The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2

  “Were trying to kill me.”

  “You have to understand.” Fitzgerald wrung his hands. “This was never supposed to become violent. It was research—”

  She snorted.

  “—first contact with an alien species. Do you have any idea what that means?”

  Evi sat down. “I have a pretty damn good idea.” The air-conditioning vents were too small, the tube was an impossible climb, and the walls were solid concrete. She was stuck here with the professor.

  “It was my life,” he went on. “Can’t you realize—”

  “Your profession,” she snapped. “My fucking life.”

  Fitzgerald lapsed into silence.

  The quiet got on her nerves. “So, in six years of research, did you find out anything useful?”

  He walked over and sat down on the bunk across from her. “What do you want to know about them?”

  “Everything.”

  Fitzgerald obliged her.

  The Race had developed on a nearby world, a massive, hot, tectonically active ball of rock circling a dim reddish sun. They had populated a number of planets, between six and a dozen of them, including a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A. They were very aware of Earth and the creatures populating it.

  They needed the resources of the planets they’d colonized, and Earth was a potential rival. Once Earth reached out of its solar system, there’d be a costly war for territory on those new planets.

  As Earth turned on, into another millennium, the Race had a political dilemma. How to prevent a seemingly inevitable conflict. The decision, after a long-distance study of Earth’s culture, was a covert operation. The aliens on Earth would prevent any force on the planet from gaining the technical expertise or the inclination for interstellar travel for as long as possible.

  “It’s interesting,” Fitzgerald said, “to see how mankind isn’t the only species capable of hypocrisy and self-delusion.”

  Evi ignored the subtle racism implied by the word “mankind.” Fitzgerald probably hadn’t even noticed it.

  “You see,” he continued, “the Race has a long history, as bloody as any human account. They now have a culture that prides itself on the ‘honor of nonconfrontation.’ Direct violence is anathema to them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think of it as ‘the hand on the knife’ syndrome. The Race’s culture puts the highest taboo, not on the knife going in the back, but on any honorable person having his hand upon it.”

  “I find it hard to believe that these things are nonviolent.”

  “That’s the irony. They believe they’re nonviolent. Ever since they landed on this planet their modus operandi, if you will, has been to employ politically active ‘locals’ who are instructed to carry out their agenda. It doesn’t matter if the ‘local’ is a member of parliament, a military commander, or a terrorist. If a few people die as the ‘locals’ are carrying out the alien’s agenda, the Race feels no responsibility.”

  Fitzgerald leaned forward and smiled. “In fact, if people get killed, the Race simply considers it an example of our own moral degeneracy and a justification of their mission here.”

  She thought the whole thing was twisted enough to be human.

  Then Fitzgerald went into a catalog of what events could be traced to the Race’s interference, and what started out being ironic and twisted became truly frightening.

  Fitzgerald said that it was almost certain that the Iranian terrorists that slaughtered the Saudi royal family in ’19 were backed financially by the Race. That had been the sparking incident that led to the Third Gulf War and the formation of the Islamic Axis. The fundamentalist Axis made sure that the only real technical progress the region made was in the area of warfare. Embryonic space programs in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan all died on the vine.

  Funds from the Race led to the rise of a rabid anti-Islam regime in India and a fascist technocracy in Japan. The rise of tensions between India and the Islamic Axis, and Japan and Socialist China broke in 2024, when the first shots in the Pan-Asian war were fired. In ’27, New Delhi was nuked. In ’35, Tokyo followed suit.

  It took only a few years for the Islamic Axis to finally turn its attention to liberating Palestine. In ’41, Tel Aviv was nuked.

  By the time Fitzgerald reached Tel Aviv, Evi was shaking. Forget the war itself. Forget a trail of blood that ran across two decades. Forget everything but those three cities. New Delhi, Tokyo, Tel Aviv . . .

  Those three names represented the only grave markers for nine million people.

  “It seems that the Pan-Asian war was so successful in keeping us earthbound that the Race is trying to foment a civil war here in the States. The Asian war left the U.S. with the only viable space program looking beyond the solar system.”

  She raised her head. Images of what she had seen when she passed through Tel Aviv were still fresh in her memory. She had to pull herself out of that private horror to pay attention to what Fitzgerald was saying now.

  “With one hand,” he was saying, “they try to get anti-technological, anti-moreau politicians elected. You uncovered one of those operations.”

  “With the other?”

  “With the other, they finance radical moreau groups. One group plays against the other, and the resulting explosion keeps people too busy to look beyond the local gravity well.”

  She thought of General Wu and her military hardware. It looked like it was getting damn close to an explosion. She could only imagine what would happen if command weren’t in the hand of that cautious, serene bear but rather in the hands of a hothead like Corporal Gurgueia.

  She thought of the probe that was, “even now,” Price had said, entering the neighborhood of Alpha Centauri. The whole reason the Race was here was to prevent that. That had been what triggered the shit hitting the fan.

  However, it wasn’t just her. It was a national shit, and the fan was the size of a continent.

