The Complete Aliens Omnibus, Volume 6

by Diane Carey

  “Wouldn’t want to go alone myself, Harl. I can’t go with you—I’ve gotta stay here and try to raise UNIC central. Nate’s pretty busy right now. O’Neil…” He glanced at O’Neil. Didn’t want to say out loud: O’Neil’s useless. “. . . Dorea and Chang maybe. They’ve got it together.”

  Buxton hesitated—and then he nodded. “But—we got to take at least one of those flamethrowers, Captain…”

  Ashley had come back in with Dorea, the two of them sitting side by side to clean their rifles and talk in low tones; Nate was bent over the surveillance monitor, trying to get another camera online; Hesse was with him

  Corgan called Dorea and Chang over, and, despite the fear in their eyes, they agreed to go without protest. He helped them get organized, sent them off with a flamethrower, two rifles, and radio headsets—they were all to wear the headsets, and stay in constant communication— and Corgan wondered if he were sending them to their deaths. He looked around at the disarray the bridge had become; the randomly arranged cots with food trash around them, the dirty clothes, the ammo boxes. Hesse and Nate were still hard at work. And Reynolds…

  Corgan frowned. “Where’s Reynolds?”

  Nate glanced up at him. “He said he had authority to go to the Giff ship. He took a lander…”

  “What! I never gave him any such authority!”

  Nate grimaced. “I shouldn’t have let him go. I’m just tired I guess… I thought he’d cleared it with you but I should’ve realized…”

  “There’s a xenomorph on that ship,” Corgan pointed out.

  “There’s two on this one. And it’s strange they haven’t attacked us here on the bridge—they seem so fucking aggressive.”

  “Yeah—” He glanced toward the corridor. “I have Chang on sentry. I’ll do sentry myself next. But let’s see if we can raise Reynolds… the boosters are still set up…” He turned to the communicator, accessed the boosters, to transmit into the steel egg. “Reynolds? Respond, now! This is Corgan on Hornblower, respond!”

  After a crackling moment, Reynolds’s voice came thinly from the grid. “Reynolds, on the anomaly. I hope this is important…”

  “Reynolds, who gave you authority to leave this ship?”

  “As ship’s xenobiologist I am in charge of alien investigations—I gave myself the authority. I also have the moral authority of historical imperative.”

  “Whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean,” Nate muttered.

  “This discovery is just too important to languish—no matter the danger!” Reynolds continued.

  “You’re alone with a xenomorph on that ship, you fool!” Corgan snapped.

  “That’s half the danger that exists on the Hornblower—less than half because this ship is vast!”

  “Here you have the rest of us to help protect you!”

  “I am taking steps to protect myself, Captain.”

  “And do you want to share those steps with us, Reynolds? Are you holding something back?”

  There was a moment of static-filled uncertainty…

  At last Reynolds responded, “No, no—I’m not holding anything back. It’s too complex to explain. But essentially I have at the moment sealed myself off in a certain area where it can’t get at me… I must go now… work calls… This is my life’s work, Captain—you cannot deny it to me! Reynolds out!”

  And Reynolds cut the connection. Corgan decided not to pursue it. Reynolds wasn’t much use to him on the Hornblower anyway. Especially if he was holding out on them.

  “He’s a lying son of a bitch,” Nate growled. “He is holding something back. I don’t know what it is. But I know that sleazy elitist is holding out on us, Captain. I’ve had about as much of him as I’m going to take.”

  “Nate—”

  “Hey Daryl? I’m tired of sending bodies to the incinerator. If I find out he’s holding back something we need I’m going to kill him—and shove his body out the airlock.”

  Corgan saw it then, in Nate’s eyes. Just how stressed out and angry Nate was. How dangerous he had become…

  And Corgan thought: Now there’s three kinds of high risk going down here. The xenomorphs, CANC—and then there’s us.

  * * *

  Reynolds was pretty sure he was in no danger from the xenomorph on the Giff ship—at least not yet—because the creaturewas so very occupied, just now. It was busy preparing to reproduce. And this thing had but two imperatives: destruction of competing organisms—which meant any species not its own—and reproduction.

