by Diane Carey
“O’Neil… Arm your fucking rifle and take up a defensive position! NOW!” Corgan put all his authority into the shout, and O’Neil blinked, as if just waking up, and nodded, unslinging the weapon.
Then Corgan ran after the others, wondering if Dorea was already dead.
15
We’re damned few now, Corgan thought, catching up to Nate and Hesse. Ashley was a good forty meters ahead of them, running full tilt down the corridor. “Goddamnit Ashley, don’t get so far ahead of us!” He was afraid she’d run headlong into a xenomorph.
She turned a corner up ahead…
And that’s when the lights went out.
“What the fuck!” Nate yelled, as pitch darkness closed in around them.
“Slow down, take it easy!” Corgan yelled. The xenomorphs had torn up the lighting conduits, Corgan figured, making it harder for their prey to defend themselves. Maybe they didn’t need light as much as human beings did. “The corridor emergency batteries should bring us some light…” But they didn’t, not immediately. It stayed as it was: pitch dark.
They continued a few paces more—he could hear Ashley breathing hard some distance ahead of him. Still moving though it was utterly dark. He couldn’t let that go on—one of them would blunder into something. Maybe end up firing at each other.
“Freeze right where you are!” Corgan called. “All of you! And don’t switch on a flashlight, unless you have to. You’ll just attract the enemy. MR Four report to my signal!”
“I be comin’, bitch!” the robot said, on the radio.
“Dorea?” he called softly, on his headset. “You read me? Where are you?”
No response. But he did hear something…
Something moving overhead, in the narrow utility space between the decks.
It would take a few minutes for the robot—with its own light source—to reach him. He moved to the bulkhead on his left and felt his way along, moving slowly toward the place where Ashley would have gone. He paused in the blackness to call her.
“Ashley?” his whispered into the headset, in the pitch darkness. “Do you read me?”
“I read you… I can hear you moving down the hall…”
“What? I’m not moving! No one’s supposed to be—”
“Then something else is moving toward me!” came her voice in the deep, unbroken darkness.
Corgan could hear her now, even without the radio, as she raised her voice—and he moved forward. And then he stumbled over something in the hall, almost losing his rifle in the process. He went to one knee, threw out a hand to catch himself—and recoiled, as his hand went into something sticky on the deck. He swallowed hard and, still on his knees, stretched out his free hand again—and felt something wet and warm and yielding lying on the deck; something with bones and flesh. Something…
His hand wandered over the body and after a moment he knew it was a woman. A woman not breathing. A woman whose throat had been torn out—he felt the wound under her jawline, the slow ooze of blood. Barely coming now that her heart had stopped pumping. A dead woman.
Dorea.
“Oh shit,” he muttered. “I found Dorea. She’s…”
A light came around a corner behind him, and he turned, blinking in its glare, made out the grinning face of a drunken elf coming at him, surrounded by darkness.
A confused moment, and then he realized it was MR Four, a light on its midsection rendering up its outline and the face painted on its globular head—a face, crudely drawn in red and yellow, like a mad, intoxicated elf. It should have made Corgan feel better to see the robot bringing light but that crude, grinning face coming toward him in the darkness, painted by a dead man, only made him shudder.
He heard something moving overhead. Getting closer…
Corgan expected the robot to come right to him but it stopped a few meters short, turned to the wall, extended its mechanical arm, opened a panel, its other mechanical hand unspooling a wire from its side which it plugged into the wall…
A dull-crimson emergency overhead light came on. The corridor looked like it was seen in infrared, everything cast in the color of diluted blood. In that light he could see Dorea’s body, sprawled awkwardly on the floor in front of him, still clutching her rifle. A puddle of congealing blood had spread around her, was staining his knees.
“I’m charging this shit all up in here,” the robot said, in a falsetto—Bayfield imitating an old lady with outdated ghetto speech patterns. “Emergency batteries were piss-poor. Not holding charge for shit. Standard lighting damaged due to being all fucked up some fucking way.”
