“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Dimitri said as the cable pulled Evi through the trapdoor. The cable was dangling through a hole in the ceiling and seemed to operate under remote control. During the ascent, she had thought of swinging up when she cleared the hole, and throttling Dimitri with her legs, much as she had the first dog she’d killed.
Her friend the peeper must have anticipated her thought. He stood well out of reach and covered her with the Mitsubishi.
The cable stopped and she swung herself to the side and stood. “Now what?”
Dimitri tossed her a pair of handcuffs, “Put those on.”
She managed to catch them with her right hand. She looked at her left arm and winced at the thought of cuffing that wrist.
Her left hand was clutching her stomach inside the remains of her leather jacket. The heat was getting to her. She was sweating profusely, and she realized that one of the reasons she’d been about to pass out on the first run through was she’d been too drugged to think of shucking the leather.
She peeled off the ruined jacket and got a good look at her arm.
The dog had given her a decent field dressing. But under the shreds of her jumpsuit, the bandage was ripe with her blood. The heat was making it itch.
“Hurry up, Isham. Important people are waiting,” Dimitri said “people” like some humans said “moreau,” or “frank.”
She fumbled with the cuffs, trying to get them around her left wrist without moving that arm. Even with the effort, she had to grit her teeth and endure fiery daggers cutting deep into her shoulder.
When she had the cuffs around her wrists, she gasped. She’d been holding her breath. She looked up from her work to see that Dimitri had used the time to fetch Fitzgerald and have him cuffed.
“Into the cart.” He waved them ahead of him, always keeping the gun on Evi.
She watched him as closely as he watched her, and she never saw an opening. Fitzgerald climbed into the back of the golf cart, and when she followed she tried to do it without using her arms. Humidity had condensed on the runner of the cart and she slipped, slamming her left shoulder into the cart.
Pain washed out her vision as a white nova exploded in her arm.
She was on her knees next to the cart, and Dimitri was laughing. She turned to look at him, the smoldering pain turning to rage. She looked at him. He made no move toward her, and the gun never wavered.
He stopped laughing. “Get in the cart.”
The heat and the pain made an anger that had been three days festering erupt into a full-blown rage.
She was going to kill this man. She no longer cared about anything but bringing the house down on the people, the things, the Race, responsible for the last three days, responsible for the betrayal of the last six years, responsible for the destruction of her homeland. And she would start with Dimitri.
She stared into his eyes. The gun didn’t move. She was too far away. She was quicker than he was, but she wasn’t quicker than a bullet.
Slowly she stood, nodded at him, and carefully climbed into the back of the cart. There would be a moment when that gun would lower, and then she would move.
“Don’t worry about that arm,” Dimitri said. “In a few minutes it’s either going to be good as new, or else it isn’t going to matter.”
The cart started rolling through a new set of tunnels, larger ones that grew even larger as they moved away from the cell. Other tunnels emptied into the main one until the tube they were traveling through became ten meters in diameter.
The stench of bile and ammonia, not to mention burning methane, became much, much worse.
The tunnel didn’t end so much as have the walls roll back into another ovoid chamber.
The chamber they drove into was another squashed sphere, thirty meters across. In the center was a two-meter tall, polished-concrete cone that belched a jet of methane flame.
The chamber was taller in proportion than most of the rooms Evi had seen down here, and the reason was obvious. A spiraling two-meter wide ramp snaked around the edges of the chamber three times.
The room was a small auditorium, and the ramp provided seating for the audience.
And the audience was the Race.
The aliens.
There were over a hundred white pulsing forms sprawled on the gradual slope of that spiral ramp. The mass of them exuded a bile—ammonia smell that made it hard for her to breathe. No two of the race held exactly the same shape: some were conical, some spherical, some cylindrical. Most had erupted white tentacles the length of a human arm, in some cases three or four of them, and waved them at the cart that was trundling in the only entrance. They all undulated to a pulsing rhythm she couldn’t hear.
The cart pulled to a stop just inside the chamber.
“Get out,” said Dimitri. “You’re about to be honored.”
The gun was still locked on her, so she did as she was told. Fitzgerald followed her, a look of awe on his face.
The three of them seemed to be surrounded by acres of white featureless flesh. A leprous wall of pulsing wax that made soft bubbling sounds that echoed throughout the chamber.
Polyethylene bags of raw sewage, she thought. They smelled like they’d been scraped off the floor of the john in that porno theater.
She hated every last one of them.
But Dimitri would not move that gun off of her.
Fitzgerald walked toward the end of the room opposite the one entrance. The ramp terminated near the ceiling there, and at that point of precedence was a Race that had taken a rough humanoid form. It had a soft, blubbery body, four limbs, and a head built around a hole that formed a mouth of sorts.
