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  The skull began showing and then the acid began to eat through that, frying Lieutenant Peter Michaels’s brain.

  “Nooooooo!” cried Kozlowski. She grabbed up her rifle and was about to riddle the beast with slugs.

  A hand on her suit’s shoulder stopped her. Garcia. “Don’t. You’re in charge her, Captain. Stay in charge.”

  The alien slumped, twitching.

  The burnt remains of her lover mixed into a liquid, unholy embrace.

  “Check on him,” she said tersely.

  If only I hadn’t let him go. I knew there was something wrong!

  “He’s gone.”

  “I said check on him!” she bellowed. “If he’s not, I don’t want him to suffer!”

  Garcia nodded. He stepped over to the bodies, gingerly nudged the lieutenant with the butt of his rifle.

  Acid mixed with smoking gore rivuleted out into a horrible puddle.

  It burned straight through the floor, leaving a ragged, smoking hole.

  “Dead.”

  “Right,” said Kozlowski. She could feel the iron grip of control exert itself and she was in command again. “There’s another chamber, and that’s where we’re going. No more heroics, you assholes.” She took a breath. “No more carelessness. Or I swear to God, if the bugs don’t kill you, I will.”

  The silent squad followed the telltale to their destination.

  Lieutenant Alexandra Kozlowski tongued for another pill. She swallowed it and her tears.

  2

  THREE YEARS LATER — BAGHDAD, IRAQ

  Victory.

  The smell of it was in the air, alongside the fading stench of the ruins of war.

  Victory.

  Domination.

  Excellence.

  He could feel the demand for it throbbing in his sinews, pulsing in his veins. He could feel the need in the stadium crowd outside, the impatient stamping of their feet, their calls and their applause. Its power and its glory electrified the air.

  Now it was time to electrify some nerves. Goose some synapses. Nudge some neurons.

  Jack Oriander stood in the shadows of the tunnel. Outside, his fellow contestants milled around, waiting for the officials to call for the beginning of the hundred-yard dash. He felt more secure here, away from the open space. He was slightly agoraphobic; anyway, that was what his dad had said. He wasn’t so sure about that himself, since he didn’t really have a fear of being outside. He just preferred walls around him.

  Pop was dead now. He’d been a captain in the Alien-Earth War, and he was dead now. The Army had not supplied the details, nor did the Oriander family want details. Not when it came to the aliens.

  Jack Oriander took a sip of cold water from a paper cup, swished it in his mouth, and spat it out. The Middle Eastern sun was hot out there. Jack wanted his mouth wet, but he didn’t want his stomach bloated. He had his sunblocker lotion on, and he’d taken care to drink lots of fluids yesterday and today as well as “carbing up” for the contest. At twenty years old, he was in absolutely peak condition. His muscles, trained and corn-fed in Iowa, sang with health and speed and proportion. He’d run track and field in junior high and high school and now college at Iowa U, now that these kinds of things were getting back on track. The Earth had lost some time—and so had Jack, because of the war and reconstruction. But time didn’t mean that much when you were young. There seemed lots of it behind you and lots of it ahead of you. Even though you saw people older than you with bald heads and paunches and lines around their eyes, the idea that you’d be like that one day seemed absurd.

  “Win today, grow old tomorrow,” Coach Donnell had said, his eyes glaring down like lasers into Jack. “We’re counting on you, Jack, to put us on the map.” That’s what the graying, grizzled man said every day of the training.

  He got his message across in more ways than one.

  The tension in the air was thick. Jack’s nerves seemed stretched as tight as violin strings. He knew that if he was going to get some help, he’d have to get it now. Around his waist was a light flesh-colored belt of synthetic material. Jack de-Velcroed a pouch, pulled out a small bottle. A fresh one. Best if fresh, his mom had always said, and though Jack wasn’t sure if that applied to this stuff, his obsessive-compulsive nature made him use a fresh bottle even though there was a half-full one in his luggage.

  Jack cracked open the safety seal and knocked out a pill.

  Hell, why not?

