Hooper pushed through waist-high ferns, then rested his good shoulder against a tree. He’d narrowly avoided taking a blast from the battloid in the chest. The right side of his face was blackened and the skin on his right arm was badly blistered. He still held his fatboy special, although his carbine was missing. The right side of his uniform had been burned away, exposing the partially melted Kevlar plate underneath. He pulled the melted plate out, examined its twisted shape then dropped it on the ground, deciding it was now useless. Hooper met Beckman’s eyes, then nodded towards a fire burning furiously a short distance away.
“Steamer’s over there,” Hooper said. “Or he was. There’s nothing left.”
At least it was quick, Beckman thought sadly, glad the big man had not suffered.
Markus ran his eye over the survivors, then glanced back towards the ruined structures, now illuminated only by the flickering light of fires. “Sergeant, you saw one of their vehicles land on the other side, right?”
“Yeah, behind the main building.”
Markus gave Beckman a meaningful look. “We need to move. There could be more of those things on the way, and we’re in no shape for another fight.”
“Timer, Vamp, do you read, over!” Beckman signaled again, but still there was no response.
“They’re gone,” Markus said.
Beckman glared at the CIA agent, even though he knew if Timer and Vamp were trapped below ground, he couldn’t help them. It wasn’t Markus being right that irritated him, it was that he took their loss so easily. Silently, he cursed Dr McInness for being a fool, and costing him the lives of two of his team. It was exactly the reason why he hadn’t wanted the civilian scientist along in the first place.
Hooper wiped his ash smeared face. “If they hadn’t blown that place, we’d all be dead.”
“Yeah, that mother owned us,” Tucker said staring at the burning trees where Steamer’s ashes lay smoldering. His grief had already hardened into a rage that demanded revenge.
Xeno sat on the ground, head down, her face white with shock. “We are so screwed. No way we can stop machines like that.”
“Hey!” Hooper barked angrily, summoning up what little strength he had left. “It’s dead! You’re not! Remember that!”
The rebuke surprised her. She saw the determination in his eyes and realized she really wasn’t a soldier. She was a scientist in khaki, not meant for this.
“You did good out there,” Beckman said, sensing her uncertainty. “Popping that smoke grenade was smart. I wouldn’t have thought of it.” She looked surprised. “The only way we’re going to beat these things,” Beckman added, “is with brains, not firepower. We need you.”
She took a deep breath, gathering her strength, and nodded. “You can count on me, sir.”
“I know I can,” Beckman said.
“We can’t stay here,” Markus said, watching the burning ruins.
Beckman ran his eye over Hooper’s burns anxiously, “Can you make it?”
“Yeah,” Hooper said weakly.
“All right then, let’s move,” Beckman said, starting up the ridge to where the others waited. Soon, a dirty brown rain began to fall, as water trapped deep in the Earth’s crust since the planet’s creation rose as steam, condensed and returned to Earth. By the time they reached the others, the rain had become a deluge, extinguishing the fires and soaking the land in primordial waters.
* * * *
Timer opened his eyes to impenetrable blackness. He tried to move, but found he was squeezed on all sides. The smooth curve of the tunnel wall angled up to the left beneath him, while a heavy weight pinned him to the ground. It didn’t feel like the rough, uneven rock of a cave-in. It was more like he was cocooned inside a smooth, cold coffin.
A hissing sound shattered the inky silence as a flare ignited just beyond his head. Its flickering light revealed the upper curve of the tunnel roof had folded over him like an enveloping blanket. The molecular bonding that knitted the tunnel wall together had refused to tear, even under the immense weight of the cave-in.
“I can hear him breathing,” Dr McInness said uncertainly.
Vamp’s hands locked around Timer’s shoulders, and dragged him free. “You alive?”
“If you call being buried under the Earth’s crust alive, then yes.” He stretched, discovering his body was a patchwork of aching muscles. “You’ll have to carry me,” he said hopefully.
