Chapter 168 – A Passage to India

Willow admitted, “No, I still don’t speak it, but I can say ‘I do not speak your language’ and ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘help me’ in maybe sixty or seventy languages I don’t know. It just made sense to memorize a big chart I found. It also had ‘where is the restroom’ but I don’t think Zok needs to know that one right now.”

Alex just said, “Tell me that again.”

“Mujhe Hindi nahi malum.”

Alex tried, “Moo-zhe hindee na-hi mal-um.”

Willow said, “Not perfect, but good enough. Just say it to yourself a dozen times so you don’t lose it.”

Jack asked, “Can you tell me how to say ‘kiss my grits, Mel’ in Russian?”

Willow fussed, “You stop teasing that nice Captain Gates!” She paused and added, “Anyway, you’d have to use ‘grits’ as an English loan word, because I don’t think there’s a Russian word for hominy grits. And ‘Mel’ would just be ‘Mel’.”

Jack just kept being naughty. “Well, I know how to say ‘kiss my something’ so I guess I’m good.”

But Jack acting like that made her feel better. Like he wasn’t worried, and he knew she’d do fine.

Willow cut in on Jack’s silliness. “Uh-oh. Zok, there’s an area just north of the town center that’s got a lot of tourist hotels and stuff, and some people there are calling for help on their phones and the NSA just picked it up when some of them called home, and … oh crap, there are YouTube videos.”

Jack said, “Wow, I guess it’s Flamey the Wonder Ouchy 2: Electric Boogaloo.”

“Stop it!” Willow fussed. “There’s a woman firing off bursts of flame, and there’s a ton of people in soldier uniforms shooting at her, and they’re wrecking the whole place.”

“On it,” Alex said.

Jack warned her, “Those may look a lot like official Indian Army uniforms, but they’re not regulation. I can tell that just from Will’s YouTube videos. Those have to be Singh militia. Watch your back.”

“Gotcha.” Alex just kept going. It wasn’t like she hadn’t already figured out that some of the badguys were wearing those uniforms. The only new problem she could see was that people getting videos of the battle were going to see her taking down ‘soldiers’ and that would end up all over YouTube. That wouldn’t be good for her rep.

She flew over a hill and across a little lake, and saw the ‘tourist’ area for the first time. Wow, that was totally nicer than the places she’d already seen. Even if it was getting blown up and shot up and smashed up and burned up by a battle between a Fire Lady supervillain and, well, other villains.

Oh, crud. She wasn’t going to have to worry about looking bad when tourists filmed her fighting ‘soldiers’. There were no more soldiers left. Fire Lady was busy hovering over three tanks and turning them into molten metal. There were a couple of Armored Personnel Carriers that were blasted to pieces, and a couple of wrecked trucks, and maybe three dozen burned corpses that Alex could see. That probably meant there were a lot more dead bodies around but out of sight.

This was going to be like fighting Pyre. But grown up and able to fly, too. Great.

Fire Lady was dressed like a soldier, in a long-sleeved camo shirt and long pants and boots, but she also had some sort of turban-thing wrapped around her head so only her eyes showed. And there was a big corona of fire all around her.

Fire Lady faced Alex and angrily yelled something in a language Alex didn’t know, but it didn’t sound like the Hindi she’d been hearing.

“She’s yelling in Arabic, I think,” Willow guessed.

“Definitely Arabic,” Jack supplied. “Apparently, you’re the filthy enemy and your disgraceful uniform shows you are a whore of the Great Satan so you must die.”

Alex figured Jack had learned a ton of Arabic because of old Spec Ops stuff he wasn’t allowed to talk about that was probably anti-terrorist stuff she really didn’t want to know about.

Fire Lady thrust out one arm, and a blast of searing fire came at Alex. It wasn’t a ball of fire. It was like a huge beam of heat surrounded by flames.

Alex darted to the side, and Fire Lady tried to track her with the fire-beam. Alex retaliated with a TK punch to the face, but she couldn’t put her full force behind the punch when she also had to keep herself in the air.

Fire Lady reeled backward, but quickly recovered and her corona of fire got even bigger. Alex threw a bolt of lightning at her, but the energy just sort of fractured and dissipated when it hit Fire Lady’s huge corona.

