Alien vs. Alien (35 page)

CHAPTER 62

H
UNG UP AND TURNED BACK
to Franklin. “Ready for that debrief now.”

Franklin’s eyes were narrowed. “Why did you call to verify that your Pontifex was where I said he’d been sent?”

“Because I’m getting used to people I care about disappearing without a trace. It wasn’t a reflection on you, Colonel.”

“No offense taken.” Franklin still looked worried.

“What is it?”

“We have too many disappearances, too close together, and all of those missing vanished without a trace. Humor me, and let’s be certain the rest of your people are where we believe them to be.”

“Okay, Paul’s where he’s supposed to be, but I’ll verify the others are okay, too. Just give me a moment.” Decided not to call, so sent texts to Reader, Tim, and all the flyboys.

Franklin grimaced. “The Pontifex went to the Dome via a floater gate, per Commander Reader. But the two Commanders and their teams went to their locations using this gate. And, with my predecessor gone under extremely mysterious circumstances . . .”

“Right, it’s a little worrying.” None of them answered immediately. “We need to give them a little time to answer, since they all went to areas with active situations.”

Franklin nodded and headed for the Executive Washroom. “Come with me for a moment, please.” I could wait for texts and walk at the same time, so White and I followed him as requested. There were five stalls in here. Franklin went to the one farthest from the door. “Can you verify that this gate is in working order?”

“I can’t. How do you even know there’s a gate here?” I could see it because I was enhanced—airport metal detector standing around a toilet, never a thrill—but Franklin was a regular human, insofar as I knew.

Franklin shook his head and pointed to a tiny red disk on the back wall, right by the floor, behind the toilet. “That’s the identifier for a gate anywhere in the world. I can’t see that a gate is here, but I can see the disk.”

“It looks fine to me, but I honestly have no way of truly knowing,” White said.

“I learn something new every, single day.” Why was I, truly, the last to know anything and everything? Chuckie undoubtedly knew about this. Hell, Amy probably knew about it. For all I knew, everyone other than me knew. The horrible truth was obvious—I was going to have to break down and look at those briefing books. One day.

But not right now. Right now, we had a situation, and I hadn’t heard back from any of the guys.

Just before worry could take over, I got a reply from Reader. “James is fine, situation in France is not. It’s not superbeings they’re fighting but supersoldiers, and rural France meant just outside of Paris.”

Another text came in, then another. “Tim and Jerry are also fine, and confirmed that the rest of the flyboys are okay, too. They’re getting into the air, though, because it’s worse in Paraguay than in Paris right now. They’re dealing with superbeings in Paraguay but more than James has in France.”

“Convenient,” White said dryly.

“Truly. Between the Festival and this, all of our Field teams are tied up.”

“This situation is going from bad to worse,” Franklin said.

“Undoubtedly the bad guys’ plan. Look, Colonel, let’s get back to the others, and you tell us what’s going on so we can figure out what to do.”

We rejoined the others. Oliver was looking rather pleased. “Colonel, you’ll be glad to know everyone in the room has been declared a safe security risk.” Oliver’s eyes twinkled. “Including me.”

“Excuse me?” Franklin said.

“I took pictures of all of us, myself included,” Oliver explained. “Captain Ward read them.”

“Captains of industry!” Bellie said.

I ignored her. “Captain Ward?”

“Captains of military!”

“Hush, Bellie. Not now.”

“I got a promotion,” William said with a grin. “I had Jennifer read them, too, though, because everyone reads differently.”

I managed not to share that, in all this time, I hadn’t actually bothered to find out what William and Walter’s last name was. I felt remarkably thoughtless, but fortunately William was an imageer, not an empath.

Speaking of empaths, though, I turned to Jeremy, whose last name I actually had learned right off. Go me. “Jeremy, you need to read everyone, too.”

“We’re ahead of you, Ambassador. Senator Armstrong already suggested it, and Captain Morgan approved. Each of us asked a question of the others, and I read reactions.”

“Call me Kitty. And that’s great news. But, what questions did you ask?”

“All along the lines of ‘which one of you is trying to kill or betray us,’” Oliver said.

“Did anyone ask about the alien invasion?”

Everyone sort of stared at me. “Excuse me?” Mona asked finally, clearly voicing most of the room’s views. “What are you talking about?”

I looked at Jeremy. He wiped the shocked look off his face. “Confusion, annoyance, amusement,” he indicated Buchanan as the one who was finding this funny, “shock, fear, some anger. Feelings of being out of control and in danger. Boredom, stress, the standard stuff.”

“No one focus on a single emotion?”

“No. Just the typical panicked attempt to hide that everyone does. Well, most everyone.”

I took a guess. “Malcolm, Tito, the senator, and Mister Joel Oliver didn’t do that, right?”

“Right.”

“Makes sense.” I turned to the Gower girls. “I sincerely hope I didn’t have to tell you that I expected you to be paying attention, too, did I?”

“Nope,” Abigail said. “Now that Sis has calmed down, we’re able to focus. I got what Jeremy got—no one knows anything about the invasion, other than you, Uncle Richard, our two military men, and Mister Buchanan, but he guessed, and your question confirmed his suspicions. I don’t think anyone here is actually working with our enemies, either.”

