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Chapter 75 – SilicateAlex tied a tentacle square knot in front of her, and one at the window on her right, and one in front of the window on her left where things were already getting inside. By then, another one was already in from the front door, and another was falling from a skylight, and two more were climbing in through the window on her right.
She slammed one of the skylight-droppers across the room to her right and tied another tentacle square knot, then she slammed the second skylight-dropper across the room to the area in front of the front door and tied another knot.
She had to back up, as four more dropped in through the skylights. And three more burst in through windows on either side of the front door. And another one flopped in through the window on her left. And two more scuttled in through the window on her right.
It was hopeless. They were pouring in faster than she could tie them up, and they were using the tied-up monsters as stepping stones to get in easier. And she couldn’t stop them from dropping in through the skylights. It was like those impossible-to-win levels of first person shooters where there was such a swarm of enemies that you had no hope unless you had a nuke. Or a lot of nukes.
She slammed the closer skylight-droppers together and tied their tentacles. She slammed the farther pair of droppers together and tied their tentacles. She took another step back and tied two more pairs.
She bumped into the door behind her. The things already had her backed up against the wall. She was nearly out of room. And it wasn’t like she could go silvery and fight them. No, she was pretty sure going silvery would be the worst thing she could do. These things did something that melted your bones. Something involving biochemistry. And she was pretty sure her chemistry didn’t change when she went silvery. She didn’t know exactly what her body did when she went silvery, but she knew the GC-161 antidote worked on people whether they were silvery or not, so she had to figure her chemistry wouldn’t change. So going silvery would just make it a whole lot easier for these things to eat the bones right out of her body, whether she was solid or not.
She suddenly had a flash of memory. The Desert Research Institute. Calcium. These things were eating the calcium right out of people’s bodies. She had a momentary thought about radium, but she had too much stuff in front of her to deal with.
She could lift off the floor and fly up high enough that the things couldn’t get at her. But then she wouldn’t have enough telekinesis to do any good. There had to be something else she could do.
She swung open the door behind her and stepped back into the hallway.
Some guy yelled at her, “Keep it up! We may only need a little bit longer!” That was when she realized the people weren’t screaming behind her. The people behind her really thought she was here to save the day. How could she tell them that she couldn’t even keep these things from crowding right through the door into the hallway and then eating everyone?
Oh.
Maybe she had an idea.
She waited until two of the things were scuttling right at the doorway, one behind the other. She shoved the front one backward and to the left. She shoved the back one forward and to the right. That way, they were side by side, and blocking the doorway at the same time, and together they were too wide to come through the door at the same time. And she tied their tentacles in a knot to keep them there.
The things crowded forward, and rammed into both sides of the doorframe. They squealed and writhed, but they couldn’t get in through the door.
The doorframe began to splinter. Maybe this wasn’t going to work after all.
Another thing scuttled up the backs of the two door-blockers, and she used her telekinesis to push it backward and to one side. It just kept coming. Another one came up the other side of the door-blockers.
She pushed a little on the one that was going to get to the top first, and she slowed it down just enough that both things got on top of the blockade at the same time. She yanked both of them forward, so they crammed into the doorframe and got stuck. Then she tied their tentacles together.
The nicely carved wood of the doorframe cracked, revealing the sturdy lumber under it. The things pressed hard against that, but it held. For the moment.
And another thing came clambering up the back sides of the four things blocking the door. She used her telekinesis to push it off the pile. But there was a small army of things crowded into the outer room now, so it only slid down half a foot before it was on top of more of the things. She waited as more of the things tried to clamber over the blockade, and she just scooted one so it got to the door at the same time as the one at its side. She tied their tentacles together.
She had a three-deep stack of the things barricading the door. But she had no idea how long she had before the things started coming in through windows and doors behind her. Or maybe right through the walls and the ceiling. Were they really just coming in through the front as long as those lights were up to attract them? She wished she had more information on what the things were, and what they did, and how they hunted, and why some crazy people thought it was a good idea to create them.
If Maggie Walsh wasn’t involved in this somehow, she’d eat a whole bowl of Brussels sprouts.
Another wave of things was trying to climb over her blockade, but she had a system now. She was going to keep letting them build this blockade higher and higher until the whole door was blocked up to the lintel.
Then she was going to use her telekinesis to push on the doorframe, and she was going to pray that the weight of the things behind her blockade didn’t simply cram them through into the hallway or rip the doorframe out of the wall.
