“Aircraft approaching,” Sheldon announced. “Time to depart.” Without waiting for confirmation, the ship shot straight up. As we parted the clouds, Sheldon added, “Cloaking field on. I will continue up into orbit.”

Patrick went over to the always-on coffee pot and poured a cup. “So what’s next on the hit list, time-zone-wise?”

“China and Russia,” Nat replied. “Not sure how much news will get out to the rest of the world. This feels like something they’d clamp down on, hard.”

“Agreed,” I said. “Let’s use the time to get some sleep. Tomorrow morning, we’ll see how the morning news handles our latest shenanigans.”

Chapter Thirty-Five: Distractions

Chapter Thirty-Five: Distractions

Day 27. Wednesday morning

I shambled into the ready room and headed straight for the coffee machine. I grabbed the pot and jiggled. Yep. At least a cup in there. Glancing over my shoulder as I poured, I saw Nat hunched over a tablet. Her expression wasn’t a happy one.

I dropped into a chair, took a long pull from my mug, then said, “Whassup?”

“It’s all over the news,” Nat said. “A group of militia attempted to take over the Minnesota state legislature building.”

“Er, what?”

“Yeah. Big standoff, cops brought in the heavy artillery. Bloodbath narrowly averted, yadda yadda. Meanwhile, nary a peep about our antics outside of Japan. Even in Japan, it’s being pushed out by the news out of America.”

I stared at Nat, my face slack with shock. “Wait, when did this happen?”

“It didn’t,” Sheldon said.

“What?”

“I have compared some of the time stamps on the news items related to the militia group with items from yesterday’s news. There are inconsistencies.”

“Which means?”

“Putative events have been backdated. Things that would have been news at the time were not reported.”

“So it’s fake news?”

“For the moment,” Nat interjected. “I imagine physical evidence is being backfilled as quickly as possible. By now they doubtless have a group of good ol’ boys actually under arrest, and real bullet holes in the building facade.”

“But they won’t confess to something they didn’t do … ” I said.

“They will if the offer is good enough. Or the threats. And I bet they won’t actually do any time.” Nat snarled silently and snapped the tablet shut.

“So we fired blanks again.” Patrick was standing at the entrance to the ready room, apparently having overheard enough to bring himself up to date.

“So it would seem.” Nat slumped. “We can keep at this, of course. Eventually we’ll cover enough territory that groups of people who’ve seen us will start to connect with each other. And we’ll have yet another conspiracy theory to join all the other conspiracy theories that have saturated social media.”

“And it’ll sink without a trace.”