“I think you were right,” he said quietly to Miriam, who was walking beside him.
“About what?”
“If there’s anything still alive in this ship, this is where we’ll find it.”
“I felt much braver about all of this ten minutes ago,” she said.
“Too late to turn back now. Where’s the kid?”
“Leading the way, I think.”
Moving in a loose line behind Guillaume and his two advance men, they walked fifty yards before they came to an opening in the wall. It looked like a sphincter muscle and stood three times as tall as a man. A thick lip of tissue lined the opening, floor to ceiling. The advance men went forward to inspect it, moving the last few feet on their stomachs and peering over the bottom of the lip. After a moment, they stood up and went into the chamber beyond. When they waved the others forward, they found a large, roughly oval chamber. The walls were made of the same material as in the passageway, with one conspicuous difference: They were full of small, rough-hewn caves that looked as if they’d been chopped, or eaten, out of the walls. Some were twenty feet long and had two doorways. Others were shallow depressions in the face of the wall. The soldiers found matting and shreds of dried vegetation in the deeper caves, which led them to conclude they had discovered sleeping quarters. But there were no bodies, no physical trace of the aliens they were hunting, so they moved on.
Farther down the passageway, they found a similar chamber, and then another. Their progress was slow because Guillaume insisted that each chamber be approached and examined with caution. Mohammed and Rahim both grew impatient. Mohammed because he was eager to find something that was still alive, and Rahim because he wasn’t. He was anxious to get back to his own work, and pointed out the obvious: The passageway gave onto only one sort of room. Since there were no signs of survivors, he suggested they return to the surface.
“No. They are here,” Mohammed said. “We must find them.” He turned and led a hurried march toward the next opening. Along the way, they found a place where the wall had tom away from the floor, opening a gap to the next floor down. Reg had a claustrophobic moment when he saw that the gap was wide enough to slip through. He knew they were going to descend to the next level.
“Are there any signs of life?” Guillaume asked the first man through the crack. When he replied in the negative, the leader of the Peacekeepers looked at Reg. “Maybe we have gone far enough.”
The last thing Reg wanted to do was wriggle into the hole and descend yet another level, but he shook his head. “We have to keep going,” he said. “King Ibrahim and several hundred civilians are heading out here from At-Ta‘if. We’ve got to make sure there won’t be any surprises.”
“And quickly,” Rahim added. “There are many preparations still to be made before the king’s arrival.”
“Let’s go then.” Guillaume ordered two of his men to stay behind and maintain radio contact with the outside. Within minutes, the others had squeezed through the opening to the floor below. The new passageway was not straight and square like the one above. The walls were rough and curved like a mine tunnel and left only enough room for two people to walk abreast. The tunnel showed signs of use. The lower half of it, including the floor, had been worn smooth, and there were grooves and dents running continuously about three feet above the ground. The crack they had lowered themselves through was on the ceiling now, and it narrowed as they followed it a short distance to a door that blocked their path. It was a heavy, rounded shell that closed against a bulkhead partition. At the center of the door was a battered, copper-colored medallion about the size of a dinner plate. At one time, there must have been a flowerlike design etched into the metallic substance, but only traces of it remained around the edges.
“Open it,” Guillaume said to one of his scouts.
The man reached out and touched the medallion with one finger. The door flew open and slammed against the wall. Flashlights explored the next part of the tunnel until the door slowly began to move closed again. When Guillaume touched the medallion, it shot open again. He stepped across the threshold and waved the others to follow him.
“Wait,” Reg said. “Does that door open from the other side?” Guillaume, Mohammed, and the others who had stepped through turned and examined the door for a moment before it sealed behind them.
“That is a very good question,” Guillaume called back. His voice came through the crack in the ceiling that extended a few feet into the far part of the tunnel before ending. “Don’t touch the door. I will examine it.” A moment later, he shouted through the crack that there was no way to open it from the other side.
After warning Guillaume to step away, Reg reached up and put his hand on the medallion. He felt a small electrical shock as the door swung open and smashed against the wall again.
“This is a one-way street,” Miriyam observed.
“We’ll need to leave someone here to open it,” Reg said.
Guillaume posted two more guards and continued into the darkness of the next segment of the tunnel. Soon, they found a differently shaped door built into the sidewall of the tunnel. It was wider than the first one and slightly lower, but had the same copper medallion set outside it. Mohammed reached it first, but when he touched it, nothing happened. Others tried with the same result. They tried to force it open, but soon realized it was futile and continued to advance. They found several more of the side doors, none of which would open, before they arrived at another bulkhead. After posting another pair of guards to keep the door open, the remaining fourteen people stepped through.
Part of the ceiling had collapsed in the next segment of the tunnel. Without opening to the upper level, it drooped into their path. Two of the Peacekeepers ducked their heads and moved under it. They called out that one of the side doors had been forced ajar.
“See what is behind it,” Guillaume ordered.
“A side tunnel,” they reported.
“Check the first fifty meters.”
