Intrusion Ch. 07

They had received the call not long after seven in the morning: the Cheshire Police had spotted Marcus Freeman's car at a service station on the M6 just short of Manchester. That was significant; it would only have taken him four hours to get there from London, so the fact that he'd stopped there, rather than travelling on, meant that he wasn't planning on travelling much further north. It seemed likely that he was heading for somewhere in or around Manchester, but that hardly narrowed things down.

Especially since it would take them time to get in to work in the first place, they didn't want to take a four-hour motorway journey themselves, but fortunately, Helen had pulled some strings to get them there quicker. Which explained why the four of them were now sitting in the passenger compartment of a Westland Puma helicopter as it flew over the Midlands.

The roar of the blades made conversation difficult, but that wasn't stopping Curtis from trying. They hadn't even invited him, but he'd turned up at the pick-up point anyway. It had looked as if Helen was going to shout at him again, but she had evidently decided it wasn't worth the trouble and had let him on board.

"This guy's not going to conquer the Earth by taking over a truck stop in northern England," the American was saying.

"It's not a truck stop," said Helen tetchily, ignoring the implied question, "it only takes cars."

"Well, motel, whatever the heck it is. Either way, you can bet it's not what this alien is after. It's not strategic."

"What makes you think it wants to conquer the Earth, anyway?" asked Rebecca, "all it's done so far is start a bar fight and convince a few people to have sex. I don't like this mind-rape crap it seems to be into, but world conquest seems a bit of stretch."

"What else would aliens want? Plus, one of its pals shot a guy through the head," he reminded her, "See, Earth has plenty of natural resources; it probably wants to strip mine the planet for minerals or turn us all into slaves. And you gotta admit, slavery is part of its MO."

"Or it might want to hollow out the Earth's core and turn the planet into a giant spaceship," she countered.

"What?" he said, nonplussed, and clearly not getting the reference.

"I'm just saying that we don't know what it wants. But, yeah, okay, I agree that it isn't the service station, and it's probably already moving somewhere else. We can only hope there's some clue there. It must want something in the area, but Manchester is England's second city, so..."

"I thought that was Birmingham?"

"Only according to people from Birmingham."

"He's right about one thing," said Helen, "it is dangerous. One man is dead, and it can take over people's minds, which I don't like, no matter what it uses it for. Which is why I've got Nalini looking into a defence against it back at base."

"I hope she comes up with something," said Kate, speaking for the first time in a while, "I'd rather fight those flying robot things than... whatever the mind control part of it is about."

"Makes you wonder why it bothered to kill anyone..." mused Rebecca, partly to herself, "it can't have been to cover up what it had done, or it would have gone after Emma as well." Kate glanced across at her, and she realised that she had been speaking too quietly to be heard over the sound of the helicopter.

"But either way," the army officer said, "it may not have been what I expected to be doing this week, but I'm going to be ready for it," she touched the sidearm partly concealed beneath her jacket, "it's not going to convert any of us into sex-crazed Cybermen."

Curtis looked blank again, but Rebecca felt her heart melt. Kate had just made a Doctor Who reference... as if I wasn't finding her hard enough to resist as it is, thought the woman who had picked the title 'scientific advisor' for a reason.

This could be a long day.

***

The service station turned out to be an old one, the sort that had a covered bridge with shops in it over the motorway, linking buildings on either side. As Helen had indicated, it could hardly be called a truck stop, with the carpark and slip road not being suitable for large vehicles. The hotel stood on the northbound side, a nondescript modern three-story building evidently intended as no more than a place for travellers to rest for a night.

Exactly the sort of place Curtis would have called a 'motel', even if it lacked the typical American layout.

As they walked over, Rebecca saw a young couple in the carpark, evidently more interested in each other than in the fact that a military helicopter had just landed in a nearby field. The man was good-looking with sandy hair and a trim build, while the woman was rather shorter with long dark hair and a curvaceous figure. The way they were kissing just before they reluctantly headed off for different cars suggested that, at least some of the time, the hotel was used for one-night stop overs for reasons other than just travel.