  He spoke into his hand-held digital recorder as he watched the looming extraterrestrial in the storage room he’d found under the gigantic aquarium-like chamber on the Giff’s “steel egg.”

  “Discovery Journal Entry Seventeen: My intuition was right once again. It’s almost as if I have an uncanny rapport with the creatures. They are capable of reproducing through a form of parthenogenesis—the xenomorph may also use another of its kind, if it can, to reproduce but it doesn’t have to. It takes some of its fresh genes from the host it occupies in its endoparasitical stage. Sufficient environmental stress—a kind of reproductive emergency—can lead it into the development of a fourth stage in the xenomorph development, what some would call a queen, as in the queen termite in a colony. I can see the bulge of fecundity in the lower abdomen—very soon it… or perhaps I should say she… will begin laying eggs! This is just ecstatically exciting. It will lead to an exponential growth, a revolution in our understanding of biology!”

  He paused the digital recorder and tried to get a little closer—closer, but without risking getting killed. He had a rifle with him but he didn’t want to use it—it was slung over his shoulder. In his left hand was a sonic key; he hadn’t told the rest of the crew that he’d found his own sonic key on another desiccated Giff body. He’d used it to open the doorway into this room…

  But how had the alien gotten in? Through one of the big pipes linked with the higher levels, he supposed. It had been much smaller at the time.

  This was a more compact, more dimly lit room than any other he’d seen in the ship. It was only about six meters from the deck to the overhead, just enough space for the enormous xenomorph queen to fit into the far corner. She was hunched over, her armor-hooded head wedged under the ceiling. Her extremities seemed to blend with the shadows. Her upper talon-tipped arms were improportionately small for her thorax—they reminded Reynolds of a tyrannosaurus’ forelimbs. Her lower limbs were thicker, powerful, armored like the rest of her; her wedge-shaped head seemed almost too large for her body, but much of this was added exoskeletal protection. She was far bigger than the xenomorphs he’d studied on the Hornblower’s surveillance footage: two of the spindle vats had been broken into, their casings, at the top, eaten away by acid, and the smaller xenomorph had fed, the vats supplying mass for its transformation into this myth-sized marvel. She was as dangerous to a human being as a striking raptor was to a rabbit—he could see that, looking at her claws, her powerful jaws, her long spiked tail, ending in a natural ax blade—but her killing capability, if he had guessed rightly, was always in the service of protecting her eggs. The egg sacs would produce the creatures who would feed on the food supplies in this room and grow to become an army of new xenomorphs…

  All the indications—including his discovery of some recently shed segments belonging to an earlier stage— were that this xenomorph was something new, something specialized. She was the final stage of the creature that had killed Collinsdale and Julie Murteno with such admirable efficiency and thoroughness.

  So what had become of the queen who’d laid the now-destroyed eggs in the tunnel at the center of this vessel?

  Could she still be on the ship somewhere? Or had the Giffs destroyed her?

  But he had this one—and indeed he felt like she was his. She was his discovery, his alone.

  And he had a new plan…

  He couldn’t trust CANC to let him live after they had this vessel. He would be the last person who knew they’d seiz
ed it illegally. So why turn it over to them—or to UNIC? Why not find a way to destroy both expeditions… and take control of this vessel somehow? Its engines might still be operable.

  Of course, the means he’d likely use to kill both groups— the alien queen and her progeny—might well destroy him too. But he knew more about them than the others; he could find a way to control them… or keep them at bay.

  Then he would have living aliens from another world at his disposal; he would have an alien spacecraft and the partly preserved bodies of a second alien race.

  And he would have an extraterrestrial technology that he could sell to the highest bidder on Earth…

  Why not?

  He moved a little closer to the alien queen, keeping the two-meter-high spindle vats between him and her—and her head turned toward him, lifted. Her arms flexed… but she didn’t move.

  She simply seemed to watch him. And to wait.

  “I am not here to harm you,” he said. “Just to observe.” Even as he said it he knew it was foolishness. She couldn’t understand him.

  The only reason she didn’t kill him, he felt sure, was because she was occupied with the inner process of creating egg sacs. If he came close enough, she’d snap his head from his shoulders…

  He stayed where he was. Like the queen, he was simply watching.

