Alien vs. Alien

by Gini Koch

  “I can’t handle any more hyperspeed right now,” Chuckie said. “I had enough of that today—I honestly don’t think my body can take it.”

  “That’s the main reason we’ve been moving so slowly,” Jeff said.

  I looked at his expression. “No, it’s not. I mean, I’m not doubting Chuckie, but you two are doing more than staggering homeward.”

  “True enough,” Chuckie said. “We had to move slowly, so we were examining the tunnels as we went. We can do more of that later. However, I can’t move fast. If I have to deal with more hyperspeed reactions today, I’m going to be bedridden.”

  “We can’t afford to have either one of you out. But we have to get back.”

  Jeff sighed. “Fine, fine.” He fiddled with whatever he was holding. I stepped closer and took a good look. It was a shiny cube, and it looked familiar. “Where, exactly, are we headed, baby?”

  “The Embassy ballroom. It’s loaded with people and equipment, though.”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem. Richard, hold onto Kitty and Chuck, will you?”

  My jaw dropped. This was the first time I’d ever heard Jeff call Chuckie anything other than Reynolds. White took our hands as requested, Jeff finished his fiddling, grabbed my free hand, and we moved.

  This felt nothing like a gate transfer or hyperspeed. There was no nausea, no feeling of movement, really. But we could see where we were going, in a sense, but we were moving by everything so fast it was something of a blur. The movement and feeling was very similar to how ACE had shifted us all to Alpha Four and back again at the end of Operation Invasion. We stopped quickly enough, right in the middle of the ballroom. It dawned on me that I’d forgotten to tell Jeff that the Embassy was shielded, but apparently that hadn’t been an issue, because we were all okay.

  “Jeff! Jeff! Jeff!” Bellie sounded overjoyed. But she stayed with Oliver. I wasn’t sure if he had a death grip on her legs or what, but I was thankful for the small favor.

  Jeff winced. “Whoa. All of you are really stressed and upset.”

  “Why wouldn’t we be?” Christopher snapped.

  “Why are you all mad at us?” Jeff asked.

  “You do realize we’ve thought you were kidnapped all this time,” White said calmly. “Therefore, while Missus Martini and I have had a few moments to come to grips with the fact that the two of you are back with us, most of the rest of the room is relieved to see the two of you alive and reasonably well, while at the same time being remarkably perturbed that you have waited so very long to reassure us of your health and well-being.”

  “What Richard said. Only not nearly as nicely.”

  Naomi stared at Chuckie. “We thought you might be dead,” she said finally.

  “Clarence said he had you,” Abigail added. “He almost convinced Sis to go with him to save you.”

  “I’m sorry.” Chuckie looked as though he had no idea of what to say in this situation. Come to think of it, he probably didn’t.

  “You didn’t call,” Naomi added. She walked over to him. “In fact, you didn’t text, send a mental message, or send an emotional message, either. Nothing. I thought you were dead.”

  “I didn’t mean to worry you.” Chuckie looked and sounded worried.

  “Clarence actually sort of had us—” Jeff said.

  Before he could finish, Naomi burst into tears. Chuckie pulled her into his arms, held her, and did the soothing murmur thing. He also did the nuzzling of the head thing, as well as the stroking of the back in an intimate way thing. I heard a couple of terms of endearment in there, too.

  This didn’t shock me all that much. I’d had a strong suspicion for quite a while, after all, and if White calling him Charles the moment we were with Naomi hadn’t been the clear clue, her actions when Chuckie was in danger certainly left no room for confusion. And some of the Poof Population Explosion was also explained. But not all. Wondered if the Poofs somehow knew what was coming and had been staffing up in preparation. Decided I could find out another time.

  I looked at Jeff. In contrast to what I would have guessed even this morning, he didn’t look shocked at all. He also didn’t look angry. He looked incredibly pleased. Clearly their time alone together had been great for bonding.

  Jeff looked at me, and the pleased look left his face to be replaced by a guilty and apologetic look. He ran his hand through his hair. Now that we were in the light, I could see that he’d definitely taken some kind of beating. Because A-Cs healed fast, he didn’t look as bad as he’d probably looked a couple hours prior, but Jeff was definitely going to need adrenaline. He probably needed isolation, but I doubted we had time for that.

