Universal Alien Read online

  Raves for the Alien novels:

  “For those craving futuristic high-jinks and gripping adventure, Koch is an absolute master!”

  —RT Book Reviews (top pick)

  “Koch still pulls the neat trick of quietly weaving in plot threads that go unrecognized until they start tying together—or snapping. This is a hyperspeed-paced addition to a series that shows no signs of slowing down.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Aliens, danger, and romance make this a fast-paced, wittily-written sf romantic comedy.”

  —Library Journal

  “Gini Koch’s Kitty Katt series is a great example of the lighter side of science fiction. Told with clever wit and non-stop pacing . . . it blends diplomacy, action and sense of humor into a memorable reading experience.”

  —Kirkus

  “The action is nonstop, the snark flies fast and furious. . . . Another fantastic addition to an imaginative series!”

  —Night Owl Sci-Fi (top pick)

  “Ms. Koch has carved a unique niche for herself in the sci-fi-romance category with this series. My only hope is that it lasts for a very long time.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “This delightful romp has many interesting twists and turns as it glances at racism, politics, and religion en route . . . will have fanciers of cinematic sf parodies referencing Men in Black, Ghost Busters, and X-Men.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Gini Koch mixes up the sometimes staid niche of science fiction romance by adding nonstop humor, blockbuster action, and moments worthy of a soap opera.”

  —Dirty Sexy Books

  DAW Books Presents GINI KOCH’s

  Alien Novels:

  TOUCHED BY AN ALIEN

  ALIEN TANGO

  ALIEN IN THE FAMILY

  ALIEN PROLIFERATION

  ALIEN DIPLOMACY

  ALIEN VS. ALIEN

  ALIEN IN THE HOUSE

  ALIEN RESEARCH

  ALIEN COLLECTIVE

  UNIVERSAL ALIEN

  ALIEN SEPARATION

  (coming in May 2015)

  Copyright © 2014 by Jeanne Cook.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover art by Daniel Dos Santos.

  Cover design by G-Force Design.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1675.

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA).

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are registered trademarks. All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and international trademark law.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-18217-2

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES —MARCA REGISTRADA HECHO EN U.S.A.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Praise for Gini Koch

  Books by Gini Koch

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  CHAPTER 50

  CHAPTER 51

  CHAPTER 52

  CHAPTER 53

  CHAPTER 54

  CHAPTER 55

  CHAPTER 56

  CHAPTER 57

  CHAPTER 58

  CHAPTER 59

  CHAPTER 60

  CHAPTER 61

  CHAPTER 62

  CHAPTER 63

  CHAPTER 64

  CHAPTER 65

  CHAPTER 66

  CHAPTER 67

  CHAPTER 68

  CHAPTER 69

  CHAPTER 70

  CHAPTER 71

  CHAPTER 72

  CHAPTER 73

  CHAPTER 74

  CHAPTER 75

  CHAPTER 76

  CHAPTER 77

  CHAPTER 78

  CHAPTER 79

  CHAPTER 80

  CHAPTER 81

  CHAPTER 82

  CHAPTER 83

  CHAPTER 84

  CHAPTER 85

  CHAPTER 86

  CHAPTER 87

  CHAPTER 88

  Excerpt from ALIEN SEPARATION

  About the Author

  To the memories of all those we’ve loved who are gone from us too soon in this world—somewhere in the multiverse we’re still together laughing.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I know I sound like a broken record, but first and foremost I have to thank my wonderful editor and agent, Sheila Gilbert and Cherry Weiner, for always taking care of me and being incredibly fun, supportive, and patient while doing so. Couldn’t do it without my fantastic crit partner, Lisa Dovichi and my main beta readers, Mary Fiore and Veronica Cook. Sure, they’re my mum and daughter, but they don’t have to read the final drafts in a day—they just do because they know I need them to.

  As always, love and thanks always to all the good folks at DAW Books and Penguin, to all my fans around the globe, my Hook Me Up! Gang, members of Team Gini, all Alien Collective Members in Very Good Standing, Twitter followers, Facebook fans and friends, Pinterest followers, and all the wonderful fans who come to my various book signings and conference panels—you’re all the best and I wouldn’t want to do this without each and every one of you along for the ride.

