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  “I’d never go back on my word…”

  “You’re so full of it. That’s it; I’m staying right here. You guys couldn’t hunt your way out of a paper bag anyway.”

  I guessed Number 7 and Number 8 knew a thing or two about the psychological makeups of these selfish hunters. There was no way they would abandon this opportunity to hunt one of the universe’s most legendary creatures if it meant letting somebody else have the chance.

  I dropped back onto my favorite hat and rode it down to the lobby.

  The aliens exited the building together, but as soon as they’d stepped out into the bright Tokyo morning, they all took off in different directions. Mine, after checking to make sure nobody was following him, crossed the plaza and loped down the avenue to a noodle shop just a block away from the big Japanese Rail train station.

  I’m not usually a soup fanatic, but I guess my fly senses were tuned a little differently than my regular ones. As it was, the place smelled so good I almost drowned in my own fly drool, and it was only through an act of sheer will that I kept my wits about me and resisted the temptation to dive-bomb somebody’s udon noodles.

  I kept looking around the narrow restaurant, expecting to pick out another alien in the crowd, but everyone seemed to be distinctly human. Everyone, that is, except for the counter girl who soon came to take my alien’s order.

  “Dana!?” I squeaked.

  Fortunately, I was a fly, and nobody could hear me.

  Chapter 34

  “WHAT CAN I get you, sir?” asked Dana, passing my alien a moist washcloth with a pair of tongs. Japanese restaurants—even McDonald’s—almost always pass out moist cloths for washing your hands before you eat.

  “Your spiciest soup,” grumbled the alien safari hunter. “And make it a double helping.”

  “Big day ahead of you?”

  “What business is that of yours?” he snarled.

  “My profound apologies, good sir,” she replied, bowing. “I will place your order immediately.”

  The alien grunted and brusquely turned his attention to a small black item he’d removed from a jacket pocket. It looked like a BlackBerry or some other smartphone, but I could see with a glance that it hadn’t been manufactured by any Earth-based company.

  I climbed to the brim of his hat and looked down, making a thorough study of the device—its shape, its color, and the specifications of the tiny screen, which, at least for the moment, simply read, AWAITING SIGNAL.

  I zipped to the men’s room, transformed myself back into human form, and returned to the counter. My plan was simple: I was going to get my hands on his tracking device, and I was going to do it without him knowing I’d done it.

  “Can I take your order, young man?” asked Dana, passing me a washcloth.

  “Yes, miss, I’d like a steaming hot bowl of whackami, please,” I said to her with a wink, using the Alpar Nokian word for “distraction” in place of the Japanese word wakame, which means seaweed, and was one of the flavors of soup featured on the menu.

  She winked back. “And would you like a large or small serving, sir?”

  “Might as well make it a large,” I said. “And if you could,” I whispered, “please time it to arrive exactly when you bring lunch to that gentleman down the counter.”

  I pulled out my iPhone and pretended to read some manga while Dana went back to the kitchen. In a moment she returned with a very large—I’m talking bigger than her head—bowl of soup, and carried it down the counter.

  I tensed, ready to spring to action.

  “Here’s your soup, sir,” she said, placing the bowl of soup on the counter in front of the alien.

  “Fine,” he muttered without glancing it up. “Leave it there.”

  “Would you like some hot sauce?”

  He looked up from the tracking device and glared. “I said I wanted it spicy—of course I want hot sauce.”

  “Very good, sir,” said Dana, reaching under the counter and pulling out a bottle of shishito chili oil. “Will this do?”

  He squinted down at the bottle’s label and nodded. But, as he did, Dana squeezed the full bottle ever so slightly, causing a single droplet of the oil to spurt out and into the alien’s left eye.

  Shishito chilies are legendary for their potency, and after handling them Japanese cooks know very well not to touch their faces, particularly their eyes. The stinging and burning can be so intense that temporary blindness often results.

