by Diane Carey
“You think that’s, what, signage of some kind, Reynolds?” Corgan asked, pointing to the ovals containing wavy lines, at intervals on the wall. The marks looked something like old fashioned shorthand to Corgan, at times. At other times they were merely lines with spikes and dips patterned at odd distances and heights.
“I think so,” Reynolds said, squinting up at it. “That’s their writing! Oh God—to read it! I’ve got a computer program—”
“Hey, look at this!” Ashley broke in, the interruption making Reynolds scowl. “This plate in the floor… it reacts to you!”
The floor was made up of big gray and off-white fitted diamond-shaped plates, each one about a meter across the long side, half a meter the other way. The whitish ones, regularly spaced, were all within a few paces of the walls. Ashley was squatting by one, tapping at an inset crystal, like the one that had scanned them, almost invisible against the white backdrop. And when her index finger came near it, the plate jumped in place, like a skateboard jumping under the skater.
They crowded around her just as she stepped onto the plate.
“Ashley,” Corgan said, “I don’t think you should—”
But it was too late, she was already being lifted up into the air by the diamond-shaped metal plate, straight up, wobbling in place a meter over their heads.
Corgan, meanwhile, reflected that he had been overly sanguine about his authority over the crew. He needed to rein them in…
She floated up there, eyes wide, mouth open, a look of anxious delight, inciting in Corgan a piquant desire simultaneous with anxiety. She could break her neck on that thing. “Ashley, can you maybe kneel on it and lower yourself, or uh…”
But she had figured out how to propel it forward—you simply leaned forward a little, and it moved forward. She sailed over their heads about ten meters into the middle of the room, then leaned back—nearly falling off, making Corgan’s heart pound—so that it came to a controlled stop. The diamond-flyer—as Corgan was thinking of it— wobbled under her, but held. “Now if I could just make it go up,” she said. “But how?”
She stared down at it, frowning—the others staring in worried silence—and then put out her hand, waved it over the front of the diamond-shape, and it began to rise.
It ascended slowly—and she propelled it over one of the cupolas of the workstations, making it settle down on the platform. She turned to call down to them, from about twenty meters above, “There’s one of those flat crystals in the front too—you wave your hand over it and break a beam or something and it reacts by going up! You make it go down by holding your hand steadily over the beam!”
Corgan took it on himself to follow Ashley, getting a grip on the initiative. He stepped on one of the diamond plates and reached back, waved his hand over the other flat crystal—you didn’t actually need to squat—and it quivered, and lofted, lifting him easily but not so fast that he was thrown. It did make him involuntarily jump above the plate, because of the low gravity, and then he caught the diamond-flyer again and waved his hand over the node on the front to make it go higher. He practiced a few moments, found it quite intuitive, and steered it up and toward the workstation Ashley was on. If he weren’t so challenged by the enormity of exploring this craft, this would be fun. He wondered at the diamond-flyer’s motility—what did it use to fly? The hovers in the Hornblower used an electromagnetic field enhanced by steering rotors. Any safe EM field was too weak to lift a man. Maybe these used some kind of antigravitational device, something like counter-spin gravitons? That alone could revolutionize technology on Earth—and that alone would be enough for the Chinese/Asian-Nation Cooperative to start a war over. The UNIC nations were struggling for resources with the socialist countries clustered around the People’s Republic of China—and there were never enough. The western economy was depressed. CANC was socialist mostly in terms of state control—it did have a free enterprise economy, within its socialist control structure, and because there were so many state controls it was often more efficient than the West’s. The UNIC nations—dominated by the USA, Russia, the EU, India, and the Central Confederation of Africa—were struggling for financial traction, failing to compete. So it was ever more imperative he get this ship to UNIC authorities…
Corgan landed the diamond-flyer on the workstation next to Ashley. She was frowning over the controls of the workstation—if that’s really what it was.
“It is some kind of computer access, isn’t it?” he asked. The screen was flickering black, with a single blinking shape that was like a computer-animated spider, or some alien form of arthropod, constantly spreading and closing its legs; closing and spreading, at half-second intervals. It looked like a warning symbol, to Corgan.
