Fic: Alienated, Chapter 3
Author’s Note: I totally wish I could have come up with a better title for this story. Alas. I did not. I know this chapter might feel a little rushed, but I wanted to get through all the story exposition and get to the real guts of the matter, and that doesn’t really start until the next chapter. I wanted it to feel like the part of an NCIS episode after the opening credits (yanno, the first “FOOF!”), where things really start rolling. Hopefully, getting to the giant fighting robots quicker is penance enough to rush Chapter 3 a bit.
Disclaimer: Sigh. Still poor. Must not be mine. Dammit.
Chapter 3
Washington, D.C.
Gathered in the bullpen of the NCIS main squad room, Gibbs and his team were going over what they knew so far about their case. Unfortunately, it wasn’t much.
“PO Second Jonathan Mitchell, twenty six, born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota,” Ziva said as she flipped through information on the plasma with the wireless remote. “He was an only child, raised by a single parent, his mother, after his father was killed in a drive by shooting. By all accounts, he did not do very well in school, though he was an exceptionally bright child. He joined the Navy straight out of high school at eighteen, has worked his way through the enlisted ranks, and has been stationed on active cruises since the end of his cryptology training.”
DiNozzo stood up and walked toward the middle of the group. “I just got off the phone with his CO, Lt. Eileen Walker, and she said Mitchell was an above average crypto, very skilled and extremely driven. She said that he had a tendency to dream, and had, and I quote, ‘A vivid imagination for all things alien.’ He spent all his down time researching and reading about it. She said that he had recently become convinced that some giant alien robot was out to kill him. Sounds like someone else we know,” Tony said, shooting a look at McGee.
“Tony, just because I play MMORPGs does not mean I automatically believe in aliens,” McGee said with a sigh. “How many times do I have to tell you that?”
“Until I believe it, McGee.”
“More like until you grow up,” McGee muttered under his breath with a lidded glare. Louder, McGee said, “I’d like to see you say that to Abby, Tony.”
“She loves me. She would never…” He trailed off. “Would she?”
“Aliens are at the top of her list of things she believes in that she can’t see. I would love to see you try.”
Gibbs took a sip of his coffee. “Okay. DiNozzo, get on the horn and talk to Mitchell’s family. Ziva, go through his financial records. McGee, go see what Abby has on his laptop. I’m going to see Ducky.”
========
“Ah, Jethro! Just the man I was hoping to see,” Ducky said cheerfully as he looked up from his work. Dressed in his customary green scrubs and facemask propped on his head, the Medical Examiner handed three vials of blood and a few meager tissue samples to Jimmy. “To Abby, if you please, Mr. Palmer.”
“Right away, Dr. Mallard.” Gibbs watched as Palmer beat a hasty exit up one floor to Abby’s lab, still unsure if he’d been forgiven for his slip of the tongue earlier at the crime scene. The senior NCIS agent inwardly smiled. It was still fun to scare the probies, even if he would never admit that to anyone but himself.
“What have you got so far, Duck?”
“Well, it’s a most peculiar thing. I’ve never actually seen anything like this before,” Ducky said as he and Gibbs stopped in front of the body of PO Mitchell. Gibbs peered inside the hollowed out cavity of the body and looked around.
“Where are all the organs?”
Ducky stuck a gloved finger up in Gibbs’ face as he made his point. “That is precisely why I wanted to talk to you. You see, for once, Mr. Palmer was not wrong when he said something strange had happened. You remember earlier today when my young assistant was struggling so mightily to retrieve a liver temperature, correct?”
Gibbs raised an eyebrow. “I was there, Duck.”
“Of course you were, Jethro. The reason we couldn’t ascertain the time of death at the scene was because our unfortunate Petty Officer Mitchell has no organs left in his body,” Ducky said as he pointed to the cavity.
“So they were taken out?”
“No, I don’t think so, though I’m entirely unsure how it would have happened. When I cut him open, all his bones were present, but his soft tissue from his torso was completely gone. It was like they had never been there,” Ducky said incredulously, the perplexed expression on the medical examiner’s face finding its way into Ducky’s verbal exposition.
“Signs of trauma?” Gibbs asked, feeling the case get weirder by the minute.
