”Ordinarily,” he said, “I wouldn’t do this to unarmed men, but you did come in with guns blazing.” He flipped the M-16 around and smashed the butt against the standing Russian’s temple.
Kurkin dropped.
Afanasiev cringed, and Philips paused. He took pity on the man and settled for tying him up, using a rifle strap to bind his wrists and a glove held in place with the helmet’s chin strap as a makeshift gag.
Then he turned back to the radio.
”Cold War to base,” he said. “Sorry about the interruption. Please repeat last message.”
”Base to Cold War,” the radio said. “There have been major changes in the operational dynamic. NORAD has tracked a special Russian transport on approach to your position; intelligence sources place a high-ranking political official on board. Further, Moscow has threatened fullscale military retaliation if there is any incident on Russian soil that violates their national security. The secrecy of the mission has been compromised.”
”Shit,” Philips said.
”You are hereby instructed to gather your men, avoid further hostile contact with alien life-forms, and permit their vessel to depart without interference. We don’t want the Russians to get their hands on that alien technology, better both sides lose it. Understood?”
”Shit!” Philips said, more forcefully.
”Say again, Cold War?”
”Understood,” Philips said. “We pack up and get out and let the bastards go.”
”Affirmative.”
”And what if they don’t leave?” Philips muttered to himself. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.” Aloud, he said, “Acknowledged. Cold War One out.”
He shut down the transmitter, packed up the equipment, picked up the two AK-47s, then waved a farewell to the two Russians. He figured the unconscious one would wake up before too much longer, and the bound one could work his way loose, but neither one was going to be an immediate threat.
Taking a lesson from the pair of them he moved as stealthily as he could the entire distance from the radio room to the maintenance area under the pipeline where his men were being held at gunpoint-their captors hadn’t relied on walls and doors this time.
All the same, it wasn’t hard for Philips to get the drop on the Russians; the guards had been watching their captives, not their backs.
”Freeze!” he shouted as he stepped out of the shadows with the M-16 at ready.
The Russian guards probably didn’t understand the word, but they got the message and stood motionless as the Americans took their weapons. Everyone there was half-frozen already, and fighting spirit was in short supply.
Once the weapons had changed hands and it was settled who was once again in charge for the moment, Philips addressed his men.
”I’ve been in touch with Cencom,” he began. “Our mission’s been ...” He stopped, blinked, then said, “Wait a minute. Where the hell is Schaefer?”
”Who cares?” Wilcox asked. “Let’s toe-tag these alien geeks and get the hell out of here before we freeze our fucking balls off!”
”He split with that bitch lieutenant when the shit came down,” Lynch said.
”Damn him!” Philips growled. He chewed his lip, considering, for a few seconds, then announced,
”Look, we have new orders. The cat’s out of the bag, someone let the Russkies know we’re here, and we’re shifting to CYA mode. Some kind of Russian big shot is coming up here for a look-see, and Cencom doesn’t want him to find us. We’ve been instructed to abandon our mission and hightail it home without engaging either Russian or extraterrestrial fire. Well, if I know Schaefer, he’s out there kicking alien butt, and he isn’t going to quit just because we tell him to. We need to stop him before he starts World War III.”
”Who the hell’s going to fight a war over a cop killing spacemen?” Lassen protested.
”Nobody,” Philips said. “But if he leaves an abandoned starship sitting out there on Russian soil, there’ll be one hell of a war over who gets to keep it. Now, come on, all of you! We’ll leave these boys tied up to give us a lead, and then head out and see if we can stop Schaefer before he does any more damage.”
Rasche looked out at the Siberian wilderness as the snow tractor plowed on through the darkness. He reached up and touched the window glass.
It was cold as hell out there; even with the heater on full blast, stinking up the cabin with engine fumes, the glass was so cold his fingertips burned where they touched it. Rasche was no hothouse flower, no California beachboy; he’d lived through a few subzero winters when the wind tore through the concrete canyons of New York like the bite of death itself. This, though-this cold was a whole new level of intensity.
