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- Herausgeber: Titan Books
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
The alien queen is dead, the hive mind left to flounder, and on a world bereft of its leader two strains of Alien divide their forces for world-shattering war. On Earth, in the wake of alien infestation, athletes are flocking to humanity's Goodwill Games. But some come with a deadly new tool: a drug called Fire, distilled from the very essence of the Aliens' body chemistry... Contains Genocide by David Bischoff and Alien Harvest by Robert Sheckley.
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Contents
Cover
Also Available from Titan Books
Title Page
Copyright
Aliens™ Book I: Genocide
Dedication
Prologue
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Epilogue
Aliens™ Book II: Alien Harvest
Dedication
Captain Hoban’s Prologue
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Hoban’s Afterword
About the Authors
Also Available from Titan Books
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
THE COMPLETE ALIENS™ OMNIBUS
VOLUME 1
VOLUME 3 (DECEMBER 2016)
VOLUME 4 (JUNE 2017)
VOLUME 5 (DECEMBER 2017)
VOLUME 6 (JUNE 2018)
VOLUME 7 (DECEMBER 2018)
THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATIONS
ALIEN™
ALIENS
ALIEN3
ALIEN RESURRECTION
ALIEN
OUT OF THE SHADOWS
SEA OF SORROWS
RIVER OF PAIN
THE RAGE WAR
PREDATOR: INCURSION
ALIEN: INVASION
ALIEN VS. PREDATOR: ARMAGEDDON (SEPTEMBER 2016)
The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume 2Print edition ISBN: 9781783299034E-book edition ISBN: 9781783299041
Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: June 20161 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
™ and © 1993, 1994, 2016 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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For the Haldemans—Jay and VolJoe and GayThanks for everything, folks!
PROLOGUE
The planet was not hell.
It just looked and smelled and tasted like it, according to the marines who had come there and raped it.
Its denizens were not demons.
They were far worse.
The marines simply called it Hiveworld, although the navigators of hyperspace had an obscure numbered tag for it. They had come here, to this blighted planet, and they had plundered it, stealing its queen mother.
Without the psychic bonds of the ruler to guide the lives of her minions, genetic drift occurred. Different queens, pretenders to the throne, developed and flourished.
All were killed by the most dominant of the bunch, a traditional creature who could have been an identical twin to the queen mother who had perished in a nuclear blast in the Pacific Northwest of Earth.
Call them “black.”
Call her the “black queen mother.”
And the new group, the changelings.
Call them “red,” though they were not red. To a casual observer, they looked identical. But to the “blacks,” through touch and smell and morphic fields, they were anathema. Strangers, aliens. Freaks that had to be destroyed.
Leader of this new brood, living against all calculable probability, was the “red” queen mother.
Bearer of recessive genes, any sign of whose chromosomal changes had brought instant death in the hive before.
The red queen mother and her minions fled. In the confusion of reorganization, they escaped and they established a new hive far enough away to thrive.
The red queen mother spawned, using the herds of animals that roved this bleak planet.
A new rival kingdom was created and for years the kingdoms lived in peace.
But each knew instinctively that the other hive was the enemy, that this peace would not last long. And when war came, the principle weapons would be in the numbers of warriors.
And so the creatures bred… and bred… and bred.
While others of their ilk were hunted under different suns…
1
The alien hive was exactly at Hollywood and Vine.
The god of the bugs alone knew if the sliming, sucking, skulking bastards knew the cultural significance of the intersection they’d chosen. In truth, that section of La-La land wasn’t exactly what it had once been, but then nothing in Los Angeles was these days. And the fact that they chose to infest the old creaking bank building, in what after all was comparatively open territory, testified to the fact that this batch’s IQ seemed rather low.
Still, thought Captain Alexandra Kozlowski as she stood a block away from the sun-faded concrete dialing the polarizing filter down on her faceplate against the grim and gritty southern California sun. You could count on each and every one of the merciless mother-killers being just as mean and nasty and ornery as the worst of the last hive she’d exterminated for Uncle Sam.
Who ya goin’ to call?
Bug Busters!
Oddly enough, it felt good to be back in an E-suit, clunky helmet and all.
She turned to the hunky lieutenant to her left, already sweating in his armor.
“Got your jock strap on tight, Lieutenant Michaels?”
“You want to check?” The square jaws grinned defiantly and the blue eyes crinkled.
“Maybe later.” She winked and chinned her radio. “Approaching hive zero zero nine, LA sector B forty-seven.” She chinned her radio off and gave a significant look to the platoon under her command: 69th platoon. AOE. Alien Occupation Eradication. The toughest soldiers in the biz. They all looked back at her, smiles covering what she knew was fear.
A fear she felt in her own heart.
A fear every time she got near the things.
“Roger, it’s a go, Captain,” crackled the command voice over her radio. “Commence exploratory and extermination. Backup targeted.”
In Captain Alexandra Kozlowski’s humble opinion, the “backup” should have been all that was necessary. A couple of borer missiles with multi-K payloads, primed to go off when the sensors were buried in alien hive musk. Just burn the bastards, erase them, destroy. However, with the numbers of aliens so significantly reduced on this, the eighteenth year following the Alien-Earth War, scientists and private interests wanted carcasses, pickled eggs, photographs, and any royal jelly that could be scarfed up.
This meant Personal Delivery. Service with a Death Grin. Rock and roll and kill.
Well, it kept a lot of lads out of gangs, anyway. The other twenty members of this assault squad had the same radios in their suits and heard the same message, but Kozlowski gave the hand signal anyway, just to reinforce her command—and to assure herself of it as much as to remind her “bug guys.”
They rolled out. They were just foot soldiers marching alongside the anchor vehicle, a Mark 23 Access Tank. In this kind of operation, if you needed extra ammo or just a quick ham sandwich, not to mention a little close-up heavy artillery, it was nice to have a Big Metal Brother along. The metal treads chewed up old concrete and worn metal stars on the Walk of Fame as the troop approached their objective. Almost immediately they broke through the ribboned “perimeter” that had been staked out when the authorities for what was left of Los Angeles had determined the existence of the hive in the old Bank of America Building. Basically, this informed the natives that this was a danger zone, that if they trespassed—no sweat off legal backs—they were likely to become egg-fodder.
