by Tim Lebbon
“So what?” McMahon said, snotting and crying. “We just hide?”
“We can’t hide when it knows we’re already here,” Palant said, “but we can close ourselves inside. Try not to appear a threat.”
“And then what?”
“Then we hope that it’s come for sport, and not a massacre.”
Palant went to close the door, but she couldn’t resist one last look. It was shocking, horrific, and magnificent. For so long she had studied these creatures, their body parts and belongings, trying to understand them through dead flesh, clotted blood, and disassociated tech and clothing. Now she was looking right at one. A living, alien creature, with mysterious thoughts, histories, and philosophies, and an outlook on the universe that she did not understand. However long she studied and theorized, she would never understand.
At last they’ve come to me, she thought. More afraid than she had ever been in her life before, and more excited, Palant slid the big door closed. McMahon helped her, along with a couple of others. Then the indies moved aside and huddled together, and she could only stand on her own, shock settling coolly into her bones.
She caught McIlveen’s eyes. He was standing beside the decayed hulk of a forklift, the machine slumped down like a dead beast. He was staring at her. She saw excitement in his eyes, and for an instant she despised him for that.
But then she understood. She nodded at him. Yes, it’s the Yautja.
He leaned against the machine. His first instinct was to look at the indies.
“No,” Palant said. “Milt, that’s the last thing we should do. You know that.”
“What is it?” someone asked. The youngest child was crying softly, picking up on the loaded atmosphere. In that moment, Palant realized that only she and a couple of the indies had seen.
The others had only heard.
“Yautja,” she said. A rumble of fear passed through the survivors, the indies standing silent and sad. She realized that she didn’t know that much about them. They’d always been there, friendly enough, but she didn’t know where they’d come from or what they had been before. Colonial Marines, more than likely, but how long they had served together, how tight a unit they were, if and where they had fought before, this was all a mystery.
She wished she’d got to know them better.
“What are they doing here?” one of the scientists asked. He was a cosmologist, studying the effects of a quasar just a couple of light years away. They were all scientists, and not all of them researched alien life, but they were all employed by Weyland-Yutani. His ignorance surprised her, but perhaps it merely illustrated her own obsessive nature. So immersed had she been in her studies, she couldn’t conceive of others knowing so little.
“I’ve heard of the Yautja,” a woman said. “Horrible stories.”
“They were probably true,” Palant said.
“You’re the Yautja Woman,” the cosmologist said, almost accusatory, as if her research had brought the danger to them. “So tell us what we’re facing.”
Suddenly all eyes were on her.
“Hunters. Predators. Killing is a sport to them, it’s their lifestyle. It might even be an evolutionary imperative. A necessity for them to continue as individuals, and a species. They’re widespread in the galaxy, but relatively small in numbers, and rare within the Human Sphere. In all my years, and all reported observations made of them through the centuries, there’s been no real evidence of any form of structured society. They’re like white sharks back on Earth… loners until they need to mate. And we’re not even sure how they do that.”
“But they have technology,” McMahon said.
“Yes, and very advanced, but no two ships are the same, and individual weaponry is always different. We’re not sure, but we suspect their technology may be adapted or stolen from other civilizations. Species we don’t even know about.”
“Why are they here?” one of the children asked.
“You had dead ones in your lab,” the cosmologist said.
“That has nothing to do with them being here,” she said, although she wasn’t sure, she wasn’t certain. “This one might have registered the explosions, or more likely the radiation leak from Processor One, and it’s come to see if there’s anything here for it to hunt.” She glanced at the indies and away again.
“What happened out there?” a woman asked.
“Connors and Sharp are gone,” Palant said. She was thinking rapidly, and as a barrage of questions came at her she turned away, facing into the shadowy corners of the hangar.
Hands held her shoulders, turning her around.
“Isa,” McIlveen said. “You know more about them than anyone. Even me. You’ve got to understand that.”
And that makes them all look to me, she thought. Even the indies, it seemed.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She looked at the meager weapons they had managed to bring with them during Svenlap’s attack, and salvage afterward. A few laser pistols, a couple of heavier-looking guns. She knew they had also dragged a couple of cases with them, but she didn’t know what they contained. Drones, perhaps, maybe even high-tech AI drones.
“They come after anyone who looks like they’ll offer a fight,” she said. “That’s their prime motivation. If cornered, they may kill for the sake of it, but usually they relish the hunt.”
“What can we do?” one of the indies asked. He was scared, and Palant was glad. They should all be scared.
“We don’t panic,” she said, although her heart was fluttering, and everything she knew about the Yautja should make her the most frightened person here. “To begin with, we wait. Milt and I will talk, try to come up with a plan. Meanwhile, keep quiet, keep away from the doors. Put any weapons down, but not too far out of reach. They’ll know what we’re doing in here.”
“How?” McMahon asked.
“They can see,” Palant said. “They see everything.”
From outside came a triumphant roar as the Yautja took its first trophy of the hunt.
