by Alex Mersey
“McAllister!”
The whisper-shout flicked his gaze upward.
The lovely Cassie, kneeling by the gnarled stub.
“Get your ass back up here,” she hissed, her expression mutinous.
“Ten minutes, tops.” He lowered his gaze to watch his footing, continuing his descent with slightly more control. “We’re just going in for a quick sneak and peak.”
“This isn’t a game, McAllister. We have orders.”
“You have orders.” He was getting into some sort of rhythm now, although it wasn’t nearly as elegant as Williams had made it look. “I don’t answer to Captain Davis.”
“The captain appointed you ambassador,” Cassie called down above his head. “Trust me, you answer to him.”
Not after you file your report, Sean thought but didn’t say, reserving his energy and focus for the climb.
The rope wobbled, throwing him off his rhythm.
“I’ll shake you off, I swear. Don’t think I won’t do it.”
He adjusted his grip and sent a scowl up the slope. She wouldn’t. Cassie glared right back at him, one hand on the top end of the rope. Then again…he glanced down to measure the distance he’d fall. Roughly twice his own length. He kept going, surprised to land on his feet with no bones broken, and shuffled behind the cover of Williams’ bush.
Williams tipped a look over his shoulder. “That woman is a dog and you’re her bone.”
“She’s not all that bad,” Sean said, examining his grazed palms.
“You should tell her.”
“Maybe I will.”
“Make it quick,” Williams said.
“What?” Sean turned to see Cassie, releasing the rope as she dropped into a crouch and crept over. He hadn’t even heard her scale the slope. “What are you doing?”
“I can’t kill you and I am not letting the two of you loose on your own.” She held out her hand, eyes on the M4 across his chest. “I’ll take that.”
“You’re not disarming me.”
“Call it a loan then. I left mine in the guard house.” Her eyes lifted to him, her chin set in stubbornness. “If we run into Silvers, who do you think will put that weapon to better use, me or you?”
She’s not carrying? A skimmed look over her brown tee and cargo pants confirmed it and Sean unclipped his rifle, passed it over, not for the reason she’d given. If they ran into any Silvers, he sure as hell didn’t want her defenseless.
Williams watched without comment as she double-checked the weapon: mag inserted correctly, safety on, selector turned to single shot. He’d brought an M4 along for this trip in addition to the pistol that lived at his hip, but he didn’t offer up the extra weapon. Sean had no problem with that. He’d seen Williams in a gunfight and the man was well worth a gun in each hand.
“On my six,” Cassie issued in a low voice and pushed past them, the compact carbine tucked under one arm, grip on the charging handle.
“Has she just commandeered our mission?” muttered Sean.
Williams shrugged and got moving.
Sean followed their lead down to the valley basin, short sprints from bush to tree to bush, sometimes falling flat and slithering in the long grass when no other cover presented itself. There was no Silver army here, of that he was fairly confident. The only movement besides them came from a bird fluttering a leafy tree and the occasional rustle as a gusty breeze kicked against the relentless heat. But they were still deep in hostile territory and he felt naked without any weapon.
At last they reached the shade where stone wall touched rugged cliff.
Cassie plastered herself to the side of the fort. Her hand slashed up with some kind of signal that Sean interpreted freely. Shut up and do as I do. He squared his jaw and fell in at the end of the line, advancing along the wall gutter.
Nervous energy raced his pulse as they edged around the corner into full, blown-up view of the battlecruiser. Close enough to see the silvery mist seemed to rise off the obsidian shell and dissipate, like a continuous cycle of vapor steaming off hot metal.
He hadn’t spent much thought on what the Silvers were, where they’d come from. They were here now, laying waste to his world, that’s all that really mattered. But there was no doubting the other-worldliness of this spacecraft, the combination of mastery and magic that had brought it across a span of galaxies.
They fanned out around the ship in silent awe, searching for any sign of entrance, weakness, any kind of door or window or seam that could split the beast open.
“Maybe it’s sealed and they can’t get out,” Sean said when they found nothing.
