by Jay Falconer
Kleezebee asked her, “When you were connected to the creature, do you remember what you said to us?”
“Yes, I remember everything.”
“Is my brother’s still alive?” Lucas asked. She nodded, then reached over and touched his hand. Despite all she had been through, she still had compassion for Lucas’ situation. His earlier plan not to become emotionally invested in this woman was failing. “Are they going to give him back if we hand over the BioTex?”
“No. They’re planning to invade as soon as you turn over the stuff they want. They’re never going to pass up such a rich feeding ground. You have to get everyone out of here.”
Lucas looked at Kleezebee and then at Bruno, hoping for some indication of what to do next. Bruno seemed distracted, standing a few feet away, touching his finger to his ear. Then Bruno touched his watch and said, “Roger that.”
Bruno walked up to the professor, tapped him on the shoulder, and whispered something into Kleezebee’s ear. Kleezebee smiled and said, “Excellent. You know what to do.” Bruno nodded, then quickly left the infirmary.
“What’s going on?” Lucas asked, figuring the only course of action was to storm the rift when the creatures reappeared. Maybe his earlier suggestion wasn’t so idiotic after all.
Kleezebee didn’t respond. Instead, he asked Alicia, “If we can get you back on their ship, will you show us where they’re holding my son?”
“No way. I’m never going back. I’ll kill myself first.”
“What about your sister? She could still be on the ship,” Lucas said.
She sighed. Then sat quietly, gently shaking her head while staring off into space. She might have been considering his request, or resigning herself to the fact that Julie Ann was long gone.
“Can you at least draw us a map?” Lucas asked, hoping the sentinel’s thoughts provided her with access to the ship’s layout.
She looked at him for a few seconds, than answered, “Yeah, I think so.”
Lucas ran over to the medical table and picked up a red pen and clipboard. He turned the medical paperwork over to check the backside of the paper—it was blank. He hustled back to the bed and gave her the pen and paper. “Here, draw on this.”
Chapter 29
Infestation
Lucas handed Alicia’s map to Kleezebee, then followed the professor back to the elevator and rode with him down to the surveillance room where they met up with Bruno and Trevor.
“Sir, we confirmed the data and their ship’s spatial coordinates,” Bruno reported, handing a report to Kleezebee.
Kleezebee looked over the paperwork for a minute, then replied, “Nice work, gentlemen.” He gave the report back to Bruno, who passed it to Trevor.
“What’s going on, Professor?” Lucas asked.
“Our scans of the rift provided us with new data. Looks like I was wrong.”
“About what?”
“It might be possible to open the rift from this side.”
“So we’re going after Drew?”
Kleezebee nodded. “But we’ll need a plan to deal with their army.”
Bruno stepped forward and stood at attention. “Me and my team are ready to go, sir. Just give the order.”
“Me, too,” Lucas said, patting Bruno on the back. “Trust me, we’ll get Drew back.”
“That would just be a suicide mission, for all of you.”
“Then so be it,” Lucas replied. “I would rather die trying than just sit here waiting to be eaten by those things. Shit, give us some frag grenades, and we’ll take out as many of those fuckers as we can.”
“Look, I want to get Drew back just as much as you do, but let’s not go off halfcocked. We need to step back and think this through,” Kleezebee said, walking away with his hand stroking his gray beard.
Lucas moved to intercept his boss, but Bruno latched onto his elbow and said, “Give him a few minutes.”
The orange tattoos on Bruno’s forearms danced as his powerful grip held Lucas in place. When Bruno flexed his left arm in just the right way, Lucas suddenly realized the drawings weren’t just random artistry. They were imprecise, but he reorganized the misshapen head, long stinger tail, and pair of claws. “Dude, are those tats supposed to be the bugs?”
Bruno nodded. “I wear them as a reminder of what stranded us here. So we would never forget what we’re up against.”
