“Stay in the vehicle,” he said.
Geri got out. “We need to do this together.”
“Do you know what ‘this’ is?”
“I do not.”
“Just checking.”
She stepped up onto the raised sidewalk.
“You get any closer to it, you’re gonna get yourself killed.”
“Closer to what?”
“One of your friends is in there. There’s another one down at the end of Plainview, and two more moving into position to prevent us from getting away.”
“This is impossible.”
“Get back in the truck and lock the doors.”
“You must not—”
“Get us all killed. I agree. Now, please give me the cooperation I need to keep you alive.”
There were two more of them in the alley between the barbershop and the hardware store, which had still been in business until tonight. No longer.
He went over to the Range Rover and leaned in the window. “First off, these windows need to be closed. Second, Diana, I want you to get the vehicle turned around and ready to burn rubber.”
“What’s going on?”
“We’re in the process of being surrounded by Geri’s mechanisms. They mean to kill me, and will certainly include you if they can. And maybe her. Obviously, I’m not sure.”
Diana said, “I just don’t see anything.”
“You don’t know how to look. I thought you’d be ready for this.”
He noticed that a black oblong object had slipped into Geri’s left hand. It was small and trim and had no barrel.
Diana opened the car door.
“No.”
She came anyway.
“Nobody obeys orders anymore.”
“You can’t give me orders, Flynn.”
“We’re surrounded right now.”
“You knew this would happen. You’re challenging them.”
“We’d better pull out,” Geri said. “I didn’t come all this way to be killed on the first night.”
“So what’s procedure in a case like this? I assume shooting our way out is a no go.”
Diana laughed a little.
“You led me into this,” Geri said. “You knew I’d end up being forced to do it your way.”
“What I knew, and what I know, is that you have no idea what you’re doing. At all.”
“I’m trained for police work. I’m not a soldier, I don’t kill unless deadly force is my only alternative.”
“What we need to do right now is give these folks who are surrounding us one hell of a bloody nose. So what’s the procedure we need to follow?”
“Of all the planets in all the galaxies in the universe, I’d be sent to this one.”
“That’s a good line.”
He drew and fired three shots, but still the alien that had leaped out of the ruins of the drugstore came on. It launched itself at him, but a fourth shot caused it to drop to the street, where it kicked and flailed wildly, blood spraying out of its exploded chest and face.
Then it stopped.
Silence fell.
“Geri, what choice did I have? What procedure should I have followed?”
She snapped, “No choice.”
“So what are we looking at, here? We haven’t had fires before. So do you know what we can expect next?”
“They’re programmed entities. They don’t invent; they repeat. Anything they do, they’ve been programmed to do.”
“How about you? Are you a programmed entity, too?”
“I don’t know.”
Diana gasped, but Geri’s words surprised Flynn only for a moment. It was the truth, it was the future talking, and it was a warning to mankind that Flynn vowed never to forget. Mix man and machine at peril to man.
Four more of the aliens had come up, and more were crossing the roofs. He could hear the faint rattle of their claws and the whispering breeze of their jumps.
“In a few seconds, we’re gonna have another confrontation. It’ll be a lot harder. If we do enough damage, they might back off. Please use your weapon, Geri.”
Three of them leaped off nearby roofs as four more came out of doors on both sides of the street. Flynn dropped two of the jumpers before they hit the street, but the rest of them kept coming.
A number of cops appeared, moving in from the side streets. He heard Eddie’s shout: “Flynn, what in holy hell?”
“Get out of here! Now!”
He took a hit so hard that he staggered, then went down on one knee with the thing on his back. Its arms wrapping his chest felt like steel bars. His left arm was free, but when he reached down for his small pistol, it was gone. It had come out in his fall and lay twenty feet away.
There was a dull thud, and the alien flopped to the ground.
He pulled out his .454 and did three of the others with thunderous shots. Diana, crouching by the truck, screamed as he fired.
The one that Geri had dropped leaped up, rising easily fifty feet in the air. Then, coming down as another three jumped onto the roof of the truck, it went after Diana. Geri pointed her weapon at it, but nothing happened. She shook it and tried again. Nothing.
He took all of them out with shots fired in such quick succession, they sounded like a single detonation.
Geri stood looking at her weapon in the palm of her hand.
“Does that thing not work?”
“Apparently not. It isn’t properly tuned to Earth’s magnetic field.”
He took it from her.
“Return that, you’re not authorized.”
He threw it as far as he could, watching it arc away onto one of the roofs.
“You’ve given a weapon to the enemy—that’s an actionable offense.”
“Let’s hope they try to use it. Now, get in the truck—we’re done here.”
“You said we’d be killed if we leave.”
“That was then.” He gestured toward the bodies. “This is now. We’ve probably got a minute or so of playtime while they regroup. They’re testing my skills, and they don’t mind using their own lives to do it.”
“Why do they need to test you?”
