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

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The Complete Aliens Omnibus, Volume One (Earth Hive, Nightmare Asylum, the Female War) Page 10

by Steve Perry


  Two men in pearl-gray uniforms stood near the table, looking down at Pindar. The uniforms identified them as TIA, members of the Terran Intelligence Agency, and that was bad. Very bad. T-bags didn’t stir themselves for menial crimes, only those that might threaten the security of the planet itself.

  Pindar was in trouble, aprieto mucho, and he knew exactly why. Salvaje. After the last time with the man, Pindar had done some investigating on his own. He had stumbled across something he shouldn’t know, something so terrifying he wanted to block it from his memory. And now, TIA had stumbled across him. He had known it was coming and he knew there was no way out.

  One of the agents, a kindly looking man who could be somebody’s grandfather, smiled at Pindar. He said, “Son, we have some questions we need answers to, if you don’t mind.”

  The other agent, a lean, hatchet-faced young man with chocolate-colored skin, said, “You understand that we have full authority to question you in any manner in which we choose?”

  Pindar licked dry lips. “Sí. Yes, I understand.” Here it was. The beginning of the end. Adios, Pindar. Any way you look at it, you lose.

  “Good,” Grandfather said. He put a small plastic case upon the table next to the platform upon which Pindar lay. Opened the case. Removed from it a pressure syringe and a small vial of reddish fluid. Loaded the vial into the injector.

  “I—I—there is no need for that,” Pindar said. He hurried to get the words out. “I will answer your questions! I will tell you everything!”

  Hatchet-face grinned, showing teeth that were too perfect to be natural. Vat-grown implants, had to be. “Oh, we know that, Señor Pindar. But this will save us all a lot of worry about how truthful your answers will be.”

  Grandfather leaned over Pindar, pressed the injector against the big artery in the tech’s neck. Touched the firing stud. There was a small pop! and Pindar felt an icy rush begin in his throat, swelling to fill his head with coldness. Dios!

  Hatchet-face looked at his chronometer. “Three. Four. Five. That’s it.”

  Pindar felt the cold in his head change into a pleasant, muzzy warmth. It was okay. In fact, it was better than okay. He couldn’t recall when he had felt so wonderful. His earlier worries evaporated like dew in the hot sunshine. Why, if he wanted to, he could get up off this table and leap into the air and fly like a bird! He didn’t want to do that, though, he just wanted to lie here and visit with these nice men, Grandfather and Hatchet-face. After all, it was easy to see that they were his friends, and they cared deeply for him, and that anything he could do for them he should do, immediately.

  “Feel good?” Grandfather asked.

  “Yeah!”

  “That’s great. Mind if we ask you a few questions?”

  “Why no, Grandfather, not at all!”

  * * *

  Grona leaned back in his chair. The TIA agent across from him wasn’t wearing the pearl-gray uniform as regulations said he must while on duty, but there was no doubt about his identity. “Shall I run it?” he asked.

  Orona nodded. “I hope you’re wrong about this.”

  “They don’t pay us to be wrong, Doctor. Sorry.”

  The agent touched a control on the holographic projector on Orona’s desk. The air shimmered and the picture flowered. A close view of a man on a pressor table, smiling as if drugged.

  “Tell us again,” a voice off camera said. “Just like before.”

  “Sure,” the man on the table said.

  “After the last time, when Salvaje threatened me, I decided I had to find out more about what he was into.

  “So I did some checking and discovered that he had hired other technicians to help him. I knew one of them slightly, Gerard, a contract worker for the Bionational Lab in Lima. I took the shuttle to Lima, made it a point to ‘accidentally’ bump into him. Bought him a few drinks. I learned that Salvaje had worked for Bionational before he started his crusade. Some kind of low-level administrator. He didn’t need the money, he came from a rich family, but obviously he needed something from Bionat. Up and quit one day, but kept in touch with some of the techs. Gerard didn’t know why Salvaje quit, and he only did some hardwiring for him, set up a small computer system. Salvaje paid well, that was all that was important.

