“They’re going to take out our ship,” Ng said.
Kaye didn’t state the obvious—that there could be no negotiating, that even if they wanted to take hostages, it wouldn’t buy them anything. It wouldn’t have, anyway; he had no doubt that most if not all of Msomi’s Fantasia workers had expendable stamped on their files.
“We’ll reassess once we’re inside,” Kaye said. “I’m open to changing our plans, if that’s what it takes to meet our objectives. But we’re not going to stop for Q and A in the heat, so you’re going to have to trust that I’m making the best decisions, based on what we see. Any problem with that?”
No one spoke. Kaye nodded once, letting it go. Any other op, he’d have had Graham’s ass for speaking out, but the circumstances were beyond exceptional. They all should be dead, and he couldn’t blame anyone for trying to create better odds.
“Borkez, make us some holes,” Kaye said.
* * *
Using her uniquely feminine wiles, Didi had actually talked Trace into taking her for a fly-see. Trog had walked them down, someone needed to check the locks, anyway—but in truth, he’d wanted to watch her at work. The whole walk, she’d been on Trace like white on rice. Trog couldn’t see it through the deflect suit, but he was sure the boss was pitching a tent. She was whispering, moving her hands in these really subtle ways, over a hip, against his arm—Trog got a hard-on just standing next to the vibes. Small wonder that Trace was taking her out, though why Didi had suddenly decided she wanted to go, that was anybody’s guess. Definitely her idea, though. Trace had just called freedom from standoff, Elvis and Taryn were getting ready to go see what was what on a fly-by, then Didi calls Ops and bam, Trace is grinning like an idiot, saying he wants to go out in the field, get his hands dirty.
“That’s not all,” Taryn had smirked, but even Trog knew better than to laugh at that. In front of Trace, anyway.
A few last directions to Trog—Simpson was boss ’til Trace got back, keep working on the camera relays from inside, get both ATVs ready to go pick up the product—and Didi and Trace were through the lock, the flyer lifting out a moment later. Lee had set it down in the main lock after taking Frank and those guys out to the pens, so there was no lock-clearing that needed to be done. Obviously. No way Trace would expose his prime piece to the bugs, or his own all important self; no blowjob was worth that, although Trog had heard it said that Didi could suck pearls from an oyster.
Trog waited ‘til the roof lock had closed again, then slipped on his filter mask and entered the corridor lock. He checked the seals, ran the built-in diagnostic. The final light was green; no bad-guy damage. Smiling, Trog stepped back into the connecting corridor, tapped his earpiece with one hand, pulling a small blina pipe out of a grubby pocket with the other.
“Hey, this is Trog,” he said. “Seal’s good on the main lock. I’m going to walk the perimeter. Trace says keep doing what we’re doing. Oh, send a couple of guys out to clear the maintenance transport, we’re going to need it.”
“Gotcha,” Freeman said.
First of his duties fulfilled, Trog lit up. Inhaled, held it . . . A slow, sweet, exhale. Bummer about the ship, though he figured the crew was okay. They hadn’t been that far up when the pulse had come. What was weird was that the only captures they’d been able to get so far off the satellite said that their ship and the invading ship were grounded, and they weren’t even that close to each other. The bad-guy ship—popular theory was corporate, though Trog was leaning toward feds, no one else could fuck up so brilliantly—should have put down at the compound or landed next to the product ship for a tap. Why pulse, then land in the middle of buttfuck bugville and just sit there? Didn’t make sense. Of course, maybe things had changed by now. All the com and cam relays were acting fritzy, they were having trouble getting anything. Rijke was saying they’d probably have to rewire a lot of stuff, which really bit the bone. There were long hours ahead, pulling boards and running voltage checks.
The attack that wasn’t. Trog inhaled another lungful of thick smoke, considering. Seemed unlikely that the bad guys were trying to kill them by making them work overtime. None of it made sense. In standoff, Lyle had pointed out that it could all be some elaborate trick, like a decoy. That maybe the real attack was still coming.
Trog grinned, blew out. When properly stoned, Lyle also liked to opine that the aliens had been created by the corporations, were actually like this attempt at the ultimate soldier that had gone horribly wrong. That, and that the president was an android. Lyle was fucking out there, sometimes.
