She sighed.
You'd think the Company would at least let her bring Attila on shift. At least then she'd have someone to talk to. She wouldn't have to resort to doodling. However, the last thing the Company was interested in was her mental health. As far as they were concerned, she could drool and doodle here, just as long as she got her job done. Just as long as she stayed out of trouble.
If only they didn't have that contract hanging over her like the sword of Damocles. If only she had money, a ftl-ship---a business plan . . . !
If only . . .
A high-pitched voice from a grille molded into the framework of the desk beside the computer facet interrupted her reverie.
"Ms. Noguchi!"
She started, then immediately realized who it was. How many times had she wished that she could yank this infernal radiocomm from its mooring and toss it into the garbage blaster? Freedom would break out. Peace from the incessant whine of the planet's Company president . . . a man who made certified anal retentives seem relaxed and carefree.
"Yes, Mr. Darkins."
"How's that oversheet coming?"
"It's going well."
"Good. Glad to hear it. I need not remind you that it's due in my office at the end of the week. Company heads are expecting a subspace transmission then, and a comprehensive one. I trust that it will be a better job than last time."
"I think it will satisfy them."
"Good. Glad to hear it. You've got an important job, Ms. Noguchi. An important job, on an important planet."
The transmission ended, with a faint buzzing sound like the annoying song of a rat-fly.
Sure.
Important, her butt.
Alistair Three-also known as Doc's World-was a planet with a perfect rotation, a perfect distance from the sun, a perfect atmosphere . . . perfect, that was, for a blandly uniform surface, with bland cattlelike grazers on its vast plains, few mountain ranges. Its weather was boring, its oceans were dull and lusterless; all its specifics were the epitome of monotony. One of these days humans from other planets would get around to fully populating this planet, but for right now there were far more appealing planets to go to, with much less distance between them and the rest of the human part of the galaxy.
What interested the corporation enough to dip its tentacles down into Doc's World (named after one of the men who'd discovered it, Doc Warden, an alcoholic ne'er-do-well whose ship had gotten lost, and whose comment on Alistair Three was "Makes me want another drink") was simple.
The mining.
Not that Doc's World had anything like rubies or diamonds or unusual precious gems.
No, what it had was narkon ore, a curious grade of ore created by Alistair Three's unique mineral vulcanization process, which the corporation liked to use in its starship engines. Thus it had set up this Blakean "dark satanic mill" to mine and process said ore, then to transport it to satellites and moons where the shipbuilding was accomplished. Almost ten thousand people lived here in Solitaire City. Many were miners who took a daily troop train twenty miles south to a mountain range where they worked. Many were the miners' companions who often as not went with them. A few were supervisors and managers. A few more were bureaucrats. Machiko was one of those few-albeit on a top echelon-and she loathed it.
And to think of what her past had been.
To think that she had once run with a Predator pack.
Oh, how the Mighty had fallen.
She sighed and tapped up the spreadsheet. She began to examine the data that had been entered by others, and to send the computer through its analytic paces so that the corporation would have the precious vital statistics it needed. She stared awhile at the screen, and then she put in another crystal, adding a new matrix of information.
Juggle, juggle.
Toil, trouble.
After a while, she saved her work. She sipped her coffee. And then she stared off into the plain plains of this nothing world, remembering what it had been like to fly with lightning in her wings.
* * *
Chapter 2
Machiko, warrior, looked around and found herself surrounded by Death
The bugs.
For a brief moment fear exploded inside her. Then she realized that fear was her friend. It helped limit the borders between life and death, light and dark. It plumbed the depths of her soul and biochemistry, bringing up the thunder of valor and the controlled explosion of adrenaline.
Up ahead Top Knot, running point, aimed a strafe of plasma. The fiery stuff raked across a line of the aliens, cracking their chitin into cinders. Lethal acid splashed back, boiling into acrid steam.
Others of the pack added to the fire, tearing a wide hole in the jumble of the bugs, the swelling ranks pouring forth through tunnels to protect their hive.
The pack had just landed on this planet in the majestic and silvery craft that was their starship. Their mission was simple: secure this hive's Queen for their own purposes. Simple though their goal might be, the road there was not.
She was working with a pack of yautja on perhaps one of their most dangerous objectives-indeed, so dangerous that the Predator Hunter's normal codes of conduct in the pursuit went right out the window.
For this expedition, anyway, the ritual laws of matching the quarry weapon for weapon were suspended.
The naginatas and scatterguns prescribed for hunting the kainde amedha, the Hard Meat, were replaced by plasmacasters and lasers.
This was no Hunting trip.
This was war.
Just as it had generally been in the history of her own ooman peoples, there are no rules in war.
Only objectives.