“They can’t figure out how to defeat me. I’m too fast.”
“Why?”
Something crossed his mind—a suspicion. Small, probably far-fetched, but there. He said, “You tell her, Diana.”
There was the slightest hesitation.
“Diana?”
“You said we need to get out of here, Flynn.”
He started the Range Rover as Geri and Diana tumbled in and locked their doors. He drove to the end of Plainview and out into the flat prairie beyond, bouncing along the same dirt track that he and Mac and Eddie had used going deer hunting together, and later taking dates to look at the stars.
He took out his cell phone and called Eddie.
“Stay the hell out of the town until further notice. It’s quarantined, do you understand? Everybody out.”
“Flynn, what in God’s name are you doing? What were those shots?”
“You didn’t hear anything. You have nothing to tell the press or anybody else, any of you. National security.”
“Okay, Flynn, I hear you.”
Flynn hung up.
Diana was on her own phone. “I want a big cleanup crew to Elmwood, Texas, before dawn. There is alien material on the streets, and we want it gone. Out of there. Every trace.” She listened. “Call out the whole operation, everybody you need.” She glanced at her watch. “Get here no later than four.”
He did not hate; it was inefficient. He said, “It’s not over. They’re going to come after us again.”
He was driving through a grazed-down pasture on the Triple Horn Ranch, a forty-thousand-acre spread bordered by the railroad and the interstate.
If they got out of this situation, which he doubted they would, he had quite a number of questions for Geri, and she would not fail to answer—he would see to that.
“Where are we goin
g?” Diana asked.
“Away. Far away.”
“They went to your town to break your heart.”
“They did.”
“Geri,” Diana said quietly, “we need an army with Flynn’s capabilities.”
“We do,” he agreed.
“You can’t raise an army?” Geri asked.
“Our problem is that we can’t find anybody else as fast as Flynn who can also do this work. So he has to be an army of one.”
“That can’t last.”
“That’s for damn sure,” he said. “We barely got out of Elmwood, and that’ll be the last time we escape, if we have. Geri, what abilities do they have to track us right now?”
“A vehicle on an isolated roadway like this would be easy.”
“And are they likely to be doing that?”
“I would think so. But remember, we’re dealing with a few hundred individuals. They’ve come here because Earth is easy. It’s undefended.”
“Why don’t you defend us? Your military could surely handle a small force like that.”
“It was a miracle that I got here. I have no idea if my pilot will even get home alive. Or if I’ll ever be able to leave Earth.”
Diana said, “Oh, Jesus.”
Flynn said nothing.
“You’re displeased?”
“Just how much trouble is Aeon in, anyway?” Diana asked.
“I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
“But you’re going to,” Flynn said.
She said no more.
He decided that he’d come back to this when the time was right, but one thing was very clear: Aeon was not some sort of giant United States or European Union like the exo team imagined. He could see that what was happening here on Earth was such a sideshow to them that they had only seen their way clear to sending a single officer, and a kid at that. Geri was no Oltisis, not wise, not deeply professional. Unlike him, though, she could breathe the air without getting allergies and walk the streets without spreading terror. Progress of a sort, but he would rather have had a seasoned cop.
He finally reached the interstate and slid into the traffic pattern. Hopefully, they would be a little less conspicuous in the flow of vehicles.
“Isn’t Menard behind us?” Diana asked.
“We’re not going to Menard.”
She considered that. “Where, then?”
“You figure it out.”
“Oh, no. No way.”
“Otherwise, we don’t have a prayer.”
“I’ll be getting out now. I’ll hitch to the airport.”
“Not gonna happen.”
“He’s a criminal. We don’t need that kind of a complication.”
“You don’t want a former lover in your hair.”
“He wasn’t my lover.”
“If you say.”
“Damn you!”
He said to Geri, “Last year we got a device from you people called a MindRay. A number of people who relied on it paid for that mistake with their lives. Now I saw that your stun gun, or whatever it was, didn’t work either. Why?”
“I think that there’s something about Earth’s magnetic field that throws our devices off.”
“And yet you got here from another planet. That worked. Why?”
“It doesn’t always.”
“Where is Aeon?”
“I don’t know how to tell you.”
“How far away? In light-years, say.”
“Your year is half as long as ours, so … twenty-four of your light-years.”
“And how long in actual travel time? In the ship?”
“About half a day—or six of your hours—to reach jump, then a second or so, then movement into your orbital zone, a couple more days—about two Earth days, total.”
“The part of the journey that involves movement across light-years takes a couple of seconds?”
“It’s a wormhole,” Diana said. “We think it’s near Saturn. We’ve detected powerful gravity waves from there.”
“So is there one, or are there many? How many ships can come here at once?”
“We control the other end of it. Mostly, anyway. A few crooks get through. Obviously.”
“So your control isn’t very secure?”
“I am sorry to say that it isn’t.”