  Special shout-outs to: Joseph Gaxiola and Colette Chmiel for continuing to be the best assistants anyone could have, near and far both; Missy Katano for help with many things military and Lynn Crain for
help with many things diplomatic and Alphabet Agency related; Tamara Baker, Moskintia, Dee Haddrill, and my other Aussie fans for helping me with all things Australian any time of day or night; Dan King, for hooking me up with Moskintia; Chrysta Stuckless, Missy Katano, Mariann Asanuma, Jan Robinson, Terry Smith, and Koren Cota for all the delicious and lovely things you’ve bestowed on me to keep me going; Oliver & Blanca Bernal for always having a welcoming home; Adrian & Lisa Payne, Hal & Dee Astell, Andrea & Duncan Rittschoff, and Stacy Stolz & Gordon Drinovsky for always supporting me wherever I go; Jennifer Stuckless for some awesome fan art; Raul Padron for late night Cuban language assistance; my Paranormal Romance Dream Team pals—authors Caris Roane, Erin Kellison, and Erin Quinn—for laughs, advice, and solidarity; my Wyked Women Who Write friends—authors Jordan Summers, T.M. Williams, Sharon Skinner, T.L. Smith, and Marsheila Rockwell—for fun times at cons and while eating cupcakes, and for being there when I needed help, teasing, or someone to veg out with; all the members of The Stampeding Herd—Lisa Dovichi, Barb Tyler, Lynn Crain, Hal Astell, and Marsheila Rockwell—for ensuring that I always have someone to run with, metaphorically speaking; Mysterious Galaxy San Diego and The Poisoned Pen Scottsdale for support at cons, events, and book signings; Craig & Stephanie Dyer, Brad “My Man” Jensen, Joseph “Pick A Nickname” Gaxiola & Edward “GF #1” Pulley, Duncan & Andrea Rittschoff, Adrian & Lisa Payne, and Linda Johnson for fantastic and much needed help during Phoenix Comicon; Chris “Delicious” Swanson for extreme late night brainstorming; Robert Palsma for ensuring I know someone likes me every day; awesome author L.E. Modesitt, Jr. for excellent advice and friendship; Missy Katano (gettin’ the hat trick) for her detailed work on cataloging and more for the earlier books in the series; and especially Emily Albee, aka Amadhia, for letting me bring her into Kitty’s worlds.

  Last but never least, thanks and love as always to my husband, Steve, and daughter, Veronica. I wouldn’t trade the two of you for anything, not even superpowers and a host of hotties in Armani. Honest.

  THE FORMER PRESIDENT OF INDIA, Abdul Kalam, shared a lovely sentiment—Look at the sky. We are not alone. The whole universe is friendly to us and conspires only to give the best to those who dream and work.

  He’s totally right that we’re not alone, of course. But with all due respect, former president Kalam is dead wrong about the entire universe being friendly to us. There are a lot of “others” out there, and while some are all for helping good ol’ Earth, there are plenty who think we should be avoided, enslaved, or destroyed.

  • • •

  George Carlin said that if it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.

  I know he’s right. I just know there’s more out there than we’ve seen. I look for it, sometimes, when I feel alone. I look for all the “others” out there. So far, unless they’re in a comic or a book or a movie, I haven’t found them.

  • • •

  I’m not sure what’s actually more surreal—that the universe is teeming with life of all kinds, or that I’ve somehow gone from being a single marketing manager to the wife of the Vice President of the United States in just under five years.

  Oh sure, it was a long road between “there” and “here”—much of it filled with fights against many very bad things, both extraterrestrial and very terrestrial. Humans are really the worst though. We’re devious and nasty on a scale that, thankfully so far, none of the aliens showing up to visit or move in seem able to manage. I’ll take a fugly space monster over most of the human megalomaniacs I’ve dealt with over the years.

  Being married to an alien, at least one from Alpha Four of the Alpha Centauri system, has definitely been the highlight. Well, our hybrid and scary-talented daughter is a highlight, too. Jeff and Jamie make all the change and general surreality that has become my daily life worthwhile.

  • • •

  Sometimes, I wonder what it’s all about. I mean, I have a pretty great life, and I love my family. I’m a good wife, mother, and daughter, and I do things that matter. But there are days when I just can’t do anything right, and I wonder what’s wrong with me.

  • • •

  Oh, of course, I have bad days. Sadly, since becoming the Second Lady, or whatever I’m really supposed to be called now, there’s a lot of pressure. Shockingly, with more public scrutiny comes more ways for me to screw up. And there are days when I wonder what’s wrong with me.

  • • •

  Sometimes, I just want to see what it would be like, if things were just a little different. Maybe not a whole lot different, just enough to where I could do something more, be something more . . . be something else.

  • • •

  Sometimes, I just want to know what it would be like if I was me, but maybe a little less unwillingly famous and a whole lot more competent on the regular people things I sometimes seem incapable of managing with anything resembling smoothness or competence.

