The Complete Aliens Omnibus

by Michael Jan Friedman

  MacCormac dropped on his side. “That’s all we need!”

  “Maybe the aliens won’t kill us,” I said, “but those robots sure will.”

  Trapped between the two approaching poison packers, we could almost feel our DNA screaming for attention. The poison packers were proximity weapons, not predisposed to operate at a distance, but the proximity was closing fast. In seconds, if we showed ourselves, they’d pick us up just as they were picking up the aliens, and they’d start shooting those darts at us.

  “Stay here!” I shouted, and pushed Bonnie flat.

  “Rory!” She didn’t want to leave me in the open.

  I dropped and rolled as if my clothing were on fire, toward the corpse of one of the dead aliens—or the half of it that was left. Expecting to be burned by the acidic remains, I reached for the mass and came up with two disembodied snorkels and the sinews that once held them onto the creature’s back. With an instinctive heave, I threw the first mass like a hatchet at the nearest poison packer, then whirled and threw the second at the other PP. I dropped behind a stump just as its ultrasonic darts began to fire. Darts splattered on the stump above me.

  Suddenly more darts came from the other direction, and then from both directions in rapid succession. Through the red glass stump, I watched the two PPs approach each other, their casings smeared with dripping alien remains. Picking up the DNA signatures or the remains, they fired madly at each other, punching darts into each other’s shells until their delicate innards were sparking and shattered. The one on the right lost its imperative and tipped sideways, crashing its helmet into a spear-shaped spire. Less than a second later, the other one tipped all the way over on its head, twirled madly, and thrashed its legs in a futile effort to stay upright, an effort that failed. It landed head-down in a pool of smoldering acid.

  “Wow!” Carmichael appreciated. “That was smart!”

  “Your hands!” Bonnie grasped my wrists.

  “It’s okay, I grabbed the outside ends.”

  “Nice going,” MacCormac said. “Follow me, people.”

  “Gladly.”

  While the turbulence of the two alien crowds fighting continued around us, we scurried under cover of insanity back toward the blind. MacCormac seemed to know the way better than I did, so I was glad to let him lead. The Marines had the sense to know when weapons wouldn’t do the trick and no longer tried to shoot at the aliens which seemed so effectively distracted and deliberately parted to let us pass— and if that weren’t weird enough, actually seemed to protect us from each other. Just as we came around a bend in the flume, a mass of them rolled past us, but suddenly dissolved their battle ball when they almost hit us. They gawked at us briefly, and us at them, and off they went again in another direction, pointedly avoiding us.

  “Keep going!” MacCormac shouted.

  We got right up and ran harum-scarum again. I could tell by the way MacCormac checked every turn that he was looking for PPs. As for aliens, we just dodged between them and they let us go.

  I wouldn’t delude myself. They were still horrendously dangerous and we were walking some kind of tightrope. I didn’t know what kind yet, but we certainly weren’t safe among them, as my mother fantasized that we were. Bonnie said nothing like this ever lasted long in the animal world, and I believed her. Whatever the trigger was, it could be tripped any time and we’d be back in the soup.

  “Hold!” MacCormac spat, and struck me in the chest with his arm.

  We fell up against a sheer wall. He peeked around the edge of the wall.

  “C’mere,” he hissed, and drew me closer. He whispered, “Look.”

  I ducked down and peeked around his thick body.

  Only twenty or so feet away were seven face-huggers sitting together on a rock, standing up on their eight fingers and quivering like bachelors in a dance line. Their tails were straight out behind them, but not flaccid or hanging on the rock. I held onto MacCormac’s belt and we watched.

  Slowly, trying not to draw attention, he pulled a grenade from his belt, right near my nose. In slow motion I watched the small and powerful casing rise out of the cartridge holder between his fingers. That grenade could take out everything within fifty feet, including us. But it was also the only way we could possibly get by seven of those parasites. We could only hope that the rock which was now hiding us would also give us some kind of protection. I knew that the concussion wave would probably knock us silly for several minutes, during which we’d be even more vulnerable than we were now. I didn’t like the odds. I thought about stopping him.