The sound the things were making was changing. It wasn’t changing to that creepy ‘let’s split in two’ noise. This sounded more … Painful? It sounded like they weren’t doing so well. The six things in the doorway stopped waving their knotted tentacles, and just sort of went limp. The things trying to climb up on top of her blockade just sort of gave up and slid back into the other room.
And then her stack of six things started collapsing. It was like they were made of rubber and the air was leaking out of them. Well, something was leaking out of them, because there was a gross, greenish-gray goo seeping out as they collapsed and stopped moving.
The stack in the doorway sank until it was about ten inches high. And Alex could see the entire big room behind them was nothing but deflated things and goo that had oozed out of them. Nothing was moving. Nothing was making a noise. And there weren’t any noises coming from outside, either.
Had she actually won? What the heck had just happened?
Suddenly people were hugging her and thanking her and crying in her arms and telling her she was a great hero and she saved them just in the nick of time. She didn’t feel heroic. She really pretty much just felt confused, and guilty for getting the credit for something she hadn’t done.
And then there was a balding man beside her, checking the thing-slime with a Geiger counter that was clicking away. He was wearing a sling, and … Oh, crud, it looked like he’d had his hand eaten off! He was missing a hand and wrist!
He smiled grimly. “You’re Terawatt, aren’t you?” She nodded, and he said, “Well done. Really well done. Although I believe we’ll need some carpenters and painters in here. We discovered that one of these silicates had eaten a lab animal that had been contaminated with strontium-90 and the silicate died before managing to complete its feeding. So we injected the cattle with strontium-90 and let the silicon lifeforms eat them. Unfortunately, the things divided immediately afterward, which lowered the concentration, so we had to stall until the radioactive strontium killed them.”
She asked, “So now all of this mess is radioactive?”
He nodded. “Not lethally so from a few feet away, but we definitely shouldn’t choose to bathe in it.”
Another man squeezed through the crowd in the hallway. “Brian! What are you doing out here?”
“Oh, contemplating how difficult playing cricket is going to be now,” the guy said in that dry British style that was sort of the English version of Jack O’Neill.
Alex asked Concerned Guy and ‘Brian’, “So what exactly are these things, and how did you kill them, because I think there’s another hundred on the other end of the island around the mansion.”
“Oh, dear,” said Brian. “David, I do believe we might have a problem.”
‘David’ said, “We used up all the strontium-90 they had in their radioisotope storage.”
Alex thought again about the Desert Research Institute crisis. Once again, it really was calcium and other stuff like it. She only knew this bit because Willow had given her a talk about how radium and calcium were related. Maybe she really needed that AP chemistry course. And a lot more chemistry courses. Still she said, “So these things were absorbing calcium, and you gave them another group 2 metal out of the periodic table, and they absorbed it, too. So couldn’t you use any radioactive group 2 metals? Not just strontium? Maybe radium or radioisotopes of other group 2 metals?”
Brian said, “Good lord.”
David said, “We’ve been idiots.”
Brian smiled and waved his amputated arm. “You’ve been an idiot. I’ve been a victim of the worst fingernail clipping in history.”
Alex could hardly believe Brian could joke about this stuff. That was his hand!
David said, “We need to check whether the lab has enough radium-228. Then we need to find a food source we can inject with the radium, so the silicon creatures will eat the food and die off.”
Alex asked, “Can’t you inject the things directly?”
Brian smiled gently. “It would be too dangerous for anyone to get close enough to do that, and it would take quite a strong jab to get through that silicate shell. We know an axehead can chop into one, so it’s theoretically possible, but no one could get close enough to one of the silicates to do the injection.”
Alex just said, “I can.” And she lifted up some of the pieces of the broken doorframe and let them hover around her.
Brian and David both said, “The injector!”
David explained, “The creatures divide about every six hours if they have a food supply. But they’re running out of food now.”
Alex said, “They found two SAS teams your government sent in to find out what was happening at that lab and rescue people. So a lot of them have gotten fed recently.”
“That’s less than ideal,” Brian muttered. “They’ll probably divide again around about six am. We have the injector tucked away in the clinic back there. But we’ll need to get back to the lab, get on the anti-radiation suits, get the radium out of the vault, and load up the injector. I’m not looking forward to trying that again, after what happened the last time.” He waved his injured arm, and Alex had a sickening idea of what had probably happened to him.
