We've Seen the Enemy Page 9

  The final dream was of Bones, or at least of his body. He was in a large room and with him were hundreds of other humans, all of them naked, and they were all standing rigidly and completely still. When she looked closer she noticed that his eyes were closed and that alien tubes went into the back of his head. Just before her dream faded, his eyes suddenly shot open and a terrifying scream came out. Jack shuddered when she realized that not only was Bones’ mouth still closed, but that it was the same type of scream she heard earlier with the ant in her dream. When darkness came once again, she felt relieved that this nightmare would be over.

  Jack woke up with a start, her suit querying her physical and mental status in an alarmed voice. A headache was pounding away and she felt the kind of tired you get from chronic insomnia.

  “I’m fine. Tired, but fine,” she informed her suit comp.

  She thought back to the dreams and was surprised that she could remember all of them to the very last detail. They all had a reality to them that surprised her, but the last terrifying one was especially vivid, so vivid that it was more a vision than a dream. She was sure that they were real and felt frustrated, feeling that she needed to do something about what she had seen but not really knowing what to do.

  Exiting the suit temporarily, Jack worked the stiffness out of her body. Getting back in, she took a drink of water from the dispenser and noticed that most of the crabs had disappeared, leaving a path for her through the nest that was still being tended by the simpler of the crab-like creatures. Her suit had scanned all the information in and had temporarily labeled these as ‘Worker Crabs’, while the larger crabs were simply labeled ‘Crabs’. That suited Jack just fine.

  Jack gingerly walked forward, being careful not to disturb or damage anything. Once she was through, she picked up her pace and thought about what she had seen in her dreams. What were these creatures, and did they metamorphose into something else like the dream showed? If so, what? Jack didn’t know, but she felt that she would soon find out.

  “How far are we from the Hive entrance we saw from the surface?”

  “Approximately one kilometer if this cave continues in its present direction.”

  Jack slowed down and started to pay more attention to details. This part of the cave seemed as if it was the same as when magma flowed through it eons ago. It showed no sign of alien activity. The walls were glass-like, with large bubbles formed here and there along the floor, walls and ceiling. It seemed fused into one piece with no magma residue left behind. ‘Strange,’ Jack thought. She continued to walk for another half hour until the suit comp stated: “Jack, We have gone beyond where the Hive is supposed to be. The cave has swerved slightly to the left, and it appears that this cave does not intersect with the Hive.”

  “Which is the part of the cave that is closest to the Hive complex?”

  “Backtrack 12 meters. My sensors picked up an anomaly on the cave wall that I originally dismissed. Please return to that spot and tap the wall.”

  Jack found the spot and tapped with her robotic knuckle. “It sounds…hollow…”

  “The wall is relatively thin, approximately one-half meter thick at its very center, but it does thicken towards the floor and roof of this cavern and whatever is on the other side.”

  “How hard is this stuff?” Jack asked.

  The suit comp took control of its arm and tapped the wall harder. After a second it said, “Very hard but very brittle.”

  Jack turned on her different light filters until she got the view she wanted – stress flows across the glass. “Do you think I can break this?”

  “Yes. I would suggest kicking.”

  “Kicking it is!” Jack wound up and gave the wall a solid kick at the weakest point. The glass wall reverberated and the tunnel rung with the impact, but nothing happened. She continued to kick time after time but with no effect other then the wall vibrating with the kick. She finally stopped kicking and her brow knit in concentration as she continued to study the stress features of the glass wall.

  “Is there a pattern to the ringing?”

  “Analyzing…Yes. Displaying on visor…”

  Jack looked and saw a consistent set of peaks and valleys that mirrored her kicks, but she also saw an underlying frequency that didn’t match.

  “Please tempo the frequency, point five seconds before they happen.”

