Alien Collective

by Gini Koch

  Thinking about Adriana meant Olga was top of mind for me. What would Olga say, right now? What is the right question? I had a feeling I hadn’t asked Siler the right questions yet. What would Mom say? To trust my gut. And my gut said that something was wrong with this picture. Which was typical for us.

  Buchanan had been assigned to me during Operation Assassination, but Adriana had shot Cartwright and been the one to save me, because she’d been able to be where Buchanan couldn’t. They hadn’t been coordinated at that time, it had just worked out. But she and Buchanan had coordinated today to get us all away from the protest safely. Because alliances were made, or broken, all the time.

  “Wait a second. Who the hell are you actually working for? Or with?”

  Siler looked right at me. “Who do you think?” He asked this nicely, but it was a challenge. And he wasn’t acting like he had when he and I had been alone. He’d been acting before, that was clear. He’d reacted in the way I’d expected him to earlier, given me canned answers in that sense, probably to test me out for whatever I knew or to see what I’d guess or how I’d reason. I mean, why should only Mom and Olga be on that bandwagon?

  But this was him right now. Barring him having troubadour talent, it was unlikely that he was good enough to fake both being a hapless lackey and Mr. Smooth all within the same few minutes. Pain had a tendency to wipe out the ability to pretend to be someone else, and blood loss undoubtedly had added to it all, but more than pain and such, we were finally asking the right questions.

  “Answer her,” Jeff growled.

  “No.” I lowered my Glock. “How is it that we were infiltrated by a guy who can, for all intents and purposes, go invisible, and yet the Poofs and Peregrines didn’t do squat until I called for them and Prince basically told them to get their butts in gear?”

  “Because he didn’t register as a threat,” Buchanan replied. “But the bombs were real, and the gas deadly. And it was released in your Embassy.”

  “And yet we were warned and able to evacuate the Embassy, everyone was gathered up and taken to safety, we didn’t lose anyone . . .” Examined Siler a little more closely. He still seemed far too calm for this situation.

  Mahin hadn’t been calm when she’d been in a similar situation. Because she was still new to the whole Terrorist In Training Game when we’d met her, and she was also a good person. In fact, I’d been around a lot of long-term bad people who hadn’t seemed calm when they were shot and/or held captive. And I’d been around some, good or bad, who had been calm, cool and collected in the same situation.

  “Three plans.”

  “What?” This was from all the men, in unison, other than Siler.

  “There’s always more going on, and Olga point blank told me she thought that we had the usual two, three, or four actions going on at the same time. Triggered by your climb up the political ladder, Jeff.”

  “I’m so proud.” He didn’t sound proud. He sounded suspicious. “What’s going on?”

  “Well, while I realize that Siler here would be a great addition to the Ronnie’s Kids Team, if he’s as old as I think he’d have to be to actually be Madeleine Cartwright’s illegitimate and hidden son, he’s been around longer than the first Apprentice. And that means there’s a good chance he’s been doing something to fill the time. And I can think of a great job for someone who can ‘blend.’ It’s pretty much what he did today, only really ineffectively. But I think that was on purpose.”

  “Want to share for the rest of us,” Christopher snarked, “or are we just going to have to try to decipher the Kittyisms?”

  “No, I’ll make it easy for you. I think Mister Siler here has been making a nice living as an assassin.”

  “Only sometimes,” Siler said with a small smile. “Just like all of you assassinate or kill people sometimes, the dangerous ones who need to be put down for the safety of the world. Like my parents.”

  “Your parents weren’t assassinated,” Buchanan said.

  “Oh, call it whatever term makes you happy. There are stories, but I’m sure most of the people all of you have killed were in self-defense in some way. I know for a fact that my mother was going to kill you, so if you’re here and she’s not, it’s not because she had a change of heart.”

  “True enough. You seem very, oh, casual about all this. Are you like a living bomb or something and you’re just waiting to detonate?”

  He grinned. “No. And I know you,” he looked at Buchanan, “are the real killer in the group. They need you. My people need me.”

