It was at this point, I later noted in my journal (which I'd programmed with an encrypted security lock which could only be opened in the event of my death), that things went not only further out in left field than they already were but entirely out of the ball park, if not actually over the state line.

I was about to sternly order her to get a grip, but Violet caught my eye and, demonstrating the kind of insight only a mother could possess, she silently pleaded: Let me handle this, Kelly, please. She's terrified and desperate to hide it.

Violet gently cupped Marie's face in both her small hands and, so softly we could barely hear her, murmured, "Sweetheart, what exactly do you mean by that?"

Marie's eyes were filled with tears, touched as she was by the gentle maternal sympathy Violet was projecting. "I...I don't know, I really don't. But it wasn't a man. I swear to God it wasn't." She hesitated, then bravely went on: "On Billy's life."

"What did you see, Marie? Can you tell us?" Violet softly requested. "Take your time, sweetheart."

"My...my Mom used to call me that," Marie revealed in a very small voice, "back when she was...more of a Mom, you know?"

Before she started to OD on antidepressants, I realised. This was a stroke of luck, Violet using just the right term of endearment to reach Marie, to remind her of happier times and God knows there had to be a few, surely.

"Is it okay for me to call you that?" Violet tactfully asked, maintaining the politeness that clearly touched Marie, a.k.a. Streetcat, more than she wanted to admit. Marie nodded, and Violet smiled and gently kissed the girl's cheek. "But not too often, huh? You have a lovely name and it's only polite for us to use it." The girl smiled and nodded again.

Judging this to be the right time to interject, I asked curiously, "Marie, why do you say 'it'?" At just the right moment a detail from Marie's case file popped up before my mind's eye: she was noted to be talented with sketching software on tablets. When she was ten she won a school prize for it - now that, surely, was a reminder of a happier time, and that would help her morale. So I suggested, "Hey, could you sketch it on a tablet for us?"

For a moment, to my carefully concealed delight, the happy little girl she once was and, dammit, still should be, showed through; she smiled broadly and nodded almost eagerly. "You got FreeSketch 4?"

"No idea," I admitted, pleased at the prospect of making at least some headway on this case, "but I'll find out." I opened the door and leaned out. "Hey, Frankie, have we got FreeSketch 4 or similar on a tablet?"

"Version 5 on this one," she nodded, holding it up. "They didn't change much, just fixed a couple of bugs and added holo and 3D printing support. Heads up!" she called and skimmed it over to me; I caught it, thanking her.

Marie took less than a minute to re-familiarise herself with the software, satisfying herself that there'd been minimal changes made since she last used it, then got straight to work. It was actually a pleasure to watch; she really was very good. A detailed image rapidly took shape on the tablet's 30cm screen; clearly this girl had a keen, almost photographic, eye for detail.

But the image itself...that was surely the stuff of nightmares. Yet it never occurred to me to question it, because it was clear she was giving this her very best effort; her expression was one of fixed concentration. Marie was putting too much into this for it to be any kind of prank.

FreeSketch was a brilliant piece of shareware to which many people had paid contributions. You could draw multiple views in 2D and combine them into a 3D image, and Marie was doing just that. She'd fixed the height of the overall image at 20cm and set the scale at, oddly, 1:12.5 - which meant the real thing was 2.5 metres in height. That was huge, bigger than Joey DiMaggio who worked part-time for Bernalli, moonlighting (if that was the right word) from his regular job as Chico's bouncer at the Main St. bar.

I simply could not believe what was taking shape on that screen. But one thing was certain: Marie was right. This...thing...was definitely not a man. Which of course begged the question:

WHAT THE FUCK WAS IT?!

Simulation Room

Two hours later

Finally the image was complete, and Denny uploaded it to our server in the Simulation Room, inevitably nicknamed 'the Holodeck', to render it in full 3D, full size.

It made for awesome if not terrifying viewing.

There seemed to be plates of armour on shoulders, elbows and knees, plus down the spine and both sides of the massive torso. The body was covered with a mesh of some sort. The long, muscled fingers ended in curved claws, similar on the toes. There wasn't a single place on the thing's body that didn't bear obvious heavy muscle. Though it was humanoid, the proportions were all wrong. The forearms were clad in metal, but not armour; the right bore what appeared to be a weapon of some sort, maybe a missile launcher, and the left had controls and touch-screen panels.

