And that left the majority of the military contingent. As much as Bernhard didn’t want to do it, he immediately made Sorensen join the others. He’d been close enough to Stroebel to hear the whining noise as Stroebel had been infected, so he was also close enough that he could have been taken by a worm soon after. After some careful consideration, Bernhard had Zersky join Teng with a weapon. It was a calculated risk, but a plan was starting to form up in his head about how to finally ferret out the Nerve, and he needed more than one person with a gun in order to do it. He knew Zersky well enough to say that he hadn’t been acting at all unnatural, nor had there been many opportunities for him to be taken over.
“Teng, Zersky, both of you come over here,” Bernhard said. He whispered his plan into their ears, doing his best to look as shady and untrusting of those remaining as he did so. It was important that those that he couldn’t be sure of started to get nervous at this point. They both listened, and while Teng did not seem to approve, he did at least agree that there weren’t many other ways to approach this at this point.
Teng took a moment to consider his own people, then directed three of them – Tshien, Ngai, and Yeow – to come over and join those with weapons, leaving Chow to join those that they couldn’t be sure of. All that left then were Hatch, Hodges, and McNeil, all of whom Bernhard couldn’t decide on one way or the other. To be safe, he had them join the larger group against the wall.
Altogether, there were seven that Bernhard believed he could trust not to be controlled by the Nerve, six of whom were military and knew how to handle a weapon. That would be more than enough for the highly distasteful thing he needed to do next. He reminded himself that this was a highly unusual situation with billions of lives in the balance, making this the only option.
The six members of the Chinese and American military with guns lined up in front of all the others. “I want you all to know that I only do this with the greatest reluctance,” Bernhard said to the increasingly agitated group against the wall.
“Captain, what are you doing?” Hodges asked.
“I can’t be certain whether any of you have been taken over by the Nerve,” Bernhard responded. “And we cannot let the Nerve infiltrate us under any circumstances. The only choice we have is to kill you all.”
“What?” Johnson screamed from her place at the table. “Bernhard, no! What the hell are you doing?”
“This potentially comes down to their lives versus the lives of everybody else on Earth,” Bernhard said. “I told you I would do whatever it took to protect my daughter.”
“But this is monstrous!” Dufresne yelled. “You won’t be able to get away with this!”
“I’m sure some of you are still fully human,” Bernhard said to the people against the wall. “And to you, I’m completely sorry. Teng, we’re commanding our people to fire on three, understand?”
Teng nodded, and all six of them raised their rifles.
“One,” Bernhard said.
“Bernhard, you can’t!” Johnson said. “You say you’re doing this for your daughter, then ask yourself if you’ll ever be able to look her in the eye again if you do this!”
Bernhard ignored her. “Two.”
Li started mumbling something to herself that might have been a prayer. McNeil made the sign of the cross over himself and looked upward as though to tell whomever he believed in that he would be coming soon. Dufresne just started screaming obscenities.
“Three.”
Not a single one of them fired. But on the last number, four members of the group shoved the others forward, using the others as human shields as they tried to get out of the line of fire. Sorensen, Pai, Xiang, and Hatch all made a break for it, going directly for Stroebel all at once as they were one organism.
Which Bernhard knew, they were. There were three hidden pieces of the Nerve.
“That’s them!” Bernhard yelled. “Take them out!” The six men with guns tracked the four trying to escape, but they moved faster than Bernhard would have expected. Whatever the worms eating away at their brains had done to them, they had also increased their speed and agility in a way that caught Bernhard completely off guard. He tried to fire at Sorensen as he leaped over the group, but the bullets did nothing but ping against the ceiling. Pai and Xiang went for Yeow and Zersky, the two of them trying to use Houston and Dufresne as meat shields. Yeow managed to get off a shot and hit Xiang in the chest, while Pai opened his mouth in preparation of spitting at Zersky. Tshien was close enough to whip his rifle around and use it as a club against Pai’s back, causing the concentrated ball of alien worms that ejected from his mouth to fly over everyone’s heads. Chaos reigned as those still remaining against the wall ducked, trying to protect themselves from the random bullets suddenly flying around the room. Hatch got off a lucky punch at Bernhard, ringing his bell for long enough that he dropped to his knees and had to shake his head to stop from seeing stars.
