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The moment they stepped over the threshold of the gate into her study, Jenny knew something was wrong. She didn't know exactly why. Then she realized the skin surrounding her key was tingling. This had never happened before. She unconsciously picked up Tidbit, cradling him protectively.
Bob and Burt looked at her curiously, frozen in place, obviously concerned. "What's up?" said Bob, his voice sounding oddly in her ears as it always did after spending some time using mindspeech exclusively.
"I'm not sure," Jenny replied softly. "Something isn't right. My key is tingling."
Burt went around her, putting his hand on the door handle. "It's warm, but not hot. Don't follow me until I give the all clear."
Jenny nodded, and Burt turned the handle. The acrid smell of smoke and...was that gunpowder?...filled the room. Burt stepped through quietly and they all stood rock still where he had left them. In a moment he called out, "We're clear, but you aren't going to like it."
As Jenny stepped into the hallway the impact of just how real her danger was, hit her like a thrown brick. The area of the door to the gateways was blackened, as if someone had set off a small bomb. The floor was littered with ceiling tiles and the hall light was shattered. There was evidence of impacts, as if someone had tried to use a hammer to get through the wall.
As she moved into her living room, she vaguely noticed her books strewn across the floor, the stuffing of her reading chair pulled out down to the frame of the chair. Her china from her hutch was in pieces all over the dining room floor. The doors to her kitchen cupboards had been torn from the cabinet and a mixed odor of spices and decaying food wafted up from the floor.
She ran to the office and her computer was gone and all of her paper files were strewn as if someone had been looking for something.
In her bedroom it was the same. Her belongings had been trashed.
"The shed!" she cried and, with Tidbit still in her arms, she ran as quickly as she could through the shards of broken china out through the French doors that barely hung cockeyed on their wrenched hinges.
Like the gateroom door, there were obvious signs of an attempt to force entry, but the door remained locked and undamaged. Jenny heaved a sigh of relief. "I don't know what's in there that they could possibly want, but evidently Aunt Lizzie did a good job of protecting it."
She turned to her team. "I need some agents to come in and clean this up while we're at Sanglarka. We don't have time for it now. I wonder how they did all of this without someone calling the cops. It must have made a lot of noise."
Then she realized why they had taken the computer. They thought her security footage was stored there. She pulled out her phone. When they had altered the tech inside it, they had also installed an app that gave her unlimited cloud storage off world. Apparently, according to her training, they had hidden a tiny satellite among the space debris in Earth's orbit. Jenny had been sending the footage from Aunt Lizzie's security system into that cloud.
She brought up the security app. She watched in horror as two burly men smashed in the French doors with large hammers. Hadn't the neighbors heard?
"How could they have done this without attracting attention?" she asked the two silent men gathered around her.
"Silence shield. They must have extended a silence shield over the property. It's pretty common tech among the less honest of the dimensions. Most merchants on gate worlds know to use counter-tech against it, but I don't imagine Lizzie ever thought to need it."
Jenny continued to watch as these men went from room to room, ravaging her belongings. They didn’t even appear to be looking for anything. However, they did search the walls carefully, probably looking for an opening into the gate room. Which was proved out after they had torn the bathroom apart, looking into the tank on the back of the toilet, throwing everything out of the medicine cabinet and the drawers and even unrolling the toilet paper roll.
As they moved toward the bedroom, they stopped in the hallway as if listening for something. One of them pulled out some kind of device and blasted exactly at the point where the invisible door existed that led to the gate room. There was a brilliant flash and when the picture returned, the wall was black, and they were attacking the spot with sledgehammers. Even as brawny as they were, they appeared to be making only the slightest dents in the wall.
They tried attacking on either side, supposedly to find a weak spot in the wall, to no avail. "The Alliance will be glad to know they get high marks for wall building," said Burt, almost gleefully.
When none of their efforts succeeded, they went on to trash her bedroom, but when they got to the computer room, one of the men, with a scruffy beard and a nose ring, reached toward the computer and ripped it out of the wall. This made absolutely no effect on the feed, as the security system was not tied into the computer. It only showed the footage on the monitor screen. "Bonus points," Burt breathed. "Magnificent."
They circled back to where the impervious door still hid behind the gate shield. One of them kicked the wall with a big booted foot, but only got pain for the effort. He hopped around on one foot, apparently swearing and shouting to the amusement of his companion until he hauled off and punched the fellow in the belly. The second man, clean shaven, even to his bald head, bent over in pain and then followed the bearded one out of the house.
