The Time of The Cat 21

TWENTY-ONE

THE TEAM

The next morning we met in the abandoned warehouse where we were going to meet originally. It was littered with the remains of some kind of packing material; cardboard and plastic with metal straps. Rudy and company were in a cleared area near some stacked-up wooden pallets that had probably held the items that had been enclosed in the cardboard boxes.

We greeted each other, and Rudy made introductions. His team was five in number, including him. I already knew three of his people, but the other was new to me. My job was easier; I only had to introduce Liz since the cat had been left snoozing in our black Mercedes.

We decided to go over the general plan first. I asked Liz to brief the others on what we were up against. There was a lot of disbelief on Rudy’s side. However, our story became more believable to them when we got to the part about the anti-matter bomb and the crater in Virginia. This part of the story provoked some exclamations along with a couple of curses.

“Damn!” Colin said. “So, that’s what caused that!”

Rudy interjected, looking at us, “What you don’t know is that we were sent to Virginia on a call from our employer. They are intensely interested in that event. Your ‘eraser bomb,’ as you call it, created a real stir, both on the part of NSA and the rest of Homeland and also a number of private corporations. We’ve been working for a private security contractor who has been using our services elsewhere. They would like to get their hands on whatever caused that crater.”

He looked at the other men in his group with an apologetic smile, “I’ve probably said too much, but, as you know, we go back a long ways. Dec will, perhaps, come to the conclusion that he should help us with our contract since he’s the cause of the situation.”

“Wait a minute, Rudy,” I said, “it wasn’t me that started this mess. The Pugs have been working on this for what seems to be a long time. Long enough, anyway, to have assets in place over most of the USA and also in a large number of places across the globe.”

“How do you know all this?” asked Chandra, speaking for the first time.

This was a good time for me to pull out the map., I spread it over the top of the stack of pallets. We all clustered around, and Liz briefed them on how to read it and what our conclusions were from our studies of the thing.

“How do you know that the transporter in Colorado is important?” asked Rudy.

“The answer to that is to be found on the back of the map and in this little book,” I replied, pulling it out. “We found this after we found the map.”

I flipped the map over and showed them the links off the Earth and then opened the book. I took the time to explain what we’d figured out about it. I did meet some disbelief with the idea of interstellar travel and the different occupants of the illustrated planet directory. However, they began to get involved in the story since it was a little too elaborate to be a practical joke. When I got to the EMP attack, they definitely sat up and took notice.

“That’s not funny,” said Colin. “We can’t let that stand. Too many people will be killed, and our whole society will go down.”

“That ain’t good!” added Joe, with a distinctive southern accent.

Finally, it was time to discuss what we hoped to accomplish. I explained that we’d decided that the best approach was to somehow destroy the Pugs’ ability to reach the Earth. They didn’t seem to be using any sort of spacecraft as shuttles to bring their forces down. According to the map, the only point where they were transporting onto the Earth was in Estes Park.

Liz thought that this allowed them to more easily secure the access point, so we could anticipate it being heavily guarded. If this were so, they’d be likely to keep a close eye on all transporters and roads leading to Estes.

This speculation seemed to be justified since the map only showed one transporter route into Estes Park, and that came through Loveland, a nearby town. There were two links in the system that led to Loveland. It was connected to Lander, Wyoming, and Pueblo, Colorado.

Pueblo was a dead-end, having only the single connection to Loveland. Lander connected to Loveland but was also connected to Carlsbad, New Mexico. This oddly structured bottleneck in the system seemed to allow the Pugs to more closely monitor comings and goings.

There was also a nearby connection from Dodge City that led to Denver. Dodge City was, for some odd reason, also linked to Singapore, but that was worthless for our purposes. However, Denver was just an hour’s drive from Loveland, so that was a possible alternate route.

It looked to me like the aliens were not much into automation. Their development apparently hadn’t made much use of computers. This was puzzling because we couldn’t envision how the transporters worked without a sizable cybernetic component.