  He held the grenade in both hands, judging the distance. Just as his thumb went to the detonator and was about to come down, I saw something and grasped his elbow.

  The face-huggers were up on their fingertips, making tent-shapes of their bodies. The flank lobes with which they grasped the faces of their victims were up high in a gull-winged fashion instead of down in the usual position. I couldn’t believe what I saw next . . . the huggers, all together, began to puff their bodies—puff, puff, puff—and the flank lobes began to grow into rings with membranes in the middles. The membranes spread wider and wider, thinner and thinner, the way balloons open up and get thinner as they’re filled with air, except these membranes were flat and getting broader with every puff. The huggers, one by one, began to fan their membranes, flapping more energetically by the second, and there was a whirring sound, almost the way a hummingbird’s wings make that constant buzz.

  Then, in a true flocking manner, all seven face-huggers crouched on their fingertips and launched themselves into the air. They stretched their tails out behind them for balance and flew right over our rock and on into the sky over the field of rolling battle balls and dead and dying aliens.

  As we watched, dumbfounded, the fliers were joined by other flying parasites. They flocked briefly in the sky, and buzzed off into a swarm, joined by still others. The swarm whirled to the left, then the right, then found a direction they liked and flew off into the distant sky over the glass spires, toward the Blue Valley.

  We stared after them, slowly digesting the full gravity of the mess we were now in.

  MacCormac blinked, still holding the uncharged grenade in both hands. “I’ll be damned . . . they can fly.”

  12

  “Theo released a pallet of poison packers. Somehow the ramp got open—he has no idea how. He saw some aliens, a dozen or more of them, coming up the ramp and he didn’t know what else to do. He shoved the crew down into the provisions hold and triggered one pallet—twenty PPs— hoping they’d take the aliens out and then just venture out into the landscape and go on their way. He figured we were probably dead, and even if we weren’t, we’d never live if the ship were taken.”

  MacCormac paced away his bottled fury at the useless death of Corporal Edney, stalking back and forth in front of the deceptively calm main stealth curtain. He paused only to drop the communicator link into Clark’s hand. “He said he tried to contact us, but the frequencies were all jammed. He threw this out the ramp just before triggering the PPs. I was able to contact him, and he explained what had happened. He also told me the PPs instantly fired their darts on the aliens, and the aliens went crazy from the poison. He says the dying aliens attacked the PPs. Get that—even though they won’t attack us, they’ll still attack the PPs! Can you imagine that? So the PPs shot ’em, and then the dying aliens jumped on top of the PPs and clung there until their bodies fell apart and the acid burned through the PPs helmets! I’ll bet nobody back at tactical ever though of that!”

  We once again huddled in the main chamber, trying to think things through. Most of the campers were in other chambers. Only my mother, Gracie and Tad, and Neil were in here with Clark, MacCormac, Bonnie, Carmichael, Pocket, and me.

  “So they’re safe?” Clark asked hopefully. “My crew’s safe in the provisions hold? Theo’s okay? They’re alive?”

  MacCormac wiped the spittle from his mouth. “I think so.”

  “If they
stay down there, they’re safe,” Pocket reassured. “Those robots aren’t programmed to decode our locking system.”

  “If they come up,” MacCormac said, “the PPs will take them out if there are any robots left in the ship. The aliens took out five PPs with their acid trick. The remaining PPs probably killed off the other aliens that were in the ship and then ventured on down the ramp and are now running wild in the landscape. We took out seven of them with grenades, then Rory took out another two. That means we still have six of them wandering the landscape which we have to avoid.”

  He fitfully kicked a crate and sent it crashing across the chamber. Full of silverware and dishes, it crashed so loudly that it left us all shaking. I didn’t want to say what I was thinking—that the aliens had figured out the PPs already and maybe the assumption that we could save this planet at all was mistaken. This would be a real war, with Humanity sending more and more PPs in waves, then synthetics, then entire armies. The story was just beginning.

