Waltzing the Warzone, chapter 2 (Patreon)

Tank held Lev’s hand as they crossed the parking lot and ended up at the black SUV that screamed a government conspiracy. Tank always found it amusing to see which details conspiracy theorists got right. Men in black with unmarked SUVs went that column. Memory erasing alien technology was as big of a fantasy as demonic possession. Either that or aliens didn’t bother using them.

The side door of the SUV slid open, and John stepped out. He was as physically imposing as ever. The Special Forces Tank trained with in summer thought he was odd for not being impressed, especially when they learned that Tank hadn’t even finished college and string pulling was involved in getting him a spot. However, anyone who trained with John found Rangers… mundane. Since Tank liked breathing and was painfully aware of how easily a group of Rangers could kill him, he would never say that out loud, but that didn’t make it less true.

“Well now I know something's wrong.”

John tilted his head down and looked at Tank over his sunglasses in a move straight out of the movies. If Tank wasn’t in a committed relationship, that would be hot. Since he was, he rolled his eyes.

Lev squeezed his hand. “Let's get in the van.”

And that was the code for things were really fucking wrong and let's get into an area that we secured using alien anti-eavesdropping technology. Worry churned in the pit of Tank’s stomach. He got in the back seat and John got in after him while Lev took the front passenger side. Clearly they were going to wait for Aldrich, which was one more FU unit. Tank had started ranking situations on a Fuck Upedness scale that went from 1 to 10, and they were at least in north of seven. As soon as he closed the door, Tank asked, “What's going on?”

“Personally, I just wanted to come see you,” Lev offered. “I am really sorry that whole situation in Cincinnati sabotaged our last vacation.”

“I could have come to Cincinnati. It's not like I need a vacation on a beach. A vacation elbows deep in alien technology kind of does it for me.” Tank didn’t want Lev feeling bad if their various leaves didn’t match up. “That probably suggests I should spend more time with the psychiatrists, but as long as you put up with my brand of crazy, I'm not going to worry too much. So if that's your personal reason for being here, the more generic reason why I warrant a visit from both the general and John is… what, exactly?”

John snorted. “I wanted to ambush you and see if you’re working on your shitty situational awareness, but given things that been going on in the news lately, I decided that a stranger coming onto a college campus to ambush an ROTC student might not go over well.”

“That's a rare bit of common sense,” Lev offered with an overly sweet smile.

John flipped him off.

Tank considered pointing out that most of the units he trained with praised his situational awareness, but that would just lead of discussion of the general inadequacy of Earth training, so Tank skipped it. “Campus security thanks you for your discretion,” he said. “Now, would someone like to give me an answer? Trust me, generals do not show up to check out ROTC units.” Tank scrunched up his nose. “Or, they do once a year, but when a general shows up, there is fanfare and inspections and everyone out on the football field and even campus administration shows up. Trust me, campus administration ignores us ninety-nine percent of the time, so that means the appearance of a general actually is a big deal in the grand scheme of the universe even though I think all of that fanfare is a little el stupido.”

“It is stupid,” John offered.

“We got information on a new incursion,” Lev blurted, which neatly sidelined the discussion of human inadequacies.

Tank clapped his hands together and rubbed them gleefully. “Great. Do I get to be the gun-toting soldier guy or the arms in an alien control panel technology guy? In a perfect world, I would like to be both, but I do best when I'm doing either one or the other. So which one are you looking for because I'm down for either.”

For the first time in his life, Tank felt competent to handle the vagaries of fighting bad guys. He'd worked hard not only in ROTC and in the covert training that Aldrich had gotten him into, but also while training with John and Colonel Sadler and Lev. With all the training he was doing, he was almost sure that he was a badass a good twenty percent of the time. Fifty percent of the time he was probably a badass. That left a certain percentage where he tripped over an untied shoelace or flailed or did something else completely mortifying, but the percentage was dropping, and he usually saved the humiliation for situations where he knew he was safe.

