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Chapter 200 – Battle RoyalAyananta gasped at the pain of that lightning blast. If it had hit her somewhere other than her TK uniform, it probably would have killed her. She still didn’t manage to catch herself until she was within twenty feet of the heavy jungle brush. Unfortunately, the dinosaur spotted her and lumbered toward her, looking for an easy meal.
She darted upward well out of its reach, and it roared at her. Uh-oh.
Seconds later, a couple of blasts of lightning seared through the air overhead as the Orphan tried to blast her again. She instinctively ducked, even if none of the jolts came within thirty feet of her.
She darted off to the side, and the dinosaur came after her. She glanced up to see if she could spot that Orphan, and then she blasted the dinosaur in the face as hard as she could. Her sun-colored bolts caught the Tyrannosaurus in the face and rocked it backward. Its massive head got knocked to the side, so she blasted it in the side of the head and knocked it over. It fell on its side with a loud crash.
It roared angrily as it struggled to its feet, and the Orphan came rocketing in at her. She figured the man couldn’t have missed all the noise the dinosaur was making. She didn’t know what to do. She flew backward and almost flew into the big jet of water still shooting up from the broken fog-generator pump.
Oh. Right. Electricity and water. She knew what she needed to do.
She detoured around the jet of water and let the Orphan fly downward at her. The dinosaur was on its feet and moving at her, too. She was more frightened by the dinosaur, but she was a lot more worried about the Orphan’s electrical powers. She kept backing up and backing up, like she was too scared to know what to do.
The Orphan threw two bolts of lightning at her. Or, at least, in her general direction. His aim was not very good. The lightning seemed to have a mind of its own. One bolt hit a tall tree, and the other one zigzagged down to hit the damaged pump.
When the Orphan finally flew down and closed in on her, she acted. She blasted him as hard as she could with her sun-blasts, and she managed to knock him backward right into the jet of water.
And nothing happened.
She was expecting him to short out, like dropping a live wire in a puddle. All that happened was his hair got messed up and wet. He flew backward several meters, and he snorted water out of his nose. Then he hurled another lightning bolt at her.
It darted over to the jet of water instead of going where the Orphan wanted.
Oh! Right! She had been so sure his power would be exactly like Terawatt’s that it had not even occurred to her that real lightning didn’t go where you pointed, it went where it could get to the ground the easiest. As long as she kept that big jet of water between her and him, his lightning blasts would keep diverting over to the water pump.
She blasted him right in the face and moved closer, scooting to the side to keep the water jet between them. He nearly tipped over backward, but he quickly righted himself.
And she blasted him in the face again. He did tilt backward, but he didn’t fall over. It was just like he was lying on his back on an invisible support. With his arms waving a little as he fought to regain control, and his legs kicking by accident.
His legs were kicking, and they were not together. She felt guilty about it, but she blasted him right in the groin. He folded up on himself, his face coming back up. So she blasted him as hard as she could, right in the jaw.
He went limp and fell toward the ground. He didn’t fall all the way to the tall grass before the Tyrannosaurus snatched him out of the air in one massive bite.
She darted up higher, struggling not to be sick, and she rushed forward on her task.
* * *
Jo stared at Dr. Trent and the handgun. She had been expecting something like that. Given what she had been trying to pull off for months, she would have been stupid to think no one would ever wise up.
But that was also why she was standing on one leg and holding her other leg so her foot was pressing against her butt. She was reaching for one of her holdouts that she hadn’t handed over to the guards. If she had been the one on guard duty, she would have done a proper search.
Jo carefully looked Dr. Trent in the eye. Jill stared back. But that meant Jill wasn’t looking down at Jo’s hand at table level.
Serious tactical error. Jo carefully tilted her holdout gun and shot Trent in the face.
Trent went down, but her handgun still went off. The bullet smashed into Jo’s arm like the bitch had hit her with a hammer.
So she had a bullet hole in her left arm, no time to assess how serious the damage was, and five armed opponents to deal with. She was already moving. She slid over the map table and took out the big guy on that side who was yanking his sidearm off his hip.
