Comet impact T minus 13 days, 11 hours, 15 minutes:
“Are you ready?”
Kim swallowed, her throat suddenly dry, but finally nodded. “Ready.”
“Okay, Kimmie,” her dad said from the sealed control room. “On your signal.”
Kim closed her eyes and concentrated. Using techniques she had picked up both during her early martial arts training and especially during the last week and a half, she urged her pulse to accelerate, her breathing to quicken, her body temperature to rise. Her clenched fists started shaking as the familiar white glow started slipping out from under her skin. Her powers activated.
Opening her eyes, she looked straight ahead, sharpening her concentration to a knife edge.
“Hit me,” she said.
At the other end of the long tunnel a machine started up and moments later a hail of small metal fragments started shooting toward her at high speed. The tunnel had originally been built to test the endurance of shuttle frames in various ways. Bombarding them with space trash and micro meteorites, testing their aerodynamics in strong winds, checking their heat shielding for re-entry.
Now, though, Kim was standing there and a hailstorm of speeding metal was about to cut her into shreds.
Raising her hands in front of her, Kim concentrated on her powers and watched as the lethal projectiles impacted against the white glow spreading out like a shield before her body. All of them stopped in mid-air and then dropped to the floor. There were hundreds of them, wave after wave, but she stopped them all cold. She didn’t feel anything from the impacts, but what she did feel was the energy inside her body beginning to build.
Like Wade had said, physics. All that energy she ‘stole’ from the fragments had to go somewhere. She was storing it in some way no one could yet figure out. She could feel as it grew hotter under her skin, more and more energy building up in her veins.
When she felt like she was about to burst, she yelled for her father to shut down the bombardment. The tunnel grew silent, no more projectiles sped toward her, and Kim opened her eyes again. She hadn’t even noticed closing them, she realised.
The floor in front of her was littered with the fragments she had stopped, piled up in big heaps. How many were there? Had to be hundreds, maybe thousands. Looking at her hands, she saw that they were glowing a bright, bright white, energy crackling around her form. She tried shutting it down, but found it didn’t work. The energy build-up inside of her wouldn’t let her.
“Okay, I think I’m pretty maxed out,” she said, her voice hoarse from the effort of containing all this energy. Sweat was dripping from her brow. “How did I do?”
“Absolutely amazing, Kimmie,” her father said. “What we shot at you would have torn a dozen space shuttles to bits. I can’t even begin to guess how much kinetic energy you absorbed.”
“Well, yeah,” Kim said, looking at the ground to see that the floor plates under her feet were beginning to crack. “It’s leaking out, dad, so we should get on with phase two of this little experiment, don’t you think?”
“Right, right!”
A door opened to her left and Kim quickly walked through it. A corridor later she was headed out onto the tarmac of the landing field, where the second phase would take place.
There was but one other person out on the field, all the others had taken shelter behind multiple layers of armour plating and lead shielding. Kim walked toward Shego, her every step causing slight tremors as the kinetic energy she had absorbed leaked out each time she touched the ground.
Shego waited for her, the green-skinned woman glowing a bright green. As part of the experiment Shego had spent the last 12 hours soaking up sunlight to max out her own energy reserves. The ratio of absorption had only increased, thanks to the approaching comet. Shego had said that it usually took her a lot longer to fuel up completely and she felt she was also able to store more power than before.
“Ready for the big boom, princess?” Shego asked. She was dressed in a standard-issue Space Centre overall, just like Kim. No sense in ruining another one of her precious catsuits, she had said.
“As I’ll ever be,” Kim said, standing beside the other woman. This last week they had worked both on Kim’s control and on the meshing of their energies. Today would be the first big-time test on how powerful a blast they could produce.
Sharing a look, the two woman hesitantly touched hands. Almost immediately the meshing of powers started, green and white once again mingling into the mint-coloured glow they had seen several times now. Professor Kruger had given them a long-winded explanation on how heat energy and kinetic energy were just flip sides of the same coin, one transforming into the other, but neither had really listened to him. They just knew they could be more powerful together than apart.
Over the course of the past eight days, ever since they had figured out Kim’s power, they had formulated theories on how it might best be put to use. Some had suggested that Kim should absorb and redirect the comet’s own kinetic energy, but considering its mass and speed, that was a fool’s plan at best. Her frail human body would never be able to contain that much energy, even for the millisecond it would take her to redirect it. Also, so far Kim seemed unable to absorb kinetic energy from a distance, only through touch. So that plan was already out the window.
Other suggestions included stealing kinetic energy from the Earth itself to slow it down and make it miss the comet (which was even more ridiculous than the first idea), imbue some other object with stolen kinetic energy and send it toward the comet (but what object and where to take the energy from?), and Shego had even suggested for Kim to throw her idiot brother Hego at the comet. Surely it would break against his dense head.
So far their original plan still seemed to be the best shot. Kim and Shego should charge up as far as they could go and then combine their powers to fire a powerful energy blast at the comet, hopefully strong enough to blast it into fragments. Said fragments would hopefully blow clear of Earth or be small enough to burn up in the atmosphere. A lot of hope went into that plan, too.
Kim and Shego touched hands and the power began to build between them.
“This better work,” Shego whispered as a thousand tingles went up her arm and through her body, the strange mesh of energies spreading. “I’m not sure I can hold this much energy much longer.”
