by Diane Carey
He did not finish the statement, but Corgan understood. The Giff was disappointed to find shuttlecraft arriving carrying beings which, to him, were primitive anthropoids from the relatively unevolved planet he’d come here to study. It was as if a primatologist lost in the African jungle saw a jeep approaching, and thought himself rescued—till he saw it was driven, quite by accident, by a chimpanzee…
“Your natural impulse,” said Larry, after a moment of apparent pondering, “is to appropriate our vessel, to take the Unbreakable Womb back to your world. It now appears that your spacecraft are relatively sophisticated—you have found the gravitational modification principle—but we have many technologies you do not have. And this is a source of rivalry. Is that the case?”
“Yeah, it’s the case,” Corgan said. “But listen—if the other side gets it, they’ll misuse it. They’re a totalitarian society, they suppress freedom of speech, religion, they’re aggressive—in time they might use this technology against your people, if they’re still out there. Our side won’t do that.”
“When we look at the development of social attitudes in societies across the galaxy,” said Larry, “we find that they are all inclined to believe themselves right, and their rivals wrong. All such points of view are relative.”
Corgan started to argue—then decided it was a waste of time. “What was the purpose of this base? And the ridgeline… I mean, the tunnel, the construction around it… ?” “Relative to the number of stars in the galaxy, there really are not many planets that host life, and few with beings that survive long enough to become civilized. When we find one, we study it, and look for ways to encourage it, if it seems to have the potential for… I’m not sure how it could be translated… for ‘that which justifies the existence of intelligent beings.’ So we were to observe you from this base, but not too closely—the base on the gas giant’s moon allowed us to remain at a safe distance. The tunnel you refer to was actually to be a long series of entrances to deeper facilities, along the length of the tunnel. But they were not built—the xenomorphs forced us to leave it all unfinished…”
Corgan decided it was time to get down to brass tacks. “What do you intend to do with us?” He glanced at the robot, again wondering if he could “take” it somehow. Could he knock it off the platform? Gravity wasn’t much here, though, he doubted the fall would hurt it, if it fell at all. It might fly, for all he knew.
“I intend to work with you,” said Larry. “Until the point at which I decide you are more destructive than helpful. That point may never be reached. If it is, I will authorize the artificial organism to put you into a dreamless sleep, for all eternity…”
23
“Look, Captain, I don’t want to seem like a goddamn floppy,” Ashley said, as their shuttlecraft flew through the ridgeline tunnel, “and you said yourself I’m not a coward, but couldn’t we get this shuttlecraft to go someplace else?” She shifted on her seat, uncomfortable in its grip. She and Corgan wore their coveralls; their spacesuits and helmets were stored in back of the shuttlecraft. “Maybe we could get to the primary space-lanes, away from the Saturn system’s interference—from there we could transmit to the Mars base! He must have some kind of radio on this thing we could use to call UNIC. I mean—why go back to a place that’s probably overrun by xenomorphs and enemy soldiers? We can get UNIC to claim the Giff ship, later, with a lot of reinforcements… They can swarm it with soldiers!” She glanced nervously at Larry, then at the “artificial organism,” the robot balanced on its rod and single-spherical wheel, poised behind her.
Corgan, sitting behind Larry, was a little taken aback by her idea. She’d been through too much…
It was Larry the alien, seated beside her, piloting the shuttlecraft with deft rippling flicks of his tentacular fingers, who answered. “This small vehicle has too short a range to reach the area you speak of. If possible, we will find a way to return you to your people. But we cannot allow the xenomorphs to run free when the ship is in danger of being moved. The ship could be taken to your planet. If even one of them escapes it can change internally, become a breeder. Your planet could be overrun by the xenomorphs. We cannot allow that to happen.”
“I didn’t think it could all really go that far…” Ashley began. Then she broke off, swallowing, going pale as she contemplated the implications.
Corgan, sitting behind the alien, was glad Larry had said it all for him. He hadn’t wanted to be the one to tell Ashley there were no alternatives. Because no alternatives meant she was probably going to be killed by xenomorphs or CANC soldiers.
