Clones vs. Aliens (5 page)

The identical two girls closest to Fisher and Alex stepped forward. They were pale, with ice-blonde hair. Electric green eyes held Fisher’s attention in a vise grip.

“Hello,” one said in a voice that was like soft violin music played in front of a gentle waterfall. “We’ve been studying your species from space for many years. We were only waiting for a signal from you to make contact.”

“Signal?” Fisher squeaked out.

“We’re so happy to meet the official Earth representatives!” the other said with a glowing smile that made Fisher feel like stammering even though he wasn’t talking. “We hope that our arrival wasn’t inconvenient.”

“No, no, no, not at all,” Fisher said, marveling at how
easy it was to serve as the ambassador for Earth’s first encounter with an alien species. He could feel the Nobel Prize slipping into his hands already. He blinked to clear his mind. The fact that the aliens looked like pretty girls was distracting him from the fact that they were
aliens.
Nobody in recorded history had ever even found proof of extraterrestrial beings, let alone spoken to one face-to-face. Out of nowhere, Fisher and his friends were standing directly in the middle of one of the biggest moments in history.

“We’re
fine
,” Amanda said, hopping on her stronger ankle to get a better look at the girls. “No thanks to you.”

“Where did you come from?” Trevor asked in an awed whisper.

“We’re from a star system approximately five hundred Earth light-years from yours,” said the first twin. “We are called …” The two girls made a series of sounds that fell somewhere between whale song and a jackhammer hitting a submarine, accompanied by flashes of light from their eyes.

“Um …” Fisher and Alex said, exchanging a look. Fisher cleared his throat. “Can you repeat that?”

“We’re aware that your physiology is incapable of reproducing our name,” said the second girl, “even though humans can make lots of wonderful sounds.” She flashed Fisher another warm grin. Even Veronica didn’t smile at
him this much. “Because of that, you may decide upon a human name for our species that you are more comfortable saying.”

“What about the Landing Impaired?” Amanda said.

“Or the Altitude Recalibration?” Veronica added.

“Veronica,” Fisher whispered. “Don’t be—” But when she turned to glare at him, he swallowed back the word
rude.

“Well, they’re all twins,” said Erin after a few seconds of uncomfortable silence. “Twins from space. That reminds me of the astronomy unit in my science class. We could call them the Gemini.”

“Yes, yes,” Fisher said quickly before Amanda and Veronica could say anything more. “The Gemini. Perfect.”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “Perfect …”

Amanda cleared her throat. Actually it sounded more like she was clearing her entire thoracic cavity.

“We, uh,” Alex said, glancing nervously at Amanda, “should give you Earth names individually, too.”

“Fine,” said Amanda, stepping up to Alex, putting her arm through his with pointed force, and giving the two Gemini who’d been speaking an iron-tipped glare. “It’ll be tough to remember a lot of complicated names. There are twenty-six of you. So we’ll name you alphabetically. Anna and Bee,” she said, pointing to the speakers.

She proceeded with the rest of them, pointing and naming, and if any of the other kids disagreed with her
they definitely knew better than to go up against the wrestling captain. Fisher tapped a button in his sleeve, switching on a hidden digital recorder to get the names down, hoping it hadn’t been damaged during the crash.

“Yang and Zoe,” Amanda finished.

The second Gemini, Bee, nodded in approval. “That’s perfect.”

“Well, good,” said Fisher. “Great, in fact! As, um, Earth representative, I … uh-oh.”

A mound of rubble and dirt clods was pushed apart from inside, and a trio of familiar faces appeared with perfectly bad timing.

The Vikings. So they’d come back after all, just in time to be caught by the blast.

“Hey!”
shouted Brody, looking as angry and stupid as usual. They stormed forward at Fisher.

But they stopped cold when they saw the Gemini. The Vikings looked at each other, unsure of how to act in the presence of so much beauty, their faces flushing.

Brody was the first to snap out of it. “We got business with you,” he said, pointing at Fisher with a broad stub of a finger.

