"A long time ago," Anna said in a whisper. Mars reached out and touched her face. She rested her cheek in the palm of his hand, and kissed it gently.
The moment lasted for a second, before Mars wheeled on himself, gun up. "What?" Anna asked, but was immediately silenced by a wave of his hand.
"There's something out there," he said.
Edna Casey had awakened a few minutes earlier. She had seen both Mars and Anna speaking some distance away, sharing what appeared to be an intimate moment. Both their backs were to her, she had moved into some bushes to relieve herself. When she finished, she hiked up her skirt and turned to go back to the cave.
Paul Casey … or what appeared to be Paul Casey … stood ten feet away.
"Oh, my god -- Paul!" she said, at first stunned and delighted, but then after a moment puzzled ... then frightened.
"But -- you're dead ... we saw you die." She then looked at the blood on his chest and stomach. The viscous remains of internal organs, still plastered in places against what remained of his shirt. Edna backed up, as Casey took a step toward her. Suddenly, an inhuman tongue lashed out of his mouth. She screamed.
Mars reached her first, pulling her behind himself, gun trained on Casey. His scientific mind did a pirouette of insanity. He was on a planet where the dead walked. Sure. It made sense, given everything else he’d seen thus far.
Anna dragged Edna to a safer distance, staring at the Casey-thing in horror.
Mars held Casey in his sights but did not fire. Casey -- or the thing that inhabited Casey's dead body -- did not try to advance beyond the initial first step it had taken toward Edna. A stand-off, Mars concluded. It was only after a few seconds of mutual stillness that Mars began to notice what stuck out of Casey's skull, in the back, shaped like some kind of ungodly tusk.
"He's dead," Mars said dully.
"Not -- dead," Casey said in a strange, unearthly tone that resonated in the darkness and made the back hairs on Mars' neck prickle. "Not -- yet!"
Edna began to cry. "Oh, Paul, what have they done to you."
"It's not Paul," Mars said, then addressed the Casey-thing. "What are you?"
"Your - adversary," Casey said as Mars' gun instinctively rose to a firing position.
"All right. What do you want?"
"For you -- John Mars to fight."
"Why?" Mars asked.
"It is the purpose of the exercise. Fight -- or die."
Casey droned on in stilted speech. Suddenly, it produced a weapon, a laser pistol, and pointed it at Mars. Anna reached for her own weapon in response, but Mars waved her off.
"No. That's what it wants," he snapped.
Anna's instinct was to blow Casey out of existence, but she refrained from doing so, though her eyes countered every move the laser pistol made. If the fingers of Casey squeezed another milli-inch, she would immolate him.
But Mars had predicted correctly that the Casey-alien would not fire upon him. "Go ahead, kill me," Mars taunted.
Casey held the gun level, but did not depress the trigger.
"Kill me!" Mars shouted.
Casey nodded, very slowly. "No. Not you. But --" and he turned to fire at Anna.
Mars saw what was coming and dove for Anna, knocking her to the ground, as the lethal laser blast shot past her, vaporizing a tree stump. Casey leveled his gun one more time, trying to find Anna, without hitting Mars. Edna crawled behind some brushes, terrified by this new dimension in an already unbelievable nightmare.
Suddenly, a form descended from out of the trees, smashing hard into Casey. Mars could tell from the muted moonlight that it was the alien creature he had freed on board the mother ship just a little while ago. The Sel lashed her massive tail into striking position, and as the Paul Casey facsimile rose to meet the attack, the Sel impaled her stinger into his face, hooking it into the jawbone and using it as leverage to throw him ten feet against a huge tree. This time, the Casey alien imposter did not move.
The Sel alien wheeled on itself and faced Mars and Anna on the ground. Anna raised her weapon. Mars reached for the pistol.
"No. She won't hurt us."
The Sel continued staring, hissing, barring strange two incisors, while inhaling and exhaling through her distended chest.
Ravers came running from around a rock, his gun now raised as well.
"Don't fire at it," Mars said, though Ravers remained implacably in firing position.
