Star Noir

by Paul Bishop

  “They knew the risks. It was their choice.”

  The other man grunted. He had three boys.

  The Humvees averaged four miles per gallon of diesel in the city and eight on the highway. With fifty-gallon tanks, they could go three hundred and twenty miles between fueling.

  Before leaving Addis Ababa, Sewell had arranged to refuel at Dongola, their last stop before the Biodome. They pulled into a Bee Station on the outskirts of Dongola Airport at noon, stocked up on water and fuel, and headed out on the final stage of their journey. The Biodome lay four hundred miles northwest. He planned to refuel in the Chinese sector. They would be there by nine pm, barring any unforeseen circumstances.

  The haboob loomed to the east.

  Chester Wee, a Korean built like a fire hydrant, talked to the gas station manager, who wore a robe.

  “Do you know when that haboob will hit?”

  “I heard on the radio within the next six to eight hours. You don’t want to be out there when that happens. I can recommend an excellent hotel. My brother owns it.”

  “Thank you.”

  Twelve miles out of Dongola, Zulu Ken—now riding with Sewell—noticed something approaching them from the northwest. His eyesight was easily the best of the group. He retrieved a pair of binoculars from the duffel at his feet and stared.

  “What the hell, mon.”

  “What is it?”

  “Look like helo. Maybe defense coalition.”

  Using limited-range transceivers, Sewell called the convoy to a halt. They all piled out.

  He pointed at Bortz. “Grab the stinger.”

  The Afrikaner scrambled, hauled the heavy hand-held device from its case, and set it on the ground. Ndugu helped put it together and lifted it to Bortz shoulder as the South African sweated through his campaign hat and peered through his amber aviator shades. He had fired stingers in Yemen and Uganda so knew what to expect. Dardeniz pulled another stinger from its box, armed it, and put it to his shoulder.

  “From the direction it’s coming, that can’t be good,” he said, a cigarette hanging from his lip.

  Zulu Ken continued to track the helo as it approached, a faint whine audible.

  “Look like Blackhawk.”

  Sewell had to make a decision. There was zero chance the helo was a welcoming committee with a cured ham and a case of beer. No one flew in this hellhole except military operations. The Biodome was a quasi-military operation and it was logical that the aircraft had been sent to stop them. The only question was who would fire first.

  “Fire when you feel confident,” he told Bortz.

  “Do you want me to bring it down?”

  “Do it.”

  The distant whine waxed and grew into the whup-whup of a weed whacker. Armed with M60 machine guns and Hellfires with an eight-klick range, the chopper was a black wasp against the sky. Why hadn’t they fired?

  Sewell’s transceiver crackled and he snatched it up.

  “Turn around or we will take you out.” The man’s voice competed with wind and engine like something out of a maelstrom.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “You have one minute to get in your vehicles and leave or we will fire.”

  The chopper hovered at a hundred yards and a hundred feet.

  He clicked the transceiver off and motioned to Bortz with his right hand.

  “Do it!”

  The South African squinted and squeezed. The stinger sputtered, flared, and fired with a sharp hiss. They followed its gray trajectory to what should have been impact with the helo, which popped aluminum confetti like a party favor. The stinger missed by ten feet, spiraled off into the desert, nosed down, and exploded out of sight.

  “What the hell!” Sewell demanded.

  Dardeniz had launched his from the other side of the vehicle within a few seconds and before their target had a chance to retaliate. It fled straight and true into the black wasp, which disappeared in a dandelion puff of orange and hurled parts over the landscape. A second later, the shock wave and metallic clang sounded. Seconds after that, black metal parts rained.

  “Let’s go!” Sewell said and scrambled into the lead vehicle.

  They rolled directly toward the point of impact in the middle of the dirt rut that passed as a road. Flames and wreckage surrounded them. He drove counterclockwise around the crash site and past the blackened body of an airman, his uniform burned to a crisp. It could have been anyone. He stopped fifty yards from the burnt hull.

