The two trucks they had followed stopped next to a long pile of slick gray body parts and immediately began to unload more of the same. The flatbeds were piled high with the wreckage of alien bodies. Arms and legs and skull fragments were dragged off the trucks and tossed onto the five-foot-high pile that was already forty feet long. Reg and Guillaume said they wanted a closer look, so Rahim led them past the armed guards. Guillaume stopped and called back to LeBlanc, the medical officer, waving him forward. The biting, acrid smell in the air became stronger the closer they got to the meat pile.
“This is a very bad job to have,” LeBlanc said to Reg as they watched the men off-loading the stinking cargo. The dead bodies were a potential biohazard, and no self-respecting Saudi was going to sully himself with that sort of work. Instead it was done by Filipino and Indian men who wore only gardening gloves. In lieu of gas masks, they’d tied shirts around their heads to cover their noses. At least there wasn’t a lot of blood. In fact, there wasn’t any. LeBlanc pulled on a pair of surgical gloves and moved up to the small mountain of carnage. He yanked a section of tentacle away from the pile. Reg looked over the man’s shoulder as he examined it.
“Is this air safe to breathe?” he asked the doctor. “Aren’t foreign microbes a danger? Things we have no immunities to?”
LeBlanc sniffed at the air. “It’s nothing. A little ammonia, it keeps you awake.” He lifted the severed end of the thick tentacle to his nose with both hands and smelled it carefully. “This is not the source of the odor. It makes no smell. It is strange,” he said, examining the eight-inch-thick tube of flesh. “No bones, no shell, no blood vessels.”
He used a pocketknife to scrape away the sand clinging to the moisture and dig out a square of white flesh. After sniffing at it and running it between his fingers, he shrugged and tossed it aside. “Like a lobster,” he said, looking up at Reg with his wandering eye. He was a strange man.
The tentacle was covered with a tough, gray skin that had striated markings like those found on the body of an earthworm. At its tip was a tough, two-fingered pincer claw. When each half closed, they formed a spearhead. After playing with it for a moment or two longer, LeBlanc returned to the pile and retrieved a three-foot-long slab of shell and carried it back to Reg. The inside was covered in some kind of sticky gelatin or fat. LeBlanc gathered up a glob of it, then watched it slowly plop off the end of his knife blade.
“This is the substance that is making the smell,” he announced, his eyes watering slightly from the fumes. When he flipped the twenty-pound fragment over, the left half of a bony face was staring back up at him. A smooth, rounded forehead bulged above a deep black eye socket. There was no eye. The lower half of the face, where the mouth would be on a human, was a confused mass of cartilage tissue full of crisscrossing channels, as if it had been hacked at with a machete. It was part of the creature’s exoskeleton.
“That’s the ugliest damn thing I’ve ever seen,” Reg said.
LeBlanc seemed surprised. “I was just now thinking how much they look like us.” He ran his fingers over the seam at the center of the face. It made a clean vertical break from the middle of the forehead down to the middle of the amorphous chin. LeBlanc said it must be like the shell of an oyster or a giant clam. “But it’s strange,” he said, rolling it over once more. “If it’s like a shell of the clam, where is the clam?”
He walked back to the pile and picked up a soft torso with one thin arm attached to it. He carried it back to Reg and tossed it on the ground. With a deft incision, he split the chest open and pulled back the dermal walls.
“You see? It’s tres bizarre. There are two different species.” He used his knife to poke at the innards of his latest find. “These small animals, they have the internal organs. But the big ones, pfffi, they are shells, they are empty.”
Rahim and Guillaume had walked to the far end of the quarantine area, keeping well away from the alien corpses. Both of them were anxious to leave when they returned to where Reg was standing.
“The smell is horrible. I have seen enough,” said the Frenchman.
“Yes, everything is under control,” said the Saudi lieutenant. “Let us continue.”
Reg nodded that he, too, was ready to leave this area and enter the ship. The penetrating ammonia vapors were heavy in the air, causing his eyes to water. If the air was contaminated with foreign pathogens, it was too late to do anything about it. Hundreds of men would have already been infected. But as the three of them started back to the truck, LeBlanc whistled sharply through his teeth and waved them over to where he was kneeling. He’d found something in the sand.