David said, “And that’s why you won’t be going. I can do it on my own.”
A pretty brunette — who obviously spent too much time keeping her hair done, although people probably said that about Terawatt — squeezed through the crowd and flung herself into David’s arms. “Oh, don’t go again! I was so frightened the last time, and Brian nearly died!”
Alex calmly said, “This is something I can do without any help. I don’t have to get near the radioisotopes, either.”
The expensively-coiffed brunette insisted, “Good, because those monsters are impossible to stop. The men have tried guns and petrol bombs and dynamite and an axe and even running over one, and nothing had any effect except the radioactive isotope they gave the cows.”
By then, Alex had a pretty good idea about who was Dr. David West, and who was the SIS cooperator girlfriend with the wealthy father.
Alex just said, “I don’t know how many of the silicon things are out there, or if they’ll be coming this way now, so keep everyone barricaded in.”
Brian said, “I rather doubt that any new silicates will be able to wade through the radioactive dead ones without picking up lethal levels of radioisotopes, but I don’t think I’m willing to put that to the test unless absolutely necessary. So we’ll do as you ask.”
David ducked back into a clinic area and returned with a fancy metal injector in a fancy case. He said, “If you’re going to inject this directly into the silicates, you’ll want the heaviest needle, and a few spares for when one gets bent. Trust me on this, if you only have one hypodermic, something always goes wrong.”
She lifted the injector out of the case, used her telekinesis to change needles to the largest one in the case, and took the two other heavy needles with her. She lifted into the air so she could fly over the silicate-goo floor, and she said, “The military will be here with a tactical team in under an hour, and they’ll have a rescue boat a couple of hours after that, so you just have to stay safe until then.”
Brian said, “Good luck, young lady. And you should be forewarned: the silicates can get into the lab areas when they like. All the researchers in the main lab room are dead, the constable is dead down there as well, and the village doctor is dead in the hallway outside the radioisotope storage. It’s not a pretty sight.”
She smiled. “Thank you, doctor.”
“Dr. Brian Stanley. And this is Dr. David West.”
She flew across the ruined room, up through one of the shattered skylights, and headed back toward the mansion. She hoped Harry and Ron were still all right.
As she flew through the darkness, she listened carefully. But there didn’t seem to be any live silicates making those horrible noises near the town. It wasn’t until she got near the stone mansion that she started hearing the noises.
She arced lightning between her hands and flew around the building. She figured out which way the sound was coming from, and she moved to the east.
It looked like every silicate that could move was moving toward the building. Crud.
And where were Harry and Ron and that other guy?
And that was when she heard the burst of gunfire that sounded like it was coming from inside the building. Crud!
She flew across the back side of the building and spotted two of the silicates oozing their way up toward a third-story window. Ron leaned out and fired at the stonework the things were clinging to, and one slipped back about a foot.
He looked up at her and yelled out, “We’re sort of surrounded right now. Got any ideas?”
She let loose a lightning bolt and blasted the stone that the silicates were just reaching for, and the rocks shattered. The silicates slid down a bit and some of their base peeled loose from the rock. She blasted bolts right into the gap between the rock and the silicates, and the shattered rock knocked both loose. They squealed angrily as they fell down to the ground.
Ron stepped back, and Alex flew through the open window into the room. There was another burst of gunfire from down the hall, so she flew through the room and down the hallway to get a look.
Harry and the other guy — Mike, maybe — were at the top of a flight of steps, aiming down the steps and waiting.
She flew over to find a pile of jumbled furniture the guys must have thrown down the steps, and two silicates trying to find a way over the junk. Crud.
Harry said, “We can’t affect them, but we can wait until they get up on something and then blast it to pieces so they fall back down the stairs.”
Ooh, that was really sneaky. She liked that idea.
She said, “Ron’s trying to keep them off the walls, but they can climb up to the windows, too. And everything in the area’s coming toward the sound you’re making. Or the light.”
Ron asked, “What about the townspeople?”
She tried to sound reassuring. “That’s taken care of, and if I can get down into the lab area again, I may have something that’ll kill these things. But I need to work fast, because Dr. Stanley thinks they’ll divide again at six.”
Harry checked, “The whole town’s taken care of? What’d you do? Rip the island in half?”
