The Filter Trap (26 page)

“Up. Get up!”

Clear as day, but far from it, Lee heard the words through a swirl of darkness and pain. She blinked her eyes, unable to recognize at first the difference between opened and closed.

Why was she here? Where was she? Things ached where she didn’t think nerves existed. Then she remembered. The plane pushed out of control, her parachute catching on fire, and her final drop to certain death on the dusty, black, alien platform in the Mojave Desert.

A miracle to be alive, but for how long? She rolled from her side to her back, staring at the blue sky, the final wisps of dust cloud gently blowing away in a winter breeze. With the holes burned in her flight suit it was almost cold. She’d beaten much of the dust, still hot or not, to the ground, and it shook off her as she rolled, echoing her previous position like a temporary ghost before settling back onto the black-the black what?

Turning her head again, she was face-to-face with this alien surface, though it was no longer a deep black. The miles-long alien installation in the desert now had a more natural caste, covered in the dust it had expelled from the ground after more objects came slamming down. Her head had slammed too, and a thousand hangovers all at once made her want to just lie there and continue dying.

Squeezing away dizziness, Lee noticed movement in the direction of the tall black spires rising from the settling dust. Dark lines shimmered like a strange mirage above the same surface she lay upon.

Black limbs shuffled nearby quicker than her eyes could follow. With a shout of agony she instinctively reached for her pilot’s standard M9 and pointed into the heart of the roiling mass, but they didn’t appear interested in her yet. The last thing the colonel asked her to do was report, not attack. Her hand shifted to her emergency radio controller.

“Colonel?” she whispered. “If you can hear me just tap on your receiver. I don’t think I’m in danger if I stay quiet.”

The receiver made a slight pop. The colonel, and likely the president, listened. She’d enlisted in the Air Force to fly fighter jets, not become a broadcaster, but she’d give it her best shot. Hopefully without taking one.

“In front of me, dark shapes bustle under, across, and through each other. A nest of dog-sized black spider-things moving in and about the spikes that embedded in the black material before I ejected. The former spikes are shifting slowly to a horizontal orientation, aided by spider-like creatures growing and losing appendages as needed.

“In my expert opinion, this is all creepy as hell, sir. I’m backing away as inconspicuously as I can. Luckily my flight suit is still covered in dust and matching the color of the sand that’s on the surface. I thought all my bones would be jelly after falling that far, but I feel okay, no worse than after a bad day in basic. The energy-absorbing properties of this stuff must have absorbed
my
impact too.

“These things move really fast, too fast to see in detail. I only catch bits here and there when one slows down to knock a pillar in place or lose appendages and roll to the next construction zone. They’re coated in a matte gray or black, but not the light absorbing material I examined on this platform before the towers came down.”

Lee smelled burning fuel from her downed jet drifting in the wind. If anything down here wasn’t a dumb robot she wouldn’t be inconspicuous for long. She pulled out her M9 and steadied it, aiming at the middle of the orgy of folding alien limbs below, though she doubted her reaction time would guarantee a hit against the hummingbird’s pace of those things.

“Lieutenant,” Franks whispered.

Bang! The voice unexpectedly coming through her emergency radio tripped her nervous finger to fire her M9.

“Shit!”

“What happened?”

“Well, I just shot at them and they didn’t seem to notice, so that’s good, I guess.”

“Shot at what? Do you see extraterrestrial beings?”

“I suppose. I’m not sure they’re alive in the sense that we are, but there are a great many manufacturing something more than a mile across. Whatever the landing pad is made of must have absorbed the impact energy and directed it downward, drilling through the rock beneath the sand. Honestly, sir, they kind of look like gigantic golf tees pounded into the ground.”

“Maybe they’re trying to reach an aquifer. If they need water, that means they’re some kind of animal, like us. They can be killed.”

“Not the things I’m seeing. Hold on, I’m coming to the edge of the platform soon. How long until the others get here?”

“Any moment now. Scramble as far away from the dead zone as you can.”

The dead zone.
“They’re nuking this thing?”

“Not yet, Lieutenant, but you’ll be dead all the same if you’re down there in the middle of it.”

On cue, the cavalry arrived on the eastern horizon. Ten F-22s boomed high overhead, little triangles flanked and followed by scores of F-18s. In the distance, Apaches rumbled lower across the desert. The tiny, blasted cross shape of a B2 bomber loomed above the faraway clouds. Lee knew she had to be long gone before it arrived. She stripped out of the sand-covered flight suit, grabbed her survival pack and ran through the sand for a high dune.

Through gulps of air she shouted questions to the colonel.

“Did they destroy the Moon, Colonel?”

“Unknown, Lieutenant, but nobody else has returned to the scene of the crime yet so they’re our prime suspects I guess.”

“Do you intend to eradicate the structure?”

“The president authorized Operation Waking Desert, a show of our offensive capabilities in case your mission for direct observation resulted in anything less than them coming out to shake hands. Needless to say the president and Joint Chiefs are less than pleased with the welcome mat they’ve laid out for you down there.”

“They wouldn’t know what a welcome mat is. I just wonder if we’re not making a mistake. When I fired my M9 they didn’t even notice. No defensive capabilities. That might mean they don’t have any offensive either.”

“Better safe than dead. For us and you. Take cover, Lee.”

Lee turned and ran, unbuckling her emergency vest and stuffing her survival pack into her waistband. A trio of F-35s flew over the low California desert hills. She heard the cool hiss of missiles going live and streaking in her direction.

Franks didn’t usually use first names. Maybe he worried it would be the last time they spoke, all pretenses of authority dropped to convey it was more than an order. He was scared.

