We’d scrambled the Skyranger somewhat before that happened, anticipating some kind of hostile action, but even that proaction on our part had us show up two hours late. Rather than show up short-handed, we had three rookies with us, Yvette Gaudin, Helga Unger, and Eveyln Hudson.

Arriving as we did several hours behind the brunt of the attack, the city was omonously quiet below us as we reached the outer reaches. What intelligence we had suggested there were a handful of alien groups going around committing kidnappings, killings, and vandalism. We set down near one such group. It wasn’t hard to find them, what with the explosions clearly visible from the air, and the pilot brought us down in a park on the outskirts.

What wasn’t visible from the air was the trap they’d laid for us. Almost the moment the ramp went down, we faced a hail of plasma from the Grays lying and standing in wait around the ship. They got Shuji on the ramp, right off the bat before any of us even got off the Skyranger. Barbara nailed two of them firing from the hip before hitting the ramp alongside me, as Leonid finished a third alien with what was, from him, a surprisingly accurate burst of fire.

The space in front of the ramp now apparently clear, we’re all just barely off the ramp when Tomos yells “TANGO LEFT!” and empties a clip from his rifle. I whip around just in time to see a burst of plasma surge through his ribcage and splatter against the back of the ramp, and the smell of cooked meat has me struggling not to gag. That’s when I clapped eyes on it: some kind of alien mini-hovering saucer by a two-story house, just sitting on a curtain of roiling heated air not fifteen meters away. A long dark slit across the edge of the saucer glows, lights up with the greenest green light I have ever seen, rolling from the edges of the slit towards the center where the two merged into a single beam that sliced towards the group of us X-COM agents still scrambling to get away from the ramp, and I barely manage to throw myself to the ground in time for the bolt to sizzle by overhead. The air feels like it’s combusting around me, and while I’m centering the ironsights on that mini-saucer and firing, I can hear the bolts cutting into my soldiers and cutting them down.

Then I see another saucer behind it, perhaps 25 meters from us, elevated and firing at us as well, and I’m sure we’re all going to die. I’ve barely hit the end of my clip when this second saucer, moving towards us as slowly and inexorably as the first, reaches the same equivalent height as the first saucer. Its plasma bolt catches the first saucer in the back, and the entire saucer crackles, raising up in the air a foot, before sagging to the ground.

That’s when we light up the second saucer. It ignores us; autocannonss and rifles alike are firing on full automatic, bullets and shells pinging off the saucer’s metallic hull, and it just continues squeezing off shots at us. One of those beams flashes at me, and then there’s a terrible burning pain in my stomach. I’m spasming and rolling on the ground in pain, reflexively, before I grit my teeth and regain control. I look up just in time to see the saucer, not twelve meters from us now, its firing slit lighting up- just as a rocket slams into it, exploding in a great cataclysm of smoke and fire. I roll my head to see Sylvie Marcelle leaning against Virgil with a rocket launcher steadied both on her and his shoulder. She screams something triumphantly, but I’m beyond hearing it, and I reflexively roll over to look back at the saucer, sitting scragged on the wet earth.

There’s a kind of humming, thrumming noise of rising intensity, and then the saucer explodes, sending a huge gout of flame and shrapnel for meters in every direction. I can hear a scream from the direction of the house, a scream abrubtly cut off by the groaning and shrieking of distressed constructions, before I can hear the landslide of the house collapsing.

And then I lost consciousness. I woke up back in the infirmary at headquarters, the sharp pain in my abdomen as they set me right overwhelming the painkillers which hadn’t entirely taken effect.

It’s been a day or so. Apparently after I was out, Barbara took command. I’ve talked to her about it, in a conversation that lasted about twenty seconds. She wouldn’t tell me what happened, except for cursing aliens who know how to fight urban warfare and the damn rookies who didn’t.

I’m taking it things went very badly. Honestly, I’m kind of dreading when she finishes writing the field report.

“Clear!” Shuji calls back to us, “One tango down.”

“Clear.” Bryan reported. “Nothing this side.”

“Right, let’s move.” I order. Everything looks like it’ll go smoothly, at first; Sylvie, Leonid, and Kevin head for the small UFO to flank it and secure the entrance, while the rest of the team fans out across the desert to search for any aliens which, like the one Shuji killed, have taken up concealed positions around the crashed UFO.

We’re not fifteen meters from the Skyranger when I see Yoko raising that huge cannon of hers towards the ridgeline of a huge dune. I catch sight of the alien Gray silhouetted against the sky as her shot veers wide.

The alien sends a single pulse from its alien carbine, the sizzling green blast scorching past Shuji, thrown flat on the ground, and tears past the cockpit of the Skyranger, nearly shearing off the vehicle’s nose. Shuji sends another burst of rifle fire off, suppressing any further blasts from the alien as it hunkers down behind the dune. Hidekemi and Virgil and I are simultaneously storming the dunetop as Shuji and Yoko squeeze off shots to keep the alien’s head down, and as we burst over the dunetop, we come across the shudderingly eerie alien sprawled on the ground, the greenish liquid that makes up its blood evaporating in the hot desert air even before it hits the sand.

“Clear,” I report. “Nice shooting, Yoko. Let’s flank the UFO, flush it out, and go home.”

“You really think there’s anything alive left in that?” Virgil asked as we continued the wide sweep through the dunes, Barbara and Tomos visible doing the same closer to the UFO. “Looks like a total wreck to me, and alien or not, I don’t think things tend to live through a crash like that.”

I considered the UFO for a moment; clouds of smoke still roiled from the terrible gashes in its side, likely inflicted by the interceptor’s avalanche missiles, and while the UFO and it’s otherworldy alloys were still blue, the shards of debris still glowed white-hot, two hours after it’d been shot down. “Those two bastards survived the crash-landing. I don’t know how many were aboard, but they’re still around.”

