Nightstalkers

CHAPTER 22

“How do you guys feel about swimming?” Scout asked as she came in the door, Nada having pushed the piano out of the way as soon as over-watch reported her approach.

Nada was puzzled. “As a sport?”

“Hate it,” Roland said.

“He sinks,” Moms said with a smile. “The water isn’t friendly to big muscles.”

Roland blushed.

“Want to go swimming?” Scout asked.

“No,” Moms, Nada, and Roland all said together.

“I wouldn’t mind a dip,” Doc said.

“You might in this pool,” Scout said.

“Eagle, come down,” Moms ordered over the net, then turned her radio off. She looked at Scout. “Pray tell, why is that?”

Scout did two cartwheels, ending up next to Roland and his stack of guns, magazines, and bullets. “Can I get one?”

“No,” Roland said.

“Do I get paid?” she asked Moms.

Nada reached into his pocket and pulled out a money clip. “How much do you get paid for babysitting?”

“What do they pay or how much do I clear?” Scout asked.

Nada blinked. “What’s the difference?”

“They pay me ten dollars an hour. But there are benefits.”

“You steal?” Roland said.

“Dude! How direct. I use stuff. And know things. Like the Lindsays are in the middle of a month-long vacation. I like their pool best because it has a slide. Ours just has a pool.” She looked at Nada’s money clip. “So let’s say twenty an hour, because this job is, like, dangerous, right, with Mac and Kirk and who knows who else getting hurt battling big Transformer-like things?”

“Where is the Lindsays’ pool?” Moms asked. “And what did you see?”

Scout held out her hand. Nada peeled off five twenties and passed them to her. She stuffed them in her pocket, then held the hand out again.

“That’s blackmail,” Nada said. “We can find out where the Lindsays’ pool is from Support.”

“But you won’t find out what I saw from your Support.”

Nada peeled off two more bills and gave them to her. Scout frowned, then put them in her pocket. “Can I get one of those ear radio things you guys use? It would have been so fab to listen in last night.”

“No,” Moms said, shuddering at the thought of Ms. Jones eavesdropping with Scout on the net.

Scout did a backflip and dropped onto the couch with a heavy sigh. “You guys don’t share well. What happened to the team? One for all and whatever?”

Eagle spoke up. “We’re not the Three Amigos.”

Scout laughed. “Love, love, love that movie. A plethora.” She looked at Roland. “You have a plethora of guns. Seems you’d share.”

Roland was frowning, which seemed to be his constant state around Scout. “A what?”

Eagle quoted: “I know that I, Jefe, do not have your superior intellect and education. But could it be that once again, you are angry at something else and are looking to take it out on me?”

“Oh, oh, oh!” Scout was literally bouncing up and down on the couch. Then she did three cartwheels, ending up in front of Eagle and holding her hand up, but restrained, not quite ready to high five. “Do you know what Nada means?”

“Isn’t that a light chicken gravy?”

“Love it!” she squealed as she and Eagle slapped palms.

“I’ve been waiting to say that forever,” Eagle said, with a worried glance at Nada.

The rest of the team was lost.

“So,” Scout said. “Who wants to go swimming?”

Moms gripped the arms of the chair tightly and grimaced a smile. “Why would we want to go swimming in the Lindsays’ pool?”

“Welllll,” Scout said. “Earlier I went over there and noticed that the pool water kind of just slid over the edge into the grass and snatched a squirrel and, wellllll, seemed to, like, just absorb it. Kind of gross. Seems like something up your alley. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe golf is more your game?”

Roland had grabbed the iPad. “The Lindsays’ house is three blocks over.”

Moms got out of her chair. “Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”

“Wellll, you’re all so faaaabulous and on your super-secret mission, which you really haven’t told me about, and were blowing up the golf course all night, so I thought you were kind of busy and when I saw you come back early this morning, everyone looked pretty beat, and it’s not like the pool is gonna go anywhere. And you guys aren’t really sharing,” she added, looking longingly at the pile of guns. “Sometimes it seems like you just got dropped in here like a nanny with a green card, ’cause you are so greeeen! I figured you knew about the carnivorous water.”

