Alien in the Family

went wide. “Uh . . .” He offered his hand to Emily.
    “Oh, Angela likes him,” Emily said chidingly as she shook his hand. “I’m sure he’s not as much of a jerk as the boys think he is. Nice grip.” She turned his hand over. “No manicure? You’re not the rich pompous ass they said. Interesting.”
    Chuckie looked at me. “Are they for real?”
    “They’re the heads of the Bluntness Division.”
    Chuckie started to laugh. “Would you two mind sharing a room? We’re going to run out of space, I think.”
    “Sure, we’d rather, girl sleepover kind of thing,” Melanie said. She gave him another close look. “Angela says we can trust you.”
    Chuckie shrugged. “She’s known me half my life, and she recommended me for initial hire and promotions within the Agency. I’d assume she doesn’t hate me.”
    “No, she doesn’t.” Emily was also giving Chuckie another once-over. “You sure this isn’t some elaborate attempt to win Kitty back?”
    “There is no ‘back’ in that sense.” He didn’t sound flippant, he sounded regretful. My throat got tight. This was not a conversation I wanted to hear, or have Martini hear. I busied myself with staring at the mystery food.
    “Huh. That’s not what my daughter said,” Melanie replied. Oh, great, Lorraine had filled her mother in on my love life.
    “Well, it was a long time ago.” I recognized his tone of voice. Chuckie wasn’t enjoying this conversation, either.
    “Nice to see you both, glad you’re staying, think you could stop torturing the two of them? And me?” Martini didn’t sound angry, at least not with me or Chuckie.
    “Just protecting your interests, Jeff,” Emily said with a laugh.
    “Right. Look, I hate him, he hates me, but even I’m sensitive enough to realize that standing here rubbing in who’s got the girl isn’t a great way to work together. And we have to work together.” Martini put emphasis on the last sentence.
    Dazzlers of all ages were two things—gorgeous and brilliant. Melanie and Emily were no exceptions. They got the point. “Fine, fine. Well, how do we get a room?” Melanie said with a sigh.
    “Reader’s probably got that covered,” Chuckie said. Our latest female additions wandered off to find him. “Thanks, I think,” he said to Martini.
    “Don’t mention it. Really, don’t mention it. I hate having to remember you’re not the antichrist.”
    “Yeah, I can relate. I hate having to remember that you’re not a moron.”
    Play-nice time was over. Time to swallow the lump in my throat and keep things moving along smoothly. “Jeff, Emily and Melanie think this is a dish from your home world, but they’re not sure.” I was still staring at it. It was still unappetizing. It also hadn’t moved, so I decided I could sleep again.
    “We’ll have my parents take a look when they get here.” Martini came over to me and stroked the back of my neck. “I’m not upset,” he said very softly.
    I looked up at him. “Really?”
    “Yeah. Any inroads he made were my fault. Hard to be upset with you about it.”
    “Jeff, that was six months ago.”
    “Seems like yesterday.”
    “Sometimes. Not always.” I took a deep breath and tried to relax. “So, have we found out who infiltrated what?”
    Martini grimaced. “In a way.”
    “In a way?”
    He sighed. “It’s both not as bad as we feared and worse.”
    “Oh, good. Routine.”

CHAPTER 15

    WE WERE ALL GROUPED AROUND the conference table again, Melanie and Emily included. The rest of Chuckie’s suite had been declared clean of alien stuff, and Martini and Christopher had done some additional checks using hyperspeed, so we all felt there were no human bugs other than the ones Chuckie had removed before the rest of us had arrived.
    “Okay, we have at least one rogue imageer,” Christopher told us, and it was clear he was furious. “They’re damned good, too. The reason my team was so slow and confused was because ‘I’ had just been there an hour or so prior and given them different directions.”
    “More than one rogue.” Chuckie, Reader, and I said this in unison.
    Christopher rolled his eyes. “Why?”
    “You all move fast, but not that fast. What was going on here required someone in place to catch any phone calls you made that would have tipped you off. So whoever was impersonating Christopher in Nevada or New Mexico wasn’t the same person.”
    “New York,” Christopher said.
    “Pardon?”
    “Imageering bases out of