12
Powell paced back and forth in the hold of the cargo ship, his movements quick and nervous. “There were one hundred sixty-eight civilian terraformers,” he said. “Men, women, children. Spears gave them to the aliens. The air plant is automatic at this stage, you see, so the people were… redundant.”
Wilks found that he was standing, his fists clenched.
Powell stopped pacing, turned and faced the sergeant.
“You let him do it.”
“I’m not a murderer,” Powell said. “Not even Spears.”
“I saw you reach for that pistol you carry when you got here,” Wilks said.
“But I didn’t pull it. I would, I suppose, if I truly thought my own life was in jeopardy.”
“And you don’t think it is? What the hell do you need, a formal declaration of war?”
Powell chewed on that for a second. “Listen,” he said, “I joined the service to do my duty for my planet. I was studying for the priesthood at the time. I planned to finish my training and become a chaplain. It didn’t work out. I got sidetracked. So I wound up here. What Spears has done sickens me, but the path to the light is not by creating more darkness.”
Wilks stared at the man. He’d run into guys like Powell before. The military had to have a certain number of medics and religious types. Their bent, because of what they did or who they were before they ever joined up, was usually pacifistic. If you were wounded in battle, you needed somebody to staple you back together, so a surgeon; if you were emotionally burned out, some kind of counselor, though Wilks himself hadn’t ever had much use for those, psychologists or fathers. They were necessary, but you didn’t want one next to you when the grill flamed on and the other side started shooting. And you didn’t want one in charge when your ass was on the line. It wasn’t that way with all of them—Wilks had seen medics who would just as soon carve your heart out as smile at you and men of various gods who would cheerfully burn a stadium full of small children if they thought that’s what their deity wanted. But Powell wasn’t one of those.
And, given the situation, that was bad news.
So what did the man want? Why was he telling Wilks all this?
Abruptly it dawned on Wilks exactly why. Powell was one of those who bought his meat flash-wrapped at the market, or pretended it was soypro—but still ate it. He wasn’t a hunter himself but he wasn’t above enjoying the taste of the game—once it had been sanitized and neatly packaged. Once the thing had been gutted and the blood drained. He would eat it, but he wouldn’t hunt and kill it.
And he at least knew a hunter when he saw one.
Wilks nodded to himself. Fine. He could live with that. He was used to doing the dirty work himself.
The queen was a giant, bigger than other queens. A force of nature, unstoppable, irresistible, like something from an ancient mythos. She was the Destroyer of Worlds, she was the eater of souls, it was foolish to even think of resisting her.
The queen loomed large, four sets of inner jaws opening and extruding like a Chinese puzzle box, able to spear and eat anything from mice to elephants. But she wasn’t interested in mice or elephants, she wanted other prey. She wanted—
Billie turned to run, but her feet were mired in the floor, she struggled and could only manage a glacial slow motion, as if she were shod in lead boots, as if she were on the bottom of a deep pool full of thick syrup.
She cried out, kept trying to run, but it was hopeless. She could smell the queen as she drew closer, the sharp, bitter, burned-plastic odor of her flowed out in waves to envelop Billie. The stench of bodies a-rot for years in some dead and fishless sea curled over Billie, a pustulent and blackened breaker with bloody red foam about to crash down…
Do not be afraid, the queen said. Her voice was soothing, a melody from childhood, the tones of a mother comforting a frightened baby. I love you. I want you. I need you.
“No!” Billie screamed. She’d heard it before. She knew it was a lie. She struggled to move in her personal amber, a prehistoric fly waiting for the hand of Death, a doomed insect waiting for Eternity to smother her.
I love you. Come. Let me touch you …
A cold claw gripped Billie’s shoulder.
“No!”
“Take it easy!” the tech said. He stood next to her, his hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay. You’re just dreaming.”
Billie blinked, trying to make the transition from there to here.
“I know how it is,” the tech said. “I dream about her, too.”
