Bonnie was a simple person, definitely a lot smarter than she let on, or than she believed. I could tell she got the message I was trying hard not to say outright.
“Are you telling me,” she attempted, “you think your sister has been . . . doing something wrong?”
I nodded. “I was so focused on my mother, so wrapped up in my own resentments, that I quit thinking like an investigator and just believed what I wanted to believe. I think I might be completely off track. Rusty’s power pack— my mother ordered it replaced just before we went out, but it was Gracie who replaced it. My mother could never overpower Marines the way Donahue and Brand were overpowered, but I just saw Gracie and Tad romancing it up. Gracie has a man at her beck and call. A man devoted to the compound. A stealth expert.”
She shivered. “Oh, my goodness—this is terrible . . . what are you going to do? Can you . . . arrest them?”
“I actually can. On suspicion. How about that? A bazillion miles from Earth, and I actually have jurisdiction. Can you believe it?” I reached into my pocket and pulled out my shield. “See? Badge and everything.”
“My goodness . . . when will you make your decision?”
“I don’t know, exactly. Is she really a murderer? If so, I have to act before anybody else gets killed. Somebody’s doing the killing, I know that. Some human. Usually I just bring ’em in and the system takes over. I have backup.”
“You have the captain. And the Marines.” She smiled. “And me.”
I looked at her. “I love having you for my backup.”
“Even if it’s just to bandage your leg?”
“Especially for that. Imagine how distracted I’d be, hobbling around with an infected leg!”
Again she laughed a little, nervously, in her cute schoolgirl way. “I can definitely stop that from happening. I can even stop the scar.”
“Hey, I kinda like having the scar. Makes me surly. Gorilla-like. Attractive to ladies of ill-repute.”
She blushed and wiggled her shoulders. Tonight she seemed a lot less boyish than she always had before, despite her not-particularly-petite build and her goofy manners and the fact that she didn’t seem to understand how smart she was. Despite the fact that she was on the fast track to becoming a doctor—a no-dummies-allowed profession—she wasn’t quite aware of her own value. Actually, I found her shyness endearing.
I nudged her shoulder with mine. “So how’s your reputation?”
She laughed again, brightening the dim room and my spirits. Her blushing cheeks glowed and her smile flickered in the red light. She covered her mouth coquettishly—and she was really lousy at being coquettish—but I knew she was covering because the red light made us both look as if we’d just eaten a crate of tomatoes. Not exactly dinner in candlelight.
I wished I could give her that. Treat her like a girl for once. We hadn’t treated her much like a girl on the ship. Maybe that was why she needed little animals around.
Logging away that I owed her a nice evening out, I asked, “What time is it?”
“Almost midnight.”
“Did my mother ever come in?”
“She did. It was amazing, seeing her out there, with them . . . ”
“I couldn’t look after a while,” I admitted. “Is anybody still scanning outside?”
“They’ve been scanning all night. Here. I’ll show you.”
She picked up a remote and clicked it. A bank of screens, six of them, flickered to life above the head of the stuffed alien. The creature suddenly looked as if it were appearing on stage.
“Wow—I didn’t even see those up there,” I commented.
“Well, the room has its distractions.”
“Sure as hell does.”
We settled back to watch the pictures of the landscape. Dreamy pictures of aliens moving around . . . just moving, squabbling amongst themselves, stalking the universe in their way . . . and other scenes where other kinds of animals sniffed and lurked. I hadn’t been able to pay much attention to the panoply of other life on the planet. For Bonnie’s sake, I wished we could just take a walk out there, maybe get a pair of binoculars and go critter watching. I thought she would like that, and deserved it. Instead we were the animals, trapped in our hole.
