DP: To Loose the Fateful Lightening

[Graywand2]

DP: To Loose the Fateful Lightning

This is part of the general continuity I established for DP and FOP in Old, Unhappy, Far-Off Things. This though reveals the genesis of the organization Timmy and Trixie are a part of in OUFOT.

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
-Chinese proverb

Samantha Manson opened her violet eyes wearily, rubbing the dirt and grit out of them with her knuckles. After that she looked around her bedroom, as she did every morning. She was lying in her queen-sized four-poster bed with it’s black sheets and curtains, and a row of dark violet throw pillows lined from one edge of the bed to the other. She threw aside the curtain in front of her and looked out to see the curtains closed on the windows in her room, blocking out the light of the morning sun and shrouding her vast room in darkness. In the darkness she could make out the shapes of her bookshelves lining the walls on either side of the room, as well as the glass case on the other side of the room between the two bookshelves on the right side of the room containing the heap of medals that she’d won due to her actions at the North Pole, carefully arranged on the four shelves in the rectangular glass case.

Yeah, I earned them, Sam thought to herself. But at what cost? Life had gotten increasingly hectic in the ninety or so days since the hour Danny had saved the world. Everyone who’d been present at the North Pole may have been sworn to secrecy about Danny’s identity, but for some reason keeping the identity of me, Jazz, and Tucker didn’t occur to them.

It was at that point that she felt a cold chill flood her body everywhere at once, as if she’d been dunked in a tub of ice water. Shivering uncontrollably, she saw a small shape in the rough shape of a girl on the other side of the curtain.

“D-Danni,” she said, her mouth trembling, mist frothing from her mouth. “Could you please change so I don’t freeze to death?”

“I’m going to do that, Sam, hold your horses,” a pleasant female voice said from behind the curtain to her left. She saw a white electric glow encircle the girl’s waist, before splitting into two identical rings and travel up and down her body. She moved the curtain aside to see a dark shape in the rough shape of Danielle Fenton standing in front of her.

“Hey, Sam,” she said amiably, her voice sounding haggard and tired.

“Hang on, Danni,” Sam said quickly. “I’m going to turn on the light so I can actually see whom I’m talking to.” She threw the covers off in a rustle of moving blankets and set her bare feet on the warm synthetic fiber carpet. She moved quickly for the door to the bedroom and through the switch to the left of it, activating the circuit and flooding the room with a soft fluorescent light. Her room was illuminated fully, and so was the girl who’d came in. When her guest was fully illuminated, she instinctively breathed in a surprised breath, something she usually did when she saw Danni, even though she’d known her for a long time now. The young girl looked like what Danny would’ve looked like at fourteen if she’d been born a girl. She had long flowing black hair, and piercing blue eyes that she noticed had large dark purple bangs under them. She was currently dressed in a black pair of slacks with a green T-shirt.

“So,” Sam asked her friend amiably. “What are you doing here at,” and she looked at the time on the oblong silver digital clock on her ebony nightstand, “at 6:00 in the morning?”

“I just got done pulling a twelve hour patrol of the Illinois-Indiana border from Chicago to Terre Haute, Sam,” Danni said softly. “I’m tired, hungry, and I didn’t want to fly the additional few miles to Fentonworks, you were the closest house so I decided to stop here.”

“I understand,” Sam said flopping back onto the bed. “I’ve been feeling spent and broken for the past twelve weeks, and I feel that way nowadays just having to deal with non-Ghost related matters. Last night I was in a three-hour fight with a giant ghost snake that had taken over the food court at the mall, so I feel like I’ve pulled all my muscles out, and dislocated my shoulder. After that jaunt through hell, I was mobbed by New Age cultists who thought I was their mother goddess reincarnated into human form and that’s nothing compared to the fact that it seems like the entire male population of every high school in the area keeps trying to get me to go out on a date with them. Fighting them off is proving to be a full-time job.”

“Have you told Danny this?” Danni asked, walking over and settling into the chair. “He’d gladly intervene in the matter on your behalf.”

“Danny’s having his hands full fending off fangirls,” Sam said harshly, feeling his blood boil when she thought of those fake, plastic freaks who cared nothing for him as a man and just wanted to bask in his reflected glory, some in ways that were less than seemly. “So when I actually have a chance to spend time with him outside ghost fighting, I don’t want to bother him with my problems, I just want to spend time with the man I love.” Sam sighed. “I wish that this whole North Pole event never happened, our lives would be normal then.”

“Why?” Danni asked, fixing her a quizzical look. “If it wasn’t for that crisis, you’d still probably had not gotten together with him.”

“Yes we would’ve, Danni,” Sam said angrily, fixing her with a slight glare, one that instantly disappeared a moment later when memories of when she and Danny finally came together. “We’ve been in love with each other on some level our entire lives, we would’ve come together eventually, it was only a matter of time.”

“Yeah,” Danni said. “How long would that have taken?” It was at that point that she got up and walked over to the display case against the wall. “Besides that, you’re a hero to billions of people all over the world.” She looked over the display case, pointing out medals in turn. “You have a Congressional Gold Medal, the Public Safety Officer Medal of Valor, the Law Enforcement Purple Heart. You’re a Dame Commander in the Order of the British Empire and, it took some parliamentary wrangling but you also have a Victoria Cross. You’re a Hero of the Russian Federation. You’re a commander in the French Legion of Honor. You finally have the recognition you deserve, not for your family’s money but on your own merit. Why would you want to give that up?”

“So I can go out on a date with Danny without being mobbed by paparazzi,” Sam said harshly.

“It’ll pass,” Danni said calmly. “The general public will find someone else to annoy and you’re lives will return to normal. Just be patient.”

“You can say that,” Sam said desperately. “You were one of two million ghosts who helped charge the generators that saved this planet, as far as the press is concerned you’re just a cousin, which means no one knows you from Adam. How I envy you.”

“True, true,” Danni said. After a few moments of awkward silence, Danni said, her voice slight, clearly hesitant to be imposing on one of her friends.

“Can we take this conversation downstairs into the kitchen, I am desperately hungry.”

“Of course,” Sam said. “I should have something for us to eat.”

A few moments later Sam and Danni were sitting side by side in hardwood chairs on the right sideat the large teak table that dominated the comparatively vast dining room, eating Raisin Bran out of there flowery white ceramic cereal bowls. Like the rest of the house, the dining room walls were covered in purple wallpaper, the only difference was in this room were paintings of the Manson family heads going back three generations: six huge portraits that started on one wall and surrounded the table, with pictures of her grandparents flanking the door to the dining room and finally ending, on the wall behind their heads with pictures of her current parents. She looked at them, everytime she walked in there. There was her mother, in a flowing violet dress with red hair and greenish eyes, looking serene and regal as she looked down with what was meant to look like benevolent love upon whoever was in the dining room. Her father’s portrait had looking upon the scene with haughty disinterest.

Nothing could be further from the truth, Sam thought, suppressing the urge to laugh that came upon her like sharp pains every time she looked at the portraits. My mother is an intelligent, domineering, and aggressive individual who gets her way on everything. My father is actually, once you get past the appearance he puts on in order to, in his mind, save face with the general public, one of the kindest human beings one can ever meet. Putting such thoughts aside for now, she returned to the conversation she was technically supposed to be having with Danni.

“I suppose there is a silver lining with all this in your lives,” Danni said. “If you think about it.”

Sam gave a derisive bark of a laugh and said, somewhat mockingly,

“What’s that?”

“The Guys in White are gone,” Danni said simply. Sam, reminded of the fate of her and Danny’s perennial enemies in the Federal government, felt warmth spread through her as though she were a freshly baked muffin.