Even if the CANC captured but didn’t kill them, the Glorious Sun might well take them back to China, or Korea— South Korea had been overrun by the North Koreans, with Chinese backing, in 2048—and inter them in a concentration camp. There was a slave labor camp in North Korea covering many hundreds of square miles, an interconnected series of camps, really, extensions of the ones established by Kim Jong Il and his predecessor long before, the whole said to contain more than a million people. Once you went in, you never came out. Generations grew up and died there…
It would be better to die in combat.
They reached the end of the tunnel, and it shimmered, irised—and the shuttlecraft shot out into space from the tunnel like a bullet from the barrel of a gun.
They rocketed over the frozen surface of Iapetus. The unspeakably vast curving electric-blue orb of Saturn dominated everything. To Corgan just then, feeling like he and Ashley were between a rock and a hard place, it was like a fist poised to smash a fly. Ashley’s fly on the wall, he thought.
The steel egg looked small, silhouetted against the rings of Saturn, some kilometers above; the CANC out-system exploration vessel floated like a pilot fish, smaller yet beside the bulk of the Giff craft.
In deepening solemnity they flew toward the steel egg…
“The CANC ship will detect us, Captain,” Ashley warned. “They have cluster torpedoes on that vessel.”
“Yeah. We have to hope we get docked before they get it together to fire. Chances are they won’t do it unless they’re sure they can knock us out without damaging the anomaly. And maybe they’d want this craft intact too…”
“You think they saw us come out of the tunnel?”
“Could have. If they decide to send an investigative crew down there they could get a treasure trove of artifacts from Larry’s culture…”
“I have already secured the base on the moon you call Iapetus,” Larry declared, in his odd, fuzzily dual voice. “Look and see.”
Corgan and Ashley looked back through the rear viewport and saw that the ridgeline along the equator of Iapetus was collapsing. Without atmosphere to carry the sound to them, the demolition happened in eerie silence. The anomalous ridgeline was caving in on itself, the implosion happening from the farther end, moving along uniformly, toward the entrance behind them, as if pursuing them. In moments it had collapsed entirely: a ridge become a valley. Dust spouted up from cracks around it; smoke jetted and vanished into the all but airless space above Iapetus…
“Nothing there will be found intact, even after excavation,” said Larry.
Corgan looked at the alien. The alien’s voice—its translator machine’s voice—was even, standardized, impartial in tone. But somehow a little feeling crept in, anyway. The Giff was bitter, and resigned. That might lead to a willingness to sacrifice them all to keep Giff secrets from human hands—a willingness which Corgan and Ashley would not share.
But then maybe it was better if the Unbreakable Womb were destroyed rather than fall into CANC hands. Corgan really believed that any technology CANC took from it they would misuse.
Not that Corgan imagined he himself was working for the “good guys.” UNIC was becoming increasingly corrupt, under pressure from the Company. The interests of the United Nations and The Company were regarded as almost interchangeable. Since the UN had become the world government of non-Communist Earth, The Company, the other face of this Janus, had
become something amounting to a nationality itself: a paradox, an international nationality, made up of billions of employees, stockholders, wage slaves, indentured servants. Since it controlled economic interests within hundreds of sovereign states, it was more powerful than any single nation.
And Corgan had his own run-ins with The Company. As a military officer he’d caught The Company’s reps raking off millions of dollars paid for troops supplies— they took in ten million dollars and laid out one million in supplies. He knew full well that The Company’s board and shareholders were primarily interested in wealth and power—social good was secondary. So ultimately he didn’t know which was worse—CANC or The Company.
At least The Company didn’t have concentration camps. So far.
Generally, the UN was more progressive than the Chinese-dominated CANC, more permissive of free speech—and that was enough for him to believe UNIC should get the anomaly. But who knew, if things kept going as they had been, with The Company taking over, how the world would be in a generation?
