The rest of the trip was in silence until they finally arrived at March Air Reserve Base.
They were the last to arrive, as all the other detained immortals had been gathered. Without their armor, their magic spent from fighting GalvanGal, hungry, and tired, they were just another batch of prisoners.
The Pantheon had arrived long before anyone else. They flew here after GalvanGal took off and only made a detour to pick up Streaker. The badge-wearing staff unloaded equipment brought from Olympus Sanatorium to set up more medical tents for the immortals. Aaliyah was deep in prayer that reached every dark corner of California.
Hannah stumbled out of the van holding her own head up straight. She was still woozy and they had no water on the long road here. She had rest, but that was not enough to recharge her to full strength. As soon as Kenny came into vision, she bolted to hug him. She had lifted him off his feet and pinned his arms to his sides. He could only tap her obliques in response.
“It’s… it’s good… to see you… too… too tight!” said Kenny. She let him go to breathe.
“I missed you,” said Hannah.
“It was only a few hours?” chuckled Kenny.
“I’m just glad you’re okay.”
“I think a few ribs broke just now.”
“Weren’t you worried about me?” she said with a smirk.
“Of course not. I knew GalvanGal could do it.”
Her smirk turned into a smile that Kenny returned in kind. But something wiped the smile off of her face.
She bolted off to one of the canopy tents which interrupted the technician there. She leaned down over the gurney where an immortal was strapped in. It was the gorgon from the first prison she arrived at. The gorgon had peripheral venous catheters inserted into her arm veins. Her eyes were covered by duct tape and her snakes were wrapped up with an aluminum wire.
Hannah held her hands to the gorgon’s head to get a better reading of what she was worried about. She could detect general electricity through electroreception, but she needed to be close to a target to perform an electroencephalogram to make out an accurate measurement of electrical activity; right now, she measured brainwave activity. The gorgon had an unusually heightened frequency of slow-wave activity. This frequency is associated with sleep, but this was no ordinary slumber. GalvanGal passed on some of her electricity to return activity to normal, yet still something was missing within the frontal lobes. That little charge was enough for the Gorgon to jolt awake in a panic. Though restraints held her down as she thrashed around, she still shook the Gurney.
“Hey! Hey!” GalvanGal added her own strength to restrain the gorgon, “It’s alright, you just have wrapping over your eyes!”
“Thunder… thighs?” she hissed, “I… I can’t think straight. It’s all… foggy… getting… harder…”
Her brainwave frequency was slowing down until she stopped speaking and moving, fully returned to the akinetic state Hannah found her in. Hannah scanned the rest of the tents and saw that everyone strapped in a gurney was under the same condition.
“What do you think you’re doing? asked WhiteOut.
“Something happened with her brain activity. I can kickstart it but we need… Aaliyah… to,” GalvanGal looked around to see that she was surrounded by soldiers who aimed rifles at her, “... did you do this?” she asked.
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“We have found a way to permanently incapacitate enemy combatants.”
“You lobotomized them!”
“I neutralized a threat that could wipe out this base. The policy was to terminate them but we have found an alternative.”
“An alternative that lets you continue to study their mutation.”
“Yes. That is the only reason for them to live. This is the compromise. This is the mercy. This is the only way and there will be no discussion.”
“You don’t know that! All you ever do is try to force your way and when it doesn’t work you say there was no other choice. We’re here because of you!” GalvanGal punctuated with a thunderous stomp that shook the base and the soldiers. Kenny had wheeled Garrick over to WhiteOut’s side. Aaliyah concentrated on her prayer.
“Hannah, please,” pleaded Garrick, “WhiteOut is balancing achieving our goals with the information and support she has. Part of doing that is serving the interests of all parties involved. Right now, everyone is scared more than ever and they don’t want to leave anything to risk, they can’t afford to. Other people aren’t like you, they aren’t bulletproof. We made mistakes—I made mistakes, and that is all the more reason we take responsibility to ensure no one else suffers because of it. This was the best we could do.”
“I understand that,” said GalvanGal, “but that isn’t the best I can do, because I am bulletproof. That’s why I have to do everything I am capable of, and right now, I’m not capable of turning away from this.
“Aren’t you the one imposing your will here?” WhiteOut stepped forward, “You're the only one who wants to let these terrorists remain a threat. As they themselves showed, even you have limits, limits you haven’t recovered from. Even if you fought everyone here, what then? Will you be able to fight the rest of the world forever? How will you transport, house, feed, and clothe these people? What about the rest of their buddies? Will you stop them from going back and fight the rest of the immortals on your own? What happens if any one of them kills someone or wipes out a town? What will you do then? Did you even think that far? Did you even think at all? Or are you just going off a feeling?”
“Aaliyah, please, I need your help to—”
“Don’t bring other people into your mess. Now who’s the one being selfish and stubborn?”
GalvanGal was on the backfoot now. She had no answers to those questions because she was just going off of feelings. All of them were reasonable concerns she had not considered. But she wasn’t concerned with what was reasonable. The feeling in her gut was all she had to trust in and right now that feeling surged now more than ever before. That surge spilled out amethyst sparkles as prances of lightning danced under and over her skin. The soldiers were put further on edge but were stayed by WhiteOut.
There was no time to think about what was reasonable; if left too long, the damage may become permanent. To save these people, there was no chance to run away. The only option was to charge forward.
“What’s the rush for?” asked the man with all the time in the world, “it’s not like we have to make a decision right now.” GalvanGal powered down and WhiteOut turned to him.
“We do, Kenny. The immortal could attack at any moment. We can’t let these detainees return to combat capacity,” explained WhiteOut.
“But they haven’t? If they wanted to break out their buddies, they would have done it by now. Especially during transport, before we were all linked up.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying we don’t understand the situation yet. We should get more information first. We’ve never captured any of them before but they can’t tell us anything if they’re braindead, right?”
WhiteOut crossed her arms and closed her eyes. Kenny had put on a brave front but her silence was unnerving him. It was hard to believe this child commanded so much authority until you were in the same room as her. Still, the fact that he got her to consider his proposal was amazing.
“If you can get information out of one of these criminals then I will consider your proposal,” said WhiteOut, “good luck finding one that likes to talk.”
At those last words, GalvanGal lit up like a lightbulb.