The Filter Trap (32 page)

Jill dreamed she was in a pressure cooker before waking up in her bunk stuffed into the little room deep under the Colorado Rocky Mountains. The room, like in her dream, was bathed in red, pulsating from a bare diode on an alarm high up on the wall. She got up and stumbled toward the door, wondering what triggered the warning lights. Jill heard military boots stamping down the hallway.

The door opened for her. Kam stood at the frame, ecstatic about something.

“I remember the last time you were excited to see my bedroom,” Jill said.

Either he didn’t notice, or he ignored her candor altogether.

“They’ve got one, Jill!” he whispered and nudged her into her room, squinting and flipping her light switch.

“One what?”

“A
thing
, an
it
, the Bearantula!”

“That’s terrible news, Kam. There’s an alien on base and an alarm is flashing. Did it escape?” Jill looked around the room, taking a visual inventory of her sparse belongings in case the next person to open the door told them to evacuate.

Blood flushed from Kam’s cheeks as he shook his head. “Don’t ruin
this
for me, too,” he said before slumping into Jill’s bunk. “I get to talk to an alien
—
AN ALIEN!
—
and you’re raining on my parade again.”

“What do you mean ‘talk to’?”

“The whole complex is on high alert prepping for a nuclear transport drill. But I know it’s not plutonium they’re delivering. It’s one of
them
!”

“And they’re letting
you
see it?” Jill asked incredulously, hands on her hips.

“You think that stargazer, Sands, should get the job? We can all
see
it, but I’m a linguist, the most qualified person within a thousand miles to make first contact.”

“I’d agree with you if they were ancient Mayans, Kam, but these are aliens. Thus the literal word
alien
. No frame of reference. I think you’re their guinea pig. Want to end up like Commander Data, an alien tentacle up your butt, whispering threats to the president from behind a two-way mirror?”

“That was Independence Day, not Star Trek,” Kam corrected her.

“Whatever. Same thing. You know what I’m trying to say: this is too dangerous!” She tilted her head, trying to remind him she had his best interests at heart.

Kam knew it was now or never. If he would mention the images that started appearing in his head after his near-drowning, now was the time, if only for the confirmation that he should recuse himself from this. But he didn’t want to miss this opportunity to see a live alien. He stifled his concern with the rationalization that if the alien really was the source of his mysterious dreams then it already controlled the situation. Kam was just along for the ride, so shouldn’t he enjoy it?

He hadn’t expected Jill to be so off-put by the idea of communicating with it, thinking she’d be an ecstatic cheerleader, eager to share in the momentous occasion. Just when he’d managed to push down all the things he wanted to say about what happened to them at Arecibo so many years ago, she found a new way to break his heart again. He had to admit, she was anything but predictable. Anything but boring. And usually right.

Kam’s face rapidly changed from boyish hope to adult cold realization. “I’ve been pushing it down, but I have a feeling you’re right. I always thought space traveling aliens would be machines, but we got lucky that, according to Allan anyway, they’re coming from close by. That means they probably have things like mouths and teeth, not so far evolved from us.”

Jill sat on the bed and put her arm around his shoulder. “But to learn their language
—
assuming they even have what we’d call language
—
that’s really presumptuous.”

She rubbed his shoulders, his head was in his hands, belying the stress he must have hidden behind exuberance minutes ago.

“It’s
Lieutenant
Commander Data, by the way,” he said, not looking up.

“Sorry to stomp all over your emotion chip. It was nice seeing you happy again. It’s been a long time.”

“It’s been really tough since the Event, and I think I took a lot out on you subconsciously.”

“
Sub
-consciously?” She raised a distrusting eyebrow. “You’ve been distant since we got here. I mean, more distant than I’d expect you to be, given how we left things off.”

“What’s so bad about it, anyway?” he asked, looking over at her.

“I want to be liked, I guess. Even when I don’t deserve it.”

“No, I meant why is the alien on the base bad? I’m surprised you
—SETI Queen—are reacting this way
. This is your dream come true, isn’t it?”

Jill looked at the floor. “I always wanted to confirm the existence of alien intelligence, but I never thought it would happen like this. I started to look at the Fermi Paradox as fact after decades of nothing.”

“Except for the ‘Wow!’ signal,” Kam pointed out.

