Coyote ran, ran howling. Death was in the air. It tore the air. It screamed like hawks. It stung like bees. It was death. Run. Run. Lay panting. Lick the wound. Death was all around. Sick here. Dying there. Death in his stomach, heaving up. The pack was dead. Mourn, mourn the pack!
Rennie reached out and touched Hellena and passed her the message of: We can’t all move in, or he’ll sense us coming. Let me get close, nail him once good, and then you can move in to hold off the others.
She nodded and replied: The sooner we finish, the happier I’ll be. This slashing our own makes me feel like Ontongard.
Me too, he admitted and broke the contact.
He stalked forward silently. He almost made it, but he’d gotten too focused, and the FBI agent’s sudden gasp caught him off guard. Instinctively he turned, aiming the shotgun, and pulling the trigger. Even as the shotgun went off, he swore at himself. She wasn’t to be hurt if possible.
But the kid took the bullet. He had been moving even as Rennie aimed, and the blast caught him square in the chest. It tumbled him away and Rennie followed, working the next cartridge into the chamber. There! He had started the killing. Now to make it as quick and as painless as possible. The boy was on his hands and knees, possibly with broken ribs, gasping for breath. Rennie sensed the boy reading him, and saw the knowledge of the execution register in the kid’s eyes.
Rennie aimed the shotgun again, hating himself. Since the kid had on a flak jacket, it was going to have to be a head shot, right into those eyes that looked like Hellena’s, that smile that had flashed so easily just two minutes before. To save Earth, he told himself, to save all the worlds beyond.
The partner was suddenly behind him, with a pistol pressed against Rennie’s head. “Drop it! Drop it or I’ll blow your brains out.”
But the kid knew they had come to kill him. It was plain to the Pack that he knew and that it terrified him, even as he begged his partner to back down. The boy raised dark eyes to Rennie, and mentally pleaded. Don’t tell him the truth. Let him believe me. Don’t let him force you into killing him.
Did the boy know that he was truly speaking to them? Was this a ploy? To what end, except to save the man’s life? He asked nothing for himself, seemed to expect nothing for himself. Rennie stood staring down at the kid, unsure if the boy was as noble as he seemed, or if he was only very skillful at manipulation.
The pistol to Rennie’s head dropped, and a moment later they had the partner stripped and neutralized. The kid was still on the ground, his breathing coming easier now, but the subsonic messages of terror still vibrated up and down the Pack’s spine. Rennie could hear the Pack’s confusion. This is the monster? This cub? This has to be one of our lost Get, not the monster.
Bear, of course, pushed the issue to a head. “He’s the one, isn’t he?”
How am I to know? he snapped at Bear then shrugged. The smell of blood was coming from the kid. Rennie got him up, the flak jacket open, and wet his fingertips in the kid’s blood.
Testing blood from an Ontongard was like sticking a thistle into your mouth. Pack blood tasted like piss and vinegar, bearable, but it bristled and complained at being sampled. Rennie expected something worse than a thistle. A monster should taste nasty. The sharpness of the Pack was in the kid’s blood, but it was mellowed, blended, softened. Unlike the jagged broken jumble of DNA that was the Pack’s signature, the kid’s DNA was a seamless work of art. Human and alien interlocked perfectly. There was no doubt; he was made by an ovipositor.
“He’s the one.”
Rennie licked the blood from his lips, remembering suddenly the raven-haired girl that was the kid’s mother. It explained the boy’s good looks and dark eyes regarding Rennie with the same fear as the boy’s mother. Have we focused so much on the father that we missed the influence of the mother?
Rennie tasted again the perfect blend of human and alien, and checked the boy’s maturity. While not a man, the kid was past puberty, a teenager, able to breed, probably able for countless years. If he was the breeding monster they thought of him as, where were the children? All the files and records claimed he was just barely legal age, an upstanding citizen with no rape charges, no paternity suits, no garnered wages to support an unwed mother, no wife, no charges on his credit card to even indicate a girlfriend. How could he be the monster unstoppable breeder if he didn’t even have sex?
