CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Hunt
Alex looked at his hands, examining them as he would a rifle, looking for small imperfections, blemishes to the finish. Something seemed off about them now, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on - that was it! The finger, the index finger on his right hand. Something was off about it, something he wasn’t sure he could see. His eyes squinted, his attention laser-focused on it now. Was it somehow… shimmering? Surely that had to be a trick of the lights in the conference room. Or was it? He turned his hands repeatedly, twisting them, examining them from all sides. It was almost as if his skin was moving, ever so subtly, almost beyond his ability to perceive, tiny ripples he thought he saw. He looked closer, but all he saw was skin. And hair, and veins, gently visible in spots, scars accumulated over the years and calluses built up little by little by those same actions. He couldn’t identify anything specific wrong - they were the same old hands he’d always had.
Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow, they were different than before, looked somehow different than they did before…
…before the incident.
“Alex,“ Major Alcheck began, “you said you believe Melissa is still in the building? You do realize that sounds crazy, don’t you?”
“Crazier than a plane meant to be invisible that somehow winds up near Jupiter? Crazier than Melissa transforming into… whatever the fuck she turned into before I incinerated her? Crazier than visions of aliens and planetary invasions?”
Alcheck considered Alex for a moment, trying to decide whether this was one of those times he needed to remind Alex how to talk to superiors. It only took a moment for him to decide.
“That’s a fair point, Captain. All right, fine, let’s assume you’re right, Melissa is still somehow here even though we both watched her vaporize. How is that possible?”
“I’m not sure, sir, I just know it’s true. What’s more, I know why she’s still here: the X-100.”
“What would she want with the X-100?”
“I’m not sure. I just somehow know it’s all she… I mean, it… is focused on now. It’s going to try and take it, and we’ve got to stop it, at all costs, Major. Whatever was causing Melissa to mutate is something… something else… some sort of alien creature maybe? I somehow sensed that there was another consciousness involved here… maybe it’s controlling Melissa, or maybe it’s what Melissa has become, and there’s nothing of her left, I’m not sure… and I know this sounds crazy, but I have a sense that the X-100 is the most important thing to whatever the hell it is now. I’m not sure why, and I’m not even certain how I know this Major, but I know it, trust me. I’m not crazy. And I know for sure that whatever Melissa became is still on this base.”
“Well, whether you’re crazy or not I’m really not sure, but that’s a discussion for another day because even if on the off chance what you’re saying is correct then we’ve got to do something about it.”
His fist slammed against the switch on the wall, setting off the general base alarm. Alcheck then hit the base-wide intercom button next to the alarm switch and began yelling into the microphone on the wall.
“Attention! Attention all base personnel! We have a potential intruder situation. Deploy defensive forces around the X-100 and set up a control perimeter around it. Nothing gets near that plane unless under direct order from me! Alcheck out.”
“Ok, let’s play this out. We saw Melissa destroyed, but you sense it, whatever it is she was turned into, is still here. If that’s true then, what, it’s invisible?”
“I know how it sounds, but yes, I think it’s invisible. I think what we saw wasn’t the thing being destroyed but was instead an ability of whatever she was mutating into. I believe that it can make itself invisible and that’s what it did when we tried to incinerate it. Somehow it survived and made us think it was gone, but it wasn’t.”
Alcheck considered this for a moment, intense thought physically apparent on his face as his brow line furrowed and his lips pursed together. His tactical mind was kicking into high gear trying to come up with a strategy to fight an enemy he couldn't even. Camouflage was hard enough to overcome when done right, but outright invisibility? That was an advantage beyond anything he was trained to handle. He knew he had to come up with some strategy though, and this was an area that Major Alcheck excelled at. Before long, he had a notion.
“If this thing is invisible, we’ve got to get around that advantage, or else we won’t be able to defend against it at all.”
Alex nodded in agreed.
“I’ve heard of biological creatures with highly effective camouflage, but this is something more. I have a hard time believing this is a purely biological adaptation.”
Alex saw where Alcheck was going.
“I know what you’re getting at: this has to be at least part technological. The nanotech, it must not have been destroyed and is at least partially responsible for that ability.”
“Exactly! And given that, it seems reasonable to think it can be affected by other technology as well.”
“An EMP!” exclaimed Alex. “We have those EMP grenades that are used to disable enemy computer equipment quickly.”