“Positively none! That’s what’s so confusing. There were no signs of trauma, cuts, abrasions, breaks, or even so much as a puncture mark the poor lad’s body,” Ducky said as Palmer, finished with his errands to Abby, walked back into autopsy. “We’ll just have to wait for the tox screen, I suppose.”
“You know, in ancient Egypt, the pharaohs were mummified by having their brains ripped out through their noses. Do you think something like that could have happened here?” Palmer asked casually with a silly smirk on his face. Ducky and Gibbs could only stare.
“Well, unless someone has figured out how to pull a man’s lungs out through his nose, which I may remind you, Mr. Palmer, are far bigger than his nose, I highly doubt it,” Ducky said. “Think before you speak, Jimmy! Think!”
Feeling properly chastised for the second time in one day, Palmer dropped his head and slumped his shoulders. Gibbs saw him deflate like a balloon. “Yes, Dr. Mallard.”
Ducky walked over to the other side of the table and put his hand on his young protégé’s shoulder. “You are a remarkably bright young man, Jimmy. One day, I will not be here to guide you, but you will not require it. You needn’t try so hard to impress us. That will come in due time.”
“I understand. I just that sometimes my mind gets a little excited, you know? My brain gets behind of my mouth,” Palmer said as he looked down to stare at the body. Anything to avoid Gibbs’ glare. Ducky nodded in sympathetic understanding.
But as he looked down, Palmer caught sight of something wedged between the ribcage and the spinal column of the victim. Cocking his head slightly to the side and narrowing his eyes, Jimmy walked across the room and grabbed a nearby magnifying glass off Ducky’s desk.
“What do you see, Palmer?” Gibbs asked as Jimmy returned the gurney on which PO Mitchell lay.
Straining to get a better look, Palmer tried to Tetris in the magnifying glass to see what he found. “I’m not sure. It looks like some sort of shard or something. It’s lodged between the seventh and eighth ribs, pressed up against the C8 vertebrae.” Switching out the magnifying glass for a set of forceps, Palmer dug into Mitchell’s chest. Twisting his wrist just right, he managed to pull the foreign object free.
“Ah ha!” he said with triumph. His expression shifted from happiness to confusion in a split second. “What is it? Geez, for it’s size, this thing is really heavy!”
Held securely in the tip of the industrial size tweezers, was a small piece of what appeared to be metal, brownish black in color, about three inches wide by about two inches across. The edges were jagged, as if the piece was ripped violently free from its mother source.
“I have positively no idea. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Look, it’s got some sort of strange symbols on it,” Ducky said as he took the shard from Palmer to examine.
“I don’t know of any language in existence that looks like this one. Maybe one of the ancient languages?” Palmer speculated.
“No, I don’t think so. Old hieroglyphics were not this complex. Gibbs, do you have--” Ducky cut himself off as he heard the doors to autopsy whoosh open and observed Gibbs step into the waiting elevator.
“Do you think he knows what it is, Dr. Mallard?” Palmer asked as the doors to the elevator slid closed. “It just looks so…alien.”
“Jimmy, over the years, I’ve learned not to speculate on what Jethro knows or does not know. That man is an enigma wrapped up in a riddle at times, and you’d do well to remember that,” Ducky said as he bagged and tagged the shard for transport up to Abby’s lab.
“Duly noted, Doctor.”
“Well now, Mr. Palmer, with this find, I think you can consider yourself redeemed for the day,” Ducky said. “What do you say we get this lad closed up and prepped for transport, hmm?
“Just when I think I’ve seen it all,” Palmer said as he prepared to close up the body.
========
Gibbs rode the elevator one floor up to Abby’s lab, finding her and McGee engrossed in the contents of PO Mitchell’s hard drive. Both computer experts were furiously typing away, trying to break the multiple levels of encryption on the machine.
“I swear, I’m going to get into this thing if it’s the last thing I do,” Abby growled as she received yet another access denied message for her troubles. Sneaking up behind both her and McGee, Gibbs leaned his head over her shoulder.
“Or you could just take a break.” McGee jumped and spun around. Abby let out a little squeak.
“Gibbs! How many times have I told you not to do that? You know I hate it!” she said as she gave him a light shove.
