Alien in the Family

to tell me and Paul later?” Martini sounded jealous. He looked jealous, too.
    “Oh, Jeff, for God’s sake.”
    Lorraine cleared her throat. “Jeff, it’s called pre-wedding jitters, okay?”
    “What is?” He sounded confused.
    “She’s scared, you idiot,” Claudia snapped. “And who can blame her? Your mother hates her, she’s the poster girl for interspecies marriage, we have your distant relatives descending on us to give her some horrible test we know nothing about. And instead of getting to do normal wedding things, she’s working on Alpha Team trying to save the world again. Of course James was holding her. He was probably keeping her from running screaming into the street.”
    Martini looked at me. “Oh. Right. Sorry.” He looked embarrassed but no longer jealous, so I took that as a win.
    “ So ,” Chuckie said, “the assassin was able to mistake Reader for Martini.”
    “Which means bad briefing. James is a head shorter than Jeff. And human, though she might not have bothered to check his heartbeats.” Another fact rose to the surface. “Hang on. She pretended to be Paul to lure James out of the shop, so she had to know he wasn’t Jeff.”
    “How do you know?” Chuckie asked.
    I related what the shop girl had said. “And why the hell did she kiss me?”
    “She thinks you’re hot would be my guess,” Tito offered. Everyone looked at him. “What? I’m new, but Kitty didn’t say I couldn’t talk, and it seems really obvious.”
    “What assassin stops to have a tumble?”
    “The overconfident kind,” Chuckie replied.
    “She’s an imageer, and that’s rare in A-C women,” Gower said. “Maybe it’s made her unstable.”
    My mind kicked. “Chuckie, how do you know she’s from Alpha Centauri?”
    “Double hearts, strong, fast, imageer. Seems like a match.”
    “Paul? Jeff? The other races in your home world system . . . what were they again?”
    “Humanoid, reptilian, mammalian,” Gower answered.
    “The warlike planet, what were they?”
    “Humanoid, close to us, close to Earth, too. Probably why they were warlike.” Gower sighed. “They can’t get off the planet, Kitty. The PPB net there would keep them in.”
    I looked at him. “Maybe their ACE got lonely, Paul. Or angry.”
    Gower twitched. “Yes, Kitty, ACE agrees. Angry. Planet was angry, so entity would be angry.”
    I thought about it. Earth was considered pretty warlike, but we were out in the middle of nowhere, spacewise, and we all knew it. So ACE took on our planetary loneliness as its own. The warlike planet over in the A-C system, on the other hand, would know there was a lot of company nearby. Company that had taken great pains to keep them from ever leaving said planet.
    “ACE, did the Ancients visit all the planets in the A-C system?”
    “ACE does not know, Kitty. Paul might.” Gower twitched again, and I restated the question. “We don’t know. Might have.”
    I closed my eyes and relived my brief fight with the assassin in the dressing room. “Christopher, I hate to ask you to do this, but I need to test something.”
    “Sure, Kitty, what?”
    “I want you to pretend to be a female, full-on body image. Then I want you to attack me.”
    “Uh, why?”
    “Do it,” Martini snapped. It was an order—he was in full Commander Mode.
    Christopher shrugged and turned into Martini’s mother. Then he lunged for me. I punched him as hard as possible in the solar plexus and desperately tried not to enjoy it. Failed. The image disappeared instantly as Chuckie caught Christopher. Felt bad now. Wondered if it counted. Figured it didn’t.
    “Nice punch.” Chuckie looked at Martini. “You’d really better fix that relationship before the big day.”
    “Are you okay?” I asked Christopher.
    “Yeah,” he gasped out. “Why?”
    “I hit that bitch a lot and a lot harder before she lost the image. So if the most powerful imageer on the planet can’t hold the image when he’s being attacked, that means she’s not an imageer.”
    “What is she then?” Martini asked.
    “She’s a shapeshifter. And I’m going to go talk to her now and find out what’s really going on.”
    “Not alone,” Chuckie said.
    “No problem. You, Christopher, Jeff, and Tito. Paul, you stay here.”
    “No. She tried to kill Jamie and I’m sure she’ll try to kill you. I’m coming with you. He won’t wake up for a while.” Gower sounded as though he wasn’t going to back down.
    “We’ll watch over James,”