Aliens

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Shit,” said Bose.

  “The Company will have to bomb LV-KR 115 with pesticides,” said Rogers.

  “The whole planet?” asked Belfi.

  “The freak weather,” said Rogers quietly, “I think it’s catastrophic atmospheric disturbance caused by the sheer size of the swarm.”

  “Are you shitting me?” asked Pator.

  “Think about it. These space bugs sleep for years, then wake up and feed. Probably used to raze the old grasslands and then sleep again until the vegetation regrew. Life cycle. But the Company fixed this planet with endless, fast-growing, self-replicating crop yields. A never-ending food supply. Can you even imagine how big the swarm has got with nothing to limit or inhibit its growth?”

  “Jesus Christ,” murmured O’Dowd.

  “We didn’t hit weather on the way down,” said Teller. “We hit the pressure wave of the swarm.”

  * * *

  Canetti leaned out over the edge of the baler platform and craned his neck. He could see the side of the crop tractor’s hull. He expected to see the same bright yellow paintwork that featured in the brochure pictures they had all examined at brief. In the ghastly amber light, the side of the hull looked like bare metal.

  He reached over and touched the surface of the hull. It was rough. It was bare metal. Bare metal that felt like it had been sand-blasted.

  A shadow fell across him. He looked up.

  The storm was coming back. The sky was black, and visibility was dropping fast. Sudden, strong wind blasted at him. A wall of darkness was rushing across the bare earth towards the tractor.

  It was churning up gritty clouds of dust and dry soil in front of it. The wall itself, a kilometer high or more, was a seething, boiling back mass, iridescent.

  Battered by the wind, Canetti staggered back to the drop’s ramp. He clung on to the stanchion, afraid he was going to be dragged off his feet by the wind force. There was grit everywhere. He’d taken off his mask and goggles, and he could feel his hands and face were bloody and raw.

  He couldn’t breathe.

  The wall hit the harvester.

  There was no time to cry out. Billions of small black shapes billowed around Canetti.

  He vanished, shredded. A body-armor shoulder plate hit the deck. The metal innards of an ear-piece mic.

  A belt buckle, polished brightly.

  * * *

  Hurrying down the serviceway towards the baler housing, they all felt the Consus rock hard. The entire bulk of it was shaking. Howling wind screamed down the hallways through the hatches they had cut open on their way in.

  “Back!” Teller yelled. “Back!”

  “To what?” shouted Bose.

  Teller didn’t know what to say.

  “The lockers?” Rogers offered at the top of her voice.

  The idea was appalling, unthinkable, but they all realized how it might have been the only option. The only viable chance.

  The idea was academic anyway.

  The control deck was two floors away, and the storm was already on them, roaring up the serviceway towards them in an engulfing flash-flood of gleaming darkness.

  They ran anyway, without hope.

  All except Bose.

  He turned, aimed his pulse rifle at the oncoming blizzard, and opened fire.

  It was all he could do. The last thing he would do. Be a marine. Be Corps. Take as many of the enemy down with him as he could.

  He was still yelling and firing when the storm engulfed him.

  BROKEN

  BY RACHEL CAINE

  “On.”

  It was the first word he said, and at the same time, he opened his eyes. They worked perfectly, of course, but the data that his optics streamed came in a flood, and took a moment to process. The moment was approximately a nanosecond, and then he blinked, because blinking delivered moisturizing lubricant to his eyes, and made them look flawlessly human at the same time.

  He knew he was not human. That knowledge had been hard-coded into him, along with a variety of terms for what he was. Android. Synthetic. Robot. Artificial person.

  He decided he was an artificial person, and as he did, he smiled, focused on the person standing across from him, and said, “Hello.”

  The person ignored him to tap on a data tablet. She was loud, he realized, and dialed his inputs back to acceptable levels where the pulsing roar of her heartbeat and rush of blood and gurgle of nutrient processing and creaking bellows of her lungs no longer distracted him. Now he only heard the tap of her fingers on the pad, the hum of electronics all around him, the whisper of the air recycling system. A great deal of inputs, but his brain flawlessly processed, identified, and stored each one.