“That was an absolute joy for me,” Sam said, smiling as the sixteen year old remembered those heady moments two months ago, when Valerie had joined her and Danny in her room to watch as the Senate voted live on C-Span to unanimously to kill the agency, an which was signed off on by the president one hour later.

“Me too,” she said, happily. “I don’t have to look over my shoulder to see some government transport plane chasing me and attempting to drag me in to be experimented on.” After a few moments of silent chewing on her cereal, Danni put her spoon down on the table with a large metallic clank.

“Mmm,” she said quickly, a look of remembrance in her eyes. She swallowed quickly and said, “That reminds me, there are shipments of heavy weaponry, computer databases, and other assorted technologies arriving at Fentonworks from the Army’s Research, Development, and Engineering Center in Natick, Massachusetts as well as Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey and White Sands in New Mexico. All the stuff they seized from Vlad and the Guys in White are a bit beyond their ability to understand, so they’re sending a lot of it over to Fentonworks hoping we can make heads or tails out of it, as my Aunt and Uncle are the closest thing to experts on them that they can trust.”

It amazed Sam how quickly she’d taken to genuinely calling Jackson and Madeline Fenton her Aunt and Uncle, considering that the fact that her identity as a cousin of Danny was a cover created by Vlad Masters. She considered pointing that out to her, but she thought better of it. It’s better not to remind her that she was created in a vat, grown to maturity in a maturation chamber, and programmed to be Vlad’s willing pawn, and that until a few months ago she was biologically unstable and could revert to a gelatinous mass at any time.

Aloud Sam said, “What are they sending, exactly?”

“Oh, nothing much,” Danni responded, nonchalantly. “Some stuff they found when the Army went into Vlad’s mansion and several PDRA facilities: long-range missiles, encrypted computer databases, tokomak reactors, short range directed energy weapon rifles and sidearms, shoulder-mounted grenade launchers, and lots of other really cool stuff.”

“Are they going to want it back eventually?” Sam asked with a mixture of curiosity and guarded suspicion. As much as I trust the military in their ability to defend the United States Constitution in general, She thought, I don’t trust their ability to defend against ghost threats. That’s our job, and I like knowing there are a few more options out there for us.

“If you read between the lines of the agreement with the Department of Defense,” Danni said, “they want the scientific data and plans we can glean from them, but after that we ourselves can produce and utilize anything we want in any matter we want.”

"Good,” she said, “I have some ideas that-,” it was at that point her cellphone went off, the dulcet strains of the Mexican Hat Dance cutting through the air. Sam hastily removed her jet black, oblong cell from her pocket and checked the caller ID on the small LCD screen.

It’s Jazz, she thought to herself curious. She keyed the accept button and put the phone to her ear.

“Manson,” she said quickly. “What’s going on, Jazz?”

“Sam,” the young woman on the other end, older than her only by a couple years, said with a clear sigh of relief. “Listen an hour ago a shipment of anti-ghost technology arrived from the Army, and Tucker, Valerie, and I have been looking it over until my parents get back from their much-deserved vacation in Majorca.”

It had taken some cajoling, and gentle but firm arm-twisting but finally Danny’s overworked parents were convinced by a coalition consisting of Jazz, Danny, and herself that they needed to go on vacation, but the location of her boyfriend’s parents was the farthest thing from Sam’s mind, as they were relatively safe somewhere in the outlying Spanish island. “It’s just you three?” Sam said; worry stabbing her heart like someone had taken cleats directly to her heart. “Not Danny?”

“He’s flying CAP in East Saint Louis airspace right now,” Jazz said. “But that’s neither here nor there. We came across a reference to something in one of the decrypted databases that piqued our interest around here. It led to Tucker breaking rather quickly into one of Vlad’s databases, what we discovered is disconcerting to say the least.”

“What did you discover?”

“A set of coordinates pointing to the orbit of Titan,” she said. “We’re prepping one of the pods for launch now. I want you and Danni on this mission, Sam. We’ll leave as soon as Danni returns home."

“Actually, Danni’s with me,” Sam said, standing up. “She was using our house as a way station before she headed home.” She turned to Danni, who was staring at her with a curious look in her blue eyes. “Get going,” Sam said. Danni nodded and stood up. She watched as the concentric rings formed around her waist and expanded upward, replacing her civilian attire with the black spandex jumpsuit, turning her blue eyes, a glowing green and ghosting her black hair a snow-white.” She jumped up into the air, going intangible as she pushed her body out of phase right before she hit the ceiling.

“She should be on her way,” Sam said. “I’ll be heading out as soon as I get dressed.”

“I’ll see you in combat,” Jazz said smugly. “Bye.” And her friend hung up the phone.

Orbit of Titan, huh? Sam thought to herself. This should be interesting. She left to hastily write a note telling her parents where she was going, leaving out the fact that they were going to Titan, her parents would freak if they discovered that particular aspect of the mission, before she walked out the door to the shiny new black Lexus that was waiting for her in the garage.

 

[RobertScorpio]

Re: DP: To Loose the Fateful Lightning

Great stuff here..and well written, as usual. I like the way you write dialogue in any of your stories because it seems so natural. What are they going to find on Titan? I don't know, but I am sure they will find intrigue.

Danni is well rounded in your writing. And the visuals describe are actually 'seeable' in my mind...

Rob

 

[Graywand2]

Re: DP: To Loose the Fateful Lightning

Thanks. And it will be.

 

[Graywand2]

Chapter Two​

“What marvelous vehicles that fate selects to accomplish its design.”
-Henry Kissinger. White House Years

Clad in a red jumpsuit, Danielle Fenton was sitting in the back of the pod as the small ship hurtled through the blackness of interplanetary space, shooting along at speeds at a good sixty times the fastest conventional space vehicle of any Earth government. She looked around her, at the cramped surroundings of the pod. Jazz and Sam were in the co-pilot and pilot’s seat respectively at the front of the oblong pod, her red-headed cousin and her dark-haired friend, intently manning the controls and exchanging few words. Tucker was sitting at a small side console, the dark-skinned sixteen year old sat in the small black seat to the right of Jazz, staring intently at the screen on the wall, and manning the control console built into the bulkhead. All three of them were too busy to hold a conversation with the bored teenager. She looked next to her on the seat in the back to Valerie, but the young woman had been up for twelve hours, and had finally succumbed to her body’s desire to sleep half an hour ago, and she was loath to disturb her best friend. That left her, to fret in the back until they reached Titan, which wouldn’t be in another five hours.

We’ve been in space for five hours now, Danni said, resisting the urge to get up and pace, her feet kept to the floor by the synthetic gravity deck plating. So far everyone’s been too busy to say anything to each other since the preflight checklist. The only refreshing aspect of this trip is that we’ve all taken showers. Otherwise everyone would’ve stunk.

It was at that point that he heard a rough movement from next to her and she heard Valerie scream out, enraged, She wheeled around to view Valerie with an angry look in her green eyes as she whipped her head around at a furious clip, clearly looking for whatever threat she had perceived in her dream before the battle rage disappeared from her eyes and she calmed down.

“Are you okay, Val?” Sam asked from the pilot seat, a concerned look in her violet eyes.

“I’m fine,” Valerie said, as she collapsed back into her seat.

“What were you dreaming about?” Danni asked, putting her hand lightly on her friend’s shoulder.

“Nothing important,” Val said a faintly haunted look in her eyes. “I just had a bad dream where I was eaten by a cougar.”

“Well,” she heard Jazz say, somewhat teasingly from the co-pilot’s seat. “There aren’t any cougars here. Now as for where we’re going, I’m not entirely sure.”

