The Complete Aliens Omnibus, Volume 6

by Diane Carey

  Dan’s declaration was heartily received by the other cadets, and especially by Ned Menzie as he lounged back in his floating chair. Around them, the salt air and warm water lapped at his skin and his crossed legs. Across from where he floated, Adam was reclined on a surfboard, Dan was ensconced in an inner tube, and between them, Robin swam with Pearl as if they were sea nymphs. At the far end of the tank, Stewart made a crazy dive off the scaffold and splashed Leigh as she practiced her backstroke, and Dylan as he retaliated with a sweep that drenched Stewart as soon as he surfaced.

  The starboard bay was brightly lit with simulated sunlight, and there was lots of bustling activity, but the cadets were officially off duty, as a reward for their brave actions in saving the ship. Ned was relieved just to be here, to hand responsibility back to the adults. There was an advantage in being a kid and he wanted to take it for all it was worth.

  He looked up as Dana came walking down the scaffold walkway toward them, with Spiderlegs spinning behind, carrying a tray of icy drinks with little umbrellas stuck in them.

  “Virgin coladas, anyone?” Dana invited.

  The kids cheered and crowded toward that side of the tank.

  “What?” Dan protested. “No rum?”

  “Just use your imaginations,” Dana merrily told them. She crouched at the edge of the aquarium and said, “Robin, guess what, honey? Your baby’s being adopted by a really nice couple on Zone Emerald. They have a vineyard, and they say you’re welcome to come visit him any time. They named him Robin, after you!”

  Robin’s face dissolved into pure joy as the cadets broke into applause for her.

  “Oh, I’m that grateful!” she chirped. “Poor wee thing!”

  “Well, the poor wee thing’s going to grow up rich, romping among the grapes, and have all the benefits of two parents who are just gigglin’ thrilled to have him. I sent him off this morning on a high-speed shuttle. They’ll be meeting him at the spacedock. Lots better than growing up in a pirate ship, huh?” “So much!”

  “What about those pirates?” Adam asked as Spiderlegs handed out the drinks.

  “We rounded up three of them, including Detroit himself,” Dana said. “The rest were killed. They’re in custody. They’re facing the death penalty for trafficking in dangerous contraband. We’ve flushed the ship completely, so it’s all safe now, stem to stern. It’s going to stink for a while, because suddenly we’re running a cattle train, but that’s okay, right?”

  “Just like home in the twigs!” Ned told her.

  They all laughed together, and Stewart splashed him.

  “I’m still impressed,” Adam said to Ned, “that you knew we could take all those Gs under water. How do you get that kind of knowledge living in the middle of a farm all your life?”

  “The farm’s on an island, mind,” Ned told him. “We know a bit about water.”

  “Oh, look!” Leigh called, and pointed down onto the main deck. “They found the bear!”

  Below, a makeshift series of corrals had been set up to separate the sheep from the deer, the geese and fowl from the horses, and the various breeds of cattle milling together, and other manners of animal into their own enclosures. Even the mammoths and the elephants were boxed in by four carefully situated containers, the only fencing big enough to hold them. The dangerous animals had been hunted down with tranquilizer darts and were being held subdued in special box-cages. The cadets watched as a robotic pallet rolled across the deck with the tattered grizzly bear placidly lounging inside. He shook his big drowsy head only for a moment, when they moved him past the cage with the sabertoothed cat soundly drugged and sleeping inside, rolled onto its back with its legs bandaged up and happily sprawled. It stretched its front leg and yawned, like big kitten, with mighty big fangs.

  Ned looked down at that cat with deep gratitude. It would go on to its own life on a new planet, never really knowing what it had done, to live as the wild thing it was meant to be, in a new unspoiled wilderness. He was glad for it.

  And there were people below, too, dozens of professional crewmen and veterinarians and wildlife specialists brought from other ships, and Mr. Nielsen down there enjoying the sights and recording the captures. They knew now who was alive and who was dead, and they had come to accept the facts.

