It didn’t take long for the vegetation to thin. Pretty soon they were walking on what appeared to have been a paved surface. It was overgrown with weeds and trees, but the stone blocks under their feet were anything but random. Melissa’s hair rose on her neck.
“Uninhabited, my ass,” Frank said. “Earth didn’t get all their facts straight before they launched this mission.”
“It doesn’t look like it’s been used for a long time. The planet could still be uninhabited. Why, is another question. You’d think it would have wildlife or something, since someone lived here before.” Melissa stopped and grabbed Frank’s arm. She pointed into the distance. Ahead, a large building stood sentinel. “What would you call that?”
“Crap,” he said.
“Not exactly what came to me, but it’ll do. Gather the squad. We need to take a closer look.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I assure you, this isn’t a joke. That building might give us an idea who we’re dealing with. It looks abandoned, but I don’t want to take any chances. We’ll go in as though it’s occupied, on alert and with weapons ready. Who knows, maybe whoever they are, if they’re still around, they’re allies.”
“Yeah, like our buddies we met in space. What if this is their planet? Did you stop to think we might be the enemy and the ones invading them?” Frank turned and signaled the group to stop and move into cover. “Invading forces never do well on foreign soil.”
“Let’s hope that isn’t the case.”
***
“What is it?” Melissa stepped away from a metal hook. The building had to be a millennium or more old but not a spot of rust marred the hook’s surface. She swept her light around the massive room, taking in every detail. When her gaze hit a pile of rusted armor and weapons, she stopped.
Melissa cut a direct path to the pile. At least ten feet high, and it was one of maybe twelve nearby. Every pile consisted of ancient swords, spears, AK-47s, a few weapons she’d never seen and even a modern laser was tossed on top. It looked familiar. Melissa snagged it and examined the barrel. Engraved with each ship’s registration, she should be able to track it back to its origins at a glance. Her eyes widened. “The Genesis II. Someone’s been here recently.”
Frank stepped up beside her. “I know what this place is,” he said. “My grandfather was a rancher. This isn’t the first slaughterhouse I’ve been in. Even if what they slaughtered was different than what I’m used to, I know what I’m looking at. This is a killing place, and it looks like they’ve been getting takeout from Earth for thousands of years.”
“My God.” Melissa dropped the laser and brushed her hands on her pants. “Get everyone out of here.”
Chapter Thirteen
“I’m guessing that’s one of the hives you saw on the shuttle?” Kaleb pointed at the massive nest before them. At least twenty feet across and twenty feet high, it wasn’t as small as he’d expected, nor as small as Jessica had expected, from the look on her face. He reached over and pushed under her chin, shutting her mouth.
“Bigger. Much bigger,” she whispered.
The pod breathed. It had a heartbeat—actually, heartbeats. If he knocked a hole in it, would big, wormlike things slitter out? Every horrific science-fiction creature he could think of from his teenage-horror-movie days slinked through his head and reminded him why he was a scientist and not a freaking combat officer. Combat officers lived for this stuff. He’d rather run from it and study it under a microscope.
“Should we shoot it?”
“I don’t know, sir.” Jessica continued to eye the hive. “The outer shell on that nest is thick. I don’t think shooting it is going to do anything, but it has a hole that vents the heat to the outside. I saw it on the smaller one. On the top.”
“Oh, hell.” And what made her think climbing on the thing was a good idea? He’d no idea if it would hold his weight. “Are you sure it’s thick?”
“I’m sure.” She dropped her pack and dug out a rope, passing it to him.
“You got any courage in there?” He watched her rummage again and pull out a vial of the virus. Jessica glanced over her shoulder and gave him a strange look.
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of heights.” She handed him the vial.
“Not heights, monsters. Big ones with fangs.” If it didn’t hold, he’d be inside snuggling with whatever they were. He swallowed. Snuggling with flesh-eaters. Maybe they were giant worms or jellylike octopi? Who knew?
“I saw eggs. They probably haven’t hatched yet, and even if they have, you only need to drop the virus in. You don’t have to go inside.”
Yeah, and that was supposed to set his mind at ease? He nodded, still not convinced it was a good idea. He looked at the top of the nest again. Good idea or not, they needed to kill these things. He swallowed. He could do this. Simple. Easy. What the hell was he afraid of? She’d said they were eggs.
“All right, let’s do this.” Kaleb shucked off his pack and handed it to Jessica. He tied one end of the rope around his waist and his weapon to the other end, making a grappling hook. He tossed it up and it caught. “Lucky me. Found the hole on the first try.” He gave it a tug. It held.
“I’ll keep watch.”
He gave her a lame smile.
She handed him a thin flashlight that he tucked in the cargo pocket of his pants. “Take a peek and make sure they haven’t put anyone in there that’s still alive. I only counted three bodies.”
“I thought you said—”
“I know. It would be nice if this could also be a rescue mission. I guess it’s wishful thinking.”
He approached the hive and touched the outside. Heat traveled into his palm. Hotter than the air around him and rough, with ridges and dips on the outside. He knocked. Solid.
