Species II (29 page)

19

“A
re they ready?” Press asked. He and Dennis watched as Laura carefully injected a bright blue gel-based substance into the emptied shells of the tranquilizer darts. The two men were holding a couple of spray canisters filled with the same material, which Laura had substituted for the failed hydrochlorine toxin. “Do you think it will work?”

Laura’s eyes crinkled as she concentrated on the last of her task, then she straightened and packed up the filled tranquilizer darts. “I can’t give you any assurances about that,” she admitted. “In theory . . . yes, it ought to be extremely efficient.” She gave them a faint, tired smile. “In practice, I’m afraid it hasn’t been tested yet.”

“Well, it’s the best shot we’ve got,” Press said and held out his hand for the weapon. Laura gave it to him and he inspected it carefully, making sure he knew how to load it now so he wouldn’t end up dying while he tried to figure it out when he was in the field. Single shot—too bad these things didn’t come semi-auto.

“That other stuff didn’t work,” Dennis said.

“That’s not entirely true,” Laura pointed out.

“It didn’t
work,”
Dennis said stubbornly. “Otherwise Patrick would be . . . ah, shit.” He looked miserable. “Well, he’d be dead, that’s what, and he’s not. So what if this stuff doesn’t work either? Then what?”

Press had no answer for Dennis and he looked to Laura. Her eyes met his, then cut to Dennis. Finally, she spoke.

“Then we’ll be walking onto a battlefield with a water pistol,” she said softly.

Dennis started to say something, then frowned as he eyed the rest of the lab and Eve’s glass bio-environment. “You know, something’s not right over there.”

The tone of his voice made Laura look up. “What?”

“Maybe I’m just seeing things—too much crazy stress or something—but I could’ve sworn I just saw part of that glass bubble thing that Eve is in sort of . . .
bulge.”

The statement made Press jerk toward the lab and Eve’s bio-environment. “Jesus Christ, Laura—you don’t think she could shatter that, do you?”

“No way,” Laura said flatly. “That’s quartz glass. It’s unbreakable and it won’t melt until it hits several thousand degrees Celsius. The stuff is used to contain—”

The whole front wall of Eve’s habitat
exploded.

The three of them spun simultaneously, and for a too-long moment, no one moved. A lifetime ago Press had stood with Laura and the members of the first team who had been gathered to apprehend the escaped Sil and had watched a laboratory tape of how as a child, Sil had cannonballed through the window of her smaller glass quarters and escaped. Now many of those people involved in the resulting alien hunt—Stephen Arden and Xavier Fitch, the head of the whole operation, among them—were dead, and the sight of all that glass, so much more this time, brought it all back to the forefront of Press’s memory. It was like before—a huge, glistening blast of strangely sharp water, a shower of glitter that razored against the skin and clothes of anyone within range.

Press and Laura both looked to the right and saw the woman in charge of the tether mechanism stagger back, her face covered with bloody cuts. Then the woman’s dazed expression cleared and hardened, and she went for the double sequence of buttons that would take care of this alien problem once and for all.

She never made it.

Even with her exceptional speed and strength, Eve was too far away to reach the guard before she would hit the death button. She must have known it would be this way, because before the woman’s stride could take her back to the tether mechanism, something flew through the air, a blur that was traveling far too fast to identify until it smashed into the side of the guard’s head and knocked her off her feet. The force of the blow tossed her against the wall behind her and it wasn’t until she slid down it and didn’t get up again that they saw what had done the damage—the lopsided remains of the baseball Eve had ruined the other day.

“The tether!”
Laura shouted, and the race was on.

Eve and Press went for the gold mechanism on the wall at the same time. The only reason Press got there an instant before she did was that he was closer—Eve was far, far faster. Still, that wasn’t enough. As his hand jabbed toward the button, Eve’s fingers closed around his arm; before he could go on the defensive, he went sailing through the air as though he was no more than a bothersome gnat.

He heard more than saw the tether mechanism shatter under the impact of Eve’s fist, had a glimpse of flying sparks followed by the stench of heated insulation. The device fell off the wall and crashed to the floor, nothing but a useless, crumpled hunk of metal leaving a few stray wires still attached to the wall. Press tried desperately to shake the fog from his brain and managed only enough sense to pull himself up on one knee and watch Eve as she sprinted across the laboratory; the main locked door might as well have been made of cardboard for all it kept her inside. She kicked it open without any effort at all and vaulted through the opening, disappearing into the corridor beyond.

“Oh,
shit!”
Press heard Dennis cry out. Then the astronaut and Laura were at his side and helping him to his feet.

“Why didn’t anyone fire?” Press demanded. Eyes blazing, he glared around the laboratory but none of the guards would meet his eyes. A few feet away, the woman who had been in charge of guarding the tether mechanism was still splayed against the wall; starting at the left temple, the entire side of her face had turned into a black bruise. Her eyes were open and staring at nothing that anyone in the lab would ever know.

“I think the quarters were too close—they were afraid they’d hit each other,” Laura said. She peered hard at Press and tried to lift one of his eyelids. “Are you okay?”

“I’m wonderful,” he retorted and pushed her hand away. “Grab the DNA compound and let’s go.”

“We didn’t test it—”

“What the hell were you going to test it on, anyway?” Press gripped her by one wrist and tugged her back toward the main lab area, knowing that Dennis would follow. “If she gets to Patrick before we do, we’re going to have problems bigger than anything we ever dreamed of. Let’s grab our gear and
go.”

