Greenflies Read online

  Anna had never before been so close to sputtering rage. She had known that the military would occupy the site but she had no idea how much damage they would cause incidentally in the first thirty seconds of their occupation.

  Farcus waved a hand at the parked helicopters. “I can’t apologize enough for this. I was not paying attention during landing, and the pilots… well, they assumed your method of sectioning off your dig was a way for demarcating helicopter landing pads. If it makes you feel better, with your discovery, we can assure you that this site, fossils included, will be examined with an obscene amount of equipment down to depths that would make miners nervous. All …terrestrial… fossils will be handed over to you.”

  “If this is how you treat a site, I doubt there’ll be much left to hand over to me,” she snapped, fixing the last corner of the tarp.

  “Please, doctor. You had to know this is what would happen when you contacted us, and you did the right thing. We may not be subtle, but we’re on your side,” said Farcus. “Now, how about you tell me what happened exactly and show me the artifact.”

  It was as much a command as a request, but Farcus had a talent for disarming people with mannerism alone. The helicopter landing may have been a debacle, but he needed the paleontologist to be forthcoming, at least for a little while. Therefore, he had to endear himself to her in spite of it.

  Perhaps in the interest of getting her and her students out of this situation as quickly as possible, she ushered Farcus over to the pit where the artifact had been discovered. It was a shallow square ditch, just like the other fossil beds, but this one had been surrounded by police cruiser SUVs instead of the standard white string. Nearly center in the square was a metal surface, shiny and nearly smooth. There was a slight curve to it, possibly indicating it was part of a hemisphere or sphere buried in the ground. About three square meters of the surface was visible, indicating that, if it was a sphere, it was enormous. The apex of the surface was marred by a crack, spread into a hole large enough for a man to squeeze through. Sure enough, a tripod had been set over the crack, and a rope dangled down into it.

  “You found it with the crack?”Farcus asked, kneeling down to place his hand in the ragged gap. The shape was hollow, to be sure, the walls no more than six inches thick. The edge of the crack bowed in slightly, as if the force which opened the sphere were pushing inward.

  “Yes,” said Anna. “When we found the surface, at first we thought it was a nickel-iron meteorite, and we dug around to find a perimeter. That’s when we found the crack.”

  “It might still be a meteorite,” said Farcus, now shining a light within the hole.

  “If you throw away the fact that it’s too perfectly round, 50 yards in diameter if the curvature holds, you still have the lack of shocked rock anywhere around here. Besides, based on rock strata, when this thing must have arrived, this was a swamp. The impact of a meteorite would have created dramatic changes in the nearby rock.”

  “So, all this rock…”began Farcus.

  “It was all mud when this thing got here. It was placed here gently, and sunk right into the swamp,” said Anna. “The date was between 60 and 80 million years ago.”

  “You seem very sure,” said Farcus, standing.

  Anna signaled one of her students who brought over a folder. They had prepared some data for the inevitable military presence. She removed a set of pictures showing a core sample of nearby terrain. The rock appeared undisturbed all the way down, although layers were very clear.

  She jabbed at the picture. “That layer would have been bedrock when this thing arrived. It’s undisturbed.”

  A few others in the recovery team had come over to the entrance to the artifact and began dismantling the descent apparatus to replace it with one of their own. Farcus got out of their way, wordlessly, although he never took his eyes away from Dr. Lions.

  Farcus pointed at another layer on the picture she was showing him.

  “What is the behavior of the iridium layer in this area?”he asked.

  She raised an eyebrow. She had taken Farcus for a soldier or perhaps an engineer and was unprepared for him to show any knowledge of paleontology or geology. The iridium layer was a thin layer of rock easily observed in some locations that chronologically coincided with the extinction of the dinosaurs. The rationale for this was that iridium was an extremely rare element on earth, but it was much more common in asteroids. As such, it was hypothesized that the iridium found worldwide at this level in the rocks was debris from the asteroid impactor that killed off the dinosaurs. It was one of the primary methods by which Anna had dated the site.