Machiko, warrior, was no longer Machiko Noguchi. No longer a streamlined ramrod for the corporation on a planet of alien cattle. She was Dahdtoudi, proud and brave warrior, who had proved herself on the planet called Ryushi and was Blooded by no less than the great Dachande, a great Predator Leader. Dahdtoudi. "Little Knife." The lightning scar that he had etched on her forehead just before his death with the acid of a broken bug finger, partly neutralized by his bloody spittle, marked her glory for life. When the pack searching for Dachande and his ill-fated mission, headed by the valiant Vk'leita, had discovered Machiko, she was Dahdtoudi, and she bore Dachande's mark and had a Queen's skull hanging above the door of her home. She'd been one of the surviving oomans---humans---on Ryushi. She had no particular reason to stay, seeing as she no longer felt committed to the Company, and every reason to go with the yautja. With the alien Hunters she found the core of honor, a state that eradicated the shame that had descended upon her family when her father, having been caught embezzling funds from his family, had committed a bloody seppuku. But a suicide without honor. Though she had excelled scholastically and then corporately, this was a pain and shame that had always hung over her, crippling her relations with other people. She had found it difficult to get close to people, but there was always the desire. Now there was no reason to get close to the yautja. Here, thus released, she could test herself, test her courage and skills, test all the things that would lead her into the state of grace shown her by Dachande.
As a Blooded One, she'd been entitled to come for Hunts.
She felt a real and profound need for that now, a vital desire to pursue honor and valor and the ways of the yautja
A desire she needed to explore.
And so now, here she was
They moved through the birthing chambers. Remains of ill-fated denizens of this foggy world, apelike creatures with four arms, big jaws, and elephantine ears-hung from the walls, their chests burst, their innards in various states of decomposition. The smell was beyond description, beyond bad, cloying and gagging. If not for the filters in the mask they'd given her, Machiko would not have been able to make it through that funk. Well, perhaps . . . After all, she was no longer Machiko, she was Dahdtoudi, and she had not yet fully tested what Dahdtoudi could take.
Whatever it was, she knew it was going to have to be a lot.
She'd braced herself for this raid. She'd braced herself when she'd gone off with the pack. Her whole life now was one big Brace--
Payoff time now.
The big guns having paused momentarily for their metaphorical breaths, the Leaders stepped aside, staggered English-line style, for their backers to let loose their volleys.
Machiko and the youngers to the rear discharged their weapons, cutting into the throng of aliens, slicing, dicing, and generally churning up the Hard Meat into chunky-style puree, acid flavor.
Machiko wore the yautja armor, sleek and economical and oddly comfortable. The material worked well in the movements of her lithe muscles, and the air circulation was superb. The armor was blessed, and it felt almost like augmenting prosthetics, as though the lines converged into power that boosted her own. Her hair was worn now in the ceremonial ringlets, rather like neat dreadlocks bouncing energetically at the back of her head as she moved forward, her discharges blasting through the dying, spindly creatures.
They broke through.
As though this knowledge was as instinctual as it was empirical, the pack moved as one through the opening presented to it. The wedge of the older, valor-hogging frontmost went first, and the others, including Machiko, allowed this. All were equal in honor, all were esteemed. However, Machiko had quickly glommed on to the fact that these Predators were pretty much like an Earthly predator pack. The members jostled for dominance, and the older, smarter, and more experienced members were generally either given deference or simply plowed past the more awkward younger members.
"Ha ha ha!" whooped one of the younger warriors, a snot-nosed kid about a head shorter than the others; a difference in height was almost made up for by the chip on his shoulder. This dude had bridled at Machiko's presence in the pack from the word go and had been on her back ever since. He took guff from the others for his lack of stature, then handed it to her coated with a little shit for good measure.
"Ha ha ha!"
It was garbled laughter. He'd heard Machiko laugh once, and he would imitate her from time to time, out of spite. She jostled right back generally; jostled just short of a set-to: no reason to make unnecessary waves, when all she wanted was to sing in the band.
No, especially right now, smack in the middle of a den of the most vicious killers in the galaxy.
"Ha ha ha!"
The tide had let up under the slash and burn of their weapons. The elders were hurrying along, intent on their goal, the other youngers tagged along, just behind them.
She called her tormentor Shorty, though before she'd assumed he didn't know English.
Now, though, she wondered.
He turned around and shoved her.
"Ha ha ha!"
She went back a few feet, surprised at the push. She'd already figured out that the very last man had the least honorable position in battle, albeit a necessary one. That must have been what Shorty intended: to make sure that she came up in the rear.
"All right," she said, "let's just go," hoping her tone was understandable, if not her words.
"Ha ha ha!"
Shorty fairly skipped ahead, waggling his locks at her in a defiant, teasing manner.
Oops.
She saw the thing way before he did. It was coming out of a tubing in the ceiling: a mean-looking bastard, its diseased banana head already dripping saliva, its claws outstretched and ready to jump.
"Watch out!" she cried, pulling up her plasma gun.
Shorty may have been young and stupid, but he was quick. He spun around, looking up immediately at the trouble.
She waited.
Not because she wanted to see Shorty killed.
Worse. She wanted to let him sweat a moment, until she did something much, much worse ....
Fast as he was, the bug was faster.
It jumped down, leaping for the certain kill.
Machiko fired.
The blast caught the bug in midsection exactly at the point she had calculated, not only smashing the thing to fiery bits but blowing back those pieces and their acid blood against the wall, preventing them from falling on Shorty.
