The Complete Aliens Omnibus, Volume 6

by Diane Carey

  They followed him because they were children. They hadn’t even noticed that he could easily have done this himself. He would let the animals overrun the ship—who cared?—and he would be safe in the charthouse.

  Making a sudden right turn, he ducked into a very small closet area, so small that the kids were left outside in the passage, unprotected.

  “Can we come in?” the dark-haired kid asked, nervous.

  “No room. Stay there.”

  He used a personal code to open the cabinet inside, and pulled out an extended M-41-A pulse rifle that was almost taller than Mary.

  “You said you didn’t have any weapons!” the girl exclaimed as he came out with the obvious lie in his hand.

  “I was afraid those boys would come get it and try to use it,” he told her. “They could just as easily blow their own heads off trying to fire a weapon like this without training. You don’t think they’d have let me have it, do you?”

  “No…”

  “Well, I have it now and it’s in good hands. Now I can protect you. Go ahead of me and I’ll back you up.” He pushed the girl and the tall blond kid with the curly hair out in front, then told the squirrely dark-haired kid, “You be the rearguard.”

  “My name’s Stewart,” the kid said, with an edge.

  “Okay, nidbits, that’s fine. My name’s ‘Captain.’ Now shut your impertinent mouth and mind your post.” To the other two, he called, “Move decisively, up there, like you mean it. Animals understand confidence.”

  21

  Ned wondered what kind of death his would be. Would the shock kill him before there was pain? Or would his mind linger on the agony after his body was rendered? He had stood up to many defiant animals in his life, knowing the things that animals sense, but this hornet was alone, without its pack, and it also knew the danger of backing down. He had called its bluff and it was calling back.

  He smelled the gassy stink of its breath and shrank from the soilage pouring from its jaws. In that last moment he thought the creature might feel cornered, isolated, perhaps knowing it was one of the last two dragons, and thus was even more dangerous.

  He decided in that final second how he wanted his death to be, how he wanted his soul to remember, if souls remember. With the fatal courage that comes of resignation, he stood up straight and drew his last breath, and held it.

  Without letting his mind get ahead of him, he surged forward, following the only track available to him, or to the alien that had taken Adam. There was nowhere else for it to go but straight down the companionway in front of him.

  What would he do when he got there? When the dragons laughed at him? St. George he wasn’t, and he knew it.

  “Dan,” he whispered urgently. “Still with me?”

  There was a crackle, then a faint voice. “Still here.”

  “How well can you work the ship’s systems?”

  “Got an idea?”

  “I do, but it’s dangerous.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  Ned ducked into a niche at a joint between two companionways and pressed his back to the wall, fighting to think. “Something Adam said. About gravity. We can’t cut off the air… we can’t freeze ’em… Can we… can we crush them? Can we enhance the pressure and smash one room? One part of the ship? Without crushing the other parts?”

  “Depends which room. Y’know, Captain said something about that—about how the bays are independent vessels, like. They detach ’em and move ’em around to other ships sometimes! Yeah—yeah, we can do that! But it’ll crush anything in there— aliens, animals, you—”

  “How?” Ned panted, exhausted. “How would it work?”

  “Lots of failsafes… it’s not easy… there’s a reason for that— it’s so bleedin’ dangerous… wish Dana could be here, y’know—I don’t know if I’m good enough… Ned, I could crush the whole ship. I’m just a little kid in diapers, y’know!”

  “I don’t know what you are, but you’re no kid. If we can use the acoustics to lure the dragons into one of the bays, can we put the gravity really high? Really high pressure, like? Just in that one area?”

  “Honest—I just dunno…”

  “I need you to try.”

  “Glory… this is bad. I don’t know if the hull wall can even stand pressure from inside. I might blow you and the works out into space! Ned—don’t ask me, mate. Don’t ask me to do that.”

