by Gini Koch
“Jeff? What did you do with the necklace and the bug? And why did my hairspray neutralize it?”
“The hairspray was a guess. Since we’re all allergic to alcohol and there’s alcohol in it—and since hairspray worked so well against Mephistopheles, and this clearly comes from our home world—I figured it might work.”
“Whoever wants us followed knows we’re all here now, however,” Chuckie mentioned.
“True.” Martini sighed. “And as for what I was doing, it’s a game my father taught us,” he inclined his head toward Christopher. “We used to think it was fun. He’d give us different metals, and we had to make something new with them without hurting the original shapes. Most of the time, he had us play with the metals and the Unity Necklace, but not always. I didn’t know it was anything but a child’s game before. But I’d guess once I make another call, and, you know, get through all the haranguing from my mother, I’ll find out this was commonly used by the royal family.”
“To spy on their underlings,” Christopher added with a snarl.
“Or their enemies.” Chuckie let this one hang on the air for a bit. “I think we need to stop pretending the only issue will be Kitty passing whatever marriage test they’re going to administer. We didn’t send bugs or spies over to check out Charles marrying Camilla, so this isn’t what I’d call standard royal wedding protocol.”
“It’s not, as far as we know,” Claudia offered.
“You’re confirming that?” Chuckie asked her.
“Sure.” She shrugged. “Girls care more about this stuff than boys. My mother told me about how weddings on our home world were handled. Spying on the bride-to-be wasn’t mentioned.”
“My mother didn’t say anything about this, either,” Lorraine added. “And she told me all about the last royal wedding she’d seen, right before they left our home world.” She shot a look at Christopher. “I think it was your parents’.”
He looked shocked. “But they disowned my mother, that’s what my father said.”
Lorraine looked uncomfortable. “They probably did. My mother would know for sure. But, disowned or not, I think they still had a royal wedding.”
“Maybe we should ask your father if they got bugged.”
Christopher sighed and pulled out his phone.
While he was engaged, Chuckie leaned over to me and Martini. “Regardless of the Pontifex’s answer, this creates some serious issues. So, Martini, before the rest of the C.I.A. starts demanding I allow them to move into every Centaurion stronghold, any idea of what’s really coming?”
“Not really. We should pull my father in, sooner as opposed to later. He’s the one with the information.”
My brain kicked at me. “Uh, guys?”
“Yes,” Chuckie agreed. “But I’d like you to ask him, if you don’t mind. I don’t want to give the impression we’re demanding his cooperation.”
“Guys?”
“Well, that’s so nice of you,” Martini said, sarcasm knob turned to full. “How is it my father rates consideration when our Sovereign Pontifex doesn’t?”
“Guys.”
“He rates consideration because he’s the only one with any real idea of what’s going on, and, just in case, the C.I.A. doesn’t want to create an interstellar incident by upsetting a royal scion.”
“Guys, oh, guys.”
“I’m supposedly a scion and so’s Christopher. You don’t seem to mind upsetting us. In fact, near as I can tell, you live to do it.”
“Guys? Really, need your attention.”
“You really have a problem with authority, don’t you, Martini?”
“Guys? Please, focus.”
“I have no problem with my own authority, Reynolds. I have a big problem with yours, or what you think is yours.”
“Guys, don’t force me to get tough with you.”
“Keep pushing it, Martini. I’ll be glad to show you just how much authority I have over you and anything you want to do.”
I stood up, turned my back to the rest of the room, and lifted my shirt up. Both of them stopped with their mouths open and turned to stare at my chest. I was in the A-C version of a WonderBra and the twins were looking particularly large and perky. The men looked like deer trapped in headlights. “Wow, now that I finally freaking have your attention, can the two of you stop fighting with each other and listen to me?”
“Gah,” Martini said.
“Ummm . . .” Chuckie sounded no more coherent.
Martini recovered first. “Put your top down.” He was trying to sound growly but it was coming off more like an embarrassed, possessive hiss.
“Ummm . . .” Chuckie hadn’t seen the twins in a while, but I could tell he wanted to get back in touch with them.
“I want you two to listen to me, and listen carefully.”
“Top . . . down . . . now.”
“Ummm . . .”
“You both going to listen?”
“Down.”
“Ummm . . .”
“Nod your heads if you’re going to listen to me when I put my top down.” Two heads nodded. Two pairs of eyes didn’t move, however. I lowered and resisted the impulse to pull my shirt up and down for a bit. “Now, look at my face.”
Both sets of eyes moved up to meet mine.
“Good. So proud.” Martini opened his mouth, and I lifted my shirt over my stomach. He snapped his mouth shut. “Good boy, Jeff. Now, I’m going to say something, and I want the two of you to listen to my words. Okay?”
They both nodded, eyes still wide, expressions still shocked.
“If the metal cannot move on its own, and we can be fairly sure no one in this room brought in that horrid pseudo-pineapple centerpiece, then logic demands that we ask ourselves these very important questions. You ready?”
They both nodded again.
“Who bugged the room? And what planet do they call home?”
CHAPTER 10
MARTINI RECOVERED FIRST, if you could call it that. “Don’t know. Don’t do that again. Ever. Unless we’re alone.”
