Patrick and I had taken a break and were lying down on the oversized couches when Sheldon announced, “Saturn is now showing a significant disk. We will be in orbit in a half hour.”

  Nat slapped her laptop closed with a whoop. “About damned time. I know more about businesses and associations in Taft County than I ever, ever, ever wanted to know.”

  On the bridge, Saturn was dead center in front of the conn. The image already showed more detail than could be achieved by any but the largest Earth-based telescopes. The rings were clearly visible, and I was pretty sure I could make out several of the larger moons. They weren’t showing disks, but they weren’t point sources, either.

  “Say, uh, my understanding is that Jupiter has a vicious magnetic field and a lot of local radiation,” I said.

  “This is Saturn, not Jupiter. See the pretty rings?”

  “Thanks, Sheldon. My point was I just can’t remember if Saturn has similar issues, and if we should be worried.”

  “I see. Let me assure you that if I had been in any danger, I would have mentioned it. Loudly.”

  “Or any danger to us as well, right?” said Patrick.

  “Sure, if you say so.”

  Our jaws all dropped at the same time.

  “I’m kidding. Of course, I wouldn’t have let my favorite humans come to harm.”

  “I’m not feeling it,” Patrick said.

  “Seriously. In the realm of imperatives to be built into a ship intelligence, wouldn’t you think protecting the command crew would rank as a high priority?”

  There was silence as the humans in the room mulled this over. Then Patrick nodded. “Okay. But just in case, I hereby order you to do your utmost to keep us safe.”

  “That was unnecessary and insulting. But one shouldn’t set the bar too high in your case, I suppose.”

  “Oh, meow.”

  I waved my hands in the air. “All right, truce. We’re here to get a look at Saturn. Sheldon, can you give us some flybys? The planet, maybe a couple of the larger moons? Say a couple of hours max, then I think we have to head back.”

  “I will work out some orbits that will produce maximum oohs and aahs.”

  Sheldon was true to his word. Over the next two hours, the Halo did several close flybys of Saturn, Titan, Mimas, Iapetus, and Enceladus. Titan was basically a ball of smog, and Sheldon had nothing that could penetrate the clouds. But Mimas, looking like a real-life Death Star; Enceladus, with the continent-wide cracks in its ice; and even Iapetus, which looked like it had run into something, were all more than dramatic enough.

  And through the whole tour, the rings dominated the sky, looking like Asgard’s rainbow bridge.

  “How low can you go, Sheldon?” I asked at the end. “Can you fly into the clouds?”

  “I could, but it would carry some risk. I am a light-duty vessel, not an armored exploratory ship.”

  “Oh.” I couldn’t hide my disappointment. “Okay, fair enough.”

  “How much radiation could you handle?” Nat asked. “Jupiter-level?”

  “Jupiter is well within my specs. I wouldn’t want to buzz a neutron star or magnetar, though.”

  I started to reply, but found myself yawning uncontrollably. It was well past two in the morning, Dunnville time. Plus, the concentrated mental labor on the way out—going over the files, and the excitement of the Saturn encounter—was taking its toll. “I’m going to fall asleep on my feet. I need some shuteye.” I picked one of the couches, fell onto it, and was asleep within seconds.

  Chapter Thirteen: Getting a Clue

  Day 9. Saturday morning

  I woke with a jerk. I’d been having a confusing dream where I kept flying over a grassy field, accompanied by a sense of urgency. I rubbed my eyes, trying to bring myself to full awareness. The thermos had been drained hours ago, so there would be no caffeine assist.

  Nat and Patrick were stretched out on couches. Nat was making a light buzzing sound, like a chipmunk snoring. It was incredibly cute, and a revelation to me. I’d never realized she snored. And it was probably not something I should bring up. Ever.

  I sat down at my laptop and fired it up. I stared at the folder full of videos and images, unsure exactly what I was looking for, but knowing it was important. Well, maybe if I just started looking at things, inspiration would strike.

