Alien Invasion 04 Annihilation (2 page)

Cameron shook his head, finally addressing Andreus with more logic than emotion.
 

“Nathan. You sent Tarantula into Heaven’s Veil to pick us up after watching me walk through the gates on satellite.” He looked at Coffey, knowing she’d have seen the same. “You’re a communications guy. I know you’re smart. But are you really that sure you ever outsmarted them? We made that mistake once, and what happened? It turned out that what we were
getting away with
was something they wanted all along.”
 

Cameron’s head bent skyward. At the right angles, they couldn’t see the mothership above the Moab facility, and might have believed they were alone.
 

“The network is down. But maybe it’s only for us. You know what our satellites can see from space. So what do you think
they
can see?”
 

Nathan looked into the endless Utah sky. He could almost feel alien eyes upon him. He resisted the urge to pull his signal detector from its pouch. He knew it was on and that if there’d been an Astral BB following them through this part of the trip, he’d have heard the detector alarm. But they didn’t necessarily need BBs to see what needed seeing. Not when the dumb humans crossed open land. Not when they circled to recover recreational vehicles they’d left behind before a raid, trying to fool themselves into believing they were fortunate to find them.
 

“So what should we do, Cameron?” Nathan said, not really asking for an answer. “If you’ve got it all figured out, what’s our next move?”
 

“Partner up,” said a voice.
 

Andreus knew it was Charlie, Benjamin’s longtime right hand, before turning to look, but hearing him now seemed so out of place. While Piper and Cameron had dealt grimly with their losses, Charlie had taken his like a mannequin. He’d known Benjamin almost as long as Cameron had — or maybe, Nathan now thought, longer. But the way Charlie acted, his best friend might merely be behind a bush, taking a piss, soon to return.
 

“They think we’ll find Thor’s Hammer,” Charlie said. “So let’s stop playing games and do it.”
 

CHAPTER 3

This was a terrible idea.
 

Behind Cameron, Piper’s presence was more assuring than it should be. They were both bent around a rock, hiding in what seemed to be plain sight.
 

On one hand, the idea of walking right up to the lab as Charlie had suggested was appealing. Either he was right and the mothership would let them go, or Charlie was wrong and they’d be incinerated. Either way was honestly fine with Cameron. He’d been hiding for over two years now, awaiting death for most of them. Certainty would be a blessing.
 

On the other hand, doing so felt like a betrayal of Benjamin’s life. All of those years spent wandering, the broken marriage to Cameron’s mother at the hands of obsession, all that time spent researching, analyzing, hoping — it would all be wasted if Cameron made the wrong choice now. And walking right out under a mothership, appealing as it was, felt like the wrong choice no matter how much logic Charlie applied. It was spitting in Benjamin’s eye, tossing out the single advantage Benjamin had earned them at the cost of one human lifetime.
 

“They’re not all powerful,” Piper said behind him. “They can’t look everywhere at once.”

She’d told him about her chats with the Rational Monks during their long, slow, disconnected trip back to Moab, hoping to scavenge whatever evidence might remain. Cameron believed it all: not just the fidelity of Piper as a source, but the monks’ words as well. Humanity really had stymied their overlords this time around. The Internet really had confused them; Cameron had seen as much in the way the shuttles and BBs had puzzled over the fiber cables and the infectious curiosity he’d felt from them over Terrence’s Canned Heat virus. They really had tricked the tiny surveillance droid that had nearly blown the group’s Cottonwood plan before they did it themselves. They really had forced the Astrals’ hands in the end; allowing human eyes to see them shift shapes struck Cameron as a move of desperation, not something planned or thought out logically. They
could
be fooled. As Piper said, the aliens weren’t all powerful. They were advanced, of course, but not the gods that Earth’s ancients had believed them to be.
 

“So you want to do this,” Cameron said, looking at the wide-open pan between them and the lab’s remains. “You really want to run over there and trust that they won’t destroy us.”
 

“They haven’t destroyed us yet.”
 

Cameron turned. Piper was dressed like the no-bullshit Jeanine Coffey, in beat-up men’s jeans and an old faded tee. Her hair was in a black ponytail, but coming loose and shining with sweat. She still had her sharp bangs and those huge blue eyes. But something had changed in the woman, scraping her two years as Heaven’s Veil away like dead skin to reveal what she’d become after killing Garth outside Meyer’s Axis Mundi. Watching Trevor die to save her had slashed an invisible scar across Piper’s pretty features that would never vanish. It made her harder than she’d been. Bolder. Bolder, in fact, than Cameron felt now.
 

Piper went on without waiting for Cameron to speak.
 

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe they’re watching us. Maybe it’s stupid to consider that we might have gotten here unseen. But that doesn’t mean we should just give up.”
 

“If they’re watching us,” Cameron said, “we’re making things worse. We’ll show them to Thor’s Hammer and sign humanity’s death warrant.”
 

Piper shrugged. “Is this so much better?”
 

Cameron supposed she had a point. Colonization was complete. Thor’s Hammer might kill off the entire population before it could stand. But it was either that or continue to live on their knees. It made sense, but it was a dark thought coming from Piper. He’d met her as the kind of woman who’d take a spider outside her home rather than swat it. Now she was the kind who could contemplate mass extinction as a sensible option, all things considered.
 

Cameron glanced at the trio preparing to try for the ranch house, maybe for the money pit that had so fascinated Benjamin.
 

He felt the hand return to his back. He turned.
 

“There’s something you’re forgetting,” she said.
 

“What’s that?”
 

“They can travel through space, maybe time. They can read humanity’s minds with rows of rocks. They can fly faster than the eye can see, and they can level cities.”
 

