Within seconds, the process was finished. The alien lay twitching and sizzling in its own remains.
“Genocide,” my mother commentated. “Who thinks of such things?”
Drained and overwhelmed, Clark turned to her and spoke in an honest way. “Mrs. Malvaux, I’m just the delivery man. This picture is way bigger than any of us.”
“Lies,” she accused. “You believe what you’re doing is right. You shouldn’t be here. You’re destroying, and they’re fighting back, and you and my son have the temerity to be angry about it. What’s happening here is natural and we have no right to interfere.”
“If we don’t interfere,” I argued, “we’re all dead and I’m not ready for that. This is not an endangered species.”
Her eyes drilled into mine. “But you mean to endanger it.”
I nodded in annoyance. “Well, you’ve got me there!”
“Yes, I have you,” she caustically agreed. “They have a natural controlling factor. We’re witnessing it. There are no evil species. Nature doesn’t create destruction.”
“Nature creates almost nothing but destruction,” I disclaimed.
That was when we heard the sound of more grenades, distant muffled booms rumbling along the landscape.
“Nobody goes out,” I said. “We’ll wait for the Marines.”
* * *
I felt dangerously alone. I’d much rather have actually been alone. Instead I sat here and stewed, watching the monitors and trying to figure out how to get everybody back to the ship and fly off this rock without losing anybody else.
This wasn’t my best thing. Clark was theoretically the one who should be calling the shots, but he was, as he admitted, a freighter captain and not an adventurer, not a soldier, untrained in this kind of maneuver. Colonel MacCormac was probably the best one to make decisions, but I didn’t want to say that kind of thing out in the open, because he could so easily become a target. Somebody was working against us, and as an investigator I was supposed to be able to tease out that identity. Most investigations took weeks, months, maybe years. I had minutes.
As I sat alone, the bank of screens had turned strangely calm. The calm was worse than action, I think. My legs quaked and wouldn’t settle down. I was a bag of nerves.
One of the screens showed the flume between us and the camp of huts. That was a dangerous road now. It had probably seen more traffic in the past twelve hours than it had . . . well, ever. Parasites flicked around, full-sized aliens trod the area. Being out there was like wading a swamp in the Amazon—no telling what manner of horror would leap up and snap you down to your death. Nature could sure be creative in a bad way.
I squinted my tired eyes. There, hanging on a drape of gauze between two skinny spires, was the bat.
There it was, with its big soggy eyes and its Chihuahua face, hanging out on the gauze.
“What are you doing, Buttercup?” I murmured. “Why don’t you fly away while you can?”
The bat flexed one wing as if it had heard my thoughts, then coiled the wing back around itself like the cape in the old Dracula movies, and just waited there.
What was it waiting for? For us to come and get it?
“Is that it?” I asked the caped image on the screen. “All the way out here in space, you know somehow which group is yours? You know you’re an Earthling?”
My head pounded with exhaustion. I leaned back and rested it on the stark black wall. No chance for sleep.
The bat rearranged its feet and continued looking at me. Somehow it was even looking in the right direction, toward the camera, and thus we were eye to eye. She was. Bonnie said the bat was a girl.
I wondered if there were girl aliens and boy aliens.
* * *
We paused for a moment of silence as we processed the information and what we thought was a pretty good theory about the things we’d seen. During that pause I found myself looking at Chantal, the pixie-ish veterinarian, which made me think of something else. I looked around the table, then past it to the tunnel opening,
“What’s wrong with you?” Pocket asked.
I scanned the group again, just to be sure. “Where’s Bonnie?”
They glanced around, just realizing she wasn’t here.
Clark darkly confirmed, “I haven’t seen her . . . ”
I reached for the control panel as I’d seen the researchers do when they wanted to speak to each other inside the blind’s tunnel system. We weren’t really supposed to use it, but I didn’t care. “Bonnie? Bonnie, where are you? Are you in the compound? Wake up and talk if you’re in here. Bonnie, come in, Bonnie, Bonnie.”
