Trade Secrets, page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Epilogue
About the Author
Look for More Titles by Cassandra Chandler
Trade Secrets
The Department of Homeworld Security
Book Fifteen
Cassandra Chandler
Copyright Page
You are a good person! You know that stealing is wrong. Remember, eBooks can’t be shared or given away. It’s against copyright law. So don’t download books you haven’t paid for or upload books in ways other people can access for free. That would be stealing.
And you’re better than that.
This book is pure fiction. All characters, places, names, and events are products of the author’s imagination or used solely in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to any people, places, things, or events that have ever existed or will ever exist is entirely coincidental.
Trade Secrets
The Department of Homeworld Security, Book Fifteen
Copyright © 2022 by Cassandra Chandler
ISBN: 978-1-945702-63-1
Edited by Evil Eye Editing
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used, transmitted, or reproduced in any manner or form without written permission from the author, except for brief quotations used in critical articles and reviews.
First eBook edition: May 2022
cassandra-chandler.com
P.O. Box 91
Mission, Kansas 66201
Dedication
For cat lovers everywhere. You’ll get that “kitten logic.”
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Chapter One
The first crackle of sound sent a shiver down Gwen’s back. She sat up straighter, knocking the small plushie of the most classic alien—a gray—that her friend Izzie had given her “for luck in her crazy quest to find aliens” to the floor.
There was no way that luck had worked. Not the very first time Gwen managed to hack into the satellite she planned to use to scan outer space for signs of intelligent life.
Gwen stared down at the near-featureless doll, with its small mouth, flat nose, uniform, hairless gray body, and huge black eyes. It seemed to stare back at her.
Just in case, she reached down and picked it up. She set it next to her monitor, then pushed her glasses farther up her nose. She didn’t want to miss a thing.
Some of the many long, thin braids that trailed down her back fell forward. She flipped them back behind her shoulder and put on her headphones to keep them in place. That would help her hear whatever this was better as well.
Background static. Cosmic noise.
She adjusted some settings and tweaked the code she’d used to cover her tracks if anyone tried to trace her signal back to her house. Her heart was racing.
Something was out of place. She hadn’t quite pinpointed it yet, but she was close. She could feel it. Or she’d finally tipped over the deep end.
She didn’t think she was crazy because she believed aliens were real. It was thinking that she could discover them in the huge expanse of the universe that made her question her sanity.
There was so much emptiness out there. The odds of her actually making alien contact were infinitesimal.
That wasn’t going to keep her from trying, though.
She had decided to start somewhere close—Mars. She altered more settings, becoming more and more sure that she had picked up an actual data stream. Narrowing the parameters of her home-brew software, she scanned for signals from the planet and found…
Her eyes widened.
It wasn’t what she’d hoped for, but it was still extraordinary. One of the Mars explorers that had gone offline over a decade ago was sending a signal.
Had the solar panels somehow managed to get enough sun to power the unit again? How could that be? They were covered in dust from the red planet. It wasn’t like someone was walking around out there with a duster and could clean them off.
The image of a gray parading around in a French maid outfit and wielding a feather duster popped into her head, making her giggle. She might be a little too sleep deprived.
Excitement gave her a second wind. She locked on to the signal, boosting it so she could clear the feed. There would be a delay from what was actually happening on Mars, but not much of one.
She was about to see live footage from another planet. Okay, almost-live footage.
A Martian landscape filled one of the windows on her monitor. The picture was washed out, like in the old videos she’d seen on the Internet from when the robot had been functional. Orangish-red sand littered with rocks stretched out to the horizon. She’d never thought such a barren view could be so mesmerizing.
What she wouldn’t give for an audio feed. But then, it wasn’t like there were Martians walking around looking to chat with—
A face appeared on the screen. A green face, hanging down from above the camera.
Gwen couldn’t breathe. Her mouth dropped open as she leaned closer, not believing her eyes.
The being was distinctly reptilian. It looked almost like an iguana, only with a flattened, somewhat more humanish face. It blinked its golden eyes, then crawled over the camera view, blocking it with its green belly.
Wait a minute.
This had to be a prank. That was a regular lizard and someone had… Had…
Had what? Figured out what she was doing and hacked her hack of the feed?
Aside from Izzie, no one else knew what Gwen was up to. And Izzie wasn’t the type to prank anyone, even if she knew how in this case.
Then again, someone hacking Gwen’s setup seemed more possible than a lizard-person crawling around on a long-dormant Mars explorer. But who would go to that much trouble?
The lizard vanished from view for a few seconds, then popped back up. On two feet. It stepped away from the camera, then lifted its arm and started tapping on some sort of metallic band encasing its forearm.
