Swarm

-7-

I thought about what Jack Crow had said. About stealing what you needed. Maybe I could do it without stealing. I ordered the ship to return to my farm again.

When we shuddered to a stop, I told the Alamo to send its arm down and dig some clothing out of the closets. The ship was warm inside most of the time, unless it opened up the floor, but I thought both Sandra and I could use something to wear. I didn’t know how to describe which closet the ship should rummage in, so I just sent it down to find whatever it could. It came back up a minute or two later with a wadded bundle of fabric. The clothing was still on the plastic hangers, the hooks of which had been broken when the powerful arm ripped the clothes loose.

I looked at the random collection of shirts and jeans. They were clearly from Jake’s closet. Seeing my son’s clothes in my hands almost made me want to choke up, but I stayed focused on the here and now. Some of the stuff was torn by the journey up in the none-too-gentle metal hand. I put on some jeans that were too tight. I managed to wrap a shirt around Sandra’s waist and tie it like a loincloth. I pulled a football jersey over her head, and she thanked me, but the little black arms wouldn’t let go. In fact, they tightened to the point that they pained her when I was close. It was all I could do to slide the shirt down over her bare breasts.

“This is ridiculous,” I complained. “Alamo, what do I have to do to get you to let Sandra free in my presence?”

“Command personnel must be protected from indigenous life forms.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that one.”

“Alamo is totally paranoid about protecting you, but not me?” asked Sandra.

“Yes. Unless you get here by passing all its tests and you kill the ex-commander, you are nothing. If you win, you get the ship and it dumps me out without a qualm. Crow said something about undergoing a nasty process for protection. Let me think for a second.”

“So why doesn’t it let me go to see if I can beat you or something?”

“Probably because you failed a test already. You are supposed to be dumped out and dead, from its point of view.”

“Lovely attitude this metal bitch has.”

I nodded. I’d worked with many annoying computer interfaces before. But this was the first that had been designed by unknown aliens. “Alamo? What steps could I take to improve my protection?”

“We can administer the—injections.”

“What kind of injections?”

“Reconstructive.”

I pursed my lips. I didn’t like the sound of that. What the hell would an alien ship like to inject into me? Something that would grow a hard shell over me like a crab?

“Don’t trust it, Kyle,” said Sandra, watching me. “I’d rather endure this than have you get some alien injection.”

“There is another option.”

“What?”

“I could have you dropped off. This is my farm. They… they probably cleaned it up by now. If my car is still down there, you could drive to town or call someone.”

She thought about it, frowning. “I’ll do that—eventually. But I would feel wrong, leaving you here alone, in this place. I mean, you did come back for me.”

“You don’t want to get away from the Alamo? We don’t really know what it’s going to do next.”

She smiled then. “You don’t want a companion?”

I shook my head. “You don’t want to miss this, do you? This is about the biggest thing that ever happened in human history, and you are in the middle of it. You don’t want to get kicked out of the party, am I right?”

“Partly,” she admitted, trying to look huffy.

“Okay fine, you are along for the ride as long you want.”

“But try to get me off this wall. I’m feeling ridiculous.”

“Alamo,” I said, scratching my head. “Sandra is not dangerous. She is unarmed and practically nude. Can you retract all but one arm, maybe one that holds onto her ankle so she can’t move freely? Then I’ll stay away from her and she can’t harm me.”

“We object to allowing a threat to remain on the bridge except for interrogation purposes.”

“Ah,” I said, getting an idea. I took on a commanding voice. “I need to interrogate this prisoner, Alamo. I need you to reduce her restraints to a minimum so I can do so.”

Finally, after a few more minutes of wrangling, I managed to bargain the ship down to holding onto both her ankles with a single black cable around each. Sandra put on some of Jake’s clothes. She looked better in them than I did.

“Um,” said Sandra once she was dressed. “Do we have a bathroom on this ship?”

“Have to go, huh? Me too. Alamo? We need a bathroom. Are there any waste removing systems on this ship?”

“All waste is removed by ejection.”

“Right,” I said. I’d seen plenty of that. My own kids had been ejected as waste. I walked around the bridge. Things were going to be pretty unlivable pretty fast if I didn’t solve this one. I thought about ordering the ship to rip out one of my toilets. Still, without flowing water, they weren’t much good.

I thought about calling on Jack Crow for help again. But I rejected the idea. Crow would just tell me I could join him for such information. I reasoned that his people had been aboard their respective ships longer than I had. They must have solved this problem somehow. If his people had figured out what to do, I could do it on my own.

“Alamo, open a door from the bridge into one of the unused cubical rooms.”

