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Chapter 202 – Final BattleAlex asked again, “Is this variant of GC-161 going to affect regular people?”
Dani said, “It’s GC-161-III, so it should. It’s more toxic than usual to Orphans, so you should clear your Orphan soldiers out of here.” Alex just looked at her. “Unless you already got George and your sister to work up a non-toxic antidote for your Orphans.” She carefully set Danielle’s body down and gently closed its eyes. “She really hated you, you know. She blamed you for everything, which wasn’t rational. She blamed you and George and Annie for the project leaks … but it couldn’t have been any of you, could it? At least two of the leaks were files that no one saw except her and Lars and …” She looked up in shock. “Dave Watt? Dave Watt outsmarted her?”
Alex carefully said, “I think it wasn’t so much that Dave outsmarted her, as she and Lars had such a low opinion of him that they didn’t take any precautions around him.”
Dani slowly shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. I was a horrible person and I deserved everything that happened to me. Including …” She looked unhappily at the corpse of Danielle R. Atron. “This is what I deserve. Not getting to walk away, with Terawatt telling me it wasn’t my fault.”
Alex pushed, “Maybe some things weren’t your fault, but it will definitely be your fault if you just sit here instead of helping me get those bombs disarmed! So get up and let’s get moving!”
It actually worked. Dani nodded miserably. “Right. You’re right.” And she got up. She didn’t fly, but she went silvery and puddled out of the wreckage of the building.
They didn’t have to check the building they were in. There wasn’t enough left of it to count as ‘building’ anymore, and the area that had held the bomb was less ‘rubble’ and more ‘disintegrated by massive explosion’. The building that had fallen off the side of the tepui had already taken care of its bomb by dropping it four thousand feet. The building that was on fire was a little harder to check through, but they found that the tank of GC-161 had been roasted until the GC-161 was nothing but constituent chemicals. That left two still-live bombs.
And dinosaurs. Dani followed her over to where the dinosaurs were standing around … Oh, crud, was that Maggie Walsh? That looked horrible! Alex didn’t like Maggie, but no one deserved to be smashed onto concrete like that and have your arm hacked off and get horribly burned and then have your throat ripped out by dinosaurs.
Okay, maybe there were a few people who deserved something like that.
Dani said, “This isn’t going to be easy. Those theropods aren’t going to go quietly. We’ll have to hurl them one by one over the wall and fight off anything trying to get back through that crack.”
Alex thought for a second and disagreed. “No. We only need to move Maggie’s body through the crack, let them follow, and then block the crack after them.”
Dani stared at her and frowned. “You’re a lot smarter than I ever realized. I should have assumed that you could be somewhere near Annie Mack’s intelligence, if not higher.”
Alex said, “I just have more experience with this type of problem than normal people.”
Dani rolled her eyes a little. “You mean ‘more than anyone else on Earth’ don’t you?”
“Well … maybe.”
Alex didn’t move. She used her TK and lifted Maggie’s body. Then she slowly floated it through the crack, to the consternation of the dinos. They jumped and leapt about as they hurried after it. Then, once she had the body a good forty feet on the other side of the wall, Dani used her TK to pick up several tons of ruined building and stuff it into the crack. They piled some more debris on their side of the wall, just to make sure the debris couldn’t be pushed aside by a hungry T. rex or something.
“There, all done and no fighting to the death with raptors,” Alex smiled.
Hanna complained over the comms, “I never get to do the fun stuff!”
Dani turned silvery and puddled into the fourth building. Alex followed in her own silvery form. It only took them a few seconds to telekinetically rip a vent off a wall and puddle down ducts to where the fourth bomb sat. Alex disarmed the bomb and pulled the tank of GC-161 into her morph. Then they were heading downstairs and toward the fifth bomb. Everything was going pretty well, except they were running short on time.
Dani rushed over to a door that looked like a bank vault. It was about four feet wide and seven feet high and solid metal, with a control pad and a retinal scanner and a hand scanner embedded in the wall to the left. Dani admitted, “I haven’t been able to get into their underground section except by riding in the maids’ carts one time when they were careless, and I’ve been resetting it electronically every day … only all the broadcasting equipment is in melted fragments now and I don’t have my notes on the 64-digit security codes. The door’s about a foot thick and around seven tons, plus it’s got security bolts all around its perimeter. I can’t budge it. I think they wanted to make sure they could stop you or Azure Crush.”