Plus there was a pair of long, viciously serrated blades projecting from sheaths on the right forearm. I immediately recognised these from Jocelyn's image interpolation scan from the fatal wounds; the wound patterns showed the blades did more damage on exit than on entry, suggesting serrated blades, so there was at least some correlation with the evidence we had - because there was no way Marie could know that.

A belt bore a loincloth plus what appeared to be small items of equipment, though no-one could suggest what they might be. Nail clippers, for all we knew.

Its left shoulder bore what Duane, my tac expert, was certain was a weapon on a swivel mount, equipped with a triple-beam sighting laser. If that was the plasma caster Jocelyn had suggested did for Gusev, it was impossibly small.

Its skin (hide?) was vaguely reptilian, overall a pasty white with a hint of green and dark brown spots in a pattern that rather reminded me of Deep Space 9's Dax character, though this thing was clearly not a Trill. It had long, thick dreadlocks, too.

You'll note I haven't gotten to its head or face yet. I'm working up to it. I have to. Even now, it's still hard to believe.

The head was huge, broad, with an inhumanly long jawline. The eyes were deeply sunken into the head, well-protected by bone. There were four - well, my best guess would be mandibles, like a crab's, spaced evenly around the mouth, each with a small tusk or large fang curving inward. The forehead (?) had brownish patterns and the thing's brow or equivalent, bearing brown stripes, stretched all the way around the skull.

But the creature's mouth was by far the most bizarre feature. There was nothing remotely resembling a nose. There seemed to be an outer jaw bearing two rows of sharp angular teeth and an inner mouth which...well, not to sound vulgar, but it reminded us vividly of a woman's external genitalia, i.e. her pussy. It was pink and wet-looking.

"What is it?" a horrified Candy whispered.

Denny, a keen fan of the original Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy radio series (definitely not the movie, a brave but ultimately misguided and inadequate attempt to recapture the charm and idiosyncratic humour of Douglas Adams' masterpiece; with all due respect to the adopted country I've grown to love, Americans just don't get British humour. Red Dwarf, The Office, Hitch-Hiker's Guide - the moment you Americanise them they just don't work), quipped, à la Arthur Dent, "Let me guess. Horrible. Am I warm?"

I was the only one to get the joke, the only Unit member old enough to hear the series the first time it was broadcast (have I mentioned that before now, that I am in fact the oldest member of the Unit? Well, I am - I'm a young 62, but the only way you'll get me to retire is in a fucking box, dammit!), and murmured, à la Ford Prefect, "Not now, Arthur..."

"Trillian, sir," he impishly corrected me. Oh. Well, even dedicated fans don't always get everything right...

"That," Jocelyn declared definitively, "is not human. Not even remotely."

Grasping at straws, trying not to reach the inevitable conclusion we all knew we were going to reach, Jerry feebly ventured, "That could be some sort of weird mask..."

But Marie shook her head. "No. It took a mask off, to show me that."

"Why, though?" Candy wondered. "To show off? To scare her? Surely it knew she was already scared, and there's no shame in that, Streetcat," she added, so as not to bruise the girl's pride.

Jocelyn sighed in exasperation. "Oh, for God's sake, you're all trying to ascribe human motivations to a creature which quite clearly is anything but human! We can't even guess at the motivations of an alien being!"

Frankie asked nervously, "Um, are we taking that as read, that we've got an alien creature on our hands?"

I knew what she was implying, and so did Streetcat. A fourteen-year-old (former) gang member wasn't exactly a credible witness by most people's standards, and unfortunately Marie knew that as well as anyone. Plus her story was so outré it bordered on the fantastical.

She very slowly crossed the room, her head down as if in shame, and lifted it only as she drew level with me. She met my eyes and said in a perfectly reasonable voice, sounding much older than her tender years, "Commander McAllister, I would swear to this in court: that is what I saw. I can't explain it. I don't know if anyone can. But on Billy's and Julie's lives, I swear I'm telling you the truth."

