I wasn’t the only person who noticed. Adam stopped what he’d been doing and his eyes widened.
If that surprised him, he recovered quickly, “Dr. Klein! I didn’t expect to see you. I knew you were Nick’s father. I just didn’t think you’d be here.”
He gave a quick smile, “It’s a little weird to have different pieces of my life crossing like this.” Continue reading Simple Choices: Part 4
I looked over at Haley. We were going to have to talk about this among ourselves and not just the two of us either—the whole team.
Of course, we had almost the entire team here already with the exception of Daniel, Jaclyn, Izzy, and Marcus. They were still out handling the police at Daniel’s house, or in Marcus’ case, traveling back from the fight at the factory.
It wouldn’t be that long and we’d have everybody whether we wanted them or not. Continue reading Simple Choices: Part 3
Adam walked across HQ’s main room like a man who knew where he was going. To be fair, except for being large enough to hold a regulation basketball court plus an audience, the room was basically a big square.
Anybody would know that all they had to do was cross the room diagonally and that we were on the middle left. Continue reading Simple Choices: Part 2
When I got back to HQ, it was too full.
My parents were there. Haley’s parents were there. Haley’s second cousins were there, both of them doctors and both of them trying to use the alien medical tech to save Travis’ life.
If that weren’t enough, most of the team was there. By the time you got out of work for two or three fights plus helping Kayla handle law enforcement’s questions, it wasn’t worth going back to whatever you’d been doing.
And besides, Travis was there. Continue reading Simple Choices: Part 1
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