The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (24 page)

She will kill you, Keenan. She will possess you! She is not human … she will usurp your flesh.

But that was impossible, he realized. She could not usurp him, or possess him, because he barely lived there himself.

“You are General Zenab.” It was not a question.

“So very perceptive.” She smiled, with small white teeth. And he knew; understood that her arrogance precluded an awesome power. She was no human, because
Keenan was no longer human
, and the alien blood from an earlier encounter had tainted his own blood, own soul, had somehow elevated him, somehow desecrated him, dropped him into another plane of existence.

“I have been sent to … to
kill
you.” Keenan’s voice was quiet. “But I will give you a choice. I will take you away from this place. Give you another life, a better life.” He no longer saw Zenab. He saw Rachel and Ally. Their bloody corpses. It ate him like acid.

“Like you would have done for your girls?”

“Yes.” Keenan’s voice was strangled, neither human nor animal; an imitation of the organic. And a tidal wave of guilt and shame washed over him, flooded him inside out and he felt his knees go weak, his anger flee, any straggled remnants of hatred were torn and all he wanted, more than anything in this world, in this life, was to save this child … as he had failed to save his own.

He knelt, and placed his gun on the floor with a
clack.
“Come with me,” he said.

She laughed. “I cannot. You do not understand.”

“I understand you are prisoner, forced to use your talents for the junks, to aid their empire, to extend their evil.”

She smiled, pretty face wrinkling, and Keenan’s heart melted, his soul burned, and he only realized Pippa and Franco were behind him when he saw the barrel of Franco’s Bausch & Harris rifle ease past his shoulder …

“Don’t move, buddy,” said Franco.

“What are you
doing?
” snapped Keenan.

“She’s a witch, a changer, a junk-spawn. She’s infested, mate. She’s hooked into your brain, and into your spine. She’s using you Kee. She’ll kill you. Don’t trust her.” He grinned, but the smile looked wrong on his face. Twisted. Too much bone. Too much skull.

Keenan frowned, the whole world tumbling down. “Bullshit!” he snapped. “She’s a prisoner. We have to rescue her … to free her! What’s wrong with you, Franco? Can’t you see?”

“He’s right.” Pippa’s hand touched Keenan’s shoulder, then her gun caressed the side of his head. “Sorry, Kee. It’s time to die.”

A feeling swept over Keenan, nausea, a violent bout of sickness worse than anything ever felt. Like a puzzle solved, everything clicked into place. The pulse of alien blood through his veins, the beat of his heart, all melded to show him the truth … he ducked as Pippa pulled the trigger, and her bullet whined, entered Franco’s skull with a
slap
, blasting his head into ribbons of flesh and curled bone. Brain mushroomed out then paused, like elastic caught at the point of furthest trajectory, and ravelled swiftly back in as the head reformed itself disjointedly and for a moment, the briefest of instants, Keenan saw the face disintegrate into a cloud of particles … and rearrange as solid flesh.

Keenan whirled fast and the world kicked into guns and bullets, into action and reaction as Franco and Pippa leaped from a doorway with guns thundering, bullets scything into the fake forms of Franco and Pippa, into their
simulacrums
, created things, imitations of life.

Pippa killed herself with a shotgun blast to the head, and watched her own body curl in on itself, into a shower of silver powder that trickled down between cracks in the floor tiles. Franco had a short vicious fight with his own head-holed ganger, and shot himself in the stomach, then the throat, and finally the face. He watched himself die and, in dying, so the real Franco was born again.

“Shit,” he panted, face bathed in sweat. “They nearly had you, Keenan!”

The three junks attacked, as Combat K attacked. Keenan was kicked out of his shock, grabbing the D5 shotgun and leaping forward, blasting a junk guard in the face with a burst of shells and removing his head. There was a whirlwind of violence which left Combat K crouched on the tiles, surrounded by blood and junk gore, limbs, chunks of flesh, as a cool wind blew through the chamber and they realized the little girl had gone.

