“This may result in punishment, sir,” Decker said meekly, staring down at the two slightly smoldering soldiers at his feet.
“Damn right it’s going to result in punishment, you crazy freak!” Murray screamed. “Lassiter is going to have your asses for this! We’re on the same fucking side, here!”
He had been pinned by Rice, but unlike the others in Beta team, he was still completely conscious.
“Strip his gear,” Marshal said, calmly.
Rice and Decker did as ordered, Rice replacing his stun-rod and Decker his laser rifle in the process. Being stripped to his skivvies seemed to bring about an immediate change in Murray. He suddenly began trying to bargain with the Gammas. Perhaps he was working his way through the stages of crisis very rapidly. He’d probably be somewhere around depression just before being teleported into deep space.
“This is a courtesy to a fellow soldier, Murray. So you don’t have to wait for death, slowly asphyxiating in your armor. You won’t suffer long,” said Marshal. “Bring him.”
Rice and Decker dragged him kicking and screaming towards the obstruction. The young man was extremely fit, and in the end, Marshal had to shoot him in the leg before the other Gammas could easily manage him. Before long they had him suspended between them a few yards in front of the barricade.
“We didn’t mean it, okay!” screamed Murray, “We were just following orders! Lassiter knew something was up with you guys and wanted a blood sample! We knew Hegerty wouldn’t report the attack so… we were just following orders!”
Marshal looked at the young man, his face unreadable, “No harm, done, son. We don’t bear grudges.”
Then, he pointed at the obstruction.
“Throw him.”
Rice and Decker swung him a couple times for momentum, and then Murray was bodily flung onto the pile of debris. Nearly the entirety of the obstruction immediately disappeared in a flash of light. The only sign it had ever been there was a hemispherical depression in the floor. Somewhere far out in space, John Murray was discovering whether the concept of explosive decompression was a myth or scientific fact.
“You… monsters…” came a weak cry from behind them.
Gamma Team looked back to see Captain Arnold propping himself on one elbow, the boot to the head having thoroughly concussed him. In a very unfocused way, he had probably witnessed everything.
Gamma walked out of sight down the tunnel.
The cistern itself was a cylindrical chamber several floors in height, and half a football field in diameter. Their tunnel led into the cistern towards the top of the room, the now-empty trough meant to spill into a series of pools and channels below. This vantage point gave them an excellent view of the chamber, now turned into an alien embarkation area.
A half dozen therapsids paced the periphery of the room, snuffling the ground like bloodhounds but unable to scent the humans for all of the olfactory interference down here. Four turret bugs were stationed on the ceiling, evenly spaced, but they too were ignoring the humans for the moment. The center of the room had once held a number of pipes, leading from the ceiling and heading into the floor and walls. Those pipes had now been bent aside, removed or welded shut by plasma, and the central half of the room’s area was now bare, save for the alien transports intermittently appearing and disappearing from sight. The flashes of blue came every twenty seconds or so, with three vehicles in the cistern at any given time. These alien transports were different from earlier ones encountered, the entire upper surface of the craft gaping open, rather than opening individual ports. The vehicles stayed for about a minute, just long enough for the alien transports to disgorge their cargo (swarms of birds which made a beeline for an open pipe near the ceiling), move a few yards to one side, brush up against a pipe covered floor to ceiling with ants, close its doors, and disappear once more.
“Too many,” mumbled Marshal.
Rice said, “And sir, if we do any damage down there, the transports are coming too fast to compensate for it. If we kick up a chunk of rubble into the path of an incoming alien transport…”
“Matter converts to energy, and Tokyo disappears,” Marshal concluded for him. “We can barely risk firing for fear of causing damage and destroying the city.”
“Clever,”added Decker, “We can’t fight them. The way they’re coming and going like clockwork.”
Marshal paused, making another check of the room.
“We can’t fight them, HERE,” Marshal corrected, “Rice, that large severed pipe over the point where the alien craft disappears, where the ants are coming in – could we get access to that?”
Rice paused to enter some data on his wrist-top keyboard and peer at his heads-up display. After a moment, he nodded.
“Easily, sir.”
“Then it should be possible to drop into one of those alien transports a moment before it disappears. I don’t see any Greenflies down there. They are probably on some form of automatic pilot.”
“A bomb, sir?”asked Decker.
“Maybe…”Marshal paused, “I think we need them again.”
The four remaining members of Beta team lay tied up in a row in front of them in the tunnel. Gamma had backtracked and bound the soldiers to force them to listen to a little proposal. Arnold was only barely conscious, his head listing to one side, but he was appearing to make an effort to pay attention. Marshal faced them, Rice and Decker flanking him with their laser rifles leveled at the hostages.
“I’m going to ask for a volunteer,” said Marshal.
The Major spat at him.