  It took less than five minutes. Something caught my eye in a high-resolution image of the outskirts of Dunnville. I zoomed in, zoomed again, then yelled, “Shit!”

  Patrick snorted and grunted, then turned over.

  Nat sat up. “Whazzit? What’s the matter?”

  “I found something. Remember Sheldon was saying that even if he stayed invisible out in that field, he’d leave a visible trace?”

  “Uh-huh.” Nat came over and sat down beside me, still blinking sleep out of her eyes, then squinched her chair around so she could see the screen.

  I pointed at the zoomed-in image. “It’s hard to make out, both because they’re faint and because there are multiple overlapping traces. But those are flying-saucer prints.”

  Nat squinted at the screen. “Um, I think I see it. Maybe. You sure you’re not suffering from pareidolia?”

  “What’s that, an STD?”

  Nat chuckled. “No, dummy, it’s a tendency to see patterns or objects in random images. It’s kind of a self-inflicted illusion.”

  “Like seeing Jesus in a piece of toast?”

  “Uh-huh, exactly like that.”

  “Okay, let’s test that idea. Hey Sheldon?”

  “Let me save you some time, Jack. I see the patterns as well. A little image processing and you get this … ” A much larger version of the image on my laptop popped up on the nearest wall panel, but this version had some colors enhanced. The result showed at least a half dozen distinct patterns that included a tripod-shaped set of depressions, centered in a circle of slightly browner grass.

  “Any possibility those are evidence of Gennan landings?”

  “No Gen have landed on Earth for about a decade. Those traces would have faded in a month or two. This is almost certainly Lorannic in origin.”

  Nat sat back with a smile. “Wow. Finally, some progress. Nice catch, Jack. Where is this located?”

  I zoomed out on the image to show the industrial park where Nat worked, maybe a quarter mile south of the field.

  Nat stared at the screen, her lip curling. “Well, that’s just friggin’ peachy.”

  “What’s going on?” Patrick said groggily from his couch.

  I turned to him and pointed at the laptop screen. “We found something, and it’s near Nat’s employer.”

  Patrick came over, yawning cavernously. He leaned over us and peered at the screen. “Those outlines on the field look like … ”

  I pointed at some details on the laptop screen. “Landing sites. And just north of the Harris Institute.”

  “Well, to be completely accurate,” Nat replied, “just north of the industrial park where I work. There are a lot more businesses in there.”

  “But the Harris Institute is the biggest,” I replied.

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” Patrick said. “What if one of the hole-in-the-wall businesses is nothing but a front for the Loranna? They wouldn’t even have to show up for work most of the time, and no one would notice.”

  Nat nodded thoughtfully. “Patrick’s got a point. No matter what else might be possible, Harris is a legitimate PR and marketing firm. We’ve done six campaigns so far this year, two of them national. I’ve seen our ads on TV.”

  “Me too.” Patrick made a face. “They suck.”

  “You think all ads suck.”

  “Your point?”

  I stared at the screen, ignoring the byplay. “Nat, have you seen anything, anything at all, that might tend to make you suspicious of your employer?”

  “Not really, no. I mean, some of the executives are kind of reptilian, but I just put that down to them being entitled, rich brats.”

  Patrick chortled. “The two conditions are not mutually exclusive, though.”

  I leaned back in my chair and glared at the laptop. Unquestionably, this was the biggest clue we had found so far—okay, the only clue—and it needed to be investigated. But how, exactly?

  Tapping my finger on the image for emphasis, I said, “Somewhere between two and four landing traces, all within the last month or two. A couple of landings a month? And not just a quickie land-and-leave, either. They have to park for a while.”

  “At least five days in good weather, or two days if it rains,” Sheldon said. “I also observe that the patterns indicate two different sizes of landing gear. So at least two ships. The radius and size of the landing struts are consistent with specific Lorannic classes of vessel. Not military models, fortunately. Civilian, and quite low-end and old, which seems odd.”

  “Hmm, okay, so a lot of traffic in and out,” I said. “But it seems risky to park that close.”

