A Protocol for Monsters: Dave vs the Monsters

by John Birmingham

  But Em was no longer listening.

  The terrible aching need to have him inside her was back.

  # # #

  Professor Raymond Compton did like to make a big entrance. He knew that about himself, and knowing it, he rolled with it. He had been about to join the Exploit team at the post-mortem having been informed that Heath had taken their guest, the intriguing Mr Hooper, straight there. But he caught himself on the threshold. Hooper was apparently delivering an impromptu TED Talk of his own, and Compton thought he might benefit from taking the measure of this fellow before having to deal with him.

  He only stood there for a few minutes, but it was long enough to develop a deep scepticism about the man.

  Washington had already briefed him, of course. He had Hooper’s tax records—incomplete—for the last five years. The details of his separation and divorce—messy. Performance reviews by his employer—competent, but difficult. Criminal record—petty. Bank and credit records—disastrous. And a quick and dirty profile by the FBI’s behavioral science wonks. They had ruled out full-blown antisocial or narcissistic personality disorders, though “the subject has elements of both”. They had Hooper tagged as an aggressive narcissist, given to distortion, displacement and acting out in his personal and professional responsibilities. Hooper displayed poor frustration tolerance, had manifest problems with authority figures and his impulsivity was suggestive of a conduct disorder. Masochistic and depressive traits were evident and although he was “probably not” a grandiose narcissist, his behavior was at times “destructively self-seeking”.

  Compton could see all that, or at least hear it in the tales the man was spinning for his audience on the other side of the heavy plastic curtains. It was hard to believe the rapt silence in which he was being received, the rubbish he was going on with. It was like reading something from a bad fantasy novel. And Compton had read all the very best ones, so he would know.

  This fabulist wasn’t even channeling Tolkien; he’d gone straight to the Chronicles of Gor.

  Still, there was no denying Hooper was mission critical for OSTP and Compton resolved to gain the whip hand over him as soon as possible. His moment arrived when Hooper asked if the hostile had carried any weapons, specifically a sword.

  “It did,” Compton announced, striding into the room. All eyes turned towards him. “I’ve done some preliminary investigations, but we lack the facilities for metallurgical or linguistic analysis. Aside from the basic facts we could ascertain here—it was made by a tool-using, tool-making culture, designed primarily for combat, with some symbology indicating that it may also demonstrate rank and achievement—we have not been able to learn much about the material culture of this or the other creatures.”

  He wasn’t expecting applause, naturally, but he was expecting something more than the mute reaction that followed. It was almost as though they resented the interruption.

  “I think I understood some of that,” Hooper said, and Compton had the distinct impression he wasn’t professing ignorance so much as…so much as Hooper was mocking him.

  Heath broke the moment by introducing “a director of OSTP” and made vague mention of the Special Programs Division, but in keeping with their agreement, he did not explain Compton’s exact role. If Hooper was to be taken into their confidence, he would have to earn it.

  “To put it another way,” Compton said, “I’m in charge.”

  He ignored the sceptical lift of Emmeline’s eyebrow but was grateful she didn’t point out that was not entirely true, as she once may have. Mister Hooper did not need a comprehensive briefing on their organizational chart.

  “No, I take it back,” Hooper said. “I’m confused again. Anyway, it’s a pity the sword was sent away. The swords have stories on them, too.” He looked at Heath, “Good intel.”

  Wait, what? Compton frowned.

  Did Hooper just somehow criticize him for sending away the sword? It sounded like he was being criticized. He resolved to get back on the front foot as soon as possible.

  “I believe I told you that, did I not, Captain?” Compton said to Heath. There was a strange atmosphere in the room. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he felt as though all of the settled relationships in this group had been completely up-ended. He was used to a modicum of deference from his underlings. Even Ashbury could at least pretend. And Heath, a military man to the bone, respected the chain of command, exercising his autonomy only in those areas which called for tactical military judgments. Compton was about to explain that Hooper would need to be properly debriefed under controlled circumstances and his—Compton’s—close supervision, when the man cut him off.

  “What do you call those animals with these kind of fingers and toes, like horns?”

  What nonsense was this now?

  But before he could recover, Ashbury replied, talking over the top of him as well.

  “Ungulates,” she said and then she blushed.

  Compton was at a complete loss. He suddenly noticed that every woman in the room was blushing, and they were all staring at this newcomer. Some of them with confused expressions, but one or two with frank, unspoken lust. He was certain that’s what it was. The expressions of the men in the room varied from excited interest to a rather cool reserve on the face of Heath. He seemed distinctly unimpressed with something. But the women, Compton could see, were agog.

  What the fuck was going on here?

  Compton had no satisfactory explanation until much later, and it was hardly satisfactory.

  He fenced with the red-necked oaf a while longer, eventually goading him into losing his temper, which was satisfying, if somewhat unnerving. Hooper had no explanation for how he came to “know” so much about the creatures—that knowledge being unverified, untested and, for the moment, of inexplicable provenance and little utility. Like so many partially educated men who ended up in the applied fields when the rigors of theoretical work proved beyond them, Dave Hooper was extremely touchy on the matter of his so-called expertise.

