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Chapter 199 – Battle LinesLess than a minute earlier
Azure Crush hardly bothered with Bane’s creepy sidekick as she ran toward Poison Ivy. All right, the guy sent some kind of flying spraygun after her, so she snatched it out of the air, crushing its little airplane wings when she grabbed it, and then she hurled it at the creep hard enough to smash up his fancy-ass control panel.
No, she wanted Plant-bitch. Perfect red hair even if the jungle was about a jillion degrees and a hundred percent humidity. Perfect body she could show off in a leaf bathing suit. Az could let those go by, but that ‘I am so much better than you’ smirk? She was not letting that one go. No fucking way. Plant-bitch was going down.
Naturally, Plant-bitch didn’t want to just get the fuck beaten out of her by a bigger bitch. No, there was another creepy tree, and a bunch of writhing vines, and a couple of pod-things that Bats had warned her about.
All right, Bats had warned her about seventy jillion bullshit things on her way down to South America, and she couldn’t possibly remember even half of them. The guy was seriously obsessive-compulsive. If it hadn’t been for the intense O.C. thing, Az might have wondered if the guy was an Orphan, because the guy was probably even better looking than Mark Carlson under that costume.
So. Stomp that tree, smash those pods, rip up those vines, then punch the fuck out of that snotty green bitch. Piece of cake.
The tree reached out for her with three big fucking branches. She grabbed the biggest branch and ripped it right off the bastard. Then she used the branch to smack one of its other branches. It staggered back a little.
Great. She swung the branch like a sledgehammer and smashed both pod-things like bugs. Yellow goo splattered all over the ground. Plant-bitch screeched like someone just told her she wasn’t gonna be Prom Queen after all.
The tree tried to come up behind her, but it groaned and creaked with every ‘step’ so it wasn’t exactly stealthy. She hammered it with its own branch. It didn’t like getting smacked, but it kept coming at her on those big creepy roots.
Fuck that shit. She pulled another boulder out of the ground and gave the tree her best shot-put imitation. Kapow, right in the trunk about twenty feet up.
The tree wobbled a bit, but wasn’t gonna fall over, so she ran over and grabbed it by its writhing roots and heaved upward. The roots broke off in her hands, but the tree kept tipping farther back and farther back and … “Timber!” It even fell over on some of the stupid vines that were annoying her. She ripped a couple others in half, and kicked the last one off into the treetops.
Then she stomped her way over to Plant-bitch, who wasn’t looking so cocky any more. Nope, Plant-bitch was on her knees, sobbing into her hands over the leaves of that tree Az had just knocked over.
Az knew that Bats had told her not to waste time gloating over her wins, but this was just too good to skip. She stepped forward so she was going to loom over Plant-loser, and —
With a snap like a whip, something wrapped around her ankles, and she tripped. She landed face-first right in front of Plant-bitch.
“Mee-yow!” some snotty fuckwad purred from behind her.
Plant-bitch’s sobs turned into full-blown supervillain laughter, and when she dropped her hands, Az could see she hadn’t been crying at all. Plant-bitch exhaled right in Az’s face, and Az got a lung full of yellow dust or whatever.
She coughed, “Fuck you, bitch!” Everything began to spin, and Az couldn’t seem to get her hands under her to push herself up.
Plant-bitch chortled, “Sorry, you’re not my type.”
Az collapsed, her body refusing to do what she wanted. Everything started going dark on her.
The snotty voice meowed, “Well, that went purrrrrr-fectly. Now kitty wants to chase down a flying mouse.”
Everything went black.
* * *
Willow waited impatiently beside the heavy door. She was still stark naked and unarmed and trapped in a locked room. With a dead body that a sicko psycho had made up like her before he tortured some poor girl to death. That just made her wonder how many rapes and maybe murders she and her fellow hackers had missed when they had been searching for evidence to get William Robert Halsey locked up for stupid amounts of time.
