Making the Galaxy Great

“Are you listening?” McCauley asked.

“Yes. I’m just trying to get my brain to absorb it. So we’re trying to get a better deal by working with just the Haku or the Yrreans. What about the Marjans?”

McCauley shook her head. “Totally separate. They’re way beyond the rest. We’re not even sure why they even have anything to do with us humans.”

“Okay, so I’m guessing we chose to work with the Yrreans so the Haku got pissed off and made a deal with the Chinese to give them this alien weapon technology.”

“But that’s what’s strange,” said McCauley. “We were actually leaning toward working with the Haku, because they have some metal that my . . . that we want to get our hands on. Super-light, practically indestructible. Apparently it could revolutionize all sorts of machinery, aircraft, even spacecraft.”

“So why would the Haku make this secret deal with the Chinese to sell the weapons? It makes no sense.”

“Not to us. But we’re not aliens, Fleming. We don’t know what their calculus is.”

“Or maybe L’harra is wrong. Or lying.”

“Do you have something against L’harra, because she knocked you down and hurt your head?”

Jason told himself to breathe slowly and stop sweating on his leather-covered steering wheel. He was trying not to tell McCauley something that would open a whole new front in their personal battle. “It’s just . . . why are you meeting her in the middle of a nature preserve? It doesn’t feel right.”

“It’s not L’harra we’re going to see. She got intel that a couple of Haku would be meeting a Russian operative.”

“The Russians? So the Haku are selling these weapons to everybody except us. Some trade deal.”

Jason turned off the main road past a large brown wooden sign marking the entrance to Beckman Forest. They drove another quarter mile or so through dense woods until they reached a small fake log cabin at the entrance to the park. An elderly woman with a pronounced case of osteoporosis told Jason the admission fee was $10 per carload. When McCauley didn’t offer to cough up any money, Jason paid the guard.

“Park closes in half an hour,” she told Jason.

“I’m submitting that expense,” he said to McCauley as they drove on. “We do have a way to submit expenses, right? I mean, especially since I’m not getting paid?”

McCauley answered with a weary frown. Not far from the entrance was a visitor’s center, which included a mini-zoo where school groups could see injured animals that were being nursed back to health so they could be returned to the wild. When Jason had gone on a field trip with Shelby’s fourth grade class, they’d seen a groundhog, an owl and a skunk.

McCauley directed Jason to keep driving down a gravel road that was marked Park Employees Only. Several hundred yards into the woods, they came to a wide part of the road, where a large dark blue sedan sat off to the side. McCauley told Jason to park behind it.

“You stay here,” she ordered when Jason started to open his door. “And take this.” She reached over and slid a tiny device over Jason’s right ear. Then she attached what looked like a small pin to the left side of her chest.

“This is one of the few examples of Marjan tech we have. You can hear me and talk to me,” she told him. “And you can see what I’m seeing if you touch the little button on the side. It’ll record everything. We may need it for evidence. And if anything goes wrong, call this number.”

She handed him a sticky note on which she’d scribbled a phone number.

“If anything goes wrong?”

“It won’t.”

Jason touched the side of the device. Instantly, he saw his own face in front of him. He realized it was because McCauley was looking at him. So he began making faces — pulling his cheeks down to distort his mouth, puffing his cheeks up till it looked like his eyes would explode, and sticking out his tongue.

McCauley shook her head at him. “Try to act like an adult,” she said. “Don’t make me wish I hadn’t asked you for help on this assignment.”

Jason immediately tapped the device again to make the hologram go away. “Okay. I think I’ll wait till you get wherever you’re going so I don’t get seasick,” he said.

He watched McCauley walk further down the gravel road, then disappear to the left down an unseen path. After a couple of minutes, Jason tapped the device. McCauley was creeping along a mulched path, staring back and forth so rapidly he started to feel dizzy. It occurred to him that she was trained to be hyper-observant, which was why her eyes never seemed to stop moving. After a minute or two, he began to get used to the motion. The sun was nearly gone now, and among the trees it was starting to feel dark.

Jason — or rather, McCauley — saw a shed of some sort in a clearing ahead. She looked down at her phone. “These are the GPS coordinates she gave me,” said McCauley.

“Looks like a maintenance building,” said Jason. Could she hear him?

“No doubt,” she replied. “I’ll see if I can get inside.”

Jason could feel his pulse throbbing as he glanced at the empty sedan in front of his car. “Where is everybody? Maybe you should wait and get backup,”

“There is no backup, Fleming,” she said. “I’m it.”

Jason bit his lip.

No, you’re not. I’m your backup. And I should have warned you.

McCauley walked closer to the shed and stopped. A pair of pant legs and shoes were clearly visible behind the small building. As she crept forward Jason could see they belonged to a man in his forties, in black trousers and a long-sleeve shirt that was mostly burned to cinders. Presumably, he was — or had been — a Russian agent.

A corpse. Jason swallowed his breath.

Shit,” McCauley whispered. “Something must have gone wrong.”

“You think?” Jason muttered.

The last dead person Jason had seen was his grandmother, in a coffin in a funeral home, treated with whatever they use to make dead people look undead for funerals. But this was a fresh, untreated, raw corpse. And this had suddenly become more than just an annoying way to spend a Saturday evening. McCauley continued walking around behind the shed.

There were two more bodies. Another possible Russian, and a Haku.

“Fuck,” Jason blurted out. “McCauley, you need to get out of there!”