Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The

by Molstad, Stephen

  The others didn’t have a clue.

  “A giant esophagus,” he announced with a dramatic expression. “The aliens probably found some poor brontosaurus-sized slob, cut his throat out, put it in one of those liquid growing vats of theirs and—voila!—instant elevator. These stringy white things hanging down the sides are cilia, just like you find in the human windpipe. I’ll wager ten quid that if we touch them, they’ll do something.” He glanced around at the others. “Any takers?”

  “Maybe they have stairs,” Yossi offered.

  When no one volunteered, Tye took matters into his own hands, literally. He reached out and grabbed one of the gooey white strands. Instantly, the entire shaft erupted to life. Tens of thousands of white tendrils began to whip around the interior of the shaft in a writhing frenzy. Pleased with himself, Tye smiled an I-told-you-so smile, not noticing that the strands were crawling up his arm. By the time he realized what was happening, the stringy tendrils had wound themselves around his shoulder and pulled him inside.

  The group had just enough time to recoil in horror and level their guns at the man-eating tendrils before Tye came flying out and landed, ass over teakettle, in a heap ten feet away. The tentacles all dropped limp, and the shaft went quiet again.

  “Michael, are you all right?” Fadeela asked.

  Tye sat up and spit out an oily piece of tendril. “It wasn’t exactly a Riviera holiday, but yeah, I’m okay.” He was covered head to foot in a fine layer of the foul-smelling slime.

  “There goes your elevator theory,” Yossi smirked.

  “Not at all,” he said, getting to his feet. “I got a little nervous is all. Once I was inside, the only thing I was thinking about was getting out, not going up. It did what I asked. Maybe I’ll have one more go. I don’t think it’s dangerous.” Before the others could dissuade him, he marched back and jumped inside. The long strands flared to life again, whipping back and forth like overcaffeinated sea snakes, and caught him. He screamed suddenly and was carried off. A moment later, the movement stopped suddenly, and the tendrils all fell dormant.

  Carefully, Reg leaned a few inches into the shaft and looked up, then down. ‘Tye! Can you hear me?” He backed away from the opening when he heard something coming toward him from above. Tye’s helmet flew past, falling to the bottom. ‘Tye!” Reg shouted again, then, straining to hear a response. He was about to give up when the millions of thin white strands whipped into a frenzy of movement once more. Reg leapt back from the opening and, a second later, Tye came flying out of the shaft and landed once more in a heap.

  “Gotta work on the landing, but I think I’m getting the hang of it,” he said.

  “We thought this thing ate you for breakfast,” Reg said. “Where’d you go?”

  “Up. How far up, I’m not exactly sure.” He looked at Yossi through the darkness. “I told you it was a lift,” he said. “And guess what it turns out to be?”

  “A lift?”

  “Precisely. This time, when I went inside, I thought about moving upward. Just like with the chariot. Next thing I knew, whoosh, I was going up.”

  “See any shiny metallic cases up there?” Reg asked, glancing at his watch.

  “I didn’t stay long enough to look around,” Tye answered.

  “Wait a second,” Edward said. “The report on that clipboard, it said something grabbed them, remember? Then it said control room. The case is up there, it has to be.”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying all along,” Fadeela pointed out. “Let’s ride this thing to the top.”

  Tye lectured the group. “Don’t be distracted once you get inside. Think about traveling up, concentrate on getting to the top.” He reached his arm inside and brought the stringy white cilia to life once more. They wrapped themselves around his lanky frame and dragged him inside. “Can you see me in here?” Tye called through the storm of movement.

  He was fully engulfed, but the others caught occasional glimpses of him—a kneecap here, an elbow there. They watched Tye think himself up a few feet then back down again until he was hovering in front of them again. Without leaving the shaft, he called through the rustling cilia, “Everybody clear on the concept?” Then, without waiting for an answer, “Good. See you at the top.”