Alex just nodded. She wasn’t going to discuss how strong her TK really was, especially when she was in the middle of an Orphan stronghold and a security camera was pointing right at her. There was no way she could budge that door, or even the bolts holding it to the frame. But she didn’t think she needed to.
She looked up at the camera and tried to sound like she was calm and in charge. “Are you listening to our conversation yet?”
A voice she didn’t recognize snapped, “Terawatt. And we knew we couldn’t trust that malevolent bitch Atron.”
Dani whispered so softly Alex almost didn’t hear it. “Sorry.”
Alex just put her hands on her hips in her ‘overconfident superheroine’ pose. “Then you should be unsurprised that Danielle Atron planted a bomb inside your underground system one time when she used her silvery form to sneak inside by riding in one of your maid carts. She’s been resetting the bomb’s timer every day, and you only have minutes before it triggers a release of aerosolized GC-161 that will kill every Orphan in there. If you let us in, we can deactivate it.”
“Oh, right. That’s completely believable,” the voice replied in a rude tone. “What’s more likely? Terawatt wants to get in here to kill us all and makes up a stupid lie, or Terawatt wants to save her enemies out of the goodness of her heart and there just happens to be a bomb that will kill all of us conveniently soon?”
Crud, she hated it when people thought she was just another creep. Even if they were creeps already. “I do not kill people. You should know that. Your only chance here is surrendering to me, so the armed forces already here and on their way don’t have to shoot you.”
“No one’s getting through our entry doors, and we have our own sealed HVAC system and our own water supply. Forget it, honey.”
She tried again. “You’re acting like you’re a mile underground, under NORAD or something like that. You’re not. You’re pretty close to the surface of a four-thousand-foot tepui that a single ICBM can turn into a thousand feet of tepui and three thousand feet of radioactive boulders. And you have no more anti-missile or anti-aircraft defenses.”
Dani added, “If that’s not scary enough, consider that the GC-161 will kill you, but will also give a significant percentage of your non-Orphan underlings superpowers. Any of you who survive in there are going to get turned into the slaves of the people you have in there as your servants.”
Alex glanced over at Dani and tapped the back of her wrist. Dani got it right away that Alex was worried about the time, but didn’t have a watch either. And there wasn’t a clock in the hall. Dani shrugged at Alex.
Dani tried again. “It’s a tank of GC-161 and a tank of O2 with a mixing nozzle and an aerosolizing jet, all hooked up to a power cord and an electronic timer that has a small wireless connection on it. It’s booby-trapped. But the power cord goes back down the duct about thirty feet to the HVAC outflow. If you just send someone down to the bottom level and get into the HVAC system and disconnect that power cord, the system will only have a few minutes of battery power. And you might be able to drag the whole system back down the duct to where an Orphan could get at it. You only have a couple of minutes before it triggers.”
The voice argued, “It’s more likely you just want us to set off your boobytrap since you don’t have a way to trigger it. We’ll consider what you said.” The sound cut off.
Alex muttered, “Any other options? I don’t think they’re going to trust either of us enough to try and disarm the bomb.”
She stood in front of the door and tried to feel the security bolts holding the door in place. They wouldn’t budge. There were big mechanical systems locking them in place. She tried feeling inside the scanners and the control pad, but it felt like strictly electronic stuff. She even used her TK to pull the control pad apart from the inside so she could try sending electrical signals into the wires behind it. That didn’t work either. She probably had to send some tricky electrical sequence to make it work. She finally gave up and hit the exposed wires with enough amperage to fry stuff. Nothing happened.
Dani spoke up. “We’ve got to be out of time by now.”
* * *
Jo looked down at the two Orphans and five soldiers they had just taken out. The Orphans had worked from a solid defensive position which would have been excellent against ordinary soldiers. They hadn’t taken into account what an Orphan could do with a grenade launcher she had practiced with. Clare had fired an HE grenade through a ridiculously tiny gap and had taken out every unprotected opponent in there. The one guy in the heavy armor hadn’t stood up to the AP grenade that came next.
