Reapers (36 page)

A shot roared through the cavernous chamber. Above, Dee's head disappeared from sight.

23

"I fucking told you so," Lucy said. "Now how about you let me upstairs so I can do some proper gloating?"

Brian glanced up at the boat's ceiling. "Hang tight."

He hurried up the steps. A discussion ensued abovedeck. Brian thumped down the top of the steps and beckoned her upstairs.

It had been halfway warm down there and the sea wind clawed at Lucy's ears and nose. Ash and his troops stood with their heads tipped back and turning in slow arcs, trying to match a point of light to the rumble of engines. The sound seemed to approach from the east, but in the hollow vastness, there was no way to be sure.

"Like I just told Brian, I told you so," Lucy said.

Ash shook his head. "That's a jet. Jets land on strips. If jets try to land on swamps, they transform into fireballs instead."

"Whatever. If they're using planes, you can bet they don't have many of them. Pilots, neither."

"Captain, swing around. Let's go back for a closer look."

The harried captain grimaced and strained his eyes into the darkness, as if they were navigating sandbars rather than sailing down the middle of a half-mile channel. The boat leaned. Lucy grabbed the slick metal railing. The turning boat slashed gouts of foam from the waters, filling the air with the smell of salt.

"There," a woman pointed.

To the south beyond the bi-color lighthouse, a dark vessel skimmed a couple hundred feet above the sea. It drew in over the land and Lucy lost it for a moment before picking it back up on its way toward the yacht club.

Ash extended his hand. "Binoculars."

Someone slapped a pair into his palm. The vessel bled speed. Even the captain watched as it slowed and slowed until, like a bullet fired straight into the air, it came to a complete stop. It hovered gently to the ground, disappearing behind the buildings on the northeast side of the peninsula.

"How about that?" Lucy said.

"That," Ash said, "is fucked up. Time for stealth mode. No talk, no lights, no nothing."

The captain guided the boat through its turn. Two crewmen yutzed around with the sails to make them quit flapping. The sea washed against the hull. The ship made the arduous pivot around the mile-long spit jutting north of the not-quite island that housed the yacht club, then hung dead south toward the street they'd berthed on earlier that day. All the while, Ash watched the homes and fields through his binoculars.

A tiny cone of light appeared from the buildings fringing the marsh field. It moved forward, waggling side to side. Lights blared from the middle of the field, revealing a black lozenge the size of a fattened semi. Semi-circular wings extended from each side, finlike.

Nobody had been talking, but Lucy got the idea that even if they'd been arguing over abortion laws, the sight would have knocked them dead silent.

A ramp unfurled from beside the cockpit. What could only be described as a thing climbed out of the hatch, propelled by whippy limbs and spiked feet. The ship's hard light showed a compact, pill-shaped body and a head as bulbous as a watermelon. The man with the flashlight toddled forward undeterred.

"Well, shit in my mouth," Ash said, so soft Lucy could hardly hear him over the slop of the waves. "I knew Distro was sleazy, but I never imagined they'd get in bed with the
crabs
."

"How can they do that?" Brian said.

"The market follows no ideology but its own," Ash said, bending his high voice into an eerily accurate mockery of Nerve's. "When the exchange of resources is beneficial to both parties, trade occurs despite artificial barriers like borders. Or the fact you're from two different fucking species who want each other extinct."

Brian waited a moment before plowing ahead. "What do we do now?"

"Duh," Ash said. "We're going to blow it up."

"Don't you think we should report to Udall?"

"Udall's not here. That means who's in charge? The captain, technically, but does he understand I'll use his balls for bait if he disobeys my command?"

"Abundantly," the captain murmured; like the others, he watched the salt marsh with a look somewhere between disgust and horror.

"So. Executive decision. We blow it up." Ash glanced back and got a look at Brian's face. "What? They're not going to punish us. Breaking our thumbs won't undo what we've done. If Udall comes after anyone, it'll be me, yeah?"

"I suppose," Brian said.

"So buck up! We're about to
blow something up
!"

