This morning, something new was happening over in Randtown. Simon used his retinal inserts to zoom in on the town, five kilometers away down the shoreline, producing a slightly nebulous image of the shiny metallic hardware just above the quayside. The force field the aliens were using to protect Randtown fuzzed the air slightly, making details unclear. Nothing he could do would bring them into sharp resolution.
Not for the first time since the invasion, he cursed the inadequacy of his organic circuitry and inserts. During his previous lives he never bothered to upgrade and modernize the way most Commonwealth citizens did when each new refinement was shoved out onto the market; all he ever wanted were a few simple systems that could interface him with the unisphere and help manage the day-to-day running of his estate. He’d always made do with whatever was available at the time he finished rejuvenation.
But despite the lack of perfect visual clarity, he could easily make out the thick torrent of dark blue-gray liquid jetting out from the bottom of the largest tower of machinery. It was as if the aliens had struck oil beneath the town and hadn’t yet managed to cap the bore hole. Then the size of what he was seeing registered. The column of liquid was at least four meters across where it left the nozzle in the machinery. It curved down to splash into a broad concrete gully they’d built roughly where the main mall used to be, allowing the liquid to gurgle down to the broken quayside. The force field had been modified somehow to let the liquid through. A vast murky stain was spreading out into the pure waters of the Trine’ba.
“Bastards,” Simon exclaimed.
He heard someone scrambling along the damp rock behind him. The cave where they sheltered began as a simple vertical fissure that extended below the waterline, forcing them to cling to the side for several meters until it opened out. Napo Langsal had told them about it; he often used to take tourists there on his tour boat during the summer. From the outside it looked like any other crevice in the cliff, which made it an excellent hideaway.
It was David Dunbavand edging his way along the slick rock. That the vine nursery owner had stayed behind after the wormhole closed in the Turquino Valley always surprised Simon. He hadn’t thought of David as a partisan fighter. But then who among us is? David was two hundred years old, which made him one of the calmest heads in their little group. As soon as he was satisfied his current wife and their children had escaped, he was quite content to stay behind. “Some things you just have to make a stand on,” he’d said at the time.
“What’s up?” David asked as he reached Simon.
“That,” Simon pointed. “Can you make it out?”
David wriggled around Simon, and zoomed in on the torrent of dark liquid. “Wrong color to be crude oil. In any case why transport crude oil all this way, then dump it into the water? My guess would be something biological. Some kind of algae they eat, maybe?”
“What do you mean, transport?”
“That big machine it’s coming out of; it’s got to be a wormhole gateway. The liquid is coming straight from their home planet.”
Simon frowned, and looked at the machine again. David was probably right, he conceded. “It’ll wreck the Trine’ba,” he said. “Permanently.”
“I know.” David pressed a hand on Simon’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I know how much this place meant to you. I loved it as well.”
Simon stared grimly at the alien pollution. “I cannot let them get away with that. They have to know it’s wrong.”
“It’ll be tough trying to stop them. We can’t get to the gateway; it’s too well protected by the force field. And even if we did mount some kind of attack, those flyers of theirs are always on patrol. We know how lethal they are.”
“Yes, we do, don’t we. Very well, let’s inform the others about this latest development. Perhaps they can think of what our response should be.”
***
The Prime motile emerged through the gateway during the night, several hours before MorningLightMountain switched it to pumping in fluid saturated with base cells. It waddled its four legs along the broken street of enzyme-bonded concrete, observing the flattened foundations on both sides that were all that was left of the human buildings at the center of the conquered town. Fragments of glass twinkled dully from every crack while flakes of ash swirled aimlessly in the gusts of fast-moving vehicles. There were large areas of the street’s remaining surface that were stained a curious dark color. Eventually, the motile realized that it was human blood that tarnished the concrete. There must have been an awful lot of it washing down the slope toward the lake for the discoloration to be so widespread.
