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Chapter 201 – Half the BattleBatgirl moved as soon as Batman hissed, “Pattern Delta!”
Bruce had been pretty concerned about her going into the crime-fighting business. Well, Batman had been gruff and concerned. Bruce had been terrified she’d get hurt or killed. Batman was an implacable force against evil. Bruce was a guy who had lost the people he loved, and who tried to keep the world at arm’s length because he could deal with being shot or stabbed a lot easier than he could deal with having his heart broken again.
That was when she had realized that Bruce had fallen for her, and she could have gotten him to do anything — anything except giving up being Batman — if she had just promised not to be Batgirl.
But Bruce was the only person out there trying to save New York City from super-crime, and he needed her support. So she had gotten him to work with her. He was awesome at martial arts, and amazing at deduction, and stunning at planning. So she had listened to him, and trained with him, and learned from him.
One thing he had insisted on was proper evasive maneuvers. If someone was firing a gun at her, or hurling energy bolts at her, or throwing manhole covers at her, she needed to be able to dodge, and dodge repeatedly. So he had designed evasive patterns based on how humans moved, and what humans unconsciously expected other people to do.
She dodged to her right and used a grapple to go straight up, quickly followed by a move back to her left using her other grapple.
And Pattern Delta saved her life, because a five-hundred-pound boulder went flying through the spot she’d been just a second before.
She was pretty sure she could take Poison Ivy. She even had a little bat-gasmask for Ivy’s breath and her pod-plants. She was pretty good with her batarangs if she did say so herself, so she didn’t have to get close to Ivy to take her down. But she was absolutely sure that she was never going to be able to take down someone like Ultraman or Terawatt. Even if Alex Mack seemed like a sweet girl who couldn’t possibly be dangerous.
Ultraman hurled two chunks of tree at Batman.
But she knew Batman was too good to get caught like that. He did one of the moves he had shown her. He had already tilted his head and moved his cape so it looked like he was over-committing to his left. Then, when Ultraman threw the chunks where he thought Batman was going, he missed by a mile.
Ultraman flew into the air toward Shaman, and suddenly the air rippled in a narrow cone. Major Carter blasted him out of the sky when she knew he was at his slowest.
Batgirl was going to have to remember that Carter was dangerously sharp, and could apply her brains in a high-stress environment, just like Batman. Batgirl didn’t see how anyone could be a gorgeous blonde and also a celebrated fighter pilot and also a genius astrophysicist and also a famous astronaut and also an expert at this type of battle. But Carter was doing it all.
Ultraman was slammed backward about thirty feet, but he didn’t crash into the ground. He caught himself a couple of yards up, and he darted to one side to avoid a batarang from Batman.
Batgirl wondered why Ultraman dodged something that couldn’t hurt him. She figured it was instinct. She didn’t wonder why Batman had thrown something that wouldn’t hurt Ultraman. She knew Batman had a reason. He always had a reason.
And there it was. The batarang was a distraction. Azure Crush came up off the ground and grabbed Ultraman by the ankle. She tried to slam him into the ground.
It didn’t work. Ultraman just lifted off, taking her with him.
But she wouldn’t let go. He kicked her hand with his super-strength. He bent over and punched her arm. He went super-speed and rained down dozen of punches on her arm. But she was stronger than he was, and maybe even tougher than he was, so he couldn’t make her let go.
Azure Crush grabbed his knee with her other hand and pulled herself up his body. Ultraman yelled in pain. He kept punching at her, but Batgirl could tell that Ultraman had no martial arts training.
Batman pulled what looked like a small raygun out of the back of his utility belt and carefully lined it up. Bruce had explained about the ray: he was certain that Ultraman had to be Andrew Clements, which meant he had to have gotten his powers from a biophysicist named Jeffcoate who still published in all the right journals, which meant that Bruce had a solid idea on how Ultraman’s powers worked, which meant that energy beams of certain types ought to knock out Ultraman’s powers for a few seconds. And Bruce Paine could get the technology to build a handheld beam generator that would do the job at a short distance. In theory.
Batman ran closer and took the shot while Ultraman was busy concentrating on Azure Crush.
Ultraman dropped like he’d lost his powers. The two of them fell thirty feet and crashed to the ground. Azure Crush got right back up and smacked him to make sure he’d stay down.
It had actually worked. Bruce had beaten someone like Ultraman with his brain. Batgirl scowled at Batman. “Are you prepared for EVERYTHING in the world?”
