Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The

by Molstad, Stephen

  There are going to be survivors, Reg thought.

  “Fly inside,” he told the pilot. He pointed toward one of the large breaks in the dome. The pilot thought he was kidding. He wasn’t. The hole in the roof was the size of a small lake. After hovering over it uncertainly for a moment, and looking nervously again at Reg, the pilot let his craft sink into the opening. They dropped fifty feet and noticed something climbing the walls around them. The soldiers nearest the open door switched on the flashlights attached to the barrels of their assault rifles and took aim. They were surrounded by vines as thick around as a man’s waist, which was extremely thin given their incredible length. They appeared to be made of stone.

  The shaft they had flown into was seemingly without bottom. Even under the glare of the flashlights, they couldn’t see the floor of the room. Since the roof had been blown out, it seemed that a powerful explosion must have traveled upward through the shaft. There was no way to tell whether the vines showed signs of damage. A hundred feet separated them from the nearest wall, but the sense of claustrophobia was strong. Guillaume yelled at the pilot to take them back toward the open air. The pilot glanced at Reg, who nodded his agreement.

  It was hard to say whether the vine-structures were grown or manufactured. There was a regularity to the way they snaked up the walls that didn’t look quite natural. Reg hardly thought about it. He sat in the copilot’s chair feeling numb and heartbroken. The only thing he was anxious to do was verify that there were no survivors. When that was done, he would leave Saudi Arabia the fastest way he could.

  Outside, they followed the slope of the ship down to the main concentration of Saudi forces. Their path brought them to within a mile of the huge black pillar that stood like a monumental skyscraper at the nose of the destroyer. It was leaning now, held up by a section of the dome that had deep fissures running through it. But the gleaming structure itself showed no signs of damage.

  “That’s where we’re going to find them,” Guillaume said, sitting next to Reg. “It’s probably their control tower.”

  “Looks like the tower is about to tip over backwards. I’d hate to be inside when that happens.”

  “I hope they are still alive,” Mohammed said, hungry for a fight. Instead of answering him, everyone turned away to look at the impossibly large scale of the craft.

  As the sky brightened, Reg could see the terrain surrounding the ship more clearly. They were far from the nearest village, and farther still from At-Ta‘if. The terrain was uneven. Acacia and other scrub brush clung to the walls of the wadis, shallow canyons formed by rainwater. The rest was low rocky hills all the way to the horizon.

  Ground troops had already penetrated into the ship. A spectacular triangular breach had opened at the edge of the craft, a mile from the base of the black tower. Trucks were driving up into the gap and disappearing into the darkness of the interior.

  Before the helicopters touched down, a jeep came speeding toward them from a headquarters tent. The man in the passenger seat was an older, rail-thin Saudi who stood straight up and held on to the windshield for balance as the vehicle swayed and jolted beneath him. He didn’t look like a soldier. He was unarmed and wore an ankle-length thobe. But his businesslike demeanor made it clear that he was an officer with a lot of work to get done. Before the jeep had come to a complete stop, he jumped into the sand and marched closer to the helicopter, keeping one hand on his keffiyeh to keep it from blowing off his head. Guillaume and Reg met him under the whirling blades, where the three of them shouted to one another over the noise until the Frenchman waved his troops onto the ground.

  When the helicopter lifted away, the Saudi addressed the soldiers in fluent French. He identified himself as Lieutenant Rahim, briefed them on the situation inside the destroyer, and said that he would personally lead them inside for a look around. He made it clear that the Peacekeepers would be asked to leave once they had determined there were no survivors, because the king had declared the crash site a national military facility. When he was finished speaking, he turned to Reg and asked, in English, if there were any questions. Reg shook his head no.

  “What did he say?” Miriyam asked one of the Peacekeepers.

  “He said the aliens are all dead.”

