The silence began, stretched too long. He broke it, finally. “They don’t have an AP vat-works here, this is the best they can do.” Another moment stretched, a spiderweb made of silken time hit by an insect in slow motion. “You okay?”
“Now that you ask, no. My homeworld is in ruins, my love life is for shit, I’m stuck on a military base with a guy who thinks he can keep monsters in a kennel like pets. The galaxy is going to hell in a hearse, Mitch, or hadn’t you noticed?”
She turned away, so she wouldn’t have to look at him.
“Billie, I’m sorry.”
“Why? None of it is your fault, except the love life part. In the grand cosmic scheme of things, that doesn’t count for a whole lot anyhow. Forget it.”
“Billie “What, Mitch?” She spun around and glared at him. “What are you going to do about it? Did the technicians hide a nice little expandable dick in that thing?” She pointed at the exoframe. “Pump it up and it stays hard all night?”
He blinked. Raised one hand, started some gesture, then dropped it. Shook his head. Turned and walked away. The quiet whine of the hydraulics grew quieter, the thumps of the pseudopods faded away.
Billie sighed and it turned into a sob. Oh, man. She’d stepped over the line. Leapt over it like she was wearing rockets. She’d wanted to hurt him and she had. They apparently didn’t teach him how to fight when it came to emotional stuff and she fought dirty, going for the throat. Oh, man. How could she do that?
How, came the little voice from deep within her mind, how could he make love to you, make you fall in love with him and not tell you he was an android?
Was there any doubt about whose sin was the greater one here?
Billie took the tablet the medic had given her, swallowed it dry, and fell on the bed. Pulled the flat and hard pillow over her head. Life was so unfair. What an original thought that was.
With the crawler docked, the three marines exited and found themselves in the antechamber of the air plant. The locks were coded but some helpful civilian had scribbled the admit number over the pad.
“Christo, what a bunch of fuck-offs,” Renus said.
“It’s not like they’re gonna get a lot of company out here, now is it?” Magruder said as he punched in the code.
The inner lock slid open and the three padded inside. Once the door sealed behind them, they removed their helmets.
“They might not take too well to visitors waving guns,” Peterson said.
“Yeah, well, until we know which way the hydrogen fuses, I’ll feel a lot better holding on to mine.” He waved his carbine. An armed marine should be worth thirty unarmed civilian air farmers.
“If they give us any flak, we go to plan B—the shuttle,” Magruder said.
“Will that thing really get us anywhere else?”
“It got the farmers here, didn’t it?”
“Yeah, but who’ll fly it? Not you.” That from Renus.
“Whoever flew it here,” Magruder said. “We’ll make him a reasonable offer.” He patted his own carbine.
Peterson snickered.
The corridor was wide, dark, with high ceilings. The lighting was bad.
“Spooky in here,” Peterson said. “And hotter than the Devil’s dick, too.”
“Some side effect of the gas generators,” Magruder said.
“Who made you an expert on this shit?” Renus said.
Their footsteps echoed as the trio walked down the corridor.
“Where the fuck is everybody?” Peterson said.
“Maybe they’re having a party,” Renus said. “An orgy. I sure could use a little pussy right now myself.”
“Little is right,” Magruder said. “Hell, you couldn’t make a mouse groan.”
“Hey, fuck you.”
“Like I said, with what? Way I hear it, you have to rent a microscope to find it when you want to piss.”
Peterson laughed, and Magruder chuckled at his own joke. They were feeling better, to judge from the banter. They’d made it to safety, the general hadn’t stomped them flat on the way. If the civilians didn’t cooperate, fuck “erri. They could steal their transport and full-wing it to worlds elsewhere.
“What’s that on the wall?” Peterson said.
“What? Where?”
Renus tapped Magruder on the shoulder with his carbine. “Over there, to the left.”
The three men moved.
“Why the hell don’t they have any lights in here? Christo, it’s like a tomb.”