There aren’t any further encounters surrounding the craft, though, and so if there are any further survivors, their hiding place remaining hiding places are limited to the UFO itself. The whole thing is barely large enough to hold a crew of ten humans, in any case. Barbara and I sweep into it through one of the gashes, while Leonid, Sylvie, and Kevin breach through the other, larger ruined wall.

As my eyes struggle with the smoke, two corpses impress themselvs on my vision; then I notice the single alien, standing defiantly iin the center of the vessel, a ruined control console behind him, weapon in his hand as the silhoutte just stands there, poised and alert. The smoke thins, somewhat, and I can just make out its eyes in the darkness of the UFO.

Then the silhoutte staggers as a bullet from Leonid’s gun pushes through its shoulder and emerges with a wave of ichor. The alien turns and fires, surprisingly fast. Barbara returns fire from behind me as I crouch and steady my rifle, exhaling as I squeeze the trigger. The alien crumbles, and I swing my eyes around the utterly wrecked cabin of the UFO. Nothing moves except the smoke.

“Clear!” I called out, moving to examine the fresh corpse. “Anyone hit?”

“Negatory.” Leonid replied, dusting himself off as he rose from the sand. “Bastard missed me, but it was close.”

“Yeah…” I mutter, staring at the crumpled child-like body on the floor of the alien craft, feeling… something. He’d known we were coming, and had stood there, resistant, defiant, poised, ready to do whatever it took to end us.

Just like so many of us had stood when they’d descended on our cities.

“Pilot says Richter’s on the line!” Tomos called from outside the UFO. “Trucks from Casablanca are en route to pick up the UFO, about thirty minutes out.”

“Right then, let’s load up these bodies and what alien gear we can in the Skyranger.” I said, trudging back towards the transport. “Leonid, you take your squad back with the Skyranger; I’ll stay with half to oversee the trip back.”

Leonid saluted. “Aye, sir. Have fun dealing with the locals.”

“You mean keeping their grubby hands off anything they could steal and sell.” Yoko muttered quietly but quite audibly.

I sighed. I may not like it, but someone had to stay and do it, it.

“Alright, listen up.” I shout over the buffeting and the shrieking of the air that the Skyranger’s cutting through at half mach one. “Surface patrols spotted something shiny on one of the small automated farms – by which I mean sensor posts – we’ve set up in the most hospitable regions around the base. A closer examination with telescopic optics revealed a small UFO had landed there. While we all know the aliens might be trying to provoke a reaction to trace us back to our base, we can’t just let an opportunity like this pass us by. Plus, it’s clear the aliens know we operate out of northern Africa; it’s not as if we’ll be telling them anything we don’t already know.”

“Tomos and I will be the flanking elements,” Barbara picked up, “Thompson, Marcelle, Shuji Koyama, Hidekemi, and Shigeru will be with us.”
“Virgil, Spencer, and I will take the rest of you with us on a direct approach to the UFO.” Leonid continued. “And the rest of you means Kevin, Yoko, and Kenji Yamanaka and Kenji Okabe, in case you couldn’t figure it out.” Lenoid frowned, turned to look at me. “Seriously? You put Yamanaka and Okabe in the same squad? Jeez,” he sighed, turning back to the troopers, “We’ll have to get you folks some nicknames or something to make that easier to remember. Anyways, we’ll secure the entrance to the UFO while Barbara’s team sweeps the perimeter. Once we’re clear and we don’t have to worry about our backs, we’ll clear the UFO. Questions?”

Yoko waves a hand in the air. “What if that UFO lifts off, or the aliens don’t wait for us to clear it?”

I grin. “A: Then it’s Interceptor One’s business. B: Then we waste ‘em.”

It’s literally fifteen minutes to the outlying sensor posts. When we get back to base, I’ll want to know why we didn’t hear anything from the posts – probably a jammer of some sort, but the scientists’ll hopefully have a solution for that. Before long we’re setting down again.

We rush out of the Skyranger into the harsh sunlight. We’ve spread out into the two distinct groups, Barbara sweeping around the UFO to check all the outlying barn buildings, while Leonid, Spencer, and I all make our way towards the UFO’s door. We’re halfway there when I can see plasma angling towards us. We can see the alien responsible leaning out from behind the cover of one of the ship’s extrusions. We all dive, but Thompson takes it in the shoulder. He’s writhing when the second blast hits him. Leonid, ever the aggressor, simply gets back to his feet and charges, his rifle blasting away on full auto. The alien’s stumbling back when a shell from Kenji’s autocannon schlepps it in the head, and the alien flips onto its back, dead.

Then we’re all crouching outside the entrance with weapons trained on the entrance, and Spencer’s leaning against the ship’s side, huge cannon covering the door at point blank range. The door telescopes open as the aliens begin to fire towards us; we dive out of the way or duck further into the ground as Spencer leans around the corner and bags it with a single cannon shot fired reflexively. Inside the ship we can see an alien diving for the entrance lever before the door telescopes closed again.

I can hearing firing from somewhere else, the sizzling of plasma and the retorts of bullets: Barbara’s team must have encountered resistance somewhere on the other side of the UFO.

We’re all lying there perhaps twenty seconds later, taking what cover we can find behind shrubs and trees and the ground itself when the UFO portal opens and a concerted wave of plasma fire just bubbles outwards towards us. The heat is scorching, and we pour our fire back into the portal. As if in a nightmare, I see Spencer moving away from the portal, out of the spot he’d had, and I see a stray autocannon shell take him down. He’s bleeding terribly, an- I force my vision from him back to the aliens, squeezing off automatic shots from my pistol as soon as the capacitors recharge, the beam lasing out and then pulsing three times per shot, each pulse delivering kilowatts of energy and causing miniature explosions. Besides me, Kenij takes a burst of plasma somewhere painful and is down, hopefully dead. I wouldn’t want to live through a blast like that, anyways. Eventually the aliens have had enough and close the portal, leaving us with a vision of two grayish corpses marinating in their own greenish fluids before we’re again staring at a portal of cold blue metallic alloys.

