Four men to two aliens now, and the remaining ninjas had learned a valuable lesson. Swords flashing, they changed tactics and aimed for the joints of the legs and arms, crippling their enemies as blow after blow separated the gangly limbs and split the ridged black shells that cupped the creatures’ equivalent of elbows and knees. Even the tails whipping in the air fell victims to the merciless blades, their sharp-spaded ends twitching uselessly on the gore-splattered floor. It wasn’t long before Ahiro and his three remaining men stood over the spasming, maimed aliens, dismissing the claw-tipped fingers that clutched uselessly at the floor in agony. To Ahiro, these were nothing more than overgrown insects, not worth the measure of his time that it would take to put them out of their misery. The only thing that mattered was…
The nest.
It was beyond the doorway at the far end, and when Ahiro and his men stepped through it was like entering a place unlike anything he’d seen on this earth. As with the previous chamber, the ceiling was high and lined with industrial tubes and cables, the same ones that fed through the wall from the outer room. In here, however, they were no longer accessible, buried as they were under layer after layer of shimmering resin. Strands of it twisted and turned overhead and around the walls, forming into hundreds of knobs that looked more like human vertebrae than anything else. Miles of the stuff, encircling the room and looping back over itself to spill onto the floor until it bunched into little hills at irregular intervals. Atop each small hill, perched like an immense, obscenely bloated and elongated lump of flesh, was an unhatched alien egg.
Ahiro moved as rapidly as he dared. His men hung back, their wide, terrified eyes searching the shadows of the outer chamber for movement and flicking back to him and the half-dozen ovals of living death that faced them. Ahiro didn’t blame them; just the scent of a human within six feet of an alien’s egg was enough to make the knobby cross etched deep into its top split and fold back like the flowers of a poisonous flower. He chose as his target the closest one and sprinted over to it; on the way, he pulled a specially designed locking clamp from his belt. By the time he reached the egg, Ahiro had it unfolded and ready, and he jammed the four prongs of the clamp over the ‘X’ in the egg’s surface and pushed the white button on the device’s top. Spikes shot from each side of the four extensions and buried themselves on either side of each slit, digging deep and holding like prehensile teeth; ready to be born or not, the egg could not hatch until the proper code was punched into the clamp’s miniature keypad.
Ahiro nodded to his men, then gritted his teeth and slipped his arms around the egg’s slimy surface. A hard tug and the egg broke free of the resin with a sound like brittle plastic being torn; around Ahiro, a few of the eggs began to quiver, the smell of the nearby humans triggering their instincts. They had to leave now, before they were overrun by the scuttling, eight-legged creatures that looked vaguely like spiders but could catch a man in less time than it took to scream.
Another five seconds and they were out of the nest, stepping nimbly among the shattered limbs of the still living and hissing aliens and the bloodied, melting bodies of their comrades. Half of his men would never leave this room, but Ahiro did not stop to consider if the prize had been worth the price. Keene had told him that an egg must be obtained, and then mapped out the strategy by which Ahiro could do it; Keene was allowed to order Ahiro to do these things because Yoriku decreed that Synsound needed the alien egg and he himself wished that it be done.
The men who had died here today had died for a great cause. Ahiro would honor their memory, and he would forgive them the stupidity that had led to their wasteful demise, but only because they had died for Synsound, and in so doing, they had died for Yoriku.
And Ahiro would do anything for Yoriku.
3
CHRISTMAS DAY
“This is a helluva way to celebrate Christmas morning, Phil.”
MedTech Elite Security’s Chief of Operations Phillip Rice leaned against the locked door of the Alien Resources Lab and waited for his men to catch up. “If you men would pick up your pace,” he retorted, “we could get this over with and go on about our lives.” The man who’d first spoken, Eddie McGarrity, gave him a sullen look but didn’t answer. “Open it, “Rice said.
“Don’t you have your cardkey?” McGarrity asked.
“I left it in my office,” Rice answered. “You have yours, don’t you?”
“I’ve got mine.” Ricardo Morez, the third man on Rice’s team, began working his hand past the outer layers of his heavy security suit.
