Colonization (Alien Invasion Book 3) (18 page)

Benjamin tumbled out the lab door behind Ivan, finding the courtyard between the lab and the ranch house in chaos.

The entire staff was outside, techs milling in their casual clothes and occasional lab coats as if unsure where to go or what to do. Ivan’s small band of military roughnecks and the minor delegation from the nearby rebel camp were climbing into an electric Jeep, one hard-jawed man with a crew cut yanking the charge cord from its rear before piling in. The lab wasn’t military, so there were few guns, but people piling into the jeep and the low transport beside it were packing and racking, cleaning their weapons and loading shells by the box.

On the horizon, there was nothing but fire, like napalm. East. Toward the resistance camp.

“What happened?”
Benjamin shouted.

Ivan’s head only cocked, unhearing. Benjamin’s voice had been drowned by a helicopter thundering by to the south, moving at what had to be maximum speed. Ivan turned to watch it pass then flinched hard when an Astral shuttle appeared in front of it from nowhere. The shuttle didn’t bother to fire its weapon. Instead, as had happened above Heaven’s Veil, it allowed the copter to plow into it, detonating in a plume of rolling flames and spinning debris.

The crowd half ducked; the explosion was nearby, and the rotors had been spinning fast enough that the lab’s grounds were peppered with the outer halo of shrapnel on detonation. Ivan ducked with a hand on Benjamin’s back then straightened as the copter’s remains pounded the desert and the shuttle zipped away.

“What the hell happened?”
Benjamin shouted.

“We don’t know! Carter saw it going down. Tried to run toward camp with the Jeep still tethered and about fucked our only vehicle charge port in the process. He has family over there.” Ivan’s lips formed a line.
“Did
have family anyway.”

Benjamin looked. Black smoke eclipsed the fire. Whatever had happened was already over. The ships had left them alone until now because they were barely a threat. The just-concluded ninety-second solution ran that point home.

“What did it?” he asked, knowing the question was unnecessary.

“Shuttles.”

“Just the one?”

“Carter said there were three. But they … ” He looked around. “They seem to have bugged out already.”

Benjamin scanned the sky, seeing nothing. They’d left the lab untouched. Why? They knew it was there, just twenty minutes west in an electric Jeep. The Vail mothership had spent six months suckling from the money pit on the property, and shuttles had buzzed the place repeatedly. The lab wasn’t an Astral mystery.

Yet they were all still alive, free to sabotage the capital another day. It didn’t make sense, just like the Astrals’ refusal to destroy the nearby rebel camp until now. There’d been no warning. Five minutes ago, Moab had been at peace. For a flash, it had been in the grip of a one-sided war. Now that skirmish was over, and the survivors could only bury their dead and wonder.

Two vehicles screamed across the parched soil, headed toward the pillars of black smoke. Ivan sat heavily on one of the outside chairs — in the shade during the afternoon and evening, where techs tended to take their breaks while pretending the world wasn’t ending. Benjamin doubted there would be many sitting outside this evening. Being inside didn’t make anyone safer from the shuttles’ return, but sitting outside would feel like spitting in Fate’s eye. They’d been on this spot for years, several spent in the aftermath of an alien occupation they’d been working to subvert. Being left alone so long had lulled them into feeling charmed, as if there were a bubble above that made them invincible. That illusion was gone. For days and weeks and months, residents would live in a throbbing state of quiet panic.

Benjamin watched the lanky man sit. He looked out across the pan, watching the flame and smoke of what used to be the resistance camp. Despite his fear and sense of loss (he hadn’t known many in the camp, but people were people), Benjamin couldn’t help but feel sorry for Ivan. What woke him in the morning and kept him going through the days was the dream that, eventually, brute force might be able to settle humanity’s grievances. But now it was more obvious than ever that the Astrals had merely been letting them play their ineffectual games — and that at any point they could tire of the irritation and end things with a snap.

What would drive Ivan now? What did he have to live for?

“Jesus, Ben,” he said, not turning his head. “They’re all gone. Every one of them.”

Benjamin didn’t bother to say that there might be survivors. It might make things worse rather than better.

“What now? That’s all the equipment. All the people who might know how to get more jets, tanks, anything at all. There must be other camps, but … what now?”

Benjamin sat beside Ivan, unable to summon a fitting platitude to make it all better when he knew things were only getting worse.

“I think we should go inside,” he said instead.

Benjamin rose, but Ivan didn’t seem to hear.

So he went back inside alone with the horizon still on fire, a pair of engines purring their way toward the charred atrocity. Benjamin could only leave the man to his loss, knowing that all anyone could do was to reach the next day … then the one after that.

“Cameron,” he said to his empty office once the door had closed behind him, “you’d better give us something to believe in, Kiddo.”

Cameron didn’t respond.

C
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21

“Sir?”

“I told you not to call me that.”

“Nathan?” Coffey repeated.

Nathan’s hands fell from his face. He looked at his second in command, trying to make his features stoic and hard. It wasn’t difficult. His default face had always been sort of impassive, and years of running a rogue paramilitary state had helped him to hone it. She didn’t ask what was on his mind, but Coffey was, of course, smart enough to intuit — and to allow no emotional inflection into her voice about that intuition when news went sour. There was a no-bullshit policy between them. Nathan always respected directness over tact.

“I’m afraid they’ve identified your wife’s body.”

“I know,” Nathan said.

He didn’t know, but he’d assumed. It was usually best to assume the worst. The upside was that the only two possibilities, if you planned like a pessimist, were neutrality or pleasant surprise. Optimism, on the other hand, had a way of clearing the path for defeat.

“No news on Grace,” Coffey said.

“Keep searching.”

