Jose Maria de Cordillera.
Behind him, out of the star racer
Mercedes,
stepped Patrick Hamilton and Dr. Aaron Rose also holding dessert wineglasses. Glenn Hamilton left her glass at the dinner table.
Jose Maria strolled toward the Marines, as if this were a congenial gathering, not a powder keg in a high-ox atmosphere. He visibly took note of Steele’s insignia, then nodded a greeting. “Colonel. Congratulations.”
TR Steele had been a Lieutenant Colonel when last they met. He was wearing the full bird now.
Steele grunted.
Jose Maria turned to the young man in dress blues with three rows of braid on his cuffs. “Commander.” Jose Maria offered his hand. “We have not met. Jose Maria de Cordillera.”
“Heard about you, mate.” Commander Ryan clasped Jose Maria’s hand, gave it a quick strong shake. “Stuart Ryan. Call me Dingo.”
Ryan turned his head sharply to Benet and said, “Not you. You call me sir.” Ryan looked to Glenn and Patrick. “You right?”
Glenn nodded. “Sir.”
Steele gave a silent signal. Weapons audibly uncocked.
Benet’s glance moved sharply from Colonel Steele to Commander Ryan. He demanded, “Who is in charge here. You or you?”
“Not
you
, mate,” said Dingo.
Benet flung an arm wide at the surrounding Marines. “Get them out of here. Get them out, get them out. No! You are not doing that!” Benet pointed at two Marines who were belting protective personal fields onto Patrick and Glenn.
“They’re leaving!” said Benet. “You’re all leaving.” He stalked around the Marines, arms waving as if shooing geese. “Go! Go!”
Then he marched up into Steele’s face, “Move!”
Steele might have been guarding Buckingham Palace for all he reacted.
Glenn spoke softly so Benet would have to stop shouting to hear her. “Dr. Benet. These men aren’t hostile. This action is defensive only. Whether you accept it or not, this planet is under invasion.”
“Oh, I admit we are under invasion,” said Benet. “
From you
!”
“We are not the only space invaders in town,” Glenn said evenly.
Benet made a show of perfect stunned outrage, his eyes round. “You dare call
us
invaders?”
Glenn threw a pointing hand out to her right. “I was talking about
those
.”
At the camp perimeter, in the growing darkness, they were just visible. Eyes. Many eyes, in sets of three, craning on their stalks.
Those
did not belong here.
Director Benet stared back. His mouth fell open. “Oh, bugger.”
21
O
N FIRST SEEING THE ALIENS at the streamside in the highlands, Glenn and Patrick had run straight back to the meadow to warn the foxes. They’d found the foxes already sniffing the air for themselves, their hackles raised, their muzzles wrinkled up at the stink, their tails bottlebrush stiff. They turned questioning eyes to Patrick.
Patrick clenched his fist before his mouth, as if closing his muzzle shut, which in fox sign-speak meant, sensibly enough, shut your muzzle and be quiet.
Patrick hummed to them. All ears pricked up and forward, intent.
Then the foxes melted away through the underbrush and disappeared into the forest, away from the stream.
Glenn had asked, “What did you say to them?”
“I said, ‘Smelly black thorn bushes crossed the river. Ugly ugly. Bad bad. Go.’”
What they had seen there was here now.
Just beyond the dirt perimeter, at the periphery of the camp’s minimal lights, the aliens stared.
They looked like rotten sponges perched on spindly tree roots.
They were muddy black. Each had three eyes, each eye set on a mobile eye stalk. One eye extended from the being’s putative chest, another extended from its midback, and the third eye attached like a very skinny off-center neck from the top of the thing’s flat, flexible slab of a spongy torso.
Positioned next to the top eyestalk was an orifice that opened and shut. One could guess it was a mouth because the aliens had no discrete heads.
Two multijointed arms attached at the top corners of the alien torsos where arms ought to connect. Thin wiry strands of hair at the corners made the creatures look as if they were fraying at the edges.
The aliens couldn’t be said to have hands because they had no palms. Their arms terminated directly into fingers. Two digits extended from the end of one arm, three digits from the other arm, and all of the digits looked opposable.
Three multijointed legs were set tripodally at the bottom of the alien torsos. Glenn and Patrick hadn’t gotten a look at their feet the first time, but they had seen three-toed tracks, the toes splayed at 120 degrees from one another. The tracks ran all along the streamside.
The closest person to the camp perimeter turned around to face the watchers in the forest. She was a Marine. Flight Sergeant Kerry Blue.
Kerry said, “Oh. Hello, ugly. You must be the space invaders.”
Three projectiles bounced off Kerry Blue’s PF with a clatter and ricochet zing. Kerry dropped to the dirt, hands to her head.
In a moment, alive and in full voice, Kerry shouted, “Who’s shooting?”
With a snakestrike flick of a spindly alien arm, two more projectiles came at Cain Salvador’s face and bounced off of his personal field. Cain blinked.
“Nails,” he said. “They’re throwing their fingernails.”
The alien had thrown its nails with so much force that the Marine’s personal field deflected them. The creature had flicked first its three-fingered arm at Kerry, then its two-fingered arm at Cain. Its fingers moved now like a spider, nailless.
Asante Addai moved in closer, head down, squinting between the trees. Night was falling. “Fark! They
are
ugly.”
Carly Delgado picked up one of the projectiles that struck Kerry’s PF. She dropped it. “And they stink like nothing on Earth.”
Asante’s face wrinkled against the stench as he tried to talk without breathing. “Gug. Is that them?”
The alien flipped over into a handstand, its three legs in the air. Asante jerked back. “Ho! Look at that!”
The three legs flicked. Asante flinched, blinked, as a barrage of toenails from all three legs bounced off his personal field right before his face.
