by Gini Koch
CHAPTER 2
CHRISTOPHER DIDN’T REALLY LOOK LIKE his cousin. Where Martini was well over six feet and extremely muscular in a non-body-builder way, Christopher was a head shorter and more lean and wiry. He was fairer, with green eyes and lighter straight brown hair. They were both gorgeous—I still hadn’t met an A-C who wasn’t—but Christopher resembled his late mother, and I’d been told Martini resembled his father, so you had to know them to realize they were closely related.
Christopher also had glaring down to an art form, and we were being treated to patented Glare #1. “What did I do now?” Martini asked.
“Why am I the one who has to field every communication from your parents?”
Oh, this one again. I tried to slip away, but Martini had a firm grasp on me.
“Because, like everyone else, they like you better.”
“I like you better, Jeff.”
“Thanks, baby. You’re about the only one.”
Christopher rolled his eyes. “If I have to tell Aunt Lucinda one more time that you’re tied up in an important meeting, I’m going to kill you.”
Martini rubbed his forehead. “What did she want this time?”
Christopher didn’t answer and looked at me. “Great landing, Kitty.”
“Your mother wants to know why you haven’t dumped me yet and married a nice A-C girl or boy like you’re supposed to.” A-Cs didn’t have hang-ups about same-sex relationships. They just had them about interspecies and interreligious ones.
Christopher flushed. Got it in one! “It’s not like that,” he muttered, but he was now looking at his shoes.
“And you wonder why I’m dodging her calls?” Martini hugged me. “Let’s get inside.”
“Jeff, it’s not Christopher’s fault.” It was mine, for being human and falling in love with her son, at least, as far as I’d picked up. Or Martini’s, for doing the same with me. The whole “saved his life” thing didn’t seem to factor in for Martini’s parents. “Maybe if I met them—”
“Not a great idea!” both Christopher and Martini chorused.
“How bad can they be? I mean, Christopher, your father seems to think I’m okay.” Richard White was the Sovereign Pontifex for the A-Cs, or, as I thought of it, their Pope with Benefits.
“My father thinks you’re great.”
“But I’m not his son’s girlfriend.” Both of them winced, because that had been a close call, and the three of us normally did our best not to bring it up. So, my bad, as pretty much always. Maybe Martini was right to keep me away from his parents.
“Let’s talk about this later.” Martini sounded tired and depressed. Which made me worry. “Don’t stress out, baby.” The positive of being with the strongest empath on Earth was that he was really in tune with how I was feeling. The downside was that I couldn’t hide anything from him emotionally, even when I wanted to.
Paul Gower joined us in the doorway. He was built like Martini, only black and bald. His father had married an African-American human. I often found myself wondering how happy she was, but I hadn’t asked. Yet.
“We have a bigger issue than your parents,” Gower shared, looking tense and sounding tenser. “Clustered activity.”
Martini and Christopher both flipped into what I considered Commander Mode. “Where?” Martini asked briskly as we all trotted inside.
“Paraguay.”
“Paraguay?” Christopher sounded shocked. Martini grimaced.
“Why not Paraguay?” I’d been all over the world by now, killing forming fuglies and keeping the world safe from becoming superbeing sushi. South America was hit as frequently as everywhere else, though in overall superbeing activity, the U.S.A. was still number one with a bullet.
“In the Chaco,” Gower added.
“Of course,” Martini muttered.
I grabbed my purse from Hughes, told him that he and the rest of my flyboys were off duty but on standby, and then we headed for the nearest bank of gates. The gates were alien technology that allowed us to move freely about the world by leaping from one gate to another. The majority of the gates were located in the restrooms of all the world’s airports. Having visited more men’s rooms than I cared to remember, by now I could attest to their placement being both effective and gross at the same time. But we could go from Nevada to New York in about three seconds.
“There are airports there,” I reminded them, as I tried to pull up how rainy or dry Paraguay was and failed.