Oh, crud. High temperatures disrupted electromagnetic fields. And apparently a big corona of fire was enough to disrupt her lightning blasts. She really hated it when science didn’t work in her favor.

Fire Lady laughed at Alex and tried to hit her with another huge beam of fire. Alex dodged to the side again, and gave Fire Lady a TK punch right in the nose, which didn’t knock her out but hurt enough that she lost her fire-beam.

And Alex knew what she was going to have to do. She started backing up like she was afraid. Fire Lady came right after her, like a big bully who couldn’t wait to pick on someone who wasn’t as big and strong.

Okay, that was exactly what Alex wanted, but she still didn’t like bullies.

Fire Lady followed after her, although Alex had to go slow enough not to outrun her and have it turn back into a ‘let’s shoot Alex with fire-beams’ fight. But as soon as Fire Lady followed her back over that little lake, Alex flew right at Fire Lady.

Fire Lady put up both hands and launched twin fire-beams at Alex’s torso.

Alex darted toward her foe and upward, which she hadn’t done before. Fire Lady’s arms went out to the sides, trying to catch Alex if she did the same old escape maneuver, but Alex wasn’t where she was expecting. And maybe Fire Lady had never had to fight a three-dimensional battle before. And Alex was going at her top speed, which was about a hundred eighty feet a second. So Alex was almost on top of Fire Lady before the terrorist had time to react.

The twin beams of fire moved back toward each other and upward, but Alex was already really close, and moving upward at a really steep angle. As she passed over Fire Lady’s head, she stopped abruptly and dived straight down, going silvery as she went.

Fire Lady tilted her head back to spot Alex, and got another TK punch in the face, just as Alex dived right down on top of her.

Alex used all her TK in a telekinetic wall going straight down on Fire Lady’s head. Along with all her TK force, she was falling with her full weight right into Fire Lady’s face. Fire Lady shrieked in surprise as Alex hammered her in the face and drove her straight down.

Alex didn’t scream. The heat inside Fire Lady’s corona was brutal. Like ‘Mark 77 in a spider cave’ hot. She just gritted her teeth that she didn’t really have while she was silvery, and she pushed down as hard as she could. They plummeted like a rock.

Like a pair of rocks, one of which really didn’t want to fall. They hit the surface of the lake with a huge burst of steam and an eruption of boiling water. Alex just pushed harder.

Fire Lady’s corona winked out amidst a cocoon of steam bubbles, and Alex pressed down until her head felt like it was going to split open. Fire Lady was trying frantically to fly back out of the water, but her fire powers seemed to be shot. She tried to blast Alex with her hands, but Alex was able to shove those arms aside with some spare TK. It probably didn’t matter, since fire wasn’t coming out of her hands anymore. Just enough energy to create huge bursts of steam around her palms.

Alex used some spare TK to grab Fire Lady by the carotids, and knock her out. Then she flew back up to the surface and over to the edge of the lake. Several dozen tourists who didn’t have enough sense to run away from a super-battle were standing there filming with their camcorders and phones. It didn’t seem to occur to those bozos that if Alex had lost, what would have come out of the water would have been very, very angry and not at all interested in being filmed.

Alex gave Fire Lady a high-voltage jolt to knock her out for a while, and arranged her so she was mostly in the water but her face was not. Alex knew it was dangerous to just leave the enemy like that, but she couldn’t bring herself to just kill an unconscious woman.

She went normal, and everyone, even the tourists filming her, applauded and cheered, like this was a sporting event. Not that she thought super-powered fights, maybe to the death, were ever going to be an Olympic sport.

Okay, she just really hoped that those Mixed Martial Arts guys didn’t try to arrange anything like this. That would be mega-dangerous.

“TE-RA-WATT! TE-RA-WATT! TE-RA-WATT!” Someone was getting the whole place to cheer for her. Man, that was totally embarrassing.

She arced a big spark between her hands and announced, “This woman is extremely dangerous, and this area is extremely dangerous! Please evacuate and move north toward Rajnagar, which should be safer!”

Crud, her hands were turning a sort of sunburned pink. She went silvery and dived back into the water, but now that the fight was over, she was starting to feel it. The burning feeling wasn’t bad yet, but she’d probably picked up a whole bunch of first degree burns.

