Greenflies Read online

  “Ow! Yeah! What the hell is going on?! A bunch of giant green flies just killed my Dad!”

  “Meg, you probably know as much as we do. We came as fast as we could to help,” she began to prep a syringe, “Now, I’m just going to give you something for the pain…”

  “No! I gotta… my brother!” she began to struggle against the medic’s unusually strong grip.

  “Rice, restrain her!”

  The man who had been holding Meg’s mother quickly deposited her on the floor and knelt on Meg’s shoulder, forcing her flat. She cried out in pain but could not resist the pair of soldiers holding her down. The needle slid into her arm, and a few moments later she was unconscious. The medic and Rice began working on affixing the survivors to collapsible backboards for transport.

  The Colonel re-entered the living room from upstairs, carrying the corpse of an alien across his back. It was riddled with bullet holes from the action upstairs, and the purplish blood was bubbling and fizzing as it emerged from the body. He dropped it in the living room, next to where Hegerty was tying up the subdued alien.

  “Bag it. That may be toxic,”Colonel Marshal said, “Doc, get the mask back on. What’s the state of the survivors?”

  Before she could answer, there was a thunderclap from the driveway. Everyone turned to look out the window. There was no shock or panic as any other group might have expressed, just a response to a stimulus. It might as well have been a doorbell. The brown vehicle was nowhere to be seen.

  “It just vanished, sir,” said Decker, the sniper, who had been watching the thing from his cover.

  “Acknowledged. Maintain your position. The enemy may return in force at any time,” Colonel Marshal said, before returning his attention to the medic, “Doctor, the survivors?”

  “The girl has a broken arm, but is otherwise fine. Not even concussed. The mother – I think she fainted. We’ll keep her sedated. Severe anaphylactic shock in the boy, in addition to a necrotizing venom at the sight of the sting. We have it tourniqueted, but amputation is warranted. Does the extraction flight have inflight surgical facilities?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “Colonel,” said Klugman, a heavyset soldier, as he tromped down the steps. In his hand, he held one of the alien weapons. “I flushed the bugs as you asked, but you’re going to want to take a look at this.”

  The Colonel collected the white weapon. Its surface felt grained, almost like wood, and it clearly was constructed of an organic material. The structure of it was all asymmetric curves, but the overall shape of it wasn’t terribly different from a human weapon. It had a stock, a handle that a human could get his hand around, and a broad depression that probably functioned as a trigger. It was about two feet long, with a broad part in the middle to hold the copious insect ammunition. The top of this bulge had a flat surface that looked detachable from the weapon as a whole.

  “In infrared, sir,” Klugman suggested.

  The Colonel flipped a switch on the side of his mask, and the world turned into a poor resolution image of the heat emitted from objects. The weapon itself looked fairly uniform, nearly as cool as the surrounding environment. That flat upper surface, however, showed a single bright dot, a point of greater heat intensity. The Colonel swung the weapon around, and the dot moved and changed size slightly. He moved the weapon, until the dot was at the center of the surface and quite large. He looked up to see the weapon was trained right on the girl survivor, Meg. They had been tracking her somehow, for some reason.

  “Restrain her as well,” he stated bluntly, before handing the weapon back to Klugman.

  He looked down at the captured alien, this green fly, as described by the girl. Even unconscious, its skin seemed to undulate slightly. One of its eyes was injured, the glassy surface a spiderweb of cracks. There really was no telling what was going on behind it.

  20 miles west of Hawaii

  The Greenfly transport appeared over the water with the customary blue flash and ripple of thunder across the landscape. Its underside crackled with little lightning bolts to the salt water. There was only blue as far as the eye could see, the light blue of the sky meeting the solid navy blue of the sea. There were three clouds in the sky, all distant, and calm seas.