After a tense moment of waiting, the two men came out from under the sagging ceiling and said the tunnel led to a cavelike room. There were no signs of survivors.
“We are going very slowly,” Mohammed complained. “We have to find them fast and kill them.”
Guillaume snapped at him to shut up and keep out of the way. Mohammed was in no mood to back down. He took a menacing step toward the rough-looking Frenchman, but Reg caught him by his skinny arm before he could do anything foolish. He pulled the young Iraqi past Guillaume, ducked under the low part of the roof, and entered the side tunnel.
After only a few steps, the walls opened around them, and they were standing in a cave. It was more like an underground cavern, full of stalactites and stalagmites. There was a forest of them, hanging from the ceiling and rising out of the floor at regularly spaced intervals. The columns looked as if they had been built little by little, by accretion, the way coral grows or the way wax builds up at the bottom of a candlestick. But the precise distances between them made it obvious that they were not naturally occurring. Scattered around on the floor were small objects that appeared to be hand tools, and larger ones that looked like water troughs. The space felt more like a factory than a cave, and there were a million places to hide.
When thermal and sonic scans came back negative, LeBlanc broke away from the others and rushed up to examine the nearest column. It was a stalagmite about four feet tall, jade green, and composed of a crystalline substance. It showed signs of having been scraped, chiseled, and hacked at.
“Look at this,” the doctor said eagerly. He had his flashlight pointed at the top of the tapering stump. “Growth rings, the same that you have inside a tree.” He looked up at Reg with his stray eye and nodded admiringly. “They were good farmers, these aliens.”
“I recognize that color,” Miriyam said.
“So do I,” Reg nodded. “The color of the light surrounding the firing cone.”
“Maybe they use this crystal as a power source.�
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“Yes,” said LeBlanc. He took out a knife and used it to scrape off a layer of the material, then raked it into a sample bag. The others began to wander deeper into the chamber, finding various tools on the floor: rasps, chisels, machete-like blades—all of them smaller than human tools. The large objects that looked like water troughs were filled with small sacks made of a hard, flexible skin. When LeBlanc opened one of them up with his knife, he found it was filled with powder of the same jade green color. The doctor was convinced that the crystalline residue provided the aliens with a renewable, self-sustaining fuel that could be converted into enormous amounts of power. He pointed out that the sides of the trough matched the groove marks worn into the walls in the passageway outside. “So if we follow the marks on the walls, eventually ...” “Eventually, we’ll get to the engine room,” Reg finished the thought.
“We can learn how they converted this stuff”—he pointed to his sample of powder—“into such a great explosive. Maybe we will learn something good from them.”
One of the Peacekeepers shouted and dropped his rifle, batting at something in front of his face. Instantly, a dozen rifles were pointed in his direction. It was the baby-faced soldier, Richaud. He spit on the floor and turned to the others, explaining that he’d run into something that felt like a spiderweb. He cracked a joke in French that brought a nervous chuckle from a few of the Peacekeepers, but Guillaume was not amused.
“Stay quiet and watch what you’re doing,” he told the soldier, then motioned for the doctor to go and have a look at him. But before LeBlanc could get to him, Richaud made a noise, and his body tensed up like a bird dog. He pointed toward a section of the room near the entrance where the ceiling had sagged almost to the lloor.
“What is it?” Guillaume demanded.
“Can’t you hear that?” Richaud asked. No one breathed as they listened for whatever it was that had spooked the Frenchman. “It’s alive,” he said.
“What is?”
“No,” Richaud said, “no, no, NO!” He reached up and clutched the sides of his head and screamed. The others ran to Richaud’s aid. He fell to the floor in the grip of a painful seizure and began to convulse. Reg and some others helped pin the soldier’s flailing body to the floor so that LeBlanc could have a look at him, but there was nothing the doctor could do. Blood began to stream out of Richaud’s nostrils and ears. His eyes, wide with terror, went pink, and then bright red. He continued to struggle and shout incoherently until his body went limp.
“He’s dead,” LeBlanc said in amazement.
“He said he ran into a spiderweb. Maybe it’s poison,” Miriyam suggested.
Every flashlight in the room turned toward the ceiling, but there was no sign of anything that looked like a spiderweb, only the carefully arranged rows of stalactites. As Reg scanned the chamber, a strange feeling came over him. At first he thought it was a powerful sense of deja vu. But he quickly realized it was more than that. He was thinking in a way he didn’t recognize at all. It was another presence inside of him, a mind thinking inside his own.
Miriyam noticed that Reg had gone still and silent. “What’s the matter?”