  A troop truck lumbered forward, and the men piled in, taking positions on facing benches. There were no seats left by the time Reg and Miriyam followed Mohammed up the steps, so they decided to stand. They quickly thought better of it once the big truck began lurching over the bumpy earth. They immediately sat down on the floor of the truck and ended up clutching the legs of the soldiers to keep from being thrown around. Lieutenant Rahim was a man in a hurry to overcome some serious obstacles, at least that’s how he drove. He smashed into potholes and ran down the banks of ten-foot-deep wadis while turned halfway around in his seat briefing the soldiers on the situation. The U.N. squad held on tightly and listened to him yell over the grind of the engine, their powder blue jumpsuits matching the early sky lightening above them. They were a seasoned group of professional soldiers who worked so well together they hardly had to speak. Reg felt like they would be able to take care of business if it came to that.

  When the truck arrived on flatter ground, the baby-faced soldier whose leg Reg was holding, bent forward and asked a question. “Does this mean we are in love?” His comrades all burst out laughing. His name was Richaud, the joker of the squad. Reg sat back, a little embarrassed. Another man nudged him with a boot, the squad’s medical officer. He looked down at Reg and shook his head.

  “Your skin is very red, too much sun. Put your hand out.” He uncapped a tube of ointment and squeezed some out. Reg thanked him and put it on. “You three look pretty funny down there. How did you come together?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  The man’s name was LeBlanc. He had a stray eye, said he was a medical doctor, and had the curiosity of a ferret. He kept glancing ahead, anxious for the encounter to begin.

  As they approached the giant triangular break in the wall of the destroyer, the huge bulk of it hung over them, hundreds of times the size of Saudi Arabia’s largest supertanker. The way up into the ship was via a steep, uneven pile of rubble. Debris had spilled out of the opening, creating a natural ramp. A man directing traffic at the foot of the slope raised a red flag and brought Rahim’s wild ride to a temporary halt. The path up the ramp could only accommodate one-way traffic, and a convoy was coming down at that moment. Two pickup trucks and a jeep were moving slowly and carefully along the treacherous path. As they sat there idling, Reg was sure Rahim wasn’t going to be as cautious. As the vehicles got to the end of the ramp, Rahim released the emergency brake and lurched forward. But when he saw what was tied to the front of the jeep, he hit the brakes again.

  The next moment, everyone was craning their necks to see. The men in the jeep had a carcass tied across the hood, like deer hunters returning home successful. It was a gray bulky mass that looked like a giant crustacean shell, except that it had a stump of a face. Long bony arms and legs mingled with the ropes, as well as a profusion of thick tentacles, some of which had worked their way free and were dragging along behind the wheels. The body seemed too thin to support the heavy, scalloped shell of its head and thorax, but the limbs looked strong. They were muscular and covered by an exoskeleton. Stretched over the engine of the jeep, the alien’s body was nearly ten feet long and the color of a freshly unearthed grub. Guillaume yelled at his troops to stay where they were as he and Rahim jumped out to have a look. After a moment, the jeep took off to the north. Reg could see that it was headed toward the area a couple of miles away that was being prepared for the royal photo op. It didn’t surprise him when Guillaume returned and explained that since the corpse was in good shape compared to most the Saudis were finding, it was going to be used in the ceremony.

  Instead of driving up the ramp and into the ship, Rahim ground his engine into gear and turned south, following the two trucks. A few hundred yards later, they ca
me to the place where the Saudi army was dumping the alien bodies. It was a quarantine area, and a stench like ammonia was thick in the air. Everyone got out of the truck and walked up to a roadblock that was guarded by a pair of Pakistani men in turbans.

  The two trucks they had followed stopped next to a long pile of slick gray body parts and immediately began to unload more of the same. The flatbeds were piled high with the wreckage of alien bodies. Arms and legs and skull fragments were dragged off the trucks and tossed onto the five-foot-high pile that was already forty feet long. Reg and Guillaume said they wanted a closer look, so Rahim led them past the armed guards. Guillaume stopped and called back to LeBlanc, the medical officer, waving him forward. The biting, acrid smell in the air became stronger the closer they got to the meat pile.

  “This is a very bad job to have,” LeBlanc said to Reg as they watched the men off-loading the stinking cargo. The dead bodies were a potential biohazard, and no self-respecting Saudi was going to sully himself with that sort of work. Instead it was done by Filipino and Indian men who wore only gardening gloves. In lieu of gas masks, they’d tied shirts around their heads to cover their noses. At least there wasn’t a lot of blood. In fact, there wasn’t any. LeBlanc pulled on a pair of surgical gloves and moved up to the small mountain of carnage. He yanked a section of tentacle away from the pile. Reg looked over the man’s shoulder as he examined it.

