The Filter Trap (23 page)

“Permission to land, sir. Used up an awful lot of fuel getting here and then trying to get
out
of here. I don’t have enough to get home or wait. This bird’s going down soon with or without landing gear.”

“Lieutenant, if you’re willing to risk your skin we’ll risk our bird. It will at least tell us something about the substance of the stuff. Important information if we’re going to order up offshore artillery.”

“Very good, sir, thank you. Can you give me an ETA of when you expect some action to take place out here? I’d hate to be caught with my pants down peeing on a cactus when Klaatu shows up.”

“Roger. Cavalry in forty-five minutes. Be ready.”

Lee made the mistake of looking down. Feeling too close, she instinctively pulled back on the stick. She reminded herself to use the altitude instruments for her approach instead of the black yawning pit of nothing below.

She had learned to game the flight simulator in training, but even those landings weren’t
this
smooth. The black surface must be perfectly flat and level. It also must have some grip, but not enough to rip her tires off. It seemed to know how much resistance to apply, surely being ‘smart’ reactive material.

“Bird is on the ground,” she radioed and released a long-held breath.

“Well done, Lieutenant!” came an enthusiastic reply. “Are you getting out?”

“Hadn’t planned on it.”

She’d planned on grieving for the bubbas, all four lost to the Event, which now provided a physical manifestation. She wanted to get out, unholster her sidearm and empty it into . . .
something
, miles of unfeeling, inanimate black gunk. If the Grim Reaper wore a cape it would be made out of this madness. Infinite emptiness. Death. She’d seen too much of it lately, so she took her helmet off, put her head back, and stared at the blue California sky, beautiful as any she’d seen. For a moment, all the pain fell away.

Another voice came on the line, buzzing in her helmet. She lifted the headset out and listened. “Lee, I can’t force you to do this, but we’d love it if you could step out and tell us what that stuff is like.”

“Colonel?” she asked, not believing her ears.

“Yes, RF. This is Colonel Franks. I’m sorry to hear about the bubbas, they were fine pilots. Fine men and women.”

“Yes, they were, sir. They’d want me to continue the mission. I’ll roll to the edge of this stuff and climb down with my vest radio.”

“I’ll stay by the radio for your report.”

“Sir, I—we all—thought after the tsunami hit Hickam you were gone.”

“My luck hasn’t run out yet, Lieutenant, and if I can spare some for you, I will. Get out there and help us figure these guys out, would you?”

“Of course sir, I’ll signal back from my survival radio.”

She powered up the jet again, not wanting to walk far across the alien surface. She taxied to the very edge, turning her jet parallel to it before powering down. As she descended to the black ground she felt her pace quicken dramatically. The bottom of the ladder floated in empty space. It took a literal leap of faith to step down as her eyes warned she’d fall into oblivion.

But no, the substance pushed back on her boots hard as granite. Better than a rock, it felt surprisingly comfortable. The substance
returned
energy to her feet as she walked.

She stopped and got out the hand-held green survival radio from her vest, fumbling to get the antenna threaded down.

“Colonel Franks, this is amazing. I’m walking on a cloud . . . at night.”

“Coming in loud and clear, Lieutenant. Do you see anything? Can you get close?”

Lee knelt down.

“No, it’s just absorbing everything. No reflection, nothing. It’s like a black hole that you can’t fall into.”

She paused for a moment, then took off one of her gloves.

“I’m going to touch it. Hope I live to tell you what it feels like.”

“Sounds like my wedding night,” Franks replied.

Lee laughed as she knelt down and slowly extended her index finger toward the darkness at her feet, shaking all the way.

“Oh God!” She made contact too soon and jumped back in surprise, gasping.

“What happened, Lieutenant?”

“I touched it before I wanted to. I thought for a moment it had reached up.”

She pressed her palm downward until she felt it again.

“It’s beyond ice cold, but doesn’t hurt.”

She pulled her hand back and looked at it.

“Leaves no mark. Other than the endothermic reaction to my skin it’s not making any meaningful contact. Feels like pushing on a cold pane of glass.”

