The Complete Aliens Omnibus, Volume 6

by Diane Carey

  “Yeah, I’m gonna read my report in. I’ll be right there.” He went to the window, and had one more look in at Cruz, Collindale, and Beresford. Three men. Suppose he’d gone down the shaft to respond to Dorea—instead of sending Collindale and Beresford? Would he have made the mistake Beresford had—falling onto the egg sacs, disturbing them so that he and Collindale both were attacked?

  Corgan didn’t think so. If he’d gone, he’d have been careful. He wasn’t prone to panic—he’d probably have come out of it okay. But he let Berry take it and now…

  He shook his head. Should have gone himself. If Beresford and Collindale died, it was his fault.

  He turned to Julie Murteno. “Anything changes, or you guys figure a strategy—you tell me.” He looked at Reynolds. “You taking the tack I suggested? Looking for a way to poison those things that won’t kill our people?”

  Reynolds opened his mouth, his face forewarning an angry rejoinder—then he pursed his lips, looking a little too crafty for Corgan’s liking. He shrugged and said, “Your wish is my command, Captain. Those are the rules.”

  “Don’t get cute, Reynolds,” Corgan snapped. “Just work on it. And listen—you’re gonna be the one leading the next expedition down that shaft in Room Two. We’re going to exterminate those eggs, so the next expedition out here is safe when they go through that ship.”

  “Exterminate them? How? In what wise?”

  “I think I can get Nate to build us a flamethrower out of the extra fuel injectors. That ought to do it.”

  “You plan to burn them?! But I need intact samples! Except for microbes these are the first extraterrestrial organisms ever discovered! It’d be a crime against science to destroy them all!”

  “A crime against science—or against your career, Reynolds?” Corgan said, as Julie went back into the quarantined examining room. “Look through that window, Reynolds—look at those things. Three men completely incapacitated. You think I’m going to take any more chances with those things? Just do as you’re told.”

  Corgan stalked out, thinking: Am I letting my dislike of Reynolds make me paranoid about the guy? We need him. He’s the only exobiologist we have. He’ll do the right thing.

  Alone in the infirmary observation station, Reynolds was trying not to remember how he’d gotten here. That meeting in the tourist orbiter. They’d been floating in orbit over the USA, he remembered…

  No. Don’t think about that.

  But he was worried. Corgan was going to transmit the discovery of the anomaly, and what they’d learned about the alien ship—along with images of it, inside and out— to United Nations command, the only Earthly rival the Chinese/Asian-Nation Cooperative had.

  Would CANC think he’d betrayed them by not putting a stop to Corgan’s transmission?

  But what could he do? If he sabotaged anything, Corgan would know. They were all implicitly against him. Suspicion would turn on him automatically.

  They were going to destroy the eggs. And probably these early stage organisms, the “face grippers” as he thought of them. And he couldn’t let them do that. He needed proof. He needed more than just the little samples he’d taken; more than a little footage. He needed a full analysis—he needed the creatures themselves. CANC had promised him he’d have full credit for any exobiology discoveries… They had promised…

  Despite himself, Reynolds remembered.

  * * *

  He had been sitting at the end of the bar, near the broad observation window, looking down at the North American continent, lacy with clouds.

  “Dr. Reynolds? I’m Helen Wu…”

  The woman who had just sat beside him was stocky, with an Asian shape to her eyes, yet they were blue. A woman of indeterminate ethnicity—Sino-Russian maybe, he thought. She wore the latest print-out costume for business women, she obviously had one of the better clothes printers, it was a high quality paper/ synth fabric; something like a man’s business suit from early in the century but cut with darts, open at the neck. She had a jade necklace instead of a tie, sneaker pumps on her feet, a flickering media band on her left wrist. There was a pin on her lapel that Reynolds thought was likely a micro-camera—someone else was watching the meeting. Could this be a UNIC sting of some kind? But he didn’t think so. He wasn’t sure why, but somehow he knew this woman was what she had said she was— unlikely she was actually “Helen Wu”—when she made the secured e-mail contact.

