The E.T. Guy (Office Aliens Book 1)

by V. C. Lancaster

  The crowd was thinner away from the screens, and Lee and Tol weren’t busy yet as most people were still watching. This time, with the stricter protocols, Lois’ bag had to be emptied onto the table and her individual items scanned and swabbed, which was an unpleasant feeling. Lee and Tol were her friends, but she still didn’t want them going through her purse in front of the whole building. She had to remove her jacket and shoes to go through the metal detector, and she still set it off. Lee looked at his screen and apologised to her, explaining that the machine was set to give the alarm for much lower levels of metal or other listed materials.

  She reassured him that she didn’t mind as he approached her with a wand, which he scanned over her body while she held her arms out. She watched as her belongings were X-rayed. Zir came through the detector behind her, setting it off so that Tol then had to go and investigate his clothing, but he was done much faster than Lee. Zir’s clothes were loose and he wasn’t wearing layers like Lois was.

  He growled as Lee put the wand down and told Lois in a sorry voice that he would have to pat her down.

  “It’s alright, Zir,” Lois told him, though part of her was mortified to have to go through this at the hands of her colleague, the guy she joked with on her way out of the office at night.

  Zir growled louder and stormed over as Lee laid his hands on her, but he made it fast and was done before Zir could do anything stupid.

  “You’re good to go, Lois. Sorry about that,” Lee said, handing her back her bag, shoes and jacket.

  “It’s alright. Hopefully we’ll be back to normal tomorrow,” Lois said, offering him a sad smile. Zir had his hand at her back, and she let him lead her away to a comfortable distance before she put her shoes and jacket back on.

  “He touched you,” Zir grumbled, his crest twitching.

  Lois ran her hands down his arms to soothe him. “I know, I know, but he was just doing his job. Neither of us enjoyed it, trust me,” she said.

  Zir obviously wasn’t convinced, still looking back at where Lee and Tol processed other people. Recognising that this could be an unfortunate outlet for Zir’s stress and lead him to make very bad decisions, Lois took his hand and led him into some nearby bathrooms.

  No one else was there, as the interior of the building was still underpopulated, with most of the employees in the lobby. Lois put her hand on Zir’s cheek, making him look at her. The fact that he didn’t focus on her even though they were alone told him just how stressed out he was by the situation. She kissed him quickly.

  “I’m okay,” she told him. “You’re okay. We’re okay.”

  He huffed out a long breath. “I do not like other males touching your body that much.”

  “I know, I don’t either. I only want you to touch me,” she said, feeling like he could use a little positive reinforcement just then. She wondered if the general atmosphere of mourning and uncertainty and fear was reminding him of how it must have been on Teiss after the Ypex came. “Hopefully the extra security won’t be in place for long.”

  Zir rumbled his agreement, and Lois led them back into the main building. They weren’t ready to separate just yet, and it was clear that most people still weren’t getting to work, so they swung by ITS so that Zir could pick up his gear and then moved on to Intake together.

  Lois peeked in Lucia’s office using the narrow window by the door, but Lucia was on the phone looking harried so Lois didn’t bother her, or expect her to come out for a while. She turned her desktop on and directed Zir to take her chair. She sat in his lap while they watched the live news coverage.

  Zir’s work Gadgit would alert him if he was assigned any jobs, but it was silent. It would probably be hours before people settled down enough to report technical difficulties. Lois had work she could be doing, but with the rest of the office empty, she would rather stay close to Zir for as long as she could. Everyone already knew about their relationship anyway, she felt they would overlook the impropriety of a little cuddling at her desk on this of all days.

  As they watched the news, more concrete information came in. The UNE had managed to open a discussion with the Rhacahr, though what the results of that discussion was hadn’t yet been publicised. The worst was when they confirmed that the ship had been leaving Teiss, carrying a full complement of refugees from the planet’s surface. The death toll was expected to be over a million. When that news came in, Lois just wrapped her arms around Zir’s shoulders and tucked her face into his neck and held him.

