“I’m on it.” Moments later he had gathered coiled cord and batteries and brought them over to Sam. “I tuck it away for safekeeping.”
“You mean, like, in case of an alien invasion?”
“Actually, most of this stuff’s for gaming.” Leaving it with her, he crawled under a desk that was piled high with hard drives and CD-ROMs, reaching for what looked to Sam like a pretty high-tech-looking box in a corner. He managed to get a grip on it with the fingers of one hand. “Got it.”
“Great,” said Sam. “Just don’t make any noise extracting it.”
He endeavored to do as she instructed as he began to pull. This nudged the box forward toward him, close enough that he was able to get a second hand on it. Then, slowly, he began to back out from under the desk, hauling the box a few inches at a time and then moving with greater confidence.
That confidence cost him when his back leg bumped into another desk nearby. It had a towering pile of stuff on it, and the impact from Cal’s leg jolted it. Sam tried to lunge toward it, to catch the pile before it fell, but she wasn’t even close to getting there in time. The pile tilted, slid and crashed to the floor. Cal whipped around, a look of wide-eyed fear on his face.
The Land Commander finds that he cannot take even the slightest break without being disturbed.
He hears the crash within the nearby human structure. It is as frail and poorly put together as any human shelters are… indeed, as much as actual humans are. It could easily be falling apart all by itself. Nevertheless, attention must be paid, in the unlikely event that any of the creatures are lurking inside.
He summons two of his subordinates and they approach hastily even as he tosses away his salt stick. They await his orders. He gestures for them to head into the structure, to determine just exactly who or what it was that caused the things inside to fall over.
Each of the soldiers is carrying a cleeb, a bladed instrument that could slice any human in half with the slightest contact. They head toward the structure, their cleebs at the ready. When they approach the structure, the door is shut. Without hesitation the foremost grunt kicks it open and enters with full confidence that nothing inside can possibly pose a serious threat. They are warriors in the service of the Land Commander, and there is nothing they cannot accomplish. Nothing they cannot defeat. Nothing—
—in the room.
The first soldier steps in, the second right behind. They clear the corners, making sure that no one is hiding there.
The rear window. It is hanging open. They move to it and look out.
No sign of anyone.
They report their findings—or lack thereof—to the Land Commander. He considers the information carefully. Which seems the most likely? That some random stack of human leavings tumbled over because of a possible gust of wind, or maybe it had never been properly aligned in the first place and had eventually given way to gravity? Or that some human or humans had braved all manner of threat just to search around in an empty building and had barely managed to escape out the back window before they could be seen?
The answer is self-evident.
He orders the two back to work and resolves to give it no further thought.
Sam had come to think of the area where the first contact had been made—the spot that was now occupied by the overturned Jeeps—as her own personal Ground Zero. The place where her view of the universe, her understanding of reality itself, had been upended.
Now she and her companions had taken refuge on a hill overlooking it and were doing everything they could to take down the creatures that had performed the actions of total destruction. God, I show up at someone’s place, I come with a bottle of wine, maybe some dessert, and if it’s a party, I offer to stay after and help with the cleanup. These guys come a bazillion light-years to our place and the first thing they do is blow shit up. I swear, some people…
Calvin Zapata had worked with surprising speed and confidence—surprising, Sam reasoned, because thus far she had only seen him out of his element. Now that he was operating within his area of expertise, he was all efficiency. He had effortlessly set up the spectrum analyzer and rigged it to batteries. Then he had put on the headphones as if he were crowning himself and, with complete certainty, snapped on the analyzer.
That was where his confidence came to an abrupt end. Needles, dials, readouts—all of it just lay there, unmoving. Dead.
“You doing this right?” said Mick.
Cal shot him an annoyed look and started double-checking the connections.
Speaking as much to herself as anyone else, Sam said softly, “Yesterday my biggest fear was that my dad wouldn’t accept my boyfriend. Now…” Her voice trailed off and then she looked back at Mick. “You?”
“I thought I couldn’t climb a little mountain. Good one?”
Suddenly they both jumped at a nearby surge of sound. Sam automatically thought it was some sort of weapons blaster aimed at them, about to blow her head off. Judging by Mick’s expression, he’d probably thought it was the same thing. She relaxed when she realized it was just the analyzer humming to life. Cal looked at them with an expression of smug triumph and then began adjusting the dials. “Oh, I should have mentioned this before,” he said in an offhand manner, “but if this works, and we get a good frequency—”
“We’ll only have a few seconds to communicate. You already told us,” said Sam.
“Yeah, that. But…” He was trying to sound casual about it and wasn’t being terribly successful. “Also those monsters are pretty much guaranteed to get a lock on our position, too. So we’ll only have a few seconds to get out of here.”
Sam took in this new information. “I almost wish you hadn’t mentioned it.”
He shrugged and returned to the spectrum analyzer, fine-tuning the dials so delicately that he seemed like a safecracker trying to discern the combination through subtle clicks of tumblers. Sam mused that, in a way, that’s exactly what he was doing: he was trying to crack into a wave band in order to gain access to it.
“Anything?” said Mick.
Cal shook his head and continued to adjust and refine it. The needles and dials were now flitting about, bouncing from one side to the other. And then, all at once, they stopped their twitching and became rock steady, pointing straight up with only the most minute of quivering. As they remained steady, Cal whispered in amazement, “I hear them. I’m listening to aliens communicate.”
“What’s it sound like?” said Sam.
He pulled a headphone free so they could hear it, too. To Sam, it sounded like a steam wand on a giant cappuccino machine. Apparently it came across that way to Cal as well. “Starbucks,” he said.
Great. Thanks to him, now I’m craving a latte.
Mick nudged Cal, who made a final adjustment, getting the patched-together device online with where they needed it to be. Then he took the police radio they’d salvaged from the Jeep, plugged it into the spectrum analyzer and handed the microphone to Sam.
Sam worked to keep herself calm. She needed to be all business. There wasn’t time for histrionics or sounding like the frantic girlfriend in one of those horror films.
“John Paul Jones, this is an urgent message for the USS John Paul Jones, do you read?”
No response was forthcoming. She repeated it again and again, and with utter despair crushing in on her, she heard a familiar voice come with an excited, “Sam? Sam, is that you?”