She knew he was going to ignore her and direct their forces against Poison Ivy and her plants. But Ivy didn’t bring a wave of plants at them. Ivy suddenly whirled to face the tepui, and she screamed in horror.
Trees shook and toppled over. Something was rushing right toward them. Something massive.
“NO!” Ivy screamed again, just as the trees Batgirl could see suddenly went down in a shivering curtain. And hundreds of tons of red blob oozed at them at thirty miles an hour.
Ivy stood right in front of the blob and yelled, “Stop! Stop hurting my babies!”
It didn’t work. Batgirl didn’t think anyone was expecting it to work. Maybe not even Ivy.
Azure Crush ripped a non-Ivy’ed tree loose from the soil and whirled around like it was time for the Olympic hammer throw. She hurled the entire tree right into the blob.
The tree punched a hole deep into the thing, but it kept moving relentlessly forward. Even worse, it simply rolled forward, absorbing the tree and filling in the gaping hole.
Batgirl heard over her comm system, “Batman to Az. Do NOT throw anything organic. Boulders only.”
Poison Ivy still hadn’t moved. Ivy focused as hard as she could and screamed, “STOP! I command you!”
It sped up, aiming right for her. Ivy didn’t even try to get out of its way. She extended her arms forward and leaned toward it, as if she could control it by her sheer strength of will.
A blast of telekinetic force seared into it, punching a circle fifteen feet across and ten feet deep. It just kept rolling forward, burying the crater within its immense mass.
Batman came swinging across from her right, holding onto a single grapple with his left arm. He snatched Poison Ivy off the ground only seconds before she would have been overrun.
“Batman here. Shaman, get all your animals out of range. Az, if Ultra gets back up, make sure he only throws boulders and nothing organic. Carter, you’re our most effective weapon right now, so keep it up.”
Batgirl threw an explosive batarang into the ground just at the edge of the mass. The explosion burned it in a small area, but it simply ‘ate’ the damaged portion and kept rolling forward.
Batman swung back to the right, hurling a gas bomb and two different toxin bombs at the thing. None of them did any good.
Carter blasted two more craters into the surface of the blob, but neither seemed to have any real effect. Batgirl noticed that Carter looked exhausted from the effort. She made a mental note to keep an eye on Carter in case the woman was about to collapse.
A boulder smashed into the blob from the right. Batgirl distinctly heard Az yell, “Take that, ya fuckin’ snotball!”
Then two boulders smashed into the blob, followed by a tree-trunk, another boulder, a tree, and another boulder. Ultraman was on his feet and hurling debris at superspeed. But the trees were just feeding the thing, and the boulders weren’t really stopping it.
Batgirl heard Batman snap over the comm system, “Batman to U, get everything edible out of its path. Stop throwing it food.”
Ultraman gave Batman a thumbs-up instead of replying over the comm system, and sprinted over to rip dozens of trees and shrubs out of the blob’s path, using the brush to herd all the peccaries away from the thing.
Major Carter asked over the comms, “Anybody got ten kiloliters of liquid helium in their utility belt?” Batgirl bit the inside of her lip so she wouldn’t laugh, because that would make a certain bat-someone really grouchy.
Batman landed beside Batgirl. He growled, “Am I prepared for everything in the world? I think we’re about to find out the answer to that one.” He spoke into the comm system, “Batman to reserves. Come in please.”
* * *
Alex darted backward as the whole building exploded. It looked like the whole outside half of the building was tilting off the edge of the tepui. She really hoped no one was standing around underneath it.
And then she heard it. “Help, Mister Wizard, help!”
There was only one person on earth who’d yell that. She darted over toward the edge as fast as she could, and … Oh, crud!
It wasn’t just Jack. It was Jack and Willow both, and they were falling to their deaths.
She flew straight down the face of the tepui, pushing herself hard so she was going way faster than Jack and Willow were falling. She had to dodge a bunch of other junk that was on its way down, but she had four thousand feet to catch up with her friends. And everything else was effectively holding still while she flew straight down past it all.
Willow was hanging onto Jack for all she was worth, so that made things easier. Alex caught up with them and pulled both of them into her morph.
The only problem was she couldn’t fly with that much extra weight. She could easily fly with just Willow. She could probably fly with just Jack, although it would be pretty iffy, and she knew she couldn’t manage it if he was packing his usual loadout for an op. Willow and Jack together like this? That was probably about a hundred thirty pounds more than she could lift when she was already lifting herself.
So … parachute time. She’d looked up some stuff on parachute sizes after that mess with the ICBM, so she was sure she could parachute down with the extra weight. She flattened her silvery form out as much as she could, so she was maybe ten or eleven feet across.