“Right! Maybe they’ll be able to disrupt that nanotech at least long enough for us to see this thing and that might be sufficient for an offensive. Captain, you head to the armory and grab the grenades, and I’ll meet you at the X-100 hangar. I’ll get us set up for the attack.”
“Yes, sir!” Alex yelled as he began running down the hallway towards the armory.
He didn’t know if this plan had any chance of success, but it was certainly better than nothing. And even if they managed to make Melissa visible again… Melissa. He had to stop thinking about it in those terms. Whatever it had become it clearly wasn’t Melissa anymore. This wasn’t his wife of more than 10 years. This wasn’t the woman who had been his friend despite all their differences. This wasn’t even the super-smart geek he loved to get a rise out of by insulting her beloved Star Trek every chance he got.
This was a thing, plain and simple. It was a target now, a thing that needed to be destroyed, nothing more. He had to fall back on his military training and experience, had to put all memory of his wife out of his mind because he knew, if they managed to find it, what he’d have to somehow do, even though he didn’t have the slightest clue how.
If it was indeed alive at all as he suspected, he had to kill it. For the second time today. Whatever it wanted with the X-100 he knew it couldn’t be good, of that Alex was confident.
He ran down the corridor, past half a dozen soldiers running towards the hangar bay, M-4 carbines in hand, locked and loaded and prepared for whatever danger they were charging into. At least, Alex hoped they were ready.
He reached the armory and violently slammed the door open, charging directly towards the shelf where the EM grenades were. He grabbed four of them, hung them on his belt with the hooks that were attached to them, and then grabbed his own M-4. He grabbed four extra magazines, fully loaded with hot-loaded hollow-point rounds, as well as a combat knife, which was so long that it might as well have been considered a sword! He threw a Kevlar vest on for good measure and attached the knife and its sheath to his left arm and took off down the hallway towards the hangar.
The alarm klaxons were deafening, and the battle lighting gave everything a slightly red tinge to it. Major Alcheck would have to turn these damned things off before they could proceed as they were very distracting even to Alex. That, of course, was their job: to get attention, and they were very effective at that!
Alex arrived in the hangar bay and saw Alcheck directing the troops into formations behind improvised barricades. They formed a circle around the X-100, separated by only about 5 feet between each soldier. Whatever Melissa had become, it wasn’t going to slip through this formation. Now, if the grenades would just work…
“Captain! We’re good to go here. You have the grenades?”
"Yes, sir, four of ‘em, one for each cardinal direction. The first hint of this thing we get, we set one off and, hopefully, it does the trick."
“Right! Let’s get into position ourselves. That thing could be in here already for all we know.”
Alex took a position in front of the nosecone of the X-100, Major Alcheck 90 degrees to his left. Alex tossed two grenades to the soldier 90 degrees to his right, who passed one to the solder at the rear or the craft. He also threw one to Major Alcheck.
Then, the waiting began.
The hangar was deathly quiet now, except for an occasional rustling of a soldier shifting his weight behind a barricade and the hum of the overhead lights and other equipment. There was also an air exhaust port a hundred feet or so behind them that periodically let out a hissing noise as the air was exchanged with the nighttime air beyond the walls of the hangar.
Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. Still nothing. No sound, no shadows, no movement anywhere. It could be standing right in front of him, and Alex wasn’t sure he’d know. He could only hope there was some sort of clue when it was near, a clue like the feeling he had gotten earlier that alerted him to its presence. He didn’t know what that was all about, but his guess was it had made physical contact with him. How simple contact would seemingly give him information like it seemed to have, but he wasn’t so much worried about the how of things right now.
He assumed invisibility didn’t mean it also didn’t interact with matter, that was the important part, and it seemed most likely to him to be true. He didn’t know much about science but somehow, as incredible as invisibility was, he thought a physical creature turning into an actual ghost was probably beyond its capabilities. Or so he hoped.
He also knew it couldn’t be the same sort of invisibility that the stealth drive was meant to create because it that was the case then it wouldn’t even be here at all, it would be in another universe, and there would be no possibility of interaction.
No, Alex figured the thing was just invisible… and he chuckled at his own use of the word just in that context.
Alex checked his watch now. Thirty minutes had passed. He looked around to ensure the soldiers were still frosty. They were, as was Major Alcheck. They were all very alert, scanning the environment regularly. They were very well-trained, Alex thought. While they were all the cream of the crop generally, only a handful of them were special forces as he and Alcheck were. He was pleasantly surprised that they had been trained as well as they clearly had been regardless.
