The Assault

by Brian Falkner

  “And flock off,” Wilton finished the old joke.

  Chisnall took his sidearm in a two-handed police-style grip. He scanned the middle passageway before crouching and stepping into it.

  It was no more than six meters long, if that. At the end, it turned sharply right and led into a long room.

  “Check your corners,” Chisnall said, although it seemed an odd thing to say in a room where there were no corners. The aliens’ fondness for rounded architecture extended underground, and the room they were in had only sweeping curves.

  The room was actually more of a long hall. They could see the end, but it seemed far away in the distance. It was dimly lit, with globes in groupings of three on the ceiling. About halfway down, a red alarm light was flashing—it washed the room intermittently with a bloodlike glow. On the left side were doorways, one after another, evenly spaced. Small shrubs in circular tubs added a little green to this stark dungeon.

  Every shrub was a hiding place. Every doorway down the long hall was a potential sniper’s nest.

  “What the hell is this place?” Wilton asked.

  Nobody else spoke.

  The alarm siren echoed off the long walls, bouncing back to them in a solid wall of sound.

  “Where are all the Pukes?” Price asked.

  “Wilton, Monster.” Chisnall nodded at the first door.

  Price pressed Brogan against a wall, her gun at the back of her neck.

  “If I even think you’re going to call out, I’ll make sure you can’t. Permanently,” Price said.

  Chisnall crouched down, weapons aimed forward down the long hall. Wilton and Monster took the doorway assault-style. They flattened themselves against each side of the door before smashing it open with a boot heel and diving inside—one left, one right, one high, one low—guns ready.

  “Clear,” Wilton said, and Monster echoed the word. The room was empty.

  They disappeared inside for a moment, then reappeared.

  “It’s a dorm,” Wilton said. “Bzadian style. Eight sleeping tablets. Empty.”

  “Lived in?” Chisnall asked.

  Wilton nodded. “Clothes, personal effects. Lights are on but nobody’s home.”

  The next doorway was the same, and the next. Wherever the inhabitants of this place were, it was not in their living quarters.

  Halfway along the hall, light from a side passage fell in a pool on the floor. After a quick sweep of the remaining dormitories, they made their way back to the lighted passage.

  As they neared it, the red flash and strident siren stopped abruptly.

  “It was giving me a headache,” Fleming’s voice said on the comm.

  “Good effort,” Chisnall said.

  The passage was ten meters long with a door at the end. Closed, but there was no lock.

  Chisnall pulled down on the handle as quietly as he could and used the snout of his sidearm to push the door open.

  Silence. No shots. No shouting.

  He eased it open a fraction more, then looked back at his team. “Okay. Who wants to be a hero?” he asked.

  Nobody answered.

  “It’s you,” Chisnall said, looking at Wilton.

  Wilton grinned and took a step backward. The others cleared a path. He broke into a run, and just as he reached the door, Chisnall flicked it open. Wilton rolled through the doorway in a crouch—the smallest possible target. He scanned the room while the others leaned out from the doorway to offer fire support.

  Two large machines took most of the space. From one came the sound of rushing water and from the other the sound of flowing air. This would be the plant room that kept air and water circulating throughout the underground installation.

  Still no contact with the enemy.

  Chisnall examined his rough map of the underground complex. “Let’s start again from the beginning,” he said.

  They returned to the passageway and walked through the accommodation block back to the entrance.

  “Anything on the monitors?” Chisnall asked.

  “All clear,” Fleming said.

  Chisnall checked his map, marking in the doors and passageways that led out from the atrium.

  First door on the left, the security office.

  First door on the right, the storeroom.

  First passageway on the right led to the generator room where they had hidden the warhead.

  The middle door was the passage to the dormitories.

  That left the second passage on the left.

  “On me,” he said, and led the way into it. Price came last, pushing Brogan along in front of her.

  It opened into an office area. A circular room. The desks were workstations, four chairs at each, with a low partition allowing the users some privacy while they worked. Admin staff, Chisnall guessed. The desks were made of a light, aluminum-like metal that the Bzadians used extensively.

  The computers and filing cabinets might yield interesting data, he thought, but there was little time to stop and investigate. Several of the desks were covered with pieces of paper. Tables of numbers and charts.

  “Still warm,” Price said. Chisnall looked over to see her pressing the back of her hand to a drinking tube on one of the desks.

  The aliens had cleared out in a hurry.

  “We’ll come back here after the preliminary recon,” he said. “See what we can get out of those computers.”

  So far they had found little of interest. Yet the aliens had gone to a lot of trouble to hide this place away from satellite eyes, deep inside Uluru. They had done that for a reason.

  They passed through the administration offices, weapons ready. The Pukes had to be somewhere. But where?

  They took the passageway directly in front of them, emerging into a mess hall. Some of the tables still had food and drinking tubes on them. A music keyboard was near one wall, a Bzadian-style electronic piano with a circle of wedge-shaped buttons emanating from a central hub. Some wilted decorations were stuck to the walls around it. There had been a celebration of some kind in here, but now it was deserted.

  “Where the hell is everybody?” Wilton asked.