Hidekemi tucks her laser pistol into her belt and unlimbers the rocket launcher from her back, dashing beside the door and nodding to us confidently. The door opens a few seconds later, and this time Hidekemi charges in, sliding and skidding under their plasma salvo as she fires the rocket launcher almost directly in front of her. Time seems to slow as plasma bolts arc over her body, towards me, and then to hell with it, I’m also skidding forward, charging towards the alien to Hidekemi’s left, coming to a stop right at the alien’s feet, disgusting as they look, firing the laser pistol up at the thing looming over me. There’s a chzzzrchzrch as the capaciter discharges, and resound cracks as the beam pulses brightly, booch, boorch, booorch, the pulses causing steaming explosions over the creature’s body leaving cratered wounds out of it as the beam flickers out, the pistol humming as the microbatteries deposit energy into the capacitor for a second shot. What look like rifle bullets are pinging of the wall behind it, and the creature’ struggling to lower its weapon at me when a world-shaking loud boom right behind me makes me cringe and instinctively look as the creature slumps; the one Kenji who still lives, Yamanaka, is standing in the entrance, that hulking autocannon cradled in his arms. The alien’s down but still struggling, and he walks right up to it and sends another shell into the thing’s abdomen, reducing its stomach to a disgustingly soupy mess. Fascinated and disgusted, I peer at the alien’s body as it lies next to me; I’ve hauled their corpses into the Skyranger’s cargo pod before, but for some reason I’ve never looked at the closely. The broken edges of its skin look more to resemble some kind of chitinous carapace, for the skin has broken and shorn off, not been torn or ripped.

I, on the other hand, am torn from my reverie by the hlk-tssch of a door opening further in the spacecraft, a sound that seems ripped straight from the set of Star Trek, and the hellish static growl of plasma fire. Leonid and the others duck away from the blast as they pour into the spacecraft, returning fire, and the door shuts soon enough again. We’re alone, for the moment, in the entry room of the UFO. It’s barely large enough for all of us to stand together; the left passage, perhaps four meters long, leads into a small secondary room, before connecting to the command center; the right hand passage curves around directly to the control center and, from there, the reactor room. At least, we assume so, since this spacecraft looks like a replica of the one we captures earlier, and the interior is as featureless as the other was. Without any cover, it’s best to instead press on and trust our reflexives above theirs.

Kenji Yamanka’s backing me up as I charge through the leftmost corridor, through one of their automatic doors and into what I take must have been a surprised alien, as h-, er, it made no reistance as I blast it with a single laserpulse to its head. It staggers backwards like a stunned chicken, looking remarkably intact  for something that just took a joule every five microseconds for four seconds, and so I deliver another blast to its neck, and then cuff the damned alien across the back of the head. It topples down, either dead or unconscious and dying.

We hear plasma as we charge into the control room, and see an alien with its back to us, aiming at Leonid, who’s frantically trying to throw himself back around the corner. I duck as Kenji hauls his autocannon in the air and shoots over me into the alien’s back, and it drops. I then come up, scanning the room for targets, but there’s nothing aside from a some complicated control consoles and a few uncomfortable chairs shaped for nonhuman assholes.

Then, standing still, we hear the muffled clanking of footsteps through the walls. We all share a quiet glance, then as one our glances flit to the one door we haven’t opened yet, as the quick, nervous, and terrified footsteps continue behind the door to the reactor room. Stealthily, stalkily, we move within the door’s scanner radius, weapons aimed as the portal scissors open.

Leonid takes the shot.

Nothing for the last six days. Our interceptors have been patrolling the European skies, as well as flying recon east across India and looping around China and Japan, as well as checking South Africa, but we still have nothing.

As a result of all the downtime, we’ve been alternating between practice drills and assisting the few workers we have cleared for this level of secrecy doing some heavy construction work in the base. The extra warehouses are nearly done, which will enable us to begin carving out more workshops and living quarters. The first SAM battery was also finished earlier today; hopefully that will keep any alien vessels that manage to find our base from setting up an LZ near our base and assaulting it on foot.

The newest batch of soldiers arrived came in tonight, around 18:oo. We got ten new recruits, few enough so we could run them through a preliminary exercises to one-on-one to measure their skills, and they’re not bad. I mean, the governments are sending us folks from the Royal Air Force, the Bundeswehr, a lot of folks from the Japanese Rikujō Jieitai (Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force) and some odd spec-ops group named The Earth Defense Force, the US Army n’ Marines, the Armée de Terre, People’s Liberation Army, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and so forth. They’re not the best, but decent. And I guess that’s to be expected, as it’s not like any government ever really trusts an international organization enough to give it the best shot possible, even if it’s something as important as, say, defending Earth against alien threats.

We’ve assigned the best to the Skyranger, while the rest will stay behind and mount drills. Hopefully their reflexes will be a bit sharper by the time they’re in active duty.

As for the team, Shuji Kayama, Kenji Yamanaka, and Hidekemi Isamu all served in the Kiryu-Kai, Japan’s national aerospace counter-extraterrestrial combat force that was, like all the other such national efforts, such a failure. While they never actually fought an alien craft, they had quite a lot of specialized training, so hopefully that will work out in our favor. I’m putting all three on the Skyranger. They are fairly tight-knit, though, and a bit quiet – hopefully they’ll integrate into the unit without any troubles.

