A Beginner's Guide to Invading Earth

by Gerhard Gehrke

  “Forced the units to reboot,” Fizz said. “We're still in range of the Grey's jammer, so we need to move along in case he fires it off again.”

  “But Oliop took it away from him,” Jeff said.

  “He got another one,” Jordan said. She then pointed back the way they had came.

  Jeff saw Whistle. She emerged from the shadows of an alley and scanned the crowd. She started their direction, although hobbled with one leg dragging, coming on like a wounded bull and pushing aside any pedestrian too slow to get out of her way.

  “I used my stunner at full power on her,” Ceph said. “Shooting her is like spitting on a fire.”

  “There's got to be other cops you can call,” Jeff said.

  “I just tried,” Flemming said. “The system told me it was busy, to try again later, and thanked me for calling.”

  “Head that way,” Fizz said, indicating a side tunnel.

  The group ran. Flemming moved better than before, but Jeff continued to help him along. The city alarms combined with the echoes of their footfalls. They moved down below street level. The corridor gave way to a long platform that connected to a system of similar tunnels. One larger tunnel had a single track. As they stepped onto the platform, some automated process detected them, and four cars rolled out before them and clicked onto the rail. They looked like single cars that might belong to an old roller coaster train, with bench seats and a lap bar. Jeff and Jordan got into one without any prompting. The interior proved more complex than upon first examination as the floor and seat automatically adjusted to the specifics of the human passengers. Fizz's body shape proved the oddest of their group, yet he sat with comfort in his own car. The others climbed aboard, and the cars engaged as one, zooming down the tube ahead before Jeff could do anything with the various controls at his disposal.

  Their destination wasn't clear. Signs passed by and monitors in the cars displayed information, but the system-wide warnings appeared on the monitors, and flashing lights obscured the signs. Jeff now understood that this city took its emergencies very, very seriously. Perhaps Fizz was directing the train. They passed through a pair of stations with differing decor. Soon, they glided to a stop in a station of orange benches and purple banners. The lap bar popped up.

  “This way,” Fizz said.

  “Wait,” Jeff said. “Where are we going, exactly? And how did the Grey even find us?”

  “Let's get out of the public byways first,” Fizz said.

  Fizz led the group to the street level. They followed him to a quaint, windowed store with large cans of rotting vegetation sitting outside. The cans reeked of sulfur and decay, the contents of the cans covered in mold and insects. Fizz held the door open.

  “I didn't think there were abandoned buildings here,” Jeff said.

  “This is a restaurant,” Flemming said.

  “A good one,” Ceph said. He checked the interior of the restaurant and gave Flemming a nod.

  “It's safe to go in,” Flemming said.

  Inside, Ceph stood drooling at a display case with dozens of items on trays for sale. Jeff looked at the offerings under the glass and thought one of the trays looked like it was filled with chipped beef with spinach and sprinkled liberally with fish guts. The other trays looked worse.

  Oliop had to hold his nose as he entered. He began to retch.

  “So I guess it's not trash day,” Jordan said as she looked out at cans by the front door.

  “Those would be the day's specials,” Flemming said.

  Fizz closed the door. “Now that we're off the street, we can talk,” he said. “The Grey may have accessed the Commons security programming, which would allow him to watch for the human.”

  “Then why didn't we spot him before?” Flemming said.

  “Because the human was gone when the alerts went up,” Fizz said.

  “I find it difficult to believe the Grey did all that,” Flemming said.

  “The evidence speaks for itself,” Fizz said. ”The human readings across the city. The alerts. And this might only be the beginning. We don't know why. Vendetta is too prosaic a reason for one such as the Grey. It must be a ruse.”

  Ceph nodded. “The tip of the iceberg.”

  “But security service has control over any surveillance,” Flemming said. “It's closely guarded.”

  “And highly automated,” Fizz said. “Like most of the police force, present company excluded. And so much else in the Commons that escapes attention because it works, sight unseen, and someone else will handle the problem.”

  “But a member of the Commons who's willing to violate the laws and even put at risk their species' place here? To what end?” Flemming said.