The guys who had been working at consoles behind her got off a couple of shots each, but she was already on the other side of the table and protected by its bulk. A nice solid metal table with metal sides that went down to the floor to cover up all the wiring and control systems. Downsides? They were screened by the bulk of the table, too. She couldn’t get off a shot without making herself an easy target. One of them could move around the table and flank her. She only had two shots left in her holdout gun. There were two other threats off to her sides who were going to be in the game in less than a second. And she couldn’t make her left arm work.
She set her holdout gun down on Trent’s body and shoved her hand down into her crotch. The crotch was another excellent place to hide holdouts, and this one was a mother. It was a plastic container shaped a lot like a guy’s protective cup, so it fit in her crotch and wasn’t too uncomfortable to wear. And it had a water balloon squeezed into it. Only it wasn’t water.
She chucked it over the table and it hit the ceiling over the heads of the first two threats. She scrambled for Trent’s .45 auto.
The balloon full of GC-161 burst when it hit the ceiling, and it splattered the stuff all over the two threats on that side of the room. They started screaming before Jo managed to get all the way to the .45. It worked out perfectly, because there was an Orphan standing there with a combat shotgun, just waiting for Jo to stick her head out, and the Orphan looked off to the side at the carnage just before Jo came into view.
Jo put her last two rounds from her holdout gun into the Orphan with the shotgun, and the guy pulled the trigger. The shotgun wasn’t aimed right at her anymore, thanks to the screaming people on the other side of the room, but shot went all over the fucking place. She was sure two pellets hit her, one in the shoulder and one in the scalp. She probably picked up a couple more hits, but she had too much other pain going on to spot them.
She got her hand on the .45 just as she heard the crunch of heavy feet demolishing the mock-up of the terrain on the map table. That meant the last Orphan was about to pop into view above her and fill her full of holes or else go for the full-body contact approach.
She rolled over onto her back, trying to ignore the intense pain in her left arm, and she aimed the .45 one-handed.
The last threat loomed over the edge and fell, even as he was trying to make his hands work enough to fire a Mini-Uzi. But his hands were already silvery and were turning into goo. Jo fired two rounds into the guy’s head, but his head was already silvery, too, and the rounds acted like she was shooting into a bowl of jello. The guy sagged disturbingly and collapsed off the table.
Jo rolled to the left, trying not to scream in pain as she rolled over her injured arm, and the guy splatted on the floor next to her. He turned into silvery goo and oozed slowly out of his clothing.
Jo looked at the guy as he disintegrated into silvery sludge, and she tried not to shudder. She’d known the results would be nasty. She was just glad Alex’s dad was a much better biochemist than he was a judge of character. He’d been working on an antidote to protect the SRI Orphans from GC-161 exposure ever since Alex figured out what straight GC-161 could do to the Orphan genome, and he’d sent them the beta-test version of the stuff just a couple of weeks ago.
She pulled the Mini-Uzi out of the silvery goo. Then she forced herself to her feet. She emptied the submachine gun into the control systems. Then she took the riot shotgun and emptied its rounds into the other consoles.
Once she was done with her task, she stopped to check herself. She had a scalp wound that was bleeding like a stuck pig down the left side of her head. The shot that hit her shoulder was inside her somewhere, but she couldn’t tell where. It might be harmless, or it might have torn through a major artery so she was bleeding to death that very second. Or anything in between. She couldn’t tell.
Her left arm was the big problem. She had a hole right through her biceps that hadn’t fractured the bone but had probably come pretty fucking close to clipping it. She yanked open her tiny medical kit.
“Nope, still no Doug Ross in here.” She squeezed some of the coagulant crap out of a little tube and smeared it on her scalp wound and around both holes in her arm. She didn’t have a lot of hope it would really stop all that bleeding, but that was the best she could do. She squirted the tube of antibiotic onto two thick pads and pressed one on each side of her biceps. Fuck! That really hurt! Then she used all the medical tape in the kit to tape the pads tightly to her arm. It hurt like a bitch, but she couldn’t afford to lose much more blood when she was still fighting in a battle zone.
Judging by the rumbling explosion she felt through her feet, someone was hard at work turning the place into a much bigger war zone, and she was betting it was Terawatt.
She clicked her comms. “Alphabet, this is L. Central security is down. I require medical help as soon as is reasonable. Now moving to rejoin F.”