“In your dreams, peewee.” She stood up and thumbed her mike. “Vamp here, Major, do you read me?” Long seconds of silence passed. “Beckman acknowledge. Anyone?”
“They can’t hear you,” Dr McInness said from the shadows. “The rock’s blocking the signal.”
One look at where the tunnel roof pressed flat against the floor, pinching off the entrance, told her he was right. Millions of tons of rock now separated them from the surface. In the sharp light of the flare, a twitching movement off to the left caught her eye. She unslung her M16 and aimed it at the long silver fingers clawing at the tunnel floor. Her eyes ran up a tubular arm, past the glassy metal sensor disk, to where the smooth ceiling pressed against the floor. Unlike Timer, who had found survival at the side of the tunnel, the seeker had been caught in the center under the full weight of the sagging roof. It was pinned, with no possibility of escape, but she fired a burst into its sensor disk just to be sure. It gave her some satisfaction to see the seeker’s fingers spasm, then cease moving.
Timer stared at the inactive machine with dread. “They don’t quit, do they?”
“Neither do we,” she said. “Got any more C4?”
“No, only got a couple of grenades.” The rest of his explosives were in his pack, which he’d left on the ridge with Nuke. He’d also lost his rifle, but his midget special was still in its holster.
“Ammo’s the problem,” Vamp said, knowing they carried food and water enough for twenty-four hours.
“Ammo?” Timer laughed, abruptly stopping when his bruised ribs complained. “What are we going to shoot down here?” The flare sputtered and went out, returning the tunnel to absolute blackness. After a moment, Timer asked apprehensively, “Got another?”
“One more. I’ll save it.”
“For what?”
She pulled him to his feet by his Kevlar vest, turning him around. “See that?”
“I can’t see shit.” He said, then noticed a pin prick of white light. The longer he focused on it, the further away it seemed. “What is it?”
“Bug-eye central. Start walking.”
“We’re just going to stroll in there and say, ‘Yo, aliens! What’s happening?’”
“Got a better idea?”
“We just blew their shit to hell!”
“We’ll say we’re sorry.”
“Sorry might work,” Dr McInness added hopefully.
She released Timer, and started toward the distant point of light.
“Man, this is really going to suck.” Timer muttered to himself as their footsteps moved away. He sighed, and started limping after them. “Hey, wait up!”
CHAPTER 11
Nemza’ri had known from her first breath since landing that the great ship had been holed. The warm, humid air flooding every corridor was breathable, even if tainted by a strangely intoxicating fragrance she did not recognize, for she’d never before smelled eucalyptus. Her olfactory implants told her the fragrance was biological and harmless, although its presence worried her because it told of the extent of the damage. Nemza’ri wondered why the ship’s automated repair drones had not already sealed the breach, and repressurized the ship. The only explanation was that the damage was too great for them to repair quickly. It occurred to her that the Command Nexus, with its inexplicable loss of judgment, had failed to coordinate the repairs effectively.
Whatever the explanation, she knew her first duty was to the safety of the ship. Using the life pod’s command terminal, she’d located the nearest damage control center eight decks away. With the grav lifts inoperabl
e, she’d had to make a series of dangerous climbs through cargo transit shafts to reach it. Most of the passageways had been immersed in complete darkness, forcing her to navigate using only her biosonar. She’d been trained to move through the ship on sonics alone, but she’d never been comfortable with the way sound waves reflected off the smooth metal walls. Even so, it didn’t take her long to find the sonic marker that identified the access hatch. This part of the ship was unpowered, but she knew all damage control centers had organic power for just such an emergency. Nemza’ri pinged the sensor above the entrance anxiously, relaxing only when the bulky hatch dilated to reveal a large rectangular chamber.
