The creatures moved closer to the group. Their skin glistened in the lights, like it was wet. Or slimy. There was something almost instinctively horrible about them, about the way they looked—like some odd proto-human that looked more suited to dark caves than above-ground life—and the way they moved, awkward and wrong, again looked more suited to an underground existence.
The thing that was most terrifying about them was their complete silence. As they approached, they made no grunts. No roars. No growls. No deep breathing. No snorts.
Nothing.
To Joe, it was an implacable silence, full of implied threat.
His hand had lifted his phone up before he realized he’d made a decision to film them. People around him had had the same idea. That was one of the things the human being had become now: a recorder of visual events. It was an urge to chronicle that had begun on cave walls, moving through paint and found its natural zenith in photography. Now that just about everyone carried a stills camera and video camera in their phone, that urge was perhaps too easily satisfied.
Joe thought it was sad that people viewed experiences through the remove of their camera screen, even as his thumb pressed ●REC.
It took Joe a few seconds to work out what happened next.
There was an armored vehicle waiting for them on the runway when their jet touched down at Braşov-Ghimbav airport. It looked like a 44 and a tank had had a baby. And then that baby had started taking steroids.
Furness, one of their armed escorts, informed them it was a Wolf Armored Vehicle, used by the Israeli military, but exported to Romania for use by their military police.
Furness and Gilman, in woodland camouflage and carrying automatic rifles, ushered Ani, Dr. Ghoti, and Minaxi Desai into the back, climbing in after them, presumably to protect them from … Ani really couldn’t guess … Drafts? The back of the vehicle was very spacious and could easily have seated another six or seven people before it even started feeling crowded.
The Romanian army driver started up the engine, which roared loudly to life, and then they were lurching forward toward the village of Poiana Mazik.
“We have no way of knowing what we’ll find,” Furness told them. “I’ll need you to hold back until we’ve secured the area.”
His stern, matter-of-fact voice contained no suggestion that objections could be raised. Which was fine. Ani had more than enough to do.
She took out the YETI-issue tablet and connected to the global satellite network that made even the highest-priced business networks look positively Stone Age in comparison. Connection was instantaneous, faster than most broadband she’d used, and rock solid. She checked her notifications and found a photo waiting for her from Brian. The picture showed a Dorian chip on a victorious motherboard. Caption: Result! She forwarded it to Abernathy, thanked Brian, and then called up a map of the local area.
As Poiana Mazik grew closer, her anxiety increased. She searched for Poiana Mazik on the Internet and found a couple of travel sites with photos, so there was no need to feel uneasy, but when you’ve just flown in a private jet and been whisked away in an armored personnel carrier, it’s hard not to feel slightly melodramatic.
She watched the arrow that represented the personnel carrier get closer to the dot that represented Poiana Mazik, but that was like watching a kettle, waiting for it to boil.
She wondered what else she could do to fill the time.
It seemed too ordinary to start checking emails.
She scrolled though apps, but felt unable to focus on anything. After a few minutes, she was sick of looking at the screen. She was just about to shut the browser down when the page that she’d searched Poiana Mazik on refreshed.
Things turned very weird, very quickly.
Joe stared at the display on his phone, his brow furrowed, his eyes narrowed. It was almost as if he were trying to trick the image, to will it into showing what he could see in the real world.
The camera app refused to obey.
There were two creatures.
That was as far as the similarities went.
The creatures on-screen were very different from the half-formed, proto-human creatures in front of him. On-screen, the creatures were terrifying, and so much less human looking.
Their bodies appeared elongated, almost like the bodies of earthworms, and they looked segmented, too, to cement that association in his mind. The legs were no longer awkward looking and oddly proportioned. On the screen of his phone they looked insect-like: chitinous, barbed, and horribly slender. The arms had become very similar to the legs, but with cruel pincers snapping at the air in front of them.
And the creatures’ heads … The camera screen transformed them from canister-shaped blobs of ill-formed matter into faces of pure, skin-prickling malevolence. There was something of a spider’s head about them—the spiky fur, the row of eyes that braceleted the face—but the heads were stretched forward, extruded into thrusting ovals, ovals that dripped glutinous slime from quivering pink mouth-parts.
He could tell that everyone else trying to capture the scene on their phones was finding the same disparity between physical reality and its digital counterpart. The confusion was becoming panic and the panic was starting to spread. People were jabbering and pointing as the world stopped making sense.
The creatures walked toward them. In the real world they lumbered, but in the digital world it was more of a centipede slither.
Joe realized he didn’t have a clue what to do next.
Ani threw up her hands in disbelief.
“There’s a breaking news story,” she said, checking the web again and finding it still offered the same sketchy, but suggestive, details. “It’s about a small Romanian village. Anyone want to guess the name of that village?”
“Poiana Mazik?” Dr. Ghoti asked.
“The very same.”
“What sort of breaking news story?” the doctor asked.
“The details are sketchy,” Ani reported. “Someone uploaded some photos of … creatures seen attacking the isolated village of Poiana Mazik. Apparently, emergency services were called to this isolated community, but attempts to reach the village have been hampered by a widespread communications blackout.”
