Mother Ship

by Scott Bartlett

  Now, the training he’d received in Basic took over. His mind cleared, the situation snapped into focus, and he knew exactly what to do.

  “Put that down, nice and slow,” he told Chambers. “Take off that pack and place it over the pistol.”

  His old principal didn’t hesitate. He crouched, placed the weapon on the carpet, then stood with his hands raised above his head.

  But that wasn’t good enough. Max had to secure what his instructors had called the “danger zone.” Chambers might not be alone, and if he had brought friends, they could attack from any part of the house. Max had been too absorbed in what he’d found in his parents’ office to track what was happening on the first floor.

  The path to securing the premises started with making sure the threat Chambers himself represented was completely neutralized.

  “Lie on the floor, face-down. Away from your weapon.”

  Chambers frowned, but didn’t move.

  “Now.” Max gestured sharply with the Ruger.

  This time, the man complied, backing up before lowering himself to his knees and then into a prone position.

  “Clasp your hands behind your back, and don’t move them. Spread your legs.”

  Chambers did.

  Making sure to regularly check all possible avenues of attack—hallway in both directions, plus the doorway into the kitchen—Max patted Chambers down, making sure he didn’t have any hidden surprises waiting. As he did, his hands shook, which made himself feel a little ashamed.

  Go easy on yourself. You’ve never done this before. Not for real.

  Satisfied Chambers wore no concealed weapons, he stepped away, backing onto the stairs again so he couldn’t get flanked.

  He studied the man lying before him. He looked different. Of course, Max had already guessed that Chambers probably wasn’t really a high school principal—at least, that wasn’t all he was. Instead of his usual wool cardigan, he wore camouflage from head-to-toe, and shining black boots. Closer to his days as a SEAL, maybe, but Max felt sure he was something besides that, too.

  He resisted the urge to shake his head at how bizarre his life had suddenly become.

  “What the hell is going on?” he asked instead.

  10

  7 days to extinction

  Chambers spoke into the hallway carpet, his voice muffled. “I’m not here to hurt you, Max. Quite the opposite. I have a lot I need to tell you, and very little time to tell it to you. But first, you’re going to have to start trusting me, at least a little bit.”

  “That’s too bad.” Max’s voice barely trembled at all, which he was glad for. “Considering I just gained plenty of reasons not to trust you.”

  A sigh from the man lying with his face pressed into the floor. “I’m guessing you’ve already figured out some things.”

  “Like how my parents made me into some sort of experiment, you mean?”

  “You broke into their office, right? I figured that, judging from your reaction to seeing me. Believe me, I understand why you’re not inclined to trust me right now. I wouldn’t trust me either, in your position. But there’s someone looking for you who you should trust a lot less. I can help you avoid her—if that’s what you want. You can also join her. But your mother wanted you to be given a choice. She didn’t want you forced into anything.”

  “It’s a bit late for that.”

  “Things can get a lot worse, Max. They’re going to get weirder either way, but you can decide how dark they get. But before that, you need to listen to me.”

  “Is she really my mother?”

  Chambers twisted his head sideways to meet Max’s gaze. Then, he closed his eyes. “She’s the closest thing you’ll ever have to a mother. Your real one died in a car accident years ago.”

  Max’s shoulders rose and fell as he studied Chambers’ face. He remembered the many conversations they’d had. About life, and about the military. He remembered how Chambers had always made time for him, no matter how busy he was.

  Clearly, someone had paid him to offer that friendship—the better to monitor Max. But he supposed even a hired friend was better than no friend at all. He’d learned that the hard way.

  “Get up, and move slowly into the living room. Stay where I can see you. Make any sudden movement, and I’ll shoot you.”

  Chambers nodded, and complied, pushing himself deliberately to his feet. As he followed, Max scooped up Chambers’ pistol from the floor.

  They sat on opposite couches, facing each other across the living room’s hardwood floor, which his father—or rather, the actor who’d played his father—had installed himself a few years ago.

