Mad Dog Lane , Ultra Woman, Et alii (2/?)
by Framework4
(Thanks to Terry for many suggestions.)(
TOC )
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Chapter Two
Normally the first thing Lois always noticed was the silence. Ever since she’d become Ultra Woman he’d existed in a world of sound. Only when moving at super speed did she ever experience silence.
Not today, today was already too, too, she struggled with the word and then gave in with mental sigh. Too weird, how could a Space Shuttle sit on top of a commercial passenger jet?
The answer was simple. This space shuttle was tiny, short and stout, with little triangle shaped wings. Barely a tenth the size of the space shuttles she knew, it confirmed for her that this was not the future, if she’d really need confirmation after seeing Chloe alive.
It was something she’d noted repeatedly since her transit through the – what to call it, anyways? A hole? A window? A gateway? The disturbance through which she’d flown ending up here, wherever here was? The technology seemed bulkier, older.
Lois shook her head. Get back on task, Lane! She told herself. This is not the time for moody introspection. Good thing she was in super speed or everybody would be dead while she was sitting in her pity pot.
She slowly approached the two aircraft. She chuckled to herself, as it only seemed slow to her, since to her perception the aircraft, traveling at not quite mach1, seemed frozen in place. She flew in close to examine the linkage between the two, careful not to touch anything on either aircraft.
She’d learned the hard way that the slightest tap at super speed was magnified thousands of times. As she examined the locked – what do you call them, anyways? Feet? Landing gear? Never mind, she could look it up later, and it wasn’t likely she’d be writing up this feat for the DP.
She sighed. Clark would likely use his laser vision to cut though the linkage in a fraction of a second. She couldn’t. or she’d end up cutting one or the other of the aircraft in two.
She carefully flew right up to one of the links or feet or whatever. It seemed that if she just disconnected that bolt here, and did the same over here to this one. She became absorbed in the mechanics of the problem. Soon, in what seemed to her just a few minutes, she had disconnected the bolts. Then she sat back to watch and wait, not daring to help the two aircraft separate for fear of damaging either.
As she waited she looked at her fingernails and smiled. One of the true advantages of being Ultra Woman was guaranteed pretty fingernails. She hadn’t broken a nail since becoming Ultra Woman.
Lois noticed a tiny gap growing between the aircraft. YES! It had worked! As she watched, the tiny gap grew and grew until there was a clear separation between the two aircraft. Yes, she’d done it! Another Ultra Woman rescue just wait till she told Clark! He’d be so pleased.
Her thoughts slid to a halt. Clark. There was no Clark here, wherever here was. If she’d understood the other Lois, Clark was dead and Superman was missing.
As she watched distance between the two aircraft grow, she thought about what the other Lois had said Clark was dead, gunned down by a resurrected 1930s mobster.
A resurrected 1930s mobster? Certainly it sounded like the events at the gambling club Georgie Hairdo’s, but of course Clark hadn’t really been dead. And what about Jason? She and Clark hadn’t been close enough at that time for her to become pregnant. Well, OK, maybe they had, and in this world they’d gotten a little carried away some night, but why did the other Lois look so scared when she said Jason looked like his father?
Lois turned her attention back to the job at hand. The two aircraft were a good three feet apart now, so what next? She needed to slow herself down and see if the pilots could regain control of their respective aircraft. Besides, if she tried to help at this speed, she could so easily rip a hole in either one.
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, another, and again. The sudden sound felt like hitting a wall. The roar of the jet engines, the screams of the passengers, the multitude of little machine noises.
She opened her eyes and saw the passenger jet sloping downward. It was too soon to know if the pilot would be able to regain control. She shifted her focus to the odd little space shuttle. It seemed fine, but orbital mechanics weren’t really her thing. She’d always hated math, gotten good grades of course, but hated every minute of it.
She continued to watch the shuttle. A stable orbit is simply a fall that keeps missing the planet, so would this shuttle miss the planet? In her mind’s eye she ran the trajectory forward. She didn’t need to do the math any more than a baseball player needed to figure the math to catch a batted ball.
A batted ball? That didn’t sound right, she’d have to ask Clark when she wrote it up. All her thoughts froze again. Clark. No Clark. No! No wallowing, Lane, at least not now. The shuttle wasn’t going to do it. It didn’t have enough speed, the angle was wrong, all wrong. No, it would not make orbit.
