Xenophobia (16 page)

“Out of hand,” cried Elvis. “Has he taken a look out the goddamn window?”

Elvis gestured ahead of the truck, his fingers pointing at the parachute-like descent of hundreds of resin pods drifting on the breeze. Rather than one per square mile, they were coming down no more than ten to twenty feet apart, catching in bushes and trees, landing on the road among the refugees.

One of the pods drifted in front of the truck and Bower got a good look at it. The seed, if it could be called that, was oblong and somewhat transparent. Like thick glass, there was a smokey, golden color to the resin, and it seemed hollow, but with the sun setting behind them she couldn’t be sure.

“FUCK.”

Elvis swore as he pulled hard to one side on the steering wheel, causing the truck to swerve out of a sandy rut in the track and onto the hard shoulder.

The first thing that ran through Bower’s mind was the possibility they’d hit someone. As the truck bounced up over the rocks she had a mental picture of someone being crushed beneath the wheels. Bower was already thinking about what she could and couldn’t do medically on the roadside as Elvis slammed on the brakes.

Jameson braced as the truck came shuddering to a stop.

Ahead of them, the Hummer pulled to one side as well.

“What the -” Jameson cried.

“Bosco ran over one of those bloody things,” Elvis said, pulling on the handbrake. And Bower found her heart ease a little. She could see the crushed seed in the tire tracks of the Hummer. An amber liquid oozed out onto the sand.

Elvis and Jameson dropped down out of the truck and onto the ground. Bower followed a little less gracefully.

“Smithy,” Jameson called out. “Keep your eyes peeled.”

Smithy hadn’t looked back from where she was perched in the gun-turret of the Hummer. She turned slightly, scanning out in front of them with the machine gun mounted on the vehicle.

Jameson was more concerned with the Hummer than he was the crushed alien pod. He was looking at the tires, trying to see if there had been any damage to them.

“Damn,” Elvis said, crouching down and looking at the crushed amber pod. He had a stick and was poking at the torn umbrella-shaped parachute attached to the pod. The webbing within the chute was no more than a foot in diameter. It disintegrated as he poked at it, with fine flecks trailing into the air like ash.

“Leave that alone, you dumb fuck,” cried Bosco.

“Nice driving,” Elvis replied, dropping the stick as he stood up. “So, were you stupid enough to aim for this thing on purpose, or were you asleep at the wheel again.”

Bosco laughed. “I was too busy trying not to leave your sorry-ass behind.”

Bower ignored them. She crouched down and looked at the viscous fluid seeping out of the shattered resin casing.

“What are you thinking?” Jameson asked her. “Ever seen anything like this before?”

“No.”

“So, is it a seed?” Elvis asked. “Are they planting alien marijuana on Earth or something?”

Bower wasn’t sure if Elvis was trying to be funny or just showing off, but his joke fell flat.

“I have no more idea than you,” she replied. “It’s certainly not a machine, at least not as we would understand one. There’s no moving parts, no sections, no joints, screws or pins. To understand what this is, you’d probably have to look at it under a microscope, and a scanning electron microscope at that.”

Bower picked up the stick Elvis had been holding. Carefully, she positioned the stick so it slid inside the shattered remains of the resin pod.

“Oh, man,” cried Bosco. “Don’t touch that shit. Haven’t you ever seen one of these movies?”

Bower looked up at him without saying anything.

“This is what always happens,” he continued. “People go sticking their nose where it doesn’t belong instead of leaving well enough alone. It always starts out all innocent and like, but then some badass alien invades the movie theatre or climbs out of the sea and there’s running and screaming.”

“Give it a rest,” Jameson said. Bower appreciated his level head.

Slowly, Bower used the stick to pick up the broken, hollow seed, if that’s what it was, and looked closely at the construction.

“I’m telling you,” Bosco said. “This can only end badly.”

“I hate to tell you this,” Bower replied. “But if this thing contains a pathogen then we’re already exposed.”

“Oh great,” Bosco replied. “That’s just fucking great.”

“You shouldn’t have run over it, you dumb shit,” cried Elvis, slapping Bosco on the chest.

