Dark Dragons (13 page)

The guard outside stood there with his MP5 ready, shouting
over the alarm into his radio.  “We have an emergency down in the
Containment Area!  Response Teams One and Two report to CA immediately!”

Bennings opened the Containment Area entrance, then fumbled
with the glasses sliding off his nose.

“What’s going on, sir?”

“Caliban’s going to kill himself!”  Bennings approached
the laboratory entrance and let the retinal-laser scan him before typing his PI
number into the side panel.  The door slid open, and Bennings and the
guard stepped into the lab.

“Doc, what are you going to do?”

“I’m not going to let Caliban kill himself!”  Bennings
approached another door that led to the circular hallway surrounding the five
containment units.

“Sir, you can’t go in there without a bio-suit!” the guard
screamed.  “Don’t open the door!”

Bennings typed his PI number, and the door slid open to
reveal the decontamination chamber.  He smelled ammonia and disinfectants
from the shower heads before he ran around the circular corridor and slid to a
halt at a sealed doorway marked
CONTAINMENT UNIT
3——RESPONSE TEAMS REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT.
  As he came to the
last digit of his PI number, a warning light suddenly flared in his head. 
The Foolish Scientist Syndrome had struck, and its first target was rational
thought.

Oh Jesus, what are you doing?
 He jerked his
fingers off the keypad like he had received an electric shock but had already pressed
lucky number seven.  The pneumatic motors inside the wall engaged. 
Bennings immediately froze, and the door hissed open, the musty odor of an
animal in captivity reaching his nostrils.  Caliban smelled just like the
gorillas Bennings used to communicate with.

The room was dim, barely lit from the observation room
lights.  Bennings whispered into the dark, “Caliban?”

“Doctor, please come back!” the guard hollered from the lab.

Bennings heard something else.  In front.  To the
left.

“Caliban?”

A shuffling sound——and suddenly there was a whoosh of
motion.  Bennings backed up, felt something tug the front of his shirt as
he did.  A snake-like hiss punctuated with an inhuman roar pierced the
air.  Bennings jumped from the terrifying sound and felt something bump
his stomach where the shadow had touched him.  What he saw baffled
him.  His mind playing tricks?  His large intestine had been ripped
from his gut, his blue jeans now purple.

At that sorry moment, Bennings realized what Caliban had
done.  Not the vicious surgery the alien had just performed, but to
everyone else over the years.  The alien duped them all——the depressions,
the concern for his infants, the act of kindness he displayed at times, his
particular liking for Bennings——all a fantastic deception.  Bennings fell
for it like a trusting child to candy.  He knew he would be the first of
many to pay the consequence.

Immense anger tore through him.  He brought his hands
up, not to defend but to attack.  He was going to tear Caliban’s unborn
infant from its stinking womb.  A huge shadow reared up in front of him,
and he gasped when his palms pressed against the alien’s chest——its skin warm
and sweaty, a creature alive and full of rage.

Humans are such easy prey
, Caliban signaled in the
dim light.

The alien propelled forward like a darting fish and bit
Bennings’s throat out.

*

Towsley bounced off the wall, stumbling, as he rounded the
corner toward the Containment Area.  One of the Response Team guards
grabbed him by the arm and balanced him to his feet.

When he arrived at the Containment Area, he saw the teams
were already there, MP5’s at their sides.  “Cover the lab!” he ordered.

“All of the doors have been sealed, sir.”

“Do it anyway!”

He trotted into the observation room where three guards
stood, flashlights pointing at the window into Caliban’s cell.  He smelled
vomit.  One of the guards had retched in the corner.

The alien stood next to its recliner, its eyes glowing
yellow from the flashlight beams.  Bennings’s body lay at Caliban’s feet,
the man’s head nearly decapitated to the vertebrae, internal organs exposed.

“Oh Christ, no,” Towsley murmured.

Towsley-person upset.  Too bad.

“What happened?” Towsley asked the guard at the doorway.

“Bennings hit the alarm and ran to the lab.  He said
the alien was going to kill itself.  I tried to stop him, sir.”

“It’s all right, sergeant.”  He turned back to the
glass
.  Caliban, why did you do this?

The alien approached the window, squatted, and defecated on
the floor.  Towsley nodded his head, knowing this was Caliban’s charming
and eloquent way of saying “Fuck you.”