Boy, did Harry have the wrong girl for that. She explained, “Dr. West and Dr. Stanley found out about a lab animal that got overdosed with strontium 90 and killed a silicate when the thing fed off it. So they got all the strontium 90 out of the radioisotope storage and dosed a herd of cattle and let the silicates feed off the herd. They maybe didn’t use enough, if the first silicate died right away and these things took maybe twenty minutes. But now I’m going to try radium.”
Mike asked, “Why the hell would radium work? Is it just radioactivity?”
She said, “No, they’re all group 2 metals in the periodic table. The silicates need calcium, which is what they suck out of your body. But strontium will act the same as calcium in chemical reactions, because they’re in the same class of elements. And radium will, too, so the silicates ought to take in the radioactive element and then die when their body tries to use the radioisotope the same way as the calcium.”
“Bloody hell, I’m sorry I asked,” Mike groaned.
Was she that bad at explaining stuff? She thought she got it covered pretty well.
Harry said, “It’s like getting a lecture from Hermione.”
Ron frowned at him. But that was when Alex got it. They thought she was too smart! Boy, did they have the wrong girl for that, too.
Alex watched the silicates. One clambered up onto the remains of an end table, while the other worked its way up onto a broken armchair.
She swooped down past them to the landing below, and grabbed the furniture with her telekinesis. The things were heavy, but pushing a flat piece of wood down a flight of stairs wasn’t that hard. She shoved the shattered end table down the stairs, and the silicate on top of it got a rough ride down past her all the way to the ground floor. Then she grabbed the broken armchair and pulled it down the stairs, letting the silicate bounce its way down until it was on top of the first one.
She flew down to the ground floor and dragged first one silicate, then the other, over to a corner of the big room. She quickly tied their tentacles in a knot, and called up the stairs, “Got ’em! I’m going down to the lab! I may need some help!”
Somebody fired off some more shots back upstairs, but she heard Ron yell, “On it!”
She kept an eye out for waving tentacles or creepy squealy noises, but she got all the way down to the lab area without trouble. The radioisotope vault was sealed with a huge vault door and one of those things like a steering wheel you had to turn to unlock it. She dropped to the floor and used her telekinesis to spin the thing and pull the door open. Then she closed it after her so she didn’t get any tentacle-y surprises. She had to find the right door inside there, and then she backed up as far as she could.
She used her telekinesis to open the vault door and lift out the lead cylinder that was marked ‘radium 228’. Then she swung the vault door halfway closed and stayed on the opposite side of the room with the door between her and the radium while she used her telekinesis to load the injector. She left the remaining radium in the lead cylinder, but brought it out of the vault with her. So far, so good.
She flew out of the basement door with the injector and the radium thirty feet behind her. Then she parked the lead cylinder of radium on the roof of the building and went hunting.
It wasn’t hard. She could hear the squealing from hundreds of feet away, so she made a beeline for the noise. A whole army of the things was still coming toward the building.
She stopped twenty feet above the ground and made a big flickering light with her lightning, while she sent the injector behind all the silicates and started jabbing them in the butt with the thing. They didn’t seem to notice it while they were concentrating on her. She counted as she worked the injector. She got forty-seven of them. And by the time she had the last one injected, the first one was already pretty much dead. Good.
She pulled the injector back to her and checked the levels. Okay, she had less than a third of the reservoir left. She flew back and got the two silicates still at the base of the building, then she flew into the ground floor to get the two still knotted together in the big room.
Harry asked, “Any trouble?”
She told him, “Not so far. But I only got fifty-one, and there’s got to be at least another thirty out there somewhere.”
Harry said, “Don’t forget about the ones you knotted together. You’ll have to go find them, too.”
Mike suggested, “Let’s make it easier on her. We go up on the roof, fire off a couple flares, make as much noise as we can, and see if we can draw any more of these little bitches in.”
Ron nodded. “Works for me. As long as we take up stations so we can tell if anything’s getting close enough to climb up after us.”
Harry asked, “How do we get up there?”
Alex said, “I have an idea, but I’m not sure how many of you I can take at once.”
“Huh?”
She went silvery and grabbed Harry.
Mike hollered, “Holy mother of God!” and leveled his rifle at her.
She went back to normal, standing Harry next to her, and snapped, “What is your damage? Didn’t I just say what I was gonna do?”
Mike choked, “Umm, no. Maybe hell no.”
