Chapter One
A dangerous game…
Dangerous, my ass. It was a few steps short of suicide. Uncle Ben’s plan was to transport me onto a Tai-Kok ship. All I had to do was leave the bomb, hit the retrieval button on my belt and poof! I was back on Earth before the Tai-Kok ship went kaboom. Sounds simple, right?
Wrong. Uncle Ben didn’t have a clue where I would actually appear on the ship.
It could be the engine room, the crew quarters, or even the bridge.
It was like playing Russian roulette. The Tai-Kok don’t like surprises or uninvited guests, and I’ll never get the image of a naked Tai-Kok out of my head either.
I shuddered. Their penises reminded me of crab claws.
The first two attempts to get me onto a Tai-Kok battle cruiser ended with me floating a foot above the ship. With only an hour of oxygen in my tank, I kinda freaked out. It’s true what they say about no one can hear you scream in space.
Out of sheer desperation, I grabbed a protruding antenna and managed to duct tape the bomb to their hull. I later discovered that antenna was part of the weapons array. If they had turned that sucker on, I would have been vaporized.
To make the situation even more fun, Uncle Ben had me wearing an old, bulky 1960s spacesuit.
Fighting or running in it was impossible.
The Tai-Kok warrior’s sharp metal claws quickly ripped the nylon and rubber to shreds.
On the upside, I got very good at psychic combat.
With my mental right hook, I scored a TKO every time.
To date, we have blown up nine Tai-Kok ships and Earth hasn’t been invaded. Yet. I wanted to tell Dad what we were doing, but he would put a stop to it and probably kill Uncle Ben too.
Uncle Ben knocked on my door. “Dinner’s ready.”
“Coming.” I wrinkled my nose. My uncle loved military MREs. Me? Not so much. The beef stew and spaghetti weren’t too bad, but the oatmeal was awful. God, I’d kill for a big, juicy hamburger and some time at the mall.
I walked into the tiny kitchen and took a seat at the card table. “I need a better spacesuit.”
“You’re letting the Tai-Kok get too close to you.”
I gaped at him in disbelief. “Seriously? I’m not letting them do anything. Yesterday, I popped in on those creatures having sex. Ewww. It was just plain icky, and they weren’t happy about me interrupting them either. I emptied an entire clip into the monsters, and it barely slowed them down.”
“What orifice were they using?”
My eyebrows shot up in baffled horror. “Why?”
“Scientific curiosity.”
I shrugged. “Belly button area, I think.”
“Huh. I need to add a camera to your suit.” Uncle Ben placed a plastic container with lumpy tomato sauce in front of me. “It’s chicken cacciatore.”
Rolling my eyes, I took a bite of the chicken cacciatore and immediately spit it back out. “Are you trying to poison me? This is awful.”
Uncle Ben ate some. “Tastes fine to me.”
Nausea roiled my stomach. “I want a new space suit that’s made from Kevlar armor. I want to go to a mall and get my nails done. I want to go out to dinner and eat real food. Not this plastic crap.” I shoved my chair back and dumped the container in the trash.
“Okay. I’ll take you to Vegas for the weekend.”
“I’m not sleeping in the car again. I want a motel room with a bed and a shower.”
“Fine. A motel and dinner at the restaurant of your choice,” Uncle Ben said stoically.
In a no-nonsense tone, I added, “We are also stopping at the local supermarket and buying food too. Like chocolate, fruit, vegetables and real meat.”
“Consider it done.” Uncle Ben waved his fork at me. “How many bombs have you made?”
“Five. We are out of ammonium nitrate.”
Pulling out a notepad, Uncle Ben jotted it down. “NASA has a new prototype spacesuit. I’ll pop you into their lab and you can steal one.”
“Oh, yippee. The last security guard shot at me.”
Uncle Ben’s satellite phone chimed. He glanced at the screen and handed it to me. “It’s your father.”
“Hey, Dad, what’s up?”
“Put the call on speaker.”
I did as he asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Earth is under attack by aliens that are a dead ringer for the one you had locked up in your lab, Ben,” Dad growled.
Uncle Ben and I exchanged appalled looks.
“What city did they hit?” There was a note of raw panic in Uncle Ben’s voice.
“The monsters are eating their way across Europe and the Middle East as we speak,” Dad snapped. “General Jones wants all your research on the alien.”
I interjected, “How many ships do they have?”
“One hundred and five spaceships are now orbiting our world. The first thing they did was destroy our satellites, the cell towers, and every military base in Europe. The only way to communicate with the survivors is Ham radios,” Dad answered.
Shock rolled over me and I sank down on my chair. Those nine spaceships we had blown up hadn’t even made a dent in their fleet. “Are we able to shoot them down?”
“No. The alien ships have some type of energy shields, and our rockets aren’t getting through. It took the monsters ten hours to decimate Europe. NATO only has a handful of fighter jets left and those are being used to try to stop the slaughter of civilians. We need to find a way to stop them now.”
“They call themselves the Tai-Kok and they are driven by an insatiable hunger. They consider humans cattle, and they will never negotiate with us,” Uncle Ben said out of the blue.
My jaw dropped and I muted the call. “Have you lost your mind?”
“They need to know the truth.”
I threw my hands up in the air. “Dad will kill you.”
“Hello? Are you there?” Dad called.
Uncle Ben unmuted the call. “Sorry. Technical difficulties.”
“How did you communicate with your specimen?” Dad wanted to know.
“They’re psychic.”
Dad shot back, “But you’re not.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. He sent me mental images.”
“No,” Dad growled. “The monster sent those images to Lexi. It was still alive when I left her there.”
“The Tai-Kok are like locust, Dad. When they leave a world, nothing is left alive. Nothing.”
Uncle Ben scrubbed his right hand over his beard. “I still have its weapon and communicator.”
“What did you do with the body?”
Anxiety knotted my stomach. Dad was beyond pissed. If he found out, I had been popping into Tai-Kok spaceships, he would have an epic meltdown.
“It broke free, and I shot it with its own pistol,” Uncle Ben replied.
Dad bellowed, “Is it dead or not?”
“It dissolved into a zillion fireflies, Dad. There is nothing left of it.”
There was a long silence.
“Dad? You, okay?”
“No, I am not okay. We’ll be at the bunker in three hours and don’t even think about running,” Dad snapped. The line went dead.
A hysterical laugh escaped me. “That went well.”
“I have to tell General Jones about the portal before your father kills me.”
Uncle Ben was right. Now that the aliens had invaded Earth, it was the only way to stop them. “I’m going to suit up and see how many ships I can blow up in three hours.”
“I’ll meet you in my lab,” Uncle Ben said and headed for the elevators.