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Federal Recovery Office
Prescott, Arizona
“WHAT DID YOU FIND, BEN?” Nathan asked. He and Stella were standing behind the boy. He was still seated at the old desk, with Erik Landers’s laptop open in front of him. The sun was low in the sky and they had been getting ready to go home when Ben called them upstairs.
The boy looked over his shoulder at his uncle. “I thought you’d really want to see this,” he said. He tapped the keyboard, and a digital image opened on the laptop’s screen.
“Well ho-lee shit,” Nathan said, bemused.
“Is that what I think it is?” Stella asked.
Ben nodded slowly. The image was poor quality, taken in low light without a flash, but there was no mistaking the subject of the photograph. The slender body, the large, hairless head, the grayish skin, and the large, dark, eyes. It was one of them.
“When was this taken?” Nathan asked.
“The image is date- and time-stamped and geo-tagged,” Ben said. He brought up the image’s properties on the screen. “It’s only about six months old.”
“Those are coordinates,” Stella said. “Lat-longs.”
“They are,” Ben confirmed. “I ran them through the map program. It’s in Brazil. As near as I can tell, the coordinates are close to the location of a prewar resort town. It’s been officially closed since the Amazon is overrun with alien wildlife.”
“If you were a bunch of UEA holdouts on the run from the US government,” Stella said, “that would be a good place to go.” Brazil didn’t have a collaborator extradition treaty with the United States the way other countries did. The country had never really recovered, having been subjected to both orbital bombardment and occupation during the war. “They could be Sagittarius Faction.”
“Could be,” Nathan agreed, rubbing his chin. The Sagittarius Faction was a terrorist group made up of fanatical alien loyalists, convinced that their extraterrestrial benefactors would return from Mars and liberate the world. “There’s a pretty good standing bounty if you can bring in a living extraterrestrial, isn’t there?”
“Mm, depends on the classification,” Stella said. “The more common they are, the less money we’d get.” The Sagittarian civilization was a complex hierarchy, with a small number of elites on top, and several subservient classes below that. Each class was engineered for its role in their society, and they all had been programmed to instinctively comply with the will of their masters for the good of their species.
“That’s definitely not a Brute,” Nathan observed. “They’re more muscly than that. Bigger, too. All of ’em were over six feet, some over seven.” The hulking Brutes occupied the bottom of the aliens’ civilizational hierarchy. They had limited cognition and no free will. Essentially meat robots, they were used to carry heavy weapons and do labor-intensive tasks.
Ben nodded. “Look at the doorway it’s standing next to. It’s pretty short.”
“The head, too,” Nathan said. “The Brutes have thicker skulls with a ridge that goes down the middle. This one doesn’t have that.” He looked at his nephew. “What else can you tell from the picture?”
“Look at the shape of the head,” Ben said. “Look how big it is compared to the rest of its body. It’s hard to tell from this picture, but . . .” He trailed off for a few seconds before looking up at Stella. “You don’t think that’s a Bright, do you?”
“I think it is,” Stella said. “Nate?”
Nathan nodded his head. “I think so, too, for the reasons Ben suggested. It’s hard to be certain from the photo, but I’d say the odds are good.” The Brights were the alien ruling class, the product of countless generations of genetic engineering. These beings had seemingly absolute power over the rest of the Sagittarians. They were exceedingly intelligent and the lower classes were conditioned to unquestioningly obey them.
“Look at this marking,” Ben said, zooming in the picture. There was a line in the alien’s flesh that went down the side of its face. “What is that?”
Nathan and Stella both leaned in. “Looks like a scar,” she said. She looked at Nathan. “That’s strange. Brights don’t make a habit of doing anything that would risk giving them a scar like that. From what we understand, they live like royalty.”
“Who knows?” Nathan asked. “Maybe it slipped in the shower.” He patted Ben on the shoulder. “Either way, damned good work, boy.”
Stella furled her brow. “The question is, what do we do with this information? The aliens that got left behind on Earth are supposed to remain in the Demilitarized Zone in Africa. That was part of the terms of the surrender of the United Earth Alliance and the Treaty of Khartoum. According to the regulations, we’re supposed to report this to Homeland Security.”
“Homeland Security can eat our asses,” Ben said.
Stella’s eyes went wide. “Benjamin Foster!”
“No, he’s right,” Nathan said. “We hand this information over, we won’t ever be able to try and use it ourselves.”
“You’re not thinking of going down there,” Stella said. “There’s no way that thing is alone or unguarded. If Erik Landers was doing business with this group, that means its people are armed and ready to fight.”
She wasn’t wrong, Nathan thought. Assuming the alien was even still there, trying to infiltrate its hiding place alone to capture it would likely be suicide. Even getting down there would require paying some hefty bribes to the local authorities.
Nathan sighed. “You’re probably right. Good work all the same, Ben. We probably won’t be able to do anything about it ourselves, but maybe we can sell the information to someone with more resources than us. For right now, though, I say we head home. It’s getting late, and I’m hungry. Nothing will change between now and tomorrow.”