Extra crud. Even under the water, she could feel the burning feeling, and it was all over the place. Her arms and legs and chest and even her face. She was probably going to look awful for days, right when people knew Terawatt had been fighting a fire-wielding supervillainess.

She gave up on the ‘keeping burns under cold water for a while’ thing and flew straight up. She just stayed silvery as she headed south toward more of the fighting.

She was really getting hungry, too. It was a good thing she had a bunch of energy bars and juice packs. And also …

Oh, crud. There was a huge silvery morph that looked like someone had crossed her morph with the Downingtown blob and added on a bunch of weapons from the last ‘Transformers’ movie. Seriously. It looked like her morph oozing slowly across an open area in front of a huge old temple, only a whole lot bigger. Maybe four times bigger in every direction, which would mean it might be sixty-four times heavier than her. And it was moving really slowly, because it had half a dozen heavy weapons sticking out of it. There were three Miniguns, two grenade launchers, and a big boxy thing around four tubes. She knew from stuff other-Sam Carter had shown her in other-Hermione’s dimension that the boxy thing was a system holding four individual anti-tank weapons.

Across the open area was a line of Singh militia guys firing at the glob with machine guns. And behind the militia were a dozen trucks in a row. A dozen trucks carrying nuclear missiles and facing away from the temple.

Crud. She couldn’t let the militia guys keep those nukes, but she absolutely couldn’t let a terrorist glob grab half a dozen nuclear missiles and puddle off to do really incredible badness with them. She swooped down toward the conflict.

The militia guys cracked out the RPGs and the glob instantly got serious. It opened fire on the militiamen with all three Miniguns. It was grim. The row of militiamen might as well have walked into a hundred machine guns. Or a dozen claymore mines.

The closest missile vehicle took a lot of damage, too. But the missile wasn’t going to go off from shooting up its truck. The glob didn’t seem to know that, and was trying to aim the Miniguns away from there.

Alex knew from reading the articles on that tablet that the missile wouldn’t go boom unless someone electronically gave it the right launch codes, someone else operated the truck properly so the missile could launch into the sky, and then it went through a full sub-orbital trajectory. If it took enough damage, all that would happen was it might become completely incapable of ever exploding, and also fissile materials could get spread all over the place, making a really nasty clean-up problem over a small area.

Still, there were half a dozen of the militia lurking around the corners of the trucks and shooting uselessly at Globbo. Meanwhile, Globbo didn’t seem to want to shoot anywhere near the trucks.

And Globbo apparently had her trick of being able to see in more than one direction at once, because two of the Miniguns suddenly swung around and pointed at her. Globbo opened fire with both.

She went silvery as she used the rest of her TK to push the bullets down so they missed her by a mile. Well, at least by forty feet. One Minigun ran out of ammo, so Globbo dumped it and stopped shooting with the other one, too. Then it switched to one of the grenade launchers.

Crud. She hated getting hit with grenade fragments.

And about a dozen horribly-mutated terrorists came up from behind her and took aim at her, too. Crud.

These guys all looked like Doctor Deemer’s dead assistant. They were hairy and caveman-ish and asymmetrical and had some weird, non-human facial features just to be extra-creepy.

Well, Fire Lady could have been due to anything, including GC-161. The man-spider could have been something else freaky. But this huge silvery morph guy totally had to be a GC-161 victim. And the mutated terrorists had to be from Deemer’s research work. So that officially made this another Maggie Walsh nightmare, along with extra-icky help from Danielle Atron. Mega-crud!

The mutated terrorists fired at her with AK’s and RPGs and a couple of slightly fancy things like those Strela-2’s that two of them had. She used her spare TK to shove everything they fired at her down and into Globbo. The Strelas wouldn’t fire if they couldn’t find a big heat source, at least according to Jack, and sure enough, they didn’t fire, much to the aggravation of their users.

The bullets from the AK’s didn’t do much to Globbo, but she managed to aim the RPGs right into him. They glooped into the silvery morph and then exploded pretty awesomely, hurling chunks of silvery goo all over the place.

She gasped in horror at the idea that she had just killed someone.