There had to be a way to get out, to entice the researchers to escort us back to the ship, and then to actually get on. That would be the ugly scene—forcing them to comply. And dangerous too. Those moments would be crucial and leave us vulnerable. They had to be planned, with Clark, with the Marines, and if possible with Theo back aboard the ship. If I’d done my job better, I’d have a clearer idea of just who would work with us when push came to shove, and who was too devoted to my mother to do anything but fight us. Gracie and Tad were definitely over there in the fight camp. How would Neil react? Diego, who’d lost his wife and unborn child? Zaviero? Couldn’t exactly muscle him around, could we? I’d feel bad doing it too. What else—take the time to explain to him what we were trying to accomplish?
Beside me, Bonnie rubbed her arms and shivered. “They keep it cold in here, don’t they?”
“Something about not expelling heat signatures. They’ve developed some fancy ways to hide. Most of them as combat basic, though, if I read it right. Most of hiding is what you don’t do, not what you do. Keeping quiet, not moving around much, not expelling heat or gas, odor, that kind of thing. They’ve taken it to other levels, though, with holographics and these smart suits and all.”
“You have to give them credit, don’t you?”
“Oh, I do. It’s the motivations that worry me, not the tactics.”
I leaned back against a stack of drums and put my head back, closed my eyes for a moment. My exhausted brain started swimming and seeing colors in spite of my eyes’ being closed.
“You’re tired,” Bonnie mentioned. “How about getting a nap?”
“Is that an offer?” I opened my eyes and poked her in the side. “Hmm? Cinderella?”
She giggled. “Cinderella . . . what’s that mean?”
“I don’t know. You look different in this light. Kinda . . . sporty.”
Palming her unruly blond hair, she tried to finger it back. “Every girl’s dream to look ‘sporty’ to a guy.”
I smiled and pulled a few strands back where it had been before. “Don’t change your hair. I like it. It’s honest.”
“Honest hair . . . ”
“Oh—God, I’m stupid!” I thumped myself in the head. “You said, ‘It’s cold,’ and like an idiot I actually commented on why! That’s not the right reaction!”
“Huh?”
“What a fool, what a goof! I couldn’t get a message if the bottle hit me over the head! Here’s the right reaction.”
I raised my arm and tucked her under it, pulling her close and rubbing her arm and shoulder to make her warm.
“See? That’s the right—”
A movement on one of the screens caught my eye. Some-thing about it was different from the movements of the aliens or the other creatures moving slowly in the photographable distance.
On the second screen from the left, there was a picture of the area just outside this blind, the place where I’d hidden under the slab, where the aliens had lumbered past me and I first saw them in person. In that area was a broken glass pillar, with craggy remains sticking up as if a tree had been cracked by lightning. And from one of those crags there now hung a flapping creature whose movements I recognized. Black leathery wings, twitchy flitting motions, finally settling down to an elongated upside-down triangle. Even on the grainy screen, I could make out two black eyes looking toward the camera.
I shoved Bonnie aside and scrambled to my feet. “Holy God!”
Bonnie jumped up. “What? What’s wrong?”
But I was already gone, running down the corridor toward the main chamber.
“Clark!” I shouted, forgetting all about keeping my voice down. My shout boomed in the otherwise quiet compound.
A half-dozen people flinched
and jumped up, shaken, including Clark, who had found a moment to doze off.
“Huh! What?” he gasped. “What’s wrong?”
“Get up! The ship’s been breached!”
11
“Look!”
I stepped over Pocket, who was asleep on the floor, and tapped the controls on the panel which I had previously seen my mother use to turn on the projectors in the stealth curtain.
As the crowd increased around me, everyone reacting to my trumpeting, the projector curtain also woke up and gave us a picture of the landscape on its other side. There, hanging on the glass spire, blinking her eyes at us, was Buttercup the fox bat.
“Oh! Buttercup!” Bonnie blurted, and stepped past me toward the curtain.
“Don’t go out there!” I seized her by the shoulders which I had hugged gently only moments ago, and dragged her back.
“The ship!” Clark pushed Pocket and me out of his way and crashed through to the main bank of monitor screens.
Everybody followed him, and in this moment my mother appeared.
“What’s this noise?” she asked.