  “Is this air safe to breathe?” he asked the doctor. “Aren’t foreign microbes a danger? Things we have no immunities to?”

  LeBlanc sniffed at the air. “It’s nothing. A little ammonia, it keeps you awake.” He lifted the severed end of the thick tentacle to his nose with both hands and smelled it carefully. “This is not the source of the odor. It makes no smell. It is strange,” he said, examining the eight-inch-thick tube of flesh. “No bones, no shell, no blood vessels.”

  He used a pocketknife to scrape away the sand clinging to the moisture and dig out a square of white flesh. After sniffing at it and running it between his fingers, he shrugged and tossed it aside. “Like a lobster,” he said, looking up at Reg with his wandering eye. He was a strange man.

  The tentacle was covered with a tough, gray skin that had striated markings like those found on the body of an earthworm. At its tip was a tough, two-fingered pincer claw. When each half closed, they formed a spearhead. After playing with it for a moment or two longer, LeBlanc returned to the pile and retrieved a three-foot-long slab of shell and carried it back to Reg. The inside was covered in some kind of sticky gelatin or fat. LeBlanc gathered up a glob of it, then watched it slowly plop off the end of his knife blade.

  “This is the substance that is making the smell,” he announced, his eyes watering slightly from the fumes. When he flipped the twenty-pound fragment over, the left half of a bony face was staring back up at him. A smooth, rounded forehead bulged above a deep black eye socket. There was no eye. The lower half of the face, where the mouth would be on a human, was a confused mass of cartilage tissue full of crisscrossing channels, as if it had been hacked at with a machete. It was part of the creature’s exoskeleton.

  “That’s the ugliest damn thing I’ve ever seen,” Reg said.

  LeBlanc seemed surprised. “I was just now thinking how much they look like us.” He ran his fingers over the seam at the center of the face. It made a clean vertical break from the middle of the forehead down to the middle of the amorphous chin. LeBlanc said it must be like the shell of an oyster or a giant clam. “But it’s strange,” he said, rolling it over once more. “If it’s like a shell of the clam, where is the clam?”

  He walked back to the pile and picked up a soft torso with one thin arm attached to it. He carried it back to Reg and tossed it on the ground. With a deft incision, he split the chest open and pulled back the dermal walls.

  “You see? It’s très bizarre. There are two different species.” He used his knife to poke at the innards of his latest find. “These small animals, they have the internal organs. But the big ones, pffft, they are shells, they are empty.”

  Rahim and Guillaume had walked to the far end of the quarantine area, keeping well away from the alien corpses. Both of them were anxious to leave when they returned to where Reg was standing.

  “The smell is horrible. I have seen enough,” said the Frenchman.

  “Yes, everything is under control,” said the Saudi lieutenant. “Let us continue.”

  Reg nodded that he, too, was ready to leave this area and enter the ship. The penetrating ammonia vapors were heavy in the air, causing his eyes to water. If the air was contaminated with foreign pathogens, it was too late to do anything about it. Hundreds of men would have already been infected. But as the three of them started back to the truck, LeBlanc whistled sharply through his teeth and waved them over to where he was kneeling. He’d found something in the sand.

  It was a greenish thing about an inch long and was squirming like a bristled caterpillar. LeBlanc said he thought it was some form of plant life. In the few minutes since he’d discovered it, he said, the wriggling, wormlike organism had nearly doubled in size.

  “Regardez,” he said. “Look at this.” He extended one of his gloved fingers and held it half an inch above the ground. The tiny creature lifted straight up, straining to reach the finger. When LeBlanc moved his hand slightly to the left, the tiny form bent in that direction.

  “It senses your body heat,” Reg said, “or maybe it smells you.”