Kim gasped, the feeling ten times more intense than the last time they’d produced a blast together. At the edge of her perception she could barely make out the voice of her father, who told them that their radiation output had increased significantly. The words were meaningless, though, only the power flowing through her veins like molten quicksilver mattered.
More and more the power built, the feelings it invoked indescribable. Kim felt in pain, at the edge of orgasm, like a god, and about to die, all at the same time. She was sweating freely now, just like Shego, their clothing began to smoulder as the heat became enough to set the air around them on fire.
Some stray thought of Kim’s remarked on how Shego’s plasma usually burned her -her powers couldn’t protect her from energy-based attacks- but left no mark on her skin when their powers meshed. The opposite was also true, as Shego was neither pushed away nor hurt by Kim’s energy output.
“Any… time… you’re… ready… princess,” Shego forced out between clenched teeth, barely able to contain the energies they had built up between them.
“Okay… on… three!”
Their joint hands rose and pointed upwards. About three hundred meters above the tarmac of the Space Centre there was a hover platform, hastily constructed by Global Justice engineers. It was basically just a big heap of metal, covered with every kind of sensor known to man. The surrounding airspace had been cleared and GJ had timed it so that no satellites would be passing through the line of fire, either. Three different orbital radio telescopes were all set to track the energy flash.
“One,” Kim said, their shaking hands now pointing at the hovering target.
“Two.” Shego clenched her hand tighter, feeling about to burst at the seams.
“Three!”
They didn’t pass out from the experience this time, but neither was sure that was a good thing. They had stored so much power inside their body, so much energy, and now it was ripping out all at once in a titanic flash of unleashed radiance. Kim felt as if the flesh was being stripped from her bones, as if her very soul was being yanked out of her body and sent to ride the lightning they were sending skywards. The pain flashed past her awareness almost too fast to register, though, to be replaced by a feeling of omnipotence and euphoria.
Behold my mighty hand, a dark and dangerous part of her seemed to whisper.
The hovering target GJ engineers had built in so many hours of hard labour vaporised almost instantly, torn into free-floating molecules by the power imbued by the comet. The energy beam travelled on, skyward, and reached orbit but a second later. The watching telescopes observed unblinkingly, their sensors recording everything without awe or fear.
The same could not be said for the observers on the ground. In the millisecond before their death the sensors mounted on the hovering platform sent a large amount of data to their master computers in the Space Centre. No one was paying attention to that data yet, though. They were too busy watching the spectacle.
Large cracks ran the entire length of the landing field as kinetic energy leaked out from Kim and split the ground in two. Concrete melted into glass, watching cameras were blinded by the glare, buildings that stood too close to the two living weapons of mass destruction began to crack and crumble.
When the energy finally dissipated an eerie silence settled over the Space Centre, broken only by the hiss of cooling concrete and metal and the settling of stone.
“Radiation levels are within acceptable parameters,” Professor Kruger finally said, looking at his sensors. “I’d say it’s safe to go outside.”
Ron was the first out the door, followed closely by Kim’s parents. The Space Centre would need a new landing field, Ron thought, as well as some new buildings. Well, he’d always thought they could so with some more colour. Maybe a Bueno Nacho at the edge of the field, too. Reprimanding himself for the stray thought, he kept running.
There was nothing left of the hovering platform they’d used for target practice, not even any debris falling to Earth. The energy blast had completely erased it from the face of the Earth. Ron didn’t much care, though, he just ran toward the shallow crater where his best friend should be.
“KP?” he yelled, having difficulty seeing her through the rising smoke.
James Possible arrived at his side and Ron immediately took a step to the side, feeling an intense déjà vu coming on.
“What?” Kim’s father asked.
“I refuse to have your hand over my eyes again, that’s all.”
“Ronald, that was only for your own protection.”
“I’m nearly eighteen, Dr. Possible. I have seen naked…”
“Stop that right this instance, young man!”
Kim’s mother ran past both of them, diving right into the smoke and arrived at the epicentre of the blast. She stopped cold, her brain refusing to grasp what she was seeing.
By now everyone picked up the new sound that echoed over the ruined landing field. It was the sound of… laughter?
“That was great,” Shego laughed, a full belly-laugh no one had ever thought the green-skinned villainess capable of.
“So great,” Kim agreed, laughing as well. “Wanna do it again!”
The two young women were lying at the bottom of the shallow crater they had created, both their clothing burned away once again. They were lying with their arms around each other and were laughing so hard that tears streamed from their eyes.
Ron arrived beside Jane Possible, watched the spectacle for a second -NAKED KIM! NAKED SHEGO! NAKED KIM AND SHEGO WITH THEIR ARMS AROUND EACH OTHER- and promptly fainted with a look of bliss on his face.
“Your partner is a wuss,” Shego laughed, unable to stop. “You’re partnered with a wuss, princess!”
Kim tried for a witty retort, but couldn’t stop laughing to deliver it. So she just threw it to the wind and kept splitting her sides, the feeling of exhilaration too much to fight.
James and Jane Possible looked at each other.
“I wonder whether this is better than a trip to the hospital, dear” James just said.
“I’ll let you know once I figure it out.”
TO BE CONTINUED