Tyrone shoved the pistol inside the creature’s mouth and fired straight into it. A piercing scream of pain soared across the forest, loud enough that it rang in Tyrone’s ears as he was suddenly released and thumped down onto the forest floor once again. The impact was far harder than he expected, his acceleration in the fall faster than that of earth, and his weakened legs crumpled beneath him as he sank to his knees.
The writhing vines coiled back up into the tree but then the humming noise soared back and he looked up in time to see the drones rushing in again. Wearily he lifted the heavy pistol in his hand and opened fire but the drones zipped left and right, up and down as they rushed in to avoid the clumsy shots.
Tyrone shouted out at them, as though it would do any good, and then one of the drones flipped over in mid air and its fearsome stinger plunged into Tyrone’s belly. His cry of desperation mutated grotesquely into one of agony as white pain ripped into his body.
The drone jerked away again and flew off, the rest of the swarm hovering nearby like hyenas circling their wounded, doomed prey. Tyrone folded over the searing agony that ripped across his stomach and travelled up his spine like fire. He knew that he was doomed, Ayleeans likely having sent the drones in to finish him off. Maybe they had survivors too and they’d seen him land. Maybe they would eat him, as apparently they preferred to do with their victims. Maybe they would keep him prisoner for endless years here on this terrible world, or subject him to tortures that he could not begin to imagine.
Tyrone turned the pistol to his own head. The fact that he was contemplating suicide for the second time in one day was not lost on him, but the pain inside his body was already so overwhelming that he could not bear it for a moment longer. At least this way he wouldn’t be giving the Ayleeans the satisfaction of gloating over their victim.
Tyrone squeezed the trigger and heard a deafening plasma shot rocket by, but his pain did not subside. The nearby buzzing became panicked as the swarm zoomed up and away from him and several more shots echoed through the forest as the buzzing of synthetic wings mercifully faded away into the distance. Tyrone looked up to see fat, smoldering drips of white hot plasma around the body of a drone just inches from him, embers of molten metal fading slowly to a deep red. An acrid stench of melting circuitry filled his nostrils as he heard the sound of heavy footfalls alongside him.
Tyrone turned his head as a heavy boot thumped down on the pistol in his hand, pinning it to the ground as the barrel of a plasma rifle was pressed hard against his cheek. Beyond it glared the yellow eyes of a towering Ayleean warrior.
The Aleeyan was eight feet tall and bore only a superficial resemblance to a human being. A powerful musculature was visible beneath a hard, leathery skin that was mostly dark brown but flecked with patches of lighter color, almost gold. Dressed in metallic armor that covered approximately half of the Aleeyan’s body, the rest was naked but for the thin, skin–like nano shielding that the species traditionally wore. Its head was a tangled mess of thick black hair surrounding a thick, heavy boned jaw, hunched shoulders and a fearsome yellow eye. The other eye was covered by a device that seemed to be some kind of laser sight, a thin red beam flickering as it pierced the drifting mists. The Aleeyan had small, sharp teeth that had been ritualistically filed, its lips thin and regressed as though the creature was showing a permanent snarl, and it wore a large plasma rifle in a long sheath on its back.
Before Tyrone could move or speak, something hard clubbed him on the back of his head and everything went black.
***
XXI
Polaris Station
Nathan walked with Foxx, Vasquez and Allen into a spectacular briefing room that was situated atop the vast station orbiting the planet Saturn. The entire structure was a hard light dome that afforded a tremendous view of the ringed planet, currently awash with sunlight and its baleful eye filling half of the entire view. Nathan saw in the distance a large warship hove to outside the station, its hull a battered mess and being tended to by a swarm of maintenance craft and tugs, and beyond it the entire CSS fleet gathered together, an impressive armada still dwarfed by Saturn’s vast sphere and rings.
‘Wow, what the hell happened to her?’ he asked out loud as he looked at the damaged vessel.
‘None of our business right now,’ Foxx said as she pulled him toward the center of the room.