  All eyes examined the charred Blackhawk. It was devoid of identifying marks. They found two more bodies before they pulled back onto the road on the other side.

  “Come on,” Dardeniz said. “It’s the Americans.” He stopped to cough into his hand. “They’re the only ones who give a shit.”

  “That was some nice shooting, Dard,” Sewell told him over the transceiver.

  “I’m a motivated individual.”

  As they approached the Biodome, they had to worry about drones. The best modern remote-controlled drones had a twenty-mile range, which meant operators were out there, seated in the frying pan to operate them. The heat reduced drone range too. The Zephyr solar-powered model could stay aloft for a month, but it cast a signature like a gay pride parade and wouldn’t last ten minutes, given the Biodome’s politics. Everyone was watching everyone else. There were at least six drone stations inside the dome trying to keep their birds aloft.

  Sewell had brought shotguns for both them and the locusts.

  They rolled through the intense heat with AC on full and feared a follow-up at any second. The helo went unavenged and it occurred to him that it might have been the only weapon the Americans could field. Their resources were limited and already stretched. This didn’t mean they were out of the woods. The Yanks might have fielded a ground force that already waited for them. The land ahead consisted of an endless landscape of rolling sand hills marked here and there with a green smudge.

  Zulu Ken tapped him on the shoulder. “We best step it up, boss.”

  The leader looked out the shotgun window at the wall of sand looming over the horizon. A tidal wave of dirt rolled across the earth.

  “Gonna be here soon, boss.”

  Sewell glanced at the fuel gauge. “We’re good. Step it up, boys. We don’t want to be outside the perimeter when that sandstorm hits.”

  They accelerated to fifty—the Hummer’s top speed—like three dun-colored beetles that raced across the desert floor and left plumes of dust in the air. The haboob moved inexorably toward them, God’s own lawnmower.

  The outer wall loomed. A shimmering column of light stretched from the barely visible green crest of the dome toward the sky. Chester Wee put a drone up and they headed to the Chinese Gate.

  8

  The hi-res image showed a lumbering giant with a tiny head and spines up its back cavorting in a stream. What was the source of water? The column halted to consider this obstacle.

  “We could go around it,” LeGac said.

  “That’s the wall creature,” Taki said from the second Hummer. “Sal Jacobs killed one at the wall two years ago. We thought that was the last of them.”

  Zeb looked at it on his dash monitor. “The Biodome keeps throwing surprises. It could be another. It could be the same one. Don’t these things regenerate? You kill ʼem, their DNA soaks into the ground, and hey presto! A year or two later, it springs up again. Parthenogenesis.” As he watched, a blurry shape rushed the video feed and it went black.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “Locust,” Toynbee said. “Hang on. I’ll send another up.”

  “Nobody likes the locusts,” Zeb said.

  LeGac broke out a Remington twelve-gauge, checked the ammo, and stood through the Humvee roof. “Taki, you drive. I’m gonna blow a few holes in these locusts.”

  Their leader leaned out the window. “Ix-nay on the blasts. You’ll only stir them up. Someone else may be in the neighborhood.”

  “Not according to
my feed,” Toynbee said. “I have visuals from three different sources including the Krumpholz and French drones.”

  “How are you getting feed from the French?”

  He put a finger to his lips. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  Zeb put the vehicle in gear, and they drove toward the center at fifteen miles per hour. Even before they saw it, they heard the mutant thrash in the underbrush. They circled a wild profusion of trees to witness a real-life kaiju stripping fruit fifty feet off the ground while its tail whipped and swept from side to side like a mace. The force shattered trunks and shook the earth and could be felt through the floorboards.

  He pushed a button and the roof-mounted air horn blasted to scare a thousand creatures into the air—locusts, birds, and…whatchamacallits, which really were unrecognizable in a hasty glance. The dino whipped its thin neck to stare with beady eyes set in its relatively tiny head before it lumbered away toward the center of the Biodome. Its footfalls shook the trees and released a shower of fruit and nuts to the jungle floor, where they were set upon by mammal, reptile, bird, and insect.

