Author's Note: Yes, it's been nearly two months since the last ATCOTS update. Work and travel slammed me again… 8 cities and nearly 25,000 miles of air travel in six weeks, followed by the San Diego Comic Con, ate up most of the precious little spare time that I'd hoped to have to write in. But August will be better; just putting this up makes it better than July, right? Oh, and I know I'm in no position to ask favors, but it looks like ATCOTS and some of my other stories might be up for a Fannie or two, so if you're so inclined, I'd appreciate folks voting for their favs (not just my stories) over at the Kim Possible Discussion forum… Ye Old Legal stuff: Kim Possible, Shego, Wade Load, Jim and Tim Possible, Adrena Lynn, Dash, Crash and Burn aka Team Impossible, Nanny Nane, Gemini, Jack Hench, Camille Leon, Senor Senior Jr., Senor Senior Jr., and all other characters borrowed from the wonderful KP Universe are the creations of Mark McCorkle and Bob Schooley, and those names are all trademarks of the Disney media organizations. Although use in this context may be considered fair under parody law, just in case: this work was not created for profit, no money changed hands etc. Also, this story takes place at a time at which all characters shown should be considered to be over the legal age of 18… except, obviously Wade and the Tweebs.
##########
AT THE CENTERFOLD OF THE STORM
Chapter 54
##############################
"We can still pull up!" The pilot urged as the leading hypersonic transport came in at the nearly impossible angle that Nane had ordered.
"Say that one more time and I'll let Sheldon handle your dismissal," Nane snapped, her lips drawn back in a predatory grin, then turned to the co-pilot "And you, be ready to take over if that becomes necessary."
Face as pale and drawn as his senior's, the co-pilot gave a spasmodic jerk of a nod, not daring to take his eyes off his instruments… though whether that was due to the need to focus on the advance radar, or fear of Gemini or Nane herself, was up for grabs. Probably the first and last combined, given that the nominal commander of WEE was currently curled up in a fetal position in his seat, attempting not to wet himself.
To be honest, Nane wasn't completely sure whether they were actually going to be able to pull this off or not, but she'd survived this type of landing before even when the pilots had failed, and THIS time they were going in with an aircraft that was still structurally sound. The real question, however, was whether their opponents on the ice were going to have enough time to shoot them down BEFORE that, since the ONLY path that gave them a chance of pulling this off was going to take them right through their enemy's cross-hairs.
#################################
"Godamnit!" Adrena swore, tearing at the collar of her jacket as she ran, pulling it open so that the cold air could poor in. It was one thing to leave that fat fuck Burns behind, but Dash and Crash were getting way too far ahead of her. Didn't they remember who was in charge here? Who was the link to the money they stood to earn? How DARE they abandon her?
But as angry as she was, she knew that she'd be out in front if she could run as fast… if she could just catch her own breath…
Which was why she was so surprised when Crash suddenly did stop. But that was only until she saw WHY he had stopped… as he started screaming.
###################################
"Kim," Wade's concerned face appeared inside her visor. "We may have a problem. Those transports we've been tracking are finally coming in and… well, look."
Kim slowed her jog to a fast walk in order to focus on the computer projections being traced against a contour map of the valley.
"Damn," Kim marveled, almost whistling at the sheer audacity of the incoming force. This was the kind of out of the box plan that SHE might have come up with, which meant that whoever was in command of that force was either brilliant or crazy… or both. "And if they're going to do that on the way IN, one has to assume that they think they can do it on the way out too."
"It's still too hard to be sure with all the jamming," Wade nodded, "But the few peeks we've got are consistent with the new KVG-Mk II Hyper Transports, which theoretically CAN do it."
"Then we need to wrap up as many of the current operations as we can before they do," Kim agreed, trying to think out a dozen threads of possibility as quickly as she could. "We just can't cover enough ground to take on three armed forces at once, and I don't want to think of what the body count will be like if we let them all go at each other unprepared."
"You know," Wade frowned, "Most field commanders would consider it a GOOD thing to have their enemies shooting at each other."