Even here, fifty meters from the objective, Kozlowski could see the hardened ooze of the hive stuff filling up the building’s windows and frozen down the side.
“Hey, Koz!” said Lieutenant Michaels. “Why did the bug cross the road?”
“To get to the other side, wreak havoc, kill and spread its kind, and generally give ‘life’ a bad name, you asshole,” she barked back.
“You heard it before!”
“You know I hate jokes while I’m working.”
“Just smart-ass remarks.”
“As long as they’re mine, subordinate officer Michaels.”
He glared at her and she started defiantly as they marched along. It was a way they’d found they could get up for a heavy mission like this. Afterward, when the acid got sluiced from their suits and any wounds were mended, she and Michaels also had another tradition.
Strip and hump each other’s sweaty bodies like bloody bunnies.
Ain’t love grand? thought Kozlowski as she let her keening hormones blend with adrenaline and regulation Army boosters for what brewed up to be a regular Kamikaze Cocktail. She and Michaels had been an item for a year now, which in this Idiot’s Army was just about a lifetime. The favorite gag around the barracks was that if the captain and the lieutenant ever got hitched and pregnant, the spawn would come charging out its birth parent (it was still up in the air in the minds of the privates as to who that would be) with a flamethrower in one hand, a missile launcher in the other—and a grenade in its mouth.
As for Kozlowski, she was always just glad that they could spend any time together at all.
They’d met in the service and he fit her like a hand in a glove. He was a couple years younger than her twenty-eight, an army brat who’d spent his younger years first in a safe area on Earth, then offworld after the evacuation. He was smooth and fit, a devotee of exercises and sports, a big blond package of sexuality that she never grew tired of unwrapping. Captain Alex’s muscles—and scars—had been earned in the field. Even before she’d joined the army she’d been battling the aliens. Her parents—landowners in Montana—had stayed and battled the things. She’d lost her brothers to the monsters, her mother had died of a broken heart—and her pop… Well, her pop was a tangle of mean gristle and bone and determination, eternally guarding his ranch under the big blue sky against the critters from beyond.
And Alex? Well, Alex was just a chip off the old tendon, a small-breasted, big-hipped storm cloud of a gal, feisty as an undefeated bantam-weight fighter. She had a brunette haircut from the Bowl-on-the-Head Salon, dark eyebrows like accents over burning hazel eyes, and a pair of scars like parentheses over a classically cut face. She could fight or make love with equal abandon. She just wasn’t sure which she liked better.
A burnt stench was hanging over the area, moving down from the Cahuenga Pass like a curse. Smog hung over the rest of the city like a stubborn spirit condemned to hell but staying put. The squad rolled along with practiced ease to the hole that was the principle entrance to the nest.
Ten meters from the entrance, she chinned her radio and commanded a halt. “Okay. Main thrust force. Double line. Let’s move it.”
However, before they could even assemble, the defenders struck.
Five large bugs, the sun gleaming sickly on their carapaces, their prehensile skeletal tails snapping behind them, scuttled from the frontmost tunnel, just below the crooked sign that read BANK OF AMERICA.
“Jesus! Guns!” she cried, unstrapping her own .45mm blaster. “Rodriguez… Swivel and fire. Take cover!”
Like the crack team they were, the soldiers broke ranks and took positions as though this were all in the plan. Even as Kozlowski lowered her rifle, the turreted guns of the tank angled and aimed. A nanosecond later, they spoke, hurling a frenzied hail of fire at the enemy.
Kozlowski found her crosshairs, aligned them on the closest alien—a twisted thing with a burned or deformed forelimb—and squeezed off a charge.
The stream of fiery energy tore off its feet at what served as its kneecaps. The thing acted as though losing its limbs was an everyday affair. Slavering as though in anticipation of burying its secondary jaws in Kozlowski’s throat, the xeno raced onward.
The others let loose with their own weapons, only staggered beats behind Kozlowski and the tank.
The resulting fire tore the X’s apart. Arms and heads and deadly acid blood flew and splattered. Entrails blew across the street. One of the banana-shaped heads rolled toward them like a lobbed bomb.
Instinctively Kozlowski aimed and fired, crushing and rendering the thing a charred, fragmented skull.
She gave them a moment to play a little more fire at the things, just in case, and then ordered a cease.
The smoke slowly cleared, revealing the scattered, steaming remains of the bugs.
“What the hell was that?” said Michaels, taking in a hoarse breath, sweat now pouring down his temples.
Ultimately, as always, it was their trained reflexes that saved them. This kind of offensive action in midday hardly ever happened with the aliens.
Kozlowski shook her head. “Don’t know. These bugs… they’re getting weird.”
“Big sons of bitches,” muttered Sergeant Garcia, lifting his helmet to spit onto the street.
“Yes,” said Michaels. “Maybe we’d better send a robo in there.”
“Right? You think the Army’s going to waste good robots when they’ve got cheap soldiers?” Kozlowski snorted disgust, lifted her faceplate, hawked and spit out a gob of phlegm on one of the smoking bodies. “C’mon. These xenos have got something in there they don’t want us to have. Which makes me want it!”
Michaels nodded, but Alex detected a glint of fear in his eyes, of vulnerability and foreboding. A pang of empathy sprang inside her: the poor guy. Spiking the X’s wasn’t second nature to Peter Michaels. He hadn’t jammed his instinctive horror and terror of the things back into a rock-hard ball to use against them. For a moment she wanted to hold him. Hold him and tell him that it would be okay, that this was just a destructive game and when it was over, she’d soothe his hurts and make everything all right.
But she couldn’t. She was in charge here. She was the dominant, and she had to pretend she’d left her femininity back in the makeup case in the locker.
“All right, groaners. Pop ’em if you got ’em, and let’s get in there while their carapaces are around their ankles!”
A halfhearted cheer sounded in her earphones as she dialed out a pill for herself. One second, two seconds. Hold the nose, open the gums—look out, stomach, here it comes. She opened her mouth just in time to accept the dosage of Wail. Getting it intravenously was faster, but the designers of these suits hadn’t figured out how to safeguard soldiers from accidentally getting jammed with drug-filled needles.
Pills were just fine with Koz. She had an oral fixation anyway. She took lots of pills. Oodles. The higher-ups not only didn’t mind, they helped supply them. Yep, things were sure different in This Gal’s Army.
“All right, assholes. Let’s roll!”
