The Complete Aliens Omnibus, Volume 6

by Diane Carey

  Corgan could see four of the EAEs—controlled by communicating onboard computers and a remote watcher on the CANC mothership—attached at their blunt magnetized ends to four equally separated points on his ship. For a few moments they ceased firing their engines, and he had a fleeting hope the communists were simply moving the ship into a higher orbit around Iapetus to make room for their own vessel. But with a sinking, lost feeling he watched as they began burning fuel, blue flame jetting out, the engines eerily silent with the vacuum of space between the lander and the EAEs. The Hornblower was moving, pushed sideways relative to Corgan, shifting from below the arc of Saturn, up to silhouette against it. The EAEs fired again, stopped firing—then only two of them fired, at the stern, to adjust the trajectory.

  Their job done, they detached, their electrical magnets shutting off. The ship drifted away from them. The EAEs fired small retros and began to drift back toward the CANC ship, which was not visible from here. Corgan hadn’t yet seen the mothership, but he thought it was probably one of their familiar out-system explorers, shaped, to him, like a Japanese bullet-train in space. The CANC robots, looking like mechanical octopi, drifted close to the EAEs and captured them in their steely jointed tentacles, like cephalopods capturing fish, and then fired their own rockets, pulling the EAEs toward the CANC mothership, to be re-stowed.

  For one long moment more he looked at the Hornblower, getting smaller and smaller, vanishing against the vast bulk of Saturn. He tried to take comfort in the fact that the xenomorph onboard would be destroyed along with his ship. But it was cold comfort. He had suppressed his emotions so he could do his job as a warrior—but losing your ship, your command… Ah. That was hard to take.

  And as he watched, the Hornblower vanished into the atmosphere of Saturn. The gas giant’s huge gravity well would already be pulling it apart, flattening the pieces, consuming the ship—would probably make it part of Saturn’s hard core, relatively small under the gelatinous, gaseous planetary bulk.

  Corgan sighed and looked back at the steel egg looming forward, aware that Ashley was watching him; that she was wondering how he was taking all this, inside.

  It wasn’t just that his command was gone. They wouldn’t be getting back to Earth on the Hornblower. They were stranded, unless the CANC took them home— unlikely. They would just have to find another way.

  Well. At least the xenomorphs were more under control… There was only one on the alien ship, after all…

  * * *

  Hundreds of them, Reynolds thought, seeing the egg sacs pulsing with lethal life under their coating of mist. Ready to be born. He felt both elated and frightened.

  Reynolds was afraid of the queen now. She was standing guard over her offspring, but she was balefully aware of him, and he was afraid that if he got much closer—or perhaps if he even stayed here more than a few moments—she’d come after him. So he’d stationed himself near the overhead entrance, the door in the ceiling activated by the Giff’s sonic key. He was standing on a diamond-flyer and he had only to activate it to fly up out of here, into the room containing the “aquariums.” There was a lot of deck between him and the xenomorph queen, too. But he still didn’t feel safe.

  He wondered that she’d sequestered herself in this room—she couldn’t fit out the door he’d made and she’d grown too big, since coming here, to exit the way she’d entered. Was she supposed to grow, gestate eggs, live a while to protect them—and then simply die? That was not an unknown cycle in some Earthly creatures, after all. And he had found the dead body of the original alien queen that had occupied the ship, at the other end of that long tunnel that traversed the ship, in a chamber under the bridge deck. Hard to tell how she’d died. Her eggs had been dormant, in some form of suspended animation, till the men from Earth had disturbed them.

  Perhaps the queen wasn’t trapped at all. She looked powerful—and doubtless she could emit a great deal of the yellow xenomorphic acid, which he suspected was a kind of digging tool as well as a defense mechanism. Possibly she could use the acid and her great strength to widen the ceiling passages she’d originally come through and escape, if the time came.

  He found that he was more afraid of that time than he had been before. . .

  Perhaps, he thought, after all I should destroy them, somehow. Flamethrowers? Poison gas? From where?

