Damn. And he couldn’t even float very well, must less walk on fucking water…
The old man was white-bearded, his left arm bandaged crudely from wrist to elbow, his clothes dirty and torn. A dark and grimy baseball cap was pulled down over his head and whatever hair he might have left. He had an antique rifle lying next to him, something that appeared to be blued steel and worn wood, an old-style bolt-action piece, probably a hunting weapon from a hundred years past. Back when people hunted for sport and not for survival. He sat cross-legged, leaning against a pile of rubble, mostly broken furniture and shattered building material; a small campfire burned in front of him, the flickers from it painting the old man’s face yellow-orange.
A girl of about six leaned against the old man’s side, her face dirty, long hair matted.
“Here comes Air Sammy,” the old man said. He pulled a vial from his jacket pocket, sprinkled a powder from it into the campfire. The fire sputtered and the flames turned a bright blue-green. “I hope the bastards have their spookeyes on.”
Overhead in the night, the running lights of military attack jets appeared, red and green against the smog that was mostly smoke. The rumble of their engines increased.
“Will they see us, Uncle?” the little girl asked.
“I hope so, honey. They should.” He waved at the blue fire.
The fiery lance of a missile erupted from one jet, then other rockets followed. like meteorites, the missiles streaked and died quickly, to be replaced by a brighter flash of light followed by artificial thunder as the rockets exploded.
“Stupid fucking airheads,” the old man said.
The little girl covered her ears with her hands as more explosions rocked them. A blast wave streamed the little fire as might a man blowing gently on a candle.
A woman moved into the circle of firelight. She looked a worn fifty, her clothes were smudged with ashes and dirt, and she had an airpump shotgun on a sling over her shoulder. She squatted next to the little girl. “Hey, Amy. You okay?”
The little girl looked up. “I’m okay, Mom. Did you find anything to eat?”
“Not this time, honey. Maybe Leroy did. He should be back soon. Damn!”
This last followed a louder boom and brighter flash of light. Dust and small bits of debris swirled over the trio, and the fire flattened briefly under the blast.
“Why do they bother?” the woman asked. “They hardly ever kill any of them and the damned things just don’t get scared.”
“Fucking airheads,” the man said. He glanced around. “We’d better move out, Mona. The things will probably start their sweep after Sammy shears off.”
“What about Leroy?” the little girl asked.
“Don’t worry about him, baby. He will meet us at the reservoir. He knows we can’t stay here.”
The old man looked across the fire, and spoke as if there were an unseen watcher sitting there. “That’s it for now, sports fans. Tune in again tomorrow, same time, same satellite, for another exciting episode of Life in the Ruins of Earth. We’ll sign on at 1900, if the bugs haven’t eaten us. Summer’s over and it’ll be getting dark sooner. That’s a dislink and endit—”
He pointed an old-style IR remote control at the unseen watcher and the three people vanished…
Billie gripped the arms of the plastic form-chair tightly and found she had been holding her breath as the image on the viewscreen went blank. She forced herself to relax. To breathe.
“They’re regulars,” the tech said. “Amy, Mona, Uncle Burt. Sometimes Leroy—he’s Chinese, we think. The kid looks to be about six. Our guess is that her mother is in her late twenties, some of the stuff she talks about. The old guy is maybe seventy, probably not related, though the kid calls him Uncle.”
“God,” Billie said.
“I don’t know why they bother “casting,” the tech said. “It’s not like anybody is going to drop down and help them.”
Billie shook her head. “Maybe it’s all they have left. It matters that they try. People do that.”
The tech shrugged, scanning for another image. “Or did it. This base location is classified information,” she said, “but I can tell you that the “cast we just saw is history. Even in cold sleep and with full race gee drives going through the hypercut we are a long way from Earth. The little girl could be years older by now. That, or worm food. It’s a message in a bottle.”
Billie’s insides clenched. She knew just how that little girl must feel.