The mellow communications system, on a constant low-volume, made my voice seem soft and distant.
There was no answer.
Then it dawned on me why there was no answer.
“Oh, crap . . . ” I scratched past the table and the people on the bench and ducked into the area with the stacked video monitors and scanned them. I missed a lot the first time over, and then saw the terrible sight I knew was out there. On the bottom left screen, almost behind a stack of foam coffee cups, was Bonnie. She was lurking between two pillars, and in her hand she held two lumps of dried fruit.
“What the hell’s she doing?” Clark demanded.
“Trolling for bats!” I burst past him. “I’ll get her! Everybody stay here!”
I ran out into the forest of glass. I hoped I was going in the direction where I’d seen the fox bat lingering. If the monitors showed a circular area around the blind, and the bat had been on the monitor to the left, I reasoned that I had to go left.
Only when I got outside and discovered that looking at the land on the monitors and looking at the actual land were two completely different things. Getting my bearings took too long, and I still wasn’t sure.
“Bonnie!” I dared to yell. My own voice startled me—we’d tried so hard to remain quiet that speaking up was a shock.
I ran around the rocky terrain which seemed to be the house for the caves in which my mother and her people had built their anthill. From here I could see that it wasn’t a solid lump of rock with caves inside—it also had dozens of openings that clearly showed on the outside. The rock was Swiss cheese, offering only the basic of scaffolds for the blind. The walls and tunnel material of the blind were the only real separation between those inside and the outside world.
The land was still pocked with shadows and the moon, now having arched almost all the way across the sky, still shone fairly brightly, enough that I could navigate.
But I’d lost my way. This wasn’t looking like the place where the bat had been. There was no hanging gauze here. Where was I supposed to go? Where would Bonnie have gone to reclaim her pet?
“Bonnie!” I called again—and skidded to a clumsy stop.
I’d run into an open plain, almost a meadow, of black and white spiky growth no taller than ten inches, and now I stood like a single turkey at a shoot. Flanking the entire northern ridge of the meadow were aliens. Hundreds of them. They turned in a single file and looked at me, heads bobbing and claws fanned. Their lips peeled back— greenish lips with phosphorescent drooling liquid running in strings to the ground.
“Aw, thank you, providence,” I murmured. There was no hiding. They all saw me.
I thought I was dead. Except that they didn’t move on me. Standing out here alone in the moonlight, looking at them, them looking at me, I felt like the lone conductor of a really big orchestra. With one flick of the baton, I could destroy the perfect pause.
“Rory?”
The voice came from my right. I pivoted only enough to see Bonnie sitting in the black and white furze, as if she were sitting at a campfire.
Moving in slow sidesteps, I closed the gap between us. “What are you doing?”
“I followed Buttercup,” Bonnie said, trembling violently. “I didn’t see them till I was all the way here.”
“Neither did I.” Extending my hand, I said, “Stand up very slowly and get
behind me.”
She unfolded her legs and took my hand. I pulled her to her feet.
“Getting behind won’t matter.” She raised her trembling hand and pointed over her shoulder.
Behind us, less than a hundred yards away, was the other edge of the meadow. To our right and extending the width of the available space, was a squall line of aliens. They flexed and threatened, hissed, rolled, and stalked with a physical message of singular purpose.
And they were moving toward us.
With awful deliberation the two lines were closing on each other. Because of the angle of the land, they’d meet first in the place where we’d come from—our escape route back to the blind.
“We’re cut off,” I said unhappily.
“Why are they divided up this way?” Bonnie squeaked, her voice barely working.
I drew her close against me and began to move laterally across the meadow.
That’s when I saw the Marines. The three of them stood enraptured by the sight of the two lines of aliens closing like pincers on the body of the meadow.
There was no sign of anyone but the three Marines. Had they made it to the ship? Was everybody at the ship dead?
