"I don't care what the schedule says," Doctor Juliette Chen snapped, her brusque tone making it clear that she wasn't really listening to the man trailing behind her. "We're moving ahead with the next round of tests this afternoon – that's a statement, not an invitation to debate."

"But why today?" the annoying man asked, stepping up his already-brisk pace to match her stride and thwart her efforts to leave him behind. "Was there some new development that your department's progress reports didn't cover? Another incursion?"

"Eh? No, nothing like that. In fact, the aliens seem to have missed several of the last projected incursion windows. On that front, everything has been extremely quiet."

"Then why?"

The sensible low heels of Doctor Chen's expensive patent-leather shoes clacked loudly on the linoleum floor tiles as they passed door after locked door, each of them secured by a silver keypad and card slot above the handle. Overhead, hanging fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered, casting their fitful illumination across the irregular surface of the tunnel's rough-cut stone walls.

"Because today is an auspicious day."

"...an auspicious day," he repeated flatly.

"Precisely."

"Could you elaborate on that?"

She stopped, whirling to face him with a slightly-manic glint in her eyes.

"This is the first time in weeks that all of the star signs lined up for a major undertaking," she told him, spreading her arms wide for emphasis. "What we're doing is far too important to go by just the sun sign alone, obviously. The Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars... all of them agree. I even confirmed it this morning with a three-coin consultation, which I normally wouldn't bother with. Every indication points to today being a more auspicious day for the test than when it was originally scheduled to take place!"

At some point in the rant, her glasses had slipped down her nose. Impatiently, she pushed them back into place.

"I'm sorry, Doctor, but are you suggesting that you decided to scrap the operations timetable approved by the deputy director because... today's horoscopes were good?"

"No, of course not."

"Oh, thank God." The man let out a relieved breath. "For a minute, I was worried –"

"I decided to scrap the operations timetable because today's horoscopes were excellent!"

Before he could bother her with any further stupid questions, Doctor Chen turned away, sweeping off with her white lab coat billowing out behind her. A moment later, he blinked, then hurried to catch up.

"Doctor Chen..."

"Listen, I don't tell you how to do..." The doctor's words trailed away as she tried to remember the actual function that this interloper in her domain performed. Nothing immediately came to mind, so she gave up with a contemptuous gesture. "...whatever your job is. Don't tell me how to do mine."

"Erm, actually, Doctor..." her assistant, who until now had been content to silently accompany them, whispered urgently into her ear. "It, erm... well, his job... it kind of is telling you how to do yours."

Aha. That last statement proved sufficient to jog her memory. Inspector General Ramirez, that was the annoying man's name.

She clicked her tongue in displeasure.

In his younger years, he'd probably been quite handsome. Tall and broad-shouldered, he dressed well, and carried himself with the casual assurance of a man long accustomed to being taken seriously by those around him. Some of the muscle he'd once carried had gone to fat, and the neat beard he wore couldn't quite hide an incipient double chin, but there was still a certain robust charm to his appearance.

He was also an idiot.

Which wasn't to say that she found his stupidity surprising. Doctor Chen was long accustomed to being surrounded by idiots.

"Do you want to take over and run this program yourself, Inspector General?"

"I – what?"

"If you'd like to be the one responsible for making these decisions, I'll have my resignation on your desk by the end of the day, and you can manage the project any way you want." She tilted her head, waiting. "No? Then get the fuck out of my way and let me work."

Her steps suddenly halted in front of a door, distinguished from the dozens of others they'd passed only by the stenciled letters PRIMARY CONTROL CENTER in yellow paint above the frame.

Making quick, practiced motions, she tapped this week's nine-digit code into the keypad. One of the two red lights on the lock flashed green. Reaching across her chest, she drew the ID badge from the clear plastic holder clipped to the front pocket of her lab coat and jammed it into the card reader. The second light went green as well, and a moment later the door unlatched with a soft click.

Behind her, she heard the inspector general discreetly take her assistant aside.

The hushed questions were the same tiresome set that everyone always asked. Is Doctor Chen crazy? Does she really know what she's doing? Can we trust her? She's the best at what she does, her subordinate loyally assured him, adding that they'd learned to put up with her... quirks. Good. Finding a replacement for his predecessor had been a tedious diversion.

Rolling her eyes, she ignored the rest of their whispered conversation.

Inside the control center, two rows of computer desks stood arrayed in angled rows, with a wide gap between them that allowed her to walk up to the front of the room without disrupting the work of the agency technicians hunched over their monitors. On the far wall, a blinking digital clock displayed the time in military format, while a huge bank of screens beneath were currently projecting topographic maps, each showing a different region of the world covered in a dense pattern of icons and notations. The only sound was the omnipresent droning hum of the base ventilation and the clatter of fingers on keys.

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"What's our status?" she asked the woman at the workstation to her left.

"Everything's nominal, Doctor Chen. Monitoring equipment is active and remote systems are on standby. We're ready to proceed whenever you give the word."

"Fine. Remind me, who's going to be on the controls?"

"Kumar, over at station twelve. He had the highest –"

Ignoring the rest, Doctor Chen crossed over to the terminal in question and unceremoniously evicted its owner. At first, the occupant tried to object, complaining about procedures and qualifications, then his eyes settled on her badge. Suddenly, he was tripping over himself in his hurry to make room for her while stammering out an apology.

"O-oh, Doctor Chen! I didn't realize –"

"I'm sure you didn't," she said disdainfully. "Out of the way."

