Alien Diplomacy

here.” She didn’t look happy. She did, however, look a lot less like, as Reader put it, our Ditz in Residence and a lot more like one of Centaurion Division’s key personnel. It was nice to see that the promotion had been good for her. So another one of us was blossoming in their new role, even under pressure; it was a small victory, but I was willing to take it.
    “And?”
    Serene shook her head. “One sentence: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
    There was dead silence. “That was it?” Chuckie asked finally, clearly voicing everyone else’s thoughts.
    “The disk was corrupted, most likely from the water, but so far as we can determine, there was only that one sentence on it.” Serene clearly felt she was failing at her job. There was far too much of that going around right now.
    “What the hell does that mean?” Jeff asked.
    Mom’s brow was furrowed. “It’s the first line they teach you when you’re learning to type. At least, it was. Who knows how you learn these days.”
    “It’s still used, Mom. I learned it.” The A-Cs and half of the humans looked really confused. It was easy to tell who was a self-taught typist in the room and who wasn’t, not that I thought this was going to help us in even the smallest way. “It’s a pangram—it uses every letter of the alphabet. You type it so you learn where every letter is on the keyboard.”
    “We intercepted a typing tutorial?” Reader sounded less than thrilled.
    “It was handed to me, and the Dingo Dog didn’t want anyone else to know I had it.”
    “Maybe he gave it to you to confuse you,” Kevin suggested.
    “No,” Tim said. “If that were his goal, he could have just told Kitty whatever he wanted. I was in the helicopter, and we were watching. I never saw him pass that to her, so he did it so no one else would know.” Hughes, Walker, and Jerry all nodded their agreement.
    “So that means it’s a message.” Chuckie sounded as though he was heading for a migraine. I hated that, because it always indicated we were clueless, and I really hated that.
    Something else was bugging me. “Serene, you said this line was encrypted?”
    “Yes. A very complex encryption. It also had to be translated.”
    “Excuse me?”
    She shrugged. “The original sentence was in Russian, written in Cyrillic. We had to have Moscow Base do translations.”
    “And you’re sure those were a hundred percent correct?” Christopher asked.
    Serene nodded. “Yes, it was checked and verified at least ten times. Mostly because no one at Moscow Base could believe this was the entire message.”
    “It means something to someone. And it was important enough to encrypt. Or else the Dingo Dog really feels learning to type is a high-priority assignment.” I sighed. “Well, at least we know something. And that he’s loyal. Or weird. Or both.” Probably both. “He also said that he wasn’t one of the guys in the taxis, and since he was already ‘dead’ when I saw them last, he was likely telling the truth.”
    “Did he give you anything on them?” Chuckie asked.
    “He said they were amateurs and didn’t want to harm the merchandise.” I saw a lot of stressed out expressions. “I know. That doesn’t really give us much help at all.”
    “This is the most information we’ve had, girlfriend,” Reader reminded me. “But we’re no closer.”
    “Maybe we are. I heard Peter and his partner talking—well, shouting—in a foreign tongue right before we went into the Potomac. I guarantee that wherever Peter’s from, his partner is from there, too. Considering Serene just said this fab message came out in Russian, let’s figure this confirms Mom’s intel that they’re from somewhere in the former Soviet Bloc.”
    “We couldn’t determine country of origin,” Serene said. “We tried, in case we were translating incorrectly. But the sentence is too short to show any kind of regional inflection.”
    “And it’s an American sentence, which would mask it even more.”
    Serene looked down. “I’m sorry. I’m better with explosives. Maybe…maybe Christopher should take a look. In case I’ve…missed something.” I saw the confidence she’d been showing only minutes earlier start to fade away. I didn’t want that to happen, but I had no idea what to do or say, especially if Christopher agreed with her.
    I looked over just in time to see Jeff shake his head almost imperceptibly at Christopher. “No,” Christopher said quickly.