“Your five hours are up,” said Nick. “Get up, lazybones.”

“Five more minutes, Mom,” said Harry. “I got time to catch the bus.”

“You got your five hours,” said Nick. “It’s time to go to work.”

“All right,” said Harry. “The first thing to do is call in for work. I need to let them

know I am taking a week off.”

“You don’t actually have to go back to work,” said Nick. “The Planetary Defense will pay you a stipend.”

“I like being a security guard,” said Harry. “I like girl watching.”

“I don’t see the connection,” said Nick.

“And you never will,” said Harry. He stretched in his chair. “Let me get cleaned up and we can get this show on the road.”

He dumped out his pockets on his desk. He cleaned up, pulling on jeans and a shirt. His hiking boots went over his feet well enough. He picked up his phone and turned it on. He had missed messages from John. He could deal with that later.

He called the university security office. He reported that he was alive and that he was taking the week off. Harmon Godder, thin as a rail, face like a prune and bright false teeth, told him it was okay. Everyone had seen him shooting at the xenos when they were trying to eat people. He got a pass, and he should call back when he was ready to go back to work.

He didn’t bother calling John back because he wasn’t going to argue about the bee security detail.

Harry put everything he needed in his pockets, calling for a mana scanner with his cascading points. He put that on his belt. He would need it later when he found the escaped xenos.

“All right,” said Harry. “I need to get a car out of the catalogues. That way I’ll be able to get around without starting with John if I pick up my car from his house.”

“All right,” said Nick. “Where do we go from here?”

“We head back to Wu U, avoid the other campus police, and try to find the xenos,” said Harry. “Hopefully we won’t find a lot of victims sucked dry and stored in a basement somewhere.”

“All right,” said Nick. “Wozniak and the PDO will still need you to sign statements and so forth.”

“All right,” said Harry. “I can do that. We should swing by the school and see how it looks in the day time. Maybe something is there we missed.”

“Like what?,” asked Nick.

“A homing beacon maybe,” said Harry. “I don’t know right now. I just want to walk around and see if something was left behind before driving down to Wu U.”

“Detective Wozniak filed a complaint,” said Nick. “Upstairs is looking at it for your performance review.”

“I expected that,” said Harry. “I didn’t know we got a performance review.”

“It’s to make sure that you are capable of being a contractor,” said Nick. “Some people we pick can’t cut the mustard. So we have to take the quartermaster away from them and set them up in new lives.”

“Have you had to do that much?,” asked Harry.

“Now and then,” said Nick. “Some narcissism happens and the contractor thinks they can take on the world and they start using the quartermaster to do whatever they want while saddling others with their responsibilities for fighting the enemy. That endangers everything. So we take their quartermaster back.”

“Sounds bad,” said Harry. “I’ll pick up the forms and fill them out.”

“If it makes you feel better, they aren’t worried about you going bad,” said Nick. “They’re worried about you going out in a ball of flame and taking the city with you.”

“I guess that makes sense,” said Harry. He paused at the edge of the parking lot. “Let’s start with the car.”

Harry flipped through the opened catalogues and didn’t see what he wanted. He opened one for common vehicles. He found a self driving car there. He smiled. He toggled a lot of options and had them installed for shipping. A box dropped down in his slot in front of his building.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

He pressed the button on the side of the box and unwrapped his new car. It was gold with black stripes across the back, racing tires, tinted windows, and hidden weapons to put down anything short of a dedicated tank.

“Looks okay,” said Harry.

“It looks like a bee on wheels,” said Nick. “And it is way flashier than I like.”

“Hopefully it will serve as a mobile base when we need it,” said Harry.

“All right,” said Nick. “We need it for the moment. Just go softly and with more

caution than usual.”

“It’ll be all right,” said Harry. “You want to swing by and talk to Delmar about his boss?”

“No,” said Nick. “That is exactly the opposite move we should take since Wozniak’s whole complaint stems on the belief that you will take justice into your own hands. We leave Delmar and his friends alone unless we’re called in to handle things.”

“I can kill xenos but I have to wait before I can do anything to the local gangs?,” said Harry.

“That is the will of your law enforcement,” said Nick. “So we have to wait until

something happens before we can do anything. Your bees will have to cover things until we can make sure of that front.”

“All right,” said Harry. “I don’t like it. I don’t think John is taking this as serious as I am.”