“All right, all right,” Moms said. “You’ve made your point.”

“Points,” Nada said.

“Tell us,” Moms said with forced patience.

“It’s kidney shaped, which is weird for here, but it’s got the slide, which is fun, but also weird for here. It does have a deep end.”

“What exactly did the water do?” Doc asked patiently, which seemed like an impossibility with Scout around.

“I told you. It ate a squirrel,” Scout said. “How the hell should I know?”

“Don’t curse,” Moms said. “It’s not pretty coming from girls.”

“Her hair’s blue and she can do a handstand longer than any of us,” Nada said, as if that mattered.

“Thank you,” Scout said with a smile.

Moms looked at Nada in consternation. “No more bantering. Especially from you. I’m not sure who you are anymore.”

“Yeah,” Doc agreed. “You’re acting peculiar.”

“Maybe he just likes me,” Scout said. “People either love me or hate me.”

“I hate you,” Roland muttered.

“She’s just a girl,” Nada said.

“I don’t think so,” Doc observed.

“Fireflies can’t go into people,” Moms noted.

“What are Fireflies?” Scout asked for what seemed the twentieth time since the team had met her.

Moms gave a cold smile. “Nothing, dear.”

“Great,” Scout said. “You’ve finally become a Senators Club mom. ‘Nothing, dear.’ That means absolutely, positively there’s something.”

“Enough!” Moms snapped.

“Describe what happened,” Doc said to Scout. “Please.”

“It was like this tentacle of water lifted up, about five feet.” Scout was using one of her arms to demonstrate, green-painted fingernails leading the way. “Then it moved horizontal, right over where this cute little squirrel was doing whatever it was doing, and then just shot down, all over the squirrel, which, let me tell you, was not happy. Then it just pulled back into the pool with the squirrel and everything was normal. Except no more squirrel.”

Roland was on his feet, heading toward the door to the garage. “I know what to do.”

They followed him into the four-car cavern. Roland pulled a portable generator out from its spot next to the wall. “What kills water?” He tapped the generator.

“Riiiight,” Scout said. “Let’s roll the generator over to the Lindsays’ pool. No one will notice that. Even though most people are gone for the holidays, there’s still enough around, and someone will notice in three blocks.”

“You got any better ideas?” Roland challenged.

“Weelll, if you want to zap the pool,” Scout said, “how about shorting out the pool light and letting the house current do it?”

“Maybe she isn’t such a little girl,” Nada said proudly, cuffing her lightly on the head, but forgetting once more about the curling iron.

“Oww, please stop with the head shit.”

“Don’t curse,” Nada said.

“Fuck you,” Scout said, and Nada smiled.

“This is getting weird even for us,” Eagle said.

“Oh really,” Scout said. “Now it’s getting too weird? It sounded like Armageddon out there last night on the golf course.”

Moms had her arms crossed. “To short the pool light, someone would have to get into the water. And probably end up however the squirrel ended up.”

“I vote for the kid,” Roland said.

“I’ll do it,” Nada said before he thought it through, which really scared Moms.

And that’s when everyone finally accepted that Yada Yada Nada, with the glass half-empty and who hated everyone, really liked the runt with the blue hair.

“You’re so brave,” Scout said and Nada smiled, something as strange as squirrel-eating water.

“Just kidding,” Scout said as she did a backflip to punctuate the moment.

“I hate to rain on everyone’s solemn moment,” Doc said, “but electricity doesn’t kill water. Water conducts electricity. As far as we know, electricity has no effect on a Firefly.”

“There we go with the Firefly again,” Scout said.

“We could drain the pool with a shaped charge,” Roland said.

“Brilliant,” Moms said. “Our first priority is containment and you want to disperse the Firefly who knows where? Into the water table? Which flows where?”

“Cape Fear River Basin,” Eagle said, as always knowing his geography.

“Let me think,” Roland said.

