Patrick held up a finger in an aha gesture. “Say, what about flying out of the solar system until we’re far enough away to open a wormhole before the Loranna could get to us?”

“How would we know how far is far enough?” Sheldon replied. “And by the way, it would depend on what the Loranna set the defensive radius to. The weapons themselves are not limited by light speed. Essentially, the death blow would come out of the wormhole as we created it.”

Patrick looked deflated. “Oh.”

Sheldon’s tone softened. “In any case, Patrick, we don’t have anything more to offer than Alaric had in the first place—just suspicions and accusations. The Gen might start an investigation, but it would be low priority and somewhat speculative, and they would have to be careful not to antagonize the Loranna with unproven assertions. The Loranna could succeed in their plans before the investigation even got past the planning stage.”

Nat looked up. “In principle, if we created enough of a ruckus on Earth, would it register with the Gen observation systems?”

“In principle, yes. The data streams are monitored by expert systems. They categorize and catalog news and events according to a set of rules about what is expected and what is unusual. For instance, a picture of a Gen and a discussion of Gen society would probably trigger something.”

Patrick smacked the table. “Then let’s do that.”

“How, exactly?” Nat said. “Contact CNN? I’m sure they’d be more than happy to broadcast something about lizard people invading the Earth, and an alien corpse, from a bunch of random nobodies. Even if we could bring in one well-known tin-hat-wearing ufologist to give it all more credibility.”

“Plus, we don’t have anything specific,” I added. “Just a bunch of broad accusations against nobody in particular.”

“We have to do something spectacular, impossible to dismiss—like set off a nuclear bomb or something—to get people’s attention,” Nat said.

“Yeah, like that’s—” Patrick cut off midsentence and stared into space, his jaw slowly unhinging.

Nat turned to look at him, her expression changing from curiosity to concern as he continued to stare into space. Finally, she said, “Patrick? Is something wrong? Or is this a lightbulb moment?”

“Lightbulb,” Patrick replied. “Look, we need to get the public’s attention. We need to do it in a way that can’t be covered up, dismissed, buried in competing disinformation, explained away, or whatever. And we need to attract the attention of the Gen, with something that will get bumped upstairs by the monitoring A.I. systems.” A grin slowly spread across his face. “How about a series of increasingly un-ignorable flying saucer sightings? As it happens, we do have one.”

“Huh. Okay, we’d have to pick our battles, but I think we could make it work … ” I said.

“Oh, hell no.”

We all reflexively looked up. “Why not, Sheldon?” I said.