  They forgot about Lucia, despite sitting at Lois’ desk for almost an hour. Wei, Jared and Susan trickled in one by one, looking pale and shaken. Susan had a friend from the Family Connections unit with her. Lois and Zir watched the live coverage, which looped a lot of the same information, but they were desperate to catch any updates. Susan flicked through more esoteric websites, while Jared and Wei monitored what was being said around the world. They let each other know what they found, repeatedly commenting on how awful it was, how they couldn’t wrap their heads around it. It was like a bad dream.

  Finally, around eleven-thirty, Lucia’s door suddenly opened and all heads turned to look at her. She looked stressed out, like she’d been up all night or rubbing her face and running her hands through her hair a lot.

  She glanced at Zir and Susan’s friend, and said “Everyone should get back to their own departments. I don’t mind if you keep in touch throughout the day, but there are still people waiting to be processed and I need to speak to my team.”

  Lois gave Zir a kiss on the cheek and slid off his lap so he could get up. He picked up his bag and she said “I’ll meet you for lunch.” They wouldn’t be apart for long.

  When it was just the Intake officers in the room, Lucia crossed to the door, making sure it was closed and scanning the hallway outside as she did so. Then she turned back to her team.

  “What I’m about to say doesn’t leave this room,” she said. “I’m going to need you all to get a lot of work done in a very short amount of time. What I want you to do isn’t policy and it is isn’t strictly legal either, so if you have a problem with that, now’s your chance to get out and stay clean.”

  She waited, but nobody moved. Lois was alarmed, terrified even, but she had worked for Lucia long enough that she trusted her.

  “Alright,” Lucia continued. “Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to start backdating immigration forms. As many as you can. Forget processing anyone who’s already here. Right now, your priority is getting ready to fast-track any new arrivals. There are people still in the air and we need to get them safely landed. And we need to make it look like they didn’t arrive today, or tomorrow, or however long we’ve got until this window closes.”

  “What’s going on?” Jared asked.

  Lucia looked at him, obviously debating how much she should tell them. “The UNE have gone into an emergency congress. The Secretary of ETI wants us to know the transporter explosion wasn’t an accident. They don’t know what happened yet, but they’re debating closing Earth’s borders. If that happens, millions of people will be stranded in space, so we need to get as many as possible down before the UNE make it official. The pilots have already been given the order to floor it.”

  “Why would they do that?!” Jared said, sounding appalled.

  Lucia gave him a sympathetic look. “If it was a sabotage, or an anti-Alliance terrorist act, or the Ypex got on board, it could be dangerous to let any more ships land on Earth. This isn’t common knowledge so it doesn’t leave this room. It is on a strictly need-to-know basis. Message your loved ones to tell them you’re going to be working overtime. Right now, we are operating an ‘Open Arms’ policy until the UNE announces otherwise, and I know I can count on all of you to work every minute to get those people a home here.”

  Lucia looked at the stunned and horrified expressions of her team, and gave them a stately nod, breaking the tension. She strode through the frozen semi-circle they had formed to listen to her, and came back with h
er arms full of forms, and began handing them out.

  “You know what to do. You know the holes in the system. I’m sorry to ask you to do this, but I am not exaggerating when I say we have a crisis on our hands. This might not be what you were expecting when you took this job, but this is your chance to be heroes.”

  Lois took the stack of paper she was handed and dropped into her chair, dazed. It wasn’t an accident? How could the UNE vote whether or not to strand millions of people in space with nowhere to go? She couldn’t wrap her head around it, it felt like the world was changing around her, like they’d tipped over the edge of an era and were crashing into another chapter in the history books.

  She couldn’t see what was coming but as she looked at the blank forms in front of her, and heard the printer start up as it churned out more, and Lucia handed her a pen, she knew what she had to do. She took out her Gadgit and quickly typed a message to Zir, telling him that she had to work through lunch and that he should go home without her, then got to work exploiting every gap in the system she knew of.

