Mission: Possible
by Gary D. Snyder
Chapter 15:
It wasn't often that Kim found herself stymied. While it was true that, as her Web site proclaimed, she could do anything, she first had to know what to do before she could do it. In sheer frustration at her dilemma she removed the grappling gun from her belt and began surveying the huge magnet for possible points of attack.
"What's happening, Kim?" came Ron's frantic voice over her Kim-municator. "Talk to me!"
"It may not be the perfect solution," Kim replied absently, "but I think I can take out enough of the power cables to –"
"No!" Jimmy interrupted her. "There's got to be a way! Just give me a second!"
"We don't have many left," Kim began but saw that Jimmy wasn't paying attention to her anymore. Instead, his eyes were closed and he seemed almost to be in pain.
"Come on, Jimmy," he was saying. "It's Cindy on the line here, so think. Think! Think!" As Kim looked on in fascination thoughts and memories began flying through Jimmy's mind, merging and combining into new ideas in a process that was somehow more than reason and beyond inspiration.
It allows the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts…
What we have should be adequate to strengthen the frame…
You just turn your opponent's strength against him…
"Brain blast!" Jimmy cried, startling Kim. He ran to the auxiliary power panel with Kim following closely behind and began dumping the contents of his backpack on the floor. "They were in here, I know they were," he muttered as he sifted through the contents. "Aha!" He snatched up what looked to Kim to be two flashlight batteries and, using the laser on his watch, began to weld them together into a single unit.
"Uh, Jimmy? Are you okay?" Kim asked hesitantly.
"Just fine." He finished his welding, opened the panel, and began using his watch laser to cut through power cables with surgical precision.
"Just what are you doing?"
"I'm using my energy cells to supplement the auxiliary power," Jimmy replied as he fitted the joined cells in place and welded them to the power cable.
Kim sounded puzzled. "I thought you said that the power could only temporarily cancel out the main power to the magnet."
Jimmy finished his welding and closed the panel. "I'm not canceling out the main power. I'm making the magnet stronger."
"Stronger?" Kim repeated in shock.
"Did he say stronger?" Ron asked.
Jimmy traced the power cables from the panel up to the top of the magnet by eye. "Don't you see? They built this framework just strong enough to handle the magnet's normal field. If we increase the power of the field –"
"- then the field of the magnet will tear it apart," Kim concluded, her face lighting up as Jimmy's idea became clear to her. Then her features clouded again. "But won't Drakken and Calamitous shut the field down when they see what's happening?"
"That's why I have to get up there." Jimmy pointed. "I need to cross-connect the two cables from this panel to those two cables entering that top ring. Once the magnet is turned on, they won't be able turn off again."
Kim spotted where Jimmy was pointing. "Leave that to me." She gave Jimmy her Kim-municator and removed the watch from his wrist almost before Jimmy realized was happening, and then fired her grappling hook into the framework high above them. "Get out of here before the magnet powers up."
"But –" Jimmy started to protest.
"Go!" She depressed the trigger again and seemed to fly towards the superstructure of the magnet as the gun reeled the line in. Not knowing what else to do Jimmy ran to the door of the chamber, but halted just outside and waited anxiously. As the few remaining seconds evaporated Jimmy began fidgeting nervously.
"Come on, Kim," he urged. "Get out of there!"
"Relax," Ron reassured him over the communications link. "Kim can handle herself." He had hardly finished speaking when red lights on the chamber began to flash and a klaxxon began to blare, warning that the magnet was powering up. The door to the chamber also began to slide shut again as automatic safety interlocks engaged. Without thinking of the consequences Jimmy put himself between the door and the frame and strained against the hatch in a futile effort to keep the doorway open. He managed to slow, but not halt, the door's inexorable advance.
"I can't …stop it!" he panted through clenched teeth as his muscles strained against the door's servos. "Shouldn't..have..let her…"
He was interrupted when a lithe figure struck him like human projectile, knocking Jimmy clear of the doorway and sending him sprawling on the floor before rolling gracefully to its feet. The door, unimpeded, slammed closed behind both of them.
"Kim!" Jimmy cried as he got to his feet. "You made it!"
"She can do anything," Ron reminded him.
"Nice watch," Kim commented as she handed it back to Jimmy and retrieved the Kim-muncator. "Does it come in women's styles?"
Jimmy returned the watch to his wrist. "Well, not yet, but if you want –"
"- you can make one for me. Thanks, Jimmy." She frowned. "But right now we have unfinished business to attend to."
"Like getting me out of here," Ron said as Kim and Jimmy headed back down the corridor. "Right, guys? Guys?"
Back in the control room Beautiful had joined the others as Drakken rubbed his hands in glee. "Is the subject in the chamber?" he asked. Beautiful nodded.
"Don't you mean 'victim'?" Shego asked.
Drakken seemed offended. "I'm a scientist, Shego. Maybe Calamitous has victims to torture, but I use subjects in the pursuit of my scientific inquiries."
"Ooh, right," Shego replied with mock respect. "So what scientific inquiry did you have in mind for your subject?"