But Globbo wasn’t anywhere close to dead. He whirled around and opened fire on the other terrorists, and he was a lot better armed.

Alex took the opportunity to zoom over to the vehicle-mounted missiles. The vehicles couldn’t lift the missiles into launching position without hydraulics. The missiles couldn’t launch without rocket fuel. Without launch codes and both those things and a successful launch, the nuclear devices wouldn’t arm.

Perfect.

She flew down the row of vehicles, unhooking hydraulic couplings and letting hydraulic fluid spill all over the place. She would have poured out the rocket fuel, too, but she didn’t want a Gojira-sized explosion hazard around nuclear missiles and an important historical site.

Then she flew back. Every militia guy was still facing Globbo and his own terrorists, who he was still blowing up with his grenade launchers. She zapped every one of the militiamen while they were facing away from her. She fried every truck’s electrical system, too. After all, she didn’t want some terrorist stealing one of these trucks and then having time to fix the hydraulics so he could so mega-bad stuff somewhere.

“Zok to Zandor.”

“Zandor right here, Zok.”

“Just found a dozen vehicle-mounted missiles on my position. Hydraulics trashed and truck electrical fried, but fuel is still in ’em and nukes are still sitting there. Also, this is definitely a Collective plot. I’ve got Maggie threats and Danielle threats. Right now, I’ve got a glob that looks like the Downingtown blob met Danielle in silvery morph and they had a baby.”

“That sounds totally of the ugh.”

“Damn it! We absolutely have to find a way to get you more support!”

“It’s okay. But there’s a lake just north of the tourist hotel area north of town, and at its southern edge we’ve got another Code Walsh. She flies and fires super-hot beams and she has a fire corona that doesn’t bother her. It was like fighting a flying adult Pyre.”

“Are you okay?” Willow worried.

“Yeah. I’ve got some first-degree burns, but nothing major. And there’s a ton of burning buildings and wrecked buildings and injured people. We need the Indian Army and the Red Cross and a whole lot of aid workers.”

Jack complained, “We’re doing what we can, but the Singh family’s putting heavy political pressure on the army to stay out of one of their personal fiefdoms. Top Banana and friends got the subs secured and the jets grounded, and they’ve manually recovered all but about forty-two vehicle-mounted missiles.”

“Forty-two?” Alex checked.

Willow butted in, “No Douglas Adams jokes, okay? I already got barraged with ’em when someone saw that forty-two pop up.”

Alex admitted, “I didn’t even think of that.”

“Grasshopper, we must work on your quip-fu,” Jack intoned in a bad ‘old Chinese guy’ imitation that was probably supposed to be someone on a TV program.

“You are gonna be getting some something-fu if you don’t stop it,” Willow fussed.

Jack got back to business. “So the good news is they’ve manually taken the official silos off-line. If you got twelve trucks, that still leaves thirty possibles, and any experimental silo-based rockets they don’t want to admit they’ve got. And they still won’t let Acid Burn into their private milnet, even though we warned them they’ve probably got P$ychon4ut loose in there right now.”

“Okay, I’ve still got a glob to stop, thirty vehicles to trash, and maybe a bunch more Orphans and supervillains to smack.”

“Good luck, Zok. Give ’em that laser-beam butt.”

“Zandor, you are about to be sleeping under the living room in your septic tank if you don’t stop it.”

Alex made sure not to giggle. She landed so she had as much TK as she could, and she walked toward Globbo. He still had two grenade launchers and that four-missile box thing. He’d dumped everything else as soon as he ran them out of ammo.

He swung the grenade launchers her way. Automatic grenade launchers. Not good. She used her TK to yank all four of the missiles out of the box and shove two of them point-first into the barrels of the grenade launchers. Then she twisted the missiles in the barrels. She didn’t have enough TK to break stuff to pieces, but she did have enough to make Globbo think she could.

He hastily ditched the four-missile box and the grenade launchers, and he rushed her. As a big blob, that meant he puddled really fast at her. She let him get within about ten feet.

She leapt into the air and as he rolled under her, she hit him with a massive electrical charge. He flinched like a dropped water balloon and tried to puddle away from her.