  She looked at the scientist, who had seemed to shrink even as he conducted his animated discussion about the Race. She leaned toward Fitzgerald. “Did you think of the reaction you’d provoke if you launched those probes?”

  “What?”

  “The reason all this happened is because of those probes. It isn’t just us, or Frey’s little group. You’ve given the Race—” She snorted at the pretentious name. “—incentive to push even harder to drive this country over the edge.”

  “No one anticipated that they had faster-than-light communications—”

  “Except Davidson. And all that means is you would have had, what, another four years or so before the aliens here got word of the launch?”

  “By then we would have—”

  “What? Gone public? I doubt it. Know the Race better? I think you had what you needed to know six years ago.”

  “You don’t understand—”

  “I understand that for six years you sat on this. You studied it, got involved in your own political rivalries, and became enamored of your own discoveries.” She stood up and jabbed her finger into his chest. “And none of you did anything about it.”

  “Frey wanted—”

  “Frey was too damn paranoid. He couldn’t trust anything that wasn’t under his own control. He was so afraid of betrayal that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

  “The Race had bribed so many—”

  “If you had gotten word to enough people in enough departments, they couldn’t have suppressed it. They aren’t omnipotent, they aren’t all-knowing—”

  There was a hiss from behind her and foul air drifted in from the opening that led to the chute. A cable descended from the hole. She heard Dimitri’s voice echo above. “Time for your audience.”

  There was a handle on the end of the cable.

  She turned back to Fitzgerald. “Did you force yourself to believe you were doi
ng the right thing, or did you simply ignore the question?”

  She picked up the handle, and the cable drew her up the chute before she heard him respond.

  Chapter 22

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Dimitri said as the cable pulled Evi through the trapdoor. The cable was dangling through a hole in the ceiling and seemed to operate under remote control. During the ascent, she had thought of swinging up when she cleared the hole, and throttling Dimitri with her legs, much as she had the first dog she’d killed.

  Her friend the peeper must have anticipated her thought. He stood well out of reach and covered her with the Mitsubishi.

  The cable stopped and she swung herself to the side and stood. “Now what?”

  Dimitri tossed her a pair of handcuffs, “Put those on.”

  She managed to catch them with her right hand. She looked at her left arm and winced at the thought of cuffing that wrist.

  Her left hand was clutching her stomach inside the remains of her leather jacket. The heat was getting to her. She was sweating profusely, and she realized that one of the reasons she’d been about to pass out on the first run through was she’d been too drugged to think of shucking the leather.

  She peeled off the ruined jacket and got a good look at her arm.

  The dog had given her a decent field dressing. But under the shreds of her jumpsuit, the bandage was ripe with her blood. The heat was making it itch.

  “Hurry up, Isham. Important people are waiting,” Dimitri said “people” like some humans said “moreau,” or “frank.”

  She fumbled with the cuffs, trying to get them around her left wrist without moving that arm. Even with the effort, she had to grit her teeth and endure fiery daggers cutting deep into her shoulder.

  When she had the cuffs around her wrists, she gasped. She’d been holding her breath. She looked up from her work to see that Dimitri had used the time to fetch Fitzgerald and have him cuffed.

  “Into the cart.” He waved them ahead of him, always keeping the gun on Evi.

  She watched him as closely as he watched her, and she never saw an opening. Fitzgerald climbed into the back of the golf cart, and when she followed she tried to do it without using her arms. Humidity had condensed on the runner of the cart and she slipped, slamming her left shoulder into the cart.

  Pain washed out her vision as a white nova exploded in her arm.

  She was on her knees next to the cart, and Dimitri was laughing. She turned to look at him, the smoldering pain turning to rage. She looked at him. He made no move toward her, and the gun never wavered.

  He stopped laughing. “Get in the cart.”

  The heat and the pain made an anger that had been three days festering erupt into a full-blown rage.

  She was going to kill this man. She no longer cared about anything but bringing the house down on the people, the things, the Race, responsible for the last three days, responsible for the betrayal of the last six years, responsible for the destruction of her homeland. And she would start with Dimitri.

  She stared into his eyes. The gun didn’t move. She was too far away. She was quicker than he was, but she wasn’t quicker than a bullet.

  Slowly she stood, nodded at him, and carefully climbed into the back of the cart. There would be a moment when that gun would lower, and then she would move.

  “Don’t worry about that arm,” Dimitri said. “In a few minutes it’s either going to be good as new, or else it isn’t going to matter.”

  The cart started rolling through a new set of tunnels, larger ones that grew even larger as they moved away from the cell. Other tunnels emptied into the main one until the tube they were traveling through became ten meters in diameter.

  The stench of bile and ammonia, not to mention burning methane, became much, much worse.

  The tunnel didn’t end so much as have the walls roll back into another ovoid chamber.

  The chamber they drove into was another squashed sphere, thirty meters across. In the center was a two-meter tall, polished-concrete cone that belched a jet of methane flame.

  The chamber was taller in proportion than most of the rooms Evi had seen down here, and the reason was obvious. A spiraling two-meter wide ramp snaked around the edges of the chamber three times.

