The Harvester tweaked the heart, and fresh blood began to flow into the Greenfly. The Greenfly’s eyes moved within their housing, and its neck and limbs arched as it returned to life. It looked down upon the orange mound sticking out of its mid-section.
The Harvester dimpled its surface in a pattern nearly as complex as the language used by the Greenflies. The Greenfly, confused and weak but feeling stronger by the minute, complied with the Harvester’s demands. It slid off of the metal table and approached its nearest neighbor, a Greenfly whose entire head had been removed. The Harvester extended a new set of tentacles through the severed neck and transferred itself to its new patient.
For such an experienced Harvester, the twenty-three Greenflies in this room would go very quickly. The weapons in the next room would go faster.
Meg and most of the staff from Xenosociology were staying together in the lower mess hall, almost as if this emergency were just another lunch hour. The klaxons had long since stopped sounding, but the spinning red alarm lights still flashed along the walls of the mess. The mess halls and large conference rooms on the lower levels were considered the emergency shelters, and the entire civilian staff at the base were now huddled in these chambers. There was very little communication about the military situation outside. Even the soldiers assigned to guard these rooms were keeping mum.
There was a little bit of a commotion as Dr. Butler was brought in, a security officer on each arm. He was resisting, albeit half-heartedly, as they man-handled him into this supposedly safe room. When it was all over, Butler brushed himself off and approached the Xenosociology table as if he hadn’t just kicked a sergeant in the shin a moment before.
“Reminds me of my sit-in days,” he said, taking a seat beside Meg.
“What was that all about, Jerry?” asked Meg.
“The Gestapo wouldn’t let me see Greenbeard. He might have some valuable insight into how the Greenflies suddenly changed tactics like this. I did manage to get to the security room and see some footage of what’s going on on the surface. The arrowheads are dropping teleportation bombs all over the base, but it’s not random. They started with the runway, and now they’re trying to take out the laser cannons on the perimeter. The surface cameras are going out like clockwork, the landlines connecting them getting cut by the bombs.”
Franz had overheard a little from the Physics table next along the row. He immediately abandoned them and moved to stand over Butler.
“The automated firing system; how’s it handling things?” asked Franz.
“Very well,” Butler said. “The bombs are mostly being shot out of the air as they fall, and at least six of the arrowheads have been shot out of the sky, but the system is going to be overwhelmed pretty soon. Each bomb that makes it through reduces the effectiveness of the screen. Colonel Marshal has taken command of all of the Interception squads, trainees, and ground forces out there. He’s got it in his head that the Greenflies are preparing to storm the facility.”
“He might not be far off,” said Paul, one of the others from Xenosociology. “Their tactics have suddenly turned very human.”
“How can they being doing this? They’re not supposed to understand runways or laser cannons,” said Meg.
“Or satellites or airplanes or the differences between a military base and a small town,” added Franz.
“Someone got domesticated,” suggested Paul, glumly.
“What?”
Butler explained for him, “He means that a human captive probably began giving the Greenflies information in the same way we’ve been getting information from Greenbeard. If the Greenflies or Whaleship could somehow overcome the communication problem, it would not take a militarily savvy individual to show them the soft underbelly of human armies. Just reading a newspaper or watching CNN would be enough to know that Earth’s defense is dependent upon satellites and aircraft. They’ve always had the capacity to win this war. They’ve just been too limited in their understanding of humanity to figure out how.”
“A traitor,” said Meg.
“Don’t judge them too harshly. If you were threatened with whatever the Greenflies consider a choke-chain for their domesticated animals, you might turn as well. It’s a rare individual who can resist torture,” said Butler. “I wrote a paper on it once. Evidently, it’s the fear of the…”
He was interrupted by a loud bang from somewhere in the halls nearby. It was followed by the sound of metal twisting and tearing. From the volume, the destructive noise couldn’t have been more than thirty or forty yards away.
“That isn’t a teleportation bomb,” said Franz.
The metal tearing noise stopped, and a new noise replaced it. It was a sound that still haunted Meg’s dreams, the dreams that cast her back in her family home, her father dead on the porch in a cloud of angry bees. The buzzing coming from the mess exit was identical, and it was growing louder.
“Run,” said Meg. She didn’t pause a moment for the others as she bolted for the mess kitchen door.
The bees swarmed through the entrance to the mess, surrounding the inhabitants in clouds. Not a one of them, not even the security personnel, were wearing more than cloth, as it had been nearly a year since the aliens had switched to plasma and the last bug gun had been seen in the field. Men and women collapsed, the venom of the stings so effective that little more than a brief scream was possible. Only Butler, Franz, and a few others from the table followed Meg quickly enough to avoid the stinging swarm.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t anyplace to go from the kitchen. There was a freight entrance, but that was closed and obviously locked. The room itself was a typical military kitchen, designed to feed hundreds through the use of bulky metal machinery. There were a few walk-in refrigerators, and it was to one of these that Meg was moving, hardly breaking pace. She, Butler, and most of the remaining survivors huddled into one and clicked the door closed behind them. It was only then that Meg realized she had left one of her friends behind in the kitchen.