Billie stared, unable to bring up words.
“Tell the medics. They’ve got some stuff that helps.”
“Nothing helps,” Billie said. “I’ve been dealing with this since I was ten. It’s only a matter of time until the dreams finally come true.”
Outside the com room there came a sound as if someone were thumping down the hallway on metal boots. Billie was sure she knew exactly who it was.
Ah, shit. What was she going to do about Mitch? Even as pissed as she’d been when they fought, she still felt that pull, that energy. Fuck, call it what it was. That love.
Damn.
As they were leaving the complex, Spears took a short detour through one of the newer egg chambers. A mere dozen eggs rested here on the alien-constructed floor, all fairly fresh, only a couple of days old. He had surveillance gear everywhere; he knew there was no danger of these units hatching anytime soon. Plus, the doors, left open deliberately so the drones could move the eggs unimpeded, still worked. He had a trooper crank the doors shut, so he could be in the room for a few moments without interruption from nervous drone egg-tenders.
He liked to do this, visit the eggs. The rubbery, fleshy shells with the flower-petal lips still clenched tightly together, protecting their precious cargo, they touched something in Spears. He was not a man given to deep introspection, no navel picker to worry over the unchangeable past or unborn future, he was a doer, not a ponderer; still, there was a cold and merciless beauty to be found here. These were unborn warriors out of the greatest warriors man had ever met. And Spears was a man of war.
With two guards standing nervously alert, Spears walked to the nearest egg, squatted, put one hand out to feel the roughness of the living container.
You could drop this little closed barrel off a tall building in standard gee and it would bounce like a plastic ball without damaging the tiny occupant. Spears knew, because he’d had it done. In the variable gravity room the scientists had built, they’d done more than a few such experiments. The eggs were tough. Even under three gees they still maintained their integrity. They could be cut, were the knife sharp enough, but the wielder had best be very quick—piercing the outer wall of an egg would get the cutter a face full of acid spray even more potent than that in the grown creatures” blood. Nature had been lavish in her protection of the aliens” birth packaging. And the first-stage babies were hardy little devils, too.
Spears grinned, stroked the egg as if it were the head of a faithful dog. The alien queens could reproduce in a kind of modified parthenogenesis, and the drones were mostly neuters. There were some males—the labbos had found a few—and indications were that there could be a battlelike sexual intercourse between the two sexes. The available males, when they reached some critical number, fought each other to the death, leaving only a single survivor, who then lay claim to the queen. She made him work for it, slammed him all over the place, and if he survived this battering, worse than the fights with the other males, the queen would submit to his advances.
The male’s triumph would be short-lived. Within seconds after this hard-contested mating was consummated, the queen would kill the hapless male. The scientists babbled on about genetic diversity and such, but it didn’t matter. If there weren’t any males around, the queen could do it herself. And if there weren’t any queens around, one of the drones would undergo what the scientists called a hormone storm; when it was done, the drone would be a queen.
Spears shoo
k his head. Goddamned efficient bastards. Just what a commander in the field needed. You could hatch your own army in a few months and as long as one of “em stayed alive, you could start over again when those got killed.
The troopers moved around, Spears could feel their fear. He grinned again, partly because he knew they were scared and he wasn’t, partly because growing down his uniform pants leg was a fairly solid erection. As long as he squatted here, stroking the egg, it didn’t show. He chuckled at his own hormone storm. That didn’t happen much anymore, he’d managed to sublimate his sexual drives into more important things, but the little head did rear now and again. Not that he found sex unpleasant, no, that wasn’t the problem, just that it took too much time and energy to indulge in it these days. Course, when he’d been younger, he thought he would live forever and he would fuck anything with a hole and a pulse and even the latter wasn’t strictly necessary. And he’d learned something from the very first time he’d ever done it, something very important.
He laughed at the memory, Ah, Gunnery Sergeant Brandywine. Whatever happened to her?