“To be blunt,” she said, “there’s not much searching to be done. The camp is in cinders. It looks like they might have got a few minutes’ warning because most of the intact bodies were in their meeting hall structure. You know, the circular roof near the stream.”

Nathan nodded. He’d looked at a few satellite images since Cameron Bannister’s visit in the way most husbands and fathers looked at beach photos from family vacations. He knew his late wife and possibly late daughter’s home from above: all rectangles and circles, the peaks of trees appearing as shrubs.

Coffey looked like she might be waiting for dismissal. She’d been better at not being subservient — being the hard-nosed number two he could respect. She’d informed him of deaths and losses, but never like this, never his own family. He couldn’t blame her hesitance, but didn’t like it. Showing him sympathy meant she felt he needed or wanted it. Either that, or Coffey just couldn’t help it.

Served him right to let her see him with his face in his hands after hearing the news.

“You can go.”

“Anything you need?”

“Just keep searching.”

Coffey looked like she might be thinking about repeating that searching was pointless, but thankfully she kept the message in her mouth. If Nathan had to repeat himself to earn compliance, he might very well snap. He was already barely forestalling a desire to throttle her. She was right, of course; he’d seen the after images of the camp. It wasn’t much more than a smoking hole in the ground — a few hundred square feet around the collapsed meeting hall being all that remained unburned. If they hadn’t found Nathan’s daughter yet, it meant she’d been in the torched areas when the shuttles had come. Maybe sleeping as death came from above.

Coffey paused for a final moment then turned to leave. The door closed. Nathan waited until his lieutenant’s footfalls were no longer audible on the steps before pulling the tall bookcase against the wall over on its face.

For a few delirious seconds, a red rage of fury subsumed him. He shouted in the mostly soundproofed room; he ripped a television screen from its mounting and smashed it on the ground. He kicked the desk, doing little more than chipping the wood and stubbing his toe.

Nathan paused, chest heaving. After a moment, he launched into another tantrum, knowing how his impotent rage would appear from the outside, not caring.

Glass vases detonated. Office items were hurled. Picture frames were shattered.

Nathan stood in his ransacked office once it was finally over, shoulders bobbing up and down with his heaving breath, unable to dominate an enemy he couldn’t see, hear, or touch.

Broken glass littered his chair. He brushed it away, suddenly delicate, and sat. Again, he planted his face in his palms then pulled himself upright.

No.
He wouldn’t mourn. Not yet.

Someone had fucked him. They’d fucked him
hard
. It didn’t matter who you were; you didn’t fuck Nathan Andreus. Unless you were looking to get fucked right back. Step on Nathan’s land and lose a foot. Kill an Andreus warrior and get friends or family slaughtered before your eyes.

He knew who’d done this, and why. Obviously, it had been the fucking Astrals. On their own. They didn’t need permission or a tip-off. So far, their needing Nathan to control the outlands had kept their fucking ET hands off the camp, meaning the Astrals had somehow known where Nathan’s people had fled before he himself had. Choosing now to decimate a camp that couldn’t dent Astral armor was spittle in his eye. An intergalactic fuck you, as repayment for … for …

Well, Nathan wasn’t sure
what
it was for. For letting the camp survive until now rather than raiding it? That didn’t seem like a good reason, considering the Astrals had proved they could raid that camp fine without his help. Same for Benjamin Bannister’s lab.

So: Was this comeuppance for helping Cameron Bannister? That didn’t seem right either. One man headed to the capital was hardly an insurgent threat. Besides, if they knew Cameron was on his way (something Nathan didn’t imagine was likely), they could easily stop him without sending a message to Nathan.

Unless they wanted to remind Nathan that they could do whatever they wanted at any time, and that they were allowing
him
to keep living, too.

Unless this was a reminder … and deeply personal.

He stood and paced. He had to do something. It didn’t matter that the aliens were responsible. He was in bed with the Astrals, but Nathan Andreus of all people knew to keep one foot on the floor no matter who shared his bed. He followed their orders but kept his own. He controlled the area’s outlands in his own way, not just as their puppet.

If they’d done this to spite Nathan and teach him a lesson, then it was game on. The shuttles destroying the camp rather than Andreus HQ or his co-opted residence told Nathan that even though he’d done something the aliens didn’t like, they still needed
him
. His army, his Republic, maybe even his mind. They’d given him access to the unrestricted net before he’d even worked out the back doors that allowed him to peek in on Moab’s chats with …

Nathan stopped. An interesting idea flitting inside his mind.

Thanks to snooping on Bannister’s communications, he knew Cameron was on his way to the capital
not
just to snoop around the Apex dig site but to sabotage the network.

A good plan: it might seriously punch the Astral below their cosmic belts, right in their interstellar testicles.

But only if Cameron could get into the city.

Which, of course, he couldn’t.

Or maybe he could.

Nathan had told Cameron that the conversations Benjamin thought were private weren’t secret to someone like Nathan, who’d once made his living in communications software.

Including conversations involving the whereabouts of certain city fugitives who might, properly leaked, act as a fine distraction for extraterrestrial minds. Distractions that might draw forces away from an intruder at the gates.

Intruders who, according to satellite, were outside the city now, trying to figure a way in.

The Astrals wanted to fuck Nathan Andreus? Well, fuck
them
.

Nathan’s portable computer was smashed, but this could be handled by someone else, easy as pie.

Nathan tapped a wall unit. Coffey answered.

“Jeanine,” he said. “I want you to have Greg send a message to Heaven’s Veil Viceroy. Not to the house, but to him personally — right into his goddamned pocket, so he can’t possibly miss it.”

“Of course. What would you like the message to say?”

Nathan smirked. “Tell him where his wife ran off to.”

C
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