Franz could have gotten into the refrigerator with the others, or he could have climbed into one of the other refrigerators or an oven. Instead, he stood in the center of the room, glancing around looking for something. When he found it, insects were already climbing under the front door. As he raced over to the stove the bees had begun to swarm.
“Franz!” screamed Meg, her voice muffled by the thick door.
Franz broke open a glass case beside the stove top with his bare hand and jabbed at a button within. The kitchen’s old fire suppression system kicked in immediately, spraying the entire room down with purplish foam. It formed a thick layer on everything, from the stainless steel countertops to Franz to the venomous insects desperately trying to fly. They plopped to the floor like fat, purple raindrops.
Coated in the gunk, Franz made his way through the purple rain to stand in front of the refrigerator. His face was barely visible, but the relief upon it was profound.
“Better wait for this stuff to stop before you come out,” he said, trying to keep it out of his eyes.
“Colonel, we’ve got reports of Greenfly sightings in the lower levels of the base.”
Another commanding officer would have reacted emotionally to the news, but Marshal took it in stride. He was standing with three comm officers and a few infantrymen in a watchtower on the training side of the base, overlooking the airstrip but with sufficient height to make out the entire perimeter of the base. Thus far, the entire alien assault had been limited to teleportation bombs, but Marshal knew that that was only preliminary.
The perimeter laser cannons and squads of snipers directed by Captain Decker had been able to destroy most of the falling bombs and the arrowheads which dropped them, but enough had gotten through to reveal that the aliens were targeting the entrenched defenses. The only reason for that was as a preamble for invasion. For a race that wasn’t supposed to understand tools, the Greenflies were doing a pretty good job of knocking out air defense emplacements and disrupting la
ndline communication. The base defenders had been reduced to radio communication, which garbled to incomprehensibility every time there was a teleportation.
“Get four squads down there,” Marshal told the comm officer who had reported the sighting. “Their first priority is to determine the strength of enemy forces within the base. I want intel straight from the security cameras down there.”
The bombs stopped falling, and the last of the arrowhead fighters above teleported out of sight.
“Here it comes,” said Marshal.
A blue flash unlike any that had been seen before appeared over the center of the airstrip tarmac. Even with the flash suppression in the soldiers’ helmets, the burst left starry after-images on the retinas of all who saw it. A single creature the size of five or six alien transports had teleported in, its column-like legs a couple feet above the ground. It fell those two feet, staggering with the shock of absorbing the tremendous impact. For the first time in sixty million years, a dinosaur walked the Earth.
At least, it had been a dinosaur once. The basic sauropod frame was obvious, with its four legs and its back the size of a highway overpass. A long slender neck emerged from what must have been the front of the creature, and an equally flexible tail emerged from the rear. On top of this basic framework, the aliens had done a lot of work. The flanks of the creature bore the same type of brownish hide as that of the alien transports, and it was clear the creature had a similar ability to teleport, if not hover. Armor bugs were already bursting from its skin, but these armor bugs were much different than those seen before. They were the size of manhole covers, and they shone like a mirror, their natural armor ability enhanced with reflectivity to make laser attacks less effective. The most glaring change to the sauropod was the replacement of its skull and the tip of its tail with batteries of plasma cannons. There was no sign of any eyes on the creature, but the long neck and tail aimed their masses of plasma cannons nimbly and accurately.
“Open up,” directed Marshal.
A hundred individual beams of laser light lanced out from foxholes and sandbag emplacements on the surface of both lobes of the base. Some of the beams were the new heavy lasers, designed to penetrate the heavy armor bugs and hide of alien transports, but most were just laser rifles. Most of these beams scattered off of the Sauropod’s reflective armor, but even the beams that seemed to penetrate only made the creature smolder. A bellow emerged from somewhere on the creature, and it swung its head and tail in different directions to fire at enemies on both sides of the airstrip. The cones of plasma from those cannon batteries did not stop after a brief shot, however. They sprayed their targets continuously with plasma, like water from a hose. Without flash suppression the humans would have been completely blinded.
Two more Sauropods appeared above the battered runway, and the ground shook with their landings. They used their bulk and blasts of plasma to provide cover for the arrival of other creatures with which the ground forces were more familiar. The shapes of brown alien transports began appearing among the sauropods. They, too, were quickly covered in the improved armor bugs, and they each boasted several large turrets.
“Give me artillery fire on the center of the tarmac,” ordered Marshal, “I want a dust cloud over the tarmac. If anything else arrives, I want it to destroy itself through the matter-energy effect.”
The tanks stationed at the base perimeter had been considered obsolete compared to the heavy lasers, but they had not gone unmanned. It took a moment, but shells began striking the concrete of the tarmac, sending up great plumes of dust. No other alien craft appeared, but if they did, the collision with the dust would surely destroy them and probably the surrounding alien forces. The tanks had no direct view of their targets, but there was occasionally a lucky shot, a shell striking a sauropod and blasting off a cluster of armor bugs.
