Stokes continued firing as it drew closer, the creature picking up momentum as it darted through the heavy undergrowth, making it difficult to land a good shot. The remaining Delta Force men opened up a second later, bullets cutting narrow saplings in two, spraying the air with a strange milky secretion. Some of their shots were landing, but the creature wasn’t going down. By the time it was twenty feet away, Mia leapt to her feet in concern. And when it cut that distance down to five feet, dread began to surge through every fiber of her being. The thing that had killed Peterson was going to take Stokes out and maybe the rest of them too. In slow motion, Mia watched that crown of razor-sharp teeth widen as it came in for the kill, its body pockmarked with holes where the soldiers’ bullets had riddled it. The beast was three feet away, Stokes only now rising to his feet, no doubt certain these were the last few moments he would be alive.
Suddenly the animal was stopped abruptly in its tracks. It let out a shrill, strangled screech, the only sound it could manage with Ivan’s heavy pincers closed around its neck. The robot’s arm rotated three hundred and sixty degrees, breaking the creature’s neck with a loud snap.
Frozen, Stokes watched the beast’s limp body fall to the ground in a heap. Ivan hovered over it, the sensors from his eyes sweeping over its corpse.
“What the hell was that thing?” Kerr asked.
Diaz secured Peterson’s weapon. “He never fired a shot,” he said, his voice thick with fear. “Must have been stalking him.”
Nobody responded. Not because they didn’t want to. But because they either were still too stunned by what had just happened, or simply didn’t have an answer.
“Stalkers,” Dag said. “That sounds like as good a name as any.”
“Dr. Greer,” Anna said. “My long-range scanners have detected a distant sound very much like the one emitted by the alien life form we just terminated.”
Stokes looked over, concern in his normally stoic eyes. “How far?”
“It is difficult to tell. I can send one of my drones higher and have it search for movement through the underbrush.”
“Do it,” Jack said.
Stokes turned to two of his men. “Grab what’s left of Peterson. Wrap him up in a giant leaf if you have to, but double-time it. We best be booking it out of here before the rest of those things show up looking for another snack.”
Chapter 20
45 hours, 12 minutes, 36 seconds
The visible light was already starting to fade.
“That’s just what we need,” Dag said, expressing the thought lingering on everyone’s mind.
One soldier was dead and they were now running from a pack of flesh-hungry Stalkers. Now the prospect of trekking through an alien jungle at night felt like a thick layer of icing on a proverbial shit sandwich. They switched on their helmet lights, Jack growing certain that if the local wildlife hadn’t been aware of their presence, they soon would be.
Within a matter of minutes, the fading light had turned to total darkness.
“That sun sure went down fast,” Stokes said, navigating a tricky bit of footwork as they descended a rocky hill.
“It means the planet we’re on is likely spinning much quicker than Earth,” Jack replied, breathing heavily from the exertion. “If a day on Earth lasts twenty-four hours, then a day here is only half or a third that long.”
“Dr. Greer,” Anna said, crossing the rough terrain with ease. “I should let you know I have lost connection to the drone that was monitoring the creatures pursuing us.”
“How so?”
“I am not certain. It appears to have collided with something.”
That didn’t sound good.
“Ivan, hurry up,” Yuri shouted impatiently. “No, not straight through, go around.”
The tank treads let out a high-pitched whining sound.
“What do you mean you’re stuck?” the Russian said, his voice dry with exasperation and growing fear.
Stokes cursed. “If that tin can hadn’t saved my life I’d be just as happy to leave it behind. Kerr, head back and see if you can help Yuri free it. But don’t hang around forever.”
Kerr nodded and ran to where Ivan was stuck. Jack followed him while the rest of them carried on.
“Anna,” Jack said. “How far away are they?”
“Please hold. I am moving the second drone into position.”
Please hold? What was this, a help line?
He and Kerr arrived to find Yuri pulling at a branch stuck in Ivan’s tread. “Give me a hand with this, will you?”
