Alien Taste

by Wen Spencer

  “Get one of the duplicate keys,” Hex ordered.

  “I’ll offer a trade,” Ukiah all but shouted, bringing everyone’s attention on him. “Rennie ordered me to break the remote key, but I didn’t have a chance.” He backed up slowly. “If you let us go—me, my partner, my memory—I’ll give it to you.”

  “Why would you die to protect it before and not now?”

  “I died to protect my mate. I used the key to stall you, so you wouldn’t hurt her. If you have a duplicate key, there’s no reason for us to die now. Just let us go, and I’ll give you the original key. You don’t need us anymore.”

  “You’re bluffing,” Hex snarled. “You don’t have it.”

  Ukiah pulled the key out of his pocket and held it up. Behind him, the Pack flung themselves against the locked entrance, the wood groaning was it was tortured out of shape. He changed his grip on the key, thumbs pressed hard at its center point. “Now, let us go, and I’ll throw it to you. Try anything, and I’ll snap it in half.”

  “You’ve been dealing with humans much too long,” Hex drawled. Like a multiheaded snake striking, there was a sudden blinding motion from all the Gets. One fired a shotgun that caught Ukiah in the side, flinging him sideways into the wall, while others leaped forward.

  There was a rush of bodies from the stairwell, and the Pack spilled into the room. The Gets reached Ukiah first, ripped the key from his hand, and flung it across the room to Hex. As the Gets checked the snarling fury of the Pack, Hex slammed the key into the console slot and turned it. Tones started to play in the room, heading out to distant Mars. Bear broke free of the Gets and leaped on Hex, and they went down in a snarling mass.

  The fight rolled over Ukiah, then left him behind. Rennie appeared to suddenly haul Ukiah to his feet and slam him against the wall. His large hands closed hard on Ukiah’s throat. “What the hell have you done? Have you betrayed everything to try and save one life?”

  “I had to give it to him,” Ukiah choked, trying to keep his mind blank. Hex mustn’t be warned. “I had to.”

  “I should have killed you the first time I saw you,” Rennie roared.

  “You’ve lost, you stupid cur!” Hex was shouting at Bear. “You had no hope of winning, you rabid dogs! I’ll have you all flayed alive and laminate your skins. Stop her!”

  Hellena had broken free of the Gets and raced to the instrument panel, hand outstretched for the key. She was going to be able to yank it free before the command was done.

  “No!” It was a duet of voice and mind, Hex and Ukiah shouting the same word. Hellena spun like a hard-twisted puppet, her eyes meeting Ukiah’s with surprise, and then a bullet exploded her head, spraying gore onto the control console.

  “No,” Ukiah repeated, softer, this time in denial.

  She’ll get better, he chanted to himself, she’ll get better.

  There was a sudden strange stillness in the room as everyone looked at Ukiah, puzzled by his outburst. Hex twisted in Bear’s stranglehold to look from Ukiah to Hellena and then to the console, where the key continued to upload its long complicated program in musical tones. Understanding dawned on his alien face.

  “He’s changed the code! Stop the signal! Stop the signal!”

  The fight took a sudden hard change of direction, as the Ontongard struggled to reach the key and the Pack fought to stop them.

  “You’ve changed the code?” Rennie released his grip, his eyes wide with amazement.

  “He had another key. A copy. It could have worked. I had to give him the booby-trapped one and hope he’d use it without checking.”

  The key finished and dropped silent. On the screen, harsh brilliant light began to fill the ship’s view ports, spilling out into the Martian dusk. The image began to tremble as the great redirected engines shook the ship.

  “What did you do?” Rennie breathed, his eyes riveted to the screen. “How could you know how?”

  Ukiah gave him the answer in the form of a question. If the first attempt didn’t destroy the ship, Prime, what can you do from Earth? What would take time to set up? Time during which you couldn’t dare be caught, so you allowed a monster to be conceived.

  Correctly asked, Rennie only needed a moment to think. Close all the engine exhaust ports, disable the emergency damper system, and then fire the engines at full.

