by Gini Koch
Gower and Martini hung up about the same time. “My parents are all set,” Gower said. “My mom’s looking forward to it, my dad, not so much.”
“Have Michael come out here to finish his vacation. We can use the help—we need to have help we know we can trust—and maybe your dad will have more fun if he’s here, too.”
Gower shrugged. “Good plan.” He opened his phone again.
“My parents are coming,” Martini said in a voice of doom. “My mother has a different impression of why we’re here, though.”
“Oh? What does she think we’re doing?”
“Girl-time bonding.” He looked as doom-filled as he sounded. “You might want to see if your parents can come out, too.”
“I’ll see if we have enough rooms.”
Chuckie hung up before I could get my phone out. “Caterer’s a jerk, but the food was catered from one of the restaurants in their version of a food court.”
“Which one?”
“L’Avventura.”
I shook my head. “There’s no restaurant named that here.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah, I’m positive.” The week with Chuckie wasn’t the only time I’d spent in Vegas, and I lived to eat out at nice restaurants—at least, I had before I’d discovered sex with Martini. Fine dining had dropped a bit on my list since then. But not so much that I wasn’t fully aware of every restaurant here.
I walked over to the huge television that dominated one wall in what I supposed was the living room. The hotel amenities book was there. I flipped through it. “No L’Avventura.”
“Check the mall,” Reader said as he finished his call. “Could be there.”
I did. “No. Nothing like it.”
Martini and Christopher looked at each other. “Be right back,” Martini said. They both disappeared. I checked the double doors—they were unlocked.
“That has to be weird to live with,” Chuckie said casually.
“You get used to it.”
“Do you?”
I looked up at him. “Yeah. Thanks, by the way.”
“For what?”
“For still being you.”
He grinned. “Well, that’s something.”
“I’m going to fail the tests.” I hadn’t meant to blurt that out.
Chuckie reached out and stroked my cheek. “He doesn’t care. It won’t matter to him. Martini’s not focused on regaining the throne—he’s focused on protecting you, the Pontifex, and the rest of his people. Not going off to a world he’s never seen to take care of it or solve its problems.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m positive. I wish I weren’t. I’d be happy if he disappeared and left you here. But he won’t, not willingly.”
“What if they force him to?”
Chuckie shrugged. “Then we’ll do what we Americans do best.”
“What’s that?”
He grinned again, but this time it was feral. “We’ll make them sorry they ever bothered us.”
CHAPTER 13
MARTINI AND CHRISTOPHER WERE BACK, both looking angry. “Get your buddies in here, fast, and get the phones fixed,” Martini said to Chuckie.
“Not that I mind, but why?”
“Catering never took an order from the front desk for anything to come up to this suite. Catering says their phones haven’t been working all day—they’ve had to send a runner to the front desk on an hourly basis. Said runner also never took an order to or from the front desk for this suite. The desk clerk, however, is positive she gave your order to someone from her catering department.”
Chuckie’s eyes narrowed. “You’re sure?”
“Haven’t found a human yet who could lie to me,” Martini snapped. “Oh, and we tell the humans from the A-Cs by the heartbeats. And A-Cs can’t lie to me, either. So, yeah, humans down there, not A-Cs. Confused humans who haven’t spoken to you, ever. Who also, let me mention, didn’t send any food up to you.”
“Stop eating or drinking,” I barked. “Lorraine and Claudia, full medical scans on everybody, right now.”
Reader opened his phone and made another call while the girls leaped into action. They scanned Martini, Christopher, me, Gower, and Chuckie first, then themselves and the rest of the team. “Our telephony team’s on the way. More medical’s coming, too,” Reader told me. “Along with the rest of our supplies. And a ton of adrenaline. That we’ll want to keep under lock and key.”
