Stephen Molstad - [ID4- Independence Day 03]

by War in the Desert (epub)

  “No, seriously,” Edward said, “they’re going to knock the tower over. Isn’t it time to get out of here?”

  “Plenty of time left.” Reg smiled. His expression changed suddenly as an idea occurred to him. He broke into a jog, searching the ceiling with his flashlight.

  “What is it?”

  “This way.” The others followed, weaving through the obstacle course of ruined workstations and collapsed walls. A hundred yards before they reached the sidewall of the tower, Reg stopped and pointed his flashlight up at the ceiling. “There it is.”

  Lying massively on the floor above was the titanic taproot they’d seen as they entered the ship. It looked like an oil pipeline stretching away toward the front of the ship. If it were still growing and burrowing into the earth, there were no signs of it. The thing lay motionless.

  Ali stared up at the giant organic tube, stunned by a horrible epiphany. “They’re not going to put the biological weapons into the air. They’re going to put them into the ground.”

  Tye was confused. “Uh, wouldn’t that be a good thing? To bury the poisons?”

  “Into the water, the groundwater,” Ali explained. “This is the desert, but there is water. An underground river, one of the largest in the world. It supplies the cities in the north with their water.” He shook his head thinking how many people would be infected if the water supply were contaminated, and how quickly the carriers would infect others.

  “Look up there,” Yossi said, pointing his flashlight at the ceiling. Dimly visible through the ceiling were the bottoms of alien feet. Three sets of them came padding alongside the taproot until they were directly overhead. Yossi followed them with his flashlight.

  “Turn that thing off, you jackass,” Edward hissed. “You’re showing them where we are.”

  But the aliens already knew where the humans were. They lingered for a moment, looking down through the semitransparent material before heading off in a new direction. Fadeela raised her flamethrower to take a shot, but Reg stopped her.

  “Let’s follow them.”

  He bolted into the darkness, blazing a trail over and around the piles of debris lying in his path. He used the flashlight attached to his machine gun to keep track of the alien feet, unconcerned that he was giving away his own position. He chased them a couple of hundred yards until they disappeared. The others followed as best they could. By the time they caught up to him, Reg was climbing a sort of trellis composed of thick diagonal bars. He was already halfway to the top and didn’t look back to see if the others were following.

  Out of breath by the time he climbed to the top, he found himself in the long, low corridor of the attacker exit bay. He took a few strides into the empty space and strained to hear the sound of the retreating aliens over the pounding of his own heart. But the only noise came from the rest of the team struggling up the trellis. As they stepped away from the trellis, he switched on his flashlight briefly and scanned the new room. In the distance, there was the ten-foot-tall taproot running past a set of columns, but otherwise the space was vacant. It was just tall enough to accommodate one of the sixty-foot-long attacker ships. The floor and ceiling were covered with skid marks where the wobbling airships had brushed against them.

  There was no sign of the aliens.

  “Did you see which way they went?” Yossi asked. He and Tye had their forearms locked together, ready to lire the alien pulse gun.

  “No,” Reg answered. “But I’ve got a feeling they’re still nearby.”

  “Listen,” Fadeela said. “Outside. You can hear the bombers.” The tunnel was open at one end. The sound of the distant jet engines echoed down the corridor, and there was a slight breeze.

  “First things first,” Ali said. “We’ve got to destroy that root before they can use it to poison the water supply.” The taproot was more than a hundred yards away.

  “You’re right,” Reg said uneasily. He had the sense that the team was being watched. “Let’s head in that direction, but not in a bunch. We’re making ourselves an easy target. Edward, you and I will go first. The rest of you follow in pairs.”

  Reg took off, running in a crouch, but stopped suddenly after only a few steps.

  “What is it?” Edward asked.

  TAP! A fist-sized ball of light sliced through the darkness. As Edward twisted and ducked out of the way, he raised his free hand instinctively to shield himself. The green pulse streaked past his hand, removing four of his fingers and leaving a bum mark across his forehead as it went. He screamed in pain and hit the floor as a second blast sailed over his head.