Well, she was sure she could do it, right up until the horrible crumbling sound above her. She was silvery, so she could see above her, too, and so she had a really icky view as the whole side of the building above her gave way. It and maybe fifty vertical feet of the tepui under it just toppled over and fell. Right toward her.
She was parachuting, which meant that the whole ginormous thing would fall way faster than her, and smack her out of the air, and smash her like a pancake when it hammered her into the ground.
Or she could tilt her ‘parachute’ and coast far enough away from the tepui that the building would miss her. Or …
Or she could try something else first. She pulled upward as hard as she could and let the side of the building catch up with her. They were dropping fast, but she still had over two thousand feet before she hit the ground and got her friends horribly killed if she was wrong about this. She let the building press her downward, and then she used all her TK on the building.
She focused on one big picture window. She used her TK to pull apart all the woodwork and framing around the window, so she could get at the thing. Once she had it separated, she could see it was a fancy triple-pane window. So she used her TK to pull it apart and get at the middle sheet of glass. Then she turned that pane sideways and diagonally so it could fit through the opening where it had been sitting in the window frame, and she pulled upward on it and her morph.
The building started dropping out from under her. It was still falling at something close to its terminal velocity, while she was parachuting again, only with a big sheet of glass added to the weight she was fighting.
She couldn’t make a nice, aerodynamic wing-shape on her own because she didn’t have that kind of control over her morph. But she could flatten herself out against one side of the glass. She slid to one side so she made a rounded bulge at one edge of the glass, and then she squeezed herself as thin as she could toward the back edge of the glass. That made her bulge the front edge of her ‘wing’ and the thin side the rear edge of her wing. She tilted the glass so it wasn’t strictly horizontal, but had an angle of attack of maybe twenty degrees. And she used all her TK to push herself ‘forward’.
And she had lift. She actually had lift! She had a lot of lift, because she had a big angle of attack, and a huge thrust-to-weight ratio. She’d looked it up after she’d been up to the ISS in that DragonX and then flown through space. Modern high-performance fighter jets usually had a thrust-to-weight ratio around one. She didn’t need that kind of maneuverability. Well, she was really hoping she didn’t. But a Boeing 767 had a thrust-to-weight ratio of maybe 0.16 and it could still fly. With Jack and Willow in her morph, she figured she had a thrust-to-weight ratio between 0.7 and 0.8, and she was figuring the sheet of glass was big enough that her wing loading was getting down near the numbers for gliders, so she was actually, really flying. Like a jet. Like a passenger jet.
Even though she was silvery, she still felt herself smiling like a goofball.
She soared in a wide curve, jetting higher as she swooped around back toward the summit of the tepui. Once she rose above the level of the tepui, she began looking for threats, and a safe place to land. She gave the buildings a wide berth. One had just fallen apart and tried to squish her, another one looked like several huge bombs had gone off in it, one was on fire, and the last one looked like it had been in a major earthquake.
She decided that she had better land in the courtyard area. She hoped that when she touched down, she didn’t shatter the glass and cut anyone.
As she came in for a landing, she spotted what was left of the fourth anti-missile system. The building that was a roaring inferno had lost its false roof, and she could see the remains of a heliport and two S-400 anti-missile systems and two anti-air systems. Everything in there was on fire, and rocket fuel periodically exploded, further ruining the upper floors of the building. She managed to land without shattering the pane of glass, and when she let Jack and Willow out of her morph, they were fine. Even if they both took big gulps of air.
Ayananta swooped in proudly and landed beside Alex. “Terawatt! Hello!”
Alex couldn’t help smiling. Had she been this enthusiastic and excited when she started out? “Ayananta. I’m glad you could come, and thanks for all your contributions.”
But Ayananta was too psyched to let it go. She babbled, “I found two anti-missile systems in the jungle, and I destroyed both! I also destroyed seven fog generators and I injured one T. rex! Oh, and I fought a flying, lightning-throwing Orphan. But he was not as impressive as you are!”
Alex patted her on the shoulder and said, “Great job. Thank you. Now let’s see what else we need to do.”
* * *
Victor Cready listened over the speaker in front of him. They had already figured out that there wasn’t a comm system that would hold up to the temperatures he cranked out.
“Batman to reserves. Come in please.”
He glanced over beside him and said, “Reserves here. Situation?”
“Batman here. We have another Downingtown blob. Estimated size: two hundred seventy tons and growing. We need both of you in Delta arrangement.”
