Alien vs. Alien

the ’gators eat her and get sick.”
    “Only my girl. We’ll be right there, baby.”
    “She seemed to believe the rest of you were going to be dead or captured.”
    “Might have been if Reynolds hadn’t been antsy. He insisted on the three of us snooping around, so we weren’t where the attack squad thought we’d be.”
    “Interesting. Is everyone else okay, Richard and Malcolm in particular?”
    “Yeah, they’re bruised up but insisting they’re okay. Per Christopher, we can wait to get back to my parents’ before we have them go to medical.”
    “So, did you or Christopher pick up anything untoward going on?”
    “No. Whatever that floor’s insulated with, we couldn’t get any reading from it.”
    I chose to refrain from cursing, but only because it would have required more exertion than I felt up to. “Figures.” I spotted what I was pretty sure was a floater gate and shared as much with Jeff.
    “Alpha Team is on the way.” As he said this, I saw Tim Crawford, the Head of Airborne, aka the guy who had my old job, step through. To human eyes, he would have appeared out of nowhere. I had no idea what it looked like to alligator eyes, but I could see some of them start to take an interest.
    “Oh, good. Maybe one of them can carry me down from the lighthouse. After we’ve set up an electric fence to keep the ’gators at bay, that is.” I wanted to check on Gigantagator and Alliflash, if I could spot them in an alligator lineup, but I wanted to do this from a distance and with the really heavy animal-enclosure glass between us.
    Jeff cursed quietly and in a moment I wasn’t alone on the top of the tower. I hung up and dropped my phone back into my purse as he picked me up. “You really overdid it, baby.”
    “I could have let the evil android kill us all and take me captive, true. I officially never want to come here again. Just sayin’.”
    He chuckled as he hypersped us downstairs, which coincided nicely with the rest of Alpha and Airborne teams exiting the gate. Well, the male portions of those teams were in attendance, meaning Paul Gower, James Reader, and the five flyboys were in here along with Tim. Serene was too pregnant to make any situation calls, and Lorraine and Claudia were still the mothers of newborns and therefore enjoying the last part of their maternity leaves.
    The rest of the team with us arrived now, accompanied by Michael Gower, who was both Gower’s younger brother and an astronaut. Michael worked at NASA Base, so him being here wasn’t a shock.
    “Who or what the hell broke through over fifteen walls and floors of the Base?” Michael asked before anyone else could speak.
    I raised my hand. “Guilty. It messed the android up a lot, though, so it was all worth it. I think.”
    Reader shook his head. “We can’t leave you alone for a minute, girlfriend.”
    “This wasn’t my fault!”
    “It’s never your fault,” Gower said. He heaved a sigh. “This is going to take some Pontifex-level charm to smooth over, isn’t it?”
    “Yeah, I think it is. Good thing you’re so good with the smooth-talking, isn’t it?”
    “Why are we waiting for the itiGood alligators to eat us?” Jerry Tucker, my favorite flyboy, asked.
    “Kitty probably wants to catch up with old friends,” Reader said as he winked at me.
    “I really want to take a long nap and figure out what the hell’s going on. But if we can toss a couple cases of chicken carcasses to the ’gators, I’m not against it.”
    “I am,” Chuckie said firmly. “This is an unmitigated disaster. Thankfully, we can get some A-Cs here to do fast repairs to the building that you almost single-handedly destroyed.”
    “Hey, it’s still standing. Besides, Sandra the Nasty Android really pissed me off.”
    “Why so?” he asked.
    “She said you were the one in charge of all the supersoldier stuff and my enemy.”
    Chuckie gaped at me. So did most of the others. Reader and Gower, however, exchanged a very meaningful glance, and it wasn’t romantic.
    “What?” Chuckie asked finally.
    “We’ve gotten some anonymous messages insinuating the same thing,” Reader said.
    Chuckie was still basically speechless. I could tell he was furious, hurt, suspicious, and the conspiracy wheels were turning.
    I was about to reassure him that I, at least, didn’t buy it. But Amy spoke before I could. “As if.”
    Everyone stared at her in shock, Chuckie in particular.
    Amy rolled her eyes. “Look, Chuck and I have