Trog started walking, paused to take another hit. He was glad nothing major had gone down, that standoff hadn’t been necessary. The idea of bad guys and bugs running through the compound, looking for innocent bystanders to kill or carry away—that was some scary shit. It was going to be hazardous enough, just cleaning up after all this. As it was, the plan had Trace and Didi checking out the product ship from the air, making sure it was safe; the flyer would come back, give a rundown to the ATV teams for transporting, then head out again to the bad-guy ship, presumably swapping out Didi and Trace beforehand. They had some shit they could drop on the invaders, make sure any threat was terminated from afar, but just in case it was some kinda trick, better not to have Trace onboard. Anyway, that meant more people coming and going outside, and while the Fantasians knew how to keep the risk to a minimum, it was never safe to come or go.
Still. It was all kind of exciting, really, this sudden flurry of activity, now that it looked like no one was coming. Trog had been up here a year and a half, and this was hands down the biggest thing to have happened. He wondered what the fallout would be, once Msomi realized that his secret world had been found. Might not be a Fantasia for much longer . . .
Trog stopped walking, listened. He’d heard something, a heavy sound. Like the flyer lock, maybe? It was hard to tell, the compound’s corridors had a way of distorting everything . . .
There it was again, louder. Trog turned in a circle, trying to pinpoint it. A big rumble, but it disappeared pretty quick. Definitely coming from behind him, back by the lock. He thought. Maybe Trace had had second thoughts, decided to come back early . . .
Or maybe he wants to take someone else along, Trog thought, stirring at the thought. Not a lot of the couple’s “special” friends talked about it, but Trog had heard it straight up from Elvis who got it from Moby, that Didi was a fuck machine, and maybe they were coming back to pick someone and if he was closest, it made sense that—
Boom!
Trog froze, looked left and right, blinking watery eyes. Quiet, now, but that was bad news, that sounded like a bomb or something, and he was just reaching for his collar mike when Freeman started talking in his ear.
“Hey, alarm! Uh, alert! Got a perimeter breach at the main lock! Simpson, call in! Trog, get back here!”
Trog’s muddled brain fired. Perimeter breach? “Get everyone to standoff!” he shouted, turning and moving fast in that direction, past the dark ant farm, past the first offshoots in the green hall.
“Right, right,” Freeman said.
“And blow the locks!” Trog yelled. Bugs, they had to get the bugs inside, they’d pick off the feds or whoever had come knocking. It was the only way.
Two or three people were talking at once now, Trog couldn’t make them out. “Blow the locks!” he shouted again.
“No, not until—” Mac Simpson’s voice, but he was cut off by Freeman, maybe it was Lyle, the distorted voice over the main system speaker could have been anybody.
“Perimeter breach, west side! Get to standoff, now!”
Behind Trog, another explosion, smaller than before but it was accompanied by the sound of the corridor lock from the hangar, there was no mistaking the telltale hiss of air, the hum of the blast-door.
What the fuck, what the fuck, don’t panic, don’t! “Blow the locks, all of them!” Trog screamed. “They’re inside!”
“No!” Simpson shouted. “Wait!”
“The bugs won’t get in right away, we gotta do it now!” Trog howled. A clatter of boot steps echoed through the hall behind him, heading straight for him, holy shit—
Trog started running, next section has a door—
“I been up here longer, I know!” he yelled. “Do it, Freeman, Lyle, whoever’s listening, trust me on this, do it now!”
“Ah, shit,” someone said, and Simpson was still trying to shout it down, numb bastard was probably already in standoff, but suddenly an alarm was sounding, overloud and unmistakable, the piercing squeal of the life support alarm. A looped female voice, calm and carrying even over the alarm’s shrieking, informed him that the compound was losing air.
Thank God, Trog thought, stumbling past the first blast-door, stopping long enough to seal it closed. There were four inside–outside locks in the compound not counting the roof, two flyer, one ATV, the one back by the gardens. By the time the bugs figured out they could get in, everyone would be in standoff. Everyone except whoever the hell was blowing holes in their compound, and the bugs would make quick work of them, Trog was sure—
Ahead of him, something screamed. He’d been on Fantasia plenty long enough to know the sound.