It could be that refugees from UN would be trying to escape to the Chinese/Asian-Nation Cooperative…
Corgan shook his head. Flying through space, far from Earth, with the rings of Saturn spinning nearby, a man got strange thoughts sometimes.
They approached the place on the curved hull of the steel egg, under the bridge, where the hangar would be. With the striated markings incised into its hull, he couldn’t make out if there was a hangar door there or not.
“Larry,” Ashley said, “those markings on the hull, like rails, all wavy, lined up, like that—what are they?”
“That is the interaction grid, for organization of quantum pulse packets, which are used for interstellar communication, spacial perception, absorption of cosmic energy, and defense. They can also be used for the creation of a field of force which prevents virtually all attack on the vessel from outside. The power system for the grid was destroyed by our enemies when we allowed them onboard. Not by the xenomorphs, but by those who planted the xenomorphs. The interaction grid is non-functional.”
“We couldn’t get it back online—functional?” Corgan asked.
“That is so unlikely it is all but impossible.”
“Fat chance, huh?”
“Is that another figure of speech? It seems an inversion of its apparent meaning.”
“We haven’t got much time for philology, Larry. Don’t you have idioms?”
“Certainly we do. One of my favorite expressions is, ‘That is about as probable as a quantum repercussive affinity in the spiritual-center of the mother of one’s spouse.’ Of course, something of the elegance of the expression is lost in the translation.”
“You’re talking about mothers-in-law? Larry—I meant to ask, is your race divided into male and female like ours?”
“It is—essentially. I’m the equivalent of your ‘male.’” As the steel egg loomed up in front of them, Larry added, “Now we shall see if the doors of the hangar open for us. I am not entirely certain they will respond from outside the vessel, with the damage that was done.”
Corgan’s mouth went dry. “And suppose they don’t open?”
“I would propose to crash this shuttlecraft at high speed into the Unbreakable Womb at a particular spot, just below the bridge, which should cause the entire vessel to explode, thus destroying the xenomorphs. Unfortunately I do not have the capability of causing it to implode by remote control alone, like the moon base…”
Ashley looked at Corgan—and again he glanced at the robot. He might just have to find out if the thing could be taken out after all…
They approached the hangar section of the hull under the bridge…
Larry’s pointed digits flew over the control panel, not quite touching the “keys.”
The hull loomed in front of them—and Corgan wondered if he should try and force the alien to veer away.
“Corgan,” Ashley said suddenly. “There was something you were going to tell me, right before we… when we thought we were about to crash on Iapetus?”
“Oh yeah. Uh…”
“Well?”
The hull grew to fill their viewscreen.
“I just wanted to say…”
The hull suddenly split open, and a diamond-shaped entrance formed. Corgan let out a long slow exhalation as they glided neatly through the opening, into the hangar, pausing only to turn about so that they backed in. And the shuttlecraft settled onto the deck with a faint clunk.
“Yes, Corgan?” Ashley prompted. “You were saying?”
“It’ll keep till later, Ashley. We’d better see if we can scrounge some weapons…”
The hangar doors had already closed and the hangar was pressurizing. When the air pressure was complete, Corgan opened the side of the vessel with his sonic key and they climbed out, the robot coming out last, its wheel changing shape to accommodate the step down to the deck.
Corgan looked around for xenomorphs and was relieved to see none. He’d probably be dead by now if there had been any in this room—since he and Ashley and Larry were unarmed. Unless the robot could be considered a weapon. It had put him down, handily enough, but he guessed it couldn’t be much use against xenomorphs… or its like would have protected the Giff.
He walked to the rear of the shuttlecraft and stopped, near the door to the ramp, to stare at the remains of human bodies, CANC soldiers, a couple of them caught on the debris, like flotsam left on tree branches after a flood has gone down—the rest of the bodies had gone into space. He saw the scorch marks on the bulkhead and the blood on the deck where Nate had lost his arm. He remembered Nate charging the enemy…
“Nate…” He shook his head, as Ashley walked up beside him. “He had some balls.”
