Aliens

by Jonathan Maberry

  While Burke’s jaw dropped, his father smiled. “I saw the rape. It was recorded. I’ve seen all of them. Why do you think I put on these different faces for your mother? It’s so that the marks will be driven mad.”

  Burke’s mother studied him with a sculpted gaze and said, “I do what I must for money, and if you are any son of mine, you will do your part, too…”

  * * *

  Burke woke to blaring sirens with a throat rubbed raw. They fall off of their own accord. ALSO – and shit, this doesn’t work. The facehugger stays on for a few hours. The amount of time between when Burke is “taken” and the end of Alien is a ticking clock. And then it blows up. The room had grown blistering, and sweat poured from him, too much sweat. It was in his clothes, encasing him beneath the cocoon. He felt wrung out, at the end of his strength.

  Through the narrow corridors, he could no longer see the Xenomorph worker, nor the queen.

  Sirens blared and fires ranged. A female computerized voice warned, “Attention, emergency! All personnel must evacuate immediately. You now have fifteen minutes to reach minimum safe distance.”

  Shit, Burke wondered, how long was I out for?

  Fifteen minutes. Did he have time to escape?

  Even if he ran as fast as he could, he wouldn’t make it outside the blast zone. He needed a vehicle. Even a wheeled excursion vehicle might do. A ship would be best.

  He thrust his left arm against the resin, banging it with the heel of his palm. The outer crust cracked reluctantly, and he managed to reach around. By punching the crust above his right hand, he damaged the resin, but he felt weak. The material around his legs and torso had hardened while he slept, locking his body into place.

  Worst of all, he had a stomach ache—not the normal pain of bloating or heartburn, but something he’d never imagined—he felt the creature inside him, down in his guts, like a huge fish in a bowl, swimming about.

  Terror lanced through him, cold and shocking, so that he was nearly mindless. He knew what was coming.

  He pounded the resin until his left fist was bloody pulpy and raw, and still could not break through. He pummeled until his head dropped in fatigue.

  All hope fled Burke, like water gushing from a broken barrel, and with the air left his lungs.

  He nearly fainted from fatigue, nearly dropped the grenade. But he wasn’t ready to die.

  Sirens continued to blare, and the computer warned that Burke had thirteen minutes to reach safety. In the distance Xenomorphs shrieked in pain and rage. The hissing of a flamethrower sounded nearby.

  He heard a huge Xenomorph pounding through the tunnels, charging toward him, and he realized that he had one chance to kill it, to get it off Ridley’s tale.

  For an instant, he imagined himself being a hero.

  His mother’s eyes. His mother’s chiseled emotionless face, with skin thinly stretched over a skull.

  He dived for cover as she rushed past, and he considered throwing the grenade after her.

  Instead, he staggered along behind. “Ripley!” he called. It wasn’t too late. He could still be a hero. He could make it to the ship. He had to.

  So he began to jog, his path lit by a trail of flares that burned among the twists and turns of the hive.

  Something wrenched inside him, and he felt terribly hungry. The chest-burster was draining his energy, so that he felt depleted.

  Burke ran for a bit, reached an elevator. He hit the call button, but no elevator dropped.

  Instead, the sirens blared.

  “Seven minutes to reach minimum safe distance.”

  He struggled to catch his breath, and realized at last that the lift wasn’t coming. Fire vented up from a nearby crevasse and lightning arced between two pillars. Some metal beams fell nearby, and the station shuddered. The plant was coming apart.

  Burke hurried to the emergency stairs and began to climb up. In the stairwell above, he heard clawing footsteps on the roof, and the screams of the hive mother. Something was going on, and he could not imagine what was happening. The building shook, and more flames shot up beside the open staircase.

  He reached the top of the landing platform as the mechanized voice called, “Two minutes to reach minimum safe distance.”

  Burke gazed up to see the blunt shape of the space shuttle lifting off into the clouds, the fires of its engines gleaming bright in the half-light.

  Atop the ship, wedged into a crevice between the cabin and the hull, he could see an unexpected shape—the giant Queen Xenomorph, hitching a ride.

