The soldiers wondered if it was a trick of the mind, a hallucination, but the figures seemed to be covered in a thick pinkish fur, mottled and rippling. The pink broke into white bands on the appendages that changed with every twitch, like a living barber pole.
Amanda, the closest to the things, was more attentive to the tiny beads of white reflected from what might be the chests. ‘Going to die on first contact,’ she thought, ‘but at least I can look them in the eye . . . or eyes,’ realizing the pinpricks were from multiple eyes peeking from the furried torsos.
One of them was a few steps in front of the other, with more pronounced color variations in the fur. ‘So you have majors too,’ Amanda thought. She noticed black lines thrusting from the fur on the leader’s upper appendage, forming a point with several jagged boxes and tubes, coagulating into some kind of ad-hoc tool. No, a weapon!
The leader pointed it at Pete, who was fumbling blindly in the dust for his own gun.
“Pete!” Amanda screamed, and one of the other creatures focused a weapon on her. She didn’t see the blast, no explosive discharge, only the sound of Pete’s rifle cracking open like crushing a pile of twigs. The rifle in Thompson’s lap looked as if it had come out of an industrial smelter, the drywall dust burning off in a gray haze.
‘Lasers!’ Amanda realized as Pete reached for his ankle knife. The three figures crept closer across the smattering of debris and destroyed furniture in the room as their heavy bodies crunched down. One of the figures at the back moved the remnants of a heavy oak sitting chair as if it was a paperweight. ‘How do you kill an alien gorilla?’ Amanda thought, scanning the room for her own rifle.
The leader stood inches from Pete with a posture that would have indicated gloating if it were a human. Amanda smelled burning from her side. Looking down she saw Ben’s entire upper body had melted into the floor; one of the other aliens must have “shot” him at the same time as the Pete. She stifled a scream and froze, but the noise still made one of the figures train a laser on her.
The only remaining noise in the house came from Pete’s heavy breathing. Dust shook off his body as he continued the slow reach for his boot. The leader touched the end of his laser gun to Pete’s forehead, and the reaching hand stopped.
Amanda squinted to see the laser. This close it seemed less of a gun than a simple extension of their own fur, emerging out of the arm without a barrel, but a kind of box attached to what might be a dark crystal shaped into a prism. She could see strands of thin, dark material emerging from the armored suit and groping the box above the prism. The strands twitched like tendons when the figures moved. She found it odd that the aliens seemed without hands or digits at the ends of their appendages, just a thick pad-like flap which cradled the black growth of a weapon.
A noise like grinding of heavy machinery mixed with hummingbird squawking came from somewhere in the leader’s fur. The other two returned it in kind, albeit subdued.
‘Came all this fucking way just to gloat about killing us,’ Amanda thought. ‘So you’re not so advanced after all. Your pride makes you take risks. That means we can kill you. You’re no better than us; just carrying better toys.’ She closed her eyes, secure in knowing that even though she may die, the aliens had vulnerabilities later soldiers could exploit.
The leader made a louder sound, high-pitched and long. The major shook uncontrollably, the leader’s laser still inches from his forehead.
Amanda opened her eyes to see where that horrible sound had come from. A wide and low mouth opened up from the bottom. Clenched teeth, maybe hundreds of them, revealed themselves atop dark green gums in a grimace. The fur-covered lips were pulled back from the bottom in a straight line, an upside down version of a human smile. The teeth seemed to vibrate and the gloating, grinding noise sounded again. This time the complimentary squeaking from the leader’s followers was joined by a fourth.
Something squeaked upstairs and a rumbling regular noise got louder. The two figures behind the leader retrained their arms on the source of the sound, the balcony to their right. Pete screamed a battle cry as he grabbed for his knife and stabbed at the arm of the leader, still trained on him. At the same time, a grand piano, mangled beyond playability but wheels intact enough, rolled off the balcony and came down on top of the three aliens.
