Species

S P E C I E S

Beautiful, blond, and deadly, she is part alien and part human, a top-secret government experiment scheduled to be destroyed. But she escaped and—driven by powers not even she understands and an instinct she cannot control—she descends on Los Angeles with a single purpose: to mate and reproduce.

Now a special team of uniquely talented individuals has been assembled to stop her. The only problem is that their quarry is like nothing they’ve ever encountered, and all they have to go on is a growing trail of bodies and the knowledge that time is running out. For if they don’t catch her before she reproduces, the planet will be seeded with the spawn of an unknown species—a species genetically superior to our own and with no known predators . . .

F
OR THREE MILLION YEARS. THE HUMAN RACE HAS BEEN AT THE TOP OF THE EVOLUTIONARY LADDER.

N
OTHING LASTS FOREVER

DEADLY METAMORPHOSIS

Above Angela’s cooling body, the chrysalis began to break apart, cracks spidering in all directions along its glossy surface. Within the husk where the woman had found death, there was motion, an unhurried shuffling, then pressure. Like an exquisite butterfly emerging from its cocoon, a new Sil pushed her way free. Headfirst, then arms, reaching up and around to the top of the chrysalis and swinging herself carefully out and down to stand next to Angela’s corpse, reborn a fully grown and beautiful woman.

She sniffed the air, and her eyes, steely blue beneath a lovely halo of blond hair, sharpened as she studied her surroundings and the body at her feet. With slow deliberation, Sil bent and began undressing the dead woman.

SPECIES
A Bantam Book/July 1995

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1995 by Dennis Feldman.

Cover art copyright © 1995 by Metro Goldwyn Mayer Inc.

ISBN 0-553-57404-3

Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

For my dad,
Marty Cochran.

Who believes in my dreams,
and still helps make them possible.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As with all projects, especially surprises like this one, a lot of people helped in the making. Many thanks to my editors, Anne Groell, Jennifer Hershey, and Jennifer Steinbach, and as always, to my agent and friend, Howard Morhaim. Don VanderSluis and my dad, Marty Cochran, patiently answered another barrage of technical questions. Lots of gratitude goes to Dennis Feldman, who started this whole thing and was always available, and I stand in awe of La Bon Ami, Master Huntress of the “I Can Find Anything Search.” Abundant appreciation goes to Jeff Osier, who can remember everything and find out anything, while Linda Schroyer continues her mission of rescuing me in my ongoing war with word-processing software. I was blessed, too, with support and solid declarations of “You can do it!” from more people than I can remember here, but particularly from Don VanderSluis, my longtime friend Wayne Allen Sallee, Janna Silverstein, Amy Wasp-Wimberger, Matt Costello, and Tammy Thompson.

And finally, thanks to Johnny Algiers for the footnotes.

PROLOGUE

November 15, 1974
Arecibo, Puerto Rico

F
rom the outside, it looked like another beautiful day in Arecibo. A bustling community settled by the Spanish over four hundred years earlier, the town went about the business of living with a sort of laid-back energy born of a tropical climate and an active industry. Plastics, farm machinery, sporting goods, clothing, and paper were manufactured in the mills and factories, while the largest distillery in the country continued the fine trade of rum-making. At one end of town, the rail yards loaded shipments on trains that would make the trip to San Juan, while at the University of Puerto Rico the students began another round of classes to sharpen their minds for the future.

The residents of the town were used to the huge Arecibo Observatory installation to the north, though many of them never knew or understood exactly what it did. The thousand-foot-wide radar-radio telescope, its antenna structures rising more than half that distance, had been there for nearly a decade and a half but today was like any other in the active lives of the people on the small inlet near the mouth of the Arecibo River.