Coyote had found Rennie dying on the battlefield. Coyote had made him an undying slave, who could be controlled like a puppet on its master’s whim. Coyote had sent him out to kill a monster, and he had gone willing. But if Rennie wanted to keep hold of his sliver of humanity, he couldn’t do this.
Prime stood in the doorway, eyeing the machine that was contained in the room, that took up the room, was the room. He wished he could just smash it.
Just one! Just one of the hated father race born on this machine could take over this world. All of its seed would be viable. It would spread itself into the native livestock, reproducing hundreds and thousands of times a year. Within its life span it would replace everything that lived. Slower by far than the invasion force Prime had already stopped, but inevitable.
But he couldn’t—
—blackness, lost memories—
Prime was running. He had the key programmed and he merely had to hit the row’s master lock as he went. Over his link he could hear the countdown for the launch of the scout ship: 88, 89. He slotted the key, waited for the confirm, jerked out the key and ran to the next master lock: 90, 91. He had to get them all: 92. He tripped, almost fell and caught himself on the #1 sleeping unit. The Ontongard inside lay waiting for its wakeup call on the new world. Prime glanced down the row, stretching into dimness. Eight more. He—
—blackness, lost memories—
—he finished the security hack. Turning, he took the impregnation tip out of stasis. Hex’s genetic sample floated inside. He slotted the tip into the disposal and flushed it clean. Hurriedly, he flipped it over, jabbed the extractor into his arm vein, wincing at the sharp pain. Once the tip was full, he quickly replaced it into stasis and backtracked through the security hack. He’d have a minute to clear the room, and then security would be reestablished, his visit neatly deleted.
It was a horrible waste of time. He probably would be finished before Hex found a suitable life form, captured an intact female, and brought her back to the scout ship. Even if he wasn’t, there would be many chances to kill Hex’s fetus before it was born. But he had to plan for the worst case. If things went wrong, a child might be born and let loose on the world. So he used his own mutated genetic material. If everything went wrong, then maybe the child would be a rebel like his father.
But Prime doubted it. The Ovipositor would probably weed out his mutation, reverting his child to what he would have been—one of them. Back on the bridge, he—
—blackness, lost memories—
“—look at what they were defending themselves with.” Hex hooted with laughter, holding out short wooden shafts with tips of stone. “I couldn’t get the setting right on the stunner and killed most of them, and the rest were male. I got only one female, but that’s all we need for now.”
The female seemed small, light-boned, motionless, like a bird killed on the wing. Her hair was long and black, glossy under the ship’s lights. Her eyes were half open, exposing an exotic eye of white outer ring and a center nearly as black as Prime’s. In proportion and shape, she was not much different than his mother’s race. Perhaps this was why he found her weirdly beautiful.
So this will be the mother of my child, he thought then caught himself. He must not let his guard slip around Hex. One stray thought, caught and noticed by Hex, would spell the doom to—
—blackness, lost memories—
Hex swung the Ovipositor over the struggling female. “Stun her again or I won’t be able to do the insert.”
Prime raised the stunner, thought about upping the power to “accidentally” kill the woman, then realized he s
till needed Hex busy with this. I’m so sorry, little female.
There was a crack and flare of the stunner and the woman went limp. Hex nodded, guiding the needle end of the Ovipositor over her bare stomach—
Ukiah bolted upward with a shout. He was in his bed, not in his bathroom. It was daylight out. He found himself clutching his stomach, unable to erase the image of the long needle out of his mind. It was memory, a memory, he chanted, of a time long ago. He looked about the room, trying to fill his vision center with something else. The braided rug on the floor. The coffee can on his nightstand. Max standing at the foot of the bed, looking angry and worried in equal parts.
The last one pushed everything out of his mind, leaving him trembling, weak, cold, and confused. “Max?” He plucked at his sheets, trying to pull them about his shoulders and failing. “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve come to find out what the hell you’ve done to yourself. Pittsburgh isn’t a big town, kid. Kraynak called me last night to talk about your shootout yesterday. I tried to call you and your phone was off. I called Agent Zheng and she told me that you’d taken off after the Pack. She was all ‘don’t worry, we’ve got him bugged,’ but when I checked back later, it’s ‘sorry, we lost him.” ’
“The Pack found the bug. Rennie broke it.”