Magruder pulled his flashlight and pointed it at the wall.
The circle of light thrown by the bright halogen lamp showed a convoluted and ridged overlay on the wall, grayish, like flattened loops of intestine.
“Some kind of sculpture?” Renus said. . “Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck!”
Renus and Magruder turned to look at Peterson. “What?” Magruder demanded.
“I—it’s—I’ve seen this shit before!”
“So?”
“When—when I was on guard duty at the queen’s chamber.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Renus wanted to know.
“The fucking alien queen’s chamber! This shit is all over the wall in her chamber!”
Magruder shone his light farther along the corridor’s wall. The stuff continued, spread so it covered the entire wall from the floor to as far up as the light would shine, all the way to the ceiling.
“Ahh!”
Both Renus and Magruder spun, their carbines pointed at the third man.
“What?!”
Peterson wiped something from his face, a clear, slimy goo.
“What the hell is that?” Renus asked.
Peterson looked up at the ceiling.
Renus and Magruder looked up, too.
11
The miracle of modern chemistry failed to put Billie to sleep. She added to the medicine the relaxation drill she’d learned in the hospital but after three rounds of pleading for her muscles to relax she was still awake. Mitch had gone, where she didn’t know. And she didn’t care.
Right.
Fuck this.
Billie stood, exhausted but past the point where she could drop off. Washed her face and looked at herself in the small mirror over the basin. Her image stared back, hollow-eyed, her muscles taut with strain. When Wilks had broken her out of the hospital—so long ago it now seemed—her almost-ash hair had been shoulder length. The hair was still a pale-brown but she’d chopped it off short somewhere along the way. She couldn’t even remember when she’d done that. During one of the post-sleep lethargies. If there were an omnipotent god out there somewhere who paid attention to what people did, he must have one hell of a warped sense of humor.
She dried her face under the blower, took a few deep breaths, and left the little room.
Billie walked as though she were a passenger on her own shoulders, along for the ride but not in control. She observed almost distantly her feet taking her back to the communications room. Maybe seeing how other people dealt with monsters might help somehow. And she found herself worried about the little girl she’d seen, a child billions of kilometers and years away. What was her name? Amy?
There must have been a shift change, a different tech was on the board when Billie arrived, a man this time. But he must have had his orders, too.
“Annie said you were here earlier,” he said. “C’mon in.”
Billie nodded at the man and sat next to him.
The images shifted on the various screens, sometimes people, sometimes test patterns, sometimes information blurring past so fast she couldn’t begin to read it. A montage of humanity calling out to itself electronically, sending its voices and pictures out on invisible waves into the galaxy. Is anybody listening? Is anybody there?
A woman appeared on the screen to Billie’s left. She was attractive, dark hair chopped short in a spacer’s cut, chiseled and even features, thin lips, good cheekbones. She spoke rapidly, her image without sound. Sweat beaded on h
er forehead, ran down her face.
“Who’s that?”
The tech glanced over at the picture. He smiled. “That’s Ripley.”
“Ripley?”
He looked at her as if she were a not particularly bright child. “Ellen Ripley. The Ripley. She was on the Nostromo and the Sulaco. She was there at the beginning, on LV-426, first contact with the aliens. Holds the record for long sleep, as far as we can tell. You been living in a eave the last few years?”
“Yeah, you might say that. What happened to her?”
The tech fiddled with the control. “Can’t get the sound, sorry. This is a real old “cast. We catch a few of them now and then, light-speed being as slow as it is. Never know what you’re gonna pick up. I can plug it into the computer lip-reader, you want.”
“What happened to Ripley?”
The tech shrugged. “Dunno, She was the only survivor of the Nostromo. Basically a buncha truck drivers who sat down in the wrong place at the wrong time, got infected. She later went back out to the colony as an adviser with a crew of Colonial Marines. The colony was destroyed in a nuclear explosion. Probably they all died. There were some rumors…”
Billie, exhausted, stared at the tech. Waited.
