Swarm Read online

  “Oh, sure,” said Sandra skeptically, looking at her bed. It was quite nice, but one corner sagged where the post had broken. “Let’s tell it to screw in the bulbs, too.”

  I threw up my hands. We had to do what we could.

  We spent about half an hour hanging over Merced, stealing stuff. We took clothing, random piles of shirts and pants that didn’t fit. We took food, furniture, and no less than three refrigerators. The first two were hopelessly mangled, but the third fridge came up in a workable state, with only a few dents in the stainless steel double-doors.

  “That’s a nice one,” Sandra commented.

  “A keeper,” I agreed. “What have we got so far to put into it?”

  “Hmm,” she said, checking the grocery stocks. “The ship seems to like steak. We have loads of that. And bread. And a hell of a lot of orange soda.”

  “Sounds good. We’ll go for canned goods next.”

  “Beer comes in cans,” Sandra said suggestively.

  “So it does.”

  We busied ourselves with our stuff, filling a storeroom and plugging the fridge into a scary-looking, specialized black arm that carried power for reasons I didn’t understand.

  It was after several more loads of groceries that disaster struck. I don’t really know how it happened. The best I could figure out afterward was that some cop had had enough. He had probably been down there since the beginning and had his orders. But he had not followed them. He decided to fire on the ship. I never even heard the sound of the shots. But I heard the reaction.

  Blinding green light flared. It filled our vision, our heads and our minds. Sandra screamed. I clutched my face, knowing what it was almost immediately.

  “Alamo! Cease fire! They are not a threat!”

  “Enemy fire detected.”

  The laser faded, but the after images still flashed in my mind. I opened one eye and looked at the front wall with the metallic radar screen I’d created. The people and cars were being tracked there. All of them. There must have been thousands. A ragged line of contacts circled us at a distance. No doubt, the police had cordoned off the area, but people had come to look at the ship floating over their town, rummaging in shops and stealing things with its great black arm.

  The arm retracted and the doors snapped shut. I hoped it was over, but Sandra shouted something, pointing.

  I looked at the wall again. Two contacts had gone red. A third and a fourth went red as I watched. They were spread around at the edge of the golden beetles that represented the civilians.

  The ship fired again. One of the red contacts vanished, then another. They must be police, firing on the ship when it fired at them. They were fools. They couldn’t do anything to this ship. I thought I heard a bullet spang off the skin of the vessel. I wondered how thick the metal hull of the ship was.

  The golden beetles had been backing up, but now they were running away from the ship in every direction. Some paused, falling. Others were too close to the red beetles, which vanished one by one, almost as quickly as they appeared. The cops must have opened fire in a chain reaction. Each of them was designated as a target and burned down moments later. From their point of view, they could hear other guns firing and the ship was suddenly shooting into the crowd. Surrounding clusters of golden beetles vanished with the red contacts. They were dying in swathes.

  “I’m not in any danger, stop firing!”

  “Command personnel are in danger. Defensive fire is mandatory.”

  “Fly up, then! Fly upward! Get us up into orbit now!”

  I felt the floor come up toward me and stumbled. I managed to get myself into a new easy chair I’d stolen. I rubbed my face, my eyes ached. How many had the ship killed? I opened a beer and drank it. Sandra and I barely spoke for the next hour. She went into her room and vanished.

  Strangely, I fell asleep on my stolen easy chair. It had been many long hours since I’d slept. I didn’t even plan on sleeping. It just happened. I felt as if I were suffocating, as if a great hand had come down and closed over me, putting me out like fingers snuffing a candle flame.

  -13-

  When I woke up, I felt better, but then I remembered everything, and felt awful again. For some reason, I’d had nice dreams of Donna and sunny days. I missed my dreams, and as I lay there, blinking up at the metallic ceiling, I tried to go back to sleep. I tried to get back into my happy dreams, but I couldn’t. I finally gave up, groaned and heaved myself out of my chair.

