Alien vs. Alien

related to interstellar security and the fate of the world, the four of you can relax.”
    “Interstellar?” Jakob said. “Did I hear you correctly? You were serious about an alien invasion?”
    “Yes,” Franklin said. “Based on everything that’s happened, much of which has involved all of you, I’m prepared to break any number of protocols and bring you up to speed. Because I think we need to focus on saving our world more than my career.”

    Yi

CHAPTER 63

    “O N SATURDAY AT OH-FIVE-HUNDRED HOURS we intercepted an extremely long-range transmission from space,” Franklin said. “From what we can determine, the message was sent to someone here on Earth.”
    “Clarence Valentino.”
    “Tino! Tino! Tino!”
    “Thanks, Bellie. Hush.”
    Franklin nodded. “It’s a reasonable guess,” he said after Bellie quieted down. “Especially since the transmission was coded, but it was in a language we’re actually able to translate.”
    I took a guess. “In the native language of Alpha Four?”
    “Yes. At first we thought it was meant for someone in Centaurion Division, but decryption proved this to be untrue.”
    “Who decrypted, my father?”
    “And his team, yes.”
    My dad had a team? I tabled asking why I never knew anything. If we survived the latest world-ending events, I’d read the damn Briefing Books of Boredom.
    Franklin went on. “The message was fairly simple: Forces ready, put plan into action.”
    “That doesn’t really scream ‘alien invasion’ to me.”
    “Nor to anyone else. However, we have some long-range probes, and due to our relatively new relationship with Alpha Four, we’ve been able to launch the probes farther and get readings back from them much more quickly.”
    Morgan brought over a folder and handed it to Franklin, who opened it and showed us the pictures inside.
    “That looks like a whole lot of spaceships.” So many spaceships that I didn’t try to count them. They didn’t look like any of the ships I’d seen from the Alpha Centauri system. They looked a lot like the space ships from the Space Invaders game—sort of inverted bowls with legs, with what appeared to be blinking lights. Very Hollywood. Meaning they might be faked. Or our alien invasion stories had a basis in fact. I was married to a space alien, so I voted for the latter.
    “Yes. And they weren’t there two days ago.”
    “Well, where are they? I mean, that looks far, far away.”
    “They were within a few thousand light years of us when this picture was taken.”
    “We can take pictures this good from that far away?”
    “We can with Alpha Four’s help, yes.”
    “So why are we panicking? I mean, it’s going to take them forever to get here. By the time they arrive, we’ll probably have built a space wall around the solar system.”
    Franklin handed me another photo. Same spaceship armada. “This was taken by a closer probe at twelve-hundred hours yesterday. We aren’t sure how they’re moving, but they moved a thousand light years per hour.”
    “That’s impossible,” Oren said. “Nothing moves like that.”
    “We do. All the time. Because of the gates.” I looked more closely at the picture, then handed it to William. “Feel free to check out the space ships, but I’m more interested in what’s sort of in front of them.”
    “Looks like space dust,” Morgan said.
    “I don’t think it is.” It looked rather gelatinous to me.
    William touched it, hissed, and dropped the picture. Jennifer retrieved it and carefully touched the spaceships. She seemed fine. Then she moved her hand to the area I was most interested in. She dropped the picture, too. Sadly, this was typical behavior. It was a behavior I’d hoped I wouldn’t see, but it didn’t surprise me all that much.
    “You two mind sharing what you just read?” Tito asked. “Kitty looks like you just confirmed her suspicions, but I think I speak for the rest of us when I say we have no idea why you both just freaked out.”
    William looked shaken. “That’s not space dust in front of the armada. It’s an inordinate number of parasites.”

    Yi

CHAPTER 64

    J ENNIFER LOOKED PALE. “What’s in the spaceships isn’t a life form we’re familiar with, but I think there are more parasites than there are spaceships.”
    This hadn’t shocked me because their reactions had been textbook for an imageer or empath touching the image of a superbeing. Jeremy pulled some wipes out of his pocket and handed them to