  Reg and Ali opened up with their guns, blasting away in the direction of the attack. Tye and Yossi sent a pulse blast of their own skittering away into the darkness. But it was Fadeela who put the aliens on the defensive. She charged toward the source of the enemy fire, squeezing out a long arc of flame as she ran. The fire lit up the gloomy corridor and exposed their attackers.

  There were three aliens—two of them in exoskeletal armor. The warriors were marching inexorably forward with their fingers extended in the firing position until the fire overwhelmed them. They recoiled from the flames and, in their panic, tripped over their biomechanical legs and crashed to the ground.

  “Hold your fire,” Reg screamed. Fadeela was in the way, charging forward without a thought for her own safety. Before the lumbering giants could regain their feet and escape, she sprayed them with a heavy dose of thick liquid fire. By the time their thorax shells popped open and the creatures within wriggled into the open, Reg and Ali had come forward and were in position to finish them off.

  “There's one more,” Ali shouted as he ran past the smoldering bodies, “this way.” They chased the fleeing alien into the shadows of the exit bay, moving toward the open front of the tower and leaving the light of the flames behind them.

  “More fire,” Reg yelled when it seemed the alien would escape.

  Fadeela raised her flamethrower and was about to send out another plume of fire when she realized there was no need. She knew exactly where the alien was standing. It was to her right, not far away, cowering against the tower’s sidewall. Without a word being exchanged, all of the humans turned in the same direction and slowly raised their weapons toward the spot. They knew what they were going to see: a tall, unarmed alien with opalescent white skin. And when they aimed their flashlights in that direction, that is exactly what they saw. The alien moved very slowly away from the wall, its huge eyes squinting into the glare of the flashlights, and raised its hands above its head.

  It told them it wanted to surrender.

  15

  A Very Close Encounter

  Another bomb rocked into the downed spacecraft. The tower absorbed the shock wave without tilting any farther off center, but as it swayed and shook beneath their feet, Reg and the others were reminded that time was running short. Dawn was quickly approaching and the Saudi jets outside were threatening to fell the tower like a tall tree.

  The alien stood perfectly still, its goose-egg eyes reflecting the beams of the flashlights. The only movements it made occurred inside its body. Beneath the translucent membrane of its skin, knots of tissue clutched and released in peristaltic motion. This creature was not like the others the team had encountered. It stood a full head taller, and its skin glistened a nacreous white. Its emaciated limbs looked long and graceful in comparison to its smaller, grayer brethren, but, like them, its face was nothing more than a blunt spot on the front of its neck. Its large brain hung off the back of the skull like a meaty, pie-sized tumor.

  The frail captive had ample reason not to move. It had a large-caliber field gun, two flamethrowers, two fully automatic machine guns, a pistol, and an alien pulse weapon pointed its way. The humans who held these weapons were waiting for the creature to make the slightest of false moves, anything that would give them the excuse they wanted to blow it to bits. They were nervous, frightened, and thirsty for revenge, but something told them it would be a mistake to squeez
e their triggers. The alien lifted its white, two-fingered hands in the air as a sign of its surrender and “spoke” to Reg.

  In a single, sustained, telepathic thought, it communicated several ideas at once. It told Reg: that there were no more bioarmored soldiers nearby; that it was personally incapable of violence; that it would cooperate fully if the humans gave it a chance; and that killing a potentially useful prisoner would be a grave tactical error.

  It took a long, confusing moment for Reg to sort out the multilayered mental message the alien was sending. It came to him as a feeling rather than in the symbolic language he was accustomed to using. The communication was both a physical sensation that tingled through his nervous system and a recognizable emotion. There were no words, no need for interpretation, no possibility of misunderstanding. But the ideas were piled on top of one another, strung together in a way that took some getting used to. Once he began to understand the telepathy, the ideas resonated with a strange familiarity through some long-unused section of his brain. And there was a rationality to the communication that caught Reg off guard. All the aliens he’d faced previously had sprung at him mentally with the same ferocious energy they used in their physical attacks. This “Tall One,” on the other hand, was serene, intelligent and—more importantly—afraid to die.

