Mindbridge (18 page)

“Uh . . . the metal of this room is obviously magnetic. Thirteen minutes. Here they come.”

She unclipped the yellow canister and tossed it in front of the aliens. The leader kicked it aside. She dropped the green one at her own feet.

Three of the aliens, including the mangled one, held back. The leader approached and said two syllables- then her eyes closed, her legs buckled and she fell to her hands and knees.

“Evidently the green tranquilizer works . . . No.” The alien shook her head and stood up again. “I’ll hold off on the red for a few minutes.” She smiled a shy, pretty smile: her teeth were white squares.

“I could have sworn all of them had pointed-“ Carol flinched as the alien pointed the weapon at her. A hole opened in the hull a couple of meters away, letting in a beam of white light.

“It’s working.” The alien wiggled the weapon and the hole widened to a long gash. She nodded and walked back to the other three. She tried the weapon on the bloody one and it sliced her in two.

Carol closed her eyes and swallowed rapidly. They aren’t human, she told herself over and over. They aren’t even proper animals, they don’t feel pain.

Deliberately looking away, she saw the alien who had first been in the room with her. It lay face-down on the floor, head against the wall.

“It looks like some of them are more vulnerable than others. One I threw against the wall is unconscious or dead.”

She forced her eyes back to the others. “They’re talking now, or growling. The . . . one they cut in two is also talking, lying on her back.

“That’s strange. She doesn’t look at all like the pictures we saw in training. Of slingshot accidents. It’s . . . the body cavity doesn’t have any identifiable organs. Just a lot of blood and yellow stuff. Here they come.”

Three walked slowly toward her while the fourth, the truncated one, rolled up on one elbow to watch. Carol centered her, its, forehead in the crosshairs and tongued the laser. A black spot appeared there, smoldering, and the creature toppled over.

“They can be killed. It takes a head wound.” The three others didn’t even look back. “Ten minutes.”

They tried all their wands on her simultaneously. She kept her arms flat against her sides; the beams glanced away and made latticework out of the thick hull. They grabbed her arms and shoulders and tried to pull her away from the wall.

“Maybe I can get you three.” Their weapons were dangling free; she swept up the cords with one hand and jerked. The machines flew in a glittering arc across the room.

She hugged the three aliens to her, lacing her fingers behind them. They struggled, growling, bones grinding, but couldn’t get free. “Nine minutes, I should be able to hold them. Unless reinforcements come, with better weapons.”

Arnold Bates didn’t look at the clock. “Thirty seconds.”

“Lefavre!” Riley said. “Get out of that rifleman’s line of sight. Get ready.”

Rather get in the way of a dart than a laser, Jacque thought. He shuffled over and, with everybody else, focused all of his attention on the crystal.

“Fifteen seconds.”

Carol and the three aliens materialized less than a meter above the crystal. She fell heavily but didn’t topple, and held on to them. A piece of the ship’s hull crashed beside her.

“Darts,” Riley said.

“Two in each!” Carol shouted.

One of the aliens got three and sagged. The others relaxed and Carol loosened her grip on them.

“All right, Lefavre, bio team . . .” Suddenly all hell broke loose. The aliens squirmed out of Carol’s grip and ran in different directions, toward the sandbags. “More darts,” Riley shouted, but the order was unnecessary; the air was filled with the missiles, most of which missed and clattered harmlessly on the metal walls.

As they ran, the aliens changed shape.

Their torsos sprouted extra limbs-claws, tentacles, hairy spider arms. Beautiful faces grew monstrous with huge luminous eyes, terrible fangs. Seductive curves hidden by hair, scales, plates, feathers.

All different, all horrible, all bent on bloody murder.

One headed straight for the control room, leaping the last two meters, its shoulder toward the glass. “Kill them,” Riley said as he grabbed Bates and both of them fell backwards to the floor.

The alien crashed into the glass just as the lasers started, lurid green pencils of energy crisscrossing in the air. The glass starred but didn’t break. Two laser beams cut the alien into three unequal pieces, and shattered the glass.

It was over in seconds. The aliens had killed two people and injured seven, not counting the three who got serious burns. Jacque was unconscious with a concussion. Smell of burnt cloth and flesh and of hot metal and something else. The chamber was filled with gray haze from the smoldering sandbags.

Riley pulled himself up off the control room floor. The table was littered with blood-smeared glass. He surveyed the wreckage and adjusted his throat mike. “See if Lefavre’s alive. Someone else pick up the bridge.

Maybe not all the creatures are dead yet.”

“Look for one without a head wound,” Carol said, her amplified voice booming into the stunned silence. “You can’t kill them otherwise. Jacque?”

A medic was kneeling over Jacque, holding back his eyelids to check his pupils. “He’ll be all right, I think,” she said, and gave him an injection.

Riley was recovering. “Let’s get an autopsy going here . . . Physics, get a sample of that metal and run it down the hall. Is that one over in the corner alive?”

“Goddam right it is,” someone said. “Tried to bite me.” The alien had been sliced off just below the shoulders; it had one functioning tentacle and stubs of two other limbs. A laser had grazed its head-during the flurry of action Carol had shouted for them to aim there-taking off an ear and exposing a bluish brain mass. It lay on its back in a gory pool, tentacle twitching, growling in its throat.

“One of you suited Tamers grab the thing and restrain it. Who’s got the bridge?”

“Lefavre’s coming around,” the medic said.

“Well, get him over there. How much time we have?”

Bates was back in his chair. “Seventeen minutes, fifty seconds. Then you have five minutes to get out. I have to steam and bake and dump the air. And stay away from my crystal. You’ve got it filthy already.”

The loading crew came through a door carrying and pushing a new window and two ladders on rollers. They moved fast and stared straight ahead.

