by B. V. Larson
Swarm
( Star force - 1 )
B. V. Larson
B. V. Larson
Swarm
1
The night before the invasion, the whole sky looked wrong somehow. It was the color of it, I think. The sky was purple-rather than blue or black. It was as if the sun never completely went down that night, but instead turned a dark umber and lurked beneath the bottom rim of the world, lighting up the heavens ever so slightly. Only a few shreds of cloud moved along the horizon, over the Sierra Nevadas to the east. Each strip of cloud was tinged a deep red, the color of wet rust or dried blood.
Other than the strangely hued sky, it felt like a typical Central California night in late spring. It wasn’t stormy, but a cool breeze came down from the foothills as the evening deepened. In the fields around my farmhouse, a thousand stalks of ripe corn rippled.
Jake, my oldest, performed his usual shrug when I asked him if he had completed his list of chores. His short, black hair was as shiny as a crow’s feathers. His eyes were blue and piercing. He looked so much like me his sister sometimes called him my evil twin.
When I took my son out to the stable to prove he hadn’t shoveled the stalls, the horses were uneasy, shuffling about and sidestepping. They showed the whites of each big eyeball and tossed their heads, but didn’t shy when I reached up to stroke them. Frowning, I joined Jake and we finished the shoveling. He looked at me, surprised to get help with a chore he loathed. I pretended nothing was wrong. But truthfully, I didn’t want to leave him alone out here.
Afterward, we came out of the stable to find the moon was rising. The fields were rustling and the smell of ripe corn and fresh-cut alfalfa hung thickly in the air. I kept looking over my shoulder, up at that strange sky. We’d bought this place, my wife Donna and I, as part of a back-to-the-country dream. My colleagues called me the ‘gentleman farmer’ and theorized I must be commuting through cow herds each morning to the University. I loved it out here and even after Donna died I refused to move back to the city. But in all my years out here, I’d never seen a sky like this one.
Jake ignored everything that was wrong with the night and headed upstairs. He would spend the evening surfing the web, twiddling with his headphones and pretending to do homework. My second child Kristine, however, knew the moment she saw me that something was different tonight. She’d always been more intuitive.
“What’s wrong, Dad?” she asked, looking up from her algebra paper. She was thirteen, with a new womanly shape to her body that I found upsetting. She looked like her mother-except she was skinny and wore braces. To me, she was perfect.
I shook my head as I tapped her algebra book. “Nothing Kris. Don’t get distracted.”
Kristine went back to her homework, and I went back to gazing out at the strange purple skies. Nothing changed, so I headed for the computer in my study. I had a lot of grading to do, but fortunately most of that was online. I logged into the University website for the last time and began answering emails and grading lab projects.
Teaching online wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Computer science students asked hard questions of their professors and typing in comments was often more work than simply discussing things in person. Sometimes I missed the simplicity of a pen and paper. Even scribbling notes in the margins of printouts was better than typing everything. Red-penned circles and Xs were wonders of communication that we’d lost somehow, over the years.
That night, I dreamt of my wife Donna, who had died nearly a decade ago in a car accident. We’d hit a chain link fence and gone right through it. The steel posts had whipped around the car as the chain link wrapped us up like a net. One of the posts had come through the back window and impaled Donna.
She looked at me from the passenger seat. I saw her eyes in my sleep. Her lips moved, trying to tell me something, but her staring eyes were the eyes of the dead.
It was the eyes that woke me up. I sat up in bed, gasping.
I’ll always wonder what it was Donna had been trying to tell me. If I had stayed asleep one minute longer, could I have heard her voice? Maybe everything would have gone differently… if I had.
2
The second night-the bad night-started off good. Both my kids were in a fine mood. School was out next week, and the excitement of the coming vacation had caught up with them. We went to bed late, after watching movies over the net and eating popcorn. It was one benefit of growing up without a mom. There was no one around to tell Dad it was a school night.
The ship came to loom over my little farm sometime after midnight. It caught Jake first. I don’t know why, perhaps because his room was on the eastern side of the house. I heard later they had come from the east, following the darkness around the world in a wave.
I was asleep at the time of the ship’s arrival. The walls shook, and my TV fell off the top of the armoire. That’s probably what woke me up. The TV crashed and broke and I threw myself out of bed, believing we were in an earthquake. I shouted for the kids, ordering them out of the house. This quake seemed like a bad one.
In movies, when they come for you, there are always lights in the sky beaming brightly into your windows. There were no bright lights at my house. In fact, the entire farm was bathed in deep shadow. This only made sense, I realized as I ran down to the window at the end of the hall in my tee-shirt and underwear, because there was a huge ship looming over us. It blotted out that strange, purple sky. I saw it hanging up there without a sound. It was maybe a hundred yards long and half as wide. It was completely dark, with no lights or visible engines. As black as pitch at the bottom of a well, my grandmother would have said. I paused and stared in amazement for several seconds.
I heard another crash, in Jake’s room. I ran down the hall, calling his name. There was no answer. His bed was empty. His window had been smashed inward. Shards of glass and a torn out black screen lay on the floor. Jake hadn’t even screamed, as far as I could recall. Then I looked out the broken window and my brain froze over for a second or two.