“Forget it,” McGarrity growled. “Mine’s right here.” He yanked the piece of white plastic from the breast pocket of his suit and double-flipped it around his fingers smartly, as though it were a playing card. In an uncannily swift move, he snapped it forward and rammed it into the card reader on the wall.
In response, the mechanism’s red light began to blink rapidly and a short, shrill alarm went off somewhere over their heads. McGarrity jumped and yanked the card back out. “What the hell!” he exclaimed.
Rice stared at him. “What’s the matter with it?”
McGarrity peered at the cardkey. “Beats me. Maybe it’s got something on the surface.”
“Sometimes they demagnetize if you put ’em next to your cash card,” Morez offered. “I did that to the cardkey to my house once.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t exactly keep this one in my wallet, if you know what I mean.” McGarrity scowled and shoved the cardkey into the reader slot a second time. This time as the red light blinked, the alarm gave a longer, more pronounced ring.
Rice’s eyes were dark. “Don’t do it again or the alarm will stay on. It thinks you’re someone unauthorized trying to get into the lab. We’ll use Ricky’s to get inside.” He held out his hand. “Let me see that thing.”
McGarrity handed it over as Ricky found his cardkey and inserted it into the reader. A half second to process the information, and the reader’s light glowed green. There was a hum of electronics and hydraulics as the bolts moved and the door slid open.
The smell was atrocious… enormous. Blood, human waste, the scent of acidic alien decomposition; Rice was glad for the temporary delay this cardkey business would give them. Intentionally diverting his gaze, he reached around the door to a small keypad on the wall inside and punched in a code to disable the automatic timer that would shut the door in five seconds. Then he turned his attention back to the cardkey. “Look again, Eddie,” he said after a moment. His voice was sharp as he held up the square of white plastic. “This isn’t a cardkey—it isn’t anything.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” McGarrity demanded.
“Just what I said. It’s not your cardkey.” Rice gave his man a steely look. “So where is it?”
McGarrity’s mouth opened and closed. “I—I guess I don’t know, boss. I had it the last time I looked—”
“Which was when?”
“Well, I guess it was when we got the clean uniforms. I… maybe I didn’t look close,” he admitted. “I just, you know, emptied the pockets of the dirty one into the clean one. I didn’t inspect every single thing in there.”
“Good job,” Rice said sourly. “Let’s go see the fruits of it.”
“Just a damned minute,” McGarrity protested. “I don’t see your cardkey readily available either.”
“I know where it is.”
“Yeah?” McGarrity’s face was nearly as red as his hair. Morez looked like he wanted to say something, then wisely decided to stay out of it.
“You got a problem with me, Mr. McGarrity?” Rice asked. His tone was low and calm, vaguely ominous. “If so, tell me now. The three of us will go up and I’ll get it. On the way back down, we’ll stop and clean out your locker. In case you haven’t figured it out, we’ve got a major security breach here and it seems to be directly traceable to your careless loss of a highly classified cardkey.”
All the anger seemed to drain out of the Irishman’s face. “Nah�
��I’m sorry, Phil.” He looked pained. “I guess coming down here’s just got me on edge, that’s all.”
“Fine.” Rice turned on his heel and motioned at the doorway. “Let’s go in.”
* * *
Without looking up, Rice pulled a scalpel from a pocket of his security suit and began cleaning his fingernails as though he were using nothing sharper than a nail file. The other two men were still moving through the carnage in the lab, casting occasional quick glances across the room to the door at the far end. Rice didn’t blame them for being nervous, but he wished they’d get past it—after all, they’d been down here for almost three hours. While he had disabled the door to the lab when they’d first arrived this morning, after a quick glance inside to make sure there were no bodies lying around with face-huggers on them and no empty eggshells. Rice had made damned certain that the entrance to the nest was closed and locked; only the personal password of the head of the Bioscience Division would open it now. Finally, he’d ordered that the remaining cardkeys that allowed access to the Alien Resources Lab be canceled and new ones issued.
