We've Seen the Enemy Read online

  Scratch was in the process of sticking his tongue out at her when he caught her leg, and in a slow motion way, started to tip over. His tray went flying as his arms started cart-wheeling, but just before he hit the ground his body stopped. Jack watched amazed as his arms flipped wildly in circles faster and faster as he somehow kept himself afloat, hands just lightly slapping the ground. She looked around to see if others had noticed him when her brain told her this slapping sound wasn’t quite right – that it actually sounded like a tapping sound, like a pen tapping on a wooden table...

  She woke up with a start, a pair of claws tapping on her helmet.

  “Power on, quiet mode,” she whispered, knowing that the ants easily picked up vibrations.

  She took stock of the bug now in front of her. Its claw had disappeared as it turned and its body now blocked her view. Tensing up, her arm shot out hitting the alien so hard its body ripped in two with the impact. Bug juice splattered on her face-shield and when she wiped it off she noticed the dozen or so others surrounding it. She stood stock still as she watched each alien swing its head toward her, their antennae waving in the air. They didn’t know what to make of this object sticking out of the ground.

  “Not gonna wait around to find out,” she said to herself. Just as they started to move toward her, she swung her arms as high as she could and hammered the ground. The vibration rippled across the hardened magma, but all she did was pulverize the rock beneath her arms. The aliens were now alarmed and their antennae frantically waved to and fro as they communicated with each other. She swung again and again, each time kicking up a cloud of dust, and was starting to feel the ground give way. The aliens were only a meter away when she hammered her last blow as hard as she could. The ground let go and she broke through, together with the other dozen bugs. Two broke legs on the fall and limped in circles, but the other ten immediately attacked.

  Jack knew her suit would be damaged if she hung around to fight against these odds. It was their cold and calculated determination that made them especially dangerous and they pursued their enemies doggedly, but it was the lack of emotion that scared her the most. She couldn’t help but compare them to a psychopathic killer, although she knew that the comparison wasn’t quite right either. Perhaps it was the fact that you couldn’t reason with either and your ultimate and only recourse was to get rid of them.

  She ran toward the path of least resistance, and on the way picked up two aliens by their heads. They struggled to get a grip on anything they could and their mandibles were working as they tried to reach the arms of her suit, but Jack held a firm grip on both heads as she struggled to keep ahead of the group now behind her. She would normally be much faster than the ants, but the two on her arms slowed her down. These ants were in their element and her bulky suit got in the way. She worried it might be only a matter of time before this cave narrowed, and if that happened she would be trapped.

  As she ran she brushed up against one side of the wall, and the cave’s course surface wore through the ant’s exoskeleton. Dropping it, she did the same to the other. Now unencumbered, she quickly gained a good lead on them.

  “Distance to aliens?” Jack asked.

  “30 meters to the closest one.”

  “Are they grouped together?”

  “No, two are in front with one immediately behind the other, and the rest vary up to 10 meters behind the first.”

  “Perfect,” Jack said. She looked around for a depression in the wall just small enough to fit into but out of view of those trailing. The path was getting rougher now, with rocks strewn here and there and the material of the walls changing from the earlier smoothed out surface of the cooled magma to a rougher, crystalline rock.

  She rounded a corner and found exactly what she was looking for, a recess in the rock hidden out of view of those following, just big enough for her suit to fit inside. She waited patiently until the first two passed and then jumped out behind them. By this time they were running almost side by side.

  Making a small jump, she and landed on top of them and mashed their heads together. She left the pile twitching as she took a quick glance behind her. The remaining six were now clumped together because of the confined space, but their claws allowed them to spread up the sides of the cave. They were only a few meters behind. The cave walls were transitioning once again from the course surface into one like smooth glass, and she hoped it would slow then ants further.

  Another bend in the tunnel was coming up and it was tight enough that Jack wasn’t sure if she would fit or not. The black, smooth glass wall seemed thick, and she had to concentrate to keep from slipping.

  “Scan ahead!”

  “No aliens for the next forty meters. As to the tunnel, my signals are getting bounced and I cannot interpret them. Visual is the only available source of information.”

  Visual, showed no way out, and there was definitely no way back. It was either run or fight, and the odds were still against her.

  “You might not fit through the gap.”

  She ignored her suit comp and dove thru it. Something clanged and she heard the sound of glass breaking, but she made it through the opening and slid more than scrambled around a small bend. After pushing herself along, the tunnel opened up again and she got up. Jack ran a few more meters, quickly scanning the ground for a large round rock, but the walls and floors here were just as smooth as the tight passage she had just come through.

  “The aliens are gaining. Twenty meters and closing.”

  Out of desperation, she knocked loose a protrusion from the ceiling, picked it up just as the bugs were rounding the tight corner. Throwing it as hard as she could, the 30 kilo piece of fused iron and diamond blasted thru the air and slammed into the aliens all funneled together at the narrow opening. Legs broke apart and exoskeletons smashed into pieces as the rock pulverized the group.

