The Filter Trap (31 page)

Pith scoffed. “I surmised as much. Taking water from another planet to replace your own would be incredibly inefficient. Sounds like the plot of too many bad movies.”

“I didn’t know you were into sci-fi, General.”

“Now that some of it’s become science—
fact
I’ve had to acquaint myself. However, I was helped by a clue you didn’t see yet.” Pith took the tablet and rifled through file folders, bringing up a new set of images.

“What do you make of
this
, hot shot?”

“These are satellite photos,” Allan whispered. “But the Wenchang satellite won’t make another pass in that area for another few days.”

“That’s right, the
Chinese
satellite won’t.”

“You launched your own satellite? NASA is back up?”

“Nope, private enterprise. NASA would take three years under normal circumstances to get this shit kicked up there. Thank God for eminent domain and eccentric billionaires with hard-ons for Mars. So, tell me what’s going on here. What’s . . . that?”

Pith smashed his index finger into a string of white dots in an arc, getting dimmer as they receded into a star field.

“I don’t know, you have to give me more. Coordinates, the change in positions over time
—
something! This just looks like bright stars, but they’re in a formation so I’m guessing not. Last time I saw this it was the mother ships on their way here.”

“Okay, try these on,” Pith said as he pulled out printouts. “I don’t know what any of this is, but from the way the guy at the computer was looking at it and breathing hard I figured you would.”

Pith finally sat down, taking one of the metal chairs beside Allan. He put a hand on Allan’s back as he scoured the new information, printouts of trajectory plots, heat grading, density projections, velocity, information only available from a sophisticated satellite; the holy grail for science in the Earth’s time of need.

“Take your time, professor.” Pith checked his watch. “I’ve still got another hour.”

“You’ve kept so much from us!” Allan said, trying to quell outrage.

“You three were always on a need-to-know basis. I think you can get more out of this than the other two. Try and be grateful your old pal General Pith is showing you now.”

“This is a solar system orbital map! You had me advise the president on guesses, speculation on crumbs we salvaged from Mauna Kea. How long have you been sitting on this?”

“Don’t get too worked up, Sandy. We’ve only had eyes in the sky
—
er
—
space for six hours, you had everything we could give you before that testimony. However, I doubt anyone else was going to show you
this
for a while.”

Allan was unsure how to respond at first.

Pith sighed. “You know in my day when someone did you a favor you’d
—
”

“Thank you,” Allan blurted to get it over with.

Allan tried to speed read, but there was too much to read even in a few hours. The data was muddy; amateur calculations splayed out in graphs mixed with raw data, numbers and codes that were just as alien to Allan as those things in the desert.

Someone on the Pith’s staff, someone young and without an advanced degree, had been up late and Allan suspected Pith hadn’t been happy with the results. Allan had to focus in on the important parts to perform any better. He wanted in the loop, now that he knew there
was
one. Allan realized the Pith’s earlier sharing had been merely a test, a gateway to the real treasure that was downloading from the satellite while everyone else in the complex was snoring.

Allan quickly found evidence for this conclusion. “This trajectory plot shows these dots were released from the area of the mother ship’s geosynchronous orbit. You already knew they were shooting water up, you just didn’t know how. So what do you need from me?”

“We know they’re shooting ice out into space. But for what?”

“General, do you still have the original photos, the ones when the ships were turning?”

Pith shuffled to the bottom of the folder and pulled them out. Allan grabbed them.

“It’s their fuel. That’s why these looked like comets at first. They’re NSWRs. I never thought I’d see this.”

“I’ve heard a lot of that lately,” Pith said. “What’s an NSWR?”

“Nuclear Salt Water Rocket, a theoretical rocket that Zubs designed for a possible Mars mission before Congress cut NASA’s funding. Holy shit, are you going to let Jill see this?”

“Jill? What’s she got to do with this?”

“She knew Zub
—er,
Doctor Zubnir.”

“Your professorial circle-jerks are truly fascinating, Doctor, but the aliens are already here. Unless Jill has ‘Zubs’ on speed-dial I don’t think showing her this will do much good.”

Allan grumbled, supposing he should enjoy Jill missing out, but his enmity towards her had softened since they started unraveling the truth about the Event together. He’d rather share these moments with her than lord it over her. She, as did Kam, appreciated this in a way Ariel never could. An intimacy of the mind, and Allan was cheating on them with Pith of all people, a real tea party patriot that would probably rather go shoot guns off the mountaintop with Ariel and her father than study satellite photos. To prove Allan’s point, Pith emphasized his ruthlessness again.

