Heaven's War (49 page)

“Jesus Christ,” Dale said, “how can you understand
anything
about this character!”

“Goddammit,” Zack said, turning back and heading straight for him. He actually poked him in the chest. “I don’t assume a fucking thing. I just want a
response
, okay?”

Dale didn’t want a fight. “Well, I don’t think you’re getting one.”

Makali stepped between them. “Both of you, stop this. We’re losing Dash.”

When they closed in, Zack tried again, but with a change of subject. “Now that we’re out of your old habitat, where are you taking us?”

This time the Sentry answered. “Control,” it said. “Vessel.” Then, clearly unwilling to waste one more second communicating with humans, it ran on ahead.

Nevertheless, those were magic words, even to Dale. He wouldn’t mind having control over this vessel at all. He had just about concluded that for the rest of his life he was going to have to give up the dream that he would ever have a clear idea what he was doing, or why. It was as if he had left motivation or reason behind on Earth.

And he no longer had his Hulk medallion for protection.

Some time later, Dash stopped and began clawing at what looked to Dale like another pile of rubble. “What now?” Valya said. She had been so silent during the hike that Dale had thought to stop and search for her…she had always been following, but slowly and painfully.

“I think it’s another habitat,” Zack said.

With five creatures and eleven hands (Dale saw that Dash was still protecting its number three arm and hand), this cave mouth was cleared quickly.

They were able to pass through without difficulty, though Dale noticed that the air was stale, burned, almost dead. He had to take several breaths to assure himself that he was still taking in oxygen.

Dash seemed to be laboring.

“Well, good news,” Makali said. “We won’t have to paddle across this one.”

She was correct. This habitat was a giant void…a huge space lit only by scattered, yellowed glowworms that showed a barren, lifeless, blasted landscape.

Run.

Rachel Stewart’s entire existence, her fourteen years of life, all her dreams, hopes, fantasies, accomplishments, disappointments, everything she owned, all that she had heard and seen, all reduced to one concept.

Run!

She was fast. Rather, playing soccer, with rest and food, she was faster than most girls her age. Was she faster than this Long Legs?

Or, as one of her father’s oft-repeated jokes suggested, was she faster than one of the other potential victims? Faster than Cowboy?

She didn’t know. She couldn’t do anything about it, anyway—

But
run
!

Yvonne was the closest thing to a local guide. She had led them downstairs and out of the Museum of Lost Aliens and across “town,” toward the far side of the habitat. Rachel had wondered why she was going so fast. Even Cowboy seemed unwilling to keep up with Yvonne. The dog kept stopping every few meters and sitting down.

“What was that thing?” Pav had said, walking as quickly as he could while still looking over his shoulder. Rachel wanted to grab him and scream,
Run!

“‘Long Legs,’” Yvonne had said. “But the name…whenever I think it, it makes me feel scared and sick.”

“We already suspected it might not be friendly,” Zhao had said.

“What would it want with us?” Pav said. “I didn’t think aliens ate humans.”

“No,” Yvonne said, “but it might want something we carry or have. Water. Energy. Matter.”

“Well, it’s dead, isn’t it?” Rachel had said. “Can’t we slow down?”

Yvonne looked at her with pity. “Oh, girl, that thing isn’t dead. It’s probably put itself back together already.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Zhao said. “It just fell off a three-story building!”

“It’s…it’s partly machine. It can…reassemble itself.”

“So you’re not taking us someplace safe,” Rachel had said. “You’re just—”

“—Getting you the hell away from the Long Legs.”

At that moment, they heard an anguished howl from Cowboy. “What is it?” Pav had said.

Looking around, Rachel could see no obvious threat…but, surrounded as they were by buildings, she couldn’t actually see very far.

“Up,” Zhao said, pointing.

The Long Legs—its upper torso still incompletely assembled—had apparently just leaped to the top of a building not fifty meters behind them.

“Run!” Yvonne said.

They entered a panting, side-aching world of twists, sudden veers down what appeared to be dead-end alleys that turned out to have narrow passages, sprints across open plazas, and near-dunkings in pools of colored goo.

It took only minutes before Zhao said, “We can’t keep running like this. We have to kill that thing.”

“With our bare hands?” Pav said.

“No,” Zhao said. “We need a weapon. A gun.”

Rachel didn’t believe a gun would be useful against the Long Legs.

“No!” Yvonne said. She stopped; they all did, even the dog. Yvonne looked frantic, confused. “I meant, no, we don’t use bare hands or guns. That thing is…it’s an electrical field that holds it together, puts it back together. Overload it and we kill it.” Yvonne closed her eyes, like a contestant on a game show trying, trying to remember some simple fact. “There are…God, the word…duplicators?”

“Plates?” Rachel said.

“Yes! That duplicating process requires huge amounts of power,
so the plates are like…nodes. We need to find a plate.” When the others stared at her, waiting for more, she said. “To electrocute the son of a bitch.”

“And the on switch,” Zhao said. “Don’t forget the on switch.”

Yvonne led them quickly through one last cluster of squat, ugly structures. Cowboy kept racing ahead, and Rachel felt compelled to call him back.

“Why don’t you let him run?” Pav said. “He’s a Revenant. He may know more than we do.” Rachel was ashamed that she hadn’t thought of that. She kept treating Cowboy like, well, an ordinary dog, even though she suspected that, in his canine fashion, he could be channeling the Architects.

“City limits,” Zhao said. He was right; they were out of the mass of buildings and alleys now…hard up against the looming, curving wall of the habitat.