Something about being clean and in fresh fatigues made a man feel better. When you faced death as often as Wilks had, minor shit like crazy generals didn’t seem so bad. While he couldn’t say he felt the same detachment about the Long Nap some of the Zen martial arts boys had, Wilks had looked Death square in the face enough times so it didn’t scare him. You lived or you died, that was how it went, and when your number came due, you got collected. He’d thought his was at the top of the pile several times but Death had only grazed him when he reached for another. Fuck it. A hot shower and clean clothes, however, were tangible, something you could relate to in the here and now. The ground might open up and swallow you next step, a stray comet could zip in and squash you like a bug, one of the aliens could hop from behind a garbage can and eat your face off, but those were in the unseen future. Right now, Wilks felt pretty damned good. One second at a time.
Being cooped up on that drone ship hadn’t given him any love for it, but Wilks found himself walking toward the vessel because he had an idea. The thing had been unloaded and it would need new fuel cells and probably some repair before it had any chance of being spaceworthy again. It sat in the middle of one of the big prefab storage areas, a mostly dark and very cold room that apparently wasn’t worth spending more than the minimum on for light and heat.
Wilks’s footsteps echoed hollowly as he walked across the sheetcrete flooring toward The American. The cargo bay door was still open, and the ship’s internal lights were off. He walked up the expanded-metal incline and slapped the light button. It was a little warmer inside the ship, the fuel cells” heat sinks radiating their excess warmth into the air.
Wilks moved deeper into the cargo hold, found an empty hex storage crate, and sat on it. It was very quiet, only the low hum of power units audible. After a few seconds Wilks heard what he expected: boot steps outside the ship.
Whoever was following him was approaching.
Wilks flexed his hands, rolled his shoulders. Prepared himself to move, if he needed to move. The footsteps drew nearer.
Billie worked her way toward the medical section. She wanted to see what they were doing to Mitch, if she could.
On the other side of a clear door inside a smallish chamber that looked like an anteroom combined with an airlock, there was a short, fat man dressed in a lab cloak and what looked like white paint. She touched the plastic wall and it was very cold. He spoke to her through an electronic pass-through. “This area is Clean,” he said. “You want to come inside, you have to be deloused first.”
Billie blinked. “Deloused?”
“Chem- and electro-instillation,” he said. He waved at a horizontal cylinder about the size of a coffin on a metal frame against one wall. “All your internal and external flora and fauna get zapped. No stray bacteria allowed. Then you get spray-suited.” He rubbed his leg with one all white hand. “Osmotic, lets your skin breathe air, keeps everything else in—including sweat.”
That would explain why it was so cold in the room, maybe. “Seems like a lot of trouble.”
“Regulation sterile technique. Can’t have some wild micro-animal messing up experiment protocols. Even though the UV overheads usually catch any we miss, you never know. If you’re just planning to satisfy idle curiosity, better you should look at it on the holoproj. That’ll save you a lot of B-time.”
“B-time,” Billie said.
“As in “bidet.” When all of your intestinal bacteria get fried, it tends to do interesting things to your bowels. After your fir
st delouse treatment, you tend to get a real fulminant diarrhea that lasts about a week. Cuts down on your personal mobility, it does.”
“Ah. I’m looking for the Artificial Person who came here with us.”
“The “droid? He’s in mechlab. They’re molding him for an exobase and walker. Won’t take all that long. I can connect you on the com.”
Billie thought about it for a moment. “No. That’s okay. I’ll talk to him later.”
“No problem. You need anything, just ask. I do what I’m ordered, no mistakes.”
.As Billie wandered away, she thought about what the fat man meant by that last remark. It had been another long day. She was tired. All she wanted to do was lie down and sleep.
No, not sleep. Not with the aliens here to infect her unconscious mind and make it churn out nightmares.
She had thought the hospital awful. Had feared for what they planned to do to her mind, the chemical lobotomy the medics had decreed.
Given all that had gone on since she’d escaped, a mind-wipe didn’t sound so bad.