Kevin Bryant and Tom Thompson are fellow Americans. Kevin Bryant is tall, in good spirits, and African American, and bears a suspicious resemble to… no, I must be imagining it. I mean, I had his papers checked a dozen times, and there’s no hint of any kind of name change in his background. Nonetheless, I suspect he’ll end up winning the basketball tournament handily. Still, he’s a bit slow on the draw, when it comes to reflex drills. As for Mr. Thompson, despite his impressive record he doesn’t seem to actually have much prior military experience, but he’s a good shot and doesn’t seem one to turn from a fight – although his questions about whether any squirrels happened to live around the base was rather tinged with fear. Strange. He did seem much reassured when I explained that, due to our underground base’s position southwest of the Nubian Desert in the middle of the Sudanese wastes, it was likely far too hot for any kind of squirrels to pay us a visit.

Sylvie Marcelle, Helene Lefevre, Yvette Gaudin all found their way here from the Fifth Republic, more specifically the streets of Paris. They’re fairly quick, but I don’t think their nerves will hold up in a fight, except maybe for Madam Marcelle.

Germany sent us Helga Unger. She could knock the hat off William Tell with a thrown grenade, and her aim’s sharper than most, but she’s not that quick, something that’s pretty important when storming UFOs and a split second determines whether the alien gets a faceful of bullets or whether you get a mouthful of plasma.

The UK send us Evelyn Hudson. Stunning appearance aside, she’s short, and her medical records show her as being pretty fragile, and not having much nerve either. Still, she scored decently on the exercises, so while she’s not on the first-response team, she’ll get her chance. I just hope she doesn’t end up panicking.

Sitting in the back of the Skyranger, I nod, and look around me at the team: Leonid, grinning madly; Barbara next to him, leaning forward, slivers of long blond hair framing a bored face; Spencer reclining lazily on a pallet of equipment; Gaston, checking that rocket launcher of his; Shigeru, napping next to me; Yoko, leaning back against the wall, looking tired; Tom, wholly absorbed in chewing bubble gum.

“The LZ’ll be hot,” I say, drawing their attention. “For the last few hours we’ve been tracking and losing a UFO over this region. We send a jet to catch it, lose it over Katamina, pick it up over Zambia, chase it into Angola, and lose it again as its heading back up towards the Congo. But, we picked up a panicked radio transmission from some hermit in the Little Karoo, and on fly-over Interceptor One saw a grounded UFO. Interceptor 2 was scrambled to provide assistance in case it launched, and we got scrambled and sent out.”

“So we’ve got a chance to capture one of their ships.” Barbara said simply.

“That’s it.” I said, feeling the Skyranger descending. “MilSat reports the aliens are in the vicinity of their craft; they’ll see us dropping in, so we have to keep vigilant and make sure they don’t drop us before we find them.”

“We’re going to set down right by the UFO in a cluster of buildings,” the pilot said, “we’ll hit ground and drop ramp any second now…”

Then we were at the mouth of the Skyranger’s troop compartment, Barbara and I taking point as the ramp fell away. We both inched forward, onto the ramp, crouched,  looking around us. Barbara raised her rifle and fired a single burst. I spotted something dropping to the ground not twelve meters in front of us; an alien, his pallid flesh having disguised his stationary body with the dust-colored earth.

“Clear.” She said.

“Clear, let’s go!” I ordered as we rushed out of the vehicle. I bracketed left, went prone behind a dwarf tree, glancing around; Barbara, Tom, and Spencer were taking cover against the shed we’d landed by, while Leonid’s on me. Shigeru, Gaston, and Yoko ducked out and under the Skyranger, running underneath the landing craft’s belly to check what looks like a vehicle shed behind me to the left. The alien UFO is just sitting ten meters away in front of me to the right, on the other side of the three sheds that Barbara’s team are plastered against.

Leonid and I are inching forward through the haphazard dwarf trees towards another building, the X-shaped UFO gleaming in the hot sun on our right, when I can hear the sizzling of an alien energy cannon from my left. I turn with alacrity, aiming towards the source, but shriveled branches obscure the target, keep me from seeing a target at all. Leonid’s stupider than me, or perhaps just less cautious, on his feet and charging round the small grove of trees. I hear another blast, and I hear a cut-off scream and a thud from where Shigeru’s team of Gaston and Yoko had charged.

Then I’m charging forward as I hear Leonid’s gun fire, and I come out of the tiny grove of shoulder-high trees to see another of those gray, wrinkled, bulbous aliens falling to the ground in a pool of its own greenish fluids.

“Gaston’s down,” Shigeru calls out, forming on my right and Yoko on my left as Leonid and I begin to approach the shed in front of the Skyranger’s ramp again. I raise a hand for a halt: I can see an alien standing on the roof, aiming its weapon at me. I duck, thrusting myself below the lip of the roof and out of the alien’s sight arm a grenade and throw it, then clutch my rifle in both hands and count. The grenade falls short against the wall of the building, and I stand up as it explodes. The alien stumbles as the building shakes under him, and my rifle is tossing bullets at him. Leonid’s also got him bracketed, and between the two of us it goes down. We charge inside through the hole in the wall my grenade made: Leonid and I climb hand-over-hand up the ladder onto the roof of the building, while Yoko guards the ladder from the ground floor.

We emerge onto the roof and have a clear view of the three shacks Barbara and her team have cleared and the far side of the UFO, where the whole team is training their weapons on the entrance portal. As I watch, Spencer fires his rifle, the muzzle flash flaring as he fires once, twice, three times. I hear the distinctive sizzling of those energy blasters then, and Yoko’s cursing wafts two stories up to us. Going prone on the edge of the roof, I can see the blasts surging towards our building from an ill-kept hedge but can’t see the alien itself. Looking down, I note the wall of the building being torn away in chunks by the alien blaster. I pump bullets into the hedge, cognizant of Leonid next to me and Yoko and Shigeru on the ground doing just that. Eventually the alien stops firing, and we see greenish fluids leaking from the hedge.