  “I’m sorry about your young lady Marine,” my mother told him. “They didn’t mean to kill her. She just got in the way.”

  “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?” MacCormac spat.

  I turned to her. “It’s never their fault, is it, M’am?” I turned to Gracie and Tad. “How did the ramp get opened?”

  Tad closed his eyes in misery. Gracie just stared at me.

  They stared at me. It was like a party, only without the cheer. I guess that would be a funeral.

  “Your mechanical troubles are your own problems,” my mother said.

  “What’s happening to them?” I demanded. “Why are they fighting each other?”

  Gracie, standing halfway between my mother and me, seemed truly in the middle. “They’ve stopped foraging and we think the queen has stopped producing. They’re putting all their energy into defense.”

  “That wasn’t defense,” I corrected.

  “What is it, then?” Clark asked.

  “It was more than defense. They’re not hunkering down. They’re going out to meet an enemy and fight. This isn’t a castle under siege. It’s a battlefield. They’re not interested in us because they’re putting all their energy into fighting each other.” Still wanting some kind of direction, I persisted, “But why would they fight each other?”

  Gracie thought about the question, and her answer wasn’t what I expected. “Because the one thing ants never tolerate is other ants.”

  “Are you saying they’re not fighting each other? They’re fighting a whole other hive? Another colony?”

  “Yes, they’re different!” Bonnie spoke up. “When I was out there, at first I just thought it was the light shining through the glass, but it wasn’t. The one hive, our hive, they’re all black. The other hive, they’ve got some green and blue on them! I thought I was imagining it!”

  “Green where and blue where?” Gracie asked.

  “Blue between the ribs. Green inside the mouth and under the arms.” Pocket made a low whistle and said, “That’s subtle.”

  “But it bears up the theory of two hives,” Clark said. “How can there be two hives? Didn’t they all start with one ‘hitchhiker’ or just a few?”

  “This could be their evolutionary strategy,” Gracie supplied. “They diversify into several hives, develop new queens, and when they come upon each other they pause in their imperatives and fight in elimination rounds, working down to the mightiest hive. They can potentially evolve faster on the timeline of evolution. Very much faster.”

  “And this flying part?” Clark asked. “It’s temporary?”

  Gracie half-nodded, half-shrugged. “Like carpenter ants, they fly, they take over an area, they kill everything, and start a new colony. Then they don’t fly anymore for a while.”

  “No bets on how long, right?” Pocket commented.

  I waved him away from his compulsion. “Then when they expand enough and bump into each other, they stop everything and engage in this bug war. And the winners get the spoils.”

  “The spoils?” Bonnie wondered.

  I forced myself to look at Gracie and Tad, Pocket and Clark.

  “It’s not just a bug war,” I told them. “This is a war to see whose genetics get to spread all over the planet. We’re not being protected. We’re being stored for the winners to use. It’s a DNA war.”

  * * *

  “This is it,” I announced. “I’ve made my decision. I want to save this planet. I want to save the Blue Valley. We’re getting out. Clark, you were right from the start. These things need to be wiped out. There’s no more discussion of the ASA. These things are a plague and we’re going to smallpox ’em. With these animals here, this planet doesn’t represent any kind of life.” I turned to face my sister again. “Get everybody together. We’re all leaving, if we have to stun every last one of you and carry you,”

  Tad hung his hand on Gracie’s shoulder as my sister stood there, arms crossed tight to her body, glaring at me. When her eyes shifted to my mother, I saw the first play of doubt.

  M’am nodded. “If that is the verdict,” she said, “gather everyone.”

  Gracie, fighting tears, didn’t obey. She turned to me. “Is this the only way that works for you?”

  I fixed my eyes on hers. “For you, too. We’re releasing the payload. Anybody who stays will be hunted down and killed by the robots. That means Tad, too. And it means you. If the ship leaves without you, that’s the end of your chance for a future together with him, with children . . . a future as somebody other than Jocasta Malvaux’s daughter. If you care about him and yourself and these people, you’ll bring them here right now. Because we’re all leaving.”