Shorty stepped back away from the devastation. He had stopped laughing. Through his mask Machiko could see the ice of his glare.
"Ha ha ha!"
One of the other youngers, up ahead, had stopped. A brawny arm pointing an accusing finger.
"Ha ha ha!"
They'd learned the laugh, all right, and now the derision was being heaped on Shorty.
A bark of communication. Shorty turned and stormed off. Machiko followed into the harsh acridity of the smoking advance.
Time to get back to work.
Sometimes, at lulls like these, when Machiko felt a little sick to her stomach, more than ill at ease with her companions, she wondered about how the bugs had spread across the galaxy. Simultaneous evolution? From what she could gather, Hunter folklore seemed to indicate that. But could that folklore have been created to mask a troublesome possibility? Could the bugs have spread because of the Predators' blooding rites? Could "accidents" have occurred on many others worlds-"accidents" of containment, like that which had occurred on Ryushi?
Of course, the cultural pride of these Predators could never stomach that notion, and so the possibility was washed over with insistent folklore. Besides, who could really say? The bugs had a way of spreading, like disease. And interstellar vector theory really had no bearing on what they were doing now, on this planet.
The bugs had this planet. That was all that mattered. The Hunter mission now was not to dispute the bug domain, but to appropriate their Queen, for their own purposes.
And their destination was not far away. Machiko could sense that much.
Breakthrough was imminent.
The elders, honor and glory and ego etched in flesh and bone and armor, blasted their way through one last tissue of defense. By the blaze of their weapons, Machiko could see a much larger chamber, lit in a feral spectral glow.
Closer, she could see that it was like a chamber of the devil's heart.
And squatting inside that chamber was its own particular demon.
The Queen was about normal size. Which was to say, big. It hunkered in its hold like a cornered jabberwocky, its fingernails-on-blackboard hiss already aroused by the surrounding Hunters.
As rear guard, it was the youngers' duty now to keep the Queen's drones away while the more experienced Hunters did their jobs.
Machiko performed that duty, but made sure she didn't turn her back on Shorty. These creatures were supposedly made of honor, but she'd never really trusted young males of any race, and now was not the time to begin.
The Predators knew their prey well.
One of the bugs' collective strengths lay in their complete subjection to their Queen. Another was their total dedication to the proliferation of their species.
But within these strengths was the key to their one major weakness: the warrior-drones would do nothing to endanger the life of their Queen.
In turn she would do nothing to endanger the lives of her unborn brood.
Armed with that knowledge, the success of the Hunters was assured.
Still, it wouldn't be easy. Trouble along the way was virtually guaranteed, despite the strutting self-confidence this pack had displayed toward the effort from the very beginning.
As the youngers picked off any of the drones who dared to poke their misshapen, horrific heads into the chamber, the elders expertly shot off their grappling devices around the numerous limbs of the Queen, around her neck, effectively hog-tying her.
The mighty weave of the cords pulled tight. The Queen raged and heaved, but her powerful huge body was held in vague check. Even though she wobbled and surged from time to time, it would have to do.
The Queen thus reasonably subdued, the drones seemed to check themselves, keyed intuitively to her vulnerability.
Now came the most dangerous part ....
The capture team had to maintain control of the Queen as
Top Knot, their brawny leader, prepared her for travel.
This was a ticklish business, as it consisted of separating her from her egg sack.
Top Knot advanced, his long, sharp blade held high and glistening in the halogen portable lamps carried by the others. He raised it high, tensed himself, aimed-
And brought it down like a surgically trained executioner upon the fleshy interstitial connective tissue.
The blade cut down and through the stuff hard. There was a shriek from the Queen.
Unfortunately, the Hunter whom Machiko called Three-Spot was caught napping. His stance had been improper, and so when the Queen unexpectedly threw all her ample strength into that limb and pulled it away, he was lifted bodily into the air by the rope curled around his arm.
The Queen hurled him around like a yo-yo and dashed him down onto the hard ground.
Stunned, the Hunter could not move.
But the Queen could.
With a vicious vengeance she brought down her own scythe like claws directly onto Three Spot's chest. So sharp were the claws, so much momentum did the Queen have in her blow, that they drove down directly through that armor, burying deep into the warrior's chest with a sickening splash and thunk of released blood.
Three-Spot wriggled and spasmed for a moment. Then he was dead.
That's what tended to happen in these situations.
On their way out of the unfortunate Hunter's body, the razor claws slashed through the rope.
Part of the Queen was free.
This wasn't good.
The situation was pretty obvious to Machiko. The capture party's continued safety rested on their ability to control the Queen. Her freedom would be the signal for her brood to attack.
Back when she was corporate ramrod on the planet Ryushi, Machiko would have examined the situation . . . weighed her options.
People would have died.
Now, instead, she simply acted.
Dropping her gun, she leapt for the loose rein. She had a split second grab for it before the thing whipped back out of reach. Her leap was automatic, but there seemed to be magic in it, talent in it, a skill and precision that she hadn't owned before her experience on Ryushi.
Aliens vs Predator 2 - Hunter's Planet Page 2
