The Filter Trap (34 page)

“Yes,” Kam said, with all the confidence and determination he could offer up to disguise his knotted stomach.

The vacuum-sealed airlock entrance to the holding cell opened with a whoosh and a crisp clamp. Jill, hidden by the two-way mirror, held her breath as Kam stepped through.

The squat thing gripped the underside of the ledge it sat on and twitched. As Kam slowly approached, it delicately moved off the ledge and positioned itself behind it.

“I believe it’s adopting a defensive posture,” Kam whispered.

Kam stopped and wrote “MAN” on the tablet, drawing an arrow toward himself. He held the tablet with one hand and pointed at himself. “Man,” he said.

Only Kam’s reflection in the alien’s deep black eyes moved.

My mind is open
, Kam thought. The creature stayed still as a statue, and the entity Kam came to know in dreams stayed silent too. He paused and closed his eyes, clearing his thoughts to make way. But nothing came. Perhaps it had been his mind playing tricks on him after all. Just a dream.

But this wasn’t. There was a real alien less than ten feet from him. He tensed, frozen now with fear instead. If this thing wasn’t the dream voice, it truly was alien. Capable of anything.

“Doc?”

“It’s okay, General. I, uh-I’m matching it, seeing if it will imitate my movements.”

Kam relaxed and moved all the way to the alien’s side of the enclosure. He gracefully put the tablet on the ledge to face the alien, then sat on the far side with hands clasped on his knees. Kam’s body faced the mirror, but his head turned to study the alien less than a meter away.

After a few minutes, the alien steadied itself, rising to look closer at the tablet. Black strings started emerging from the end of one of the upper appendages. Kam clenched his teeth but tried not to move in the hazard suit.

“Kam, you should know, our soldiers said it creates weapons like that,” Pith warned. “It’s usually lasers, and we’ve coated the room with something to refract the energy. Even if it’s not pointed at you the spray might get you or the heat might build up and cook you.”

“I’m staying, General. Surely a race that can fly across space isn’t dumb enough to shoot me when I’m clearly trying to communicate.”

“It doesn’t know that!” Jill said. “You don’t know
what
it thinks you’re doing!”

“It’s seen our soldiers, Jill. It knows what
our
malevolence looks like.”

“Good feelings or not, if he starts shooting I’m turning that room into a vacuum chamber,” Pith warned.

The black strings turned not into a laser, but a point. It slowly started to draw something on the screen. After a few frustrated moments the alien stopped and pushed the tablet back to Kam.

“The alien drew thin, seemingly random strokes,” Kam reported. “Unlikely to be writing of any kind; there’s no discernible pattern to it.”

Instead of writing, Kam brought up a star chart and zoomed in to show the Earth. He held up the tablet to face the alien. “Earth,” he said, then pointed around the room. He placed the tablet near the alien again.

Pith put his head in his hands. “If this is the best we got we’re in trouble.”

It regarded Kam for a moment, then used its black “finger” to point at the Earth and made a sound like a harsh whistle with more staccato stops.

Kam zoomed in on the Earth more, pointed at it, and then played back the alien’s sound.

Kam pulled the tablet back, ready to take the next step, but the alien made a short noise.

It held out an appendage and the black “finger” recessed and spread over more of the fur. A device was emerging from the arm.

“Doctor Douglass, should we—”

“Shhhh!” Kam whispered, enraptured.

The device assembled itself and blinked to life as a kind of holographic projector. Kam watched in awe as the display showed the flight-path from the alien’s home planet to Earth. Then it continued and the flight path went from Earth to another planet with an orbit interior to Earth’s.

“They’re going to the other source of the radio emissions,” Jill whispered.

“Sands was right,” Pith whispered. “Ask him why,” he ordered.

Kam looked up at the mirror.

“We’re hardly there yet,” Jill said for him.

Kam raised his arm and pointed at Earth in the display, said “Earth,” and then moved his finger to the alien’s planet. It made a chirpy sound. He played the sound back and pointed at the alien’s planet. The alien made the same sound again. Kam pointed at the planet interior to Earth.

The alien made a different sound, but this time with guttural stamping. It shifted position too, broadening the torso with spider eyes. It looked for all the world like a little headless gorilla about to pound its chest. The small mouth curled out more as it spoke, and Kam glimpsed for the first time the sharp teeth inside.

This time Kam couldn’t control himself and twitched back in horror.