Only now he was sort of limping, if puddles could have a limp. She hit him again, and he sagged, rolling off to one side and flattening out. She blasted him once more, and he stopped moving. He slowly dissipated until there was just a really fat, ugly naked guy surrounded with about three tons of white goo. Yuck!

She landed on a clean area and used her TK to drag the guy out of the goo so he didn’t smother. There was no way she could lift him. He looked like the world’s fattest terrorist. She wondered if the GC-161 had done that to him, too. But she could slide him across the slippery goo and dump him on a clean patch of dirt.

Once she was sure he was still breathing, she took off into the air. She still had more people to rescue. And thirty trucks to find and wreck.

*               *               *

Khan looked up from his study of the battle when one of the militia rushed in to hand a private message to Tran. He fumed, “Well?”

He didn’t want to be abrupt with Tran, but the battle was going badly. Very badly. He had expected to be able to handle the terrorists, but they had moved on his hidden positions as if they had inside information, which was probably a reasonable assumption. Then their super-powered threats had overwhelmed every one of his outer positions and were now threatening every one of his interior bulwarks. He had expected that no superheroes could arrive in time to interfere, but Terawatt had shown up — somehow — and had been humbling both sides ever since the early morning. He had assumed that Terawatt’s reputation was overblown, and he had been very annoyed to find out that, if anything, her abilities had been underestimated.

Tran tilted his head at the messenger, who ran out the door. That meant it was going to be bad news, and Tran didn’t want Khan to take it out on the militiaman.

Tran said, “We lost twelve of the missiles a couple of hours ago. We lost a second dozen only an hour and a half ago. The last six in Khajuraho have just been stolen when a team of the super-terrorists killed our forces and a dozen more terrorists drove the vehicles away.”

Khan cursed under his breath. They were slowly losing all their nuclear deterrents, too, and the last dozen vehicle-mounted missiles were within a hundred kilometers, so someone like Terawatt might be able to find them as well, given enough time. It was not to be tolerated. He checked, “Do we still have Plans Chah and Sat on the table?”

Tran bit his lip. That was a clear sign he knew that Khan would not like his answer. “No, Leader. Terawatt apparently disabled the former in a matter of seconds, and the terrorists have taken out our people we needed for the latter.”

“Then what do we have left?”

Karenin spoke up. “We can launch the nukes we still have under our control, before we lose every one of them.”

Lee ventured, “We have the crisis rocket ready for we Orphans. We can start a global nuclear battle, make an escape into High Earth Orbit, and remain there in cryo-sleep for the agreed-upon time interval until the radioactivity levels die down enough to make our return feasible.”

Khan clenched his jaws and refrained from upending the worthless table with his maps and deployments. “Very well. Do it at once. Recall our remaining people and start putting them in cryo. And do not refer to us as ‘Orphans’ in my presence ever again!” He turned to his computer lead. “Begin countdowns on all the nuclear missiles we still control. Once I notify you that the crisis rocket computers are passing all evaluations, you may join us on board.”

P$ychon4ut nodded. “Yes, leader.”

He turned to Karenin. “Marcus, are you sure about this?”

The man nodded ponderously. “Yes, leader. The primary bloc has anti-missile defenses we won’t be able to bypass, and they won’t be targeted by the retaliatory strikes of the nuclear nations. I need to infiltrate them and begin preparing for your glorious return far in the future.”

“So you’ll become a philosopher?”

Karenin smiled coldly. “I prefer the idea of a ‘sage’ providing expert advice to the masses. We have to teach them that knowledge and power, not love, are the essential vocation of humanity. They have to understand that there is no absolute limit to either knowledge or power as long as we are in charge.”

Khan slapped him on the shoulder. “Good man.” He turned to his other councilors. “Lee, you and I will be the last people placed into cryo, after we are certain the rocket’s flightpath doesn’t need adjustment. Marzakian, do we have everything onboard that we might need?”

His logistics expert nodded carefully. “Yes, and we have planted five supply caches that are in places with low probabilities of being targeted by any nuclear strikes. Everything we will need will be ready when we return.”

“Then start now.”

*               *               *

Alex was still looking for the last eighteen vehicle-mounted nukes. She had already found the second dozen over on the east side of the town, hidden among several temples that looked way too old and valuable to have battles for nuclear missiles going on around them. She had wrecked the truck engines and the electrical systems and the hydraulics after zapping the badguys into unconsciousness.

