by Tim Lebbon
“We need to move,” he said. “Can’t stay in one place too long. Sara, what’ll happen now that the birthing’s begun?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“You don’t know?” Durante asked.
“I’m a medic,” she said. “I didn’t deal with the nurseries. I hardly ever even saw them.”
“We can assume the ship’s crawling with little baby Xenos,” Lieder said. “So the General will want to do whatever needs doing to get them under his control.”
“They already are,” the man said. No one had even asked his name, and he hadn’t offered it.
“How?” Mains asked.
“The queen is genetically modified with the Touch.”
“What’s that?”
“The technology that links them telepathically to their general. Every egg she lays, every facehugger, every infant Xenomorph is already under its general’s control.”
“You… have a queen?” Mains asked.
“Not on board. Maloney had one on Macbeth, and until we parted ways there were regular shipments of eggs across to Othello.”
“A regular production line,” Lieder said.
“We need to time this right,” Durante said. “How far to the docking bay from here?”
“Depends which one you landed at,” Sara said.
“The one with an open fucking door!” Hari said. She moved toward the shipborn, drawing her combat knife. “I don’t trust you. Either of you.”
“Then you’re a fool,” Sara said.
“Listen, once we leave here and head for the docking bay—” Mains began, but then their ears were filled with a transmission from the ship. An agonized scream, rising, wavering, then being cut off. Something wet, tearing. A hiss.
“Bekovich!” Durante said. “What’s happening?”
“Something got on board!” Bekovich shouted. “Something in the—” His words were swallowed by the sound of gunfire.
“Who the hell’s shooting?” Durante shouted. They all knew what the results of gunfire might be in a ship as small and enclosed as the Navarro.
Mains’s stomach sank, and he felt sick.
They heard the unmistakable sound of a Xenomorph’s wild shriek.
“L-T, there are two of them, I’m coming in to—” A wet, meaty thud. Something sharp scraped against metal. Someone whimpered, muttering rapidly, their words lost to the sounds of violence. Then an explosion slammed through their headsets. A loud roaring followed, rapidly diminishing to dreadful, painful silence.
“Decompression,” Hari said. “Someone let off a plasma grenade.” She shook her head.
“Bekovich!” Durante shouted. When he saw Mains looking at him, he glanced away, knowing it was hopeless and that he had to take control. Just for a moment, Durante looked much smaller and lighter than he was, grief curling around him and crushing him down. Then he straightened and faced them all.
“Hari, Lieder, guard the doors. Moran, check for any other ways in here.”
“Eddie,” a voice said. Mains held his breath. It was the Navarro’s computer.
“Spike,” Durante said.
“Eddie, it’s not looking very good out here.”
“So tell me.”
“The crew are all dead. In the chaos, a plasma grenade was detonated, and the Navarro has suffered total decompression. There were three Xenomorphs on board. They’re dead too. They seemed to melt down when they were killed. Their blood is everywhere, and it’s eating the ship. There’s nothing I can do.”
“Spike, can you bring the ship in, land it in the bay you recently took off from?”
“There’s nothing I can do,” Spike said again. “Controls have been badly damaged, relay nodes are smashed, and the acid is… it’s damaged the warp core and…”
It wasn’t often that a computer spoke with anything approaching real emotion. Spike sounded scared, and it reminded Mains of Frodo, his computer on the Ochse that had given them as long as was possible before its drive failed and exploded.
“Core stabilizers are melting. Navarro is about to drop out of warp.”
They all knew what that meant. Dropping out of warp in such an uncontrolled manner would smash the ship into a billion pieces.
“Are you sure you can’t dock?” Durante said. “You have to try.”
For a few long seconds, Spike did not reply. Then it said, “Oh, dear.” A moment later, silence fell, and the Navarro was dust.
The marines and the two remaining shipborn stood in stunned silence.
“Well,” Lieder said, “it looks like we’re stuck without a ship again, Johnny.”
“Getting to be a habit,” he said.
“We usually get rescued.”
“We just listened to our friends dying!” Hari shouted. She went for Lieder, but Durante held her back.
“Sorry,” Lieder said. “Sorry.”
15
JIANGO TANN
Space Station Hell
November 2692 AD
“It’s time to see past our hate,” Yvette Tann said. “This is bigger than all of us. Bigger than anything.”
“I know that,” Jiango said. He was tired, sad, frustrated. Terrified. “I just wish none of this had come here.”
Gently Yvette touched his face. They had always been a tactile couple, more so since their son had died. He sometimes thought they were constantly reassuring themselves that the other was still there.
They were sitting in Bailey’s, one of the bars in Hell’s big central core, and probably the hub of the whole station. Bailey’s was spread over five levels with three bars on each, a brewing room, several restaurants, a holo deck, a gaming room, and four dance floors. As usual they’d chosen Floor Four, ostensibly the quietest of the bars but still a buzzing place, floors vibrating with the pulse of music from below. There was no day or night in Bailey’s, no closed, only open. One day each year the whole establishment shut its doors for maintenance and cleaning, but otherwise it was maintained floor by floor, day by day.