“Oh, that’s going to work,” Scout said, and Roland’s lips tightened in anger.

“Could someone shut her up for a minute?” Roland pleaded to Moms.

Scout started humming the theme song to the final Jeopardy round, and Nada took her by the arm. “Let’s you and me get something to eat while they work this out. I’m hungry.”

As they left the garage, Eagle and Roland were arguing about how to kill water, Mom refereeing, while Doc just sighed continuously.

As the garage door shut behind them, it drowned out the words.

“I don’t eat during the day,” Scout said as Nada went over to his rucksack.

“Give me a break,” Nada said.

“Hey. Every woman here in Senators Club is size two. We either eat and puke or don’t eat at all. I’ve got a lousy gag reflex.”

“That will cause you problems drowning,” Nada said as he opened the ruck and rummaged in it.

“What?” Scout said, taken aback for once.

“I used to teach at the Special Forces Scuba School in Key West,” Nada said. “Everyone in scuba school drowns at least once.”

“That sounds like fun.”

Nada paused. “Well, Special Operations takes a lot of things that other people do for fun, teaches you how to do it on the government tab, then makes it miserable. I learned to scuba dive, parachute, ski, and some other things in the army. And it was rarely fun.”

“And you’re not in the army anymore, right?”

“Nice try,” Nada said, pulling some meals out of his ruck. “Let’s just say no one is in Kansas anymore on this op.”

Nada couldn’t figure it out as he read the labels on the meals. The kid was rubbing everyone the wrong way, especially Roland, and even Moms, but the kid rubbed him right. He had no idea why he gave a shit about her. Then he remembered the really smart dog he’d had as a child. It was brilliant. He could tell it which of the tattered stuffed toys to bring and it knew which one. Everyone thought it was just this barrio half-breed mutt, but it was smarter than most of the people wandering the streets shooting each other.

It bothered him that it bothered the rest of the team that he liked the kid. Like he wasn’t supposed to like anyone? Didn’t any of them think he could be normal? He knew he had more time on the team than anyone else, but that didn’t make him abnormal. Did it?

“Hey,” Nada said, holding up his favorite freeze-dried meal. “Eggs and ham.” Everyone else on the team hated that one so he always had plenty. In fact, everyone in every unit he’d ever been in hated them. Which started worrying him again. Was he abnormal?

“Yuck,” Scout said. “Gross me out.”

“Give it a try,” Nada said, and there was something in his tone that made Scout pause.

“All right,” she said reluctantly as he led her to the kitchen.

He put a pot on the stove to boil water, something even he could manage in a kitchen. They waited in silence. Then he searched through way too many drawers and cabinets before he gave up and pulled out his mess kit and split it, one part for Scout and the other for him, although he did find a spoon for her. He broke the freeze-dried glop into two parts, one in each, then poured boiling water on it.

“I do have to admit,” Nada said, “everyone gives me their eggs and ham.”

“Gives, not trades?”

“Gives.”

“And you gave Roland your other meal.” Scout leaned over as the solid mass began dissolving in the boiled water. “Smells like someone already ate it and gagged it back up. Like mother birds do.”

“I know,” Nada said, and his face felt like it was breaking into a million pieces because he was smiling and he wasn’t used to it.

“Oh,” Scout said. “I get it. You eat it ’cause no one else likes it. You give them your other meals.” Her feet were drumming against the wood base of the kitchen bar.

Nada froze, never having thought of that. It actually was kind of a lousy meal.

But Scout took a spoonful and put it in her mouth. She didn’t start spewing, which he took as a good sign. Nada took a mouthful. They sat across from each other, eating the one meal everyone hated.

“Nada?”

He froze with his plastic spoon halfway to his mouth, which reminded him of how during Isolation before an op they used to tear apart their meal packages, tossing away the extra plastic spoons because they weighed too much and you only needed one spoon to eat. They stripped the meals down to the very basics before mission launch because they carried everything, and when it came between choosing to carry an extra meal or extra rounds or an extra plastic spoon, it always went in favor of the rounds. For the first time he also realized how weird that kind of math was.