  He rattled out another one into his palm, then quickly screwed the top back on and stuffed it back into the pouch, readjusted his oversize shirt, tucking it into the elasticized top of his shorts.

  He looked down at the capsules. They were a deep green, seemingly embedded with silver sparkles.

  For a moment he heard the old man’s voice at the back of his head. “Take it from me, Jack. You’ve got all the drugs you really need in you already. Learn to tap those first before you go for other ones.” But he discounted it as he’d always done, listening to the voice of the coach instead. “Tell you what, Jack. You do what you got to do to win.”

  Jack slipped both capsules between his lips. He took the paper cup and used the small amount of water left to wash them down. Not too much. Didn’t want to get too much moisture inside of him. Balance. That was the ticket. The old man was always keen on balance. Yin and yang. Now the old man was dead. So if what Jack swallowed tipped the scales a little to his favor, what did it matter?

  Xeno-Zip.

  Street name: Fire.

  From Neo-Pharm.

  Great stuff.

  He’d been taking Fire ever since it first came out. He’d asked the coach about it and the guy had taken a few seconds to read the label. ALL NATURAL INGREDIENTS. That was okay with the coach, just as long as there weren’t any steroids in the mix. Not that the man had anything against steroids himself. Anything that could give you that extra edge was really okay by him. Judging committees were a lot more laissez-faire these days.

  Besides, it wasn’t any worse than a couple of extra cups of coffee in the morning. That’s what the ads implied, anyway.

  He hadn’t looked into it very closely. Jack immediately noticed that not only was he more alert and self-confident after swallowing one, his athletic abilities improved. Concentration, agility, coordination: all jumped into higher levels. Not only that, he felt better. Fire gave a little more zing, a little more oomph.

  The official line was that they made the stuff from alien queen mother royal jelly.

  Rumor had it that they used ground-up alien bodies from the war.

  Jack didn’t care. He liked the stuff. The glow that it put on life’s horizons was just the icing. What Jack liked was the edge it gave him in sports.

  Jack waited for the glow to start, listening to the sounds outside, peeking into the light, shading his eyes.

  The stadium was a spectacular tribute to the reconstruction of Earth, a wonder spawn of new technology and architecture. Lots of companies had tossed in contributions to build the thing, and not just demicreds. Big coin. A tubular confluence of lines and efficiency, of new and mighty alloys, centered around a traditional field. Wedding of the new and the old. Blimps and zeppelinlike hovercars hung in the sky, bristling with tracking devices and media sensor arrays. Field Humanitas was the name, and these competitions in which Jack Oriander participated had been dubbed the Goodwill Games.

  Now that the Olympics had been destroyed, along with much of old Earth, you had to start with something, after all. Something to unite people, something to celebrate the New Humanity, something to take civilized minds off the savage past.

  A sweeter conflict among nations.

  A good-natured competition among athletes.

  Jack Oriander leaned out into the sun a bit. He could smell the familiar humanity out there. He smelled the popcorn and the hot dogs, the spilled beer and the excitement in the air. He intended to be the center of that excitement now, yes, sirree bob.

  He felt a lick of the drug playing around
his nerves, and blinked.

  Ah!

  “Yo! Oreo! You want to get your ass out here!” called Fred Staton. Staton was the other guy from the States. He was clean-cut and slender like Oriander, only he had neatly clipped blond hair instead of black, with no widow’s peak. A strapping young man. As Oriander’s senses sharpened, squeezed into a fine focus by the tongues of fire, he smelled his friend’s lemony deodorant and the talc on his hands. Caught a wisp of grape jam from today’s breakfast, along with the astringent touch of Gatorade. “We’re just about set to line up!”

  “Uh… yeah, right.”

  “Hey, man. You okay?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “I dunno. Your eyes… they’re a little odd.”

  “This sun… it’s kind of getting to me. That’s why I’m staying in the shade as long as possible.”

  “And your hands. They’re trembling some.”

  Oriander lifted his hands. He fancied he could feel special blood pouring into them now. Fiery blood.

  But they’d never shaken before on Fire.

  “Man, I just guess I’m a little nervous!”