“All clear on our end and in the UFO.” Barbara reports.

“Pilot, report our status.” I ask, surveying the terrain nervously before climbing back down to the ground level. This storage shack of mud bricks looks sturdy enough, but it’d already lost one side to those alien blasters, and if there was one more out there ready to weaken it with another blast, I’d hate to be standing on top of it while it collapsed.

“MilSat reports all clear.” The pilot radioed back. “You lot get those corpses and their gear into the containment unit and get back aboard, and then we’ll see about lifting that UFO and bringing it back to base.”

Hayden took a perverse joy in slipping the lever from the coffee dispenser. All the CERN personnel had taken to minor sabotage of the break lounge machines as an act of retaliation for the supreme annoyances that working with Spirit Corp inflicted upon them.

“Hey Boss!” Darek called as he strolled into the the off-duty lounge. As the beefy man came to a halt next to Hayden, the receiving parts manager smacked Hayden between the shoulders amicably. “What’s the most recent outrage against common decency that our overlords have committed?”

“That’s a hard question to answer,” Hayden chuckled as he steered his way to an empty table, his mug of coffee steaming in his hand. “They finished the containment shell in three days when it should’ve taken eight. Hammond and I kept our eyes on them the whole time and didn’t catch anything obvious, but I bet they cut corners somewhere. They had to have, to finish so fast. And on the damn containment shell!” Hayden shook his free hand, as if trying to rid it of a persistant cramp. “It’s not as if containing the raw plasma mix wherein nuclear fusion is occurring is important at all, you know.”

Darek shrugged off his messenger bag before sitting and taking a slurp from a can of the cherry soda he always managed to have in hand. “Rejected about 250 meters of wiring already today, and that’s just the optical cabling. Way they’re buying up shoddy parts and gear for us and the construction workers, the reactor’s bound to hiccup on its first run.”

Hayden’s face twisted into an ugly grimace. “They want us to run the first “test” at full power. In three days.”

Darek rolled his eyes back up into his head. “Surveys of that mycelium won’t be done for another-”

“Six days, I know. And to get the reactor’s framework up to date in three days, we’ve had to pull what personnel we had on that mycelium project off it.” Hayden paced around the table, grinding his teeth. “I just hope its filaments hasn’t actually penetrated any of the LHC.”

“That’d definitely help the test run hiccup, if so, which is the last thing we need.” Darek agreed.

A Spirit Corp construction worker entered the lounge, folder under one arm and a piece of paper in the other. His eyes flicked from the paper over the people in the lounge, then back, then back to Hayden. He started towards them.

“Dammit.” Hayden muttered. “News for me? He asked the man, attempting to be somewhat more congenial.

“Ya.” The man chewed, tossing the folder onto the cheap card table. “SpiritCo’s got some new requests for build jobs.”

Hayden flipped it around to faced it, and was intently scanning the itemized summary at the head of the sheaf of papers when it occured to him the man was still there. “Need something?” Hayden asked, not looking up.

“Bishop Nalim wants a signature of receipt.” The man said, laying down an email with a picture of Hayden in-line.

Hayden glanced up at the man, his face emotionless, then drew the paper to him and signed an illegible scrawl across the bottom. Then he handed it to Darek, who took it and began rooting through his messenger bag .

“Ey, I need that!” The worker said, agitated and annoyed.

“No problem, just a minute.” Darek said, finally putting the paper and another page on the table. Stapling them together with a mini-stapler, he handed the papers to the messager. “To be returned to Bishop Nalim, eh? Well, this is a list of all the items wee need Spirit to reorder, with the tolerances and manufactorers as specified, in order to complete the deadlines requested of us. Make sure Bishop Nalim sees it, alright? And run off a copy for Bishop Olaf and deliver it to him, too.”

The worker grabbed the papers and glared, before stalking to the coffee machine. Taking one of the stacked recycled corn-plastic cups, he stuck it under the machine’s nozzle and jammed the espresso button, only to have the machine explosively eject a scalding combination of cream, coffee, and gas. There was a simultaneous eruption of scattered coughs and poorly-muffled laughter. The worker knocked the empty cup to the ground and stomped out.

“Ah, hilarious every time.” Darek snotrted, wiping his eyes. “Petty, but worth it. So worth it… anyways, what we’ve got from the high and mighty this time?”

“The main item is to add a wireless receiver-transmitter onto the injection line, ‘so that it can be monitored remotely.’” Hayden closed his eyes and ran his hands across his face and through his hair.

“Isn’t the muon injection line wired into both the CC and ACC by optical cables?”  Darek asked. “The kind of cables which, last I checked, provide faster and more reliable access than wireless transmi-”

“Its never about whether something’s a good idea or not, with them.” Hayden sighed. “It’s about what they want done. Normal business corps are clueless, but they have smart engineers who kill dumb ideas before they get to us. It isn’t worth it for them to waste money doing something that won’t work.”

Darek rose to his feet. “Ah, but from the eyes of Spirit, it’s not a waste of money if they spend all this and it doesn’t work. It’s just a vindication of their point of view. That’s why they’re funding us, after all – if we can’t explain the universe even after we have the energy we should need to find answers… well, what can one do? I’m back to receiving crate after crate of shoddy gear. Thanks for letting me send that list to the bosses.”

“Olaf might get it, but Nalim won’t read it.” Hayden muttered, walking to the coffee machine. Grabbing the mop stored by it, he took twenty seconds to clean up the spilled coffee the worker had left behind, then put the mop back and tossed both cups into the compost bin and headed out of the lounge.

