Species II

by Yvonne Navarro

  “Nah. It’s not nearly big enough.” The room was small, barely ten by ten and painted that oh-so-attractive shade of dull military green. Press began inspecting the weapons stored neatly in racks along the walls. “Besides, they don’t make ’em; we just stock ’em. That’s why it’s called the ‘Emergency Armory.’ ”

  “You sound like a commercial.”

  The special agent gave a short laugh. “Yeah, that’s me. Number One Fan of Uncle Sam.” Next to a rack of M-16s, Mossberg 590 shotguns, and SWAT H&K MP5A3s, he saw half a dozen Kalishnikov rifles; he picked one up and peered at it, then put it back in its place. Speaking of Uncle Sam, where—and why—the hell had a U.S. Air Force base come up with this Russian shit? There was even an entire shelf of ammunition. So much for buying American.

  “What’s this thing?”

  Press glanced over his shoulder. “A Tartex land mine. It’ll pretty much wipe out this room if you drop it and it goes off.”

  “Shit,” Dennis said nervously. He set the mine back in its slot on a shelf, handling it like it was a paper egg, then eyed the supply of olive-drab hand grenades next to it. “Can’t we just call in the National Guard?”

  Press shook his head. “Sorry, pal. No can do—this is strictly a solo mission.”

  Dennis made a sound that Press thought was a moan. “Man, I’m a lover, not a fighter. How’d I get involved in this?”

  “Lover, my ass,” Press said with a wicked grin. “You ain’t been laid in eleven months, remember?”

  “Yeah, and no thanks to you, hotshot. And I do recall, thank you very much. Right down to that up-and-coming moment of golden truth when your army boys burst in and ruined it all.”

  “Big talk.”

  Dennis scowled at him, but without real animosity. “Okay, so I used to be a lover.” He gazed around the room again, taking in the kind of armor that they’d never had on the Excursion. “But I’m sure as hell no kind of soldier.”

  “You’ll be doing your country a good turn,” Press said. “Helping out more than anything you ever did up there floating around in space. Hell, you never know—maybe once we’ve got him captured, they’ll award you the Congressional Medal of Honor. Hell, I’ll even recommend it.”

  “Whoopee,” Dennis said, but Press thought he sounded anything but enthused.

  “This looks about right.” He plucked a small, high-tech tranquilizer gun from a stand and inspected it closely, then snagged a box of darts. “Perfect, except that it only holds one dart at a time, plus there’s only one of these shooters in here—not much call for this kind of thing lately.”

  Dennis came over to see and his mouth dropped open. “That punk-ass little thing? What are you trying to do—make it take a nap? No offense, but where are the bazookas? This looks like something my grandmother would hide in her purse at the bingo hall!”

  Press smirked. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you that size doesn’t matter?”

  “The hell it doesn’t,” Dennis retorted. He scanned the rows of weapons, then stepped over and plucked a long, serrated machete from its place on the wall. “You can have your wimpy little gun, but I’m taking this for good measure.”

  Press stopped, watching as Dennis fastened the handle of the machete to his belt loop. There was no doubt that the guy was a cutup, a smart-ass, and a continuously horny bastard to boot. But there were other qualities here that Press was discovering. “Dennis,” he said pointedly, “you don’t have to come with us, you know. You’re not Special Ops, and you’re not under any kind of obligation—”

  “Oh, you are so wrong,” Dennis interrupted. He looked at the floor and Press knew he was trying to hide the pain on his face. “I’ve got so much of an obligation. Patrick was my best friend, and despite what he’s become, he was a great guy. You’ve seen all the horrible things he’s done now, but you never knew him when he was okay. He would’ve never done anything to hurt people, would have never, ever harmed Melissa—he worshiped her.” Dennis’s words had grown thick and he stopped for a moment, then continued in a quieter voice. “If he could stand outside himself and see what’s he’s become, know what’s he’s done . . . he would want us to end it for him.”