Ashley nodded and put her hand on Corgan’s arm. Pretended not to notice the tears in his eyes. Larry the Giff was at another shuttlecraft, the damaged one with the desiccated Giff bodies in it, contemplating his own loss. He stood there, looking mournfully—so it seemed to Corgan— at the Giff bodies. And then turned abruptly away. Corgan could almost feel Larry’s grief in the air, again.
Ashley and Corgan followed the alien to the bulkhead at the rear of the hangar. The alien touched a device strapped to his chest, it whistled, and a two-meter-square section of wall opened up, revealing banks of control panels and a computer-monitor cube.
Corgan snorted. “I had no clue that was there.” He glanced at Larry—and remembered that he had said he was male. No visible genitals, however. But maleness wasn’t defined by the human notion of genitalia, he supposed. There was a fold of some kind, he noticed, not far above the alien’s crotch—maybe something came out of that fold.
He winced at the picture that came to his mind.
Larry’s fingers waved artfully over the keys, and an image flickered into life, in the hollow computer-box—
The alien breeder. The xenomorph queen, climbing up out of a triangular hole someone had cut in the deck. There was abandoned equipment nearby with Chinese ideograms on it—a compression tank.
“Look at the size of that thing!” Ashley breathed, sounding almost as impressed as she was scared. “Some kind of alpha xenomorph! Look at that head carapace!”
“That is a breeder,” said Larry. “There was another—I isolated it, and it eventually ran out of air and died. It takes many hours before it runs through its stored-up air supply. But there were eggs on the ship, somewhere, and they need no air at all, as they go entirely dormant until they sense someone close. I was afraid to stay on the ship alone. I see now I should have piloted this vessel into the gas giant, and ended the infestation that way… to protect those who might come later.”
Corgan looked at him, for a moment surprised that the alien had felt fear, much the way a man would. But fear would be necessary for any creature’s survival. And Larry apparently also felt regret.
“Where is she going?” Ashley asked, staring at the xenomorph queen.
“I do not know,” said Larry, �
��but not this direction. Here are more of them… heading away from us, also. Going toward the stern of the vessel.”
A view down the axis tunnel at the center of the ship showed a number of xenomorphs moving toward the stern, making Corgan think of cockroaches moving through a drainpipe.
“Perhaps they might be attempting to find a way into the engine room…” It flicked its digits at the controls and the image changed to a hologram of Reynolds in the lower part of a cavernous room Corgan had never seen before, in which great pulsing globes were arrayed in a circle, and a single large globe connected to the stern bulkhead, all of them throbbing with subdued but persistent energies.
“Is that Reynolds?” Ashley asked, walking up. “What fucked up thing is he doing now?”
“He appears to be working out the ship’s mobility,” Larry said. “He may be close to operating it.”
Corgan went cold, at that. “We’ve got to stop him. He’s likely to run this ship into the moon, or Saturn— and even if he doesn’t, if he starts it to Earth CANC will swarm over the damn thing. They’ll get the ship… and UNIC will be screwed.”
“That is not the greatest risk,” said Larry, tilting his head toward Corgan—even though what Corgan had assumed was the “front” of the alien was turned away. The alien’s silvery band of diamond-shaped eyes went all the way around his head, looked out to the back, after all—bodily front and back might not be the same concept for Larry the Giff.
“Yeah,” Ashley said, “he’s right—the big risk is the xenomorphs. If that lunatic Reynolds gets them back to Earth…”
“He can’t want to take them there,” Corgan said. “He must be planning to get rid of them somehow.”
Ashley shook her head. “Captain, you’re not a scientist— could be you don’t know how scientists think. And if a scientist is sick, neurotic, or worse, he thinks obsessively about his research, his career, his discoveries. He’ll take those things to Earth. He’s a megalomaniac, he probably thinks he can control them. But if the ship’s already headed for Earth, it’ll be boarded before it gets there and the xenomorph infection would spread to those ships and… Oh God. I think I just felt the ship move!”
