About a hundred yards or so out in a shallow gulch, the blue object had belly-flopped and split apart, leaving a deep furrow in the dirt. No way was this a meteorite. Tangled scraps of metallic debris were jumbled in the gulch and splashed up and over the sides. The fire was loud, as were the arcs of electricity stabbing out from fragments of what had to have been a hull. What had caused Ben to stomp the brakes, pushing through the yelp of protest from his damaged leg, was the perfect silver dart hovering a few feet above the rough shrubs and dirt of the New Mexican desert.
It was the size of tractor trailer, but coiled like a sports car. Faint wisps of yellow smoke or vapor drifted from the reflective surface and wandered off into the night sky. The flames from the crash reflected off the bottom of the silver ship, dancing with the mirrored starlight from above.
It was definitely a ship. An alien ship. There was nothing in the human arsenal, not even in the experimental programs Ben had occasionally observed, that could do what this huge machine was doing, hovering silently in midair.
Ben’s mind, trained to react to anything, struggled to respond. He killed the engine, eased open the door, and slipped out of his truck. Maybe he was still lying in the sand at the foot of the hill, hallucinating through his pain. Or perhaps he had simply lost his mind. That seemed unlikely. His senses seemed to be working normally. His leg was still in tearing, burning agony. His nose detected the bitter scent of the fire. That couldn’t be how insanity worked, could it? Did a psychotic break have a smell?
At some point, you just had to trust what your body was telling you. Whatever was unfolding right now in this quadrant of nowhere must be real, or else nothing was. He’d deal with the impossibility of it all later.
Instinctively, Ben edged toward a shadow behind a boulder a few feet to his left, his right hand drifting down to the SIG P226 pistol strapped to his thigh. He sensed, though, that if this were to turn into a shooting match, he was probably outgunned.
Seconds passed. A minute.
No frame of reference for how to act. No training exercise had prepared him. This felt like a surreal video game, but with no indicators pointing to the next objective. He was hiding behind a rock, looking at a machine from another planet, and had no idea what to do next.
Just as he was about to inch out, the silver ship hissed and a door opened. Or, rather, it melted out of the hull of the ship, like mercury, changing shape, flowing into the form of a ramp. A moment later, a figure emerged. Ben stretched to see. The flames on the other side of the craft made it hard to make out details, but the creature looked human enough, with two arms, legs, and a head. It moved lightly, with a glowing cable or stripe of some kind extending down its left arm from roughly the elbow to the hand. In its hand, attached to the glowing cable, the creature held a device about the size of a small flashlight.
Gun.
Ben leaned back into the shadow, only his left eye exposed. A tingle of familiarity coursed through his body. A gun was something he could understand, even if nothing else here made sense.
The figure either didn’t notice or didn’t care that Ben was there. It turned right toward the crash site, hopped off the side of the ramp the last foot or so to the ground, and climbed down into the gully where the first ship had died. The creature disappeared into the maelstrom.
Ben breathed.
Rocks crunched behind him.
He spun, pistol in hand.
Another creature lay sprawled against the stone. It was nothing like the first. This seven-foot figure was, by all appearances, a grasshopper that had drunk the growth potion from Alice in Wonderland. A sprawl of legs and arms covered in a green-brown exoskeleton, each ending in talons and hooks. A long torso, or thorax, at the top of which was a small head with bulbous eyes, two antennas, and a pair of clicking mandibles for a mouth. Whatever flimsy grasp on the situation Ben had started to develop instantly came loose.
The creature was clearly dying. Two of its four legs had been torn off at the “knees,” and two gaping holes in its side pumped out green fluid. The creature wheezed. A raspy, rattling sound clattered from its mouth.
Ben held his gun and his gaze steady on the crumpled figure. The creature attempted to rise. The arms and legs fought for purchase, yet failed, collapsing back. It stared up at Ben. The mandibles opened as if to speak, but made only an unintelligible snapping sound and spat out more of the green ooze.