  The transport opened one flank, disgorging a trio of Greenflies into the water. Each of the aliens carried a two-meter-long pipe, bulbous on one end, in their four upper appendages. The pipe lined up parallel to their central axis, a weapon that could be fired directly ahead of them while swimming. Each of the Greenflies was also equipped with a red tail, shaped very much like that of a tuna. The rigid vertical fin was connected by powerful lateral muscles to the posterior of the Greenfly. While the tails seemed to mesh perfectly with the anatomy of the rear of the aliens, they clearly weren’t part of the same creature. Rather, the tails had an elaborate docking structure that allowed them to solidly attach to the lower end of the alien’s torso. In the water, the Greenflies pointed their eyes along their axes and swum into the depths. The two meter white pipes were slung on the underside of their body, like a remora.

  They swam straight down in a V pattern, their tails propelling them faster than most terrestrial fish. The one in the lead occasionally glanced down at a flat region of the pipe-weapon, to correct its course. The darkness and the pressure didn’t seem to faze them at all as they descended, for they had no gas-filled sacks in their body, and the infrared portion of their vision was still adequate to navigate.

  They passed a region of tiny squid, flitting about like mad and flashing bioluminescent warnings at the strange intruders. They passed a series of jellies and comb jellies. All were of unique species desirable of collection, according to the detector mounted to the Greenfly weapon, but there was evidently a higher concentration below. In a manner of speaking, those were the species they were about to sample, albeit in a less direct manner than simply capturing them.

  The detector indicated they were at nearly the correct depth. The Greenfly leader stopped, and allowed its body to reach a neutral position. The tail attachment was of greater buoyancy than the Greenfly body proper, so the neutral position was that of the tail pointing straight up. The Greenfly’s massive eyes and axial weapon pointed downwards, trying to penetrate the murky black. The species they were pursuing would be nearly invisible in these frigid waters even with the Greenfly’s vision, but, according to the scanner, it was getting closer.

  A structure several meters high floated towards them in the blackness. It was shaped like an arrowhead, a meter across, pointed to the surface far above. The Greenflies could tell it was only the apex of a larger creature, still hidden in the abyss. Quick flicks of their tails sent them lower, enough to see the body of the thing.

  The giant squid was floating casually, its arms dangling beneath it, allowing the currents to pull it along. It clearly wasn’t a strong swimmer, most of its bulk consisting of loose, non-motive tissue. Instead, it appeared to be fishing, its two longest tentacles lashing downwards every now and again, pulling up some edible creature and placing it in its maw. The squid had eyes the size of dinner plates, ghostly luminescent in blue. They seemed able to focus on the Greenflies, even in this darkness, but did not see them as a threat. Perhaps it mistook them for the tuna which their tails resembled, or for some sort of crustacean, given their many limbs.

  The Greenfly leader confirmed from the scanner that this was an apex predator with many collectible species still digesting in its gullet. To sample this creature would be much more efficient than harvesting hundreds of smaller creatures. It signaled to its companions to begin the attack.

  The two subservient Greenflies fired. The tubes beneath them lashed out with tendrils that struck the squid in its mantle. Much like the stinging tentacles of the sea creatures of this world, the alien weapons dug in with poisoned stingers. But the stingers kept burrowing into the flesh, spreading through the flesh and extending barbs to prevent the squid from escaping. The ocean filled with ink as the squid stru
ggled against the twin lines tethering it.

  In the cloud of ink, a whip-like tentacle lashed around one of the leader’s legs and yanked it further down in the water. It could feel suckers and claws bite into the limb, pulling the Greenfly toward the squid’s maw, despite the resistance of its sweeping tail. He reversed his own weapon, so the bulbous end was pointed towards the squid. He fired and was pushed back by the recoil. A pressure wave rushed forth, striking the squid squarely. The loud, concentrated noise seemed to stun the sea giant, enough for the poison of the tethers to do its work.

