by Cam Daly
“I need to thin out that group a little. Still no sign of heavier backup?”
“Nothing yet. Are you going to try to engage them then come back for Connor?”
She wished she had some way to review her past missions for a similar situation. Her one idea seemed almost too cruel. And risky.
“Well, Keryapt? Clear the way first, or risk bringing Connor with you?”
“I think there’s another way.”
“What other way?”
“Hold on while I get Hawk in here.”
Kery ran to a conference room on the east side of the 30th floor and smashed open a window. The resulting shards spun down, flashing with reflected sunlight as they headed for the canopy over the plaza far below. She ordered Hawk to fly inside to the elevator car.
“I’d rather not be that far away from Connor, in case more are in the building somewhere.” Talking out loud seemed to help alleviate her indecisiveness. “Shadow, I’m giving you access to the Interloper’s biolab. We’ve encountered Tumorish before - how long for a counteragent that works on humans?”
“At least 30 seconds. So what’s the plan?” Before Keryapt could reply, Shadow apparently noticed something in the data feed from Hawk. “Movement near Connor!”
The Active dashed back to the elevator lobby. Briggs wasn’t dead after all. His face had been shredded when the camera exploded but somehow he was dragging himself across the floor towards one of the plasma arc weapons.
She snapped the weapon up just before he could. “I doubt you can hear me still, whatever human awareness remains, but I’m sorry for what happened to you. And for what I’m about to do next.”
The alien parasite which had devoured a significant part of the poor bastard’s brain didn’t care about injury or pain the host suffered. It would drive him on until so much damage had been done to the host that its cardiovascular or nervous system failed completely. He glared at her with his remaining eye.
She picked him up with one hand and hauled him into the conference room, then repositioned Hawk so it could monitor him and Connor at the same time.
“Keryapt, why don’t you just finish him off?”
“I need him moving. You’ll see.” Kery clipped the plasma arc weapon to the back of her combat suit then returned to Connor's elevator. She climbed through the ceiling hatch and disabled the emergency brake mechanisms. She was almost ready.
Back in the elevator car, she pulled Connor inside and heard him manage something between a groan and a whimper. She bent down to him and put a cool hand to his face. “I’m going to get you out of here. It might get a little bumpy, like one of your amusement park rides. Try to focus on staying calm.” As she spoke his pulse slowed a bit. Good. The slower the better.
“Shadow, give me a connection to Conner’s phone.”
“Done. Why?”
“To calm him down.”
She set his phone to speaker mode and placed it near his head. “Connor, I’m going to be moving back and forth some, so focus on my voice. Oh, and let me take your jacket.” She was careful not to pull too hard at his paralyzed limbs, then threw the jacket into the elevator lobby.
“His jacket, Keryapt? What good - oh, I think I am starting to get it.”
Kery deactivated the emergency stop setting on the elevator control panel and the doors began to slide shut. She quickly clambered back to the roof, grabbed one of the six elevator cables, set her feet grapplers to maximum and fired the plasma gun to cut the cable just above where it met the car. The tension on the cable caused it to try to jump out of her hand but she held on to it.
“So, Connor, I’m on top of the elevator. That sound you heard was me cutting one cable free. Don’t worry, you won’t fall.”
With its doors finally shut, the elevator could finally follow the human fire code requirement to head to the ground floor. It started downward with her top, holding the severed cable taut.
As the top of the elevator reached the 30th floor she jumped back through the doors she had torn open a minute earlier, still pulling the cut cable. For each floor that Connor’s car descended, she got another three meters of slack. She picked up his jacket and walked the cable past Hawk and into the conference room.
“I’m still on the 30th floor for another few seconds. Don’t worry, I’ll catch up to you.”
Briggs resisted feebly as she grabbed his body. She reminded herself that there was no chance the human host could have survived once the Tumorish infection advanced to this point.
She replaced Briggs’ police jacket with Connor’s slightly scorched one, pausing once to drag the slack cable into the room. Without anything pulling at it, it would probably all fall back into the elevator shaft.
“Shadow, any sign of enemy reinforcements?”
“Still nothing. You’re going to use Briggs…”
“To make them think that they are winning. Yes.”
She carried the dying Tumorish and the cable to the open window, then used her immense strength to tie a crude knot around his waist. She carefully pushed him out the window and made sure the cable wouldn’t catch on anything.
“So, Connor, that Tumorish policeman is now dangling at the end of the elevator cable I cut. As your elevator descends, he will be lowered down the outside of the building at the same rate.”
A quick check of the Dove remote showed that there were a pair of Tumorish almost directly below Briggs, on the covered plaza at ground level. She threw a chair out the window to make sure they would look up and spot him sooner rather than later.
“Keryapt, Connor is halfway down. Shouldn’t you-“
“I know, I know!” She raced back to the elevator lobby and jumped into the open shaft, then slid down the cables to Connor.
“Counteragent is ready. We suggest giving it to him immediately.”
“Got it.” She was pleased about her idea with Briggs. Almost giddy. “By the way, what do you call it when I go running back and forth without telling you my plan in advance?”
