by Steve Perry
Billie opened her eyes. Ripley was nodding. Wilks wore a skeptical look.
“Maybe it’s something you ate,” he said.
“Listen, Wilks, remember the robot ship? The dream I had?”
Wilks nodded. “Yeah. I remember.”
Billie had known there were aliens on that ship when there was no way she could have; that dream had saved their lives.
“So what do you want from me?”
“We need to know who’s having dreams,” said Ripley. “I had ’em for a while, but they stopped; if they’re actually transmissions of some kind, we may be able to use them. But we have to find out if anybody else dreams them to be sure. Any ideas?”
Wilks stared into his splash. “Maybe. I can ask some people I know. If you think it’s really worth doing.”
“I don’t know if it is,” Ripley said. “But it might be.”
Wilks shrugged. “Fuck it.” He took a big drink of his splash. “Not like I got a whole hell of a lot else to do on this bucket of rocks and plastic. What the hell. I’ll ask around.” He drained his glass. Stood. “Meet you in the B-2 conference room at 0900 tomorrow.”
Ripley smiled and Billie let out a deep breath, relieved. Amy was still hiding on Earth, and there was probably nothing she could do; but they were going to do something.
* * *
The private conference room was military access only, but it was small and rarely used, so Wilks had no trouble signing it out. Ripley and Billie stood on either side of him in front of a small computer. He spoke as he tapped in codes.
“I looked up an old friend last night, Leslie Elliot. She used to go out with this guy I trained with, till she realized that she had about 50 IQ points on him. She’s a pretty good hacker, but these days she’s doing basic data entry. I figured she wouldn’t mind rascaling up what we needed… she even edited. Wait, here we go.”
A readout scrolled up the screen. Names, dates, places. Then vid images.
Quincy Gaunt, Ph.D./Subject: Nancy Zetter. It was a poor quality vid of two people sitting in an office, the woman speaking:
“…and then she comes up to me and I hear this voice in my head telling me that she cares about me. She says, ‘I love you.’” The attractive middle-aged woman shook her head, disgusted. “That awful thing, telling me that.”
“And that’s where it ends?” said the doctor, a thin young man with a neutral expression.
“Yes. Except it doesn’t end,” she said. “I keep having them—”
Wilks pushed a button on the console. More names blipped across the screen, another office with different people. A well-built young man squirmed nervously in a cushioned chair while an older man looked on.
“It’s like—I don’t know, she wants me,” he blurted out.
“Sexually?”
The young man colored visibly. “No, not like that. Like—aw, shit, I don’t know, like she’s my mother or something.”
“Do you dream about your mother?” said the doctor, leaning forward.
Wilks hit a button. A Dr. Torchin was talking to a female Lieutenant Adcox.
“…and you feel like she’s calling you to come be with her in these dreams,” Torchin said. “Interesting.”
Wilks handled the keyboard swiftly.
“…it’s a recurring dream—”
“…she loves me, wants me—”
“…you say the creature is asking you to find it—”
“It wants me to find her—”
“…she’s calling me—”
Wilks hit the stop button and turned to look at the two women.
“How many?” said Billie, her mouth dry.
“Not sure,” said Wilks. “But Les accessed a week of psych visits and she came up with thirty-seven.”
“And there are a lot of people who don’t go to psych,” said Ripley. She looked thoughtful. “Good job, Wilks.”
“Where the fuck is this headed, Ripley?” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Does this mean something?”
“That queen mother wants her children,” said Ripley. “I don’t know why she wants them, but she does. The signal is for them. The drones aren’t smart enough to load themselves onto starships and fly home. But if we could find her, get her to Earth—”
“They would go to her,” said Billie.
“Lemme get this straight: This queen of queens is in another stellar system? Christ, you’re talking faster-than-light transmission of this fucking call. Voodoo stuff.”
“But what if it’s true?” Billie said. “What if somehow the superqueen can make that long-distance call? Think how it would work if she were here.”