"Most field commanders aren't heading up an organization called Global RESCUE," Kim shrugged, "And as far as I'm concerned, this is still a rescue, not a military op. So if there's anything we can do to minimize the chances of anyone from being hurt or killed, we have to try."
"Just remember that that 'anyone' applies to you as well," Wade reminded her gloomily, knowing full well that his boss was going to forget her personal safety completely just as soon as the next combustible situation arose… and speaking of hot spots…
#############################
"Fire!" Dallas yelled, the high pitch of his voice barely carrying over the raging inferno. Not that he actually needed to give the order; the mortar team he'd brought down to the edge of the forest fire had eyes as well.
BwAAAMMPFF! BwAAAMMPFF! BwAAAMMPFF! BwAAAMMPFF!
The combined team of mortarmen, snipers and plain old henches that Commander Cholla had sent to take care of the forest-sized weenie roast that was threatening to melt the glacier out from under them held their collective breaths as the bombs detonated… and, for a second, it seemed to work… the fire buckled as the liquid contents of the devices sprayed over a huge area, with an even larger zone flickering like a candle that has almost, but not completely, been blown out. Unfortunately, that analogy proved all too exact, as the undrenched flames immediately roared back up with a vengeance as the displaced oxygen feeding the blaze was sucked back in.
"Again!" Dallas commanded as it became obvious that the first round of Bazaalt extinguisher bombs had only made the slightest dent in the roaring blaze.
Four more bombs disappeared into the firestorm with as little effect and Dallas cursed. These AsP-500ms were supposed to be able to put out anything, but he felt like he was a three-year old pissing on a campfire… there was no way his limited supply was going to be able to handle this, and Cholla was NOT going to be happy if Dallas couldn't handle a simple assignment like putting out a fire, especially after that brownie incident…
"You've got to start at the sides!" Shouted one of the Henchmen they'd picked up at the armory, interrupting Dallas' train of thought.
"What?" Dallas yelled back over the conflagration.
"Make firebreaks so the fire can't spread, then work inwards!" The Henchman hollered through the facemask of one of the protective helmets that all of the men were wearing. "We can't put it all out, but we can keep it from getting any bigger, and there can't be that much more left to burn in the center!"
Damn, the Hench was right, Dallas realized… and given that the trees were bordered by open snow on this side and the frozen lake on the other, they wouldn't have THAT much they had to knock out.
"Right!" He agreed before snapping out new orders to the squad. "Two teams, one on each end. Set up a round of conventional explosives and clear a section. Then set up a barrage of aerial bursts and move inward… I'll take group one," he made a swath with his arm to indicate half of the men, "And the Scorpion down to the far end and find a place to make a break there and…"
Dallas stopped, realizing that all of his regulars were going to be too busy shooting mortars to focus on the big picture.
"You, Mister Fire Expert…" he told the Hench who'd spoken up. "Go with the second team and the Leviathan. You've got the bright ideas, you help them figure out where to make the cut. Think you can handle that?"
"Yes sir!" The Hench practically snapped to attention, and Dallas suppressed a laugh as he saw the way the man was sweating profusely… well, even more profusely than they all were already. If he was a typical hench, the prospect of being suddenly made responsible for the success of the assignment was bound to be unsettling.
'Well, that's what you get for stepping up to the plate,' Dallas thought wickedly, 'And now you've learned rule number one in any army: "Never Voluntee….'
And then it became impossible to hear even his own thoughts.
"Holy Shi…" He managed to utter as the roar of four giant air transports bearing down on his team drowned out all else.
##############################
Shego moved through the camp as quickly as she could while maintaining her now mostly affected limp… her leg still hurt, of course, but given a chance to simply sit and start healing, her regenerative powers had had time to focus on working their magic, and even with the painkillers that she'd taken starting to fade, she could might have even been able to get away with actually running for a short distance. Camille Leon, however, had no such abilities, so as long as Shego was wearing the holographic disguise of Camille over herself, she didn't dare act any differently than she had when she'd first been 'taken' by Cholla's men. She'd been reluctant about this part of the plan at first, but Kim had been right in assuming that since the Black Widows were expecting to meet up with Camille, any checking as to the legitimacy of her identity would be cursory at best… and what better way to double check Wade's overhead analysis than to walk into the middle of the enemy camp as a trusted ally?
