Epilogue

Exactly 71 years and 47 days later

She glanced away from the control panel of the TeraJet and checked on her two budding superheroes. The autopilot had everything under control. The trip had gone well. Her two grandchildren had even gotten all their homework done, according to the AI in the jet.

She wouldn’t have taken the TeraJet if she hadn’t been taking the twosome along. Her usual method of long-distance flight these days was jetting upward at her top acceleration into a suborbital path, moving at her top acceleration above the atmosphere, and then decelerating sharply as she dived back into the atmosphere to reach her destination. She thought back to the first time she had fought an ICBM. Now she could outrace one.

She smiled at her grandchildren. Her second granddaughter and her third grandson. When she had started out as Terawatt, she hadn’t believed she could keep being Terawatt. She certainly hadn’t expected to stay Terawatt for over seventy years … even counting maternity leaves.

“Hanna Anne? Would you like to fly her for a few minutes?”

Her granddaughter looked up in alarm. “Grandma! Mom said we’re not supposed to!”

She gave the girl a look. “Aht! What happens when we call grandmother ‘grandma’?”

Both of the teens recited in exhausted tones, “We have to do all the cleaning at Justice League HQ for a whole week.”

Hanna Anne winced. “Sorry, Terawatt. I’m really sorry. Please don’t make me scrub the toilets again, please? Pleeeeeeeeeeze?”

She pretended to think it over, even if she had already planned this out. “Okay … I’ll let you off the hook, but just this one time, and the next time you slip up it’ll be two weeks of penalty.”

“Eww.”

“Crud.”

She smiled at her grandson. “Okay, R.J., would YOU like to take the controls for a few minutes?”

“Sure, Tera!” He couldn’t keep the grin off his face as he leapt into the air and flew forward to the co-pilot’s chair.

But the AI interrupted, “Terawatt, there is a call for you from Base Gamma.”

Hanna Anne looked at her brother and winced. “Uh-oh.”

R.J. glanced back at his sister and muttered, “Oh, crud.”

She calmly tapped her subdural transponder with her TK. “Hello, Base Gamma.”

An angry voice blared over the jet’s speaker system. “MOTHER! Did you take Hanna and Riley with you to Russia? They have homework to do!”

She smiled. “And hello to you, too, Electra.”

Her middle daughter — even if Electra was her only biological daughter — fussed, “Mother, I retired from the JL over twenty years ago. How many times do I have to ask you not to call me that? You named me Charlene, the least you could do is use my name!”

She smirked to herself. A lot of Jack O’Neill really had rubbed off on her over the years. It didn’t hurt that Electra had married Jack and Willow’s son Alec, codename Airblast. Electra and Airblast had two children, Hanna Anne Sheila O’Neill and Riley Jonathan Raymond O’Neill. Hanna Anne was going to be eighteen in a couple of months and R.J. was going to be eighteen in two years. They were both already champing at the bit to get into the ‘family business’.

R.J. had already picked out his codename and uniform design, although he’d gone to the Justice League’s designer emeritus when his mom didn’t know it, and Debbie had worked up his uniform on the sly. Hanna had sketched out three uniform styles without consulting Debbie or the JL’s current uniform designer, and Charlene had put her foot down on every one of them because they were even skankier than the ridiculously skimpy uniforms in the comic books. Terawatt knew Hanna was excited to get more in the chest area than most of the women in the family, but really, an open rectangle all the way across the front and sides from just below the nipples down to just above the pubes? How was she expecting it to stay on and stay in place? Teraglue?

Terawatt calmly said, “I’ve had them doing their homework. And there’s no distracting net connection on the TeraJet unless I say so, so they made a lot of progress.”

Hanna Anne smirked at her grandmother and said, “Dynamo to Electra, I completed both my assignments and got them checked. Terawatt’s a cruel taskmaster.”

“Cruel but fair!” chipped in Riley Jonathan.

Electra complained, “Oh, mother, now you’ve got them doing it, too! And making with the bad jokes. I got enough of that from my father-in-law, you know.”

She tried not to smile at that, when the grandchildren were behind her and watching her every move. But she really missed Jack O’Neill. Jack had ended up staying in the Air Force until he was a four-star, and had complained about the increased paperwork every time he got promoted. Willow had learned to just tease him mercilessly about his ‘paperwork-o-phobia’. They really were the cutest couple ever.

Jack and Willow had their first child when Willow was 30, after she had finished her first Ph.D. But they had used the Walsh aging treatments, like so many other people did these days, and had gotten ridiculously effective results because of their genomes. They had another kid about every five years in between Willow’s new grad degrees until their sixth child, when Willow was fifty-five and Jack was seventy-three, and Jack was insisting he was too old to be changing diapers. Okay, Jack had complained about that with every one of their kids. But Jack had survived everything, including parenting, and hadn’t passed away until he was 106. Willow had mourned him for years.

Jack’s funeral had been huge. Even Terawatt had come. And Willow’s bestie Alex Mack. Former U.S. President Finn had come, and had brought her husband the retired general. It had even been televised. Okay, it was on a cable channel, but still it was televised.

