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Chapter 170 – Off HoursAlex let Jack sneak her off the helicopter while two guys in white ‘intern’ clothes hauled the medical gear off to one of those trucks the paramedics drove around on emergencies. This time, sneaking off meant going silvery and changing into the ‘Alex’ clothes in her Terawatt gym bag Jack had along, and then staying silvery and hiding in the gym bag while Jack carried it over to Janet’s car and tossed it in the back seat. She used her TK on herself so the bag only weighed what it was supposed to, because it would look pretty suspicious if people could see Jack was lugging a gym bag that weighed way over a hundred pounds.
When Janet stopped the car and said “All clear,” Alex puddled out and went normal in her Alex clothes and hopped out of the car with the gym bag.
She followed Janet into the house and used her TK to go toss her gym bag back in Hanna’s room. “Janet? Don’t you have more work hours? You’re not gonna get in trouble because of me, are you?”
Janet glanced at her watch. “It’s already a quarter of four, and the general signed me out until six just in case you needed something more serious than a couple of roast beef sandwiches. I am kind of concerned about those burns, but I couldn’t find any sign of any serious effects from radiation exposure. Still, we’ll keep you around until tomorrow evening and spend time with you and keep an eye out for any suspicious symptoms.”
Alex remembered what those were, from the last time everyone had been worried about her radiation exposure. “Gotcha.” She really needed to cut out the getting exposed to radioactive stuff.
Janet smiled. “Maybe you’d like to call your family, even if it’s in the middle of school back there. And then we’ll fix dinner. It looks like we’re going to have a lot of company tonight.”
Alex grinned. “Good!”
So she texted Ray, and then called her mom and dad, and then Ray texted her, and then Nicole and Robyn and Marsha texted her, and she ended up not being much of a help on fixing dinner. Janet already had the lasagna made and in the oven before Alex got back to the kitchen.
“Oh! I’m really sorry. I said I was gonna help and everything!”
Janet smiled gently. “I think someone who just spent a whole day fighting supervillains and then doing whatever you were doing that had Willow so upset? They get a few minutes downtime.”
Alex winced a little. “I don’t think I can tell you what I was doing, if Jack and Willow wouldn’t.”
Janet nudged her with an elbow. “I’ve got a pretty good idea if they’re worrying about you being exposed to fissionable materials. And it’s not like it won’t be all over the news in a little while.”
Alex admitted, “It’s probably all over the internet already. There were people taking videos and pictures and stuff.”
Janet shrugged. “I have more important things to do than surf the internet during work hours. I can wait until the real news. Anyway, the important thing is that you’re here now, and you’re safe, and you hopefully didn’t get more than a sunburn.”
Alex just made a nice salad with the fresh veggies in the fridge, while Janet prepared a bunch of broccoli in a microwave steamer.
Alex asked, “Do Hanna and Charlie like broccoli?”
Janet smiled. “No, but they like this recipe. I steam it until it’s just cooked, and then I pour melted butter over it and add salt and pepper to taste. I got it off a cooking show I like to watch.” She looked over at Alex’s expression and admitted, “Okay, I do some stuff besides work and teen-raising.”
Alex just said, “I need to learn this recipe, because I’ve got a nine-year-old who thinks veggies are the Great Satan. I got a glazed carrots recipe off the internet that she really likes, and a recipe for a whole head of cauliflower with a tangy roux over it and you bake it and then scatter grated cheddar cheese over the top while it’s still hot so it melts. She eats that, too.”
Janet grinned. “Looks like we need to have some recipe trading time.”
Alex checked, “Does showing someone ‘Naruto’ and then fixing them ramen count?”
Janet giggled at that. “I have to admit Hanna will eat anything if she’s hungry.” Then she frowned. “Part of me really appreciates that, and part of me would like to track down Mr. Heller and punch him in the mouth for treating a child like that.”
Alex knew Janet already knew Erik Heller was dead because of Marissa Weigler murdering him in Berlin last year. But she pretty much felt the same way when it came to how Hanna had been brought up.
They ended up talking about Hanna’s year in school as ‘the hot exchange student’ and how Charlie was really great boyfriend material even if he was just as snarky as Jack was. And then they talked about Janet’s friends on the base, and Alex’s friends back home, and how smart Sam Carter was. Alex even told Janet a little stuff about other-Sam’s adventures as a galaxy-traveling astrophysicist badguy-fighter, because other-Sam was pretty amazingly awesome, just like this Sam.