  “Ouch!” Shawn snapped and slapped his neck. “Freaking mosquitoes.”

  Matthew handed him a canister of Off! which he applied liberally to his shoulders before he sprayed a little in his hands to smear it over his neck.

  Jean looked at Zeb. “Aren’t you announcing our presence?”

  “That’s another thing about the Biodome. It swallows sound. Last time I was in, Matt was ten meters away and I couldn’t see or hear him. We were looking for a lost drone. After a while, he came up to me and said, ‘Didn’t you hear me?’

  “I said I hadn’t heard him. He told me he shot some kind of giant buzzard out of the air with his Remington and actually fired five shots. When he could see I didn’t believe him, he took me back to show me the bird—except it had already vanished and left only a damp, green, oozing place on the ground where it was. He showed me the shotgun shells, though. Weird.”

  They rolled on. The only way they could communicate with Camp Krumpholz was to either stand at the barrier and hold the transmitter on the other side or send a drone up to hover precisely at the dividing point between the Biodome and the normal atmosphere with one antenna up and one down. Otherwise, the barrier stopped most transmissions.

  They had gone about twelve klicks when Zeb called a pause for lunch and to gather intel. Toynbee raised his drone slowly until it tickled the barrier. Beyond the dome, the sandstorm had rendered all communication impossible.

  The screen went blank. He looked at the other man, who sat on the lush kudzu with his back against a fat tire and manipulated a black control panel on his thighs. “Outside the dome, everything is shit. Eighty-miles-an-hour winds and sand that will strip the finish off a Ferrari in fifteen minutes.”

  “Shit,” Zeb said. “Okay, we’ll head toward the center.”

  The American sector had attempted to overcome the communication problem by laying a cable from Camp Krumholz across the desert and into the dome. Something constantly cut the cable. They kept drones on it twenty-four seven, but whatever it was, it came up from below—some kind of goddamn sandworm, maybe from the Biodome. Was it spreading underground? Ground-penetrating radar was low on the list of priorities. Every nation involved had to deal with spending complaints. Money that went to explore the bizarre was money politicians couldn’t promise to their favorite constituencies.

  But this was like the moon opportunity, scientists argued. It would confer benefits beyond anything anyone could imagine. The desert bloomed before their eyes. Outside the dome, the sky was black. The jungle itself glowed from mutant lightning bugs, phosphorescent fungi, and green glowing succulents that grew in marshy ground. Rain drifted from place to place as clouds dissipated and reformed. The Biodome was its own little ecosystem. Jean wrote furiously in an old-fashioned spiral notebook and sometimes took pictures out the window.

  It was bright enough that they didn’t have to turn the lights on.

  “Let’s go,” Zeb said.

  They advanced at ten klicks an hour and circumnavigated fallen trees, bizarre rock formations that thrust themselves up abruptly, and mirror-like ponds that rippled and dimpled when creatures touched the surface from both sides. The Humvees could take three feet of water, but no one knew how deep the ponds were and no one wanted to find out. Two more drones died.

  Jean gasped at a rock formation. “Stop. I want a sample of that rock.”

  “Every minute we delay allows the poachers to advance further into the jungle.”

  She zipped her lip but didn’t look happy. They rode with the windows open and listened to the eerie cacophony. A general insectoid buzz surrounded them and moved from left to right and back again like a Jefferson Airplane album. Night fell and the jungle dimmed. The vehicles relied on infrared and Toynbee’s drones to pick their way toward the center. It was the quickest route toward the interlopers and no one had seen the center for months. For all they knew, it now had an Arby’s.

  They paused at eleven pm for Toynbee to float a drone. Outside, the sky was black and there was no communication.

  Zeb checked the fuel. They could easily make the center and return to the edge. He turned to Jean. “When is that thing gonna move on?”

  “A typical haboob can stretch for a hundred miles. If it encounters a low-pressure area—and I have reason to believe the Biodome causes low pressure—it could settle in for twelve to fourteen hours. I don’t see it lasting much longer than that.”