  “Aren’t we all.”

  “I’ll be fine. Just give me a sec.”

  “Sure. But seconds aren’t mine to give. And those officials arc oiling up their guns.” He slapped his friend on the shoulder. “You’ll be fine. Take a deep breath. You’re only a few feet away from a hundred yards.” He snapped his fingers. “It’ll be all over like that and we’ll go out and celebrate, huh?”

  “Yeah. Right.” Jack grinned.

  Fred was right. He should move on out. He could see the milling racers not just lining up, but slotting themselves in their starting posts.

  Yet the sun was not only hot, it looked terribly bright now, much too bright. Fire had never sharpened his vision up this much before. He felt like he had just been blessed with telescopic sight. Such incredible detail!

  Maybe he shouldn’t have taken two pills after all.

  Squaring his shoulders, pushing back the razory feeling along his spine, Jack Oriander trotted out to assume his position.

  As he slotted himself in line, he got the A-OK signal from Fred. “C’mon, Oreo. Let’s show them that American sneakers can still kick butt.”

  Jack smiled and waved. He fitted his feet into the metal stirrups, leaned down onto his knuckles. A buzzing began to keen in his ear, like an amp feeding back. He cocked his ear, waiting for the starting pistol. The finish line loomed ahead like a magnificent promise.

  Glory. Achievement.

  Winning.

  The crowd noise died down to a hush.

  But the keening in his ear grew to a roar.

  What was—

  The chemical rush hit Jack Oriander like the hammer of Thor. Molten energy poured into his muscles and lightning exploded from his brain.

  The signal pistol went off, and his legs answered as though they’d been waiting for this moment their entire life. They pushed him forward, shooting him off like a bullet down a rifle chamber. Suddenly he wasn’t just Jack anymore. He could feel the atoms exploding in his sinews, he could feel a cosmic power gushing through his entire being.

  He was a god!

  The crowd went crazy.

  The PA system rumbled with the announcer’s astonishment. “Unbelievable! Jack Oriander of the USA is literally burning up the track!”

  His face had grown a rictus of determination and sweat burst from his brow in rivuleting globules. His feet seemed to have grown wings. The air rushed past him like a wild river and the determination to win inside his breast burst into white-hot brilliance.

  The yards streamed by in a flash.

  Jack Oriander crossed over the finish line, well ahead of the others, his feet a blur and his mind hot as an incandescent filament in a megawatt bulb.

  And Jack Oriander kept on going.

  * * *

  The crowd in the stadium and the millions watching the race would never forget the close-ups.

  Jack Oriander’s arms pumping.

  His legs slamming onto the turf outside the track like John Henry’s sledgehammers.

  His eyes gazing into madness.

  The young athlete from Iowa did not seem satisfied in shaving off a solid four seconds from the world record for the one-hundred-yard dash. As though eager to get on to yet another race, unseen by any but him, he loped over the finish line, covering the distance between the edge of the track and the wall in a couple of blinks of the eye, reason and sanity burned out in chemical conflagration in his cortex.

  He smashed through the corrugated plastic of the wall.

  Only the steel girder just beyond stopped his demented run.

  And the blood…

  The blood was everywhere.

  You can buy black market videos from media vultures. You can see shreds of skin and veins and hair torn from the speeding body and hanging from the edges of the shattered plastic wall in clumps of gore. You can see the twisted remains of the rest of the body, lying akimbo under the harsh glare like road kill in a cleated tank run.

  And, if you look closely in these tapes, you can see the medic take something from Oriander’s blood-spattered pouch belt, and tuck it into his own pocket.

  Xeno-Zip.

  3

  The sun shone down gently and pleasantly on Quantico Marine Base, Virginia. It wasn’t often these days you got sun, not with some of the clouds that still hung in the atmosphere, not with the strange weather since the invasion. Colonel Leon Marshall had his drapes flung wide to let the warmth into his office.

  He sat at his desk now, the report printout neatly encased in clear mylar before him. He glanced over the neatly listed facts and figures and smiled to himself, feeling a pleasant rush of anticipation.