Colonial Marine Cadet Spears at fifteen was still two years away from his first hitch, though he’d already gotten three Corps tattoos. Gunny Brandywine was his small-arms instructor, she was probably twice his age, tough as a boot sole, and could drill the eye out of a ship rat at twenty paces with a carbine or a handgun, you pick which eye. She wore her black hair chopped short in a spacer’s buzz, had a rangy, tight frame, flat pectoral muscles and no breasts to speak of, and abs Spears would die to have himself. A lean, mean fighting machine, Gunny was, a strong and deadly female. He’d watched her in the showers a couple of times, carefully keeping his back turned so she wouldn’t see the short-arm salute she was causing. Christ, he was so hard sometimes it stood nearly straight up.
He didn’t think she’d noticed, but one afternoon after a session in the gym with the autoboxer, he’d found himself alone in the shower with her. As usual, his dick was trying to go ballistic, and he kept fiddling with the water’s temp control, as if it were malfunctioning, so he could keep his erection out of her sight.
She shut her shower off and started to leave. Good.
But her footsteps on the wet plastic tiles went the wrong way. He could see her peripherally when she reached out and slapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, cadet. You might as well learn how to use that.”
Spears thought of himself as a marine already, tough, unflappable, cool under stress, but he felt himself go red. “Excuse me?”
“You’ve been wanting to stick that in me for weeks, kid. In my quarters, five minutes, you can give it a shot.” She turned and padded away. He watched the muscular roll of her buttocks, unable to breathe he was so scared.
But it had been fine. Gunny was practiced, she had obviously broken in more than a few first-timers, and she was patient.
The first round took maybe three seconds until he discharged his weapon. Five strokes, no more. It was great, but he knew enough to realize it hadn’t done anything for her. He started to apologize. “Oh, man, I’m sorry, I—!”
“Forget it, cadet. I know how you young guys are. Besides, that didn’t even take the edge off you. Here. Give me that.”
The next three hours were a wonder to Cadet Spears. Sure, he had beat-off plenty, but it didn’t feel anywhere close to as good as what Gunny Brandywine taught him that afternoon. Amazing things.
In the end, the most useful thing of all was patience. He was a hot-shot cadet, always rushing, always in a hurry, like life was a race he had to finish first. He couldn’t wait to be on active duty. Gunny taught him how to wait.
They were on her bed, reconnected for the fifth time, she on her back, one leg drawn up, foot hooked over his ass, he on his side, pumping fast.
“Slow down, mister.”
“Huh?”
She reached out, caught his hip with one hand, slowed his movement.
“When you’re on the handgun range and you get an in-your-face pop-up target, what do you do?”
“Pointshoot, triple tap, two in the heart, one in the head,” Spears said, as if he were in class. Which, he realized much later, he was.
“Right. Slow will get you killed in that combatsit. But if you get a pop-up at fifty meters, do you react the same way?”
He continued his motion at the speed she had set.
“No, ma’am,” he said. “You take deliberate aim using your sights and squeeze off two to the torso.”
“Ah, that feels good.” She grinned, looked at him. Raised her leg so her toes pointed at the ceiling. “Now, back in the combat scenario, explain your actions.”
“Pointshooting is inaccurate at long range. Accuracy is more important than speed in that situation. Shoot too fast and miss, the enemy might not. Better to be slow and certain.”
“Push a little harder now and a little faster.” She bent her knee, brought it down close to her face. “Good. Put your finger here. Rub this way. Mmm.”
He was getting close again. But he forced himself to hold his pacing where she wanted it.
“life is like the range, cadet. There’s a time to hurry and a time to go slow. Learning when to do the right thing at the right time is as important as anything you’ll ever learn, you got that?”
He nodded. Drawing close to his release yet again, he would have agreed with anything she said, but on some level, he did understand the lesson. It was a unique teaching method.
“Now you go fast. Move, cadet. Move!”
He obeyed. It was one hell of a teaching method.
