by Diane Carey
They didn’t know she was there until she had dropped, ravaging as she came, down amongst them.
“It’s like a running a field mower over a lot of little rhesus monkeys!” Reynolds sneered into his digital recorder, as the xenomorph queen, towering over the paralytically terrified CANC explorers, smashed through one man’s skull with her pistoning jaw, slashed another’s throat with her talons. A stout little man who hadn’t got his helmet off yet, managed to get back into the airlock. The others were falling to the left and right, just as if they were being harvested, their heads and limbs wrenched away, or scrambling for their weapons. But they never did get the weapons into play, they didn’t have time—the xenomorph queen smashed the weapons aside, knowing full well what they were; her left talon was damaged, reduced to a single claw, but it could still slash and she used it to rip the CANC soldiers open, to spatter their blood against the bulkheads like an abstract artist splashing paint on a canvas.
The CANC woman, though, scooped up her mini-missile launcher and sprinted to put some range between her and the queen. She turned, prepared the launcher…
The queen had snatched an assault rifle from a falling man… and clutched it in her clawed grip for a moment, looking down at it, as if considering its use. Reynolds suspected they used a genetic splicing, a DNA appropriation of some kind, and borrowed some reflexes, perhaps even simple, pragmatic memories from those who hosted their endoparasites, and she understood the use of the weapon.
But the bone-hooded xenomorph queen flung the assault rifle to one side and lurched quickly, hissing, head rearing to strike at the CANC soldier—as the woman fired her missile…
The missile, aimed by someone choking with terror, whipped past the queen, missing.
The queen closed the distance between them with a single bound, and pulled the woman to her in a raptor’s embrace, crunching her jaws through the CANC soldier’s forehead…
She had killed all but three; one just managed to escape out the airlock.
The other two, struck unconscious, mangled, she carried away to serve as hosts for her offspring…
22
Chou was surprised to see Dr. Kim up and around. Even smiling.
The medical center of the Chinese/Asian-Nation Cooperative vessel, Glorious Sun, was a low-ceilinged room with uneven, dingy lighting—somehow, the comrades in maintenance had neglected to keep the lighting working consistently on the ship. The room contained a row of six cushioned examination tables. Kyu Kim and Ho were sitting up on two of these padded tables, wearing hospital gowns, busily eating. The creatures who’d been attached to their faces had died, their arthropodic bodies now under glass in the quarantine laboratory.
“How long have you been out of the coma, ah, Doctor-Commander?” Chou asked, as the robot physician rumbled around in the background, clucking to itself. He had been unsure from the start what honorific to use in addressing his superior, since Kyu Kim was both a professor and the ship’s commander—the unusual combination occasioned by their mission to the alien craft. At last Chou had settled on “Doctor-Commander.”
“Oh it has been a while now, that I’ve been awake,” said Doctor-Commander Kim, around a mouthful of food. He and the man beside him were eating their third plastic tray of rations. Chou thought Kyu Kim looked rather dreamy eyed. Perhaps the robot physician had chosen to give him a tranquilizer. “It has been twenty-four hours, or a little more, since the thing fell away… I have been drugged, of course, drifting in and out of sleep, but we have been talking for a good amount of time…” Kim was eating a plateful of freeze-dried eggrolls. It really looked as if he’d not bothered to moisturize and reheat them. “I trust all is well with the expedition, Chou?”
Chou looked at him in amazement. He trusted all was well! Had he no memory of what had happened to him? And evidently no one had told him about the disastrous decimation of the ship’s personnel; the men lost to space, to combat, to the alien monsters. Chou had decided, when it was reported that the gigantic xenomorphic “hive mother” had left her lair, that no one would enter the alien ship again until reinforcements arrived.
There had been some difficulty requesting reinforcements. No vessels or crews were in readiness, at the Cooperative’s L-5 colony, the giant CANC space station orbiting between Earth and the moon; most of the personnel who might be of use were involved in guarding the very sensitive military-base construction on Titan.