Jenny regretted the lack of audio, as it might have given them a clue as to what their orders were and maybe where they were holed up or if there were more of them.
"But wait...there's more!" said Burt, who was practically dancing with excitement.
He pulled out his little multipurpose electronic device. It wasn't a cell phone; he had assured her the first time she had asked him about it. He called it his "swiss army knife". Apparently, it had many functions, one of which was to extract information from a person's mind and also to erase inconvenient memories. She shuddered to think what it would have done in someone else's hands.
He poked a few icons in rapid succession and his face lit up. "Gotcha!" And he actually did do a little jig on the spot.
"Gotcha?" Jenny inquired hopefully.
"It was a shot in the dark, but thanks to listening to my gut, we will now know exactly where they are from now on, thanks to my little bug friends. You see, when they went through the French doors, one of my little bug friends, actually tiny nanobots, dropped like a little spider on a web onto their backs and burrowed beneath the skin. They just feel like a little itch going in and, when the victim scratches at the itch, the bugs just burrow deeper.
It looks and feels like a mosquito bite. They can't be detected by any current tech and there is no additional sensation once they dig into the fatty tissue or muscle. These little hummers will tell us exactly where Curly and Moe are anywhere on the planet. Score a big one for dastardly alien tech! And the really cool thing is that they are dirt cheap and easy to manufacture. I keep a large supply of them in my MDP."
Jenny let out the breath she didn't realize she had been holding. "Do you think they will lead us to Engoza?"
"If not her, at least whoever is next in charge. I doubt she will risk being seen on Earth for awhile."
"Can I have a look at that?" Bob said, looking longingly at the little device in Burt's hand. "How do I get one of those?"
"Actually, they'll probably issue you one at the end of your Agent training," grinned Burt, but for now it stays in my pocket," and he suited words to action.
Jenny looked at Tidbit, who she had let down and had been sitting quietly at her ankles. "Are you OK?"
"I'm fine," he sent back. "I think I want to check the koi pond. She may have left a clue."
Burt turned to Jenny. "I know this all looks pretty bleak from where you stand, but we'll get a lock on this. Was there anything valuable on your computer that wasn't backed up?"
Jenny considered. It had been her work computer, but other than email, she hadn't done much on her computer since all of this had started. Thankfully, she made a habit of trashing her read emails and dumping the trash folder nightly, so there was nothing there that might give them a clue as to what she might have been doing all of this time. Any emails she wanted to save, she saved to a highly encrypted cloud server, but she hadn't saved any of Aunt Lizzie's notes.
She shook her head. "I think I'm good there. And the laptop's no loss. It isn't like I can't afford to get a new one. I just hate having to reinstall all of that software."
Burt nodded sympathetically. "OK, well, I'd like to suggest we get on the road to Sanglarka, then. The house will be restored as much as possible while you're gone. Just think of it as an excuse to redecorate. A shame about the books, though," he said with a sigh.
Bob and Tidbit were examining the edge of the pond.
"Nothing here, but some cat blood," Bob said, as they walked up. "You might want to call Ted and find an excuse to give him a couple weeks off with pay until the clean-up crew is finished, though. Don't want him putting 2 and 2 together and coming up with 16."
Jenny nodded and texted Ted.
"So, let's go," said Burt.
"Wait a quick minute," Bob said. "I need to check on my house. Remember, they know I'm involved now."
Burt agreed, and they all trooped over to Bob's place, waving at Miss Longtree as they crossed the street. She waved back cheerfully and went on with pruning her prize-winning roses.
There was no sign of forced entry. Burt scanned for signs of Curly and Moe and they went in, after the scan revealed nothing. Bob and Burt did a quick tour of the house, then they headed out to the workshop. The lock was a fingerprint lock and an iris scan and once again Burt's scan found nothing. They went in and, to Bob's evident relief, nothing had been touched.
"I have Ignatius boarding with my son," Bob said. "And since it doesn't look like anything's been touched, while I'm here, I want to add a few things to my MDP. You never know when the right tool will come in handy."
After quickly gathering a number of tools and gadgets, many of which Jenny could only guess at their purpose, he paused. "Fidget goes too," he said, "and my main laptop and external drives."
After packing these into his MDP, he smiled and said, "Okies, kiddies, let's go."
