“Wilks, there’s something floating next to the ship.”
“The alien?”
“No, it’s long gone. This looks like a contrail. Runs right toward the rear of the ship, but at an angle.”
“Stray vapor, maybe,” Wilks said. “From when we blew the aliens out. Or the dregs from your EVA lock-open.”
“I don’t think so. I can see some frozen air here and there. This looks like a jet trail. Real thin, but it seems to make a loop out in the distance. I can’t tell at this angle.”
“So it’s an anomaly. Forget it. Come inside.”
“I ought to go check it out, long as I’m here.”
“I said forget it.”
“Yeah, well, you say a lot of things, Wilks.”
“Billie. Maybe it’s alien piss. Or puke. It doesn’t matter.”
“Maybe. Maybe the other alien could pee hard enough to shove itself back to the ship.”
“Come on. The things aren’t that bright.”
“You ever hear of anything that could survive hard vac without a suit? That could pound on a deep-space ship from the outside when it didn’t have any air or protection from cold down around Absolute Fucking Zero? They might not be bright, but they die hard, Wilks.”
The com was silent.
“I’ll go see. Probably it’s not anything.”
“How many shots do you have left?” Bueller put in.
“Uh, actually, none.”
“Dammit, Billie—”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “I don’t have anything to shoot with, anyhow.” The carbine was gone. She couldn’t remember when she’d let it go.
“What are you gonna do if there is another one of those things there?” Wilks asked, “Insult its mother?”
“I’m just going to look. One thing at a time.”
Bueller started to leave his cradle. “Where are you going?”
“Outside.”
“Cancel that thought, mister. Not gonna happen.”
“Sergeant, if there’s another one of those things out there Billie won’t have a chance against it unarmed.”
“And you will? Last time you went up against these suckers you lost your ass, Bueller. And you are a bottle-bred marine and were armed.”
“Wilks—”
“Civilization may be down the tubes but you’re still a marine assigned to my command until you hear otherwise, ain’t that right, Bueller?”
“You know it is.”
“Then stay right where you are. We don’t know anything is out there and therefore Billie is not in any clear danger.”
Bueller bit down on his anger; Wilks could see him fight the desire to disobey the order. The programming won out. “All right.”
“Good boy. Now, see if you can figure out something we can do if she gets to a place she does need help.”
Billie walked down the rear of the ship until she was at the docking thruster. The gravity drives didn’t use this thing; they were tuned to waves that ran completely through the ship, as she understood it, but for close order drill, the ship had rockets for maneuvers. As long as the gravity drives were operating the rockets wouldn’t budge the vessel, that’s what Wilks had told her.
The main thruster was a hollow tube a good three meters across, and it went far enough in so the other end of it was in complete blackness. The only way she was going to see that far was to lean over the rim and use her helmet light. Which meant that if anything was in there, it was going to see her when she peeped over the edge.
She told Wilks and Mitch what she was going to do.
Her breath was loud in the suit, the no-fog plastic of the helmet’s faceplate was beaded with little drops of condensation, perfect, round spheres, unaffected by gravity, held together by surface tension.
“Okay. Here goes.”
Billie pressed herself flat against the ship, using her hands to keep her steady, her boots touching only at the tips of the toes. She edged forward and leaned over the rim of the thruster, the lip of which was some slippery ceramic material. Managed to keep her grip as she was looking into the black hole.
Nothing. Least not from this angle. She edged farther out, to give herself a better view, all the way to the back of the thrust tube.
The little pool of light from the helmet splashed on the smaller reaction tubes that formed the rocket’s spray controllers. Nothing. She started to relax.
Then she saw the alien. It was crouched against the reaction tubes, ready to spring. As if it had known she was coming.
“Oh, shit! It’s in the thruster!”
Billie scrabbled backward, trying to get back over the rim. Her gloved hands slipped on the ceramic liner. Her right boot came free of the ship.
“Turn over!” she yelled at herself. “Get your fucking boots down!”
The monster raised its head and seemed to smile at her. It crouched lower. It was going to spring, and if she wasn’t out of its way when it got here, it would catch her.