I would have immediately placed computerized monitoring on the entire transporter system, but we’d seen no sign that they viewed the system as anything more than a series of doors that didn’t need much guarding. They seemed to be very confident in their plan, and so far, it was justified. They’d built a huge number of transporters, kidnapped a lot of people, and messed around with our financial system without being caught.

Those made me wonder if they had already been discovered but had somehow bought the cooperation of the people in charge of any investigations. Thinking about Liz’s boss didn’t really clarify the matter much. We thought he was collaborating, but we weren’t absolutely sure that a Pug that had stolen his face hadn’t replaced him. It would have had to speak better English than most of them, but that was a possibility.

Despite their apparent lack of monitoring the system, we wanted to be sure we got through, so we planned our approach through the transporters in two separate groups. One would go to West Texas and the other directly to Lander, Wyoming. We hoped that at least one group would get through.

The Lubbock, Texas, group was Rudy’s responsibility. From there, they would drive to Pueblo. As I mentioned, there was no direct jump from Pueblo to anywhere except Loveland, so driving was the only way to reach that end of the link. Once at Pueblo, they’d find the transporter and move to Loveland. Liz noted they could drive to Dodge City and jump directly to Denver, but then they’d have to drive on from there to Loveland.

Joe scratched his head and asked, “Why don’t they make things more direct?”

Liz answered, “I guess when you can go any distance instantly, any spot on the globe could be viewed as equally convenient to any other spot, so maybe they don’t have to worry about keeping transporters close to each other...but I don’t know. That still doesn’t explain it very well.”

Liz and I were going to jump to Lander. The map indicated that the in and out transporter stations there were separated by several miles, so we were going to need a vehicle once we arrived. When we reached the link to Loveland, we’d move there and wait for Rudy’s group to show up.

When they arrived, we would try to sneak into Estes Park through the single transporter link and raise hell with whatever we found. We hoped to be able to disrupt the Pugs’ operation and somehow shut down their ability to bring reinforcements to Earth.

As for the EMP problem, we thought that we would have to get the military involved. Liz and I didn’t think the Pugs had their own missile. Given all we’d seen, they had arrived on Earth with less equipment than a human expeditionary force would think adequate. They apparently thought they could steal or confiscate enough of our weapons to take us down. It looked as if they were probably correct, especially if they could get hold of a missile capable of reaching Earth-orbital altitudes. This wouldn’t have to be extremely large, but that depended on the size of the warhead that they would use. On that point, I hadn’t a clue, but I imagined that it would probably be smaller than any of ours. That is if they used their own technology and didn’t simply steal and use one of our own nukes.

Everyone tentatively agreed that this rather sketchy plan was about the best we could do, given the lack of time and lack of specific information from which we were suffering. Rudy said that he thought the Pugs would be forced to launch sooner rather than later because of our actions. He had some good military connections and thought that he could alert them to be on the lookout for anything suspicious happening with our store of missiles.

Our access plan relied on keeping the Pugs unaware of our approach. If we were able to keep their response unbalanced, it might mean that we could sneak into our objective before they had a chance to fully prepare a reception. By dividing into two groups, we hoped to ensure that at least one got through.

The next phase of our meeting involved various weapons and other equipment. We first tried the communicators that Rudy had brought along. I placed an earphone in my ear and turned on the small battery pack while Colin walked away with another one.

“Range of three-thousand meters, and the battery will last for four hours of continuous broadcast. Turn them on standby, and your body heat will slowly recharge the battery.” The sound came in stereo. I could see Colin talking and hear him while the earpiece echoed his speech in my ear.

Joe handed out survival gear, bullet-proof assault vests with first-aid packs, and night vision units. Levi provided a choice of conventional weapons with ammo. We vetoed the nine millimeters. They were too light to really stop a Pug, as Liz’s attempt to kill them with her Glock had demonstrated.