  She ordered a drink from the handsome young male bartender—cranberry juice and soda.

  They sat at the lonely end of the bar, near the window, in the orbital tourist station: the Low-Grav Cocktail Lounge. Techno-folk music played just loudly enough to cover their conversation from the bartender and the other customers. There was just barely enough gravity to keep your drink in your glass and your feet on floor—if you were careful. The ceiling here was padded—people when they drank sometimes leapt up from their seats, tried to do something acrobatic, and smacked into the ceiling.

  The window to Reynolds’s left consumed the entire wall. It was thick and wrapped with a protective field that flared decoratively every so often when a micrometeor or some little piece of space trash hit it. “Oooh!” said a blonde with the group at the other end of the bar, when the field outside the window flashed with a golden impact. “There went another! Do you think it was old astronaut pee or a meteory thing or what?”

  The people with her laughed and said she wasn’t getting another drink for at least an hour.

  The drinks were made weak because low gravity somehow made you more susceptible to alcohol’s effect, but Reynolds already had two gin and tonics in him. He was nervous as all hell about this meeting. If the contacts he’d had were who he thought they were, then he might conceivably be committing treason. He looked nervously at the North American continent, his birthplace—which, to Reynolds just then, was almost looking back. The whole country was a witness to his betrayal, in a way. Not that he had any particular loyalty to the government that the USA took part in—took part in as New York State had once taken part in the USA, as just another state—but he had no wish to be arrested. The war with CANC was at an end— bare days before a nuclear conflict would have erupted, some said—but then again it wasn’t at an end at all. There was a new cold war, only this time it was with China and its satellite nations.

  “Can I buy you a drink, Mr. Reynolds?”

  “No, I’m quite… lubricated already. No need to try and get me confused.” He was aware that he’d spoken clumsily, the moment he’d said it. He was also aware that social interaction was not his strong suit.

  “We’re interested only in helping you, Mr. Reynolds. You want to go on an expedition to the outer planets—and you cannot get an approval. Your work history is… problematic.”

  “No! It’s my social history that’s ‘problematic’!” He wiped spittle from his lips and tried to calm down. “My work was fine—I did all the analysis I was asked to do! It was I who identified the fossilized tubules of Titan as relics of microorganisms—an identification that led the explorers to the living organisms! But I was barely mentioned in the articles! And just because I got into a little misunderstanding with that snobbish bitch Betty Luskin, they took me off the Titan project entirely!”

  “But of course,” she said, her tone all sympathy— what was that accent?—“there were… quite a few other incidents. There was that time you accused the doctor of trying to poison you at the training center—”

  “Is there a point to this… this browbeating?”

  “The point is that you need us. You need a kind of professional, what would you say, a professional redemption?”

  Reynolds started a retort—then decided against it. She was right. Painfully right.

  “We can offer that redemption, Mr. Reynolds. We believe that your UNIC Planetary Sciences Committee has located a…” She leaned toward him and lowered her voice. “An extraterrestrial anomaly. But we don’t know where, precisely. We have heard that it may be in the
Jupiter moon system, it may be in Saturn’s—we heard a report it may be beyond the planetoid they used to call Pluto. Mr. Reynolds—please close your mouth. We don’t want anyone curious as to what we’re talking about…”

  “I’m… well what do you expect? What do you mean, an anomaly? I mean—exactly? You don’t mean…”

  “I might mean… just what you’re thinking. It could still be a geological peculiarity. But there’s a metallic object somewhere out there that seems to be moving when a probe gets near… as if it’s intelligently controlled. That’s really all the information we have.”

  He glanced around, suddenly feeling proprietary. This must be his! No one seemed to be listening.

  “We have a… a friend in personnel who can get you onto the crew, Mr. Reynolds. The choicest exobiological job in existence can be yours. But we need a guarantee… that you will steer us to the anomaly. We will have a team waiting, who will send a probe into the area your ship is heading to. We won’t know till you are past Mars—they’re planning to keep it a secret from the crew, even the captain won’t know for sure what he’s looking for. They’ll let him think it’s an exo-geological oddity. When you’ve found it, you will signal us—we will give you a special means. Our drone will be on hand and a ship not far behind it. Then… we will take over from UNIC.”

