Ukiah pointed down the corridor past the escalator. “We could stay on the main level and go out past check-in.”
Max shook his head. “If their main stronghold wasn’t downstairs or down this wing, then it’s back toward check-in. At this old terminal, they had foot traffic bottleneck through security just beyond the escalator. People flying out would check their bags and then go through security. People flying in would go down the escalator and pick up baggage, rent cars, and such, without having to pass through the security check area.”
In other words, there was only one way out past check-in, and that was most likely where the Ontongard were.
“Let’s try these doors,” Ukiah suggested.
Each waiting area had four sets of doors. Through the filthy windows, it was clear that the doors opened into midair, some thirty feet or so from the ground. Once upon a time, umbilical corridors connected the doors to jumbo jets. Now the heavy steel doors were locked tight.
“Damn,” Max swore at the last door as it too proved to be locked. “We don’t have time to sit and try to pick the lock.” Only in the movies could a lock be picked in mere seconds. The gunfire grew louder. With a growl of anger, Max picked up a chair and flung it at a window. The chair bounced harmlessly off with a loud hollow thunk. Max swore, pulled out the Sauer and emptied it into the window. Nine tiny thumb-sized stars appeared in the glass.
“Oh, give me a break,” Max moaned.
“Someone’s coming.” Ukiah shifted the baby on his shoulder to draw his Colt.
Someone was running, light and quick, through the slats of light. It was Rennie, carrying a shotgun and bleeding from a thigh wound.
“Cub!” Rennie called as he spotted Ukiah. “You’ve got luck a mile long and whisker thin. I see you found your partner. I don’t suppose you found the damn remote key too?”
“Of course I found it. It’s what I do.”
“It’s what he’s good at,” Max added.
“Yes! We’ll win this one yet.” Rennie glanced at Ukiah again, eyes narrowing as he took in the sleeping baby on Ukiah’s shoulder. “What is this?”
Ukiah flinched back as the Pack leader reached out for the child. “It’s mine.”
“I won’t hurt the babe,” Rennie promised quietly. “Let me see him.”
Reluctantly, Ukiah handed the infant over.
Rennie took his Memory gently. “It’s been such a long time since I held a baby. Not since Bear blew himself up. It’s an awe-inspiring thing, to see the smallness that will one day be a tall strong man. Look how tiny his hands are! Surely in a baby, you can see the face of God.”
“Ukiah thinks the baby is his,” Max ventured.
Rennie gave a short laugh. “Oh, it’s the Cub’s. Even if you can’t smell the Cub’s scent or sense his blood in the child, surely you can see the Cub in the baby’s eyes and hair. The Ontongard must have tortured the Cub’s Memory and then stuffed it well to grow it so quickly.”
“Tortured?” Ukiah claimed back the infant. “What do you mean by that?”
“We age fairly slowly, Cub, except when we’re hurt. Our cells are forced to divide quickly and recklessly in order to heal the body. With the deterioration in the quality of the cell copies, we age. For the Ontongard to get a mouse to grow to this size in three days, they would have had to hurt it over and over again, providing it with all the food it could eat.”
Ukiah laid a protective hand on the baby’s head. “They weren’t taking very good care of it when we found him.”
Rennie shrugged. “It’s a Pack baby. It will survive just about anything. The Ontongard could afford to neglect it when other projects took precedence. Well, finders keepers, losers weepers.” He chuckled happily. “Nip that little breeding project in the bud. Provided, of course, we get you three out of here.”
“We can go back the way you—” Ukiah started but his sentence was clipped short by an explosion deep in the belly of the terminal.
“Nope,” Rennie stated cheerfully as dust swirled around him. “No can do.”
“You blew up the way out?” Max gasped.
“We plan on blowing up the whole place. That was just the start. We were sure that the Ontongard had the key, so our only hope was to stop the Rover. The Ontongard are controlling the Rover from here, so we’re going to blow up everything.”
With logic like that, Ukiah thought, no wonder the FBI had all the Pack members on their most wanted list.
