I ka pau ʻole a ma hope loa aku
by elfstone
Author's note: Sorry about the long wait for this! Going back to work after vacation has been exhausting. Also, I wanted to try to make sure all my threads are coming together the way they should. To the reviewer who pointed out that I used the wrong form of "its" (twice in the same sentence! Eek!) thank you and sorry about that. It was a typo. Anyway, here's the next installment. Hope it was worth the wait.
Chapter 14: Galaxy Quest
Under the bright lights in the Five-0 interrogation room, their alien prisoner looked bug-like. Its skin was gray with a rubbery, serpentine texture. A huge head dwarfed the rest of its body, a round cranium with two large, unblinking black eyes, unadorned slits for ears and nose. A thin, short mouth that never opened was set in a tiny chin. Silver boots covered its feet. Its legs and all four of its hands were cuffed to the metal chair it sat in.
It sat patiently, not that it could do much else, and bided its time. It didn't really know what to expect next. The plan had been to avoid the authorities. The plan had not been to get tangled up with the authorities. It certainly hadn't involved getting arrested by them. Before this week, the alien had never even heard of the Five-0 Task Force. It occurred to it now that reconnaissance was probably more important than they had realized, that eight months of unbridled success had made them sloppy, and that attempting to silence the inconvenient blond guy had been ill-conceived.
It studied the room and wondered how much trouble it was in.
It was deep underground, it knew that from the route they had taken to get here. The room was concrete block, the concrete floor broken only by a worrying floor drain. Besides the chair it sat in there was one other chair sitting next to the heavy door and a small rolling cart in the corner, its contents covered with a sheet.
Hours had passed since it had been captured in the detective's hospital room. Surely they were well into the next morning now and no one had been in to speak to it. There was a camera high on the wall and a light on the camera suggested it was being watched, but it was honestly starting to worry that it had been forgotten.
And then the door opened.
The man that it now knew was not Lance Jacobson came in first. Commander Steven J. McGarrett wore khaki, many-pocketed cargo pants and he had a black tactical vest on over a forest green tee shirt. His posture was loose and easy and there was a cheerful air about him.
He was followed by a large young man in jeans and a plaid shirt. He had curly hair and an open, innocent face. He carried a tablet computer, studying it until they were in the room. He stopped in the doorway and stared at the prisoner with a look of awe.
"What are you going to do with me?" the alien asked.
McGarrett crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back, gesturing to the prisoner with one hand. "See, Jerry, how it never moved its mouth? It's using," he tapped his own temple, "mental telepathy."
"Whoa," Jerry breathed. He approached the alien gingerly. "What planet, solar system, star system or galaxy are you from?" he asked.
The alien took a moment to process this. This Jerry person looked and acted entirely sincere.
"We are from Alpha Centauri," the alien ventured.
"Awesome! I've always wanted to meet an alien. Welcome to Earth. We mean you no harm." He hesitated. "Well, actually, I mean you no harm. Commander McGarrett means you harm."
McGarrett gave the alien a bright smile and a little finger wave.
"I mean," Jerry made a face and shrugged apologetically, "you did try to kill his best friend. Like, four times."
"I read it its rights," McGarrett said. "But then I started wondering if it actually has any."
Jerry consulted his tablet again. "From what I can find here, when you arrest an alien-"
"Undocumented alien," McGarrett specified. He turned to the prisoner. "Unless you have a green card?"
"We are from another star system," the alien said. "We do not require green cards to travel between the worlds."
"Right. Undocumented alien."
"Right," Jerry agreed. "When you arrest an undocumented alien they have the same rights as a citizen. Also, you're supposed to notify their embassy."
"Does Alpha Centauri have an embassy on Oahu?" McGarrett asked.
Jerry bit his lip. "Not that I could find."
"See, though," McGarrett said, "I think that, when you look up the laws on undocumented aliens, they're talking about humans who are citizens of other countries. I don't think the law applies to non-humans. See what it says about extra-terrestrials."
Jerry consulted his computer. "I'm not finding any laws or formal guidelines for dealing with captured extra-terrestrials," he said after a minute.
McGarrett made a show of considering. He frowned, shrugged, and tipped his head to the side. "In the absence of formal guidelines, we can go with common practice. What's the standard practice for dealing with extra-terrestrials?"
"Well..." now it was Jerry who frowned, shrugged, and tipped his head, "in popular culture, when someone captures an alien, they autopsy it."
