When they arrived at Gage’s lab, Mica Ashcraft was the only person there. “Hey, Mica,” Diesel said. “Where’s Gage?”
“He and Charlotte went off-planet a few days ago for vacation. Didn’t he tell you?”
Diesel heaved a sigh like the weight of the planet was on his shoulders. “He might’ve and I forgot with everything else going on. Nova would know. My next question is, what are you doing here?”
Mica grinned at his cousin. “He said I had free run of his lab while he was gone, if I promised not to destroy anything. So I promised.”
Diesel looked at Wyatt, who shrugged. Wyatt didn’t know Mica very well, though they had met at an impromptu family get-together soon after the Ashcraft cousins arrived in Alienn.
The ever-present rumor mill belowstairs said that Mica was the science nerd in the Ashcraft family. If Gage was gone, maybe Mica could help them.
Diesel appeared to be of the same mind. “Do you have a minute to help us out with something?”
“Sure thing,” Mica said, moving closer. “What can I do to help you?”
Wyatt thought they’d interrupted him doing something with what looked like a perfect pint of strawberries. Odd. But then again, Wyatt was in the basement of the Big Bang Truck Stop, where “odd” spent quite a lot of time.
Wyatt pulled the evidence bag out of his pocket and handed it to Mica. “Cool. What is it?” He held the bag up to the light, squinting and looking at it closely.
“That’s what we’d like for you to tell us,” Diesel said.
“Right. Where did you get it?” Mica asked, lowering it from the ceiling light, turning the clear bag over and over in his fingers as he studied the contents.
Diesel gave Wyatt the nod that it was okay to share.
“That wire was attached to a human named Jake Jones. He was unconscious until that wire was removed from behind his ear.”
At the mention of Jake’s name, Mica said, “Jake Jones—you mean Beryl’s guy?”
Wyatt nodded. “He was abducted by an alien last night. I don’t know if the alien is itself invisible or if it was using some kind of tech as camouflage. When Beryl, Jett and I found Jake, it looked like the alien was trying to use that wire and some kind of portable device to do something to Jake, but we don’t know what.”
Mica looked up with the eager smile of a kid who’d just been giving the latest cool toy. Wyatt and Diesel were not smiling.
“Interesting. Can I open the bag and get a closer look?”
“Yes. I want to keep from damaging it, if possible,” Wyatt said. “I don’t want to destroy something when we don’t yet know what its significance or value is.”
“No worries.” Mica strode to a nearby worktable, took the wire out of the bag and put one end on a clear plate under a microscope. He examined it for a good minute before adjusting the wire to examine the other end under the scope. “It looks like a transfer wire.”
“Transfer wire?” Diesel asked. “For what?”
Mica looked up from the microscope. “It’s a rather sophisticated version of a wire you’d plug into a computer to power it up or transfer information from one place to another.”
“How sophisticated?” Wyatt asked. It seemed to him that this wire had been attached pretty close to Jake’s brain. Jakehad recently suffered memory loss. Mica thought this wire might be of the sort that transferred information. It was a wiggly way to connect the dots, but Wyatt’s intuition said there might be something there.
Mica shrugged. “State-of-the-art in some places.”
“What about here on Earth? Is that one of the places where it’s state-of-the-art?” Diesel asked.
His cousin nodded. “Indeed. It’s very valuable. I’d love to have one.” He looked with clear desire at the transfer wire under the scope.
Wyatt hoped he wouldn’t have to pry his evidence out of Mica’s fingers before he left the basement.
Darkfall returned to The Event Horizon Inn and sequestered himself in his room after an eventful visit to the hospital.
He’d spent all week reading Luca’s notes, retracing his steps and attempting to build a picture of his mission. Six months of work involved a lot of notes, but Darkfall gathered that Luca had just found his target—an Alpha he’d only identified by the name of Smithers. Luca discovered Smithers was the source of the leak about Alphas hiding in plain sight in Alienn, Arkansas, on the backwater planet of Earth. Darkfall was as mystified as Luca had been as to why Smithers would do this terrible thing that he knew was illegal. If he was found criminally culpable, it meant a one-way ticket back to Alpha-Prime and possibly a visit to a gulag, where bad things often happened.