The three men grabbed hold and rocked it back and forth in an effort to pry it loose.
“Geez, Ivan,” Kerr said. “How the hell’d you wedge this in so bad?”
“Dr. Greer, I am picking up movement on the jungle floor three hundred meters away and closing fast.”
They gave it one final go with everything they had. The branch broke free with such force it sent Kerr tumbling backwards. He swung a leg around to stay his fall and twisted his ankle.
“Ah, crap,” he swore, stumbling to the ground. Jack and Yuri helped him to his feet.
“Can you run?” Jack asked him.
Kerr tried to move a few steps and nearly fell again. “Run? The real question is can I walk?”
“How close are they, Anna?”
“One hundred and fifty meters,” she replied. “I recommend you hurry up.”
“Yeah, no shit,” Kerr snapped.
Jack and Yuri positioned themselves on either side of Kerr as the three men began moving again, albeit at a much slower pace.
They didn’t get more than twenty feet before Kerr said, “There’s no way we’re gonna make it. Not like this. Leave me here and I’ll slow them down as long as I can.”
“Don’t be a hero,” Stokes barked from about a hundred yards ahead. “I’ll come back there and carry you myself if I have to.”
As if on cue, Ivan spun around and plucked Kerr out of their grasp and cradled him in his giant metallic arms like a baby. The machine then rolled through the jungle at high speed, giving Kerr a whipping from every branch in his path.
“Dr. Greer, they are fifty meters away from your position.”
“We’re not gonna make it back to the portal,” Stokes said. “We’ll hold up in the greenhouse and wait for sunup. Otherwise those things are gonna pick us off one by one.”
Jack magnified his external audio sensors. If something was scrambling up behind him, he wanted to hear it coming first.
Ivan and Kerr were now about a dozen feet ahead of them.
Struggling through labored breathing, Yuri said, “An old Russian saying about meeting a bear in the woods. You don’t need to outrun the bear. Only the man next to you.” He let out a dry, humorless laugh and pulled slightly ahead. Jack dug down deep, fighting to keep up. This was payback for turning around to help that crazy Russian and his dimwitted robot.
“Ten meters,” Anna called out to him right as he entered the clearing and saw the angled shape of the greenhouse rising up from the ground, its roof nearly hidden by a twisted mangle of psychedelic foliage. Bates and Conroy stood by the entrance, waiting for them. Jack saw their eyes grow wide as they levelled their rifles, aiming in his direction. At once he cut to the right as the soldiers opened fire. Ivan was already inside, Yuri not far behind. That was when the soldiers stopped firing and ran for the greenhouse. Jack hurried along the straight edge of the outer wall, aiming to tuck around and dive into the entrance. He could hear something only feet away, grunting after him. His legs felt light and tingly with the knowledge that any second he might feel the teeth from that meat grinder of a mouth sink into his back. A part of Jack had already begun to accept his fate when he spotted a shape reemerge from the greenhouse entrance. It was Ivan and he extended both arms, firing his twin machine guns on full automatic. Jack reached the entrance and dove in, right as two of the creatures crashed into the robot. He heard the sound of the machine’s heavy pincers clamp down on bone and
flesh alike. Then more of the creatures joined in and Ivan was overwhelmed.
Chapter 21
Jack reached the bottom of the staircase to find Stokes and another soldier covering the entrance above. Just outside, signs of a vicious battle were still in progress. Ivan might not be all that smart, but he sure was tough.
Inside the chamber, Yuri paced back and forth. He stopped and faced Jack. “What’s going on up there? Is Ivan okay? He’s not responding.”
“Ivan’s a little busy,” Jack said. “He sacrificed himself to save me, which is more than I could have asked for.”
“We need to head back up there and save him,” Yuri protested, gripping the sides of his helmet.
“Negative,” Stokes replied. “Robots can be replaced, people can’t.”
Suddenly, the air outside grew still.