Jake hadn’t been taken away by some kind of magic beam. Instead a thick, cable-like, multi-segmented arm had reached down and plucked my boy out of his bed. It resembled the body of a two-foot thick snake-long, sleek and black. Was there someone up there in the ship working a joystick and collecting specimens? That was my first stunned impression. I got the feeling that to them, we were things that crawled under rocks at the bottom of the sea. They were the scientists who had come down to our world to poke about and disturb our tiny existence.
When I’d gotten over my shock enough to move, I ran out front. Kristine joined me on the porch. She stared up with me at the ship with the snake-like arm. Jake was in the grip of the hand. He still wasn’t screaming, but he was squirming, so it hadn’t killed him yet. As we watched, he disappeared with the arm up into the ship’s belly.
Kris’ mouth hung open, full of braces. Her eyes blinked in horror. “What do we do, Dad?”
“Get in the car,” I ordered.
“What about Jake?”
“I’ll get him,” I said. I had no idea how to perform such a miracle, but I was determined to try. I raced back into the house and snatched up my keys and my Remington 12-gauge with a box of shells. I was going to blow off that snake-arm, or at least blast away at the ship. What else could I do?
I ran back outside. The screen door had latched itself shut. I straight-armed it and the flimsy aluminum thing snapped off the frame with the sound of ripping wood. Kristine sat inside the car looking out the passenger window, terrified. I thought to myself, in a disconnected moment, that Jake would be angry when he found out she had taken the front seat. He was the oldest, and since time immemorial in our family, the oldest kid had always gotten to ride up front with Dad.
I loaded
the Remington and trotted out into the gravel driveway, craning my neck to look up. Jake and the arm had vanished, but I kept loading. The ship hadn’t moved, so maybe they could be convinced to give Jake back. It was the only thing I could think of.
When I raised the gun to my shoulder, I saw a darker spot open up on the bottom of the ship. It was then that Jake fell back down to earth, plummeting out of the ship. He landed in the horse trough, or rather half-in and half-out of it. That broke his spine, I think, but he was probably dead before they’d dropped him. I ran to him, making choking sounds. Kristine was screaming inside the car, her high-pitched cries muffled by the closed windows and doors.
There was my boy… dead, with his face looking up at me from underwater in the trough. The rest of him was bent at an impossible angle, limp and draped over the steel edge of the trough. There was blood everywhere. He had been gutted, then dropped.
I fired a shell at the ship, then. Probably, it wasn’t a smart thing to do, but I no longer cared. I left Jake and half-ran, half-staggered, still in shock, toward the car. It was time to run for it.
That’s when I saw the snake-arm clearly for the first time. It had slid silently down again while I had stared helplessly into my dead boy’s eyes. It punched through the passenger side window of my car and grabbed my daughter, who was struggling to escape. She had managed to get the driver’s door open. She crawled over the seats and tried to run, but the snake-arm had a loop around her mid-section. The arm dragged her backward.
I raised my shotgun and fired a second shell at the snake-arm. I saw a tiny cluster of orange sparks, as if I’d hit metal. There was no other visible effect. I kept running to my daughter, but I didn’t make it.
Kristine held onto the steering wheel with grim determination, but that didn’t last more than a second. She was ripped screaming from the car, dragged through the broken window and hauled up into the ship.
I could see a darker spot up there, where she had disappeared. I circled under the ship, all around the farmhouse, raving. I thought about firing up at it, but feared I might hit Kristine somehow. I suppose I could have driven off in the car, or ran out into cornfield to escape, but I didn’t even think of these things.
Soon, it didn’t matter. Kristine’s body fell, flopping, out of an opening that yawned in ship’s dark belly. She crashed down onto the roof of the house. I could tell right away she was broken, but I climbed up there anyway. I got on top of the garbage cans, then onto the rickety fence which my wife Donna had told me to fix until the day she died, but I’d never gotten around to. From the fence, I managed to scramble up onto the shingles and ran to where Kristine lay. My face was wet, either from tears or blood, I’m not sure. I’d been clawing at my own face by that time and it was difficult to see, so it could have been either.
Her eyes were open, and there was terror imprinted forever on her brow. I’ve never forgotten that look. The memory has hardened my mind like nothing else in my existence.
The snake-arm got me next. Coming up from behind, it plucked me off the peak of the roof. I no longer cared. In fact, my only thought was to hang onto my Remington, which I somehow managed. I had lost the box of shells, probably back when I found Jake.
I held my gun, and I held my fire. My only hope was that I would get the chance to blow a hole in something. Something softer than steel.
I was deposited in a quiet chamber. It wasn’t big, maybe the size of a bedroom or an examination room. I wasn’t thinking too well at that point, so I just kept turning around, aiming my gun at the walls. I didn’t try to find a way out. Right then, I didn’t care about escape. I was no longer trying to run away. Everyone I cared about was dead, and all I wanted now was revenge. I wouldn’t say I was calm, far from it, but I was cold inside.
I think now, looking back, that my unusual behavior saved my life. Part of the wall opened, and a being took a half-step forward.