Caliban, we no longer have any use for you.  You
know that don’t you?

Give me best shot.

“Pull the plug, sir,” one of the guards begged with a
whisper.

He was referring to the thirty-gram canister of VT nerve
agent in the ceiling of Caliban’s cell.  All Towsley had to do was be
retinal-scanned for computer-clearance and push a button.  VT, created
secretly by Army scientists, was an aerosol of the V-series of nerve agents
similar to Sarin and VX and the first true “gas” of that class, the others
actually being liquids.  It was determined to be the most deadly synthetic
nerve agent ever produced, so lethal in fact that the powers that be, typically
stoic and fearless of any weapon of mass destruction, refused to authorize its
mass production because it simply scared the hell out of them.  The APIS
possessed the only VT in existence, the only earthly substance found to kill
aliens.  It was thought that a mere ten milligrams per cubic meter could
kill a human in just five seconds.  It had taken 50 milligrams to kill one
of Caliban’s infants in the same amount of time.

“Did you say the doors have been sealed?” Towsley asked.

“Yes, sir.  All units.”

Towsley brought his hands up and said,
Goodbye, Caliban
. 
He was about to turn and head for the lab to deliver the
coup de grâce
when
he saw Caliban raise his right hand to show that he had something in his
palm.  The VT canister.

One of the flashlights pointed to the cell’s ceiling and
highlighted the compartment where the alien had ripped the device out just
moments ago.

I have known about bad-can for long time.  Too bad,
Towsley-person.

The question of how the alien knew about the VT ran through
Towsley’s mind, but he quickly answered it——Bennings.  If the doctor had
told Caliban that he was unhappy with Towsley’s attitude toward the alien, then
it was also likely he had informed the alien about the VT.  Caliban could
smash the window and ram the canister’s Tetrytol detonator down on a hard
surface, releasing swift death throughout the entire complex.  But did the
alien have the strength to actually smash the glass, which was reinforced with
tungsten fiber?  If the guards tried to gun Caliban down, shattering the
glass in the process, the alien’s redundant nervous system would still allow
the alien a few precious seconds to set off the detonator.

Stalemate, Towsley-person.  Caliban will breathe
little longer.  We have lots of talk coming.

I do not want to talk anymore.  Our understanding is
over.

That is fine.  Caliban finally enjoying self 
here.  Been very long since happy.

“What are we going to do, sir?”

Towsley looked down at Bennings’ corpse.  “Open doors
CU Three and Four, and allow Caliban to enter the other unit so we can get
Bennings’s body out.”
  Will Caliban let humans clean your cell? 
Go to another cell in the meantime?

Yes.  Will take bad-can with Caliban, though. 
Richard will stink.  Like clean cell.

Towsley stepped out of the room.  Major Forrester,
commanding officer of the NESSTC’s Response Team security force, followed him.

“Sir, after we get Doc Bennings’ body out, we can have a
Response Team suit up in the CBRN gear and go in with the doors sealed behind
them.  We’ll terminate the alien there, and if he pops that VT, we’ll just
suck the bad air into the compression tanks.”

“Only the individual containment cells are sealed for
chemical pollutants, major.  Not the access into the Containment Area
itself.  There was no reason for it to be.  If Caliban smashes that
window, which I think isn’t as strong as advertised, then the entire base will
get zapped.”

“Sir, I suggest we risk it.”

“Risk it?  We don’t have enough CBRN suits for
everyone.”

“But I’m sure that——”

“For Christ’s sake, major, give me awhile to think. 
I’ll have an answer for you in one hour.”

Saturday, May 15

Darren glanced quickly at the sensor box on his visor. 
The alien fighter——which looked like a giant trilobite with short,
diamond-shaped wings——had not lost sight of him, still blazing away with its laser
cannons.

“I need help!” he screamed.  But his friends, engaged
in their own furballs, couldn’t assist.

He dropped the Dragonstar’s nose and banked hard to
starboard, simultaneously jamming the mental-stick forward.  He
accelerated toward the surface, searching for cover, but the icy terrain
revealed no place to hide——just a sheet of flat white in every direction. 
Laser fire across his wing reminded him the alien fighter was still on
him.  He gripped the hand struts on the armrests tighter as he thought-rolled
his bird to port then to starboard, trying to jink his opponent.  The
computer signaled that another trilobite fighter was streaking in to join its
companion, this one from Darren’s four o’clock.