  ‘Well, that was surprisingly effective. I should make a game out of this,’ she said to herself. ‘A hard round ball, and ant-like figures standing at the end of a long corridor. Points for every bug you knock down, and extra points if you knock them all down at…Concentrate, dammit,” Jack reminded herself. “Comp, did you get this all recorded?”

  “Yes.”

  ‘At least anyone who finds my remains could look back at how smart I was before I died,’ Jack thought and then corrected herself. “Enough about this, I’m not dying. It’s thinking like this that will get me killed.”

  After double checking that all the bugs had died and that none could return and report back on events, she continued down the tunnel in the general direction of the alien hive she had seen earlier.

  As she thought about it, Jack couldn’t believe that an alien hive had started here. It had been clearly established that the aliens kept some sort of telepathic connection open to a Queen mother on their home planet. How they did it was still a mystery, but captured alien ants apparently lost that ability even though they were kept well fed and taken care of. Once that link was lost, any captured ant would be in some sort of a dormant state, reacting to external stimuli in a purely mechanical way, like sleeping goldfish in a glass jar. They wouldn’t even eat unless food was placed in their mandibles, and almost all of them eventually died of starvation. The few they kept alive lived to what was old age for them – two years, remained in that comatose state.

  It was easy to deduce that with the destruction of the home planet, the bugs would have roamed around without a purpose until they starved to death, but recent events made it obvious that their understanding of how the aliens functioned must be wrong. Was there a new queen here? Obviously. Was there more than one, one for each planet perhaps? Intel had said no a year ago, but now they were mysteriously quiet. “Well, I’m not going to get any answers standing around here.”

  Unknown to Jack, her actions were being observed by the tunnel denizens, a crab-like species with a transparent shell and a number of larger and smaller sets of pincers located around the perimeter of their bodies.
As Jack walked, a number of these creatures made themselves visible, defiantly walking in front of Jack’s direction of travel.

  Jack had gotten tired of adjusting her eyesight to the proper light level. The little light there was fluctuated in intensity in the different parts of the tunnel. The walls seemed to radiate it, but how it was produced was a mystery. She hadn’t seen the creatures and was about to step on one when she stopped, her foot inches above the crab-like alien. Its pincers were up and ready, as were all the rest that had now joined it.

  “Jack, there are a number of small creatures blocking our direction of travel.”

  “I can see that. Why were you late noticing them?” Jack asked as she adjusted her sight.

  “They did not register on my sensors at first, and they have no heat signature. Because of the low light…”

  “Ok, ok I get it. They obviously don’t want us to pass. I wonder why?”

  All the creatures were immobile, facing her with their pincers in the air. Up the sides of the cave were round objects about the size of grapes clustered in the hundreds of small cavities carved out from the smooth glass walls. Jack guessed them to be eggs, but she knew she could easily be wrong. Tending these clusters were a similar type of crab, simpler and without the larger pincers of their cousins on the ground. They carefully rotated each egg one by one. Paying close attention, Jack noticed one of the eggs oozing something from a small hole, and one of those smaller creatures collecting the stuff as it went from egg to egg.

  “So they’re protecting their nest. Can’t go around it, and there’s no other underground way to get to the hive that I know of. Hmm…”

  Jack looked down at the creatures again. They had lowered their pincers but still stood there facing her. She noticed that they had organized themselves into a good defensive position, taking advantage of their size and the layout of the cave. Jack was sure they couldn’t hurt her, but it didn’t matter. They were obviously sentient creatures and she didn’t want to harm them in any way. After thinking for a bit, she raised her left arm and pointed in the direction she wanted to travel. They all looked at her hand, facing her quietly. She waited to see what they would do, and when she was just about to give up, they all lifted up their left pincer and pointed the direction she had come. She laughed at their audacity and wondered if they were simply imitating her move. At about this time Jack started to hear noises, a sort of whispering sound similar to the sound of a light wind rustling through tree branches.

  “Where is that noise coming from?”

  “What noise are you referring to?”

  “That rustling noise…Is there a breeze in this tunnel?”

  “No,” the suit computer replied. “There is no breeze, and no noise save very minor sounds made by the creatures.”

  Jack repeated her earlier hand signal. When she got no further reaction she sat down. The creatures hadn’t moved except for the lowering of their pincers. As Jack sat and waited, the creatures stood completely still and she started feeling an unusual pressure building up in her mind.

  “This is definitely freaky,” she said as she looked at the group. Jack had no idea what it was and she was given no time to find out as they broke their inactivity by scurried up her like a wave. Fighting a strong impulse to wipe them off, she waited to see what they would do. The last thing she wanted was an action misinterpreted as aggression.

  The creatures probed and squeezed and even surprised her with some sort of internal light they turned on when peering through her visor. The whispering was now a drone, one that sounded like bees taking care of a beehive. Then all of a sudden, a deep low sound like a bell tolling rung so loudly Jack thought her suit was hit by a falling rock.

  “What was THAT?” Jack asked surprised.

  “What, Jack?”

  “Oh, come on. There was an obvious noise like a large bell being rung!”

