What they seem (UC-CC,M/T I/A M/M,ADULT) Part 15 Jul 31 2007

[Chrisken]

Part 11

"Okay, we need to settle on some groups to split up into, I think," Max said a little while later. The entire group was mostly crowded into the Valenti's hotel room, which was a pretty tight fit. "Four groups makes sense I think."

"One for... for each of you alien kids," Amy Deluca said, sounding more than a little shaken by the idea.

"Yeah," Tess said to her softly. "That way, there's... there's always someone with the power, the strength to protect their friends, no matter where Amarie or her creator might strike."

"And whichever group I'm with should be staying back here at the hotel," Maria reminded them out loud.

"That's my group, I think," Isabel said, smiling faintly at Maria. "My powers tend to run that way... good at long distances and co-ordinating other people, rather than direct, umm, field operations, as it were."

"Yeah," Michael said softly, though he obviously regretted that he couldn't be the one to make sure that Maria would be safe. "Umm... Laurie, babe, you wanna be in my group?"

"Sure!" Michael's sister replied. "Can Kyle come too?"

"Uhh... okay I guess." Michael didn't really have any problems with Kyle backing him up in a crisis, as much as he liked aggravating the athletic and popular kid when he had a chance to. "That... that'll pretty much fill us up, won't it? Twelve people total, four teams, means three people to a team."

"*Very* good, Michael!" Tess said, applauding his feat of arithmetic. "Umm... mister Valenti, Miz DeLuca - how about the three of us team up?"

"Okay I guess." Amy smiled affectionately at Tess, and Jim nodded.

"Alex is with me too," Isabel called out, to nobody's real surprise. "Umm... okay, that leaves..."

"Sean and me," Liz realized. "...and Max." There were quite a few glances exchanged at that. Max didn't seem particularly upset that he'd be guarding Liz, but Tess and Sean clearly weren't wild about the way it had gone. Liz herself seemed more undecided. "Okay, good enough I suppose. Are there specific team assignments for the three fielding teams?"

"Umm, not really," Max admitted. "Maybe if we're moving openly around town, they'll show themselves. We need more information."

"Maybe I could examine the scene of... of Liz's struggle with Amarie," Jim said doubtfully. "There might be some kind of clue there." He looked about awkwrdly. The groups had made so much sense a moment ago, but nobody else in Mister Valenti's team had been there for the original incident - only Liz, Sean, Michael, and Maria knew anything about it from personal witnessing.

"Okay," Liz said, "I can show you where to look on our way out." Jim nodded. "That seems to make as much sense as anything else."

"Okay," Michael muttered. "How about one team goes into town, and one moves along the beach?" Michael suggested.

"Okay I guess," Max said. "Anybody have any preference--"

"We'll take the beach," Sean blurted out. "Just wanted to decide it quickly."

"Alright, that works for me," Kyle said. "Let's go."

----------

"Okay," Jim murmured thoughtfully. "So, *she* - Amarie, that's as good as anything else to call her right now, after Michael knocked her away from you, she went out that door?" He pointed to the heavy door at the base of the stairs, a thick metal pushbar running just under the window, and below the bar, a warning that opening the door would 'sound siren.'

"Yeah," Liz muttered, looking at the door thoughtfully and frowning just slightly. "She... she didn't run immediately, there was kind of a momentary tableau, or nearly that. And then she took off, and - and there wasn't any siren or alarm or anything."

"Maybe she had android powers, to turn off the alarm systems somehow," Tess said in a low voice.

"Perhaps," Jim agreed, moving towards the door. "Or maybe..." Before anyone could stop him, he pressed solidly on the crossbar, opened the door about halfway, far enough that he could have gotten out if he'd wanted to, and looked out. There was no sign other than some gasps and mutters from the kids present. "I think that there never was an alarm, just the threat of one." Jim shrugged. "Or that the management turned it off, for whatever reason. Maybe Amarie knew that, or maybe she just didn't care."

"Okay," Liz said. "We should head into town soon - do you want to see where I first met her?"

"Please."

So Liz showed them the spot where she had first met someone who she thought was Maria at the time. "I was, was pretty much right there," she whispered to Mister Valenti, pointing at the nearest part of the pool, which was almost crowded with other hotel guests now, "and she came in from this passageway, and led me back through it when I agreed to go with her."

"So you came right from the pool?" Tess asked, and Liz looked up at her. "Umm... just wondering, when did you stop to get dressed? I mean, considering that Sean was hurt after your encounter with Amarie was over, and..."

"Hey, that's enough," Sean said, stepping protectively close to Liz and putting a hand on his shoulder.

"Yeah, Tess," Max said in a low whisper, more gently but still somewhat firm. Tess looked at him, and then blushed slightly, realizing how snarky her question could have been taken as. Possibly she'd even meant it that way, but if so, only out of habit. She really *didn't* want to add any more fuel to the feud between herself and Liz... especially not considering what she'd already taken away from the other girl.

"For the record, I didn't really change until we got back to the rooms, like an hour ago," Liz replied. "Grabbed the things I'd had on earlier and put them on over my swimsuit, which was kinduv annoying considering how much running around we did." She sighed. "Took like forty-five seconds." Tess shrugged apologetically.

"Well, I guess this is where we split up," Sean put in.

"Actually, no, let's leave by the main entrance together," Valenti suggested, catching Amy DeLuca's hand in his. "Then you guys can go into town, and we'll circle around the building and look outside that door. Seems like it's the best place for us to start." Max nodded, and they headed down the corridor towards the lobby. A uniformed doorman, impressively bright and straight, was standing by the main entrance. "Hello, sir. Call you a cab?"

Tess blinked in surprise. "How come there's never been a doorman here before?" The words came out more suspicious and accusing than she'd have liked.

The doorman's handsome dark skin seemed to acquire even more color for a moment. "Um, hotel policy, ma'a-- miss... urr, miz." Flubbing the honorific so badly was apparently disturbing him even further. "The position is only staffed weekends - from Friday afternoon through Sunday evening."

"Ohh," Amy said pleasantly. It made some sense... and several of the group checked the readouts on their watches or otherwise appeared to be sorting out the days of the week to verify whether it was, indeed, now a friday. "Well, have a nice day, and no, we won't be needing any cab I think." She looked over at Liz, who shook her head. "Yeah."

So they went out, and Max, Liz, and Sean quickly took the footpath leading across the hotel lawn and towards town, while Jim led the other team around the wing of the building that contained the pool. "I have to admit, I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking for," he admitted under his breath. "Never tried to chase an an-droid before - at least, not that I know of. Still, might as well keep our eyes open and see if we see anything."

"Yeah, that sounds like good advice to me," Tess replied, and sighed softly before looking around. "This was *not* what I wanted to be doing on my vacation. Why does weird stuff always pop up whenever we're trying to have a nice, dull time?"

"I... I could come up with a few joking replies to that," Amy said softly. "But... but I guess I shouldn't." She sighed, and Tess looked over at her, feeling a smile come to her face. "I guess it's annoying that you and Max had to split up, for teams."

"Mmm," Tess replied, wondering if Amy was trying to draw her out about the fact that Max had been paired wiith Liz - AND with Liz's new guy. But right then, Jim distracted them both by making an interested sound as he looked down at the pathway behind the hotel, which was bare dusty earth. "What is it, Mister V?"

"Well, maybe nothing, and then..." Jim squatted down, waving the ladies over, and Tess got carefully onto her hands and knees to take a close look at the patch of earth that was apparently the subject of the ex-cop's attention. "There's a mark of discoloration there, yeah?"

"I guess so," Tess agreed, and Amy nodded a bit blankly, sitting down next to Jim. "Umm, what does it mean?"

"Could be nothing. It's very hard to say, this long after the incident," Jim admitted. "But Liz said that when Michael tore part of Amarie's face away, the cut leaked a clear fluid,"

"Yeah," Tess agreed. "Maybe it was some kind of weird motor oil or lubricant."

"I was wondering the same thing," JIm admitted. "And if a drop or two of some kind of lubricant landed on the ground and soaked into the dust, you might get a spot like that."

"So?" Amy asked. "It... it doesn't tell us anything we didn't know already. Unless..." She frowned, trying to work the unfamiliar ideas through her head. "Unless there'd be some way we can track the way she went with these spots?"

"Yah," Jim muttered. "Seems a bit unlikely, I have to admit - we probably wouldn't be able to follow far, because eventially she'd come to a place where the trail wouldn't show up at all, or where it'd have been washed away or worn away. But it'd be worth something just to know in which direction she headed after leaving the hotel."

"Okay," Tess said, and got up to resume their original progress along the wall, keeping her eyes open sharply. "Wait a second," she said, realizing something belatedly. "I can try to probe that spot - that might tell us if your hypothesis is solid or if we're barking up the wrong tree."

"Probe it?" Amy repeated doubtfully. "Umm. assuming that this has no connection to the jokes about alien probes, then I'm still not sure what to make of it." Jim shrugged blankly himself.

"It's something I've been trying to teach myself about my powers," Tess admitted. "We've all been able to make changes in molecular structure, almost instinctively, without any real awareness of the mind-numbing details of what's really going on at a molecular level. But I figured that it should be possible to get information the same way. I was using it earlier to test Maria, and make sure that she was the real deal, not a robot impostor." Tess sighed and returned her attention to the little spot of dusty earth. "The problem is, I'm not that good at recognizing unfamiliar molecular patterns, and I'm not sure what molecules an alien lubricant would be made out of."

"Hmm," Valenti considered that question weightily. "That's a tough one. I think lubricants are made from a bunch of chemical bases - just so long as the molecules end up liquid and slippery at the right temperature and pressure. Some are made out of hydro-carbons, and some have silicon compounds in them." He sighed. "Not very helpful, I know."

"Maybe it helps a little," Tess said, and extended her powers into the spot. "Oooh!" she exclaimed in surprise after nearly a minute. "I... I think I got something. A... a weird kind of chemical compond... heavier atoms in it than usual componds, umm. What's heaver than oxygen, but works the same way, with two molecular linkies?"

"Chlorine," Amy filled in absently. "Chloro-fluorocarbons?"

"Yes!" Tess replied. "Except, not quite. Chloro-fluoro-silico-carbons?? Does that make any sense??"

"Yes, it could, if I remember my chemistry," Valenti agreed. "Chloro-fluoro-carbons work by replacing the hydrogen and oxygen in more ordinary organic compounds with fluorine and chlorine. If you replaced some of the carbons - then silicon would be the next step up to replace them with, I think." He took a deep breath. "Can you somehow 'scan' for this stuff and find it without us needing to find a visible trace first??"

"Hmm," Tess thought about it. "I... I've never tried that sort of thing before. Not sure how well it would work... or how quickly the effort would tire me out."

"Alright, well, give it a shot in a minute," Valenti suggested. "And keep an eye on your energy reserves or whatever. Don't keep at it if it's draining you too fast. Better to poke around using just our normal human senses than do without your protection against androids or alien android makers, I think."

"Umm, yeah," Tess said softly. It had occured to her that if she ran low on energy, the most sensible thing to do would be go go back to the hotel rooms and meet up with Isabel and the others... which sounded like more fun than wandering around here android hunting. But she couldn't really drain herself on purpose, just because it would get her out of distasteful work. That wasn't the right thing to do, and Max would be disappointed in her. Plus, they might all pay the price for that sort of laziness later on.

When Jim nodded at her, as they fanned out over the field next to the hotel, (which was partly dusty and partly grassy, with green stuff sprouting in odd circular patches,) Tess tried to scan a good-sized chunk of the field, and gasped at the stabbing weariness in her chest. "Oh, okay, I shouldn't have done that," she muttered. "I... I think I can only look with this sense in a fairly narrow cone. I can check a small area, fairly close, but not magically find what we're after over a large area."

"Okay," Jim said, taking whatever disappointment he felt in stride. "But I think I see something myself." He pointed at a clump of grass that had been partially pulled out by its roots - Tess had noticed it herself and not paid much attention, thinking that kids had been having fun tugging at the grass leaves. But now that she thought about it - if a slightly wounded robot, who didn't know her own strength, had been hurrying across this field, and tripped over the grass, she might have left a mark like that.

They continued along the same direction from the corner of the hotel in the direction of the torn clump and straight beyond. About forty feet further on Mrs DeLuca spotted another faintly colored spot of dust, a little to the right of their path and Tess confirned her alien chemical residue there too. Valenti corrected the course slightly, from the torn grass towards the second spot, and pointed his arm ahead to see what lay in that direction. The route went across a street, and towards a small convenience store and parking lot.

"Do you think that she might have gone inside?" Tess asked.

"Maybe," Jim allowed. "Or maybe she had a car waiting there, or a confederate driving a car. Or maybe she went past the store entirely." He sighed. "I think that we need to investigate there next, though."

"Great." Tess sighed as they crossed the street, still looking for anything unusual.

------------

"Okay, wait a second," Alex said after they'd been alone for a few minutes. "Do... do I have any homework to do up here, or am I just here to keep you girls company?" He grinned. "I, I mean -- Maria, you're here so that nobody confuses you for Amarie, and Isabel, you're here to protect her, and to serve as home base in case one of the other aliens wants to try 'calling in' with your as-yet-rudimentary mental powers."

"Are you thinking you wanted to be with one of the other teams, Alex?" Isabel asked with a sly smile.

"Um... no, definitely not," he admitted. "But I'm feeling a bit useless here. Might have been able to contribute more with Max's team, if you hadn't all been so set on having exactly three people per group."

"Well, I do have one idea," Isabel said, coming up beside Alex and hugging his arm to her. "Tapping into whatever kind of computer network they have here in the hotel, maybe reaching out from there to the police station or anywhere else promising that we can reach from there on a network. I... I have to admit that I'm not quite sure what we'd be looking for, but it's something to pass the time."

"And something that just so happens to fall into one of my areas of expertise," Alex admitted. "Okay, but - well, we don't have a computer in any of these rooms to use as an interface - you might be able to interact with computer circuits directly, but I don't think that I'd be able to help much if you're doing it all in your head."

"You have a computer, of a sort," Maria countered. "Or maybe Michael still has it..."

Alex caught the reference quickly. "My palmpilot? He *did* swipe it??"

"Yes, he did yesterday," Maria admitted, "but he said that he was going to give it back or put it back. Don't think there'd have been a chance last night, but maybe he put it back in your bag this morning."

"Could be, I guess. I don't think I checked," Alex said, and the three of them slipped out through the hall from Isabel and Tess' room, where they'd been sitting on the beds and desk chair, into Alex/Max's. Sure enough, Alex was able to find the little handheld digital unit fairly quickly - all that was required was to reach into his suitcase, actually. "Okay, next problem... this isn't really designed for anything even remotely like what you're talking about, Isabel... It isn't capable of networking to other computers. I realize that you can probably handle the physical connection, as it were, with your powers - but there's the software angle. The unit hasn't been taught what to do, how to do anything useful about communicating with external systems."

"Yeah, I got that impression," Isabel admitted. "But... but I've been practicing a bit this spring in terms of interfacing directly with computers, and so I think I can compensate for the software issue. Just, sort of, take control of the screen of that unit, for both display and stylus tapping, and the handwriting recognition space etcetera. They'll get routed through to me, instead of the usual processor and core software of the palm pilot."

Alex grinned. "Just like that?" Isabel shrugged, a little uncertainly. "Well, how about we try that part of it, before worrying about hooking you into the hotel network too?" He opened up the cover of the PDA and turned on the screen, waiting to see if Isabel would be able to do anything with it.

For a few seconds it was just the regular palm applications listing. And then that suddenly cleared, and a new display quickly drew itself. A very familiar cross-hatching in heavy, perfectly straight and even black lines, two up and down and evenly spaced, the other two from left to right across the small screen, a similar distance apart so that their pattern of crossing formed a square in the center of the screen, with eight vaguely squarelike (but not enclosed) regions surrounding it. Across the top, in dark blue newspaper font, the word 'Tictactoe' was spelled out, along with a little yellow smiley face and a tiny purple rose. On the bottom of the tictactoe board, after a moment, a message to 'tap the square you want to play in' appeared in the more usual small palm font, slightly greenish perhaps.

Smiling, Alex tapped one side square, and a bold brown X appeared therein, followed a few seconds later by a purple O in the center. They played out the game quickly - Alex tried to lay a trap for his darling girlfriend, but Isabel was too canny to step into it, so they ended, to neither's surprise, at a deadlocked cat's-eye pattern. By the end, Maria was standing next to Alex and watching the screen as best she could, while Isabel stood a little ways away, not even facing in his direction as she concentrated. "Okay, I wanna play this time!"

"No," Alex corrected gently. "You can have the palmpilot," and he passed it, and the little black plastic fake-pen that he used to tap on the screen, to her. "But Isabel has to come up with some kind of different interface or diversion, no second game of tictactoe." Isabel turned around to look at him, and the calm intensity of her regard almost hit Alex with physical force, but she nodded, understanding the point. Providing an interface to the hotel computer system would be much more complicated than tictactoe. She had to at least experiment with maintaining more and more complex, and varied, screen displays.

After several different games and demonstrations, Isabel collapsed onto Alex's bed. "Okay, I need to take a breather I think. That's more tiring than I expected it to be." She sighed. "And anyway, maybe I should check in on Michael, just to see how he's getting along."

"Hmm." Alex considered that, flipping up the palmpilot and putting it in his shirt pocket, where it made a heavier weight than anything he was used to keeping in there, but not a terribly uncomfortable one. "Do you think it'll be hard to use your mind to reach Michael that way? I heard about the thing with Liz, when Max was in New York."

"Yeah," Isabel allowed. "But part of what made that so difficult was the distance, and Michael isn't nearly so far away. Also, we've trained in this just a little bit - because it seemed, after the New York thing, that it was a trick I'd probably have to use soon again. Max, Tess, and Michael have become a bit more familiar with the sensation of me 'walking' into their subconcsious mind when they're awake, and are learning to recognize it, and concentrate on communication when it happens."

"Couldn't we just call Kyle's cell phone?" Maria thought, and then grumbled at herself. "No, dammit, it didn't work on the Bermuda network, did it?"

"We should *get* cell phones that'll work here on the island," Alex pointed out, aware that he was stating the obvious. "They're too useful to go without."

"Anyway, I'm trying." Isabel sat up on the bed, and concentrated. Alex crept carefully near, and Isabel silently took his hand in hers, and pulled him close, so he sat down next to her, After nearly a minute, Isabel spoke. "I... I got through for a moment. He's telling Kyle and Laurie what's going on, so that they don't worry." There was a pause. "Oh, whoops! Laurie has a cell phone that works here in Bermuda. She's gon..." Just then, of course, the phone next to Max's bed started to ring. "...na call us here in the room."

