"The destiny of mankind is not decided by material computation. When great causes are on the move in the world, stirring all men's souls, drawing them from their firesides, casting aside comfort, wealth and the pursuit of happiness in response to impulses at once awe-striking and irresistible, we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (November 30, 1874-January 24, 1965), Prime Minister of the United Kingdom May 10, 1940-July 26, 1945
Chapter Two
Valerie hung in midair, suspended her wing's turbines as she stared out over the vast yellow-gold lights of the Chicago area spread out below her, as far as the eye could see, even in the air. It looked so peaceful from up there, so quiet, as though the problems that gripped so much of the area didn't exist. And from a certain standpoint it was. Ghost attacks in the area had slowed down dramatically in the course of the previous year. Apart from the occasional skirmish with Skulker, they seemed to be giving Amity Park a wide berth. For now.
Emphasis on Amity Park, random ghost portals still formed every day, letting ghosts back into this dimension. That coupled with the permanent gateway in the Bermuda Triangle met that ghost incursions were becoming a regular thing throughout the Western Hemisphere. They could just come through in the Triangle and make their way anywhere in the Americas that suited their fancy.
Which is why Danielle is still fairly busy, and why she has trouble getting this far north these days.
Danielle's approach was different from there's. While she relied on patrolling as much as they did, she also didn't have routine access to advanced sensor suites that could cover an entire mid-sized state at a time. So she had put together a network of informants. Mostly people she'd befriended and/or saved, and who agreed to keep an eye out on possible future incursions for her. They also opened their home to her, giving her places to rest in relative safety.
It also keeps her firmly in the Deep South these days, unfortunately. The idea had been that one day she'd settle down here. Still it's probably good that someone be trying to keep a lid on the problem. Lord knows, nothing's going to be happening up here anytime soon.
Then a message icon appeared on her HUD, blinking an ominous red, indicating a priority flash message from FentonWorks Operations.
She looked straight at the message and blinked, the sensors in her suit translating the blink as a command to access the message.
The suit's computer uploaded the days encryption codes and the message popped up.
From: Samantha Manson, FentonWorks Operations, authentication Sierra-Yankee-052-Mike
To: Valerie Gray, authentication, Victor- Lima -076-Golf
Re: Contingency BLACK DAGGER
Paulina and Starr have shown up at FentonWorks. They claim to have been attacked by parties unknown and have come to us for help. Proceed home, get into your car and drive down here to FentonWorks. We need you on the ground over here in case unknowns attack. Everyone on recipients list BLACK DAGGER has been advised and is on alert.
Valerie's eyes were as wide as dinner plates as they took in the utterly unexpected message. At her suggestion, they'd come up with a basic set of contingency plans soon after she'd signed on with them. The names on the recipient lists were her, Jazz, Tucker, and Danny's parents, and even now it seemed like a tad to hide their names under codenames and NATO phonetic codes, but she understood the logic. Sure it'd probably wouldn't fool their usual enemies, but the hope was to distract anyone new, and get anyone they already knew about wondering if there was anyone else they needed to be concerned about.
BLACK DAGGER was the contingency plan that was put into effect when there were signs of a threat they could not conclusively identify. This was the first time the new contingency, which focused on gathering as much intel on the enemy as possible, had been activated since it's inception.
And it revolved around Paulina and Starr.
She grimaced, her lips pursing into a thin line as she remembered her last encounters with them. She'd once counted Paulina and Starr, especially Starr, as among her very best friends. Until a certain giant green dog named Cujo had shown up and cost her father his cushy job at Axion Labs. They'd "promptly" turned on her with remarkable speed.
She winced internally at the memory of that bitter betrayal that still stung after so long. She had new friends, real friends who'd stick by her no matter what. She hadn't spared either of them more than a passing thoughtin the past year.