  “Maybe they’ve got a panic room,” Price said.

  That would make sense, Chisnall thought. A safe room where the Pukes would have headed as soon as they heard the alarm. That would explain why every room they found was deserted.

  They passed a kitchen, also deserted, although some large pots still steamed. A passageway at the end of the hall took them to restrooms with circular Bzadian-style toilets and wash cubicles. That was a dead end, except for a short passage back to the dormitories, so they backtracked to the administration center.

  They had finally come to the last door. Every other room and passageway had been searched. Whatever secret Uluru had to reveal, it was behind this door.

  Would it be worth it? Chisnall wondered. All the danger. All the risk.

  Would it be worth Hunter?

  He looked at his team. They were poised and ready.

  He looked at Brogan.

  He took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

  It led to a large room with benches running around the outside walls and computer workstations in the center. A closed door blocked the way forward.

  The strangeness was upon him once again.

  “Stay frosty,” he murmured.

  The team took up assault positions around the door.

  The door opened inward, so Chisnall eased it open while the others trained their weapons on the gap.

  They were greeted by silence and darkness.

  From the air in the room, Chisnall felt it was large, but he could not see the end, nor the ceiling, not even the sides—except where a small beam of light from the open doorway illuminated the walls.

  “Get out of the doorway,” he said. Silhouetted by the light from the lab, his team would make perfect targets for anyone inside.

  The Angels split to either side, out of the firing line.

  “Wilton, on me,” Chi
snall said. “Everyone else, hang back, give us cover.”

  He moved forward and shone his flashlight around the walls. It reflected back at him off glass surfaces, making it impossible to see what lay on the other side.

  Wilton moved behind him, searching the darkness.

  There was no light switch that he could see.

  “See if the lights are controlled from the lab,” he called back through the doorway.

  A moment later Monster said, “Got it.”

  There was a click and a series of fluorescent lights flickered above them, creating a harsh strobelike effect for a moment. Then the lights came on fully, bursting into brilliant incandescent life. They revealed another long chamber with rounded corners, narrower than some of the other rooms, little more than a wide passageway. On either side, glass walls covered a series of cubicles that ran the length of the wall.

  And in those cubicles was the truth about Uluru.

  “Holy shit,” Chisnall said. His voice sounded far-off and distant.

  Wilton said nothing as Chisnall lowered his weapon.

  “You’d better get in here, guys,” he said.

  He walked to the nearest cubicle and put his hand on the glass wall. It was actually a door, he realized, rubberized around the edges, with a long metal strip hinge that ran from top to bottom on the right-hand side. Gleaming white walls and harsh lighting gave the cubicle the appearance of a hospital room or a morgue. Inside the cubicle was a bed: a hard, narrow, rubberized mattress on a dull metal frame.

  On the bed was a human.

  A woman.

  Naked.

  With tubes running in and out of her body.

  The woman appeared to be conscious but didn’t look at Chisnall as he approached the glass. Her eyes were unfocused, dull. The world outside the cubicle did not seem to exist for her.

  Her hair was cropped so short that it might as well have been shaved.

  And she was pregnant.

  17. CELLS

  CHISNALL FLIPPED UP HIS COMBAT VISOR, SUDDENLY needing air.

  Thoughts of an ambush were gone for the moment. Thoughts of the outside world vanished. There was only Uluru. This cavern. The glass-fronted cubicles. It was as if his entire world had been reduced to a small bubble.

  Each cubicle was the same. A glass-fronted prison cell. In each, a woman: vacant, staring, impaled by the cold plastic of the tubes worming into her naked body. The women all appeared to be in their twenties. Their skin was pale, un-pigmented and unblemished by the sun of the outside world.

  One moved as he passed her cell, and he pressed himself to the glass, convinced that she had just made an effort to look at him. But her eyes were unseeing, and she didn’t react when he tapped on the glass. A bubble of saliva drooled out of her mouth. It hung from the edge of her lip for a moment before stretching into a long string and collecting in a small pool on the gray rubber of the mattress.

  “What the hell is this?” Wilton asked, right behind him, making him jump.

  “Is like a farm,” Monster said.

  Monster was right, Chisnall thought. It did look like a farm, like battery hens. But it wasn’t eggs they were laying. It was babies. This was the dirty secret of Uluru.

  He looked at Brogan. She looked shocked, and he didn’t think she was faking it. She hadn’t known about this room.

  He eased himself back from the cell and looked toward the end of the cavern. He forced himself to focus. They were on a mission. He was the leader. He had to command. But all he could see was this horror. This inhumanity. Human beings reduced to breeding animals. And why? What reason could the aliens have for doing this?

  The women were in various stages of pregnancy, but there seemed to be some kind of order to it. The most pregnant women were closest to the lab. As he walked away from the lab, the size of the swelling in the women’s stomachs reduced.

  “This isn’t right,” Wilton said. “Where did they get the women from?”

  “In a war, people disappear every day,” Chisnall said.

  “And who got them pregnant?” Wilton asked.

  “Who knows,” Chisnall said. “Artificially inseminated, probably.”

  “By humans?” Wilton asked, and a dreadful silence fell over the room.