She didn’t like being stark naked — well, not like this — but at least she was out of that creepy little birdcage thing. Once she had busted her forearms loose, she had been able to turn around in the thing and open the door in the back half of the thing. It wasn’t even locked, since she was supposed to be helpless. The forearm things were locked, though, so she still had them on her arms.
But she was still locked in a torture dungeon, and nobody with a key was her buddy. In fact, she was pretty sure the only three people likely to have keys were a psychotic serial killer with a Rosenberg-paraphilia, a serial killer named Maggie Walsh, and someone she hated even more than serial killers.
The key rattled in the lock. Willow held her breath and tried not to move.
Cordelia stepped in and locked the door behind her. With a smirk, she said, “So, Willow, ready to be a cooperative little girl, or do I need to let a serial killer work on you for a couple hours unt–… Fuck.”
Cordelia had just spotted the cage was empty. Willow slid up behind her and punched her as hard as she could in the kidney. Cordelia gasped in pain and tumbled onto her face.
But Cordelia turned her fall into a graceful roll, and she popped back up on her feet. “Sneaky. Very sneaky. But I’ve been working out for years while you’ve just been sitting at a computer d–…”
Willow kicked her. Jack always advocated the surprise attack. And striking in the middle of the evil monologue was a good starting point. And fighting dirty was the only way to fight. That was why Willow kicked her in the knee.
Cordelia screamed in pain but still launched a karate strike at Willow’s neck.
Willow snapped her arm up and blocked the strike with her forearm. Her forearm that was still encased in a steel bracer. Willow felt the bones in Cordelia’s hand break even through the metal. The look of sheer agony on that face made the whole birdcage-prison thing all worthwhile.
Next lesson from the Jack O’Neill School of Fighting? Don’t let ’em off the hook just because you got that one really great shot in. Willow kicked Cordelia right in the crotch and then immediately punched her in the solar plexus.
Cordelia was in a lot of pain, but she was still mostly vertical, and Willow had no way of knowing if Cordelia had a knife or a gun in her expensive purse. Or an alarm button. So she didn’t stop. She brought her left arm up hard, and her bracer met Cordelia’s perfect nose with a nasty crunch. Then she snapped up her right arm in a backhand swing and caught Queen C across the side of the head with her right bracer, dropping her in a heap.
Willow kicked the purse away. She caught her breath as she waited to see if Cordelia was going to try and get back up. She looked over at the birdcage and got a nasty idea. She told her childhood tormentor’s unconscious form, “Hey, it’s nothing personal. It’s just a business decision.”
* * *
Jo Lupo walked down the underground corridor with the flyboy and the lightning guy right behind her. It looked like there might be a lot of underground area on this base, and that bank-vault door to get in here looked like Cheyenne Mountain’s little brother. The regular door at the end of the corridor had two armed guards standing in front of it. That automatically made it a high-value target.
She walked up to the guards, and the one on the right snapped, “Weapons?”
She handed him her machine gun and shrugged off the backpack that fed the ammo belt to the weapon. She said, “Sure. Just don’t go playing with it. We’re gonna need every round we’ve got when Terawatt starts kicking your asses.”
She handed over her sidearm, too. “Here, you’ll want this.” She even slid her combat knife out of its sheath and handed it over hilt-first. “And this baby. Don’t damage her.”
Flyboy and lightning guy took off back down the hall as the left-hand guard opened the door for her and escorted her in.
She stepped into what was obviously a security command office. There were half a dozen Orphans running the ‘war room’ for the whole tepui. There were computer stations all around the room. There were huge computer screens showing all kinds of graphics. There was a big, solid, electronic map table in the middle of the room that held a non-scale model of the tepui and its surroundings, with model buildings and anti-missile systems, along with little red symbols that had to be the SRI people. It looked like the Batman’s supers were kicking the living shit out of the ground forces.
There was a woman with long blonde hair who was wearing a retro-styled business suit with a skirt instead of the military outfits of the people around her. But the woman was obviously in charge, and was pointing out various features of the ongoing battles and giving the orders.
