“Mr. President”

Carl snorted in surprise, his eyes gummy from falling asleep… he glanced at the time. Dear God, two hours ago?

Then Carl’s brain kicked on and he was no longer an old man without enough sleep. Now he was Carl Simmons, Leader of the Free World.

“What is it?” He said, suppressing a yawn as his sat up, his bladder protesting being moved.

“There’s a situation.” The secret service agent said.

“Better be,” Carl grumbled. “Obviously it’s not time sensitive, because you didn’t tell me immediately.”

“There’s been an incident at blacksite C-6.” The stone-faced man handed Carl a pad with a video of a tiny tattooed woman kicking major ass. It looked like one of those newfangled marvel movies as she hopped dozens of feet between heavily armed soldiers, utterly annihilating them with ease.

“Is this real?” Carl asked incredulously.

“It’s real, sir. The other E.T.s responded to sedatives and poison, but this one just won’t go down. The director tried to handle it, but he and a large portion of the people who work there are dead. We sent in some spec ops teams, but…”

The bodyguard tapped the screen showing a man getting his bent and warped rifle shoved up his own ass.

Carl winced.

“What are our options?” Carl asked.

“We could slag the place with the thermite hidden in the walls, but that would lose a large portion of the evidence and E.T.s captured near the event. Our analysists say with this creature’s speed and resilience, there’s a forty percent chance it’d survive anyway.”

“Option two, we could use a tactical nuke to –“

“You realize C-6 is buried under Chicago? I’m not gonna be the president that blew up Chicago.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

“Anything else?”

The man glanced away from him uncomfortably.

“The…creature has declared that it now owns the lab ‘by right of conquest’. And before we sent the spec-ops team it was attempting to assume control over the facility. Surveillance suggests it’s trying to co-opt our resources to create a device that will allow it to follow the architects of The Event.”

“That’s exactly what we want, isn’t it?” Carl asked.

“We wanna be the ones holding the trigger, sir.”

“You don’t kill a prize stallion because it’s a bit hard to work with,” Carl said, pausing the video, with the creature in the middle of kicking a soldier’s head off his body. She looked like a slender girl covered in tattoos. Plucked right off the street.

“Replace the entire facility’s personnel. Tell the survivors that we killed the creature then keep them quiet. The new hires, we tell them she’s their boss. Give her a babysitter to brief her on the situation and observe her. Route all the security cam footage to a separate site. Turn every new hire’s cell phone into a listening device. I want us hearing or watching every twitch and fart. In the meantime, dedicate a team to coming up with a way to effectively kill her in the extra time humoring her buys us.”

“Sir.” The secret service agent nodded before leaving.

“And for the love of god, get that woman some clothes!” Carl called after him.

“Looking at naked pictures of other women in bed again?” Shelly asked, rolling over under the covers.

“Quiet, you,” Carl muttered.

It was one time. One!

Carl slid out of bed and went to the toilet, where he did some of his best thinking. His thoughts dwelled on The Event, wherein some honest-to-god aliens came and kidnapped no less than four U.S. citizens, and killed many more.

They used something that could only be described as magic to kill the spread of information, preventing anyone important from learning of it for most of a week, when some people eventually shrugged off whatever was preventing them from talking about it.

Satellite recordings showed these people driving into a fourth-dimensional portal leading to God knows where.

Why? What in god’s name did they need from two cops, a kid and his baby girl?

Carl’s heart momentarily went out to those four citizens. Then he couldn’t help but think how good it would be for his re-election campaign if he saved them from the aliens.

The baby girl was a gimme, of course he’d try to get her back, but the old cop would probably perform better in front of a camera. Smile, shake hands, make speeches about how much better the U.S. food was than the alien’s, that sort of thing.

If he’s even still alive, Carl thought, sourly.

***Chris Campbell***

“And to think, I was honestly worried about your crazy ass,” Chris said as Debbie grunted, piling up her plate with another enormous helping of the tangy pasta and savory bread with vinegar that seemed to be a specialty in this neck of the universe.

Chris had kind of assumed they would kill or enslave Debbie and subject her to all kinds of dehumanizing medieval practices, like forced marriage or repeated rapes, or…

Maybe I’ve been reading too much pulp fiction.

In the REAL world, Debbie carried slightly more value than him, because while Chris’s booze-tinged memories of college in the eighties were vague at best, Debbie was a recent graduate with a minor in chemistry. She exemplified the old adage ‘Deep down, every chemistry student secretly wants to blow something up.’

So Debbie was more likely than Chris to know how much carbon was in spring steel, how to make gunpowder, thermite, and more.

Sure, Chris knew a lot of things, but at his age, his brain had narrowed down his pathways to doing what he was best at: Catching bad guys.

The relative freshness of her college experience made her a veritable gold mine to these backwards magical rubes. Chris was more like a silver mine. And he didn’t have as long to live as Debbie either, so he was a smaller one.

They were treating the young woman like a queen.

“You realize you’re selling out our country right now, right?”

She scoffed. “You think teaching these people how to make gunpowder is going to make one iota of difference against F-16’s or engineered viruses? Enjoy your fucking vacation.”