10
Wilks saw the man step into the cargo bay, but not who he was—the hangar lights were dim and the ship’s standby lamps were not much brighter. The man looked around.
“Over here,” Wilks said.
The man tensed, dropped his hand toward his hip and the handgun clipped there, then froze. He straightened, then moved closer.
“I thought it might be you,” Wilks said.
It was Powell.
“What do you—?” Wilks began.
Powell gave him a cut wave. Wilks shut up. Watched as the major pulled some kind of electronic sniffer from his belt and touched a control on it. A green LED lit on the little black plastic rectangle. “Okay, clear.”
“Walls have ears?” Wilks said.
“And the ceiling has eyes. Everywhere on the base, except in here. Another few days and this ship will be bugged, too.”
“Spears.”
“He’s as paranoid as they come. Crazy as a spider on a hot griddle, you know.”
“Yeah, I figured.”
“He lives for his scheme of retaking the Earth and being the hero of the millennium. He thinks everybody is out to get him. He runs a poison scan on his food and still makes an orderly taste it first; he sees conspiracies everywhere. In normal times the mindbenders would be lining up to write books about him.”
“Normal times,” Wilks said. “Been a while since then.”
Powell nodded. “Yes.” The man paused, sighed, seemed to gather his thoughts. “Maybe we’re beyond reason as a species. Maybe what mankind needs is a sociopathic psychotic killer to match the aliens.” He shook his head.
“But you don’t believe it,” Wilks said.
“No. It would be a step backward, a return to the caves. We’re… better than that. We have achieved civilization, the stars. We can’t go back.”
“Not to defend Spears, but dialogue doesn’t seem to work too well on these things.”
“I understand that. But the queens are intelligent. They can be communicated with—we’ve done it here. Our queen is cooperating, after a fashion. They want what we want, to survive, to thrive.”
“If you’re preaching the “Brotherhood of Life” line, Major, you’re wasting your time. I’ve seen my friends slaughtered by these fuckers. I was on Earth just before they nuked a big chunk of it rather than get eaten alive.”
“I know, I know. I’m not saying we should hug the aliens and expect smiles all around. Sharing the same world with the aliens isn’t likely, they’re too much like we were half a million years ago, too egocentric to think of life forms other than their own. No, I’m not suggesting any such thing. But we are supposed to be intelligent, to be civilized. War is stupid, annihilation of an entire species is barbaric.”
“Funny, coming from a major in the Colonial Marines.”
“Not all military men are killers, Sergeant. Neither are all officers automatically savage morons.”
“Could have fooled me,” Wilks said. But he grinned. Powell was somebody with a conscience, and he was obviously trying to do something here. Wilks wasn’t sure just what, yet, but he had a feeling he was going to find out.
“They didn’t nuke it, you know.”
“What?”
“Earth. Didn’t happen. No major atomics, nothing but tacticals, according to our feeds.”
“Probably because your friendly neighborhood aliens ate the guy supposed to push the button.”
Powell shrugged.
“Okay, so, what’s the scat, Major? Why are you telling me all this and risking your own ass?”
Powell nodded, and took a deep breath.
The atmosphere plant was never going to produce a surface nitrogen-oxy mix thick enough so unaugmented humans could use it for breathing purposes, unless they crawled in the bottoms of deep craters. True, the planetoid was big enough to hold some gases down with its feeble gravity but the term “terraforming” was something less than exact in this case. Unless you thought of humans as moles or perhaps prairie dogs.
No, the civilian colony was here because there were a vast number of underground caverns that could be sealed tight, filled with air, and used either as shelter or to grow enough food to sustain a permanent population. Once the tiny world became self-supporting, there were plenty of uses for it: expanded military bases, mining, an escape-proof prison. It was to those ends the terraformers worked. What the atmosphere plant produced was, save for venting, pumped into the ground.