“The General’s fled,” said Pippa. “What the fuck’s going on?”

“Nano-technology,” snarled Keenan. “And the box she carries. It’s the Nano-Bomb Factory. I don’t know why we thought it’d be an installation; it’s something complex, something small, something incredibly advanced. We have to get it. It’s too dangerous to let go.”

They ran through corridors, through chambers, all writhing with ancient alien stonecraft. They emerged, saw the little girl sprinting towards the river and a sleek alloy craft.

“She’s going to escape,” snapped Pippa. “Shoot her! QGM rely on it! Millions rely on it.”

Franco lifted his rifle, and caught Keenan’s eye. Keenan looked as if he’d been hit by a hammer. How could he shoot his own daughter in the back?
How could he murder his little girl?

Franco, also, was flooded with doubt. He lowered the gun, long barrel pointing at the churned mud floor. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t shoot a child in the back. It’s just not right!”

“Give me the gun,” snarled Pippa, dragging the rifle from Franco’s scarred hands. She aimed, and with a
crack
took the back of the girl’s head off. General Zenab toppled to the floor in a tangle of limbs, and did not move.

“I’m just mangled,” said Franco. “What the hell actually happened? Why did I just kill myself?”

They moved to the girl, a destroyed form. Even as they watched, a tiny cloud, millions of silver particles, formed into a fist, then dissipated swiftly on the wind.

“Nanobots,” said Keenan, mouthed twisted in a sour grin. “They imitated you. Imitated the girl. General Zenab doesn’t exist; it’s an AI construct, a very, very advanced machine.”

Pippa stooped, picked up the wooden box. “But we got the Nano-Bomb equipment.”

“Yeah. At least we got something.”

“We didn’t kill her, him …
it
, did we?” said Pippa.

“We hurt it,” said Keenan. “Whatever the hell it was. And we bought QGM some time.”

“So we’ll be back?”

Keenan, programming the PAD to bring in the SLAM, nodded. “Yeah, Pippa. The war ain’t over. We’ll be back. For people like us, this kind of shit never ends. The suffering never stops.”

Pippa gave a nod and, clutching the small wooden box, waited for exit.

THE LIBERATION OF EARTH

William Tenn

“It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it,” an American major notoriously said during the Vietnam War. What if the entire Earth similarly falls victim to the tactics of warring super-aliens?

William Tenn was the pen-name of Philip Klass, who appropriately taught classes at Pennsylvania State College in SF and writing. He served in World War Two and wrote darkly comic tales as well as one marvellous novel,
Of Men and Monsters,
in which the human race only survive mice-like in the walls of the homes and starships of giant alien invaders, although thus we spread out to the stars, verminously.

T
HIS, THEN, IS
the story of our liberation. Suck air and grab clusters! Heigh-ho, here is the tale!

August was the month, a Tuesday in August. These words are meaningless now, so far have we progressed; but many things known and discussed by our primitive ancestors, our unliberated, unreconstructed forefathers, are devoid of sense to our free minds. Still the tale must be told, with all of its incredible place-names and vanished points of reference.

Why must it be told? Have any of you a
better
thing to do? We have had water and weeds and lie in a valley of gusts. So rest, relax and listen! And suck air, suck air!

On a Tuesday in August, the ship appeared in the sky over France in a part of the world then known as Europe. Five miles long the ship was, and word has come down to us that it looked like an enormous silver cigar.

The tale goes on to tell of the panic and consternation among our forefathers when the ship abruptly materialized in the summer-blue sky. How they ran; how they shouted; how they pointed!

How they excitedly notified the United Nations, one of the chiefest institutions, that a strange metal craft of incredible size had materialized over their land. How they sent an order
here
to cause military aircraft to surround it with loaded weapons, gave instructions
there
for hastily grouped scientists, with signalling apparatus, to approach it with friendly gestures. How, under the great ship, men with cameras took pictures of it; men with type-writers wrote stories about it; and men with concessions sold models of it.

All these things did our ancestors, enslaved and unknowing, do.

