Star Noir

by Paul Bishop

  “That’s Commander Morocco,” the woman said.

  He leapt over a side rail to the iron mesh floor and bolted toward the glass with Dak at his heels. They crossed the room in less than three seconds. Jen stood inside the shaft and inside the cubicle. An expression of dark mirth played across her face as she faded and reappeared, a hologram in her own right but powered by alien forces Slade couldn’t comprehend.

  I’ve been so worried about her body, I never considered what the ticks were doing to her mind.

  “Open it,” he shouted to the nearest available tech, a young blonde who simply shook his head in noncompliance.

  “Crap,” Slade said and nodded at Dak.

  She leveled the shotgun at the wall of the elevator access. “Everyone, duck,” she said and pulled the trigger. Fire erupted from the barrel and a million shards of glass imploded onto the hard rock floor outside the elevator. He brushed the jagged pieces away with his boot and strode toward the tube. When he pressed a green button, the pad lit up, the port opened, and he stepped inside the round glass car.

  “Stay here,” he told his companion and took the shotgun without asking.

  “You can’t go down without a suit,” Liz protested. “You’ll contaminate the server.”

  “I’m betting that’s already been accomplished,” he retorted.

  “You can’t go down alone.” Dak looked anxious.

  “There’s only room for one.”

  He pushed another button and fell through a long tube of night punctuated by horizontal bands of green and blue.

  When he reached the cubicle, it was filled with ticks.

  The sealed glass port on the elevator opened and the fetid rush of air made him gag. He slammed his fist into the glass car’s control panel but there wasn’t any way to close the door.

  The scene was worse than he expected.

  Ticks, like great bags of pus, protruded from every nook and cranny of the room. The floor, walls, and ceiling were three layers deep with throbbing, feeding vermin, their mouthparts latched onto the off-white protoplasm gel that covered the surface of the room. Running through that gel were neurons and currents, the thoughts and dreams of Lin Wu—hijacked. Phasing.

  Slade grasped the shotgun in sweaty hands, tossed it up to his shoulder, and almost pulled the trigger. The face of the AI’s hologram stopped him.

  Pixelated, it wavered in the air like smoke and was a beautiful face in distress. How much pain would he add to that expression if he simply blasted away?

  There was a time for firepower and a time for restraint.

  He lowered the gun and Jen stood beside him in the elevator, her eyes reflecting the ticks’ golden glow and her voice merry and alive. “If you read the file, you know where we’re going,” she said. She snapped at his shoulder with her teeth and brought them together in a click. “Let us feast and you can go too.”

  The wriggling mass glowed and faded and in their place, he caught a glimpse of another place where enormous flowers swayed in the wind against a hot-pink sky. He saw orange and blue toadstools like skyscrapers and trees with roots that crawled and moved through purple soil like worms. Birds with the legs of jaguars and panthers that walked on two legs were only two of the creatures he saw in that fleeting window.

  Through the pulsing, phasing walls of Lin Wu’s server core, Slade saw the Biodome.

  The whole thing was a heist on a planetary scale, a grand experiment in hijacking something that couldn’t be hacked any other way. He recalled Stevens’ explanation in the corridor.

  First, you’re here. Then, you’re over there.

  Someone in the Biodome complex was looking forward to the delivery of a new AI today, and he was damned if he’d let it happen.

  He shoved Jen out of the elevator into the swarm and smacked the elevator’s comm panel madly. “Dak, Lin Wu needs to be turned off. Turn her off, now!”

  “Roger-dodger,” she acknowledged.

  “Turn off the AI and half the base goes dark.” Liz sounded panicked in the background.

  Tell me something I don’t already know.

  “Dak here, buddy. Liz says if we can’t get it started again, we have to evacuate the base.”

  “I already talked to Stevens. Just do it. The ticks are drawn to Lin Wu’s signature frequency. If we shut it off, we might have a chance.”