  • • •

  Some days, I just want to be somewhere else. A place where I do everything right.

  • • •

  Some days, I’d really like to be somewhere else. Where everything I do is right.

  • • •

  Hey . . . is there an echo in here?

  CHAPTER 1

  MY BRAINS OOZED out of my ears.

  Not from being shot or something. From boredom. Massive, stultifying boredom. Boredom on a scale so epic I didn’t think anyone could really fathom it. I could barely fathom it and I was living it.

  Cheers went up from those around me. Well, not most of those immediately around me. I was surrounded by Americans. Sure, more than half of them were actually aliens only one, two, or zero generations out from Alpha Four in the Alpha Centauri system, but still, beings that lived in America and had been raised as Americans. And this was not an American pastime.

  “You’re sure this is cricket? I mean, the game. The game that millions of people around the world supposedly love?”

  This earned me a dirty look from everyone near me, American or no. I’d tried to keep my voice low, but apparently cricket shared something in common with golf, that most boring of Scottish games that had infected the U.S., in that the fans were hushed unless something “exciting” was happening on the field.

  I wasn’t actually sitting next to my husband. As the newly minted Vice President of these non-cricket-mad United States, Jeff was sitting a couple of rows below me with now-President Armstrong and the Australian Prime Minister. Technically, as his wife, I should have been sitting with them.

  Wiser heads had prevailed, however. Despite a great deal of effort and patience on the part of the Head of the C.I.A.’s Extra-Terrestrial Division and the American Centaurion Public Relations Minister—otherwise known as Charles Reynolds and Rajnish Singh—and a week’s worth of immersion therapy, I still hadn’t been able to grasp or enjoy cricket.

  Since we’d been in our mid-twenties Chuckie had lived half the year in Australia, and Raj had been born and raised in New Delhi. Ergo, they both actually enjoyed cricket. In fact, Raj was quite a rabid fan, and Chuckie had an Aussie team he supported. Meaning if anyone was going to get this game through to me, it should have been them.

  Only, it took the complexity of baseball, the slowness of golf, and the bizarreness of croquet, and managed to turn them into something that, sports lover though I was, I just couldn’t manage to follow, let alone like.

  The hope had been that I’d pick up enough to have the light bulb go off while watching a live match and suddenly become an expert. Hope might have sprung eternal, but it was definitely being dashed against the wicket today, because I still wasn’t sure where the wicket was, let alone what it was or why it existed other than to be the current bane of my existence.

  It didn’t help matters much that the entire point of this extravaganza was the Australi
an government’s visiting to show support for both the new administration in particular but also aliens in general.

  Because of Operation Destruction, the entire world knew aliens lived here. The entire world also knew that there were a lot of different alien races out there, and that some of them really hated humanity. Of course, some of them liked us just fine, in part because we’d given the exiled A-Cs a home.

  However, there were still a lot of people around the world who felt that aliens were the worst things to hit Earth, and they wanted us gone. Off the planet, in work camps, or merely wiped off the face of the Earth, they weren’t picky. What with Jeff and then-Senator and now-President Armstrong’s surprise landslide win, knowing an alien was a heartbeat away from the presidency had all these anti-alien groups in a tizzy of epic proportions.

  Australia had its share of alien haters. Club 51, our biggest, most coordinated anti-alien enemy, had made a lot of inroads into Australia, meaning one of America’s biggest allies had a huge anti-alien population.

  So it was vital for us to make the Australian Prime Minister and his retinue feel happy and comfortable. The PM was a huge cricket fan, hence this game. That I was supposed to feign excitement about.

  Wished I’d studied acting instead of business in college, because, despite my desire to be a good wife and representative of my constituents, I was failing to convince anyone that I liked this sport.

  The fact that we’d spent money to fix up the stadium where the Redskins played football to look like a cricket field didn’t help. They weren’t my team—we might live in D.C. now, but I remained true to my Arizona Cardinals and their tradition of usually losing—but I’d have committed many major felonies to have seen the Redskins trot onto the field and toss the pigskin around. I couldn’t pick a Redskins player out of a lineup, but still, football was a sport I understood and enjoyed.

  I loved baseball, too, but neither the Washington Nationals nor my beloved Diamondbacks were going to be showing up to save my day. There were lots of guys on the field who, according to the program, were quite cute. Not that you could really see them. So I didn’t have that distraction going for me. And when I could see them, they were standing around in a giant circle or running back and forth along a small strip of dirt in the middle of the field far, far away. For whatever reason, this didn’t make my Sports Gene go wild.