ALIEN THE COLD FORGE

by Alex White

  “I—” she starts, and he slaps her, cutting up her cheek.

  “Louder!” he roars in her face. “You killed all these people! The least you can fucking do is be sure about it!” “I want to live!” she screams. “I want to live! I want to live, you motherfucker. I want to live!”

  He turns to watch Nick absorb these new facts, to truly understand that he worked so hard to drag Lucy Biltmore here, so she could betray him. Although they’ve probably never been close friends, the look on his face says it all. Her betrayal wounds Nick deeply, and Dorian drinks it up.

  Dorian spots a flash freeze button with a safety latch. “That’s what I’m talking about.” He flips up the latch and jams down the button. The glass chamber fills with bright mist and screams as the nozzles flood it with aerosolized liquid nitrogen. When the screams stop, Dorian lets go of the button.

  Nick’s body rests in the corner, eyes shut, skin covered with a fuzz of fresh winter frost. Little glossy trails run down his cheeks, because of course the white knight was crying when he died. Dorian opens the door and, glancing back at Lucy, steps inside. She could rush up to him, seal him up, freeze him to death, but she won’t. She’s just like Nick—there to be consumed.

  Ice seeps into the skin of his bare feet, and he gazes in wonder at what he’s wrought. He raises his hands, as if in prayer, then smashes in Nick’s brittle face with a savage kick. The skin cracks apart, but he’s only frozen on the surface. His warm, bloody center comes oozing from between the cuts, so Dorian takes him by the hair and smashes his head against the tile a few times. He’s getting good at killing people.

  Dorian dances out of the enclosure on freezing feet and looks to Lucy.

  “That’s everyone, you know. We need to go.”

  “E-everyone?”

  “Yeah,” he says, acting like it was his plan all along. “Everyone. I was instructed to leave no survivors, except for our mole. That’s you.”

  She wipes her bug eyes on her sleeve. “You were so cruel.”

  “You fucking brought me here!” Dorian laughs, then he cackles, spreading his arms wide. Selling himself as a spy is more fun than he’d expected—though not as fun as breaking Nick’s face apart. “You summoned me, and here I am! What did you think was going to happen when you started fucking around in the wallets of megacorporations? Stern letters? We’re talking about billions of dollars here, and thousands of lives.” He strides to her and pokes her on the collarbone with a long, bloody finger, shoving her backward. “So why don’t you drop the whole doe-eyed babe-in-the-woods act and get to the fucking airlock?”

  Now comes the fun part. If she buys it, she’ll unlock the pod for him, and he can be done with her.

  Her eyes search his, a hint of rebellion in her. She hates him, that much is clear, but she’s wondering what she can get away with. For a moment, he considers throttling her—something he’s wanted since before he started killing people. He’s so much taller than she is, and she’s so skinny that he could twist her apart like taffy.

  “You get to leave, because you showed the correct loyalty,” he says, a little quieter. “Now get a move on.”

  The halls in the kennels are the worst, with no cover and a lot of blind corners. The creatures shriek deep within egg storage, the sound echoing up through the winding passages. There’s something happening down there—something beautiful, Dorian knows, because the beasts no longer prowl the long corridors. He wants to go down there and bear witness. But he can’t.

  His objective is holding his hand. He leads Lucy out of the labyrinth and into the SCIF commons—

  Where he is promptly hit by a car.

  29

  VEHICULAR HOMICIDE

  That’s the only way his mind can describe what he feels—white-hot pain across his entire form, crushing breathlessness, tumbling, bashing, the complete loss of orientation. He rolls to a stop, and the world swims before him, splitting and congealing into the wide-open area.

  White light floods his sight, like searing daggers in his eyes. He rolls onto his back and scrambles away from the source, shielding his vision. Yellow lights flash.

  Thunk.

  The ground shakes. He shakes his head, trying to get his balance back.

  Thunk.

  He rises to unsteady feet, stumbling as he does.

  Thunk.

