Alien Collective by Gini Koch Read Free Book Online

call. He stepped to a part of the room that no one was in and started speaking in a low voice.
    Buchanan was busy. I could trot over to eavesdrop, but he clearly didn’t want to be sharing. Fine. I turned to Serene. “Did your team happen to take care of hiding the bombs at the protest, or our removal from it?”
    She was texting on her phone. “No, Kitty. I just checked. Imageering didn’t have anything to try to alter. There was no footage of us being dragged away. They have nothing of use from Langley, by the way.”
    The word “try” wouldn’t have been used in relation to our imageers a year ago. But a year ago we were hit by the best hacker in existence, Chernobog the Ultimate. She’d not only wiped all our data, but she’d put some kind of anti-imageer bug into the digital systems worldwide. We still hadn’t isolated what it was that was affecting the digital feeds, but whatever it was, the imageers were blocked from all digital images.
    Considering imageering talent meant that said imageer could touch an image and know everything about the person in the picture, that they were blocked was beyond frightening. Film was still “seeable” for most imageers, but right now they could read digital just like a regular human could—with their eyes only.
    Christopher White, who was Amy’s husband and the most powerful imageer we knew of, said that pictures took copies of people’s minds and souls as well as their bodies. So whatever had been put into the digital airwaves was somehow blocking said minds and souls.
    Christopher would be with Jeff and the others at Langley, as would Kevin Lewis, who was Mom’s right hand man in the P.T.C.U. and also our Defense Attaché. We probably had other guys there I wasn’t thinking of, too, because that’s just how our luck ran. So everyone’s husband was in some kind of mortal peril right now, how nice. Except for maybe Serene’s and Lucinda’s. Got a nervous feeling in my stomach. “Can we see if there are more attack sites than the protest and Langley?”
    “Funny you ask,” Abigail said with no humor in her tone. “I’ve been checking our bases worldwide with William and Uncle Alfred. The Kennedy Space Center was just attacked.” NASA Base, where Jeff’s father, Alfred, worked, was part of Kennedy. “William had already put all bases on full alert due to the Embassy being attacked, so no one was hurt.”
    “Why is this happening?” Mona asked quietly, while the reporters chattered on about terrorist bombings going off all over. “I mean this kind of effort, right now?”
    “That is the correct question,” Olga said. And whenever Olga tossed off a really obvious hint, I paid attention.
    Unfortunately for those around me, I did my best thinking while running my mouth. I could give in and freak out about how half the people I loved could be blown up or I could continue to give calm and in charge a go. Really wanted to start freaking out, but instead went with thinking.
    So many weird and scary things had happened this afternoon, but the weirdest had to be the call from Nancy Maurer. Start there.
    “Missus Maurer called to warn me to leave the protest. But she called after the bombs had gone off there, and after our Embassy had been gassed. So why did she bother?”
    “Maybe she didn’t know what was going on, or where,” Culver suggested. “Just that something bad was going to happen.”
    Lorraine nodded. “She didn’t sound like she was what I’d call in the know.”
    “More like she’d heard something by accident and was trying to stop bad things from happening,” Claudia said.
    “That would make sense,” Raj said, looking at his phone. “I’ve been researching the Cleary-Maurer campaign while we’ve been here, and there’s a lot of press about how Missus Maurer is supporting her boy. It’s clear that they’re using her in a public relations capacity, but that also means they’re bringing her out to a wide variety of events, including