Jack caught sight of Anna, who also seemed concerned, and not only from the harshness of Stokes’ comment. “You’re worried about him, aren’t you?” he asked her.
The expression on her digital face fell. “I will admit, when I first encountered Ivan I was not very impressed. And in no small part due to the poor construction of his neural architecture. Then gradually my perceptions began to change. I am not certain why.”
“He grew on you,” Jack said, putting a hand on her shoulder and squeezing gently, anxious to keep her mind off of Ivan’s probable demise.
She paused for a moment, working to untangle the literal from the figurative in Jack’s statement. “I believe you are correct. The longer I spent interacting with Ivan, the less his inferior abilities bothered me.”
“Perhaps there was another quality he possessed that impressed you.”
She nodded, scouring the vine-covered floor with her eyes as though searching for something. “He was brave and loyal to his friends.”
“I think you hit the nail on the head.”
Anna’s head jerked to one side in momentary confusion about how Jack’s statement about hammers and nails was relevant. “Oh, yes. I am becoming accustomed to the strange way humans speak. To an outside observer, such methods of speech and action make little sense, although they seem to govern much of human behavior.”
“You’re right, Anna,” Jack told her, forgetting sometimes she wasn’t just like a child. She was like a child from another country and in some ways maybe even from another planet. “A big part of what you’re talking about is culture. Did Rajesh ever teach you about that?”
“I’m afraid not,” she said with a touch of melancholy. “Although I do recall noticing a marked difference between the Real Housewives and their counterparts in Atlanta.” Anna raised her arm and gave three crisp snaps. “Do not get me started, girlfriend.”
Jack laughed and shook his head. “How much of that crap have you watched?”
“Every available episode,” she replied without missing a beat. “Often I view several at the same time.”
“Well, I don’t mind, but some folks get uncomfortable when the topic of race comes up.”
“I fail to understand why.”
“Uh, it’s complicated,” Jack said, feeling this wasn’t the right time or place for such a chat. Where was Rajesh when he needed him? Somehow Jack had become something of a surrogate parent and now the full responsibility for answering all of Anna’s often fair, but rather challenging questions had fallen squarely on him. She could tell you in a heartbeat why the sky was blue or why humans didn’t have tails, the sort of questions parents had dealt with for years. It was the other stuff she had trouble with, the things that hid in the cracks of our daily lives, the things most of us worked hard to avoid. Those were the things Anna wanted to know about most. Her sense of wonder and insatiable curiosity were part of what set her so far apart from anything that had ever come before her. Of course, the flipside was the burden Jack now bore to ensure he taught her the truth of what it meant to be a human being without crushing the light that made her want to know in the first place. He let out a deep, ragged breath. “How do I put this? A lot of folks have a view that something which is starkly different from them is bad.”
“Why bad? Why not better?”
This wasn’t going well. “I suppose because each of us thinks of ourselves as the hero of our own story. At heart, that’s what we are, as humans. We’re storytellers. Sometimes those stories are mostly true and sometimes they’re not true at all. But however you slice it, each of us always has to come out on top. When the facts don’t support that conclusion, it normally means the story has to change to fit the desired outcome. Uh, a child loses at a game of pingpong. Rather than admitting his skills need improvement, he claims he wasn’t really trying or that the sun was in his eyes. That way he can avoid dealing with the truth.”
“But that is a lie.”
Jack laughed. “Get used to it. Lies probably account for the vast majority of human behavior. In this case, lying is a tool humans use to maintain their hero status. But the point I’m getting at isn’t about lies. It’s about why different is seen as bad. If different were good, then by that logic it would mean something was wrong with the person doing the observing. The truth however is that different isn’t better or worse, it’s just different.”
“That would imply humans spend an inordinate amount of time dwelling on meaningless distinctions.”
“See,” Jack said, nudging her chin. “Now you’re getting it.”
Anna shook her head and smiled. “Dr. Greer, do you think I am the hero in my own story?” The hopeful look on her face was undeniable.
