by Ian Creasey
“Warning: anomaly detected in sub-basement seven, room twenty-one.”
As I came around the desk, I found the body of a middle-aged woman shot to death on the floor. I stepped over it and touched the screen, opening the details of the warning. A map popped up, which I quickly memorized. Then I checked the time stamp; the warning had been running continuously for over two weeks.
“There you are,” I said.
An elevator took me down to sub-basement seven. It was a long, skinny corridor with rooms branching off it, unsafe for claustrophobics. The map from the computer upstairs told me room twenty-one was to my right. Two minutes of walking proved that to be true.
I tried the handle, but it was locked. Cursing, I grabbed the instruction sheet from my pocket and typed a series of passwords into the number pad on the wall beside the door. A loud clunk told me the magnetic locks had disengaged.
I raised my rifle with one hand and pushed my way into the room with the other. Inside I came face-to-face with the man in the machine.
His voice immediately bombarded my mind, like a schoolyard bully, with empty accusations of murder and abandonment. Some true. Some not.
“I am the voice of judgment,” he boasted. “Confess and be free! I can take away your pain!”
He screamed all sorts of absurdities. So I pointed my gun at him, half-machine/half-alive, and asked, “Who is she?”
Fifteen minutes later Doyle is still looking through my brain and I’m tired of playing this game. My orders were clear: locate the cause of Hera’s tempest and destroy it if possible. The rifle in my hands says it’s more than possible.
I still haven’t really figured out the machine, but I suppose that the experts can analyze it thoroughly once they’ve cleared the bodies from the surface.
Destroy him.
So I lower my gun and walk over to the girl, offering her my hands. She takes them, and I help her up.
“What are you doing?” Doyle rages. “Don’t touch her!”
I’m sure she can hear him too, but we both ignore his demands.
I lean in and kiss her, slowly at first, then once she accepts it, we kiss with what you might call passion. I pull her close so I can feel her contours against my body.
Doyle launches a string of threats and curses so that they ricochet inside our skulls but ultimately fall lame and impotent. He adorns our affectionate display with vile words and oaths, but they amount to nothing as I caress her form with my hands.
His screams and protests only serve to motivate us and bring us together – destroy him, I think, while I kiss his love.
When I’m done with her, I pick the gun off the ground and raise it up. I look him square in the eyes and unload half the clip into his flesh.
After Marlowe had finished questioning me about the head on the pike, he asked me about the last person I remember killing. So I told him about one day near the end of the tour when we were entering the house of suspected rebels. Three to the front door; me and a guy named Jamison watching the back.
We got word that they were ready to move in the front, and about fifteen seconds later someone came bursting out the back. I could see a gun in his hands, so I put him down with three to the chest.
Once we got word that the house was clear, Jamison and I moved over to the body. It was this baby-faced kid wearing rags at best, clutching an AK-47.
“Damn,” said Jamison.
“What?”
“Can’t be more than twelve.”
“So?”
He shook his head. “You’re gonna remember this day for the rest of your life, man.”
Marlowe raised an eyebrow. “What do you suppose Jamison meant by that?”
“No idea,” I answered. “But he was right. Just because he said that, I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.”
Just before mission liftoff, Marlowe hauled me aside so that no one else could hear us. He licked his lips. This time there was no barrier between us.
“I don’t know about the rest of them,” he told me, “but I have no doubt you’ll come back from this.”
“How sweet.”
“When you come back, they’ll welcome you as a hero, but you should know that there’s nothing heroic about you.”
“You’re putting a lot of faith in me, Marlowe.”
His teeth were grinding together. “Listen to me. The only reason you’ll survive, the only reason you’ll defeat that thing, whatever it is, is because you’re worse than it.”
I pulled the clip from my rifle and checked to make sure it was full. It was. “What’re you getting at?”
I could see the dew of sweat building up on his forehead. His hands were balled into fists. He whispered one more thing before I left: “You, Hammond, are pure evil. If my theory’s right then you’ll make it back, but I pray to God you never do.”
Roanoke, Nevada
By Edward J. Knight
As I stepped off the small plane, the wind shocked my skin. I’d known the desert could get cold in winter, but hadn’t expected this. The night wind wasn’t strong enough to howl, but it sucked the heat out of my exposed neck and cheeks.
The military escort meeting me seemed unperturbed. They stood stock-still as if they could wait an eternity for me to descend the steps. I was half-tempted to stall just to see if they would.
I took one long look around the bleak Nevada landscape. Given the isolation of this base, whatever had led them to summon me had to be serious. Which meant I was likely to be here a long time.
The demeanor of the men meeting me was as cold as the night. They didn’t smile. They didn’t ask for my name or identification. As soon as I was on the ground, a lieutenant scooped the bag out of my hands, and a colonel told me to follow him. Those were the only words any of them spoke.
Fortunately, it wasn’t a long walk to shelter. One security checkpoint leaving the airfield, another entering the compound, and then a short walk to an underground bunker entrance. There the guards gave me only a cursory examination before they had me enter an elaborate scanner, hold my arms away from my body, and turn slowly in a complete circle.