“Billie, get clear of the thruster!” Mitch yelled. “I’m going to fire it!”
“I’m trying!”
Time stretched, seconds became days, months, eons. Billie twisted, tried to put her foot down, but had nothing to shove against. She pulled on the umbilical. It was loose, it didn’t help.
“Billie!”
The alien sprang. It seemed all teeth and claws…
“Billie!”
In desperation, Billie realized she was trying to do the wrong thing. There wasn’t any gravity out here. She didn’t have to crawl backward on the ship, she just had to get out of the thing’s way. She was thinking in two dimensions, but now she had wings. She shoved, as if she were doing a push-up. Flew away from the ship at a right angle—
“I’m clear!”
Fire blossomed, yellow-orange heat and light that nearly opaqued her faceplate as the polarizers turned the plastic dark against the wash of brightness.
She imagined she could hear the alien scream as it pinwheeled away from the ship, wrapped in a mantle of burning fluids, cooking within its shell. She took joy in watching it roast. Found herself grinning wolfishly. Yes. Fry, you son of a bitch, fry.
“Billie?”
“Nice shot, Mitch. Score another one for the good guys.
“Now I’m coming in.”
5
Two days after Billie blasted the last alien into space Bueller picked up radio transmissions. The signals were on the military band and coded, so they didn’t know what was being said, but from the strength, they had to be close. Unfortunately, the ship did not have any transmitters they could use, only receivers.
It didn’t take Wilks long to figure out where the signals originated. “Hello,” he said. “Lookie here.”
Billie leaned over his shoulder as Wilks played with the computer screen. “Got us a planetoid. Not much bigger than a moon, but in direct orbit around the local primary. Been on the opposite side of the sun from us pretty much since we left the chambers, that’s why we couldn’t see it.”
Numbers crawled up the screen. Wilks did something and the tiny blotch expanded and took on a roughly spherical shape, overlaid with grid lines.
“Colonial Marine base?” Bueller said.
“Yeah, that’d be my guess. Inflate a few pressure domes, pump “em full of breathable, bury a couple gravity generators, and you got all the comforts of home. Provided you grew up in a barracks. Military has hundreds of these bases scattered around the galaxy. Or did have.”
“Is that where we’re going?” Billie asked.
“I don’t see anywhere else, kid. If these crappy range finders can be believed, we’ll be there in a couple more days.”
The three of them stared at the computer-augmented image. Billie wondered if they were thinking the same thing she was: Was this a place of refuge? Or were they leaping from the frying pan into the fire?
It looked as if they were going to find out soon.
These damned gravity drives were something, Wilks h
ad to admit. They were moving at speeds the old reaction ships couldn’t touch. As they approached the planetoid—it was about the same size as Terra’s moon—the constant drone of the engines shut down. The ship turned and began to retro, slowing their descent toward the only sizable chunk of real estate around for a hundred fifty million klicks. There was some rumble from the rockets, but compared to the thrum of the gravity drives, the ship was quiet. He had tuned the vibrations out, but now that they were still, he missed them.
“Might as well use what water we have left to clean up,” Wilks said. “We want to look good for the party.”
“Yeah, especially since they aren’t expecting company,” Billie said.
He shrugged.
Despite his banter, Wilks was nervous. They were a long way from what any of them knew as home. Their reception was questionable.
The ship fell toward the tiny planet. The gravity increased as the military-industrial-strength generators on the base enveloped them in their fields. Bueller shut off the ship’s faux gee and it got a little more comfortable.
The landing was rough; the ship fell straight in on its tail, the retros firing. Apparently it navigated some kind of gigantic hatched roof and wound up in a bay. The ship vibrated as compressors pumped air into the bay; when there was enough atmosphere, they could hear the machinery.
His back was still pretty tender, but Wilks could walk on his own. Bueller rode in his cradle strapped to a wheeled hand truck Billie had found. The aft cargo bay registered breathable air, and the three passengers made their way into it as the loading ramp was lowered from outside. The hydraulics whined as the back of the ship yawed wide and the ramp grated to a halt. It was cold, but the air felt fresher than what they’d been used to.