It had been a man-sized vase in Ramadi, but the effect was the same. The piano dumped the three aliens into the floor in a gnashing of incongruous, shrill piano wires pricked all at once. Music to Amanda’s ears.
The leader fired his laser as he was hit, grazing Pete with a reverse mohawk, before blazing a six-inch-wide smoking trail that traveled up the wall and into the ceiling, barely missing Leto who emerged after the piano, to watch his handiwork.
In the wreckage-on-wreckage the only visible alien body didn’t move, the others trapped under the broken piano. Whirring and buzzing came from its body as the black tendons retracted into the fur. The fur had flattened and hardened, making a kind of defensive shell for the unconscious wearer.
“Run!” Leto shouted from the balcony.
The smashed piano lid shifted.
“Run, Amanda!” he reiterated.
“Get out of here!” Pete also shouted at Amanda, as he tossed aside debris, looking for Leto’s gun. Or anyone’s gun, really.
Amanda didn’t question the order, running through to the back of the house, escaping through the back door. By the time she reached the side fence she heard the sounds of struggle from inside. Pete and Leto yelled valiant battle cries so loud they nearly matched the intensity of the rounds pouring out from Leto’s recovered rifle. A crash and a thud later and the voices stopped.
Amanda reached the street and ran straight south on Roxbury, not stopping until she reached Olympic. The aliens were here; there was no need for time-consuming kitty-corner backyard sneaking. She turned the corner and headed west on Olympic, then skidded to a stop.
A block away twenty-five soldiers were forming a line. They faced in her direction, watching something behind her with rifles trained. One by one they noticed her within their peripheral vision and she watched waves of horrified indecision wash over each.
She’d only seen that look once before, when she’d relieved a sniper in Fallujah. The sniper had accidentally shot a friendly when a soldier tripped into the line of fire. That look from an American soldier only meant one thing. You were about to die in crossfire.
Chapter 7
Jill dreamed she was in a pressure cooker before waking up in her bunk stuffed into the little room deep under the Colorado Rocky Mountains. The room, like in her dream, was bathed in red, pulsating from a bare diode on an alarm high up on the wall. She got up and stumbled toward the door, wondering what triggered the warning lights. Jill heard military boots stamping down the hallway.
The door opened for her. Kam stood at the frame, ecstatic about something.
“I remember the last time you were excited to see my bedroom,” Jill said.
Either he didn’t notice, or he ignored her candor altogether.
“They’ve got one, Jill!” he whispered and nudged her into her room, squinting and flipping her light switch.
“One what?”
“A thing, an it, the Bearantula!”
“That’s terrible news, Kam. There’s an alien on base and an alarm is flashing. Did it escape?” Jill looked around the room, taking a visual inventory of her sparse belongings in case the next person to open the door told them to evacuate.
Blood flushed from Kam’s cheeks as he shook his head. “Don’t ruin this for me, too,” he said before slumping into Jill’s bunk. “I get to talk to an alien—AN ALIEN!—and you’re raining on my parade again.”
“What do you mean ‘talk to’?”
“The whole complex is on high alert prepping for a nuclear transport drill. But I know it’s not plutonium they’re delivering. It’s one of them!”
“And they’re letting you see it?” Jill asked incredulously, hands on her hips.<
br />
“You think that stargazer, Sands, should get the job? We can all see it, but I’m a linguist, the most qualified person within a thousand miles to make first contact.”
“I’d agree with you if they were ancient Mayans, Kam, but these are aliens. Thus the literal word alien. No frame of reference. I think you’re their guinea pig. Want to end up like Commander Data, an alien tentacle up your butt, whispering threats to the president from behind a two-way mirror?”
“That was Independence Day, not Star Trek,” Kam corrected her.
“Whatever. Same thing. You know what I’m trying to say: this is too dangerous!” She tilted her head, trying to remind him she had his best interests at heart.
