by Steve Perry
“Yeah,” she said, and then sighed. “Sorry. I got lost there for a minute. Anyway, the last thing I really remember is settling into sleep after LV-426, me and one of the soldiers and a civilian, a little girl. I—I guess the ship must have sustained some damage somewhere along the way. I don’t remember anything else. I woke up in a crowd of refugees on Earth six weeks ago, and they were on their way here; it seemed like a good idea—everything was falling to shit down there. So I’ve only been here a month longer than you have.”
Billie nodded. “So what did the medics say about the missing part? Physical or psych damage?”
“I don’t do medics,” she said, smiling a little. “Besides, I feel fine.”
Ripley stood and stretched her arms over her head. “Want to walk with me to dinner?”
* * *
Billie glanced curiously at the older woman as they headed toward the cafeteria. She was the first survivor, so far as anyone knew, to have seen the aliens and gone back for more. Billie found herself intrigued by Ripley’s relaxed, confident demeanor, a calmness that seemed unlikely after all she must have been through. Especially given her own experiences with the monsters. Even after only two weeks here, it seemed like a million years had passed.
They walked down C-corridor toward the nearest dining hall. There was a viewing plate adjacent to the hatchway that led them down another corridor; peering out the window was a young couple, both medtechs by the look of their IDs, holding hands and talking quietly. Billie saw one whole stretch of the station from her vantage point, long tubes set into spheres and cubes, assembled like a giant child’s toy. She shivered slightly from the cold as they neared the hatch. The station was made from heavy plastic and cheap lunar metals; heat came from baseboard heaters set along each corridor, but the void outside kept the corridors from ever really getting warm.
Apparently the newer modules were worse, exposed plastic beams and cramped quarters with poor facilities and lights. They had been slapped together to field the incoming refugees from Earth, the flood of people that had finally tapered to a trickle. Gateway Orbital Station now held somewhere around 17,000, almost twice the number it had been intended for—but it wouldn’t need to hold many more. As Ripley said, things were falling to shit down there.
Though it was early for dinner, the hall was crowded. There had been a midday shipment of real vegetables from one of the hydroponic gardens, and word had spread fast.
Billie and Ripley both got small salads of carrot and lettuce to go with their meals. They sat at one of the smaller tables near the entrance. In spite of the crowd, it was quiet; most of the people on Gateway had lost friends and family to the aliens on Earth. It was almost like people were embarrassed to laugh or have a good time. Billie could understand that.
She had spent much of her life in various psych wards, trying to convince medtechs that the aliens existed; the solemn atmosphere of the station was familiar, if not comforting. She didn’t feel particularly at home here, but then she’d never really had a home. At least her life wasn’t in danger; that was something. After the trip with Wilks, being safe seemed almost like a dream.
Ripley ate a bite of her heated soypro and made a face. “Tastes like insulation that’s been dehydrated, frozen, and reheated. Then spit on.”
Billie tasted her own, then nodded. “At least it’s warm.”
They ate quietly, each concentrating on her meal.
“So do you dream of her? The mother alien?”
Billie looked up from her tray, startled.
Ripley watched her intently. “I do,” she continued. “At least I did, before my memory lapse.” She took another bite of soypro.
“I—yeah. I do, too. I’ve heard that others have dreams…” Billie trailed off. Yeah, she had heard stories, mostly about fanatics, people who had turned their dreams of the aliens into some kind of religion; the Chosen who had realized that Judgment Day had already come. She’d mostly kept quiet about her own dreams, but recently… “I have them often. Almost every night.”
Ripley nodded. “It got that way with me, too. They started with her reaching out, expressing love, and turned into these. I felt a connection. They were transmissions. I knew where she was, that she wanted to gather her children to her. The queen of the queens, the driving force behind the whole goddamned species. I knew where to find her!”
She pushed her tray aside abruptly. “And I lost her.”
Billie nodded. “I knew I wasn’t the only one, but I haven’t had a lot of time to think about it lately and this station doesn’t offer a whole lot in the way of group therapy sessions.”
