Cut Off

by Robertson, Edward W.

  They paused to rest in a side room. Sprite sat heavily on a low metal table. "This is like the most fucked up game of Pac-Man I ever saw."

  Ness sat and drew his knees to his chest. "Except Pac-Man never had to worry about his legs giving out."

  "I hate to ask, but do we have a plan? Seems like we're running low on easy targets."

  "That's because they're figuring us out." To Sebastian, he signed, "Look, they've moved almost all the stragglers over to the western tunnels. All that's left is the security teams. We can't ambush them and we sure can't fight them all head on. I think it's time we worked out a new approach."

  "Agree," Sebastian replied. "And such as?"

  "Can we get at the non-soldiers somehow? Confuse the security teams and split them up? Can you make them think there's more of us somewhere else in the tunnels?"

  "Possible," he signed slowly. "I disabled system so they would not see. Task is to restore enough to make them fools without restoring so much it makes them wise."

  "Yes or no?"

  "Yes," Sebastian said. "But it takes time."

  "Then get to it. I'll keep watch on their movements."

  He held out his hand. Sebastian passed him the alien's tablet, then went to work on his own pad, tentacles dancing. Ness had enough experience with the pads to handle basic navigation and zoomed out for a look at the complete tunnel network. The Swimmer refugees remained in the western half of the facility, which had just two tunnels connecting it to the east. A small contingent of security was with them. The rest had been split into two groups of a dozen each. At the moment, both teams were near the middle of the grounds, slowly heading east, but their search progressed in an unfocused way that suggested they had no clue where the humans had snuck off to.

  Electronics hummed softly. Sebastian tapped and prodded his pad. Sprite got up to wander around the expansive room, moving through the meager illumination thrown off by monitors and status lights. As Ness kept tabs on the dots on the pad, he tried to formulate alternate strategies to the current master plan of sitting around helplessly, but his brain was too frazzled to spit out anything useful.

  "Progress," Sebastian signed some time later.

  "Yeah? You got it?"

  "No. I said I have progress."

  "Any idea how long?" Ness gestured. "The Swimmers are still northeast of us, but it's only a matter of time before they head this way."

  "Don't know. Much harder to alter system than to blind it or destroy it."

  He resumed work and Ness resumed thinking. Logically, they ought to withdraw and begin a guerrilla campaign of some sort. Yet as long as the jet could come and go with impunity, it could continue spreading the second virus. The Swimmers would only have to hold out for a few days to infect their trade networks and take down the few remaining vestiges of civilization.

  Sprite began to snore. Ness leaned over the pad, chin cupped in his palm, trying to draw meaning from the squiggles of the tunnels and the slowly advancing squadrons of dots. Just as something began to stir in his mind—they were few, and that was the problem, but what if they could be more?—he lost it.

  He don't know what woke him. It remained as quiet as ever in the room. Sprite had even quit snoring. All he knew was that he had fallen asleep, he was awake now, and in the time between those two events, the Swimmer soldiers had advanced to within spitting distance of their position.

  "Oh fuck," he said, adrenaline jetting into his system in a hot rush, booting his brain to maximum speed. "Sprite. Sprite!"

  "Huh?"

  "Wake up. We got to move. Like five minutes ago." He dashed around front of Sebastian, who looked up blearily, blinking his transparent eyelids. Ness stuck his pad under Sebastian's face and signed, "We need to go!"

  Sebastian stared down at the display. They were in a remote stretch of tunnel on the southeast edge of the rambling installation. To their right, the tunnel curved gently northward for a hundred yards before reaching an intersection. As they watched, the dots comprising one of the two main security squads encamped at the crossing. On the left side of the screen, a second squad was checking a room just beyond the closest intersection on that side.

  "How did this happen?" Sebastian signed.

  Ness' first and strongest instinct was to lie, to save himself from the blame. But they were beyond that. He needed Sebastian's help, and for Sebastian to be able to help, the alien needed the truth. "I fell asleep. Strangle me later. Have you got their system figured out yet? If you can draw them off, we've still got a chance."

  "I have progress."

