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The Never Ending Battle (Part Twenty-four)
“I was … he … we were just …”
“In the Mideast? Yes you were. I take it Zoran showed you the room where the students were being held and how we rescued them …well, rather, how he rescued them?” She nodded, still dumbfounded. ”You see, Colonel, there was no need for half the force to come in from one direction and half from another, no need for distractions, no need for anything more than the speediest member of the Force to simply remove the hostages faster than the captors could react. After they were safely back home in America (and I believe Zoran showed off a bit and returned each hostage to his or her actual home), he went back and, first, removed all the weapons he could find and then moved all the captors into jail cells.”
I popped my fresh candy into my mouth. ”It took all of five minutes. Do you understand now?”
She stared at me blankly, so – partially to give her time to catch her wits and partially to preface my point – I leaned back and told her about my grandfather, who’d been a member of the legendary Texas Rangers.
“He used to tell me about his adventures as a Ranger when I was a kid,” I reminisced with a small smile. ”I loved hearing about them, but something always bothered me. You see, the television police shows always made it seem like all the police in creation used to show up every time there was a major disturbance, but grandpa never mentioned any other Rangers in his stories. One day I asked him why that was. He smiled and told me that the proper ratio for Rangers was; ‘One riot, one Ranger.’ ”
I gave her my best grandpa smile and concluded, “One emergency, one member of the Force; it’s generally enough and backup is only seconds away, no matter where on Earth the emergency is. With that sort of superiority, why should we bother with tactics?”
She nodded, her color coming back.
“Plus I remember reading something back in college …” I rattled off something in Chinese (yeah, I speak Chinese … it was summer, I was a bored teenager, and there was nothing but reruns on), then added, ”Loosely translated, ‘These are the principles of planning attacks. Generally in warfare: If ten times the enemy’s strength, surround them; if five times, attack them; if double, divide them; if equal, be able to fight them; if fewer, be able to evade them; if weaker, be able to avoid them.’ ”
She stared at me oddly before replying, “That’s from The Art of War.”
“Yes, a philosopher or series of philosophers writing under the name Sun Tzu. The Force is, regardless of the size of the opposing forces, roughly a thousand times their strength, so I added a new level that I though Sun Tzu would have approved of; ‘If a thousand times the enemy’s strength, screw with them as much as possible while giggling and still get home in time for dinner.’ ”
The Colonel grinned in spite of herself and seemed to relax a bit.
“We inflict as little damage or injury as possible, do our level best to embarrass the enemy badly enough that they simply disband rather than show their faces again, and - most importantly – do it as effortlessly as possible. Y’see, fear of getting caught just isn’t enough, not with the level of bad guys we’re talking about; I want the bad guys so afraid of looking like incompetent idiots that they’ll take a pass on whatever their planning rather than risk their precious reputations. Towards this end, I’ve found that simply turning the Force loose to handle matters as they see fit, without any real advance planning, gets superb results.”
Which, for the most part, concluded our meeting. After the Colonel left, first promising to never simply drop by again, I contacted Wanda and asked her if we were going to have any problem with the military women?
She hesitated and asked what I meant by “problem?”
I described, quickly, my meeting with Lieutenant Colonel Rodriques, concluding with, “Are we going to get that sort of attitude of superiority from all of them, or only the officers, or what?”
Wanda laughed merrily and replied, “Are you kidding? Not just the military women; you’re going to get that attitude from the NASA women, too! These are women who have advanced, rung by tiring rung, up a ladder generally still reserved for men. They are better trained and more professional than most of their male immediate supervisors, much less their male peers. They are going to be introduced to four boys barely out of high school who’s sole claim to any sort of superiority is that they’ve been doing the job for a scant few months.” She laughed again and concluded, “They are going to roll right over the guys like nothing they’ve ever experienced.”
“Crap,” I muttered.
“Which is why I’m rewriting the psychological protocols for the indoctrination, Al. All the new members will be subtlety adjusted to accept the existing members as, at the very least, their equals. At the same time, I’m adjusting the nightly protocols to ready the men for the onslaught. Relax, I’m all over this.”
“Sorry, Mistress Mine. I should have known. How is the testing going, by the way. Have any of them started the psychological testing?”
