|
|
Chapter 169 – Aerial ActAlex tried not to cringe outwardly when she heard the girl’s name. She checked, “Singh? As in Khan Noonien Singh, who’s in the middle of all the trouble in Khajuraho right now?” At least Alex already had a plan in mind if ‘Solstice’ raised her hands to blast that stuff at her.
Kiran shrugged. She moved her arms, and her ‘sari made of sunlight’ uniform faded away, revealing a teen in American jeans. And a Terawatt t-shirt. And she was still floating in mid-air. “I think not. We are not a part of the wealthy Singhs with all the political connections. There are too many Singhs to keep track of, if you do not mind me saying so.”
Alex felt really funny about having Kiran wearing a Terawatt t-shirt. She admitted, “I’d prefer it if you didn’t have any connections with him. His people tried to kill me in the Congo last month, and we have reason to believe he stole a large part of India’s nuclear arsenal.”
“Eww.” Kiran winced. “I didn’t know. I mean, I just managed to talk my father into letting me fly up here to help. He does not like me being so ‘Western’ and he does not like me revealing my powers. I did not know that nuclear weapons were … Oh, my God! Are those atomic bombs? I … They could have exploded!”
Alex tried to reassure her. “They’re a lot safer than you think. They won’t explode until they get the secret launch codes first, then get launched from the trucks, and then go through a proper flightpath. Oops. That reminds me. Hang on.” She spoke into her earjack, “Zok to Zandor and Tara, come in please.”
“Tara here, Zandor’s getting another cup of coffee. You’re really making him nervous, even if he won’t admit it. He hates it when he has to send trained soldiers out into the field. Sending you out all alone is making him so upset I had to make him take some Maalox. Not that he’s ever gonna admit it.”
“Tara, I need you to mark my GPS location and get the Indian Army here ASAP. I’ve got six missile-trucks, two of them crashed, blocking the road from Khajuraho. And I’ve got about a dozen terrorists out cold. And I’ve got an Indian superheroine. Solstice, AKA Ayananta, I think. AKA Kiran Singh, but not related to you-know-who. She has telekinetic powers —”
“I have light powers!”
“— that go with a sunny yellow light. But the concussive blasts she does are totally TK, not light beams. And she can create a yellow ‘sari’ uniform around herself that’s definitely more TK than light. And she can fly, which is totally telekinesis and not photons.”
“You mean I don’t have light powers?”
Willow murmured, “Okay … There’s millions of Singhs … but I’ve found a Kiran Singh, daughter of P.D. Singh and J. L. Singh, husband-and-wife archaeologists.”
Alex checked, “Are your parents P.D. Singh and J. L. Singh, the archaeologists?” Kiran nodded eagerly. Alex murmured into her earjack, “Bingo.”
Willow gasped. “Eww! Kiran’s from Bhopal, and her mom was one of the victims of the Bhopal industrial accident when she was helping in a soup kitchen, and her mom was sick for a while and … Oh. Doctors were totally of the surprised that her mom could have healthy, normal children after what the biochemicals did to her. I guess that ‘normal’ part is right out.”
“What part is right out?” asked Jack from way away from his mike.
“The part about you acting like an adult for more than ten seconds at a time,” teased Willow.
“Oh! Well, that goes without saying!” Jack said.
Alex just insisted, “Tara, give Zandor the details. Get an Indian Army NBC team to this spot ASAP to recover these weapons.” Then she looked up and asked, “Solstice, would you stay here until the Army comes to handle these things? We’ve still got terrorists who could wake up before I get back.”
“Back from where?”
Alex told her, “Back from Khajuraho. There’s still fighting, and there’s still terrorists loose, and there’s still a bunch of threats to the safety of your country loose and pretending to be goodguys.”
Kiran nervously agreed, “Okay, if you’re sure these things are safe now.”
Alex flew north, back toward the fighting. But she was starving and really thirsty, and she was getting an awful headache, and she was so tired she just wanted to go take a nap for about a month. And she still had another dozen vehicle-mounted nukes to find, and who knew how many super-powered terrorists, and all of Khan’s jerkhead Orphans.
She totally needed a much bigger fanny-pack. Maybe something the size of her flat camera pack that would have enough room for a case of energy bars and a box of those juicepacks. Even if she would look stupid flying around carrying twenty pounds of snacks.
She got halfway back to the town when she heard it over her earjack. “Tundro to Zok. Tundro to Zok. Come in, please.”
She had never felt so relieved. “I didn’t know how much longer I could keep going!”
Riley tensely replied, “We have a crisis. We think Singh is launching Indian nukes right now as a counterstrike.”
“Oh, crud!” She had never felt less relieved.
