Doors had opened on the flyer sitting next to the Celestial Tours quay, allowing aliens to lumber down.
Mark’s personal predictions had faltered at this point. But he certainly hadn’t expected anything quite so… robotic-looking. Maybe they are robots? Watching them spread out, he quickly changed that opinion. They moved fast, heading straight for cover. Within seconds they were infiltrating the buildings that faced the promenade.
Twelve flyers landed along the waterfront. The second wave flew over to circle the town park at the back of the General Hospital before extending their legs and sinking down. Some flyers were heading toward Blackwater Crag and the start of the highway.
“Stand by,” Simon said. “Don’t expect our weapons to penetrate their force fields, aim for maximum disruption around them. And fall back immediately.”
Mark gave Liz a look. She stretched her lips wide, mimicking a smile. “Okay,” she mumbled.
He carefully raised his head above the wall, and brought the laser rifle up. Several aliens were slipping quickly across the open ground of the promenade to the first line of buildings. He suspected Simon was right, his rifle wouldn’t get through that armor. Instead he shifted his aim to the buildings, wondering if he could knock out some of the framework, and collapse the roof.
Somebody else fired. He actually saw the air sparkle around an alien as the energy beam was deflected by its force field. Their response was terrifyingly swift. The Bab’s Kebabs franchise on Swift Street exploded.
Mark ducked down as smoldering fragments spun through the air. “Shit!”
Four of the flyers heading for Blackwater Crag turned sharply and flew back low over the town. Masers lashed down, scoring long lines of fire and vapor across the rooftops.
“Hit them,” someone yelled out of the handheld array. “Hit them. Shoot back.”
Two more buildings exploded, sending broken lengths of framework girders spinning through the air. Composite panels cartwheeled down the street like tumbleweed. Laser shots, ion bolts, and even bullets peppered the buildings along the waterfront. The force fields around two of the overhead flyers flickered briefly with static.
“They’ll slaughter us.”
“Shoot them, kill them all, kill the bastards.”
The air above Mark emitted a sibilant sizzling. A line shimmered faint violet. Flames burst out of every gaping window in the Babylon Garden restaurant behind him.
“Fall back. Get the fuck out of here.”
“No! They’ll see us. Knock down the flyers.”
“Where’s the convoy? Are they clear?”
“Hey, yeah! I got one, I saw a wall fall on it. Oh, shit—”
There must have been twenty buildings burning vigorously now. Three more detonated in quick succession.
“God, no. What have we done?”
“Simon, you motherfucker. This is all your fault.”
“Stay calm. Stay under cover.”
Mark looked at David, who was pressed up hard against the wall. His eyes were closed as he whimpered a prayer.
“You want to make a break for it?” Mark asked Liz.
“Not in the pickup,” she said. “They’ll see that.”
“All right.” He brought the handheld array up. “Carys?”
Liz’s hand closed tight around his upper arm. “I don’t goddamn believe it.”
Mark twisted around, following Liz’s disbelieving stare. “What in God’s name… ?”
Mellanie was walking down the street past the Ables Motors garage, heading toward the waterfront. She kept to the center of the road, avoiding the worst of the debris. Her hair and shoulders were damp from the earlier rain, otherwise she was as perfectly groomed as usual. Dense-packed silver OCtattoos flickered over her face and hands, as if they were her true skin emerging into the light.
“Get down!” Mark screamed at her.
She turned her head and gave him a small sympathetic smile. A nearsubliminal golden fractal pattern spiraled out around her eyes. “Stay there,” she told him calmly. “This isn’t something you can handle.”
“Mellanie!”
She’d gone another five paces when four aliens burst out of Kate’s Knitwear ten meters ahead of her, smashing straight through the remaining aluminum wall panels. Their arms curved around to line up their weapons on her. The motion slowed, then stopped. All four of them stood perfectly still in the middle of the road.
Mark realized that all the flyers in the air were gradually lowering themselves to land. Out over Trine’ba, the flyers rushing to Randtown dipped gently, angling down to strike the water hard. Big plumes of spray cascaded upward, falling away to reveal the craft bobbing low on the surface.
“Mellanie?” Mark croaked. “Are you doing this?”
“With a little help, yes.”