He looked around, as if he might have spoken too loudly, then grinned some more. His mirth was short-lived. A flap opened on the back of the ship. Two other aliens deplaned and transferred goods onto the ground. The first approached the man with the flashlight, who stopped twenty feet from the vessel. In the light shed by the ship, the two species gestured back and forth.

It made Lucy's skin crawl. She had never actually seen a live one before. She'd only ever seen direct evidence of the invaders on two occasions. Once up in South Carolina, where a friend of a friend had cured one of their exoskeletons and mounted it in his garage and was still fighting with his wife about it two years later. And the second time in Jacksonville, where the wreckage of one of their fighter jets cratered Highway 1.

Along with eight metric shitloads of stories, rumors, and whoppers, that was her entire exposure to the aliens. Her patch of Florida coast certainly hadn't been important enough to invade. They hadn't exactly stuck around, either. Six months after their arrival, the aliens were toast. She'd heard an international team of mercs had distracted the mothership with a fleet of small boats, helicopters, and light aircraft while one man rammed it with a nuke-bearing F-22 Raptor. Blown the whole thing straight to tentaclemonster hell. Now and then you heard stories of alien survivors cropping up and raiding a city or eating everyone in a settlement, but that's all they were: stories.

And here she was looking at them in the flesh. If you could call whatever they wrapped their guts with "flesh."

Ash ordered the boat closer. Everyone on board got all churchmouse. Lucy kept expecting the beings to look up, point a snakelike tentacle at the ship, and gurgle-screech like a body that's been snatched, but the Kono sailed around the marsh to the homes on the canal without a peep from the creatures in the field.

The crew tied up. Ash went downstairs and reemerged with the rocket launcher and two assault rifles, one of which he handed to Lucy.

"Could be this feels sudden or frightening or unjust," he whispered to his people. "You just remember those things are the motherfuckers that made us live like this. They're the ones who killed your friends, your husbands, your daughters. And now Distro's making money with them."

He smiled. In the darkness, his elfin features became as twisted and awful as a goblin's. "Me personally? I can't wait to put a bullet in every last one of them."

The doubt that had fostered on his soldiers' faces vanished. As memories of past wrongs and wounds were dredged from the mud of time, their eyes filled with angry resolve. Ash split them into two groups. Lucy's wing would circle through the marsh and set up a couple hundred yards from the ship. Ash's division would hang back, then head straight in once the first group was near position.

He assigned a woman named Gen to head Lucy's team. A canal separated the subdivision from the swath of marshland. Gen crouched down and jogged down the street, the four others following her single-file, and swung into the field. The jet rested on the ground some three hundred yards away. Shrubs and trees broke up their line of sight, but at times they moved over open ground, exposed, shoes squelching in the brackish water. A topcoat of snow stuck to the dirt wherever it was solid and Gen used this to navigate her way over land interrupted by shallow channels of saltwater.

After a hundred yards, she stopped and got down for a look behind them. The silhouettes of Ash's team entered the field. Gen got up and moved on, circling to the right to cut off the direct line between the jet and the yacht club a quarter mile to its southeast.

The aliens set down bins with plastic clunks. Their pointy feet thumped into the dirt. Otherwise, they moved in silence. Gen slowed and crouched so low she could have trailed her fingers along the grass. Placid surf lapped against the shore beyond the alien vessel. When they got within a hundred yards, the shrubs gave out, leaving nothing but low grass between them and the ship. Gen got down and motioned the others to do the same.

A blue beam licked past her, painting a sizzle of steam through the humid air. One of the men shrieked and stood up. The beam reappeared and sliced straight through his neck.

Guns opened up beside Lucy. She flung herself in the muck and pelted the wildly gesticulating monsters. The Distro soldier beelined for the subdivision bordering the field. Lucy swung her gun on him and fired. The first shots were behind him; she swung past, leading him, and knocked him into a canal.

The air smelled like burnt powder and seared flesh. Behind and to the left, Ash's team tromped toward the battle. One of the aliens raced to the other side of the ship, tentacles twirling. Another lashed its laser through the brush, kicking up the scent of hot salt and burning twigs.

Lucy sighted in on the creature. Beside her, Gen emptied her clip at it; it jolted repeatedly, but held its ground, spiked feet planted in the dirt like posts, its tentacles tangled in the shrubs. Lucy shot until her rifle clicked dry.