Willow had eventually found someone new … even if her new significant other was twenty-five years younger and female. Electra had been mortified throughout all of that bit, especially when Airblast had made those ‘Electra Complex’ jokes. Airblast was just as much his father’s child as Charlie, or any of the other O’Neill kids.

It was weird that she still thought of them as kids, when the youngest one was going to have her forty-second birthday in a month. One of the consequences of old age, no doubt.

Alex and Ray had had two terrific children, while Terawatt adopted four others who were all ‘picture taking’ rescues. Five of the six had gone into the family business, even if most of them had retired at reasonable ages, like Charlene. Fortunately, Annie had figured out how to suppress her and Ray’s kids’ powers until they were old enough to use them responsibly. Alex used to have nightmares about her babies suddenly turning into little Terawatts or Pyres, with all that entailed. Charlene Barbara Alvarado had turned out to be an electrokinetic, while Wesley George Alvarado had turned out to be a telekinetic. And helpful Uncle Jack had never stopped giving them ‘advice’ on awful pranks they could perform with their powers, even if Charlene was really a lot more like her Aunt Annie.

And it had turned out that there was another reason why Annie was sticking so close to the SRI guys at Shar’s funeral. Annie had eventually convinced Hank that he was chasing her, and then there was romance, and then Annie Mack-Marshall and Hank Marshall had two kids of their own. Annie and Hank had eventually figured out how to give Terawatt that curry-dinner super-strength, too. Once Alex’s children were older teens, Alex took the drug and then learned how to handle being able to lift a couple of tons with her TK. It also made her top atmospheric flightspeed and her maximum acceleration go ridiculously high, even if she had to re-learn fine control with her TK. Crud, she had been floating raw eggs with her TK for weeks before she really had it down again. And the first time she had tried picking a lock with her newly-enhanced TK? Metal fragments everywhere. What a mess.

Electra had retired. Airblast had retired. Alex’s other children, both natural and adopted, had all retired. Even two of her grandchildren had already retired from the biz. Terawatt was the only one who had never retired. It seemed like the world always needed Terawatt. Maybe it was that she really loved being Terawatt.

Part of it was probably that Terawatt wasn’t aging like normal people. Alex Mack had needed to spend a lot of time making herself look older, when she was out in public. She hadn’t even taken the Walsh aging treatments, as Ray and lots of other people had. She claimed that she had, though.

Ray had passed away three years ago, and she still missed him. He had developed an obscure heart problem that was probably related to what the GC-161 had done to his muscles. Not that he ever complained about the GC-161. He had always considered it a blessing. It had made him good enough to star at Georgetown, and good enough to have a long career as a point guard in the NBA, even if he was never the very best point guard out there. Still, he was on four championship teams in fifteen years, and he played in ten All-Star games. Toward the end, Ray had been on a host of medications, and had been told not to drink alcohol or eat any of a couple dozen different foods. Terawatt had been out of the country fighting those plastic lifeforms in China. Ray hadn’t called 911 or even any of the kids. He had probably had the chest pains first, realized what they meant, and then put on a data chip of video clips of Alex and the kids, opened a beer, made himself a bacon and swiss and chicken sandwich with too much dressing, and gone out the way he wanted to.

Terawatt had just arranged with the SRI that Ray’s loving wife A.L. Mack passed away in her sleep three months later. Erica Tera Josephina Winkelman — who was almost the spitting image of Jo Lupo-Winkelman because a lot of Orphan traits like looks and brains were turning out to be dominant — was running the SRI then, even if Erica got to call her Auntie Tera in private, too, and had handled all the details.

Now she was Terawatt all the time. She hadn’t used her Alex voice in almost three years. No one had even called her ‘Alex’ in even longer. The closest anyone ever got anymore was the very small group of people who could call her ‘mom’ or ‘grandma’ or ‘auntie Tera’. That, and her friends like Willow and Sam who all still called her ‘Tera’.

She had grown out her hair again, and she kept it the right color thanks to Miss Clairol. She used permanent makeup so she didn’t ever have her Terawatt makeup off anymore, and most days she had her mask on almost constantly. She even wore the gel boob padding all the time, since she found it was the easiest way to carry several types of antidotes and liquid weapons around surreptitiously.

None of her original Justice League was still superheroing — except her. Melvin had ended up doing a couple of years ‘community service’ as part of the SRI, and somehow Jack had talked him into using the codename Toxic Avenger. Even Mel’s wife thought that was tacky, and she had kept that Eighties hair through three babies. All three kids were normal-looking and unscarred, but had Mel’s superstrength.

Azure Crush had joined the Justice League, too, but she also did a series of B-movies as ‘Azure Crush: The Monster Masher’. She did her own stunts, of course, which saved Sergei’s production company a lot of money.

Buffy had used her improved celebrity status and her Orphan abilities to give her a long run in reality TV. Her show got major boosts when her husband Freddie won two Super Bowls in a four-year period. And she also got a nice role doing ice dancing for the Ice Capades, where she really got to show off what she could do that she had suppressed for years. And she even managed to talk Az into making ‘drop-in’ appearances on her reality show once in a while as ratings stunts.

