Alien vs. Alien

by Gini Koch

  “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.”

  Yi

  CHAPTER 63

  “ON 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 d
ust,” 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.”

  Yi

  CHAPTER 64

  JENNIFER LOOKED PALE. “What’s in the spaceships isn’t a life form we’re familiar with, but I think there are more parasites than there are spaceships.”

  This hadn’t shocked me because their reactions had been textbook for an imageer or empath touching the image of a superbeing. Jeremy pulled some wipes out of his pocket and handed them to William and Jennifer, which was the textbook response from any other A-C around someone who’d touched a superbeing image.

  Parasites was the name given to the jellyfish things from outer space that attached to mammals on Earth and turned them into horrific superbeings. My introduction to my new life happened when a superbeing formation occurred right in front of me.

  The parasites were attracted to rage, meaning they tended to attach to humans. Superbeings were just that—super, but in a bad way for the Earth in general and humans in particular. Most of them turned into enraged killing machines at the moment of transformation.

  They were stoppable, but it took a whole lot of firepower to do it. If the invaders were bringing or driving more parasites toward us, we were in worse trouble than anyone could imagine.

  “I thought we’d gotten rid of most of the parasites,” Tito said. “Based on what I’ve learned since joining Centaurion Division, we’ve destroyed hundreds of thousands of these things.”

  “They came from a world whose sun went supernova. We have billions of people on this planet—why assume their planet had any less of a population?” Based on the number of parasites heading toward us, I felt confident they’d had a population to rival, or even beat, ours.

  “Has anyone contacted Alpha Four?” White asked.

  Franklin laughed mirthlessly. “Oh, yes. This is the answer we got back: ‘Until you verify via the proper protocols, we cannot trust your transmissions.’ Signed by King Alexander and Councilor Leonidas.”

  “But they sent us the Peregrines.” I looked at Bruno, who looked right back. “Because they don’t trust Earth, necessarily, but they do trust us.” Bruno bobbed his head. “Why don’t you have the proper protocols?” I asked Franklin.

  “We aren’t the ones who normally contact Alpha Four.”

  The light dawned in a big, bright way. “Oh, crap. The notes that came with the Peregrines—the ‘mutual friend’ Christopher was being warned to protect wasn’t Jeff, it was Chuckie. He’s the one who Alexander and Leonidas trust. So if you take him out, then Alpha Four no longer knows who to talk to.”

  “And they’ve been fooled before,” Naomi said.

  “Exactly, and by those most likely involved right now. For all they know, Earth has called this invasion force out to take over the Alpha Centauri system.”

  “Interesting that you say that,” Franklin said. “Because as of right now, we can’t be sure where this armada is headed. The direction they’re coming from indicates they’re headed for us, but they could easily branch off and head for Alpha Centauri, or even divide and attack both solar systems.”

  “If the message was sent to Clarence, then somehow LaRue and Ronaldo have made new friends, and they’re the ones dropping by for a visit.”

  “We need to be able to prove that,” White said. “Because if it’s not them, then there’s another action being taken against Earth, and that complicates the situation even more than we suspect.”

  William and Jennifer were talking quietly, and he had the picture again. He nodded. “Ambassador, we’ve both read the beings inside the ships. It’s difficult, from this distance, because in addition to the distance, what we have is a metal of some kind that we have to read through. So we can’t identify any individuals.”

  “But we can pick up generalities,” Jennifer said. “So I can tell you that the minds aren’t mammalian.”

  “They feel somewhat familiar,” William said. “But not like anything I’m really used to reading.”

  “You two can’t read through these ships, but I know someone who can, especially if he knows where to look and what to look for. We need to get these pictures to Christopher White, faster than immediately.”

  “I can’t let these out of my control,” Franklin said. “You’ll have to bring him here.”

  “No way. He’s all we’ve got right now. They took Jeff, who Alexander and Leonidas might listen to. If we lose Christopher, then we have no one who’s able to work at the super levels.” And I knew in my gut they’d be after Christopher. The Peregrines had arrived just in time, presumably at the exact moment Alpha Four had determined that the space invaders were absolutely heading for Earth.