It shouldn’t prove too difficult to scale. Hopefully it would hold his weight. He knocked again and a dull thud echoed inside. “Okay. Here we go.” He glanced over his shoulder at Jessica, who nodded. Kaleb grabbed the rope and began to climb.
***
As he leaned over the hole, the smell of rotten meat wafted out. Turning his face away, he swallowed and cupped his hand over his mouth and nose. Whatever alien creature the hive contained began to cry softly—like a human baby. The sound trickled up his spine and for the thousandth time that day, the hair on his neck snapped to attention. He looked down at Jessica, who nodded, encouraging him to get moving.
He pulled the flashlight from his pocket and tried to block out the cries. Maybe he should throw the virus in first and then look? “This is stupid. Just turn the damned light on and look,” he said to himself.
“Sir?”
“Nothing,” he snorted. They were movies. Monsters like that didn’t exist. But then again, aliens hadn’t existed for him until a few days ago. He closed his eyes and clicked on the flashlight, aiming the beam into the hole. The pitch of the cries rose. He slowly counted back from three and opened his eyes.
“Shit.” Kaleb dropped the rope and jumped away from the hole, losing his balance. He flailed in the air, grabbing for a hold that didn’t exist before bouncing off the side with a dull thump. He hit the ground with less grace, knocking the breath from his lungs and any sense he’d retained loose.
The patch of grass did little to buffer the impact. He shifted. Pain shot through his ass and up his spine and he couldn’t have looked like a bigger moron. Kaleb couldn’t decide which hurt worse, his pride or his tailbone.
Jessica ran up to him. “You okay?”
His pride, definitely his pride. “It’s going to be a little harder than I anticipated.” Of all the things it could have been.
“The eggs are in there?”
“Kind of.”
“What’s the problem?”
“They’re not—they’re—you have to go up there and look for yourself. You’re not going to believe what’s in that nest.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Jesus.” Not what he’d anticipated. Nothing close to it.
<
br /> “Huh?” she said.
“I don’t know if I can do it.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
Kaleb sucked in a deep breath. “They’re babies.”
She shifted her pack and looked up. “I figured whatever hatched from those eggs would be babies. What’s the issue? Just climb up there and dump the virus in. We already know they’re monsters.”
And that was the problem. He could kill monsters. He ran a hand through his hair. But babies? Cute, big-eyed, pink and chubby—babies. He could have handled something with fangs and multiple eyes. This—this was another matter. How was he supposed to kill babies? “They look human.”
“Human?” Jessica’s eyes widened. “As in infant—human?”
“Except for the goo.” The babies were cradled in a green sludge, rolling, flailing, crying. Some sucked their thumbs and one even had his fist crammed in his mouth. All had the parts and pieces that made them look…. They smelled wrong, but they looked and sounded…. “I can’t murder a nest full of babies. It’s just not in my genetic programming to do that.”
“And it’s in mine?”
“No, I didn’t mean that.”
“Somebody has to do it.” Jessica glanced at the top of the hive and began to pace. “Can’t you close your eyes or something?”
He stared.
“Okay, so what do you propose we do? These things are eating the corpses of the command crew. They’re not human babies.” She walked ten feet, spun around, and strode back to him. Jessica thrust her hand out. “Give me the virus.”
“No, I’ll handle this. I can do it. I just have to remember what they are. No matter how cute or innocent those things look, they’ll kill us if we give them a chance. They’re not human.” His responsibility. His risk. As commander of this mission it was his job, not hers, to see this through. It was the aliens or his crew. Since option two wasn’t an alternative, it was going to have to be the aliens. He started back up. He couldn’t let her be responsible for wiping out an entire alien race. That would be his burden to bear.
Once on the top, he crawled across the surface and leaned over to uncap the vial, trying not to think of the chubby infants under him. “They’re not human babies, they’re predators.”
“They’re human, suffering from a form of the same mutation you do,” a familiar voice called out.
Damn. Kaleb lifted the edge of the vial, stopping the virus from pouring into the hive. Vegetation rustled below and he glanced down to see the alien commander and her security guards step from the forest. They pointed weapons at Jessica.
“Don’t come any closer.” Kaleb raised the vial, holding it over the nest. He didn’t waver, taking a chance she’d think she had more to lose. She didn’t. Jessica and Melissa were his world. The bitch encroacher could lose millions and it would never compare to what he’d lose. He’d found love, enough to sustain him through anything, through what he faced now or in the future—even human-eating aliens. “Stay back or I’ll dump this vial.”
Her gaze traveled over him, stopping on his hand. “Don’t kill my children. They’re innocent. We are the last of our people,” she said. “This is our world—our home. They are human. We once lived on Earth and experimented with mutating genes, trying to create superhumans. We succeeded, but the mutation wouldn’t stop and the resulting creature was aggressive, spreading the transformation everywhere. You are that same creature, half man, half wolf. You are what we once were. We tried to develop several cures, only making it worse. It made us allergic to canines and unable to tolerate our home. We had to leave our planet or die. We found this world, colonized it, made it our home, our world.”
