Howell brought down his arm. Hernandez dodged left. The scissors flashed past him. Hernandez rammed the butt of his M4 into Howell's wrist. The scientist howled in pain. The scissors fell from his hand and clattered on the floor. Hernandez kneed Howell in the gut. He gasped and dropped to his knees.

"Get up." Hernandez grabbed Howell by the collar and yanked him to his feet with one hand. He then shoved the scientist into his chair and kicked the scissors away. Howell grimaced and rubbed his wrist.

"You wanna try any more stupid shit?" Hernandez glared at him.

Howell swallowed and shook his head.

"You're the walking piece of crap that gave Zamora control of Gigan, huh?"

Howell looked away.

"I asked you a question, shithead!"

A whimper escaped Howell's lips. He tried to shrink away from Hernandez.

Scowling, Hernandez stepped closer to him.

"Master Sergeant," Nicole called out.

"Ma'am?"

She waved for him to come over. They stepped out into the hallway, Nicole speaking in a low voice.

"Let me give it a try."

"Are you sure, Ma'am?"

"Look at him." Nicole nodded to Howell. "The guy's scared out of his mind."

"Good," said Hernandez.

Nicole frowned briefly. "Maybe what we need is a softer approach. Like the saying goes, you can catch more flies with honey. We might get more information out of him than we bargained for."

Hernandez looked at Howell, then back at Nicole. "Is this an order, Ma'am?"

"I can make it one."

"Okay. But I'll be right outside if you need me."

Nicole nodded. "Thank you, Master Sergeant."

She handed Hernandez her M4 – she figured not having a rifle would make her less threatening – and re-entered the office. Howell still rubbed his wrist as she pulled up a chair across from him.

"Are you okay, Doctor Howell?"

He looked over at her. She immediately sensed him relax a little. "It hurts."

"Can you move your fingers?"

Howell flexed his hand. He winced in pain.

"It doesn't look like anything's broken," Nicole said. "We have some nurses with us. I can have them take a look at it."

"Thank you. Who are you?"

"Oh, I'm sorry." She gave him an apologetic smile. Howell sat up a little straighter. "Captain Nicole Fox, United States Air Force."

"Are you a pilot?"

"No, I'm actually a signals intelligence officer."

Howell's brow furrowed. "What are you doing here?"

"I think you know why we're here, Darrell. Can I call you Darrell?"

He nodded.

"Like I said, I think you know why we're here. It has to do with Gigan."

Howell avoided eye contact with Nicole. "I can't talk about it."

Nicole stared at him, thinking about what to say or do next. Saying, "Please tell me," would make her sound like an annoying little sister. If she looked like some Victoria's Secret model she could just bat her eyes and make some seductive pouty face and have Howell spill ever secret he ever had. Jeff acted like she was the hottest woman on the planet. At best, Nicole considered herself okay looking.

Whatever I've got, I might as well use it.

"Darrell." She reached across and took hold of his hands. Howell stiffened. His wide eyes showed more surprise than anything else. Nicole figured this was a guy who never had much luck when it came to women.

"Darrell, please." She slowly ran her thumb along his hand. "You have to tell me what you know about Gigan."

"I-I can't." He looked down at his hands and Nicole's hands intertwined. "This is all supposed to be a secret."

"Darrell." Nicole leaned closer. "Please. You seem like a really smart, really nice guy who got caught up in something bad. I don't want to see you get hurt, but if you don't tell me what I need to know, Master Sergeant Hernandez is going to come back in here and he will hurt you. He will hurt you bad."

Howell shuddered. "But-But you're an officer. You can order him not to hurt me."

Nicole's shoulders sagged. "I wish I could, but these macho, sexist types like Hernandez only listen to female officers for so long. When he gets too jacked up on testosterone, no order I give is going to stop him."

Howell looked out in the hallway. Hernandez stared back at him with an unsmiling, menacing look. He shifted in his chair and took two loud, deep breaths.

"He'd . . . He'd want me to be brave."

"Who?" asked Nicole.

"Horatio. I mean, President Zamora."

"Why would he want you to be brave?"

"He wants to bring about a new era in America. No more war, no more racism, no more greed, no more hunger, no more divisive talk. Everyone would have whatever they needed, corporations would no longer exploit the poor, people wouldn't be allowed to spread lies on TV, radio or the internet. We would have a real utopia where everyone got along."

"And that's what Zamora's using Gigan for?" asked Nicole. "To create this crisis and bring about his utopia?"

Howell started to nod, then stopped.

"What about all the people Gigan's killed?"

Howell cast his gaze to his lap. A nervous twitch formed under his right eye. "H-Horatio said some people might get hurt or killed, but that it would be a small price to pay."

"A small price?" blurted Nicole. She tried to push down her anger as she continued. "Do you know who many people Gigan has killed? Millions!"

"They were bad people." Howell didn't look at Nicole as he spoke. "That's what Horatio told me. They were people who didn't like his vision for America."

"They were not bad people, Darrell. They were just people." Nicole paused. "Do you have a family?"

"Uh-huh." He nodded.

"What if it was your family who died in these attacks?"

"That won't happen. My family live in states that supported the Vice President in the last election. Horatio won't attack them."

Nicole exhaled slowly. She calmed herself before trying a new tactic. "Darrell, can you do something for me?"

"I-I guess."

She smiled and gave his hands a gentle squeeze. "I want you to close your eyes and think of a place with lots of people, like a baseball game or football game."

"I don't like sports."

