“Yes,” said Walker. “I’m sorry it has to end this way, Eddie. But we must all follow duty in our own way. Good luck.”
And just like that, we all went our separate ways.
I walked slowly through the crowded Roswell streets, one man in the middle of unsuspecting crowds, all of them so much dead meat unless I could come up with a plan to save them. It was hard to keep from staring into their happy, innocent faces. How could they not know how much danger they were in? Couldn’t they feel the tension on the air, the first echoes of the horror that was coming, so close they could almost reach out and touch it? Of course they didn’t know, didn’t even suspect; they lived in their world and I lived in mine, and it was my job to keep them from ever finding out my world even existed.
Five and a half hours now and counting . . .
I strode on more purposefully, not going anywhere in particular yet, just full of the need to keep moving, to at least feel like I was doing something. I concentrated on this idea and that, coming up with and discarding one plan after another, scowling so hard as I thought that people hurried to get out of my way. I could just leave Roswell. Commandeer a car and get the hell out of town until I was out from under the aliens’ communications blackout. Yell to my family for backup and support. Throw enough Droods at a problem, and any enemy will go down in flames. The Hungry Gods found that out the hard way. Of course, there was no telling how long that might take; it could all be over by the time I got back. And nothing left to do but contain the situation and make sure the aliens couldn’t repeat their bloody experiment somewhere else. Like Walker said: there’s always time for revenge. But there was no telling what I’d run into outside of town. The aliens might just stop me at the town’s limits and hold me there, and then there’d be no one left to stand between the townspeople and the aliens.
I couldn’t risk that.
No; my only realistic hope was to locate the aliens’ base of operations and shut them down before they could start anything. One man against an unknown number of aliens and an unknowable amount of alien technology . . . For anyone else that would be suicide, but I was a Drood, with a Drood’s armour and training. And the aliens were going to find out just what that meant. So . . . think it through. If the aliens were jamming all communications going in and out of Roswell . . . it made sense that the jamming signal was coming from apparatus somewhere inside the town. And a jamming signal that strong would have to be pretty damned powerful and leave its own distinctive footprint on the local electromagnetic spectrum. Shielded from detection by Earth technology, of course, but not from me.
I concentrated hard on my torc, coaxing and bludgeoning it into doing something new and different . . . until at last a long thin tendril slid up my neck from the torc to form a pair of stylish golden sunglasses over my eyes. An absolute minimum use of my armour, hopefully not enough to set off any alien detection systems. I focused my Sight through the golden strange matter over my eyes and Saw the town of Roswell very clearly indeed. Parts . . . I’d never tried parts of armour before . . . I made a mental note to discuss this with my family when I got back. Assuming I ever got back, of course . . .
My augmented Sight showed me a whole new Roswell. Dark shapes drifted through the streets like animated wisps of shadow, lighting here and there on people disturbed by a vague sense of menace or unease. Elemental spirits are always drawn to potential arenas of spiritual destruction. They feed like vultures on the fiercer, more distressed emotions. On the other hand, Light People were standing and watching all through the town. They were scintillating light and energy bound into human form, almost abstract living things. Their appearance at a scene was both a good and a bad thing. It meant something severely dangerous was about to happen, with many lives on the line, but also that they expected some agent of good to put up a fight. I always think of the Light People as basically good-hearted supernatural sports fans. There were ghosts too, and semitransparent memories of places past, along with other-dimensional entities and travellers just passing through. None of them mattered. I looked slowly about me, sifting through the various information streams permeating the local aether, and soon enough, there it was . . . A strange alien energy broadcasting from a location right near the centre of town.
I’d found them.
I headed straight for the source of the alien signal, and people grew increasingly scarce the closer I got. In fact, the few people still on the streets seemed to be actually hurrying away. I stopped a few and asked them why, and wasn’t that surprised to find they couldn’t tell me. They didn’t know. They just knew . . . they weren’t supposed to be there.
The source itself turned out to be something very like a giant termite mound, thirty feet tall and almost as wide, pushing up from the broken earth of a deserted back lot. There were no people here at all, the surrounding streets silent and empty. I studied the alien mound from the shadows of a side alley, my augmented Sight feeding me almost more information than I could handle. The mound itself was a strange mixture of technology and organic materials. Grown as much as made, its vast sides undulated slowly, slick and sweating, as though troubled by passing dreams . . . There were shadowy entrance holes all over it, set to no discernible pattern. The cracked and broken earth around the mound’s base suggested it had thrust up from below and that there might be a hell of a lot more of it deep below the back lot. What I was Seeing could be just the tip of the alien pyramid. I watched for a long time, but nothing came out, and nothing went in.
Apart from the jamming signal, the mound was also broadcasting a powerful avoidance field. More than just the usual Don’t look at me, nothing to see here, move along suggestions; this was mind manipulation, a field strong enough that people couldn’t even think about the alien mound or anything connected with it. No wonder everyone in Roswell had seemed so unnaturally calm and languid; the alien signal was all but lobotomising them to be sure they’d stay in place for the great experiment. Presumably the signal would be dropped once the bloodletting began so the aliens could observe the full spectrum of human reactions to what was being done to them.
My Sight punched right through the avoidance field, but I knew I couldn’t risk that for long for fear of being detected. There had to be all kinds of surveillance going on within the mound. So I grabbed as much useful information as I could in quick looks and glances, ready to shut down my Sight at a moment’s notice that I’d been spotted. I couldn’t See any alarms or proximity fields or booby traps . . . Just the mound, sitting there, sick and smug and serene, like an abscess on the world. So sure of its own strength and superiority over mere humanity that it didn’t even feel the need for protection. Fools.
I checked the time. Four and three quarter hours, and counting.
I began to get the feeling I was being watched. At first I thought it was the mound, that some alien device had finally reacted to the presence of my torc and locked onto me. But it felt more like someone, rather than something, was watching me from behind. That someone had sneaked up on me while I was concentrating on the mound. Walker had been convinced someone was following us through the streets of Roswell . . . and we never did find out what that was all about. Could there be some unknown third party at work here in Roswell? Someone with their own agenda? Whoever it was, it felt like they were really close now. I let my hand drift casually onto the butt of my holstered Colt Repeater, took a slow steady breath, and then spun around sharply with the gun in my hand.
And there was Walker standing a discreet distance away, leaning casually on his furled umbrella. He smiled easily at me.
“Hello again, Eddie. I’ve been standing here for some time, waiting for you to notice me.”