Men in Black International

by R. S. Belcher

  Em saw the beautiful lights of London, the dark mirror of the Thames reflecting and distorting the flare of the car’s jets. She recalled what it was like to have a mystery come into your life, to show you there were secrets and wonders in this world. She remembered that night, all those years ago, when the young Tarantian had stolen into her house and the agents in black had stolen her parents’ memories, and she was glad she had never stopped chasing her star. She wondered if some kid down there in London was watching right now, and dreaming of another world.

  Pawny struggled to pull himself free of the rear windshield as the MiB-sanctioned rocket car roared into the night, rapidly becoming a new star burning in the sky, bound for Paris.

  33

  The brilliant full moon was not alone in the sky above the City of Lights. Heat lightning flashed above the Eiffel Tower, and distant thunder rumbled, a warning of the storm to come. H’s sleek, black Lexus rocket car came in at hyper-speed on final approach toward the Eiffel Tower. H wrestled to keep the wheel straight and on course as the winds grew stronger over Paris. He saw distant, dancing red lightning and it brought him back to the last time he had been in Paris.

  “Strange, isn’t it? How history repeats itself,” H said.

  Em murmured a reply, watching the streaming lights of the city beneath them. It was beautiful, like a city made of jewels.

  “It was a night just like this,” H continued, “when High T and I went up to face the Hive with nothing but our wits and our Series-7 De-Atomizers.”

  Em glanced over at him. “You know you tell that story the same way, every time?”

  “That’s how it happened,” H said.

  Several stray ideas started banging into one another inside Em’s head. Once again, she got the feeling that something was not right. The ideas collided into an awful thought. For now, she kept it to herself.

  The rocket car landed on the street, merging flawlessly into the evening traffic on the Quai Branly, the street running on the side of the tower, facing the Seine and the Trocadero. The Lexus pulled to the curb as the rocket and wing components melded back into the body, turning it back into a car again. The two agents got out of the car, illuminated in the blinding headlights, and looked up. Strange, reddish heat lightning was surrounding the apex of the tower, like a crown. Pawny popped up out of Em’s jacket pocket and regarded the iconic structure.

  “God, I love Paris,” he said.

  The agents slung their rifles as they strode across the plaza toward the banks of elevators, and approached one that was labeled STAFF ONLY. H keyed a code into an old-style keypad next to the slightly rusted steel trellis doors.

  The door to their elevator slid open, and H and Em entered.

  As the elevator lifted the agents closer and closer to the portal at the apex of the tower, Paris, in all its radiant beauty, showed herself to them.

  “Ah,” Pawny reflected, “Paris. The City of Bicycles.”

  They were silent for a moment as the car took them higher and higher.

  Em kept looking at H. She decided she needed to test her theory, and now was better than later. She hoped she was wrong. She took Pawny off her shoulder and slid him back into her pocket.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but do you mind telling me one more time? How did you beat the Hive?”

  “What?” H looked a little annoyed. “Em, we have no idea what we’re about to face up there. Let’s focus on the now, shall we?”

  “Just humor me.”

  “It was three years ago,” H said, hurriedly. “High T and I went up to face them with nothing but our wits and our Series-7 De-Atomizers.”

  The sick feeling Em had began to show on her face. H looked confused.

  “Yes, but how did you beat the Hive?” she asked again.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Curious,” she replied. “How’d you do it?”

  “I told you,” H started again, “with nothing but our wits, and our…” H paused. A look of horror and betrayal fell on his face, as the realization came to him, finally. Em wished she hadn’t been the one to put it there, but he needed to see, needed to know, the truth. “My God,” he said. “I’m repeating myself, aren’t I?”

  Pawny popped up out of Em’s pocket. “Word for word,” he blurted out. Em made a gesture for Pawny to hush.

  “Over and over,” Em said.

  “It’s actually kind of freaky,” Pawny added.

  Em wished Pawny wouldn’t be quite so keen to have the last word sometimes. H had already had a rough night with the revelations of T’s treachery, and now this. She glanced over at the old-style floor indicator, above the elevator’s doors. Its needle was edging closer to, almost at, the top.

  “H,” she said, unslinging her gun, “I don’t think you beat the Hive that night. I think… I think you were neuralyzed.”

  H didn’t want to believe it, any more than he wanted to believe High T had betrayed MiB, but the truth was relentless. Em could see him trying to fight it, hanging onto the shreds of the man who had been his partner, his friend, and in many ways, his father.

  But then Em saw H accept the truth—her idea made an awful kind of sense. He hadn’t saved the world, not really. He’d just become part of the lie. The elevator shuddered as it neared the top and the abandoned portal depot.

  They turned to face the door as it slid open, guns raised. Outside the feeble light of the elevator car, there was darkness and silence.

  The two MiB agents chambered their De-Atomizers. They stepped together out of the light and into devouring darkness.

  34

  The pregnant moon, burning with silver light, was nearly overhead. The agents made their way across the silent, empty deck at the top of the tower. Off in an alcove, there should have been a black door marked STAFF ONLY. The massive metal seal that had once covered the opening had been ripped off and lay crumpled on the floor. An emergency access light above the door was a silent, red, blinking star in the darkness. The light blinked rapidly, paused for a moment, and then blinked again. The seal had been broken.