McGarrett's face lit up. "Now that's a protocol I can get behind." He got the rolling cart out of the corner, pulled it over next to the alien and whipped off the cover. It held an assortment of scalpels, probes, tweezers, pliers, hammers, and a bright, shiny, surgically clean chainsaw.
The alien shied away, putting as much space between itself and the cart as the handcuffs on its four hands would allow.
"It's not dead, though," Jerry objected. "Doesn't something have to be dead before you autopsy it?"
"How do we know it's not dead?"
"Maybe because I'm sitting here talking to you?" the alien suggested. "And I'm breathing." Its own breath echoed in its ears. It was breathing faster, trying to avoid hyperventilating but failing miserably.
"But we have no knowledge of alien physiology," McGarrett said reasonably. "Maybe dead aliens do talk and breathe. We need a baseline of information."
"Okay," the alien said. "Okay, this is nuts. You've made your point. Take my head off."
"That's what the chainsaw is for." He picked up the chainsaw and pulled the starter cord. An overwhelming roar echoed and reverberated through the concrete chamber. "Should I start with its head or maybe try taking off one of the hands first?" he shouted to his companion. "This hand, maybe." He held the chainsaw over the rubbery left wrist, then moved it up to hover over the much more flesh-and-blood hand protruding from the left forearm. "Or this one?"
The alien could only shriek unintelligibly in terror.
The door to the room flew open and a big black man stormed in. "McGarrett! What are you doing? McGarrett, stop!"
McGarrett throttled back on the chainsaw and turned to the newcomer. "Oh, hey, Lou!"
"What are you doing?"
"I'm just getting ready to autopsy this alien."
"Autopsy the alien?"
"It's standard operating procedure. Jerry looked it up."
Jerry gave a small shrug and nodded, holding up his tablet as if to illustrate.
"You can't just autopsy the alien," Lou objected.
The alien gasped and slumped back into the chair, limp with relief.
"You have to film it so you can put it on YouTube. Here, I have a camera on my phone." He took out a phone, tapped the face a couple of times and then held it up so it pointed at the prisoner. "Okay, go ahead."
"No! No! Stop! I'm not an alien. Okay? I'll admit it! I'm not an alien. I'm just a guy in a rubber suit. I'm from Cleveland, goddamn it!"
"Cleveland?" McGarrett echoed, his voice skeptical. "A few minutes ago you said you were from Alpha Centauri."
"Really? I lied."
"You've certainly lied at some point. But how do I know you're not lying now, to try to trick me? No, I think the best way to find out the truth is to go ahead and start removing body parts. Just so we can examine them more closely. Nothing personal."
He revved the chainsaw. The alien wet itself. The rubber suit held the moisture in a puddle around its left foot.
"Seriously?" Its voice climbed an octave in terror and disbelief. "You know I'm from either Cleveland or Alpha Centauri and you're gonna go with Alpha Centauri? Does that really sound reasonable to you?"
McGarrett turned off the chainsaw, set it aside, and leaned in to put his face right up against the alien's. The alien would not have believed it thirty seconds ago, but Steve McGarrett was even scarier without the chainsaw.
"Coming from the thing that I caught making a fourth attempt to kill my best friend, I'll tell you how it sounds to me. It sounds to me like plausible deniability."
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry," the prisoner shrieked. "Don't kill me! Please! Don't kill me! I'll tell you everything I know!"
McGarrett stood up again, grasped the alien's head on both sides and lifted it straight up. It was set into a rubber gasket and it took a minute, but then it gave and popped off. He set it aside and turned back. The prisoner was a young man in his early twenties with a bright red face and brown hair plastered to his skull with sweat.
He looked back at Steve. "We were making a movie," he said. "We were only making a movie."
5-0 5-0 5-0 5-0 5-0
"Making a movie," Danny echoed skeptically.
He, Steve, and Lou were seated in a row, looking up at the screen in the main Five-0 office. Jerry was down in his basement conferring with Eric. Grace and Will stood side-by-side at the smart table, working the computers. Danny was fresh out of the hospital (again) and they had just shown him the recording of their interrogation.
"This whole thing started in Burbank," Steve said, "with a low-budget, independent film company. They made science fiction movies."
"If you want to call them that," Will said disparagingly. "We found them and watched a couple. They had very limited releases. Like, one of them has a brother-in-law who owned a theater and he let them have late-night showings in exchange for cleaning the auditorium. They're also on YouTube, with a link to donate money. One of them raised, like, fourteen dollars."
"Their special effects weren't bad," Grace offered, "but the scripts were horrible."
