Jamie nodded with extreme reluctance. She'd had vague notions of getting close enough to attack the ship through space on her own and either get inside or do enough damage to make it vulnerable for a follow-up attack by her teams and the US space fleet. Teleporting with Dennis inside the ship made more sense, but the thought of exposing him to that kind of danger made her insides turn to jelly.
"Do you think he's capable of transporting you or others into the alien ship from a distance of, say, a few million miles?" Kushner asked.
Jamie shook her head. "From what we know, a teleporter runs out of energy after a few hundred thousand miles. There's a way of overcoming that by adding energy to the process – I have done that using my own power – but it's tricky, and I did that with a skilled teleporter who had plenty of practice. Dennis hardly knows what he's doing yet."
Kushner spread his hands. "We're open to suggestions."
Jamie stared into the Alternative Research Director's murky green-brown-grey eyes – eyes that had probably looked on approvingly as WANDA had attempted to kill her and the authorization for the ten megaton bomb was given. To him and his ilk, Jamie suspected, she and her family and her friends were mere pawns to be pushed and sacrificed as necessary.
"I think we'll need to practice with my husband in teleporting me and others."
Kushner smiled as though he hadn't heard the grudging tone in her words. "By all means. We can make that one of our highest priorities. All I had in mind otherwise was testing our powers against each other and against targets, attempting to learn how we can best work together. For the specifics of that, I defer to Major Harrington."
Major Harrington had been quietly studying her and Jake from the start, Jamie had noticed. Nothing too obvious or aggressive – just a momentary gaze from time to time – looking away politely when Jamie met his eyes. He wasn't asserting his dominance in any obvious way, but there was an unnatural stillness around him that for some reason Jamie felt could explode into lethal action in an instant.
"Thank you, Dr. Kushner," the Major said with a mild smile. "I recommend we divide our training into several complementary phases. First, the most combat-capable of us should train together with an emphasis on testing our individual and combined powers against the various targets in the field and air which have been brought in for this exercise. Second, the most combat-capable individuals should train with smaller, less powerful units in leadership roles. Third, the majority of us could do more damage and more efficiently with a DAK rifle than with our so-called 'super powers.' And even with lethal individual powers, a weapon could be useful. What if you get tired or injured and can't summon your power? Therefore, I strongly recommend that everyone, with the possible exception of Mrs. Shepherd, should devote time to training with rifles. I'd suggest mini-lasers as well, but we're dealing with time constraints."
A few moments of silence passed.
"First off," said Jake, "what the fuck is a 'DAK' rifle?"
"Dual Armament Kinetic rifle," Major Harrington answered with a mild smile. "Fires 43 gram tungsten projectiles at 5200 feet per second, powered by a super- capacitor."
"Are you saying it's electrically powered?"
"Yes."
"Forty-three gram bullets? That's not much less than a fifty. At 5200 FPS? That's 2000 FPS more than a fifty."
"Correct."
"Jesus." Jake ran a hand over his crewcut. "That must pack a helluva punch."
"That's the idea." Major Harrington's smile had grown amused. "Plus eight rounds of a super-high explosive."
"What kind of super high explosive? You're not talking grenades?"
"Not a lot of grenades pack the explosive force of 120 kilos of dynamite."
Jake let out a low whistle. "Are you fucking kidding me? You could blow up a building with that shit."
"Among other things."
"What's the conventional round capacity?"
"Forty-six. Three hundred rounds per capacitor."
"Recoil?"
"A bit more than an AK."
"Man." Jake's smile turned cold. "Where was that when we were in Tehran and North Korea?"
"In safekeeping. Along with our starships."
Major Harrington's smile assumed a chill that mirrored Jake's. The two stared at each other as if waiting for – or willing – the other to blink. Kushner released a soft cough.
"In any case," he said, "I think the Major's idea of training with firearms is a sound one. Most of our unit lacks the ability to incapacitate someone without physical contact, and our enemy may be enhanced as well."
