Aliens

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Are you getting paid proportionally to this shit?” Rogers asked over the intercom, her tone light and measured to calm his focus.

  “Absolutely not,” he replied.

  Jesus Christ, that overhang was low. With an almost angry stab, he flicked off the collision warning. It wasn’t telling him anything he couldn’t already see on imaging, and the noise was drilling his nerves.

  “Come on, come on…” he murmured.

  The drop, all twenty-five meters of it, drifted into the slot sideways. Not even a scrape to the tail boom. He could just about see the deck below him, picked up through the broiling grit by the floods. He let the drop sink.

  Contact. A sprung bounce as the landing gear made contact. A slight lateral drag as the skids travelled. He heard metal-on-metal squealing.

  And they were down.

  “Everybody off!” Canetti yelled into his mic.

  * * *

  Rogers dropped the ramp and opened the exteriors. A combination of funneled wind and pressure exchange almost blew the ready marines off their feet. The payload bay instantly filled with swirling airborne filth. Teller could feel it pattering off his body armor and sleeves. It felt like his goggles were being jet-washed.

  “Go!” Bose yelled over the set-to-set.

  They scrambled down into the grit-storm. It wasn’t the most dynamic or heroic de-bus in the history of the Corps. Fighting the gale, the marines moved like clichéd mime artists.

  “Achieve the hatch!” Bose ordered, leading the way. “O’Dowd, get ready with your damn tether!”

  There was an entry hatch on the hull-side of the baler platform. They had already run tether cables from the payload bay deck rings, roping the men together in strings of five. Fighting into the wind a step at a time, each lead man carried the snap-hook for the front of the tether line. The last man in each file played out the end of the cable from the ramp drums.

  “Jesus!” Private O’Dowd protested.

  “Jesus loves you, son,” Bose replied. “Now get the line secured!”

  At the head of one string, Bose carried the snap-hook. He almost slammed into the hatch, and then groped frantically for a lock-point. He found one, flipped it out, and snapped the hook in place.

  “O’Dowd!”

  O’Dowd was beside him, leading the second string in. A gust blew him into the hatch, and he dropped the snap-hook. It was swinging from his waist. He fumbled to grab it. Blind, his hands found the wrong hook and disconnected his own harness from the tether line. Trusting too much in a line he was no longer connected to, O’Dowd relaxed slightly, and the wind took him off his feet. He crashed away, rolling and sliding along the deck.

  O’Dowd’s barreling form took Teller off his feet. Teller had been advancing at the front of the third string. They both went down. Rogers, in the string behind Teller, grabbed at Teller, her heels sliding on the deck plates. Teller, on his side, lashed out and got hold of O’Dowd’s webbing. From the schems being projected onto the inside of his goggles, Teller could see that O’Dowd was about three meters shy of falling into the through-deck cavity, a five-meter drop straight down into the metal guts of the baling machinery.

  “Lieutenant? Lieutenant!” Bose called.

  “Get the hatch open!” Teller yelled back, strained to keep his grip on O’Dowd.

  Bose turned back to the hatch. The lever mechanism felt misshapen. He tried to locate the bar. He pulled out his cutting tool, lit the torch, and sliced through the handle and the cross-bolt.

  There was no power. He and Private Belfi had to haul the hatch open together. It slid surprisingly easily in its groove, as if the wind had loosened it in the frame.

  The entry lock was dark, and the wind and grit followed them inside. One by one, the strings fought their way in behind them. Teller’s group was the last through, dragging O’Dowd with them.

  “Get that hatch shut!” Teller ordered. Rogers and Pator slammed it back home, shutting out the storm.

  The air went still. Slowly, the eddying dust and grit began to settle. They could hear the bang and surge of the wind against the hatch, the monsoon patter of particles hitting the hull. The marines were breathing hard. Helmet and pack lamps went on, revealing a grey haze and shadows. Teller pulled up his goggles. Visibility hardly improved.

  “Interior hatch,” he ordered. His voice sounded dead and hollow in the dull, confined air. He could feel the scratch of dust in his throat and it seemed like his nostrils were plugged with grit.