  “You did read the file,” Jen said and slithered into the car beside him. “And you’re right about the ticks being drawn to Lin Wu, exactly like they’re drawn to certain kinds of people. Like Shackleton was drawn to Antarctica. We all have our compulsions.” He felt frozen, locked in space and time as she put one arm around his waist and touched his cheek with her hand. “Like you’re drawn to me,” she said. “I’m drawn to you.”

  Her lips brushed his neck and she opened her mouth.

  God, her teeth were white.

  8

  Everything went dark and Jen’s full weight fell against him.

  The door shushed closed and the elevator pulled Slade from the pit.

  He held her around the waist and supported her unconscious form.

  When they reached the top, he handed her off to Dak and stepped through the broken glass of the cubicle. She carried the commander to an open carpeted area and called for medics.

  The rest of the AI maintenance crew stood and stared at Slade like kids on a playground waiting for the teacher to call them to class.

  “You guys had something of a pest problem down there. I guess I’m the exterminator,” he said.

  Dak rolled her eyes. “Everyone needs a catchphrase.”

  “What are we supposed to do now?” Liz asked.

  “The core is packed with arachnids. With the AI turned off, some might already be gone. You’ll need to clean the space and fix the damage.”

  She glanced warily at Jen’s unconscious form. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “They were drawn to Lin Wu’s specific energy pulse and fed off her neurons and protoplasm, maybe her electromagnetic energy too. I’m no scientist,” he told those assembled, “but I grew up in a hothouse of bugs. My best guess is that without food, they drop off and die. Or phase out to someplace more appetizing.”

  “What if we can’t fix the damage?” Liz asked the question the entire tech group seemed to share. “And if we do achieve a successful restart, what’s to stop the ticks from coming back?”

  “Get Charlie Walton out of jail,” he said. “Bring him down here post haste. He built her and he can fix her.”

  “Do you really think Charlie will help?” Dak sounded skeptical.

  “At this point, I don’t think we’ll give him much of a choice. It gets real cold outside in the dark.”

  Two hours later, Slade sat in the same Med Space cubicle as before with the green walls and the off-white floor. Jen reclined on the bed and sipped cold water, her brown eyes clear and her skin a normal pallor.

  He told her that Charlie Walton was busy at work, setting up new parameters for the AI. “We ought to be back to normal in a week to ten days. Stevens says if we shut down non-essential things and with proper rationing of power, we ought to be able to hold out that long. It looks like his wind experiments are kaput.” He shrugged.

  She matched his ambivalence, then changed the subject. “About that file in my floor safe,” she began but fell silent.

  “About that…” He remembered how she’d looked the day she arrived, walking toward him across the ice with her big dark sunglasses.

  Looking like a spy, he’d thought.

  The Shackleton file certainly contained considerable classified information—intel that might’ve made his job easier.

  Jen stretched to set the bottle on a wheeled tray almost out of reach and winced.

  He took the water and put it on the tray. “Stevens says most of your body tissue is still massively inflamed but so far, there’s no infection. And all the bugs are gone.”

  Her head fell to her pillow with a gentle thump and he caught a
tear on his finger as it trickled down her cheek.

  “You’re gonna be okay,” he said.

  “You don’t need to believe me, but I planned to share the file with you at the first of the month,” she said.

  “Sshhh,” Slade said. “We can talk about that later.”

  “I had this grand scheme in mind where I’d tell you all about Charlie and the ticks and the Biodome. Then you and I would partner up to take on the bad guys,” she said. “Like you and Dakota.” More tears trickled.

  Slade’s laugh was gentle and friendly. “You’re not jealous of Dak?”

  “She’s tall, hot, and blonde and she likes guns.” She closed her eyes. “Why should I be jealous?”

  He picked her hand up and held it.

  For a while, they simply sat in silence. Finally, he said, “I have a feeling this thing with Lin Wu is only the start. The arachnids are still out there. The phase tech is still out there. There is probably any number of enemies we need to eliminate.” He carried her hand to his lips and kissed it. “We can still partner up.”

  With her eyes closed and breathing normal, Jen squeezed his fingers.