“Y-yeah,” Willard said, taking a step forward. “P-punching b-business.”

Ingrid and Jeanne (Gemini girls nine and ten) neatly intercepted them.

LIST OF GEMINI NAMES

and brief descriptions
***

1. Anna

2. Bee

very blonde, green eyes leaders, gorgeous

3. Claire

4. Deb

very tall, wow so pretty

5. Ellie

6. Fae

red hair, flickering a lot might explode? stunning

7. Gloria

8. Helen

intensely beautiful, brunettes

9. Ingrid

10. Jeanne

exquisite, definitley exploded

11. Kat

12. Leah

short hair, breathtaking

13. Mae

14. Nina

curly hair, extremely pretty

15. Ophelia

16. Phoebe

bright blue eyes, stunningly beautiful

17. Quinn

18. Renée

extremely tall, so so pretty

19. Sandy

20. Tina

glasses, devastatingly gorgeous, you get the idea

21. Ulyana

22. Vera

jet black hair, surprise: magnificently stunning

23. Wendy

24. Xena

just wow

25. Yang

26. Zoe

super gorgeous

***
none are as pretty as Veronica

“Excuse us,” said Ingrid sweetly. “We’re in conversation with the ambassadors. You’re interrupting us.”

“This isn’t your business,” said Brody. But he sounded nervous. “You tell ’em, Willard.”

Willard gulped a little and puffed himself up. “Yeah. It isn’t your business. So … just … g-get out of our way. Why don’t you just … go do c-cartwheels??”

“Yeah,” said Leroy. “You look like a bunch of dumb, squawking, uh, pairs o’ cleats.”

“Parakeets,” corrected Brody, smacking his forehead.

Ingrid and Jeanne frowned deeply. Then they started to glow. Fisher heard a faint hissing sound. The hiss grew into a harsh crackle, like a big log in a fireplace or very violent popcorn.
BOOM.

Fisher blinked and staggered backward as another blast nearly knocked him off his feet. Had the Gemini shot the Vikings with some kind of high-energy particle beam?

When his vision cleared, he saw the Vikings were flat on the ground, marked with cuts, bruises, and burns. One of Brody’s eyes was swollen shut and Willard was holding one arm like it was broken. On the spot where Ingrid and Jeanne had been standing there was now little more than a scorch mark and a small puddle of green fluid.

Two Gemini had
exploded.
Oddly, the other twenty-four girls didn’t really seem to care.

Fisher and Alex jumped at a second earsplitting noise.

But it wasn’t the Gemini this time. It was the crash of a bulldozer finally breaking through the debris of the M3. That crash was followed by the sound of heavy boots as the guards raced through the gap the dozer had created.

“Step away from the aliens!” the team leader said, forming a semicircle behind the kids.

Fisher spent a second wondering how the guards knew the Gemini were aliens. Maybe the people farther away had seen the ship coming. But Fisher didn’t have long to wonder. He knew things were about to go from bad to worse. His heart sped back up to panic mode. Everything had been going so well until the Vikings had shown up.

Now they were on the verge of interstellar war.

The Gemini started glowing. They reminded Fisher of deep-sea bioluminescent fish, sending out an eerie red light from just beneath their skin. The heavy brow of the security team’s leader twitched as he eyed the girls, his weapon hovering at the ready in his thick, blue-veined hands.

“Wait! Wait!” Fisher said, running up to the leader of the guards. “Please don’t agitate them. They … they don’t take it well.”

“We saw the explosion,” the guard said coolly, his eyes not moving from the aliens for even an instant. “I’d say how they’ve acted so far gives us every reason to believe they’re hostile.”

The scientists had poured in through the breach and were gathering in a loose half circle behind the guards, chattering among themselves and calibrating various handheld instruments. Still, Fisher didn’t see his parents. Where
were
they?

One of the guards grabbed Fisher by the arm; another one grabbed Alex. The Gemini glow became more intense, along with the crackle sound. The area was bathed in their light, which strobed slowly and menacingly.