Then a tremendous slab snapped up in the middle of the ship and the first of the aliens stepped out in the complex tripodal gait that all humans were shortly to know and love so well. He wore a metallic garment to protect him from the effects of our atmospheric peculiarities, a garment of the opaque, loosely folded type that these, the first of our liberators, wore throughout their stay on Earth.

Speaking in a language none could understand, but booming deafeningly through a huge mouth about halfway up his twenty-five feet of height, the alien discoursed for exactly one hour, waited politely for a response when he had finished, and, receiving none, retired into the ship.

That
night, the first of our liberation! Or the first of our first liberation, should I say?
That
night, anyhow! Visualize our ancestors scurrying about their primitive intricacies: playing ice hockey, televising, smashing atoms, red-baiting, conducting give-away shows and signing affidavits – all the incredible minutiae that made the olden times such a frightful mass of cumulative detail in which to live – as compared with the breathless and majestic simplicity of the present.

The big question, of course, was – what had the alien said? Had he called on the human race to surrender? Had he announced that he was on a mission of peaceful trade and, having made what he considered a reasonable offer – for, let us say, the north polar ice cap – politely withdrawn so that we could discuss his terms among ourselves in relative privacy? Or, possibly, had he merely announced that he was the newly appointed ambassador to Earth from a friendly and intelligent race – and would we please direct him to the proper authority so that he might submit his credentials?

Not to know was quite maddening.

Since decision rested with the diplomats, it was the last possibility which was held, very late that night, to be most likely; and early the next morning, accordingly, a delegation from the United Nations waited under the belly of the motionless star-ship. The delegation had been instructed to welcome the aliens to the outermost limits of its collective linguistic ability. As an additional earnest of mankind’s friendly intentions, all military craft patrolling the air about the great ship were ordered to carry no more than one atom bomb in their racks, and to fly a small white flag – along with the UN banner and their own national emblem. Thus did our ancestors face this, the ultimate challenge of history.

When the alien came forth a few hours later, the delegation stepped up to him, bowed, and, in the three official languages of the United Nations – English, French and Russian – asked him to consider this planet his home. He listened to them gravely, and then launched into his talk of the day before – which was evidently as highly charged with emotion and significance to him as it was completely incomprehensible to the representatives of world government.

Fortunately, a cultivated young Indian member of the secretariat detected a suspicious similarity between the speech of the alien and an obscure Bengali dialect whose anomalies he had once puzzled over. The reason, as we all know now, was that the last time Earth had been visited by aliens of this particular type, humanity’s most advanced civilization lay in a moist valley in Bengal; extensive dictionaries of that language had been written, so that speech with the natives of Earth would present no problem to any subsequent exploring party.

However, I move ahead of my tale, as one who would munch on the succulent roots before the dryer stem. Let me rest and suck air for a moment! Heigh-ho, truly those were tremendous experiences for our kind!

You, sir, now you sit back and listen! You are not yet of an age to Tell the Tale. I remember,
well enough do I remember
how my father told it, and his father before him. You will wait your turn as I did; you will listen until too much high land between water holes blocks me off from life.

Then
you
may take your place in the juiciest weed patch and, reclining gracefully between sprints, recite the great epic of our liberation to the carelessly exercising young.

Pursuant to the young Hindu’s suggestions, the one professor of comparative linguistics in the world capable of understanding and conversing in this peculiar version of the dead dialect was summoned from an academic convention in New York where he was reading a paper he had been working on for eighteen years:
An Initial Study of Apparent Relationships Between Several Past Participles in Ancient Sanskrit and an Equal Number of Noun Substantives in Modern Szechuanese
.

Yea, verily, all these things – and more, many more – did our ancestors in their besotted ignorance contrive to do. May we not count our freedoms indeed?

The disgruntled scholar, minus – as he kept insisting bitterly – some of his essential word lists, was flown by fastest jet to the area south of Nancy which, in those long-ago days, lay in the enormous black shadow of the alien spaceship.