“They would head for her like lemmings,” Ripley said. “Gather themselves in a big bunch all together, every one of them.”
Wilks wasn’t the brightest guy who ever lived, but he saw the possibilities of this scenario pretty damned fast. When he spoke, his voice was soft, but interested: “We could wait until they all got collected into a big bunch and then nuke ’em all to hell.”
He looked back at the vid screen, where a patient with dark circles beneath her eyes was frozen in mid-sentence. Nice dream, but that’s all it seemed to be. He’d drifted since his first contact with the monsters, lost a big chunk of time, until he’d rediscovered Billie in that psych ward, and a new purpose along with her: to destroy the aliens who had fucked up him—and mankind—royally. That was his goal, but he was a practical man.
To Ripley, he said, “What makes you so sure about this?”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure, at least not in any way you could lay out and measure with a rule or a scale.”
“But you believe all this psych stuff means what you said? There’s some kind of supermom alien somewhere who could draw these bastards like shit does flies?”
“That’s what I believe, yeah.”
Wilks stared at the screen. Billie had been able to tell about the aliens on the ship he and Bueller and she had stolen, that was a fact. And he’d had his own hunches, ducked when there wasn’t any reason to do it, and saved his ass because of it. He wasn’t much on religion or psyche stuff, but you didn’t have to be a chemical engineer to start a fire, either. Pragmatic was the way to go, to hell with the theoretical crap. If Billie could dream the truth, maybe other people could do it too. Made sense.
“Okay. Let’s suppose this scenario works,” he said. “It’s worth checking out a little more. If it’s right, it gives us a big hammer we can use against the suckers. I’m willing to play along and see where it goes. I’ll go talk to my friend.”
“I’ll go with you, if that’s okay,” said Ripley. “Billie? If you could dig through these files, pull out names of military personnel—”
Billie plucked the metal info sphere out of the reader and put it in her pocket.
Ripley grinned. “Fine. Why don’t we meet this evening and see what we’ve got?”
* * *
Billie walked toward her quarters quickly. It was good to be in action, better to know that she shared her dreams with others, that she wasn’t alone. Ripley was a strong woman, a leader.
She turned a corner and almost ran into a robotech adjusting a light panel. Billie stopped short and stood there, studying the design. It was simple machinery, made for only a few manual tasks; vaguely humanoid, about two meters tall. Basically a control box with arms and legs.
Not like an android that you could mistake for human…
Billie was suddenly very near tears. Mitch. She wondered what had become of him, her android lover. As always, a mix of confused emotions came with the thought: anger, that he hadn’t told her the truth; worry, sadness. The pity she had felt when he’d been “repaired” on Spears’s planetoid, his lovely torso strapped to ugly metal legs like the limbs of the robot moving past her. When the final realization had hit, it had been too late; she and Wilks were in space, headed away from the battle on the planetoid where Mitch had been trapped. The transmission to their ship was the last she had seen
of him. The truth of it was that for whatever Mitch had come to be, he was the best person she had ever known. And she had loved him.
Yeah, okay, so, life was fucking unfair. It was a cold fact that she’d learned and relearned too many times to cry about now. You spent a lot of time in a hospital, you learned to suck it up and keep your face blank.
Billie wiped the tears from her face. Crying didn’t get you anywhere. If she’d learned nothing else in her recent adventures with Wilks, she had learned that the best way to get things done was to do them. You wanted an ass kicked, best you wore your heavy boots. Then you could take care of business. Sitting around and whining didn’t get it done.
Ripley knew. Ripley had a plan. What the plan was didn’t matter as much as the fact that it existed. And if there was any chance at all that it would work, Billie was going to help make the damned aliens suffer for what they’d done.
And laugh while they burned.
3
Ripley rubbed at her temples, frowned slightly.
“Problem?” Wilks whispered. He didn’t want to disturb the woman concentrating at the console a couple of meters away.
