Alien vs. Alien

today.
    The boys each took one side of Olga’s wheelchair and lifted it, then they stepped through.
    “See you over there,” Amy said. She and the animal-laden stroller went through.
    I steeled myself. I’d hated gate transfers from Day One with Centaurion Division, and gaining some A-C powers hadn’t made them any better. Going through the gates was, for me, a nauseating experience at best. I didn’t want to literally toss all the cookies I’d been scarfing down, and I really didn’t want to toss them onto Jamie.
    Took a deep breath, relaxed. Took another, relaxed more. Took a third—and heard a step behind me. In an Embassy that was supposedly locked tight and devoid of anyone other than me and my baby.

    Yi

CHAPTER 45

    I WANTED TO FREEZE, but instead I spun around. And let out the breath I’d been holding.
    “What the hell are you doing, Missus Chief?” Buchanan asked.
    “Malcolm, are you part A-C?”
    “Not that I know of. Why?”
    “You have an amazing ability to sneak up on me.”
    He shook his head. “Where’s everyone else?”
    “Um, where I need to go. But you can come, too.”
    “Oh. Great. Floater gate transfer?”
    “Wow. Can you see the gate? I mean, I used to be able to see the gate, before, but only like a kind of faint shimmering.”
    “I didn’t need to see it. Since you came inside, the number of people in the second floor study continued to increase and not all of the new arrivals came in through the front door. Mister White and Senator Armstrong went to the American Centaurion Embassy, but no one else has exited this building via conventional means. And now I’m in here, and the only people left inside this entire place are you and Baby Chief. It doesn’t take genius to figure out that you’ve been using floaters for some reason. Are you worried about another attack?”
    “Yes, but not from the Club Fifty-One lunatics this time. At least, I don’t think so. Tell you the reason once we get to our next stop.”
    He sighed, took Jamie from me and held her in one arm as he put his other arm around me and headed us toward the gate. “You don’t make this job easy.”
    “As near as I can tell, it’s easy for you.” I steeled myself. And hoped Jeff wasn’t paying attention to me at this precise time.
    Buchanan did a variety of things similarly toeas Jeff, and this was merely one of them. Whether Jeff would perceive this as being better or worse than Buchanan catching me I couldn’t guess. I didn’t really want Jeff and Buchanan to be forced to have the jealousy chat, in part because I didn’t think Jeff was going to cut Buchanan even half the slack he cut Chuckie, and said Chuckie slack was essentially nil.
    However, we stepped through, and my worries about Jeff’s jealousy were wiped away by intense nausea. Buchanan’s arm tightened around me, which helped a little.
    I’d heard the gates’ functioning explained as using a temporal warp filtered through black-hole technology or similar, allowing the fast, safe, movement of matter across a large physical space in a very short amount of perceived time.
    That made as much sense to me as international politics, which so far had made almost no logical sense at all. Suffice to say that going through the gates felt like you were taking a very slow step while the world moved past you very, very quickly. I’d tried going through gates with my eyes open and my eyes closed. To date, the only way going through them had been even remotely pleasant was if Jeff was carrying me and I had my face buried in his neck.
    Needless to say, since Jeff wasn’t here, I was nauseated by the time our feet hit the terra firma of the Dome’s interior.
    Christopher was waiting for us and gave us a lovely shot of Patented Glare #2. “You took a while to get here.”
    “Oh, my God, did Jeff ask you to cover the jealousy stuff if he wasn’t around? Malcolm got into the Romanian Embassy, God alone knows how, and found me and Jamie just before we were stepping through the gate.”
    “Actually, I found them while the Ambassador was stalling going through,” Buchanan said as he let go of me and put Jamie in my arms. “I know how much she hates them—frankly, if I hadn’t come inside, she’d probably still be there, prepping for the trip.”
    “You don’t know me.”
    Christopher snorted, and Buchanan laughed. “Fine,” Christopher said. “I think I have things under control here.”
    I took a good look around. The Dome looked as it