MacCormac had his sidearm raised. As we approached the Marines and they came into the meadow to meet us, I called, “MacCormac, don’t . . . shoot.”
“Say that again?”
We finally came together two-thirds of the way across the meadow.
“Don’t antagonize them,” I said. “They’re leaving us alone. Don’t trigger any other kind of behavior.”
Not being an idiot, he did as I instructed and waved his two Marines to hold fire. Never thought the day would come when I’d be giving tactical instructions to a Colonel in the Colonial Marines.
“What happened at the ship?” I asked. “Is everybody dead?”
“No, they’re in the hold, locked up,” the colonel said quickly. “Your first mate left a com link on the ground outside, with a code to talk directly to him in the hold. We destroyed six of the PPs with grenades to get to the link. Aliens got aboard somehow, and Theo didn’t know what to do except release a pallet of PPs. He threw the com link out the ramp, hoping we’d find it. We couldn’t get in. There were still PPs in the cargo area.”
“It’s the ‘somehow’ that bothers me,” I grumbled.
We hunkered together, trapped, as the astonishing tableau unrolled around us. From the south came the longer phalanx of the dogs of Anubis. They bobbed the curves of their hammer-shaped heads, holding their faces low to show the curved transparent shells of their skulls in some kind of species-specific signal. Distending their main jaws, they expelled and flexed their second sets, glistening with silvery saliva and sticky drainage. All in all, they were a disgusting display.
“We’re cut off,” I croaked.
MacCormac crouched on the other side of Bonnie, with Carmichael and Edney huddled at my side. “We could try flanking them,” the Colonel said. “Lay down suppressing fire—”
“Too many,” I told him. “No chance.”
“I’m going down shooting!” Corporal Edney swore, and caressed her pistol, which seemed very small right now.
“There are other ways to fight,” I told her. “Like not drawing attention to yourself.”
“He’s right,” MacCormac said. “Make a circle around these civilians and hold fire!”
The three brave Marines, taking their roles seriously, arranged themselves flat to the ground around Bonnie and me. Then came the terrible moments of watching without being able to do anything else. The aliens moved in two concentrated waves toward each other, bundling into tighter units as they closed the gap between them. I felt as though I were watching one of those old-time Biblical epic movies with waves of extras creating endless throngs to showcase the power of the pharaohs. They came up through the spillways and out of the ditches, across volcanic lakes and down flumes. Each army was a juggernaut, moving toward us as if two vault doors were closing to lock us in. The hair-raising sight made us feel tiny and tortured, about to be killed by inches.
My skin came up in prickles. I coiled my arms around Bonnie and we made ourselves small.
Then the doors closed. The two squall lines of aliens came together around us, leaping over us to get to each other. Then the slashing and tearing began.
“Duck!” I dragged Bonnie down and pushed Carmichael sideways. He rolled away as two aliens landed between us, going at each other like cats.
The noise was mind-blowing. The world around us erupted into an atrocious and craven battle. The aliens leaped at each other and instantly tangled up into balls of two and three, after which others would leap onto the balls and create globes of five, ten, more, all tearing and biting at each other. Tails whipped out and stabbed back into the balls, spraying acid and glowing bodily juices around each battle ball. Parts of the aliens’ brittle bones splintered past us as they tore each other apart, rolling in their huge balls and leaving tire tracks of body parts and acid sizzling on the writhing bodies of the not-quite-dead who were left behind. The aliens paid no attention to those of their own who were wounded or trampled. The fallen became launch pads for others to stage their own grisly barbarism.
“Move!” MacCormac shouted, and led the way.
We crawled on all fours, almost down to our stomachs. Carmichael couldn’t stand the pressure and opened fire twice before following us. Edney shouted something unintelligible, and Carmichael responded with another round, which struck home on one of the creatures and sent a firework of acid spraying past us on our left.
“Come on, Ken!” I called. “Don’t bother!”
“Too many of ’em!” Carmichael confirmed, and gave up trying to use his weapon. He might as well have been spitting at a tornado.
