Three walked slowly toward her while the fourth, the truncated one, rolled up on one elbow to watch. Carol centered her, its, forehead in the crosshairs and tongued the laser. A black spot appeared there, smoldering, and the creature toppled over.
“They can be killed. It takes a head wound.” The three others didn’t even look back. “Ten minutes.”
They tried all their wands on her simultaneously. She kept her arms flat against her sides; the beams glanced away and made latticework out of the thick hull. They grabbed her arms and shoulders and tried to pull her away from the wall.
“Maybe I can get you three.” Their weapons were dangling free; she swept up the cords with one hand and jerked. The machines flew in a glittering arc across the room.
She hugged the three aliens to her, lacing her fingers behind them. They struggled, growling, bones grinding, but couldn’t get free. “Nine minutes, I should be able to hold them. Unless reinforcements come, with better weapons.”
39 – CHAPTER ELEVEN
Arnold Bates didn’t look at the clock. “Thirty seconds.”
“Lefavre!” Riley said. “Get out of that rifleman’s line of sight. Get ready.”
Rather get in the way of a dart than a laser, Jacque thought. He shuffled over and, with everybody else, focused all of his attention on the crystal.
“Fifteen seconds.”
Carol and the three aliens materialized less than a meter above the crystal. She fell heavily but didn’t topple, and held on to them. A piece of the ship’s hull crashed beside her.
“Darts,” Riley said.
“Two in each!” Carol shouted.
One of the aliens got three and sagged. The others relaxed and Carol loosened her grip on them.
“All right, Lefavre, bio team . . .” Suddenly all hell broke loose. The aliens squirmed out of Carol’s grip and ran in different directions, toward the sandbags. “More darts,” Riley shouted, but the order was unnecessary; the air was filled with the missiles, most of which missed and clattered harmlessly on the metal walls.
As they ran, the aliens changed shape.
Their torsos sprouted extra limbs-claws, tentacles, hairy spider arms. Beautiful faces grew monstrous with huge luminous eyes, terrible fangs. Seductive curves hidden by hair, scales, plates, feathers.
All different, all horrible, all bent on bloody murder.
One headed straight for the control room, leaping the last two meters, its shoulder toward the glass. “Kill them,” Riley said as he grabbed Bates and both of them fell backwards to the floor.
The alien crashed into the glass just as the lasers started, lurid green pencils of energy crisscrossing in the air. The glass starred but didn’t break. Two laser beams cut the alien into three unequal pieces, and shattered the glass.
It was over in seconds. The aliens had killed two people and injured seven, not counting the three who got serious burns. Jacque was unconscious with a concussion. Smell of burnt cloth and flesh and of hot metal and something else. The chamber was filled with gray haze from the smoldering sandbags.
Riley pulled himself up off the control room floor. The table was littered with blood-smeared glass. He surveyed the wreckage and adjusted his throat mike. “See if Lefavre’s alive. Someone else pick up the bridge.
Maybe not all the creatures are dead yet.”
“Look for one without a head wound,” Carol said, her amplified voice booming into the stunned silence. “You can’t kill them otherwise. Jacque?”
A medic was kneeling over Jacque, holding back his eyelids to check his pupils. “He’ll be all right, I think,” she said, and gave him an injection.
Riley was recovering. “Let’s get an autopsy going here . . . Physics, get a sample of that metal and run it down the hall. Is that one over in the corner alive?”
“Goddam right it is,” someone said. “Tried to bite me.” The alien had been sliced off just below the shoulders; it had one functioning tentacle and stubs of two other limbs. A laser had grazed its head-during the flurry of action Carol had shouted for them to aim there-taking off an ear and exposing a bluish brain mass. It lay on its back in a gory pool, tentacle twitching, growling in its throat.