Звезда Пандоры

Mark realized that all the flyers in the air were gradually lowering themselves to land. Out over Trine’ba, the flyers rushing to Randtown dipped gently, angling down to strike the water hard. Big plumes of spray cascaded upward, falling away to reveal the craft bobbing low on the surface.

“Mellanie?” Mark croaked. “Are you doing this?”

“With a little help, yes.”

He clambered slowly to his feet, trying to stop the tremble in his legs. Liz stood beside him, gazing warily at the young girl. David poked his head above the wall. “Jesus.”

“Take their weapons,” Mellanie said. Her face was almost completely silver now, with only a few slivers of skin remaining around her cheeks and brow.

“You’re joking,” Mark said.

The four aliens dropped their weapons onto the road.

“You’re not joking.”

“You should be able to shoot through their force fields with those,” Mellanie said. “You’ll probably need to when they come after you again. This standoff won’t last forever. But I’ll keep them here as long as I can.” She took a deep breath, closing her chrome eyelids. “Leave now.”

Mark glanced down, her voice had come out of the handheld array as well.

“Everybody, get in your vehicles and fall back,” she ordered. “Join the convoy.”

“What’s happening?” Simon’s voice asked.

Mark brought the array up to his mouth. “Just do it, Simon. She’s stopped them.”

“Stopped them how?”

“Mark’s right,” someone else said. “I can see a whole bunch of them. They’re just standing there.”

“Go,” Mellanie said. “You haven’t got long. Go!”

Mark looked at the weapons lying on the tarmac as if it were some kind of school dare. The aliens still hadn’t moved.

“Come on,” Liz said. She darted forward.

Mark hurried after her. The weapons were bulky, too heavy to carry easily, let alone aim. He pulled up a couple, giving the tall, silently immobile aliens a cautious look as he scrabbled around at their feet, as if this might be the act that finally broke the spell, goading them into motion and retaliation. David came up beside him, and picked up one of the chunky cylinders.

“Let’s get out of here for Christ’s sake,” Liz said.

Mark managed to hold on to a third weapon. He scooted the hell away from the bizarre tableaux.

“What now?” Liz asked Mellanie.

“You go.”

“What about you? Will you be all right?”

“Yes.” She gave Mark one of her menacingly erotic smiles. “Quits?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Quits.”

“Thank you,” Liz said.

The three of them raced for the pickup. They slung the purloined alien weapons in the back, and Mark slammed the accelerator to the floor. He snatched one last glimpse of Mellanie in the rearview mirror. The silhouette of a small human girl standing defiantly in front of four big armored aliens, waiting, watching, as silent as the army she had stilled.

Mellanie’s inserts were feeding her a fresh image of the world; no longer data but an extension of her ordinary senses. She could actually see the electromagnetic emissions flooding out of the aliens as they stormed ashore. Each one blazed brightly in this black spectrum. Long, complex, and slow signals slipped between them, a conduit of tight-packed analog sine waves dancing and crackling around each other. They formed networks, brief, transient patterns that were forever rearranging themselves, connecting individual aliens, then switching back and forth between the flyers who relayed them in new combinations to the big conical ships floating on the Trine’ba. Huge columns of information streamed out of both ships, twisting up through the atmosphere to vanish inside the trans-dimensional vortex of the wormholes above.

It made a striking contrast to the abridged electronic network of Randtown, with its slender lines of carefully packaged binary pulses zipping purposefully around her. Where the human systems were neat and efficient, these alien outpourings were crude; yet, she acknowledged, they possessed a certain integral elegance. As it was with all organic forms.