“You’re shit lucky they didn’t hold it against you.”
Ukiah hunched over, holding his head, which banged painfully with the flow of his blood. “Yeah, yeah, they cut me slack because they think I’m a kid and don’t know better.”
“You are a kid, but you should know better. You promised me.”
Ukiah flinched under the stinging words. “I took my gun and I told Indigo where I was going, but I couldn’t take backup, Max, not to visit the Pack.”
“I figured you were either in deep shit, or here at home with no idea of the chaos you were causing. So I called out here to eliminate the second.”
Ukiah returned to his sleeping memories and discovered he had heard the phone, moaned in reply to Mom Jo’s soft query, and they had cleaned him up, tucked him into bed, and forced liquids down him. “God, I was out of it.”
“So I gathered. They said it looked like food poisoning to them, but they didn’t know you’d run off to visit the Pack, or that Doctor Haze was running a full viral infection before she went loony. Now, what the hell did you do to yourself?”
“Rennie gave me the Pack memory. My immune system was fighting it, but I think they’ve come to a compromise.”
Max moved suddenly from the foot of the bed to his side. He caught Ukiah’s chin and studied his face carefully. Worry overcame anger in Max’s eyes. “The Pack gave you an unknown drug and you took it?”
Ukiah moaned, rolling his head free. “Max, please. I had to take it. I had to know what the hell was going on. The Pack tried to kill me, you know how close they got. Worse was how close they came to taking out you and Indigo. Rennie warned me, when he was dropping me off downtown, that there was another gang, one that makes the Pack look like puppy dogs. That shootout yesterday was with one of them, Max. I walked into the room, and he chewed through a dozen cops trying to get to me. I had to know what I had gotten into the middle of. I had to know before the trouble followed me out to the farm.”
Max understood the beginning of his logic but not the end. “Ukiah, no drug is going to explain gang warfare to you. All they do is get in and screw with your mind.”
“I didn’t say it was a drug, Max. It was the Pack memory. Actually, it was a mouse. And it did explain everything.”
“Memory? Mouse? What’s a mouse?”
“A mouse. A little hairy thing, like Mickey Mouse, only more real.”
Max reached out to press a hand up against Ukiah’s forehead. “I think you’re still out of it.”
Ukiah pushed his hand away. “I’m not out of it, I only sound like I’m out of it. It’s impossible to explain.” Ukiah threw back his covers and climbed shakily out of bed. He was starving and dehydrated. He cast about and found his bathrobe. “You wouldn’t believe me anyhow.”
Max flung up his hands in exasperation. “So you’re not going to tell me? Are you going to leave me wondering again as to what the hell the Pack has done to you this time? Why don’t you trust me anymore?”
Ukiah closed his eyes, not sure how they got to this point. There had been a break between them. It had been growing over the last few days, and the whole ground was about to give in. How had he missed it? How did he stop it?
“Max, I don’t trust anyone more than I trust you. I don’t even trust myself as much as I trust you. Before Janet Haze, I knew I was your partner, Cally’s brother, and my moms’ son. I loved my job. I loved my life. Then it all went to shit.”
He dropped back to sit on the edge of his bed, shaking his head. “It’s like I fell through the looking glass. There’s a girl turning into ferrets. The Pack does this really weird mind-meld shit to me, where they actually experienced my memories like I was some type of ViewMaster. I’m suddenly telepathic with the Pack! I can read their minds, and they can read mine. Last night I watched Rennie cut his wrist and bleed into this coffee can.” He picked up the can and held it out to Max. “When I got home, his blood had turned into a mouse. I held the mouse in my hands, and it merged with my body.” He considered the can himself. “Yeah, I really think the mouse bit sums up my life for the last three days. How can I ask you to believe me when I don’t even believe myself?
