by Gini Koch
The A-Cs, as they called themselves on Earth, were religious refugees when they came in the 1960s. And they’d integrated into the world, sort of, and stayed hidden, almost completely, as citizens of the United States first and the world second. Now, thanks to a just-barely foiled alien invasion, the entire world knew that aliens were real, and that the best looking ones in the galaxy had chosen to live with us.
Perks aside, our A-Cs were here to protect and serve. Could not say the same for at least half of the alien races out there we’d encountered so far.
The A-Cs had two hearts and this gave them faster regeneration, hyperspeed, and superstrength. Some of them also had special talents, like Jeff, who was the strongest empath in, most likely, the galaxy. In addition to the empaths, there were imageers, who could manipulate any images, static or live or whatever, dream readers, and troubadours, who were the actors and public speakers of the bunch.
Our female hybrid children, of which we didn’t have all that many, were all specially talented, with skills far surpassing the norm. But no hybrid boy had been exceptionally talented until Charlie showed up. And telekinesis wasn’t an A-C trait.
I’d gotten pregnant on a world where telepathy and telekinesis were normal, though, which was the only explanation we had for Charlie’s abilities.
You’d think that, with all the other things the A-Cs could do, Charlie being telekinetic would be no big to anyone in the A-C community.
And you would be wrong.
The car was still floating, and now it had company. “Charlie, put the cars down, please and thank you.” He grinned at me—he totally had his father’s smile—and yet the cars continued to fly away from the other kids in the American Centaurion Embassy Daycare Center and fly right to Charlie. “All the cars down, please, Charlie. Now.”
Counted to ten. Cars were still flying. It was time to channel my mother. “Charles Maxwell Martini, you return those cars and put them right down this instant, young man.”
No more grinning from my son, but the cars zoomed back to the kids who’d been playing with them and landed nicely. One for the win column.
Denise Lewis, whose husband was my mother’s right-hand man and our Embassy’s Defense Attaché, smiled at me. “Good job, Kitty.”
Managed not to say that Jamie hadn’t been this much work. She had been, she’d just been different.
Was saved from having to respond in any way by Kyle Constantine and Len Parker sticking their heads in. I’d met them when they were still playing football for USC and they’d helped me out in a big way. They could both have gone pro, but instead they joined the C.I.A. right after they graduated. Len had been assigned as my driver and Kyle as my bodyguard and they’d done a great job.
But right before some of us took a trip to the Alpha Centauri system to avert a variety of civil wars, evil plots, and yet another alien invasion, Kyle had been put in charge of the Second Best Lady’s Cause.
Actually, I still had no idea what my official title was as the wife of the VP. No one around seemed to know, or care. I’d searched the papers for clues, but stories written about me tended to focus on all the madness that surrounded us on a daily basis and the adjectives tended more toward “outspoken,” “blunt,” and “trigger-happy.”
Anyway, a politician who’d been aligned with all of our enemies during the presidential campaign that had put Senator Vincent Armstrong into the White House, dragging Jeff along kicking and screaming, had somehow managed to become our ally. The slipperiness of political bedfellows and changing alliances never ceased to amaze me. It truly made fighting alien invasions, mad super-geniuses, and crazed megalomaniacs seem like such clean work.
“Kitty, Gideon Cleary’s here,” Kyle said. Speaking of the devil I’d just been thinking about. “We need to brainstorm the next ad campaign.”
Mommy Time was over. Time to get back in the saddle and handle grown-up things.
“And,” Len added, “we have news, too. News you’re not going to like.”
• • •
Hugged and kissed Jamie and Charlie, handed Charlie to Denise, petted all our animals—of which we had so many, both Earth and alien, we’d all lost count—grabbed my purse, and headed out.
“What’s going on?” I asked as we got on the elevator and headed down for the meeting. “New issues with The Cause?”
The Cause was protecting campus coeds from being attacked and raped. When we’d met, Kyle had been drunk and suggested that I might like to get to know half of the Trojan football team intimately. Len had stopped that—well, Len and Harlie.
Harlie was a Poof, aka the best wedding gift ever. Poofs were alien animals that looked a lot like tiny, fluffy kittens with no ears or tails, but with shiny black button eyes. They were fluffy balls on tiny legs and paws and I and everyone else loved them. They were also incredibly great protection because they could go Jeff-sized with tons of razor sharp teeth when danger threatened, so they were wonderful personal protection bundles of cuteness.