But she was still searching. She’d spent way more time rescuing people from burning buildings and wrecked ruins. And she had managed to go through all her energy bars and juice packs, so she was really hungry. Mega-hungry. If she wasn’t freaking about those remaining vehicles, she would have listened to Jack and flown back to Rajnagar and gotten some emergency food and water at that hospital. She’d flown enough people there. Surely they’d help her out.

She checked her tPhone again. Holy crud, she’d been flying around here for six hours! No wonder she was starving. Where was the Indian Army and Air Force? Where was the Red Cross? Where was Riley?

There was still shooting going on all over the place, but it was dying down. This morning, it had been like two dozen pitched battles going on all at the same time. Now it was like a couple of guys firing off guns once in a while.

She flew over what had obviously been one of the big battles of the whole assault. A fifty-foot giantess and a half-fly person and another weird blob-thing and some sort of half-man half-reptile thing had duked it out with what looked like an entire heavy weapons battalion, and there were no survivors. Not even the blob-thing, which was splashed all over the place like an anti-tank weapon had gone off inside a ton of Jack’s blue jello, and it looked extremely dead. And all the heavy weapons and vehicles were smashed, and there were dead militiamen all over the place.

She flew south, preparing to make a bigger circle around the town, when she ran into another battle. This one looked like most of the fighters had run away. There were five militiamen, two of them wearing fancy officer uniforms and looking way too handsome not to be Orphans. They were pinned down in the wreckage of a building by a human-looking terrorist who was a weird blue color all over, and was using TK to hurl stuff at the enemy. But they had a couple of heavy machine guns, so Blue TK Guy couldn’t get close enough to see what he was doing and finish them off. Every time he tried to take a peek from his position, he got his hair parted with bullets.

Just as she was zooming in, Blue TK Guy threw a big glass bottle into the air. It looked like it was full of …

Oh, crud. Was that a bottle of GC-161? It was sure the right color.

The bottle shattered as one of the Orphans shot at it. The liquid darted forward and splashed the five militiamen. The three normals ignored it and wiped goo off their faces.

The two Orphans didn’t. They screamed in pain and slowly went silvery and collapsed and … She zoomed into the little hidey-hole the five guys had.

The two Orphans were turning into silvery muck on the ground. Not silvery puddles that could reform as people. No, they were dead. Totally dead. The three normals stared in horror at what had been their bosses. The poor guys were probably afraid that was going to happen to them.

But there was no way Alex could explain to people who didn’t speak English what this stuff was, and what it meant for them. She just zapped the threesome and called Jack.

“Zok to base, are you still there?”

“Yeah Zok, we’re here. Problems? Tara’s gonna be mad at me if there are more problems. Tundro’s probably still half an hour out, even after he got some serious support from the air force and the army.”

Alex scowled. “We need to check what GC-161 does to Orphans. I think the terrorists just used it as an anti-Orphan weapon. It hit three normals and two Orphans. The three normals? Nothing. Yet. I zapped them to keep them down for now. The two Orphans? Horrible silvery-morph death. I need you to get my GPS location and dose the three militiamen with antidote ASAP and get samples of the silvery dead-guy goo and check that I’m right about this. And we need to make sure our Orphans don’t get hit with this stuff!”

Willow worried, “I’m sure Bill can come up with a testing regime, and I got your GPS. Are you okay?”

Alex frowned. “Yeah, but I’ve got another super-terrorist to fight, and I haven’t found the last eighteen missile-trucks.”

Jack groused, “Well, if that’s not cheery enough, Top Banana got an Indian general he knows to admit off the record that they’ve got a new ICBM test program going, only the guy insisted there’s nothing to worry about because they’re not ready for testing even if they’ve got eight of ’em set up in silos already. So guess who’s in charge of the research program?”

Alex groaned, “An Orphan.”

“Ding ding ding! Give the lady a kewpie doll!” Jack snarked. “Yeah, a thirty-year-old genius who’s so good-looking every woman on the program has thrown herself at him. So Top Banana’s busting his chops trying to get his Indian equivs to wise up and realize Khan’s probably got those missiles ready to fire and completely under his control.”