“But, it wouldn’t be any fun then, Abbs.” Gibbs smiled. “I have something I need you to look at, and I need to steal McGee from you.”
“What did you find in the body?” McGee asked.
“It’s what we didn’t find that’s the problem, McGee. No organs, no soft tissue, just a piece of what looked like metal. I need Abby to analyze it and I need you for a little research,” Gibbs said.
McGee gaped. “Nothing? How is there nothing? I thought Ducky said no signs of trauma at the scene.”
“He did.”
“Ooh. Hinky!” Abby said with a waggle of her dark eyebrows, eyes alight as Ducky strolled into her lab.
“Hello, Abigail. I come bearing a fine, strange gift,” Ducky said as he extended his hand with the evidence bag of the shard. “This was pulled out of PO Mitchell, and as I’m sure Gibbs has already informed you, was the only thing we found inside him. I am certain you can ‘work your magic’ to find out what it is?”
“Of course, Ducky. Never doubt it,” Abby said as she smiled and signed the evidence tag, preserving the chain of evidence.
“Uh, boss? What did you want me to research? If it’s okay with you, I’ll just do it down here in case Abby needs any help,” McGee said.
Gibbs sighed. This was going to be really embarrassing, and Abby would love every minute of it. “I need you to research every recording of alien encounters in the last four months. When Abby’s done, she can help you, too.”
McGee’s jaw hit the workbench. “A-alien? Boss? Are you feeling okay?”
“Yes, McGee I’m fine. I just have a gut feeling. Now get on it!”
“On it, boss!”
“I’m going for coffee.”
Abby watched Gibbs breeze out of her lab, her black painted fingernail massaging the side of her face. “This is way more than hinky.”
========
A few hours after Ducky dropped the unknown shard of metal from PO Mitchell off with Abby, Gibbs found himself at an impasse. Even coffee wasn’t helping his thought train anymore. Gibbs blew out a frustrated breath and looked over his computer monitor at Ziva and Tony.
“Ziva, DiNozzo, what do you have so far?”
Tony sighed. “Nothing much, boss. I’m still trying to locate most of Mitchell’s remaining family. I’ve got calls in to his shipmates, but since they’ve been on liberty since the Stennis put in to port, they’re in the wind.”
“And I do not have much better news, Gibbs. Mitchell paid cash for most everything. He had no credit cards and no car payment. No student loans and the man barely managed his checking account. I do not see any history at all of excessive spending. The man was very fungal.”
“Frugal, Ziva. It’s frugal. Fungal is like mushrooms, and that would be really gross,” DiNozzo said as he swiveled around in circles in his chair and crinkled his nose, images of green mold now running through his head.
“Fungal, frugal, whatever. You get the point!” Ziva said as she gestured animatedly with a pencil in her hand.
Gibbs’ cell phone rang. “Keep at it. We need answers,” Picking up his ringing cell phone, he barked his customary greeting. “Yeah, Gibbs. I’ll be right down, Abby.”
========
Gibbs stepped through the threshold of Abby’s lab and was immediately assaulted by loud rock music blaring at ear shattering decibel levels from her speakers. He thanked the Director every day for her soundproof lab.
“Whaddya got for me, Abbs?”
Abby turned to face her boss, her face alight with energy only present when she was on the cusp of something new and exciting. “Gibbs, this shard of whatever is the freakiest thing I’ve ever seen! Like freakier than a Predialien freaky. Like really freaky!”
A raised eyebrow was his only response.
Slowing down to accommodate for the generation gap, Abby said, “You have no idea what a Predalien is, do you?”
Gibbs shook his head to the negative.
“A couple of years ago, some crazy people made a mash up of Alien and Predator, and the Predalien comes along when the alien and the predator…” Abby trailed off, seeing the annoyed look on Gibbs’ face. “…You-don’t-care-at-all-because-you-hate-pop-culture-and-you-just-want-to-know-what-I-found,” she spit out in a rush.
“That about sums it up, Abbs.”
Abby turned and walked to her computers, bringing up the analysis of the shard. “Okay. I ran the shard through Mr. Mass Spec, and I got nothing. Nada. Zip! I thought maybe it was my machine, so I cleaned and recalibrated and tried again. Same result. You know what I found? I think that this shard - it’s from no metal that exists on Earth.”