  Eve sat and watched the activity outside her habitat, noting with detached interest the tripled guards, the woman stationed by the tether mechanism, and down at the far end, Laura and that special agent, Press Lennox. They were doing something over there that had to do with filling tranquilizers that would be shot out of a pistol—as if such things could stop her. Or Patrick . . . especially him.

  Sometimes Eve wondered if the good doctor had as much of a handle on her as she was reported to have on Patrick. Here she came now, a determined look on her face, and confidence—false, Eve could feel it—in her step. She motioned to the sentry to raise the outer gate and the person obeyed. A smart fox, though; the female guard retracted it only enough to allow Laura to duck inside the exchange hallway. When the gates behind her had been lowered back into place, she gestured for the guard to open the inner set.

  “Dr. Baker,” Brea said, “we strongly advise you not to go in there. There’s been a definite shift in Eve’s personality. She’s unpredictable at best, and at worst she’s got the strength of ten men.” The young woman’s eyes were wide and frightened, her face bisected by the white strip across her broken nose. Both eyes were rimmed in bloody-looking purple, all thanks to the results of Eve’s little choking act. After patching her up in MedLab, Laura had wanted her to stay home for a few days, but Brea had refused. “I guess we all know how devious she can be, and now she’s refused to cooperate anymore with the laboratory monitoring.”

  “I have to agree, ma’am” said the guardswoman by the tether mechanism. Again, it was one of the women who had been there during Eve’s first outbreak. Beyond a few nasty bruises, she was fine, although her opinion of the life-form was clearly leaning toward a preference for termination. Brea seemed to regard the female soldier with more respect since the incident. “Even with this”—the guard gestured at the main switch—“the fact is that thing in there could kill you before the toxin would kill her, and there’s nothing I could to stop it.”

  Laura stood for a moment, considering. Finally, she said, “It’s okay. It’s worth a reasonable risk if she cooperates.”

  Brea stared at her. “And if she doesn’t?”

  “Then I’ll get the hell out of there. Go on—open it.”

  Brea shook her head and activated the switch for the external gate. Before Laura stepped inside, she glanced back at her staff members. “If she takes me hostage, trigger the tether mechanism. Do not negotiate, and do not open this gate for her, under any circumstance. Understood?” They all nodded, faces creased with apprehension.

  The external gate came down with a clang, but Laura had to gesture again before her reluctant crew would raise the inner one. Then she was inside Eve’s habitat and she could see the alien woman on the other side of several glass walls where, at the far end, she was amusing herself in what they called the exercise area. This small section had a few basic pieces of exercise equipment—a treadmill, an exercise bicycle, one of the Total Gym systems that used body weight as resistance. There were no weight plates, barbells or dumbbells, nothing that could be thrown or used as a weapon. As it turned out, they needn’t have bothered with anything but the treadmill, which Eve seemed to use only as a way of releasing pent-up energy. She was on it now, dressed in a sports bra and a pair of spandex bicycle shorts above thick cotton anklets and her Nikes. Her long, lean body was lathered in sweat as she pounded along the rubber surface at a good ten to eleven miles an hour, the treadmill’s motor screaming and at its performance limit. Her hair was plastered to her forehead but she wasn’t breathing hard at all; there were no more electrodes taped to her body.

  When she saw Laura, she flipped the OFF switch and let the treadmill wind down, then stepped off it. “What are you doing in here?”

  Laura studied her, noting the fine muscles and the immediate
cardio recovery despite the long, vigorous run on the treadmill. Such beauty . . . such danger. She hesitated, then went for it. “I came to ask for your help again,” she said slowly. “To find Patrick. On our own—”

  “No.”

  “Eve—”

  “If I came to you,” Eve said coldly, “and asked you to help me destroy the only other one of your kind in the world, would you agree to help me do it?” Her mouth twisted as she watched for Laura’s reaction. When nothing came, her expression changed once again, this time to fury. “We’re back to that lab-rat thing again, aren’t we? That’s me, an experimental little nothing to be poked and prodded and thrown out when I’m just no fun anymore.”

  “That’s not it at all.”

