Paired Pursuit

by Clare Murray

“Couldn’t someone invent a permanent UV light that acts as a wall?” She frowned at the equipment being lugged around. Most of it seemed to be aimed at shoring up the physical wall, which had taken a rattling from the alien battering ram.

  “That invention is already in existence. It’s impractical to have a series of huge UV lamps shining for more than a few hours, but some of the better-equipped Cities use them occasionally. They’ll never replace physical walls.”

  “I sure wish this place had them,” she couldn’t help saying. The thought of that giant leader alien staring up at her made her shudder. But if wishes were horses, then beggars might ride, as her mother had been so fond of saying.

  They spotted Finn ahead, bending toward the wall with the device in one hand and his commtab in the other. “Dr. Felton called. Again.”

  “I hope you hung up on him.”

  Finn rolled his eyes at Gareth. “I’m supposed to be the diplomatic Twin.”

  “Quit letting them pigeonhole you.” Gareth bent toward the device. “Shit, that thing’s beeping so fast, it’s almost continuous. It gets worse when you put it to this part of the wall.”

  Both men stared at a section of the concrete wall, eyeing a much-patched part. Mari bent, listening to the device. Gareth was right—even she could hear it now, albeit barely. It could hardly be described as beeping—it sounded more like an animal mewling, and it made her very uneasy.

  “Finn 01223,” Finn snapped into his commtab. “Yes, Doctor, I believe we have the location, but I don’t think it’s a good idea—okay. Are you sure? No, I’m not questioning whether you have clearance, goddammit! I’m asking whether this is a good idea.”

  “Fuck this. Let’s get it over with before he screams about disobedience and court-martials.” Mari stepped back as Gareth stepped forward. Without preamble, he ripped several bricks from the crumbling wall until he’d exposed a small hollow, in which the other half of the device nestled. Mari blinked. Was that a note underneath it? She nearly reached out—and let out a yelp as the device flew toward Finn.

  The mewling—and now she realized it had been coming from both devices—stopped, melding into a brief, primal scream. Everything in the world seemed to pause, then the device went quiet, with only a single red light flashing where the two halves had melded themselves together.

  “Dr. Felton, I’m going to need to speak to your superior,” Finn said quietly.

  Everything seemed to be limned in red. Gareth wasn’t sure whether that was because his rage was through the roof, or because he was still holding the device with its red light shining through the gloom. His hands ached from his fifth serious attempt at breaking the thing—on panicked orders from Command.

  The silver lining was that Dr. Felton’s reedy voice was no longer piping over the comm. Now it was others, higher up the chain of command. Dr. Felton was screwed seven ways to Sunday.

  Arguably, however, Scar City was screwed worse. The device coming together had roiled up the aliens even further, and they’d been forming battering rams almost continuously for the last two hours. Despite taking serious damage, they kept coming, probably desperate to reach this newly activated device.

  There were a thousand theories flying about. Gareth listened, his commtab still tuned into the agitated conference call. Some speculated that the device had already woken the cryogenically frozen breeders. Others questioned why the aliens still wanted the device back if it was working. Still others pointed out that Scar City was about to fall, so why wouldn’t the aliens attack?

  In the safety of the Complex, sitting around a table drinking coffee, it was easy for them to talk. Gareth picked up the commtab and switched off mute. “Tried again. It’s indestructible in my current situation.”

  “Have you tried melting it?”

  “No, because I don’t have the equipment for that. We’re focused on survival here. There’s more than a thousand aliens outside the walls, and all of them are slavering to get in.”

  Gareth knew his tone was disrespectful. Hailey had cautioned them against that kind of thing, warning that many of the older people viewed the Twins as tools to be used on a whim. She was right too—he’d heard of several disappearances, or reassignments as the powers-that-be preferred to term them.

  Couldn’t get a worse reassignment than Reno, though. So he gave clipped responses to a few more questions, then was given permission to sign off and go back to his attempts to destroy the device.

  Once he’d terminated the call, Gareth tucked the device in his pocket and strode up the steps to the top of the wall, ready to get back to fighting.