Ripley smiled, a short, bitter expression. “I think I know what she’s waiting for,” she said, “and I have an idea. We need to find more dreamers… what about Wilks?”
Billie shrugged. “I know he dreams, but I don’t think it’s the same way I do. That doesn’t mean much. He keeps to himself. We could ask him.” She glanced around, although she figured he had gone for a workout. In their two weeks at the station, Wilks had spent most of his time in some gym or another. “I’m supposed to meet him later for a drink.”
“I’d like to come along—if it’s not intruding,” Ripley said. It seemed she chose her words with care.
“No problem. You’re welcome.” Billie smiled, and Ripley smiled back, a much easier expression than before. Billie found herself liking this woman more and more.
* * *
Wilks had been cycling for the better part of an hour, working up a real good sweat, when he noticed the young boy sitting in the corner with his head resting on his hands. He had been concentrating on the vid screen in front of him, a level-nine cycle run that was going to make him hurt like hell tomorrow, or he might have seen the boy earlier.
It was one of the station’s smaller gyms, and he liked it that way; the larger workout rooms could hold 200, and that many people sweating in one place wasn’t particularly appealing, especially given the smell of recycled air. And he didn’t care much for crowds.
The kid was maybe ten or eleven, a thin, pale boy with dark hair and a neutral expression. He stared at nothing, his chin resting on his knees.
Something about him reminded Wilks of himself at that age; maybe it was the build or the hair… maybe the blankness. He could relate to that.
* * *
Wilks had grown up in a small town on Earth in the southern United States, raised by his aunt; his mother had died of breast cancer when he was five, after his father had left the two of them the year before. Aunt Carrie was nice enough, but didn’t spend much time with him; she worked the night shift at a rest home and was rather indifferent to his life. Little Davey Arthur Wilks had enough to eat and clothes to wear, and that was her responsibility as she saw it, that and nothing else.
Carrie Greene did not understand much of anything, and sure as hell not little boys.
They didn’t discuss his parents often; his mother was a saint who had nothing but love for Davey, his father a no-account bastard son of a bitch who had nothing but his own best interests at heart. David—who hated being called “Davey”—wasn’t so sure. He couldn’t really remember either of them, and although he knew his mother wasn’t gonna come back, he did dream of his father coming to get him one day, standing on their weather-beaten porch with a smile for his son and things to play with and a new place to live. His dad was handsome and strong and smart and didn’t take shit from nobody.
It was late summer, two days after his eleventh birthday. David lay on the floor of their small, stuffy living room with his newest Danno Kruise, Action-Man comic. Danno was in the middle of kicking some serious bad-guy butt when there was a knock at the door. Aunt Carrie was “resting her eyes” in the back bedroom, so David answered, expecting a salesman.
A tall man holding a brightly wrapped box stood there.
“David?” The guy was badly in need of a shave and wore a shabby suit a few years out of date, the synlin frayed at the cuffs.
“Y
eah, why?” David stepped back from the door a little; he didn’t know this man. This man with bright blue eyes…
“Ah—well, hi. I knew it was your birthday, and—well, I was in town. Here.” The stranger pushed the box toward him.
David took it and looked at him. “Who are you?”
“Oh, hell.” The stranger smiled weakly. “I’m Ben. I am—was a friend of your mother’s.” Ben looked at his watch, then back at David. “Happy birthday, Davey. Listen, I gotta get going, I’m supposed to meet someone… you know how it is.” He looked at David helplessly.
David stared, unable to speak. His father’s name was Ben. He clutched the package tightly. The wrapping crinkled under his grip. Ben.
The man turned and walked away, without looking back. David stood there for a long time before he closed the door. He tried to tell himself that it wasn’t true, that this Ben wasn’t his dad. It couldn’t be. He wouldn’t just come here, drop this present off, and leave. He wouldn’t do that.