  Fighting her own emotions, she nodded. She tried to speak, but couldn’t. With a soulful look at Tad, she led him out of the tunnel.

  My mother watched them go. Her self-control was admirable, I have to say.

  “So you have won,” she said quietly to me. “You’ve taken my daughter away from me.”

  All eyes were on me as my mother slipped away.

  “Ken,” I said to Carmichael, “Go with them and make sure they don’t pull any fast ones.”

  Carmichael pushed off toward the tunnel. “Yes, sir!”

  MacCormac forced himself to think clearly. “If we can avoid the PPs, we can get everybody back. If the PPs Theo released on the ship have rolled down the ramp and are out of there, then the ship should be clear.”

  “We can scan with infrareds,” Clark said. “The PPs show up on those scanners.”

  “We’ll have to keep our heads low,” the colonel went on. “If the PPs pick up our DNA signatures, we can’t avoid those goddamned darts. Humans were never supposed to be on the planet with those robots. This is a complete screw-over.”

  “If Theo only released one pallet and there are only six left to avoid,” Clark computed, “then we have a fair—”

  “They’re gone! They’re gone! Mr. Malvaux! Rory!”

  Private Carmichael came barreling out of the tunnel, all worked up.

  “They’re gone!” he gasped again.

  “Who’s gone, son?” Clark asked.

  I caught Carmichael’s arm. “You were watching them!”

  He shook his head. “They were right in front of me, and then somehow they just weren’t there anymore! Turned out I was following holographs! I can’t find any of them!”

  Pocket pushed through to the monitor bank and did his bosun thing at the keyboard. Dozens of pictures popped up of the interior of various chambers and the exterior of the compound. No longer were there any people milling around, sleeping or working or eating. The chambers were completely unpopulated, except for the one museum chamber and its stuffed trophy.

  “Oh, glory, we’ll never find them,” Clark groaned. “We’ll never find them in a thousand years! They’re too good at this!”

  “We’ll flush them out,” MacCormac swore. “Goddamn it, I’ll grenade the whole mountain if I have to!”

  “Listen!” Bonnie�
��s urgent warning came from the projector curtain, where she stood watching the picture of the dim glass forest. “Listen—”

  A low moan began in the distance and grew more intense, deeper, until the whole landscape and the cave and all the sky was humming. With its underlying vibrato, the trombone call set the ground beneath us to quivering.

  Clark stared out at the projected land. Pocket’s face swiveled as he twitched in fear. The Marines were still and tense.

  The hoooing noise rolled through the valleys and grottos, down the flumes and up the grades, traveling farther and farther across the land. It lasted ten . . . twelve . . . fifteen seconds. Maybe more.

  When it began finally to draw back and fade away, we were all as spooked as anybody ever had been in history.

  Bonnie turned to look at me. “It’s over.”

  13

  The DNA war was over. One side had won. They’d be coming for us, to present us to their parasites for impregnation. We were back on the losing side. The period of grace had ended.

  With one confrontation comes all of them.

  I shook my head, sighed, and let my anger lead the way.

  “Mother!” I shouted. “Where are you!”

  MacCormac made a noise of disgust. “Who are you kidding?”

  “Rory . . . ” Clark began at the same time, steeped in doubt.

  “Oh, she can hear us,” I told him contemptively. “You don’t think she lets anybody do anything in here without her knowing about it, do you? She thinks she’s a god. Gods are always watching.”

  Over the blind’s muffled sound system came my mother’s voice, velvety and superior.

  “We are in hiding. You will never find us. So you might as well leave. You are here without invitation and you have worn out your welcome. Go on your way and leave us in peace. Go home.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Clark murmured.

  “Fine!” Pocket snarled, pushing to his feet. “If that’s the way they want it! To hell with ’em! Let’s get out and save our own skins! They want to be stupid? Fine! I’m all for suicide, as long as it’s somebody else’s! Let’s get out and leave these morons to their own fate!”