  Flames shot up around the platform, impossibly hot, and lightning arced into the sky in a bright crown. The whole platform trembled as if it would teeter and fall into the fiery pit.

  Burke reached to his aching head, mussed his hair, and peered about in frustration.

  He held the incendiary grenade in his fist, refusing to take his finger off of the plunger quite yet.

  Something moved inside him, pushing out his ribs, like a baby on steroids, kicking.

  I have become a dark mother, he realized, bearing life inside me. No different from the alien or my own dark mother.

  Fires vented from a dozen shafts nearby, billowing soot and smoke. The last of his hopes flew away with the ship.

  He tossed the grenade over the edge of the building. In the end, he didn’t even have the guts to commit suicide, much less try to be a hero.

  “One minute to reach minimum safe distance,” the computer announced, and something within him lurched.

  Burke shook his head, wondering. Is there life after death? Do I get another chance? Or am I just going straight to hell?

  He wondered how many billions of people had asked that question in their final moment.

  He dropped to his knees, too weary to flee anymore, and gave birth. The alien ripped from his chest. Blood and fluids gushed out with it, his guts and stomach spilling onto the metal floor like afterbirth. NO. It takes 12–18 hours to gestate!

  Miraculously, the creature seemed to have missed ripping out his heart and lungs. It just left a gaping hole, and lay there, its skin looking almost red in the firelight. It made a tiny growl, and peered around.

  Burke slumped to his side, felt his heart weakening, the blood and life pouring out. His breathing slowed until he had no more energy to even close his eyes, and then the ground rumbled as the facility exploded and light flared and took him.

  * * *

  Sometimes we can wake from dark dreams into a deeper nightmare.

  EPISODE 22

  BY LARRY CORREIA

  SAGA OF THE WEAPON, SEASON 1, EPISODE 22

  THE M41A PULSE RIFLE

  The M41A is one of the most successful combat rifles in history, and has become a potent symbol of American military might, not just on Earth, but into the furthest reaches of space. It has seen battle on every continent and dozens of worlds. It is beloved by those who use it, and feared by their enemies.

  However, the adoption of the Pulse Rifle was controversial, and the story of its evolution is filled with tragic errors that cost many Colonial Marines their lives.

  Join us now as we discuss the history of the legendary M41A Pulse Rifle, on Saga of the Weapon.

  There’s nothing like the sound of a Pulse Rifle. It’s like a maniac is running a jackhammer on a steel drum. That’s the sound of freedom.

  —Lance Corporal Chris Johnson, USCM

  Today’s Colonial Marine takes having a reliable and potent rifle for granted, but it wasn’t always so. When the USCM was formed in 2101, their standard issue infantry weapon was the Harrington Automatic Rifle, with one Weyland Storm issued per squad.

  Marines now don’t realize how good they have it. Back in my day, you had basically two choices. Have a handy little rifle that ran slicker than snot—the HAR—but bounced its feeble little bullets off your enemies’ body armor, or have a rifle that would put them down no matter what, but only when that complex hunk of junk wasn’t broken down or hopelessly jammed because a speck of dirt got
into the action. You ever pull the side plate off a Storm? It looks like an old fashioned clock in there. When Marines talked about something working like clockwork, we sure as hell didn’t mean the Storm.

  —Staff Sergeant Mike Willis, USCM

  Personally, back in the ’60s I carried a HAR, because I’d rather know it would go bang every time I pulled the trigger, than have this super advanced killing machine that could track enemies across the battlefield from a satellite feed, but was so fickle that if you looked at it funny it would crash. Nothing sucks more than waiting for your rifle’s operating system to reboot while a thousand Swedish insurgents are shooting at you.

  —Corporal Cheryl Clark, USCM

  After the battle of Kochan and the long campaign on Miehm, there was a clear need for a next generation infantry weapon to arm the United States Colonial Marines. It needed to be rugged enough to survive the rigors of combat in a wide variety of planetary ecosystems, and fire a potent enough round that it could defeat newer forms of advanced body armor. The 6.8mm armor piercing round of the beloved HAR was simply too anemic, and the Storm was just too fragile. After many campaigns with inadequate equipment, the USCM put their foot down. Enough was enough.