Even worse than the cold, though, was the sheer desolation. The surface of the moon couldn’t have been any deader than the landscape beyond the glass. Rasche was a city boy, born and bred; until he’d moved out to Bluecreek his idea of roughing it had been driving through a town that didn’t have a 7-Eleven. He knew he wasn’t any sort of wilderness scout, but this place ... this was the end of the Earth. This was the end of life and hope and light made manifest. It was hard to imagine anything surviving out there.
Even Schaefer.
Then one of the Russians patted his shoulder and pointed, and Rasche squinted through the fog on the windows, trying to see what the man was indicating.
There was some sort of structure ahead.
”The Assyma Pipeline,” Komarinets said. “We are almost to the pumping station.”
There was a sudden burst of noise from the front seat, the two men there babbling excitedly in Russian and pointing to somewhere ahead.
”What is it?” Rasche asked, tensing. He was uncomfortably aware that he was unarmed; he had left his familiar .38 behind at the ambassador’s request, to avoid any international incidents. If those things, those hunters from the stars, were out there somewhere...
”The driver thought he saw something moving up ahead, on the horizon,” Komarinets explained.
”The aliens?” Rasche asked.
Then he remembered. They wouldn’t see anything if the aliens were out there. The aliens were invisible when they wanted to be.
At least, assuming their gadgets worked in weather this cold, they were invisible.
Komarinets shook his head. “I think he imagined it, or perhaps some bit of scrap paper or old rag was blowing in the wind.”
That statement, intended to reassure him, made Rasche far more nervous-perhaps those things were out there, but hadn’t activated their invincibility gadgets until they noticed the approaching convoy.
”Whatever he saw, there is nothing out there now,” Komarinets said.
”I hope so,” Rasche said with heartfelt fervor. “I really hope so.”
Chapter 30
Schaefer took a cautious step onto the ship’s hull. “Warm,” he said, “but my boots seem to be holding up.”
”You told me they like the heat,” Ligacheva said.
”So I did,” Schaefer said, taking another step. “Didn’t know that included their ships. You know, the hull feels almost alive.”
”Maybe it is alive,” Ligacheva suggested. “We don’t know anything about it.”
”So if we go in there, we’d be walking down its throat?” Schaefer grimaced. “I can think of a few things I’d like to ram down their throats.”
”You want to make it warm enough for them, eh?” Ligacheva laughed nervously. “Well, why not?” She slid down off the boulder and began marching toward the opening, her AK-47 at the ready.
Schaefer smiled after her. “Why not?” he asked no one in particular.
Together, they walked into the ship.
Schaefer had expected some sort of airlock or antechamber between the opening and the ship’s actual interior, but there didn’t seem to be any; instead, they simply walked in, as if the opening were the mouth of a cave.
Once they were inside, though, the environment abruptly changed. The air sta
nk, a heavy, oily smell, and was thick with warm fog, reducing visibility and making it hard to breathe. The light was a dull orange-red glow that came from the red walls, walls that were completely covered in elaborate, incomprehensible patterns. Whether those patterns were machinery, or decoration, or something structural, neither Schaefer nor Ligacheva could guess.
Whatever the patterns were, they were ugly. Schaefer didn’t care to study them closely. He felt sick and dizzy enough already.
He wondered whether there were forcefields or some other device that kept the foul air in, or whether it just didn’t want to mix with Earth’s atmosphere.
”It’s FM,” he said in English, remembering something an engineer had once told him. “Fucking magic.” He looked around at the ghastly light, the oozing, roiling fog of an atmosphere, the insanely patterned walls. He peered ahead to where the curving corridor opened out into a large chamber; patterned red pillars joined floor to ceiling, while other curving passages or rounded bays opened off every side. The place was a maze, all of it awash in baleful red light and stinking mist.