“Headache,” she said. “I get ’em a lot lately.” She gave up her self-massage and looked around the small cubicle. The tasteful paintings and prints seemed out of place next to the cheap, built-in furnishings.
The tech, Leslie Elliot, had agreed to help them, volunteering her lunch break to dig for their information. They sat now in her cube, watching her work. She was an attractive woman, tightly muscled, with an easy smile and reddish-brown hair that she wore in tiny braids. Ripley wondered how well she and Wilks were acquainted…
“Maybe you should stop by medical,” said Wilks, interrupting her thought.
Ripley looked at him blankly.
“Your headache.”
“Oh. No. I’m fine. Besides, I don’t do medics; most problems seem to fix themselves.”
Wilks seemed about to say something else when Leslie turned in her chair and grinned. “You owe me for this, Sarge,” she said.
“If you got something.”
Leslie’s grin widened. “Gold mine, what I got. Just gotta ask the right questions. Hold on a sec. Gotta store these where we can find them and nobody will stumble across ’em.”
Ripley smiled at Wilks.
“Okay, so maybe you aren’t totally crazy,” he said.
* * *
Ripley and Wilks walked toward Ripley’s quarters. The smell of canned air seemed particularly stale in this corridor, a metallic tang that you could almost taste.
Wilks thought about the conversation they’d just had with Les.
“Only a few of the dreamers seem to be linear-minded,” Leslie had said, tapping the keys expertly as she talked. “You know, math-science, left-brain types. Guys like you, Sarge, no imagination.”
“Fuck you.”
“You wish. Um, anyway, it stands to reason that they would have a better fix on charting a map. If you’d told me what you were looking for last night, you could have saved yourselves a trip.”
“Actually, we’re making this up as we go along,” Ripley said.
Even so, they had the names of people who could describe the alien’s planet, six in all. Their details were vague, but Leslie had cross-referenced a known-systems map and come up with several possible locations. Ripley said she figured they could narrow it down if they could talk to the six.
This telepathy-empathy stuff was tricky, but it was what they had to work with. Wilks was still willing to go along for the ride, given that something had turned up. Weird, but there it was.
“I thought we blew their goddamn planet out of space,” Wilks said. “I dropped chain-linked nukes that should have scraped the fucking surface clean.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Ripley. ‘They spawn wherever they are, and a planet overrun is a planet overrun.”
“Yeah. But this one, wherever it is, appears to be the core. Makes me wonder how many places are seeded…” He trailed off, remembering the conversation with the old soldier in the bar.
“Something?” Ripley said.
“Yeah. A few days after Billie and I got here I met this old man at the bar, name of Crane. He was ex-military and very drunk, wanted to buy every uniform in the place a drink. He rambled, glory days and dead soldiers, shit like that, I didn’t pay much attention—until he started talking about the aliens. He called them war toys; said that they were too good at surviving to be natural.”
Ripley turned to look at Wilks.
“Interesting,” she said, considering for a minute. “Rapid procreative ability, acid blood, vacuum-resistant—it would explain a hell of a lot if it were designed that way.”
Wilks nodded. “Worth thinking about, anyway. ’Course then the questions get worse: Who designed the fucking things? Why? What do they have in mind?”
They stopped in front of Ripley’s quarters. “I’ll catch up to you and Billie later,” he said. “I’ve got some things to check out.”
* * *
Ripley shut the door and thought about Wilks’s secondhand theory. War toys? What insane species could’ve come up with the alien design; what kind of war could have warranted it?
Her headache was coming back.
* * *
There was a knock at Ripley’s door.
“Come in.”
Billie stepped in and glanced around at the bare walls of the older woman’s room. Efficient and practical, like Ripley, who sat at a desk staring at the console in front of her. She looked weary.
“Hey, Billie,” she said, swiveling in her chair. “Anything?”
“Eighteen military-affiliated, maybe half of them trained in combat,” she said. She leaned on the desk. She was on the tired side herself.
