Alien Tango

we can get some sort of information down here for them to go through, pictures, preferably?”
    He shrugged. “Kennedy has pretty good archives, and they have video in these cells.” He pulled his phone out and made a call.
    While he was talking, I wandered back to Chee. “Daniel, the people you don’t recognize, what are the odds they were all in space at one time?”
    He studied them again. “It’s possible. But . . . people are missing. The Challenger crew, for example, they’re not here. I didn’t know any of them, but I know what they looked like, and I don’t see them. So, it’s not everyone who was in space.” He heaved a sigh. “Something’s wrong with us, right?”
    “Well, you’re seeing dead people and Bruce Willis is nowhere in sight, so I think, yes, Houston, we have a problem.”
    He rubbed his forehead. “I just want to get out of here.”
    “All three of you do.” It could be natural, or it could be whatever was wrong with them trying to get out. I had a hard time believing it was our run-of-the-mill parasitic superbeing, though, since they looked normal and weren’t destroying things. However, there was a sure way to tell.
    I went back to Christopher and Martini. “Can either one of you feel Michael through the glass? I mean, the way you did when you discovered Robot Kitty during Operation Fugly?” They’d done a two-man “go team” move on some video footage and determined that the bad guys had created a fake me to take out my mother. My introduction to the A-C crew had been exciting in a lot of really icky ways. I wondered how icky this latest adventure was going to get, then shoved the worry aside. I’d find out soon enough, one way or the other.
    Christopher gave me a pained look for the “Operation Fugly” comment and shook his head. “I can’t, that’s not an image, that’s Michael.”
    “I can. Put your hand to the glass,” Martini told him. Michael did as asked, and Martini put his hand opposite. He concentrated, eyes closed, then he pulled away slowly. “No parasite that we’re used to is in there.”
    That we’re used to. “What is in there, Jeff?”
    “I don’t know,” he said, as he pulled me into his arms. “But it wants out.”

CHAPTER 32
    I HAD TO FORCE MARTINI to do the same test with Chee and Brian. He confirmed that whatever was in Michael was in the other two as well.
    “You need to stay far away from them.” He sounded freaked out.
    “Why me? I mean, why me more than anyone else?”
    “No idea, but I can feel it, and it wants you.” He was clutching me to him and I got the impression he was ready to hyperspeed us out of not only the quarantine area but the entire Space Center.
    “Jeff, it’s okay,” Christopher said. “She’s not going in, and they’re not coming out, at least, not right now.”
    We were standing in front of Chee’s cell, and he was paying attention. “If we have some entity within us, we need to get it out.”
    Martini shook his head. “I don’t know what it is. It’s . . . odd.”
    “Odd how?” I could feel his hearts—they were pounding.
    “I think they’re here to . . . do something. But either I can’t tell what it is, or they’re confused.”
    “I can understand something confused gravitating to Kitty,” Christopher said.
    “The entities must have done the landing, or helped the astronauts to land.” I was trying to come up with something that made sense before Martini lost it and decided getting out of Dodge was more important than helping out.
    “Yes, we have to assume that now,” Gower said. “Jeff, do you get an evil feeling?”
    He shook his head. “It’s nothing like a superbeing. Only . . . it is, in a way.” Martini looked at Christopher. “Put your palm against mine.”
    Christopher raised his eyebrow, but he did as asked. “Do we say something alienlike now?”
    Martini was concentrating. “No. But . . . you feel . . . similar to whatever’s inside the others.” He did the same with Gower. “You, too.”
    “So, whatever it is comes from Alpha Centauri?”
    Martini shook his head again. “Not . . . quite. Similar, but not the same.”
    Something knocked in my brain. “Jeff, you said there were a lot of inhabited planets in your system, right?”
    He nodded. “And, to guess where you’re going with it, there are only a few similarities between planetary species.”
    “How many are humanoid?”
    Gower answered. “Out of the ten planets that had intelligent life