Ben swung around, mentally scanning the available options on the gun before selecting a large explosive charge. He burst back down the ramp, leaping sideways as he emerged, turning in midair and firing at the feet of the alien as it rounded a jumble of rocks at full sprint. The alien fired at the same time, a thin stream of targeted energy that grazed Ben’s left arm as he tumbled backward. Ben’s shot struck the ground a few feet to the right of the attacker and exploded. The creature was swatted backward in mid-stride, and the shock wave catapulted Ben into the gulch where the other ship had crashed.
His new reflexes saved him from smashing into the rocks, and he landed in a tense crouch, his weapon raised. The wound on his arm was already zippering shut.
The enemy had disappeared into the night. The cloud of radio signals had vanished, apparently shut down. Infrared scanning turned up nothing. Ben leaped a dozen feet out of the bottom of the gulch, landing lightly on a chunk of rock, his hands and feet finding almost invisible purchase. He bounded to another rock, searching the area just beyond the silver ship where his shot had landed. A smoking crater about six feet across was glazed in sand that had melted into glass.
The smoke shimmered for a fraction of a second. Without a thought, he jumped backward as a bolt of energy streaked through the air and destroyed the rock to which he’d been clinging. He came up firing, his gun and eyes communicating directly without interference from his brain. The tiny fractions of a second it took for electrical impulses to travel from retinas to brain to hand would simply have been too slow to survive this encounter.
He was something more than human now. While he had trained for years to make his instincts override conscious thought, biology was still a hard limit. That was no longer the case. The nanomachines buzzing through his cells and nerves had cut Ben’s conscious brain out of the decision loop. A computer in the gun had taken over direct control of his nervous system, creating a priority data flow that left his brain a mere spectator.
I’m not a warrior, I’m a weapon . . . or maybe I’m both.
Ben sensed he could shut down the direct link and forcibly retake control of his body. He wouldn’t survive five seconds in this firefight, but he had the option. Instead, he watched almost from a distance as his body became a self-guided missile. He dodged and spun and fired with the preternatural foresight of a fly sensing a swatter.
The other creature was just as gifted. The two fighters attacked and counterattacked across the desert. Fireballs rose in the night, pencil-thin beams of lethal energy snapped across the landscape, and booms echoed and rolled across the wasteland. The strobe light of battle flickered across the sand and rocks.
Everything was unfolding so quickly that Ben’s thinking, conscious brain could barely keep up. Through the blur he could tell that he was slowly being boxed into a shallow canyon, too deep to jump out of—even with his new athleticism. He had explored this place some days before, dragging his throbbing leg through the narrow path out of sheer bull-headedness, determined not to turn around until he’d reached the impassable end. As painful as that return journey had been, he was currently in a much tougher spot. Having cornered his query in a cul de sac, the other creature could simply lob volleys of high-explosive rounds and either obliterate Ben or bury him under an avalanche of boulders.
In a brief lull, Ben disengaged the gun interface, retaking manual control of his body. He ripped his clothes off, threw them behind a jumble of rocks, dropped on his back, and went cold and invisible. The nanomachines in his body obeyed instantly, throwing his bodily functions into a near comatose state. His field of vision narrowed and darkened. He felt dizzy as blood flow in his body slowed to a trickle. He lay sprawled, his weapon extended, but now as lifeless as the dirt on which it rested. The data stream that had been flowing across his vision for the last 20 minutes dwindled to nothing, a small blinking red light indicating standby mode.
Two explosive rounds streaked over Ben’s head, pummeling the tightening passageway that led into the back of the canyon. Dust and small rubble spattered on his naked body, but he didn’t flinch. His nearly hibernating body wouldn’t allow it.
For a few moments, there was nothing. Silence. Then the creature bounded into view, jumping from rock to rock—an impossible target. It landed a dozen feet in front of Ben, scanning the passage ahead. Wait. Not yet. Move now and not even his new body could save him.