  “Why? What’s the alternative?” Nat asked. “Park a mile away and hike it? That would get old pretty fast.”

  “Maybe it did get old pretty fast,” Patrick said. “They might have started off parking a long way away, then got lazy as everything became routine and nothing bad happened.”

  I couldn’t help a chuckle at the thought. “That sounds a lot like something humans would do.”

  “Laziness is not a uniquely human trait,” Sheldon said. “Although you seem to have elevated it to an art form.”

  Patrick looked up. “Again, meow.”

  “You make it so easy,” Sheldon replied.

  “We need a strategy,” Nat said.

  I nodded. “Well, we’ve got the cloaking detector. Do people at Harris walk around outside on their lunch hours?”

  “A little bit, but we have a cafeteria in the building. And the executives have their own dining area upstairs, of course. People from the smaller businesses generally walk to one of the fast-food joints or the food trucks that park on the street.”

  “Well that’s good,” I said. “You could go for a stroll with a detector under your jacket and no one would be suspicious.”

  Nat hesitated, then nodded. “I guess so. It’s not much of a plan, but it’s all we have right now.”

  Chapter Fourteen: Hacked

  Home.

  The re-hangaring was performed without effort, the wagon doors opening and closing at Sheldon’s transmitted command. In no time the Halo was safely parked, undercover, and invisible.

  I walked down the airlock steps, closely followed by my friends. I turned at the bottom and said, “Okay, Sheldon, close it up.” The airlock staircase rose slowly into midair, then disappeared.

  Nat put her backpack and laptop on the workbench. “It seems like an odd thing to say, but I’m glad I’m back. Space travel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, even on a luxury flying saucer.”

  Patrick put his hands on the small of his back and arched backward. “Next time, let’s get Sheldon to assign us staterooms or whatever it is the scientists lived in.”

  Patrick’s phone dinged in his pocket. He looked down but didn’t pull it out. Moments later, Nat’s phone dinged as well, then mine.

  Nat did take her phone out and look at it as it dinged several more times. “Of course. Every notification and text and whatever that we haven’t been getting while we’ve been out of range has just dumped onto our phones all at once. Yee-hah.”

  I looked at my own phone. Two texts from my mother, a couple from other friends, a bunch of Facebook and Twitter notifications, some other miscellaneous things. I was just reading the second text from my mom when Patrick yelled, “What the fuck?”

  Patrick’s eyes were wide and staring, and his mouth had formed an O. Without a word, he held out his phone to us. A video was playing of an obviously dead, furry alien being loaded into a chest freezer while an off-screen female voice made a comment about mobsters.

  “Okay, but you took that video,” Nat said. “What’s the—?”

  “This is on Twitter,” Patrick said, his voice shaking.

  I gave him a look of disbelief. “You didn’t … ”

  Patrick screwed up his face. “Of course I didn’t. TimJay666 did.”

  “And that would be … ”

  “The shrimp. Timothy J. Jordan. My soon to be very, very dead little brother.”

  “But how?” Nat said.

  Patrick sighed. “He got into my private folders once before on the family cloud storage. I’ve changed my password several times since, but I’ve always wondered if he had a hack of some kind to get it in the first place. Looks like the answer’s yes.”

  “Has he posted anything else?”

  Patrick poked at his phone for several moments. “Doesn’t look like it. Not on Twitter, anyway.” He poked some more, then put the phone to his ear and walked to the other end of the barn.

  I fired up Twitter and did a search. I quickly found the post and watched the attachment. Fortunately, it was only an excerpt. Nothing more than a comment from Patrick about the body being heavy, my response, and Nat’s question about putting it in a chest freezer. And a shot of the corpse as it was being tossed into the freezer, of course. But there was no way to identify the voices or the location of the video, unless you knew the people speaking.

  Patrick’s voice rose in anger from across the barn—not quite enough to make out entire sentences, although individual words sometimes floated above the general noise level. And one phrase, repeated several times: “fucking dead.”

