by Steve Perry
Then, when all of the naked humans had been infected, the outermost eggs hatched and depleted of their inhabitants, the remaining robed people darted in and dragged their comrades away, adroitly avoiding, save for one, being attacked by the remaining eggs.
The queen did not approve of this, but she was anchored to her huge egg sac and could not move quickly enough to catch the scurrying humans.
“Normally there would be drones to hold them,” Orona said.
“What?”
“Never mind.”
The door shut. The queen raged.
As the attackers hauled away their fellows, one of them spotted the watching camera. He pulled a handgun and fired at it. He missed three times, but the fourth shot wiped the screen.
“What happened?”
The agent shrugged. “The security system was overridden at this time. We have no more images of the fanatics.”
“Overridden?”
“One of Bionational’s chief security people sent a coded squirt to the system. Self-destruct code.”
“What?”
“Ninety seconds later the security system destroyed itself—along with the entire complex. Blew it to bits.”
“No! What about the alien? The eggs?”
“Scattered about the countryside in pieces the size of your little fingernail, Doctor.”
“Oh, no!”
Orona was stunned by the news. What a waste! He’d sent a ship halfway across the galaxy to obtain such specimens and if they’d been a few hours quicker, they could have had one right here on Earth! That explained the dreams people had been having! Damn! Damn!
Wait. Ninety seconds. Could that mean—?
“What about the fanatics? Did any of them get away? There were at least a dozen of them infected!”
The agent sighed. “We don’t know. Our people have been combing the country looking for them, but there’s no sign of them. The explosion was in the half-megaton range. There’s no way to tell from the wreckage how many people died in it, whether anybody got away.”
For a moment hope flared in Orona. There might be a chance.
“We hope none of them did,” the agent said.
“What? Are you crazy? These life forms are priceless!”
“Think about it, Doctor.”
Orona was a brilliant man; he had always been at the top of any class he was in. It hit him, what the agent was trying to say. Yes, the aliens were priceless. But under controlled circumstances. Bionational knew that. That’s why the complex was rigged to blow up if there came a breach in security. If the alien somehow escaped, got free of captivity, that could be disastrous. Even a single egg was potentially dangerous. Given how quickly they could breed and come to maturity, given how they could change into queens if the need was there…
Orona nodded. Yes. He saw it.
A dozen queen aliens, hiding out, laying eggs, that could be a problem.
That could be a major problem.
17
Billie stood in front of one of the “viewing ports,” watching the streams of light strung like thin, crooked tubes of bright neon across the dark background. She hadn’t spent much time in space, not since she had been a child, and this kind of travel was new to her. She stared, trying to remember her parents during happy times, but their bloody end kept jamming itself into her thoughts. Since Wilks had come to see her that first time, the reality the doctors had tried to wipe kept bobbing to the surface like floats on a pond. The truth was rising and would not be denied. All the dreams that had been real…
“That’s an illusion, you know,” came a voice from behind her.
Billie turned and saw one of the marines, Bueller, standing there.
“The improved gravity drive means we can spend less time in hypersleep, but the multidimensional matrices of the butterfly field turn dots into lines. Something to do with some esoteric particle, chronons, or impiotic zuons or some such.”
“I wonder what Easley saw in his last seconds?” she said.
It was a rhetorical question, but Bueller shook his head. “I don’t know. I can’t imagine why he would have gone EVA and taken a grenade with him.”
“Some kind of depression, the colonel says. Maybe Easley was running from monsters.”
Again Bueller shook his head. “I don’t think so. We were pretty close. It doesn’t make any sense that he would suicide. Besides, there are a lot easier ways.”
Billie nodded. Blowing yourself to bits in deep space was not her choice of an entry to the final chill.
“I don’t trust Stephens,” Bueller said. “He doesn’t have any command experience in the field and I think he wanted to hush the whole thing up. If we’re successful in our mission—whatever it is exactly—then up-levels will overlook a few bodies. But if we fail, then the little things will count.”
“I hate to disillusion you, Bueller, but if this mission doesn’t succeed, we’ll get eaten by things with big teeth, or else turned into puppy chow for the baby things with little teeth. We’ll all end up on the cold ground as lumps of alien dung for the bugs to fight over.”
“How colorful,” Bueller said.
“Telling it like it is. I’ve seen these things work.”
“You sound like Wilks.” He stood there for a second and she could see he was uncomfortable.
“Come on,” Billie said. “I’ll buy you a cup of what passes for coffee.”
“Okay. Yeah.”
In the mess hall, Ramirez was waiting for a self-heating meal packet to cook. He grinned at Billie and Bueller when they came in.
The two of them sat at an expanded plastic table with their paper cups of the vile ship’s brew.
“Wilks must really think a lot of you to bring you along. You know Stephens will hang him out to twist when we get back, no matter what face-saving shit he’s telling us now.”
Billie sipped the coffee, made a face. “Yeah. Wilks and I, we understand each other.”
“I’ll bet,” Ramirez said as he put his tray down on the next table. “Wilks, he’s an expert on cradle-robbing, hey?”