Its clientele reflected the wide range of people who lived on Hell or merely visited, once in their lives or multiple times. A sign above one bar said, “We Serve Pirates and Popes,” and although the pope claim was hard to substantiate, many were happy to believe it. Some people spent most of their life in Bailey’s. A few of Hell’s residents had been conceived there, and more than a few had died there. It was one of Jiango’s favorite places in the whole Human Sphere.
Today it buzzed with excited conversation. There was a Yautja on board! Tall tales were being spun, animated discussions held, opinions mooted, fighting talk talked. News of the Yautja incursion had reached the station, and there were a couple of Hell-dwellers who had apparently lost family members in some of the attacks, but most people were excited rather than scared. Everyone was trying to figure out what Hashori’s appearance on their station meant.
Most residents knew Jiango Tann as one of the regular council members, and he’d already had to fend off several interested parties.
“There’s an announcement coming at midday,” he’d told them all. Now they were five minutes from midday, and every holo screen in Bailey’s was tuned to the Council’s main channel. Tann had declined the invitation to make the announcement himself. He had enough on his mind without having to make himself presentable for a public broadcast.
“Come on,” he said, grabbing Yvette’s hand. “There’s something we need to discuss, but not here.”
“We haven’t finished our wine.”
“I don’t want any more. I need a clear head.” And so do you, he thought, but his wife had already picked up on his meaning. Fear clouded her expression. She squeezed his hand, as if in confirmation of what he had to ask her. In truth she probably already knew, and that was why he loved her so much.
“Where do you want to go?” she asked, and the question brought him up short. For the moment he kept up the pretense, feigning to have misunderstood her question.
“Let’s go to the g
ardens,” he said. “We haven’t been there for a long time.”
Yvette sighed heavily, and together they left Bailey’s just as the holo screens lit up. Outside they crossed the main plaza and headed toward the entrance to the green dome. There were six diamond tunnels stretching upward from Hell’s main body to the green dome moored five hundred yards out. Three of them could be walked, while the other three were designed for transport of produce and water.
Halfway up the tunnel, Tann paused and leaned against the clear wall. He was panting hard, wishing—and not for the first time—that they could reduce the artificial gravity a little. Age was creeping up on him, and climbing the long, curving staircases was hard work.
“Just take a look at that,” Yvette said. She was always the one to see wonder in things, and she had long ago taught Jiango never to take anything for granted. Indeed, this view always took his breath away.
Hell was in geostationary orbit several hundred miles from LV-301, the unnamed planet that had once been mined by workers dropping down from the station. That was before the station had been renamed Hell. It spun around its central axle, the spin creating the artificial gravity. Newer stations and ships had gravity generators designed around a core centrifuge, but Hell was of a much older and more basic design.
As they watched, LV-301 appeared above the station and slowly moved into sight, its pink and red storms a palette of color set aflame by the Scafell system’s sun. It was majestic and beautiful, and the colors kissed the diamond enclosure, refracting red-toned rainbows, the beams slowly dropping as the station turned.
LV-301 had a circle of pale rings, the remnants of an asteroid that had been smashed to smithereens a billion years before. In the station’s early life as WayStation 14, a few expeditions had ventured across the rings to search for precious minerals, but those found had been much too difficult and expensive to harvest. Now, the rings were objects of wonder, and Hell undertook a twice-yearly festival when they reached their northern and southern zeniths. They caught the sunlight now and glimmered in the darkness, jewels set into the landscape of infinity.
It was beautiful and mind-blowing, and Tann thought he and Yvette were of an age to appreciate that. Sometimes younger people seemed to take such sights for granted. For them the future was long and the darkness far away. A sense of mortality gave such sights an element of the sublime.
“They want it to be you,” Yvette said, and it was a statement more than a question. “The Council wants you to take the android and the Yautja and hand them to the Company.”
“No,” Tann said. “They want it to be us.”
Yvette smiled at him sadly. “At least we won’t be apart.”
“We never would,” he said. “If it was just me, I’d have said no.”
“But since it’s both of us, you said yes? Without asking me?” Her voice had taken on a harsh edge that he recognized all too well.
“Asking you is what I’m doing now.” He paused, looked up, and said, “Come on.” They climbed three more staircases toward the next elevator point. When the doors opened a few people came out, nodding a casual greeting. Tann had seen them before, but they were like many people on Hell—passing acquaintances. He couldn’t be friends with everyone.
In the elevator he leaned in close and kissed her cheek.
“You remember?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said. “You remind me often enough.” She was only pretending to be angry. On another world, far away and many years ago, they’d been trapped in a similar elevator when the station’s power had gone down. They’d made love, hardly caring if the power came back and the doors opened, revealing them to anyone waiting to board. Such events made up the tapestry of a relationship.
“Pity it’s an express elevator.”
“Fifteen seconds would be long enough,” she said.
“You hurt me, Yvette.”
The doors opened, and they walked toward the security gate. Two dome employees scanned the chips in their wrists and waved them on.