The Sel moved its lips and teeth with some effort. "No kill. I.”
Mars stood, then approached the alien. The alien continued trying to communicate: "Me -- understand. Little."
Suddenly, the alien lurched forward, face to face with Mars. "They -- come -- for -- you -- John -- Mars. They -- enemies."
Mars nodded. "I know. Why are you helping us?"
"I -- outsider. Like you. Not -- fighter. Me -- Healer."
And with that, the alien bounded over Mars' head, approaching the downed corpse of Casey. Her tail upright, she rammed it again into Casey's skull, this time with more precision and less force.
Anna moved close to Mars, fascinated, watching. "What is it doing?"
For a moment, the Sel alien was silent. Finally, it retracted its stinger, and turned to Mars. "I -- you and me -- we can communicate -- I think -- much better -- now."
Mars understood in an instant what had happened, correlating what he had seen in the cryochamber on board the ship and tubes passing from the human corpses to this alien's body. "It uses the tail to download information, like an antenna. Casey's brain would still retain some living tissue and electrical activity, even after death. She must have given herself a quick fix of data transfer just now."
Anna cringed. "It seems ... invasive."
"Invasive," the alien Sel repeated, analyzing the word. “I understand. No. It is not my intention to invade. Is the only way I can -- to learn."
Mars walked slowly over to the alien Sel. "They'll be looking for us soon, won't they?"
"There -- is no need -- for them to search," the Sel alien spoke more easily now, adjusting to the English language. "They know you are here."
The alien moved very close to Mars now, within an inch of his face.
"When they come -- look under. Under ... is where they will attack from."
And with that, the Sel disappeared into the night.
Mars, Anna, Ravers, and Edna remained transfixed, frozen in place. Ravers spoke first.
“You make friends quickly, John,” he said.
Mars walked over to the corpse of Paul Casey, now inactive, truly dead. Or so he hoped. He glanced at Anna, who caught the look, moving to Edna, and helping the woman out of the immediate vicinity. Ravers slid up next to Mars, staring down at the mauled lawyer’s carcass.
“The alien saved our lives on the ship,” Mars explained. “It’s a prisoner, too.”
Ravers studied Mars coldly. “What else did it tell you?”
Mars looked to Ravers. Something in the man’s voice bothered him … and again, that bad feeling was creeping up and down his neck. “Nothing. It wants to help, that’s all.”
“And you believe it?” Ravers pushed.
“It just saved our lives again, Ravers,” Mars said tonelessly. “I have no reason not to trust it. For the time being.”
An hour later, the body of Paul Casey was lowered into a shallow grave, a few feet from where he lay after the Sel had thrown him. Mars and Ravers had done the digging, while Lisa leaned in against Wes Simpson's chest. Myoga provided stoic companionship to Edna. The Controller within the Barry facsimile stood apart by himself, near a tree, studying the group and ignoring the corpse of Casey completely.
Mars wiped some sweat from his brow, then glanced around at the group. Edna stepped forward, reached down for a handful of dirt, and threw it ceremoniously on Casey. "Good bye, Paul."
The dirt was shoveled over quickly, but even before the burial was finished, Ravers was speaking. "I say we start hunting down this scorpion lady of yours and get som
e payback."
Mars looked at Ravers and sighed. "The alien isn't our enemy, Ravers."
"They're all enemies, Mars. We're being butchered. Haven't you noticed?"
All eyes were on Mars. He finished the last bit of burial service, then turned to Myoga, who had reached for the tusk-like appendage that had been impaled in Casey's skull.
"Dr. Myoga, what is it?" Mars asked.
Myoga looked up at Mars. "From what you described of Casey when he had this attached to his brain, I would say it is some kind of cybernetic neural neutralizer. A mechanism by which every motor function in his body could be controlled and sustained. Further, since you say he communicated with you, it is able to translate brain waves and thought and thus construct language. Remarkable technology," Myoga finished, duly impressed.
"So, Casey was dead," Mars said softly.