Maria smiled slightly and went to pick it up. "Hey, girl. Um, yeah, okay, put him on." She turned to Isabel. "Michael wants to talk to you this way instead, I guess." Isabel nodded and went over to get the phone. "Hey, Michael?"

"Yeah," his voice came back through the connection. "Listen, I had a picture of Maria with me and tried showing it to a few people here on the beach. Actually found a few people who recognized her coming through a few hours ago - and it doesn't sound like it was really Maria, coming through with you and Alex. You didn't go to the second pier east of the hotel and get into a little boat, did you??"

Isabel blinked. "No, definitely not - we went way down the coast and swam in all by ourselves." She considered that. "So... if that was Amarie, getting away after confronting Liz... that suggests that she and whoever she's working for might be based... umm, either somewhere else on the coast or on another island?"

"Yeah," Michael agreed. "Um, waita second, Kyle's here." There was a momentary pause, during which Isabel tried to catch Alex and Maria up on what Michael had just told her, and not getting very far before he was back. "Okay, Kyle found someone who was able to tell us the direction that her boat went off in, for whatever that's worth. Mostly straight away from shore, bearing maybe twenty degrees to the right."

"So tending towards the east north-east?" Isabel said, and Michael made an 'ehh' sound. "Okay, find out anything more you can around that spot of beach, and then come back to the hotel pretty soon. This may change our strategy."

"Gotit. We'll call when we're coming in," Michael agreed. "Can you put Maria back on for a moment?"

"Sure," Isabel said, and left Maria as alone as she could without leaving the room, not wanting to intrude on their private moment. So she repeated everything that had been said of interest to Alex, and he smiled and went searching through his luggage, finally finding a small map of the island and surrounding ocean that he'd bought on the cruise tour boat. By the time Maria had hung up the phone, Isabel had found a ruler and a pen, and was hoping that they wouldn't need to scrounge up a protractor.

"Okay, the piers are marked like this, so Amarie's starting point would be here," Alex said, tapping with the pen. "And considering the general vector of the shore, a heading twenty degrees left of perpendicular would put Amarie's last known heading in this direction."

"Of course, she might not have continued long on that heading," Isabel put in. "She might have just been wanting to get a certain distance from shore, and then start circling around."

"No," Alex agreed. "We don't know... unless Kyle's witness saw her going quite a long way out into the ocean. However, if she DID stay on course... " He arranged the ruler and drew a straight line with the pen. It intersected a small brown-green spot.

"What... what is that," Maria asked.

"C- cannonball island," Isabel said. "The old pirate hideout."

"Oh, boy," Maria muttered, frowning.

----------

"No, her hair was very bright, and she was wearing, ummm..." I sighed, and looked towards Liz. Suddenly brightening, she fumbled in her bag, found a cheap digital camera, and fiddled with it for a moment. When she showed the camera to the nice man in the dark uniform, it showed a picture of Maria that Liz must have taken early that morning, before the android incident hit. She was wearing a halter top and a long-ish skirt, with a flower tucked into her hair. I nodded approvingly - that camera would be useful. The policeman, (or whatever he was, though that seemed like a good way to express his function as far as I could tell,) considered a moment.

"Yes, I saw her pass this way a while ago," he said. "Was further up my beat, perhaps three blocks that way. She came up from the beach, and headed towards the hotel. Were two other young people with her."

"Yeah?" Sean said. "What were they like?" I was curious about this myself. Confederates of Amarie's??

"Both wearing beach clothes, not cover that much," The uniform-guy continued. "One another girl, taller, lovely with blonde hair. Hourglass figure. And a young man around your age, with dark hair, skinny with ears that stuck out."

"Okay, thank you sir," Liz said, and turned away, I followed her. "Isabel and Alex... so that was our Maria, not Amarie. Right after she found them on the beach, and before they headed out looking for, umm, for Kyle and Laurie." She sighed. "Well, let's try showing a few other people the picture in the camera, just in case."

"Yeah," I replied. "But, umm, obviously we shouldn't head in the direction that they came from, and that they went to." Of course, the direction they went to was the one that we'd come from - the direction of the hotel. And since they'd come up from the beach, continuing on straight seemed as good as anything else. For a while nobody said anything. "Do... do you remember the time we were, umm..." Sean shot a look at me that was sharp enough to make me completely forget what I was talking about. "Erm, never mind." Yeah, if I were in his situation I wouldn't want Liz's old ex-boyfriend trying to stir up nostalgia for old times - especially not when the old ex-boyfriend had a new girl. But it seemed so weird to be staying silent.

"As - assuming that we find out where Amarie went - or where the people she's working for might be," Liz said softly. "What - what do we do about it next? Charge in with all of your alien powers blaxing??"

"Hmm," I considered that. "Not sure. I want to confront whoever's behind it, just because it's a weird thing to be hanging over us. But... but no, there's no need to move too fast once we've got a line - especially if they don't know that we know what we know."

"That's a good point," Sean allowed. "We can afford to wait and watch a bit, though splitting up to look for clues right away made some sense. See what they'll do if you're sitting pretty."

"On the other hand," Liz put in. "If they get too scared, they might do something that could hurt people. We don't want that."

"Yeah, but us doing nothing isn't more likely to scare them than us doing something," I argued. "Or, at least, it shouldn't be. Heck, I don't really know."

We asked a few other people if they'd 'seen this girl', and didn't get any more hits. After about an hour, when the thread of civilization that we'd been slowly following was fading out, Liz called the hotel, talked with Alex for a little while, and said that the other groups were coming in. "Apparently, Michael and Tess had more luck, though they're not sure how to put the whole thing together. We should go."

"I'm down with that," Sean agreed. "But do we have to walk all the way back?"

"No, I think there should be a bus or something along the road over there." Liz waved vaguely in the direction away from the shore. We headed off, waited with a bunch of other people at an unmistakeable public transit stop... but were surprised to find a very old-fashioned looking tram instead of a bus. Liz and Sean got seats together, and I had to stand up, holding onto a railing and trying not to bump into other riders with all of the stops and starts, but it was kinduv fun to take a trip that way anyway. Ran much quieter than a bus, too.

I was expecting that we'd be the last group to show up at the hotel, but Tess, Mister Valenti, and Amy Deluca didn't show up until a few minutes later. There was all of the usual palaver about figuring out where to gather, since none of the rooms were really big enough for all of this. Eventually, a bunch of people decided that they didn't care about the tense android crisis discussion, and so Sean, Kyle, Laurie, and Amy went off to watch a movie in Laurie and Amy's room, and the rest of us crowded into the room that I shared with Alex, for our war council.

To me, the most interesting part was the sighting of Amarie getting into a boat from the pier on the beach. Like Alex and Isabel, I wasn't sure if the fact that the boat started off heading towards Cannonball island was important or just coincidental - it was certainly evocative. And then, there was Tess' report of having tracked the trail of android lubricant up to the convenience store.

"We asked around at the store about her," Tess said. "None of us had a picture, but I was able to describe the outfit that she was wearing this morning, and the guy behind the counter said he thought he remembered a blonde girl with a flower in her hair, and some kind of weird scratch on her face."

"Hey," Maria suddenly exclaimed. "Mom, you don't carry a picture of me with you??" She then realized that her mom wasn't in the room. "Oh, umm..."

"I - I think that she usually does," Tess said. "But she forgot to grab her purse when we were setting out."

"It's kind of beyond the point, too," Michael said. "No offense honey. But did he remember what she BOUGHT??"

"Yeah," Tess replied with a sigh. "Scotch tape, tin foil, and some engine oil."

There was a moment of silence after that, which Liz broke. "And nobody else at the store remembered her? Might be able to tell us, say, which way she went when she left?"

"And did she actually pay for that stuff?" Alex put in.

"Yes, she paid, with American money, mostly coins," Jim filled in. "And no, nobody else admitted having seen her."

"Okay, so does this all fit together?" I asked. "Michael catches Amarie in the middle of interrogating Liz, and scares her off. Wounded, bleeding drops of lubricant, she heads off to the convenience store and buys that stuff. Was she hoping to do some emergency self-repairs?"

"Sounds like she just might have," Maria agreed. "Oil to replenish whatever she lost. The foil could be used to, I dunno, make wire connectors or something, and the tape to fasten the tear together without being obvious."

"It'd still look weird if anybody DID notice that she had tape on her face," Isabel argued. "Why not just get bandages? Did they have bandages?"

"I... I'm not sure," Tess replied. "But bandages would be more immediately obvious, even if less fundamentally strange. Maybe she would think that wasn't a great tradeoff."

"Okay, then," Michae continued. "But she crosses the street to go to the convenience store, and then has to cross back to get to her boat. Were the repairs that important?"

"Maybe she really needed to get the cut patched as well as she could before getting into the boat," Jim argued. "Couldn't risk getting much spray and water inside."

"Yeah, that makes sense," Tess agreed. "I was wondering if maybe she had a car waiting in the convenience store parking lot, and going inside was just a momentary idea. But that doesn't really fit with the boat idea. A car would be more trouble than walking, between the convenience store and the pier."

"So, we've got some stuff sorted out," Liz summarized. "On the other hand, we don't seem to have any idea yet what Amarie was up to BEFORE she came to me. She might have come straight from the pier to the hotel - or maybe not, we're not really sure." She sighed. "The big question is... what do we do now?" She looked at me meaningfully.

"We don't give away that we know about the boat connection, like by hiring a boat and sailing around ourselves, or... or driving a motorboat, or whatever the right word. We try to see if we can find out anything about recent activity around cannonball island, or any other places she might have been heading to." I yawned a big yawn. "But not right now. Most of us have had a busy afternoon, and we've made some headway. Relax tonight, and continue the investigation tomorrow??"

"I think I'd concur with that," Jim agreed, and there were other muted cheers of concurrence, even from Maria and Alex, who I would have thought hadn't been doing that much, but come to think of it, staying shut up in here during the day had probably been stressful.

Tess got up and came close, speaking to me softly. "Can... can we go out to dinner together, Max? Please??"

I looked down in her eyes, realizing that she wouldn't have phrased anything that way unless she was... well, I wasn't quite sure how to label her mood at first. Everything that had happened that day flashed through my mind, including the bus ride together, which she had been so excited about, and which had been interrupted not long after it started. Also getting split up for the teams... Tess liked Mister Valenti and Amy DeLuca fine, but she had obviously been a bit upset at seeing me working with Liz and Sean, and not wanting to show it.

I leaned forward, putting an arm around Tess' body and pulling her close, planting a tender kiss on her forehead. "'Sit okay if we take off for a little bit?" I asked out loud so that everyoen could hear. Liz turned and blinked a little... I know that she still gets a bit upset whenever anything coupl-ey between me and Tess gets terribly obvious, but I didn't care about that at the moment.

"Fine by me, Maxwell," Michael answered with a tight smile. "I'm not going to let my girl out of sight for a *long* time right now." He looked at Maria, who was kinduv nestled into his arm - they looked very sweet standing together like that. "Dinner downstairs?" he asked Maria a little more quietly, but loud enough that I could hear. "I realize that you've been cooped up in here all afternoon, butit still doesn't seem smart to--"

"Great by me," she replied a bit louder. "I don't need to go out on the town, spaceboy - all I need is you. But the restaurant sounds good, better than room service, for now."

So things got sorted out pretty quickly. Kyle and Laurie decided to go down to the restaurant with Michael and Maria, and everybody else opted to stay in for the room service. Tess disappeared into her and Isabel's room for a minute or so, and emerged in a pretty white sundress and a hat. We got into the elevator, just the two of us.

"I... I'm sorry if I'm being high maintenance or whatever," Tess suddenly blurted out. "I, I don't really have much experience with this sort of dating or whatever, so I'm not entirely sure about the etiquette."

I smiled at her. "I'm not really an expert myself, and somehow, of everything that could possibly happen in the entire galaxy, you following 'etiquette' just because someone else decided that it's etiquette is about the last thing I'd ever expect to happen." Tess reacted for a fraction of a second as if I'd physically slapped her, and then suddenly the fact that I was calmly smiling penetrated, along with the non-spoken 'and I like you just fine that way.' "Probably better that you let me know when you need something from me, and I'll make sure to let you know what *I* need, and hopefully we'll always be able to work it out."

Tess smiled. "And is there anything particular that you need right now?"

"Umm... can't say that anything occurs to me," I said. "Looking forward to spending some time with you, I have to admit. Do you want to try the steak place at the other end of town?"

"Well, I didn't know that there was one, but sure." Tess chuckled. "How much of a walk is it?"

"Um, around fifteen minutes - maybe even twenty." Sigh. "Of course, there's still a rental car in the hotel parking lot that nobody else is going to miss if we take it."

"Oh, right," Tess said, her blue eyes dancing slightly as she considered the possibilities, and then dropped her gaze, doing that eyelash-fluttery thing, and I had to wonder if she was pulling it on purpose. "Probably should make sure to remind mister V about that when we get back, and figure out what we're going to do about it tomorrow... if we're going to need a car enough for the rest of the trip to keep it, or at least until the Amarie situation is sorted out, or if we give it back now."

"Yeah," I agreed, but didn't speak any further about that sort of thing right now.

"Of course, neither of us actually has car keys," Tess pointed out.

"Well, no," I agreed. "Think that'll stop me?" Tess made a (somewhat fake) surprise face.

"Hotwiring a car with your extraterrestrial powers? I'd never have thought such a thing of you, Max Evans. Whatever would your parents say? Come to think of it, I can't see Mr. Valenti being wildly impressed."

"Yeah, but I've practiced strictly on the 'for hairy dangerous alien emergencies' basis," I said. "And... and it's not like we're really stealing it, just borrowing it. We've both walked enough today."

The elevator doors opened at this point. (Yes, it's a slow lift.) "Well, you don't really need to convince me," Tess said caprciously as she walked out. "In fact, come to think of it, committing grand theft auto for the sake of a dinner date, (okay, not really theft but allow me to stretch the point,) is something I don't really mind doing before I graduate high school."

I shook my head and led the way out into the lot. And 'stealing' the car wasn't particularly exciting, so much so that I think Tess was disappointed on an odd level. A wave of my hand was enough to open the locks and another one to start the ignition. Kinduv felt a little like I wasn't using alien powers, just working with a high-tech automobile that was responding to an implanted sensor chip in my palm or something like that - of course, the look of the car somewhat clashed with this impression. Flashy and new, no it was not.

But the restaurant was very nice - it was one that I'd noticed while out on the beat with Liz and Sean, as you might have guessed, and seemed pretty fancy, to the point that the maitre D glared disapprovingly at my t-shirt and clucked as if he wished that he could show me the door for now showing up in a proper jacket, dress shirt, and tie. (Tess seemed to fit in perfectly in her evening wardrobe selection.) We were shown to a nicely intimate booth, with two glasses of ice water waiting, and a little bundle of sourdough bread and a tiny dish of garlic butter emerged as we were considering the menu.

"Okay, drinks," Tess said, considering the proper section of the menu with a businesslike air. "Oooh, I'll take..."

"The yellow grapefruit juice, on the rocks," I filled in. She looked up at me. "What... like I haven't figured out a few things about you, Tess Harding?"

"Okay, that's semi-impressive," she admitted. "Especially since I'm not sure what you're going to have to drink. Um... something fizzy."

"Maybe a vanilla coke," I admitted idly, moving ahead to the entrees.

"You're not steering clear of cherry coke because you think I'd get upset, or anything stupid like that?" Tess asked softly. "Just wondered."

I blinked in surprise a bit. Now this was one area I hadn't expected the Liz-Tess-me baggage to come up... and actually, I wasn't even sure where Tess had picked up the fact that I kinduv associated Liz with cherry cokes, because she used to bring me one when I came into the Crash - when things were going well between us. "No, not really... I just didn't feel like one." Pause. "If I was steering clear of them because I thought they'd make me bummed out or sad, would that be stupid?"

It was Tess' turn to blink this time. "Umm... no, that's - well, I dunno, guess it makes sense as a decision making strategy." She sighed. "Suppose sometimes I forget that I'm not the only person who has reason to get upset about Liz Parker... or that these days I don't have that much of a reason anymore. Sorry."

"It's okay," I said. "I'm dealing okay, I think." Pause. "Okay, what about meat? Feel like a filet mignon?"

"Oh, right," Tess drawled. "Funny how your mind immediately leaps to the girliest steak that there is for me."

Puzzlement. "Filet mignons are girly??"

"Umm... yeah, I always kinda thought so." Tess pondered. "Maybe I'm in the mood for a T-bone."

"Alright." I sighed. "So should I be worried now that *I* quite like filet mignon?"

Tess laughed. "No, no, sorry. I shouldn't have said anything, that wasn't fair." She smiled so intently that I couldn't help but accept her apology silently with a node of my head. "So do you want a filet mignon?"

"Nah... maybe I'll try a New York striploin," I replied. "It's a good night to try something a bit different, anyway." Pause. "And they have garlic cream noodles, if you still like those."

"Well, I like some garlic cream noodles, if they can put enough garlic in the sauce," Tess agreed. "Think I'll give these guys a chance...."

TO BE CONTINUED...

[Chrisken]

Part Twelve

"Hehe, how's your chicken?" Michael asked Maria. He was trying hard to let most of his brain forget about alien weirdness and robot lookalikes, and just enjoy the time that they had here on a sunny island paradise. Having dinner together in the hotel restaurant was helping a bit... though he couldn't help but feel a bit like the attention that Kyle was paying to his sister Laurie wasn't exactly conducive to a relaxing vacation. Oh well. She wasn't a little girl, after all, and if she'd been able to survive creepy blue-crystal alien abductors, she could probably handle just about anything.

"I... I'm not sure," Maria admitted slowly. "Something feels a bit weird about it, like it's slipperier than usual." Maria took a bit of the oven-roasted chicken on her fork and ate it pensively, as if she were hoping to be able to shed some more light on the phenomenon. "Oh well. Mashed potatoes are durned tasty, though! I'm not sure quite what kind of gravy this is - it isn't a usual chicken gravy I think, but I really like it."

"Maybe you should ask the waiter or somebody," Laurie put in. "Okay, umm... so, any idea what we should do after dinner?"

"Hmm." I considered this weightily. This didn't seem like a night to indulge in deeply prurient fun, like last night... partly just because it felt faintly 'been there done that,' (not that messing around with a beautiful and passionate girl like Maria ever entirely loses its appeal, but it can take a bit of the spice out of things,) and partly because our holiday chaperones, Jim Valenti and Maria's mom, would be hanging around, and probably a lot more vigilant than usual, just to make up for having given us kids a nearly complete free pass the evening before. "There's a nice big TV in your room, right Laurie? And some nice movie picks on the hotel system, I seem to remember."