“Sands, are you listening to me?” Pith snapped his fingers in front of Allan’s face. “Wake up! The silent treatment won’t convince me to show this to Jill. Tarmor doesn’t have a family; she can still try to lie to me. You won’t. So the aliens have some kind of salt water propellant. We hopefully have the rest of our lives to figure out the how. Right now I need you to tell me why they’re shooting more of it off into space.”

Allan parsed the data for a few minutes, looking for something.

“Our colorful new friends will be leaving soon.”

“I like what I’m hearing so far, keep going, son.”

Dear God, Pith said it with the same twang as Ariel’s father, and it made his spine twitch the same way.

“If my estimation is right, and these orbital maps are correct, they’re sending the ice out to orbit between the Earth and the next planet on an interior solar orbit to us. They’re setting up refueling stations for their trip to that jungle planet with the repeating signals.

“We were just a pit stop with some annoying locals.”

A cloud of black smoke rose high into the air a few blocks behind the group.

“That fucking kid!” Leto whispered and shook his head. “I told him not to go back for her, but he had to try and be a hero. Now they’re both dead and we’re down a rifle.”

“Quiet Leto. All of you, get frosty!” Pete warned them, gripping his rifle tighter. “That explosion didn’t look like any artillery I’ve ever seen.”

“But we didn’t hear them coming,” Amanda said. “The other aliens buzzed from a mile out.”

“Keep going to the evac unless there’s something in front of us to shoot at.” Pete waved them all in front of him as he scanned the rising smoke a few blocks away.

The privates walked on looking wildly side to side. Leto felt the hair on his arm stand up before he heard Pete say “Oh shit” under his breath. Reflexively Leto pointed his rifle in the air and squeezed.

“Take cover!” Pete shouted as Leto’s bullets dropped off the truck-sized black delta fifteen feet above, the coating absorbing the impact with no apparent effect. As the rounds pattered on the grass, the delta stopped and began to slowly lower.

“Did you see that?” Ben asked in amazement. “The bullets just . . . stopped, and fell.”

Pete shushed Ben and waved them into an adjacent home.

They bustled to the front window and peered out, sticking rifles out and tipping their helmets down. A few large thumps came from the side of the house where the privates had just been.

“Ground troops?” Ben whispered, squinting to see the strange figures outside.

“I counted three,” Amanda said.

Leto grinned, moving his rifle scope to his eye and pointing it at the door. “Advantage Marines
—”

The living room wall blasted in and threw them into the opposite wall. Leto, his rifle lost somewhere in the dizzied drywall and wood chunks coating everything, coughed and scrambled up the stairs to a balcony, the railing destroyed in the blast. It was their ambush in Ramadi all over again.

Amanda found Ben nearby. Half his face sagged like he’d had a stroke, but a bloody brick and matching imprint suggested a shattered cheekbone. “He’s unconscious. Man down!” she screamed and grabbed her tiny med-kit, taping padding to Ben’s face. “Major!” she screamed, but Pete didn’t answer. He was busy furiously unlodging himself from bricks and drywall.

Three stocky figures, silhouetted in shafts of sunlight and escaping dust from the explosion, entered the dark room through the hole where the living room wall had been. None were more than four and a quarter feet tall, but what they lacked in height they made up for in bulk. Each lumbered through the gap with wide appendages on all fours, but stood tall on two after breaching the hole.

The soldiers wondered if it was a trick of the mind, a hallucination, but the figures seemed to be covered in a thick pinkish fur, mottled and rippling. The pink broke into white bands on the appendages that changed with every twitch, like a living barber pole.

Amanda, the closest to the things, was more attentive to the tiny beads of white reflected from what might be the chests. ‘Going to die on first contact,’ she thought, ‘but at least I can look them in the eye . . . or eyes,’ realizing the pinpricks were from multiple eyes peeking from the furried torsos.

One of them was a few steps in front of the other, with more pronounced color variations in the fur. ‘So you have majors too,’ Amanda thought. She noticed black lines thrusting from the fur on the leader’s upper appendage, forming a point with several jagged boxes and tubes, coagulating into some kind of ad-hoc tool. No,
a weapon!

The leader pointed it at Pete, who was fumbling blindly in the dust for his own gun.

“Pete!” Amanda screamed, and one of the other creatures focused a weapon on her. She didn’t see the blast, no explosive discharge, only the sound of Pete’s rifle cracking open like crushing a pile of twigs. The rifle in Thompson’s lap looked as if it had come out of an industrial smelter, the drywall dust burning off in a gray haze.