“An anomaly, the one and only narrow-band obvious signature we ever found in five decades of looking. That, more than anything, proved to me they had to be out there, but not talking to us. Wow! was already ancient history by the time I got to SETI, so instead of looking in vain for another one, I spent my time on why we’d never make contact, exploring all the loopholes; waste radiation, signs of Dyson Spheres, evidence of encryption in supposed natural events, slight disruptions in gravity signatures, unnatural black hole movement, anything that would betray their existence.”

Kam understood. “Chameleons are easy to see in infrared.”

Jill smirked. “The Event threw my life’s work out the window. All my conjectures, the speeches that bounced around YouTube from my TED Talks, all that is just noise. Worse, it’s lies. If the Internet ever comes back I’ll be pilloried as the one person in the world who should have known better. Imagine if Galileo voluntarily denied his scientific instincts to appease his own lack of results. If you want to know how this whole thing makes me feel, Kam, I’m ashamed.”

He put his arm around her shoulders and they leaned against each other.

“So how the hell
are
you going to talk to it?” she asked.

Kam shrugged. “Combinant deduction. It breathes, it lives, and it communicates with its own. They’re all just patterns to recognize and repeat back until we establish a commonality to grow from.”

Liar. If this is the source of the images, the characters, the stories that have filled your dreams then you’re cheating. You haven’t used your enormous brain, you’ve had a card up your sleeve the entire time. At least let Jill in on the act. But why help her? She threw your studies into peril.

Six months on Zoloft to get over her. Maybe tell her
that
. Tell her something. She’s not going to buy your little intuition act. Someone will find that little notebook eventually, anyway, the one with “ASAF Intelligence” on the cover, under your government-sponsored mattress, in your government-sponsored room, under a federally-owned mountain. Attempting to keep a secret in this place might get you killed. Tell her!

Kam broke out a fake smile of confidence as he fought inner conflict. His vanity won out, for now. “At least this thing is alive; I usually study dead writers that aren’t there to let me know when I’ve got it right. I think that gives me a leg up for dealing with these things, don’t you?”

She frowned at him. “Aliens.”

“I know, it’s not enough to convince
you
, but it worked on Pith. I’ll come up with something, I have to. Don’t worry.”

She pushed him back a little. “You think that’s what I’m worried about? That you’ll embarrass yourself? Kam, this thing might kill you with a word or a thought or sound,” she said, raising her voice a bit. “They’ve brought a sleeping shark into the kiddie pool and asked you, the kid with more curiosity than common sense, to poke it. What happens when it wakes up?”

“You’re being ridiculous, Jill. I’m not going to just walk in and shake hands
—er, mitts—with it.
”

She shook her head. “This isn’t so different than the argument against the singularity, you know. There’s nothing
we can devise to outsmart something evolved beyond our intelligence. You know how this works.”

He put his head back in his hands.

“Yeah, yeah. Even without the Internet and in a dark room, the supercomputer could figure out how to put out frequencies by fluttering its power or something that would convince an easily-manipulated human to do anything. It would probably figure out ways to hypnotize us we haven’t even discovered yet.”

She nodded. “The fact that it’s more advanced means we can’t control it. It automatically has knowledge we don’t, and not to sound like Pith-but that gives it an advantage in any fight for resources. That’s exactly what these
Bearantulas
are here for, in case you forgot Allan’s presentation about the water elevators.”

How does that fit in?
Kam questioned himself.
You still think this is a misunderstanding? That you’ll be a peacemaker? Isn’t that what Brent Spiner’s character was trying to do in that old movie? Good God, you’ve even got the glasses and the stubble. Cold Flash was an offensive assault: this is an alien captured in battle. Even if he was the one speaking to you in the dark spaces of your mind, he’s not going to be happy to see you now.

You convince yourself—and try to convince Jill—that your great mind will get you out of this trap, but your DNA is only 2% different from a gorilla. What if your mind is too? What if their minds are 3% ahead of yours, or 5 or 15? No, it’s just flashy technology. Endothermic nanites, something we’d have too if they left us alone for another fifty years. That’s not a progression of brain power, just computing power. Strip a soldier of its tools and it may be no smarter than one of ours. Though just as cunning.

