Swarm

-12-

I was nervous. I felt like a shop-lifting kid, dared into stealing a popsicle by my friends.

At first, the raid went well. We drifted over the biggest mall in Merced, which really wasn’t that big of a mall, but it had what we needed. The belly of the ship opened and the big, black snake-arm dipped down. I told it to find me a bed first, and hovered over a furniture store. I stood in the doorway between the bridge and the cargo area where the arm originated. It was rooted in the cargo chamber ceiling and hung down like some massive jungle vine.

The opening allowed a gust of hot air and familiar smells to come up into my face. I looked over my shoulder and saw Sandra was there, leaning forward and sniffing as well. Her long black hair fluttered around her face.

I squinted down into a parking lot. Everything looked so normal. There were Dodges and Fords. Lots of pickups and SUVs. A few nice cars, a few trashed ones. Windshields reflected the late afternoon sun upward, flashing it into my eyes. How I missed, in that instant, the open air and sunshine. Today should have been a fine day, just before summer. I should have been working on the farm, or sitting in my office at the university, or giving a lecture.

Below us, in the parking lot, the initial reaction was predictable. Cars zoomed away. There were a few crunching sounds, screeching tires, shouts. I didn’t see anyone wreck their car, but I imagined that a few drivers, craning their necks up at the terrifying vessel that blotted out the sky overhead, had done so.

I tried to ignore the fleeing citizens. I focused on the homey feel the place gave me. That’s what I craved. The scents got me the most. Hot asphalt. Dust. Trees in full bloom. Even the oily smell of exhaust was comforting and filled me with a longing for my old life. I realized then how sterile the ship was. I’d spent less than two days in it, and already the normal world seemed so very different. Being in the ship was like being in the hold of an airliner. The air was canned and stale—flavorless. The light was muted and had no obvious source.

I took a deep breath, enjoying the breeze and the smells of home. And the bed began coming up.

“This ship has taste,” said Sandra behind me. The ship’s little arms were straining at her, trying to hold her back, but she leaned against them.

I looked at what the ship had in its alien, metal hand. It was a big bed, an old fashioned four-poster with ruffles that rippled in the valley wind. I snorted. I did not smile, but my cheek did twitch. I was amused.

Even as the ship lifted the bed upward, I realized something and Sandra voiced the feeling out loud.

“Idiot Nanos,” she said, “it’s too big.”

And indeed it was. The ship dilated the openings between the cargo area, the bridge and Sandra’s bedroom to the maximum, but it wasn’t careful with the awkward burden. One post crunched into the ship’s hull. The arm was too strong to notice, and simply pulled it through. There was a splitting, ripping sound. Part of one post snapped off and fell down into the parking lot. The chunk of hardwood crashed through one of those sun-silvered windshields and smashed it into white spider webs of broken safety-glass. I hoped no one was in there.

“Damn,” said Sandra.

We stepped out of the way and ducked as the bed sailed over us toward Sandra’s bedroom.

“Quite a dainty ship, isn’t she?” I asked wryly.

There was a crash as something fell over. It was the kid’s teddy bear lamp. I headed over there and righted it. I had had the ship build a power outlet in the wall, made with leads and a real surge protector from my house. The leads ran up to twin streams of quivering, liquid-looking metal. It looked as if the positive and negative wires were connected to frozen arcs of mercury. I didn’t know how the ship powered those leads without frying the little robots that made the connections, and I didn’t ask.

“How’s the lamp?” asked Sandra.

I looked at her. She knew I liked the lamp. She knew it was my kids’ lamp. “It’s fine,” I said. “The bulb is broken, but we can have the ship get another one.”

“Oh, sure,” said Sandra skeptically, looking at her bed. It was quite nice, but one corner sagged where the post had broken. “Let’s tell it to screw in the bulbs, too.”

I threw up my hands. We had to do what we could.

We spent about half an hour hanging over Merced, stealing stuff. We took clothing, random piles of shirts and pants that didn’t fit. We took food, furniture, and no less than three refrigerators. The first two were hopelessly mangled, but the third fridge came up in a workable state, with only a few dents in the stainless steel double-doors.

“That’s a nice one,” Sandra commented.

“A keeper,” I agreed. “What have we got so far to put into it?”

“Hmm,” she said, checking the grocery stocks. “The ship seems to like steak. We have loads of that. And bread. And a hell of a lot of orange soda.”

“Sounds good. We’ll go for canned goods next.”

“Beer comes in cans,” Sandra said suggestively.

“So it does.”

We busied ourselves with our stuff, filling a storeroom and plugging the fridge into a scary-looking, specialized black arm that carried power for reasons I didn’t understand.

It was after several more loads of groceries that disaster struck. I don’t really know how it happened. The best I could figure out afterward was that some cop had had enough. He had probably been down there since the beginning and had his orders. But he had not followed them. He decided to fire on the ship. I never even heard the sound of the shots. But I heard the reaction.

Blinding green light flared. It filled our vision, our heads and our minds. Sandra screamed. I clutched my face, knowing what it was almost immediately.

“Alamo! Cease fire! They are not a threat!”

“Enemy fire detected.”

The laser faded, but the after images still flashed in my mind. I opened one eye and looked at the front wall with the metallic radar screen I’d created. The people and cars were being tracked there. All of them. There must have been thousands. A ragged line of contacts circled us at a distance. No doubt, the police had cordoned off the area, but people had come to look at the ship floating over their town, rummaging in shops and stealing things with its great black arm.

The arm retracted and the doors snapped shut. I hoped it was over, but Sandra shouted something, pointing.

I looked at the wall again. Two contacts had gone red. A third and a fourth went red as I watched. They were spread around at the edge of the golden beetles that represented the civilians.

The ship fired again. One of the red contacts vanished, then another. They must be police, firing on the ship when it fired at them. They were fools. They couldn’t do anything to this ship. I thought I heard a bullet spang off the skin of the vessel. I wondered how thick the metal hull of the ship was.

The golden beetles had been backing up, but now they were running away from the ship in every direction. Some paused, falling. Others were too close to the red beetles, which vanished one by one, almost as quickly as they appeared. The cops must have opened fire in a chain reaction. Each of them was designated as a target and burned down moments later. From their point of view, they could hear other guns firing and the ship was suddenly shooting into the crowd. Surrounding clusters of golden beetles vanished with the red contacts. They were dying in swathes.

“I’m not in any danger, stop firing!”

“Command personnel are in danger. Defensive fire is mandatory.”

“Fly up, then! Fly upward! Get us up into orbit now!”

I felt the floor come up toward me and stumbled. I managed to get myself into a new easy chair I’d stolen. I rubbed my face, my eyes ached. How many had the ship killed? I opened a beer and drank it. Sandra and I barely spoke for the next hour. She went into her room and vanished.

Strangely, I fell asleep on my stolen easy chair. It had been many long hours since I’d slept. I didn’t even plan on sleeping. It just happened. I felt as if I were suffocating, as if a great hand had come down and closed over me, putting me out like fingers snuffing a candle flame.