One skeletal arm lifted off the ground and beckoned Ben forward. Hesitating, he clenched his weapon, feeling the sweat running again down his body, the heat from the crash fire mingling with the frosty air.
There was no other human within at least 30 miles. That’s why he was here. It was a place to settle his thoughts and rebuild his shattered body. He hadn’t spoken to another human in weeks, living out of a tent, catching small prey, learning to shoot again, and trying not to think of a future beyond the next dawn. The wandering coyote had been his closest thing to a companion. Under the sun and the moon, Ben had left behind the rest of the world and it had been happy to return the favor. He’d brought a cellphone with a solar charger, but it was kept off and he’d quickly forgotten about the device. All had collapsed down into a black hole, the solitary man slipping over the event horizon, the gnawing pain in his leg the only tether to the past.
But for all that had been lost, Ben had gained some clarity. He thought he might spend the rest of his life in this desert, a prophet without a gospel. There was life here. It was hard land, but not barren. There was water in the rocks if you knew how to call it forth, and food if you knew how to hunt. Ben had given enough to the world. He had bled on almost every continent, sometimes nearly to death. Certainly many of his friends, too many, had bled out on those alien, enemy wastelands.
Out here, though, now, on this frigid patch of dirt that had been ancient when humans were learning to walk, this shattered creature on the ground was going to be a problem that could not be ignored. Ben sensed that everything was about to change, for everyone, regardless of whether he lived through the next few seconds. He tensed, then relaxed.
“Aw, hell,” he whispered, and bent forward.
The wounded creature struck with impossible speed, a last gasp that was almost imperceptible to the human eye. One claw slapped the gun from Ben’s hand, snapping several bones in his wrist like toothpicks, while another drove a spike into his right thigh. Ben looked down, stunned at the lightning attack. His right hand flopped uselessly, but that was the least of his concerns. The object jutting from his leg was the bigger issue.
About the size of a test tube, the silver cylinder was buried so deep that it had scraped bone. The exposed end of the object sank down. It was apparently some sort of plunger on a syringe, and Ben felt a liquid injection course through his leg muscle. The pain came like flood water breaking the banks, quickly followed by a second surge of rage.
Ben ripped the object from his leg with his left hand and hurled it into the darkness—along with a stream of his own blood—and with a single motion pulled his knife from the scabbard. The six-inch blade slammed down. No need. Even as the knife crunched into the chest of the insect creature, Ben could tell it was already dead or unconscious. The blow to his leg had been its last act.
Ben sagged against the boulder, knife abandoned and the devastation in his right leg now impossible to ignore. The light was fading as the fire seemed to be subsiding, concealing the wound, but the leg was all but useless. Raw agony was spreading slowly from the site, enough to make Ben gasp. Tendrils of flame seemed to be licking his nerves, radiating out.
The ravaged muscles quivered, then spasmed. He fell to the desert floor, his breath shoved from his lungs as he landed on his back.
The first creature walked around the boulder. It still had the gun.
Up close, Ben could see it was about six feet tall, with gray skin, a hairless head, and wide, thin eyes, but was otherwise remarkably human-looking. It wore black pants and a long-sleeve shirt, with a glimmer of silver lines ru
nning diagonally across the right breast. The silver lines blinked at a regular pace.
Not glancing at Ben, the humanoid creature aimed and fired its weapon at the insect creature. A burst of gold light flashed from the barrel and the insect creature’s head disintegrated. A cremated puff floated away on a slight breeze. Now the humanoid creature turned toward Ben.
Bleeding, paralyzed, defeated, Ben couldn’t move. He was back on the beach near Karachi. In a daze, he looked around for his shattered friends, and for a moment he thought he saw them, looking silently into his eyes. Then the vision passed and the dead disappeared.
The creature bent down, grabbed Ben by the neck with its free right hand, and lifted him to his feet as casually as a child picking a dandelion. The cold grasp was almost a relief against the fever flooding Ben’s body. The creature, the alien, stared into his face, turning it this way and that, peering into his eyes. The creature then glanced around, down at the ground, searching. Whatever it was looking for, it didn’t find it. The creature looked back at Ben and flicked his 210-pound body 30 feet through the air.
