Greenflies Read online

  Greenflies

  By Andrew Leete Darling

  Copyright © 2014 by Andrew Leete Darling

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotation in a book review.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: Contact

  Chapter 2: Specimens

  Chapter 3: Autopsy

  Chapter 4: Lessons in Respect

  Chapter 5: Lassiter

  Chapter 6: Gamma

  Chapter 7: Captive

  Chapter 8: Mobilization

  Chapter 9: New arrivals

  Chapter 10: Troy

  Chapter 11: Steady State

  Chapter 12: Beta

  Chapter 13: The Plan

  Chapter 14: Close Combat

  Chapter 15: Weapons

  Chapter 16: Inconstant moon

  Chapter 17: Origins

  Chapter 18: Holding Ground

  Chapter 19: Tunnel Rats

  Chapter 20: Monsters

  Chapter 21: Downtime

  Chapter 22: Turncoat

  Chapter 23: The Fall of Utah Base

  Chapter 24: Life Raft

  Chapter 25: Lost Asset

  Chapter 1: Contact

  2:34 AM, June 27, 2004, Heidelberg, Germany

  The display on the monitors remained as it had for the duration of his shift. There were the occasional decimal numbers appearing, as likely to be noise in the system as an actual neutrino being detected.

  Franz Liter had already given up on the system and spent the majority of these night shifts surfing the Internet for interesting safe for work content. It was rare for the lab faculty to stop in this late at night, but Franz’s position was too valuable to risk over late-night downloaded porn.

  Franz glanced out of the control room windows, towards the gigantic fiberglass tank beyond. The white case of the thing made it look like nothing so much as a fifty-foot-long egg. Within the tank was a complex mixture of heavy water and rare elements, a cocktail that had cost as much as the entire graduate staff’s annual salary. The interior of the case was studded with optical detectors, sensitive enough to witness a single molecule of water flash in cataclysmic destruction as a neutrino impacted.

  In theory, billions of neutrinos were passing through the tank every second, but the weak interaction of a neutrino with its environment made detection nearly impossible. The giant tank neutrino detector was built to witness the one-in-a-quadrillion chance collision between atomic nucleus and ghostly neutrino. It was an experimental version, not buried beneath hundreds of meters of rock as most neutrino detectors were, and much smaller. In theory, the cocktail of material within the tank should have been more prone to cataclysmic destruction with each neutrino collision, and the optical detectors should have been sensitive enough to detect a single photon anywhere within the dark mass of water.

  Sadly, it didn’t work. Franz, or whatever grad student was on duty late on a given night, invariably had a lot of free time on his hands. The experimental water tank detected a small fraction of the hits of the more mainstream neutrino detectors. Despite its technical advances, it simply wasn’t large or deep enough. As a result, Franz’s dissertation prospects were poor. At this rate, he was more likely to get an engineering PhD in troubleshooting the darn thing than a Physics degree in analyzing its data. No one would begrudge him the hour he was spending playing Solitaire right now.

  The computer monitor displaying the detector data beeped. It was programmed to do that whenever it had a 50% likelihood of having made a detection. This was the first tonight.

  Franz wheeled his chair across the tile and peered at the data. The numbers were levels of light detection, averaged from thousands of detectors within the tank. Sure enough, the detectors had picked up a light, with high fidelity and correlation between sensors, indicating a single molecule had died a fiery death. The probability of the murderer being a neutrino was well into the 90th percentiles, according to the computer’s first statistical test. While not a breakthrough by any stretch, it was nice to know the machine could occasionally catch something. It was probably the sun sending the detector a slow pitch. Franz could expect one or two brownie points at the morning lab meeting.

  He wheeled back to the other terminal where he had left his lab notebook. The detection would have to be recorded tonight in about six places, both written and digital.

  The monitor beeped again.

  Somewhat perplexed, Franz wheeled back, notebook in hand. A second neutrino collision had been witnessed, with even higher probabilities than the first. The odds of this feeble detector picking up more than one neutrino in a thirty second space were distinctly worse than of lightning striking the same place twice. The likely explanation was some sort of power surge in the optical sensor system.

  The data from the last impact scrolled away, the monitor beeped, and a third impact was allegedly detected. This would seem to support the technical glitch theory. Franz’s brownie points disappeared. It was never enviable to be the one to report a major malfunction. No doubt, this would call for the replacement of a lot of electrical equipment before the source of the surge was found.

  The monitor beeped again, then twice more in rapid succession. The data from the three new detections raced across the screen, faster than Franz could focus. A few moments later, the beeping became rhythmic, then a continuous hum. Numbers didn’t even have a chance to fully form on the monitor before they were replaced.

  Franz turned down the speaker and pulled the error log from underneath the keyboard. He would have to visually inspect the entire system for obvious problems, get the logs from the power room, run a virus check on all the computers involved, take the system offline… five hours of work had just materialized, and that was if the malfunction was easy enough to diagnose and/or fix. He flicked the switch turning on the cameras all around the tank, and even a few inside. Monitors around the control room flashed to life with boring images of the giant egg.