“I had a buddy, used to work for a civilian biotech division of a major Terran company. He said Ripley managed to get offworld before the place blew. Wound up on an old prison world somewhere. They sent somebody out after her, but that’s where the story ends. A lot of shit got lost after the invasion. Who can say?”
“You seem to know a lot about it.”
“Not really. Spears—ah—General Spears studies everything available on the aliens. Bunch of it gets routed through here. You pick up stuff.”
Billie stared at the woman on the screen. She felt a kind of kinship with her. How had she behaved when she faced the things? Was she alive somewhere? Or blown to atomic dust, the same way Wilks had blasted the aliens” homework! with nuclear flames? Or worse, webbed to a wall and used as a human incubator for a baby monster?
The image faded. Billie leaned back in the chair and allowed the other vidpixs to wash over her. They were hypnotic, light strobing, low sounds droning her into a kind of somnolence…
Without realizing it, Billie dropped into a troubled sleep.
The glob of slime apparently marked Peterson somehow as the first target. He raised his carbine and started blasting, waving it back and forth, spraying a 10mm fan of steel-sheathed lead. The armor-piercing bullets sang as they struck the ceiling, the roar of the exploding propellent smashed against the ears of the three marines, deafening them.
Renus and Magruder brought their weapons up but not in time. The things dropped from the ceiling, peeled away from the convoluted resinous bas-relief sculpture, invisible until they moved.
The first alien fell on Peterson, slammed him to the floor, knocked his weapon away.
Peterson screamed, a wordless bleat, full of terror.
The thing bounded up like a giant grasshopper, Peterson held in its claws like a doll.
“Fuck! Shoot it!” Magruder yelled.
“I can’t, Peterson’s in the way—!”
“Out, out, get out, move—!”
“Help!” Peterson finally found a word to put into the scream.
The alien holding the man leapt toward the wall, reached it. Another alien—two, three of them—unfolded from the wall right in front of the marines and reached out to grab Peterson. They passed him from claw to claw upward.
“Oh, man!” Renus fired, and the closet alien shattered under the hail of hard metal, spraying yellowish fluid in all directions like a popped water balloon.
“Yaah!” Magruder yelled as some of the acid splashed on his suit, ate small holes in it. He turned, ran.
Renus didn’t see Magruder go; he was busy waving his carbine back and forth, filling the corridor with noise and death. Another alien fell, cut in half at the hips. But Peterson was gone, moved up the wall, out of sight.
More of the things dropped from the ceiling, sprang from the walls, charged Renus.
“Die, motherfuckers!”
The cyclic rate on the M-41E carbine was, in theory, nearly seven hundred rounds per minute. Slightly more than eleven rounds a second. With the weapon held continuously on full auto, therefore, a hundred-round magazine would be exhausted in a little over nine seconds.
It was the longest nine seconds of Renus’s life.
Three heartbeats after the magazine ran dry, one of the things sprang at him, shot that efficient toothed rod from its mouth right down Renus’s screaming throat. The scream turned into a choked-off liquid gurgle. The aliens had saved Peterson for implantation but Renus was nothing more than fresh meat. The last thing he did before he died was to trigger the grenade launcher on his carbine. The 30mm explosive shell hit the wall at an angle, bounced upward, and went off somewhere near the ceiling. The explosion washed the corridor with clean fire and deadly shrapnel.
Magruder ran, driven by fear and adrenaline, the acid burns on his suit trailing acrid smoke. The blast wave hit him, he staggered, nearly stumbled, but kept on his feet.
Ahead was a doorway marked Interior Life Support. Magruder reached the door, slapped frantically at the admit panel. The door slid open. He jumped into the room, pressed the closure control, held it until the door slid shut.
“Jesus, Jesus, fuck!” Safe, he was safe, for now. He had to find a way out of here, fast! He looked around frantically.
Something clattered, a rattle of claws on a metal grate.