“I can call you that, right?” Scout asked, bringing him back to the room and the present.

“Sure,” he mumbled.

“Gross. Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

He sealed his lips and continued chewing, happy that she wasn’t ten years older or else he’d be signing off another chunk of his pay to more spousal support. Maybe he should get a dog, he fantasized for a moment, but that made him think of Skippy and he swallowed hard.

“Where’s the trash?”

Scout pointed to a cabinet.

“How can you tell? They all look the same.”

“It’s all in the placement,” Scout said. “Are you going to throw out your eggs and ham?”

Nada nodded.

Scout smiled. “Great. Me too. But we’ll use the garbage disposal. And you should have known it was bad when they couldn’t even call it ham and eggs.”

She took both parts of the kit and turned the water on. She scraped the food off and turned on the grinding disposal. When she was done, she washed them and dried them, then handed them back to Nada.

“That was an experience,” Scout said as he put the kit back in his ruck.

She was twirling her hair with one hand and gnawing on the fingers on the other. “You aren’t that different from this place, you know?”

“What do you mean?” He picked up his camouflage Camel-Bak and took a few deep slugs from the end of the blue hose.

“Can I have some of that?”

“Use the sink, I’m sure it’s better water.”

“I want that.”

Nada stared at her, then walked over and handed it to her. “What did you mean?”

“I think you’re hiding your real self behind all this ‘Nada’ BS like everyone around here hides behind baby grand pianos and golf courses and fancy cars.”

Nada looked at the tiny girl with blue hair sipping from his CamelBak. He definitely had to get a dog when they got back to the Ranch, but then the problem was who would take care of it when they were on an op. Ms. Jones? Doubtful. “What?”

“You’ve got the same look on your face as when I first met you,” Scout said. “Like you’re someplace else and just existing here.”

Nada blinked, but the door to the garage opened and Moms came in, followed by the rest of the team, still arguing. Nada was oddly grateful to the team for interrupting his conversation with Scout.

“We need to call in an Acme,” Moms said. “I’ll get Ms. Jones on it.”

Roland groaned.

“You know how to kill a pool?” Moms asked.

“Blow it up.” Which was usually Mac’s response to every situation, but Roland liked blowing things up also.

“It’s in the water,” Moms said, “not the pool itself. Like I said, we destroy the integrity of the pool we spread the Firefly who knows where. It’s never been in a liquid before according to our history. We go Acme.”

While they waited for the Acme, Moms sent Roland and Doc over to recon the pool. They drove one of the SUVs and Doc dialed up a bunch of codes on a transmitter. It took him all of three seconds to turn off the alarm system for the house and get the garage door to go up. They pulled in, shutting the door behind them.

Roland had his machine gun, which Doc found rather amusing, since they were reconning water in a pool, but it was a comfort to the big man, and Doc had been on the team long enough to know not to make the big man uncomfortable. They wove their way through the enormous house, although it wasn’t quite as big as the Winslows’ since it was three streets down from the top of the ridge.

There were lots and lots of pictures. There was a framed photograph of presumably the Lindsays in snow gear and holding skis, and engraved on the frame: Snowbird 2010.

Roland was looking about, shaking his head. “They can’t remember anywhere they been and what they done? They got to take pictures of every place?” Every member of the Nightstalkers was extremely camera shy. In fact, it was against Protocol for them to have their photo taken.

There was a psychology paper for the writing in here, Doc thought as they penetrated further into the house, going by photo after photo of the same people. Roland paused as they passed one door. Doc looked around him to see what had caused him to stop. It was the family room, with big-screen TV, comfy chairs, and a bunch of pictures. But what had grabbed Roland’s attention was that an entire wall was covered by a map of the world.

“That’s pretty cool,” Roland said, walking over, machine gun resting on his shoulder.

There were a number of different-colored pins scattered around the map — four different colors, in fact — and there was even a legend set in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, north and west of Hawaii, explaining what the colors meant.

