Gabrielle and told her, “You were overthinking it. Make it seem like a ‘win’ and send the problem to Dan. You’re golden.”
She wanted to both smack him and also give him a hug because she wasn’t sure what Bethany Anne wanted to do with fifteen vampires that had just attacked her team.
In the end, she should have just gone with her gut. Gabrielle's over analysis of the situation brought about ‘analysis paralysis’ and nothing got accomplished. She went to John and whispered “thanks.” He didn’t look over to where she was, he just replied, “We got your back.”
The sudden overwhelming amount of emotions threatened to break her exterior facade. Gabrielle stepped over to a window to peek out and provide herself a few moments to compose her face. If she had to die in order to protect any one of these four men, it would be a payment she would be willing to make and consider it an honor at the same time.
Fuck the back door exit, no Queen’s Own was ever going to be left behind when she was around.
She turned around with a renewed sense of purpose and caught John watching her. That damnable man was too smart by half. He just nodded and continued to grab papers, asking one of the vampires to translate the content so he could decide which ones to take. They only had a few hours to gather intelligence, make plans, and schedule a date to pick them up.
They all agreed to meet back in Japan for pickup. Now, Gabrielle was bringing them to the base.
The schedule had been planned to coincide with the arrival of the first Wechselbalg group of one hundred volunteers accompanied by Nathan and Ecaterina.
The goal was to get the two groups together, lay down the law and provide a demonstration why upsetting the apple cart would be a bad idea. Dan was coming in via Pod himself in an hour.
The teams knew that all of the major superpowers had to be constantly tweaking their satellite and radar abilities to capture the comings and goings of the pods. That made their team, fronted by TOM, who found the idea of a ‘technology’ race against the humans to be a fun challenge. TOM would work with ADAM to see what was happening and what chatter about the supposed radar returns could be intercepted.
Occasionally, there was a significant amount of chatter that TOM knew wasn’t anything of theirs. On two occasions, TOM was so involved he was trying to figure out if radar signatures were other aliens. In one of the two instances, he butted into a meeting Bethany Anne was having to explain he wanted to chase a UFO in a Pod in case it was truly not of Earth.
Bethany Anne excused herself from the meeting to jump in a Pod. Her present conversation wasn’t a subject that needed her input, and it was rare for TOM to ask for anything, so she felt ‘why not?’
She was even excited to find out that the radar pings had been consistent until they came over the horizon on a straight shot towards the anomaly. The UFO had vacated the area suddenly twenty-two seconds before they came blistering through the upper atmosphere in a chase.
She could see the planes below try to track the Pods entrance into the area by the visible streak they were making across the sky. Bethany Anne had TOM keep the Pod disturbing the upper atmosphere enough so they could be visually detected by the jets.
Unfortunately, the UFO was gone and not even their existing technology focused down towards Earth was adequate in the area.
Which caused the two of them to disappear back up into space and ponder the issue.
She sent a note for Marcus to start working with TOM to increase the capabilities of their spying on Earth by an order of magnitude. They had been so focused on outer space, that Marcus’s wisdom about the best place to look for aliens would be on earth had been wasted.
So, whenever the superpowers on Earth were able to successfully tweak their capabilities to better trace a Pod, TOM