He went on, “I’m in a new Apache the Indian Army just got their hands on, so I’m all checked out as the co-pilot. We’re southwest of your position, heading toward a silo farm that’s east-northeast of your position. Meet us there if you can.”
She went silvery and took off toward the east before she even checked her tPhone for a GPS heading. “Zok to Tundro. On it. What about the one dozen vehicle-mounted nukes I couldn’t find?”
“Tundro. No one has found them yet. Khan probably has them hidden somewhere under camo or in a building so he can roll ’em out and launch before anyone can locate ’em. Someone else has that tasking, and we just have to trust them to do their job. We’ve got eight silos of intercontinental ballistic missiles that could target anywhere.”
Oh, crud. And mega-crud! She checked her tPhone and picked up a compass heading and a GPS heading, along with a heading for Riley’s chopper, which was going a lot faster than she was.
She felt like she was slowing down. Maybe it was because she was trying to race a military helicopter. Maybe it was because she was just so totally tired. Maybe it was because she was starving and that was making her tired. Maybe it was because … something she couldn’t think of because she was too tired.
Maybe she needed a speedometer. Willow could make one if Alex remembered to ask.
She darted over a line of hills and found herself diving down into a flat valley shaped like a crescent roll. Maybe a croissant. Maybe some of those yummy rugelach that Mina brought to school back when it was Hanukah.
Maybe her brain should stop thinking about food.
Riley’s Apache was way ahead of her. It looked slender and deadly. If there was room for two guys in it, one of them had to be sitting behind the other, because there was no way there was room for two guys to be sitting side-by-side even if they were Siamese twins.
The chopper turned to the right and fired twice. One was a missile, but one shot off like a rocket out of a rocket pod. Both hit a big hole in the ground and exploded down in the hole.
Okay. She got it. Massive concrete covers protecting the missiles, but you had to retract the cover to fire the missile. So all the missiles were vulnerable for a few seconds, but it was only when someone was trying to launch the things.
And since the covers were open, someone was trying to launch the things. Crud.
The chopper tilted back the other way and fired another missile and rocket. She didn’t even see that silo. It was pretty far away. But the missile and rocket disappeared into a hole and then exploded, with a big blast that went straight up. She was really glad Riley was operating the weapons and not some ordinary guy.
The chopper kept zooming across the valley and turning from side to side, and Riley kept sinking missiles in the open silos. Alex was sure Jack would be making ‘use the Force, Luke’ jokes. And there would be ‘I used to bullseye womp rats’ jokes, too.
She really missed having Jack out in the field with her. He made her feel better, like having a dad to protect her, and his jokes made her feel like maybe things weren’t as awful as she thought.
Riley was firing on the seventh silo when a pair of surface-to-air missiles came searing up from some camouflaged site on the ground. Both missiles hit the side of the helicopter, one right after the other.
“Riley!” she screamed into her tPhone. She pushed as hard as she could to catch up and pull him out of there. Because how could you possibly eject from a helicopter when those rotors over your head would chop you to pieces?
The chopper dropped hard, even with the rotors spinning. Riley’s calm voice came back. “Tundro to Zok. Target that last nuke. That is an order.”
Alex was nearly in tears even if she was silvery. But she did it. She raced ahead of the falling helicopter and headed for where the last silo had to be.
Only she was too late. There was already smoke or steam pouring out from where she was heading. She pushed even harder and cut up at a steep angle, just in case. The pain in her head was terrible, but she still wasn’t going to get there in time.
A huge missile shot upward. She hit it with a massive burst of lightning, and it ignored her. She kept heading forward and up. With a last burst of effort, she slammed into the base of the missile only ten feet above the fiery rocket exhaust. The impact nearly knocked her out. The rocket was speeding up. A lot. The acceleration was pulling the rocket out from under her. She started sliding downward. If she slid off the bottom of the rocket, she’d never be able to catch up with it. And the exhaust would probably barbecue her.
She used her TK to grab onto one of the missile’s little fins. But the missile was accelerating like crazy, and it was all she could do to hang on.
That was when she remembered the stuff from Jack’s thing about nuclear missiles. The file. She had less than sixty seconds before it dumped the first stage she was hanging onto, and the rest of the rocket blasted off to blow up some city.
Not only had she not stopped an ICBM which could be aimed at anyone, but now she was along for the ride. She really didn’t want to make any ‘Iron Giant’ refs, because she knew there was no way she could survive a nuclear explosion no matter where it went boom.
She was using pretty much all her TK to hang onto the rapidly-accelerating missile. She tried to find something inside it that she could switch off or turn to change the direction. But she couldn’t stop the rocket from firing, and she couldn’t find any steering stuff. And crud, it was going to separate soon.