  “Mari’s all set,” Finn sent. “Patrice has set up camp in the living room with two guns and the dog, so they’re together and safe.”

  “Good. Come back and let’s kill some aliens. Got another good six hours of darkness left, so maybe we can beat our previous score.”

  It helped somewhat, thinking of it as a game. That had been the scientists’ intention, of course, desensitizing them to violence, training them to kill without compunction. In some countries, Twins had run double duty as soldiers, waging war against other humans. Gareth was glad that hadn’t happened here. Despite his gruff exterior, he truly cared about the people here and had the deepest respect for the hard-working people just trying to survive.

  “You, with a soft spot?”

  “Yeah, don’t get all soppy now.” Gareth squeezed the trigger on an unattended laser and got an alien through the throat. The blackened creature slammed to the ground but was immediately replaced by two more. That gave him pause. How many Barks had been inside the spaceship Mari had inadvertently opened? Two thousand? Three? The aliens could fold themselves down fairly compactly, so maybe he was underestimating the bastards.

  Motherships held even more than the intact spaceship they’d stumbled upon, of course. Gareth shot another alien, watching it stagger back into its fellows, briefly impeding their progress.

  Finn was thinking about Mari, how she’d brightened up both of their lives. Gareth couldn’t disagree, although he was more focused on surviving the night so that she could continue to brighten up their lives. And, he hoped, to raise a little hell at the Complex.

  “More than a little hell.” Finn’s mindvoice grew a little stronger as he came nearer. “I heard rumors that some Twins were going to be bred.”

  “Bred?” Gareth steeled himself against the gut-kick that accompanied that word. To be put to a woman, to not see his own child…no, fuck that noise.

  “To humans, yeah. They haven’t been able to create Twins with XX chromosomes, only us XYs, so they want to experiment further.”

  “I’m done being experimented on,” Gareth replied.

  “As are we all, so I’d like to talk to others when we get back. Some of us toe the line less than others. Maybe bringing Mari back will be the encouragement some of us need to start running our own lives without asking for permission to take a piss.”

  A surge of mingled satisfaction and surprise swept Gareth. His Twin used to be someone who sought permission for most things, preferring to follow official guidelines rather than strike out on his own. Now Gareth sensed him chafing against all the restrictions as much as he did. Score one again for Mari.

  “I’m completely fed up with the way we’ve been treated,” Finn sent. “I won’t deny that Mari’s presence in our lives has me worried about our future, but I would eventually have snapped. Others are pissed off as well…the triplets, for example.”

  “Yeah, well, splitting them up for that job was an idiotic thing to do.” Gareth shook his head and blasted another alien.

  “I know. It’s going to come to a head sooner rather than later.”

  “I’ve been telling you this for years,” Gareth replied.

  “I wasn’t ready to listen. I am now.”

  “Let’s kill some aliens first.”

 
Finn sent the equivalent of a snort. It was good to banter with his Twin—they’d been pretty damn snappish with each other for the past six months—but Gareth’s attention was soon fully occupied by fighting. The waves were never-ending. Even a well-equipped City would struggle to repel this attack.

  Scar City was utterly crumbling.

  Gareth yelled a warning as he saw a wedge of aliens enmeshing. Another good ramming or three would bring an entire section of the wall down at this point—and the bastards were deliberately targeting the weakest spots.

  One of the soldiers, her shirt sleeves rolled up, leaned forward to hurl a bomb just as the ram rushed forward. The resulting crash against the wall caused her to overbalance and fall. Gareth swore viciously, but she was lost in a sea of paleness, swallowed up so completely that only a few shreds of her boots were left. He shot anyway, leaving an alien’s flank blackened.

  “Bombs in three!” Ramsey roared, his voice cracking through the loudspeaker.

  “Sir?”

  Gareth whirled. He’d never been called sir in his life, but a soldier stood awaiting his attention, clearly having addressed him.

  “Sir, this wall is going to come down. It’s dangerously unstable.” The soldier was on the young side, his facial hair still a little peach fuzzy, but there was no mistaking his earnest intelligence.

