“Stop there,” Colonel Barrett Milton said, “don’t go any further. I don’t want to know any more. I like you, Neal, and I am already going to have to report what you have said so far. Don’t incriminate yourself any further.”

Neal nodded, waited for the colonel to settle down a bit. Madeline stood behind him, biting her lower lip. Now that they were here talking to the colonel, she was far from sure they had made the right decision.

For that matter, neither was Neal, but he tried again. “Colonel,” he said to the military man’s raised hands and bowed, shaking head, “what if I were to tell you what actually happened in India?”

Barrett froze, his eyes rising to meet Neal’s once more, then flashing to Madeline’s. Her desperate blue eyes were imploring him to listen.

“Barrett, we found something out there.” Neal went on, “and it reacted. It killed James and Laurie and the crew of the King’s Transom, and now it is watching Madeline and me to see if it needs to do the same to us.”

The colonel stared at him, incredulous. What had they found, a fucking sea monster? But the faces of his two visitors were deadly serious, and he could not help but feel the weight behind Neal’s words.

“Colonel, the meteors, they were not meteors at all, nor were their landing sites accidental. Colonel, we are being prepared. An invasion is coming, and I can prove it to you, right here, right now.”

* * *

An hour later, after showing Barrett the photographs which James had managed to stow away before the King’s Transom was attacked, and several of John’s notes, Neal and Madeline stood behind the austere man as he stared out the window of his hotel room, trying to grasp what he had heard.

He was not a stupid man, and he prided himself on being open-minded … compared to his military peers, at least. But this was incredible, literally. It was too much to handle. The more he started to believe the two scientists, the more he had to fight the overwhelming urge to run and report this. To sound the alarm bells and launch everything they had.

But if what he had just heard was true, then that, he knew, would be equal parts futile and fatal.

Just days beforehand, the general and he had discussed at length the incident in the Indian Ocean, and the comment that the victims looked as if they had been attacked by laser had come up twice. Both times the idea had been dismissed as preposterous, but in light of this new information … he was … oh god, what was he thinking.

God Damn It.

He whirled on the two of them and they stepped back involuntarily from the fire in his stare.