“We’ve found the alien embarkation point, and we believe we have a means to attack, not just them, but perhaps one of their bases,” Marshal continued, ignoring the spittle dripping down his armor. “They have established what amounts to a teleportation assembly line in the cistern we were looking for. From scratches and other recognizable markings on the alien transports, it appears that the aliens are not using a quarantine point, but are rather sending a steady stream of nine transports from a specific location with a transit time of thirty seconds or so. If we were to cause any damage to the embarkation area, we’d most likely disrupt a teleportation and cause the annihilation of Tokyo.
“It appears that there is a way to gain entrance to one of the transports just before it leaves. If someone were to do that, they could attack the alien waypoint itself.”
“So do it, already!” yelled the Major.
“They can’t,” said Farcus meekly. “It would be a suicide mission.”
“And that would mean they can’t get their next fix,” added Davies, the Beta demolition man.
“Fucking junkies,” said the Major. “Just send a bomb through.”
Marshal nodded, “We had considered that, but a human with a bomb as a fail safe would be more reliable. Could react to the environment.”
“I’ll do it,” said Farcus.
“You will not! Let the junkies send a bomb through!” yelled the Major.
“The junkies are right, Norman.”
Rice moved forward to cut Farcus’s bindings and pull him to his feet. He handed the soldier his helmet, but withheld the laser rifle, presumably until they were ready to send him through the pipe. Without another word, Rice and Marshal began ushering Farcus down the corridor. Decker remained, presumably to guard the remaining prisoners.
“Get back here, Farcus!” the Major yelled, just as the three men left ear shot.
Once he was sure the rest of Beta could no longer hear, Farcus asked, “You’re going to kill them, aren’t you?”
Marshal paused before answering, as if to assess Farcus’s character and determine whether a lie would be necessary to ensure cooperation.
“Yes.”
“They were destined to die the instant you decided to use one of us to open the barricade, weren’t they? So there’d be no witnesses.”
“Yes. Witnesses to such an encounter would have damaged our handler, and we would have been punished.”
&nb
sp; “And you didn’t kill them all on the spot because…”
“We might have needed to trigger more mines,” Marshal answered. “That is also how Decker will dispose of the bodies.”
“You really are monsters,” Farcus said.
“So I’m told.”
The trio was taking a roundabout route, first leading away from the cistern, and then finding their way into a set of utility tunnels that would lead to the desired pipe. The utility tunnels appeared unguarded, being too small for the therapsids. Also, the route required passage through several doors, an invention the turret bugs would simply not understand. To turret bugs, and even Greenflies, doors were simply dead ends. To creatures with thumbs and laser rifles, such as the Gamma soldiers, locked doors were barely even a delay.
When they reached the pipe, it was at a horizontal section perhaps twenty feet above the ceiling of the cistern. The steel drainage pipe was four feet in diameter and meant to carry runoff into the cistern for elimination to the ocean. Marshal sliced it open with his laser rifle to reveal an interior lined not with mud or scum but with several inches thick of squirming insects.
“This is the ants’ path back to the transports to deliver their genetic material back to base,” said Marshal, “It continues another fifteen feet in that direction, then drops directly into the back of one of those alien transports. There is one there for fifteen seconds before it disappears, then there is a ten second pause before the next one moves into position below the pipe. Get to the edge, look down, and time the jump. It’s going to be a long drop, but nothing you haven’t done in jump training.”
“Right, and the…”
He felt a slap on the back of his armor.
“The bomb’s attached. It’s five minutes, starting now,” said Rice.
Marshal handed Farcus the laser rifle. Farcus knew that if he so much as blinked in the wrong way, now that he was armed, Rice would send a laser beam through his head.
“Lassiter has a plan to make more soldiers like you. He’s been setting up a surgical and training facility in Virginia. After seeing what you’re capable of now, I don’t think you should let him. Tell Caufield.”
Marshal nodded, and Farcus charged down the tunnel.
At first, he couldn’t even see the passage down to the cistern, so thick were the ants. The diffuse red light emitted by his rifle showed several inches of the creatures over every surface, including his own armor. He was certain, if not for the armor, he would be well on his way to being consumed alive right now.
He reached the drop-off to the cistern, and watched as gobs of ants fell away from the pipe into waiting transports. The flashes of transports arriving just out of his line of sight illuminated his target. Gamma Team had not exaggerated; it was very much clockwork. Farcus was quite certain he could time it so that there was barely a second between when he hit a transport and when it teleported way. He bided his time, still aware of the bomb ticking away on his back.
He dropped.
Rice and Decker helped Colonel Marshal up the ladder to the surface. The sky here, right by the port, was relatively clear, but a great pall of debris hung over most of the city. Boats were buzzing away from the city, trying to escape the panic that was occurring within, and, as a result, they were creating accidents of their own out in the ocean. Three boat collisions were visible just from the manhole cover from which Gamma Team had climbed.
Decker, who had reached the surface first, pointed at the sky.
The moon, nearly full, had developed a growth. The bright curve of the moon was now distorted with a bulge, a region of the dust that had been blown off the surface. There also appeared to be a reddish circle beneath the bulge, rimmed by a black ring.
“Matter to energy,” said Rice, “I wonder how much he weighed.”
“Two-fifty with gear, I’d say,” said Decker.