“And all that is nothing to what I learned last night. Oh God, Max. Everything I’ve ever thought or believed about myself isn’t true. I’m not human, Max. I’ve never been human. My father was some rebel from an invading alien force. They used this machine to make my mother pregnant. I was supposed to be the first step in taking over the Earth. That’s why the Pack tried to kill me. My father made the Pack to stop the invasion, to protect the world, and they saw me as a threat. I’m the only breeder ever born.” Ukiah hunched over in sudden misery. “Oh god, Indigo! What am I going to tell her? What if I got her pregnant? We used protection, but what if that doesn’t work with me? What if I’ve infected her? God, how do I tell her I’m some kind of monster?”
“Ukiah, stop it.” Max dragged him upright and made Ukiah look at him. “If this was what you were born as, then nothing has changed. You are what you always have been, a good, honest, loving person. I’ve seen you wade through knee-high muck for sixteen hours to find a little girl. I’ve watched you burn the soles off your shoes to carry Boy Scouts out of a forest fire. I’ve pulled you half-drowned out of filling storm sewers because you won’t stop looking. You’re kind, compassionate, loving, and human. I’ve always been proud of you and there’s no one on this planet I trust more. Nothing has changed.”
Ukiah scrubbed at his face, feeling brittle. “What do I tell Indigo? I can’t hide this from her. It would be like not telling her that I have AIDS.”
“I’m not sure. Come downstairs. Let’s get some breakfast. Tell me everything you know, and we’ll see what we can figure out.”
The fridge was disappointingly bare—one stick of butter, a few tablespoons of sour cream, a dozen eggs, a pint of mushrooms, a gallon of milk, a can of frozen orange juice, a wedge of cheese, a squeeze bottle of chocolate syrup, and a four-pack of AA batteries. Must be Saturday, when Mom Lara cleans out the fridge and goes food shopping. He started with the dry goods instead, washing five potatoes and putting four into the microwave. He ate the fifth raw. He didn’t cook the eggs either. He cracked the full dozen into a glass, planning to drink them raw.
Max intercepted the glass. “I hate when you eat this way.” He got out a nonstick skillet, poured the eggs into it, added milk, and whipped them well. “Okay, explain.”
There were so many angles Ukiah could take. He could start at the very beginning when the Ontongard overpopulated their native planet and reached for the stars. Or he could start with their most recent success, the planet Prime had been born on, a planet with thousands of nat
ive species and trillions of life forms, all replaced by the Ontongard. An entire ecosystem reduced to one vast hive mind. He could explain how Prime sabotaged the invasion ship, or how his father failed to act prior to the scout ship departing the main ship, allowing the Ontongard to reach Earth.
He decided instead to start with Schenley Park and Janet Haze, as he should have days ago. He told Max for the first time about finding the mouse and “losing” it and what he realized later as to what had truly happened with it. He recounted the trial completely—memory search weirdness and all.
As Ukiah talked, Max pushed the scrambled eggs about the nonstick skillet until they formed a fluffy yellow mountain. The smell was maddening to Ukiah, and when Max spooned three-quarters of the scrambled eggs onto a plate for him, he ate frantically.
“So you’re telepathic with the Pack?”
Ukiah nodded, his mouth full of hot fluffy eggs.
“Why? Do you know?” Max asked.
“Well, I think it has to do with the fact that we’re collections of cells, a communal being. The Dog Warriors are one creature with twenty bodies, a continuation of my father. Despite my mother’s DNA, I’m genetically very like my father. The Ovipositor tended to favor the alien genes over the native life-forms when it could. So, in the way that my toe communicates with my nose, I can communicate with the Pack.”
“I don’t get this toe communicates with your nose.” Max set the remaining eggs on the back burner, layered them with cheese, and started to grill a small onion and a cup of mushrooms. Once they were done, he folded them into the cheese and eggs.
“Well, it’s hard to explain.” Ukiah got up for orange juice. “If you have a skin cell, normally that’s what it stays. But with me, if there’s a sudden need for heart tissue, the skin cell converts into heart tissue. There’s a communication between the cells, working to keep the whole colony alive.”