We were halfway between the grotto and the camp when Pocket’s scanner started flashing red on its screen and beeping in broad tones. We all stopped while Pocket held Berooz’s foot with one hand and picked up the scanner on its shoulder strap with the other. He looked at the screen, then looked up at the tightly packed columns and unwelcoming channels in the landscape behind us.
“Uh . . . guys . . . ” he murmured. At once he dropped Berooz’s leg, clasped the scanner in both hands, and stared up at the long trenchlike gulley extending onward past the grotto’s mouth and around a bend. “Something’s coming! A lot of somethings!”
“People?” Clark asked.
“Not unless they’ve shrunken to the size of squids!”
“How many?”
“Sixty . . . seventy . . . seventy-five . . . Mother Mary!”
“Drop him!” I shouted to MacCormac and Axell.
“No!” MacCormac kicked at me as I let go of Berooz’s arm and his body crunched to the ground. “You pick him back up! Pick him up!”
The argument was already history. At the end of the visible corridor appeared a single creature. It looked like a scorpion with extra-long legs—or a human hand gone mutant. No eyes, no head, yet it was taking a bead on us from fifty yards away. Behind it whipped a long segmented tail, waving in the air, snapping back, forth, back, forth in a manner of threat.
MacCormac dropped Berooz and grabbed for his weapon, somehow managing to disentangle it from Berooz’s, which was also strapped to him. He cleared the muzzle, aimed, and fired without pausing.
The spidery ghoul exploded into uncountable pieces. Bits of it bounced off two pillars on the sides of the corridor, and I swore it squealed as it died.
“Not enough!” Pocket warned. “Nowhere near enough! There they are!”
As we stood stupefied in that one instant that everybody hates, when you can’t move and you know you should, suddenly dozens of the craven creatures showed themselves at the gulley’s bend.
They came around the pillars—on the pillars, crawling around the glass pillar the way squirrels do around trees, and they jumped from column to column, crossing wide spaces in instants, closer and closer by the leap. They crowded along the gulley floor, their fingery appendages clicking staccato on the skulch. Behind them came a second wave, fundamental as scorpions, tails high and snapping, racing toward us on their spindles.
“Face-huggers!” Clark shouted. “Think with your legs!”
4
Berooz’s mutilated body struck the path floor. His empty skull made a pok on the skulch. In an instant everyone was running. I drew my plasma pistol and fired on the run. A bolt of compact plasma streaked back and splattered two scorpions, but the others closed in and skittered over the exploded remains without the slightest disruption.
“Run, run!” Pocket called out with each of his own pounding paces. “Run, run, run, run, run!”
Impossible. A glance over my shoulder told me we might as well have been trying to run under water. The hyperkinetic face-hugger platoon covered the yards between us like brushfire.
“Marines!” MacCormac saw the same thing. He skidded around to face the hair-raising sight.
Despite every instinct of self-preservation instilled in Humanity since the dawn of time, he and Carmichael scraped to stops on either side of me. Even Edney, wounded as she was, shook off the support from Bonnie and Clark and ordered, “Keep going!”
Clark pushed Bonnie, Axell, and Mark in front of him. “Faster!”
“Formation!” MacCormac bellowed.
Corporal Edney cranked around, using her acid-burned right hand to support her weapon, and brought it to her shoulder to be fired by her left hand. I saw the pain reaming her face and admired her tremendously.
The three Marines came to meet each other and adjusted their stance to put all of us behind them and themselves in a perfect line, ten feet abreast of each other. I didn’t understand why until an instant later, when the chittering fingers of the face-huggers became maddeningly close, rushing along the ground and jumping from pillar to pillar, covering ground shockingly fast. The whipping assault was almost upon us. I couldn’t shoot over my shoulder, or I’d hit one of the Marines, so I stopped and braced to take aim. I never got the chance to fire.
“Ready!” MacCormac shouted. With the courage of training and of spirit, the Marines set their weapons on their targets and somehow waited for their commander’s order.
