“Kristang? Ha ha, those idiots?! No way! It was me.” Came a muffled voice from my zPhone.

Now everyone was looking at me. “Not me, me.” I pulled my zPhone from my pocket, and set it on the table.

“Yup. Twas me, Skippy the Magnificent. Hey, how come I didn’t get invited to this party? Sounds like a swinging good time.”

“Am I to understand the being called Skippy,” the national security director shot me an unfriendly look, “broke into the NSA last night, and ransacked through our top secret files?”

“Ransacked? I left everything where it was. If you don’t want people reading your files, you should have encrypted the data.” Skippy grumbled.

“They are encrypted!”

“Really? Oh, I thought those files were just poorly indexed. Huh. That was encryption? Oh, ha, ha. You’re messing with me, right? Good one.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” The national science advisor gasped. “That is state of the art encryption! How did you get the keys?”

“Keys?” Skippy asked innocently.

I decided to end Skippy's fun. “Sir, at our low level of technology, Skippy doesn’t bother to decrypt files, he just goes to the end and reads the contents. It has something to do with Schroeder’s cat?” I held up my hands.

“Schrodinger’s cat. Anywho, whazzup, my peeps?” Skippy called out.

The president actually smiled. “Mister Skippy, since we apparently can’t exclude you from a meeting, would you like to join us?”

“No, I’m good, I'll phone this one in. That way, I can lay on the couch here in my fuzzy slippers and underwear, and pretend I’m listening. Besides, I’m watching Wheel Of Fortune.” And probably all other TV shows that were being broadcast all over the planet at the moment.

I held up my hands again.

“I saw that.” Skippy announced.

“How?” The science advisor scowled.

“Through the camera on Joe’s phone. Duh. Also, the dust particles in the air contain ions that, hmm, I'd better not tell you monkeys about that.  It’s all very complicated.”

"Monkeys? What-" The Air Force Chief of Staff started to say.

“Very well,” the president said, “Mister Skippy, we have been monitoring the Kristang sites on Earth, can you tell us the status of their ship in orbit?”

“Sure. There are two Kristang still alive aboard the troop carrier. Two more of them survived initially, because they were in compartments they could manually seal. But their oxygen has run out, so they’re dead. The other two were already in spacesuits, preparing to go outside, when their buddies got blown into space. By me. Those two have managed to seal doors, restore atmosphere to part of the ship, and they’re attempting to gain access to the bioweapons storage compartment, so they can launch missiles at you.”

“Bioweapons?” The Navy Chief of Staff exclaimed in alarm. “What kind of bioweapons?”