  “Cross-breeds,” Price murmured. “Chimeras.”

  “We don’t know that,” Chisnall said.

  He walked to the back of the group and grabbed Brogan by the back of the neck, pushing her face into the glass of the nearest cell.

  “What’s going on in here?” he asked, trying and failing to restrain the fury that exploded from somewhere deep within his brain.

  Her nose began to bleed. The blood ran down the front of the glass.

  “Are you cross-breeding humans and Bzadians?” he asked.

  “No,” she gasped, spitting out blood. “No, not that.”

  “Then what?”

  She was silent.

  “Maybe they’re studying the human development cycle,” Price said. “Trying to develop a weapon that will stop humans from reproducing.”

  “Then we all die out and the planet is theirs,” Monster said.

  Chisnall looked around at them, his gaze finally coming to rest on Brogan, blood covering her lips and chin. He was losing it, he knew, and he shut his eyes briefly, trying to get on top of his emotions. Was it the horror of what they had just found or the feeling of betrayal? Either way he had to act professionally.

  He let go of Brogan, who slumped to the floor.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said to Price and Monster, without clarifying who he thought was right. Did it really matter?

  “What’s that noise?” Wilton asked.

  Chisnall heard it too. A sluicing sound, like water through pipes. Tiny nozzles in the ceiling of the cells burst into life, dispensing a soapy solution. The women below automatically shut their eyes and mouths as the spray soaked them. Another spray rinsed the soap from their bodies.

  “Like a car wash,” Monster said, which was exactly what Chisnall had been thinking.

  “This place gives me the creeps,” Wilton said.

  “Everybody focus,” Chisnall said. “The Pukes are still around somewhere. Let’s finish this recon and get the heck out of here.”

  “What about the warhead, Lieutenant?” Price asked.

  He looked at the woman in the cubicle nearest him. The wide, staring eyes, the drooling mouth. What had they done to her? They had turned her into little more than a test tube.

  But she was still human.

  He keyed his comm switch. “Fleming, what’s the status on the warhead?”

  “Just let me know when you want the big bang, and I’ll set the timer,” Fleming said.

  “We can’t do that now.”

  “Can’t do what now?”

  “Detonate the warhead.”

  “Why is that, Lieutenant?”

  “There are human beings in here,” Chisnall said. He described the scene to Fleming.

  “Copy that,” Fleming said. “In that case, finish your recon, and let’s bug out of here before the Pukes break through that rock pile.”

  He had answered a little too quickly, Chisnall thought. But there was no time to dwell on what that might mean.

  “Okay, we are Oscar Mike,” he said.

  The passageway at the end of the room took them to a nursery where long rows of plastic boxes—incubators—sat on frames under soft lights. Above each incubator, a cantilevered arm held a lamp.

  Chisnall eyed one curiously.

  “Ultraviolet lights,” Price said.

  The incubators were empty.

  They did not delay in the nursery. A passageway at the end took them back into the dormitories.

  “Back to the entrance,” Chisnall said. “Fleming’s right. It’s time we got out of here.”

  But he stopped after a few meters. A side passage appeared in the wall to the left, and through it he could see rows of chairs and tables.

  “Hold up,”
he said. “A quick look in here first.”

  It was a classroom. It was set up with SMART boards, desks, chairs, and a globe of the world in a corner. It looked just like any classroom in any school in the world. Any human school.

  “Just like immersion camp,” Monster said.

  Chisnall gaped at him.

  The last year of their training at Fort Carson, they had been in immersion camp. They lived in a Bzadian-style dormitory. They spoke only Bzadian and ate Bzadian food. They lived, breathed, and even dreamed Bzadian. It was all designed to prepare them for infiltrating Bzadian society.

  “No, not just like. It is an immersion camp,” Chisnall said. He looked back at Brogan. She glared at him.

  “What are you saying, LT?” Wilton asked.

  “Maybe that’s what this is all about,” Chisnall said. “Maybe they’re not cross-breeding species or designing some supervirus to wipe us all out. Maybe they’re growing spies.”

  “What?” Wilton said.

  “It makes sense,” Chisnall said. “They breed human children, train them to infiltrate human society. They’re preparing them for the human world the same way we were prepared for the Bzadian world. That explains the baby factory back there. It explains the school. It explains …” His voice trailed off.

  “Explains what?” Price asked.

  “Brogan.”

  They all turned to stare at her.

  “Brogan’s sixteen,” Wilton said. “This hasn’t been built that long.”

  “Maybe she’s from an earlier batch,” Chisnall said.

  He looked around at the faces of his team. They had all flipped up their visors and the sharp light of the overhead fluorescents shone through the glass of the visors and made patterns on their faces. Price’s lip was curling up in disgust. Wilton looked sad. Monster’s face, as usual, showed no emotion.

  “The Pukes’ greatest weakness in this war is their lack of intel,” Chisnall said. “They don’t have satellites and they don’t have spies in the Free Territories. If I’m right, this project could change all that.”

  He turned to Brogan. “How many of you are there?” he asked. “How many have already infiltrated the Free Territories?”

  She stared at him without expression and said nothing.