The Complete Aliens Omnibus, Volume One (Earth Hive, Nightmare Asylum, the Female War)

by Steve Perry

  “Yeah, what?”

  “You are to report to MILCOM HQ, OTD.”

  “Fuck you, tinhead. I got two more days to serve on the S&D.”

  “You wish, pal,” the bot said. “Your high-rank friends say otherwise. Up-levels wants you, OTD.”

  “What high-rank friends?” Wilks asked.

  One of the other prisoners in the multi-unit cell, a fat man from Benares, said, “What friends, period?”

  Wilks stared at the line bot. Now, why would the glitter want to see him on the double? Anytime rank started rumbling, it usually meant trouble for the grunts. He felt his gut churn, and it wasn’t just the dregs of the chem-binge he’d gone on, either. Whatever this was, it wasn’t good.

  “Let’s go, marine,” the bot said. “I am to escort you to MILCOM HQ soonest.”

  “Lemme shower and clean up first.”

  “Negative, mister. They said, ‘Soonest.’”

  The burn scar that mostly covered the left half of his face began to itch suddenly. Oh, shit. Not just bad, but real bad.

  Now what did they think he’d done?

  2

  There was a lot of trash orbiting Earth.

  In the hundred years since the first satellites had lifted, careless astronauts or construction crews had lost bolts, tools, and other chunks of hardware. The small stuff, some of it whipping around at fifteen klicks a second relative, could punch a nasty hole in anything less dense than full-sheath armor, and that included people inside a ship coming or going. Even a chip of paint could dig a crater when it hit. While this was a danger to ships, most of the little stuff burned up on reentry; what didn’t was collected by special robot rigs everybody called dust mops.

  For a time there was a real risk that the big stuff would get to the ground—part of a construction ship flamed down and killed a hundred thousand people on the Big Island once, and also made Kona coffee exceedingly rare. Because of that and similar incidents, somebody finally realized there was a problem with all the orbiting junk. Laws were passed, and now anything bigger than a man got tagged and swept. And rather than create a new agency, the work was passed on to an organization that already existed.

  This was why the Coast Guard cutter Dutton hung in high orbit over North Africa, starlight glistening on its armored boron-carbon hull, its crew of two yawning as they moved in to tag a derelict ship. Garbage Control’s flight computer said this heap was about to start its fall, and before that happened, the thing had to be probed, checked for anybody who might be camping on it, then blasted into pieces small enough for the dust mops to collect. SOP.

  “Probe ready to launch,” Ensign Lyle said.

  Next to him, the cutter’s captain, Commander Barton, nodded. “Stand by and… launch probe.”

  Lyle touched the control. “Probe away. Telemetry is green. Visuals on, sensors on, one-second burn.”

  The tiny robot ship rocketed toward the battered freight hauler, feeding electronic information to the cutter behind it.

  “Maybe this one is full of platinum ingots,” Lyle said.

  “Yeah, right. And maybe it’s raining on the moon.”

  “What’s the matter, Bar? You don’t want to be rich?”

  “Sure. And I want to spend ten years in the CG pen fighting off the yard monsters, too. Unless you figured out a way to shut down the blue box?”

  Lyle laughed. The blue box recorded everything that went on in the cutter, plus all the probe input. Even if the ship was full of platinum, there was no way to hide it from Command. And military officers didn’t get salvage rights. “Well, not exactly,” Lyle said. “But if we had a few million credits, we could hire somebody who might.”

  “Yeah, your mother,” Barton said.

  Lyle glanced at the computer flat screen. It was cheap hardware; the Navy had full holographies but the Guard still had to make do with the bottom-of-the-line Sumatran Guild electronics. The probe’s retros flamed as it reached the hulk. “Here we are. Is that good flying, or what?”

  Barton grunted. “Look at the hatch. It’s bulged outward.”

  “Explosion, you think?” Lyle said.

  “Dunno. Let’s open this can up.”

  Lyle tapped at his keyboard. The probe extruded a universal hatch key and inserted it into the lock.

  “No luck. Lock’s shot,” Lyle said.

  “I’m not blind, I can see that. Pop it.”