  His eyes adjust, and he looks up at the yellow metal colossus before him—the Caterpillar P-5000 Power Loader. Caution stripes run up the sides of its arms like a paper wasp’s stinger. Yellow lights flash on its limbs. Its scarred pilot’s cage hangs open, seatbelts jangling as it lumbers toward him. Its pincers spin and open, whining as they do.

  “Hello, Dorian,” it rasps at him in a voice so distorted that it is neither masculine nor feminine. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  It takes a wide swipe at him and he jumps backward, landing all wrong on his ankle. His breath comes in huffs, from where the machine smashed it out of him. The loader’s reach is longer than he anticipated, and the edge of a pincer catches his shoulder, spinning him to the ground. He scrambles away as the second arm comes down on the deck like a meteorite.

  Dorian tries to juke past the behemoth and run toward the SCIF side airlock, but its wide arms halt any forward progress. If he gets pinched, if he gets pinned, Blue is going to smear his guts across the deck. Out of the corner of his eye, he spots Lucy trying to make a break for it.

  “Get to the airlock!” he shouts to her, and the loader swivels, searching. He takes advantage of the distraction to try and run along the wall, but the loader kicks a steel crate, sending it sliding into his path, causing him to stumble and fall to one knee.

  “No you don’t, you little shit,” the loader barks, lumbering after him.

  Dorian barely avoids being crushed by the charging vehicle. He clambers over the crate to get past, bobbing and weaving to stay out of reach of the pincers. But everything he’s experienced is beginning to take a toll on his body. His ankle sears with agony as Blue grabs the crate and rolls it, knocking him loose.

  Blue’s control of the loader is so much more thorough, so much more natural than anything he’s ever seen. Though it’s clumsy and slow, she uses it as her own body, often moving in unpredictable ways. Dorian searches for any weakness he can exploit, but find nothing. He’s not a licensed operator, but he’s pretty sure the electrical controls are housed on the loader’s forearm. He’d have to be inside the pilot’s cage to stop it.

  It raises its arms and slams them at him, and Dorian darts past to get a better look at the back. The working camera on top swivels around and snaps onto him. It bats a transit case at him, and the plastic box hits Dorian harder than a baseball bat. He falls to his hands and knees, trying to shake the concussion from his head.

  “Stand still,” it shouts. Still between him and the exit, the loader comes jogging backward, before tripping in Dorian’s direction, grinding toward him like a semi. He rolls out of the way, but only just.

  While it moves to right itself, Dorian gauges the distance to safety. There’s too much chance that, with its long legs, the loader could catch him at a jog. He finds a cable run grating and rips it open, then worms his way inside.

  “No you don’t!” the loader rasps.

  Its stomping shakes the deck like a bomb going off. Dorian’s ears ring and his head spins, and his hands and knees go numb with the vibration. He can’t quite see it, but he can hear it up above him. There’s a fork in the conduit in a few yards. If he can reach it, maybe he can lose her.

  The loader’s foot comes crashing through the grating, collapsing it within a few feet of his face. Then again, and again, working its way backward toward him. It hasn’t yet made it back to the fork, and Dorian turns the corner before it bashes through his section. He races down the duct toward an exit grate.

  His bloody hands sting. His frozen feet burn. Every muscle aches with exhaustion. He has never been more alive.

  “Get back here, you coward!” Blue sho
uts behind him. “Who’s a big, strong man now, huh? You fucking limp dick!”

  He pauses for a moment. Did she just call him that? How dare she?

  Pincers wedge into the cable run behind him, ripping the grating open like a can. He struggles forward, shearing metal and sparking electrical cables in his wake. He just has to get to the end, and—

  The pincers smash down in front of him, skewering the grating and shattering it. They close around the twisted steel and rip it free. A piece of conduit becomes tangled up in the mess, and a sudden wind across his beaten body tells Dorian he’s trapped, fully exposed, and awaiting death. He rolls onto his back in his trench to see the loader straddling the cable run, poised to deliver a crushing blow.

  She’s beaten him. This infirm woman, this goddamned cripple. She can’t. It’s not possible. Nature favors the fittest, and he’s an unstoppable machine. He was first in chess club. He’s a card-carrying genius. Dorian is the successor to the inevitable legacy of the snatchers.