Danger, he thought. Peligro.
“Probably a computer workstation, yeah,” Ashley said distractedly, taking off her gloves, staring at the bank of flat crystalline nodes under the diamond-shaped screen. “Might have lots of functions…”
Ashley tucked her gloves in her belt and then ran her fingers over the nodes, without actually touching them— the device hummed and the screen went completely dark—then hollow. Or, apparently hollow. It was as if a video monitor had hollowed itself out, in a second, and inside it were three-dimensional images, sharp as life.
“A hologram, of some kind, and a damned good one,” Corgan remarked. More world-beating technology they could use, if they could retro-engineer it.
“That must be one of… them!” Ashley said, pointing at a figure in the holographic chamber. It was bipedal, its columnar legs rubbery looking, the legs flowing into the feet without visible ankles. The skin was pinkish-tan, slightly mottled, in places, with thatches of hair growing from its shoulders. It had devices affixed to its body on straps, but nothing that looked like clothing. Its upper body was barrel-like, its arms rubbery, its gripping digits not unlike tentacles, with six to a hand, prehensile enough to be opposable without a thumb. Its head was fixed on its shoulders but roughly cylindrical and rubbery: the head was also its own neck; a band of sensory organs, shaped like a chain of diamonds lying on their sides—each one shaped just like the monitor—encircled its head, and cryptic sounds came from a mouth that looked rather human, except that it had no visible teeth. Its gestures seemed adamant, urgent, and there was a pulsing red light behind the alien, forming that warning symbol again—which Corgan now recognized as an image of an alien hand opening and closing.
The alien recording could be a warning, Corgan thought. Then he shook his head. How could he know? It could be singing alien opera and the gesture could mean “Make love to me, darling” in the symbolism of its culture. There was a word that kept recurring, or a sound anyway—and it seemed to Corgan that the alien gestured at itself when it voiced that sound: Giff. So in Corgan’s mind the creatures became “Giffs.”
Moments later Reynolds joined them, literally shoving Corgan and Ashley aside. “I had some trouble controlling that dratted flying thing… Oh my Lord, look at it… it must be… one of them!”
“Yes,” Corgan said, deciding not to upbraid the scientist. It was natural enough he’d be excited. “Any exobiological thoughts, looking that thing over, Reynolds?”
“That thing as you so haphazardly call it, is a biped like us, with a strong possibility of having much in common with us—but note the eye-bands, the tentacular fingers… And we may presume that their skin, which at least superficially resembles ours, is similarly…”
“The image is changing!” Ashley burst out, prompting a glower from Reynolds at the interruption.
But all three of them bent close to gaze at the holographic chamber, where the image of the monologueing Giff had been replaced by an image, recorded by some 3-D digital surveillance device, of the interior of a small alien spacecraft rather like their own landers—judging by the view from the outscreens, and the setup of the bulkheads and control panels—and through the alien lander was moving a shadowy shape, something difficult to make out at first, sleek and yet ung
ainly, sinuous and yet almost mechanistic. “Is that… a robot?” Ashley wondered.
“No!” Reynolds said breathlessly. “It’s… yet another alien life form… quite another sort entirely… A xenomorph of the first water!”
The figure moved through a band of light and they saw it clearly for a few moments, a creature around two and a half meters long that seemed to have a hardened blue-black exoskeleton, almost insectile—or like a bipedal crustacean—with an elongated head, no visible eyes, a lipless mouth with a strangely human arrangement of teeth, but sharper, those teeth, metallic silver, and dripping with a transparent ichor; a carapace covering the elongated, smooth head and parts of the torso, the body ridged and articulated in a manner reminiscent of an exposed spine; there were webbed, clawed hands on lean arms, four almost dinosaurian daggerlike spines on its back, a long spiked tail—everything about the creature, a kind of organic machine, spoke of a single purpose: stealthy predation, monomaniacal killing…
They knew, with the primordial certainty of a species that had been the object of many predations, that the xenomorph was hunting—that it would kill anything that it came upon, except its own kind.