  Max looked Chambers in the eyes. “Talk.”

  The man nodded. “All right. I’ll start at the beginning. We’ve known about the existence of the species causing our present hardship for years.”

  “How?”

  “One of their ships crashed into a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. In the forties.”

  Max’s mouth fell open. “Good lord. Jimmy was right.”

  Chambers gave a tight smile. “Not as such. The little green men that feature in your friend’s conspiracy theories weren’t inside. Actually, the craft was unmanned.”

  “Hmm.” Of course he’d know about Jimmy’s theories.

  “What we did find was technology far beyond our own. Some of it, we shared with the public. The internet in its current form—or at least, its form as of a couple days ago—is based on some fiber-optic tech we found aboard that ship. Night vision is another advancement we carefully leaked. But much of it, like their advanced flight capabilities, their manipulation of gravity, their weapons systems…well, we kept all that to ourselves. And we used it to prepare.”

  “Prepare for what, exactly?”

  “For yesterday.”

  “So you knew they’d invade, too?”

  Chambers shook his head. “It’s more than that. The aliens didn’t just stumble upon our star and decide they liked Earth and wanted it for themselves. They’ve been with us a long time. In fact, in a sense…in a sense, they created us.”

  “What?” Max narrowed his eyes. “How long ago did they come here?”

  “Hundreds of thousands of years. Have you ever heard of Mitochondrial Eve?”

  “Yeah. She’s the one they think everyone’s descended from.”

  “Exactly. Two hundred thousand years ago, we had a bottleneck in human evolution. We almost went extinct, except for Eve’s abduction. I don’t know if you’d call it lucky, precisely, but it was her modification that allowed us to survive.”

  “Modification,” Max repeated.

  “Yes. Our…caretakers, you might call them, though jailers would probably be more accurate. They changed her. Specifically, her brain, plus her DNA, so that her descendants would inherit the changes. The modifications to her brain made her susceptible to their nanobots’ influence. Nanotechnology is another idea we got from them, by the way. Anyway, she unwittingly passed those modifications on the entire human species, as we know it today.”

  Max sat in silence. He realized he’d lowered the Ruger to his lap, and he didn’t bother raising it again.

  He’d always prided himself on being able to process a lot of information, but after learning the true nature of his relationship with his parents, and now this…his head felt like it was clamped in a vice.

  His mouth quirked. “You’re talking about mind control.”

  “That’s right. Our planet is covered with these nanobots, which our experts have taken to calling ‘neural smart dust.’ It inhabits the atmosphere. We breathe it in, and it covers our brains, influencing our behavior by stimulating specific neurons, and controlling what we perceive and don’t perceive. The organization I work for is the only one to have ever detected its presence, because the aliens don’t want anyone to detect it.”

  “Then why didn’t it prevent you from seeing their crashed ship? Or make you forget about it?”

  “Good question. For one, the du
st can’t make us forget anything—its influence does have limits. And making us fail to perceive an entire ship was likely problematic, if not impossible. The ranch was still destroyed either way, so how would that have been accounted for?

  “No, the aliens had no choice. The cat was out of the cosmic bag. In fact, we’re pretty sure that crash led to the invasion we’re seeing now. After that, they knew that we knew about them. So they sent their invasion force. We don’t know what they want, why they interfered with our evolution, or even what they look like. We all have our theories, but no one actually knows.”

  Max had plenty of other questions about the aliens, but Chambers had said they didn’t have much time, and there were things he needed to know that were much more relevant.

  “Tell me about the choice. The one you said I need to make.”

  Chambers leaned forward, and Max’s hand holding the Ruger twitched upward.

  The former principal leaned back again. “As I said, we’ve been preparing for this. There’s a facility in the Colorado Rocky Mountains where we have a squadron of sixteen fighters, all with systems based on their technology. We think they could be capable of going up against the aliens. Obviously those fighters can’t take on their entire fleet, but we’ve identified what could be a single point of failure—their mother ship. If we can destroy or incapacitate that, then maybe we have a chance.”