Corporal Edney doubled back to avoid the twisting body of a dying Xeno, a critical mistake that put her in the path of a massive battle ball. I started to shout a warning, but never got the chance. The battle ball of ripping, thrashing aliens rolled over Edney and when it came up off the ground, she was inside it.
She screamed—we heard the terrible sound of shock and defiance—and then we heard the ballistics of pistol fire inside the tumbleweed of aliens. Tail sections and an alien hand came blowing out of the ball, and we caught the sight of Edney’s tanned face showing between a pair of alien legs. Her mouth was open in horror, one eye nothing but a bloody socket. Her hand came out of the ball, still shooting wildly.
Then Edney’s entire arm fell free of the ball and dropped to the ground, pistol, hand, and all. Her screams drained away. The battle ball rolled on, and she was gone with it.
“Shit, shit, shit!” MacCormac stopped crawling and rolled backward into me and Bonnie as we bumped up against a low-lying outcropping of silver stone.
Crumpled on the ground, we looked up at the sight that now completely blocked our way.
Three aliens, enough to kill a suburb, scowled down at us with their gracile bodies splayed in threat. They were hell’s dragons, so frightful that even the Marines froze and just stared. We could have shot them, but there would be three more, then thirty more after them, then three hundred. I think in those seconds we established a silent pact to let ourselves die now, be over with it.
The trio of aliens stretched their arms and necks, rolled their heads back, and cried to the heavens with their glass-breaking shrieks. The uproar almost cracked our skulls. Bonnie dug her face into my shoulder, having seen enough, finally. MacCormac gritted his teeth and peeled back his lips in a mockery of the aliens, and Carmichael took his hat off to welcome death uncovered.
A scratching sound behind us alerted me and I dropped Bonnie and cranked around. More aliens—four of them, rose over the rock I was leaning against.
“MacCormac!” I warned. “Get out of the way!”
The colonel spun around as the three dragons launched themselves at other four. He was trapped!
The aliens clawed at each other and amazingly pushed MacCormac out of th
e way. It wasn’t a mistake—they deliberately pushed him away! The seven aliens rolled into a weird ball, limbs and tails and heads all curved into each other, and actually rolled across the land in a nasty fighting mass.
I grabbed him and pulled him into the pile of us. “Get up and run!”
We scrambled out of the boiling pot, not even bothering to try to hide anymore. The riot went on, aliens slashing and biting at aliens by the hundreds, while we ran right through the middle of it, trying to avoid being splashed by acid or just rolled over by tumbling masses of aliens locked together in battle. Rolling around in every direction until they smashed into pillars or rocks or each other, the battle balls tumbled aimlessly as those aliens locked in them used their tails to whip outward and punch back in, spearing madly and leaving trails of dead fighters behind them like tire tracks on a demolition- derby field. The field now had a ghastly smell about it—acid, oil, saliva, a gaudy stink of flesh and befoulment. More butchery for this sad planet.
Our legs pumping against the unwelcoming ground, we crested a mound of glass that was the remains of a crumbled pillar. The mound was hard to climb since we didn’t dare use our hands on the crushed glass. I pulled Bonnie, and she pulled Carmichael. Behind us, Edney and MacCormac scrambled awkwardly up the talus spread by the rest of us. When we hit the top of the mound, I took one look at the landscape and shouted, “Back!”
Right in front of us were two poison-packing robots, spewing hypersonic darts from their hoods, taking out aliens left, right, and around. The poisoned aliens forgot about each other and began biting and ripping at themselves, biting their own arms off and trying to claw out the poison spreading inside them. If a sight can be more horrible than what we had already seen, this was it. The poison made them actually help in the killing process.
I fell on Bonnie, and lashed out a foot to trip Carmichael. “Down, down! Keep your head down!” I landed on my back and swept my arms out to hold Bonnie, then strapped Carmichael down with the leg that had tripped him.
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 44