'Credible' be damned. I was using every scrap of my Unit-trained psycho-analytical skill and forty years of experience as a cop to assess her, putting aside all personal feelings as I knew was utterly necessary, and I was absolutely convinced of her sincerity. But as Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. So I gently told her, "I believe you. But you know we have to check."

She only nodded.

There followed a number of tests on her, some with surprising results. For a start we proved she did indeed have a camera eye for detail, and nearly as good a memory for words and sounds. Her IQ was the biggest shock: 164, higher than some Unit members (higher than mine, I have to admit!) and firmly in the 'exceptionally gifted' range on the M.U. Gross Scale. How the hell had her teachers missed that? No wonder she never fit in at school and was always the class clown: she was bored, because the lessons weren't challenging enough for her!

The psych tests showed she had a strong talent for leadership and keen analytical skills. Dammit, this girl did not belong on the streets! She should be in an elite academy somewhere, being pushed to her limits and helped to realise her full potential, not wasting her life!

A wild thought occurred: the Unit Academy? No, she was too young.

But her credibility as a witness had now vastly improved. I was almost ready to go to the Commissioner to tell him the game had changed. Almost. But we still needed independent verification, somehow.

Out of nowhere it hit me: Frankie's FWB in Vandenberg. If any space vehicle or whatever had passed near or landed on Earth, surely U.S. Space Command would know about it. When I asked her, she gulped and managed, "Well, now I come to think of it, he did mention something passing by recently, in, um...pillow talk." I couldn't quite believe her blush. "He knows I like to hear about them; I'm an amateur astronomer," she confided.

"Do you think he'd be willing to talk to me about it?"

Frankie gaped at me. "Sir, you don't seriously think they saw -"

"They might not have known what they saw," I pointed out, "because we're apparently dealing with stealth tech that's beyond state-of-the-art - ours, anyway. So the ship or whatever could've been disguised." A thought, an angle of approach, occurred to me. "We may actually be doing him a favour. If these beings do have such tech, the military needs to know about it to maintain national - or even global - security."

"That's a very good point, sir," she slowly admitted. "I'll give him a call."

The Lobster Place, New York City

Next evening

Quite understandably, an off-duty Lieutenant Colonel Scott Parker, U.S. Space Command, wasn't too happy at first about Frankie's deception. Only her plea that this was desperately important to her job "and might just involve national security, too!" halfway convinced him to listen.

The other half was facilitated by my offer of a meal in one of NYC's best shellfish restaurants on the Unit's tab; she'd mentioned he was fond of lobster. He sighed. "Frankie, you so owe me a major Bravo Juliett for this caper."

She giggled. "Okay."

I have to ask. "Bravo Juliett?"

"Yeah. BJ, you know?"

Then I got it. Yeah, I had to ask.

"What's on your mind, Commander?"

"Whatever passed by Earth a few nights ago," I answered, clearly surprising him.

He looked at Frankie and sighed. "Frankie, does the phrase 'national security' ring any bells?"

"If a passing meteor was a matter of national security," she returned impishly, "surely you shouldn't have mentioned it at all, especially not to a loose-lipped FWB!"

Scott laughed, conceding defeat. For all her youth Frankie's very hard to argue with. Better men than either of us have tried.

"So what was it?" I asked.

"Well, as far as we could tell via radar and a visual satellite scan, just a random meteor. We tracked it in case of any possible collision, but the trajectory clearly showed it wasn't going to hit. It was a grazer, that's all." He paused. "But just as it brushed the atmosphere, something seemed to break off it and fall towards Earth. Way too small to be any serious danger to anyone, and we scanned the Internet to check if any amateur astronomers - like Frankie here -" he grinned, "had picked up a meteorite, and sure enough a few of them did."

Hmm. "Is there any way you could backtrack its trajectory, work out where it hit?"

Scott shrugged. "We know where it hit. Just off the shore of Liberty Island. Maybe a few fish bought it, but we could tell immediately it wasn't gonna hit Lady Liberty, which naturally would be most people's major concern - especially in New York City - so we didn't even bother reporting it."

Just outside New York City, I realised. "Scott, could it have been something...other than a meteorite?"

He must've caught something in my voice. "What do you mean? What's this about?"

It was time to show my hand.