  She pointed at a faint whitish line along the visible surface of the sphere. “That line marks where the mud level was when the asteroid struck. The sphere was probably very recent at the time, but mostly buried in the mud.”

  Farcus nodded, this news not being much of a shock.

  “We had an idea of what it might be, but I still allowed one of my students to enter the crack to see what the interior looked like…”

  Farcus interrupted her and quickly picked out Craig from the row of students. How he knew it was him was beyond anyone present, as the young man had long since removed his climbing harness, and everyone was equally grimy. In reality, he had looked into the history of every one of these kids before ever setting foot on the ground. Only one of them had any spelunking experience.

  “Wow,” he said. “A braver man than I, being the first one down in there like that. What did you see? Is it a sphere or just a hemisphere? Are there levels?”

  “Greenfly bones,” said Craig, starting with what had been the most exciting discovery to him. “They looked just like the pictures on the news. They were all over the place, but mostly settled towards the bottom. It’s not quite a sphere anymore, but I think it used to be. There are a lot of columns and struts in there, going in every direction, but a lot of the vertical ones look like they’ve been crushed. I’ve been in a lot of caves, though, and I think it’s stable in there. Everything in there is iron, but there’s very little rust and no sign of anything alive down there. No bats, no insects, nothing.”

  “Alright, thanks everyone,” Farcus said to the doctor and her students. “Please follow the sergeant here, and he’ll take you to each give statements and then collect your belongings. You’ve done your country and world a great service.”

  As the students and their professor were led away, a short man with an obviously military bearing came up beside him. He held a descent harness in hand. Behind him, another pair of men were completing construction of the new tripod. The new apparatus was motorized, rather than hand-powered, and it was powerful enough to bring up large pieces of recovered material if necessary. Eventually, the crack would have to be widened, but the automated tripod would be sufficient for the first few forays.

  “That was pretty brief for you, sir,” said the workman beside him. “You didn’t even chat them up like you usually do. Are you in a bit of hurry on your last day?”

  “Don’t remind me. I’m about as happy about joining Interception as the paleontologist was with our helicopters,” said Farcus, turning back to the tripod and the hole it hung over. “But that’s not it. I’m inclined to agree with the doctor and her kids on this one. Preliminarily, this looks like it may have been a Greenfly base, here, on Earth, sixty five million years ago. It’s not wholly unexpected, as there were rumors that something like this was found in Africa fifty years ago. There were no bones inside like the boy claims to have found here, and no one knew what to make of it at the time. It means, at some point in their ‘process,’ the 'flies start putting bases all over the place.”

  “Why is that so bad? It’d be easier for us to fight them,” said the workman.

  “No central base means no Window, and that means the missile and interception shields need to work 24/7, which they can’t,” said Farcus. “Now, help me get this darn thing on.”

  They wrestled him into the descent harness and ho
oked him up to the tripod. He was handed a reinforced helmet that possessed both a light and a video camera.

  “Admit it,” said the workman. “You’re going to miss this.”

  “I’m still going to be doing this,” Farcus replied. “Aliens will just be shooting at me while I do.”

  He held down the descent button, and the tripod answered him with a loud whirring noise. Farcus dropped down through the crack slowly, using the heavy nickel-iron shell to stabilize himself but not trusting any other structures he came across. As it appeared from outside, the wall of this sphere bowed inward. The solid, six-inch plate of metal had the look of a submarine hull rupture. Farcus had seen several during his time as a Navy reactor man, but the hulls of submarines were much different. Instead of using a functionalized, double-walled hull, this sphere was built with the brute force approach of building a single, extremely thick hull. Most likely, the interior of this shell was kept in vacuum, and there was no way of telling when it had been breached. Whatever triggered that initial puncture, the wall of the sphere had puckered around that initial pressure change, much like a balloon in reverse. There was very little oxidation anywhere, so either the atmosphere in this chamber was very new or the material of the sphere was not nickel-iron as it appeared.

