“Yet another reason to believe that Braley saw the staging as a necessity,” he said. “But why?”
“If we want to stay alive we better figure it out,” Frances said. “Fast.”
* * *
They opened a link to Darby and sent him a recorded briefing on what they had discovered. Why not a live link? Kramm wanted to know. This way was slower but more secure, Frances claimed, since all live signals routed through the station unless one had an exception code.
They had to wait several hours for the signal to reach Darby and then for him to have word sent back. They took turns sleeping, an hour at a stretch. At last, the com-link crackled and Darby’s face appeared.
He looked pale.
“I don’t need to tell you this is very disturbing news,” his image said. “You already know. Frankly I’m as puzzled as you are as to why Weyland-Yutani would take this step. It doesn’t seem to be in their best interest, even if you hadn’t been able to retrieve Marshall’s recording. We will of course inform Marshall’s family of his unexpected and tragic death and arrange for compensation. I hope you’ll believe, Mr. Kramm, that had I had any inkling that our investigation might end in murder I never would have sent anyone in the first place.
“But before I go on,” he said, “are you certain you’re operating on a secure signal? Are you certain you are in a secure, unmonitored location? Are you absolutely positive? If not, please disconnect from this transmission now.”
Kramm and Frances looked at one another. He shrugged. “I think it’s safe,” he said. “As far as I can tell.”
She nodded; they let the vid continue.
“If you are still watching this,” said Darby’s image, “it means that you are convinced that the signal is safe. I’m afraid I believe that the chances of it actually being safe, in light of what you’ve told me and considering what seems to have happened to the synth LaFargue, is relatively slim, so I’ll be brief and somewhat evasive.
“First, we have at this moment reasonably definitive evidence that there never was a new prototype of a terraformer, neither in the station you visited nor anywhere else.” He rubbed his face. “Which makes the situation even more incomprehensible than it was before.
“Second, Mr. Kramm, didn’t I tell you that you didn’t need to know what the device I gave you was? What part of that message did you fail to understand?”
Kramm opened his mouth to answer, but immediately realized that there was no point explaining himself to a vid.
“Third,” said Darby, “Frances, you are, as all who know you agree, a delight. But you’ll have to explain to me why it seemed like a good idea to give Kramm the code and for both of you to watch the vid. More than that, you’ll have to explain where you got the code in the first place. Clearly your talents are wasted in your current job: you should be in espionage. Still I can’t help but be a little irritated. Don’t do it again.
“In any case, I think it would be best for you to report to me in person, as soon as possible. I don’t particularly want to see the vid after what you’ve told me about its contents, but I probably should. Considering what has happened, I can’t help but feel a little concerned about your safety. Please leave immediately.
“If you need to talk to me in transit, use this coded channel,” he said, and then offered a long stream of numbers and letters that Frances frantically coded in. “Add your own personnel code to the end of that, Frances, and it’ll connect. It’s a live feed, direct, just established through a dummy corporation that’s not yet registered with us. The Company will crack it before too long, but we should be okay for half a day at least.”
He smiled and saluted the screen. “Cheers,” he said. “And good luck. Matthew Darby, Planetus representative, signing off.”
2
It took some time for Frances to get clearance from the tower to take off. Braley tried to connect to her by com-link in the meantime but she didn’t pick up. Braley had left three messages by the time clearance to depart finally came through.
“Do you think he knows we’re leaving?” asked Kramm.
“I doubt it,” said Frances. “If he knew, I doubt clearance would have ever come.”
They closed and sealed the outer lock, Frances firing the ship up, priming the engines. Kramm, his knowledge of ships nearly thirty years old, just watched.
“That’s strange,” she said.
“What is?”
“Problem in the engine room,” she said, pointing. On the screen, a schematic had appeared of the ship’s sub deck, one of the square control panels in the engine sector blinking red.
“Do you want me to go down and see what it is?”
“It’s the third i/o valve,” she said. “Panel three. It’s been accidentally flipped. I’m surprised it allowed you to make the trip here like that.”
“Shall I go flip it?” asked Kramm.
“Do you know what it looks like?” Frances asked.
“Can you describe it to me?” asked Kramm.
“I thought so,” said Frances, and rolled her eyes. “I’ll do it.” She unwebbed herself and pulled herself out of the pressure chair. “You might as well come too,” she said. “Wouldn’t hurt you to learn a thing or two.”
By the time Kramm was unwebbed, she had opened the bridge lock and started down the dark metal passage of the aft corridor. He followed after her, watching her narrow shoulders and long slim back. They passed the door to the hibernation units, across from which was the door to the storage hold. Near the end of the corridor was the hatch down to the engine room. When she put her hand on the pressure pad on the wall above it, the hatch slid open.
She half turned. “Well?” she said. “Coming?”
“Yes,” he said, “right behind you.”
She started down the ladder. Once she had reached the bottom, he started down himself.
He was still on the ladder when she began to explain to him what the problem was.
“No need to come down,” she said, and pointed. “Right here. That’s all it is. Just this one lever needs to be flipped the other way.”
He swiveled around on the ladder to get a good look at her. Saw her brow suddenly furrow.
