Puny Humans – Part One: The Arm – Chapter Sixteen

Agent Ross checked the perimeter of Annabelle’s yard as soon as he noticed the trench.  With his flashlight, he wasn’t sure if he made out footprints in the dewy, scorched earth, but he was sure he could get a better view of it in the daylight.  Whatever had landed here, it was gone now, and most likely in the possession of a civilian, and the property of the US government needed to be taken back into custody by one of her agents.  The absence of lights inside or outside of the house told him that the occupants were either absent or asleep, and he was banking on the latter as he pulled his lock picking kit from his pocket and began to break into the kitchen through the back door.

:::+++:::

Annabelle was inquisitive to a nigh suicidal fault, but she did draw the line at getting into odd, windowless vehicles with strange men.  Though Sam had given her a brief rundown of their situation as she packed up some things and they gathered some food (despite Fred’s passive objections), she had maintained a healthy note of skepticism; a note which grew to a full chord of disbelief when they made it back to the huge tour van/RV looking vehicle that Sam and Fred called their “freighter”.

Sam noticed Annabelle’s growing reticence, and blinked a bit, putting together the pieces of her disbelief.   He was stepping toward Annabelle, reaching out a hand to her as his mind formulated a suitably reassuring response to her decreasing faith, when she suddenly shuddered, her eyes widening before she collapsed in a heap on the ground, wheezing faintly as her backpack slapped against her back and the spur from her middle finger shot into a nearby tree.  Sam blinked in shock, quickly kneeling next to her and assessing the damage, and just as quickly found the tiny tag of the laser bullet stuck to the back of her neck.  He looked up, his brow furrowing, as Fred shoved his side arm back into his coverall pockets and loaded up their cargo bay.

Fred wasn’t cold hearted.  On the contrary, he just knew how badly Sam managed to screw up conversations with girls he liked.  Not that he really cared whether Sam hooked up with some Puny Human or not, he just didn’t want him to say something that would make them have to chase her down through the increasingly dark woods. “Best to just tase her, bro.  She was going to freak out.”  Fred looked over to Sam apologetically as he opened the entry hatch.  “And anyway, it’ll be hard to argue with the story when she’s out of orbit.”

“Fine.  But no more shooting!” Sam grumbled in assent, and gathered Annabelle’s unconscious form into his arms as he rose to his feet.  He immediately regretted his gallantry, however. Annabelle was pretty, but far from petite, and Sam fell forward with a painful groan.  Fred shook his head and jogged over to them, helping Sam to load Annabelle into the freighter.

:::+++:::

A thorough sweep made it clear the house was empty, and though he had not begun to cut open the couch cushions in his search, Agent Ross was becoming increasingly confident that there was no space debris in the house.  Retracing his steps to minimize his exposure at the site, he made his way back through the kitchen, where his eyes stopped on the kitchen table, taking note of a clear blue tumbler he hadn’t noticed before.  Adjusting his latex gloves, he reached for the tumbler, and smiled as he looked inside.  A tumbler full of eyeglass screws is a slightly suspicious sight on its own, but Agent Ross thought he recognized the faint violet sheen of the metal.

Just as he reached into his pocket for a plastic evidence bag, he heard a rumbling.  Far enough that the noise was just short of deafening, and close enough that the house shook, a few dishes clattering out of the cabinets.  A layman might have mistaken the event for an earthquake, but Agent Ross had greater ken.  Stepping toward the window, he watched as the strange, but familiar blue lights rose from the woods, only to quickly disappear upward into the stratosphere.

“Crap, really?”  Agent Ross rubbed his temple with his free hand before pulling his phone from his pocket to call his supervisor.  His investigation was clearly going to require more man-hours.

