Swarm (17 page)

“Who are you?” I asked. “Who sent you here?”

“I’m nobody,” she said.

“You’re an assassin. A spook. Is the whole government in on this, or just one panicked branch? Or did you decide to go for it, solo? Are you what they call a
fighter?
”

She smiled tightly. “Would it make any difference what I told you? Pick the one you like. Call it a lie or fact.”

I nodded, crossing my arms. That movement, as slow and harmless-looking as it was, put her on her guard.

“Someone sent you,” I said. “You don’t seem the type who is out for solo power. And it wasn’t the whole government, either. You didn’t have any backup in sight out there. No choppers. No agents. No snipers. You barely know the tests and you can’t operate the ship properly yet. I’d say you came from a panicked group of spooks somewhere.”

She shrugged. “Unfortunately, I’m tired of the conversation now. If you tell me how to turn off the ship, to stop it from bringing test subjects in here for me to kill, you will save some lives.”

“How about my own?”

She shook her head. “Can’t do it. I know the rules that well. Only one of us can leave this room alive.”

I nodded. My next surprise came when she put down her gun on the doubloon-encrusted coffee table. Was it empty?

“Not in a shooting mood today?” I asked.

“I need to save bullets if these tests keep going. And for you, I won’t need it. I’ve read up on you. A college nerd. Unarmed, and with very little combat training.”

She took a step toward me.

I smiled at her. Her face faltered, just slightly. Perhaps that wasn’t the fearful response she had been expecting.

Her first kick went low, to my knees. It might have crippled me, if I hadn’t had a new, hard surface under my skin. I think the kick stung her foot.

She hopped back, made a huffing sound and punched me. My nose stung, but not that badly. I swung back at her. She was very fast. She blocked my blow, but without taking the full force of it on her forearm. She staggered back, looking pained and surprised. My fists were harder now than they had been. Faster too.

She bounced forward again. She was muscular, and she was even stronger than she looked. She rained blows down on my face. My skin broke open in places, and it did hurt. But nothing penetrated deeper than, say, a quarter inch.

I reached for her and tried to grapple with her. I’m not sure what I wanted. I suddenly didn’t want to just kill her. Was it because she was female? Was it because Pierre had so obviously stolen everything that wasn’t nailed down to our good mother Earth? She had a point about us being pirates. The Nano ships had killed a load of people. For all I knew, one of them had murdered her family and she was here for revenge.

I wrapped my arms around her and I was too strong for her. She jabbed me with a half-dozen knees and elbows, but each blow hurt her as much as it hurt me. She might as well have been beating on that teak coffee table.

Before, when I’d had the strength of a half-assed gentleman farmer, she’d have broken away easily. But the nanites had definitely done something to me. She elbowed and twisted, but couldn’t get away from me.

She surprised me then. This time, with a sudden, passionate kiss. It worked on me. I relaxed fractionally for a few seconds, blinking at her in surprise. Was she going to bite my lips off? Worrying about that made it hard to enjoy the kiss.

She slipped an arm free, then managed to turn away from me. I’d loosened my hold on her enough to allow her partial escape. I reached to grab her again, but she was already reaching backward, toward the teak coffee table. I didn’t comprehend what she was doing until it was too late.

She snagged her 9mm pistol off the teak table with her outstretched fingers. She whipped it around, aimed it into my face and fired. Three times.

That did it. I let her go. I staggered back, putting my hands to my face. Blood and flapping shreds of skin came away. I thought maybe I was dead—but I wasn’t.

We looked at each other, both panting. I’m not sure who was more shocked. I must not have looked too good.

“You’re not human,” she said.

“You’re pretty amazing yourself.”

She looked at my face. There was disgust in her eyes, now. “There’s metal showing. You are metal underneath, where the skin is broken. Are you some kind of robot?”

“No, but I’ve been modified. You can’t beat me.”

“Your eye is blow away. It looks silvery, purple underneath. That isn’t a human eye. Drop me out of this ship. I don’t want to become like—whatever you are. I want out.”

I shook my head. “You need to give me a few answers first.”

I sprang at her. For the first time, I used my full speed. I crashed into her, scooped her up, and squeezed her arms against her body, pinning them. She fired a few more rounds, aiming down. I felt lead burn hotly on my foot. I shook the gun from her hand.

She stopped struggling when it became obvious she was helpless. We were close. Face-to-face. Sweaty and scared, she looked younger and prettier to me now.

“I’d make a bad prisoner, alien,” she said.

“I’m human, not alien.”

“No. No human could move like that. You’re a freak,” she said, “that’s worse.”

“Just talk to me.”

“I won’t become like you,” she said.

I heard a crunching sound. I looked into her face, and I knew what she had done. She had bitten into something.

“Why don’t you tell me your name, at least?” I asked.

“Esmeralda,” she whispered, and then she collapsed. I held my breath and hopped backward. I felt bad letting her slump onto the Persian rugs, to die in a heap on the floor. But I didn’t want to breathe that stuff in. I wasn’t sure the nanites knew how to fix a lungful of cyanide—or whatever it was.

I looked down at her body regretfully. Somehow, killing Pierre’s assassin hadn’t been as fulfilling as I’d hoped.

Small black arms dragged Esmeralda to an open spot on the metal decking, where there weren’t any Persian rugs. She slipped through the floor as if it were liquid and vanished. The ship had
released
her. To them, she was biotic waste now.

“Dammit,” I whispered to nobody.

-19-

I was
different
now, with a coating of nanites inside me. I was able to walk through the walls of Pierre’s ship, if I wanted to. It felt as if a soap bubble passed over my body when I did it. I supposed the nanites considered me one of their own now, and maybe they were right.