Rennie glanced at him. The Ontongard outnumber us ten to one. It’s unlikely we’ll win today, but there’s a chance we’ll do enough damage as we go down that we’ll stop them for now.
Ukiah blushed and looked away. The other Pack members came straggling in. They were splattered with Ontongard blood, and sported dozens of bullet holes and shoulder-riding mice themselves. Mixed in with Dog Warriors were men and women he recognized only from Rennie’s memories. Hell Hounds. Wild Wolves. Devil Dogs. Not all five gangs, not all members of four present. Where are the others?
We couldn’t reach the Demon Curs, Rennie answered him. Some were too scattered around Pittsburgh to show up in time. Two have fallen already.
“Well,” Bear drawled, “they know we’re here.”
“Most of Pittsburgh knows you’re here,” Max commented.
The Pack laughed at him, reloading guns and patching wounds.
“Stay here,” Rennie ordered Ukiah and Max. “We’ll go ahead and see if we can slip you out before we level the place. And, Cub, break the damn key.”
Bear took off, running off into the darkness, and the others followed with practiced grace.
Ukiah handed the baby off to Max and dug the key out of his pocket. He spent several minutes trying to snap it in two, or even bend it. He laid it on the floor and beat at it with a chair. It didn’t bend, break, or scratch. Nothing in Pack memory said it was indestructible, but also there was nothing saying it was easily breakable either. It seemed, in fact, designed to be somewhat idiot-proof and thus very durable.
He eyed it. It would have been so much easier if Prime had just broken the remote key so long ago. Why hadn’t he?
Of course, there was no answer—or more correctly, the answer was lost along with massive amounts of Prime’s blood.
Ukiah tried for information in another manner. Had Prime access to the key after they came to Earth?
Yes, there was one clear memory of Prime casually picking it up, as he reminded Hex that the directives were clear: in case of emergencies, a breeding program was the first thing to establish.
Prime was guarding his thoughts from Hex, and thus his plan was unknown to his children. The breeding program had been a distraction, because he went off to sabotage the Ovipositor. So the real plan must have been to send Hex away, so Prime could play with the remote key. If he was bothering with the key, then he had known the main ship was on Mars. If he had followed his normal mode of operations, then he would have made the destruction of the main ship his top priority.
There were no clues, though, to support this theory at all—thus the Pack ignorance of the main ship’s survival. Prime’s only warning that remained was the enigmatic “Don’t wake the sleepers,” and that had been misunderstood completely.
So what had Prime done with the key?
Ukiah had learned over the years of investigating that it was pointless to guess at what people had done. Usually, though, it wasn’t difficult to discover what they could have done, and then do a process of elimination on their possible choices. He rummaged through Pack memory, discovering that Prime’s options were slim: the remote key could not reach through the shielding.
It couldn’t reach through the shielding.
If Prime had any plan involving the remote key, then when he started, the shields must have been down. The landing on Mars hadn’t triggered the automatic defense program, or the shields would have been up. Hex wouldn’t have raised the shields; such an act would have stranded him on Earth until the humans developed space flight. Prime mu
st have used the remote key to raise the shields, rendering the key useless.
Starting the automatic defense program, however, was a single command. Prime could have triggered it seconds after he picked up the remote key. There had been numerous distractions for Hex on the scout ship. Why not use one of them? Why had he sent Hex off to start the dangerous breeding program?
Prime always made backup plans. Plans upon plans. The breeding program had been a distraction, but layers of sabotage had still been created to deal with it. If Prime hadn’t finished before Hex returned, Prime’s mutated genes would have been used. If a child were created, he had planned to kill the mother as soon as possible. If he couldn’t do that, the problem would still have been solved when he blew up the scout ship.
Layers on layers.
The shields must have been a default plan. What would take a long time and probably meant the destruction of the main ship?
Asked correctly, Pack memories supplied the answer: the correct codes, programmed into the remote key, then uploaded to the ship, would trigger total destruction. It would take hundreds of commands to override all normal safety procedures so that the destruct sequence could be sent and fully obeyed. One missed safety procedure would render the whole process null. Worse, the system might automatically clear itself of earlier acts of sabotage, and the sleepers would be awakened.