He clambered slowly to his feet, trying to stop the tremble in his legs. Liz stood beside him, gazing warily at the young girl. David poked his head above the wall. “Jesus.”
“Take their weapons,” Mellanie said. Her face was almost completely silver now, with only a few slivers of skin remaining around her cheeks and brow.
“You’re joking,” Mark said.
The four aliens dropped their weapons onto the road.
“You’re not joking.”
“You should be able to shoot through their force fields with those,” Mellanie said. “You’ll probably need to when they come after you again. This standoff won’t last forever. But I’ll keep them here as long as I can.” She took a deep breath, closing her chrome eyelids. “Leave now.”
Mark glanced down, her voice had come out of the handheld array as well.
“Everybody, get in your vehicles and fall back,” she ordered. “Join the convoy.”
“What’s happening?” Simon’s voice asked.
Mark brought the array up to his mouth. “Just do it, Simon. She’s stopped them.”
“Stopped them how?”
“Mark’s right,” someone else said. “I can see a whole bunch of them. They’re just standing there.”
“Go,” Mellanie said. “You haven’t got long. Go!”
Mark looked at the weapons lying on the tarmac as if it were some kind of school dare. The aliens still hadn’t moved.
“Come on,” Liz said. She darted forward.
Mark hurried after her. The weapons were bulky, too heavy to carry easily, let alone aim. He pulled up a couple, giving the tall, silently immobile aliens a cautious look as he scrabbled around at their feet, as if this might be the act that finally broke the spell, goading them into motion and retaliation. David came up beside him, and picked up one of the chunky cylinders.
“Let’s get out of here for Christ’s sake,” Liz said.
Mark managed to hold on to a third weapon. He scooted the hell away from the bizarre tableaux.
“What now?” Liz asked Mellanie.
“You go.”
“What about you? Will you be all right?”
“Yes.” She gave Mark one of her menacingly erotic smiles. “Quits?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Quits.”
“Thank you,” Liz said.
The three of them raced for the pickup. They slung the purloined alien weapons in the back, and Mark slammed the accelerator to the floor. He snatched one last glimpse of Mellanie in the rearview mirror. The silhouette of a small human girl standing defiantly in front of four big armored aliens, waiting, watching, as silent as the army she had stilled.
Mellanie’s inserts were feeding her a fresh image of the world; no longer data but an extension of her ordinary senses. She could actually see the electromagnetic emissions flooding out of the aliens as they stormed ashore. Each one blazed brightly in this black spectrum. Long, complex, and slow signals slipped between them, a conduit of tight-packed analog sine waves dancing and crackling around each other. They formed networks, brief, transient patterns that were forever rearranging themselves, connecting individual aliens, then switching back and forth between the flyers who relayed them in new combinations to the big conical ships floating on the Trine’ba. Huge columns of information streamed out of both ships, twisting up through the atmosphere to vanish inside the trans-dimensional vortex of the wormholes above.
It made a striking contrast to the abridged electronic network of Randtown, with its slender lines of carefully packaged binary pulses zipping purposefully around her. Where the human systems were neat and efficient, these alien outpourings were crude; yet, she acknowledged, they possessed a certain integral elegance. As it was with all organic forms.
Mellanie concentrated on the rush of strange wave forms radiating out of a Prime flyer as it maneuvered above the promenade, ready to land. A newly woken batch of inserts buzzed with electric vibrancy inside her flesh. She knew of the SI’s presence inside them, analyzing what she discovered for it, teasing apart the oscillating signals to discover their meaning. As the flyer’s emissions coursed through the inserts she heard a harsh unintelligible voice at the back of her mind. It bloomed to a whispered chorus. Then there were the images, leaking out of the signals like some long-forgotten dream. A confused multiple viewpoint of motiles emerging from a congregation lake, millions of them pressed together, slipping and sliding as they waded ashore. Next to them was the towering mountain, honeycombed by rooms and chambers, where it was centered, all of life in the star system. A mountain where long ago light used to shine in the morning. Now the sky was permanently dark beneath the heavy clouds, an everlasting night split only by the incessant flash of lightning bolts, revealing the filthy rain and sleet that fell across the protective force fields. A black sky also seen from the asteroids orbiting far above, a sky that shielded the whole planet, its turbulence illuminated to insipid gray by