Green: Places the Lindsays have been.

Blue: Places the Lindsays have plans to go to.

Yellow: Places one or more of the Lindsays have been but not all.

Red: Places the Lindsays dream of going.

“What the fuck?” Roland muttered. He stepped back and looked at the map, noting the colored pins. “I’ve been more places than they even dream of going.”

“Yes, but it wasn’t for the tourism and you usually didn’t land with the airplane,” Doc noted. He pointed at some of the pins. “And it wasn’t Hawaii or Sydney or Hong Kong. It was usually some place no one wants to go to. Note no pins in Iraq, Iran, or Afghanistan.”

“I don’t get this place or these people,” Roland said as they left the room. Not for the first and probably not for the last time.

They reached the sliding glass door that opened to the backyard. The yard had a high, solid wood fence around it. The pool was indeed kidney shaped with a slide. It looked deceivingly tranquil, not like one that had eaten a squirrel earlier.

“How about I throw a frag in it?” Roland suggested.

“We already used our Fourth of July excuse,” Doc said. “And remember what Moms said about dispersing the water.”

“Maybe the girl is wrong,” Roland said. “Maybe she made it up, just to get Nada to pay her?”

“You think?” Doc said, turning to look Roland in the eyes. “You think she would lie to us about this?”

The big man shifted his feet. “Well, no.”

“Okay, then,” Doc said. “I will tell you what, though. You feel like tossing the barbecue grill over there into the pool? Just to see what happens?”

That made Roland happy. He slung his machine gun over his shoulder and slid open the patio door.

“Careful,” Doc warned. “Water can be pretty powerful. People underestimate it. Remember it killed hundreds of thousands during the tsunami.” Doc pulled out his phone and began filming Roland’s assault on the pool.

Roland got behind the grill, turned it toward the pool, and then ran a few steps pushing it, before releasing. The momentum carried it over the edge and it toppled in.

It promptly sank. Roland turned to Doc and shrugged, just as the pool ejected the grill up into the air thirty feet.

Roland dove out of the way as it crashed down exactly where he’d been standing. A half-dozen water tentacles rose out of the pool, groping toward Roland. He ran toward Doc, who slammed the door shut as he passed. The tentacles reached the glass door and began sliding about.

“Why don’t they just bust it?” Roland wondered. “If it can throw that grill, it can bust glass.”

“Fireflies have never been known for their smarts,” Doc said, backing up and tapping Roland to join him. They moved away from the glass. The tentacles finally gave up and retreated back to the pool. Doc stopped filming.

Their earpieces came alive. “Sitrep?” Moms asked.

“We’ve got a Firefly,” Doc said.

“Acme is coming in the gate. We’ll meet you there.”

The radio went quiet. “Keep an eye out,” Doc said to Roland. “I will meet them in the garage.”

He retraced his steps, the eyes of the Lindsays peering at him from numerous frames in every room. He got to the garage as Moms pulled in with Eagle, Nada, Kirk, and Scout. They piled out of the SUV as a Support driver in a Senators Club patrol car pulled in the drive. A man got out and Moms waved him into the garage as Nada hit the close button for the door.

“Doctor Kelsey?” Doc always took points with Acme. “I’m Doctor Ghatar.” Doctor on doctor, it always worked better than Moms or Nada as Acmes tended to view the military as Neanderthals.

Kelsey was a surprisingly young man, one they’d never worked with before on a mission. He had black, thick-framed glasses and carried a briefcase tucked tight under one arm. They always carried briefcases.

“It was a surprise and a pleasure to be called,” Kelsey said. “Very exciting. They picked me up right off the campus at Duke in a helicopter.”

Behind Kelsey, Nada rolled his eyes and Scout giggled.

“Should that girl be here?” Kelsey asked, pointing at her. “I was told this could be dangerous.”

“We gotta kill a pool,” Nada said. “You let us worry about her. She’s the one who figured it out.”

Kelsey forgot about Scout just as quickly as he noticed her. “Yes, yes, the pool. I was given the rough parameters of the situation. A possessed pool. How exotic.”