A long table was manned by countless military figures, and Nathan instantly recognized Admiral Franklyn Marshall and Rear Admiral O’Hara. Doctor Schmidt was present, as were a couple of Marine guards.
‘Detective Foxx,’ Marshall greeted Kaylin with a handshake. ‘It’s been too long.’
‘We only ever seem to meet when there’s a crisis.’
‘I’ll hope for a few more then,’ Marshall said smoothly, and then turned to Nathan. ‘Ironside. How’s life in the 25th Century?’
‘Great, thanks,’ Nathan replied, ‘except for the alien invasion. A bit bummed about that.’
‘Detectives,’ Admiral O’Hara greeted them. ‘Franklyn has told me much about your work, for which we’re all immensely grateful.’
His skin was dry and rough as sandpaper as he shook Nathan’s hand, the grip firm but hot. Nathan waited with Foxx as the high and mighty of the senate and the military sat down, evidently having been waiting for Foxx to arrive.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ O’Hara began, ‘as you all by now know we are facing a crisis the likes of which we have no precedent for. Our greatest fear, that the first contact we experienced was a prelude to an invasion attempt, has come to pass. We know that Ayleea has already fallen and that our ships have been viciously attacked by an unknown aggressor. Our only certainty is that this aggressor uses an advance guard of sorts, a sentient species with the ability to transform itself at a near molecular level and assume identities beyond its own.’ O’Hara paused as he looked at the men and women arrayed before him. ‘We now also know, thanks to the investigative work of these detectives from the New Washington Police Department, that the invasion has already begun.’
A rush of whispered rippled through the crowd as the JCOS and dignitaries digested this new and unexpected information. O’Hara anticipated a flood of questions and so he gestured to Foxx.
‘I will leave it to Detective Foxx to explain what’s happened.’
Kaylin got to her feet, and Nathan watched as she moved to where she could be seen by all of those watching.
‘My team and I recently began investigating a series of murders, both on New Washington and planet side, where the victims appeared to have been desiccated. Their apparently mummified remains had been utterly divested of their internal organs and bodily fluids, leaving only their bones and skin behind. We have since determined that the entities responsible for these killings, of which there have been twenty eight now recorded, is the same extra terrestrial species encountered by Titan and her crew some months ago.’ Foxx took a breath. ‘They have been here and on the surface of earth for some time and have taken to adopting the form of their victims, ID implants and all. We have no idea how many there are walking among us.’
One of the JCOS spoke up. ‘How can this have happened? How could they have slipped through our defenses undetected?’
Marshall spoke, his voice quiet but with sufficient authority and gravitas to be heard throughout the chamber.
‘Detective Ironside was able to deduce that the alien beings reached earth through the atmosphere via cocoons of some kind that allowed them to survive re entry. It would appear that they sought out victims at random, presumably to overpower the population while we were sent off to fight other attackers such as the larger alien Marauder ship encountered by CSS Defiance and Endeavour at Ayleea. This tactic should be familiar to you all as we also performed similar…’
Nathan was beaming with pride at being mentioned by Marshall for having solved the riddle of how the alien beings arrived on earth. He almost didn’t catch the admiral’s last words, but now they echoed through his mind as a
larm bells rang inside his head.
‘What was that?’ he blurted.
The congregation looked at him in surprise as Admiral Marshall ground his teeth in his skull at the interruption.
‘What was what?’
‘The frigates,’ Nathan said. ‘You mentioned ships engaged against an alien vessel?’
‘Two of our frigates encountered an alien capital ship in orbit around Ayleea, code named Marauder,’ Marshall confirmed. ‘We believe it to be our true enemy.’
Nathan swallowed. ‘CSS Endeavour was there?’
‘Yes,’ Marshall replied. ‘What of it?’
Nathan swallowed and controlled himself. She’s not your daughter. ‘Nothing,’ he said finally. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
Marshall peered at Nathan suspiciously but turned to Doctor Schmidt. ‘The doctor here knows more about this enemy than anybody else, and may be the key to figuring out how to prevent them from proliferating.’
