One of the Peacekeepers shouted and dropped his rifle, batting at something in front of his face. Instantly, a dozen rifles were pointed in his direction. It was the baby-faced soldier, Richaud. He spit on the floor and turned to the others, explaining that he’d run into something that felt like a spiderweb. He cracked a joke in French that brought a nervous chuckle from a few of the Peacekeepers, but Guillaume was not amused.
“Stay quiet and watch what you’re doing,” he told the soldier, then motioned for the doctor to go and have a look at him. But before LeBlanc could get to him, Richaud made a noise, and his body tensed up like a bird dog. He pointed toward a section of the room near the entrance where the ceiling had sagged almost to the floor.
“What is it?” Guillaume demanded.
“Can’t you hear that?” Richaud asked. No one breathed as they listened for whatever it was that had spooked the Frenchman. “It’s alive,” he said.
“What is?”
“No,” Richaud said, “no, no, NO!” He reached up and clutched the sides of his head and screamed. The others ran to Richaud’s aid. He fell to the floor in the grip of a painful seizure and began to convulse. Reg and some others helped pin the soldier’s flailing body to the floor so that LeBlanc could have a look at him, but there was nothing the doctor could do. Blood began to stream out of Richaud’s nostrils and ears. His eyes, wide with terror, went pink, and then bright red. He continued to struggle and shout incoherently until his body went limp.
“He’s dead,” LeBlanc said in amazement.
“He said he ran into a spiderweb. Maybe it’s poison,” Miriyam suggested.
Every flashlight in the room turned toward the ceiling, but there was no sign of anything that looked like a spiderweb, only the carefully arranged rows of stalactites. As Reg scanned the chamber, a strange feeling came over him. At first he thought it was a powerful sense of déjà vu. But he quickly realized it was more than that. He was thinking in a way he didn’t recognize at all. It was another presence inside of him, a mind thinking inside his own.
Miriyam noticed that Reg had gone still and silent. “What’s the matter?”
He turned and looked at her, but couldn’t answer. As his mouth moved, struggling to form words, a sharp pain gripped his neck and spiked upward into his brain. He screamed and grabbed his head as Richaud had done. As he collapsed to the floor, he felt a tremendous weight crushing down on his skull and tried frantically to push it away with his hands. He forced his eyes open and looked at the ceiling above him. At the same time, he saw himself lying on the floor, surrounded by people trying to help him. This second point of view, which overlapped his normal vision, came from low on ground, from the area below the collapsed ceiling, the same place Richaud had pointed to a moment before. Whatever the thing was that had invaded his brain, Reg realized it was there, nearby on the floor. The already-unbearable pain ratcheted upward in intensity, and he felt himself beginning to black out. His assailant, whatever it was, was reaching across the room with its mind, infiltrating his nervous system and working him like a puppet. With the last of his strength, he struggled to turn and lash out at his attacker, but there wasn’t much he could do. His body went limp. But Reg didn’t lose consciousness completely, and the pain did not leave him. He understood that there was only one way to relieve his suffering: He had to answer a question.
The question was not put to him in words, but in the form of images and an urgent sensation of need. He found himself standing in a huge, dark, cathedral space hiding from a band of filthy, vile creatures that had him surrounded. He knew somehow that these creatures were an enemy army, and he could feel the intense hatred and loathing they had for him. He sensed the presence of others, his own kind, hiding in the darkness.
Reg realized that he was inside a group mind—hundreds of individuals thinking together as if all tuned to the same radio frequency and able to communicate instantaneously by means of shorthand image/thought/impulses. Two overpowering sensations coursed through this group mind: a burning physical hunger and an intense loathing for the army of humans. Then the interrogation began. There was a great gash in the wall of the cathedral, a towering triangular opening. Beyond it, a bright sun beat down on the sands of a hostile alien planet. Outside, in the distance, a caravan of enemy vehicles was approaching across a barren plateau. The mind ordered him to divulge everything he knew about this approaching force. Reg recognized that they were limousines and armored military vehicles, being seen through the eyes of the aliens. To his horror, he was being asked to act as a spy for the aliens, to help them prepare an attack. But such was his fear and confusion that he complied without the slightest hesitation. In a rapid-fire sequence of half thoughts, he communicated everything he knew about the group and their plans, then begged for the excruciating pain to end. But the response from the mind was an order to die instead. It reached into him and forced his heart to stop beating, his lungs to stop breathing.
