The Assault

17. CELLS



CHISNALL FLIPPED UP HIS COMBAT VISOR, SUDDENLY needing air.

Thoughts of an ambush were gone for the moment. Thoughts of the outside world vanished. There was only Uluru. This cavern. The glass-fronted cubicles. It was as if his entire world had been reduced to a small bubble.

Each cubicle was the same. A glass-fronted prison cell. In each, a woman: vacant, staring, impaled by the cold plastic of the tubes worming into her naked body. The women all appeared to be in their twenties. Their skin was pale, un-pigmented and unblemished by the sun of the outside world.

One moved as he passed her cell, and he pressed himself to the glass, convinced that she had just made an effort to look at him. But her eyes were unseeing, and she didn’t react when he tapped on the glass. A bubble of saliva drooled out of her mouth. It hung from the edge of her lip for a moment before stretching into a long string and collecting in a small pool on the gray rubber of the mattress.

“What the hell is this?” Wilton asked, right behind him, making him jump.

“Is like a farm,” Monster said.

Monster was right, Chisnall thought. It did look like a farm, like battery hens. But it wasn’t eggs they were laying. It was babies. This was the dirty secret of Uluru.

He looked at Brogan. She looked shocked, and he didn’t think she was faking it. She hadn’t known about this room.

He eased himself back from the cell and looked toward the end of the cavern. He forced himself to focus. They were on a mission. He was the leader. He had to command. But all he could see was this horror. This inhumanity. Human beings reduced to breeding animals. And why? What reason could the aliens have for doing this?

The women were in various stages of pregnancy, but there seemed to be some kind of order to it. The most pregnant women were closest to the lab. As he walked away from the lab, the size of the swelling in the women’s stomachs reduced.

“This isn’t right,” Wilton said. “Where did they get the women from?”

“In a war, people disappear every day,” Chisnall said.

“And who got them pregnant?” Wilton asked.

“Who knows,” Chisnall said. “Artificially inseminated, probably.”

“By humans?” Wilton asked, and a dreadful silence fell over the room.

“Cross-breeds,” Price murmured. “Chimeras.”

“We don’t know that,” Chisnall said.

He walked to the back of the group and grabbed Brogan by the back of the neck, pushing her face into the glass of the nearest cell.

“What’s going on in here?” he asked, trying and failing to restrain the fury that exploded from somewhere deep within his brain.

Her nose began to bleed. The blood ran down the front of the glass.

“Are you cross-breeding humans and Bzadians?” he asked.

“No,” she gasped, spitting out blood. “No, not that.”

“Then what?”

She was silent.

“Maybe they’re studying the human development cycle,” Price said. “Trying to develop a weapon that will stop humans from reproducing.”

“Then we all die out and the planet is theirs,” Monster said.

Chisnall looked around at them, his gaze finally coming to rest on Brogan, blood covering her lips and chin. He was losing it, he knew, and he shut his eyes briefly, trying to get on top of his emotions. Was it the horror of what they had just found or the feeling of betrayal? Either way he had to act professionally.

He let go of Brogan, who slumped to the floor.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said to Price and Monster, without clarifying who he thought was right. Did it really matter?

“What’s that noise?” Wilton asked.

Chisnall heard it too. A sluicing sound, like water through pipes. Tiny nozzles in the ceiling of the cells burst into life, dispensing a soapy solution. The women below automatically shut their eyes and mouths as the spray soaked them. Another spray rinsed the soap from their bodies.

“Like a car wash,” Monster said, which was exactly what Chisnall had been thinking.

“This place gives me the creeps,” Wilton said.

“Everybody focus,” Chisnall said. “The Pukes are still around somewhere. Let’s finish this recon and get the heck out of here.”

“What about the warhead, Lieutenant?” Price asked.

He looked at the woman in the cubicle nearest him. The wide, staring eyes, the drooling mouth. What had they done to her? They had turned her into little more than a test tube.

But she was still human.

He keyed his comm switch. “Fleming, what’s the status on the warhead?”

“Just let me know when you want the big bang, and I’ll set the timer,” Fleming said.

“We can’t do that now.”

“Can’t do what now?”

“Detonate the warhead.”

“Why is that, Lieutenant?”

“There are human beings in here,” Chisnall said. He described the scene to Fleming.

“Copy that,” Fleming said. “In that case, finish your recon, and let’s bug out of here before the Pukes break through that rock pile.”