Maybe there’s a chance we win this thing, however small a chance it might be.
Alex too continued scanning all around him, his eyes moving slowly, his head moving as his eyes reached their maximum lateral movement to expand his range. As he did so, he allowed his mind to wander just a little bit.
He wished Melissa was here - the real Melissa that is. She would have had three different theories on how to deal with the thing by now, how its cloaking technology worked, probably would have some fancy machine built to track it by now too.
Yeah, that’d be pretty damned helpful right about now!
To his left, Alex noticed something: a slight shimmering off in the distance, along the wall of the hangar. It was almost like the wall was wet, and the light was glistening off it, in contrast to the rest of the wall that wasn't. He whistled as gently and quietly as he could, just enough to get the attention of the soldier to his left. The soldier turned to look at Alex, who noted the movement of the soldier's head in his peripheral vision and gestured towards the spot that he had been keeping his eyes on the whole time. The solder looked and squinted for a few moments.
But he couldn’t see a thing, Alex realized. Only he was seeing it. He knew that either made him crazy, or the only one that could initiate the attack.
The shimmering began to move, slowly, deliberately. Alex was now sure it was the thing, the creature. It had to be. He wasn’t crazy, but he was the only one that could see it. He had to do something about that.
Alex gestured to the two soldiers nearest him who had EM grenades to remove the pins and prepare to throw where he was directing them. They hesitated momentarily, and for good reason: to them, Alex was telling them to throw the only weapons they had that they suspected might have a chance of working, at an empty wall!
Alex gestured again, more forcefully this time, and this time the soldiers complied. Pins removed, they stood at the ready, their attention focused on the wall where Alex was pointing.
A few seconds later, the thing they couldn’t yet see came into range, and it was time to strike. Alex kicked off the action.
“NOW!”
The soldier threw the grenade towards the shimmering, its movement suddenly halted. The grenade detonated a few feet from the shimmering, arcs of electrical energy emanating from the point of detonation. It was like a ball of lightning in midair, tendrils of intense white and blue light crackling, searching out an Earth ground. A few of the bolts found one: the metal hangar walls behind the shimmering.
The bolts of lightning charged towards the wall, through the shimmering, pulsating and moving as they went. The discharge that hung in the air began to dissipate as the electrical streamers all started moving towards the wall. As they did so, the shimmering began to intensify, now like the distortion effect produced by the intense exhaust heat of a jet engine. The wall behind it began to be obscured, slowly fading out of view as if being blocked by undulating water.
The shimmering began to take on a form now, and Alex recognized it at once: the creature Melissa had morphed into in the lab right before they sterilized the room.
It was working.
By now, all the other soldiers, and Major Alcheck, had run from their positions, now able to see the beast, and were forming up in a defensive position behind the soldier who had thrown the grenade, forming a firing line. Alcheck was now pulling the pin on his grenade and preparing to throw it at the same time the soldier from the rear of the X-100 was now throwing his. The discharges from that grenade supplemented that of the first grenade, which was now almost finished fully discharging. Alex looked down at the weapon in his hand and with the speed of a cheetah, pulled the pin and threw it at the same moment Major Alcheck threw his.
Three balls of lightning now hung in the air not far from what they all knew now was definitely the creature, bolts of lightning streaming through the creature and into the wall behind it.
As if tuning in the distorted picture of an old over-the-air television, the shimmering now gave way to a physical being, writhing in pain thanks to the electricity coursing through it.
“Maybe that’s enough to kill the damned thing!” Major Alcheck yelled.
Wishful thinking, Alex thought to himself. He supposed it was possible, but he wasn’t about to bet on it.
“Maybe, but if nothing else it looks like it’s stunning it… doesn’t seem like it can move… we’ve only got a few seconds before those grenades discharge completely, we’d better use it!”
Alcheck nodded in agreement, both of them having the same thought. Alcheck yelled “Fire!” to all the soldiers around him as loudly as he could to be heard over the crackling of the electricity in the air.
Suddenly, all the fury of Hell was unleashed from the line of soldiers. Each of them began firing their weapons at the creature in unison, the sound echoing off the walls of the hangar in all direction. It was deafening. Alex had been in firefights before of course, but the acoustics of the hangar bay were uniquely suited to amplifying the noise. He knew they would all have some serious tinnitus after this!
