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Chapter 197 – ConfrontationsSam Carter felt frankly embarrassed. She’d been part of the planning team, and she had agreed to this method of ingress, even if no one else wanted to call it that. But she and Ultraman had bailed out of the chopper with her lying in his arms like some simpering bride. And he was only about sixteen!
Still, he had flight, and she didn’t. She didn’t feel like trying to parachute out of a helicopter at a hundred feet up and a hundred fifty mph over heavy jungle canopy. She’d crash into something heavy long before her chute could deploy properly.
So she was letting Ultraman carry her as they veered off to the right. The Batman managed to launch some sort of non-lethal gas dispersal system at one anti-aircraft battery just before he would have crashed headlong into the base of the tepui, and he veered off to the left.
Their task was simple in principle and difficult in practice. They had to take down every anti-missile and anti-aircraft system before the second wave could launch. Then things got more complex. If they hadn’t heard from any of the crew up top, they would have to take the Batcopter — or whatever Batman called it — up to the summit of the tepui and risk the anti-aircraft fire up there to take out that anti-missile weaponry. If they got the anti-missile hardware down and everything else was still live, then the top brass might try and resolve the problem with a couple of multiple-warhead ICBMs that would turn everything for dozens of miles into radioactive wastes. If they fulfilled their tactical mission objective number one and the fighters up top fulfilled their mission objectives, then they still needed to tackle objective two: clear any super-powered threats down here and eliminate any anti-infantry threats, so half a dozen different countries could move ground troops and artillery into position around the tepui. Not that anyone was going to move in ground troops until it was clear that no one needed to nuke the entire area.
So … The first anti-missile site had been gassed, she and Ultraman were moving counter-clockwise to take out anything they found, and Batman was going to take Azure Crush down to deal with more ground sites, while Batgirl was going to fly the chopper to the far side of the tepui and begin sweeping up on that side.
“C, this is B. Gassed site is still live. Tackling it now. And we now have more support inbound.”
She had been perfectly willing to be Charlie instead of just C, but the Batman hadn’t wanted to be Baker for some reason. Or maybe it was someone else’s code letter he was cranky about. Still, she could be ‘C’ as long as no one had trouble distinguishing letters due to background noise or firefights.
“This is C. Roger that.” She didn’t want to see what that site would look like after Azure Crush rampaged through it.
And really, the guy’s a genius, and the best superhero name he could come up with was Batman? Sam was so glad she wasn’t stuck with some idiotic supername, like Ultraman. Or Action Girl. Or Azure Crush.
Granted, Terawatt was a seriously cool name. It was tera.
But she was never going to let General O’Neill choose a superhero codename for her. She’d seen his sense of humor in action. She’d end up with a name like ‘Boom Boom’ so her office would forever after be known as ‘the Boom Boom room’. Yuck. Or ‘Blonde Ambition’. He’d find that amusing. Or ‘Fist Girl’. Or ‘Blast Lass’. Or …
Oh, hell, she’d probably better make up a name to have in reserve, just in case. ‘Impact’ would do. Or ‘Newton’, since it was a unit of force, and it was named for a scientist. Even if the general would probably nickname her ‘fig’. Or ‘Juice’. Perhaps ‘Joule’ would do since it was a unit of energy or work, and it was named for a physicist. Even if the general would probably go with the ‘family jewels’ joke, or maybe ‘precious jewel’. Or he’d call her ‘Joules’ Verne …
And … crap. She was looking at a well-defended anti-aircraft battery with heavily-armored positions to handle any sort of ground forces coming their way. And plenty of manpower staffing it.
Ultraman had spotted it, too, and they dived downward.