  Three of them showed something else. There was no artificial illumination within the tank, but the interior tank cameras were picking up an image. Trails of diffuse blue light, like spiderwebs, laced through the tanks. A line would exist for a fraction of a second, then vanish, only to be replaced by another at a skewed angle. Franz stared in wonder at the rapidly changing tracery of light. Such images could not come from the impact of a single neutrino.

  Each of those lines, if real, would represent millions of impacts, all from a single point, no doubt along with orders of magnitude more neutrinos that failed to be detected.

  1:36 AM, June 27, 2004, London Zoo

  A brief blue flash appeared in the water cooler, but Wes was looking in the other direction, swiping his ID badge across the sensor on the wall of the security office before beginning his rounds. The little devices all across the zoo served to confirm that security guards were moving at a regular pace through the zoo and weren’t napping. There was a little bit of lag time, which Wes had spent in the administrative building, but it was now time to return to duty.

  He adjusted the nightstick and flashlight on his belt and stepped out into the night. The lever for the “employees only” door gave him a little static discharge as it popped open. It was a clear night, and warm enough so that some of the animals were still permitted to be in their outdoor enclosures. Animals such as the elephants, great cats, and zebra contributed some nocturnal noise to the zoo. They seemed unusually active tonight, Wes thought. Probably one particularly loud animal had started them off while Wes was in the john.

  The administrative building was nestled among the interior enclosure buildings - the primate house, the noctur
nal habitat, and the veterinary building. Wes ambled by each one in turn, briefly pointing his flashlight inside the front doors before moving on.

  The lights in the veterinary building were off, indicating that the keeper on duty was visiting one of his animal charges - perhaps bringing some creature into its interior enclosure away from the noise.

  The noise was getting a little unnerving. Unlike most times when the animals would get excited, the sound didn’t come in bursts, stimulated by a single animal. Rather, all the animals now seemed to be taking turns, creating a constant din throughout the zoo. The greatest contributors now were the zebra, filling the night with their donkey braying. Wes began heading in that direction, as the zebra enclosure was quite close to the primate house.

  As he approached the fence, the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. There was nothing to precipitate the sensation. No ominous sight or noise. No chill wind. Just a sudden physiological reaction which began to unnerve him. Something in the back of his mind grew skittish, like the vocal animals all around him.

  There was the typical concrete decline beyond the steel fence and the moat beyond. The zebra shared a broad grassy habitat with the ostriches, an arrangement similar to what they had in the wild. The ostriches were gathered in a lit alcove, to one side of the enclosure, the entrance to their interior chambers. They should have been roosting at this late hour, but they seemed quite alert, standing in a semicircle in the entrance way, their heads erect and wings outspread in a sign of threat. The zebra, on the other hand, were sprinting back and forth across the enclosure, braying to the limits of their lungs. Or rather, that was the behavior of all but one of them.

  The last zebra lay on its side near the center of the enclosure. One of its hind legs had been severed at the ankle, and blood flowed freely into the grass. The blood didn’t spurt, a sign that the animal’s heart had grown as still as the rest of it. There was no sign of any other wound on the creature. It simply lay dead in the center of the enclosure while the other animals fretted that they would be next.

  Eyes wide, Wes leaned forward against the metal rail but jumped back again as the rail gave off an enormous static discharge. It had felt much like the time he had stuck his finger in a lamp socket as a child. Peering at his hand, he saw an impression of the metal rail, red against the palm. When he looked up again, he got a quick impression of motion above the alcove where the ostriches were hiding.

  Wes grabbed the radio receiver on his shoulder to summon the keeper on duty.

  “Doctor Garver, please pick up. There’s been some kind of attack at the zebra enclosure. One of the animals has been killed.”

  The radio just spat static back at him.

  “Doctor Garver…”

  Wes was certain he had seen this horror movie before and had no intention of following the usual script. Instead of following the motion he had seen across the enclosure, and no doubt meeting up with the lion or bear or whatever that had escaped and attacked the zebra, Wes chose to return to the administrative building by the fastest route and call for the keepers-on-call, animal control, the zoo director, the police, and whoever else he could think of. Better to be the alarmist but alive zoo security guard than the one found in the digestive tract of a bear.

  He ran back the way he had come but stopped short when he rounded the corner of the primate habitat. There, between him and the veterinary building, where he had just been perhaps two minutes ago, was a floating creature. The thing was perhaps the size of a garbage truck with a bumpy brown hide dimly lit by the zoo lamp-posts. There were few features on its surface, just a boxy shape with smooth corners, and a shiny but bumpy skin. The silhouette of the thing reminded Wes, in the instant that he first saw it, of a giant Volkswagen van, inexplicably hovering a half meter off the ground. There was the sound of static discharge and occasionally a spark in the gap between the base of the creature and the ground. It moved at the pace of a human jog towards the nocturnal habitat. In a calm corner of his mind, Wes realized that all of his hair was standing on end, over every inch of his body.

