Alien--Invasion

by Tim Lebbon

  For many, Hell had become a safe haven, a destination rather than a waystation. Some had come to call it home.

  Jiango Tann and his wife Yvette were two of those people. They had arrived five years earlier, after fleeing halfway across the Sphere, and it was a long time since they had felt so at peace.

  * * *

  “There’s more today,” Jiango said. Yvette groaned something from beside him, rolling over and opening one eye. “Morning,” he said.

  “Is it?”

  “According to the clock.” He was sitting up in bed with an old datapad on his lap. They had owned it for almost as long as they’d lived on Hell, and over that time Yvette had adapted and upgraded it so that it was probably now up to military standard. Quite brilliant. Quite illegal. That pretty much summed up their whole existence.

  “Wake me for breakfast,” Yvette said.

  “Your turn to cook it.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah. I bought bacon yesterday. Four rashers, bread roll, rat sauce for me, please.” Rat sauce tasted exquisite. No one knew what was in it, apart from the man who made it, Marx Kellant, and it had taken on some random name because, for all anyone knew, it was made of space rat.

  “Ugh.”

  “And coffee.” Jiango worked the datapad, sweeping pages aside, accessing quantum folds that should have been secure. Yvette had written a protocol that took him in under a different identity every single time, kicking his location around so that even if his hack was noted, its source would be untraceable. So she said. He trusted her. The station had yet to be taken out by a Marine nuke.

  Not that it wouldn’t happen… eventually.

  “I’m so comfortable.”

  “Hmm.” And then there was another one. Just a shred of communication—three errant words plucked from a secure quantum fold… “morphs dropped from”…

  “Go on, make breakfast.”

  “Hmm,” Jiango said again. He zeroed in on the message source, refined its frequency and depth, expanded the search grid on either side from seconds to a minute. It would take a few moments to analyze such a wide data range. He tapped the screen, impatient.

  A hand crept across his thigh.

  “I’ll give you a hand job,” Yvette said lazily, stretching beneath the covers.

  He looked at her, raised an eyebrow, considered.

  The datapad chimed… and what he saw caused him to sit up straight, knocking Yvette’s hand aside and startling her properly awake.

  “Look at this,” he said, offering her the pad. “Look!” It was the most complete transmission he’d yet found, and it confirmed to him that something important was happening.

  down from the ship disgorging a wave of

  Xenomorphs before peeling away and

  “What the hell does that mean?” Yvette asked.

  “I’m not sure, but it follows on from the increased activity over the past few days, and those snippets of transmissions I’ve managed to pull.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning I think the Colonial Marines are at war with someone, or something.”

  “Xenomorphs?”

  The word chilled them both. Jiango actually felt goose bumps, even though they kept their suite warm. Yvette sat up and moved closer to him, her familiar warmth and smell comforting.

  “How far away is this?” Yvette whispered, voicing a natural concern. Even in the depths of space, a little less than a light year from the nearest drophole and twenty light years from the Outer Rim, danger could be close.

  “Not far from the Outer Rim,” Jiango said. “Where anything can happen.” It was a saying they used a lot, a familiar part of their marital language that others might not understand. They had been in space for a long time. They had seen a lot, suffered so much. “Anything” had happened to them.

  Their son had been dead for over ten years.

  Their only child, Christopher Tann had fulfilled his childhood ambition of becoming a pilot by the age of twenty, and achieved a commission into the Colonial Marines at twenty-three. Eight years later he was a lieutenant, and that was when he grew far more secretive about what he was doing. They saw him every couple of years, having based themselves on an asteroid community a light year from Addison Prime, one of the major Colonial Marine bases in the sector. While he made a name for himself as a pilot in the 6th Spaceborne, Yvette and Jiango pursued their interest in alien intelligences.

  In particular, they studied the Xenomorph. There were many who considered the beasts as little more than animals, but the Tanns believed that they possessed a complexity of thought and behavior that research had barely touched. Just because they did not resemble humans in societal structure and dexterous intelligence didn’t mean that they weren’t on an equal level. The Tanns frequently accessed old research into a species long-since extinct on Earth, the dolphin. It had possessed an ability to communicate, the gift of empathy, and an intelligence close to that of a human, and they could draw many parallels between dolphins and Xenomorphs.

  True, there were no accounts of dolphins pursuing and slaughtering humans wherever and whenever the species drew close, but there was an irony inherent to their comparisons—dolphins had also been used by the military.

  Because the species fascinated them, and they had possessed limited resources, the Tanns’ fascination required proper funding.

  As a result, they worked for a company that worked for the Company.

  A great, expansive tree of organizations began with Weyland-Yutani as the main trunk, branched into a network of sub-companies with ever more nebulous relationships, and finally their small concern was a green shoot on one of the outer limbs. Nevertheless, funding found its way through, and they believed that their organization’s directors somehow reported directly to Weyland-Yutani. Yet while they divulged some of their research, easily as much again was kept to themselves. By mutual agreement, from the beginning of the Tanns’ employ the husband and wife team had been using the oldest storage media known to mankind.