  With a muffled yelp, the hunter dropped the tracking device onto the counter and jammed his washcloth into his eye, rubbing furiously and shouting all manner of alien curse words. If it hadn’t been a brightly lit, crowded restaurant, I’m sure he would have leaped across the counter and throttled Dana without a moment’s hesitation.

  Instead, he snarled at her: “Would you… please… get me… a clean washcloth!”

  I quickly transformed a stack of napkins into something that looked exactly like his tracking device. And then it was a simple matter of sidling up behind him and making the old switcheroo while Dana hurried to get him a clean cloth so he could dab his eye.

  “You are a fool,” he spat out as he ripped the towel from her hands.

  “A thousand apologies, good sir,” she said. “May I offer you a free cup of tea?”

  “You can offer me nothing, you pathetic lower life-form,” he grumbled. He was about to say something more hostile than that, but he stopped himself. Instead, he grabbed his newly replaced tracking device and stormed out of the restaurant.

  “This is some excellent seaweed soup,” I told Dana as she passed me the check.

  “I thought you’d like it.” She smiled as I shelled out the appropriate combination of yen notes and coins and scribbled some instructions on the back of the check for her to meet me outside.

  Chapter 35

  TEN MINUTES LATER I’d gotten us a fortieth-floor room in the Park Hyatt—the swankiest high-rise Western-style hotel in the area—and I summoned the rest of the gang.

  With Joe’s help, we quickly determined that there was more to the alien’s smartphone than I’d begun to guess. Not only was it tuned to a secure channel that would receive transmissions from Number 7 and Number 8, but it contained a preloaded database about the nearly extinct Pleionid species and its abilities, as well as a smattering of other encrypted information that I hadn’t been able to access from their heavily secured network.

  Joe had run a signal from the device straight to the wide-screen unit on the wall, so we could all see the information it contained.

  “They spoke in colors!” exclaimed Emma. “How amazing!”

  The transponder was now displaying images from the Pleionid’s home world—a cloud land of shifting colors and shapes, mesmerizing in their complexity and beauty. And there, flitting in and out among the semisolid shapes—their towns, their buildings?—were the Pleionids themselves. Sweet, wide-eyed creatures that seemed to be a cross between ET, a long-haired terrier, and maybe Alvin of Alvin and the Chipmunks.

  But that form was apparently just a default. They easily, effortlessly, became balls of pulsing light, lightning streaks of pure color, and nearly transparent clouds that floated hither and thither. Sometimes, they even seemed to turn completely invisible.

  The screen now filled with a chemical study of what I quickly realized must be pleiochromatech, the unique lifeblood of these creatures that, combined with their pacifist ways, had led to their demise. I’d never seen anything so beautiful in its chemical complexity. It seriously put the DNA double helix to shame. Its structure—containing elements ranging from neon to lithium to magnesium—looped, intersected, folded, and refolded itself in front of our eyes. Impossibly, it seemed to be a living molecule.

  Now the screen showed the Pleionid home world of today: a gray, dusty cinder of a planet. Just another burned-out orb, like so many others the Outer Ones had left in their wake.

  Emma was practically sobbing at the sight, and the rest of us weren’t far behind
. Joe shut off the feed.

  “Anything else, Joe?” I asked.

  “They haven’t activated the tracking program yet, but it should work once they release the activation code. And I think I’ve figured out how to triangulate any signal we get on the Pleionid—hopefully that will help us find it before the other hunters do.”

  “What about intelligence on the other safari hunters, or on Number 7 and Number 8?”

  “Nothing really, but there’s one image here…”

  And right then, the screen lit up with a headshot of another alien. An all-too-familiar and disturbing one.

  It was a high-res photo of me.

  Chapter 36

  THE FACT THAT Number 7 and Number 8 had put my mug shot into the device meant, at a minimum, they wanted to warn the hunters of my presence in Tokyo. Quite possibly, it also meant I was the next target in their hunting “game.”

