Vatican Ambassador (24 page)

“What?”

Simple as that? Move on? I guess…

“What do you want?” she asks.

“Anything?”

“Anything,” Anita prods him. “Go ahead. You’ll be surprised.”

“How about Tuna Salad? A Tuna Salad Sandwich?”

Anita nods. “Krish, will you go get that and my usual?”

“Me?” Krish protests. “Why am I the waiter all of a sudden?”

“Because BC and Dell need to stay here to tell and listen to the story. And I need to stay to keep BC in line,” she says with sarcasm.

“Oh, she does,” BC echoes her sentiment.

“Right,” Krish sighs.

“Besides, you know the way there!” Anita says. “It was so nice of you to volunteer, Krish!” she smiles at him.

“Bah!” Krish says, standing up. “I’m going! Are you sure all you want is a tuna sandwich?” he asks BC.

“Well, since you’re asking,” BC pauses...

...Let’s push him a little...

”...how about a salad and a cola, too? Oh, and creamy Italian dressing on the salad, but on the side, okay, not on top, I don’t want it to get soggy, I hate that,” BC says, sounding faux-finicky. “And croutons! Don’t forget croutons! Make sure they’re crispy, not stale. Do you have garlic ones? I love those! And could you make sure the cola isn’t too syrupy...”

“AARGH!” Krish loses it. BC smiles. So does Dell.

“That was good,” Dell nods to BC.

Krish leaves the room, cursing under his breath.

“I’ll be back shortly!” his voice echoes as he hits the hallway.

“Sometimes it’s at his expense, but Krish is usually good about being our comic relief,” Anita confides to BC conspiratorially. “I’m sorry things got hot there for a second. I was actually trying to make a joke.”

“I don’t joke about killing people,” BC says without humor.

I don’t joke about them, do I? Have I? Hmmm... okay maybe I have a couple of times...

“It
is
war,” she admits. “People get killed on both sides. We’ve all done what we’ve had to,” she says.

Wonder what she’s done?

“I can see how it could have sounded like a cheap shot,” she admits, “and I’m sorry about that, okay?” Anita checks with him.

“Apology accepted,” BC says.

You know, she is kind of pretty in an unconventional way. Like a mischievous angel. When the
light hits her right. And when she isn’t trying to kill you. Or give you shit over what you do.
Funny, any woman looks good when she’s apologizing to you, happens so rarely...

“Look, don’t gloat, okay?” She admonishes BC. “And don’t get used to it!”

“Shall I go on?” Dell asks, stoic and reserved. BC and Anita look at each other and laugh.

“Please,” BC says. He shifts in his seat, settling in for more of Dell’s story. Anita sits back down in her seat as well, and the tall man begins again.

“We in The Project built our own ships, and we didn’t stop at Mars,” Dell says. “The asteroids were the next logical step. We hoped to find a large enough, stable enough rock to build a base on, with raw materials we could use to build more ships, well beyond the reach of either side of the war. We’d be left entirely to ourselves,” Dell explains.

“Van Kilner wanted to go to the asteroids to live in lower gravity. Gravity was punishing him, as he got older. That was one reason. The monetary support from the UTZ was beginning to dry up, too, each year’s budget slightly smaller. Van Kilner figured the asteroids’ resources would free us from the UTZ’s budget control, give us the means to build Transpace Ships to jump beyond the Solar System,” Dell says.

“That was Van Kilner’s dream, to go to the stars themselves, beyond our own system. He could see that wouldn’t happen with the war going on. Not if we tried to survive just on the UTZ’s scraps.” Dell shakes his head.

“We moved everyone out to The Project’s first asteroid base in mid ‘92. The base was fully functional by then. We kept a small staff here,” he says, looking around the room and the base around their conference room, “but all our meaningful work moved out to the asteroid base,” he says, confirming BC’s earlier guesses.

“This place has been like this,” he indicates the emptiness, “ever since. Mostly used now as a base for covert-ops,” Dell says, nodding to Anita.

“Those ships we built for ourselves to take us to the asteroids were spotted by some commercial pilots. They called our ships flashers, pretty much from the start, so we called them that, too. Van Kilner doesn’t like that name, though, says it’s undignified, and reminds him of fat naked men in long trench coats...” Dell laughs.

“BC’s all about flashers,” Anita jokes.