Holding her gun at the ready, she waved them on and the mechanical pack kicked into motion again, heading for that door into X-land.
By the time they made it to the otherworldly entrance, the drugs had kicked in. Kozlowski felt a power, an elation—a sense of belonging and an Army urge to fuse her forces into a brilliant battering ram and crush out this threat to Earth. Primal territorial urges were tapped. She was the leader of a Neanderthal pack, guarding her tribe from saber-tooths. She was the head of a village on the English coast, guarding her kin from marauding Vikings, broadsword gleaming in the lightning. She was Gaia, guarding her precious brood from cosmic crawly interlopers.
The suited soldiers entered the hole into the bank building without incident. They continued down the tunnel. It was like a tube through a cancer. Noxious drippings oozed along the sides. X-holes always had an acrid, unnerving stench. Alex had already kicked in her filters.
“Looks like a normal hive to me,” said Michaels. “I hope this is a by-the-book.”
“Only these xenos want to be stars. I bet they’re all wearing sunglasses and sporting tans!” said Garcia.
“Well, this is the only take we’re going to have on this production,” said Alex, bringing up her rifle. “Lights, camera, action, guys.”
They came up to a narrower passage that dived downward.
“The tank won’t fit,” barked the machine’s operator into her ear.
“Yeah,” said Alex. “I figured as much. Okay, you stay here. Sentinel duty. The rest of us—we go down. Looks routine to me, but expect the unexpected anyway. Got it?”
“Yes, sir!” chimed the voices of the units cacophonously in her ear.
“Good. I want the short rangers out on the horn tip.”
Two men with Mark Five Crankers—the equivalent of high-tech sawed-off shotguns—trundled up to take the lead, and they were off to see the lizards.
Within twenty-five yards, the tunnel opened up into a large underground chamber—the remains of a huge vault basement, daubed with alien gunk.
“Gimme some light!” said Alex, and the guys obliged her by turning up their suit lanterns. The chamber blazed with incandescence, but as usual in these kinds of places, Alex Kozlowski wasn’t crazy about what she saw.
Against one of the tenebrous walls hung people.
Alien egg sacks.
Live people, impregnated with alien young. Chest-bursters that looked like they were about to blow at any minute. The victims—ten men, five women—hung at the edge of death, dangling like corpses that had forgotten to rot.
“Agents,” said Garcia.
“What?” said Kozlowski.
“Hollywood agents. That building got overrun by bugs last week down the road.” The dark-skinned man nodded toward the ropy remains. “The Creative Talent Agency, one of the diehards of the entertainment industry that stuck it out here in LA.” He walked forward to have a closer look, remaining cautious.
“Yeah. Yeah, I remember,” said Michaels. “Whole building blew up. The assumption was that everyone was killed.”
“Looks like they’re still making deals,” said Kozlowski.
One of the agents, a woman in a shredded dark black jumpsuit, her hair a mat of grease, slimy green threads clamped into her skull, seemed in some netherworld of delirium. She had on an ear-tab that sprouted artfully into a thin microphone, and she was mumbling dramatically into it.
Garcia stepped back into ranks, clucking his tongue. “Too far gone. All of them.”
Kozlowski nodded. She’d suspected as much. If you caught an egger early, you had a pretty good chance of squeezing out the spark of new life in it. But this far along, a baby xeno was so linked up in its parasitic position amid vital tissue that even if you were able to yank the X out without it boring a hole in you, there was no way you could save the donor.
Kozlowski knew what had to be done. There were precedents. She’d done it before, and would probably do it again. She was just following orders. Orders that made sense.
That didn’t mean that she liked it.
“Needles,” she whispered.
Three of the men were certified executioners in this kind of circumstance. They brought out their air pistols, tapped in cartridges of darts filled with a fast-acting poison that shut down the nervous system first, then destroyed the body. Two of the men had grim frowns as they aimed. The other man, Dickens, was an LA native. Dickens had been a writer and producer and actor in LA.
Dickens was grinning.
“Put the poor bastards out of their misery,” commanded Kozlowski.
Thwip! Thwip! Thwip!
Three of the hanging bodies shuddered, and then were still.
Quickly, the executioners finished their task, then stepped back. “Okay, quick—before the bursters hit their ejection buttons!” Kozlowski screamed.
Two men had readied themselves. They stepped forward. One sprayed a thick fluid on the bodies, stepped back. The other, with a high-density flamethrower, stepped forward and with fire condensed to incredibly high temperatures immolated the dangling egg sacks.
When the smoke cleared, all that was left was blackened, incinerated ashes.
“Good. Now let’s go slag the Xes that did this!” barked Kozlowski.
“Amen,” said Lieutenant Michaels, pale, with sweat shining on his brow.
* * *
Of course, they weren’t just here to slag xenos.
Nope, that would be too easy.
In this day and age, in a disintegrating place like the City of Angels, theoretically you could just slip a limited nuke down a nest and skedaddle. Easy, quick, and a minimum of lost soldiers. However, although that nuclear holocaust up in the Pacific Northwest years back had certainly turned the tide in the Alien-Earth War, giving humanity a hope of getting its planet back, such extreme measures weren’t used these days, for more reasons than just the glowing glands they tended to produce in neighboring villages.
No, these xenos had their uses these days.
And damn them for it.
“Okay. Fall out. The chamber’s probably down that tunnel there,” called Kozlowski. “Garcia?”
“You got it, sir,” said the grizzled vet. “These bugs haven’t changed that much, and this tunnel looks like the anteroom to where we’re headed. What I ain’t seen though is enough bugs. These hellhounds know we’re here. I don’t get why they didn’t try and protect their progeny. Something stinks.”
“Could be they’re out somewhere,” said Michaels. “Could be lots of things.”
Garcia grunted. “Yeah. Lots.”
“We’re here, we’ll do what we came to do, and second-guess later. We’ve got artillery guarding our asses, and we’ve got firepower. Now move it!” Kozlowski growled in a low, no-bullshit voice. She’d perfected it when she realized she had to order men around. Lowered voices worked well with dogs and human males.
The troop descended quickly but cautiously, illumination lamps picking out their direction for them down the foul, mucousy passageway.
Kozlowski would have liked these missions much better if she could just obliterate all the xenos. However, there were two things that the Army wanted her to haul out these days.
A couple of bug bodies, dead of course.
