The eighty-eighth missile, bearing an eight hundred kiloton warhead, detonated directly over the Serebryanyy Dozhd’ Kart-tsentr, an amusement park in the southern outskirts of Moscow along the MKAD ring road. The survivors of a battalion of paratroopers from the 106th Guards Airborne Division and the hundreds of terrified civilians they were trying to protect from waves of attacking harvesters felt no pain as their bodies, and those of their enemies, were consumed by the nuclear fireball.
PROPOSAL
Kiran was gripped by a nightmare. It visited him every time he closed his eyes, and it was always the same.
He was aboard the Indian Air Force IL-76 transport that was carrying them to the United States after escaping the horrors of Hyderabad. The men of his unit had sacrificed themselves so that he and his cousin Vijay, who lay strapped in a gurney, still suffering from the injuries he received in a terrible automobile accident, might live.
The plane had stopped in New Delhi to take on more passengers, government officials and members of high-ranking families, along with more scientists. They were faceless ghosts who took their places around him and his cousin in the hold of the plane.
Vijay spoke to him, but Kiran couldn’t hear the words. Vijay, too, had become a ghost, his dark skin having faded to a pale, translucent shroud over his skull as the big four-engine jet took off and turned northeast, heading toward Turkey, the first refueling stop on their way to America.
But they never made it. Kiran thrashed and cried out as fire and shrapnel swept the huge cargo bay, slashing many of the ghosts to bits before they were sucked out the gaping hole torn in the side of the plane, just aft of the wing. The ghosts of men, women and children, nearly a third of those on the plane, were cast away into the darkness, their screams lost in the roar of explosive decompression. Their bodies were set alight by the fire consuming the inboard engine, and they fluttered away like burning moths through the night sky.
Beside him, Vijay screamed. Kiran clung to his cousin’s hand and the gurney, which threatened to break free from its bindings to carry Vijay away into the night.
The plane’s fall from the sky took far longer than Kiran would have imagined. It spiraled down and down, the destroyed inboard engine, the fire out now, streaming thick smoke that blotted out the stars until they, too, were gone in a cataclysm of rending metal and terrified screams.
He awoke on his back, staring up at a crescent moon. Propping himself up on his elbows, he saw that he was on a small rise overlooking a sea of flame, above which towered a massive white triangular shape. At first thought it was a monument to the gods, but eventually came to realize that it was only the tail of the IL-76. Ghostly bodies were scattered about, some in the flames, crackling as they burned, and some not. A few, like deranged ghouls, staggered here and there, wailing.
His cousin’s gurney lay on its side, perilously close to the fire. Getting slowly to his feet, Kiran staggered toward it. Turning the gurney’s twisted metal frame toward him, he saw that Vijay was still alive, his mouth open in an unending shriek of agony. His lower body had been crushed, his legs crumpled and twisted, following the shape of the smashed gurney.
There was no sense of time in the dream, and Kiran had no idea how long he sat there, staring at his screaming cousin. He might have done something to try and help Vijay and the other ghosts, but he could not remember. It didn’t matter in the dream. Because in the dream they came before the dawn. No matter how many times he had the dream, no matter how many times he prayed for a different ending, they still came. They always came.
At first he thought they were soldiers come to help them. He did not recognize the uniforms, although their complexions were not far different from his own. The plane might have gone down somewhere in northern Iran, or perhaps eastern Turkey. He knew they had flown past the Caspian Sea not long before the explosion, for he remembered how intensely dark the water had been against the land as he took a look out one of the plane’s windows.
But he quickly discovered that the soldiers were not who they appeared to be. They dragged the bodies of the ghosts, living and dead, away from the flames. The things that masqueraded as men took the dead ghosts first. They crouched over the bodies, their faces peeling back to reveal dark slick mandibles that opened wide, like a snake, to swallow the heads of the dead, then the bodies, bit by bit.