“Hey, cut it out,” Jameson said, finishing their banter. “What do you make of it, Doc?”

Although it looked like a glass cylinder at first, on inspection Bower could see it was either an elongated hexagon or an octagon. Pointing at it, she began counting the different faces. There were six sides, making it an elongated, hexagonal cylinder similar to the inside of a honeycomb cell.

In the back of her mind, Bower vaguely remembered something from her university biology lectures. Bees and wasps used hexagonal shapes incidentally and not by deliberate design, they were an emergent property, a byproduct of maximizing every possible space. Pack regular cylinders together and there was a massive amount of wasted space between them. Flex the walls of the cylinders a little and they naturally formed a hexagon, filling up all the available room. Hexagons were nature’s little space savers.

Bower went to say something, but in the quiet of the moment she kept that observation to herself. She didn’t want to sound stupid, or worse, seem to be babbling about something inconsequential. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t have worried what others thought of her, but there was something about the hierarchy within the troop that made her feel like she had to maintain a sense of dignity. They looked up to her as a qualified doctor, at least she thought they did. Or perhaps she was sensing their deference to her as a woman. Either way, she figured she’d only speak up if she had something concrete to contribute.

“It’s disintegrating,” she said, noting that the alien pod was coming apart, and not just because it had been run over.

The light from the setting sun caught the smoky, glassy resin, reminding her of the old dark brown medical bottles. Those had been tinted to prevent light from breaking down the complex chemical molecules within the medicine and she wondered if the same was true here. She doubted any of the attributes she’d noticed were purely coincidental. There was an alien intelligence at work here, but on a biological not a mechanical level.

Goo dripped from the resin casing, running down the stick before dropping to the dusty ground. Sections of the casing slid with the viscous fluid. Both the texture and consistency reminded Bower of honey and treacle.

Someone was tapping her on the shoulder.

Suddenly, Bower was aware they’d been tapping her shoulder for quite some time, but she was too absorbed by what she was looking at and the sensation had only just registered. It was annoying. If they wanted her for something, why didn’t they just say so, why did they have to touch her. Touch was personal. Touch was privileged. She pulled away, deliberately ignoring them, hoping they’d get the message. The hand followed her as she shifted sideways and lay the broken resin casing on the ground.

“What?” she said rather impatiently, wondering what could be so important.

A shadow passed over her, blotting out the setting sun. As she turned she could see all heads facing in one direction. The refugees stood still, their eyes cast up. The soldiers stood silently facing the same way. As she stood, she got her first glimpse of a floater hundreds if not thousands of feet in the air.

There were three of them, stretched out several hundred yards apart. One of the floaters cast its shadow on the truck as the creature drifted north. The sun blazing through the flicking tentacles trailing behind the massive beast.

Bower was entranced. Whereas mankind flew in space in what amounted to tin cans, these aliens creatures were capable of spanning the depths of interstellar space, enduring a bitter cold vacuum and then making the transition to flying within a planet’s atmosphere. What were these animals?

Each floater appeared to be hundreds of feet in height, like a blimp, only with a giant, semi-transparent purple bladder keeping them buoyant in the same way in which a bluebottle jellyfish floated on the waves of the sea.

Beneath the inflated bladder sat a mass of what Bower could have only described as organic pulp. Despite her years of medical study and her interest in biology, Bower wasn’t prepared for what she was seeing. The mass beneath the presumably gas-filled bubble didn’t appear to have any differentiation. Bower was used to seeing biology as functional, practical, with insects and animals having segmentation, being divided into limbs and organs. The base of the floater, though, looked more like the ravaged, torn, raw wound of a gunshot. Behind the creature, a series of tentacles stretched out for thousands of feet, floating on the breeze, drifting lazily to one side then another.

Another floater appeared from over the forest of acacia trees to the south of them. The massive beast looked like it was no more than a few feet above the treetops, causing panic among the refugees but Bower quickly realized this was an illusion of size. From what she could tell, the floaters were at least several hundred feet above the road. Given that their tentacles trailed below and behind them, remaining well clear of the ground, she figured they were somewhere around five or six hundred feet up.