“But they’re pretty much the same words that Brian remembered from the dotmeme file,” the doctor said. “It doesn’t make sense …”
“Or it makes a very dark kind of sense,” Minaxi offered. “What did you say about memes, Ani? That they are the unit by which ideas spread across cultures? Maybe that’s been victorious’s goal all along. To implant a new idea into our culture. This new idea. This attack. Your friend Brian just got a quick look at it before it was ready for transmission.”
Ani showed her one of the images that had been uploaded.
A terrifying insect creature in the half-light near a rustic village.
“Some idea,” she said, “but what do they have to be gained by implanting that?”
“Fear?” Minaxi said. “Isn’t that the ultimate goal of all terrorists?”
“But victorious are hackers,” Ani said. “Hackers aren’t terrorists.”
“Until their skills are used in the service of a terrorist organization,” Minaxi said pointedly. “Maybe the hackers are being duped. Maybe this is terrorism, just a new form …”
“But it’s Dorian tech that’s making it possible,” Ani insisted. “Not terrorists—a software company. There’s something else going on that we’re not seeing …”
“That may be so,” Furness said, “but we’re arriving at our destination. So get ready for … well, for whatever this is.”
A few minutes later, the vehicle stopped abruptly, its engine still running.
Furness opened the back.
“Stay here,” he said. “We’ll cut you a path.” And then he jumped down into the darkness.
One of the creatures reached out and grabbed the neck of a Romanian man, dragging him away from the other villagers. It was enough to pull Joe out of
his stunned disbelief. With something to fight for, things made sense. He put the phone away in his pocket, stepped up to the creature, and tried to wrestle the man free from its grasp. The creature’s arm was thick, hard and strong, and it hardly seemed to notice Joe at all. The man, himself, was clawing at the creature, but hadn’t made any headway.
Joe tried a couple of hard blows to the creature’s face, but it was like punching wet clay; he was sure that it hurt his fists more than it hurt the creature, especially the fist that had danced across the Lakers fans’ teeth. It didn’t feel like he was making any progress, and the creature remained seemingly oblivious. In fact, the creature was tightening its grip on the man’s neck, and the choking sounds coming from his mouth made Joe think the guy didn’t have long before the thing killed him.
And that was unacceptable.
Back when he was still in training, learning fighting skills in another of Abernathy’s specialized gyms—this one in Birmingham—his instructor had been an avid student of a book called The Art of War by a Chinese military strategist and philosopher named Sun Tzu. Amid a slew of useless quotations about how to fight, when not to fight, how to win, and times not to win, there was one that came to mind now: “In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.” It always annoyed Joe when he recalled one of those Art of War aphorisms in the middle of an actual fight, because there was little or no relation between the two. That chaos quote? Joe had always thought it was a trite thing that people used to try to sound clever, but they neglected to notice that the maxim offered no practical advice whatsoever, just like most of the Sun Tzu quotes his instructor had come up with.
Joe thought that a lot of Sun Tzu’s quotes would be more useful if they were a bit less fortune cookie in construction, and a bit more context specific.
Or, in Joe’s case, more user specific.
In the midst of chaos, switch your fighting chip to “lethal force” and have another go.
There was an idea that he could work with.
He made the adjustments, felt his body respond to the new muscle forms and tolerances, and turned his attention, once again, to the creature’s head. When he’d been hitting out at it before, he hadn’t even managed to make it acknowledge that he had hit it, but now his body was recoded with muscle memories that reminded him how he should have been punching the first time around.
He kept his knees slightly bent—going for a hard jab without using the legs was already a failure, because he had been missing out on the most powerful muscles in his body—and he kept his body loose. Swinging from the hips and launching from the legs, moving his whole body into the punch, rather than just his right arm. Punching was actually described by a pretty simple mathematical calculation that formed the basis of Newton’s Second Law of Motion: net force equals mass times acceleration. To get more force—more power—in the punch you needed speed, but you also needed mass. The more mass the better. Move from the shoulder, and it doesn’t matter how much speed you generate, you’ve set yourself a low limit on the amount of damage you’ll do. Throw the entire weight of your body behind the punch, and the acceleration has something to work with.
It was a simple fighting tip, but one that was so easy to forget when a battle got underway. Joe’s chipset not only reminded him, coached his body, and made him ready to implement the strategy, but it was also programmed in the perfect sequence of physical moves to make sure that Newton’s calculation did its best possible work.
When Joe’s fist hit the creature’s temple, it was traveling at speed, and it was a punch that started on the balls of his feet, sprang through his knees, swung through his hips, pushed forward his body, transferred into his shoulder, through his arm and down into his fist. The contact made a horrible sound, and if Joe’s chip hadn’t been managing things for him, it could easily have broken the small bones of his hand.
Could have.
Didn’t.
But it certainly gave the creature something to think about.