The guard cleared his throat carefully. “Dr. Trent? Lieutenant Lupo is here for debriefing.”
The woman looked over and smiled. “Call me Jill. Can I call you Jo instead of Lieutenant Lupo? It’ll save time in the long run.”
Jo shrugged. “Sure. Not a problem. It’s not like I’m gonna be a member of the U.S. Armed Forces after this.”
Dr. Trent nodded. “That’s right. Now what can you tell me about the ground forces surrounding our little tepui? They’re far more effective than what Eddings thought they could be.”
* * *
Hanna lay helplessly on her back. She could look around, and she could breathe. That was about all she could manage until Walsh’s device was disabled.
Maggie Walsh softly stroked her hair. “Oh, Hanna, I’ve waited such a long time to see you again. You know, you’re my greatest creation. I’m so proud of you.”
The smile on Maggie’s face made the hair on the back of Hanna’s neck stand up. She looked at Walsh’s white-blonde hair and strong cheekbones and still-attractive face, and she knew. She knew how you could engineer perfect cheekbones and Nordic-blonde hair into a fetus.
Walsh smiled. “I can see it in your eyes, baby. But don’t worry, you won’t have to call me ‘mom’ until you want to. I’m so sorry that stupid Weigler woman over-reacted and I lost you, and I lost all your siblings to her. We could have been a family. Us, and my Midwich children, and my father. But I can still teach you everything I know, so you can work with me to create some ‘cousins’ and then you can have children of your own when you’re ready.”
Hanna had heard about people who were so frightened that they prayed to be saved. She had thought those people were cowards and idiots. She was re-thinking that really hard.
* * *
Alex used a smidgen of her TK to re-direct the grenades. Danielle really didn’t like having the grenades curve and explode on the ceiling over her head.
Alex really wanted to go silvery, but she didn’t think every anti-Alex weapon in the room was wrecked. If she was Maggie Walsh, she would have at least one hidden in a wall or the ceiling to aim at her when Alex couldn’t see it coming. Or maybe to aim at whoever won this battle. So she stayed normal.
She just used her shields like big guide parries, forming two walls that joined in front of her and made a big wedge with a really acute angle so even stuff with a lot of kinetic energy could get re-directed off to her sides.
The grenades took out most of the ceiling, and shrapnel went everywhere. That gave Alex the chance to put her backup-backup plan into play. She couldn’t get through Danielle’s TK to clamp down on some carotids or anything like that, and she couldn’t use the stuff she got from her dad as long as Danielle was sealed up in that power armor. But this time, Alex had a Plan C for this situation.
And she was totally not calling it a ‘sitch’.
The ceiling in the middle of the room collapsed, and the floor overhead poured into the room, dropping lab tables and refrigerators and heavy-duty chem lab equipment all over the place. Danielle swatted an entire refrigerator out of the air, so Alex knew that power armor was even stronger than it looked. It wasn’t ‘Knights of the Round Table’ strong. It was ‘Iron Man’ strong.
If Plan C didn’t work, Alex was going to start worrying. She didn’t have a lot of confidence in her Plan D or Plan E.
Danielle stopped firing grenades and used her power armor to throw big chunks of falling floor out of her way. The big chunk that came flying Alex’s way got a tiny TK push so Alex only had to zip a couple of feet to her right to make it miss her completely.
And Alex felt it as her tiny cutting wheel managed to slice a small cut in a seam of that power armor. The small plastic squeeze bottle she had snitched out of her mom’s cake decorating stuff was ready to go. Alex had already snuck it behind Danielle with the cutting wheel while Danielle was busy not being squished by a falling ceiling.
Alex pressed the tip of the bottle against the cut-through seam and squirted liquid down Danielle’s back.
Danielle Atron felt the splash of liquid. She laughed nastily. “You stupid cow, did you really think antidote would work on me anymore?”
Terawatt coldly said, “No, but that’s not antidote.”
Danielle suddenly started worrying again. Could Terawatt have done something intelligent? “What did you do?”