  It would have taken strength far beyond a human’s to tear off the covering, and then fold it up in the process as if it were made of aluminum. But there were indentations on the torn seal that resembled human handprints. Beyond the broken seal, through the opening, was a spiral staircase leading upward.

  This was where it had all gone wrong for H, Em thought, and in the very moment of victory. He’d thought he’d finished off the threat, all those years ago, but it was quite the opposite. It had been the beginning of the Hive’s campaign. And perhaps that hidden memory, under the surface, was the thing that had changed him—made him date arms dealers, go for the highest stakes, live on the surface.

  Em took the lead, stepping through the circular doorway and cautiously ascending the stairs, her De-Atomizer aimed up them. H was right behind her, watching left and right, gun leveled as they climbed. The stairs led, H knew, to the antechamber of the portal room. They reached the top, now side by side, sweeping every corner, every dark shadow of the long, dusty, cobweb-covered room. Em had visited Ellis Island once with her parents as a child and the depot reminded her very much of the island. There were rows of processing booths and desks, where new arrivals to Earth would wait in line to begin their new lives. An extraterrestrial Ellis Island.

  As dangerous and unnerving as the situation was, Em felt a sense of wonder fill her as she imagined the depot over a century ago, bustling with life and color, like the MiB headquarters in New York, or London. She paused before a wall with departure and arrival times scribbled in chalk on old slate tablets. Surrounding the timetables were ancient framed photographs, black and white and silvered, faded with age.

  Em recognized Gustave Eiffel, the builder of this very tower, in one of the photos. He was with a group of men dressed in what was apparently the height of nineteenth-century fashion. They appeared to be standing on the construction site for the tower. All the men around Gustave Eiffel were
dressed head to toe in black and wore smoked lenses. Em touched the dusty glass covering the photos. Other photos showed lines of aliens, dressed in Victorian garb, variously smiling, waving, and stern-faced as they were processed in this very room. H couldn’t help but smile at Em’s wistful reaction. He could hardly recall the last time he had felt wonder, real wonder, in this job. It was nice to see the world through her eyes, even for a second.

  There was a loud thump from the other side of the depot, and the two agents snapped their heads in that direction. The noise echoed through the stale air. H and Em began to advance, their Series-7s moving back and forth before them as they went past the booths and desks, making sure each one was empty before they moved. Pawny had even come out of hiding from Em’s pocket and had his small, but powerful, blaster aimed—covering his queen. They moved as silently as they could past wooden benches and rusted, skeletal luggage carts.

  The far end of the depot contained the portals. They were just as H recalled them, three circular arches, each sealed by a heavy, metal slab of a door. The size and shape of the arches reminded Em of subway tunnels. There was a circle on the floor of the chamber. The edge of the circle was surrounded by a ring of alien symbols interspersed with pictograms that represented the cycle of all the phases of the moon. Directly over the circle was a round skylight and the huge, brightly lit moon was almost dead center in the skylight, edging ever closer to perigee.

  Large cables snaked along the floor between the portal archways and among strange box-like contraptions of brass, leaded glass, dials, and meters. The arches were labeled in roman numerals, I through III. Below the numerals was an old-fashioned power meter with what looked like a pressure bar, half red and half black. The brass arrow-like needles for each indicator were currently in the red.

  “You came to say goodbye. Good lad.” The voice was High T’s and it echoed in the ancient air of the depot.

  There was a loud snap, the sound of electrical current, and a whining hum like a turbine powering up. Em and H looked up to see High T standing behind a pedestal on the catwalk above the three portals. The controls for the portals were on a pedestal made up of three circular, equidistant panels, covered with dials, levers, switches, and glowing glass-covered meters. The rogue agent manipulated the switches and dials of the consoles, bathed in the blue, ghost-fire glow of the meters that he had just powered up. Lights encircling the middle portal’s door came to life, indicating the sequence to activating Portal II was underway.

  “You can feel the history here,” High T said, looking down on the two agents, who had split—H left, and Em right—into the shadows of the depot. “Can you feel it? Eiffel discovering the wormholes, gangways to other civilizations. The first alien migration.” H and Em climbed the ladder to the catwalk as quietly as they could, weapons at the ready.

  “And we made history here, too, didn’t we, H? With only our wits and our—”

  “No!” H shouted as he leveled his weapon at his old friend and former partner. “We didn’t.”

  Em, on the other side of the catwalk, also covered High T. Pawny, on Em’s shoulder, also aimed his blaster at the rogue agent. H moved closer, cautiously. High T glanced from side to side, seeing he was surrounded. He didn’t seem concerned in the least.

  “We never beat the Hive,” H almost snarled. “The Hive wanted the most powerful weapon in the galaxy. They knew Vungus would bring it to the Men in Black. So, what, you made a deal? You’d wait and when it came, you’d give it to them?”