Standing inside the library’s cubby, shielded from the stinging rain, I looked at her, then at the card in her hand, outlined against the cool marble ground she stood on. For one so usually prescient, I sure hadn’t seen this coming. “What the hell?” I asked, my heart burning with fury. Give me a few more seconds and I was sure my vision would brim over with red.

She looked down, that startled, offended yet shocked shyness which got to me every time. “Wha… I’m sorr, Peter.”

I ignored the vibrant jade shade of her downcast eyes. “No, honestly Triss, what the hell makes you think that’s appropriate?”

Her face had been reddening, and now she just burst into tears. I felt bad, but I resolved not to let it change my course of action. I’m a pretty lax guy, but there’s some things that even I will no-

“I… we had some good times together, I thought you liked me, and you’re pretty cool, and I thought, maybe…”

I blinked. Fuck, I thought.

“Forget it.” She said tiredly, turning and walking down the steps onto the Memorial Glade.

I stood there a moment, the grandeur of the library’s stonework enhancing the impact of the postcard she’d dropped. The postcard she must have thought was witty, with sepia-toned Egyptian stonemasons crafting an obelisk to the caption: “FYI, I am building a shrine to your cock.” I took two steps, bent over and picked it up.

A thought ran through my head, self-depreciating and unnaturally calm, something like ‘You do have a tendency to overreact to things, don’t you, Peter?’

Then I ran after her, doing my best not to shiver in the rain.

“I’m sorry!” I said, settling into pace besides her. “I misinter- … I thought you knew!”

She just quickened her pace across the mud, the umbrella hanging at her side. Then she responded, “What, that you’re an ass?”

I sighed. “I’m an orphan. My parents were Egyptian laborers, killed by a skirmish between Sudanese and Egyptian troops over possessions of oil reserves off the coast of Hala’ib.”

She blinked. “Uhhh…” she breathed, confused but at least somewhat less angry.

I looked down at my feet. “It still… nevermind.” I smiled hesitantly, offering her my hand. “Would you like to get coffee? And if you want, I can explain why I’m such an idiot.”

She looked at me, deep grey eyes beneath soaked brownish hair searching my face for something. I don’t know if they found what they were looking for, but she smiled slightly, and slipped her hand into mine, pulling me with her as she resumed walking towards northside.

“Umbrella?” she asked, blinking as raindrops splashed down on her face.

“If you want.” I said, taking it from her as she passed it to me. “I’m already soaked, so it doesn’t much matter to me.”

“Eh.” She leaned against me. “The rain feels nice.”

I scanned the Café Strada’s outdoor seating warily, trying to hide my anxiousness. Peregrinnor sat at the same round wooden table, a grin lighting up his eastern European features. I looked back to him as I realized he’d stopped talking.

“You really ARE high-strung, man.” Peregrinnor lamented. “It’s a class, same as any other 4-unit class, and it’s not like it’s a prerequisite for any of your degree requirements.”

I just shook my head, checking my watch. 7:37pm. Per thought I was meeting a grad student to discuss the last Chem midterm I’d failed; if that were so, I’d be positively chill.

My first “big” assignment didn’t even involve violence, and I already wanted out of the spy business.

So I took a deep breath, leaned back in the flimsy chair, and exhaled slowly. “You’re probably right.” I said, glancing to my right at a particularly loud outburst of noise. Peregrinnor looked too, then grinned. Again. I swear, the man had more happiness in him than most amusement parks. Then again, he was a math and stats grad student who had a steady job, almost had a master’s degree, had just achieved a sixth-degree taekwondo blackbelt, and had been dating the same girl for four years. So he had his reasons to be obscenely cheerful, I suppose.

“Still can’t believe those two.” Peregrinnor chuckled, leaning back in his chair.

“Always here drinking and talking politics, every bleeding night.” I sighed.

“Every night for the last three years.” Peregrinnor agreed. “Then-president of the Young Republicans, then-president of the Young Democrats, drinking together. Who’dve thought?” There was a strange look in his eyes.

“You did.” I reminded him. “Told everyone the recount’d hold up. Even had the math to show it, Mr. Hari Seldon.”

“Hah. Don’t I wish I was as good as Seldon.” Per ran fingers through his hair.” Sometimes we do the wrong thing for the right reasons.” He was silent a moment then, staring into his deep mug of hot chocolate. “And just as often we do the right thing for all the wrong reasons. Cheers!” He said, raising his glass of coaca. I clinked our glasses before tossing back my glass of orange juice.

“Hey handsome.” A girl’s voice came from behind me. I ignored it… until I noticed Per’s eyes had widened and were staring incredulously behind me.

I turned to see a tall girl looking down at me, an amused look on her face. Punk-goth rocker, about seventeen years old by the looks of her, although I tend to underestimate ages by three to five years. Short indigo skirt over black leggings, striped black and purple arm warmers matched with shoulders bared by a black tank top. Her hair was a cascade of jet black hair with rivulets of countless shades of blue.

Wordlessly, I turned back to Per and shrugged, a helpless expression on my face. Then I found the words I was looking for. “She’s definitely not my section’s TA.”

She looked nothing like the photo’s I’d had in the dossier on my potential contacts.

“That, I can believe.” Peregrinnor smirked.

“Come now, that’s not sporting.” The girl smiled, moving to my side to pull one of the chairs out and sit down on it backwards. “What’s with Berkeley boys, anyways? Guys won’t even give a pretty girl the time of day. Something ain’t right with this place, I’ll tell ya.”

“It’s 7:42. In the evening, not during the day, even though the sun hasn’t set yet.” I had been looking past her, but now I forced myself to look her in the eyes. Eyes, definitely not lower. “Happy?”

“Puts him one over all the other guys in Berkeley.” Per chuckled. “Trust me, this one’s a keeper.”