The Casper High grapevine suggested that they'd turned over a new leaf, that they were trying to be better people. They had a long way to go before they earned back her trust. Still didn't mean that she trusted either of them if they said rain was wet. She especially didn't trust them with certain things like secret identities.
Whatever, she thought, a burst of hot irritation flooding her, I'll believe it when I see it.
She queried her suit's on-board GPS, who gave her directions to orient her to FentonWorks before she banked to the right and made her way south.
Danny Fenton sighed as he stood on the sidewalk next to Paulina, watching as Tucker walked a circle around her car, waving his handheld scanner, his dark face illuminated with the light glowing greenish tint characteristic of all FentonWorks displays like the one he was staring at so intently. Danny sighed with sympathy. Tucker had thrown himself into his work as FentonWorks computer analyst after he was forced to leave office earlier that year. His emergency appointment to mayor of Amity Park at sixteen had been the result of a casual discussion with several members of the town council in the chaos surrounding the end of the Disasteroid threat. Admittedly said members were desperate to make a change and hopefully deflect state and federal attention away from the fact that they allowed someone who wasn't even a resident of the State of Indiana, let alone the Lake County or the City of Amity Park, to even stand for election in the first place. Desperate to deflect the negative attention of Indianapolis and Washington, they'd appointed Tucker the interim Mayor of Amity Park, expecting him to flounder on the job long enough for them to cover up the…irregularities
The people who had opposed the appointment (holdovers from the Montez administration) however had opposed it on the grounds that a careful reading of the town charter said that he was ineligible to either stand for or be appointed to any office until he was eighteen. And once everyone had calmed down they'd sued the City on the grounds that his appointment had been illegal. Tucker (who to his credit, realized that he'd effectively been duped by people desperate to avoid ending up spending time in a federal prison) stole a march on them by resigning. He was disappointed, but he would be damned before he ended up a puppet, or be at the center of a legal battle he was almost certainly going to lose. The states set the minimum age for elected officials at all levels of government, and Indiana state law said that he was too young. End of story.
Tucker had semi-reluctantly gone back to his usual role, their tech geek and computer analyst. For now, at least.
Right now he was shaking his head in wonderment as he perused his display. "I can't find anything, no unusual radiation, no strange magnetic resonance traces in the chassis. Nothing to corroborate anything she's told us, from the car at least."
"Were we really expecting too?"
"No," Tucker responded, and his ebony-skinned friend shook his head in frustration. "Worth a shot though."
Danny nodded, turning to the tall, darkly attractive young woman to his right. "We're going to have to take you and Starr to my mother to have you looked at by the Axion Labs clinic staff."
Paulina nodded, she opened her mouth to say something before her face notably flushed. Her mouth closed with an audible pop and she averted her gaze towards the sidewalk.
He looked at her searchingly for a second before the realization hit me.
She's infatuated with me, he realized with a start, and a smile he couldn't help broke out on his face. He'd moved on from Paulina to Sam a long time ago, but Paulina had been the object of at least the purely sexual side of his ardor for too long for him not to feel at least somewhat satisfied that she was noticing him finally. Sure she was still attractive, he wasn't blind, after all, but aside from noticing that it was much too late to expect him to be genuinely interested in return. He was happy where he was.
Still though, Danny couldn't resist it. "Cat got your tongue?" He teased.
She looked up at him, and he could tell her face was blushing. "Her accomplishments, particularly in the last year, have been all over the place," still looking at her. "It'd be an honor to meet her."
"But she's not a medical doctor," Tucker pointed that. "She's said that. Repeatedly."
"True enough," Danny said. "But we have MDs on the payroll. Quite skilled ones in fact; if there's some sort of physical evidence in either of you, between them I think they'll find it."
Paulina smiled, "Thank you, I'll go tell Starr," and she turned to go back inside.
The door opened right when she was headed towards it to reveal Sam, looking at him as if she knew exactly what was going on in his head. The two froze for a second, regarding each other before nodding to each other and resuming their respective courses.