Ultraman had super-strength and flight and superspeed when he was on foot, but he didn’t have any ranged attacks. And since he was only sixteen or so, Sam was loath to give him any, especially when he had no training in gun safety or anything useful. So she had him wearing some armor. Most people couldn’t wear something like a steel breastplate with nothing under it, because when they got shot with anything bigger than a .22, the transfer of force would injure them. And most people couldn’t wear enough steel to stand up to a high-caliber bullet without falling over from the weight. Ultraman wasn’t invulnerable, but he didn’t have those problems. So he was wearing a few hundred pounds of titanium armor, even if it didn’t cover his fingers or his joints.
She didn’t have that kind of strength, so she was wearing ordinary body armor and a tac vest. She had her TK blasts, even if they didn’t have the range of, say, a mortar, so she was just carrying a P-90 plus ammo, and a sidearm. And a row of grenades, plus the usual gear you needed when you were operating away from a supply line in a jungle climate.
So he slung her around to put his body in between her and any incoming fire. That put her clinging onto his back with both hands, so she couldn’t use her P-90 and she couldn’t use her TK blasts. That wasn’t at all what she had planned.
He quickly landed at the base of the tepui where she could step behind a boulder, and he did an end run around the emplacement.
Holy Hannah, could that kid run! She was guessing his airspeed was somewhere around fifty-five miles an hour, based on the wind resistance she’d been feeling, but he was sprinting to the far side of the emplacement at maybe three times that. At that speed, no one was getting close to hitting him.
Oh, shit, one guy was hurling lightning bolts at Ultraman. So an electrokinetic — possibly the one who was broken out along with Clare Tobias — on top of four heavy machine gun emplacements and two guys with Strela anti-aircraft weapons and two guys with serious anti-tank hardware.
Sam knew enough about Strelas to know there was no way these Strelas would lock onto something with no heat source, so those two guys were wasting their time. But the guys with the anti-tank weapons could be problems if they managed to get a bead on Ultraman. He was strong, but he wasn’t invulnerable, and a decent anti-tank weapon would punch a hole right through his armor.
That defined her tactical parameters pretty clearly. She slid far enough around the boulder that she had clear lines of sight without exposing herself unduly to enemy fire. Then she aimed carefully and took down both anti-tank men with her P-90. Everyone was so busy worrying as Ultraman started hurling small boulders at them, that no one noticed her work.
All four of the machine gun emplacements were dug in, surrounded by concrete, roofed over, and had embrasures that would be hard to shoot into. Fortunately, she wasn’t limited to target shooting anymore. She extended her right arm and pointed her palm at the closest emplacement. She had to concentrate hard to get her TK blasts to work, but it was worth the time.
A narrow cone of invisible force rippled through the air and smashed in the entire side and roof of her target. Perfect.
Almost half of the defenders whirled about and started firing her way, while the rest kept trying to deal with a super-strong guy in armor who was hurling two-hundred-pound boulders hard enough to crush anti-aircraft missile launching systems.
One of the defenders gestured, and about four hundred pounds of metal shards that used to be anti-aircraft missiles and anti-aircraft batteries and transport trucks suddenly leapt into the air and flew right at her.
For a split second, she considered ducking around the boulder. But if this guy had enough control to lift all that scrap and then project it her way, he could probably make it curve around obstacles to perforate her. And she’d spent enough time in hospitals this year. She extended her arm again and concentrated.
The metal targeted her, and she let it get a little closer. Then she fired off another blast. That telekinetic might have several hundred pounds of highly-maneuverable force at his disposal, but her blasts were more like several tons of highly-directed blast.
The blast plowed into the flying debris, taking about eighty percent of the metal shards with it and turning a concussive wave into a telekinetic claymore mine. That took out the enemy telekinetic, too, and so the remaining shards simply dropped to the ground. She pulled up her P-90 and sprinted forward.
Ultraman darted forward at maybe two hundred fifty feet per second, so he was in the middle of the wreckage of the enemy force before she got anywhere close to it. There were no weapons left standing. The missiles were all wrecked. The machine gun emplacements and anti-tank weapons were all smashed. There weren’t any red team soldiers left who were doing anything except lying unconscious or groaning in pain.