Corgan sighed. No longer regretting having to incinerate Bayfield’s body.
He stood—and then a panel in the ceiling was flung down, and he looked up to see the xenomorph crouching in there, not far overhead, two meters distant. He raised the gun but the alien leapt at him before he could get the assault rifle in play, and he was smashed back onto the floor, the breath knocked out of him as he was driven heavily onto his back. He still had the rifle, and he tried to turn the muzzle toward the wet steely jaws of the xenomorph now dipping toward his face, the glutinous lubricant dripping on his cheeks, but, as if impatient, almost contemptuously, it pressed the rifle aside. He twisted the weapon, steadying the gun butt on the deck under his right armpit, using the assault rifle as a kind of lever to hold the thing back. Its jaws opened wide and its inner jaws pistoned out to poise just over his head. It drew back to strike. He felt his strength ebbing as he struggled against its strength and weight and its implacable certainty—which was almost an audible hum in the air—that it was going to kill him.
“Get off me you fucking ship’s rat!” he snarled, putting all his strength and will into pushing. But it wasn’t enough. He couldn’t budge it.
It struck down at him—
And a rattle of gunfire came from his left. The alien was hit in its left side, knocked off Corgan, careening to his right, scrambling away. Yellow acid-blood flew as the creature leaped up into the ceiling opening—one drop of the yellow acid hitting Corgan’s left arm just below the elbow, and burning through the cloth of his uniform, into his skin—
He groaned with pain, dropped his gun, grabbed a utility knife from his belt, flicked it open and, as the acid burned down to the bone in his forearm, he dug the knifeblade into his own flesh, cut away the acid and a chunk of his arm with it, flipped it away, cursing the pain. He looked up to see Nate, with his gun muzzle smoking, firing into the ceiling, the bullets pocking the panels. They could hear the creature scuttling away through the crawl space.
“Cease fire,” Corgan said, through teeth clenched against the pain. “And thanks.”
Ashley strode up, slinging her rifle over her shoulder, bringing out her first aid kit, spraying his bleeding arm with another instant bandage. “I keep having to patch holes in you,” she muttered. When she’d finished she turned to look at Dorea’s sprawled body. Her lips quivered. “I must’ve passed her in the dark… I should’ve…”
“She was dead before you got here,” Corgan said, getting up. He could see acid burning away at the breach of his rifle. It was useless. He tossed it aside, picked up Dorea’s weapon.
“Acid’s burning through the deck,” Hesse said, pointing as he jogged up, breathing hard.
“It’ll go down toward the bottom hull,” Corgan said, closing his eyes, still feeling the pain in his arm despite the anesthetic bandage. “And uh… fuck that hurts… and uh, it should neutralize before it gets that far…”
Nate nodded. “Something’s back there, around the corner, maybe the other one… The injured one. Sounded like it was breathing hard.”
“If we go after it,” Corgan said, “we’ll be between it and the other one. Let’s go back to the bridge—they can’t get behind us there. We’ll retrench and try calling UNIC again.”
“What about that fucking thing in the ceiling?” Hesse asked.
“Move fast, keep an eye on the ceiling. But my guess is, that thing’ll be h
iding out, doing whatever its equivalent of licking its wounds is…” He turned toward the robot. “When you’re finished there, MR Four, dispose of her… of this body, here. Like the others.”
“I gotcha, I’m yo’ bitch, I am so totally on that, I’m—”
Hesse growled in annoyance and called out: “MR Four! This is an override order. Restore communication defaults! Immediately!”
The robot, still charging the emergency lights, hummed to itself a moment, then said, “Order facilitated. Default restored.”
“Thank god for that, at least,” Corgan said. He turned to see Ashley looking down at Dorea.
There were tears in her eyes as she asked, “Do we just have to… to toss her body in the…”
“We do,” Corgan said gently. “But we’ll have a ceremony for her, as soon as we get our plans set. Come on…”
He put a hand on her arm—and smiled. Nodded toward the bridge. She cleared her throat, checked the load on her rifle, and started down the corridor, with Corgan and Hesse and Nate, leaving Dorea’s body behind.