By the time Bernhard fully came back to his senses, Xiang was dead on the floor. Yeow, Ngai, and Teng were finishing off the worms from Pai’s mouth before they could try to take over anyone. But most importantly, Pai, Hatch, Sorensen, Dufresne, and Stroebel were gone.
Chapter Eleven
Johnson slapped Bernhard across the face. He took it, accepting that he probably deserved it.
“You bastard!” Johnson yelled in his face. Her cheeks were wet from tears, but she had already stopped crying. Instead, her eyes were full of the fury of someone who had thoroughly fallen for a nasty bluff. “I actually thought you were going to kill them!”
“I may put my country and my daughter above everything else,” Bernhard said as he rubbed the red mark on his jaw. “But I’m not so heartless that I would blatantly kill innocent people. I just needed the Nerve to think I would.”
Houston picked himself up from where he’d been unceremoniously been thrown to the floor. “Wait a second,” he asked. “Where the hell did Dufresne go?”
“They took her with them,” Teng said. “There’s no chance to save her. She is probably already part of the Nerve.”
Bernhard saw several worms trying to work their way out of the mouth of Xiang’s corpse. He had no choice but to smash the man’s head with his rifle until he was certain that nothing else was going to come out. Once he was done, he finally had a chance to take stock of everything around them.
The room was a mess of bullets and casings and blood. None of their shots had actually gone into the walls, but whatever material they were made of had thankfully absorbed the impact and prevented ricochets. Chow, McNeil, and Hodges had already grabbed their weapons once more, while the weapons left behind by Hatch, Sorensen, and Stroebel were distributed among those scientists who had any experience at all with firearms. Li, the only one among the Chinese scientists that was still alive and human, stood where she had been against the wall, still too shell-shocked to move. Teng went over to her and gently coaxed her to join with Johnson and Houston where they could continue examining the dead worms.
Johnson, however, wasn’t quite finished with Bernhard yet. “That was a really shitty thing to do, you know.”
“I said I was sorry,” Bernhard said. “It was the only way I could think of that might smoke out the Nerve.”
“So you were never really going to shoot them?”
“No.”
“But what if it hadn’t worked? What if you got to three and nobody had moved?”
“Then we wouldn’t have been any worse off than we were before. It was a chance I needed to take.”
“But how do you know for sure that the Nerve didn’t leave one of its bodies behind to keep up the charade?” Houston asked. “There’s still a possibility that someone among us could be an alien spy.”
“Yes, it is possible,” Bernhard said. “That’s why we’re not going to let our guard down anymore, and why we all stay within each other’s sights at all times from now on.”
“Where the hell did they even go?” Hodges asked. “You’d think
the Nerve would stay behind to try killing us. I mean, it’s not like it actually cares if it loses any bodies it takes over, right?”
“No, it probably doesn’t,” Bernhard said. “But as long as there are more of us than there are of it, the Nerve probably thinks it more tactically prudent to pull back rather than go kamikaze on us. Trust me, we haven’t seen the last of them.”
“So what are we going to do?” Houston asked.
“We need to get the hell out of here,” Zersky said. “We should all get back on the Ambassador and head back to Earth. And as soon as we get out of range of whatever’s messing with our communications, we send a message to Earth telling them to nuke the Visitor.”
“That might be a good plan if I didn’t suspect that the Nerve was already ahead of us,” Bernhard said. “If it’s not about to sabotage the Ambassador, then at the very least we could expect some kind of ambush before we got there.”
“Then we need to find the bomb and set it off,” Johnson said.
Bernhard gave her a curious look.
“What?” Johnson asked. “All hypotheticals are gone. We know exactly what alien civilization sent the Visitor and why. Maybe we could still try to salvage some tech from it, but there’s no more chance of this just being E.T. wanting to borrow our cell phones for a call home.”
