Ukiah - Alien Taste Part 26

It was a numb, unreadable question.

Ukiah floundered for an answer. Putting on the T-shirt had been some gut action he hadn't thought out. "I don't know. I missed you. I was so lost and alone. Maybe, wearing my tracking shirt was as close as I could get to having you with me.""Oh h.e.l.l, get up."

Ukiah got up slowly, unsure of what was coming next.

Max startled him by pulling him into a rough hug that went on and on. "You saw me and joy went across your face. There's no other word for it. And I thought, 'That was Ukiah's true smile, his true eyes filled with happiness. This is Ukiah.' But I knew it couldn't be you. Oh kid, you were hard and cold when I got to Kittanning. You had to be one of the fakes, only better than the others."

Ukiah laughed into Max's shoulder with pure relief. "It's me. It's me."

"The more you talked, the more I knew it had to be really you. You could never talk your way out of a paper bag. Oh kid, I missed you. Don't you ever pull this dying s.h.i.t on me again."

Ukiah shook his head. "No, I don't want to do that again."

Max let him go, sobering. "I'm serious, Ukiah. I never want to see you lying dead again. It was like my wife all over again, only worse. I had months to brace myself to see her and it was awful." He looked away, shaking his head.

It certainly was his Max. Ukiah caught his arm, flipped it palm up, and pushed the torn sleeve up to his elbow. An angry puncture mark scarred Max's forearm. "Why aren't you dead-or worse?"

Max laid a rough palm on Ukiah's cheek. "Because the answer to the question 'would you ever hurt me?' is an emphatic no, not even on the viral level. They shot me full of your blood and left me to change. I thought I was dead, one way or another. Then, out of the wound crawled this black worm, thin as a hair and slimy. It had to be the weirdest, grossest thing that ever happened to me. I really just wanted to rip it out of me, but it was already coming out, and I was afraid I'd break it off inside me. It took forever for all of it to crawl out, and then it turned into this." Max reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a sickly runt of a mouse by the scruff of its neck. "Even the littlest part of you recognized me and refused to hurt me."

Ukiah accepted back the memory with great relief. "Oh thank G.o.d. I didn't think I could live with myself if they made you my Get." He closed his hands about the mouse and reabsorbed it. "Come on, let's get the h.e.l.l out of here."

On the edge of his hearing, he suddenly caught a thin wail of misery. It was underscored by a weird, stabbing ghost pain. It was as if part of him was standing far away, lost, frightened, and hurt. The feeling pulled at him, a desperate needing. "What is that? Did you hear that?"

Max paused, listening intently. The wail came again and he nodded. "It sounds like someone in pain."

They looked at each other, and knew that they couldn't leave without finding the person. They moved down the corridor, counting up the gate numbers. The cry came infrequently but grew louder, clearer. It was the wail of a baby. Toward the end, Ukiah found himself all but running toward it, unable to resist the pull.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Max warned quietly behind him.

The corridor ended in a huge round room, an arc of departure gates. Just before the corridor opened into the sun-filled room there was a set of rest rooms. Ukiah followed the sound into the men's room.

When he pushed open the door, a stench hit him, making him gag. Balanced on a row of sinks sat a battered Quaker Oil box. A newborn infant had been left naked inside, untended for a long period of time.

The infant had fouled itself many times and the smell was overpowering. The baby boy shook its tiny fists and wailed with hunger. There were no baby supplies in sight: no bottles, clothes, blankets, cans of formula, or diapers. There was just the battered Quaker Oil box and the baby.

"Oh, poor thing," Ukiah crooned, gathering the infant up, trying to ignore the mess. The baby quieted immediately, looking at him with huge black eyes. Coming from it was the pure oneness, the senseof "This is right" that Ukiah had felt dozens of times over the last few days, only from tiny little mice.

"Oh, G.o.d, no!"

Max spun from the door he had been guarding. "What is it?"

"This is me, Max. This baby is me."

"What?"

"They took one of my memories, Max, and made a copy of me. This is me."

"Oh, Jesus Christ on a donkey," Max swore. "Well, regardless if it's you or someone else, we can't leave it here with these monsters. Clean him up a little and let's get out of here."

Amazing, the sinks had running water. The Ontongard apparently had reconnected this rest room.

Ukiah ran the water, hoping it would get warm, but it didn't. "This is going to be cold, little one, but you need to be quiet, okay?"

The baby regarded him seriously and accepted the chilly bath with grace. There were no diaper sores that Ukiah had expected from such filth, until he remembered that this was a Pack baby. He took off his shirt and wrapped the now shivering child in it. Hunger came from the infant with alarming intensity.

"Max, do you have a candy bar or anything?"

"Ukiah, it's a baby. They drink milk and maybe some cereal. You should know that after Cally."

"It's a Pack baby, Max. I think it will digest about anything you put into it."

Max slipped out a Snicker's bar and threw it across the room to Ukiah. "Well, he's welcome to it.

Watch he doesn't choke on the nuts."

Ukiah cut the candy bar up with his Swiss army knife, paring off the chocolate layer, and fed the slivers to the infant. Slowly the intense hunger abated.