“Volley!” MacCormac called.
The Marines engaged their enormous guns.
FOOOOM—crack!
Three arched waves of electrical energy in a blinding neon-orange blew from the Marines’ weapons and shocked the flank of face-huggers. The wave actually rolled back a few feet. They were frying in place!
“Volley!” MacCormac shouted again.
FOOOOM—crack!
“Volley! Double!”
FOOOOM—crack crack!
With each volley the blinding orange energy wave drove the face-huggers back another fifty feet, buying us time to run. We made it back to the middle of the camp, jumping over the swaddled corpses and zagging between the huts toward the ship. The chittering sound faded back, then began to surge behind us again. After the third volley, the Marines broke formation and ran with us until they too were at the camp, where they again stopped and formed up, facing the nightmare. MacCormac’s voice was the steadying force in the chaos.
“Flames! Fire at will!”
They uniformly clacked their weapons to another setting and opened up with streams of gas-fed flame, broiling the rolling ranks of creatures including the ones that were jumping from pillar to pillar. The creatures fell on each other, shrieking and raving, and began to tangle up and lose ground.
“Cease fire! Retreat and recharge!”
I stuffed my plaz back into my vest pocket and skidded against a pillar. “MacCormac!” I called. “Weapon!”
As the Marines caught up, the colonel instinctively tossed me Berooz’s heavy weapon. It rolled once in the air and with a long reach I caught it. The weight, despite excellent balance, almost took me down. Like theirs, it was a military-issue combination explosive-tipped percussion rifle, flamethrower, and electrical field dispersal cannon and a dozen other exclusive features for sensing and accuracy. I hoped on the soul of my favorite person on Earth, if I had one, that I could figure it out in time.
The others were ahead of us now, gaining at least some ground. We turned again to stand our ground, this time with me and Berooz’s weapon added to the rank.
“Volley!” MacCormac’s command energized us all.
I pulled the trigger. Out came a shuddering bolt of flame instead of the energy wave, while the others all managed to actually work the weapon properly and get the shocker component. I stopped, lowered the weapon into a thin band of sunlight, and found the control pad so I could reset it for the shock wave.
“Volley!”
This time I got it right. FOOOOM—crack!
The mad alien squall blew into a wide roll of acid and flesh.
“Volley!”
Again we fired, each time driving the creatures back, but they weren’t stopping. Unaffected by fear or thought, they simply replenished their dead with more from behind, but we were managing to slow them down and gain ground. Every volley force decimated the front line of the aliens and tangled those behind it as they stumbled into each other’s fingers and tails. Their physical momentum caused them to knot up with each other’s bodies and their long bones to snap in such numbers that we could actually hear the crackle.
“Retreat!” MacCormac ordered at the right instant, just when I would’ve done the same thing, just as the alien scorpions rolled backward, stumbling into knots, fouling their advance.
The four of us scratched into a full run. We could see the ship—the ramp—Theo at the top of the ramp waving us in. My legs burned with the effort of running on the unforgiving skulch that brushed away under every step.
Somebody h
it me . . . something tripped me . . . what happened—I was on the ground. What happened? Something rammed into my chest, drove me down, left me gasping, aching—
The Marine weapon was still in my arms. I clung to it and tried to get to my knees. Why was I down? What had hitme? I couldn’t think . . . had MacCormac kicked me in the stomach?
“Keep moving! Get up!”
It was Axell. Geeky and clumsy as he was, he’d come back for me. He knotted his fists into my vests and twisted me to my feet. I looked back just as I gained footing. The alien wave of lariat tails and spindle fingers were coiled in bundles on the ground between the camp and the ship. They squealed and tumbled, trying to find their feet. Some staggered, then stumbled. Their bodies spat tendrils of smoke and tissue.
Ahead of me, Pocket and Mark were staggering to their own feet. Had they tripped?