"Oooh, that has possibilities, yeah," Kyle chimed in. "How about Gladiator? I haven't had a chance to see that one all the way through yet."

"Oh, please," Maria scoffed. "Can you say brain-dead? I've... I've heard some good things about Traffic though."

As Laurie weighed in with a cautiously spoken opinion, something seemed to *wrench* Michael entirely out of the conversation with his friends. He had a sudden impression of being watched, and couldn't help but whip his head around quickly this way and that so as to get a good view of all the diners around them. Nobody seemed to be paying their table any particular attention, including the wait staff. And... and definitely there was nobody that he could spot who looked anything like Maria.

But - but what about the android maker who had constructed Amarie. (They were assuming, of course, that where there was an android there had to be an android maker, Michael admitted to himself. Was it possible that she had been formed by some kind of... of bizarre alien microtechnology that could *grow* itself into an android, and had just happened to pick Maria as a template? No, that wouldn't really explain how she had matched Maria's hairstyle and dress so completely, and it definitely didn't fit how the fake Maria had known certain things about their group, but wanted so badly to know others. An alien puppet master trying to do recon on them still made the most sense.) So - was it possible that the puppet master was here in the room, covertly observing them?

It was possible, Michael had to admit, but probably not something that he should pay that much attention to even if it was going on. No alien would find out much about them by listening in on THIS bickering, and if they went upstairs after dinner, he (or she) wouldn't be able to follow so easily. Making a big deal out of leaving in a hurry would just let the other guy know that they were on their guard, and plus it just flat out didn't make sense. Still, Michael couldn't help but feel a bit disquieted as he joined in the argument, first making a 'Braveheart' pitch mostly just to get Maria and Laurie laughing, and then trying to support Kyle's Gladiator proposal.

The bill for their food was signed off to the rooms, (which meant that Laurie would end up paying it,) and Maria found out, at that time, that the gravy was a house specialty, made out of the drippings from their roast pork and roast lamb specials. The four kids headed back up the elevator, agreeing to go and watch the movie channel guide before arguing any more about what movie to see. Maria knocked on the door of the room she shared with Liz before going in. "Max??" Liz's voice called back.

"Um, no sweetie, just me." Liz made an embarassed face. "Why did you... ohh." Maria sighed and hurried over to her old friend. "It's just dinner. I thought... I guess I thought you were doing better at handling all of this breakup stuff."

Liz sniffled slightly and didn't resist as Maria flung her arms around to embrace her. "Yeah, I - I thought I was too. But... but spending time with him, away from Tess today. It... it was like we were back to being friends, and I guess that I was able to forget, for a little while, that she was in the picture."

"Oh," Maria said softly. "Random question, and not one that really applies to this moment in time, but..."

Liz laughed. "Go ahead, Mare."

"Umm, okay. If... if you had to pick between being friends with Max again, and spending some time with Tess into the bargain, or just avoiding them both almost completely... which one would you rather?"

"Oh, boy, that's a tough one," Liz said. "A bit hard on both sides. I guess ideally I'd rather be around Max and tolerate Tess... but that's just easier said than done, you know?"

"Yeah, I guess." Maria sighed and let go. "So, where's my no-good cousin?"

"I'm not sure... he was in the bathroom, last I knew. Maybe he found out that the spicy Conch didn't really agree with him."

"Okay. We're thinking of watching a movie - wanna join in."

"Sure, okay. What film?"

"Oh, we haven't agreed on that yet..."

Soon enough, though, it was settled that the new Mike Myers cartoon movie, a silly fantasy romp about an ugly green ogre, was suitable to all interested parties. As well as Michael and Maria, Kyle and Laurie, and Liz, Mrs Amy Deluca settled in to watch the film, and Sean showed up about twenty minutes in. Liz smiled and wrapped an arm around his shoulders.

----------

"Okay, so how do you do this one?" Isabel asked, frowning at the little palmpilot screen.

"It's pretty simple," Alex replied. "You use these four buttons to move up or down, left and right - this one to stay still and wait, and this one to start over. If you escape one maze without the minotaur catching you, you move on to the next one."

"Alright." Isabel tried pressing a few buttons. "Wait a second. The other guy - minotaur, whatever. He's twice as fast as I am... and he's strong enough to get me if he catches me, yeah?" Alex nodded. "So what chance do I have?"

"Well, he's spectacularly dumb," Alex pointed out. "If you can figure out the rules by which he chases you , especially, then you can take advantage of that. To win, you generally have to run him in circles, trapping him here and there and then the other place, until you have a chance to make a break for the exit. Want me to show you?"

"Umm... no, not just yet," Isabel muttered, trying a few more buttons and then frowning slightly as the machine made a sour note to signify how she'd been eaten. Undaunted, she started again, a little more cautiously. A knock sounded on the slightly-open hallway door. "Is this okay, mister chaperone sir? We've got the door open and... and nothing really's happening anyway."

Jim Valenti smiled slightly. "Yeah, I guess so... just remember that I'm reserving the opportunity to keep making spot checks... up to and after the time that you go back to your room, Miss Evans." She chuckled. "I... I think I'll be with everybody else in Amy-Laurie's room, watching the movie."

"Everybody??" Alex asked.

"Well... except for you and Max-Tess," Mister Valenti added. "They still haven't come back from dinner... which means that they might have some explaining to do, but I'm not terribly worried."

"Yeah!!" Isabel exclaimed. Valenti shot her a look. "Sorry, I just... I think I've got this maze nearly solved. Alex, you're right - the monster really is something stupid. If I'm right there in front of him and dodge behind a wall, he'd move aside and lurk for me on the other side of the wall, instead of just chasing me around the corner."

"Yeah, some of the time," Alex agreed. "If you're already opposite each other with a wall in between he'll never go around to find you." He chuckled. "But it's still pretty tough to figure out the right combination of dodges and moves to trap him in the right places, and get out." He looked up, and saw that Valenti had left. So Alex hurried over to kiss Isabel, but they didn't let the makeout session go to far, mindful of what had been said about spot checks.

Isabel was already on the fourth maze in the series by the time that Max and Tess showed up - Alex thought that she had an intuitive frame of mind that was actually more suited to the puzzle than his own logical and deductive bent. (He tended to try to explore all possible strategies, which quickly got frustrating, while Isabel had the gift for seeing one particular path that would keep her alive and lead to some sort of progress.) "Hey hey, how's it going?" she asked Tess.

"Pretty good. Umm, did you want us to give you guys a bit more alone time, or..."

"Nah," Isabel set the palm aside and gave Alex a big hug and an enthusiastic kiss. "I... I feel kinda tired, and Ms Deluca will probably be along in a bit for a spot check. So maybe you two guys should just head back to your own room.

"Awww..." Max said, and leaned in to playfully nuzzle Tess' cheek with his nose before kissing her goodnight too. "See you bright and early? We can try a nature hike through the jungle paths."

"Are... are there really jungles here in the Bahamas??" Tess asked.

"Just little ones," Max said.

"Hmm... well, maybe. We'll talk about it over breakfast," she said, and laughed. Alex went to join Max at the door and they headed back to the room that they shared.

"Hey, man," Alex said once they were inside. "This... this is something that may be none of my business, but... but I feel like I just kinduv have enough reason to... err..."

"Just spit it out," Max suggested.

"Okay. Liz still feels uncomfortably about seeing you and Tess together. I - I realize that the four of you are in a situation that's kind of awkward for everybody, but... but she's my friend and I don't like to see her heart hurting like that. And... and I'm kind of your friend too, and I get the impression that no matter how excited you are about this new thing with Tess, you really aren't trying to make things hard on Liz, and... and so maybe you could do something to make it easier on her."

"Yeah, well I'd be open to any ideas," Max muttered. "S-sorry, I didn't really mean that to come out as rude as it sounded... just - we've tried spending time together, and we've tried giving each other space. And... and it's not something that Liz has a monopoly on. I guess I feel the same way when I see her and Sean getting cozy together." Max sighed. "That... that's just kind of the nature of things. I... I really would like things to be better, especially if it meant that Liz and I could put the baggage behind us and grow back to being friends again. But - but I'm not sure where to start."

"Well, I don't have much experience with this kind of thing," Alex said, looking in the dresser for his sleepwear, "but I think that doing the staying together thing is better than handing out space. All four of you doing things together, I mean. Keeping distance is just something that you're doing to avoid the situation, to each pretend that the other isn't seeing anybody, and to insulate yourselves from each other. However, I do see how pushing things the other way might do more harm than good." Alex considered. "Have you tried really making an effort to make friends with Sean??"

Max's expression of shock was eloquent. "Yeah, I know, but think about it," Alex admitted. "I realize that he's not your favorite type of guy - I'm not wild about Sean myself, but Liz has picked him. If you don't find some common ground with the guy, then you're gonna keep butting heads over him, and that's going to force Liz to pick sides in a way. And he's got the inside track, so she's not going to pick you." Alex sighed. "Also, big picture... if you take the initiative and show the way, then that'll give Liz and Tess an incentive to follow your lead and sort out their own differences. That's going to fix the other side of things... that is, unless you and Liz really have any big unresolved issues about the way that you ended things. Probably that can get sorted out afterwards, if it's the case."

"Unresolved issues..." Max swallowed. "Yeah, I guess you could say that. But... umm, thanks man. You've said a mouthful - definitely I'll have to sleep on it, which makes the timing pretty good." Alex laughed slightly. "But... I'm glad that you said something. You really are a great friend." There was a short, awkward pause. "And Isabel is lucky that the two of you got past being friends to something more."

"I think I'm lucky too," Alex pointed out, getting into the bed and sighing slightly. "So, no particular plans for investigating the Amarie situation tomorrow?"

"Hmm." Max thought about that. "Maybe you and Isabel could try renting a boat and going close by Cannonball island - just to see if she can pick up anything interesting there. But don't go too close." He considered. "Maybe bring Michael and Maria along too - Michael's good backup, and Maria could do with a bit of a treat and a chance to get outside. I don't think we need to be paranoid about keeping her inside anymore - especially not as long as Michael stays close to her, which I think he will."

"Cool," Alex decided. "And are you going to invite Liz and Sean onto a nature walk, maybe?"

"Perhaps," Max said, yawning and closing his eyes.

-----------

"Hey there, handsome," a sweet voice said, very close to his ear.

Kyle stretched out, and realized that something was wrong. Why was he lying on a carpeted floor. He looked up and saw Laurie Dupree staring down at him. He looked around - Amy DeLuca's room - hers and Lauries. "What am I doing in here??"

Laurie giggled slightly. "You fell asleep here before the movie ended, and I didn't want anyone to wake you."

"Hmm..." Okay, that explained a few things, but... "So you girls just went to bed in here not minding me? That doesn't sound like something Ms D would be cool with."

"No, your dad and Michael took our beds, and we took the Valenti room. Don't ask too many questions." So Kyle decided not to inquire about why Michael had had to switch rooms. "What do you feel like doing today? It's getting well into the morning already."

Kyle thought about that. "Is anybody doing anything about... about the Czechoslovakian stuff??"

"Umm... who's czechoslovakian? Didn't they break up??"

"Your brother, for one," Michael said. "Sorry - it's an old reference - something that Maria and Liz thought, I think." He sighed. "About Maria's twin??"

"Oh. Michael, Maria, Isabel, and Alex are just leaving to go rent a boat and cruise past the pirate island, see if Isabel can pick up anything." Laurie thought about that. "Do you want us to tag along? You'd have to get dressed really quickly, and I'm not sure if they'd planned on having a boat that was big enough for six people, but..."

"Nah, actually I like the idea of just hanging around here," Kyle decided, "or going down to the beach. How does that sound??"

"Great by me," Laurie admitted. "I can try sun tanning - but you'll have to watch the time for me. I haven't seen that much of the daylight recently, all things considered, and I've always burnt easily."

"Keeping an eye on you will SO not be a problem," Kyle replied with a wink. Laurie giggled flirtily.

"Anyway, I think the chaperones are staying here for the day, trusting that none of us will be able to get into too much trouble in public." Oooh, Kyle decided. If dad's around, I don't really want to be hanging too close to the hotel. "And Max and Liz, Tess and Sean are all going out on a hike... I think that they don't really want anyone else joining in for that."

"Okay," Kyle decided. "I'll get changed into my trunks quick, then, and probably take a quick dip into the surf to wake myself up before vegging out in the sun." As he got up, he gave Laurie a quick kiss, just to see how she'd react. (And because it was fun.)

"Cool," Laurie said with a smile. "Meet you at the elevators in five."

----------

"I wonder what's keeping him?" Liz said, flexing her legs impatiently as she sat in one of the lobby chairs.

"I dunno." Tess yawned. "Maybe Valenti caught him and decided to give him a lecture about no group sex in the jungle." She paused just a minute. "Or he's looking for some bug repellent - it's either one or the other."

"Hehehe, very funny," Liz pronounced flatly.

"Come on, no deliberately jumping onto each other," Sean said with a sigh. "Max'll be here soon, he's only behind us by a few minutes so far. And... and it's going to be a long walk, which will seem even longer if you two ladies immediately slip into 'cold war mode.'"

Both Liz and Tess turned to shoot Sean somewhat bemused looks, and the silence stretched out. Finally Tess cleared her throat. "By the way, umm, Liz. I, umm - I kinda like the way that you've got your hair today."

"Oh, what, this??" Liz touched the brim of the baseball cap - emblazoned with a Diamondbacks logo - as if it was nothing special.

"Not just the hat," Tess pressed. "The thing in the back."

"Oh, the ponytail?" Liz asked, looking into the glassy surface of the front entrance to try to get a better look at her own hair.

"Yeah, gotta admit that's hot," Sean chimed in, and shot a grin over at Tess, who smiled back.

"Okay, well thanks," Liz replied to Tess, beaming slightly herself. "And, umm... that top is pretty cute, too." Tess was wearing a yellow-white tank top with bright blue detailing around the sleeves and down the sides.

"Yeah, I like it a lot," Tess replied.

"Hey hey, sorry." I said, hurrying into the lobby at this point. (Tess told me about the stuff that happened before I got there, later.) "I couldn't remember where I'd put these maps."

"We could've just gotten more, couldn't we?" Tess asked me. "Umm... just saying."

"Yeah," I agreed, putting an arm around her "What can I say, I obsess sometimes. Alright, umm... everybody here, so we ready to go?" Sean and Liz nodded. "Okay." I led the way out of the hotel.

"Are we using the car, Max?" Sean asked.

"No, Michael returned it before they went down to the pier," Liz put in.

"It's not far to get to the start of the trail, using the town streets," I said. "And walking is kindof the point. Of course, if you have another suggestion." Sean shrugged his acquiescence, and so we kept walking across the parking lot and carefully found a place and time to negotiate the street.

"So, umm..." Sean put in. "I... I hope that you guys don't mind answering a few questions about the alien thing," Sean said softly. "I... I'm still pretty confused by everything."

"Oh - right," I muttered, remembering what Sean had said about wanting to have a talk with me about putting Liz's life in danger, the day before. But somehow I got the notion that that wasn't what he was getting at now, in front of both Liz herself and Tess. "Sure, ask away I suppose."

To my surprised, Sean turned to Tess first, not me. "Okay, umm... I'm not sure where to start. You were in the Roswell crash, but you didn't grow up anywhere near New Mexico, right?? So - umm, how'd that happen?"

I watched Tess carefully, wondering if she'd be upset by this type of question. "Well, the whole story is kind of too long to get into right now," she said in a soft whisper. "Qucik answer, while the other three were found by regular people here in the Roswell area, I was met by another alien who raised me vaguely as if I was his daughter. He was staying well away from Roswell for a whole bunch of reasons, so I was far away too."

"Oh, alright," Sean said. "And where is he n... oh - is this the guy Liz mentioned, who, umm - who died last fall?"

"Yeah, that's Ed," Tess said with a long sigh. I think that Sean was wondering about asking further follow-up questions, but decided that he didn't want to be that insensitive.

"And Max," he asked. "When did you first realize that you guys were... you know. Not from anywhere around here?"

I chuckled slightly. "Umm, well... by the summer after second grade Isabel and I knew that we were different, that we could do things that our parents and the kids at our school couldn't. Isabel had heard stuff about the Roswell crash and wondered if we were from some other planet, but we didn't really have any serious evidence, and I kinduv wondered if we were mutants or maybe even something supernatural. It was nearly a year later, after we'd met up with Michael, that I... I kinduv did a home blood examination to see what that would tell us. None of us have ever liked the idea of losing blood, which probably helped make sure that nobody would find out when we were really little. Completely differently shaped blood cells kinduv sealed the deal."

"Okay, all right," Sean said. "No other questions, but if you've got stuff that you're willing to tell me about, to help me understand a bit better, then I'd be pleased to listen."

So I kept talking. I told him about the weird clubhouse-of-life-or-death subculture that Isabel, Michael and I got ourselves into, tighter and tighter, leading up to the fateful day of the shooting. I've started to realize how unhealthy that secrecy was more recently... and I don't want to think of what my mentality would be like if Liz and her friends hadn't managed to get us thinking about the outside war a little more... of course, to a certain extent the conspiracy has just been expanded a bit, but the fresh blood makes it easier to breath freely, after a matter of speaking, and it seems like every so often something happens to keep the secret spreading a bit wider - though hopefully we'll always be able to keep it from exploding in an uncontrolled fashion. First Liz, then Maria soon after, and Alex a few months later. For so long it was the six of us, then Mister Valenti, and Kyle - though it was a long time before he wanted to have much to do with us even after he knew. Then Laurie, and now Mrs DeLuca and Sean knew too.

But I didn't tell Sean that kind of stuff. I told him what it was like when Liz and Maria first knew - the excitement of those first few months - Topolsky coming to the school, Michael trying to find Valenti's alien files, Valenti putting the squeeze on Maria after she hit his car, trying to find out how much she knew. Liz's grandmother dying, the missing journal, Marathon texas, meeting River dog for the first time, and the car crash that landed me in hospital. I kind of broke off there, mostly because a lot of the next stuff had to do with the passionate beginning of Michael and Maria's affair, (and I didn't want to spill many details about that to Maria's cousin,) and how Liz and I got together for the first time, which I thought might embarass Tess if I mentioned just at the moment.