"Actually, I've always been curious as to how strong a magnetic field it would take to rip the iron from someone's blood cells." He surveyed his control panel. "Okay. Gigawatt generators are online…"
"Magnetic interlocks engaged…" added Calamitous from his station.
"Atomic batteries to power…" Beautiful said.
"Turbines to speed…" Shego continued but cut short her commentary as Drakken and Calamitous glared at the two women. "What?" she asked innocently as Beautiful snickered. "It sounded kind of natural."
"There's nothing natural about it," Drakken snapped. "Only an idiot would have those kind of things in a checklist."
"Can we get on with it?" Calamitous asked.
Beautiful simply rolled her eyes, bored with the proceedings. "Whatever."
"What she said," Shego agreed.
"All right then. Activate magnet!" Following his own instructions he pushed a lever forward and watched anxiously as a bank of indicators turned green. "There, you see, Shego?" he asked in triumph. "And you were worried that Possible and Neutron would somehow stop us."
"It ain't over 'til it's over," was Shego's observation.
Calamitous was calling out numbers. "sixty percent…seventy percent…"
"Once it reaches full power, we'll drop the force field in the test chamber and channel the field so that we can monitor the effects on the subject," Drakken said.
"Eight percent…ninety percent…full power!" As Drakken was about to deactivate the protective forced field about the test chamber Calamitous added, "Wait a minute. That's not right."
Drakken stared at him. "What?"
"One hundred ten percent…one hundred twenty…one hundred thirty…"
Drakken stormed over to verify the numbers that Calamitous was reporting. "One hundred forty…one hundred fifty…." he mumbled in unison with Calamitous. "That's not possible!"
"Actually, I think it probably was her," Shego commented.
"With some help from Neutron," agreed Beautiful.
Calamitous sneered. "Well, what of it? They made our magnet stronger. How much of a genius can Neutron be to do something like that?"
At the moment a groan from somewhere within the complex seemed to roll through the room, accompanied by a sudden rumble that nearly threw them off-balance. As they steadied themselves another, louder shriek of tortured metal was heard as the floor shook even more violently.
"I think we're about to find out," Beautiful observed dryly.
Drakken frantically jerked the lever up and down several times in a desperate attempt to deactivate the magnet. "I can't shut it down!" he called in a panic. "It's only a matter of time before the magnet rips itself to pieces!"
"But that will shut off the field, right?" asked Shego.
Calamitous nodded. "Yes. But the question is how much damage it will do before then." A violent tremor threw them all to the floor.
"And how long will that be?" Beautiful asked, struggling to her feet again.
"It depends on just how well Calamitous designed the magnet," Drakken answered. "It could be hours, or even days –"
Before he could finish a violent explosion reverberated through the building as the titanic magnetic induction coils ripped free of their mountings and were hurled violently against the walls of the chamber, shattering the reinforced concrete like so much plaster of Paris. The force of the colossal impacts rocked the complex, shattering floors and bulkheads and throwing the entire installation into darkness as power cables snapped like threads. Afterwards there was complete silence for some time.
"Or maybe less than a minute," Drakken continued despondently when he had sufficiently revived and picked himself up off the floor. "I don't suppose that civil engineering was one of your achievements, Calamitous?"
Calamitous stirred. "Well, it was going to be," he confessed, "but there were one or two keggers I may have gone to, and I never did find the time to get that statics project completed…"
"Well, I'd say you're going to have a lot of time on your hands to do that," a voice in the darkness said. "In jail," it added
"Possible!" snarled Shego. Two emerald flames illuminated the gloom as Shego prepared to confront her archenemy.
Drakken, a dim shape in the green radiance, pointed to the silhouette of Kim standing in the doorway. "Attack, Shego!" he ordered.
"Get her, daughter!" commanded Calamitous.
As Shego and Beautiful tensed to spring Kim said calmly, "Before you ladies do, you might consider three things."
"And those are?" challenged Beautiful.
Kim ticked off her fingers. "First, I'm wearing Jimmy's Omnispecs, and believe me, I can see all of you a whole lot better than you can see me. Second, Jimmy has just about finished putting together something he calls a liquid helium super-soaker, and from what I've seen him do so far I really don't think you want to mess with that. And third, unless you don't mind the Arctic climate I think you'd prefer taking a nice warm military transport to walking out of here. So what's it going to be?"
It must be said that Beautiful and Shego were practical people and that even Drakken and Calamitous could see reason when the circumstances were properly presented to them. Slowly the green glow around Shego's hands faded and Beautiful relaxed her stance as Drakken perhaps best summed up the thoughts of the four of them.
"I really," he moaned, "hate that girl."
End of Chapter 15
Author's Notes:
Some more astute readers may recall that Shego had blasted Jimmy before Calamitous mentioned that they had enough of the beryllium alloy needed for the supporting framework. All I can say is that Calamitous was speaking over a loudspeaker and since Jimmy would probably have fought to stay conscious he was able to hear that critical piece of information he needed for his brain blast. They may also wonder how Jimmy's watch still had enough power to drive his laser after being used to negate the force field of his cell. As to that, I'd have to say that it wasn't battery power that was a factor in how long he could shut down the force field, but how long he could keep power going through circuits in his watch to do so.