This one didn’t go to the lengths that the ones in Cleveland had gone to. The ones there had worn fake plastic eyes and dentures and had taken to human clothing to rein in cascading flesh. This one did none of that, and there was no way, even with its token humanoid form, that it could be mistaken for an earthly creature.
Evi rounded the cone, following Fitzgerald. Dimitri stayed a good distance behind her, the gun tracking her every move.
“Welcome,” said the lead creature. “In the name of the Octal and the Race.”
“Some fucking wel—” she started to say. She stopped because she could now see a concave depression in the floor between the cone and the far end of the room. The cone had blocked it before. The depression sank for two meters, and had stopped Fitzgerald’s progress toward the lead creature.
Sitting in the center of the pit was a creature that was neither Race nor anything from Earth.
The thing was a pulsing amoebic form, like the Race. It formed a rough spheroid. Unlike the Race, it was a dull red in color. And rippling across its body were hairlike tentacles that resembled red grass waving in the wind.
The smell of rotting meat hung over the pit. “Show some respect,” Dimitri said. “That’s about to become your mother.”
Evi couldn’t repress her shudder.
“Evi Isham,” the leader continued in its bubbling monotone.
“You show an aptitude that we find useful when you work for us.”
She looked up from the pit. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
The creature went on. Either it didn’t understand her or it was ignoring her. “We find few natives useful enough for us to offer what we offer you. You are much more effective than the canines we employ. More effective than Dimitri, the last one we offer this.”
She was dumbfounded. After what she had gone through, after what these things had done to her and her planet, they were asking her to . . .
“No,” she whispered. “I’m not going to work for—”
“You don’t have a choice,” Dimitri said from behind her.
The creature kept going on, ignoring her, as if it were reciting a memorized script. “You join with us, bond with us, become one of us. Commune with Mother.”
“What the hell?” She looked into the pit that smelled like rotting meat. The red spheroid undulated on, oblivious.
“Mother,” Dimitri whispered at her. “Race have trouble with English.” He laughed. It sounded more ironic than anything else. “Wonder why I keep walking? After a bullet through the neck?”
Evi looked over her shoulder at Dimitri. The gun was still locked on her, he was still too far away, and he was smiling. “I didn’t kill you because they’re going to do to you what they did to me.”
She looked back into the pit. The lead creature went on, but she was only listening to Dimitri now.
“Mother lays eggs,” he said, his voice low, almost seductive. “Lays them in any living tissue. The microscopic larvae bond to your cells. They’ll do just about everything to keep you alive, until they mature, of course.”
She was feeling sick to her stomach.
“Up to that point, you’re as invulnerable as the Race are. Fire, acid, electricity, that’s it. Only two problems.”
“What?” she found herself asking, unable to tear her eyes off the creature in the pit. She was focusing on it now, letting it fill her field of vision. She could see that the cilia that waved across its back were actually hair-thin hollow tubes. The tubes were pointed at the end and resembled hypodermic needles. That must be what they were, ovipositors, designed to inject microscopic eggs into a host.
Thousands of those injectors, millions of eggs.
“Problem is,” Dimitri said, “you have to eat their food, or the little beasties die off and take you with them. The other is, you have to take the Race’s suppressant drugs or the larvae mature.”
And the Race thought of themselves as nonviolent.
“You’ll embrace Mother, Isham,” Dimitri said. “Then, if you won’t work for the Race, you’ll be eaten alive.”
Rage, that’s what she felt, that and a fear bordering on panic. She was going to be used, again. Used in the worst possible way. She looked at Mother and could only think that she was about to be raped, and she was panicking because she couldn’t see how to fight.
If only she could do something. If it weren’t for that damn gun.
“Scott Fitzgerald,” she heard the creature say.
It crossed her mind that it was about to go through that whole speech again for the professor.
Not even close.
“You help in locating our four others. For that you are thanked. Your purpose for the Race and the Octal is served. We allow Dimitri to deal with you as he sees fit.”
She got a ten minute speech. Fitzgerald got barely ten seconds. She supposed that it was poetic justice. She’d been duped; Fitzgerald apparently, had sold everyone out.
Fitzgerald backed away from the pit. He opened his mouth but didn’t say anything. He began to shake his head violently.
“No!” was what finally came out. “Not after all—” He broke off choking on his own words. Evi turned toward him and began to realize what must be going through Fitzgerald’s head. His life’s work had led up to this point, and he’d just been dismissed as so much extra baggage.
He might have wanted what the aliens were offering her.