Williams scrubbed his jaw, standing back to study the problem from a small distance. “Maybe they don’t need to get out.”
“Why land, then?”
“Um, guys?” Cassie called, drawing them to her around the other side. She pointed at the gated archway to the fort’s inner courtyard.
Not really a gate. The black chain links formed a diamond-patterned lattice and attached itself to the walls like veins bleeding into the stone. The chain was thin as wire, the same obsidian black as the ship and shimmering faintly with only bare traces of mist trailing along the links.
They’d missed it the first time around, too focused on the ship. “Guess they’re not sealed in after all,” Sean said.
Williams reached out to touch.
“For the love of—” Cassie slapped his hand away. “Alien material? And look at that mist, it’s like some sort of reaction going on.”
“Only one way to find out.” Williams gave her the shoulder and brought his hand up again, carefully, reflexes primed to pull back the split second any contact proved adversary. Misty tendrils swirled out of the way as he tapped a link with the tip of his finger, as if afraid of human contact. “Now that’s interesting.”
Sean tried, then clasped the chain link with his hands as the mist swirled away, trying to bend or shake the diamond lattice. It didn’t give a millimeter. As wiry thin as the metal seemed, it was as tough and rigid as cast iron.
A dulled, scraping noise came from inside the courtyard.
Sean froze.
Williams’ hand slipped from the fence and Cassie aimed her rifle.
The inner courtyard was a squat rectangle. It was open to the sun, but caged with the same black lattice attached to the surrounding roof. A number of steel-studded doors opened onto the courtyard, and of those doors was moving.
“Go, go, go,” Williams whispered urgently, as if they needed telling to jump the hell out of sight.
Sean grabbed Cassie by the arm and pulled her with him. She jerked her arm free as they slammed themselves against the wall, her eyes blazing fury into him. Because he’d helped her along? Or because he’d landed them in this mess. Probably a bit of both.
Williams flattened himself to the wall right beside the gated fence. He shared a look with Sean, pulled out his pistol and passed along the M4. Sean took it, glanced at Cassie to see how it was done and mimicked her double-handed stance. Williams had talked him through the basics, but he’d never fired any type of semi-automatic and this felt like…like a child playing with adult toys.
You okay? Cassie mouthed, the fire in her eyes dampened with genuine worry.
Sean gave a curt nod and looked back toward Williams and the archway, holding his breath, listening hard. Even after everything he’d lived through, everything he’d seen, he did not believe they were about to come face-to-face with an alien species. His mind couldn’t go there, searched for any other explanation for that door opening. The fort owners? Silvers prisoners? Collaborators? Sympathizers?
There was no warning.
No slurp or squelch or whatever the hell sound the fence veins should make as they were ripped out of the posts.
There was just the oblique angle of Williams’ jaw partly blocking his line of vision and then there it was, the alien apparition. The Silver. Humanoid in form. Seven—no, closer to eight feet fall. A translucent creamy white all ov
er splashed with milky pale blue eyes. Not dressed, not naked, as if white body armor had been melted on from bald head to toe.
And narrow. That was Sean’s fleeting first, overwhelming impression. Narrow face. Narrow shoulders. Narrow torso. Narrow hips. Narrow legs.
Williams didn’t hesitate.
He stepped forward, aimed and fired a shot to the heart. A silvery green web blossomed from the entry point, the spidery lines multiplying at lightning speed into a solid patch over the chest wound. The Silver showed no reaction to the impact, except to tilt his head and raise one of those narrow arms, fluid and slow, no hurry.
Sean fumbled with the safety, heart thudding, fingers suddenly too thick for the small switch but finally the damn thing flicked over. In his peripheral vision, he saw Cassie jump out, putting herself in the line of fire. Straight ahead, he saw the Silver’s fingers reshape on his left hand, fuse together and lengthen into something resembling the barrel of a rifle. I’m losing my fucking mind. He blinked hard, but nothing changed.