Doctor Schmidt stepped forward, his holographic form glowing a soft blue that contrasted starkly with the blackness of space outside.
‘We’ve known for a long time that alien entities can enter our atmosphere at will and have done so for millennia. The British were the first to discover such alien forms way back in 2014, long before routine space travel, ID chips or any of the orbital cities familiar to us all. They sent a balloon twenty miles up and captured microscopic aquatic algae, biological organisms known as extremophiles, living high in earth’s atmosphere that could only have come from space. Their findings were published in a paper during the Instruments, Methods, and Missions for Astrobiology conference of that year in San Diego. The entities they described had varied from a colony of ultra small bacteria to two unusual individual organisms part of a diatom frustule and a two hundred micron sized particle mass interlaced with biofilm and biological filaments. The findings of the British team were the first confirmation that life is common in our universe both around and between the stars,’ Schmidt went on. ‘The seeds of life exist all over the universe and travel through space from one planetary system to another. It was one such seed that caused The Falling, the dreadful plague that wiped out six billion humans three hundred years ago and set us on our new path.’
Schmidt gestured to a holographic projection of earth and of various alien bacteria as he spoke. Some of the bacteria had segmented necks connected to teardrop shaped bodies. Others were like small animals, but the majority were spheres that seemed to leak a biological substance that at the time of their discovery had simply been named “goo”.
‘What frightened the people at the time was that these spheres, each as wide as a human hair, had all been identified via X ray analysis as being made from titanium and traces of vanadium. They had also found that they had a “fungus like knitted mat like covering”, a combination known to no species on earth at the time.’
‘What does this have to do with the expected invasion?’ Admiral O’Hara demanded.
‘Nothing,’ Schmidt conceded, ‘but the use of such a species as a means to degrade a populations’ ability to defend itself suggests that our enemy, whomever they may be, are perhaps not much further advanced than ourselves and purposefully use this swarm like entity to soften their targets up, so to speak.’
‘Explain,’ Hawker said impatiently.
‘Our frigates identified a very large, very powerful vessel which attacked them,’ Schmidt said, ‘and that in itself tells us a lot. The ship was recognizable for what it was; its weapons operated in a similar, albeit more powerful manner as our own, and it was capable of super luminal travel, as are our own. Their technology has a basis in ours, so perhaps might their biology.’
Marshall’s eyes narrowed as Commodore Hawker spoke.
‘So you’re saying they’ve sent a big swarm of bugs to infiltrate and cause disruption on earth, after which they come in and mop up what remains.’
‘Eloquently put,’ Schmidt murmured in a dry tone, ‘but correct.’
‘We were expecting gigantic insects or machines,’ Admiral O’Hara muttered, ‘not a shape shifting soup.’
‘Of course,’ Schmidt said. ‘Mankind has been raised on a diet of movies featuring insectoid aliens or anthropomorphic beings, but the most likely form of life to spread across the universe in large numbers is cellular bacteria and viruses, perhaps merged with some form of technology. Even on earth, bacteria have always outnumbered larger life forms by billions to one. Your own body contains more bacteria than every human being who has ever lived. Bacteria have been found here on earth, such as Bacillus permians, that have been known to survive inside sodium chloride crystals in New Mexico caves for over two hundred fifty million years and been successfully revived, so such entities are more than able to cross the distances between star systems and survive the journey.’
‘And now they’re here,’ O’Hara murmured uncomfortably. ‘Last time something like this made it to earth several billion people died, and that was from just what people managed to breathe in. If they’re already here and waiting for a thumbs up from their overlords to start massacring the population, our rear guard is already destroyed. It’s no wonder the Ayleean defenses collapsed so quickly.’
‘The species we’ve encountered may not have a willfully predatory purpose,’ Schmidt replied, ‘it may simply be surviving.’
‘In what way?’ Foxx asked.