"It's done," Sam said softly. "Valerie's on her way. Though it's a little annoying having to send her back home and have her walk. If the person or persons who came after them try again in force, we may not be able to stop them if she can't get here in time. Also…" she said, her voice trailing off.
Danny tensed. She's found something. Something so disturbing that she hesitates to tell even me.
Danny cocked his head, giving her a curious look. "What have you found?"
"After I contacted Valerie," Sam said, with an apprehensive sigh. "I went through our sensor records. There was an anomalous reading in the area in question at the exact time in question. It suddenly appeared, hovered there for a few minutes before heading up a few feet before it suddenly and abruptly dropped off our sensors as though it wasn't even there. Two hours later, it appeared again for a few minutes before heading up again and pulling it's little disappearing act again."
Danny stood there as though rooted. "What the hell?" Danny said after a moment at the same time Tucker managed, "How the hell'd they do that? And why wasn't it flagged earlier? Sure we were out on our date at the time, but it should have gone to our phones. And how did we lose track of it? Those sensors can monitor everything up to low orbit."
"Well," Sam said, brow furrowing as the brain behind it thought, "some sort of stealth ship? B-2 bombers are only visible on radar during takeoff and landing, after all. As for why neither of us was alerted to its presence, we'll have to look into that. It was probably a glitch but we can't be sure."
"Which means I have to look into it," Tucker muttered, but his eyes were lighting up at the prospect of this new mystery.
"With all your usual skill, Tuck," Danny said sincerely, putting a hand reassuringly on his shoulder. "
Danny nodded. Her day job was that she was a FentonWorks test pilot. "A stealth variant of our Speeders, perhaps?" A stealth variant of the Specter Speeder was perhaps a logical outgrowth of that particular design. It was an easy hurdle, but designing one still took time. As far as he knew no one had so much as a prototype even under construction at the moment.
"That's my thinking," Sam said, "Unless one of our competitors has stolen a march on us…and is using them to kidnap people for some reason that we can't comprehend and they couldn't possibly benefit from, unless being shut down and sent to prison somehow constitutes a benefit, or there's…someone else out there. Someone with roughly the same level of capabilities we're just now beginning to attain as a species."
Danny stood there, digesting the implications of this. Sam was right, as usual. Their major competitors in aircraft design and manufacturing, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and Airbus, weren't the type of companies to kidnap random people for no reason or, to use a phrase Valerie liked, "for shits and giggles."
It's not that he didn't believe that people with sick plans for personal power existed, Lord knows he'd spent two years fighting Vlad Masters! But those plans, if one put themselves in their enemy's shoes had to make sense, had to contribute to one's overall goal. Unless there were some very interesting skeletons in Paulina and/or Starr's closets, the only reason anyone would go after them was their connection to him, to lure him or his friends out to get a clear shot at them.
Except if that's their aim, it would make more sense why them hostage and force us to try to rescue them, he thought with a shudder. Sam's right, someone wants something.
"Sam," he said aloud. "Once Val arrives we'll take Paulina and Starr to Axion Labs for testing. I want you and Jazz to take a Speeder out to the area, look for any signs of our unknown contact."
Sam nodded. "Will do."
"So what do you think of this situation," Danny said.
"I think we've stepped into something major," Sam said with a short, sharp nod. "Now, Jazz and I will go out looking for clues while you escort our two beautiful new clients to meet your mother," she said that last phrase just a little too quickly and a little too snippily.
Danny sighed. "You're not jealous of Paulina, are you?"
Sam turned back to face him. "Of course not," she said, again, just a little too quickly.
"Sam," he growled.
"Fine," she conceded, "a little. This is Paulina, after all. You were hard after her, in every way for years, and she hasn't exactly gotten any uglier."
"That was then," Danny pointed out, "this is now. Sure, she's still hot, and I couldn't resist teasing her a bit for getting all tongue-tied around me after all this time, but there's a world of difference between that and you coming home to find us in bed together."