“Plus eighteen missiles on trucks,” Alex griped.

Jack said, “You go get that super-terrorist. I know you can do this.”

“Zok out.” She went silvery and zipped out of the hidey-hole. Then she made a big detour and came after Blue TK Guy from behind. The guy was already walking through the rubble to check on his enemies. She just zapped him one in the back of the head and dropped him.

Then she darted over to where he had been lurking. Oh, great. Three more terrorists, and they were all armed with AK’s. She zapped them before they realized she was even there.

There was a little covered area they had apparently been using as some sort of command post. She looked around. Grenades, another bottle of probably GC-161, some other nasty stuff, and a military radio. Plus a map.

She used her TK to pull the map over, and she checked it out. It was totally a map of Khajuraho, with all kinds of intel she could have really used when she got here. The guys had been marking on the map, too. There were markings for attack points, and markings for where battles had been fought. And markings for where the missile trucks were! Ooh!

One row of trucks where she’d fought Globbo. One row of missile trucks over on the east side of town. She’d taken those out, too. And six trucks right where she was, only there were no trucks there now. Crud. And someone had drawn arrows on the map like someone else was going to be heading south out of town on one of the few roads into Khajuraho. Extra crud.

She took off into the air and headed south. “Zok to Zandor.”

“Zandor here.”

She growled, “Looks like the terrorists just got six missile-trucks and are driving them south away from the war zone.”

“Crap! Stop that if you can. Remember, if you run one of those trucks off the road, the nuke won’t detonate. India makes really reliable nuclear devices.”

She tore through the air above the road. “It’s not exactly an interstate, so I could be able to catch up with ’em pretty fast. But these guys didn’t have the last dozen marked on that map.” She still went silvery so she could go faster. She just held her phone out of her morph so she could talk on it.

“Okay, that may mean they’re better concealed, but it may mean they’re well outside Khajuraho.”

That was totally not what she wanted to hear. She pulled her tPhone into her morph and pushed as fast as she could. She had no idea how long ago those creeps had taken those nukes. She had no idea how fast you could drive a big, long nuclear-weapon truck on that little road.

She tore along, maybe four hundred feet above the road, hoping she could catch those trucks before terrorists escaped with vehicle-based nuclear missiles that had launch codes the Collective would probably give them for free, along with fun ideas on where to shoot them.

And there they were, way up ahead. She checked her tPhone, and it had only been eight minutes. Okay, she was now about sixteen miles outside of the town and still closing in on the trucks. She figured she’d make a fast pass alongside the row of trucks and zap every driver and let the trucks run off the road so she could …

Crud! There was a big flash of yellow light! It was somewhere near the front of the line of trucks, just where the road curved tightly around a big hill.

She closed in fast as the trucks all slammed on their brakes. There was another flash of yellow light, and the lead truck veered off the road. It crashed onto its side, and the second truck smacked into it pretty hard. All the rest of the trucks screeched to a halt as armed terrorists leaned out of the shotgun windows to take aim at someone or something just around the curve, out of Alex’s sight because of that hillside.

Alex swooped in and darted along the line of stopped trucks, zapping the badguys in the cabs and yanking their AK’s out of the trucks. She zoomed around the curve and found …

A teenaged Indian girl floating about fifty feet in the air and wearing what looked like a sari made of yellow light. The girl extended her arms and fired off another blast of the yellow light, only it hit like a TK blast, sending two armed terrorists flying.

Alex zapped the downed badguys and checked that there wasn’t truck fuel or rocket fuel leaking all over the place or a fire starting in someone’s engine. Then she flew over to the girl. She opened her mouth to say something forceful and impressive.

“Oh! Terawatt! You are the real Terawatt! I am so honored! I chose a superhero name because you use one!”

Wow, the girl spoke really good English, but she had an accent like Raj in ‘The Big Bang Theory’. Okay, more like Raj’s sister.

Alex said, “I’m pleased to meet you. You can call me Tera, if you want.”

“Oh! You can call me … Ayananta! In English that would be ‘solstice’. Or you can call me Kiran. That is my real name. Kiran Singh.”

SINGH? Oh, crud!

 
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