“No, that’s okay,” I said. “I think we can be confident of their identities.”
“Did any of them look coerced?” asked Poly.
“On the contrary,” said my phone. “They looked convivial.”
“Interesting,” I mused. “I wonder if the kidnappers put something in the food or champagne.”
“Remember the Wand-A-Know booth at GALTEX?” asked my phone.
Poly and I nodded.
“Their technology seemed like it might come in handy…”
“So you reverse-engineered it?” I said.
“Plus added enhancements,” said my phone. “It’s now effective at over thirty meters.”
“We’re going to get into so much trouble over appropriating intellectual property,” I muttered to myself.
Poly pretended not to hear me.
“So is their food drugged? Is there anything in the champagne?”
“Scanning.”
I was surprised to hear five soft pings.
“What did you find?” asked Poly, excitedly.
“Shrimp. Gluten. Peanuts. Bell peppers. And MSG.”
“Crap,” said Poly.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Sounds like a good buffet to me.”
“Shush.”
Poly looked thoughtful.
I considered that maybe we could license my phone’s detector enhancements back to Wand-a-Know and avoid lawsuits.
“What about psychoactive compounds?”
“There are no signs of rohypnol, ketamine or gamma-hydroxybutyrate.”
“So they weren’t at risk of being date raped. Whoop.”
Poly didn’t sound very happy. I think my phone was up on points in this exchange.
“Did you see any guards? Anybody who wasn’t a big shot?” asked Poly.
I was glad she was asking questions, since I was obviously still in shock.
“Telltale bulges indicate that the servers working the buffet and delivering drinks have concealed mini-sweeteners,” said my phone. “And there are three hundred and sixty degree cameras and more powerful remote controlled wide-area sweeteners hidden in the chandeliers.”
“There were chandeliers?”
“Four of them,” said Poly.
I had to get my head back in the game. Time for a brilliant plan.
“Do you want to sneak in, incapacitate a couple of servers, take their uniforms, and see if we can talk to Roger Joe-Bob or Tomáso?”
“That could work,” said Poly, considering the idea. “But we can’t slide down the bungee cord through a skylight.”
“We can’t?”
“It’s a little too obvious, given how bright it is inside and how conspicuous we’d be.”
Poly smiled at me indulgently. I don’t think she’d ever seen me when my expectations had been so perfectly turned upside down and inside out. I’d really thought EUA was holding the corporate leaders hostage—but the scene below made me think there was a much more massive conspiracy at work. I put all that sort of thinking on hold until I collected more data.
“I don’t know,” I said. “We could pretend we were entertainers from Cirque du Soleil…”
“My body hasn’t bent that way since I was eleven,” said Poly. “And I don’t think you’ve ever been that flexible.”
“Sad, but true,” I said, “at least physically. Mentally, I can tie myself in knots in seconds.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Poly, kissing me on the cheek, then wiping camouflage face paint off her lips. “So how do we get inside at ground level?”
“The human-sized door to the left of the big rolling door?” I suggested.
“What if it opens directly into the party space?” asked Poly.
“Let’s check and see.”
I got my phone’s attention.
“One step ahead,” said my phone. “The most reliable respondent from your previous question says that the exterior door on the left opens into a small office and storeroom.”
“Perfect,” I said.
“Wait,” my phone continued. “He also wants to know what Dam Fine Woman is wearing.”
“Tell him khakis,” said Poly. “No, he’s been helpful. Tell him she’s wearing a black thong and a silver Vegas Raiders cropped t-shirt.”
“He’ll want pictures.”
“So send him some,” said Poly. “I’m sure you can find plenty that match that description. Why do you think they call it Gal-net?”
“Galnet is an English portmanteau of the galang word for network plus a particle indicating the applicable scope encompasses the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds,” said my phone. “Slang terms for human females don’t figure into it at all.”
“Just send pictures that match the description,” said Poly.
She was starting to get exasperated, which was probably my phone’s intent. I’d have to talk to it about that.
“Sending,” said my phone.
“How are we getting down to ground level?” asked Poly.
I didn’t answer. I just grabbed the bungee cord and started walking the blimp down half the length of the power station until I could toss the cord over the edge of the roof. It dangled in front of the large rolling door with six or eight feet of its length coiled on the ground. Poly followed me.
“Ladies first,” I said.
“No, after you,” she said.
I slid down the cord and found myself on a broad expanse of concrete big enough to be a helipad. For all I knew, maybe it was a helipad and the place where the station’s giant turbines had been brought in and out with heavy lift choppers. Poly was right behind me.
I used the bungee cord to tie the rented dirigible off on a wall hydrant to the right of the big door, then the two of us stepped over to the standard-sized door on the left. I held my phone next to the doorknob, expecting my phone to use its integrated mutakey to unlock it. Instead, it turned around so Poly and I could see its screen and slowly displayed several lines of print, one character at a time, like a human typing out a text message. The results of its thermal imaging sensors were worth the wait.
