The Complete Aliens Omnibus

by Michael Jan Friedman

  “Yes, I’m a resident physician. Not quite there yet!”

  “I’m sure you’ll be marvelous. What will you do after your residency?”

  “I’m indentured to PlanCom for fifteen years.”

  “Ah. Let me know if you ever want to get out of it. I have some influence.”

  For the first time, a shadow of something less than hero-worship crossed Bonnie’s face. “Oh . . . thanks, but I’m very comfortable right now. PlanCom’s been very good for me.”

  “Of course.” My mother’s gentle smile was as practiced as a professional model’s. “You’ll join us for our meal. You can sit next to me.”

  Bonnie fell for it. She bounced on her toes with excitement at meeting her idol. M’am took her by the arm and escorted her to the table, around which the mismatched gaggle of humans was beginning to form. They sat on little uneven benches made of boards and more crates.

  Before we joined them, Clark leaned toward me and whispered, “Do you call her ‘Ma’am’ all the time?”

  I nodded. “I was almost eleven before I figured out it isn’t exactly the same as ‘Mom.’”

  He sighed. “She seems real sweet, Rory. You sure you’re not just imagining this because you don’t like her?”

  “Maybe you better ask why I don’t like her before you write me off.”

  He lowered his voice even more, which only gave me the idea that there wasn’t surveillance inside as well as outside. Clark didn’t suspect that—but I started to.

  “You may not realize it,” he said, “but you have control over something huge and important for all mankind. What you say goes, as far as releasing the PPs. Aren’t you kind of intimidated? I know I am.”

  “It doesn’t intimidate me all that much,” I told him. “Unless I think about it or some jerk reminds me.”

  We joined the others and found places to sit. The so-called food sat in serving containers put on the table by Oliver, the “chef.” There were bowls of grains, several kinds of dried fruit, dried, rolled tortilla things stuffed with something green, and spiky vegetables, also dried. I assumed the drying was to eliminate the aroma of fresh growth.

  Nobody took anything. I got the idea it was the same as when Gracie and I were children—nobody touched the food till the queen was ready.

  M’am took her seat at the far end of the table, in what was obviously the place of central attention and honor. “Attention, team, my dear friends, and children. Captain Sparren and my son Rory, and their Marine friends will be leaving soon and launching their ship off the planet. They know they’ve compromised months of work by coming here and we know it was an honest mistake. They’ve promised to leave as soon as the area can be cleared and we can deliver them back to their ship. We are sad to note the deaths of some people today who came to our planet without knowing how to live safely here, and we are crushed to lose them for no good reason. We would like to note their courage today and to mourn their loss. They did not come here to die, but to rescue us. They didn’t know we don’t need rescue. And to our new friends, Miss Bonnie and Mr. Pocket, and Marine Edney, we would like to note your courage as well for answering the distress call.”

  “What do you know about that call?” I asked, dashing her dramatic monologue. I didn’t want to let it go by, and I didn’t think Clark would ask.

  My mother’s eyes focused firmly on me and she paused long enough to make a dramatic effect. “The only possibility is that your Marine tried to send one before he passed away during his battle with the primal stage.”

  She made it sound romantic, as if Brand had “passed away” in his sleep during some moral quest.

  It was a better answer than I expected. I suppose it was the best answer. Some of my suspicions began to calm down. I was probably more on edge about her than I needed to be.

  When I didn’t forward any arguments to her logic, my mother continued addressing the entire table. “Whatever things are now, they are. When we decide, we will deliver you back to your ship and you may be on your way. We’ll enjoy our meal, and then I will take my son and Captain Sparren on a tour of our most beautiful area. It will be relatively safe by then.”

  Before we had a chance to mull over the term “relatively,” I poked Clark and said, “’Scuse me.”

  He looked as if he’d eaten a bad olive. “Yeah?”

  “Tell them, please.”

  His head wagged a little from side to side, then huffed out a breath and seemed to accept that there was no point in continuing the misconception. “Yeah,” he uttered unhappily. “I’m sorry, but . . . Mrs. Malvaux, I’m afraid you got the wrong idea here.”

  My mother sniffed through a napkin. “Pardon?”

  I knew that inflection. The one that pretended she didn’t know exactly what he was going to say when really she did. I’d heard it before. Kids tune in to these kinds of things with their parents, then later nobody believes them.

  Clark pulled a computer slide out of his pocket. He held it between his thumb and forefinger to show the official seal. “This planet has been declared a dying planet with a fatal disease. The aliens are classified BioHazard One, a plague that will destroy the planet’s biosystem by wrecking the food chain. They’ll consume every animal over twenty pounds and the food chain will collapse.”

  My mother counted off a dramatic pause before speaking. “How do you dare to say this? Where do you get such information?”

  “From you,” I spoke up. “It’s all your own research, deep-spaced back to Earth for analysis.”

  “You’re using our own reports against us?”

  “Not against you, Mrs. Malvaux,” Clark said. “For your own good. For the good of this planet.”

  Accustomed to arguing her point before committees, companies, boards of directors, and Congress, she kept her cool but spoke with a very firm and decisive method. “This is not “our good” at all. We will not be leaving our work behind before we barely get started.”