“He must’ve just stood in the way of the next arriving transport once he got there.”
“Enough chatter,” Marshal scowled, “Rice, get me Caufield on a secure channel.”
Chapter 20: Monsters
“The Greenfly base on your moon has been destroyed?”
“Yes.”
Greenbeard appeared to take the news fairly calmly. Butler had come to realize that Greenflies could express vehement emotion without moving a limb. When angry, their skin would writhe in discontinuous swaths, as if their language centers were arguing with each other. Their confocal inner eyeballs would move in their sockets, no doubt losing focus and adding a new meaning to the term ‘blind with rage.’ Greenbeard exhibited none of these symptoms. He had apparently grown detached enough from his people that he was able to sit calmly sphinx-like as he heard of hundreds of Greenfly deaths.
“That is regrettable. It is likely there were many Greenflies there,” said Greenbeard.
Butler nodded, “We feel that it is a first step in driving the Whaleship away from our system.”
Greenbeard paused as if the information was a great revelation. He now spoke through a translator mounted on the glass barrier itself, and the translator interpreted the confused movements of his skin as a clicking noise for a second. When he did speak, it was clearly with great deliberation. After his nine months of captivity, Greenbeard had grown quite articulate, but he realized he was poor at communicating ideas any Greenfly knew instinctively.
“That has never been a possibility,” replied Greenbeard.
“Surely, once enough casualties have been sustained or the Whaleship runs out of supplies…”
“More Greenflies can be built, and they will be more loyal to the Whaleship for their lack of blood savings. As for supplies, even now Harvesters are picking apart comets and asteroids in this system. There is nothing the Whaleship needs that cannot be obtained from the abundant resources in this system. I anticipate that your successes will delay the final attack of the Whaleship, eliminating most life on earth. All you have bought is time.”
“If we eventually destroy the Whaleship…”
The Greenfly began responding before the words were out of Butler’s mouth, “If you were to destroy the Whaleship, this system would be deemed a threat, and it would be destroyed, along with all life-bearing planets here. The Whaleships possess a means to communicate with each other instantaneously. Were you to destroy the Whaleship, the others would know you to be the cause. They are aware of what has been transpiring so far.”
“So, what would you have us do, just roll over and die?”
“I do not understand the significance of posture in this instance, but yes. Your species’ extinction is inevitable. You are clearly the dominant large land organism on your planet, and as such, it will be incumbent upon the Whaleship to ensure your extinction before leaving. If not, your kind will dominate the new ecology and reduce biodiversity. The future harvest of genetic material would be reduced. Humans must be destroyed. As you are an adaptable species, several methods will most likely be employed.
“Large populations of human-specific predatory animals will be released. It will most likely be a terrestrial animal from a previous visit, selected based upon human strengths and weaknesses, and supplemented by domesticated organisms such as the armor bugs. The quadrupedal animals you described to me from the city of Tokyo might be a first attempt at assembling such a creature. Other options might include the bipedal organisms I encountered on my last visit to this planet or some type of avian. Such creatures could be relied upon to dramatically reduce human population, but humans have shown a capacity to hide and burrow, so secondary methods would have to be employed.
“A disease pathogen would then be the next logical step, something that would remain in the environment indefinitely after release. This would most likely be drawn into your sanctuaries and, for those sanctuaries which remain sterile, the pathogen would be waiting for humans upon their emergence. As most human genetic variability is now known to the Whaleship, the pathogen would be very specific.
“Last would be a major impact e
vent to reset the remainder of the biosphere. This is most likely the fate of the Troy asteroid that has been shaped into a sphere. While the spherical shape makes it possible to displace to any point on the earth’s surface, the shape will also minimize material loss during atmospheric entry.
“It won’t work,” replied Butler.
“Explain.”
“Not a bit of it. If our soldiers have demonstrated anything to you, it’s their ability to adapt to any new creature the Whaleship throws at us. The Whaleship’s predators, lacking our tools or intelligence, will fall to human tactics. The disease you speak of will most likely kill large sections of our population, but we know a great deal about quarantine and vaccines. It may take hundreds of years, but we will isolate such a disease and find a way to counter it. As to the asteroid impact, it worked excellently against the dinosaurs, but the dinosaurs didn’t have food preservation, artificial lighting, and greenhouses. They didn’t have mine shafts. You can be sure that facilities miles deep into the bedrock have been being prepared since the first Greenfly appeared on Earth. The Whaleship can take a huge bite out of our population, but, because of its own limitations, it cannot understand us well enough to destroy us.”
The Greenfly nodded, a human gesture it had picked up, “You are most likely correct. Your planet has always proven irritating in eliminating dominant species. For instance, three efforts have failed to eliminate the cartilaginous fish in your ocean. Your species may be considered more of a threat. If so, the Whaleship will most likely visit you again after its next stop, maybe in a hundred of your years, and repeat the process. If you are deemed a threat to other planets’ biota, it will destroy your planet.”
“The planet?” asked Butler, a little stunned.
Greenflies Page 26