At least they didn’t make me remove my shoes, I mused.
As we entered the elevator, I turned to the colonel. “So what do you do for fun around here?”
At first, I didn’t think he’d heard me. But then, after a pause, “Most of the personnel play videogames in their spare time. Others go to the gym or the shooting range.”
“What, no moonlit hikes in the desert? No dune buggy races across the sand?”
My little joke failed to get a rise out of him. He just stared straight ahead for a half-dozen heartbeats.
“There’s an observation deck for the astronomers,” he said, his tone still flat beyond monotone. “Sometimes people go up there if they want time outside.”
If all the people here were as droll as the colonel, it was going to be a long, long stay.
The general, at least, appeared to have some personality. While his office was mostly the stereotypical military bland, a large gag “photo” of a green skinned, bug-eyed alien holding up two fingers in a peace sign adorned one wall. In it, a younger version of the general stood next to the “alien,” also making a peace sign and grinning like a loon.
When I was ushered in, the general smiled, apparently in relief. At least someone is glad to see me, I thought.
He stood and offered his hand. “Dr. Lowrie, welcome. I’m glad you could join us.”
I suppressed a grimace. It’s not like I had a choice … “Happy to be of service.”
He introduced a man in a dirty white lab coat next to him. “You may remember Dr. Britt. He says he met you at the Biological Warfare and Defense Conference.”
I looked at Britt – young, gawky, and a bit gaunt. I didn’t remember him.
“I met a great many people at the conference,” I said.
“Ah.” Britt said, “We, uh, just talked for a few minutes after your presentation.”
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p; I nodded and turned back to the general. He gestured for me to be seated. When I had, he cleared his throat. “We have a problem.”
I nodded. It wasn’t hard to guess what type. “You’ve had an outbreak.”
“Correct.”
“And it’s unusual, or you wouldn’t have called me.”
“Correct again.”
I leaned back in my chair. This was familiar turf. I’d already bailed out the military’s germ warfare units more than once, even though I hadn’t realized they had one in Nevada.
“So what did your bio guys cook up this time?” I asked.
“We didn’t cook up anything,” Britt said. He looked hurt. “It’s the population that’s the problem.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“It’s the extraterrestrials,” the general said, watching for my reaction. “Our extraterrestrials are falling ill.”
“Really?” I couldn’t keep the disbelief out of my voice. My eyes wandered back to the picture on the general’s wall.
He noticed. “That’s an untouched photo,” he said. “The aliens are real, and they’re here.”
I couldn’t help but burst out laughing.
The general had been pretty tolerant, I mused later, as Britt gave me a tour of the facility. Part of it was surely the fact that I was one of the few epidemiologists with a top clearance, but part of it also seemed to be that my reaction was expected. I had the strong sense that I wasn’t the first one to laugh at the picture of the aliens.
Because they were so … Hollywood. The dark green skin, big black eyes, bulbous heads, and spindly limbs were straight out of a Spielberg movie. They were unbelievable because they were exactly what we had always imagined.
Which, Britt confirmed, was the point. “We decided to go with the purloined letter approach,” he’d said, although I was sure the “we” was honorific and not literal. “We intentionally put out some pictures, early on, that anyone would interpret as obviously fake. That way, if any reports leaked out, no one would believe them.”
“You managed that,” I said.
Britt grinned in reply.
But as he took me around, he told a story that was astounding. The aliens had come from Eridani, in a slowboat as potential colonists. Their closest biological Earth equivalents were amphibians, which meant they could hibernate in cold water for extended periods of time. It had been a small jump to develop a successful cryofreeze technology. That had enabled them to make what had been a several-hundred-year journey at the fastest sublight speed they could manage.
They made first contact with the Apollo 13 astronauts. Apparently, the entire “we have a problem” had been a cover-up of the real problem, which was coming face-to-face with the aliens’ ship. Roswell, Britt told me, had indeed just been a weather balloon.
The cover up, including the full quarantine at the base, had continued ever since. I was too used to government paranoia to be surprised, particularly when it gave them an excuse to mine the newcomers for advanced technology.
Communication had been difficult at first, as Eridanians only “talked” visually. Apparently, they had firefly-like emitters in their fingertips that radiated in the near-infrared, which humans couldn’t see. They “talked” through complex patterns of gestures and flickers. Fortunately, their vision did extend into the visible light spectrum, so rudimentary communication had been possible until the Air Force engineers had developed better tools. Since then, the tools had been refined so just about any human could use them. Britt said he’d teach me the next day.
He continued to explain a great deal of minutiae about the base and the lab, but I was no longer listening.
I was going to talk to aliens!
I was actually going to talk to aliens!
I had devoted my entire professional life to studying the strange, the weird, and the deadly – admittedly at the microbiological level – but I had never been as overwhelmed by the possibilities before. Who knew what I might learn?