  “We’ll all be attending memorial services for Mary and Chris on Zone Emerald,” Dana went on, pulling them back to a sadder reality. “Mary’s parents and Chris’s aunt and uncle are donating a children’s medical research wing to the university in their honor. It’s hard, but this is space. Tragedies do happen.”

  “They do,” Ned murmured, thinking back.

  Everyone looked at him, aware of the burden he had carried. He wished they would stop looking.

  “Dana,” Adam spoke up.

  She looked at him. “Yes.”

  He sat up on his surfboard, letting his legs hand in the water. “I want to apologize for what I did to you. It was immature. I put everybody in danger because I didn’t trust you and your authority. In fact, I owe all you guys an apology. I thought I was somebody. I didn’t respect anybody else. I’m really sorry for it.”

  The moment grew quiet. Adam held his ground.

  Just when things were becoming too intense, Ned cupped the water and splashed him in the face. “And don’t forget it.”

  With that he released them to laugh and move on.

  “That’s so nice,” Spiderlegs uttered, and sniffed back a tear. “Kids are so nice… good kids. I love kids.”

  “We love you, Mr. Follo!” Robin cheered.

  Dana gave him a little smile, then turned back to Adam. “Guess there’s hope for you, Mr. Bay.”

  Adam nodded, but he didn’t smile. It wasn’t an act. Not this time. Ned looked at him, and they shared a private moment of mutual appreciation.

  “Hey!” Dana turned as one of the veterinarians appeared on the scaffold walkway. “Ned, look who we found!”

  She was echoed by a happy ruff! and the tick-tick of toenails down the metal walkway.

  “Kite!” Ned splashed to the edge of the tank to meet the delighted border collie who had worked so flawlessly when the hard moment came. “Kite, that’ll do! That’ll do, boy! What a dog! What a good dog, good dog!”

  The others had no idea, but he knew and the dog knew that this was border collie command, saying that a good day’s work was done, and come thee now to me. The dog ruffed again and almost pulled the veterinarian off his feet to get to Ned, who greeted the collie with open arms.

  “Kite…” Adam gave him a quizzical look as the dog joyously licked the salt water from Ned’s face, and Ned returned the joy with his own.

  “Cosmic!” Dylan exclaimed. “You’ve got a dog!”

  “He also has a sabertooth,” Leigh said. “And I think that bear likes him now.”

  “I want the mammoth!” Stewart claimed.

  Dan laughed. “I really want to see your skinny bum riding a mammoth!”

  The dog, the Kite of space, overcome by delight, could no longer contain itself and leaped into the water beside Ned, then came up and shook its head as it paddled, and indeed seemed to actually be smiling. Ned helped Kite stay afloat with a sincere hug, and smiled at Adam over the dog’s head. Could a day so dire have turned out so bright? Could this be real?

  Pearl looked up at Dana with special admiration. “Are you the captain now?”

  “Yes, I am. That’s how things work on a ship. And as soon as you’re all done swimming, there’s a lot of mess to clean up.”

  They let out a collective groan of protest.

  “What?!” Dana declared. “Did you think you’d get out of sailors’ work? What do you think you came here for? A vacation? What do you think this is? A resort? Now, float around till you’re good and pruny, because that’s when we start spittin’ and polishin’! Snap to! Brace those yards over! Let fly those sails! Sheet her home and smartly now! Hup to, you salty monkeys! There’s a ship to run and a galaxy to tame! Bedad and argh and all th
em clichés!”

  BOOK 2

  STEEL EGG

  JOHN SHIRLEY

  For Julian.

  Special thanks to Martha Millard, Micky Shirley… and to Jim Baldwin for the IN-fo

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In the first Alien film—a film distinguished by a remarkable convergence of talent: e.g., Ridley Scott, Ron Schusett, Giger, Ron Cobb, Chris Foss, Jean Giraud, Dan O’Bannon, and a very talented cast of actors—we get the definite impression that “The Company” already knew about the aliens, and had diverted the starship specifically so that more could be found out about them, and so they could possibly be used for The Company’s sinister purposes. We have the impression, too, that these corporate overlords knew something about the destructive nature of this alien species, with its potential military applications. So far as I know, or can recollect, this foreknowledge has never been explained (unless possibly it was explored in Aliens comics, or in other “tiein” novels). I attempt to explain, here, how knowledge of the aliens first came to the people of Earth, later to be collated by savants at The Company with the discovery of the crashed ship teeming with alien eggs, as seen in the first film.