* * * * *
Spears came back to himself. Patted the egg and stood, his sexual excitement cooled. A less patient man than himself might have missed this whole opportunity to develop an invincible army. If Gunny Brandywine were still alive, she’d be a crone, pushing eighty, easy, but it would be Interesting to see her. To show her how well her lesson had taken. And what the hell, maybe to fuck her once for old times” sake.
“Let’s move out, marines.”
He wouldn’t have to tell these men that twice.
13
The queen has learned to obey the general,” Powell said. He leaned against a bulkhead, staring at the floor.
“Obey him?” Wilks said.
They’d been in the little ship a long time, Wilks was beginning to feel stiff and cramped, but he wanted to hear as much of it as Powell could get out before they had to break this off.
“Oh, yes. Spears started training her like a dog. Used his cigar lighter. He’d have a trooper with a flamethrower roast an egg while the queen watched. After she calmed down, he’d put a human into the testing cage with her. When she went for the bait, he’d pop the cigar lighter on and hold it next to another egg. The queen picked it up fast. You could leave a man in with her and a dozen drones for hours and none of them would touch him. She’s not stupid, the queen.
“It seems odd, though,” Powell continued, “that the queen will sacrifice the drones without a second thought but that she’ll obey Spears to protect the eggs.”
Wilks shrugged. “She’s an alien. What drives her doesn’t drive us. Maybe her responsibility ends when the damned things hatch.”
“That’s what Spears thinks. But she controls the drones. Telepathically, empathically, we don’t have the sophisticated gear here to be sure exactly how, but it isn’t with sound or odors or any visual signals we can detect. We’ve run tests where the drone was a klick away in an airtight chamber, no possible way it could see or hear the queen, and Spears made it do what he wanted.”
“You have more than one queen,” Wilks said.
Powell blinked. “How do you know that?”
“Somebody is laying the eggs in the air processor. Unless you’re ferrying the queen from here back and forth.”
“No, you’re right. We put one egg from this nest over there. Spears did it himself. There are a score of drones there now tending the young queen.”
Wilks shook his head in disgust. �
��Spears doesn’t know what the hell he is messing with here.”
“He thinks he does. And he’s done more with them than anybody else, Wilks. Last month he took a dozen of the things out and had them marching in close order drill. He’s taught several of them how to hold a modified M-69 machine gun and had them shooting the weapon.”
“Jesus.”
“Yes. It’s Maggie’s Drawers for accuracy, they can’t hit anything smaller than a wall even at close range, but still.”
Wilks nodded. A monster with a machine gun. The only advantage men had in battle with these things was their weaponry. If they were armed as well as human troops, they’d be unstoppable.
“The drones are stupid,” Powell said. “But even a chimp can be trained to shoot fairly straight. And we think the queen’s connection with the drones gives her the ability to see what she sees. And the queen is probably as smart as we are, according to the psychologists.”
“Buddha fucking Christ.”
“Crude, but apt.” • Wilks stood, paced across the room. “But—what’s the point? Earth is history. When we left there, it was already nearly overrun. A few more years and everybody there will be dead. A few clean neutron bombs after that would sterilize the place. All this cowboy shit is stupid.”
“This isn’t about saving the Earth or anybody on it,” the major said. “It’s about Spears and his ideas of personal glory. Or something. I don’t know what, for sure.”
Wilks nodded. “All right. Let’s get to the bottom line here, Major.”
Powell sighed. “Enough people have died, Sergeant. This has to end. Spears is at the air processor plant. There’s a magnetic storm heading this way, sunspot activity on the primary is up. Spears will be delayed some hours, maybe even a day or two before he can lift and return to base. We need to begin our preparations now.” Wilks nodded. “All right.”
“Mitch?”
The door to his room was open. He was half machine now, but the android part of him was programmed for sleep, to enhance his human characteristics. He lay on a pallet on his back, a sheet covering him to the chest.
[Aliens 02] - Nightmare Asylum Page 9