On a hunch, at almost two in the morning (a time a friend in Britain used to call Oh-My-God-O'Clock or There's-No-Such-Bloody-Time-O'Clock - always a card, that guy, and unlike me he was anything but a night owl) after Marie had finished her work, it'd occurred to me to check police archives to see if any cases like this had ever cropped up before, the primary search criterion being the mysterious mutilations. I got one hit:

L.A. in '97, during a major street war between the Jamaican voodoo drug gangs and the Scorpios, their Colombian rivals, both of whom were vying for control of the entire West Coast and choosing the City of Angels as their preferred battleground.

During a heatwave like the one we were currently sweltering through.

I remembered Gladys mentioning her service in L.A. back then, talked to her and discovered there had been a hit on the Metro by some unknown assailant, connected with neither side as far as anyone knew, taking out street gang members and ordinary commuters alike in apparently senseless killings. She'd been one of the EMTs first on the scene.

Just like Billy and the others. There were too many parallels for this to be a coincidence. Victims skinned, butchered, decapitations, and a detective who'd had his spinal column and skull ripped out. He still had a machete in his hand, DNA trace confirming it had formerly belonged to a dead gang member on the train.

Again, like Billy.

"I'm sorry I didn't mention it at Columbus, Commander, but it was such a long time ago, I'd forgotten the details..."

"That's okay," I assured her, "maybe this guy's a copycat. Thanks, Gladys." I hung up and continued searching.

Then an oddity: parts of the record had been redacted, other parts erased, especially forensic reports. Certain software reconstruction tools invented by and unique to the Unit recovered fragments, and an AI analysis program suggested high-profile Fed involvement, possibly military intelligence. But I recovered enough to dig out the name of the most prominent officer in the case: Michael R. Harrigan, a lieutenant at the time and now Captain of Metro Command - which after the pacification campaign of '23 was now a hell of a lot quieter than it'd been back in '97.

I decided to pay him a visit via the newest Super-Sonic Transport, the Aerion AS3 - it was slightly faster than Concorde. If anyone would know what we were dealing with and could give me sufficient verification to approach Ed, surely he would. Sure, I could use Zoom, but I felt an old hand such as Harrigan would appreciate the personal touch more.

As it turned out, he did.

Los Angeles Police Department, Metro Command

Ten hours ago

"Look, kid," I tiredly addressed the rookie manning the front desk of Metro Command, "don't give me that jurisdiction crap! It doesn't matter where he comes from, a cop's a cop! Just tell Captain Harrigan that Commander McAllister of the NY Tactical Operations Unit needs to see him! As to why, son, that's way above your pay grade!"

I hate stations where they put rookies on the front desk. That position should be occupied only by experienced officers, because they have to deal with all sorts: irate civilians demanding to know why more isn't being done to track down their lost dog, down-on-their-luck reporters desperate for a story, cops struggling with recalcitrant perps, ACLU creeps whining about suspects' rights...and, occasionally, people like me.

"Cap'n Harrigan's a very busy man -"

I groaned. "Oh, tell me about it!"

"- and he's got better things to do than talk to out-of-state cops who don't even have an appointment," the kid finished, infuriating me further.

I'd had enough. I was just about to reach across the desk and grab the brat by his lapels when I saw a sudden look of surprise in his eyes. Playing a hunch, I turned around and held out a hand to "Captain Harrigan, I presume."

He was still tall, though a little shrunken with age; still powerfully built, but...you know. His careworn face was deeply lined, hair sparse and white now, but he was still recognisable as Mike Harrigan, a cop with one of the top three felony arrest records in the history of the LAPD and multiple commendations for valour.

Plus a certain notoriety re the totalling of several squad cars and assorted other vehicles...

He barely chuckled. "I'd heard they were all sharp in the NYTOL."

"I wish people wouldn't call it that," I groused. Now he laughed, a husky laugh I liked straight away, and shook hands, and Christ, he had a firm grip.

"C'mon in. Hey, kid, this fellow officer's come a long way to see me. He's right: a cop's a cop. It's called professional courtesy." He grinned. "'sides, you never know when it might be you. I don't wanna be disturbed, got it?"

"Got it, Chief," he replied respectfully.