  “Interior hatch locked,” Bose called back.

  “Cut it,” said Teller.

  Bose got to work with his torch again, and sliced the lock. They got the interior hatch open.

  Stale, oddly cold air breathed out at them. The interior serviceway was unlit. Heat and light had been absent for a long time. The platoon moved through, weapons up, lamps on.

  “Take a look,” Bose said to Teller as Teller moved through the inner hatch. The inside lock of the hatch showed bare metal where Bose’s torch had cut through it. But the lock itself was malformed.

  “The hell?” said Teller.

  “Someone’s used a torch or a burner to seal that from the inside,” said Bose. “Exterior hatch was the same.”

  “They locked themselves in?”

  “Someone did,” said Bose.

  “Why?” asked Rogers.

  “To keep something out?” said Teller.

  “I know. I’m saying what?”

  “I’m saying I have no idea.”

  * * *

  In cover formation, they moved through the dark interior. There was nothing around. No sign of life, not even any trash or debris. Their flashlights picked up the bare metal of the deck plates, the untreated steel of the walls, the hard edges of the bulkheads. Rogers found a wall rack of heavy weather gear, but there were no suits on the pegs. Just unpainted helmets, shoulder plates and buckles.

  “Why take the suits and not the head gear?” she asked.

  “Some one got cold?” suggested Belfi.

  Rogers took down one of the helmets. She thought the slide-down visor was some kind of metal blast shield, but turning it over, she saw it was tinted glass. The exterior had been treated with some process that had left it frosted and opaque.

  Inside, there was no padding or inner liner, just the buckles and press-studs needed to fit one. A silt of fine dust winnowed out of the helmet as she turned it over.

  “Can we patch up some power?” Teller asked.

  Gothlin moved up, found a wall-box, and tried to rig in the man-portable genny. Nothing happened.

  “Are the connectors clean?” asked Teller.

  Gothlin played her flashlight inside.

  “Clean as, sir,” she said. “Cleaner than the boxes on the Montoro.”

  Teller saw the torch beam glinting off metal that was polished to an almost chrome finish.

  “Hang on, back, back,” Teller said, directing Gothlin to pan her torch around again. There was no trunking coming off the box. No cables, no wall lines, no ducting, just a feint, grubby streak where the power trunking had once been run along the wall. A few metal cable fasteners remained in place.

  “They stripped out all the wiring?” asked Gothlin.

  “Maybe they needed it for a fix somewhere else?” said Belfi.

  Teller shook his head.

  “Doesn’t look like it was stripped out,” he said. “It’s just gone.”

  * * *

  They cut through four more hatches to reach the control deck. Behind the third one, Belfi’s lamp picked up something on the floor: small metal objects catching the light.

  “What is it?” asked Teller.

  Belfi crouched down, and picked the little items up. He cupped them in his hand.

  “Looks like… a belt buckle. And a wedding ring. And… what are these?”

  Teller took a look. The tiny things looked familiar. Out of context, it took a moment to place them.

  “Eyelets,” he said.

  “W
hat now?”

  “Eyelets. Metal eyelets for laces. From a pair of boots.”

  * * *

  The control deck was dark. They moved between the console stations and seats.

  “Are those windows?” asked Rogers, panning her torch beam.

  “Should be,” said Teller.

  “Sergeant?” Rogers called. “See if we can get the storm shields up.”

  “On it,” said Bose.

  “There’s trunking here,” said Gothlin. “There’s cables and wiring. These consoles look pretty much intact.”

  “See if you can boost one into life,” said Teller. “Concentrate on archive, log, datalink.”

  Gothlin got to work.

  “Lieutenant?” Bose called out.

  “Yup?”

  “The storm shields are open.”

  Teller and Rogers crossed to the back of windows at the front of the deck. They were black, as though the external shutters were down.

  “Are you sure?” asked Teller.

  “Positive,” said Bose.

  “So, is that the storm?” asked Rogers.

  “No, there’s something wrong with the glass,” replied Bose.