“They’re throwing their toenails!”
Several quick movements showed between the trees in the darkening forest, like flicking twigs. A rain of nails came flying out toward the camp.
Dak Shepard, standing farther back, where the thrown projectiles began to lose velocity, got a smattering of nails moving slowly enough to pass through his PF. Yelled, “Hey!”
Kerry Blue picked up a nail that had bounced off her energy field. She held it up for Colonel Steele to see. “Sir?” she asked, like a dog waiting for permission to bite.
A LEN xeno ran between the Marines and aliens, waving his hands. “No! No violence!”
Asante spoke, cross. “No. Hey. They started it,
frer
.”
The man was the expedition’s xenosociologist, Helmut Roodoverhemd. “They feel threatened by us! We are strangers on their world!”
“It’s not their world,” Patrick called from a safe distance. He made sure his PF was energized just the same. “Those things are every bit as Zoen as I am.”
“They are strangers here. They have come to study—as have we. Don’t hurt them,” Roodoverhemd implored. He turned and moved slowly into the forest to say hello to the visitors.
“Watch it,” Patrick warned. “They take specimens.”
When Patrick and Glenn had first seen the aliens, the aliens were grabbing small animals, squeezing them dead and shoving them into bags at the streamside.
The aliens here were carrying their bags now, but these bags were empty.
“It’s easy to love what is beautiful,” said Roodoverhemd. “We are strangers to them. They are intelligent. They crossed the stars. They must be made to know we mean them no harm.”
Roodoverhemd seemed to have—as so many xenos had—a professional self-loathing that drove them starward, far away from their own kind, to commune with things better, purer, more natural than themselves.
Dr. Roodoverhemd approached the strangers. He held his arms up in imitation of the contorted way the aliens held their multiply articulated arms.
Jose Maria cautioned from a distance, “I would not.”
His dog leaned into Jose Maria’s legs, standing between her master and the aliens, trying to herd him backward. She barked toward the forest.
“Would not what? Try to communicate? They’re not viruses,
Don
Cordillera,” Roodoverhemd called back. His gaze remained fixed on one of the aliens, trying to hold its three-eyed gaze. “If they are spacefaring, then they are civilized.”
But even Director Izrael Benet, looking like a man slapped suddenly sober, said, “Take a shield, Helmut.”
Benet offered the xenosociologist one of the lightweight mesh shields made of clear woven polymer that were stacked at camp’s edge. Roodoverhemd refused the offered shield, offended. “What kind of message does that send?”
Sticklike arms flicked, too quick to see. Fingernails hit like bullets. Roodoverhemd jerked around in the air, twisted. Fell.
Colonel Steele bellowed, “Man down! Man down! Fire at will.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Marines opened fire into the trees. Tags and splinters tore through the foliage. Nothing cried out in pain.
The xenosociologist, lying on the ground with three deep wounds, was not bleeding. He looked pretty damned dead, but you don’t ever assume.
Against the barrage of splinters, a mass of the stilted things advanced and converged on the body. Spongy-bodied, stick-armed figures bore the dead xeno up.
Patrick cried, “They bagged Helmut!”
Surviving aliens—and there were way too many of them for the number of shots fired—spirited the body away at a lurching gallop into the forest depths.
Watching from under the camp lights, Patrick muttered, “I warned him they take specimens. Did he think they were going to ask him to pee in a cup?”
Steele thundered, “Get that man.”
Cain shouted, “Sir! Either we are really bad shots, or the splinters are passing straight through the targets!”
Steele roared, “Hand to hand then! I want that man!” And he charged forward to lead the pursuit into the alien woods.
Staying behind in the LEN camp, Commander Ryan took a hail from
Merrimack
, which would be able to detect the shooting from orbit. Calli’s voice sounded over his com, “Commander, what is your situation?”
“Hell, sir. We have a right regular old cluster down here.”
Into the woods. Dark.
Kerry Blue’s night vision switched itself on. Heard other Marines baying like bull mastiffs. The aliens didn’t yell. Of the aliens she heard only the thrash of leaves and snap of twigs. There was also a squeak of something she almost stepped on.
She caught glimpses of the aliens’ tottering gallop and their handsprings.
Her splinter gun was turning out to be no good against those spindly, quick, dark targets. She wasn’t allowed to bring a beam weapon into the oxygen-rich air. Damn that.
Unless she struck a hard part of the alien, and there didn’t seem to be too many of those, her splinter shots were passing clean through.
The aliens jumped like spiders. Big spiders. Anyone who had been in the Hive conflict reflexively reached for a sword. She reached more than once.
Saw one alien spring end over end like a bad gymnast.
The things were torqing her off. Made her feel inept. Her protective field buzzed. One of those things had nailed her PF again. She screeched. “I want my sword back!”
Twitch Fuentes and the other guys had the right idea—run in and tackle the bastards. Just grab a leg or three, swing ’em up and beat them to death against a tree. Make sure they spent their nails first though.
Cain yelled, “Grab ’em! Just grab ’em. Watch your eyes!”
Weightlifting was not Kerry’s strong suit. But she could still tackle these things and twist them till something crunched.
She launched herself at one. It squished under her like a sponge, its stick legs and arms still flailing. She tried to crank its joints the way they didn’t go, but they went every which way. The fummers had ball joints. Lots of them.
She bashed them with a rock.
Be careful of your eyes, Cain had said. Kerry’s eyes were fine, except they were watering from the stench.
Dak got hold of two of the squigs that were part of the mob carrying the LEN guy away. He yanked them back and knotted their squiggy limbs together. “Yeah! You! Gretta! Like that? Now I’m gonna stomp on your heads!”