“Oh, wait,” she said. “These are set wrong as well. It wouldn’t matter for takeoff but will matter once the deep space drive is locked in. But there’s no logic to the settings. It’s like someone put a heavy box on the control panel or fell against it.” She looked at him with a smirk. “I blame you,” she said.
She reached out to flick the switches back and then suddenly pulled her hand back, as if stung.
“It’s sticky,” she said.
She turned toward him and held out her hand and he saw the mucuslike web quivering between her fingertips.
Oh God, he thought. We’re in for it now.
3
There was, beside the console, a dark shadow that flexed and moved, a tail coiling scalily out. Frances turned and saw it, and began to grope around her for something with which to defend herself. Kramm let go of the ladder, dropping as silently as he could to the floor below.
“Frances,” he said, as calmly as he could manage, careful not to move too quickly, “do you have that prototype derringer on you?”
“It’s upstairs,” she said. “On the bridge.”
The creature remained in its corner, alert but not yet aggressive. It moved forward a little and into the light. Its edges became a little more distinct, the light darting along it in gleaming threads, making it look liquid, like oil.
“Don’t make any sudden movements,” said Kramm.
“I wasn’t planning to,” said Frances.
There was, Kramm could see, molt still clinging to the creature’s leg. It was smaller than a full-grown adult, but not by much. Big enough to kill a human. Or maybe two.
“What I’m going to do is carefully take one step forward,” said Kramm. “At the same time, I want you to take one step back. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” s
he said. “I understand.”
“All right,” Kramm said. “Now.”
He took a step forward, slowly, as if underwater. She stepped back. The creature, he saw, had turned toward her, its lips starting to tighten. Its legs were quivering slightly.
“Again,” he said, his voice a little tighter in his throat. “Don’t look at its mouth,” he said.
She didn’t respond. Stood there as if frozen.
“Frances,” he said. “Did you hear me?”
For a moment she didn’t answer. “Yes,” she finally said, with some effort. Oh, God, Kramm thought. It’s starting all over again.
“When I say now,” he said, “take one step back.”
Instead, she threw a sudden, pleading glance back over her shoulder at him, jerking her head. The creature sprang forward and into her, grabbing her and leaping onto the console, scrabbling its way up the top panel and onto the wall. Kramm darted forward in time to grab hold of one of its legs. He began to drag it back down off the wall, Frances now screaming and fighting it above him, her own foot dangling down into Kramm’s face.
The creature began to slip off the top panel and back onto the console. Kramm braced himself as best he could and pulled hard. The creature hissed and Frances screamed. Kramm lifted his head and looked up to see it shrug Frances’s head hard once against the wall, and then a second time, until Frances went limp.
He pulled harder. For a moment he thought the creature might drop her and come after him. And then it caught its balance again and struck him hard across the face with its tail.
Dazed, he started to lose his footing. The tail whipped down at him, tearing his uniform along one side and opening a gash in his thigh. He let go with one hand, steadying himself against the console, and the creature wriggled its way away from him and was up the wall, clambering quickly into the ventilation shaft, taking Frances along with it.
Kramm gave a shout of frustration. He started clambering up onto the console, up toward the ventilation shaft, but then, starting to think now, leapt down and to the floor. In a moment he was up the ladder and running down the oiled metal passage, through the lock and onto the bridge. Where was it? He began to search the lockers, the tops of consoles, the table, without finding the small gun. He tore most of a supply cabinet apart before finally catching sight of it out of the corner of his eye, resting in the chair next to the one Frances had been sitting in earlier.
He grabbed it, checked the clip; it was at seventy-five percent. How many shots had she claimed it had? Four? That made three then?
And what was it she had said about it? he wondered, running again now down the corridor. That it had never been tested on Aliens before? That the theory was it would stop them but that nobody knew for certain?
He clambered down the ladder, leg aching where it had been gashed, jumping off it before he reached the bottom, and then climbed up onto the console and up the instrument panel to its top lip. From there, with the small gun held in his mouth, he pulled himself awkwardly up and into the ventilation shaft.
The shaft went up vertically a half meter or so, then turned sharply to become horizontal. He struggled to where his fingers could grasp the right angle of the floor and wormed his way upward.
It was only once he was in, his body partly blocking the shaft, that he realized he should have thought to bring a flashlight as well. No tunnels, he immediately thought, no darkness. And yet here he was. The shaft was dark in front of him; he could hardly see much of anything. The walls touched his shoulders to either side. It was tight and claustrophobic, and he could move forward only by wriggling. As he did so, gun held in one hand now, his movements made the shaft boom and shake.
So much for the element of surprise, he thought, and laughed.
His laughter sounded hysterical to him. He took a deep breath and let it out and then wriggled forward. There was a very dim, gray light from the shaft behind him, filtering here and there past his body. Not enough really to see by but enough to keep the darkness from being pitch black: enough to let him see hints of his own movements, his own body. Maybe even enough to keep from going mad, he thought. But he could feel another part of him turning around within his head and walking away and leaving him alone and helpless in the darkness. He wondered how long it would take the rest of his mind to follow suit, and what would happen to him then.