  “You say that as if it's an unthinkable act,” Fizz said. “Don't be naive. Your species relies on perfect cooperation or your entity breaks down. Most other species are more fractious. And many would even risk self destruction if there is something to be gained. Few of these ever think they could actually be caught.”

  “You're being condescending,” Flemming said, his voice raising. “I know there are criminals here. That's why I've taken this job.”

  “A job that no one else wants!” Fizz said. “Species are too happy to allow bots to handle security and automation to look after anything unsavory. Most want the big things managed and their persons to be kept safe, but they want to get away with petty misdeeds when it suits them. I'm part of that thinking, and I've found plenty of flaws in the Commons systems that can be exploited. Look at Oliop. He can hijack an elevator, which is something I wouldn't even try to do. He also was able to procure a translator for the human.”

  Oliop cocked his head. He was still holding his nose against the smell. “I never got him a translator.”

  Fizz froze. The eyes on his eyestalk narrowed. “Then where did it come from?” Fizz said. “He didn't exactly arrive via the new species induction services.”

  Oliop shrugged. “Grey must have given it to him.”

  Fizz moved over to Jeff. Jeff couldn't help but to recoil as the tentacled scientist grabbed him again. He reached into Jeff's jumpsuit's neck pouch and pulled out the small translation unit. After an examination, he put it back and let Jeff go.

  “It's a typical unit,” Fizz said. “I checked him earlier for bugs down to the molecular level. He's clean.”

  Flemming considered. “But why would the Grey bother giving him a translation unit unless it served the Grey's purpose. I doubt it was for the human's benefit. Did the Grey tell you anything?”

  “No,” Jeff said. “The one thing that little psycho didn't do was explain his plans.”

  Jeff saw Jordan join Ceph at the display case, both looking at the variety of foods available. Jordan had an expression of both amusement and horror. Many of the dishes looked like they had been scraped from a garbage disposal, each labeled with by-weight pricing. Some of the items weren't quite dead.

  “We need to get back out there,” Flemming said. “We can't just hide here while the city panics. And we have to keep you safe, Jeff Abel. And thank you for helping me out of the lab.”

  Jeff gave the Captain a nod.

  “Good to see not everyone acts completely out of self interest,” Flemming said. “Now back to the translator. You say it's not possible to trace someone through the translator.”

  “I would have found something,” Fizz said. “No tracking device. It's just not possible.”

  “Yes it is,” Oliop said almost to himself. When the room got quiet, his ears folded flat against his head. “Just saying it's possible.”

  “Nonsense,” Fizz said.

  “How?” Flemming said.

  “Galactic Commons Translation Services,” Oliop said. “If the service itself was compromised, each species could be tracked. Or recorded. Or monitored.”

  “Preposterous,” Fizz said.

  “What a sec,” Jeff said. “What translation service? These devices don't work automatically?”

  Flemming shook his head. “
Each unit sends and receives data. Works on same principle as the transportation system. Instant. Set up at the founding of the Commons. It's something that has just always worked.”

  “And will always work,” Fizz said with a huff. “The system is hardened. Nothing can hack into it, there's nothing to hack into. There's no interface. No one and nothing could interfere with how they work. No one even understands them in their entirety.”

  Jeff walked around the back counter and came to a small, fixed terminal that reminded him of a cash register. Jordan moved next to him with a grin and gave the room a quick, conspiratorial check. Then she hit a few keys on the machine. The register let out a series of beeps.

  “Don't,” Jeff said.

  Through a curtain from a back room, a large creature came out and moved towards her.

  “Uh, sorry,” she said. “I was just looking and didn't know what this machine was. I didn't take anything, you know.”

  As the figure moved from the dark into the light, Jeff saw it wasn't the proprietor nor any resident of the Commons. It was a Bunnie. His many arms unfolded, and he reached for Jordan. Two sets of sparkling amber eyes stared at her, reflecting her face as she screamed. He grabbed her and flung her against a wall. Unspeakably horrible-looking condiment trays crashed down with her like seven shades of vomit. She didn't move. The Bunnie vaulted the counter and leaped forward, landing in the group's midst. He brandished several weapons in his many tarsal claws, at least six snub-nosed energy pistols that morphed into the Bunnie's hairy grip as if he had been born with them. He began to fire in rapid succession. The two police officers fell to the floor.