  Yossi was the first to follow. He took a deep breath and stepped bravely to the threshold of the shaft, but lost his resolve and hesitated, staring into the grasping tendrils, overwhelmed by the strangeness of what he was about to do.

  “This is not why I joined the Air Force,” he moaned, closing his eyes tight and leaning forward until he felt the moist strands begin to lash softly across his face and chest. The next thing he knew, they had wrapped themselves around him and dragged him inside. It was an odd, terrifying sensation. He suddenly found himself floating in a zero-gravity environment. The moist white strands came at him from every angle and buoyed him up, each one lifting a tiny fraction of his weight. When he opened his mouth to yell, the strands darted into his mouth. He batted at them with his arms and kicked with his legs, but felt no resistance. It was like fighting against the air. Individually, the tendrils had very little strength, but they were wickedly quick and adjusted to changes in his position as fast as he could make them. It took a second or two for Yossi to realize that although he was floating inside the shaft, he wasn’t moving. I need to move up, he remembered. The mere thought wasn’t enough, it had to be a positive act of will. Up, up, I want to move up! Sensing his desire through the conductive medium of the gelatin, the tendrils obeyed. Yossi shot upward, tumbling end over end. Once he stopped struggling, the ride was surprisingly comfortable. Then it came to an abrupt end. He was spit out of the shaft and crashed to the floor. When he looked up, Tye was looking down at him.

  “Weird, isn’t it? Come on, get out of the way before the next person comes through.” Still slightly disoriented from the experience, Yossi allowed Tye to drag him to one side a moment before Edward came crashing out of the esophageal bioelevator. One by one, the others followed until the group had reassembled on the new, higher stage of the tower.

  “That was disgusting.” Fadeela winced, wiping the film of clear gelatin off her face. “Are we at the top?”

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Reg said with a sinking feeling. He moved a few strides into the cavernous space. It was a virtual replica of the floors below, full of the same shattered walls and pieces of broken equipment. In the distance, the false daylight filtered through the gaps between the exterior plates. “It looks like there’s at least one more floor above.”

  Through the semitransparent ceiling, they could see what appeared to be an open chamber above. It looked completely empty. The team marched toward the front of the tower, keeping their eyes open for a way up to the next story.

  “I just realized something,” Reg announced. “This floor above us, it has to be the exit bay for their attacker planes.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right,” Tye said, nodding. He was the only one who had been with Reg during the first attack over Jerusalem, when hundreds of the disk-shaped attackers had come swarming out of an opening about three-quarters of the way up the face of the tower. “This is the tunnel they flew out of. It’s as wide as the tower itself.”

  Ali cursed in Arabic, then said, “There’s got to be a way around it.”

  “Maybe along the sides,” Fadeela suggested, and started to walk in that direction.

  “Sounds logical,” Ali grudgingly agreed, and began to follow.

  Just then the walls began to quake violently, followed by a booming explosion. The floor shifted sideways beneath their feet, powerfully enough to knock all of them to the ground. With a shudder, the tower leaned another degree off center. The entire structure teetered back and forth as the support beams on the lower levels decided whether to give way and collapse. When it seemed as if they would hold for a while longer, Fadeela was the first to break the silence. “And what exactly was that?”

  “I think your fiancé’s planes have decid
ed to show up after all.”

  “Just when we need them least,” Edward observed. “They’re going to knock the tower over before we can get outside.”

  “It’s getting close to sunup,” Reg announced. “We’ve got to find these bioweapons.”

  “No, seriously,” Edward said, “they’re going to knock the tower over. Isn’t it time to get out of here?”

  “Plenty of time left.” Reg smiled. His expression changed suddenly as an idea occurred to him. He broke into a jog, searching the ceiling with his flashlight.

  “What is it?”

  “This way.” The others followed, weaving through the obstacle course of ruined workstations and collapsed walls. A hundred yards before they reached the sidewall of the tower, Reg stopped and pointed his flashlight up at the ceiling. “There it is.”