  "Anything at all that can move them away from here?"

  "Possible," Sebastian said, tentacles drawing inward with doubt. He motioned over his pad, skipping through fields of text, then flourished the tip of his tentacle. All the dots on the screen disappeared. An instant later, so did the map of the tunnels.

  "What the hell!"

  "It rejects my intrusion. Shuts down rather than allow corruption."

  Ness beckoned to Sprite, speaking out loud as he continued to sign to Sebastian. "Their troops have the eastern intersection completely blocked. A second team is sweeping toward our western exit. Another minute and they'll have us hemmed in on both sides. And now we're completely blind."

  "Is this as awful as it sounds?" Sprite said. "What do we do?"

  "Make a stand and take down as many of them as we can. There's no other way out."

  "Wrong," Sprite said. "There's no good way out."

  "Have you got a bad one?"

  "The worst I ever thought up." He paced in a quick circle, running his hands down his exhausted face. "Well, come on."

  Ness frowned. "Come on what?"

  Sprite tugged open the door and slunk into the hallway. Itchy heat climbed Ness' ribs. Sprite hung a left down the curving tunnel and Ness followed, weapon in hand. As soon as the intersection came into view, Sprite pressed himself flat against the wall, holding up a palm.

  "They're just ahead," Sprite said. "You ever see Scooby-Doo?"

  "Don't you dare," Ness said.

  "No reason for all of us to get caught. I've got this, man. I'll see you in Valhalla." He grinned and sprinted away toward the intersection. Ness swore silently and edged forward. At the crossing, Sprite skidded to a halt, windmilling his arms, bug-eyed at whatever was down the tunnel. "Oh shit! They're everywhere! Game over, man!"

  He bolted to his right up the north fork. Aliens charged after him, claws and pods maintaining traction on the orange matting. Ness counted seven of them. That left three to five others still lurking past the intersection, but with the tracking system down and the lighting so poor, he had no way to tell where they might be.

  Sprite's hollers echoed down the tunnels, fading in the distance. Sebastian pushed Ness to the wall, screening him with a thicket of limbs. "Move with me. As if you are my shadow."

  He walked forward, unhurried. Ness matched his pace. At the intersection, seeing no Swimmers, Sebastian slipped left down the southern branch of the tunnels and hustled away. Once the tunnel began to hook right, Sebastian picked up speed, galloping down the hallway.

  "We have to get out of here," Ness said. "Regroup. Figure something else out. We can't throw our lives away after what he just did for us."

  Sebastian nodded. "But we must return before more is lost."

  Ness didn't know how the two of them could possibly knock out the remaining troops, but he was too fried and nerve-dead to give that any thought. Anyway, with the maps killed, he needed to devote every brain cell toward remembering the route to the tunnel outside. Getting to it took much longer than it felt like it ought to, but just as he was ready to sit down and give up, Sebastian beelined toward a closed door. He gestured it open. Beyond, the tube sloped down into blackness.

  Sebastian led, tethering Ness with a tentacle, soon slowing from a brisk walk to a careful trudge. With no way to communicate with Sebastian, Ness was left with his own thoughts. He couldn't believe he'd let Sprite throw down his life f
or them. In the moment, it had made sense, but now it felt grotesque, witless. If Ness hadn't fallen asleep, they could have relocated as soon as the Swimmers began to move in. The whole thing had been a mistake, with Sebastian pissing away what—two hours?—failing to crack the security code when they ought to have been getting the fuck out of there to brainstorm in safety.

  He shut his eyes; they were useless anyway. As were their delusions of wiping out this nest of Swimmers. The most they'd be able to do would be to sneak in from the west behind the Swimmers' security, massacre the "civilians" as quickly as possible, then hit-and-run through the tunnels until their luck ran out. It wouldn't save humanity from the coming virus, but maybe the loss of manpower would slow the Swimmers down, buy the humans a few more months.

  After an hour of marching, a blue-white glow sprang across the tunnel. Ness blinked, shielding his eyes. Sebastian released his grip on Ness and peered at the pad's display, his thin appendages casting angular shadows against the ceiling.