  “Let’s do that,” she said.

  Slade kept a firm hold on her hand and this time, it didn’t slip away.

  Blue Ivory

  A Story From The Biodome by

  MIKE BARON

  1

  The temperature was thirty-seven degrees at two-thirty in the morning on April 14 when the first image came into Camp Krumpholz in the American sector, part of a multinational task force that enclosed the alien phenomenon known as the Biodome. It was located in the Northern Kordofan, four hundred miles west of Khartoum.

  Austin Holbrook, the twenty-two-year-old tech on duty, gazed at the green picture with consternation. He knew he was seeing something different—an anomaly. The picture, taken by a drone operating within the dome, showed some kind of large animal lumbering through the exotic jungle that had sprung up as a result of research into what scientists called the goop. Because radio transmissions wouldn’t pass through the dome, the drone had to exit in order to transmit.

  He manipulated the image, magnified it, and used shape recognition software and comparative analysis. The creature was the size of an elephant. In fact, closer inspection confirmed that it was exactly that, except for one minor deviation. Its tusks glowed a cobalt blue. The nearest elephants were endangered wild forest elephants—the world’s smallest—a thousand miles south and west.

  This wasn’t one of those. The average African bush elephant weighed thirteen thousand pounds. Camp Krupholz’ Cray computer estimated this one to weigh close to twenty, which made it bigger than mammoths and mastodons. In fact, it appeared to be the largest elephant that ever lived. But what was it doing in the Biodome, which was surrounded by a five-hundred-mile buffer zone of uninhabitable desert? Since the landing five years before, all kinds of weird and wonderful things had emerged from the alien jungle known as the Biodome. The missile had landed and spread its glowing goop amid the sands before it was carried off piecemeal by various foreign powers to study its unknown metal.

  It wasn’t until months later that someone noticed that the crash site—which had been an arid desert for thousands of years—had suddenly grown a tiny oasis. This led to the discovery of the Alien Goop, or AG, an alien life form that found the desert amenable and sucked water out of the air for its needs.

  As the humidity in that part of the desert averaged thirteen percent, scientists were stymied as to the source of this water until they actually arrived on-site and witnessed the clouds forming. The United States proposed partnering with Sudan in building a Biodome, but the Russians were already on the first plane out of Moscow. The EU wanted in, France, Israel, and India set up an unlikely partnership, and before you knew it, the Biodome had more sponsors than a Realities For Children ride.

  Holbrook sent the image to AIC Dawn Wilson. Seconds later, she asked him to come into her office. Dawn was a squat, no-nonsense ecologist with a PhD in Environmental Science from Colorado State University. When Holbrook first met her, he called her Doctor Wilson.

  “Oh, please,” she’d replied. “Call me Dawn.”

  She sat behind her gunmetal-gray desk and motioned him into a chair.

  “What the hell is this?”

  He helped himself to bottled water from her dorm fridge and sat in one of a half-dozen mismatched chairs culled from all over Africa. “I don’t know. I’m surprised you’re up.”

  “I couldn’t sleep. It’s a real drag. Have you confirmed this with any other sources?”

  “I thought I’d check with you first.”

  Dawn stared at the image on her computer and tapped her keyboard. “I’ve asked Williger to confirm with another drone. That glowing tusk shouldn’t be hard to find.”

  “It looks like some kind of elephant.”

  “Yes, it does. The question is, how did it get there? How does the AG latch onto elephant DNA when there isn’t an elephant within a thousand miles?”

  Holbrook waggled his fingers. “The same way it summons rain?”

  “This is a major development. I’m sending a team in.”

  “Why not simply use the drones?”

  “If we have the image, it means the Chinese and everyone else has it too. How long before someone leaks this to the ivory poachers? This so-called security buffer is a joke. They’ll most likely come through the Chinese sector. It’s a miracle it hasn’t happened already with the rhino. We already have video of a group of poachers infiltrating through there but they disappeared during bad weather. No trace of them has ever been found, and we’re still tracking the six rhinos.”