  Jack got ready and gave the wall a solid kick, and the sound came back again. Each time the computer prompted her, she gave another kick, and with each kick the volume of the ringing intensified. Finally, after eight kicks and just when Jack was ready to stop again, the wall exploded in a shower of glass and debris and a jagged hole big enough for her to walk through opened up.

  Her jaw dropped as she looked into a large chamber approximately one hundred meters across, with tunnels branching off all around the perimeter of the chamber. In the center Jack saw a naked Scratch sitting on a natural glass formation that looked very much like a throne. Near him hanging off the ceiling of the chamber were thousands of long tendrils of ooze dripping down into a honeycomb framework that contained alien larvae.

  It was obvious the chamber was a Hive nest, and worker ants lined the perimeter with eggs while they waited. Jack had just caught one fully grown ant vacating a chamber, its exoskeleton completely white from having just recently hardened. Worker ants cleaned up the ooze on its skin and once it left, they deposited a newly hatched larva back into the same honeycomb chamber.

  Although Scratch was near the center, no worker bothered him as he sat there. But with the vibration of the exploding wall spreading through the rock, worker ants turned towards the origin of the vibrations as they actively waved their sensors in the air. Jack watched as dozens headed toward her with more coming out of the tunnels. There was no way Jack could win against all of these, and her mind went blank as she confronted certain death.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Rat at Work

  Pliny and the other elders were going to be pleased, Rat thought. He knew that John the Elder would be especially pleased as to how things were progressing, but his thoughts turned back to his father.

  He found it more and more difficult to please his father as of late, but this time things would be different. Control would come once again, and with that, stability and power; Rat smiled at the thought. Those two had been causing trouble since the very beginning, questioning authority, asking all sorts of stupid questions, and worse, making others think and question long held beliefs. No one publicly spoke up, but it would only be a matter of time, Rat thought. Not that Rat didn’t have questions, of course. But the beliefs were there for a reason.

  “And the reason has nothing to do with truth,” he said to himself, smirking at the thought. He knew where the power lay and he knew what was needed to stay in power. No, these two had to be taken care of in a way that would quiet everyone down, and do it once and for all.

  Rat stood on the small rise looking into the hollow where he had gotten everything ready. No doubt Pliny was getting suspicious about his lengthy absence, but there was nothing Rat could do about that except blame it on Timothy and Ruth.

  ‘I’ve waited years,’ Rat thought. ‘Collected all the Tests of Faith, hidden them, transported them with the tribe as they migrated, and now finally all is ready!’

  As he busily worked away he muttered to himself happily, knowing he could do it here without reproach or prying ears. Rat’s father complained about everything he did, and he especially hated Rat’s muttering and jabbering but soon it would all be taken care of.

  “Must be careful,” Rat said to himself. “No telling what other Tests of Faith happen to be lying around.”

  It was tough enough for Rat as it was. He was originally born thin and sickly and his body unusually long. Worse yet, he had a small tail that hung from the bottom of his spine. Anything unusual in a birth automatically meant culling to protect the tribe and keep the genes strong, and he looked so sickly and unusual that the birth helper
was about to act immediately, but his mother would have none of it, making it clear to Pliny that Raymond was to live, no matter what. When she got pregnant, she called the event a miracle and she was sure God had a purpose for him, tail and all. It was her only child conceived just before the cut-off age, and she was insistent on not using a donor mother.

  His father hated the idea of keeping Rat alive. He was disgusted by this sickly mutant baby, but he felt it would serve him better to acquiesce to a domineering wife that held considerable leverage over him, at least until he could do something about her. So Pliny hid the tail and had the birth helper suffer an unfortunate ‘accident’. To the others that knew nothing of the tail, he insisted the sickly looking baby was not an abnormality and that Rat should live; nobody argued.