  “If the aliens have infested everyone’s brain with nanobots, then they’ll know about the squadron. They might already have destroyed it.”

  Chambers lifted his hands, palms up. “I don’t really know what to say to that. There’s a lot the aliens might have done to disrupt our efforts over the last decades, but haven’t. I don’t know why they’ve allowed us to continue. But we’ve continued to work, and to hope. I don’t see why we should stop now.”

  “Where do I come in?”

  “We’ve discovered that certain individuals are more resistant to the dust’s influence. That’s why some people didn’t go crazy, or at least not as crazy—they have a natural resistance to the impulses the dust infects them with. One of our primary focuses has been to identify which genes makes someone resilient, and to…well, to breed humans in whom the trait is even more prominently expressed. You’re the culmination of that breeding program—the only subject who didn’t go insane. Our hope was to continue the program for generations, to create dozens of people immune to the aliens’ influence. But clearly we won’t have that opportunity. Instead, we have you.”

  “Jimmy didn’t go crazy.”

  “No, but I’m sure he was affected in some way. Yes?”

  Max frowned. “Yeah. He said he felt like hurting people. Killing them.”

  “And if the aliens turned their attention on him, they’d be able to cause him to lose it quickly enough. But not you. You have complete control over what happens to your mind. Others, we’ve managed to keep sane with a cocktail of amygdala-suppressing drugs. That includes me, and it includes the men and women who’ll be piloting the fighters I mentioned. But there’s only one person we can safely assign to lead that squadron. Someone we know won’t be influenced to act against us, even subtly.”

  “Me.”

  Chambers nodded. “That’s your choice. I can take you to the person running the show right now—a woman named Janet Thompson. Or I can help you evade her. But if you go with them, there’ll be no going back. They won’t give you that option. You’ll be forced to do exactly as they say.”

  Max shook his head. “How can I turn my back on a chance to fight off the invaders? Even if it’s a small chance…if it might mean saving the species, or what’s left of it, then I have to take it.”

  “I don’t think I’m explaining this very well. Janet is…unhinged. She had a reputation for brutality long before I ever met her, but everyone thought she’d cleaned up her act. That’s why she got the job she has now. But she’s been acting erratically since the invaders got here. I have to hope she hasn’t been compromised—I have to hope that the aliens don’t know about our organization, or that their nanobots can’t override our drugs. But either way, I can’t say I trust her.”

  The man exhaled audibly. “She’s not supposed to be in charge. A man named General Caleb Andrews has spearheaded our organization for over a decade, and he’s on his way from Washington. He’s a good man, and he represents what we’ve always fought to accomplish—to save the species, even if it means sacrificing anything resembling a normal life.

  “But there’s no guarantee he’ll make it here, so for now, we have Janet. I’ve always known she’s power-hungry, but she managed to hide it from the people who mattered. And since the aliens came, she’s gone completely off the rails. I’m honestly not sure what she’s capable of.”

  It was a lot to take in. Even so, Max’s thoughts were churning effortlessly, weighing variables, and balancing probabilities. “If she’s the only game in town when it comes to fighting our attackers, I still can’t see an alternative to joining her. I can’t just abandon a chance to do something about this whole thing.”

  “The alternative is, I can take you to Colorado myself, to our installation in the Rockies. With any luck, there’ll be people in charge there who outrank Janet. People we can trust to take the reins from her. But I should tell you that Janet has your parents. And if you try to get to them, you’ll end up in her grasp. I can guarantee that.”

  “You mean, the closest thing to parents I’ll ever have. The people who pretended to be my parents for nineteen years.”

  “Yes.”

  Max took a deep breath. “Help me, then. Get me to Colorado. Without them.”