Terawatt didn’t gloat or even smile. She gave a stony look and said, “It’s GC-Divide.”
GC-Divide? Danielle snapped, “Idiot, that only works on protoplasmic lifeforms.”
Terawatt gave her a look of ruthless determination. “And … us.”
Danielle was about to rebut a stupid statement like that, but she suddenly felt a terrible burning sensation down the middle of her body. She gasped in horror as she realized that if she divided while trapped inside the confines of this armor, she would be crushed into paste. She screamed.
Alex watched as Danielle started to divide. It looked a lot more disturbing than she remembered it being when she was the one doing the splitting.
The suit of armor was really strong, but it wasn’t as tough as Danielle’s TK. The metal and plastic of the power armor rippled and strained, and then it was telekinetically ripped into a thousand chunks that flew outward like slow grenade fragments. Alex just put another wedge of two angled TK screens in front of her and diverted the frags that would have hit her.
And there were two Danielles, both in spandex armor-operator suits. Alex idly wondered if the excess mass for the new Danielle came from the parts of the power armor that weren’t currently embedded in the walls and floor and ceiling.
One Danielle sneered, “You fool! You couldn’t defeat one Danielle Atron, and now you’ll face two of us!”
Alex calmly told her, “There’s something else you don’t know about GC-Divide.”
Danielle glared at the smug bitch. “Something I don’t know about GC-Divide? Hah! We will crush you!”
She looked over and didn’t see agreement in her copy’s face. She saw stark, utter horror. And then she saw a telekinetically-supported fist coming right for her face. She went silvery just in the nick of time. She was slammed across the room to hit the wall so hard she left a massive dent in the supposedly-sturdy walls. She would have been a smear if she had stayed normal.
She hurled a lightning bolt, but her doppelganger hurled one back at her at the same time. The bolts hit in mid-air and exploded, wrecking what was left of the ceiling.
Terawatt just stood there, watching the show. The bitch coldly stated, “It splits you into good and evil sides, like a Robert Louis Stevenson story.”
Danielle flew for the grenade launcher on the wall and fired it by hand, only to realize that her twin was doing the exact same thing. She tried to block the grenade coming right at her, but the explosion hammered against her TK shield, sending a searing pain through her frontal and parietal lobes.
Terawatt just pointed out, “And since you’re evil, I assumed your split would be the good side, and she would want to stop you.” Then the bitch just jetted up through the hole in the ceiling and left her to fight … herself.
Danielle let her twin have it. She hit the bitch hard enough to punch her and her grenade launcher through the wall into an engineering lab.
Unfortunately, her twin was just as smart as she was. The bitch stayed silvery and hurled a massive dewar at her. Danielle threw a TK shield up to stop it. But when the dewar hit her shield and her twin tossed in a massive lightning bolt, Danielle realized it was a dewar of liquid oxygen.
The explosion took down the wall. And the ceiling. And the labs overhead. And set off a series of secondary explosions somewhere around the second floor.
Son of a bitch, there was a munitions research lab up there.
She cast the strongest shield she could, but still the next explosion smashed her silver form against the floor and nearly knocked her out.
* * *
Billy Bob Halsey hurried down to his private dungeon. He’d been stuck doing shit for one of the local honchos, and he didn’t like taking orders from bitches. Even if he kept his mouth shut around Walsh, because that was a bitch who was fucking scary.
He quickly unlocked the door and stared in fury. Someone had already been dishing it out to Rosenberg, and he’d been promised she’d be all his! Whoever it was, they’d hacked off her gorgeous red hair that gave him a boner just thinking about it, and there was blood all over her sexy face, and she was crammed upside down in his personal torment cage so he was looking at her ass and not seeing much of her face. He angrily strode forward …
Wait a minute. Had Rosenberg gotten a titjob? He was sure she wasn’t that well stacked. And someone had busted one of his spotlights, because there were only three …
He heard the swish of something whistling through the air behind his head, and there was a brief explosion of pain before everything went black.