Then it happened again—the big gut-punch. This time I saw the flash of green energy. The ship’s protection system! At least now I knew what was knocking us down and I could fight it. This time I stumbled back into a pillar the diameter of my wrist and it shattered with the impact. Fragments of glass, broken into pieces the size of pop cans, collapsed onto my head and shoulders and on Axell as he ducked beside me.
“This is so unfair!” he complained.
Colonel MacCormac reached us and pushed Axell out of the raining shards. “Carmichael, volley!”
The two of them formed up and fired another volley. They were running on sheer training and determination. I knew they’d been punched hard just the same as I, and everybody. Between me and the ship, Pocket and Bonnie were dragging themselves and Edney up the ramp.
I planted my feet under me in the detritus of the fallen pil-lar and tried to take aim, but never got the chance. Two face-huggers blew past me, racing toward the ramp. Maybe they didn’t sense me there in my cloud of rubble—I don’t know—but one of them launched itself into the air and slammed into Axell’s face.
I saw his face, his eyes and gaping mouth at the last instant. He saw the thing shoot itself directly at him, saw it close on his face, the reaching fingers and whipping tail crowding out the landscape. He made a gushing noise of insult just before it hit him.
Spinning, I aimed my weapon at it, but what could I do? His head was in there!
Axell clawed at the creature as it snaked its lariat tail around his throat and took an anchorage. Stumbling, now blind, the sorry little man grasped at the bony limbs clamped around his head.
I took the weight of the Marine weapon in my left hand and coiled my right arm around Axell’s waist. He wasn’t limp—he was still staggering. I steered him toward the ramp just as another deployment of the ship’s weapon turned the air green around me. This time it didn’t knock me down. I felt the tingle on my flesh and grimaced at the burning sensation, but I was apparently close enough to the ship that it let me come in while still striking the nonhuman animals with its hard charge. The charge must be heavier farther out, like the ocean ripple that would eventually build into a tidal wave.
I dragged Axell as he began to lose the power of his own legs. I wrapped both arms around him, trapping him and the Marine weapon inside, and could barely close my arms around both. We shuffled toward the ship in a weird kind of sidestep dance. The scent of the scorpion-like animal clasping his face turned my stomach. Its knuckles brushed my cheek as I tried to bend away, and there was a squishing noise as it tightened its tail and its fingers around his head. So tight was the grip the pink flesh of Axell’s neck and his scalp swelled up between the fingers. He went even more limp just as my foot touched the ramp and another hammering of energy blasted from the ship’s spine above us, blanketing the curving rank of face-huggers with another paralyzing strike. They curled into frying masses, and finally those who hadn’t yet come into range gave up, rolled into tumbleweed, and unrolled running in the other direction. Finally, finally we had turned them back.
Axell collapsed in my arms and went completely limp, unconscious, without the slightest muscle tone. I lost my grip on him halfway up the ramp, but by then MacCormac and Carmichael were there to take over.
I turned and fired one more orange volley at the retreating scarecrows and crawled up the ramp. Theo cupped my elbow and pivoted me all the way inside, then hit the ramp controls and the ground disappeared beneath me. The huge metal ramp clacked shut and locked itself with a musical chang.
The landing party gasped and rolled in agony around me, still hammered by the protection bolt and just plain horrification. I fell to my knees beside Axell, then recoiled at the nearness of the face-hugger still clinging to him. Bonnie and the others, even the Marines drew back, away from the awful sight. Axell lay on his back, arms straight out, limp. The thing on his face was very much alive, tightening its noose around his throat and tensing its fingers around his head, as if it knew we were here and would challenge its catch.
Panting hard, MacCormac pushed himself off the ramp gears he was leaning on. He swung his weapon around from behind his leg and put the muzzle squarely on the spine of the face-hugger.
“No!” I shouted, but the weapon discharged a percussion blast that exploded on contact.
The face-hugger, and Axell’s head, were blown to soup. In all my years of homicide investigations, I never saw that much blood. It sprayed out in a flat red streak along the entire walkway back to the bay hatch, and took with it the green acidic fluid and tissue that an instant ago had been a victorious little cockfighter.