‘Because if it’s a non sentient being then it merely exists,’ he replied. ‘It has no emotion, no cares other than consuming prey and only achieves what we would call consciousness when acting in concert in large numbers. It cannot be reasoned with, or empathized with, it simply is. However, its fundamental simplicity means that a coherent defense against it should be well within our capabilities, as we discovered with the superglue fluid I formulated on Titan when we first encountered the species.’
‘Easier said than done, I suspect,’ Marshall said. ‘We barely escaped with our lives from that last encounter.’
Schmidt gestured to a holo display that appeared in the room, showing footage of the entity they had first encountered wrapped around the long dead corpse of an alien vessel.
‘The alien entity forms as a fluid devoid of pollutants,’ he said. ‘Sensors indicated that it is as hard as steel, the near absolute zero temperature of deep space responsible for its rigidity and likely an evolutionary response. If these things first evolved to travel within cometary debris or similar, they could gradually have evolved defense mechanisms against the cold vacuum of space.’
Schmidt gestured to the display as it zoomed in to moving shapes beneath the icy cocoon.
‘Channels,’ Schmidt replied, ‘passages of heat generated by biological processes through which the life forms move and consume the vessel they’re aboard. That’s their fuel, the metals of the hull, the electrical circuits, the wiring, probably the crew too. They either break the metal down by oxidizing it or by corrosive means, consuming it directly on an atomic scale. The energy gained from this process allows them to power that spacecraft if they feel the need to travel.’
Schmidt slipped his hands into the pockets of pants that didn’t really exist, the gesture an endearing sign of his human origins.
‘They would not have needed to infiltrate the vessel in great numbers, only sufficiently so that they could replicate, spread and eventually take control. They’re a collective intelligence constructed of biological cellular forms and nano scale machinery, able to move freely throughout the vessel without the crew ever having known that they were there until it was too late.’
Nathan stared at the display for a moment.
‘And that’s what they intend to do on earth,’ he said finally, ‘undermine us from within, and then the big guns come in and finish us off. That’s what must have happened on Ayleea. We need to find these infiltrators, and fast. Maybe we could set up stations using that glue fluid and have people walk through it? The infiltrators would be unable to get through, their locomotion impeded.’
/> ‘Hosing down a few billion people might be beyond our capabilities and is certainly not something we’ll have the time for,’ Admiral Marshall pointed out. ‘The enemy know that we’re aware of them now, which will accelerate their timescale. We need to do something before we get our backsides taken out from beneath us. What do we know about the individuals who were killed on earth?’
Suddenly all eyes were on Nathan, and he coughed to clear his throat.
‘Twenty eight dead and counting, from all continents on the planet,’ he replied. ‘No known connections between them but we’re working on it.’
‘Why are they picking these people off one by one?’ O’Hara asked. ‘And why are they picking them off at random? Are you sure there’s no connection between the victims?’
‘We can’t be absolutely sure,’ Nathan admitted, ‘but right now nothing’s jumping out at us. The victims are widely geographically separated and have no connection to each other that we can find. All we can do right now is track down the killers using the ID chips consumed when the victims were killed, which go off–line for a short while before reactivating, and hope to get them all as soon as we can.’
Marshall frowned
‘If they’re raining down on earth as frequently as you suspect, there could be dozens more arriving on earth every day. You’ll never track them all.’
Doctor Schmidt stood forward.
‘That’s where I come in, Admiral. We know from previous experience that this species can clone cells perfectly, after we witnessed the Ayleean clone that infiltrated Titan. What we also learned at the time was that they clone cells just a little too perfectly. Nature does not replicate with absolute precision, and thus slight changes in our DNA and genetic make up is what causes us to look a little like our parents but not precisely the same. This genetic drift is what gives us evolution in the hereditary sense. It’s possible that I could use CSS protocols for hunting escaped criminals and alter the programming to search for signals evidence from the brains of these clones that exhibit the perfect symmetry this species produces when it clones an entity, and use that as a means to track them down.’
Predator (Old Ironsides Book 3) Page 16