“Three dead watchdogs and three dead dirtbags,” McGarrity growled. They were five sublevels down and the air should have been naturally cold; instead it was heated to nearly ninety degrees and saturated with moisture from the in-ceiling humidifiers because the eggs did better in a tropical climate. The temperature and muggy air were doing wonderful things to the corpses scattered around and Rice could hear the nasal tone Eddie’s voice had taken on as he breathed only through his mouth. The other man grimaced and shoved aside a stiff tangle of alien limbs, probing underneath the rigid remains for anything that might give them a clue.
Rice looked up. He was a big African-American with bulging muscles and the lower half of his hair dyed a stylish pure white. Most people avoided making him angry, and for good reason. Right now his face was calm, but his eyes were hooded and nearly as dark as the top part of his coal-black hair. No one else knew that fury was making the washboard muscles of his stomach ripple beneath the fabric of his shirt. “Hardly seems like a fair trade.”
“No shit.” Ricky flipped another sheet on his clipboard, then let it drop back and began rapidly pressing buttons on the MedLink Port he pulled from his utility belt. “Especially since they got an egg.”
“Don’t remind me,” Rice retorted. The scalpel disappeared and he plucked a pair of heavy rubber gloves from the tool bag his team had brought in and set by the main door. He snapped them on, then bent and locked his oversize hands on the shoulders of the body nearest him, the only one with any semblance of a face remaining. He hauled it up easily and held it in front of him, scowling as he studied the dead man’s lolling head. Another trained Japanese ninja; whoever he’d been, his martial arts instruction hadn’t gotten him squat in here. “Who are you, you bastard?” Rice hissed into the slack face of the corpse. “And where the hell’s my egg?” No answer—obviously—and after a moment he shook the body once, then turned and tossed it atop the heap in the center of the room with the remains of the two others that had been scraped off the floor.
“Nice try, Chief.” Eddie sounded amused and Rice dearly wanted to belt him. That man had the strangest sense of humor he’d ever come across. “Did he whisper his secrets in your ear?”
“Up yours, McGarrity. One way or another, we’ll find the sons a bitches. And when we do, they’ll think fighting these aliens was a picnic compared to what I’m going to do to ’em.” Rice glanced around the chamber again and saw Ricky still peering at the MedLink Port; abruptly the oliveskinned man’s mouth turned down and he snapped the Port off-line and clipped it back onto his belt. Rice already knew what the answer would be, but he had to ask anyway. “You get anything at all from the prelim checks?”
Morez gave a negative shake of his head. “Not a thing. No identification on the bodies, of course, but we knew that. It shows a serious desire to hide when you have your fingerprints lasered off, but I was still sure we’d pick up something from the CityWide computers, a physical for grammar school, something. Shows what I know—the DNA checks are coming up stone empty. As far as MedTech knows, these guys don’t exist.” Morez stared at the three cadavers curiously. “You think we missed something?”
“No, and the odds are the rest of the tests won’t find anything either. I figured these guys would be ghosts.” Rice waved a hand at the bodies of the ninjas, then carefully nudged one of the alien carcasses. “We’ll go for the usual, just for giggles—retina scans, WorldWeb DNA searches, palm and footprints, whatever. This is a pro job though. We’re not going to find anything.”
Morez looked doubtful. “I don’t know, Chief. Once the research department taps into the main network in Washington, then moves onto the WorldWeb—”
Rice’s shrug cut him off. “Suit yourself, Ricky, but look at these guys. I’d bet my next paycheck that all three are illegal imports. Hell, chances are that when they were alive, they probably didn’t even speak English.”
“What makes you so sure of that?” McGarrity reached a gloved hand down and lifted a bottom jaw clear of the puddle of melted flesh and blood around it. “Can’t exactly tell what language courses the guy took from his dental records.” He gave the other two men a dark grin, then glanced at Morez just to be sure. “You pick this up on the Port’s scanner?”
Morez pointed to the MedLink Port. “Yeah, I got ’em, safe and snug.”
“These ninja types almost always come from out of the country,” Rice told them. “Completely untraceable, usually government or corporate. A government job doesn’t make sense in this instance, though. We would’ve gladly donated an egg to keep the grants flowing. It’s got to be corporate. But who?”