  “What do you suggest, soldier? You know who I am—I have no authority here.”

  “No, sir, not officially, but you can convince people to get down before everything falls. Look—the next time the aliens hit, that part of the wall is going to shear away. See the exposed rebar there? We need to get down and hold the place from the ground.”

  He’d been shooting at aliens for so long that their ghostly white bodies seemed to swim in front of his eyes. Gareth shook it off, sending a mental shove to Finn as he studied the failing section of wall.

  “He’s right. That’s going to come down. I’ll tell Ramsey while you start getting people to the base. We’ll need a blockade down there—anything, really. Old cars, fire engines, that kind of stuff.” Finn sounded stressed.

  “Let’s go. My brother’s informed the sergeant.”

  “How—oh.” The soldier cleared his throat. “I forgot you were telepathic.”

  “We’re pyrokinetic too. That means I can set you on fire when you don’t move fast enough.” Gareth was immature enough to chortle as the soldier turned tail and ran, calling for the section of wall to be evacuated. It was a shame they couldn’t really set stuff on fire.

  Although, come to think of it, burning oil drums would be a decent deterrent if part of the wall wound up coming down. Gareth shot a series of laser beams into the crowd of aliens, noting that the solar battery was nearly spent, then abandoned his post to head for the stairs.

  Fortunately, the young soldier had warned everyone. Unfortunately, he’d started a minor panic. Soldiers and civilians alike were beginning to stampede. Their fear was almost palpable, and Gareth knew it was only a matter of time before some trigger-happy idiot fucked up and shot a beam into a human.

  “Single file!” he bellowed, and the combination of his imposing presence and commanding voice caused the line of people to quit shoving so much. His brows drew down at the thought of Mari being in there somewhere, and only the knowledge that she was safe at Patrice’s held him in check as he strode toward the stairs.

  Had there been any room, they would have parted like water for him. As it was, most people shrank away, hurrying down the steps as he barked orders to gather material for a blockade and oil for fires. Some faces wore clearly disbelieving expressions—and one soldier had defiantly remained behind atop the wall, continuing to shoot aliens—but now that Gareth was descending the stairs, he could see the large cracks running through the section the aliens had repeatedly rammed. No amount of mortar could fix that kind of damage.

  “Yeah, this City’s falling tonight,” he sent.

  “Ramsey is evacuating the other side. The rest of the wall seems structurally sound, so it’s just this part we’re going to have to hold. You okay?”

  “A little homicidal, for a variety of reasons. I’ll take it out on the aliens as soon as possible.”

  At the bottom, people scattered. Gareth gave most of them credit—they dove right into shoring up the wall…although a handful took the opportunity to disappear into the center of the City. No doubt they intended to hole up and try to survive the night.

  “Ram!” The shout was distant, panicked. Gareth’s head snapped up.

  “Finn?”

  An adrenaline-tinged hash of thoughts was all that greeted his query. Gareth leaped backward as scores of aliens slammed into the wall. Someone screamed as the much-patched structure of concrete, wood and metal began to crumble. There was a loud rumbling, a cracking that drowned out the zapping of lasers. The wall was holding—barely though, and not for long. The next ram would be its death knell.

  “The wall is going down!”

  “So hold the line!” Gareth pitched his voice to override the rising tide of terror. A few at the edge of the crowd slunk away, but others gave him their full attention. “Get some old vehicles over here, ready to plug the gap. Start up a big fire and get your lasers ready. How many hours until dawn?”

  “Four, sir.”

  “We’ve survived until now. We can make it until dawn.”

  “Nice pep talk.”

  “Are you off that wall yet?” Gareth wasn’t in any mood to joke around.

  “About to be. Had to help carry Ramsey off. I think he broke his leg, so he should be out of commission for a few months. If it were one of us, we’d be in bed for what, a day or two? I don’t know what I’d do if I had to stay in a bed for weeks on end.”

  “I do, but it involves Mari being there.” Gareth instinctively went to a defensive crouch as the alien ram battered the wall again. This time there was a strange, low groaning, as if the bricks themselves had been mortally injured. Then the groaning turned into a full-fledged rumbling.