  Another thing that has never been explained, so far as I can find out, is how the adult alien grows from a creature of small mass, a chest-burster, to the full-sized xenomorph, without apparently eating—and in a remarkably short time. Many have expressed puzzlement over this. My guess, mentioned in this work, is that the chest-burster and young xenomorph is indeed consuming materials of various kinds, scavenged food stolen from storage, human flesh— even metal, softened by acids—but that consumption wasn’t documented in the other Alien adventures because the people involved were too busy just trying to stay alive to do an inventory of the ship’s stores or see how much human flesh might be missing from the corpses of the creature’s victims. (Sometimes the aliens will kill people and not eat any part of them—they only eat victims if they need the materials to grow.) Had the crew of those other ships done that inventory or weighed those bodies, they would have deduced how the creatures are getting the mass.

  As to how they are growing from infant to adult in a single day, that’s just one of the wonders of their alien biology—it’s a radical evolutionary adaptation, using the large amounts of material they have ingested in the process. Being primarily biological machines for killing and reproducing, obtaining information from the DNA of those they destroy, they have no need of a long youth, an extended period of development.

  In poring over the one Alien “bible” (as the industry term has it) that I have come across, and dipping a bit into other publications based on the Alien films, I find a good deal of contradictory information—or at least apparently contradictory information. It isn’t possible for me to incorporate every story development, revelation, and term used in every printed Alien story, in this book. And since they’re at least somewhat contradictory, at times, I’m loath to use them as a source.

  My source, therefore, is primarily the Alien movies, especially the first two. Readers may assume that this novel’s take on these intriguing creatures is based on those films—and on my personal approach to telling a story about them. This is not some other author writing about the creatures found in Alien. This is John Shirley writing about them.

  The Heim device, by the way, is real—it’s still in development. But there’s a good chance it really will provide a kind of “space warp” drive for real-life spacecraft. And that ridge bisecting Iapetus is real, too. What it really is, however, is still being debated by astronomers.

  The language in the book is more or less contemporary to our own times, just for clarity’s sake, but I occasionally threw in a term used in the future just to give a flavor of what their casual talk might be like.

  One last thing—this book is not for little kids. Parents take note. You’ve been warned.

  And now—let us proceed. Because I think I hear something moving about in the ventilator shaft.

  —J. S.

  Scary monsters, super-creeps, keep me running… running scared.

  —David Bowie, “Scary Monsters”

  1

  “Wake up!”

  “What?”

  “I said wake up, Captain!” said Science Officer Norton. Ashley Norton, a blonde apparition in the faint deck light. He could only see the corona of her yellow hair; her face was hidden in the shadows of the dimly lit cabin. The excitement in her voice, however, was clear enough. “We’ve got an anomaly…”

  “It’d be a goddamn anomaly if I got any sleep around here,” Daryl Corgan grumbled, sitting up on his bunk. The spacecraft’s artificial gravity was dialed relatively low, about the same as the Earth’s moon, so he stood up carefully. With the ship’s low gravity any quick, clumsy movement could result in cracking your head on the low ceiling. And this being a spacecraft, most of the ceilings were low, its quarters and corridors fairly cramped.

  He stood up, a head taller than Ashley—a compact woman, with small feet and hands, but enormous competency—and in the close confines was sorry he had gone to sleep in his skivvies, and unshowered. He was always uncomfortable, up close to Ashley, because he was so attracted to her, and because, on her part, she encouraged no physical intimacy, offered no emotional inroads—not overtly, at least—and pretended to not know how he felt. Of course, he never stated it outright; he’d never come on to her. But she knew. The nervous way he talked when she was physically close to him…

  “Uh, Ashley, I… could you… I need some room to…” Almost incapable of finishing a sentence when she was close. Unless, of course, he was in what he thought of as “Captain mode”—and then his training and personality kicked in and he was all authority. He was relatively young for a captain, only thirty-six, and most of the crew members were a bit older than he was, but he’d never had trouble feeling in charge.