Chuckie was back to staring at my chest. “Love Aerosmith.”
“Yes, I still do.” I snapped my fingers in front of his face. “Come on back now.”
Reader was next to me. “You know, that was possibly the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen. Not your rack, girlfriend, but their reactions to it.”
“I warned them I was going to use the big guns.”
“They are big, I’ll give you that.”
“Stop looking at or talking about her chest, James.” Martini was growling.
“Jeff? I’m gay, remember?”
“Don’t care. Stop looking at them. Stop talking about them.” Martini looked at Chuckie. “Look at her face or, better yet, look at me, or I’m going to kill you.”
“I saw them first,” Chuckie said. This was true.
Martini was about to lose it, I could tell. “Boys? You either focus on my questions and how we answer them, or . . .” I raised my shirt over my stomach again.
“I don’t want to answer the questions,” Chuckie said. “Punish me for it.”
“That’s it!” Martini leaped up.
I jumped in between them. “Jeff? If you grab him, I’ll be sandwiched between the two of you. Is that what you want?”
Martini growled, loudly, but he backed off.
I kept eye contact with Martini. “Chuckie? Enough with the comedy jokes. Serious questions want serious answers.”
“I really want to be punished for my disobedience,” he said from behind me, and I could tell he was standing. “But okay.” He leaned down and whispered in my ear. “He’s fun to bait. But . . . damn, they’re still magnificent . . . and mesmerizing. Seriously, my parents love you, so, you know, consider the benefits of human marriage.”
“Flattery will only get you so far.” I tried not to smile or blush. Martini’s expression said I failed at both.
“I’ll keep working at it, then.” Chuckie stepped away from us,
and Martini relaxed a tiny bit.
“So, back to my questions. Who bugged the room?”
“It wasn’t a human,” Reader said. At least someone was paying attention to the issues at hand.
I turned around to see Christopher, Tim, and my five pilots all staring at me in various stages of shock, as near as I could tell. Claudia had her face in her hands, and Lorraine appeared to be recovering from trying to laugh without making noise. Gower was shaking his head.
“What?”
Tim pointed behind me. I turned around. To see that the wall behind Martini, ergo, the wall I’d been facing, was a mirror.
“Oh.” So I hadn’t noticed that when we got in. So what? “Um . . .” Didn’t quite know what to say. “Whoops” about covered it. But I didn’t feel the need to admit it out loud.
Randy and Joe seemed to be recovering. After all, they had girls in the room who had racks at least as good as mine. Lorraine was still laughing silently, and Joe had her in his lap now. Randy was patting Claudia on the back—I realized she was laughing too, so hard that she was having trouble breathing. My friends, there for me when I needed them.
“The United States Navy is proud to serve under those, Commander,” Jerry said finally. “In fact, I’d like a picture, in case we ever need to remind the rest of the troops what it is we fight for.” Walker and Hughes nodded their agreement.
“Dudes, they’re not that big.” I mean, they weren’t. I wasn’t Pam Anderson material.
“As women love to tell men, it’s not the size that matters, Commander,” Walker said. “It’s how they look in their packaging. Or something.” He sounded dazed.
I looked at Christopher. “What did your dad have to say?”
“He’s never mentioned your breasts!”
I took a deep breath. All the male eyes in the room followed my chest. Even Reader and Gower were looking now. “I meant what did he say about a royal wedding?”
“Huh?” Christopher seemed stunned.
“Jeez, it’s a pair of boobs. Covered up, at least somewhat, in a bra and now, again, in a T-shirt, too. Surely all of you have seen something like them before.”
“Never used as an interrogation device,” Jerry said. “I’m with Reynolds. Punish me for my disobedience.”
I could hear Martini’s growl—it was on “rabid dog” and about to head to “enraged bear”. I decided to try to get things back under control. “Sorry, they’re Jeff’s now. Okay?”
“Lucky bastard,” Hughes and Walker said in unison.
“I’m beginning to see why Centaurion hired you on,” Chuckie added. Martini’s growl wasn’t subsiding.
“Okay! So, we have an alien plot, possibly much more sinister than just asking me if I know which one is the fish fork and which is the butter knife. Can we focus? Either that, or I’m going down to the casino to play craps.”
“Can you change into a low-cut top before you do that?” Jerry asked.
I looked at Reader. “A little help?”
“I saw a great low-cut top in the women’s clothing store in that mall they have connected to the casino. It was glittery and see-through. Want me to go see if they have it in your size?”
I put my hand on Reader’s forehead. “Are you okay?”
He shrugged. “Just trying to sound like one of the boys.” He flashed me his cover-boy grin. “C’mon, you know it’s fun to see Jeff almost pop a vessel.”
I rolled my eyes. “Not helping.” I looked back to Christopher. “Seriously, what did your dad have to say? About why you called him? His wedding? Royal? Bugged?”
Christopher was still staring at me. “I can’t believe you pulled your top up in front of all of us.”
I managed to refrain from mentioning that he’d seen the twins in all their glory a year ago. Apparently, he wasn’t as past all that as he said he was. “Christopher. Info from your dad. Needed now.”