  “Gerard didn’t know anything else about it, but that was enough. I knew that Salvaje had his own system.

  “So I went to his place when he was visiting the pregnant whore and broke in.”

  The man on the table laughed. “His security was not so good as he thought. I got inside. Ran a download program and copied all his files. Took them home; he would never know I had been there.

  “I found out where his messiah came from when I ran an AV he had buried in a mathematical program.”

  The agent waved his hand and the image froze, floating silently in the air. “You’ll want to see this while Pindar talks,” he said. “We found it in his computer.”

  The agent touched some controls. The man on the table vanished and was replaced by a somewhat grainy picture of Bionational’s logo. The logo was overstamped by a naming red sign that said: Authorized Personnel, REQUIRED CLEARANCE TS-1, Bionational Internal AV 42255-1, composite.

  Pindar’s voice continued.

  “It was a bad induction copy of a Bionational top-secret AV, for internal view only. Salvaje must have stolen it or had somebody steal it for him. Whoever had done it screwed it up, they lost part of the visual and all of the audio track, so there’s no sound.”

  The image blurred, then resolved into a view of a clean room. A man lay on a table, bucking against a field. A spot on his solar plexus tore open and what appeared to be an eel’s head the size of a man’s fist emerged, flashing bloody needle-sharp teeth. Three men in cleansuits stood over the thing. The eel like creature shot out of the man on the table like a dart and latched on to one of the cleansuited men. It ripped a hole in his suit.

  “The first part of the recording showed the birth of one of the things. Showed it attacking another man.”

  The camera’s view switched to another pickup, zoomed in on the eel as it disappeared into the cleansuit. The pickup pulled back to show the terrified face of the man in the suit. He was screaming, but there was no sound. The image blurred, lost a couple of seconds, then re-formed.

  Orona stared, fascinated.

  The suited man ran. The camera lost him.

  Two men fell as they tried to follow the fleeing one.

  The image changed again. Armed guards stood in a corridor. A door opened and the cleansuited figure ran into view, slapping at a hole in his suit front. He lost control, shambled away.

  The image jiggered. Another camera. The running man.

  “They couldn’t let it get away,” the voice said.

  The running man’s head exploded, the clean-suit’s helmet ballooned out, split, sprayed gore.

  The image held, an angle on the body on the floor.

  “Now,” the agent said. “We switch to…”

  A huge room. Armored walls. Looked like a containment vessel for controlled fusion experiments. Suspended from cables was a naked man’s body. No doubt that he was dead; most of his head was gone.

  A telemetry crawl ran across the image, but the figures and words were not those of a human.

  “I didn’t see it at first,” came the voice. “But I figured it out fast enough when I saw the recording. They left the thing inside the guy they’d shot. He was a doctor, by the way, I saw that on the screen. Had been head of a division of Bionational before he became baby food.

  “They put it in a place where it couldn’t get out and they watched it.”

  The picture of the dead man froze.

  “This is edited,” the agent said. “Apparently this Salvaje couldn’t get the other recordings, so this only hits the high points. Though he seems to have a hell of an organization, coded names and payouts, we’re still working on those.” He touched his control pad.

  The image faded into another.
r />   “Here’s what it looks like about halfway grown,” the agent said.

  Orona stared. The thing appeared pretty much like the reconstruction on his own informational AV. But wait—half grown?

  “Here is Salvaje’s messiah,” Pindar said. “It isn’t a computer image as I thought, it is real.”

  The image faded again, went blank.

  “Apparently neither Salvaje nor the technician were able to get past this point in the recording,” the agent said. “But there is more. Our people have state-of-the-art recovery gear. We were able to pull another set of visuals from it.”

  The blank image faded in again.

  This time the monster was larger, shaped slightly differently, with a massive cranial plate that branched antler-like. It had an extra set of smaller arms coming from its chest area. The creature was huge, there was a scale built into the edge of the holo. The walls of the room were now covered with convoluted loops of shining black material, and the floor was dotted with garbage-can-sized eggs.

