“What’re we going to do now?” she asked him.

  He reached out his hand and snapped his fingers. “Give me your headset.”

  Malena reached up and touched the thing that crouched there at her temples. Oddly, she rarely thought about it anymore. How could she have forgotten this thing welded to her temples? She supposed she’d had plenty of distractions.

  “I—I don’t think it comes off,” she said.

  “Sure it does. Just put the pad of your right thumb against the back of each probe.”

  She did as he suggested. The headset popped off easily. She handed the tangle of wire and rubbery plastic to him.

  Tanner took something that looked like a tiny sphere out of her headset with the tip of his knife. It was smaller than a marble.

  “What’s that?” she asked, staring.

  “The power unit. This is the part with the X in it.”

  She watched as he put the sphere into the other headset. There was a flash when the connection was made. She jumped and stepped back when it flared and filled the hut with blue-white light.

  “Don’t worry, it’s a cold energy release. The two power nodes detected each other and synched up. No big deal. Kind of like screwing in a light bulb and having it turn on in your hands. Or like hooking up a car battery with jumper cables. You have to expect a spark.”

  He continued to work on the two headsets, cannibalizing parts from both to make a new one. She looked on with growing concern. He was doing surgery on the device with a small, folding multi-tool. He took two of the modules off the set she’d had originally and added them to the new headset. Then he scooted all six around until they were about the same distance apart.

  “They work best with even numbers of probes. At least, that’s what I was taught in tech school.”

  She was left wishing again that she’d had time to attend proper training before being thrown into this. “Are you sure that’s okay? I mean, you’re expecting me to put this thing on when you’re done, right?”

  “I’m just putting two of your sensitivity enhancers in line with the four com probes the last agent had. That should give you both abilities.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Yeah, well—no. No, it isn’t cool to do this. This is like overclocking your computer. Not officially recommended. It’s hard on the agents and makes them unreliable. I’m figuring that you’re way too sensitive anyway, and can operate with half a unit. But I’m giving you the full power of four com probes. That should let you at least receive orders.”

  She put her hands on her hips. “So it’s dangerous? Are you going to fry my mind or something?”

  “Prolonged overexposure is not recommended.”

  “It never is, is it?” she asked.

  “But we’re in it deep, here. Don’t you think our situation warrants a few risks?”

  “Easy for you to say, it’s not going on your head.”

  “Well, this won’t be anywhere near as dangerous as shooting two soldiers on patrol in a swamp.”

  Malena had to admit he had a point there. She reached out her hand, heaving a sigh. “Give it to me. If it scrambles my brain, send a note to my parents.”

  He didn’t laugh, which didn’t make her feel any better. He handed it over and she took it gingerly, checking it for blood. She didn’t like the idea of using a piece of equipment that had been pried from another dead agent. She didn’t see any bloodstains, so she put the unit on her head. It sank itself into place almost immediately. She winced and bared her teeth.

  “I hate this feeling,” she said, closing her eyes.

  “All the psi people do.”

  A moment later, she opened her eyes again. “What do I do now?”

  “Let’s see if it’s what I think it is. There was only one sensitive on the Alpha Team, but two com agents. Our odds are two to one.”

  “You guys should stamp a letter on them or something.”

  “That’s been tried, but it interrupts the signal. Try to connect.”

  “What should I say? Testing…testing.”

  Tanner laughed. “No, talk to Ostlund.”

  She frowned at him. “Ostlund?”

  “The dayshift commander. Burke runs nights, and he runs days. You’ve already met him. He was the guy who zeroed you up in Boca Raton. The pale guy in the hat.”

  “Yeah, I know who he is. But why should I be calling Ostlund?”

  “Because he’s a com-agent, and it’s the dayshift now. The shift leaders are almost always psi-com people. That way, they can talk to their teams in the field. He was wearing one of these headsets under that hat, you know.”

  She recalled the first interview she’d had with the night commander, Burke. The woman had talked as if she’d expected Malena to hear something in her head. She’d asked about strange thoughts, and when Malena had repeatedly denied having any, Burke had left and told Tanner she was useless. Now, she finally understood why Burke had disliked her. She’d been looking for a com agent, not a sensitive.

  She tried to forget about all that. She closed her eyes and called out to Ostlund in her mind. Right now, Malena was wishing she’d quietly slinked out the door of XCU and never looked back. She wished Tanner hadn’t taken her down the hall and given her that second chance, proving to everyone she was a sensitive, and thus valuable to this team.

  “Ostlund?” she said aloud experimentally.

  There was no answer. She listened, but she only heard the wind in the treetops. “Nothing,” she said.

  “It’s okay, you’ve never done this before. We can keep trying. Let’s get out of town before someone comes looking for the last troops they left here.”

  They left the village behind, and Malena was happy about that. She hadn’t wanted to stay in the vicinity of those strangely murdered soldiers for another minute. What kind of being would want to arrange a group of human heads around itself? Why would it punch holes in the heads? Even more importantly, why would the men allow themselves to be ritually killed like that?