Ukiah studied the key. It had essentially two levels. The first was a top buffer, the active code, what would be loaded onto the ship’s computer when the uplink was established. The second area was a densely packed set of possible commands. The lower sets of these were common commands; “Give status report,” “Raise shields,” and “Wake all sleeping crew.” “Wake all sleeping crew” was the command loaded in the active code area.
If Prime had spent a long time coding in a new set of commands, it would be a higher set. Ukiah considered the key. Like humans’ computers, the alien’s computers had developed on the simple electric principle of on and off. They too had counted in binary at first and the storage of the device was an exponential of two—a high exponential. One of all these memory slots had Prime’s destruction code locked into it. Which slot?
Ukiah hunted through Pack memory and found nothing. He wished he could explain the alien device to Max. The language, the equipment, the concepts were all so foreign. Even with Prime’s memories, Ukiah could barely understand how the item worked.
Forget the item, he told himself, focus on the man. What did he know about Prime? Alien memories slipped by, sights seen by alien eyes, the Earth experienced by an alien taste. Prime hadn’t seen the lush Oregon wilderness as a place fit for saving. He would have loved better the mountains of New Mexico. The countless animals hadn’t stirred him. Truly, Ukiah’s mother had been the first thing on the planet he had seen fit for saving. He had seen beauty in her.
Ukiah shook his head. No. That didn’t lead to anything. Which number would Prime have selected. He moaned inwardly. Prime number.
He checked his memories. Yes, Prime’s name had come from his father, not from the Pack.
Which Prime number?
Ukiah decided on the highest one inside the set of possible slots.
There, like a birthday present waiting to be opened, was the first instruction set. “Prepare to upload new safety overrides . . .”
Had Prime finished it? Ukiah prayed that Prime had, because Ukiah knew he couldn’t finish it. The destruction sequence seemed to be complete. If it was, why hadn’t Prime uploaded it? What was missing?
Prime probably would have set the active code to “Raise shields” until he could finish the destruction sequence. That way, if something were to go wrong, Prime could quickly trigger the shields, and Hex couldn’t wake the sleepers. After he had programmed in the code, but before he had changed the active code, the shields had been raised.
Ukiah rubbed his forehead. Why? Why? Then it hit him. Prime had been overly cautious—he had laid too many plans. He had taken too long setting the sabotage on the main ship and had run out of time. The scout ship had been launched before the destruction of the main ship had been triggered, and the damage hadn’t been complete because he hadn’t finished.
Prime wouldn’t have loaded the code into the active buffer until he was sure, 100 percent. He had finished the code, but had taken too long. The shields were raised instead. Hex had killed Prime, and a long wait to wake the sleepers had started.
Ukiah dropped Prime’s program into the active code, overriding the “wake the sleeper” code. If he had a chance, he was going to finish what his father had started. As an afterthought, he also overwrote the “wake the sleeper” code with Prime’s program. Hex, if he checked, would easily catch the substitution and be able to write a new program. It would take time, and time was what they needed.
Ukiah slipped the remote key back into his pocket. The baby woke in Max’s arms and started to cry. Fear radiated out of it, striking Ukiah seconds before the sense of Ontongard. He turned and out of the shadows came a host of Hex’s Gets.
“Come with us,” one Get intoned, without his words registering on his face, as if he were merely a radio, the voice of Hex piped through him. “Come now, or die.”
A door, cloaked by the dark and clutter, seemed as if it should lead to a closet. Instead it gave access to a maze of halls and blank doors—secret passages for airport security and maintenance. They were hustled to a vast upstairs room. Cables snaked from computer to computer. Racks of equipment, empty pop bottles, and greasy pizza boxes littered the floor. The Ontongard had lined up a row of seventy-two-inch flat screen televisions and fed onto them a processed version of the NASA channel, with its live Rover coverage. The result was a huge and grainy picture of Mars, as if you had been suddenly transformed into a small alien being squatting on the surface of the red planet.
