Cold War

Chapter 30

Schaefer took a cautious step onto the ship’s hull. “Warm,” he said, “but my boots seem to be holding up.”

”You told me they like the heat,” Ligacheva said.

”So I did,” Schaefer said, taking another step. “Didn’t know that included their ships. You know, the hull feels almost alive.”

”Maybe it is alive,” Ligacheva suggested. “We don’t know anything about it.”

”So if we go in there, we’d be walking down its throat?” Schaefer grimaced. “I can think of a few things I’d like to ram down their throats.”

”You want to make it warm enough for them, eh?” Ligacheva laughed nervously. “Well, why not?” She slid down off the boulder and began marching toward the opening, her AK-47 at the ready.

Schaefer smiled after her. “Why not?” he asked no one in particular.

Together, they walked into the ship.

Schaefer had expected some sort of airlock or antechamber between the opening and the ship’s actual interior, but there didn’t seem to be any; instead, they simply walked in, as if the opening were the mouth of a cave.

Once they were inside, though, the environment abruptly changed. The air stank, a heavy, oily smell, and was thick with warm fog, reducing visibility and making it hard to breathe. The light was a dull orange-red glow that came from the red walls, walls that were completely covered in elaborate, incomprehensible patterns. Whether those patterns were machinery, or decoration, or something structural, neither Schaefer nor Ligacheva could guess.

Whatever the patterns were, they were ugly. Schaefer didn’t care to study them closely. He felt sick and dizzy enough already.

He wondered whether there were forcefields or some other device that kept the foul air in, or whether it just didn’t want to mix with Earth’s atmosphere.

”It’s FM,” he said in English, remembering something an engineer had once told him. “Fucking magic.” He looked around at the ghastly light, the oozing, roiling fog of an atmosphere, the insanely patterned walls. He peered ahead to where the curving corridor opened out into a large chamber; patterned red pillars joined floor to ceiling, while other curving passages or rounded bays opened off every side. The place was a maze, all of it awash in baleful red light and stinking mist.

”No wonder they’re such jerks,” he said. “If I spent fifteen minutes tooling around in a madhouse like this, I’d want to kill something myself.” He hefted his AK-47. “In fact, I do.”

”Wait,” Ligacheva said. “Look over there.”

”What?” Schaefer asked.

Ligacheva pointed at one of the rounded bays. Schaefer followed her as she led the way into it.

He saw, then, what had caught her eye. One section of wall here was not entirely red. It was hard to be sure, in the hideous red light, whether the pieces they were looking at were green or gray or black, but they weren’t red.

The original red wall was torn open here; to Schaefer it looked as if something had exploded, but he supposed it might simply have been ripped apart by the aliens in their efforts at repair.

And parts of the pattern had been replaced, not with more of the red substance, but with ordinary pipes and valves and circuit boards. Schaefer could see Cyrillic lettering on several of them.

”Those filthy bastards,” Ligacheva said. “The attack on the refinery, the workers slaughtered, my squad, my friends, all of them killed for this?”

”Got to give them credit,” Schaefer said calmly. “They’re resourceful. Something blew out here in the crash, or maybe caused the crash, and they needed to make an unscheduled pit stop. Your little pumping station served as their version of Trak Auto.”

”But they killed all those men for a few pieces of machinery!” Ligacheva shouted. “It’s not even anything secret, anything special just plumbing! They could have asked! They could have bartered! They could have just taken it without killing-we couldn’t have stopped them, and why would we care about junk?” She slammed the butt of her rifle against the pipes. “It’s just junk!”

Schaefer grabbed her around the waist and pulled her back. “Stop it!” he ordered. “Damn it, that’s enough!”

She struggled in his grip. “But…”

”Just shut up! There may be more of them aboard! If you want us to have a chance to do any good here, shut up before any of those things hear us!”

Ligacheva quieted, and Schaefer released her.

”Now, I admit,” he said, “that our friends here have not been on their best behavior during their visit to your country. I agree completely that before we leave their ship, we should make sure to leave them a little something to remember us by.”

”What sort of something?” Ligacheva demanded.

Schaefer hefted the pack. “Oh, a few of these toys in the right places ought to do wonders.”

Ligacheva stared at the pack for a moment, then turned to the makeshift repair job.