“Two humans inside. One man. One woman. Both naked. Vigorous exercise.”
I didn’t need three guesses to figure out what they were doing. That would make getting into the decommissioned power station a lot easier.
My phone opened the door and Poly and I stayed low, moving silently inside. I quietly closed the door behind us. The amorous couple were going at it on a low sofa on the far left wall and oblivious to external stimuli. We located their discarded clothing by the small slivers of light showing around the inner door. Poly found two mini sweeteners in their jacket pockets and handed one to me. We crawled over to the couple on our bellies and chilled their hips and shoulders without rising from our prone positions. This froze them together temporarily in a risqué, but pleasurable tableau. I even envied them, a little.
Poly helped me to my feet. In the dim light I could barely see her wiggle her eyebrows at me suggestively. That didn’t help my attempts to focus. I didn’t want to risk either member of the couple yelling for help, so I played it safe by putting strips of duct tape from my backpack tool bag over their mouths. Then I decided to be kind and draped a tablecloth from a shelf filled with catering linens over them. There was no need for them to be cold as well as frozen.
We were lucky. The couple’s discarded clothes fit us well, even the shoes. Maybe more uniform designers were integrating mutable fabrics? I stuffed our ninja outfits—just black pants, black athletic shoes, and long-sleeved black t-shirts—into the top of my bag for safekeeping. I gave Poly a hug and felt the cylindrical bulge of her mini-sweetener against my chest, which reminded me to move mine to the side pocket of my jacket, closer to my hand.
My phone extended a pseudopod with a camera under the inner office door and scanned the party, then jumped back into my palm to report.
“Party continues,” it typed on its screen, “Safe to exit.”
My phone hopped over to its usual spot at my waist.
I squeezed Poly’s hand with my left hand to signal we were ready to go, then reached for the knob. Suddenly my phone started vibrating insistently.
I was smart enough to grab it and check its screen.
“Camouflage makeup,” it typed. “Highly contraindicated.”
I slapped my forehead, getting makeup on my palm in the process. I was an idiot. Poly and I had both missed that because the light was so dim in the office. Maybe Poly was also suffering from a minor case of shock?
Using my phone’s screen for light, I found a box of pre-moistened towelettes on the shelves with the catering supplies. Poly liberated several white linen napkins from a stack of them next to the tablecloths. We did our best to remove the makeup ourselves, then finished the job by working on each other with my phone perched on my shoulder providing advice and illumination.
“Good,” said my phone after it had inspected both of us. “Checking party again.”
It scuttled over to the inner door and repeated its earlier scan. I marveled that no one had come into the office looking for the missing couple. Then again, maybe their colleagues suspected what was going on behind closed doors and opted for discretion.
My phone jumped back to my clean palm and gave us an on-screen text update.
“Something’s up. Presentation starting. Exit while attention diverted.”
Say no more. My phone hopped back to its standard spot on my belt. I disguised my backpack tool bag inside a laundry bag for linens and took it with me as Poly and I left the office. It took a few seconds for our eyes to adapt to the brighter surroundings. When we could see again, we realized that all the bigwigs were congregated near the center of the long, high-ceilinged room. They were sitting in rows of folding chairs that must have been set up while we were in the office. Most of the serving staff was standing against the left wall near the center of the room, behind the buffet tables. There was a small raised platform with a lectern set up a few feet out from the opposite wall. A giant flexible video screen was descending from the rafters and sliding into place behind the platform. It looked like a corporate shareholders’ meeting where management was about to report on the state of the company.
Poly and I joined the near end of the line of servers and tried to look inconspicuous while my phone paid close attention to the buffet. When I saw no one was looking I put it on the table so it could examine the food at close range.
I saw Roger Joe-Bob Bacon standing near the front on the right—Pyrs don’t need chairs. Unfortunately, his eye on this side wasn’t looking this way and he didn’t turn around, so I couldn’t get his attention. I’d wait and see what was going on with the presentation first, but might send my phone over to connect with him if the situation warranted. Queen Sherrhi, Tomáso, Diágo and a couple of Tōdons I didn’t recognize were standing in the back on the far side, which helped explain why more of the servers were bunched up near us on this side.
We watched as the lights dimmed, then a spotlight lit up Scott Winfield and Josephine Johnson from Chapultepec & Castle at the lectern.
“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen and honored guests of all species,” said Winfield. “As you know, Chapultepec & Castle is proud to be an EUA Corporation company.”
The crowd of bigwigs murmured impatiently, which I took to mean “Get on with it and tell us something we don’t know.”
“The General would be here to address you,” picked up Johnson, “but he was unable to attend in person and asked us to speak for him.”