  “Oh sure, Captain—but hurry. This is something good. We’re down in Oh-Oh.”

  Oh-Oh was Open Observation, one of the few places, on the United Nations Interplanetary Corps ship the Hornblower, where you could look at outer space directly. Now that they’d entered the orbit of Saturn, they spent a lot of time in Oh-Oh—there wasn’t a more spectacular view in the solar system.

  He dressed in his captain’s coverall uniform, sky blue with zippered pockets, hash marks, and UNIC patch on the shoulders, pulled on his cling boots, and hurried out into the corridor, glancing at his watch to see how long he’d slept. More than he’d supposed, six hours, not bad. He hurried through the ashen blue light down the pentagon-shaped corridor of pipes and vented panels and sensors, mostly the dull color of gym lockers, wishing for the moment that the artificial gravity was turned off. If you knew what you were doing you could “fly” the eight-hundred-meter length of the ship in under a minute, when the gravity was turned off. Corgan reached the lift tube, stepped on the plate, tapped “Descend,” and dropped through three decks, flashing by them and catching a grumpy glance from Dix, the black Secondary Maintenance Engineer, scowling over a rewiring job on deck two. Corgan lifted his hand in greeting but had passed by before Dix could respond. Dix had signed on for the Lunar Base and had gotten transferred to this ship, which was far more cramped— had been bitching about it right up to the moment they’d implemented the Heim Envelope for the accelerated trip to the outer planets. There were fifteen crew members on the Hornblower, none of them particularly high-spirited, but Dix was the gloomiest.

  The lift stopped at the base deck, and he strode down the corridor to the Oh-Oh, a metal-reinforced bubble, like an insect’s eye when seen from outside the ship, bulging from the ship’s lower starboard side. Of course “lower” and “upper” were all relative, here in space, but the crew clung to the terms; they needed the orientation.

  He slid down the ladder and crossed to big clear pane where Ashley, Corporal Beresford, Second Lieutenant Dorea Rondell, and First Lieutenant Nate Eusebius were gazing out at Saturn’s seventeenth, outermost moon, Iapetus. All
Corgan could see through the observation dome at their feet was the odd, dull-gray, ridge-bisected face of Iapetus, at the lower right, and the great looming bulk of Saturn itself, upper left, pearly and vast.

  “The good news, Captain,” Ashley said, “is the anomaly—we’re just able to keep it in sight, by putting Navi-Grip on track-and-push—but the bad news is, there’s a CANC probe approaching, and we think it’s a short-range remote-control probe, which means their ship is not far off. And if they get to this thing before we do—if they can even pretend they did—”

  “Not to sound like an alarmist security officer,” said Nate, a stocky man with bobbing eyebrows and a sardonic manner, “but I don’t think the Chinese will care if they can make a case they were here first. I think they’ll blow this ship out of the sky to get hold of that thing…”

  “To get hold of what thing?” Corgan demanded, becoming exasperated. “I don’t see anything out there. Is it on instrumentation?”

  “Sure, I can bring that up for you,” Ali “Berry” Beresford said. A deep-voiced, dark-skinned man of mixed ethnicity, happiest when he was plugged into something, he was a communications and scan specialist. He turned to the bobbing portable workstation at his elbow. A floating box with a screen and keyboard, it snuggled up to him and went stock-still in the air as he turned to it and stroked the keys.

  “But it’s right there, Captain!” Ashley insisted, pointing.

  He sighted along her arm and saw a steel-colored arc, like a blister on the upper curve of the moon Iapetus. He’d taken it for a lunar feature.

  “You say it moves. Like—on its own initiative?”

  She nodded, her eyes wide as she gazed at it.

  “So this anomaly is… what?” he asked.

  “It’s some kind of craft,” Beresford rumbled, making a holographic image appear over his portable station. “It’s maybe unmanned, but big as a son of a bitch—almost two and a half kilometers long!”