She hung on as tight as she could, despite the pain in her head, and she used a tiny bit of her TK to unscrew a row of countersunk screws that were holding a huge panel on. That gave her a series of tiny grips she could hang onto and haul herself up. She just didn’t think she was going to make it in time. The acceleration was murder.
And then it stopped accelerating. That meant the first stage rocket was done and the stupid thing was going to separate before the second stage fired. She launched herself up the side of the missile and managed to get just past the ring between the stages just moments before she felt the clanks, and the missile released the no-longer-useful first stage.
She was silvery, so at the same time she was seeing the first stage drop away behind her, she saw the top of the missile come apart in two sections and fall away. It was a shroud. And she remembered from that file what the shroud meant. She wasn’t flying along on a nuclear bomb.
She was flying along on a bunch of nuclear bombs.
She was on a MIRV or a … or whatever the other thing was. She didn’t have to stop one nuclear warhead. She had to stop maybe four or five or ten of them. Crud!
If she remembered what Jack’s file said, she only had like a minute before stage two wrapped up and got dumped so stage three could start doing its job.
She reached out with her TK and … This stage had controls! There were nozzles! And directional controls!
She used her TK and turned the nozzles to put the thing off-course. She felt a sort of quivering through the whole stage.
And … then it adjusted. What? That wasn’t fair! She was riding a nuclear missile and going to get horribly killed and the missile wasn’t supposed to outsmart her!
She tried again, but once again the missile adjusted. There had to be something like a computer or gyroscope so every time she twisted a nozzle or tried to turn a directional control, the stupid missile corrected its course.
Well, sure, the whole thing had to be built to handle Electro-Magnetic Pulses from anti-missile weapons and even other nukes going off. And it had to have course correction stuff to deal with the same kinds of problems.
Stupid rationally-designed evil-thing. She just wanted to scream in frustration.
She reminded herself she only had a few more seconds before the second stage quit on her and dropped off, and the third stage took over. She unscrewed two rows of countersunk screws and then more screws along the top, and let the panel pull free and dangle off the side. She grabbed the interior stuff, which on this side was just big tanks of fuel, and pulled herself up.
She was hoping the loose panel would mess up the missile’s aerodynamics, or get enough drag to pull the thing off course. But she was nearly out of the atmosphere, and the stupid missile just kept making adjustments. The panel ripped loose and went sailing off to burn up on re-entry … or fall on someone … or something.
She was looking at a fuel tank, so she slid into the tiny gap beside it. That way, she didn’t need every bit of TK just to keep from sliding off the stupid missile. She took all the TK she could spare and punched in a tiny spot on the side of the tank. It dented but didn’t punch through. She tried again and again, still with no success.
And the stage stopped firing. Oh, crud! She leapt upward and just barely got past the ring before the second stage dropped away and the third stage started firing. She knew from Jack’s thing that she only had about a minute before the third stage finished its job and the ‘bus’ took over. The bus was what the missile guys called the Post-Boost Vehicle that the nuclear warheads and all the other junk sat on. Once the bus started throwing the warheads at their separate targets, they would be out of her reach and she was hosed. Some important place was hosed. The whole world was hosed.
The third stage started firing, but this time she knew it was a waste of her precious time to try and mess with the directional controls. Instead, she pulled herself up to the front of the missile and puddled in between the five nuclear warheads. Each one looked like a five-foot-high metal cone pointing upward. There was a bunch of other stuff there, like chaff packets. And conical metal shells that would be decoy warheads to make things harder for any anti-missile weapons. She yanked the chaff and decoys loose and threw them away. That gave her some room. And if she failed, she wanted the target country to have as good a chance as possible at shooting these things out of the sky.
Being on top of the missile instead of clinging to the side, she had all of her TK to spare now. She wasn’t sliding down the outside of the thing, she was being pushed against the ‘front’ side of the bus. Everything was bolted down, even the stuff that was going to get launched soon. So she used her TK to yank out bolts and ditch panels and get at everything. Bingo. There were the computer controls and everything else.
And she was already too late.
The missile was way up above the atmosphere and the third stage was going to finish firing in a matter of seconds, and she could look down and see what the missile was probably aiming at. If her geography was right, she was on a nuclear missile heading for Moscow. Make that five nuclear missiles, because this was a MIRV.
She was about to start World War III.
Suddenly she remembered what Ray had said when they first watched “The Iron Giant” and the iron giant flew up into the sky to stop the nuclear missile. He had said, “What would Terawatt do?”
Ray believed in her.
And Shar had said, “Terawatt could totally stop the bad missile without getting blown to pieces.”
Shar believed in her.
She couldn’t let them down. She couldn’t let everybody down.