  Within moments, the creature began to drag on the tethers, its body evidently not buoyant when it was not exerting some sort of effort. The two tethered Greenflies beat their tails downward, hauling the squid up. The leader kept his sonic weapon handy, should the squid be attacked by the chondrichthians that had been so problematic to some of the other teams that had landed on earth. Evidently, the chondrichthyan hunters found the skin shifting of the Greenflies to be very stimulating, although they apparently found the taste foul. On this trip, though, no sharks had made their presence known.

  As the Greenflies rose, the squid began to swell, small gas pockets in its body expanding to match the external pressure. By the time the corpse had reached the surface, it was largely a gas bag, quite buoyant. The leader had to rip the mantle open with his claws in order to fit the squid into the hovering transport. The three swimming Greenflies and one still in the transport hauled the carcass inside. It barely fit, even with the gas and ink released. The tentacles had an unpleasant tendency to adhere to things, even cutting through Greenfly hide with the claw at the center of each sucker. Even dead, this was a dangerous and irritating creature.

  Glancing down at his scanner, the leader noticed that there was another cluster of signals nearby, a great density of different species that had not been sampled yet. This cluster appeared to be moving along the surface, however, not from the depths.

  The leader climbed to the top of the transport, sticking to its hull like a gecko, and sited the two-meter weapon/scanner in a circle until he located the source of the clustered signal. It was farther than he thought, and he had to readjust the positions of his confocal eyes in order to see it. It was an artificial vessel, most likely belonging to the dominant megafaunal biped of the planet. To either side of it stretched long nets. According to the scanner, the vessel possessed many different species in its lower component, but strangely, these species had not registered from space. Evidently, the upper component of the vessel was constructed of some sort of shielding material, perhaps metal, that precluded detection from long range.

  The squad leader pondered. While the Greenflies had identified the humans as the dominant form of megafauna on the planet, they had not identified them as an apex predator. If these humans devoured and sampled numerous species themselves, direct sampling of larger numbers of humanity and their structures might be warranted. The vessel in the leader’s sights had nearly the biodiversity of the innards of the creature they had just sampled. The squad leader would have to relay his thoughts to his own superiors.

  The other Greenflies queried as to whether they should remain and sample the human vessel, but the squad leader vetoed the idea. Their transport was full, and the leader’s leg wound was beginning to fizz in the open air. He ordered the transport to depart.

  With the squad leader still standing on its roof, the vehicle blinked out of existence, a thunderclap in its wake as air moved to fill the void.

  Chapter 3: Autopsy

  Quantico, VA

  Mariah Caufield saw a buzz of activity on the tarmac as her helicopter descended. There were other choppers and aircraft coming in from all over the country to turn the Marine base into a reception area and quarantine for the returning Gamma Squad and their alien detainees.

  She could make out a pair of landed helicopters, their blades still spinning, clearly belonging to the CDC from the medical symbols. Men in uniform were unloading boxes in bucket-brigade manner, getting them into a group of waiting Humvees. Those boxes contained pressurized biohazard suits and the equipment to maintain a sterile environment with unusual atmospheric conditions. The biohazard suits of the US Bioterror Response Units had been judged woefully inadequate to treat a creature that, by all reports, might well need to be held in an entirely different atmosphere. Other equipment was being wheeled off a Galaxy transport plane that Caufield knew to be from the Norfolk Naval Yards.

  Already on site were some of the experts in a variety of fields to study the alien captive, corpse, and weaponry. The President’s science advisers were most likely on the phone right now, continuing the recruitment drive.

  Caufield was aware of candidates in the areas of physics, biology, and linguistics who had been selected and were being hunted down by the FBI. There would be no shortage of materiel or personnel in the investigation of these alien creatures. The greatest concern was that there might be a shortage of time, now that the aliens might have been incited by the attack on one of their field missions.

  Fortunately, six hours into the alien incursions, or at least since the earliest one that had been confirmed, intelligence was beginning to unravel some of the patterns of the alien behavior. The appearances, easily detectable by satellite, were restricted to one hemisphere of the Earth, moving as the planet rotated. In another two hours, the East Coast would be clear of this region of threat. In addition, the alien craft only appeared to teleport into regions where the weather was clear, perhaps indicating that they were identifying their landing sites from orbit.