"Okay, then. Someplace else. Think of a mall or a park."

"There's a mall in Las Vegas I go to sometimes."

"Good, good," said Nicole. "Picture it. Picture your last visit there."

"Okay."

"What were some of things you saw there?"

"They have a nice food court there, and a decent electronics store."

"What about the people?"

"There were lots of them there," said Howell.

"Describe them."

"How can I? There must have been hundreds."

Nicole chewed on her lip, thinking. "Which ones stood out in your mind?"

Howell was silent for several seconds. "There was a girl at the Orange Julius place. She was pretty. She was also nice to me. I saw this old couple holding hands and laughing. I remember thinking I wish I had someone I could spend the rest of my life with."

"Good. Good. What about children?"

Howell paused again to think. "There were two girls, maybe eleven or twelve, running out of a photo booth and laughing. There was this little boy, I guess two or three, on a little merry-go-round. His parents were smiling and taking pictures of him."

"That sounds nice," Nicole told him. "Do you still have all those people pictured in your mind?"

"Uh-huh."

"Good. Now picture all of them dead."

Howell stiffened.

"That pretty girl at Orange Julius, the old couple, the girls at the photo booth, the parents and their little boy at the merry-go-round. Picture them all dead."

Howell lowered his head.

"Now multiply that a million times. Those are the kinds of people Gigan has killed."

Howell's jaw quivered as Nicole continued. "Parents bringing up their children, old people enjoying their golden years, girls just having fun. Do these sound like bad people to you, Darrell? Do these sound like the kinds of people who deserve to die?"

The scientist choked off a sob.

"Is this how you want to create utopia? On the bodies of millions of people who never hurt anybody?"

Howell trembled. A tear slid down his cheek.

"You have to know this is wrong," Nicole said. "You have to know that President Zamora is wrong."

"But he's my friend."

"What kind of friend makes you kill so many people?" She leaned closer to him. "Help me stop this, Darrell. Please don't let any more innocent people die."

"I'm sorry." Darrell cried. "I'm sorry. I just wanted to make things better, like Horatio always talked about."

He wept for a few minutes. Nicole said nothing. When he looked up, she put on her most sympathetic expression. "That ship in the pit. Is that how Gigan came to Earth?"

"Yes." Howell nodded.

"Who found it?"

"I did. I've studied Native American stories for years looking for clues about extraterrestrial visitations dating back hundreds, even thousands of years. Some petroglyphs from the Washoe Tribe led me here. That's when I found the capsule, and Gigan."

"So why did you tell Zamora about it?" asked Nicole.

"He's always been interested in my research. Most people think aliens are bad because of beings like the Kilaaks and King Ghidorah. But Horatio felt aliens might have technology and philosophies that could benefit the entire human race. He asked me to inform him if I ever came across anything extraterrestrial in nature."

Nicole nodded. It sounded like Zamora had been plotting to use alien tech to gain power since his college days.

"It took years just to translate the language of the civilization that built the capsule. But I did it." Howell sat up straighter, displaying renewed energy, like he was proud of his accomplishment. "I learned a lot of interesting things about Gigan."

"Like what?"

"Well, it confirmed a theory some of us at NASA's xenobiology department had. That there wasn't just a single Gigan. There are many of them. They're artificial constructs, living weapons, built by a race on the other side of the galaxy hundreds of thousands of years ago."

"What happened to them?" asked Nicole.

"The aliens? From what I could translate, the whole race apparently died out."

"But they left their weapons behind, specifically the Gigans."

"Yes." Howell nodded. "So when the aliens that originally built the Gigans became extinct, other races used the monsters for their own purposes. The Nebula M Aliens, the Seatopians, and probably many others."

"Including President Zamora," said Nicole.

"Yes."

"So how does he control Gigan?"

"The control signal is disguised as a cell phone," Howell told her. "And developing that wasn't easy. Gigan's brain is like nothing anyone has seen before. Part living tissue, part computer."

"You mean like a cyborg."

Howell shook his head. "More like organic technology. A living central processing unit. Trying to figure out that technology also took years. Even when I did, it was so complex I could only come up with a rudimentary control device."

"So there's a limit to what Zamora can do with Gigan?"

"He can order Gigan to whatever place he wants, or order him to leave it. But he can't control every single movement during a fight. Not that it matters since Gigan has autonomous programming for that."

"In other words," Nicole began, "just point Gigan at a target and let him take care of the rest."

"It's a simple way of phrasing it, but basically, yes."

Nicole looked over the desk, grabbed a pen and a Post-it note and gave it to Howell. "What's the frequency of the control signal?"

Howell wrote it down. Nicole took the note and smiled. "Thank you, Darrell. You may have helped save a lot of lives. You should feel good about that."

He nodded. "You're welcome. I'm sorry, about everyone else who died."

It took an effort for Nicole to maintain her smile. The fact Dr. Darrell Howell had gone through with his efforts to revive Gigan, even after Zamora told him point blank people would die, told her all she needed to know about the man's character, or severe lack thereof.

She walked into the hallway and motioned for Hernandez to follow.

"For the record, Ma'am, I am not a macho, sexist type who refuses to follow the orders of female officers."

"Oh quit being so damn sensitive. It helped get Howell to open up, didn't it?"

Hernandez gave her a half-smile. "That it did. So, what are you going to do now that you have the frequency?"

"What else? Build a jamming device. Then we'll see how bad President Zamora is without his pet monster."

TO BE CONTINUED