  “And—what happens to the crew?”

  “They will be merely detained for awhile. We will create an impression of a violation of the Space Exploitation Laws. An investigation. Legal maneuvers. By the time they are released and can dispute the claim, we will have the anomaly, and we will be well on the way to making use of it. You, however, will not be detained. We will maintain that you did not take part in their violation and you are the discoverer of the… anomaly. And you will defect to us. You will live in any one of the CANC nations you choose to live in—and very comfortably. You will be wealthy—and given an enormous research staff to help in the investigation of the anomaly. We will pressure the Nobel Committee to award you the prize. We have some influence there—some on the committee have secrets they’d rather were kept…”

  He stared at her. “You didn’t approach anyone else?”

  “No. We did our homework on the qualified exobiologists. None of the others were… motivated enough to, what is the expression, play ball with us?”

  None of the others, he thought, were unsuccessful enough. They’ve all accomplished more than I have—more than I was allowed to accomplish.

  “So, Mr. Reynolds,” she went on. “Do you fully understand what we’re offering you?”

  “There’s a stick to go with the carrot?”

  She nodded apologetically. “That expression I do know—and yes there is. If you betray us, if you fail to guide us to the anomaly in time, we will find you and end your existence. No matter where you go, we will find you. We have the resources of the world’s most populous countries. We will get to you, Mr. Reynolds.” There was no harshness in her voice, as she made the threat. It was simply a guarantee.

  He felt like snapping at her for that—but a dryness in his mouth warned him not to. These were dangerous people…

  “Why not just follow the ship out… and then move in?” She gestured dismissively. “If we follow closely, they’ll notice. They’ll take steps. We need someone to inform us when they’ve found it and then we’ll move in quickly from a safe distance out. It’s all a matter of timing… Well, Mr. Reynolds?”

  When he hesitated, she put a hand on his arm and switched to her sympathetic voice. “You owe them no loyalty—they gave you none. Your qualities were ignored— while trivial issues were trumpeted to keep you down!”

  Reynolds felt like he was falling in a deep, deep well as he said it:

  “Okay,” he said. “You’ve got a deal.”

  * * *

  “Merely detained for awhile,” she’d said. Reynolds shifted uncomfortably on his seat, watching Nurse Julie through the glass. Did he believe that—that they wouldn’t hurt the crew?

  No. They were millions of miles out in space. Easy to arrange an accident—and then issues of international agreements wouldn’t come up at all. The tragic loss of the Hornblower, the media would call it. An accident in deep space where there was no one to help… After enough time had passed CANC would “find” an alien spacecraft. A treasure trove of new technologies.

  Nothing he could do about saving the crew, now. Why should he care? But he felt a sickening flip-flop in his stomach, imagining the crew of the Hornblower murdered.

  Would the Chinese even keep him alive? Why should they, really? He might be a liability. Somehow, up until this point, his deal with them had seemed cozily worked out, foolproof. But now—being out here, in the farther reaches of the solar system—he realized that it would be just as easy for them to make him disappear with the rest of the crew… All they wanted was the anomaly. Which he’d already in effect given them.

  He had to see to it that they needed him somehow. He had to find a way to take control of the alien ship… to move it, or to move key objects from it. To control its technology and—the alien organisms on it.

  He stood up and went hastily to the gene analyzer, and set to work trying to sort out the alien DNA…

  7

  Corgan was climbing the steps of a gallows. It was a wooden gallows silhouetted against a leaden sky. He had seen them in movies about the nineteenth century but he was surprised that they were still in use. If these people taking him up to the gallows, their faces hidden in opaqued space helmets, were going to execute him, why didn’t they simply give him a lethal puff of Last Sleep, the designer nerve-gas that was used on Death Row now? It was painless and instantaneous.

