He took care of it and then checked in with his aide to get an updated sit rep. The lockdown of the I-10 had been lifted, press releases prepared and sent off, the necessary confidentiality agreements had been signed by everybody involved, and Young’s staff was proving its worth once again by keeping civilian authorities and the rest of the alphabet soup at bay. The reports from the crash site, on the other hand, were disheartening. What little had remained of the ship was still disintegrating. All attempts to secure samples had failed because the substance that was destroying the alien vessel also dissolved every single container they’d used for collecting the material and, up close, the vapors were eating through the air filters. The only upside was that there were no towns or groundwater deposits anywhere nearby, and the soil contamination was minimal. In short, the only thing they were learning from the wreck was that these aliens knew how to build a kick-ass self-destruct mechanism.

Back to square one: autopsies and witness interviews.

THERE was one thing about General Nick Young a lot of people figured out too late in dealing with him, and that was that he was good at extracting information. He’d attended several advanced training courses on interrogation and interviewing techniques out of interest and because nobody anticipated a brawny giant of a man to use psychology instead of blunt force. Kind of like people not expecting him to be fluent in Russian and Arabic, even though he’d served in Spec Ops for most of his life and foreign language skills were mandatory in his field. He didn’t mind the prejudice. It fucked with people’s minds and Young enjoyed that

considerably. An additional bonus was that the tricks he’d picked up were also remarkably helpful when dealing with politicians.

The soldiers had all been debriefed before. Since then they’d been poked and prodded, pricked with more needles than any sane being would think acceptable, and kept in quarantine quarters that weren’t exactly designed to put a man’s mind at ease. They were exhausted, irritable, and scared shitless. It required skill and patience to tease out new facets of what they’d already said over and over again without having them tip into POW

mode and clam up. He started with the ones who were worst off so they’d be able to get some rest sooner. It was long past midnight by the time he finally got to talk to Captain Mark Brennan.

Young liked Brennan. The captain was a sturdy man in his mid-forties, solid in a way that went beyond the physical, but he was pale now and probably well on the way to developing PTSD, like most of his men; haunted by the ghosts of the fallen still, because it was too early for him to have properly dealt with the loss and the survivor’s guilt. Brennan had been stationed abroad several times but hadn’t seen combat until he’d gone up against those aliens. Talk about a baptism of fire.