No. No way. Not yet.
Trog kept running, past the garden offshoot, past the dead tunnel by storage, sure it was a mistake, someone in Ops had hit the ant farm pickups, maybe to psyche out the bad guys, yeah, that makes sense—
Another shriek, rising, joined by a second, and it was louder, now, louder than the shrill alarm, and it was coming his way. Further down the hall, a man or woman screamed. No way to tell which.
The sound made his balls shrink tight against his body. He stopped at a turn in the main corridor, breathless, head swimming, trying to think, but someone else was screaming now, and he could hear the clatter of alien bodies, more alien cries, the sounds echoing strangely through the dim halls.
“Fuck, man,” Trog moaned. He’d give his left fucking nut to be in standoff right now. The bugs were inside, they were already inside, like they’d been standing by the doors, waiting to come in—
Bam! Bam-bam-bam-bam! Trog turned, turned again. Someone behind him was fucking shooting, he couldn’t go back. Maybe Ops, maybe he could—
In front of him, a tall blackness swept around the corner. It leapt for him, shrieking, and behind it there were more, he couldn’t tell how many. Trog’s bladder let go, a high exhalation of terror the only sound he could make. He didn’t feel the urine running down his leg, couldn’t feel it because the grinning monster was snatching him up, its claws digging into his arms, separating flesh from bone, and the pain was fucking huge, it was everything.
Got me!
Bugfucked, he was gonna be bugfucked, and he kicked and screamed but the creature easily tucked him under a spiny arm, slamming his head against one bone-hard thigh and then he couldn’t kick anymore, there were black blossoms flowering in his eyes and he couldn’t breathe.
He saw his blina pipe fall out of his pocket, hit the floor in slow-mo. He saw bug feet, long and shining, then boots, soldier boots and the thin, shiny material of deflect suits, and heard a roar like flame. Trog felt his wispy, greasy hair catch fire, heard the hiss of his skin crackling. He tried to turn away from it, couldn’t.
“Kill me,” he said, but his raspy shadow of a voice couldn’t be heard over the shrieking bugs, and it didn’t matter anyway because they started firing their guns again and he just had enough time to feel grateful.
* * *
Rijke had been pulled cruelly from sleep’s embrace by the announcement to go to standoff, blared into every corner of Fantasia. It wasn’t a drill, he knew there was serious trouble, but it had still been hard to get up. He had been half drunk and more than half asleep, but had managed to stagger down the hall in a reasonably timely manner; he’d just flopped on one of the couches in standoff when he was called to report to Ops, along with Trog D.
Operations had been a mess, a thousand warning windows to shut down before he could run a diagnostic program. Trog fumbled around with some of the panels, testing the shielding, while Trace directed traffic, other workers calling in reports, showing up and running off again to perform various errands. The circuits had been surged, but the automatic protectors had mostly done their job. Some lines of code, a conditional reboot, and they’d been able to tap back into the satellite. While no one could assume they were safe, the situation was not as bad as they’d all feared. Msomi’s transport had been dropped, but apparently, so had the invader’s, and nothing was moving out there but for the bugs.
With standoff tentatively cleared, Trace had spent a few minutes conferencing about their options. Elvis and Taryn had volunteered to go out for a look, and Trace had finally excused the team to grab some food and stimulants before coming back to work; it was going to be a long day spent surfing code and running checks, rewiring the secondaries for safety’s sake. Trace had received a call from his gratenkut just as they were all leaving Ops, had waved for Trog to stay behind, and that had been that.
Rijke sat in the mess hall now, forcing himself to drink bitter coffee while he waited for the tabs to kick in. Many of the people who’d waited together at standoff had come to hear the scoop, although there was little to tell. They’d been pulsed. Now, nothing was happening. It caused something of a stir when Elvis and Taryn had come in a few moments later, reporting that Trace and Didi were going to do the fly-by, but Rijke was too tired to enjoy the gossip as he normally might; providing suitably witty euphemisms was beyond his current capabilities.