  "It is the jet," he signed. "It is gone."

  "Gone as in vanished from the sensors?"

  Sebastian met Ness' eyes, shaking his long head, claws shivering. "Gone as in gone. Destroyed."

  Ness gaped. As he signed, his hands were shaking as much as Sebastian's. "How? When? Had it landed yet?"

  "Some miles south of New York. The place where it always lands for trade. But this time, it is attacked."

  "You're sure it didn't shut off its signal?"

  "Final transmission registers an incoming rocket, fired from the ground, by humans unknown to the Swimmers."

  Ness laughed in disbelief. "How could the humans have known the jet was carrying the virus?"

  Sebastian shrugged broadly. "The attackers were not those the Swimmers had been trading with. I guess strangers see the Swimmers and do as their spirit demands."

  He gazed up the tunnel, as if the glow of the pad might reach all the way up the mountain and draw down the enemy. "And they don't have another jet?"

  "Not here. They must summon another from elsewhere."

  "We just got handed a second chance. I don't know how we're going to take this place down, but we have to find a way."

  "First is getting out."

  "Totally," Ness signed, laughing in pain. "I'm about to drop dead on my feet."

  Sebastian fiddled with the pad. Its glow retracted to nothing. He hurried on. It wasn't long before the pad's light was replaced by a new source: the glow of the morning through the exit of the tunnel. Outside, Ness sucked down deep breaths of fresh air, squinting against the mid-morning brightness. It could be days or even weeks before the Swimmers were able to requisition a new jet from one of their other outposts. It wasn't like they were manufacturing new ones. Orchestrating a second assault on the mountain wasn't going to be cake, but so long as Sebastian was tapped into their network, the two of them would have a huge advantage. All they needed to do was rest, prepare, and work to create an opening.

  "Let's head to the yacht," he signed. "Move out of sight, then get some sleep."

  Sebastian nodded and hiked up the side of the ravine, sending pebbles tumbling down the slope toward Ness. At the top, he stretched his tentacles and gazed south, waiting for Ness to catch up.

  Sebastian staggered, collapsing to his side. The crack of a rifle shot pealed across the mountain.

  27

  She knew as soon as she pulled the trigger that the shot was perfect. The rifle bucked, the view from the scope jarring to the green scrubland above the gully. She steadied her aim. The alien had fallen and was writhing in the grass. She considered putting a round through its head, then waited to see if others would come to its aid.

  A human head poked above the ridge. Male, pale-skinned, short dark hair fuzzing his head. He was shirtless, clad only in a diaper; it would have been comical if she hadn't seen Robi wearing the same thing two weeks earlier. The man whirled, looking to all sides, holding up a small black weapon that resembled an overfed revolver.

  "Stop!" he screamed into the wind. "Hold your fire!"

  Tristan drew back from the scope, but the man was alone on the edge of the gully. Beside him, the alien struggled to get its many legs beneath it. The man dropped beside it, reaching for its thorax where Tristan had shot it. His movement wasn't violent or angry. If anything, it was concerned.

  Tristan tensed, ready to rise. After landing on the beach, she had followed the alien tracks from the yacht up the gully to the tunnel, found the orange inside, then backed off to put down whatever squirmed out of it. The rightness of this plan had been self-evident.

  Up on the hill, the man stood, waving his hands over his head. "Don't shoot! We aren't your enemy!"

  Either something was deeply wrong, or she was witnessing the most extreme case of Stockholm Syndrome in the universe. She was situated in the brush not far from the beach, out of reasonable pistol range, but she got no closer. The man bent and helped the alien to its feet. Together, they slogged downhill toward the yacht. Once they were fifty feet from her, Tristan stood.

  "Hold it." She aimed her rifle at the man's chest. "Drop your gun and step away from that thing."

  The man's eyes blazed. "I advise you to lower that rifle, ma'am."

  "Do you want to join your friend?"

  "In most things. Do you want to get shorn in half by a laser?" The alien's tentacles flexed around two of the weapons. The man raised his own. "You can drop me, or you can drop him. We both know you won't get that bolt back again before one of us cuts you down."