Then Hanna showed up, with Charlie O’Neill driving her home. Alex gave Hanna a big hug and gave Charlie a hug, too. They started chatting about school, when Grover and Cindy showed up with Grover wearing a turtleneck and jeans and sneaks, and then Jack and Willow showed up, too. Willow even had a picnic basket for bringing some food along.
Alex asked, “Is there blue jello in there?”
Charlie laughed really hard, while Jack pretended to pout.
Willow smiled. “Well, someone wanted to bring blue jello, but I decided an ice cream cake would be more fun.”
And Alex put it in Janet’s freezer and took a quick peek, using her TK to cut a little slice of the frosting away to look underneath, and then paste the frosting back down and smooth it over. Mmm. A thick layer of chocolate cake, a thick layer of chocolate chip ice cream, and probably chocolate ice cream for the frosting. Well, that was her best guess without tasting it. But it looked tera.
Cindy brought a green bean casserole with cream of mushroom soup for the sauce and crispy onions on top. It smelled great.
So Hanna and Charlie set the dining room table, and everybody served themselves in the kitchen and then ate and talked around the dining room table.
But only a few minutes into dinner, Charlie looked down at his smartphone and winced. He looked at Alex with big eyes. “Holy crap!”
Hanna calmly asked, “Evening news?” As Charlie nodded, Hanna explained, “Charlie checks the national and international news about four times a day to check on what his dad is getting up to. Or me. Or Alex.”
Willow bubbled, “There’s some great newsfeeds that focus on super-stuff, which mainly means Terawatt and Code Walshes. Once in a while, Batman, too.”
Charlie showed Hanna the screen of his phone and told the table, “So Terawatt stopped a town full of Orphans and a squadron of super-powered terrorists, and then pulled an ‘Iron Giant’ on a nuclear missile headed for Moscow.”
Alex winced in embarrassment. “It wasn’t really like that.”
“The hell it wasn’t,” insisted Jack. “She was f–… fracking awesome.”
Alex didn’t want to talk about it, so she said, “And maybe we’ve got a new superhero. She calls herself Solstice. Well, the Hindi word for solstice. Ayananta, or something like that.”
Willow complained, “Yeah, why do superheroes in comic books always have an English name even if they’re Chinese or Russian or African or whatever? That’s so ethnocentric!”
Jack smirked. “Whatever you say, dear.” Willow stuck her tongue out at him while Hanna and Charlie laughed into their hands.
Willow explained, “Jack showed me this TV show, and the wife is like a total B-I-T-C-H, and whenever the wife says something else mean or nasty or stupid or hateful, the husband just says ‘whatever you say dear’. So now it’s our codephrase for ‘I think you’re totally wrong but I’m not gonna call you on it’. And Jack uses it all the time.”
Janet firmly said, “Just as long as he doesn’t say it to me.”
Jack couldn’t resist. “Whatev–…” Willow clamped her hand over his mouth before he could get himself in a lot more trouble. That really cracked Charlie up. And Grover.
Grover ate all the regular food, but that made Alex realize why he was wearing a turtleneck. You could see all the food getting chewed up in his invisible mouth. A turtleneck meant you couldn’t see it going down his throat. Still that would be better than seeing it digesting in his stomach. Unless you were a medical researcher and you studied that kind of stuff.
Alex had three servings of everything. Especially the lasagna, which had ground Italian sausage and lots of ricotta cheese, and lots of mozzarella and parmesan cheese, too. Janet said she mixed some raw egg into the ricotta so it would be creamier and set up better when it got baked. Alex figured she’d try the green bean casserole on Shar some day, because Shar liked green beans more than some of the other vegetables they had for dinner.
Okay, she only had two servings of the ice cream cake, even though it was really great. But that was because Jack and Grover and Charlie and Hanna all had seconds, too, so there were no thirds left on the cake plate.
