by Steve Perry
“Billie, goddammit!”
“I’ll keep up,” she said.
Mitch said, “Billie, don’t do this—”
“Shut up, Mitch. Otherwise I’ll stay here with you and they’ll kill me. If you don’t want me to do that, then you have to hang on and go with me.”
Wilks sprinted away, Billie and her passenger right behind him.
29
When they stopped for breath, Billie said, “Why are we running? There’s no place to go. They’re going to blow this place up when they leave. Even if there weren’t any aliens outside the defenses, we can’t get far enough away on foot to escape the blast.”
“I don’t plan for us to be on foot,” he said.
“If what they said is true, nowhere on Earth is any better,” Bueller put in.
The three of them were leaning against the inside of a stanchion, a support post that ran from the ground up through the level they were on. Wilks guessed they were on the third level, probably fifty meters above the surface.
“I don’t plan for us to be on Earth, either,” Wilks said.
“What are you talking about?” That from Billie.
“Remember what the controller said when we left orbit? There are programmed troop carriers here. When they leave, we’ll be on one of them.”
“How?”
Wilks hefted the general’s pistol. “By doing whatever it takes.”
Bueller looked uncomfortable. “I’m not supposed to allow that,” he said.
Wilks laughed. “How you gonna stop it, gimpy? Besides, I see a basic flaw in your programming here. If they are gonna kill us, me and Billie, and we are gonna kill them, who do you worry about the most?”
Bueller chewed on that for a second. “Billie,” he said.
“Ah. So some folks are more important than others, eh?”
“Yes.”
“They didn’t teach you that in the vats.”
“No.”
Wilks laughed again. “You just stopped being an android, pal. Welcome to the human race.”
* * *
Billie allowed Wilks to take Mitch; they could move faster that way, Wilks said. And even as they ran, she marveled over what Mitch had said. He had outgrown his programming. His body might not have been born of a woman, but as far as she was concerned, he was a man.
Wilks led them into a storage area that had a computer terminal. He began punching questions into the system.
“What are you doing?”
He didn’t look up at Billie. “Finding out which of the drone ships are carrying crew and which are only lugging cargo. Some will have troops; some will be hauling supplies. We can find a supply ship; we can dump some of ’em and replace the weight with us.”
“We don’t even know where they are going,” Billie said.
“Who cares? Can’t be any worse than being fried by atomics or eaten by the monsters.”
“Wilks—”
“I know what you are gonna say,” he said. “I thought my job was over when I blasted the aliens’ homeworld, that I could come back, get stuck away in some nice quiet prison or brainwiped and that would be it. I was looking forward to it. But now, no. I can’t quit until every one of these alien bastards is dead.”
“Is it worth it?”
“It is to me. A man’s got to have a reason to get up in the mornings. I spent years trying to decide if I should just shut my own lights off. Something always kept me from doing it. I never knew what, exactly, but I’m glad it did. I might die, kid, but I am going to go down swinging.”
He was as happy as she’d ever seen him. He had a purpose, and that was more than a lot of people had.
“Ah, here we go. A cargo drone, number three-oh-two, nicknamed The American. Bay sixteen, level five. Here’s the overlay map…”
* * *
They approached the docked ships cautiously. Wilks put Bueller down carefully and drew the handgun. “I’ll just wound the guards,” he said, “I won’t kill them.”
“Thank you,” Bueller said.
“Stay here. I’ll be back when I’m done.” He started to leave. Paused. “Hey, Bueller, I never got around to telling you how good a job you and your troops did. You did okay.”
“For an android?” Bueller said.
“Nah, for anybody.”
Wilks eased his way onto the dock, using the supports as cover. In the end, it was easy. There were four guards, they had their weapons slung, they weren’t expecting trouble. When he was close enough and still covered, Wilks took a deep breath, brought the pistol up, and quickly fired four times. The suppressed barrel cut most of the noise.
He hit each of the four guards once.
Right between the eyes.
Head shots were the best way for an instant knockdown.
So he lied to Bueller. Life was hard.
* * *
Billie saw Wilks coming back. “Our ride is here, people. Let’s go.”
He led them past the bodies of four soldiers who had been guarding the ship.
Mitch looked at the dead men.
“Sorry. My hand must have slipped,” Wilks said.
Mitch shrugged. Once they were dead, his responsibility ended. Wilks had to know that.
Behind them, small-arms fire rattled. It didn’t sound close, but it wasn’t too far away, either.
“Looks like company has come calling,” Wilks said. “I’d bet the schedule is going to be advanced just a tad.”
The ship was a rectangular module with heat tiles on the bottom and a small control cab that looked vaguely like the head of a giant insect stuck on the front. It seemed almost an afterthought to Billie, the way the cab joined the brick-shaped body of the ship.
Wilks caught her look. “Cobbled together out of spare parts,” he said. “We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t come apart when we lift. Come on. We’ve got to move some gear around. This bird is loaded with food supplies and frozen sperm and ova, regular little Noah’s ark. We have to install an oxy plant and recycling and recovery system so we can breathe and have a way to clear wastes. And since I don’t know how long we’ll be in flight, some sleep chambers would be nice, too. Take us a couple of hours, I’ve located the stuff we need on the ship next door.”