  “Hope the inner hatch is closed.”

  “Come on, this piece of crap has been up here for at least sixty years. Anybody on it would be dead of old age. There ain’t no air in there and if by some miracle somebody is home, they’re in a suspension tank. And aside from that, this thing has about thirty minutes before it hits enough atmosphere to boil lead. Pop it.”

  Lyle shrugged. Touched controls.

  The probe attached a small charge to the hatch and retroed back a hundred meters. The charge flared silently in the vacuum and the hatch shattered.

  “Knock, knock. Anybody home?”

  “Go see. And try not to bang the probe up too bad this time.”

  “That wasn’t my fault,” Lyle said. “One of the retros was plugged.”

  “So you say.”

  The tiny robot ship moved in through the opening in the derelict ship.

  “Inner hatch is open.”

  “Good. Saves time. Move it in.”

  The probe’s halogens lit as it moved into the ship.

  The radiation alarm chimed on the computer’s screen. “Kinda hot in there,” Lyle said.

  “Yep, hope you like your soypro well done.”

  “Mmm. I guess anybody in this baby would be toast by now. We’ll have to give the probe a bath when it gets back.”

  “Chreesto, look at that!” Barton said.

  What had been a man floated just ahead of the probe. The hard radiation had killed the bacteria that would have rotted him, and the cold had preserved what the vacuum hadn’t sucked out of him. He looked like a leather prune. He was naked.

  “Lordy, lordy,” Lyle said. “Hey, check the wall behind him.” He touched a control and the visuals enhanced and enlarged. Something was written on the bulkhead in smeary brown letters: KILL US ALL, it said.

  “Damn, is that written in blood? Looks like blood to me.”

  “You want an analysis?”

  “Never mind. We got us a flip ship.”

  Lyle nodded. They’d heard about them, though he himself had never opened one. Somebody went nuts and wasted everybody else. Opened a port and let the air out, or maybe flooded the ship with radiation, like this one. A quick death or a slow one, but death, sure enough. Lyle shivered.

  “Find a terminal and see if you can download the ship’s memory. The meter is running here.”

  “If the batteries are still good. Oops. Got motion on the detector.”

  “I see it. I don’t believe it, but I see it. Nobody can possibly be alive, even somebody in a full rad suit would cook in this tub—”

  “There it is. It’s just a cargo carrier.”

  A short, squat robot crawled along a line of Velcro against the ceiling.

  “We must have jolted it awake when we blew the hatch.”

  “Yeah, right. Get the memory.”

  The probe floated toward a control panel.

  “Damn, look at those holes in the deck. Looks like something dissolved the plastic. Radiation wouldn’t do that, would it?”

  “Who knows? Who cares? Just dump the memory and pull the probe so we can blow this sucker. I have a date tonight and I don’t want any overtime.”

  “You’re the commander.”

  The probe connected to the control board. The ship’s power was almost gone, but sufficient to download the memory.

  “Coming in,” Lyle said. “Here’s the ID scan, onscreen.”

  “No surprises here,” Barton said. “Type five nuke drive, lotta deep-space time, bad shields, dead core. No wonder they junked this bucket. That’s it. Shove it sunward, set the 10-CA and le
t’s go home.”

  Lyle touched more controls. The probe placed the small clean atomic against a wall where it adhered. “Okay, three minutes to—aw, shit!”

  The screen went blank.

  “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything! The camera’s gone out.”

  “Switch to memory drive. We lose another probe and the Old Man’ll chew our asses to pulp.”

  Lyle touched a button. The computer took over the probe. Since it had memorized every centimeter of the flight in, it could retrace the flight and bring the probe back.

  “It’s clear,” Lyle said a moment later. “Burning more fuel than it should, though.”

  “Maybe it snagged on something coming out. Doesn’t matter.”

  “Probe docking. Outer hatch open. Let me see if I can get an eye on the sucker and see why it’s wallowing so bad.” Lyle ran his practiced hands over the controls.

  “Holy fuck!” Barton said.