As Reg slipped toward death, he realized that he could resist, that the power of the group mind was not absolute. In some way he couldn’t fully understand, he realized that the aliens couldn’t control him without his consent. For a moment, his will struggled against the Will that was controlling him. He felt himself regaining some control, but when the pain intensified, he lay back and obeyed the command to die. Darkness.
There was a series of quick explosions, and then someone was speaking to him in a language he didn’t understand. Reg’s eyes shot open without being able to focus, and he gasped for air. An indistinct figure hovered over him, preparing to inject him with a hypodermic needle. In a daze, Reg swatted his hand at the needle and knocked it away. Slowly, he realized the strange language was French and the figure leaning over him was LeBlanc.
“You are not dead,” the doctor said with surprise.
“Over there,” Reg groaned, pointing in the direction of his attacker. “An alien. It’s alive.” He turned his head in that direction and saw Miriyam inspecting something under the collapsed ceiling with a machine gun in her hands.
“It’s not alive anymore,” she told him. “I killed it.”
“How? How did you know?” Reg asked.
“You told us,” said the doctor with the stray eye. “Don’t you remember? We had no idea, but then you pointed to where it was hiding.”
“It must have been trapped there when the ceiling fell on it,” surmised Guillaume. “Are you okay? Can you walk?”
“We have to get out of here, have to run.” Reg pulled himself into a sitting position and tried to shake the cobwebs out of his head. The attack had left him disoriented and slightly dizzy. “They’re coming.”
A shock of fear ran through everyone in the room. “Who’s coming?”
“The others, the aliens. They know where we are,” Reg said, struggling to find his feet. “We have to get outside and warn them.”
LeBlanc prevented Reg from standing up. “What are you talking about? Tell us what happened.”
“It used its mind. Some kind of telepathy,” Reg explained, sorting through the experience, trying to make sense of it. “They were asking me things, torturing me.”
“They? How many?”
Reg shook his head. He didn’t know. “Many.”
Guillaume knelt down beside him and spoke in an urgent whisper. “We found only one of them. Where are the others? How do you know they are coming?”
“Oh, my God,” Reg gasped when he realized he’d given the aliens information they could use to attack the people in the royal entourage. “Let me up. They’re going to attack. We’ve got to warn them.”
Guillaume grabbed him by the collar, shook him roughly, and held him in place. “You’re talking nonsense. Tell us what happened!” The Frenchman’s scarred face was close to his, illuminated in the glow of the flashlights.
“This one,” Reg began, pointing to the creature Miriyam had shot, “invaded my mind, attacked me with its mind. But there were others, other minds. They communicate… I don�
��t know how to describe it… they think together, as a single mind. When this one reached inside of me, I was also inside of it. There was a melding, and I saw through its eyes, but I also saw through the eyes of the others. I saw what they were seeing. They’re at the entrance to the ship, looking out of the same opening we drove through when we came in. Right now, the king and his people are arriving outside. The aliens are going to ambush them. They’re going to kill the king.”
Guillaume was alarmed, but remained skeptical. Reg had been through a traumatic experience and was badly shaken. The pain could have caused him to hallucinate. He had one more question. “How do the aliens know it is the king?”
“Because I told them,” Reg answered. He shook free of Guillaume’s grip, stood up, and began moving unsteadily toward the exit. Mohammed took Reg by the arm and assisted him.
“I think he is right,” Rahim said, checking his watch. “King Ibrahim is scheduled to arrive exactly now. We must warn him at once.”
The Peacekeepers followed Reg, Mohammed, and Miriyam through the side tunnel and into the main passageway. They turned and hurried toward the first bulkhead door. The Peacekeepers radioed to the men on the far side of the door to open it but received no reply.
Guillaume had given them orders to keep it open at all times.
