Major Justice sputtered, “We… We don’t have anyone in reserve. Every available person is in the fight.”
Except for the first word or two, he sounded honest. I said, “Great, but if someone new arrives, please send them in. I’m not sure how we win this.”
“We’re all here,” he grunted. “We’ll win this.”
Then he closed the connection. Continue reading Roll The Dice: Part 14
When the lightning stopped, I could see smoking zombie bodies all the way down the road. Many of them were charred to the point that they were unrecognizable or at least they would have been if they were human.
Had they been human, I’d have been horrified at the devastation. Given that they weren’t human, I could only feel disappointment that it wasn’t worse. Continue reading Roll The Dice: Part 13
Nodding, I said, “Then I guess we’d better go do something that’s obviously stupid.”
“It’ll be fine,” Cassie said, “Mr. Sparkles is looking forward to it. I don’t think he quite understands that we’re not going out there to slaughter them.”
I eyed the alien gun in it’s holster on her belt. Using it to its full potential would get us in more trouble than I wanted to imagine.
Haley’s mouth twisted as she glanced down at it, but she said, “I think we need to get out there. Is everyone ready?” Continue reading Roll the Dice: Part 2
Making a mental note to ask Amy if we could do something about him teleporting into HQ whenever he wanted, I stood up. I wasn’t the only one. Jaclyn, Haley, and Izzy had beaten me to it. Izzy was already in the air, hovering above her seat.
Tiger hadn’t done much when Adam first appeared in HQ, but this time, he’d made it to his feet and was already walking around the table.
He wasn’t growling, but watched as Adam walked toward the group, sometimes glancing over at Jaclyn as if wondering what she wanted him to do. Continue reading Simple Choices: Part 8
Daniel’s grandfather shook his head, “I wish that were true. What you’re seeing isn’t Alzheimer’s. It’s the result of overuse of my powers. You might even call it the growth of my prescience without a growth in my ability to stay grounded in the world around me.”
He stopped, looking from Izzy and Daniel to C, Jaclyn and me, “I can pull it together for meetings, but not for too long.”
C nodded, “We can’t talk too much about that. Not here.” Continue reading Sudden Changes: Part 14
As it turned out, I was right to worry because the situation evolved before my eyes—assuming that watching through a window in my HUD counts.
The True stood in front of Daniel’s house on the sidewalk and pointed their their rifles toward it—which was a good tactic. No one inside could prevent them from shooting up the house.
Except then, they didn’t. Continue reading Sudden Changes: Part 13
As ideas went, it was incredibly wrong. There were some that might say it was so wrong that it was right, but on a gut level, knowing what I did about my armor, his armor, and Johnny Destruction’s power, I would never have done the same except in a desperate situation where it was the only way to protect someone I cared about.
In short, the exact situation Travis was in. Continue reading Sudden Changes: Part 12
Izzy hit the dome fist first, obviously expecting it to work like a force field and shatter with the strength of her blow plus her momentum. It didn’t. Through my HUD, I saw the spot where she hit give but turn into a kind of tunnel through the dome, adjusting her course to slide her out the side before she had time to adjust.
Not anyone could have done that. Gish either had Daniel’s prescience or practiced adjusting his shield a lot.
At the same time that Izzy had tried punching the dome, I’d tried my own experiment with punching it. As I did, I saw through my HUD that rather than moving out of the way of my punch, the shield darkened around my hand, becoming denser and holding it in place. I hadn’t been hovering as I did it either. Continue reading Sudden Changes: Part 11
The first part wasn’t hard to guess. They’d gotten their parents on the jet and that’s where it began to go wrong. The Cabal soldier that Jaclyn had been chasing made it to the jet and knowing that it was there, tried to destroy it even though it was cloaked.
The soldier had run at the jet and punched, happening to hit a spot that had thinned so that sensors could work. The Cabal soldier’s fist made it all the way through, slowed by the shield, and dented the hull. It didn’t take much to fix it later and didn’t affect the jet’s structural integrity, but the fact that it made it through at all was scary. Continue reading Sudden Changes: Part 10
Upon landing, the Cabal soldiers were met with the jet’s anti-personnel lasers, spraying laser beams everywhere with uncanny accuracy, hitting all of the Cabal soldiers.
The jet’s anti-personnel weapons hadn’t been designed with the Cabal in mind. They’d been designed more to slow and discourage than to kill. They could kill, but not Cabal soldiers.
On the other hand, they were still lasers, however thin they might be, and in this case, they were being operated by Hal, our AI, whose primary purpose had once been to model space battles. Essentially, he’d been created to assist aliens in how to most efficiently kill each other, and long before this battle, I’d given him permission to listen to the rest of the team and help them as effectively as he knew how. Continue reading Sudden Changes: Part 9