  “Finn!”

  The segment of wall collapsed in a pile of rubble, throwing up a huge cloud of dust through which aliens began to clamber, howling and yipping. Gareth raised his laser and got off a quick series of shots.

  A shrill siren cut through the air, sounding the direst of warnings to the City’s population. A nearby chorus of howls sang along, providing sinister backup. Gareth shook himself, fired a beam through a pale body, partially severing it. He had to keep his head. But…

  “Finn, damn it, tell me you’re all right.”

  One of the soldiers gunned a truck toward the newly created gap, parking so that it formed a partial blockade. That seemed to be the catalyst for more people to act, rushing forward to bolster the breach. A line of oil-filled barrels began to take shape, and a woman who looked like she’d been a junkie for decades was the one to light the first flame. She handed her lighter to a soldier, barely flinching as bullets and lasers zinged overhead.

  A score of aliens lay dead atop the rubble now, but more slavered behind, cautious enough to avoid being shot. The breach was as shored up as it was going to be, yet Gareth knew how tenuous their position was, how close the City stood to absolute annihilation.

  “Finn? Answer me. I can feel you’re alive but you’re worrying the hell out of me here.”

  “Hurt. Sorry. Karma for joking around earlier—my arm’s broken.”

  “Get to the infirmary. Or to Patrice’s.”

  “On my way to grab a sling. It looks bad down there. Least I can do is come back and fire a few rounds with my good hand.”

  Gareth ducked as someone chucked a grenade over the barricade. It exploded, sending the wave of aliens scurrying backward. A soldier huffed. “Not so tough when they’re all packed together with nowhere to dodge.”

  “Yeah!” someone roared, and resistance redoubled.

 
Three hours later, however, morale was in tatters. Ammo was in short supply, so the soldiers had to space out the grenades. At several points, Gareth had been forced to leap onto the top of the barricade and fight hand-to-hand with his UV-saber. Even with the aliens funneled through the narrow gap, he couldn’t keep up with the sheer number of them.

  An hour left until dawn, and his muscles ached like hell. Sweat dripped into his eyes as he took a chug of water, seizing an opportunity to rest for a minute while a few soldiers chucked hastily constructed Molotov cocktails at the aliens. The smell of gunpowder and gasoline rested heavily in the air.

  “Take it easy out there, okay? You’re exhausted.”

  “So are you.” Gareth eyed the aliens at the wall and decided they were too intimidated to press the attack. He remained where he was, wedged against the bumper of a burned-out van. “You still on the other part of the wall?”

  “Yeah, I’m in the infirmary. Arm’s splinted and already healing, though it hurts like hell. Repairmen are working overtime but the Barks aren’t focused on ramming anymore. They’re all trying to get through the gap.”

  “How many?”

  “Lots.” Finn’s tone was bleak. “And I had another call from Command—Dr. Felton delayed those train evac orders until the last minute. Scar City’s population isn’t totally screwed…but it’s going to be close getting everyone out.”

  “What the fuck?” He was going to kill Felton. “That asshole wanted us to finish the mission that badly? So much he’d risk an entire City to get that goddamn device?”

  “Yep. And I’m dealing with his superior now, so hopefully he’ll have been properly disciplined. But Command says our plane isn’t going to be here until nearly nightfall.”

  “When we get back to the Complex, I want to call a meeting with the other Twins.”

  “Roger that.” Finn’s easy acceptance of his fury was unusual. Generally, he tried to smooth things over, make him cooperate with the powers-that-be. Clearly, he was done kow-towing, and Gareth was fiercely glad of it.

  With renewed vigor, he leaped into the fight. The current—or perhaps former, judging by her lucidity—junkie he’d seen earlier was still helping out. She even started up a countdown to dawn, hollering out the time in five minute intervals. As if galvanized by the light at the end of the tunnel, people rushed around faster than they had before. Out of the corner of his eye, Gareth noticed a few new people, perhaps sent here from other sections of the wall, or deserters who had come crawling back after a change of heart.