Rapunzel

By Laura Montgomery

First contact.

First sacrifice.

First answers.

FAA attorney Terrence Rogers dreams of space, but he spends his days on informed consent for space tourists. Young foreign service officer Hal Cooper faces real change with the arrival of an alien spaceship, but it means something else for Terrence.

A short story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ground Based Press
• Release date: Jan 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386922933

Book preview

Dedication

This one is for my dad, who was once a young foreign service officer.

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RAPUNZEL

YOU COULD STILL GET Independence Day on Netflix, which meant that people were evacuating the greater Washington Metropolitan area in droves.  It had caused problems, but not for everyone. 

It was getting close to five o’clock, and Terrence Rogers could hear Nigella’s voice coming from her office.  She wants me to swaddle Genevieve because ‘native’ people did it.  It makes the baby feel more secure.  It also takes a lot of time.  ‘Native’ people bound their women’s feet and practiced female circumcision.  They are not my role models.  Nigella was always angry.  She had her issues as a mother, but they were not what Terrence cared about right now.  Regardless of the etiquette failure of interrupting such important matters of state, Terrence felt the appearance of aliens might be worth it.

Might not.  What? Nigella snapped as she looked up and saw him in her doorway.  You would never know she was his junior by more than a decade.  Or that she worked at the Federal Aerospace Administration at his sufferance.

I’m going to the White House in an hour.  Do you have the prep?  Terrence had never been to the White House.  His palms kept turning damp, and he really needed the moisture wicking material he usually wore only on his bike.  Now he was in a suit, a real suit, not business casual, and it hung wrinkled and rumpled from his forty-five year old bureaucrat’s frame. He’d guessed right that the White House would want to hear from the FAA when the aliens came calling.

I’m almost done, she said.  So.  Aliens were on the far side of the moon, he was supposed to facilitate a lawful invitation from the U.S., and Nigella was chatting about her infant.

Give it to me, he grated, and, because the