Jack nodded. “Not only in yours, kid, but in mine too.”
“Stay alert,” Stokes called out over the radio. “Inbound hostile heading down the staircase.”
Jack spun around, readying his rifle. Dag, Mia and the remaining Delta operators also braced themselves.
A moment later Stokes swore. “Oh, crap, it isn’t one of those things. It’s Ivan and he looks pretty banged up.”
Chapter 22
Three hours after their encounter in the Washington Metro, Kay, Ollie and Sven took a private plane to Orlando. From there, they would head east toward a safe house on the mainland a few miles from Merritt Island and the Kennedy Space Center. The nukes designed to intercept the incoming alien ship would be launched from two locations. The first was Kennedy. Vandenberg Air Force Base in California was the other. Ollie had informed Kay that a second team of pros had been dispatched to perform a similar mission.
“Don’t you want them to stop that ship?” she asked him as Sven drove them from the airstrip.
“I may be a lot of things, but I’m not suicidal,” he assured her.
“It just seems like a strange policy to sit back and do nothing when we’re being attacked.” As a reporter, she was used to playing devil’s advocate, although in this particular instance, the moral decision on how to respond was nowhere near a hundred percent clear.
“This is not an attack,” he told her with stalwart confidence. “It may have disastrous effects, but I don’t believe they’ve got it in for humanity. I’ve seen certain things this last week that have convinced me nothing about what’s happening is personal.”
“You’re talking about the genetic work Dr. Ward was doing?”
“That’s right. To them we’re merely a crop that went bad.”
She shook her head in disgust. “And that gives them the right to wipe us out?”
“I read in your file that you’re religious,” Ollie said, turning to face her.
Kay nodded and then shook her head. “Well, my father’s a pastor, but I don’t share all of his views.”
“I’ll bet you heard quite a few of those views growing up though, didn’t you?”
“Of course,” she replied, frowning. “What does that have to do―”
“With what I’m talking about? In all that time your dad spouted off passages from the Bible, did you ever hear him complain once about God’s wrath?”
“What do you mean?”
“Take t
he flood, for example. God decided man wasn’t worthy and snuffed out the lot of them.”
“They had sinned,” she began to say in protest, only to realize after how her words were only helping to make his point.
“We’ve been taught that when God gets angry and steps on us, it’s because we musta done something to deserve it. That’s what some folks believe. And far from trying to question it, I’m merely pointing out that it has always been assumed that God had the moral right to destroy mankind and start fresh if he wasn’t satisfied with the way we were acting. I’ve seen a few sermons in my time. Australians are just as nuts for the Bible as you Yanks are. But in all that time, I never once heard a single person raise a stink over the extinctions driven by God’s wrath. So why is everyone raising a stink now? Hey, I’m not in a hurry to die, believe me, but at least with an impact we have a chance. If those Sentinel bastards manage to blow that thing up, don’t think whoever sent it won’t launch a thousand more to take its place.”
“You sound like the ultimate pragmatist,” Kay replied, chewing over what Ollie had just told her.
“If a bigger, stronger man’s about to punch you in the face and you don’t have time to duck, what do you do? Try to kick him in the balls and really piss him off or take that punch as best you can?”
Kay regarded Ollie, studying the heavy lines of age and experience that contoured his face. “You’re saying we’re in a lose-lose situation.”
“I’m saying it could be worse than that. Imagine we’ve read it all wrong and they aren’t here to fry us. Let’s say the ship zooming through space is really part of a delegation aimed at welcoming us. I don’t believe it, but for the sake of this conversation, let’s just pretend. So here they come, a hand extended, and we blow the crap out of them.”
Kay nodded. “I see your point.”
“You might think, hey, I’d rather take my chances and attack them first. But that’s the insidious part of the whole affair. You wouldn’t just be throwing your own life away, you’d be dooming the entire species. I don’t want that sort of burden hanging over me.”
Extinction Crisis Page 10