  Two minutes later, Patrick came stomping back across the barn. His expression was still one of rage, his complexion flushed. “He’s going to take it down. I gave him one minute, and told him I would knock a tooth out of his face for every extra minute.”

  Nat chortled. “And he bought it?”

  “I meant it, Nat. I’m pretty sure he could hear that in my voice. I haven’t beat up the little prick since I was fourteen, but I think he got that I was serious. I’m still going to have a very pointed conversation with him later.”

  I looked down at my phone just as the post from TimJay666 changed to ‘This video is no longer available.’

  “It’s down,” I said. “I hope it stays down.”

  Patrick’s only reply was a cold, angry glare that I admitted to myself didn’t bode well for Tim’s future.

  “We have to get rid of the freezer,” Nat said.

  “You’re right. Even though it’s empty now, if someone saw it, they might make the connection.”

  “But if someone sees us dropping it off at the recycler, they might make the connection anyway,” Patrick pointed out.

  “Dammit.” I pulled out the communicator. “Sheldon, we’re going to load the freezer into the ship. Lower the cargo elevator when we’re ready.”

  “Acknowledged. Question: would this be an appropriate use of the pejorative shitstorm?”

  “Oh hell yes.”

  “Nailed it!” Sheldon crowed.

  Patrick and I quickly dead-lifted the freezer onto the pallet jack, which hadn’t gone with the truck to the shop, and moved it to the middle of the barn. As we approached the ship, the cargo elevator lowered from its center, a solid cylinder with an inset door appearing out of midair. We loaded the freezer and the elevator doors closed behind us.

  “Sheldon, is there a storage room or something we can put this in?” I said into the air.

  “Follow the rose-colored line on the wall to the open door on your left,” Sheldon replied.

  The elevator doors opened and I looked around. One of the corridors had a slowly pulsating line along the wall at about chest height. I pulled the pallet jack in that direction, to find an open door on the left side. The turn was too tight, and we had to raise and lower the freezer several times to maneuver it in, but finally we got the appliance inside the room, among a lot of unidentifiable items.

  Patrick looked around with his fists on his hips. “Jeez, we keep saying we should be asking about this or that or the other thing. But even standing in the goddam broom closet generates mysteries.” He pointed at one odd mechanical item, which resembled nothing less than a giant folded-up insect. “Like that. What the hell is that? It looks like a Transformer in sleep mode. It’s like we’ve just gone numb.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “Of course, it would help if we had some actual, you know, spare time.”

  “Yeah, nothing like a planetary invasion to screw up your schedule.”

  Patrick had gone home to have a talk with his little brother, which might or might not end in mayhem. Nat had elected to stay, since the day was still relatively young.

  I headed to the house to get some munchies and possibly coffee. My mother was in the kitchen, and turned as I came in. “Oh, Jack. I didn’t realize you were back.”

  “How could you miss Patrick’s car roaring past?”

  She chuckled, apparently buying the bluff. “I may be used to it by now. Would you like some breakfast?”

  “You read my mind. I’m going to make a couple of coffees as well.”

  “Only two?”

  “Patrick already left.”

  In short order, I was loaded up with a carafe, mugs, a pitcher of cream, and some lemon cake. I headed back to the barn, carefully balancing the tray to avoid any spillage.

  I set the tray on the workbench and placed the communicator beside it. Nat immediately stuck a piece of lemon cake in her mouth and began preparing a coffee while still chewing.

  “Here, Nat, have some cake. How about coffee?” I said sarcastically, and received a middle finger in reply.

  But the food and coffee helped to relax me, and seemed to be doing something similar for Natalie. I wasn’t quite sure how the simultaneous application of sugar and caffeine could do that, but I was willing to write it off as one of life’s great mysteries.

  Nat finally said, around her second piece of lemon cake, “There’s no point in walking around the industrial park on the weekend, and we might stand out anyway. What about checking out the field?”

  “I dunno, Nat. It’s in the middle of nowhere. The only thing anywhere near it is the industrial park, so it’d be pretty obvious that you were going to the field. Not suspicious in the least.”