  Oliop grabbed Jeff by the hand and pushed him along towards the curtain to the back. Whistle blocked the doorway, her massive hands grabbing Jeff and Oliop before they could change course. From behind them, the Bunnie kept firing. Fizz crumpled.

  “You are troublesome,” Whistle said in her hollow voice. She tossed Oliop towards the Bunnie. The Bunnie zapped him, and the technician collapsed.

  The Grey stepped in behind Whistle. “Bring him,” it said.

  Whistle's grip squeezed the breath from Jeff's body. With every wiggle, her hold on him tightened. He fought to not pass out.

  “And if you happen to break him, that's acceptable,” the Grey said.

  The Grey surveyed the inside of the diner. The Bunnie stood over Jeff's fallen group, each stunned and unmoving. He clicked his mandibles and bounced on his legs excitedly.

  “Finish them off?” the Bunnie said. “They're only stunned.”

  “Your choice,” the Grey said. It smiled. “But we have to go.”

  With that, the Grey headed for the front door. Whistle followed with Jeff fixed firmly under one arm. The Bunnie shrugged. If giant spidery aliens could have fun, this one was, with stunners pointing up and down and every other direction, the energy weapon barrels releasing trails of vapor that rose like smoke. His mandibles chewed the air, and juices foamed in the tiny hairs of his chin.

  “Such eager creatures,” the Grey said.

  “What about the Bunnie?” Whistle asked.

  “We'll give him a minute.”

  It led Whistle to a waiting grav sled. Still in Whistle's arms, Jeff went limp, less of a ruse, more that he felt numb. She carried him with the ease of carrying a beach towel. Jeff worked on breathing, but couldn't. His vision blurred and things went dark.

  The Bunnie continued to stand inside the deli, split upon the horns of a dilemma. Instinct motivated the Bunnie to stay and at least wrap up the group of fallen creatures with webbing in spite of the disgust at the thought of eating any part of them. Duty motivated the Bunnie to follow the Grey lest the tiny creature give him the slip. It was not to be trusted. Yet finally being here, in the center of galactic commerce and the heart of a civilization of beings that had rejected his race so long ago, the Bunnie wanted to indulge. It wouldn't take but a minute. The Bunnie put away its weapons and started spinning.

  Vegetarian sensibility stopped him from going any further once finished. The job was sloppy, the strands of white web a tangle, but these creatures wouldn't bother anyone for a while. He scurried out the door.

  CHAPTER 34

  JORDAN HID IN AN ALLEY and watched as the Grey, Whistle, and an unconscious Jeff exited the building. She tried not to move or make a sound, but that was difficult. The smells here proved much worse than anything inside the restaurant, like someone had liberally applied hot sauce to swamp mud near an open pit of sewage. The odor made her throat itch. She needed to cough, but she resisted the urge. She held her breath, letting it out slowly as the Grey and Whistle left her sight. But where was the Bunnie?

  When the Bunnie had leaped into their midst, he had knocked her down hard. Her head still ached from a bounce against the diner's wall and floor. She had played dead. In the moment it took her to regain her senses and fight off actual unconsciousness, the Bunnie was blazing away with his guns. So she stayed down, with various pureed chimichurris, rotting syrups with bugs, and ordinary low-fat mayonnaise seeping down her hair and neck from the spilled condiments. Whistle entered next, followed by the Grey. More commotion. Jeff got grabbed, and then Whistle and the Grey left out the front door. Once the Bunnie turned his back to her, she elbow crawled behind the counter. The last she saw of any of her party was the hairy technician Oliop, eyes closed, out cold, an arm's reach away. But she didn't dare try to help. Fighting the Clyptus was one thing, but the Bunnie was so...big. She crawled out through the back of the establishment and found the alley.

  She was about to move when the Bunnie came bouncing out of the front door. He didn't notice her. She moved to the corner of the alley and peeked.