Hex paced before the televisions. He turned as the Gets brought in Ukiah, Max, and the baby. “Breeder, Get, Memory. A nice collection of breeding stock, one would hope. Soon to be unnecessary, one would also hope.” He stopped pacing to focus on Max. Ukiah tried to edge sideways, to shield Max from the alien gaze. “There’s something wrong with our happy family picture. Your blood failed to create a Get.”
“Thank God,” Max muttered.
“I refuse to bend to you,” Ukiah growled. “I refuse down to every cell in my body.”
Hex looked down at Ukiah. “I can kill you even more painfully this time, and the next time, and the next time, until I reduce you down to only memories.”
Ukiah winced. Obviously refusing wasn’t the wisest answer.
And all his memories will hate you, his Memory unexpectedly retorted from Max’s shoulder. We’ll hunt you down and sear you from this planet like a weed.
Hex laughed. “Don’t make threats at me, Memory. By the time you can do any hunting, you will believe I’m your father.”
Never! We’ll tell ourselves the truth every waking moment of the day, every sleeping moment of the night. We were the Cub and Hex unmade us. We will never forget, even after we’ve forgotten everything else.
Hex shook his head. “Where did this insanity in Prime’s blood come from? I thought it was just a temporary illness in him, something that would have been worked out of his system if I had felt like giving him the time to live. Then his Gets turned up as rabid dogs, nipping constantly at my heels as I tried to finish my mission. And now his son and all his parts—rebellious, traitorous little shits. One wonders if your bloodline is worth trying to use at all. Surely all you will breed will be tainted with your father’s insanity.”
Forewarned this time, Ukiah managed to silence his son’s next outburst with Hush, go to sleep, and Max held a peacefully sleeping baby.
“Prime destroyed the scout ship,” Ukiah replied. “And even after the Rover reaches the main ship, you can’t wake the sleepers. I’m all you have.”
Hex waved away the problem. “Getting up to Mars to lower the shields was the hard part. If I can’t get the key back,
I’ll jury-rig something. I had rough copies made before I realized that I could just modify the Rover’s existing equipment. I hate the idea of trusting everything to an untried copy of the key, but in theory it will work. I’ve got time to fiddle until it does work. One way or another, I will get the damn ship to Earth. Still, it would not do to dispose of you too quickly. I could try for a hybrid with your Memory, half you and half me. That might solve the insanity problem.”
Max took a quick step backward, shielding the baby with his hands.
There was a deep roar below them. The floor heaved up and fell. The lights flickered, browned out, and then steadied. Dust rained down from overhead.
“Go kill those damn dogs!” Hex shouted, and Gets rushed down a staircase on the far side of the room, almost directly opposite from where they had been brought up.
Ukiah thought he heard a distant voice, a cry of dismay, then Rennie’s mind touched his.
Cub? He has you?
He does. He stands close to me.
Damn! Your life is safe, but not your soul. Did you do as I asked?
I couldn’t.
Rennie broke off the contact instantly and down in the guts of the terminal came a wolf howl. A chorus of wolves went up. It sang to Ukiah of fear, of determination, of hate for an ancient foe.
The Gets had stopped their activities at the computers, heads lifted to listen to the wolf song.
Hex, however, stared at Ukiah. “What did Rennie Shaw ask you to do?”
I had a rough copy made, Hex had said. In theory it should work.
“What did Rennie Shaw ask you to do?” Hex asked, moving closer.
Ukiah cringed, remembering being struck full on by the two-by-four.
A weirdly human smile played at Hex’s mouth. “I’m sure we can find one of those lying around here. Now, for the last—”
Hex turned suddenly to look back at the wall of TV screens. The Martian landscape had flickered and vanished. Now, displayed across the TV, was the main ship, ugly in the way only a race with no regard for beauty could create ugly. Huge, mottle-colored, it bristled with weapons that Ukiah knew from Pack memory; weapons that even now humans couldn’t withstand. He felt a howl of despair beat against his lips, and he swallowed hard to keep it from escaping. He reached out to Max, touched him on the elbow to get his attention, and nodded toward the far staircase where the sounds of fighting had resumed.