by Gini Koch
Raves for the Alien novels:
“If you like your futuristic adventure with heapings of over-the-top fun and absurdity, Koch has the series for you. . . . A rip-roaring and outlandish romp!”
—RT Book Reviews
“Koch still pulls the neat trick of quietly weaving in plot threads that go unrecognized until they start tying together—or snapping. This is a hyperspeed-paced addition to a series that shows no signs of slowing down.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Aliens, danger, and romance make this a fast-paced, wittily-written sf romantic comedy.”
—Library Journal
“Gini Koch’s Kitty Katt series is a great example of the lighter side of science fiction. Told with clever wit and non-stop pacing . . . it blends diplomacy, action and sense of humor into a memorable reading experience.”
—Kirkus
“The action is nonstop, the snark flies fast and furious. . . . Another fantastic addition to an imaginative series!”
—Night Owl Sci-Fi (top pick)
“Gini Koch has another winner, plenty of action combined with just the right touch of humor and a kick-ass storyline. What’s not to like?”
—Fresh Fiction
“This delightful romp has many interesting twists and turns as it glances at racism, politics, and religion en route . . . will have fanciers of cinematic sf parodies referencing Men in Black, Ghost Busters, and X-Men.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Gini Koch mixes up the sometimes staid niche of science fiction romance by adding nonstop humor, blockbuster action, and moments worthy of a soap opera.”
—Dirty Sexy Books
DAW Books Presents GINI KOCH’s Alien Novels:
TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN
ALIEN TANGO
ALIEN IN THE FAMILY
ALIEN PROLIFERATION
ALIEN DIPLOMACY
ALIEN VS. ALIEN
ALIEN IN THE HOUSE
ALIEN RESEARCH
(coming in December 2013)
Copyright © 2013 by Jeanne Cook.
All Rights Reserved.
Cover art by Daniel Dos Santos.
Cover design by G-Force Design.
DAW Book Collectors No. 1621.
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
ISBN: 978-1-101-63557-5
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are registered trademarks. All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and international trademark law.
Contents
Cover
Praise
Also by GINI KOCH
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
CHAPTER 72
CHAPTER 73
CHAPTER 74
CHAPTER 75
CHAPTER 76
CHAPTER 77
CHAPTER 78
CHAPTER 79
CHAPTER 80
CHAPTER 81
CHAPTER 82
CHAPTER 83
CHAPTER 84
CHAPTER 85
CHAPTER 86
CHAPTER 87
CHAPTER 88
CHAPTER 89
CHAPTER 90
CHAPTER 91
CHAPTER 92
CHAPTER 93
CHAPTER 94
CHAPTER 95
CHAPTER 96
CHAPTER 97
CHAPTER 98
Excerpt from ALIEN RESEARCH
About the Author
To the memory of my grandmother, Julia, who instilled a love of language, reading, science fiction, and mysteries in me from a very young age.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The usual massive thanks to my epic Gang of Four: my amazing editor, Sheila Gilbert, who managed to keep me calm and writing when my deadline moved up and I was nowhere close to done, and fit in some great brainstorming at the same time; my wonderful agent, Cherry Weiner, who always knows when to nudge me and when to leave me alone and keep everyone else away, too; my awesome crit partner, Lisa Dovichi, who managed to do all her crit partnering and then some while writing and drawing and launching her first series; and my great, longtime main beta reader, Mary Fiore, for reading a long book and catching a plethora of little errors in record time. So glad the four of you are with me on this journey, ’cause I don’t think I’d be sane (or as close to sane as I get) without you.
Love and thanks to all the good folks at DAW Books and all my fans around the globe. To my Hook Me Up! Gang, members of Team Gini, all Alien Collective Members in Very Good Standing around the world, Twitter followers, Facebook fans and friends, and all the wonderful fans who come to my various book signings and conference panels, I have but this to say: You complete me and I love you all.