Lucas studied the artistry more carefully, observing something new about the creature’s physical appearance. Their segmented bodies gave him an idea. “Dr. Kleezebee, is it all right if I make a quick trip home to Phoenix? There’s something there that might help.”
The professor turned around and looked at Lucas, as if he were sizing him up for something. Kleezebee looked at his watch, and then asked his techs, “Is the jump station still viable at the hockey arena?”
The tech typed into his computer, then reported, “Confirmed, sir. The pad’s still online and available for transport.”
“What about ground transportation?” Kleezebee asked Bruno.
“Our van should still be parked in the underground garage.”
“All right then, you go with Lucas. But make it quick.”
* * *
Ninety minutes later, Lucas and Bruno returned from their trip to Phoenix. Lucas put a torn, dirty cardboard box on the floor in front of Kleezebee, then blew off a cloud of dust. He’d found it in a corner of his dad’s workshop next to a pile of old clothes ready for donation to Goodwill.
“What the hell is that?” Kleezebee asked.
“It’s one of my dad’s inventions,” Lucas said with a proud grin on his face. He unfolded the box and pulled out a black device the size of a cigarette pack, which was attached to a two-inch-square power transformer. He untangled the six-foot electrical cord before handing it to Kleezebee. “Dad called it a Sonic Pad.”
Kleezebee tested the device’s retractable legs before wiping the dirt off its ring of sensors lined up across its middle, directly below the miniature antenna protruding from its top. He gave the unit to Bruno.
There was one more item lying in the bottom of the box—a notebook containing his dad’s handwritten notes. Lucas opened the journal, fanning the pages to demonstrate its contents before giving it to Kleezebee. “Dad’s handwriting is worse than a doctor’s, but I can translate if you need me to.”
“What’s this thing do?” Bruno asked, holding the sonic pad away from his body as if it were an explosive.
“It’s for pest control. And it works awesome.” Lucas thought about mentioning the device’s one minor flaw, but decided against it. He didn’t see how the liquefaction of a dog’s brain had any relevance to their current situation. At least the device wasn’t harmful to humans.
“Pests?” Bruno asked.
“Dad networked a series of these around our yard to kill scorpions. If one of them crawled inside the perimeter, the motion sensors triangulated its location, sending a finely tuned blend of infrasonic and ultrasonic sound waves at the creature. The blast was powerful enough to shatter the bug’s segmented body. They’d explode like popcorn.”
Kleezebee was busy skimming through the journal and remained silent.
“Dad hated scorpions. They were always wandering inside the house at night and after Mom had stepped on her third one, he decided we needed to do something else. The commercial pesticides he sprayed were slow to work, if at all.”
“Damn ingenious,” Kleezebee said, pointing at one particular page in the notebook. “The pad emits an inaudible set of specifically calibrated sonic pulses that attack the creature’s nervous system. It would work whether the scorpion was awake or asleep.”
“Do you think we can adapt it?” Lucas asked his boss.
“For what?” Bruno replied.
“For the Krellians,” Lucas answered.
“It might work. But we’ll need to crank up the juice considerably.”
“We might be able to use the E-121 for the additional power,” Lucas said.
“Excellent idea. We can use it to power all of them.”
“All of them?” Bruno asked.
“We’ll need to arm each member of the rescue team with one of these. We certainly don’t have enough bullets to kill a hive ship full of warriors.”
“Do we have time to make enough of them?” Lucas asked.
Kleezebee opened the med-lab’s hidden door and walked inside where Trevor was working. Lucas followed him. “Rig a power source based on E-121 and make as many copies of this as you can,” Kleezebee told Trevor. “We’ll need it weaponized by morning.”
“Ja, will do.”
“BioTex can replicate inanimate objects?” Lucas asked the professor.
“Sure, why not? They’re much less complicated than replicating a living organism. Granted, it’s not a very efficient use of our technology, but given the time constraint, we don’t have a choice.”