  Watching and waiting.

  * * *

  Buxton had strapped the flamethrower to his back, was leading the way down the top deck corridor to the out-scan chamber—leading the way because he felt like he ought to, after his earlier panic—and was nearly ready to piss his pants with fear.

  Come on, he told himself. You can deal with this thing. With the flamethrower. And now you’re prepared for them, you know what to expect.

  But in his mind’s eye he kept seeing the thing crouching on Dix’s body, cracking his head as easily as a man would crack an eggshell… the brains and blood erupting around its pistoning inner jaws…

  “Here we go,” Buxton said, as they came to the short twist of stairway that rose to the plasmetal bubble of the top deck out-scanner. “Check your fire—and remember it’s gonna ricochet in there if you do fire so try to hit the thing square and, I don’t know, maybe put it on single-shot.”

  “Good idea,” Chang said, flicking the switch on his rifle. Dorea followed suit.

  Buxton made himself climb the stairs, thinking: If they sabotaged the room, they won’t be there now. They’d have moved on to something else. Probably getting ready to attack the bridge. Maybe we can catch them from behind, or flank them on the way back.

  Buxton entered the chamber, heart thudding as he looked around. The ten-meter expanse of the bubble, rising above the top hull of the ship, the tilted plasteel column of the out-scanner in its midst, seemed quite normal—and deserted, too, at first glance, as Buxton came in with the sweat running down from his palms onto the flamethrower’s grip.

  “I don’t see anything…” he muttered as Dorea and Chang followed him in.

  “Kind of an odd smell in here,” Dorea muttered.

  “I don’t smell anything either,” Buxton said. He took off the flamethrower—too awkward to work with its fuel tanks strapped to his back—and leaned its firetube against the dais supporting the out-scan column. But he did notice something: the cowling over the interior wiring of the scanner, just above the base, wasn’t quite in place. As if someone had incompletely closed it. He flipped it open, and, with the penlight from his workbelt, peered inside. The wires ended, summarily, partway down the column. “Someone’s cut the wires,” he said, wonderingly. “It’s like… it doesn’t look like they were ripped. They were cut with a tool. And those things don’t use tools, right? Unless Reynolds is wrong.”

  Chang bent over beside him and peered into the recess. He reached in and touched the wires, brought his hand out, looked at it. “That’s definitely been done with a cutting tool… And there’s something, some yellow filmy stuff on the wires…”

  “Who’d want to do something like that?” Dorea asked. “Sabotage the out-scanner? And… why? None of us, not even Reynolds, would want the ship blinded like that. I mean, that’s dangerous as all hell.”

  Buxton was distantly aware of a thumping sound, a metallic scrabbling, reverberating from somewhere nearby. Like in that ventilator…

  He snatched at the flamethrower, but the xenomorph was already smashing out through the grating, launching itself at him, its teeth bared, its inner jaws aimed like a pike for his head…

  Chang yelled and swung his rifle around but the thing, coming at them—seeming to Buxton in that fear-telescoped moment of time to leap at him in slow-motion— knocked Chang’s rifle quite deliberately aside, so that the bullet bounced off the ceiling. And then the alien blotted everything else from Buxton’s vision, striking him like a speeding freight train, hitting him full in the face with its blunt, battering-ram-like head so that his nose exploded, the front of his skull cracking as he flew backward, skidding across the floor with the xenomorph slamming itself down on his chest, its mouth, dripping fluids, opening wide…

  “No!” was all Buxton managed to say through his broken teeth as the silvery shaft of the alien’s inner jaws flashed toward him and punched through his forehead, just above his eyes, and he was grateful for the darkness that came riding in on a white-hot comet of pain…

  * * *

  Dorea was shouting at Chang to get out of the way, but he was grabbing the flamethrower’s firetube as the alien, its jaws dripping gore, whipped about to face them, giving out a snarling hiss. Chang moved close to it, trying to make sure he hit it with the full force of the flamethrower, fumbling to turn it on—the fuel pack was still on the deck. Dorea thought the xenomorph would spring but instead it ducked lower, still hunkered over Buxton’s twitching body, and slashed its spiked tail at Chang like a scorpion stinging, slashing through his neck, so that his head tipped topsy-turvy to one side, his neck spouting gore, his nearly beheaded body staggering a step before falling.