The ghosts who still lived tried to run, but there was no escaping what had come for them. There were more screams, not of pain, but of terror, wails and shrieks that echoed through Kiran’s mind as the ghosts were run down by the monsters and taken.
But not all the ghosts were killed then and there. Oh, no. In the dream, Kiran tried to fight the monsters, to protect the ghosts, even though he knew they were just that, lost spirits in the night and nothing more. But his pathetic struggles were for naught. One of the monsters looked at Vijay, who was still screaming in agony, then crouched over him, the flesh of its head melting away to reveal the terrible jaws. Vijay screamed even louder, for screaming was all he could do with both legs and both arms broken. Kiran remembered the look on his cousin’s face as it disappeared into the thing’s maw, remembered how the screams were muffled, then abruptly stilled.
“Kiran.”
He heard Vijay’s voice calling him, but knew it couldn’t be him. Vijay, too, had become a ghost, just like all the others that the soldier-things had marched away from the burning wreckage for safe keeping in an abandoned mine. It was cool there, and dark. Food kept longer when it was chilled.
“Kiran, wake up.”
His eyes snapped open as a booted foot prodded him awake. The dream faded, to be replaced by a reality that was even more horrifying. His cousin Vijay, or what looked like his cousin, stood over him, holding a fluorescent camp lantern. The Vijay-thing was flanked by two other men who were not men, wearing military uniforms.
“Have you finally come for me?” He was weak, not having eaten since the crash (how long ago that had been, he was uncertain), and had been reduced to licking the condensation off the walls for want of water. The side tunnel of the mine where he and the others had been kept was dark except when their captors came to take away one of his fellow survivors. One of the ghosts.
Kiran was the only one left.
“Yes, but not the way you suspect.” His cousin smiled, and something dark and slimy chewed its way through Kiran’s soul. “Come, get on your feet.” The thing reached down and effortlessly pulled him from the floor.
“What do you want?” Kiran suppressed a scream as the thing pulled his arm over its shoulder and helped him walk toward the main shaft. It wasn’t the pain of Kiran’s injuries, which were minor, but the reality of touching one of them. His foot bumped against something, and in the lantern light he saw it was a boot, with the remains of the foot still inside. The flesh, which was starting to decompose, looked like it had been cauterized where it had been severed from the leg, just above the ankle.
Ghosts, he thought, his mind teetering on the edge of madness. The people on the plane were only ghosts. Just like I will be soon.
“Here,” the Vijay-thing said as they emerged into a well-lit part of the tunnel. It looked to Kiran like a small military command post, with a map board, a table with several chairs around it, another smaller table with a set of radios and two laptop computers, and several olive drab crates stacked up against a wall. Half a dozen of the things, all in military uniforms, stared at him. “Sit.” The Vijay-thing helped him slide into a chair at the table. Another thing emerged from the darkness with a plate piled high with food and a canteen of cool water.
Kiran did not question why he was being given a reprieve, temporary though he knew it must be. He snatched at the canteen and drank, the water soothing his parched mouth. Momentarily sated, he set the canteen down on the table and began scooping the food into his mouth with his fingers.
All too soon, the food was gone. Kiran licked the plate clean before he upended the canteen to his lips and sucked down every last drop.
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“You may have more later,” the Vijay-thing said. “We don’t want you to fall ill by eating too much too soon.”
“Are you fattening me up before the slaughter?” Kiran’s courage was starting to return. He could think more clearly now, and here, in the light, he could drive away the ghosts. For now.
“No. The others held no use for us beyond what we required as food. We must eat, too, you know.” The thing smiled. It was Vijay’s smile, the kind and endearing smile he had known and loved since childhood.
Kiran shivered at the sight.
“You will be spared that fate, assuming you do what we require of you.”
“And what is that?”
The Vijay-thing went to stand by the map, which showed Russia between the Black and Caspian Seas, down to the Persian Gulf. Dozens of red circles had been drawn on the clear plastic overlay, making southern Russia look like it was covered with boils. “Do you know what these are?”