‘Lasers!’ Amanda realized as Pete reached for his ankle knife. The three figures crept closer across the smattering of debris and destroyed furniture in the room as their heavy bodies crunched down. One of the figures at the back moved the remnants of a heavy oak sitting chair as if it was a paperweight. ‘How do you kill an alien gorilla?’ Amanda thought, scanning the room for her own rifle.

The leader stood inches from Pete with a posture that would have indicated gloating if it were a human. Amanda smelled burning from her side. Looking down she saw Ben’s entire upper body had melted into the floor; one of the other aliens must have “shot” him at the same time as the Pete. She stifled a scream and froze, but the noise still made one of the figures train a laser on her.

The only remaining noise in the house came from Pete’s heavy breathing. Dust shook off his body as he continued the slow reach for his boot. The leader touched the end of his laser gun to Pete’s forehead, and the reaching hand stopped.

Amanda squinted to see the laser. This close it seemed less of a gun than a simple extension of their own fur, emerging out of the arm without a barrel, but a kind of box attached to what might be a dark crystal shaped into a prism. She could see strands of thin, dark material emerging from the armored suit and groping the box above the prism. The strands twitched like tendons when the figures moved. She found it odd that the aliens seemed without hands or digits at the ends of their appendages, just a thick pad-like flap which cradled the black growth of a weapon.

A noise like grinding of heavy machinery mixed with hummingbird squawking came from somewhere in the leader’s fur. The other two returned it in kind, albeit subdued.

‘Came all this fucking way just to gloat about killing us,’ Amanda thought. ‘So you’re not so advanced after all. Your pride makes you take risks. That means we can kill you. You’re no better than us; just carrying better toys.’ She closed her eyes, secure in knowing that even though she may die, the aliens had vulnerabilities later soldiers could exploit.

The leader made a louder sound, high-pitched and long. The major shook uncontrollably, the leader’s laser still inches from his forehead.

Amanda opened her eyes to see where that horrible sound had come from. A wide and low mouth opened up from the bottom. Clenched teeth, maybe hundreds of them, revealed themselves atop dark green gums in a grimace. The fur-covered lips were pulled back from the bottom in a straight line, an upside down version of a human smile. The teeth seemed to vibrate and the gloating, grinding noise sounded again. This time the complimentary squeaking from the leader’s followers was joined by a fourth.

Something squeaked upstairs and a rumbling regular noise got louder. The two figures behind the leader retrained their arms on the source of the sound, the balcony to their right. Pete screamed a battle cry as he grabbed for his knife and stabbed at the arm of the leader, still trained on him. At the same time, a grand piano, mangled beyond playability but wheels intact enough, rolled off the balcony and came down on top of the three aliens.

It had been a man-sized vase in Ramadi, but the effect was the same. The piano dumped the three aliens into the floor in a gnashing of incongruous, shrill piano wires pricked all at once. Music to Amanda’s ears.

The leader fired his laser as he was hit, grazing Pete with a reverse mohawk, before blazing a six-inch-wide smoking trail that traveled up the wall and into the ceiling, barely missing Leto who emerged after the piano, to watch his handiwork.

In the wreckage-on-wreckage the only visible alien body didn’t move, the others trapped under the broken piano. Whirring and buzzing came from its body as the black tendons retracted into the fur. The fur had flattened and hardened, making a kind of defensive shell for the unconscious wearer.

“Run!” Leto shouted from the balcony.

The smashed piano lid shifted.

“Run, Amanda!” he reiterated.

“Get out of here!” Pete also shouted at Amanda, as he tossed aside debris, looking for Leto’s gun. Or anyone’s gun, really.

Amanda didn’t question the order, running through to the back of the house, escaping through the back door. By the time she reached the side fence she heard the sounds of struggle from inside. Pete and Leto yelled valiant battle cries so loud they nearly matched the intensity of the rounds pouring out from Leto’s recovered rifle. A crash and a thud later and the voices stopped.

Amanda reached the street and ran straight south on Roxbury, not stopping until she reached Olympic. The aliens were here; there was no need for time-consuming kitty-corner backyard sneaking. She turned the corner and headed west on Olympic, then skidded to a stop.

A block away twenty-five soldiers were forming a line. They faced in her direction, watching something behind her with rifles trained. One by one they noticed her within their peripheral vision and she watched waves of horrified indecision wash over each.

She’d only seen that look once before, when she’d relieved a sniper in Fallujah. The sniper had accidentally shot a friendly when a soldier tripped into the line of fire. That look from an American soldier only meant one thing. You were about to die in crossfire.