  Chapter 23

  Over the next few hours, the whole Intake department was called in. Lois filled out forms until her hand ached, eventually cutting it down to the essentials only. She didn’t make anything up, she just signed, dated, stamped and double stamped blank forms.

  The whole team together probably cleared thousands of forms, more than they ever processed in a single arrivals group. Lucia kept reminding them though that the transporters that were left out there in between Earth and Teiss might arrive virtually back to back as they raced to make landfall before the borders closed. It made Lois shudder to imagine how terrified the crews must be, knowing their home planet might lock them out at any moment, condemning them to a limbo in orbit.

  Lucia also stressed that different countries might react differently, potentially even going against the UNE ruling, whatever it was, for as long as they could. This meant that if the UNE voted to close the borders, but the USA ignored that vote, their San Diego branch might be taking a hundred times what it was used to. Other countries would close their offices, and the three American offices would become bottlenecks for the transport ships. No country could ignore the ruling for long, but the USA could hold out for several hours, maybe even a day, before being forced to close as well. That could be time enough to receive hundreds of thousands of refugees, if not over a million.

  They all agreed though, that despite the inevitable risk of overcrowding and all it entailed, it was better for the Teissians to get their feet on the ground than to be left in space. Lucia assured them that the dorms had been alerted to the situation and emergency plans were being made to double or triple their capacity if need be.

  Lucia let them know that any ship en route to Teiss had quietly been issued a recall command. That was not a good sign. Aborting a mission like that wasted hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, and it could take years to establish a regular relay chain again. Any refugees left on Teiss would be without safe passage off the planet for at least two years, unless the recall was cancelled and the closest ships were told to turn around and head for Teiss again.

  Lois estimated that in two years’ time, with no escape, the Ypex and the Rhacahr hunting them could wipe out eighty to ninety per cent of the Teissian population remaining on the planet.

  Unless Earth sent their ships back, the Teissians would have to rely on the Rhacahr to evacuate them, and the Rhacahr had already made their resistance to their forces being used for non-militant purposes known. According to them, they needed every ship and crew member to fight the Ypex, not taxi refugees through millions of lightyears. They had given Earth the technology so that humans could do that and leave the Rhacahr free to wage their war of extermination. It would not be easy or cheap to convince the Rhacahr to help the Teissians rather than just use their planet as a battleground.

  In the early afternoon, Lucia allowed them to leave one at a time to buy lunch they could eat at their desk, and she herself bought them a round of coffees as thanks for their hard work. None of them begrudged her for making them work like that, they all knew what was at stake and they wouldn’t be doing the jobs they were if they didn’t want the Teissians to be able to settle safely and well on Earth. And they knew they wouldn’t be doing this for long. The first of the arrivals was barrelling towards them, and the UNE could close the borders at any time.

  When it was Lois’ turn to get lunch, she grabbed her Gadgit and called Zir as soon as she was out of the Intake door. She told him she couldn’t tell him exactly what was going on, but she would as soon as she could. She told him she missed him, was thinking about him, and checked that he was doing okay. As predicted, no one was too fussed about computer glitches, so the ITS team were half-watching the news while fiddling with whatever jobs they had to keep them busy, but the atmosphere was not good.

  They had the news running in the Intake Office as well, with Lucia periodically taking phone calls in her office that everyone tried to pretend they weren’t straining to overhear. Lucia had sat down with them in the main area with a stack of forms she had been forging as well.

  Over the course of the day, the only new information being reported was that the UNE were in an emergency meeting, that they were in talks with the Rhacahr though the subject of these talks was unknown, and that the transporter ships had been recalled.

  Unfortunately, this meant that the broadcasters began including a lot of public speculation in their reports, disseminating the theories that the ship had been blown up from the inside as an act of Teissian terrorism protesting the Alliance Treaties, or that the Rhacahr had fired on the ship.