Special shout outs to: my distance assistant, Colette Chmiel, who continues to keep my sanity safe from the pirate hordes trying to destroy it; Tammy Baker for doing me the ultimate honor and naming her youngest daughter after Jamie Martini; Hal and Dee Astell for massive fan support and being such good owners of the Travel Poo
f; Mary Rehak for coming all the way from Chicago to be with me when Alien vs. Alien released; Nicole Snyder and Edward Pulley for making me the loveliest warm pink scarves I wear all the time (many times together); awesome authors Weston Ochse and Yvonne Navarro, for saving me from evil spirits; all the good folks at the Greenway branch of the United States Post Office for having supported me since well before Touched by an Alien came out, and who continue to make every trip to the USPS one I look forward to; my Sister in Insomnia, Kelsey Rowe, for helping keep the giggles going when we’re both up far too late while being far too stressed; The Poisoned Pen bookstore, for throwing such an awesome release day party for Alien vs. Alien, which was made doubly special by being my first “on release day” signing ever; and ever-wonderful author, BFF, and sister in crime Marsheila Rockwell, for always being there when I’m having late night author panic attacks and only ribbing me a little bit about how an outline might have forestalled whichever dilemma I’m having before helping me figure out how to fix it.
Last, but never least, thanks to my wonderful husband, Steve, and fabulous daughter, Veronica. I love you both more than I can say (yes, Veronica, even more than the cats), and I wouldn’t trade you for anything, not even A-C talents.
AS ANY PERSON WHO’S ever had to hide a huge secret about themselves knows, being outed before you’re ready is one of the things you fear the most.
Whether your secret is that you’re gay, in a country illegally, the wrong religion at the wrong time and in the wrong place, a space alien living on Earth, or that you hate popular shows, have been bitten by a radioactive spider, or have mutated due to giving birth to a half-alien baby whose father was supercharged by an evil bad guy drug, being outed can mean terrible things.
The people you’re hiding amongst can turn against you in cold and scary ways. They can run you out of town with torches and pitchforks. Your loved ones can become targets for all sorts of bad guy schemes. You can lose everything.
There’s nothing like a huge, interstellar invasion to really point out to the regular folks that aliens exist. And in our history, there’s been nothing like the huge, interstellar invasion we had, complete with Flying Space Dinosaurs and their really bad attitudes. At least, nothing anyone living in modern times can remember or compare to.
The term “nowhere to hide” pretty much summed up the so-called fun. As did the terms “we’re so screwed” and, happily enough, “take me to your leaders.” It looked like evacuation time for My Favorite Centaurions, if they got that lucky.
But sometimes people surprise you.
Speaking of surprises, they keep on coming for me. In addition to being Megalomaniac Girl and Wolverine with Boobs, I’m also now Dr. Doolittle. Because I like to be as diverse as possible in my worldview and talents.
But as I wasn’t really saying, my talents tend to lie in areas most people ignore, like talking to space animals and catching on to whatever the crazed evil geniuses have going before it’s too late.
It’s been quiet for a few months, relatively speaking, which is nice and all, but tends to make me a little jumpy. Because quiet rarely means things have settled down. Quiet—in the almost three action-packed years of my experience with the A-Cs of Earth—means that the bad guys are readying for the Execution Phase of the next major conspiracy to take over the world or worlds and destroy everyone I know and love.
So I’m paying attention, because they’re not going to catch us with our pants down, so to speak, while I’m still on duty. Of course, I don’t always look for evil bad guy conspiracies. But when I do, I make sure to look everywhere.
• • •
That’s right. I am the most interesting, bad-guy-foiling, sometime-superbeing-exterminating, mutated diplomat for an outer-space principality in the world. Okay, in the galaxy. What can I say? I get around.
CHAPTER 1
“THIS IS THE THIRD representative to become incapacitated in as many weeks,” the TV announcer’s voice shared.
“This is the only one incapacitated,” Jeff corrected, presumably for my benefit, seeing as the TV announcer wasn’t going to hear him unless said announcer had the best hearing in the galaxy.
“What do you mean?” I paid as much attention to the news as I did to the inner workings of the common housefly, which was to say, not at all. Hey, just because it was sort of my job to pay attention to the news didn’t make me excited about it. I had a husband who seemed to live to stay on top of things, after all.
“I mean the first two are dead. This one’s in the hospital.”
“Anyone we know? Knew?”
“Yes.” Jeff sighed the sigh of a husband who’s required to stay on top of things because his wife refuses to. “The two who died were from Alabama and Oregon, and they died in a car crash. This latest one is from Montana, and he’s got an extreme case of pneumonia. Because he’s in his late eighties, the prognosis isn’t good. You’ve met all of them at one time or another. I’d tell you their names, but I don’t have the desire to play your version of Name That Tune.”
“Why don’t you find a Love Boat or Fantasy Island marathon going on? You’ll enjoy those so much more than the constant barrage from CNN and C-SPAN.”
