A scream came from the deck above.
"Oh my God! They're breaking in! The spiders are breaking in!"
Screams rose from all around. From this deck. From above and below.
"The aliens are boarding us!"
People wailed. Screeches sounded. A roar echoed. Alien noises. Clattering feet.
Niles whimpered. "Oh, we're done for!"
"We will fight!" Emily said.
She looked around the room for a weapon. Shards of broken pottery? No. Useless. A fireplace poker? That was better. Maybe that African spear on the wall?
Then she saw it.
On the mantle.
An authentic Samurai sword. According to a little plaque, it was centuries old but still sharp.
Emily took a deep breath. Her legs trembled. Her heart pounded against her ribs. She reached out, gripped the katana, and drew the blade. It hissed free. Ripples gleamed across the folded steel.
"Emily!" Niles hovered backward. "What do you think you're doing with that? Put it away before you cut yourself."
A screech sounded somewhere in the ship. Nearby. A man screamed, then fell silent. A gunshot rang. Deep laughter rolled through the decks.
"Niles, stay here in the suite," Emily said, stepping toward the door.
He huffed. "Where do you think you're going, young lady? To fight? You're not a soldier."
"We're all soldiers now, Niles." She glanced at him. "Well, maybe not fussy little drones. Stay here. Hide in the closet. I'll be back. I hope."
"Fussy little drones?" he exclaimed. Something clicked inside him, and an array of blades, muzzles, and hooks sprouted from him. "Does this look like a fussy little drone to you? You forget that I'm designed to protect you, Princess. And protect you I shall." His voice softened. "You're the last of the House of Windsor. The last hope of Great Britain and the Commonwealth. I was made for times such as these. Come now, Emily. If fight we must … then let us fight with courage."
She looked at him. "I've never heard you speak so eloquently before."
He harrumphed. "Of course you have. I am always the paragon of elegance and eloquence." He spun, and his blades flashed. "Tallyho then, good princess! To war!"
Emily raised her katana. "To war."
She opened the door, left the royal suite, and stepped into a nightmare.
* * * * *
Emily walked down the corridor, katana held before her.
Leaving the royal suite was like stepping into another world. The opulence ended at the door. Diamond plate steel covered the deck. Pipes and cables ran along the curved walls. Fluorescent bulbs shone pitiless white light. The royal suite was just an illusion, an oasis of comfort aboard a military warship. A corner of heaven in hell.
For the Freedom had become hell. Screams echoed in the distance. Somebody ran by, barely sparing her a glance. His arm was gone, ending with a spurting stump. Blood speckled the deck.
A roar sounded deep in the distance. Somebody or something was cackling. A mighty boom shook the ship. The corridor whipped from side to side. Emily swayed and caught the bulkhead for support. The overhead lights flickered and died.
Darkness filled the corridor.
Emily gulped.
"Oh crumbs," she whispered.
The blast had cracked open a bulkhead. Cables spilled out, sparking, offering the only source of light. Emily kept walking, each step slow and cautious. She gazed into the darkness. Niles hovered beside her, his jewels reflecting the sparking light.
The corridor stretched ahead like a tunnel. Emily remembered herself as a girl, traveling the Chunnel under the sea, heading from England to France. She remembered being afraid of monsters in the dark, of how the tunnel never seemed to end.
"There's no such thing as monsters," her mother had told her.
But there was. Monsters were real. Monsters had always been real. And now they were here aboard this ship.
A scream sounded ahead.
Emily froze, hackles rising.
A shadow came lurching toward her!
Emily gasped and raised her blade, and Niles made a whirring, angry hissing sound.
But it was not a monster. It was a man. A soldier. He came running, and the sparkling light reflected in tears on his cheeks. His belly was gashed open. His insides were spilling out. The man was holding the gash, trying to keep his entrails inside, and as he ran, he called for his mother. He didn't even notice Emily. He ran by her, delusional with pain.
"Emily?" Niles whispered. "Perhaps we should return to the suite. We can both hide in the closet."