“Where are we going, anyway,” Valerie said angrily. “I’m tired, hungry, and I want nothing more than to eat the largest steak I can possibly find and then go to bed and not wake up for another year and a half.”

“That’s just it,” Tucker said, anxiously, turning to face him. “We don’t know what it is we’re looking for. The whole point of this trip is to find out just what it is Vlad was building in the vicinity of Titan before he died. So far all I’ve been able to glean from this database is that he was building something. What it actually is, I cannot say at the moment. I’m still trying of course, but it’s taking longer than I expected. These databases are defeating every algorithm I can think of, no wonder the Army had trouble getting through it.”

“Eh,” Sam said, tapping a few commands into her panel. “We’ll find out soon enough. We’ll be there in about five minutes.”

“Thank God,” she heard Valerie say, relief on her voice. “This is more boring than watching Congress fight over how best to kill the Guys in White as an agency. I mean, I’m glad they’re gone, but still, watching Congress wrangle over a bill is about as fun for me as watching grass grow. The only interesting part of that whole process was when you testified before Congress, Sam and listening to what the Department of Justice investigation turned up.”

The agency had been quietly founded as a rider on a House bill during the Nixon administration. Apparently, when the bill passed out of the House and onto the floor of the Senate, it was justified as Cold War era brinksmanship. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had a specialized branch of the KGB devoted to just such a task , so naturally in the eyes of the Senators who kept the bill in, the United States of America, the other preeminent superpower, had to be shown, if only to the KGB and the GRU, to be investigating the same thing, even if ghosts on the level and power of the ghosts they now fought were considered at the time to be the delusions of cooks and hacks a view that was held on both sides of the aisle. The agency, officially the USPDA, was signed into law, but, as most rational people didn’t believe in ghosts the way they were now known to exist, the agency was considered a laughingstock. It was poorly equipped, poorly funded, and other federal agencies used it as a dumping ground for problem agents they couldn’t normally fire, i.e. the ones who had political connections and could make life difficult for them with one well-placed call that would bring the Inspector General’s office or funding cuts. The agency was rapidly becoming stocked with the incompetent, the dangerously reckless, and the unbelievably corrupt, the rationale being that so long as they were bottled up to waste their careers doing a joke job, they could minimize the harm they’d do to the American people. It was an arrangement that actually did work out for three decades.

Then Amity Park burst onto the scene two years ago, and all hell broke loose on the Hill. With casualties mounting in the Chicagoland area, and disturbing reports of ghost activity throughout the United States and Canada, Congress, in a desperate attempt to avoid drawing ire from the civilian population by putting the Department of Defense, and by extension, the military, in charge of the situation, as usual demonstrated an inability to run things correctly and turned the situation over to the United States Paranormal Defense Agency, along with an almost unlimited budget and zero force restrictions, and the vague mandate to “handle the problem.”

If they’d actually bothered to keep track of the agency on a regular basis, Danni thought wryly. They would’ve figured out they were giving billions of dollars and an arsenal of super-advanced weapons and equipment over to incompetent, dangerously reckless fools, a good portion of them more crooked than a Virginia fence. What disturbs me is that they were actually taken by surprise when the situation got worse.

While the skyrocketing casualties and property damage costs were enough to turn most of the general public against the Guys in White, it was their lackluster response to the Pariah Dark and Ecto-Asteroid crises that finally got Congress to get up and finally seriously consider killing the agency. However, the death knell occurred when the head of the USPDA suffered a mental breakdown due to the fact that the IRS and the FBI were closing in on her “creative” tax returns and equally creative bookkeeping and declared that Congress, the President, the whole Cabinet and every state government had been suborned by ghosts, and sent waves of agents to take them all into custody. Something the military didn’t take kindly to, for obvious reasons. By the time saner heads prevailed, the Third Infantry Regiment had the USPDA’s headquarters on the outskirts of Washington under siege, Fort Bliss and Fort Hood soldiers were overrunning every Guys in White facility in the Southwest, and the Air Force was attacking GIW airfields in forty states. After the Guys in White surrendered they were dissolved by Congress, again, for obvious reasons, not the least of which Sam’s testimony about their tactics in Amity Park before there leader’s breakdown.

Danni was deep into a conversation with Valerie about when they were going to get Casper High rebuilt after it was accidentally hit by fifty pound bomb during the fighting when an alarm rang throughout the cabin, jolting her out of their reverie.

“What’s going on,” Val and Danni called out in unison. Danni looked up to see a massive structure, brown, and faintly illuminated in the light of the sun that was illuminating off Saturn’s largest moon. It consisted of what looked to her to be a huge brown beam that had under it sixteen thinner structures, eight on either side, that looked like upside down flea antenna made of metal. But what was more interesting was what was inside the scaffold. An oblong object made of silvery-metal, huge, dwarfing their small shuttle by a couple orders of magnitude. She walked over to see a shocked look on Sam’s face, her amethyst eyes having grown to the size of dinner plates. Danni glanced over to Sam’s console and saw a sight that made her almost lose control of her bowels. The ship, oblong, with the rough shape of the head and torso of an alligator without the legs and with four silvery pods in the back that she guessed were engines was roughly four thousand, seven hundred and twenty feet long and one thousand seven hundred and sixty-four feet wide. She was about to point out the size of the ship before them when she caught a glimpse of the rest of the sensor display, and her jaw dropped open. There were two dozen of them, spread out over eighty kilometers of space, with ships of sizes ranging from nine hundred and thirty-five feet to two thousand three hundred seventy-five feet.”

“We need to get onboard that facility,” Sam said grimly, “Find out as much as possible about it and the ship inside.”

“No kidding,” Jazz said immediately. “Tucker, are you picking up any open hatches that we can use to get through?”

“Nope,” Tucker said, working his board diligently. “No open hatches or hull breaches that I can detect that we can use to enter the facility.”

“Wait a minute,” Valerie said, an annoyed tone on his voice, shaking her head, continuing to stare at the facility in front of her. “This pod has the capability to dock with the hull and we can cut our way in with wielding tools and plasma cutters, if I remember correctly.”

“Aye,” Jazz said anxiously, fixing her a somewhat annoyed look. “That only works if the hull is capable of being penetrated by wielding tools and plasma cutters.”

“I understand that,” Valerie said angrily, shooting daggers at Jazz. Her already tenuous control was breaking under the sheer magnitude of what they had just discovered. “We don’t have a choice. We have to get in there and find out what that is, and who built it.”

“It’s fairly obvious that Vlad built it, Valerie,” Sam said, still staring out into space.

“Probably,” Valerie conceded. “But it doesn’t leave out the possibility that someone else built these ships and Vlad simply found them. We need to get aboard now and find out.”

It was at that point that the emergency alarms started ringing again and Danni saw Sam’s screen wiped and replaced with the words, in bright red, “WARNING: NETWORK INTRUSION.”

Sam swore and lunged forward, entering commands at a furious clip as she tried to bring the system back under her control. After a few anxious seconds, she released and enraged groan and slammed her fist down on the screen in frustration.

“Tucker,” Sam said anger and anxiety on her voice, “Can you get us control of our computer systems again?”

“I’m trying,” Tucker said anxiously. “But I’m locked out completely.” Tucker sighed and turned to face the rest of them, a scared and apologetic look on his face. “We’re sitting ducks.”

Fear coursing through her, she saw them moving, again, at a bare fraction of their original speed toward the appendage to the left of the alligator head, the closest one to them. The furnace of her fear started to give way to a maelstrom of terror when they realized what was happening.

“Guys,” she said, half-shouting out of terror, a cold sweat starting to form on her brow. “We’re moving.”