He didn’t need to tell me. Martini’s empathic blocks and synapses burned out under too much stress and activity. Sleep was a regenerative, and so were some medical procedures, but he routinely reached a point where he had to go into an isolation chamber, and if he didn’t get into one, he had to have adrenaline or die. Point of fact, I had to slam a huge hypodermic that resembled a harpoon far more than a sewing needle into his hearts. It was horrible, but it was a better option than letting him die. We’d had plenty of enemies use his adrenaline dependency against him, particularly during Operation Drug Addict, so there was no reason to think this time would be any different.
The girls were done. “Nobody has anything wrong that we can tell,” Lorraine said with relief.
I looked at the table. “What, if anything, wasn’t eaten by someone on the team?”
We all examined the offerings. “That,” Chuckie pointed to a dish near the center. “I have no idea what it is, by the way, which is why I didn’t touch it. But it’s undisturbed from how it was when it arrived, so no one else had any either.”
Reader and I looked at it. “No clue.”
“Me either, girlfriend. Yo, Tim, flyboys, need you for a minute.” The rest of the humans came over. Reader pointed. “Don’t eat it or taste it, but do you have any idea of what it is?”
They all shook their heads. “Looks gross,” Jerry said.
“Sort of like boiled okra,” Joe offered.
“Only not like my mamma ever made,” Randy added.
All the A-Cs were staring at it. “Familiar?” I asked Martini.
“No. I’m with the others, that looks disgusting.”
I reached out and took the alien-detector out of Jerry’s hand and held it toward the icky foodstuff. It glowed red.
“Sentient food? I mean, after it’s been cooked?”
“They don’t find sentience,” Chuckie said. “They find something alien to Earth.”
“Why the color spectrum, then?”
“Because we have DNA samples of what pure A-Cs and hybrid A-Cs are made of. So we can spot them. You know, so we know who the friendlies are?” Chuckie looked over to Martini. “Red means alien we don’t know about.”
Martini nodded. “That’s why the necklace and the tracker showed red. They’re metals from our home world, but not metals that are in our DNA. Baby, run it over everything else.”
I did. Only the one dish glowed red. Tim checked out the minibar and all the stuff in the refrigerator—all clean. Something in my brain kicked. “You said the front desk clerk thought she’d given Chuckie’s food order to the Catering department’s runner, right?”
“Yes,” Christopher confirmed. “And we’re not quite as stupid as you always seem to think. Already checked out every person in the Catering department. No one’s missing, no one’s extra. Everyone who’s supposed to be here today is, and no one has a day off today, either.”
“So we have an extra body. That the front desk clerk thought was someone she knew.”
“Right.” Christopher shrugged. “No idea of what to do about it, though.”
I hated to say this in front of Chuckie. “Okay, then the A-C we’re looking for is an imageer.”
“Come again?” Christopher sounded insulted. “What makes you say that?”
“Because you don’t have shapeshifters.” I looked around. Everyone else looked blank too. I had no idea why. It seemed obvious.
A-Cs with imageering talent were able to manipulate images, which was how the Imageering side of the Centaurion house kept
the regular humans from realizing parasitic jellyfish things had splatted onto a human and turned said human into an alien superbeing monster.
In addition to manipulation, an imageer who’d touched the picture of a person would know everything about that person—Christopher had explained it as pictures taking a copy of the mind and soul as well as the body. The stronger the imageer, the more information he or she could glean from the touched image.
Christopher was the strongest imageer on the planet, and during Operation Fugly, he’d touched some of the pictures I’d had displayed in my apartment. This was why, during Operation Drug Addict, he’d recognized my old boyfriend from high school, Brian Dwyer, before I did. Well before, but hey, as I liked to remind everyone, I was the big picture girl. Details were for other people.
Chuckie almost never allowed his picture to be taken. I’d always figured it was because he didn’t think he looked good when he was younger and was more comfortable out of the limelight as an adult. Now I wondered how long he’d known just what kinds of aliens were on Earth.
