They all stopped at the same moment, and then three of them rolled together to melt and merge into one great pile over eight feet high, hundreds of dripping tentacles piled on top of each other. Disturbingly human eyeballs formed on the end of bobbing tendrils, all aimed at me and Walker. A bright pink speaking trumpet extruded from beneath the eyes, flushing with rhythmic crimson pulses.
“Welcome,” it said. “Be calm. You will not be killed; you are useful. Of use to us. You have demonstrated impressive capabilities. Your value will be incorporated into us, and when you have been improved we will send you back out into your world to prepare the way for us. You shall be our voice, our messengers and prophets.”
“I wouldn’t put money on it,” I said.
“Their language skills are improving,” said Walker.
“Practice makes perfect,” I said.
Parts of the greater alien reached out to manipulate semi-organic machines that rose up out of the floor. The eyeballs still looked steadily in our direction. Creamy white eyeballs without any veins and pure black irises.
“I destroyed your discarded experiments,” I said. “The people you ruined and threw away. They’re all dead now.”
“They were failures,” said the alien. “Of no further use to us. You will be of use to us. There is much that we can do with you.”
“I’ll die first,” said Walker. “Better yet, you’ll die first.”
“I represent the Droods,” I said, raising my voice so all of them could hear. “No visiting alien species goes anywhere or does anything on our world without our consent. We exist to protect humanity from things like you. You should have come to us first. We could have worked something out. Prevented all this.”
“No,” said the alien. “This is necessary. You are small, limited, incapable of understanding what is best for you. We know. We are experienced in changing, upgrading species.”
“You’ve done this before?” said Walker. “On other worlds?”
“On many other worlds,” said the alien. “You must be changed; your species is inefficient. It will not survive the future that is coming. You are wasteful of your potential, but you can be made better. Remade. You must not try to interfere. That is wasteful, of time and energy and resources. We are doing important work here. You will thank us later. This is our work. Our responsibility. Our joy. We make things better.”
“Not here,” I said. “Not to us. We decide our own destiny. The experiment you’re planning is an abomination, and we will not allow it to happen.”
“You can’t stop it,” said the alien. “It is already in motion. Humans. You think so small. So petty. Even your language is barely adequate for communication. You do not even see us clearly. We are not what you look at. This body. You talk with an extension. You are inside our body.”
“The mound,” said Walker. “The whole damned mound is the alien . . . One massive organism. That changes things.”
“Yes,” I said. “Don’t suppose you have any explosives about you?”
“Nothing big enough.”
“You will be remade,” said the alien speaker. “Improved, made speakers of our purpose. You will convince others to do what is necessary. Conflict is wasteful. You will observe the results of our experiment, the greater things we will make out of those who survive. You will tell your world to cooperate, that it is all for the best.”
“We’ll never work for you,” said Walker. “No one on this world will do anything but fight you to the last breath in their bodies.”
“You won’t fight us,” said the alien. “After a point, you won’t want to. You will become greater. And it starts now.”
Dozens of aliens appeared in the chamber: rising up out of the floor, sliding out of walls, dropping from the ceiling. They blocked all the entrances to the chamber. More and more of them, too many to count, surrounding Walker and me as we moved quickly to stand back-to-back. He had his sword blade in his hand again. I called up my armour and took on my battle form, bristling with weapons. Holding its form was a strain, but I was too angry to care. The aliens filled the chamber around us, packing the place from wall to wall, piles of slimy ropes sliding in and out of each other.
“Bad odds,” said Walker, his voice as calm and cool as always.
“I’ve seen worse,” I said.
“Really?”
“Actually, yes. Of course, I had reinforcements then.”
“Terrific,” said Walker. “How powerful are those energy weapons protruding from your armour?”
“The blades are sharp enough to cut through a loud noise,” I said. “Everything else . . . is just for show.”
“No energy weapons?”
“No. I don’t normally need them.”
“Well,” said Walker. “When there’s nothing left to do but die, die well. And take as many of your enemies as possible down to Hell with you. Get out of here, Eddie.”