Okay, so not an iguana…
With a better view of it, she could see more of the metallic bands around its arms, legs, and body. Beneath the silver metal, its otherwise emerald-green scales had black stripes on its sides that seemed to come from its spine, with thinner, lavender-blue stripes lining them. There was a shimmering gold aura around the lizard-person as well. Some sort of energy spacesuit?
This was incredible. She was witnessing an actual alien!
Or else an elaborate prank.
If this were real, what did an alien want with Earth tech from decades ago? It could walk around on Mars with a spacesuit made of energy. Its technology was light-years beyond what they had on Earth.
The feed brightened, the colors becoming more vibrant. The lizard-person approached the camera again, reaching up above it to do something Gwen couldn’t see. It must have been pretty short to have to reach like that. Maybe three-and-a-half or four feet tall. She found herself leaning down, as if she was looking through an actual window and changing her angle would alter the view.
When she realized what she was doing, she sat back, and murmured, “Get it together, Gwen.”
The lizard-person smiled, then patted the side of the camera.
That was weird. But then, what part of all this wasn’t? The pat looked…affectionate.
She shook her head. She was probably reading things into the situation. Anthropomorphizing the lizard-person’s behavior.
It took a few steps back and stared at the camera for a few moments. Gwen felt the hair on her arms rise. It was almost like the alien could see her through the monitor.
She looked up at her computer’s camera. The light was off. She quickly closed the lens cover anyway, just in case. If this was a prank, the person behind it was probably trying to tap into her camera to get a reaction shot and they could have disabled the alert light. The last thing she wanted was a recording of—
“Crap!” Gwen yelled.
She separated the portable storage drive from her necklace and quickly plugged it in, starting up a recording that would capture everything on her screen directly to the drive. If this wasn’t a prank, she was going to need evidence to take to…the UN or something. Having the data on a drive disguised as jewelry would make her feel better, too.
The alien nodded, then dusted its hands together in a strangely human gesture. It waved, as if urging her to follow it. Again, she found herself half-rising from her chair.
It wasn’t communicating with her, though. It was talking to the explorer.
The view on her screen changed as the robot started to move forward. The alien really had fixed it.
Its smile broadened and it clapped its hands as the explorer stopped. Gwen couldn’t keep herself from joining in, laughing and weirdly realizing there were tears streaming down her face.
She had been so heartbroken at the explorer’s last message. Part of the reason she’d chosen her field had been in the hopes of being part of some sort of…rescue operation.
She didn’t care if it was ridiculous. All of her dreams centered around space. If what she was seeing was real, then some of her biggest a nd best dreams had just come true.
Aliens were on Mars. And they were kindhearted enough to want to fix a broken robot.
The explorer followed the lizard-person around for a bit. Each time it changed direction, the alien jumped and clapped. Its joy was infectious.
After a while, they both stopped. The lizard-person stood with its hands on its hips and nodded as if satisfied with the explorer’s progress.
It approached the camera, and once more gave the robot an affectionate pat. Then it angled its head, as if listening to someone.
Gwen couldn’t see anyone else on the screen. The lizard-person seemed to be looking at the explorer. Was it…talking to the explorer? As if the explorer could talk back?
Maybe all the years on Mars had rendered it intelligent… Maybe during its long dormancy, the explorer had developed a consciousness and—
She shook her head sharply.
“Get a grip, Gwen.” Even she had her limits on what she’d entertain.
The lizard-person’s lips pulled into a broad smile. She was really starting to like the little guy.
It angled its head again, its eyebrow ridges creasing and its smile fading as quickly as it had formed. It took a few steps back, then slapped its forehead and shook its head.
It ran toward the camera, frantically doing something. Its mouth moved the whole time, as if it was talking quickly. And it didn’t look very happy.
The feed suddenly cut off.
“What?” Gwen shouted. “No!”
She did everything she could to try to reconnect. Maybe it was on a different frequency. The feed had to still be out there.
A flashing red box on the window warned her that her haste had made her slip up. Strange symbols flooded her screen. They morphed more quickly than she could register their shapes, making her eyes hurt.
Just as frantic as the lizard-person had been, Gwen disconnected everything, sending a scrambling packet at the last moment to try to cover her tracks. The packet should take care of hiding her activity from most computer systems on Earth.
As if that would help against whatever the heck that had been.
When she was done, she realized she was crouched next to her chair, staring wide-eyed at her monitor, her glasses crooked on her face. She ejected her external drive and reconnected it to the rest of her necklace, then powered everything off.
She sat down for a few moments, trying to process what she’d seen.
That had to have been a prank. But if it was a prank, it was a damn good one. Whoever was behind it had gone to great lengths to make it look real.