Williams fired again, a kill shot between the eyes. An instantaneous web cracked out and thickened there to tint silvery green over a patch of white. Still the Silver didn’t drop, didn’t seem to notice. Shit. No one, no species, could survive a shot between the eyes.
The next shot came from Cassie, a single deafening burst that discolored the lower abdomen. At the same time, the Silver targeted Williams with that mutated arm extension and fired a thin, red beam.
“No!” Sean shouted. He fired and then realized the selector had been turned to 3-shot. The first round might have hit, the next two went sky high as the muzzle climbed on the recoil. “Williams!”
He darted a look from the Silver to Williams. The man was on his feet, gun arm lowered to his side, pistol dropped to the floor, but he was on his feet, still standing.
“Williams,” he shouted again, although he couldn’t hear a damn thing, couldn’t even hear his own shouts above the ringing in his ears and Cassie shooting off one steady shot after the other. But it was like shooting fucking paintballs, splashing the Silver the color of tarnished brass. It wasn’t doing any damn good and the Silver was turning that weaponized arm on Cassie.
Sean tensed his muscles in preparation for the additional recoil and fired another 3-shot. The muzzle still climbed, but this time the rounds climbed up the Silver and something struck, a single true shot that came from either him or Cassie, no way to tell with all the rounds they’d blasted into the invincible alien. The Silver’s knees collapsed out from under him and he toppled to the ground.
Everything went still.
Quiet.
“Back out!” Cassie yelled, a muffled shout that seemed to reach him through an echo chamber. “Back out now!”
Sean lurched backward, rifle ready, darting looks in every direction. Where were the others? Why hadn’t the gunfire drawn them out?
And why the hell wasn’t Williams backing out?
“Williams!” Sean rushed forward again, grabbed his arm as he whipped around to face the man. “We need to go!”
Williams stared at him. No, not at him, through him. Sean looked for a wound, blood. Nothing showed on the gray t-shirt, no stain, no rip or burn. The Silver had missed. Think! He’d seen the targeted red beam. That was no miss. But the Silver weapons didn’t wound, they disintegrated. If Williams had been hit, the man would be a pile of cremated flesh and bone now.
Sean snapped his fingers in Williams’ face. “Williams!”
“Williams! McAllister!” Cassie ran back to them. “We need to go.”
“I know.” Sean pressed two fingers to the curve of Williams’ jaw. “Wait, I feel it. His pulse is strong, but he’s not responsive.”
“Slap him.”
Sean looked at her. “It’s not that kind of—”
She shoved him aside and did it herself, a hard slap. Williams’ jaw went with her hand, then swung forward again. Her hand came up again and Sean grabbed her wrist.
“He’s not in shock, Cassie. I think…” Sean shook his head, not sure what to think. “He’s not in shock, he’s not dead. It’s like he’s paralytic.”
“Paralyzed?” Cassie peered up at Williams’ face. “That red beam… The Silver zapped him with some type of red laser.”
“I saw that.”
“Okay.” Cassie spun away, swinging her rifle this way and that, as if she’d heard something.
Sean looked, and his gaze hitched on the fence between them and the courtyard, still sealed into the walls at both sides. Where was the damn gap the Silver must have peeled away to come through?
“How do we move him?” Cassie asked, her attention back on Williams. “We can’t carry him up the slope.”
He looked at the fence for another moment, puzzling over the lesser of their problems. How had the Silver passed through? Fucking apparition?
“McAllister!”
“Yeah, I hear you.” He switched tracks in his head, frowning at Williams. All 180 pounds of him, and that was at the low end of his guestimate. “What about the compound gate?”
The road winding up the hill stopped at a massive iron-studded wooden gate.
Cassie shook her head. “It’s rock solid and locked.”
“Then we shoot the lock out.”
“If we do that, they’ll know we—”
“They’ll know anyway.”
She threw a disgusted look at the Silver on the ground. “Not if we take the body with us.”
“Jesus, Cassie, the surveillance operation is compromised. It’s over.”