That certainly was not the news he had been hoping for. “Anything else?”
“Yes,” Abby said, moving around her computers to face the plasma directly. She began to flip through documents already preloaded on the screen. “I scanned the symbols on the shard and ran it through a program McGee and wrote that translates foreign and ancient languages to English. Again, nada. Nothing in the databank on this one, Bossman. This language doesn’t exist, or we just discovered a new one. I’m going with a new one, because that means I can name it!”
“How is this good news, Abby?” Gibbs asked.
“It’s not, really. But I know what killed Petty Officer Mitchell.”
“Shouldn’t that have been the first thing out of your mouth?”
“But Gibbs! I wouldn’t have anything to lead up to if I did that! Okay. This is what makes this shard really, really freaky,” Abby said as she walked over and picked up the small evidence bag. “This thing is radioactive.”
Gibbs looked stunned. “Radioactive? How?”
“I don’t know. But it’s a weird radiation. It’s not the atomic bomb type radioactive. In fact, the signature it gives off doesn’t even show up on a dosimeter.”
“So then how do you know it’s radioactive?”
Abby picked up her lunch, formerly a turkey sandwich. “Because it cooked my lunch.”
Gibbs looked at Abby’s turkey sandwich, now a charred and unrecognizably blackened piece of meat resembling a hockey puck. “Are we in any danger?”
“I don’t think so. It’s so weird, Gibbs. I was nuking my turkey for lunch, and the shard was on the table near to the microwave. As soon as I turned it on, the microwave quadrupled its power output. It’s almost like it’s alive,” Abby said with a wave of her fingers.
“You’re going to have to do better than that, Abby,” Gibbs responded.
The forensic tech sighed. “It seems like it picks when it wants to give off its radiation, and even then I think it’s some type of mechanical radiation. I don’t know. I’m still working out the details. I do know for sure that some of my machines have been going crazy since Ducky brought that thing to me a couple hours ago. It’s like things have been humming with extra electricity.”
“What does this have to do with PO Mitchell?”
“Well, if the proximity of the shard can do this to my turkey sandwich, what do you think it did to Mitchell’s insides?” Abby asked. “I’m not sure how it ended up in Mitchell in the first place, but my best guess is that he swallowed it. Maybe he didn’t want someone to find it,” Abby said with a shrug.
“Thanks, Abby,” Gibbs said as he handed her a large Caf-pow! and a platonic peck on the cheek.
“No problemo, Bossman. Oh, and McGee wants to see you. He’s in my office with that research you wanted. Are you going to tell me what you think is going on?” Abby asked as she followed Gibbs to her office adjacent the ballistics lab as he went to check on McGee.
“Not until I know for sure,” Gibbs tossed over his shoulder, not bothering to look back at her. As the doors slid open with a hiss and a beep, McGee looked up from his cyber sleuthing to greet his boss.
“Boss, I’ve got all that research you wanted,” McGee said, hesitating.
“Spit it out, McGee.”
“There was kinda a lot of it. Is there something specific you want me to narrow it down to?”
“What’s the most outlandish sighting on Earth?” Gibbs asked.
“Oh, that’s easy. About four months ago, a ton of reports came flooding in from a place called Mission City. It’s near the Hoover Dam. Apparently, several hundred people claim that giant alien robots trashed their city in some sort of fist-fight to the death. They claim it was complete with jets, helicopters and big, big, guns,” McGee said.
“Okay, I believe in aliens, and even I don’t buy that story,” Abby said as she sat down at her desk next to Tim, black patent leather platform boots propped up on the table. “That’s just…lame. You’d think people could come up with something better than that!”
Gibbs was deep in thought, though his face would never belie that. “That’s good work, you two. McGee, Abby help DiNozzo and David upstairs. They’re having trouble tracking Mitchell’s friends and family down.”
As Abby and McGee rode the elevator up to the ground floor, Gibbs walked by the evidence table in the lab and grabbed the shard. He had a trip to make, and he needed to make it now. The Gunny needed answers, and there was only one person on Earth he was sure would know.