Except she had to get past the two guards on the other side of that door, and she hadn’t been all that quiet so far. They had to be waiting for her with weapons at the ready. And she didn’t have any more GC-161.
She retrieved Trent’s automatic, checked the magazine to make sure she had enough ammo for the next maneuver, and moved over to the exit door. She moved to the wall on the handle side of the door. Then she turned the knob and flung the door open, while moving a yard further from the opening in case the guards not only perforated the door but also everything around the doorframe.
Nothing. Not even the sound of a gun being cocked, or a whispered instruction.
She dived through the doorway at as sharp an angle as she could manage without clipping her bad arm on the doorframe, and she executed a somersault to get into position to take down both guards before they could target her. It hurt like a motherfucker, but it was better than getting shot. Some more.
Both guards were dead on the floor.
And Clare Tobias was standing there looking smug. “What, Lupo? You thought you were the only person on earth who could be a double agent?” Jo grimaced, and Clare spotted it. “Yeah. When the NID higher-ups told Colonel Maybourne to set up Operation Tera-Double, he had me go straight to the President’s people, because the colonel really didn’t trust the SRI or Terawatt or your buddy O’Neill, but he sure didn’t trust any of the people who might be covertly running the NID or setting the NID up on that one. I’ve been operating under orders from the NSC the whole time.”
Jo re-armed herself with her sidearm and her M240G and its backpack, which wasn’t all that easy to get set up right without a little help, especially with one bad arm. And she made sure she got her combat knife back. She really liked that knife, and she really wished she knew who in the SRI kept telling people she had named it. What was she, Jack the Ripper? She just liked a well-made, effective knife. She suspected Bailey was the rumormonger, mainly because O’Neill wasn’t on her base. She could absolutely see Jack O’Neill claiming that kind of crap if he was her team leader.
She growled at Tobias, “Yeah. Right. That was why you tried to kill a room full of generals and the CinC, and then targeted an entire Silicon Valley conference.”
Tobias just rolled her eyes. “Grow up. If O’Neill and then that Mack kid hadn’t rumbled me, my NSC handler had a backup in place both times who would’ve stepped in and stopped me ‘just in the nick of time’. Sure I killed a couple of people. Goes with the territory. Getting to this base has been my assignment all along, and I’ve done what I had to do to get here. And you’ve got more problems, because they’ve got a massive underground section I still can’t get into that’s about as hard to bust into as Cheyenne Mountain, thanks to Christakos Construction.”
Jo pointed out, “Not a problem. If we can get all the anti-missile systems off-line, a big nuke can take down the whole tepui regardless of bunker construction. It just won’t be good for the blue team on-site.”
Clare peeked through the door and groaned. “You smashed up the entire war room, right?” She didn’t even wait for Jo’s nod. “Taking out their central war room won’t take the anti-missile systems down, it’ll just give them distributed control, so now every one of the individual systems has to get taken out.”
Jo gritted her teeth and cursed under her breath.
* * *
Batman somersaulted out of the reach of two more vines, and he threw a batarang to slice up both vines.
It didn’t reach its target. Catwoman — or whatever she was calling herself given those cat ears and the feline claws and the awful cat puns — snapped her bullwhip and knocked the batarang out of the air. That was a phenomenally skilled maneuver. He didn’t think he could pull it off, even if he had practiced extensively with a bullwhip first.
He had already tried a gas bomb, but Poison Ivy seemed to be immune to ordinary toxins, and Catwoman was too fast to catch with a stationary cloud of gas.
The two women were trying to bracket him with their attacks, but he was successfully staying out of their traps. And he only had to stall them. As long as they thought they were only seconds away from getting him, they wouldn’t stop and realize that time was no longer on their side.
His teams were on their way. Ultraman and Carter were demolishing the last intact battery around the base of the tepui, and Shaman was on the move with Batgirl.
He really wished that Julie had listened to him and chosen a name other than Batgirl. Why did she even have to be a bat-anything? He had lobbied for ‘Nighthawk’ or ‘Night Owl’ or just plain ‘Owl’. Even Batwoman would have been better. ‘Batgirl’ made her sound like she was about twelve. Although no one was ever going to look at her in that skintight costume and think ‘twelve-year-old girl’. No, they would be thinking ‘twenty-something Playboy centerfold’. He had to admit she looked even sexier than usual in that outfit. If she hadn’t been twenty-two, he would have assumed she was a potential Orphan.