When Janet was ready to wash dishes, they all just moved into the kitchen and helped. Alex used her TK to wipe off plates in the sink and load the dishwasher. Jack and Charlie put away leftovers. Hanna put hand-wash things away as Janet washed and Cindy dried. Grover cleaned off the dining room table, while Willow cleaned off the counters. It hardly took any time at all to have everything all done. Then everybody sat in the living room and watched CNN coverage of the Khajuraho crisis and Terawatt. Alex mainly complained about the tourists and residents who didn’t have enough sense to run away when they were in a war zone with supervillains. Especially the tourists who stood there and filmed her fighting Fire Lady.
Janet just said, “No wonder you got those burns.”
Hanna sat up sharply. “You mean that’s not a sunburn?” She glared at Alex. “You didn’t tell me!”
“Umm, I really didn’t have much of a chance to.”
Jack muttered, “I’m just glad that’s not radiation burns.” Most of the room turned and stared at him. “What? You don’t think ICBMs with multiple re-entry vehicles just turn themselves off if you ask nicely, do you?”
Grover swore, “Damn! Alex, you’re major league! So I must be about single-A ball.”
Alex objected, “No! You were totally awesome in Korea!”
Jack glanced over at Charlie and said, “Yeah, you were like The Spy from TF2.”
Charlie and Grover snorted with laughter, while Willow frowned. “Jack, you’re not playing Team Fortress 2 at work, are you?”
Jack looked at her and put an arm around her shoulders. “Hey! I have to get some practice in if I want to keep up with my favorite Pyro.”
And that was when Alex found out that Jack and Willow had organized a Team Fortress 2 squad with Charlie and Grover and Hanna and a couple of other players. Hanna was The Heavy on their team. Alex was totally not surprised. Not even the part where Hanna talked smack to the other teams in real Russian.
Like she didn’t know whose idea that one was.
* * *
Jack and Willow eventually left, and Charlie stayed for another hour or so because he totally knew what Jack and Willow would be doing as soon as they got home if he wasn’t there. Charlie admitted unhappily, “I’m not exactly thrilled with old-people sex going on just down the hall, but Dad’s so damn happy these days. And it’s all my fault he doesn’t have Mom anymore. I mean, could things be any worse than that?”
Alex patted him on the hand and told him, “Umm, yeah. Things could be a lot worse. Terawatt’s gone to other universes, and there are places where you didn’t shoot someone else. You accidentally killed yourself.” He winced and Hanna gasped. “Your folks’ marriage fell apart and your dad never really got over losing you. So it could be a ton worse.”
Grover said, “That’s pretty creepy that you know stuff about Charlie and Jack from some other dimension. Is that how you found me?”
Alex admitted, “No, but it’s how I knew about Willow. And Riley Finn. And a few other people, including Maggie Walsh.”
Cindy said, “I bet a Willow from another universe would be really smart there, too, and really awesome. I hope they get married and have some kids, because I bet a Rosenberg-O’Neill baby would be the cutest thing this side of ever!”
Hanna grumbled, “And I bet that a Maggie Walsh in another universe would be just as bad as this one.”
Alex decided to spill. “Other-Willow is not only an amazing hacker, but her world has magic. Real magic. And she’s a self-taught mage, and one of the most powerful mages in the whole world. And her world’s Maggie Walsh made a Frankenstein’s monster out of human parts and robot parts and demon parts and it figured out how to make more things like itself, and it tried to kill a whole military base and a ton of demons at the same time so it could make an army of cyborg-human-demons. Willow was one of the people who stopped it. And there were way worse things in that universe.”
“Wow.”
“Cool.”
“Are you supposed to tell this story?” Janet checked.
Alex told her, “I thought it over. Everyone here has the clearance. And everyone here already knows Willow’s more than just the CEO of a software company. And everyone on the whole planet already knows Maggie Walsh is majorly creepy.”
Charlie added, “Willow’s twenty-five, and incredibly smart, and she remembers like everything, and she’s got reflexes you have to see to believe. And she can pick up Dad! Okay, I probably wasn’t supposed to see that part. I may not be as smart as she is, but you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to put those clues together. I did the math even before those Joe Frady news stories started coming out.”
Grover muttered, “No kidding. Everyone knows now. Even Mom knows. She goes through the celebrity gossip mags and bugs Cindy and me asking if the hot ones between twenty-five and thirty-one are Orphans. Like I’d tell her even if I knew.”
