Alien vs. Alien

Red added. “They’re difficult for a variety of reasons.”
    “The rooms or the tunnels?”
    “The subterrestrial locations are more difficult than the access tunnels, but both have their own challenges,” Stryker said.
    “Cloaking, lead walls, visual and audio disturbances,” Henry clarified. “Very little computer activity we can track.”
    “Any more,” Ravi added. “Fortunately, we monitor and save everything, and so did our predecessors.”
    “Predecessors?” Franklin sounded like he was going to get a migraine. “How many predecessors?”
    Stryker shrugged. “Enough.” He looked over his shoulder at Franklin. “You’re in charge and this is a surprise?”
    “These functions are not a surprise. Who’s doing them is the surprise.”
    Stryker shrugged again. “You want the best for this kind of work? Accept that the best of our breed don’t join the military.”
    “Yeah, most hackers aren’t into the up at five a.m., run twenty miles with a full pack on, and　 do two hundred pushups lifestyle.” They were into the sleep until noon, catch up on the latest internet porn, eat all the junk food they could manage, while spying on the world lifestyle. I looked around. Sure enough, there were some donuts. I checked them out. Fresh. Snagged one, took the box around and offered it to the rest of the gang. I got a dirty look from Stryker, but he kept his mouth shut.
    “Glad you’re making sure we have fuel,” White said. “As always in these situations, I was a bit peckish.”
    “Donuts are nice,” Tito agreed. “However, we’re not much of anywhere, Kitty.”
    I looked at the map again. “I think we are. ACE said Christopher was looking the wrong way. Since he was looking all over the planet and in two solar systems, Christopher and I both figure ACE didn’t mean that Christopher just needed to work harder and try to reach another galaxy. Oh, and note how many of the ones with green circles radiate out from the one with the red circle that happens to correlate to where many of us now live.”
    “Seven,” Buchanan said. “Nice to see you’re keeping on top of things.”
    “You’re almost as funny as Chuckie and Mister White. Big George, how far are you into any of these?” I pointed to the green circles near the Embassy. There were others, dotted all over the globe, but these seemed the most likely targets.
    Of course, “near” was a relative term, because maps always made things seem closer than they actually were. I assumed the circle nearest to the Embassy was the remains of the Secret Lab where Amy’s father and his cronies had done their horrible and horribly successful experiments. The others were farther away, and none were in a straight line from the others.
    “As noted, in the D.C. area, we’ve identified and located seven rooms,” Big George said, rolling his pointer over different points of the map. “We call them rooms, but they could be a series of rooms, caverns, something else that has a general cube shape. But they’re not tunnels, because we can actually enter the tunnels and confirm structure.”
    “We call them dead zones until we can confirm their structure,” Henry added. “Because we can’t read anything within them, so it’s like they’re dead to our equipment.”
    “Henry, I think everyone with me understood ‘dead zone’ without the condescending explanation. But it’s nice to see you’re still the fun party dude I remember.”
    “One of the D.C. dead zones, the one nearest to your Embassy, was declared destroyed by Chuck, but we mapped its area as best we could as well,” Big George went on quickly, pointer on the green circle closest to the Embassy. He rolled the pointer. “We feel there’s another one in this area, but haven’t finalized mapping.”
    The one Big George’s pointer was now on seemed to be within or near to the metro area of D.C. But in order to show the dead zones all on one screen, the map was small enough that I couldn’t really make out city names or exact locations. However, the others were all farther away, and one, per the map, appeared to actually be in the Atlantic. I presumed under the ocean floor, but I put nothing past the Club of Evil Super-Geniuses these days.
    “So, by mapping you mean what, exactly?”
    “　We send sonar, infrared, electronic, and other forms of probes and scanning through the earth,” Omega Red explained. “Areas our equipment’s unable to access in some way are declared