"Oh, I would say so. Surely, he could not have survived the attack we witnessed earlier today. Yet somehow, these aliens are able to preserve some iota of brain function and actually utilize the remaining electrical discharge to considerable effect."
"When they come - they will come from under. That's what the alien said," Mars repeated. "From under..."
He looked to the ground and nodded. "They're using tunnels. Like ants."
Myoga understood the captain's train of thought. "The aliens appear to be arthropodic, insect-like. Yes, perhaps they are a burrowing species."
Simpson glanced back to the cave, then looked at the rock surrounding the entire plateau. "The cave. This hill. It's on bedrock. Maybe that's why they haven't attacked all at once."
"No," Mars said wistfully. "Think about it. These things are a thousand times ahead of us technologically. They could blast through bedrock, hell, even rearrange the molecules and simply make it vanish, if that's all they wanted."
"Then what do they want?" Lisa asked. "Why are they waiting?"
"They want us to fight," Anna said. "Casey told us that. They want to see us defend ourselves."
"Why?" Simpson asked pointedly.
"To study us," Anna said at last. "Chess.”
“Chess?” Ravers echoed.
Mars nodded. “They make one move, we counter. We attack, they respond. It's all controlled, calculated. They probably killed those of us that were injured simply because they were liabilities, damaged participants in some bizarre wargame. Further, they gave us a nudge today by killing three more of our party. A kind of Pavlovian incentive."
The reference, Lisa Maynard thought, was not inappropriate and it chilled the marrow in her bones. The great nineteenth century biologist Ivan Pavlov worked with animals, specifically dogs, instigating a variety of conditioning techniques designed to elicit specific emotional (or learned) responses. In essence, this is what the aliens are doing to us, Lisa thought wretchedly. Prodding us, like Captain Mars said. Like animals! She closed her eyes, covering her tears.
Mars looked from Ravers and the others, out into the blackness. He yelled into the night.
“I’m not playing,” he said clearly. “Do you hear me? We’re finished with you!”
He didn’t expect an answer, even if the Sels were monitoring them and had figured out their language. In any case, action would speak louder than words. He raised the pulse rifle in his hand, and threw it to the ground. He looked to Myoga.
Myoga hesitated only for a second. Then he threw his weapon down. Lisa looked out into the night, wiping away her tears, suddenly angry: “Screw you, you bastards. You killed my father. You want to kill me, now’s your chance.”
The Barry-morph, in essence, the Controller, continued to clench its weapon, then glanced at Ravers. The Controller realized it had an ace in the hole. It now planned on using it.
Ravers sighed. Weary, resigned. He looked to Mars and then to the others. “Well, hell. I was afraid of this.”
He raised his own weapon, and fired almost point blank at Myoga. Myoga let out a single tortured scream, before his body splattered against bedrock. Mars flung himself at Ravers, but found himself dragged sharply in the other direction, then thrown into the air. He slammed into a coil of stones at the rear of the cave. He fought for focus, trying to identify his attacker.
It had been the boy. Indescribably, the boy had lifted him and tossed him into space as if he were a pebble. But now Barry himself was changing; flesh stripped itself away from bone, and bone itself transmuted into bio-metallic tissue. Barry’s head exploded in a mass of red, white and yellow, and in its place formed the hideous visage of the Controller in its true form. Distended, almost putrefied in appearance, the Controller’s most striking features were the fangs in a maw of a mouth that was large as a human abdomen, and the serpentine tail and stinger which moved almost independently of the body itself. It was pure mass, but it seemed to be something more … as if part of its unholy composition was pure energy.
Anna was closest to the horror, and she responded as quickly as one might expect under the circumstances ... which was not fast enough. She tried to lunge for one of the discarded pulse rifles, but the Controller backhanded her with one of its eight claws, driving her small, compact body toward the back of the cave, slamming against the cave wall near Mars.
Simpson ducked one particular claw attempting to right hook him, but he had an immediate problem to his left. Ravers’ gun was now trained on him. Simpson dived behind a rock, barely missing the lethal beam from Ravers’ discharged rifle.