  Dorea switched her rifle on full-auto—but the creature, aware of her gun muzzle swinging toward it, leapt onto the angled metal column of the out-scanner. She fired sloppily, emptying her clip, keeping the alien off balance, the bullets ricocheting. She dropped the rifle, in almost the same motion throwing herself toward the flamethrower. Skidding on her belly to the weapon, she grabbed the flamethrower’s hose, flipped the switch on the fallen pack beside it and turned, spewing flame, just as the alien dropped to the deck and charged her, shrieking wordless primeval hatred as it came.

  She caught it with the full plume of flame. Squealing, flailing and blinded, it veered past her, a bipedal meteor, its own roaring competing with the roar of the flame rising from the burning chemicals she’d sprayed on it. The flamethrower stopped gushing fire, just then—the jerry-rigged device simply failing to work any longer—and Dorea threw it aside, rolling and picking up Chang’s rifle, bringing it to bear as the flames died out and the alien turned toward her in an agonized rage…

  She became aware that the ship itself was whooping in alarm—it had detected the flames and a woman’s computer-generated voice was calling out, between alarm whoops, “Fire, fire in out-scanner one!” Whoop, whoop. “Fire, fire in out-scanner one!”

  Dorea fired a burst at the smoking, pitted but still-living xenomorph. The bullets caught it across its left side, shattering heat-damaged natural plating where a man would have ribs. Yellow acid flew onto the bulkhead behind it, immediately burning into the metal.

  It squealed and slipped to the left, sprang upward, and clawed its way into the ventilator opening… and was gone from sight.

  Then she heard the other one coming from the vent on the other side.

  * * *

  “We got fire in out-scanner one!” Hesse shouted, over the whoop of the alarm, as Corgan, carrying the rifle he’d used on sentry, rushed onto the bridge.

  Corgan ran to the communicator, Nate, Hesse, and Ashley crowding close behind. He hit the a
larm suppression button and the alarm stopped. Heart pounding, knowing what the report of flame meant, Corgan tapped the panel’s in-ship radio. “Buxton! Report!”

  No response.

  “Chang! Dorea! Anybody!”

  “Captain…” Dorea’s breathless voice from the grid. “They’re dead. Chang and Buxton.” She paused to clear her throat. Keep the sobbing at bay. “It was like it was waiting for us to go in there. Somebody sabotaged that scanner, Captain…”

  Corgan glanced at Nate. “You think it was…?”

  Nate’s face had gone stony. “It was Reynolds, Captain— there’s no working camera in there but I got security cam of him going down that corridor and coming back. There’s no place else he could have gone in that time. It was fucking Reynolds!”

  “Captain,” Dorea went on, fear tremoring her voice. “I’m moving down corridor one, deck one, heading back to your position—but the fucking thing is after me, not too far behind. I hurt one of them with the flamethrower and the rifle, but the flamethrower stopped working and I only burnt it some, I didn’t kill it, and it’s still out there… or one of them is… I think it’s gaining on me… I can hear its claws, Captain, I can hear them on the deck back there!”

  “We’re coming for you, Dorea! Just… just keep moving, fast as you can, and be careful—”

  “Captain! It’s… I think it’s…”

  Then the sound of bullets spraying came over the radio. A scream.

  “Dorea!”

  Another burst of gunfire.

  “Don’t distract her, Captain,” Ashley advised him. “Let’s just get down there!”

  Before he could confirm the plan, Ashley had snatched up her rifle and run out the door to corridor one, an action that both irritated Corgan and filled him with admiration.

  He, Nate, and Hesse caught up their own weapons and started after her—Corgan pausing to bark an order at O’Neil. “Yo! O’Neil! You hold the fort here! I don’t want those things in here tearing up the bridge!”

  O’Neil, rifle slung over his shoulder, gave him a foggy look of only vague comprehension. “Um—yeah. Captain.”