========
Next Up: Gibbs has a flashback. I know I said I’d do this scene in the previous chapter, but it’s just gotten too long to post in a single go. I wanted to make sure I did justice to Gibbs’ Gulf War experience with the Autobots, so I’m giving it its own chapter.
Disclaimer: Sigh. Still poor. Must not be mine. Dammit.
Chapter 3
Washington, D.C.
Gathered in the bullpen of the NCIS main squad room, Gibbs and his team were going over what they knew so far about their case. Unfortunately, it wasn’t much.
“PO Second Jonathan Mitchell, twenty six, born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota,” Ziva said as she flipped through information on the plasma with the wireless remote. “He was an only child, raised by a single parent, his mother, after his father was killed in a drive by shooting. By all accounts, he did not do very well in school, though he was an exceptionally bright child. He joined the Navy straight out of high school at eighteen, has worked his way through the enlisted ranks, and has been stationed on active cruises since the end of his cryptology training.”
DiNozzo stood up and walked toward the middle of the group. “I just got off the phone with his CO, Lt. Eileen Walker, and she said Mitchell was an above average crypto, very skilled and extremely driven. She said that he had a tendency to dream, and had, and I quote, ‘A vivid imagination for all things alien.’ He spent all his down time researching and reading about it. She said that he had recently become convinced that some giant alien robot was out to kill him. Sounds like someone else we know,” Tony said, shooting a look at McGee.
“Tony, just because I play MMORPGs does not mean I automatically believe in aliens,” McGee said with a sigh. “How many times do I have to tell you that?”
“Until I believe it, McGee.”
“More like until you grow up,” McGee muttered under his breath with a lidded glare. Louder, McGee said, “I’d like to see you say that to Abby, Tony.”
“She loves me. She would never…” He trailed off. “Would she?”
“Aliens are at the top of her list of things she believes in that she can’t see. I would love to see you try.”
Gibbs took a sip of his coffee. “Okay. DiNozzo, get on the horn and talk to Mitchell’s family. Ziva, go through his financial records. McGee, go see what Abby has on his laptop. I’m going to see Ducky.”
========
“Ah, Jethro! Just the man I was hoping to see,” Ducky said cheerfully as he looked up from his work. Dressed in his customary green scrubs and facemask propped on his head, the Medical Examiner handed three vials of blood and a few meager tissue samples to Jimmy. “To Abby, if you please, Mr. Palmer.”
“Right away, Dr. Mallard.” Gibbs watched as Palmer beat a hasty exit up one floor to Abby’s lab, still unsure if he’d been forgiven for his slip of the tongue earlier at the crime scene. The senior NCIS agent inwardly smiled. It was still fun to scare the probies, even if he would never admit that to anyone but himself.
“What have you got so far, Duck?”
“Well, it’s a most peculiar thing. I’ve never actually seen anything like this before,” Ducky said as he and Gibbs stopped in front of the body of PO Mitchell. Gibbs peered inside the hollowed out cavity of the body and looked around.
“Where are all the organs?”
Ducky stuck a gloved finger up in Gibbs’ face as he made his point. “That is precisely why I wanted to talk to you. You see, for once, Mr. Palmer was not wrong when he said something strange had happened. You remember earlier today when my young assistant was struggling so mightily to retrieve a liver temperature, correct?”
Gibbs raised an eyebrow. “I was there, Duck.”
“Of course you were, Jethro. The reason we couldn’t ascertain the time of death at the scene was because our unfortunate Petty Officer Mitchell has no organs left in his body,” Ducky said as he pointed to the cavity.
“So they were taken out?”
“No, I don’t think so, though I’m entirely unsure how it would have happened. When I cut him open, all his bones were present, but his soft tissue from his torso was completely gone. It was like they had never been there,” Ducky said incredulously, the perplexed expression on the medical examiner’s face finding its way into Ducky’s verbal exposition.
“Signs of trauma?” Gibbs asked, feeling the case get weirder by the minute.
“Positively none! That’s what’s so confusing. There were no signs of trauma, cuts, abrasions, breaks, or even so much as a puncture mark the poor lad’s body,” Ducky said as Palmer, finished with his errands to Abby, walked back into autopsy. “We’ll just have to wait for the tox screen, I suppose.”