Puny Humans – Part One: The Arm – Chapter Fifteen

Annabelle had no training with a flashlight, and unintentionally glared the beam of light directly into the eyes of the young men who knelt next to the trench on her lawn.  She shoved her metal hand into the pocket of her hooded sweatshirt, mentally chastising herself for forgetting her gloves as she looked down at the figures.  The shorter, round faced member of the grey jumpsuit-clad dyad appeared almost childlike in his momentary fear, clutching what looked like a PSP to his chest as he stared up at Annabelle like a deer in the headlights.  She almost smiled in sympathy at his awkward, messy blonde hair and obvious terror, but she remembered the comment about someone coming to kill her, and looked down to the figure that delivered it.  The taller of the two men shuddered in obvious agony, his dark hair falling into his eyes as tears glittered on his muddy cheeks.  They were both pale, even in the darkness, but this one was sheet white, as though he were going into shock.  She blinked in a mixture of concern and distrust, and clenched her metal fist tighter in her pocket, burying it further.

“Her,” Sam croaked, looking up to Annabelle.  Fred blinked, his free hand twitching toward his sidearm as he slid his console into one of his pockets. “She’s got the prosthetic, I saw her in the window.”

Annabelle paled at the revelation, and shrank away, taking a step back from them in the darkness.  The attempt to shove her hand even further into her pocket caused her to unintentionally lift her hooded sweatshirt, like a bank robber motioning with a concealed weapon.  It all but broadcast the truth of Sam’s statement.

Fred leapt to his feet in surprise, leaving Sam shuddering on the ground.  He pointed his sidearm at Annabelle, who whimpered reflexively.  It’s hard not to whimper when one points a gun at you, even if Annabelle could not immediately recognize what Fred held as a gun.  The strange square device seemed to have a cutout for Fred to grip, but what constituted a barrel was a deep black square roughly the size of a can of soup.  Like a snub nosed can of spam.  She shivered, lowering her flashlight, and looked pleadingly between the prone man on the ground, who seemed to be slowly recovering, and the stocky fellow still pointing the spam gun at her.

“Please…don’t…fire that thing…”

A Black Stop is a simple, but grave protocol.  In the event that an agent or element runs the risk of making contact with virgin soil, a Grey Stop is necessary to retrieve and/or contain said agent or element before it can contaminate an ecosystem or culture unfamiliar with it.  One simply conceals their presence to the best of their ability and engages their necessary business.  There are other reasons for a Grey Stop, a need for provisions, for example, and though such was the case in Sam and Fred’s situation, element retrieval was a strong priority.

If the agent or element makes contact before it is possible to contain or retrieve it, then a Grey Stop becomes a Black Stop, wherein all individuals and objects with which the agent or element has come in contact must be contained or destroyed.  Exposure must be minimized, especially on Earth.  Those bitches, as the manual states, be crazy.

Therefore, it was Sam and Fred’s solemn duty to contain or destroy Annabelle.  Despite her clear concealment in the long sleeved, hooded sweatshirt, Sam had already noticed her through the kitchen window, and had seen that the venusium prosthetic had replaced the poor girl’s hand somehow.  And while he was noticing her, he was becoming decidedly smitten with the first woman he’d seen in a while that wasn’t his mother, his aunt, or his supervisor, a feeling that only seemed to grow as she whimpered in worry, her eyes growing round and terrified, staring down the barrel of Fred’s sidearm.  So, for Sam, destruction was not an option, and he needed to make sure that Fred was on the same page.

Sam slapped Fred in the leg, breathing deeply as he recovered.  The nail and splinter sensation was slowly dying to a painful tingle, as though his leg had fallen deeply asleep.  Fred’s already weak resolve to shoot Annabelle began to dampen, and Sam reached out to her as he began to rise to his feet.  “If you want to live, you’re going to need to come with us.”

Annabelle blinked a few times as his statement processed through her stress-addled brain.  “You mean…come with me if you want to live?” The Terminator joke she desperately wanted to make as a defense mechanism refused to come to her.

“Yeah, sure.  Come with me if you want to live.” Sam looked down to her, brushing some mud from his coveralls and quickly tucking his own sidearm away into one of his coverall pockets.  Fred followed suit, his eyes shifting between Sam and the girl, growing increasingly uncomfortable.

Annabelle chuckled nervously, and smiled at the taller man, who seemed to be regaining his color, but still shook with weakness from whatever travail had befallen him.

“Okay, but I’ve got to get some clothes or something.”

“That’s fine.  We need some food.”