  Clark avoided the eyes of everybody else on the team and just tried to face down my mother. “Our ship is loaded with robotic hunter-killers filled with coded poison to neutralize these aliens. We call them ‘PPs’. Poison-packers. We have orders to sterilize the planet of all non-native DNA.”

  “But we have non-native DNA!” Gracie argued.

  He looked at her. “It’s not aimed at you. Everybody in this outpost will have to be evacuated back to Earth until the poison-packers have completely scoured the planet, which we figure might take a year. It’s aimed at the alien species you’re here to study.”

  “But we’re not finished!” my sister continued. “It took us half this time to set up this outpost! We just mounted the last two cameras yesterday! We’ve barely begun the real observation!”

  “Nothing will happen to the outpost,” Clark explained, faltering some. “It’ll still be here and usable after the planet is cleansed and we have a good planet for colonization, right in a spacelace. You can return here in a year and take over right where you left off—”

  Gracie slapped her hand flat on the table. “After you’ve killed off the subjects of our research!”

  “You can’t do it,” our mother said. “No, you can’t.” She remained calm, but she was starting to twitch around the eyes, brows, and lips, and her hands were pressed knuckle-down onto the table. “These actions are in violation of the Alien Species Act.”

  Clark drew courage from a little glance at me, and went on with his obviously rehearsed statement. “This planet’s been declared an exception to the ASA. The aliens are regarded as more dangerous to other innocent forms of native life populating this planet. We have your reports of the ecosystem’s population of—”

  “There is much native life here, yes! The Xenos are part of that life! They show intelligence enough that the ASA applies!”

  “There’s no point to arguing points,” I said, as quietly as possible and still firm. “This planet has to be evacuated. The aliens need to be wiped out before they wipe out everything else
.”

  “You have no right to destroy them on a planetary scale!” my mother said angrily. “You want to exterminate a healthy species for profit!”

  We’d hit a nerve.

  Knowing it would make her crazy, maybe break down her control, I leaned an elbow on the table and casually said, “Everybody does everything for profit, M’am. You courted billions so you could fund your expedition.”

  “That’s not profit!” Gracie exploded. “This isn’t just some decadent vacation!”

  “Oh, like hell it isn’t. You took somebody else’s money and spent it the way you wanted it spent. What do you think ‘profiting’ is? You can profit for your purposes, but somebody else who spends the money on his own family is ‘decadent.’ What makes your choices more moral than anybody else’s?”

  “We don’t spend our money on eccentricities!”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “Advancing science!”

  “What’ve you learned? How they breed? How they kill? We already know that.”

  “I hate you.”

  “They have a right to be here,” our mother said, breaking into our argument as she had so many times in our lives.

  “No more than we do,” Clark took over again. “They’re as alien to this planet as humans. They’ll destroy it. We won’t. If you want to cherish the planet, this is the way.”

  “I will defend this helpless species, Captain.”

  “They’re a disease, Mother,” I said. “According to your own reports, they sweep through an area, consuming or implanting every species that accommodates them, then they move on to the next group. If you do the math, this planet won’t have any of its native species left after another year of this invasion.”

  Gracie turned another shade of red. “That’s a lie!”

  “No, it’s not. I read your reports. They’re consuming their way through every native species big enough to host their larvae. A whole planet’s health trumps one invading species.”

  Our mother pressed her arms straight and leaned on the table. “I refuse to allow you to use my own data against me to your evil purpose.”

  Sweating visibly now, Clark stood his ground. “’Fraid you have no choice. Your research hasn’t given us any reason to be hopeful that this species would be, like you say, subordinated in time to save the planet’s food chain. The Alien Species Act makes an exception when ‘kill or be killed’ is the rule.”

  “You’re lying,” she said with a twisted smile. “This is a lie. You’re simply lying. There’s no such clause in the Alien Species Act.”

  Clark shrugged in a kind of apology that wasn’t really one. “I’m sorry to tell you the amendment was added after you left on this mission. A lot of people were nervous that it was so inflexible, given what we know about the, uh, Xenomorphics.”

  “This planet will adapt. It is adapting. I’ll be able to prove it. I will prove it.”

  “Can you prove it now?” I dared. “This species is like smallpox. It’s a kill-or-be-killed species. There’s no living with them, there’s no way to reason with them, and they don’t respect other species’ territory. I’ve heard you talk about things like this before, M’am. I learned this from you. This planet has a death sentence on it. You’re enamored of a disease and you actually want the disease to win. Ask your . . . your virologist here how a virus works.”

  Diego, the virologist, looked as if he’d been fingered in a line-up. He seemed terrified that M’am would actually ask him something. That was the moment when I noticed that nobody beside M’am and Gracie were speaking up. These people were either worshipful, or they were just plain cowed.

  “Ask Bonnie here,” I added, gesturing at my uncomfortable shipmate. “She’s a doctor. If a bear breaks into your house, you can kill the bear.”

  Bonnie seemed very uneasy at being asked to challenge her idol’s work, but when you’ve got a weapon, you need to use it. I needed some leverage right now.