Why, though, was he worrying about the baby? It had been just a splash of his blood three days ago. It was a mouse, just changed slightly, and larger. It was him, operated remotely. It was-a baby. He lifted it to his shoulder and it nuzzled into him. With a sigh of contentment, it fell into trusting sleep.

"Come on, kid, let's get out of here. I hate to remind you, but if the Ontongard get hold of you, they can make hundreds of those babies."

So they ran. Ahead came the sounds of gunfire. Sporadic at first, then building. Max caught Ukiah's arm and they stopped.

Panting, Max glanced back the way they had come and toward the growing gunfight. "We don't want to get in the middle of that."

Ukiah pointed down the corridor past the escalator. "We could stay on the main level and go out past check-in."

Max shook his head. "If their main stronghold wasn't downstairs or down this wing, then it's back toward check-in. At this old terminal, they had foot traffic bottleneck through security just beyond the escalator. People flying out would check their bags and then go through security. People flying in would go down the escalator and pick up baggage, rent cars, and such, without having to pa.s.s through the security check area."

In other words, there was only one way out past check-in, and that was most likely where the Ontongard were.

"Let's try these doors," Ukiah suggested.Each waiting area had four sets of doors. Through the filthy windows, it was clear that the doors opened into midair, some thirty feet or so from the ground. Once upon a time, umbilical corridors connected the doors to jumbo jets. Now the heavy steel doors were locked tight.

"d.a.m.n," Max swore at the last door as it too proved to be locked. "We don't have time to sit and try to pick the lock." Only in the movies could a lock be picked in mere seconds. The gunfire grew louder.

With a growl of anger, Max picked up a chair and flung it at a window. The chair bounced harmlessly off with a loud hollow thunk. Max swore, pulled out the Sauer and emptied it into the window. Nine tiny thumb-sized stars appeared in the gla.s.s.

"Oh, give me a break," Max moaned.

"Someone's coming." Ukiah shifted the baby on his shoulder to draw his Colt.

Someone was running, light and quick, through the slats of light. It was Rennie, carrying a shotgun and bleeding from a thigh wound.

"Cub!" Rennie called as he spotted Ukiah. "You've got luck a mile long and whisker thin. I see you found your partner. I don't suppose you found the d.a.m.n remote key too?"

"Of course I found it. It's what I do."

"It's what he's good at," Max added.

"Yes! We'll win this one yet." Rennie glanced at Ukiah again, eyes narrowing as he took in the sleeping baby on Ukiah's shoulder. "What is this?"

Ukiah flinched back as the Pack leader reached out for the child. "It's mine."

"I won't hurt the babe," Rennie promised quietly. "Let me see him."

Reluctantly, Ukiah handed the infant over.

Rennie took his Memory gently. "It's been such a long time since I held a baby. Not since Bear blew himself up. It's an awe-inspiring thing, to see the smallness that will one day be a tall strong man. Look how tiny his hands are! Surely in a baby, you can see the face of G.o.d."

"Ukiah thinks the baby is his," Max ventured.

Rennie gave a short laugh. "Oh, it's the Cub's. Even if you can't smell the Cub's scent or sense his blood in the child, surely you can see the Cub in the baby's eyes and hair. The Ontongard must have tortured the Cub's Memory and then stuffed it well to grow it so quickly."

"Tortured?" Ukiah claimed back the infant. "What do you mean by that?"

"We age fairly slowly, Cub, except when we're hurt. Our cells are forced to divide quickly and recklessly in order to heal the body. With the deterioration in the quality of the cell copies, we age. For the Ontongard to get a mouse to grow to this size in three days, they would have had to hurt it over and over again, providing it with all the food it could eat."

Ukiah laid a protective hand on the baby's head. "They weren't taking very good care of it when we found him."

Rennie shrugged. "It's a Pack baby. It will survive just about anything. The Ontongard could afford to neglect it when other projects took precedence. Well, finders keepers, losers weepers." He chuckled happily. "Nip that little breeding project in the bud. Provided, of course, we get you three out of here."

"We can go back the way you-" Ukiah started but his sentence was clipped short by an explosion deep in the belly of the terminal.

"Nope," Rennie stated cheerfully as dust swirled around him. "No can do."

"You blew up the way out?" Max gasped."We plan on blowing up the whole place. That was just the start. We were sure that the Ontongard had the key, so our only hope was to stop the Rover. The Ontongard are controlling the Rover from here, so we're going to blow up everything."

With logic like that, Ukiah thought, no wonder the FBI had all the Pack members on their most wanted list.

Rennie glanced at him. The Ontongard outnumber us ten to one. It's unlikely we'll win today, but there's a chance we'll do enough damage as we go down that we'll stop them for now.

Ukiah blushed and looked away. The other Pack members came straggling in. They were splattered with Ontongard blood, and sported dozens of bullet holes and shoulder-riding mice themselves.

Mixed in with Dog Warriors were men and women he recognized only from Rennie's memories. h.e.l.l Hounds. Wild Wolves. Devil Dogs. Not all five gangs, not all members of four present. Where are the others?

