Scott Mackay - Phytosphere

And… disconnect again… because it was late, it was early, but it was neither late nor early because these two qualifiers didn’t apply anymore. It was dark—the only qualifier. As a result of his two miserable failures, it was dark all the time now. They sat in the second-floor games room—five remaining airmen, his three daughters, himself, and his wife; and they had the gas generator hooked up so that they could have some electrical lights, and he heard the generator humming at the back of the house. Lenny was giving them all a lecture on how to use the airman weapon of choice, the Montclair Repeater, a nasty little submachine gun about the size of an umbrella.

“The rounds are more like darts, but they explode on impact. The thing you have to remember about Tarsalans is that they don’t kill as easy as we do. Rib cage like a rhino. That’s why an exploding round is an advantage.”

He disassembled the weapon, reassembled it, snapped the banana clip in place, then said, “Four hundred rounds a clip. Ingenious.”

He passed it around. Neil could hardly believe his girls were handling one of the most vicious military weapons ever devised, that it had actually come to this; his precocious, bright, pampered, pretty, and innocent daughters being forced to protect themselves from alien invaders with military-style firearms.

When it came his turn to try, he smiled his idiotic smile, and briefly—ever so briefly—broke into tears.

He caught Fernandes and Rostov looking at him. Neil handed the weapon to Morgan. A bloody Montclair Repeater in Morgan’s hands when she couldn’t even read.

“When you’re not engaged, hold the barrel pointed toward the ceiling, hon,” Lenny reminded Morgan.

The gun went to Ashley, then Melissa. Neil remembered this from the Air Force. Standard weapons training. But what he didn’t remember was little girls with guns.

Melissa went first, walking to the window with a strange fire in her eyes, pointing the Montclair out the casement, and shooting out into the grounds. Melissa, the oldest, was like him, ready to try new things, embracing this harsh new world as the status quo, accepting it readily.

Then it was Ashley’s turn, and Ashley was petulant about it, rolling her eyes a time or two as she took the weapon and walked to the window. She fired the Montclair without even looking. An involuntary squeal escaped from her lips as the weapon jumped in her hands.

“You’ve got to grip it, kitten, if you want to stop that recoil,” was all Lenny had to say.

And finally it was Morgan’s turn. Neil was hard-pressed not to intervene, because this was just a ten-year-old girl after all, but what if it came down to just Morgan at the end of it all—just her, and a handful of aliens trying to harvest the countryside without due regard for human life? So he gave her a chance. And she did okay with it, seeming to understand with a profundity that apparently escaped the other two just why Lenny was asking her to shoot the weapon in the first place.

And then… another horrible disconnect. Where he just sat there with Rostov on guard duty, with headsets on, listening through the various microphone plants in the forest beyond the perimeter, hearing crunches and cracks, and the trees settling bit by bit into decrepitude. Hearing the wind blow through the once magnificent Chattahoochee National Forest. Occasionally going to the back to check on Louise and Melissa, who scanned the grounds to the rear through light-gathering goggles. Bits and pieces of the long, perpetual night of the shroud gluing themselves together out of one disconnect after another, until finally Lenny told him how the senior airmen on their little staff, Harmon, Earl, and Scott—Neil’s old friends, Greg’s old friends—had fought brilliantly, but had finally succumbed to the Vibration Modules, the VMs, those insidious Tarsalan weapons they had all grown to fear so much.

“Buried them out by the pool. I hope you don’t mind.”

And in Lenny’s voice he heard a letting go of hope.

Later, near the end of his shift with Rostov, Lenny came to the front and asked, “What went wrong?”

So Neil became Dr. Thorndike again, and tried to explain some of it to Lenny, how with the hydrogen sulfide, the xenophyta had gone into a state of suspended animation; and how, with the virus, the carapace had surprised everyone by jailing the virus during its lytic phase. Lenny stared but said nothing.

And in that stare, Neil saw doubt and, aggravatingly, some Monday-morning quarterbacking, as if Lenny thought Neil should have figured out the pitfalls ahead of time.

After that, he slept for a while—at least as much as he ever slept in this perpetual night—a light doze that never released him into the sweet oblivion he craved so much.

Fernandes came for him three hours later. “We’ve got a full alert, sir.”

Neil took up a position with Louise and Morgan in his study on the second floor. The only light came from the control panel of the communications equipment, but it was enough so that he could see their faces—and their faces were tired and thin and, most of all, fearful.

He lifted the light-gathering goggles and strapped them to his eyes, then raised himself to the windowsill and looked out at the grounds.

He could see them. Yes. Sketched in the ghostly green of the goggles’s light-gathering properties.

Aliens.

Inoculated and biologically adapted to live here, the first Tarsalan immigrants, maybe surprised that they were now soldiers, perhaps baffled by human intransigence, and certainly distressed, the way they all were. The goggles magnified. He saw them clearly, five altogether, their huge, bicephalic heads covered with shaggy black hair that reminded him of a bison’s pelt, visible among the dead yew trees.

He saw a small burst of light from the right, out beyond the six-car garage, like sparks from a welder’s torch. The sparks rose toward the mansion, and as they got closer to Marblehill they drew apart, and pulsated, like the flickering radiance of a pulsar. Chatter drifted up from the radio on the floor. Lenny’s voice, the voice of command, but also the voice of desperation. Through the goggles Neil watched the Tarsalans shift to the left, where they took cover behind the stone wall. Then the tattoo of Montclair Repeater fire erupted from the house, with every fifth round a tracer. Louise and Morgan looked at him.

He gave them a nod, and they tentatively rose to the window and, with shaking hands, pulled their triggers.

He did the same.

The whole thing seemed surreal. Especially watching Louise shoot her Montclair. She was a housewife, for God’s sake, not a combat soldier. And Morgan was a ten-year-old grade-five student with Attention Deficit Disorder who had to take medicine just so she could concentrate. And he was a fifty-two-year-old physicist and biologist, a university professor with a spreading paunch and a taste for fine wines. Yet now he was blasting away, praying that the VMs wouldn’t get anywhere near him. Their light shifted against the ceiling, making green and blue squares, like geometrical ghosts. As they got closer, they began to whine and shriek. They floated with a not particularly urgent velocity toward his study on the second floor, and he shot at them, and they were easy to blast out of the air, but there were just so many of them, as if the Tarsalans believed that the basis for all successful technology was redundancy to the Nth degree.

How it happened he wasn’t sure, because he was too busy shooting out the window, too much in the grip of his own frantic combat mania, shooting but not even looking where he was shooting. Yet…yet the next disconnect was framed in the context of Morgan screaming at him, tugging at his sleeve, pointing at Louise, who was lying on her back on the handwoven Moroccan rug, quivering in the oddest way. At first he thought she was having a seizure, but she was quivering so fast she actually looked blurred around the edges. When he placed his hand against her chest it was like placing his hand on the hood of a car, because his hand vibrated the same way. He saw a tiny, bloodless hole on her neck. Her eyes were half closed, and she didn’t seem to be in any particular pain.