* * * * *
They approached the docked ships cautiously. Wilks put Bueller down carefully and drew the handgun. “Ill 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 impor
tant.
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.
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[Aliens 01] - Earth Hive Page 20