“Davey?” His aunt, risen from her nap, padded toward him. “Was that somebody at the door? What have you got there?”
The boy stared at her. He shook his head. “It wasn’t anybody important,” he said. He tossed the present at the shiny copper ash bucket his aunt kept next to the antique wood stove.
* * *
In the gym, Wilks shook his head again. Jesus. Some of those old tapes were real fucking hard to get rid of. He stared at the boy. “Hey, kid, you won’t build any muscle sitting on your butt like that.”
The boy looked at him, like some kind of big-eyed bird.
“Here. Let me show you how that machine works.”
It wasn’t much, but it was something Wilks could do. Nobody had ever done it for him.
The smile on the boy’s face was worth a million, easy. And it didn’t cost Wilks anything at all.
2
Amy and the old man stood in front of a tunnel covered in alien secretion and littered with debris. The tunnel led off into thick darkness.
The old man ran a shaky hand through his dirty white hair and put his arm around the adolescent. Amy smiled up at him. She was a pretty girl, in spite of her grimy skin and tattered clothes. Her nervous smile made her look much younger.
“They’re using the underground to move beneath the city,” he said, keeping his voice quiet “The tunnels and grids are still here, but changed. Transformed.” He and Amy walked forward a few steps. The lighting was weak; long shadows danced and re-formed beyond them as they moved through the silent cavern.
The old man continued:
“It’s—it’s difficult to be sure, but the tunnels appear to converge into a central locus—like spokes on a wheel.”
The dark, ropy alien construct surrounded them completely now. The walls were embedded with long-dead humans—a mostly rotted arm hanging down from above, a half skull jutting out to their left. To the right was something that might have been a dog once.
Amy moved closer to the old man.
“As far as I can tell, the creatures keep to one area at a time, use it up, and move to another. Our camp is set up nearby.” He put a shaky hand on Amy’s shoulder. “The aliens are a few klicks from here, as far as I can tell, so we’re as safe as we can be.”
“I wish we could go up,” Amy said. “We can’t, though.”
The old man nodded. “There are those who feel the ‘connection’ and hunt for alien breeders above ground. We’re better off down here.”
They walked down through the tunnel, death all around them like obscene art, both breathing shallowly through their mouths. After a minute they stopped, and the old man began to speak again in his schoolteacher’s voice.
“We’re not far from the hub now, one of the central areas. That’s why there are more breeders here, what’s left of them. We don’t dare go any farther.”
Amy shuddered slightly. “Can we get out of here, Daddy? It doesn’t feel right.”
He looked around warily and then smiled at the child. “Yeah, okay. Let’s get an early dinner.” They turned back to the tunnel, the old man letting Amy take the lead.
“You know, I should’ve—” he began, when suddenly a hand shot out from the dark wall and grabbed his knee. Amy let out a single, high-pitched yelp. The old man fell.
Another voice came out of the darkness. “Oh, shit. Oh, shit!” A young man ran into view.
“Paul!” shouted the old man, and the younger one ran to help him. “Get it off me, get it off!”
Paul held a small lantern into the air over the old man. A breeder was strung into the black secretion there, close to death. It had once been a woman, and now was barely animal, its eyes insane. It held tight.
“Daddy,” Amy breathed out, chest hitching. She started to sob.
Both Paul and the old man beat at the woman’s hand with their fists, but she would not let go. Her face was bloated and almost black. Paul looked toward the hub; somewhere, maybe far away, there were clattering noises.
“Lisssen,” she rasped out, her lips bleeding and cracked. “I am the mother…”
Paul stood and kicked at her hand. The thing’s wrist snapped cleanly, and the old man scuttled backward, away from the dying creature. She didn’t seem to notice that her hand was hanging off her wrist; she didn’t seem to feel pain.
The old man stood, grabbed Amy by the arm, and they all backed away from the mad breeder.
She closed her awful eyes. “Soon,” she whispered hoarsely. “Soon, soon.” The terror was there on all of their faces as they moved back toward camp, her final words seeming to echo all around the trio.
