Red Dot: Contact. Will the gravest threat come from closer to home than we expect? Read Online Free

intelligence was approaching. A week and a half later CSS, had confirmed that D9 was an alien craft. That first wave of fear at CSS had faded in seconds, as Claire and her colleagues focused on pinning down the direction and origin of the spacecraft.
    This time, with palpable evidence of an alien presence on Earth, it would take a few minutes before the act of responding to the new presence pushed Claire’s fear into the background.
    But she quickly decided to try to get an email through servers almost certainly stretched far beyond capacity, to assure her son and others close to her she was OK.
    Mommy is fine
, she began.
I’m on the plane and will soon be in Washington, D.C. I’ll call as soon as I can, but it may take awhile. Don’t worry. Those things you see won’t hurt you. They’re just…
    Here, she stopped. Just what? She had no idea what was going on. But as wrenching cries for help and mercy continued around and behind her, she had to come up with a comforting explanation.
    They’re just gifts from the spaceship
, she typed.
    After sending the message, she squeezed the armrests of her seat tightly and looked around. The jet seemed to be moving normally, with no suddentwists or turns. A flight attendant—the short, brunette woman who had delighted in joking with passengers earlier in the flight—stood in the aisle, holding a microphone. With a serious look on her face and seemingly unaware that her uniform cap was askew, she asked the passengers to stay in their seats and fasten their seatbelts. Passengers shouted at her: “What’s happening?” “Are we going to crash?” But the attendant said she would have more information later and walked back toward the front of the plane, amid a chorus of frightened voices.
    Why doesn’t the pilot come on and say something, anything?
Claire wondered.
    She didn’t realize it, but the last thing the distraught passengers needed to hear was the panicked conversation going on in the cockpit.
    “St. Louis, St. Louis this is AF 428,” pilot Andrew Sarriff said hurriedly. “We’re turning around and coming in. Estimated time, seventeen minutes.”
    “Negative, AF 428, repeat: Negative,” came the equally rushed reply from flight control at Lambert—St. Louis International Airport. “We have no runway for you. Continue to Dulles as planned.”
    Sarriff turned to Flight Officer Denise Lewis, who raised her head from her cell phone and said, “Someone blogged that it’s been reported these red things are killing people by the hundreds, and aliens are fighting their way into government buildings.”
    “Maybe they’ve taken over the control tower at St. Louis,” Sarriff said as sweat began to trickle from his salt-and-pepper hairline.
    “We should go in anyway,” Lewis said.
    “If there really isn’t a runway available in St. Louis, or at some other airport,” Sarriff said, and paused. “…We need to find a road or something we can put down on, even a body of water if it comes to that. There’s got to be some big lakes on the way, in Kentucky or Tennessee,” he said. Lewis nodded her head in approval.
    “What the hell are you people talking about?” In the confusion, the crew hadn’t noticed that flight attendant Rodney Powell had entered the cockpit and heard their desperate plans.
    Surprised, Sarriff turned and said defensively, “Hey, it’s our job to get everyone in safely.”
    “It damn sure is,” said Powell. “Get a grip on yourselves.” He opened the flight deck door and started to walk out. As he was closing the door, he said emphatically, “Just fly the damn plane.” He turned and walked quickly down the aisle with a grim expression, as Claire looked on, more confused than ever.
    Just then, shrieks of alarm rose from around her as two F-16 fighter jets swooped in to fly alongside the airliner, about two hundred yards to the right.
Jesus Christ, they’re not going to shoot us down, are they?
she thought before she could get a grip