Which is how, instead of heading to the latrines as she'd told her guards, she'd instead come to be 'casually' walking towards the tacking beacon identifying the impromptu 'armory' and single largest ammo dump in the Black Widow encampment just as she'd heard someone screaming "They're coming in!"
An evil smirk that her lover would have found all too familiar creased Shego's lips, transferring itself to the false lips of her disguise. Things were about to get exciting again for Go City's former favorite heroine… and as far as she was concerned, it was about damned time. She loved Kim and had to admit that the redhead's latest convoluted improvisation was nothing short of inspired, but using an invisible plasma field to slowly fry out the weapons controls in the Leviathan she'd been sitting in wasn't the kind of work Shego lived for. .. and there was no way she was letting her Kitten have all the fun when it came to the physical side of the action.
##############################
"Shoot them down, Godamnit!" Cholla barked as his command staff ran around in disarray. "Why aren't we SHOOTING at them?"
"We are, but something's wrong with the stingers on the Leviathan's missile racks!" Came near-panicked response from his ops officer. "Dallas took the other Leviathan and one of the Scorpions when he took the mortarmen to fight the fire!"
"He did WHAT?" Cholla exploded, blood vessels in his forehead threatening to rupturing like sausages bursting in the microwave as he realized his entire air defense had been reduced to the cannons on a single Scorpion and the handheld FIM-92s that were still in the armory dump! "Why the hell would he… no, never mind, just get the rest from the…"
And then he was thrown to the floor as the Widow's entire armory went up in a single gigantic explosion.
#################################
"Grenade!" Shego/Camille had yelled at the top of her lungs as she hurled a ball of concentrated plasma into the center of the hastily fortified enclosure.
The guards at the perimeter stared for just a second in confusion as they tried to place the fact that Shego/Camille's voice had come from one direction, while her visible holographic projection was clearly twenty feet on the other side of them… then what she'd actually said registered and they did the only wise thing to do when sitting on top of enough explosives to start a small war… hit the dirt face first and pray for it not to hurt too much.
Shego had already gone to ground, watching 'her' image do the same even as she focused on the latest wrinkle Kim had thought of for her plasma, forming a cone of kinetic force AROUND the armory in an attempt to funnel the brunt of the explosion upwards instead of outwards. As with jumping in molten lava, she'd never tried this before, but she was hoping that her physics-whiz of a girlfriend had figured things out correctly. Otherwise, this blast was likely to kill everyone in a several hundred foot radius of the detonation, including herself.
In the end, the trick was about eighty percent successful…
#################################
"…it!" Dallas finished screaming as the first of the four transports came barreling in over his men's head and a huge explosion erupted over the ridge, in the direction of the Widow's base camp. "I didn't think those things could drop bombs!"
'Time to get the hell out of Dodge,' Ralph decided, 'Before someone notices the BCUs I buried under the fire-fighting bombs in the truck.'
Because someone WAS going to be noticing that the ones for the other Stinger systems were missing now… The only question was whether that discovery would come before or after Dallas finally realized that the sweating henchman who'd offered advice on how to stop the fire was someone he'd never seen with his unit before. Someone who'd merged himself into the firefighting team when they came to get the Baazalts from the ammo supply area. Ralph hadn't had enough time to get a complete inventory of its contents, but he had managed to confirm that there were no toxic agents that could be set off by a plasma fueled explosion… as tough as Shego was, nerve gas would almost certainly kill her… and to his own surprise, he'd even managed to swipe the BCUs for the most immediately threatening weapons, the Stingers. Knowing that the hand-held missile launchers were useless without the argon battery coolant units, he'd snagged every one he'd been able to find, then snuck them into the bottom of Leviathan's rear storage when no one was looking. Equally unnoticed was his placement of the tracking marker and sending a brief 'bomb here' signal to Shego using Camille's smart phone, which Wade had hacked into to create a secure communications channel. It wasn't as good as a Kimmunicator, obviously, but it had been sufficient to confirm his own suspicion that, for all their 'professional mercenary' veneer, the Black Widows still did most things by the standard Henchco manual… which had taken him less than a minute to find, despite it being 'perfectly' hidden.