Willow dropped the spotlight pole. On Halsey’s head. She had been planning on escaping as soon as she had Cordelia all arranged in the birdcage thing, but Halsey had decided to show up a little too early.
On the upside, you needed a key to get into the room and also out of the room, and now she could get Halsey’s keys, too. Cordelia and P$ychon4ut. A match made in … Well, not heaven but maybe the seventh circle of Dante’s Inferno.
She checked that Halsey was really unconscious, and then she frisked him for his keys. She also found a really nasty knife in a sheath. She took that, too. She already had Cordelia’s keys. And Cordelia’s clothes. She just hadn’t had time to get fully dressed yet. Cordelia’s panties weren’t that awful a fit, but the bra was about two cup sizes too big for Willow-boobage. Not that Jack ever complained, but still, sometimes Willow wished she were better endowed.
So Willow had just padded out Cordelia’s bra, so the blouse fit. If the blouse fit, she was pretty sure the blazer would fit, even with the metal bracers still on her forearms. Cordelia was two inches taller as well, so Willow had to tug the waist of the skirt up a little so the hem of the skirt looked more or less right. And then the high heels. Willow had to stuff a little foam rubber in the toes and heels of the high heels because someone had big feet that were maybe a size larger than Willow’s feet.
She pulled the blazer on and adjusted it as much as she could, given she didn’t really have Cordelia’s exact shape the blazer was tailored for. She pinned up her hair, hoping she could make it look like stylish hair was supposed to look. Then she strapped P$ychon4ut’s knife to her thigh under the skirt but with the hilt pointing down so she could reach down and grab it in an emergency.
She stepped over to the spotlights so she could use Cordelia’s little compact and its mirror. She needed a little lipstick and mascara from Cordelia’s purse so she looked more like someone wearing this outfit ought to. A big, concealing hat would have been handy about now, but Cordelia Chase was too stylish for that.
Willow didn’t think she’d be able to pass herself off as one of the locals for more than a few seconds, but she still had those bracers on her forearms where they weren’t going to show inside the blazer, and they were really effective weapons. Plus the knife. Too bad Cordelia hadn’t been carrying a gun. Jack had made sure Willow knew how to fire revolvers and automatics, and a ranged weapon wouldn’t be amiss right about now.
She locked the door behind her and went looking for Jack. Or a computer she could break into that would let her loose in The Collective’s intranet. She had no doubt that P$ychon4ut would have inserted plenty of backdoors for himself, and she had studied his code enough that she knew all his standard techniques and a dozen of his favorite passwords. She figured if she could get into their intranet, she could use one of his backdoors to take over the entire system in a matter of minutes.
She tried to walk down the hall like she belonged there. It would have been easier in shoes that had lower heels or that fit better. But she’d practiced walking in high heels enough just because of Jack’s very exploitable weakness for her legs and ass. She was okay in these heels. Not Jessica Rabbit good in heels, but okay.
Two guards came hurrying her way, and she pretended she wasn’t worried. She even took the compact out of her purse and pretended to check her makeup, while really screening part of her face for a couple seconds.
The guards ran past her, although one glanced behind him to check out her backside before he hurried on toward whatever guards hurried toward. She hoped it was some drastic crisis that would draw the whole secret lair away from wherever they had Jack.
Then something rocked the building like an earthquake, and she heard the sound of an explosion as she fell over.
That couldn’t be of the good.
* * *
Jo pretended not to pay any attention as the guard slipped back out of the room to take up his usual station. She was still dealing with Trent, and Trent had five underlings who were all armed. None of them looked like they wanted to keep her around once she was fully debriefed.
She wrapped up with a little detail she figured they didn’t have yet. “And they pulled in this new superhero. Ultraman. Pretty fast flight, but not in Terawatt’s league. Super-strength. And real super-speed. Fastest runner I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of weirdness working for O’Neill and his boys. You may be able to stop someone like Azure Crush, but I doubt you’ve got anyone downstairs who can stop him.”