  Some viewers were calling for the loss of the Tyberius to be considered an act of war, as it should have been under Rhacahr protection in Rhacahr-occupied space. They wanted the UNE to prepare a military response. There was even a theory that a human on board had sabotaged the ship as an act of protest against the influx of Teissian refugees to Earth. The comments following that one hadn’t been pretty.

  In the end, the UNE debated for eight hours. At nine pm, a ship that had been scheduled to come in the following week made orbit and everyone scrambled to process the people coming in off the dropships. This meant that Lois didn’t return to the Intake Office until after eleven, and so didn’t hear the announcement of the UNE’s decision.

  At ten pm, the UNE had declared that the borders were closed until they knew the cause of the explosion on the Tyberius. They made it sound like the incoming transporters would only be in orbit for a few days, but Lois’ heart sank at the news. With the ships racing to return to Earth, they would quickly pile up out there, and they would have burned fuel when they increased their speed.

  It was a dangerous decision. Just when the UNE and the Alliance needed to pull together and show solidarity, Earth’s leaders were responding with suspicion - of the refugees, of the Rhacahr, and even the human crews. The ships that had been recalled before reaching Teiss were not being allowed to land either, as if they had somehow been contaminated. It looked like the group Lois had just processed would be the last, for now at least. She couldn’t believe only one ship had made it back in time.

  As Lois walked back along the corridor to the office, her eyes sore with fatigue, she texted Zir to update him. It was late, and she knew she should let him get to bed, but truth be told she didn’t want to travel across the city to her apartment, she wanted to walk around the corner and crawl into his nest with him.

  She pushed the door to Intake open and paused. Lucia was sitting alone, slouched in a chair, no longer filling out forms, just staring into space. The poor woman looked as exhausted as Lois felt. She looked up when she heard Lois enter the room.

  “They’ve made their decision,” she said.

  “I saw,” Lois replied, going to her desk and collapsing into her chair and kicking off her heels. The others were all still with their groups it seemed.

  “I’ve had word from the Secretary. We’
ve got tonight, but by opening hours tomorrow, we have to stop accepting new arrivals. Ten a.m. at the latest,” she said, rubbing her hands over her face. “That’s when our credible deniability runs out. San Diego might be able to push it further, but that would be taking a huge risk. We might get two more ships in by that time, but we’d be lucky to get more than that.”

  Lois nodded, at a loss for what to say. She didn’t feel like she could do two more groups tonight, but she would if she had to. How many more millions of people would that leave stranded?

  “Go home, Lois. Get some sleep,” Lucia said. “It’ll be a few hours until another ship reaches us.”

  “What about you?” Lois asked.

  “I’ll stay here. Find a sofa to nap on or something. We might get a group in at four, I need to be here for that,” she replied.

  “I don’t feel right leaving,” Lois said.

  Lucia looked at her. “You’re a good woman, Lois.”

  “It’s just one night,” Lois hedged.

  “Yeah,” Lucia sighed. “We’ll work until the borders close, then we can all go home and sleep.”

  “Sounds good,” Lois agreed. “I’ll see if I can find us something to eat,” she said, pushing to her feet and heading to the vending machines.

  The building should have been deserted, but there was still a skeleton crew of people working at their desks or hurrying between the departments. Lois brought food and drinks back to Intake, then she and her co-workers did as Lucia suggested and tried to find places to nap before the next group came in. Lois lay down on the carpet behind her chair while Jared tied up some loose ends at his desk. Wei wasn’t back yet and Susan had gone to investigate a sofa in a boardroom upstairs.

  They all worked through the night, though Lois would never normally have called what they did a job well done. They rushed a couple thousand people through at four am, asking only for names on the forms before they were allowed to go to the dorms. They would collect more information in the days to come, but for now it was enough to get them safe and out of the way. There were rumours of a military lockdown of the dorms, or a curfew for the Teissians, or a handful of other paranoid security measures being put in place in the morning.