“What about the passengers on that ship?” Mitch asked.
“They can double up in the chambers if they have to. This bird doesn’t have any ’cause it’s meant to be crewless. We need ’em more than they do.”
* * *
It took almost two and a half hours to get the proper gear installed, and would have been impossible without the dumbots Wilks rounded up.
The sounds of combat were drawing much closer as they finished. He could hear the occasional ricochet ching off the alien armor, and whoever had taken over from the dead general would probably be hauling ass real soon now.
Every now and then, Wilks heard a man or woman scream.
Yeah. Real soon now.
“Let’s lock it up,” he said to Billie. “I have a feeling we’ll be going for a ride any minute.”
The control cabin still had acceleration couches in place, they hadn’t gotten around to stripping them, so Wilks helped Billie cinch Bueller into place before he went to his own couch. He didn’t know exactly where the retreat was going, but he had rigged the sleep chambers so they could climb in when they hit hyperspace; the automatics would shut the things down when they dropped back into normal space. After that, well, they’d see.
No sooner had he fastened his own restraints than the ship’s board lit up with launch readings. Close.
“Hang on,” he said. “Looks like somebody just lit the fuses.”
30
The ship lifted, and the high-gee force shoved at the passengers, pressing them deep into the cushioned seats. Wilks supposed that if he had a viewer operational, he would have looked back, although it would surely be a depressing sight. Watching your own planet being overrun by monsters wasn’t what he would call fun.
There was
nothing to be done for it, now, at least.
The first rule in winning a war was to survive. If you lived, you could fight another day. Dead, you couldn’t do shit.
And Wilks planned to stay alive as long as it took to kill those things. As long as it took.
Whoever had programmed the ships had figured on using Earth’s gravity to help sling them into deep space. The cargo drone reached high orbit and the drives pulsed, pushing them into an ellipse. The monitors showed that there were at least fifty ships in the loose formation. Plus one unidentified vessel whose configurations Wilks recognized.
“Hey, say good-bye to old longnose,” he said.
Billie looked at him. Went blank. Then screamed.
* * *
Somehow Mitch managed to unhook himself from his seat and walk on his hands to where Billie was still strapped into her chair. He climbed up, held her, tried to reach her.
“Billie! What is it? Billie?”
It was inside her brain again, that alien presence she’d last felt light-years away. The thing that had saved them from the monsters.
It was laughing.
The force of its thoughts overwhelmed her, she couldn’t stop them, it was like trying to halt an ocean breaker with a bucket. The feelings were mixed: it gloated, it was filled with snide joy, it lusted, it felt superior, it hated, it raged, and among all those were things she couldn’t identify, feelings for which there was no human reference.
But she got enough of it to know what it wanted her to know.
Oh, God!
“Billie?”
She managed to focus on Mitch. Mitch, who loved her. Her feelings for him became like a wall, against which the alien spacefarer’s emotional sea splashed. Some of it slipped past, but enough was stopped so Billie could recover her senses. Somehow it knew this. The tide stopped.
“It—that thing. It talked to me.”
“What did it say?” Wilks put in.
“It has no more use for us than it did the aliens. It followed us here to see our world, to see if there was anything here worth taking. It wants to conquer us.”
“Won’t have a lot of opposition, will it?” Wilks said.
“It plans to wait and let the aliens kill all the humans. Then when the soldiers come back—it knows their plans—it will be waiting. Maybe with others of its own kind. To take Earth from the winners.”
“Damn,” Wilks said. “If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. Out of the hurricane and into a tornado.”
After that, there wasn’t much any of them could say.
* * *
Wilks had the sleep chambers cycling on line; according to his instruments, the ship was about to enter subspace. None of them knew for how long or how far they would travel while dancing in the nowhere and nowhen of the Einsteinian Warp. It didn’t really matter.
Billie helped Wilks install Mitch into his chamber. Wilks moved away to check his own bed for the long sleep. Billie stood over Mitch, smiled down at him.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yes. I am.”
They embraced, a long, soulful hug, then she stepped away and triggered the system. The lid clamshelled down and sealed. Mitch kept his eyes open, watching her, until the gases put him under.
She watched him sleep for a moment, then turned toward her own chamber.
Wilks was already climbing into his. He waved at her.
Well. She had come a long way in her life. From one destroyed planet to another, to yet another. But she was still alive. Not so long ago, that wouldn’t have meant much to Billie, but things had changed. She had Mitch now, somehow they would find a way to repair him, bring him back to what he’d been before.
No, that wasn’t true. He was already more than he’d been before, even if his body was half-destroyed. But there were ways to fix that, easier because of what he was. And even that wasn’t really important.
Billie climbed into her chamber. Touched a control. Watched the lid fan slowly down. No, what was important was, she wasn’t alone anymore.
And she knew as sleep claimed her, she would not dream of the past and of monsters. Rather she would dream of the future. Whatever that might be. After all, they hadn’t done too bad so far. A war was fought one battle at a time.
Billie smiled, and closed her eyes.