She smiled as the couple parted, reflecting that not every such encounter had to be part of a mysterious alien agenda. From the little they had learned, neither of the pair looked to be possessed, since they were acting far too naturally for that. A genuine moment of affection, she guessed... although the fact that they were meeting here suggested a tryst that at least one of the pair wanted kept secret.

The group's arrival had not gone entirely unnoticed, however, since a police officer was already heading across the car park towards them. Helen went to meet her, flashing her ID card, although the officer barely glanced at it, apparently deciding that the arrival of a military helicopter was more than sufficient evidence that these were the people she was expecting.

Rebecca noticed that Curtis was hanging back, glancing around at the surroundings, and looking a little jittery. "Are you all right?" he asked him.

"Yeah, sure..." he muttered, "I'm just worried about these killer drone things. If there's any of them about, they could be a real threat."

"You think there's more of them?"

"You don't?"

"I wouldn't rule it out," she conceded, "although I'm still wondering how the one we know about got here. We only had one object land, and it wasn't in that. Unless they were very close together when they entered the atmosphere, perhaps... but then why didn't they turn up until London? Not to mention that the drone would have burned up on entry without some sort of heat shield to protect it. Something's definitely odd here."

Curtis shifted about, looking away from her without replying. Did the American know something she didn't? She was about to ask him, but, at that moment, the helicopter took off again, drowning out the conversation and blowing a wind across the car park.

By the time it had left, Helen was heading back to them, a business-like expression on her face. "There has been a development," she said, "our targets left the hotel last night, but the plods weren't following them, so they disappeared..."

Curtis swore under his breath. Rebecca didn't catch much of it, but got the general idea that he was criticising the efficacy of British law enforcement.

"I said that had lost them," Helen told him sternly, "they put out a call, and about a quarter of an hour ago, a road patrol found the car. It's stopped in a lay-by a few miles north of here."

"Abandoned?" asked Kate.

"Apparently not. But whoever is inside isn't doing anything, and the police have been given strict instructions not to approach."

"Then let's go!" said Curtis, eagerly.

Helen shot him a look. "Just remember which country you're in," she told him, "and exactly how far your legal authority extends here. But come on; we have a lift."

***

Nalini carefully placed the sample in the testing rig that Brandon had set up for her. The greenish goo had lost some of its lustre, no doubt having degraded since they had removed it from the alien sphere. She hoped that it was not so far gone that further testing was useless... but at the same time, couldn't help but feel concern that it might still be too active, and hence dangerous. Here, in the limited facilities under the Ministry, they did not have the same level of protection as they did at Porton Down. That shouldn't make any difference, from what they knew so far, but, of course, it was difficult to know for sure.

Rebecca had been right that the researchers at the defence lab had been primarily interested in the sphere itself. They still were; the object was packed with microscopic circuitry that, according to their best guesses, was primarily sensory in nature. The capsule, if it could be called such, seemed to be a sensor drone, although if so, why it had also carried a substantial organic payload was a mystery. But it would, she suspected, take years to reverse engineer it, even if such thing were possible with current technology.

Nonetheless, with the much larger sample of the stuff that they had, and suitably shielded behind Category 4 protection, they had conducted some research on the organic material itself. They had shown that it wasn't an infectious hazard, nor toxic in any way -- at least not to mice -- which was why Nalini felt that her own experiments were worth the risk. But what it actually was was proving harder to fathom.

It wasn't cellular, at least not in the conventional sense. It seemed to be more like a syncytium, and contained high levels of peptides and lipid complexes that loosely resembled sphingomyelins, cerebrosides, and various neurotransmitters. The whole structure was laced with microtubules, which, although they were now inactive, sometimes still held together in complex networks.

Nalini suspected that all of this would make about as much sense to most people as the engineers' speculations on the functioning of the sphere had to her. But to those with a medical or biological background it suggested one thing: a nervous system.