Clare opened her mouth like she was trying to get her ears to pop. Jo figured Clare was having as much trouble hearing as she was, after the explosions. Clare glanced over at Jo and moved her right hand. She spelled ‘Do you understand ASL?’
Jo spelled out letters: ‘I know the ASL alphabet. That is it.’
‘Oky. These stairs are probably a bad choice. Easy to defend.’
Jo spelled out ‘elevator’.
Clare signaled ‘shaft not car’.
Jo nodded at that.
A greenish-yellow tinged gas began drifting out of the vents. That couldn’t be good. They backed up, but the stuff seemed to be coming out of every vent they could see. Jo definitely wasn’t going to go over and sniff at it to try and guess what kind of threat it was.
A voice blared out of the intercom system. “Attention all personnel. There is a GC-161 gas bomb in the HVAC system. All levels are at risk. If you are on level one, move at once to the entry cleanroom and get into the NBC gear or the sealed units. All non-priority personnel, you are at risk, too. This may have zero effect on you, but it may have serious consequences. Get to the med labs at once.”
Jo just muttered, “Well, I guess my hearing’s back.”
Clare rolled her eyes. “Don’t you know what this stuff is going to do to us?”
Jo gave her a smirk. “Just to you. We have better biochemists on our side.”
Clare gritted her teeth. “Well, fuck. Been nice serving with you. Okay, once you pry the elevator doors open, climb up to level one. But don’t go to the doors up to the buildings. Your best bet is taking the maintenance tunnels out under Walsh’s playpen and up to one of the anti-air defenses. Things should be pretty clear, with everyone else running for hiding places. Then just signal your guys to come get you. I’d appreciate it if you’d tell the President’s security advisers where I croaked and ask ’em to tell my parents the truth about me.”
Jo fished in her med kit. “I’ve got a better idea.” She pulled out the black-and-white striped injector and stabbed Clare in the neck with it. Black and white meant Terawatt, as in GC-161 antidote. “This ought to be enough antidote for you. It’s dosed for a two-hundred-pound man.”
Clare stood there and asked, “How long till it kicks in? This gas isn’t going to wait.”
Jo looked at the clouds of gas moving out of the vents. “Yeah. It’s like time and tide.”
Clare watched the gas clouds drift toward them. “If we both get out of this alive and the President’s guys don’t fuck me over, I definitely want to join up with you guys. And I want to spar with you and Finn. Maybe even Carlson.”
Jo mentioned, “Yeah, Carlson? He’s even stronger than you’d think, and he’s a lot smarter than he looks. And he’s pretty damn wholesome for an Orphan.”
“Dateable?”
“Not even close,” Jo answered. “He’s seriously married. Date options will probably be better for you if you stay non-military.”
“What about you?”
Jo admitted, “Don’t laugh, but I’m going out with one of the general’s IT guys when I get back. My parents are pretty mad that I’m not dating a nice Catholic boy who’s Hispanic. Jeremy’s Jewish and white and a Ph.D. in comp sci. But he likes me and doesn’t care that I can benchpress him.”
Clare just looked off at the gas clouds. “I know there’ll be guys who want to date me, but that’s because Mom and Dad have major moolah and I’m the only heir. You guys got any psychics who can tell if a guy’s lying?”
“I wish. Our best psi got blown up in a nuclear blast last month.”
“Ouch. Sorry.”
* * *
Alex waited impatiently at the vault door. Dani looked like she was going to burst into tears. Alex had figured that the Jekyll-and-Hyde effect of the GC-Divide was a perfect attack against Danielle, but she hadn’t thought out what it would be like for Danielle’s other half. Right now, Alex was feeling like a major jerkhead, even if a lot of people she knew wouldn’t have had any qualms about it at all.
Maybe she was finally learning a lesson about what was necessary in warfare. Maybe she was finally growing up. It sure didn’t feel like it.