  Also coming in was news that Gamma Squad was not the only force to engage the aliens.

  “What is the status on Congo?” she said into her headset as the pilot brought the helicopter in on final approach.

  Her aide, still in the office in Langley, replied, “The firefight appears to have concluded. Satellite intel is showing a large number of human casualties. The analysts are saying they think the aliens appeared within a mile of a large rebel force in the region. The rebels engaged the aliens after they disembarked from the transport craft, and it appears the rebels prevented the aliens from returning to the craft. As the window of teleportation moved away from the site, the transport craft teleported away without the alien creatures. The four alien crew appeared to engage the rebels for a half hour afterward, but they are now thought to all have been killed by small arms fire.”

  Caufield cast her mind for a moment to the jungles of the Congo where the alien craft had appeared. The aliens might have appeared only to sample the local plant-life, for all anyone knew, and their vehicle would have teleported into a clearing. The rebels could easily have established a perimeter of bullets to keep the aliens from returning to their craft. Then the aliens would have started firing back. Swarms of venomous insects flying through the trees. The rebels would have faced enemies that could bound from tree to tree fifty feet up in the canopy, raining down projectiles that would home in on their targets. Caufield could not imagine a more hellish combat. The African forces had prevailed through sheer numbers. They should probably have held their fire and allowed the aliens to do whatever it was they wanted, but Congolese rebels were not known for their restraint. The sight of such a monster in their territory might have incited superstitious rage.

  “Continue to follow it,” she said, “Also, notify Air Force to redirect the B-1 to Quantico. We want to be ready to redeploy Gamma Squad minus one should a second North American intercept be authorized. Have Sci-Tech pick a West Coast intercept zone. We’ll want all the intercept time we can get before the teleportation zone rotates away from the continental US.”

  “Should interception be authorized,” added her aide, more of a comment than a question.

  “Yes, Helen. Should it be authorized.”

  That was the rub of the situation. The wisdom of interception was a subject of debate around the world right now. Interception might be inciting the aliens, but there were now three reports of civilians approachi
ng the aliens with intent to communicate, and in all three cases the civilians were summarily stung to death. Caufield thanked her lucky stars it hadn’t been at the televised Boston incursion. The panic level in the US was already at the threshold of inconvenience.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Updates every half hour. Caufield out.”

  The skids of her helicopter hit the tarmac, and Caufield slid out of the passenger door before the pilot could even stop the props. A marine ran up to her, holding his hat on his head against the prop wash. He was a slight brown-haired marine, of the sort commonly given gopher jobs. He wore a sidearm, which prompted Caufield to look around at the others on duty. Every marine was armed, from the stationed guards to the men unloading supplies from the other aircraft. The high alert status was warranted, but Caufield had been unaware it had been ordered on this base.

  “Assistant Director Caufield,” he began. “I’m Lieutenant Leonard. I’ll be assisting you with anything you need on base.”

  Caufield continued to walk, towards the compound building she assumed to be the biohazard facility. The Lieutenant did not correct her, and it was the large concrete structure that the storage containers from the Galaxy were being wheeled towards. A truck had emerged from the transport plane, struggling to haul a flatbed trailer behind it. Beneath a tarp on the trailer was a thirty foot long, fifteen foot tall object shaped like a lozenge. Caufield knew it to be the sealed pressure vessel brought in from the Navy yard.

  “What is the ETA on the Osprey?”asked Caufield.

  “Just a few minutes out. We’ve set up a quarantined path from the runway, through the cargo doors, straight into the operating room in the biohazard building. It’s an operating theater, with safe observation booths separated by glass. The cadaver will be brought into there immediately. The captive will be stored in the pressure unit being set up now. The survivors and your unit will be brought into separate isolation rooms back there.”