About this point, we got to the start of the rainforest trail, and there were a surprising number of other tourists around, so it seemed fairly natural just to stop talking about the alien stuff entirely. Remembering what Alex had said about trying to mend the burning bridge with Sean, (or something like that,) I tried to start a more casual conversation with him, but at first it didn't go very well, possibly because I didn't know much about him that I had anything in common with. (Bringing up the juvie hall stuff REALLY didn't seem a good idea.) Sean seemed to understand what I was trying to accomplish, but wasn't having much better luck with common ground until he... I'm pretty sure that his gaze just happened to land on Liz's baseball hat and asked if I was a fan of any sports. Now I'm not, exactly, but I watch baseball sometimes as a way of spending time with my dad, and hockey when I'm hanging over at Michael's place, and so I know how to hold a conversation about the wild-card playoffs or whatever. Liz joined in a bit - apparently the hat was not just a fashion statement - her Dad had brought her up as an Arizona ball fan, and she'd been getting into it more recently. Even Tess was able to participate in the conversation a bit - Nasedo had 'cultivated' a reputation as a baseball fan as part of fleshing out the Ed Harding persona, I think, (and I suspect he managed to use that as a cover for some interesting rendezvous,) and he had taken Tess to a surprising number of major-league parks, mostly on the east coast and midwest, while she was growing up.

Then we kind of fell in and started tagging along with a larger tour group that had a trained tour guide with them, talking about some of the interesting plants and other facts about whatever stretch of jungle we happened to be going through at the time. (I hope that they didn't mind us sponging off their docent, as it were.) Or at least, Sean and I tagged along, and Liz held Tess back and they started following at just enough of a distance that I couldn't really make out what was being said between them. I hope that neither of them got upset with how often I was turning back to watch and check that they weren't out of sight.

"Quite a pair they make, don't they?" Sean asked one of those times. I looked up. "Don't worry, man. I understand what you're trying to do here, and I hope it works too. They've gotta learn to live in peace with each other. We do too."

"Yeah, I guess so. Thanks for making an effort, man." I stole another look. Definitely, no matter how their personalities might clash, the two girls were an impressive pair visually - Tess in her sensible white sneakers, mid-length cutoff jeans, the halter top, and her hair down all loose and curly the way she likes to wear it. Liz was wearing a brown t-shirt, with black cotton shorts, the baseball cap of course, and some kind of light hiking boots. There was no denying that both of them were exquisitely desirable young women... but events had conspired to send me into Tess' arms and drive a wedge to push me away from Liz. And... and that wasn't an entire tragedy... no more than it would have been if Liz and I had reconciled and forced Tess to find someone else to love. This was just the way that things had happened. I didn't regret my choices, or the things that had happened to me that I hadn't asked for. Now - I was working together to be friends with Liz again, to make my peace with her new romantic interest, and do what little I could so that Liz and Tess would have an opportunity to mend their fences as well.

Liz and Sean might go the distance, or they might discover that things wouldn't work out. That wasn't really my business, except inasmuch as I could wish Liz the best of luck, as someone who cared for her but wasn't romantically involved anymore. I turned away and tried to pay more attention to what the tour guide was saying. About five minutes later, I felt soft fingers touch mine, and realized that the girls had caught up again. Wonder what had happened between them.

----------

"I... I don't know," the attendant said, trying not to too obviously leer at Isabel's voluptuous figure in her brief halter top and shorts, or the amount of skin exposed by Maria's swimsuit. "Dealing with the Caribbean sea is very different from taking a little motorboat out onto a lake stuck in the middle of the desert. Heck, you have hardly any water out there in New Mexico as it stands, do you??"

"Listen, bub," Isabel said, leaning towards the rental kiosk with a glint in her eye that numerous football players at West Roswell High had learned to respect and fear. "First off, I've driven boats out on the East coast of Florida, when I went down there to visit my grandparents. Secondly, our experience isn't your concern. We've filled out the forms, we have the money. You don't have a policy not to rent to tourists without a valid marine pilot's license, so you don't get to judge our qualifications yourself. I can take care of myself. So can every one of my friends. We're customers, and I expect you to hand over the information on our rental."

The guy blinked a little in surprise, and Alex guessed that Isabel hadn't had to play hardball... perhaps he had just been making a half-hearted effort to sell them on serving as their pilot, (if there was someone else who could take over on the desk,) and made a little money at the same time as he got to hang around beautiful girls. The deal might even have been planned with positions switched - the counter guy not going himself, but setting a friend of his up as the hired-out pilot. And for a second Alex wondered that his girl might have even gone too far, that she had ruined a situation that could have been saved with a bit of subtlety and tact. But eventually he took the rental form and the sheaf of American dollar bills that Isabel had counted out, and after a few seconds, presented them with a receipt, a little pale green card with what looked like registration and insurance information on it, and an oddly shaped key. "Alright, I've given you one of our small motorboats, number twelve. Big enough for the four of you, and it should be relatively hard for you to get in trouble with that, but don't go out of sight of the island, okay?" Nobody answered, and the clerk gave them directions to where the boats were parked.

Alex was thinking about the money issue as they headed off. The Bahamas had their own money, but apparently it was carefully locked in to be worth the same as US dollars, and most of the time American currency was used instead in the tourist areas... in fact, half of the time they'd even gotten US money back in change instead of Bahamian. Oh well. Alex would actually have liked to exchange some of his money, but Isabel and Laurie had convinced him that it wasn't worth the trouble and the expense of switching. They found their boat, showed the receipt to someone who was keeping watch over them, got in, and cast off the docks. Isabel turned out to have remembered more than she expected about boating from Florida, and she took over the job of piloting at the small many-pointed steering wheel, while directing the others on things that needed to be done. Soon enough things were peaceful as they got their bearings and headed cautiously towards Cannonball.

"Okay, this is going to take a little while at this rate," Maria pointed out.

"It's a fairly long way," Alex reminded her.

"Yeah, I know." She sighed. "And we can't go too fast or we'd attract attention." Alex and Michael nodded. "Speaking of which - can you guys maybe... I dunno, see if you can tell if any alien is trying to spy on us, the same way you're hoping to spy on them??" There was a pause. "I know it sounds weird - but you guys have kinduv already found weird powers just because someone brought the idea up, so I figured it was worth a try to..."

"Yeah, thanks, I see the reasoning," Michael said, wrapping his arms around Maria from behind and kissing the side of her neck. "I... I'm willing to try, but I hardly have any idea what I'd be trying to block. Never been really good with the sensitive, informational powers in the first place. If... if I don't know what they feel like, I certainly wouldn't be sure what to block off." He looked down into Maria's face, as if expecting her to reply to the comment that he wasn't sensitive.

"Hmm..." Isabel thought about that. "Normally, if I'm trying to sense someone or connect with someone at a distance, I have to focus very hard on who or what I'm trying to sense." She sighed. "That... that's why having a picture is almost required when I go dreamwalking, I think, and it may mean that I'm not likely to pick up anything on this trip, since I can't picture what I might be looking for on a place that I've never been." She sighed. "I... I'm not generally aware of my powers reaching through space to make the connection, but that doesn't mean that they don't. Like Tess has said, and like Laurie tried to tell us once before she died - it's all about personal energy and how to use it." She considered. "How... how about trying to push out a dome of thin awareness, with no strength or resistance to it, just the ability to tell if alien energy is hitting it?"

"Hmm... okay, I guess that's worth a try," Michael said. "Hmm..." He got a somewhat odd expression on his face, and let Maria go, as if touching her was affecting his ability to maintain concentration. "That... that - I'm not sure if I'm doing it right, but I think I'm doing something."

"Ohh." Isabel looked up from the sea ahead of her and focused for a brief moment. "Yeah, that... that *feels* somehow right, Michael, and I wasn't meaning that you had to do it, but I'm pleased that you could." Her eyes narrowed again as she looked where they were going.

"Hey, I felt that," he said. "You... you were reaching out with your powers to move a little bit of the water back and forth, huh?" Isabel nodded. "Cool."

"Can - do you think that you can keep it up until we get on our approach, Michael?" Alex asked.

"I... I'll try. Won't push myself too hard yet. It's something that I'm not exactly used to, but not terribly tiring even so."

"This is kinda cool," Maria said suddenly, looking out over the railings on the little deck of the boat.

"Oh, yeah, you guys weren't with us on the day cruiser, were you?" Alex asked. "That was bigger, but about equally fun, I'd say." He considered. "Have you ever been in a boat before, Maria?"

"Well, sure, camping with my Mom and Liz's family up at Lake Campbell. Never out on the ocean, though." She sighed slightly. "It's different - but cool."

Alex chatted about his own adventures in boating - mostly from visiting with his Aunt Louise in California - for a while, and the familiar shape of the Cannonball began to draw near. Maria pointed out that the island behind them had grown hard to see, but the others reassured her that they would have no difficulty finding their way back. Suddenly Michael muttered, "I've got something!!"

"What, really?" Isabel asked. "What... what was it like?"

"Kinduv... like - like a wave of energy sweeping across the water, coming over us left to right." He paused. "There... there it went again."

"Sweeping around?" Alex asked. "Like... like radar - or an alien form of detection system like radar??"

"Yeah, umm, I kinduv think it's the second one," Michael muttered. "Very - very regular and controlled, more like the work of a machine or device than a person using powers. So - so far I think I've been able to damp it down and keep from sending any echoes back - assuming that that's the principle it works on. But - but I'm not going to be able to keep that out if we stay out here much longer. What then?"

"For now, we turn back," Maria said decisively, and Isabel turned to stare at her. "We... we came to find out if there's any evidence that Cannonball is really involved in what's going on with the Amarie plot. This - this looks pretty seriously like evidence that it is, and also would appear to be evidence that we can't investigate further without whoever set that beacon up knowing that we're onto them." Michael's face twinged slightly as the beacon hit again. "Isabel... just let this go for now."

Izzy hesitated just a moment and then swung into action. "Alex, you've seen enough to know how to steer this thing, yeah?" Surprised, he nodded. "Okay, take us home." Isabel stepped away from the steering and towards Michael. "I'll... I'll help you cover our retreat," she suggested. "Let me in, and I'll connect." Michael reached out his hand, and Isabel took it, as Alex started the boat in a slightly jerky, tight circle.

------------

"No, come on Kyle," Laurie said, shaking her head slightly, (which made other parts of her sway slightly.) "'I never' is just no fun when there's only two people OR when you're not drinking alcohol, and I am NOT going to bring you back to the hotel drunk so that your father can chew me out. Sorry."

"Oh well." Kyle yawned softly. "I... I'm just bored. Getting a tan is great, but still..." He sighed. "There has to be some kind of game we can play out loud, just the two of us here on this beach."

"Hmm... I spy? Twenty questions??"

"Both way too kids' stuff," Kyle complained. "Ehh, well..."

"There's geography I guess," Laurie said quietly. "Not really kids' stuff, though it could get pretty nasty with just the two of us. Probably we should limit it somewhat... maybe just countries, or cities in the US."

"Okay, what's this?" Kyle asked.

"Well, one player starts by suggesting a place name... maybe I go Memphis, and then you have to start one with S... so you go sacramento, and then I have to find one starting with O. And you can't repeat the same name twice, no matter how long the game goes. Certain letters get really hard to fill quickly."

"Hmm." Kyle thought about it. "Well, I've never been that good at the usual kind of geography, but I guess I'll give it a try." Pause. "Can I start?"

"Oh, go ahead."

"Hmm, alright. Oh - can we leave it open? Any place name on earth, at least to start?"

Laurie thought. "Sure."

"Okay. Roswell."

"Louisiana."

"Albuquerque."

"Encino? Is that a place? Umm..."

"Yeah it is," Kyle assured her. "Okay, we've got our first 'O' - Ontario."

Laurie chuckled slightly. "Ohio."

"Dammit... alright, gimme a minute. Oklahoma."

"Arizona," Laurie replied.

"Alabama."

"Arkansas."

"Hmm, okay, an S. Spain."

"Nebraska, and we're back to the A."

"Hmm... Argentina."

Laurie thought a long time. "Oh, Alaska."

"Austin," Kyle tried.

"Okay... Nevada."

"Oh, you've gotta be kidding me!"

And so the game went on. Despite Kyle's every attempt to play dirty, Laurie's devious mind almost matched him, and the field of place names immediately available to her memory seemed several times larger, so that as the endgame drew near, she scored points again and again as Kyle was unable to reply. The final score when neither of them could remember what names had already been played was fifteen points for Laurie, four for Kyle.

"So, Kyle," she said casually in the quiet after the end of the game. "You've had sex, right?"

"Hehh?" was Kyle's first reply, a little surprised by how abruptly the question had come. "Emmm... yeah. Not as much as I'd like, all things considered in their proper place, but yeah - the sex has been had." He paused. "And you? Um, I guess that likely you haven't... unless, well, maybe with that ballboy of yours..."

"Adam the caddy," she reminded him softly. "No, we didn't... though I kind of wished that I had, after I got locked up." She sighed a little forlornly. "And yes, you're right that I haven't." Pause. "Does that change how you think of me?"

"A... a little I guess," Kyle admitted. "I know that you're older than me, but finding out just reinforces how a big chunk out of your teen years was pulled out of your ordinary happy life and stuck into a nightmare. I'd... I want to with you, but on the other hand, if you've waited so long, you deserve specially for it to be a great first time, and that thought makes me a little nervous I guess."

"Kyle, you're such a softy underneath that jocky frat-boy exterior," Laurie said with a smile. "Well, I'll take all of that under advisement, just in case." Kyle waited to see if she would have any further comment on the subject of S-E-X, but none was immediately forthcoming. Instead, after a moment of silence Laurie's hand flew to her mouth, stifling a soft cry. "Oh, my gawd, that's her," she whispered, her voice thrillingly low to Kyle's ears which hadn't yet changed contextual gears. "It's Amarie!"

"Hmm, huh?" Kyle asked, trying to keep his own voice just as low. "Where?"

"Walking down the beach, almost at the edge of the water," Laurie said, pointing out a girl in a black two-piece swimsuit with shoulder-length brown hair. Kyle couldn't catch a good look at her face and wasn't entirely used to that shade of hair on Maria yet, but it seemed to fit. Except, "Why not Maria? Amarie wasn't wearing that color hair or those clothes the last time she was seen. The real Maria was."

"If it was really Maria, Michael would have been right there next to her," Laurie pointed out, and Kyle had reluctantly to admit there was some validity to that thought. "Maybe somebody spotted Maria and the guys as they headed out to the docks."

"Hmm..." Kyle muttered, not liking the thought. "Well, at least she doesn't seem to have paid any attention to us."

"Yeah," Laurie replied. "Now come on, we've got to follow her!"

"Follow her?" Kyle repeated, somewhat surprised by the notion. "Why? Remember, if she spots either of us as friends of Michael's, things could get nasty quick. She's got superhuman strength and there aren't any friendly neighborhood aliens nearby to help out."

"Hmm." Laurie's face fell slightly. "Yeah, but this is an opportunity to find out more about what she's up to." Laurie seemed lost in indecision. "Do you think she'd really spot us?"

Kyle sighed slightly. "Maybe not if we stay well back. Of course, we might lose her hat way, but better to be safe." In fact, the figure of Amarie was already so distant among the crowds on the beach that she was almost lost, so the two of them got up, quickly gathered a few things and hurried after. As soon as Kyle spotted the black halter top, he held Laurie back from following for another thirty seconds.

And then - he couldn't seem to find her again.

TO BE CONTINUED...

[Chrisken]

Part Thirteen

"Oh, I'm so glad that we did that," Liz said as we walked back in the direction of the hotel through the Bahamia town. "Thanks for setting it up guys."

"No problem," Sean said absently. "It was mostly Evans' idea, right? Evans??" A short pause. "Max?"

"Huh?" I muttered, looking around at him. "Oh, sorry, yeah. I... I guess I thought of it, but - well, I take no exclusive credit. Sean, you helped me work out the details, and everybody made this hike such a success." Liz laughed softly, and Sean shook his head in bemusement.

"So, something on your mind?" Tess asked softly. It could hardly have escaped her attention that I'd been casting a fond eye in her direction when Sean was trying to attract my attention to the conversation.

"Umm... no, not really," I admitted. "Brain feels curiously light and empty, at least, those parts of it which I can... can see or feel." Sighed. "Tired of walking, I admit... will be nice to get back up to my room and lay down, not doing much of anything."

"Not *anything*?" Liz and Tess actually asked in unison, and Liz giggled again, as Tess shook her head. I blushed slightly. "Well, maybe we could just veg out together," Tess said softly.

"Could be," I admitted. "Maybe after that..."

"Oooh, umm -- darnit, I forget what those things are called," Sean said, pointing across a square filled with flea market stalls and other little concessions that we had just stepped into. "Come on, Liz, you've got to try one."

Liz smiled impishly up at him. "I don't usually try out stuff that I don't know the name of." Sean's face fell. "Or at least, something about them."

"I tried these frozen treats, or at least they look something like what they have in that stall over there - when I was in Guatemala for a high school trip a couple of years ago," Sean explained, his voice growing excited. "Something vaguely like a snow-cone, except that the syrup is made from local exotic fruits and what-have-you." He turned around. "You've *all* got to have a taste."

"Exotic fruits," Tess repeated, staring intently at the pinkish mounds of slush that were being handed out at that stall. "Like, including berries?"

"Umm... I guess so, yeah," Sean replied. "Not sure of the specifics."

"Well, then we might have to beg off," she replied. "There are a bunch of different rare tropical berries here in the Carribbean that... well, that people like Max and I have to stay away from."

"Really?" I asked in surprise. "Did, umm, did your dad tell you about those?" Tess nodded silently.

"Wow," Liz breathed softly. "I... I didn't realize tha-- do Michael and Isabel know??"

"Umm, I told Isabel when we were getting ready to go," Tess said, blushing slightly. "Didn't really expect that it'd come up, even here... maybe I associte them more with spanish-speaking places - Latin America and all. Maybe I figured that Michael wouldn't be likely to try something 'native' - something that he wouldn't be familiar with."

"I... see," Liz said, looking at us. I could tell that she was more than a little upset at the thought of any of her friends getting accidentally poisoned because Tess hadn't been more careful about spreading around this particular helpful tidbit. And probably, the reason that Tess hadn't told *me* in particular were just as galling to her... Tess wouldn't have wanted to see me hurt any more than Liz, but... well, knowing Tess, I guessed that she just assumed she'd always be close enough to me, for the duration of this trip, to notice when a particular situation came up involving this risk and mention it then, instead of sharing the information on contigency long beforehand. Also... well, we had issues with Tess lecturing us about our alien heritage, though I don't think that this kind of warning is really an issue on those terms, but maybe Tess was feeling gun-shy about that sort of thing.

"Well, it'll be okay," I insisted out loud. "You guys go and try the treats out, and we'll wait over here. Maybe go looking for a few souvenirs in the flea market." Liz smiled a little uncertainly, and Sean hurried her off to join the line at the treat stand, which would probably keep them waiting a while. Tess and I turned to one of the flea market tables - and then stopped short. On the other side of the square, a familiar figure had hurried in, brushing past other tourists. Maria.