A man got up and ran behind Lucy. A beam punched through the brush, dropping him with a wet pop. Lucy swapped her empty clip for her single spare. Ash's team knelt in a line and opened up on the alien. It juddered and dropped.

The jet's engines flared. A high whine droned across the field. Bullets plinked uselessly from its sides. It lifted from the dirt with a slurp.

"Clear!" Ash shouted in his crystalline, androgynous voice.

Flame gouted behind him. The jet rose, swaying. The rocket streaked over the marsh, a red meteor, and plowed straight into the vessel's side.

Lucy had sense enough to bury her face in her arms. Somehow, she still saw the flash. The heat washed over her first, then a jolt of pressure, then the bang. A cloud of fire fell to the marsh and disintegrated in a second explosion. Debris arced in all directions, spinning smoke behind it.

Ash stood and thrust his middle finger at the flaming wreckage. "You like that, you slimy shits? How does it feel to die on a world that isn't yours?"

"Man down!" Gen said.

"And about eight inches shorter than I recall," Ash said, gazing at the headless body. Meanwhile, the man who'd been shot behind Lucy whimpered and gasped. Ash snapped his fingers. "Stewart, see if you can do something for that SOB. The rest of you follow me."

He loped toward the yacht club. Lucy followed. "They got a radio."

"Good. We can always use more radios."

The man in the control room took a couple shots at them as they ran across the street, but Lucy led the Kono straight to the unlocked front door and pointed them up the stairs. The radio room was locked, but Ash shot out the knob. Gen and Lucy laid down covering fire as Ash threw himself through the door and gunned down the lone defender before he could get off a round.

After the ruckus of the gunplay, the club was as silent as a snowy wood. Ash took a quick look around and ordered his people to grab up the radio and the ledgers. Finished, they returned to the field, where the downed ship continued to burn. The flames had spread to the cargo and the whole marsh smelled like roasted coffee.

"Don't know my own strength," Ash said. "I was hoping to loot that thing."

"I'd say you just knocked out their main pipeline," Lucy said. "Time to go for the jugular."

"You ever shot a tiger? I have. Fucking thing must've escaped the Brooklyn zoo. I got it in the lung and knocked it down, but it was lying in the street staring at me. If I'd gotten close, it would have lunged and torn out my throat with desperate-tiger strength.

"So what did I do? I let it bleed out. Because I'd shot it and there was nothing it could do." Ash grinned. "We'll do the same to Distro. In a couple of months, after they can't pay their workers and soldiers, we'll walk in and cut their throats." He slung his gun over his shoulder. "Grab the bodies. No reason to let them know it was us."

His people gathered up their dead and bore them back to the ship. As soon as the last man was aboard, the captain shoved off. It was near midnight but Lucy was far too amped to think about sleep. The ship lugged its way up the coast, fighting the winds, which felt cold enough to convince Jack Frost to pull up the covers and stay in bed.

"I feel like solid gold," Ash said to her once they were properly underway. They stood on the railing together, wind chapping their faces. "How did you know about this?"

"Distro's people disappeared from it about a month back," Lucy said. "We went down to take a look. They figured it was you."

"What do you know, they predicted the future."

"Still don't know who took them out. Maybe Distro's got more enemies than we know. Good time to press the advantage."

Ash shrugged and spat into the churning sea. "They were dead either way. We're about to unleash our mandatory labor program. Will we have the luxuries, the coffee and sugar? No. But we'll undercut them on everything else. And after tonight, I doubt they'll be shipping in any more Jamaican Blue Mountain, either."

"Mandatory labor?" Moonlight shimmered on the crests of the waves. "You're talking about slaves."

"Don't get high and mighty on me, little girl. Distro pays their people room and board and a pinch of tea. If you're really lucky, you might get to run the lights an hour per day. Does that really sound different from what we're doing?"

"Least their people are free to leave."

"Free to starve. Or get murdered by bandits. If they're really desperate, they can throw themselves on the mercy of the Feds and go mine coal instead. Where do you think the power comes from?"