  He still had some alarm-pheromone extract, and the capability of making more—he’d brought a good many of his lab tools with him and had found others on the alien ship. He would have to find a way to keep the aliens where he wanted them to be—away from him, attracted to his enemies. He’d definitely need more extract, he decided. Until he got the ship moved. Shouldn’t be a problem… If someone were infected by the face-hugging first-stage, he could then extract the pheromone from the organism when it had fallen away from its host and died.

  It was then that he heard the noises from the deck above.

  Someone from Earth was invading his ship.

  * * *

  Commander Kim, his young assistant, and five soldiers— one of them a woman—followed close behind the three crew members of the doomed Hornblower, entering the food-cultivation room of the alien craft. They were walking. Kyu wouldn’t let them use the diamond-flyers as yet. All wore spacesuits without the helmets—Kyu had made Corgan take off his helmet first, to try the air out.

  Nate was quiet and sullen; Ashley was tense, pale, but Corgan wasn’t worried about her; he had developed a healthy respect for her ability to function in a crisis. She was what his old training sergeant in Syria had called “flexible frosty.” That was the way to be.

  But Nate was another matter. Nate was head of security for the Hornblower—whether or not the ship still existed— and it occurred to Corgan that Nate probably blamed himself for not protecting the crew even more than he did. Looking at him, Corgan suspected that Nate might just snap and try to grab a weapon from their captors. Kill one of them maybe. But in the end—get them all killed.

  Of course, Corgan planned escape himself. But at the right time. Nate might be mad enough to let his anger decide the time to act.

  “This is truly remarkable,” Kyu Kim said, looking around. He turned to Corgan. “Now—where is this Reynolds you mentioned? We will need him… with us, as well.”

  “You were in touch with him,” Nate growled, “you should know.”

  Commander Kim glanced at Nate, shook his head briefly—and ambiguously—and spoke insistently to Corgan. “Where is he? Contact him! You have your suit radio!”

  Corgan didn’t care much what happened to the traitor Reynolds. Another warm body to distract the CANC men might be a good thing. “Reynolds?” he said, into his radio. “Report. This is your captain, I’m aboard the alien craft. Our ship has been destroyed. There have been developments. You read me? We’re in Room Four!”

  There was no reply. Kim set his own suit radio to a series of frequencies. “Crewman Reynolds! This is Commander Kim of the Chinese/Asian-nation Cooperative! We require your attendance and… information! You will report!“

  Still no reply. They each tried again once more. No response.

  “Could be he decided he doesn’t trust you,” Ashley said. “I wonder why that could be?”

  Commander Kim gestured dismissively. “I will decide later. We have many men, and after our first look, I will organize a large survey party. He will be found.” He glanced around, trying to take it all in. “Ah—a door is open there!” He pointed to an aperture, probably opened by Reynolds, in one of the glassy walls of the giant aquarium-like chambers. “Is it safe to go in?”

  “I think it is, yeah,” Corgan said.

  Kyu Kim started toward the door—then stopped and turned to Corgan with a look of suspicion. “So it is safe? Indeed? You go first…”

  Corgan shrugged and went in—into the alien fug. This particular glass-walled room contained alien plant growths in trough-like metal planters, gooped with what was probably a dried-out nutritive fluid. He approached the n
earest plant, a shrub or small tree-like organism about the proportions of an ornamental fruitless lemon tree but with branches of the same red material as its red-blue “leaves”— the leaves shaped like trumpets within trumpets within trumpets. He reached out, curious, himself, as to how well it was preserved. He touched the tip of a branch… and the entire plant crumbled into a small cloud of dust, going from a fully formed tree-shape, tall as he was, to a clump of dust in a dust-cloud, in under a second.

  “Shit!”

  The CANC soldiers laughed, and Corgan backed away from the cloud of dust, briefly holding his breath.

  “Never mind,” Kyu Kim said, from the doorway. “We will preserve all this for our botanical research team. Come out immediately!” He had the large, blocky pistol pointed at Corgan.