It was a greenish thing about an inch long and was squirming like a bristled caterpillar. LeBlanc said he thought it was some form of plant life. In the few minutes since he’d discovered it, he said, the wriggling, wormlike organism had nearly doubled in size.
“Regardez, ” he said. “Look at this.” He extended one of his gloved fingers and held it half an inch above the ground. The tiny creature lifted straight up, straining to reach the finger. When LeBlanc moved his hand slightly to the left, the tiny form bent in that direction.
“It senses your body heat,” Reg said, “or maybe it smells you.”
“Maybe,” allowed the doctor. “I believe it wants something else. I think it feels the moisture.” The doctor pulled his hand away, then watched as the small green shape turned and began wriggling toward the nearest source of moisture—the alien cadavers. When it had traveled a couple of inches, LeBlanc unscrewed the cap of his canteen and poured a small ampunt of water into the sand. The organism turned and immediately began burrowing into the wet spot, sucking the moisture out of the sand. As it did so, its body grew visibly, doubling in length.
“Interesting,” said Guillaume, looking slightly queasy. “Where did you find it?”
“Here,” LeBlanc said, “in the pile.”
“Maybe there’s more,” Reg suggested. “There’s plenty of moisture in these bodies.” Thinking that Reg was probably right, LeBlanc began removing body pieces from the top of the heap and tossing them aside. He didn’t have to dig very deeply before he found proof that Reg was right. The plants were growing at an exponential rate just below the surface of the heap. Thousands of slender, translucent tendrils many feet long had grown in thick bunches throughout the pile of biowreckage. They were glass-clear and writhed in protest to being exposed to the morning sun. Within moments, they changed color and began to turn green.
“This plant, it is very dangerous,” LeBlanc said. “If it finds a lake or an ocean, maybe we cannot stop the growth. It must be contained here before it spreads.”
“It might be a source of food for the aliens,” Reg surmised. There was no way of knowing how many months or years or centuries they had been traveling through space. A fast-growing plant like this one would create an abundant source of nourishment. “The doctor’s right,” Reg said. “If this plant spreads, we could have an ecological nightmare on our hands.”
Rahim immediately issued orders that no more bodies be brought out of the ship until the problem was better understood. Then he went to inspect one of the trucks that had been carrying the bodies to the quarantine site. First he checked the tires, then popped open the hood and looked into the engine compartment. Cursing in Arabic, he reached down and pulled away a handful of the vines. They had already overgrown the truck’s radiator. Immediately, he regretted having touched them. He threw them aside and wiped his hand vigorously on the material of his robe. “Burn them,” he shouted to the men off-loading the bodies, “bum everything, including the trucks.”
After meeting with the officers in charge of the quarantine area and making sure they understood the danger LeBlanc had found, the men returned to their own vehicle. After inspecting it for signs of the aggressive plant, the Peacekeepers piled in.
Rahim drove back toward the triangular breach in the wall of the destroyer and headed up the uneven ramp of debris. Although the path to the opening w
as treacherous and bumpy, Rahim drove fast. The soldiers riding in back were tossed around roughly, but they were eager to get inside and begin the work they had come to do. It was an ironic mission for a U.N. peacekeeping force: locate survivors of the battle and kill them.
They came to the top of the ramp and drove onto the smooth floor of the city destroyer’s main deck. The gray walls that closed in around them were the color of graphite. They towered above the truck, smooth in some places and intricately worked in others, like large sections of circuit board. The ceilings of the first rooms they entered were low, but as they penetrated deeper, the domed roof climbed higher. Rahim was forced to slow the truck to a few miles per hour as he steered through the obstacle course of shattered walls and missing sections of floor. The first few hundred feet of the ship were a warren of collapsed passageways and work spaces extending both horizontally and vertically. Shafts of sunlight leaked in where the roof had tom away, but it was soon dark enough that Rahim switched on his headlights. Even though all of the internal walls were badly fractured, most of them appeared to be sturdy; others were teetering on the brink of collapse. It was like driving through a darkened house of cards that threatened to fall apart at any moment.