By her estimation, they had moved roughly forty-five degrees around the tepui from the first targeted battery. She said, “Let’s move. Expect the next battery will be about the same distance around the tepui. I’m guessing we’ll find eight total, laid out in an octagon. And this time, hold me so I can use my weapons so we can strafe the battery first.”
He looked around at the carnage and grimaced. She felt badly about dragging a teenager into something like this, but it needed to be done. He just nodded and said, “Got that, major.”
* * *
Eddings watched as Finn and Lupo headed out across the heliport and toward the elevators into the buildings. He knew there would be people waiting for them. And he tuned his radio to the right channel.
“Tepui, come in. This is Eddings. Passphrase: Masada mesosaur.”
“Eddings, this is Tepui. Just sit tight. We have Finn and Lupo under surveillance.”
“Tepui, you also have Action Girl and Terawatt inbound. Both bailed out over the jungle.”
“That matches our intel. Good work. Tepui out.”
He turned off the engine and sat back. Now all he had to do was wait. He took off his helmet and reached for some water.
He never noticed when the steel bar came up off one of the rear seats. It came down abruptly on the back of his head. He keeled over. Invisible hands dragged him out of the pilot’s seat. Then a hypodermic syringe lifted off that same rear seat and plunged into a vein in his forearm.
* * *
Andy Botswell looked out his kitchen window at the Macks’ house. He could see two suspicious black trucks in their driveway. He knew what that meant. It wasn’t like the entire neighborhood didn’t know the Macks had been kidnapped by Atron just before the big GC-161 rollout got stopped by the FDA and the local cops and the National Guard troops from Camp Atron. Heh. Irony, thy last name around here is probably Atron. And then the Macks got kidnapped again last year, and Atron finally ended up in the slammer. For about two weeks.
He groaned. “Dottie, the Macks are in trouble. I’ve got to go.”
“But Andy …”
He would have scratched his head, but he still had his asbestos oven mitts on. “Yeah, I know, but I can’t let this happen.” He marched out the front door.
* * *
Louis was driving above the speed limit, and frankly he was hoping a police car would spot him and chase after him. He didn’t glance over at Marsha as he asked, “Any luck?”
Marsha sounded worried. “Nothing.”
He turned the corner, and there were two black vans in the Macks’ driveway. It felt like his whole intestinal tract seized up. “Call 911. Then leave the phone in the car and get out.”
“Why?”
He explained, “Because I’m gonna block those vans in with my car, and they won’t be happy with anyone still inside here.”
She fussed, “Louis, that’s a bad idea.”
He gritted his teeth. “Then you’ll really hate my next idea. You know those guns your dad showed you? Well, I’m gonna depend on you remembering something about ’em.”
“Louis!”
He slammed on the brakes right behind the vans that were parked side-by-side behind Mr. Mack’s car and Alex’s car. He tried not to think about what had happened to Alex’s mom’s car.
Then he scooted Marsha over behind one of the black vans and had her crouch down so she couldn’t be seen from its rear window. “Ready?”
“No!” she whispered frantically.
“Me, neither.” But here came two badguys in black uniforms that looked a lot like SWAT team uniforms. One was wearing a gasmask, but the other guy wasn’t. Crazy bleached-white hair. Big nose. Crazy look in the eyes. He’d seen photos of this guy, courtesy of the Macks. It was former plant security chief Vince Something-or-other. Something basketball-y. Jordan? O’Neal? Bryant?
And the guy in the gasmask was pushing a gurney that had an unconscious Mrs. Mack on it. Shit.
He stepped forward, even if Vince Whoever was carrying a nasty-looking sub-machine gun. Or something like what assault squads used in movies. Louis knew Alex had read up a lot on guns and explosives and stuff, but there was no reason he needed to know stuff that would just ruin action movies for him.
Well, not until this very second.
