Free Alien Collective by Gini Koch

“Try thinking. Without talking. Just for a change of pace.”
    “Harsh.” Fine, Mom didn’t want me sharing my mental processes with the room. This would be harder, but not impossible.
    Back to the problem at hand, then. There had to be a reason Mom was bringing up the Head of Security now, right now. And I knew she wasn’t worried about William’s performance—he’d added in a ton of new security, most of it based on Mom’s recommendations. And per Buchanan, no one at any of our bases had been hurt, meaning that William’s security measures were working just fine.
    So Mom wasn’t concerned about that. Ergo, Mom indeed wanted me thinking about Gladys. Considered if I was supposed to be thinking about the fact that Gladys was dead. Or maybe take the leap from there and think about Michael Gower, who was also dead, or Naomi Gower-Reynolds, considered dead by everyone other than me, but she was on another plane of existence, at least as far as I knew, so dead to us for all intents and purposes.
    Maybe it
was
Naomi they wanted me thinking about. Chuckie and Naomi had been married for six months when she died. He’d been a widower for a year now, and most of the time we just didn’t talk about it, because he couldn’t take talking about it. So Mom and Olga wouldn’t want to bring Naomi up unless it was vital, or Chuckie wasn’t here.
    Risked a look at him. He seemed okay. Well, as okay as he’d been since Operation Infiltration. Bad things going on helped give him something to focus on, so that was one for the win column. A pathetic one, but still, one. Looked back to Mom.
    She gave a small shake of her head. “No. Right time, wrong person.”
    Okay, so this wasn’t about Naomi. And it probably wasn’t about Michael either. Back to Gladys. Why Gladys? Why now? What about what was going on was making Mom and Olga think of her, and making them want me to think about her? And why was that the question right after I’d suggested Club 51, the Church of Intolerance, or my Uncles the International Top Assassins as the potential bombing culprits?
    Because they weren’t who Mom and Olga thought were actually responsible.
    Okay, so there was another person or group I was forgetting. Back to Gladys. Right time, wrong person. So, Mom definitely wanted me thinking about Operation Infiltration. What about Gladys then could have any impact on what was going on now?
    The people we’d captured when Gladys had sacrificed herself to ensure that Ronaldo Al Dejahl was dead and gone were still in a severe form of custody. No one had gotten anything much out of them, though because we had Chernobog’s son, the hacking attacks had stopped.
    Other than Annette Dier, who was a top assassin who wanted me dead, regardless of whether she was paid or not, the rest of the prisoners were, like Mahin, all technically Gladys’ half-siblings, just as she was a half-sib to White and Lucinda.
    White, Lucinda, and Gladys were the only legitimate children of Ronald Yates, born when they were all still on Alpha Four and he’d been a different person. Two wives being murdered due to assassination attempts on his life had changed him, apparently. Shocker. Said different personage had included being the Supreme Pontifex of our A-Cs, which was the reason for said assassination attempts.
    He’d been banished to Earth, changed his name, built a huge media empire, YatesCorp, that still existed, expanded into a variety of other businesses including robotics and any corporation we in Centaurion considered enemies such as Gaultier Enterprises and Titan Security and probably more we didn’t know about yet, and had created the Al Dejahl terrorist organization. He’d also joined with an alien parasite and become an in-control superbeing, codenamed Mephistopheles, aka the Devil Incarnate. And, just to show his range, he’d become what we now called the First Mastermind. He had a lot of titles in my world.
    He was a doer, you had to give him credit for