Puny Humans – Part One: The Arm – Chapter Fourteen

There is no man alive, on Earth or Rigel 5, who could take even a graze from a laser bullet without screaming in pain.  Less a method of execution (though the highest settings were assuredly lethal), and more a method of disarmament, laser bullets were a long range taser shot designed not only to inflict damage as necessary, but to trick the nervous system into believing that it is being consumed by overwhelming sensations, from white hot fire, to sub zero freezes, and any number of painful mind tricks in between.  In Sam’s case, or, more appropriately, in the case of the Rigel Shipping standard issue sidearms, the sensation was closer to having nails or heavy splinters driven into ones skin.

Sam had yet to adjust the damage settings on his sidearm; they were set to their lowest point, and the damage to his shin from the laser bullet was slightly short of sunburn.  He could possibly count on a few bruises as well from his fall into the ditch – the same fall Annabelle herself had taken only a few days earlier.  But the mind trick levels had been set to max.

Sam howled in pain from the bottom of the shallow ditch, a barely human noise that escaped him helplessly as the imaginary splinters and nails shoved under his skin, into his leg.  Fred’s eyes widened and he stepped back, holding out his console to illuminate Sam’s fall, trying to assess of the scope of the damage.

Sam shook his head, trying to breathe through it as he looked down – or up, really – to his leg.  No blood.  No broken bones.  No vague scent of bacon.  He could tell he was fine, but still his mind reeled with the sharp pain.  He struggled, trying to rise to his feet, but the effort forced another sharp cry from his lips as he stood.

Annabelle had heard the sharp buzz, and dropped the Buffalo wing she was eating.  Having tired of the diagnostic game, she had put the screwdriver away and retired to the sofa for pizza and TiVo.  She had assumed, however, that the electric shock noise was a sound on television, and went about finding the upholstery spray for the orange stain the sauce made on the couch.  It wasn’t until Sam’s scream of pain cut clearly through the evening’s silence that she realized there was someone outside.  Beyond the realm of rational thought – where normal humans might call the police or otherwise avoid becoming involved in someone else’s suffering – Annabelle pulled her hoodie on over her pajamas and wandered outside to investigate.

Fred reached for Sam, on his knees next to the trench where Sam had fallen.  “Someone’s gonna hear, Sam!  We’ve got to get out of here!”

“We can’t!” Sam gritted his teeth and grasped both of Fred’s arm’s, wincing and letting the tears rush from his eyes as the pain continued to cut through his leg.  “If we come back without that thing, you know they might burn down this entire forest just to get it back…”

“So what if they do?” Fred groaned as Sam released him, letting his friend fall to the ground and helping him to rise to his knees.

“Because they…” Sam stammered, stuck on the thought, mostly thinking of Annabelle, the thought of fire reminding him of the strange scarlet streaks that ran through her hair, and became nauseated at the thought of Corporate taking anything into their own hands.  “They’ll kill her…”

“Kill who?” Fred blinked, looking at Sam curiously as they knelt, pausing as he began helping him to his feet.

“Yeah, who?”  Sam and Fred looked up, blinking at the flashlight that Annabelle shone over them.

 

Puny Humans – Part One: The Arm – Lucky Chapter Thirteen

“This seems to be where it landed.” Fred stared down into the trench, his console illuminating the deep scar in the earth where the prosthetic had, in fact, made landfall. “There’s thermo-luminescence, but you can tell the thing burned from the scorches in the grass here.”  His sight had once again become compromised by the glow of his readout as they wandered the perimeter of Annabelle’s house, and he did not have Sam’s vantage; a clear view of the kitchen window, and the warm glow of the light above the table where Annabelle sat.

There have been many beautiful women born on Rigel 5, and quite a few of them in Larestra, where Sam and Fred had grown up.  But they didn’t often stay there for long, lured from the rough hewn relief colony by the glamour of the big cities; the universities and business sectors of the Bellatrix and Saiph systems were major brain drains, and the Betelgeuse pleasure colonies seemed to devour the young and beautiful like fuel composters.  As a result, their experiences with women were few and far between, despite the ongoing long distance relationship that Fred claimed to be having with a young coed from Gamma Gamma Orionis.