  “How do you know all you think you know?” Buchanan asked. He, like Siler, seemed amazingly relaxed and calm. In fact, if I wanted to make comparisons, they were a lot alike, at least in terms of how they handled intense pressure situations.

  “Oh, crap. France. Meaning Europe. You’re with Interpol, or MI-Six or something like that, aren’t you? In their James Bond Division? Or are you part of the Assassination League and you’re just helping out in some really ineffective way? Or both?”

  Siler jerked, just a little. He tried to hide it, but I knew it had been real and I wasn’t the only one who’d caught it.

  “That’s it, baby,” Jeff said. “Good job.”

  “Always glad to toss out random crap and have it work. So, which job is our new pal here doing?”

  “It’s not one or the other . . . it’s both. He’s working with your ‘uncles,’ but he’s also infiltrating the terrorist networks targeting us and . . . more besides.”

  “How are you getting that?” Siler growled.

  “Why do you think they gave you an emotional blocker, scrambler, overlay or whatever the hell it was?” I asked him. “I mean, surely you’ve done your research on us.”

  Siler nodded. “They didn’t exaggerate about you, any of you, did they?”

  “Oh, they tend to like to sell us really short, but we don’t take it badly, usually because that way we get to stay alive.”

  “Let’s have some proof that we should leave you alive,” Buchanan said to Siler. “Because right now, Missus Chief, I’m on the side of kill him and let God and the governments sort it out.”

  CHAPTER 18

  “I CAN’T GIVE YOU ANY PROOF you’d believe,” Siler said, sounding unperturbed. “At least not here.”

  “Tell us what you were doing,” Christopher said. “Because I’m with Buchanan—regardless of what Jeff got from you, I think you’re our enemy and we should get rid of you before the next attack hits.”

  Something Cartwright and I had talked about before we’d killed her nudged. “I don’t think we can kill him. His cousins were essentially killed by their father, as was their mother, in early experiments with the supersoldier drug. Their all dying is probably why Marling focused more on androids and left the superdrugs to Gaultier. My bet, though, is that the reason Siler here isn’t out to avenge his parents’ deaths is that he knows he was an even earlier experiment. Clearly successful.”

  Siler gave me a closed-mouth smile. “Despite the fact that since you’ve joined up you’ve foiled almost every major offensive sent against your people, most of your enemies still want to consider you merely stupid and lucky.”

  “Your mother actually didn’t. We kind of . . . got along. In a sense, anyway.”

  “That’s nice. Would that have stopped her from murdering you if she’d been able?”

  “No. Not at all, honestly. If I’d promised to go away and not try to save people she might have. But I couldn’t do that.”

  He nodded. “Because you’re not like her. She was driven,” he spat out. “They were all driven. No one really matters to them, not as a person, an individual. Everyone and everything’s a means to an end.”

  “Mostly. Your uncle loved his wife, I do know that. And he loved his parrot.”

  “Lucky parrot. Maybe if my cousins had had feathers they’d still be alive.” Siler’s sarcasm knob, like everyone else’s around me, went to eleven. He looked at Christopher. “I’m not telling you who I�
��m affiliated with. You’re just going to have to trust me.”

  “Kitty might,” Christopher said. “Jeff might, too. I won’t.”

  “Up to you. And not my problem.” The color was coming back to his cheeks. “I was a successful experiment, yes. But I think it’s because of who my father was, and I’m certain that the reason Gaultier went on to create Surcenthumain was because I didn’t die and my aunt and cousins did. Gaultier made the connection to my father.”

  “Oh. Wow. You’re our Patient Zero, aren’t you?”

  “Patient what?” Jeff asked.

  “Patient Zero is a genetics term for the first person identified with a communicable disease, or for the first genetic anomaly in a family. It’s also used for computer viruses and even ideas.” Everyone stared at me. “What?”

  “As always,” Christopher replied, “it’s just strange hearing anything rationally scientific coming out of your mouth.”

  “See?” I said to Siler. “My friends think I’m an idiot, too.”

