Predator (Old Ironsides Book 3) Read online

  Nathan felt his blood run cold.

  ‘That’s how they did it,’ he said out loud. ‘The Ayleean fleet didn’t get destroyed in battle and Ayleea didn’t burn under an enemy attack. The infiltrators provoked the Ayleeans to kill their own and they destroyed themselves.’

  Schmidt’s voice cut across them all.

  ‘Divide and conquer,’ he said. ‘The signal the entity just sent may be that which starts the invasion process.’

  ***

  XXVI

  Nathan barely had time to think about the consequences of what he had done when a priority signal appeared inside the room with them, bearing the emblem of the CSS.

  ‘It’s a military signal,’ Schmidt warned. ‘We cannot reveal anything that we’ve learned, or it may alert the enemy to what we know about them. We can’t trust anybody.’

  Nathan nodded, and a moment later Schmidt allowed the signal to open and a holographic Rear Admiral O’Hara flickered into existence in the room alongside them.

  ‘Detectives,’ he said with a somber voice that immediately put Nathan on edge.

  ‘What is it?’ Foxx asked, sensing the same air of regret as Nathan.

  The admiral was standing with his hands behind his back, his jowls resting on his chest as he looked directly at Nathan.

  ‘We have had word from Defiance,’ he said simply. ‘A brief contact that would have been sent about an hour and a half ago, from a neighboring system to Ayleea.’

  Nathan’s heart sank as he stared at the admiral, knowing somehow that whatever he was about to hear, it was not good.

  ‘Tell me,’ he insisted.

  ‘I can show you,’ O’Hara said. ‘I’m truly sorry, Detective Ironside.’

  The admiral’s image was joined by a vivid scene of the bridge of a fleet frigate that Nathan assumed was Defiance, her captain a stern looking woman who was shouting commands to her crew. The connection was weak, the image trembling and distorted, but it was clear that they were under attack.

  Nathan could not hear any sound, only the moving images as the ship was repeatedly hit by plasma blows from an unknown source. He stepped toward the holographic display, peering into it as he saw glimpses of the bridge, of the lights flashing in and out, of explosive discharges from panels being blasted from the walls. And then he saw her, crouching by the command rail, her long blonde hair vivid against her CSS uniform.

  ‘Sula,’ Nathan gasped, reaching out for her by instinct.

  The frigate’s deck shook and trembled beneath the attack and then the ship’s transmission was cut brutally short and the image vanished. Nathan stared into the empty space where Sula had been moments before, and then he looked at the admiral.

  ‘The frigate entered an asteroid belt,’ O’Hara explained. ‘Although we have no visual data, we do have digital information that made it out. The frigate was pursued further, and approximately five minutes after it entered the asteroid field there is a sharp spike in electromagnetic interference followed by a complete cessation of all transmissions.’

  Nathan swallowed.

  ‘Just spit it out,’ he said, his throat dry.

  ‘The spike was a major detonation from within the field, equivalent in signature to the ignition of plasma fuel on a massive scale. Analysis of that signature and also of considerable metallic debris detected in the field before the data transmission broke off confirms the destruction of CSS Defiance with the loss of her crew.’ O’Hara sighed. ‘The enemy warship pursuing her left the area shortly after the event.’

  Nathan closed his eyes. In the silence that followed he realized that everybody was watching him, could feel their gazes burning into him. He heard his own mantra revolving around in his head. She’s not your daughter.

  ‘Again, I’m truly sorry for your loss, detective,’ O’Hara went on. ‘You’ll be required to help prepare for the defense of our planet and also to continue to try to root out the enemy within. We will arrange contact with Sula’s mother to…’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Nathan replied, opening his eyes. ‘I’ll tell her.’

  He felt Foxx move closer to him as the admiral nodded in agreement, and without another word the transmission shut off. The silence weighed heavily on him for a brief moment, and then he whirled to Schmidt.

  ‘Can you get the uniforms to transport Erin’s mimic to the airlocks at the spaceport?’ he asked as he pointed to the trapped infiltrator. ‘Quickly?’

