Alien Proliferation

really good. Commander White doesn’t trust the C.I.A. any more than any of the rest of us do.”
    “So, what did he have you read on Chuckie?”
    They both busied themselves with the screens. I doubted these two were going to fall into the “able to lie to us” category.
    “Dudes, don’t make me pull rank. What were you monitoring Chuckie for?”
    “Whatever he might be hiding,” Wayne said.
    “Chuckie’s not hiding something from us.”
    “Everybody’s hiding something, Commander,” Wayne said as Jeff came back in, accompanied by several other A-Cs who were clearly along to help with clearing out the video stuff. “Everybody. But not always for the same reasons.”

 
    CHAPTER 7
     
    O N THAT CRYPTIC NOTE, the brothers left, equipment and extra A-Cs in tow. “You want to explain that?” Jeff asked me.
    “No. You want to explain what you were talking about with Chuckie?”
    He grinned. “No, other than to say we’re not going to panic or spend undue amounts of time on the supersoldier theory just yet. Christopher’s handling the loss of our recordings, so you can stop worrying about that. You want to nap or are you hungry?”
    “Both.”
    Jeff laughed and hypersped out of the room, returning shortly with a couple of laden food trays. The rest of the day shifted back into the normal, dull routine of me being really pregnant and him being really great about it. In between, I napped and he did the paperwork part of his job. It was an unexciting schedule, but it currently worked for us.
    After dinner and a variety of reruns of old, cheesy shows Jeff couldn’t stop loving if his life depended on it, we went to bed. Well, I got back under the covers again, and Jeff did, too. After some fun cuddling that was interrupted by the baby kicking the crap out of me, we snuggled up and went to sleep.
    Slept for a few hours, then I woke up. For no reason, other than possibly the baby being frisky. Jeff was still asleep. I was wide awake. This was not fun. I didn’t want to wake him up, so reading or watching TV were out. So I went for thinking, which meant I tossed and turned the issues of the day over in my mind.
    If there was a secret supersoldier conspiracy afoot, who was behind it? The people from today’s meeting? Someone else? The President or one of his nearest and dearest advisers?
    And if there was one supersoldier project Chuckie and my mom knew nothing about, did that mean there could be more? There was so much going on at any time, and Chuckie always felt that there were a huge number of active conspiracies going all the time. So, competing clandestine groups could be creating supersoldiers. In fact, the ones in Paraguay from last year could be run by a completely different set of megalomaniacs than the ones from Paris earlier today.
    After an hour or so of this, I accepted that I couldn’t sleep. I also knew Jeff wouldn’t want me to wake him up merely to fret about things we had no info for and I had less than no idea of how to solve. So I had to come up with something else to do to pass the time in the wee hours.
    No problem. We still had to register for baby things. No time like the present, right? Of course, I couldn’t be expected to make these decisions alone, since Jeff was as picky about this stuff as I was.
    I nudged him. “You awake?”
    He heaved a sigh. “I am now.”
    “Great! I can’t sleep. Let’s look at baby product catalogs.”
    Jeff groaned. “I can remember a time when, if you were waking me up in the middle of the night, it wasn’t to thumb through catalogs.”
    “Yes, the result of which is why we need to look at baby catalogs now.”
    Jeff rolled out of bed, turned on the lights, grabbed a handful of catalogs, and came back to bed. “Maybe we should just open pages at random and pick whatever’s on them.” We weren’t having much success with the registry—if one of us loved it, the other hated it.
    “Worth a shot.” We tried it. I opened my catalog to the pages with bath toys. Jeff opened his to the pages with car seats. “I don’t want twelve car seats.” I wanted one really awesome one, but Jeff felt it wasn’t safe enough. I wasn’t sure if he was going to think an armored tank was safe enough.
    “What child needs that many bath toys?” Jeff felt that too many toys was a bad thing. I felt there was a lot of cute out there, and our baby should have as much of it as possible.
    We closed the catalogs. “Well, we still have time. The big baby