Alien Tango

issue than your parents,” Gower shared, looking tense and sounding tenser. “Clustered activity.”
    Martini and Christopher both flipped into what I considered Commander Mode. “Where?” Martini asked briskly as we all trotted inside.
    “Paraguay.”
    “Paraguay?” Christopher sounded shocked. Martini grimaced.
    “Why not Paraguay?” I’d been all over the world by now, killing forming fuglies and keeping the world safe from becoming superbeing sushi. South America was hit as frequently as everywhere else, though in overall superbeing activity, the U.S.A. was still number one with a bullet.
    “In the Chaco,” Gower added.
    “Of course,” Martini muttered.
    I grabbed my purse from Hughes, told him that he and the rest of my flyboys were off duty but on standby, and then we headed for the nearest bank of gates. The gates were alien technology that allowed us to move freely about the world by leaping from one gate to another. The majority of the gates were located in the restrooms of all the world’s airports. Having visited more men’s rooms than I cared to remember, by now I could attest to their placement being both effective and gross at the same time. But we could go from Nevada to New York in about three seconds.
    “There are airports there,” I reminded them, as I tried to pull up how rainy or dry Paraguay was and failed.
    “True,” Martini acknowledged. “But we’re not going there.”
    “We’re not?” I wasn’t overly disappointed. We had dinner with my parents planned, and superbeing-extermination trips tended to wreck any schedule.
    Reader joined us. “They’re right on the line.” He sounded worried, and the other men looked tense. I felt nothing other than confusion—this was a new one.
    “Excuse me?”
    We reached the gate, and Gower calibrated. As always when any A-C did this, his hand was a blur. and I couldn’t watch. Not that staring at alien technology that still looked more like an airport metal detector than anything else to me was a thrill in the first place. “Going through single. Sorry, Kitty,” he added with an apologetic smile. “We’re in an emergency situation.
    Martini didn’t look happy, but he didn’t argue, either, so I chose to be a big girl and not whine. Gower went through, I took a deep breath, then I followed.
    Going through a gate was like being in a movie where they speed up the film to show the passage of time quickly. Only you were in said movie live, with no Dramamine. The gates had made me sick to my stomach from day one and continued their work unabated. It took no more than a second and a half for the step that moved me from Area 51 to the Dulce Science Center but it was a year in terms of nausea.
    Out just before I barfed, like always. Martini and the others were right behind me. We were on what I call the Bat Cave level of the Science Center—it looked like the most high-tech command-type center ever conceived. I tended to ignore most of the equipment on the grounds that it made me dizzy, and if I ignored it, I could pretend it wasn’t there.
    We trotted to Batman’s Inner Sanctum, or what Martini and Christopher called Field and Imageering Central Command. Well, Reader and I trotted. Martini, Christopher, and Gower all used hyperspeed, meaning to our human eyes they disappeared. Hyperspeed for humans was slightly better than the gates in terms of nausea, but only a little, so I was glad to move at boring old human levels.
    “What did you mean by ‘the line,’ James?”
    “The Tropic of Capricorn crosses through Paraguay, that’s what we mean by the line.”
    “Why is that good, bad, or indifferent?”
    He shook his head. “For whatever reasons, when superbeings form along the Tropics of Cancer or Capricorn, they’re stronger.”
    “Stronger than the ones that were able to control the transfer?”
    “No. Differently stronger.”
    I wanted to share that this wasn’t clearing anything up for me, but we were in the Inner Sanctum, and things were in a very controlled form of chaotic activity. There were actually two rooms that made up this section, one for Field, one for Imageering. By the time Reader and I arrived, Christopher had presumably raced off to his room, and Martini was settled in front of the huge bank of screens that were the focus of the Field side.
    By settled, I mean he was standing in front of them as images flashed on the screen. There were easily fifty screens on the main wall, and while the peripheral