A quad of Colonial Marines in combat gear stood there, carbines held ready. At the sight of them, the four marines snapped their carbines up. Behind them, an officer sat in an electric cart, a fat cigar stuck in his mouth. He wore duty fatigues, and the gold braid on his visored cap identified him as a light general, a brigadier.
“At ease!” the general yelled. He stepped from the cart. He was medium height, but powerfully built, with the body of a weight lifter. He wore an opchan command headset, the bonephone and mouthpiece a single sculptured unit. He had an antique stainless 10mm auto pistol with full santoprene grips in a hip holster. The sleeves of his fatigues were rolled up to reveal several tattoos on his forearms: on the left, a rampant screaming eagle and chains; on the right, the Colonial Marine emblem and a dagger-and-banner. A rainbow holopatch shimmering on his left breast said T. Spears.
The general moved to stand in front of them. “I didn’t expect to see you ambulatory,” he said.
Wilks blinked. Nobody knew they were on the ship. If the general was expecting to see somebody not ambulatory, then he had to know about the human cargo.
“If you’re talking about the four people in the freezers, that isn’t us,” Wilks said. “Sir.”
The general raised one bushy eyebrow. “Say what, marine? Download it.”
“We just came along for the ride,” Wilks said.
The general nodded. “All right.” To the marines standing by, he said, “Maxwell, Dowling, go check on the cargo.”
“If you’re talking about the four men in the sleep chambers, you’re wasting your time,” Billie said. “They were infected by aliens.”
Billie wasn’t slow. Wilks realized she also understood what the officer meant.
“‘Were’ infected?”
“The aliens ate their way out. The men are dead.”
Wilks could see the general didn’t care a lizard’s ass about the men. The general frowned. “What about the aliens?”
Before Wilks could stop her, Billie said, “We killed them.”
The general’s jaw muscles bunched. Wilks thought he was going to bite his cigar in half. “What? You killed my specimens?”
It was Billie’s turn to blink. “Your specimens?”
“It was them or us,” Bueller put in.
The general stared down at Bueller. “listen, vat-scat, I’ve got a base full of people, I don’t need any more. What I needed were those Terran-bred specimens! I needed to have my R&D people studying possible mutations! There’s a war on, mister, in case you haven’t heard. You just fouled up a Priority One mission. I could have you shot for that.”
Wilks stared at the general.
He pulled the cigar from his mouth, tapped ash from it. “Put these three in isomed and scan them,” he said. “Maybe they’re infected and trying to hide it. We might salvage something yet.” He tapped the command headset. “Powell! Get down here, we got a snafu.”
The barrel of the carbine jabbed Wilks in his tender back. He fought the urge to spin and smash the marine who’d prodded him. He managed to keep a grip on himself. No point in getting blasted by one of his own after coming all this way. He’d go along. Maybe later he could figure out what the hell was what.
One of the marines pushed Bueller’s carriage, the other kept his weapon trained on Billie and Wilks. Billie didn’t understand what was going on. They went down a descending corridor. When they rounded the end, they were on the edge of a large room.
Billie gasped.
Against the far wall was a row of clear cylinders. The six tubes were four meters tall, perhaps two and a half meters in circumference. There was some kind of pale bluish, transparent liquid in the containers.
Each of the cylinders contained a full-size alien drone.
Billie found that she was digging her fingers into Wilks’s arm.
“Jesus,” Wilks said.
The marine with the carbine pointed at him said, “Not to worry, Sarge, those babies are in suspension. That’s fluropolymer fluid. They’re alive, but they ain’t going nowhere.”
Billie saw a dozen smaller containers lined up on a long table nearby. Each of those had one of the crablike alien hatchlings in it, ovipositors drooping limply under the fingerbonelike jointed legs. Several techs in osmotic clean suits stood or sat at the table. Billie, who had spent years in hospitals, recognized microscopes, surgical lasers, autoclaves, and other medical impedimenta.
Billie felt a wave of nausea. They were doing research on the aliens. Why? To learn how to kill them better?