“What?”
“I’ll hold their attention while you make for the surface. Don’t worry; you’re not the only one with a few tricks up his sleeve. You get the hell out of here and do whatever’s necessary to stop them. I’ll buy you time. Go, Eddie. It’s all up to you now.”
“I can’t leave you here! Not with them; they’ll—”
“No, they won’t. I’ll make them kill me first.”
“I can’t . . .”
“You must, Eddie. It’s the human thing to do.”
I was still looking at him, trying to decide what to do for the best, when a blast of searing energy slammed out of one entrance, incinerating a whole bunch of aliens. They blew apart, great lengths of burning ropes flying through the air. More energy blasts raked across the cavern, blasting aliens out of the way, as Honey Lake came striding in with her shimmering crystal weapon in her hands. She laughed cheerfully, a bright and wonderfully sane sound in that hellish place, like a Valkyrie come down to Hel to rescue her heroes. She fired again and again, and pieces of ragged tentacles flew this way and that as she opened up a space around her.
“Heads up, guys!” she yelled cheerfully. “The cavalry just arrived!”
I whooped with joy and relief and ploughed through the nearest aliens, hacking them apart and kicking the pieces aside so I could get to the next. My golden blades tore through them as though they were made of paper. I waded through alien gore like a hungry man going to a feast. A cold and vicious rage burned within me, not just at what they had done and planned to do, but at what they had made me do. I killed and killed, and it was never enough. Walker cut about him with his sword, deadly and elegant, and Honey fired her gun, and soon we’d cleared the whole chamber of living alien forms.
But more bodies slipped out of the walls, and rose up out of the floor, and dropped from the ceiling; again the entrance ways were blocked and the chamber was full. Because the alien was the mound, and we were just destroying things it had made to fight us. The alien was distracting us, keeping us busy, while the clock ticked down to the great experiment in the streets of Roswell. I had to stop the alien, not just its extremities. I called up my Sight, focused it through my mask, and made myself concentrate on what really mattered. The dark and secret heart of the alien mound: the one thing it couldn’t live without. I glared around me, Seeing terrible things hidden in the walls and floor of the chamber, until finally I Saw, deep below my feet, something that blazed and burned like a dark sun: living energy sourced in alien flesh.
I yelled to Honey to blast the floor with her energy weapon where I pointed, and she nodded quickly and hit the floor with everything she had. The floor rocked beneath our feet, splitting apart, forced open by the crystal weapon’s implacable energies. They dug deeper and deeper into the alien tissues until finally I could see the dark heart itself. It wrapped itself in thick protective alien tissues, struggling to replace them as fast as Honey’s weapon burned them away. I formed one long, slender, and very deadly blade from my golden right hand, and sent it plunging deep into the dark heart of the alien mound.
It exploded. Alien flesh was no match for other-dimensional strange matter. Particularly when driven by the terrible cold anger of the human heart.
The individual alien forms collapsed, sinking in upon themselves, the long ropy tentacles already rotting and falling apart. The cavern shook like an earthquake, great jagged cracks opening up in the slimy walls. The floor seemed to fall away beneath my feet in sudden drops and shudders. The whole mound was dying, rotting, falling apart. I ran for the nearest exit, Honey and Walker right behind me. I followed my Sight back up through the mound, heading for the surface even as the mound collapsed in on itself, sinking down into the earth. I ran through piles of dead alien bodies, kicking them aside, punching holes through walls where necessary. Strange lights flared all around me, vivid energies spitting and crackling helplessly on the air. I ran for the surface with Honey and Walker.
We burst out of the final exit and kept running out into the fresh and human air of Roswell. We jumped over cracks opening up in the back lot, urged on by the sound of the dead mound slowly sinking down into the earth. Finally I decided I was far enough away, and only then did I let myself stop and look back to see the last death throes of the alien mound. It was dry and cracked and corrupt now, disappearing into the hole it had made for itself. Walker and Honey and I watched till all of it was gone and there was nothing left to show it had ever been there but a dark hole in the ground of a deserted back lot.