They chatted about the kind of SRI stuff that was unclassified enough that Cindy and Charlie knew about it just from hanging around, and after a while, Janet reminded people that they had school tomorrow. Hanna went outside with Charlie and was gone for about fifteen minutes, so Alex took Janet into the kitchen and helped with the stuff Janet wanted ready for the next morning.
There was a box of Cocoa Pebbles in the cupboard along with the healthy breakfast cereal stuff. Janet caught Alex’s glance and muttered, “I’ve ruled out Grover. And Cindy. And a couple of other people. I’m pretty sure now it’s Jack.”
Alex sort-of-fibbed, “Why would you think it’s Jack?”
Janet smiled slightly. “You mean, other than because it’s what Jack would do? Well, mainly because Willow is lousy at lying. Or should I say ‘of the lousy’?”
Alex tried to be casual. “Hanna’ll probably outgrow the ‘bad cereal’ stage. Mom says she used to eat stuff like Honeycomb and Cocoa Puffs, and now she can’t stand ’em.”
Janet glanced at the clock and said, “You’re getting better at the subterfuge, too. Were you just going to stall me until Hanna came back inside?”
Alex admitted, “Well, maybe. But I was really sort of interested in tomorrow’s breakfast. And maybe a snack.”
Janet laughed a little and got out the ice cream. Then the two of them made a breakfast casserole in a big 9"×13" pan while they ate ice cream, and they had the casserole in the oven before Janet finished her single serving of vanilla. Alex was looking forward to being able to scoop up a few squares of that casserole in the morning and have a big breakfast without a lot of morning prep time.
Janet added, “Oh, and be sure not to drink or eat anything artificially sweetened between now and tomorrow morning. We’re going to try out Willow’s thought experiment but with your preference. Two two-liter bottles of Diet Coke.” She frowned. “Tequila? I don’t know what gets into that woman sometimes.”
Alex defended her friend. “Well, maybe she just sort of forgets that her BFF isn’t the same age she is. And if I hung out with Robyn more, I’d probably have had too much tequila at least once, which is sort of how Robyn ended up with a mega-embarrassing tat on her butt.”
Janet snorted into her glass of water. “Most of us have that kind of story, sooner or later. Come to think of it, my story like that is before I got into the Academy, but you are not to tell Hanna that.”
Alex smiled a little. “I probably shouldn’t hear any more about it, because we have a small problem at home. And the small problem already picked Willow’s brain a couple times and Mom had to give her The Talk and The Other Talk. And when Mom gave me The Other Talk, she totally didn’t need to cover stuff like Skype-sex or some of the other stuff Willow was thinking about. Some of it grossed Shar out enough that she even worked hard on not reading minds. For almost a month, before she started slacking off again.”
Janet frowned a little. “Isn’t she a little young to be getting all this ‘mature content’ already?”
Alex shrugged. “Well, I think so. But a lot of her little friends are getting way too much mature content, just straight from the TV or movies or Netflix or parents or big siblings or whatever. When I asked her if Willow had been thinking about other girls, Shar said yeah, but she wasn’t weirded out by it, because her friend Toni has two mommies who kiss and hug a lot. So there’s a lot of stuff out there that nine-year-olds get exposed to, whether we like it or not.”
Janet checked, “And what’s she picking up from you?”
Alex blushed. “Well, Ray and I still haven’t gotten to third base, and he says he’s okay with that, so she says that about all she got from me is that kissing boys is totally great. I explained that kissing the right boy is totally great, and kissing the wrong boy can be pretty yuck.”
“Totally tera?”
Alex grinned. “Totally tera. Ray is the tera-est boyfriend ever.”
Hanna ran into the kitchen and slid into her chair. “No, Charlie’s the tera-est BF, and … Ooh! Ice cream!”
Alex didn’t say anything about Hanna having just about smeared all her lipstick off while kissing with Charlie, but she figured Janet had spotted it, too. Alex just made an effort not to smile, because she totally thought Hanna deserved a great boyfriend and all the boyfriend benefits, like getting fifteen solid minutes of smoochies.
Alex and Hanna went back to Hanna’s room after ice cream and getting the food out of the oven, even if they were going to need to cover the pan and put it in the fridge in an hour or so. Then they changed into pajamas and talked about boyfriends and how great they could be and how lame some guys were and how it was cruddy that some girls had totally jerky boyfriends.