  Amazing.

  Absolutely astonishing.

  Puissance to the formerly powerless, power to the formerly impotent, is heady stuff indeed, and the close-cropped, burly colonel was feeling positively giddy with the prospects that lay before him.

  The digital clock on his desk turned silently to 11:00 A.M. The general was a prompt man. He’d be here any moment. Colonel Leon Marshall had been preparing his demonstration since seven hundred hours this morning, and all was ready to go. Now he could afford to take a quick breather, relax and enjoy the prospects that lay before him, his career and, of course, the future of this battered country in its efforts to build a strong defense even as it rebuilt its cities and its economy.

  The digital clock was just threatening to transmute to another number when his intercom chimed softly and the adenoidal voice of his secretary swept through.

  “Colonel. General Burroughs is here.”

  “Excellent.” Colonel Marshall slapped his desk and its thin burden lightly and stood up. “Send him in.”

  The door cycled open with a whir and the burly figure of General Delmore Burroughs marched in, his eyes turreting like offensive guns on a land carrier. They lighted on Marshall and a flicker of camaraderie shone in them below the grim and businesslike exterior. “Leon.” Pudgy fingers were extended. The general’s grip was certain and firm.

  “General Burroughs. Thank you so much for coming.”

  “I believe the words ‘urgent’ and ‘maximum importance’ were used in your communication, Colonel. I tend to respond to those words. But I am a busy man.” The eyes turned stony. “I hope that my time here is not misspent.”

  General Delmore Burroughs was a beefy black man with a bald pate rising up from grayed temples. He had a broad nose and a voice deep and full. He smelled strongly of bay rum and the Instistarch of his uniform. He was a general who had gotten where he’d gotten by taking no shit, and Marshall respected that. If he was a person who trifled with such things as mottos, then this general’s motto would have been “The ends justify the means.” That was why Colonel Marshall needed to get him in on the project.

  “I’m not a man to waste time, you know that,” said Marshall. “Tell you what—you think it�
�s a waste of time, you get to use my ski chalet in Vermont for a weekend… complete with my little black book.”

  The general’s eyes glimmered a bit. A hint of a smile played on his lips. Then his teeth clamped down, his face assumed its normal grim posture. “Fair enough.”

  “Good. Then lean back, drink some Kona, and have a cigar. This will take a couple of minutes and I might as well kiss your butt awhile as well.”

  The general couldn’t help but chuckle. “Cigars? Where you getting cigars, Colonel?” He sat down.

  Marshall stuck a cup of steaming Java beside the general’s elbow. Then he pulled out a humidor from one of the drawers. Smith y Ortegas. “They’re just swinging into production again, and my sources dug up the best of the first batch.”

  The general rolled it, sniffing. “You know, soldier. It’s been so long since I’ve had one of these, this might just kill me with pleasure.” He chuckled and took up the clipper Marshall offered, dealt with the cigar end in an almost reverent fashion. “Now exactly what have you got on that scheming mind of yours?” He stuck the cigar in his mouth and allowed Marshall to play a flame over the end. He puffed, blew out bluish smoke. His eyes seemed to roll back with pleasure.

  “General, do you recall that unfortunate incident last week with the Iowa boy at the Goodwill Games?”

  “Sure. Put the world record in the American camp firmly. Probably for years to come.” Puff. Spume. “Too bad about the accident.”

  “Colonel, did you know that drugs were involved?”

  “Nonsense. Good American talent and muscle pulled that boy over the line.”

  “You didn’t read the results of the autopsy? Oriander had Xeno-Zip in his blood.”

  “Xeno-Zip? Fire? What, that silly pick-me-up they’re putting in the stores now? Marshall, he probably had caffeine and lots of good old-fashioned testosterone, too. Ain’t nothing that great about those pills. Hell, I tried a couple. Goosed me a bit is all, but with no crash and burn. Nothing that would make me win a race!”

  “That’s exactly what everyone says. But I did a quick search of news cuts for the last couple of months. And then I had the boys at biochem do some quick testing. Came up with some remarkable findings.”