Greenflies Read online

  “Do you think it’s intentional?” asked Franz. He was one of many here who was unnerved to know that the alien was being kept just a few hundred yards away from where they worked and slept. He never understood Butler’s trust of the creature.

  “I doubt it,” replied Butler, “I sense no loyalty in him for the other Greenflies, although I think he places value on their lives. I asked him if he was upset with humanity for resisting the Greenflies, and he just responded that that was what wild species did. He still seems to think of us as just a particularly dangerous kind of ape. Anyways, how about you? How’s the research coming?”

  It was a more common question around here than ‘how are you doing?’ and Franz chose to answer it by drawing from his pocket something that looked like a computer hard drive. It had a flat cylinder at its core, surrounded by a simple control chip and power supply. He flicked a switch and placed it on his tray beside the untouched beef stew. The little device hung there about two inches above the tray, neither wobbling nor listing from side to side. Franz pushed down on it with his finger to illustrate its stability.

  “They moved me from teleportation to high energy phenomena. The levitation of the alien transports is one of the least energetic of their high energy technologies, and its pretty straightforward. It’s a lot like the eddy current levitation technologies we’ve been familiar with for years, but whatever creature the alien transport used to be, it evolved the levitation to work on nearly every surface. We can duplicate it to a certain degree, but so far, the effect is just vertical. It actually resists lateral movement if it’s close to a surface. To actually get the velocities we see from the transports, they must have a … well… biologically complex control system to manipulate the fields.”

  Butler had forgotten his malaise and was poking the little levitating hard drive with a finger. It tingled a little when he poked his finger beneath the field, but that was about the only effect he could elicit from the thing. As promised, it was extremely stable.

  “The military is going to want that,” said Butler, “for everything.”

  Franz smiled but shook his head a little, “It’ll be a little while before it’s ready. As I said, it doesn’t take much power as far as alien technologies are concerned, but it is still a power hog by Earth standards. There was a fresh Ni Cad battery in there now, and I can already see the field is failing. Until we unravel their power source, all we’ll be able to use this for is short term applications. There’s talk of using it as a form of parachute…”

  Franz lifted the device from the table and dropped it from about two feet up. It fell rapidly at first, but its rate decreased as it neared the surface, finally coming to a stop at two inches again. Then, its power exhausted, the little hard drive settled to the tray beside the beef stew.

  “It doesn’t generate much force on air, but it could be set to slow down or hover a human being up to twenty feet above the ground. If you start with the device close to the ground, it will shoot upwards with great force. It could never be used for flight, but it might make a neat booster. That would require us to crack the alien power supply problem, though.”

  Butler continued to prod the dead levitation device, as one might poke a dead animal. He had his usual grin on his face. All it usually took to brighten his mood was a simple magic trick from Physics or Xenobiology. In a way, he preferred not knowing how the trick was performed. Stage magic was much more impressive that way.

  “So, why did they take you off teleportation?”asked Butler. “I would think it would be one of the most important research areas to the military, and you’re one of the people who cracked its first mysteries.”

  Franz sighed and slurped his orange juice miserably.

  “Because there’s no real hope of understanding it, not to the degree we would need to duplicate it to attack the aliens on their own ground,” he said. “And, experimenting with it would be more dangerous than the atomic bomb tests at Trinity. Those radiation bursts that the transports release when they reappear… those are the best case scenario. When a transport appears, its atoms are placed in intimate contact with the atoms that are at the target destination. At those distances, both atomic forces come into play, but it is electromagnetic repulsion that causes most of the damage. The particles are accelerated away from each other at an incredible rate. The blue flash you see consists of particles of gas being flung away at tremendous speed.”

  “Doesn’t that defy the law of conservation of energy?” asked Butler.

  “So long as the atoms of the transport are being effected as well, then no,” said Franz.

  “So the very act of teleporting causes damage to the transports. How bad?”

  “Probably well over a lethal dose of radiation by human standards, for someone teleporting into air at one atmosphere,” replied Franz.

  “But, the Greenflies don’t appear to heal,” said Butler, “I mean, Greenbeard still has his wounds unchanged from his encounter with the soldiers. How is it that other Greenflies could sustain that kind of cellular damage again and again through repeated teleportations?”

  “I don’t know. They must have something that can get inside of them and initiate repairs, or maybe they just build more Greenflies,” said Franz, dismissing the subject, “But what if it isn’t air you’re transporting into, but a liquid or solid. There’d be orders of magnitude more atoms to accelerate. At those speeds, heavier nuclei would come apart and impact other nuclei. It would very quickly become a nuclear reaction in an otherwise non-radiating material. You might be able to get a several kiloton blast from an apple.”

  “I don’t want you experimenting with teleportation,” said Butler.

  Franz grinned broadly, “That’s what the base commander said. Whoever would have thought that such an apparently harmless technology like the transporter from Star Trek could be turned into the be-all-and-end-all technology that the Greenflies use it for? I mean, they use teleportation to pump their blood, to travel between the stars most likely, to fire their weapons…”

  “To fire their weapons?”asked Butler.