  He chuckled and stood up, slowly. “Not all of them, I’m sure.” He looked at Buchanan. “So, what’s your next move?”

  “Funny,” Buchanan said, with no humor in his tone, “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  “He looks better,” Tito said. “But I’d still like to get him to an infirmary, if not a hospital.”

  “Captain America rarely needs medical attention. Though we’ve already assigned that name to someone else.” And I wasn’t willing to give up Reader’s superhero name to Siler any time soon. “Besides, I’d say what with all that disappearing, he’s more like Nightcrawler.”

  “So glad you’ve assigned him a bizarre nickname,” Christopher said. Opened my mouth to explain. He put up his hand. “I don’t care which comic-book character it is or why you assigned it to this guy. Because I truly don’t care and I’m with Buchanan—we need to figure out what to do with him. Now.”

  “I think we need to figure out what else is coming,” Jeff said.

  “I can’t tell you,” Siler replied.

  Jeff nudged me. Took the hint. “So, are more places being set up to have poisoned gas released? And if so, why? Who’s going to be assassinated? Were you going to reveal yourself to us or did we just get lucky? Where are the other Ronnie’s Kids?”

  Jeff grunted. “Keep going,” he said quietly.

  “Fine by me. So, Nightcrawler, you seemed really well prepped to act like you’re part of the New Terrorist Mutant Network. So, are you a part of it? And, if you are, are you trying to bring it down, join and take over, or just along for the family reunion portions?”

  “I’d like to know how he’s been hidden from all of us for all this time,” Christopher said. “Because we understand how the others were hidden—they only knew that they were different from other people before they were approached. They didn’t know why. But he’s too aware of what he is to have stayed in hiding all this time.”

  “I want to know why you faked me out earlier, too, by the way. That seemed like a lot of work for basically nothing and no reason. Unless you really wanted to off yourself and take me and Prince, and only me and Prince, with you.”

  “I could just kill him and we call it good,” Buchanan offered.

  “I really like that plan,” Christopher said. “Right now, that’s my favorite plan.”

  “Why did you have me patch him up if we’re just going to kill him?” Tito asked. “I do have things to do, you know.”

  “I want to know if he’s working with the Dingo, if he’s working with the League of Assassins, if he’s working with Interpol or similar, if he’s working with the Mastermind and the Apprentice, if he’s made a real or fake love connection with Ronnie’s Kids, and if, by chance, he can point us in the direction of said siblings.”

  Siler sighed. “I get it. You’re all just going to talk at, around, and about me until I give in or die from boredom.”

  “No,” Jeff said. “They’re going to talk at, around, and about you while you have emotional reactions to what they say that I’m interpreting. And I know you know this, because I can feel you trying to control what you’re feeling so you can fool me. Here’s a tip—you can’t possibly fool me. You’re good, but nowhere near good enough.”

  “You’ve been fooled before,” Siler pointed out.

  “True enough.”

  “How do you know that?” Christopher asked.

  Siler rolled his eyes. “I have sources. Lots of them.”

  “Fine,” Jeff said amiably. “But your sources should have told you that I was fooled by people who’d spent their lifetimes learning how to lie to empaths.”

  “Or by those using the various devices,” I added.

  “Thanks for the support, baby. The only empaths are within my community. And you’re not a part of that community, which was one of Christopher’s points. So it’s pretty hard to practice lying to an empath when you’ve never spent any time with one. You’re good, I’m sure you’ll learn how. But not today.”

  “So, what my awesome husband is saying is that we can continue to talk at, about, and around you—and speaking for myself I can do this all day, nonstop—or you can start sharing information we want to know, and need to know.”

  “She can talk nonstop for days,” Christopher said. “Trust me. Do yourself, and the rest of us, a favor.”

  “I heard that.”

  “Fine,” Siler said, sounding exasperated. “We’re on a schedule, so I’ll give you some help.”

  “What ‘we,’ Kemosabe? The we that is all of us in this room, the we that is you and your many employers, the we that is you and your many illegitimate siblings, or the we that is some other kind of we?”