Dropping herself into the seat the no-doubt-highly-qualified lab tech had just vacated, she dismissed the man from her mind, focusing her attention entirely on the panel in front of her. One hand settled lightly on the directional input controls, while the other reached for the bank of levers and knobs located beside them.

On the monitor in front of her, the high-resolution remote feed connected the terminal to the hot cell buried ten meters below their feet. In the center of the display was a stainless-steel workbench, bracketed by a pair of manipulator arms. Affixed to the table's polished surface was a segmented silver belt, topped by a triangular prism of transparent crystal...

...a Change Matrix.

Alien technology, from the depths of outer space!

An awe-inspiring display of engineering prowess, representing an almost-unfathomably advanced understanding of the natural sciences.

The metallic housing around the crystal had already been partially disassembled, working in stages and following a process that had taken an embarrassing amount of trial and error to perfect... but those catastrophic failures were all in the past. Today, they were finally ready to take the next step: to extract the crystal itself.

Her fingers touched the control knob labeled FINE ADJUST – LEFT.

"Doctor Chen!"

She jerked upright, startled by the loud, unexpected voice speaking directly into her ear. The twitch nearly sent the manipulator smashing into the table, another disaster averted with a tremendous effort of will by the narrowest margin.

It was the annoying inspector general again. Her eyes narrowed dangerously.

Didn't I already get rid of you? she wondered to herself, but what came out of her mouth was a terse, "Yes?"

"Doctor Chen, what are you doing!?"

"What does it look like I'm doing?"

He made an annoying sound deep in his throat.

"It looks like you're getting ready to perform the test yourself... but I'm sure I must be mistaken, Doctor, because that would be wildly inappropriate. Why, you'd be violating at least five agency statutes, just off the top of my head, not to mention the standard operating procedures and a whole host of safety regulations."

"Is that so?" she muttered, turning her attention back to her task. "And if you were standing here watching me while I did it, you'd probably be held responsible, too. How fortunate for both of us that you were otherwise occupied."

It was possible that the man replied. She wasn't listening anymore.

On the screen, the left manipulator arm started forward, its clawed end opening to latch onto the upper surface of the device.

The feed hiccuped, froze, then dissolved into a blizzard of monochrome static. A moment later, there was a deep rumble from below, shaking the room and setting the fluorescent lights flickering.

"Status report!" she barked, cutting through the rising babble of frightened voices.

"Both PPIC banks are offline! Last incident beam current reading was a high range error!"

"Video and audio feed is out, all controls are nonresponsive!"

"No response from the interferometers! Backups are also down!"

"What a waste," she said, pushing away from the desk with a disgusted look. Glancing over to her assistant, she added, "Mark attempt seven as another failure, and send in the decontamination teams to start cleaning up whatever's left down there. Tell the engineering staff I want another proposal for an alternative disassembly method on my desk by close of business tomorrow. Something that doesn't require the manipulators to contact the upper hemisphere of the housing."

"Ahem. Doctor..." the inspector general began.

"I know what went wrong!" she suddenly announced.

"Was it an issue with the EMF dampening?" her assistant asked in a hesitant voice. "The engineering project lead had concerns about –"

"We took his concerns into consideration when we ran the preliminary simulations. There are multiple redundant layers of shielding to compensate for any field disruption caused by the positioning of the manipulators. No, the problem was that Mercury is in retrograde." She shook her head angrily. "How could we have overlooked something so obvious?"

"Doctor!"

She spun, turning her glare on her frustratingly-persistent superior.

"What do you want now?"

"Remember, Doctor, the authorization order that created the Xeno-Entity Research Group was only a provisional one. We've given you a lot of leeway so far, but that privilege is contingent on your ability to continue producing results for us."

"I told you already, when you find someone better qualified, you can feel free to replace me. Until then, if you want to make yourself useful, concentrate on finding more Changers for me to work with. Speaking of which, it's been over a week now," she said, pointing an accusing finger at the man as she abruptly switched gears. "What ever happened to those two civilians with Changers that your staff was supposed to be tracking down for us? My team provided visual descriptions, their last known location, a list of possible associates... hell, we even gave you a social media account that belongs to one of them!"

"Actually, about that..." He scratched the back of his neck awkwardly. "We put together an inter-agency request for cooperation using the data you provided, and it got kicked back to us... along with a strongly-worded memo from Senator Wheelwright on the Oversight Committee suggesting that we drop this line of inquiry. Whoever those women are, they've got some friends in very high places."

"Tch. That's typical. I suppose we'll need to lean harder on that dive bar, or the clinic we traced them to –" The control center shook again, harder, and this time the lights went out entirely. After a brief delay, the red backups kicked on. "What was that?"

"Incursion detected!" a panicked voice shouted from one of the nearby workstations. "It's... it's right on top of us!"

"Another one? Impossible," Doctor Chen said, even as the base's alarms began to wail. "We’re well inside the safety window. All of our calculations –" At the front of the room, the screens began switching over to the internal security feed. The above-ground camera clearly showed the distorted spiral of an alien portal hanging in the air above the entrance tunnel. "– were apparently mistaken."

A hand came down on her shoulder.

"We need to get out of here, Doctor," the inspector general suggested. "Is there another exit?"

"You want to leave? Now?" The larger man recoiled at the sight of her eager grin. "Absolutely not. This is the perfect opportunity for us to secure some additional samples! Where's the security coordinator? I want every available body deployed to sector one immediately! If an armored vehicle isn't up there in five minutes, tell him that he's fired!" Moving towards the door, she shouted over her shoulder, "And somebody get me a gun!"