He wriggled forward, crossing the slickness of a mucus trail, until he hit a dead end. He felt around. There was a wall to his left, another in front of him, another to his right. Where had they gone? Had he missed a fork along his way? Had the Alien come back down while he was searching for the gun and was it now safe and in hiding somewhere else, Frances already dead? Would he have to crawl back the way he had come, slowly, and backward? and if he did, how would he know what he was backing his way into?
He worked his arms under himself and heaved himself upward. His back struck the ceiling of the shaft, but his head didn’t.
Up, he realized.
Which turned out to be a more difficult proposition than he had imagined, it being nearly impossible to bend in a way that allowed him to go from prone to vertical in the tight space. But in the end, scraped and sore, he had managed and was standing in the shaft. Reaching up and feeling around, he found just above his head another lip where the tunnel turned horizontal again. He placed the gun on the shelf of the new horizontal passage and pulled himself up, cramming himself in.
There was a hint of light here, filtering down from somewhere, a dull gray ghost of light that made him feel like he might be okay after all. Parts of himself that had been on their way to being lost did an about-face and started to come back to him. His elbows and hips hurt from the crawling, and his thigh ached from where he’d been slashed.
He came to a fork, a subsidiary shaft breaking off, and didn’t know which to take. There seemed to be light coming from the end of both passages. He started down one and then stopped, hesitated. It didn’t feel right; he wasn’t sure why. He backed slowly up until he was back at the other passage and worked his way, grunting, into it.
As soon as he put his hand into the damp mucousy slime, he knew what he’d been missing in the other passage, that he was on the right track now.
He followed the tunnel forward, the light growing stronger until he could see clearly again. Up ahead was a grate, broken, kicked in. He approached it slowly, trying to move as quietly as possible.
Through it he could see Frances, unconscious it seemed, kneeling and slumped. The Alien was behind her. At first Kramm thought it was caressing her and then he realized that it had begun to secrete a baroque and variegated substance similar to the wall the beast seemed to have built at the far side of the room, which it was drawing in around Frances’s body now, filaments of it attaching her to the floor and wall. Her arms were already looped into a meshwork of it and hanging loosely, becoming more and more thickly enmeshed.
He lifted his pistol to get a shot at the creature but Frances was too much in the way. He edged farther along and saw a human hand cuffed to some piece of machinery that it took him a moment to realize was one of the cryonic units. He couldn’t yet see the body attached to it, nor did he have any idea who it might belong to. From the pallor of the flesh, though, he was certain the person was dead.
He pulled himself slowly through the opening and into the cryonic storage room. The creature, working to immobilize Frances, was still blocked by her at this angle. Kramm gathered his feet under him and slowly stood.
It was only then that he saw, on the other side of one of the cryonic units, the two eggs. Beside them was the rest of the man whose wrist he had seen, his chest a gaping hole. He didn’t recognize the face.
All right, he thought. Two eggs and one juvenile. Three charges in the pistol. Not impossible. But everything has to work out just right.
Then one of the eggs began to open.
4
When he had worked for the Company, he had seen it probably a dozen times, the way the leat
hery flesh of the egg split and curled back, the egg slowly opening to reveal the moist gray-pink interior which, when you got too close, would whip up and against your face and latch on and never let go until after you were a host and as good as dead. Most of the time when the eggs had opened he had been in a position to douse them with flame or set off a small explosive charge. But once they had been a fraction of a second too late and the facehugger had whipped out of the egg and thwapped like a pancake onto the face of the man next to him, who had dropped like a stone. Kramm, not knowing what else to do, had tried at first to pry it free, then watched the tentacle tighten around the man’s throat and begin to strangle him.
“What do we do?” he had asked the third man on the team, a laconic and cynical ex-marine named Hermann Ungar.
“Nothing,” said Ungar. “He’s as good as dead. We kill him. It’s the merciful thing.”
At the time Kramm had been unwilling to accept this. Instead he had carefully sighted his plasma rifle along the side of the man’s face and pulled the trigger. The shot had killed the facehugger but had also taken off a good portion of the man’s mouth and nose, and the creature’s acidic blood had burnt most of the rest before Kramm could use the neutralizer. The man had lain there like that for three days, pleading and mumbling in a nearly incomprehensible voice for them to kill him. On the third day, his chest swelled and he began to convulse, and Kramm realized that the facehugger could manage to implant its host much quicker than anyone had realized. He shot the man through the head, killed the chestburster with a few well-placed shots even before it made it out of his chest.
Ungar grimaced. “Maybe next time you’ll listen to me.”
And indeed Kramm did just that when, a few years later, Ungar was the one whose face was covered by a facehugger.
Could he bring himself to kill Frances if she became infected? If not, what would he do with her?
He moved carefully forward, keeping one eye on the Alien, the other on the opened egg. He circled carefully around a cryonic unit and stepped over the dead man, approaching the egg, keeping a cryonic unit between himself and it. The Alien, he saw, had stopped its labors and had turned toward him, was waiting, silent, unmoving. He leaned slightly, looking over the top of the cryonic unit at the eggs on the other side. He could only see the top of them. The open one seemed to have begun to pulse inside. It wouldn’t be long now, he realized.
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 32