The floater passing directly overhead seemed majestic, strangely beautiful. The refugees cowered, taking cover, as did the soldiers, leaving Bower standing alone in the road staring up at the massive creature as though she were watching a Blue whale swimming within the ocean.

“Bower,” Jameson cried, sheltering beside the truck. His voice was quiet, just a shade above a whisper as he beckoned her over to him.

“They’re ignoring us,”
Bower
replied, not bothering to lower her voice.

Smithy crouched low in the turret of the Hummer, making herself as small as possible.

Bower breathed deeply, taking in the awe of the moment. Within a minute or so, the creature had passed overhead, leaving long strands whipping slowly back and forth in its wake. The tentacles, if they could be called that, reminded Bower of the elongated tail of a sauropod, slowly tapering to a tip so fine she couldn’t be sure quite where they ended.

With the floaters having passed overhead, the refugees doubled their pace, pushing on, trying to ignore all that was around them. Were they making up for lost time? Bower doubted that, thinking it was simply the single-minded focus of
Homo sapiens
, the characteristic
goal-driven instinct kicking in, pushing them on to what they perceived as safety, and not just from the rebels, but from these alien intruders as well.

“What do you think they want?” Bower asked, absentmindedly, not really directing her question to anyone in particular. “There has to be a reason they’re flying through our atmosphere. And as for these pods, what’s their purpose?”

Kowalski came up beside her.

“Well, I’m just glad they weren’t after us,” he said. “Whatever they want, I’m happy so long as they stay the hell away from me.”

Jameson joined the rest of the soldiers standing by the back of the Hummer. She could hear him talking with his troops.

“Threat assessment?” he asked.

“Scary as hell,” Smithy replied from up in the turret of the Hummer. “But no imminent threat. Not yet, anyway. They didn’t seem to notice us at all.”

“My money would be on a squadron of F22 Raptors,” Elvis added. “As nasty as these floaters seem, they aren’t war machines. Couple of missiles and they’re beached whales.”

“You really think we’re going to catch an evac flight out of here with these things in the air?” asked Bosco. “My money is on CentCom grounding all flights regardless. I think we are alone on this one now. All bets are off.”

Jameson nodded thoughtfully.

“Game plan?” he asked, and yet Bower got the distinct impression he already knew what he was going to do.

“We’re fucked if we don’t hook up with someone,” Elvis offered. “We’re too big to hide, too damn small to fight. So long as we’re around government troops there’s a degree of safety, but I’d feel a whole lot better if we had US soldiers to call on. If we run into rebels or if any of these flying fuckers turned nasty, it’s going to be
Game Over, Player One
.”

“Elvis is right,” Bosco said. “For once, the Southern Belle has a point. We need to hook up with those Marines in
Lilongwe. Safety in numbers. Uncle Sam’s not coming back to Malawi, not with monstrous aliens
floating overhead at home.”

“Somewhere someone’s got to be taking the fight to these fuckers,” Elvis said. “Please don’t tell me the US is letting these Mo-Fo’s drift through our airspace without taking a few of them out.”

No one offered a reply.

“
Lilongwe raises the issue of
the chain of command,” Jameson said, looking for a response from his soldiers. Bower had moved closer. She figured she and Kowalski might not be soldiers, but they deserved a say in their future. Jameson must have picked up on that, as he clarified his point, opening the huddle to include her and Kowalski. “We’re autonomous at the moment. If we hook up with a larger force we’ll probably lose a degree of flexibility in decision-making. Regardless of the service, anyone ranking beyond sergeant will assume seniority in the chain of command.”

“What he’s saying,” Elvis said, butting in, “is some panicked dweeb could get us killed with a stupid order.”

“The more senior the officer, the bigger the asshole,” Smithy called out from the turret of the Hummer.

Jameson softened the point by adding, “Officers can be idealistic, lacking common sense.”

“Oh,” said Bower, not used to the idea of giving the responsibility of life and death to someone she didn’t know and trust already. “So what you’re saying is, once we hook up, we’re stuck with whoever we get?”