“That’s a big no, Shotgun Man. They are all still in the loving clutches of Daniel’s techies and I don’t anticipate starting with them until Friday at the earliest … on the other hand,” she added, in a new tone of voice, “I have started reviewing the psychological testing of the veterans.”
“Find anything that might be a problem?” I put my feet up on my desk and loosened my tie.
“Hell, Al; where to start! If we use our standard guidelines with them, none of them will qualify for enhancement. These are men and women who have been through some really nasty stuff, Al; I would have been astonished if they weren’t mentally screwed up. The real question is are they too screwed up to even make telekinesis work, much less maintain sustained flight.”
I asked her to keep me informed and called Daniel to check on the medical aspects of all our various subjects. ”Well, I have to say that I’ve never seen a better put together bunch of women in my life … and if you mention that to Wanda, I’ll deny it to my grave.” After I got done laughing, I asked him if he’d found anything at all that would disqualify any of them?
“Seriously? Al, these women are in the top one percent of the top one percent of the top one percent of the population as far as fitness. I’ve worked with professional athletes who weren’t in as good a shape. They max out in every endurance test, I wish the plumbing in my lab had pipes half as clean as their arteries and that my car’s engine was a carefully tuned and maintained as the worst one’s heart, and I retested the first couple of reflex tests simply because I didn’t believe that any unaugmented human could be that quick. I’d simply rubber stamp them and send them on to Wanda’s fun loving bunch of brain busters if it wasn’t for the raw data that I’m collecting.”
I hmm’d and asked about the veterans. His laughter wasn’t encouraging.
“Are you kidding? There was this one guy who scared the crap out of one of my techs by calmly throwing himself out of his wheelchair, then casually performing a floppy legged handstand, and then cranking out a dozen or so inverted push-ups … when all the tech had done was simply asked him to crank a wheel to elevate his heart rate!”
“Wait a minute … steely eyed old fart with a buzz cut? Looked a little like he could power his chair through a wall?”
“Ah, you met him, then? Well, he was just an extreme example of the whole bunch. My guys are trained to determine the physical condition of average humans and augmented humans … nothing in their training for paraplegic ultra-humans, so the tests are a little inconclusive. I’ll tell you one thing, though; if it was simply a matter of will-power, I’d pass them all in a heartbeat!”
I asked him to explain and he added, “One of them, when being put through a modified stress test, actually passed out rather than give up before hitting the requested mark. When he was brought back around, he insisted on trying again.” He paused, and then added, “Seriously, Al, I don’t know what’s going to happen when they go through the flight process. As a group, they range from average to excellent shape, injuries aside, but every last one of them are so … I don’t know how to say it.” He paused for a longer period before announcing, “Focused. It’s the only word that really fits. They’re so damn focused on whatever they do that it’s scary at times.”
“So you don’t know if the process will help them?”
“Al, with God as my witness, I haven’t the foggiest fuck of an idea. I will say this, however: We won’t, that was will not, get one bloody single insight as to whether the process will help any regular paraplegic from how the vets do.”
“You think they’re that different from the baseline?”
“Nope, I know they’re that different, Al.”
Great. I told him we’d talk about it further at home, hung up the phone, and looked at the clock … then looked a second time in mild shock. It wasn’t even noon.
I remembered, back when I used to actually work as a scientist, that I often missed lunch simply because I was too busy working to notice the time. Then I’d wonder why the lights had dimmed and finally notice the sun had set. Now it seemed like I spent most of my time talking to people and never getting anything done, while spending days doing it, but then seeing that only a few hours had passed.
I was trying to decide if I should run up to my lab and see if I could squeeze a few minutes of research in before my lunch meeting (if you can believe it, the lawyers and publishers of the top comic book companies wanted to discuss possible infringements on their ‘intellectual properties’) of if it would be better to simply put my feet up and wait for my secretaries call that it was time. I had just about decided that it would be more restful to just wait when a movie star walking into my office in a star-spangled cape and tights.
Okay … make a note: Get a damn lock on that frigging door!
Disappointed
hungry
Gah
Pleased
Speechless
amused
Good Riddance
Spooked