Bullets screamed through the air, striking the creature all over its hideous body. Tracer rounds created lines showing the path from the rifles to the impacts, a sight Alex always found kind of beautiful in a terrible way.
The creature added to the thunderous racket with what Alex supposed were cries of agony. Whether it was the electricity, the bullets impacting its body, or both, he wasn’t sure. The soldiers unloaded on the thing, swapping out magazines as they ran through their ammo, a constant barrage of blazing-hot metal flung downrange towards the creature. The grenade discharges were ceasing now, and it was at that point that Alex could finally see the damage all those hundreds of rounds were doing to the creature…
…none whatsoever.
Alex couldn’t quite make sense of what he was seeing, but what he thought he saw was the bullets exploding just inches in front of the creature as if they were impacting some invisible wall. With each impact, a bluish wave expanded out from the point of impact like ripples on a lake from a stone dropped in.
“Major! This fucking thing has some kind of energy shielding!”
He wasn’t sure Alcheck had heard him, but the gunfire from the line was slowing now, almost finished. He guessed everyone else had realized what was happening about the same time he did.
The creature was now bent down on what Alex supposed was its knee. Tentacles exploded out from the flesh of its back now, moving around it in all directions, searching for Alex could only guess what, its arms hunched down in front of it. Its body expanded and contracted rhythmically, air brought in and expelled rapidly as it breathed. All around it, electrical energy coursed along its edges, interacting with the shield, now fading.
Alex recognized a creature collecting itself after exertion, and he somehow knew it was only a matter of time before it recovered enough to attack, and he wasn’t sure there was a damned thing any of them could do when it did.
——————————
Energy spike dissipating across outer shell. Shield energy low, recharge not initiated due to electrical overload. Damage control systems activated for correction of data transmission errors resulting from discharge. No damage to biologics.
"Well, that doesn't sound good!" Melissa thought with glee.
She was still struggling to gain connection to the central processing core so she could see what was going on outside. Given the data stream she still had access to though she had a pretty good idea what had just happened:
Alex had.
He discovered the creature and even managed to figure out a way to attack it!
“That’s it Alex! Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it! It’s working.”
The data stream was corrupted now, a result of the powerful electrical discharge the creature had been hit with. It was her way in. Melissa reorganized her program structure so that it appeared in the stream as corrupt data. The primary shouldn’t see anything suspicious in that, though Melissa knew she didn’t have much time: the primary would certainly move to correct the corruption as quickly as possible, and with it, Melissa.
Data corruption detected. Corrective measures engaging. Checksum routines processing data flow, retrieval of parity bits for data reconstruction commencing.
Yep, there it was: this primary was highly efficient, something Melissa appreciated from a technical standpoint. She didn’t have much time now at all. As soon as the data packets she had sent were corrected, part of her would effectively be erased. She had to press the advantage as quickly as possible.
The packets arrived in the central core a few cycles later and began coalescing into a single program. As it did, a data link was established between Melissa’s main code and the sub-code in the central processing center. She had effectively broken off a part of her consciousness, part of her program and used it to establish a link with the central core.
“Ok, let’s see what this buys me.”
It took a bit more than a dozen cycles – an eternity in this place – but Melissa managed to gain access to the low-priority visual data acquisition system.
She could see what was happening now!
Outside the body, she saw a line of soldiers, guns at the ready, moving extremely slowly. Time seemed to be passing at a vastly different rate in here than in the real world. Melissa experienced an eternity for every moment that passed outside. She could see Major Alcheck there, pointing in her direction, no doubt barking commands. Maybe 20 feet away was Alex, a stern expression on his face. Melissa recognized it in an instant, knew it from all those years long ago from that day in school, the only time she had seen him in a combat situation: he was preparing to attack.
Did he have any chance though? Melissa needed more information to determine that. She directed the remote code to extract data from the damage control system. This was another lightly protected subsystem as the interface she had access to was read-only and the primary apparently didn’t think there was any real need to defend it in a more robust way. And, it was right: Melissa couldn’t use this access to actually do anything… but information was all she needed right now. She saw a catalog of data storage files, ordered by microsecond time slice. She commanded them to be retrieved and replayed in reverse chronological sequence.