Jake turned his gaze from the Major to him. "What's the schedule for this mission?"
"As soon as humanly possible. Or inhumanly, in this case."
"It takes time to become proficient with a firearm," Jake stated.
"It takes time to become proficient at anything," said Major Harrington. "But while we're becoming proficient, they might decide to end us."
"It has to be a compromise," said Kushner. "We have to become good enough to have at least some chance of succeeding, but if we strive for perfection we could be too late."
"Then maybe we should start training instead of sitting around jabbering?" Jake suggested.
Kushner and Major Harrington exchanged a dry look.
"The man has a point," said the Major.
IT DIDN'T take long for Jamie to see that the enhanced government soldiers were overmatched by her people. Major Harrington's heat beam was fairly tepid compared to "Hot Girl" Belinda James from her world. Belinda was capable of melting down a car; Harrington could melt a soccer ball-sized hole through a steel plate in his claimed top setting. At one point, Horner jumped straight through Harrington's beam, his t-shirt bursting into flames, and threw the former Special Forces officer to the ground. The Major lay on the ground semi-conscious a good ten minutes before his nanites revived him enough to rise.
Doug Janowski was a lanky, professorial dude with a ponytail whose telekinetics struck Jamie as maybe a high Class Three – enough to knock over one of their target humvees, but packing no apparent super-knockout punch. Thomas Mayes flew straight through his telekinetics, planting him on the ground in a replay of Major Harrington's ten-minute stupor.
Monica Leonard, a brunette thirty-something CIA analyst, had a brain-scrambling power similar to Joy Kamada's from Jamie's former team. But while Joy's ability to confuse and generally subvert other people's mental processes was psychical in origin – "psychic" meaning they couldn't isolate a physical mechanism of force – Monica's power operated on the measurable electromagnetic spectrum. It turned out that weapons based on the same principle already existed and were just as effective if not more so that Monica's ability. Also, Joy had been able to mess with Jamie's mind, but Monica's efforts against her and her team had little or no effect. Still, she might be able to affect the aliens, though Jamie doubted that, particularly if they were avatars.
The most dangerous of the government team, Jamie decided, was probably its leader, Jacob Kushner. He was physically stronger than everyone but her, Kylee, Thomas Mayes, and Greg "Still the Hulk" Horner, and capable of killing any of them with his dematerialization powers. However, against the more densely constructed of them, including herself, Kylee, Mayes, and Horner, Kushner's power was heavily resisted, allowing them plenty of time to remove the threat. Yet Jamie suspected Kushner's super skill-set could be effective against the Elementals and their machines.
Jamie was relieved they could easily defeat the government's team if it came to that, but disappointed they hadn't produced more deadly abilities to battle the aliens. However, she chose to be optimistic. This Elemental ship was much smaller and presumably much easier to destroy. She was able to fatally compromise the "mothership" alone last time – well, with a little help from her 13 gigaton antimatter friend – but now she'd have some super-powered assistance. If they could find a way to get them into the ship, which didn't strike her as an easy feat.
After hours of attacki
ng targets on the ground and in the air – and each other – the two groups took a break to start training with the DAK or "kinetic" rifles. Mini-lasers were another possible armament, but on Harrington's recommendation, they focused solely on mastering the rifle. Even she and Kylee practiced with them, though she had no intention of carrying them with her.
The rifle was scary. One round could penetrate halfway into a large engine or punch through a foot-thick cement block as if it were cardboard. It was eerily accurate, with an optional smart scope-trigger integrated mode: you placed the crosshairs on a target, activated the system with a touch just beyond the trigger guard, and pulled the trigger. In "Smart Scope" mode, the gun fired automatically when it was aligned with the original crosshair selection. You could come damn close to placing round after round into the same bullet hole.