But it wasn’t relevant to the current problem. Other imageering skills were. When we were recovering from that mad moment of not-too-wise passion in the elevator, Christopher had shown that imageers could also draw images using air molecules or some such. To me, this knowledge should have made what I was thinking obvious to all, but apparently the heavy thinking was somehow being left to me. Always the way.
“The fake runner shorted out the phones to Catering, probably after he or she heard Chuckie call for food. He or she overlaid an image of the real runner onto himself and took the order from the front desk clerk. Same faker delivered the food to Chuckie. No one’s the wiser. They’ve tapped the phones, so it was simple to call Chuckie back, since they’ve kept the lines out to Catering. They made up a restaurant name, and Bob’s your uncle.”
“My uncle’s name is Richard,” Martini said. “But, okay, that makes sense.”
“So they’re on the premises somewhere,” Chuckie said.
“One of them is, for sure. But A-Cs move so fast, it wouldn’t need to be more than one.”
Christopher closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he pulled out his phone. “This is Commander White. I want a full personnel status report for today. Every imageer, where they were, who they were with, every detail. And I want anyone who can’t prove his or her whereabouts put under immediate house arrest. Yes, I’m serious. Yes, I want this done immediately. No, it’s not a drill, it’s real. No, this is me telling you, not the C.I.A. Look, you want me to come down there and explain it personally to you?” He was snarling. “Right. Faster than that. Yes, that’s why I said immediately.” He covered the phone and looked at Reader. “James, we need Security to main Imageer control stat—I don’t think I’m talking to who I should be.”
Reader nodded and dialed. I looked at Chuckie. “I am so sick of being infiltrated.”
“Maybe they’re just confused.”
“Maybe.” Martini had his Commander hat on, too. “But maybe not.” He pulled out his phone. “We’re on internal alert. Yes. Right. Imageering. No, I’m not kidding. No, not Christopher. Every other imageer, however. Right. Handle it fast, handle it right, because if I have to come down there and handle it for you . . . Right, good. I want to know the moment you find anything suspicious. Any kind of suspicious. Right. Good. Yeah, Christopher’s very concerned. Yes, thanks for taking care of that already. Appreciate the help. Thanks, Gladys.”
“Gladys? You called Gladys for this?”
He gave me a sideways look. “You’d be surprised at what Gladys’ job title is.”
I thought about it. “I supposed Center Operator isn’t it.”
“No.”
I thought about it some more. “Why does the Head of Security run the intercom system?”
He grinned. “Because we don’t want a peon disturbing our rest.” He nodded to Christopher. “She’s already got the Pontifex secured.”
Christopher nodded back and mouthed, “Thanks.”
“Yes, I really would like to know who’s in there with you. Really? How interesting. Hello? Confirm, please. Okay, good. Take them all in. I want all of Imageering under the closest scrutiny. Looking for anything suspicious, particularly anything that relates to Commander Martini. Regular updates would be nice. Yes, with extreme prejudice.” He hung up and rubbed his forehead. “This sucks, but good call, Kitty.”
“You think your department’s been infiltrated?”
“Well, the reaction time’s not exactly what I’m used to when we’re under alert, so yeah, I’m pretty sure we have a problem.”
“Only one?”
“Hilarious.” Christopher looked at Martini. “Jeff, if my department’s infiltrated, what about yours?”
“If we have a rogue imageer out there, who knows?” Martini sighed. “At least it’ll be fast.”
“How so?” Chuckie asked.
“We move fast,” Martini said. “And we move faster in these kinds of situations.”
“How fast?”
Christopher and Martini’s phones both rang. Martini grinned at me as he answered. “That fast.”
CHAPTER 14
MARTINI AND CHRISTOPHER WERE BOTH DEEP in conversation when there was a knock. Chuckie pulled a gun out of his jacket and motioned for the rest of us to get away from the door. I dug my Glock out of my purse, and Reader and Gower pulled their guns out of their jackets as well. Nice to know the three of them were wearing shoulder holsters. Martini and Christopher still refused to, another thing I was working on.