"Sorry 'bout that," Harrigan began as we sat, "normally I'd have a sergeant or higher on the desk, but we're a little short-handed today. Had a minor flare-up of that damn Covid-19 thing again, got three guys self-isolating. Ain't that fucker ever gonna quit?"

I shrugged. It wasn't important. "I can appreciate how busy you are, so I'll get right down to it. You remember a case back in '97, during the drug wars? During the heatwave?" I added significantly.

He chuckled. "These days I can barely remember last week, which is why I'm finally retirin' next month. First Captain of Metro Command to even make it to retirement," he added.

I braced myself. "I think you'll remember this case. People being decapitated and mutilated? An apparently invisible assailant who could take out hoods armed with automatic weapons using nothing but a blade? A blade, moreover, which left no metallic traces in the wounds?"

Harrigan stared at me. I knew I'd got him. He remembered, all right.

"Yeah," he said very quietly, "I remember. I tried to forget, for a long time. But that would've meant forgettin' two damn good cops, and they deserved better."

"Detectives Danny Archuleta and Jerry Lambert," I recalled from my research, in a respectful, equally quiet tone. "One with fifteen years' street service, the other up-and-coming but reputedly good."

"Danny Boy," he whispered, "and the Lone Ranger."

"I need to know what happened, Mike," I requested, "because I'm sure the same thing's happening all over again in my city. I want to stop it. I believe you can tell me how."

"Sounds like you know most of it," he noted, non-committal.

But I shook my head. "We have a fantastic unlikely theory, and our most credible witness is a fourteen-year-old former gang member, so before I put what we've got before the Commissioner, I need independent verification - or else I, and my entire Unit, are toast. You're my best bet. Time served and then some, decades of experience on the street and under fire. That's something he can't dismiss lightly, if at all." I played my last card. "Even when I start talking about homicidal aliens on some sort of murder spree."

He seemed to sort of relax then. "Yeah...sure sounds like you got the same problem I had. Ain't the same kook, though, an' I know that for a fact because," his voice rose, impassioned, "I KILLED that motherfucker!"

There was a pause. I knew he needed it. Then I asked again, "Tell me."

He did:

How he and his team ran a group of Scorpios into their hideout, only to discover them slaughtered. How a drug lord was ritually murdered voodoo style as a message to the Colombians, only for his murderers to be murdered themselves, skinned and hung out to dry.

How he and Archuleta had decided to bypass Keyes, the faux DEA agent allegedly trying to stop the Jamaican lord King Willie from taking over the West Coast, and how his partner had made the mistake of returning to a crime scene alone, paying for the error with his life when the perp returned to the scene of the crime (if he ever left, given how good these damn things are at hiding) as they often do.

The Metro hit, losing Jerry, pursuing his killer by road only to be rammed by Agent Keyes' operatives, finding out the truth and watching their (futile) attempt to capture the creature.

Battling the thing, partly crippling it, finally meeting it one-on-one on its own turf, and besting it.

"Not that I came out of it unscathed," he wryly added, showing me the incredible scar across his belly. "He thought I was done, came close to finish me off - and I shoved that discus or whatever the fuck it was right into whatever he had for guts. Killed him. Pushed it right into his spine, I think.

"Then the others appeared."

"There were others?" I gasped. Oh, Christ, that's all we need!

"But I think they were just watchin', maybe judgin' or supervisin', I dunno. They didn't touch me - just picked him up an' carried him off. The biggest one, looked the oldest, too, he tossed me somethin' and said, 'Take it'."

"They speak our language?" I inquired, fascinated.

Harrigan chuckled. "Fucked if I know how, with a mouth an' teeth like that!"

I returned the chuckle, recalling Marie's depiction. "What did they give you?"

"This," he answered, taking a DNA-coded lock-box out of a locked drawer, opening it and showing me. Inside was an antique flintlock in beautiful condition.

I whistled appreciatively. "I bet that's worth a pretty penny."

"Works, too," he grinned. "Shoulda seen the looks on those kids' faces when I came down to the range one day an' fired that!"

I couldn't help but laugh, picturing it. He was looking at me in an expectant way, I noticed. Somehow I knew he wanted me to pick it up. "Could I...?" I indicated, and he nodded. I carefully draped a sterile tissue over it first to avoid smudging the finish with fingerprints and drew it out of the box, admiring it. "How old is it?"

