Clones vs. Aliens (11 page)

Exactly fifty-seven minutes later, Fisher, Alex, Amanda, and Veronica were staring out over the top of a low ridge. On the other side of the ridge was a flat expanse of long brown and tan grasses, lit up weakly with the last red rays of the setting sun. A chain-link fence made a giant square around a collection of dilapidated barns and grain silos. As darkness fell, Fisher popped open a pair of night vision binoculars that collapsed to the size of a postage stamp, and aimed them at a sign posted on the fence.

“‘US Department of Agriculture Crop Testing Area,’” he read. “Nice. That’s why there aren’t a lot of guards around the perimeter. It would spoil the illusion.”

“Here comes a patrol,” said Amanda, pointing. “It looks like there are just two of them.”

A pair of tan-clad guards rounded the far corner of the fence, passed only a dozen feet from them, and turned their backs at the near corner. The kids waited for more
guards to pass as a cold wind whipped up the dust at their feet. An owl hooted somewhere in the trees, followed by a second. The chilly breeze kept up, and Fisher rubbed his hands together.

“Looks like it’s just the one patrol,” Veronica said, shivering.

“Okay then, let’s move it,” said Amanda. They crested the ridge and ran as quietly as they could down to the edge of the fence. Fisher removed a vial from his backpack as Alex and Amanda pulled on Fisher’s strength sleeves—Alex had kept even more of them tucked away in his room. The dodgeball experience had given them a better idea how to use them. Fisher put a drop of his patented Screw Liquefier, which handily liquefied anything made of steel, at several key points in the fence. The fence began to drip like melting cheddar. Alex and Amanda pulled in opposite directions, opening a hole through which they all slipped.

When Alex and Amanda set the fence back in place, Fisher immediately reapplied the rapidly solidifying metal, and the fence was back to normal.

“Okay,” Fisher said, looking over what appeared from the outside to be decrepit farm buildings, including several grain silos and an old barn. “So where’s the ship?”

“I overheard Willard bragging about his dad and this
place to Brody,” Amanda said. “I think the key point in this facility is the biggest silo.” She pointed to a massive, round silo in the middle of the compound. “Let’s take a look.”

Ducking low, they ran toward the building’s dark silhouette, scanning the landscape as they went. So far, they hadn’t seen a single person other than the two guards.

Fisher was baffled. If there really
were
an extraterrestrial spacecraft concealed here, the place should be swarming with scientists and researchers. But the place was almost totally silent except for the occasional calls of the owls and the whispering wind. Could CURTIS have been wrong? Could this really be a place for agricultural crop testing after all?

“Down!” whispered Amanda harshly, pointing to the two guards in the distance.

They dropped as a group to the grass and Fisher took a thin, dark sheet from his pack, covering them with it. The sheet had a complex sensor system that quickly analyzed the colors and textures of the material around it. The sheet’s material itself could then change its appearance accordingly. After a moment it turned a mottled green and black, and filmy blades of green sprang up from the tarp in imitation.

Fisher could only hear his own breathing for a few seconds, and then footsteps, growing louder. They had
good camouflage, but it wouldn’t do much good if they got stepped on.

The steps got closer. Twenty feet, ten, five. A boot came down two inches from Fisher’s right ear, and he tensed every muscle in his body to keep from springing up and running.

The guards passed. Fisher waited another minute before throwing off the tarp and gesturing to his friends to move on.

The grain silo’s wall was solid steel all the way around. No doors, no buttons—no way to enter at all.

“What now?” said Alex.

“Brody didn’t believe Willard,” Amanda said. “Willard demonstrated the password to back up his case. Let’s see if he was telling the truth.” She sighed, cleared her throat, and started whistling. The melody was weirdly familiar. Still, it took Fisher a minute to identify the melody.

“Is that … is that the tune to ‘Gift-Wrapped Heart’?” Fisher said, flabbergasted.

“Yep, that’s it,” Veronica muttered. Even in the dark, it was obvious that she was blushing.

Pop sensation Kevin Keels had written “Gift-Wrapped Heart” back before he had been revealed as a tone-deaf lipsyncher, but maybe NASA was a little behind the times. The song had saved them once before, when it turned out Keels’s real singing voice could literally kill robots.

What had been a featureless stretch of wall became a door, sliding open with a faint hiss. Inside was a small chamber of plain-brushed steel.

Amanda, Fisher, Alex, and Veronica passed inside together. The door shut behind them, dim bluish light glowed to life, and the little room, which turned out to be an elevator, began to descend.

The ride lasted for what felt like a
very
long time. When it finally began to slow, Alex muttered a warning.

“Be ready to fight,” he said. “We don’t know what’s waiting for us on the other side of that door.”

The elevator finally came to a halt, and the door hissed open, revealing … nothing.

“Fisher,” Amanda whispered. “Where are we?”

“What
is
this?” Veronica added.

Beyond the door was pitch-darkness and heavy silence. It was like the elevator had taken them to the end of the universe. The bright light spilling from inside the elevator didn’t even reflect onto the floor.

“I—I don’t know,” Fisher said. “It must be the weirdest security measure I’ve ever seen.”

He took a deep breath and inched cautiously out of the elevator, hoping he would encounter solid ground and not a thousand-foot drop into nothingness. Instantly, the room burst into multicolored light. At the same moment, music began to play.