  “I need you to shore up,” Ned told him firmly. “This ship is heading for Zone Emerald. All your families are there—thousands of innocent people. If we don’t stop the dragons here, they’ll infest a whole planet. I’ll die every day to stop that. Dying once is nothing. Put the oars down and let’s paddle.”

  There was silence on the other end for several seconds. “I… hear you…”

  “Be ready, then.”

  “Standing by, I guess…”

  Ned pocketed that conversation and slipped out from his niche. He hoped he would be alive to give the terrible order to a student who had no idea what complex systems the ship would kick up against such a radical protocol. Were they smart enough? Had they learned enough in their short time aboard? Wouldn’t the designers of the ship have thought of its possibly being taken over by outside forces and wouldn’t they have…

  His brain imploded and crushed his thoughts as he rounded a bend and came to an intersection—and he had company.

  At first he thought it was another bear or an elk or mammoth, but no such luck. There, standing in the corridor to his right, a black dragon unfolded its skeletal body before him. It rose to its full height, rolling its banana-shaped head upward to show its craggy teeth. The lips rippled and peeled back. Ned froze in place, almost in a half-stride, bracing for a grisly death and hoping the seconds would go swiftly for him.

  The alien unfolded its long hands. One by one the razor claws fanned outward in a display. Behind the alien, the yellow lights from an unknown room cast a glow about the creature, almost a halo, as if it were an angel of vengeful gods.

  Instinctively Ned knew he would move no farther forward. He had no magic, no tricks, no way to really stand down an animal that was determined to kill. All he had left was to make peace with himself and his gods.

  “I know it’s your job,” he uttered, his voice ragged. “It’s mine to run from you.”

  Perhaps he could draw it away, fool it somehow.

  He began to step back… back more… retracing in his mind the route back to the bay, where possibly it would lose him in the other animals. Would it work twice for him or had he played that card?

  The alien made a long haaaaaasssssss. The gassy stink of its breath kissed Ned’s face and he shuddered from deep inside his body. Terror ate at him, rattling his knees, his shoulders until he could barely stand.

  He took another step backward.

  At that moment his ears were assaulted by a guttural jet-engine noise, loud and appalling and close. Hot breath poured down his collar. He twisted around, for the sound came from behind.

  Almost filling the corridor was literally the last creature he might’ve expected to see—a massive assault vehicle in the shape of a cat. A sabertoothed cat right out of the books, right out of the stories and the tales of wilderness predation and the feverish minds of young artists who wanted secretly to ride such animals into the fires of battle fantasy.

  But this one was alive—making a terrorizing noise. Ned found his head almost perfectly positioned between the cat’s two famous eight-inch canine fangs.

  22

  Tom Pangborn figured things couldn’t get much better for him. Circumstances had turned on their edge, but if he played it right, he’d win. The cargo might be lost, the ship in dire straits, but the crew was gone and the rest of the people would be killed, including the brat camp. He just had to make sure he was the one who survived. Terrible how he had been so betrayed, how some of his crew had finagled a deal with smugglers to bring those aliens aboard this ship. How could he have known, after all? Probably the Virgi
nia had been in on the deal. By the time he spun the right stories, he’d be a hero. Insurance would move in, he would get a huge settlement, and his pick of commands from now on.

  The girl, Marie or whatever, moved in front of him, with the curly-haired boy, and Stewie came behind, not saying a word.

  Marie was crying, making chicken whimpering noises. The curly-haired kid pulled her behind him and took the lead. Good boy, you do that. Nobility. Cute.

  “Turn right up here,” Pangborn instructed.

  They had traveled almost the whole length of the ship, a six-minute walk on a good day, and they had made it in three.

  “Up these steps, then left,” he instructed.

  The curly-haired boy said, “But there’s a hatch up there!”

  “Go through it.”

  “What if one of those things is—”

  “Stick your head through the hole and look.”

  “That’s not fair!” Marie protested. Mary. Whatever.

  “Boys his age are soldiers and cops. He can handle it. Rise to the occasion, kid,” he said to the boy. “You’ll have something to tell your little classmates back home.”