  Without lifting his eyes away from his prisoner, Reg began to explain to the others what the alien had told him. There was no need. The rest of the team could also hear the alien thinking.

  “It’s reading our minds,” Ali said nervously. “We should kill it.” “No. We are reading its mind,” Tye said. “Aren’t we?”

  “Don’t kill it!” Edward demanded. “There’s no need. It’s not going to hurt us, and we need its help.”

  “Not going to hurt us?” Yossi asked. “What about your hand?”

  Edward had his mangled left hand tucked under his right arm to staunch the bleeding, but kept his flamethrower in the ready position. He and the alien answered Yossi’s question simultaneously, one silently, the other aloud. “It’s the others ones who shot me,” Edward insisted, “the ones in the suits of armor. This one is different. Can’t you feel what it’s telling us?”

  “I think he’s right,” Tye said. “Maybe it knows where the biological weapons are.”

  Reg tightened his grip on his .357 Magnum, walked forward until he was standing within an arm’s length of the five-foot-tall ghostlike figure, and pointed the gun at its forehead. The alien didn’t flinch, but everyone sensed its panic level rising. As calmly as he could manage, Reg spoke to it. “I’m going to put a big, messy hole through your ugly face unless you help us. Understand?”

  It understood.

  “We’re looking for a silver case. It’s full of little glass test tubes, and we want you to . . Reg didn’t need to finish putting the idea into words. The alien was already answering. It pointed one of its hands, a set of banana-sized pincers, toward the horizon of the ceiling, then “spoke” once more. In one mental stroke, it told them, in no particular order: that the silver case would be found on the floor immediately above; that it would gladly lead them to the spot; and that the biological poisons were still safely inside their sealed tubes. There was no question about w'hat the alien wanted. It was trying to exchange cooperation for survival.

  “I don’t like it,” Ali grumbled after listening to the alien. He turned and swept the darkened exit bay with his flashlight. “I’ve got a bad feeling. He wants to trap us. Why are the weapons upstairs? Why aren’t they over there?” He pointed the flashlight in the direction of the distant taproot. “It doesn’t make sense.” “Why don’t we ask him,” Fadeela said. She walked angrily to where Reg was standing, gave the alien a sharp thump on the chest with the warm tip of her flamethrower, and spoke to it in heated Arabic. She wanted to know what the taproot was for.

  The Tall One was remarkably forthcoming in its reply. Without words or images, it answered Fadeela’s question in surprising detail: The massive root, nearly two miles long from end to end, customarily served as a food source for the aliens and had been grown from a tiny seed; the one growing down the side of the tower had been altered to grow in such a way that it would serve as a powerful pump; the tip of the plant had already penetrated to the level of the groundwater; the test tubes were to have been snugged into a specially designed insertion, a cartridge chamber, and then forced downward under explosive pressure; the first anthrax deaths in the northern population centers would have occurred within seventy-two hours. The alien understood, and began to explain, the geometric progression of infection among the human population. The lethal efficiency of the plan seemed to please the creature.

  “That’s enough!” Fadeela shouted. She felt like punching the balloon-headed creature right between its bulging chrome-colored eyes. Before she could, Reg made a decision.

  “This is our best bet,” he announced. “We’ll follow our little friend upstairs. If he leads us to the silver case, we’ll let him live. If not, he’s vapor, and we’ll come down here and destroy that big root.” He started the alien marching with a shove.

  He knew Ali was probably right. Chances were good that it was leading them into an ambush. There was no way to know for sure. Even though the individual they’d captured seemed to be cooperating, Reg knew the aliens worked together as seamlessly as bees from the same hive and that they had descended on Earth intent on exterminating humanity. They were colonizers, and cold-blooded killers. It made sense that there would be a trap waiting for them on the floor above, and that’s exactly what Reg was hoping for. If the silver case was the bait, there was always a chance of getting away with it before the trap was sprung.