If that wasn't enough, the rifle also fired small versions of the same super-explosive that had stunned her in space during the battle with "Mothra." They obliterated a few whole barns and trucks – set out in the fields for target practice – with single shots. Jamie pitied any normal soldier in the field that came up against a rifle like this. She wondered about their safety in close-quarters within a space ship, but in combination with their super-abilities the amount of firepower would be apocalyptic.
As the first day wore into the evening, they began practicing teleportation with Dennis. Teleportation had its risks – the worst being a partial dematerialization during the departure. They'd learned that "grounding" an object or person to a teleporter was necessary to safely – that is, completely – transport that person or object. So if you wanted, for instance, to carry a box with you, it couldn't be touching anything but yourself – not a floor or wall or another person, unless that person was also grounded to you. If the teleporter was touching an object or living thing but lacked an exclusive connection – if, say, the object or thing was touching the floor or something else not also in full contact with the teleporter – then only part of the object/thing was transported. Dennis had experienced that with his hyena, and more than a few dogs had arrived in pieces in the course of their experimentation on Jamie's world. Their premier teleporter, Jay Utrecht, once joked: "It's a good thing I'm a cat-person," but Jamie remembered the haunted look in his eyes. She was glad she hadn't witnessed those experiments.
So some caution was needed. The smart people at DARPA had thrown together something that resembled a ski lift: four chairs welded to a steel tube, separated into pairs by a u-shaped padded harness in the center. The idea was for Dennis to lift four people, two on either side of him, like a people-weighted squat. Everyone would be grounded through him and presumably safely transportable.
Dennis, who was pretty solidly built and "farm strong" (as he liked to put it), probably could've managed to lift one person on either side before his super-virus transformation, Jamie thought. Now that he was "supercharged," maybe seven or eight times his previous strength, it was effortless. Dennis said that if it worked, they should add another four chairs. If it worked. Jamie noted the nervous exchanges of looks at those words. Not working was a very ugly option.
Both Major Harrington and Kushner insisted that Jamie not be among the first volunteers. Not out of any special affection for her, she knew. She would've disregarded them, but her own people said the same thing. So four guinea pigs selected from the least powerful of the government team were selected for the maiden flight.
Dennis's first objective was one of the barracks a few hundred meters distant, where several soldiers and cameras waited. He shouldered the four passengers without incident, as expected, and in an eye-blink they vanished. A few seconds later, the report came back that the "transport was successful." Another few seconds and Dennis reappeared with his human cargo.
They repeated the procedure until Dennis ended up in a government safe house in Alaska thousands of miles away. By the time he returned, only a couple of hours into the experiment, Kushner had already placed an order for a ten-person carrier. Dennis admitted to being a little tired, but not because of the lifts. "It's the teleporting," he said. "It's hard to explain, but it takes something out of you."
Their day ended a bit after 12, signaled by a beautiful, hissing, green and blue aurora borealis display over the northern skies.
"I'm gonna take that as a positive omen," said Jake.
"So you should," said Kushner. "It's been a highly productive day."
The teams, primed with superior energy and strength, could've continued training through the night, but the government wanted the chance to process what they'd learned, and Jamie knew from experience that even super-people's brains needed rest.
After consuming tons of food and in some cases matching quantities of drink, the teams retired to their cots, grateful for the added toughness of their flesh on the thin mattresses.
Chapter 24
UP CLOSE, THE SUN ceased being the basketball-sized, benevolent provider of life and warmth and cheerful blue skies, Jamie thought, becoming a massive, roiling, flame-expelling giant – more of an enflamed tyrant than a bright beacon of hope, Jamie thought. A ruler of their space that held the Earth and all its planetary minions in its powerful, fiery fist.
Clinging to the northeast quadrant of that fist was a tiny black flea-like object. Though smaller than the Elemental mothership, it was large – over fifty kilometers in length and ten or so in width – far larger than Jamie or anyone else had expected given Gabrielle/Amelrina's description of their second ship as being "much smaller."