“You can’t change his mind for him,” said Nick. “And you are not allowed to since you are not a therapist.”

“So I could change his mind,” said Harry.

“Either he will get used to the idea that you’re a smothering mother hen, or he won’t,” said Nick. “It’s not our place to make him get used to it, savvy?”

“I don’t like it,” said Harry.

“I don’t like sheepdogging someone who should know better at this stage of the game,” said Nick. “Those are the cookie crumblings.”

“If you say so,” said Harry. He snickered at the cookie crumbling. “Let’s test this baby out.”

“How long have you known the Stuarts?,” said Nick.

“A while,” said Harry. He put his hand on the door of the car to unlock it. “How long have you been an agent for the Bernies?”

“A longer while,” said Nick.

Harry dropped in the driver’s seat. Panels came to life. An overlay of his three story apartment building snapped to life on the screen. Weapon lights, sensor screens, mapping programs lit up one by one.

“This is extremely nice, Harry,” said Nick. “I like it.”

“So we need to go to Wu U,” said Harry. The car backed up and rolled out of the complex. “We might have to drive around the perimeter.”

“So how do you think the enemy hid?,” asked Nick.

“I don’t know,” said Harry. “Why did they hide? That seems more dangerous to me.”

“Because it’s a tactic they almost never use,” said Nick. “Numbers always seem to be where they excel at in their invasions.”

“And the bees killed a bunch of them before the rest escaped,” said Harry.

“Abaddon said to congratulate you,” said Nick. “A note just came in from the office.”

“For what?,” asked Harry.

“Apparently you killed a Star Whale with your drones,” said Nick. “Very few

contractors have done that.”

“That was where the third beacon was coming from,” said Harry. “That’s why it got cold so fast when the life support ran out.”

“The death notification just came in, so apparently your bee hive kept functioning and finished the job you started with the plasma lance you bought,” said Nick.

“I have all that muted,” said Harry. “I don’t usually need something to tell me I killed something else.”

“And the other hives are also active so the kill notices would get tiring to look after a while,” said Nick.

“It was the best idea I could come up with but I would like to go out there and keep the area clear with more than an expanding network of drone builders and their drones,” said Harry.

“If we could figure out how their gates worked, we could set up a way to deny them,” said Nick. “We just haven’t been able to do that.”

“It has to be something simple and stupid at the same time,” said Harry. He watched the city go by, overlay pointing things out to him he would never thought of on his own.

“Isn’t that the same thing?,” asked Nick.

“Maybe,” said Harry. “It seems to me that they need something that an idiot could work, but also it will have some principle no one thought of applied to it.”

“So when we find out what they are using we’ll all do a face palm at the mind

boggliness of it all,” said Nick.

“I think so,” said Harry.

“Here’s the school, Harry,” said Nick. “Which way should we be going?”

“Go counterclockwise around the outside,” said Harry. “Mana scanner out.”

The car obeyed, pausing for people in the way. Harry checked the scanner, seeing a spot in the distance.

“Go to that spot,” said Harry. “We want to know what it is.”

The car made the turn and rolled smoothly down the street. The spot shifted as they approached. It looked like some kind of deserted factory.

“I don’t see any movement,” said Harry. “I’m going to have to take a closer look.”

“There should be a bigger reading,” said Nick. “I don’t like this at all.”

“Maybe they split up,” said Harry. “I’m going to have to take look inside and see what I can find. Wait here until I get done.”

“You should summon some of your drones,” said Nick. “This might be more

dangerous than it looks.”

“All right,” said Harry. “Who’s being a mother hen now?”

Harry got out of the car. He pulled on some modified sunglasses. He produced a hive ball and a pistol full of variant ammunition. He hoped he wouldn’t need either one.

He walked toward the mana spot. His eyes swept the compound but saw nothing. There wasn’t that much there.

Holes for posts where there used to be a fence surrounded a broken parking lot with his car in the middle of it. One building made of rusted metal with a hole in the roof stood to his right. Another building, smaller, made out of brick, with broken windows, stood to the left.

Harry eased to the person door next to the loading dock on one side of the metal hut. The spot inside the metal building had not moved.

He tried the door and found it locked. He winced at the decision he had to make. He could blow the door down and risk running into a monster, or he could try to find some way to climb up and drop down through the hole in the roof.

Could he throw the hive over the wall and let the bees take care of business when they were spawned in?

That was the easiest way to do things in his opinion.