“This is as much cleanup as I’m doing,” McGarrity announced. “I’m not a friggin’ housekeeper. Sanitation can pick up the rest of this crap. For this, they ought to bring in a mini-plow.” He shoved the last severed alien limb to the edge of the pile of dead flesh, then straightened with a groan, eyeing his handiwork with disgust. “I dunno, Chief. You sure it’s not junkies?”
Rice motioned to his men and they followed him out of the chamber gratefully, stripping off the soiled gloves and dropping them in a moist pile inside the lab door. “I doubt it. The only thing that would do druggies any good would be a queen—that’s the only place they’d get the jelly. Dealing with a queen is impossible for a layman—the diet and the environment’s got to be just right, plus the jelly around the eggs isn’t any good unless the eggs are fertilized. That means they’d also need at least one drone. We’re not exactly talking about a hobby you can keep in a basement somewhere. By itself, an egg is nothing but death.” Rice’s expression turned thoughtful. “Unless that’s exactly what they’re looking for.” They passed a couple of men dressed in SaniSuits and Rice nodded his permission for them to go in and do the final mop-up and disposal.
“What do you mean?” Morez asked. “Seems like a lot to go through for suicide. Hell, why not just walk in front of a monorail? At least that would be quicker.” He grimaced. “I can’t imagine having something like one of those things growing inside of me, then chewing its way out. When I go, I want to do it in my sleep.”
“Coward,” McGarrity said flippantly. Morez shot him an astonished look and the larger man laughed. “Just kidding, you fool.”
“Who knows why these religious fanatics do what they do?” Rice asked. “But the queen freaks are almost always junkies, way too buzzed out to pull a job like this. Those people don’t have resources—they pour everything into getting more jelly and drink it as soon as they get their hands on it. This had to be a professional job—how they’d get into the Alien Research Lab itself, huh?”
“I think we’ve got an idea,” McGarrity said.
Rice smacked a fist into his palm. “Exactly—the bastards got their paws on your cardkey. Isn’t it just too fucking convenient that all the bioscientists have ironclad alibis for themselves and their security keys, yet one of ours turns out
to be missing?”
“That is pretty snaky,” McGarrity agreed as they left the subcorridor behind. “I don’t know what to say about mine, Chief. I know I had it the last time I changed suits and I can’t explain where it went.” In front of them was the elevator door on the left, and the staircase on the right; they headed for the elevator by unspoken agreement. None of them wanted to climb five flights of stairs after sweating in the re-created tropical air of the lab for nearly three hours. After a couple of minutes of silence, McGarrity spoke up again, his tone of voice less cavalier. “Phil, do you… do you think I’m going to be canned for this? I guess I’d understand if you had to, it being your responsibility and all.”
When Rice hesitated before answering, McGarrity swallowed. “I don’t think so, Eddie,” Rice finally said as they boarded the elevator. They were all large men, and their combined weight made the elevator bounce appreciably. “Since you can trace the cardkey back to the locker room, I think that shows it could have been any one of our cardkeys that turned up stolen. That’ll be my position, and I won’t take it further unless I’m backed against the wall. If that happens, I’ll try to give you as much advance notice as possible. But I’ll do my best to pull for you, and as things stand how, I think you’ll be all right.”
For a moment the big redhead’s face looked as relieved as a lost little boy’s after being reunited with his parents. “Thanks. I really appreciate it.”
“Ricky, I want you to keep on top of MedLink,” Rice said as the car began its ascent. “Help the research department go as deep as they can, rattle some suits in City Hall if necessary. Put the fear of God in whomever you have to without actually breaking anyone’s toes. Step on ’em a little, but I want these bastards.” The three of them stood silently, drinking in the cooler, filtered air of the elevator as it carried them to the seventieth-floor Security Center. As it stopped, Rice spoke again. The tension in his voice made it clear he wasn’t in the mood for arguing. “If I can’t get what I want from the DataSystems,” he said darkly, “we’ll put the bloodhound on their trail.”
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