“Why not? What’s wrong?”
“That’s complicated.”
“Try me.”
“Corruption is one problem. Illegal crossing another. Mainly, it’s illegal crossing.”
“Why Earth? Why even come here?”
“Criminals come here, rebels come here, not decent people.”
“Of course,” Diana said. “Just our luck.”
“We only engage with species on our own level. The crooks go for the lesser ones because they’re helpless.”
“Okay, so why are the crooks here?” Flynn asked.
“Take your DNA, your stem cells. That stuff has markets all over the galaxy—a healthy, smart species like you people. Plus, Earth is a beautiful planet and it’s incredibly rich. You can live here in serious comfort and luxury, and on most planets, that is not the case. Earth has a rep for being a really fun place to be. But the only legal travel here is for scientific or social engineering purposes.”
“Social engineering?”
“The ones you call the grays are increasing human intelligence by creating a question around themselves that you can neither bear nor answer. They do it with the UFO and abduction mysteries, which they will never allow to be solved. Such questions increase logical intelligence, which gets into the DNA. Two more generations of this, and your average human is going to have the intelligence of what you now consider a genius.”
“And what about grays? What sort of social engineering do you do?”
“We don’t have the resources or the skill. They’re very advanced.”
Now that he’d gotten her talking comfortably, he shifted to critical questions.
“The criminals here can make themselves appear human. How many are doing this?”
“No idea.”
“You’re like that, aren’t you? This isn’t the real you.”
“This body is so nice. It’s soft and it smells good and it’s so sleek and curvy.” She stretched, leaned her head back, and shook out her hair. “Even your hair is wonderful. And these eyes! They’re way better than ours. I’ve never seen the world like this before, all these colors. It’s just very sweet in this thing.”
“How many others are here like you?”
“None, not legally. It’s very strictly regulated.”
“But there may be criminals doing it?”
“You need to understand a little better just what you’re dealing with. There is one criminal, or a gang of them, who have taken on human form. They are running the robots you are killing, and probably building them here.”
“The robots can also make themselves look human. I’ve seen it.”
“That’s just a skin-deep disguise. Their programming doesn’t change.”
“So how would I detect one?”
“Vicious, paranoid personality, judging from the way the ones your perp is deploying have been programmed.”
Light glared in the windshield. He hit the horn and swerved onto the shoulder, but it wasn’t out-of-control traffic, it was something else, and the light stayed right with them.
Geri let out an unearthly wail.
The truck’s engine screamed as its wheels started to leave the ground. He jammed the gas to the floor, gaining just enough traction to get out of the column of light that was trying to drag them skyward.
The vehicle bounced as its full weight dropped back onto its shocks. The next second, the light was on them again. Again, he turned out of it, then went caroming across the field he was in with the light following him. Every time it flooded the car, he spun the wheel again, but he knew that he was going to run out of luck sooner or later.
“Do you have any way of dealing with this?
” he shouted to Geri above the screaming of the engine.
“We can deprogram them.”
“How?”
The light hit again, and this time he slammed on the brakes, threw it into reverse, floored it, and backed up swerving wildly at the same time.
“You need their core code, and we’re not going to be able to get that.”
The light flooded the windshield. It had them now, and it wasn’t going to lose them again.
He opened his window, drew his gun, and fired upward.
The wheels left the ground entirely. The engine shrieked so much, he pulled up his foot.
They were a good four feet off the ground.
He fired again, two quick shots.
The light turned blue. The truck lurched.
He fired again.
A sheet of flame enveloped the truck, which fell to the ground, hitting with a jaw-snapping crash.
Once again, he hit the gas and they lunged forward.
“Can they fix whatever I hit?”
“I don’t know.”
Behind them, he saw a column of orange smoke, glowing from within. “What’s that mean?”
“It’s on fire, I think.”
Had he destroyed it? “Are they vulnerable to bullets?”
“Not usually. But that one’s a relic. A real piece of junk. A lucky shot would probably do damage.”
“How can you tell it’s junk?”
“You can hear it.”
Ahead, he saw a familiar berm. “Railroad track,” he said. He drove along beside it until he found a small trestle spanning a draw. He parked the truck under it.
“Ever hop a freight, Diana?”
“Every day.”
He got out of the truck. “Come on. Lesson one.”
He led them up onto the track. “This is a main trunk line. There’s trains through here every few hours. Long trains. Slow. We’d hop ’em as kids.” He knelt down and listened to the rail. “Okay, there’s something a few miles out. Don’t know which direction yet. We need to walk a bit, find a place where the berm’s flatter. You need to be able to sprint. Can you sprint, Geri?”
“Excuse me, but what’s a train?”
“Oh, God,” Diana said.
“A big engine that pulls cars along rails.” He kicked one with a toe. “Point is, they come through here just slow enough to where you can grab a ride. I mean, the full ones. The empties, forget it. Way too fast.”