”Yes,” she said. “But…”

Before she could say any more, a blow from nowhere knocked both of them down. The choking mist seemed to be thicker down at floor level, and Schaefer was coughing even before the alien appeared out of nowhere and picked him up, one-handed, by the throat.

It was as big and ugly as any of the others Schaefer had ever seen. It wore no mask, presumably it had no need for one here aboard its own ship. Its yellow fingers and black claws closed on Schaefer’s neck, not tight enough to inflict serious damage, but tightly enough that it lifted him easily and inescapably.

Ligacheva came up out of the fog with her AK-47 in hand, but before she could squeeze -the trigger, in the second she took to be sure she wouldn’t hit Schaefer, the monster slapped her back with its free hand. She slammed against the wall and slumped, dazed, back down into the mist.

Schaefer struggled in the thing’s grip, but resisted the temptation to pry at its fingers. He knew these things were too strong for such a maneuver to do any good; strong as he was by human standards, he wouldn’t be able to free himself. He needed to find another way to fight back. Bare-handed, he couldn’t do anything; his AK-47 was out of reach; he needed some other weapon.

He reached back behind himself, stretching.

The creature growled at him, a grating, unearthly noise. The fingerlike outer fangs around its mouth flexed horribly, and the vertical slit of its mouth opened wide, revealing its inner teeth.

”Damn you to hell,” Schaefer said as his hands closed on a shard of the shattered red wall of the spaceship’s interior. He gripped it, felt the razorsharp edge where it had broken, and yanked at it.

It came away in his hand, and without a second’s hesitation he plunged it into the alien predator’s side.

The creature screamed in pain and flung him aside as if he were so much junk mail, tearing the makeshift dagger from his grasp.

Schaefer rolled when he landed and came up gasping but intact. He started for the broken section of wall, hoping to find another sharp fragment he could use.

”Just tell me,” he said as he watched the bellowing alien, looking for a chance to dodge past it toward the wreckage, “why Earth? Why is it always Earth? What’s wrong with the big game on Mars, or Jupiter, or the goddamn Dog Star, or whatever the hell is out there? It’s a big fucking galaxy, isn’t it? Why can’t you just…”

Then he saw the shadow in the fog behind his foe, and even before the new arrival turned off its invisibility shield, Schaefer knew he was facing a second enemy in addition to the wounded one.

Then the creature appeared, and Schaefer saw that it was carrying a corpse draped over its right shoulder-an alien corpse, the corpse of the sentry he and Ligacheva had killed out in the canyon.

”Oh, shit.”

He backed up against the broken section of wall, knowing that he was letting himself be cornered, but not knowing what else he could do. The wounded predator was staggering slightly, holding its side, but still upright; the new arrival was ignoring its injured companion and staring directly at Schaefer, but not yet moving to attack. It lifted its dead companion off its shoulder and lowered the body gently to the floor, all the while keeping its masked eyes directed straight at Schaefer.

Then the uninjured alien reached up and disconnected something from its mask; gas hissed for a few seconds. It lifted the metal mask away and revealed its ghastly face; those hideous mouth parts, looking like some unholy hybrid of fang, finger, and tentacle, were flexing in anticipation. It took a step closer to Schaefer as he groped unsuccessfully for another sharp piece of wreckage.

Then Ligacheva came up out of the reeking mist again, her AK-47 at her shoulder, and fired.

The aliens, Schaefer knew, could shrug off most small-caliber bullets; their hides were incredibly tough. Depleted uranium coated in Teflon, however, was something new to them; Ligacheva’s shots punched through the monsters as if they were merely human, and glowing yellow-green blood sprayed from a dozen sudden wounds.

The previously unharmed creature went down at once; the fog swirled up in clouds. The other alien, presumably already heavily dosed with whatever these things used as the equivalent of endorphins, snapped its jagged double wrist blades into place and tottered several steps toward Ligacheva before collapsing into the mist.

”They aren’t dead!” Schaefer shouted. He had seen before how tough these things were.

”I know that,” Ligacheva said, irritated. She stepped forward, pointed the AK-47 at one alien’s head, and squeezed the trigger.

Yellow gore sprayed.

She turned her attention to the other alien; it managed to roll over and raise one clawed hand as she approached, but that only meant that it took her last eight rounds directly in the face.

The echoes of the gunfire were oddly muffled in the foggy atmosphere and died away quickly.