  “I’m not going to turn on the waterworks. Because I’ve been too busy to focus on the fretting, so I’m not nearly as upset as Mimi is, and because I’m just under the emotional level where I’m so angry that I’m going to cry. But if you don’t tell us all exactly what the hell is going on, quickly, succinctly, and immediately, I’m going to show you that Naomi has nothing on me in terms of histrionics.”

  Jeff looked at Chuckie, who nodded.

  “I told you he wasn’t in love with me any more,” I said quietly.

  “Yeah, yeah. You know, he’s a great guy. I have no idea why I didn’t realize it before.”

  Christopher coughed. We’d moved from throat clearing to coughing as the new noises epidemic. “No idea at all, Jeff. Wouldn’t be your typical jealousy thing, would it?”

  “Or the Alpha Male fighting thing.”

  Jeff shrugged. “Things of the past.”

  Christopher and I both coughed. It was the new epidemic for sure. “I’ll start the betting pool,” Christopher said to me.

  “This is touching,” Franklin said. “But since we have an alien armada about to invade and likely conquer us, I believe we’d all appreciate knowing what you two gentlemen have been up to.”

  “What do you mean, we have an alien armada on the way?” Jeff asked, Commander voice back on full.

  “I’m pulling rank,” Franklin said. “As Commander of Andrews Air Force Base, or whatever’s left of it, I want your intel first. We’ll catch you up after that.”

  “What do you mean, whatever’s left of it?” Chuckie asked.

  “Long story. I’m with Colonel Franklin—you show us yours and then we’ll show you ours. And make it snappy. We don’t know how much time we actually have before they show up.”

  Jeff nodded and looked around. “Who are all—”

  “Later. They’ve all done the spit shake and pinky swear, or will do as soon as we have time. Your intel now. Introductions after you get some adrenaline. Now, Jeff. I mean it. We’re all seriously tired, pissed, and stressed.”

  “Fine. You told me to find Reynolds, which I did.”

  “Just as Clarence showed up out of nowhere,” Chuckie added, still holding onto Naomi.

  “C

  larence tried to grab Reynolds, I was able to get him first. I saw that Clarence had . . . something of mine.” I could tell he didn’t want me sharing what I’d seen him use to get us back here with anyone else.

  “The glowing cu*be Terry gave you when you were ten.”

  Jeff gaped at me. “Why are you discussing that here when—?”

  “Seriously, Jeff, hurry the hell up and stop being coy. Figure everyone in this room knows or should know all about what’s going on. You two are way behind on the Bad Guy Scheme du Jour.”

  “Fine. I saw the cube, realized he must have been the one who took it from my parents’ home. Then Clarence took off. We were both fine, and Reynolds agreed Clarence was the highest security risk at the Festival. So we followed him.”

  “For miles,” Chuckie said. “At hyperspeed.”

  “Right. So, we caught him at some golf course. While Reynolds was on his hands and knees throwing up, Clarence and I got into a fight.”

  “He’s taken Surcenthumain. A lot of it, from what I could see.”

  “Yeah, baby, he has. I was able to get the cube a
way from him, but only because he knocked me down and I grabbed it as I was falling. Once I had it, I grabbed Reynolds, only Clarence attacked us again. He hits hard, and I hadn’t been winning the fight in the first place. I wanted to get the hell away and get the two of us to safety.”

  “And?”

  Jeff shrugged. “And all of a sudden, we weren’t on a golf course anymore.”

  Yi

  CHAPTER 89

  “WE WERE IN A ROOM,” Chuckie said. “The movement that took us there was similar to when we were all taken to Alpha Four, only much faster.”

  “Just like Jeff used to get us back here.”

  He nodded. “So, once inside, we were safe from Clarence.”

  “And anything else,” Jeff said. “We couldn’t get out.”

  Chuckie looked around the room. “You activated the protocols?”

  “Yes, we’re all caught up, Director Fury. And everyone here knows about the tunnel system and the rooms.”

