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sixteen, level five. Here s the overlay map& ."
* * * * *
They approached the docked ships cautiously. Wilks put Bueller down carefully and drew the
handgun. Ill just wound the guards, he said, I won t kill them.
Thank you, Bueller said.
Stay here. I ll be back when I m done. He started to leave. Paused. Hey, Bueller, I never
got around to telling you how good a job you and your troops did. You did okay.
For an android? Bueller said.
Nah, for anybody.
Wilks eased his way onto the dock, using the supports as cover. In the end, it was easy. There
were four guards, they had their weapons slung, they weren t expecting trouble. When he was close
enough and still covered, Wilks took a deep breath, brought the pistol up, and quickly fired four
times. The suppressed barrel cut most of the noise.
He hit each of the four guards once.
Right between the eyes.
Head shots were the best way for an instant knockdown.
So he lied to Bueller. Life was hard.
Billie saw Wilks coming back. Our ride is here, people. Let s go.
He led them past the bodies of four soldiers who had been guarding the ship.
Mitch looked at the dead men.
Sorry. My hand must have slipped, Wilks said.
Mitch shrugged. Once they were dead, his responsibility ended. Wilks had to know that.
Behind them, small-arms fire rattled. It didn t sound close, but it wasn t too far away, either.
Looks like company has come calling, Wilks said. I d bet the schedule is going to be
advanced just a tad.
The ship was a rectangular module with heat tiles on the bottom and a small control cab that
looked vaguely like the head of a giant insect stuck on the front. It seemed almost an afterthought to
Billie, the way the cab joined the brick-shaped body of the ship.
Wilks caught her look. Cobbled together out of spare parts, he said. We ll be lucky if it
doesn t come apart when we lift. Come on. We ve got to move some gear around. This bird is
loaded with food supplies and frozen sperm and ova, regular little Noah s ark. We have to install an
oxy plant and recycling and recovery system so we can breathe and have a way to clear wastes.
And since I don t know how long we ll be in flight, some sleep chambers would be nice, too. Take
us a couple of hours, I ve located the stuff we need on the ship next door.
What about the passengers on that ship? Mitch asked.
They can double up in the chambers if they have to. This bird doesn t have any cause it s
meant to be crewless. We need em more than they do.
It took almost two and a half hours to get the proper gear installed, and would have been
impossible without the dumbots Wilks rounded up.
The sounds of combat were drawing much closer as they finished. He could hear the
occasional ricochet ching off the alien armor, and whoever had taken over from the dead general
would probably be hauling ass real soon now.
Every now and then, Wilks heard a man or woman scream.
Yeah. Real soon now.
Let s lock it up, he said to Billie. I have a feeling we ll be going for a ride any minute.
The control cabin still had acceleration couches in place, they hadn t gotten around to stripping
them, so Wilks helped Billie cinch Bueller into place before he went to his own couch. He didn t
know exactly where the retreat was going, but he had rigged the sleep chambers so they could climb
in when they hit hyperspace; the automatics would shut the things down when they dropped back
into normal space. After that, well, they d see.
No sooner had he fastened his own restraints than the ship s board lit up with launch readings.
Close.
Hang on, he said. Looks like somebody just lit the fuses.
30
The ship lifted, and the high-gee force shoved at the passengers, pressing them deep into the
cushioned seats. Wilks supposed that if he had a viewer operational, he would have looked back,
although it would surely be a depressing sight. Watching your own planet being overrun by monsters
wasn t what he would call fun.
There was nothing to be done for it, now, at least.
The first rule in winning a war was to survive. If you lived, you could fight another day. Dead,
you couldn t do shit.
And Wilks planned to stay alive as long as it took to kill those things. As long as it took.
Whoever had programmed the ships had figured on using Earth s gravity to help sling them into
deep space. The cargo drone reached high orbit and the drives pulsed, pushing them into an ellipse.
The monitors showed that there were at least fifty ships in the loose formation. Plus one unidentified
vessel whose configurations Wilks recognized.
Hey, say good-bye to old longnose, he said.
Billie looked at him. Went blank. Then screamed.
Somehow Mitch managed to unhook himself from his seat and walk on his hands to where
Billie was still strapped into her chair. He climbed up, held her, tried to reach her.
Billie! What is it? Billie?
It was inside her brain again, that alien presence she d last felt light-years away. The thing that
had saved them from the monsters.
It was laughing.
The force of its thoughts overwhelmed her, she couldn t stop them, it was like trying to halt an
ocean breaker with a bucket. The feelings were mixed: it gloated, it was filled with snide joy, it
lusted, it felt superior, it hated, it raged, and among all those were things she couldn t identify, feelings
for which there was no human reference.
But she got enough of it to know what it wanted her to know.
Oh, God!
Billie?
She managed to focus on Mitch. Mitch, who loved her. Her feelings for him became like a
wall, against which the alien spacefarer s emotional sea splashed. Some of it slipped past, but enough
was stopped so Billie could recover her senses. Somehow it knew this. The tide stopped.
It that thing. It talked to me.
What did it say? Wilks put in.
It has no more use for us than it did the aliens. It followed us here to see our world, to see if
there was anything here worth taking. It wants to conquer us.
Won t have a lot of opposition, will it? Wilks said.
It plans to wait and let the aliens kill all the humans. Then when the soldiers come back it
knows their plans it will be waiting. Maybe with others of its own kind. To take Earth from the
winners.
Damn, Wilks said. If it isn t one thing, it s another. Out of the hurricane and into a tornado.
After that, there wasn t much any of them could say.
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