“You’re at the edge, correct?” asked Franks. “Tell us what it looks like where it meets the sand.”

Lee walked to the edge hovering a few inches from the ground. She walked off, bent down and ran her finger along the edge, suddenly pulling back. A red stream of blood came out from a perfectly straight cut on her fingertip.

“I didn’t even feel it break my skin. It’s hovering above the sand, probably aligned to level and this patch of ground is lower than somewhere else. The ‘edge’ of this thing is so thin, though. I really can’t even see it unless I move up or down to look at it on angle. Cut my finger like a laser. When I look straight at it I just see the shadow on the ground and nothing above it.”

“We suspected as much. Atom-thin nanites,” Franks said. “The three profs are here, wishing they could see what you see.”

“Well that’s nice, but if this is a landing pad I doubt they want to be here when the ship shows up.”

“About that, Lieutenant—”

The sky burped deeply and flashed several bright bursts.

“They’re coming. I’m getting back in and lighting up.”

“We hoped you had more time to explore, but the safest place is going to be in the air. Pull up and observe till reinforcements get there. You can’t fight this alone. Conserve what fuel you can and fly at high altitude; I may ask you to do something I’d rather not if this goes badly.”

“Roger.” She knew what he meant. The last resort of any desperate pilot: kamikaze attack.

Lee made the smoothest take off of her career and circled into the sky, maintaining an arc around the black landing pad at 8,000 feet, just above sparse cloud cover. From that height the alien landing pad looked like a black circle the diameter of an airport runway. The absolute darkness was surreal, a sinkhole straight to hell. She chuckled at how appropriate it might end up being, but these devils made a hole to come from above, not from below.

“You’re our only eyes out there, Lieutenant, so be as descriptive as possible. All of NORAD, the Joint Chiefs, the president and several other world leaders are listening on radio relay.”

“Several large objects, maybe the size of the Goodyear Blimp, coming through. They appear to have no parachutes or deceleration engines that I can see.”

“Do your best to describe them, Lieutenant, every detail may be crucial to the survival of our
—
of
all
—
species.”

“They’re burning off something. Now I can see the shape: long, angular spikes descending from smooth, convex, irregular bases. The tops are a hodgepodge of turrets and domes and antennae. They all appear to be protected behind some kind of translucent shield that’s repelling the fire venting between the spikes.

“Unbelievable! They aren’t changing their rate of descent. They’re going to crash into the landing pad.

“3,000 feet . . .

“1,000 . . .

“The objects hit the landing pad, going partially into the ground. A lot of the energy absorbed, but the soil displacement shot out debris, coming up quick. Still a shock wave and heat. I’m getting tossed like a toy. . .”

“Pull the stick as hard as you can, Lieutenant!”

“Spin’s unrecoverable! I’m going down! I’m sorry, Colonel.”

“Eject!” Franks shouted.

Lee thrust up the seat ejection rails into the sky with a fire trail under her. She felt her spine compress and her organs press deep into her pelvis as she hit 15 Gs in upward motion. Being under 8,000 feet, the first stabilization chute deployed almost instantly and she started falling again, organs working themselves back into familiar positions.

Her main parachute opened and Lee’s lungs bunched in her throat. She tried hard not to give in to nausea, sucking as much oxygen from her emergency can as possible. She might asphyxiate if she vomited inside the helmet and hit another gust. Outside her helmet the sand blasted up so thick she could barely see her feet, much less the parachute.

Even inside her helmet something smelled. A hot poker singed the bottom of her forearm. Some of the dust in the air had been superheated by the impact and the spikes plunging into the Earth had turned the sand into embers which she was falling through. Her outstretched arms were the most exposed, and coincidentally, the least covered part of her flight suit. More little stings bit at her, so she flipped her arms and held the parachute handles underhanded. This only exposed new flesh to the heat.

