by Tim Lebbon
The creature they had found when they arrived on Midsummer—they called it the Faze—had made the Macbeth’s engine room its home. Sometimes it still chose to move around the ship, building, bettering, remolding parts of the vessel to its own mysterious design, extruding new materials and controls from its various appendages. But the engine room was the ship’s muscle, and the creature wandered those vast spaces, continuing to build the Macbeth’s strength.
They had never succeeded in making any meaningful contact with the entity. For a long time that had troubled Maloney. She never allowed any experiments upon it, fearing that it might take exception to such aggression and unmake all the wonderful creations it had given them. It wasn’t even clear whether it was fully a creature as humans understood the concept, or some sort of machine that had been left behind on Midsummer by its ancient builders and inhabitants, to continue building, growing, and bettering.
Over time such worries faded away. The Macbeth grew better and faster, the Faze seemed never to tire, and Maloney started to believe that fate had brought them together.
Today, however, she was not visiting the Faze. Today, her destination was the hold.
Kareth and Dana were quiet, and in their silence she sensed unease about what was to come. They were shipborn after all, and to them the Human Sphere was something they were told about as children, an almost mythical place that over time formed part of something they regarded as the Promise. A promise to return, a promise to regain, a promise to avenge being driven out into the depths of space in the first place.
Even the shipborn grew up feeling adrift, and focused on the concept of Home.
“Don’t worry,” Maloney said to them. “The war’s begun, and everything will turn out fine.”
“But what is it really like there?” Dana asked. “We’ve heard the stories and legends, seen the holos. What’s it really like in the Sphere, Mistress?”
“It might have changed in the centuries I’ve been away,” Maloney said. “But we’ve grown strong. Once we triumph in war, the peace that follows will allow us to make of the Sphere exactly what we desire. We’ll have taken control, and time will be on our side—but for now, the hold. Quickly. I want to see her.”
* * *
And there she was.
The queen sat secured in the center of the large hold. Her great head and body were held in place by a network of carbon-filament bindings, gentle yet strong, dark lines sweeping across the chamber like scratches on reality. Her mighty egg sac, half the length of the hold, was suspended by material extruded from her own body, a hardened substance that looked like saliva made solid. The sac bulged and flexed constantly, a subtle movement that to Maloney was almost hypnotic. Many times she had found herself sitting in this observation pod for hours on end, just staring. So wonderful. So terrifying. Here was the source of the Rage’s vast army, still doing what nature drove her to do even after so many decades in captivity.
They had found the queen on a mission out from the artificial habitat they called Midsummer. They had been actively seeking Xenomorphs by then, and it had taken them over twenty years to find them. More than five hundred unmanned drones had been sent out into the void, and when one of them found a nest, it had sent back excited chatter, like a bee leading its hive to a new patch of flowers. The recovery mission had been risky, and costly, but by then the Faze was working on the Macbeth, and Midsummer’s technology was incorporated into their own.
As Maloney watched, another egg was laid. The pulsing end of the queen’s egg sac drooped down to the floor, dribbling thick fluid that hazed the air. The egg was squeezed out, placed gently, secured in place by more of the hardening secretion, and then the sac was delicately lifted away.
The queen gasped. Steam formed around her head, settling on her wide chitinous collar and condensing into water.
For decades no human had been inside the hold, and survived. Instead, Xenomorph soldiers under Rage control performed tasks instructed by the scientists. Groups of them huddled around the edges of the room, dark shapes like shadows waiting to leap. Every now and then a pair would break away from their waiting place, skitter across the floor, grab an egg that might have been laid weeks or months before, and make their way toward the exit.
Every single time this happened the queen watched, seemingly bereft. She tried to lure them back with their precious cargo, but these Xenomorphs were no longer hers to control.
None of them were.
Maloney had once tried counting the eggs in the hold, but she had stopped at two hundred. They were everywhere. The queen laid between forty and fifty eggs per day.
The hold’s atmosphere was warm and damp, intensely humid, and sometimes skeins of moisture formed small clouds that drifted back and forth according to her breath. The viewing pod’s outer glass was cleared by wafts of warm, dry air. Otherwise Maloney wouldn’t have been able to see anything. There were other pods around the hold at various heights along the walls, and she could just make out the pale shapes of Rage scientists in one or two of them. Some would be making observations and taking readings, ensuring that the environment was stable and that the queen was still safe and secure. Others would simply be watching.
Always, people watched.
“You’re old, just like me,” Maloney said. She often talked to the queen, even though she knew the creature could not hear. In a way the beast had become her most trusted confidante. Maloney could tell her anything. “Old and tired, but still we go on, because instinct drives us. Your instinct to lay eggs and perpetuate your species, and mine to find my way back home. To take what is ours.” She tapped the glass. “What is mine.” The hold was huge, the queen probably two hundred yards away at the center, but still her head seemed to shift, just a little. Steam drove from her mouth as she exhaled, or growled.
Maloney glanced left and right at Dana and Kareth.
“When did she last feed?”
Kareth consulted a datapad on the wall beside the viewing window.