Random DNA samples.
And whatever royal jelly from the queen’s chambers they could tap. Gold from outer space, some of the top brass were calling it these days. Bug juice. The lab coats were going absolutely nuts with it, and there was talk about all kinds of new possible uses for the stuff. With the U. S. government pretty much busted, private industry had suddenly become the main financial backer for the armed forces. Drug companies, mostly, along with other medical and scientific researchers. The government wanted their share, of course, but when push came to shove, the interest groups holding the biggest bucks in their outstretched hands got the biggest shovelsful of goop.
Alien royal jelly.
The stuff that made the right land of drones into queens. Food of the xeno gods. Kozlowski wasn’t entirely sure what they needed it for. Hell, it could just be gab, and they were collecting the stuff for nothing. But it was what the upper brass told them to do, and so they did it, without questioning.
The scuttlebutt that she heard was this:
Each hive was based around a queen. Queens bred drones. However, only a certain kind of bug could breed queens—the so-called queen mother. None of which existed on Earth now. Rumor had it that it was the queen mother royal jelly that was the primo stuff. Regular jelly had its uses, but it was nothing compared to the Q-M gunk. In truth, though, Kozlowski had other more important things to think about. Like staying alive.
There were all kinds of differences between alien hives and insect hives on Earth. Scientists didn’t really understand the full activities of the beasties. Was their communication telepathic, or some weirder somatic buzz? It had already been established that the wavelengths of a queen’s call could be picked up by human dreamers. One of the best ways of scoping out obscure hive locations was listening to these sensitive dreamers who acted as receivers, and in the best circumstances as locators.
Just what did the monsters want? Where had they come from? What were they doing? Where were they going? What was their cosmic destiny?
Were they so grouchy because the race had gotten up on the wrong side of their galactic beds in some prehistoric starday?
Kozlowski had a theory.
They’d accidentally eaten all their males, and were on one hell of a PMS jag. The theory wasn’t exactly scientific, but it did explain a lot. Here were all these hysterical bugs, with no men to scream at.
Anyway, the core truth of what they were doing down here was the tanks in the cart that Private Henderson drove. Of course, to get to the jelly, you had to off the royalty first, and this was probably the most onerous task anybody could want in this kind of situation.
Corporal Michelin’s head snapped up from a radar set.
“Incoming!” he said. “Twenty-five yards ahead. Sensor range. Picking up five bogies, coming in at five klicks per hour. Same direction.”
Kozlowski was almost relieved. This dead silence was getting to her. “Okay, dig in, and I want a man with his weapon trained on the ceiling. Adams—you can shoot skeet. I’ve seen them break through and jump down from above. If they do that, I want ’em dead before they hit the ground.”
“Yes, sir!”
She didn’t have to notify the front or rear guards.
They were already down and dug in, ready for the attack. Kozlowski threw a beam of light down on the floor. Solid-looking enough, but she was ready if any of the bastards popped up from that direction. With bugs, you just didn’t know where they could pop from. They couldn’t teleport, that much was known. But for all of that, sometimes it seemed like they could. And the commanding officer who underestimated them usually ended up just as dead as her men…
Or worse.
In this case, though, what the sensors showed was all the hive was throwing at them.
Five bugs.
Plenty, though.
As soon as they scrabbled into view, the frontmost boys let loose a barrage of fire. Down here in the claustrophobic darkness, Kozlowski felt the familiar tug of total irrational fear. Trapped-in-a-coffin fear. Preternatural mammal-hiding-from-the-dinosaur fear. That was one of the unnerving intellectual aspects of the bugs. They seemed to have been designed specifically to grip those hard claws deep into the softest parts of your soul. And squeeze.
The bugs dodged the first bolts. Awareness of human weapons was either bred or trained into them by their maturity these days. These were Earth bugs and they were ready to scrap with Earth people.
However, the soldiers had also been trained, and better. Countless simulations gave them a sense of exactly where the things would hop in their erratic jumps.
A bolt hit one. The explosion shattered it, splattering its viscous blood over the whole corridor.
“Duck, dammit!” cried Kozlowski, hitting the dirt as the acid blood sprayed every which way The stuff could bore through the best armor if you got enough on you. She peered up through the smoke. The boys were still firing away, but crouched low and off to the side. “Knees and head!” she cried. “Knees and head.”
You hit the head, the things died with a minimum of acid splatter. You hit the knees, you had the bug on the ground and a good chance for the head.
Alex Kozlowski immediately saw that she was going to have a chance to show them. A bug minus a right arm had broken loose and was scampering along the side wall. Alex lifted her weapon and squeezed off two quick but carefully aimed shots. The first missed, exploding far away. But the second caught the left knee dead on, shattering the joint and causing the alien to go down.
Garcia’s next shot caught it right in its banana brain with a satisfying thud and soft ker-plow, like an M-80 in a gourd.
With this guidance, the boys calmed down and picked off the rest of the things. The fire boys cleaned up the wiggling jaws and claws with a dose of concentrated high temp, and then applied a splash of acid-neutralizing spray to get through.
Kozlowski allowed herself a smile. They’d killed lots of aliens already, without so much as a stubbed toe. “Good work, chums, but don’t get cocky. The toughest part is straight down there, in the general direction of hell.”
“Hey, don’t we know it!” said Michaels.
“Pretty dumb bunch of bugs, though,” said Garcia.
“They’re not exactly known for their high IQs,” said Kozlowski. “But then neither are grunts, so I don’t want any slackers. Move it! We’re not exactly in unfamiliar territory now.”
Chances were the xenos were about as ready as they could be for the attack, but that didn’t mean it was good for the men to rest on their laurels. Best to use the adrenaline and the other performance-augmenting drugs while they were peaking.
They traipsed over the dead, crackling things in the tunnel, trundling into the darkness.
The corridor widened, and their lamps illuminated a chamber.
In the center, like a giant flower bulb of chitinous flesh, grew the “throne”—the storage place for the royal jelly and home of the spawning queen.
Kozlowski had been in these places before. That didn’t mean she was used to them. The hole was like Death’s uterus, with hubs and cordings and odds and ends of effluvia that while biological seemed antilife. Every cell in her body rebelled at the sight presented here. Training and experience and resolve fought with a deep instinct in her to turn and run.
A bent, insane frieze of alien sculpture, a mockery of life.