  “You hadn’t heard?”

  “Evidently not,” replied Butler.

  Franz indicated that he was about to use his beef stew as a model, “There are two kinds of teleportation that the aliens have used. There’s the simple displacement…”

  Franz took a chunk of beef with his fork from the plate and dropped it off with a splat on the other side of the tray.

  “That is the method utilized by the alien transports, the aircraft, the teleportation bombs, and probably whatever vessel they used to get to this star system in the first place. It is limited to the speed of light, so when something leaves from Troy, for instance, it takes about a half hour to get here. Whoever is being transported probably doesn’t sense any time pass at all. However, there is a second kind of teleportation used by the hearts of the Greenflies and the plasma weapons.”

  He took his own straw and laid it between the plate and the piece of beef on the side of tray. A little bit of gravy dribbled through a straw and nearly reached the chunk of beef.

  “Mated pairs of wormhole mouths, here inside the Greenfly and there at the source of their blood. It’s a much safer way to travel, as there’s no radiation risk, but it requires that there be a portal at the entrance and exit point. The transfer is also instantaneous, so blood that leaves the source at time A arrives at its destination at time A, regardless of distance. The same applies to the plasma weapons,” said Franz.

  “How?”asked Butler, “There’s a plasma generator somewhere?”

  “Sort of,”Franz nodded. “The plasma is stellar, from the inside of a star. The plasma cannons are just one part of a paired system between the cannon and the inside of star. Specifically, it’s a metal-poor star, probably a red dwarf. The Greenflies must have placed a …umm… mine, I suppose, into a star. It’s impossible to exactly place the star from just the data on its plasma, but it’s probably not in our galaxy. Not enough heav
y elements; but that was very common four billion years ago.”

  Butler paused, taking in the new information.

  “So, is it possible to block either form of teleportation?” he asked.

  “Do you have a black hole?” asked Franz expectantly.

  “Not on me.”

  “Then no,” replied Franz, going back to sipping his orange juice, “And why I’m now working in high energy phenomena.”

  The war room at Utah Base was getting a little dirty. While the Window only lasted for fourteen hours above the continental United States, there were interception teams fielded across the Pacific and over US allies and interests such as Pakistan, Iraq, Europe and Australia. As such, the Window never truly set over the interception teams’ territory, and the janitorial staff was having difficulty finding time to wax the war room floors. This was one of many things Caufield noticed as she passed through the glass antechamber, prepared to head back to her on-base apartment for a few hours before the Window hit the continental US again. She was not expecting to find General Lassiter there, staring at the global maps and the red dots flashing on and off of it.

  “General,” Caufield said, suspecting he was probably there to draw her into conversation.

  “The goodwill toward men appears to have run out,” said Lassiter, pointing, “Four incursions over Syria, probably in search of new and interesting kinds of scorpions or some such. You can be certain it will be the Israelis who intercept… they’re better at it than we seem to be.”

  “Less territory,” said Caufield, not at all defensively, “They use twice the coverage as we do.”

  “And they intercept incursions all over the middle east because they don’t want their neighbors to get hold of plasma weapons, never mind that plasma cannons die the moment the Greenflies realize they’ve been captured,” continued Lassiter. “There’s going to be a war over there, mark my words, a war over who rightfully gets to wage war on the alien race waging war on us. Ironically, I think the random militants over there are almost as well qualified for the job as the Israelis, with their RPGs on every street corner. They’re gaining in power in their respective countries as well. It is clear to the people that well-armed rabble are better at protecting them than their governments. When this is over, there will be a cascade of civil wars.”

  Caufield decided not to address the notion of ‘this being over,’ as the scientists were suggesting that, at present collection rates, it might take the Greenflies years to completely fill their collection. It all depended on how many species they were willing to miss. Instead, she chose to point out the many blue dots on the screen, helicopters recovering debris from interceptions and the occasional alien accident. It occurred infrequently, but once a month, an alien transport appeared to accidentally materialize partially in solid matter. On one occasion, there was satellite footage, and the culprit turned out to be a swooping seabird. Such accidents resulted in dramatic explosions, usually enough to blow the craft to bits. The bird incident had resulted in a four kiloton explosion over the Pacific near Midway. There was one such accident earlier today, over New Hampshire, but it appeared to have only half destroyed the alien transport. A heavily laden cargo helicopter was transporting it on the first leg back to Utah Base.

  “Your man Farcus,” Caufield began, “I’m moving him up in Recovery. He seems to have a head for management…”

  “I’m pulling him from Recovery,” interrupted Lassiter, “He has the chops for Interception.”

  “I haven’t seen his scores yet,” replied Caufield, still refusing to be defensive, despite the direct tread on her turf.

  “And I haven’t seen the files on Gamma Team!” Lassiter turned on her, nearly hissing, “They are men under my command, and I find their files sealed under Presidential order, issued the day after I demanded them of you. I mentioned the impending wars across the world to help impart to you the urgency with which we need advanced technology and the soldiers with which to implement it. I need to know how Garrette created those soldiers and how to duplicate the process. It goes beyond training; that much is clear. Don’t you realize how much we’re going to need soldiers like this after the alien threat has passed? Imagine Iran with plasma rifles and hovering tanks, North Korea with body armor made from dead armor bugs. What if someone else figures out how to breed some of these alien monstrosities? The world will be a much more dangerous place, and our dominance will be at risk. We need your men.”