She didn’t have super-hearing or anything, but it was pretty easy to tell when the door was about to open. There were fists frantically pounding on the door, probably while someone else was trying to get it open. She stepped back a few paces and put up a TK wall in case people came through with weaponry.
The door slowly swung open, and half a dozen non-Orphans scrambled out. Alex zapped each of them as they moved past her, just in case. She figured they were going to need GC-161 antidote at a minimum. Then an Orphan stepped into the doorway. The guy was in a sealed plastic suit and carrying one of those backpack-powered anti-morph rifles. He pointed it at Alex.
Dani dived in front of the rifle to protect Alex.
Nothing happened. The Orphan frantically checked the system indicators on the rifle stock. Dani picked herself up off the floor and looked over at Alex.
Alex clamped the Orphan’s carotids with her TK and dropped him. Then she explained, “It only works if we’re silvery. And I pulled a few wires loose in the backpack as soon as I saw it.”
“Oh. Right.” Dani used her TK to haul the Orphan out of the doorway. “That’s what you did to Danielle’s shoulder weapon. She really over-thought that.”
Alex explained, “I need to go in there and take down all the Orphans who are still okay. And I need to stop all the normals before they turn into supervillains.”
Dani winced at that. “I need to help. I mean, I’m sure the GC-161 won’t have any effect on me anymore. Well, I’m pretty sure. Danielle was dead certain, but … you know, in retrospect, she was too arrogant for her own good.”
Alex asked, “How about you wait right here? Then you can keep an eye on these people, and you can stop anyone who gets past me, and you can let my forces know all these normals need GC-161 antidote ASAP.”
Dani thought it over really quickly. “That’s … All right, it’s rational. Good luck.”
Alex flew into the corridor, looking for the next Orphan toting a huge gun or the next non-Orphan turning into a super-threat. She made sure she stayed normal instead of changing into her morph, because those anti-morph rifles were nasty.
The ‘cleanroom’ was only thirty feet from the door. A solid wall had been slid shut across the corridor so you now had to go through one door of the cleanroom and out the other side to get to the big exit door. Alex felt around the edges of the sliding wall and found a lock that was pretty easy to unhook with her TK.
She slid the wall back and winced. There were maybe a dozen dead silvery messes on the floor on the other side of the wall and outside the closed door to the cleanroom.
The cleanroom had large clear panels so she could see into it. There were another four Orphans zipping themselves into sealed suits and checking each other. Two had more of those Ghostbusters anti-Terawatt weapons, and two had heavy machine guns. As soon as one of them spotted her and yelled, they all turned to face her. At least one of them had enough sense to keep the two with machine guns from firing through the glass and ruining what little protection they had from the GC-161. The fourth one fired her anti-Tera rifle.
Alex still wasn’t silvery, so the rifle did nothing. Okay, there was a weird buzzing feeling she ignored while she grabbed their carotids and knocked them all out. She could have just ripped their suits open and let the GC-161 do its stuff, but she didn’t need to, and she wasn’t ready to be that ruthless yet. Just more ruthless than she’d been before. Once they were all unconscious, she pulled the wiring apart on the anti-Terawatt systems.
But there was a gun battle going on down the hall. She was pretty sure who that was likely to be, so she jetted down the hall looking for more trouble. She used her comms. “Terawatt to anyone. Inside underground area. Can anyone hear me?”
“Finn to Terawatt. You’re breaking up, but I can hear a lot. Lupo should be down there, too.”
She reported, “GC-161 bomb. At least five Orphan survivors in NBC gear, all unconscious for now. Half a dozen normals who need antidote before they get powers. I’m hearing a gun battle so I think I know where Lupo is.”
“Copy that. Minimum five tangos in sealed suits. Minimum six with exposure. High probability of Lupo in action. Please assist.”
Alex jetted down the hallway with a TK shield up in front of her in case she ran into any threats, or in case there were ricochets bouncing down the hall in her direction. There were several more silvery splotches on the floor that were more totally dead Orphans who hadn’t made it to the cleanroom in time. She refused to think about that right now.
She ignored the gas drifting down the hallway. GC-161 wasn’t one of her problems anymore. It was a massive problem for a huge proportion of the planet, though.