  Focus, she told herself. She marched through the jungle, going slightly uphill now. The land around the swamp was mostly flat, but there were undulations. She mumbled Ostlund’s name to herself and pictured his odd, pale face in her mind. She didn’t know if that would help or not, but she couldn’t see how it would hurt.

  “Who’s there?” asked a male voice.

  She stopped, stumbled, and almost walked into a tree. She whirled around, looking behind her. There was no one there.

  Tanner had stopped, and looked at her hopefully. “Did you get something?” he asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Identify yourself.”

  Malena opened her mouth, then closed it again. She didn’t see anyone, but she could hear the words in her mind, as if they’d been spoken nearby. It was disconcerting. She looked around, but there was definitely no one there.

  “I’m Malena Marin,” she said. “Psi-sensitive, Bravo Team.”

  “Excellent. Give me a visual, please.”

  “A what, sir?”

  “Open your eyes, Agent Marin.”

  “Uh, they are open, sir.”

  “Ah, right. The signal is weak. Report verbally, then. Quickly.”

  “We’re in trouble. Apparently everyone in Alpha Team is dead. Bravo Team is down to just myself and Commander Tanner.”

  “Tell me what hit you,” he said impatiently.

  “It wasn’t the Cubans, not directly. There is a force dome, miles in diameter. We ran into it. Most of our people were killed that way.”

  “A force dome that big…? We never even considered it. The energy required—it would be beyond anything we’ve seen. Are you certain of this?”

  She explained that she had personally slid down this surface on her butt and landed in the swamp. She continued, telling Ostlund about the dead Cubans arranged in a circle and the missing equipment.

  “A hot site. It’s the only answer. Alarming. You’ve done well, Agent Marin.”

  “I formally request extraction,” she said.

  “That request is regretfully denied.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She glared into the distance. “Look Ostlund, we’ve done our part. We’ve been nearly killed on many occasions. We can’t get through the dome, and we need—”

  Tanner was urgently signaling her to settle down at this point, but she wasn’t interested in his opinion.

  “Agent Marin. Your sacrifices are appreciated at the highest levels of the U.S. government. They are positively heroic. But we must call upon you to continue your efforts to investigate this hot site. To that end, we’ve arranged to put a third team in play. An allied team.”

  “A third team? Don’t let them run into the dome!”

  “There is no chance of that. They’ve already made their landing several miles down the coast from the site. I’ve pinpointed your location, and during our conversation, I’ve relayed your position to them. They’ll be meeting up with you by nightfall. Do not move from your current coordinates, please.”

  Malena crouched on the forest floor, stunned. She didn’t know what to say. All along, in her mind, she’d played out this wonderful moment when she was put back into contact with her own people. She’d dreamt of it during their brief interludes of sleep. The helicopters were supposed to come and take them away to safety. But now, Ostlund was telling her the nightmare wasn’t going to end.

  “Why can’t you pull us out, sir?”

  “You’re not injured. You’ve had a hard time of it, but you’ve survived and are intimately aware of hostile activity in the area. That knowledge will be invaluable to the new team.”

  She felt like she was going to be sick. Tanner signaled for her attention.

  “Ask who he’s sending!” he told her.

  “What team is coming, sir?”

  “Gamma.”

  She repeated this information to Tanner, who frowned, then shrugged. She had no idea who Gamma was, and right now, she didn’t care.

  “Commander Ostlund?” she asked, fearing he’d disconnected somehow.

  “Go ahead.”

  “What’re we going to do about that force dome? We can’t get through it.”

  “You let Gamma Team worry about that. You’ll act as their guide. And I’m impressed you were able to operate the com set, Marin. Burke told me you registered a zero for com ability.”

  Malena felt a wrinkle of irritation. “I guess she was wrong, sir. Now that I have the right headset on, I’m at least able to talk to you.”

  “Obviously. Good luck. Ostlund out.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she heard herself saying. But she didn’t mean it. She didn’t want to thank him for anything. In fact, if the man had been standing within reach, she probably would have tried to kick him in the balls.

  -11-

  “So, we wait,” Tanner said when she’d explained the other half of the conversation to him.

  “Is this a safe place?” Malena asked.

  “In a swamp crawling with hostiles it’s about as safe as anyplace else. We’re on a relatively dry island surrounded on three sides by bogs, and the last side is a waterway. If they do come, they’ll probably be traveling by boat, which makes them easy targets. At least this spot is relatively dry.”

  She frowned. “If they do find us, we can’t run easily. The bogs will slow us down.”

  Tanner shrugged. “Moving makes us more visible. I agree with the boss. We hunker down and wait for Gamma Team. Haak is their leader. He gets the job done, but some question his methods.”

  “How many teams does XCU have?”

  “Well, that’s need-to-know information. I will say Gamma isn’t from the Boca Raton base—they aren’t exactly XCU at all, in fact. They’re allied forces. They must have shipped them in when we lost both our own teams.”

  Malena thought about that. Clearly, there were other hidden stations like the one she’d joined in Boca Raton. She could understand how such information wouldn’t be distributed to every agent. A secret wasn’t a secret if everyone knew about it.

  “Should we sleep until nightfall?” she asked.