“Did you guys ever read
Childhood’s End
?” he asked.

“What?” Pith said.

“Nothing,” Kam replied. “I, uh, I’d rather this guy look like the devil than a lamprey-mouthed tarantula.”

After suppressing his fear, he leaned closer. Might as well go all-in since the alien was cooperating. It wanted to show him something. The display showed a three-dimensional construct of a desert fox, then a rattlesnake, then a human. It was detailed but crude in understanding of human anatomy. It probably hadn’t observed any humans naked yet. The composite was a stocky and bumpy asexual bipedal creature, with a cartoonish head.

“I don’t think it can communicate with the rest of them from in here,” Kam said.

“How do you know that?” Pith asked.

“It’s showing me what it thinks a human looks like naked, and believe me it pales in comparison to whatever the lieutenant must look like.”

“That’s good, Kam!” Pith said excitedly. “It doesn’t know they’ve got one of us. It can’t demand a prisoner swap.”

“Would you not swap if you could?” Jill asked, terrified.

“We’re not just at war, Doctor Tarmor, we’re at
interstellar
war.”

Jill tried not to let a tear fall inside her suit. ‘The aliens came, but
we’re
abandoning humanity,’ she thought.

Kam was concerned with other things back in the room. The alien’s other appendage grew another black finger, which it pointed at the crude human in the display.

“Man,” Kam said. “Hu-man.”

The alien made a noise that sounded like “mrrrrr-ip,” and its mouth curled up at the end for the high pitch again. Closer than before, Kam noticed something: the fur around the mouth didn’t move as it should. In fact, it seemed cracked, exposing white muscles underneath that flexed when the thing talked.

Kam leaned in more and saw that the movement of the fur and the muscles inside were disconnected. ‘So that’s why they didn’t know if it had a mouth or ears or anything,’ Kam thought.

The alien backed away suddenly, but Kam had already seen enough.

“Ha! I wondered how these guys could walk around in their fur. I mean, hadn’t they ever read
War of the Worlds
? No wonder they weren’t worried about microbiome issues, bacterial contamination, all that stuff . . .”

“What are you talking about, Douglass?” Pith snorted.

Kam smiled inside his helmet.

“General, that’s not a fur suit, that’s a space suit it’s wearing!”

“So what did you learn from that thing?” the president asked, starting the meeting without any formalities. This core group of military advisors and handpicked scientific experts had met in the war room nearly every other day since assembling under the mountain. The president spoke freely, and expected the same of his staff.

“We know they’re leaving,” Jill said.

“Best news I’ve heard in months,” the president emoted, looking around at a room of still stern-faced generals and senators. The scientists remained guarded but excitable, as always.

“And we know where they’re going,” Allan added with relish.

“So you established a dialogue?” the president asked.

“Something like that,” Kam answered. “We’ve got a long way to go before we’ll have a conversation, but I think I understand something about their language and their writing. Unfortunately, we can’t hear everything they say, and we can’t make those noises either. We’ll never have a one-to-one verbal communication without better software, but we can share data all the same. Not so different than it was for Columbus talking to the Native Americans I imagine.”

“Except we’re the natives,” Jill mentioned.

“Hold on,” the president sternly stopped them. “You said you shared data?”

“Yes,” Kam answered nervously.

“Did you share
our
data?”

“Only the most basic of things, the planet we’re on, what we call it,
etc.
Just enough to make sure we’re talking about the same things. Establish the ground rules. Most of what we learned was from their talking about themselves. Either our captive thought he was buying his freedom, or he was overly-confident and bragging. It showed us their whole mission plan, as if it was an after-school special.”

“Confidence without humility can be a weakness,” the president said. “I wish more congressmen knew that.”

The room was cold, indifferent to the president’s attempt at humor.

Pith unfolded his crossed arms and pulled up a map on the holo-table. “We’ve got a developing situation, Mr. President. The invaders have already left Australia, and it looks like they’re pulling out of China. Of course, we’ll be next. But they’ve still got one of ours
—
”

“And we’ve got one of theirs,” Jill interjected.

“Hardly the point,” Pith corrected her.

“The point,” the president interrupted them both, “is that we have no way to defend against further attacks if we don’t know more about them. There are two ways to do that; get it from them while they’re here, or go to them. I think you can guess which one we’re more capable of doing.”

“And how do you propose we learn more here, sir?” Jill asked. “Their power plants are nearly impervious to all but nuclear attacks, and for all we know, that too.”

