Alien vs. Alien

international and interstellar crises of epic proportions.”
    “They’re crazed with power, you mean. I’m familiar with how it looks—I’ve seen it with you for over two years now.”
    “Choosing to ignore your snippy attitude because things are going on. Right before you arrived, Big George said there was action in the tunnels.”
    “Tunnels? Big George? What
is
going on?” Christopher sounded one syllable away from a full on snark fest.
    “I thought you were briefed.”
    “No. The
Commanders
and
Chiefs
were briefed. I was allowed to resign pending the end of the world.”
    “Kitty,” Big George said urgently. “You need to look at this.”

    Yi

CHAPTER 81

    “T ITO, RICHARD, MALCOLM—I need to focus. Someone catch Christopher up on what’s going on.”
    “I’ll do it,” White said. “I can talk the fastest.”
    “I’ll assist,” William added with a grin. “I can talk fast, too.”
    “True enough. Just do it in a far corner and at low levels.” As they did as requested, I did my best to ignore the sounds—A-Cs could talk at hyperspeed and hear at that level as well. But it was so fast that it had a negative effect on most humans, me in particular. Enhancement hadn’t made that any easier, either.
    Instead, I focused on the screen as most of those standing clustered around to watch as well. “All I see is tunnel, Big George.”
    “I’ve got heat readings. I’m following them. They were extremely faint before, but are slowly getting stronger, so whatever’s giving off the heat is getting closer to our sensors.”
    “We don’t have sensors throughout the tunnels?”
    “No. NASA’s been generous, but we’re talking thousands of miles of tunnels, limited personnel, and somewhat limited budget. Chuck’s been extremely careful about who goes down there, let alone who knows about this in the first place. We have cameras and security sensors all along what we call the Embassy Tunnel. We have security sensors along the tunnels we’ve finished mapping, but cameras are only placed intermittently, mostly near the dead zones.”
    I saw a long, dark hallway. The camera was moving. “How is the camera moving?”
    “It’s on a tread.”
    “Wow.”
    “It’s hardly amazing, Kitty. We’ve had things like this since the moon landing, if not before. It’s how we patrol the sections that don’t have stationary cameras set up.”
    “You aren’t going to tell me the moon landing was faked are you?”
    “No, that’s Omega Red’s thing. I know it was real.”
    “Okey-dokey. You can share your pet conspiracy theory with me later.”
    “You’ll want me to. I’ve proven that the world governments create boy bands in order to subliminally control the citizenry.”
    “Yeah, I’ll wait until we’ve saved the world to get into that one.”
    “Fine. You like rock anyway.”
    I chose to refrain from mentioning that I also had a nostalgic fondness for *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys. I didn’t listen to them all that often, though, so I was probably safe from the musical mind control.
    Studied the picture on screen as the camera rolled along. Big George had said this was part of the D.C. tunnels, meaning it was connected to “our” tunnel and the Embassy.
    Based on the use of a roving camera, knew it wasn’t near the Secret Lab, where they’d been creating Gaultier’s Zombie Army of Hot Guys. Even without the roving camera clue, we’d blown that up, and though A-C fail-safes meant the lab had explodeÀd in on itself, there had still been rubble. And I saw no rubble.
    However, dark halls with murky-to-no lighting didn’t offer a lot of landmarks to compare against, and I’d only been down in our part of the tunnel system once.
    Decided to stop keeping my questions to myself. “Big George, where is this, in the schematic of the underground tunnels?”
    He tapped something onto his keyboard and another screen tossed up the D.C. area underground map. “It’s heading for the last dead zone, the one we’re not done mapping, but it’s not there yet. The sensors react and interfere with our mapping equipment, so we have very few sensors in this area.”
    Because Big George had put up the map for this one underground area only, I could actually make out some of the words. “From the map, that dead zone looks to be near Langley.”
    “It is.”
    “But it’s also near Arlington, in that sense, and D.C.,” Stryker said. “It’s under the Washington Golf and Country