The damage control center was lit by the glow of two view screens facing a row of bulky heavy lift suits. She resisted the urge to climb into the nearest heavy lift suit, choosing instead to approach the screens. One hissed with white static, overlaid with symbols that told her there was a ship wide failure of the command net, that complex mix of communications, sensors and relays that controlled every aspect of the massive vessel. The other screen displayed damage reports from all over the ship. She was shocked to discover how many reports there were, then she saw the screen’s time indexes. The screen had not been updated for many days, then one of the old damage reports caught her attention, filling her with horror.
The stasis sleep system had suffered a catastrophic malfunction!
She pinged the screen to display all reports from the sleep chamber, but like so many other areas, she found no updates had been received for many days. Whatever had happened, the ship’s command net had failed when the sleep chamber had called for help. She wondered if that was what had caused the Command Nexus to fail, its inability to protect the sleep chamber?
Again, she felt the urge to rush to the nearest heavy lift suit and race to the heart of the ship, but her training held her back. Nemza’ri pinged the screen, recalling all damage reports. She was shocked to discover there were over a hundred and seventeen thousand of them! Her implants scanned them all in a matter of minutes, updating her memories with information related to critical systems and ignoring the rest. When she’d finished, the scale of the cataclysm was fully apparent to her.
Finally, Nemza’ri climbed into a heavy lift suit with a sense of hopelessness and waited for the suit to seal around her. When it had connected to her implants via her nervous system, it became an extension of her body, allowing her to hold an eggshell without cracking it or bend neutronium bulkheads like melted plastic. A large oval section of the helmet in front of her face dissolved to translucence, then she activated the suit’s exterior lights and headed towards the sleep chamber.
Nemza’ri forced herself to proceed calmly, even though she was driven by a desperate desire to rescue as many as she could. The damage reports had left her in no doubt as to the magnitude of the disaster and the unlikely possibility of finding survivors. The knowledge filled her with a terrible dread as she finally grasped her fate.
She was alone.
CHAPTER 12
Bandaka led the team up the rugged eastern slope of Parson’s Range in darkness and rain, following an ancient track used by his people for tens of thousands of years. By midnight, they reached the lip of the plateau overlooking the five glowing calderas that were all that remained of the destroyed power plants. The gases venting from the mine shaft had thinned to wispy threads reaching towards a dark cloud that now filled the sky. To Beckman’s surprise, there was no sign of activity anywhere near the mine. He’d expected at least a reconnaissance of the area, if not a punitive strike to punish those responsible for the destruction.
“Where are they?” Xeno asked, voicing Beckman’s thoughts.
Nuke pointed to the smoking ruin below. “Those wimp ass aliens got the message. Now they know there are serious bad asses on this planet!”
Markus peered thoughtfully into the shadows. “Or they’re coming after us stealthed.”
Nuke’s eyes widened nervously, then he took cautious step back.
“We’ll keep moving,” Beckman said, determined not to rest until they were hidden deep within the plateau’s forest.
With the energy dome obscuring the moonlight, the forest was a maze of mysterious shadows and baffling sounds, yet Bandaka always knew exactly where they were. He led them into the forest for another hour, until Hooper could go no further. When they made camp, Xeno washed the Sergeant’s burns with water from a nearby stream and fed him pain killers to help him sleep. When finished, she turned to Virus, who lay on his makeshift stretcher, unconscious and moaning incomprehensibly. She checked his vitals and threaded an IV into his arm, hanging the saline pack from a nearby branch.
“I’ve got enough of these to keep his fluids up for twenty-four hours,” she informed Beckman who silently watched her tending the two wounded men.
“That’ll be long enough,” he said, then approached Nuke, who was fiddling with Virus’ communications gear. “Anything?”
“The short wave is dead.”
“Are they jamming us?”
Nuke shook his head uncertainly. “No, there’s just nothing out there.” He glanced up at the sky. “Maybe that dome can block radio waves?” He held up the recovered communicator in the Groom customized housing. “This thing on the other hand is going nuts. Traffic is increasing by the hour.”
“Talking about us?”