If she could, she’d trade places. Alien larvae or not, she thought she could take Dimitri in a fair fight.
Fitzgerald was backed all the way to the cone. “I will not let you do this to me.” Then he surprised the hell out of Evi by jumping Dimitri. The doctor was still in the air as Dimitri turned the Mitsubishi around to empty half a clip into his chest. Fitzgerald jerked and fell face-first onto the smooth concrete floor with a dull wet thud.
The bubbling around the perimeter of the chamber increased in volume.
Evi was primed for action. The second that Dimitri turned the gun away from her and began firing, she jumped. She was much faster than Fitzgerald, faster than Dimitri. She got behind him and lowered her arms over his head, to pull the chain on her handcuffs across his neck.
Dimitri was trained. He saw her arms lowering and in the split-second he had, he raised the Mitsubishi up to his neck. Her arms met the hard resistance of the submachine gun’s short barrel, and the impact sent a shuddering flame of agony down her left arm. Dimitri’s right elbow slammed into her abdomen, awakening deep bruises left there by Sukiota’s interrogation.
She slammed him face-first into the concrete cone. She felt an explosion in her left wrist; the cuffs were becoming burning brands.
Dimitri jerked against her, rotating. He was now turning to face her, and the gun had come loose. She was no longer clamping on the vulnerable portion of his windpipe; her hands were feeling the back of his head.
They were too close together, leaning by the side of the cone. Dimitri was pushing against her with his knee, trying to clear a space to point the gun at her.
She glanced up at the jet of burning methane shooting out the top of the cone. He glanced up there, too.
“No,” he said.
Evi clamped her forearms tight on either side of Dimitri’s neck, under the jawline, her hands entangled in his hair. The effort of tightening the muscles flamed up her arm and blurred her vision. She wanted to scream or pass out. She let herself scream.
She put everything she had into the lift and the swing, all the rage, all the pain, all the strength she could squeeze out of her genetically engineered muscles. She could almost hear the bicep in her left arm tear as Dimitri’s hundred kilos left the ground. As her forearm brushed the lower edge of the methane flame, every nerve in her shoulder was flayed open and ignited as her shoulder redislocated.
When Dimitri’s chin caught on the lip of the gas nozzle, she couldn’t hear his screams over her own.
She hung on to the back of his neck, arms on either side of the concrete cone, as Dimitri’s face was forced into the fire. His arms flailed widely on the other side of the cone, clawing at her arms. He stared at her through the blue-green flame, and she stared into his eyes as his face reddened, blackened, melted . . .
Evi closed her eyes.
Dimitri stopped struggling.
It took her five minutes or longer to disengage herself from the body. She had to slowly pull her arms over Dimitri’s head, and that hurt, especially because the insides of both forearms were badly burned. The only reason she didn’t burn herself worse when disengaging herself was because, when she pulled on the back of Dimitri’s head, it nodded forward and plugged the hole. That put the flame out.
Once she got the handcuff chain over the back of Dimitri’s skull, she slid off of the cone and landed on her ass next to Fitzgerald’s corpse. Dimitri fell off of the cone in the opposite direction.
The room filled with the sound of hissing, flameless methane.
She sat down, clutching her arms to her stomach, breathing heavily. She wanted to throw up, but her stomach was empty.
She sat there for a long time it seemed, only aware of the pain in both her arms. She forced herself to look up. The Race were still there, unmoving, bubbling, pulsing, unaffected by the little drama that had played out before them.
“You freakish bastards. You just don’t give a shit do you?”
The leader, the one at the head of the spiral ramp, spoke in its underwater monotone, “Personal native arguments do not concern the Octal. We appreciate now that you step in and embrace Mother.”
Evi got to her feet, clutching her stomach with both arms. Her laugh broke from her in racking silent spasms. “Fuck you.”
She backed away from the pit and the hissing gas jet. “You’ll have to kill me first.” She was grinning, and that scared her. She was losing it, and it was a bad time to lose it.
“The Race does not kill. Lesser species kill.”
She had backed to the cart at the entrance. There seemed to be a shuffling movement along the ramp. The bubbling was deepening in intensity and increasing in volume. Both her arms were burning, the wound on her left arm had burst open and she was bleeding all over the place, and she couldn’t help laughing. “Bullshit.”
“Evi Isham, you embrace Mother for your own good. You are wounded. You die without Mother’s aid.”
She looked down at her arm. That was a hell of a lot of blood. There was a clear trail from her all the way back to the hissing cone. She clamped her right hand over the wound to stop the bleeding.
The bubbling was reaching a crescendo and the leader continued. “We leave you here to decide as we handle infrastructure problems.”