Reg took the machine gun Miriyam was carrying and smashed the butt of it against the door, signaling to the men on the other side. When there was no response he threw down the gun and wedged his fingertips into the thin gap between the door and the bulkhead. “Help me!” he yelled over his shoulder. First Miriyam and then a few of the Peacekeepers stepped forward to try and pry the door open, but they did so reluctantly. If the men on the other side touched the copper medallion, the door would fly open and crush them against the wall. The bayonets the Peacekeepers had on their rifles provided them with the leverage they needed, but it took the full strength of six men and one woman to pull the door open twelve inches.
“Movement behind us. Something is coming,” one of the soldiers standing farther back yelled to Guillaume.
“Pull harder!” Guillaume shouted.
When Rahim came forward to lend his strength to the effort, Miriyam turned and grunted at him. “You are skinny. Reach through. Touch the medallion.”
“But the door will open too fast.”
“Do it!”
The rail-thin Saudi lieutenant pushed his way past the soldiers straining against the strength of the door and reached his arm into the next chamber. “I will count to three,” he told them. But he never got the chance to start counting. Something grabbed his arm and pulled hard enough to break his neck when it slammed against the side of the door. The others backed away, startled, and let the door smash closed on his limp body. A moment later, a tentacle the size of a python slid through the opening and began slashing through the air, searching for another victim.
The group retreated from the door and started in the other direction, but soon realized they were surrounded. The collapsed section of the ceiling that sagged into the passageway was moving. Although it weighed several tons, something was walking below it, lifting it out of the way as easily as if it were a bedsheet hanging on a clothesline. One of the soldiers moved closer and lay on his stomach, peering ahead with his flashlight.
“Two pairs of feet,” he called back to the others.
As they braced themselves for the attack, there was an explosion in the passageway behind them. The door had been opened. They wheeled around to see a gruesome and terrifying sight: a ghost gray stump of a face jutting toward them from the center of a wide, flaring shell. The creature was an eight-foot-tall exoskeleton, one of the biomechanical suits of armor they’d discovered lying in the vats of liquid two floors above. It filled the doorway. The multiple pairs of tentacles on its back waved through the air like the hypnotic, ophidian locks of Medusa’s hair, and the sight of the creature turned the humans momentarily to stone.
All except Mohammed. He was carrying the machine gun Miriyam had tossed to the floor. As soon as the hissing, many-armed beast revealed itself, Mohammed lowered the gun and charged ahead, firing and screaming as he went. His bullets bounced off the hard shell, but their collective impact began to crack it apart. When he was almost to the bulkhead, the pointed tip of the skeletal head shattered completely and broke away. It made no difference. With alarming agility and speed, the hideous creature darted through the bulkhead and speared the young Saudi in the chest with a tentacle, spraying blood everywhere. As Mohammed’s body dropped to the floor, the Peacekeepers opened fire and hit the monster with hundreds of rounds of ammunition, knocking it a few steps backwards. Each bullet chipped away another piece of bone, but only little by little. It took several seconds of sustained firing until the thing died.
“Go! Go! Back to the entrance!”
The team broke into a sprint down the hallway, stepping over and around the fallen alien. When they were through the bulkhead, they stumbled on the bodies of the Peacekeepers who had been guarding the door. A moment later, the first of the two aliens behind them stepped clear of the fallen ceiling. The soldier bringing up the rear of the retreat didn’t notice until it was too late. The big creature raced down the tunnel twice as fast as the humans and quickly caught them. One by one, the men running at the end of the line realized they were lost and turned to make their last stands. Each one blasted the alien with as many shells as he could before being trampled, killed, and tossed aside. Reg was running just behind Miriyam and Guillaume. Like the others, he was terrified out of his mind and desperate to climb out of the tunnel. But when he realized what was happening behind him, he stopped running and wrested the machine gun away from the Peacekeeper who had taken it from the dead Mohammed.
“Keep going,” Reg told the man, then pressed himself against the side of the tunnel and watched the flashlights of the last two men running toward him. He had decided to help them slow the aliens down in order to give Miriyam and the others time to escape. But the men didn’t see him waiting and when he pushed away from the wall and began running alongside of them, he startled them so badly that they tripped over one another and went down in a heap. Reg fell with them and watched the flashlights break free and go rolling across the floor. As the men scrambled to collect their guns, the sound of rushing feet came toward them. They turned and fired into the darkness. They fired until their ammunition was nearly spent.