"There's a nameplate," he told me quietly. Something in his voice gave me pause. Then I looked.

Raphael Aidolimi

1715

The implication was obvious. These beings had been coming to Earth for at least 312 years and probably longer; perhaps they started coming once we developed firearms...and now, at last, I understood why.

Why those people had been mutilated the way they had.

Why Candy, the whores, Marie and the two other Metro survivors hadn't.

This was the final piece of the puzzle, the something I knew we were missing. Now, finally, I could put it all together.

"Trophies," I whispered, sickened. It was the only explanation which made sense. "He's after trophies. He only attacks people who are armed, because they can shoot back. He lives for the challenge...the hunt. That's all that matters to him. How you fight back determines either how he kills you, or what he does after he kills you:

"Automatic weapons, like AK-47s, AR-15s and so on - he just guts you. They're too easy, powerful weapons.

"Small-arms fire, .38s, .45s, 9mm, he beheads you, takes your skull. Those require more skill, so he treats you differently.

"But take him on with nothing but a knife or a sword...he takes your skull and spinal column. To pay respect," I understood, "to honour an especially courageous opponent."

"An' if you ain't armed," Harrigan agreed, "he won't touch you. He can't. It don't matter whether you're young, old, male, female, he don't give a fuck. All he cares about is if you're armed or not."

"If you're worthy prey or not," I nodded. "There's no way a human could take him on in hand-to-hand, and he knows that, so we're allowed weapons to even things up a little." I snorted. "'Little' being the operative word. It's hardly a fair fight even then."

"The fuck do these things know about a fair fight?" Harrigan spat.

I sighed. Well, I'd gotten my verification, and we and Marie were right after all. Just to be certain I showed Harrigan the image Denny had rendered from Marie's sketches, and he nodded. "Yep, that's our ugly motherfucker. Looks a little different, but then again the others looked different from each other an' from him."

"Just like us," I supposed, "individual variations." Okay, then. All that remained now was a final word with Frankie's FWB, and I could present our findings to Ed.

Except Harrigan wasn't finished. "Two more things I gotta tell you. First, I had another partner, Leona Cantrell. She went lookin' for Jerry at the Metro hit...but our boy found her first. But here's the odd thing: when the EMTs pulled her out, she was in deep shock...but alive."

I frowned. "But that doesn't make sense. She was armed, surely." Harrigan nodded. "So she was fair game. So why didn't he kill her?"

"My best guess? She didn't know it at the time...but she was pregnant. That's the only reason I've ever been able to come up with. Every year, on that day, she goes to her local church even though she ain't a believer, an' she gives thanks for bein' spared. Leona figures someone was watchin' over her that day, and fuck knows we needed it back then."

"But if even she didn't know she was pregnant, how the hell did he?!"

"Damned if I know," he admitted, "but accordin' to Keyes, an' I think he was right, these things only see in infrared, so maybe that's how. Or he heard the baby's heartbeat, or picked up on her scent..." He shrugged. "Who knows? But she had a beautiful little girl, who ain't so little now," he chuckled, "an' she's followin' in her mom's footsteps, studyin' at the Police Academy."

"Well, thanks, Mike," I returned the gun to its box and stood. "I think we've got enough to -"

"There's still the second thing," he interrupted, "an' that is: there ain't no we. It's just you from now on."

I froze. I didn't like the sound of that. "What do you mean?"

"I think he picked up on the leader of any group tryin' to fight him. He saved that one for last. The Scorpio leader from his first hit. The big man in the voodoo posse in the penthouse. Jerry, at the Metro. Keyes." He paused. "Me."

That made more sense than I wanted to admit. The leader of a group would, in these beings' eyes, be superior, the biggest challenge...and therefore the most honourable kill, the most worthy trophy. That led me to an uneasy conclusion. It had to mean...oh, fuck. Fuck a duck.

"You mean...I'm his priority target now?"

"Yeah."

I sighed. "Make my day, why don't you."

"Just tellin' it the way it is. Been doin' that all my life, ain't gonna stop now."

"Forewarned is forearmed," I conceded. "I just hope that's enough." We shook hands again.