Magruder looked up. Saw one of the aliens overhead on an expanded aluminum mesh ceiling plate. “Fuck!” He snapped the carbine up and fired. Half a dozen rounds hit the grate, some of them got through to the creature. It fell, a puppet with its strings cut, collapsed on the grating. Acid dripped, burned the grate, the floor beneath it, raising smoke and a stench.
Magruder backed away from the acid rain, slammed into the wall.
Something banged on the door. The thin metal dented inward as if it were no thicker than foil.
“Oh, man!”
A claw came through the wall and stabbed Magruder just above his left kidney. He lurched away from the pain, felt a piece of his back jerked out. He screamed wordlessly in pain. The shock hit him as the blood spewed from the hole in his back. He stumbled through the pool of acid eating away at the floor. His boots began to smoke. His feet took fire, blistered, began to char.
He dropped his weapon, pulled at his boots, burned his hands getting them off.
He leaned against another door opposite the one the things tore at.
The door opened behind and he fell backward.
Looming above him, something. An alien! No, it wasn’t a thing, it was a man! Thank God!
Then he saw it was Spears.
“The wages of treason are death,” Spears said.
He smiled.
Spears had watched it all. The initial desertion. The frantic ride through the canyons. The entry into the air processor plant. This fool thought he could just steal a crawler and escape. Never even looked for the hidden cameras onboard the stolen property, the cameras that sent every moment of the trip back for Spears to enjoy at his leisure. Every word, every fart, every bump on the frantic ride. Just as the surveillance equipment had picked up the attack only moments ago. True, some of the network had been put out of commission by the drones, webbed over or covered by the resin secretions as they built their nest inside the plant, but plenty of photomutable gel eyes had remained. AH of it had been recorded, fed to the computers at Third Base, where the tactics would be broken down and studied, used to extend his knowledge of his alien troops.
The three deserters had panicked, lost it, and that disgusted Spears. Real marines would have used controlled bursts, overlapped their fields of fire, and walked through the drones to safety. But humans were weak, filled with fear, and they lost control. Their emotions damned them. Had three aliens been armed as the deserters, the wild strain
would not have been able to touch them. That was what a real trooper was, one without fear. One without the emotional entanglements that came from being born of woman. In a way, Spears felt a kinship with the aliens. He had come from an egg and sperm, but had been carried to term without the uncertainty of a living mother.
The marine at his feet—Magruder?—stared up at him. “G-g-general! Th-thank God …”
“You fucked up, son. Fouled your jets right across the tubes. Because you are weak. But you served your purpose. Every little bit helps. They’ll be watching the recording of that chickenshit run you did for a long time. What not to do. A classic example of bad tactics built on an even worse strategy.”
He turned. A pair of troopers in full combat gear stood nearby. They were nervous, fidgety, the stink of fear rising from them. Not much better than this scum lying on the floor, but at least they obeyed orders. It was what he had to work with, for now.
“I’m done with this,” Spears said, waving at Magruder. “The drones are hungry. Give them supper.”
Magruder screamed. “No! You can’t! Please!” He struggled to rise.
One of the guards opened the door. The aliens were about to break through into the next room, the walls shuddered under their blows.
“Please! Pleeaassee!”
The two marines shoved Magruder toward the door. He stuck his arms and legs out, trying to stop himself. Caught the doorjamb with one hand. His fear gave him strength. He stopped.
Spears kicked out with his boot and smashed Magruder’s fingers. Magruder screamed as he slid through into the room. The door slid shut with a grating noise.
Spears watched through the plastic viewplate set in the door as the alien drones breached the wall and stormed into the room. Magruder’s voice filtered through the closed door. He kicked at the first alien to reach him, but it was a wasted effort.
Spears turned away. “Let’s go,” he said. “We’re done here.”
The two guards practically leapt to obey. That brought another smile to Spears’s face. A little example did wonders to keep the troops in line. Yes, sir. Indeed it did.
[Aliens 02] - Nightmare Asylum Page 8