Sam gave the reluctant sigh of someone who knew she was being just a tad unreasonable. "I know," Sam said softly.
"Besides," Danny said, gently holding her by her shoulders. "It's probably mostly a reaction to the situation. She probably won't try to act on it, and it'll probably fade in a day or two."
"And if it doesn't?"
"If it doesn't-," Danny said, "I'll turn her down, however often and hard enough for her to get the point across. Besides," he said, as much for him as her, "we'll probably get whatever's going on resolved and we can go our separate ways long before it ever becomes a problem."
Sam laughed, her tone suggesting she didn't believe it any more than he did. If even half of what Sam's evidence implied was true, there was a new player out there, and it probably wasn't something they could send scurrying off to lick their wounds after a battle or two.
Paulina Ortega hated hospital gowns. She always had. Leaving aside the fact that they were open along the back, they also made her itch, a fact she'd discovered nearly three years earlier.
When I walked into the office of my mother, and my, gynecologist to be told that I had ovarian cancer, she thought, a trace of that old terror she'd experienced in that moment shooting down her spine. That scare had ended with them "only" removing one ovary and fallopian tube.
And here we go again, she thought with a sigh as she spread herself out on the table, about to be scanned through an MRI machine again for signs of something wrong with me. She closed her eyes as the hydraulic whine of the bed's servos began and she felt herself moving into the machine.
Think of something else, girl, she thought, anything else.
An image of the tall, muscular, unexpectedly handsome black-haired young man in his doorway, looking at them with concern flashed into his head.
He does clean-up nicely, she thought, her heart fluttering. I'd drape myself all over that, she finished lamely. She sighed, flashes of memory flitting about in her head, memory of arms that weren't quite so strong, and a hard, bruising kiss. It wouldn't be the first time.
Except for the fact that you weren't in control of your actions at the time, and he didn't know it, she thought.
The memories of that incident, where she'd apparently been possessed by a ghost and controlled into kissing Daniel Fenton had resurfaced in the last year. She wasn't entirely clear on the precise timeline, but a combination of surface memories and vague impressions had made it clear that neither had really been in a position to stop it at first. Which was also why she hadn't either tried to kill him or take him to court for "assaulting" her; it made no sense when Danny had literally no idea she hadn't been in control, at least at first. She was going to have to talk to him about that. Like as soon as she was out of this blasted machine.
If you can do it without babbling a lame come-on, she thought with a sigh. I haven't been this disordered over a guy in years. Maybe it's the fact that, on a purely physical level, your body enjoyed that kiss he gave you. And the fact that he's filled out somewhat since last you really saw him probably has something to do it.
And by filled out, he's six-foot-two and looks like he bench-presses small cars.
She sighed. This is going to be a lot harder than I thought. The opposite sex had stopped being a problem once she'd gotten passed the awkward, coltish stage of early puberty. Indeed she reveled in it. Even her last few actual relationships had been approached with an inner narrative of her as a supremely confident vamp sure in her own prowess. It's been a long time that a guy's made me weak in the knees and filled my head with Selena Quintanilla and Enya just by looking at me.
I'm not going to come between him and Sam, she thought to herself. I'm not. Not again. A wave of revulsion passed over her, thinking about the wave of broken hearts and destroyed relationships even her failed attempts to steal other girl's boyfriends had tended to leave in their wake. There are other fish in the sea, Polly. Look at this one all you want, but don't try to catch it.
Oh, this will be so difficult!
Daniel Fenton sat very rigidly in his chair in the Axion Labs clinic, his thoughts a roil. Images of a Specter Speeder tumbling from the night sky in flames, malfunctioning ejection seats keeping them trapped as his girlfriend and his sister fell to their deaths in an Indiana cornfield as the unknown ship that killed them flew off in the opposite direction interspersed with some sort of chestbursting alien monstrosity exploding out of Paulina's chest and trashing the lab before proceeding to wrap a tendril around his mother's throat, and communicate with them through her.