On this fine and bright Friday, as part of the ceremonies dedicating the newly ungraded telescope, a reel-to-reel tape machine whirred into life in the Observatory’s control center in response to the carefully programmed instructions fed to it by the mainframe computer. At the computer’s keyboard sat a young man wearing thick glasses, jeans, and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, listening to someone on the other end of a telephone and nodding his head. “Yes, sir,” he said. His gaze flicked to the industrial clock above the desk, and he watched its second hand sweep around to the sixty mark, then begin another trip. “Sixty seconds and counting.” Neither he nor the party on the other end said anything, but the young man did not hang up. Across the room, an older man in a more conservative white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up checked the position of the tape machine for the third time, then hit the pause button. He looked expectantly at his younger colleague.

Both of them stared at the clock. At minus five and counting, the young man at the computer moved his finger to a strategic position above the keyboard. The older man began counting backward in time with the measured tick of the second hand. His voice was soft and tense.

“Four . . . three . . . two . . .

“One.”

The young man at the keyboard pressed the enter key, and both turned to stare at the tape machine as the reels spun into motion and their transmission—destined for the fringes of the galaxy—began. Behind them, data began to flash across the green screen of the computer monitor, far too rapidly for either to read. It didn’t matter; they both knew the essence of the message constructed by Frank Drake, Richard Isaacman, Linda May, James C. G. Walker, and Carl Sagan:

A 1,679-bit picture portraying a counting scheme; a description of fundamental terrestrial biochemistry including five biologically significant atoms: hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus; a schematic of the DNA double helix; a representation of a human being, including dimensions; a depiction of the solar system showing that human beings inhabit the third planet; and a schematic representation of the Arecibo Observatory and a description of its dimensions.

The two men were not close. One, a family man with a boy flunking out of high school and a girl doing well in college, thought about how his wife wanted another baby and worried whether the transmission instructions were programmed properly, although he knew the programmer, Bernard Jackson, had done a perfect job. The keyboard operator thought the whole idea was cool, but didn’t believe for a moment that anything would ever hear it. He didn’t want to be sending messages into the empty reaches of the universe; he wanted to be sending satellites to explore the closer planets. As he sat at the keyboard and kept a close eye on the readouts from the computer tracking the program output, he decided he would reevaluate his major and make sure his education was aimed in the right direction.

While the town of Arecibo went about its daily living, the message of human life began its journey into space.

1992

E
ighteen years had brought a lot of change to Arecibo. Sprawling across the greenery of the Puerto Rican coast, a continually expanding industry had made the town prosper. Operated by Cornell University under an agreement with the National Science Foundation, astronomy students from all over the world now vied for the chance to work in the SETI facility at the Arecibo Observatory.

Miguel Perez had lucked out. The son of a coffee-farm laborer, he had earned a scholarship to the University of Puerto Rico through stubbornness and hard work. His household was poor enough to be considered below the poverty line, and he was acutely aware of the fact that he was the only family member to go beyond the first year of high school. While his peers were studying and compiling the information for their theses in air-conditioned dorms, he did his schoolwork in the hot kitchen of the three-room apartment he shared with his mother, father and two baby brothers, banging out his papers on a manual typewriter his father had found for six dollars in a junk shop.

Miguel was not bitter. Rather, he felt incredibly fortunate—life, he thought, was full of promise and adventure. Someday he would be able to do wonderful things to reward his hardworking parents, and he knew that every day he set an example for his younger siblings. He did not need to have huge amounts of money: the education he was receiving would expand his intellect and care for his future, and his family would nurture his heart. Taking care of his simple needs wasn’t even that difficult. Monitoring the computers at the facility for two hours a day gave him enough cash to buy schoolbooks and supplies and help out with the groceries at home. To help Miguel, his mother packed a homemade lunch for him every morning. Today’s fine meal was a
carnitas
tortilla and
menudo
soup; the tortilla was long gone and he was savoring the spicy soup while reviewing his spectroscopy notes.

Right now Miguel was alone in the whitewashed room, but Francis Leverton, the American exchange student, would return in about ten minutes. By then Miguel’s soup would be gone and he’d be packed up and ready to go; sometimes sitting here by himself for the last sixty minutes of his daily stint—the lunch hour—was tedious enough to make him feel dull and sleepy, and he was looking forward to the return of the two regular staff members and the brisk walk in the sunshine to his next class.