“Sir…”
One of the communications men was trying to draw his attention to the first of the transports to appear. Its hatches were open, and it was disgorging something different. The new creatures were small, about the size of a mid-sized dog, but they bore no resemblance to anything seen on earth before. They were based on a three-legged, radially symmetrical architecture with three vertebral columns leading from legs to the center of the creature. There was no obvious head, or anything, really, other than the legs, which were heavily muscled. There was a metallic sheen to the animals, as if they were made from steel cast in organic shapes. It became obvious quickly what the creatures were for. They were evolved to run, and they were small enough to fit a hundred in an alien transport. Packs of the triped runners bolted away from the alien transports, charging towards the sources of laser beams. Through binoculars, Marshal could make out wicked metal claws on the runners.
Before he could issue another order, there was another rush of wind towards the perimeter, indicating the teleportation bombardment had begun again. With its ground troops deployed, the alien army was resuming air support.
Marshal snagged the radio off the nearest comm. man, “Cavalry, go. Cut down those runners before they make it to the troop lines. Infantry, switch to missiles, and take those dinosaurs down. This is your best opportunity. They have begun bombing again to clear the dust screen from the airstrip. Once it’s gone, there will be a second wave.”
Spirals of rocket exhaust streamed from infantry positions, terminating as great explosions on the flanks and legs of the dinosaurs and the armor plates of the alien transports. Meanwhile, the first generation of man-made hover-vehicle screamed out across the landscape, looking much like the flying motorcycles of science fiction films. Small, automated laser turrets on the sides of the vehicles chopped into the triped runners, as the hovercycles flew above them, just out of reach of their leaping and clawing.
Marshal looked down at the scene without emotion, but the tactical disadvantage was clear. The human soldiers’ cover would not last long against plasma weapons, and a breakthrough by the tripeds would break discipline and morale instantly. What was worse, from the aliens’ continuing efforts to dispel the dust cloud, it was clear they wanted to reinforce. There was no way of knowing how many alien forces could be brought to bear on Utah Base, but it would likely be enough. If the day was to be survived and his handler saved, they would have to find a way to strike out at the source.
A plasma blast melted the forward armor of Colonel Marshal’s watchtower, and the occupants ducked down behind the sagging metal rail.
Marshal grabbed the arm of the nearest comm man, “Find me what members of Gamma squad you can. Now.”
The group ducked behind a hallway corner as they heard another sound of plasma from somewhere in the facility. Franz was still covered in the purple fire retardant chemical, drying and congealing across his clothes. Meg and Butler were taking turns at leading the way, Butler possessing the security codes they needed for locked doorways and Meg being very sensitive as to when they needed to run. They’d left the others hiding in the walk-in refrigerator.
Since they had chosen to leave the kitchen, they’d nearly run into Greenflies several times. How they had gotten into the base was anybody’s guess. Fortunately, most of them were armed with plasma weapons rather than the bug guns, so there had been no more clouds of venomous insects in the hallways. Unfortunately, there were enough aliens wandering around to block the group every time they tried to find a secure location or a working elevator. They were stuck on the lowest levels of the base, and they’d yet to run across a living soldier down here.
“We need to get to Greenbeard’s cell,” said Butler. “It’s as safe a place as can be found around here, and it has an airlock passageway to the labs on the upper levels. Even if there aren’t people on that level, we can get to the surface from there if we have to.”
“You want us to trust that alien in the middle of an alien attack?” asked Meg.
“He might not even know it’s going on,” suggested Franz.
“Or he might have already been set free by his buddies
,” said Meg.
“We don’t have many other options. That last hallway was the only other way to the upper levels, and you heard the plasma blast as well as I,” said Butler. “Besides, Greenbeard most likely still believes we have the capacity to kill him if he betrays us. Honestly, I’m not sure if we do. All of the people who might have held that remote control may well be dead now, and mine is back in my office.”
The three made their way to the central corridor of this level, emerging into one of the original bio-labs from the first days of the program, the security door ripped off its hinges with large claw marks across its face. The steel pathology tables were empty; the specimens that had been housed here had long since been removed and placed into nearby vaults, and the active labs had long since been moved to a higher level. These lower levels were now dedicated to more mundane projects such as storage of valuable specimens and containment for the alien prisoner. It was sort of an antechamber for the vaults and the lower level entrance to the detention area. Unfortunately these heavy security doors all hung open and showed signs of Greenfly mayhem.
The white tiled room still possessed some of the plastic sheets that could be sealed around dissection table to form a vacuum seal. For some reason, the transparent plastic sheets had a number of holes ripped through them. Someone had also knocked out most of the lights. An ominous silence hung over the room, only broken by the occasional rumble from the battlefield far above.
“Let’s just get to your pet Greenfly, and…”
A Greenfly dropped from his resting place on the ceiling and landed on a metal table only a few feet from the human group. It clung to the table with all six limbs, weaponless but certainly not unarmed. The steel edge of the dissection table bent under the force of each clawed hand. Its eyes were fixated on the group of humans. Something seemed odd about the creature’s head, as if it had a slightly different texture than the rest of the creature. There was a ragged scar around its neck.
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