Touched by an Alien

take me to explain this.”
    “Fine,” Martini sighed. He slid down in the seat a bit. “I’ll behave.”
    Gower gave him a look that said he didn’t believe a word of it, then went on. “We were one of the planets the original aliens warned, just like Earth. We call the aliens Ancients, because their race was much older than ours. The ship that arrived at our planet didn’t crash, but the crew couldn’t survive in our atmosphere. The ones who landed here would have died as well. Their world, we’ve figured out, was a lot closer, spacewise, to the one the parasites came from than ours or yours, and it made them very different from our two races.”
    “They reached our world a hundred years before yours,” White added. “We didn’t have good enough space travel to reach any other inhabited world for decades after they landed, though.”
    Gower nodded. “We got most of what we needed from the Ancients’ spaceship. Just as Earth scientists did and are still doing today. But we’ve had more time than you.”
    “Earth did a better job with translation,” Christopher added.
    “True,” Gower agreed. “We were clear a menace was coming, and we could figure out that more worlds than ours were warned. They had a star map, and we used it to determine which worlds were the ones presumed in danger.”
    “We came to Earth to help,” White added. “You needed us. You still do.”
    “So these brilliant Ancients set out to warn all the worlds, and they don’t wear space suits? How stupid is that?” I felt bad for asking, but it had to be said.
    “You go, girl,” Reader called from the driver’s seat. “That was my first question, too. You’ll love the answer.”
    “They thought they could adapt,” Gower said in a resigned tone. “They were shapeshifters from all we can tell, and they’d been able to do it before. But their planet was closer to the galactic core than ours are, and things are different there than out here.”
    “So how many planets is it safe to assume they couldn’t adapt to?” I felt a pang of pity for these Ancients, doing their best to save the galaxy and in a way failing before they could even begin.
    “Most of them,” Gower said with a sigh. “Most of the inhabited planets are far from the core, not near it. We don’t know why. We’ve been too busy fighting to keep this threat at bay to do any form of exploration.”
    “They might be figuring it out back home,” Martini added. “But we don’t know. Radio waves take forever to get through, so communications is pretty poor. None of us are going back, but we knew that coming here.” For the first time since I’d started this journey he didn’t look confident or happy—he looked lonely and sad.
    “You leave a lot of family back there?” I asked quietly—it wasn’t a raucous moment.
    “Not a lot. No wife,” he added with his normal smile.
    “Oh, thank goodness.” Glad to see that moment of personal exposure wasn’t going to last longer than a nanosecond. Not that I could blame him. They might be aliens, but they were also clearly men.
    “Most of us don’t have immediate family back on our home world,” Gower said. “Our families are here.”
    “What do you mean, here?” This was getting weirder by the moment.
    “We perfected a transference system, where we don’t need spaceships to get here,” White replied. “It works very well to send us from our home world to Earth.”
    “But we can’t go back,” Christopher added. “Our world’s core is different from Earth’s; the magnetic pull here won’t allow the system to work in reverse. So, for some, it was better to send the whole clan out.”
    “Why so? That seems odd, really.”
    “It’s how they are,” Reader said. “Think of them like a huge extended Italian family and you’ll be on the right track.”
    “You’re all related?” I looked around. “That would explain the hunkiness, but not your skin tone,” I said to Gower.
    He shrugged. “My father married an African-American woman. Earth genes dominate over A-C ones, at least the ones that deal with physical appearance.”
    “So you’re an alien-human hybrid?”
    “Yep. Jeff’s a pure alien, though,” Gower added with a chuckle.
    “My parents both came as operatives,” Martini said. “I’m Earth-born but full A-C blood. Same with Christopher and most of our younger agents.”
    “So, you’re U.S. citizens?”
    “Yep, with all the rights therein,” Martini confirmed.