He cleared his throat. “I can’t let you take her.”
Vince lifted the gun and pointed it right at Louis. He flipped a little thing on it that was probably the safety. If guns like this had safeties. He smirked at Louis. “Oh, I think you can.”
The little lever-like thing flipped back the way it was. Vince pulled the trigger, and nothing happened.
Vince flipped the safety again, and it flipped back the way it was before. He tried again, and it flipped back again. He growled, “Oh. Somebody’s got a little TK and thinks they’re frigging Terawatt.” He let the gun swing loose under his arm as he pulled out a massive knife. “I got this.”
Louis momentarily wondered if you could face down badguys while wetting your pants.
* * *
Batman looked around the anti-aircraft battery. Nothing was still intact. It had been surprisingly easy to take down the panicky soldiers once Azure Crush charged in, ignoring the rifle fire, and proceeded to use an old jeep as a sledgehammer.
“Alphabet, this is B. Based on perimeter, it looks reasonable that there are eight defensive positions around the tepui, roughly forty-five degrees apart. Team One finished the first position and just took down the second one.”
“B, this is C. Team Two just took down a third one, and we’re aiming at another, so we agree with your evaluation.”
“B, this is G. Your gas has impacted two more on the back side, but they’re not down. Just inconvenienced for a few minutes. And … shit, someone just caught the side of the copter with anti-aircraft. Putting down now.”
Damn it! He was miles away from her, and even Ultraman couldn’t get there fast enough to catch that copter.
“B, this is C. I can release U to support G.”
“B, this is G. I am down safely, and my position is secure. I do not require support. I am moving toward emplacement now.”
He growled, “You heard that, C. Maintain progress around the tepui. Primary tactical mission is essential.”
Azure Crush had obviously been listening on the comms, because she ripped a truck cab free of the ruined missile battery it had been towing, and leapt in. She started it up and yelled at him, “Let’s move it!”
He fired a grapple at the big spoiler atop the cab, and launched himself toward the back of the cab as Azure Crush raced forward. He wasn’t sure if she had intended to go that fast, given that she often left footprints stomped into the ground where she walked. But he pulled himself into a protected position on the back of the cab and hung on as she raced across the uneven ground toward the next battery. Given her driving skills and the dirt-and-rock path she was on, he was making extensive plans for leaping to safety and using his grapples to keep him from hitting the ground.
He was estimating based on the geometry of the tepui and Azure Crush’s driving that it would be roughly ten minutes before they reached the next anti-air battery.
“Hey, B, who’s that?” Azure Crush asked over the comms.
He adjusted his position so he could look through the back window and the windshield to study what she had spotted.
It was Bane, only he looked significantly larger. His hair had mostly fallen out, like that of a chemotherapy patient, so he might be taking much larger doses of his drug, or even some new cocktail of chemicals. He was wearing some sort of breathing mask as well, although Batman could think of six reasons why that might be needed. Bane had thick black tubes running from somewhere on his back to plugs scattered along his arms and shoulders and legs, and he had a minion standing off to the side operating some sort of control system.
And they weren’t alone.
* * *
Andy Botswell looked around. There were two teenagers in George’s driveway, and he was pretty sure both of them were Alex’s friends. The girl was hiding behind one black truck, and the boy was standing in front of those goons like he had superpowers or something.
All right, in this town, that wasn’t so unreasonable.
Andy saw there were other neighbors making their way toward the Macks’ house. He was just the only one wearing oven mitts. Even Jennie Sliff was hobbling over with her cane.
He even recognized that jerkass Vince Carter from the plant. Great. Andy stepped forward and ordered, “All righty boys, time ta drop those things and wait fer the police.”
Vince pointed a fancy sub-machine gun at him and sneered, “Botswell. I remember you. We can do this the hard way or the easy way.”
Andy threw his oven mitts on the driveway and growled, “No, Vince. The question you should ask yourself is: do you want it regular style …” His hands burst into furious orange fireballs. “… or extra-crispy?”