“It killed a squirrel,” Doc said, “and it almost killed our weapons man. Threw a two-hundred-pound grill at him.”

“Sounds like an angry pool.” Kelsey laughed at his own joke.

No one else did.

“Come on,” Doc said, taking Kelsey by the arm before Nada pulled his machete out.

They trooped through the house to join Roland standing in the kitchen, staring out at the killer pool.

“Watch this,” Doc said, taking out his phone and putting it in front of Kelsey. He played the grill assault.

“Fascinating!” Kelsey said when it came to an end. “The force required to move the water molecules like that in a coherent form. But I wonder why it simply didn’t break the glass when it came after you?”

Roland shot Doc a triumphant grin.

“And you still don’t know what this Firefly thing is that has caused this?” Kelsey asked.

“Not a clue,” Doc said, which earned him a hard look from Kirk.

“I read the reports on your encounters in the form of Fireflies when I signed on,” Kelsey said. “I must say, they act rather irrationally on all levels.”

“We’re not here to analyze it,” Nada said. “We’re here to kill it.”

“Well, that is the key question, isn’t it?” Kelsey said, and they all, except Kirk and Scout, who’d never worked with an Acme before, knew what was coming: the theories every Acme spouted, proving Kelsey had actually taken some science courses and earned his doctorate. They always went to the theories when standing around a group of people armed with guns and intent on killing something, because it made them very insecure at a primeval level. Like they had to prove themselves to the Neanderthals.

“It depends,” Kelsey said. “Do we want spectacular or clever.” It wasn’t a question and no one replied. They knew they had to wait this through. “From a clever standpoint, I’d be tempted to add cornstarch or some other polymerizing agent. From the scientific standpoint, once the cornstarch polymerizes you have a non-Newtonian fluid. Which means that its viscosity increases with applied force. At the very least that would slow the pool down.

“You put enough in, in this case,” he looked out the window, “I would say at least a thousand pounds, it would make it so that you could actually probably run across the surface.”

“But until it solidifies,” Doc said, playing his role, which was bubble-burster on bad ideas, “you’re slowing it down, but you’re also making it more powerful in potential force and coherence. So we could end with the water taking a more solid form and literally climbing out of the pool and killing us.”

“Uh, well, yes.” Kelsey recovered quickly. “And, frankly, we don’t know how the chemicals that are in the pool will affect the process, so I’d say we move on from that idea. It was just a warm-up.”

“Right,” Roland muttered. He was fingering his machine gun, which Kelsey failed to note.

“Water is tricky. Evaporating it is a possibility, but that would require a ridiculous amount of energy.”

“We can get a ridiculous amount of energy,” Doc said, “if it would work, but I definitely would not want the Firefly to go into a single gaseous cloud, which it might be able to do if we evaporated the entire pool.”

“Is ridiculous a scientific term?” Eagle wondered, which earned him a high five from Scout.

“Electrolysis,” Kelsey said.

“Hey!” Roland stepped forward. “That’s what I wanted to do.”

“Not electrocution,” Doc corrected the big man. “He said electrolysis.”

Kelsey nodded. “Apply an electric field to the water and disassociate the H2O molecules into H2 and O, both of which are gases, but”—he quickly added with a glance at Doc—“not a cloud.” As Doc was about to speak, he jumped into the breach once more. “However, it would be dangerous because it would become explosive, very quickly.”

“Water explosive?” Roland said. “Mac would love that.”

“Who is Mac?” Kelsey asked.

“Forget that,” Moms said. “Continue.”

“The other problem is,” Kelsey said, “I don’t know how to electrolyze that much mass.” He nodded toward the pool.

“Whoa!” Eagle said, getting everyone’s attention. “Check it out.”

A column of water about six inches in diameter was rising out of the pool, straight up.

“Fascinating,” Kelsey said.

The water went up, passing above fifty feet.

Moms was on the radio. “Support, we’ve got a situation here. You might get some calls on a column of water.”