  ‘Yes of course,’ Schmidt said, ‘but why would you want to…?’

  ‘Just do it, and bring that fluid you hosed it down with!’ Nathan snapped and then hurried out of the interrogation room.

  Foxx followed him with Vasquez and Allen as he marched toward the main office.

  ‘This isn’t the way, Nathan,’ Foxx said urgently as she jogged to keep up with him. ‘We need that thing alive and you know that killing it won’t bring Sula back to…’

  ‘I know that!’ Nathan insisted. ‘Just trust me! We can’t finish this if we can’t talk to anybody at CSS! We have to find a way to identify who has been replicated!’

  Foxx didn’t reply as they got into the squad vehicle. Nathan remained silent as she took off and lit up the lights and sirens, the squad cruiser accelerating up and away through the streams of traffic cruising above North Four and climbing vertically into the North Arm.

  Nathan did not look at the spectacular scenery this time, his mind utterly empty but for an image of Sula and the cheeky, mischievous grin that had reminded him so much of his daughter. He barely noticed Foxx landing at the spaceport and activating the gravity cells on her boots before she climbed out of the vehicle.

  ‘I need to know what you’re going to do,’ she said as he climbed out and started walking.

  Nathan did not reply, climbing out and striding with absolute conviction toward the airlocks that lined one side of the spaceport’s landing bays. Protected by hard light barriers and solid steel doors, access could be granted only by a security officer manning a guard post outside the airlock.

  Nathan flashed his detective’s shield at the officer and was met with a gesture to stop him as the guard stepped out.

  ‘Can’t let you through I’m afraid guys, I haven’t had clearance from…’

  Nathan acted without conscious thought. He stepped into the guard’s left and wrapped one arm around his throat as he twisted him around and closed the other arm over the first and then squeezed hard.

  ‘Nathan!’

  The guard struggled in his grip but Nathan lifted him almost bodily off the deck and the pressure around the guard’s throat partially closed the arteries in his neck. After a few seconds the guard’s struggling body fell limp and Nathan lowered him gently to the deck and then dragged him back into his guard house.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Foxx demanded, one hand moving instinctively to her sidearm.

  Nathan grabbed the guard’s pass and turned, accessing the hard light barriers and door controls on a panel nearby. The barrier vanished and the solid doors hissed as they opened.

  Nathan turned and saw Doctor Schmidt crossing the spaceport behind them, with the hard light cubicle and the trapped entity within now being pushed along on a gravity pad by two uniformed officers. The officers pushed the cubicle into the airlock as instructed by Doctor Schmidt, and set a canister of hemostatic agent down alongside it.

  ‘Detective Ironside,’ Schmidt said as he joined them and blocked the entrance to the airlock, ‘this time I really think that you’re in danger of going too far and I…’

  Nathan walked straight through the doctor and into the airlock, Schmidt flinching and then brushing himself down in disgust.

  ‘Do you have any manners?’

  Nathan saw the infiltrator standing before him inside its hard light cubicle, once again having taken the form of Erin Sanders. Beside the cubicle was the cylinder of compressed hemostatic agent which Nathan picked up in one hand and activated with a flip of a switch.

  ‘Guess what?’ Natha
n said to the infiltrator, ‘I’m gonna let you go.’

  Even as he said the words he noted the expression of concern on the face of the infiltrator. Its eyes moved to the cylinder in Nathan’s hand and then back to his, and whatever it saw in his eyes he could tell it didn’t like.

  ‘You wouldn’t let me go,’ it said simply in the female voice that was like Erin’s but didn’t sound quite right.

  ‘You sure about that?’ Nathan asked, and then with one hand he reached out to a control panel and shut off the hard light cubicle.

  ‘Nathan, what the hell are you doing?!’ Foxx screamed as she drew her pistol and aimed into the airlock.

  The infiltrator looked at Nathan and frowned, not moving despite there being nothing now to contain it.

  ‘You’re not gonna run away?’ Nathan asked, one hand on the trigger of the dispenser in his hand, the cylinder heavy and humming with energy as he held it pointing at her.