  “Then we need to leave now. I expect your parents…uh, caretakers, will divulge your location to Janet at some point. Possibly soon. That is, they’ll tell her your last location, wherever that was. I just took Cynthia and Peter to her, and she had them separated and imprisoned the moment we arrived.”

  Max winced. The fact that anyone would undergo imprisonment just to protect him didn’t sit right, let alone the two people he’d lived with and loved his entire life.

  But they’d wanted to give him a choice. And how good could they actually be, considering what they’d done to him? How they’d manipulated and lied to him?

  Suddenly, it hit him: as soon as this Janet Thompson got the information she wanted from Cynthia and Peter Edwards, she would be headed to the Somerton acreage.

  “We need to go get Jimmy, first.”

  Chambers blinked. “Somerton?”

  Max nodded. “I left him on his family’s property, outside town. Alone.”

  Chambers frowned.

  “If they kidnap him, they’ll use him against me, right? Then I’ll have no choice but to go to them. I won’t abandon Jimmy.”

  “Okay. We’d better get moving.”

  11

  7 days to extinction

  Screamed lyrics set to a pulsating guitar riff assaulted Cynthia Edwards’ ears as she lay on the cold metal of the truck bed curled into a fetal position.

  Her hands were clamped over her ears, but she was trying to be gentle. Pressing too hard made the headache worse, and it irritated her fingernails, which were already raw and sensitive to the touch.

  The music, if you could call it that, wouldn’t have been to her taste even if it hadn’t been turned up to decibel levels high enough to make her head throb with pain. She enjoyed classical music, preferably Chopin, or Bach if Chopin wasn’t available. Not this tsunami of noise that assaulted her from all sides, keeping her fight-or-flight response permanently turned on.

  The last two days had been a waking nightmare. Returning to the GDA camp had plunged her into a state of shock and disorientation. Janet had made sure of that. Cynthia had expected the woman to apply some unconventional pressure to get Max’s location from her, but she hadn’t been prepared for this.

  Do the others know she’s treating me this way?

  Maybe not. The horrible woman had ordered the back of the truck close
d before each of their sessions. During her last visit, she’d driven splinters deep underneath Cynthia’s fingernails. The pain had been excruciating. She’d shrieked with it. Surely the soldiers standing guard behind the truck had heard…but Janet had likely hand-selected them for the ability to remain unmoved by screams of pain.

  Of course, the woman’s brutality only made Cynthia more certain she was doing the right thing by keeping Max’s location a secret. Still…it was hard. Janet had clearly done this before. She was good at it.

  The blaring music also kept Cynthia from sleeping properly. She would doze off for a few minutes only to be jerked awake by a particularly screechy guitar riff. And Janet had been allowing her less and less water. Her throat already felt like a cat had raked it with its claws, and she knew that would only get worse.

  Cynthia felt herself retreating somewhere deep inside, trying her best to become numb. Memories of a book kept coming back to her—Lord of the Flies. In that story, a group of boys had been stranded on an island. Far from civilization’s laws, they’d descended into savagery.

  Except, in the story, the descent had been a gradual process. Janet’s savagery was like a light switch. Off, on. The moment civilization had fallen apart, so had Janet’s morals, apparently.

  Could Peter be right? Has she been compromised?

  Cynthia grimaced at the idea of her fate lying in the hands of some otherworldly being. A being who saw humans as nothing more than cattle.

  She shuddered. No. I can’t accept that possibility.

  The music stopped, and in contrast, the sudden silence didn’t seem natural. A high-pitched ringing accompanied the quiet.

  The back of the truck opened, and daylight streamed in, making her squint. A feminine silhouette climbed into the covered compartment.

  Janet. Cynthia felt herself begin to tremble. She couldn’t help it. But she forced herself to rise to a sitting position.

  The vile woman had to stoop to reach the hump over the wheel well, which she took as her seat. The ceiling was too low to stand.