She felt like she’d be crying if she wasn’t silvery. She unbolted everything she could get her TK on, and she heaved. It felt like the top of her head was getting smacked with an ICBM, but she pried the first warhead loose, clamps and electrical connections and fuel systems and all.
Oh. Clamps. Right.
Okay, this time she knew about the clamps. She undid the clamps and yanked the second warhead out of its little nest. It took a lot of her TK, but it didn’t make her head feel like it was exploding. She yanked loose the other three warheads. Then she ripped loose the electrical connections to the engine system of the bus.
She was out of time. The third stage finished burning, and the bus unclamped itself from the third stage. But it didn’t fire its motors. It just flew through near space on an arc that was going to land it right in downtown Moscow anyway.
Crud! She had totally messed things up! She so needed the bus to have its wheels go ‘round and ‘round and go somewhere not Moscow.
She used a small burst of lightning to set off the electrical connections, and the bus fired. She kept the warheads piled on the front of the bus so she didn’t lose them, and she pushed hard on one side of the bus with her TK.
It slowly drifted off-course. She was looking down at Russia and Latvia and Lithuania, and she totally didn’t want this stuff crashing on anyone even if it wasn’t going to explode. So she pushed as hard as she could on the side of the bus, until it was firing off at an angle, right toward a big bay on the east side of the Baltic Sea. Maybe it was the Bay of Riga, but it was definitely a bay instead of some town.
That geography stuff she’d read after the Korea and Japan ops was totally paying off.
She figured she had maybe three minutes left to impact. Maybe less. And she still had five nuclear warheads on her hands. That was not good. It was mega not good. And what was left of the missile was now on re-entry, and as the bus cut into the upper atmosphere, things were starting to get really hot.
She undid the screws on all five warheads and ditched the outer casings. She could see the bombs in the middle of all the other junk. Each bomb was a bunch of chunks of fissile material held in a frame and sitting in some kind of reflector thing, with plastic explosive frosted all over the outside and scads of detonators to make the plastic explosive go off really evenly so the blast would slam the chunks together really hard to get one perfect chain reaction and an immense boom. She peeled the explosives off the outside of the fissile metals and pulled the chunks of radioactive metal away from each other.
She ended up with four chunks from each warhead. Each chunk was shaped like one quarter of a sphere that someone cut some slices off. And they were heavy. She held them in a circle around herself so each one was about a hundred feet away from her. She was too tired to figure out how far apart from each other they’d be, but it looked like they were maybe thirty or forty feet apart, which had to be good enough to keep them from detonating.
Now she just had to get down to the ground. She dived off from the bus with her mega-dangerous chunks of death, and she let the bus go flying off toward that bay. She went straight down.
Not that she wanted to. Oh, no, she wanted to fly off at an angle to someplace she could turn the stuff over to someone she trusted, like maybe Finland because they were happy with the E.U. Terawatt Liaison Office deal. But she couldn’t fly and hang onto the metal chunks, too. They were too stupidly heavy. Each bomb must have had forty or fifty pounds of the stuff, and she couldn’t lift that much and herself, too.
She plummeted down through the atmosphere, trying not to turn into a blazing chunk of carbon. She spread herself out as flat as she could and heaved upward so hard that the pain in her head made her feel like she was going to vomit. She was still falling.
But she was slowing down. Pulling up with as much TK as she could when she was hanging onto the bomb stuff, she was only needing to slow down the equivalent of fifty or a hundred pounds with her ‘parachute’ which maybe wasn’t big enough to slow that much weight to something safe for a regular person to make a landing, but was big enough to slow her down to something that wouldn’t incinerate her as she fell.
She was spread out like a disk and was maybe ten feet across. That was totally slowing her down, and the thicker the atmosphere got, the more slowing down she did.
She needed to go read up on how big parachutes needed to be.
At least the heat of re-entry wasn’t so bad now that she was parachuting down instead of being rocketed down by a Post-Boost Vehicle. She couldn’t even spot the bus anymore. She really hoped it didn’t crash down on someone. With her luck, it would hit a ship in that bay and sink it. Or crash into a giant sea monster and make it really mad. Or … something else she couldn’t think of at the moment.
But the pain of using so much TK was a miserable drain on her. She felt so tired she wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep herself in the air.
She was getting closer and closer to the ground, even if she was still miles up. She couldn’t tell if she was going to land in very western Russia or maybe one of the former Soviet republics. Maybe Belarus or Latvia, if she remembered the stuff right. It would have totally been helpful if someone had drawn giant black borderlines along the edges of the countries so people falling from space could see what country they were going to go splat in.
She just kept falling. The pain in her head got even worse, and she felt so hungry it was like her stomach was going to have to eat itself pretty soon. And the ground kept getting closer and closer.