You couldn't call it a brain, not as would be understood in terrestrial organisms. But that might be the closest analogy that humans could come up with, especially given that Room 42 already had clear indications that the thing was intelligent.

Much of this was really Rebecca's speciality, but Nalini was nonetheless beginning to develop a theory as to how this alien worked. It existed, she suspected, as a sort of mental template, something like the sort of disembodied psychic entities you often saw in science fiction. (Rebecca would, she was sure, have been able to come up with a veritable slew of examples). Except, because this wasn't science fiction, it needed a physical substrate in which to exist. Energy didn't just wander about like some self-contained blob, and energy patterns, especially ones as complex as this, needed something to be a pattern in.

So, somewhere out there, there was an original alien being that had uploaded a copy of its mental state into this ball of goo -- probably it had been more solid at the time than it was now. Some people on Earth speculated that, in the future, humans would be able to upload their consciousnesses into silicon, gaining eternal life as a digital simulacrum. This alien had done something like that, but with organic technology, rather than silicon.

And, now that it was on Earth, it had developed the ability to transmit that copy into human brains, to somehow overlay its own consciousness onto the neural circuitry of the cerebral cortex. That was how it possessed people. Of course, that part of the process -- the transmission and overlay part -- was the bit that really did seem like science fiction. How it could do such a thing was beyond her.

It seemed that strong emotions had something to do with the process. Perhaps they distracted the target, or perhaps they created certain patterns within the brain that gave the alien a 'foot in the door' as it were. Sex, in particular, was associated with a host of different chemicals being released in the brain. Dopamine levels surged during orgasm, for example, and probably oxytocin as well.

If so, then to take control of someone, the alien needed not only to have them be physically engaging in sex, but to have a satisfying climax when they did so. Which was probably a minor consolation, under the circumstances.

Hence the set-up that Brandon had arranged for analysis of their small sample. It might be that, after all this time, it was too degraded to do anything. Certainly, it wasn't currently active, and she doubted that she could fully bring it back to life even if she had wanted to -- which she certainly did not. But, if she could generate just a spark of low-level activity, she might have something to monitor, something to give her a clue as to how a defence against this thing's power might be constructed.

A defence other than 'not having sex', anyway.

Gingerly, she applied the tiny probes to the surface of the material in the petri dish. Satisfied that everything was set up correctly, she slid the large magnifying glass over on its arm-stand to get a closer look, and switched on the power. A few microvolts of power surged through the goo... and nothing happened.

Nalini sighed; this could take a while, if it worked at all.

She was right; the process proved painstaking. Over the next few hours she tried different voltages, with the probes placed different distances apart and in different locations within the sample, just in case it was less degraded in some parts than others. A couple of times she saw spikes of activity, the monitoring equipment picking up signals on the edge of detectability for a few seconds at a time. It might have been nothing, though, and it was proving hard to replicate.

And then she saw it... a small ripple or distortion in the goo, just a flicker, barely visible, and only apparent at all because she was viewing it through the lens. She glanced up at the monitoring equipment, and there was a signal on the oscilloscope, an irregular pattern averaging around 23 Hertz. Something was happening!

She flushed with excitement, heart beating faster in a mixture of nervousness and fascination, as the signal continued to scroll across the screen, the instrument recording everything. Her hand clenched onto the armrest of the chair as her eyes flicked from the magnifying lens to the monitor. Could she extract any useful meaning from this? She certainly hoped so.

She was feeling a little flushed, the excitement getting to her, her usual clinical detachment fading. This was fun... this was... the warmth reached her crotch, and she realised that she was feeling rather more than a simple thrill of discovery. Her breath caught in her throat, as she involuntarily shifted on the chair, rubbing her thighs together.

It was obvious what was happening, so she tried not to think about sex. Which, naturally, brought exactly such thoughts immediately to her mind. They didn't involve her ex, or even any of the well-known actors that she might occasionally have admired, but Damien, the young doctor who had invited her on a date tonight. Unlike any of her previous boyfriends, he was European, but he was undeniably cute, and obviously fine with Asian women.