  Lying massively on the floor above was the titanic taproot they’d seen as they entered the ship. It looked like an oil pipeline stretching away toward the front of the ship. If it were still growing and burrowing into the earth, there were no signs of it. The thing lay motionless.

  Ali stared up at the giant organic tube, stunned by a horrible epiphany. “They’re not going to put the biological weapons into the air. They’re going to put them into the ground.”

  Tye was confused. “Uh, wouldn’t that be a good thing? To bury the poisons?”

  “Into the water, the groundwater,” Ali explained. “This is the desert, but there is water. An underground river, one of the largest in the world. It supplies the cities in the north with their water.” He shook his head thinking how many people would be infected if the water supply were contaminated, and how quickly the carriers would infect others.

  “Look up there,” Yossi said, pointing his flashlight at the ceiling. Dimly visible through the ceiling were the bottoms of alien feet. Three sets of them came padding alongside the taproot until they were directly overhead. Yossi followed them with his flashlight.

  ‘Turn that thing off, you jackass,” Edward hissed. “You’re showing them where we are.”

  But the aliens already knew where the humans were. They lingered for a moment, looking down through the semitransparent material before heading off in a new direction. Fadeela raised her flamethrower to take a shot, but Reg stopped her.

  “Let’s follow them.”

  He bolted into the darkness, blazing a trail over and around the piles of debris lying in his path. He used the flashlight attached to his machine gun to keep track of the alien feet, unconcerned that he was giving away his own position. He chased them a couple of hundred yards until they disappeared. The others followed as best they could. By the time they caught up to him, Reg was climbing a sort of trellis composed of thick diagonal bars. He was already halfway to the top and didn’t look back to see if the others were following.

  Out of breath by the time he climbed to the top, he found himself in the long, low corridor of the attacker exit bay. He took a few strides into the empty space and strained to hear the sound of the retreating aliens over the pounding of his own heart. But the only noise came from the rest of the team struggling up the trellis. As they stepped away from the trellis, he switched on his flashlight briefly and scanned the new room. In the distance, there was the ten-foot-tall taproot running past a set of columns, but otherwise the space was vacant. It was just tall enough to accommodate one of the sixty-foot-long attacker ships. The floor and ceiling were covered with skid marks where the wobbling airships had brushed against them.

  There was no sign of the aliens.

  “Did you see which way they went?” Yossi asked. He and Tye had their forearms locked together, ready to fire the alien pulse gun.

  “No,” Reg answered. “But I’ve got a feeling they’re still nearby.”

  “Listen,” Fadeela said. “Outside. You can hear the bombers.” The tunnel was open at one end. The sound of the distant jet engines echoed down the corridor, and there was a slight breeze.

  “First things first,” Ali said. “We’ve got to destroy that root before they can use it to poison the water supply.” The taproot was more than a hundred yards away.

  “You’re right,” Reg said uneasily. He had the sense that the team was being watched. “Let’s head in that direction, but not in a bunch. We’re making ourselves an easy target. Edward, you and I will go first. The rest of you follow in pairs.”

  Reg took off, running in a crouch, but stopped suddenly after only a few steps.

  “What is it?” Edward asked.

  ZAP! A fist-sized ball of light sliced through the darkness. As Edward twisted and ducked out of the way, he raised his free hand instinctively to shield himself. The green pulse streaked past his hand, removing four of his fingers and leaving a burn mark across his forehead as it went. He screamed in pain and hit the floor as a second blast sailed over his head.

  Reg and Ali opened up with their guns, blasting away in the direction of the attack. Tye and Yossi sent a pulse blast of their own skittering away into the darkness. But it was Fadeela who put the aliens on the defensive. She charged toward the source of the enemy fire, squeezing out a long arc of flame as she ran. The fire lit up the gloomy corridor and exposed their attackers.