  I suffered through lectures, worried warnings, and a firestorm of pleadings from my friends to call the whole thing off. But either I acted now, or I let the universe’s last living Pleionid die. So—after my friends were done saying every discouraging thing they had to say—I politely thanked them for their concern and waved them out of material existence.

  Now that I had the hunter’s tracking device and we had pored over every piece of its data that we could unlock, there was only one lead left to pursue in the hours before the hunt began—Kildare Gygax.

  I’d learned he was going to participate in the Pleionid hunt. I also knew he was the child of my two immediate foes. But my most compelling interest in Number 7 and Number 8’s kid had to do with an unshakable hunch that he wasn’t as simpatico with his parents as they might have hoped. Besides, I knew something about feeling distant from your parents.

  Of course, it still took quite a lot to psych myself up and go to his school to find him. Never mind the obvious risks, there was also the matter of that horrible, soul-scarring school uniform, the seifuku, I had to wear. I swear, even the ever-kind Emma would die laughing if she ever saw me in it. And Willy, Joe, and Dana—forget about it. They’d probably call me Sailor Boy until the day I died.

  I choked down my last shred of dignity and put on the ridiculous thing.

  Having spent the morning stealing and analyzing the hunt transponder, I didn’t arrive at school until lunchtime break. Unlike most of the other kids, Kildare was not out on the playing fields; I found him alone in the science lab intently studying ants in a glass terrarium. With all my senses on high alert—ready to fight or take flight as the circumstances dictated—I approached and cleared my throat.

  He whipped around so fast, I swear, even the ants in the terrarium jumped in surprise.

  Chapter 37

  “WHAT ARE YOU doing here, Daniel? Why weren’t you in class this morning?”

  “Um, you know, immigration stuff.”

  He looked me up and down, and, though I’ve seen more convinced expressions, he nodded. He had a notepad in front of him with formulas scribbled all over it.

  “What are they doing?” I asked, bending down to look at the ants.

  “Their favorite thing—eating,” he said.

  The ants were swarming over a lump of something white and were methodically carving it into transportable pieces that they carried back to the nest entrance one by one.

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “A turnip,” he replied.

  “Good thing turnips don’t have nervous systems, huh?” I said. “That looks like it might hurt.”

  “Yes,” said Kildare, looking up at me. “It’s definitely a very lucky thing for turnips and anything else that ends up in front of a hungry colony of ants if it’s unable to feel pain.”

  I nodded grimly, trying not to imagine what it might be like to be stung to death and then carved up into a few million bite-size pieces. “It’s amazing how coordinated they are. How they work so well together.”

  “They use pheromones,” Kildare explained. “They lay down scents and other chemical markers that affect each others’ behavior. As social communications systems go, it’s unrivaled. They can even stalk and kill prey thousands of times larger than themselves.”

  “Of course, Myrmecina nipponica don’t do a whole lot of hunting, do they? Aren’t they pretty common house ants here in Japan?”

  He looked at me with surprise. “This terrarium isn’t labeled. How did you know the name of this species?”

  “Big Edward O. Wilson fan, dedicated Discovery Channel viewer, and budding entomologist, I guess,” I improvised.

  “Me, too.” He smiled and turned back to the ants. “Actually, you’re right about their dietary habits,” he went on. “More than ninety-eight percent of what ants eat is vegetative or already dead. Some species can and do hunt other living animals, but their reputation as predators is grossly exaggerated.”

  “And that’s a good thing,” I said, “considering they represent more than fifteen percent of the biomass of all creatures on Earth—more than ten times that of all living humans—or they might eat us all up.”

  “Yes,” he said, looking up at me again with a curious smile. “It’s a very good thing.”

  Just then, the door opened and Professor Kuniyoshi came in with two students.

  “Ah, Kildare,” he said. “How’s the colony?”

  “Very healthy, Professor,” replied Kildare. “I expect they’ll soon be fledging.”