  “Sorry, Dr. Baker. You’ll have to find Patrick without me. I won’t help you this time. Good luck, though—you’re definitely going to need it.” She turned her back and started to step back on the treadmill, but Laura’s next words stopped her.

  “Eve, you have to understand that if you refuse to cooperate in this laboratory I can’t guarantee that the program will continue,” Laura said. She tried to keep her voice bland, but Eve wasn’t a stupid woman. Still, this was a last resort—

  Eve whirled. “You’re threatening me!” she said incredulously. “Do you think I care what you do to me?” One hand gestured angrily at her living quarters. “This is all nice and bright and cheery, but in case you’ve forgotten, it’s a prison.” Laura saw the color change in Eve’s skin as her face took on a faint shade of red. “You want to kill me, Dr. Baker?” she hissed and took a step toward her. “Then do it . . . if you can.”

  Laura locked gazes with Eve and her heart started pounding. For the first time in all these months, there was nothing at all human in Eve’s eyes—sure, the blue color was the same, the shape was the same, but there was something else there, too. Something she couldn’t put a name to and that was unbelievably menacing.

  The tables had turned.

  Fear or not, Laura still told Eve the truth. “No,” she said as evenly as she could. “I don’t want to do that. I never did.”

  Heart thundering, unwilling to turn her back, Laura edged out of Eve’s exercise area and left the life-form staring after her, then hurried out of the habitat.

  She would never go in there again.

  19

  “Are they ready?” Press asked. He and Dennis watched as Laura carefully injected a bright blue gel-based substance into the emptied shells of the tranquilizer darts. The two men were holding a couple of spray canisters filled with the same material, which Laura had substituted for the failed hydrochlorine toxin. “Do you think it will work?”

  Laura’s eyes crinkled as she concentrated on the last of her task, then she straightened and packed up the filled tranquilizer darts. “I can’t give you any assurances about that,” she admitted. “In theory . . . yes, it ought to be extremely efficient.” She gave them a faint, tired smile. “In practice, I’m afraid it hasn’t been tested yet.”

  “Well, it’s the best shot we’ve got,” Press said and held out his hand for the weapon. Laura gave it to him and he inspected it carefully, making sure he knew how to load it now so he wouldn’t end up dying while he tried to figure it out when he was in the field. Single shot—too bad these things didn’t come semi-auto.

  “That other stuff didn’t work,” Dennis said.

  “That’s not entirely true,” Laura pointed out.

  “It didn’t work,” Dennis said stubbornly. “Otherwise Patrick would be . . . ah, shit.” He looked miserable. “Well, he’d be dead, that’s what, and he’s not. So what if this stuff doesn’t work either? Then what?”

  Press had no answer for Dennis and he looked to Laura. Her eyes met his, then cut to Dennis. Finally, she spoke.

  “Then we’ll be walking onto a battlefield with a water pistol,” she said softly.

  Dennis started to say something, then frowned as he eyed the rest of the lab and Eve’s glass bio-environment. “You know, something’s not right over there.”

  The tone of his voice made Laura look up. “What?”

  “Maybe I’m just seeing things—too much crazy stress or something—but I could’ve sworn I just saw part of that glass bubble thing that Eve is in sort of . . . bulge.”

  The statement made Press jerk toward the lab and Eve’s bio-environment. “Jesus Christ, Laura—you don’t think she could shatter that, do you?”

  “No way,” Laura said flatly. “That’s quartz glass. It’s unbreakable and it won’t melt until it hits several thousand degrees Celsius. The stuff is used to contain—”

  The whole front wall of Eve’s habitat exploded.

  The three of them spun simultaneously, and for a too-long moment, no one moved. A lifetime ago Press had stood with Laura and the members of the first team who had been gathered to apprehend the escaped Sil and had watched a laboratory tape of how as a child, Sil had cannonballed through the window of her smaller glass quarters and escaped. Now many of those people involved in the resulting alien hunt—Stephen Arden and Xavier Fitch, the head of the whole operation, among them—were dead, and the sight of all that glass, so much more this time, brought it all back to the forefront of Press’s memory. It was like before—a huge, glistening blast of strangely sharp water, a shower of glitter that razored against the skin and clothes of anyone within range.