”No wonder they’re such jerks,” he said. “If I spent fifteen minutes tooling around in a madhouse like this, I’d want to kill something myself.” He hefted his AK-47. “In fact, I do.”
”Wait,” Ligacheva said. “Look over there.”
”What?” Schaefer asked.
Ligacheva pointed at one of the rounded bays. Schaefer followed her as she led the way into it.
He saw, then, what had caught her eye. One section of wall here was not entirely red. It was hard to be sure, in the hideous red light, whether the pieces they were looking at were green or gray or black, but they weren’t red.
The original red wall was torn open here; to Schaefer it looked as if something had exploded, but he supposed it might simply have been ripped apart by the aliens in their efforts at repair.
And parts of the pattern had been replaced, not with more of the red substance, but with ordinary pipes and valves and circuit boards. Schaefer could see Cyrillic lettering on several of them.
”Those filthy bastards,” Ligacheva said. “The attack on the refinery, the workers slaughtered, my squad, my friends, all of them killed for this?”
”Got to give them credit,” Schaefer said calmly. “They’re resourceful. Something blew out here in the crash, or maybe caused the crash, and they needed to make an unscheduled pit stop. Your little pumping station served as their version of Trak Auto.”
”But they killed all those men for a few pieces of machinery!” Ligacheva shouted. “It’s not even anything secret, anything special just plumbing! They could have asked! They could have bartered! They could have just taken it without killing-we couldn’t have stopped them, and why would we care about junk?” She slammed the butt of her rifle against the pipes. “It’s just junk!”
Schaefer grabbed her around the waist and pulled her back. “Stop it!” he ordered. “Damn it, that’s enough!”
She struggled in his grip. “But ...”
”Just shut up! There may be more of them aboard! If you want us to have a chance to do any good here, shut up before any of those things hear us!”
Ligacheva quieted, and Schaefer released her.
”Now, I admit,” he said, “that our friends here have not been on their best behavior during their visit to your country. I agree completely that before we leave their ship, we should make sure to leave them a little something to remember us by.”
”What sort of something?” Ligacheva demanded.
Schaefer hefted the pack. “Oh, a few of these toys in the right places ought to do wonders.”
Ligacheva stared at the pack for a moment, then turned to the makeshift repair job.
”Yes,” she said. “But ...”
Before she could say any more, a blow from nowhere knocked both of them down. The choking mist seemed to be thicker down at floor level, and Schaefer was coughing even before the alien appeared out of nowhere and picked him up, one-handed, by the throat.
It was as big and ugly as any of the others Schaefer had ever seen. It wore no mask, presumably it had no need for one here aboard its own ship. Its yellow fingers and black claws closed on Schaefer’s neck, not tight enough to inflict serious damage, but tightly enough that it lifted him easily and inescapably.
Ligacheva came up out of the fog with her AK-47 in hand, but before she could squeeze -the trigger, in the second she took to be sure she wouldn’t hit Schaefer, the monster slapped her back with its free hand. She slammed against the wall and slumped, dazed, back down into the mist.
Schaefer struggled in the thing’s grip, but resisted the temptation to pry at its fingers. He knew these things were too strong for such a maneuver to do any good; strong as he was by human standards, he wouldn’t be able to free himself. He needed to find another way to fight back. Bare-handed, he couldn’t do anything; his AK-47 was out of reach; he needed some other weapon.
He reached back behind himself, stretching.
The creature growled at him, a grating, unearthly noise. The fingerlike outer fangs around its mouth flexed horribly, and the vertical slit of its mouth opened wide, revealing its inner teeth.
”Damn you to hell,” Schaefer said as his hands closed on a shard of the shattered red wall of the spaceship’s interior. He gripped it, felt the razorsharp edge where it had broken, and yanked at it.
It came away in his hand, and without a second’s hesitation he plunged it into the alien predator’s side.
The creature screamed in pain and flung him aside as if he were so much junk mail, tearing the makeshift dagger from his grasp.