Lyle had just stepped out of the kitchen with a steaming dish of reconstituted eggs, scrambled with fresh green pepper and onion, and Rijke was thinking seriously of vomiting, when Freeman’s distorted voice blared through the com system.
“Perimeter breach, west side! Get to standoff, now!”
There was a single beat of stillness and then everyone was moving at once, talking, standing, hurrying for the corridor. Twenty-plus bodies, all pushing to be in front.
West side, Rijke thought, finally awake, enough to be afraid. The viewing hall? Had they gotten in, somehow? He hurried with the rest of them, listening to the fear in their voices, the urgency—
—and then they heard the shouting in the hallway, and some of them stopped, listening, perhaps not sure what they were hearing. Rijke recognized the voice immediately. It was Mac Simpson, his angry, frightened shout carrying clearly through the main hall.
“No, wait!”
A pause, and then he was practically screaming, the levelheaded Mac Simpson on the verge of hysteria, and Rijke knew they were in extremely bad circumstances.
“Don’t do it, goddamnit, you stupid fuck! Don’t listen to him, do you hear me, that’s a fucking order—”
Whatever else he said was lost to a terrible, high-pitched alarm that blasted through the compound. The brief, milling confusion turned into a panicked rush, everyone suddenly pushing as a recorded female voice explained calmly that they were losing air, that multiple locks had been opened. Rijke felt a flush of shock, saw it reflected in the faces around him. At a dead run, it was a minute-plus to standoff from the cafeteria.
“Go, run!”
“Fucking move—”
“Fuck oh shit oh fuck!”
The body in front of him tripped, it was the strange female chemist, the mafketel, and Rijke ran over her, along with everyone else. She screamed, but no one stopped, the tunnel turning ahead, and now they could hear more screams, alien screams . . . Coming from ahead of them, from where the garden lock connected to the main corridor. Those at the front of the moving pack tried to turn around, but the people at the back kept shoving and shouting, frantically insisting that they had to get to standoff, it was their only chance. Rijke, caught in the middle, had a brief, terrible feeling of being crushed—and then he saw them, a shrieking, rushing blackness coming from in front of the small group of humans, and heard the sounds echo down the corridor behind them, a
nd realized that they weren’t echoes.
Too fast, he thought, it was all happening much, much too fast, he’d had no time to prepare. The first bug reached the front of the screaming mob, snatched up the new sex worker, Ri, carrying her flailing back into the press of clattering limbs and eyeless skulls with a victory shriek. He saw Stinky John being hauled away by his dreadlocks, frozen by terror, his eyes darting back and forth in his deathmask expression, the only proof that he was not an unplugged android as the monster swept him away.
There was weapons fire from somewhere, and Rijke felt a brief, sharp hope, gone again before he could take a breath, as more and more of the animals came at them, as they ate the air, creating darkness all around their soft, defenseless prey.
Elvis screamed, a terrible sound, and was pulled away from the group. The pudgy warehouse worker grabbed wildly for some anchor, caught hold of Ana Lewis’s skinny arm. He held on tight, and managed to take her with him, Ana screaming and beating at him, to no avail; she was pulled into the terrible black, powerful arms wrapping around her, stealing her from the light, from the chance of salvation.
He was still at the middle of the group, but the group was almost gone now, the bugs like walls closing in and Rijke turned, locked gazes with the chemist, Chopra, saw that he held a syringe in one badly shaking hand, was stabbing it into his own arm—
—and then Rijke was lifted from behind, sharp, vicious talons tearing into his perfectly toned, tanned skin, and he knew it was too late for any of them.
* * *
Trace had barely lifted from the compound lock when Didi was sliding her hand in his pants, whispering in his ear, doing that thing she did with her tongue. He went high, set the flyer on a slow auto heading roughly southeast—they had at least four minutes before they’d reach the last coordinates of the product shipment—muted the feed from Ops, and closed his eyes, leaning back in his chair.
It didn’t take long. He’d been sporting bone since the second she’d suggested a spin around the grounds, telling him in that breathy voice that she wanted to see their world together.
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 17