Annabelle was not movie star beautiful, but she would have no problems getting laid at Dragon*Con.  Sam was tired, hungry, disturbed by his mission, and spellbound.  The golden light of the kitchen glowed around her, and Sam’s eyes trailed from the surprising scarlet highlights in her messy brown hair, to the bright golden glow of her eyes as she stared intently at the violet-silver fingers of her prosthetic hand…

Sam gasped, his hand instinctively gripping his sidearm, even as his conscious mind protested the inevitability of their duty.  Fred looked up from the console as he heard Sam’s gasp, and spun around swiftly. “What, do you see something?”

He barely got thought out before he lost his balance in the spin.  Fred blinked and stumbled, his arm wind milling into Sam, smacking him squarely in the chest with his console.  As Fred regained his balance, Sam fell backward with a sharp cry, gripping the only solid object his hand could reach.  As he tumbled into the pit, his finger pulled the sidearm trigger.

The loud, electrified percussion of the laser bullet shattered the still night silence as Sam shot himself in the leg.

:::+++:::

Agent Ross looked up at the sky as the sharp buzzing sound cut through the stillness of the forest.  He squinted in the darkness; slowly turning his flashlight toward the sound, though he knew it was too far away for him to see from his vantage.  Since scaling the privacy fence, leaving his sport coat behind and trudging through the forest in his slacks, business socks, and the athletic shoes he’d had the presence of mind to pack, he’d successfully hiked at least 10 acres of woodland and unfinished construction plots.  The suspicious nature of the highly secure – but only half completed – neighborhood was enough to qualify for its own report, Agent Ross thought, but he’d worry about that after he’d obtained the debris, which was, according to his GPS, located somewhere in the direction of the strange electrical noise he’d just heard.  He grimaced.  If it had damaged a transformer or some such thing, the paperwork would be unpleasant.  He didn’t have much time to ruminate on this before the growling on his 7 distracted him.  Sliding a hand casually into his right pocket, he turned his head ever so slightly, glancing over his left shoulder.

Coyotes are highly versatile carnivores whose hunting patterns could be considered both ecologically and culturally influenced.  Coyotes who have been born largely trapped inside of the walls of a gated community and have learned to eat the garbage (and occasionally the small pets) of the human inhabitants therein tend to be markedly more aggressive toward people who trespass upon their territory than those otherwise unencumbered by human encroachment.  This one, in particular, was decidedly annoyed by Agent Ross’s presence, displeasure he made clear with the raising of his hackles and the baring of his healthy white teeth, which glimmered under the rise of the moon.

A flash of light was certainly the last thing it saw.  Agent Ross twisted quickly, flicking his knife with ease toward the coyote at the first twitch of a charge.  The beast didn’t have time to squeak before the flying blade lodged firmly in its eye, killing it instantly, silently.

Agent Ross frowned.  He approached the creature to retrieve his knife while considering his options.  Leaving it for carrion would probably make short work of it, he thought, and shrugged, relieved at one less hole he would need to dig this evening.  Pulling a disposable wipe from his other pocket, he cleaned the coyote’s gore from his blade before checking his GPS and continuing his trek toward the debris.

Puny Humans – Part One: The Arm – Chapter Twelve

The tree-lined road leading to Annabelle’s neighborhood delved so deeply into the woods that it evoked memories of the movie Deliverance.  Just as Agent Ross pulled over to the side of the road to check his gps, certain he was completely lost, his eyes caught the light of the small security shack, and made out the wide gate that closed off the road.  As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, with the help of the guard light’s yellow haze, he made out the figure of the sentry, quietly reading a novel in the shack, either unaware of Agent Ross’ car, or disinterested by it.  Ross sighed in relief, and drove a few feet forward, pulling a U turn to drive up to the gate.

“Can I help you?” The guard responded to Agent Ross’s arrival before he looked up from his book.  Agent Ross let the car idle in park as he held up his FBI badge “I’m looking into suspicious activity in the vicinity and I need to cross through, please.”

The guard remained nonplussed, his book still in his hands “Appointment or warrant?”