  So she can’t win. It’s not allowed.

  “This is for Anne, you son of a bitch.”

  A loud clank fills the hall, and the loader stumbles. Through its flashing yellow lights, Dorian makes out a black shape, snapping at its cameras, at its hydraulic hoses. The loader thrashes, and another beastly shadow leaps onto its caution-taped bulk.

  They’ve come to save him.

  They’ve come to put things right.

  Dorian climbs to his feet, struck by the majesty of it all. Her stomping must’ve brought the hive down upon her. In the battle of the physical, she cheated, and now she’s paying the price. Two more beasts join the fray, then three more, bounding up out of the kennels and scampering across her metal body, searching for weaknesses.

  He can’t stay to watch, though. They’ll be on him any second, and he has a lot more fleshy spots than a power loader. So Dorian jogs as best he can around the corner, out of the front of the SCIF, with a limp in his step and a song in his heart.

  He finds Lucy cowering outside the airlock, waiting for him, and stops to give her a hand up. She’s crying, of course. How is she crying? Did she not see what just happened? He wants to shake her and slam her against the wall and tell her, “You just saw the greatest sight any human alive has ever seen, and you’re just huddling in a corner, trying not to look!”

  Instead, he says, “Come on. It’s almost over.”

  This is why humanity is doomed—because when true art and beauty are thrust upon them, they’d rather look away than face it. Because they’re so afraid of dying that they don’t do any living.

  That’s why he’s got to find a way to kill this bitch.

  30

  OPERATOR ERROR

  He got away. The son of a bitch just took off through the far door while the creatures swarmed her.

  No matter where she looks, Blue finds an alien appendage striking at her. They surround her like piranhas, darting across her unfeeling body, knocking her off balance. The power loader’s internal sensors aren’t like Marcus’s. When she starts to fall, she doesn’t feel it until it’s too late. Blue swings wildly, batting two of the creatures into the far walls, but their hardened carapaces shatter against her pincer. Their intensely acidic blood turns her right forearm into a smoking ruin.

  She looks on in horror as crimson hydraulic fluid sprays from ruptured cables in her exoskeleton. Her right pincer slides limply open, unable to grip anything. If her left pincer goes, she won’t be able to carry the egg crate. If she can’t carry that, she can’t live through what’s coming.

  Blue steps out, seizes a piece of broken steel conduit with her left pincer, and swings it like a whip, cutting one of the creatures in half. Acid sprays far and wide, coating part of her hip. She doesn’t notice any pain, just a slow list to the left. She cracks the conduit against the deck a few more times, trying to get the bastards to back off, but to no avail. They snap and rage at her even harder, as if to prove they’d never let her best them.

  She can’t wait. If Dorian and Lucy are working together, then they’ll commandeer the escape pod, leaving Blue high and dry. She must stop them, and so help her, if Lucy gets in the way, Blue will crush her. Anyone who’s thrown her lot in with Dorian can go to hell. Threading her pincer through the lift hold on the egg crate, she drags it toward her.

  Then she turns and marches for the SCIF exit, igniting the blow torch on her limp right arm and sweeping it back and forth as she does. It’s a short jet of flame, but it annoys the creatures. The aliens hiss and spit at her, but they don’t charge.

  The dangling hydraulic cable on her right side is obvious, however, as is the damage to her hip. The snatchers knew enough to get the egg crates open, so they might be clever enough to cut her cables. Her fluid is crimson, just like human blood, and the beasts must know to seek blood.

  One in the back of the pack bounds toward her and she swings the egg crate at him like a baseball bat. The crate connects and the creature flies across the commons before smashing into a wall, acid spraying from several broken pieces. It was an instinctual move, but her heart stops when she realizes what she’s done. She can’t afford to jeopardize the airtight seal of the box.

  But the crates are all shock-proof, tamper-resistant, and best of all, super-hydrophobic. The acid rolls off, leaving no damage at all.

  Blue has a battle mace.

