A silence that seemed to last for weeks passed between them.
Doc Martin tried to fit the strangeness—the outrageousness—of what she was learning into the basic design of the life she’d always known.
It didn’t want to fit.
“So that’s why you’re here?” she asked with a certain grimness, watching the horrible things squatting around the cell tower pulsating with sickening life. “To tell us that we’ve already lost and should just quit without a fight.”
Interpreter looked at her. It was getting harder and harder for her to see the sad young man that she’d come to know and like.
“Your kind . . . is different.” He glanced at the throbbing instruments that were somehow part of their conquest and then back to Doc Martin before he said the oddest thing. “They have noticed.”
“We’re different all right; we’re fighters—thinkers,” she told him. “We may get knocked down a whole bunch of times, but some of us are always going to get up again.” She smiled at her own words, believing every single one of them.
“One that has been . . . changed.”
“We’ve all been changed by this shit,” Doc Martin retorted bitterly.
“One that . . .” Interpreter searched for the word. “One that scares them.”
And suddenly Doc Martin couldn’t help but smile. “Sidney. Sidney scares you . . . scares them?”
His head moved from one side to the other.
“Sidney,” he repeated, letting the name dance upon his tongue. “Sidney . . . Moore.”
“That’s her,” Doc Martin said proudly, but at the same time feeling a tinge of unease. She’d always felt a certain amount of affection for the girl, imagining that it was something akin to how a mother feels for her daughter, even though she’d never had children.
“What happened . . . was a fluke,” Interpreter explained. “Somehow this human woman . . . this Sidney Moore and the device became conjoined.”
“Conjoined,” Doc Martin repeated.
“The two became as one,” Interpreter said. “On all the worlds that have fallen to us . . . nothing like that has ever occurred before.”
“She’s a threat to you then . . . to your plans.”
Interpreter paused, again looking at the loathsome creatures around the base of the antenna. “She could ruin . . . everything.”
Doc Martin’s thoughts raced. Was this supposed representative of an alien race admitting to a weakness in their plans? Why would he be telling her that? Was it a trap to throw them off guard . . . to give them false hope?
She had to ask. “Why are you telling me this? Is this some sort of sick game your kind plays? Build up our hopes, and then—surprise, surprise—there isn’t a chance at all.”
Interpreter said nothing.
“Why are you telling me this?” Doc Martin nearly screamed her question.
Again Interpreter remained silent, and her frustration became like a lit match dropped into a bucket of gasoline. She stormed over to a pile of construction trash beside the maintenance shack, hefted a length of metal pipe. She caught movement beyond the cliff area, the living mass of controlled life slowly emerging from the underbrush. But it didn’t stop her.
“You’re not going to tell me your game?” she asked as she strode back toward the antenna. “Is that it? Let the inferior life-forms figure it out on their own?”
She loomed over the first of the jellyfish-like creatures at the base of the tower, its pale body puffing up and then deflating like a lung outside the body. Watching the expression on Isaac’s face, she raised her pipe and drove it down into the creature’s body. The thing screamed on some psychic level, and her head felt as though it was about to split, but that did not prevent her from bringing her makeshift spear up and down again on the second alien.
The wave surged out from the underbrush, a serpent of living things coming at her like a runaway freight train. Doc Martin stood above the next of the throbbing sacks of alien life, spear poised to fall as the serpent of living things reached her.
And stopped.
The serpent stopped, swaying before her.
An act that told her everything.
She brought the end of the pipe down into the gelatinous body of the third organism, and when she was done, the once pulsating bodies looked like deflated balloons days after a parade.
Her anger spent, and suddenly exhausted, Doc Martin leaned on her pipe. “So,” she said, looking directly at Interpreter. “Are you going to help us defeat your kind?”
Interpreter just stared.
“Or am I reading this all wrong?”