  Their brains.

  While they pursued their interests, Jiango performed more covert research into his son’s unit, postings, and what missions he embarked upon. With Yvette’s technical expertise he could go deep, and they were fastidious about covering their tracks.

  When he realized that Chris was working for ArmoTech, the bottom fell out of their world.

  Jiango and Yvette were explorers. They traveled, but most of their exploring was in the realm of knowledge. Space was a wondrous place to them. There were dangers out there for sure, but while most people saw species such as the Xenomorph and Yautja as terrors to be avoided, the Tanns wanted to know them better.

  Chris was seeking to make weapons out of such wonderful discoveries.

  Devastated, distraught, wondering how they had gone so wrong and their son had come to work for such an organization, they’d had to keep their discoveries quiet. If they confronted him, he would ask how they knew. ArmoTech was extremely covert, and knowing that he worked for them would prove that his parents had been snooping into Weyland-Yutani and Colonial Marine matters.

  They had no wish to end up in prison, or worse. But way beyond this, they had a duty to their son. They decided that the next time they had contact with him, they would reveal that they knew.

  They never saw him again.

  Seven months later they received news from a somber but impersonal Marine major, telling them that their son had been killed on active service. That he was brave and dedicated, he had died doing what he loved, and the Colonial Marines would forever be in their debt. They would receive compensation in the form of his pension lump sum, please provide preferred account details…

  The grief had been crippling. Yet almost instantly, so had the need to know. Day and night they had searched, and eventually they’d discovered that Chris had been killed on a mission to hunt and gather Xenomorph samples from a derelict ship that had been discovered adrift in a remote star system half the sphere awa
y. A whole Marine contingent had been sent, along with advisors and so-called experts, and every one of them had died. The Marine craft was destroyed, the derelict still adrift, and perhaps somewhere on board the body of their son lay rotting.

  Yvette wanted to leave it alone, let it lie. Their son was dead and now they only had each other. If they pursued the matter and revealed what they knew, they’d be charged with espionage and imprisoned separately, and she could not imagine her and Jiango being torn apart. They might never see each other again. After losing so much, she told Jiango, she couldn’t bear that idea.

  * * *

  It was ironic, then, that it was Yvette who eventually broke and tried to make the news public. Planning a widespread release of the information, she demanded transparency in the Company’s Xenomorph program, suggesting that their experiments were putting humanity at risk, and that their covert projects and development of alien-inspired weaponry needed to be made public.

  She named one of the Thirteen, Gerard Marshall, as the perpetrator of these crimes, suggesting that as director of ArmoTech he had to take responsibility. His orders had resulted directly in the death of her son, as well as dozens of other Colonial Marines.

  For a while they became notorious.

  The people standing up to the Company.

  The radicals.

  Then came the attempt on their lives. A ship venting to space, a catastrophic depressurization, six dead and dozens injured. The source had been a drive shaft close to their cabin on the passenger craft on which they were traveling. They had only survived because they’d gone to the mess for an unusually late meal.

  It was an accident, of course.

  That was how it was reported, and in more innocent circumstances they might have believed the same. But the Company had already been breathing down their necks, suggesting that they were paranoid and misinformed, then becoming threatening when they asked how the Tanns had come into ownership of classified information.

  They had gone on the run and ended up, eventually, in Hell.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Yvette said, standing from their bed and tugging on some clothes. “Whatever’s happening, it’s a long way away from us. It doesn’t matter.”

  The more she claimed that it did not matter, the more it did.

  * * *

  The Tanns lived on one of Hell’s larger docking arms, their cabin a collection of small rooms that provided a comfortable place to retreat to while being away from the hubbub of the station’s central core. It was a half-hour walk down the arm to the core, or a three-minute elevator ride. They usually chose to walk. Well into their seventies, the Tanns were fit and healthy, and looking forward to another four decades of life at least.

  What they would do with those years was often the subject of discussion. They had been on Hell for almost a decade, and both knew they could not remain there forever.

  In the vestibule at the base of the docking arm, they paused at one of the big holo screens that showed a 24/7 status of Hell and its occupants. There were the semi-permanent occupants like them, given resident status by Hell’s station council and allowed to travel to most areas of the vast structure. Then there were the visitors, who were invariably welcomed with open arms, but monitored for the duration of their stay. The holo screens provided information concerning new arrivals and those who had departed, and they were always an interesting read.

  Today, Jiango read the screen with greater focus than usual.

  “Autonomous Exploratory Salvagers,” Yvette said. “Four crew.”

  “Indies or pirates,” Jiango said.

  “Yeah.” Yvette waved at the screen and images of the crew appeared close to them. “They even have a uniform.”

  Jiango grunted, but he was looking elsewhere, scanning the other arrivals from the eight days since the last time they had been down here. There were six. Four of them were from in-system, the other two having journeyed from the nearby drophole over the last couple of months. One was the pirate ship, the other an independent mining expedition planning to search for precious minerals on one of the system’s many moons.

  No one to concern them. Yet he was still concerned.