This being was an alien. There had never been anything like it on Earth, at least not to my knowledge. It would have made an interesting subject for a documentary if we’d discovered it in some remote spot of the globe. The thing stood about four feet tall and had four hooves. But it had hands, too. Well, not hands, exactly. Three opposed digits would describe them better, each hand looked like a tripod of thumbs. It had blades too, natural ones that sprouted from its head like antlers. Imagine a deer with horned knives for antlers and a set of three-thumbed leathery hands. It reminded me of something from Greek mythology. What had they called them? Centaurs. Half-man, half-beast. But this centaur leaned in the direction of pure beast with freaky hands.
The eyes swept over me with some level of intelligence. I could only pray this was one of things that ran the ship, because I wanted some revenge. It took a step forward, and maybe it had expected me to retreat, I don’t know. But I was not in a cooperative mood. There was red blood on those horn-blades. I suspected it was my kids’ blood.
It took a second purposeful step, lowering its horn-blades in my direction. That was as far as it got before I blasted it. I had no doubt now those blades were showing me my own kids’ blood. It was too fresh. The hard part was to stop blasting, even after the centaur went down. It managed to cut me once, being faster and tougher even than it looked. I didn’t care.
I stopped firing and heard something. I turned around quickly. There stood a second one. This one didn’t wait around. I fired as it charged, taking one of those freakish three-pronged hands off, then the shotgun clicked. The magazine was dry. The centaur-thing picked itself up and came at me again, and I met its head with the butt of my shotgun.
The fight went on for a while, and it became dirty at the end. I gouged at the eyes and hammered its skull with the barrel of my weapon. It took a long time to die, but it finally did so. My legs and arms were slashed and bleeding freely in spots, but I’d won. I roared at the centaur, snarling and gleeful. I hoped it was one of the ones that had gotten the kids. Mad with grief, I hoped that it had kids of its own.
At this point, I figured I had to expect more of these things. Would they give up after only two tries? There had to be more of them.
Some part of my brain that still insisted on thinking was stuck on the detail that these beings didn’t seem overly technological. Could such creatures have built this ship? They had hands, after a fashion. But why risk themselves to fight me without weapons? What was the purpose? Both the centaurs had been males. Was this some kind of tribal hunting expedition? A rite of manhood, perhaps?
I decided to stop worrying about anything other than making sure I kept breathing and they kept dying. Accordingly, I checked my wounds. I couldn’t find any serious injuries, just cuts and bruises. I used my teeth to tear my tee-shirt into strips and tied bandages around the worst spots.
Panting, I waited for the next centaur. The next one would take me, I was pretty sure. I was tired now, and out of shells. Even as a club, the Remington had done well, but I doubted it would win a third fight for me.
Getting an idea, I bent and tried to rip loose one of those foot-long horn-blades. Maybe, if I could snap it off, I could use it as a knife. The idea appealed to me, using the same blade they’d used on my kids to slash open the next one.
3
A voice spoke. This was a shock, as up until now, things had been pretty quiet inside the ship. There had always been a slight, background hum-and of course, the centaurs and I had been making plenty of noise in our struggles.
“Aggression demonstrated,” said the voice. The tone was vaguely feminine, but it had a non-descript quality to it. A translating computer? Maybe.
I supposed the comment was about me. Nice of them, I thought, to tell me how I was doing.
Again, a doorway opened where there had been nothing but smooth metal before. I had snapped off a horn-blade by then and stood up, my teeth baring themselves without my consciously commanding them to do so. How quickly we turn into snarling animals if properly provoked, I thought.
There was no third member of
the horn-blade species waiting for me, however. Instead, it was the snake-arm. It reached down and looped around the alien I’d killed first and began to drag it outside. Maybe it was going to drop it into my cornfield. I decided to try to go with it.
It was too big to squeeze by, and I was worried the door would melt away when it left. So I climbed onto the snake-arm and rode it out of the room. I found myself in another cubical room, identical to the first.
“Initiative demonstrated,” said the voice.
“Who are you?” I demanded, craning my neck. I didn’t see any cameras, or microphones or speakers. Nothing but blank, dark walls.
The snake-arm shook me off in the next cubicle and hauled away the dead centaur before I could climb up on it again. I watched it vanish into another room. Had I missed my ride? Had I just failed one of these tests? My heart pounded.
Then I thought of the door behind me. Climbing to my feet, I looked back around. The floor in the first room vanished as the wall between the two rooms grew back together out of nothing. I had just enough time to see the second centaur’s bloody corpse fall an unknown distance down. I blinked at that. If I had stayed in the room, would they have dumped me too, allowing me to fall tumbling to my death?
“What do you want from me?” I demanded of the walls.
There was no answer, but a moment later two more doors opened. Why two? I investigated both paths, gingerly tapping with my foot. The floor vanished on the first one and opened upon a scene of the Earth whirling by at night. We had to be a mile up. I was surprised, as I’d felt no sensation of flying upward. No gee forces had tugged at my body, yet obviously I should have felt the elevator-ride sensation of upward momentum. I could see a dark night landscape, dotted with light. What had to be Highway 99, strung with orange sodium streetlights, snaked off to the north and south.