  “My God,” Orona said. “It’s a queen!”

  “One that doesn’t need to be fertilized, apparently,” the agent said.

  Orona shook his head. “This could confirm my theory that a queen can develop from a drone as needed to continue the species. Some kind of hormonal change, perhaps.”

  The monster showed teeth, looking directly at the observation camera. The image faded and went blank again.

  Orona waited.

  “That’s all there is of the stolen recording, I’m afraid,” the agent said.

  “Sweet baby Buddha’s left nut,” Orona said. “We’ve got to get it and those eggs. I’ll make some calls, we’ll seize the Lima laboratory in the interests of Terran Security.”

  The agent shook his head. “Too late for that.”

  Orona blinked. “What? What do you mean?”

  “Watch.”

  The agent’s hands did their magic with the control pad. The air lit with new pictures.

  “These are from Bionational security monitors at the Lima complex. Note the date.”

  Orona looked at the red numbers in the corner of the image. Yesterday. Last night, from the hour.

  “Apparently Salvaje had Pindar under a loose surveillance. Or perhaps an informant in the local police. Whatever. He must have found out we were closing in on him. Before Pindar’s questioning had been completed, this is what happened at Bionationals Peruvian labs.”

  The scene was of a fenced perimeter. A guard kiosk. Two men sat inside.

  “Hey, look at that!” one of them said.

  Both guards jumped up. The road camera caught the approaching vehicle. An old-style windjammer thirty-ton cargo truck approaching the gate. At speed.

  “Stop, you asshole!” one of the guards yelled.

  The truck slammed into the gate. The gate was durasteel mesh and solid wrist-thick bars and had not been designed to withstand the impact of a multiton cargo truck moving at fifty kph. The metal bent, bolts tore loose, wire stretched… but even so, it held. The truck slewed to a halt against it.

  From the ruined cab of the vehicle, a single battered woman crawled out, managed to stand. She wore a robe. The security computer locked a wide-angle camera onto her. Her face was bloody. Her hands were empty but she had something strapped to her chest, a blocky circular device about the diameter of a dinner plate.

  One of the guards hit the panic button and the alarm Klaxon started hooting. The other guard pulled his sidearm and ordered the woman to halt.

  She kept coming. As the guard raised his weapon to fire, the woman exploded. The image washed white.

  “Buddha,” Orona said.

  “We IDed the bomb as a five-ton building demolition charge,” the agent said. “It took out the kiosk, the truck, and twenty-six meters of fence.”

  A patrol robot provided the next segment of recording.

  The POV shot as the robot approached the destroyed entrance to the compound was a little shaky, despite the minicam gyros in the bot, because of the rubble it was traversing, the agent said.

  Orona watched, fascinated.

  The bot broadcast its security warning as a stolen passenger bus stuffed full of people roared past it. Since a security alert had been called the bot’s guns were armed and it was authorized to fire upon intruders. It sprayed the bus with twin 10mm machine guns; its cameras picked up the holes as the rounds pierced the heavy plastic sides of the bus. People were dying inside, that was apparent, and the bot continued firing, aiming for the operator. A warning light began flashing on the bot’s proximity detectors, and the bot reacted to the new target, shifting on its axis, just in time to be smashed by a speeding aircar. The driver, who died in the subsequent explosion as he and the car and the bot were engulfed in a yellow flash, died smiling.

  “This next piece we got from a spysat we had footprinting the area,” the agent said.

  The view was from overhead, and had that too slick look that an augmentation computer added to a pixilated image. Three buses approached the large building centered in the frame. Security robots fired on the vehicles, and return fire came from the buses at the defensive bots.

  The first bus reached the complex’s entrance. Ten or twelve robed figures scrambled out and ran for the door. From the angle, Orona couldn’t tell if they were men or women, but it didn’t matter, because they were cut down by gunfire from within the building.