Dr. Trent made a couple of notes on a tablet computer that was almost certainly hooked into the local intranets. She glanced up at Jo. “And do you know the identity of Terawatt?”
“Hell, yeah. And I’m not telling until I get all the concessions I requested.”
Trent just looked at her maps and her monitors. “That will be useless in a matter of minutes, when I take her down. I had high hopes that Danielle Atron would be able to defeat Terawatt, but it looks as if Terawatt has found a way to get Atron to self-destruct. Extremely ingenious.”
“I’ve been saying she’s more dangerous than she looks.”
Trent nodded slightly. “That was why Dr. Walsh directed me to come up with plans to take out either one of them. We have an anti-Terawatt energy weapon.”
Jo shrugged. “Yeah, I heard about it. She got blasted with one in the Congo. It didn’t take her out.”
Trent disagreed. “That was a man-portable, ruggedized field weapon. We have several much larger weapons in place. I have three different scenarios that should force her to switch to her fluid state, and then we’ll target her. It’s elementary.”
Jo objected, “Yeah, that’s what you pricks think every single fucking time, and she’s still kicking the holy shit out of you.” But she was starting to worry. She carefully balanced on one leg, bringing her other foot up until her heel touched her butt. She casually slid one hand behind her.
Trent continued, “Oh, I think rather a lot more than that. I think that Walsh has Action Girl secured. I think that Klar must have been on the chopper you rode in on. And hence I think you’ve been O’Neill’s double agent since day one.” She pulled out a .45 and pointed it at Jo’s face.
* * *
Klar tried not to flinch as another explosion went off in the end building. After all, he was using the explosions. He was depending on the explosions. Every time there was another bang, or the ground under the courtyard trembled, or one of the buildings shook, he took out another set of the security cameras. He only had to take down two more cameras, and there would be nothing left that was covering the courtyard or garden area, or even any of the outside cameras at any of the entrance doors.
And there was a lot of stuff going on. The end building was blasting itself into pieces with big bangs going off in the middle of it. The building next to that was on fire, and since one of the big anti-missile systems was sited on top of it, that was likely to be another huge boom pretty soon. A couple of squads of Orphans were using firehoses to keep the burning building from setting the next building on fire. Klar didn’t know where the water source was, but there was a well or massive water tanks or an underground lake — or something — that the hoses were leading off to, and it looked to him like it was underground. He had just mucked with the controls for one of the pumps that were moving the water, and that had really messed things up for the fire-department Orphans.
So everyone was running around trying to save the compound, or trying to avoid getting blown up, or running for cover, or trying to stop Terawatt. No one was watching the dead SRI guy in the middle of the courtyard.
Klar ran for the last cameras, and got there just as another boom erupted from the far building. He smashed both cameras with a rock, and the whole courtyard was unsupervised.
He quietly slipped over and whispered, “Courtyard’s clear and I took down all the cameras that could see you.”
Riley lifted his head, took a quick survey of the area, and whispered, “Nice work.” He stood up and groaned in pain. Then he peeled off the plastic bag of B negative blood that was stuck to his lower back.
Klar took the antiseptic wipes that Riley pulled out of a front pocket, and he wiped up as much of the blood as he could. They didn’t want to leave a track showing where they were going. Then Riley reached back and checked the hole Jo had sliced when she had pretended to murder him.
Klar quietly checked, “You okay?”
Riley nodded. “It’s already partly healed up. Still hurts, but I can maneuver.”
Klar just nodded. It was a good thing Riley still had that ridiculous healing rate, courtesy of the Davenport op. Still, if Riley was saying it hurt, then it was probably agonizing.
Riley smiled. “Jo really sold the con to the rubes. She did a huge arm-twist to disembowel me, and everything.”
Klar could see there was just a single horizontal slice in the small of Riley’s back. So he could tell that the lieutenant’s ‘huge arm-twist’ had been a fake, and she hadn’t really turned that knife and sliced Riley’s kidney and bowels into confetti.