“You know, in ancient Egypt, the pharaohs were mummified by having their brains ripped out through their noses. Do you think something like that could have happened here?” Palmer asked casually with a silly smirk on his face. Ducky and Gibbs could only stare.
“Well, unless someone has figured out how to pull a man’s lungs out through his nose, which I may remind you, Mr. Palmer, are far bigger than his nose, I highly doubt it,” Ducky said. “Think before you speak, Jimmy! Think!”
Feeling properly chastised for the second time in one day, Palmer dropped his head and slumped his shoulders. Gibbs saw him deflate like a balloon. “Yes, Dr. Mallard.”
Ducky walked over to the other side of the table and put his hand on his young protégé’s shoulder. “You are a remarkably bright young man, Jimmy. One day, I will not be here to guide you, but you will not require it. You needn’t try so hard to impress us. That will come in due time.”
“I understand. I just that sometimes my mind gets a little excited, you know? My brain gets behind of my mouth,” Palmer said as he looked down to stare at the body. Anything to avoid Gibbs’ glare. Ducky nodded in sympathetic understanding.
But as he looked down, Palmer caught sight of something wedged between the ribcage and the spinal column of the victim. Cocking his head slightly to the side and narrowing his eyes, Jimmy walked across the room and grabbed a nearby magnifying glass off Ducky’s desk.
“What do you see, Palmer?” Gibbs asked as Jimmy returned the gurney on which PO Mitchell lay.
Straining to get a better look, Palmer tried to Tetris in the magnifying glass to see what he found. “I’m not sure. It looks like some sort of shard or something. It’s lodged between the seventh and eighth ribs, pressed up against the C8 vertebrae.” Switching out the magnifying glass for a set of forceps, Palmer dug into Mitchell’s chest. Twisting his wrist just right, he managed to pull the foreign object free.
“Ah ha!” he said with triumph. His expression shifted from happiness to confusion in a split second. “What is it? Geez, for it’s size, this thing is really heavy!”
Held securely in the tip of the industrial size tweezers, was a small piece of what appeared to be metal, brownish black in color, about three inches wide by about two inches across. The edges were jagged, as if the piece was ripped violently free from its mother source.
“I have positively no idea. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Look, it’s got some sort of strange symbols on it,” Ducky said as he took the shard from Palmer to examine.
“I don’t know of any language in existence that looks like this one. Maybe one of the ancient languages?” Palmer speculated.
“No, I don’t think so. Old hieroglyphics were not this complex. Gibbs, do you have--” Ducky cut himself off as he heard the doors to autopsy whoosh open and observed Gibbs step into the waiting elevator.
“Do you think he knows what it is, Dr. Mallard?” Palmer asked as the doors to the elevator slid closed. “It just looks so…alien.”
“Jimmy, over the years, I’ve learned not to speculate on what Jethro knows or does not know. That man is an enigma wrapped up in a riddle at times, and you’d do well to remember that,” Ducky said as he bagged and tagged the shard for transport up to Abby’s lab.
“Duly noted, Doctor.”
“Well now, Mr. Palmer, with this find, I think you can consider yourself redeemed for the day,” Ducky said. “What do you say we get this lad closed up and prepped for transport, hmm?
“Just when I think I’ve seen it all,” Palmer said as he prepared to close up the body.
========
Gibbs rode the elevator one floor up to Abby’s lab, finding her and McGee engrossed in the contents of PO Mitchell’s hard drive. Both computer experts were furiously typing away, trying to break the multiple levels of encryption on the machine.
“I swear, I’m going to get into this thing if it’s the last thing I do,” Abby growled as she received yet another access denied message for her troubles. Sneaking up behind both her and McGee, Gibbs leaned his head over her shoulder.
“Or you could just take a break.” McGee jumped and spun around. Abby let out a little squeak.
“Gibbs! How many times have I told you not to do that? You know I hate it!” she said as she gave him a light shove.
“But, it wouldn’t be any fun then, Abbs.” Gibbs smiled. “I have something I need you to look at, and I need to steal McGee from you.”
“What did you find in the body?” McGee asked.