  Another dozen figures boiled forth from the bus.

  Yet more from the next bus that arrived, and a fourth wave from the final bus. Nearly all of them were slaughtered, too.

  Nearly all of them.

  One of the figures tottered to the door.

  The spysat’s filters cut down the white blast as the figure blew apart. Smoke and debris sprayed from the building.

  “Got the door and the guards there,” the agent said. He spoke as if he were talking about what he had for lunch.

  More figures emerged from the buses.

  The images wavered.

  “Spysat moved out of range there,” the agent said. “We didn’t have anything else we could shift over for another few minutes. This piece is from the building’s security comp. Watch.”

  A lone guard, one of his legs missing, lay on the floor, a suppressed machine gun in his hands. He fired the weapon, waving it back and forth.

  The wounded guard’s targets were robed figures, men and women, smiling as they walked into the hard sleet of bullets. Ten, fifteen, maybe a score of them fell before the guard’s gun ran dry.

  The camera caught perfectly the woman who bent over the wounded guard and put a thin knife blade through his eye. She was smiling as if this were the funniest thing she had ever seen.

  More figures moved into view.

  “Freeze frame,” the agent said.

  The moving figures turned into an oil painting, clear, sharp, still. “Nice optics,” the agent said. He pointed at the hologram. “See that one, second from the right?”

  Orona nodded.

  “Salvaje.”

  Orona regarded the bearded man. He didn’t look like a fanatic. But then—what exactly did a fanatic look like? Was he supposed to be drooling and foaming at the mouth?

  “Resume play.”

  More robed people arrived. Orona estimated there must be at least thirty-five or forty of them who had survived the attack.

  “Thirty-seven passed this camera,” the agent said, as if reading Orona’s thoughts.

  The image cut to a view of a door. DANGER, it said in ten-centimeter-high letters, BIOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT. Authorized Personnel Only.

  A pair of dead guards lay on the floor. One of them had a thin knife stuck in his eye. Five robed figures sprawled near the guards.

  “Thirty-two of them left,” the agent said.

  Another angle. Inside the chamber. Orona recognized the ropy exudate on the walls. A translucent mist fogged the ground, partially covering rows of eggs.

  Some of the attackers stripped off their ro
bes, showing themselves naked underneath. They each had a tattoo of a drone alien on their bodies, extending from neck to pubis.

  “Goddamn,” Orona said.

  “We found the tattooist, he was one of them. Been making house calls for months, apparently. It gets better,” the agent said. “Check this part.”

  The queen alien lumbered into view. She stared at the people, twisted her head to one side, then the other, as if puzzled.

  Salvaje faced her. He said something, but only a few words were audible.

  “—be one with you, Messiah!”

  “Sorry about the sound,” the agent said. “We’re lucky we got this much. We found the blue box almost six klicks away.”

  Orona looked at the agent. “What?”

  “I’ll explain. Watch.”

  Some of the eggs began opening. Half of the invading people now stood naked, arms outstretched, eyes closed, waiting. The others remained well outside the room, one angle showed them. “We’ve cut together several views here,” the agent said.

  The first one to open was in front of Salvaje. He stood with his arms wide, as did the others, but his eyes were open. He leaned down over the egg. The flaps glistened with strands of shining slime. Fingerbonelike legs emerged and caught the edges of the opened egg, hauling the primary-embryo stage of the alien’s crablike body onto the lip. It leapt at Salvaje, wrapped a muscular tail around his neck, jammed its ovipositor into his startled mouth, and clutched his face with the legs, pressing itself flat against his face.

  Orona could see the terror grip the man, and he realized that in this final moment of truth, the reality was more than he had bargained for, for Salvaje tried to scream.

  The sound was choked off by the tube rammed down his throat.

  The scientist in Orona was intrigued, but the human part of him recoiled.

  Other eggs splayed wide their fleshy openings, other primary-embryos leapt upon waiting faces.

  The queen watched it all impassively.

 

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