He was slimmer than her ex, and she wondered what it would feel like to run her hands over his body, to feel his arms about her. Of course, he was also taller than her, so she would have to crane a little to kiss him. But it would be worth it. And did him being taller mean that he had...

Nalini suddenly pushed herself away from the bench, wanting to get away from the goo. She stared at it, fanning herself to cool the sudden flush, and noticed that the signal on the monitor was already becoming more erratic, slowing and fading. And, there... it had stopped.

Whatever was left of the alien substrate here was far too weak and damaged to even begin to take her over, just to cause a rush of thoughts and emotions that had soon passed. That made sense; the controlling entity was elsewhere, inhabiting the brain of Marcus Freeman and whoever was with him. It had just left an imprint behind, one she had awakened, and enough to get information on.

That was what she had wanted, but she felt too nervous now to want to try it again. She just wanted to analyse the data she had collected.

Well, that and to get Damien into bed.

***

Rebecca watched nervously as Kate approached the car, gun held out in front of her. They were standing some way back, too far to make out more than a shape behind the wheel. They had moved the police ever further away, out of sight around a corner, and had them temporarily close off the road.

The car was parked on a narrow concrete footpath on one side of the road, blocking pedestrian, but not vehicular, traffic. A low stone wall, overgrown with weeds, separated the road from an open grassy field just beyond, while the other side seemed to be waste ground, a few bare bushes and trees standing behind a dilapidated chain-link fence. There was nothing nearby of interest, and no buildings over-looking the scene. The car was blocking the footpath, but if nobody happened to be using it -- and it seemed unlikely that many people would -- nobody but passing drivers would be able to see it.

There was no response from the car's occupant as Kate came up to the vehicle, firearm still at the ready. Rebecca clenched her hands, fingernails biting into the palm, as she stared, silently willing everything to go smoothly. Her breath caught as the security officer first tapped on the window, then, when there was still no movement from inside, opened the driver's side door and reached inside.

Nothing happened.

Rebecca let out an audible sigh as she breathed in again. Kate was waving them over, and she found herself striding over as quickly as she could, even outpacing Curtis.

The occupant of the car was a woman, probably aged in her early twenties, with a slender frame, pale skin, and black spiky hair with bright blue highlights. She was also unconscious.

"Georgina Haywood," Rebecca read out, once she had found the woman's driving license, "and she has an NUS card as well, so she must be the woman that Freeman was with at the University. I can't know for sure without Nalini here, but it looks like she's in exactly the same state as Emma Foster was."

"So what's she doing here?" asked Curtis.

"And where is Marcus Freeman?" agreed Helen, "he's our real target."

Rebecca nodded, "yes, but there's probably another one now."

"Because we know that this entity can control two people at once," said Kate.

"As a minimum. We can't rule out that it can take over more, even if it hasn't done so so far. Although I'll agree that the fact that it has abandoned Miss Haywood here means that it has probably moved on to somebody else. But we have no clue who that might be."

"So, it went from Denzel and Emma Foster to Freeman to this woman here, and now it's moved on from her as well. Why, did it find someone more suitable?"

"That depends what it wants, which we still have no clue about. But it would seem likely. Denzel and Emma were just unlucky, the first people it came across that it could control. Marcus Freeman seems to have been a more deliberate choice. Georgina here... I don't know, maybe she was just somebody that Freeman was sexually attracted to. And then it came all the way to Manchester to find someone else specific..."

She trailed off, deep in thought, and turned around to look down the road. "Except..." she said, "it didn't get to Manchester, because this car looks to still have been heading north. It could have headed into the city and come back out again, parking on this side of the road because there's no path on the other side... but, no, I don't think so, that would be a very round-about route."

"And if you were travelling straight from the hotel they stayed at last night, and wanted to go into Manchester, you would just carry on up the M6. The same if you wanted to go to the airport. But here... there's nothing here, unless it's just a convenient place to stop on the way from somewhere else. So... what's down that way?" she pointed down the road away from the city, in the direction that the car had seemingly been coming from.