“It’s what we didn’t find that’s the problem, McGee. No organs, no soft tissue, just a piece of what looked like metal. I need Abby to analyze it and I need you for a little research,” Gibbs said.
McGee gaped. “Nothing? How is there nothing? I thought Ducky said no signs of trauma at the scene.”
“He did.”
“Ooh. Hinky!” Abby said with a waggle of her dark eyebrows, eyes alight as Ducky strolled into her lab.
“Hello, Abigail. I come bearing a fine, strange gift,” Ducky said as he extended his hand with the evidence bag of the shard. “This was pulled out of PO Mitchell, and as I’m sure Gibbs has already informed you, was the only thing we found inside him. I am certain you can ‘work your magic’ to find out what it is?”
“Of course, Ducky. Never doubt it,” Abby said as she smiled and signed the evidence tag, preserving the chain of evidence.
“Uh, boss? What did you want me to research? If it’s okay with you, I’ll just do it down here in case Abby needs any help,” McGee said.
Gibbs sighed. This was going to be really embarrassing, and Abby would love every minute of it. “I need you to research every recording of alien encounters in the last four months. When Abby’s done, she can help you, too.”
McGee’s jaw hit the workbench. “A-alien? Boss? Are you feeling okay?”
“Yes, McGee I’m fine. I just have a gut feeling. Now get on it!”
“On it, boss!”
“I’m going for coffee.”
Abby watched Gibbs breeze out of her lab, her black painted fingernail massaging the side of her face. “This is way more than hinky.”
========
A few hours after Ducky dropped the unknown shard of metal from PO Mitchell off with Abby, Gibbs found himself at an impasse. Even coffee wasn’t helping his thought train anymore. Gibbs blew out a frustrated breath and looked over his computer monitor at Ziva and Tony.
“Ziva, DiNozzo, what do you have so far?”
Tony sighed. “Nothing much, boss. I’m still trying to locate most of Mitchell’s remaining family. I’ve got calls in to his shipmates, but since they’ve been on liberty since the Stennis put in to port, they’re in the wind.”
“And I do not have much better news, Gibbs. Mitchell paid cash for most everything. He had no credit cards and no car payment. No student loans and the man barely managed his checking account. I do not see any history at all of excessive spending. The man was very fungal.”
“Frugal, Ziva. It’s frugal. Fungal is like mushrooms, and that would be really gross,” DiNozzo said as he swiveled around in circles in his chair and crinkled his nose, images of green mold now running through his head.
“Fungal, frugal, whatever. You get the point!” Ziva said as she gestured animatedly with a pencil in her hand.
Gibbs’ cell phone rang. “Keep at it. We need answers,” Picking up his ringing cell phone, he barked his customary greeting. “Yeah, Gibbs. I’ll be right down, Abby.”
========
Gibbs stepped through the threshold of Abby’s lab and was immediately assaulted by loud rock music blaring at ear shattering decibel levels from her speakers. He thanked the Director every day for her soundproof lab.
“Whaddya got for me, Abbs?”
Abby turned to face her boss, her face alight with energy only present when she was on the cusp of something new and exciting. “Gibbs, this shard of whatever is the freakiest thing I’ve ever seen! Like freakier than a Predialien freaky. Like really freaky!”
A raised eyebrow was his only response.
Slowing down to accommodate for the generation gap, Abby said, “You have no idea what a Predalien is, do you?”
Gibbs shook his head to the negative.
“A couple of years ago, some crazy people made a mash up of Alien and Predator, and the Predalien comes along when the alien and the predator…” Abby trailed off, seeing the annoyed look on Gibbs’ face. “…You-don’t-care-at-all-because-you-hate-pop-culture-and-you-just-want-to-know-what-I-found,” she spit out in a rush.
“That about sums it up, Abbs.”
Abby turned and walked to her computers, bringing up the analysis of the shard. “Okay. I ran the shard through Mr. Mass Spec, and I got nothing. Nada. Zip! I thought maybe it was my machine, so I cleaned and recalibrated and tried again. Same result. You know what I found? I think that this shard - it’s from no metal that exists on Earth.”
That certainly was not the news he had been hoping for. “Anything else?”