The alien space craft had given no detectable response to the sudden appearance of the Cheyenne emerging from subluminal space four million miles away. But it was early yet. Or perhaps it had been aware of the approach of the starship fighter for much of its three-hour flight-time and simply hadn't labeled it as a threat. They'd learn the answer to that soon enough.
Jamie and the two teams were passengers aboard the small interstellar fighter ship, the Cheyenne, still commanded by Zane Cameron. Jamie had made it a condition of their mission that all the dissenting starship captains, prisoners in a top secret military prison under Nellis Air Force base, be reinstated. She argued that they were by Space Command's own measurements the best people for their positions, and were the only leaders who'd had firsthand experience fighting the Elementals. She was relieved when the Tomlinson Administration did not dispute her points.
The three days had passed in a blur of training, training, and more training. They were a long ways from an "integrated fighting unit," as Major Harrington put it, but they were able to work together and deliver loads of hurt to various ground and air-based targets, and all of them had experienced at least two trips with Dennis and his new ten-seat "teleportation buggy." Jamie had gained a lot of respect for her this-world husband as a fighting man – a role he'd slipped into so naturally that she wondered if he'd been a soldier in another life – and she was impressed by how the members of both teams, most of whom had no military experience, had come together as a combat unit in such a short time.
She felt a fair amount of confidence in what she thought of as the core invasion unit: herself, Jake, Greg, Major Harrington, Jacob Kushner, Thomas and Terry Mayes, Tildie, Karen and Kevin Clarkson, and, of course, Dennis. There was some argument about who should be on the first attack force, but Harrington and Kushner eventually came around to Jamie's way of thinking that the strongest of them should lead. Except Kylee. Perhaps it was just her selfish instincts as a mother, but she just wasn't comfortable with the idea of her daughter being in the initial invasion. Jamie wasn't sure what the others were thinking, but no one argued that point. In fact, a few nodded in obvious agreement, for which she was grateful. The thought of a ten year old, no matter how smart or strong, being part of the most critical opening stage didn't sit well with anyone, Jamie suspected.
So there they were, taking their seats aboard the Dennis Shepherd Teleportation Express on the Cheyenne's bridge. It seemed to Jamie that they'd been training for this moment
for years – and suddenly, without any definite point of transition, here it was.
Without fanfare, they found themselves teleported into space, approaching the northeastern part of the sun from their perspective. Teleportation, Jamie knew, could occur at light speed or far greater – no one knew its precise speed limitations – but it could also be slowed to a leisurely walk. Near-simultaneous transport was possible if the teleporter had been to the destination before or if they had a clear sense of its location. In this case, Dennis needed to locate the alien ship visually. To the naked eye that was a little like detecting a dark speck of dust on a room-sized halogen lamp. Fortunately, N-Space – what the Elementals called the Purgatoryish location where teleportation occurred – filtered the outer world in a muted, eye-friendly mode for those like Dennis who lacked Jamie's eye-protection.
Closing in on the upper portion of the glowing white orb, Jamie spotted the alien ship first – larger now, but still no more than a dark, insectile speck. Dennis closed in a couple of sharp accelerations that they didn't feel. Then they hovered directly off one end of the black egg-shaped craft.
"Is everyone ready?" Dennis asked.
"Into the belly of the beast," Jake murmured.
"Once we're inside," Jamie said, "keep us in N-Space until we're sure where we want to be, Dennis."
"Of course."
Her husband's voice was a bit clipped, from nervousness or slight annoyance at her repeating what had been stated multiple times. She could live with his irritation. This wasn't a time to leave anything unclear. Lacking Xray vision, it was an unnerving moment, but they had the reassurance that nothing could harm them in N-Space. Nothing they knew of.
Inside the ship, they were startled to find themselves drifting underwater in what appeared to be a giant aquarium, with strange, creatures swimming around them that made Jamie think of giant amoeba.
"What the fuck," said Jake.
"These aren't Elementals," said Jamie. "Not like I've ever seen anyway."
Super World Two Page 45