“So we don’t destroy their ship, we take it!” he answered with grim determination.

Pith smiled, he’d cajoled the president behind the scenes, feeding just enough information in just the right way to convince him it was not just possible, but necessary.

“We know they’re not invincible.” Now Pith would be the president’s mouthpiece. Easy, since it was Pith’s own plan. “They’re flesh just like us, but using technology decades ahead.”

“Which means we’ll likely fail,” Kam said.

“I can only imagine what would have happened if you were in the war room with Eisenhower before D-day, Doc. Normandy had a predicted casualty rate for some divisions of 80%. That 20% freed Europe and made sure you’re not giving advice to Hitler’s great-grandson. That 20%, or 2% if that’s what it takes, will give us the tools to make sure it’s not a 100% casualty rate for the whole human race when these things come back. We need to learn what we can about the enemy while we still can!”

“The Nazis didn’t have endothermic healing alien technology, and thought-controlled nano-bots,” Jill said.

Pith wasn’t enjoying the back and forth atmosphere that the president had fostered. He glanced in that direction.

“The decision has been made,” the president calmly educated the scientists. “And with more information than you three’ve got.”

“What does that mean?” Allan asked. “What do we not know?”

“I thought that’s the reason we were here,” Jill added.

“Show ‘em.” The president gestured to Pith before standing and starting to leave the room. He turned back at the last moment. “I assume I have no need to explain my decision to the rest of you. You’ll be getting full battle plans for your commanders by the end of the day.”

The other military men and women were more than pleased to have authorization to confront the invaders in earnest. Air strikes and satellite reconnaissance were the tools of the CIA, and the old hawks, whether at the Pentagon or the Capitol, were glad to get the chance to flex their muscle. After the better part of a century of training, World War Three had come at last. They’d go out guns blazing, even if the enemy was in full retreat.

Pith led the three scientists down dark hallways in the rambling complex under a harsh winter storm on the Colorado mountainside. Occasionally a path would twist too close to the hillside and a lightning rumble would echo strangely down the barren halls. The scientists wondered how many secrets were locked away in the mined tunnels beneath the rocky peaks. Could anything be more astonishing than an alien prisoner?

“The president wants to learn their technology,” Pith informed them without looking back. “We need to catch up before they come back.”

“They can wipe us out if they want,” Kam said. “We were just a galactic refueling station.”

“Heliospheric refueling station,” Allan corrected.

“Whatever,” Pith countered, slightly annoyed. “Aren’t you interested in their
final
destination?”

They entered a sort of control room with bustling young soldiers in a hurry to deliver updates on top of updates. Some stopped to salute Pith, but otherwise the group was invisible in the frenzy. Pith flipped through file systems at a monitor, looking for something,

The scientists scanned the room. On the walls a plethora of monitors displayed stunningly detailed information: aerial photos of riots in Zimbabwe, night photography of the Eiffel tower aflame, schematics of the Mojave invasion site, biometric readings on the captive alien. Pith wiped a nearby monitor clean of everything else and brought up a single image.

“There,” Pith said, pointing at the screen.

A pyramidal temple top peeked from above lush leaves. The zoomed-in resolution was terrible, but the shapes cut into the giant triangular sides were visible even from space.

Kam nearly fainted. It was a mirror image—no, an exact replica—of the temple from his dreams. Pith noticed the sudden change and Kam struggled to excuse his surprise.

“That looks vaguely Mayan, with the steps running up the side and the box at the top. I’m familiar with every variant of the Mesoamerican empires, and none of them built anything of this scale, only the ancient Egyptians. This must be ten times that size. The symbols too are different, more like design elements than language. Where is this?”

As if he didn’t already know.

“There’s a reason the Mayans, Egyptians, Minoans and the Greek shared architectural ideas,” Pith said proudly.

“Please don’t say ancient astronauts,” Jill moaned. “That damn
von Däniken set serious SETI work back decades.”

“No,” Allan answered for Pith, “design is a universal concept. Any species advanced enough to look up at the stars with opposable digits would stumble onto geometry. If they avoided religion they’d have a ten thousand year jump on us, too.”

“You mean this is on
their
home planet?” Jill asked.

Pith shook his head. “Not the bearantulas’ home planet; our other new neighbor, no farther away than Mercury used to be, but not nearly as inhospitable.”

“Where they’re going!” Kam gasped.