As Catwoman moved farther to his right, the vine he had lost track of suddenly dropped from a tree onto his back and tried to strangle him. It would have been convenient if Azure Crush hadn’t kicked it into the trees so it had been impossible to follow for a couple of minutes.
He decided to use the vine as a stalling tactic. He had enough armor in his uniform, particularly in his cowl and its attachment points, that he wasn’t overly worried about the vine being able to throttle him. But his opponents had no way to know that. He grabbed the vine in both hands and fell to the ground.
Poison Ivy didn’t move toward him, but one of her trees did. That wasn’t what he had planned. However, he could make that work for him. He struggled to his left, and the tree moved to its right to pursue him.
The tree moved within a few feet of Azure Crush, and she moved. She wasn’t at her best, but she was still strong enough to do damage. She reached out and grabbed a handful of roots, and yanked hard enough that the tree dragged her across the ground while at the same time she tore off one entire side of the ‘root system’ it was using to walk on.
She growled at it, “Hells, no, you fucktard! I may be too fucked up ta stand, but nobody threats my peeps!” She reached out with her other hand and sunk her fingers deep into the trunk of the tree.
Batman briefly wondered if Az had meant to say each of those words, or if her language was still affected by Poison Ivy’s toxins.
Meanwhile, he was doing his job. He had already palmed a batarang, and he was using it to slice deeply into the key sections of the vine, weakening its grip around his neck and shoulders, while making it look like the vine was winning.
And Az was refusing to give up, even if she still couldn’t get her legs to work. She sank the fingers of her other hand deeply into the trunk, and then used her first hand to tear a massive chunk of wood off the tree. She pulled herself up with the fingers still embedded in the trunk, and did it again. Each time, she ripped out a section of trunk that was bigger than her head. And each time, the tree tried harder and harder to brush her off with its biggest limbs. He watched out of the corner of his eye as the tree smacked her across the back with a branch bigger than he was, and she just refused to let go.
He couldn’t think of a way to speed up her metabolizing of the toxins, other than what she was already doing, and he had nothing that would make an effective antidote. Even if he had an antidote, he didn’t have a delivery system unless it could be administered orally, because her skin was about as penetrable as steel.
Poison Ivy looked around and focused on more of her plants. Suddenly another tree lumbered over to rescue that first tree. A small armada of vines gathered and advanced on him. He also noticed that Catwoman was moving well behind those two trees, presumably to get in a flanking position.
He decided to drop the comm security, given that he didn’t know just how clear Azure Crush’s thought processes were. “Az, you have incoming behind you.”
“Countin’ on it, Bats.”
He glowered at that, but he decided he had asked for it by being familiar with her. And maybe she really was planning her next attack, which would be an important improvement in her fighting style.
Catwoman came swinging toward him, using her bullwhip in much the same way he used his grapples. He took advantage of the situation and threw the batarang in his palm at her utility belt.
She twisted in mid-air like a real cat, and she released her bullwhip so she dropped to the ground. She performed an expert shoulder roll and came up just in time to snap the batarang out of the air with her whip.
And just in time to get caught by his real attack. He flung the vine from his shoulders and it caught her diagonally across her ribs and shoulder blades. The vine instinctively tried to attack her, even as she sank her claws into it and hissed, “Pammie!”
“Do NOT call me that!” Poison Ivy yelled. But the vine instantly let go of Catwoman.
Meanwhile, the second tree had closed in on Azure Crush. He had to trust that Az really was ‘counting on it’, because he had a platoon of vines crawling his way, and no clear path from his position to hers. Not even using his grapples, unless he wanted to try attaching a grapple to points in a mobile tree that might be able to unhook a grapple or lock it in place or even yank his grappling point so he was whipped through the air.
The second tree leaned over and smacked Az hard enough to crush a regular person into tomato paste. She just shrugged it off and retaliated. Her legs still didn’t seem to be cooperating, but she let go of the first tree with her left hand and grabbed the second tree’s massive branch. Then she slammed the trees together so hard that the impact knocked loose maybe a quarter of their leaves.