  There were three aliens—two of them in exoskeletal armor. The warriors were marching inexorably forward with their fingers extended in the firing position until the fire overwhelmed them. They recoiled from the flames and, in their panic, tripped over their biomechanical legs and crashed to the ground.

  “Hold your fire,” Reg screamed. Fadeela was in the way, charging forward without a thought for her own safety. Before the lumbering giants could regain their feet and escape, she sprayed them with a heavy dose of thick liquid fire. By the time their thorax shells popped open and the creatures within wriggled into the open, Reg and Ali had come forward and were in position to finish them off.

  “There’s one more,” Ali shouted as he ran past the smoldering bodies, “this way.” They chased the fleeing alien into the shadows of the exit bay, moving toward the open front of the tower and leaving the light of the flames behind them.

  “More fire,” Reg yelled when it seemed the alien would escape.

  Fadeela raised her flamethrower and was about to send out another plume of fire when she realized there was no need. She knew exactly where the alien was standing. It was to her right, not far away, cowering against the tower’s sidewall. Without a word being exchanged, all of the humans turned in the same direction and slowly raised their weapons toward the spot. They knew what they were going to see: a tall, unarmed alien with opalescent white skin. And when they aimed their flashlights in that direction, that is exactly what they saw. The alien moved very slowly away from the wall, its huge eyes squinting into the glare of the flashlights, and raised its hands above its head.

  It told them it wanted to surrender.

  15

  A VERY CLOSE ENCOUNTER

  Another bomb rocked into the downed spacecraft. The tower absorbed the shock wave without tilting any farther off center, but as it swayed and shook beneath their feet, Reg and the others were reminded that time was running short. Dawn was quickly approaching and the Saudi jets outside were threatening to fell the tower like a tall tree.

  The alien stood perfectly still, its goose-egg eyes reflecting the beams of the flashlights. The only movements it made occurred inside its body. Beneath the translucent membrane of its skin, knots of tissue clutched and released in peristaltic motion. This creature was not like the others the team had encountered. It stood a full head taller, and its skin glistened a nacreous white. Its emaciated limbs looked long and graceful in comparison to its smaller, grayer brethren, but, like them, its face was nothing more than a blunt spot on the front of its neck. Its large brain hung off the back of the skull like a meaty, pie-sized tumor.

  The frail captive had ample reason not to move. It had a large-caliber field gun, two flamethrowers, two fully automatic machine guns, a pistol, and an alien pulse weapon pointed its w
ay. The humans who held these weapons were waiting for the creature to make the slightest of false moves, anything that would give them the excuse they wanted to blow it to bits. They were nervous, frightened, and thirsty for revenge, but something told them it would be a mistake to squeeze their triggers. The alien lifted its white, two-fingered hands in the air as a sign of its surrender and “spoke” to Reg.

  In a single, sustained, telepathic thought, it communicated several ideas at once. It told Reg: that there were no more bioarmored soldiers nearby; that it was personally incapable of violence; that it would cooperate fully if the humans gave it a chance; and that killing a potentially useful prisoner would be a grave tactical error.

  It took a long, confusing moment for Reg to sort out the multilayered mental message the alien was sending. It came to him as a feeling rather than in the symbolic language he was accustomed to using. The communication was both a physical sensation that tingled through his nervous system and a recognizable emotion. There were no words, no need for interpretation, no possibility of misunderstanding. But the ideas were piled on top of one another, strung together in a way that took some getting used to. Once he began to understand the telepathy, the ideas resonated with a strange familiarity through some long-unused section of his brain. And there was a rationality to the communication that caught Reg off guard. All the aliens he’d faced previously had sprung at him mentally with the same ferocious energy they used in their physical attacks. This “Tall One,” on the other hand, was serene, intelligent and—more importantly—afraid to die.

  Without lifting his eyes away from his prisoner, Reg began to explain to the others what the alien had told him. There was no need. The rest of the team could also hear the alien thinking.

  “It’s reading our minds,” Ali said nervously. “We should kill it.”