Vince suddenly looked like he might shit himself. But there were more goons. One stepped out and pointed a gun at him from the side.
Jennie Sliff yanked off her dark glasses for the first time in a couple of years, as far as Andy knew.
And suddenly he knew why. Her eyes were glowing a frightening red.
She snapped, “Or maybe you’d like some laser eye surgery.” Red beams shot out of her eyes and carved a line down the middle of the thug’s gun, practically melting it in half. The thug hastily dropped the thing and put his hands over his head.
Vince suddenly leapt into a fancy-looking martial arts stance and yelled, “Hiii-ya!” He moved right at Andy, just as the girl peeked out from behind one truck. And as Vince moved, his shoelaces untied themselves and then the laces from the left and right shoes tied themselves together in a knot. Vince fell on his face so hard it sounded like someone had dropped a hammer on the driveway.
Andy wasn’t sure what to do next, but he didn’t have to worry. Two police cars screeched to a halt in the street, and four policemen came charging onto the driveway. Two had riot shotguns, and two had big handguns. One of them pointed his shotgun at the back of Vince’s head and snapped, “Vincent Carter! Put your hands behind your head! You are under arrest!”
Vince glanced up and winced. “Watt. Why did it have to be fucking Dave Watt?”
Andy remembered Dave Watt from the plant. Somehow, Dave had turned from the biggest idiot in the plant into a real policeman. Andy wondered if he should have tried harder to help the guy.
But Dave was conspicuously not looking at the fire around Andy’s hands, or Jennie’s glowing red eyes. He was ordering the other cops around. “Don’t worry about the bystanders. Concentrate on the kidnappers! Nobody check in the house until we have these guys handcuffed and searched, and then we’ll need at least two men in gasmasks before we go into the house.”
Andy figured the crooks coming out of the house wearing gasmasks was a big enough clue even for Dave to notice.
In no time, there were six crooks handcuffed and face-down on the driveway, with about ten policemen frisking them and getting statements and making sure the house was empty. A couple of paramedics were checking over George and Barb, who seemed to be fine once they woke up.
He tugged his oven mitts back on and wondered why no one had said anything. Was every cop and every paramedic and every neighbor just going to pretend he hadn’t made his hands burst into fireballs?
Jennie nervously adjusted her dark glasses as she hobbled over to where he was standing. She muttered, “I … I was scared everyone would want me out of the neighborhood.”
Andy glanced around at the crowd. “Me, too.”
She admitted, “I had no idea.”
He sighed. “Yeah, I got exposed to something at the plant the night Danielle Atron tried to blow it up. I’ve kinda been hiding in the house ever since.”
Jennie frowned. “Howard thinks I got this from planting flowers at the old cemetery on Veteran’s Day, a few years ago.”
The teenaged boy walked over to Andy with the teenaged girl. The boy calmly asked, “I wonder how many other people in your neighborhood have powers?”
Four other people hesitantly raised their hands.
* * *
Alex went as fast as she could, but she was having to move back and forth in stretched-out ‘S’ shapes to try and find as many of the anti-missile systems as she could. She was flying in the shape of big integral signs. Who would’ve thought that notation from math class would be relevant to superheroing?
Okay, who other than Willow and Sam and Hermione? And Bruce?
She’d spotted some of the dinosaurs loose in the jungle parts, so she wasn’t too worried about an anti-aircraft battery made up of a dozen soldiers just hiding out there with no protection. They’d get eaten long before they could shoot down anything. But that didn’t mean there weren’t automated systems out there, or maybe even systems that were walled off from the jungle and connected to the Collective base through an underground tunnel or something.