Except, no matter how much she looked like Maria, this person couldn't be. She was wearing the same black bikini that Maria had put on this morning for the boat trip, along with a green wrap cover-up that looked like something my friend would own, but she was ALONE. That, in itself, was the biggest tip-off. We'd agreed that Maria would never go anywhere by herself - it seemed like a good way to tell the difference, and besides, Michael was very worried about keeping her safe. He'd be right next to her, or at least Isabel or Alex would, if this were really Maria DeLuca. So... we'd found the android impostor again, just when I least expected it. And I had no idea what to do now.

Tess seemed to have something in mind. She took my arm and moved us slowly through the crowd, watching the girl until she'd almost passed us. "Amarie!" Tess called out suddenly, and the lookalike took a few steps more, slowing down, and then turned to look at us. Because of the way things had worked out, we were maybe fifteen feet or a bit more away from her, in between Amarie and the rest of the square - including the treat stand, Sean and Liz.

"I... I don't recognize that name," Amarie said, in a very casual and conversational way, just as if Maria herself were talking... except that Maria herself WOULD have recognized. "Are you speaking to me, Tess?"

"Yes I am," Tess continued. cautious but not too defensively. "Amarie is what we have decided to call you... to tell you apart from Maria."

"But I *am* Maria."

"No you're not," I said, casting forward lightly with my nonhuman senses to make sure of it. Yep, some kind of weird alien computerized brain... bunches of hydraulics and plastic membranes and sophisticated non-electric motors of some description. "You're... you're not even alive. Maria is alive."

"And exactly how do you define life, such that it exclude me?" Amarie said, (the first time that she'd used dialog that sounded very different from what Maria would say, and somewhat to my surprise it seemed too poetic and flowery, instead of too dry and robotic.) "I can move, and react and learn."

"Can you grow?" Tess asked, more as a curious question than a challenge. "Can you reproduce yourself?"

"No - can you?" Amarie even seemed to put a sarcastic edge on that turnaround. Tess blushed and looked at me.

"Well, not yet I guess." Amarie nodded. "But... well, let's say you're not carbon-based."

"Can't fool you guys," the android said, and sighed.

"Why... why are you here in the Bahamas, Amarie?" I asked, moving forward.

"I... I'm here because you're here, Max. You and all of your friends."

Ask an android an unclear question... groan. "Who... who brought you here, then? Who told you what you have to do??" That was who we really wanted to know about, after all - not Amarie, but her master. Her creator, probably.

She made a very Maria-like double take. "Umm, I'm not really sure that I should be telling you that, Max." Uncertainty clouded her face. "Can I ask YOU questions instead, Max? I'm *supposed* to ask you guys questions." And she stepped a bit closer - Tess and I tensed, but didn't react as long as she didn't get too near.

"I... I don't think that I know you well enough to answer your questions," I said softly. "You already seem to know quite a bit about me and my friends, so it's only fair that you should answer OUR questions first." Another kinduv sad look, that I had to steel myself against reacting to. "I... I don't want to hu- to damage you, Amarie, but I... I will if I have to. Do - do you know what pain is?"

"Pain is what comes next when I'm not able to complete an order," Amarie said very softly, "or when I'm unable to protect somebody who I'm supposed to watch out for. Yes, Max - I understand pain very well."

Ouch. So whoever had made her, had made her so that it hurt her to fail in her mission, like that pretty robot girl on 'Buffy' or the ones in Isaac Asimov stories. I was torn between admiring it as good engineering and anger and how cruel it was, if you accepted Amarie as a living, feeling person. (If she experienced pain, how could I *not*?) And... this meant that to refuse her questions would probably be a worse thing to do to her than to break her limbs and drive her back with my fiercest powers... but giving up our secrecy because of that would be a kind of emotional blackmail. (Especially since Amarie had been CONSTRUCTED to get the answers... so it was different than threatening people who already had lives with pain and the threat of death if I didn't go along with whoever's plan.)

"Mari... Amarie!" Liz exclaimed. Uh-oh, it hadn't taken as long for Liz and Sean to get their treats as I had expected. Were they still eating them? How dangerous was this tropical-fruit stuff to Tess and I, and was there any real risk as long as we didn't deliberately eat or drink it ourselves?? Well, that didn't matter so much as the Amarie situation. I was NOT going to give her any further opportunity to hurt Liz... or Tess, or anybody else.

I stepped a bit closer to her. "If... if we agree to meet you back here tomorrow, Amarie, then you still have a chance to complete your orders, right?" A bit uncertainly, she nodded. "Okay, then let's make it five PM local time, over there near the chalupa stand." I carefully pointed back behind us without letting my gaze slip entirely away from the android girl. "I'm not going to make you any promises, but we'll think about how much we can tell you between now and then."

"Al... alright, I guess," Amarie said, seeming to have a bit of trouble with this notion. "Hell... hello Liz. Hello Sean. I - I'm sorry that I hurt you both when you found out what I'd done. That was stupid, and it wasn't in the plan."

"Well, I appreciate the apology," Liz said slowly. "Are you going to leave first, or should we??"

She considered that a moment. "You go. I... I will not try to damage you, but I will remain until you have gone, so that you will not be able to follow me after I leave."

I resisted the urge to smile. "Deal. Until tomorrow, Amarie." I met up with Liz and Sean, and led the way out of the square and back towards the hotel as quickly as possible.

"Um, Max?" Tess asked. "Shouldn't we maybe... I dunno, try to set up a rough net, catch her on her way back to her master, and follow her anyway? She's probably going to head back to the beach."

"Eventually, yeah," Liz put in, "but if she was on the ball enough to come up with the idea of asking us to leave first so that we couldn't follow her, then she'd probably follow a circituitous route. Also, if she spotted us waiting for her, things could get awkward."

"And I think that I have a better way," I said. "Hope that Alex and Isabel are around when we get back to the hotel. This'll be much easier if we can get right on it as soon as possible."

"What... what better way, Evans?" Sean asked, frowning slightly.

"I'll explain it once we're there."

-----------

It didn't take that long to find Isabel, though it could probably have been much quicker if I hadn't insisted on spending so much time searching the obvious places inside the hotel itself - lobby, rooms, restaurant, pool, and so on. Eventually it turned out that the whole time, they had both been laying out on the beach and sunbathing again, not more than a hundred and fifty feet from the hotel entrance but hidden behind a shrubby hill. Oh well. By this time pretty much all of the other kids in the gang were tagging along and had heard about our confrontation... Michael and Maria had been up in his room, listening to some music, and Kyle/Laurie had been sitting on the pool deck. It turned out that they'd seen Amarie today as well, on the beach, but hadn't been able to follow her without getting spotted. Presumably, that hadn't been long before I spotted her in the square.

"Okay, so what's this idea that we need to help with?" Isabel asked, stretching and groaning once I had told her some of the basic facts. "How can we find out more about Amarie or her cruel overlord??"

"Well, it's probably going to start with Alex, and maybe Liz," I explained. "I... I probed Amarie while we were talking, with our powers." Pause, bated breath all around me. "And... it looked like she had a GPS broadcaster inside her."

"Really, a standard human one?" Alex asked.

"Maybe some alien miniaturization involved," I said, "but definitely working to the same specifications I remember from experimenting with how my dad's worked."

Now Alex and Liz seemed to start realizing the possibilities. "Could be a navigational aid," she wondered aloud, "or a tracker specifically meant for her Master, so that he can know where she is at all times. But... but if you know the code number for her GPS signal..."

"Then we can break into the system, and track her ourselves!" Alex finished. "And I *will* need Isabel's help for this, since I don't have a laptop computer or anything like that here on the island. The stuff that she was working on yesterday, with providing unconventional interfaces via the palmpilot and so on."

"Okay, then, let's quit sitting around here and head back upstairs!" Michael urged. I guess I couldn't blame him for being impatient... it was pretty easy to see how worried he was about the fact that Amarie was back around, (though she didn't seem quite so threatening this time,) and anxious about protecting the real Maria.

"Okay, I've got the connection to the hotel wireless established," Isabel said, nearly as soon as she'd gotten into the room and picked up the palmpilot. "What's the next step??"

"Umm... just google first," Alex laughed. "I'm going to need to get some background on how GPS works before we actually start the attempt to crack it." Isabel laughed softly at that.

Tess, Kyle, Laurie, and I settled down to play some poker while waiting for word, but surprisingly it was only in the middle of the second hand that Alex called me over to look at the PDA's tiny screen. The by-now-familiar coast of the island was mapped out there, some of the town, and so on. A little blip that presumably indicated Amarie was coming up the beach towards the nearest pier. Apparently Tess and Liz had both been right... she was heading for the water, but she'd gone by a roundabout route. Tensely, I waited as the blip went out to the docks, and then into the water itself and off to sea. The contours of the island coast slipped off to the bottom of the screen, and then another suspiciously round small lump of land appeared. "So there's no doubt," I said. "She and her master are based on cannonball?"

"Hmm... very much looks that way," Alex muttered, as the blip came slowly in towards the shore, and in from the edges of the island a bit, and suddenly winked out. "No more signal. Maybe that has something to do with the protective fields that they noticed over there."

"Or she's under orders to turn the GPS off once Master knows that she's back home," Isabel suggested. "Keep it from wasting power."

"Okay, we need to meet in council," I decided uncertainly. Alex was taking the PDA away and plugging it back into the wall outlet.

"Here, and the overflow going into Valenti's room?" Michael suggested, coming in from the hall. I paused a moment, and nodded.

So once again we all tried to gather and squeeze into two just-barely-adjoining rooms. "We... we need to go to cannonball island, break through whatever defenses are there, and settle things with Amarie's master once and for all," I announced, sticking close to Tess and Isabel. "He, or she whatever, probably doesn't realize that we've found out, but that could change at any time. And I don't want to have this whole thing dragging on any longer."

There was a pause, and no real comment from anybody, so I opened my mouth again. "Looking over the possible plans, it seems like a light and strong expedition force makes sense. Three of the 'pod squad', and... and maybe two more people who want to go and can convince me of their usefulness in a crisis situation. Everybody else stays behind, staying close for mutual protection."

"I... I'll volunteer to be the one hybrid who stays again, if none of you are going to fight me for it," Isabel muttered. "The same reasons pretty much hold true."

"All right with me," Michael said, and Tess nodded too.

"Well, I'll certainly come," Valenti said. "Do I need to convince any of you how much experience I have in... well, in vaguely similar situations?"

I shook my head. "No, I was hoping that you'd offer, actually."

"And I want to go this time," Maria spoke up. Michael's face fell. "I... I'm not sure if I qualify as 'indispensable personnel' or whatever, but... but I need to confront this android chick face to face. Maybe... maybe something like that would be useful... that if I talk to Amarie, I'd be able to get through to her when none of the rest of you will, or possibly there'll be an opportunity for a switch, where you guys can hold Amarie restrained and I go to scout out the Master's lair, pretending to be her."

It wasn't too hard to tell that Michael didn't like the idea of Maria risking herself like that, but... but I didn't feel like it was my place to refuse her offer. "Okay, that's two. Anybody else want to volunteer?" I asked, and groaned. Kyle's hand quickly went up, followed by Liz, followed by Sean.

"This might take a while to sort out," Tess muttered.

"I... I think that we might have trouble finding a boat that would carry more than six people," Michael put in quickly. "I think that Kyle was the sixth. That leaves Isabel and Alex, Liz and Sean, Mrs DeLuca and Laurie staying behind. I realize that some of you might not be so happy with it, but..."

Liz shot a look at Michael, and then turned to watch Sean. "Ehh, I guess this'll be okay, yeah," Sean muttered."

"Okay, then what do we need to get ready??" Maria asked.

"Umm... not sure," Michael admitted. "But we'll work it all out."

-------------

"So, hey," Laurie said as she came up next to Kyle, who was searching through all of the guys' bags for any useful gear that the expedition force could take. "How's it going?"

"Umm, not too bad." Even as distracted as he was, when he happened to look up it didn't take much for Kyle to realize that Laurie wasn't perfectly fine herself. "Hey, don't get so worried."

"How... how can I not?" she muttered, disconsolate. "You guys are getting ready to go off and face down this android girl and whoever made her... who you don't really know anything about. I... I knew that Michael might stupidly put himself in danger, I've been preparing myself for it ever since I realized that I was finally safe from the Jellyfish alien guy." Kyle had to struggle not to laugh at the way she put that. "But... but for Maria to go into danger too, and... and you - I *don't* want anything to happen to you, Kyle."

"Well, you can't keep things from happening to me," Kyle said softly to her. "Life is full of stuff happening to us, and you can't stop that." Laurie shook her head. "We're all going together so that we can be safe, and there's no particular reason to think that this android master guy, whoever he is, will have the means and the motive to really hurt us. Obviously there's something a little nasty going on, but I think he's afraid of... of Michael and the others, or he wouldn't have messed around with sending Amarie out in the first place. We've figured out where he is, and we're going in to kick some alien ass and take down names. Nothing to worry about."

"I... I hope so," Laurie admitted, and impulsively threw her arms around him. Kyle turned in Laurie's embrace and found her lips with his own...

...But just for a second, because Michael walked in at that point. "Hey, you can french with my sister later, Buddha-boy. Got a job to do, right??"

Laurie immediately backed away, but Kyle just shook his head. Obviously they'd all have understood if Michael and Maria were taking a little private moment together to show their mutual affection - but Michael couldn't resist the urge to needle him just because Laurie was supposedly his sister.

"Okay, well, I'm almost through here," he grunted out loud. "Keep your head nailed on."

------------

In the dark of the ocean nearly two hours before twilight, a small sailboat made its way out from the docks well to the west of their hotel. THe plan was to get well out beyond Cannonball and come back in towards it from the opposite direction than Amarie had in the afternoon, in the hope that this would give them some advantage of surprise.

"I... I'm still not so wild about this sailing business," Michael grumped to Maria. "We shoulduv got a motorboat, even if that's louder. At least we know that we can get it to go in the direction that we want."

"Or a plane?" Kyle needled. That had been one suggestion that Michael had brought up earlier in the planning phase, but all methods of airborne travel to Cannonball had eventually had to be rejected as too unwieldy, expecially since they had no notion of any landing facilities.

"No, no plane," Michael repeated. "But... but none of us are really trained sailors, though Jim and Max do have some little experience I admit. The way the winds are blowing, we're going to have to zig-zag into them to make our final approach to Cannonball. I know that's not easy."

"It's called tacking, Michael," Max said. "And..."

"I... I pretty much knew that," Michael said, though he hadn't really been able to call the term up from memory.

"And - I'm hoping that we can call up a wind if we really need to," Max finished, waving a hand dramatically.

"Cool," Maria put in. "Alien mage winds."

"Mage winds?" Michael repeated, turning to her.

"Oh, it's something from a book, fantasy stuff," Maria replied absently, looking out at the water. "Wizards and medieval times, except that the planet was mostly full of islands, no big continents like America. A... a little bit like the gulf of Mexico all over I guess."

"Earthsea," Tess said, stepping up close to them. "Good stuff."

Maria smiled slightly, taken by surprise at this recognition from Tess. "And so sailing is the best way possible of travelling the world, since they can't use land routes and don't have the tech for airplanes or motorboats... even balloons. One of a wizard's most important spells is the mage-wind, which can give him as strong a wind in his sails as he needs, applying only to his own boat."

"Well, I'm not sure that I've got so fine a control," Max said, "but it'll work as an analogy I guess."

"Just be careful with the winds, Max," Tess said lightly. "We don't want to start a hurricane off in... in Turkey or something like that."

"Ehh, if it happens, it happens," Max muttered. "Sometimes the butterflies have to take care of themselves." Michael laughed.

Maria looked at him. "Hey, what butterflies?"

"Well, um, it's a little hard to explain..." Michael started.

-----------

"I hate the waiting most of all," Liz muttered in a darkly histrionic voice.

"Like what, Liz?" Amy Deluca said, and Liz shot her a look. "Umm, well, you don't have to answer if you don't want to, but I'm curious, and we need SOME way to pass the time." She sighed. "Or if you'd rather talk about some time when waiting around wasn't so bad... I, umm, I dunno. Sorry."

"That's okay," replied Liz, who knew where Maria had gotten her tendency to ramble. "Well,. umm..." She looked around at Sean and Laurie, who made up the rest of the group - they were in the DeLuca-Dupree room. Isabel and Alex were off by themselves - he was keeping her company while she tried to keep an eye on their friends without attracting any unwelcome attention. Amy had decided not to worry about a couple spending time alone together under circumstances like that.

"How about when you were waiting to see if Alex and Kyle would be okay, and what was going to happen over in Tucson?" Laurie suggested, and Liz made a face.

"That wasn't even waiting so much... that just felt like failure at the time... like we'd done everything that we could think of and it wasn't enough. Max and Tess had tried throwing rocks into the crystal barriers, but that stuff was surprisingly tough even when you didn't consider its more unusual properties, and they didn't want to do anything that could hurt the guys... like shattering the Gandarium hard enough to send shards flying at them, or create an impact strong enough that it might just collapse the entire nest in a cave-in. And we were still working on the side access, hoping that it wouldn't get blocked until too late - when suddenly everything was over." She sighed. "At least sometimes we can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, or something like that."

"Yeah," Laurie agreed. "Okay, what else??"

"Umm... when Max was in the white room," Liz said slowly. "Though... well, we got tired of just sitting and waiting that time and came after the gang, and it's a good thing that we did I guess. They had a getaway car there just at the right time, and Jim probably saved Michael's life by going into the base and shooting at Pierce while Michael was trying to escape."

"Hmm... probably not the best thing to get into," Alex muttered, drifting into the room. "Especially since I don't think we want to persuade ourselves that we have to go charging off to help out, unless the need really is great."

Liz waved her irritation at him. "How's Izzie doing?"

"Pretty good, just resting for a bit. Does anybody have a can of juice or pop or something in their mini fridge? I didn't want to go downstairs... not sure why, but..."

"Umm, yeah, we've got cola and sprite actually, and I don't guess that Michael would mind," Sean said, getting up. "Come on."

Alex nodded at him, they left and pulled the door to behind them, and Laurie giggled slightly when she realized that they were now in an estrogen-only zone. "Okay, so what was the nature hike with Sean like, Liz?" she asked. "Before - umm, before Max ran into - well, you know."

"Umm... I'm not sure how to say it," Liz replied. "It was great, it was fun, though I'm not the greatest nature lover you'd ever find I guess. Spending the time with Sean was great of course, I really do like him, though it'd be different, and maybe better in the short time, if I'd been on the walk with just him." She sighed. "But... but no matter how awkward it was doubling with him and Max and Tess... well, I'm starting to not get so upset when they act coupley together around me, and I guess that that's a good thing, if I want to stay friends with Max. Maybe Tess and I will even figure out how to sort things out together... that really wouldn't suck."