The alien was already heading off into the darkness as Ben crashed into a pile of rocks. The edge of a large stone met his head, and a cascade of stars swarmed his vision, blocking out their real-life counterparts overhead.
No matter. The sensation migrating from the injection site in his leg now commanded all of Ben’s attention. The pain had transformed into something much more foreign. It felt like spiders were crawling up his veins, not just under his skin but deep inside his body. A snippet of a childhood nursery rhyme flitted through his brain: It wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.
An odd stretching and pulling sensation spread from inside the muscle, like knitting. Ben writhed, the foreign substance unfurling across his body. Convulsions ripped through him, and the muscles thrummed like guitar strings tuned to their breaking point. Whatever had been in the syringe, it was now seeping through his arteries and capillaries, like liquid metal, down into his cells and DNA. His arms and legs thrashed and his back arched off the desert floor.
Pinpoints of light exploded across Ben’s vision, like fireworks in his brain. Green and blue, the scattered illumination quickly settled on the profiles of the rocks and mountains and flickering flames in his field of view. The lights coalesced into sharp outlines, perfectly marking the shapes and locations and features of landmarks that had moments ago been obscured in darkness. Then the contours were filled in and the rocks became fully visible, the starlight amplified a thousandfold.
He could see in the dark. Some 400 feet away, a striped scorpion scuttled out of its hole, and Ben could see the ridges running down the length of its back, even the coarse hairs coating its body and stinger. He could see them in the night, from a distance that even during the noonday sun would have required powerful binoculars and an inhumanly steady hand.
More than that, the digital outlines began spitting out odd, indecipherable text . . . alien script, which in moments resolved into English. There was data, reams of information about everything from the composition of the smoke drifting into the night—carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen fluoride, an anarchist’s cookbook of chemicals—to the weight and height of the rocks and shrubs that stretched out into the desert, to the distance of the stars and galaxies in the sky. The scorpion was a Hadrurus arizonensis. The data rushed in, an avalanche of information that no human mind could have wrestled down in the brief seconds in which it flashed across his vision.
As the deluge mounted, Ben could feel his mind expanding. The data vanished from before his eyes almost as quickly as it appeared, shuttled off to new warehouses in his brain. The perceptive explosion filled his brain and threatened to overflow. All his senses were flooded. He could hear the coyote running, now more than a mile distant, and he could almost taste the dirt rubbing against his palms and the blood drying on his brow.
The wounds on his body were closing, binding, healing, expunging grit and pebbles when necessary. He watched as the shrapnel in his arm, his Pakistani souvenir, poked up through the skin on his bicep, popped out, and fell to the ground. It left no exit wound. His leg, his mangled, doomed right leg, was healing, binding itself together at a supernatural rate, while the freshly broken bones in his wrist were pulled back in place and mended. The pain lessened, then stopped. With control returning to his limbs, Ben sat up and yanked up his pant leg. The feeble light from the fire didn’t illuminate much of anything, so his new eyes found other sources. Starlight and moonlight was amplified. Now it looked like late afternoon. And what he could see was a miracle.
The deeply scarred and gouged flesh running down his calf was now coated in a lattice of what looked to be thick ropes of silver, almost like silk from a gargantuan spider. The quarter-inch-thick tendrils glistened and pulsed. They spread across the wound, welding together new muscle and ligaments and skin. The silver strings now spread across Ben’s body, like chain mail. The lines then dissolved into a single sheen and melted down into the skin. The material didn’t disappear completely, though, leaving the skin a vague shade of gray. Ben stood up, leaning gingerly on his right leg. No pain.
Not only was the pain gone, but he had an almost literal spring in his step. He bounced easily off the desert grit.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered.
He clenched and unclenched his hands, then turned them over, outlined in the firelight. A vague awareness of his new capabilities flickered across his mind. With a quick thought, his hands vanished, and he could now see the flames clearly through the space where his flesh had once been. The sleeves still hung in the air, but the hand was almost invisible, revealing just the faintest silhouette.