“Seven days ago.”
“She’ll be hungry,” Maloney said. “Contact Wilder. Tell her to feed our queen. And tell her I’m watching.”
“Mistress,” Kareth said. He dashed away, leaving Maloney alone with Dana.
“Will you watch with me?” Maloney asked.
“Of course! It’s a beautiful thing to see.”
“It truly is,” Maloney said.
They observed in silence. The queen laid another egg. Mist drifted across the hold. Several minutes later Kareth returned.
“Three are being sent in,” he said.
“Good. Good.” Maloney drifted closer until her platform nudged the viewing window, and below her and to the left she saw movement.
Three Xenomorphs entered, each of them carrying a human being. The humans were naked, thin, pale, and weak from their centuries-long hibernation. Several hundred cryo-pods were kept in a separate hold, liberated from one of the Fiennes ships before it was sent on its way with thousands more of its subjects already impregnated. These few hundred were not impregnated. Instead, they were kept for an even more important purpose than birthing a soldier of the Rage.
They were awake.
The first barely moved as he was laid before the queen. Only his expression changed, to one of sheer horror, as she eased her huge head down and her mouth extended, inner teeth lashing out and smashing the man’s head apart. One leg spasmed. The queen ate.
“Be strong,” Maloney said.
“She’ll want more,” Dana said.
“Of course. She has to build her energy.”
When there was little left of the man but blood and shreds of skin, the second man was presented to her. He had time to raise a hand before her teeth smashed into his chest, and she lifted her head and brought him with her, giving one massive shake that split him in two. His upper part thudded to the floor as she ate his lower torso and legs.
The third human, the woman, had seen what was happening. She might have been screaming,
although Maloney could not hear, but she was certainly thrashing, striking out at the monster holding her, weak ineffectual impacts that the Xenomorph ignored.
Just for a moment Maloney empathized with the woman. There was something quite amazing about her, too—she had last been awake centuries ago. Everything she knew was gone, everyone she had ever known either dead or light years away with a Xenomorph in their chest, just waiting to be birthed. She had volunteered for a Fiennes mission, expecting to be awakened when a potentially habitable planet was reached. It might have been hundreds of years before they reached anywhere suitable, they had all been told. It might have been thousands.
Instead, she had woken to this.
It might be a kindness, Maloney supposed, if the woman believed herself to be having a nightmare.
But the heat on her skin. The slickness of the Xenomorph’s carapace. The sound of the queen hissing and growling as her head snapped down and then bit off the dead man’s head.
No nightmare could ever be so real.
When the Xenomorph dropped her she tried to stand and run, but she was too weak. Maloney saw her mouth open in a scream of terror moments before the queen crushed her to the floor and ripped out her guts.
“More?” Dana said.
“No. Not for a while. We want her strong enough to keep giving birth, but not too strong. Keep her hungry. That way she’ll always be ours. Now, accompany me to the bridge. It’s time to start taking stock.”
* * *
Challar was on the bridge. Another of the original Founders who had become Rage, he was older than Beatrix Maloney by a few years, but those years had not been as kind. Both legs had been amputated thirty years before, and one arm, and now Challar’s other arm was starting to wither and die.
Yet his mind was still strong. Completely submerged in the life-giving gel, what was left of Challar floated in a large crystal globe. The gel gave him oxygen and sustenance, maintaining life long past the time when it should have withered along with his limbs. He communicated via an artificial voice box attached directly into his larynx, giving his words a mechanical lilt. What he said, however, was all human.
“Fucking fantastic!”
“Eloquent as ever, Challar,” Maloney said.
“We’re almost there. It’s happening, Beatrix. After so long!”
“Did you ever doubt?”
“Well, no… yes, I don’t know.” He hovered his own platform close to one of several viewing screens on the bridge, analyzing data that came through. “We lost Patton,” he said.
“I know. Unfortunate. He was one of our better generals.”
“And to the Yautja, too. They were supposed to be a test for our armies, not destroyers.”
“If you look at the data more carefully, I think you’ll note that there were Excursionists present on the habitat, too.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Challar said. His mouth still moved when he spoke, in a mockery of talking. His gel was mostly clear, although Maloney could see specks of skin floating in it, and streaks of body fluid. It didn’t disgust her—she’d known him too long for that—but she did make a mental note to suggest that he change his gel.
“What does matter is that we’ve still not heard from Othello,” she said. “Any contact?”
“No, Mistress Maloney,” a shipborn controller said. “We’ve tried on all channels we know, sub-space and quantum fold, even traditional radio. There’s nothing.”
“Hmm.” Maloney frowned and scanned the screens, taking in all the data that had reached them so far from their advance armies. Successes were far in the majority. Things were going well, but the Othello still should have been in touch.
The Othello was their sister ship. They had parted company many years ago, on the same mission and general course, but approaching the Sphere via two different routes. That way, Maloney hoped, if something happened to one vessel, the other would still make it through. Until recently there had been periodic contact, so she knew that the Othello had fulfilled its mission as well as the Macbeth, up to a point.