Ron complained, “Bloody hell, Mike. Haven’t you watched the news any? The turning into mercury — or whatever it is — is one of her signature moves.”
Harry said, “It’s okay. You just surprised him. And I’m fine, even if it felt really weird.”
Alex tried again. “Okay. Well, I’m not sure I can take all three of you up the side of the building at once anyway.” After all, each of them was lugging around a lot of gear.
Mike looked kind of nervous. “I’d be fine looking for some stairs.”
Alex rolled her eyes. “Okay, I’ll take Ron and Harry, then you’ll see they’re okay when I come back down to get you.”
Mike muttered, “Somehow I think I’m going to regret this.”
Alex scooped up Ron, then Harry, along with all their gear, and puddled up the side of the building. She was just about at her limit, given how hard it was to scoot up the stonework. She had to give herself a huge telekinetic push. Then she dropped them off, and while they waved down at Mike, she puddled back to the ground and asked, “Ready?”
“Not on your li–… Aack!”
She scooped him up and puddled him up to the roof, too. Once she let him go normal again, he frantically checked that all his gear and all his body was still there.
Ron calmly ordered, “Two people take a corner on the back side and the third person takes the middle of the front side so we’ve got full three-sixty vision. Then Harry fires off flares toward each compass point, so the things have something to follow. Then we take turns firing off three-shot groupings into the ground. If that’s not enough to draw ’em in, we’ll have to wait until daylight, and they’ll have divided again.”
Alex swooped over to where she had left the radium, and from eighty feet away she refilled the reservoir of the injector. Then she flew off to the east to find the silicates she had tied up. She also didn’t want to lose her night vision or her hearing when the guys cut loose.
It took her maybe five minutes to find the still-knotted silicates. She ended up having to fly to the coastline, find the boat at least one team of the commandos had arrived in, and then aim for the mansion from there. The things weren’t smart. Just persistent and hungry. The ones she had tied up had just pulled until the knots were much tighter. Okay, that was good for her. She stayed up above the treetops, while she jabbed creatures with that injector.
And the one silicate she had tied to the tree by its tentacle? Gone. She should have picked a bigger tree, because the thing had ripped the tree trunk in half. It was probably out there somewhere, scuttling around with a still-knotted tentacle that maybe had a big chunk of tree trunk in the loop.
What the heck had those loony scientists thought they were doing when they made these things? Okay, if The Collective was behind this, then maybe the scientists were all operating under instructions that were really supposed to be harmless, or even useful. If this was supposed to be a lab doing cancer research, how many of the dead guys there really thought that was what they were working on?
When she flew back toward the mansion, she could hear little three-shot groupings followed by long pauses. And she could see the light of at least two flares from a long way away. So she wasn’t surprised that another half dozen silicates were drawn to the building, including the one that had its tentacle still in a knot. She injected all of them, and then flew around the building looking for more. When she didn’t find any, she flew in a wider circle. Then an even wider circle.
She landed on the roof and said, “I think you can stop firing off ammo. There don’t seem to be any more nearby.”
Harry insisted, “We’ll need to mount a full-scale search as soon as it’s light. If they do divide every six hours, we’ll want to have every one of them killed off before noon.”
She told him, “And you’ll need hazardous waste clean-up teams, too, because every one of the dead silicates is radioactive goo. And the cattle they ate are radioactive.”
“It’s a bloody nightmare.”
Harry smirked. “Well, Ron, at least it isn’t a two-hundred-foot tarantula.”
Ron shuddered. “Very funny, mate. Very funny.”
It looked like this Ron was just as creeped out by spiders as the other Ron. Alex decided not to tell him about the hundreds of hungry baby spiders the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. After all, she was kind of creeped out by spiders now, too.
Harry added, “And we have to find out who took all the papers and notebooks out of the lab, because they’re probably party to all of this.”
Alex remembered what David and Brian had said, and figured it out. “No, I know where the papers are. When the town doctor brought Dr. West and Dr. Stanley here, they went to the lab and raided it for papers. I think they have all the papers at the clinic in the town.”
Harry said, “It would be a relief if that’s all it is.”
Alex knew about the other Harry’s life from stories Harry and Ron and Hermione had told, so she was pretty sure this Harry was expecting to find a crazed supervillain was behind this. Okay, she was expecting to find a crazed supervillain behind it, if you counted Maggie Walsh’s skill with genetics as a superpower.