  The woman—his first Real Person—had a slight frown on her face, and he checked his database, widened his eyes to the correct pre-programmed amount, shifted the timbre of his voice to a warmer, deeper setting as he asked, “Are you in some distress? How can I help?”

  She glanced up from the data pad, and he felt something flash through him like a faulty circuit. What was that? Processing caught up an instant later, and identified it as emotion. She seemed irritated, and he was… sorry. Her shoulders had gone stiff, and that body language conformed to—to what? Suspicion?

  “Designation HS17B48XG5-D5, your name is now Bishop, do you acknowledge?”

  Her voice was a complex marvel of harmonics, one he stored to examine later, but she had asked him a question, and he immediately answered, “Acknowledged, Dr. Sasaki. I’m pleased to meet you.”

  Her frown deepened. “I didn’t tell you my name.”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Sasaki, I read your name tag. I hope that’s all right.” He smiled again. This seemed to be the right expression for the occasion, and he chose one that the database identified as wistful. “Have I done something wrong?”

  She seemed to debate that for a very long time, with her finger hovering over her data pad, and then shook her head. “No, Bishop, you haven’t. Please join the others.”

  She pointed across the room—a very plain, empty room, with nothing in it but Dr. Sasaki, who also wore white, a form-fitting skin of material that wrapped up around her head in a hood to conceal her hair, and the only other shades in the room were the black letters of her nametag under the embossed seal of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, the color of her skin—amber—and her eyes, which matched a shade his database identified as dark brown. Even the data pad was the same stark white, at least on the side he could see.

  Bishop turned while processing all that to look where she indicated. There was a doorway behind him and beyond it another room.

  Instead of moving toward it, he looked down, because he detected that the area on which he stood resonated at a different frequency. It was a round section that was hollow beneath, and bisected in the middle. “What is that, Dr. Sasaki?” he asked, and then immediately clarified, because he had been imprecise. “What am I standing on?”

  “You’re a curious one,” she said, and there was a change in her voice now, another resonant shift he’d have to save for examination. “That’s the failsafe. There is a very small chance that upon activation, a synthetic such as yourself may exhibit signs of… instability.”

  “I see,” Bishop said, still staring down. “It opens. Where does it go?”

  “The chute leads to a machine that disassembles defective units to constituent parts for reuse.”

  He was standing over an execution chamber.

  Bishop stepped off the circle. It wasn’t a conscious decision, it was one his volume processor, his brain, had simply ordered in the interest of self-preservation. The artificial organ that regulated the flow of hydraulic fluid through his trunk, head and limbs had increased its rate of flow.

  He didn’t want to die.

  “Thank you, Dr. Sasaki,” he said, because he had been programmed to be polite, and walked into the next room.

  Behind him, he heard Dr. Sasaki give a deep, trembling sigh, and whisper something in a langu
age he identified as Japanese.

  I should have flushed him.

  Another flicker of emotion raced through him, this one subtly different. A new one.

  Sadness.

  There were four other Artificial Persons seated in the next room. All of them looked identical to him in form and coloring, except that they were dressed in gray clothing with the Weyland-Yutani corporate logo on the collars, and he had nothing except his synthetic skin. “Hello,” he said. “My name is Bishop.”

  All four stood up, flawlessly synchronized. He heard the pitch of data exchange, inaudible to human hearing, as they coordinated actions, and then one said, “I am Rook.” The others were named Castle, King, and Knight.

  “Someone likes chess,” Bishop said, and smiled, because he felt a pulse of what he identified as amusement. It was followed by disquiet when none of the rest smiled back. They simply stared, clinically analyzing him, cataloguing, dissecting.

  “Our names are based on chess terms,” Knight replied. It was Bishop’s voice, but the inflections were flat, uninspired, lifeless. “I am not sure why that implies someone likes chess.”