“True,” Martini acknowledged. “But we’re not going there.”
“We’re not?” I wasn’t overly disappointed. We had dinner with my parents planned, and superbeing-extermination trips tended to wreck any schedule.
Reader joined us. “They’re right on the line.” He sounded worried, and the other men looked tense. I felt nothing other than confusion—this was a new one.
“Excuse me?”
We reached the gate, and Gower calibrated. As always when any A-C did this, his hand was a blur. and I couldn’t watch. Not that staring at alien technology that still looked more like an airport metal detector than anything else to me was a thrill in the first place. “Going through single. Sorry, Kitty,” he added with an apologetic smile. “We’re in an emergency situation.
Martini didn’t look happy, but he didn’t argue, either, so I chose to be a big girl and not whine. Gower went through, I took a deep breath, then I followed.
Going through a gate was like being in a movie where they speed up the film to show the passage of time quickly. Only you were in said movie live, with no Dramamine. The gates had made me sick to my stomach from day one and continued their work unabated. It took no more than a second and a half for the step that moved me from Area 51 to the Dulce Science Center but it was a year in terms of nausea.
Out just before I barfed, like always. Martini and the others were right behind me. We were on what I call the Bat Cave level of the Science Center—it looked like the most high-tech command-type center ever conceived. I tended to ignore most of the equipment on the grounds that it made me dizzy, and if I ignored it, I could pretend it wasn’t there.
We trotted to Batman’s Inner Sanctum, or what Martini and Christopher called Field and Imageering Central Command. Well, Reader and I trotted. Martini, Christopher, and Gower all used hyperspeed, meaning to our human eyes they disappeared. Hyperspeed for humans was slightly better than the gates in terms of nausea, but only a little, so I was glad to move at boring old human levels.
“What did you mean by ‘the line,’ James?”
“The Tropic of Capricorn crosses through Paraguay, that’s what we mean by the line.”
“Why is that good, bad, or indifferent?”
He shook his head. “For whatever reasons, when superbeings form along the Tropics of Cancer or Capricorn, they’re stronger.”
“Stronger than the ones that were able to control the transfer?”
“No. Differently stronger.”
I wanted to share that this wasn’t clearing anything up for me, but we were in the Inner Sanctum, and things were in a very controlled form of chaotic activity. There were actually two rooms that made up this section, one for Field, one for Imageering. By the time Reader and I arrived, Christopher had presumably raced off to his room, and Martini was settled in front of the huge bank of screens that were the focus of the Field side.
By settled, I mean he was standing in front of them as images flashed on the screen. There were easily fifty screens on the main wall, and while the peripheral ones had areas I knew weren’t in Paraguay, the majority were showing what I assumed was the Tropic of Capricorn.
It looked like a flat, marshy part of Paraguay with a lot of superbeings in it. The Paraguay portion of our Must Watch Horrorvision was rather pretty. The superbeings made up for that, though. All twelve of them.
CHAPTER 3
IN THE OLDEN DAYS OF the mid-twentieth century, the parasites that created superbeings when joined with an unsuspecting human host arrived in ones
and twos at irregular intervals. After Mephistopheles, the Big Bad of Operation Fugly, had established himself on Earth, they came with a lot of regularity, building up to lots and lots all the time.
However, clustering—where several superbeings manifested at the same time and in one area—had happened in the past only when an in-control superbeing was getting ready to hit the town. Since we’d destroyed all the in-control ones, it was unsettling to have a cluster, especially one of a dozen.
The parasites were attracted to rage. How they’d found twelve angry people out in what looked like the middle of nowhere was beyond me.
Every superbeing manifested differently based, as far as we knew, more on the parasite than its human host. These were no exception, though I saw similarities among them. They were all along the Insect of Your Nightmares variety, though insects that weren’t from anywhere around here. Then again, I didn’t know what kinds of bugs Paraguay specialized in. However, I tended to doubt their bugs were between six and ten feet tall and loaded with an amazing array of horrifically shaped, yet seemingly razor-sharp, extremities, mandibles, and so forth.