Otherwise the chamber was empty.
“What the hell?” said Michaels. “Where are they?”
Garcia looked like if he hadn’t had a helmet, he would have very much liked to have scratched his head. “I don’t understand. Where’s the freakin’ queen?”
“Off at the Hollywood high spots?” quipped a jokester.
“I don’t like it,” said Kozlowski. “Get back. The queen doesn’t leave her chamber unless there’s a damned good reason.”
Michaels shook his head. “Look. We’ve got a pot full of royal jelly waiting to be tapped. Half the time, the stuff gets blown up or burnt.” He grabbed a tapper and started walking toward the bulb. “I say let’s get this stuff tanked right now and we’re assured a good supply, no matter if we take out these bugs or not!”
“Michaels! Halt!” screeched Kozlowski. “I’m not certain that junk is all that valuable. It’s certainly not worth the extra risk. You’re not going anywhere—and that’s an order.”
Michaels stopped in his tracks. He turned around, his eyes flaming. Kozlowski could see the drugs in those eyes, and the male pride. Don’t do this to me, Koz, said those eyes. Don’t be so damned protective.
“Yeah! Lover boy might get himself a boo-boo!” said a veiled voice in baby talk.
“What have you got on the sensors?” Kozlowski demanded.
The private looked up from the telltale board. “Activity, but nothing close.”
“Come on, Captain. I could have started tapping by now!”
“Yeah. We get our quota, we get extra leave!”
She didn’t like it. Not one bit. But there wasn’t any good reason to say no. And if she didn’t let Michaels do this, the other jerks here would call favoritism, and she couldn’t deny that.
“Okay, but I want the rest of you to back him up. And, Daniels… you go along.”
“No problem,” said the tough Army man.
Damn it, Peter. Why are you doing this to me?
“The rest of you. Fan out and check for other exits.”
The men, grateful for action, spread out.
“What do you think, Garcia?” she asked the sergeant as Lt. Michaels strode for the huge bulb.
“I don’t know, sir. It’s not like the bugs to leave their jelly unguarded.”
The soldier walking off to one side looked up from his instruments. “Sir! I’m reading lower rooms. They’re chambers, sir, and just as big as—”
The lieutenant was just driving in the tap, connected to a couple of storage tanks. Daniels had slung his rifle in order to help with the tricky manipulation.
It came to her like thunder.
This wasn’t the main chamber. And if it wasn’t what they were really after, then it was a—
“Michaels! Daniels!” screamed Kozlowski. “Get away from—”
Trap!
The bulb split open like a pregnant belly. And the baby was deadly as death itself.
“Jesus!” cried Daniels, leaping back, pulling his rifle down.
The emerging bug struck with the speed that still was astonishing to see, even though Kozlowski had seen it many times before. It grabbed Lieutenant Michaels by the arms and pulled him up.
It had been hiding inside. The alien was just waiting for them to tap.
Michaels screamed as he was hoisted upward in the claws. The secondary jaws, slathering drool, rammed against the reinforced helmet, cracking it.
Michaels screamed again.
Automatically Daniels fired his rifle.
Only yards away, the shell hit its mark. The mark, though, was the torso of the beast. A gory hunk of creature was torn away, and like a burst vessel, alien blood pumped.
The secondary jaw whacked into Michaels’s helmet again, cutting a hole before the thing began to crumple. Michaels fell under it, and Kozlowski, helpless, watched as the alien blood spouted into the interior of her lover’s helmet.
Directly into his face.
The scream ratcheted through the radio, until the radio was killed. It seemed to grow louder and more horrible carried only by the fetid air.
The acid worked with amazing quickness upon the face. It was as though she were watching time-lapse photography. The skin sizzled off, snapping with gooey bubbles. The eyes boiled and melted.
The screaming stopped.
The skull began showing and then the acid began to eat through that, frying Lieutenant Peter Michaels’s brain.
“Nooooooo!” cried Kozlowski. She grabbed up her rifle and was about to riddle the beast with slugs.
A hand on her suit’s shoulder stopped her. Garcia. “Don’t. You’re in charge her, Captain. Stay in charge.”
The alien slumped, twitching.
The burnt remains of her lover mixed into a liquid, unholy embrace.
“Check on him,” she said tersely.
If only I hadn’t let him go. I knew there was something wrong!
“He’s gone.”
“I said check on him!” she bellowed. “If he’s not, I don’t want him to suffer!”
Garcia nodded. He stepped over to the bodies, gingerly nudged the lieutenant with the butt of his rifle.
Acid mixed with smoking gore rivuleted out into a horrible puddle.
It burned straight through the floor, leaving a ragged, smoking hole.
“Dead.”
“Right,” said Kozlowski. She could feel the iron grip of control exert itself and she was in command again. “There’s another chamber, and that’s where we’re going. No more heroics, you assholes.” She took a breath. “No more carelessness. Or I swear to God, if the bugs don’t kill you, I will.”
The silent squad followed the telltale to their destination.
Lieutenant Alexandra Kozlowski tongued for another pill. She swallowed it and her tears.
2
THREE YEARS LATER — BAGHDAD, IRAQ
Victory.
The smell of it was in the air, alongside the fading stench of the ruins of war.
Victory.
Domination.
Excellence.
He could feel the demand for it throbbing in his sinews, pulsing in his veins. He could feel the need in the stadium crowd outside, the impatient stamping of their feet, their calls and their applause. Its power and its glory electrified the air.
Now it was time to electrify some nerves. Goose some synapses. Nudge some neurons.
Jack Oriander stood in the shadows of the tunnel. Outside, his fellow contestants milled around, waiting for the officials to call for the beginning of the hundred-yard dash. He felt more secure here, away from the open space. He was slightly agoraphobic; anyway, that was what his dad had said. He wasn’t so sure about that himself, since he didn’t really have a fear of being outside. He just preferred walls around him.
Pop was dead now. He’d been a captain in the Alien-Earth War, and he was dead now. The Army had not supplied the details, nor did the Oriander family want details. Not when it came to the aliens.