  Don’t wake the sleepers, Ukiah replied.

  Rennie smiled full with evil delight, then frowned, glancing at the screen filling with light. The pack leader caught Ukiah’s shoulder and gave Max a hard push toward the door. “Run!”

  Ukiah could sense Rennie barking silent orders to the Pack. Even as the threesome started to run, the Pack opened an exit, heaving and flinging themselves and Ontongard out of the way.

  “What?” Ukiah shouted as they cleared the door. “What did I miss?”

  “The sleepers were Plan A for taking over the human race. If they’re gone, you become Plan A.”

  The Rover control center was, it turned out, in the observatory level of the old terminal. Escalators led down to the great concourse and beyond were a row of doors to the outside. They stumbled down the uneven stairs, the fight following close on their heels. As they sprinted toward the doors, Rennie flung away his shotgun.

  “What are you doing?” Ukiah cried.

  “I’m trying not to get killed by the cavalry,” Rennie snapped. He yanked open the center plywood-covered door and pushed Ukiah out into the open.

  Thirty-odd police cars were jammed into the five-lane half-circle departing zone, their lights almost blinding after the darkness of the terminal. A hundred police, it seemed, crouched behind the squad cars, shotguns and service revolvers aimed at Ukiah.

  Ukiah jerked up his hands, cringing. Oh, this is going to hurt.

  “Hold your fire!” Indigo’s voice boomed across a megaphone. “He’s one of ours!”

  Max, carrying the baby, was pushed through the door next. He too paused, stunned by the array of weaponry aimed at him.

  “Hold your fire!” Indigo chanted.

  Rennie stepped out behind them, caught hold of their arms and hustled them to the curb. Even as they reached the cars, the fight burst out of the doors. Tight knots of three and four combatants roiled through each of the five doors, spilling out quickly until the entire war spread across the sidewalk.

  “This is the FBI!” Indigo boomed across the megaphone as Ukiah and the others dropped down beside her, panting from running. “You’re under arrest! Put down the weapons and don’t move!”

  “Who are the good guys?” the officer beside Indigo asked her.

  Indigo turned her gray eyes to Ukiah.

  “Shoot them all,” Rennie whispered to him.

  Ukiah quailed at the thought, then nodded as a policeman beyond Indigo suddenly cried out in pain, shot by the Ontongard. “Shoot them all, sort them out later.”

  “Return fire,” Indigo commanded.

  The thunder of gunfire was long and deafening. Ukiah crouched behind a cruiser’s tire as the thunder went on and on. Mars glistened in the evening sky and, for a moment, seemed brighter and larger than ever before.

  They bagged the dead as quickly as possible, wearing leather gloves to snatch up mice and ferrets gathering around the bodies. Ukiah and Rennie picked out the Pack dead and gathered up the Pack’s collection of mice. Indigo had the dead Pack members moved to a temporary holding area; officially their bodies were to be moved to the coroner’s office after the Ontongard were dealt with, but when that time arrived later the next day, they were gone.

  Once the Pack was cleared away, Indigo started on the Ontongard. “These people are carriers of a highly deadly virus transmitted through the blood,” she told the coroner who just arrived, having only been called after the Pack dead had been culled. “Have them fingerprinted, a dental print made, and then cremate all the bodies.”

  She made a point to single out Hex’s body. “Make sure this one is first to be cremated.”

  Ukiah watched them carr
y Hex away. “That’s cold. You know they’re still alive.”

  Indigo looked away. “What they did to you was cold. What they tried to do to me was cold. What they did to Wil Trace and Agent Warner was cold.” She shook her head. “This is the only justice that makes sense. I’m not going to risk the lives of these officers over and over again. What would a jail term be to the Ontongard? Would they even serve it? What about the other prisoners? How would you protect them from the Ontongard? If we gave them a trial and found them guilty and sentenced them to death, how would we carry it out? Our Constitution, made for men, bans burning people alive, and nothing else would kill them. They’re not human, Ukiah, and we can’t treat them as such.”

  “I’m not human either, Indigo.”