Finally, Alex slipped out of the bedroom, used her TK to cover the pan with plastic wrap and stick it in the fridge, and then she went to sleep on Hanna’s trundle bed.
* * *
In the morning, Hanna woke Alex up because Alex forgot to set an alarm on her tPhone. Alex had to rush through a shower and hurry through three servings of the really tera breakfast casserole while her hair was still wet. But when you have TK, you can move air through your hair and dry it and even style it while you’re doing something else. Then Janet gave Alex a key to the house and Alex changed into her Terawatt uniform. As soon as Hanna left for school with Charlie in Charlie’s car, Alex went silvery and hid in Janet’s car as she drove over to the HWAAA offices. Then Alex snuck in through the HVAC system and came out in Sergeant Harriman’s office.
And Walter Harriman was totally casual about having a silvery blob appear in the office and turn into a superheroine. “Oh! Terawatt. The general said you’d be swinging by, and he has a conference call he’d like you to be on. Go on in.”
“Thank you, sergeant.”
She rapped on Jack’s door with a little TK and walked into his office as soon as he called out, “Come!”
Jack grinned at her and waved her toward the nice chair in front of his desk. “Hey, Tera, we’re going to have a call with Finn and Team Two and Team Four. Team Four managed to wrap up their op and arrange transport, so we got them down to Khajuraho just ahead of Team Two, and so they’re all helping out with rescue efforts and militia hijinks and busted nuclear missile trucks.”
“Sorry.”
He shook his head slightly. “Don’t be sorry. Trucks that just need new hydraulic fluid and maybe a new electrical system? Way easier to fix than if I’d been sabotaging them with C-4. They still had to round up another dozen terrorists, and all the usual less-than-fun that goes with war zones. And Lupo’s been making friends with Solstice. Seems someone has a huge girl-crush on a certain superheroine who’s ‘so awesome and tera and amazing’.”
Then he sat there in his chair and smirked while she blushed like crazy. Alex finally managed, “I thought she might like me when I saw she was wearing a Terawatt t-shirt under her TK uniform.”
He just smiled some more. “You made a good call. I would’ve been utterly suspicious when she gave us her last name. Okay, I was utterly suspicious.”
Alex admitted, “I was pretty untrusting, too. But the t-shirt kind of sold me on the whole ‘not with Khan’ thing.”
Jack nodded. “Yeah, he probably had standing orders that anybody caught wearing Tera-merch was to be drawn and quartered. And then fed to the sarlacc.”
Willow slipped into the room. “Sarlacc? You aren’t telling her about my Slave Leia outfit, are you?”
Alex squeaked, “He would never! I had no idea!”
“Oops?”
Jack slowly shook his head. “Leia, Leia, Leia, what are we gonna do with you? Next thing, you’re gonna tell me you were kissing your brother in movie one.”
“Hey, buster, it’s not my fault George Lucas didn’t plot ‘A New Hope’ out any farther than putting in sequel hooks!”
Jack just glanced over at Alex. “It’s a good thing we’re planning on an entire sewing-and-cosplay room downstairs. You should see the new sewing machine she bought. It looks like Singer went off and had a baby with whoever makes Stormtrooper armor.”
Willow stuck her tongue out at him. “It’s a serger. It’s a really nice Bernina serger that does embroidery and stitch designs and it’s programmable, too, so it’s super-useful.”
Jack teased her, “It’s a good thing Will has her own money, because that thing cost more than Charlie’s car. I think it cost more than my car.”
Willow insisted, “It cost less than half of what your car cost. And I got it at a ten percent discount from the manufacturer, so it only cost me $12,599. Plus VAT and shipping.”
Janet walked in with her medical bag and a tote bag. “General, is there a reason why your guards are overly suspicious about a couple of two-liter bottles of soda? Or is this another Colonel Wooldridge issue?”
Jack rolled his eyes. “Wooldridge is pushing base security again. I think he thinks the TSA has the right idea when it comes to keeping everybody down to three-ounce bottles. Walter tells me he’s got the MPs driving the non-coms over at the mess up the wall about their bulk food purchases. Given what we’re up against, I hardly think our biggest concern is getting attacked by suspect soda bottles.”