Which probably means I shouldn't have watched Alien and Independence Day over the weekend, he thought sullenly. Even so I am scared. I get scared every time Sam and Jazz have to do something like this without me. Because I'm not there to make sure they come back. Or even say goodbye. He felt a lump form in his throat. He'd loved Sam since they were twelve years old, even when he thought he'd loved others, even the young woman who'd just gotten out of the MRI machine down the hall. His sister however… his sister was his oldest friend, as it was for all siblings in healthy relationships with each other. He'd never believed that she wasn't on his side. Not really. Vague memories flashed through his head. Vague memories of a six-year-old redhead and beside herself after her four-year-old brother had bolted into the street.
He was snapped out of her reverie when the bathroom door opened and Paulina stepped out, fully dressed once more in her jeans and tank top, her hands clasped behind her back and not meeting his gaze.
"Hey, uh, Danny," she said softly, her moderate accent strengthened by her apparent nervousness. "I need to ask you a question."
Well, that was quick, Danny thought to himself, sighing, as he prepared the "let-her-down-easy" speech.
"I have these memories I can't quite place," she said after a moment, giving him an apprehensive look, "of you kissing me, or me kissing you. Only I felt like I wasn't in control of myself at the time."
Danny's mouth hung open for what felt like a full thirty seconds before he closed it. "Oh. I was wondering when or even if you were going to bring that up."
"So I wasn't imagining that," she said, her voice recovering much of its usual strength.
"No," Danny muttered, "you weren't."
"I gather I was possessed," she said, her voice regaining much of the usual strength he associated with Paulina, "but why?"
"It was a ghost who was apparently trying to date me to make her own boyfriend jealous," Danny said, editing on the fly any references to the fact that he knew it was Kitty, he knew exactly why she'd done what she'd done, and that it was he as Danny Phantom who had gotten rid of her. "But I-er I mean Danny Phantom, figured out what was going on and stopped it before things went too far."
Paulina's eyes widened. "That's it?"
Danny stared at her, his own eyes widening. He wasn't sure what to expect, but a matter-of-fact, that's it was not it.
"Gee," Danny found himself saying, voice filled with as much genuine surprise as sarcasm, "You sure are taking your horrible violation well."
She shot him a withering look that reminded him disconcertingly of the ones Sam gave him. "It wasn't your fault. It's not like you knew from the start." She suddenly shot him a suspicious look. "Did you?"
"Of course not!" He bit out harshly. That, even now, was one of the most deeply painful incidents in his life. He finally had the one thing he he'd wanted more than anything in the world to that point only to discover he was being cynically manipulated by one of his enemies for advantage in a petty spat with her boyfriend.
"I was just surprised," Paulina said lightly, "I thought with, everything we now know about what your parents were working on, that they were after some secret weapon or something."
"Hardly," he muttered sullenly.
Paulina stood there,
Danny stood there, rooted by the sheer weirdness of the conversation.
"Wait!" A familiar voice said from behind him, and he turned to see his mother, Valerie, Tucker, and Starr all standing behind her.
"We've got a problem," she said, eyes wide with the fear he rarely saw on her face. "A big one."
Samantha Ariel Manson's gloved fingers tapped a course correction into the Specter Speeder Mark Two's flight control panel as she directed the Specter Speeder of it's wide circular orbit over the area where Paulina and Starr reported their encounter, while Jazz manned the suite of sensors scanning the ground and everything in a ten mile radius of their ship for any sign of abnormalities. It was a task that the Mark Two's were more than suited for. This was not a small car converted into a flying gas can designed for short-range hops into the Ghost Zone (though they'd somehow managed to fly it as far away as Colorado without it hitting turbulence and falling out of the sky). This was a purpose-built multirole short-range aircraft and spacecraft (in addition to it's usual role of entering the Ghost Zone). She was nearly nine meters long, three meters high, had a wingspan of just over five and a half meters, and weighed fifty tons with single stage to orbit capability. She had the very best in sensors, electronic countermeasures, and electronic counter-countermeasures that Vlad and the Fentons between them had developed prior to the Asteroid Crisis, and she had eight hardpoints that could be used to fit weapons to provide fire support for ground forces. For a science fiction nerd like her it was everything she'd ever wanted out of a ship fitting that mission profile.