  Press and Laura both looked to the right and saw the woman in charge of the tether mechanism stagger back, her face covered with bloody cuts. Then the woman’s dazed expression cleared and hardened, and she went for the double sequence of buttons that would take care of this alien problem once and for all.

  She never made it.

  Even with her exceptional speed and strength, Eve was too far away to reach the guard before she would hit the death button. She must have known it would be this way, because before the woman’s stride could take her back to the tether mechanism, something flew through the air, a blur that was traveling far too fast to identify until it smashed into the side of the guard’s head and knocked her off her feet. The force of the blow tossed her against the wall behind her and it wasn’t until she slid down it and didn’t get up again that they saw what had done the damage—the lopsided remains of the baseball Eve had ruined the other day.

  “The tether!” Laura shouted, and the race was on.

  Eve and Press went for the gold mechanism on the wall at the same time. The only reason Press got there an instant before she did was that he was closer—Eve was far, far faster. Still, that wasn’t enough. As his hand jabbed toward the button, Eve’s fingers closed around his arm; before he could go on the defensive, he went sailing through the air as though he was no more than a bothersome gnat.

  He heard more than saw the tether mechanism shatter under the impact of Eve’s fist, had a glimpse of flying sparks followed by the stench of heated insulation. The device fell off the wall and crashed to the floor, nothing but a useless, crumpled hunk of metal leaving a few stray wires still attached to the wall. Press tried desperately to shake the fog from his brain and managed only enough sense to pull himself up on one knee and watch Eve as she sprinted across the laboratory; the main locked door might as well have been made of cardboard for all it kept her inside. She kicked it open without any effort at all and vaulted through the opening, disappearing into the corridor beyond.

  “Oh, shit!” Press heard Dennis cry out. Then the astronaut and Laura were at his side and helping him to his feet.

  “Why didn’t anyone fire?” Press demanded. Eyes blazing, he glared around the laboratory but none of the guards would meet his eyes. A few feet away, the woman who had been in charge of guarding the tether mechanism was still splayed against the wall; starting at the left temple, the entire side of her face had turned into a black bruise. Her eyes were open and staring at nothing that anyone in the lab would ever know.

  “I think the quarters were too close—they were afraid they’d hit each other,” Laura said. She pe
ered hard at Press and tried to lift one of his eyelids. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m wonderful,” he retorted and pushed her hand away. “Grab the DNA compound and let’s go.”

  “We didn’t test it—”

  “What the hell were you going to test it on, anyway?” Press gripped her by one wrist and tugged her back toward the main lab area, knowing that Dennis would follow. “If she gets to Patrick before we do, we’re going to have problems bigger than anything we ever dreamed of. Let’s grab our gear and go.”

  Laura and Dennis didn’t have to be told again. A few seconds that felt like eternities, then they were sprinting through the wreck of the main lab door and after Eve, following corridor after corridor while alarms began to scream through the speakers. It wasn’t hard to track the life-form—it was BioHazard policy to post a sentry at every half-landing to check identification cards and authorizations; all they had to do was to track the trail of bodies Eve left in her wake. One of them was missing the chain of keys at his belt that no doubt had held a security cardkey . . . and that meant that Eve was going to be able to get all the way outside.

  “She won’t make out of the building, will she?” Dennis demanded as the three of them jumped over the unconscious man and kept going. “I mean, someone will stop her before she takes off, right?”

  “How does she even know where she’s going?” Press asked on the heels of that. “This damned place is the biggest tangle of halls I’ve ever seen.”

  Laura pulled up, then motioned at a stairway marked EMERGENCY ACCESSS ONLY—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. “Let’s go this way—the stairwell alarm hasn’t been triggered, which means Eve must’ve taken the elevator.” She pulled a security cardkey from her pocket and jammed it into the card reader; an instant later the red light on the device changed to green and the locking mechanism clicked open. “Even if we don’t beat her upstairs, we should at least be able to get there at the same time. Come on!”

  “Oh, I can’t wait,” Press said.