“Shut up, Ramirez,” Bueller said.
“Hey, man, I’m all for a little pussy myself, but not so green—”
Bueller came up, caught Ramirez under the chin with the V of his thumb and fingers, and shoved him back against the wall. “I said shut the fuck up!”
Ramirez’s voice was choked when he tried to speak. “Hey, man, fuck, let go!”
Billie saw the tendons in Bueller’s hand standing out. He was practically holding the bigger man off the floor, pinned to the wall like a struggling insect. He seemed too strong for a man his size.
Abruptly Bueller relaxed, pulled his hand away.
Ramirez rubbed at his throat. “You’re crazy, man, you know that?” He turned and walked out of the room, leaving his steaming dinner behind.
“Why did you do that?” Billie asked.
Bueller looked flustered, embarrassed. “He’s got a big mouth and he shoots it off too much.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah.”
Billie let it alone. There was something else here, but she wasn’t sure what it was. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what it was.
* * *
In his quarters on the chase ship, Massey sat seiza and concentrated on his breathing. He had never learned to meditate as the masters did, but he could use it to calm his system. Sure, he exercised his body, practiced fighting techniques, drilled over and over again with weaponry, but these things brought him no joy. They were to keep him crisp, to maintain his cutting edge, nothing more. Being in top shape was part of the business, necessary, and he trained himself as if he were a prized show animal, proper diet, enough rest, technical mastery as required, no more, no less. He was the equal of any serious athlete, and against the few who might be in better physical shape or with faster reflexes, he augmented himself with drugs or figured ways to cheat. If you wanted a man dead, it was better to shoot him in the back from
long range than to stand facing him like some holovid hero. That was a fool’s game, and since the last man standing was the victor, it was always better to slant things your way when possible.
Soon another test would come. He must be ready for it. So he sat, but it was not mindless meditation but mindful scheming that filled him. In a contest like this, there could be no second-place winner, to be second was to be last and to be last here was to be dead.
* * *
“Have you got a first name?” Billie asked as they toured the magazine. Here were racks of carbines, canisters of gas, grenades and other hardware, all securely stored under the QM’s seal.
Bueller said, “Yes. Mitchell.”
“Mitchell,” she said, testing the word. “Mitch?”
“If you like.”
Billie turned to look at the racks of small arms under their kleersteel cases. Bueller put a hand on her shoulder, to point her toward the display model.
“Don’t touch me,” she said.
He snatched his hand away. “Oh. Sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“It’s okay. In the hospital, when somebody put their hands on you it almost always meant you were in trouble. After the hand came a derm-patch or an injector, to fill you with chem that made you sluggish and stupid.”
He sighed. “Yeah, I can understand that.”
“Can you? Do you know what it’s like living most of your life in a medical unit full of crazy people?”
“No,” he admitted. “But I’ve spent my share of time in hospitals. Not fun places.”
He changed the subject. “Here, here’s the basic weapon we’re using on this mission.” He pulled the demo model, a dummy, from the rack. “This here is your four-point-eight-kilo-fully-automatic-electronic-blowback-operated-caseless-ten-millimeter-M4l-E carbine,” he said, as if reciting a litany. “It has an effective range of five hundred meters, holds either a one-hundred-round magazine of antipersonnel, a one-hundred-round magazine of armor-piercing, or a seventy-five-round magazine of rainbow tracer ammunition, and mounts a thirty-millimeter pump-operated grenade launcher under the barrel with a range of one hundred meters. Officially.”
He grinned. “Unofficially, you can’t hit anything smaller than a subway car past a couple hundred meters ’cause the sights are for shit, and if the grenade goes farther than fifty meters before it hits the ground, you must have a god who likes you.
“At close range, however, this is a mean machine and you don’t want to be on the receiving end in anything less than full class-VII spidersilk armor or you get turned into bloody mush.”
He held the weapon out. “Take a look. It won’t bite.”
Billie held her smile in check. The model number had changed, but the basic weapon was not that different from the one she had dreamed about. No, not dreamed about, remembered. This part of the dreams had come back to her dozens of times over the years, the instructions that Wilks had given her were burned into her as if branded by white-hot metal.
She took the carbine, thumbed the magazine catch, and popped the dummy, checked to be sure it was empty, then slammed the magazine back into place. She cycled the action twice to make certain the chamber was cleared, then stroked the grenade launcher’s pump twice to make sure the loading tube was empty. She pulled the weapon to her shoulder, sighted at the far wall, both eyes open, and dry fired the piece. The electronic trigger was rigged to make an audible click for such practice and did so. She lowered the weapon, twisted it to present arms, and tossed it at Bueller. It had been more than a dozen years, she had not touched such weapons in all that time, but it was like she knew it would be. Except that the weapon felt so much smaller and lighter now than it had when she was ten.
He was surprised, but managed to catch the carbine without dropping it.
“Trigger’s a little stiff and it’s got some creep,” she said. “Your armorer should run a diagnostic on it when he gets the chance.” She was showing off, but what the hell.
He laughed. “I’m impressed. Where’d you learn to do that?”