“Excuse me?” Agent Ross blinked, the hand holding his badge twitching slightly, as though subconsciously reiterating his credentials to the security guard.

“I need to see your warrant.  There are no appointments tonight, so unless you’ve got a warrant I’ve got to ask you to move along.”  The guard waited approximately 3 seconds for Agent Ross to produce said warrant before leaning back in his chair and opening up his book again.

“Look, I’m under orders from the US Government to investigate suspicious phenomena in the area – “

“And they didn’t give you any paperwork that proves that?” The guard lifted one eye briefly from his book, but didn’t seem too impressed by Agent Ross’s insistence.  “Look, if something weird is going on in there, I’m sure one of our residents will bring it to the attention of the homeowners association, and they’ll call the proper authorities.  But I haven’t heard about it, so unless you’ve got a warrant, I’m going to have to ask you to move along.”

The guard flipped a page, and Agent Ross grumbled.  He looked around his rental car, and blinked, grabbing the folded rental agreement and insurance papers. “Okay, here’s my –“

The guard interrupted him, not looking up from his book. “And don’t think I don’t know what a real warrant looks like, because I do.”

Agent Ross grumbled, setting the papers back down on the seat, and put the car in reverse, pulling away from the gate.  Pulling back onto the road, he looked over the high privacy fence into the dense woodlands, unbroken except for the occasional, elegant punctuation of high roof peaks topping out over the trees.

“How far out does this fence go,” he wondered aloud, and drove his car further down the dark forest road, far from the contemptuous flicker of the security light.

Puny Humans – Part One: The Arm – Chapter Eleven

Fred sighed quietly as they broached the tree line, and Sam looked around them, his eyes having adjusted to the descending nightfall more readily without a computerized display to read.  The thick wall of natural woodland that circled Annabelle’s home was moored on a downward slope, as the house stood tall at the top of the crest.  Hours of MAV games hadn’t prepared Fred for the actual rigor of climbing up a very real hill; especially since his difficulty settings were usually set to zero.  Sam seemed to be having less of a rough time with it, but that was mostly due to having longer legs.

“It’s coming from that direction,” Fred pointed toward the manse, though, with his eyes locked on his backlit display in the darkness, he remained completely unaware of it.  Sam, however – his eyes adjusted to the darkness – looked up, and then up again to take in the enormity.

Annabelle’s parents had done well for themselves in a way that only the shrewdly financial and shockingly brilliant can.  The physical manifestation of ones’ wealth body in the United States, more or less, is in the size and appearance of ones’ home, and in Sam and Fred’s home province of Larestra, the custom was not much different.  Larestra was, however, a rather modest relief colony on Rigel 5, where the most imposing buildings were the iridium buffer plant and the technical college where Sam and Fred had received their freight vessel operator training and taken a few pottery courses.  Annabelle’s parents lived in a structure that would have housed the governor and visiting heads of state, and Sam was unable to respond to Fred’s calculations, as his jaw had fallen to his chest, his eyes round as saucers.

“Sam?  What is it?”  Fred squinted, putting his display to sleep so his eyes could adjust to the darkness.

Sam dry swallowed, finally recovering his senses, and made a motion behind him to Fred. “Do you think anyone’s inside?”  Fred looked up questioningly when his eyes finally settled on the manor.  They had no real concept of French Provincial design, glass windows, or gas lights, but inhabited homes glow from the inside on Rigel 5 and Earth, and this one did not seem to.

“Good night!” Fred exclaimed, then gasped and clapped his hand over his mouth.  He spoke more quietly, parting his fingers over his still covered lips “Do you think their entire government has shut down?”

“I know.  It’s eerie.”  Sam shook his head.  He had no way of knowing that Annabelle, still calmly unscrewing her finger inside, had no need to keep the outdoor lights burning; she had retired to pajamas and, having already received her pizza and hot wings from the delivery person, expected no further visitors.

“Well, lets try to circle the perimeter and, with any luck it landed outside and we won’t have to trick anything out or break in.” Sam looked back to Fred, who nodded and reactivated his console, using the readout light to illuminate their steps as they followed the stone path through the landscaped gardens that surrounded the manse, his eyes tracking the blinking light that indicated the venusium’s position.