“Huh? I don’t know.”
“I’m being a hyper-Active!”
“Oh, Keryapt. That’s awful. Worse than the last one.”
She landed on the roof of Connor’s car and climbed inside. His eyes widened as she pulled the injector out from behind her back and stuck it in his neck.
“This will help you. Your paralysis should pass quickly.”
She caressed his forehead, felt the fever there.
Kery switched her sensorium to the Planning Stage. Camera remotes showed that the elevator cable attached to Briggs had lowered him from the 30th floor window to the 20th. He left a red streak on a few of the windows in the mid-twenties, but wasn’t moving as much now.
A squad of Tumorish were running out of the skyscraper, past the glass canopy over the plaza and into firing positions.
Shadow was studying them, profiling their movements and weapons. “What will you do next?”
The answer came a moment later. The attack was invisible to the naked eye but her remote’s spectral sensors picked up the energy beam. “Maser. Ouch.” The body of Briggs was being incinerated by a microwave laser in the multi-kilowatt range.
“Where are the rest?”
“There's one group of four still in the lobby. It looks like they decided that you were lowering Connor out the window.”
Keryapt scowled at Shadow’s update. She had hoped that all of them would leave once they thought they had killed their target. “Time for plan B.”
“You have a plan B?”
“Keryapt Zess always has a plan B, doesn't she?” She disappeared from the Stage.
She climbed back to the top of the elevator car. The other elevator cars were all parked with their doors open on the ground floor.
“Gravity here is almost 10 meters per second…”
As her car descended past the tenth floor, she pulled the pin off of one of Briggs’s grenades. A second later she leaned over into the adjacent shaft and fired a burst at the roof o
f the elevator below.
“…the timer is four seconds…”
Two of the Tumorish ran for that open elevator and peered inside, weapons ready. The hole she had just made in the top of the elevator car was just a few inches wide.
“…so I should drop it…now.”
She dropped the grenade. It fell perfectly towards the hole.
“Connor, it’s about to get bumpy. Think ‘amusement park’.”
As she passed the third floor she fired the plasma arc weapon at the cables on her own elevator car, cutting all of them in a full power blast. The severed cables sprang upwards with a reverberating twang and the car, safety systems destroyed earlier, plummeted down.
The grenade exploded just as it entered the open elevator car, sending a wave of incendiary vapor through the lobby. One Tumorish survived just long enough to fire at the doors of the elevator holding Kery and Connor, but by then they had already fallen past into the basement levels.
The hydraulic buffers at the bottom of the elevator shaft were never intended to catch a car in free fall. Connor would probably not have described the resulting crash as anything like an amusement park ride.
The run that followed could have been described as equally breathtaking.
CHAPTER 7
“How is the human?”
“He’s sleeping. He should be fine. Stop avoiding my question.”
Ruut took a look around the Planning Stage, verifying for the third time that the two of them were alone. “Does Shadow know about this, Keryapt?”
“She does not. And she won’t need to, if you can do what I am asking.”
“But she has to suspect.” He glanced nervously up at the Admiralty sigil in the corner of the Planning Stage. They could always be listening. “And I’m sure that they…”
“Yes, the Admiralty knows all about it.” They know all too well that I don’t have clear memories of my time as an Active. Or from before that, when I raised the girl who is now my Shadow. But Ruut didn’t need to know any of that.
“I’ve known you for a long time. This isn’t like the Keryapt Zess that I remember. You disappeared for ten years, then spent almost another ten as a…product tester. An Outsider. But before that, you were precise. You kept things simple. You got the job done-“
“-by making the decision every time to stay alive a little longer. Find a way to win. Usually by shooting people. Yes, I know the ‘Keryapt Zess’ way of doing things. But the experiences that let me strategize like that are…unclear to me. In a direct confrontation, my reflexes are enough to keep me alive. But the more complex planning and big picture stuff - keeping Connor alive, deciding who to trust, figuring out who might be an alien - that doesn’t come as easy as people assume it will for me. That’s why I need your help.”
“That’s a lot of responsibility, for me, then. But I think I can do it.”
She smiled in relief. “Any questions, then?”
“So you want me to take the complete database of your past actions, which is already broken down and tagged by Labworld Command for training and education purposes, and turn it into an expert system.”
“Yes.”
“And it will analyze whatever situation you’re in, and recommend what you - the old Active you, the ‘Keryapt Zess way’ you - would have done. If you were ever in a similar situation before.”
“Yes.”
“Lucky for you, that part is already mostly available.” He clacked his teeth together a few times, thinking. “And this system has to run entirely on the Interloper hardware, so that Shadow doesn’t know about it. And be accessible in such a way that she doesn’t see video playing in your display or anything like that.”
“I really wish there was another way, but I don’t want her or anyone else knowing.”
“How long do I have?”
“Connor will be unconscious for a while longer, and I have some prep work to do. You’ve got a few hours until he wakes up.”