“Stop!” Fisher shouted. He managed to shake free of the huge man’s grasp. “They’re not hostile. They think you’re trying to hurt us. They’re trying to protect us.”

“Fisher,” Veronica whispered harshly. She didn’t look exceptionally pleased that Fisher was defending extraterrestrial beings whose chief method of debate seemed to be self-detonation.

“Nobody was badly hurt in the explosion,” Alex said, fighting his way out of the other guard’s grip. “Well … no humans, at least.” He looked again at the sooty spot that had been Ingrid and Jeanne. “The aliens have a … some kind of natural defense mechanism. They thought we were in trouble.”

Amanda glared at him.

The guards paused, exchanging bewildered glances, clearly unsure how to proceed.

“Stand down, Sergeant,” said a calm, familiar voice. The sergeant lowered his weapon and stepped back, gesturing for his men to do the same, as Fisher’s parents stepped forward between them.

In that moment, Fisher was reminded that his mom and dad weren’t just his mom and dad. They were titans
of the scientific community. Helen Bas wore her long white lab coat like a knight’s armor. Fisher could practically
see
Walter Bas’s incredible mind humming along at speeds most people couldn’t imagine. The rest of the scientists treated them like nobility.

“Mom!” said Alex and Fisher. Fisher was incredibly relieved to see that his parents were here, and all right. At the same time, he felt a pinch of dread: they’d been busted, pure and simple. He raced to come up with an excuse. Maybe he could say he rushed here to warn them of something. A sudden outbreak of reactivated Fisher-bots? The home lab was on fire? Paul had accidentally hugged the lever that released Mr. Bas’s semi-intelligent plastic-eating ants into the wild?

But Mrs. Bas looked right past Alex and Fisher and beamed at the Gemini. As the guards backed off, the glow from the aliens dimmed and went out, and the crackling softened and finally went silent.

“This is a monumental event, boys,” Mrs. Bas said in a trembling voice, putting a hand on each son’s shoulders. “We’ve made first contact with a highly advanced extraterrestrial species. You realize this moment will be taught in history classes for the rest of human civilization?”

Fisher exhaled. Of course, now that he thought about it, his act of minor trespassing had no significance next to the arrival of the Gemini. He just hoped the people who
wrote those history books would spice up his dialogue a bit, and maybe give him more to say than “uh.” He could already imagine the moment immortalized as a painted tableau: the Gemini, Fisher and Alex, the Bas parents; scientists and engineers with testing apparatuses buzzing; FP trying to nuzzle Warren awake.

Maybe, Fisher thought, the Vikings could be deleted from the scene. Currently, an EMT was treating them for their cuts and bruises. Fisher wondered whether the incident would finally teach them something about how approaching every situation by yelling at it can and will end badly. He wondered this for about two and a half seconds before remembering that the Vikings did not learn anything, ever.

“This has gone even better than we planned,” Mrs. Bas went on.

“Planned?”
squawked Alex and Fisher simultaneously.

Mrs. Bas smiled. “Astronomers have been tracking their ship for months. We suspect they’ve been in the solar system dozens of times, studying Earth, and us. However, they made no response to radio contact, so we designed something more
advanced
.”

Fisher’s jaw dropped like a bowling ball through tissue paper.

“The M3,” Alex breathed.

“Mega Mars Madness is just a cover name,” said Mr.
Bas. “Its real name is the Magnetic Modulation Mechanism. The operation of the coaster creates a detectable ripple in Earth’s magnetic field. We hoped it would be a sign to the ship that humanity was ready for interstellar contact. And it seems to have worked, if a little early. Today was a day to check and calibrate the systems. The big day was planned for next week.”

So
that
was the signal that the Gemini had referred to.

Fisher gazed at his parents wonderingly. They’d been tracking an alien spacecraft for months and he’d had no idea. It must have been
unbearable
for them to keep from telling him.