“On our way. Out.”
Cready stood up in the cargo area of the chopper. He hadn’t thought Terawatt could do much more for him, but he’d been stupidly wrong. Again. She had gotten some hotshot general named O’Neill to get him out of jail on some sort of special release, and then she’d gotten some big-brain chemist at the Paradise Valley Chemical plant to do a dose-and-antidote thing with him until he had more control on his power. He could turn off his fire when he wanted to, and he could control what parts of him were on fire, and most important of all, he could just barely stand the pain when he was aflame.
But this was even better. He was going to be flying into battle with his own personal ice-pack.
Tsurara stood up next to the large man. She had not thought that Terawatt would come through for her yet again, but this was amazing. Victor kept feeding her heat every time the helicopter heater wasn’t adequate, and so she felt warm. She could tell that it hurt him, but they had figured out that when she touched him and he set just that part of himself afire, it didn’t hurt him and it truly helped her. So they were sitting in the helicopter, flying into a battle zone, and holding hands while sitting so that their arms pressed against each other. It was intensely personal, and embarrassingly pleasant.
And he spoke Japanese, too. Not well, but far better than she expected a gaijin to do. He said he spoke eleven languages besides English because he had been an international mercenary for a number of years. That was both intimidating and … exciting. She had never imagined that someone like her might someday sit like this with a ronin.
She stood up next to him and let him wrap his arms around her. Even fully clothed, this was not proper in public, and yet she was enjoying it quite a lot. He was also perhaps the only man on earth who could hold her like this and not get an instant case of frostbite. Or be turned into a block of ice.
He could also fly while holding her, which was amazing, and thrilling. It was also terrifying, but she had refused to admit that to anyone except herself. Although she might have screamed the first time he lifted her into the air and soared around the Batman’s helicopter.
He held her tightly and burst into flame as he leapt out of the Chinook. She could ‘ice down’ everywhere she touched him and help him with the pain of his powers, and yet he still had more than enough telekinesis to fly both of them around. He raced forward at a speed that made her eyes water and forced her to press her face against his chest so she could breathe. But they had miles to go, when the Chinook had to stay far enough from the tepui that it would not be blasted out of the sky. She just hoped that the heat of his flames would not make the two of them an easy target for heat-seeking missiles.
She knew they would be at the tepui in a very short time. And then they would be fighting something much bigger than that blob monster that was so dangerous it required Terawatt to stop it. She just told herself that the Batman had this all planned out.
* * *
Maggie Walsh stood where Hanna could look up at her, and carefully explained, “You still don’t understand, dear. I —”
She felt the vibration in her feet a split second before the building exploded. It literally felt like at least one of her labs had just had everything flammable or explosive in it ignited all at once. The blast ripped through the floor and the wall and slapped her forward like she was a golf ball. And it was Jack Nicklaus.
The picture window would have shredded her, but it wasn’t intact by the time she was hurled that far. The balcony railing would have crushed her, but it was gone by the time she was hurled past it. She went flying out of the building and over the courtyard.
She landed on her back, in the garden area on the far side of the courtyard. The impact knocked the wind out of her, but she knew that was a temporary effect, no matter how painful it felt. Some of the other pain wasn’t transitory.
She could see that something had hit the wall separating the garden from her jungle, and now a four-foot wide ‘V’ was smashed out of the wall. Her wall was shattered, just as her body was.
She began assessing her physical status. She couldn’t feel her legs. She had a broken or at least damaged spine. Based on what she could and could not feel, it was probably a T9 or T10 injury. That was less than encouraging.
She could still feel pain above the injury, though. Her right arm was missing from her elbow down, and burned until the wound was essentially cauterized. There were drastic burns all over her back and the back of her head. Lying on those burns was agony, but she couldn’t turn over.
She could probably survive this, but she knew she would be in a hospital bed in a prison forever. They would never let her have the biochem research facilities needed to work out how to re-grow spinal damage or a limb, not when she would need access to hundreds of different genomes. She would rather be dead.
And then she heard it.
Chirrr.
Chirrup? Chirrr.
Four raptors slipped out of the jungle, through the break in the wall, and immediately spotted her. She assumed that the scent coming off her burnt skin would be extremely easy for them to track.
The four of them cautiously moved to surround her body. They all sniffed her and then looked around at the compound. One moved even closer to her face.
She looked up into the raptor’s face and smiled. “Clever girl.”
The raptor moved forward until its mouth was inches from her face. She reached up with her one good limb, despite the pain of the burns, and stroked its muzzle.
