Alien vs. Alien

now, and the longer we delayed, the more danger Jamie, ACE, anۀd everyone else were going to be in.
    “Eddy? You either tell me, right now, why Chuckie has you listed as his immediate backup when things are beyond dire, or I will kick you in the balls so hard that you’ll wish you’d never, ever, heard of the term U.F.O.”
    Stryker grinned. “See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
    I knew I wasn’t the only one gaping. “Excuse me? That was the protocol?”
    He laughed. “For you, yeah.” Stryker shrugged. “What can I say? Chuck knows you really well.”

    Yi

CHAPTER 69

    B EFORE I COULD COME UP WITH a suitable retort, Stryker was giving orders. All the hackers raced to their stations, easily spotted by the fact that they were the messiest parts of this particular high-security pigsty.
    “How does Yuri not kill himself in here?” I asked as Omega Red lumbered to his station without incident, even though his path was scary cluttered.
    Stryker shrugged. “Nanotechnology’s good for a lot of things.”
    Bruno seemed to agree, or at least he liked the trash Omega Red had. He flapped up out of the way, settled into some of the mess like it was a nest, tucked his head under his wing, and, as far as I could tell, went to sleep. I chose to take this to mean I was safe and among friends.
    “Whatever. Where are my men?”
    “Geez, Kitty, give a guy a minute. I don’t remember you this impatient.”
    “Do you remember me stating that my husband and oldest friend are missing?”
    “You’ve checked the obvious places?” Stryker asked as he sat down at his console and started typing away on what looked like a megakeyboard. It had more than the standard qwerty stuff on it, by far.
    “We’ve searched all the way to the Alpha Centauri solar system. There is no sign of Jeff or Chuckie. I think they’re on Earth but in one of the many rooms our enemies have constructed that appear to be impenetrable via normal and alien means.”
    “Nice to know you think we can work miracles,” Stryker snapped.
    “The Supreme Commander’s January report indicated that a number of subterrestrial locations that have been recently identified are priority one,” Henry shared. “So that’s where we’ve been focusing.”
    “Dudes, really, what’s up with the Supreme Commander stuff? You’re aware that Chuckie’s laughing his butt off when he uses that title, right?”
    “Sure,” Ravi replied. “But he
is
our Supreme Commander.”
    Franklin cleared his throat. “Not if you’re on the U.S. Air Force’s payroll he’s not.”
    I thought about the various chains of command I’d learned about over the past two-plus years. “Actually, Colonel, they might be right. But guys, really, lay off with the titles.”
    Big George shrugged. “If we must. However, Henry’s right. There’s a network of sub-terrestrial strongholds we have yet to map completely.”
    “Put them onscreen,” Franklin snapped. “Speaking as the Supreme Commander in attendance.”
    Henry did some fast typing, and a map of the United States appeared. The map was hard to read since it covered all the U.S., but I spotted what I was confident were the locations of the Dome, the Dulce Science Center, and Caliente Base. Each was surrounded in red. “Why are those circled?”
    “Chuck wants us to ignore them,” Stryker replied. There was a lot of color in the area where NASA and East Bases were and even more in the D.C. area.
    “And you do?” I found this hard to believe, knowing Stryker as well as I did.
    “Yeah, we do, ’cause Chuck monitors every damn thing we do, and he’s gotten really nasty in his old age.” Stryker sounded annoyed. Considering Chuckie and I were ten years younger than Stryker, this was amusing.
    Stryker zoomed in on the D.C. area. Sure enough, there was the Embassy and the Pontifex’s residence, circled in red. Jeff and I were going to have a serious talk about this once I found and saved him and dealt with the people who’d, again, taken and most likely hurt my men.
    However, there were a variety of locations marked in green. “Eddy, the green ones are the ones you guys are mapping?”
    “The green circles are subterrestrial locations. The green lines are the access tunnels that connect the subterrestrial locations to each other and to upper-level exits and entrances. We’re mapping the entire network.” He zoomed out a bit. It was a rather impressive network of green lines. This boded.
    “Trying to map,” Omega