She didn’t get a chance to talk to Harry about anything like that, because right then, the tac team they had been waiting for showed up in a really big helicopter high overhead.
Harry put a hand to the earbud in his ear and said, “Iron four here. Iron one and three dead, all of Lead Team dead, entire lab dead. We have creatures. And a superheroine.” He paused for several seconds while someone talked at him. “That’s right. Creatures. Things.”
Alex said, “Tell them they’re an artificial silicon-based lifeform that eats calcium, as in eating the bones right out of your body.”
Harry relayed that message and then asked her, “How many have been killed, and how many are still out there?”
She guessed, “Killed? Maybe two hundred to two forty. Still out there? Maybe one or two dozen, which means there may be two to four dozen at six am.”
Harry relayed that message, except he said 0600 instead of ‘six am’. Then he added, “No, guns are useless. Grenades, too, so mortars are probably a waste of time. No, getting touched by these things is lethal, so hand-to-hand is out.”
Alex said, “They also tried petrol bombs and dynamite.” She was pretty sure a petrol bomb would be like a Molotov cocktail full of gasoline.
Harry added, “Also, the villagers tried dynamite and petrol bombs without success. The only thing that’s worked is loading them up with certain radioisotopes. Strontium and radium, I think. So we’re going to need hazardous waste clean-up details after the fact. Terawatt’s right here, and she can give you a technical explanation, but let me warn you, it’ll be like getting a lecture from a chem professor.”
She wasn’t like that, was she?
The helicopter moved to land in the big open area out in front of the mansion. She said, “Come on, we need to get down there and check that there aren’t any silicates down there.” She grabbed Ron and Harry and went silvery with them.
Mike yelled at her, “Don’t worry about me! I’ll rappel down!”
She puddled down the wall and across the drive, out past some large trees, to the big open area that was probably supposed to be the ‘front yard’ for the mansion. She dropped Ron and Harry out of her silvery morph. Then she flew fifteen feet into the air and started checking to make sure there weren’t any silicates that would sneak up and eat the helicopter team. She figured that with the noise of the helicopter engines, the tac team would never hear the things coming.
And maybe the people in the helicopter would have some food with them. She was really hungry, and she’d left her gym bag in the Blackbird. She needed to start wearing a utility belt so she had a place for her earjack and some energy bars and … some other stuff. Maybe more energy bars. She’d think about it later. She went normal and arced lightning between her hands so she could look some more for silicates.
Ron set off two flares and set them down so the helicopter would know where to land. Then, as it came down, a team of about six commandos leapt off from both sides with their rifles at the ready. It looked pretty intimidating. Alex decided she’d better not tell them they were stupid for not listening to Harry, because if they’d leapt off and run into a flock of silicates, those guns would be useless, and they’d just be Purina silicate chow, and the copter side doors would be open so the silicates could get at everyone still in the copter.
Once she was sure the area was safe for the moment, she flew back toward the helicopter. A stiff-looking British army officer was trotting out of the propwash with a few more people behind him, all of them covering their heads or holding their hats on.
She landed in front of them and over on the drive so she was far enough from the racket of the helicopter that they could talk.
The officer trotted up to her and announced, “Major Thomas Beldon, at your service. And you’re Terawatt, I take it?”
She smiled a little when she saw who was behind him. “You take it correctly. When the EU Terawatt liaison office called me, I dropped what I was doing and flew out as fast as I could manage.”
Hermione Granger stepped forward and said, “Colonel Jack O’Neill of the U.S. Air Force got her an SR-71 two-seater so she got here less than four hours after I first contacted her.”
Harry stepped over and nodded at the major. “Beldon. Good to see you. But warn your team that artillery has no effect. I’ve already seen three men get eaten by these things, and I’d just as soon never see that again.”
The major questioned, “But … you said you’d killed over two hundred of the … whatever.”
Harry said, “I haven’t killed any of them. Terawatt?”
Alex explained, “Dr. West and Dr. Stanley injected a herd of cattle with strontium-90, and the things that ate the herd died within half an hour. I’ve been injecting the things directly with a larger dose of radium-228, and that kills them in seconds. They need to eat calcium, and normally they just suck it right out of your body. But uptake of radioactive elements which are chemically similar to calcium ruins the calcium biochemistry inside them.”
Hermione said, “Oh! Of course. Radioisotopes of other group 2 elements! Strontium and radium and … beryllium or magnesium or barium.”