There had been a big anti-missile battery near the edge where she had entered the fog, and it had been on top of a fifty-foot-high concrete structure so nothing was going to be able to eat them. She had no idea how they got there or left the site, unless there was a tunnel from there down into the tepui to some underground area. And she was pretty sure she had wrecked every missile in that whole battery without even alerting the half dozen people operating it. She had flown in as a silvery blob, disconnected all the hydraulics on the big stuff with her TK, fried all the electronics on the launch systems, and wrecked all the anti-aircraft missiles inside the Strelas by tugging wires and connections loose with her TK. The two people sitting at radar screens and the two people sitting at control panels hadn’t even twitched.
She had also found half a dozen huge things that had to be fog generators, and she had zapped every one of them. Then she pulled apart little pieces inside their pumping systems with her TK. That ought to knock out a lot of their fog before a lot longer.
But she was all the way at a huge wall on the opposite side of the tepui without finding more anti-whatever systems, and she was sure there had to be a lot more. She sure hoped Riley and Bruce’s plans were going to work, because if there were more of those batteries, then helicopters couldn’t swoop in to the rescue, and missiles would get shot down.
Even an Option Failsafe attempt might be useless. Alex was pretty sure Riley would have had the courage to bring a ‘suitcase nuke’ along even if he knew he wouldn’t be able to get away. But she’d figured out a while ago that way-too-handsome, way-too-skilled Captain Eddings was probably an Orphan. And that he was probably that mole in the SRI that Jack knew about. And that Jack had probably been feeding Captain Eddings disinformation for a long time. Alex had even realized that Jack had managed to keep Eddings from getting to fly Alex to or from Paradise Valley ever since the Orphan thing exploded, just to protect Alex’s secret identity. But with Eddings piloting that helicopter to get them safely onto the tepui, there wasn’t any way to sneak a nuclear bomb up here with them.
She stayed silvery and hovered right below the top of the wall, and she slid a silvery tendril up on top so she could see without being spotted. The wall was at least a foot thick, and no one was using it as a walkway. But on the other side of the wall was a big garden area, and a big courtyard, and several four-story buildings. Each of the buildings looked really new, and looked like a cross between a fancy hotel and a modern office building.
And there were security cameras covering pretty much the entire area. She used her TK and disconnected wires in every camera she could see. She was about to jet across to one of the rooftops when she spotted a really hunky Orphan stepping out of a ground-floor door with a big tray of food. That was a lot of food on that tray. Maybe enough for three hungry people.
Or one GC-161 case. Like Danielle Atron.
She moved up on top of the wall to follow him, and he spotted her. She expected him to sound an alarm or start shooting at her or something. She was totally not ready for him to spot her and break out in a huge smile.
He set down the tray and started waving. “Over here! Terawatt! Over here!”
Okay, now she was mega-confused. If this was a trap, she wasn’t seeing how it was supposed to work. Yet. But there wasn’t anyone else in sight, and she didn’t see any automated weaponry, so she didn’t know what was up with this.
She went normal as she flew over toward him.
He looked … relieved. “Ach, Terawatt, I am so happy to see you! You are here to fight Danielle Atron, are you not? Please say you are. Please please please! If you are not here for her, please take me off of here to a nice prison or something!”
She asked, “Who are you?”
“I am Klaus Huber. I have been stuck dancing attendance on that witch almost since the day she arrived here! I cannot take it anymore. Please, I’ll do anything if you just kill her or capture her and take her away from here! I know where she lives, and where her main lab is, and where she is right now, and where she’ll be in an hour. Oh, and she has powers like yours, so be careful!”
Okay. Trap, or desperate person who hates Danielle? Jack would tell her that it could be both. Still, if he could take her to Danielle … “Perhaps you could show me where she is right now.”
“As you wish! She is in the next building, in her workout room, for at least another half hour. All we have to do is walk in through that door there …” He pointed at a door into the next building. “… and take the stairs down to the basement, and then a left and a right, and I can show you her private workout area.”
“Lead on,” she ordered. She hoped she could handle whatever was going to happen, because she figured Danielle would be a lot tougher to fight than the last time. But Danielle was the target she had specifically prepared for. Well, one of the targets she had prepared for.