  Teller unhooked his goggles and shone his torch at them. The glass was almost opaque. The glare coating was gone. The external surface looked like it had been rubbed with an abrasive scourer. Billions of micro scratches fogged the lenses.

  “The dust did that?” asked Rogers.

  There was a flicker of light and a mechanical chatter. Gothlin had patched in the portable power unit and woken up the master console.

  “What have we got?” asked Teller, coming over.

  “Not much of anything, sir,” said Gothlin. “Memory’s been dumped, or backed up someplace I can’t access. No logs.”

  “Datalink?” asked Rogers.

  “Maybe,” replied Gothlin, at work.

  “Try automated task record,” said Teller. “The harvester would record its own routes to make sure it matched quotas.”

  “Good call,” said Gothlin. “That would be stored automatically and pretty much tamper proof.”

  She typed, and data scrolled across the screens. It was hard to read. Rogers tried to wipe the soot off the monitor glass, but it wasn’t soot. It was ground-in distortion.

  Gothlin peered.

  “Okay, we have a track monitor. That column is the timecode. Day to day, hour by hour. That’s… yeah, that’s yield. That side bar there is coordinates, so we can map from that. So let’s see… nothing for the last three weeks. Nada. No tracking record at all. I guess that’s how long this baby’s been dead out here.”

  “What’s the last log?” asked Rogers.

  “Mmmmm… three weeks, but it’s incomplete, and runs incomplete for… the nine weeks prior to that. The tractor was moving for those nine weeks, but no yield was taken. Or nothing logged anyway. There’s a code here. Hang on, let me try and work this out. There should be a key. That code repeats at every track entry through the nine-week period. Okay, yeah. It means… ‘off designated course’ .”

  “So the Consus was moving for nine weeks off pattern?” asked Teller.

  “That matches the data collected by the Company,” said Rogers. “Diverted from harvest route and no answer as to why.”

  “At the start of that nine-week period,” asked Teller. “What’s that?”

  There was an unusually dense block of data.

  Gothlin typed some more.

  “That’s the malfunction,” she said.

  “The causal event,” murmured Rogers.

  “Details?” asked Teller.

  “Mmmmm… okay, hello. Looks like the Consus hit something. It was harvesting and it ran into something in the crop. Some light damage to the blades, nothing systemic. But it hit something big. There’s a file attached.”

  “Open it,” said Teller.

  Gothlin grinned up at him.

  “Already on it,” she said.

  Pictures opened on screen. Blurry low-res pics taken from a flier. They could see the tractor, an aerial view. The endless landscape of the crop, like an ocean. The weather had been better then. This had been before the storms.

  There was something in the crop ahead of the tractor. A large dark mass half buried in the deep corn.

  “Zoom it?” asked Teller.

  “No, but there’s a close up or two,” Gothlin replied. She opened more pictures.

  “What the hell is that?” asked Teller.

  * * *

  The storm had suddenly eased. Waiting in the lead drop cockpit, Canetti suddenly realized that light levels were rising. The black soup of weather was slowly resolving into an eerie amber twilight. The wind was dropping. The drop was no longer vibrating on its stand.

  He looked out. There was still dust in the air, and the light was stained, as though pale smoke was shrouding the sun. He could see out beyond the lip of the baler housing platform. He could see the ground. It looked bare and grey.

  “This is Canetti,” he said into the mic. “The storm’s dropping right now. I’ve got some visibility.”

  “Copy that, Canetti,” Rogers crackled back over the link.

  “How’s it looking in there?”

  “We’re still trying to piece it together,” Rogers replied.

  “You want me to take a look around out here? I can’t see much from the cockpit.”

  “Okay, but be careful. And check in with drop two first.”

  “Copy that,” he replied. He switched channels.

  “Drop two, drop two, this is lead drop. Drop two, drop two, do you copy? This is lead drop. Do you copy?”

  Dead air hissed back at him.

  “Drop two, drop two, requesting sit rep from Captain Broome. Drop two, what is your status? Have you reached the Demeter?”

  Atmospherics, Canetti reasoned, the weather. He left the channel open, replugged his headset to mobile, and unstrapped.