As he approached a narrow gap between two towering walls (hat had fallen against one another, Rahim honked his horn and flashed his headlights to alert oncoming drivers to his presence. Then he drove through the opening.
On the other side, they entered a curved hallway of monumental proportions. It was several hundred feet across and long enough that it disappeared around the bend of the ship in either direction. It was completely empty and reminded Reg of an underground flood channel he and his friends had played in when they were children, only this place was a thousand times larger. The truck suddenly felt like a small toy moving across the smooth floor of the chamber. A trail of burning flares marked the path to the far side of the space. Rahim hit the gas and sped into the darkness. He didn’t slow down when they came to a soft spot in the road, a place where the floor hung limply into whatever open chamber lay below. It felt like driving across a swaying trampoline until they climbed up the other side and found solid footing once more.
As they approached the opposite wall, Reg looked up into the gloomy light and saw that there was a series of large rectangular openings, each one a doorway to a new level of the ship. On either side of the portals were massive, swollen structures that looked like the roots of some enormous tree. They were grayish white and stood out against the rest of the dark wall.
Rahim stopped the truck near the portal on the ground floor and everyone climbed out. The Peacekeepers switched on their flashlights and inspected the rootlike structures. It quickly became apparent that they were hollow inside and formed a natural staircase to the portal doors above.
“They are growing a lot of plants in here,” Miriyam observed.
Reg nodded as he studied the way the hollow structure twisted its way up the wall, but it looked as much like a thick vein as it did a root. He was quickly coming to realize that the ship was composed largely—if not completely—of organic materials. He and Miriyam walked past a group of Saudi soldiers who were standing near their trucks and smoking cigarettes, until they came to the place where the towering wall joined the floor. Reg knelt down and inspected the corner.
“What do you see?” Miriyam asked him.
“Look at the way the cracks run through the floor and travel up the walls.”
“What about it?”
“It means they’re built from one piece of material. This whole room,” he said, gesturing toward the massive hallway, “was cut from a single block. Unless ..
“Unless what?”
“Unless it was grown.”
“If it was grown,” Miriyam said, “it means we are inside a large animal. That the whole ship was living at some time.”
“Not a very comforting thought, is it?” Reg moved his hand over the wall. Despite the hairline fractures running in all directions, the surface was smooth and hard. The texture was closer to leather than metal. It gave like soft wood when he drove his thumbnail into it and left a mark.
Some of the Peacekeepers had climbed up the hollow rootlike structures and were beginning to investigate what lay behind the portal doors. Rahim yelled up at them that those areas had already been searched. They were identical in every detail to the room on the ground floor, the next stop on the tour he was giving (hem. As the Frenchmen began to climb down, Rahim led the way through the floor-level portal into an area he called the room of the barrels.
Inside, under a low ceiling, was another huge room. Battery-powered work lights were switched on to reveal a series of low walls that reached halfway to the ceiling and formed a kind of open maze. Rahim led the way to a hexagonal tank that was four feet deep and twelve feet across. The soldiers peered over the edge and saw themselves reflected in a shallow pool of silver liquid. Half-submerged in the shiny solution was a large pale body, an alien exoskeleton. It had long, powerfully built arms and legs. Instead of feet, it had a pair of hooked toes that curled forward like a ram’s homs. The hands were similar to human hands. Each one had three bony fingers that reached lengths of up to twelve inches. But the part of the body that drew the most attention was the giant clamshell that composed the head and thorax region of the animal. It was split open along the seam running from the pointed crest of down to its abdomen. As LeBlanc had noted earlier, there were no internal organs. The interior walls of the shell were pinkish gray muscle. At the bottom of the tank, there was a piece of machinery that looked like a harness or mold. When the ship crashed, the body had tom free of the harness, and most of the fluid had sloshed out of the vat.
“This one, it is more smaller than the ones we found outside,” LeBlanc pointed out. The body was about six feet long.
“Yes, yes,” Rahim agreed. “It is still young, still growing. We believe this entire area is a farm to grow these creatures. They tell me this liquid is a growth culture. A preliminary chemical analysis shows a balanced pH and many hormones and nutrients.”