  He assumed they wanted to see him choke. He felt strangely detached about it at first. But when he stepped up to the gallows’ hanging platform, and he saw that the rope was a living thing, that it was dropping away from the beam overhead and slithering across the boards to him, the noose like the head of the slithering snake.

  That’s when the fear really began.

  When it started climbing up his legs he shouted, and was instantly ashamed of himself for his weakness. He should die bravely. But the noose was crawling up his body and shoving a rope end down his throat and the other end had looped itself around his neck and it was tightening and tightening and turning to bone, to fingers of bone…

  He woke up to Ashley pounding on the door of his cabin. He sat up, still feeling sick from the nightmare. “What’s, uh… what’s the ST?” he called through the door, as he stood and stretched. ST was the ship’s time.

  “It’s oh-five-hundred! Captain—something’s happened! Those things fell off! The things on Cruz and the others— they just kind of… fell off them!”

  “And—are they okay? Our guys?”

  “They seem to be fine! They’re awake anyway and eating!”

  “Oh Jesus that’s great—!” He opened the door in his excitement—and forgot he was in his skivvies. And he still had the hard-on he always woke up with.

  Ashley looked at his bulging boxers, his lean, muscular bare chest, and her cheeks flushed. She looked at the deck, cleared her throat, and said, “Uh… we’re all down in the…”

  “The infirmary? I’ll just… I’ll be right there.”

  “Yes, sir. Captain.” She turned away, and he started to go back in his cabin—then stopped to look after her. And caught her glancing back at him, her eyes sweeping across his bare chest, her lips parted. He went hastily back in his cabin and, dressing, thought: You know, I think she was genuinely attracted. I need more cues than that though. Don’t want to get accused of sexual harassment.

  He chuckled at himself. He had an alien ship at hand, evidence of dangerous aliens, alien “video” that’d make anybody agonize… and he was thinking about hitting on one of his officers. But he’d always had a thing for her… The reproductive imperative sometimes overrode even the imperative for staying alive.

  There was coffee waiting in the infi
rmary observation room, and as Nurse Julie handed him a cup he saw, to his infinite relief, Collindale and Beresford sitting up, drinking it, both of them looking pretty well. Cruz, though, was lying on a gurney, his head heavily bandaged. That acid burn on his face… He seemed awake but doped up.

  Ashley came in, her cool detachment recovered. “Nate wants you at the hangar deck when you’re done here, Captain.”

  Corgan nodded. “So those things dropped off? They’re dead?”

  Nurse Julie nodded. “They are.”

  “Did Reynolds poison them like I asked? You find a way to kill those things?”

  “No—they just… died. On their own.”

  “How you doing Cruz?” Corgan asked, crossing to put his hand on the engineer’s shoulder.

  “Okay…” Cruz said—hoarsely and unconvincingly. “Sore throat. Lost an ear. Lotta skin.”

  “We’ll grow you a new ear back on Earth, bro. Graft you good as new. How about you two guys?”

  “I’m okay, man, I guess,” said Collindale.

  But Beresford was staring into space. He kept putting a hand to his throat, and swallowing, and wincing. Touching his chest. “I could’ve sworn… I was dead.” His voice was hoarse, almost inhuman. “I was sure I was dead. I mean—not that I remember exactly. What it’s like to be dead… but…”

  “What do you remember?” Corgan asked.

  “Nothing much, after I fell. Something jumping at me maybe… and I was choking and…” He winced and squeezed his eyes shut. Shook his head.

  “We gotta talk about it right now?” Collindale asked, grimacing.

  “Nope,” Corgan said. “Later. You guys rest. You need anything, just ask. But listen—I’m gonna ask you to stay in quarantine for a day or two. Just until… until the doc clears you. Julie—what’s the doc say?”

  “It says they’re in pretty good health but ‘long-term consequences still being assessed.’”

  Corgan nodded. But he definitely didn’t like the sound of that. “We’ll need something more clear-cut before we can take you guys out of quarantine.”