When Pierre’s ship reached down to grab a new victim, I slid out along the long black arm and dropped the last twenty feet or so to the ground. The arm ignored me. The person riding upward looked terrified. I smiled, recognizing him. It was the cop who had told me to run back when I stood on the apartment roof. I thought, looking up at him, that he might have recognized me. His face registered more shock and terror than anything else.

“Just keep moving, follow the tests they talk about on TV,” I shouted up, cupping my hands. “There’s no one left to fight at the end. You’ll be okay.”

I wondered what the ship would do if there was no one aboard to fight. Would the basic tests suffice to have it accept him as commander? Or would the ship cage him and use him to test others? I didn’t know. I didn’t even know if he’d heard my advice.

I walked through the park for a few minutes. Summer in Virginia, at night. There was no one around, unsurprisingly. A few yellow-green fireflies glimmered hauntingly in the bushes.

I remembered days in the park like this, summer evening walks with the kids—and with my wife Donna. They were all dead, gone. Sometimes that weighs on a man. Sometimes, I felt I had been charged with saving the world that had taken everything I’d ever loved from me.

I didn’t call the
Alamo
for a few minutes. I knew Sandra was probably worried to death, but I just wanted to walk on the Earth’s crust again. It felt good under my feet. I thought about Pierre’s voice—I’d never met the tricky, pompous man in person. I thought about Esmeralda’s face, her true face, the one that had erased her tough snarl at the end. She’d been much more human than I felt myself to be, in her final moments.

This dreamy walk in the park only lasted a few minutes. I’m not good at introspection or self-pity. I had a war to fight. Like it or not, I was a Commander of Star Force. Never mind that a few nobodies had made the organization up just days ago. It had all become increasingly real to me. I recalled something a sergeant had told a scared recruit in an old war movie. When asked
why us?
The sergeant had replied
because we are here, and nobody else.
That seemed to sum up my situation. Why was I, of all people, fighting assassins and aliens? Because the
Alamo
had chosen me. It had to be someone—and this time it was my turn.

Alamo, come pick me up,
I thought.

ETA ninety seconds.

I didn’t hear the ship’s approach. The Nano ships were amazingly quiet as they stalked the night skies. There was a crack or two of branches breaking as the thick, black arm snaked down into the park, damaging trees behind me. I didn’t turn around or even look up. The whipping, finger-like cables grabbed me around the middle and hauled me up into the ship’s belly, swallowing me whole.

As I rode back up into the
Alamo
I kept breathing in fresh air, as much as I could suck into my lungs. I listened to the muted sounds of the night and looked around at every tree, bench and streetlight. Standing in the cargo bay a moment later, I felt something in my hair. I reached back and found a leaf. It was big, and looked like it had belonged to a sycamore tree.

I walked onto the bridge. Sandra made a happy whoop when she saw me.

She hurried toward me, smiling. Then her face fell. She saw my mood, and the rips in my skin—and possibly the metal gleaming from beneath that torn skin.

I put my hand to my face, covering my left eye. That area had seemed the most upsetting to Esmeralda, so I tried to hide it from Sandra.

“You’re hurt,” she said.

“Yeah. I’m sure the nanites will fix it. I can feel them working on it right now, knitting my cells back together.”

“Did you get your butt kicked?” she asked.

I tried to force a smile. “Something like that,” I said. “Here, I brought you a present.”

I held out the green sycamore leaf. She took it, and smiled at it. Such a small gesture, but she seemed to soften. She came to me and hugged me. We embraced for a while. She put her head against my right shoulder, keeping her eyes far away from my face and especially my left eye.

I touched her as gently as I could, as if I held the wings of a butterfly between pinched fingertips. I watched for any signs of pain, but she gave none. This relaxed me a fraction. I had wanted her to be free of the ship’s shackles, and now she was. The ship had no leash on her, nothing snaked around her waist or ankles to keep her away from me. But if I’d still been unable to touch her for fear of hurting her…. Well, that would have been worse.

It occurred to me that we might have trouble in the future if we wanted to be—intimate. There were times in the throes of passion for any man when he’s not himself. Human women were tough enough for a normal male, but what about an enhanced male such as myself? What if I’d had a few beers maybe, then moved too quickly—and tore her apart? It was a grim thought, and it made me move very cautiously around her. I think she knew I was holding back, barely touching her. I think it turned her on, too.

Before things proceeded further, however, she spoiled the mood by having an important thought. “Oh, I almost forgot. Crow has been calling for you. I couldn’t answer—the
Alamo
won’t listen to me at all, not even when you are gone. She’s such a bitchy computer—or a billion little bitchy computers, I guess. Anyway, Crow doesn’t know what happened to you. All he knows is that first Pierre vanished and then he lost contact with you. Kyle, you should call him.”

I agreed and told my ship to make the connection. Crow answered with no delays.

“Riggs? Is that really you, Kyle?”

“Yes sir,” I said to the walls. Sandra and I had moved to our new couch and settled ourselves there. That arrangement worked better for me. I could sit and relax, and she could sit close beside me or prod at my wounds if she wanted. She did both, seeming to get over the weirdness of seeing metallic glints shining through nearly bloodless rips in my skin. She got out the medical kits we had picked up while ‘shopping’ and taped together the worst wounds.

I explained recent events to Crow. He’d known Pierre was dead, but hadn’t figured out that I’d gone over to fix matters personally.

“So you actually
did it
, mate?” he asked, whistling. “You took the injections? What are they like?”

I described the sensations briefly. “I thought you had already done it, sir,” I said when finished.

“No,” he said. “I said it was nasty because I’d heard from another fleet member that it was, but I never had the guts.”

“Who was the other guy?”

“Doesn’t matter. We lost him in space during the first Macro attack. Poor bloke. He must be dead now. I truly hope the nanites aren’t reviving him out there in the frozen void over and over again.” He laughed.