  “It might not be related,” Abigail said.

  “It is. I know it is.” I did. What Jeff called my feminine intuition and my mother called gut reactions said this was all part of LaRue’s plan. She’d been the brains of Operation Confusion—the massive number of distractions that had been doing their evil double duty were classic LaRue. And when they’d escaped in the FTL spaceship they’d conned Alexander out of, they’d gone out of Christopher’s range, meaning far, far away. Who knew what, or whom, they’d found to help them?

  Ronaldo was part Yates and, as we’d determined, he was Serene’s older brother, meaning his mother was an A-C, too. But Yates had been a player of the highest order, so there could be a ton of his kids, most likely hybrids, out here. They could be organized—after all, the Al Dejahl organization was back in action.

  Yates was also one of the few who’d managed to remain in control of his human side once he’d joined with the Mephistopheles parasite. Meaning Ronaldo probably had that ability, too. For all I knew, White, Lucinda, and Gladys might have it, as well. They were all Yates’ offspring, after all. But whether or not this meant Ronaldo had joined with the parasites or just knew how to control them, I didn’t know. But only someone with experience in controlling them somehow would be able to use them as a strike force.

  “What about ACE?” Naomi asked quietly. “He’s connected us to Alpha Four before, and that means of communication has been trusted.”

  “This is why he’s been distracted. He can’t help us—he’s already torn.” And ACE had told me as much. ACE was going to guard the Dome. Or die trying. That statement had a lot more impact now that I knew what was coming. “We can’t rely on ACE for this. He’s protecting the only area of the world he can.”

  I took the leap, but I took it silently—ACE was protecting what the invaders were after. We were making it easier on him by moving all the goals into one place, but that meant we were focusing more firepower at ACE, too.

  Operation Assassination had been a good trial run, but I knew that Reader and Tim were still too untried for the magnitude of what was coming. So was I. We needed the guys who’d managed enemy attacks for over a decade and knew how to do it in their sleep. We also needed the guy who’d likely planned for this eventuality. The bad guys knew it, too, which was why Jeff and Chuckie had been kidnapped.

  “How did Valentino get here?” Buchanan asked. “Without anyone noticing, I mean.”

  “Tino! Tino! Tino!”

  “Yes, Bellie. Seriously, MJO, shut her up. Anyway, Clarence used a gate of some kind. They’re using something like that to move as fast as they are through space. The Alpha Centauri system has fas
ter-than-light travel and they use it, but they also use gate technology to move even faster.”

  “Something else works that fast,” Tito said.

  “True.” Nothing moved you faster than ACE, and I knew that was what Tito meant—he and I had been part of the team that had taken the Time Warp Express over to Alpha Four during Operation Invasion, after all. “You think they figured out how to reengage their mini-ACE?” I asked him.

  “I think it’s a really strong likelihood, yeah. They could have sent Clarence here that way, too, which would mean we’d be unlikely to notice.”

  “And we weren’t looking for Clarence,” Naomi said.

  “We were supposed to be,” White

  replied.

  “But why didn’t ACE say something?” Abigail asked.

  My conversation with ACE came back to me. “Because whatever it is they’ve got is also sentient and is trying to, I think, confuse ACE, turn him against us, something along those lines. At a higher level than we can understand. And ACE warning us goes against his ‘observe and don’t affect’ programming.”

  “From what I’ve heard, ACE struggles with the decision every time he helps us,” Tito added.

  “True enough. Look, we have to get these pictures to Christopher. We need to stop flying blind.”

  White nodded. “I agree. I’ll take the pictures to him.”

  “I need you here. Can’t we just calibrate and toss them through the gate?”

  “It’s not a secure method,” White admitted.

  “And I say again, I can’t let them leave our control.” Franklin neither looked nor sounded happy. I couldn’t blame him. “It sounds like it would be wiser for us to have him come here, in part because I’m sure we could use his help.”

  “We can’t risk Christopher. Period. Right now, he’s the most important person on Earth. At least, if we want to have an Earth left.”