  “Good news, good news!” beamed the teacher, taking the two students to his desk to review some papers.

  Kildare remained focused on the ants, perfectly content not to talk. I couldn’t help liking him, but he was definitely an intense kid. There’s an old Japanese saying—still waters run deep—and something told me I hadn’t a clue what lay in the depths of Kildare’s personality.

  Chapter 38

  IT FELT ROTTEN spying on Kildare, but I had no choice but to follow him when school got out. After all, I’d only known him for a day. It wasn’t like I could ask him what he knew about his parents and the Pleionid hunt in the middle of class.

  I expected him to go home to the GC Tower, but I wasn’t completely surprised when he headed in the opposite direction instead. I trailed him down the street, onto a bus, to a Mister Donut—where he bought a dozen glazed—and then to the shinkansen station. He seemed distinctly gloomy, and I again wondered what he might be thinking about tonight’s hunt. Was he really just going along with it for some almost-human reason, like maybe he wanted to please his father?

  Not, of course, that it really mattered. Right then I had more immediate things to figure out—like where the heck he was going. The bullet train he was boarding ran out to the northeast suburbs of Nishinasuno and beyond.

  I’m pretty good at tailing people, if I do say so myself, but we’d only gone twenty minutes when he nearly gave me the slip. The train was hurtling through the fields outside of Kurodahara when I noticed him getting up from his seat and heading forward, maybe to use the bathroom in the next car.

  But no sooner had he exited the car than I happened to spot him out the window!

  Somehow he’d gotten himself off the train and was striding through a rice field like he was a farmer out for a stroll.

  With a quick “Pardon me” to the middle-aged commuter at my side, I made my way to the bathroom, then teleported myself off the train, something that I assure you is much easier said than done. I didn’t know the area very well, so, to be safe—and to make sure I didn’t teleport myself into a rock or something—I simply rematerialized myself five feet off the ground and on the opposite side of the train, in case Kildare happened to look back in my direction. Only problem was I forgot to materialize at a speed relative to the ground. That meant I was still traveling as fast as the bullet train.

  Yeah, over one hundred miles per hour. Ouch is right.

  I bounced and rolled like one of those Olympic downhill skiers who wipes out halfway through the course, only my wipeout was in a muddy, flat field. It was a good thing
I’m a pretty sturdily built kid and that there weren’t any trees. It was also a good thing Kildare was too far away to hear me crash to the ground.

  Once I’d determined I wasn’t mortally wounded, I turned myself into a butterfly whose anatomy I’d fortunately had occasion to memorize from Professor Kuniyoshi’s collection. I caught up with Kildare just as he made his way to a moss-covered old Buddhist lantern at the edge of a small field.

  The timing was good, because what happened there was something I really had to see with my own eyes. As Kildare approached the stone lantern and placed his hand on it, the moss began to move—and talk!

  Chapter 39

  THE PLEIONID!

  The creature had been waiting for Kildare cleverly disguised as a layer of moss and lichen on the surface of the ancient lantern.

  Despite its being maybe the cutest creature I’d ever seen—those big puppy eyes, those adorable little hands and feet—it tore into Kildare’s bag of Mister Donut donuts with ravenous savagery. Then it collapsed to the ground in a fit of satisfied groans and bubbly giggles.

  But Kildare wasn’t smiling as I landed on a nearby stalk of bamboo.

  “You can’t stay here,” said Kildare. “They’re coming for you in less than an hour. You need to leave this planet. Now.”

  “I need to talk to the boy,” it replied.

  The boy? Did it mean me?

  “He was at my school today,” replied Kildare.

  My little butterfly mind was racing at a thousand miles an hour. Did Kildare know who I was? I guessed that would make sense given that his parents had mug shots of me floating around their information network.

  “Take me to him,” said the Pleionid.

  “There’s no time,” Kildare told him. “And I don’t think you can help him anyhow.”

  “Faith,” the Pleionid responded simply.