Who were the Sentinels? Who was Nick Nicola? How did he know so much? And most importantly, could what he had said about Tessa Barrett be true?
It was painful to even contemplate. What if what I had with Tessa wasn’t real? What if I was being played by a woman I had come to love with a passion so immense it was almost frightening?
The nanites could ease physical pain, but not the excruciating emotional pain I would suffer if this proved to be true. It would be the ultimate betrayal, impossible to forgive, even if the entire galaxy was at stake.
As we whipped through the sky on the way to a hidden island, I was desperate to confront her, hoping against hope that she’d be able to offer a convincing denial, but terrified that she wouldn’t.
Still, I fought off the urge. I needed to know what Nari planned to tell us first, before making a move that would reveal Captain Nicola as being more than just a clueless mercenary, and change the complexion of everything.
I’d have discounted what Nicola had said about her, except that it answered a number of questions. How Tessa could be so damned amazing. How such an amazing woman could fall for me in the first place, when she could have any man in the world. And why Nari had arranged to put her in my path.
So I sat in silence on the way back to the island, sulking and licking what could well be imagined wounds, while Tessa was visibly concerned about my well-being. I’d have blamed my uncharacteristically morose mood on a headache, but with nanite MDs coursing through my bloodstream, this was no longer a valid excuse.
Brad had sent a local team to rescue us, but had remained on his private island. He was there to greet us warmly upon landing. Tessa had called ahead to provide him with an outline of what had happened, but saved most of it for the full debriefing he had requested with Nari present.
I, for one, couldn’t wait to complete the debriefing so we could have our private meeting with Nari. Once this was completed, I’d have some hard choices to make. Some possible confrontations to initiate. But I needed it to happen quickly, before I couldn’t help but demand answers from Tessa, or give away what I was feeling.
Tessa asked to delay the meeting for an hour to give us time to shower and depressurize, and the colonel readily agreed. I insisted that Tessa shower first, which gave me time to check my cloud account. Sure enough, Nick had already placed a file with his name—his alias—inside.
The video was only eighteen seconds long, but it was filmed outside, and I could see Milad Tower rising into the sky off in the distance, an unmistakable Q-tip-shaped landmark in downtown Tehran. Tessa’s unit had been wiped out in the ambush and were in pieces on the ground, but Tessa had been taken prisoner for reasons unknown. Perhaps they thought a stunningly beautiful woman would make an ideal hostage, or perhaps their leader wanted her for himself. Regardless, after disarming her, they dropped their guard, and in that moment she struck, so quickly and precisely that the five men she wiped out seemed frozen in place by comparison.
It wasn’t pretty, but it was conclusive. Tessa had been enhanced at the time. The footage left no doubt. It wasn’t dated, but it had to have been before she was supposed to have been injected with nanites, since we hadn’t spent a single night apart since that time.
Unless the video wasn’t real. Definitely a possibility given the technology I had seen recently, which would make a perfectly faked version child’s play. Still, I found it quite disturbing, to say the least.
I showered in a daze and soon found myself back in the same conference room we had been in before, overlooking the ocean.
Déjà vu all over again.
But what a difference a day made. This time dawn had yet to break. And when I had left the island less than twenty-four hours earlier, I had never been inside a UFO, traveled into space, faced an alien with murderous intent named Michelle, or met a member of an organization named the Sentinels.
Oh yeah, and I had never seen a wild kangaroo, but that somehow didn’t seem quite as remarkable.
Brad was with us in the room, joined by Nari’s hologram, and we began. I let Tessa handle the entire debrief up until the part when she’d been hit with a dart. She was a military professional and did a better job of conveying relevant information than I could have, and I was still reeling from the possibility that she wasn’t what she seemed to be.
“Jason?” I vaguely heard the colonel say, as if his voice had traveled through a mile of cotton. “Jason?” he repeated. “Are you okay?”
I shook my head to clear it. “I’m fine,” I replied.
“Are you sure? I just asked you twice to pick up the baton from Tessa, and you seem to have completely zoned out.”
“Sorry. A lot on my mind. And I didn’t need to listen to Tessa, because I lived it.”
“That’s true,” said Brad. “But you also seem uncharacteristically . . . subdued. You’re positive everything is all right?”
“Positive.”
The colonel didn’t look entirely convinced, but didn’t press. “Then can you go ahead and pick up where Tessa left off. I’m sure you can guess where that is.”
I nodded. “There isn’t much to tell. The man calling himself Captain Nick Nicola shot her with a dart, and pointed a gun at my head. I heard a shot and was sure I was dead. But—spoiler alert—I wasn’t. He had killed his three comrades instead, surprising them.”
Nari recoiled as I spoke, even after setting the AI to sanitize our report in real time, aware that the debriefing, especially Tessa’s part, wouldn’t be pretty. So the AI was transmitting a euphemism-laced, slightly defanged version of the actual story to him.
“Why did you say the man calling himself Nick Nicola?” the colonel asked. “Did he tell you that name was an alias?”
“Uh, no, he didn’t. I just wouldn’t be surprised if it was.”