Like so many others.
* * *
“How’s your arm—or arms, I should say, you’ve got two wounds on your arms…” Ashley asked. She and Corgan were sitting back, side by side on a cot, leaning against a bulkhead on the bridge, waiting for a call-back from UNIC central.
“It’s okay,” he said, though it still hurt like a son of a bitch. He’d filled the wound with cellular-repair foam; it would repair damaged tissue if the wound wasn’t too big—no good for a torn-out throat or a bullet through the heart—but it took a while. “I’m wondering about the Heim transmitter though…”
“Sure we have enough power to use it?” she asked wearily. She had her assault rifle, its butt to the deck, pointing at the ceiling, held there in her right hand. He was holding his the same way.
“We do,” Corgan answered, just as wearily. “And to receive…”
The Hornblower’s bridge had its own backup power source—and not just a weak emergency battery—just in case the ship’s electrical power went down. The bridge was lit up as formerly. The ship’s life-support system was designed to use solar or planetary electromagnetic energy—Saturn gave off a lot of that—to maintain heat and clean air and artificial gravity if internal power went down. But much of the ship was still dimly lit and would eventually black out entirely. Why didn’t they include the lighting system in the circuit that operated life support? Corgan wondered.
He glanced at the door to the cross corridor outside the bridge. Wondered how O’Neil was doing out there, on sentry duty. Maybe he shouldn’t have sent him to take his watch—he probably wasn’t competent. But the others had stood their watches, they were all tired, and it was O’Neil’s turn. Still… he ought to bring him back in. Take his place. But it was pleasant being here close to Ashley, half dozing, waiting for that call from UNIC. That we are sending reinforcements call he dreamed about…
O’Neil would be all right for a few minutes more.
* * *
O’Neil was flattened against the wall, sweat dripping into his eyes. He shook damp strands of blond hair away from his forehead, wishing he could make his pulse slow down. It was so tiring, being scared.
He was alone in a cross-corridor, where Corgan had stationed him for the watch, close to the hatch on the port side—on his right, from where he stood facing aft. The hatch on the other side had been sealed, welded shut against the xenomorphs. But they couldn’t seal this one or they’d be sealed in.
He hadn’t seen all those dead bodies himself. But he’d heard. He’d seen digital film of the things moving past the security cameras…
He looked through the hatch—they needed it open for air circulation, because the bridge didn’t have any but small vents—and it was dim and dark out there… and getting dimmer. The batteries were failing.
He thought he could hear claws on the deck…
* * *
Hesse was working at the bridge’s mainframe station, Nate at another workstation, both of them grimly focused.
Just five of us left, Corgan thought.
He remembered, with a deep pang, the day he and Nate had fought side by side in Lahore; the worst day of the Pakistan cam-paign. Seven men went out, two came back. Just him and Nate.
Maybe I failed those guys too, he thought. Just like Dorea and Buxton and the others.
He’d been depressed after Lahore, and they’d sent him to the division psychiatrist, who’d reviewed the records and reports of that day with Corgan, almost bullet by bullet, and had managed to convince him that there had been nothing he could do, nothing he could have done would’ve saved those men. An ambush is an ambush.
But I could have died with them, he thought.
He glanced at Ashley, thinking that she was a reason to fight for life. He’d lost that kind of reason, when his ex-wife, June, whom he’d called June Bug, had got tired of waiting for him to be rotated out of Pakistan, and had rotated herself into Tony Bullock’s bed.
He’d gotten out of the military first chance. Into the UN space corps—which operated under something like military rules, and offered military training, but wasn’t a strict martial atmosphere most of the time. Normally it wouldn’t generate a combat situation. Only now he was feeling like he was hunkered down, under fire, again, in Lahore.
After this, he thought, I’m staying the fuck home. Back home in Olympia, Washington. Do some fishing, find some peace. If I get out of this alive. “So uh… you’re from Long Island, originally?” he asked. He had read it in her file.