That had to be it, didn’t it? Why else would they be doing it?
6
The forklift rolled across the floor, thick slunglas tires silent on the smooth sheetcrete. The powerful electric motor hummed louder as the driver slid the special hoop clamps around the specimen container and lifted it. Carefully—the driver knew that breaking a container was a shooting offense—she backed off slightly, then pivoted the fork and headed for the queen’s chamber.
Spears watched, nodding to himself as the specimen was carted away. The driver was good, she deftly avoided the hoses and power lines connected to the bases of the other containers in the vast storage room. Spears had more than a hundred of the alien drones undergoing suspension here, each of which had a complex chemical bath being pumped into it full-time. According the R&D scientists, the hypnotic chem flowing through the special drones should match their particular chemistry enough to affect them. To make them more amenable to outside suggestion.
Spears grinned, chewed on the end of his cigar. It was real tobacco, vat-grown and illegal as hell, but that didn’t mean shit. Out here, he was the law. The cigar wasn’t as good as those made from sun-raised and barn-dried leaf, but it was what he had. Oh, he still had six of the precious Jamaican Lonsdales left, maduros and dark as they came, each sealed in its glass tube of inert gas. But those were worth a fortune, he could get ten thousand credits apiece if he wanted to sell them.
He chuckled. As if money meant anything. Money was nothing, money was only a means to an end, the only reason you needed it at all was for supplies, equipment, to get things done. Here at Third Base, they didn’t even use the stuff. The troops took What they were given and liked it or lumped it. The cigars had come
from a vault in Cuba, a gift from a rich man who had been grateful to Spears for saving his ass in some dinky banana republic revolution. There had been eight of the valuable smokes. He’d smoked the first on the day he got his stars and command of Third Base. He’d smoked the second when his tame medicos had succeeded in bringing forth an alien queen and establishing her in a controlled hive. He planned to smoke the third after he won his first battle against the wild-strain aliens back on Earth.
Thomas A.W. Spears had plans, big plans, and they amounted to no less than the retaking of man’s homeworld, using the deadliest soldiers a man had ever commanded.
He turned and strode toward his office, trailing smoke as he walked. A military man was bred for war, and in his case, it was truer than usual. He’d been among the first to be incubated in an artificial womb—he proudly kept the middle initials he’d been given at his decanting signifying just that—and it had been on a marine base where the first live births of AW children occurred. He’d been raised in a creche with the other children, nine of them, and all but one had become Colonial Marines. The other one would have, if he hadn’t been killed in an accident when he was still a prepube. Sure, the bulge-brains had come up with androids later, but he wasn’t vat-scat, he was a real man, all his chromosomes in place, not a stray gene among “em. A man who knew what he could do. What he must do.
The general paused next to one of the specimen containers. Put his hands on the thick Plexiglas. It was cold to the touch. The alien inside didn’t move, but he imagined it could feel him, was aware of him, even in its suspended state. Mark me, Spears thought at it. I’m your master. You live or die at my whim. Obey and live, disobey and die.
He moved away from the container, took another look at the killing machine within. Hell of a soldier, this thing. Would destroy or die for its queen without hesitation. He nodded at the alien, then walked away.
He rounded the corridor’s end and marched to the small office from where he ran the base. Damned civilian authorities on Earth had bollixed it up, just like they always did. Tried to fight a forest fire with little buckets of water, tried to extinguish a raging conflagration with spit and prayer. The only way to kill a big fire was to use a bigger blaze. Burn its fuel, choke its oxy off, eat what it would eat and starve it. Sure, you could punch holes in the aliens with armor-piercers, could blow “em up with bombs, but that was wasteful. What better way to fight a beast than with another beast of equal ferocity? Something that could hunt the enemies down because it knew how they thought, because it was like them? Like a king snake” will kill a poisonous viper or tame dogs will track a wild animal, the solution to the problem was painfully obvious. He hadn’t believed that at first, until he got to know how the aliens operated. Now he was the strongest believer. The powers-that-were had been eliminated; now, it was up to him to carry on alone. No problem.
[Aliens 02] - Nightmare Asylum Page 4