  The room was a small auditorium, and the ramp provided seating for the audience.

  And the audience was the Race.

  The aliens.

  There were over a hundred white pulsing forms sprawled on the gradual slope of that spiral ramp. The mass of them exuded a bile—ammonia smell that made it hard for her to breathe. No two of the race held exactly the same shape: some were conical, some spherical, some cylindrical. Most had erupted white tentacles the length of a human arm, in some cases three or four of them, and waved them at the cart that was trundling in the only entrance. They all undulated to a pulsing rhythm she couldn’t hear.

  The cart pulled to a stop just inside the chamber.

  “Get out,” said Dimitri. “You’re about to be honored.”

  The gun was still locked on her, so she did as she was told. Fitzgerald followed her, a look of awe on his face.

  The three of them seemed to be surrounded by acres of white featureless flesh. A leprous wall of pulsing wax that made soft bubbling sounds that echoed throughout the chamber.

  Polyethylene bags of raw sewage, she thought. They smelled like they’d been scraped off the floor of the john in that porno theater.

  She hated every last one of them.

  But Dimitri would not move that gun off of her.

  Fitzgerald walked toward the end of the room opposite the one entrance. The ramp terminated near the ceiling there, and at that point of precedence was a Race that had taken a rough humanoid form. It had a soft, blubbery body, four limbs, and a head built around a hole that formed a mouth of sorts.

  This one didn’t go to the lengths that the ones in Cleveland had gone to. The ones there had worn fake plastic eyes and dentures and had taken to human clothing to rein in cascading flesh. This one did none of that, and there was no way, even with its token humanoid form, that it could be mistaken for an earthly creature.

  Evi rounded the cone, following Fitzgerald. Dimitri stayed a good distance behind her, the gun tracking her every move.

  “Welcome,” said the lead creature. “In the name of the Octal and the Race.”

  “Some fucking wel—” she started to say. She stopped because she could now see a concave depression in the floor between the cone and the far end of the room. The cone had blocked it before. The depression sank for two meters, and had stopped Fitzgerald’s progress toward the lead creature.

  Sitting in the center of the pit was a creature that was neither Race nor anything from Earth.

  The thing was a pulsing amoebic form, like the Race. It formed a rough spheroid. Unlike the Race, it was a dull red in color. And rippling across its body were hairlike tentacles that resembled red grass waving in the wind.

  The smell of rotting meat hung over the pit. “Show some respect,” Dimitri said. “That’s about to become your mother.”

  Evi couldn’t repress her shudder.

  “Evi Isham,” the leader continued in its bubbling monotone.

  “You show an aptitude that we find useful when you work for us.”

  She looked up from the pit. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  The creature went on. Either it didn’t understand her or it was ignoring her. “We find few natives useful enough for us to offer what we offer you. You are much more effective than the canines we employ. More effective than Dimitri, the last one we offer this.”

  She was dumbfounded. After what she had gone through, after what these things had done to her and her planet, they were asking her to . . .

  “No,” she whispered. “I’m not going to work for—”

 
“You don’t have a choice,” Dimitri said from behind her.

  The creature kept going on, ignoring her, as if it were reciting a memorized script. “You join with us, bond with us, become one of us. Commune with Mother.”

  “What the hell?” She looked into the pit that smelled like rotting meat. The red spheroid undulated on, oblivious.

  “Mother,” Dimitri whispered at her. “Race have trouble with English.” He laughed. It sounded more ironic than anything else. “Wonder why I keep walking? After a bullet through the neck?”

  Evi looked over her shoulder at Dimitri. The gun was still locked on her, he was still too far away, and he was smiling. “I didn’t kill you because they’re going to do to you what they did to me.”

  She looked back into the pit. The lead creature went on, but she was only listening to Dimitri now.

  “Mother lays eggs,” he said, his voice low, almost seductive. “Lays them in any living tissue. The microscopic larvae bond to your cells. They’ll do just about everything to keep you alive, until they mature, of course.”

  She was feeling sick to her stomach.

  “Up to that point, you’re as invulnerable as the Race are. Fire, acid, electricity, that’s it. Only two problems.”

  “What?” she found herself asking, unable to tear her eyes off the creature in the pit. She was focusing on it now, letting it fill her field of vision. She could see that the cilia that waved across its back were actually hair-thin hollow tubes. The tubes were pointed at the end and resembled hypodermic needles. That must be what they were, ovipositors, designed to inject microscopic eggs into a host.

  Thousands of those injectors, millions of eggs.

  “Problem is,” Dimitri said, “you have to eat their food, or the little beasties die off and take you with them. The other is, you have to take the Race’s suppressant drugs or the larvae mature.”

  And the Race thought of themselves as nonviolent.

  “You’ll embrace Mother, Isham,” Dimitri said. “Then, if you won’t work for the Race, you’ll be eaten alive.”

  Rage, that’s what she felt, that and a fear bordering on panic. She was going to be used, again. Used in the worst possible way. She looked at Mother and could only think that she was about to be raped, and she was panicking because she couldn’t see how to fight.