The creature glanced around and seemed to stare directly at Ben.
Then it took two steps forward. Three. Four. It was now parallel with Ben. Six, seven paces . . . past his almost lifeless, invisible body.
The alien raised its arm to fire again into the canyon. Just as it fired, Ben sprang to life, his body and mind roaring into action as his eyes and gun reconnected like iron to a magnet. The creature sensed its mistake and began to turn, its weapon already spraying a wide purple beam.
Damn, it’s fast. But so am I.
Ben fired a shotgun-like blast of incendiary pellets. They streaked outward at twelve times the speed of sound, zigzagging through the air, a cone of destruction that swallowed up the alien even as it shrieked one last radio signal back to its ship. The alien was torn apart, its body nearly vaporized. The boom of the final blast echoed down the canyon and washed back out to the desert like a sonic flash flood.
Ben stood up, surveying the wreckage. Only bits and pieces of the alien remained. Its gun was still intact, though, and still attached to the creature’s severed arm. Ben picked it up, and the tentacles uncoiled from the arm and the gun went dark. He collected his tattered, bloodstained clothes.
A hundred yards away, the silver ship still gleamed in the moonlight, undisturbed by the recent battle.
Clutching the guns and severed arm, Ben headed back toward the landing site. In his mind, he tried to decipher the encoded transmission the alien had sent back to its ship in its last moment. Ben’s upgraded brain had automatically recorded the stream and stored it for analysis even as his body was fighting for its life. Exactly how much of his body was still under his control? Was he a soldier or a puppet? Did he have full control of his own body or was he now some kind of . . . drone? Or a vessel for delivering a payload he couldn’t understand? Ben could sense new clouds of data hovering at the back of his mind, alien information encoded bit by bit in the robotic dust inside his body. A problem for later, though.
For now, he felt the billions of tiny computers embedded in his body tune their combined processing power to unraveling the encryption on his enemy’s last transmission. He continued back toward the ship and was now about 50 yards away. The ship had forwarded the transmission on to an unknown destination. Back home, presumably. The ship was now waiting for a reply. A small, spiky antenna had sprouted from the spine of the ship, and Ben’s new internal radio detected an open channel. A squirming feeling in his gut, a familiar feeling in this unfamiliar body, a vague intuition of danger, made him stop.
Several things happened all at once.
Ben’s network of nanobots cracked the encryption on the outgoing message—//Mission failed. Voyager destroyed but payload delivered. Human integration complete.//—Just as a reply arrived. //Self-destruct. We are coming.//
Tendrils of electricity thrust out into the night from the silver vessel, snapping and cracking like Lucifer’s lash. The writhing bolts extended a hundred feet in every direction, then folded back in on themselves, forming a dazzling white cocoon around the ship. An electric hum filled the air, and rose to a whine. The sound and vibration seeped into Ben’s body.
The ground and air, in a circle around the craft, were sucked inwards, as if the machine had become a black hole, but of the fiercest white. Ben, too, was tugged toward the roiling energy. The tug became a yank and his heels cut furrows in the dirt. He clutched a jagged boulder, the edges digging deep into his new skin. He felt the rock begin to vibrate, answering the screaming call of whatever it was that now coursed around the ship. He felt as if every cell was being summoned to the fury. Smaller
rocks and other debris flew toward the pulsing ball and vaporized on contact. Just when Ben thought his anchor would be ripped from the ground and catapult him into the howling vortex, the ship exploded.
It was a massive, angry detonation, and it briefly lit up the valley with a midnight sunrise. The shockwave expanded, lifting Ben off his feet and hurtling him hundreds of feet back into the desert. Again, his new reflexes saved him from splattering against the ground. He dodged a storm of debris, boulders, while being pelted with smaller pebbles and rocks. He looked up just in time to avoid one last projectile, the mangled engine block of his own pickup truck, as it plummeted from the sky and crashed to the ground, disintegrating in a cloud of rust.