More impatient murmuring, with a touch of frustration now. Despite the fact that EUA’s founder, The General, was a notorious recluse who made Howard Hughes look gregarious, these people were not used to hearing from underlings. In this case, however, the subordinates themselves were the Chairman and CEO of C&C, respectively.
Scott Winfield leaned into the microphone. He was a short, oily-looking man with a substantial paunch, a comb-over, and a smug, unctuous expression more common in career politicians than businessmen.
“We’re very pleased that so many of you have responded to the galactic emergency we’ve hinted about by already cross-licensing your technologies to EUA,” he said.
Say what?
I looked at Poly. She looked equally puzzled.
How many times could I be gobsmacked in one day without getting a concussion? I suspected I was about to find out.
“You’ve heard hints about what we’re facing,” said Josephine Johnson, “but now it’s time to tell you everything—and it ain’t pretty.”
Her voice was sepulchral, like a callous veterinarian telling a couple that their dog had just died. Her tall, angular frame, hawk-like nose, and supercilious frown made me feel like she thought her listeners were all lesser mortals. Her tone didn’t sit well with the crowd.
The lighting in the room grew even more dim as the giant screen glowed, showing a shadowy figure of a man, visible only in silhouette.
“The Galactic Free Trade Association,” said The General, “is facing a threat to its very existence.”
Poly and I had the same WTF? expressions we’d shared earlier.
The scene on the screen shifted to a familiar video of humans and aliens in Times Square fifteen years ago, when Earth was invited to join GaFTA. The leader of the Galactic delegation, Chuck the Pyr, was holding a smiley-face balloon and people in the square were cheering.
“EUA Corporation,” said The General, “owes its growth and its very existence to GaFTA and its farsighted SANIC program.”
The image on the screen switched to a giant Dauushan Model-47 3D printer churning out thousands of football-sized space probes on a cavernous production floor.
“That’s why I instructed my scientists to develop our own Search for Alien New Intelligences with Congruencies program.”
Now the screen showed a vast, slowly rotating galaxy. It looked like the same one I’d seen on the wall of Anthony Zwilniki’s office a couple of months ago.
“Using layer after layer of interconnected teleportation gateways, EUA’s exploration teams spared no expense to push billions of scanners leapfrogging out into extragalactic space, trying to detect evidence of congruent tech in our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda.”
A simple animation was superimposed over the turning Milky Way—thankfully just using curved lines, not hopping frogs, to illustrate how the probes were distributed.
“We hoped to find new trading partners, new products and new technologies from novel minds across the vast gulf of space…”
Poly looked at me and mimed sticking her finger down her throat. I could see why The General didn’t do much public speaking if this sort of overblown rhetoric was his default mode of speech. Still, I was listening carefully, wondering what was coming next.
“Nothing could have prepared us for what our probes discovered.”
I was almost ready to laugh, The General’s words were so melodramatic.
The flickering images on the screen made me swallow any thoughts of laughing. A composite picture from multiple probes provided a Great Bird of the Galaxy’s eye view. I watched as an intergalactic invading armada of warships made angry ripples through spacetime like crazed giant sandworms displacing desert in the finale of the third remake of Dune. You know, the good one. There must have been over a hundred thousand of the vessels. It was hard to tell, given the distances involved, but each warship seemed to be cylindrical, ten miles in diameter and a hundred miles long. Their surfaces appeared fuzzy, bristling with what I took to be weapons. I gulped involuntarily.
“We don’t know anything about these invaders directly, beyond their apparent belligerent posture…”
The camera angle pulled out from the invasion fleet and revealed a ragtag collection of much smaller spaceships of a dozen different designs struggling to stay ahead of the warships. They must be survivors of the invaders’ earlier attacks, running for their lives.
“However, we were able to contact the captain of one of the vessels fleeing the invasion fleet.”
A video transmission started to play, revealing an alien that looked like a big-headed ostrich with T-Rex arms standing on the bridge of its vessel. It had four metal bands around its neck—perhaps its rank insignia—and seemed terrified.
“Help!” It said in sub-titles. “The Scourge is coming!”
I was amazed by the effectiveness of EUA’s translation software.
A new video started on a screen on the wall of the ship’s control room behind the avian-ish alien captain. Flashes of destruction appeared as kinetic weapons crashed down from orbit on a beautiful non-human city. Aliens from the captain’s species were running about in mindless panic, like chickens with their heads cut off. Ugly-looking attack drones with spike-studded housings captured ostrich-people families and carried parents and chicks alike into the sky for who knows what foul purposes. It was horrifying. The transmission stopped abruptly and went to static.
Everyone was silent as we took in the implications of what we were seeing. Poly squeezed my hand so hard I nearly winced. This was bad. Very bad.
“EUA took the initiative and discovered the threat of The Scourge,” intoned The General, “and EUA is taking the lead to stop them. We need your companies’ best minds, top technologies, and capital resources to stop this invasion and protect the galaxy.”
Xenotech What Happens: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 3) Page 24