Lee was more worried about what the stings did to her parachute. Surely it would be riddled with holes. How long could it hold her? Luckily the force of the debris was starting to wane and drift or fall back to Earth, so she wouldn’t be caught in an updraft. But that also meant that whatever embers missed the underside of her parachute would boil through it on the way back down. The bigger they were, the more likely they would still be hot. If a large enough one came down right on her helmet she’d be killed instantly.

Lee strained to look up at her chute, her helmet becoming too covered in falling dust to see through. The reddish, orange air around her floated for a moment, matching her rate of descent, then began to accelerate to free-fall. Tiny pieces of the Mojave, some billions of years old, began to gently rest on her arms and shoulders like tan snowflakes. Occasionally a warmer, larger piece warranted shaking off.

After the bulk of the particles between her and her chute fell away, Lee looked up again. Her chute was half gone. A normal parachute from her altitude would be about a seven minute ride down. With what she had left she knew she was coming down faster, but where? She still couldn't see the ground, and she had only a few minutes left.

Lee squinted, looking below in every direction to find some clue. A few seconds later, she saw it. Not the ground, but a dividing line. To her left, maybe a few hundred yards away, a darkness began running as far as she could see to the right. That must be the alien tarmac, and the open desert on the left, reflecting sunlight through the sand in the air. In fact, a few times she caught sunbeams creating glittering shafts of light as they cascaded over the dust cloud. Where they hit the ground on her left the yellow color glowed, compared to the right, an inky sea where sunshine and embers alike fell to die.

The air above her felt hot through the holes in her suit and the glowing pillars of light started to reflect strangely, as if following her as well as the Sun. She jerked her head up again. Her parachute had caught fire. The embers must have sparked the thin fabric, and now it was going up in strips, slowed only by the heavier pleated sections every few feet. She still had a few minutes to fall, at least a few thousand feet up, but that chute would only push back on the oxygen feeding its flaming parasite for less than a minute.

Lee pulled as hard as she could, shifting her body weight to put its entirety on one handle. At first the remainder of the chute pushed her toward the glowing desert and away from the black approaching alien platform. Her effort only fanned the flames to the other side of her parachute and made her handles all but useless another second later. As she watched, helpless and feeling her velocity increase, the flames jumped through open sections of the chute and played with the strings connected to her flight suit.

She would have to free-fall if the flames latched onto the strings and came her way. Every second was precious. She could no longer look to the ground, although without the ability to turn it made little difference anyway. The parachute all but destroyed, she began a mad spin, something completely disorienting if she hadn't already been concentrating at the center, at the strings connecting her to the chute.

In less than a second she saw the flames flare down toward her and she pulled the cutaway, separating herself from the useless parachute. She felt for her reserve, but without any chute at all she spun out of control, every second at terminal velocity bringing her 200 feet closer to the Earth, or something else. The thought occurred that she should have bailed a minute ago: now she may be too low for the reserve chute to do anything.

She found the lever and pulled hard before spinning like an upside down top. The chute had come out at the wrong point in her spin and her feet were tangled. As the chute flailed in the wind she desperately tried to wiggle out of the nest of strings, turning toward the encroaching ground for a moment.

“Shit.”

Sandy debris blinked like stars against the void beyond. She didn’t know how close, with the alien material not bouncing any photons back, but larger pieces of debris came toward her, obviously sitting on the alien tarmac. She had maybe ten seconds left.

Still at just under terminal velocity the second chute was only a hindrance. In fact, hitting headfirst at this speed meant almost certain death. Her hands were already at her ankles, trying to unwind the parachute strings. She unsheathed her survival knife and swished it through the strings as she tried to twist her body, pulling against the remaining strings. Halfway up she gave up on the knife and grabbed the rest of the chute strings, pulling herself upright.

Lee knew from training that if she had any chance of surviving the impact, it had to be feet-first. As she looked up, grasping for a stronger grip on the flopping parachute, she realized she was close enough to the ground that she could see debris rising up in her peripheral vision. The dust was not as thick down here and the spikes towered up into the dark, debris-laden sky. Other things, moving things, legs perhaps, moved through the dust like shadows of giant spiders.