Colonization (Alien Invasion Book 3) (11 page)

He looked at Charlie then Danika. “I gave him Canned Heat.”

“Oh, hell.” Danika sighed then turned away.

“Well,” said Charlie, “I guess we can expect that worldwide network failure any day now.”

“
Dammit
, Benjamin. Terrence wasn’t even finished with it. That thing’s based on years’ old technology. Even
then
it was a risk.”

Calmly, Benjamin said, “Terrence says there seems to be a communication hub in Heaven’s Veil.”

“Obviously,” Charlie said.

“But he thinks it’s run through the network center right there at the viceroy’s mansion.”

Charlie was about to say more, but something stopped him cold.

“The hub and Heaven’s Veil database are sending the native connection off the ground unfiltered and out into some sort of unfamiliar wireless network. We don’t have to understand the way the ships communicate; we just have to cut them out of the loop. The Canned Heat virus can do that. And don’t worry about it being old technology, Danika; I don’t think the Internet’s evolved a lot during the occupation. Hell, the Astrals don’t even seem to
understand
the Internet. Why do we do our thinking out in cyberspace instead of in our heads like they do? It’s collective consciousness without being conscious. Terrence can modify the virus, once he has the code and hardware from Cameron. If he can plug it in and find what he expects to, the virus’s release should give us a window without the Astrals knowing. We’ll grab zettabytes of data before they can fix it, and create secure tunnels under the surface for after. Terrence has plans for those tunnels already. He just needs the Heat.”

Charlie huffed. “If it works.”

“It’ll work. I trust Terrence. I trust his work.”

“You’d better,” said Charlie, “or we can say goodbye to whatever connections we’ve managed to cobble together so far — and to Terrence and Cameron when they get caught trying.”

The office fell silent. Benjamin didn’t respond because there was plenty of truth in Charlie’s words. But that didn’t make the risk less worth taking; it was pretty much all they had. If they wanted to know the Astrals’ true colonization plans — especially the daunting revelation of what might be happening under the Apex in Heaven’s Veil — this was the only way.

“You could have just emailed the virus to Terrence and saved Cameron the legwork,” Danika said. “Forget the hardware. Just compress Heat into an image file and tell Terrence it’s a lost nude picture of Pam Grier from the 1970s.”

“Funny,” said Charlie, not at all amused.

C
HAPTER
12

Piper clutched the small card, bobbing between buildings, staying low and still feeling stupid. She’d crouched her way out to Terrence’s house, ducked behind his hedge before knocking, then stooped her way through his door before closing it like a conspirator.

And look how that had turned out.

She hadn’t heard the low, rattling sucking of the Reptar since she’d made her way out the back of Terrence’s house, around to the public gate, then sauntered into the city with a nod to the guard as if everything were perfectly ordinary. She had no idea what she was doing. It had been two years since she’d done anything other than stand beside Meyer and pretend he was unchanged and fabulous. But even during the exodus from New York and all their adventures thereafter, she’d never truly been on her own.

This was all so odd, only having herself to rely on. She’d always had
someone
. First, she’d had Meyer, followed by the kids, Raj, Heather, and eventually Cameron and his crew. Then she’d had Cameron — including the months when he’d had
her
.

She still felt guilty about that, even though Meyer had been gone. She still loved her husband, but it was hard to feel she’d been out of line with Cameron. There were things Meyer hadn’t told her, and places he’d gone alone. There was little difference between them.

Although really … was Meyer as ignorant about what had happened between her and Cameron as she hoped?

Piper stopped behind a building that was as anonymous as all the others. Without circling to the front, there was no way to tell if the place was a residence, a restaurant, or a quasi-black market hardware store. Heaven’s Veil had sprawled a lot since its days as Vail (or, more specifically, Meyer’s small corner), and with increased growth had come the usual human downfalls: crime, menace, even a proliferation of have-nots in a supposedly idealized socialist city.

But appearances could be deceiving. She’d learned that during her time as the viceroy’s wife, queen in all but name.

There was poverty even without circulating currency, just as there was wealth.

There was crime despite the peacekeepers.

There was corruption, even though the authorities were supposedly beyond profiteering.

For a second — seeing graffiti on new walls, and the slinking forms of undesirables in what was supposed to be one of nine global utopias — Piper saw her species through the Astrals’ eyes. The ships had changed their world, but what she was seeing now would have existed anyway, somewhere, in some form. Evil bloomed where humans gathered, like rust in oxygen. It only required time.

She shrugged the thought away and peered again at the card Terrence had given her. Flimsier than a business card but too small for a flier. A sticker without adhesive.

It read:

NEW REDEMPTION CHURCH

A curious thing, Piper thought, for Terrence to have in his house. An even more curious thing for Terrence to hand Piper on her way out, when time and nerves were in short supply. Terrence had never struck her as particularly religious — or religious at all, to tell the truth. He was a man of logic, not faith. He’d even openly laughed at the new religions that had sprung up after the colony’s formation.
People always need something to believe in, even if they know up front it’s bullshit
, he’d said.

But Terrence had handed her this card. A tiny advertisement to have her spirit lifted in times of crisis. It was as if she’d been abused and he’d suggested heading to a shelter.

Piper clutched the card like a talisman, trying not to feel the depth of her loneliness. She’d always had someone to lean on. Or take care of. She was great as half of a whole, terrific with a partner. Piper had learned she was a capable leader — but even a leader needed someone to follow.

Here, in the increasingly bad part of Heaven’s Veil, Piper had no one.

Nobody except the little card given by a friend.

She thought back to Terrence — and thinking of him took her mind to Meyer, from whom she’d so recently stolen. The man she loved, desired, and feared in equal measure. Here and now, Piper wondered if she was in trouble with her husband. She’d walked by the gate guard.
Was
she in trouble — had she been discovered?