"Come on, let's get this fire out so we can get the hell back to base!" Ralph ordered the half of the men Dallas hadn't singled out as 'his,' running for the truck where the stingers were hidden. Whether they followed or not, he was taking off for the far end of the forest where he could hopefully dispose of the weapons, but in the meantime he'd try to accomplish at least half of what Kim had hoped for and try to get a firebreak started.
Dumbfounded, Dallas watched as half of his team took off after the heavyset henchman without even waiting for his authorization.
Then again, maybe it's because he was making sense, Dallas realized. The Commander was going to be MORE than pissed when he found out that Dallas hadn't even thought to order his Scorpion and Leviathan gun crews to shoot at the transports when they'd passed right over him. Never mind that they'd had their attention on the job they were supposed to be doing and literally no warning from base.
Not to mention, his subconscious whispered, that the ends of this forest are going to be a lot better position to be running from away from once the shit really starts coming down… this probably isn't going to be a safe place to be at all once whoever's in those planes starts unloading.
"Right!" Dallas snapped to the remaining team, "Let's get those firebreaks started!"
#################################
"God, I hope Ralph is having a better time than I am," Sam swore to himself as the frame of the massive transport he and a fourth of Gemini's hired henches was riding bucked like a crazed bronco. "Lucky bastard is probably sitting on a tropical island somewhere serving cocktails to the Seniors."
Things had been going so smoothly until just a few minutes ago, when one of Gemini's Greek Letters… Kappa… had suddenly ordered everyone to strap in. Now the entire aircraft was shaking like a an out of balance vibrator as it fell out of the sky at an angle that experience told Sam was way too steep for a normal landing.
And the worst part was that the view through the side window told him exactly why Kappa had asked for a show of hands as to which henches knew how to swim.
"BRACE FOR WATER LANDING!" Someone yelled over the P.A. and then the ride got REALLY rough as something much bigger than the usual landing gear deployed from the bottom of the craft.
################################
"Pontoons down!" Shouted the pilot as Nane's knobby fingers shredded the padding off her shock-seat's armrests and the annoying little dog in her carrysack let out a mournful howl of doom.
"Here we go!"
#################################
With a splash of water the size of a large suburban block, the first of the WEE hypersonic transports belly-flopped into the freezing waters of the glacial lake above the dam. If there had been any huge chucks of ice floating in the targeted landing zone, things could have gone VERY badly for the Gemini/Nane contingent, but the dam's regular maintenance crew did an excellent job of keeping the water clear of anything that could potentially be a threat to the walls of the dam itself… which turned the lake into an acceptable landing zone for any plane that was equipped to do so. Which, theoretically, the KVG-Hyper Transport WAS.
Until that very second, however, it was mostly theory… an extra feature grafted onto the plane at the last minute as a way of potentially selling the insanely expensive craft to small nations with minimal free land but excess open bodies of water and as a last ditch alternative for emergency landings. The pontoons and floatation systems had been tested had been tested under ideal circumstances exactly four times prior to this exact moment, and whether the transports would yet prove to be able to take off from the lake was still a matter to be determined. However, the simple fact that the system HAD worked this time was irrefutable, and a cause of great joy not only to those who had been ON the plane, but also to the pilots of the planes following as they saw clear proof that it could be done… evidence that was doubled and tripled as two more of the monstrous metal birds duplicate their leader's example to land in similar giant mass of foaming white spray.