She took a deep breath and heaved like she was Victor Mature in ‘Samson and Delilah’. The two trees went flying apart, and both fell over. Az fell to her hand and knees, but still grinned. “Suckers!”
“You bitch!” Poison Ivy screamed furiously at Az.
He smiled to himself. Maybe Az was learning the advantages of fighting scientifically. Maybe she’d listen to him later and start working at a martial arts regimen. Although first he needed to make sure there was a ‘later’.
He prepared to launch his attack while Poison Ivy was distracted with her injured trees. The vines were moving in a frontal assault, while Catwoman was on his flank so she could use her bullwhip and deflect anything he threw at the vines. He could work with that.
Just as he palmed another batarang, he spotted the motion on his left. It was pretty tough to miss, since it consisted of an army of howler monkeys overhead and a battalion of peccaries on the ground, with Shaman and her chimpanzee in the midst of the monkeys.
The peccaries and howler monkeys hit the vines like a herd of locusts. It was surprisingly brutal, as peccaries ripped vines to shreds and monkeys dexterously kept the vines from grappling with anything while tossing them in front of peccary tusks.
Shaman swung down and faced Poison Ivy. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that fauna tops flora almost everywhere?”
Catwoman tried to use her bullwhip to blindside Shaman, which was one of the events he had been planning for. He hurled the batarang and sliced through the bullwhip only a couple of feet in front of Catwoman’s hand.
Batgirl swung through the air and landed near him. She moved to join him, and she had a batarang in each hand in case of more plants. She glanced over at Shaman and hissed, “Why didn’t you tell me about her? She’s the scariest thing out here!”
Catwoman retreated from him now that her long-range weapon was gone and he had backup. But a hundred-pound chunk of tree came flying her way, and she only barely managed to dodge it with an elaborate, arching backflip that would have made Olympic gymnasts cry in envy.
He hurled another batarang and caught her left heel, so she had to make a mid-air correction on her backflip. Still, the batarang stuck in the heel of her boot, so when she landed on her feet, she fell over. And she said something about it.
Batgirl hissed, “What? Did she just say ‘kitty doesn’t like’? Really?”
He went to the comms. “Selina Kyle Christakos. Orphan. She may be using a codename like Catwoman.”
Batgirl nodded and remembered to use her comms as well. “Right. Tera warned us about her.”
There was more noise off to his left, just as Azure Crush was struggling to her feet at right-center and throwing another hundred-pound chunk of wood at Catwoman like it was a softball. Catwoman dived acrobatically out of the way, but was clearly in trouble against an opponent like Azure Crush.
Ultraman came sprinting into the left edge of the clearing at what Batman was going to estimate as about a hundred fifty miles an hour, and he was carrying Major Carter. Batman wondered if Carter had been able to get a decent breath at that speed.
Ultraman set Carter down and flew across the battlefield at Catwoman. Carter gasped for air but gave Batman a thumbs-up that she was all right. Even if he thought Ultraman had set her down far too close to those peccaries.
Batman decided he really needed to train that boy, even if he was diametrically opposed to the idea of tearing around his town with a ‘teen sidekick’. Even if said sidekick had flight and super-strength. He had no idea what that other Batman had been thinking.
Catwoman leapt into the air to avoid another chunk of tree, and Ultraman went into a high-speed sprint that was, if anything, even faster than he’d been moving before. He darted over and grabbed Catwoman while she was still in the air.
Catwoman hissed and yowled and slashed with her claws, but Ultraman had already let go of her. In fact, he had tossed her at Azure Crush. Catwoman really didn’t like that outcome. She twisted in mid-air like a cat, and prepared to land on Az claws-first.
But Carter had her right arm extended with her palm out, and Batman could see where she was pointing. A wave of telekinetic force rippled out from her hand and smacked Catwoman in the side. Catwoman went flying sideways. She hit the ground and didn’t move.
Not that Batman was assuming Catwoman was really unconscious, or going to stay unconscious for long. But Poison Ivy was a bigger threat. He spoke into his comm system. “B to Alphabet. Poison Ivy has —”
But Ultraman had already sprinted over and grabbed Poison Ivy by the wrists.
Batman snapped, “B to U! Back —”
Poison Ivy leaned forward and kissed Ultraman.
