Alien vs. Alien

he cooed at her. “I also see you’re all bustling off about more exciting diplomatic business. Shall I just hold onto our little one and leave Mommy’s arms free?”
    There was no way Jeff was going to have time to give Jamie attention right now, and I wasn’t going to let him hold her while Bellie was on his shoulder anyway. “Sure, Pierre, that’d be great. Ah, is there anything to eat?”
    He grinned. “Yes indeed. Your lovely mother-in-law called and told me to ensure all of you kept on eating well once you were back here. I believe she’s worried about your Jeff’s eating habits, too.”
    I snorted. “Jeff’s a healthy eater. I’m not. So, um, any brownies around?”
    “Indeed there are.” He went to the pantry. “A plate of Lucinda Martini’s brownies, if you please.” Opened the pantry door, there they were. The Elves had come through once again. Pierre handed them to me. “I must say I love working and living here.”
    I grabbed a brownie. Considered, and took the plate. “Me too. I’m going to bring these in for the others.” I was willing to take one for the team, especially since that meant I could snag another brownie while being kind and generous.
    Gave Pierre a one-armed hug, gave Jamie a big kiss, and headed off down the hall to Jeff’s office.
    Fortunately his office, like everything else in the Embassy, was spacious, because we had more people in here than I’d left in the hall.
    Our in-person additions were Christopher and Amy, both of whom looked slightly mussed and only somewhat happy to be here, along with Kevin Lewis, who was my mom’s right hand man in the P.T.C.U. and assigned to a permanent berth at the Embassy, Tito, Melanie, and Emily. There was a video conference going, and I could see Alpha and Airborne on screen.
    Everyone in the room and on the screen looked at me as I came in. “About time,” Christopher snapped.
    “Sorry. I’m not the one who dragged you out of bed for the latest War Room discussion. Brownie? They’re Lucinda’s.”
    Christopher, Amy, White, and Buchanan all grabbed a brownie before anyone else. Yeah, we’d gotten used to the good eating, even Buchanan. Sure he’d housed in the servants’ luxury pad, but Lucinda had insisted he eat dinner with us every night and had ensured he had plenty of snackage during the day.
    I took the plate around to everyone, in part to be polite and in part so that the brownies stayed near to me. Jeff sighed as he took one. “Where’s Jamie?”
    “I traded her for a plate of brownies and some magic beans. She’s with Pierre, getting cuddles and tons of one-on-one attention.” I managed to stop myself from mentioning that the person I’d expected to be doing that was Jeff. We were occupied. And, of course, he had his bird.
    Who, it turned out, had her own Special Perch in his office. I wondered if there was some sort of Parrots Anonymous group I could drag Jeff to. Soon.
    “So, now that you’re all snacking, can we get back to business?” Reader sounded annoyed. Probably bummed there were no brownies wherever Alpha Team was.
    “How did the cleanup go?” I asked.
    “And I’d very much like to know how our instructor, John, fared,” White added.
    “Thankfully we were able to call in field teams as well as the Operations team, and because they evacuated the humans, they were able to use hyperspeed,” Reader said. “Everything but the gate hub is fixed and like new. The hub’s a little trickier, but it should be completed by tomorrow if not sooner.”
    “And the instructor’s fine,” Gower added. “Shaken, but in a safe location, being debriefed.”
    “Was he in on the attack?”
    “No,” Tim said. “NASA had surveillance tapes running. Watch.”
    There were several screens running. Actually, there were a lot of screens, with a lot of images running, but our particular focus was only on a set of them. With this and Serene in the room I realized Alpha and Airborne were at Imageering Control, or what I called the Bat Cave Level of the Dulce Science Center. I felt a pang. I still missed living there. The Embassy was great, but it wasn’t the Lair.
    I pulled my focus back to the screens. One showed us arriving in our limo, with Buchanan right behind us. The other cars arriving raised no suspicions.
    The employees parking lot showed John arriving in an older Toyota Corolla. He drove and parked carefully, but rushed out of his car and to the employees’ entrance. I checked the