He hurried over to the entry door and used a keycard to unlock it. Alex noticed that the door had really heavy weatherstripping, so just in case she needed to escape and she couldn’t open that door, she used her TK to tear some of it off the doorframe down near the floor. Klaus was already heading toward a stairway door and didn’t notice.
He led her down a flight of stairs into a set of halls that seemed to lead to research labs and storerooms and offices. None of them seemed like the kind of thing that would be around a gym or a workout room.
He ushered her into a short hallway to a solid door. On the door was a sheet of paper taped in place, with the printed words:
MY PRIVATE ROOM
TRESPASSERS WILL BE ELECTROCUTED
Wow, that was friendly. And really Danielle-like.
She pretended to step toward the door, even if she was floating an inch above the floor just in case.
A wall slammed into place behind her, with Klaus on the other side of it, and the door in front of her swung open.
She could see into the room. There was a big staircase that she was at the top of, and it led down into a room bigger than a high school basketball gym. On the side walls were large weapons that were tracking her way: heavy machine guns, weird ray-guns, maybe even grenade launchers. And standing confidently in the center of the floor was a figure in power armor. A massive metal-and-plastic body with weapons mounted on the shoulders and a large clear-plastic dome atop the torso.
Danielle Atron was inside the power armor and waiting for the chance to turn Terawatt into hamburger.
Alex whispered to herself in her best Beetlejuice voice, “Showtime.”
* * *
Action Girl used her grapples to swing up to the top of the wall, and she looked over the big courtyard area. The four-story building just next to the one opposite her had a guy leaning back against the railing of one of the third-story balconies, just taking a smoking break. He had his back to her. And the door to the balcony had to be unlocked if he was out there.
Perfect. She pointed one grapple at the gutter of the building opposite her, and she fired it. She hooked the gutter just where she wanted, and she leapt, reeling herself in as she went.
She landed in a balanced stance on the fourth-floor railing just below the gutter, and she leapt upward, grabbing the gutter and flipping herself onto the roof. It was a heliport, and Riley’s helicopter was there. She could see that Captain Eddings wasn’t sitting in his seat, so she assumed Riley’s plan was still working.
She sprinted at the next building. It was too far away even for her to make the jump, but she didn’t have to jump to the next roof. In mid-air, she fired a grapple and snagged a section of gutter halfway toward her target. Then she swung through the air, reeling herself in and then unreeling the line so she swung up in just the right spot.
She flew through the air and kicked the smoker in the back of the head with both feet as she landed on the balcony. The man’s head hit the concrete floor with a thud.
She looked down at the man and said, “You knew it was bad for your health.” Maybe she had watched too many James Bond movies with Charlie.
She checked the door as she opened it. No alarms, just a very sturdy door and a solid lock. She closed it behind her and moved into the room. She listened closely, but she didn’t hear anything unusual. There was some movement far down the hallway outside the room, but she couldn’t tell more than that. She stepped silently toward the door.
Something sharp punched into the back of her neck. Suddenly she was hammered by an explosion of electrified agony that jolted her all the way down to her toes. She collapsed helplessly.
She hit the floor hard. Whatever the thing in her neck was, she could feel it was sharp, and it was buried in the back of her neck right where her spinal column ran. She tried desperately to make her muscles move before someone took advantage of the success of their trap. She was hit with another pulse of electrical agony for her trouble.
Maggie Walsh stepped into view. She knelt down beside Hanna and buckled some sort of collar around Hanna’s neck so the weapon couldn’t come loose.
She gave Hanna a smug smile. “There. That should hold you. I thought you’d never get here. I’ve had that moron facing away from you and smoking cigarettes on that balcony for almost fourteen minutes now.” She looked at Hanna’s expression and added, “You didn’t really think we weren’t tracking you and Terawatt both, did you?”