  Sandra wasn’t on the bridge. I figured she was in her room that I’d set up for her. Maybe she was sleeping too. I rummaged for food, washed in the bathroom, which I’d managed to set up with a bowl of running water. It was cold water, and there was no shower yet. But even cold water and a bar of soap on my face felt good at that point.

  When I finished and turned around, Sandra was staring at me. She had a loop of black cable around her neck now, not her ankles. She looked like some kind of prisoner. I sighed, we were both prisoners.

  She pointed to the thing wrapped around her neck. “This sucks,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. What happened to the ankle things?”

  “I took a nap in my room and you told the ship to remove them when I was alone, remember? It did, since you weren’t around. But once I came near you, it just reached out and grabbed the nearest thing it could. In this case, my neck.”

  I would have laughed if I’d felt better. “Is it better or worse than the ankle?”

  “Well,” she said, considering. “It’s easier to move around, actually. It doesn’t hurt, and so far the ship’s been very careful not to choke me. But it is demeaning.”

  “Do you want me to change it?”

  “No, I suppose its fine.”

  “Here, I can at least put it around your waist.” I ordered the ship to switch the cable to circle her waist. It looked far more natural that way. It was almost like a safety harness, rather than a slave collar.

  “Thanks,” she said, breathing more easily.

  I hesitated. “Should I get those injections? I think, eventually, I’m going to have to do it. I won’t be able to live like this forever.”

  “Don’t do it for my comfort. You don’t know how it will turn out. I’ll just play harem girl here for another day.”

  I snorted and we ate some breakfast. I wondered what time it was. Looking at the wall, I realized we were up above Earth, but not so far up we didn’t feel the gravity. I wondered how long we’d been up here, and if we were even over California anymore. Life in space was rather different. It sort of scrambled your brains. All the normal cycles of night, day, meals and sleeping were disrupted. I supposed it was rather like spending a long period in a submarine or underground in a mine.

  “Do you know what they do to keep themselves feeling right on a submarine or a spaceship?” I asked Sandra.

  “What?”

  “I have no idea,” I said, “I’d hoped you would.”

  “Well, they probably try to keep as normal a cycle as possible with clocks and all. We should do the same.”

  “I agree,” I said. I talked to the Alamo for awhile, giving it instructions to sound off the hours as they passed if we weren’t sleeping. I also told it to dim or brighten the glow of its walls in rhythm with the normal sun cycles. We set ourselves up on California time. That would probably feel the most natural.

  Later, Crow contacted me and I talked to him about it. He said they were already doing it, but I should set my clocks by Greenwich Mean Time, which meant I would be living on British time. If we all went by that time standard, we would be in synch and could coordinate better. I agreed, it was the simplest system, and as an officer he didn’t want us calling him all night every night.

  He went over a plan with me, telling me he wanted to place picket ships around Earth. Using six ships, one over each pole and four more in a belt over the equator, we could increase our warning time if a new enemy contact arrived on the scene.

  “Good idea,” I said.

&n
bsp; “Glad you like it. You are assigned to the North Pole, with a twelve hour shift. Take the day shift. I want you awake and thinking up new ways to get these ships working for us.”

  “Fine.”

  “I’d put you in command of a squadron to practice formations, but I think instead you are going to be our one-man research team. Did you manage to raid a few shops and make your ship more homey?”

  I told him about the slaughter at the Merced mall. He clucked his tongue disappointedly.

  “Now, don’t take that to heart. That was their screw-up, not yours. You shouldn’t feel bad about it. They all know what will happen if they fire on these ships.”

  “Yes, but I figure just one man lost his nerve and fired, then the ship fired back, then the rest thought it was open season and—”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know what happened. It’s by no means the first time. But they have to learn, even if it is the hard way.”

  I didn’t like his attitude. Not at all. “These are human beings we are talking about here. The ones we are supposedly defending.”

  “There are kinks that need to be worked out. I’m on it. I have my diplomatic team—”

  “We are talking about Pierre the internet con-man, right?”