When she was maybe two or three hundred feet above what looked like a recently-planted field, she just let go of the chunks. She suddenly had enough TK to pull herself out of her dive. The chunks punched into the soil below her, and she pulled herself upward hard enough to stop. She managed to float down so she was a couple of yards above the ground. So all she had to do was call for help. Or walk over to the busy highway maybe a couple hundred yards south of her, and hitch a ride.
She tried to fly toward the road, but her TK gave out on her and she fell with a soft thump to the ground. She needed to get back up. But she was just so tired! She didn’t know what to do. Maybe she needed to ask someone. She managed to pop her tPhone back out of her morph, even if it was a real effort.
“Tara to Zok, Tara to Zok, come in please!” Willow sounded pretty worried. “Zok, if you don’t answer me right now, I am going to tell your mother!”
Alex moaned. “Hi, I don’t feel so good. Is it okay if I just sort of … pass out here?”
“Absolutely not!” Jack snapped. “Pay attention to me! Don’t fall asleep! Look, you need to concentrate. You don’t have to do anything else, but I need you not to pass out on me, okay?”
“Tara to Zok. We’ve got your GPS location now, and we’ve got Russian military coming your way as soon as we relay the data. At least one of them is friends with Gates, so they’ll be nice. But we really need you to hang on until they get to you.”
Alex tried not to move, but the sky seemed to be spinning around. “Tara’s a pretty name. I bet you’d like someone if her name was Tara.”
“Zandor, she doesn’t sound so good.”
Jack said, “Okay, information time. Zok, please pay attention and remember this stuff. Do not drink the water there either. And if they take you to Moscow, don’t drink the city tap water. Believe me, even the locals don’t drink that tap water. Get some bottled water. And some food. They’ll probably offer you vodka. DO NOT drink it. It is not going to be good for you now. And plenty of that vodka is homemade, so it’s not good for anybody at anytime anywhere. Any ice they have may be made with untreated water, so avoid that, too. We’ve got a Blackbird diverted to Moscow to pick you up, and it’ll land at a military air base. So just go with the nice Russian officers and try to hang on. Okay? Zok? Zok, please talk to me.”
Alex tried to close her eyes, but she was still in her silvery morph, so she couldn’t even make the spinning sky stop spinning. “The sky won’t stop spinning. Can you throw up while you’re still silvery?”
Willow carefully asked, “Zok, where’s the fissile material? Did it crash in the Gulf of Riga with the post-boost vehicle? Are the nukes still armed?”
“Uh, no, I took the warheads apart and took the bomb-y stuff with me. I’ve got all twenty chunks, but they crashed in the ground about …” She had to take a look. “… maybe two hundred feet north of me.”
Jack checked, “How far apart are the sections?”
“Umm … maybe forty feet? They’re all in a big circle ’cause I was worried about the radiation, but they were too heavy and I couldn’t hold ’em all and me too in the air, and so I fell pretty fast, and now my head really, really hurts.”
Willow told her, “Now I want you to say ‘ya nee pa nee my you’. Just try it.”
“Ya nee pa nee my you. Ya nee pa nee my you. What’s that?”
Willow explained, “Say it a couple more times. It’s Russian for ‘I do not understand’. I doubt everyone who arrives will speak perfect English, even if they’re a lot more likely to know English than a bunch of Americans are to know Russian. Or Hindi. Or pretty much anything.”
“Hey!” Jack protested. “I’m telling Finn and Lupo you said that! And Miller and Gates, too!”
Alex just tried to concentrate and say the thing in Russian, but her brain kept wandering off, and Willow had to correct her about three times. Maybe four or five times. She wasn’t really sure.
Jack told her, “Look, if you’re having communication problems when the Russians arrive, flip your tPhone to speakerphone and I’ll take a shot at talking everybody through things. I don’t want you ending up in a Russian hospital, either.”
Willow cut in. “Yeah, I mean, can you say ‘nosocomial infections’?”
Alex thought about it for a couple seconds. “Uhh, I don’t think so?”
Jack sounded like he was sadly shaking his head. “Oh, Zok, Zok, what are we gonna do with you?”
Willow angrily answered, “Well, for one thing, you could keep her from going off by herself again! She could’ve died!”
Jack told Willow, “We’ve got to find a better way to keep her fed, for starters.”
Alex felt like her stomach wanted to rumble, even if she was still silvery. “Maybe you could fire roast turkeys at me in guided missiles. Mmm, I could sure go for some roast turkey. Or gravy. Or pumpkin pie. Or doughnuts. Or ice cream. Or ice cream with sprinkles. Or ice cream with sprinkles and hot fudge and Oreos and those little red cherry halves and a bunch of real whipped cream like grandma makes and —”
“Zok! Zok! Stop talking about food,” Willow insisted.