  As he completely passed the shell, he peered down into the depths of the former alien base. There was a certain insect-hive quality to the place. Great struts of metal crossed the near-spherical chamber in every direction with nothing like a right angle visible anywhere. The metal of the struts had visible grooves, and it took Farcus a moment before he realized that those grooves were from Greenfly claws. With that new bit of information, he began to glean how this place was constructed. The interior of an asteroid might have been hollowed out with a teleportation bomb, but the cross-braces to resist gravity were constructed by Greenflies afterward. They probably softened the metal with their plasma cannons and then drew the metal across the chamber with their bare claws. Farcus had heard that the Greenfly skeletal material had an astronomical melting temperature, and evidently this handling of molten metal was the reason why.

  His descent came to a halt as he reached a particularly sturdy-looking strut which passed across the sphere, nearly horizontally. He paused for a moment before putting any weight on the metal brace, but eventually he decided that if the strut could hold back hundreds of metric tons of rock for sixty five million years, he was unlikely to break it just because he’d had a heavy breakfast. He stepped solidly on the brace and held down the descent button on his vest to give him some slack on the line.

  Farcus walked along the horizontal strut as a bridge, shining his helmet light across the maze of struts around him. He was not yet halfway down the structure, but he began to see some of the Greenfly bones that Craig had mentioned. They were nestled at the intersections of the support struts, all in jumbles, as if they had been resting on some other surface that had degraded with time. Unlike terrestrial bones, those of the Greenfly were physically connected with a series of eye-bolt-like joints. If Farcus picked up one of the exoskeletal ribcage-like torso bones of a skeleton, the limbs, head, and other torso segments would hang off of it like a marionette, even after millions of years. Evidently, Greenfly bones didn’t degrade with time any more than the alloy which made up this place.

  He stopped on his bridge for a moment to examine a skeleton at a strut intersection not five feet away, its eye sockets glaring accusingly at Farcus. There were obvious bite marks on two of its dangling limbs, and the size of the bites was incredible. This alien had tangled with one of the great lizards who had kept Farcus’s ancestors hidden in burrows and stealing eggs for a living. A glance at another nearby skeleton confirmed that that one too had been mauled by a dinosaur. Farcus imagined that both Greenflies had had it coming.

  “Some sort of field hospital, maybe,” Farcus mumbled to himself. “A teleportation depot on Earth so that they could rapidly tend to their wounded.”

  Now with a healthy respect for the durability of the metal support structure, Farcus set his descent harness to stop him only if it felt a sudden drop, and he began to climb downward through the twisting structures. He demonstrated great caution whenever he neared a Greenfly skeleton, realizing that he was already contaminating the site more than science would appreciate. Still, there was an immediate need to scout the artifact and determine the best approach to recovering it for further study.

  He made his way to what he assumed was the center of the sphere. There was a convergence of the struts in this area, and now he could definitely discern that these struts had once supported platforms made of some other material, evidently degradable. There were indentations in the struts where the platforms were most likely mounted, and clearly these platforms had not been entirely horizontal. After all, the Greenflies were zero-gee creatures who could stick to any surface under the influence of gravity when they had to. It made sense that they would defy the vertical in their architecture. In fact, the only real sign that they respected gravity in the construction of this shell was the prevalence of thick vertical struts compared to the other orientations. As Craig had noticed, these vertical columns had sagged somewhat under the weight of rock and millennia.

  Farcus reached a position he was certain was just over the center of the sphere. The struts converged just beneath him, and more complicated elements of structure could be seen below this central core. He threw his rope around a nearby strut and switched back to using the descender. He lowered himself beside this central core, which turned out to be a nest of struts surrounding a cavity no bigger than a beach ball. Within that cavity he made out the framework of an alien device that he had seen dozens of times since beginning work with Recovery. It was the bony exoskeleton of a spherical teleportation bomb.