  “We’re operating blind,” he said.

  “Except for drones within the dome.”

  Toynbee leaned out of the Caiman and waved. “Hey! Is this what we’re looking for?”

  Everyone turned to their monitors, which displayed a mammoth bulk from above that clearly had a prehensile trunk and two blue torpedo-like tusks.

  9

  Toynbee sat Indian-style in the cargo area, a drone upside down in his lap and a bottle of superglue and a roll of T-Rex at his side. Zebulon leaned in.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to glue this drone to the heffalump’s head.”

  He clapped the man on the shoulder. “Brilliant. How far away is it?”

  “About a hundred meters. It’s at a drinking hole.”

  Zeb looked at the monitor and peered through trees and fronds lit by ambient light that made it seem like an infrared image. It wasn’t, of course, and the impression was simply the natural light that had an eerie green cast. The pond was about five hundred square meters and surrounded by animals including a pale blue chimera and pup and six hyenas that watched them hungrily. The drooling hyenas approached clockwise and their movement scared a half-dozen waterfowl that scudded into the center. The momma chimera lunged forward, seized a predator in its jaws, and shook it like a squeaky toy to break its neck. The others retreated and cackled a protest. Monkeys hurled shit from trees.

  The hyenas were at one o’clock, the chimera at four, and the heffalump at seven. Toynbee brought a program up. “It weighs about seven thousand kilograms.”

  Jean stared at the monitor in the lead vehicle. “Why are the tusks blue?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied.

  “How many legs?”

  He fiddled with the controls. The drone swooped for a side view to reveal that the creature had only four legs before the feed went dead. A split second of violent sideways motion was the only warning, then it went black.

  “What the hell?” Zebulon demanded.

  “Something got it. It could be anything.”

  “How will you find the heffalump again?”

  “Hang on.” Toynbee’s fingers tapped his device. “The drone’s still transmitting its location. If it holds steady, I should have this thing up in a few minutes. Hopefully, the critter that downed it won’t be anywhere near.”

  He wound T-Rex tape—sticky-side out—around the drone’s chassis. With that in place to his satisfaction, he squeezed an entire bot
tle of Gorilla Glue between the tape and all exposed surfaces, carried it carefully into the clearing, turned it delicately right side up, and threw it into the air. The rotors caught and it glided up and forward and disappeared from view. Everyone watched its progress through their monitors as he directed it toward the pond. It was like a documentary from a strange green world.

  “Matt,” he said over his shoulder. “Get another drone up.”

  Matthew Montana held a black control harness up. “I’m way ahead of you, hoss. And there’s the feed.”

  The view from above returned from a different perspective and now looked down at the pond from six o’clock. The heffalump waded in up to its belly. Several birds alighted on its back. Things swam barely below the surface to create ripples. An albino deer approached the water cautiously and lowered its head. Reptilian jaws rose, seized the animal by its neck, and dragged it flailing beneath the surface. Montana cut back to the heffalump, which drank without concern.

  The feed switched to the glue bomb. Toynbee went into a trance, his movement on the control yoke invisible to the eye. The video approached the heffalump from its right rear quarter and three meters above the ground. The animal was massive but not as big as the wall monster. Up close, its smooth gray skin looked like Naugahyde. It was, after all, brand new. The drone rose to back level and the birds squawked and flew off.

  He settled the glue bomb between the front shoulders, facing forward. A press of his thumb thrust the drone firmly onto the creature’s back. The rotors continued to whir and provided downward pressure.

  “That epoxy sets in fifteen minutes. I think I made it in ten.”

  The heffalump paid no attention.

  Matthew Montana raised a finger. “Here’s another drone at four o-clock, ten meters.”

  “Let’s see,” Zebulon said.

  The image from Montana’s drone rotated and zoomed on a hard black plastic disc that stared at them with a single insectoid lens.

  Taki stared at the screen in his Humvee. “If it’s not us it’s them.”

  “Should I destroy it?” Matthew said.