The fourth transport wasn't quite as lucky. With a shout of jubilation, the gunner in the Widow base Scorpion FINALLY managed to hit a target and the tail stabilized on the HyperTrans simply ceased to be. Under normal circumstances that might have been a savable situation, but with all the odds stacked against him, the pilot of transport four did a miraculous job of simply keeping the plane from plunging nose-first to the bottom of the lake. Instead, the transport hit the water sideways and skipped like a stone across a pond, losing the entire tail end in the process. Within seconds, the vehicle was sinking rapidly… though not as quickly as it would have had the pontoons not remained deployed… and the crew and henches inside were engaged in a desperate struggle to fight their way out of the soon to be coffin and arctic waters.
None of which phased their real commander in the slightest.
"Three out of four. Not bad at all," Nanny Nane spoke calmly as the rest of the cockpit crew of the lead ship was still in the process of assessing the fact that they were still amazingly alive. Secretly, though, she was doing cartwheels… not only had she cheated the Reaper one more time, but since the fourth plane's crash had clearly been the result of an 'unprovoked attack' by HenchCo's Black Widows, the legal battle over who was responsible for the carnage could be played out in the courts for years.
"And now Gentlemen," she commanded the white faced pilots, "taxi us to the nearest shore and let us get our men disembarked. We've got a teen hero to kill."
#################################
"Stop!" Crash's voice screamed. "For God's sake, stop!"
"What the fuck now?" Dash swore to himself, but despite the urgent need to escape and the fact that they had quickly abandoned Burn only a few minutes earlier, something about the timber of the pilot's voice forced the leader of Team Impossible to draw up short and turn... just in time to realize that Crash WAN'T speaking to him. Clutching his head in pain, Team Impossible's pilot collapsed first to his knees, then fell face first into the snow where he began rolling and thrashing in what was obviously horrific agony.
Gasping and sweating, Adrena, who'd been bringing up the tail end of their group, ran up as Crash unleashed a bloodcurdling shriek and began clawing at his own face.
"Burns!" Crash babbled mindlessly, attempting to bury his head in the snow of snow and convulsing as if having a seizure.
"What's wrong with him?" The now drawn and ragged looking blond demanded, perspiration streaming down her face as she gave voice to the same question that was in Dash's mind. "Some kind of ninja weapon? A poison?"
"I don't know," Dash growled, trying to calm his freaked out employer even as Crash went into a new series of spasms.
"Then what…?"
"I said I DON'T KNOW!" Dash screamed.
"Burns…." Crash whimpered, and to the others' disgust, his clawed fingers grabbing handfuls of the now muddy snow he'd been wallowing in and them into his mouth. "Inside!"
Adrena and Dash exchanged furtive glances.
"If you don't know what's wrong, we've got to leave him." Adrena's tone was insistent and demanding. Dash started to snarl back a retort about who was in charge, but one look at the blonde's matted and dripping hair told him that she wasn't in any mood for arguing… and as the only one who knew how to contact the son of a bitch who'd sent them on this fool's errand, she DID have the last word.
Besides… she was right. Whatever the hell was wrong with Crash, there was no way Dash and Adrena could carry him, even if the former TV star was willing to try. And assuming that whatever was wrong with Crash wasn't going to hit them too. Now that he thought about it, he wasn't feeling so good himself, and as he watched Adrena start to undo the front of her winter survival suit, revealing a completely sweat soaked undershirt, he realized that they might not have much time left in which to make their getaway.
"aw… fuck it," Dash bit the words out angrily. This mission had already cost him the Skyvixen and the other third of Team Impossible, but if he could get back to civilization, they still had assets he could draw on to start rebuilding. No, HE still had assets. From this point, Crash was on his own and shit out of luck.
"Sorry man," he whispered under his breath as he broke back into a stride to catch up with Adrena, leaving his last partner twitching uncontrollably in the snow.