On the bad side, those were the same situations where someone was likely to have a cell phone and take a picture of him covered in swamp mud after he’d tripped over the world’s smallest alligator.

“We need someone to play nice,” Lev said as he handed over a folder. He hung on the back of the car seat and watched Tank in a way that was concerning.

“You know, I'm not great at playing nice. Between the verbal diarrhea and the occasional shoving of feet in my mouth, I am better at making people run away. If you want someone to play nice, I've got the name of a good psychiatrist I can give you. Then again, Colonel Aldrich originally gave me that name, so he probably has it.” Tank winced. “General Aldrich. General Aldrich. I really need to get that clear my head before I say something stupid and get the sarcastic glare of death that sends me limping back to the land of feeling 2 inches tall.”

“Clyde would understand,” Lev said.

Tank doubted that. “This is why I am not competent to handle sweet talk. I speak before I think. I’m self-centered and do things like forget other people’s promotions. Their well-earned promotions. I’m thoughtless, and the only reason I’m a good boyfriend for you is that you get so caught up in your work that you don’t notice how rude I am.” While Tank wouldn’t say it, they were equally matched in that department. Both of them were workaholics buried in work they loved.

Tank flipped open the file and studied the first photograph. The man looked amazingly familiar, but Tank couldn't quite put a finger on it. He had a straight nose that had a slight upturn at the end, curling hair that was going white and dark eyes that narrowed on the outside. He also had a strong cupid’s bow and a slight cleft in his chin. At one point, he was probably a cutie, but there were dark bags under his eyes and something sallow about his complexion made Tank think of illness even though the guy didn’t look older than his fifties or sixties. The picture’s background suggested that it was taken somewhere in India, or in a city large enough to have an Indian neighborhood at least. “Who is he?” Tank asked.

“Keep looking and you'll find a photo of the guy from when he was in school.”

“Okay.” Tank drew the word out. That wasn’t an answer, and a 30-year-old picture wouldn’t jog Tank’s memory given that he’d only been involved in the world of aliens and incursions for threeish years. Nearly four. But if he recognized this guy, it was either because the guy had been wandering around the bodegas of Tank’s childhood home or he was one of the individuals Tank had met in the service. He would put his money on the latter. Still he dutifully flipped past two more photographs that showed some sort of street festival where this guy was buying meat on a stick before he got to the black and white photograph in question. He froze.

The guy’s brown hair was curling slightly, several locks escaping their neighbors to go in wildly illogical directions for hair, giving him a bad case of bed-head that wouldn’t be smoothed down no matter how much he brushed it. Tank knew because that hair and that asymmetrical smile were too fucking familiar for him to miss the obvious.

“We knew cloning was one of the possibilities,” John said without much sympathy. Then again, there really wasn't any reason to be sympathetic. Tank had long ago realized that his life, like the lives of his friends, had been defined by alien experiments. But up until this moment, they had never known whether Tank was a genetic experiment or a clone or a control group or some other weird sciencey category that only made sense in an alien's mind. But seeing an exact duplicate of him running around India 30 years ago did highly suggest cloning.

“What do we know about him?” Tank asked.

“He works as a computer programmer,” Lev said. “He's doing some cutting-edge work, and we think he gained the attention of the aliens. We got these photographs from India's Internal Security Force, and they are under the impression that this guy is a normal human who has caught the aliens’ attention because he is so good at programming.”

“Which suggests we aren’t telling India's ISF everything we know because clearly this is me.” Tank held up the photograph the 30-year-old photograph next to his own face and perfectly mimicked the smile.”

“It gets weirder,” John said.

Tank winced. “Joy,” he said weakly. He had a paper due in his Compressible Flow and Renewable Kinetic Energy Design class. He didn’t have time for weird. “Can we reschedule our regularly scheduled drama for some time next month?”

“Sticking your head in the sand and ignoring it is stupid. It gives the weird a chance to bite you in the ass,” John said.

“You are blessed with the wisdom of a thousand domesticated turkeys,” Tank said.