“The Long Island Rig House Project, yeah.”
“Oh yeah. Long Island itself being underwater.” Global warming had taken Long Island, and would have gotten Manhattan but for the big sea walls they’d built, almost at the last moment. “How was life on those housing rigs? What were they, covered oil rigs or something? I’m from the west coast, never got out there…”
“They used the bases of oil rigs, floated them there, sure. But they connected eighty-seven of them up, barged in a lot of dirt, laid out some land there, on the stabilizing decks between the rigs. Planted trees, gardens, between the condo complexes. Even with a hurricane it was stable, because of the ‘righting’ technology—it was a great place to live. Drunks now and then would fall off into the ocean but—that’s what they get for being drunk.”
Her face went hard, as she said that: That’s what they get for being drunk.
Corgan looked at her, and inferred some history with alcoholics in her life. She saw him looking, and guessed at his thoughts. She shrugged and said, “Yeah. My dad. A drunk. Absent even when he was there. And then—he wasn’t there. They found his body, half eaten, washed up against one of the pontoons, about three days later…”
He wanted to put his arm around her, but he knew it wasn’t the right time. So he just nodded. And she understood.
Funny. He could feel that. He could feel her understanding him…
Was that his imagination? He’d felt that way with June too. But then, with June, she’d understood him more than he’d understood her.
Don’t trust another one, he thought. Don’t do it.
But he knew it was too late. He had already surrendered to her.
He felt his eyes drooping; seemed to see June, walking away from him down a beach. Getting smaller and smaller as she walked away…
He shook himself. “Dreaming as I sit here,” he muttered. “Falling asleep. But I should relieve O’Neil.”
“It’s not the end of his watch.”
“Yeah but…”
“Hey. He’ll be all right. You need some rest, Captain.”
* * *
He had been imagining things, O’Neil decided. Nothing was coming through that door.
But if something did—he was all alone here.
Of course, he wasn’t quite alone, O’Neil told himself. The robot was there outside the hatch. The only robot that was working. That was Dinswood’s fault. Him and Bayfiel
d. Responsible for keeping the electronics working. Lots of stuff they let just fall apart, Dinswood out of laziness, Bayfield because he was wasted.
O’Neil cleared his throat, spoke into his headset. “Um— MR Four? You still there?”
“That is affirmative,” the robot replied over the headset radio.
“See any… any movement?
“That is negative.”
“Okay… if you see anything, you…”
He heard a sudden clattering sound.
“There is…” The robot began. Then it broke off. He heard a metallic crunch and lifted his rifle… and stared at the dark doorway, frozen in terror.
* * *
“Captain?” Nate’s voice.
Corgan started out of a dream. He and Ashley swimming naked in a warm sea, swimming right by June who was staring, bereft, from the beach…
Much rather stay in the dream. But he had to wake up. A pattern for days now: nothing but rude awakenings. He sighed and sat up, his back aching, arm throbbing. “Yeah, Nate?”
“I did a system check on the Heim transmitter—the processing unit is gone. It’s not sending or receiving.”
* * *
O’Neil was backing toward the entrance to the bridge, trying to croak out a call for help, as the thing in the doorway crouched to leap. But his throat didn’t seem to want to work. He just kept staring at that pistoning inner jaw, the eyeless face, the dripping silver teeth, the talons… The xenomorph’s exoskeleton was pitted, charred; it was the one Dorea had injured, but it was still deadly.
He made himself raise his gun… the alien hesitated.
But he knew it would make its move.
* * *
“Oh shit,” Corgan blurted, realizing. “That unit was inside the same goddamn piece of equipment as the out-scan power lines…”
“Yeah,” Nate said, disgustedly. “Reynolds got them both. And Hesse found something else…”
Hesse had a printout in his hand. “Nate talked me into it—I hacked into Reynolds’s personal journal. Wasn’t hard to figure his password. I got it in six tries. ‘Eli Reynolds Genius.’”