“But I’m really hungry!” She wasn’t whining. It just sounded that way. By accident. “Anyway, I deserve to get thrown in an evil hospital and have Doctor Three-Bums take away my clothes and be creepy to me and make me eat yucky hospital food! I let Riley get killed!” She started sobbing even if she was still silvery.
“Zok, stop it right now!” Jack snapped. “Finn is fine. Hardly even any bruises.”
“But … but his helicopter was crashing! I saw it drop really fast just before I tackled that stupid missile!”
Jack patiently told her, “He’s fine. Really really. The chopper got hit, but Apaches have a ton of armor for the pilots and lots of redundancy. The pilot got knocked for a loop by the blasts, so Finn took over the flight systems and did what we flyboys call an ‘auto rotation landing’ where you drop as fast as you can to keep the rotors spinning fast enough from the upward airflow, so you can then execute a flare just above the ground and pull off an incident-free landing. In theory. But Finn pulled it off. Well, almost. He’s fine, the pilot has a concussion and a crap-ton of bruises and a really sore tailbone from the landing, the helicopter got a little more damaged, and you’ll be happy to hear none of the other seven missiles were launchable after he got through with ’em.”
“Umm, so he’s okay?” Alex checked. She hadn’t really managed to track most of what Jack said.
* * *
Willow and Jack kept talking to her, but she was having a lot of trouble listening to them, so she puddled south to that big road she remembered seeing when she was coming down. Then she made herself go normal and wave at some oncoming cars, even if her mom had told her not to hitchhike and not to get in strangers’ cars and not to take candy from strangers and stuff like that.
Mmm, maybe they had some candy they’d share.
Two cars screeched to a halt and pulled off the side of the road. She walked over to the closer car as three Russian-looking guys hopped out of the car. “Do you have any food? Or bottled water? Or anything?”
She had no idea what they were saying, but she caught ‘Terawatt’ in there a couple times, so she said, “Yeah, that’s me. Terawatt. Food? Water?”
The three guys said more stuff she didn’t understand, so she tried, “Ya nee pa nee my you.”
Hey, that worked! They stopped saying stuff in Russian!
Two guys from the other car ran up and started taking pictures with their cellphones. She smiled at them and asked, “Do you speak English?”
“Da! Our Eengleesh was very finest!”
The other guy smacked him in the back of the head and said, “Yes, one of us can speak English, and the other one is an idiot.”
She sighed, “Oh, great! Can I get some water and some food? I’m starving!”
“We’ve got vodka and some sodas and some sandwiches Ivan made that I would not feed to wolves.” He made a spitting-nasty-food-out-of-your-mouth face. The other guy complained a lot, or at least it sounded like it. And there were some hand gestures in there that were probably really naughty.
She hardly had to beg much to get two unopened cans of real coke. She sat down in the first car while the guy ran to the second car to get the soda. Okay, it wasn’t really a ‘sit’ as much as a ‘total collapse with legs not really working all that well’.
The guy was back in maybe seconds with the cans. Wow. The cans looked like American coke cans, except they had really cool Russian letters on the side. Maybe they’d let her keep the cans to show Ray and Louis and Shar.
She leaned back in the seat and pretty much poured coke down her throat. Then she let out a huge burp, and she drank the second can less like a frat guy chugging beer, which she had to admit she’d only seen in movies so she didn’t really know if guys really did stuff like that in college. She’d seen Jackson trying to chug a huge thing of beer and choking halfway through and then hurling all over the yard, but that was Jackson. College guys wouldn’t do that, would they?
Maybe she should ask Willow. Or Annie. She had no idea if guys at military academies did stuff like that, but she was pretty sure Riley never did.
The guys in the first car talked with the guys in the second car, and one of them dug out a couple of granola bar things that were still in their wrappers. She wolfed them down and thanked them, and it looked like English-speaking guy was translating her thank-you into Russian for her, because all the other guys smiled at her and nodded.
By then she noticed that Jack and Willow were complaining at her because they’d been telling her for maybe twenty minutes not to do what she did because she wasn’t listening to them. She told them, “Hey, Tara, I only drank a couple cans of coke and ate some granola bars still in their wrappers. And I feel better already.”
Jack fumed, “When you’re sick and helpless, I do not want you getting in cars with strange guys!” Wow, he sounded totally dad-like there. He’d be a really great dad when he and Willow started having little Jacks and Willows. Even if he’d probably teach ’em all kinds of mega-naughty stuff.