John flipped him off. Valid response.

“We might need you if he questions our veracity,” Lev said. “Just read the rest of the file.”

Half afraid of what he would find, Tank flipped to the next set of photographs. An Asian man was sitting on a concrete pylon laughing at something this Tank look-alike was saying. With a sinking feeling in his guts, Tank found the matching thirty-year-old school photograph. This time it wasn't an exact match. However, if Tank squinted his eyes, he could see Zhu in the stranger's features. This guy was a little narrower in the shoulders and his face was longer giving him a slightly more pointed chin, but that made him look more normal because Zhu with chiseled features stood out in a GQ cover model sort of way. This guy was like Zhu’s normal-looking little brother. Except of course that this guy was clearly in his 50s.

“Are there versions of anyone else like Marie?” Tank asked. He didn't mention Roger or Ellie because he wasn't sure he could handle it if there were genetic doubles for those two. The aliens had convinced Roger that he needed power and that the best way for him to get it was to make a human sacrifice. In one night, both had died, and Tank still felt guilt for each of those deaths although for our vastly different reasons.

Lev shook his head. “Nothing. The IF did a deep dive into the targets’ backgrounds, and they couldn't find anyone else who resembled the group from New York. This supports the assertion that you and Zhu were part of Chow's experiment, and the others were part of a competing alien agenda.”

“Chow has been at this experiment for a while,” tank said as he tapped the photographs. Once he ran out of photographic evidence, he went back and started reading the reports.

George Dodwell was a programmer who owned his own company with contracts all through the Middle East and East. When the rest of the English left India, his family had doubled down, and they owned a number of corporations that still turned a healthy profit. Dodwell started a cyber-security company apart from his family’s holdings and was heavily involved with the Chinese government. Nothing on the page suggested that Dodwell was an operative, but no one worked Chinese cyber-security without having some level of involvement with the Chinese government.

And given that the Chinese government was, right now, seriously pissed at the US government and information sharing on alien incursions was at an all-time low, that was not a comforting thought.

Dodwell’s best friend and the CEO of his company was Daniel Yoon, a graduate of the same school as Dodwell, had adopted by as an infant. His adoptive father worked for Dodwell’s supposedly biological father. Tank wondered if that was Dodwell’s father—a man with a square chin and a predatory look reinforced by a Roman nose. If so, he was technically Tank’s genetic father as well—at least if clones had genetic fathers.

Tank had assumed he was a clone, but he’d never thought through all the possibilities.

Dodwell was twice divorced, but rumors suggested he had a close and potentially sexual relationship with Yoon that probably caused at least one of those divorces. Yoon had never been married or even linked to a partner. Weird. The guy looked so much like Zhu, but Zhu was the ultimate family man. He had Marie had adopted two kids, and he was all about working from home so he could spoil his rug rats. But Dodwell… that was enough to make Tank uncomfortable.

The guy was sciencey, bisexual with strong hints of gayness, described as creative but hard to keep focused—and Tank was not going to consider how the IF had gotten the guy’s school records. Add in a couple of trips to the ER and a poorly considered decision to join the military and he would be Tank. Well, except for the part where Tank was gay with hints of bisexualness.  Lev had once suggested that gay men would make exceptions for Xena, and Tank had to admit that he'd made a valid point with the boxed DVD set. It made Tank uncomfortable to think about how much of his identity might come down to genes.

“Tank?” Lev asked.

Tank looked up and cleared his throat. “This is weird.”

Lev offered a sympathetic smile. “Very. I mean, to think that under different circumstances, someone with your core of moral strength could have turned into a profiteer who helps the Chinese screw over their people by controlling the Internet… that is proof that nurture trumps nature.”

Tank was trying to rally brain cells for a response when the driver’s side door opened. “Okay, kiddos. I am in a good mood after ripping a homophobe a new asshole. So, are we ready to head to the airport?”

“The what?” Tank asked. However, Aldrich started the SUV without providing any answers. Apparently, Tank was heading to the airport.