“This looks ancient and overgrown,” Jill said with hushed awe. “No signs of activity. Why are the bearantulas so intent on going to a dead planet?”

Jill realized the answer to her own question. “It’s the people that are dead, not the planet.”

“Our pollution must have saved us,” Allan said. “Global warming was our best defense against a hostile alien invasion.”

“If left alone we would have done the same,” Kam said. “Watch the turning point go by and send future generations to somewhere else, terraforming Mars, probably.”

“Exactly,” Pith agreed. “And we were further into the planning than any of you pompous Prius drivers knew.”

Jill smiled. “Well, apparently greed is a universal concept, too. Unlike us, the bearantulas ruined their planet probably knowing they had this one as a perfect backup the whole time. But if that’s the case, what killed the original inhabitants of that planet?”

“About that . . .” said the general, clicking more buttons, bringing up infrared orbital scans of the habitable planet.

“Lights!” Kam gulped.

“Fire, actually,” Pith corrected him.

“They’ll be slaughtered!” Allan deduced.

Pith nodded again. “We need to make a push, show these bastards they can’t get the same idea about this planet.”

“This planet’s going to look like theirs soon enough,” Jill said.

“Have you forgotten why they came here in the first place?” Pith scolded her. “If their soldiers need a pit stop, their migrants will too. Now that they’ve discovered we’re not insects that can casually be swatted away, they’ll bring the big guns next time.”

Kam nodded sullenly, thinking not just about his own planet, but about the primitive one that he didn’t believe was so primitive after all. “So we need to catch up, at least protect ourselves with similar technology.”

“Now you’re coming around.” Pith smiled. “But we need more than tires to kick, we need someone in the driver’s seat, someone who knows how to work the clutch.”

“What does that mean?” Jill asked with dread.

“There’s one more reason why the president preserved the best scientists equipped for alien contact in the whole world.”

“You’re not serious.” Kam said.

“We’re
going
on that raid, the one the president told us about?” Jill asked.

“Oh, don’t worry, you’ll have a full complement of our best soldiers with you; men and women that, unlike you three, I’ll miss.”

“This is a death sentence. What good are we in a firefight?” Allan asked.

“Don’t be so naive; you’re not going to be there to take bullets—er—lasers, we don’t even send our own nerds in there for that, and they at least know how to shoot. No, you three are there to observe and report while the real heroes rescue Lieutenant Green. The intel she’s been gathering inside that complex is gold, justifies any lives lost in the operation. Assuming she’s still alive.”

“I’m sure you’ll want her even if she’s not,” Jill said under her breath.

“Of course we fuckin’ do!” Pith shouted. “We take pride in leaving no soldier behind.”

“You just want to study the body,” she said, looking away from Pith. “Learn what you can while you still can.”

“Well, this is a new development,” Pith mocked her. “A liberal professor that thinks education is a bad idea. What will you propose next, we
pray
they don’t come back?”

“What if the ship is on autopilot?” Allan asked, cutting through the bickering.

“Then you’ll get to make the second great leap for mankind,” Pith said coldly.

“How likely is that?” Jill asked, fear creeping up.

“Allan already helped us calculate how much oxygen you’d need, assuming their rate of travel is the same as their trip here.” Pith smiled.

“You bastard!” Allan screamed, realizing Pith’s promise to deliver him to his family was a lie. Not only had he not seen them yet but now that they were supposedly on the base, Pith was authorized to take Allan to the Mojave. To die.

The soldiers in the room had more important things to do than listen in on Pith’s conversation, but they perked up when Allan balled his fingers into fists. Soldiers, hands on the pistols at their hips, stood in front of Pith.

“It’s okay,” Pith said as he pushed them aside. “You’ve got more important things to do than get mad at this old man. And so do you three. I also have some encouraging news for you.”

Pith clicked another few buttons on the computer and a satellite view of the space around the small tropical planet interior to the Earth’s orbit came up.

“They’ve got satellites too!” Jill said with astonishment.

“Yes, over two hundred, actually. But we’ve only found the few signals you detected and tried to decode earlier.”

“They’re more advanced than we supposed,” Kam stated.
Maybe all the other signals are telepathic, detected inside my head.

“Correct again, and if that ship does take off, you three are going to find out why, and make sure what happened to them doesn’t happen to us.”

“And we don’t have much time if these other ones are going to get busy wiping them out!” Kam added.