We couldn't reach the Demon Curs, Rennie answered him. Some were too scattered around Pittsburgh to show up in time. Two have fallen already.

"Well," Bear drawled, "they know we're here."

"Most of Pittsburgh knows you're here," Max commented.

The Pack laughed at him, reloading guns and patching wounds.

"Stay here," Rennie ordered Ukiah and Max. "We'll go ahead and see if we can slip you out before we level the place. And, Cub, break the d.a.m.n key."

Bear took off, running off into the darkness, and the others followed with practiced grace.

Ukiah handed the baby off to Max and dug the key out of his pocket. He spent several minutes trying to snap it in two, or even bend it. He laid it on the floor and beat at it with a chair. It didn't bend, break, or scratch. Nothing in Pack memory said it was indestructible, but also there was nothing saying it was easily breakable either. It seemed, in fact, designed to be somewhat idiot-proof and thus very durable.

He eyed it. It would have been so much easier if Prime had just broken the remote key so long ago.

Why hadn't he?

Of course, there was no answer-or more correctly, the answer was lost along with ma.s.sive amounts of Prime's blood.

Ukiah tried for information in another manner. Had Prime access to the key after they came to Earth?

Yes, there was one clear memory of Prime casually picking it up, as he reminded Hex that the directives were clear: in case of emergencies, a breeding program was the first thing to establish.

Prime was guarding his thoughts from Hex, and thus his plan was unknown to his children. The breeding program had been a distraction, because he went off to sabotage the Ovipositor. So the real plan must have been to send Hex away, so Prime could play with the remote key. If he was bothering with the key, then he had known the main ship was on Mars. If he had followed his normal mode of operations, then he would have made the destruction of the main ship his top priority.

There were no clues, though, to support this theory at all-thus the Pack ignorance of the main ship's survival. Prime's only warning that remained was the enigmatic "Don't wake the sleepers," and that had been misunderstood completely.

So what had Prime done with the key?

Ukiah had learned over the years of investigating that it was pointless to guess at what people had done. Usually, though, it wasn't difficult to discover what they could have done, and then do a process of elimination on their possible choices. He rummaged through Pack memory, discovering that Prime's optionswere slim: the remote key could not reach through the shielding.

It couldn't reach through the shielding.

If Prime had any plan involving the remote key, then when he started, the shields must have been down. The landing on Mars hadn't triggered the automatic defense program, or the shields would have been up. Hex wouldn't have raised the shields; such an act would have stranded him on Earth until the humans developed s.p.a.ce flight. Prime must have used the remote key to raise the shields, rendering the key useless.

Starting the automatic defense program, however, was a single command. Prime could have triggered it seconds after he picked up the remote key. There had been numerous distractions for Hex on the scout ship. Why not use one of them? Why had he sent Hex off to start the dangerous breeding program?

Prime always made backup plans. Plans upon plans. The breeding program had been a distraction, but layers of sabotage had still been created to deal with it. If Prime hadn't finished before Hex returned, Prime's mutated genes would have been used. If a child were created, he had planned to kill the mother as soon as possible. If he couldn't do that, the problem would still have been solved when he blew up the scout ship.

Layers on layers.

The shields must have been a default plan. What would take a long time and probably meant the destruction of the main ship?

Asked correctly, Pack memories supplied the answer: the correct codes, programmed into the remote key, then uploaded to the ship, would trigger total destruction. It would take hundreds of commands to override all normal safety procedures so that the destruct sequence could be sent and fully obeyed. One missed safety procedure would render the whole process null. Worse, the system might automatically clear itself of earlier acts of sabotage, and the sleepers would be awakened.

Ukiah studied the key. It had essentially two levels. The first was a top buffer, the active code, what would be loaded onto the ship's computer when the uplink was established. The second area was a densely packed set of possible commands. The lower sets of these were common commands; "Give status report," "Raise shields," and "Wake all sleeping crew." "Wake all sleeping crew" was the command loaded in the active code area.

If Prime had spent a long time coding in a new set of commands, it would be a higher set. Ukiah considered the key. Like humans' computers, the alien's computers had developed on the simple electric principle of on and off. They too had counted in binary at first and the storage of the device was an exponential of two-a high exponential. One of all these memory slots had Prime's destruction code locked into it. Which slot?

Ukiah hunted through Pack memory and found nothing. He wished he could explain the alien device to Max. The language, the equipment, the concepts were all so foreign. Even with Prime's memories, Ukiah could barely understand how the item worked.

Forget the item, he told himself, focus on the man. What did he know about Prime? Alien memories slipped by, sights seen by alien eyes, the Earth experienced by an alien taste. Prime hadn't seen the lush Oregon wilderness as a place fit for saving. He would have loved better the mountains of New Mexico.

The countless animals hadn't stirred him. Truly, Ukiah's mother had been the first thing on the planet he had seen fit for saving. He had seen beauty in her.

Ukiah shook his head. No. That didn't lead to anything. Which number would Prime have selected.

He moaned inwardly. Prime number.

He checked his memories. Yes, Prime's name had come from his father, not from the Pack.