Sam looked up and, her eyes widening again, she said, “No kidding.”

“I think whatever force took over our navigational systems did that so it could take over and guide us in to the berth of whatever that ship is out there.”

“That seems to make the most sense,” Jazz said, her voice hoarse.

“Well, Valerie,” Sam said in an ironic tone. “You wanted to find out what was going on? Guess what, we’re about to find out.”

They watched as their tiny ship was pulled inexorably forward, beyond their own ability to control.





Samantha Manson watched, helplessly, as the pod was pulled towards an open set of double doors sticking out near the top of one of the lower door. She watched the yawning entranceway, dark as pitch inside, get larger in their vision. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, the rest of the appendage fell away from their vision, leaving the black hole dominant. Finally, her eyes wide, her fear held back only by a supreme effort of self-control on her part, the blackness surrounded them as they drifted inside. After a few moments she felt the ship shudder as it was set down on the deck.

“Tucker,” Sam said cautiously.

“Standby, Sam,” he said quickly. “The hangar doors have closed and the interior environment’s being repressurized.” After a few more tense moments, Tucker said, wonder on his voice. “The atmosphere is oxygen, nitrogen, and argon in all the correct proportions, Sam. The temperature is well within habitable norms, no poisonous trace gases in the atmosphere that my sensors can detect. ” Tucker turned to face them, amazement on his dark features. “This appears tailor made for humans.”

“Good,” Jazz said standing up, “let’s arm ourselves with both standard weapons and anti-ghost weapons and see what’s going on out there. We’ll take combat flashlights, because it’s too dark for night vision equipment.”

“I”ll go ghost,” Danni said confidently. “Of course.”

“Let’s get too it then,” Sam said, moving towards the back, to the visible impression of the small arms locker to the left of the passenger seat. Pulling it open, she started handing out weapons and ammunition back to her friends. After distributing M-16s, Desert Eagles, and the accompanying ammunition back to her friends, she spied the silvery gray Fentonworks rifles, attached to the power converters behind the standard-issue weapons. The sight made her wish, fervently that Danny was here with her.

He always wanted to be an astronaut, Sam thought, a smile forming on her lips. He’d want to be out here. Alas, she thought somewhat bitterly. Jazz is right; we all have our duties to attend to. Danny’s first duty is to safeguard humanity in Amity Park. My duty is right here in front of me, to explore this mystery. With that she sighed and grabbed the Fentonworks weapons, small-arms and sidearms off the wall and passed them back to her friends. Finally, she holstered her sidearms, slung the Fentonworks rifle on her shoulder and picked up her M-16 off the bulkhead where she’d leaned it. Grabbing an ammunition clip from her belt, she loaded it into the rifle, cocked it and turned to face the door.

“Let’s see what’s out there, shall we?” And with that she walked over and slammed the egress panel. She watched as the bottom half of the door opened up and touched the ground with a metal thunk. Mastering her fear, she stepped forward, first into the black, into the unknown.

 

[RobertScorpio]

I love any fan-fic that explains the politics of Earth, especially when real politics/people (Nixon in this case) are included. Love dialog with Tucker/Jazz. Comes of natural and forced at all. Oh oh..here we go, into the darkness!!!!!

Great sequence; keep it up. Your descriptions as to what is being seen is always spot on!

Rob

 

[Graywand2]

Chapter Three​

“Do your duty, and leave the rest to the gods.”
-Pierre Corneille, Horace

Danielle Fenton watched expectantly as Sam stepped off the pod, half-expecting some crazed monster to come tearing out of the dark and sink its jaws or claws or whatever into her friend’s neck. She watched; tense, as she clicked on the combat flashlight. She shone the light around, illuminating the grey metal alloys of the floor. He pointed it up and it illuminated the wall, again just a dull grey.


She turned around and said back into the pod, curiosity on her voice. “I think it’s relatively safe to come on out.”


She heard Jazz, Valerie, and Tucker move beside her and walk down the ramp, setting down hesitantly as they brought their weapons up around them. Danni, the only one who wasn’t packing heat in the traditional sense of bullets and artificial directed-energy weapons, grunted directing all thought towards her abdomen. A second later, a burning sensation traveled up and down her body as white concentric rings moved across her, transmuting the red jumpsuit to black, ghosting her hair snow-white as though it had been exposed to a massive dose of radiation, and causing her eyes to glow an ethereal green. She felt pure power coursing through her bones. Confident that she could hold off any foe, she put aside Danielle Fenton, and Danni Phantom stepped forward onto the ramp. No sooner did she step out of the entranceway to the pod then a massive rumbling sound reverted through the station. She heard harsh clicking sounds reverberate throughout the room and realized that lights were being switched on in the chamber. In about an instant, the room, the pod, and everyone in it was illuminated by the harsh electric lights shining down from the ceiling.


“Well,” Danni said in a somewhat perplexed tone, walking down the ramp and staring the room, empty save for her, her friends, and the pod that had transported them both. “That was convenient.”


“Welcome, Daniel,” a vaguely mechanical female voice said from behind her. In an instant everyone was bringing their rifles and turning rapidly, looking for the source of the voice, clearly ready to fill the source with bullets at a moment’s notice.


“Automated message,” Tucker said after a moment, lowering his rifle. “Nothing to be immediately worried about.”


“It called Danni, Daniel,” Valerie said after a moment, curiosity on her voice.


“Well,” Jazz said in response. “Danni and Danny are so close genetically and the energy signatures of their powers are virtually identical so maybe the systems just confused the two of them.”


“Maybe they respond to voice commands,” Sam postulated with curious look in her eyes. “Like on Star Trek.”


“It’s worth a shot,” Danni said, conceding the point. Raising her voice, she said, “Computer, what is this station?”


No response. Silence reigned throughout the chamber.


“Okay,” Sam said, nodding. “So, either it doesn’t respond to voice commands or it doesn’t recognize your voiceprint which means it probably won’t recognize any of ours either. We should probably look for a way out of this room.”


“No need,” Tucker said. “There’s a door in the far right corner of the room.” He said, pointing behind them. Danni turned, and indeed saw an oblong metal door sitting in the corner of the room, a manual valve jutting out of the door.


Carefully they walked over to the door. The words, in black, “Main Landing Bay Entrance” were clearly visible in block letters. Curiously, Jazz walked over to the metal door and ran her hand over it.


“Hmm,” she heard the other woman say, nodding. “It’s not freezing, which means there’s a good chance it’s not exposed to vacuum on the other side. So, Sam, Val, would you mind covering me?”


She watched as Sam and Val immediately moved either side of the door, rifles at an acute angle to the floor, ready to be raised at a moment’s notice. Jazz tugged and pulled the door to the right. The metal tumblers scraped against metal and she heard the door unlock. Sighing, Jazz grabbed the metal door handle and pulled. The door opened on a narrow stairway, illuminated by lights along the wall. Sam and Valerie moved from the side and pointed their rifles in the doorway, preparing to take out any possible threat, lowering their rifles when it became obvious that there was nothing in the stairwell to shoot at.


Everyone looked at each other, and, seeing no other option, began to creep up the narrow stairs, eyes alert for any threat. The door was open on the other side. At the top of the stairs, there was another door, closed like the door below them had been.


“Launch bay control, maybe?” Tucker asked, curiously.


Danni nodded, “That would seem to make sense. We are close to the launch bay, of course.”