“Hours? That’s a tall order. The interface will be very simple, not much more than a positive or negative indicator. You’ll have to talk out loud to yourself. And I’ll have to hand off some of my current work to other techs. We can refine it as we go.”
“Whatever you can do will help. I’ll tell Shadow that you’re working on something for me. For Horseplay.”
“Horseplay? What’s that?”
Her smile was wider now. “My next body. You won’t believe what the Admiralty has authorized.” She brought up the general schematic.
“That’s…amazing.”
She was surprised by his fearful expression. “You sound worried.”
“It’s just that, with that much power, you’ll have even less time to react to events. My work has to be that much better. That’s all.”
She hadn’t thought of it that way, but realized he could be right. “Then I’ll let you get to it.”
#
Connor’s earliest distinct memory was of the arrival of the ship. A wingless collection of larger boxes and smaller spheres, it was unclear how it could possibly have flown. The heat radiating from it had kept his brethren at bay, but he had dared get close enough to see the weak-looking face peering out from the inside. Like a young pup. Connor wanted to get closer to it, but it wouldn’t come out. He brought food and placed it at the edge of the burnt grass. His brethren helped, of course. They all naturally wanted to get closer to the new arrivals.
They took their time, waiting two full suns before opening their hatches. Connor and his people waited in shifts, just far enough away. When enough of the newcomers came out to inspect the offerings, the people charged. They timed it so that the aliens were able to make it back to their hatches just as they caught up to them, and they all entered the ship at the same time. Then Connor’s people entered the aliens.
When their conversion was done, they were astonished by how limited they had been before. They had been as strong as they were stupid. With their newly stolen intellect and knowledge of the starship, Connor’s people prepared to return home. They would have to explain why they were returning ahead of schedule, but it seemed unlikely that the government of the puny ones had the will to shoot down their greatest technical accomplishment.
Halfway there, destiny seized them. Connor himself remembered the shuddering of their ship, how an entire bulkhead had been torn away. The metal things that entered had subdued the people in seconds. The master of the metal things had become his master, taking his essence and improving on it. It offered Connor the chance to survive in servitude, to spread across whole worlds.
To become eternal.
He awoke in an unfamiliar tangle of sheets. The room was too dark to make out clearly but the smell of bacon was real. He struggled to get out of the covers and reach his feet but managed to trip over the neat pile of clothes next to the bed. His addled mind was further confused when Kery Lee seemed to appear from nowhere and caught him in mid-fall. Her grip on his shoulder and arm was like being in contact with a piece of gym equipment - soft on the exterior but unmovable rigidity contained within. She stared into his blinking eyes for a moment with a squint of concern then helped him upright.
“What happened to my clothes?” He eyed the pile at his feet with curiosity.
She let go of him as he regained his balance. “There was some Tumorish on them. I had to destroy them.”
“Oh. Right.” His hand went to the back of his head. Nothing unusual there. “That was just a dream. Wasn’t it? I was…something else. A yellow spot on the head of some sort of ape thing. Then a little…alien person. Then something caught our ship, improved us. Enslaved us.”
Kery didn’t look that concerned. “Yes, that was just a dream. Of your new genetic memories as a Tumorish.”
“My what?”
“The Craven discovered the Tumorish while observing a primitive world’s first interplanetary ship launch. The dream you had is hard coded into the invasive cells, as a reminder of what you owe the Craven. That’s why the
Tumorish serve them. To have a chance to spread.”
“But I thought - you said that I…”
“You? Oh, you’re fine. The drug I gave you halted the spread. But apparently it was enough to affect your memory some. I would need the right equipment to do a detailed scan, but you are no more than one percent Tumorish. Maybe two. You are safe now.”
His brain set that aside. He remembered the elevator, and stumbling up some stairs and getting in one of the dozens of cabs idling near the Transit building. He sat back on the bed and pulled a sheet over himself. It was a nice sheet. High thread count or something. He realized he was in a very modern apartment or hotel room which could have been almost anywhere in the world. “Where are we?”
“In a safe house near Market Street, a few blocks from where we were this morning. Do you want a minute to get dressed?” She had changed from the leathery looking body suit into some obviously new exercise gear. Her feet were still bare, and he realized that the black streaks on her ankles and lower legs weren’t just dirt or shadows.
She followed his gaze. “I got a little blown up. It’s mostly superficial.”
“Uh huh.” He rubbed his hands against his eyes, hard enough to see spots. “What the hell is going on?”
“May I?” She gestured towards the bed.
He pulled the sheets a little closer to himself and moved to give her room. She sat next to him. “The short version is that I am an alien ambassador from something called Fleet Four, here to monitor your world and investigate why my predecessor was killed. There are other aliens here as well. Something you did caused one of them, perhaps the most dangerous of them, to decide that they needed to know what you know.”
“The Tumorish.” He shuddered. “That’s a weird name. Are they like tumors?” A brief pause. “Do all aliens speak English?”
She smiled. “Pretty much none of us do. My body translates what each of us says into the language of the other. Everything we read, or hear and even our body language gets translated. My natural gestures are turned into movements of this body.”