  She steps into the pack and catches another of the beasts off-guard, slamming it toward the distant wall like a baseball. She swings again, but they’ve become wary and quickly leap out of the way. They’re so much faster than she can be in her cumbersome body, and have little trouble avoiding her attacks.

  As she moves forward again, however, they do back away, retreating into the corners, leaping up to cling to the ceiling, darting toward the shadows. Blue’s right leg whines where the metal has fused, and she almost trips. If she follows them, they’ll get her eventually. They’re at an impasse.

  Retreating into the open corridor of the central strut, she switches to the camera behind her as she walks backward, yielding a strange sensation.

  There’s no sign of Dorian or Lucy. She does, however, find the telltale slug trail of Marcus’s blood. He’s dragged himself through here on his way to the escape pod, and that means Dorian is bound to find him soon. She stomps down the hall toward the airlock, and stoops down to find it empty, several of its suits missing. Blue can’t remember if they were gone before or not.

  If Dorian and Lucy reach that escape pod before her, she’s dead. It can’t end like this. Not after everything she’s done.

  “Fuck you!” she screams out, her metallic voice filling the corridor. She bangs once with her flaccid right pincer, then backs away. If Dorian and Lucy launch, she’ll know it.

  She has only one choice—keep going.

  * * *

  Backing out of the brain-direct interface, Blue returns to her own body in her burned and stinking quarters. Her swollen lungs and throat aren’t handling the soot well, and she may develop pneumonia out of this. Maybe she’ll start coughing, choke and asphyxiate. Or maybe she can do what needs to be done and get out of this shithole.

  The loader has all of Marcus’s access, which means it can open and close sealed emergency bulkheads. It can move through the vacuum-exposed docking bay, perhaps even build impromptu airlocks using emergency bulkheads. No telling how long it might take, and it might not work at all. She keys in the message code to communicate directly with the loader’s memory.

  >>HELLO, BLUE.

  She blinks. How much of Marcus’s personality was he able to cram into that tiny computer?

  //I’M IN THE CREW QUARTERS. PROCEED TO THIS LOCATION.

  >>ACKNOWLEDGED.

  He might encounter Dorian and Lucy along the way. If he’s too similar to Marcus, he might try to help them.

  //IN MORTAL DANGER. HURRY.

  >>ACKNOWLEDGED.

  So maybe not much of Marcus’s personality after all. She closes her portable terminal and
winds the BDI cord around her wrist. She won’t have time to reapply it to her scalp if it comes loose.

  Blue then begins her long crawl toward the central strut, and with any luck, freedom.

  * * *

  Unsealing the emergency bulkheads would’ve taken too long. Once Dorian and Lucy don their suits, the fastest way to the escape pods is out the airlock and through the hole in the docking bay.

  Besides, that makes it a lot harder for the maniac in the power loader to follow them.

  The bright line of Kaufmann’s light seeps across the hull of the Cold Forge in a slow transit along its length. Dorian pokes his helmet-clad head out of the airlock to time its passing and mentally gauge how long he has in shadow. It takes about ten seconds, and then Kaufmann peeks over the far side of the hull, blinding him. Dorian ducks back inside, immediately grateful to have the heat off his face.

  Lucy huddles in the corner while they wait for it to pass, hugging herself. The doorway grows unbelievably bright, and they inch around it, seeking cover from the burning sun below.

  “I can’t do this,” Lucy repeats over and over again. “We’re never going to get out of here.”

  “Not with that attitude, you won’t,” he says, clamping a rope harness to her suit’s belt. “Because getting off the station is a vapid goal, Lucy.” He manhandles her upright, slamming her against the wall to get her legs under her, then reaches down and activates her mag boots. They clamp to the surface and the green safe light illuminates along the side. “You see, you need smart goals, Lucy. Specific, measurable, achievable, results-focused and time-bound. Smart, you understand?”

  He shoves her toward the open door, full of tumbling stars.

  “Specific: get to the fucking escape pod.”

  She steps out, and he can hear her sobbing. How long has she been crying? Who the hell would cry when everything was going so well?

  “Measurable: stop when we get to the escape pod.”