########################
"Hold back just a little longer Kim," Wade's voice insisted via the speaker inside Kim's head, his image appearing over satellite and surveillance camera views of, among other things, the sinking hypertrans, the fire in the middle of the Black Widow encampment and Crash's body lying in the snow. "Tim just pulled up Crash's records and it looks like he has lot of old school dental reconstruction. It's a good thing you made us start as low as possible and build."
"Except he's not the one I was concerned about," Kim reminded him with a guilty frown, never breaking stride as she made a beeline toward the fallen Team Impossible member's location. "Even though I should have been."
Wade fumbled for something to say. "You can't think of everything Kim."
Kim didn't want to hear it. Sure, it was easy enough to argue that, logically, the wreck of the hyper transport wasn't really her fault, and even if conscience did keep insisting that the fact that it was attempting to land on the lake in the first place made it, however tenuously, a direct result of her decision to come here in the first place, she'd been a hero long enough to have the fact that you can't take the blame for what the bad guys do drilled into her head.
But what was happening with Crash, on the other hand, WAS her fault, 100%, and while she hadn't expected one of her quarry to have this extreme a reaction, she'd known it was possible and she knew she was going to have more than a few bad nights of sleep as a result. Maybe that was part of the price she paid for going against her natural inclinations and tracking TI electronically with a video feed from the safety of the extreme edge of the microwaves saturating the HERFsat's focus area rather than maintaining direct visual contact… the video images being ironically far more graphic and visceral than a binocular view from 500 feet…. yet it was more than that. Kim wasn't adverse to hurting someone if it needed to be done… there was a long list of villains and henchmen who could readily attest to that fact, but she was used to doing it herself, with her own feet and fists, where she often got as good as she gave and could pull her punches as needed. This… inflicting pain that someone couldn't even understand, let alone fight against, from a distance sickened her… and only gave her renewed respect for the restraint Shego had always shown in the years when they were adversaries. There were so many ways her now-lover COULD have hurt her, yet never attempted.
That said, once she chosen this course of action, she'd been stuck hanging on the edge of the hot zone, because what had happened to Crash would have been far, far worse for Kim herself. Her short career had already left her with more pins and metal plates inside her than any five normal people… and that wasn't even counting the wires inside her skull that made communicating with Wade possible. And because of that, it wasn't an anticipation of Crash's pain that had kept her from letting Wade really turn on the juice; it the fact that she'd have to retreat even further away herself if she didn't want to get the world's worst case of inside-out sunburn. Due to the complexity of using a High-Energy Radio-Frequency satellite that had never been expressly designed for use as an anti-personnel weapon like the U.S. Military's Active Denial System (ADS), the best that Wade and the Tweebs had been able to safely manage was to create a microwave cannon that was now raise the temperature in the area surrounding Team Impossible's remaining members to a sweltering 120 degrees Fahrenheit… which that meant that, inevitably, TI was going to have to make a choice of continuing to wear all that stifling body armor or passing out from heat strokes. And, in the meantime, as anyone whose ever left a bit of foil in the microwave by accident has discovered to their dismay, what that would do to any metal objects Dash, Adrena and Crash were carrying was going to be even MORE painful.
"If he wasn't trying to kill you, I might more feel sorry for him," Wade was saying. "But he was Kim, and no doubt he'll keep trying if we let up on him."
"It's enough," Kim countered, shaking her head as she continued making her way towards the place where Crash was still lying. "Just keep following Dash and Adrena, and I'll get Crash zipped up as a matching package for Burn."
"You got it boss lady," Wade nodded and his image went blank. He was still there, of course, waiting for her to initiate a resumption of visual communication, but it was the best he could do to give her the illusion of privacy.
Kim stopped for a second and pulled up her visor to wipe the sweat off her face and daub up the blood at the corner of her mouth. It was getting really warm now and she needed to slow down if she didn't want to start having the same reactions that Crash had had… but there was so little time in which everything had to be done. If only she'd had a chance to rest and didn't hurt so damn much… but she had to keep pushing the envelope. Just a little longer.
"You're a Possible, yada yada yada," She reminded herself wearily… and then she started running again.