Batman called over the comms, “Alphabet! Stop her now, be–…”
But it was already too late. Poison Ivy smiled into Ultraman’s face and pleaded, “Save me from them!”
Ultraman sprinted over to Azure Crush at an insane speed and punched her, sending her flying backward.
* * *
Alex hung onto the GC-Divide antidote she was carrying just in case her Plan D didn’t work on Danielle. Judging by the explosions going on behind her, her plan C had worked maybe a little too well.
Okay. There was the message from Riley. Time to take out a bunch of Orphan supers. A year and a half ago, she would have been panicked at the idea of half a dozen GC-161 cases with extra strength and speed and quickness. A year ago, it would have been a nerve-wracking battle she would have wanted tons of help on. Now it was just another op to plan for.
And she knew how to plan for it. She knew what needed to be done first, and what could be done second, and what wouldn’t work.
She flew around the corner, and nearly crashed into them head-on. Only two flyers, one male and one female, with a guy darting at high speed underneath her to attack her from behind, plus five guys with AKs, two of them able to go silvery on her if she gave them a chance.
She didn’t give any of them a chance. She reached out with her TK.
The male flyer smirked. “So … the world-famous Terawatt!”
The speedster ran into her head-high TK wall with a loud smack, and his unconscious body went flying feet-first. The AK-wielders collapsed to the ground behind the two smug flyers.
The male flyer just kept monologuing. “You dare to pit your powers against the might of The Collective!” He let fireballs blossom around his hands … and then his eyes rolled back in his head from having his carotids squeezed closed for a few seconds. He fell the thirty feet to the ground.
Yep, TK for the shifters and fireguys before they could go silvery or wreck your TK efforts with a big, fiery corona. And not wasting your TK on TK-wielders who could overcome a small TK trick without thinking about it.
Alex let go of all their carotids and glared at the remaining flyer with a pointed finger. “You might want to skip the monologuing and get straight to the part where you surrender.”
The flyer looked over at her unconscious teammates, who could be dead as far as she knew. She gulped. She whirled about in the air and started to yank a handful of weaponry out of her belt with her TK.
Alex was already pointing a finger at her, and just fired off a bolt of lightning that knocked her out of the air. “Yeah, I kinda figured you weren’t the surrender type.”
She spoke into her comms. “T to Alphabet. Orphan supers down except for that electro.”
“Solstice to everybody! I stopped the lightning-thrower! Well, I knocked him down and a dinosaur stopped him. And I have found a second anti-missile battery at map coordinate … umm … A-4. Attacking now!”
Alex nodded to herself. She remembered being like that, and probably sounding like that, too. How had Jack managed not to tease her about it? “Terawatt to Ayananta. Good work. I knew you could do it. Now take out that battery.”
She still needed to find Jack and Willow. And what had happened to Hanna?
* * *
Jack O’Neill felt the building shake as something relatively near went boom. He was pretty confident that meant his people were bringing it. He was wondering whether Finn or the Batman had figured it all out, but he was going to have to be Captain Nice with the guards until he got a chance to do something violent. Of the violence, as someone might say.
And if they’d hurt Willow, he was going to level this place.
The two guards kept an eye on him, even while they were obviously sweating the whole ‘we are under attack’ deal. He smiled at them. “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred.”
They ignored him. “Ooh, tough crowd, tough crowd.” If he’d been wearing a tie, he would have pretended he was adjusting the knot.
There was a bigger boom, which shook the building enough that he almost fell over. He wondered if someone had managed to get Terawatt back into the game. If she came back just because of him and Willow, and she got hurt because she wasn’t ready to be back, he was going to do something drastic. But if this made Alex go all Anakin Skywalker after losing Shar, then he might not be able to do anything drastic enough to save her.
The two guards led him into a huge ‘conference room’ that looked like it was for the really fancy meetings. There was a long teak conference table surrounded by nice office chairs. The outer wall was all tinted glass looking out over the drop-off, with fog curling over the outer wall to hide the building. There was even a fancy handrail all across the outer wall that looked like teak with really expensive inlays. And there was a fancy projector mounted on the ceiling that would project onto the white inner wall next to the fancy electronic whiteboard. At the far end of the room there was a cabinet that was probably full of conferencing crap, like whiteboard markers and erasers, and projector controls, and maybe even computer systems or audio-visual systems. He figured it would all be state of the art.