She rounded a corner and found her war zone. At the end of this short hallway were half a dozen people behind a makeshift barricade, firing down an intersecting hallway at someone who was shooting back. Four of the people looked normal, one was hurling lightning bolts while hanging onto a steel post that jutted up from the floor, and one was a big silvery blob acting like kinetic gel armor for two of the more-exposed people.
Alex telekinetically grabbed carotids and squeezed. One of the normal-looking people had some sort of TK barrier up around himself. Everyone else except the blob dropped. Alex used a little TK to shove the lightning hurler away from that grounding post, and lightning blasts went everywhere. The blob shuddered and collapsed. The telekinetic jumped back and held up his hands, but couldn’t stop the lightning bolts. Once both of them were down, Alex just used her TK to wrap the electrokinetic around the steel post so his hands and head were touching the pole, too.
Her earjack clicked. “Lupo to Tera. Nice work. I’ve got an ally, so don’t blast her to pieces.”
“Tera here. Glad you’re okay.”
“Lupo. I need a medic, but I’m ambulatory.”
Alex was really glad she’d done all that studying for SATs, so she even knew what ‘ambulatory’ meant. She peeked around the corner to see Jo was walking with Clare Tobias.
Clare Tobias? Really?
“Tera to team, especially Lupo. I have an ally, too. It’s Dani Atron. Not Danielle. I used a biochemical to split Danielle into Jekyll and Hyde, only the original was the Mister Hyde part. Jekyll won. Danielle Atron is dead, and now we’ve got an innocent biochemist who holds herself responsible for everything Danielle did.”
Jo walked up to her and clambered over the barricade despite a nasty arm injury. “Better living through chemistry?”
Alex grimaced behind her mask. “It’s living through chemistry. I’ll give it that much.”
Jo pointed at Clare Tobias as Clare vaulted over the barricade. “Double agent. We’re coming out of the woodwork today.”
* * *
Riley listened to the reports coming in from his forces. Then he switched to a different frequency and used the agreed-upon names. He thought they were silly and potentially guessable, but he was not going to refuse to use them when General Jackson had personally picked them. “Rolland, this is Schaffer. Rolland, this is Schaffer. Come in, please.”
“Rolland here. Passphrase ‘Reichsmarshall Rosemeyer’.”
Riley gave the correct response for the situation where he was speaking freely and not being coerced. “ ‘Zum Wilden Hirsch’. Sir, we have disabled all batteries on top of the tepui and at ground level, but we still have a ground threat at position Delta on the ground. It’s a Downingtown problem, so alert the U.N. forces to stay back along that vector.”
“Understood, Colonel. Ground forces and air forces are moving now. Expect helo support starting in twenty minutes.”
“Copy that, sir.”
“Your people Carlson and Miller and Valentine are in the lead helos, so I sincerely hope you’re right about the anti-aircraft.”
* * *
Jack left Willow with Hanna, and raced to get to Locke before the man could make an escape. He grumbled to himself, “I should’ve known. The only people who have three names are Miss America contestants and serial killers.” He dashed past burning rooms and a couple of halls that looked like Gojira had paid the building a visit. He started hunting at Locke’s office.
And Locke was still in there. So were two bodyguards. None of them were in any condition to fight him.
Both bodyguards were crushed under collapsed chunks of the ceiling. Locke was sort of sitting in his chair behind his desk. The ‘sort of’ part went with the huge section of concrete-coated rebar that had ripped out of the ceiling and punched right through Locke’s abdomen. Jack ran over and took a look. The business end of the rebar had punched through Locke, through his chair, and into the floor. The other end was jutting up into the collapsing ceiling.
Jack grabbed the rebar and tried to budge it. Nothing. It would take Azure Crush or Terawatt to get the guy out.
But Locke wasn’t dead. He groaned, “Jack … I have something … just for you. The teak stand … and behind … middle picture.”
Jack grimaced. “And if I don’t want to play this game?”
Locke looked up at him. “It will … cost the lives … of millions. Maybe billions.”
Jack scowled. “I’m not really up for more threats.”
“It’s not a threat … son. It’s … a reward.”