“You still have enough survivors to do the basic expeditionary work,” he was told. “We will send more when we can… Stop bungling and do it right!”
But in Chou’s view this was a military problem—and he was not a military man. He was a scientist who’d been assigned as Kyu Kim’s general factotum. He was not…
His thoughts derailed when Kyu Kim dropped his tray on the floor, and looked as if he might suddenly vomit. He had eaten too much, evidently. He was clutching at his belly… which was palpitating in an odd way.
Instinctively, Chou stepped back. “Physician! Attend!” he called.
The physician trundled briskly up, its computer-voice speaking in Sino-Multi as it came: “I have just confirmed the first scans, which indicate the presence of a parasitical entity in the chest cavity of patients Kyu Kim and—”
Chou stopped listening, was rushing toward the door, away from the fountain of scarlet blood gouting from Kim’s mouth; away from the out-blossoming of bone and ripping red-blue flesh blossoming from the commander’s chest.
Something was tearing free of Kyu Kim, muscling its way out, snarling and snapping and hissing as it came. Kim fell back, dying, as the thing tore its way free from him, a perverse caesarian birth performed from within.
It was an eyeless thing, crouching in the bubbling red crater of Kyu Kim’s chest, turning from side to side to take in its surroundings—with its identical twin ripping out of the other patient, at the same time.
Axenomorphic alien, Chou realized; a secondary stage. His mind was working matter-of-factly behind the white cloud of terror.
And then Kyu’s stage-two xenomorph leapt from the gaping, steaming wound, right at Chou’s face, its steel-colored jaws opening wide…
Chou didn’t even have time to take in the breath he needed for a good long scream…
* * *
“It has taken thirty-six hours for the translator to examine your sleeping mind, compare sound-patterns to images, learn your language, and convey it to the machine that is now speaking to you,” said the little diamond-shaped box hanging around the alien’s neck, its voice roughly like a blend of Ashley’s and Corgan’s. “It was necessary to learn this means of communication while you were in a state of unconsciousness. That is the most expedient way. I believe the machine has learned it with something in excess of ninety-eight percent efficiency.”
“Yes,” said Corgan, his mouth dry, swaying as he tried to stand beside the padded table. “Very… you’re very clear… I feel a bit sick…”
“Is that… is that the only reason you knocked us out?” Ashley asked, sitting up, holding her head. “So you could study our minds, learn our language?”
“No, it was not the only reason,” said the machine around the alien’s neck, unapologetically—the translator device was, Corgan later learned, translating from sounds the alien was making at a pitch that they had to strain to hear, without the amplification of the hologram. “I also needed to be clear on your intentions. You are a violent race. I myself intend you no harm whatever. And I had to clear you of microorganisms that might be dangerous to me—and immunize you to my own.”
The alien was standing about three meters away. Corgan looked the Giff over with a feeling of dislocation that heightened his nausea. The xenomorphs were aliens too, but they were, to him, like wild animals, however cunning; but this creature was a fellow civilized being. A more civilized being, if anything. To see it standing there, full of life—not in a hologram, not a dried-out husk—was more shocking than he’d imagined it would be.
Its r
ubbery legs looked even rubberier; its mottled pink-tan skin, with gray hair growing from its shoulders, even more disturbingly familiar, as if it’d been taken from some indeterminate Earthly animal and transferred onto the alien; its barrel-like torso expanded and contracted with gentle regularity, impelled by a grid of breathing pores, which drew in the air rhythmically through hundreds of tiny holes. The head was cylindrical, its diamond-shaped sensory organs, some form of eye, wrapped around it, each diamond end to end with the last; it was noseless but it had a prehensile, toothless slit for a mouth with a fibrous complexity of pink organs inside for sound and, perhaps, taste; various arcane tools were affixed to its body on ornate straps. Its arms looked like its legs, though slimmer and shorter; they were boneless but firm and each ended in six short tentacles, without suckers, its equivalent of fingers.