Lee scrambled up the dune on all fours. She couldn’t let Franks down, not after already letting down her squad. Someone had to live through this and sell the movie rights, after all. She’d dreamed about meeting aliens since she was a little girl. Now her true-life ET story was turning into a Heinlein novel, and her only part in it was collateral damage.

‘They’ll try anything but nukes first,’ she reminded herself. The fallout was too close to significant population centers. As devastated as Los Angeles and San Diego were, anyone that had escaped east before the tsunami hit would meet radiation from a nuclear bomb dropped in the Mojave. She knew they might use that option only if the AIM-120 missiles on the F-35s’ mission failed to stop what was growing in the sand.

She kept moving higher, her heavy flight boots sinking deeper into the sand with each step until she abandoned them altogether to move like a jumpy lizard. At least it was winter, otherwise she might burn her hands and feet.

A succession of concussion blasts sounded behind her and she hit the sand face first. Shielding her eyes, she peeked around her shoulder. Orange bubbles and black smoke coated the alien structure. The pointy black spires and odd mechanical angles of the place reminded Lee of exploding oil wells in the Kuwaiti desert. Iraq War I was far before her time in service, but they’d all seen the footage.

Jet after jet zoomed through the smoke, arcing around for secondary runs. Wait, smoke? The structure was burning, vulnerable. Earth might survive, but what would victory look like?

Waves of destruction rained upon the supposed invaders, a barrage of inescapable heat and force that would not only cripple, but completely incapacitate any human army.

But human armies never braved the more brutal environment of space travel. The towers continued to rise. Robot spiders regenerated limbs and continued undaunted. For half a mile along the black patch, alien spires grew amidst grand explosions.

It went on for nearly an hour before the sky fell silent, the jets called off after inflicting no lasting damage. A nuclear equipped B2 remained in a miles-wide circle. The masters of the mechanical spiders, if there were any, remained hidden.

Hundreds of towers covered in thistle-shaped protrusions grew into the clouds. The desert morphed into a gigantic rose bush carved from coal, curated by black widows, and watched by two curious blue eyes on an untouched dune.

“Colonel, will they drop the big one?” Lee tried to hide her fear. The heat of the bomb blasts came too close for comfort; a nuclear bomb would fry her in a split second. With all the smoke still clearing into the upper atmosphere above the clouds, she might never see the B2 bringing her doom.

“Colonel?”

She turned the radio over. The custom-shaped battery, impossible to shove in backwards, but also impossible to replace, was gone. She was alone, waiting and watching for what might be her death. She’d miraculously escaped so many close calls already; even a cat with nine lives would feel out of luck by now.

Waking Desert had retreated to slumber again, apparently. Nothing flew, at least in visible range, near the alien complex. Undaunted, the spires grew until reaching an apex, prompting the spiders to scurry into tumorous growths at the base. A crash from the heavens drew Lee’s attention toward long, angled shapes repeating births through the upper atmosphere. A
third
alien landing.

Landing was the most dangerous part of any man-made flight, space or otherwise. These aliens seemed to have it so under control that they split their landings into multiple parts, like humans eating a fancy meal. Was this next bit the main course, or the dessert?

Again, no parachutes or jets flared to slow the descent. Instead, with pin-point precision the sharp prongs engaged the tops of the spires, sliding down upon them using the energy-absorbing properties of the black material to slow to a stop. After reaching the base of the spike, each entire ship flopped over with great force but made no sound.

They kept coming, a bottomless buffet of landings, one right on top of the other. After reaching several levels, the ends of the bottom ships sloshed open. The greenish-black exterior, burnt from atmospheric entry, exposed a soft orange interior glow. This happened in unison down the line of spires.

Lee snapped her binoculars up to get a closer look at figures slowly emerging. The movement, deliberate, but with enough hesitation to belay biological decision-making, showed these were not more automata. Perhaps their masters, at last.

Yet they resembled their robotic servants, with four appendages allowing quadrupedal or bipedal movement. Each ended in a pad, like an oven mitt, rather than independent digits. Where their servants resembled black widows, the masters resembled four-legged hairy tarantulas the size of small bears. Almost comical in appearance, each
bearantula
sported multi-colored fur, often with contrasting neon rings.

Lee’s blood ran cold when she saw the eyes. Multiple, deep set, unemotional black jewels peeked from beneath fur in the midsection. Only then Lee noted the beasts had no head to speak of. As she contemplated this, a bearantula stopped and stood on two legs, looking in Lee’s direction for several seconds.

Reminded of a passage in Stephen King’s
It—
the first time she felt honest terror as a child
—
Lee dropped her binoculars. Her loose interpretation of the titular monster’s final form looked a lot like what walked down there on the landing pad, all legs and dead eyes. Even if those legs were lined with carnival side-show-colored fur. But she couldn’t close this book. There was no escape. She picked up her binoculars, hoping to see the deadlights looking away from her with disinterest as their mechanical servants had.

To her horror, the thing concentrated on Lee, and more began to notice. Under emotionless eyes it pulled a pair of furry lips back to reveal a small oval of crystalline teeth. Lee noticed more eyes, a small ridge of them circling the mouth, and smaller dots leading up to each of the four appendages.

The bearantulas were only four feet tall standing on two legs, or hands, or whatever they should be called, which they apparently tended to do when curious. Lee studied more of them as they studied her in return. She noticed only slight variations in color and body mass, unlike her own species. Perhaps these were soldiers, which, like her peers, were forced to meet certain standards of appearance and fitness.

Lee found out how they’d manipulate something more delicate when she saw a set of pincers leap out from under the edge of one of the appendage-ending pads. The pincer seemed to be made of the same endless black void the landing pad was formed of. The landing pad material, the ships, and the robots were all enabled by some kind of shape-shifting meta-material. Franks said the scientists had called them nanites and Lee hoped she’d live to research the definition.