"Thank you for this movie review," Danny said. He turned to Steve and Lou. "Why are our children in Five-0 headquarters operating the computers? This is no place for children. Dangerous things happen here. Plus, there are child labor laws."
"Just think of us as Five-0, The Next Generation," Will put in.
"I don't want to think of you as Five-0, The Next Generation. I want to think of you as being somewhere safe and doing something innocent and age-appropriate, like playing hide-and-seek or having tea parties."
Grace rolled her eyes affectionately.
"They're interning," Steve said.
"Interning? Interning?"
"Sure. Interning. Think how it'll look on college applications. Cheerleading, softball, helped take down a terrorist organization, president of the library booster club..."
"They are years from college."
"Yes, but only a couple."
"Shut up. I'm not speaking to you."
"That would be a welcome change," Steve said. "Shall I continue telling you about our adversaries or do you want to bitch some more?"
Danny didn't answer.
"Danny? Danno?"
"I'm thinking. I'm thinking."
"Time's up." Steve leaned back and crossed his left ankle over his right knee. "The whole thing began, as I understand it, with a practical joke gone wrong. One of the guys wanted to scare his brother, so they decided to stage a mock alien abduction and film it, so they could laugh at it later. They mocked up a UFO with a small drone they'd been using for camera work, snuck in a window via the fire escape, and kidnapped the sleeping occupant. Only they got the wrong window and ended up kidnapping a total stranger."
"The guy was sleeping off a bachelor party and completely fell for the alien routine," Lou said. "The film they got wound up being about a thousand times better than anything they'd done deliberately and they came up with the idea of making a movie by kidnapping strangers, convincing them they'd been abducted by aliens, and filming them."
"There were a couple of problems, though," Steve said.
"You think?" Danny shook his head. "Like not being able to release the movie without getting arrested and sued?"
"That and they had ideas for really convincing alien abduction details," Lou explained, "but nowhere near the capital they'd need to pull them off. Things like the drone UFO that tried to drown you last night. Convinced that these were simply details that needed to be worked out, they started looking around for someone to finance the project."
"And they found someone," Steve said. "But, and here's where it gets dicey, our guest downstairs has no idea who, exactly, it was."
"Someone's financing their big, stupid movie project and he doesn't know who? Okay, but someone must. He's giving us the names of his co-conspirators, right?"
"Sort of." Steve sighed.
"Sort of?"
"They all had stage names and nicknames. For example, the guy we've got downstairs is named Ian Goldberg, but he's known to the others in the group as Boog Martian."
"You're joking," Danny said flatly.
"I'm not. He's given us some useful information and we should be able to identify more of them. We've got the YouTube channel to trace, and the money from the donation link. The theater where they showed their films in Burbank is out of business and in foreclosure. It was actually owned by a consortium and we haven't figured out yet who, exactly, gave his brother-in-law the keys for late-night viewing parties. And there are little details about some of the others that might pan out. Like, for example, one of the techs is a woman known as Eureka, Reek for short and no, I'm not making that up. Goldberg knew that she had a day job delivering pizzas in the greater Los Angeles area, so we reached out to a new task force that's just setting up in California-"
"Chin," Danny grinned.
"Chin," Steve agreed, smiling, "and he's got people looking into pizza parlors, trying to identify her. And our computer experts," he indicated Grace and Will, "are running down all the leads they can. But, of course, the film company members are just the little fish."
"Right. It's the 'producer' we want. Do we know what his or her end game is?"
"The film company was under orders to steal the X-ray machines and get the Ocean's Eleven project and turn them over to their producer. He is supposed to stage a demonstration-"
"An act of terrorism," Danny supplied.
"Exactly. Supposedly, he's going to show what he can do and then demand money not to do it again. He gets rich-though I'd bet that's not the real goal. The real goal is simply to commit an act of terrorism on the United States. But he gets rich and they wind up with a movie that, when they release it, is guaranteed to be a blockbuster."
"When they release it?" Danny echoed. "When they release it? Has it not occurred to them that when they release it they will get arrested on a host of charges, including terrorism?"
"Oh, you haven't heard the really brilliant part," Lou said with dry sarcasm. "In addition to the money, one of the demands was full immunity for everyone involved and-and-all film rights."
"Well, they didn't pull off the Ocean's Eleven technology," Steve said, "and they're not likely to. If they try again, they'll be caught. But they have enough material for at least three dirty bombs and there are a lot of ways their producer could use that. We need to find this guy, and we need to find him now."