  “Great. Based on what I already knew, I realized we had to be in a dead zone, and based on where we’d been when the cube activated, I figured we were inside the dead zone still being mapped. We couldn’t receive or send any electronic signals, and Martini had no empathic abilities at all.”

  “I couldn’t read Reynolds, and he was right next to me.”

  “Wow, we’ve officially found A-C kryptonite. Wonderful.”

  “Our watches stopped working, too,” Chuckie said. “So we didn’t have a clear idea of the passage of time.”

  Naomi sniffled and looked up at him. “Great excuse. I don’t think I buy it any more than Kitty will.”

  Chuckie smiled at her, and it was a smile I remembered from long ago. I savored the warm, fuzzy moment. I wasn’t sure how many more we were going to get. “Sorry,” he said again. “But we didn’t realize anyone was looking for us.”

  “Seriously? With Clarence running amok? With me point blank telling Jeff to get you because you were the assassination target of the day?”

  Jeff sighed. “Baby, there was more going on. We weren’t alone in the room.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the glowing cube. “It turned out that this wasn’t the one Christopher and I had when we were little.”

  Chuckie released one arm from around Naomi and reached into his pocket. “The only thing the room contained was this.” He pulled out another glowing cube. “Per Martini, this one isn’t the one he had as a child, either.”

  “So, did you try the wishing we were somewhere else thing?”

  “Yeah, after the ‘throw himself against every part of the walls’ attempt that lasted far longer than was good for anyone’s health, your husband did,” Chuckie said. He looked like he was trying not to laugh. “For what I’m guessing was an hour. With no success.”

  “Yeah, yeah. It was more like fifteen minutes, if that. Reynolds finally convinced me to sit down and tell him what I knew about our cube and how it worked.”

  “From what I can tell, your mother,” Chuckie said to Christopher, “was able to alter the cube you two used to be trained on your DNA signature. Maybe tuned to your talents. But set up just for the two of you. The ones Clarence had and we found are more . . . general.”

  “How would my mother have ever found a cube like this?” Christopher asked. “They aren’t manmade and they aren’t something from our home world. Are they?” he asked White.

  “I’d never heard of these until today, son.”

  Chuckie’s wasn’t the only human mind that could move fast when needed. Mine liked to comply now and again as well. “Richard, I’m sorry, I know you don’t know this, but now’s apparently the time. I know Terry went to see Yates right after the Mephistopheles superbeing showed up. She was going to ask for his help. Instead, he infected her in some way. Whether it was with a parasite or something else, I’m not sure, but that’s what killed her.”

  White clenched his jaw but otherwise didn’t betray emotion. Christopher put his arm around his father; Abigail took and squeezed White’s hand. “I’m fine, children,” he said quietly. “Confirmation of long suspected truth is something of a relief.”

  “I know it was a long time ago, but do you know where Yates was the week before Terry got sick?”

  “It still feels like yesterday most of the time, so yes, I do remember. He was in Washington, D.C. Rumors put him at his club.”

  “Which we can safely assume was the same country club the dead zone is under. So, maybe he had the cube, maybe Terry followed him, something, but somewhere along the way, she found it. Figured out how to program it and brought it back with her. So she could pass on what Jeff and Christopher would need in order to survive without her.”

  “But she never told me where she got it,” Jeff said. “Why not?”

  “The same reason she didn’t tell you many other things. You were ten years old, and she was already giving you more responsibility than any child should have to bear.”

  “So, how did you two get out?” Stryker asked. “The room’s impregnable.”

  “With our tools, yes,” Chuckie said. “But not if you use the cubes properly.”

  “Only works if you’re with the smartest guy in not just the room you’re in, but any room in the world,” Jeff said. Proudly. Wow. This was a red-letter day in a lot of ways.

  “Thanks. It’s based on mental telepathy, which would sound like so much New Age junk if we didn’t have A-Cs doing similar every day of their lives. It requires more than wishing to make it work, however.”

  “So how did Jeff manage it?”