  “Maybe,” allowed the doctor. “I believe it wants something else. I think it feels the moisture.” The doctor pulled his hand away, then watched as the small green shape turned and began wriggling toward the nearest source of moisture—the alien cadavers. When it had traveled a couple of inches, LeBlanc unscrewed the cap of his canteen and poured a small amount of water into the sand. The organism turned and immediately began burrowing into the wet spot, sucking the moisture out of the sand. As it did so, its body grew visibly, doubling in length.

  “Interesting,” said Guillaume, looking slightly queasy. “Where did you find it?”

  “Here,” LeBlanc said, “in the pile.”

  “Maybe there’s more,” Reg suggested. “There’s plenty of moisture in these bodies.” Thinking that Reg was probably right, LeBlanc began removing body pieces from the top of the heap and tossing them aside. He didn’t have to dig very deeply before he found proof that Reg was right. The plants were growing at an exponential rate just below the surface of the heap. Thousands of slender, translucent tendrils many feet long had grown in thick bunches throughout the pile of biowreckage. They were glass-clear and writhed in protest to being exposed to the morning sun. Within moments, they changed color and began to turn green.

  “This plant, it is very dangerous,” LeBlanc said. “If it finds a lake or an ocean, maybe we cannot stop the growth. It must be contained here before it spreads.”

  “It might be a source of food for the aliens,” Reg surmised. There was no way of knowing how many months or years or centuries they had been traveling through space. A fast-growing plant like this one would create an abundant source of nourishment. “The doctor’s right,” Reg said. “If this plant spreads, we could have an ecological nightmare on our hands.”

  Rahim immediately issued orders that no more bodies be brought out of the ship until the problem was better understood. Then he went to inspect one of the trucks that had been carrying the bodies to the quarantine site. First he checked the tires, then popped open the hood and looked into the engine compartment. Cursing in Arabic, he reached down and pulled away a handful of the vines. They had already overgrown the truck’s radiator. Immediately, he regretted having touched them. He threw them aside and wiped his hand vigorously on the material of his robe. “Burn them,” he shouted to the men off-loading the bodies, “burn everything, including the tracks.”

  After meeting with the officers in charge of the quarantine area and making sure they understood the danger LeBlanc had found, the men returned to their own vehi
cle. After inspecting it for signs of the aggressive plant, the Peacekeepers piled in.

  Rahim drove back toward the triangular breach in the wall of the destroyer and headed up the uneven ramp of debris. Although the path to the opening was treacherous and bumpy, Rahim drove fast. The soldiers riding in back were tossed around roughly, but they were eager to get inside and begin the work they had come to do. It was an ironic mission for a U.N. peacekeeping force: locate survivors of the battle and kill them.

  They came to the top of the ramp and drove onto the smooth floor of the city destroyer’s main deck. The gray walls that closed in around them were the color of graphite. They towered above the truck, smooth in some places and intricately worked in others, like large sections of circuit board. The ceilings of the first rooms they entered were low, but as they penetrated deeper, the domed roof climbed higher. Rahim was forced to slow the truck to a few miles per hour as he steered through the obstacle course of shattered walls and missing sections of floor. The first few hundred feet of the ship were a warren of collapsed passageways and work spaces extending both horizontally and vertically. Shafts of sunlight leaked in where the roof had torn away, but it was soon dark enough that Rahim switched on his headlights. Even though all of the internal walls were badly fractured, most of them appeared to be sturdy; others were teetering on the brink of collapse. It was like driving through a darkened house of cards that threatened to fall apart at any moment.

  As he approached a narrow gap between two towering walls that had fallen against one another, Rahim honked his horn and flashed his headlights to alert oncoming drivers to his presence. Then he drove through the opening.

  On the other side, they entered a curved hallway of monumental proportions. It was several hundred feet across and long enough that it disappeared around the bend of the ship in either direction. It was completely empty and reminded Reg of an underground flood channel he and his friends had played in when they were children, only this place was a thousand times larger. The truck suddenly felt like a small toy moving across the smooth floor of the chamber. A trail of burning flares marked the path to the far side of the space. Rahim hit the gas and sped into the darkness. He didn’t slow down when they came to a soft spot in the road, a place where the floor hung limply into whatever open chamber lay below. It felt like driving across a swaying trampoline until they climbed up the other side and found solid footing once more.