The column was now at a hundred feet. The level in the pool was now down appreciably.

“To keep coherence of that much weight in the face of gravity,” Kelsey said, “is truly remarkable. And powerful.”

The column reached over one hundred and fifty feet, then wavered.

A second later all the water came pouring straight down, splashing into the pool.

“Well, what the hell was that about?” Kirk asked.

“I don’t like it,” Nada said. “It’s planning something.”

“Planning indicates intelligence,” Kelsey said. “The Firefly reports have never been—”

“How do we fucking kill it?” Nada demanded.

“Oh. Uh. As far as electrolysis, it would take more than this house is wired for anyway. Too much thermal mass in the water. Going back to the cornstarch, we could add a zeolite.”

“A what?” Kirk asked.

“The stuff that comes in those little packets in things like baby diapers; my wife just had a little boy by the way. Those packets are stamped ‘Do not eat’ and it makes diapers ultra-absorbent. Hmm, you know, if you add a strong acid to water it becomes exothermic. You can boil a pot of water just by pouring acid into it. Again, though, it would take several tankers full of acid to tackle this.”

“I can get several tankers of acid here within an hour,” Moms said.

“Cloud,” Doc repeated. “With acid. Not good.”

“Got it,” Moms replied.

Kelsey was off in his theoretical wonderland. “For spectacular, there are things that react negatively with water. Sodium, lithium, and cesium all react violently and produce an explosion.”

“That much water,” Doc said, “and that much metal, we’d take out the entire neighborhood. And it would disperse the water everywhere and the Firefly might stay in part of it.”

Kelsey sighed. “Supersaturated sodium acetate will instantly crystallize when added to water, but you’d need a lot.”

“That still doesn’t kill it,” Nada said.

“How do you usually kill a Firefly?” Scout asked.

Kelsey ignored her. “More simply, how about we drain the pool into a tanker? That would contain it.”

“Unless it decided to punch a hole in the side of the tanker,” Doc said.

“We flame it,” Roland said to Scout, ignoring Kelsey. “If it’s in an animal or plant, we flame it. I usually do the flaming.”

“What a surprise,” Scout said.

“And if it’s in a mechanical object,” Nada said, also ignoring Kelsey in favor of the girl, “we blast it, like the other night on the golf course, until it’s so structurally destroyed that even the Firefly can’t keep it coherent.”

“Be that as it may.” Kelsey was getting irritated that the adults were talking to the child and not focusing on his words of wisdom. “Perhaps we could use Occam’s razor. We don’t know if the Firefly inhabits all of an object or part of it.”

“Part,” Nada said. “I chopped a rabbit in half and the Firefly kept the front going, but not the back.”

“You killed a bunny?” Scout looked about to cry.

“It was a bad bunny,” Nada said defensively.

“Kidding,” Scout said with a playful punch into Nada’s body armor. “Ouch.”

“We divide the water into portions,” Kelsey said, “trying to isolate the part where the Firefly is.”

“I don’t know,” Moms said. “And while we’re doing that? One of those tentacles could eat one of my people.”

“Flame it,” Scout said.

Roland was eyeing the pool. “I don’t have enough napalm.”

Scout shook her head. “What he said earlier,” she jerked a thumb at Kelsey. “Baby diapers. They absorb water, right? A lot of water. But they can also be burned, right?”

Everyone stared at Scout.

“Get me Support,” Moms said to Kirk.

“You’re on,” Kirk replied after tapping his PNR.

“Support. We’re going to need a bunch of baby diapers. And tampons. Enough to absorb”—she looked at Doc—“how many gallons?”

Doc did some quick mental calculations and supplied the number.

“Roger,” Support responded. “Diapers and tampons.”

“I’m gonna need a lot more flamers,” Roland said, smiling at the thought.

Moms clicked off the radio and smiled bitterly. “I remember the code line in the Special Forces resupply report for tampons. They used that as my nickname in the Q-Course.”

“They were assholes,” Roland said.

“Yeah,” Scout threw in. “Assholes.”