“There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?” Danni asked, and without another word, she walked over and spun the lock, and pulled the door open, revealing a brightly lit room with a bank of computers and monitors on the bulkhead in front of them. When Danni stepped into the room, the monitor in the center of the facing wall flared to life. Danni watched, curiously, as the screen glowed an iridescent blue before switching over to a view of a plush red armchair sitting in the middle of the floor. The chair was in a room on Earth, as proved by the fact that the sun was shining through the window, and illuminating the room, and the fact that there was a forest clearly visible through the same window. Danni watched, expectantly, as she waited for the person she knew was going to come and sit in that chair. Her expectations were validated when the sounds of heavy footsteps came through the speakers set in the wall. She heard muttered curses from her friends behind her when she saw, walking onto the screen, clad in a black business suit, white undershirt and navy blue tie, the angular face and sharp features of Vladimir Masters.


Sitting primly on his chair, he leaned back, and began with, “Daniel my boy. If you’ve found these ships, and are listening to this recording, then I have perished. If I had assumed control of Earth, this fleet would’ve been the nucleus for the creation of an interstellar empire. The fact that you’re watching this now will mean that plan has failed, and I have paid for that failure with my life. And since I will likely have been destroyed past the point of even having a ghost form, I will have no further need to secure an interstellar empire. So I bequeath the ship and the shipyards to you to do with as you will.” He then fixed the group with an annoyed look. “Even if it means giving it to the weak and fallible governments of ordinary men.” With that Vlad’s face blinked out of existence, to be replaced by a black screen with greens lines of computer code scrolling on it. Danni stood there, stunned, a thousand emotions running through her mind.

What would Danni do with these ships? Come to think of it what would we do with these ships? Her feelings of incredulity, however, were rapidly swamped by the feeling of excitement. These ships, though, represent the greatest discovery mankind has made since we harnessed the capability of fire, though. We must do something with them. She looked in Sam’s eyes and saw a look of excitement on her face, mingled with incredulity, and she could tell that she was feeling the same way about these ships to.


“Guys,” Tucker said, turning from the computer banks, shock on his voice. “According to these, the databases on every ship and dockyard in the area have activated. We now have complete access to every ship in the fleet.”


“We should we explore further,” Sam said, excitedly.


“I agree,” Danni said, as taken by the potential of this ship, for both exploration and defense, as Sam was. Impulsively, she scanned for another door and saw one to the right of Valerie, embedded into the starboard bulkhead, and walked towards it. She didn’t get more than a few inches when she was caught by a tugging at her neck. She wheeled around to feel Valerie holding onto the scruff of her neck.


“Hold your horses,” Valerie said. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea at this time.”


“‘Not a good idea?’” Sam and Danni repeated at once, both women giving Valerie a look of shock.


“How is that not a good idea?” Danni said.


“I agree with Valerie, you guys,” Jazz said, assertively. “We should wait until Tucker and I have had a chance to go over the databases, see if there are any booby traps or security safeguards in place to protect the crew that might be active.”


Danni felt an urge to argue the point, but quickly shut up, conceding Jazz had a point. I was being a tad reckless there; it’s just another trait I share with Danny. Her cousin had learned the value of caution and planning in the engagement against ghosts, while she, by contrast, was still known to rush headlong into a dozen enemies without hesitation.


“You’re right, of course,” Danni said, and Valerie let her go. Giving a resigned sigh, she said, “Well, while you’re in here digging around in boring computer databases, I’m going back to the shuttle to get something to eat.” He turned to Sam and asked, expectantly. “Do you want to get something to eat?”


Sam shook in head, “I’m not hungry, Danni. Besides, I want to see some of what’s in these databases for a bit.”


Danni sighed, annoyance flooding her as she walked back down the stairs and went back to the pod. When she got inside, she opened the supply cabinet and pulled out a bar with a green wrapper on it. She unwrapped it to reveal a brown granola bar; it was festooned with tiny black dots that may or may not have been chocolate… or raisins. She wasn’t entirely sure.


It better not be the second one, she thought, the possibility of it combining with her desire to explore being stymied to wear her down to her last good nerve. She bit into it, and furiously spit out the offending granola chunks and threw the bar against the wall.


“Raisins!” She spat angrily. “I hate raisins.” Sighing in frustration, she walked over and sat in the co-pilot’s seat, putting her head in her hands, stewing over how annoyed she was at the situation. This annoyed her to no end. She wanted to explore, to see what was on this station, at the ship it enclosed. But, here she was having to wait until they made sure it was safe.

I mean, Vlad is dead. Danni thought to herself. What possible purpose could it serve to leave active traps for us? She shook her head. This is ridiculous. She leaned back in her chair and looked out the door into the empty docking bay. A thought occurred to her, so obvious in its simplicity, she wandered why she didn’t think of it before.


If I phase myself, Danni thought to herself. I can go through the floor into another level of the station, and start exploring, and they won’t even notice. Part of her screamed that that was a bad call, going off on her own without telling her friends where she was going, but she squelched the little voice that was supposed to tell her not to do stupid things in order to keep her alive. Grinning, she phased herself and flew up through the roof. Floating in the middle of the room she felt the buoyant feelings of happiness that she usually associated with flying, and rushed up towards the corner of the room. She watched as the metal of the wall got closer and closer. She hit it, expecting to phase through as effortlessly as she had phased through the hull of the shuttlepod.


A searing wave of pain ripped through her the moment she hit the wall. The overwhelming pain felt like someone had just torn the muscles out of her entire upper body and she screamed in an agony she had never felt before. She passed through the wall, and collapsed screaming. Severe pain firing her nerve endings she sat up just enough to see that she was dephased again before blacking out entirely.


*


Samantha Manson sat expectantly in the pilot’s seat on their small pod, memories of what had happened flashing through her as she watched Valerie and Tucker lay Danni’s unconscious form on the floor of the drop pod, the gentle rise and fall of her chest the only indication that she was still alive. They’d just accessed a database full of ship schematics when they’d heard the scream come from behind the door to their right. It had been a primal scream, she recalled, so fresh that it still reverberated in her skull. It sounded like her very soul was being torn, ripped away with unbelievable brutality. When they’d stormed the corridor, rifles out, they found her body, unconscious on the floor, her hair singed and her clothes smoldering. Acting quickly they grabbed a fire extinguisher off the wall and sprayed her down, putting out the fire before it could erupt in a full flame. It stuck to her still, white foam all over her clothes and in her hair. For some absurd reason, to her it looked like they had just rescued her from the web of a giant spider.


“You guys,” Sam said urgently. “We need to get her back to Earth and into a hospital.”


“Thanks for stating the perfectly obvious,” Jazz said, a snarky tone on her voice as Jazz walked over and sat in the pilot’s seat. Sam turned around and keyed her console on.


“Preflight,” Sam said, preparing to read off the preflight checklist on her computer screen. She heard Jazz open her mouth to respond, when there was a sharp intake of breath from behind them. Sam turned around to reveal Danni, eyes open and with a stunned look on her face, as she struggled to pull herself off the floor.


“Danni,” Sam said as she rushed from her seat, converging with Valerie at the young woman’s position. “Don’t try to move.” Danni tried to get to her knees, but she grunted in pain and collapsed back to the deck.


After a few moments, Danni asked, curiosity mixed with lingering pain on her voice, “What happened?”


It was Tucker who responded. “When you phased through the wall, you apparently triggered some sort of anti-ghost security device. However, instead of destroying you outright it simply forced you out of phase and into the corridor, no doubt due to your unique…physiology.”


Danni nodded in understanding, even though the effort obviously caused her great pain. “Could I assume that Danny would’ve suffered the same thing I did?”


“Yes,” Sam said immediately. “Anyway, we need to leave, we need to get you to a hospital.”


“No,” Danni blurted, surprising her with the vehemence in her voice. “I’m fine. We need to stay here and gather as much information as possible.”