He pursed his lips. “But you’re forgetting, they’re not necessarily that much more advanced. They’re
not
stemming from a singularity. They have some technology that we don’t have, but that doesn’t mean they’re any smarter, especially about biology. We have the capacity for interplanetary travel too, we just didn’t have the motivation they do. We haven’t totally destroyed our planet . . . yet.”

She put her hands back on her hips. “No, Kam, these things are worse than a sentient supercomputer. At least there’s a chance the singularity wouldn’t be openly malicious to us: these things kill anything that gets in their way.”

“Yet we captured one, didn’t we?” Kam protested. “They’re not invincible.”

“Or they know how to play dumb,” she responded grimly. “So how did they get it anyway?”

“Pith didn’t say much more than it came from Operation Cold Flash and the body is inbound, intact, and alive. And they want me there when it arrives.”

“Oh, Kam, just be careful.” She rubbed his shoulders again. He looked up at her with regret.

“They want you there, too.”

The horrified soldiers shouted for Amanda to run to them before it was too late. She heard dull thuds on the pavement behind, inching closer even as she ran parallel to the line of fire.

Amanda didn’t need to turn her head to see the source of the sounds; the same thuds had landed outside that house before the explosion. The alien ground troops were assembling for battle behind her.

“Where’s the major?” a soldier shouted, as she breached the side of their assemblage.

“Dead!” she said without looking, her eyes drawn instead to the flat rainbow of fur growing just a few hundred meters ahead. Realizing that Pete’s death would demotivate the young crew setting up this last stand she shouted, “They’re vulnerable!”

“To what?” someone asked.

“Concussion. Does anyone have a Stinger? Something with bite?”

The figures, some still on all fours, advanced, black lasers pointed at the soldiers.

“I think I know what to do!” said a private behind Amanda.

The soldiers parted as Amanda looked back to find him.

“Look!” he shouted, pointing behind the soldiers at a heavy delivery truck, worse for wear from the Event, but maybe still drivable. “Must have been on a rooftop when the water hit.”

Amanda nodded. “Good thinking! Anyone know how to hotwire?” she asked.

A skinny private from Pendleton ran to the truck. It belched a cloud of smoke and sputtered as the flooded engine struggled to stay alive. The private screamed, “Cover me!” from the driver’s seat. The rest of the soldiers made an opening just wide enough for the truck to squeeze through.

The soldier stomped the gas pedal to the floor and the truck lurched out from behind the soldiers. At least half of the bearantulas trained their arms on the truck and pieces of steel flew off as the lasers sliced through. Two wheels burst and flapped as momentum kept the big truck barreling toward the furred wall, now taller as the otherwise unphased aliens stood on two legs.

Another round of pointing by the aliens and the C-pillar collapsed. One of the lasers burned a fly-sized hole in the windshield before bloody flesh splattered over the rear window, deflating the cheering soldiers.

But the truck kept going, dead meat pressuring the accelerator. The lasers’ precision became their impediment as surgical cuts struggled to stop 10,000 pounds of rolling steel. The aliens couldn’t get any more lasering done before the truck broke their line. The stubby beasts were mowed down, only flinching at the last second. The remaining aliens preoccupied themselves with stopping the truck and turned toward it, away from the line of Marines only a quarter block away.

“Flank!” Amanda shouted and pointed to the sides of the street.

Her scream was accompanied by the first faraway flutters of helicopters zooming in from the Pacific. Smiles crept onto the young soldiers’ faces. They looked at Amanda for direction; by default she was the highest rank around.

“The high school is two blocks away,” Amanda said. “We’ll never make it with these things on our tail. Flank, split and defray!”

She hoped the maneuvers she’d learned in training were universal, or this wouldn’t work. The soldiers split into thirds, with the flanks crowding to the sidewalks, running up the street and hiding behind defilades that used to be yoga studios and coffee shops. The soldiers opposite Amanda climbed to the tops of the wreckage and set a firing line with three Stingers and five M32 grenade launchers. The bearantulas were distracted; otherwise, none of the soldiers would have made it more than two paces without being sliced in half.

