The workers also needed protection. They were designed to hatch out of hosts and then build, not fight. They could kill, but were far outmatched by the human forces responding to each gate. The workers needed defenders, something to occupy the human forces, fight them long enough for workers to activate the gates.
Since defenders would not build the gate, they did not need the template. That was good. That opened a new strategy. Because the new defender design didn’t need a template, it could do something that the template-carrying embryos could not—the new design could reproduce.
The Orbital began modifying the next batch of seeds.
DAY TWO
FUN WITH SNOWMOBILES
The Jewell family reunion was turning out to be a smashing success, and Donald Jewell couldn’t have been happier.
Granted, there weren’t that many Jewells left.
Ma and Pa Jewell had gone to that big snowmobile trail in the sky. Ma five years ago, Pa less than six months later. They left behind their three children: Mary, Bobby and Donald.
Mary Jewell-Slater now lived in London with her husband. She couldn’t exactly fly overseas to see the family every Christmas. She called.
That was enough.
Bobby Jewell now lived in Ma and Pa’s house. He’d married his college sweetie, Candice, and promptly kicked out a bundle of joy named Chelsea, a curly blonde seven years old and worldly-wise.
Donald, the eldest member of clan Jewell, had divorced his bitch of a wife, Hannah, four years earlier. Hannah won custody of Betty, then twelve, now sixteen and hotter than a five-dollar pistol. Hannah moved from their home in Gaylord, Michigan, to Atlanta, taking Betty far away from her family. The divorce stipulated that Donald got Betty for every other holiday. So the first Christmas with Hannah, then Donald and so on.
This was his second Christmas as a divorced father.
Donald—now living in Pittsburgh—talked to his daughter at least every other day on the phone. They also chatted on webcam, emailed and even wrote some old-fashioned letters. They were as tight as a father and daughter separated by seven hundred miles can be.
Mostly from a distance, he’d watched his daughter grow from a gangly twelve-year-old into a stunning teenager who could have graced the cover of practically any magazine. She looked exactly like her mother, which annoyed Donald, because that made him hate Hannah just a little bit less.
He had thought he might be biased about his daughter’s looks, but when he showed pictures of her to his co-workers, their lewd hoots confirmed his fears. Those hoots had also, unfortunately, generated a couple of fights.
The same temper Hannah cited in the divorce papers hadn’t gone away.
His court-appointed psychologist called it “impulse-control problems.”
The shrink prescribed pills. Donald lied and said he took them. Everyone was happy.
His baby girl was growing up fast, and he didn’t want her to lose touch with her family. Thus the family reunion. A flight for Betty from Atlanta to Pittsburgh, then an eight-hour drive from Pittsburgh to Gaylord. Did they dread the drive? Nope, they got to talk the whole way up. Donald learned more about hot music, hot clothes, school gossip and backstabbing friends than he cared to, and he loved every minute of it.
Once she was back in Gaylord, the Southern Girl faded away and the Northern Girl came back to life. Betty hadn’t been on a snowmobile in two years, yet she hadn’t lost a step. In a white snowsuit on a blue snowmobile, she raced across an open field, with her father only fifty feet behind her and closing. Even over the roaring Arctic Cat engines and the whipping wind, Donald could hear her laughter. Let’s see Hannah compete with this. Bobby was at least a hundred yards back. He just didn’t have the aggression of Donald and, apparently, Betty.
Betty shouted something. Donald thought it was Try and catch me, old man, but he couldn’t be sure.
Bobby owned this whole area. Some places in the world, twenty acres was considered an “estate.” Near Gaylord, Michigan, twenty acres was just called “some land.” Mostly old cornfields, along with tall green pines, skeletal winter oaks and birch stands. Bobby lived smack in the middle of it all in total isolation—it took two minutes just to reach his house from the road.
Betty followed the trail into a left-hand bend that cut around a stand of pine trees. She slowed to start the turn, then gunned the engine, accelerating through the curve. She disappeared from sight for just a few seconds as Donald came around the curve behind her.
When he saw her again, he felt his nuts jump into his chest. Up ahead, the trail crossed a snow-covered road, and on that road was a brown and white Winnebago moving along at a good clip.
“Slow down, girl,” Donald hissed to himself. Betty couldn’t hear him or read his mind, obviously, because she poured on the speed. Donald tried to catch up and cut her off, but she had her throttle wide open.
The Winnebago started honking, but didn’t seem to slow. Betty apparently thought it would. Sick in his soul, Donald traced the two vehicles’ trajectories—she wouldn’t make it across in time.
Betty apparently saw the same thing. She locked up the brakes. The Cat’s back end fishtailed to the right, kicking up a wave of powder in front of it. The sled lost most of its speed but still tipped. Betty hopped off as the sled flopped onto its side and kept moving. She actually landed on her feet and slid for a few yards before she fell hard. The Cat skidded along the path for another ten feet, coming to rest right at the edge of the road.
The Winnebago roared by, trailing a cloud of powder. The big vehicle slowed down, working toward a full stop on the snowy road.
Donald skidded to a halt and hopped off his sled. Betty was already sitting up. Sitting up and laughing.
“Betty, are you all right?”
She took off her helmet, black hair spilling out across the shoulders of her white snowsuit. She laughed again, then winced.
“Owww,” she said through a grimacing smile. “Oh, Daddy, I think I hurt my boo-tay.”
He heard the Winnebago come to a stop and his brother’s sled approaching. Donald didn’t care about either; he was too angry.
“Betty Jean Jewell, what the hell were you doing?”
“Trying to beat you, of course,” Betty said. “If I could have made it in front of that RV, you would have had to pull off, and I’d win.”
“You idiot. You could have been killed.”
Betty waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, re-lax. You taught me how to dump a sled, Dad, I’m fine.”
“You’re not going on a snowmobile again, and that’s that.”
Betty’s smile faded. “Dad, seriously, I’m fine. I think you’re getting a little fired up here.”
He was losing his temper again, the same temper that had fucked up his entire life. He took a deep breath and started to get a hold of it.
And he would have succeeded, were it not for the driver of the Winnebago.
“You stupid little brat!” the man screamed. “What kind of a stupid fucking stunt was that?”
Donald looked up. The driver—a red-bearded fat man well past middle age—had gotten out of the Winnebago and walked over. He was only ten feet away. Donald’s temper shifted targets in an instant, fueled by the language directed against his daughter.