His sensors cried that one of the aliens had fired a
missile.  On his visor, a tiny dot was speeding in for the kill, and
Darren immediately went cold.  Instinctively, he surged forward and down,
jinking to port in hopes of losing it.  A quick thought-command activated
the anti-missile pod at the rear of the fuselage, and a bright red star shot
away to intercept the incoming weapon.  A bright flash in his windshield
told him the micro-nuke warhead had destroyed the enemy missile.

He decelerated immediately, and the two aliens shot across
his windshield.  He put the optical-crosshairs on the left one and
fired.  A twin blast of laser pulses cut the alien fighter in two. 
The other alien quickly sped off his starboard quarter, out of his forward
sight; Darren locked on with the Aerial Mass Displacement Sensors and
thought-fired an all-purpose missile programmed for air-intercept.  The
fighter’s weapons computer slaved the missile’s guidance into the AMDS with an
in-flight signal, and the projectile accelerated after the alien like an angry
fish.

“Get it, baby,” he murmured.

Suddenly his missile went stupid.  The alien had
somehow projected a pair of false mass fields.  The missile slaved into
his fighter’s AMDS now had three bad guys to choose from, two of which did not
exist.  The weapon was suddenly lost and confused.

Quickly, Darren switched to a more primitive back-up——a
low-energy pulse, synthetic-aperture laser-radar——and hoped the alien fighter
did not have stealth.  His Dragonstar immediately reacquired the target
and regained control of the missile’s guidance, but one second later, his
laser-radar lost contact.  The alien had activated some kind of active
stealth field similar to his own.  Darren switched to the infrared search
and track sensor in a last ditch attempt to guide his missile, but the alien fighter
emitted not one photon of infrared radiation.  The alien was now so
invisible to Darren’s sensors, it didn’t even exist.

Scratch the fire-and-forget modes.  Now he had to use
his laser cannons’ optical-tracker, which meant he had to get up close and personal
again, but his opponent was nowhere to be seen.  A beep in his helmet told
him his missile had self-destructed.  He accelerated and turned in the
direction where the computer had last tracked the alien.

There!
  A glint of sunlight at one
o’clock.  Darren increased magnification, put the optical-crosshairs on
it, and accelerated.  Before he could fire, however, the alien shot
skyward.  The trilobite was directly above him about six miles distant,
searching for escape in the solar glare.  Before the alien could go any
higher, Darren looked up, the laser cannons in their cradles simultaneously
rotating to match his line-of-sight, and put the crosshairs on his
adversary.   He thought-triggered his guns and turned the bad guy
into a blazing comet.

He scanned the sky for more bandits, but only an innocuous
supergiant red star and a blue crystal moon filled the heavens.  Nothing
on the short- or medium-range AMDS/laser-radar scopes either.

Darren had time for a quick missile inventory.  Looking
at the status box on his visor, he counted 220 optical-guided interdiction
rockets, beer bottle-size——used for assaulting ground troops, buildings and
light-armor vehicles——and 170 all-purpose fire-and-forget missiles, baseball
bat-size, with heavy warheads programmed for air-, space- or
ground-intercept.  The 140 singularity missiles had dial-a-yields of
.5-to-80 kilotons, designed for deep bunker busting, city-size “urban renewal,”
or attacking large spaceships.  MACH twelve anti-missile orbs, eleven hundred
of them fired from two automatic servo-pods fore and aft, lay ready inside
internal magazine canisters.  Lastly, Darren tallied eight
proton
destroyers
hidden within the retractable rotary carriage in the fighter’s
belly——enough about them, he thought ominously.

The electromagnetic gauss cannon on the tip of his
Dragonstar’s nose had not been fired yet, and Darren was itching to test its
armor-piercing capabilities.  Like the laser cannons, the gauss cannon was
optically-controlled, slaved to the crosshairs that moved with Darren’s
line-of-sight across his visor.  The gun fired poly-coated slugs made of
the same super-carbon armor as the Dragonstars in single-, ten- or fifty-round
bursts at dial-a-speeds of two thousand feet per second to a whopping twenty thousand
fps.