It was a bit of an argument since Levi, an ex-Ranger who was apparently an excellent marksman, and Joe favored the round, especially when used in a sub-gun. Joe had a great deal of kinetic experience in urban combat settings. We won out by simply showing them our two eraser guns.

When I pulled them out of their case, there was a collective gasp, and everyone gathered around, wanting to handle them. I called a halt to that impulse immediately by simply pointing one at a box lying at the far end of the warehouse and pulling the trigger. The box obligingly disappeared with a crackle. Then I looked at the guys and said, “There is no safety on this thing. When you pull the trigger, something WILL be destroyed. Make sure it isn’t one of us.”

Well, that slowed them down a bit. After visually looking the weapons over, Levi asked if he could try one, and on my assent, he picked it up, shouldered it, pointed, and clicked the trigger. Unfortunately, he happened to be aiming at the wall at the end of the warehouse at the time. The gun did its stuff, and a hole appeared in the wall and rapidly enlarged until he released the trigger with an exclamation. The blast had narrowly missed Chandra Singh, who exclaimed loudly, “You need to go back to basic training, you crazy, stupid Jew!”

It was pretty egregious of Levi. To give him credit, Rudy commented that he’d never seen Levi shoot anything by accident. I think that he hadn’t really believed the eraser gun was a real weapon. It did have a rather toy-like appearance since it was very light and made mostly of a plastic-like material.

“The next shot will take your head off if you call me ‘crazy or stupid’ again!” Levi retorted. He didn’t mind being called a Jew since he was proud of his heritage, but he drew the line at insults to his mental acuity.

“That is an example of what I’m trying to tell you,” I said, trying to distract them before things became more acrimonious. Chandra was a demolition expert, and we really needed him with his head intact.

“The hole is going to attract attention, but I’m still glad you made it. I learned something by watching.”

Liz interjected, “The gun continues to project the anti-matter field, or whatever it does until the trigger is released. It looked like you could successfully wipe out targets of any size.”

I finished up with, “I’m not sure of the range. It may keep going until it hits something to destroy, or it may eventually attenuate due to erasing molecules in the intervening atmosphere. In any event, I also don’t know how long the power supply will work, so let’s reserve these for actual targets that we want to make disappear.”

There was a general agreement on that point. I then reached into the bag and pulled out the four other eraser bombs that I’d managed to shove in my pockets before blowing the armory. I explained that these worked about the same but were incredibly powerful and needed to be used with extreme caution.

“No worries, boss,” Rudy responded. “We have been out to the collapsed crater, and it’s pretty seriously large. Did you say just one of these did that?”

“Yes, and we were on the other side of a transporter portal, so we didn’t have to worry about getting caught in the blast.”

I couldn’t think of what else to call it. I’d heard there was a fairly loud boom when it went off, but it was more of an implosion than explosion. I thought it was probably like the one made by a lightning bolt vaporizing the atmosphere and leaving a vacuum. The vacuum causes a thunderclap when the air rushes back in. That must have been the cause of the boom. In either case, it was obvious that the eraser bombs had to be reserved for use when extreme prejudice was required.

We also took a couple of minutes to demo the splinter-shooters. Unfortunately, we only had the two of them, and Liz and I were keeping those. I regretted not gathering more of the weapons at the armory, but I hadn’t felt we could carry any more weapons at the time. I rationalized that the chances were pretty high that we’d pick up more sooner or later. I could see through the indicator that both of ours were down to their last quarter load. In addition to several bricks of C-4 and detonators with timers, Rudy brought some other useful tools. I made a mental note that the C-4 could be handy to blow up transporter cubicles if there was no time or space to use one of the erasers.

We finished outfitting in good spirits. Rudy seemed confident that the exotic weapons we’d liberated from the Pugs would be helpful. We broke up into couples as we left the warehouse. We’d meet at the Steinway building in Astoria that housed the transporter in precisely thirty-six point five hours.