“We were jumping back and forth all the time, so it was inevitable that some of our ships would be seen. A few were that first year,” Dell explains. He gets back to his story. “It was after we had spent a year out in the asteroids that we found the other base. The alien base,” Dell says.

“I wondered when we were getting to that,” BC chimes in.

“We found an abandoned base, left years ago by some alien race. They left parts behind, ship parts, fusion reactors, fusion drives. We hit the jackpot!” Dell can’t help but smile. “We began reverse engineering what we found!”

Dell leans in towards BC. “We had a working shipboard fusion reactor by the end of ‘93. We moved into their base in ‘94. And we kept making new discoveries. But somehow our activity had, unknown to us, set off some sensors, some silent security alarm of some kind. That, and it turned out that our jumps between Earth and the asteroids had not gone unnoticed. Someone discovered us. We drew attention... alien attention.”

“The original residents came back, huh?” BC asks.

“They came back,” Dell nods.

“Who were they?” BC asks him.

“They’re the ones we call ‘The Domo’” Dell says.

“We call them a lot of things,” Anita mumbles under her breath, loud enough so BC will hear her.

“They are...” Dell hesitates. “They’re not all you would hope for in an alien race,” Dell says.

“They’re greedy, nasty, bloodsucking, fat, little bastards!” Anita says.

“Oh, yeah, you mentioned them before,” is all BC can say.

“They’re okay,” Dell says, “as long as you don’t mind dealing with vampires.”

“Okay,” BC shakes his head, “You know,” he laughs nervously, “I thought for a second there you said

‘vampires’.” He lets out another nervous chuckle.

“I did say ‘vampires’,” Dell tells him.

“Damn,” BC can’t help shaking his head again. “I was hoping I was having a flashback or something.”

Anita cuts in. “We don’t have any proof... but we think Domo invaders on Earth in the seventeenth century may have been the basis for the old legends of vampires.”

“Really? Did they suck your blood or something? Do they?” BC asks.

“We’ve never caught them in the act,” Anita admits.

“But there have been strange, um...” Dell pauses looking for the right word, “casualties, when they’re around. A few people just... die. Their life-force just sucked out of them,” he says quietly. “They seem to pass quietly in their sleep.”

“Not too scientific there, doctor,” Anita admonishes Dell.

Krish enters with food and breaks up the mood. He gives Anita and BC theirs, then sits down and begins to unwrap his own lunch. He stops and looks at the other three when he realizes no one is talking.

“What’s up?”

“The Domo,” Anita fills him in.

“Oh, the Vampires, lovely ghouls. Stephen Spielberg would have been so disappointed,” Krish sighs, and then gets back to unwrapping his food.

“Who’s that, someone in The Project?’ BC asks.

“He’s an old moviemaker,” Krish says.

“Krish is an old movie buff,” Anita explains.

“Close Encounters? ET?” Krish asks BC.

“What?” BC asks, at a loss.

“They’re movies?” Krish prods him.

“Sorry. Don’t watch them,” BC tells Krish.

Krish puts down the sandwich he was about to bite into. “Spielberg thought we’d meet cute, even cuddly aliens. The Domo are more X-Files.”

“You lost me there, too. X-Files? Is that Project lingo?” BC asks him.

“That was a television show,” Anita interjects. “Krish is big on all that old sci fi,” she tells BC. “It used to be big a hundred years ago. Krish is a connoisseur of that crap. Hang around him long enough and he’ll try to get you to watch some of it with him,” she cautions BC.

“It’s not crap!’ Krish says, defending himself and his interests.

“I’m sure those Domo like that old sci fi,” BC says dryly, “Maybe they inspired that, too, huh? So what the hell is ‘that old sci fi’?”

“Sci fi is science fiction, stories about the future,” Dell says. “It’s quaint to see what they thought we’d be doing by now.”

“Wait until you meet one,” Krish says to BC.

BC is lost by the non sequitur. “What?”

“Wait until you meet a Domo. Just being with one is draining, like they’re siphoning off your energy while you’re with them. It feels like they’re taking something from you. We don’t know if that’s intentional or not,” Krish informs him.

“Something?” BC asks.

“Don’t listen to those two,” Anita says. “They’re a couple of surprisingly superstitious babies for being supposed scientists.”

“Wah, wah, wah,” Krish mock cries.

“Anita likes the Domo, don’t you,” Dells prods her. She glares back at him.