Laura and Dennis didn’t have to be told again. A few seconds that felt like eternities, then they were sprinting through the wreck of the main lab door and after Eve, following corridor after corridor while alarms began to scream through the speakers. It wasn’t hard to track the life-form—it was BioHazard policy to post a sentry at every half-landing to check identification cards and authorizations; all they had to do was to track the trail of bodies Eve left in her wake. One of them was missing the chain of keys at his belt that no doubt had held a security cardkey . . . and that meant that Eve was going to be able to get all the way outside.

“She won’t make out of the building, will she?” Dennis demanded as the three of them jumped over the unconscious man and kept going. “I mean, someone will stop her before she takes off, right?”

“How does she even know where she’s going?” Press asked on the heels of that. “This damned place is the biggest tangle of halls I’ve ever seen.”

Laura pulled up, then motioned at a stairway marked
EMERGENCY ACCESSS ONLY—AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
“Let’s go this way—the stairwell alarm hasn’t been triggered, which means Eve must’ve taken the elevator.” She pulled a security cardkey from her pocket and jammed it into the card reader; an instant later the red light on the device changed to green and the locking mechanism clicked open. “Even if we don’t beat her upstairs, we should at least be able to get there at the same time. Come on!”

“Oh, I can’t wait,” Press said.

Nevertheless, he was the first one through the door.

E
ve lost count of the number of people who got in her way.

There was no doubt that she’d killed some of them, including the woman back in the lab, the one who had been charged with the task of triggering the tether mechanism. But she had no regrets; she had passed the point of no return and she neither needed nor wanted to go back. Tonight she would find what she was,
be
what she was, or die trying. And if that was the way it was meant to be, then a lot of the humans would die with her.

There was no question about finding her way out of the BioHazard complex. The urge to go upward was as strong as the longing deep inside her that was pulling her unerringly toward freedom—every time she turned in the correct direction the sense of impending physical fulfillment grew stronger, and every time she chose wrongly, it faded. It was a built-in homing beacon, destined to lead her out of this place and, ultimately, to her mate.

After such a long time in the bio-environment—literally her entire life—Eve had no idea what to expect when she hammered her way through the final metal door that led to the outside world. Up until now, her entire knowledge of anything beyond the BioHazard 4 hallways had been limited to the programs she’d seen on television. She’d watched everything from sitcoms to soap operas to nature programs, slice-of-life serials to science-fiction movies. But none of it had prepared Eve for her first sight of the night sky.

It was beautiful, stretching endlessly above the complex as she stepped through the wreckage she’d made of the last doorway.
Big sky
—she’d heard that term applied often enough to a state somewhere called Montana, but had never understood it until now. She still wasn’t sure she did, but she could at least finally comprehend why someone would say that: so far above, and for her, unreachable . . . yet she felt an undeniable connection to it that the people on this planet would never feel. Her ancestors had come from somewhere out there—
she
had, too. The sky and the concepts behind it and everything it stood for in her existence overwhelmed her for a single, eternal moment, wiping out everything else—the BioHazard 4 complex, the escape from her habitat, Dr. Baker and her associates in pursuit. The silence around her was absolute, and she felt fused with the universe, as though every part of her was finally back where it belonged.

Eve never even saw the soldiers ringing the parking lot around the building’s exit, nor did she hear the MP squadron leader’s shouted, single-word command—

“Fire!”

“T
here is unusual activity on the western edge of the compound perimeter, sir.”

Colonel Burgess resisted the urge to tell the pilot of the AH-1G Huey helicopter that he had eyes, thank you, and could see that for himself. “Keep your distance,” he said instead. “Let’s see what’s going on but stay high enough not to become a part of it.” The man nodded and banked the black-painted chopper, his smooth handling of the stick a good indication of his years of experience; in a few moments he’d brought them to a point where Burgess could focus his binoculars and get a closer bead on the action below.

Watching, Burgess saw their flight here in his mind again in much the same way that a drowning man sees his life flash before him. With Monroe A.F.B. as his destination, they’d taken off from the Pentagon and flown above Washington, D.C. proper. Burgess had had little on his mind but the assignment ahead—let Lennox neutralize the alien threat, then he would neutralize Lennox. But the flight had been an unintentional delight, giving the colonel a panoramic night view of all the monuments that he loved and that stood for American freedom—the Capitol building, the White House, the Lincoln and Washington memorials. These were all representations of his life, and now everything Burgess saw happening on the ground below the helicopter threatened that. Soldiers and military vehicles crawled around the outside of the BioHazard end of the complex like ants attacking a sugar hill while searchlights swept the area and another two dozen men poured out an exit and positioned themselves on the edge of the roof. In another instant, the main door to the building came crashing down—so much for steel-reinforced construction—and out stepped a blond-haired woman who could only be—

Eve!

Burgess leaned forward in the passenger seat, his breath caught in his throat. Bad enough that Patrick Ross was still out there somewhere, but if this alien female escaped and went to him, then all those spectacular symbols back in the city, everything they stood for, would probably be destroyed. She
had
to be stopped here and now—

Machine-gun fire rippled through the night, its bright orange flashes and sound detectable even above the drone of the helicopter. Far below, the woman jerked and fell, then lay facedown and motionless on the concrete.

For a few precious seconds, both he and the pilot thought it was over—

—then everything changed.

Burgess only had to jerk his head and the pilot nodded and knew to pursue.

E
ve opened her eyes to a ring of soldiers’ faces peering down at her.

For a second she thought she was back in the lab—damn it, she must have been unconscious long enough for them to hustle her back to the lower level and imprison her again. But no . . . beneath the skin of her arms and legs she could feel concrete, warm and rough, unlike anything in the lab. And sparkling from between the gawking faces above her—