Greenflies Read online

  “The neutrino teams are working on it, but most of their sensors are in a region of the world covered by both the old Window and the new one,” said Barnard. “I suspect the moon, or somewhere along a vector passing through Earth and the moon. Whatever setup they have there, it is not as ideal as Troy. You can see that they are primarily appearing over bodies of water, large plains…”

  “Highways,” said Caufield.

  “Really?” Barnard couldn’t mask his curiosity. “I suppose it makes sense. They need to shed a great deal of angular momentum inherited from their previous location. With the repulsor field to prevent them from twisting and spinning, that translates to velocity. Highways with very little traffic would make good landing pads, more so than airports I’d imagine. One of those transports could survive a collision with a car or two, but I suspect a plane would be lethal. I imagine they are having very rough landings.”

  “My heart goes out to them,” seethed Caufield. “What can we do about it, Donald?”

  Barnard peered over his spectacles at her. It was not uncommon for people to turn to him and expect miracles, but Caufield had never been one of those people before.

  “Nothing for the moment,” replied Barnard. “If the new alien base is on the moon, it might as well be in the asteroid belt. We gave up the capacity to put men on the moon decades ago. There are ways to get warheads there, with a trip of several days, and I’ve no doubt such a program will be attempted, but it will be ineffective. Greenflies were designed to be asteroid miners. You’ll find them quite adept at detecting approaching objects and destroying them. It was a way of life for their ancestors, after all. As for any other method of blocking their transport, the only way we think would work is obscuring their view of the surface. That could be done by increasing cloud-cover, which is within our capabilities, but, on a global scale, it would destroy the ecology we are trying to protect.

  “Field your teams as best you can. We will find this new base, rest assured. It is just a matter of time before the neutrino detectors, the optical telescopes, and most likely the Japanese lunar orbiter can pinpoint it. Then, we’ll find someway for you to attack it. The new laser technology would work, if we could accumulate enough fuel. Alternatively, Butler’s work on negotiation may bear fruit. Until then, persevere, Maria.”

  Maria turned back to the map with its flashing lights.

  “You’re running out of time, Donald. Maintaining the shields as they were was a barely sustainable drain on resources. We cannot afford to expand them to last 19 hours and still provide protection to our allies. The General is at the Pentagon now discussing contingency plans for withdrawing interception shield protection from Western Europe. They’ll be on their own.”

  “Economic issues?”asked Barnard.

  “Only five hours a day when traffic can travel freely through the infrastructure, and 12 hours a day of alien transports using those same highways as landing pads. The GDP is going to plummet, and we’re certainly going to have to tap the national reserve for jet fuel…”

  Instead of her cell phone, for a change, her pager vibrated. She glanced down at it for just a moment, then turned back to Barnard.

  “The Israelis have decided to tap their reserves as well. They’ve just invaded Syria.”

  The two remained in silence for a moment, absorbing the news.

  “Are you going to risk adding Gamma to the new interception schedule?” asked Barnard. “Hegerty’s another month away from action. If you field them a man short with no alternate, Lassiter won’t be the only one asking questions?”

  “No,” replied Caufield. “Keeping them on-base to train the others is a valid enough excuse to keep them on the ground. The brass realize that each of them is worth two instructors, and the soldiers know that not a one of them could take Hegerty’s place. It’s respect, though, not suspicion. On occasion, I use the team for other duties, such as field-testing the new weaponry, personal security or…”

  She paused and then jabbed the button allowing her to talk to the war room, a realization hitting her like hammer.

  “Flight, there was a helicopter sent this morning to Colorado Springs. Check on its return status immediately. There are samples of alien interest on board.”

  “It’s still over the mountains ma’am,” the Flight Officer replied after a second, “Given the erratic landings we’re seeing from the Greenflies, they should be safe until the primary Window opens up. Shall I direct them back to Colorado Springs?”

  A Blackhawk was a solidly built aircraft, but none of its designers had envisioned the aerobatics that Captain Hu was subjecting it too. He was expert at his art, although not surgically altered like the soldiers he transported, but this was a wholly unconventional form of attack.

