Rick Yancey - The Infinite Sea

A hundred yards away, I see someone jump from one of the choppers’ holds. He’s wearing a heavy parka and toting an assault rifle. His face is partially obscured by the hood, but I’d know that smile anywhere.

I hop from the M882.

And Razor says, “Hi.”

“Where’s the pilot?” I ask.

He jerks his head toward the cockpit. “I got mine. Where’s yours?”

I pull Teacup from the truck and jump inside the chopper. A guy wearing nothing but a drab green T-shirt and a matching pair of boxer shorts sits behind the controls. Razor slides into the copilot seat beside him.

“Fire her up, Lieutenant Bob.” Razor grins at the pilot. “Oh. Manners. Ringer, Lieutenant Bob. Lieutenant Bob, Ringer.”

“There’s no way this is going to work,” Lieutenant Bob says. “They’ll come after us hard.”

“Yeah? What’s this?” Razor holds up a mass of tangled electrical wire.

The pilot shakes his head. So cold, his lips are turning blue. “I don’t know.”

“Neither do I, but I’m guessing they’re very important for the proper operation of a helicopter.”

“You don’t understand…”

Razor leans toward him and all his playfulness is gone. His deep-set eyes burn as if backlit and the coiled force I sensed from the beginning springs free with such ferocity, I actually flinch.

“Listen to me, you alien sonofabitch, you fire this mother-effing stick buddy up ASAP or I’m—”

The pilot shoves his hands into his lap and stares straight ahead. After getting one into the chopper undetected, my biggest concern was getting a pilot to cooperate. I lean forward, grab Bob by the wrist, and bend his pinky finger backward.

“I’ll break it,” I promise him.

“Go ahead!”

I break it. His teeth clamp down on his bottom lip. His legs jerk. His eyes swim with tears. That shouldn’t happen. I press my fingers against the back of his neck, then turn to Razor.

“He’s implanted. He isn’t one of them.”

“Yeah, well, who the hell are you ?” the pilot squeals.

I pull the tracking device from my pocket. There’s the hospital and the magazine surrounded by a swarm of green dots. And there are three dots glowing on the airstrip.

“You cut yours out,” I say to Razor.

He’s nodding. “And left it under my pillow. That was the plan. Or was that the plan? Shit, Ringer, wasn’t that the plan?” A little panicky.

I drop the knife into my hand. “Hold him.”

Razor understands immediately. He grabs Lieutenant Bob and puts him in a headlock. Bob doesn’t put up much resistance. I worry now that he might go into shock. If he does, it’s over.

There isn’t much light and Razor can’t hold him perfectly still, so I tell Bob to chill or I might sever his spinal cord, adding paralysis to the problem of a broken finger. I pull out the pellet, toss it onto the tarmac, yank Bob’s head back, and whisper in his ear, “I’m not the enemy and I haven’t gone Dorothy. I’m just like you—”

“Only better,” Razor finishes. He glances through the window and says, “Uh, Ringer…”

I see them: The glow of headlights expanding like a pair of stars going supernova. “They’re coming, and when they get here, they will kill us,” I tell Bob. “You too. They won’t believe you and they will kill you.”

Bob stares into my face, tears of pain streaming down his.

“You have to trust me,” I say.

“Or she’ll break another finger,” Razor adds.

A deep, shuddering breath, shaking uncontrollably, cradling his wounded hand, blood trickling down his neck and soaking into the collar of his T-shirt. “It’s hopeless,” he whispers. “They’ll just shoot us down.”

On impulse, I reach forward and press my hand against his cheek. He doesn’t recoil. He becomes very still. I don’t understand why I touched him or what’s happening now that I am, but I feel something opening inside me, like a bud spreading its delicate petals toward the sun. I’m freezing cold. My neck is on fire. And the little finger on my right hand throbs to the beat of my heart. The pain brings tears to my eyes. His pain.

“Ringer!” Razor barks. “What the hell are you doing ?”

I pour my warmth into the man I touch. I douse the fire. I caress the pain. I soothe his fear. His breath evens out. His body relaxes.

“Bob, we really have to go,” I tell him.

And two minutes later, we do.

AS WE ASCEND, the truck screeches to a stop and a tall man steps out, and his face is a study in deep shadows thrown by the floods, but I see his eyes with eyes enhanced, bright and hard like the crows’ in the woods, polished blue while the crows’ were black, and it must be a trick of light or shadow, the small, tight smile he seems to wear.

“Keep us low,” I order Bob.

“Where are we going?”

“South.”

The chopper banks; the ground rushes toward us. I see the magazine burning and the spinning lights of the fire trucks and recruits swarming around like ants. We pass over a river, black water sparking in the spillover light from the floods. Behind us now, the camp is an oasis of light in a desert of winter dark. We plunge into that dark, skimming six feet above the treetops.

I slide into the seat next to Teacup, lean her into my chest, and pull her hair to one side. I hope this is the last time I have to do this. When I’m done, I crush the implant with the heel of the knife.

Razor’s voice squawks in my headset: “How’s she doing?”

“Okay, I think.”

“How’re you doing?”

“Good.”

“Glitches?”

“Minor. You?”

“Smooth as a newborn baby’s ass.”

I ease Teacup back into the seat, stand up, and open compartments until I find the chutes. Razor rattles on as I check the assemblies.

“Anything you want to say to me? Like, I don’t know, Thank you, Razor, for saving my ass from a lifetime of alien servitude after I punched you in the throat and generally acted like a douchebag ? Something along those lines? You know, it wasn’t exactly like taking a walk in baseball, secret codes embedded in bogus games and slipping laxative in pudding and rigging explosives and stealing trucks and kidnapping pilots with fingers for you to break. Maybe Hey, Razor, I couldn’t have done it without you. You rock. Something like that. Doesn’t have to be word-for-word, just something to capture the general spirit.”

“Why did you?” I ask. “What made you decide to trust me?”

“What you said that day about the kids—turning kids into bombs. I did some asking around. Next thing I know, I’m in the Wonderland chair and then they take me to the commander and he’s all down on my ass about something you said, and he orders me to stop talking to you because he can’t order me to stop listening, and the more I think about it, the stinkier it gets. They train us to terminate Teds and then load down toddlers with alien ordnance? Who’re the good guys here? And then I’m like, who am I here? It got really angsty, a real existential crisis. What tipped it for me, though, was the math.”

“Math?”

“Yeah, math. Aren’t all you Asians really good at math?”

“Don’t be racist. And I’m three-quarters Asian.”

“‘Three-quarters.’ See? Math. It comes down to simple addition. As in it doesn’t add up. Okay, so maybe we get lucky and seize the Wonderland program from them. Even super-superior aliens can screw up, nobody’s perfect. But we don’t just snatch Wonderland. We have their bombs, we have their track-and-kill implants, their super-sophisticated nanobot system—shit, we even have the technology capable of detecting them. Wha duh fuh? We’ve got more of their weapons than they do! But the real kicker came that day they jacked you up, when Vosch said they lied to us about the organism attached to human brains. Unbelievable!”