Sam shook her head, “Danni, you’ve been seriously injured. We need to get you to a hospital on Earth.”


“I’m fine,” Danni said vehemently. “We can’t leave, not yet.”


“Why not?” Sam said, shaking her head. “We have the databases, and we can always come back.”


“No,” Danni said. “No, no. We have to leave with one of the ships or there’s no point in us being out here.” Danni sighed, closing her eyes as she thought to come up with a rational argument. “These ships are the most important discovery mankind has made since we harnessed the power of fire. We have to get on that ship out there,, get control of it, and bring it back to Earth, before we can leave.”


“Why?” Sam said incredulously. “They’re not going anywhere.”


“So you say,” Danni said. “Do we really want any of the more hostile Ghost Zone powers getting their hands on these? Or…” Sam could tell she was dancing around the word, “aliens.” “Sure we might not be able to get all of them this time, but we should at least have had the foresight to grab one of them.” Her voice softened and she said, “Besides, I’m fine. All I need are some painkillers so I can stand without screaming.”


Sam sighed, Danni’s words running through her head. “All right,” Sam said. “We’ll get the ship out there and return it to Earth.”


“Good,” Danni said. Turning to Jazz she said, boisterously, “How are you doing with those painkillers?”


“Wait a minute,” Jazz said, pausing from rooting around in a medical kit. “Couldn’t you just go ghost? That would get rid of the pain, unless you’re hit by an energy blast or dumb enough to go through the wall again.”


Danni, nodded wearily and closed her eyes. After a few moments though, nothing happened. Danni, opened his eyes and said, terror on her voice.


“We need to grab that ship and get out of here, now,” Danni said, her voice trembling.


“What’s wrong,” Sam said, fear taking her, even though she had a pretty good idea what the problem was.


“I can’t change,” Danni said, trembling. “I can’t go ghost.”

 

[RobertScorpio]

Great ending and great pacing and really good description/dialogue. One of your better DP installments...I liked the passdown/message from Vladimir. It was well written too!!

Rob

 

[Graywand2]

That which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield
-Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson FRS “Ulysses”

Interlude​

​

Four Days Later

Samantha Manson stepped out onto the roof of the Fentonworks building that evening, closing the door behind her as she looked around for the woman she knew would be there. She found her, of course, standing at the edge, looking out over the neighborhood, her black hair flowing to her shoulders. She was wearing a white shirt and blue jeans. Sighing, she walked over to her.

“Danni?” She asked. The young woman turned and looked at her with a surprised look in her blue eyes, a look that softened when she saw who it was.

“Hey, Sam,” she said, turning back out to stare at the world. “What do you want?”

“To see how you were doing,” Sam said.

“Nothing’s changed, Sam,” she said tediously. “I have no powers, my DNA is as normal as any other humans, and, due to the unique…nature of my birth, sending me through the ghost portal is more likely to kill me than change me back into a hybrid.”

“I know,” Sam said, sympathetically. “I was there when we tried to find a way to restore you to your normal self. Have you told Danny’s parents?”

“No,” Danni responded. “They get back from Majorca in a week. I’ll decide when I tell them when they get back.”

“Have you told Danny?” She asked, “You know he’s going to start asking questions when he realizes you’re not flying your regular patrols like you used to.”

“You and I both know that I only fly those patrols when I can,” Danni pointed out, still staring out over the city. “We both have school that must be done.” She didn’t bother mentioning the fact that said school was now being done in the schoolyards in makeshift tents because Casper High was not being rebuilt in a timely manner. Everyone suspected political corruption, organized crime, or, more likely, an alliance of both. It was sad, but the fact of the matter was they were living Illinois, specifically Chicagoland. Corruption was as rife in Amity Park as it was seemingly everywhere else in Illinois, particularly in the Chicago metropolitan area, and organized crime had its fingers in everything in her city just like it did throughout the state. “Not being on patrol for a week is nothing me and Valerie haven’t done before.” After a second, she said, “Have you told Danny? About the ship?”

“I will tonight,” Sam said, sadly. “We both know that the only reason, the only reason, I haven’t told him about this yet is because it will hurt him deeply. He always wanted to be an astronaut, to go into space. But ever since he’s got his powers he’s made his peace with the fact that his duty to fight ghosts won’t allow him the time to go into space full time. When he finds out that we’ve discovered something that makes that possible for us but not for him is going to hurt him deeply.”

“Do you think he’ll break up with you?” Danni asked her frankly.

Sam sighed, thinking about that possibility. She’d always loved him, and he her, but the knowledge that she now had an opportunity to fulfill his dream, when he couldn’t, when he was, for better or for worse, bound to fighting ghosts on Earth, or, at the very least, near-Earth orbit, when at least the possibility for her to travel the stars if she wanted to, and a growing part of her really did want to, might be too much for their relationship.

No, she thought to herself. Don’t allow yourself to go down that road, girl, not until you have no other choice. Give him a chance. We love each other, we won’t break up.

“No,” Sam said confidently. “He won’t break up with me. That I know in my heart.”

“I hope so,” Danni said confidently. After a moment, she heard footsteps behind her and she turned to see Jazz, clad in her favored black shirt and blue jeans, walking towards them onto the roof. The pretty redhead had a look of concern in her green eyes, which was belied by her folded arms and the fact that she seemed to be shifting to watch the entire building in front of her.

“Guys,” she said, an undercurrent of worry on her voice. “We have some unexpected guests. I think you need to come down.”

Sam looked at Danni who stared back at her, concern in her eyes. Sam looked back at Jazz and nodded, “Okay?” Giving Danni another concerned look, she followed the older woman back down the stairs, Danni trailing behind her. They went down the stairs, entering the hallway that held the bedrooms before going down another flight of stairs. When Sam’s feet touched the bottom of the stairs, she looked around and saw the guests that Jazz had been referring to on the roof: There were four bulky men in black suits and ear communicators, and they were arranged around a fortyish woman with black hair and brown eyes, clad in a gray skirt and tunic sitting in one of the armchairs.

“That’s the Vice President,” Sam found herself whispering, remembering her from earlier in the year. “Which would make the four guards Secret Service.”

The older woman’s eyes glided over to them and she smiled and said, “Ah, Miss Manson, Miss Fenton. It is good to see you again.”

Remembering her courtesy, which even she was willing to extend to the Vice President, Sam nodded, and said, “It’s good to see you, Madam Vice President Abbot. What brings you here?”

Sarah Abbot smiled, one of those clearly practiced smiles that politicians of every political party were adept at. “You cut right to the chase, I see.”

“It’s saved my life on more than one occasion,” Sam said calmly, holding back her natural distrust of politicians, particularly ones who did as little as she: apart from casting the extremely rare tie-breaker vote in the Senate, Vice Presidents didn’t do much of anything.

“I like that,” she said. “I’ll get down to it. As I’m sure you’re aware, the government’s Anti-Ghost task force has been dissolved due to recent…unpleasantness.”

“Yes, I was there,” Sam said. “I was the one who testified before Congress.”

“Yes, well,” the Vice President said. “The problem of rogue ghosts and other…paranormal threats is growing worldwide, and there is a growing concern that there should be some sort of unified response to it. Mr. Fenton, while we all respect and admire his work around here in Illinois, unfortunately cannot be everywhere at once.”

“Well of course,” Jazz interjected. “What’s your point?”

“The point is,” Abbot said. “Is that this world needs someone to step into the role left behind by the USPDA, to build and equip a force that can respond to threats around the planet. Those people, my friends, are the four of you.”

For a second, Sam just stood there, rooted to the floor, staring at the Vice President as if she were insane.