“I ran with a rough crowd when I was a kid.” She paused, then said simply, “The things we’re going to go hunt, they killed my family and everybody I knew.”
“Buddha,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “What about you? You have family?”
“No. The marines are my family.”
Billie thought about that for a second. Well. Other than going off to get killed they had something else in common. No family.
“Listen, about Sergeant Wilks,” he began. “If you’ve got something going with him—”
She cut him off. “When the aliens took over our colony, Wilks and his squad came down. He and I were the only ones left who got off-planet before they sterilized it. He saved me. I was ten years old. That was the last I saw of him until a few days before we left Earth.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to pry—”
“Sure you do. That’s okay. I’ve been pried open by experts. I got used to it.”
He stared at his feet.
“Let me ask you something,” she said.
“Okay. That’s fair.”
“Why’d you really grab Ramirez in the mess hall?”
He sighed. “What he said about you and Wilks. I didn’t want it to be true.”
“Why not?”
He shook his head, stared at his feet again.
It hit her why all of a moment. Buddha and Jesus in a hammock, Billie, you been taking stupid pills again? This guy likes you! Not like one of the orderlies who felt you all over when tucking you in bed, or who took out their dongs and jacked off on you when you were lying there so stoned you couldn’t move, he’s concerned about you!
We’re going off to get killed and here’s this marine falling for you. How about that.
Suddenly she saw him in a new light. He was her age, he had nobody but the marines and they were sending him off to die. He was lonely. She knew what that felt like.
She reached out, touched him on the shoulder. “Hey,” she said. “Mitch.”
He looked up from his boots, his gaze bright, pale eyes clear and searching. “Yeah?”
“Why don’t you show me some more of the ship?”
He grinned, like a kid with a new toy. “Yeah. I’d like that.”
Billie was fairly certain she was going to like it, too.
18
The agent said to Orona, “No. Nothing new on possible survivors of the explosion in Lima. There are some rumors floating around about a cult talking over a ranch in New Chile; we’re checking it out. Other than that, nothing.” He shrugged.
Orona merely nodded. In this case, no news was bad news.
* * *
Massey checked his timers for the fifteenth time. Soon. Very soon. The last squirt update said they were within a light-year of their destination. Practically there, as fast as the new gravity drives could move the ships. Getting close. Getting ready.
* * *
Wilks had given Billie a couple of make-work chores, checking systems, cargo manifests, like that. When he arrived at the midship comp terminal kiosk, he expected to see her there.
He didn’t expect to see somebody with her. Somebody like Bueller, with his hand possessively on the girl’s shoulder, kneading the muscle gently.
“Bueller,” Wilks said. “You have business in here?”
The marine jerked his hand away from Billie’s shoulder.
Billie turned. “Wilks. Mitch was only—”
He cut her off. “Yeah, I can see what Mitch was ‘only’ doing. Take a hike, Bueller.”
“Dammit, Wilks!” Billie said. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
“Me? I’m the guy who pulled you out of the chemical fog you were living in, just before they were ready to strain your brain and throw your mind out.”
Billie flushed, stared at him. She owed him, he knew that, and he knew she was holding her comment because of it.
“I thought I t
old you to take a hike.”
Bueller smoldered. He was on the edge of swinging at him; Wilks could feel the rage like heat from a furnace. He hoped Bueller’s sense of duty was stronger than his anger: if he let go, Wilks wouldn’t be able to take him—Bueller was younger, faster, stronger, better-trained. He would have to shoot him and Wilks wasn’t sure that would stop him in time, given the tightness of the quarters.
But Bueller stalked out, not saying anything.
Billie rounded on him. “All right, Wilks, I owe you, but that doesn’t give you the right to tell me who I can talk to!”
“I saw you,” Wilks said. “You were doing more than talking.”
Billie’s eyes went wide. “Are you jealous? Damn, Wilks!”
“Not jealous, kid. Just trying to save you grief.”
“I’ll handle my own grief, thank you! I’m not a child and you aren’t my father!” With that, she turned and marched out.
Wilks stared at her as she left. He shook his head. Maybe he was too burned out. Maybe she just liked having somebody pay attention to her. Maybe he should tell her the rest of it.
No. Maybe none of them were going to ever get home; even if Billie did, the whitecoats would be waiting for her. Maybe she should enjoy whatever free time she had left.
Lotta maybes there.
So, no. He wouldn’t tell her. He’d tried to warn her, that was the best he could do. Like she said, she’d have to handle her own grief.
One way or another, grief was coming, that was for damn sure.
* * *
They’d dragged a cushion into the forward storage compartment, between two rows of hex cartons that effectively formed corridors in the room. It was dim, quiet, and nobody was going to happen across them accidentally. There was a door alarm rigged to chime if anybody even stuck their head into the room.
They sat facing each other on the cushion, and Billie rubbed her hand against the hard muscle in Mitch’s arm, feeling the smoothness of it. His strength appealed to her, it made her feel safe.
“I’m sorry about Wilks,” she said. “He was out of line.”
“Maybe not,” Mitch said. “Maybe I don’t know what I’m doing here.”