  She looked at him with tears in her eyes. “Yes, you are, because you allow yourself to be one. You’ve taken a name and place in our society. You’ve got a birth certificate, Social Security number, you’ve registered for the draft, you pay your taxes, and you obey the law. You’ve said, ‘These are my mothers. These are my friends. This is my lover.’ You take photographs, have favorite clothes and favorite foods. Everything you’ve ever done has made you part of mankind. Even the Pack, with all their lawlessness, have kept their names and wear their gang colors as a signal of ‘this is who we are within your society. We are the lawless ones that run on the fringes, expect trouble from us.’ They have friends. They take lovers. As long as there has been the FBI, there has been a Pack file. They’re human because they make themselves human.

  “But the Ontongard—” She shook her head. “They held me for four hours, Ukiah, and not once did any of them give a glimmer of having a soul. You saw how they were, human-shaped appendages for Hex, a group mind working as one spread-out body. They don’t have names anymore. The one or two we’ve managed to capture understood the concept, but refused to apply it to themselves. They don’t collect personal effects. You’ll find more stuff in a doghouse than where Ontongard have lived for weeks. They don’t have friends and lovers. They eat what is at hand. Sometimes it’s pizza, but often it’s bulk dry dog food. They’re not human, Ukiah, and I’m not going to treat them as such.”

  What justice would make sense? Pack memory told him how impossible it was to keep Pack in normal jails. Intricate escape-proof cells would have to be built, and scattered wide to keep the Ontongard separated and isolated from other prisoners. A thousand in all would need to be built and then maintained for hundreds of years.

  “You’re right,” he sighed. “We can only ignore them, or deal with them thoroughly. Doing things halfway would only lead to dead law officers and Ontongard still roaming free.”

  She took his hand. “Do you hate me for this?”

  He laughed and put his arms about her. “How could I hate you when I love you so much? Besides, I don’t think the Pack would let me get another girlfriend. They like you. They call you the Lady of Steel.”

  She hugged him tightly. “The last three days, there was always a Pack member on the fringe of my vision. It was like you were hovering over me, protecting me.” Reluctantly, she released him. “I have work to do. It will take me the rest of today and all of tomorrow to fill out the paperwork. After that, if you don’t mind the wait, I could take vacation time and we could go together up to the safe house and get your moms.”

  “I’d love that.”

  A smile came to her gray eyes, and she went off to wreak her cold vengeance on the remaining Ontongard. As Ukiah watched her compact figure move among the tall burly policemen, Max drifted over to stand beside him.

  “You and Agent Zheng.” Max smiled at him. Besides the baby, he now also held diapers, baby clothes, a can of formula, and a baby bottle. “I see it, but I still have trouble believing it.”

  “She’s the most amazing and beautiful woman there is.”

  “They all are when you’re in love with them. Here, take the baby. Arn Johnson had some extra baby things in his squad car and he let me have this stuff. Did you know he and his wife had triplets?” Max shook his head. “And he always seemed like such a sane man.” He held up a small disposable diaper. “I can’t believe that as small as this is, it’s going to be too big.”

  “He’ll grow into that size.” Ukiah laid his Memory on the trunk of a squad car and found that he hadn’t forgotten how to diaper an infant.

  “Not today, I hope.”

  Ukiah shrugged, reaching for the T-shirt. “I don’t think so. Anything is possible.” The T-shirt read “Daddy’s Pride and Joy.” He picked up the clothed baby and held him at arm’s length. Serious black eyes studied him in return. Beside him, Max read the instructions on the formula can out loud.

  “Max, it just suddenly hit me.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve got a baby.”

  Max gave a tired, weak laugh. “You certainly do.”

  “This is–like–forever.”

  Max caught Ukiah’s slightly panicked look and patted him soothingly on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, we’ll work it out.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Wednesday, June 24, 2004

  Moon Township, Pennsylvania

  While things were still in full chaos, Max slipped them away from the police and FBI. It would be better to go, he pointed out, before anyone thought to ask exactly where the baby came from. Retrieving both the Hummer and Cherokee, they drove to the offices. By then, Ukiah could do little more than slump over the steering wheel of the Cherokee.