“The ship’s been breached,” I said, pointing at the screen that showed the right angle. “The ramp is down!”
“I see,” she responded. “More mistakes?”
We crowded to the monitor bank and Clark leaned close to the three screens which showed parts of the Vinza, parked at its landing site. Sure enough, the ship’s ramp was down. At the bottom of the ramp were four Xenomorphs, dead or dying. And moving down the ramp on frighteningly proficient segmented legs, were five metallic-hooded shapes.
“The poison-packers! Shit me blind!” Clark gulped. “Some-body activated them! What the hell! What the hell!” He jumped up. “I have to contact the ship!”
“You must not, Captain,” my mother said bluntly. “Any disturbance in wave use could trigger another behavioral change. We simply do not know enough yet.”
Colonel MacCormac made a noise of contempt and growled, “Well, that’s that. Squad!”
I spun around to him. “Are you going out?”
“That’s right.”
“You know those robotics will target you as well as the aliens—”
“That’s why we’re going out. We have to neutralize them before they find their way in here. You don’t give up your only bivouac. Captain, how can we neutralize them? Do you know?”
“Theo was the only one who could’ve activated them!” Clark exclaimed, shaken. “Him and me—we’re it! He must’ve had a reason!”
“I think the reason is clear.” MacCormac pointed at the screen. “The aliens got inside the grid and somehow inside the ship, and your first mate didn’t know how else to fight them.”
“How could they get inside the grid?”
“Don’t care.”
“Yeah, but I care.” I couldn’t help an all-too-human glance at my sister and Tad. Tad caught the glare and returned it with a twist of his mouth. Not a good sign, as body language goes, but a helpful one.
“What are those helmets made of?” MacCormac asked.
“Quadra-fold TGX,” Clark said.
MacCormac turned to Carmichael and Edney. “Grenades only. Load up. Take sidearms in case the bugs give us trouble.”
“You want an extra hand?” I offered. Was I crazy or just stupid?
“No,” he said sharply. “Everybody else stays inside. I don’t want to have to worry about anybody but my own squad. This is now a military operation. Is that perfectly clear?”
Heads bobbed like daisies all around.
While he and the other two Marines loaded up with grenades and sidearms—down to two, stoic, brave, silent— MacCormac turned to Clark. “How many do you think there are, Captain?”
Clark was deeply disturbed, frustrated that he had to be here. “A hundred to a container, five pallets, twenty to a pallet. They have to be activated in bulk, a pallet at a time, so the least you’ll face is twenty. Look, it’s my ship—I want to go with you. My crew—”
“Out of the question. We’ll see to your crew.” MacCormac slung a whole belt full of grenades over his shoulder. “If there are any left.”
“Don’t let them see you first,” Clark warned. “The darts are hypersonic.”
“Understood.”
The Marines moved out, leaving the rest of us feeling as if we were baby birds left in the nest. The flurry they caused at the projector curtail startled the fox bat, and she spread her huge wings and flew off over our heads.
“Oh, no!” Bonnie cried. “Buttercup!”
“Stay here, stay here,” I ordered, holding her by the arm so tightly that she winced. “Pocket, where are you?”
“Here.” He stepped between Tad and the chef, Oliver.
“All right, how could that have happened? How could the ship’s security blaster be turned off?”
“You mean, other than we turn it off inside?”
“Obviously!”
He paused to think. “Maybe a targeted frequency pulse. But that’s a fancy procedure. The frequency would have to be diagnosed first, then rolled down to a tight beam.”
“Like stealth technology?” I faced Tad in full accusatory mode.
“Somebody did this on purpose to make sure we didn’t launch tomorrow. It fits.”
“Back off, man,” Tad fumed.
Clark grimaced and shook his head. “I hate that it fits.”
“You’re paranoid!” Gracie accused. “You’re trying to turn us against each other!”
“Graciella, remain calm,” our mother instructed, leading by example. “From their point of view, I understand.”