The old man said, “Paul?”
The younger man nodded. “I’ll take care of it.” He pulled a knife from a sheath on his belt. A stray beam of light glittered from the blade. He moved back toward the breeder—
* * *
The screen went to static. Billie found her hands clamped to the arms of the chair so hard her tendons creaked when she managed to loosen her grip. She shook her head back and forth, almost without realizing that she was doing it. A denial of Amy’s pain, of her own—
She was in Gateway’s main broadcast room, alone; the tech had gone on his dinner break.
“Not again,” she said, feeling like a little girl herself. Her own childhood of running and hiding on Rim had never seemed closer—everyone gone, dragged away screaming to be food for the creatures. A flood of memories hit her: crouched in a ventilation duct while a fat man with bleeding ears howled in fear and pain a few feet away; gunshots and shouts in the middle of the night; blood splattered in the dark hallways; and always the terror, the constant, aching terror and hopelessness, the certainty that she would be discovered by the monsters. And eaten. Or worse.
But Amy was alive! A few years older and still alive.
The tech, an elderly man named Boyd, had mentioned offhand that there were still a few things coming in from Earth. “Mostly those goddamn religious shitheads,” he’d muttered, picking at one ear.
“Any ’casts of a family?” said Billie, not expecting it. That would have been a miracle…
“Oh yeah. Comes in on various channels, pretty random signals. A girl and her dad, couple of others off and on. Sad.”
Boyd had shrugged and left to eat, warning her not to touch anything while he was gone. Billie figured the old tech hadn’t meant he didn’t care, it was just that there was nothing to be done. Except—
Ripley. Maybe her plan, whatever it was, could mean helping Amy. The same child, now older, she had seen in the ’casts when she and Wilks had been trapped on that mad military asshole’s base. Amy.
Billie took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She saw herself in that little girl on Earth and would do whatever she could to save her. Anything.
* * *
Billie was a few minutes late to the Four Sails, no doubt the sleaziest bar on Gateway—and of course the one that Wilks would come to. It was small and dark. Drinkers and chem-heads sat at round tables surrounding
the tiny stage near the back; according to a schedule posted on the wall, there would be erotic dancers later, couples and threesomes crowded onto the platform performing to pulsing music.
Billie spotted Ripley by herself at a table in the corner, a pitcher of splash and a few glasses in front of her.
“Wilks isn’t here yet,” Ripley said, pouring pale straw-colored liquid into one of the glasses. “Drink?”
“Yeah, thanks,” said Billie. She took the glass. She swallowed half of its contents before setting it down.
Ripley raised an eyebrow. “Hard day?”
“Some of my past catching up to me. There’s a family on Earth that sends broadcasts out—I first saw them on Spears’s planetoid. One of them is a little girl, maybe twelve or thirteen now. Watching is—” Billie stopped and sipped her splash. “It’s hard.”
“Is it Amy?”
Billie looked up, surprised.
Ripley said, “I saw one a few days ago. Do you know her?”
Billie shook her head. “I feel like I do.”
“Yeah, I understand. Amy was my daughter’s name, too.” She drank.
Wilks stepped through the doorway, nodded to the bartender, and came to their table.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I was—uh, weight-training. Guess I lost track of time.” He smiled and sat down, then poured himself a glass of splash.
Billie noticed that he seemed much more relaxed than usual, his scarred face almost calm.
“Lo, Ripley.”
Ripley leaned forward. “We need some help, Wilks,” she said. “No point in coating it—do you dream of the aliens?”
“Doesn’t everybody?” he said.
“Not nightmares,” Billie said, her voice quiet. “Signals. Transmissions. From a queen mother, a leader of queens. She’s—she’s in a dark place, a cave or something, and she wants. She’s waiting, she’s calling.”
Billie closed her eyes, remembering. “She moves closer, and then she speaks. She says she loves you and wants you with her; you can feel it coming off of her in waves, her need…”