While she waited for the Russian military guys to show up, the guy Ivan who didn’t speak really great English stood over by the road and flagged down a couple more cars and managed to talk various people out of three unopened cans of soda, two still-sealed bottles of water, an unopened thing of M&Ms, and an unopened store package of dried fruits. Plus two bottles of vodka, which the other guys gave him a bunch of high fives for before they shoved the bottles in their cars.
After Alex ate all the snacks and drank all the soda, she felt a little better so she got out of the car and made sure she got pictures of all five guys along with their names and their email addys. And she sent Willow the pictures to go on the main Terawatt site with a message that they helped her out when she crash-landed in Russia. Jack was still grumpy and dad-ish about the whole thing.
Okay, the more she ate, the better she felt and the less space-cadet she felt. And her headache and nausea and exhaustion got better. And she started thinking a little more clearly, so she realized that she did a really stupid thing when there were people out there who would pay these guys a zillion bucks if they shot her in the head while she was sitting in their car and helpless. And there were probably half a dozen ways to drug her or poison her with a can of coke that looked unopened, starting with painting a biochemical around the opening or on the rim so she’d swallow it while she drank the coke.
Okay, she probably really was a ‘space cadet’ since she’d been to the ISS and she’d been in the Blackbirds a bunch of times and she’d ridden an ICBM from India to Russia.
Or maybe she was an actual astronaut. Kewl.
* * *
It took another hour and twenty minutes before the military vehicles drove up. By then she had learned all the guys’ names, and how to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and a dozen other useful things in Russian, plus a dozen things she totally did not need to know how to say, like the Russian for ‘you have great tits’. And she had her picture taken another hundred times. And she’d turned down Ivan asking her for a date about twenty times. The guy was totally persistent and he wasn’t even good-looking. Or suave. Or classy. Or smart. Or anything. The only thing he had going for him was he was willing to risk getting hit by a car in Russia to get her snacks … and trick people out of their vodka.
And boy, were those Russians bad drivers. Some of them acted like they couldn’t even see Ivan standing there too close to the road. A couple of ’em acted like it was a video game and they needed to hit Ivan to get more points. And then there was this truck going the other direction that was passing this other big truck and not caring about what was in the oncoming lane and a car nearly had to crash into Ivan and his car just to get out of the way.
So she was pretty glad to see the two military jeeps and the two military trucks. She flew right over. “Who speaks English? Because I only know about a dozen phrases in Russian.”
The officer who climbed out of the back of the first jeep said, “Most of us speak English. And you are Terawatt?”
“Da.” She gave him a grin. “And I hope you brought some people who can deal with radioactive materials.”
He looked worried at that. “You did not send the warheads into the Bay of Riga?”
She explained, “I disarmed all the warheads and pulled all the radioactive materials and brought them with me. They are arranged in a large circle just north of us.”
So she took the officer and a couple of his men over to see where she dropped the chunks. As she went she asked, “Could you get the names of those five guys and see that they get some sort of award or commendation for helping me? I’d appreciate it.”
Then it took a few minutes to show him the twenty holes in the ground. After that he had to order his people to go out and recover the stuff, and they had to go out in the field with shovels, and he had to get on the radio and tell them whatever he was saying in Russian. Maybe that they didn’t need bomb disposal guys, but they did need twenty lead boxes to carry the bomb stuff away.
She wished she had a way of disposing of nuclear bomb parts. Maybe Sam had a way of shooting them into the sun. Even if Willow had explained to her why shooting stuff into the sun took a lot more fuel than shooting it into outer space. She just didn’t like the idea of throwing her trash out where someone might run into it in a thousand years and have a big disaster.
So the soldiers had several Geiger counters, and they checked the holes and put stakes where people needed to dig. She didn’t say anything when one of the soldiers snuck up behind her and checked her with a Geiger counter, but she was sure the officer told him to do it. She was just glad it didn’t make that clicky sound, because being radioactive would not be good. Even being covered in radioactive stuff would not be good.
So, once the soldiers got started on dealing with the fissile materials, the Russian officer gave her a ride back to Moscow to a military base where the Blackbird was just arriving. The drive took several hours, but they had food. It was Russian military field rations, which were not exactly yummy, but she was starving.
Okay, they were pretty much the opposite of yummy. She was never going to complain about MREs ever again as long as she lived.
Then she got in a good nap. By the time they got to the military base, it was dinner time, and the Russian officer was just ridiculously pleased that she accepted his offer to eat with him and his group in the officer’s mess. She ate a ton, and it was all really pretty good, but she had to lie that she couldn’t drink alcohol because it did bad things to her biochemistry. The look on their faces was like ‘No more drinking vodka? Well, forget the superpowers!’