She gulped. "Maybe you're right."
Her courage fled. She was not ready for this.
She spun around, intending to rush back to her suite.
It was there.
It had been stalking her.
It loomed before her, grinning a terrible white grin in the darkness.
A rah.
Emily gasped and took a step back. She waved her blade before her.
"Step back!" she cried.
The enormous spider scuttled closer. It straightened its eight legs, rising taller. Its dorsal spines scraped the ceiling. The creature filled the tunnel, so large it could have swallowed her whole. Its grin widened, a vicious moon in the night, a Cheshire grin, a predator's grin. Multiple eyes like pools of blood blinked above the hellmouth.
"Ah, the princess . . .," it hissed. "My lord told us to kill the soldiers. But you … ah, you will decorate my web. Your womb will carry many eggs."
Emily stood, paralyzed, as it loomed above her. She could barely see it in the darkness. Just that horrible, grinning mouth, with its white teeth all slick with saliva, and the red eyes like balloons full of blood, and the tips of those terrible claws, long and black and reaching toward her. A spider? This was more than a spider. It was a demon. A dark god. It was darkness taken form, the most perfect of predators, hatched in the interstellar void, and she was its prey.
Emily could only stand before it, frozen in terror.
Then Niles shot forth.
The drone buzzed toward the rah, weapons flashing, thrusting every which way like the spikes of a blowfish.
"Have at you, scoundrel!" the robot cried.
Like a sphere of light, he flew toward the bulky dark form of the beast. With a great battle cry, Niles sank one of his blades into the rah's head. Just below an eye.
The blade couldn't have been longer than Emily's index finger. It didn't seem to bother the rah very much. With a swipe of a mighty claw, the alien knocked Niles down. The drone crashed onto the deck, and the rah slammed down its leg. Jewels spilled across the floor. Niles let out a pitiful mewl.
"Niles!" Emily cried.
The rah kicked the mutilated robot aside, then scuttled closer to Emily. For a big creature, it moved with incredible speed, its patter patter on the deck beating with the rhythm of a much smaller animal. The sparking cables flashed, lighting its form, revealing the forest of spines on its back. Upon every spike was impaled an enemy head, leering at Emily with dead eyes. All but one spike. One spike was waiting for her.
Join us, the severed heads seemed to say. Rot with us.
The rah rose before her again, its grin a celestial light, a crescent moon, hanging above Emily and washing her with its sickly, milky white. The teeth parted, and a red tongue slithered out, as long and thick as her arm. It licked her. From navel to forehead, that bloated tongue caressed her body, tasting, and the alien shivered with delight.
"Yes, you taste delicious," it hissed. "After my eggs hatch inside you, I will enjoy your flesh."
The tongue reached out again, dripping and sticky.
Emily let out a great cry, a howl, a torn scream, the cry of a girl who was dying in this ship, of the woman being born from her shattered shell. With the cry of childhood's end, Emily swung her katana downward.
The blade sliced clean through the alien tongue.
The hideous red muscle slapped onto the deck. It wriggled there, leaving trails of slim
e, a wounded worm.
The rah screamed. Blood spurted from its mouth. It tried to say something, could not, and instead let out a terrible squeal, a sound like pigs being butchered.
Emily swung her katana through the air. "Back, back!"
But it charged at her.
The mighty jaws widened, nearly filling the tunnel, a portal to agony. The tongue's stump bubbled with black blood.
Emily leaped back. The jaws snapped shut before her like a bear trap, nearly slicing off her arm. The beast roared again, scuttled closer. Even swinging the katana did not hold the beast back. She slammed the blade against its face, but it bounced off the exoskeleton. It was like hacking at a boulder.
She tripped over something. A cable, she thought. She fell to the deck. Cables snaked out from the cracked bulkhead, stirring, hissing, tips sparking with electricity. The rah slammed down one claw, and Emily squirmed aside. The claws slashed across her arm, drawing blood. She screamed.