“Go down,” I said to it. “Go all the way down to Hell, where you belong.”
I put away my armour and stood there in the empty street, just a man again. I was shaking and breathing hard from exertion and emotion and from relief that we’d stopped the filthy experiment before it even started. Honey and Walker stood with me, breathing just as hard.
“So,” I said finally. “You came back, Honey. Right in the nick of time. What changed your mind? What about the game and the prize?”
“How was I going to be able to get anything done here with all this nonsense going on?” said Honey reasonably. “Besides, I didn’t get into the spy game to turn my back on people. I serve the American people. As I decide best.”
“What are we going to tell the townspeople?” said Walker. “Do we tell them anything?”
“Would they believe us, without evidence?” I said. “They don’t even have the farmer and his cow in the morgue anymore, remember?”
“This is Roswell,” Walker said dryly. “They’ll believe anything, or at least just enough to make money out of it. This time next year, this will all be a television movie. I wonder who they’ll get to play me?”
“You were never here,” Honey said sternly. “None of us were.”
“Right,” I said. “This isn’t the Nightside. We have to keep a low profile.”
“There could be more aliens . . . from where those things came from,” said Honey, hefting her shimmering weapon. “They could be back.”
“My family will take care of that,” I said. “We have connections in faraway places. Treaties and compacts work both ways. Or we’ll kick alien arse till they do.”
“I never knew you could do that,” said Walker.
“Not many do,” I said.
“And you wonder why other organisations don’t trust the Droods,” said Honey. “Your family has secrets the way other families have pets. Would it kill you to share information like that so we could all sleep better at nights?”
“Possibly,” I said. “We don’t take chances. But . . . I will talk to the Matriarch. Sharing can be good. What say the three of us go back to Alexander King, give him the answers we’ve accumulated, and then share the secrets he gives us?”
“Hell,” said Honey, “I’m game if you are. Nothing like hanging out with a Drood to help you see the bigger picture.”
“Fine by me,” said Walker. “But will the Independent Agent agree?”
“The man is dying,” I said. “He doesn’t have enough time left to haggle. He can give his prize to three agents who’ve proved their worth or risk his precious secrets falling into unworthy hands after he’s dead.”
“And . . . Peter?” said Honey. “How do we tell an old man that we got his only grandson killed?”
“We don’t know that he’s dead,” Walker said immediately. “He’s just . . . missing in action.”
“Alexander King wanted his grandson in the game,” I said. “He knew the risks.”
“Did Peter?” said Honey. “He didn’t operate in the same world as the rest of us.”
“No,” said Walker. “He worked in industrial espionage. I’m pretty damn sure he wouldn’t have shared the prize.”
“The game is now officially over,” I said. “We’ve been to all five of the designated areas, investigated each mystery we found there, and come up with an answer. We may not have uncovered the answer to the original Roswell mystery, but I think this . . . is better. Certainly it’s more than enough to prove our worth as the Independent Agent’s successors, which was supposed to be the whole point of the game. Time . . . to call it a day.”
“How are we supposed to let Alexander King know?” said Walker, glaring at the teleport bracelet on his wrist. “How do we persuade these infernal contraptions to take us back to Place Gloria?”
I took out Peter’s phone and showed it to the teleport bracelet around my wrist. “See this?” I said loudly. “Proof, evidence, and answers to all the questions we were set. I know you’re listening, Alexander! We can either give this to you or . . . take it back to our respective organisations. So, beam us up, Scotty!”
And that was when Peter King stepped out of the shadows, stabbed Honey Lake between the ribs with a long-bladed knife,
snatched the phone from my hand, and disappeared, teleported away.
Honey made a shocked, surprised sound, and then collapsed as the strength went out of her legs. I caught her and eased her to the ground. Her whole left side was already soaked with blood, and more ran down between our closely pressed bodies. Walker was saying something, but I wasn’t listening. Honey made a pained sound and blood spilled from her mouth. I held her tightly to me. I looked up at Walker to yell at him to get some help, but the look on his face stopped me. It confirmed what I already knew.