  “Not a bad idea,” he said. “But I’ve got a better one. Let’s do some training with your gear.”

  Malena reached up and touched her headset lightly. The probes were cool and slightly sticky. They felt flesh-like under her fingertips.

  “All right,” she said. “How do we start?”

  “First, try to sense our equipment. It’s familiar and low-power, but it should give you some readings.”

  She closed her eyes. That seemed to make it easier to focus. She felt her surroundings, thinking about them. There was the headset itself, of course. It gave her a slightly hot feeling to think about it, encircling her head like a glued-on headband.

  She perceived other items moments later. There was the second headset, their suits—and Tanner’s big gun. The accelerator was the strongest impression, she realized now. It didn’t look like a gun in her mind, however. It had no shape. Everything was a formless blob.

  “How do these things look to you?” Tanner asked quietly. “Do they have a sound or a color associated?”

  She suddenly did sense something about the blobs, even though it seemed odd. “They have a smell,” she said. “A distinctive scent for each. They’re like little stink-clouds.”

  “A scent, huh? That’s a new one.”

  Malena opened her eyes and looked at him. He was watching her seriously. He seemed as mystified by this process as she was.

  “How do these damned things work? Where did you find them—were they wrapped around some alien’s skull?”

  Tanner shook his head. “I don’t know. We found a large number of them once, a big supply. They’re quite valuable and do different things. I’ve never seen the file on the find. I don’t think they even tell psi agents where the headsets are from. Maybe Burke or Ostlund knows, but I doubt they’d tell you if you asked them.”

  It was creepy, thinking that this bizarre set of fleshy probes and wires had once been worn by some inhuman creature. She didn’t like the idea. It made her skin crawl around each of the six jewel-like blobs that ringed her head.

  “What does my gun smell like?” Tanner asked.

  “Licorice,” she said, and laughed.

  Tanner nodded. He was deadly serious. “The last sensitive I worked with saw them as colors, another as numbers. The theory goes like this: your mind doesn’t have a way to categorize the input, so it finds a preexisting system of identifying input and uses that instead. Sensory-deprived people often compensate that way. You’re like a blind person who’s never seen before, and now, with the new gift of sight, you’re having difficulty. It’s only natural and nothing to worry about.”

  Malena nodded and closed her eyes again. She turned her head this way and that, feeling for more contacts in her environment. Suddenly, she drew in a gasp of breath.

  “What is it?” Tanner whispered.

  She turned her head. “Pepper,” she said. “A big, giant blob of pepper. It’s dark and huge. I think it’s a long way off.”

  She opened her eyes, and saw she was staring off to the east. “That’s the direction of the force dome, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m not surprised you can pick it up. There has to be a massive amount of X in there somewhere to power that dome.”

  “Now that I know it’s there, I can’t believe it hasn’t been bothering me all along. It dwarfs everything else. It reminds me of a background smell, like the smell of the sea when you’re at the beach, or the smell of pines when you’re up in the mountains. I guess when it’s everywhere you don’t even notice it after a while.”

  Malena continued to experiment with her headset, feeling and probing for alien technology. Except for their equipment and the big peppery blob to the east, she didn’t sense anything else. She was glad for the headset at that moment, without it she thought having so much X in the region would have made her sick.

  After she tired of using her headset they ate some of their rations and took naps in shifts. They both had the feeling it was going to be a long night. When Team Gamma arrived, Tanner assured her, they wouldn’t want to sit around. They would want to press ahead.

  “Tanner?” she asked. “What’s the emergency?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, why rush down here? If the Cubans have the stuff, it will still be here a month from now, won’t it? Or will the visitors leave?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “They never leave. I don’t think they can leave. They come to Earth in a bad mood, and they usually seem lost. Mostly we find they’re all dead when we get to the site. But that doesn’t mean the X will stay put. There are other nations on this Earth, other organizations like XCU. We’re all hunting for the same thing.”

  “So, it’s a race? Countries like Russia are sending teams here too, to try and steal the find from the Cubans?”

  “Yeah, and not just them.”

  “It seems kind of unfair for the Cubans.”

  Tanner shrugged. “Not with a hot site. Things can go very badly for the local population. Remember the scene back in the village? Those bodies in a circle—they would have been better off if we’d taken this whole site down with the first team.”

  Malena wasn’t sure what to think, but she decided to fluff up her pack as best she could at the base of a palm and put her head against it. She tried to sleep in the muggy heat, but it wasn’t easy.

  She was dozing an hour or so later when something awakened her. Someone was talking.

  “What?” she asked aloud.

  “I say again, Gamma is in trouble. We have reports of hostile contact less than one mile west of your position.”

  “Tanner?” she called. “It’s Ostlund. He says the Gamma Team is fighting. I don’t hear any gunfire though.”

  Tanner was already up on his feet. He frowned to the west, peering through the trees. One of the bogs that surrounded their position lay in that direction. It was the deepest of the three.

  “I’m surprised they’re approaching from that direction. “The mud must be up to their knees.”

  “It’s the most direct route from the coast. They must really want to get here.”