  He bolted back the way he had come. He’d happily call the police from the zoo entrance, rather than trying to sneak by a floating alien creature. Or at least that was the thought going through the calm corner of his mind. Most of his reactions were now those of the terrified animals throughout the zoo. He sprinted past the zebra enclosure, the bright footprint of his flashlight bouncing along the footpath. He passed the elephants, hearing the sounds of a wounded animal down there but not giving it so much as a glance. He came to the lion enclosure and was forced to stop.

  The steel fence along a section of the lion enclosure had been sheared away where the footpath narrowed. Fifty yards down the path was another of those floating brown box creatures, casually moving one way down a fork in the path. It still trailed a small segment of torn steel fencing behind it. Wes gauged its distance and prepared to continue his sprint, taking the other fork, the one towards the entrance to the zoo.

  Before he could take his third step, a pride of scared lions, all sopping wet, stormed out of the hole in the fence and rushed past him. He was instantly bowled over, and his flashlight clattered to the ground twenty feet away. Blood dripped down his leg from a casual slash he’d been dealt from one of the passing lionesses.

  He was not alone lying on the pavement though. Another fifteen feet away lay one of the wet lions, the large male known as Hercules. He was convulsing on his side, eyes rolled up into his head, claws bloody from the climb up the inclined concrete of their enclosure. Wes could make out five insects of some kind on the lion’s haunches. They were big, about the size of a bumblebee, and their yellow bodies squirmed, still pumping venom into the big cat. Wes lay transfixed as the animal continued its death throes, vomited once, and then lay still.

  Something else crawled up through the gap in the fence.

  The monster was well over two meters in height but very slender. It had six narrow limbs and walked up the inclined concrete surface on the rear four effortlessly. The front two held a white device. While the device’s surface looked like mold Wes had seen growing on trees, the thing had an obvious barrel belying its purpose, and it was trained on the fallen lion. A buzzing could be heard from within the weapon. The creature holding it was green, with a complexly textured skin that seemed to writhe with a life of its own. Patterns and ridges raced across its tube-like body as it moved, thousands of tiny scales standing on edge or laying flat in sequence. The top of the tube led into a long, flexible neck, upon which something loosely describable as a head rested. The head was very small, offering only enough room for two purple eyes, the size of baseballs. Their surface was shiny, as if made of glass, and there were second orbs visible inside those eyes. Nested glass spheres that moved in relation to each other, when the creature changed focus.

  It pointed its weapon at Wes. The security guard could hear the buzzing very clearly and thought he could make out glimpses of flitting insect wings inside the wide barrel. He scurried backwards like a crab, terrified beyond speech or even screaming. The alien, apparently feeling secure that Wes was not a threat, retrained the weapon on the dead lion and continued walking towards it across the path. As it stepped off the inclined concrete surface of the enclosure, the alien shifted from walking on four feet to its rear two. The middle pair of limbs shortened visibly, and crossed in front of the creature at what would have been the abdomen on a human. It walked bipedally in this configuration, but was unlikely to ever be confused for a human, no matter how far away it was viewed.

  Once it reached the lion, the middle limbs unfolded and extended to handle the corpse. The alien began worrying with its three-fingered claws at the lion’s tail, trying to sever it. Wes didn’t wait to see how the situation turned out. He clambered to his feet and ran off, limping terribly on his right side. The alien didn’t pay him any heed as it cut into the lion’s body.

  Wes reached the fork, seeing the alien hover-creature moving slowly down the tra
il to the right. He turned the other way to be confronted with another tube-like alien, perhaps twenty feet away, a bug weapon in its upper limbs and walking on two limbs towards him. Its middle pair of appendages were extended behind it, towing a body behind it like a sled. This time, the body wasn’t an animal. From the staff jacket and hat it wore, it was most likely Garver, the keeper on duty. From the amount of blood, it was likely Garver hadn’t been stung by insects, but rather had been clawed to death.

  His hindbrain taking the initiative, Wes ran towards the nearest section of fence and vaulted over it. He rolled gracelessly down the incline and splashed into the water of the moat. Clambering on shore, he found himself in the lion enclosure, having approached from another angle. While normally this would not be a healthy place to be, it was now empty of big cats, so comparatively safe.

  He limped to the entryway of the indoor enclosure, secluded in an artificial cliff-face. He looked over his shoulder once, to see the alien still working on the lion outside of the enclosure, and then he slipped into the indoor section. A few door latches led him to the supply pantry, filled with leashes, muzzles, tranquilizers, padding material for bedding, and a dozen other odds and ends.

  There was just enough room for a scared security guard to sit down, trembling, the door wedged shut with a piece of hard chew toy.

  10:11 PM, June 26, 2004, Langley, VA

  “Once again, the footage you are seeing now is live from the Botanical Gardens in Boston. About a half hour ago, three strange floating craft appeared near the gardens at that location, and unloaded twelve creatures that do not appear to be human…”

  Colonel Tom Marshal watched the changing screenshots on CNN. Evidently, they were switching between a half dozen different helicopter cameras, trying to catch an essentially simple event from every conceivable angle. In addition to the news copters, there had to be at least as many police and military helicopters there, keeping the media reasonably at bay. That had to be very busy airspace. And all over a few aliens picking flowers.