  Compton did nothing more than ask, quite reasonably, how the engineer had come to know what he knew.

  “It seems a preposterous suggestion that you have taken it in by osmosis.”

  Because it was a preposterous suggestion! And Professor Raymond Compton was merely pointing that out.

  By way of reply, Hooper folded his arms defensively and jutted out his chin as though challenging Compton to take a swing.

  “Look. I’ll be fucked if I know,” he said to Heath, through pressed lips, apparently unable to even look at Compton. That would fit with the FBI’s profile of an aggressive narcissist given to distortion and acting out. Challenged to justify his assertions, he lashed out.

  “A couple of days ago I couldn’t have told you any of this stuff. But a couple of days ago this ugly motherfucker—” Hooper smacked the Hunn with the back of his hand. “—hadn’t crawled onto my rig and bitten the head off one of my best friends. There’s a fuckin’ preposterous suggestion for you right there, Doc. I hadn’t discovered my previously unknown ability to juggle refrigerators and small cars at the same time. Another preposterous suggestion. And I hadn’t put a hammer through old Urgon’s skull here and apparently downloaded all of his nasty fucking hopes and dreams.”

  His voice grew louder as his anger got away from him, his aggression flaring as one indicator of an antisocial personality disorder. He smashed his fist down on the chest of the dead xenomorph. The resulting crash made everyone jump and two marine guards came running in with their weapons up. The xenomorph’s chest cavity crumpled under the force of the blow.

  Ashbury jumped back in fright and Compton swore.

  This fellow was going to be hell to manage.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Emmeline, a word, if you have a moment?”

  Compton drew her aside as the Exploit team filed out of the makeshift morgue. Heath and Hooper were already gone, apparently to feed the engineer, who was complaining of hunger and fatigue.

/>   “Yes, Professor,” Emmeline said. “I do have a moment and we do need to talk.”

  That surprised him a little. She’d been working for more than twelve hours and he’d expected her to beg off. Ashbury thanked her team as they filed past. It was probably an item on a checklist for her. She had explained to him once that she did that sort of thing. It helped regularize the way she dealt with people. Compton nodded to a few of the stragglers, wishing Cadence Ramsay a good night after she had closed up the room. He could hear the rumble of a portable generator that would keep the room refrigerated overnight, delaying putrefaction.

  “Night, Em. Professor,” said Ramsay. “Six tomorrow, right.”

  “Yes, and thank you, Cady,” said Emmeline. A simple courtesy, but weighted with extra meaning.

  Compton and Ashbury waited until they were alone, aside from the two marine guards posted outside the improvised mortuary. He was about to draw Ashbury away from them, heeding his natural caution about the need to control all information, but again she anticipated his move, taking him by the elbow, which was unusual. She was notoriously prickly on issues of personal space. He couldn’t recall the last time she’d laid a hand on him, or anyone for that matter. But her fingers dug painfully into his upper arm as she steered him around the corner into a poorly lit corridor leading to the recreation room where Hooper had killed the hostiles. Another pair of marines stood guard at the end of that walkway, and Ashbury appeared to stop at the midpoint between the guard posts.

  “We have a problem with Hooper,” she said, leaning into him.

  “I hope you don’t expect me to put you up for a Nobel prize on the basis of that revelation,” Compton deadpanned. He saw the flicker of confusion and then annoyance pass over her face as she processed the surface meaning and then the actual meaning of what he had said.

  “Please don’t fuck around,” she said. “This is serious.”

  “I am sorry,” he replied, genuinely curious about what she might say next. “I should know better by now. Please, go on. Is this to do with Mr Hooper’s off-the-cuff tutorial back there?”

  Ashbury appeared to give the question more than a moment’s cursory consideration. A frown line appeared between her eyes as Compton listened to the stomping boots of a patrol on the deck above them.

  “No,” she said at last. “Not really. That is a separate matter. More your area than mine, actually. This is something different. Something else about Hooper.”

  She looked as though she was about to say something, even opened her mouth to do so, but then blushed slightly and shook her head as if trying to clear it, rather than deny something.

  This was not at all like her and Compton frowned. He was never sure what to say around Ashbury, and this situation seemed especially fraught. In a flash of genius he asked, “Is there something I can help with?”

  You were always best asking practical questions of Ashbury.

  She shook her head again, but slowly this time.

  “I don’t imagine so,” she said before taking a deep breath and plunging in. “Hooper has obviously undergone a number of physiological changes. Michael has confirmed that his metabolism is running much hotter than it should be and his body appears to be burning the energy to remake itself. I don’t know whether you read the entire briefing note on him…”

  “I did.”

  “Well then you will have noticed the difference between the recent photographs of him and his actual appearance. He seems to have dropped a lot of weight. Did you notice that?”

  Compton had to concede that he had not. The briefing pack on Hooper had indeed included a number of images, some taken from his personnel file, some from his Facebook account. Compton had skimmed through them, only pausing briefly to admire the form of some topless woman sharing a hot tub with Hooper in an image tagged as the most recent available. When he thought about it, and about that photograph in particular, he supposed Hooper was looking less rotund. As though he had cut back from morbid obesity to the high end of merely clinical obesity.