Chirrr?
She purred, “My pretty, pretty baby. I have one last thing for you to do.” She turned her head so her neck was exposed as much as possible. “Right here, please.”
Chirrurr!
“I know, but this is for mommy.”
The raptor sunk its teeth into her neck, neatly severing her carotid and jugular on that side.
It didn’t hurt quite as much as she had anticipa–…
CHIRRRR!!
Riley heard the awful wailing and ran to where he could look down at the courtyard.
There were dinosaurs slipping through the hole in the broken exterior wall. Vicious-looking raptors that looked like your worst nightmare. A dozen of them had gathered around a broken, burned body. And they weren’t eating it. They were …
He felt a sick sense of horror as he realized that they were guarding it.
CHIRRRR!! CHIRRRR!!
He left the mourners to their funeral, as the only beings who would mourn the passing of Margaret K. Walsh sobbed in their own inhuman way.
* * *
Jo sprinted along the corridor and then slid on her back across the intersection. Someone was on the ball and managed to get a few shots off before she was past the hallway, but they had started out firing at chest height. By the time they corrected enough, she was out of sight. Still, they were armed, and they didn’t have to see her to kill her.
She quickly signaled to Clare that there were two fighters with heavy armament. But Clare was already taking the opportunity to use Jo’s distraction. Clare leaned around the corner just long enough to fire her M32.
Grenades in closed hallways? Not good. Not of the good, as a certain bride would say.
Jo opened her mouth and tried to get her hands over her ears before the grenade detonated, but no one was that fast, except possibly speedsters. The HE grenade exploded, probably exactly where Clare was aiming, and the shockwave smacked into her like a truck. Like a painfully loud truck.
Clare pulled out a spec ops periscope and checked the hallway.
Jo muttered to herself, “Now she pulls out the fucking peri.”
Clare said something, but Jo’s hearing wasn’t back yet. So Clare gave her a thumbs-up and a hand signal to advance.
All they had to do was get past every guard and soldier, and then get the security doors open so they could get out of the underground areas up to where Jo had some allies she could actually trust.
* * *
Hanna waited patiently.
The room had been blasted apart. The ceiling could fall at any moment. The room was on fire, and the fire was spreading directly toward her. The searing heat was incredible.
She looked around the room and waited. The rug had caught fire, and so it was only a matter of time before the fire reached her feet. Then her legs. Then … other parts.
She knew it was going to hurt. A lot. But she still couldn’t move. So she had to lie there and just … wait. Wait while the fire got closer. And closer. The fire was licking at the sole of her left boot, sending scorching heat into her foot.
It was really annoying.
Oh, she knew it was supposed to be horrifying. Like those stupid slasher movies Cindy liked to watch so she could scream and hug Grover and then have endorphin-enhanced sex right afterward. Hanna still didn’t think there was any other reason anyone would watch such stupid movies. But the fire just wasn’t scary. Not like Maggie Walsh was.
How was she supposed to tell Mom she was part Maggie Walsh and part Code Walsh? Her mom already knew she had plenty of non-human stuffed into her genome. But predator dinosaur? And Maggie Walsh?
How was she supposed to tell Charlie?
She lay there, refusing to move from the pain as her pants cuff caught on fire.
The ceiling light shorted out, as some of the wiring finally got hot enough that the insulation melted. Or maybe the metal of the wiring actually melted. She sort of wanted to know. But the important part was some of the electrical power in the room was down.
She moved her arm.
She was expecting a vicious electrical shock, but nothing happened. The power to the weapon was finally out. She yanked her legs up into the air and did a roll away from the fire, landing smoothly on her feet. She stomped her left boot until the sole was no longer on fire, and she tore off her pants leg from the knee down, where it was on fire. She beat out the flames elsewhere on her shoe, because she was planning on keeping it for the rest of the op. Then she unbuckled the strap around her neck.
The sharp blade didn’t come out. There were barbs or something holding it in place.
Oh, well. She yanked harder. It tore free, ripping her flesh as it came out. She put her hand back there, and it wasn’t bleeding all that badly. She’d been hurt a lot worse. She’d been hurt a lot worse and just kept going for days. And Charlie did not care that she had some scars.