  Having his manhood challenged worked on the kid. Pangborn had bet it would. The kids hadn’t figured out that he was smarter than a teenager.

  By gosh, the punk actually went up the ladder and slowly opened the hatch. It made a metallic crack and a slight sucking sound as it opened. Pangborn watched from the bottom, aimed his weapon, and said, “Go ahead, sport. Push it up. I’ve got you covered.”

  He didn’t mention that if he opened fire he’d take the boy’s head off along with anything else that was up there.

  Sweating and trembling, the boy put his foot on another rung and pushed upward. The hatch made a faint creak.

  “All clear,” he rasped, having trouble finding his voice.

  “Go on, then.”

  “Sweet Jesus, protect us…” Mary choked, halfway up the ladder.

  “Don’t cross yourself,” Pangborn said. “You’ll fall off the ladder.”

  She glanced down at him, but kept climbing after the boy.

  Only when they were all the way up and there was no sound of slaughter did Pangborn sling his weapon and hurry up the ladder. He came out into the auxiliary staging area for the charthouse, a sort of hallway-slash-meeting room for officers’ conferences. Stewie came up after him— Pangborn had almost forgotten he was there.

  The two other kids were waiting at the hatch to the charthouse.

  “Made it,” Pangborn said. “Told you we—”

  He froze in place, looking past Mary and Curly to the charthouse, dimmed with red lights for emergency vision. Out of those red lights, in a blood-colored shroud, came the blue-black head of a xenomorph.

  Mary felt the acid breath on her shoulder and turned, already screaming. She jumped toward Pangborn, trying to get behind him as he shouldered his weapon, but he stuck a leg out and knocked her back toward the animal with a well-placed knee.

  Behind him, he heard Stewart yelp with fear. Mary’s screams tore through their heads as the xenomorph snatched her by the torso, turned her to face him, and sank its claws into her spine. With one final ragged shriek, she gagged and went limp, falling backward like rag doll in its grip.

  Curly made some unintelligible cry of terror and agony, but before the alien could get to him, Pangborn opened fire. On both of them.

  His weapon made a deafening machine-gun ratchet noise and sprayed shells all over the forward part of the staging area, cutting the boy in half at the chest and blowing the alien’s exoskeleton to shards. Razor-sharp bone splinters blew through Mary’s corpse. Acid splattered all over Curly’s demolished body parts as they tumbled to the deck, and were instantly eaten through to a mush.

  The alien’s head, severed clean from its shoulders, did an acrobatic flip backward into the charthouse, and neatly hung itself on an overhead hatch handle over the co-pilot’s seat.

  “Perfect!” Pangborn shouted. He stopped firing. His weapon smoked from the barrel and cast an aromatic pall through the cabin.

  “Aw! Aw!” Stewart gasped over and over. “Aw! Nah! Aw, God, aw!”

  “Don’t whine,” Pangborn said. “A fast death. S’all we can ask for. Stay there. Don’t move.”

  Stewart collapsed into a shivering mass, his head in his hands, staring at the rather shocking bodies of his fellow cadets. Fine. He could stay there.

  Pangborn stepped carefully past the sizzling mess, being sure not to get his shoes in the acid.

  Hearing the boy whimpering behind him, Pangborn was driven to move that much more decisively, to put on a good show just for the hell of it. Stewart wasn’t going to live to be a witness anyway, but it was fun to show off.

  “Just stay there. I’m changing the helm protocol to full squawk. This’ll take a few minutes, but we’ll go to full speed and get to Emerald Sector in record time. They’ll hear us long before that and probably send the Stellar Guard. We’ll burn up every last vestige of fuel and probably toast half the systems, but we’ll get help. Worth it, right?”

  The boy wept pathetically and didn’t speak.

  He turned to reach upward to key in the long-range broadcast system, but paused. Staring down at him with its eyeless case, grinning savagely, was the disembodied alien skull. Torn and smelly, the head hung upside down from the overhead hatch handle.