  My mother’s arms quivered with effort. She drew a few long breaths to steady herself. “This is not ‘our’ house. They have a right to be here. They are beautiful and intelligent. We will not be leaving. So you might as well turn around and go away from here.”

  The cold food somehow seemed even colder. Nobody had taken a single bite.

  “Tell her, Clark,” I said through my teeth.

  He cast me a desperate gaze.

  “Clark,” I insisted, “tell her.”

  Under the prickling glares of the entire research team, whose dreams he was about to trample, he found himself compelled by responsibility and the pressures of his title.

  He pulled a small leather pouch from his vest pocket and opened it, showing a legal envelope, stamped with a seal, and the corresponding computer disk with the identical information.

  “I have a court order.”

  The whole group of researchers gawked, gasped, and looked at each other in astonishment. Had my mother finally been subdued? They couldn’t imagine it.

  “Why do you come here with a court order?” my mother demanded.

  “Because I told him to,” I admitted. “I knew you’d resist.”

  A moment of uneasy silence twisted the recycled air.

  “This is human arrogance at work,” my mother proclaimed. “Mankind has gone through changing moralities. Slavery. Dictators. Kings. We have rejected them. This is the age of cutting edge decisions. This is the age when we stop looking at other species as if they have no rights.”

  She drew another breath to continue her soliloquy, but I stopped her before she got rolling and everybody ended up in tears to her favor.

  “Rights are something specific,” I said. “Rights are given to human beings through the Constitution. Animals don’t have rights, or we lose the definition of the word.”

  “Humans are just animals,” Gracie challenged. “The Xenos are intelligent. They communicate. They figure things out. They’ll be the dominant species. The same thing has happened all through history. Species move in and out—”

  “And we’re going to help this one move out. This planet is in the process of being overrun by these things.”

  “It’s a dying planet,” Clark attempted. “They’ll destroy everything.”

  If my mother had ever loved me for an instant, that instant was eradicated right here and now as she glared at us. “This planet is adapting. It’s about to strike back and battle the Xenomorphs to a level of integration. Nature is bigger than any species. It will subordinate them. The environment is changing and the planet belongs to the species that are here.”

  “Humans are here,” Clark pointed out. I gave him a lot of credit for speaking up that way. He really must believe all that stuff he told me on the ship.

  My mother somehow seemed to get taller. I wished we could bottle that trick.

  She grew strangely calm in a projection of having regained control. I wondered if she hadn’t “lost her temper” on purpose, to demonstrate her passion, and now would re-establish her authority through purposeful dignity. She’s actually taken seminars on how to control situations, so I didn’t think I was imagining this.

  Very calmly, she began again. “This decision is premature. Even if we could have evacuated, now you have ensured we never can. We must stay to protect this species. They are beautiful and vibrant. They learn. They change. You can’t get back to your ship without us, and we will not take you until we are ready to do it under our conditions. We will not go voluntarily. Will you and your soldiers attempt to drag us through this land? With all the noise and commotion, you might get forty feet. We came an amazing distance to do the research of a thousand lifetimes, and now we will stay to protect them from you and your small universal view. As long as we remain here, you cannot release your genocidal machines.”

  She stepped away from the table and had to move behind those of us sitting on the outer bench. As she passed behind me, I felt the knife of her mind sink into my spine.

  She paused, and looked do
wn at me. “I’m certain you have told him that. Being the law.”

  Coming around to the other end of the table, making it clear she had no intention now of sitting down to dinner with us—dinner was probably over before it had even started—she addressed the uneasy group once again.

  “However, in fairness,” she went on, “there’s only this one opportunity and I want to make sure it isn’t missed. Is there any one among you, and I’m speaking to my own children now, who would like to give up our work here and go with them?”

  I sat still and watched them. The campers sat still too, with just their eyes shifting as they watched each other. Their chins were down and each seemed to want to draw as little attention as possible.

  “This is your chance,” M’am went on after a pause to see if there were takers. “No other ship will come here for many months. Probably years.”

  Another few moments of silence. Somebody coughed. Nobody spoke up.

  “Please,” my mother continued. “Please listen to me, my dears. This is my life’s work. I will not abandon it. I would like to encourage you, each of you in your own heart, to think clearly about leaving now that there is a chance to go. I admit freely that this is a difficult environment, more unforgiving, more bleak than I ever imagined. I may have misled you. You may have imagined something better. You may be disillusioned. We have lost friends here. We have lost lovers. I have no right to ask you to stay and every passion to bless you to leave. Please . . . if you want to go, speak now. No one will think ill of you.”

  Clark’s eyes were big as baseballs. He stared at my mother, then, without blinking, shifted his eyes to me in helpless panic. Should he speak up again, or was he hoping I would?

  My mother beamed at her own team members. Ultimately the beam of love turned into a humble smile. “I knew I had picked the best people out of all of Humanity. I knew when I saw your faces in the crowd that you were each so very special . . . to be this dedicated . . . so . . . ” She broke off into an episode of fighting back tears. “I’m so very honored,” she murmured through her hand pressed to her mouth.