Jack Oriander took a sip of cold water from a paper cup, swished it in his mouth, and spat it out. The Middle Eastern sun was hot out there. Jack wanted his mouth wet, but he didn’t want his stomach bloated. He had his sunblocker lotion on, and he’d taken care to drink lots of fluids yesterday and today as well as “carbing up” for the contest. At twenty years old, he was in absolutely peak condition. His muscles, trained and corn-fed in Iowa, sang with health and speed and proportion. He’d run track and field in junior high and high school and now college at Iowa U, now that these kinds of things were getting back on track. The Earth had lost some time—and so had Jack, because of the war and reconstruction. But time didn’t mean that much when you were young. There seemed lots of it behind you and lots of it ahead of you. Even though you saw people older than you with bald heads and paunches and lines around their eyes, the idea that you’d be like that one day seemed absurd.
“Win today, grow old tomorrow,” Coach Donnell had said, his eyes glaring down like lasers into Jack. “We’re counting on you, Jack, to put us on the map.” That’s what the graying, grizzled man said every day of the training.
He got his message across in more ways than one.
The tension in the air was thick. Jack’s nerves seemed stretched as tight as violin strings. He knew that if he was going to get some help, he’d have to get it now. Around his waist was a light flesh-colored belt of synthetic material. Jack de-Velcroed a pouch, pulled out a small bottle. A fresh one. Best if fresh, his mom had always said, and though Jack wasn’t sure if that applied to this stuff, his obsessive-compulsive nature made him use a fresh bottle even though there was a half-full one in his luggage.
Jack cracked open the safety seal and knocked out a pill.
Hell, why not?
He rattled out another one into his palm, then quickly screwed the top back on and stuffed it back into the pouch, readjusted his oversize shirt, tucking it into the elasticized top of his shorts.
He looked down at the capsules. They were a deep green, seemingly embedded with silver sparkles.
For a moment he heard the old man’s voice at the back of his head. “Take it from me, Jack. You’ve got all the drugs you really need in you already. Learn to tap those first before you go for other ones.” But he discounted it as he’d always done, listening to the voice of the coach instead. “Tell you what, Jack. You do what you got to do to win.”
Jack slipped both capsules between his lips. He took the paper cup and used the small amount of water left to wash them down. Not too much. Didn’t want to get too much moisture inside of him. Balance. That was the ticket. The old man was always keen on balance. Yin and yang. Now the old man was dead. So if what Jack swallowed tipped the scales a little to his favor, what did it matter?
Xeno-Zip.
Street name: Fire.
From Neo-Pharm.
Great stuff.
He’d been taking Fire ever since it first came out. He’d asked the coach about it and the guy had taken a few seconds to read the label. ALL NATURAL INGREDIENTS. That was okay with the coach, just as long as there weren’t any steroids in the mix. Not that the man had anything against steroids himself. Anything that could give you that extra edge was really okay by him. Judging committees were a lot more laissez-faire these days.
Besides, it wasn’t any worse than a couple of extra cups of coffee in the morning. That’s what the ads implied, anyway.
He hadn’t looked into it very closely. Jack immediately noticed that not only was he more alert and self-confident after swallowing one, his athletic abilities improved. Concentration, agility, coordination: all jumped into higher levels. Not only that, he felt better. Fire gave a little more zing, a little more oomph.
The official line was that they made the stuff from alien queen mother royal jelly.
Rumor had it that they used ground-up alien bodies from the war.
Jack didn’t care. He liked the stuff. The glow that it put on life’s horizons was just the icing. What Jack liked was the edge it gave him in sports.
Jack waited for the glow to start, listening to the sounds outside, peeking into the light, shading his eyes.
The stadium was a spectacular tribute to the reconstruction of Earth, a wonder spawn of new technology and architecture. Lots of companies had tossed in contributions to build the thing, and not just demicreds. Big coin. A tubular confluence of lines and efficiency, of new and mighty alloys, centered around a traditional field. Wedding of the new and the old. Blimps and zeppelinlike hovercars hung in the sky, bristling with tracking devices and media sensor arrays. Field Humanitas was the name, and these competitions in which Jack Oriander participated had been dubbed the Goodwill Games.
Now that the Olympics had been destroyed, along with much of old Earth, you had to start with something, after all. Something to unite people, something to celebrate the New Humanity, something to take civilized minds off the savage past.
A sweeter conflict among nations.
A good-natured competition among athletes.
Jack Oriander leaned out into the sun a bit. He could smell the familiar humanity out there. He smelled the popcorn and the hot dogs, the spilled beer and the excitement in the air. He intended to be the center of that excitement now, yes, sirree bob.
He felt a lick of the drug playing around his nerves, and blinked.
Ah!
“Yo! Oreo! You want to get your ass out here!” called Fred Staton. Staton was the other guy from the States. He was clean-cut and slender like Oriander, only he had neatly clipped blond hair instead of black, with no widow’s peak. A strapping young man. As Oriander’s senses sharpened, squeezed into a fine focus by the tongues of fire, he smelled his friend’s lemony deodorant and the talc on his hands. Caught a wisp of grape jam from today’s breakfast, along with the astringent touch of Gatorade. “We’re just about set to line up!”
“Uh… yeah, right.”
“Hey, man. You okay?”
“Sure. Why?”
“I dunno. Your eyes… they’re a little odd.”
“This sun… it’s kind of getting to me. That’s why I’m staying in the shade as long as possible.”
“And your hands. They’re trembling some.”
Oriander lifted his hands. He fancied he could feel special blood pouring into them now. Fiery blood.
But they’d never shaken before on Fire.
“Man, I just guess I’m a little nervous!”
“Aren’t we all.”
“I’ll be fine. Just give me a sec.”
“Sure. But seconds aren’t mine to give. And those officials arc oiling up their guns.” He slapped his friend on the shoulder. “You’ll be fine. Take a deep breath. You’re only a few feet away from a hundred yards.” He snapped his fingers. “It’ll be all over like that and we’ll go out and celebrate, huh?”
“Yeah. Right.” Jack grinned.
Fred was right. He should move on out. He could see the milling racers not just lining up, but slotting themselves in their starting posts.
Yet the sun was not only hot, it looked terribly bright now, much too bright. Fire had never sharpened his vision up this much before. He felt like he had just been blessed with telescopic sight. Such incredible detail!
Maybe he shouldn’t have taken two pills after all.
Squaring his shoulders, pushing back the razory feeling along his spine, Jack Oriander trotted out to assume his position.
As he slotted himself in line, he got the A-OK signal from Fred. “C’mon, Oreo. Let’s show them that American sneakers can still kick butt.”