  Compton began to have an inkling of where this might be going. He wisely kept his mouth shut, letting Ashbury take them there. She seemed intently focused on what she was saying.

  “I very strongly suspect that the changes affecting Hooper go a lot deeper than gross musculature, body mass index and bone density. I think…” Ashbury paused, choosing her words carefully, “I think whatever he was exposed to when he opened up the skull of that creature…The one he called Urgon…”

  Compton could not help but smirk, “The Han or the Hunn if I recall correctly.”

  Ashbury nodded. “Yes, that one. Well, look, I’m not going to speculate about transmission vectors or even what sort of agent might be at work, but I think we can both agree it is having gross and observable physical effects on the man.”

  She crossed her arms and hunched her shoulders. It created a little fortress of her body. Compton briefly glanced up at the two marine guards he could see at the end of the gloomy corridor, but they displayed no interest in the conversation between the two scientists. They spoke quietly between themselves, lost in their own exchange.

  “I think Hooper is giving off some sort of powerful pheromone,” she said, all in a rush. Compton suppressed his instinctive need to scoff. This was indeed where he thought she was going, and he was satisfied to have his observations about Exploit’s female staffers confirmed. There had been something going on when Hooper was talking to them, it wasn’t just the overpowering aroma of cheap aftershave. Frankly, they had all read the file on him and nobody could be in any doubt about what a poor prospect Dave Hooper would offer as a partner of any sort.

  “I did notice something,” he said carefully. “I wasn’t quite sure what it was, just that something was wrong back there. Off, you know?” He went on even more carefully, “Was I right about that?”

  She nodded, grimacing.

  “Yes, you were. Something was very wrong, Raymond.”

  And something was still wrong. She rarely called him by his first name, unless she was using it as a rhetorical whacking stick. Unlike her, however, Compton could easily read into other people’s emotions and she looked authentically vulnerable. He knew he had to take great care with whatever he said next. This felt like a precariously balanced situation that could tip over and crash down around them. He tried to remember an article he’d read about dealing with people on the spectrum, shortly after his disastrous attempt to invite her out on a date, but nothing came to him. Instead he simply kept his voice low and his hands to himself, intuiting that even a simple gesture such as a reassuring pat on the shoulder could blow up in his face. “I can see this is difficult, Emmeline.”

  After all if they were going to be throwing around first names…

  “But it’s not about you, it’s not even about him. It’s the situation. Just tell me what is happening and we will deal with the situation.”

  Some of the tension dropped out of her shoulders and she seemed to sigh with relief.

  “The situation is that as soon as Hooper came within about twenty feet of any woman in that room, the effect was instant and undeniable. We were all drawn to him…” She took a deep breath, “…attracted to him. There was nothing rational about it. It was quite powerful and very unsettling.”

  She shook her head again, biting her lip and looking for all the world like an alcoholic bitterly regretting the first drink after long years of sobriety.

  “Did you talk to any of the other female staff about this?” Compton asked.

  “Of course I did,” she snapped. “That’s how I know it wasn’t just me. I spoke to Cadence and Jenny Kwan and Gillian. They all had the same reaction, and they were all relieved to discover it wasn’t just them.”

  He didn’t bother asking whether she had discussed the matter with Heath or any of the male researchers. To her, they would not be relevant. But as the director of the Special Programs Division, he was. If anyone from HR had been on the rig she’d probably have r
eported the matter to them too.

  “Okay,” he said, biding his time while he thought it through. He could not help but feel a little put out, given how brutally his own advances had once been rejected. “Okay,” he said again, “so what do we know about this effect? What can you tell me? Is it constant? Was there any variance in the intensity or periodicity?”

  These are the sorts of hard data questions he supposed she would be comfortable answering, and he was right.

  “It waxed and waned,” she said. “For all of us, and at different times. There is definitely a proximity effect, the closer you get to him the more intense it grows. But we could all feel the force of the effect fluctuating even when distance to the agent remained constant.”

  Compton stroked his beard, thinking it through.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “perhaps the effect is still in flux. Perhaps it will settle down, find a constant. But it’s something we’re all going to have to work with, unfortunately. Do you think you can do that? Do you have concerns about any other members of your team?”

  Another person, another woman, may have taken offense at that, but say what you might about Emmeline Ashbury, she was practical and level-headed to a fault. Her little Bento box of a mind had just the right spot for the question.

  “No,” she said. “Perhaps if he came across them in a bar or some other social setting, somewhere without context, when they were not aware of what was happening, under those circumstances I imagine it could be disastrous. But we are all grown-ups. Scientists. And this is not a bar or a nightclub. It is an oil rig, currently under lockdown, secured by marines and Navy SEALs. There are four dead monsters on the gurneys back there, and we are still tripping over bits and pieces of the people they killed and ate yesterday. This thing with Hooper is a minor irritant at best. But it is a datum point and as regards the female staff it’s…”