The small, cryptic, oddly asymmetrical devices, made of the ivory-colored synthetic, attached to the Giff’s body-straps might be anything—they might be toilet articles, fetishes, weapons, or technician’s probes. It was impossible to tell.
But looking closer Corgan could see that its left arm was partly artificial—it looked as if it’d been split up the middle, one side replaced with a synthetic, the same material as the robot… which now stood within reach of Corgan, as if on guard against him.
The synthetic part of the alien looked as if it compensated for a terrible wound. An encounter with a xenomorph, he suspected.
Corgan stretched, beginning to feel better. “At least we got caught up on our sleep,” he muttered to Ashley, trying to reassure her with a joke.
He looked around, noting that the room was typically voluminous—the Giff seemed to require lots of open space around them. The padded tables were on an equipment-festooned platform about ten meters off the floor; the big room, suffused, like the entry tunnel, with a misty blue light, its proportions like a hangar for a spacecraft but without the spacecraft; the room seemed carved of the rock of the moon itself, the walls studded with devices of metal and white synthetic, set about with the nodes of crystal. A passage into the wall from the platform was edged with the striated metal forms; Corgan guessed that it reached back to the bubble-enclosed landing port and the shuttlecraft they’d arrived in, the long tunnel to the Iapetan surface.
“You had some contact with our race before?” Ashley asked, automatically trying to order her hair with her fingers. “You’re in our solar system.”
“Yes,” said the alien. The Giff startled Corgan then by bending his head (Corgan somehow felt that the alien was a he) partway down the length of that cylinder, toward her as it spoke—it was like one of those adjustable drinking straws or a tilted microphone. It had bent between the mouth and eyes—if those were mouth and eyes. “We took samples of your dead, from your battlefields. We spoke to some of your people, and set them back down. We kept no living beings. We also communicated with your…” It hesitated, looking for the word. “Dolphins.”
“Did you?” Ashley said. “I’d like to be a fly on the wall for that one.”
“A fly on the wall?” The Giff tilted its head a little more toward her, as if expressing puzzlement or curiosity.
“A figure of speech.” She looked around, realizing they’d been stripped to their coveralls. “Our spacesuits— there’s food in them. A little. I’m starving… well, no, that’s another figure of speech. But I am hungry.”
“I’ve synthesized some food for you, based on our knowledge of your physiology and the food in your spacesuits. Follow the direction of your right ear.”
She turned to look right, and they saw a container of the familiar synthetic, shaped like a wild beehive on struts over a table. Corgan and Ashley approached the device, Corgan wondering if they should eat anything—if they should trust the Giff that far. But he strongly suspected the robot would interfere with any attempt to take the alien down, and with great efficiency, which meant they were pretty much at the Giff’s mercy. They had to trust it. And he was at least as hungry as Ashley.
As they approached the table, walking with care in the low gravity, the Giff touched one of the devices on its chest, which chirped, and in response tapered hoses emerged from the beehive-shaped device, to tilt toward their faces. “You have only to step close and open your mouths,” the Giff said.
“You online for this?” Corgan muttered to Ashley.
Ashley nodded. “We’ve gotta trust him. He seems to have it together…”
Corgan opened his mouth at the tube and the feeder immediately exuded a multicolored paste, the food coming very slowly. He caught it in his mouth, the process fairly disgusting, but he found the nutrient mash palatable enough: it tasted of beef gravy, then broccoli, then apples, then chicken, then pears, then fish, then beef again…
It seemed sensitive to how quickly he ingested it, never pushing too much into his mouth. He ate, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and turned away—the hose sucked up the excess food and withdrew into the beehive-shape.
He looked at Ashley and she laughed, wiping food from her mouth. “Well—that was infantile.”
“Efficient though.” He turned to consider the Giff. “Do you have a name, friend?”
“Larry.”
“What?”
“I’ve chosen a name from your culture that’s more or less close to mine in sound and feel.”
“I see.”
Ashley rubbed her eyes. “Larry, he says. Are we sure we didn’t get killed? Smash into that rock wall? This could be some kind of hallucinogenic afterlife.”