“Targets?” Kiran had no idea what else they could be, but he also could not understand the relevance of targets in Russia. Targets for whom?
“Yes. More specifically, nuclear strikes launched by the Russians themselves this morning in an attempt to destroy our kind in the southern part of the country. You would have heard the rumblings of the bombs detonating if you had not been crying out from your nightmares. The nearest target was less than a hundred kilometers from here, and the weapons they used were quite large. There is much we don’t know, of course, but we were able to piece together much of what happened from what we could glean from the internet.”
“Did they succeed?” Kiran did not question the bitter reality of what the harvester was telling him. It was as unreal as everything else that had happened since he, Jack, and Kiran’s other cousin Surya had gone to the village outside of Hyderabad where all this had started.
“Only in destroying their own food supply.”
“You sound disappointed.”
The Vijay-thing stared at him. “We are. We thought either Russia or the United States would try such a thing, and while we hoped for a positive outcome, the Russians did themselves more harm than good in the long term, in the time they have left. I’m sure they killed many of the feral adults and larval forms, as you would call them, but many will survive to prosper even more as Russian food reserves begin to dwindle.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying. Why would you want the Russians to win? You’re one of them!”
With a frown, the Vijay-thing came and sat at the table beside him. “Kiran,” it said in a gentle voice, “those like me are in as great a danger as you of being exterminated. You see, some few of us, very few, are different. Of the adults spawned by the larvae, the vast majority will never be more than mindless animals in adult harvester form. They are mere breeding and killing machines that will never achieve sentience or even the ability to mimic other forms of life. They will prey on anything other than the larval forms, which can kill us as easily as they can kill you, and they can live for hundreds of years doing so.” The thing leaned closer. “And when I say they will prey on anything, I mean that they will also kill us, those few of our kind that rise to achieve full sentience. In particular, those of us who achieve sentience and also stop replicating.”
“I don’t think I see the problem,” Kiran said.
“I am not surprised, nor do I expect your sympathy. But it is necessary that you understand if you are to carry out the task we have for you, which is your only chance of survival.” It gestured to the others in the room. “We were born in a laboratory in southern Russia and are among the first to have achieved full sentience. We fled that region as the infestation spiraled out of control and came here, hoping that this barren land would afford us some protection through isolation. But we have come to realize that nowhere on the planet will be safe for us in the long term if a solution is not found.”
“A solution?” Kiran leaned forward, not sure he was hearing correctly. “As in a way to kill them?”
“Nothing quite so drastic as that, my friend.” The thing smiled. “More precisely, we need a way to control their spread. I do not think you really understand what your people are facing, Kiran. Unless they are stopped, the entire planet will be overwhelmed by our, ah, lower castes, you might call them. Our creators, the harvesters that your cousin Vijay and the others eradicated, must have had a vision for us far different from what we have for ourselves. We know nothing about them, of course, as the last died before the first of us was spawned. But it is clear that the lower castes are entirely out of control, and if their unrestrained propagation is not contained, Earth will no longer be a home for humanity, nor for us. Everything down to the bacteria in the soil will eventually be consumed, and someday our progeny will be all that remains in the biosphere, with nothing left to eat but one another. Everything else will become extinct.”
“I do not believe it. Something would survive. People would survive.”
The thing shook its head, an expression of sadness on its face that twisted Kiran’s guts, for he had to force himself to remember that it wasn’t Vijay, but the monster that murdered him. “Look at what has happened across the world in the short time since the first larvae were spawned. What do you think the world will look like a year from now? Ten years? You could launch all the nuclear weapons that remain in the world’s arsenals, and it would barely make a dent in the epidemic, while killing your own people and rendering some of your most fertile lands useless.”
The thing leaned closer to him, and Kiran flinched away.