Nuke shrugged. “Whatever they’re saying, there’s a lot more of them saying it than a day ago. And they don’t much care that we can hear them.” He glanced at Virus’ comatose form. “I’d feel better if he was listening to this stuff instead of me.”
“You’re doing fine. Keep me posted.”
“Affirmative.”
Beckman returned to his backpack, leaving Nuke to channel surf the recovered communicator. He opened a dehydrated ration pack, allowing himself to rest for the first time that day. Some of the team had already finished eating, and were stretching out to sleep while the aboriginal guides had vanished into the woods to forage. Tucker lay on his back, absently scraping his fingernails with his knife, thinking about Steamer’s death and planning for pay back, while at the edge of the camp, Cougar was on watch, cradling his rifle as he scanned the shadows. When Xeno finished with Virus and Hooper, she stripped and cleaned her M16, listening absently to Markus and Laura now engaged in a lengthy conversation.
“I used to think all this UFO stuff was some kind of a mass psychosis,” Laura said.
“That’s how we like it,” Markus said. “Most people are afraid of something; the dark, the bogey man, creaking noises. Imagine how they’d feel if they knew what’s really out there.”
“They’d deal with it.”
“Would they?” His tone indicated he didn’t think so.
“Lots of people have seen them. It hasn’t ended the world.”
“Only crackpots see UFOs,” Markus said with a wry smile. “And while there’s no evidence, that’s how it’ll stay.”
“And you discredit the evidence that does exist.”
“We don’t have to do much. They don’t want to be seen, and they have the technology to stay out of sight. If they wanted the world to know they’re here, we couldn’t stop it. All they’d have to do is land on the White House lawn and it’s all over.”
“There are photos.”
He snorted. “Of blurry, out of focus blobs”
“You guys screw up the pictures, is that it?”
“It’s not us, it’s the cameras. They can’t handle the extremes of light and dark, especially at night. If you photograph a brilliant light against a dark sky, automatic cameras overexpose the bright part, creating featureless blobs. What makes it worse is that the light is not coming from the ship’s hull, but from the air around it, between the camera and the ship. It’s what Dr McInness said, their acceleration fields cause the air to glow. It screws the focus and the exposure. So we say UFOs don’t exist because there are so many cameras out there, and no good photographs. Simple, yet believable.”<
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“You make it sound like a game.”
“It’s no game,” Markus replied soberly. “The truth is, we made a big mistake.”
Laura looked confused. “What mistake?”
“We dropped the big one, much sooner than we should have. It got the attention of the Local Powers.” He cast his eyes toward the night sky, where the real great powers were. “They’ll let us have our wars, and slaughter each other, but nuclear weapons is pushing the envelope. Before 1945, there weren’t many UFOs here. Earth was a back water. Once we started nuking cities, sightings went through the roof. It took a couple of years for them to get set up. I’m talking bases, people, equipment. They’ve got logistics to manage, just like us. By 1947, they were here, in strength, and have stayed ever since.”
“But wouldn’t every civilization get nuclear weapons, eventually?”
“Sure, but peaceful civilizations wouldn’t build them. Not us. We spent a fortune getting them early and then mass produced enough of them to fry the planet many times over.”
“If I were them,” Beckman added dryly. “I’d be watching us too.”
“You think they’re frightened of us?” Laura asked.
Markus shook his head. “Suspicious, contemptuous, but not afraid. They’re monitoring us so they know how close we are to getting out there, where we could really make a nuisance of ourselves.”
“But, we wouldn’t nuke them.”
“We’ve already nuked our own kind,” Markus said. “Of course they think we’d nuke them.”
“I’d nuke them,” Beckman said, then gave them a cautious look, “If they attacked us.”
Markus raised his hands, vindicated. “There you have it, the military mind.”
Beckman grunted. “It’s academic. They won’t let us past Pluto.”
“They’ll let us into the Oort Cloud,” Xeno corrected. “That’s still part of our Solar System.”
“So we’re prisoners?” Laura asked astonished.
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