CHAPTER 9
THE ROOM WENT SILENT for a few long moments. Then Jeff nodded. “That is definitely the right question, thank you.” He shook his head. “We can’t keep this a secret for too much longer, and I mean minutes, not hours or days. We need to make a plan of action, and that requires a good chunk of those in the LSR.”
“They’re fleeing from the Z’porrah. I mean, that seems like the obvious choice to me.”
Chuckie shrugged as he turned back to his calculations. “Maybe. But just because the big war is between the Z’porrah and anyone else they don’t like, that doesn’t mean that smaller conflicts aren’t causing issues.”
“True,” Wruck said. “We tend to let the individual solar systems deal with their issues themselves. We step in as needed, but less and less once species are on a path toward full sentience and civilization.”
“Do you mean spaceflight?” Alexander asked.
“No, not wholly.”
“The Shantanu are hella sentient and hella civilized and they only care about spaceflight because they had to in order to help their solar system and because helping the Cleophese to survive on land and, as an extension, space was something important to them.”
Wruck nodded to me. “Exactly. Sentience requires a full understanding of not just the world around you but that there is a vast galaxy filled with other beings out there. Whether you desire to meet those others or not isn’t the defining characteristic. For us, at any rate.”
“What’s the defining characteristic for the Z’porrah?” I had a feeling I knew, but it was always nice to do the double check.
“They want races that will strengthen them. They don’t care about sentience and civilization, or even the potential for such, so much as they care about creating a stronger fighting base.” Wruck shook his head. “Originally, when we were allies, they didn’t feel this way. They agreed with us on how to uplift.”
“That must have been one hell of a spat.”
“They start small,” Siler said. “They always start small, and then get larger and larger until they’re all-encompassing. You’ve seen that here on Earth. And if you’re not sure, look no farther than Stephanie.”
Jeff groaned. “Speaking of my niece, we have an extra layer of issues.”
“You mean you think Cliff Goodman and his Crazy Eights and Stephanie and the Tinkerer are going to try to take advantage of the current and upcoming situations?”
“It’s a safe bet,” Siler said.
Chuckie nodded as he appeared to finish perpetrating higher math. “We need to assign more resources to tracking them down.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” This statement earned me the room’s attention.
“Mind explaining that?” Christopher asked.
“Sure. I enjoyed being ahead of our now dethroned Mastermind. And, frankly, we’re currently ahead of Stephanie and the Tinkerer, too.”
“How?” Jeff asked flatly.
“She means that we know what’s coming and they don’t,” Chuckie said. Rightly. “However, they do know about the current push to join Centaurion Division. Meaning they have a great way to infiltrate.”
“Yeah, join up as a World Protection-Minded Citizen, undermine from within. Only, we know what all of them look like.”
“Do we?” Buchanan asked. “We have no idea what the LaRue and Reid clones are looking like right now, nor how old they are. You know that Goodman isn’t going to try to become a recruit. And while we have descriptions of the rest of them, most of them are average-enough looking that it’ll take one of us to identify them. And we don’t have the time to do that.”
“Meaning at least some of them are already trying to enlist.” This time, the rest of the room was with me, at least if I took the morose expressions to be accurate. Heaved a sigh. “Really, guys, why so serious? We have A-Cs. A-Cs who have seen these people. A-Cs with hyperspeed who can look at everyone at every recruiting station in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. I think it’s a fabulous way to grab whichever Crazy Eights are out to do active dirty work duty.”
Jeff nodded slowly. “That makes sense. And that falls to Alpha Team.”
“Geez, I’m not trying to distance us from them. I just want us telling them what we want them focused on, not the other way around.”
“Why?” Christopher asked, clearly speaking for the majority of the room. “They’ve never ignored you before.”
“Really? Every single one of you ignored me when I said that letting the press see our flag was a bad idea. Alpha Team works independently from us—if you’d care to recall when you, Jeff, and I were in charge, we almost never advised the President of anything. We ran whatever we needed through my mother or Chuckie and then just did whatever we wanted. James, Tim, and Serene are continuing that fine tradition. And I’m saying that, in this case, we cannot have them doing that. They need to follow direction from the Office of the President, period.”
“That didn’t work so well a short while ago,” Chuckie said quietly.
Managed not to roll my eyes, but it took effort. “Yes, I know. You guys were all fooled and the Office of the President was stupid. However, to toss all modesty to the wind, I’m here right now. I’m not presumably kidnapped and you’re not watching fake torture porn. I am not going to allow us to be stupid.”
“Other than when we’re following your plans,” Christopher snarked.
Siler turned to him and shot him a look worthy of the Glaring Throne. “Before you insult her one more time, I’d like to mention that regardless of what goes wrong in her plans, they work out in the end. What plan of yours has worked out recently?”
Christopher looked shocked, and Jeff looked ready to try busting Siler’s head. Cleared my throat and, thankfully, got their attention again. “Once more all kinds of flattered, and Nightcrawler, I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your support of my planning, or what Richard and I call Going With The Crazy. However, I think Christopher was joking, hard as that sometimes is to tell. And his plans work, too.”
“Occasionally,” Christopher said. He eyed Siler. “Your loyalty to her has never been in question. Your loyalty to the rest of us, however . . .”
“Doesn’t matter,” Chuckie said firmly. “Unless Kitty’s planning on leaving Jeff, which I doubt, this particular family fight is over. And I mean that in a very Director of the CIA way.”
Looked at Wruck. “This is how it started, isn’t it? The big fight between you guys and the Z’porrah. Someone made an unfunny joke, someone else got offended, and here we are, thousands of years later, dealing with the fallout.”
