In space, the pursuit ship decloaks. What issues from the strange Predator’s mouth then, in clicks and spittle, is what passes for profanity on its home world.
“You okay down there, kiddo?”
Rory froze. He stared at the device, at the helmet and the gauntlet, and then at the steps that led up from the basement. This would be a bad time for his mom to come down to check on him.
“Just playing games, Mom!” he yelled, trying to make everything sound normal.
For a few tense seconds he waited, wondering if she would reply—or even whether he’d hear the clump of her descending footsteps. But there was silence from up above. She must have gone away.
His hunched shoulders lowered slowly as he relaxed.
The only thing Anya Martin didn’t like about her job was that she could never tell the truth about what she did. Not that she worked for the CIA or anything—she wasn’t going to have some Russian spy shoot her in the back of the head on a street corner, or poison her food in a London restaurant. Although eating in London restaurants did seem wonderfully exotic to her. It depressed her when her train of thought chugged down these particular tracks, because then she got thinking about traveling the world, and though the job of Tracking Analyst sounded fancy, her salary was anything but.
Whine, whine, whine, she thought to herself, sitting in front of a whole bank of radar and tracking arrays. Truth was, Anya made more than a decent living. If she hadn’t been a single mother, saving for her daughter’s college, she probably would have done plenty of traveling by now. She fantasized about various European river cruises, got all the catalogs and emails, and didn’t even care that she’d probably be the youngest person on board by thirty years or more.
Someday, she’d do all that traveling.
For now, though, at least she loved her job. Many of the programmers she had gone to college with would surely be making more money than she did by this point in their lives. Others would be managers by now. Maybe executives.
The good news was that the US Air Force had paid for Sergeant Anya Martin’s education. She had no college loans.
Also, she spent her days watching the skies for signs of alien invasion, or any other unidentified flying objects—anything that might indicate that alien enemies were approaching or traveling through Earth orbit. The military wanted forewarning of any possible threats. But here in her very comfortable chair in the 6th Space Warning Squadron’s headquarters in Sandwich, Massachusetts, Anya just loved the idea of aliens. She pretended to be quite serious about the work—as serious as the title Tracking Analyst implied—but in the end, really, it was all about Dana Scully and Fox Mulder and late nights watching The X-Files when her parents had told her to go to bed.
It didn’t hurt that she got to live half a mile from the ocean on the coast of Cape Cod.
Blip.
Anya’s heart jumped. She stared at the radar screen and then glanced at the PAVE PAWS tracking monitor. The blip vanished, and then reappeared. It repeated the pattern again. Quickly, she went through her protocol, including identifying its location and trying to make radio contact with the object, to no avail.
“Sir?” she said, gesturing toward the Lieutenant General.
He came across, a man so wiry she wouldn’t have been surprised to find that his gray hair was made of steel. “What you got, Sergeant?”
“Weird-ass bogey, sir.”
They watched together as the blip vanished and reappeared sporadically.
“One second they’re on the grid, the next they’re ghosting,” Anya said, trying to hide her excitement. She’d caught plenty of weird shit during her time in this job, but this was odd as hell.
“Radio contact?” the Lieutenant General asked.
“Negative, sir.” She narrowed her eyes, skin prickling with ice as her thoughts filled with wonder. “But it seems to have an ion trail.”
The Lieutenant General had a pen in his hand. He started to chew on the back of it while he stared at the monitor. Then he turned and scouted the room for Anya’s supervisor, Lieutenant Crain.
“Where’s the 325th?” he asked.
“Tyndall, sir,” Crain replied.
The Lieutenant General’s gray eyebrows crinkled in a deep frown. “Let’s scramble some jets. I don’t want to take any chances.”
Sergeant Anya Martin couldn’t hide her smile. This was getting good. It was even more exciting than being poisoned to death in a London restaurant.
10
Casey could smell Traeger’s cologne, not overpowering or even unpleasant, but strange under the circumstances. She was bent over an electron microscope, doing her job, and Traeger stood a little too close behind her. His proximity wasn’t so intimate that it had become unprofessional, nor so close that she could turn around and tell him to back off. But still, it made her uncomfortable. Despite—or perhaps because of—his handsome features and the grin he’d flashed earlier, she thought maybe he was the kind of man who took power from making people feel unsettled around him. Not just women—anyone.
It had grown quiet in the lab, and silent between them, and that added to her discomfort with his nearness. She was relieved when Traeger’s aide, Sapir, appeared, rushing up to them with a look on his face like his grandmother’s ghost had just whispered sweet nothings in his ear.
“Sir,” Sapir said, “NORAD’s reporting a two-oh-two anomaly.”
The weighted look that passed between the two men pissed Casey off.
“Look,” she said, bristling. “I know I’m new, but it’d be swell if somebody would kinda, sorta, I don’t know… tell me what the fuck is going on here?”
A visible calm descended on Traeger. He’d decided how to handle her.
“This isn’t the first Predator we’ve encountered.”
Casey waited for more. From the file she’d seen, and the information they’d already given her, that much was obvious. She cocked an eyebrow, inviting him to continue.
“Apparently,” he went on, “they use Earth as a kind of hunting ground. We’ve even got unconfirmed reports of them abducting people. For sport.”
And? she thought. Haven’t we already established all this? Try telling me something I don’t know.
But it was Dr. Keyes who spoke next. He had been hovering on the periphery of the conversation, but now he stepped closer, as if worried that Traeger might not give a fulsome enough account of the situation.
“They’ve left things behind,” Keyes said. “Evidence. Weapons. You saw some on the way in.”
“Your point?” she said, unable to conceal her frustration. Now it was Keyes’ turn to bristle.
“The point, doctor,” he said in a clipped voice, “is that our satellite defense stations have just tracked a new UFO.” He nodded grimly toward the dormant Predator. “Our friend here might have some company coming.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when klaxons began to blare throughout the complex. Casey’s pulse quickened.
“What’s happening?”
Traeger glanced over to where his aide had already picked up an internal phone receiver. The guy grew even paler as he covered the mouthpiece and turned to stare, wide-eyed, at his boss.
“Proximity alert, sir!” the aide called. “Bogey’s inbound! Range two hundred miles!”
To her horror, Casey saw the supposedly dormant Predator’s eyes suddenly snap open. Her mouth opened in an ‘O’ of astonishment, and she let out a cry of alarm, but didn’t think anyone had heard her over the klaxons. The Predator’s eyes were calm and alert, and she wondered if it understood English—if it had been listening to them the entire time—or if the alarm had been the signal it had been waiting for.