The Time of The Cat 16

SIXTEEN

HOTEL

Liz and I had gone nearly to the outskirts of town when I came up with our next step, “Let’s find someplace to stay for the night.” Sometimes I’m so brilliant that I astonish even myself, but the fact was, I couldn’t come up with anything else except to delay while we thought things over.

“Yes, let’s. I’m tired,” she assented.

Not too tired, I hoped. I usually find women somewhat distracting, but she was the most distracting one I’d ever encountered.

We got on the interstate and headed west through Virginia. After driving for only about fifteen minutes, we pulled off and located a hotel. It wasn’t anything special, but the rooms all had outside doors. I thought that might be good since we had to sneak Jefferson into the room, and I didn’t want any hassles about pets.

We brought our weapons and kit into the room, and I drove around to locate another vehicle while Liz and Jefferson cleaned up and rested in the room. I figured it was about time to dump our white SUV. It was pretty scarred up from the road incident, and that made it easy to recognize. I wasn’t specifically looking for another M-Class, but I found one parked in a shopping center parking lot.

This Mercedes was black and exactly as easy to lift as the white one. I walked up to it and broke the antenna off to prevent any tracking. Then I used my electronic key spoofer and was shortly on the way back to the hotel. Before I got there, I stopped and changed the tags with those I found on a junky-looking pickup. I figured the pickup owner wouldn’t notice the different numbers for a long time. Considering the shape of his pickup, it looked like he didn’t pay much attention to it.

My two companions were waiting when I got back. I cleaned up, and then we left the cat in the room while we walked to an adjacent cafe for some supper. I had a rather greasy hamburger, and Liz had some chicken strips. She wrapped a couple of them in a napkin and tucked them into her pocket.

When I looked surprised at this, she smiled and said, “I’ll bet you’re so involved in trying to come up with a way to set the Pugs back that you didn’t even think that the third member of our team would want something to eat.”

“Oh. Right! I should have thought of him first,” I admitted.

We made it back to the room, and Jefferson greeted us with a rather irritated meow. He cheered up tremendously when he received the chicken pieces, “Now this is more like it.” You could practically see his thoughts. “Maybe those humans aren’t totally hopeless after all.”

He ate carefully and then licked his whiskers thoroughly. Then he nosed the bathroom door open a crack and disappeared. We heard him use the toilet with a tinkling sound followed by a flush. We looked at each other and burst out laughing. That was one smart cat!

“I’m next,” I said and went into the bathroom, pushed the door closed, and sat down. Five minutes later, I came out.

“What’s with you?” she asked. “You look like you lost your best friend.”

“Liz, I’ve tried to come up with an idea, but the best I can get is to try to reach the transporter that they’re using to come onto the Earth and then see how much damage we can do,” I was pretty dejected at my lack of a viable plan.

She looked sympathetic, and after a bit, I added, “It seems to me that the only link off the planet is the one we saw in the book and on the map that was in Northern Colorado. That one transporter may be the key, but I’m not sure. I guess we’ll just have to go there and see.”

“I don’t want to depress you, but the situation is even worse than we thought,” she said as she looked through the little book she’d picked up. “The first part has the list of planets that we looked at before. That part is useful in that it shows the connections off the planets to local moons or asteroids.”

She continued, “There’s a second part that we didn’t look at. Or rather, you didn’t look at it since you were so excited about understanding the meaning of the list of planets. I’ve been trying to intuit the meaning of the last three pages while you were answering your call of nature.”

“What did you come up with?” I asked.

“It’s bad if I’m correct. You see this picture here? I think it is an illustration that represents setting off a massive nuclear burst over the central part of the country. It has an atomic symbol that is almost the same that we use, and this must be a rocket. The pages have a symbol that I think is a key. I found the same symbol on the page with Earth.”

“Let me see that,” I took it from her hands. “Hmm. It looks as if they want to create some fancy fireworks. The picture shows it exploding at a very high altitude. See this line. I think that represents the edge of the atmosphere. If that’s so, the missile will be – “ I paused. “Oh, damn! It’s an EMP burst! They’re planning on disabling all of our electronics and the power grid.”

“That’s what I thought,” she interjected. “The electromagnetic pulse will blow all electronics that are un-shielded. They must have used this technique against other civilizations before. I looked and found the same key on a couple of the other earlier pages. That must mean that they used an EMP there also.”