As the unseen camera tracked the creature it crept up behind a Giff which was now seen in the pilot’s seat, evidently preparing the vessel for takeoff from the mother ship. The xenomorph pulled itself along the floor with a motion that made Corgan think of a black panther stalking a deer, just the way the big cat would press itself close to the ground, limbs tensed to spring at any moment, all its perceptions single-mindedly focused on its prey… An oily saliva dripped from its jaws—two sets of jaws, one within the other, both equipped with teeth… And an inner set of jaws, shaped like a cube that stretched into a rectangular shape, the inner jaws coming out, and out, extending tonguelike but slowly and ominously and rigidly and at a length several times that of a man’s tongue. It seemed to Corgan that all that extra, extended head-length, that long narrow curving carapace over the creature’s back, was for the holstering of this angular extendible jaw—and now, as the creature suddenly leapt, covering three meters in a split second, that extendible inner jaw smashed through the back of the Giff alien’s head. Blood—the same color as a man’s—sprayed out, and the Giff writhed, flailing in death throes in its chair… The quivering right-angled jaws, oozing silvery lubricant, withdrew neatly into the creature’s head, as it began to tear into its victim’s already dead body, like a maniac dissectionist, as if frantically searching for something hidden in the Giff’s body. The image went dark…
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Corgan muttered. His mother had been a lapsed Catholic. “What the devil is that thing…?”
“What… what they were warning about…” Ashley said, so softly he could barely hear her. “And I just hope…”
Corgan had the same thought. But no. The creature couldn’t still be on the ship—it had been centuries since the attack recorded in the ship’s computer.
“Lord but I hope we can find that predatory organism alive!” said Reynolds, his eyes shining. He stepped back from the computer, swaying, looking almost drunk, dizzy with the glory of it. Alone of all exobiologists—a purely theoretical profession except for two kinds of microorganisms discovered on Mars and one amoeba-like organism on Titan—Reynolds had seen the recorded, moving images of two alien species. Corgan could appreciate his excitement. But wanting to encounter one of those predatory xenomorphs alive? No.
“You record all that, Reynolds?” Ashley asked, her gloved hands experimenting with the computer station’s controls.
“Certainly—my helmet camera should have gotten it.”
“So—you’ll want to go back to the ship, analyze that, get it ready for transmission to Earth—”
“By no means yet! Who knows what else we’ll find? Perhaps tissue samples! And as for transmission… that has to be thought about long and hard. I want to establish my control… the depth of my analysis… before they send out the usual fools and clutterbrained pseudo-exobiologists to trample my work!”
“Oh, but naturally,” Ashley said dryly. “Ah—another image…”
In the holograph chamber was an image of a Giff lying on a table, strapped down, with five floating devices, probably medical scanning and analysis equipage, floating over it, darting in close, projecting rays onto its limbs, its torso, moving back when another Giff bent near with a hand-held instrument…
The Giff alien on the table began to writhe, to quake, to spit blood. Its upper torso bulged creakingly up, relaxed flat again, then bulged even more dramatically. Was it giving birth? Corgan wondered. And then the bulge erupted outward, splitting open with a spurt of blood and mucus and disgorging a grotesque head, a smaller variation of the nightmarish thing they’d seen killing the pilot of the small alien vessel; the emerging parasite—if that’s what it was—twisting its head this way and that as it looked about, looked without eyes somehow. Then it leapt out of the streaming crater of gore, away from the dying Giff, and sped off, trailing blood, into the shadows…
“Holy shit,” Ashley muttered.
“Holy fucking Mother of God,” was Corgan’s stunned rejoinder.
“Wonderful!” was what Reynolds said.
The clearly dismayed Giffs around the examination table began to talk at once, looking into the shadows around them… and the image blurred out, to be replaced by the original image of the Warning Giff, as Corgan supposed it, waving its arms…
“I wonder if there’s any way to translate him, in the short term,” Ashley said.