“Not for me, it isn’t.” She gave him one of those hard, stubborn looks. “My orders haven’t changed.”
“I’m not going anywhere without you, that is not happening.”
“You don’t have a choice,” she said in a clipped tone. “Williams needs help and Captain Davis needs to know what’s gone down here. You’re taking Williams back to Little Falls and I’m staying here.”
Her focus snapped from him.
Sean heard it this time, too. He brought the rifle up and whirled around Williams, stopped just short of blowing Private Evans’ head off.
“Evans,” barked Cassie. “Who told you to leave your post?”
“Sorry, Sergeant.” The young soldier kept coming, trampling through the bush. “It sounded like a war zone down here and…” He trailed off as his eyes landed on the fallen Silver. “Holy shit, is that…?”
“Yes, it is,” Cassie sighed. “Okay, since you’re here, stay sharp and watch over these two while I arrange their exit,” she added and turned to go.
Evans looked at Sean uncertainly.
The poor kid probably didn’t know if he was supposed to protect them or guard them.
Sean walked over to where the Silver lay. Dead. Defeated. And it looked like he didn’t have any buddies in the vicinity, but there would be more, somewhere, sometime, plenty more they’d have to kill or be killed.
The ground around the body was littered with shells of the bullets fired, at least a dozen direct hits before the one that had finally brought the Silver down. At first it was the sheer number that paused him, but then he noticed something odd and stooped to examine the shells. Not the casings, he saw, the actual bullets, stub-nosed from where they’d hit and bounced off. None of these bullets had punctured flesh—or whatever exoskeleton the Silvers wore.
Sean tossed the bullets and went down into a squat before the freakishly white body: the tarnished discoloration was already fading, erasing any evidence of the massive assault. He placed a tentative hand on the Silvers chest. Smooth. Cool.
There was little give when he pressed, but it wasn’t rock hard like body armor that could stop bullets either. Maybe it hadn’t. He thought about the silvery green web cracking out, how it resembled tarnished brass plating. Was it possible? Not a self-healing reaction, but a shielding mechanism that identified an incoming threat and slammed up barriers faster than a speeding bullet?
He rocked back on his heels and saw th
e kill shot. One pale blue eye, round like a blazer button. The other a blackened hole where the bullet had scorched. He leant over to get a closer look. No gaping socket where the eye had been, just a pulp of blackened tissue.
That had to be it.
A bullet to the eye.
A shot gone wild, a lucky coincidence.
But now they knew.
They knew what it took to kill the enemy.
- 8 -
Beth
The cold cement was murder on her kneecaps. The zip ties cut into her wrists. The blindfold kept her disorientated.
“You okay?” she murmured.
“Just fine,” Jackson said.
That small exchange earned her a stab in the shoulder blade from what felt like a rifle butt. Not the first one and she didn’t care. It was worth it, just to hear Jackson’s voice, to not be alone in this eternal blackness with only her thoughts and the heavy breathing of the guard at their backs.
She had no idea where they were, the blindfolds had come on before they’d been yanked off their knees and marched to this place. They hadn’t walked more than fifteen minutes, so they were still near the Medical City.
They were somewhere inside.
She knew that much.
There’d been a doorway; she’d banged her shoulder against it. There’d been steps; she’d tripped on the third one and then counted a further four. The air had changed from hot to stale.
She’d been shoved to her knees.
Again.
And at her back, a gun was waiting to be pressed to her head, a trigger waiting to be pulled, a bullet waiting…there it was, those thoughts again.
“You okay?”
“Just fine,” Jackson said.
The rifle butt knocked into her shoulder blade. “Shut the fuck up, lady.”
Beth gritted her teeth against the pain.
Jackson swallowed his, all that escaped was a grunt.
She spoke. He answered. Then came the pain and it was better, so much better than the waiting. Why aren’t we dead yet?
The sound of someone approaching at a rapid clip reached her. Then the scent of fresh sweat. Her skin crawled as she sensed a new set of eyes on her.