Leandra didn’t relish the thought of going over Young’s head. It was a shitty thing to do and it certainly wouldn’t help their working relationship.

It meant losing respect wordlessly given and making an enemy far up the totem pole. She could talk to the general and try to convince him, but she’d tried that before and it hadn’t led to the intended result. A female officer who changed her mind was considered fickle, too emotional to do her job properly, too soft. Another of those lessons learned.

She didn’t have much time to make her decision. Talk to Young and risk getting dismissed or overruled? Or skip the middleman, take it one higher, and deal with the inevitable repercussions? The president was a civilian, more likely to consider potential medical benefits that went beyond military use. He’d also recently lost a close family member to cancer, which might make him more willing to listen to her arguments. She wasn’t a fool; she wasn’t going to insist on retrieval at any cost. All she wanted was that they try.

In the end, it was Lt. Dr. Butler who sent off a modified version of her report to the Commander in Chief without informing General Young about it, but it was Lee who made her do it.

NINETEEN

UNLIKE in the movies, tracking someone via satellite didn’t yield immediate results. It might’ve gone faster if they’d involved other agencies (NASA and Homeland Security came to mind), but the Commander in Chief had slapped a black label on the matter and enforced an information lockdown.

It was a sensible decision given the delicate nature of the situation, but it meant keeping the number of people involved to an absolute minimum.

This was why a trusted four-star general was doing the investigating and why two Alpha detachments stood by in Fort Bragg, just in case. Young would’ve preferred to move them closer, but he had orders to keep a low profile and he honestly didn’t believe he’d need them. This was a search-and-destroy mission, but it wasn’t a terribly complicated one despite the unique circumstances. You didn’t need special operatives to fire a grenade launcher.

Thankfully, Warrant Officer Cabrera was good at what she did. The non-authorized personnel had long been kicked out of the room and so she’d gleefully confiscated several workstations. She was going after the data she needed with single-minded zeal, mainlining energy drinks and muttering under her breath. In the general’s experience, the muttering was a good sign when it came to specialists, so he left Cabrera to her job and focused on his own part in this hunt.

One of the immutable laws of any operation was to know your enemy.

Since the enemy in this case was something unprecedented, Young went to the only sources available to him: Captain Mark Brennan and the other survivors of the first encounter, and Paul Riordan, the trucker who’d spoken with the alien and lived to tell the tale. They all had been quarantined in the deepest level of the Basement even though it didn’t look like they’d been infected with anything. Dr. Weston, the physician in charge, had handed in a long, comprehensive report on the tests done and the lab results gained, then