He turned and looked at her, but couldn’t answer. As his mouth moved, struggling to form words, a sharp pain gripped his neck and spiked upward into his brain. He screamed and grabbed his head as Richaud had done. As he collapsed to the floor, he felt a tremendous weight crushing down on his skull and tried frantically to push it away with his hands. He forced his eyes open and looked at the ceiling above him. At the same time, he saw himself lying on the floor, surrounded by people trying to help him. This second point of view, which overlapped his normal vision, came from low on ground, from the area below the collapsed ceiling, the same place Richaud had pointed to a moment before. Whatever the thing was that had invaded his brain, Reg realized it was there, nearby on the floor. The already-unbearable pain ratcheted upward in intensity, and he felt himself beginning to black out. His assailant, whatever it was, was reaching across the room with its mind, infiltrating his nervous system and working him like a puppet. With the last of his strength, he struggled to turn and lash out at his attacker, but there wasn’t much he could do. His body went limp. But Reg didn’t lose consciousness completely, and the pain did not leave him. He understood that there was only one way to relieve his suffering: He had to answer a question.
The question was not put to him in words, but in the form of images and an urgent sensation of need. He found himself standing in a huge, dark, cathedral space hiding from a band of filthy, vile creatures that had him surrounded. He knew somehow that these creatures were an enemy army, and he could feel the intense hatred and loathing they had for him. He sensed the presence of others, his own kind, hiding in the darkness.
Reg realized that he was inside a group mind—hundreds of individuals thinking together as if all tuned to the same radio frequency and able to communicate instantaneously by means of shorthand image/thought/impulses. Two overpowering sensations coursed through this group mind: a burning physical hunger and an intense loathing for the army of humans. Then the interrogation began. There was a great gash in the wall of the cathedral, a towering triangular opening. Beyond it, a bright sun beat down on the sands of a hostile alien planet. Outside, in the distance, a caravan of enemy vehicles was approaching across a barren plateau. The mind ordered him to divulge everything he knew about this approaching force. Reg recognized that they were limousines and armored military vehicles, being seen through the eyes of the aliens. To his horror, he was being asked to act as a spy for the aliens, to help them prepare an attack. But such was his fear and confusion that he complied without the slightest hesitation. In a rapid-fire sequence of half thoughts, he communicated everything he knew about the group and their plans, then begged for the excruciating pain to end. But the response from the mind was an order to die instead. It reached into him and forced his heart to stop beating, his lungs to stop breathing.
As Reg slipped toward death, he realized that he could resist, that the power of the group mind was not absolute. In some way he couldn’t fully understand, he realized that the aliens couldn’t control him without his consent. For a moment, his will struggled against the Will that was controlling him. He felt himself regaining some control, but when the pain intensified, he lay back and obeyed the command to die. Darkness.
There was a series of quick explosions, and then someone was speaking to him in a language he didn’t understand. Reg’s eyes shot open without being able to focus, and he gasped for air. An indistinct figure hovered over him, preparing to inject him with a hypodermic needle. In a daze, Reg swatted his hand at the needle and knocked it away. Slowly, he realized the strange language was French and the figure leaning over him was LeBlanc.
“You are not dead,” the doctor said with surprise.
“Over there,” Reg groaned, pointing in the direction of his attacker. “An alien. It’s alive.” He turned his head in that direction and saw Miriyam inspecting something under the collapsed ceiling with a machine gun in her hands.
“It’s not alive anymore,” she told him. “I killed it.”
“How? How did you know?” Reg asked.
“You told us,” said the doctor with the stray eye. “Don’t you remember? We had no idea, but then you pointed to where it was hiding.”
“It must have been trapped there when the ceiling fell on it,” surmised Guillaume. “Are you okay? Can you walk?”
“We have to get out of here, have to run.” Reg pulled himself into a sitting position and tried to shake the cobwebs out of his head. The attack had left him disoriented and slightly dizzy. “They’re coming.”
A shock of fear ran through everyone in the room. “Who’s coming?”
“The others, the aliens. They know where we are,” Reg said, struggling to find his feet. “We have to get outside and warn them.”
LeBlanc prevented Reg from standing up. “What are you talking about? Tell us what happened.”
“It used its mind. Some kind of telepathy,” Reg explained, sorting through the experience, trying to make sense of it. “They were asking me things, torturing me.”
“They? How many?”
Reg shook his head. He didn’t know. “Many.”
Guillaume knelt down beside him and spoke in an urgent whisper. “We found only one of them. Where are the others? How do you know they are coming?”
“Oh, my God,” Reg gasped when he realized he’d given the aliens information they could use to attack the people in the royal entourage. “Let me up. They’re going to attack. We’ve got to warn them.”
Guillaume grabbed him by the collar, shook him roughly, and held him in place. “You’re talking nonsense. Tell us what happened!” The Frenchman’s scarred face was close to his, illuminated in the glow of the flashlights.
“This one,” Reg began, pointing to the creature Miriyam had shot, “invaded my mind, attacked me with its mind. But there were others, other minds. They communicate ... I don’t knowhow to describe it.. . they think together, as a single mind. When this one reached inside of me, I was also inside of it. There was a melding, and I saw through its eyes, but I also saw through the eyes of the others. I saw what they were seeing. They’re at the entrance to the ship, looking out of the same opening we drove through when we came in. Right now, the king and his people are arriving outside. The aliens are going to ambush them. They’re going to kill the king.”
Stephen Molstad - [ID4- Independence Day 03] Page 16