“I must respectfully disagree,” Teng said. “This is now about more than countries involved in petty squabbles. We need to do everything we can to keep the Visitor in one piece. Because all of Earth is now going to have to fight against an alien civilization.”
“Well duh, not if we blow the aliens up first,” McNeil said.
“No, Teng’s right,” Bernhard said. “Destroying the Visitor will only destroy those drones of the Cortex that are on this ship. As an alien race, they’ll still be out there, and it will only be a matter of time before they send something to check why they’ve lost contact. When they do, we’ll be facing them all over again, and this time probably with them having a way to speak to their hive mind despite our technology getting in the way. The only way the human race can be prepared against that is for us to harness any and all technology we can find on the ship to use against them. As of this moment, I am officially removing the destruction of the Visitor from our list of possible plays.”
Johnson made a humorless chuckle. “Well, that’s certainly turning the table a hundred and eighty degrees. I get what you’re saying, Bernhard, but the bigger threat to the human race right now isn’t the Cortex. It’s the Nerve. If that thing were to get down to Earth and start taking over people…”
“It wouldn’t get far,” Bernhard said. “If the Cortex can’t function right now on or near our planet, then neither can the Nerve. The only reason it’s able to try picking us off in here is because there’s something blocking our own communications. If we can find what that is and turn it off…”
Finally, Johnson looked like she was coming around to his thinking. “Then the Nerve is no longer a hive organism. It’s just a bunch of worms cut off from each other.”
Bernhard nodded. “Worst-case scenario, the Nerve would still be able to replicate inside a host, but anyone it takes over would just be a brainless zombie. Best-case scenario, the Nerve would react in exactly the same way as the Cortex and shut down completely.”
“All of that relies on something we still haven’t accomplished yet,” Li said. “We would need to find some kind of central control area of the Visitor. Then we would need to figure out how to operate the alien technology in order to turn it off.”
“But what about the bomb?” Houston asked. “Aren’t we still going to need to find it?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Bernhard said. “Even if, tactically, the best play the Nerve could do right now is to destroy the entire Visitor just so we can’t get back to Earth to warn everyone about what we know, it wouldn’t. You heard it. Its primary reason for existing is to protect the Visitor and everything on it from us. Blowing the ship up would be the exact opposite of its programming.”
“There’s still the question of what happened to the bomb in the first place,” Hodges said. “If the Nerve is the life form on the ship that’s working other than us, then how did it get into the Ambassador and walk away with a thermonuclear weapon? Can you imagine how many of those little worms it would take to do that?”
“What if the answer is related to something else we have been seeing?” Li asked.
Bernhard raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“The lack of radiation on any level whatsoever.”
“Hey, yeah,” Houston said. “It can’t be a coincidence that we find the Visitor resists any and all signs of trace radiation, and then at the same time the device we brought that capable of large amounts of radiation just suddenly disappears.”
“I admit that’s an interesting coincidence,” Bernhard said, “but what would the connection be?”
Houston shrugged. Li and Johnson seemed equally baffled.
“Then I suppose that’s something we’ll need to remember but put on the back burner for now,” Bernhard said. “Our number one priority for the moment needs to be taking down the Nerve. If we can accomplish that, then we can turn our attention to getting back to Earth and warning the world about what we’ve found out.”
“We’re going to still run into the same problem we’ve had up until this point,” Teng said. “The Visitor is very large. We could very well search it for days or even weeks without finding the way to stop the jamming.”
“And even though they don’t have any weapons, there’s still the Nerve’s various bodies out there looking for the best way to kill us all,” Hodges said. “Not to mention the worms, which could be anywhere at all on the ship and we wouldn’t have any idea.”
Bernhard put his head in his hands, rubbing his temples as though trying to hold back a headache. That was indeed a problem, and one he had no solution for at the moment.
“If only I had some Ozzy,” he muttered.
“What was that?” Johnson asked.