  Outside, a breeze was gusting, tugging at him. Fine dust, like flour, swirling in the air. Beyond the baler housing, the world was lit amber. A dead sky hung over dead land, all hazed by the powder dust. He figured he could see about one, maybe two klicks before it got too murky.

  The wide prairies of LV-KR 115 dwarfed anything on Earth. Flat and unimpeded by geographical feature, they made an ideal site for bulk crop production. Weyland-Yutani had terra-formed the soil, boosting nitrate levels, and then sown a robust strain of genetically modified, high-yield wheat across the entire northern and western territories. The strain was self-seeding. Crop would follow crop on a self-germinating cycle. The Company proudly claimed that LV-KR 115 would render annual, overlapping harvests for a ninety-year period before another round of terra-forming was required to re-nitrate the soil.

  So where was the crop, he wondered. The Consus had wandered off course. This region hadn’t been systematically harvested. But there was no wheat out there.

  As far as he could see, the ground was bare and black.

  “What is it?” asked Rogers. “Some kind of pit?”

  “Is it natural?” asked Bose. “Like a sinkhole or something?”

  Teller looked at the pictures.

  “That doesn’t look natural,” he said. “Well, it looks organic. Like it was made.”

  The cavity in the pictures was deep, and maybe fifty meters across. The earth around its mouth was folded into disturbingly organic puckers. It looks like a throat, or similar body cavity.

  “Looks like the tractor hit it and took the top right off,” said Gothlin. “Unplugged it.”

  “And let something out,” said Rogers.

  “Why the hell you saying that, Rogers?” asked Bose.

  “Because it looks like a nest,” she replied.

  “Is this a bug hunt?” asked Belfi. “Dammit, don’t tell me this is a bug hunt.”

  “We don’t know anything yet,” said Teller.

  He drew Rogers to one side.

  “You know something I don’t?” he asked.

&n
bsp; “I know Canetti can’t raise the Demeter or drop two,” she replied.

  “Okay. But I don’t mean about that.”

  She shrugged.

  “I grew up in the South West,” she said. “I know what a termite nest looks like. Ant hills too.”

  “Great, but this—”

  “Termites can remain dormant for decades,” she said.

  “That’s locusts.”

  “Well, whatever, the same applies. If this is unknown exotic life-form nest, it could have been dormant a long time. The harvester blades its top off, thing wakes up. If there’s a feeding cycle, the Company has provided an entire planet’s worth of crops.”

  “Weyland-Yutani would have detected something like that during survey and the TF program.”

  “Yeah,” Rogers said, “because as we know, they never make any mistakes. The Consus woke something up. It’s picking everything clean. Organics, clothes, fabrics, trunking… boots.”

  He looked sick suddenly.

  * * *

  “People,” he said. “Everything’s stripped back to bare metal. The crew seal themselves in, deeper and deeper. The exotic life-forms eat away everything, until they destroy the harvester systems and leave it dead.”

  “So, they sealed themselves in this control room? Okay, where are they?”

  Teller looked around as Bose put a hand on his arm.

  “Look at this,” he said.

  There were storage lockers at the back of the control deck. Searching, Bose and Belfi had been forced to cut them open because they had been torch-welded shut from inside.

  God alone knew what fate had befallen the rest of the sixty-eight crew, but the last four had died here, inside the lockers, sealed in coffins of their own manufacture.

  Teller stared at the shriveled remains. Starvation, he thought. Starvation and dehydration.

  “Why… why didn’t they cut themselves out again?” asked Gothlin, wide-eyed. “They had cutters.”

  “Because they didn’t know it was safe to come out,” said Rogers. “They didn’t dare.”

  “We’re aborting,” said Teller. “Everyone back to the drop.”

  “If this is a bug hunt,” Bose protested, “we can—”

  “No, we absolutely can’t,” said Teller. “If Rogers is right, we’re dealing with an immense exotic predator. But it’s not one target. It’s composed of countless tiny individuals. You’re a good shot, sergeant. How much ammo did you bring? How do you rate your chances in target practice against a swarm of space locusts?”