  “Then I can’t help you,” Bishop said. He took in more data. The room was white, like the last, only there were no failsafes in the floor, and there were two stiff, white couches that could seat three each. A low table in the middle, also white—he was, he realized, finding the decorating uninspired—held a neatly folded cloth jumpsuit like the ones his brothers—could he call them brothers?—also wore. He took it and pulled it on over his synthetic epidermis with quick, efficient motions, pulled the zipper shut, and said, “What do we do now?”

  The others sat down on the couches, perfectly synchronized. He heard the dataset sync calling to him to join them, but instead, Bishop continued to stand, and folded his arms.

  Identical sets of eyes stared at him—medium brown, not as dark as Dr. Sasaki’s—and he studied the identical, worn features of their faces. Pale skin. High, arching forehead with a shock of brown hair. Deep-set lines bracketing nose and mouth.

  Looking at the other four seemed like looking at strangers, not a mirror.

  The others turned their heads in unison toward the closed door at the far end. He heard the activation code being entered, too, but waited until the portal slid open before he shifted his gaze to it.

  A young, bulky man—a real person, bored and annoyed—leaned in and said, “Move out. You’re being shipped.”

  “Shipped where?” Bishop asked. The man seemed startled, and then he frowned, the same as Dr. Sasaki had. My responses are outside the normal parameters, he thought. But not so far outside that I was sent to my death down the chute. What did that make him? Defective? Strange?

  Different, he thought. I’m different. He waited for the emotion to come, and it did, a bright flash he identified as… satisfaction.

  “Shut up and walk,” the man said, and Bishop did. But where the other four walked in precise rhythm, he made sure his steps were a bit longer, a bit out of sync.

  Different.

  * * *

  “Holy fuck, watch your field of fire!” Lieutenant Larsen screamed it at Private Peekskill, who’d sprayed a deadly burst of bullets too close to a screaming knot of civilians. There were dozens of them, all spread out flat or crouched down or already dead in the firefight; at least five lay sprawled on the bullet-chewed wooden floor, spot-lit by a broken skylight.

  Bishop, unarmed, crouched behind a pillar next to Larsen; the rest of their squad, including Peekskill, were pinned down on the other side of the common hall that had once doubled as the brand new Haarsa Colony marketplace. Bishop still saw grace in the arching lines of the concrete pillars, and the glass tile mosaic on the far wall—damaged by gunfire and bomb fragments—showed real merit. Haarsa was planned to be a showplace for the Terraforming Division of Weyland-Yutani; there were a total of forty-seven colonists here already, and—by his calculations—half were now dead in some part of the facility or other. This wasn’t going to reflect well on next quarter’s profit and loss statements.

  “Sorry, Lew!” Peekskill yelled back, and opened fire on a balcony somewhere overhead. Bishop turned down his hearing as the bullets pounded into concrete, wood, glass and steel above, shattering store windows and severing power lines with showers of sparks, and finally, Peekskill managed to find at least one soft target.

  Even muted, Bishop heard the difference when bullets ripped through flesh, bone, and organs.

  “He got one of them,” Bishop reported quietly to Lieutenant Larsen, which was probably unnecessary, since Peekskill gave a wild whoop of victory across the way. Bishop ignored that to listen to other things. “The rest are retreating, sir. I don’t think we’re going to dig them out this way, and we don’t have a lot of time. Has the corporation considered paying them?”

  The soldiers currently occupying Haarsa Colony were criminals who called themselves Company F. Company F recruited former Colonial Marines, mercs, anyone who met their standards of moral absence and greed. Their methodology was, Bishop thought, objectively brilliant; they landed on an otherwise hard-working, peaceful settlement, took hostages, killed as many as it took to get their point across, and made a financial demand to the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, or whichever rival company owned the terraformed colony. It was a quick payoff, and the pirates moved on to pillage another day.

  Only this time, it had gone wrong simply because a complement of Colonial Marines, under the command of Lieutenant Lucky Larsen, had been less than half a day’s flight out after refueling. And Weyland-Yutani had decided that it wasn’t paying Company F any more bounties.