Jack smiled and waved. He fitted his feet into the metal stirrups, leaned down onto his knuckles. A buzzing began to keen in his ear, like an amp feeding back. He cocked his ear, waiting for the starting pistol. The finish line loomed ahead like a magnificent promise.
Glory. Achievement.
Winning.
The crowd noise died down to a hush.
But the keening in his ear grew to a roar.
What was—
The chemical rush hit Jack Oriander like the hammer of Thor. Molten energy poured into his muscles and lightning exploded from his brain.
The signal pistol went off, and his legs answered as though they’d been waiting for this moment their entire life. They pushed him forward, shooting him off like a bullet down a rifle chamber. Suddenly he wasn’t just Jack anymore. He could feel the atoms exploding in his sinews, he could feel a cosmic power gushing through his entire being.
He was a god!
The crowd went crazy.
The PA system rumbled with the announcer’s astonishment. “Unbelievable! Jack Oriander of the USA is literally burning up the track!”
His face had grown a rictus of determination and sweat burst from his brow in rivuleting globules. His feet seemed to have grown wings. The air rushed past him like a wild river and the determination to win inside his breast burst into white-hot brilliance.
The yards streamed by in a flash.
Jack Oriander crossed over the finish line, well ahead of the others, his feet a blur and his mind hot as an incandescent filament in a megawatt bulb.
And Jack Oriander kept on going.
* * *
The crowd in the stadium and the millions watching the race would never forget the close-ups.
Jack Oriander’s arms pumping.
His legs slamming onto the turf outside the track like John Henry’s sledgehammers.
His eyes gazing into madness.
The young athlete from Iowa did not seem satisfied in shaving off a solid four seconds from the world record for the one-hundred-yard dash. As though eager to get on to yet another race, unseen by any but him, he loped over the finish line, covering the distance between the edge of the track and the wall in a couple of blinks of the eye, reason and sanity burned out in chemical conflagration in his cortex.
He smashed through the corrugated plastic of the wall.
Only the steel girder just beyond stopped his demented run.
And the blood…
The blood was everywhere.
You can buy black market videos from media vultures. You can see shreds of skin and veins and hair torn from the speeding body and hanging from the edges of the shattered plastic wall in clumps of gore. You can see the twisted remains of the rest of the body, lying akimbo under the harsh glare like road kill in a cleated tank run.
And, if you look closely in these tapes, you can see the medic take something from Oriander’s blood-spattered pouch belt, and tuck it into his own pocket.
Xeno-Zip.
3
The sun shone down gently and pleasantly on Quantico Marine Base, Virginia. It wasn’t often these days you got sun, not with some of the clouds that still hung in the atmosphere, not with the strange weather since the invasion. Colonel Leon Marshall had his drapes flung wide to let the warmth into his office.
He sat at his desk now, the report printout neatly encased in clear mylar before him. He glanced over the neatly listed facts and figures and smiled to himself, feeling a pleasant rush of anticipation.
Amazing.
Absolutely astonishing.
Puissance to the formerly powerless, power to the formerly impotent, is heady stuff indeed, and the close-cropped, burly colonel was feeling positively giddy with the prospects that lay before him.
The digital clock on his desk turned silently to 11:00 A.M. The general was a prompt man. He’d be here any moment. Colonel Leon Marshall had been preparing his demonstration since seven hundred hours this morning, and all was ready to go. Now he could afford to take a quick breather, relax and enjoy the prospects that lay before him, his career and, of course, the future of this battered country in its efforts to build a strong defense even as it rebuilt its cities and its economy.
The digital clock was just threatening to transmute to another number when his intercom chimed softly and the adenoidal voice of his secretary swept through.
“Colonel. General Burroughs is here.”
“Excellent.” Colonel Marshall slapped his desk and its thin burden lightly and stood up. “Send him in.”
The door cycled open with a whir and the burly figure of General Delmore Burroughs marched in, his eyes turreting like offensive guns on a land carrier. They lighted on Marshall and a flicker of camaraderie shone in them below the grim and businesslike exterior. “Leon.” Pudgy fingers were extended. The general’s grip was certain and firm.
“General Burroughs. Thank you so much for coming.”
“I believe the words ‘urgent’ and ‘maximum importance’ were used in your communication, Colonel. I tend to respond to those words. But I am a busy man.” The eyes turned stony. “I hope that my time here is not misspent.”
General Delmore Burroughs was a beefy black man with a bald pate rising up from grayed temples. He had a broad nose and a voice deep and full. He smelled strongly of bay rum and the Instistarch of his uniform. He was a general who had gotten where he’d gotten by taking no shit, and Marshall respected that. If he was a person who trifled with such things as mottos, then this general’s motto would have been “The ends justify the means.” That was why Colonel Marshall needed to get him in on the project.
“I’m not a man to waste time, you know that,” said Marshall. “Tell you what—you think it’s a waste of time, you get to use my ski chalet in Vermont for a weekend… complete with my little black book.”
The general’s eyes glimmered a bit. A hint of a smile played on his lips. Then his teeth clamped down, his face assumed its normal grim posture. “Fair enough.”
“Good. Then lean back, drink some Kona, and have a cigar. This will take a couple of minutes and I might as well kiss your butt awhile as well.”
The general couldn’t help but chuckle. “Cigars? Where you getting cigars, Colonel?” He sat down.
Marshall stuck a cup of steaming Java beside the general’s elbow. Then he pulled out a humidor from one of the drawers. Smith y Ortegas. “They’re just swinging into production again, and my sources dug up the best of the first batch.”
The general rolled it, sniffing. “You know, soldier. It’s been so long since I’ve had one of these, this might just kill me with pleasure.” He chuckled and took up the clipper Marshall offered, dealt with the cigar end in an almost reverent fashion. “Now exactly what have you got on that scheming mind of yours?” He stuck the cigar in his mouth and allowed Marshall to play a flame over the end. He puffed, blew out bluish smoke. His eyes seemed to roll back with pleasure.
“General, do you recall that unfortunate incident last week with the Iowa boy at the Goodwill Games?”
“Sure. Put the world record in the American camp firmly. Probably for years to come.” Puff. Spume. “Too bad about the accident.”
“Colonel, did you know that drugs were involved?”
“Nonsense. Good American talent and muscle pulled that boy over the line.”
