Chapter 9

"I think you'd better see this, Nils," Anastasia told me as I was working in my study.

I didn't question her. Ana had proven to be a better partner in my endeavors than I could have hoped for, and I had come to trust her judgment.

In the family room, the news had moved on to a new story, but Ana used the remote to play something she had recorded on the DVR.

" ... knows this man, please contact police at..."

The picture on the screen was unmistakable. Wolfy, it seemed, would not be 'playing' with anyone anymore. According to the story he had been the victim of a hit-and-run driver and police were still trying to identify him. We would, of course, have to tell what we knew of his identity, but that was not the troubling aspect of his death. Though he had been used as an enforcer by our enemies, Wolfgang Holtzman was little more than an innocent bystander in the game being played out behind the news.

The fact that they, whoever 'they' were, had thought it necessary to kill him was a cause for concern, as was the knowledge that whoever it was had brought our little private war into the public view. The police might not be able to piece the puzzle together, but until now, most of what had been done had been kept beneath the radar, so to speak. This murder, for neither Ana or I doubted that it was murder, spoke of a new level of desperation on the part of our enemies, and a correspondingly higher level of danger to us. Even more disturbingly came the thought that perhaps it was greater confidence, rather than desperation that drove them to such extremes, in which case, the danger to us was even greater.

I took the remote from Ana and muted the sound so I could think. I sat on the sofa, lost in thought, while the pictures continued to play silently across the screen.

Ana finally broke into my reverie.

"What are you thinking, Nils?" she asked, nestling into my shoulder, her familiar warmth both a comfort and a distraction.

Ana had healed, and seemingly had lost none of her desire for sex since the incident in the basement, but Wolfgang had decided he wanted to stay in his apartment, rather than moving in with us. He did come to visit now and then, and became quite friendly with the housekeeper when he discovered that they shared a love of boxed Mac and Cheese. Ana, too, had begun to show a certain amount of affection for him. When he wasn't 'playing' with someone, he was actually quite endearing, and I knew she would miss him, but there were other things occupying both halves of my brain.

"Nils?" Ana tried again.

"I'm sorry darling," I told her, softly stroking her hair. "When I undertook this quest of mine, I realize now that it was something of an adventure - an exciting way to apply all of these extra little abilities with which I've been endowed. It was a bit of a lark when Sarah tried to have me killed, first by pirates, then by your uncle. This though," I waved vaguely at the TV screen, "indicates that we face a desperate and ruthless enemy. If my surmise is correct, any expectation of human compassion or concern on their part would be a mistake. In fact, ascribing to them any human motivation is likely to lead us astray. Wolfy's death casts a somber cloud over this gay adventure I've been having, and I think I need to re-evaluate my strategy."

"Surely you are not giving up!"

"No," I answered thoughtfully. "No, adventure or not, what we're about is too important to too many. I think, though, that we might want to take a few precautions for your safety. I also think that we need to know a bit more about who was behind Holtzman and Sarah."

"I've been wondering when you were going to think of that," Ana said softly.

"Think of what?" I asked.

She sat up and gazed steadfastly into my eyes, answering, "Taking the fight to the enemy, of course."

I stared at my wife, seeing her with new eyes. I had only been talking about gathering information, but she had gone beyond that - and she was absolutely right.

I smiled as I replied, "You know, until now, I've been content to mount a clever defense, believing that I could easily counter whatever this hidden enemy sent my way. I see now that the battle will only escalate until one of us can no longer take the field. Thank you, my dear, for opening my eyes. As they say, the best defense is a good offense, so let us see what kind of offense we can mount."

They were brave words, indeed, but it took a great deal of thought and not a little wasted effort before we hit upon a way of narrowing the search for an elusive enemy. I had connections in the Police department, and I managed to get a look at the files covering the investigation into Wolfy's death. In themselves, they didn't tell me much - a black SUV with heavily tinted windows ran him down at night, then backed over him.