For Dianne of course;
And for John Locke, who probably would
have written it a bit differently…
Thanks go to: Mike Richardson, for the work and his input therein; to Janna Silverstein for her input and green pencil; to Vera Katz and Sam Adams for their oblique support. Couldn’ta dunnit withoutcha, folks.
“Now this is the law of the jungle—
as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper,
but the Wolf that shall break it must die.”
Rudyard Kipling
1
Outside in the dead vacuum of space there was no sound; but inside the robot ship, the steady drone of the gravity drives vibrated like a low note played on some deep-throated musical instrument. It went through the flesh, to the bone; right to the soul; it had been there since the sleep chambers clamshelled up to expose their inhabitants to it. A mechanized om that lulled, as if calling them back into the long sleep, no chambers needed.
Billie sat in the makeshift kitchen, staring at what passed for coffee. The color was right, but that was about all. The taste was almost nothing, hot water with some vague taint to it. She watched it cool, stuck in the post-hypersleep lethargy, her own animation still feeling somewhat suspended. It was like the flu, you couldn’t cure it and it just seemed to hang on forever sometimes. The coffee vibrated, making tiny ripples that lapped against the circular wall of the cup.
Behind her, Wilks said, “Tastes like shit, don’t it?”
“That would be an improvement,” Billie said. She didn’t turn to look at him as he moved into the room. He sat on the bulkhead roll-out to her right and watched her for a few seconds before he spoke again.
“You okay?”
“Me? Yeah, I’m fine. Why shouldn’t I be okay? I’m on a robot ship going God knows where, leaving behind an Earth overrun by alien monsters, in the company of half an android and a marine who is probably a borderline psycho.”
“What do you mean ‘borderline’?” he said. “Hey, I’m certifiable on any world you want to name.”
Billie glanced at him. Couldn’t stop the grin that matched his. Shook her head. “Jesus, Wilks.”
“Hey, cheer up, kid. It’s not as if things are really bad. We got each other. You, me, and Bueller.” There was silence for a moment. Then: “I’m gonna go monitor the ’casts. You want to come along?”
Billie shifted on the crate she was using for a chair. Looked at Wilks. The burn scar on his face was something she almost never noticed anymore, but in this light, it gave his features a kind of wry malevolence. Like some minor demon out to play practical jokes. “No,” she finally said.
“Suit yourself.” He stood.
Billie sipped at the tepid liquid. Made a face at the nontaste. “Wait. I changed my mind. I’ll go along.”
It wasn’t as if there was an awful lot to do on this tub. Since they’d awakened, a week had gone past, with no sign of stopping. Their monitoring gear was crappy, but even so, if there were any human-inhabited places around, they should have spotted them. The gravity drive was a lot faster than the old reaction sprayers, but if there was a planetary system, Wilks couldn’t find it. There were better ways to die than starving on a ship going nowhere.
She should go and see if Mitch wanted to come with them. Mitch. She had trouble with that even now. Yeah, she loved him, but what a can of worms that turned out to be. Maybe not worms exactly, but whatever plumbing androids had installed sure looked verminlike. She loved him, but she also hated him. How was that possible, to have two such opposing feelings at once for someone? Maybe the medics in the hospital where she’d spent all those yea
rs were right. Maybe she was crazy.
The ship was fairly large, most of it was given over to cargo. They hadn’t really gotten around to exploring all the nooks in it yet. Billie supposed that if they were stuck in it much longer, she’d get around to serious poking about, but the urge hadn’t really come upon her; she wasn’t quite bored enough. Why bother? Who gave a shit?
The control room was tiny, barely space for two to wedge their way into it. The designers had only to leave enough room for a repair tech, since the thing had been built to be run by the computer and a few service robots. The ‘cast screens were blank, save for the two running ship data in computer language.
“Showtime,” Wilks said. He wasn’t smiling.
* * *
A man who looked like Albert Einstein at sixty said, “Have we got it? Have we got the uplink—okay, okay, listen, anybody out there, this is Hermann Koch in Charlotte; we’re out of food, we’re almost out of water, we’re overrun! The damned things are killing or kidnapping everybody! There are only twenty of us left alive—!”
The man went away and abruptly there was another place. Outside, a bright and sunny day, spring flowers in bloom, bright green leaves sprouting on the trees. Only something hideous wrecked the scene:
One of the aliens carried under its arm a woman, as a man might carry a small dog. The alien was three meters tall, light gleaming from its black exoskeleton; its head was shaped like a mutated banana; it looked like some obscene crossbreed between an insect and a lizard. Boney, notched spars protruded from the thing’s back like exposed ribs, three paired sets. It walked upright on two legs, a fact that seemed impossible given the way it was constructed, and a long, vertebrae-flanged, and pointed tail swept the pavement behind it as it moved.
A bullet spanged off the thing’s head, doing no more damage to the hard surface than a rubber ball bouncing on a plastecrete sidewalk. The alien turned and looked at the unseen shooters.
“Aim for the woman!” somebody screamed. “Shoot Janna!”
Before the alien kidnapper could flee with its prey, three more shots boomed. One of them missed completely. One of them hit the alien’s chest, flattened on the natural armor, did no harm. The third bullet hit the woman, just above the left eye.