  I was there when General Phillips threw a fit in front of Space Command. He said that if his men were going to fight against the insurgents, what did he expect us to do? Tickle them to death? Watching a bunch of four stars yell at each other was way over my pay grade, but it was a hell of a show.

  —Captain Trent Miller, USASF

  The Marine 70 Program shook up everything, and small arms procurement was no exception. The commission that was created to study the need for new replacement weapon systems immediately met fierce resistance. The Weyland-Yutani Corporation filed a lawsuit, alleging that the Colonial Marines were simply misusing their Storm rifles, and it was their lack of following the proper maintenance guidelines that was causing the reliability issues.

  Yeah… Those pogues actually blamed us. Can you believe that? Abuse and neglect they said. Guess what, you corpo-monkeys, this isn’t a clean room at your factory. Proper maintenance kind of goes out the window when you’ve flown half way across the galaxy, to be neck deep in blood and mud and guts for weeks, and have to beat a man to death with the butt of your rifle—seriously, who puts circuitry in a stock?—and the unit armorer is a little indisposed because he stepped on a land mine that morning. Well excuse me that I didn’t have the proper factory approved widget to fix it! At that point if a Marine can’t fix it with a hammer and duct tape, it ain’t going to get fixed.

  —Sergeant Mario Cordova, USCM

  Ultimately, amid allegations of bribery, corruption, and blackmail, Weyland-Yutani dropped the lawsuit, and the new small arms appropriation committee got to work.

  You know what they say about things designed by committees, right? Well, that’s where we were heading. You should have seen the original list of requirements. It was ridiculous. The specs weren’t written by combatants. They were mostly wish lists from staff officers who’d never seen the inside of a drop ship unless it was parked at an air show, and specs inserted by lobbyists requiring gizmos that only their company happened to make. There were so many suggested bells and whistles screwed on that you’d need a wheel barrow to carry the rifle.

  —Construction Mechanic

  1st Class Mike Raulston, USASF

  It was a time for bold concepts. Many of the more advanced technological aspects proposed by the committee would later be incorporated into other weapon systems, such as the stabilization mechanism of the M56 Smart Gun, but it threatened to bog down the current rifle project in red tape.

  However, there was a ray of hope. While various mega corporations were preparing their new weapon systems for trials, a retired Colonial Marine, Jonathan LaForce, was working on the prototype of the rifle that would become the legendary M41. By day he made ends meet running a food truck, but his nights were spent in his humble workshop. A distant cousin of legendary gun designer John Moses Browning (see Saga of the Weapon episodes one, four, fifteen, and twenty). Corporal LaForce had served with distinction at Miehm, and knew firsthand the needs of the modern warfighter.

  If you’re a Marine, when you’re saying your prayers, you better tell whoever it is you’re talking to that you’re thankful for LaForce. That man was a mechanical genius. We’re lucky he was a gun nut, and not into space ships or something. Sure… We’d have some awesome space ships, but my Pulse Rifle has saved my life more times than I can count. Thank Odin for Corporal LaForce.

  —Gunnery Sergeant Aimee Morgan, USCM

  LaForce started with the familiar layout of the HAR, utilizing an integrated pump action grenade launcher, but the similarities end there. The sonic “shaker” burst weapons used by the rebels on Miehm to disable the Marines’ HARs, had shown the need for a firing mechanism that couldn’t be disrupted by outside sources. So his new design started with a unique electronic pulse ignition.

  This feature would go on to cause the M41A’s infamous nickname.

  Pulse rifle isn’t in the official designation, we all know that, but since it was a pulse that ignited the primer, the name just kind of stuck. Marines do that kind of thing. My great great whatever grandfather carried a Pig and his dad carried a Tommy Gun. It sounds cool, it works, it sticks. The problem with calling the M41 that name though is always some dumb boot hears we get issued pulse rifles and gets all excited thinking it’s going to be shooting laser beams or something. What do they think this is? Sci-fi?