“You’re kidding right?” Sam finally said.

“No,” the Vice President said. “I’m not. The USPDA was a mistake created out of Cold War brinksmanship and, reacting to a threat before we knew anything about that threat. We’ve since realized that if humanity is going to be properly defended it needs to be defended by people who know what the hell they’re doing, if you’ll forgive my language. Those people, we’ve since come to learn, are you. You’re actions during the late crisis have proved that, if our race is going to survive, you must be the ones who defend it.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Danni said, shoving herself to the fore, a look of shock on her face as she regarded the Vice President. “You want us to build and lead a force to replace the Guys in White?”

“Yes,” she said. “But more so. You’re remit is to defend the entire world, not just the United States and our allies.”

“Will we be allowed to recruit our own people?” Sam asked, asking despite the hoard of reservations that flooded her. “Or will you give us the recruit pool that we have to draw from?”

“I have been asked to assure you that sources of funding, recruitment, and training will be entirely up to you, if you agree to take this on.”

After a moment, Sam found herself saying, “We need time to think about this.”

Abbot put on that practiced politician smile again and said, “But of course.” She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out four business cards and handed three business cards out. They were white, with gold lettering and bore her name, title, and number to the right of the Great Seal of the United States. “Call this number when you make up your minds,” she said softly. “Good day to you all.” With that, she motioned for her Secret Service detail and the nine of them left the room, walking out the door and closing it behind them. After a second they heard a car drive away from behind the building.

“Well,” Sam said, her voice hollow, her shock addled mind trying to wrap itself around what they were being asked. “That was unexpected.”

 

[RobertScorpio]

Sam better becareful here. VPs, even more so than Presidents, in American politics at least, can be more devious because they don't have all the attention that President gets.
There has to be something up Abbot's sleeve!!! I hope Sam isn't too distracted by the situation with Danny's "heart", because love can be the biggest decoy of all.

Good sequence..can't wait for the next installment...

Rob

 

[Graywand2]

Duty is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more. You should never wish to do less.
-General Robert E. Lee

Chapter Four

“I think we should take the Vice President’s offer,” Danni heard Jazz say. They were standing on the bridge of the ship she’d privately dubbed the Antietam, the first battle of the American Civil War to be fought on Union soil and the bloodiest single day in American history. The bridge, perhaps unsurprisingly, had a design architecture similar to the FentonWorks operations center, albeit with more consoles and on a vastly larger scale. The helm, at the forward end of the room, was four rectangular consoles jutted against each other, the large LCD screens in the top part of the consoles were glowing a soft and almost eerie green, as they sat there in their low power state. There was a communications station that was squarer shaped to the left of the center of the bridge, behind them, there were a dozen consoles arranged in a semicircle for the weapons control personnel. Finally where they were standing had two consoles shaped roughly in half columns. According to the database they were for the commanding officer and the executive officer of the ship. Each one had a small black phone next to it, for communicating, presumably with the rest of the ship.

That was hardly important at the moment as she saw Valerie and Sam give Jazz a mortified look. “Are you serious,” they both remarked at once.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Jazz said, looking at them with a determined look in their eyes. “‘What could we possibly do? We’re just a bunch of teenagers who are too young, and don’t have the years of training to handle this thing.’” She shook her head. “Have you just forgotten that you’ve commanded men in battle before? You pulled off the assault on Ember and Youngblood’s ship without a single fatality on our side. You turned a bunch of stupid cheerleaders, jocks, and regular kids into the weapon that pulled off that victory and saved their parents lives, and my own, and in only a few hours no less. Besides, that group was far more competent than the GIW ever was.”

“The last thing I want is to get slammed for using “children” as soldiers,” Sam said pointedly. Danni sighed, she had a point there. If those disgusting African militias were routinely slammed for using people under the age of eighteen as soldiers, than what was going to be perceived as different about them?

“Teenagers are not children,” Jazz said pointedly. “There’s a reason that we’re called young adults, at our ages we’re expected to start taking on adult responsibilities. And one responsibility that historically we’ve always had is to defend our homes and loved ones. All the rules and laws that seek to limit teenager’s participation in situations like this were aimed at preventing those disgusting terrorists and rebel groups in unstable Third World countries from ripping eight, nine, and ten year olds from their parents arms, brainwashing them into mindless killing machines, and using them as cannon fodder. They were not aimed at curtailing the long-standing recruiting traditions of countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. The thirteen and fourteen year olds that served as midshipmen in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars were old enough to understand what they were getting into, and the enormity of their job, once they were actually training and at sea, and the same for the young men the same age that fought and died by the thousands in the Revolution and the Civil War. Granted, they deluded themselves into thinking that they were going to wander around for a bit, fire their weapons a few times, easily drive the enemy before them and spend the rest of the day partaking of the spoils of war, but so did the guys in their early twenties.”

That’s easy for you to say, Danni thought to herself as she stood there. You’re a legal adult. Jazz did have a point, though. The choice was really quite laughably simple. Continue to rely on governments that have proven that they are not up to the challenge, or take over with those selfsame governments blessing, and maybe actually make a bit of a difference. It was a simple choice, human lives depended on it.

“Jazz is right,” Danni said, staring at her friends, as she allowed her decision to settle over her. “As much as I’ve enjoyed working with you all in defending Amity Park, the world is a lot larger than our one city, and so is our race. There are over one hundred and ninety-two countries and close to seven billion people, and with ghosts and other paranormal activity beginning to, if anything, skyrocket, since the Ecto-Asteroid event, someone has to at least start fighting back against the ones that are actually a threat.”

Sam and Valerie gave a resigned sigh simultaneously and gave each other a long look. Finally, the two of them nodded.

“We’ll do it,” Sam said, giving a relieved sigh, surely realizing the enormity of what she was saying, the task that was being set before them, and what it would take to begin to achieve it. “God help us, we’ll do it.”


Two Months Later

Samantha Manson was sitting in her room, looking at her computer screen as she typed out her English assignment for Lancer. She looked at her clock in the bottom right corner of her screen. It was after midnight, and she could feel the sand gritting in her eyes. She so wanted to crawl into bed and sleep, but that wasn’t an option. In the two months since they had taken the offer, things had, if anything, gotten more hectic. Building an organization from scratch, especially since the very nature of what they were planning precluded anything resembling government financing. Enough taxpayer dollars had been wasted on the last organization dedicated to fighting ghosts, and it had turned out to be a disaster. Beyond immunity from prosecution within their borders, and their unofficial blessing, they were essentially on their own.

And it wasn’t just the United States that was involved in this, the United Kingdom, Turkey, South Korea, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Mexico, Japan, Italy, Indonesia, India, Germany, France, the People’s Republic of China, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Argentina, and the European Union all wanted this. However, collaborating to form an international ghost deterrent force, particularly among the political actors involved, would open a Pandora’s Box of debate and unrest that, particularly in these trying times economically, could never be closed, hence no help in funding or logistics from any of them.

Which is good, Sam thought to herself, as she typed steadily away on her report for Lancer. No government bureaucrats telling us what we can and cannot do, the bad news is that organizing everything, namely organizing the mission to retrieve the entirety of Vlad’s fleet, as well as laying the groundwork for the ground based forces that are going to be Valerie’s has been a mess.

She smirked to herself; At least Danny had understood when I told them of what we were planning. He realized the need for a force that could do the job of the GIW sans the violent ignorance. Granted, he was angry when Danni told him that her powers were gone, and that Valerie has almost no time to join him on combat patrols anymore, but he still understood.