Kam knew it was now or never. If he would mention the images that started appearing in his head after his near-drowning, now was the time, if only for the confirmation that he should recuse himself from this. But he didn’t want to miss this opportunity to see a live alien. He stifled his concern with the rationalization that if the alien really was the source of his mysterious dreams then it already controlled the situation. Kam was just along for the ride, so shouldn’t he enjoy it?
He hadn’t expected Jill to be so off-put by the idea of communicating with it, thinking she’d be an ecstatic cheerleader, eager to share in the momentous occasion. Just when he’d managed to push down all the things he wanted to say about what happened to them at Arecibo so many years ago, she found a new way to break his heart again. He had to admit, she was anything but predictable. Anything but boring. And usually right.
Kam’s face rapidly changed from boyish hope to adult cold realization. “I’ve been pushing it down, but I have a feeling you’re right. I always thought space traveling aliens would be machines, but we got lucky that, according to Allan anyway, they’re coming from close by. That means they probably have things like mouths and teeth, not so far evolved from us.”
Jill sat on the bed and put her arm around his shoulder. “But to learn their language—assuming they even have what we’d call language—that’s really presumptuous.”
She rubbed his shoulders, his head was in his hands, belying the stress he must have hidden behind exuberance minutes ago.
“It’s Lieutenant Commander Data, by the way,” he said, not looking up.
“Sorry to stomp all over your emotion chip. It was nice seeing you happy again. It’s been a long time.”
“It’s been really tough since the Event, and I think I took a lot out on you subconsciously.”
“Sub-consciously?” She raised a distrusting eyebrow. “You’ve been distant since we got here. I mean, more distant than I’d expect you to be, given how we left things off.”
“What’s so bad about it, anyway?” he asked, looking over at her.
“I want to be liked, I guess. Even when I don’t deserve it.”
“No, I meant why is the alien on the base bad? I’m surprised you—SETI Queen—are reacting this way. This is your dream come true, isn’t it?”
Jill looked at the floor. “I always wanted to confirm the existence of alien intelligence, but I never thought it would happen like this. I started to look at the Fermi Paradox as fact after decades of nothing.”
“Except for the ‘Wow!’ signal,” Kam pointed out.
“An anomaly, the one and only narrow-band obvious signature we ever found in five decades of looking. That, more than anything, proved to me they had to be out there, but not talking to us. Wow! was already ancient history by the time I got to SETI, so instead of looking in vain for another one, I spent my time on why we’d never make contact, exploring all the loopholes; waste radiation, signs of Dyson Spheres, evidence of encryption in supposed natural events, slight disruptions in gravity signatures, unnatural black hole movement, anything that would betray their existence.”
Kam understood. “Chameleons are easy to see in infrared.”
Jill smirked. “The Event threw my life’s work out the window. All my conjectures, the speeches that bounced around YouTube from my TED Talks, all that is just noise. Worse, it’s lies. If the Internet ever comes back I’ll be pilloried as the one person in the world who should have known better. Imagine if Galileo voluntarily denied his scientific instincts to appease his own lack of results. If you want to know how this whole thing makes me feel, Kam, I’m ashamed.”
He put his arm around her shoulders and they leaned against each other.
“So how the hell are you going to talk to it?” she asked.
Kam shrugged. “Combinant deduction. It breathes, it lives, and it communicates with its own. They’re all just patterns to recognize and repeat back until we establish a commonality to grow from.”
Liar. If this is the source of the images, the characters, the stories that have filled your dreams then you’re cheating. You haven’t used your enormous brain, you’ve had a card up your sleeve the entire time. At least let Jill in on the act. But why help her? She threw your studies into peril.
Six months on Zoloft to get over her. Maybe tell her that. Tell her something. She’s not going to buy your little intuition act. Someone will find that little notebook eventually, anyway, the one with “ASAF Intelligence” on the cover, under your government-sponsored mattress, in your government-sponsored room, under a federally-owned mountain. Attempting to keep a secret in this place might get you killed. Tell her!
