Cold wind stirred the cavernous landing bay. Eighty feet below and two hundred feet away from their place on the catwalk, a conveyer hummed into life, drawing a dark, pilotless jet into a massive tunnel and the storage cells beyond. White lights blinked alongside the tarmac, leading the way. Two of the creatures stood near the slowly moving vessel, exchanging gestures Walt could barely see. He leaned forward. To the right, another spiral ladder descended to the bay floor; the catwalk continued across the walls, disappearing into shadow.
"Given how fucking ludicrous this is," Walt whispered, "I don't think any strategy is off the table."
"Bridge is front and center," Otto shrugged. "Literally, I mean. I figured we'd just mosey on that way."
"Through a foreign ship a half mile wide."
"All roads lead to Rome, don't they?"
"Shit." Walt glanced down the catwalk. Mist gleamed on the metal. "Suppose we'd better stay out of sight as long as possible."
He crouched forward, gaze switching between the far-off aliens and the web-like walkway ahead. There were no handrails, probably because those things didn't have hands, but the path was at least wider than human-normal, nearly six feet across, and Walt was able to largely pretend there wasn't eighty feet of open air between him and the runways below. Otto shifted behind him, shoes squeaking. The conveyor finished hauling the jet into the depths of the bay. The two aliens followed it out.
Walt hurried on. A black door opened off the catwalk, tall and ovoid. A recessed silvery circle sat in its center at neck height. Walt pushed the circle. The door cracked down the center, the two halves retracting into the walls. Beyond, lights flicked on noiselessly, dim but more than enough to make out the rounded, high-ceilinged hallway that extended for dozens of feet before gradually curving out of sight.
"Pray we don't run into Darth Vader," he muttered. He stalked forward, pistol in hand. Doors passed on either side. The tunnel unfurled further and further, curving leftward with each step. Behind them, the lights faded to nothing, leaving them in a perpetually advancing circle of illumination and granting Walt no way to tell how far they'd traveled.
"You tell which direction we're headed?"
"Starting to get off track," Otto murmured. He tipped his head at one of the featureless oval portals. "Want to see what's behind door number three hundred?"
Walt shook his head and continued on. Too easy to get lost down a rabbit hole, to stumble into the main barracks. Their only hope of reaching the bridge was, like Otto implied earlier, to follow the big roads—which, of course, meant risking run-ins with anything else putting them to use. If so, no big loss. Alive or dead, the bombs would go off in another twelve minutes.
Finally, the tunnel branched, a six-way intersection with a steeply pitched hexagonal ceiling. Glyphs played on its high walls, providing useless instructions. Walt glanced at Otto, who pointed down the rightward-veering branch. This kept on like the previous tunnel until suddenly widening into a bright lobby. To one side, windows overlooked a wide and dark room, sparsely furnished with perversely tree-like metallic chairs and stands with as many limbs as the aliens themselves. Walt skirted past. Far down the curved tunnel, lights flicked into being.
"Back," Walt hissed. He jogged back to the lobby, Otto beside him, and knelt beside the doors to the gym-like room. Otto extended his weapon. The soft smack of feet and treads filtered down the hall. The light followed, first as faint as starlight, but quickly advancing to something he could have read by.
A pair of aliens padded into the lobby, lightly dressed in glyph-marked straps. Their fat, ovoid heads swung toward the two humans. Surprise flashed in those watery, oversized squid-eyes. Walt opened fire.
Otto's target dropped in an instant, smoke curling from the dime-sized hole between its eyes. Walt's leapt back in a confusion of limbs, yellow fluid pattering from a scorched hole beside its mouth. Walt fired off five more shots as fast as the pistol would let him. The thing dropped, tentacles flapping against the smooth floor.
The hallways were dark at both ends. Otto gestured toward the gym. "Try the doors."
They opened easily, swinging outward in conventional fashion, so long as you overlooked the apparent total lack of hinges. Otto grabbed hold of a mess of limbs and dragged the body for the doors, the alien's tentacles still twitching, claws opening and closing dumbly. Walt went for the other body, stashing it beside Otto's in the corner of the room of metal trees.
"Ought to pick up the pace." Otto palmed viscous yellow blood onto the thighs of his pants. "Right now surprise is the only advantage we got."
Walt didn't argue. They jogged onward, dogged by the lights, soon passing another vast room thoroughly filled with stools and roundish things that could have passed for tables. At its far end, creatures stirred in dim light, metallic bowls flashing in their tentacles. The windows to the cafeteria began at knee height; Walt flopped to his belly and wriggled along, Otto army-crawling behind him. When the tunnel once more narrowed around them, they rose and hustled on.
Past a pair of retracting doors, the tunnel expanded into a massive hangar of wide-open spaces and canyons of freestanding shelves forty feet high. Black machinery rested in the walls and dangled from ceilings too high to see. Metal clicked on metal. A hundred yards down an alley of shelves, an alien carefully selected a steely rod from a drawer of identical pieces. Walt aimed his pistol and edged on. The alien didn't turn.
Emptiness, stillness, and desertion, as if the ship were a closed museum, a place that no longer was. It could have housed tens of thousands, even millions, but Walt had seen no more than a skeleton crew, the ushers left to sweep the stadium after the game has finished. Were they that low on manpower? Were these creatures interstellar Pilgrims, a handful of outcasts gone far to sea for a new home? No reinforcements, then, no swarming billions with lasers clamped in their claws and knives clenched between their beaks. Just a small sect with a good idea: let the virus do the fighting for us. Bound by strict scriptures and baffling beliefs. And when they'd arrived and found a few of the locals still kicking—now what?