“God!” Bonnie screamed.
Clark belched “Jesus, MacCormac! Jesus! That was slaughter!”
“It was mercy!” MacCormac spat back firmly. “This is the standard procedure! We will terminate anybody who gets wrapped by one of these things. There’s no cure. No other course.”
“You can’t do this on my ship!” Clark protested.
MacCormac lowered his voice very deliberately. “I’ll do it anywhere and everywhere, Captain.” He lowered his weapon and wiped his face on his sleeve. “Anywhere and everywhere.”
Clark trembled as if MacCormac had actually physically slapped the sense into him.
We all stared at the remains of Axell’s detonated head and the stringy remains of the creature that had doomed him. Torn tubular parts of it were still moving, still searching, probing along the cold metal deck.
In that red streak of blood and skull fragments and brain tissue lay huge volumes of information about the ship’s computers and all its intertwined systems, and the memories of a reliable shipmate who didn’t say much, but could do much. The loss was alarming on many levels. I stared at the gory remains of yet another person who had saved my life today, whose life I then had failed to save. Twice in one day.
Clark shook his head, paced away, then paced back and almost fell over when he spun too quickly. “Theo,” he choked. “Scope, will ya?”
Theo, whose calm English voice I kind of wanted to hear right now, said nothing. He engaged a viewer just as the ship belched another bolt of its protective green broadband. We watched as a few determined scorpio-wigglers broiled in place while the last of those at the edge of the defense perimeter disappeared in retreat.
MacCormac grabbed Theo by the collar. “Where are Donahue and Brand? Did they report back? Are they in the ship?”
Theo braced against the Marine’s big fist. “No—no answer.”
“God damn it!” The commander threw Theo backward catching him on the ramp railing. “God damn it!”
“This . . . this . . . this . . . this is awful,” Clark mourned. “It’s clear we’ve got to get out of here. We’re in over our heads. Those people must’ve had tragic ends . . . either they were implanted with the things that break out of the chests, or they were dragged away.” He shook his head again, trying to think, to compose himself. “I don’t want to add to the body count. Let’s secure and prepare for launch as soon as we can deploy the poison-packers. Let’s just . . . just get out of here. Let’s just go.”
“Wait a minute—wait
!” I stood up and braced myself to stay standing. “The researchers are still out there. Maybe as many as forty people!”
“Aren’t you watching?” Pocket demanded.
“We barely got back to the ship,” Clark countered to me. “You said yourself they wouldn’t have defended themselves and didn’t have weaponry. We’ve got Marines, for God’s sake, and we—we—” He waved his hand at the twitching corpses of Axell and the creature.
“They didn’t die in that camp,” I said. “They could still be alive.”
“Add it up, detective!” MacCormac’s anger came out in a string of spittle down his chin. “They’re not even answering the hails. If you were stuck in this nightmare, wouldn’t you rush to a possible rescue?”
“You don’t know my mother.”
Clark flapped his arms. “Nobody is the pathological nut you’re describing!”
“Everybody is,” I corrected. “You’re here. I’m here. And somewhere out there, they’re here. My mother can cultivate a martyr from raw material in about two weeks flat. I don’t know how she spots ’em. Perfume, maybe.”
He leveled a finger at my chest. “They’re here because they were dragged away by those—”
“They weren’t dragged away. They went on their own power.”
“How can you be sure of that kind of statement?”
“The huts are empty. The camp is empty.”
“Because they’re dead! They got dragged away by aliens!”
“Did the aliens also drag away all their equipment?”
Sudden silence broke between us. In their minds they saw pictures of what I was describing. I saw in all their faces—in Pocket’s squinty eyes, in Bonnie’s sorrow, in Gaylord’s fear, in Clark’s desperation, the Marines’ desire to go home heroes—that I had struck them hard.
“The survivors went somewhere,” I pushed, probably too hard. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.
Clark pressed his lips tightly together, so tightly that his whole face screwed into a grimace. “They went somewhere . . . and died.”
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 29