"Yeah, I think I know what you mean, Liz," Amy said. "When... well, when I was young, it was easy to get all wrapped up in some guy that I had baggage with, and take whatever was going wrong out on other girls that I thought were the competition. But really... well, all of us chicks were kinduv going through the same stuff. We had more in common than we knew, and once we realized that, it was great to start building supportive relationships instead of rivalries and feuds."

Liz smiled slightly. "Did you ever become best friends with a girl that you'd fought with over a guy?"

"Umm... of course. Right off the top of my head, well, there's Brenna."

"You're kidding. Brenna Waverly?" Liz had met Brenna, a vivacious, slightly dizzy woman in her early forties, several times over at the DeLuca house when she'd gone there to spend time with Maria. "That Brenna?"

"Umm... same girl, but of course she was Brenna Jones before she married Trent. I... I swore some pretty nasty things about Brenna during senior year. I really thought that she'd stolen Curt Pressman away from me the summer before, and then, once Maria's father and I became an item, I got really jealous, even a little paranoid, that Brenna was going to take him away from me too. But she didn't even like Ryan that way, actually, and after I found out that I was going to be having a baby... well, I was sitting in the Eraser room all by myself and trying to hold back tears when she came in with her boyfriend... can't even remember his name, maybe something with an N in it." She paused.

"Okay, well, what happened next?" Laurie asked eagerly.

Amy looked like her mind was all the way back then, and Liz was wondering if she could spot a hint of a tear in the corner of her eye. "She... Brenna sent N away, whoever he was, and came in to ask me if I was going to be okay. She... she didn't really have any reason to be so concerned after I'd been a bitch to her, really, and that simple kindness blew me away. Considering everything that happened to me in those few months, my parents finding out that I was going to have a baby - Ryan asking me to marry him and everything. I... well, somehow she became a friend who I relied on very much, though I'm not sure if I could tell you when that started even now." She sighed, and did brush a tear away from her eye, and then another on the reverse side of her face. "At least two of my other girlfriends suddenly became too busy to hang out, once the rumors started to fly around. I... I guess it's when things get tough that you figure out who you can really count on."

"I wouldn't argue with that." Liz suddenly looked up at the adjoining door, with Amy and Laurie following the new voice too. Isabel was standing there, smiling slightly. "Umm, I didn't mean to eavesdrop or anything, was just..."

"Hey, it's okay," Liz insisted. "You're qualified to sit in on the girl talk stuff, right? I mean, umm, as long as you don't mind, umm..."

"Yeah, it's fine," Amy assured Isabel as well. "How're the others doing??"

"Well, they've finished the turnaround and are approaching cannonball from the far side." There was a slightly worried look on Isabel's face. "I... I'm not quite sure what kind of interference has put up there, but it's starting to get harder to reach them already."

"Uh-oh," Alex said from the hallway door. Isabel flashed him a half-smile, and he tossed a soda bottle over to her.

----------

"I... I think that something's coming," Michael muttered, straining out into the darkness ahead of the boat. In the darkness, it was only just possible to make out the rounded dome of Cannonball island against the tropical stars, but the senses that he was using had nothing to do with visible light. "Something... something very small, and flying."

"Uh-oh," I muttered. Here it came - the first sign that the android master of Cannonball had any notion that something was coming at him, and that he was ready to respond to it. "How fast is it coming? Can you tell *how* small??"

"Umm... not that fast, maybe... umm, maybe forty to fifty miles per hour?" Michael said, frowning. "And... and something like three feet long - ish."

"Ish in which way?" Tess asked, and got a nasty look from Michael. "Well, that doesn't sound too big - it's not a manned vehicle, or aliened - unless there are some really tiny aliens that we don't know about. Whatever."

"No, but it could be some sort of crude bomb," I suggested.

"Doesn't sound like it's going fast enough to be much of a rocket or a missile," Kyle pointed out. "Unless it speeds up a lot. You should be able to get a better 'look' at it well before it's in range to blow us up... well, depending on just how much explosive boom they can cram into three feet-ish."

"I - I'm not sure, but..." Tess started.

"SSHH!" Michael hissed, and she jumped a little, stepped next to me, and glared at him. "Sorry, it's just - I'm trying to concentrate, and not having to tune out the chatter would really help." So we hushed up, and Michael tuned into whatever it was. Without anything else to do, I tried to extend my own senses towards the island, and realized that I could sense something too.

"It's..."

"It's a sensor drone of some sort, and it's alien," Michael said, talking in a slightly louder voice than my whisper. "Not quite sure if it can pick us up yet - I'm thinking not, but if the two of us get much closer..."

"What kind of sensors does it have?" Jim asked curiously. "Can you tell that??"

"Umm... low-frequency sound, active infrared scanner, and - and that's it I think. Some kind of radio link to connect it to headquarters."

"Alright," Tess said, stepping up towards the bow. All of a sudden, there was a very deep low rumble out ahead of us that rattled my bones hard, and a sort of a flash of heat, and something vaguely like a spark of lightning. "That should take care of it - I've fried out the sensors, and disrupted the command hookup for good measure. Do you think that another one will get sent out?"

"Umm... hard to say," I said, looking over at Tess with a trace of concern. The fact that she'd just acted without asking any of the rest of us about possible consequences was more than a little disturbing... but maybe there really hadn't been time. "What do we do if he sends out more than one?"

"Depends on if they're as toothless as this one," Michael said, and so we argued different tactical contingencies for a long while.

All of it came pretty much to nothing, though, because for the rest of the sail in, there was no particular sign of activity from Cannonball. Twilight was just beginning now, as we'd planned it for the landing, and we looked at the far side of the shore, (well, the far side from the vicinity of our hotel, the near side now,) and looked for a natural harbour or pirate docks or anything. Mister Valenti suggested that a range of straight rocks would make a decent pier, although we might need to throw ropes up to climb onto flat ground.

It was in the middle of this operation, with Maria, Kyle, and Tess already scrambled up when disaster struck. A huge wave appeared out of nowhere, maybe fifteen feet away from the rocks, and swept towards the boat. To add injury to insult, or something like that, a flash of light from somewhere up above smashed down and cracked the hull open. Jim, Michael, and I just managed to grab on quick enough and climb well enough to avoid getting dunked in the salty water.

Tess, meanwhile, had oriented and returned fire. Some sort of drone that none of us had noticed, (presumably better armed than the last one,) fell down out of the sky to land in the water thirty feet down the 'pier.' And then, things were awfully quiet.

So we were stuck on a pirate island with who-knew-what, except that it involved a bunch of weird alien hardware. And we'd just lost our ticket home, unless our powers would be enough to dredge the boat back up and make it seaworthy again, which seemed like a long shot. Without that, our only transportation off the island would presumably have to be taken away from the tech-Master.

"So, what do we do next?" Jim asked earnestly. I didn't have any good ideas.

TO BE CONTINUED...

[Chrisken]

Part Fourteen

Tess stepped close to me as we crept crouching through the rain forestey underbrush, and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. "Umm, maybe you shouldn't be..." I started to whisper

"Come on, why Max??" The words slipped out of her a little bit snappishly. "I mean, things are dire and we're heading into unknown dangers. Is it so wrong if I want a little reassurance from my b... from you?"

I smiled slightly, stopped creeping, and hugged her back. "There. Reassurance." And then I pointed about fifteen feet ahead of us. "And now, if we're still arm in arm by the time we hit those trees, I'm actually a little worried that we might get wedged in and stuck. Now, as fun as the notion might be if it weren't for the hairy danger quotient of this island..."

"Oh, umm. Right." And Tess slipped away, falling in behind me, which probably made sense. Her powers weren't great for leading the way into the unknown, (not that mine are, but that's why Michael's breaking trail,) and her deceptive tricks might be good at getting one of us out of trouble, as long as she can see what the problem is.

And, as long as there was a person who was actually vulnerable to mindwarping. So far, the issue seemed more likely to be machines of various designs, from those little drones that had worried us so much when we were in the boat, all the way up to Android-Maria-duplicate herself. (Hopefully no further.) Tess hadn't even tried mindwarping Amarie, but from what I knew of how her power worked, it wasn't likely to work - the mindwarp was a form of nervous signal override, sending fake stimuli into the optic nerve or the visual center of the brain, or the equivalent for whatever other sense she wanted to manipulate. Any robot wasn't likely to have a brain that worked on the same principle closely enough for it to work.

"I feel nervous about the fact that we haven't spotted anything else yet," Kyle muttered. That was the other side of it - there hadn't been any trouble so far, at least none since the boat sank, and that was indeed rather ominous. Why hadn't the android master sent something else down to the waterfront to catch us? Well, that might depend on how many 'somethings' he had available - well, he or she, or it, or whatever. (Maybe hesh was the correct pronoun, what the heck did I know about it?)

"Don't worry too much about that," Valenti muttered. "The most likely alternatives is that they're unaware we made it onto the island alive, or that they don't have the resources to send against us here. That's good."

"Yeah, I suppose so," Maria said. "And, um, well - where are we headed? I understand the point about heading away from the waterfront into the center of the island, but it’s still pretty big, and do you really expect that the evil mastermind’s lair will be that easy to find??”

“I guess I assumed that it’d be right at the top of the ‘hill,’” Kyle said, and Tess groaned. Oh, yeah, we’d been heading uphill all this time - there was a fairly steep slope right after we got away from the water - the sides of the ‘ball’, although the island wasn’t nearly as obviously sloped as its namesake. This jungley section didn’t have so steep a grade, but it was still a bit punishing to slog through, for the uphill-ness and other reasons.

“No, more likely he’d be using the old pirate base, or whatever was left of it,” Mister Valenti argued. “Which would be close to the water I think, and - on the other side of the island?”

“Actually, it’s more like the left side I think,” Maria put in.

“How do you know that?” Tess asked. “Umm, not meaning to be snarky or anything, but - you weren’t on the boat cruise, and it was Kyle who said he was going to be finding out more about the pirates - Kyle and Laurie.”

“Well, I guess I’m the one who actually went and did it,” Maria said. “With Alex’s help, last night - he wanted a few more things to try out with his laptop internet thingee, so I suggested that.” She stopped and looked around, trying to get her bearings. “I think that we’ll need to be heading off in that direction, sooner or later.” And she pointed about forty degrees left of the path that we were following.

“Okay, babe,” Michael said - he had turned back and was smiling at her. “I’ll keep a watch out for any side paths that might be heading that way. Otherwise - well, we’ll be reconsidering what we do when we run out of jungle anyway.”

“What happens if we’re already all the way across the island when we run out of jungle?” Valenti said, in a tone more light-hearted than I usually think of him using in a situation like this. He’s not really the type to be joking around to break up the tension.

“We’ll follow the far shore, or figure something else out,” Maria grumped. For a while there was quiet.

We kept along the path, and after a while there was a forking in the way, a chance to bear to the left, and we took it - and soon after that the rainforest gave way to a field of very tall grass. (We could see the place where the other end of the trail came out of the rainforest too, so it didn’t really matter much which way we’d gone.) Tried to keep our heads down and not disturb the grass too much, but that was hard. The sky was already fairly bright and it seemed to me, looking east, that the sun would probably come up just around any minute.

Michael suddenly bumped into me gently and pointed over to the right. I looked, couldn’t see anything, and then realized that I could hear something very faintly. Some kind of a motor.

The machine, when it finally came close for an impression of it to be seen, was a bit larger than a riding lawnmower without a rider - though it didn’t mow the grass, just drove over it and the stalks did their best to stand up again afterwards. It hadn’t been coming right at us, at least, and the only sensors anybody could pick out were a kind of passive sonar, listening for the noise of intruders. So all six of us stood as still as we could, and Michael worked on creating a sound baffle in addition to that, and it seemed to work. Once the mower-matic got to the end of the grassy field it headed off in a new direction, which again brought it fairly close to us but not too close, and then it drove off away and we never saw it again.

Finally we got to the edge of the grassy space, which was a border with another forest, not quite a rainforest type but one that looked more like Frazier woods back home. It seemed a bit odd that there were so many different types of ground cover in such a small space on this island, but that didn’t really seem to matter. This little patch of forest looked like it would surround the old pirate hideout, which was good, in that the trees should make it easier for us to sneak up on it.

Something like what I guessed was halfway there, Tess stopped still and grabbed my arm again. I paused too, listening, and heard a soft growling noise. Oh, no.

“What is it?” I whispered in a single breath, wondering if anybody would have an answer.

“I... I’m not sure,” Tess admitted in a similarly quiet voice. “But... but it’s fierce. Sharp teeth, and - and some kind of limbs that can stick to anything they grab hold of.” She hesitated. “And - and I don’t think it’s from anywhere around this solar system.”

---------

Liz and Sean had just finished watching the sun rise out on the balcony when there was a knocking on the room door.

“Jim?” Amy asked immediately, though she should probably have known that he wouldn’t be getting back so soon - and not without Isabel being able to tell, by this point.

“No. Please open the door, I am an officer of the peace.”

“Uh-oh,” Liz muttered, and headed inside, though she wasn’t sure what she could do. After exchanging glances with everybody else who was around - which was mostly just Laurie and the two of them, Amy nervously opened the door. Alex and Isabel were off in his room.

“What’s this about, officer?”

“Sorry for calling so early, but it is a matter of some urgency and I wished to be sure that I could meet with you before you headed out for the day - Miz DeLuca.” The knocker was a handsome, dark-skinned policeman, and there seemed to be two others in lesser uniforms outside in the hallway. “There has been a rather puzzling theft at one of the local piers.”

“What made it so puzzling?” Sean asked, before Liz could stop him.

Officer B (for Bahamas) turned to stare at him a moment. “I’m afraid I cannot speak more about it. However, certain people were recognized at the scene of the crime in the middle of the night, and I was wondering if you could assist me in identifying them. I have reason to believe that they may be members of your... of your party of travelling companions, Miz.”

”Umm, okay, I suppose.” The officer produced a small sketch pad, turned it sideways so that it was wider than it was high, and showed it to her. Instantly inner conflict filled Amy’s face, followed by bitter regret. It seemed to Liz that no matter how much she might want to spare her daughter and the members of her ‘group’ trouble, she could not bring herself to deny them. That was probably for the best - unlikely that playing dumb would really accomplish much, when so many eyewitnesses had seem them all together at various places. “Well, yes, that - that’s my daughter Maria, and... and her friend Michael. But I don’t really believe that they could be involved in anything...”

“Thank you Miz. And these people?” He turned the page.

“Umm...” Now Amy was registering confusion. “Yes, but surely you don’t think that THESE people were involved in your robbery?”

“No, however, they were seen with your daughter and her ‘friend’ at the pier yesterday.”

She relaxed slightly. “Yes, they - they were going to rent out a motorboat and see, umm, see some of the coastline.” Amy took a deep breath. “That young man is Alex Whitman, he’s been friends with my daughter for years and years, and the beautiful lady is his, umm, his girlfriend, Isabel. I believe that they’ll be in the next room over if you need to ask them any questions.”

“Hmm.” He considered that. “And, your daughter? Her friend??”

“They - umm, they’re not here, no. He... uhh,”

“They drove off to the other end of the island about an hour ago,” Liz blurted out. “Wanted to wait in line for tickets to the big, umm, the big rock concert that’s being held day after tomorrow.”

“Ahh.” The officer’s dark regard lingered on Liz. “And, are any other members of your company also absent, perhaps with Michael and Maria? You checked into six rooms all together, I believe - twelve patrons.”

“Yes, three of the other teenagers went too,” Amy said, realizing what had to be done to make the story stick. “Along with, umm, with Mister Valenti, my co-chaperone.”

“Six people driving over to the coliseum?” he asked. “Did they have two cars?”

“No, just the one rental,” Liz said. “I don’t envy Maria or Tess, especially, they’ll probably end up getting squished into the middle just because they’re girls.”

“I see. Well, thank you for your time.”

“Just one thing before you go,” Sean spoke up. “What was stolen. Can you tell me that much?”

“A fairly expensive sailboat.” The officer smiled ever so slightly. “Well, good day, and hopefully I won’t need to bother you again, if your friends truly weren’t involved. Perhaps it was a mistaken identification - the young man saw two other young people and thought that they were the ones he was waiting on yesterday morning.” He shrugged slightly and left, pulling the door closed behind him.

“Grand theft marine??” Laurie spluttered after a long moment of silence. “What was Michael *thinking*??”

“That they couldn’t wait for someone who was awake and willing to rent them a boat at three in the morning,” Liz put in. “I hadn’t expected this, but I’m not really surprised. Wish that they hadn’t been quite so obvious about it though.”

“So... so what do we do about that?” Amy asked. “When they get back, they might get thrown in jail!”

“We’ll worry about that when we get there,” Liz replied. “I - I’m going to go over and fill Isabel in. It might be important. She can tell Max as soon as he’s out of the interference field.”

But when Liz got into Alex’s room, both he and Isabel were lightly drowsing, and she didn’t have the heart to wake either of them yet.

-----------

“Michael?” I hissed. He was already heading over for the huddle with Tess and I, and making sure that Maria was safely behind the huddle. “Okay, come on, a fierce alien creature of some kind. What do we do??”

“Same thing I’d do if it were an ordinary human guard dog on an important mission, except more carefully,” Max muttered. “Well, actually, maybe I wouldn’t shoot to kill an ordinary dog, but...”

I thought about that. The analogy, and Michael’s reaction, didn’t seem entirely out of line, and I looked at Tess. She just shrugged as if to say ‘well, what else are we going to do?’ That was a point. For one thing, we didn’t really have the luxury of a quiet retreat, since whoever had sunk our sailboat. We *needed* to get into that base sooner or later, and the sooner the better, if we were going to find our way back home.

“Okay, you wanna take point then Michael?” I muttered.

Michael thought about that a moment. “Think you could pull your specialty trick?” he asked Tess. She paused a moment, nodded, and I realized what he was saying. If she could get into the guard creatures head and distract it with a fake sensory impression, then that would probably let Michael do whatever he was going to do more safely and more surely. “Okay, then let’s get ready, because I think it’s coming this way.”

I took two steps back, just to give them room to maneuver, and so that I could try to accomplish something as a second line of defense. But there wasn’t actually a need. I saw it clearly for about three seconds, and the characterization of an alien guard dog didn’t seem too bad, except that it wasn’t making any loud sound of warning that I could hear. Big purple-black pointed fangs, and many-jointed limbs with suckers and spikes on the ends - and then it skittered to a stop, paralyzed with a momentary fright. Don’t have any idea what image Tess projected to it, but there wasn’t much subtlety about the way Michael blasted it to bits.