Ben stood up, wiping the grime from his brow as the last echoes reverberated and faded into the darkness. The desert was scraped clean 200 meters in every direction from ground zero of the explosion. Nothing remained of the ships, aliens, or battlefield to indicate what had happened.
Nothing but the two silver guns and the severed arm in Ben’s hand.
“Well, and me,” he said out loud. He looked from horizon to horizon with his new eyes. He was still alone. So he’d be walking back to the world, but now with two good legs.
He dug in his pocket and fished out his battered cigar. The click of a Zippo. He chewed the cigar around his mouth, savoring the smell, noting absently how his new nano companions eliminated the toxic elements from his lungs as soon as they arrived, and he wondered what the hell he’d gotten himself into. Prophet or not, he now had his gospel.
Time to head back to civilization and preach. So he started walking.
3
“General Rickert.”
“Voice identity confirmed. You may proceed.” Computer-generated voices had gotten so good that Tom Rickert could no longer tell the difference between the humans and the machines. The only reason he knew this one was a computer was because the engineers who had created it worked for him.
“Colonel Hale, sir. We have a preliminary delta report that has been escalated.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, sir. Roughly 36 minutes ago, New Mexico, about 120 klicks northwest of Albuquerque.”
“Sounds like the ass-end of the middle of nowhere.”
“Yes, sir. Pretty much just rocks and rattlers out there, sir.”
“Yeah, I bet. So what have you got? More than last time, I hope.”
“Yes, sir. We picked up a pair of incoming blooms, one real faint, but the other was hot, really cooking. It only popped up about 80 klicks above the Earth’s surface. For such a hot signature, the fact that we only picked it up at the last minute suggests it was damaged just before entry.”
“You think it was a firefight?”
“That’s what the analysts are saying, sir.”
“Hmm. Or a big meteorite and a small one. Sure sounds like another false alarm.”
Rickert hovered his finger over the disconnect button on his phone. This job was essentially an endless series of false alarms, and another one added to the list. Number 379, to be precise. Which Rickert certainly was—even if no one ever read his reports.
“That was our first thought, sir. But . . .”
“Yes?”
Rickert leaned forward. Out of the previous 378 calls just like this one, there’d never been a “but.”
“But we happened to have a Janus satellite in the region. We weren’t lucky enough to catch the objects’ incoming flight path, but we did tune in the ground-facing sensors just in time for the landing. Sending it to you now over secure video link.”
“Hold on, let me grab my tablet. Just a second.”
“Got it, sir?”
“Yes, dammit, just cool your jets. Okay, here we go. Whoa, that’s a helluva of an impact. So, zooming in, can’t see anything through that smoke. Okay, clearing . . . wait, what the hell happened? Why’d the screen just go white?”
“We lost all imaging at that moment, sir.”
“Did we have another bird nearby?”
“No, sir, we lost all imaging. Every surveillance satellite orbiting the planet went dark at precisely 21:07 hours. We couldn’t see a thing anywhere on the globe for 23 minutes.”
Rickert was quiet for a moment, absorbing the implication.
“Not a lot of meteors that can do that, huh?”
“No, sir. It was some kind of jamming signal that our techs can barely even begin to analyze.”
“Hmm, okay, forget about that for the moment. What did you see when the satellite came back online?”
“The crash site had been wiped clean, sir. Flat as a chalkboard. Both heat signatures gone, although some of the civilian seismic listening stations in the area reported a substantial ground disturbance that was almost certainly an explosion—a big one—while we were blacked out. We’re telling them it was an accidental ordinance drop during a test flight.”
“Christ in a sidecar. So what really happened out there?”
“As near as we can figure, sir, we had two intruders, exchanging fire. One crashed, the other landed, there was some kind of ground skirmish, and then one of the ships self-destructed, obliterating both ships.”
“So we’ve got no solid intel at all?”