  Corgan shrugged and rejoined him. Commander Kim turned away to speak to his men in his own language, and Corgan used the opportunity to catch Nate’s eye. He mouthed, Not yet. Wait.

  The muscles in Nate’s jaws bunched. His fists clenched. But after a moment he nodded curtly.

  Corgan noticed something, then. On the other side of the avenue-wide space between the glass panels, there was a place where two of the “aquariums” had a narrow alley’s space between them. Down that alley, he saw, almost to the further bulkhead, was a large square hole in the deck, exactly like the entrance to the shaft that had gone down to the axis tunnel—the tunnel in which they’d encountered the xenomorph egg sacs. He was pretty sure that opening hadn’t been there before. Reynolds must have found a sonic key. So far, the CANC expedition hadn’t noticed it.

  It occurred to Corgan that he had his own sonic key, in his pocket. Possibilities came to him then… Ideas formed… But the CANC men would need to use the diamond-flyers and there were none here.

  “Come!” Kyu said, breaking in on Corgan’s thoughts. “We will go on!”

  Herded by the CANC soldiers, Corgan, Ashley, and Nate passed on, to the big room containing the alien craft’s bridge. “Judging from position, and viewport,” Commander Kim said, “that might well be the ship’s bridge.” He glanced at his prisoners, but they gave him no confirmation. He took a step toward it, staring up at the panels, momentarily perplexed. At last he said, “We will use these flyer devices to reach it.” He pointed at a row of the diamond-flyers, left on the deck under the bridge. “You will show us how to use them.”

  Corgan shook his head. “I’ve already cooperated more than I should. If I give you any technical information, it could be construed as treason.”

  The CANC commander’s face contorted into an almost comical expression of rage—it reminded Corgan of a carved demon on the cornice of some Asian temple. “You will cooperate—or we will have to evict all of you from an airlock without your helmets!” He assumed a more rational expression. “Now—how do they work?”

  Corgan shrugged. “No can do. Threats are pretty meaningless, really. You’re going to kill us anyway, to cover up our discovery of this artifact. Whatever you say, you know and I know that we discovered the anomaly— and you don’t want us around to dispute your claim on it. You’ll kill us, when you’re ready. We’re in no hurry—but we’re not kidding ourselves, Commander Kim.”

  Kyu Kim opened his mouth to deny it. Then he shut it, and looked at the deck. His eyes had gone flat, without affect, when he looked back at Corgan. “Perhaps. Perhaps not.” Nate snorted. Corgan knew what he was thinking. Same as Corgan was thinking. There was no perhaps about it.

  “We have electric batons with us,” said Kim’s assistant, speaking in fast, clipped tones. Chou, his name was. A small man with a pinched face. “We can persuade them, Commander.” Saying it in English was part of the persuasion.

  Corgan wondered if this was the time to “buckle”—he actually wanted Kim to use the flyers… he wanted at least some of the CANC men down in that shaft. They’d need the flyers for that. But he knew they’d figure it out.

  “So you’re saying,” Ashley put in, speaking to Chou, “that the Chinese/Asian-Nation Cooperative is incapable of working out the controls on those devices, when United Nations Interplanetary Corps worked them out in just a few minutes? That’s… so sad.”

  “What?” Chou blustered. “I have not said that!”

  Kyu Kim chuckled. “Very well.” He spoke in Sino-Multi to Chou, who bowed slightly and went to work out the controls of the diamond-flyers.

  Leaving two soldiers watching them, weapons in hand, Kyu Kim stepped away to look at some of the other deck-level equipment. Corgan could see Nate tensing, thinking that this might be the moment. But the two soldiers seemed very alert indeed. Their fingers were on the triggers.

  “Uh-uh, Nate,” Corgan murmured.

  “Captain, there won’t be a better—”

  “Nate? You’re still under my orders. I’ll say when.”

  Nate shook his head sourly. “‘UNIC’ they call it. You ever notice the acronym’s pronounced almost like eunuch? That’s us, Captain.”

  “I’m thinking, Nate. That’s all I want to say. I’m thinking. Okay? And UNIC is pronounced Yew-nick, not yew-nuck, dammit.”