When they picked up their flashlights and looked behind them, fragments of an exoskeleton were spread across the floor of the tunnel, the bulk of it lying only a few paces away. Despite having been torn to pieces, the body was struggling slowly forward, determined to complete the hunt. Reg and the two men turned away from it and ran as fast as they could. Far ahead, they saw the bobbing flashlights of the main group. Then they heard gunfire and screaming.
“Stop,” one of the Peacekeepers beside Reg said. “Back the other way.”
“No, keep going.” But the man had already turned and headed back in the other direction. Reg and the remaining soldier continued to run, but they slowed their pace because everything had gone silent and still ahead of them. A pair of rifles lay on the ground, the flashlights attached to them creating a dim pool of light on the floor.
“Maybe we should go the other way,” the Frenchman said.
“No, there’s another one back there.”
“Yes, but only one. How many are up ahead?”
“Switch off your light. Let’s keep going.” The two men walked at a fast march through the pitch-darkness, feeling their way along the curving, uneven walls and keeping their fingers tight against the triggers of their guns. They walked for a long time before they heard a sound.
“Psst. Over here.” The voice belonged to Guillaume. He told them not to turn on their lights, but he turned on his, keeping the palm of his hand closed over the bulb. Reg felt his way along the wall until he reached the spot. He could feel people huddled low against the wall, but couldn’t immediately tell how ma
ny. Clumsily, he made his way close to Guillaume.
“Another one just ahead, twenty meters,” he told Reg.
LeBlanc’s voice whispered out of the inky blackness. “Put all your bullets to the face of the shell. We must kill the little one inside.”
There was another report of gunfire, this time far down the narrow passageway. The man who had turned back had obviously found something. When the firing ceased abruptly, everyone could imagine what had happened. “We’ve got to do something,” Reg said. “We’re going to have company in a minute.”
Miriyam said, “Better to take them one at a time.”
And a moment later they heard the scraping of footsteps ahead. Guillaume switched on his flashlight, and the group opened fire. But the skeletal warrior quickly retreated behind the first curve in the tunnel.
Reg knew immediately that the creature was stalling, waiting for the one that was coming from behind so they could work together. Reg snapped a fresh cartridge of shells into the machine gun. “We can’t wait any longer,” he said, and started forward.
“Remember to aim for the head,” Miriyam said, joining him.
The creature retreated no farther. When the team came around the bend in the tunnel and began blasting away, it charged forward. The head-thorax shell dipped forward slightly, as if the alien wanted to gore them with the blunt tip of the pointed head. The team’s decision to concentrate their firepower on the face led to mixed results. The hard material quickly fractured and then broke apart, but before the alien inside the suit could be killed, the exoskeleton turned away from the gunfire, scampering backward toward them, tentacles first. Guillaume fired until his ammunition was spent, then moved forward to use the tip of his gun as a spike. Before he could do so, one of the flailing tentacle arms connected and sent him sprawling against the wall. Guillaume was down but not out. As the exoskeleton stepped past him, he sprang to his feet and attacked it with his hands. He reached through the shattered face of the shell and grabbed hold of the squirming alien within. When he did so, the biomechanical suit of armor lost its coordination. The tentacles went limp, and the knees buckled. As the suit clattered to the ground, Guillaume was left holding a slender gray body about three and a half feet tall. It thrashed violently, trying to escape, but the Frenchman had his powerful hand wrapped tight around its tiny throat. Guillaume screamed out in pain when the alien attacked him mentally. He reached up to his own throat as if he were being strangled by an invisible hand. Reg and the others ran forward to give help, but before they reached him, Guillaume had smashed the creature’s head open against the floor. Behind a set of delicate, almost-human facial features, the alien’s brain was a swollen disk extending off the back of the skull. A thin membrane was all that protected the brain, and it split open easily under the force of Guillaume’s strength. The small gray body was slathered in a layer of clear gelatin and smelled powerfully of ammonia.
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 67