  High T responded by turning a large knob. There was a deep bass throbbing that rose in intensity. “You have no idea. There’s no stopping this. There never was.” The moon had reached apogee through the circular skylight. Portal II began to rumble open. Brilliant white light spilled out from the retreating aperture as the wormhole yawned open.

  H advanced. Only a few feet separated the two men. “You neuralyzed me,” H said. “Made me a hero, ‘the guy who saved the world.’ But I was just your prop, left alive to sell the lie.” H’s massive gun barrel was inches from High T’s face. “What did they promise you?” he asked. The rage came off him almost like heat off a desert road. “What could they? To make you betray everything you ever stood for?”

  High T winced, seemingly physically pained by H’s wounding words. He let his gun fall to the floor. H kicked it away.

  Below them, Portal II yawned wide open. Though it was difficult for Em to see it from her vantage point, she had a horrible vision of what waited across the frozen gulf of space on the other side of that door. Hive Space: the worlds invaded and consumed by the Hive.

  It was a swath of death and destruction that scarred the universe, like an ugly wound, like a cancer. Em knew hungry, terrible entities waited to pour through that gate and do to Earth what they had done to so many other vital, living worlds. The only thing that stood between the Hive and her beautiful little blue-green world was Em, the tiny alien pawn, and H.

  T removed the puzzle box from his pocket and held it so Em and H could see it. “They wanted this. I said no. You were there.”

  H’s gun wavered for a moment as he struggled to find some scrap of memory. Em took a step closer, worried for her partner.

  “They… take you over… from within,” High T said. “Until whoever you were, you’re not that anymore.”

  High T looked into H’s face, his eyes. “You were always like a son to me.” His voice became deeper, his body convulsing.

  “H…” Em began, but the warning died on her lips.

  “You were always… like a son to me,” High T said again. He sounded like a record skipping, stuck in one groove, one strong memory. His skin began to split like rotted cheesecloth. His body began to twist and grow. T’s voice dropped several octaves. “You were always like a son to him.” His hand morphed into a Hive hand made up of tentacles—disposing neatly of H’s gun as it did so.

  And then the man who had been known as High T exploded, his body popping and shredding, countless tentacles erupting from within. H and Em jumped back in utter horror.

  For the second time in his life, H found himself standing before a great Hive monster, a gigantic mass of nearly indestructible, wrapped muscular tissue strands. Whirring, super-humanly strong, rope-like tendrils shot out of the thing that had only seconds before been High T.

  A mass of tentacles slapped into him with the same kind of strength that had ripped and crumpled the seal to the depot, smashing him into a wall. Em opened fire, hitting the monster in his back several times, but apparently doing no damage. A group of lash-like tendrils shot out of the Hive creature’s back, knocking her for a loop and sending her crashing to the floor below, and skidding toward the portals.

  Pawny went sprawling as well; his tiny armored form flew free from Em’s shoulder and he bounced a few times before coming to a stop. As Em struggled to her feet, a rain of slithering Hive tendrils spilled over the catwalk and began to wrap themselves around her feet. She struggled to scoot away from them before they got a firm grasp on her, scrambling for her De-Atomizer.

  Above, the monster ripped away a piece of the catwalk’s steel rail and stabbed it into the portal control panel. The panel erupted in sparks and smoke. On the ground by the portals, Em, blasting away the encroaching tendrils, saw Portals I and III grind partway open and she couldn’t help but look.

  The first portal opened onto wonder. It was a vast vista of deep space, icy oblivion smeared with thousands of subtle colors from a nearby nebula. A violet star radiating a crown, a golden corona, and beyond it, millions of distant lights, pinpricks of ancient ghost light, filling Em’s eyes from the depths of the birth of time. Crystalline mountains floated in the obsidian deep—asteroids made of sapphires, rubies, and emeralds flashed in the scattering rays of the purple sun, refracting the light of the star. Drifting islands of pure diamond with castles, temples, whole cities carved into them. Em saw their ghostly, gaseous inhabitants flying from place to place among the glittering spires.

&nbs
p; A quick glance at the second portal showed a lush world of seemingly endless vegetation, plants and trees of every imaginable color thrived under twin yellow suns. Em was shocked and delighted when she saw several of the “plants” uproot themselves and begin shambling along, seeming to join limbs to communicate as they walked, or perhaps they were just holding hands.

  Em pulled her eyes away, but she didn’t want to. The swarming flesh-ropes of the Hive reminded her that the universe could be an ugly place too.

  The Hive monster made sure the puzzle box was tightly secured inside its fibrous body. Its long mission complete, it launched itself toward the portal that would allow it to leave this chaotic world of undirected individual lifeforms and disharmony, and take it home to the silent, undulating unity of the Hive. It launched itself off the catwalk and straight toward Portal II. H, his back to the wall he had just been smashed into, clambered to his feet, knowing what the thing that had been High T was planning to do. He ran full-tilt down the narrow metal walkway and launched himself at the monster, knocking it off course and causing it to crash to the main floor of the depot. H bounced off and tumbled into a pile of old debris from the depot’s active days and lay still.