  Then something happened that made Pliny reconsider his decision of killing the child. Soon after Rat was born, his mother had taken ill. She dreaded leaving Rat with his father but she had no choice, and Pliny, seeing the opportunity, drugged the child and left him out during the night. Pliny heard of a few that had survived the night out in the poisons, but that was very rare. He was sure that this sickly thing wouldn’t make it even a few hours. But Rat did survive, and with no apparent bad effects. Pliny was so stunned he tried it again the next night, with the same results. He then realized that although he hated the child, that here lay an opportunity.

  Rat’s unusualness didn’t escape notice. It didn’t take long for his flexibility to increase to a level of awkwardness that could no longer go ignored or excused. Most people ended up being disgusted by it or upset that he was allowed to live and promulgate his genes when so many of theirs had been culled. The last straw was when the tribe found out what Pliny had discovered years before, that Rat was immune to the nightly poisons. When Rat started to use his abilities to spy on others, people just ended up hating him. A few had even spoken aloud concerning Pliny and his actions in the matter. That was all fine with Rat; he had his own agenda. ‘One day I’ll be Head Elder,’ Rat thought. ‘And then we’ll see what people think.’

  Nobody knew that Rat had altered some of the ‘Tests of Faith’, redirecting them in such a way as to be more effective against those of his tribe he particularly hated. Rat was proud of his accomplishments – in twenty years he had secretly gotten rid of eleven people in this way, another seven for his father, and four more for John the Elder.

  Ruth and Timothy were another matter though. They were careful, and he felt that they knew what he had been up to. There were many times that Timothy had taken down his setups, destroying or using the equipment for other things. These ‘Tests of Faith’ had lost their reverence and the tribe was questioning their theocratic place. Pliny was the first to notice his power waning as a result. ‘They have to go, and the sooner the better,’ Rat thought.

  Walking into the hollow, he reached into his backpack and pulled out all the old relics he had found that were similar to what Timothy had collected, and he carefully sorted them into piles here and there, as if Timothy had organized them for some sort of study. He had set up a work table with a nicely done shade, and had spent months stealing tools from Timothy and the others when they weren’t looking. Now he laid them out neatly, just as Timothy would have done.

  Having completed the setup, he then turned to the inactive Tests of Faith.

  “I’ll show them!” Rat kept repeating to himself as he dropped down to do some final adjustments on the last one. “They think I’m weak…They think I’m useless…They wanted to kill me! We’ll see who dies now!” Rat said as he left the area with a smug satisfaction.

  He worked his way through the long, barely perceptible path that led back to the Tribal grounds, and just as he neared a clearing that was the sort of thing Tests of Faith would set themselves up in, he stopped in mid stride and dropped to the ground. He had heard an unusual noise and waited, hidden behind a small bush to see what would come out. After some more rustling, the bushes on the other end moved and Pliny slowly got out, cursing at the heavy brush and looking around carelessly.

  ‘Stupid idiot, he’s going to get himself killed,’ Rat thought as he watched his father look the clearing over and then look around to see if anyone else was there.

  That’s all he needed, to have Pliny die and have one of the other elders take Pliny’s place instead of Rat. He shook his head at his father’s stupidity, and then he got up and yelled, “Wait, father! The dangers are great here!”

  ‘It’s a wonder he survived long enough to have me,’ Rat thought as he quickly worked his way around the outskirts of the clearing. He was about to grab hold of a trunk when he sniffed out the barbs of a Bioll. If it weren’t for his nose, he would have missed it, seeing as the barbs were on the other side of the trunk. Once Rat carefully walked to the other side, he saw the Bioll clearly, and the remains of a Test of Faith that Timothy must have left on the ground as some sort of warning.

  Rat cursed Timothy under his breath and then stood undecided as to what to do with the Bioll. The plant was a mutated version of a crawler plant that grabbed hold of its victims with barbs. The more the victim struggled, the more the barbs dug in. It was a horrible death because the barbs injected a chemical that broke down fats while the victim was still alive so the plant could suck them out afterwards. Anyone caught in its trap lived for a week in terrible agony, and even if they were somehow released, there was no known antidote. Rat knew that, because he had used the chemical poison a number of times on others. So he stood there trying to decide if he should collect the poison or come back for it later. In the end, he decided he had no time to collect anything now.