“Not quite, sir. After the satellites came back online, we scoured the area and we found one faint heat signal. Optical view confirmed it was human, or least human-looking, and on foot, walking away from the blast site. He’s been flickering on and off our scopes, real hard to track, but he seems to be making a straight line south to the highway, I-40.”
“There was someone down there? A person? Who is it?”
“Not sure, sir. But we’ve already dispatched a pickup crew. We’ve got the 512th Rescue Squadron scrambling three Pave Hawk choppers with modified stealth from the 58th Special Operations Wing at Kirtland Air Force Base southeast of Albuquerque. They’re hauling pretty hard and should be there in about eight minutes. I’ve got live video if you want to be hooked in.”
Rickert leaned forward on his worn leather sofa in his small home outside of Washington, DC, depositing his barely sipped whiskey on last month’s issue of Scientific American. Fifty-two years on this planet, thirty-one of them in the Army, and twelve assigned to this oddball unit that all his colleagues had assumed was punishment for a mission gone pear-shaped.
The 1st Stellar Expeditionary Force? What the hell did that even mean? Rickert hadn’t tried to explain it—had been ordered not to, actually. Now he spent his days in a basement in a nondescript, suburban office park. It looked like any other semi-successful tech firm. There was a server room and a refrigerator stuffed with old sandwiches and abandoned cans of Diet Coke.
Some of the accoutrements might have raised an eyebrow, though. Anyone who looked closely at the bookshelf in Rickert’s modest office might suspect this was something other than a third-rate computer networking company. Rickert had edged away from the battlefield—and his gut had edged away from his waist—as he immersed himself in astrophysics and psychology, diplomacy and molecular biology. Barely 5-foot-6, with bad eyes and salt-and-pepper hair, he was far more comfortable with a book in his hand now than at any time during his days in the field. He occasionally felt his department’s top export was email and paperwork. Most of the day-to-day production was routine and predictable, punctuated only by the occasional false alarm. He’d stopped fretting about career advancement years ago. He could live with the routine, and he enjoyed the quiet research. The only thing to worry about was the day—this day—when the false alarms stopped being false.
Rickert shifted in his seat, sighed, and wished silently that he’d retired years ago. Still, he was curious.
“Push it through.”
A window popped open on the tablet, and the pudgy general peered into the glowing screen displaying the inside of a helicopter soaring through the New Mexico night nearly 2,000 miles away.
Ben heard the helicopters at about the same time he detected their radio signals. His new internal computer i
nformed him the three aircraft were 12 miles out, traveling close to their top speed of 195 knots, or about 220 miles per hour. They’d be on him in a little over three minutes. No need for a computer to tell him they were likely Pave Hawks from Kirtland, as it was the only air base close enough to get here this fast. Each bird would be loaded with a handful of Air Force combat search-and-rescue specialists. He could easily disguise himself from the choppers’ sensors, or even disarm the airmen once they’d landed, if he wanted to. But that wasn’t his goal.
He needed to be found.
So he kept walking.
Soon, the muffled sound of the spinning blades could be heard even with unaided hearing. The three aircrafts rumbled over a ridge, searchlights raking the desert floor. The lights pinpointed Ben. He stopped, set his cargo on the ground, and raised his hands as the vehicles touched down around him in a swirl of dust.
Eight airmen poured out of the helicopters, M-4 rifles raised, advancing on Ben. They slowed when they were within a few meters, noticing his gray skin and bare torso. He’d wrapped the two weapons and alien arm in his shirt. No sense alarming his “rescuers” more than necessary.
“Sir! I need you to come with us!” one of the airmen shouted over the roar of the turbines and the growling sand. The engines were throttled down just enough to let the wheels rest lightly on the hard-packed dirt so the choppers could lift off again the moment the passengers were back onboard.
“I know,” Ben said. “I’m glad you boys showed up. Long walk to Kirtland.”
The First Protectors: A Novel Page 4