Supposedly they were solely pets for the Alpha Four Royal Family—which I’d somehow married into—but the Poofs were androgynous and mated whenever a royal wedding loomed. Supposedly.
In reality, the Poofs were Black Hole Universe animals and apparently our Poofs had decided to go forth and multiply. We had tons of Poofs and more seemed to show up with a lot of regularity.
In the Poofs’ world, if you named it, it was yours. And the Poofs sort of chose what they considered a name—and therefore who they considered their “owner”—so a lot of people had Poofs simply because they’d said something like, “Look at that, how adorable is that?” Which is how one of our friends, Representative Nathalie Gagnon-Brewer had gotten a Poof. She called hers Dora for short.
Harlie had gone large and in charge way back when and scared Kyle straight, and to prove it, totally without my even knowing, Kyle had started a Take Back the Night program while he and Len were still at USC, which created a service where anyone could call to get a security escort throughout the campus back to wherever they lived, as well as doing community service teaching girls what to look for to avoid a date rape situation and also what to do to get out of it safely.
Many colleges had these programs in place, but Kyle’s had been particularly effective, in part because he’d gotten all the jocks involved in a positive way. He’d been one of the representatives for USC’s sports program’s preventative counseling service that worked with athletes to keep them from becoming the kind of men who thought women were there as things for them to play with and dominate, and he’d been, from all Len said, quite intense about it.
All this had made him the man for the job when Cleary had come to us asking for support with putting a similar program in place in all the colleges and universities in Florida, where he was still governor. He’d also suggested it as my Cause, and I honestly had no objection.
Cleary had thought up The Cause, however, because he was intimately involved in a scandal that we had, so far, managed to keep under wraps.
“No, not with The Cause,” Kyle replied. “I think we have a hit on Stephanie.”
“Really?” Think of the scandal and it appeared. Or something like that. Maybe I still had some telepathic resonance from Operation Civil War. “How confirmed a hit?”
“We’re not sure,” Len said, as the elevator opened and we headed off for one of the smaller salons. “Governor Cleary didn’t want to tell us a lot without you in the room.”
“For a guy whose state isn’t next to the Beltway, he’s sure up here a lot.”
“He’s going to run for President again,” Len said. “We all know it. He’s keeping his ties tight. Can’t blame him for that.”
“I can guarantee he wants to activate Clarence, though,” Kyle added. “So if you still want to tell him no, you’d better call Jeff.”
“Why?”
“Because
Mister Reynolds sounds like he’s on Cleary’s side,” Len said. “Not sure why.”
Speaking of one of my son’s namesakes and my best friend since 9th grade. “Chuckie’s here? When did he get here?” Normally I knew when he or Jeff were coming to or in the Embassy during the work day.
Chuckie was the head of the C.I.A.’s Extra-Terrestrial Division and, based on what we came back with from Operation Civil War, the Golden Boy of the Agency. Which meant that he had even more enemies within the Agency than he had before, in addition to all the enemies he already had.
Chuckie lived in the Embassy now, but that was because his apartments kept on getting trashed by people trying to kill him. And his emotional state hadn’t been stable since we’d gotten back from Operation Civil War, because of the horrible things that had happened to him during that war and the fact that the guy he’d thought was his best friend had turned out to be the Mastermind and therefore the guy directly responsible for the death of Chuckie’s wife. Crap like that can affect a person for some reason.
“He came with the governor,” Len answered as we reached the salon. “And they came in with Mister Buchanan. And they were all vetted by the Secret Service.”
We had a lot of Secret Service agents with us, more than the VP normally got. Because of me. Oh well, I was keeping people employed. Go me, making jobs. We had less Secret Service tailing us inside the Embassy because we were in one of the most secure buildings we could be, and because we had other internal protection.
Malcolm Buchanan had been assigned by my mother to be my personal shadow and bodyguard when we’d first come to D.C. And there wasn’t a day I wasn’t grateful for Mom’s prescience. I insisted Buchanan had Dr. Strange powers because he came and went like the wind and if the man didn’t want you to see him, you didn’t see him.
I saw him now, though. He was standing at the back of the room, clearly on guard, leaning against the wall in a way I knew meant that he could propel himself wherever instantly. The boys moved to similar positions within the room.