“You didn’t read the results of the autopsy? Oriander had Xeno-Zip in his blood.”
“Xeno-Zip? Fire? What, that silly pick-me-up they’re putting in the stores now? Marshall, he probably had caffeine and lots of good old-fashioned testosterone, too. Ain’t nothing that great about those pills. Hell, I tried a couple. Goosed me a bit is all, but with no crash and burn. Nothing that would make me win a race!”
“That’s exactly what everyone says. But I did a quick search of news cuts for the last couple of months. And then I had the boys at biochem do some quick testing. Came up with some remarkable findings.”
He gave the general a moment to exhale his last puff of smoke, and then he tendered the plastic-enclosed paper to the man. General Burroughs grunted. He murmured a whiff of annoyance, and then dug into a side pocket for a pair of half-frame spectacles, which he put on. His eyes strafed the paper for several moments, then he shrugged and handed it back to Marshall.
“I’ve got a team of science boys to read this stuff for me and digest it. I don’t get much out of it on my own, I’m afraid.”
“That’s all right, General. I had to have most of it explained to me. Just a few items of jargon, some facts and figures to illustrate the fact that I’ve done some serious work on this.”
“Right, Colonel. I believe you, but I still don’t see where you’re coming from.” The general tapped off some ash from the cigar, then left the smoking thing sitting in the tray. He folded his arms. A sure sign of impatience. Time to cut to the chase.
“You’re aware of the active ingredient of Fire, aren’t you, General?”
“Sure. The PR is that it’s alien royal jelly. Actually, there’s more to it than that. It’s alien royal jelly, with a drop or two of queen mother extra royal jelly. All that comes from one source, the queen mother who got nuked. Can’t get it anywhere else. A minuscule amount of this mixture acts in a positive boosting fashion on the human nervous system.” The cigar remained in the tray. It went out. The general ignored it.
“Correct. However, even with a minuscule amount, Neo-Pharm, the manufacturer, found itself running out of the regular jelly. They started manufacturing synthesized stuff, with mixed results. It still needs a few molecules of queen mother royal jelly to work, though.”
The general grinned. “Right. I’m not surprised they’re running out of jelly. We blew most of the bug bastards straight to hive hell!”
“Absolutely and we did a fine job of it, too—and a better job of reconstructing. But that leaves us, as the military, in a bit of a quandary, doesn’t it? And I don’t have to give you a sheet of facts and figures to prove it. The enemy is mostly defeated, all the governmental money is pouring into rebuilding or into outer space. Now that the military’s done its job, it’s the same old story. No respect. We get squat in the way of money to develop what we have to develop to stay modern.”
The gray eyes sparked with anger. It was a sore subject with all career military sorts. The general had taken the bait. Now all Marshall had to do was to reel him in.
“Public sentiment is also very antiwar machine. I think it’s a historical distrust of power. The media tends to think that if the military has too much resources in a time of peace, they get antsy and take over the government. So the other extreme occurs. The military gets weak. And so when the country needs us, we get thrown into the fray, unprepared… and get clobbered. That’s provable history, General.”
The general nodded, anger etched into his face. He picked up the cigar, stuck it into his mouth. Marshall happily relit it for him.
“What can we do about it? We’re not getting the funds to build new and improved equipment. So… why not build a new and improved soldier?”
General Burroughs squinted suspiciously. “What? Synthetics? Cybernetic? DNA jobs? That costs a pretty cred, too, Marshall.”
The old boy wasn’t following the line of reasoning. That was one thing about Burroughs, he was a little thick sometimes, a little bullish. But like a bull, if you pointed him in the right direction, all you had to do was grab the tail and he’d take you where you wanted to go. That was why Marshall had cooked up his little exhibition. In show-and-tell, the “show” carried the greatest weight.
Marshall smiled. “How about if you could do it for just a few bucks a head, General?”
General Burroughs barked a growly laugh. “Pull the other one, Colonel.” He pushed out a stream of smoke and palpable disbelief.
Marshall checked his wrist chronometer. The players in the game would be just about ready. “General, if you’d care to step out on my balcony, there’s a little demonstration I’d very much like to show you, courtesy of some of the men in my company.”
Burroughs shrugged. “I’m here. I’ve smoked your cigar. I’ve listened to your curious nonsense. And I must say, you must have used some of the government money I’m responsible for to throw together this bit of research. So I guess you’ve put me into a position where I don’t have much of a choice in the matter.” He took out the smoking cigar and pointed it gruffly toward the colonel’s nose. “But let me tell you, Colonel. I’d better see some serious justification for the use of this taxpayer’s money.”
“Naturally, sir.” Marshall got up and marched over to a side wall, hung tastefully with mementos, weapons, and equipment. He pulled out two pairs of electronically enhanced binoculars from rechargers and handed one to the general. Then he pointed toward the sliding glass doors and the open spaces beyond.
“Come on, General. Wait till you get a gander at this.”
* * *
The “balcony” was actually an extension of a catwalk and stairs system that connected a number of buildings in the newly built assembly of offices, barracks, and warehouses that comprised this portion of Quantico.
Beyond, a bank of obsidian-bottomed clouds hung on the horizon. A storm was brewing. Nothing unusual on Earth now, storms. Marshall shivered a bit at the prospect. They moved fast, those storms. Dark battalions of weather, phantom marchers left behind after the war. But there would be time for the exhibition.
Marshall picked up a walkie-talkie from the desk.
The two officers walked to the edge of the balcony. Marshall leaned against the railing and pointed down at the open yard below. Some yards away, a group of enlisted men seemed to be milling about, up to nothing much more than loitering.
The general glowered. “Looks like a bunch of men goofing off!”
“If you’ll just direct your binocs toward that lone private over there in the corner, sir…”
General Burroughs harrumphed. But he angled the cigar off to one side of his mouth and put the binoculars up, finger expertly adjusting the focusing vernier. “Looks like just a normal grunt. And a mighty doofy one, come to think of it.”
Marshall brought up his glasses and took a look. Yes, there he was, the poor guy, looking a little lost and oblivious as usual. Gawky. Geeky. Big Adam’s apple, tiny brain. Colonel Marshall was a collector of mid-twentieth-century cultural remnants and he remembered one of Edgar Bergen’s puppets. That was who the guy reminded him of.
Mortimer Snerd.