Off to my left, a wall melted away. I walked over and looked inside. “This will do.”

“I’m supposed to just let loose on the floor in there? My feet will get wet,” complained Sandra.

I thought about the ability of the ship to reshape itself. How far did that technique go? “Alamo, can you shape something from the ship’s deck? Make a toilet-shape from the decking.”

“Accessing modeling data from archives,” said the ship.

Nothing happened for about ten seconds. Then a bud of metal grew on the floor. The area turned brighter, more reflective. It seemed as if part of the deck had shifted into a liquid. The metal bubbled up then, like a lump of clay upon a potter’s wheel. It grew taller and shaped itself.

“Sandra, come look at this,” I said.

She shuffled over and gazed past me. The cables that sprouted out of the floor and wrapped around each of her ankles moved with her. The cables wouldn’t let her get too close to me. She craned her neck to watch. “Wild,” she said.

It took a couple of minutes, but soon we had a metal toilet.

“You first,” I said.

“No way.”

I sighed and walked into our invented bathroom, closing the door behind me. It worked reasonably well. I set up standing orders for the ship to allow people to enter this room whenever they touched the wall that adjoined to the bridge. I also set orders to wait until they exited, and when the room was empty, to evacuate the contents. It occurred to me that all this setting up of rooms and things was rather like programming. If you were careful and detailed, the ship was accommodating. Sandra trusted the bathroom enough to give it a try after hearing my testimonial.

Dressed and relieved, Sandra and I soon felt more comfortable. Next, I had the ship drag a couch up from my living room. Sitting on the metal floor wasn’t going to work forever. The couch was leather-upholstered, but arrived somewhat torn up, as the huge black arm had apparently dragged it out through the bay window. But it was better than nothing. A few more chairs and a table joined the rest, and the bridge began to look almost homey. Next, I brought up various items from the fridge and the cupboards. The ship’s aim wasn’t perfect, however. Bottles all arrived broken, so I had to be satisfied with cans.

Soon, an early breakfast was ready. We had beer, breakfast cereal and a bag of apples, each spread with peanut butter. It tasted good, and I wondered just how long I’d been aboard this strange ship. It had to be morning by now.

I decided it was time to get another report on my kids. Were they done yet?

But before I could even clear away the table, all hell broke loose.

“Enemy detected. Emergency signal received. Gathering initiated.”

Sandra and I had time to look at each other, eyes wide. Our next thought was: what the hell... as the ship tilted, and vaulted upward. The opposite side of the bridge from the ‘bathroom door’ was now the top part of the room, but not exactly the ceiling. I’d say we were at a forty-five degree angle.

I’d placed an armchair at what was now the nosecone of the ship. It slid down toward us and smashed into the table. The whole mess hit the leather couch.

I reached for Sandra, trying to pull her out of the way. The ship didn’t like that. About a dozen arms snaked out of the ceiling and the floor, they lashed around Sandra and ripped her out of my grasp. The arms yanked her up and pinned her to the ceiling. She was growling and cursing. The whole thing might have been funny, if we had known whether or not we were going to live through the next few seconds.

“Alamo, restrain the furniture!” I ordered. “I might be injured by it!”

Arms snaked out and pinned everything down. I pushed the ruined table out of the way and sat on the leather couch, which was now against the back wall of the bridge. It was smeared with peanut butter. I felt myself pressed back into the cushions. Was that the sensation of gee-forces? Could we be accelerating that fast? I hadn’t felt anything when moving over the Earth, so how fast were we going now?

I didn’t have any answers. I smelled the powerful odor of beer, it had gone everywhere, and I could feel the cool liquid sinking into my pants to touch my skin.

“Alamo? What the hell is going on?” I demanded.

“Command personnel must prepare for battle. What are your orders?”

Battle? “Alamo, put me on the public ship-to-ship channel. I want to hear what the other ships are broadcasting.”

Immediately, a chorus of confused voices filled the bridge. There were people chattering, some were screaming.

“What the hell is that?” asked Sandra, still pinned to the ceiling.

“Alamo, put Sandra in that armchair.”

She floated, red marks and purple bruises around her limbs, as the ship put her into the chair as I’d instructed.

“Do you know what the frigging hell is happening, Kyle?” Sandra asked.

“Not exactly, but I think we are flying up into space. And it’s happening to everyone who is part of this ‘fleet’.”

I heard Jack Crow’s voice, roaring for calm. He asked people to shut up and sound off, his people first. I had to admit, hearing a single commanding voice and having that voice give you something to do did help fight the panic everyone must be feeling. The screams stopped and people did as they were told.