The smooth quasi-concrete ground surface gave way to raw, packed-down earth. There were even patches of greenery and some trees…everything looking old.

This wasn’t a walkway. Every few meters lay a cluster of pipes or other impediments.

“Which way?” Rachel said.

Yvonne had stopped and, eyes closed, arms outstretched, was turning in a slow circle.

“Great,” Pav said, “now she’s an antenna…”

This struck Rachel as both funny and true.

Yvonne stopped her turn with her arm pointed toward the south end of the habitat. “Somewhere along there,” she said.

“Question,” Rachel said, finding it difficult to talk with the endless exertion. “How do we get the Long Legs on the plate?”

“Bait,” Zhao said. “One of us has to be on the plate, I think. To make the Long Legs attack.”

“Zhao, I volunteer you,” Pav said. He was working his way under, then over, the pipes.

“I’ll do it,” Rachel said. It wasn’t nobility or the desire to sacrifice
herself. One of them needed to be bait. She was smaller and quicker than the others. And it would spare her the agony of
watching
—

Then the Long Legs emerged from an alley—it was now
between
them and the plate.

Cowboy ran toward the Long Legs, barking furiously. Rachel was amused to note that the Long Legs treated the dog as a threat…backing away and moving to one side.

But they were still unable to reach the plate.

“Sorry, Rach, I don’t think we’re going to be able to use you as bait,” Pav said.

“Yvonne,” Zhao said. “What are you doing?”

The Revenant astronaut had her hands up against the nearest wall, running them slowly, as if searching for a minute crack in the surface.

“Time is our enemy, Yvonne,” Zhao said, his voice growing more agitated.

“I’m looking for the controls, all right?” she said. “The voices are telling me, controls are everywhere…just got to—” She smiled. “Got ’em.”

Rachel couldn’t see anything different. “It’s just a
wall
.”

Yvonne used her right index finger to draw a big rectangle on the wall…it was like dragging an image on a Slate screen.

But then half a dozen different colored boxes appeared inside the larger box Yvonne had sketched. Each one was marked with symbols.

Rachel could see the Long Legs approaching now, as if moving in for the kill. What would it feel like, she wondered? Would she be ripped into pieces? Or would her death be even creepier…being absorbed somehow? Sucked dry?

Closer and closer…

“Got it!” Yvonne shouted.

“What?”

“Just…everybody hold on! Seriously, I mean.”

Rachel looked at Pav. She could hear the scraping, skittering sound of the Long Legs approaching. What? “Grab the pipe,” Pav said. They all did.

With her arm hooked around an alien tube, Yvonne brushed her hand across the panel.

Rachel immediately felt her vision distorting, whether due to her eyeball changing shape, or the habitat itself, she couldn’t say.

It was as if a gravity wave passed through them, simultaneously stretching the buildings, walls, and ground around them, squashing them…and dragging them toward the Long Legs and the plate.

But Rachel and the others held fast.

The Long Legs was slammed into the wall behind it, not hard enough to damage it…just to pin it.

“Here goes,” Yvonne said. With difficulty, as if she were being pulled toward the plate herself, she touched the panel that activated the duplicator.

The Long Legs twitched, then froze as a massive electric jolt surged through it. Then it began to smoke and melt, matter dripping down the creature’s sides as it began to shrink. Rachel wanted to look away but couldn’t. She wanted this thing gone; if this was how it had to happen, too bad.

In less than a minute, the Long Legs was gone. Yvonne shut off the power.

“How did you do that?” Zhao said.

Yvonne seemed surprised. “I guess I accessed the gravity controls.”

“The what?” Pav said.

“The whole NEO is, ah, filled with clumps of super-dense matter. There’s a…a system of magnets that moves them around, which is why we have Earth-like gravity even though we should be bouncing like balloons.” She blinked, confused. “I can’t believe I know all that, somehow. It makes my head hurt and my stomach ache.”

Zhao turned to Pav and Rachel. “The cat’s-eyes, you called them. They can be controlled.”

“Great,” Pav said. He had knelt to hold on to Cowboy. The dog seemed eager to sniff the remains of the Long Legs, and Pav was holding him back.

Zhao was taking a moment to be an engineer again. “Gravity. Nanotech plasm. 3-D printing. Morpho-genetic mapping and retrieval. I’d love to see the main computer and power station for these things.”

“Soon,” Yvonne said, tapping her temple. She looked tired, but satisfied somehow. “We’re on our way to some answers, I think.”

Rachel was still distracted by the awful, gagging smell of the electrocuted Long Legs. It was like burned plastic times ten.

As for the Long Legs itself…there was sizzling black matter spattered all over the plate.

“Is it dead?” she said.

“For the moment,” Yvonne said. “You can never really kill these things.” Incredibly, as Rachel looked on, several puddles of former Long Legs goo began to shape themselves into squares, as if forming up for battle. “Oh my God, Yvonne, look.”

“That’s what I mean,” Yvonne said. “We’ve got to go.”

She made several additional passes at the control panel, which then, magically, closed itself down and vanished, leaving the wall as blank as it had been when Rachel first saw it.

There was a portal not far from them, large and, to Rachel’s mind, industrial; it was worn and stained from the passage of God knew how many tons of goo or other fluids. There was a spillway of sorts, and channels leading from that to pools in the “city.”

It also smelled bad, exactly like a sewer. Rachel’s overwhelming impression of Keanu, at least the parts she had seen since leaving the human habitat, was of nasty odors. “Are you sure we should go through here?” she said to Yvonne.

“My voices are telling me it’s not the best route, but it is the most direct.”

“Are we going to have to walk much farther?” Pav said.