“Yes,” Abby said, moving around her computers to face the plasma directly. She began to flip through documents already preloaded on the screen. “I scanned the symbols on the shard and ran it through a program McGee and wrote that translates foreign and ancient languages to English. Again, nada. Nothing in the databank on this one, Bossman. This language doesn’t exist, or we just discovered a new one. I’m going with a new one, because that means I can name it!”
“How is this good news, Abby?” Gibbs asked.
“It’s not, really. But I know what killed Petty Officer Mitchell.”
“Shouldn’t that have been the first thing out of your mouth?”
“But Gibbs! I wouldn’t have anything to lead up to if I did that! Okay. This is what makes this shard really, really freaky,” Abby said as she walked over and picked up the small evidence bag. “This thing is radioactive.”
Gibbs looked stunned. “Radioactive? How?”
“I don’t know. But it’s a weird radiation. It’s not the atomic bomb type radioactive. In fact, the signature it gives off doesn’t even show up on a dosimeter.”
“So then how do you know it’s radioactive?”
Abby picked up her lunch, formerly a turkey sandwich. “Because it cooked my lunch.”
Gibbs looked at Abby’s turkey sandwich, now a charred and unrecognizably blackened piece of meat resembling a hockey puck. “Are we in any danger?”
“I don’t think so. It’s so weird, Gibbs. I was nuking my turkey for lunch, and the shard was on the table near to the microwave. As soon as I turned it on, the microwave quadrupled its power output. It’s almost like it’s alive,” Abby said with a wave of her fingers.
“You’re going to have to do better than that, Abby,” Gibbs responded.
The forensic tech sighed. “It seems like it picks when it wants to give off its radiation, and even then I think it’s some type of mechanical radiation. I don’t know. I’m still working out the details. I do know for sure that some of my machines have been going crazy since Ducky brought that thing to me a couple hours ago. It’s like things have been humming with extra electricity.”
“What does this have to do with PO Mitchell?”
“Well, if the proximity of the shard can do this to my turkey sandwich, what do you think it did to Mitchell’s insides?” Abby asked. “I’m not sure how it ended up in Mitchell in the first place, but my best guess is that he swallowed it. Maybe he didn’t want someone to find it,” Abby said with a shrug.
“Thanks, Abby,” Gibbs said as he handed her a large Caf-pow! and a platonic peck on the cheek.
“No problemo, Bossman. Oh, and McGee wants to see you. He’s in my office with that research you wanted. Are you going to tell me what you think is going on?” Abby asked as she followed Gibbs to her office adjacent the ballistics lab as he went to check on McGee.
“Not until I know for sure,” Gibbs tossed over his shoulder, not bothering to look back at her. As the doors slid open with a hiss and a beep, McGee looked up from his cyber sleuthing to greet his boss.
“Boss, I’ve got all that research you wanted,” McGee said, hesitating.
“Spit it out, McGee.”
“There was kinda a lot of it. Is there something specific you want me to narrow it down to?”
“What’s the most outlandish sighting on Earth?” Gibbs asked.
“Oh, that’s easy. About four months ago, a ton of reports came flooding in from a place called Mission City. It’s near the Hoover Dam. Apparently, several hundred people claim that giant alien robots trashed their city in some sort of fist-fight to the death. They claim it was complete with jets, helicopters and big, big, guns,” McGee said.
“Okay, I believe in aliens, and even I don’t buy that story,” Abby said as she sat down at her desk next to Tim, black patent leather platform boots propped up on the table. “That’s just…lame. You’d think people could come up with something better than that!”
Gibbs was deep in thought, though his face would never belie that. “That’s good work, you two. McGee, Abby help DiNozzo and David upstairs. They’re having trouble tracking Mitchell’s friends and family down.”
As Abby and McGee rode the elevator up to the ground floor, Gibbs walked by the evidence table in the lab and grabbed the shard. He had a trip to make, and he needed to make it now. The Gunny needed answers, and there was only one person on Earth he was sure would know.
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Next Up: Gibbs has a flashback. I know I said I’d do this scene in the previous chapter, but it’s just gotten too long to post in a single go. I wanted to make sure I did justice to Gibbs’ Gulf War experience with the Autobots, so I’m giving it its own chapter.