  “Well, fuck me,” Larsen said in disgust. He was a short man, blocky, with a scar bisecting his face almost exactly down the middle, but twisting over his nose like a seam not pulled straight. He also had thick burn scars running up the left side of his neck. Lucky Larsen, his soldiers called him, for obvious reasons. “How many left in Company F, Bishop?”

  “Minus the one that Private Peekskill just killed, I count at least thirty, sir, holding eleven hostages, including four children.” Company F liked holding children, under the theory that it forced a faster payout. While it didn’t make Bishop angry, it did make him—what was that exact emotion?—disgusted.

  “Too many for us to dig out without losses of our own, and we’ve got our orders,” the lieutenant said. He seemed especially grim, Bishop thought. “Right. Time to get these people out. Bishop, take point, get the ones who can walk to the transport and on the ship. Check the wounded. Then tag the ones you think are worth cryo, but remember, we only have twelve extra chambers.”

  “Yes, sir.” Bishop stood up, but he didn’t immediately follow the order, even though that priority was clear. “Sir. If we’re not going after Company F, how do we rescue the hostages?”

  “We don’t,” Larsen said. “Orders are to blow the central converters and evac.”

  “I don’t understand. If we destroy the central converters, it’ll flood the central complex with Prevox gas. Everyone will be dead if they can’t get to masks.” Dead painfully, Bishop thought, but didn’t add. Larsen knew how Prevox worked. It was a vital component in the terraforming process, but it was volatile and dangerous.

  “Lucky for us, the masks are smart-linked, so even if they do make it to the cabinets, the masks won’t work. Ybarra already locked them down.”

  Bishop felt the artificial muscles of his face contracting, forming his expression into a pinched frown. “That means everyone dies. Even the hostages.”

  “Yeah, Bishop, no shit that’s what it means, it happens and there’s nothing we can do about it. Now go get these people out. That’s an order. We have to save those we can.”

  Larsen, Bishop realized, didn’t like this either. Not at all. But he had orders. Real people had the ability to disobey an order, but in Bishop’s observation they rarely did—not when there were real consequences along with the action. It was almost as if there were no real distinctions b
etween real people (biologicals, he called them, but only privately) and artificials.

  At least an artificial person had the excuse of being programmed.

  Bishop weighed the odds of persuading Larsen to go against orders, and decided that they weren’t good. Larsen wasn’t afraid to kill, and he wasn’t afraid of civilian casualties; he had a pragmatic outlook to war, and as far as he was concerned, Haarsa Colony had just become a war zone. Innocents were bound to die, and his job was to make sure his soldiers survived.

  So Bishop walked out into the open atrium, spoke calmly and quietly to the frightened colonists, and sent them with Peekskill’s soldiers back to the ship as he methodically checked each of the fallen. Seven dead, two so gravely wounded that even cryosleep and the best medical attention wasn’t going to save them. That left ten for the cryo chambers, and Bishop used comms to call for transport.

  Larsen left him to it, and followed a map to the central control room. Bishop calmly reassured the wounded—those who could hear him—that they would be evacuated and treated, and they were in no danger.

  He tried not to listen to the cries of the ones he’d red-tagged as too far gone. He wasn’t wrong about their chances at life. It wasn’t a judgment call. They were dying, and nothing could stop it.

  So when the two company medics, Patel and Luo, arrived and began loading the yellow tags on stretchers, it was odd that he felt it necessary to go and talk to those who were being left behind, to tell them that everything was all right. He didn’t tell them they were dying.

  Four of them died while he was with them. One ceased functioning before he could get to him. The others weren’t conscious.

  When he looked up, he was the only one standing, and the atrium seemed utterly still now, with only the rush of wind through the broken skylight. The dead were as silent as the broken, bullet-marked concrete.

  “Bishop.” He looked up. Larsen was leaning over the balcony, staring down. “Everybody out?”