“Good. Wilks and I got some stuff from his hacker friend that looks promising, so we can get started. We’ll have to do background checks on some of these folks and get going on transport—sooner the better.”
Billie smiled at Ripley’s straightforward confidence in her plan. Must be nice to be so in control, so sure of yourself. “Just out of curiosity,” she said, “how did this idea of yours come up?”
Ripley shifted in the chair and looked suddenly uncomfortable. “You remember I said I had a daughter?”
Billie nodded.
“Amanda. She was very young when I left to work on the Nostromo. I promised her I’d come back for her birthday. I didn’t make it.”
Billie nodded again. She knew that part of it Ripley had spent decades in deep sleep—she held the record, as far as anybody knew. It had been a lucky accident that she had been found at all, drifting through dead space. Billie wondered what it must have been like, to leave a child and come back to find she had died as an old woman. A daughter older than your own grandmother. Awful.
“On the ship to Gateway, I thought a lot about her, her whole life passing by while I slept. And the dreams of another mother who wanted her children back.”
Ripley shook her head and smiled. There was no humor in the expression. “Funny comparison. Me and that monstrous creature both wishing for the same thing.”
Billie needed to do something. Awkwardly, she reached out and took Ripley’s hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Yeah.” Ripley pulled her hand away, not accepting the gesture of comfort. “Anyway. I didn’t have any kind of revelation about what to do, no brilliant inspiration. I just loved my daughter and I miss her and I blame that thing for taking her away.”
She looked up at Billie, her eyes angry. “My idea didn’t come from wanting to save anyone, no great love for humanity—I just hate her and her whole fucking brood and I want them exterminated.”
She took a deep breath and dropped her gaze, then shrugged. “Enough history. We have a lot to do.”
Billie wondered how old the child had been; Amy’s age, perhaps? Something that all three of them had in common, then; Ripley, Billie, and the alien queen. Just wanting their children… No.
Amy wasn’t her child. Just a face on a viewscreen. Don’t think of her that way.
Billie moved a chair over to Ripley’s desk and sat beside her. There would be time to sort through the reasons later. For now, Ripley was right—there was a lot of work to be done. After two weeks of hanging around, the idea didn’t seem so bad. Doing nothing was always worse than doing just about anything.
4
Sergeant Kegan Bako was ten years younger than Wilks and looked years younger than that. He had a baby face and a blond’s complexion, fair and unwrinkled. Wilks guessed that Bako only had to shave every other day, if that, to keep with military office standard.
The two men sat in Bako’s office, separated by a desk covered with paper flimsies and plastic food wrappers. The small room was stuffy, the smell of soy sauce cloying in the air.
“Sure you don’t want some of this? Better than that shit they serve in the dining rooms.” Bako maneuvered his chopsticks clumsily to his mouth, losing at least half of his fried noodles in the process.
“Thanks, I already ate some of the dining room shit.”
‘Too bad. So what brings you here? Don’t tell me you’re looking for a rematch?”
“What, you haven’t suffered enough this week?” He’d met the younger man at a gym while looking for a handball partner. They’d played several times since; although Bako hadn’t won yet, it was a good workout and okay company. “Actually, I wanted to check something. Who’d I talk with to requisition a transport?”
Bako swallowed a mouthful of noodles and grinned. “God, maybe. You’re kidding, right?”
“Hypothetically, let’s say I wanted to go pick up a… weapon that might wipe out the infestation on Earth. Could I get a ship?”
“What kind of weapon?”
“A hypothetical one.”
Bako tapped his chopsticks against the desk. “Well, first of all, you’d have to have proof of this weapon, no hypothetical about it. Take that to General Peters, or maybe Davison—get an okay, a volunteer crew, and fill out the forms.” Bako made another attempt at his noodles as he spoke. “I gotta tell you, though, you’ll have a fuck of a time, even with solid evidence.”