“Oh, don’t be absurd, woman!” Reynolds said, snorting with contempt. “Of course not! It’ll be years before we can make out a sentence!”
“Hey Reynolds,” Cruz said, “you’re the exobio guy. You figure those things in the warning film, if that’s what it is— you figure they’re the reason this ship is deserted?”
“You’re assuming the ship is deserted,” Reynolds said. “We don’t know that for sure.”
This made everyone look around nervously—like those Giffs in that examination room. “We’ve got a lot more exploring to do,” Corgan said, turning to see the others lofting on their diamond-flyers to another workstation in the big chamber. He touched his communicator. “Team, nobody operates anything but the diamond-flyers… you got me? You could accidentally depressurize the room or something…”
“Copy!” came the reply. From everyone but Reynolds, who didn’t seem to want to commit himself.
“Hey Captain,” came Cruz’s voice from the transmitter in Corgan’s spacesuit collar, “you see those, like, little holo films with the monsters?”
“We saw ’em too, yeah.”
“You don’t think they’re still around?”
“No way. Not after all this time. Let’s meet down below—I want everyone there. You too, Reynolds.”
They stepped onto their diamond-flyers and managed to get safely down to the floor—except for Beresford who fell off his about halfway down. But the artificial gravitation was relatively low in the alien craft and he landed on his feet, jarred but unhurt.
They helped Beresford up, Collindale chuckling. “Berry, you got to get with the ancient art of skateboarding. That’s how I got so good at it so fast. My son is a—”
“Okay, can it,” Corgan said, “and gather around.”
Reynolds was only half attending, was gazing through the doorway into the next chamber, as if mentally already there; the others came to stand beside him, looking expectantly at Corgan: Immy Cruz, Horus Collindale, Dorea Rondell, Ashley, Beresford.
“We’ll break up into two parties,” Corgan said. “Team one is Dorea with Reynolds and Cruz, the others with me.”
“Maybe we should get O’Neil to bring Hesse down,” Collindale suggested, “with these computers here—he’ll be in heaven, man.”
“I don’t want Hesse fooling with the computers here anytime soon,” Corgan said. “He’ll try to get into their mainframe—hell, he couldn’t help himself. And there
’s no telling what he might trigger. This ship could have robotic defenses just waiting to be activated, we don’t know.”
“Maybe those things attacking the…” Collindale gestured vaguely, “. . . the aliens who built this ship…”
“The Giffs,” Corgan said, pronouncing with a hard G. “Anyway, they kept saying ‘giff,’ so…” He shrugged.
“Giffs then,” Collindale went on. “Maybe the things that attacked them are artificial themselves. Designer killing machines. Could be they got out of hand. They could be triggered somehow…”
“Nonsense,” said Reynolds. “They were evolved, living organisms. That was obvious to the meanest mentality.”
Collindale gave Reynolds a cold, flat look. “Well, this meanest mentality isn’t sure.”
“You’re a geologist,” Reynolds said, with an unusual go at mollification, “not a biologist. Those were natural organisms. Evolved for efficiency, yes. But then so are scorpions,” he added musingly, staring into space. “The xenomorph reminded me of a scorpion, to some extent. Scorpionida of the class arichnida… but clearly far more capable, with some manner of intelligence…”
“That whole thing gave me the fucking willies,” said Beresford, rubbing his bruised rump through the spacesuit material. “Can we get on with it?” Reynolds asked impatiently, his voice a rasp. “We have our teams. We can stay in touch…”
“Chang was pretty pissed off he didn’t make the lander teams,” Dorea said. Chang was her boyfriend, as it happened.
“I was having trouble raising the ship in here,” Corgan said. “Not sure I could get O’Neil…”
Which makes me nervous as all hell, he thought. But he didn’t say that aloud.
“Let’s just do a quick survey,” Corgan went on, “and then we’ll get back to the ship, arrange for a serious expedition—get a big lineup of scientists out here…”
Reynolds went stony-faced at that.
“We’ll go together to the farther room there,” Corgan continued, “if we can get through to it—and then split up, the second team explores that room, mine’ll take the next room…”