  “Hey, champ,” Pangborn greeted. “Whose ship did you think you were on?”

  With a grin, he thought about mounting the damned atrocity and hanging it in the main salon. Better than an antique bell any day!

  He turned back to the controls, reveling in that image.

  That’s when he felt it. Something went thwap on the top of his head. He flinched and looked up at the alien head, but it was just an illusion. The thing was dead, not moving. Just his imagination.

  He pulled out the command keyboard and hit a key to call up the visuals. Just as the monitor flipped to life and showed him a beautiful view of the exterior of the ship, just as he saw the big painted letters “U M I A K” on the ship’s magnificent glossy burgundy hull, he felt the burning begin.

  Pangborn grabbed at his head. His fingers came back scorched at the tips. He shook his head, feeling the sensation of a laser burn on the top of his skull.

  He bolted back out of the chair, stumbling, knocking the alien head, finally striking the edge of the beverage dispenser with his spine.

  Before him, the alien head turned lazily from where it hung on the hatch handle.

  As Pangborn’s skull sizzled, driving him wild with pain, and sweat broke on his face and neck, he saw the alien head leak again. A single drop of potent green acid formed in its mouth and fell to the seat he had just left. The drop burned through the leather, leaving a trail of green smoke. It burned through the chair and fell next to the deck, and began to burn through the carpet.

  His body began to shudder violently as the drop of acid on his head burned through to his brain. He lost motor control almost immediately and slumped forward, seeing his own hands before him, splayed and useless. His mouth began to burn and fell open. The single drop of acid bored through the roof of his mouth and landed on his tongue. The last sensation in this universe for Thomas Scott Pangborn was the taste of alien blood.

  23

  Cats—nature’s most perfect predator. From the tailless Manx housecats at Ned’s farm to the lions of the Savannah, they were formed by time for the ultimate hunt. Pointy on five ends, this was the quintessence of cats, the best nature had ever done. It was big as that grizzly bear with all the power and ten times the speed, and no fear. In its instinctive memory, this cat had fought with dinosaurs. It was loaded and ready to fire.

  Ned looked up, up, up into its huge square jaws, its blocky powerful head, and the neck muscles twitching and cording over his shoulders. But the cat wasn’t interested in him. It stared with glowing golden eyes over his head at the dragon. Those eyes—those marvelous machines which could
hunt in light or darkness, which sized up an enemy and calculated a thousand details before the strike—

  Cramping bodily, Ned crouched. The sabertooth batted him out of the way like a furry toy. Ned tumbled without the slightest control, and slammed into the side wall, landing beside a pile of spark tarps left there by the maintenance crew.

  On Ned’s right, the dragon hissed, opened its primary jaws wide, and showed its inner jaws, but didn’t snap. Not yet. On his left, the giant cat spat and snarled a bestial warning. It lowered its boxy head and the great shoulders rolled. It opened its own jaws—a stunning hundred-degree maw with the lower jaw extended and the eight-inch serrated fangs arching out forward, forty degrees more than a modern lion could open its own mouth. Ah, an historic animal built for historic prey!

  Tick-tick-tick-tickit-tick—fanned claws clicked on the deck as the cat moved sideways and maneuvered into the intersection of the two corridors. The alien also pivoted to make room for itself. The cat kept its fangs toward the alien, and they began to circle each other, sizing each other up.

  Ned made the near-fatal error of thinking he could move, perhaps slip out while they were so engaged, but the first hint of a step drew the cat’s snarl and raised its tail, though it never took its eyes off its primary target—the dragon. Ned shrank into the crack where the wall met the deck, but his movement had triggered the inevitable.

  The alien made a savage leap into the air, trying to get on top of the cat. The cat flattened, efficient eyes never leaving its target, never being fooled. But the corridor was cramped and the alien had misjudged. Its long head case slammed into the overhead support bars, which drove it down sooner than it expected.