Had they been pranking someone else? Gwen wasn’t supposed to be accessing that feed. No one should be watching for signals from a dormant Mars explorer. And no one knew about her pet project.
Even if they did, how would they have known she’d be scanning that exact section of space at that exact time? The sheer improbability of it… The timing was almost as hard to believe as what she’d seen.
Not a prank for her, then.
Maybe… Maybe not a prank at all.
Chapter Two
The soft rumbling of Bandit’s purr had all but put Xan to sleep. The orange and white striped kitten was curled up under his chin as he leaned back in his seat, his feet propped up on the console and his eyes closed. He gave the kitten another scratch behind his ears, enjoying the warmth and soft fur of the tiny animal.
Forget all the other resources Earth had to offer. If they decided to start exporting cats as pets, they would make a fortune. Xan didn’t understand why every human on the planet didn’t choose to have a dozen of the animal companions.
Then again, it seemed more like Bandit had chosen Xan. The kitten followed Xan wherever he went and demanded attention whenever it seemed to suit the animal. Bandit especially liked to jump up on the control console when Xan was trying to pilot the shuttle.
At the moment, though, they were between ferrying jobs. Cyan was saying her goodbyes to her best Earthling friend after spending the afternoon gathering genetic samples from several of the woman’s cats for her xenobiological studies.
From past experience, Xan knew their “goodbye” could take over an hour—not that he minded at all. It gave Xan a chance to enjoy some quiet time with his favorite Earth being.
Bandit had seemed to have a blast playing with the Earth cats. As night fell, he quieted down and came back to the shuttle to hang out with Xan, though.
“Shuttles might not be as fun to fly as a skimmer, but they sure are more comfortable,” Xan said. He sank deeper into his seat and closed his eyes.
He heard Cyan board the ship and then the door start to close. She ran up to the cockpit, her steps fast enough that Xan quickly straightened.
Bandit let out a protesting meow, then jumped over to the console, sitting on the flat space between the controls and the front viewport. Xan took one look at Cyan and knew something was wrong.
Her scales had dulled from their normal emerald green to a pale lime, making the black and sky-blue stripes along her back stand out strikingly. Her golden eyes were wide, their pupils thin slits, and she was wringing her hands in front of her chest. Most disturbing of all, the silver bands of her exosuit kept rippling and changing shape, almost as if it didn’t know what she wanted it to do for her.
Xan had no idea what would happen if a Vegan lost control of their exosuit, or even if it was possible. He really didn’t want to find out.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Wrong? Nothing is wrong. Everything is fine.”
She sat in the seat next to him, and reached for a safety restraint. Her exosuit suddenly expanded, forming straps that wrapped around the seat, securing her in place.
“What…” She pulled on one of the bands, then swatted at it. “Stop that. Stop that! Ugh.”
He’d never heard a Vegan make a noise like that before.
“Vapor pits!” she said.
“Whoa.”
Bandit let out a crackly meow that sounded almost like a laugh.
“Watch your language,” Xan said. “There’s a child present.”
“You are right. I am sorry.”
She took a deep breath, then let it out. The straps released the seat and settled back in their earlier configuration. Very deliberately, she reached for the shuttle’s restraints and strapped herself in.
“Did you and your friend have a fight or something?” Xan asked.
“My friend? What do you mean?” She cast a wide-eyed glance at him and turned a shade paler. “What friend?”
Xan gestured toward the house. “You were saying goodbye to your Earth friend and now you seem upset. Did you get into an argument?”
“Oh, no. Nothing of the sort.”
“Okay…”
Xan started going through system checks. He’d done them so many times it was easy to divide his attention between that task and whatever Cyan needed. Bandit batted at his hands as Xan ran his fingers over the etchings that served as the shuttle’s controls.
“I take it you’re ready to head back to the Reckoning?” Xan asked.
“I um…” She was wringing her thin fingers so hard, he was afraid she’d break them. “Actually, I was hoping we could make a brief stop on the way.”
“Sure. Where would you like to go?”
“I am still determining that.”
Xan paused in his work, then turned to look at her. Bandit used the opportunity to jump into Xan’s lap. He butted his head against Xan’s chin, demanding attention.
“All right, all right,” Xan said, petting the kitten and urging him to sit. “Now settle down. Our friend is upset, and we need to help her.”
Bandit turned on Xan’s lap and sat up straight. He angled his head, his orange ears perked toward Cyan.
With all the trips he’d made bringing Cyan to Earth to study this group of cats, he’d had a chance to hang out with other specimens. None of them seemed remotely as smart as Bandit or his sisters onboard the Reckoning. The commander’s bondmate theorized that growing up in space was affecting them somehow. It was as good a theory as any.