Schaefer rolled when he landed and came up gasping but intact. He started for the broken section of wall, hoping to find another sharp fragment he could use.
”Just tell me,” he said as he watched the bellowing alien, looking for a chance to dodge past it toward the wreckage, “why Earth? Why is it always Earth? What’s wrong with the big game on Mars, or Jupiter, or the goddamn Dog Star, or whatever the hell is out there? It’s a big fucking galaxy, isn’t it? Why can’t you just...”
Then he saw the shadow in the fog behind his foe, and even before the new arrival turned off its invisibility shield, Schaefer knew he was facing a second enemy in addition to the wounded one.
Then the creature appeared, and Schaefer saw that it was carrying a corpse draped over its right shoulder-an alien corpse, the corpse of the sentry he and Ligacheva had killed out in the canyon.
”Oh, shit.”
He backed up against the broken section of wall, knowing that he was letting himself be cornered, but not knowing what else he could do. The wounded predator was staggering slightly, holding its side, but still upright; the new arrival was ignoring its injured companion and staring directly at Schaefer, but not yet moving to attack. It lifted its dead companion off its shoulder and lowered the body gently to the floor, all the while keeping its masked eyes directed straight at Schaefer.
Then the uninjured alien reached up and disconnected something from its mask; gas hissed for a few seconds. It lifted the metal mask away and revealed its ghastly face; those hideous mouth parts, looking like some unholy hybrid of fang, finger, and tentacle, were flexing in anticipation. It took a step closer to Schaefer as he groped unsuccessfully for another sharp piece of wreckage.
Then Ligacheva came up out of the reeking mist again, her AK-47 at her shoulder, and fired.
The aliens, Schaefer knew, could shrug off most small-caliber bullets; their hides were incredibly tough. Depleted uranium coated in Teflon, however, was something new to them; Ligacheva’s shots punched through the monsters as if they were merely human, and glowing yellow-green blood sprayed from a dozen sudden wounds.
The previously unharmed creature went down at once; the fog swirled up in clouds. The other alien, presumably already heavily dosed with whatever these things used as the equivalent of endorphins, snapped its jagged double wrist blades into place and tottered several steps
toward Ligacheva before collapsing into the mist.
”They aren’t dead!” Schaefer shouted. He had seen before how tough these things were.
”I know that,” Ligacheva said, irritated. She stepped forward, pointed the AK-47 at one alien’s head, and squeezed the trigger.
Yellow gore sprayed.
She turned her attention to the other alien; it managed to roll over and raise one clawed hand as she approached, but that only meant that it took her last eight rounds directly in the face.
The echoes of the gunfire were oddly muffled in the foggy atmosphere and died away quickly.
Ligacheva stood over the three creatures-the two she had just taken down and the one she had slain earlier. She stared down at them through the mist, getting as good a look as she could at their ruined faces.
”Now they’re dead,” she said, satisfied.
”Probably,” Schaefer agreed. “Let’s not hang around to be sure, though. If there are any more of these joyboys aboard this madhouse, they could be here any minute.”
”I can reload while you make your bomb ...”
”I think we’d be smarter doing that outside,” Schaefer said. “They could be here now-remember their little invisibility trick.”
Something hissed somewhere. Ligacheva hesitated another half second, then turned and sprinted back up the corridor they had entered by.
Schaefer was right behind her.
A moment later they emerged into open air, Earth’s air. Even the cool, flavorless Siberian air, utterly devoid of any scent of life, was far better than the stuff they had been breathing aboard the alien ship, and once they had scrambled from the hot hull up onto the familiar boulder they both paused for a few seconds to savor it.
Schaefer glanced at Ligacheva. She wasn’t beautiful, but right then he was glad to be looking at her. “Pretty good shooting in there, comrade,” he said.
”Credit your American technology,” Ligacheva said. “And of course, my damned good aim.” She ejected the spent magazine from her AK-47. “And give me another clip of that technology, would you?”
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