Whatever technology the insect alien had injected let him bend light around his body, rather than block and reflect it. Ben clasped his invisible hands together to feel the physical sensation and assure himself they were actually still there. Despite his heightened sense, it was hard to believe any of this was real.
With a second thought, Ben turned his entire body invisible. Another mental command and he could see in infrared, his body’s heat signature exposed in the desert chill, a small blob against the hotter fire of the crash off in the gulch. One last command, and Ben felt his body grow cold, his pulse slow. He disappeared from his own infrared eyes, an invisible iceman.
He snapped back, his vision returning to the visible spectrum, deactivating the light bend system. Whatever was now inside his body driving these changes must be some form of nanotechnology, computers and machines at a molecular scale, paired intimately with his nerves and cells.
Ben wasn’t an engineer, but he knew that no one on earth was close to creating the technology now embedded in his flesh. Hell, he thought, I might be the most valuable thing on the planet right now. He looked down at the dead insect creature. Whatever it was, it hadn’t been attacking him. It had been upgrading him, arming him. Arming him against . . .
A soft step in the sand jarred Ben from his thoughts.
The other one was still out there.
His new senses tingled with the slight but steady stream of radio signals that fell even in places as remote as the New Mexican desert. Television and communication satellites orbiting the Earth, a commercial jet cruising at 32,000 feet. A much more intense storm of data swirled around the other alien, an encrypted cloud some 100 feet distant that was wirelessly tethered to the creature’s ship. And the creature was coming back.
Ben wondered if he’d become a wireless beacon himself, if the humanoid creature had sensed his transformation and was returning for the kill. It must have been looking for the alien’s exotic serum, hoping to find it still in the syringe. It probably hadn’t taken long to find the empty vial, though. And if Ben’s body was now blasting radio signals out into the night, it would be obvious where the contents had gone.
Ben’s pistol was lost in the jumble of rocks and scrubs, the cold metal invisible even to his enhanced vision. His knife was still buried in the ches
t of the insect alien, but he left it there. This was about to turn into a shootout, and a blade would be about as effective as harsh language. If he was a warrior again, he needed a real weapon.
The other ship.
Ben spun and sprinted. The silver dart was about 50 meters away. Before the leg injury, he guessed he could probably have covered that distance in seven or eight seconds. Not world record speed, but faster than the average bear.
He felt his new muscles tense and explode. His feet flew, nanomachines in his blood delivering oxygen with inhuman efficiency, the reinforced tendons and ligaments and muscles unleashing torque that would have shredded any other man’s body. He covered the distance in less than two seconds. Stunned at his own speed, he nearly sprinted past the gleaming craft, skidding to a stop.
Up the ramp, into the gloomy interior. The perfect dark was momentarily disorienting . . . until his electronic eyes came to life, automatically searching for a connection to the ship’s network. Three horizontal blue lights appeared, and it took him a moment to realize they were only digital projections on his eyeballs, a sort of virtual reality display. The three lines were answered by three dots that appeared on the wall of the ship, real lights illuminating the interior of the vessel. Then the entire ship awoke in a symphony of light, instrument panels firing up and a seat rising up from the floor. A display resolved into a 360-degree exterior view of the desert. Ben sensed that, given just a minute or two, he could connect to all the ship’s system and take full control. But he had seconds, not minutes. The alien, a few hundred meters away, was now sprinting in his direction.
In a blink, Ben searched the ship’s inventory, and a panel slid open by the entrance ramp to reveal a weapon locker. One slot was empty, presumably missing the gun the alien had taken when he exited the craft. The second slot held a small black pistol that seemed to be only a grip and a barrel, without an obvious trigger. Ben grabbed the device. It, too, automatically activated, lighting up as three tentacles extended from the barrel, back over his right arm. They snaked around his forearm, clamped down, and dozens of small needles punctured his skin, anchoring the gun and establishing a physical connection with his high-tech body.
The First Protectors: A Novel Page 3