  “There is no noise you can hear Jaclyn, and yes, I am working under normal parameters. Otherwise, there are sub-audible noises emanating from the creatures themselves. I assure you, you are not able to hear any of these sounds, unless you want me to amplify and modify them to suit your hearing range.”

  “No, that’s fine,” Jack said, frustrated.

  “Are you working under normal parameters?”

  She laughed. “Wait, let me do an internal check…Yup, everything is A-OK!” This is the first time any suit had asked her anything like this before. It was definitely screwed up.

  In the meantime, the noises ceased, as did all movements from the creatures. Even the ones on the walls tending the nests stopped and watched her as she sat there. She felt odd being watched by them and didn’t know what to do.

  She was startled by the same sound she had heard before, a low tolling bell sound that rung and reverberated through her head. This time she checked her suit sensors for vibrations instead of noise, but there weren’t any. As she sat there thinking about it the creatures seemed to watch her reaction.

  Slowly her mind calmed down and a comforting darkness descended until her vision went black. Jack didn’t know what to make of this, but somehow she felt calm, as if she was getting ready to watch a teaching unit holoplay back at the ship. She knew she should be alarmed, and she heard a distant voice that sounded like the voice from her suit saying something, but it was lost in the image that started to form in her head.

  In a fugue state, the darkness gave way to an image of a creature relentlessly approaching her. Still in her suit, she tried running at first, but creature closed the gap until it finally caught up to her and started to tear her suit apart. No matter what she tried, she couldn’t get it off, and although she felt she could have destroyed it easily, she knew that would be the wrong move. As much as she realized her drop suit was her greatest friend, a soothing wave of peace and calmness enveloped her. She stopped struggling and simply waited until the creature broke through. She could feel its claws against her skin but the feeling of peace persisted, fighting her natural fear. The claws, though cool to the touch, didn’t hurt. It took a few tentative steps as it stood there on her belly, and then it slowly climbed up until she could feel it on the side of her face. At one point it stumbled as it tried to find a grip without cutting her skin, and she was surprised to see her own hand come up to help it as it made its way up to her head. Once there it stood still for a moment and then somehow slowly sank in until she could feel it inside her skull.

  Somehow, she didn’t feel terrified. She knew it wasn’t actually happening but every aspect of it certainly felt real, right down to the sweat pouring down her body. She wanted a drink bad, but her body was paralyzed. The vision went black again as Jack slowly fell into a deep sleep.

  Jack came to with a start as she realized that another vision had just started, and this one showed her an alien ant coming toward her through the same tunnel she was in. Her first reaction was to destroy it as she had all the others, but then she remembered that this was simply a vision and she figured the crabs wanted to show her something.

  The ant came closer, but on its way through the tunnel it came across the nest and started analyzing everything in it with its sensors. Once it was done it stood completely unmoving, as if in some sort of trance. Seconds turned into minutes, and Jack was startled when it suddenly let out a piercing scream. It was unlike anything she ever heard and certainly unlike anything an ant ever did. They had no way of making noise other then the clipping sound of their claws or the tapping of their antennae.

  It stopped screaming as abruptly as it had started and then stood there completely still again, waiting. Within moments out of the darkness of the tunnel hundreds upon hundreds of ants emerged, and they ravaged the nest. Jack couldn’t imagine how so many ants could fit inside that space but she could see them pushing and shoving each other violently in their frenzy. Many of the ants trampled each other and some of them were so crushed their exoskeleton burst from the pressure of those behind, but those that were able to started feeding greedily, smashing
nests, taking eggs, and cracking open the crabs.

  She watched disgustingly as one ant greedily slurped down the contents of one of the creatures while a few others slowly pulled the legs off the other ones they found tending the nests. By the time they were done, the nest was completely destroyed and crab carcasses littered the ground the ants had trampled. Jack couldn’t help but look around in pity, revulsion still showing on her face from the grotesque things she had just witnessed. She felt that although some of what she saw was not quite real, the event portrayed in her vision had actually happened. She didn’t know what to make of it all or when the events occurred or why she was seeing it, but her revulsion and hatred for the ants was clearly understood by the creatures reading her mind. The visions ended, and Jack drifted off once again into darkness.

  That night Jack’s dreams danced from one subject to another. One minute, she was married to Scratch, the next they had found Earth, then she saw Scratch back on this planet naked, alive and co-operating with the ants while she walked freely among them. An unknown third person in a drop suit like hers, face unrecognizable, then came crashing into the Hive, causing utter confusion and destruction. After this Jack’s dreams drifted to these creatures and the colonies they had set up, their metamorphosis into another type of being she couldn’t quite discern, the destruction of their nurseries by the ants, and the counterattack they launched in return.

  Her mind then drifted to space, to a human colony of misfits and mutants living in some station somewhere, plotting death and destruction. The next image she sees is of the Hive chamber once again, with Scratch in the middle sitting on a throne made of solid diamond. The bugs are ignoring them both while he sits naked, looking at her in adulation. Only then does she realize she’s naked too and she gets embarrassed, but their attention is diverted by the activities in the background as the person in the drop suit causes havoc among the ants.