  He saw the infiltrator swallow, an endearing sign of the human traits it was picking up. Nathan, a seasoned interrogator of suspects, knew fear when he saw it.

  ‘You intend me harm,’ the infiltrator said.

  ‘No,’ Nathan frowned, shaking his head as though offended. ‘No harm, only an endless nothingness.’

  The infiltrator smiled now. ‘I cannot die, for I am not one.’

  ‘I know,’ Nathan said, ‘let me help you with that.’

  Nathan lifted the cylinder and fired, a stream of amber colored fluid hosing out and splashing across the infiltrator. The figure did not move as it was drenched in the thick fluid, Nathan knowing that it would not be able to escape or change shape as it was smothered. The fluid hardened almost immediately, not solid yet but thick and dense, sufficiently so that the entity could move only slowly.

  Nathan shut off the dispenser and set it down on the ground beside him. Then he stepped back out of the airlock and slammed the steel door shut. He turned the locks and secured them, then opened a communications channel with the infiltrator trapped inside.

  ‘You’re alive,’ Nathan said. ‘I know that you live and that you wish to continue to live, that you fear dying because I can see it in you. You say you can’t die, not really, but then nothing ever does, does it? It just breaks down and becomes something else. So, what I’m gonna do is deny you that right.’

  The infiltrator frowned, confused.

  ‘Consciousness,’ Nathan whispered to it, malice surging like poison through his veins. ‘Scientists and psychologists argue about what it is but I reckon it’s all about having enough neurons in place to know who and what you are. People don’t remember life as a baby, or in the womb, because our brains haven’t developed enough to be truly conscious. But when the two halves of a human brain join up by the time we’re two years’ old, memories start to form. We’re no longer blindly responsive to stimuli, we can think. We’re conscious. That’s what you are, right now. But when we die that consciousness is lost and we cease to exist. It doesn’t bother us any more than the fourteen billion years we didn’t exist in this universe before we were born. But, imagine, if we were to die but be aware of it and yet powerless to change it, an endless prison that will last for the life of the universe, countless trillions of years, dead and yet alive at the same time.’

  The infiltrator’s face collapsed as it realized what he was about to do.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ it said, once again using Erin’s voice.

  Suddenly, Nathan realized what was wrong with the infiltrator’s rendition of Erin’s voice, the depth of it, the strange twist to its chords. It had only heard Erin speaking once and she had been in terrible pain, her voice twisted with agony just before it killed her.

  ‘Nathan, you can’t do this,’ Foxx said.

  ‘I can do whatever the hell I want,’ Nathan snapped without looking at her. ‘To hell with this thing. Once that airlock’s open the hemostatic fluid will freeze as hard as rock. I’ll fire that thing out there into the cosmos and it’ll move in a straight line for the next billion years with nothing to come near it.’ Nathan smiled at the infiltrator. ‘How long do you think it will take for your consciousness to break down into utter insanity?’

  The infiltrator’s features collapsed into true panic. ‘You won’t do this, it’s not in your nature!’

  Nathan grabbed the emergency evacuation lever, a thick steel handle painted in bright yellow and black chevrons.

  ‘Try me,’ he snarled and hauled on the lever.

  ‘Okay I’ll talk!’

  ‘Then talk, now!’ Nathan yelled. ‘Everything! How do we locate all of you?!’

  The infiltrator’s expression warred between rage and desperation, and then it blurted its response in a flourish of self loathing.

  ‘Water, that’s what sets us apart. We are as much machine as we are living beings, and our cells can no longer hold sufficient water.’

  Nathan frowned. ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That is why we draw the fluids from our victims,’ came the response. ‘We use it both to conceal our true identity and to retain life. Without hosts, we will perish.’

  ‘Who leads you? Who is in command?’ Nathan yelled as he leaned his weight against the evacuation lever.

  ‘I don’t know!’ the infiltrator shouted. ‘We have Sentinels, leaders in high places but the identity of their hosts is never revealed. We all operate alone!’