This confirmed, in my mind, that it was murder. The cops, despite what they told the press, were inclined to agree with me.

I got one of my contacts in the department to let me into Wolfy's apartment after the crime scene people were done with it. Wolfy had mentioned that his handlers spoke to him through the TV, and I quickly took the back off the little set. Sure enough, I found, connected to the signal input from the cable connection, a tiny grey gelatinous mass, about the size of the end of my thumb. There were two tiny tendrils that uncoiled to touch the connections on the back of the cable connector.

The thing was surprisingly difficult to pry loose, and as soon as one of the tendrils broke away from it's moorings, the whole mass began to heat up rapidly. It didn't quite burst into flames, but it glowed bright red for several seconds, turning rapidly to charcoal, then to fine ash. That was another suspicion confirmed, but it added no useful information to my investigation. Certainly, no one on Earth had built that little circuit, the power-pack that could incinerate it so thoroughly in such a short time, or the insulating base that, while being consumed in the rapid oxidation of the whole, barely warmed the panel to which it adhered. The thing had to have been self-contained - not drawing power from the TV - since, when it incinerated, it did not have enough connections to the set's circuits to make a complete electrical circuit. The barest touch, when it cooled enough to do so, caused it to fall apart into a mound of grey and black powder. There were suggestions of tiny shapes in the patterning of the lighter and darker areas of powder, but what they could have been was anybody's guess. I had taken pictures with my cell phone before I started prying at it, and several more as it burned and cooled, so I was hoping that some genius at computer modeling would be able to take the pictures of the powder heap and give me some idea of the internal structure of the thing by reverse engineering its collapse.

I collected the powder in a zip-lock bag that Ana found in the kitchen, in hopes of getting a chemical analysis on the substance.

Okay, advanced, or at least unknown-to-Earth-science technology. Further evidence that whoever was behind Sarah Pasternak and Holtzman was not from this planet, but many questions remained. Someone had sent the cops to the rescue when they thought Ana and I were in a situation we wouldn't be able to get out of by ourselves. Were they also from somewhere else, or was there someone on Earth who was battling the 'opposition'?

How do you go about finding aliens who are trying to destroy your planet? By Wolfy's description, they wouldn't be able to walk among us without being recognized as aliens, so they had to use human agents to do their dirty work - at least until they were sure enough of victory to take a direct hand in things. Even using human agents, however, meant that they had to have ways of contacting those agents - ways that might give further clues about who and what they were.

We found nothing else of interest in Wollfy's apartment, so I gave Ana a starting set of search patterns for an internet search that might help us turn up something, and took a quick flight to Seattle.

Sarah was frightened. I could see it in her eyes when she opened the door. Her fear, though, had nothing to do with me. In fact, she seemed relieved to see me, but she wouldn't invite me in.

"Let's go for a walk, then," I suggested, only to be met with a mute, urgent, negative shake of her head, and a rolling of her eyes as if to indicate that someone else was in the house with her - someone who was the source of her fear.

"Okay," I told her. "I can see that you're busy. Perhaps another time..."

"Yes," she answered, too quickly, "I'd like that."

I returned to my rental car and turned back the way I had come into the quiet neighborhood where Sarah lived. Out of sight of the house, I drove around the block to the neighboring street as I had when I first broke into her house.

There was someone working in the back yard of the home whose yard had provided my initial route to Sarah's, but a quick check of the neighbors' yards yielded an even easier route. Sarah's back fence overlapped the property line of the neighbor immediately behind her by about six feet on each side, and I found a loose board in the section of fence that bounded the neighbor whose yard provided my entrance. Slipping in behind the Photinia's that bordered Sarah's yard, I discovered a well-used path between the bushes and the side fence running all the way to her front fence. Apparently, the neighborhood kids had been using Sarah's property for some sort of clandestine passage for a while.