"Anything?" She asked, her voice slightly muffled by her helmet. The fully-enclosing space helmet, designed to attach airtight around her suit's collar were required in the event that they ended up having to go into space and even then had to bail. That contingency was also why their red flight suits were full pressure suits with three hours of air in them, more than enough time for another Specter Speeder to hopefully reach them and pull them in before they suffocated. Or at the very least compose their last wills and testaments.
"No," Jasmine said from the ECO's station, behind and to the right of the flight controller's station, shaking her head in frustration. "I'm not getting anything. No weather abnormalities that we weren't expecting, no unusual traces of radiation, no odd electromagnetic signatures, nothing. Our unknown aircraft didn't leave anything behind for us to investigate."
"And no aircraft that shouldn't be there," she said.
"Apart from liners landing at O'Hare and Midway, no joy," Jazz responded.
"Hmm," Sam said, leaning back in her chair and staring at her board and queried her navigational display. There was nothing between them on a flight path that took them from their location into low orbit. She checked her fuel status, and found she had more than enough fuel for what she had in mind
But it's not going to work, she thought sighing. If there were alien small craft operating on Earth, it stood to reason they had either a support base or a mothership or both in the area to base at and service them. A mothership under a competent captain and crew (assuming it had either of those things and wasn't automated) would be parked out of radar range, and while a small craft could theoretically build up speed and coast towards it, it'd be inefficient. On the one hand, space being space, unless one knew where to look, a spacecraft could basically hide anywhere indefinitely once out of radar range.
On the other hand, servicing small craft would become terribly inefficient.
Either way, the thought that she could take her ship on a quick jaunt out of the atmosphere, scan for a few minutes, and pick up an alien carrier and/or battleship hanging out in radar range and waiting to get nuked out of the sky was kind of wishful thinking on her part.
Then again, there could be a base (or bases) on Earth they were operating out of.
"Sam!" Jazz blurted, voice spiking with alarm. "We're picking up a priority burst transmission from FentonWorks Ops! It's a general transmission across all FentonWorks frequencies."
But not directed specifically at us, Sam thought, brow creasing with worry.
"PRIORITY*PRIORITY*PRIORITY*PRIORITY" The automated, vaguely feminine voice of the message header said, right before Danny broke in.
"To Humble and Levelheaded!" Danny's frantic voice shouted over the comms, using the codenames for Sam and Jazz that (as per tradition) were the exact opposite of their personalities. "We've been compromised! There were microchips embedded in our guests! As nearest as we can tell they've been transmitting continuously. They have our home and our lab's locations. Do not head home. Repeat, do not head home. Proceed direct to black site; we will attempt to remove and destroy tracking microchips before proceeding to black site with our guests. There will be no further transmissions." She heard her boyfriend's voice catch in his throat. Good luck."
"Shit!" Sam swore as soon as Danny was off the air, entering commands into her control panel. "Stop playing to the local airports' tender sensibilities, go full active. If there's anything in my sky that shouldn't be and we can detect it, I want to know it. The FAA can bill me later. Clear?"
"Clear," Jazz said, tapping commands into her console, "Radar is at full power, though if there is some sort of stealth speeder out there, if it operates on our understanding of stealth technology it'll only be visible at takeoff or landing. Anything else will look like a bird until it's much, much too late."
Sam sighed, "I know. I'm coming one-seven-six degrees to port at one-half power." And I hope to God we don't get there to find out all is lost.