Kam broke out a fake smile of confidence as he fought inner conflict. His vanity won out, for now. “At least this thing is alive; I usually study dead writers that aren’t there to let me know when I’ve got it right. I think that gives me a leg up for dealing with these things, don’t you?”
She frowned at him. “Aliens.”
“I know, it’s not enough to convince you, but it worked on Pith. I’ll come up with something, I have to. Don’t worry.”
She pushed him back a little. “You think that’s what I’m worried about? That you’ll embarrass yourself? Kam, this thing might kill you with a word or a thought or sound,” she said, raising her voice a bit. “They’ve brought a sleeping shark into the kiddie pool and asked you, the kid with more curiosity than common sense, to poke it. What happens when it wakes up?”
“You’re being ridiculous, Jill. I’m not going to just walk in and shake hands—er, mitts—with it.”
She shook her head. “This isn’t so different than the argument against the singularity, you know. There’s nothing we can devise to outsmart something evolved beyond our intelligence. You know how this works.”
He put his head back in his hands.
“Yeah, yeah. Even without the Internet and in a dark room, the supercomputer could figure out how to put out frequencies by fluttering its power or something that would convince an easily-manipulated human to do anything. It would probably figure out ways to hypnotize us we haven’t even discovered yet.”
She nodded. “The fact that it’s more advanced means we can’t control it. It automatically has knowledge we don’t, and not to sound like Pith-but that gives it an advantage in any fight for resources. That’s exactly what these Bearantulas are here for, in case you forgot Allan’s presentation about the water elevators.”
How does that fit in? Kam questioned himself. You still think this is a misunderstanding? That you’ll be a peacemaker? Isn’t that what Brent Spiner’s character was trying to do in that old movie? Good God, you’ve even got the glasses and the stubble. Cold Flash was an offensive assault: this is an alien captured in battle. Even if he was the one speaking to you in the dark spaces of your mind, he’s not going to be happy to see you now.
You convince yourself—and try to convince Jill—that your great mind will get you out of this trap, but your DNA is only 2% different from a gorilla. What if your mind is too? What if their minds are 3% ahead of yours, or 5 or 15? No, it’s just flashy technology. Endothermic nanites, something we’d have too if they left us alone for another fifty years. That’s not a progression of brain power, just computing power. Strip a soldier of its tools
and it may be no smarter than one of ours. Though just as cunning.
He pursed his lips. “But you’re forgetting, they’re not necessarily that much more advanced. They’re not stemming from a singularity. They have some technology that we don’t have, but that doesn’t mean they’re any smarter, especially about biology. We have the capacity for interplanetary travel too, we just didn’t have the motivation they do. We haven’t totally destroyed our planet . . . yet.”
She put her hands back on her hips. “No, Kam, these things are worse than a sentient supercomputer. At least there’s a chance the singularity wouldn’t be openly malicious to us: these things kill anything that gets in their way.”
“Yet we captured one, didn’t we?” Kam protested. “They’re not invincible.”
“Or they know how to play dumb,” she responded grimly. “So how did they get it anyway?”
“Pith didn’t say much more than it came from Operation Cold Flash and the body is inbound, intact, and alive. And they want me there when it arrives.”
“Oh, Kam, just be careful.” She rubbed his shoulders again. He looked up at her with regret.
“They want you there, too.”
Chapter 8
The horrified soldiers shouted for Amanda to run to them before it was too late. She heard dull thuds on the pavement behind, inching closer even as she ran parallel to the line of fire.
Amanda didn’t need to turn her head to see the source of the sounds; the same thuds had landed outside that house before the explosion. The alien ground troops were assembling for battle behind her.
“Where’s the major?” a soldier shouted, as she breached the side of their assemblage.
“Dead!” she said without looking, her eyes drawn instead to the flat rainbow of fur growing just a few hundred meters ahead. Realizing that Pete’s death would demotivate the young crew setting up this last stand she shouted, “They’re vulnerable!”
The Filter Trap Page 29
