“There has to be another way,” she said. “There are also three technicians who went over the security camera vid the Company sent. They’re likely to be in some danger as well.”
“Maybe they should all come here,” said Kramm.
She looked at the instrument panel. “We still have clearance to take off,” she said. “It’ll last another twenty-three minutes. After that, we’ll have to renew. As soon as the tower sees our faces they’ll not only cancel our clearance but Braley will come after us. And they’re likely to start grounding everyone now that word of the ‘invasion’ is out. They probably aren’t giving new clearances and just haven’t gotten around to revoking our old one.”
“So, the ex-marines can’t make it in time and we can’t wait for them. We simply can’t take them,” Kramm said.
“We have to take them,” said Frances. “Otherwise they’ll die.”
“We contact them and warn them,” said Kramm. “That’s all we can do.”
She reached out and turned on the com-link, slotted it to a contact, blanking out the vid pickup. “I won’t leave them,” she said. “We’ll have to do a hop.”
“What’s a hop?”
“You’ll see,” said Frances, “if it doesn’t kill us.” The link connected. “Hello?” a soft male voice said, the accent palpable.
“Do you know who this is?” asked Frances.
There was a long pause. “Ya,” he said. “And for what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I’ll be requiring your services,” she said. “For the second option. Do you understand?”
“Ya,” he said. “I understand. And anybody else?”
“The triplets,” she said. “Let them know and have them come over.”
“Okay, then,” he said. “We will be seeing you.”
She cut the line, primed the engines.
“That was Bjorn,” she said. “A little contingency plan we worked out a while back. We’re good to go. He’ll tell Jolena and they’ll get the technicians and they’ll be waiting.”
“For what?”
“For us. We’re picking them up.”
“In what?” said Kramm. “How?”
“In this.”
“What exactly is a hop, Frances?” Kramm asked.
“What do you know about controlled planets?” Frances asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
She pressed the touchscreen and the engines began to hum. “Looks good from here,” she said. “No Aliens flipping switches in the engine room this time.”
“Frances,” he said. “What’s a hop?”
“The way a controlled planet works,” she said, “well, every registered interplanetary spacecraft has a controller that prevents it from landing anywhere but at a planet-controlled spaceport. The only exception is made when a ship has to crash-land. What a hop does is to simulate a crash landing so as to bring a ship down somewhere other than a spaceport. If we can do it within our clearance time limit, we should be able to land and take off again.”
“So basically you’re going to crash us,” said Kramm.
The engines rose to a whine.
“And that’s our cue,” said Frances, and took off.
The power of the thrust threw Kramm deep into the chair, the webbing suddenly loose in front of him. Frances, he saw, was fighting the gravity pushing her back, had the craft controls still on manual and was pushing hard on the joystick. The craft lurched and then did a lazy flip and righted itself, then they veered hard, dove. Kramm felt his stomach lurch up through his brain.
“The trick,” Frances shouted over an instrument panel covered with lights and beeping furiously, “is to simulate a crash landing instead of simply crashing.”
“Have you done this before?” Kramm couldn’t help but shout.
“You know better than to ask that,” she yelled back.
She slowly pulled the ship out of the dive, but Kramm realized suddenly from the screen that they were yawing sideways. He closed his eyes, opened them again when Frances began to curse.
There was the ground, flashing up toward them.
The craft turned slowly over again and he felt himself hanging from his web. Frances was frantically punching the command screen, the other hand on the joystick. For a moment Kramm thought they would come in upside down, but then the ship slowly righted itself again. A moment later its belly struck the ground hard, a hideous scraping groan shuddering its way through the chassis as they slid forward for what seemed like forever.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” asked Frances.
She unwebbed herself and started for the door. Kramm unwebbed and tried to follow her, walked right into the wall.
Frances looked back and laughed. “Dizzy?” she said. Kramm shook his head, felt his way after her.
“We’ve got thirteen minutes before our authorization expires,” she said. “I think I’m just going to leave the engines running.”
She pressed the release for the forward airlock and they scrambled out. The ship, Kramm saw, had dug a long and smoking scar through a series of fields, perhaps a mile long.
“How do we know the hull hasn’t been breached?” he asked.
“We don’t know,” she said brightly. “We just hope.” She started off at a fast walk and then quickly began to run across the fields, toward a settler’s house, perhaps two hundred meters distant. “I meant to get closer,” she called back over her shoulder, “but it’s hard to do everything just right when you’re crash landing an unfamiliar vehicle.”
Kramm, loping after her, didn’t even try to answer. It was all he could do just to keep up.
* * *
The door to the house was open. Frances peered in. “Jolena?” she called. “Bjorn?”
“We’re here,” called Bjorn, and a moment later came out, a walking arsenal. He had a series of grenades strung on his belt and a bandolier of plasma cartridges crossing on his chest. A huge old-style gattler was slung on his back. A plasma pistol was under each arm, a big hunter’s knife was strapped to his calf. The grip of another pistol poked out of his thigh pocket.
“I had only a few things I didn’t want to leave behind,” he said.