At once he was convinced it was true. It would explain so much: their lack of a cohesive plan. Their inability to finish the job. Their hesitance to just bomb the hell out of anything left. And why he and Otto had been able to plant bombs on the engines and slip inside their floating fortress. They just weren't that smart. Certainly no smarter than most of the humans through the history of their own invasions. That understanding filled him with a cold and questing fury, and when he and Otto reached a round hub of identical doors, digital glyphs shifting above each one, he knew precisely what to do.
"What do you think you're standing around for?" Otto said.
He turned in place, slowly scanning the readouts above the doors. "A guide."
"We got about two minutes before the engines go, son. After that, it's apt to get messier than a pet store Dumpster."
He continued turning. He didn't have to wait long. Piping lit around one door, outlining it in soft blue; the glyphs above stabilized, flashing twice. The doors opened, revealing a roomy and well-lit pod and disgorging a lone alien into the round hub. Its sensory forelegs reared in surprise. Walt shot it through the throat. It gurgled yellow goo onto the rubbery floor. Walt shot it in the head, kicked it back into the pod, and stepped in behind it.
"What the hell?" Otto hissed.
"This place barely has a crew. The only ones here must be going somewhere important."
"Or straight to the barracks."
"Or the bridge."
"Or the shitter."
"Shut up." The doors glided closed. Hammocks webbed the high walls. Walt snarled his arm into the lines and braced his feet. The pod accelerated at a shallow downward angle, lurching his stomach. Otto swallowed and burped.
The pod jolted, lifting Walt's guts. Otto glanced at his watch. His brows and mustache jumped. "Well, that would be the bombs."
"Did they work?"
"Let me just ring up one of the enginee
rs here," he scowled. "How in God's name would I know that?"
The pod slid to a swift but smooth stop. The doors parted. On the other side, a waiting alien hopped back in horror. Otto bullrushed it, laying into it with his pistol. A second being scurried into the short, curved foyer. Walt dropped it with a quick blue pulse. Otto gritted his teeth and ran right, Walt on his heels.
He found himself on the upper terrace of a vast, stadium-style auditorium that led down like a giant's staircase to an oval command center of officers and computer banks. The far wall was a single transparent pane, huge and perfectly clear. Beyond, whitecaps surged inland, washing Venice Beach. Black mountains rose behind the silent corpse of the city. The scene tilted subtly downward, as if the ship were a rollercoaster just past its zenith.
Inside the auditorium, dozens of aliens throttled the space above their control pads, gesturing furiously to each other, signing orders with flailing limbs. Others rushed for the elevator-pod. An eerie silence hung over the chaos, as if Walt were watching through soundproof glass; no yelling, no alarms, just the clicking of their ball-shaped keypads and the thump of their feet on the spongy floor.
Otto flanked left along the smooth blue wall, gunning down a pair of creatures on their way to the elevators. The flash of his pistol spurred a score of sense-limbs to leap upright. Other creatures stayed bent over their controls. Otto fired, aimed, repeated. Walt sprayed blue light at every alien in easy range and ran along the upper tier toward more of the unarmed crew. They splayed shot in their seating-hammocks, limbs coiling and flopping. Others ran down the broad circular tiers, sprawling over spindly desks, collapsing them. Something small and silver blurred from below. Otto hollered and poured back fire.
At the end, a half dozen of the things clustered together at the very lowest terrace, tentacles intertwined, clutching and plucking at each others' leathery bodysacs, limbs held before them—warding, pleading, praying. Walt strode down the tongue of carpet, pistol extended. He didn't begin firing until they were close enough to touch.
The bodies of captains and admirals dropped no different from the others, mucosal blood slopping together. Monitors flashed soundlessly. Walt panted, wide-eyed, the world literally tipping beneath him.
He found Otto seated halfway up the wide steps, one bloody hand held to his glistening belly. The old man grinned, eyes pinched. "What are you staring at? You ain't finished yet."
Walt nodded. Like a Luddite god, an avenging aspect of the billions of dead, he circled the bridge, shooting every monitor, black box, and control pad he could see. Plastic smoke curdled in the air. Sparks spritzed from shattered circuits. Otto hadn't moved from his seat on the steps.
"What the hell are you waiting for? Get out of here!"
Walt gestured for the window, now half filled with the black waves below. "The ship's going to crash!"
"I can't think of a better reason to abandon it."
"What about you?"
"Don't give me shit about how you can't leave me behind. I'm an old man with a gut wound. I've got less chance than the Cleveland Browns."
"Save your breath," Walt said. "I just reached the same conclusion."
"You son of a bitch," Otto laughed. Blood seeped from his side. "Get somebody to write me a song or something. Anyway, another few weeks, you're gonna be hurting for things to do."
"It was fun, Otto."
"You have yourself a boy and you name him after me. That won't be any possible unless you quit this sewing circle right now."
Walt grinned. He turned and ran up the terraces, swerving around toppled desks and smoking hardware. Yellow blood oozed down the tilted floors. The elevator door closed automatically behind him. He could hardly feel its angled ascent. The silence inside pressed on his ears like swimming to the bottom of the pool. Three aliens waited at the far end. One managed to squeeze off a shot before he cut it down.
He sprinted through the huge warehouse, shoes banging, and down the curving tunnels past dark windows. Many of the doors now hung ajar; aliens scrambled down intersections clutching strange, spiky tools. He shot anyone who gave him a second look. Most failed to see him at all, or deliberately ignored him, rushing instead for whatever repairs or escape pods they expected would save their lives. Walt was back on the catwalk above the landing bay in five scant minutes. Below, jets taxied from storage, cramming the runways in the rush to launch. Engines blared, painting long shadows from the harsh white light of their boiling engines. His feet clanked on the metal walkway. And then he was through the last door, the last tunnel, standing in the cold wind on a thin platform overlooking the calm waters of Santa Monica Bay.
He laughed all the way down.
EPILOGUE