* * *
The following morning, Lucas was ready to head to the video room to meet up with Kleezebee and his staff. The aliens were due to reappear in sixty-two minutes for the exchange, but first he needed to stop at the mess hall on the way down to fill up on caffeine—he had battled a serious case of insomnia through the night, leaving him exhausted. He couldn’t get Drew out of his mind all night long. He kept seeing his little brother sitting in a corner of a Krellian jail cell, surrounded by the blood and guts from hundreds of men eaten right before his eyes.
When he looked back over the events of the past few days, it was almost surreal. It felt like he was in a low-budget sci-fi movie, one filled with endless twists and turns, almost too much for anyone to believe. Yet it was real and happening to him and his family. If they somehow survived this mess, he promised himself to write a novel about their experiences. Even if no one ever read his story, he felt it was important to chronicle the events, to pay homage to those who had suffered and died.
Earlier last night, he had spent several hours consoling his mother after explaining what had happened to Drew. It wasn’t easy to tell her, but he managed to get through it. He took great care to relay the tragic news with a positive spin, but despite his optimistic words of rescue, his mother took the news of Drew’s abduction extremely hard. In her eyes, he knew he only had one job to do—protect his little brother—a job that he had failed miserably. He worried that she might never forgive him.
After what seemed like half the night, his mother finally managed to fall asleep. Lucas left her side and snuck down to the silo’s armory. A traditional handgun would be too loud for a stealthy assault, so he decided to grab two of Kleezebee’s stunners instead. He flung one of the Kevlar vests over his shoulder before returning to his own room. He sat on the edge of his bed for almost an hour, staring at Drew’s empty bunk. He sobbed quietly until his body was devoid of tears and energy, then he crawled into bed and shut his eyes. Other than the sound of his heart beating, the room was dead silent. He felt like he was marooned on an island’s beach without another soul around for hundreds of miles. He let out a muted chuckle when he thought about a floating FedEx box washing ashore with a volleyball inside. All he needed was some coconut hair and a pair of figure skates, he thought. But he decided he would call his imaginary friend Drew, not Wilson.
In the morning, he strapped one of stunners to his ankle and slipped the other one inside the back of his trousers. He hid the Kevlar vest under his shirt, readying himself for the fight. Lucas was in such a rush to join Kleezebee that he forgot to check on his mother, who was sleeping in the room across the hall. He was in the elevator, almost down to the surveillance room, before he thought of her. He rationalized his absentmindedness by telling himself that she needed extra time to rest, and he shouldn’t disturb her.
When Lucas walked out of the elevator, he found Kleezebee and Trevor fitting Bruno with a jet-black vest. Five feet away from them was a four-wheeled sled with a stack of five-gallon containers filled to the brim with scarlet-colored liquid.
The vest contained a series of bulging pockets with a set of electrical wires hop-scotching between them. All the vest needed was a few dozen sticks of dynamite and Bruno would have looked like a Islamic suicide bomber ready to take out a shopping mall. Bruno was wearing street clothes under the vest—white polo shirt, dark slacks, and brown loafers. The polo shirt fit his sagging gut much better than his uniform top did, except it highlighted his baseball-sized bellybutton recess. The only part of Bruno’s outfit Lucas recognized was the pentagon-shaped watch. Overall, Bruno actually looked good in casual attire.
“What do you think?” Kleezebee asked, leaning forward on his crutches to tug at the open belt clip hanging from the front of Bruno’s vest. “Trevor did a hell of a job integrating your father’s device.”
“It’s almost comfortable,” Bruno said, clipping the belt to close the vest around his midsection.
There was a second vest lying on the table next to Trevor. Since it was much too small to fit Trevor or Kleezebee, Lucas assumed the vest was for him. Either that, or it was for one of the skinny security officers to wear. He assumed they only had time to make two vests, not the dozen Kleezebee ordered.
“We’re calling it a Sonic Disrupter,” Kleezebee said.
Lucas picked up the second vest to inspect it. Each of the garment’s six front pockets contained a smaller version of his father’s sonic pad. “Nice work.”