She pushed herself to her feet and stepped to the huge hole that had once been the outer wall and a balcony. She used her grapples to grab a gutter and pull herself up to the roof. She considered moving down to the courtyard and seeing if the dinosaurs would fight or flee. She thought they would be challenging to fight, and she doubted they would abandon Maggie Walsh’s body. She wondered if she would stay there like the dinosaurs if Maggie Walsh had raised her from infancy like she had probably raised those creatures. She wondered if Marissa Weigler had accidentally done her an enormous favor by committing crimes that guaranteed she was raised far from where Maggie could reach her.
“Action Girl, come in. This is Terawatt.”
“Terawatt, this is A.G. Walsh is down.”
“I’ve got Pinkie Pie and Twilight Sparkle, and they could use some backup while I go check on Atron.”
Hanna leaned over the edge of the roof to get a look, and she spotted where Jack and Willow were standing. They were about as safe as they could be while they were still on this tepui, but that was not safe enough with exploding buildings and invading dinosaurs and maybe other Maggie Walsh surprises lurking nearby. “A.G. to Terawatt. Moving to guard them now.”
She leapt off the roof and hooked a grapple much farther down the gutter of the building. That let her swing well off toward the general and Willow.
Well, maybe some of the raptors would decide to come after her, and she’d get to fight them.
Or maybe something bigger would squeeze through that crack in the outer wall! Surely Jack would tell her to protect Willow. This might be really challenging!
She started thinking about ways to fight a Tyrannosaurus with a pair of grapples. She just knew Jack would ask her why she was smiling.
* * *
Alex darted back to what was left of the building where Danielle Atron had tried to ambush her. There wasn’t much left. It looked like several different explosions had gone off inside the building and had blown the roof and walls all over the surrounding area. There were some flickering fires and some smoking messes, but there was nothing aflame in the center of the wreckage.
In the middle of the building, down in what had been that gym-sized room, were two identical-looking people. One was sitting in the rubble, weeping and holding the corpse of the other.
Bad Danielle wouldn’t have wept over anyone’s body. Alex wasn’t even sure Danielle could cry for someone. That made this one Good Danielle.
Alex drifted down until she was only a couple feet above the wreckage. “Danielle? We have to go.”
“No.” She looked up at Alex. “Why aren’t you killing me? I’m a monster. I … We killed those people. We would have killed you without caring a bit. We were going to poison millions of Americans just for some stupid money.”
Alex gently pointed out, “That wasn’t you. That was her. You’re not her. You’re her opposite.”
“I’m still D.R. Atron. I’m still responsible for … for everything we did.”
Alex tried again. “Danielle, you have to —”
“Stop calling me that!” the woman snapped. “I can’t stand hearing that name! Call me anything else. Hey, you … bitch … anything. Just … I don’t want to be Danielle.”
Alex thought about a small boy and softly said, “How about Dani? Is that okay?”
Atron just nodded her head a couple inches. “I’m so sorry. I was so horrible to your dad, and to your sister, and to you … I really would have captured you and tortured you and dissected you, just to find out the truth about GC-161. I really would have killed your mom and dad and boyfriend in Bakersfield. You and your whole family ought to hate me. You should just kill me. The world would be a much better place without people like me and Walsh and …” Her head snapped up and a look of abject horror passed over it. “The bombs! I planted GC-161 bombs in the HVAC systems for all of the surface buildings and also the underground structure! We’ve got to stop them before they go off and kill every Orphan here.”
“How long do we have?” Alex checked. “And will this variant give powers to all the exposed regular humans?”
‘Dani’ looked around. “What time is it? I’ve been resetting the timers to twenty-four hours every day since Walsh’s people came up with that van der Waals force disruptor. They’ve got at least two full-sized disruptor cannons mounted as part of the building defenses. I know Walsh was planning on using one on me sooner or later.”
Alex checked her tPhone. “Two twenty-one local time.”
Dani winced. “We only have until three o’clock.” She looked around at the ruins of the building. “At least we won’t have to worry about the HVAC system for this one. But we’ve got to stop the others. If they haven’t already been destroyed. They’re a tank of GC-161 and a tank of O2 and an aerosol injector on a simple battery-powered timer. If the timer gets crushed, or the injector, or either tank, it’s disarmed, but we don’t want the GC-161 getting on anyone if that tank’s leaking.”
Alex asked, “Any boobytraps?”
Dani shook her head no. “Just a rudimentary one, so if you do the obvious and disconnect the battery, it’ll go off. No one but me — or you — could get into the ductwork to get at them, and no one but me knew where they were planted, or even that they were planted.”
Alex pointed out, “Walsh probably guessed.”
Dani shrugged. “Maybe. I … The other me really didn’t like her and didn’t think she was smart enough to figure it out, but you’re probably right.”