  Lyle just stared. What the hell was that? Some kind of thing sat on the probe as it approached the ship. It looked like a reptile, no, a giant bug. Wait, it had to be some kind of suit, no way it could live in vac without a suit—

  “Close the hatch!” Barton yelled.

  “Too late! It’s inside.”

  “Flood the bay with antirad! Pump the air out! Blow it back through the fucking door!”

  A clang vibrated through the ship. Like a hammer smashing metal.

  “It’s trying to open the inner hatch!”

  Frantically Lyle tapped controls. “Antirad spray on full! Evacuation pumps on!”

  The banging continued.

  “Okay, okay, don’t worry, it can’t get in. The hatch is locked. Nobody can break through a sealed boron-carbon hatch with his bare hands!”

  Something crashed, ringing loudly. Then came the sound spacers fear more than anything: air rushing out.

  “Close the outer hatch, goddammit!”

  But the dropping air pressure tugged at Lyle. The cabin was filled with loose items being sucked toward the rear of the cutter. Light pens, coffee cups, a hard-copy magazine fluttering madly. He lunged at the controls, missed the emergency button, lunged again.

  Barton, also half out of his chair, stabbed at the red button, but hit the computer override instead. The ship went to manual drive.

  The cabin pressure raced toward zero. A hatch-sized hole blew air into space real damned fast. Lyle’s eyes bulged, began to bleed. One eardrum popped. He screamed, but found the control for the external hatch.

  “I got it! I got it!”

  The outer hatch cycled shut. Emergency air tanks kicked on. The faux gravity pulled the two men back toward their seats. “Goddammit! Goddammit!” Barton said.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s closed!”

  “Coast Guard Control, this is the cutter Dutton!” Barton began. “We have a situation here!”

  “Oh, man!” Lyle said.

  Barton twisted.

  The thing stood right fucking there!

  It had teeth! It came toward them. It looked hungry.

  Barton tried to get up, fell, and hit the drive control. The ship was still on manual. The drive kicked on. The acceleration threw the monster backward, drove Lyle and Barton into their seats. Even though they couldn’t move, the thing somehow managed to drag itself onward.

  It was a nightmare. It couldn’t be real.

  The thing ripped chunks out of Lyle’s seat as it pulled him from the chair. Blood sprayed as its clawed hands punctured his shoulders. It opened its mouth and a rod shot out, so fast Barton could hardly see it. The rod buried itself in Lyle’s head like his skull was putty. Blood and brain tissue splashed. Lyle screamed in total terror.

  The cutter, still under acceleration, headed directly toward the radioactive hulk in front of it.

  The monster jerked that hellish thing from Lyle’s skull. It made a sucking sound, like a foot pulled out of mud. The creature turned toward Barton. Barton drew breath to scream, but the sound never came out—

  At that instant the cutter smashed into the scuttled freighter—

  —and the bomb the probe had set went off.

  Both ships were destroyed in the explosion. Virtually everything was shattered into tiny bits that spiraled in a long loop toward Sol.

  Everything except the blue box.

  * * *

  Wilks stared at the screen as it washed white.

  Amazing how well the blue boxes were armored, to survive even a close atomic blast like that.

  He looked at the guard bot. “Okay, I’ve seen it.”

  “Let’s go,” the bot said.

  They were alone in a conference room in MIL-COM HQ. Wilks stood, and the bot led the way. If he’d had a gun, he would have shot the bot and tried to run. Yeah. Right.

  As they walked along the corridor, Wilks put it together. So this was why they’d never kicked him out of the Corps. It was only a matter of time before humans stumbled across the aliens again. They hadn’t wanted to believe him about what had happened on Rim, but the truth machines wouldn’t let them off the hook that easy. The brain strainers had pulled it out of him, and the Corps never threw anything away that might be useful someday.

  His belly clenched around a cold knot, like somebody had jammed a blade of liquid nitrogen into his guts. The bomb on Rim hadn’t gotten them all. The military found itself in need of an expert on these things and Corporal Wilks was what it had. Probably didn’t make them very happy, but they would make do.

  He wasn’t looking forward to this meeting. It certainly wasn’t going to do him any good. Not at all.