“I’m not forgetting any of that,” Cameron said grimly, knowing a punch line was coming.
 

“They have everything under control,” she said. “But they can lose it, too.”
 

Cameron looked at Piper, unsure how to respond, feeling a scintilla of hope for a reason he could barely understand. He’d expected a platitude that meant nothing. And this, too,
seemed
to mean nothing. But it mattered. For all the world,
it mattered.
 

Cameron opened his mouth to reply. But then he saw movement in the corner of his eye and knew their time was up.

Andreus was giving the sign:
now or never.

CHAPTER 4

Lila stared out the window, watching the city attempt to settle. It didn’t seem to want to.

She could sympathize. Lila wasn’t sure if she was angry, afraid, or some third terrible emotion. There had been a time when she’d been happy, a time when she’d been innocent, looking forward to little things like movies and time spent with friends. But those days were so far gone as to feel like another person’s memories. These days, Lila was a mother whose child was closer to a sister, with a family that had been shattered like glass on tile. People kept coming and going. She’d grown used to Piper in their strange new digs (also more like a sister than a stepmother), but now she was gone, too. So was Trevor. And not long ago she’d seen her mother run across the lawn with her father, sure in a bizarre way that they were leaving as well.
 

Leaving her trapped with Raj.
 

Lila wanted to shiver. The thought made her glance at Clara, who was now sleeping peacefully. She’d been restless a while ago, following her return to the room after … after
whatever that was
up in the network center. After Raj had trussed Lila’s mother and Terrence, who were supposed to be friends but seemed to have become enemies. After Dad had turned on Raj and shot him with darts to knock the asshole flat.
 

Then the shuttle out front. Terrence being taken away under Titan and Reptar guard. The shuttle flying high, disappearing somehow through the mothership’s titanic silver belly above the Apex. Terrence maybe gone forever, just a shade from family himself.
 

The door opened without a knock. Lila turned to see Christopher, his dark eyes worried.
 

“Where’s your father?”
 

Lila shook her head.
 

“When did you see him last?”
 

“He was running off with Mom.”
 

“With
Heather?”
 

Lila nodded. The tension in Christopher’s voice was unnerving. Lila wondered if she’d been rationalizing all she’d seen and realized with horror that she probably had been. Not long after Terrence had been taken away, guards had begun to mill about, alerted but unclear on their orders. She’d seen shuttles buzz by like agitated wasps. Meyer’s leaving the grounds on foot was, as Christopher seemed to imply, a bit unusual, and leaving with his ex-wife not long after his current wife had turned traitor was stranger still. Maybe they were leaving too. Soon, Lila, Clara, Raj, and Christopher would be the only people left. They could become the new viceroys, with Mo Weir as an assistant and a direct line to Divinity in the mothership overhead.
 

Christopher went to the window, where Lila had been a moment earlier.
 

“What is it, Christopher?”
 

“We’re not being told.”

“By who?”
 

Christopher opened the sash without answering. Lila realized how odd the city sounded. Everything was still, but the silence felt pregnant — the kind of quiet where agitation pauses in its tracks, freezing in unnatural positions. Sometime after Lila’s mom and dad had left the grounds, buzz from the Astrals — both inside the house and outside in the streets — had become …
uneasy
. There was no other word for it. They weren’t precisely nervous, because they didn’t seem to
get
nervous. But Lila, with echoes of the old psychic intuition she’d felt before Clara’s birth and occasionally thereafter as her mother, could sense that unease coming from them all.

Something had gone wrong, and Lila hadn’t wanted to ask what it was. The last time the city had seemed this unsettled, it turned out an armored tank had crashed the walls and taken Trevor and Piper away. Lila had thought them dead, and believed her mother dead as well. This felt worse. Like the city itself had taken a stake through the heart.

“Who’s not talking, Christopher?” Lila repeated.
 

Christopher returned to full height shaking his head, sighing, frustrated.
 

“Take your pick. The Astrals. Captain Jons, who’s now sending orders through the house like a dictator.”
 

“How can the
human police captain
send orders through the house?”
 

“I don’t know. Ask Mo Weir.” He made a little gesture of fake recognition. “Oh, wait, no, you can’t. Because Mo isn’t talking either. Only Raj is talking.”
 

“Raj!”

“Oh yes. Raj has lots to say. He’s giving orders like the viceroy himself. Stuff your dad wouldn’t let him do if he knew. That’s why I need to find him. To shut that little motherfucker up.” He looked at Clara, still sleeping, and Lila. His eyes almost seemed to apologize. Raj was Lila’s husband and Clara’s father, but nobody, here and now, was ready to fault Christopher for speaking his mind.
 

“It’s fine. He
is
a little motherfucker.”
 

Lila told Christopher the story of what she’d seen earlier, how Raj had been lording over her mother like a dictator on the prowl, and about her father’s change of heart.
 

“Your dad shot Raj?”
 

“With a dart gun.”
 

Christopher went back to the window then the door, unsettled like the falsely calm city. “That might explain it.”
 

“What?”
 

“He’s claiming the viceroyship, if you can believe it. As interim head, anyway. Says Meyer is
compromised
.”
 

“Nobody will believe that.” Lila almost laughed.
 

“The Astrals are scattered, Li. My people don’t know who to listen to. Remember, Raj outranks me. Doesn’t seem to matter that his position is symbolic; there’s nobody around to contradict him, and everyone knows he’s listed as commander, even though that’s not a thing in our hierarchy. So he’s taken control of the guard, sending people all over the house and grounds like chess pieces. Telling them to watch out for your father. I heard him say he was taking credit for ‘having it handled’ when your mom knocked him out or … ” Christopher shook his head, half squinting as he continued, “or something. I don’t know. I just need to find your father.”