  —Lance Corporal Tripp Dorsett, USCM

  The specifications required the new weapon to use caseless ammunition, but this presented several challenges. LaForce believed that standard ammunition was a better choice, because sustained fire of caseless ammunition causes a rapid buildup of heat, which could cause stoppages or even premature parts breakage. In a rifle using standard brass-cased ammunition, the ejecting cartridge case serves as a heat sink, and some heat escapes through the ejection port. However, the committee specified all submissions had to be totally sealed from the elements. LaForce’s solution to the overheating problem was using advanced materials for the internal mechanism, and ultramodern, cooler burning propellants for the ammunition.

  LaForce was issued several new patents. Among them was the visionary rotating breach design, which not only cut felt recoil in half, but allowed the use of his new U Bend Conveyor magazines. This brilliant system made his weapon far more controllable than competing designs, even while using more powerful ammunition.

  We had the best engineers in the business all competing to come up with a new gun, and some retired Marine, who doesn’t even have an engineering degree, shows up to the trials with this cobbled together piece of junk that looked like it got built in his garage. I found out later it literally was built in his garage. Here we were, the sharpest designers in the military industrial complex, all representing corporations with millions budgeted for R&D and marketing, and he walks up to the line like he belongs there, and pulls this ugly thing out of a case, and goes to town.

  Phase one was just a demo shoot for some of the officers. No big deal. Until LaForce opens up with that beast. Everybody knows what a pulse rifle sounds like now, but this was new back then and we’d never heard anything like it before. Nothing gets your attention like the noise a pulse rifle makes. Every head on the range swiveled that direction.

  He’d chambered it in 12mm Darnall, a monster of an old caseless hunting round that can shoot through a genetically modified rhino, just to prove that he could. Show off. This thing was shooting bigger bullets and more of them, with less recoil and still shooting better groups than every million dollar prototype on the line… It blew our socks off.

  The competitors found out later that LaForce hadn’t been invited by the committee at all, but had snuck into the initial test firing. He’d saved the life of one of the Marine testers during the battle of Kochan and had called in a favor to get onto the range as an ‘observer’. I h
ad gone to MIT and spent thirty years designing firearms on the most advanced CAD programs in the solar system, and there were twenty others like me there, but we all got our butts kicked by a hobbyist whose day job was selling barbeque.

  —Michael Ankenbrandt, Daihotai Engineering

  LaForce had the clearly superior design, but no ability to manufacture it. After a demonstration where the prototype was frozen in mud, and then fired six thousand rounds without a single malfunction, LaForce received an official invitation to the competition. He was also approached by several of the competing arms manufacturers and offered huge sums of money for his patents. Surprisingly, he refused them all, declaring at the time that he was in it to help his brother Marines, not to get rich. At the time there were even rumors of an attempted break in at LaForce’s workshop to steal the prototype, followed by an attempt at deliberate sabotage, all of which was blamed on—and vehemently denied by—Weyland-Yutani.

  With a working prototype in hand, and USCM interest in his design, LaForce approached Armat. The once respected company had fallen on hard financial times, yet retained a reputation for never skimping on quality, and always doing its best to support the soldiers it supplied. Luckily for LaForce, Armat, and America, this would prove to be a match made in heaven.

  If you look at the history of small arms development, what came first, cartridge or rifle, is usually a chicken or the egg kind of proposal. Sometimes you design a platform to fire an existing cartridge to spec, other times you have the weapon system and you shoe horn in the best round you can fit. This time we got lucky. As LaForce was designing his Pulse Rifle, Armat had been making some real breakthroughs in chemical engineering and projectile materials. This allowed us to really push the boundaries of terminal ballistics. Our new experimental 10mm x 24 caseless approximated the ballistics of the old .300 Winchester Magnum sniper round in a far shorter and lighter package, with a bullet that could penetrate most modern body armor, and an explosive payload inside that would absolutely wreck whatever was hit. The issue was that it produced too much recoil energy to control on full auto in an assault weapon sized package, so we were primarily marketing it for crew served weaponry. When LaForce came to us with a light rifle platform that could easily handle the recoil of our new experimental 10mm round, our executives bet the future of the company on manufacturing the pulse rifle. The rest is history.