Carol got to the creature and grabbed its tentacle, pinning it under her arm. The alien tried to bite her on the wrist; she pulled its head back by the hair.

One of the Psych Group had the bridge. He approached rather timidly and touched it to the alien’s chest.

“Not much,” he said. “There’s a sound, a word, that it repeats over and over. ‘Liv . . . liver eye.’”

Jacque came over, stumbling, holding the side of his head. “Here, let me try.” A creature had slugged him between the temple and eye; it was already swelling.

He bridged with the creature and instantly recoiled. “Jesus!” His face grew even paler. He hesitated and then made contact again.

“It . . . it’s dying, I can tell that. I’ve never felt, never felt-there’s so much hate here. Contempt. Disgust . . . It sees me as a, as a soft . . . squishy thing, ugly. It would rather kill me than live, I think.

“There is one word. ‘L’vrai.’ Maybe that’s its name. Maybe the name of its race.”

Jacque was silent for a minute. Then he set the bridge on the floor and sat back on his heels. “It’s dead now.” The creature continued to stare but had stopped growling.

“I made a kind of contact with the thing, just before it faded out. Nonverbal.” He closed his eyes. “See if I can get it straight.

“If L’vrai is its name, it’s also the name of the other two. It was checking, seeing whether the others were still alive. It’s telepathic, at least in some limited way.

“I came closest to communicating when I allowed myself to . . . hate it back. When I couldn’t control my revulsion. It understood that.

“There’s more. It’s hard to put into words.”

“That’s all right,” Riley said. “We’ll see what we can get with hypnotics. Either of the other ones alive?”

Jacque was glad they weren’t.

(From Peacemaker: The Diaries of Jacque Lefavre, copyright © St. Martin’s TFX 2151:)

24 Jan 2053.

Spent most of today under hypnosis, the Psych group trampling around in my brain, trying to find out what that L’vrai said to me. They didn’t seem too happy when they released me.

They have Carol now. She’ll be home in an hour or so. We can sit and groan at each other. It’s no fun to do it alone. They wouldn’t give me anything stronger than APQ’s-and an admonition not to drink any alcohol for eight hours, unless I wanted my stomach pumped. Couldn’t be any worse than having your mind pumped.

I don’t remember much of what I said to them; I was conscious and could hear myself talking, but the words didn’t register. Guess I’ll have to read the report.

Speaking of reports. Somebody put a clipping from Midnight TFX on the bulletin board outside the ready room; an exposé of the AED. Says there’s no such thing as the Levant-Meyer Translation, men have never been to other planets, the holos and pictures are all faked (and Hollywood does a better job), the reams of official reports are all fiction. The AED is a hoax perpetrated by World Order members to maintain an expanding economy without allowing cash flow to non-member enterprises in proportion to their contributions to the GWP. I suppose Midnight is owned by an Independent.

The article explains everything except this fucking bruise on my face. If those L’vrai were actors I hope they got paid well.

I was lucky, though. The same one who cuffed me killed two scientists by cracking their heads together.

Maybe I was also lucky that psychologist picked up the bridge and used it first on the L’vrai. It made the alien fourth in sensitivity, rather than third. And that was bad enough.

Still can’t describe it. It was like seeing a color you’ve never seen before, a new primary color. The only thing familiar about the alien’s thoughts was hate, and I’ve never felt any emotion so strongly with bridge. Not even from the Thanos people.

What will they do now? They got their autopsy and a little more behavioral information. And gave the L’vrai some information about us, I guess. Maybe they’ll keep repeating the one-Tamer/minimum-time expedition until they stop learning new things.

Or they might take action. Gus told me there was some talk about attacking the aliens via the LMT. Pushing nuclear bombs through, dirty ones that would fill the planet’s atmosphere with deadly isotopes.

Sounds stupid to me. What would we do if some aliens wiped out 61 Cygnus A? We’d have to go find them, and fight them, out of self-preservation.

And with the L’vrai we’d certainly lose the fight. They’re technologically superior to us in most ways, as well as being shape-changers and natural telepaths. Naturally bloodthirsty, too. And when they go to a planet, they stay there, even if it takes them longer to get there.

It’s enough to keep you awake nights. As Sweeney’s report said, they might be in our backyard right now.

Carol’s home.

SIRIUS WAVES

ALIEN THREAT?

PARIS, 13 JULY (WPI). Scientists here confirmed today that the gravity waves recently received from the vicinity of Sirius are of the same form and intensity as those which last October revealed the presence of L’vrai space ships near Achernar.

Sirius, less than nine light-years distant, is one of the closest stars to the Earth. It has a white dwarf companion and, so far as is known, no planetary system. It is too close to have been explored by the AED via the Levant-Meyer Translation.

The gravity waves were detected Monday by the Legrange satellites of Institut Fermi, at whose headquarters here an emergency conference met this morning.

An AED spokesman refused to comment on this new development, saying that an official statement is being prepared. . . .

AED FOES CLAIM

SIRIUS HOAX

LOS ANGELES, 14 July (IP). In a press conference here today the Union of Independent Scientists charged that a conspiracy exists between Institut Fermi and the Agency for Extraterrestrial Development.

They claim that the AED plans to capitalize on public hysteria over the threat of a L’vrai invasion to greatly increase their annual appropriation from the World Order Council. This appropriation will come to a vote next Wednesday, they point out; the coincidence is striking.

While admitting the existence of gravity waves from Sirius, the UIS claims that Institut Fermi has exaggerated the similarity between these and the Achernar disturbance that last year led to the discovery of the L’vrai.

They explained that the companion of Sirius is an extremely dense white dwarf star. A minute change in the angular momentum of the system could generate gravity waves similar to the ones detected by Institut Fermi....