  Nathan turned to look over his shoulder at Foxx.

  ‘Erin Sanders, the reports said she treated drug addicts on North Four.’

  ‘Yeah, but there was no connection to Freck Seavers or any military networks.’

  ‘But what if there didn’t need to be?’ Nathan said as he used his ocular implant to access the reports on Erin Sanders. ‘You recognize any of the names on the list of patients Erin worked with?’

  Foxx’s gaze drifted slightly as she scrutinized the same display and then her eyes widened.

  ‘Paul Montgomery.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘He’s the son of the Governor of New Los Angeles,’ Foxx explained. ‘He got addicted to Shiver and was admitted to a North Four clinic by his father, who had revoked his son’s wealth and ordered him to be treated like any other orbital citizen on threat of losing his inheritance. It was all over the news a few months back.’

  ‘Okay,’ Nathan said, ‘and Freck went to a prestigious college, right? Wouldn’t there be sons and daughters of governors and politicians and even military figures in the same colleges too?’

  ‘Lots of them,’ Foxx responded without hesitation. ‘San Diego’s climate draws them in from across the world. It’s one of the top colleges globally.’

  ‘That’s how they got in,’ Nathan said. ‘They weren’t looking to get to kids like Erin and Freck. They were targeting the people those kids came into contact with, their co–workers, their bosses and parents.’

  The infiltrator glared at them both from within the airlock.

  ‘If you pull that lever, I will still be able to let every single infiltrator on the planet know about what you’ve done before I am frozen. They will know you’re onto them, detective.’

  Nathan looked the infiltrator in the eye.

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  Nathan hauled down on the emergency evacuation handle and he heard the infiltrator’s scream as the airlock opened and the atmosphere within was vacuumed out in an instant in a whorl of vapor and ice crystals. He saw Erin Sander’s form turn pure white as it froze along with the hemostatic agent enveloping it, an icy coffin from which the infiltrator’s tortured expression stared wide eyed at Nathan as it tumbled out of the airlock and into the chill embrace of deep space.

  Nathan pushed up and closed the airlock once again. He turned and looked at Doctor Schmidt.

  ‘That enough for you to locate them all?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m on it,’ Schmidt replied. ‘I can use body temperature data to start isolating the infiltrators and broadcast the result to every human being alive.’


  ‘If we have any time left!’ Foxx snapped as she turned and dashed for the squad cruiser. ‘Damn it Nathan, you know you just started the invasion, right?’

  ***

  XXVII

  Allen and Vasquez arrived near the airlocks to see Foxx running with Nathan toward them.

  ‘What gives?’ Vasquez asked, looking at the airlock as two uniformed officers helped an unsteady looking guard to his feet.

  ‘Get your guns and get ready,’ Foxx ordered them as she jumped into the squad car.

  Nathan knew that he had provoked whatever pre–invasion mission the beings had and he could tell that the team would be more than annoyed about it, but now they had a lead, something tangible they could follow.

  ‘You provoked it into activating the invasion?!’ Detective Allen said in horror as Foxx explained what Nathan had done.

  ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference,’ he said as they walked swiftly through the spaceport. ‘It’ll be much harder for them to hide now. If we didn’t get them out into the open they’d have taken us down from within.’

  ‘They might do that already, Nathan,’ Foxx pointed out as the squad vehicle took off and Foxx guided it toward the North Arm.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Back to the precinct,’ Foxx snapped. ‘The only way we’re going to prevent these things from committing mass murder is to obtain their precise locations and that’s not going to happen off the signals you provoked it to send because you can bet your arm they’ll seek to find new hosts as fast as they can.’

  The central panel between Foxx and Nathan shimmered into life and Schmidt appeared as a small hologram between them.

  ‘I have initiated a scan for all individuals who exhibited a response of any kind to the signals the infiltrator attempted to send from the precinct building. It’s only a short range protocol but it might pick up a few of them.’

  Nathan accessed his ocular implant as they flew down the North Arm and saw locations pinging up all over the orbital stations.