He held up a piece of paper that Jack snatched out of a shaky hand. The notes on the paper said:
the name and location of every remaining Orphan
every bit of research my Maggie has developed and entrusted to me
the finances behind the Collective
Locke moaned, “You’ve won. You’ve proved … you’re the future … You should know … how to cure more diseases … protect people against more illnesses … extend the human lifetime … everything. Solve the puzzle, and …” Howard Royer Locke’s head lolled backward, and his body went limp.
The ceiling didn’t look that solid, and Jack could hear the building groaning around him. That wasn’t good. He looked behind the picture. There was a safe with nine dials, each of which had numbers from 1 to 30. But there were also a series of diagonal and horizontal and vertical metal rods blocked the way. He checked with a metal strip ripped loose from the ceiling, and at least some of the rods were seriously electrified. Crap.
The puzzle looked like … It looked like random Scrabble tiles blanketing a square board, only he could see words on the diagonals and horizontals and verticals. He glanced back at the safe. Oh. The rods were the words. And the words were all words he’d learned from reading up on Alex’s picture-taking, or else words from various fighting styles. Okay, photography and fighting, what did they have in common? He didn’t have long to solve this puzzle before the whole place was on fire. He slid the rods back into the wall one by one, going alphabetically based on the words on the board. And the leftover letters spelled … ‘adeeeehikopprrrrstt’.
“Well, that’s helpful.”
It was the wrong number of letters to go with the nine dials, so there was more to the test. He had to stare at them for a minute or two and try a bunch of rearrangements in his head. Oh. ‘peter parkers other id’. Duh. Photography and fighting. Nine dials. That made total sense now.
‘Total’ sense? He was hanging with Willow too much.
Nah, there was no such thing as hanging too much with his Will. But maybe he needed to have more conversations at work with starchy military types.
He went to the safe and dialed in 19-16-9-4-5-18-13-1-14. It opened smoothly. Inside was just a small envelope that in handwriting said ‘for my boy Jack’. Man, that put a chill down his spine. It was three small thumb drives he shoved into his pocket. He got moving.
* * *
Victor Cready had never really thought that being able to catch on fire and throw fire would be a good thing. He’d sort of figured he was doomed to supervillainy just by his powers. To hell with that dork Johnny Storm. That guy fought monsters that were out of even Terawatt’s weight class, and there was no way he didn’t burn down thirty blocks of New York City every time he fought anybody.
But here were things he could do that were definitely on the ‘not going straight to hell’ scale of things. Keeping Yuki warm was just sort of … nice. More than nice. She was way out of his league. She was pretty, and far smarter than him, and she already had tons of jobs in Japan that used her powers for really important stuff, like cooling down nuclear power generators and doing research with cryo-stuff he didn’t understand at all. There were big Japanese winter festivals begging her to come be their guest of honor! But she was depending on him for heat, and that was making him think stuff that she’d probably be appalled about if she could read minds. She probably wanted some ultra-brilliant Japanese scientist who was so traditionally Japanese it was crazy.
Maybe it was just that he hadn’t gotten laid in a long time. Yeah, that was probably it.
But here was something else he could do with his powers that wasn’t badness. He and Tsurara were tag-teaming a deadly giant blob. And if he couldn’t stop it, the damn thing was probably going to eat the entire Amazon rainforest.
She pointed to a spot right in front of the thing, and he dropped her off. He hurled a big ball of fire into the blob’s front, and that charcoal-broiled its face. Not that it was really hurt. It just ‘ate’ the burned part. But it stopped rolling forward. And Tsurara started pulling in heat.
He jetted up and out of her way, and in seconds she was covered in ice, and the cold around her was spreading like mad. She stepped forward and put out her hands. The front of the blob froze solid. White crystalline ice formed all over its frozen surface as the moisture in the air started freezing on contact. Tsurara pressed her hands against the frozen surface, and the ice spread.
That meant it was time to do his job. He flew around to the back side of the blob, trying to ignore the pain in his hands and arms. He only had his arms on fire, and he still had enough lift to fly, but Christ, did it hurt! At least it was just his arms.