  Max opened the Cherokee’s door. “You okay?”

  “I’m wiped, and I know there’s nothing here to eat.”

  Max laughed and tousled his hair. “Just hold on, it will only be a little while longer.”

  Chino appeared minutes later with a plate of sushi from the corner Japanese restaurant. “Oh man, you look like the walking dead. Max too. Where did you find him? Shit, have you been shot again? What the hell happened? Hey, did you hear about the spaceship?”

  “Spaceship?” He barely tasted the twelve pieces of California and tuna maki as he wolfed them down, one bite per piece.

  “It’s on all the channels. The Rover malfunctioned and stumbled onto this alien spaceship on Mars! Then the dude blew up! They’re playing it again and again. Hey, where did the baby come from? Max told me to go get a carseat, but I thought he was shitting me.”

  “It’s a long story. Where’s Max?”

  “Taking a shower. He says you’re moving out as soon as he’s got some clothes packed. The house is full of workmen and cleaners. He doesn’t want you to come in, so stay put. I’m running over to Babyland on Penn Avenue. It shouldn’t take me more than a couple minutes to get a carseat.”

  Ukiah shifted over the central console to the passenger side and napped while waiting. He was vaguely aware when Max returned, opening the hatch to load suitcases. It was Chino’s return, with bags of fast food, that woke him up.

  “I thought you might still be hungry.” Chino grinned as he installed the carseat. “Cute kid. Whose is it?”

  “Mine.”

  “Ukiah’s.”

  “You dog!” Chino’s smile melted to puzzlement. “So, who’s the mother?”

  Ukiah glanced helplessly at Max.

  “We’ll explain later.” Max slammed shut the hatch. “I’ll call you tomorrow about the rest of the work that needs to be done here. Watch your step, things still might be a little hairy for a while.”

  “Where are you going to be?”

  “It’d be better if you don’t know.”

  Max went out by the zoo, then up through Etna. At one point he stopped and switched the license plates. They went through a McDonald’s drive-through in Allison Park, cut through the small town of Mars, and finally they stopped at the Residence Inn in Cranberry Township.

  “Here?”

  “This is a family place.” Max slid on sunglasses to hide his two black eyes. “We’ll blend in here. Kind of.”

  Max went in alone and checked them in as three adults (thus
creating a paper mother) and a child under the name of John Schmid. They parked in the back and took the elevator, unseen, up to the fourth floor. The suite had two bedrooms, a kitchenette, a living room, and two complete baths. The “do not disturb” sign was a magnet that stuck to the steel door and stated “no service.” Ukiah numbly stripped, showered, pulled on a pair of shorts Max had packed for him, and crawled into the bed of the smaller bedroom. Max stayed awake to set up the crib that housecleaning delivered to the door, fed the baby, changed its diaper, and tucked it into the crib. Then he too collapsed in the larger bedroom.

  There was a mega-watt streetlamp right outside the window. With the curtains drawn, it was impossible to tell night from day. Ukiah woke from a shared dream of being small and helpless. For a moment he laid curled in the unfamiliar bed, fearful of the Ontongard’s return. Then, as he woke up fully and realized what his memory had endured, he went to the crib, full of anger and guilt.

  “Hey, little one, it’s okay. You’re safe.” He lifted the baby out and cradled it to him. Where they touched flesh to flesh, they were so identical that he could barely determine where his body stopped and his memory’s started. The baby’s fists were covered with saliva and sour milk. The tiny head had minute traces of baby powder. Still, Ukiah could feel the pain of the baby’s gas bloated stomach as if it was his own.

  Max came out of his bedroom still looking jumpy. He wore drawstring sweatpants and a white sleeveless undershirt that left little doubt to the hardships he’d suffered the last few days. He held his SIG-Sauer carefully pointed at the ceiling. He relaxed after scanning the room and finding only Ukiah and baby. “I forgot how often those things ate.”