Maybe they’d never let her return. Maybe this was her new life.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Piper thought of the Reptar at Terrence’s door and its death rattle breath. The black paw; its twining, shifting skin. The way the creatures moved. Those movements were so (go ahead, say it)
alien
. The way she’d seen Reptars swarm: not civilized like the quiet Titans, but as a frantic mass, like feeding piranha. Titans carried discreet weapons just like the shuttles that could supposedly vaporize enemies, though Piper had never seen or heard of a Titan using one. The Reptars carried no such weapons. Maybe they had brains and logic, as those in the know swore they did. But it was hard to remember that after seeing them swarm, tearing heads from bodies, arms from torsos, shredding skin from limbs in long, red-ribbon curls.

If Piper returned, would the peacekeepers be there to meet her?

Did someone, somewhere, know what she’d done — what she’d
learned?

And if they did, would she be tried and found guilty, ripped to bits? Or would she be propped up again, secretly watched, kept as the necessary companion to the powerful Meyer Dempsey? Meyer had done that with Raj, after all. His granddaughter needed a respectable father, so Raj had officially (and compulsorily) become family. Piper’s visibility and public popularity might be her get-out-of-jail-free card. If so, maybe the worst she’d endure would be a sort of slavery at home.

Piper was consulting the card, trying to work out the unknown church’s position relative to hers, when she heard the tapping of stone on stone.

She knew the rhythm: a peacekeeper behind her.

Piper’s breath quickened. Her heartbeat doubled its speed. She pressed her back to the building.

Piper could hear the thing coming. Then she could see it.

The Reptar was facing the opposite way. Piper fell back slowly, without any idea of how well the creature could hear. Did it sense every step, biding its time before turning to confront her, its skin giving off its curious blue glow between ebony scales, eyes dialing in and shifting their colors, its mouth open to display row upon row of teeth like thorns? Or would she remain invisible to its senses unless it turned?

Could other senses give her away?

Peacekeepers had bodies not unlike a large dog, but they moved like bugs on four legs. Limbs skipped too quickly, at odd angles, buckling and twitching, pausing and reanimating when their interest was captured. They could bound like predators, but their movement had a curious burst-pause-burst pattern, like a scurrying spider.

If it turned now, the Reptar could be breathing down her throat within a second or two.

Or — since the creatures seemed to always breathe in rather than out — it might be
sucking
down her throat. Subtly pulling her into its too-far-unhinged jaw, toward that needle teeth forest.

Could it smell her?

Could it somehow taste Piper on the air, like a snake’s bifurcated tongue?

The Titans looked like idealized men and women — strong, powerful, almost Zen. Reptars were the opposite.

Maybe they saw through compound eyes, like a honeybee.

Maybe they saw through sonar, like a bat.

Maybe they saw in infrared or ultraviolet or X-rays. Maybe it could see Piper now, as she slipped around a corner.

She’d never imagined that a Reptar could see through walls, but who knew what senses an alien species might have evolved?

Piper waited, her breath shallow and held, heartbeat like a snared rabbit’s. She listened. She heard the clack of its somehow hard-ended feet on stone. She heard the short inhale as purred — smelling for her, perhaps.

Or maybe it was out on a normal patrol, minding its normal duties to the city: allowing those who didn’t cause trouble to stay, while slaying the troublemakers.

Maybe she could walk right by the thing, and it would let her go. But Piper didn’t want to find out. Reptars weren’t dumb animals. They’d stop you. Assess you. Interview you in their invasive way … but because humans couldn’t communicate directly with Reptars in any meaningful fashion, it was hard to plead a decent case.

The clicking, inhaling, rattling sounds receded. After a breathless moment, Piper exhaled, her eyes closing of their own accord.

She had to reach the church. The place Terrence had so heartily dismissed in words — then endorsed when push came to shove.

She ran through the guts of Heaven’s Veil, hearing the rattle of bones at every corner.

C
HAPTER
13

It took Piper a while to find the church. She had no familiarity with this part of Heaven’s Veil and felt somewhat guilty for her ignorance. She was apparently too fancy for the city’s lesser quarters — and this despite the sector being just an hour away on foot. It was a breed of guilt she’d once associated with being white and relatively privileged, but now she felt it for being one of only a handful of humans used by the Astrals as puppets.

At each turn, Piper paused and peeked around, stopping to listen like an old school bus at a railroad crossing. She saw peacekeepers a few times and human police a few others. She avoided them on a hunch, still unsure whether they were looking for her or merely on their usual rounds. There were a few close calls. Once, Piper found herself in a Reptar’s direct line of sight. The thing crossed a street two blocks down, and she froze, trying to appear occupied by something on the street by her feet. It halted, slunk closer, then suddenly lost interest and turned, off to find other prey.

After the close call, Piper darted into a residential backyard (really just a stone courtyard) and snatched a black shawl from a clothesline. Feeling ridiculous, she wrapped the thing over her head like a babushka, allowing it to hang over most of her upper body. An absurd look: she was still wearing one the pretty dresses Meyer liked — something that didn’t complement the half burka even a little.

Piper finished her journey sneaking, sure her efforts to hide were making her more (rather than less) obvious.

Eventually, she found Dempsey Avenue, felt disgusted by its existence, and found that once on the street, the church’s spire was plainly visible. Piper was at the door ten minutes later.

The church was adjacent to the city’s outer wall, which in this quarter was nothing more than a fence with barbed wire at the top. Fences weren’t meant for security. Piper, as wife of the Heaven’s Veil viceroy, had more insight into city security than the average citizen — not
all
, of course, but enough to know the shuttles kept the place safe, not the fences. The fences were there to make a point:
if you leave, it won’t be so easy to come back … so maybe you’d better stay put
.