A moment later, Jolena was there as well, more lightly armed but still thoroughly equipped nonetheless. She was wearing a silvered thermal suit, had her hair pulled back out of her eyes.
“What did you do with the one you strangled, Bjorn?” she asked.
“I tucked him into the closet. And I did not strangle him,” he said, indignantly. “I broke his neck.”
“Well, excuse me,” said Jolena.
“We have to go,” said Frances. “Where are the triplets?”
Jolena squinted, shading her eyes with one hand. “There,” she said, and pointed back at Kramm’s spacecraft, where a flitter had just touched down.
They set off, running quickly over the fields back toward the ship. Kramm was amazed to find that Bjorn, despite being weighed down by all his guns, not only could keep up but didn’t even seem to be breaking a sweat.
“I thought it was the other one whose neck you broke,” he overhead Jolena saying to her husband. “The one in the bathroom.”
“Ah, no,” said Bjorn, almost sadly. “I did that fellow in with a bang on the head.”
“A little trouble?” asked Frances from ahead, glancing back and smiling.
“Ah, no,” said Bjorn. “No trouble.”
“Can you believe the nerve of Braley, sending over men to kill us? And thinking three would be enough?” asked Jolena.
“What happened to the third one?” asked Kramm, breathlessly.
“He’s dead as well,” Jolena said. “But you wouldn’t know it to look at him. I’m more of a precision worker than Bjorn, much neater.”
“A woman’s touch,” said Bjorn, and smiled.
They reached the flitter and the three technicians: two men and one woman. Each had a bag over one shoulder. Together they continued up the hatch and onto the ship.
&
nbsp; “Kramm,” shouted Frances from the top of the ladder. “Let me introduce Duncan, Gavin, and Kelly.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Kramm.
A moment later they were all in the craft, extra jumpseats down, everyone webbed in.
“Nearly two minutes to spare,” said Frances, and made the engines begin to whine again.
“Not really,” said Kelly. “Look.”
Ahead, a long way off but getting closer, was a police flitter, its lights blazing.
“Everybody ready?” asked Frances. “This is going to be messy. If the hull is breached, you’ll probably find pressure suits in one of the back lockers. Right, Kramm?”
“I don’t know,” said Kramm. “I hope so.”
“We’ll just keep our fingers crossed that the hull’s not breached,” said Frances. “Hold onto your hats: here we go.”
Kramm was thrown back hard. He felt the ship scrape its way forward and then slosh sideways and then Frances got its nose up and it began to skip, in the air for brief moments and then shuddering down, then in the air again. The police flitter made a hard turn to avoid being hit by them, but a moment later was there next to them, trying to flag them down. Then they were up in the air for good and Frances kicked in the thrusters and they were gone.
7
Once they were far enough out that the gravitation of the planet was no longer an issue and they had shaken their pursuers, Frances put the craft on automatic pilot, setting a course for Planetus headquarters. She and Kramm briefed the other five, explaining where they were going, what they were planning to do.
“Hey, thanks for getting us,” said Duncan. “I prefer to be alive.”
“Same here,” said Gavin.
“Now the problem we have is seven of us on a ship with enough food for one. We’ve got three days until we reach Planetus headquarters.”
“I brought some food,” said Duncan, and opened a canvas bag to reveal a plasflex container holding a twenty-centimeter white cube.
“What is it exactly?” asked Gavin.
“Homemade tofu,” said Duncan. “I strained it myself. Cruelty free.”
“That certainly doesn’t qualify as food,” said Kelly. “The cruelty comes in suggesting that we should eat it.”
“All I’m saying,” said Frances, “is that most of us will have to go into cryonic storage. But there are only six units. One of us is going to have to stay awake.”
“I’ll stay awake,” Kramm volunteered. “I’ve been asleep thirty years. I’m not quite ready to go under again just yet.”
“No?” said Frances. She reached out and ran her hand along his arm. “All right,” she said.
And so, once they’d cleaned the cryostorage compartment out, ejecting Standish’s corpse out the airlock along with the husks of the eggs and as much of the Alien encrustation as they could break away, Kramm found himself alone on the ship again, waiting impatiently for the journey to end.
At first, he worried that there was an Alien they’d missed. He spent his time wandering restlessly from one end of the ship to the other. He had the computer scan the ship for additional life forms, without result. He shined a flashlight up into the ducts though he couldn’t bring himself to crawl up and into them. The first night he slept with one of Bjorn’s pistols beside him and had terrible dreams, waking up every few hours, hoarse from screaming in his sleep.
Still paranoid the second day, he wandered the ship, not sure what to do with himself. This isn’t healthy, he told himself, but couldn’t stop moving aimlessly about. Sometimes he would go into the cryostorage compartment and stare at Frances, sleeping peacefully in her plexene case. She was quite beautiful, he couldn’t help but think. He couldn’t help but like her. Probably by the third day, he couldn’t stop himself from thinking, I’ll be stir-crazy enough to hold conversations with her that she can’t hear.