  Wind ruffled her hair and raced through the grass. She kept the rifle steady. "It's already wounded. If I put one in you, and it shoots me, then all three of us die."

  The man's face lit with such pure wrath she nearly shot him before he could do the same to her. Teeth clenched, he blinked back his rage, speaking in a voice so soft it was nearly lost in the wind. "There's a second virus, shithead. And we're the only ones who know about it."

  Her rifle drooped. "A second virus? What are you talking about?"

  "I've already lost one friend trying to knock this place out. Now get the fuck out of my way before I lose another."

  She shouldered her rifle. Though there was plenty of room to walk past her, she stepped aside. "Where are you going?"

  The man didn't look back as he went by. "My boat."

  "You're leaving? What about the virus?"

  "First aid kit."

  She drifted after them. "That's my canoe down there. I'll row you out."

  "How about you do me a bigger favor and leave me alone?"

  "That's why they're taking people, isn't it? The orange boxes? They're test subjects."

  The man glanced over his shoulder. "How do you know about that?"

  "Because I've seen them," Tristan said. "And years ago, they took me, too."

  They reached the beach. The man gestured to the alien, who signed back vigorously, two tentacles wound tight around its chest. Yellow fluid gleamed on its carapace, but the blood appeared to be from the initial shot; the thing's tentacles were doing an admirable job as a bandage.

  The conversation intensified, hands and claws flashing. The man took a tablet-style computer from the creature, fiddled with its display, and pointed. The thing shook its head, gesturing calmly. The man flung up his hands and turned away, eyes squeezed shut.

  "Are we going to the boat?" Tristan said.

  "Won't do any good. He's hurt too bad."

  "Then what can we do?"

  "I don't know. Can you turn back the clock and not shoot my best friend?"

  "You know that I can't," she said, feeling a pang of annoyance at his whininess. "But I know people here. Maybe one of them can help."

  "Any of them do their residency at Rigel General?" The man shook his head and turned to the volcano. "There's only one place they got the equipment to treat an alien. But at this point, the bad guys will have the way in locked down tight."

  "There are other ways in."

  "Good luck finding
one."

  "I know two."

  The man swung his head her way. "Tell me it's on the east side of the mountain."

  "A few miles that way," she said, gesturing northeast up the coast. "What's it matter?"

  Resolve cemented his face. "Because they've withdrawn virtually everything to the western tunnels. We come in east, we might be able to get to the surgery uncontested."

  "It's a long hike up the tube."

  "It's the only chance he's got." The man grinned at his companion. "Anyway, Sebastian's a tough motherfucker."

  "Then let's get him in the canoe."

  He tipped his head to the side. "I got a yacht right here."

  "If you think it'll be faster to rig that thing for sail, then I'll meet you at the tunnel."

  The man grumbled a bit, but helped the alien climb inside the outrigger. Once the being was settled across two seats, they pushed the canoe into the water and got underway.

  The words felt absurd, yet she needed to say them. "I'm sorry I shot your friend."

  Behind her in the boat, the man took a moment to reply. "Know what, I'm surprised it hasn't happened before."

  "You're taking this pretty calmly."

  "That's because I'm so damn tired that if I raise my voice I might pass out." He slipped his oar through the water. "Are the people on this island worth a damn?"

  She glanced over her shoulder. "I only know a few. They seem like good people."

  "I don't care if they send Christmas cards and help each other cross the street. Are they worth a damn in a fight?"

  "Some. Most of them came here to get away from that."

  "If me and Sebastian don't make it, you'll have to lead them."

  "If this is about a virus, what's with all the farming? They're growing coffee. Past the tunnels, it looks like a botanical garden."

  "That's a different leg of the operation."

  He proceeded to explain how he and the alien he called Sebastian had been following the trail all the way from China, exposing tendrils of a vast trade network built for the sole purpose of destroying everyone attached to it. It made a wicked kind of sense, but as she was still picking through the implications, he revealed the aliens had already tried to spread the virus earlier that morning—and they would have, if not for a stroke of luck.