The spider raised its claw again, then a second claw, a third, and the rah grinned, ready to slam down those claws and impale her.
Emily lifted the sparking cables and thrust them upward.
The severed tips of the cables touched the spider's underbelly. Electricity leaped into the beast, branching across its body in fractals of light.
Emily hurried backward to safety. Electricity raced across the rah like luminous serpents, and the alien screamed, a pained cry, high-pitched. It wobbled, fell onto the cables, then burst into flame.
Heart pounding, Emily raced around the burning alien, careful not to cut herself on those long claws. Behind the spider, she knelt on the deck, and her heart broke.
"Oh, Niles."
The drone lay on the deck, his hull cracked open, revealing gears and flashing microchips. His weapons had retracted. He still seemed to be alive. His twin cameras moved from side to side on their stalks.
"I've been savaged!" he said. "Oh Lord. Oh, look at me now! No. No! Actually don't look. Look away, Emily! I'm a monster now."
"Oh shush, Niles," she said. "You're just a little broken. We can fix you."
"I'm done for. Done for! Leave me behind, Emily. Keep going! Leave me to die. Make sure that they write songs about my sacrifice. Make sure they mention my jewels."
"You're not going to die, Niles. But I might if I must listen to any more of your whingeing." She laughed and wiped tears from her eyes. "My dear Niles, it was rather brave of you to charge at the beast like that. Foolish but brave."
She lifted the broken drone, tucked him under her arm, and kept moving down the corridor.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Fort Liberty
Nebraska
07:20 December 26, 2199
Dawn rose over Fort Liberty. The morning light spilled over a scene from hell. Corpses lay across the courtyard and beneath the defensive wall. Blood stained the snow. The battle still raged, and the guns still boomed.
But hope rose with this dawn.
Where two hundred guns had fired now roared five thousand. For hours, the brave Badgers Company had held the fort alone. Now the full brigade was mustered. Now they showed the enemy their true might.
The rahs shrieked in fear. Bullets pounded them, cracking exoskeletons, taking eyes, shattering legs. The aliens kept fighting. Not a single rah retreated. The humans trapped them—some companies inside the fort, the others pushing from the fields. Squeezing. Squeezing the aliens and making them bleed.
Now we're even, Bastian thought.
He stood on the wall, facing the southern fields. They had raised a great barricade where the gate had stood. Sandbags, pieces of scrap metal, and two armored trucks blocked the entrance, all topped with barbed wire. A hundred soldiers stood in the courtyard behind the barricade, and more topped the wall like medieval archers defending a castle. They had built makeshift guard towers from scaffolds and ladders. More soldiers stood atop them, armed with Gideon rifles and enough bullets to last for days.
One battalion was fighting in the field, driving the rahs against the walls, where the fort's defenders shot them down. The alien army screeched and clattered among the two human forces. Slowly, spider by spider, the humans were cutting them down.
"The rahs caught us with our pants down," Bastian said. "But now we're hitting them hard."
"Maybe your pants wouldn't fall down if you could find a belt that fits you," Alice said.
A bandage was wrapped around her head, red at the temple. Another bandage covered her arm. Bastian too was wounded. His arm was a bleeding mess, and his side was bandaged and aching. But both soldiers could still stand, still pull the trigger, so they still fought.
"Very funny," Bastian said. "You know, you could lay off the donuts in the rec room yourself. You're no—" He frowned. "Alice, what is that?"
They stared together toward the southern fields.
New spiders were arriving, scuttling through the snowy fields toward the base.
Just three. But Bastian had never seen anything more terrifying.
"They're huge," Alice whispered.
The smaller rahs, the ones Bastian had been fighting all day, raised their claws and chirped and grunted and hissed. It sounded almost like cheering. Those ones were about the size of horses. But the spiders approaching now dwarfed them. They were the size of woolly mammoths.
"What are those?" cried a sergeant.
"Jesus, we're screwed!" shouted a corporal.
"Why are they so big?" somebody said, pale and trembling.