Puny Humans – Part One: The Arm – Chapter Ten

Annabelle was lost in thought, staring blankly at the plastic cup full of tiny screws. The package Josh had delivered contained the boxed DVD set of Star Trek: The Animated Series, the latest John Swartzwelder novel, and an eyeglass repair kit, complete with a delicate flathead screwdriver that had so far served Annabelle’s needs perfectly, those needs being to dissect and disassemble her new metal phalanges.  Her desire to know them inside and out had outweighed the reality that she would be taking apart her fingers with a screwdriver.

But her efforts thus far had been for naught.  Whatever sort of metal this new appendage was made of, it regenerated like the Terminator.  The cup at which she stared had been filled in entirety from her index finger, as no sooner would she drop a screw into the cup than she would turn to discover a new screw, shiny and precocious, nestled in the mooring hinge.

She never felt them. She could sense and touch with the fingers, the elegant elongated digits with the strange insets that looked like nails, except that they shot out like darts when she was startled.  She had done her best to remain calm ever since, but the woods around her house had been devoid of wildlife so far.  In between the unsolicited meteor and firearms, Annabelle imagined word had gotten around the forest community.

She sighed, and readied her screwdriver, quietly working the fresh screw from the hinge despite Einstein’s warnings about repeating a task in expectation of different results.  Though illness did leave her quick to tire, her dogged stubbornness allowed her to continue with difficult tasks or intricate, research intensive interests until long after more sensible minds would have declared the issues a matter of insanity.  It was rare that she lost a debate over which one of the Star Wars movies was better (it was, unquestionably, the Empire Strikes Back, and anyone who said otherwise was obviously suffering from some sort of criminal brainwashing), and her interest in the Hunger Games series had evolved into an obsessive compulsion regarding the maintenance of Peeta Mellark’s Wikipedia entry that nearly led to a series of menacing allegations between she and the other editors.  This task didn’t involve any regular browser refreshing or explanation of cinematic storytelling techniques, so she was content to lose herself in her thoughts, lulled by the rhythm of screw removal.

The silence was a comforting blanket into which she had snuggled without realizing it.  The woods devoid of life, her parents still absent, unaware of her recent anatomical additions or the collateral property damage.  Stillness fell over the breakfast nook at which she worked with all the crystal clarity of an undisturbed pond.  From every window she was surrounded by trees, her landscaped yard a sylvan meadow over which the setting sun began to cast a violet shadow.  The simplicity sharpened her senses, even within the comforts of her parents’ kitchen.  She noted the flutter of a robin taking roost in the marigolds just outside the window, and the sudden pickup of the wind in the trees as night fell.

But her house was large, and the surrounding woods were vast, and Annabelle did not hear the deliberate crunch of soggy twigs as Sam and Fred hiked up the hill, through the trees, toward the venusium signal that, unbeknownst to her, emanated from Annabelle’s new appendage.

Puny Humans – Part One: The Arm – Chapter Nine

Once upon a time, before all of the world’s money spontaneously burst into flames and normal, placid Americans began bartering sexual favors for medical attention, there was a dense, harmonious forest where men with pencils and dreams and seed money came to draw circles around spots on maps where they would clear land and build castles for the rich elite to come and rule their private kingdoms in secret and seclusion, out of reach, but within driving distance, of the Emerald City. Clearing an acre here and there, and the paths to connect them like the suckered tentacles of a cephalopod to the arterials of the rest of the city, barely nicked into the surface of the forest, so they remained largely hidden from view, and were therefore less of an embarrassment when the majority of the project was abandoned before completion due to dried up funding. Only Annabelle’s home, and a few more that peppered the denser woodlands, were entirely completed and inhabited.

From the sky above the neighboring tract, Sam had to rely on GPS and surface imaging to assure him that there was an abandoned clearing in which their freighter might be safe from aerial spies and other such pedestrian concerns. As oblivious as these Puny Humans tended to be about such things, Sam was facetiously confident that he could park the freighter in open view of one of their capitol buildings without raising any suspicions. And truthfully, he may well have. The standard Rigel freighter was about the size and shape of an oversized tour bus, but perhaps with a few more retracting awnings and oversized exhaust pipes.