He had answered a little too quickly, Chisnall thought. But there was no time to dwell on what that might mean.

“Okay, we are Oscar Mike,” he said.

The passageway at the end of the room took them to a nursery where long rows of plastic boxes—incubators—sat on frames under soft lights. Above each incubator, a cantilevered arm held a lamp.

Chisnall eyed one curiously.

“Ultraviolet lights,” Price said.

The incubators were empty.

They did not delay in the nursery. A passageway at the end took them back into the dormitories.

“Back to the entrance,” Chisnall said. “Fleming’s right. It’s time we got out of here.”

But he stopped after a few meters. A side passage appeared in the wall to the left, and through it he could see rows of chairs and tables.

“Hold up,” he said. “A quick look in here first.”

It was a classroom. It was set up with SMART boards, desks, chairs, and a globe of the world in a corner. It looked just like any classroom in any school in the world. Any human school.

“Just like immersion camp,” Monster said.

Chisnall gaped at him.

The last year of their training at Fort Carson, they had been in immersion camp. They lived in a Bzadian-style dormitory. They spoke only Bzadian and ate Bzadian food. They lived, breathed, and even dreamed Bzadian. It was all designed to prepare them for infiltrating Bzadian society.

“No, not just like. It is an immersion camp,” Chisnall said. He looked back at Brogan. She glared at him.

“What are you saying, LT?” Wilton asked.

“Maybe that’s what this is all about,” Chisnall said. “Maybe they’re not cross-breeding species or designing some supervirus to wipe us all out. Maybe they’re growing spies.”

“What?” Wilton said.

“It makes sense,” Chisnall said. “They breed human children, train them to infiltrate human society. They’re preparing them for the human world the same way we were prepared for the Bzadian world. That explains the baby factory back there. It explains the school. It explains …” His voice trailed off.

“Explains what?” Price asked.

“Brogan.”

They all turned to stare at her.

“Brogan’s sixteen,” Wilton said. “This hasn’t been built that long.”

“Maybe she’s from an earlier batch,” Chisnall said.

He looked around at the faces of his team. They had all flipped up their visors and the sharp light of the overhead fluorescents shone through the glass of the visors and made patterns on their faces. Price’s lip was curling up in disgust. Wilton looked sad. Monster’s face, as usual, showed no emotion.

“The Pukes’ greatest weakness in this war is their lack of intel,” Chisnall said. “They don’t have satellites and they don’t have spies in the Free Territories. If I’m right, this project could change all that.”

He turned to Brogan. “How many of you are there?” he asked. “How many have already infiltrated the Free Territories?”

She stared at him without expression and said nothing.

“LT,” Monster said, looking at the back of the classroom.

Chisnall followed his gaze to another door. He tried the handle—locked.

What more secrets did this rock have to reveal?

“Blow the lock,” he said.

Wilton was already pulling a length of det cord out of his backpack.

Chisnall walked around the schoolroom while he waited for Wilton to set the charge. The desks were plastic, as his had been at school. This was clearly designed to mimic as closely as possible the real-world environment that these kids would find themselves in, even down to graffiti on the desks. Scrawled names and pictures of animals and airplanes.

But where were all the kids?

“Fire in the hole,” Wilton said.

A flash and a bang and the door sprang open, smashing back into the wall behind.

“Cheese and rice,” Monster said.

This was the playground to go with the school. What looked remarkably like blue sky shone overhead, and underfoot was a thick mat of grass. It was set up as a baseball diamond, although a set of moveable soccer goals at each end made it a multipurpose field. To the right was a tennis court and to the left a roped-off area full of gym equipment.

And crowded against the back wall, behind the soccer goal, were children.

Their ages ranged from about five up to perhaps twelve or thirteen. There were boys and girls, all of varying heights and hair colors. They looked just like the kids you would see on any street of any country in the world, playing in front yards, kicking balls across the road.

Chisnall took in the wide, staring eyes of the innocent-looking faces.

These kids could walk through Times Square and no one would give them a second glance.

Human children, raised by Bzadians to betray their own species.

Around the edges of the large, oval room were a bunch of Bzadians in a variety of uniforms and clothing that meant nothing to Chisnall. There must have been at least fifty of them. Probably the scientists and administrators who ran the facility.

“Lieutenant.” Fleming’s voice broke into his thoughts. “Movement in the monorail tunnel. Pukes, and lots of them.”