The Song of Sqia'lon Seven

3. Cuckoo

It was Nathan who managed to move first and push the now familiar red button.

"But, I thought . . " stammered Blade, gazing at Frank Sqia'lon with a confused expression on his face.

"You think I'm going to let those aliens kill another one of my family?" Frank exclaimed angrily. Nathan hastened to Violet's other side, as if poised to push her father away from her.

"Violet told me she was adopted by you as a baby, but now we discover that you are just her 'handler'. You're leading the CIA mission – she's just an asset to you!" Nathan accused scathingly.

"The truth is far more complicated than that," Frank replied looking exhausted. Frank peered inquisitively across at the teenage boy who now stood so protectively over his unconscious daughter. "Its Nathan, isn't it?" At Nathan's wary nod, Frank continued more gently. "Yes, we did adopt Violet, though we weren't supposed to. My wife, you see . . . "

"Sqia'lon Six?" wondered Blade out loud.

"Sqia'lon Six be damned!" yelled Frank, the force of his explosive anger causing Blade to take a few steps backwards, his large body pressing against the console. "She was Allison Hemmant when I met her, a beautiful, bright College student from Ohio."

Nathan knew better than to ask questions of a clearly desperate man, but he was worried about Violet. "Agent Sqia'lon, we need to get Violet medical help, her pulse is very weak."

Hollowed out, blood shot eyes bored into Nathan from beneath a hawkish ledge of eyebrow and forehead. "Don't you know boy, our medical science can't help her now. She's in the control of . . ". Although Frank couldn't bring himself to say more, he looked upwards toward the ceiling and both Cartwright boys understood immediately what he meant – he meant whatever it was that was now hovering in the airspace above their home.

"It was exactly the same with Allison" and then glancing at Blade, Frank added, "or Indigo, as you already know her as". She was a medical student you know, going to be a doctor. The Agency asked for round the clock care from volunteer medical students to help monitor the health of a comatose patient. Hmmph! Some patient. He'd been in detention his whole life poor bugger, bred for the purpose of acting as host for . . . . 'It'!" Frank finally spat out, looking heavenwards again. "Why did they risk those poor, unsuspecting students," he moaned shaking his head, "- to allow them to go in and so expose them to infection from 'It' for God's sake?"

"What do you mean, that the patient was 'bred for the purpose of acting as host'?" interrogated Blade, feeling more emboldened now.

"As soon as the Agency realised the security risk of having an alien roaming free out there in a human host collecting potential intelligence about Earth, they put an end to it, didn't they? Yeah, poor, little Sqialon' Two: three years old and he lived his remaining couple of years in nothing more than a locked lab. You see 'It' seemed to know that the hosts were being kept like lab rats and never let out. Each of them died within a couple of years. The Agency tried all sorts of techniques to control 'It' including breeding clones of the host, purpose built if you like, for alien infection. Sqia'lon three, four and five all died the same way poor buggers – for nothing."

An audible intake of breath from both Blade and Nathan seemed to pull Frank from the dark reverie his mind had descended. He looked at both Cartwright boys as if noticing them for the first time. "So that must have been when the Agency decided to do it – to allow the alien to infect a non-cloned human host."

"One of the volunteer medical students?" Blade guessed.

"Yes" growled Frank, through clenched teeth, "my future wife, Allison Hemmant".