“The larvae will spread like a virus,” Vijay went on, “consuming everything in their path. As things stand now, humanity has no future. Nor do we.” It put a hand on his, and Kiran wanted to recoil from its touch, which felt so real, so human. “But together, perhaps we can survive.”
Pulling his hand away, trying to keep his food down as his stomach churned, Kiran said, “What do you want of me?”
“We want you to deliver a message, offering our cooperation in developing a solution to the danger that confronts us all.”
Glancing at the computers, Kiran said, “Why don’t you just send your own message? Or just…masquerade as me?”
“Because you — the real you — will be believed. I know you have the trust of Jack Dawson, and you must certainly be known, if only by name, to many in his circle. We have already tried sending an emissary, but he met with an untimely end long before he was able to deliver his message.” The thing grimaced. “Too few of us are left to take such risks again. We have been desperately searching for someone who would suit our needs, and we were incredibly fortunate that your plane came within range of assets that we control.”
Kiran’s mouth gaped open. “You shot us down?”
“Not directly, no, but it was…arranged, shall we say.” The thing shrugged. “It was a calculated risk, because we had no way of knowing if you or your cousin would survive. But it was easy enough to arrange with the forewarning we were given. We had nothing to lose if you did not survive.”
A tide of rage rose in Kiran’s gut as he remembered the ghosts that had plagued his dreams, all the people, including poor Vijay, who had died in the crash or had been taken by the harvesters later. He sprang across the table, trying to wrap his hands around the thing’s neck.
Without even blinking, it swatted him aside, pinning both wrists in one of its hands. The thing began to squeeze, and Kiran screamed as a bone in his hand cracked.
“Ever the fearless soldier,” the thing said as it released him, and Kiran slumped back into his chair, cradling his injured hand. “There is no dishonor in what we are asking of you. And tell me, would you rather we set you free to deliver an offer of peace that may help your species survive, or suffer the fate of the others aboard your aircraft?”
Kiran swallowed hard and looked away from the thing’s eyes. “And who am I to take your message to?”
“I would think that was obvious.” The thing’s face split i
nto a wide smile. “Naomi Perrault, of course.”
DRAGONFIRE
President Daniel Miller and the members of his cabinet were in one of the conference rooms in the White House Situation Room complex, while the Vice President had joined them over a video teleconferencing circuit from North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) Headquarters, deep in Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. In the President’s hand was a brief note of explanation and apology from the Russian President that had been delivered by the Russian Ambassador five minutes after the warheads had detonated. That had been thirty minutes ago.
Miller crumpled up the note and angrily threw it to the floor. “I’m not sure what makes me angrier, that they kept us completely in the dark and nearly triggered a nuclear war between themselves, us, and the Chinese, or that they had the guts to do it and we don’t.” His face was pale in the bright fluorescent light.
“The latest estimate puts the number of immediate casualties at over ten million dead and at least half that many injured, with another five million deaths projected in the next six months from injury and radiation exposure,” the Director of National Intelligence reported in a somber voice. “But the worst will be the famine that will hit them before next winter. They’ve destroyed or irradiated twenty-five to thirty percent of their primary grain producing region, not to mention the havoc the harvesters are wreaking on everything else.”
“And what about the harvesters?” Miller asked.
“From what we can tell so far, they’ve been largely exterminated in the strike zones, but are still propagating like wildfire everywhere else.” The DNI scowled. “The bottom line, Mr. President, is that it’s a Pyrrhic victory for the Russians. The strikes took a huge bite out of the current harvester population, but did nothing to reduce the reproductive rate of the survivors. If I had to call it one way or the other, I’d say the strike was a failure.”
“Mr. President,” Vice President Andrew Lynch said through the videoconferencing television at the front of the room, “you can’t possibly be considering following the Russians’ lead. You’ve always been vehemently opposed to any use of nuclear weapons, especially on American soil. Look what a disaster Sutter Buttes was for Norman Curtis! I doubt nuking our major cities is going to earn us any points in the polls.”
Reaping The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 3) Page 4