He told Riley, “I used the steel bar and the hypodermic syringe you left on the back seat. Eddings won’t be waking up for hours.”
Riley nodded. “Good. We may need that chopper to get out of here on short notice.”
Klar didn’t say anything about that, but he knew the general could fly a helicopter, along with fighter jets and other stuff. And Riley had shown that he could fly a helicopter if he needed to. And Jo had gotten ’emergency pilot’ lessons from Sam Carter. But if it came down to dorky Grover Dunn Jr. needing to fly anyone off this tepui, they were screwed.
He absolutely needed more training in a few dozen different things.
Riley checked his weapons and moved out. “We’ve got to make sure every anti-missile and anti-air battery is down. There’s one up on that roof, and two more, most likely around the tepui perimeter.”
Klar muttered, “I don’t know how we’re gonna do that if the other batteries are way out past the wall, because I got a glimpse of what’s out there and it’s ‘The Valley of Gwangi’.”
Riley just stared at him for a second. Klar added, “Sorry. Too much time hanging with Jack and Charlie. Walsh made herself a freaking dinosaur ecology. You may be tough, but I don’t think you can fight a T. rex.”
Riley checked his watch and said, “We should be getting reinforcements on that front any second now. While I was playing ‘dead guy’, Lupo managed to get all the details on all the powers of these Orphans, and also the number of still-functional anti-missile batteries. And she did it without tipping anyone off.”
Klar watched as Riley carefully gave all the details out over his comms. Then Riley told him, “Let’s move out. You’re on point. We need to make sure that anti-missile system up there is really out of commission. The general will be thrilled that I listened to him about carrying more C-4 on ops.”
* * *
Ayananta was flying in at a steep angle. She was following the directions from the GPS system on her forearm, so she was coming in directly between the sun and the compound on top of the odd mountain. As she flew, she was projecting her sun-colored beams in front of her so she was invisible to the anti-missile defenses as well as any Orphans looking her way. Perhaps.
That was certainly the theory that the major who was a physicist had told her. But she was not as confident about it as the major was.
She listened to the message from the colonel. Three more large anti-missile/anti-aircraft batteries on the mountain, one of which was in the Collective’s compound, and possibly two more still active down around its base. And the colonel thought the other two large systems would be roughly ninety degrees on either side from the Collective compound.
Those two batteries were her primary target. If she found fog generators along the way, she could take them out if it was convenient, but they were not her top priority. And once she had the main batteries down, she was to dive down to the base of the mountain and blast any emplacements that had not been announced as disabled over the comms.
The mountain was topped with a thick jungle buried in a massive fogbank, but as she got close, she could still make out the fifteen-meter tower within a hundred meters of the closest edge. Atop the tower were trucks loaded with missiles, and there was a small building no bigger than her parents’ living room.
She remembered about the trucks near Khajuraho. She swooped down and blasted each of the trucks, knocking one over and pushing the other two back far enough that they slid off the tower and fell to the jungle floor.
“S to Alphabet. First new battery down.”
She dived into the fog as she flew toward the opposite side of the flat mountaintop. She found a big fog generator just on the other side of the missile battery, and she hammered it with her sun-blasts. There must have been a big water pump inside it, because it stopped pumping out fog and started spraying a massive squirt of water that went almost straight up before splattering over one side of the wreckage.
She dodged off to the side to avoid getting splattered, and she almost crashed into a big boulder.
A big boulder with fangs.
She shrieked as a massive Tyrannosaurus rex loomed out of the fog and tried to snatch her out of the air with the biggest jaws she had ever seen in her life.
She jetted straight up. But as soon as she flew up out of the fog, a lightning blast seared past her. She nearly screamed again.
She whirled around as she dodged, and it was a really handsome man with sparks crackling off of his hands. She was under attack by an Orphan with superpowers!
He hurled two more lightning blasts at her. The first one missed. She still ducked downward away from it. The second blast caught her right in the chest, and she fell out of the sky.