Christopher handed me his phone. It was still open, and the call was still live.
“Mister White?” I figured formality might be a good idea.
“Here, Miss Katt. From what I picked up when Christopher stopped speaking to me midsentence, you’ve used the age-old technique of flashing to get the situation under control. Your ability to adapt on your feet remains impressive.”
“Thanks. Anything for the cause. Speaking of which, we found some weird Alpha Centaurion bug that Jeff and Christopher seemed to have dismantled or at least subdued.”
“Interesting. Alfred would know more about this than I, however.”
“Yes, but I don’t think I want to call Mister Martini at this exact moment.”
“Because Jeffrey’s ready to explode?”
“Wow, you do know him well.”
“Very. How is Mister Reynolds dealing with this?”
“He found the bug. Apparently the C.I.A. has some alien-detector thing. Does nothing by a human, turns purple by a hybrid, green by a pure A-C. And red by the bug. It also turned red by the Unity Necklace.”
“Interesting again. I truly would have expected the Unity Necklace to have become inactive. As we’ve seen, not the case.”
“So, they’re sentient? For real?”
“In a way. Call it smart metal. From our home world, obviously. We can’t make metals here work in the same way.”
“So, the bug, it would have had to have come from the home world?”
“Yes. However, all our families here have their Unity Necklaces. Any who might have been separated when we were exiled here would have made a new one before leaving.”
“How do the bugs work?”
“They attract to a Unity Necklace.” He said it like it was obvious.
“So, any bug can attach to any Unity Necklace?”
“No. Think of them less like a bug and more like a tracking device. These necklaces are hugely important in our culture. The loss of a necklace is devastating. In the past, we had several suicides over the accidental loss. Hence, the tracking devices were created.”
Wow. People killed themselves over losing their necklace? I’d have felt like total crap if I’d lost it, but I didn’t think I’d have gone suicidal. Then again, I wasn’t an A-C.
“So, how does the tracking device work?”
“It’s set to find its necklace. The ones Jeffrey and Christopher played with as children were the ones Alfred and I had for our necklaces. I would have thought they were the only ones in existence for those specific necklaces, but I believe my thinking is incorrect.”
“So, the tracking device finds the necklace, and then what?”
“It transmits location to the owner, by means of another piece of the intelligent metal.”
“Is that how they knew which mountain ranges to light up the night skies with?”
“No, that would have tracked based on Jeffrey.”
“How so?”
White sighed. “It’s more complex. If it’s not relevant at this moment, it would be easier to explain it to you in person.”
“There’s not a bottom line I can give to Chuckie?” Who, I knew without asking, would want a better answer than “tell you later.”
Another sigh. “I would be happy to share it with Mister Reynolds. He actually has the capacity to understand the explanation.”
“I’ll ignore that comment about my mental prowess.” I handed the phone to Chuckie. “You get the scientific mumbo jumbo, but I want the Pontifex back.”
Chuckie shrugged. “Hello, Pontifex White. No, I haven’t demanded this answer yet. Yes, she’s right, of course I’m about to.” He was quiet for a couple of minutes while the rest of us basically watched him listen to the phone. It didn’t seem to faze him, but I was used to that. “I understand. Yes, nothing we can do about it. Yes, that’s a good idea, thank you. Here’s Kitty.”
Chuckie handed me the phone. “It’s based on a process similar to how their Operations Team functions.” Oh, right, the Elves had an official title. “High-level math, higher-level science. Trust me when I tell you th
at you don’t want to know.” He looked at Martini. “We’ll be putting some people onto this—I don’t think we want the heads of American Centaurion tracked like timber wolves, at least not by our enemies.”
Martini snorted. “As if you’re not tracking us.”
Chuckie grinned. “Of course we are. But we’re not your enemies.”
“Right.”
I decided going back to my call with White was the better part of valor. “Okay, happy to have let Chuckie do the heavy thinking. But I do have another question, Mister White.”
“No insinuation that you’re not able to think heavily intended, Miss Katt. I just know where your strengths lie. So, please, do go ahead.”
“The night sky thing. Is that triggered from across space, or does it trigger closer to home?”
There was a pause. “The trigger would be Jeffrey, again, based on the complexities I shared with Mister Reynolds. However . . . I don’t know about the relationship between physical location and original home world.”
“You’re saying you don’t know if the light show went on at Alpha Centauri at the same time as here?”
“In a way. I’m saying I assumed all ties were severed when we came here. But if we were on our home world, the light show, as you call it, is an announcement that a royal match is beginning, the declaration made and accepted, and so forth. And at home it would be triggered by the agent of the royal family who was assigned to guard that particular member.”
I looked at Martini. He still looked upset. But I could tell he was picking up my feelings, because he cocked his head and gave me a questioning look.
“So, Mister White—who’s here, watching Jeff?”
CHAPTER 11
“NO IDEA, MISS KATT. I have to say I doubt it’s any of our own people.”
Made sense but could be wrong. “You’d have told me Beverly was trustworthy, too, though.”
“Yes, good point. Bottom line is I have no idea.” He coughed. “That’s what Alpha Team is for.”