“Heh, that’s sad.” She winked. “Oh, chaos, chaos chaos, all right. You’re not making this fun enough for me.” She sighed, slumping forward. “Marissa broke her leg, sent me off to bring you to our place for tutoring. I’m her roommate, Shiva.” She turned her head up to face me, as if to say ‘Happy, now?’ But a strangled cough from Per interrupted her. She glared at him. “Yessum?”

Flicking my eyes to him, I noted a raised eyebrow. “Who’d name their child after the Destroyer?”

Shiva laughed, a short cheerful sound. “I AM my mother’s daughter.”

I checked my watch again. 7:44, and the sun about ready to sink below the treeline and the buildings, if not the horizon. “Well, I’m Wilbur, and this here is Per. I’d love to stop by, but it’s already late, and the test is pretty long. I wouldn’t want to-”

“It’s no trouble at all, baby doll.” She waved a purple-black stripe covered arm dismissively. “Mar’s not teaching class for two weeks, so she won’t be going to sleep before 3 am. Hell, it’s a Friday, so I doubt she’ll sleep before 5.” Shiva stood up. “If I can tear you away from your friend here…”

SIghing, I got to my feet. She had worked the recognition code into the flow of conversation, thus indicating she was one of the contacts the Agency had expected me to meet, so I might as well go with her. “I’ll try to make it to tea and movies, Per.”

“Me and Izi will wait, no worries.” Per chuckled. “It IS a Friday night, after all. We’ll find something to do if you’re late.”

Shiva had already left and was walking off up Bancroft, so I hurried to catch up with her. I turned back to see Per watching us, stroking his chin.

“How long have you been a spy?” She asked as we walked up the hill towards International House.

“I’d rather not talk about the things I’ve done in my past.” I replied. “Besides, I’ve heard you’re the one with things to tell me.”

She gave me a long glance, then. It was an entirely serious glance, one so far outside the demeanor she’d displayed so far that I wasn’t sure what to make of it.

“I know what the CIA wants me to tell you.” She said as we turned right onto Piedmont. “But that is not what I have to say. Things… are not as the agency thinks they are.”

“And why is that?” I asked.

She looked at me, annoyed. “You think this org I happen to be in, the one I’m informing on, is setting things in motion. But we are not. We are merely reacting, and I think your superiors would do well to look at what we’re reacting to.”

I sighed. “If you don’t have details…”

“But I do, love.” She grinned, putting an arm across my shoulders and pulling me next to her. “I’ll show you at my penthouse. Got everything assembled there, maps, documents, timetables…” She winked at me. “Everything.”

I was looking at her as we brushed past someone, and I turned to stammer an apology. As I did so, I saw it was Izumi, Peregrinnor’s girlfriend. She passed a finger across her lips and winked, then resolutely ignored us, continuing walking at the pace that let our lead increase slightly.

I’d never known him to be a devious sort, or involved with any spy business… but Peregrinnor was having me tailed. By his girlfriend, no less. What were they up to?

* * *

Shiva’s “penthouse” was the surprisingly spacious third-floor attic of one of the co-ops. We took off our shoes at the co-op door, but carried them up to the second floor and left them by the ladder to the attic.

I emerged behind Shiva into a room with a triangularly shaped ceiling, cute furniture lightly sprinkled with clothes and papers, and clean green walls partially covered by posters for apocalyptic sci-fi movies.  “Where’s the stained glass windows and grand architecture?” I asked jokingly.

Shiva rolled her eyes, then punched me in the arm. Hard. “I dress gothic, sometimes. I don’t live gothic, and I certainly don’t rent out a damn cathedral.” She pulled off her arm warmers and slid them onto the prongs of a lifeless and unplugged Jacob’s ladder that sat by the trapdoor. “Rent would be outrageous, besides. Anyhow, I’m to change,” She said, taking a pile of clothes from a chair. There was a small corner blocked by a partition wall with an entryway obscured by a cloth curtain, which she slipped through.

Her bedroom was painted a neat, cheerful green. Windows set in one wall looked out over a rooftop garden and a magnificent view of Berkeley, the Bay, and far off in the distance, San Francisco. Cacti were lined up neatly on the windowsill. She had a purple kontatsu in one corner, an Apple lap-comp charging atop it. Pillows and cushions were arrayed randomly through the room. A large mattress dominated the floor, where the ceiling was only 5 feet tall, although both ceilings sloped to an 8 foot tall ceiling.

Shiva came out wearing a plain black tank top and dungarees. Now she just looked like a girl going to the gym, rather than a crappy concert. She grabbed a cardboard tube fully four feet long and tossing it to me, before jumping and landing full-body on the mattress. She rolled over on her side to face me, and tapped the mattress. “Bring that here.”

I settled down crosslegged across from her, and uncapped the tube. There was a good variety of papers in there, so I pulled them all out. I spread a large map of some facility out on the mattress, then used what looked to be personnel dossiers and research reports to weigh down the corners so the map wouldn’t curl up on itself.

Shiva traced a circle over the facility map with her index finger. “Cornstone Pulsed-Fusion Propulsion Laboratory.” Shiva said. “Did a crapload of work for NASA’s Endless Voyage project that’ll launch in a year, but they also have done a lot of work for stage 3 reactors. You know, the sonolumi-whatever reactors. We think that work is bogus.”

I frowned. “How bogus?”

She spread her arms wide helplessly. “Completely bogus. We picked up a pre-publication report by some Berkeley alums slamming Cornstone’s work. But from what we can tell, they didn’t actually do any work. Nah, Cornstone just got a biig bonus from the eminent Spirit Company to vouch that the reactor design was safe.”

“Do you know what Cornstone di- er, was supposed to do analysis on?”