  “Come on,” Yvette said. “Since you wouldn’t cook me breakfast, even though I offered you a hand job, you can at least buy it for me.”

  He relented and they headed through the vestibule and into the station’s core. As ever the place was abuzz, the wide plazas awash with people, musicians playing for credits, a varied soup of humanity ebbing and flowing and sometimes simply sitting to observe. They went to their favorite cafe and ordered food and coffee, then sat and watched in companionable silence. It was only after their order came and Jiango poured his coffee, that he said what was on his mind.

  “I think we should move on.”

  “That’s a bit out of the blue.” Yvette paused with her coffee mug raised halfway to her mouth. The sound of a hundred voices washed over them, but for a while a heavy silence seemed to hem them in.

  “It might be dangerous,” he said.

  “Because of what you saw? That’s a long way away, and we have no idea what it really is.” She put her mug down. “We should stop snooping. No good can come of it.”

  “We’ve talked about leaving before,” Jiango persisted, trying to justify his fears.

  “A hundred times… but aren’t we happy here?” Her eyes clouded a little, because they both knew the truth, and Jiango did not need to reply. They could never be truly happy ever again.

  “Just a thought,” he said, relaxing against the back of his chair. “It’s got me…” He waved his hand. It’s got me agitated, he thought. I know it’s never over, not with them. Other sons and daughters are being sent to die at the Company’s behest.

  He fucking hated them. But the hate of one man meant nothing.

  * * *

  They spent the day swimming, walking in Hell’s green dome that had been added only a couple of decades before, and watching a holo in one of the several theaters. They bumped into a few people they knew and chatted for a while, and also talked with a couple they didn’t know, rich travelers undertaking a forty-year journey out from Sol to the Outer Rim.

  It was while they were wandering the core hub, considering where to have a meal, that a familiar sound sang in. A ship was approaching Hell, and the chiming meant that it was as yet unidentified. Regular visitors were issued with beacons. This ship was unknown.

  Jiango and Yvette made their way to one of the holo screens and joined a small crowd watching for news. It was curiosity more than anything, the thought of new visitors causing ripples of excitement.

  None of them seemed afraid.

  The chiming ended. The pause was comfortable, the hubbub of conversation good-humored. Jiango heard a child laughing. A man coughed. In front of him a woman whispered into a man’s ear, and he turned to her and smiled.

  Then a more frantic buzzing began, and a red glow burst out from the holo screen’s surround.

  “Oh, no,” Yvette said as the whole image was replaced with a long-range scan of the approaching ship. It was sleek and sharp, spiked with weaponry, heavy at the rear, and it possessed the familiar blister-skin of a cloaking shield. “Yautja.”

  People started running. Some were heading for home, a few sprinting for the walkways and elevators leading to various docks.

  Jiango and Yvette hurried toward their own docking arm, a fifteen-minute walk away. They passed a small group of indies marshalling close to one of the hub’s main plazas, and some voluntary militia dashed by, looking around as if they were searching for someone to give them orders. Hell’s defenses consisted of an indie unit of thirty troops on retainer and some militia, most of whom were more used to dealing with internal squabbles than threats from outside.

  “What the hell is a Yautja ship doing here?” Yvette asked. “I thought there was a ceasefire. It was all so far away.”

  “See?” Jiango said as they entered the docking arm. They queued for the ele
vator to their suite. “Dangerous.”

  8

  LILIYA

  Approaching Space Station Hell

  October 2692 AD

  After fifty-one days traveling with Hashori of the Widow Clan, Yautja warrior and perpetrator of torture, Liliya might have expected to know her better. But it had been a long, quiet, exasperating seven weeks.

  The Yautja ship was very small, with hardly any room to move about. Hashori, all nine feet of her—Liliya could still only assume the Yautja’s sex—remained strapped in her flight seat for the bulk of their journey, not sleeping and only eating on rare occasions. She did not wear her helmet or armor, but kept her battle spear close at hand. She seemed immune to boredom. Liliya knew that some Yautja were far, far older even than her, and perhaps with age came a more sedate appreciation of the passage of time.

  For long periods, Liliya retreated to a small cubby close to the engine pod. There, the android did her best to treat her own wounds.

  Hashori had tortured her, recognizing her as of the same group responsible for shattering attacks upon Yautja interests across this sector of space. The torture had been imaginative and unrelenting, until their ship the Zeere Za was attacked by the Rage general Alexander and his forces, in pursuit of Liliya. At that moment, Liliya knew that her continued existence was balanced between life and death. But Hashori had chosen to believe her, and they had escaped only an hour before the Zeere Za had been destroyed.

  In her veins, Liliya carried the same tech that enabled the Rage to control their Xenomorph army. In her mind, she bore the truth of the Rage’s intentions, their plans, their capabilities and numbers. That was the only reason Hashori had allowed her to live—the chance for revenge.

  At the beginning of their journey the Yautja had seemed willing to communicate. Liliya sat beside her on the small flight deck, a place obviously designed for one, not two, and they conversed using Liliya’s basic grasp of the Yautja language.