Alien Taste (24 page)

“Sometimes,” she whispered back as she kissed his neck, “it really shows that you were raised by two women.”

 

It was nearing two o'clock when they disentangled themselves from the couch.

“Are you going to be in trouble for taking such a long lunch?”

Indigo shook her head. “I've been pulling fourteen-hour days this week so far. When I said I was taking a long lunch, the only thing that they said was not to go out alone. They've tightened up security on the offices and are double-teaming everyone. Things are tense right now.”

Ukiah considered his new memories. “This is really weird for the Ontongard. Normally they would do anything not to attract attention to themselves.
They have time and patience usually to do things right. It's how they've stayed invisible for so long.”

Indigo shrugged. “Statistically, they couldn't stay invisible forever. Wil Trace almost disappeared mysteriously with his death blamed on the Pack. They didn't count on the speed trap. They didn't expect you to be at the police station. Those two points are the only things that brought them to the forefront.”

“And Doctor Haze.”

Indigo's eyes narrowed as she considered the dead robotics engineer. “Doctor Haze is a tricky mystery. If you assume that the Ontongard were going to use her, the question becomes how. She was working on several top-secret projects with broad military applications, but the more we looked at those, the less likely they were the target. Her family is comfortably wealthy, but not the Rockefellers. She has an uncle who is a judge on the state court, but his caseload has nothing of importance right now.”

“The Ontongard work in the far future. They might have been setting up with something five years from now being the target. What are the projects she was working on?”

Indigo winced slightly. “I can't discuss them with you. I can tell you that they're years from being in a working prototype stage, and Doctor Haze was barely involved in them until recently. She was only bumped up the promotion ladder a few weeks ago when her immediate supervisor was killed.”

A Pack memory clicked and whirled in Ukiah's mind, and he almost spilled Indigo onto the floor when he bolted up.

“What is it?” She studied his face. “Are you all right?”

He took her hands. “What I say to you next is part of not being human. Rennie didn't
tell
me anything—
well, not much. What he did was give me his memories. Doctor Haze's supervisor was Doctor Sam Robb. Rennie killed him because he was an Ontongard. Rennie screwed with the gas main on the Robb's house, and it blew up.”

She nodded slowly, no doubt on her face. “It did. We suspected arson, but the explosion destroyed most of the evidence.”

“Rennie was in Schenley Park when Janet Haze was killed because he suspected that the Ontongard might approach her. He had come to check her out, and the place was crawling with police. He followed the chaos into the park and found us before the police.”

“Then the company is the focus.”

Ukiah nodded, wishing Indigo could tell him about the projects. Pack memory might be triggered again. “They must be interested in one of her projects.”

Indigo looked at the ceiling for several minutes, thinking hard. “This looking into the future is difficult. A band of alien terrorists like the Ontongard could be interested in any one of the projects, depending on their having the patience to wait through development. I can't see the connection, though, of taking the FBI agents.”

“Haze's company hasn't finished any projects?”

She looked at him. “You think it might be something already developed, in place, and shelved?”

He shrugged. “They hurried with Haze. It was just a week or two between her supervisor being killed and her first being approached.” He remembered the books on immortality, and the photograph. “And they approached her, courted her, instead of just taking her. What they're doing with the FBI agents is their normal procedure.”

“Taking her would have triggered almost as many alarms as they're triggering now.”

He shook a finger to indicate time was an important point. “If the target date was five years out, then a kidnapping and release wouldn't damage things horribly. It would have been smoothed over and forgotten. But if the target date is now, they couldn't grab her and hold her. They can do it with the FBI agents, because there's no real connection between the agents and Haze's company. It's relatively safe for their plans to take the agents.”

“And there is a sense of desperation to this. Like everything is coming to a head. Things have gone wrong for them, and they're scrambling.”

“So, has the company finished any projects lately, something they're about to ship or release?”

“Just one, but I doubt that would invoke any interest in a gang of covert terrorists. It's not even top-secret.”

“What is it?”

She picked up the remote, flicked on the television, and punched in a number. The NASA channel came up, showing the desolate red Mars landscape, moving by ever so slowly. “They built the Mars Rover.”

 

Tribot, the company Doctor Janet Haze had worked for, was housed in an unassuming yellow brick three-story building between Centre Avenue and Baum Boulevard in Oakland. Indigo pressed the buzzer on the street entrance and talked to a receptionist over the attached intercom before the door unlocked with a
thunk.

The receptionist was young, pretty, and flustered. “Special Agent Zheng, we weren't expecting the FBI today. Who should I tell that you're waiting? Mr. Lang again?”

Indigo shook her head. “We would like to see someone familiar with the Mars Rover.”

Startled, the receptionist picked up her phone, dialing a quick three-digit extension. She swung in her chair so her back was to them and spoke quietly into her headset. Still Ukiah heard. “Mr. Lang, Special Agent Zheng is out here wanting to see someone about the Mars Rover. The Rover crew is all in the War Room. Should I send them down there? I don't know. Yes, sir.” She turned back and smiled. “Mr. Lang says you're to go down and see the Rover crew.”

 

The receptionist gave them directions down to the War Room. Indigo apparently recognized the landmarks given because she nodded at certain points. As they hurried through the offices, Ukiah suddenly caught a familiar smell. He paused, sniffing, and comparing the faint scent to his great store of known odors.

The musky scent, he realized, belonged to an Ontongard. He patted his hip, reassuring himself he was armed, then followed his nose through the maze of cubicles and offices. He found himself at the doorway of an inner core office. The reek of Ontongard made the hair on the back of his neck rise.