And most importantly, they were still a couple, which is why she was still engaged with the world and hadn’t withdrawn inside of a nightmare world in her own head from which there could be no awaking, for any world without Danny’s love would be a nightmare far worse than anything the awesome power of the human mind could come up with.

I wish my mind could wrap itself around this English project, she thought to herself. I know its due Monday, but I’ve lost so much time, that I can’t put this off any longer, I at least have to get my rough done tonight. She had hit control-S on her keyboard when her cellphone started ringing. Sighing, she picked up the phone, looking at the caller ID.

Danny? She thought to herself, vaguely curious. He rarely calls at close to one in the morning…unless he needs reinforcements. Sudden fear gripping her, she flipped open the shell and put it to her ear.

“Hello,” she said, a frantic tone on her voice.

“Sam,” the sheer panic on Danny’s voice said. “You need to get down to Mercy General. There’s been an accident.”

Sam impulsively stood up in fear, a thousand images roaring through her at once, images of the love of her life a mangled wreck on a hospital bed, though just as quickly common sense roared back in. If he was injured, he couldn’t very well call her on the phone now could he? “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Danny said quickly, fear and anger on his voice. “It was Jazz. Someone careened into the side of her car while she was crossing an intersection. She’s going into surgery.”

“Oh no,” she said, fear and anger surging through her. “I’ll be right there.”

“Thank you,” Danny said quickly, and the phone hung up. Hanging up herself, she jammed her phone into her pocket, flung her nightgown off, flung on her street clothes, grabbed her car keys from off her nightstand and ran at full speed out her bedroom door.

She hit the bottom step when a loud, grating female voice from the top of the stairs cut through the air of the darkened living room. “Samantha Ariel Manson!”

She sighed, and looked up to see her mother, Pamela Avera Manson, standing at the top of the stairs, a glare in her eyes as she stood illuminated in the glow of the hallway light. Her mother’s face was a mask of anger as she stood there, her arms folded.

“Danny’s sister was in a traffic accident,” she said quickly. “I need to get to the hospital to support her and Danny.”

Pamela’s mouth was agape, her finger raised to begin a lecture, but after a second, her mouth abruptly closed and her hand dropped to her side.

She sighed, “Carry on, then,” she said, “Just call me when you get there.” Without another word she turned and walked back into her room, and closing it behind her.

Guess not even she can argue with that, she thought to herself, sighing in relief. Putting her mother out of her mind she turned and walked into her garage.



The golden light of the morning sun was peaking in through the windows of Jazz’s room in ICU, filtering out through the room’s glass wall when the door finally opened and the doctor finally came out into the corridor. The thirtyish woman with dark skin, black hair, and brown eyes came over to the small group of people waiting outside her room.

“Will she live?” She heard Maddie ask immediately, concern on her voice. Danny’s parents, she noted, were wearing normal clothes this time Maddie was clad in a red long-sleeved shirt and tan slacks, and Jack was in a black shirt and blue jeans.

The doctor sighed, “Yes,” she said, a lilting Indian accent on her voice. “You’re daughter should live, though she’ll be here for the next week or two. She took some nasty injuries out there.”

“May we speak to her?” Danny asked, a tinge of desperation on her voice.

The doctor, Jivanta Takeri according to the ID on her coat, cocked her head to the side and finally said, “Yes, but you must go in one at a time and only for five minutes at a time. The last thing that poor woman needs at the moment is family and friends barging in their all at once.”

So, Sam waited, as Danny and her parents and friends took turns going in there and talking to her. When one timed out, he or she left and sent in the next person. Finally after about half an hour, a visibly relieved Danny walked out of the room and said, a relieved calm on his voice, “You’re turn, Sam. Sam sighed, and walked into the room.

Sam felt her heart drop into her stomach at her friend’s condition. She had studiously avoided looking directly at Jazz the entire time, instead focusing her attention on the medical staff treating her. It was unavoidable now. There was a large bruise on the right side of her face. She had some freshly bandaged cuts on her face, as well as a bandage wrapped around her head.

“How are you feeling?” Sam asked.

Jazz turned and gave her a faintly annoyed look. “You’re the fourth person to ask that question. Danny could’ve told you what I told him, I had a some cuts and bruises, some internal bleeding, and a collapsed lung, but all that’s been taken care of and I’m on enough painkillers to choke a horse.”

Sam smirked despite herself, though the laugh was hollow, devoid of joy. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

Jazz nodded weakly. “Yes,” she said, nodding. “Tell Danni, Valerie, and Tucker about how I’m doing-,”

Sam nodded, “And?”

“Ensure that the mission continues as planned,” Jazz said weakly.

Sam looked at Jazz askance, shock pouring through her, she’d poured her heart and soul into this mission, to go and leave her convalescing in a hospital bed or at home seemed like a cheat. Heck, it was part of the reason that they’d accepted the offer of the Vice President to begin with, to have an excuse to use those ships. Better to just postpone the mission until she felt better “This mission can’t succeed without you. You know more about the technology involved than anyone save Tucker.”

Jazz leaned up slightly, fixing her with a glare. “Listen,” she bit out. “Those ships have to be brought back. We know what they’re capable of now. They’re much more than interstellar warships.”

That was true. Two weeks ago, Tucker and Jazz had discovered data that answered a key question. Why? Why build spaceships? There had to be more than just expanding to the stars. There just had to be a reason Vlad spent so much time and effort into building them before he had control of Earth. The answer, they discovered, surrounded their planet. They’d discovered that there were several emitters built into the front section of the ship. Emitters that, if aimed at an area of high radiation flux, it would open up a portal to the Ghost Zone to open up in front of them, and pull them inside. Those ships were enough to handle the major Ghost Zone threats, who easily had the capability to build starships that could enter this dimension.

“I know,” she said finally.

“You’re a good leader and a good strategist,” she said. “You were the one who whipped that small force we do have back into shape.” The extremely nascent force which they were calling the Paranormal Defense Force consisted of one hundred people, divided into the space forces under Sam and Danni, and the ground forces under Valerie and Star, but both under the overall leadership of Jazz. Their forces were the forces that Danny and she had used to take down Youngblood, and they had actually managed to get them all back into service, save Dash and Paulina, both of whom still harbored serious grudges. Though they did get Starr, who’d apparently had some sort of falling out with Paulina over something she was unwilling to discuss. And she was actually turning out to be a good at her job, so much so that she was her OOD on Antietam, such as her crew was. The plan was to use the internet to gather and even larger force from the around the area, train them as best as they could on short notice and use them to get the rest of the fleet to the far side of the Moon. The hope was that a large portion of them would stick around, further expanding her personnel even as they sought a way to recruit without drawing attention too much attention to themselves, at least until they were ready to step out onto the world stage formally.

“But that’s not the problem,” Sam said, sadly. “The problem is that you were as involved in planning this operation as anyone. You fell head over heels for the concept of having those ships the same way me and Danni did. You gave a hundred and ten percent to this like the rest of us and it seems like we would be cheating you if we left to get those ships without you.”

Jazz smiled. “I’ll be fine, Sam. Don’t worry about me. There will be plenty of opportunities to me to be involved in creating your fleet. But getting those ships has to outweigh any other considerations. It just has to. Promise me, Sam. Promise me, that you’ll get those ships back here using the schedule we worked out.”

Sam sighed, “Absolutely, it will be done.” Jazz was right, getting those ships back to Earth had to be a priority.

Jazz smiled. “Good,” she said. “Now, you’re five minutes are almost up. Go home, and get some sleep. You have a lot of work ahead of you, and I believe you still have an English assignment to complete.” Sam nodded and turned and left the room. She did have a lot of work to do, the mission was in a week. And she did have the English assignment for Lancer to get done by Monday.