“Good morning,” he said. “I’m so sorry to keep you waiting. I’m Skip Anderson, otherwise known as the dean.” He spoke with a prim accent. Not one I could place within a region, but more one acquired through an upbringing in private schools and Harvard education.
I was still holding the book, and when I saw his eyes scan to it, I set it down. “You a fan of Clarke?” he asked.
“Sure. Who isn’t? He revolutionized science fiction. But I’m not sure I have a stomach for any of it anymore,” I answered.
“I always liked Asimov better. Robots always interested me as a teenager. Back to business. You really believe this guy from D.C.? There’s no way our hybrids could have contacted him,” Skip said smugly.
Mary rolled her eyes. “I highly doubt that. We learned that there’s an intricate hybrid network of terrorists, recruited even in space. They had a long game, that’s for sure.”
Skip leaned forward, frowning. “That’s impossible,” he said, voice raised. “They have no way to communicate, and no way out. We have things under control here.”
“We were told your surveillance heard some keywords. What can you tell us about that?” I asked, wondering if he would lay his cards out on the table or hold them close to his chest.
“Yes, we have, but those people are under our care now.” Skip spat the word “people,” and Mae tensed as he spoke.
“Which people?” I asked.
“The ones causing the stir at the Oval Office, and evidently around the world. They sent another group of guards when they heard the word Bhlat come through the speakers. As if one of them saying the name of a race will actually make them appear and destroy us.” Skip looked like he was about to stand up, and the handsome man took on a dark, unpleasant face.
“You do remember what happened under a year ago, right? Where were you that day?” Mary asked, probably thinking it would diffuse his undeserved anger.
Skip slid back in his chair; her question seemed to have the desired effect. He looked much younger than his forty-something years as he began to quietly speak. “I hate those bastards.” He looked at Mae for a brief second and averted his eyes back to his desk. “I lived in D.C., well, Arlington. The ships came and I still went to work at the senator’s office. I remember being so mad that no one else showed up. Can you imagine me at work, trying to email files and work on a presentation while we had these gray ships over us, and a bunch of those behemoth vessels looming over the world? What an idiot I was.” He stopped, getting up to cross over to his wet bar. His hand moved to the Scotch, lingering for a few quiet moments before continuing to the single-serve coffee maker. “Coffee, anyone?” he asked, trying to put on an affable voice.
We all shook our heads silently, me wanting him to continue his tale.
“Very well.” He made a cup of coffee, and took it black back to his desk, sitting up a little straighter. “Sorry about that. It’s hard going back to that day, I’m sure for all of us. There I was like a crazy man, working as we were invaded, and my wife was trying to get me to come to her. Well, my ex-wife. She called me first thing and I told her I couldn’t see her. I was still angry with her for leaving me. She’d left a few months earlier, telling me all I cared about was work, and never had time for her.
“She wanted a family. Kids, white picket fence…I thought I did too, when we first met. Only the older I got, the less I wanted that, and the more I wanted a career in politics. We were drifting, but… I didn’t want to admit it.” He was taking us on an extended journey through his time of the Event, but I assumed this path was relevant to the big picture. “She decided to head out of town, I guess. She made a break for it, but no one escaped, as we all know. Well, except you two and your friends.” He said the words with a drip of envy. “I was just leaving the office when the sun had set. I still can’t believe I stayed there all day. No wonder she left me.” He took a drink of his coffee and stared blankly past us toward the door.
“Hey, life is full of growth moments. None of us were or are perfect. It’s what we do with our teachable moments that define us and change us,” Mary said, again impressing me with her ability to spout out positive messages.
He looked at her and smiled lightly. “I’m still trying to be at peace with that idea. I was brought to vessel twelve, along with countless others. I spent the first day just trying to figure out what was going on. There were fights breaking out everywhere, and I witnessed two murders in the first two days alone. I never even tried to stop the young man from killing the other guy. I don’t think anyone was expecting it. He just clocked the older guy and went straight for his throat with his hands. The kid wasn’t big, but he had a sinewy strength to him. Before we knew it, the older man was on the ground, unconscious. The kid took something from his pocket and ran out of the room. Pills.
“The room was full of people, and no one stopped him. We all just stood there with our jaws open, like we didn’t understand what had happened. Finally, a burly man ran after him, but I guess the kid was long gone down the corridors. I decided, then and there, I wasn’t going to be a passive prisoner.
“After exploring the vessel and talking to a lot of people, I knew our prison was huge. Gargantuan, with hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions. We didn’t know the scope, but we were trying to figure it out. So that meant the area they beamed us up from must have been a large one. That meant my wife might have been there with me.” Skip stopped, and I almost said something comforting but decided to hold off. “My ex-wife, I meant. So that was my new goal. Find her among the throngs of matching rooms full of people. Some of the rooms seemed to have expelled a gas into the rooms, because people were down all over the place, seemingly at random.”
We knew now that the Kraski were planning on moving their whole species away from their home, and they were going to put everyone in some sort of stasis using this gas. It basically slowed down the metabolic functions and allowed them to keep humans alive without food and water for prolonged periods of time. Quite a cool concept, if it didn’t mean the death of so many people. It turned out a percentage of people were deathly allergic to the alien toxin, and about five percent of Earth was lost just from that alone, among the already sick who just couldn’t survive, the vessels we’d lost to the sun, and the mass firings the hybrids had rained down on some vessels.
“Quite the needle in a haystack,” I said, getting up to make myself a coffee. I asked if anyone else wanted anything, and after a pause, the dean asked for a splash of Scotch. I wasn’t going to judge the guy for taking a pinch at eight thirty in the morning as he told us a story; I expected it wasn’t going to end well for anyone involved.
He continued as the single-serve machine whirred and poured. I passed him the Scotch, and he swirled the brown liquid on the bottom of his tumbler and watched it as he spoke. “I tried to find the upper corner – the top floor and far left room. It took me hours to get there, and when I did, I searched that first room. People were milling about: some in the halls, some fearful of leaving the room for fear of retribution from an alien host we hadn’t seen yet.
“Some people thought it was a crazy government experiment, and others thought they were just dreaming. I called for Marcie. When I entered a room of the unconscious people, I searched through the piles of them, hoping to see her lovely face. I never did find her. She didn’t make it. They killed her.” His eyes moved once again to Mae’s face, hard lines etched on his forehead. “I found her name on my vessel list after it was over. If only I could have made it to her, I could have protected her.”