The stolen crawler approached the plant, slowed. Came to a stop. Inside the small craft the trio of deserters were four days from a bath and out of food.
“We made it,” Renus said.
“Yeah, so far,” Magruder added.
The crawler’s pilot at the moment, Peterson, nibbled at his lip, but said nothing.
“Radio’s still quiet, “cept for stray stuff from Third Base,” Renus said.
“Spears would have them on a war footing, no transmissions—like there’s anybody out there who gives a roach’s ass.”
“Yeah,” Peterson said, “but we ought to be picking up suitcoms or Doppler or something this close.”
“This isn’t a place where people go out for a picnic, now, is it, dickhead? They’re all underground.”
Peterson glared at Renus, looked as if he were going to come up from the seat and take a swing at him.
“Bury it,” Magruder said. “We made it, that’s the important thing. Spears didn’t even come looking in this direction; we didn’t see any flyovers. We’re home free.”
“I’ll feel better when I’m inside,” Peterson said. “Be a hell of a lot easier to steal a ride offworld here.”
“So what are you waiting for?” Renus said. “Move in.”
The crawler started forward.
In the hold of The American, Powell said, “He’s been feeding the experimental subjects all kinds of chem the scientists say might have some effect on the things. We don’t know if it’s working or not. The body chemistry of these creatures is astounding.”
Wilks touched the scar on his face without conscious thought. He realized what he was doing, dropped his hand, said, “Yeah. I noticed. Acid blood probably fucks up your basic tranquilizer pretty good.”
“We’ve done some conditioning exercises with the queen. She doesn’t appear particularly concerned with the fate of individual drones—we’ve killed them and she doesn’t display distress in any way that shows. But if we threaten or destroy any of her eggs, she becomes very agitated.”
“Fetch the stick or we squash the babies?”
“Something like that, yes. It seems to work. And the queen controls the drones—we aren’t sure how, some kind of telepathic or extremely low frequency radiopathic waves, something. We—ah—we’ve put a single human subject into a chamber filled with alien drones, given him an egg and a blowtorch with which to threaten it, the queen watching, and none of the aliens touched the man.”
&nb
sp; “Jesus, you’re cold-blooded fuckers.”
“It wasn’t my idea, Wilks. Spears runs the show here.”
“Why doesn’t somebody put a bullet into him? Shove a grenade under his bidet?”
“He has his supporters. And like I said, he’s very careful.”
Wilks shook his head. “He trust you?”
“Not really.”
“But you could put him away. Then you’d be in command.”
“I’m not a killer, I told you that.”
“Yeah. Go on,”
Powell went on.
Billie was in the room they’d issued her, a closet-sized cube big enough for a bed and chair, the sink, shower, and toilet all in a walk-in space inset in one wall. She’d just finished cleaning up. She didn’t want to sleep, but she was so tired she knew it was going to happen soon. One of the medics she’d talked to had given her a tablet he said would help. She wasn’t the only one on the base who had bad dreams, so it seemed.
She was staring at herself in the tiny mirror over the sink, wondering who this thin, hollow-eyed woman was.
“Billie?”
She turned. Mitch.
They had repaired him, after a fashion. He was held in a bipedal frame by shoulder straps and a wide band across his chest and waist. The platform began where his body ended, and extended into a pair of hydraulic struts, pistons and stainless steel and stressed plastics that terminated in oval pads nothing like human feet. They hadn’t tried very hard to match his proportions—he was about eighteen or twenty centimeters shorter than he’d been with his own body intact, so his hands dangled at the mechanical knees of the legs. Billie’s flash image was of a man who had been stripped of flesh from the waist to his toes, then had his skeleton chrome-plated and hung with cables.
“So,” he said. “Is it me, you think?”
The joke fell flat and it broke her heart that he tried it. But if that was how he wanted to play it, she would give it a shot.
“I think the flitter salesman sold you a demonstrator. You should have held out for next year’s model.”
[Aliens 02] - Nightmare Asylum Page 7