“You’ve got it. If all goes well, I’ll let you try it out.”
“Whoa...that would be way cool,” Franklin replied.
“Well, will you look at that? Both of our friends are where we want them,” Christy said, pointing to the video feed, “Shall we be off?”
She pulled a small lever, and the ship rose a couple feet into a hover, and then she moved the same lever forward and the ship started moving forward.
“This lever controls directional thrust. Up or down, or forward and backward,” she explained as she maneuvered out of the garage and into the yard behind the house.
“You two might want to hold on,” she said, lifting up a few more feet before pointing the nose upward and pushing the throttle forward. They were thrown back in their seats as the small ship rapidly picked up speed and before they knew it, they were out of the atmosphere and the movement became smoother. She pulled up a small touch screen, typed a few characters, and sat back.
“Course is set for the moon. At this speed, we should be in orbit in a few minutes. Open that cabinet behind your chair, Franklin, and remove what’s in there. I hope we don’t need them, but we can’t be too careful.”
Franklin opened the cabinet and removed three guns like nothing he had ever seen before. They looked like rifles, but there was no magazine and the trigger appeared to be a small button on the side.
“How do these work? Is that the trigger?”
“The button on the side is the trigger. You hold your hand underneath and use your thumb for the trigger,” Christy replied, “The button on the other side will cycle through lethal or non-lethal modes.”
“Where do you put the ammo?”
“It’s an energy weapon. There is no ammo.”
“Like lasers?”
“Not exactly. Anyway, it fires much the same. The first time you depress the trigger, it will turn on, then you can select the firing mode and then you’re live. We will each wear a small transponder as well. They’re programmed not to fire on anyone wearing one, so we won’t be able to shoot each other.”
A few minutes later, the ship entered a low orbit over the moon and Christy took over manual control. It took a couple orbits before she found the entrance to the base.
“How are we gonna get it?” Franklin asked.
“This is one of their ships. Unless they’ve changed the codes recently, we should be good,” Christy said.
“What if the codes have been changed?” Kendra asked.
“Then we get out of here fast.”
She throttled down and began descending toward the surface, and when they were no more than a hundred yards out, they heard a high-pitched whistling sound.
“We’re being scanned. We’ll know in a few seconds if we’re good,” Christy said.
Ten seconds later, the sound stopped, and a door opened in the surface. Christy lined up and flew in, coming into a large hangar bay with marked landing pads on the floor. One of them had flashing lights around the perimeter, so she set down on that pad and shut off the engines. She went over the weapons one last time, and ten minutes later they exited the ship.
Cat Mixon set the armored car down in a remote field and transferred the contents to a large burlap bag she had brought for the purpose. She leaned in the open window and gave the unconscious driver a pat on the cheek.
“No hard feelings, buddy, just business,” she said, before flying off with the sack of money. A minute later, she was approaching her warehouse and her super hearing picked up voices from within. Those alien dudes again, discussing what she didn’t know.
‘What if Walter is right?’ she thought.
With that thought, she landed on the roof and just sat there eavesdropping.
‘No point in letting them know I’m here just yet,’ she said to herself. The conversation stopped for a minute, then resumed. They were speaking in their language, and she could understand nothing of it. Then she remembered the earbuds she had found in her office a few days ago. She hadn’t taken any notice of them at the moment, but now she had to wonder if they might have a purpose she hadn’t thought of before. She put them in her ears and the gibberish became English.
“You’re sure we have nothing to worry about from Mixon?”
“I’m sure. She’s out doing whatever illegal activity suits her at the minute. I doubt her ambitions rise much above that.”
“What about the man?”
“Walter? He hasn’t been seen around for a couple days, but if she keeps up her end, he’ll be busy enough.”
“What about the other woman? She could pose a threat. How much do you think she knows?”
“Don’t worry about her. I have that taken care of.”
“Care to enlighten me?”
“You didn’t notice the camera?”
“I wasn’t really looking for one.”
“Well, there’s a camera on the ceiling. It’s not recording sound. It wasn’t here the other day, so I figured she planted it, or had Walter plant it when he was here recently.”
“Why don’t you disable it?”
“Think about that? If she put it here, she wants to keep tabs on us, not on Mixon. Mixon is nothing to her, but if she suspects we’re up to anything, we’re her real concern.”
“How does that camera help us?”
“She knows about the moon base, has for years probably. She won’t show up there if she knows we’re there.”
“So you left the place wide open and you’re letting her see that we’re not there?”
“Precisely. By the time she figures out what’s waiting for her there, it will be too late.”
“You know we’ll eventually have to deal with Walter and Mixon.”
“You’re probably right, but they’re not the biggest threat at the moment. They don’t know who we are and what our plans are.”
“Not yet, but if Walter has been working with the other lady...”
“That’s why we have to get her out of