“She did call them ‘greedy, nasty, bloodsucking, fat, little bastards’,” BC says in her defense.

“She gets along well with a couple of them,” Dell continues.

“They seem to warm up to me. I do not like them. At all,” Anita insists.

“Well, you do see the best in everyone,” Krish quips.

“How else could I stand to work with you?” Anita shoots back.

Krish tries to laugh and talk and drink his soda, all at the same time. All he manages is a snort that sends soda shooting in a spray out of his nose. Everyone jumps at the sound, and to avoid the spray.

“Nice,” Dell admonishes Krish.

“Did he get you?” Anita asks BC. He looks down to see if he’s been hit
Good... no droplets of snot soda here...

“I’m good,” BC tells her.

“Sorry,” Krish apologizes. He mops up his mess with some napkins.

“May I?” Dell asks.

“Go ‘head,” BC says with his mouth full of tuna sandwich. “Sowry, ma mouf is full.”

“For all their flaws, the Domo were the first aliens we met,” Dell gets back in his storytelling groove. “We were using their old base. They grew curious as to who was operating on their old property. So they paid us a visit. It did not go well, or smoothly, at first.”

“Ha! That’s putting it mildly,” Krish says, having recovered from his snort. “They were very... what would you call it... agitated? Annoyed? Pissed off? Put out? They weren’t happy someone was in there. Our presence was not welcome.”

“And we imprisoned the first Domo who appeared on the base, so we did well right from the start, too,”

Dell says to him.

“You imprisoned the first one you met?” BC asks.

“He looked almost human! And he wouldn’t speak to us. We thought he was a human spy from somewhere local,” Krish says trying to justify their actions. We locked him up, so they sent a bunch more.”

“They have a planetary base not far from here,” Dell says. “Close enough that reinforcements arrived very quickly. We calmed that situation down, thankfully. And then we began to get to know the Domo. We found out the Domo had been here for a while. The base was quite old. And they’d been on Earth in the past, and blended in,” he tells BC.

“The Domo are a highly adaptive species,” Dell explains. “We know they were on Earth about three hundred years ago. They’ve admitted as much to us. They adapted while here to look like us, to live among us undetected. They did look very human at one time... except for their mouths,” Dell says.

“They have vertical smiles,” Krish says, then bursts out laughing.

“An old joke,” Anita says. She reaches across the table to try to smack Krish. He leans back out of the way.

“Their mouths move sort of sideways,” Dell explains. Anita sits back down, shooting Krish the evil eye.

“Are they still around?” BC asks Dell.

“Oh, they still exist,” Krish speaks first. “They’re just not around
here
much anymore.”

“The Project still has dealings with them,” Anita tells BC. “Just not here,” she says, looking around the room to indicate the base they’re in. “Not on the Moon.”

“Out at the asteroid base?” BC asks.

“Some. They’ve got another planet we go to most of the time, now, the one I was mentioning. But let’s not get too far ahead,” Dell says. “Back in ‘94 we had just met the Domo. Once we ironed out our differences, we found we could share technology and both profit from it. It turned out we were actually ahead of the Domo is some ways. Our Transpace Drive,” Dell grins, “was entirely new to them.” Dell smiles with pride. “’Never saw anything like it’, they told us. That gave us leverage for negotiating with them.”

“You ask me, it was a good thing they had a reason to be nice to us, a different reason we were useful to the Domo... other than as a protein source, I mean,” Krish jokes. He looks at his sandwich for emphasis before taking another bite himself.

BC swallows hard. “They eat us, too?”

“Krish is exaggerating,” Anita assures BC. “We don’t have actual proof they do anything to us. They’re just unpleasant. And I hate watching their mouths move, it just looks wrong. But that doesn’t make them evil. Greedy, nasty, bloodsucking, fat, little bastards, yes, but not necessarily evil. We can work with them.”

“A little bit like the UTZ,” BC jokes.

Everyone laughs.

“They do drain your energy, though. I’ve felt it myself,” Krish says. “They are kind of like vampires.”

Dell clears his throat. “That’s where we were when you came back with the food and disturbed everything,” Dell looks down at Krish.

Krish laughs, “Ooooh, I’m hurt,” he says with sarcasm.

“Can we move on?” Dell asks them all.

“I thought you were moving on,” BC says to Dell. BC pops the last corner of his tuna sandwich into his mouth.

“I’m trying to,” Dell says, sounding all put upon.