18
LILIYA
Testimony
It all should have been so different. It could have been wonderful, but in my three centuries as an artificial person, the greatest lesson I’ve come to learn has also been the most terrible. I have come to know human nature.
I remember the day hope died.
* * *
After so long traveling in places where no human had ever ventured, the Founders were close to achieving the state they had been seeking. Wordsworth and the others had found a way to prolong their lives, with few side effects. They no longer looked entirely human, true, but in a way they had cheated evolution, so in that sense they were exploring new territories in existence as much as in space.
Their gel constructs became works of art. Those who were shipborn respected and honored them, but in a healthy way. They weren’t deified. They weren’t treated as anything other than human.
Midsummer might have become our home, but that alien habitat wasn’t a good place. Though it held incredible technologies which we investigated and used, and reverse engineered where we could, it was also toxic to body, mind and soul. We found only a few traces of the beings that might have built or inhabited Midsummer, and they became objects of fascination. Fossilized into the structure of the artificial moon, into history itself, the best of them was also buried the deepest. I spent lonely hours staring at this thing, looking into the deep past and endless distance, trying to make sense of what I saw.
Shreds of a thin, metallic covering still existed here and there. Clothing of some sort, perhaps. Its torso was wide and heavily boned. Withered flesh lay across protruding bones, turned as solid as stone over time. Four thick legs supported the body, while there were traces of thinner, more delicate limbs protruding higher up the torso. At the end of one of these limbs was what appeared to be a hand, fisted shut, the several digits slender and long. It was dog-like, only larger, and what remained of the head only went to reinforce that canine image
.
There was only half a skull, but it had the remnants of a small eye socket, a snout-like nose, and jawbones layered with several rows of wide, flat teeth. Not the mouth of a meat eater.
I stared at that empty eye socket for a long time, wondering what marvels it had seen. I tried to imagine that thing alive and moving, riding Midsummer through the unknown depths of space, seeing and experiencing things we would never know.
Yet I knew so little that I realized these things might simply have been the builders’ pets.
I said many times that we should leave that place. The Macbeth was in orbit, but many of the Founders and travelers had ventured down to the surface, and beneath it as well. Some said it was haunted. I saw no ghosts, but I did sense the echoes of the place it had once been. Those echoes were a language, an experience, that none of us could understand. It was as if we were listening to the thoughts of old, dead gods, whispers that we could not hope to comprehend in a million years.
It wasn’t meant for the likes of us.
There are locations in the galaxy where life has had its time. It has bloomed, faded, and died away, and trying to introduce life to those dead places once more is a folly. After all, although we know that life exists throughout our galaxy, and probably the wider universe, the vast majority of places are lifeless. We are a tiny minority in an incomprehensible vastness, and we should pay heed to the echoes we hear.
Beatrix Maloney, much as I now dislike her and everything she represents, listened. She knew that we did not belong in that place, that false utopia we had proudly called Midsummer. She gathered her inner sanctum around her in secret. Whispered conversations in shadowy hallways, shared glances across empty chambers deep beneath the habitat’s surface. Thus they drew their plans.
We really should have known. Perhaps Wordsworth did know, but could not bring himself to believe. Such infighting, such betrayal is what the Founders left the Human Sphere to escape, after all. It was our first great failure.
Deep down in Midsummer, in humid chambers that should have been left alone, we found those sleeping things we had been seeking for so long. Thousands of them. Beatrix realized instantly what they could do, and what they could become. Wordsworth marked this as the moment that the Founders should depart. The conflict between them was brief, and private, and its true nature was never revealed.
After Wordsworth’s death at her hands—and I have no doubt that, even though there is no proof, Beatrix Maloney killed Wordsworth, my friend and father figure—the change was gradual but obvious. We remained orbiting Midsummer while those hibernating, chitinous bugs—those Xenomorphs—were brought on board the Macbeth, and the holds were adapted to contain them. Experiments were performed, incorporating research and data I had stolen from the Evelyn-Tew. Then the Macbeth and Othello left orbit and started their long journeys back toward the Human Sphere.
The two ships were traveling independently of each other, on the same mission but many light years apart. After the loss of the Hamlet, it was deemed wise.
The Founders had become the Rage, and Maloney was a preacher of hate. The transition was slow and almost imperceptible, and I berate myself for not acting sooner. I hate myself. That emotion feels strange, yet it fits.
It all should have been so wonderful, and when the rot set in, perhaps I could have changed everything.
Yet, to use a saying Wordsworth taught me, I’m only human.
19
LILIYA
Outer Rim
August 2692 AD
She was used to spending time alone. When Liliya had been created, more than three hundred years before, solitude would not have concerned her at all. But now, progressed as she was, evolved, loneliness was one of her nightmares.
Sometimes while resting her systems she imagined that she was the last living thing in the galaxy. All humans were gone, vanished into the void. Other species had faded into history, just like whatever civilization had created and maintained Midsummer so many millions of years before. There was only her…
…and she could not die.