It was “Gift-Wrapped Heart.”

“What the …?” Amanda turned a full circle. The walls were bursting with kaleidoscopic colors. The floor was a pulsing white, and multiple colored trails moved across it in different directions. Fisher looked more closely. Each trail looked like footprints.

“Are these … dance instructions?” he said, looking at the shifting footprint patterns.

“Yes,” Veronica said, cheeks bright red. “But only one of them is correct for this song. Please,” she sighed and her face glowed even brighter, “allow me.”

Fisher stepped aside. Veronica carefully followed the orange trail, stepping in time to the music, even miming with her arms. She kept going until the song reached its first chorus, and then everything but a simple soft light clicked off. Now the room just looked like a room, and a door was visible on the other side of it.

“Wow,” Alex said. “I’ve never seen a
dance
lock before.”

“I guess my Kevin Keels obsession had a bright side after all,” Veronica panted, pushing a stray bit of hair out of her eyes.

The door slid open with a satisfying click. On the other side was a man-made cavern bigger than a basketball arena, crisscrossed by walkways and gantries holding immense machines. The sides of the excavated cave were studded with windows, probably offices, laboratories, and
living quarters. The floor far below them bustled with engineers and researchers.

And in the center of it was the Gemini’s ship.

Fisher could tell it was designed to fly in atmosphere. It had a rounded, aerodynamic nose and a streamlined body with stubby wing-like extensions on either side. It was a dull turquoise color slashed with glinting black stripes, and had no visible engines.

There was a staircase down to their right and a door to their left.

Amanda started moving toward the stairs, but Alex grabbed the back of her shirt.

“If we take the stairs, we’ll be spotted,” said Alex, pointing to a series of cameras on the walkways, all of which were aimed down.

“Agreed,” said Veronica. “Our best bet is the door. We can try to work our way down through the offices. There must be a secondary way down to the floor.”

Fisher nodded and took the lead, the others forming up behind him like the well-trained team they had become. Fisher leaned against the door. In his left ear he inserted a mini-stethoscope the size of an earplug. He didn’t hear anyone moving or speaking. He hoped that meant it was empty.

He opened the door and the others snuck in. Fisher closed it silently behind him. The room looked like a
guard barracks, with two rows of bunks, a few posters on the walls, and a computer terminal on the cave-side wall underneath its broad window. There was also a promising-looking hatch in the floor, and a door on the far side of the room.

Amanda crossed to the second door, leaned in to listen, and then shook her head. “Footsteps. Coming this way, fast.”

“We have to backtrack,” said Alex, waving Fisher toward him. Fisher put his ear to the door they’d just come through. More footsteps.

“They’re coming the other way, too,” Fisher said, his breathing harsh in his own ears.

With no other choice, Veronica opened the floor hatch. It was a dark, ladderless tunnel.

“Down the hatch then,” Veronica said as she hopped in. Alex threw a look at each door and followed her.

“After you,” Fisher said, and Amanda jumped.

Fisher heard a door handle turn. He sat down at the edge of the hole in the floor, looked at the abyss into which his friends had vanished, and pulled the hatch closed after him as he followed them down.

For six seconds there was nothing but the
whoosh
of air rushing around his head. It must have been some kind of rapid deployment tunnel, for when guards were needed on the cave floor as quickly as possible. He hoped that
meant that the landing would be soft—otherwise they’d splatter like pancake batter on a hot griddle.

After the sixth second, he felt air open around him for an instant, then the soft embrace of a flexible net. It was an immersion cloth of some kind, built to absorb momentum and cushion landings. It even had a fresh, linen-ish scent.

In fact, the cloth’s components felt an awful lot like boxer shorts.

Fisher felt around some more and realized that the “net” he had landed in was a pile of underwear. They had gone down the laundry chute.

He dug himself out of the underwear as the others pulled the mercifully clean laundry off of themselves.

“Well, we’re down,” said Alex, removing a tank top from his forehead. “Let’s go find that ship.”

The laundry room led to a corridor. They moved carefully down the narrow hall. Suddenly, Alex held out an arm, stopping them in place. He pointed to a swiveling camera in the ceiling.

“My turn,” said Alex, reaching into his pack. He withdrew a small tube, pointed it at the camera, and pressed a button. An almost invisible object zipped out and covered the camera’s lens.

“I can make that membrane over the camera turn opaque, and then clear again, with the push of a button.
If I darken it for just a second or two, it’ll just look like a momentary glitch. Everybody ready to run?” They all nodded.

Alex led the way, and they ran around the corner as Alex pressed a second button on the tube, releasing it the moment they passed out of the camera’s view. They came to the mouth of the corridor and ducked behind a pile of supply crates.

The open cavern floor was ahead of them. No more than fifty feet away was the ship. It glimmered in the dim lighting of the lab, majestic and sleek.

Fisher noticed another figure, shrouded in shadow, searching through one of the supply crates. His blood turned to chunks of ice.

“Alex,” Fisher whispered, gripping his clone’s arm. From the way Alex stiffened, Fisher knew that he’d seen.

They would know that slender, sharp-faced profile anywhere. When the figure turned enough to throw light on its face, their worst fear was confirmed.

Dr. X.