He went back to the bridge, tried to read one of the books from the ship’s digitized library, but all they had was highbrow stuff and he couldn’t concentrate. Eventually, staring out at the silent stars, he lazed his way into sleep.
* * *
He dreamt that he had been packed into a casket and was being buried alive. At first he could hear voices, the low murmur of them somewhere just above him. Then the sound of shovelfuls of dirt falling onto the lid of the casket. He cried out and beat against the inside of the lid but the dirt kept falling, the sound of it growing more and more distant, the voices fading and then gone completely. He kept beating his fists and crying out, beating his fists and crying out, only to realize his own voice was growing more and more distant, the sounds of his fists seeming to reach him delayed and over a great remove.
And then that too faded and for a time he heard nothing, just a pure and impenetrable silence. He could feel his hands moving, could feel his throat tensing and crying out, but heard nothing, nothing at all.
And then very slowly he began to hear something, a regular and repeated sound. At first it was very soft and he could hardly make it out at all. Then it grew louder, a regular beat, and slowly he realized it was the sound of the blood beating within his ears.
And then it grew louder still, and became raucous and something else altogether, and, very afraid, he woke up.
* * *
They were almost forty-eight hours into the trip. The control screen was blinking red, the panel beeping. Course change, it said.
Course change? he wondered.
He queried the ship’s navigator about the change, found that their itinerary had veered sharply away from the path that would lead them to Planetus headquarters, was moving away from registered travel routes, veering into a quarantined sector.
“Explain,” he said to the navigator.
“Course change,” the navigator responded in its pleasant but featureless voice.
“Who changed the course?” he asked.
“Classified,” the navigator responded.
“This is a navigation error,” said Kramm. “Please return to original course.”
“Course change,” the navigator insisted. “Authorized.”
What now? Kramm wondered.
“Destination?” he finally asked.
The screen flicked black and then he watched a tiny ship icon appear on it and trace a path through a series of systems, ending at a small one deep within a quarantined sector. He touched it with his finger, brought it close: two planets, a swelling, reddish sun. He touched the planet with his finger and it grew larger, became terrifyingly familiar.
Soulages, the planet was called. The planet where he had lost his wife and child. Quarantined, it said beneath it.
“There must be some mistake,” said Kramm, his limbs suddenly almost immovably heavy.
“No mistake,” the navigator said. “Authorized course change.”
He clicked the planet again, followed the trajectory of their landing down its path to where they were to touch down. He tapped the touchscreen again, saw the landscape begin to become textured. He touched it again, saw the rough shapes of the buildings of the colony which he, along with his family, had lived just beside.
“Navigator,” he said. “Adjust course. Flight back to Planetus headquarters.”
“Unauthorized user,” said the navigator.
He tried to move the controls back into manual, but the fail-safe seemed frozen. He phrased the request in a different way. All the while something was beginning to shriek somewhere within.
We’re in deep trouble, he realized.
He tried to hail Planetus on the secure channel but the connection wouldn’t come up. He kept trying, eventually setting the processor to keep trying to hail on its own.
He tried to manipulate the navigator again, without any success. No, he thought, I can’t go to Soulages. Too many ghosts.
He waited nervously, wondering what to do. What would Frances do? he wondered. What about Darby? Hard to say for sure with Darby, particularly as long as the signal was out, but Frances he could ask, couldn�
��t he?
He went into the cryostorage compartment and activated the trigger switch for Frances’s cryounit, starting the process of bringing her back to consciousness. Then he sat on top of the plexene surface of the cryounit next to hers—Gavin’s—and watched her slowly come alive.
He watched her skin’s pallor go from an almost bonelike white to a mild clouded porcelain that then began to be faintly suffused with washed-out pinkness. Her eyes, motionless until now, began to move softly under their lids, then the lids themselves began to move. He watched her cheekbones become slightly more defined as her muscles started to function again, watched her lips purse slightly and then the breath begin to come, fogging on the inside of the plexene. Then she opened her ice-blue eyes and looked at him, smiled.
He opened the plexene cover, helped her out. She was a little unsteady on her feet, but not having been under long, she quickly recovered.
“Are we there already?” she asked, leaning against him, her motions still languid.
“Not yet,” he said.
“What, you missed me?” she said, and then turned her face up and looked at him with her steady ice-blue eyes until he didn’t know what else to do but kiss her.
It was a strange kiss, her face and mouth still colder than normal body temperature, the kiss slow and careful like something just learned, but somehow just right too. He felt his own lips growing simultaneously hotter and cooler as the kiss continued.
After a moment she pulled her face back, looked up at him, a little less languid now.
“Is this why you woke me up?” she asked.
“I wish it was,” he said. “But we have a problem.”
He explained to her that the course had been changed, and she immediately gathered herself, was all business again. How long ago? she wanted to know. Where were they heading now?
“Are there still Aliens on Soulages?” she wanted to know, once he’d told her everything he knew.
“It’s still a restricted sector, the planet still owned by the Company. Who knows what Weyland-Yutani’s been doing with it over the last thirty years?”
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 34