“The blood roses are in full bloom right now,” one said.
That gave the Tanns a destination.
* * *
Blood roses were used for many purposes, chief among them a medicine that could temper the dizzying effects of space sickness. Their stems were churned and used to fertilize the next crop, petals were shipped down to the Bailey’s best restaurant to spice various foods, and their aroma was fed into the station’s life support systems, offering an occasional subtle hint on staid, bland air. That they were also beautiful to behold made the blood rose fields a favorite place to visit for many of Hell’s residents.
“So what’s the plan?” Yvette asked.
“Really?”
“Oh, Jiango.” She sighed, and he heard every sadness they’d ever experienced in that sound. Sometimes it was as if their son was always there with them, in each word spoken and every move made. Silent, unseen, he haunted their lives, and they wouldn’t have it any other way. “If we could stay here and grow old together, I’d be more than happy with that, but I’ve always known that would never happen. Not with you and your sense of adventure. I’m amazed we’ve been here as long as we have, to be honest, much as I love the place. So if we are destined to leave, I’d rather us leave together, to hopefully do something good.”
“You never cease to amaze me,” Tann said. He meant it. Yvette was an amazing woman, and in his infrequent conversations with whatever his God might have become, he often thanked Him for such a blessing.
“So…” she said again.
“The plan,” Tann said. “That’s the interesting part. The plan is to hire a ship, and a crew, and get the woman and the Yautja into Company hands as soon as possible.”
“Why hire a ship when the Yautja already has one?”
“Because they’ve already had a couple of near misses,” Tann said. “They’re being chased by a Rage army, and no one really knows whether they’re still being followed. Could be it’s the Yautja ship they’re tracking. If that’s the case…” He looked up through the sectional dome at the deep darkness beyond, the starscape shifting as the ship slowly turned. Far away lay the nearest drophole, and from what Liliya had told them, an army might be flying through there at any moment. An army the likes of which no one on Hell had ever seen.
The idea that they might come here was awful.
“If that’s the case,” Yvette said, “it’s all the more reason to get the Yautja ship away from here.”
“That’s the other part of the plan,” he said. “Trouble is, the Yautja’s not too keen on the idea of separating from its vessel.”
“That thing makes me cringe,” Yvette said, and she shivered against him.
“Yet it seems intent on remaining with Liliya,” Tann said. “Even though it’s responsible for those wounds and scars she carries, there’s some sort of loyalty thing going on between them.”
“Why here?” Yvette asked, expecting no answer. Tann knew what she meant. Hell was a nice place, people here kept themselves to themselves, and they’d existed without any serious trouble for a very long time.
It was almost as if all the trouble had been saving itself for now.
* * *
Bailey’s was the best place to find a ship, too. Two days following the Council meeting he left Yvette in their rooms to begin packing. Tann knew that the first things she’d gather would be the mementos of their son’s short life, and he found it too painful to look at these objects, even now.
They had the commemorative cap from his passing-out parade with the Marines, the first pair of shoes he’d worn as a baby, and several recorded messages he’d sent them from places far away across the Sphere. Although he’d been delighted at becoming a Marine, he’d also been keen to keep in contact with his parents, and eager to visit them every couple of years, if his missions allowed. As time went on he’d seen them less and less, but they still held memories of those visits, clear and close.
While Yvette ga
thered the detritus of their family life, Jiango Tann had tasked himself with sourcing the fastest and most appropriate ship for their mission. He’d already perused a manifesto of ships and crews currently docked on Hell. There were the craft that used the station as a permanent base, and he knew most of them quite well. Of the nine ships, he wasn’t sure any of them was really suited to such a journey. A couple of old tugs, an in-system cruiser, three ex-mining vessels, and some private ships too small and slow to undertake such a treacherous voyage.
Even the decommissioned Colonial Marine frigate wasn’t suitable. Used by the station’s indies, it was more than a hundred years old. It had an outdated warp drive and several ongoing mechanical problems that plagued its core. Its computer was notoriously cranky, only answering to the name Al and calling every crew member, no matter what their name or sex, Dave.
That left the complete strangers who were visiting Hell. One of the mining ships was a possibility, because it was modern and fast and specifically designed for frequent drophole travel. The one that caught his attention was the Satan’s Saviour. Aside from the colorful name—curiously apt for where it had come to rest, for a time—it looked to be the sort of ship and crew he wanted.
They called themselves “autonomous exploratory salvagers.” Some might have viewed them as indies, but in reality they were probably pirates, and as with all good pirates, Bailey’s Bottom Bar was their favorite haunt. Not only was it on the lowest level of the establishment, it also serviced what some might view as the basest desires.
Its two dance floors were constantly abuzz with exotic dancers of both sexes, greased flesh catching poor lighting, pulsing music vibrating through the metal-decked floors. Drinks stations served some of the roughest brews from Bailey’s brewery, as well as selling booze imported by some of the visiting ships, and in the darker rooms at the back, private exchanges of credits, illegal substances, and bodily fluids were commonplace.
