Drake raised the gun and rested it against Hansen’s forehead.

With a final burst of will, Erin broke through the fear-induced paralysis and dived on the ground, coming out of a roll with Gibb’s gun in her hand and the trigger fully depressed. She emptied the entire magazine into the alien until he was hamburger, blown from his spot over Hansen, the gun that he had been holding falling harmlessly to the floor.

“Never again,” she whispered with her last reserve of strength.

And with that, Erin Palmer collapsed onto the cold garage floor, unconscious.

49

KYLE HANSEN’S EYES fluttered open and the world gradually came into focus. He realized he was lying on a bed—he had no idea where. Erin Palmer was sitting in a chair above him, reading a book on a small electronic tablet. He turned his head slightly and she caught the motion, launching herself at him and hugging him for all she was worth, albeit gently.

She separated and kissed him warmly on the lips. “Welcome back,” she said happily. “How do you feel?”

“How long have I been out?”

She checked her watch. She had bandages around her wrist, but she looked great otherwise. Freshly scrubbed and alert. “Twenty hours,” she replied.

Hansen glanced around. “Are we safe?”

“Couldn’t be any safer.”

He swung his legs over the side of the bed and pushed himself into a seated position facing Erin. “I feel like I’m having déjà vu,” he said. “How many times will I pass out, sure I’m dead, only to wake up to you?”

“Well,” she replied, a wide grin spreading over her face, “I’ve gotta believe that twice in a lifetime is already pushing it. Don’t you think?”

Hansen laughed. “Okay, tell me how you got us out of that one,” he said. “And just for a change of pace, tell me the truth this time. I don’t want you to think that whenever I’m unconscious for an extended period, that means you can lie to me.”

Erin nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind. What happened is that I picked up Gibb’s gun from the floor and I shot the alien bastard. Not Drake, but the Hive. You know.”

“But how? Gibb and Zalinsky, two hardened mercenaries, couldn’t fight through that level of fear and pain. And Burghardt and I collapsed like a house of cards. How could one woman be so extraordinary in so many ways?”

“Well,” said Erin with a sly smile. “As much as I’d like you to think I’m superwoman, I do have a more pedestrian explanation.”

He stared at her in anticipation.

“I cheated.”

“Come again?”

“I cheated. I told you that I had to edit out parts of my meeting with Fuller. So Drake wouldn’t hear. Let me fill you in. Fuller had expressed surprise that the Hive hadn’t tried to pry the combination from my mind. The Hive knew it couldn’t control humans, but Fuller was surprised that it hadn’t taken a shot at slipping in just to get that little snippet of information. A far simpler task than trying to take control.” Erin paused. “That’s when it hit me.”

Hansen just blinked and waited for her to continue.

“It had tried. The night in the motel I woke up screaming. The pain was enormous. That must have been the Hive. Trying and failing.”

Hansen nodded slowly. “It makes a horrible kind of sense,” he said. “That was the most intense scream of pain I’ve ever heard. And you did say you didn’t remember having any kind of a nightmare.”

“Exactly. Fuller told me they suspected that when the Hive tries to enter a human mind, our minds automatically block it, but the attempt hits the fear and pain centers of our brains pretty hard. That’s how Drake escaped in Yuma. Four of Fuller’s best men experienced such a high level of pain they all passed out.”

Hansen sighed. “Funny,” he said. “I suddenly have no trouble imagining what that might be like.” He paused. “Okay, so you were forewarned. I still don’t see how that helped you.”

“Forewarned is forearmed,” said Erin. “You didn’t think that injection was really glucagon, did you? Do you really think if I was diabetic I’d keep that such a big secret?”

“Come to think of it,” said Hansen. “I did find that strange. So you faked the diabetic thing?”

“Right. We were screwed. Big-time. When Drake realized I’d given him the wrong recipe, and then discovered the bug and homing devices, the situation turned pretty ugly. I was really counting on Fuller and his team to come to the rescue if I needed them. And then Gibb frisked me and removed the syringe Fuller had given me in case of an emergency.”

“What was in it?” asked Hansen.

Erin grinned. “A potent dose of morphine. Very potent,” she added. “I told you I cheated. And even with enough morphine on board to choke a herd of buffalo, the pain was still more intense than any I’d ever experienced. I can’t even imagine what it was like for you. Even with morphine on board, I still barely managed to fight through the pain and fear to shoot Drake.”

Hansen nodded appreciatively. He had wondered how she could have been so stoic when she was purposely cutting into her wrist and tearing skin to free herself. And now he knew. Morphine.

“Amazing,” he said. “But that doesn’t make you any less extraordinary, Erin. When the morphine was taken from you, and knowing Drake was listening in, you had to come up with the idea of faking diabetes to get me to ensure you received the injection. In fact, using your wits to survive is more remarkable than just happening to have a high pain threshold.”

“Thanks. I knew there was a reason I liked you so much,” she said, and then leaned forward and kissed him again.

“Don’t get me wrong,” said Hansen. “I’m thrilled to be alive. And I plan to take you up on your promise to rock my world later on. But we lost. Humanity has been defanged. I know it won’t affect us or our children or our grandchildren. But the Hive will end up the big winner in the galaxy without our more mature, but still relentless descendents around to lead the Seventeen against them.”

Erin smiled broadly, and she looked so happy Hansen thought she might float off the ground. “No. I’m afraid we won,” she said. “We won huge.”

Hansen stared at her. “Okay. What did I miss this time?”

“Fuller knew no plan survived engagement with the enemy. And the stakes were too high not to cover every base twice. So he made sure there was redundancy. If Drake somehow did what he ended up doing, learning I had given him the wrong instructions for the cure, there was a backup plan. Any guesses?”

Hansen pursed his lips in thought for an extended period, but came up empty. He shook his head.

“I sabotaged his DNA synthesizer,” said Erin happily. “After a few hours of brainstorming with Fuller and his team, we came up with the idea. I’d always planned to check the virus before Drake released it. You and I discussed it. And you explained how you had personally inspected the device they would use for this job, the Seq-Magic Ultra. And obviously, to give the virus a clean bill of health, I’d have to go online.”

Hansen’s eyes widened in wonder. “Brilliant,” he said. “So while you were checking out Drake’s biological virus online, you were exposing his DNA synthesizer to a computer virus.”

“Pretty cool, huh? While you and I were being flown back to Tucson so we could end up under a bridge, and while we were driving through the night to Colorado, Fuller’s people were busy. They awoke the engineer who wrote the software for the Seq-Magic Ultra from a sound sleep. National security and all that. He helped them navigate around his own safeguards and modify his software. They designed a bogus site for me to visit to—presumably—vet the virus. But while the site was pretending to check for pathogenic matches to a biological virus, it was sabotaging the synthesizer. So that it would put in wrong bases as it built DNA strands, but indicate the correct ones had been inserted when the sequences were double-checked.”