“A wild and tempting idea, but no,” Corgan said. “Because I have to pee. And there’s no mistaking the reality of it.”
They were directed by the Giff to a tube in the wall for discharging wastes, and after they took discreet turns, Corgan asked, “How’d we get here, exactly… Larry? I mean—the shuttlecraft, the little ship we came in, I expect it was on some kind of autopilot… ?”
“Autopilot…” It hesitated, seemed to be thinking. “Yes. If I understand the translator properly, it was the equivalent. The craft were programmed to return here, since you didn’t program them for any other place. I myself was awakened, when you came here. I have been asleep for…” It hesitated and then said, “In excess of a millennium.”
“Some kind of suspended animation,” Corgan said, nodding, trying to imagine sleeping in excess of a millennium. “Are you the only one here, Larry?”
“I am the only one. Perhaps the last of my kind anywhere.”
Corgan and Ashley both felt a wave of grief from it then—they received the feeling itself, gusted to them on a psychic breeze, as distinctly as the smell of decayed leaves on an autumn wind.
Ashley sobbed. “I’m sorry, Captain… I’m feeling something, something so… awful. So sad.”
“I feel it too,” he said, as the alien’s grief keyed his own. He was thinking of the crew he’d lost. Of Nate. Of the failure of his mission. His heart throbbed with grief…
“I apologize,” said Larry, the Giff. “In the process of exploring your minds with the psychic interrogator, an empathic field is generated. You have felt what I felt because of this artificial vibratory affinity. A moment…”
It lifted its right arm and one of its tentacles fluttered about a small, crookedly spindle-shaped device strapped to its barrel-like torso. Immediately Corgan felt better; the grief receded.
“You should now be insulated from my feelings,” said Larry. “But you must have further questions. Ask them— time grows short.”
“You lost everyone on your ship to the… we call them xenomorphs, for lack of a better term.”
“Yes. It was I who left the message on the ship’s computer, to any who might come, warning them.”
“How did a whole ship of your kind get so completely overwhelmed by the damned things?” Corgan asked. “They’re rough—but they can be killed.”
Larry’s head bent itself toward Corgan. “We are essentially a defensive people—we rarely take the offense. It is
almost unknown to us. Our defenses are quite strong, but they’re designed to protect our vessel from the outside. An enemy who penetrates to the inside has found our weakness. We have no interior weapons. We have not used them for many, many millennia. We have no… guns. Nothing of that kind. We have no ‘hand-to-hand’ fighting skills. We tried to seal them off in a certain area, but we were too late to get them all… and they got us instead. I alone escaped. This base was partly built… and I put myself in suspended animation, and sent a transmission to our people asking for help. But—it appears they never came. I suspect I know why. The xenomorphs evolved on their own—but they are sometimes used by unscrupulous races against others. Our competition is the…” The translator hesitated and translated, “… Those Who Come From Beyond the Galactic Rim, the Place of Darkness. We admitted some of them to this ship, to negotiate with them, a peace mission. But while they were here, they planted the eggs of the creatures you call xenomorphs on our vessel. Many hundreds were killed. Their bodies were committed to space—others we had no time to gift to the galactic mother.”
“Does your ship have a name?” Ashley asked.
Again, a hesitation. Then Larry spoke and the translator said, “Approximately, it is Unbreakable Womb.”
“You think the reason you weren’t rescued by your people was because the xenomorphs overran them?”
“I believe our enemies may have arranged for that to happen, yes. My civilization may have been sadly deteriorated, perhaps destroyed. It was not designed to resist a… a macroscopic infection.”
Now Corgan understood the pungent wave of grief they’d felt from the Giff before.
After a moment Larry added, “I would have slept on for millennia more, perhaps, had you not found the only way into this base. Your arrival triggered the activation of the artificial organism, which directed the sleepmaker to wake me. I have evaluated the situation and, if anything, find it worse than when I entered the sleepmaker. I was disappointed when it was you…”