“This is part of the job of being the Head Diplomat, baby.”
I managed not to say that it was the boring part. There were lots of boring parts to our jobs now. They were interspersed with lots of terrifyingly exciting parts, the most recent of which had exposed the fact that aliens lived on Earth to the majority of the world’s population. Change, it was good for you, right?
There was a knock at our door. Seeing as Jeff was engrossed in the afternoon news, and seeing as I didn’t want to have to catch him up on whatever he’d miss in the minute and a half it would take to answer said door, I dutifully trotted out of our humongous living room to do the job. Helpful, that was me all over. Since we lived on half of the top floor of the American Centaurion Embassy, this also wasn’t me taking any kind of risk. Whoever was knocking lived here.
Opened the door to find our top floor neighbors standing there, otherwise known as Christopher and Amy Gaultier-White. True to form, Christopher was glaring. Patented Glare #5, to be precise. “Have you heard the news?” he asked as he strode in past me and headed for the living room and his cousin, my husband.
Amy sighed. “He’s a little stressed.”
“That’s his natural state of being. But, shocking one and all, yes, I’ve heard the news. If the news is about dead and dying politicians.”
Amy looked shocked for a moment. She was one of my best friends from high school, so she knew about my “love” of the news. She recovered quickly. “Oh. Jeff told you?”
My turn to sigh. “Yes, yes, fine. I was busy.”
“Doing what? Jamie’s at daycare right now.”
“I was wrapping her presents.” Our daughter’s first birthday loomed, and, since she was born on Christmas day, I felt it was unfair to do combo presents, meaning I had a lot of things Jeff felt were far too much for a one-year-old to be wrapped, bagged, tagged, and hidden.
Sure, as the daughter of a Jewish father and Catholic-yet-also-former-Mossad mother, I’d grown up sort of waving at the December holidays. And Jeff, being an alien whose parents were born on Alpha Four of the Alpha Centaurion solar system, didn’t celebrate the majority of the available human holidays.
However, we were in Washington, D.C. now, and certain things were inevitable. And demanded. There’d been a lot of demanding in recent months.
Amy and I joined our men in time to hear Christopher ask what was becoming a very common question. “Are they going to try to blame this on us?”
Jeff ran his hand through his hair. “No idea. So far, I haven’t heard about any anti-alien groups trying to pin a bad car crash and an illness on us.”
“Just give it time.” Christopher shook his head. “Either that or they’ll be asking us to revive the dead and save the sick.”
I’d stopped making really inappropri
ate jokes about this months ago. Because, sadly, Christopher wasn’t wrong.
During the excitement that ended up with us all being outed, we’d discovered that our old friends, the wackos from the anti-alien Club 51, were still around and active, albeit with new leaders we had yet to ferret out.
Once the general population knew about us, however, we got the fun of seeing just how many anti-alien groups there were. Turned out, there were a lot.
Turned out there were also a lot of groups who sincerely believed Jeff, Christopher, and their extended family were here to save us all and show us The Way.
In some ways, of course, they were. The A-Cs, as they called themselves, had been showing us the way since the 1960s, particularly in the areas of math, science, and technology. And they’d been protecting the Earth constantly from all the bad things from space that wanted to drop by to kick us or take over. There had been some human bad guy thwarting, too.
I’d been involved with the gang from Alpha Four for about three years now. I had a natural affinity for handling the weird and mind-melding with the psychos and megalomaniacs we routinely tangled with. Hey, it’s nice to have special skills.
However, the special skills I didn’t possess were those of diplomatic decorum and the ability to pretend to like people I detested.
“Will it affect tonight’s dinner party?” Amy asked. “I don’t know if this means we should cancel or carry on as if nothing’s happened, or something in between.”
Amy having come from money meant she was supposed to have been our go-to girl for all the formal affairs, fancy table settings, and keeping the rest of us from saying the wrong things to the wrong people. In other words, in the perfect world I didn’t live in, I should have been asking that question and she should have been answering it.
Sadly, she’d spent her first few months with us dealing with the fact that her father had been one of the megalomaniacs we’d had to deal with in a very permanent fashion. So while she was good enough to pass muster almost anywhere in the shoulder-rubbing circles we now traveled in, her confidence had been somewhat shaken and she’d flipped over to my side of the house—the kick butt first and take names later side.