A sweet zephyral bouquet of wild flowers accompanied the dense scent of pine, and Sam felt a little more placid with every breath he took as he waited for Fred to get a directional indication from their misplaced and activated prosthetic. “I really hope the thing has just eaten a dead squirrel or something,” he said offhandedly as Fred nodded over his global position device. The manual on emergency prosthetics did say that they can also be used for a variety of quick disposal tasks, such as carcass removal, and a temporary activation on contact was a distinct possibility, but the fear that the containment grid might be compromised, leaking loosely tempered Venusium onto a virgin planet, was a fear that even the hint of lavender carried on the breeze couldn’t quell.

“Hey!” Fred looked up from the beeping device. Sam looked over curiously, but he hadn’t taken the 3-week training course necessary to decipher the readout, so he blinked a few times at Fred from where he gently tapped his toe. “Okay, so this might be problematic.”

“Howso?” Sam frowned and stepped closer. Maybe he was just attracted to the bright lights on the console. “Do we need to dig it out of something?” He quietly began wracking his mental inventory to remember if the drill had been charged on their last stop or if they were going to need to get another battery from somewhere.

“I don’t think so, no, but get the shovel just in case.” Fred frowned as Sam turned to open the exterior supply hatch, quietly going through their shovels and other gardening supplies from their side job as landscapers. “No, it’s just really near what looks like a school, or a really big house or something”

“Oh, crap, that’s not good.” Sam blinked, nearly dropping his chain saw, which was charged. “Do you think anyone might have seen it? What kind of compliment are we looking at?”

“Just…I don’t know, it’s really faint, so maybe there is one. One!” Fred blinked. “Do you think it’s one person’s…wait.” Fred blinked and poked around a few more times on the console. “The prosthetic and the heat signature are bouncing around really close together.”

Sam nodded and frowned, putting the chainsaw and the shovel back into the compartment. “This is a Black situation.”

Fred’s expression became truly pained, and he nodded, the color fading from his face. “Yeah, I think it might be.”

Sam looked down, nodding again, and sighed with a slowly rising grief as he reached into the artillery compartment, tossing Fred his Rigel-issued sidearm and grabbing his own.

“You’ve got to do it when we get there, Fred. You’re the one who blew the hatch.” Fred swallowed dryly and nodded, holstering his sidearm as he trudged toward the indicated position. Sam gathered a large empty sack from the hatch before closing it, and made his way into the woods behind Fred, his face grey with morbid anticipation of their contractual obligation.

Puny Humans – Part One: The Arm – Chapter Eight

Established in the 1940’s as a preliminary venture into the process of examining and investigating extraterrestrial events and contacts, the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit was officially shut down by the Air Force in 1959, and no records of its existence have ever been released to the general public.  As such, it is generally established and understood throughout the Armed Forces, the NSA, CIA and FBI that the IPU is a defunct archival department of the government whose memory is kept alive by the deluded ravings of conspiracy minded alarmists.  The IPU was an experiment.  It does not exist. And the very same was summarized and reiterated in the first page of Agent Ross’ field handbook the day he was assigned to the unit.

Agent Ross’s duties as an agent of the IPU would be disavowed by the FBI if discovered, because they honestly would have had no knowledge of them.  The IPU’s continued existence as a shadow department of the US government was funded by a line item in the FBI’s budget requests labeled as “Library Fines.” Apparently no one in the accounting departments of the myriad Bureau field offices for which this request had passed had ever read a Doonesbury cartoon in their entire lives.

Contrary to most of the prevailing mythos of the paranoid, the Library Fines did not amount to the kind of dollars that paid for unlimited Special Operative man-hours or the teams of windowless vans and Black Hawk helicopters necessary to disappear people to the far regions of the beyond.  In fact, the Portland office line item this month would not comfortably cover the plane ticket to Seattle, and Agent Ross found himself gassing up his economy sedan for a road trip north to investigate the bogey that had landed in the woods to the east of the Puget Sound, while quietly cursing his luck that the Seattle IPU operative had chosen this week to have her stupid baby.