Chris paused. “Fair point. Dibs on electricity.”

Debbie winced. “Ooh, sorry, I already gave them electricity.”

“Come on, Debbie, I’m too old for this space adventure bullshit. I wanna get a ride back home to be with my kids. How am I supposed to do that if you keep giving them all the low hanging fruit?”

“You do realize that the more you give them, the more they wanna hold onto you?” Debbie asked “Realistically, it ain’t happening.”

“I’m gonna see my kids again,” Chris said, meeting her gaze. “One way or another.”

“I’m rooting for you,” Debbie said around some bread. “I really am, but god-damn, is this a cushy gig. And the fringe benefits…” The frizzy-haired redhead winked at one of the dark-skinned knights assigned to watch them. The man averted his gaze, blushing furiously.

“You didn’t…” Chris said, jaw dropping.

She pointed at him with a piece of bread. “Fuck you Chris, you think I’m gonna pass up the chance at being the first woman in recorded history to actually receive an alien probing? And visa versa…If you know what I mean.” She gave him a crooked grin.

“I wish I didn’t,” Chris said, massaging his temples. “What if they’ve got some kind of alien virus or you get pregnant or some shit like that?”

“Not that this is any of your business, but I’m fixed,” Debbie said. “You think I was gonna let my career get derailed by an unwanted pregnancy? Fuuuck that, I love boning too much.”

“As for the alien virus, I’ll take my chances. Gamen over here has a six-pack, and he can lift my entire body with his deltoids. Mmmn.

“Gamen!” She shouted, startling their captor. “Do the thing!”

The dark-skinned man sighed and raised his arm, which Debbie proceeded to do pull-ups on while the fellow gave no visible sign of effort, arm steady as a rock.

Every time her face raised above the man’s arm, she gave Chris a brilliant smile, showcasing her crooked teeth. It’s times like this, I think to myself that Debbie is a diversity hire to get more idiots in the police force.

Later that night, Chris was offered the chance he’d been looking for.

Chris’s ornate but solidly built prison cell door opened, and their translator popped his head in. It was Grant En’hol.

“Chris! There you are!” Grant said, entering the room flanked by a couple knights. The men were half there to protect Grant and half to prevent him from escaping. The En’hol scion was both a prisoner of his own family, and a lightning rod that a coup could likely form around.

He was tall, about six two, with dark hair and odd features, including shimmering gold eyes that seemed to reflect light in the dark, marking him as subtly inhuman. He bore well-hidden golden tattoos underneath his sideburns.

“Here I am, same as every other night since your family stuck me here.”

“Hmm, not my family, it was the Kinzena who’ve been your keepers, actually.”

“Tomato, tomahto,” Chris responded. “Whaddya want?”

“I had a vision! One I actually remembered!”

“That’s…nice.”

“The vision told me…” Grant sat down on the chair beside Chris’s bed, unconcerned by the old man’s state of undress. “That you would do anything to see your family again.”

“Anything is a big word. Define anything.”

“In this case? What you do best. Finding a bad guy.”

“Are you in my head?” Chris had literally been lamenting his overspecialized skillset earlier this morning. At this point he was willing to accept some strange shit.

“Nnnnot exactly?” Grant said. “it’s more like I choose a destination in the future and let my mouth drive itself. Some of what I say is a surprise to me.”

“I see. And what bad guy do you want me to find?”

“There’s going to be a small insurrection against a minor noble house who lives deep in the snowy reaches of southern Deraan. This insurrection is going to grow into a full-blown revolution that sweeps across the continent.

“Whaddya need me for?”

“There are reports of a person leading the insurrection. Your job is to find that person and –“

“Kill them?”

Gods, no. I want you to figure out why we can’t stop them.

“That’s it?” Chris scoffed.

“En’hol are very well informed. We know “Who, What, When, and Where.” He stood, gazing down at Chris. “But sometimes, we don’t know Why. We only know that they can’t be stopped. Vision after vision of being overwhelmed and torn apart by implacable hordes has broken the minds of several of my cousins, and offered no insight as to ‘Why?’”

“And if I find out why this person is kicking your ass, I get a ride back to Earth?”

“You have my word, and that of my aunt.” The kid took a very official looking letter out of his vest. And waggled it in front of Chris’s face.

Let’s face it, this is about the best deal I’m going to get. Debbie knows more about tech, and she’s easier to get information out of.

“Alright, Chris said, grabbing his boots by the edge of the bed. “What’s the person look like? Your people have seen them kicking your ass in the visions before, right?

“Umm….” Grant hedged, “We’re not one hundred percent sure…because they change form from vision to vision. Sometimes male, sometimes female, but usually a mix of both.”

“You don’t even know what it looks like?” Chris asked.

Grant waggled his hand. “We know what they all look like, but telling you what to expect might cause you to miss something.”

“This is a shit show,” Chris muttered, putting his clothes on.

“Oh, you don’t need to get out of bed,” Grant said, stopping him. “We’ll have a garruk for you to ride in the morning. You’re certainly not going to walk all the way to the southern reaches.”

“I’m gonna ride a what now?”