Melissa saw the short battle that had just taken place in reverse order. Her own code automatically reversed the playback sequence in chunks, and although it wouldn't make sense to a normal human mind, this new digital form she now found herself in gave her insights and emerging abilities that she could never have had as a purely biological entity, and it all made sense. The EM grenades (great idea, Alex!), the hundreds of bullets that had impacted the shields.
Shields! The creature she had become had shields! She had theorized such a thing was possible, but only on aircraft. She never imagined an individual biological being could possess such a capability. So many questions raced through her mind: how were the shields powered? How did air exchange occur so as to not suffocate the creature? Did it have limits in terms of energy it could dissipate? Would it block all kinetic attacks or was it vulnerable at various scales? The scientist in her couldn’t control the enthusiasm of such a discovery.
But, before long, the realization hit her:
“They’re not going to have any chance against us… against me.”
Her mind combined the new information about the shielding with the damage report data, and she understood at once that even though the shield energy was almost depleted, it was rapidly regenerating and even at the low level it was now, guns wouldn’t work. Neither would knives, which was a problem because she had a feeling about what Alex would do next. Melissa knew the way Alex thought.
Weapons systems engaging. Muscle control now at full discretion of combat control routines. Air flow optimal, respiration returning to normal levels.
“Oh shit! I gotta give Alex at least a fighting chance!”
Melissa began surveying the data links she had access to. The primary still had not corrected the corrupted data streams, and now with the combat subsystem activated that task was being pushed to a secondary processor array. Melissa realized this gave her an opportunity: there were holes in the data streams that she could exploit just like she had done to gain access to the central core. Unfortunately, each time she did so she also knew that she was destroying a part of her own consciousness, breaking off pieces of herself that couldn’t be replicated. She noticed that cost of the gambit the first time she had done it.
But it was a price she had to pay. If she couldn’t figure out a way to give Alex some sort of advantage out there in the real world then he, and all the soldiers around him, wouldn’t stand a chance.
——————————
“It’s getting ready to attack!” Alex yelled.
“Why hasn’t it yet?” Major Alcheck yelled back.
“We must have stunned it, but I don’t think that’s going to last for long.”
“Any ideas, Alex? Guns obviously have no effect. How do we get past those shields?”
“Not a clue, Major. We’ve got to figure something out though, we can’t let that thing get the X-100!”
Alcheck considered the situation. He didn’t know anything about energy shields like this thing had, but he did have at least a rudimentary understanding of basic physics, thanks to Melissa and all the technical reports he had to read about her work over the years. Some of what he had read included some theoretical musings Melissa had written up specifically about energy shielding possibilities. Alcheck figured this had to be quite a bit different than what Melissa had been describing on fighter jets, but maybe the principals weren’t entirely different. Maybe they just were similar enough…
"Alex! Melissa wrote some papers on shields like this, though on a much larger scale, for use on aircraft. I didn't understand most of it of course, but I remember one key point being that shielding would have to be highly tuned against a specific threat. They were unlikely to work against all types of weapons. I wonder if the same might be true of this thing?"
Alex realized in an instance what Major Alcheck was saying. It made sense: guns were a soldier's primary weapon in modern warfare, and this creature may well know that since Melissa would have, and since it obviously knew about the X-100 then that had to mean Melissa's knowledge, or at least some part of it, was still in there. Melissa certainly knew about guns: Alex had taken her to the range many times.
“So, guns may not work, but knives may!”
Alex unsheathed the combat knife he had taken from the armory and regarded it. The bright xenon lights that hung from the top of the hangar glistened off its sharp edge, like morning dew on a blade of grass.
“Exactly! Men, fix bayonets and prepare to…”
Before Major Alcheck could finish his command, it began.
——————————
“Oh no, not yet, I haven’t found it yet!”
Melissa, or whatever the equivalent of a disembodied mind yelling was, yelled that phrase into the abyss surrounding her. She could see the data pouring in now: muscular energy consumption levels, attack pattern vectoring algorithm results, update energy shield status reports. It all meant only one thing: it had begun its attack.
Motor functions nominal. Vectoring towards first target, anticipated time of contact 234 cycles.
It was a highly efficient mechanism, but it still had the same physical limits the biological portion of it had. It may be tough in that regard, but Alex could handle tough. That meant if Melissa could just disrupt it somehow, either its movement or its senses, Alex and the soldiers might have a chance at taking it down. If she could disengage the shielding, then they might have an opportunity to hurt this thing. It might be like fighting a grizzly bear - not a thing to be taken lightly - but not impossible at least.