Ron smiled fondly. “Hermione always paid attention in science class.”
The major nodded briskly. “So we need visibility, and we need to sweep the island with search teams. Any enemies found will have to be cordoned off and then ‘injected’ by Terawatt.”
Hermione said, “Unless you have tranquilizer dart rifles that we can load with radium-228.”
The major called out, “Sergeant Maugham! Front and center!” A fierce-looking soldier with an icky scar across one cheek ran over. The major directed him, “Sergeant, go fetch your tranq rifle. It looks like you’re going to get to play with it again.”
Alex said, “I can load all his darts with the radium, so you don’t have to worry about contamination, but they’re still radium. If you have a lead-lined pouch to hold them, it would be a good thing.”
Hermione said, “The hazardous waste gear has a special gel pouch for radioactive material.” The major sent another man to fetch that. She explained, “Some radioactive materials give off gamma radiation, and some give off neutrons or other forms of radiation. This is lead lined inside and out, with a gel in between the layers that’s stabilized heavy water, so it blocks pretty much everything to some extent.”
That even made sense to Alex, so she figured she was getting something else useful out of her science classes. Or maybe stuff her dad and sister had told her.
Maugham showed up with a rifle case that had a tranquilizer rifle, compressed gas cartridges to fire it, over a dozen tranq darts, a row of injectable drugs to load in the darts, and some other stuff, too. Once the other soldier came back with the heavy anti-radiation pouch, Alex flew up to the roof and loaded the darts with the radium-228 before putting the last little bits in her injector that was still following fifty feet behind her.
She flew back to the ground with the darts and the injector and the now-empty radium canister in its lead container. She said, “I want to put this back in the radioisotope vault, and we should show Major Beldon and his team what they’re up against.”
That actually helped. Even the major was shocked by what was left of the scientists. And the commandos were suddenly a lot more wary.
She warned them, “We don’t know how many of these things are still out there, but they’re probably after food. Which for them seems to mean light and noise and maybe vibration.”
Hermione frowned. “Lovely, so the helicopter is a large buffet sign.”
Harry pointed out, “As long as the copter doors are closed, anyone inside should be safe. But they can climb walls and stairs, and there are multiple entry points they’ve made into this building, so this is not a secure base.”
Alex suggested, “We should move to the village and talk to Dr. West and Dr. Stanley. They’ve been here for longer than any of us, and they know what’s in the research papers.”
The major nodded. “Good plan. And we’ll be able to assist in the evacuation of the village when the boat arrives.”
Alex finally asked, “Oh, and does anyone have anything to eat? I’m starving.”
* * *
Alex rode in the helicopter with everyone else, and she directed them to the open area she’d seen just north of the village. While she was in the copter, one of the commandos broke open a cardboard box he called a ‘compo’ and she ate everything in it that didn’t require prep-time. Even if ‘hamburger and beans’ was a weird thing to eat for breakfast, and it said it was part of the breakfast stuff. She downed a canteen of water, and she figured she was good for another few hours.
She just held the injector and the radiation pouch of tranq darts in a telekinetic grip underneath the copter, because she really didn’t want anybody to get irradiated from that stuff.
When the helicopter landed, she went silvery to avoid the propwash and she flew out to search for more silicates. It looked like the area was still clear, so maybe everything on this half of the island had gorged on the cows and paid the price. She led Major Beldon past the town hall room — or whatever it really was — so he could see the army of melted silicates. You couldn’t tell what they had been like, but you could tell they were something weird and creepy.
She had everyone else go to the back of the building, while she flew over the goo and then down the inside hall. “Is everyone okay?”
Dr. West stuck his head out and said, “We’re coping. I ended up prescribing Prozac to about half of us. And we haven’t had any further invasions.”
She said, “The radium-228 works great. I killed another several dozen up around the mansion, and the British army’s here to help. If you can take down the barricade on your back door there, the soldiers are here to protect everyone. And in a couple of hours, a boat will be here to take everyone off the island until it’s safe.”
One of the villagers grumbled, “What good are a bunch of soldiers going to do?”
Alex looked at him and said, “They now have a tranquilizer dart rifle loaded up with stuff that will kill these things. So they have one long-range weapon that will work.”
Grumpy Villager Guy complained, “So what? There’s what, a hundred of these things left out there?”