Kaleb snorted. “Your world? It’s been abandoned for at least a century or two, from the look of it. No wildlife—nothing to indicate anyone has even been here recently.”
“No.” She cocked her head and studied him. “Arrogant. You assume you’re the only life outside your little planet.” She pointed to a spot on the horizon. “A city rests over there, full of artifacts from my people, other worlds we once visited. Those artifacts are thousands of years old.”
“I’ve seen it and it’s also in ruin. Nobody’s occupied it for hundreds of years.”
“No, we’ve always been here. You invaded us, awakened the planet, and pulled us out of our stasis. You brought your technology to a world you thought dead. We were merely hibernating. A famine came, wiping out our food supply. Since we lacked what we needed to feed our people, we chose to sleep through the famine. You didn’t give us a choice. We had to do what we did.”
Kaleb held the vial in a death grip. He could end this all now. One move. Was it his place to make a decision to exterminate an entire species? Could he do it? She stepped closer to Jessica and his hackles rose. Without question. “Excuse me for not feeling sorry for you. You eat us.”
“No different than you eating the flesh of the animals you share your world with. We’ve eaten human for thousands of years, but in the last few hundred we’ve been unable to tolerate the canines that plague your world. We were starving.”
“Pity.”
“Then we learned most of your animals were suitable for consumption and tested them. We only want the animals your ship carries, to restock our planet. Since we were unable to get food from your world because of our allergies, we quickly depleted the natural resources here. In the end, we ate insects to survive. When those were gone, we went to sleep.”
“I’m supposed to believe you?”
“We let you bring the animals here, but when we discovered you brought the canine death with you, we couldn’t allow them to the surface. We could’ve lived on the animals you provided. Instead, you brought the one thing that could destroy us, so we killed your command crew in self-defense. We had to stop it.”
“You fed them to your monster babies. You didn’t have to do that.”
The alien commander shrugged. “My children will grow into that which I feasted on before I conceived and what they consume when newly hatched. Once we fix our shape, we don’t need to consume human flesh any more to stay that way. We can and will survive on the animals and will leave your world in peace.
“And eating our people is a show of peace?”
“We thought if we appeared like you, you might be more accepting of us when you discovered our cities down here. Your command crew was already dead so we utilized the bodies to fix our children’s shapes, that we might refresh our populations and appear in a more acceptable form. We were hopeful a human form would be easier for you to relate to and trust. We never meant for you to find the nurseries or the bodies. That was unfortunate. We hoped we could form a treaty, that you would let us keep the animals and trade technology for food. We don’t have to eat your kind. We can survive on the animals, as you do.”
“You thought eating our command crew would make accepting your cannibalism easy? Think again.” She’d said they developed into what they ate. That made them—doppelgangers? If they took the forms of their victims, who had her mother eaten to create her and the crew who had hijacked the Genesis II?
And if she’d told the truth about eating humans for thousands of years, he doubted they’d be willing to give it up and take on another form. He certainly wouldn’t want to be a cow or elephant when he could have a human form, opposable thumbs and all the capabilities that came with being human. Plus, they’d intentionally tricked Earth into sending the ships full of colonists. Yeah, they wanted the animals and the humans.
She also knew what was in the vial. If she knew what was in the vial, she knew her people on the ship were dead. The bitch was bluffing. Way too obvious.
“We would have left your home world and people alone. We are nearly extinct. Your animals will save us.”
Definitely bluffing. “There’s a problem with your little plan. We’ll die if we don’t land.”
“We’ll die if you do. I can’t allow you to release that virus on my world. I’ll give you fuel and supplies to retur
n home. You don’t need to do this. You can take your ships and people. We can live together in peace.”
“No, we can’t, and do you know why?”
“I’m sure you plan to explain.”
She took another step toward Jessica and Kaleb raised the vial, stopping her advance. She never intended to help them or give them supplies to get home. The big tip-off—she’d failed to mention the bomb. Yeah, like he wanted to ride back to Earth on that ship. Nice stinger, honey. “You ever heard of Aesop’s Fables?”
She shook her head and sneezed.
“You have no intention of living together in peace. You can’t change your nature, and we’d be fools to think you could. You’re a scorpion.” He dumped half the virus in the nest and yelled into the com, praying Melissa heard him. “Broken Arrow!” He flung the rest of the vial at the queen and her bodyguards.
Jessica seized the opportunity to spin into a roundhouse kick. She knocked one of the guards to the ground and had the other’s weapon in her hands and pointed at the last man before Kaleb could blink. “Good here, sir.”
The queen freaked. He doubted her reaction to the virus would be that instant, but there it was: she shrieked and clawed at her skin where it had splattered.
Jessica fired a bolt into one guard and turned to pop a hole in the other. The queen was on her before she could pull the trigger. The laser fired into the air as the pair struggled for control.
“Back off, bitch.” Jessica tried to elbow the woman, but she was strong and held her off.
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