Chuckie and Cleary were sitting, and they both looked rather stressed and grim. So, it was going to be that kind of meeting. Oh, goody.
“Missus Chief,” Buchanan said with a small smile. “In case you haven’t already guessed . . . we have a problem.”
“I took the leap, Malcolm. Chuckie, Gideon, why so serious?”
“Someone just tried to kill me,” Cleary said, voice shaking. “And I’m pretty sure it was Stephanie.”
• • •
Stephanie was Jeff’s niece, his eldest sister’s eldest daughter. Her father, Clarence Valentino, had been an A-C traitor of the highest order. And I’d had to kill him. But not before he’d turned Stephanie.
Understandably, she’d blamed us for her father’s death and joined the Mastermind’s team with gusto. She’d also started sleeping with said Mastermind. And then he’d had her kill eight of our Secret Service detail during Operation Bizarro World.
Stephanie had freaked out and disappeared. There were two points of view about her disappearance. One was that she was faking us out, so that we’d come after her and then be trapped. The other was that she was afraid of the Mastermind, and hiding from him. The longer she was gone—and she’d been gone for over a year and a half now—the more credence the second point of view gained.
There was also the point of view that said Stephanie was dead, killed by the Mastermind. While we never discounted that one, if she’d been sighted, that would be a good thing. Barring her once again trying to murder people.
“Are you sure it was her?” I asked as I sat down at the small conference table we had in this room.
“Fairly sure,” Chuckie said.
“Very sure,” Cleary said.
Looked to Buchanan. Who shrugged. “I didn’t see any of it, Missus Chief. I was just near enough that when Reynolds called I could get to them the quickest.”
Wondered why Buchanan had been near to Chuckie, versus near to me, for this particular situation. Chose to table the question for later. “What happened?”
“The governor was finishing a meeting with several lobbyists,” Chuckie said. “I was . . . observing the meeting.”
“He was spying on us, he means,” Cleary said, without a lot of animosity. Chuckie just shrugged.
“What was the meeting about?”
“Whether or not to close NASA Base,” Cleary replied.
Well, that was new. And now it made a lot of sense that Chuckie had been “observing” this meeting. “Why would anyone want to close NASA Base?”
“I have no idea,” Cleary said. “I certainly have no desire to do so.”
“But you did, during your presidential campaign,” Chuckie pointed out. “And the people who you met with are still on that platform, even though you’re shifting to have a better chance of success in the next election, or the one after.”
Cleary nodded. “That’s very true. At any rate, we finished the meeting, and as we were leaving the restaurant, I saw Stephanie across the street. As soon as she saw me she disappeared. I thought she’d run away from me. But then someone took a shot at me.”
“Excuse me? No one’s mentioned that Florida’s governor was attacked on our streets.”
“The restaurant lets out into the back, where there’s an alley and a small parking lot,” Chuckie explained. “So that people can leave without being seen together, if needed.”
“Gotcha. But still, shots tend to draw attention.”
“Not,” Chuckie said dryly, “when they’re done with a bow and arrow.”
Gini Koch lives in Hell’s Orientation Area (aka Phoenix, Arizona), works her butt off (sadly, not literally) by day, and writes by night with the rest of the beautiful people. She lives with her awesome husband, three dogs (aka The Canine Death Squad), and two cats (aka The Killer Kitties). She has one very wonderful and spoiled daughter, who will still tell you she’s not as spoiled as the pets (and she’d be right).
When she’s not writing, Gini spends her time cracking wise, staring at pictures of good looking leading men for “inspiration,” teaching her pets to “bring it,” and driving her husband insane asking, “Have I told you about this story idea yet?” She listens to every kind of music 24/7 (from Lifehouse to Pitbull and everything in between, particularly Aerosmith and Smash Mouth) and is a proud comics geek-girl willing to discuss at any time why Wolverine is the best superhero ever (even if Deadpool does get all the best lines).
You can reach Gini via her website (www.ginikoch.com), email ([email protected]), Facebook (www.facebook.com/Gini.Koch), Facebook Fan Page: Hairspray and Rock ‘n’ Roll (www.facebook.com/GiniKochAuthor), Pinterest page (www.pinterest.com/ginikoch), Twitter (@GiniKoch), or her Official Fan Site, the Alien Collective Virtual HQ (thealiencollectivevirtualhq.blogspot.com).
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