  They both chuckled. “Lucky accident, as near as we can tell,” Chuckie said. “He was pressing the right points of the cube at the right time, and was completely focused on his goal, which was a clear and simple goal.”

  “How do you mean?” Buchanan asked.

  “Martini wanted to get the two of us away from Clarence and to safety. That’s a clear goal. ‘I want to be rich’ isn’t as clear a goal, for example, because it’s not saying how you’re going to get rich, it’s not saying what you consider rich to be, and so on.”

  “Makes sense.” Who was I to argue? I could talk to animals now. I had no That’s So Crazy leg to stand on.

  “If you look at the cube, it’s set up almost exactly like a Rubik’s Cube,” Chuckie continued. He held up his cube. It glowed, but I could see that each side was faintly different in color from the others. “It moves similarly, so each square, row, and side means something. I’m nowhere close to determining how it works all the way around, but after a variety of experiments, we determined the right formation for traveling through the dead zone. We tested and ended up outside the walls.”

  “We each went back in, separately,” Jeff said. “So the one in the tunnel could go for help if the one in the room couldn’t get back out. But the pattern is consistent. And the goal was simple—I want to be on the other side of this wall, in the room.”

  “Or I want to be outside this room, in the tunnel. I was glad to be right on that one,” Chuckie said as he fiddled with his cube.

  “We were looking to see what we could pick up from the tunnels when you found us,” Jeff added.

  “Why were you two just sauntering along?” Christopher asked. “You were moving slowly by any standards, let alone ours.

  “Because Reynolds threw up for ten minutes straight while I spent time on the losing end of a fight with Clarence, and then we both got to enjoy Clarence hitting us for a while, and then we were locked in a room with no water or food, and we’ve both used a lot of energy, and, speaking for both of us, we feel like crap. I have no hyperspeed left, and as Reynolds confirmed earlier, he can’t take hyperspeed right now anyway. We ehad no choice but to ‘saunter.’ ”

  I looked at both their expressions. “You need adrenaline, don’t you?” I asked Jeff.

  “No, I’m sure I’m fine.”

  Tito sighed. “I’m sure you’re not, and we have a world of hurt heading for us, so let’s get you taken care of.”<
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  While Jeff whined and complained and Tito, Christopher, and White overruled him, I put on my Recap Girl cape yet again and brought Jeff and Chuckie up to speed on what had gone on in their absence, which included introductions of those here and elsewhere they hadn’t officially met and all the other niceties.

  I might have mentioned how distressed we all were with their being kidnapped and all that more than once, but who could blame me? Not Naomi, if her chiming in was any indication.

  Chuckie was overjoyed to discover Franklin was truly now the man in charge at Andrews and concerned about Hamlin’s disappearance, which he hadn’t been briefed on.

  Ravi interrupted to demand information from Chuckie about how he controlled the nine supersoldiers in his charge. Once the information was relayed, and Chuckie confirmed that he, Reader, and Tim—and only he, Reader, and Tim—had access to where these nine supersoldiers were housed, I went back to theories and recaps. I’d gotten so good at this over the past couple of days that I didn’t miss a thing. White, Buchanan, Oliver, and the Middle Eastern Contingent even applauded when I was done.

  The nice thing about Tito being here and Jeff not being at death’s door was that the adrenaline could go in via the vein in his arm rather than stabbed into his hearts. It was the most pleasant adrenaline injection of his I’d ever experienced.

  Ravi chimed in again as all this finished up and Jeff was rolling his sleeve down. “We have confirmation of control of all supersoldiers, from teams in Paris and Paraguay. I’ve also apprised Commanders Reader and Crawford of our status.”

  My phone beeped. I had a text. “James says that he and Tim are so thrilled that the two of you are alive and well, they plan to celebrate by kicking alien invader butt.” Another beep. “Tim says that he appreciates that we took forever to let them know you two were okay.”

  “Enough with the guilt,” Jeff said. “Does my mother know I was missing?”

  “Yes, indeed. And I’m sure she’ll make you feel even guiltier than I possibly can.” Another beep. “James says that, under the circumstances, now that Chuckie’s back, he’d like to suggest that we get Alpha Four’s help, pronto.”