  As they walked, Yossi tore off his shirt and used it to make bandages and a tourniquet for Edward’s wound. “Listen, I know you don’t like to take advice from Jews,” he told Edward, “but next time, don’t try to catch the bullet. Try getting out of the way.”

  Tye took off his belt, looped it, and slipped it over the alien’s head to create a choker leash, which he promptly handed to Reg. The alien’s head bobbed heavily atop its thin neck as it shuffled across the floor. Its movements were stiff and wobbly at the same time, somewhat like an old man’s.

  Very quickly, they came to a trellis of diagonal bars like the one they’d found earlier. Reg kept the alien tightly tethered with the belt leash as they began to climb. Ali and Yossi helped Edward up the bars. Fadeela shot ahead and reached the new level first. By the time the others caught up to her, she had already wandered beyond the short entrance hall and out into the open, exposing herself to the danger of being picked off by a sniper’s pulse blast.

  She was standing in a room that was as wide as a prairie and of incredible height. It had once been full of tall crystalline spires, towers within towers, most of which were now reduced to a jagged rubble. The architecture was stark and utilitarian. In many places, the spires were still connected to one another by horizontal footbridges. There were plenty of places left to hide; enough to hold a small army. But it would only take a sniper or two to finish the team off. They stopped at the end of the low hallway and crouched at the threshold.

  “Woman,” Ali hissed at her quietly, “come back here before you get all of us killed.”

  “Quiet, dog breath,” Fadeela answered at normal volume. She was staring straight up, lost in contemplation of the vast ceiling, which was composed of thousands of diamond-shaped panes of the light-amplifying, telescoping glass. Light from the outside world poured in through the panes as if it were midday, but only through a few at a time. Circular clusters of them lit up to create a moving pattern across the ceiling, like a half dozen spotlights sliding across the skies over a destroyed city. Reg leaned out of the hallway far enough to follow Fadeela’s gaze. He looked up at the hazy blob of light she seemed to be following as it traveled, a few panes at a time, across the ceiling. The moment he focused his eyes on it, it began to change. Suddenly, the windows showed him a fighter jet streaking silently through the
predawn sky at a high altitude. A moment later, the image magnified and refocused until he could see that it was an American-built F-15. The image magnified again, and he could read the serial numbers stenciled onto the undersides of the plane’s wings. He blinked and looked away, slightly disoriented.

  Tye stared out into the open space ahead with a combination of awe and dread. “What drives such small creatures,” he asked, “to build on such a gigantic scale?” As if the proportions of the room were too grand to contemplate, he turned his attention to something small. The floor was covered with pieces of debris, some of which looked like tools or machine pieces. Tye stretched one of his long arms through the doorway and picked one of them up. It looked like an ordinary ball bearing, but stung his fingertips when he squeezed it. An inspection under his flashlight showed him that it was covered with bristles, a stiff metallic fuzz. He put it in his pocket and was about to back away from the opening when the alien spoke again.

  This time, no one could feel the thoughts except Tye. It “suggested” that he pick up one more, and it forcibly steered his attention to something that looked like a half-melted black pen. The alien told him it was a medical tool that could be used to treat Edward’s wounds. When Tye retrieved it, the alien communicated to the rest of the group what the wand could do: stem Edward’s bleeding; repair the shattered bone; clear and cauterize the wound; and accelerate the regrowth of the skin.

  “It could be a weapon,” Tye pointed out, looking down at the lightweight object. One end of it flattened out into a dull blade.

  “Give it to him. Let him try,” Edward said urgently. The bandages Yossi had made for him were already saturated and dripping with blood. If the bleeding didn’t stop soon, he wouldn’t be able to keep pace with the others.

  After a nod from Reg, Tye held the instrument out and let the alien’s thick awkward fingers take it from him. The creature fumbled with the tool for only a moment, then tossed it aside before Edward could finish unbandaging his mutilated hand. By the time he did, the bleeding had already stopped. A moment later, he realized the pain was gone, too.