But of course by the time we got to my bunk, my analytical side had kicked in. They’ve been asking the aliens questions for nearly thirty years. What makes you think you’ll ask a new one? I might have slid into a small funk if Britt hadn’t chosen that moment to clear his throat.
“So,” he said, “how do you intend to proceed?”
I blinked.
“We’re really at wit’s end,” he said. “We don’t know how they’re getting infected, or if it’s even an infection. That’s just what their doctors called it before they died.”
I gulped. “Died?”
His eyes took on the seriousness of the men I’d met outside. Just as cold, but with Britt I could see the fear lurking beneath.
“Their entire medical staff didn’t survive the month,” he said. “They die fast. And every day, we lose a few more.”
I took a deep breath. “Then let’s get started on figuring out why.”
After I’d gotten a mug of coffee and something to eat, Britt and I settled into a small conference room. A couple of the staff scientists and techs joined us, at first trying to bring me up to speed on the intricacies of alien biology, but I waved them off.
“I’m an epidemiologist,” I said. “I’m not going to spot anything in their cells or whatever their equivalent is that you guys haven’t already looked for.”
One of the techs frowned. “We were hoping ...”
“If you want someone to check your work, get some other microbiologists,” I said with some annoyance.“My goal is identifying the transmission vector. If we can stop the transmission, we can save some, even if we can’t find a cure.”
“If it’s transmitted,” Britt said.
“And if it’s not,” I said, “we find the environmental factor. Something’s killing them, because the probabilities don’t favor natural causes. Not if this death rate is new after them having been here for decades.”
The heads around the table nodded grimly.
“So when did it start?” I asked.
“The first death was one of their agricultural engineers, about three months ago,” Britt said. “He was found face-down in one of the hydroponics rooms. We didn’t examine him ourselves; the Eridani doctors did. But then after the doctors died, we got White – that’s what we call their leader – to transmit us the medical files.”
“I’m still trying to understand everything in those files,” muttered one of the scientists.
Britt didn’t bat an eye at the interruption. “As far as we can tell, the Eridani were baffled themselves. When they told us about it, the doctors said that the engineer’s body had ‘eaten itself,’ but we suspect that’s not an accurate translation.”
I managed to suppress a sour smile. “Try explaining AIDS to African Bushmen in their dialect sometime. You’ll end up with something similar.”
“That’s actually what we think it is,” one of the scientists said. “Not AIDS itself, but some disease of their immune system. That’d explain the wide range of symptoms and actual causes of death.”
“Oh, great,” I muttered. “Any consistent symptoms?”
“Other than death?” Britt said. “Hard to say. There’s a broad range.”
“Any patterns at all?”
Britt shook his head. “No. That’s why I asked for you. If there’s a pattern, we can’t find it. It doesn’t matter if they’re young, old, male, female, where they work, or even if they’ve been in isolation. The only pattern is they’re dying at a regular rate, and if it doesn’t stop soon …”
“… there won’t be any left.” I finished.
They solemnly nodded, almost in unison.
“Then I guess fun time is over,” I said, as I set my coffee down. “Let’s start building the parameter database and see what commonalities we can find.”
With a few quick sidebars for coordination, they dispersed to bring back files, paper, and laptops. The conference room would become our war room, and it looked like everyone would be deferring to me, even Dr. Britt.<
br />
I couldn’t help shaking my head as I thought about it. The aliens are here, and we’re at war. Just not with them.
But there’s no rest for the wicked. I had work to do.
I spent a few hours showing the team how to set up the database and run my custom software package. We also set up the tracking wall and news wall as well as the assignment whiteboard. Dr. Britt wanted the team to review some of the case files with me, but I put him off – I knew that the best way to avoid fixating on a single hypothesis early on was to first populate as much of the database as possible. Confirmation bias could be nipped in the bud by cold hard statistics.
After that, I begged exhaustion and retreated to my bunk, but I couldn’t sleep.
Extraterrestrials! Here!
I wasn’t surprised that the government had kept them a secret – secrets are what governments excel in. It was their natural reflex. They’d quietly pry every bit of advanced knowledge they could out of the aliens until something forced their hand and they had no choice but to go public. Then it would be done with the most exquisite spin possible.
I could already see my role in that spin. Not by name, of course, but part of the meme “We had to make sure they couldn’t infect us with some disease, like the one that almost killed them.” I’d be one of those “top scientists” that had “ensured our biological safety.”
I snorted. Mother Nature – and I was sure she was a mother on Eridani as much as on Earth – was a capricious, relentless bitch. She was constantly coming up with plagues that laughed at attempts to contain them. Antibiotics? Meet resistant staphylococcus. Vaccines? Meet the flu virus, annually changing. Quarantine? Almost impossible to enforce, even if the vector turned out to be something controllable instead of fleas or airborne spores.
At least quarantine has a chance here, I mused, where they’re already contained. Checking the tightness of that containment would be part of our work during the next few days. We’d check the air, water, and other pathways that could have introduced the disease, whatever it was, to the Eridani. I was confident it wasn’t a perfect seal, although that didn’t mean something had gotten in.