“The structure of the containment shell and its capacity to withstand meltdowns. The stability of the gas mixture used to initiate plasma ignition. Modeling of how the sonolumenescence and muon injection systems would interact…”

I whistled. “That’s everything essential to the reactors. If all that’s faked, and the safety specs for the reactors are all bogus, it could put a lot of lives at stake…”

“Every stage 2.5 or stage 3 reactor is in danger of meltdown, if this is true.” Shiva ticked points off on her fingers. “If one does go meltdown, then the operators of all the other reactors of that type would have to shut them down until they know how to run them more safely. That would leave nearly every major metropolis in the United States, in Great Britain, in Germany, France, Australia, Argentina, Israel, Egypt, and such without enough power for months.”

“Or they would have to leave the reactors on, risking a meltdown that would endanger all their citizens.” I said grimly.

“Just a lovely situation, isn’t it? And the best part is, as a nobody, no one listens to you about it.” She stretched her arms, and rolled to her feet. “I’ve been a spy for three months exactly now. You?”

I blinked. “Uh… the same, actually. Ah, with different employers, of course.”

“Let’s drink to that!” She said, opening the mini-fridge covered with newspaper clippings. She tossed me a plastic cup emblazoned with rainbows and unicorns, and bounded back where she’d been sitting. I blinked at the label on the bottle in her hand.

“Martinelli’s. This IS business, so we’ll keep it dry.” She winked, pulling out a cork stopper and pouring me a unciorn-cup full of sparkling apple cider. She clinked the bottle to my glass. “To saving lives!” She toasted, before glugging a swallow from the bottle.

My cellcomp buzzed, and I checked it. Peregrinnor. I flipped it open with a grimace for Shiva’s benefit. “Hey man. Yeah, I’ll be here a while. This test is a lot more difficult than I thought. Feel free to turn in whenever. I’ll be quiet coming back.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then Peregrinnor spoke. “Just be careful. That girl’s had martial arts training, and a lot of it.” Then he hung up.

I chuckled, keeping a light demeanor. “Housemates. Anyways, this map…”

Shiva shifted from her side to lay on her stomach, bare legs idly kicking the air as she considered the map before her. “We have a raid scheduled to net Cornstone’s real, non-doctored reports. I’ll give you the details on this, but I want the CIA and NSA and whoever’s watching us to stay back and just watch. Otherwise I’ll stop feeding you all hints, and it’ll be the warpath between the CCC and you guys. Can you arrange this how I want?” She took another sip from the bottle of sparkling cider, her clear eyes locked with mine.

“You know how superiors are,” I sighed. “But I can sell, and I will sell them this.”

Shiva’s eyes were beautiful, a peculiar reddish gray, and I felt I saw all of her encapsulated in those eyes. Then she smiled, her face opening up in radiance.

“Aight.” She put the bottle down on the bed, and shoved a stack of dossiers towards me. “There’ll be six men from a local cell on the team…”

* * *

As I turned onto the street of the small apartment I shared with Peregrinnor, I checked my watch. 3:19am. Well, I hadn’t planned to do anything Saturday morning. It was scheduled to rain all day, too, so I might as well sleep in. Threading my way past the homeless lying inert on the sidewalk bundled in their clothes and sleeping bags, I slipped through the front door. I took the stairs one at a time up to my apartment, the top floor of an old house.

The lights were off in the whole apartment, so I removed my shoes and left them by the front door – I may be Caucasian, but wearing shoes around the house isn’t something I like to do. Stepping forward into the common space, I reacted instinctively as I saw a blur of motion originating from the kitchen to my left. The blur pulled short just as I recognized it as Peregrinnor and pulled my own punch.

“Hey.” I murmured quietly, my closed fist hovering a hands length in front of his stomach, his knife-hand blow poised almost touching my neck.

“Good morning, Wilbur.” Per said, the both of us frozen in place. Then, simultaneously, we withdrew.

“I, uh…” I started.

“Who’s the girl?” Izumi asked, appearing out of the gloom of the living room. Her hair was tousled and her eyes were slits, as if my arrival had woken her from sleep.

I flipped a light switch on, and the living room’s dim blue-tinged overhead light came on. “Uh… my TA’s roommate.” Izumi had been sleeping on the couch, as her sleeping bag was sprawled across the massive green conglomeration of cushions.

Per chuckled as he slid his arm around Izumi. “Mm… right. Well, glad to see you got home safe.”

I rolled my eyes. “What, you think she’s dangerous?”

“Wilbur, girls do not walk the way that girl walks unless they’ve been trained in one of a few disciplines. So she’s either a gymnast or a martial arts instructor like me and Per.” Izumi smiled, ruffling my hair. “Heh. You’re cute when you think we’re crazy.”

“Well, you are.” I muttered. “How about I put both of you on speed call, we all let each other get to sleep now, and when crazy girls are chasing me around trying to beat me into a bloody pulp, I’ll call you two to come save me. We could even have a big old gloating and I-told-you-so session afterwards!”

Per grinned as he slapped me on the shoulder. “Sounds good. See you later today!”

I watched the two of them as they slipped into Per’s room. I collapsed onto the couch, thinking furiously. I just couldn’t work it out. Somehow, Per knew Shiva was a spy, or more accurately, he knew that she was something more than a simple college student. I was pretty sure Per’d never suspected me of anything unusual. But I’d never thought him or Izumi to be anything more than who they appeared to be, either.

That he could tell Shiva was suspicious implied he had some experience in the area of covert operations and shady dealings. And that he knew Shiva was suspicious implied he thought I was involved in something suspicious as well. Something sufficiently dangerous that he thought I might be trailed home, or some threat sent after me that he would need to be awake to handle at 3:21am.

Shrugging, I yawned and got to my feet. Frankly, if an assassin killed me in my sleep, I’d be grateful to them. Less for me to worry about when I never got up.