I knew that only last year, the US House had authorized action to defend America’s power grid against an EMP or solar storm, but the Senate eliminated the contingency plans. The thought of our lack of providence made me shake my head in dismay as I answered, “We’ve had coronal mass discharges before, which caused problems with the electric grid, but the historically bad ones occurred before people were so dependent on electricity and all that it does, so they were largely non-events for society. Our cell phones will go out. We won’t be able to pump gas even if our cars will still start, and it’s far from certain that cars won’t have their electronics fried. Hell, even the food we rely on will spoil without refrigeration, and we won’t be able to get clean water.”

“That domino effect,” she added, “would cause deaths in the millions.”

“Yes,” I agreed. I’d read some reports that hypothesized the likely outcome, and I told her about it, “The cities will have a death zone surrounding them that extends outwards about a hundred to one-hundred and fifty miles. Most people will not be able to travel farther than that on foot before they starve to death. The ones that leave first will actually be the ones that are more likely to get through. The ones that leave later won’t have enough food and will find all of the resources have already been stripped. By then, they will also meet extreme resistance by the few survivors in the area.” She nodded in agreement.

“This is clearly not something our society ever wants to experience firsthand, it could lead to millions of casualties,” I added. “I’ve read estimates that suggest that an effective EMP attack would leave nine out of ten Americans dead. It would likely be at least as bad for the rest of the electricity-dependent parts of the world.”

“What a way to neutralize all of our defenses,” she was thinking out loud. “They’d be able to move in and eat the rest of the population with hardly any resistance.”

“OK. Now we really have to come up with a smart way to throw a wrench in their works. I vote for finding some reinforcements and heading to the link off the planet. That is probably the point at which we could disrupt their plans. If we could stop them from getting here, even for a while, we could try to get organized to counter their invasion. Maybe we could use the anti-matter grenades to blow up their interplanetary connection,” I realized as I said it that my plan was weak, but I was completely out of ideas.

She interrupted my reverie momentarily, saying, “There are already a lot of the aliens here that will have to be taken out also.”

“I wonder exactly how many they have here now?”

“I don’t know, but I believe a lot of them. When I was a captive, I saw a bunch of movement back and forth. It looked like Pugs coming in and humans going out somewhere,” she answered as best she could.

She had a very worried look on her face, and I couldn’t take it. It really seemed to tear me up emotionally.

“What are you doing?” she exclaimed as I moved over to the couch and sat down and put my arm around her.

I ignored her question and bent my head to kiss her. Her next vocalization was a sigh, and she relaxed into my arms.

The cat gave a snort of disgust or perhaps derision and turned his back on us as he settled down on the armchair and pretended to go to sleep.

It was a long night, but we both felt like a million dollars the next morning. The promise of a sunny day with nice weather cheered us, and it seemed like we had fewer limitations. We were also enjoying each other’s company, and that made everything look more positive.

We got ready to go out. Liz fed the cat while I searched in my bag and eventually pulled out a couple of burner phones that I had stored in my office desk and brought along, just in case.

They were inexpensive cell phones with pre-paid minutes. I had purchased them in Walmart several months ago. Normally, I keep one or two at every one of my “offices” for emergency use. They have gotten so cheap that there is no reason not to have several.

I will mention that some of the cheaper ones, especially ones that are unbranded, come from factories in Southeast Asia and can be loaded with spy software. Someone, a while back, tested several of these phones that they’d purchased off the Internet and found enough malware in them to make them very undesirable. They were loaded with software that would grab your credit card number and any passwords that you used and forward it to some unsavory people elsewhere on the globe.

Liz looked on with interest and commented, “Burner phones, huh? Are you sure they’re secure?”

“No.” I explained to her, “I generally purchase a specific brand that I have a hacker test several times. He never found any malware in their internal code, so I think that I’m relatively safe using them. Nevertheless, I keep my conversations short, mostly ambiguous, and never, ever mention names.”

She grinned, “We were briefed on their use. My trainers indicated that burners were a curse on our law enforcement work. They wanted those types of phones to be made illegal.”

I smiled in acknowledgment and reminded her that I was more interested in privacy in my activities and appreciated the phones.

Now that we know the true extent of our own government’s surveillance, not to mention the snooping by hostile foreign powers, people in my line of work are very reluctant to use phones at all. I use a voice distorter and a cheap cell phone that I discard after one call. Any snooper can still hear the content, but the disposable phone keeps them from tracking a known number linked to my name. Changing phones often keeps them from following numbers that have had “interesting” conversations.

To help keep any hostile systems from latching onto more than the meta-data of a call, I always spoke in careful generalities and didn’t mention any keywords that automated voice recognition systems might glom onto. I carefully limited my calls since the meta-data can be quite damaging. It contains the approximate location of both parties, the time, and phone numbers with associated names, if any.