  Ashley spoke up, then—to their guards. “Kind of odd that you fellas brought missile launchers in your little invasion of our ship. Shoot an exterior-faced bulkhead with one of those, you’ll be sucking vacuum. We supposed to be intimidated by just looking at them, that the idea?”

  The two men pursed their lips, looking in puzzlement at one another—the taller one shook his head at her. It was an “I don’t understand so shut up” head-shake.

  Corgan had to suppress a smile, realizing what Ashley was about: Trying to decide if these two spoke English. It seemed they didn’t. So they could talk around them freely. She kept her voice low, however, and stood turned away from the CANC men when she said, “Captain—we’d better think of something soon. They get this thing fully defended, we’ve lost it.”

  A strange thought came to Corgan, and he almost voiced it: No matter what, we’ve lost it. We’re not supposed to get control of all this. It’s too soon… Something will happen to whoever wins here…

  But it was just a notion, almost as if it had been whispered in his ear—probably arising from stress. He couldn’t figure out where else it might’ve come from, and he dismissed it.

  Aloud he said, “I’ve got an idea. It’s just… something to try…”

  18

  Reynolds was floating near the ceiling. Watching.

  He was standing on a floating diamond-flyer, high up in the room he thought of as Sustenance Cultivation— Corgan thought of it as the aquarium room. He was up in a dark corner, gazing down at the stream of explorers and captives, all in helmetless spacesuits, floating into the room on diamond-flyers from the doorway at the opposite end, hundreds of meters away.

  They seemed small, paltry down there.

  He could see two men who were clearly from CANC, carrying what appeared to be small missile launchers of some kind, coming out front of the procession. Behind them came Corgan, Nate Eusebius, and that odious Ashley Norton woman, who’d always looked so disdainfully at him when he’d tried to chat her up. Behind them came several CANC soldiers, and two men with an administrative air, if he was any judge at this distance. One of them might be Commander Kim, he of the imperious radio voice who’d tried to order Reynolds around.

  “I see through you now,” Reynolds muttered. “You’re a man who would murder the one who is intended to transform the Earth… you will not get the opportunity! You people deceived me once—you won’t do it again.”

  He chuckled. He had taken to talking to himself out loud quite a bit, since coming here. But why not? Who was better company? He was the One who would take the technology in this gigantic artifact and transfigure the Earth in His image! No wonder he’d been so out of place, so alienated and shrugged aside all his life—the Ordinary Ones could not bear the brightness of his mind! It burned like an acetylene torch and they had to look away or have their eyes burned…

  �
��Ordinary Ones,” he muttered. “Ordinary Ones.”

  He shifted on his diamond-flyer, quite confident on it by now though he was far above the deck, and thought he ought to drop down, now, and fly through the nearer door, into the other shaft to the hiding place he had set up near the great engine in the aft…

  But there was something fascinating about watching them from up here. They were so small, from this height! He was seeing them, indeed like a god would see any mortal, looking down from on high!

  The procession had reached the alleyway between the two cultivator tanks, parallel with the entrance in the deck he had purposefully left open. Would they not notice it? Would he have to draw their attention to it? It was important that they find it, and enter…

  But then he saw Corgan slowing, looking that way— and closing the entrance!

  What was he doing? He was using a sonic key, interfering with Reynolds’s plans. This must not stand. But his own sonic key was out of range here. Must he fly down there and correct matters himself, in person? Must he let them force his hand?

  “The queen,” he muttered. “The queen!”

  * * *

  Corgan had deliberately slowed their procession, which was floating along only half a meter over the deck, so it was near the entrance Reynolds had left open… which he had closed, arguing loudly with Nate, as pre-arranged, to cover up the telltale sound of the sonic key. But only so he could open it again.

  He turned to look defiantly at Commander Kim, and they floated to a halt, the CANC men—with less practice— wobbling nervously, almost falling off their flyers. “I just want something clear—if I show you where you can get control of this vessel, you’ll agree to let me and my people go?”