  “Negative, Utah Base, we cannot return to Colorado Springs! We are under fast mover attack, over!”

  Well above the helicopter, three arrowhead-shaped craft crisscrossed the stratosphere. They were moving much faster than the Blackhawk and had an unusual flight path. Each would perform a linear bombing run over the helicopter, fly an additional mile or two, then teleport to the start of a new bombing run over the aircraft. The three arrowheads operated with a quiet unity. Things were much more noisy at the altitude of the Blackhawk.

  There was another peal of thunder, and the Blackhawk lurched uncontrollably to the left. The force of the motion was such that Hu was reminded of the G-training centrifuge he’d sort of liked in flight school.

  “Another stall!” he shouted to his passengers. “Hold on back there!”

  The teleportation bomb attacks were repeatedly sucking the air out of the engine, even though they were missing by a wide margin. The blades continued to spin, but there was no engine noise or vibration. The four occupants of the Blackhawk felt their stomachs lurch as the vehicle began to fall, the auto-rotation of the blades just enough to keep it from being true free fall The engine made noises like a very old car being choked, and then it burst into life once more.

  “I can’t believe they’re trying to bomb a moving aircraft!” yelled Hu.

  Leena was huddled with Meg on one side of the passenger section, and Decker was on the other, bracing his position with his legs and one arm while he tried to strap on equipment with the other. Both he and Leena were equipped with the new repulsor belts in lieu of a parachute, but Meg and Hu were not. It mattered fairly little, as the arrowheads would probably be able to kill them either through direct teleportation or by indirect wind effects if they chose to jump. No one had seen this strategy among the Greenflies before, but then again, they had never before been after prey flying at 20,000 feet, well out of range of ground plasma.

  “They don’t have to hit us to kill us!” shouted back Leena over the din.

  As if by way of demonstration, the helicopter was wrenched downward by a detonating teleportation bomb as much as a thousand feet too low. The forces generated by the attacks were difficult to appreciate until you experienced them. 14 psi over the surface of a sphere fifty yards across; single teleportation bombs could wipe out villages with wind just by detonating nearby.

  Meg was sobbing, doubled over in her seat, a little bit of vomit sliding around on the floor by her feet. Leena had an arm over her back and was putting her weight there to dampen the lurching motion.

  “Why are they doing this? Now is supposed to be safe!” Meg whined.

  This had been one of the trips to visit her mother and brother in the hospital at Colorado Springs, both of them still in a state where they needed constant medical attention. Her brother had woken from his coma some time ago and was now in the middle of a long and painful rehabilitation, the poison of the single bee sting having damaged his nervous system, but not irreparably. Her mother was also showing great improvement and was even permitted to eat her food with utensils. She was being kept in the dark about current events, though, and Meg was forbidden by the psychiatrists from informing her mother of her current employment.

  His repulsor be
lt secured and one of the new laser rifles strapped to his back, Decker moved to the front of the cabin. He braced himself in the door between the cockpit and passenger compartment. In this position, with both legs and arms wedging him in place, he didn’t even move with the aircraft’s next lurch.

  “We need orders,” said Decker to the pilot, calmly.

  “They know that, soldier,” Hu replied.

  He’d gotten a bead on the bombing run pattern, and he managed to steer such that the next two bombs detonated immediately behind the helicopter. As a result, the aircraft didn’t lurch so much as slow briefly. It was a tactic that could not be maintained because each bomb would detonate closer as airspeed dropped.

  He realized that somewhere on the ground, a decision was being made. They were weighing the value of this girl, who could be used as bait for the Greenflies in future, versus the value of two Gamma soldiers, one decent pilot, and a helicopter that would need a lot of maintenance when this was over. The simple solution would be to toss the girl out of the Blackhawk. The aliens would teleport her away; maybe before she hit the ground and maybe not. More likely, her neck would first be broken by a gust of wind. Hours later, when the Greenflies would be crawling over junk at their quarantine point in the vacuum of space, they’d find Meg lifeless but still useful to them, and the pilot and two soldiers would be alive and well in Utah.