“Trevor constructed it out of interwoven layers of Kevlar fiber. Should be able to withstand one hell of a beating.”
Lucas opened the vest and looked inside. Attached along the lining were more of the electrical wires connecting each sonic pad to an orange pouch sewn inside the back of the vest. Lucas tore open the pouch’s Velcro zipper.
“That’s the E-121 power unit,” Kleezebee said, holding up a push-button activator switch. “All you have to do is press this button.”
Lucas didn’t see any wires connecting the switch to the vest. “Wireless?”
Kleezebee nodded.
Bruno walked around the room with the vest wrapped around his chest, though not in a normal upright posture. He was leaning slightly backward. “I don’t know. It’s a tad back-heavy.”
“That’s the E-121,” Kleezebee replied. “We could add a counterweight to the front?”
“If you make it any heavier, I’ll be too slow to react. I think I just need to get used to it.”
“Why are you using multiple sonic pads in one vest?” Lucas asked the professor.
“We tested it on the alien corpse and found that we needed to use multiple combinations of infrasonic and ultrasonic waves. Otherwise, it had little effect.”
“You should have seen the mess when that thing popped,” Bruno added.
“It took longer to tweak than we expected, so we only had time to make the two vests.”
“Is the other vest for me?” Lucas asked.
“Yeah, go ahead and put it on,” Kleezebee said, testing the trigger on the activation switch. “If something goes wrong during the exchange, I want you and the security team to do whatever is needed to bring Drew home.”
“So we’re going to wait until the exchange?” Lucas asked, wondering why they weren’t going in ahead of schedule, in a pre-emptive assault.
“Yes. They might just return him without a fight.”
“You don’t really believe that, do you? What about what Alicia said?”
“Her intel could be wrong. We have to try the diplomatic solution first. An all-out assault is our last resort.”
Lucas disagreed and wished he were the one making the decisions. He checked to make sure the stunner hidden inside the back of his waistband was still out of sight. It was.
“Once we have him back, what then?” Bruno asked.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, let’s try to rescue Drew and not get us all killed in the process.” Kleezebee turned to face his techs and said, “Once we’re back, be sure to close the rift immediately.” The tech nodded.
Lucas
slid on the vest, but initially had trouble buckling the belt’s clip. He didn’t say anything about the snug fit, fearing they might discover the protective vest hiding under his shirt and the stunner tucked in his pants. Having two layers of protection couldn’t hurt, assuming he could breathe properly. He finally got the belt clipped and waited for Kleezebee’s orders.
“As a good faith gesture, Bruno and I will step through with a small amount of BioTex. I suspect they’ll want to test its authenticity. Once they do, I’ll demand they return Drew before we conclude the exchange.” Kleezebee told Trevor, “Remember, don’t step through with the rest of the material until I call for you.” Trevor nodded.
“What do you need me to do?” Lucas asked.
“You stay here with Trevor and monitor the exchange.”
“But I’m wearing the other vest,” Lucas replied, holding up the activation switch. “What if something goes wrong?”
“Bruno will activate his device. Then we’ll improvise.”
Lucas wondered why Kleezebee gave him the second vest to wear if he did not intend to let him join the fight. Maybe the professor had other plans, or possibly Kleezebee knew it was the only way to shut him up. Either way, it seemed like a waste of technology, but he chose not to argue the point. Lucas figured he could jump through the rift and use his stunners if need be. Kleezebee wouldn’t be in a position to stop him. “Fine, what do you need me to monitor?”
Kleezebee held up a pair of pendant necklaces. “The techs have built a one-way video/audio transmitter into these pendants that should allow you to see what’s going on during the exchange.” He pointed to a pair of unmanned video monitors, just to the right of his lead technician. “We’ll pipe the signals through to those monitoring stations.”
“Will they be powerful enough to carry the signal back here, across dimensions?” Lucas asked.