“No rifles!” Amanda shouted, realizing the soldiers might not know what she knew about the strange fur that absorbed heat and energy. The lead soldier across the way tipped his helmet. They knew what to do. The enemy’s main weakness: unknown dangers on a strange planet. The most dangerous of all: physics. Although armed with better weapons, a five-ton truck still crushed their alien bones. Blunt force would be the aliens’ downfall if the Marines could muster enough.

The grenades would distract the aliens long enough to allow an escape, she hoped, both for her column and the Marines straddling the wreckage. She never heard the innocuous clicks of the M32s’ grenades escaping their chambers, but the close-range plops and crunches when they met their targets was welcomed by every human within earshot.

The aliens started to bleat in high tones that kept soaring out of human range. If any stray dogs wandered this part of the city, their ears surely bled. Panic set in at last for the invaders. The soldiers knew they had a chance.

While the M32s were bombarding the hairy, spider-like demons, the middle column Amanda left in the street busied themselves making a barricade of rucksacks and communications blocks. Anything that could provide cover was put down like a sandbag wall, with the short ends of the Stingers for mortar. As the aliens that still had limbs to aim turned toward the tops of the adjacent wreckage, hunting for the source of their strife, a chorus of high-pitched targeting lock tones emanated from the sandbag wall.

The efficient middle third let hail a barrage of Stinger fire as Amanda led her column of soldiers up a side street; Linden Drive. She heard the echo of the missiles heading out at close range. Made for surface-to-air combat, the missiles searched for a heat signature. Given their endothermic fur, the missiles might have skipped their alien targets and hunted for more attractive fare. However, the bearantulas were so close that dumb force, the inability to turn a rocket in close quarters, brought them to bear on the invaders efficiently.

Strange taps and whistles came as the errant missiles that missed their primary obstacles scraped the broken street or bounced into buildings. Ordinarily this might be a problem, but against this enemy, blowing shards of glass or toppling steel might be as much of a win as a direct hit. Many aliens crunched like popcorn when the missiles hit, many more were trapped or squashed by falling girders. American soldiers were, too.

Amanda realized too late that some of the enemy had fanned out after the M32s landed and avoided the Stingers altogether. They were behind her, and making good ground somehow. She didn’t discover this by looking back, but by hearing and smelling soldiers get literally cut down around her. On her left, two arms clattered to the ground still holding a rifle, while the former owner screamed out before being sliced a third time diagonally right through the heart. Blood gushed, thankfully in the opposite direction of Amanda, from the two halves of the dead body.

Amanda was startled for a moment, realizing that the soundless weapon of her enemy held a tactical advantage. “Don’t run in straight lines!” she screamed and strengthened, knowing the lack of sound left more courage in her troops than a chasing Gatling gun might. The lasers also seemed limited to short, targeted bursts, probably using a lot of energy each time. That was another good thing about lasers, unlike a Gatling guns, where the enemy could mow them
all
down in one long spray. Without enemy gunfire it was also easier to relay orders. “They have to aim,” she reminded the column. “Don’t give them an easy shot. Use your surroundings.”

Amanda and her soldiers headed west through an alley to Spaulding Drive. A powerful “ka-kow!” more deafening than the earlier missiles and grenades, echoed for miles. A washed-out mansion behind the troops burst into flame from a terrific explosion.

“Someone had a Javelin!” she screamed, recognizing the unequaled destruction provided by the anti-tank artillery. Wondering if that meant other troops had joined the fight she peered back through the smoke. Their pursuer seemed to be buried in the rubble from the Javelin strike.

Further back she could see to the original street where she’d given the order to defray. The middle column had evaded the laser fire smartly. Radio packs and provisions lay in neatly-sliced chunks in the street, toppled off the abandoned Stingers, but few bodies lay with them.

Through the closer rubble on Spaulding, a pile of glass burst outward like glitter. An alien emerged and clambered over pieces of flooded cars and mushed drywall. It looked more like a spider than ever, skittering low to the ground and twitching unnaturally.

‘If anything positive comes out of this, it’s that I’ll never shiver at the sight of a house spider ever again,’ Amanda thought, absentmindedly rubbing her grandfather’s ring.

The soldiers at the front of the column never stopped running. She tapped the soldiers around her closer to the rear. They let those in the back run forward and around while she and four others carefully pulled pins from their grenades.