Bastian stared, and his fists balled at his sides. "Among spiders on Earth, the females are larger. The female black widow makes the male look as insignificant as a larva. I believe we've been fighting only males so far." He slammed a fresh magazine into his trusty Gideon. "Well, that's about to change."
The three female spiders let out terrible shrieks. Bastian had never heard anything louder. He grimaced. Some soldiers dropped their guns and covered their ears. Icicles cracked, falling off the barbed wire and guard towers.
The beasts stormed forward, jaws open wide, full of fangs like swords.
"It couldn't be wrinkly little ETs from space," Bastian muttered, gripping his gun with weary fingers. "It had to be goddamn giant spiders."
Gideons roared all across the walls. Thousands of bullets flew at the spiders. But the females kept charging. It was like firing bullets at rumbling tanks. Pointless.
"Grenades!" Bastian shouted. "Tear them down with grenades!"
He himself was out of grenades. He scanned his surroundings, saw a dead corporal, and knelt by the young woman. He knew her. Valerie Bowie. A girl from a nearby farm who loved dogs. She went to his church. Bastian ripped grenades off her belt, then returned to his position. He stared off the wall.
The female rahs were closer.
With a small attachment, Gideon rifles could be converted into grenade launchers. Bastian screwed on the launching tube, then loaded the grenade. He aimed at one of the females and fired.
His grenade flew at the enemy.
From the walls, a dozen more grenades arced toward the spiders.
The three females paused, opened their jaws wide, and hissed. Strange organs extended from their mouths. Not tongues. These organs looked like black tubes.
Spinnerets, Bastian realized.
A second before the grenades could hit, the spiders spat sticky webs.
The webs caught the grenades in midair. Explosions shook the landscape, tearing the webs apart. The females kept charging, unhurt.
"Great," Bastian muttered. "They can sling webs. Of course they can."
"I always told you, dude," Alice said. "We females are way tougher than you males."
She was bantering, but Alice was pale and trembling. That head wound was nasty. She was possibly suffering from a concussion.
Under a hailstorm of bullets, the three females reached the southern wall. On Bastian's MindLink, he saw more females attacking the walls in different locations. All around, the male spiders were ce
lebrating.
"Die, humans, die!"
"Kill them, sisters!"
"Drink their blood!"
"Earth is ours!"
"Eresh, eresh!"
One female was approaching the gateway. From his position on the wall, Bastian fired another grenade. The female whipped her head toward him, shot a strand of webbing, and caught the grenade. It exploded in midair only meters away from Bastian.
The shock wave slammed into him. Shrapnel flew, pattering the wall.
Bastian groaned, stumbling backward, and bumped into Alice. She grabbed him before he could fall off the wall. His ears rang. Smoke filled the air. His body armor had absorbed the blow, sparing his organs, and his earplugs protected his eardrums from rupturing. But everything hurt. He looked around, dazed. For a moment he could just stare in shock, not sure if he was alive or dead.
Alice groaned beside him. "You okay, Bas?"
He blinked. He looked at a piece of shrapnel embedded into his armored vest. Another piece had cut through his sleeve and was stuck in his skin.
"I … think so?" he said. He could barely hear himself, and it wasn't just the earplugs. His ears rang. He shook his head madly, struggling to clear the haze.
The female spider was firing more strands, blocking more grenades. Explosions rocked the sky. Bullets kept pounding the female, but they just bounced off her armored abdomen. The spider reached the barricade protecting the camp—that pile of metal, sandbags, and armored trucks.
With long, thick legs, the massive spider lifted one of the armored trucks.
Bastian stared in wonder. That truck weighed many tons. The spider struggled. Her back legs drove into the ground. Her body was shaking, and bullets kept sparking against her abdomen. One bullet took an eye. But the spider kept at it. She managed to lift the truck overhead—then hurl it.
Bastian and Alice ducked.
The truck flew over their heads, then crashed into the courtyard, plowing through a squad of marines.
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