Bruce and Julie Paine had a boy and a girl who both went into bat-heroing when they got old enough, even if Bruce never stopped grumbling about it and worrying about them. At least Julie talked Bruce into helping found Justice League North America. Action Girl finally changed her name when she started up Justice League Europe, even if Terawatt still thought the Finnish words for ‘Action Girl’ were not a good codename. Charlie and Hanna O’Neill adopted a couple of picture-taking rescues, and Hanna let them join Justice League Europe as soon as they were eligible. Victor and Yuki Cready settled in Tokyo and were two of the founding members of JL Asia. They had three children who all had thermodynamics-based superpowers as well, and all three joined JL-Asia once Victor decided they were old enough and trained enough. Shaman and Hanna managed to get the top of the tepui turned into a government-protected wildlife preserve, even if it was too dangerous to let people do more than fly over it in helicopters.

But it wasn’t just them. In the end, over six thousand Paradise Valley residents came forward and admitted they already had superpowers, too, even if most of them were totally unsuited to fighting crime. The Paradise Valley police had to hire a ton of supers because they started getting a lot of super-powered crime, even if a lot of it was stuff like telekinetically TP’ing houses or using a silvery morph to swipe candy out of stores. But Paradise Valley ended up with the world’s first super-powered grocery with people who could keep vegetables and fruits fresh longer and people who could keep meat and milk from spoiling; the world’s first super-powered gas station and car repair, the world’s first cyberpath computer security company, the world’s first super-powered lawncare and garden store company, and a super-powered delivery team that unfortunately put some of the town’s regular delivery services out of business.

And then there was the other side of the coin. Dani Atron had been offered a special arrangement by Jack O’Neill’s group, but she had turned it down. Instead, she had insisted on being tried for crimes that Danielle Atron had committed. It had taken testimony from Terawatt and George Mack and Annie Mack and Jack O’Neill to keep Dani from getting life in prison for Danielle’s crimes. Dani ended up getting ten years of probation and fifteen years of therapy. She still spent all her time trying to make up for the things ‘she’ had done. And Clare Tobias had turned out to be another sticky legal problem, with the murder charge and the attempted murder charges being hard to press when the President revealed at a press conference that Clare had been operating under the aegis of the NSC. Her lawyer had played Clare up as a loyal soldier saving the country, and had gotten a hung jury. Twice. Andrea Harrison’s family had still sued Clare for millions of bucks, and Clare hadn’t contested that.

Khan’s spaceship didn’t make quite the right adjustment at Jupiter, so it just missed being able to slingshot around Neptune, and it flew out into interstellar space. NASA and the ESA and RSA and JASA were still tracking it. Sam Carter helped invent new, more sensitive tracking technology including tracking satellites in HEO. Alex had even been called in when the tracking tech spotted a couple of asteroids that were going to be too close to earth in another dozen years. No one had ever let Sam put a hunter-killer satellite up to stop the risk of Kessler Syndrome or stop incoming killer asteroids, but Terawatt had been allowed to fly up with Sam’s maser and deal with a few thousand potential problems. Now there were a dozen self-sufficient space stations in LEO and HEO, and two on the moon, and two on Mars, with plans to build bigger ones in Earth’s Lagrange points and on Mars. Every space station these days carried a special Terawatt food cache in case she needed to make an emergency dash to them for a rescue. In decades, it had only happened twice, but still people just equated ‘Terawatt’ and ‘world-saving’.

Terawatt had ‘gone into another dimension’ when Alex Mack was pregnant the first time, and boy, had super-crime jumped while she was gone. It dropped as soon as she was ‘back’ and busting badguys, even if she had to wear a couple of pairs of Spanx under her uniform for a while. Then when Alex Mack was pregnant the second time, Terawatt ‘went into space’ on a mission. The same crime problem happened. There were other supers out there, but for some reason, Terawatt was the name that super-crooks feared.

Now she was worried about her eventual retirement. She took memory and IQ tests every day, to look for senile dementia or Alzheimer’s or anything like that, because nothing could be worse than a crazy Terawatt. If that happened, she had a fallback already prepared. She would announce that she was rocketing into space to hunt down Khan’s spaceship and she would be back when she could. Then she would let Hotaru incinerate her. No one would know that Terawatt wasn’t ever going to come back, or why. Super-crooks would just be out there worrying about Terawatt dropping in on them from space.

But that might not happen for years. Or decades. Given her current levels of hormones and skin elasticity and telomere expression, it could possibly extend for longer than that. And there was still so much good that Terawatt could do. Speaking of which …

“Okay, RJ, it’s on ‘trainer’ now. Just take the joystick. The AI will give you feedback, and when you’re not over-correcting or under-correcting, it will slowly give you more and more control, until you’re really flying her.”

“Kewl! Tera, you’re the best!”

She smiled warmly at him. Despite the demands of being Terawatt, she’d had a marvelous marriage and wonderful kids and terrific adopted kids and fantastic friends and amazing grandchildren. She’d gotten a truly tera life. She ruffled his hair with her hand instead of her TK and whispered in his ear, “I like to think so.”



fin

 
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