  “They’ll be here.”

  “We need more of them,” seethed Lassiter.

  Caufield thought carefully before answering, “General, it occurs to me that I would be breaking an executive order were I to divulge that information.”

  “Gained by having Barnard cash in a favor from a previous administration,” said Lassiter, “What interest does that fossil have in Gamma Team?”

  “Sir, that… fossil… is playing as great a role in the defense of Earth as yourself,” said Caufield, “And you recruited my team and I into this program. If you no longer respect our role here, please let me know. You’ll find we’re a unit, and we can pull another executive order from our hat to prove it, if need be.”

  “Very well, Maria,”said Lassiter, calming in an instant and turning back to observe the war room. “I’ll see you in a few hours.”

  “Excellent, sir,” she said, already walking down the corridor.

  Chapter 12: Beta

  This would be Beta Team’s first drop. A second team was dropping to join them, but it was their first drop too. The target was a single squad of Greenflies, their transport disabled by a modified HARM missile, seeking cover and waiting for extraction in the swamps of the Everglades. The transport had been destroyed only five minutes ago, so there was at least a twenty-five minute delay before any other transports teleported in to extract the aliens. More likely, the delay would be fifty minutes or more, to allow the Greenflies visual inspection of the landing site prior to risking more transports.

  The team consisted of six personnel, just as their Gamma Team instructors had been. There was the sniper, the demolitions man, the communications specialist, the squad leader, the combat medic, and the close combat specialist in the tradition of the point men and tunnel rats of Vietnam. The modified B-1 bomb bay could barely fit the team, cramped together on makeshift benches. The standard uniform for this duty was a set of black armor, complete with helmet, capable of becoming environmentally sealed to ward off the alien bee weapons. Their weapons were squat black firearms, somewhere between a sub-machine gun and an assault rifle, held before them as that was the only room available. They were occupying a cavity that, years ago, would have housed a single nuclear weapon. Between them was the seam of the bomb bay door. Beyond was air moving at over 900 miles per hour while the team was en route to target.

  They felt the lurch of deceleration and descent as they arrived at the drop zone. The bomber was dropping from its cruising altitude of over 30,000 feet to a drop altitude of only 5000, and it was doing so in the matter of a minute. In order to achieve the descent at that rate, it had to both thrust downwards while reducing its speed to avoid tearing the wings off in the thicker air. The experience in the bomb bay was that of any small objects not stowed properly floating up into the air, then flying with great velocity against a wall. This occurred a dozen times in the descent and did nothing to alleviate the atmosphere of tension and nausea in the bomb bay.

  A green light flashed on at the front of the bay, a signal that the bomber had reached drop altitude. The soldiers flipped a switch on the underside of their helmet, switching from external to internal air supply. There was no further discussion. Maps of the vicinity had been reviewed and the tactical profile had been discussed all within the first two minutes after notification. The interception teams were trained to make tactical decisions in moments.

  The light switched from green to yellow, and the bomb bay doors yawned open with the sound of hydraulics. The atmosphere of the bomb bay turned into something s
imilar to a vacuum cleaner. The pressure wasn’t the culprit at 5000 feet; the rushing air outside had the effect of creating a cyclone in the bay, generating a swirling mix of vacuum and wind. The team stood and prepared to jump.

  The tension was palpable. Beneath the plane could be seen an endless sea of grass, dotted with islands of forest. The sun was just creeping over the horizon, adding a golden glow to the vista. The team realized that the picturesque landscape was perhaps the deadliest environment that could be chosen for an interception. The actual soil upon which that grass grew was mud and quicksand. The alternative was parachuting into a tree, an equally distressing target.

  Yellow turned to red, and the team jumped. They dropped through the gap in pairs, from front to back, pushing off of each other in midair to gain more space to free fall. As they fell, they gauged distance from each other very carefully. While it was essential to land in a tight enough group to regroup quickly on the ground, mid air collisions once the chutes were deployed could result in tangling and plummeting. There were a few seconds of instability when the chutes were initially deployed. The distance between the troops had to compensate for that behavior.

  They spent most of the fall without chutes, to speed interception. Their terminal velocity was quite high as the weight of their equipment pulled them groundward. In addition to their primary weapon, grenades, and packed parachute, each possessed a large cylinder beneath the parachute.

  The group pulled their cords, nearly in unison, but the vertical distance after deployment between the first and last was over a hundred feet. Beta team, while better than most of the interception teams, was still unable to master the simultaneous landings Gamma Team could perform each and every time. Also, Beta’s chutes were much larger than those used by Gamma Team, nearly as large a conventional paratrooper’s. As a result Beta descended comparably slowly. Between their slow descent, their spread out profile across the sky, and the parachutes which presented large targets of vulnerability, the Greenflies had a shooting gallery before them.