in one window. And Riley was on in another window, and the background looked like he was calling from inside the sat-phone jeep at the Doctors Without Borders compound.
Jack smirked. “Tera, I love what you’ve done with the Tera-lair.”
Alex looked behind her and smiled. “What, this old thing? I just did a little redecorating.”
Jack told her, “Well, that feng shui is important in a secret lair. You wouldn’t want to have the trapdoor opening up over your bathtub or anything. Unless it’s a really big bathtub. Full of sharks. With frickin’ laser beams on their heads.”
A stiff British guy’s voice cut in. “Are you sure this is right?”
And Debbie Thornberry said in the standard teen exhausted-with-parents voice, “Honestly! No, like this.”
Suddenly, there was a new window on Alex’s screen, and it was the Thornberrys in their CommVee. Sir Nigel, and Lady Marianne, and Debbie, and a pretty redheaded teen with a big smile and no glasses and a lot more blinking than was really necessary. Unless you were just learning how to wear contacts. Alex had seen that over-blinking thing tons of times, including with Annie. A couple of the cheerleaders had gotten contacts just as soon as they needed corrective lenses so no one would ever see them wearing glasses, and then there were the goth girls who went for freaky lenses, and even a few girls like Cora who were into anime and wore those circle lenses so their eyes looked about twice as big as normal.
Oh, and just in case Alex wasn’t smart enough to figure out who the redheaded teen was, Darwin was sitting in Eliza’s lap looking really smug.
Sir Nigel smiled. “Middle of the afternoon. Dashed civilized time for a conference call. I was half-expecting we’d need to be on in the middle of the night.”
His wife rolled her eyes. “We’re not that far ahead of Washington.”
Debbie complained, “I still have to TiVo everything good except the British shows.”
Jack started off, “I want to make one thing clear. Shaman has no team who can back her up on an op. I am not going to consider Darwin as backup, after the after-action reports I read. So we are not going to give her assignments and throw her into the deep end of the pool. What we are going to do is give her the ability to alert us when one of you thinks there could be a Code Terawatt, so we can fly in and have her as part of a bigger team.”
“Good show.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“What…ever. I mean, I spent hours designing her uniform!”
Eliza grinned. “Colonel Finn got the dental surgeons at the compound to look over my teeth and take a couple of x-rays, and they took off my braces! And then he got me these amazing contact lenses!”
Marianne Thornberry smiled. “We really cannot thank you enough on that. Eliza has lost her glasses before when she was on her own, and she was in quite a pickle.”
Alex asked, “What did the SRI get her?”
Jack explained, “She’s a little young for LASIK, since her eyes will probably change some more in the next five or ten years. So we got her some extended-wear sports lenses. They’re harder to put in and they take a little more getting used to, but they don’t fall out and they don’t drift off under your eyelid.”
Marianne insisted, “And I looked them up on the internet. They have to be ordered for the shape and size of your cornea, and they cost an extravagant amount, so I want you to know we can buy the next sets.”
Jack staunchly replied, “Shaman is one of our people, too, and we take care of our people.”
Sir Nigel smiled. “So I noticed. That fold-up satellite phone the colonel gave Eliza is not exactly consumer electronics. I told her she needed not to lose it, because it’s undoubtedly military hardware.”
Riley said, “I had one of the doctors scan her eyes so we could get the right size of lenses, and we might have asked the company to make it a special order. Also, I checked her out with one of our earjacks, and also a compact taser for large predators who don’t want to listen, particularly if they’re humans.”
Jack added, “I had my bosses put in a special request to the United Nations, and we’re trying to get international deputization for Shaman as part of their new Superhero Support Initiative. Right now, the only countries speaking out against the SSI are North Korea, Pakistan, India, Somalia, and Uzbekistan. And we already knew why North Korea and India would be problems on this one. But I don’t want Shaman treating this as grounds for getting into as much trouble as she can.”
Debbie groused, “Like she doesn’t already do that!”
Marianne said, “With her braces off and her new contact lenses, Debbie gave her a makeover.”
Sir Nigel smiled. “She looks just like you, dear.”
“Just like I did over twenty years ago, you mean.”
Debbie announced, “So I gave her a Terawatt makeover. Out with the icky pigtails for Shaman, and off with the glasses, and now she’s at least wearing a decent sunscreen foundation for a change!” She held up a piece of paper with a badly-drawn Eliza pretty much the way she looked when Alex met her, except there was a big ‘S’ on her shirt and a tiny black mask like burglars in cartoons wore. “Can you imagine? This is her idea of a costume.” Debbie held up another picture. “Now this is my idea of a costume.”
Alex was impressed. That was pretty good artwork. And a pretty stylish outfit. Instead of Eliza’s clothes, the redhead in Debbie’s drawing was wearing a stylized, feminine version of the safari outfit Sir Nigel usually wore, down to the short pants.
“I gave the top some darts to make it look like she’s got more boobage, and it has a slight peplum to give her more hippage, and these lines on the safari jacket will make it look like she has more waist, so now she’ll have more of a Terawatt shape, even if she doesn’t have your curves. And she’s got a better hairstyle and with a little makeup and a Terawatt mask, she won’t look anything like my little sister.”
That was really smart. Alex added, “And that uniform has pockets for her sat phone and earjack and anything else she wants to carry along.”
Debbie announced, “And I’m making it right now!”
Marianne rolled her eyes. “What she means is I’m doing most of the work on it, while she criticizes my seamwork.”