Alien vs. Alien

The shoe had a foot in it, too, which was nice. I wasn’t taking anything for granted right now.
    “She doesn’t,” Chuckie said icily, gun trained on Cantu. “But as you well know,
we
do.”
    Cantu managed to bark a laugh. “There won’t be any ‘we’ left, Reynolds, don’t you get it? They’re here, and they’re going to destroy us. Surrender would at least mean we got to survive. But you and your self-righteous do-gooder ideals—you’re the one who’s going to doom Earth. Not me. Never me.”
    “Cantu, enough with your blah, blah, blah. Dude, seriously, what kept you?”
    Chuckie helped me to my feet, and I took a look around. He wasn’t alone. My mother was here, along with Kevin and Buchanan and several guys who looked as if they were familiar with Guantanamo and extracting information. Everyone other than Chuckie and Buchanan was wearing their P.T.C.U. caps and vests.
    “We couldn’t use a gate,” Chuckie said. “Floaters aren’t stable, and we’re not sure how long the gate system is going to last so it’s reserved for Field agents only right now.”
    “Dammit. We could use a few floaters to get the people out of here. There’s a lot of dead and probably even more injured.”
    “Can’t help them until we can be sure medical teams can get in without being destroyed themselves. Right now we have everything focused on the invaders.”
    The muscle guys picked up Cantu and handcuffed him, despite his broken wrist. I chose not to care. Cantu glared at me. “This isn’t over.”
    “No, but it’s over for you.” The muscle moved him away from the rest of us. Not too far, but to where he couldn’t hear us.
    “Good work, kitten.”
    “Thanks, Mom.” I hugged her and got her breath-stopping bear hug in return. “Air . . . Mom . . . need air . . .”
    She laughed and let me go. “I was just worried about you. Nice work on the phone. It’s not enough, but it’s a good start.”
    “Yeah, great. But Cantu here makes a good point—we need to get the Z’porrah under control or gone before someone launches a nuke. Oh, but, Chuckie, you and Hacker International need to know that the Z’porrah are an ancient race, they’ve been here before, a lot, and the underground tunnels and such are their version of a computer network.”
    “Really? Interesting.”
    “Yeah, I thought you’d enjoy that. They also look like mini T-Rexes with wings. Don’t even ask. And by mini, I mean shorter than me. But I think that they and the Ancients had rival breeding programs or species advancement programs in place. My bet is that the Z’porrah are why we had dinosaurs, and they’re still bitter that the dinos died out.”
    “Maybe the Ancients got rid of them to make way for the mammals,” Buchanan suggested.
    “Could be. At any rate, that’s what’s in those spaceships. And the three who beamed down don’t like me much. At all. They said I was rude, can you believe it?”
    Mom, Chuckie, Kevin, and Buchanan all gave me looks that said they could easily believe it. Always the way.
    Forged on. “Lola did an awesome fake out. Clarence thought he had Jamie when he had a really pissed off Peregrine instead.”
    Chuckie and Mom exchanged a worried glance. “The Dome was evacuated,” Chuckie said slowly. “The Z’porrah have half their fleet firing directly on it.”
    “Crap.” Well, that explained why we were having problems with the gates. “They’re trying to blow the planet. If the tunnels really are a computer network kind of setup, then the Dome is where the heart of everything is.”
    “You’re sure?” Chuckie asked.
    “Pretty darned.” ACE was guarding the Dome, not Washington D.C. I was positive.
    “The U.S., Russia, and Israel already launched nuclear weapons at the Z’porrah ships,” Kevin said. “The nukes were destroyed in the air.”
    “The Z’porrah fired on the Dome after those attacks,” Buchanan said. “They may not consider that they’re attacking us; in their minds they may think we started it.”
    “Possibly, but I’m not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt right now.” I could still see the faces of the dead, wounded, and terrified. “What’s it like elsewhere?”
    “As far as we know, they’re only attacking here and at the Dome,” Kevin said. “No retaliation was sent toward Russia or Israel, despite their having launched nukes, and the Z’porrah aren’t firing at the part of our country where the nukes launched from,