  “Ambassador Pierre Gaspard, you mean. Make sure if you have any contact with the Earth governments, you call him Ambassador. I should never have told you about his background, I see that now.”

  “Don’t get huffy. Okay, he’s our Ambassador. How’s he doing?”

  “Rather well, actually. Using your brilliant scheme for capturing young women—”

  “That wasn’t my intention!”

  “Whatever. In any case, I managed to catch a U.S. Senator in her bathrobe this morning in D.C. She failed the very first test, of course—you remember the ingenuity test where you are supposed to ride on the arm to get out of the room?”

  “I recall it well.”

  “Anyway, she was dumped back out onto her lawn within a minute. My ship was only about two meters above the ground. I had the ship snatch her up again and brought her to my bridge. I thought the woman was going to have a heart attack, but she lived and I handed her over to Pierre’s ship to open negotiations.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, “she failed a test on your ship, but the Nanos let her aboard Pierre’s ship?”

  “Yeah, it seems once they are marked as losers they stay losers for all the Nanos.”

  “Thanks a lot,” said Sandra, interrupting.

  “Oh, hey Sandra. No offense.”

  Sandra stalked off the bridge.

  “What’s the Senator’s name?” I asked.

  “Kim Bager.”

  “Really? Isn’t Senator Bager chairing the foreign relations committee?”

  “Maybe. I don’t follow Yank politics, I follow football. The kind where you use your feet. Anyway, she’s having a long talk with Pierre now. I mean, Ambassador Gaspard.”

  “I’ve got to talk to her. To both of them.”

  “I think that can be arranged. But try not to say anything embarrassing or too revealing, okay? This is serious business.”

  “The business of serious extortion.”

  “Now, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. We aren’t pirates, mate! We are a serious political force. We lost several ships and good people fighting for Earth just yesterday. If we can get the supplies we need in an orderly fashion, your ship won’t have to slaughter people at malls next week when you run out of food.”

  I took a deep breath. He was right about raiding, it was dangerous for the people on the ground. It was hard for me to take our ragtag group seriously as a political power because we were so new, so green. But we were like a separate nation now. We were trapped in our ships. We knew things no one else on Earth understood. Our mission was life and death, not only for ourselves, but possibly for the rest of humanity as well.

  “Okay,” I said. “I promise to play the role of a Star Force Commander. If they take us seriously, this will all go more smoothly for everyone.”

  “Exactly. Glad to hear it.”

  “What would you have done if I didn’t agree, Jack?”

  Commodore Crow sniffed. “I wouldn’t have given you the name of Pierre’s ship.”

  I smiled. That was it, the first smile since my kids had died. I blinked at the thought. Crow’s slippery maneuvers had brightened my day somehow. I had a sudden thought then.

  “Crow?”

  “Yeah, mate?”

  “You weren’t really a Captain in the Australian navy, were you?”

  A deep breath. “I never said I was. Not exactly, anyway. Keep that under your hat, will you, professor?”

  “Of course,” I said. And I meant it. “Now, can I have the name of the Frenchman’s ship?”

  “Who said he was a Frenchman?”

  “Well, I assumed—”

  “He’s Canadian.”

  “Ah, I see. So he speaks English fluently, I take it?”

  “And several other languages as well.”

  “And the ship’s name?”

  “The Versailles,” said Crow, with a hint of an apology in his voice.

  “He named his ship after a palace?”

  “Yes, well… he believes in tradition. Anyway, contact him if you want an update on the political situation. I’ll leave you in his capable hands. Crow out.”

  -14-

  As Crow had ordered, I took up a position about fifty thousand miles above the North Pole. We encountered a whole new problem at that point, weightlessness. At first, it was kind of funny. Sandra laughed at me, as I floated away from my chair. I called to the ship and had it tether me with one of those instantly grown arms. The thin cable felt warm around my waist. It was a creepy feeling, as I knew now the thing was made up of about a million tiny, squirming nanites. Just knowing that made me itch when the arms touched me. It was like being touched by arms made up of fleas that had all interlocked their legs together and formed a chain with their bodies.