“Don’t wait for my command-just throw and take off,” Amanda said low, while pulling two more pins, holding the first grenade gingerly on her finger.

They threw their grenades and didn’t look back. Amanda prayed one of them hit that monster right in its beady-eyed stomach as she led the column further south, taking every kitty-corner available, until they reached the high school.

A gate, uprooted by the tsunami, separated the high school track field from the street. The football field looked more like an actual field, waterlogged and growing out of control. A Chinook set down in the tall grass as Amanda’s column approached. Marines hopped out on either side of the chopper to provide cover. In the distant northwestern sky a second Chinook approached; more dotted the horizon.

Amanda and the other soldiers streamed onto the field, making a beeline for their rescue. The Chinook exploded from inside out, knocking the soldiers on their backs. On the wet grass they craned their heads up to see four of the alien delta-shaped troop carriers slip overhead. A group of Apaches shadowing the destroyed Chinook swung behind the alien delta ships in pursuit. The “karang” of heavy machine guns ricocheted over the soldiers through air filling with black smoke.

The Apaches scored direct hits on the delta ships headed towards the remaining Chinooks. The way the ships reacted was odd to anyone familiar with the destruction normally attributed to 30mm shells. Instead of blasting holes through alien fuselage, the delta ships absorbed the impacts, bouncing and spinning after every hit, sometimes out of control.

Several spun west and collided with remnants of the glitzy hotels on the Avenue of the Stars. Another ship, at the edge of the pack and taking the brunt of the lead Apache’s firepower, flipped end over end. It quickly lost altitude and ditched on the far end of the high school football field. The soldiers lay motionless in the uneven grass a hundred yards away.

Amanda ran to the Chinook, a charred husk burning from the front and back, its cargo hold a smoke flue. The big M60 mounted on the chopper was hot to the touch, but otherwise undaunted by the smolder still pouring from within.

“It’s gas operated!” a nearby soldier, still flat on the ground, warned her.

“Got a better idea?” Amanda shouted back, wincing from the hot smoke hitting her skin as she grasped the spade-grips and checked to see if the ammo feed was jammed.

‘Why am I bothering to check?’ she thought, leaning hard on the grips to tilt the heavy gun around at the other end of the field. Before she started firing she yelled to anyone that could hear, “I’ll cover you! Get down there!”

Her compatriots knew exactly what to do. The Apaches drew the fire of the remaining airborne delta ships; the soldiers had the burden of eliminating any threat from the ground. The dripping wet soldiers fanned out and crept low across the former high school football field as Amanda pelted the top of the alien ship with rounds from the M60. The rapid fire over their heads gave the weary soldiers a strange confidence; they were ready to make whatever drove that thing pay for coming to
their
planet.

The delta craft had come down nearly perpendicular, sticking into the earth on one of the longer sides. Unfortunately, the black bottom faced the troops. Just as in the air, the dark coating absorbed the rounds with little more than a vibration rippling the surface. As the soldiers got closer, they saw the craft remained intact, and their gait slowed. M60 rounds make Swiss cheese out of cinderblocks; the delta ships were stiffer stuff.

Amanda’s gun fell silent and the soldiers froze. She looked around for more ammunition, but the rest lay in a box so hot it wasn’t retrievable with human hands, especially Amanda’s, already burnt from the metal of the M60 handholds.

The soldiers looked back at her, surprised to suddenly lose their comfortable suppressing fire. “Hit the deck!” yelled one, and they all turned back to the delta ship. The legs of a soldier on the far side of the crash slid out from under his chest. He screamed in shock, not at his own misfortune, but at the soldier next to him. The laser's path had cut higher up on his friend, right into the armpit and on through the neck.

The headless soldier’s trigger finger reflexively compressed as she began to slump forward. Semi-automatic rifle fire arced across the grass, bouncing off the delta ship, and hitting two other soldiers in the legs before the dead hand hit the ground and released its grip.

The soldiers stayed on the ground, taking sniper stances. All eyes rested on the underside of the delta ship embedded in the earth. Sonic rips and snorts made the vicious air battle behind them apparent, but they couldn’t pay attention to it until nullifying the threat in front.

“Move forward!” Amanda commanded them, as she jumped down from the empty M60 and ran across the field. “Ready grenades!”