“Eww, man,” Maria muttered. “I know it wasn’t the cuddliest critter I’ve ever seen, but still, that was kinduv harsh.”

“Let’s go,” I just said. “There might be other guards alerted to that guy’s activity - or to his absence, now.” And we hurried further into the forest.

It wasn’t hard to spot the wood and stone outline of the old pirate fort - or a few distinctly non-pirate additions that had been made, like the landing pad with a snazzy little shuttlepod sitting at its edge. I approached the little ship cautiously, wondering if there were any kind of alarms on it. Didn’t get closer than about ten feet, but my impressions were... well, I really don’t know anything about spacecraft, but I made a few guesses. One was that it wouldn’t really be much good for extended atmospheric flight, just up and back down again - or maybe I should say down and back up again, under the circumstances. Also, it wouldn’t carry many people, especially in anything like what I’d consider comfort. But then, maybe aliens don’t mind so much about being able to get up and stretch every so often, or having a variety of recreation options.

“Any sign of robot activity?” I whispered to Michael after leaving the landing pad. “Maria’s idea about trying to impersonate her android worser half is an okay one I think, but only if we can be sure that Amarie herself is well out of the way. Preferably with the rest of us guarding her. Otherwise, it’s too dangerous.”

“Hmmm.” He considered that. “If Amarie’s got a GPS transmitter built into her, how can we be sure about communications gear? I wouldn’t want to put much weight in being able to hold her prisoner, if she can just phone home without even speaking a word out loud, and warn the boss.”

“Oh, umm, yeah,” I said, kicking myself a little inside for not thinking of that one myself before Michael did. Robots with hidden communication gear and other little gadgets were a staple of the science fiction stories that I wrote when I was younger. “Maybe we could make an interference pattern or something.”

“Well, once you make a decision what you want to do about it,” Maria weighed in, “I... I’m pretty sure that I see someone out on the docks over there, and the shape looks - well, female.”

I looked, and nodded. In fact, more than just feminine, the outline of the distant figure did seem reminiscent of Maria, though she was much too far away to identify with any true certainty. However, there were relatively few people who I’d expect to see here on Cannonball island, and Amarie was one of them, (using the term ‘people’ loosely perhaps,) so it seemed like a reasonable guess. The docks themselves were fairly simple affairs, floating wooden deals stretching out into the water, like the ones that you might expect to see at a summer camp in Minnesota or someplace like that, to pick a summer-camp-ey location at random.

“Roll the dice, Max,” Tess urged me quietly. “Confronting whoever it is, especially if it’s Amarie, is worth the risk. Considering what we were able to tell of her mental faculties when she showed up at the village fair, I’m not sure that she’ll be able to effectively argue against ‘herself’, even if what Maria is trying to get to do runs against her orders or her programming. And - if worst comes to worst and we’re unable to keep her from raising the alarm - then all isn’t lost. It just means that we’ll have to go hardcore and hope for the best.”

“Hmm,” I mused, not quite sure where to go based on that recommendation. Michael made a sound of agreement, big surprise there. Hoping for a sanity check, I turned to Mister Valenti, who hopefully would be the voice of reason.

“Yes, go, but not everybody comes with,” he suggested. “Tess, Max, you’re with Maria, since you’ve dealt with Amarie fairly sucessfully before. Michael, you come with Kyle and me, and...” he pointed the nearest bit of cover to the fort. “We’ll take our place there, as it looks like a fairly good place to launch an offensive from if we need to.”

Well, there seemed to be no choice or alternative now. Unless... I turned to Michael, wondering if he would protest about not being able to protect Maria directly himself. There was a conflict in my old friend’s face, as if he was struggling with an urge to say something about that, but instead he just put his hand on my shoulder and nodded towards Maria. That said it all, no words needed. ‘Keep her safe’ was the message, and I intended to do just that.

The other three were well hidden in their own position by the time the girls and I crossed the bare stretch of beach and stepped onto the pier. I felt much too exposed out here - anybody could be looking out of the fort building and see us - including two Marias. But, well, there didn’t seem to be any way around that, and it might give us a good opportunity instead of the other bad stuff. At the moment, there seemed to be no indication that anyone was awake inside, but I didn’t count on that.

There seemed to be several good boats tied up on the two piers, which would be be good news as far as getting back. One pier was just a straight line of wooden planking, and the other had a crosswise ‘spar’ coming out a little more than half way up, turning it into a deformed T shape.

And Amarie turned around, holding some sort of little glass globe in both hands - I wasn’t sure what she’d have been doing with it out here, and did a very good impression of being startled. From the way her eyes widened, and her legs twitched, which made her body almost topple backwards, to the way she took in a deep breath, everything about her human semblence was perfect this time. “How - how can I be here twice??”

Tess smiled slightly, hoping that her guess was paying off. Myself, I was more than a little caught off guard as the alien senses I had been working on honing picked up radio signals moving through the air - Amarie did indeed have some kind of signaler, and she was using it. Quickly I did the best I could to generate static radio noise on the same frequency, but something in my stomach sank as I realized that maybe the burst of static might itself be detected. Well, still, that was the best I could do for now, I wasn’t anywhere near good enough with EM fields to damp down Amarie’s signal by generating an exact opposite, or to try creating an energy Faraday cage around us that would keep the signal from getting out.

“We, umm, we came here on a sailboat during the night,” Maria said, “because I wanted very much to talk to you - and my friends want to meet the person who gave you your orders, if he won’t hurt them.” She sighed. “I... I have to admit, this is weird. Why do you look like me?”

“I... I don’t understand the question,” Amarie said, in an almost identical tone and voice. “This... this is the way that I am, the way that I have always been. I... I need to be like you, in order to fufill my function.” And she turned to scowl at Max and me. “You were supposed to meet me again tomorrow.”

“I’m not sorry for jumping the gun,” Tess insisted. “We can still go there, if it’s really that important to you, after. But - but we had to do something that you wouldn’t expect, to take the initiative against your... I’m sorry, talking in vague terms is getting too annoying. Who - who brought you here, to this island?”

“I... I brought myself here.”

“Not just now,” I muttered sourly.

“The first time I came here, I brought myself, and more than myself,” Amarie insisted. “We - we landed in an airplane on the bigger island over there.” She pointed back towards the hotel. “I drove the boat. I’m good with boats - I was made so.”

“Okay,” Maria said, growling. “Who else is in we? Who did you bring with you in the boat, the first time you came here?”

“X and some of his other friends,” Amarie said. “The little flying people, and the saber-doggie and - well, there’s a few others really...."

So robot drones and the creature that we'd destroyed - maybe. "This X - what is he like?" Tess pressed.

"Now, that's one of those questions that I don't think I should answer," Amarie said in an annoyed tone. "Especially since you haven't let me ask many of my own."

"But you can talk about X to me, right?" Maria said, matching her othre self's calm, friendly tones from a moment before quite closely. "I mean, I already know about him, right??"

For a second, again, this seemed to take Amarie in. But something else in her programming must have kicked in. "A question for a question, each answered to the best of our ability, no hedging."

I had a very bad feeling about it - the kind of answers that Amarie might be able to get out of us seemed more likely to be damaging than any answers we could get out of Amarie were likely to be helpful. Even if the 'no hedging' bit would allow her to violate her programming and speak of things that her master had constructed her to keep in the strictest secrecy, there were too many things that he could just have kept her ignorant of, thus making her truly incapable of answering. And somehow, he suspected that even when Amarie was trying to be as forthright and clear as possible, they'd have some trouble understanding her responses.

Tess seemed to be reluctant too, and I heard her voice whispering in my ear - a small mindwarp, used to talk to me without Amarie overhearing. 'If you've got another plan, move on it NOW.'

Somewhat to my surprise, I did. Pulling up water from beside the dock, I wrapped it around Amarie, not in an attempt to short out her workings or anything, but just because it was the closest source of matter that I could work with easily. Stronger bonds between the particles of water, so that it wasn't really a highly fluid liquid anymore, and on the surface of that bubble of hydrogen monoxide I built the faraday cage that I had refrained from earlier.

"Go, Maria!" Tess cried out, seeing what had to come next. "Try to get inside. I'll give what help I can. You can play A pretty well now, right?"

Maria had blanched a little at the sudden envelopement of her lookalike, but she ran down the docks again and up the beach. Saw Michael poke his head up just a bit from his lookout post, and I tried to wave him down just a little bit without being too obvious about it. We didn't need a full flanking assault at this point, not if the lookalike gambit could work...

And then, all of a sudden, there was a figure in the building doorway that Maria had been heading for. She yelped a bit and stopped so quickly that she lost her balance and tumbled to the sand. This new person didn't look terribly impressive, but appearances could be especially deceptive when dealing with aliens. He was - well, he looked young-ish, with a brown head of unruly hair, a slightly thick midsection, and glasses that I couldn't see through. Almost a stereotypical twenty-something geeker genius.

A wild throught ran through my mind - was it possible that this was just a human kid as he seemed, who'd managed to figure out how to build androids? No, that didn't really explain why he'd be trying to find out so much about us - or why Amarie seemed to know so much already. In fact, if a guy liked that could build a girl as beautiful as Maria, obedient to his every world - you wouldn't expect that the rest of the world would ever get a chance to see her, really, because she'd be kept pretty busy behind closed doors.

His voice was more intimidating than his appearance, though. "I wouldn't try it, Miz DeLuca." Well, talk about obvious. Of course the jig was up in that respect.

And on that note, Michael let out his best Braveheart battle scream and charged out of the bushes, shooting more energy bolts at the doorway. He probably couldn't see the guy as well as we could, but he could obviously tell that there was someone there who had frightened his Maria.

Most of the bolts missed entirely at that range. One struck the wooden wall of the pirate fort and started to burn there, until the guy, (I'll call him X from now on as a hunch,) waved the fire out with a hand gesture, and used another to squelch into sparks a burst of blue fire that might have actually hit him. Seeing this, Michael slowed down to a slower jog, and I could tell that he was trying to think of something that had a little bit more oomph to it.

"Could you tell your friend to stop?" X asked Tess and me. "I... I don't want to hurt you, now that you've shown the initiative to get here, but if he's just going to keep at me like this and not learn to relax..."

"Michael," I called. "Maria's okay, for now. Just come on over." Michael got an annoyed look on his face, I could just make out, but he came over and didn't do anything more other than glare at X. Jim and Kyle followed, and we all sort of met in the vicinity of where Maria had originally fallen - she was up now, and gratefully hugged Michael, still trembling slightly.

"And, well, now that we're starting to get along, how about releasing my Mari?" X asked, pointing to the ellipse of nearly-solid water still sitting on the deck. Oh, right. I checked with everybody else before letting the water flow away - Amarie, or Mari or whatever we were to call her now, would probably be a great asset to X if he were to surprise-attack us, but if there was a chance to reach a peaceful understanding wth them, I felt we pretty much had to follow that up, even if it turned out to be a trick in the end.

"Okay, so what's the deal, man?" Michael asked as Mari walked up from the dock, looking very waterlogged at least as far as her skin. "Why send your robot to try and trick my friend? What do you want out of us anyway, and why couldn't you have just asked nicely in the first place??"

"Yeah," X said, and sighed loudly. "Of course you'd ask that straight away."

-----------

"Oohh," Isabel moaned, stirring from sleep, and Alex instantly started awake, concern flooding through his brain. "What... what is it, baby?"

"Erm, I'm not sure," Isabel muttered, and there was a confused moment as they both tried to sit up without bumping into each other too badly. By the time that was over, Liz had come back into the room - maybe she had been on watch for some sign of trouble, and had heard Isabel's first sounds of distress. "It - it's like something mental pushing at me, pressing at my senses."

"Like an attack?" Alex asked nervously. "The android master, trying to overwhelm your defenses??"

"I'm not sure I had many defenses up," Isabel said uncertainly. "If it was an attack, I would think that I'd be in pain, not just discomfort... but who knows, on that score. Maybe I underestimate my own mental resilience, or how hard it is to press home an attack over these kinds of distances."

"Hmm." Liz considered this herself. "Or maybe it's not quite a hostile move, but trying to find out more about us?" Isabel shrugged uncertainly. "Well... is there anything that any of us can do to help you?"

"Order some room service," Isabel said with a chuckle. "Me's hungry and thirsty." Liz nodded. "And... well, I guess that we'll find out soon if there's anything else."

Brunch was a relatively somber affair in Alex's room. Amy joined the three of them, while apparently Laurie and Sean were sleeping, overwhelmed by the tension and preparations that had kept everybody up through the night before. "I... I've got what sounds like a really weird idea," Isabel suddenly put in after finishing her second banana bran muffin.

"Oh, come on, please, like anything you say would really qualify as weird at this point," Alex said with a big grin. Liz shook her head and rolled her eyes at him.

"Okay, then try this," she countered. "I... I think that whatever it is that's pushing at me from Cannonball, it's coming from a computer system, a very sophisticated one." Alex nodded. "And... and that if I tried, I could push back, or ride back, and be inside the computer."

"Okay, I have to admit that that's weird by my standards," Amy said. "Have... have you ever had any experience with this kind of thing, Isabel?"

"Umm, no," she admitted. "I've worked with computers before, and used my dreamwalking powers to go and be somewhere that I'm not really - or at least go be in someone's head, and I know that that's not the same as being in a computer's circuits." She sighed. "I just... I know that it's weird, but I can DO this, and maybe it'll be something that helps Max and Maria and all the others. If we're inside his computer, then maybe we'll be able to cause some trouble for him, whoever he is - give our friends an opening."

"And maybe this is a trap," Amy said boldly. "Heck, it could be the whole reason for this 'pushing' thing, right? Making you think that you've got a back door in, when really all it leads to is a very carefully guarded... containment system inside the computer?"

Isabel's face fell. "Alex, if I - if I were able to take you with me, would you be able to tell if we were getting into something like that?"

"Umm... I think so - I hope so. If it's too hard to tell what's going on, will you be able to bring us back out before we're too far in?"

"Yeah, I will," she promised. "Go right after breakfast??"

"You're not going in alone," Liz suddenly promised. "Come on - I may not be the computer genius that Alex is, but I'm a quick thinker, and Isabel, we've worked together well in unusual mental contact situations before."

"Hmm... I guess that that's true," she admitted. "But - well, maybe I shouldn't even say this - but what if something goes wrong? If Max and Maria and the others get back here... and Ms DeLuca has to break the news that we haven't made it back??"

Liz sighed. "Still... it's all three of us or nothing. If - if I'm there, I think that I can help make sure that we're all okay."

Isabel looked over at Alex, who shrugged. "All right, you're a musketeer then Liz."

"Oh gee thanks."

------------

Sean had been woken up to wish Liz goodbye before she left... and maybe aunt Amy hoped that he'd be able to talk some sense into the three kids. But Sean asked a lot of questions, and then kissed Liz, wished her good luck, and said that he'd look after her body until she got back to it. Isabel took Alex and Liz's hands, sitting down, and drew them along with her, not their bodies, but some aspect of their minds, along the channel that the computer had established between them.

*Oooh, watch out - there are firewalls here and there,* Alex warned almost immediately. *Yeah, that's an authorized channel. See if it lets us through...* He indicated the direction toward a shimmering blue curtain.*

*Wait a second,* Liz said, pulling up at Isabel's mental essence. *Doesn't that mean that it might let us in, even let us out right now if we test it, and then in response to some stimulus or condition change to lock us in??*

*Oh, right,* Alex admitted. *I guess that I didn't think of that. Maybe we can look for a better exit - a back door or something.*

*Or make our own hole through the firewalls?* Isabel suggested. *If the security system doesn't notice them.*

*Umm - can you do that?* Alex asked uncertainly.

*Let's see.* Isabel concentrated on the furious red barrier, and a hoop of blackness emerged in it, large enough to crawl through. "Okay, I've opened a hole in the firewall, and kept the firewall-monitoring systems from noticing." Alex drifted close to examine the hole carefully, and then a huge wave of frenetic activity, hard to understand in all of its complexity, burst into existence a moderate distance away and closing in fast. "Oh, no - the security system! What'd I do wrong??"

"Probably the systems that monitor the firewall monitors," Alex suggested, and Isabel groaned.

"Okay, well, we don't want that thing to find us or seal us inside, right??" Liz said, mentally pointing at the approaching thunder sounds and waves of oscillating light. "Back to the hotel? We can still make it from here, right??"

"Just a few questions first," Alex said, his voice calm and full of that quiet smile that he used when he was about to figure out something really brilliant. None of them were even sure when they had switched from thoughts into voices, and that much was probably an illusion, but... "What you did to break through the firewall - do you think that you could do it to any programs in this system, as long as you can sort out what they're doing??"

"Umm... yeah I guess," Isabel said, and then started to realize what he meant. "Yeah, it's an aspect of my power - my energy, which stays with me even in digital form. I didn't realize it as such before now, but..."

"And can you make sure that other programs don't corrupt or alter our digital images?" Alex pressed. "Kind of like the way a force shield would work in the real world."

"Yes, of course," Isabel said, getting it now. "So... so we don't need to worry about the security systems or the access barriers. We can..."

"We could let that catch us, secure in the knowledge that we're protected and it wouldn't be able to wipe our patterns clean," Alex said, his 'digital image' smiling. "And we never need to worry about the firewall, because you can create a new hole in it whenever we need to leave." He looked at the wall, and realized that it had sealed itself shut while they were talking. "New hole in the wall, or where the gateway used to be, or do we let mister security do the honors??"

"I... I think that all of those are too slow, now," Isabel whispered, awed at the new horizons that this aspect of her powers was opening to her. "Contact." Alex and Liz touched their digital selves to hers, ~~though Liz seemed very uncertain about.

"What - what are you going to do?" she asked.

"Jump command," Isabel whispered, and surely enough, in the blink of a microsecond, they were somewhere else.

"Cool," Alex said, looking at all the digital windows and readouts that surrounded them in this virtual space. "Security control?"

"Yeah, I guess," Liz said, pointing at one of the windows. It showed a scene through a window from a dark room - an island beach, with a number of familiar figures gathered there - all six of the group who had gone on the sailing mission, plus another copy of Michael, and an unfamiliar man. "I... I wonder if we can actually get a sound pickup to hear what they're talking about."

"Umm... we've got another problem here," Isabel said suddenly. "Alex - I, I can't believe that I didn't think of this. There's - there's something else ALIVE here inside the computer. Something else with powers like mine."

"Uh-oh," Liz muttered. "What's our safest path to follow?"

"I... I'm not sure," Isabel burst out. She looked at Alex, but his face seemed as blank and scared as she felt.