  Caufield would be making this call and she’d probably feel a little relieved to have the girl dead, truth be told, but Caufield knew there would be a record of what happened aboard this helicopter. Hu would write it, and he was not a Gamma.

  A different order came through, but he did not really understand it.

  “Decker,” said Hu. “You’re to destroy the alien craft, and then we’re to return to Colorado Springs and take cover 'til the Windows pass. Big bonus, she says.”

  Decker appeared to actually relish the order. He looked over Hu’s shoulder at the altitude and through the window at the terrain below.

  “Distract them for a minute while I set up, and then lead them back to this location,” said Decker.

  He then maneuvered into the passenger section, closed his helmet, and opened the door opposite Meg and Leena. While Meg screamed, he dropped out the door. Hu dramatically swooped the helicopter to keep the arrowheads far above from killing his comrade with a near miss. The lurching became more severe for nearly a minute as he flew back into the heart of the aliens’ bombing pattern.

  Suddenly, the bombing became less intense. Upon banking the helicopter, Hu saw the fiery remains of one of the arrowheads plummeting to the ground.

  “What the hell?”

  A little bit to the east, near where he had dropped Decker, faint streaks of blue light could be seen lancing upwards to invisibility. The individual shots lasted only half a second, but there were a great deal of them. Somewhere on the ground, Decker had found himself a stable vantage point and was opening fire on the alien craft four or five miles above. Normally the shots would be impossible, but the laser had phenomenal range, and the flight paths of the arrowheads were straightforward and predictable. Given the smart sight on Decker’s rifle, a sniper probably wouldn’t even have to be a Gamma to make those shots.

  A second arrowhead began its long fall. The first one had yet to hit the ground.

  “Give a sniper a laser, and he thinks he’s god,” muttered Hu, a smile on his face.

  Chapter 17: Origins

  The auditorium was abuzz, more so than for the majority of these departmental presentations. A broader cross-section of the research staff had shown up than for most of these events, and there were even a selection of soldiers from the interception and recovery teams that had managed to worm their way in. The rumor had gotten around that the interrogation reports for the lone captive Greenfly were finally being declassified enough for disclosure within the base. The entirety of the Physics group was in attendance, hoping the captured alien had given some hint as to how their teleportation was accomplished. Even though the brass had had the reports for a week, there were a great number of military commanders in attendance, both foreign and domestic, all hoping there would be tactical clues. Only Butler knew the extent to which the interrogation had borne fruit.

  Dr. Barnard introduced him as briefly as possible, and Butler stepped to the podium. He clicked a button for the first slide.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the home system of the Greenflies,” he said.

  The image onscreen was a chaotic jumble of asteroids tumbling through space and extending as far as the eye could see. The image was of very high resolution, as if a video camera had been placed atop one of those asteroids. A reddish star could be seen occasionally, occluded most of the time by great boulders in the sky. While the distances in the image were difficult to gauge, some hint was given by blue flashes visible occasionally on the surfaces of the rocks. The rocks were perhaps mere thousands of feet apart, with alien transports visible moving across their surface. There were bright shapes moving across the asteroids, as well, shapes that could only be great crowds of Greenflies, although they appeared bright white onscreen.

  Butler gave the audience a moment to gasp and absorb the image, “The Greenflies are artificial, as is their language and mode of communication. Having been designed, rather than evolved, both were made complex enough to optimize for one of the basic intents of language, to describe and share what one individual has seen and experienced. The data transfer rate of their optical communication is on par with cable television, permitting them to reveal what they have seen in pictorial detail. Whereas humans are forced to describe an event, every Greenfly has a built-in camera.

  “The image before you is the system Greenbeard regards as his home, some 50,000 light years away. It was a system of terrestrial planets which had been deemed dispensable so the Greenflies, requiring no atmosphere or gravity, broke the planets down into a system-wide asteroid belt. The amount of surface area available after the transformation has provided a home for trillions of Greenflies. Most of these Greenflies are at rest, much like sailors on a long shore leave. Possessing no knowledge of non-biological technology and no need for industry or farming food, they spend their time developing a culture and art, rich in communication but poor in anything tangible. They have complex and tightly bound social groups, but those groups have nothing to do with family, as all Greenflies are genetically identical.