"Hey, lemme know how it works out," Harrigan requested.

"I will," I promised, then reconsidered...as I might very well not live to do that. "If I, uh, fail," i.e. die, "what happens then?"

"Not sure," he admitted, "but I think he'll leave."

"So either way," I understood, "it ends with me. I can live with that." A gallows smile. "I hope."

His last words before I left the office were, "Good luck, Kelly...'cause you're sure as shit gonna need it."

The Lobster Place, New York City

So much I told Scott. When I'd finished, he said only, "Dear God, you're serious, aren't you?"

I nodded. "Harrigan seemed very sure of his facts. It all fits."

"So you think this 'meteorite' was -"

"- some sort of HALO pod, yeah," I nodded.

"HALO?" Frankie asked.

"High Altitude, Low Opening," Scott expanded. "It's a good way for paratroopers to avoid ground fire on their way down - descend as rapidly as possible, then open your chute at the last possible moment. Rough as hell," he winced, remembering one or two HALO drops in his career, "but doable. Except in this case he'd have been coming down at nearly escape velocity, over ten klicks per second, then firing retrorockets near the ground. Come to think of it, amateur reports did say it flared up before it hit," he recalled.

"They're tougher than us, so they could probably better withstand a HALO drop from orbit," I opined. Something occurred to me: the Blues had reported a missing person in the area around the time our shenanigans started. We hadn't previously connected Morrie Peters with our case, but now...

He was an amateur astronomer; the head of his local astronomy group had reported him missing. Had he gone to look for meteorite fragments, and instead found something even more out-of-this-world? Was he the hunter's first victim?

Scott was silent for a time. Then he began quietly, "Look, I have no verification of this. But my Dad used to work in the DoD and told me once about some weird op a friend of his, Adam Garber, was involved in." That was a name Harrigan had mentioned, I recalled. "It was a highly classified op in L.A. of all places - yeah, in '97. There was another op like it in Cambodia in '07 - but by all accounts that was an even bigger failure, no survivors."

"I bet I know why," I nodded, "they knew and were ready for it."

Scott nodded. "A third op in Zaire in '17, a third clusterfuck. After that the military quit trying. Official policy now - if 'official' is even the right word, as this is all black-ops territory - is to leave them be. It's less wasteful in men and materiel."

"Tell that to little Billy," Frankie murmured.

"So you're saying we won't have the Feds dropping in?" I inquired. He nodded. "Well, good...I suppose. This is our problem, we'll handle it. Now, at the risk of asking you to reveal classified military intelligence to civilians, does any branch of the U.S. Armed Forces possess weapons which can do this?" I showed him a holo of Gusev.

"Jesus," he breathed.

"Our forensic expert's best guess is a plasma caster of some kind, tightly contained; the wound was fused and cauterised. The weapon was wielded as antipersonnel; we think he used it for shock and awe."

Scott shook his head. "I didn't tell you this."

"Tell who what?" I asked innocently. "I am not here." That was in fact true as far as the restaurant's CCTV was concerned; taking a leaf out of Kadmin's book in the Netflix series Altered Carbon, Denny had written software which selectively hacked into and edited the footage in real time, effectively erasing its user from the images (and perhaps slightly misusing Unit CCTV access privileges). He's clever, that lad. When I explained this, Scott just grinned.

"The military does have one or two prototype plasma weapons, but they certainly aren't portable by any stretch of the imagination - the smallest is a two-man cannon. It's more of a field piece than an antipersonnel weapon, definitely not suitable for the kind of close-quarters work you're talking about. Best guess for earliest deployment in the field would be, oh, 2030 at least."

I thought so. "Thanks, Scott." I shook his hand and stood. Frankie made as if to stand as well, but I motioned her to stay put. "I'm giving you the night off, Frankie. Enjoy the meal, both of you...and the afters," I grinned, with a man-to-man wink at Scott.

I headed back to Base in a sombre mood. It'd been years since I'd engaged in a serious throwdown with anyone, let alone an alien thing taller than Darth Vader and with a worse attitude than a pissed-off puma. But I knew there was no other choice. He wouldn't accept anyone lesser (in his eyes) and I was through asking my team to take risks I wouldn't.

Whether I wanted it or not, this was now my fight.