  I didn’t laugh, but it did give me my second smile since I’d lost my kids for good. Sandra and I were equals when weightless in space. The ship had us both on leashes. Then we noticed all the liquids we had around the place in cups and cans were now floating with us. This took a while to clean up and sort out. The nanites weren’t super good with liquids. They could form hard surfaces of their liquid metal, or turn the floor porous and suck it up, but those skinny black arms were simply no good at catching liquids out of the air.

  After a few hours of drifting, we got into a routine and things were almost normal. We were going to have a problem with liquids, however, I could see. We only had so many squeeze bottles and we had no way of handling cooking properly. It was a good thing, I realized, we were only expected to hang out on sentry duty for half of every day. I was looking forward to returning back to my familiar gravity-well long before our first shift was over.

  “Shouldn’t you call that Pierre guy?” asked Sandra, drifting over the new couch with a roll of paper towels. She’d found one last floating dollop of orange soda and was determined to catch it.

  “I should,” I said, “But somehow I’m not looking forward to it. The truth is, besides being distracted, I’m a little embarrassed.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, he’s some kind of internet scam artist, from what I gather. Who knows what kind of embarrassing crap he’s been spouting off to Senator Bager. It just seems so unprofessional. They must think we are a bunch of nuts, and we’ve acted like kids. Kids who accidentally got hold of nuclear weapons.”

  “Your first time talking to a Senator?”

  “Definitely. What a way to start my political career.”

  “Just get it over with.”

  “I will, after we figure out how what we are going to eat for lunch.”

  We never did get to eat lunch that day, however. I’d just managed to get a floating frozen rice dinner into the microwave and slapped the door closed before it could drift out again when
the Alamo spoke up. I’d been dreading the words it spoke.

  “Enemy ships detected. Emergency signal received. Gathering initiated.”

  Enemy ships? I thought. Knowing what was coming, I tried to grab the cable arm that tethered me and pull myself down against the floor. I managed to do it, but I’d guessed wrong. The ceiling was the floor this time. Everything began to fall, sag or slide toward it.

  “Alamo, secure everything you can!”

  Arms snaked out but it was too late in many cases. Bottles broke and spilled their contents in slow, glugging motions. The fridge slid up the wall it had been against and dented its top against the roof of the ship.

  “Alamo, new standing order: When about to accelerate due to some alert, secure everything first.”

  “Program rejected. Overridden by prior programming. Options not set.”

  I gritted my teeth. “Alamo, as soon as you can when we get an alert call, secure all equipment and personnel.”

  “Program set.”

  “Also, Alamo, turn us right side up.”

  “Ambiguous statement. Command rejected.”

  “The deck that has been the floor since I was kidnapped by this crazy ship. Make it the floor again, turn the ship so that our acceleration pushes us against it.”

  “Command accepted.”

  Another series of sliding sounds and a few crashes soon followed. I sucked air through my teeth and put my hands over my head. The microwave missed me, as did the fridge, but my rice bowl caught me in the back of the head. It was still uncooked and frozen, and I felt like I’d been hit by an iceball. Sandra yelled something from the main bridge, but I didn’t hear exactly what it was.

  “You okay?” I called out to her.

  “Quit screwing around with the ship!” she called back.

  She didn’t sound hurt, so I didn’t pursue the matter.

  “Alamo, where are the enemy ships? Are they in our sector?”

  “No.”

  “How many ships are there? Put them on the forward screen.”

  “There are three ships. They are being displayed.”

  Paranoid, I stepped unsteadily out of the kitchen area into the main bridge. The forward wall showed the dark circle representing Earth in the center now. I looked around for a few long seconds before I spotted the rust-red contacts. One was on the wall to the left, one to the right, and one was crawling along the floor. I’d almost stepped on it.