his captors as he had when he was brought here.
They were humans—the ones in charge at least—and spoke with some kind of Eastern European accent, probably Russian, and that was it. The only time he saw them was during the interrogations, and then he was in no condition to ask questions. He couldn’t even remember how much he’d revealed under the influence of the drugs. This was, he reflected bitterly, the lowest point in his life.
Jameson felt himself beginning to sag back onto his bed, the perpetual drowsiness beginning to take hold of him once again. He had almost decided to go back to sleep, convinced the noise had simply been the product of an incoherent nightmare, when the door to his makeshift cell was unceremoniously yanked open. Into the room burst a man—a man and not one of the blue-skinned things!—in a brown military uniform, his eyes clouded with fear, the ugly, angular lines of a small pistol in his right hand. He was an older man, with thinning hair and lines under his eyes, and seemed less imposing than he had when the President was under the drugs.
“You will come with me,” he declared, grabbing Jameson by the arm and jerking him off the bed.
Being manhandled was something the President was
With an incoherent roar, Jameson grabbed the man’s gun hand and smashed the forearm down on his knee, snapping the bone with an audible crunch. The European uttered a high-pitched scream, the gun dropping from his suddenly-useless hand, but Jameson kept his grip on the man’s arm, using it to spin him around and send him flying backward across the room. The uniformed man bounced off the far wall with a grunt of breathless pain and came right into the elbow that Jameson poised to smash across his temple. The European went down like a felled tree, his eyes rolled back into his head, while Jameson went for the pistol.
His heart was pounding and his head felt as if it were about to explode. The President struggled to stay conscious as he covered the fallen enemy with the weapon. The man didn’t move, didn’t even breathe. Jameson wondered if he’d killed him with the blow to the head, finally deciding that he hoped he had.
He took a second to check the pistol for any kind of safety, but it had none. It was a primitive design, made of metal stampings, with a concealed hammer. He pulled back the slide and a round popped out, clattering to the floor—the weapon had been chambered and ready to fire. Jameson fought back a fresh wave of dizziness at the knowledge of how close he’d come to death, then decided he’d better get out of the cell while he could.
Grasping the pistol tightly in both hands, he ducked out the open door and quickly scanned the corridor up and down. Nothing, not a soul. To the right was the entrance he’d been brought through, to the left the washroom—and the control room. Which way to go? He leaned back against the wall, trying to catch his breath, and listened. For a moment all he heard was the pounding of his heart, but then, so close it made him jump, there came the hollow, metallic echo of gunfire down the hallway to his right.
Gunfire! That meant someone was attacking the Invaders! Jameson limped cautiously down the corridor, keeping his right shoulder against the right-hand wall, pistol extended in front of him as he approached a bend in the hallway. This was it, he decided. Whatever was happening, he wouldn’t go back to a cell—they’d have to kill him. He’d be damned if he would wither away strung out from drugs, locked in a box like a lab-rat.
The hoarse stutter of an automatic weapon came even closer this time, and the President abruptly realized that he wouldn’t have to seek out the fight—it was coming to him. He glanced around quickly, searching for a doorway to take shelter in, but before he could move a step a pair of brown-uniformed soldiers burst around the corner, running headlong toward him. Gasping in panic, Jameson fell backwards onto his butt, bringing his captured weapon up in front of him as he saw that the two men were facing the other way—the way they’d come—firing ear-splitting submachinegun blasts at their unseen pursuers.
It had been over twenty years since Jameson had fired a gun, but apparently it was just like riding a bicycle because the gun seemed to point itself as he lined the sights on the first man’s chest and squeezed the trigger. The gun’s sharp report and bucking recoil took him by surprise, but he managed to keep it on line as he fired again and again, watching with an almost out-of-body detachment as the two men jerked under the impact of the bullets.
The President only stopped firing when the pistol’s slide locked back empty, a haze of smoke and heat pouring from the chamber and obscuring the image of the two soldiers, turning them into surreal shadow-figures that spun silently to the floor. Jameson seemed to wake from a trance with a wave of gut-twisting horror, the red- hot weapon slipping slowly from his grasp to land next to him with a metallic thunk.
“Sweet Jesus,” he murmured, his whole body trembling uncontrollably.
So shaken was Jameson that he almost didn’t notice the black-armored troopers swarming around him until they grabbed his arms and pulled him to his feet. For a moment, the President tried to struggle, thinking his captors had retaken him, but then one of the armored figures pulled off its helmet and revealed the flaming red hair of a captivatingly beautiful young woman—none of the Invader humans had been female.
“Mr. President,” she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay—we’re here to rescue you. I’m Lieutenant Stark, Fleet Intelligence.”
“Thank God,” Jameson sighed, finally feeling his breath return.
“Sir,” Stark said, “we’ve got to get to the control room. Can you walk?”
“Walk?” He laughed with an almost giddy relief. “Hell, Lieutenant, I can run!”
Senator Daniel O’Keefe burst into the base infirmary bare-chested and barefoot, his trouser belt flapping around his waist, face twisted with horror at the sight that confronted him. Valerie, his only child, his whole life for the past two decades, lay motionless on an examination table, her dress stained with blood, her skin as pale and lifeless as a corpse.
“Oh, my God,” he gasped, stopping in his tracks.
Slowly, the rest of the scene penetrated his stunned senses. Gathered around the table in a frenzy of feverish activity were three RSC medics, part of the small group which had remained at the base. Even as he watched, they were fixing the tube of an IV drip into Val’s arm and placing a medical scanner over her swollen abdomen, their faces taut with anxiety.
“She just collapsed,” Glen said, coming up behind him. “We were outside, talking, and she just collapsed.”
“What’s wrong with her?” O’Keefe demanded, stepping up to the medics. “What are you doing for her?”
“She’s hemorrhaging,” the woman administering the IV, snapped impatiently. “As soon as we find out where, we’ll have to go in and stop it.”
“Oh, Jesus,” the medic examining the scanner readout murmured, shaking his head. He looked back up to his two colleagues. “It’s the baby—it’s coming prematurely… or trying to.”
“But why is she bleeding?” O’Keefe wailed, fists clenching helplessly.
“High blood pressure, maybe,” the medic shrugged, plunging into a supply cabinet, searching for an injection gun. “Doesn’t matter—we can’t close it off, so we’re gonna have to get some coagulants into her.”
“Can’t you stop the labor?” Glen asked, amazed at how detached he felt from the situation.
“I could,” the man grunted, concentrating on loading a drug vial into the injector, “
“So what are you going to do?” O’Keefe wanted to know.
The medic finally looked up at the Senator, and the fear in his eyes nearly matched that in the older man’s.
“Only one thing we can do, sir,” he said with a sigh. “We’re going to have to try to deliver the baby.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