  3

  Salvaje’s place was almost directly under the huge reactor shield for the Southern Hemisphere Power Grid Switching Station. The PGSS field was big enough so it sometimes created its own weather. Mostly that was rain. Day and night, steady, unrelieved, dreary-as-shit rain. The building was eon-plas prefab, proof against the more or less constant downpour, a dull gray material that blended in against a sky the color of melted lead. It was a good place to hide. Nobody came here unless they had a reason, even the ground police avoided the rain when they could.

  Pindar the holotech splashed through puddles, ankle deep despite the drainage pumps’ attempts to clear the water. If Salvaje didn’t have so much spare money he was willing to part with, Pindar would have avoided this scum hole. The building walls were thick with mold, even the retardant paint couldn’t stop it, and there were rumors that you could catch a mutant strain of flu here that would kill you before you could get to a medic—which wouldn’t help anyhow because even recombinant antivirals couldn’t touch the stuff. Nice.

  The door slid open on creaky runners as Pindar walked up the incline to Salvaje’s place.

  “You’re late,” came the ghostly voice from within.

  Pindar stepped inside, stripped off the osmotic rainfilm that kept him dry, dropped the torn bits of spiderweb-thin plastic onto the floor. “Yeah, well, between my day job and this shit, it’s lucky I can find time to sleep.”

  “I care nothing for your sleep. I pay well.”

  Pindar looked at Salvaje. He was ordinary enough. Medium height, hair slicked straight back in some kind of electrostatic hold, a little beard and mustache. He could have been thirty or fifty; he had one of those faces that don’t seem to age much. He wore a plain black coverall and flexboots. Pindar wasn’t sure what a holy man ought to look like, but Salvaje sure wasn’t it.

  “There,” Salvaje said, pointing.

  Pindar saw the cam on a table. “Damn, where’d you get that antique? It looks like an old ship’s monitor—”

  “Where I got it is not important. Can you use it to tie us into the Nets?”

  “Señor, I can tie you into the Nets with a toaster and a couple of microwave cooker circuit boards. I am a very good technician.”

  Salvaje said nothing, only stared at Pindar with those cold gray eyes of his. Pindar repressed a shudder. Gave him the crawlies when he did t
hat. “Sí, I can put you on the air. But visual and auditory only. No sublims, no subsonics, no olfactories. Be pretty tame compared to what your competition is throwing at the GU.”

  “The Great Unwashed will hear the truth of my message without trickery. And they will see the image of the True Messiah. Such things will be enough. Behold!”

  Salvaje touched a control on an old projector on the table next to him and a hologram shimmered to life behind him.

  “Madre de Dios!” Pindar said softly.

  The image was perhaps three meters from the tip of its pointed, spiky tail to the top of its banana-shaped and grotesque head. If it had eyes, they seemed recessed just behind twin rows of needle-tipped teeth. Pindar stepped to one side and saw what appeared to be thick external ribs jutting from the thing’s back, and overall, it looked as if some god playing a joke had created a manlike thing born of giant insects. The monster was a dull black or dark gray, and Pindar would not wish to meet such a thing under any circumstances. He didn’t know what the Messiah was supposed to look like, either, but he would bet all the iron in the Asteroid Belt that this wasn’t it.

  “I can put you on the air in five minutes,” Pindar said, bending to pick up the antique camera. “Along with your…messiah. It is your money. But I wonder that anyone will look upon this thing and think it might deliver them, señor. I myself would expect to see it in Hades.”

  “Do not blaspheme about that which you do not understand, technician.”

  Pindar shrugged. He accessed the camera’s computer, tied it into a shunt, and rigged a relay transmitter. He moved quickly to the power unit and control console, tapping stolen codes into an orbiting broadcast satellite. He held off on the last digit, then turned to Salvaje. “When I input the final number, you will have three minutes before the WCC locks its trace of our signal. Two more minutes and they will find the dish I hid in Madras, and two minutes after that they will find this place. Best you hold your transmission to five minutes. I have an automatic cut off thirty seconds after that. I will have to find another bounce dish if you wish to broadcast again.”

  “Esta no importa,” Salvaje said.

  Pindar shrugged. “Your money.”