Moving carefully, I took no chances on being spotted from the inside of the house. As I came opposite the back corner of the house, a spot that was hard to see from any door or window, I slipped from my vegetative cover and flattened myself against the wall at the corner. As I crept beneath one of the back windows, I almost tripped over a handheld cultivator with three sharp steel tines bent at a right angle to the handle and a weed-puller. If you live in suburbia, you know what I'm talking about: the weed-puller is about twelve inches long with a steel shank that's flattened into a fork with two short, broad points. The handle of this one was made of wood.

Realizing that I might soon be facing the very enemy who had been the impetus for this trip, and not having brought a weapon of my own, I decided not to look a gift-horse in the mouth. The cultivator's handle went into the back of my belt with the tines sticking out, while I checked the balance of the weeder. In a pinch, I figured I could throw it like a knife with a reasonable chance of it sticking into whatever it hit.

It was, for Seattle, a rather warm day, and only the sliding screen door to the kitchen stood between me and the interior of the place. I could hear Sarah's voice in another room, pleading with someone, but I couldn't make out what she was saying. Rather than take a chance of being heard, I took out my pocket knife and cut the nylon screen away from it's frame until I had a hole large enough to admit me. I stepped carefully into the kitchen, then checked the bottoms of my shoes before going any further. Sure enough, a couple of small pebbles had lodged in the grooves on the soles of my tennis shoes.

Rather than take a chance on making unwanted noise on the floor tiles, I worked them loose with the blade of my knife and tossed them back outside before creeping toward the open doorway from which the voices emanated. There were at least two besides Sarah's, but there was something not quite right about them.

As I neared the door, I realized what it was. Whoever was speaking was doing so in a sibilant language whose origins were definitely not on Earth. How did I know? Because, along with knowledge of the language, my internal database brought up a thought reference to a planet whose name could not be easily pronounced with human vocal apparatus.

The English voices I was hearing were electronically produced in response to the sibilants, and, I realized, that whatever artificial translation mechanism was being employed, it suffered from the same problems that any other automated translation mechanism must suffer: It could translate literally, but lacked the cultural understanding to choose the appropriate word when there was more than one choice.

Slowly, carefully, I knelt and poked my head around the edge of the doorway. The family room was two steps down from the kitchen. Sarah sat on the sofa across from me, but thankfully, she didn't notice my movement. Two slender, grey-skinned beings with very large heads crouched with their backs to me, their legs bent backward at the knee instead of forward. They wore some sort of silvery coverall thing that my database warned me would be tough to penetrate, especially with the weapons at my disposal.

One of the beings held a weapon of some sort. At least, I surmised that the pistol-gripped thing that looked like a tiny microwave antenna was a weapon. Sarah certainly seemed to fear it.

I didn't yet have a plan, but from the way Sarah's anxiety was growing, especially when the guy with the weapon did something that caused it to whine as if charging, I figured I'd better move quickly.

Hoping the being with the gun would see me as the bigger threat and swing it in my direction, I threw the weeder with all my strength at the head of the one who appeared to be unarmed unarmed. I was gratified to see that it sank into the base of his skull as far as the wooden handle. On a human, that would have destroyed most of the brain's contact with the body and pretty much killed him. Not so with these guys, but I didn't have time to worry about it.

Long, skinny legs unfolded, bringing the other alien erect as it turned. As the gun swung in my direction and Sarah let out a piercing scream, I launched myself at the armed alien, drawing the cultivator from my belt as I did. I felt the burn along my ribs from the weapon as the tines of the cultivator plunged through the juncture of the limb just below the appendage that held the weapon. I could not be certain that alien anatomy was enough like ours for most of what I knew about martial arts to be effective, but it seemed reasonable, from a purely mechanical standpoint, that disrupting whatever was going on in that 'wrist' would make it difficult for the alien to get off another shot. In that, I was correct.

The hand, or whatever it was, separated from the rest of the appendage with the force of my blow, and I plucked the weapon from what remained of the thing holding it, as an unexpected amount of purple and yellow fluid burst out of both severed pieces. The alien's already wide eyes seemed to stare at me in disbelief, and before my eyes, it deflated!