I could see a great number of droolingly handsome men in Armani suits dashing about on the screens, meaning we had a lot of A-Cs on the scene. All field teams consisted of an empath and an imageer. Depending on what was going on, they might have a human along to drive or fly, and usually no more than two additional A-Cs. The teams in Paraguay had all that and more. It didn’t look like a normal setup at all.
Martini was giving orders, and he was doing it at normal speed for an A-C, meaning a lot faster than humans could hear, at least if we were interested in silly things like comprehension. Like so many other aspects of hyperspeed, this made me sick.
A random A-C handed me a set of wireless headphones, which I put on gratefully. Since I’d joined up and pointed out that having your human teammates barfing when you were trying to save the day was a bad plan, the A-Cs had added their version of translation headsets to the Inner Sanctum supply closet.
So I could now hear Martini’s orders and not pass out. I was hearing them at least five minutes after he’d said them, but I considered this a huge improvement over fainting. I made sure I didn’t look at his mouth moving—the few times I had, it was like watching a badly dubbed foreign film. Right after barfing or passing out, I’d discovered no one liked me cracking up during Inner Sanctum sessions, Martini least of all.
“Do we need Airborne involved?” I asked Reader, who was putting his own headset on.
He shook his head. “Jeff’s handling it.”
I decided not to argue or whine about this. My division was still very new, and while I had utmost confidence in my team, they were all still at Home Base, and even with a gate transfer, shipping military jets took some time. Hopefully it’d all be over before they could get there, so why send them. Besides, Martini seemed intent, and I didn’t want to throw off his groove.
I listened for a while, but after a few minutes it became boring and frustrating. Frustrating because I was now used to being in the action, and I wasn’t a fan of sitting around watching others getting to kick butt.
Martini was sending various A-C teams to different parts of Paraguay, calling in military support from both Brazil and Argentina, and giving a variety of directions to those directly engaged with these particular manifestations. I should have been paying rapt attention, learning how to do this myself.
But it was all done in extreme military-speak, which got dull fast. I hadn’t yet mastered the lingo and jargon, and situations like this never made learning seem worthwhile. And watching international politics fade in the face of extreme danger had stopped being a thrill months ago. I’d learned that when it came to hanging around kibitzing, I preferred watching the imageers work.
While Martini brought in tanks and artillery, I slunk over to Christopher’s half of the Sanctum.
The Imageering side had a similar setup to the Field half—lots of screens, computer terminals, and so forth. There were also a variety of monitors, and every one of them had an A-C in front of it, hands on the screen, expressions in varying stages of concentration.
Empaths felt emotions but couldn’t manipulate them. They were the ones who spotted superbeing trouble most of the time, because the superbeings were attracted to rage and when they formed, the human host’s brain and emotions went haywire.
Martini, the most powerful empath on Earth, was able to feel what the other empaths did, almost like shortwave radio, passed from the teams in the Field on back, as needed. He could turn it on and off—apparently they all could—due to drugs and training, but it meant that while he was ordering everyone around, he was also monitoring who was in the most emotional need.
It was impressive to the extreme and one of the main reasons he was the man in charge of pretty much all A-C operations that weren’t religiously based, but it wasn’t something I was actually able to share or experience myself.
Imageers, by contrast, couldn’t feel anything unless they were touching an image—any kind of image. Once touched, they knew everything about that person. Christopher said it was because photos and the like captured a copy of the person’s mind and soul as well as their physical image.
Imageers could also manipulate images, and that’s what they were all doing—altering what the cameras in Paraguay were catching and changing it into something far less terrifying than the Attack of the Intergalactic Dirty Dozen.