“They’re growing these bodies the same way our scientists culture cells?” Reg asked.
“Exactly,” LeBlanc said, “but the level is very sophisticated, far beyond our ability.”
“Is it alive?” Mohammed asked, peering down at the alien. “No,” Rahim answered definitively. “All of them are dead. We are certain of this.” To prove his point, he took out a pistol and shot into the tank. The large body remained as lifeless as it had before.
“Remarkable,” LeBlanc gasped. He shook his head in awe of the alien scientific accomplishments. “They have done what we cannot do: pluripotent cell differentiation. This is something we humans cannot do. Maybe in one hundred years.”
Miriyam was puzzled. “I don’t understand how a species of animals can exist if they have to be grown like this. Don’t they have sex?”
LeBlanc looked at her with his stray eye from the opposite side of the tank. “You have to understand that this one is not the real alien who drives the ship and fires the weapons. This one, it is only an armor, an empty body for the real aliens. They sit inside the shell like a little . . . how do you say? . .. the little man who rides the horse.”
“Jockey?”
“Exactly. The real alien sits inside this empty body like a jockey. Without the little one inside, this one is without the life. C’est brillant, n ’est-ce pas?”
“Yeah,” Miriyam replied sarcastically. “They’re real geniuses.” Guillaume glanced curiously around the mazelike room of the barrels. “All of these pools have bodies in them?”
“Yes,” Rahim said. “And the same on the floors above. There are thousands of these barrels.”
As they talked, the long fingers of an exoskeletal hand lifted over the side of the tank and reached into the air. An “alien” voice called out, “Aidez-moi! Je suis mortH It was Richaud, the same baby-faced soldier who had joked with Reg in the truck. He had found a severed arm
lying nearby and was using it to put on a show for the others. No one found his impromptu puppet show particularly amusing. After a sharp word from Guillaume, Richaud tossed the arm away.
Rahim led the group through the labyrinth of half-wall partitions until they arrived at an open pit. It was as big around as a manhole leading down to a sewer. Turning to LeBlanc, he gestured toward the hole in the floor. “The plant you found outside is also here.” When flashlights were pointed into the opening, they saw what he meant. The same glassy vines were clinging to the walls of the round shaft, writhing and wriggling in slow motion.
“Maybe there’s water down there,” Reg said, “or some other source of moisture.”
“Perhaps,” said the doctor, leaning over the opening with a flashlight and trying to measure the depth of the shaft. “Or perhaps there are more bodies.”
“It’s nice and dark down there,” Miriyam said. “It’s a place survivors would hide.”
“We’ve got to find a way down to the lower levels,” Reg said to Guillaume.
“I already thought of that.” The Frenchman grunted. “My scouts have found an opening. Follow me.”
Not far from the large door they’d stepped through to enter the room of the barrels, there was a long rip in the floor just wide enough for a large man to slip through. The floor of the next level was visible about twenty feet below. The Peacekeepers broke open their backpacks and began unpacking the gear they would need.
Lieutenant Rahim thought Reg and Guillaume were crazy for wanting to go belowdecks with such a small force, but he could see he wasn’t going to be able to stop them. Reluctantly, he decided to join them.
Using ropes, the Peacekeepers were lowered through the opening two at a time. Guillaume ordered two of them to stay behind and keep an ear to the radio. Reg, Mohammed, and Miriyam were the last ones down. When they assembled on the lower level, they found themselves in a wide, rectangular passageway. The first thing Guillaume did was to order thermal and sonic scans, both of which came back negative. The weak light filtering down through the shaft cast a dim glow on the floor. Otherwise, they had only their flashlights. The floor felt spongy under their feet. Both it and the walls appeared to be made of muscle or some other living tissue. Thick bundles of the sinuous, fleshy material were coiled around one another, the color of granite and as flat as a brick wall. The material looked as if it had been pressed and compacted. But as LeBlanc pointed out, the walls had probably been grown that way, through the use of molds. As the group set off, Reg had the uneasy feeling he was moving through the bowels of some enormous living creature.
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