After twenty or so people had sounded off, Crow called upon the rogues to report. Only twenty? So, Crow had padded his numbers, telling me he had thirty in his group. Still, there were only about another twenty rogues who called out afterward, including myself. That made up a total of about forty ships. That sounded low to me, the fleet was supposed to be over seven hundred ships strong. What were all those other ships doing? Were they still looking for ‘command personnel’? That meant, essentially, they were still down on Earth prowling around pulling people out of bed and killing them. I shuddered, remembering my own kids. I thought about asking the ship how my kids were doing, but stopped myself. What if it was bad news? What if one of them hadn’t made it? I would be distracted and I needed my mind operating right now. I tried to reach for a cold area of my mind, a place where emotions feared to tread. I needed to focus on this battle—whatever it was about, if any of us were going to survive the experience.

“By my count, some of you are either staying quiet, unable to communicate, or dead,” said Crow. “We’ll presume the latter.” He told them all to order their ships to secure everything they had brought onboard, which I had already done.

I hated the sensation of flying blind. Where were we? Where were these enemies we couldn’t even see? I realized the problem was undoubtedly due to different alien physiology. Whoever had built this ship, it now seemed clear to me, had no eyes. Or at least, vision was a secondary sense for them.

Crow was calling out more names repeatedly now. I got the idea very quickly that some people weren’t responding. What had happened to them? Were they already dead? Had they been crushed by their couches or had these enemies shot them down? What in the nine hells, exactly, were we supposed to do when we found these enemies? I had no idea how to operate this ship other than ordering it to pull things through the windows of my own house.

Sometimes, in a panic, things go very badly. Sometimes one’s mind is confused and shocked. Panic can bring out random, useless behavior. But I’ve never been that sort of person. When an emergency rears its ugly head, I’ve always gone cold inside, and my mind seems to operate faster, more accurately. Back when I’d been a reservist, before taking on a teaching job, I’d been an industrial automation specialist. One year, my occupation had gotten me into real trouble. Paid to build a computer system to control a chemical reactor that produced robine for an auto parts manufacturer, I’d done something wrong. I’d crossed two points in the reactor’s database. I recalled the moment vividly, as the plant went into emergency shutdown and my mind was jolted into high gear. I realized in an instant that I had made a mistake, and what the mistake was. Thousands of lines of code, and I’d made one critical error. My mind had gone cold then, too. I’d worked the reactor controls with great speed, fearing an exothermic reaction and a fire. In the end, there had been a big clean-up and some muttering about lawsuits, but no one had died.

The gee-forces pressing me into my wet leather couch increased. We were accelerating. We were heading up into the sky, toward I knew not what. Like a car crash, events seem to slow down and take on a hyper-real quality. Then I got an idea.

“Alamo, I want you to manipulate the forward wall of the bridge. I want you to shape it into the shape of objects outside the ship. I want to see—bumps on the wall, raised surfaces, for each friendly ship and enemy ship.”

It seemed to take a long time, but I’m sure it was no more than thirty seconds before the wall opposite us, the wall that had almost become our ceiling, changed. It came to resemble a silver blanket under which dozens of beetles crawled slowly, independently. As we watched, the beetle swarm converged closer together.

“Where the hell are we going?” asked Sandra, staring at the wall that had now become a metallic relief-map like a radar screen. “And which one is us?”

“Alamo, can you color friendly ships? Green or—gold?” I thought of the brassy color of Sandra’s pupils when she’d been blind. Could the ship have put metal in her? Liquid metal? I pushed away the thought. We could figure that out later.

The bumps changed color. They took on a reflective, lightly golden color, like melted tin. They reminded me of beads of solder stained with amber resin. All of them looked the same, however.

“Make the enemy a darker color. And show me physical objects like the Earth and the Moon—with a neutral gray.”

The wall shimmered and a large portion of the wall to the left became a curved surface.

“That must be the Earth. We’re leaving it behind,” said Sandra in a lost voice. “Why aren’t we floating?”

“We are accelerating so fast that it’s pressing us backward,” I said. “If we slow down and coast, we should start to float.”

“Hey, what’s that?” asked Sandra, pointing. “Something is moving toward us over on the far wall.”

We stared at the walls. Over to our right was a fist-sized, rust-red thing. The small golden swellings on the forward wall slowly left the crescent of Earth behind and slid toward the rust-colored thing. All the moving contacts were on a collision course.

“That must be the enemy our ship spoke of,” I said. “Look at it. Whatever it is, it looks a lot bigger than us.”

“Kyle?” asked Sandra after a quiet moment.

“What?”

“Any chance you can take me back home and let me off at your farm? I think I’ve changed my mind.”