  She brought an image up on the big screen that displayed Ground Zero at the center, while the concentric walls showed as colored rings with dozens of tiny dots, each representing a drone. Blue for America. Red for Russia. Green for France. White for China. They had originally intended to make the Chinese drones yellow, but some feared accusations of racism. The German drones were black. A handful of rogue drones were black-and-yellow striped. No one knew to whom they belonged, but the coalition had resolved to remove all undocumented drones. Toward this end, they employed a company called Drone Tech, whose only purpose was to destroy rogue drones, usually with laser beams.

  Camp Krumpholz maintained a lab whose function was to evaluate the mechanicals. Maximum drone range was now twenty miles. Operators had adopted a range of technologies to hide their appearance near the Biodome from other drones and satellites which used infrared and lidar to locate life anywhere near the zone. Stealth drones used a variety of strategies, including carbon nanotubes which used a sharp temperature gradient between the cloak and its environment to bend light away, or metamaterials which guided light away from an object. Cold tech allowed them to operate without giving off a heat signature, but each of these systems had flaws that could be exploited via triangulation. The problem was, such triangulation tied up three drones to find one. There were more mechanicals crisscrossing the Biodome than airplanes stacked up over O’Hare International.

  It was five am when Arthur Zebulon arrived, wide awake despite the hour. He entered Dawn’s office and brought a whiff of the desert with him. A former Army Ranger and lifelong hunter from Colorado, he was six-four and wore camo fatigues and a Rockies ball cap, with the profile of a rock outcropping and a brush mustache.

  Dawn stood. “Thanks for coming, Arthur. There are coffee and doughnuts over there.”

  Zebulon helped himself to black coffee. He sat in a chair facing the desk.

  “What?”

  She brought the image up on the screen. “We’re tracking it live now. It looks like an elephant.”

  He sipped his coffee as he studied the image. “It does look like an elephant. How soon before the ivory poachers arrive?”

  “They’re probably gathering right now. How long before you can assemble a team?”

  “Twenty-four hours. Most of them are hanging around METRO.
A couple of ʼem just got back. I’m thinking six men. You know some of them. I’ll want Jean.”

  “She’s the climatologist?”

  “That’s right. Plus LeGac, Brian Toynbee, Taki, and two more, depending on who’s available.”

  “All right. I’ll go out on a limb here and authorize you to form a team and stand by. By the time you get back to the French Sector, it will be approved. Please notify me as soon as you are ready to go.”

  Zeb fingered the whistle around his neck. “And our orders?”

  “Shoot to kill.”

  “What about the heffalump?”

  Dawn grinned. “Save the heffalump.”

  2

  A veneer of modernity hung over Addis Ababa like makeup on an old whore. Soaring skyscrapers built with Chinese money jutted from downtown—the Zemin Bank, Nani, Huda and KK Towers, the Maritime Transit HQ and the Bank of Ethiopia, and the seven-hundred-and-thirty-two-foot Carlton Center. But if you drove a mile in any direction, you would find the old Addis Ababa with its serpentine, rutted streets, myriad stalls jostling for elbow room selling everything from weapons to goats, back-alley taverns that served tella, areki, and shamita, distilled from teff and sorghum. Home-brewed areki was a leading cause of lung cancer and deforestation. Ethiopians couldn’t get enough of the strong homemade brew.

  The Okeci Tavern occupied the ground floor of a crumbling three-story cinderblock building on Tarera Street on a winding road off Libya Street. Twenty-four hours after Austin Holbrook had downloaded the image of the blue tusk, Weldon Sewell sat at a scarred wooden table in a back room, his laptop open and a clay bottle of areki at hand, and waited for the rest of his team to arrive. Afrikaner Martin Bortz was there. He was always the first to arrive. The hulking man with a handlebar mustache that would not have looked out of place in Tombstone was a mercenary with no personal life. When he wasn’t in the field, he amused himself with bare-knuckle boxing matches or slapping contests. When he needed a woman, he paid five dollars for a prostitute.