  “This isn’t just a base,” he said, “It’s a spacecraft… the closest thing these bugs can understand to a spacecraft. A solid hull, a teleportation bomb to move from place to place, and a … oh, boy.”

  Farcus paused. He was staring downwards at an area where the struts opened up to provide an empty space. It may have originally been intended as an alien transport embarkation area, but the gap had now been filled by Greenfly skeletons. They were probably all over the structure when they died, but over the centuries earthquakes and shifts of the terrain had slid the skeletons relentlessly downward. The bed of Greenfly bones must have been several layers thick.

  Farcus crossed himself, subconsciously. “I’m not sure what happened here, but it looks like you guys got the short end of the stick. Still, if this setup worked for you, maybe it can work for us.”

  Chapter 14: Close Combat

  “So, Hegerty wakes up in the next morning, hung over and praying for death, in the middle of a field of donkeys. He had no memory of how he got there, of course, ‘cuz he’s good and Irish, but it turns out he owned those donkeys. He’d gotten them fairly in trade from a local Afghan warlord by offering him Captain Ramachandran’s hand in marriage.”

  “Thanks again, Liam,” said Leena.

  “Anytime, Cap’n,” piped in Hegerty.

  All of Gamma Team, save Colonel Marshal himself, were seated at a table in the base Cantina, with Meg, Franz, and a few others from Physics and Xenosociology. They had been regaled by Lt. Rice’s stories of missions and downtime with Gamma Team from long before the alien incursions. The stories were entirely made up, of course, but the audience suspected a certain degree of embellishment. What they did not know was that these stories were written for Gamma Team by Caufield and her aide, for the sake of faking social interaction with other soldiers in places just like this. Such story-telling could instill trust, the same sort of trust they needed from Meg, their source of bait and a potential leak of their secret. Before the alien incursions changed their training regimen, Gamma soldiers had been subjected to regular acting lessons.

  Rice continued his story. “But, it turns out that the Afghan warlord was even drunker than Hegerty, because he hadn’t notice
d the previous night that his lovely bride-to-be was an Indian and hence human garbage by his tribe’s standards.”

  “Ah, I love this story,” said Leena, sarcastically.

  “Well, when he hears that the warlord wants to renege on this deal, the Colonel acts all indignant, and demands that either he fulfill his duty to the woman the Colonel considered to be like a daughter or offer some other form of compensation. In the end, the warlord gave up the position of a Taliban weapons cache, and Hegerty got to keep his donkeys.”

  “What did you do with those things, anyway, Liam?”asked Meg from down the table.

  “Followed through on some of those promises of food aid you Americans made,” said Hegerty, grinning. “Good eating on a donkey.”

  The cantina was essentially a tavern on the edge of the training side of the base, but there was never any need for ID for the few people who were under-age here. While the place was mostly filled with noisy soldiers, the people who did most of the drinking here were handfuls of scientists from the research side who weren’t allowed off-base to find a real bar. The soldiers, rumors and stories aside, didn’t drink much. At the level of physical performance expected of them in training, a single hangover could do a world of damage to their career. Even the Recovery workmen kept their habits under control, due to their unpredictable work schedules.

  A table with such an eclectic lot wasn’t that unusual a sight. There was a certain degree of mutual self-interest involved in scientists consorting with soldiers and vice versa. The soldiers were never officially given any insight into the behaviors exhibited by the aliens, except in the occasional briefing, so they would ply scientists with alcohol to get them to reveal information they weren’t supposed to. The soldiers loved the Physics boys, in particular, because they were the ones who talked about future weaponry and equipment the interception squads would eventually get to use. Conversely, the scientists were very interested in the stories the soldiers would tell as all of the Greenflies and most of the Greenfly equipment was dead by the time the scientists got hold of it. The soldiers got first-hand views on how these creatures behaved, even when they had no idea how they functioned. That mutual curiosity, along with the knowledge that both sides of the spectrum relied upon each other totally, shattered any social separation that may have otherwise existed between the factions.