TO BE CONTINUED...

[Chrisken]

Part Fifteen

"Oh great," Amy DeLuca muttered, looking at the unconscious bodies of Isabel, Liz, and Alex - not able to tell if they were safely inside some alien computer system, or just - well, she wasn't even sure what the alternative is. "And then there were two, huh Laurie?"

Laurie hesitated for a moment, reached out, and touched Isabel's hand. "Don't worry so much, Missus D," she replied. "They... they'll be okay. Don't ask how I know this, but... they'll be back soon."

"Really?" Obviously the temptation to grasp hold of any thread of hope was very hard to resist for Amy, especially with both Amy and Jim Valenti off on the boat expedition. "Okay, well... I need to do SOMETHING to try and get my mind off of it. Do you know how to play Spite and Malice?"

"Oh, my granpa taught me that one," Laurie said, laughing. "Bring it on!!"

"Hey!" Sean growled, coming in from the bathroom. "Did you forget I was still here??"

-----------

"Okay, let's see," the mysterious alien figure said. "First off, I'd like to apologize for trying to spy on you. I... I've been in desperate straights ever since I arrived on this planet, and... and that doesn't really excuse what I've done, but I... I had to try and figure out whether I could trust you guys or not. Except... except that since I've pissed you off this much, there's not much to do but explain the whole thing and throw myself on your mercies, or something like that."

"Okay, maybe you'd better go back to the begining," Jim said reasonably. "Like, how you DID get here. It..." He hesitated before speaking a guess. "It was an unintentional landing of some sort, yes? You didn't expect to be here, and you're not prepared - maybe you just want to get headed for home once more??"

"Oh, come on," Tess scoffed. "Yet another alien accidentally crash-landing here? Seems unlikely."

"Well, you're not wrong about that," the alien said, peering a bit at his android (who still looked uncannily like Maria,) and futzing with a seam in her artificial skin. Maybe he was trying to get the water to drain out of her interior spaces better. "Neither were you, sir. It... it wasn't accidental, but it wasn't intentional on my part either. I... I had a difference of opinion with some Breeolyn - not too hard in and of itself - and they decided to put me off in an escape capsule on a landing course for Earth, figuring that I'd be stranded here."

"Marooned here, then?" Michael said. "And pardon me for being blunt, but why shouldn't we find you just as disagreeable as the Breeol did?"

"I don't think that I'd ever find myself likely to take the opinion as a Breeol," Tess remarked absently. "They're mean, or so I've heard. Nicholas was a Breeol, under his husk - or is, if he's still kickin' around somewhere."

"Okay, so..." Max sighed. "Maybe we'd better go through the names first - or get yours at least. If you've spied enough, you might already know ours..."

"Some of you, of course -- Max, Tess, and Michael. I assume that Isabel is waiting to lead a rescue mission if you got into too much trouble?"

"Um, something like that," Michael muttered.

"And you would be Maria," the newcomer said. "Obviously."

"I'm Jim Valenti," Jim put in, "and this is my son Kyle."

"Right, right... okay. Call me Razhun. So, umm, well, I landed somewhere in the water, umm... not too far from the continental coast of this great gulf of water." Razhun pointed out far to the northwest of his small island lair. "Maybe two miles out into the sea. Took some doing to get myself and the few tools that had been left in the escape capsule safely back to land."

"Including her?" Kyle said, pointing at the android who Razhun had called Mari.

"No, why would the Breeolyn have left a functional android in an escape capsule?" he replied. "I, I had to build her myself, here - with a few Breeolyn tools to help me. I was working on a spaceship too, but there are a few parts that I'm having trouble with."

"Okay, just how long have you been here on Earth?" Max asked, cutting to the point.

"Umm... maybe thirty-five Earth days."

"That was - well, a little while after we got back from Vegas," Tess interpreted, thinking about it.

"Okay," Michael said. "Next question."

And all of a sudden, back in Razhun's home, a loud alarm suddenly started to blare.

"What's that?" Jim shouted over the klaxon. "Warning of an air strike by the Bahama government??"

"No, worse," Razhun yelled back, dashing inside. Most of the Roswellians followed him. "Self-destruct system activated... darn it, I *knew* that I shouldn't have put in a self destruct device, but it was just so cool that I couldn't resist. Didn't expect that... Freeble it all, I've got no control, no override! The computer's gone and mutineed on me, and...." The rest was lost in a string of unintelligible, frustrated alien words.

Despairing himself, Max gently slapped the console that was causing their alien host so much aggravation, and gasped at the completely strange sensation that occured to him. "Razhun - is it at all possible that a person's intelligence - a human or a hybrid, could transfer into your computer system?"

Razhun stared at him with confusion, and then some sort of realization dawned. "Yes, perhaps - with the powers of an Antarian mentalist, and some sort of carrier wave - like the scanning beam that I'd aimed at your hotel just before I realized that you guys had landed on the island!!"

"We need to make contact with them," Tess said instantly, though a somewhat cross and peevish look hadn't been entirely wiped off of her face from Max's original epiphany. "As soon as possible. Maybe they set the self destruct off intentionally, as a - no, that probably doesn't make sense. But if it was accidental, then..."

"They can stop futzing with the computer's innards and let you override," Michael said, seeing it. "But how..."

"There isn't time to get anybody into VR mode," Razhun chimed in. "But I can set up a voice link into the system, and that should work. He made a few adjustments, then tapped near a pair of unequal-sized squared on the console. "You should be linked in now."

"Liz?" Max called immediately, and Tess rolled her eyes again. "Isabel - are... are you girls in there??"

"Max?" Liz's voice came back. "Where are you, are you in the system too?"

"No - the android master has connected us to you," he said. "You've tripped a self-destruct system that will blow us all up in - well, soon. You need to stop interfering with his computer control, if you can, so that he can disarm the system."

"Ohh, just a second." This was Isabel. "Alex, yeah, we've got to trust him, just stop it." Maria chuckled nervously. "Okay, try again now."

Razhun worked furiously on the console for several long seconds, then spoke some unfamiliar words at it. Finally he turned around and smiled. "We're good and safe. What now?"

"Well, now that some of our friends are here," Maria said, "maybe they should listen in on our conversation."

"Hey, what's going on there?" Alex complained from the speaker. "You'll need to catch us up."

"And if things are at all settled," Isabel chimed in, "or at least not immediately hostile, why don't you head back to the island and the hotel? We can talk more comfortably there, and it'll be reassuring to Miz DeLuca and everybody else. I, umm, I think I know how to get back out of here alright."

"Just one quick thing before we go anywhere," Max said. "Razhun, you've hinted that you need our help to leave here... but how? What can we do, we don't know anything about spaceships."

"But you're Antarians," he said, as if that explained everything.

"Half Antarian, maybe" Tess put in. "Hybrids."

"Still, you have molecular shaping abilities?" he asked, and Michael nodded warily. "So, if I describe the molecular structure of the needed components well enough, and provide the required raw materials, you can fashion them for me. Things that I understand how they work, but don't have the necessary tools to manufacture in any other way."

"So you don't have that power?" Max asked.

"No, my people have tried to harness such abilities, but without much luck, and I've got absolutely zip all," he confessed. "We're clever with machines and such, sometimes canny businessmen, but Mother Evolution has granted us very little in terms of metaphysical capabilities."

"I... I think that we can come to some sort of arrangement," Tess said. "Especially if you tell us more about what life is like off of Earth, and explain some of what you've already done in creating your spaceship." Max turned to glare at her. "What?? That's something that may very well come in handy - I'm not saying that we should leave ourselves now, or any particular time - just that it's smart to have an option available."

"Hard to argue with that logic," Michael chimed in.

"Much as I hate to say it, yeah," Isabel agreed. "After what nearly happened with the Gandarium and all."

"What happened with Gandarium?" Razhun asked. "I... I've heard of them, but..."

"It, it's a long story," Kyle told him. "We can tell you on the way - you've got a boat or something capable of carrying us all, right?"

"Well... it might be a tight fit, and we'll have to leave Mari behind." He sighed. "Probably better not to wake her up until I've finished repairing the water damage."

"Hey, wait one second," Tess said, as Max was agreeing that Isabel and the others should get back out of the computer the way that they came. "Mari - why did you construct her so that failing in her tasks caused her pain??"

"I... I'd have tweaked that if I could, really," he insisted. "But I had to work with some Breeolyn components, and following their rules, and I just couldn't get her brain to work without following the Breeolyn laws of robotics. It's nasty, I grant you, and I tried to only ask things of her that I felt she could complete, but... you guys were a bit unpredictable."

"Okay," Tess said, mollified. "Well, let's go."

-----------

It all ended fairly anticlimactically, like that. Razhun was an interesting guy to spend time with, not at all like my worries of an evil alien android master, and some of the things he had to say about our homeworld, about the Kivar situation, and about people like Larek were interesting, and provided a bit of depth and character to situations that had always seemed so one-dimensional before. Tess in particular loved spending time with her, and it was with relief that I realized what she was learning was making her more cautious, instead of more eager, about the idea of going off to an alien world. I might be falling in love with Tess Harding, but that didn't mean that I wanted to blast off into outer space with her.

There was time for a lot more sun in the fun... err, well come on, you know what I mean. Cannonball island was actually very pretty, with a few rocky overlooks that you could dive into the water from, and one small stretch of lonely beach most of the way around from the island our hotel was on, and pretty woods with nice trails to hike through, and we ended up going out there most days. Razhun's alien gizmos kept any of the authorities from noticing that there was too much traffic to and from an island that was possibly a protected heritage site or whatever, and it was great having a place to go to that wasn't mobbed by other tourists.

Kyle and Laurie's romance continued to blossom as far as I could tell, though I'm not sure what they plan to do about it once we get back home to Roswell... and Michael didn't seem to be too upset about Kyle dating his sister anymore, or whatever the right term is if 'dating' isn't it. Mister Valenti and Maria's mother, also, were spending a lot of time alone together and clearly loving every minute of it.

Tess confronted me about her feelings over whatever remnants of a connection Liz and I still have. I wasn't quite sure what to tell her at first. It was definitely true that when I touched Razhun's computer I could instantly tell that some of Liz's essence was trapped as a ghost in the machine - and I'm not sorry about that, for the very obvious reason that that realization saved all of our lives. But it was something that was hard for Tess to come to terms with, that no matter how much anger Liz and I may both have over the way something ended up at the prom, and even though we're both trying hard to move on with new people, that link between us persists, and I don't really know if it's ever going to fade away completely.

Let's see, what else. Mari got drained and repaired, and oddly enough Maria was the first to sort-of become friends with her. Maybe that's not surprising - the alien one was programmed to have a lot in common with our Maria, to be able to imitate her as well as possible before starting her job, and Maria's not the kind of girl who would bristle and snap at someone who's a lot like her. Sean eventually did have his confrontation with me about putting Liz in danger, but Liz herself broke it up, insisting that either she voluntarily took on risk herself, or it was something that nobody could really have predicted or prevented, and eventually Sean was satisfied with that. I still can't say that it makes me happy to see the two of them together, but I do wish her the best of luck.

Finally, the day before our plane left, Razhun's spaceship was ready for a take-off. He'd been working on it a the very top of cannonball, screened from view by a stand of trees, and we'd spent many long days up there, talking, and trying to use our powers to fashion the complicated equipment that he needed to build into it, and also to test them to be sure that they were up to snuff. "It does look pretty small," Laurie said, examining the inside with a slightly wrinkled nose. I couldn't blame her, especially as the interior wasn't too much larger than the box that she'd been buried in, down beneath Frazier woods. "How long are you going to have to be inside here?"

"Umm... let's see... in Earth days, maybe three or so to coast away from your planet, then maybe six or seven in Warp space, then another two or three approaching Kaalto."

"Where's that?" Isabel asked. She'd been asking nearly as many questions as Tess had about alien planets, which I hadn't expected.

"Cool little place, only fifteen light-years or so away," he replied. "Not much of an outside atmosphere, but there are underground settlements in tunnels and what have you. Mostly Rahlicx - that's Larek's planet, along with some... well, I can't remember the name of them, but some of the inhabitants are from a much older settlement that lost track of their true origin. A bit ugly by humanoid standards, but they're really nice guys once you get used to them." He sighed. "Most importantly, I should be able to draw on a galactic credit account there, and find some other ship to carry me further on my way."

"And where are you going?" Alex asked softly.

"Home," Razhun told him longingly. "My people come from a small waterey world not too different from Earth, or this part of it anyway. Long away, much further than Antar is, and it'll take me a long time to get there. But I'll get there eventually."

"And what about Mari?" Tess asked. "Is she going with you?"

"Umm, yeah, I've made sure that there'd be room for her. At least as far as Kaalto - I'm not sure about after that... I don't really need an android servant girl or anything."

"Don't sell her to people who'd be cruel to her," Maria suddenly burst out. "Do they buy and sell robots on alien planets?"

"A lot of the time, yeah... and the money will help, if I can find a good buyer," Razhun admitted. "But I promise - only somebody who'd take good care of her." He sighed awkwardly at that.

"Good luck on your voyages, Ranzhou," I said, shaking his hand, which apparently confused him a bit. "I'd say that I hope we'll meet again, but I'm not holding out MUCH hope of that one."

"All the best, Max, guys," he said with a laugh. "Not sure where your own lives will take you, but you'll figure it out, given a bit of time." And with that, he helped Mari into the ship, got in himself, and the vessel we had helped to build shot up into the sky.

"Alright, so what's next?" Jim asked.

"We clean up around here," Liz said decisively. "Any of his left-behind gear that might be useful, I figure that we can take. The rest, we destroy to keep it from falling into the wrong hands."

"Makes sense," Michael said, and groaned. "More chores."

"And don't forget what else, too, Michael," Kyle put in. "More alien swag!" He rubbed his hands together eagerly.

------------

"Well, it's actually been a pretty fun holiday," Maria admitted as the kids headed over the sand to the spot where beach blankets and big umbrellas had been set up. They'd just finished a short period of beach touch football, (Guys versus girls, except that they got Kyle and we got Liz,) and Michael was looking forward to enjoying some of the picnic basket during half-time. "I mean, when I was planning things, I didn't expect a tense confrontation with an alien castaway and his android accomplice, but - as crazy as things were for a little while there, I'm glad we got to meet Ranzhou and Mari."

"Yeah," Isabel chimed in, grabbing a can of juice from the cooler and laying back against Alex's side. "So, well, Bahamas time is almost over, but the rest of the summer still stretches before us. Anybody got interesting ideas?"

"Don't look at me," Michael disclaimed. "I'll be stuck working away most of the summer days in a cramped, hot kitchen... and something similar could probably be said for Liz, Maria, and even Maxxie boy."

"Me too," Sean chimed in. "Got a job offer from this new 'handyman for hire' company. Busy summer installing air conditioners and sprinkler systems, who knows what else."

"Funny, I never thought you were a handy guy to have around," Maria joked with her cousin. He made a face back at her.

"Hmm... maybe I should look for a job too," Tess said thoughtfully, looking over at Max.

"I might be able to offer an opening." Tess looked around surprised, to see Amy Deluca approaching them from the edge of the beach. "Business in the store was fairly good when I left, and my own flesh and blood would rather carry around Martian Meat loaf platters than help out. Do you have any experience working with a cash register, Tess?"

"Umm, a few months from just before we came to Roswell," she said, blinking in surprise. "I wasn't great at making change, actually, but I'd like to give it another go."

"What about you, sweetie?" Isabel asked Alex without turning around to look at him. "I seem to remember you mentioning something about trying to get a job at the Java Server."

"Only when you're doing charity work," Alex laughed back, and Isabel shook her head slightly, eyes closed.

"Or maybe we should both avoid taking on too many distractions," she replied after a moment. "Leave plenty of time for hanging out together - or taking road trips, whatever."

"I like the idea, but I'm not so sure my parents will be agreeable," Alex laughed.

"We'll all work something out," Laurie said, with more enthusiasm than concrete evidence.

And from there, the conversation somehow turned to some of the things that had happened the last summer.

-------------

"We'll be back in Roswell before you know it," Michael said, looking out the window of the small commuter plane that was taking them back out of Texas. It was late in the night by this point in the trip, and most of the passengers, including their friends, seemed to have dropped off to sleep, though such appearances could be misleading.

"Yeah," Maria sighed. "As great as the sunny Bahamas were, I think it'll be great to go home." She sighed. "Do... do you think that you'll really want to head off for another planet someday? Like... like Razhun did?"

"Hmm." Michael considered the question, surprised by some of what he was feeling. "Not... not for a long time, actually, I think. Razhun was trying to get back home. Me... I think I've found mine, even though I never really expected that it would be here - or there, I mean." Maria smiled. "There... there may be new circumstances in our lives, that make a compelling case for an extraterrestrial journey of some sort, but... but I'm not hoping for that flying saucer to come down and rescue me anymore, not longing for someplace nicer or more exciting than Roswell anymore."

Maria grinned, remembering all the way back to their first brief heart-to-heart in a roadside motel, on the way to a geodesic dome house in Marathon. "Yeah, I guess that I'm not either, actually. I mean... going someplace else for good reasons isn't something that I'm scared of... somewhere that I can get a good education, or a decent job. To prepare for my future, maybe even having a family when I'm ready for it." She sighed. "I... I guess that more than a place, wherever you and the rest of my friends are - and my Mom of course, that's home. And even if you're not all in the same place, I'll be okay." Michael laughed.

"I'll drink to that," he said, picking up a little can of iced tea that the stewardess had given. Maria tapped her plastic bottle of water against it - and there was almost no sound at all, which made both teenagers erupt into strangled giggles so that it was a long time before either of them ever drank to the toast.

Max and Tess really were both asleep, as was Laurie. Kyle was alternating between listening to MP3's on a cheap little music player, and opening up one eye to look at Laurie as she slept. Isabel and Alex were whispering back and forth to each other about various strategies for 'handling' their parents when they got back to town.

Sean DeLuca cracked one eye open, and then whispered softly, so that only Liz could hear him. "Oh, no... Aunt Amy, sheesh!"

"What?" Liz opened her eyes too, and looked around the cabin. "What is it?" she hissed. "She's not even in her seat."

"No, and neither is his ex-sheriff-ness," Sean pointed out. "Work that one out for yourself."

Liz didn't need much thinking to wonder what he meant, but the prospect didn't bother her as much as it did Sean. She reached out to touch Sean's hand, and gasped as a flash struck her... certainly an unexpectedly sweet scene, with both of them looking several years older and apparently out shopping for a home.

She wasn't at all sure that she was ready for that notion as anything more than an idle daydream. But it would be fun to get a little closer to Sean DeLuca.

THE END.