So where do I grab a shuttle to give it a boost? “The issue is structural integrity,” she could hear Clark’s voice in her memory. Yes, structural integrity.
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“Clark, why does our side bar sound like Star Trek? Captain I canna hold her together! Structural integrity is down to thirty percent”
“Lois, I was trying to explain why Superman couldn’t just grab the airplane. It was safer, far safer for him to do what he did, to simply hold up the wing as if he was the missing engine. Almost anywhere Superman tried to grab hold of would have torn the plane apart. Planes are not made to be carried by people. There would have been little bits of Air Force One all over the landscape.”
“Oh. In that case I think we need some diagrams, because all these formulas...”
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As Lois watched, the space shuttle’s main jets shut off. Yes, I can just push on the exhaust manifolds. Or were they called nozzles? Never mind. All she had to do was position herself at the center of the three nozzles and gently push.
She flew up and placed herself in the center. She carefully braced herself using both hands and knees to evenly distribute the force and pushed ever so slightly. With in a few seconds she’d accelerated the shuttle to escape velocity, just over seven miles per second, and she let go and drifted backwards, watching as the shuttle flew upwards.
Turning, she shifted back to super speed, and as the world went silent she shot downward in search of the passenger jet.
As she approached it she could see the angle was wrong. Clearly the pilot had not regained control.
Lois circled the plane, checking the angle and the airflow. Again she projected a trajectory in her mind’s eye. Drat, it was going to crash! There was no way this huge thing could hope to pull up in the time remaining.
While she thought, Lois scanned the aircraft with x-ray vision. “I don’t know why Clark calls it x-ray it doesn’t look a thing like an x-ray, no it looks more like an anatomy diagram, one with the layers peeled away.”
“Hmm, stress fractures in both wings. They’re going to come off when I least want them to and add in the wind resistance.”
Ultra Woman approached one wing and applied a slight touch and the wing slowly separated from the body of the plane. She had to remind herself that it only appeared slow to her. She gave it a push and it moved away from the main body of the plane.
Carefully pushing the wing in front of her, she accelerated upward. As she flew, the wing began to glow. “Of course, I forgot the heat. The space shuttle was built to withstand the heat, but this wasn’t.” She let go of the wing. It flew upward and continued to glow.
She figured the trajectory. It would not achieve orbit, but it would go high enough to burn up harmlessly on re-entry. She flew back to the plane and repeated the procedure with the other wing.
Now she was left with the cigar-shaped main body of the plane. She needed someplace to land the plane. It couldn’t be at an airport. Without a way to talk with air traffic control, she’d be endangering countless other flights.
As she created a column of rising air underneath the jet, she scanned the local area. Nothing caught her eye. But she needed time and distance to slow the huge airliner, so it really didn’t matter if it was that close by to her current location.
Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium came to mind. A field large enough for the plane, close to city emergency services and with a river right next door in case she couldn’t slow the falling planes speed enough to permit a safe landing.
Using the column of air and her super breath, she directed the aircraft along her desired flight plan. Within what felt to Lois like hours, but was only minutes in real time, the plane approached the stadium.
Drat! There was a game of some sort in progress. The players were running from the field. Baseball? Rather late in the year for baseball, she thought.
Barely touching the plane’s nose caused it to collapse and a ripple ran the body of the plane. But she was able to maintain control and at last set it carefully on the field.
She approached the cabin door and it flew off in her hand. Drat! She’d forgotten she was at super speed. She took a few breaths and slowed down. She hear the roar of the crowd, she looked around and noticed the scoreboard. Bottom of the ninth, the score was tied. Oh, someone was going to be unhappy with her for messing up this game.
Lois stepped into the cabin and faced the passengers.
“Anyone hurt?” she called. Silence. Everyone looked pretty rattled but in one piece. She scanned the room looking for a familiar face. She knew from experience that if she addressed someone directly it would serve as a catalyst to get people talking and moving and caring again.
The in the second row to her right, just standing up now, her old roommate Linda King.
“Ms. King, are you alright?”
All heads turned to look at Linda, who nodded briefly, then said:
“Hey, aren’t you going to tell us that statically speaking flying is still the safest way to travel?”
Lois snorted. “Do I look like a statistics-obsessed male?” As she looked out the door, she noticed that her face had now displayed as a live video feed on the scoreboard.
She forced herself to smile for the camera, gave a half wave then flew off.