“What is it?” Indigo asked.

Ukiah leaned back to eye the nameplate beside the door.
Sam Robb.
“This was the office of Doctor Haze's boss, the Ontongard insider before Rennie killed him.”

The room was a dark cubbyhole. Not a room people would fight to fill. It had not been cleared after Sam Robb's death, stocked full of papers, books, charts, graphs. Ukiah noted, however, that there were no personal items. No framed pictures. No posters
or artwork hung on the wall. Nothing pleasing or odd sat on the desk, attracting the eye. When tracking missing persons, Ukiah found knickknacks and useless clutter to be the greatest clues into people's minds and habits. All the clues he normally looked for revealing the inner personality were missing.

“Did Robb's family come and clear out his office?” he asked Indigo.

“Robb didn't have family. No next of kin or emergency contact information was ever provided. It was one of the quirks of his death that kept the case open. We kept finding holes and outright lies in his employment records.”

“How did he get work at a company that does top-secret projects?”

“That's what the FBI would like to know. Someone let him slip through, maybe for money.”

Pack memory served up a disturbing alternative. “Or they were Ontongard too.”

Indigo didn't answer, but her eyes went cold.

 

The War Room was a high-tech conference room. White boards hung on the walls with almost every inch covered in techno-babble. Each person had their PDA linked to screens embedded into the top of the table, and computer gibberish scrolled up and down. An air of frantic activity clung to the twenty employees gathered in the room. Only one or two glanced up as Ukiah and Indigo entered.

One of them recognized Indigo. “Special Agent Zheng? This is not a good time.”

“Doctor Elsie Janda,” Indigo said to Ukiah. “She's now project leader on the Mars Rover project. Doctor Janda, this is Ukiah Oregon. He's working as a
consultant on the case.” Indigo glanced about the room. “Is there something wrong with the Rover?”

The woman managed a weak smile. “We're trying to decide that right now. NASA called us about an hour ago. There was an unexplained course deviation. Nothing major, except that the Rover doesn't seem to be responding any more to their course corrections.”

“So they've lost control of the Rover?”

The woman shook her head. “Lost control is too strong for the present situation. The onboard computers will go a long way to keep it from damaging itself. I'm sure we'll be able to correct the problem shortly.”

Ukiah tilted his head to see a screen as the user scrolled through the lines and lines of code. The code reminded him of the scrap of paper that had vanished from Doctor Haze's bedroom. He pulled out his own PDA and scribbled down a piece of his memory. “Excuse me, would this suggest anything to you?” He handed his PDA over to the project leader.

The woman frowned at it. “Well, the first are all modules of the Rover programming. I don't recognize the second set.”

Ukiah took back his PDA. “This list was at Doctor Haze's place when she died. It's quite possible that she somehow sabotaged the Rover using this list.”

“Janet?” The woman's surprise seemed real. “Sabotage the Rover? She lived for the Rover. She said it was going to put her in the history books, her ticket to immortality.”

“Was immortality important to her?” Indigo asked.

“She hated obscurity,” Doctor Janda said. “We were the ones that called the police on the day she died. It was too unlike her to miss a chance in front of the cameras. All the local stations had interviews
lined up with her, and some of the nationals too. When she didn't show, and no one picked up the phone at the house, we knew something went really wrong.”

“So there's no chance that the Rover has been sabotaged?” Indigo pressed.

Doctor Janda exchanged guilty looks with some of her programmers. “Someone used Janet's passkey and passwords the night after she was killed. We didn't think to report it because all that was accessed were old Rover files. Some of her stuff, and some of Doctor Robb's diddles.”

“Diddles?” Indigo and Ukiah asked in duet.

“He was weird—brilliant but weird. He'd waste time coming up with alternate codes to get equipment to do the weirdest stuff. Like this.” Doctor Janda pulled out a diagram and pointed to a mass of circuitry. “This is the short-range radar unit. Sam came up with a diddle that made it act like a radio transmitter, sending out a repeated message signal.”

“What was the signal?” Ukiah asked.

The project leader shrugged. “Who knows? A soda jingle maybe. Sam always said it was ‘Wake up and come here.” '

Don't wake the sleepers.

Ukiah blinked. The Pack had said it a dozen times, kind of like “God be with you,” and he hadn't thought to ask. Don't wake which sleepers? Pack memory supplied the answer; the crew of one hundred thousand on the main invasion ship. Pack memory also maintained that they were dead. Prime had killed them when he sabotaged the ship by first wiping out all crew wakeup programs and then blowing the torpedoes while still in their launch tubes.

How could you wake sleepers who were dead? Ukiah searched back through the memories to find
the source of the quote. It was a fragment of Prime's last thoughts and words as he filled the hypodermic dart that transformed Coyote from wolf to alien being. The true phrase had been “must not/don't allow/forbid those sleeping to be awakened.” Prime had repeated it like a chant. What blazed bright in Prime's heart at that moment was the realization that he had to become what he hated in order to fight on past death. He had previously vowed to struggle to his own death, and that would be where it stopped. What had changed his mind was lost in the flashes of pain's blackness. What was passed on to the Pack was the knowledge he had to become a lesser evil to fight a greater evil.

Coyote made his Get and abandoned them, stringing them out behind him. Their wolf-bred instinct, however, drew them together and they worked to make a culture for themselves. The Pack clung to the moment of Coyote's creation, because in it was validation for their own acts of violence and Getting.

So they took their maker's chant and made it their motto, forcing it into a rough English translation: “Don't wake the sleepers.” Wolflike, though, they had never questioned what it meant truly. What sleepers? How could they be awakened if they were dead?