  “More governments than just the United States’ have been aware that aliens were on Earth for decades,” Siler said, ignoring my questions yet again. “I wasn’t hidden by my parents and their friends—I was hidden from them.”

  “By whom?” Tito asked.

  Siler sighed. “By my uncle.”

  “Antony Marling hid you from his cronies? Pull the other one, it has bells on.”

  This earned me a dirty look. “No, not him. My mother’s brother, Hubert Siler.”

  CHAPTER 19

  “TRUTH,” JEFF SAID. “Who is Hubert Siler?”

  “Who is Keyser Soze?” This earned me the “you so crazy” looks from Jeff and Christopher, chuckles from Buchanan and Tito, and a still-not-up-to-our-high-standards glare from Siler. Prince shared that he thought I was hilarious, though, so there was that.

  “My uncle was real. Quite real. He’s the only reason I escaped to have an even halfway normal life.”

  “Where is he now?” Buchanan asked.

  “Dead,” Siler snapped. “For years. He found me, rescued me from his sisters’ insanity, and we hid out until they lost interest in us.”

  “Sounds like a great movie. Only issue is, I’d never lose interest in someone who can go invisible, and I’m just going to spitball here and say that your parents and their buddies didn’t, either.”

  “They didn’t,” Jeff said. “He’s desperately trying to hide this, God alone knows why, but he and his uncle spent his childhood on the run. He’s lived all over Eurasia.”

  “He’s trying to hide it so we’ll know less about him,” Buchanan said. “Assume he can speak several languages fluently, possibly all of the languages of Europe, since he’s been around for decades and had the time to learn. It takes money and connections to be able to run and hide like that. So the family, or at least the uncle, had both. Most likely answer is that the uncle was in intelligence work and took his nephew along.”

  “Or his uncle was an assassin, and also took his nephew along.”

  “Ah,” Jeff said. “That’s the right answer, baby.”

  “And so not a shocker. That’s why you’re working with the Dingo Dog and Surly Vic.”

  Siler blinked. “That’s what you call them? To their faces?” He looked and sounded shocked, horrified, and
just slightly impressed.

  Controlled the Inner Hyena, though it took effort. “No, dude, I’m neither moronic nor suicidal. I call them Uncle Dingo and Uncle Surly to their faces. If you catch my drift.”

  Siler’s horror remained intact on his expression. “And they’re okay with that?”

  “Oh, my God, no! I call them Uncle Peter and Uncle Victor. When we chat. Which is rarely. But, these days, always something I look forward to. If only because they’re more forthcoming with the information than you, my mother, or most of my in-the-know friends. A girl likes to have someone tell her the damn poop and scoop once in a while, you know?”

  “Ah, yeah. Okay.” Siler looked at Buchanan. “I see why they all think she’s just lucky.”

  “Never make the mistake of thinking that I’m willing to insult Missus Chief, or have anyone else insult her to me, especially someone who’s not a close relative of her husband’s.” Buchanan’s voice was icy. “We’re not friends, you and I. I’m not betting we ever will be. She gets your respect or you get my boot up your ass.”

  “Malcolm’s my favorite, in case anyone wasn’t clear.”

  “I thought Len and Kyle were your favorites,” Jeff said, sounding worried.

  “They’re my favorites, too. I have a lot of favorites.”

  “And you wonder why I’m jealous,” Jeff muttered.

  “You’re my most favorite. Does that help?”

  Jeff grinned. “A little.” He kissed my cheek and nuzzled my ear. “A lot,” he purred. Did my best not to rub up against him, but it took effort.

  “Do you two ever stop?” Christopher asked.

  “No. Whine about it to Amy later. So, Nightcrawler, what’s the good, evil, and/or horrific word? We have a lot to get back to, including dealing with the Tastemaker, which I, personally, cannot wait for.”

  Siler jerked. “Wait, what? What’s Jenkins doing sniffing around you?”

  “Really? That’s what gets you? Some gossip columnist?”