Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

Mama and Papa Fiend must have ditched the taser patches somehow. They’re loose, armed and firing.

Quarters are close. Bodies, human and offworlder, are surging everywhere. I’m drawing a bead on Papa when four Fiends in sensor-clouding capes drop out of the T-bar ceiling. Gollum clamps his shell shut, a hair too late. The caped human drives a firespike into the carapace before it locks. A whoosh of heat—the smell of grilled seafood fills the air.

Nerve gas and flame spikes, I think. This little operation is well funded.

I’m aiming at a caped Fiend when I feel a flamespike against the nape of my neck.

“Guns down.” It’s Mama Fiend, speaking American.

“She’s telling us to surrender,” I say.

Loot and Bluto grope at each other, tentacles twining in the squid equivalent of nonverbal communication.

“Now,” Mama says. “Or I burn your head off.”

“Come on, they’re going to waste me.” I stare across the room at Loot. He’s a good-enough guy, in his way, but we’re not the same species. He’ll clamp his armor and take his chances. It’s what they do, every time.

But no. Flesh darkening with frustration and fear, they surrender.

“What now?” I ask, feeling oddly giddy. She thumps me upside the head, just a warning, no real damage. Loot, bless his weird offworlder heart, fluffs his cap protectively.

“It’ll be all right,” he tells me. “Tell her she has three minutes before our backup takes the roof off this dwelling.”

Before I can translate, we hear the whump of surface-to-air packets. A high-pitched shriek and a thunderclap follow; a few seconds later, the ground shakes. Upstairs, windows shatter.

“That’d be your air support biting dirt,” explains Mama Fiend unnecessarily.

Loot’s strange, moist skin mottles in an unreadable roil of emotions. “Tell her we’ll send missiles.”

“He says they’ll bomb you from orbit.”

“They aren’t going to dust their own people,” Mama Fiend says. Her pals are gleefully using the squad’s own restraints to bind the surviving squid onto wheeled palettes. One of them is setting up a webcam, pointing it at Loot’s face as they wrench off his mussel shell and the hydrator that keeps his skin moist.

“It seems Intel was right for a change,” he says calmly.

“Sir?”

“A new-hatched fry could see this neighborhood really is Fiendish. What do you suppose their plan is?”

I shrug. “We’re alive, so Command can’t bomb.”

“We’re bait,” he agrees. “They’ll draw the other squads back to rescue us.”

“Into a trap.” I nod. This street lies at the bottom of a gently rising wave of cookie-cutter houses. If Fiends are dug in all along the hill, the slaughter will be unthinkable. “It’ll be kill at will.”

Flashes of blue-white fury bloom across his translucent, helpless body, but what can he do? It’s all been very neatly planned.

“It won’t work,” he says finally. “We’ll lose a few squads here, but you’ll all die.”

You. A bit of a chill.

“Tell them,” he says, and I realize he just wants me to pass the word along.

“What’s he saying?” asks Mama Fiend.

I let out a long breath. “Basically? They rock, we suck, we’re all gonna die.”

Mama laughs. “Let him know we don’t need a traitor on-hand to translate his bullshit.”

Loot fluffs again—probably caught the word “traitor.” “Tell them you’re a prisoner, Cantil. Say we forced you to help us.”

Poor guy. Impulsively, I knot my bony fingers into a sign of friendship, then press both hands into the flesh of his webbed-up tentacle, giving him a last taste of my damp palms and dirty fingers. “Thanks for everything, Loot.”

“Come on.” Mama Fiend drags me toward the door, leaving her minions to watch the hostages.

He bellows in fractured American as we disappear down the hall. “Don’t hurt! Not hurt! Cantil!”

But Cantil is flaking away, all but gone. He was never more than a false skin, and it is good to finally shed him.

Mama Fiend, whose name is Debra Notting, hits a remote on an antique iPod. The basement fills with the sound of me shrieking in agony. We pass through an old bedroom, where a redheaded girl is pouring two pints of blood—mine, donated a couple months back—onto a stained mattress.

Deb points at my shoes. I slip them off, along with my sweat-stained socks, and kick them into a corner. There won’t be a body, but there’s a lot of my DNA in here now. Given the way Dust can obliterate a person from existence, you can never know for sure if someone’s alive or dead.

“Spit your gum onto the floor?” the girl suggests.

“Can’t—it’s laced with drugs,” I reply, undertone.

Beyond the bedroom is a squalid john whose tub is full of broken tile. A crude tunnel has been hacked into its wall; we head down and then east for two hundred feet, coming up in another basement. The battle wranglers are here, crouched in a sensor-proof tent, peering into portable datascreens and murmuring orders into headsets. The others are tracking the incoming squid squads that are heading back to rescue Loot and his fry.

“Demolition ships are clearing off,” reports one old man.

“Told you, Deb,” I say. “They’re too pricey to risk when we’ve got surface-to-air.”

“What happened with the ship we hit?” she asks.

“Four survivors, pinned down in the Hamiltons’ backyard,” a wrangler answers.

“The squid receiving video of their captured platoon?”

“Affirmative.” He tilts a screen and we see Loot and the others, bound tightly onto the pallets, taser-patched and already drying out. I make myself smile. It’s always important at this point to look solid, loyal.

The mental shift of gears is harder this time.

“One squad’s almost back to Sycamore Drive,” a wrangler reports. “Permission to fire?”

“No,” Deb says. “Wait until they’re closer. We’re wasting five hundred troops here. To make it worth the blood, we need to draw in and kill as many as we can. I want lots of bait, well-placed bait.”

“They’ll deploy,” I say. It took me months of careful maneuvering to get onto Loot’s squad. Months of minty chewing gum that made me sweat like a pig and smell ever so faintly sweet. Months of shooting Fiends and telling dumb Dem jokes and worrying that Kabuva Intel would figure out I’d been behind the bloodbath last year in Atlanta. “The lieutenant’s mother will throw half the West Coast Command in here if she thinks it’ll get Loot back.”

“You sez,” Debra replies, but she’s smiling.

“Been right so far, haven’t I?”

“No,” she says.

“No? I brought him right here, on time.”

“Yeah.” She taps the screen. “You also said he’d sell you out.”

It’s true. Loot came through, unlike all the other squid I’ve so carefully betrayed. My voice, when I answer, is steady: “Kid’s an idealist, the real deal. Had to happen eventually, I guess.”

“Almost a shame we’re gonna kill him, huh?”

She’s watching me carefully.

“Almost,” I agree. If I do feel a pang, if the game is suddenly less fun than it used to be, how’s she going to know? I’m a serpent. I lie.

“Okay.” She smiles. “Time you scrambled. I’m sure you’ve got a hot date with a new identity.”