He got right behind the blob and about forty feet up, and he let loose. Massive balls of fire hit the back of the blob and incinerated everything they hit. The blob tried to roll away from him, but it was up against a solid wall of ice, pretty much all of which was frozen blob. Tsurara had gotten it but good. It couldn’t roll at her because of the frozen wall, but it couldn’t roll away from her because it was frozen to the ground there. And the more time she had to suck heat out of it, the more of the blob turned into fudgesicle.
He blasted it some more, and it tried to ooze away from him. All that happened was it squeezed itself into a taller thing that covered less ground, because it couldn’t get away. He had his entire side burning into blackness, and it couldn’t get away.
It suddenly dawned on him that big forest fires needed firefighters getting to problem areas really fast, and then making backfires to cut the fires off from more areas of unburnt forest. Maybe he could learn to do that! He needed to talk to Terawatt, because she was probably one of these science geniuses, and she could come up with ideas for stuff he could do besides ‘wait until giant blob turns up and then barbecue it’.
He hurled more fire onto the back and the top of the blob, roasting everything into blackened goo. Yuki had maybe the front quarter completely solidified, and he had burned up a hell of a lot of the back side. Even better, the damn thing was stuck in place. It couldn’t move forward or backward. When it tried to spread out to the sides, Ultraman and Azure Crush beat the crap out of it with boulders. It was just a matter of time before he burned up everything that Yuki hadn’t turned into a blob-sicle.
He glanced over at where Batman and Batgirl had those two hot chicks all tied up. Batgirl was fucking hot, but the two supervillains were mind-blowing: one sexpot in a skintight catsuit with extra cat, and one green babe in nothing but leaves. He concentrated on the blob, because his libido was telling him that he really needed to get laid.
He wondered if Yuki would consider dinner in her hot apartment at the nuclear power plant a ‘romantic date’.
* * *
Jack stood there and checked on the progress of the primary tasks. He was just glad Finn was sharp enough and detail-oriented enough to be carrying a couple of spare comm systems, along with that plastic bag of blood that was now all over his lower back and butt and legs so from behind Finn looked like Dead Guy Number Two in a spatter film.
All four anti-missile systems atop the tepui were down. All eight anti-air and anti-ground systems around the base were down. One giant economy-sized blob was immobilized and getting turned into a baked Alaska. Tera and Lupo and the rest had the underground areas covered. Half the fog generators were offline so the incoming forces could see where to land. The combined UN chopper force was on its way in, with four team leaders including the Potter kid heading things up.
Jack was just holding Willow and she was snuggling tightly against him. He was thinking that this was what it looked like at the end of the big hokey summer-blockbuster action-adventure movie, and he’d gotten the gorgeous heroine, so that automatically made him the hero of the movie. He smiled to himself, because he knew damn well who the heroine of this movie really was. And here she came.
Tera flew down to him. She looked immaculate and indestructible, as usual, but he could see the tiredness in her eyes. She asked him, “Is it all over?”
He looked around at the destruction. “This round? Maybe. But we’ve got Round Two coming up, as soon as something else goes haywire in Russia, or another chemical plant blows up, or the next mad scientist decides to take over the world, or we just run into the next supervillains.”
She scowled. “You were supposed to say ‘yes’.”
He smirked. “Oh, right. We’ve completely wrapped this one up, and no one will ever be evil again, and you get to ride off into the sunset. On a pony.”
Willow said, “Fine, because you owe me a whole new honeymoon. Except for getting to beat the poo out of Cordelia Chase, this one’s been the worst one in the history of honeymoonage.”
They looked at each other, and Jack snarked, “Except for the first twelve hours, which were spectacular.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that.”
Jack couldn’t resist. “I would even say those hours were tera.”
Willow grinned naughtily. “Totally tera.”
What the hell, so what if they were in a firezone? This was his honeymoon. He kissed her.
Alex just rolled her eyes. She had a feeling Jack and Willow were going to be like this for a long time. And she totally wasn’t going to say ‘get a room you guys’ because they’d do it. Or act up even more. But Willow was happy. Even in the middle of a recent battlefield, Willow was ecstatically happy.
Alex decided that Jack was a really good influence on Willow.