They had hunted down and taken control of the old Fiennes ships, nurtured huge stores of Xenomorph eggs in order to impregnate the sleepers and give birth to armies. Then, at a pre-arranged time, they had turned their attention back toward the Human Sphere.
Beyond that, she knew nothing of the Othello. It was possible that the ship had met a bad end, just as the Hamlet had on the Founders’ original journey away from the Sphere, three centuries before. Space was filled with dangers, and traveling at such immense speeds held its own unique and mysterious hazards.
She cared, but not too much. Even without the Othello they would triumph. Her own true plan, constructed long ago and nurtured over time, involved only her ship.
Soon, her time would come.
7
JIANGO TANN
Space Station Hell
October 2692 AD
Jiango Tann was growing old, and Hell was his little slice of Heaven.
The origin of the station’s name had always amused Tann, not least because there were at least a dozen different stories about how the name had come to be. The one he believed—the tale generally accepted and most supported by solid and anecdotal evidence—concerned a woman named Maxella Murian May. Her name was outlandish, her story even more so.
She harked back to the past, when reputation had been important and exploration was still seen as a subjective, adventurous pastime for anyone with the hunger for discovery and the means to indulge that hunger. They were still around, these explorers, but as he’d grown older, Tann had come to see Weyland-Yutani’s growing and strengthening influence as a dampener of adventure. Exploration became a corporate endeavor, more concerned with monetary profit than a growth in knowledge. Adventure became a thing of the past.
His own story had a lot to do with that opinion, but Maxella Murian May’s tale began long before Tann was born.
Fifteen decades ago, Hell had gone by its original name of WayStation 14, a staging post for mining expeditions into the Scafell Minor system. Consisting of seven planets and more than forty moons, the only one officially named was LV-301. No life had been found in the system, and LV-301 itself was a barren rock notable for one thing—a large deposit of trimonite. This discovery had led Weyland-Yutani to launch several huge mining missions, and it had built and commissioned WayStation 14 in an orbit between Scafell’s third and fourth planets.
Crewed by over a hundred, the station had been vast—large enough to provide docking facilities for dozens of ships and storage for huge amounts of mining equipment and supplies. For over thirty years of industrialized mining on LV-301, it might have been one of the busiest places in the galaxy.
WayStation 14 had quickly adapted to the needs of miners. Though on Company missions funded by Company money, the miners were a tough, rough bunch, and very demanding. Spending up to a year at a time on and beneath the planet meant that their infrequent rest and recreation journeys to WayStation 14 were boisterous affairs. Gyms were converted to drinking dens, storage hangars became gambling centers and combat arenas, and male and female prostitution on board was rife. Though mining crews were always mixed, while on their infrequent rest periods they preferred to mix it up sexually with people not scarred by rock falls or grown pale through prolonged periods underground.
Weyland-Yutani still funded the station, but they had quickly lost control. WayStation 14 became its own beast. While the trimonite continued to flow the Company did not care, but after the last few tons were extracted and the mining operations began to wind down, a group of miners made an offer to the Company to administer the space station.
W-Y agreed. To decommission or move it would cost too much, and usually in cases like this they would either abandon the station or set it on a degrading orbit into the system’s sun. The deal set a precedent that over the following century saw many more space stations and ships falling into private hands. By then the Scafell Minor system had a decent-sized populatio
n on four worlds and a dozen moons. Where there were enough people, there was a call for what these ex-miners wanted to provide.
Maxella Murian May was one of the miners. Nicknamed MayDay—allegedly due to her voracious appetites for drink, food, and sex that left many exhausted and despairing people in her wake—she also had a sharp mind, and had always embraced the privateer’s outlook. She’d worked for the Company on LV-301 for two years, always knowing that the trimonite was running out and that the station would be up for grabs.
Three months after she and a consortium of other individuals took ownership, she unwittingly changed its name during the first of their broadcasts. Back then they were calling themselves the Private Club, but that name was destined to change.
“Come to see us, we’re always private at the Private Club,” the broadcast went. “Formerly a Weyland-Yutani mining post in the Scafell Minor System, we’re now a fun place to be. Forget the Company, come here for company like you’ve never had before. Everything you want, everything you need, everything you desire… all the good things they do in hell, without the eternal damnation.”
Seventeen days later the first indie ship arrived.
The crew spent a week on the station, and by the time they left it had been renamed Hell. The name stuck, but Hell quickly became something else. Not only a credit-spinning enterprise for May and her fellow ex-miners, it started to attract others who had become cynical about working for the Company. Indies, pirates, independent salvage crews, private mining enterprises, rich spacefarers on voyages of exploration, the lost and dispossessed found their way to Hell, and many ended up staying.
The original crew of a hundred, all long dead, would never have recognized their station which was now home to over two thousand people, with anywhere up to a thousand extra visitors at any given time. A rough place, it also maintained a sense of community that kept trouble mostly at bay. Hell was no longer simply a playground for those looking for illegal drugs, drink, and illicit sex—although of course, those were still to be found.