So it was pretty dark by the time they escorted her out to the Blackbird and thanked her for saving Moscow from nuclear attack by Orphans and hugged her goodbye. She managed to sleep for most of the flight back to America. It wasn’t that long a flight. Even with the takeoff and landing it only took about two and a half hours, so it was afternoon again.
But part of that was because she wasn’t going home. The Blackbird landed at Andrews Air Force Base, which was still her least favorite air force base ever. Jack and Willow rushed over to hug her and make sure she was okay and then whisk her over to an SRI helicopter for a trip to the West Virginia base.
Willow hugged her again and whimpered, “We were so worried!”
Jack hugged her, too, and said with a scowl, “You gotta stop doing stuff like this! I’m already turning gray.”
Willow smiled. “I think he looks distinguished.”
Jack fake-whispered, “I think she needs to have her eyes checked.”
But then, when she got on the helicopter, Janet was there, too! Yay! With a bunch of medical equipment. Ugh. And a bottle of the Pedialyte stuff Grover had to drink on missions. Double ugh. This was the orange stuff, and it tasted like orange Gatorade if someone like Shar mixed it up for you and made it with too much powder and way too much sugar. Blech.
Janet and Willow made Jack sit in the front in the co-pilot’s seat so Alex could puddle out of her uniform and into a pair of nurse’s scrubs so Janet could examine her properly. Willow fed Alex from a picnic basket she’d brought. Hot roast beef sandwiches with onions and sliced sweet red peppers, hot chicken sandwiches with bacon strips and spicy dressing, a couple of fish sandwiches with battered fish and tartar sauce and lettuce and tomato … Yum. And a bunch of Diet Coke.
Crud! She forgot to bring those Russian coke cans!
And after Alex had eaten and drunk enough stuff that she didn’t feel like she was dying of hunger, she remembered the dosimeter strip inside her leotard. After her last encounter with radiation, her dad had come up with a chemical to paint in a strip inside each of her leotards.
“Janet? What color’s the dosimeter strip in my leotard?”
Janet checked the tiny lines painted in the inside of the front and back of her top. “Some of them are still purple, and the others are blue. One’s a blue-green color. So at least the dosimeters didn’t get a dangerous dose. That’s really reassuring. But that doesn’t mean you’re perfectly safe, either.”
It was still mid-afternoon by the time they landed at the West Virginia base. Mid-afternoon on Monday, which meant she was missing another day of school. Crud! It wasn’t like she loved classes and tests and stuff, like some of the Science Club people, but it was just a lot easier to learn the stuff if she could read ahead and then listen to the lecture and then ask questions if she didn’t get something.
But she was all checked over by Janet by then, and she was just suffering from an electrolyte imbalance and dealing with what was basically like a sunburn over maybe a quarter of her front side including her face. And needing more calories. So Janet gave her some ibuprofen and told her to have another sandwich.
Jack told her, “We’ll have a cover story for you. Your prospective mentor took you down to a South Carolina wildlife preserve to photograph animals, and he didn’t pay attention to how long you two were out, and you picked up a sunburn because no one told you where you were going to be heading so you didn’t bring anything like sunscreen or proper clothing when you left.”
Willow smiled. “And so you won’t get home until tomorrow evening, either. We can do stuff!”
Jack smirked. “But I read Hanna’s last after-action report. No taking my fiancée and flying her a thousand feet in the air and doing the Peter Pan thing.”
* * *
Khan roared in fury as he stared at the readouts. He had been betrayed by his computer experts. The spaceship was not parking itself in High Earth Orbit. No, it was heading off toward the outer reaches of the solar system without enough fuel to slow to a stop and turn around and ever get back to Earth. Undoubtedly, it was P$ychon4ut, who had managed not to arrive at the crisis rocket in time to board before the launch. He wondered if there were any other moles in his bloc, and if he could trust Karenin, who had also stayed behind. He stood there and ran computations in his head.
Lee finally ventured, “It is just remotely possible. If I could come out of cryo and design a slingshot around Jupiter and go back into cryo. Then years later I would come out of cryo again and program a slingshot around Neptune …”
Khan considered the plan. It was his only shot if he wanted to come back to Earth ever again, instead of ending up drifting off into the emptiness of space, where his ship would slowly deteriorate and lose power over the centuries and millennia. “Do it.”
He studied the news reports they could still pick up. There wasn’t a nuclear war currently going on that would reduce Earth’s human population to something he could control more easily. He knew who was at fault. When he got back to Earth in a few decades, he would hunt down every descendant of P$ychon4ut and Walsh and the primary bloc and torture them all to death.
Assuming Lee’s mental calculations and manual adjustments worked perfectly. Otherwise, he was going to be adrift in space, cryogenically frozen, hoping some future spacefarers rescued his ship and were too stupid to realize what reviving Khan Noonien Singh would mean.