Alien Tango

ones had areas I knew weren’t in Paraguay, the majority were showing what I assumed was the Tropic of Capricorn.
    It looked like a flat, marshy part of Paraguay with a lot of superbeings in it. The Paraguay portion of our Must Watch Horrorvision was rather pretty. The superbeings made up for that, though. All twelve of them.

CHAPTER 3
    IN THE OLDEN DAYS OF the mid-twentieth century, the parasites that created superbeings when joined with an unsuspecting human host arrived in ones and twos at irregular intervals. After Mephistopheles, the Big Bad of Operation Fugly, had established himself on Earth, they came with a lot of regularity, building up to lots and lots all the time.
    However, clustering—where several superbeings manifested at the same time and in one area—had happened in the past only when an in-control superbeing was getting ready to hit the town. Since we’d destroyed all the in-control ones, it was unsettling to have a cluster, especially one of a dozen.
    The parasites were attracted to rage. How they’d found twelve angry people out in what looked like the middle of nowhere was beyond me.
    Every superbeing manifested differently based, as far as we knew, more on the parasite than its human host. These were no exception, though I saw similarities among them. They were all along the Insect of Your Nightmares variety, though insects that weren’t from anywhere around here. Then again, I didn’t know what kinds of bugs Paraguay specialized in. However, I tended to doubt their bugs were between six and ten feet tall and loaded with an amazing array of horrifically shaped, yet seemingly razor-sharp, extremities, mandibles, and so forth.
    I could see a great number of droolingly handsome men in Armani suits dashing about on the screens, meaning we had a lot of A-Cs on the scene. All field teams consisted of an empath and an imageer. Depending on what was going on, they might have a human along to drive or fly, and usually no more than two additional A-Cs. The teams in Paraguay had all that and more. It didn’t look like a normal setup at all.
    Martini was giving orders, and he was doing it at normal speed for an A-C, meaning a lot faster than humans could hear, at least if we were interested in silly things like comprehension. Like so many other aspects of hyperspeed, this made me sick.
    A random A-C handed me a set of wireless headphones, which I put on gratefully. Since I’d joined up and pointed out that having your human teammates barfing when you were trying to save the day was a bad plan, the A-Cs had added their version of translation headsets to the Inner Sanctum supply closet.
    So I could now hear Martini’s orders and not pass out. I was hearing them at least five minutes after he’d said them, but I considered this a huge improvement over fainting. I made sure I didn’t look at his mouth moving—the few times I had, it was like watching a badly dubbed foreign film. Right after barfing or passing out, I’d discovered no one liked me cracking up during Inner Sanctum sessions, Martini least of all.
    “Do we need Airborne involved?” I asked Reader, who was putting his own headset on.
    He shook his head. “Jeff’s handling it.”
    I decided not to argue or whine about this. My division was still very new, and while I had utmost confidence in my team, they were all still at Home Base, and even with a gate transfer, shipping military jets took some time. Hopefully it’d all be over before they could get there, so why send them. Besides, Martini seemed intent, and I didn’t want to throw off his groove.
    I listened for a while, but after a few minutes it became boring and frustrating. Frustrating because I was now used to being in the action, and I wasn’t a fan of sitting around watching others getting to kick butt.
    Martini was sending various A-C teams to different parts of Paraguay, calling in military support from both Brazil and Argentina, and giving a variety of directions to those directly engaged with these particular manifestations. I should have been paying rapt attention, learning how to do this myself.
    But it was all done in extreme military-speak, which got dull fast. I hadn’t yet mastered the lingo and jargon, and situations like this never made learning seem worthwhile. And watching international politics fade in the face of extreme danger had stopped being a thrill months ago. I’d learned that when it came to hanging around kibitzing, I preferred watching the