It was difficult to conceive a greater hell, but while fleeing on the stolen assault ship, Liliya had only hoped that her loneliness would last a little while longer, because she knew she was being pursued.
Traveling at such incomprehensible speeds, skimming hyperspace planes that swirled and twisted toward the Human Sphere, she knew for certain that Beatrix and the rest of the Rage would have sent one of the generals to bring her back if they could, or destroy her if they could not. She even knew which general it likely would be.
Alexander was their troubleshooter. He had been at the forefront of their takeover, and she had long suspected that he might even have been the weapon Maloney used to kill Wordsworth. Big, scarred from combat with an aggressive indigenous life form on one of the planets they had landed on, his skin pale and eyes deep, dead pits, he was the least human-looking of all the generals, and he would not come alone. His two thousand Xenomorph soldiers would accompany him, nursed in their cocoons in the belly of his ship. Maloney would suspect where Liliya was heading, and she knew that Alexander’s ship would be bigger, faster, and far more advanced.
The odds were stacked against her. The assault ship she had stolen was barely up to the task. She wasn’t a soldier or a pilot. Her knowledge of military tactics was limited, although she’d had long enough to study and understand the ship’s weapons systems.
Nevertheless, she had a head start, and the deep-set belief that she was doing the right thing.
The Rage had been traveling on their return journey for decades. They had been nurturing their weapons, creating their armies, and now, this close, she knew that the initial attack on the Human Sphere was being launched by an advance guard. She hoped that the information she had injected into her veins could be used to combat the greater invasion yet to come.
When she closed her eyes she thought of Erika, the woman she had killed, but with her eyes open, she saw only Wordsworth. Everything he had dreamed of had been trampled beneath the Rage’s feet. All the good he had proposed, the advancements and progress, the evolution of the human mind he had been so desperate to seek, all had been assassinated by the people he’d sought to remove from negative influence.
Assassinated, as had he.
A synthetic with good on her side, Liliya would do everything in her power to make it back to the Human Sphere. She might yet have time to avert genocide.
* * *
Thirty-three days into her journey, the assault ship’s hyperdrive failed. The computer informed her that a cease signal had been sent.
They’ve found me! she thought. Hurrying into the small ship’s containment hold, she shrugged into a sleep suit and programmed a pod. Even she could not survive a rapid deceleration from hyperspace travel to real space, and whoever or whatever had discovered her would be waiting once the ship had slowed beneath FTL speeds.
She might only have moments to leave the pod, take control of the ship, and fend off an attack.
The vessel was starting to shake as she immersed herself. Before initiating suspension she spoke to the computer.
“Avoid contact with any other vessel, protect the ship at all costs,” she instructed. “Bring me out the moment we’re out of hyperdrive.”
“Of course,” the ship said, its voice neutral. She wasn’t convinced that she could trust the computer. Though she had probed its quantum folds and examined the many levels of its mind, she had been unable to discern any loyalty programming. However, she was left without any choice. The hyperdrive couldn’t reverse the cease signal without catastrophic effect, and whoever had sent it would likely be waiting.
The cryo-pod closed around her and she breathed in the suspension fluid. Time slowed to a crawl, reality became slurred. A human would be asleep by now, gone, but her mind did not allow such luxuries. Liliya remained conscious as time slowed, and then stopped around her. Frozen in a moment, her existence became a micro-second with nothing before, nothi
ng after. All thought fled, and only a shred of consciousness remained.
Even so, each thought lasted an eternity.
* * *
Reality, the great expanse of time, the crushing depth of infinity rushed in. “Proximity alert… proximity alert…”
Liliya expelled the suspension gel from her insides and rolled from the pod, slapping onto the floor.
“Status?” she gasped.
“Probe approaching, distance seventeen miles and closing.”
“What sort of probe?”
“Rage.”
“Manned?”
“Unmanned,” the computer said. “Should I destroy it?”
“Of course,” Liliya said. “Why haven’t you before?”
A subtle vibration passed through the ship, so subtle that a human would not have felt it.
“You did not order me to engage any other vessel, only avoid contact,” the ship’s computer said. “The drone has been destroyed.”
“It will have…” Liliya scrambled to her feet, unsteady as her systems caught up with real time once more. She had been under for less than thirty minutes real time, but her own internal systems insisted that she had been prone for several years. She closed her eyes and did her best to ensure that sense overtook logic.
Drying and dressing quickly, she hurried through to the small flight deck. Once in the pilot’s seat she accessed all system views and assessed her situation, preferring to do it herself rather than request it from the ship’s computer.
Paranoia’s your prize for betrayal, she thought, instantly trying to cast the idea aside. She had betrayed the betrayers, that was all. It had taken her far too long, but at last she was pursuing ideals that Wordsworth had also been following. She told herself that, remembering Erika’s death in the same thought.
“Full status,” she said, and as the computer ran through the assault craft’s position, Liliya scanned the displays to double-check the information. Speed and location were accurate, system analysis seemed correct, and full weapons capability was confirmed.