I rubbed my face, feeling the fatigue race through my fingers into my eyes at her smooth performance. “Uh, cripes . . . All right, everybody quiet down and don’t move around. Those robots are programmed to kill anything that’s not native DNA to the planet, and that means us. Let the Colonel do his job and don’t attract any attention.”
“Aren’t you afraid we’ll escape?” my mother snidely said, letting out more emotion, I’m sure, than she intended.
“You want to escape?” I spread my hands and gestured toward the outside world. “Go ahead. Go on out there. Make my job a hell of a lot easier.”
The uneasy crowd dissipated into groups of two or three, but nobody was talking much. We now had two kinds of creatures on this planet gunning for us, and I knew that was because the Vinza had come here loaded for bear. Now what?
“Please,” Bonnie spoke up, “let me go out and get Buttercup! She’s so lost out there . . . she’s all by herself. She’s just out the door!”
“Have you looked outside?” I chided. “There’s a jungle. She’ll fit right in.”
“She was raised by humans! She’s looking for us! All I have to do is put out my—”
“Bonnie, forget it,” I snapped. “I think you’re smart. Don’t prove me wrong.”
“But what if those things catch her?”
“She can fly. They can’t. She’ll be okay.”
“I can get her to come to me. I’ll use some of that dried fruit—”
“No! Just . . . no.”
Bonnie broke down into a spate of angry sobbing, during which I realized I was being unfair to her.
I coiled my arm around her. “Sorry . . . okay, okay . . . I’m sorry. Look, Bonnie, she’s probably a lot better off out there than we are. There are a zillion insects, according to Zaviero, and lots of fruit or whatever she eats. She’ll live.”
“We can’t just abandon her,” she moaned. “You’ll help me, won’t you?”
“Me? Honey, I’m not going out there again for anything. Nothing and nobody. I’m done. Anybody who goes out is crazy.”
“Oh, please . . . ”
“The only thing that’ll get me outside again is to go back to the Vinza and launch off this sin of planet. We’ll go first thing in the morning, all of us, whether these idiots know it or not.”
“And just leave her on this planet by herself?”
“She’s a bat.”
Tears broke out again.
What was the big deal? It wasn’t as if we were leaving a child out there. Or even an Irish setter.
A bat, for pity’s sake.
“Hey, look at this!” Pocket called. He drew our attention to one of the screens, on which we could see a poison-packer moving on two of its six legs down a gully ridge.
We crowded around the screen, desperately wishing we could see the events unfold in person, knowing that we’d be dead if we did. The poison-packers had no genetic imperatives or behavioral changes. They just hunted relentlessly any life form not native to this planet. There would be no walking among them.
“Look at how it walks,” Pocket appreciated.
“They have six legs,” Clark said, “for any kind of terrain. If they lose one, they just use the others and keep going. You can’t outrun them. All you can do is hope they don’t catch you on their senses. They’re programmed to examine every inch of the planet. If our first wave is successful, the plan is to deploy another ten million of them from subsequent ships.”
We watched, unable to participate, as the poison-packer’s supertechnical helmet glowed with special sensors and dart ports. An adult alien was approaching it with a strange innocent curiosity. The aliens didn’t care about machines, didn’t know about them—at least, we assumed they didn’t.
On sight, the poison-packer zeroed in on the alien and fired one of its darts. We never even saw the dart, it happened so quickly. The alien jolted physically, let out a bawling howl, and clawed at its ribcage, where the dart had struck it dead-center. The poison-packer simply trundled on past the alien and went on its way, seeking the next one.
The alien began to claw at its body. It wagged its huge head, then tipped its head sideways and bit furiously at its right arm, tearing ligaments and cables, chewing furiously, and then the left arm. It stomped its legs, finally dropping to the ground and snapping its second set of jaws at its thighs. As the DNA-specific poison coursed through its body, the alien was helping to rip itself to shreds. The long clawed hands tore at its open wounds, opening them further, spurting acid all over itself and over the ground, creating a sizzling, smoldering puddle for the creature to die in.
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 43