So the screens on the wall showed what was really going on, and the monitors showed what the A-Cs were changing the various camera feeds into. Christopher had tried to explain it to me, and I’d done better with it than learning all the military blah, blah, blah Martini had shared with me. I wasn’t clear on how it all worked, of course, but the bottom line was that the more cameras, cell phones, video cameras, and satellites that were trained on a superbeing incident, the more imageers needed.
From the number of bodies in the room, there were a lot more cameras in this part of Paraguay than I’d have thought there would be. The area I was looking at on the big screen didn’t seem overly populated.
Christopher had the biggest monitor, and he was altering footage while barking orders. Unlike Martini, he was barking them at human speeds. And also unlike Martini’s side of the house, I got to see what those orders translated into.
“I want all the cell phone feeds altered to blurred images,” Christopher snapped. “Video and film footage altered to show native folk dancing and similar. Go for stock footage.”
The imageers handling the cell phones had it easy, as far as I could tell. The images on their monitors blurred until they looked like nothing so much as someone with serious palsy taking pictures of the inside of an enthusiastic squirrel.
I was interested to discover that the term “stock footage” was used by the whole galaxy, at least those parts of it present on Earth. There was a wide variety of choices filtering through—some I recognized from a couple of National Geographic specials, some I didn’t. But they all had the canned look of people performing their native dances for the cameras—it was clear these shots weren’t Live at the Scene.
An A-C ran in from the Field side. “Commander White, Commander Martini says the C.I.A. on the scene are creating problems.”
“Like always,” Christopher growled. “What do they want?”
The A-C gulped. “They want to control these superbeings, not kill them.”
“What?” Christopher exploded. “Are they crazy? This is their stated goal?”
“No, sir. Commander Martini was able to determine this based on their emotional reactions.” The A-C coughed. “The rest of us were able to determine based on their telling our field teams to go away and let them handle it.”
“How Aliens of them.” I shrugged at the confused look Christopher shot me. I always forgot—the A-Cs never went in for science fiction movies of any kind, presumably on the belief they were documentaries they lived every day. “It’s a real common theme
in the movies. Governmental bad guys want to control the evil, almost unstoppable monsters, small band of good guys manages to save the day, blah, blah, blah. Want me to talk to them?” I asked brightly.
“No, and I’m sure Jeff doesn’t, either.” Christopher looked at the messenger. “What does Commander Martini want to do?”
Before anyone could reply, the superbeings on screen all blew up. The images shifted to either the native dances ending, fireworks displays, or the palsied squirrels going dormant, depending.
Martini walked in. “Now that our friends from Argentina used some stinger missiles and stopped the immediate problem, I want to go to C.I.A. headquarters and deal with the ongoing one.”
CHAPTER 4
“GREAT!” I’d been dying to go to C.I.A. head quarters for quite a while now. Based on the A-Cs’ levels of hierarchy, the only people allowed to interact with the top C.I.A. bigwigs were Martini and Christopher. The Pontifex, Gower, and Reader weren’t even allowed over there. I hadn’t been, either, and this looked like my big chance.
“Not just no, but hell no,” Martini said calmly. I started to pout, and he shook his head. “You don’t need to see what we’re going to do over there, and we don’t need them getting any better idea of what you can and can’t do than they already have.”
Reader joined us. “Jeff, I just got off with your favorite guy. He insists this wasn’t an official C.I.A. plan and wants you and Christopher over there immediately.”
Martini growled. “They don’t give us orders.”
Christopher’s expression said this wasn’t actually true. I thought back to Operation Fugly—the traitorous side had certainly had the C.I.A. on speed dial, and despite what my parents had said about government control of Centaurion Division, I wasn’t fully convinced they were right. In the few months I’d been here, it seemed as though every government agency in the U.S. and at least half of them worldwide felt they had a stake in Centaurion.
But no amount of whining and complaining changed Martini’s mind. I still wasn’t getting to hang with the C.I.A. He and Christopher cleaned up, gave some orders, then they and Reader headed for the main launch area. I tagged along, of course, on the off chance I could still weasel an opportunity out of Martini.