“Ozzy Osbourne. I do my best thinking with music, but I couldn’t exactly bring my MP3 player with me on my trip to a mysterious alien spaceship, could I?”
“The Sabbath years, or his solo stuff?” Johnson asked with a strange amount of enthusiasm.
Bernhard waved her off. “Just forget it. If anyone has any suggestions regarding an easy way to find some kind of control room, I’m all ears.”
Everyone was silent.
“I was afraid of that,” Bernhard said. “In that case, it looks like we’re back to our original plan: wandering aimlessly until we find something interesting. Everybody pack up and get ready to move out.”
Chapter Twelve
An hour later, they were all tired, exhausted, and hungry. They didn’t yet find a control room, but they did at least find something other than more rooms full of the Cortex trapped in stasis. The endless doors and inexplicable rooms finally yielded to a much larger archway. They approached it cautiously, but Bernhard could tell by the postures of the military folks that they desperately needed to find some place to stop and get a solid rest.
The massive room beyond the archway would not be it.
Bernhard repressed the urge to whistle in appreciation as they passed into the room, except room was a terrible word for it. Even calling it a hangar like the very first room they’d been in wouldn’t correctly express the sheer size. Cavern wouldn’t even work. Given that Bernhard had trouble seeing the ceiling through some kind of hazy wisps that might have actually been clouds, he hesitated even to call it a room at all. If they had been on Earth, he would have thoroughly believed they were out in the open.
“This…this is amazing,” Houston whispered reverently. “This room must take up the largest portion of the ship.”
“Maybe,” Bernhard said. “Although we shouldn’t make assumptions.” He was hedging. In truth, he figured that Houston was probably right. The Visitor had certainly been massive, but the perspec
tive in here almost made it look like it was larger in here than even on the outside. Hell, given that alien technology was involved, for all he knew, it really might be bigger on the inside.
“Maybe it’s like the TARDIS,” Johnson said.
“I have no idea what that means,” Bernhard said.
“Wait, seriously?” Johnson asked. “How can you not know that?”
“Yeah, Bernhard,” McNeil said. “Even I know about Doctor Who, and I hate television.”
“Well, excuse me if I’m usually too busy defending liberty and such to pay any attention to pop culture,” Bernhard said. Beyond its size, there was quite a number of things within the room to catch the eye. The sky, if it could really be called that, was a hazy red color, and the ground covered in some kind of purplish dirt. The land, such as it was, looked hilly, and appeared to go on for actual miles in most directions. All of this might have otherwise made this place the ideal spot for them all to stop and get some sleep, except immediately around them they seemed to be surrounded by something that Bernhard couldn’t help but think of as an alien military base. There were buildings that were several stories tall (actual buildings inside a room, Bernhard thought with awe), but the architecture was unlike anything that could possibly be seen on Earth. In fact, the architecture seemed very off in relation to the simple geometric shapes and patterns that had seen everywhere else on the Visitor. They looked organic, like something an insect would build, but on a much larger scale. The entire area was surrounded by a fence, and just beyond was a long flat field. It was the items lined up in orderly rows in that field, however, that really inspired the most boyish parts of Bernhard’s imagination.
“Oh my God,” Bernhard said. “Are those what I think they are?”
“Depends,” Houston said with something in his voice that might have actually been glee. “If you think those are fricking giant robotic mechs, then yeah, I think they are.”
Calling them giant was something of a misnomer considering the scale of the rest of the room, but each one of the mechs was somewhere between fifteen and twenty feet tall. Their make and aesthetic implied the same designers as the buildings, yet they were very clearly made to resemble something vaguely humanoid, if again vaguely bug-like. Bernhard carefully approached the nearest one and inspected some of the details. There appeared to be handholds, although definitely not designed for human hands, that led up into something resembling a cockpit. Through the clear material at the front of the cockpit, he could see a complicated series of controls and possibly a chair or seat of some sort. The mech’s arms had protrusions on it that were probably guns of some sort, as well as what looked to be a long, strangely shaped blade that could retract into the arm.
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