Ligacheva stood over the three creatures-the two she had just taken down and the one she had slain earlier. She stared down at them through the mist, getting as good a look as she could at their ruined faces.

”Now they’re dead,” she said, satisfied.

”Probably,” Schaefer agreed. “Let’s not hang around to be sure, though. If there are any more of these joyboys aboard this madhouse, they could be here any minute.”

”I can reload while you make your bomb…”

”I think we’d be smarter doing that outside,” Schaefer said. “They could be here now-remember their little invisibility trick.”

Something hissed somewhere. Ligacheva hesitated another half second, then turned and sprinted back up the corridor they had entered by.

Schaefer was right behind her.

A moment later they emerged into open air, Earth’s air. Even the cool, flavorless Siberian air, utterly devoid of any scent of life, was far better than the stuff they had been breathing aboard the alien ship, and once they had scrambled from the hot hull up onto the familiar boulder they both paused for a few seconds to savor it.

Schaefer glanced at Ligacheva. She wasn’t beautiful, but right then he was glad to be looking at her. “Pretty good shooting in there, comrade,” he said.

”Credit your American technology,” Ligacheva said. “And of course, my damned good aim.” She ejected the spent magazine from her AK-47. “And give me another clip of that technology, would you?”

Schaefer smiled and opened the pack. He handed her another clip, then started pulling out blocks of C-4 and plugging in wires.

”If we wire this all into a single charge and put it back down inside there, it ought to tear their ship up just fine,” he remarked as he worked.

”And we can scavenge the wreckage, and our governments can fight over it,” Ligacheva said.

Schaefer shrugged as he wired a detonator into the series of charges. “I don’t give a shit about that,” he said. “I just want to make it plain to these bastards once and for all that Earth isn’t a safe place to play.”

Ligacheva didn’t answer; she watched thoughtfully as Schaefer finished assembling his bomb and stuffed it back into his pack.

”Perhaps we should think about this a little further,” she said at last as he strapped an electronic timer into place on top.

He looked up at her.

”I want them to pay for their crimes, too,” Ligacheva said. “But I do not want American missiles to make sure my country does not use this starship to restore us to our former place as a world power.”

”Washington hasn’t got the guts to nuke anyone,” Schaefer said. “We’ll just steal it from you, and then everybody’ll have it.”

”And would that be a good thing?”

Schaefer started to answer, then froze. He was crouched on the boulder, the pack-turned-satchel-charge in one hand, facing the opening into the ship’s interior.

Ligacheva whirled.

One of the alien monsters stood in the opening, looking out at them. It was visible and unmasked, it hadn’t come out to fight, Ligacheva realized, but only to see what the hell was going on.

That didn’t mean it wouldn’t kill them both, given half a chance. It must know that they had killed its companions; she was suddenly horribly aware of the AK-47 she still held in her hands, the very gun that had blown the other monsters’ heads apart.

If she shifted her grip to firing position and swung the weapon around, she might be able to shoot the alien-or it might take her own head off first. She had seen how fast those things could move, how fast they could kill.

She didn’t try. She kept the gun pointed away. She looked at Schaefer to see whether he, too, was still frozen.

He wasn’t. He was still working on his bomb.

”That’s right,” Schaefer called to the creature. “Come out and play! This C-4 will turn you into hamburger faster than UPN canceled Legend!”

Ligacheva turned to stare at Schaefer’s fingers as he punched codes into his electronic detonator.

”But if you set it off now to kill that thing, the explosion will take us down with it!” she exclaimed.

Schaefer didn’t look at her; he was staring at the alien, his attention focused entirely on his foe. “I’m tired of your games,” he said. “I’m tired of all this crap! This time we’re going to finish it

…”

Ligacheva realized that he meant it, that he was ready and willing to die-he wanted only to give his death meaning, the meaning he seemed unable to find in life, by taking his foe with him.

She wanted to stop him, but he was too far away for her to reach the detonator in time, and even if she had been able to think of the words to shout, she knew he wouldn’t have listened to her.

Then a shot rang out, and a bullet smacked off the starship’s hull inches away from Schaefer’s feet. Ligacheva, Schaefer, and the alien all turned simultaneously, looking for the source.

Five men in tan snowsuits stood on the rim of the ravine, looking down at them. A sixth man knelt, holding a smoking rifle.

”Drop it, cop, or the next one’s right between your eyes! And drop your gun, too, Russkie!” the kneeling man called in English.