Joe saw it release the Romanian man, who slunk to the floor clutching at his throat making a rasping, choking sound. It turned its face toward Joe and opened its mouth. Joe thought it was going to roar or growl but it maintained its inscrutable silence, moving forward faster to try to latch onto him with its teeth. The problem for the creature was it was too slow for Joe, who was now operating on his fight clock, which made his reactions sharper, his perception clearer. The creature might as well have been standing still for all the good its lunge did it. By the time it had reached the end of its maneuver, Joe was already off to one side, coming back in for another blow, this one with the meat of his right palm, aimed for the ridge over the top of the creature’s left eye.
Net force = mass × acceleration.
Joe had put his whole body behind the blow, and he made sure he did it fast. The net force was great enough that Joe felt the ridge of bone give beneath the meat of his hand. He hit again with his left, then once more with his right, a quick one-two-three, concentrated on the same spot. Instead of hitting the eye, he aimed at the orbit, the circle of bone that housed the eye. An orbital fracture was likely to cause diplopia—double vision—disorientation, and chronic pain.
Should soften the thing up for …
The creature’s arm suddenly swung out and hit the side of Joe’s head, moving a lot faster than its previous movements had suggested it capable of. It was like being hit by a bag of bricks, and Joe realized that the creature had pretty much suckered him in. The blow stunned him and he struggled to stay on his feet. As he reeled off toward the ground, he thought that he was lucky the creature knew less about Newton’s laws, just using its arm rather than its whole body. He thought that he might have been dead if it had multiplied the acceleration.
Joe wasn’t dead—that was something. But he did land on the ground with the wind knocked out of him, and the thing was lifting one of its feet in the air above his head.
He looked up.
The creature started to bring its foot down.
Not a whole lot of velocity, but one heck of a lot of mass by the look of it.
Furness had told them to wait in the personnel carrier, but Ani, Dr. Ghoti, and Minaxi disagreed. Not to his face—he wasn’t the kind of guy who would back down after giving an order. But when he and Gilman had left the back of the vehicle and were running toward the disturbance some distance ahead of them, they slipped out the back. Ani wondered what the strategic value of parking this far from the scene of conflict was, then realized that it was probably the driver, himself, that decided to hold back. Maybe this kind of op was way above his pay grade.
From where Ani stood, it looked like they’d come to the location where the pictures of the insect creatures had been uploaded from. There were villagers and screams and squeals of panic.
The three agents climbed down from the vehicle and followed the soldiers.
As they drew closer, the details of the scene became clearer. But along with that came a sense of bemusement. The villagers—and Joe, Ani noticed with delight and horror—were indeed fighting a pair of monstrous creatures, but they certainly weren’t the ones she’d seen in the Internet photos. These were squat, thick-set creatures that looked more like poorly-made humans. They still looked dangerous though, and as she watched, one of the creatures smashed Joe in the head and he fell to the ground.
She saw Furness shoulder his weapon and point it in the creature’s direction. It was still quite a distance away. With the chaos and panic Furness, surely wouldn’t risk a shot.
The creature raised its foot to crush Joe’s skull.
Furness fired a volley of bullets into the thing’s chest.
Joe was already rolling out of the path of the creature’s foot when it stopped suddenly. The foot hovered in midair. Joe heard the shots then, but kept moving. Priority one: get clear. He could see what the bullet fire meant, see how it changed the playing field, when he was clear of danger. The most important strategy for surviving the next few moments: don’t
be underneath that foot when it stamps down.
Once safely to the side, Joe was able to study the scene. He saw the line of bullet hits across the creature’s chest—puckered holes from which a thick, dark liquid the consistency of gruel leaked. Someone had shot the thing with an assault rifle, probably an AK-47. He looked over to where the shots must have originated and saw two soldiers, one with his rifle shouldered, the other with his at his hip. Behind the soldiers he saw Ani and a woman that looked like Minaxi Desai from YETI HQ.
Everyone was staring at the creature that was still standing there on one foot, seemingly defying gravity, still leaking from its wounds. The man it had been strangling was still bent over on one knee, but someone was assisting him—Dr. Ghoti, Joe realized. Abernathy had sent in the cavalry.
The creature finally put its foot back down on the ground. The monster did not fall, it didn’t even stumble. Instead, it moved again toward Joe.
“Well, that’s just great,” he muttered.
He dragged himself up from the ground and turned to face the creature.
Ani could understand being called out in the field to use her computer skills, maybe her general technology knowledge, and maybe for her newly trained and honed fighting skills, if someone was really desperate.
This … this was too much. Helpless didn’t even begin to describe how she was feeling. She was out of her depth. With a tablet computer in her hands. Against those … those things. They might not be the living terrors the Internet was making them out to be, but they were still pretty scary.
What were they? Where had they come from? Why were they here? Those were the questions at the forefront of her mind, which made her worry about her suitability as a field operative. The question, How do we stop them? had occurred to her in a pretty poor fourth place. But maybe that was her strength. Joe and the soldiers could be working on the problem of taking the creatures down, she could try to work out what the hell was going on. And why.
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