He nodded. “I assume so.”
“Let’s learn from other people’s mistakes for once, then, gang, what say?”
“I agree,” White said. “I also believe that we’re about to restructure an entire division with existing bases worldwide. Meaning we’re about to take an agency that works for the good of the world, change it, and essentially shove a very American agency into every country where a Centaurion base already exists. Some won’t mind. I’d anticipate that most will.”
“So, what do you suggest we do to soften that blow?” Jeff asked.
White looked at me and smiled. “I suggest we send our best diplomat out on a conversion mission.”
“I’m against Kitty traveling the world without me,” Jeff said firmly. “For a variety of reasons.”
“First ladies travel without their husbands frequently,” Chuckie said without any indication that Jeff’s tone was something he was going to pay attention to. “It’s something the job demands.”
Jeff shot him a betrayed look. “You think Richard’s plan is what we should do?”
“It’s not a plan yet,” Chuckie said. “Currently it’s a suggestion that has great merit. We will have to form a plan, which Kitty and her team will then totally ignore, but still, at least we’ll have an idea of what they’re not doing when and where.”
“I resent that. I totally can’t deny it, by the way, but I also totally resent it.”
Chuckie grinned. “I’m going to make everyone happy. Among the people going with Kitty are going to be Alpha Team. So that way, when they’re being mavericks, they’re with the Maverick Queen and will, we all hope, be following the Crazy that works.”
“That’s sound,” Buchanan said. “We’ll be with them, of course.” He indicated himself, Siler, and Wruck.
“As if we could stop you?” Chuckie asked. “I realize we could assign you elsewhere, but I highly doubt that Angela will want the three of you too far from Kitty. And the kids.”
“WHAT?” Jeff bellowed. No one bellowed like my man. This was, for him, a rather quiet bellow in that Walter’s many TV screens didn’t all shatter, but it was a bellow nonetheless. Teddy dove into Walter’s pocket, all three Peregrines squawked in pain, and every other person jumped. “Sending my wife off to do whatever it is you’re planning is one thing. And it’s a thing I don’t like. But sending my children, too? No. They stay here, where it’s safe.”
“Oh, Jeff, calm down. I’m going to point out that the big kid going with us is able to kick butt with the best of us, and you know that Lizzie’s going.”
Siler nodded. “She’d never forgive us if we benched her for this.”
“What this are we talking about, exactly?” Christopher asked, presumably to keep Jeff from popping a vessel.
“A worldwide recruitment tour,” Chuckie replied. “I’d tell you to go, Jeff, but we’re still too volatile for the President to be absent for a week, let alone longer. She’ll visit the countries where Centaurion bases are, talk to their leaders, get them to agree to the divisional change, and then do some recruiting at the same time.”
“Chuckie, that all sounds grand, but I think I do better with aliens and good guys who’ve been seduced by the Dark Side. I’m not so great with regular, normal people in the diplomacy department.”
“Which is why Richard will be with you.”
Christopher’s turn to show what apoplexy looked like. “Why are you always so fast to risk my dad?”
Chuckie shot me the long-suffering “why me?” look. White chuckled. “Son, I appreciate your concern, just as I’m sure Missus Martini appreciates Jeffrey’s hysterical overprotectiveness. However, I feel that Charles is right—Missus Martini has the best chance of doing what we need, she and I work very well together, and it’s not as if you won’t be monitoring us constantly.”
“And it’s also not as if you can’t use a gate and get to us if we need help,” I added. White was clearly jazzed about being on this show—he only called me Mrs. Martini when we were in action situations. “Heck, Christopher, these days you don’t even need a gate.”
“I just worry,” Christopher grumbled softly.
“By the way, I want Camilla with my team, too.”
“Done,” Chuckie said.
“You two know I can just veto this, right?” Jeff asked.
“Yeah? Let’s see what my mother thinks before you toss your Presidential muscle around.” Other than in the bedroom. Jeff could toss the muscle in the bedroom better than anyone else in, by my estimate, the entire galaxy. The only downside to this plan was that I wouldn’t be with him, so I would miss out on countless orgasms.
I found this thought depressing, and Jeff clearly picked it up because he shot me a look I was both familiar with and totally loved—his Jungle Cat About To Eat Me look. “We’ll discuss it later,” he said quietly, right before he put his Serious Leader Of The Free World look back on his face.
“What about the flyboys?”
Chuckie shook his head. “I’m not sure. I don’t want Jeff without plenty of people we know we can trust implicitly. Just because we’ve foiled a variety of assassination attempts, and haven’t foiled others, doesn’t mean that more aren’t in the works.”
“It doesn’t mean that more aren’t on their way in six spaceships,” Christopher snapped. “One spaceship in particular.”
“I’ll try to reach ACE tonight, I promise.”
Christopher heaved a sigh. “I don’t want to hurt Jamie just for intel.”
“But in this case, it’s vital intel. ACE is very good about ensuring that she doesn’t hear us talking when she’s asleep.” And I did have at least one other option, too. It would be just as tricky to get information out of him as it would be from ACE, but for entirely different reasons. Still, this appeared to be the right time to try to reach our various Powers That Be Hangin’ Out On Earth.
“Tonight would be good,” Chuckie said. “As long as Jamie’s not at risk.”
Took a good look at him. He looked tense and kind of excited and also just a little worried. “Huh. Those ships are going to be here a lot faster than we’d like, aren’t they?”
Chuckie nodded. “Less than a week, if none of them use a hyperjump of some kind.”