  “Their needs are met by biological organisms. There are living probes in the central star which teleport plasma to their cutting beams and any other function they have that requires energy. The Whaleships provide them with a continuous stream of filtered blood teleported directly into their bodies. But these needs are not free, for there is something we have in common with the Greenflies, an economy.”

  The image switched to that of a shape amid the asteroids, a purple vessel of some sort looking like an elongated acorn. Greenflies could be seen leaping from their homes on the asteroid to fly across thousands of feet of empty space and land upon the surface of the Whaleship. There were stretches of the ship’s hull devoid of any Greenfly hangers-on, and alien transports teleported into these gaps, disgorging Greenflies from further away in the system than could be easily jumped.

  “This is a scene from shortly before Greenbeard himself joined the crew of that ship. As in human economies, the efforts of the producers of the food, farmers in humanity, the Whaleships in Greenfly culture, must be repaid by some sort of compensation or labor. While humans work for money to buy food to put in their stomachs and then into their blood, the Greenflies work directly for a supply of blood. They join a Whaleship and receive a credit for blood over many years. Greenbeard himself has several decades of credit saved up. He joined the Whaleship for the experience and exploration.

  A series of images began appearing on the screen. Complex alien planetscapes and landscapes flashed across the screen, each lasting for only a few seconds. Gas giants, moons, and dead stars never seen before by human eyes flashe
d across the screen with a disturbing casualness.

  “A Greenfly spends most of its life relativistically frozen in time, traveling from star to star. The biological teleportation technology is limited to the speed of light, and it is the basis for the propulsion of the Whaleships. As such, a stint aboard a Whaleship lasts for tens of millions of years, making a hundred stops before returning home. While they may only spend one to ten years in any given system, they crisscross the galaxy at light speed sometimes going on meandering routes just to kill more time and allow biology on the planets they visit more time to develop before they return.

  “The function of these missions is simple. Since the Greenflies themselves cannot understand non-biological technology, and they lack the basic knowledge of physics or chemistry to design their own functional biological organisms from scratch, their technological advancement comes from finding creatures and adapting the creatures’ special abilities to suit their needs. There are, evidently, millions of life-bearing worlds in our galaxy, and the Greenflies visit them each in turn, once every hundred million years or so. They are tending their gardens, as they have for approximately four billion years.”

  The slideshow in the background continued flipping between planets behind him as he spoke, each image only lasting a few seconds. Dozens had flashed by already. Several in the audience had gasped at the reference to four billion years, but most had been distracted by the many worlds onscreen. Green, blue, deeper red than Mars, the banded majesty of gas giants, yellow moss across a single lonely asteroid.

  “That is the time, Greenbeard informs me, that the creatures that created the first Greenflies and Whaleships themselves went extinct. Their images have been preserved in the programming which is in every Greenfly, Whaleship, and Harvester.”

  He signaled to the AV man, and a second image appeared beside the continuing slideshow of worlds. A dull brown creature, looking somewhat like a Greenfly, appeared on a background of empty space. It was bilaterally symmetric and possessed the same three torso sections as the Greenfly, but it was clearly a different species. Its head possessed a ring of six eyes, surrounding a hole presumably analogous to a mouth. The head was much larger than that of its Greenfly creation, but still it was doubtful that was where it kept its brain. It possessed six limbs, but their hands differed in pairs. The foremost pair ended not in claws but in a bifurcation of each of the three fingers, leading to a complex and flexible six-fingered hand. The middle pair of limbs ended in five-fingered hands, with two fingers bifurcated and the “thumb” still beefy and singular. The hind hands were three-fingered and clawed. The creature wore some sort of bodysuit, but a ridge of dorsal armor, much like that of a silverfish, could be seen through it. The overall impression was of a creature less threatening but more complicated than the Greenflies.