One creature, the one nearest the bottom of the spiral ramp, descended toward her, the cart, and the exit.
Evi looked at the creature, then to the cone back in the center of the room. Flameless methane still hissed into the room.
No wonder these things were acting nervous. Fire was one of the things Dimitri said could hurt the Race. This whole room was about to become a bomb.
She turned to look at the robot golf cart. Electricity was another . . .
She raised her foot and kicked the cowling off the rear of the cart. The plastic cracked off, revealing the inductor housing and the lead wires. She bent over it and grabbed an insulated wire in each hand, even though it hurt like hell. She pulled the wires away from the engine, which sat under the cart, and something out of her sight gave.
She fell on her ass with about a meter of wire in each hand. Even though the pain in her arms whited out her vision, she managed to keep the red wire from touching the blue one. She managed to croak out, “Stop moving. I think there’s more than enough juice in this to liquefy you.”
When she opened her eyes, the creature had stopped short of the end of the ramp. She got to her feet, hands shaking. More blood was streaming down her arm, and now she couldn’t put any pressure on it. Her left hand had stopped hurting, even though she thought her wrist was broken. Felt like it had fallen asleep.
Slowly she turned toward the other end of the room. Yes, she had enough play in the wires to cover the end of the ramp from where she stood. If aliens started bailing from the ramp in other parts of the room, they could make it out the other side of the cart, but it didn’t look as if they were built for jumping. “Wrong answer,” she told the head alien. “Try again.”
“You bleed to death without Mother—”
“You have a one-track mind. Get the picture. I’m taking your worthless asses with me.”
The room, not just the leader who’d been addressing her, but the entire room, became silent. The bubbling quieted. Tentacles stopped waving. Undulation ceased.
The only sound was the hissing gas from the methane jet.
“This makes no sense. Such an ending when other options—”
“You’ve been fucking with this planet for so long that you don’t understand revenge?” She couldn’t believe she was grinning at the thing. She was feeling light-headed and giddy. Her entire left arm was asleep now.
There was a thudding plop and Evi turned around. One of the Race had jumped from the ramp. It wasn’t going to be much more of a standoff. They were going to rush the exit now.
The ground shook under her feet. “What?”
She looked back down the tube of the corridor, and she thought she could hear a crash or an explosion back in that direction.
She turned back to the alien that had jumped the ramp. It wasn’t moving toward the exit. It had turned grayish and was pulsing quietly.
The leader spoke again. “We reconsider our offer. Put down the wires and we discuss other options.”
The leader sounded weak and was turning gray, too. In fact, all the creatures near the top of the chamber were becoming grayish. As she watched, a dull gray pulsing cone with five tentacles collapsed into itself and rolled off the edge of the ramp, hitting the edge below, pushing aside two grayish fellows.
Damn, Evi thought, this might look like home to these guys, but I bet, back home, their volcanic vents don’t go out.
The room was filling with methane and they were asphyxiating. A wave of dizziness hit her. I could use some oxygen myself.
That started a silent laugh that degenerated into a gasping wheeze.
She thought she could smell smoke under the sulfur-ammonia smells now. She wondered if she really heard gunfire in the background or if it was just wishful thinking.
“We give you what you want,” said the lead creature. The pseudo-humanoid form it wore seemed to be melting into a gray slime. “Name a wish, it is yours.”
“I want my life back, I want my country back, most of all—” She paused to catch her breath. “I want to see you dead.”
“Isham.” Where the hell did that voice come from?
“Isham.” The voice came again as the alien spokesman slipped off its perch and slammed into the ramp below. She looked around the room and at first saw only collapsing aliens. Then she saw Dimitri’s corpse move.
“Oh, shit.”
Apparently Dimitri could still hear, because a blackened skull turned toward her. Empty sockets looked for her as Dimitri’s hands groped about him. “Kill you.” It came out as a moan.
There was no way that this man could still be alive. His face was burnt off. Despite that, he was on his hands and knees groping around.
Dimitri’s right hand brushed the Mitsubishi.
Evi looked from the gun to the methane jet to a few dozen gray asphyxiated aliens, dropped the wires, and ran.
She was twenty meters down the hall before the thought struck her that if Mother’s larva were bonded to all of Dimitri’s cells, then she needed total immolation to kill him, not just burning his face. Thirty meters down the tube and she was sure she could hear gunfire ahead of her. Forty meters down the tube and she heard gunfire from behind her.
She felt her feet leave the ground as a pressure wave blew by her. A flaming hand slammed her into the ceiling. Her last coherent thought was how much she hated explosives.