One guard dashed out when the next explosion went off, and the other guard pointed at a chair for Jack to sit in. And that guard had a sidearm. So … the first order of business was getting that guard to step too close to him.
He walked over to the chair and yanked it back from the table. He made sure to tug it just a bit too much, so it rolled too far. Then he sat down without looking. He managed to hit the edge of the chair seat, so he fell to the floor and the chair tipped over on him.
“My back!” he gasped.
The guard actually fell for it. It was maybe the fourth-oldest trick … in the book. And the guy fell for it. He hurried over and lifted the chair off him, and got a kick in the face for his troubles. Followed by a kick in the balls.
Followed by a leg sweep and two more kicks.
But the guy was still not down for the count, and he tried rolling away. Jack didn’t dare let the guy get any separation. Not when there was a sidearm only inches away from where the guy’s hands were more or less welded to his balls. And Jack was still lying on his back.
Jack kicked off against the table leg and shot across the polished floor to catch up with his guard before the guy could try anything.
The explosion felt like it came from the room immediately underneath them. And the building didn’t shake. It broke in half.
The entire room tilted insanely, and Jack scrabbled at the polished floor, trying to find a handhold. Or a sticky spot. Or anything. The best he could do was his Wiley Coyote imitation, which wasn’t really helping. The guard went sliding down the incline. So did the entire table, and every chair around it.
The massive conference table hit the window wall at way over the posted speed limit and shattered the entire length of glass before shooting out into freefall. The guard slid through the shattered opening and vanished out of sight.
“Jack!”
But he was too busy trying to find something to grab for him to look up. He still couldn’t stop his slide down toward the edge. He couldn’t find anything to latch onto. He slid through where the window wall used to be and he started a four-thousand-foot fall.
A grip like steel caught him around his wrist. He looked up to find Willow holding his wrist and hanging from the cracked handrail by her calves.
He gave her a smile. “Come here often?”
Willow ignored Jack’s smart-aleckiness and hung on desperately. She only had one hand on him, and she didn’t have a great hold on the handrail, which felt way too polished for her peace of mind. And she was trying to look at Jack’s face instead of what was below him, because there was nothing below him for almost a mile, except some stuff falling to its doom.
The stupid tepui should have had convenient handholds or maybe little ledges or something, but there was nothing. She was looking at a four-thousand-foot drop onto rock and other really hard stuff. Not that anything would be soft enough after four thousand feet of freefall, even if she spread out flat and managed to achieve a terminal velocity of only about a hundred twenty miles an hour, instead of what she’d get if she did the head-first dive, which … she did the calculations in her head and came up with something more like a hundred eighty miles an hour. If she was using the right equation, since she wasn’t Sam Carter.
Jack insisted, “Will, just let me go. You have pretty much zero chance of pulling both of us up, but if it’s just you, I think you can pull yourself up onto that handrail and climb over to the side wall and maybe even find some way to climb up to the doorway.”
Stupid self-sacrificing hero-type. She stared into his gorgeous eyes and glared. “There is no way in hell I’m letting you go, mister. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me!”
He glanced down and then stared into her eyes. “Don’t be stupid about this. Just face facts, for once!”
She scowled. “Hell, no! Alex said we’re gonna continue to do wonderful things together! So shut up and start doing some wonderful rescuing! If you help, I’m sure I can pull you up high enough you can get a grip on the handrail, too!”
Okay, she had no idea how they were going to get up the smooth wall to anything approaching safety. Not that she was going to let that stop her. All she had to do was an inverted sit-up. Alex did dozens every morning. So what if there were two hundred pounds of smart-alecky dead weight to lift along with all of her?
Another tremor hit the whole building. She peeked upward and saw one of the heavy wall units on the side wall suddenly break loose. It went careening along the wall and out through the window where the handrail was connected to the wall.
The handrail shattered, and the piece she had her legs around was suddenly loose. The two of them dropped into freefall.
Jack yelled, “Help Mister Wizard, help!”
Willow hadn’t thought he’d die being all snarky, but it sure looked like it was about to happen.