Everyone else got out of the way. Four guns were probably good for one door, and that way, the others were in fallback position.
Chuckie opened the door so that he was to the side. And we were greeted by the threatening sight of Melanie and Emily, Lorraine and Claudia’s mothers. “Nice welcome,” Melanie said dryly. She looked a lot like Raquel Welch had when she was playing a cave girl.
Emily, who looked like a young Sophia Loren, shook her head. “Nice to see things are always tense for you guys.”
We put the guns away. “Nice to see you. What’re you two doing here?”
Melanie shrugged as they started dragging several fully loaded luggage carts into the room. “James felt having people you could trust deliver your supplies, particularly Jeff’s adrenaline, would be a good idea.”
I loved Reader. “Great idea.”
“Plus, we wanted to have a good time, too.” Emily laughed at my expression. “Lucinda’s coming, we got the word. You’ll be happy we’re here, trust me.”
Lorraine and Claudia trotted over to help their mothers. “You’re going to stay?” Lorraine asked.
“We won’t cramp your style,” Melanie said. “Promise.”
“Sure, you say that now.” Lorraine grinned. “It’s great to have you here, Mom. Joe’s being a stick-in-the-mud and doesn’t want to let me gamble.”
Melanie laughed. “We’ll see about that.” I’d never really questioned where Lorraine and Claudia got their personalities from. As mothers went, Melanie and Emily were my faves, right after my own and Chuckie’s mom. I pushed the fact that I didn’t really like Martini’s mother, and she really didn’t like me, as far down as possible.
“Are your husbands coming, too?”
Emily rolled her eyes. “No. They hate Vegas. Which is good, because that way we have contacts back at the Science Center we can trust. I can’t believe Imageering’s been infiltrated.”
“How did you know about that?”
Melanie shrugged. “The Science Center’s already been searched. We’re all clean, but you never know.”
“In five minutes?”
They exchanged glances. “Um, Kitty? Hyperspeed, remember?” Emily looked concerned. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Just overwhelmed.” A thought occurred. “Hey, do you two happen to know what this is?” I pointed to the dish of creepy food. “Don’t eat it, we think it’s poisoned.”
; They stared at it. “It’s familiar . . .” Melanie shook her head. “I think it’s a dish from home.”
“You think? You don’t know for sure?”
“All of you always act like there are only two generations here,” Emily answered. “But really, there are three or more. We’re a lot younger than Jeff’s parents, as an example. We don’t count as the older generation, and since we have children in it, we don’t count as the younger generation, either. Our parents came as operatives, too, but they were older, and many of them aren’t with us any longer. We were little when we left the home world, but we remember it.”
This made sense, it just hadn’t really occurred to me. I felt unobservant, which was pretty much my par for any course.
Chuckie sauntered over. “Ladies, glad you could join us. Charles Reynolds.” He put his hand out.
Melanie took it first. “Right, the new boss.” She gave him an obvious up and down. “Hmmm. Well, I suppose if Jeff ever acts stupid again, you’re not a bad option.”
Chuckie managed to keep his jaw closed, but his eyes went wide. “Uh . . .” He offered his hand to Emily.
“Oh, Angela likes him,” Emily said chidingly as she shook his hand. “I’m sure he’s not as much of a jerk as the boys think he is. Nice grip.” She turned his hand over. “No manicure? You’re not the rich pompous ass they said. Interesting.”
Chuckie looked at me. “Are they for real?”
“They’re the heads of the Bluntness Division.”
Chuckie started to laugh. “Would you two mind sharing a room? We’re going to run out of space, I think.”
“Sure, we’d rather, girl sleepover kind of thing,” Melanie said. She gave him another close look. “Angela says we can trust you.”
Chuckie shrugged. “She’s known me half my life, and she recommended me for initial hire and promotions within the Agency. I’d assume she doesn’t hate me.”
“No, she doesn’t.” Emily was also giving Chuckie another once-over. “You sure this isn’t some elaborate attempt to win Kitty back?”