Contagious

It heard.

It found the Mather gate location.

It brought the military... again.

So close.

Successful worker design in itself wasn’t enough to get the job done. The Orbital changed tactics.

Batch fifteen worked perfectly. It dispersed near Parkersburgh, West Virginia, and produced six hosts—all of which made it to the woods near South Bloomingville before hatching.

Batch sixteen fired only a few hours later, spreading over Glidden, Wisconsin.

Fifteen and sixteen hatched in record time, built their gates in record time. The Orbital activated the South Bloomingville gate as a decoy, drawing the human military.

The sonofab.i.t.c.h found both gates.

After all of these near hits, the Orbital had only two probes left. If those did not work, the entire mission was a failure.

It had to change strategy again.

The large explosion that destroyed the Marinesco gate demonstrated that humans could react quickly and with overwhelming force. Placing the gates in secluded areas had seemed like the best strategy at first, but it also allowed for ma.s.sive ordnance without much risk to local populations.

The workers also needed protection. They were designed to hatch out of hosts and then build, not fight. They could kill, but were far outmatched by the human forces responding to each gate. The workers needed defenders, something to occupy the human forces, fight them long enough for workers to activate the gates.

Since defenders would not build the gate, they did not need the template. That was good. That opened a new strategy. Because the new defender design didn’t need a template, it could do something that the template-carrying embryos could not—the new design could reproduce.

The Orbital began modifying the next batch of seeds.

FUN WITH SNOWMOBILES

The Jewell family reunion was turning out to be a smas.h.i.+ng success, and Donald Jewell couldn’t have been happier.

Granted, there weren’t that many Jewells left.

Ma and Pa Jewell had gone to that big snowmobile trail in the sky. Ma five years ago, Pa less than six months later. They left behind their three children: Mary, Bobby and Donald.

Mary Jewell-Slater now lived in London with her husband. She couldn’t exactly fly overseas to see the family every Christmas. She called.

That was enough.

Bobby Jewell now lived in Ma and Pa’s house. He’d married his college sweetie, Candice, and promptly kicked out a bundle

Donald, the eldest member of clan Jewell, had divorced his b.i.t.c.h of a wife, Hannah, four years earlier. Hannah won custody of Betty, then twelve, now sixteen and hotter than a five-dollar pistol. Hannah moved from their home in g.a.y.l.o.r.d, Michigan, to Atlanta, taking Betty far away from her family. The divorce stipulated that Donald got Betty for every other holiday. So the first Christmas with Hannah, then Donald and so on.

This was his second Christmas as a divorced father.

Donald—now living in Pittsburgh—talked to his daughter at least every other day on the phone. They also chatted on webcam, emailed and even wrote some old-fas.h.i.+oned letters. They were as tight as a father and daughter separated by seven hundred miles can be.

Mostly from a distance, he’d watched his daughter grow from a gangly twelve-year-old into a stunning teenager who could have graced the cover of practically any magazine. She looked exactly like her mother, which annoyed Donald, because that made him hate Hannah just a little bit less.

He had thought he might be biased about his daughter’s looks, but when he showed pictures of her to his co-workers, their lewd hoots confirmed his fears. Those hoots had also, unfortunately, generated a couple of fights.

The same temper Hannah cited in the divorce papers hadn’t gone away.

His court-appointed psychologist called it “impulse-control problems.”

The shrink prescribed pills. Donald lied and said he took them. Everyone was happy.

His baby girl was growing up fast, and he didn’t want her to lose touch with her family. Thus the family reunion. A flight for Betty from Atlanta to Pittsburgh, then an eight-hour drive from Pittsburgh to g.a.y.l.o.r.d. Did they dread the drive? Nope, they got to talk the whole way up. Donald learned more about hot music, hot clothes, school gossip and backstabbing friends than he cared to, and he loved every minute of it.

Once she was back in g.a.y.l.o.r.d, the Southern Girl faded away and the Northern Girl came back to life. Betty hadn’t been on a snowmobile in two years, yet she hadn’t lost a step. In a white snowsuit on a blue snowmobile, she raced across an open field, with her father only fifty feet behind her and closing. Even over the roaring Arctic Cat engines and the whipping wind, Donald could hear her laughter. Let’s see Hannah compete with this. Bobby was at least a hundred yards back. He just didn’t have the aggression of Donald and, apparently, Betty.

Betty shouted something. Donald thought it was Try and catch me, old man, but he couldn’t be sure.

Bobby owned this whole area. Some places in the world, twenty acres was considered an “estate.” Near g.a.y.l.o.r.d, Michigan, twenty acres was just called “some land.” Mostly old cornfields, along with tall green pines, skeletal winter oaks and birch stands. Bobby lived smack in the middle of it all in total isolation—it took two minutes just to reach his house from the road.

Betty followed the trail into a left-hand bend that cut around a stand of pine trees. She slowed to start the turn, then gunned the engine, accelerating through the curve. She disappeared from sight for just a few seconds as Donald came around the curve behind her.

When he saw her again, he felt his nuts jump into his chest. Up ahead, the trail crossed a snow-covered road, and on that road was a brown and white Winnebago moving along at a good clip.