Naomi looked at Armstrong. “Any more.”

He rolled his eyes. “That’s so five hours ago, young lady.”

“Senator, you have a sense of humor we’ve been unaware of. How refreshing. William, Jennifer, your thoughts?”

“All clean, so to speak,” William said. He smiled at the Middle Eastern Contingent. “Your secret will be safe with us, by the way.”

“Secret?” I looked at the four of them. Khalid was on a couch next to Mona. Jakob was in a chair near him, and Oren was in a chair near Mona. I studied their body language and expressions. Mona looked protective. So did Oren. Jakob and Khalid, however, had poker faces on. And, as I judged the body language, they were leaning toward each other, just a bit. I had a feeling Mom somehow already knew what the secret was. “Ah. Interesting. We’re
really a very open principality. Or country. Or whatever you think we are.”

Jeremy cleared his throat. “You just raised their anxiety levels, Ambassador.”

Abigail laughed. “You met my brother, didn’t you? And his husband, Commander Reader. It’s not exactly a secret. Our people don’t have any issue with who someone else loves.”

I saw the human males catch up, other than Buchanan, who looked as though he’d already known. Mom’s training, most likely. My strong impression—based on him flirting with me and sometimes seeming to live for making me blush—was that Buchanan was straight, at least if Jeff’s jealousy meter was any indication.

“It’s a tremendous security breach, not to mention culturally frowned upon, so I can understand why the four of you don’t want it shared with the world. But since the secret you’re trying to hide isn’t related to interstellar security and the fate of the world, the four of you can relax.”

“Interstellar?” Jakob said. “Did I hear you correctly? You were serious about an alien invasion?”

“Yes,” Franklin said. “Based on everything that’s happened, much of which has involved all of you, I’m prepared to break any number of protocols and bring you up to speed. Because I think we need to focus on saving our world more than my career.”

CHAPTER 63

“O
N SATURDAY AT OH-FIVE-HUNDRED HOURS
we intercepted an extremely long-range transmission from space,” Franklin said. “From what we can determine, the message was sent to someone here on Earth.”

“Clarence Valentino.”

“Tino! Tino! Tino!”

“Thanks, Bellie. Hush.”

Franklin nodded. “It’s a reasonable guess,” he said after Bellie quieted down. “Especially since the transmission was coded, but it was in a language we’re actually able to translate.”

I took a guess. “In the native language of Alpha Four?”

“Yes. At first we thought it was meant for someone in Centaurion Division, but decryption proved this to be untrue.”

“Who decrypted, my father?”

“And his team, yes.”

My dad had a team? I tabled asking why I never knew anything. If we survived the latest world-ending events, I’d read the damn Briefing Books of Boredom.

Franklin went on. “The message was fairly simple: Forces ready, put plan into action.”

“That doesn’t really scream ‘alien invasion’ to me.”

“Nor to anyone else. However, we have some long-range probes, and due to our relatively new relationship with Alpha Four, we’ve been able to launch the probes farther and get readings back from them much more quickly.”

Morgan brought over a folder and handed it to Franklin, who opened it and showed us the pictures inside.

“That looks like a whole lot of spaceships.” So many spaceships that I didn’t try to count them. They didn’t look like any of the ships I’d seen from the Alpha Centauri system. They looked a lot like the space ships from the Space Invaders game—sort of inverted bowls with legs, with what appeared to be blinking lights. Very Hollywood. Meaning they might be faked. Or our alien invasion stories had a basis in fact. I was married to a space alien, so I voted for the latter.

“Yes. And they weren’t there two days ago.”

“Well, where are they? I mean, that looks far, far away.”

“They were within a few thousand light years of us when this picture was taken.”

“We can take pictures this good from that far away?”

“We can with Alpha Four’s help, yes.”

“So why are we panicking? I mean, it’s going to take them forever to get here. By the time they arrive, we’ll probably have built a space wall around the solar system.”

Franklin handed me anot
her photo. Same spaceship armada. “This was taken by a closer probe at twelve-hundred hours yesterday. We aren’t sure how they’re moving, but they moved a thousand light years per hour.”

“That’s impossible,” Oren said. “Nothing moves like that.”

“We do. All the time. Because of the gates.” I looked more closely at the picture, then handed it to William. “Feel free to check out the space ships, but I’m more interested in what’s sort of in front of them.”

“Looks like space dust,” Morgan said.

“I don’t think it is.” It looked rather gelatinous to me.

William touched it, hissed, and dropped the picture. Jennifer retrieved it and carefully touched the spaceships. She seemed fine. Then she moved her hand to the area I was most interested in. She dropped the picture, too. Sadly, this was typical behavior. It was a behavior I’d hoped I wouldn’t see, but it didn’t surprise me all that much.

“You two mind sharing what you just read?” Tito asked. “Kitty looks like you just confirmed her suspicions, but I think I speak for the rest of us when I say we have no idea why you both just freaked out.”

William looked shaken. “That’s not space dust in front of the armada. It’s an inordinate number of parasites.”