  “Curse that Timothy,” Rat said, looking at the destroyed Test of Faith again.

  “What was that?” as his father met up with Rat. “I was talking about Timothy, father. He neutralized another Test of Faith. He must have left it here as a warning about the Bioll.”

  “Hmm”, he replied, and a smile came to Pliny’s face for a moment. He suddenly remembered why he was there and added, “Why did you take so long?”

  “Timothy wanders around a lot, Father… and he seemed suspicious in his doings, so he was being very careful… and I wanted to make sure he wasn’t up to something.” Pliny seemed satisfied with that explanation, but was annoyed that Rat kept calling him Father.

  “Is everything arranged?”

  “Yes”, Rat answered.

  “When will they be back?”

  “I’m not sure, but they have…” Rat stopped, deciding not to tell Pliny about the base, “…hit a snag. Timothy’s leg was broken, but they found shelter and will survive the ordeal. I expect them back when he’s able to do the three day journey here, in about a week or two.”

  “Good, good. Make sure all is ready then, and I’ll make sure to have that wife waiting for you.”

  Rat smiled at that. Naomi was beautiful. He had wanted her ever since she had walked into the tribe out of the forest, over ten years ago. And with the wife came a dead father too.

  Pliny had his own thoughts of a soon to be dead Rat, but he stifled his smile. “Did you get anything useful to present to council and the tribe?” Pliny asked.

  “Well, the usual. They complained about the tribe and about you in particular. They both felt that these Tests of Faith have nothing to do with God, and that you and the council are using this to maintain your position. They have collected items, old world items, and are getting ready to present these to the tribe as proof that all we have learned and have been taught is false.” In other words, the truth, Rat thought. “They are blaspheming, Father!”

  “Yes they are, and they must die for their sins. I will present this to council and see what they decide.”

  ‘No, he will decide whether they have enough to condemn both to death’, Rat figured, but he added instead, “As the Council decides, Father.”

  “Come back and report to council then,” Pliny said. Rat started walking with Pliny until he gave him a withering stare, and Rat dutifully hung
behind in a show of respect. ‘One day, I’ll be walking on your grave, old man,’ Rat thought as he stared at his father’s back.

  When they arrived, the tribe was up in arms. Naomi had just been killed by another Test of Faith. She had been very popular with everyone, the older ones taking her in as a daughter or a sister and the younger ones looking up to her for her courage under trial. She had quickly adapted to her new tribe and everyone knew her as generous and loving. This death was a severe blow, and it marked an especially tumultuous period of an unusual amount of deaths in the last ten years.

  The council had been able to put off these accidents as a sign of weak faith, uncertainty, and lack of devotion, but Naomi was sincere in her devotion and took the faith to heart. She had also been loved and courted by more then a few men. It was no secret that she was the one who had been promised to Rat by Pliny, against the tribe’s wishes, and since then she had been walking around depressed and spiritless.

  As Rat came into the tribe, the people gave him a withering stare. He didn’t know why but he marked their names for future reference anyway. Pliny went straight to council hall and Rat followed closely behind, wondering what the turmoil and stares were all about.

  The name ‘Council Hall’ didn’t seem to fit the building they were about to enter. As all homes in the village, this Council Hall was easily dismantled into sections small enough to tow behind a set of horses. This allowed the Tribe to move to summer and winter grounds and to go where the game was more plentiful.

  The ‘Hall’ itself was short and squat, built in a functional way to house the council when in session, but it was very simple and utilitarian. A lobby greeted members as they entered and rooms were at the end and left of the lobby, with the actual chamber on the right. Solid doors separated the chamber from the lobby. At some point the recent council had tried to add on extravagant themes to the simple chamber, but it was obvious that the additions didn’t fit in.