  The Bunnie was impossible to miss, even as he joined the Grey on the floating vehicle parked at an intersection. While the street with the deli was devoid of pedestrians, it fed into another that wasn't. Foot traffic passed along the side street near the grav sled, but no one noticed the Bunnie as he settled into the back seat of the open roof vehicle.

  The sled came to life, a wave of distorted air shimmering underneath. It slid horizontally from its parking space, stopped, and drove down the street. Jordan ran after it. They would get away from her in a moment. There was no way to keep up on foot, and Jeff would be gone again. She made it to the intersection, already out of breath, her head pounding from the earlier shock.

  But there they were, not a hundred feet away, stuck in traffic. She could only see the top of the Grey's head, but the Bunnie and Whistle looked like giants sitting in a child's wagon as they waited for automated bots and other passenger vehicles to start moving. The pedestrians on either side of the street shuffled along faster. She slowed down to a walk and was able to keep pace with the vehicle.

  Whistle did a shoulder check, her eyes shining down the street behind them. Jordan got low behind a group of shuffling pedestrians and moved along with them. Whistle missed her, looked forward again. The traffic ahead loosened up, the vehicles ahead of the Grey starting to race ahead. The Grey's grav sled began to accelerate, already moving faster than Jordan could walk. She bolted, pushing through pedestrians. She ran out onto the street and jumped onto the back of a boxy hover vehicle with no driver. A robot car of some kind, one of many. Would it notice her getting on? Would it even go the same direction as the Grey? No time to worry about that. She found good footing on a small ramp in back and held tight to a fortuitous handle. Her vehicle smoothly accelerated, soon gliding along in the same direction as the Grey. Jordan leaned out and looked forward. Wind brushed at her face. She saw the Grey dead ahead. She laughed and ducked back behind the back of her vehicle.

  All too soon, they were slowing again. The way ahead was jammed with gridlock. Her car came to a stop, and she got off, keeping low. She made it to a crowded sidewalk lined with metal light posts and began to walk along with the foot traffic. From unseen speakers around her, the city alerts had changed. They looped the following: “Urgent. Uncontained Contaminate in Air. Seek Shelter. Emergenc
y Personnel are Responding.”

  The message burned into her brain like hot pins. Her head hurt more than it had before. The crowd grew denser, and the many beings that pushed along the sidewalks all moved with a distracted urgency bordering on panic, oblivious to the human female in their midst. Before long, she had caught up with the Grey's sled. At least the Bunnie's bobbing abdomen rose high above many of the other vehicles on the road, marking the location of the Grey's sled as they puttered along.

  A thing that looked like a moving cloud with tentacles and a toothy maw knocked Jordan down. It grumbled at her, picked her up, and set her standing. The tentacle was cold and clammy on her skin.

  “Apologies,” the thing behind the cloud said with a deep bass voice worthy of an opera singer. “I will repay you with my next born.” It moved on, leaving her to wipe her hands off on her jeans.

  “No problem,” she said, but it was already out of earshot.

  She rubbed her arm where the thing had touched her. Too weird. She looked past the crowd at the street. The vehicles were moving again. But where was the Grey's sled? Too many creatures were heads and shoulders taller than she. Jordan grabbed onto a light post and shimmied up. She scanned the scene, saw an arched bridge fed by an off ramp. The Grey's grav sled shot across the bridge and out of sight. Jordan slid down, knocking into several creatures that grunted in annoyance but didn't promise anything or wait for an apology. She ran.

  ***

  The Grey's grav sled sped along, its automated piloting software obedient and silent as the Grey liked it. Once the Grey gave the sled its destination and route via a wet app, they glided along through the city and its traffic without having to touch a control. Only the Bunnie broke the silence with his nonstop babbling.

  “We're here, we're here, we're finally here,” the Bunnie said to no one in particular.

  But the Grey didn't shut him up. The Grey felt excited, too, but it tried not to show it. Its hands trembled, so it kept them grasped tight in its lap. They finally broke free from the logjam, exiting the main thoroughfare and crossing a bridge to a lonelier part of the city, one separated from the lofty sovereign buildings and well-trafficked public spaces. They drove towards one tiny, unobtrusive little bunker set between taller structures dedicated to the manufacturing and maintaining of the Commons transportation and machinery.