Alex gave him a stern look. “About a dozen or so. Any that we can spot ahead of time, I can kill when they divide at six o’clock. And I still have the injector.”
Brian coyly asked, “And where might the injector chock full of deadly radioactive radium be at this moment?”
She grinned at him, because he was just so much like a British version of Colonel O’Neill. “It’s on the roof, out of harm’s way, with metal between it and us, and far enough from everyone not to be a threat.”
He smiled back. “Smart lass.”
When the barricade came down and the commandos came in, Major Beldon went around, checking on the injured and talking to the people left in charge. It looked to Alex like Dr. Stanley was both. Hermione and Harry went straight to the papers from the lab, Harry to check that they really were there, and Hermione to start mining for information.
Major Beldon had the soldier with the tranq rifle stand ready outside the building, while teams of three moved throughout the rest of the village, looking for more monsters.
Alex said, “I’m going to make a longer sweep and see if I can deal with any threats before they get near here.” The major gave her an okay, and she headed off.
She flew into the big room and up through a skylight, grabbing the injector with her telekinesis as she went by it. As she moved away, she was pretty sure she heard Hermione screeching at someone, “Are you all MORONS?!”
Then Alex flew through the darkness, listening for squeaky monster noises as she went. She circled around the entire village, then moved farther out, checking around every little house or paddock she could spot.
She did find a middle-aged couple cowering in their truck with a teenaged girl. The truck was stalled in their driveway. Three silicates were squeaking and flailing at the truck, and had managed to dent the grill and the sides of the truck and star the safety glass of the side windows with their tentacles, but hadn’t yet shattered the safety glass of the windows. If the truck hadn’t been so high off the ground, the things would have swarmed all over it and smashed the windshield in before eating the people.
She injected all three silicates, and in under a minute the things were dead. The father rolled down his cracked window and thanked her profusely. She popped the hood with her telekinesis, jumped the battery with her fingers, and urged them to hurry down to the town hall.
She was back at the town hall building in well under half an hour. She found Hermione in the clinic, going through the piles of papers like a madwoman.
Alex asked, “What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong? WHAT’S WRONG? Everything!” Hermione shrieked. “And … Oh, my God, here it is!”
It looked like an ordinary sheet of paper. Alex asked, “What is it?”
Hermione yelled, “Addresses! There are three other labs doing this same experiment, and Phillips sent notes off to all of them before he started the work here. Right now, Rome and Tokyo and New York City may be flooded with more of these things! Major Beldon, I need your sat phone ASAP!”
Interlude XIIIMaggie Walsh let the three armed men escort her down the long hall, past the lavish artwork, to the big office at the end of the hall. She smiled to herself at the sight of the two armed, muscle-bound guards on the door. She walked through, to find herself in a vast, lavish room that was part office and part conference room and part living room and part library.
She looked at the man behind the desk and beamed. She really smiled for the first time in weeks. She walked forward. “I knew it was you.”
He stood up and smiled back. “Maggie, it’s so good to see you. I knew you’d figure it all out and find your way here.”
She almost stopped in front of the desk, but she shrugged and walked around to give him a hug. She said, “I missed you. And I’m really sorry, but everything I’ve tried so far has failed. It’s that damn Terawatt and Jack O’Neill’s SRI. I’m still waiting to see how the project with Phillips goes.”
He kissed her lightly on her forehead and said, “That’s all right. They stopped us in Siberia and the Ukraine and Bulgaria, too. I really thought the Chinese project would do the trick, but the Central Committee went with the nuclear option far faster than we expected. We’ll see if the other plans work. I have high hopes for the Beirut one and your Ireland one, and I’m just not convinced about the others. Even your Arctic Ocean one and the central Africa one.”
She calmly asked, “And if not?”
He shrugged carelessly. “We have a few other efforts under way. The American bloc is working on a few options on its own, and the India bloc is up to something they don’t want to tell us about. Also we’re still working on three nuclear holocaust scenarios, but those projections are all messier than I’d like. If we have to, it will really mess with our timetable. And you know how some of our people feel about timetable slippage.”
She looked down at the floor and admitted, “And you already know I couldn’t get into the SRI.”
He smiled gently. “That’s all right, liebchen. We already have someone in place there.”
She leaned against him and said, “I thought you’d be upset with me.”
He smiled. “You’ve done far better than any of our other people. And what kind of father would I be if I was angry with you, when you’ve done so much better than I have?”