Mars was on his feet once more, charging Ravers. Ravers saw the big man heading toward him and swung his rifle hard, connecting with Mars’ jaw. His world turned bright white for one stinging instant and then blackness filled the void of madness Mars thought would never end.
The use of Ravers was premature, yet necessary. The Controller did not berate itself; the creature known as Mars had become intractable … he had refused to fight. He has refused to succumb to his destiny, the purpose of his transport here to the home world.
Phase Two would begin ahead of schedule.
The Controller was not disappointed. Mars was, for all his shortcomings, an extraordinary specimen. The man could think, discern, isolate opposing stratagem, such as the Controller’s will to make Mars do battle … and reject it as non-viable to his interests. He was an animal, no doubt about it … yet an animal that fashioned thought and decision with clinical exactness.
Impressive, the Controller conveyed to the Sel Collective. A worthy opponent.
What now, a thousand minds reached out to the Controller?
The Experiment continues, the Controller replied.
We wait. As always…
SIX
MARS, THE BRINGER OF WAR
Blackness was replaced by agony. Searing, absolute, and accompanied by shapes and sounds that turned his mind gray with insanity. If this was death, Mars thought from someplace far away, it was a death that had conspired with the worst kind of hell. A cruel combination of incessant pain and disorientation. But even with the agony, there was the awareness of physical embodiment still. No, he was not yet dead, though a part of him wished he was. His eyes fluttered, and he realized he was staring at some kind of huge screen.
No, not a screen. Something else.
Faces formed slowly for him, and the pain began to subside. As consciousness returned, so did Mars’ almost supernatural ability to dismiss pain using sheer will.
The Sels watched him, though Mars was able to discern that they were not actually in this huge, cavernous chamber with him; rather, they were holographic representations, somehow projected here from someplace else. Even through the diaphanous membrane of the holograph itself, the horror of the Sel visages did not diminish.
“Who are you?” he growled, almost inaudibly.
Silence.
“What the hell do you want?”
A light suddenly beamed down in front of him, then disappeared a second later. In its place, a figure appeared. It had two feet, and two arms, but was completely in shadow. It began to walk toward Mars. Mars grimace
d as he recognized Ravers. He nodded imperceptibly.
Of course. It should have been clear to him from the beginning.
Ravers had been an alien plant.
He was part of this madness. Perhaps as far back as the beginning. Mars’ conclusions came tumbling forth in his mind like a spilled domino train, chain reacting one to the next, the only end to be gleaned when the last domino fell.
Mars found his voice, gravelly, laced with fatigued rage. “I should have figured. You on the plane. What were the odds of that?”
Ravers looked irritated. Like shining rocks aimed at what was left of Mars’ sanity, Ravers’ words were sonorous and clear. “Of course we took your report seriously last year, John. Contact was established with the Sel Recon Vessel a week later.”
Mars stared, stupefied into momentary silence. He waited, trying to control the fear that moved in his stomach like a snake; waited to hear what new horror Ravers had to impart.
Not that it could get any worse.
Or could it, laddie?
“We were in negotiations with the Sel Empire within days. The President, the Russian Premier, most of the European Consortium. We had no choice.”
His voice reverberated against some unseen boundary, this last statement declared with a tone of almost pleading necessity.
Ravers made it all sound so … mundane. Negotiations with the Sel Empire. Is that what they were called? Sels? Mars’ mind pitched, reeled and did a wheelie, his talent for levelheaded, logical reason abandoning him.
“Why was I kept out of the loop?” Mars managed at last.
Ravers smiled at this. “Come on, John. You’re a helluva astronaut, but you’re not a team player. Decisions had to be made. Politically expedient decisions which you never would have accepted.”
Mars understood completely what Ravers asserted. “Decisions. I get it. Decisions, let’s say, that would endanger countless innocent lives and basically betray most of the human race.”
Mars, The Bringer Of War Page 16