Then Willow put a plastic punchbowl on the desk over against the wall. The desk looked like it was just a white formica top sitting on a row of eight two-drawer file cabinets. She and Janet started pouring the Diet Coke into the punchbowl. She explained, “So Janet takes a blood sample now. You go silvery and pull the punchbowl and the Diet Coke into your morph. Then you hold it for an hour, and we’ll have the conference call in the middle so you don’t get too bored. Then you pour the coke back out and Janet takes another blood sample so we can see if any chemicals in the Diet Coke got into your bloodstream. If small molecules don’t go into your bloodstream, then we figure anything bigger, like macromolecules and viruses, won’t either.”
Jack said, “And then I’ve got four liters of ruined Diet Coke to pour down the sink.” He saw where Alex was looking, and he said, “Oh, yeah, the files. There’s no such thing as the paperless office in the military. And this is just the crap I have to keep on hand. Walter has enough paperwork to fill that warehouse at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’.”
Willow said sadly, “Making a truly paperless office takes a lot of work up front, and a lot of effort to change the way people do stuff. We were only able to do it at Red Tree after I designed a whole bunch of stuff for Mindi and Jerry so they weren’t writing paper notes and taking paper orders and collecting paper receipts. And then I had to take away all of Mindi’s post-it notes and notepapers and her typewriter and her printer and the funny notepad from her husband. She was pretty cranky about it for weeks. Jerry only stopped complaining when the customers he met with in person were totally impressed that we had a fully-computerized system and then they started asking if we could design one like that for them. That was when I had to start hiring other programmers, because I totally wasn’t interested in extending the on-line form entry system to a general business system. When we turned it into a web-based system and people found out, everybody and their brother wanted to either buy it or sue us so they could get it cheap. We sold it right away and let the big boys fight over it. Someone oughta check whether computer company lawyers are some sort of Wacky Maggie apocalyptical evil.”
By then, Alex had already let Janet take a hypodermic of blood from her arm. And it only took a few seconds to go silvery and pull the punchbowl into her morph. It didn’t even feel as weird as she was expecting. Then she just stayed silvery while Janet went and took her blood sample over to the base hospital for testing.
The conference call started about fifteen minutes later. Before the call, she just stayed silvery and talked with Willow and Jack about how to test whether GC-161 would do mega-bad stuff to Orphans like Riley and Jo. Jack wanted to know what the heck Danielle Atron was doing for The Collective if GC-161 was a toxin to Orphans. So Willow went off to run her own conference call while Jack and Terawatt talked to the folks in India.
Then the conference call was great. It was such a relief to hear from Riley that he was fine. He was all healed up already from the bruises he’d picked up, and he wasn’t mad at her for leaving him to maybe crash and get really hurt or worse. In fact, he sounded really pleased that she had done what he told her to, and really proud that she took out an ICBM without turning it into a nuclear contamination crisis.
And everyone else was doing SRI and HWAAA taskings. There were terrorists to round up and terrorist corpses to try and ID. There were Orphan corpses to try and ID, and Orphan bases to search through. There were people to rescue, and Red Cross workers to help, and vehicle-mounted missiles to get fixed and get back to the Indian Army.
Lieutenant Lupo said, “There’s also a huge backlash here over Khan Singh’s family’s political pull and India’s nuclear weapons program. Singh’s escape rocket was hidden inside a part of one of the local historic monuments, and it destroyed the temple when it blasted off. An awful lot of people are angry about that. And the army didn’t manage to stop all of the last dozen vehicle-launched missiles. Four of them were launched. Three got shot down or knocked out with self-destruct codes, but one detonated while it was still inside the national border, and the death toll from that one is going to be in the hundreds of thousands, and the number of seriously injured is going to be a lot higher.”
“Eww.” Alex didn’t bother to keep quiet. That was bad.
Jack said, “As long as it didn’t detonate over Pakistan, because the Pakistanis would definitely have retaliated, and they have maybe a hundred nukes of their own.”
Riley added, “And the U.N. people here are definitely pushing the General Assembly to censure Pakistan, because everyone’s certain the terrorists launched from one or two supposedly-secret terrorist bases there. And they used a stolen Indian Air Force cargo jet plus three Pakistani Air Force jets which were not officially listed as stolen. Yet. Lieutenant Marshall is trying to help the U.N. and state security groups ID the terrorists from DNA samples, because a lot of them are never going to be identifiable from pictures.”
Alex thought about some of the things she had fought over there, and she totally agreed on that one.