Aliens

by Jonathan Maberry

  “If you’ll all move closer,” Mr. Jones beckoned, sidling up himself, nearer to the seam, nearer to that suspicious robotic arm.

  Amotz caught her heart beating inexplicably fast in her chest. She was so eager to see one of these creatures in person, her mind was creating monsters where there were none.

  With a burst of speed, the arm she’d been eyeing shot sideways into the room, out of its dark corner. It moved to a large tank occupying one-third of the space, tracing over the glass like a protective mother. Yellow liquid filled the tank, and the solution sat absolutely still. Not so much as a ripple fluttered through the murky film. But the tank wasn’t empty; Mr. Jones had already explained that was where they kept the “neutralized” facehuggers. Hundreds of them.

  She squinted again, trying to discern shapes in the preservation fluid. There, perhaps, was something that looked like the bony, pale fingers of an emaciated man. It twitched, or the light flickered, or her eyes refocused, and the phantom shape disappeared.

  “Now,” Jones began, “if you’ll look to the right of the lab, you’ll see—”

  “Ma’am? General? Mr. Ribar? Sorry to interrupt…” The young aide with whom Ribar had left his son sidled up, looking sheepish, sliding her glasses higher up her nose. “Daniel is asking for you. He said it was time for his medication, but you didn’t leave me anything.”

  Ribar looked annoyed. This had been a last-minute assignment for all of them, and he had tried to refuse because of having no one to place his son with. Amotz had suggested the kid simply come along. After all, this was only a milk run.

  Ribar emitted a heavy sigh. “He doesn’t take any medication,” he said. The aide looked confused. “He’s messing with you,” Ribar continued. “Ten-year-olds do that.”

  A too-wide smile flitted over the aide’s face and away again. “Oh. Of course. I’m sorry.”

  “Who’s with him now?”

  The aide’s cheeks blanched. “No one. I left him in the quarters we assigned you.”

  Amotz decided to intervene. “Go check on him, just to be on the safe side.”

  The woman hurried away.

  Cortez bit back a laugh. “God, she’s too easy!”

  The tour guide seemed puzzled, looking for all the world like he’d just witnessed an exchange in a foreign language.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Jones,” Amotz said. “Please continue.”

  “As I was saying: If you will focus your attention to the right, we’ll start the neutralization process.”

  “To the right” was a large, dark cage, with thick struts and corrugated slats. It butted up against a thick, gray vault door, slashed in many places with claw marks. Beneath the door ran a length of conveyer belt, which ground into motion, groaning and screeching as its guide-wheels turned.

  As the vault door slid upwards, a trap door at the end of the belt slid aside. A white-plastic and stainless-steel figure rose, hunchbacked, from the floor. It looked both ghostly and broken within the dark grasp of the cage. It was a mannequin in the approximate shape of a human, much as a poorly-wired skeleton bears that same approximate human shape. Its ovoid head lolled on its shoulders.

  With a flick of some unseen-technician’s wrist, the dummy came half-alive, lifting its head and opening its wide, devilish mouth, revealing whirling gears and clamps within. A small, blue pilot light glimmered behind its metal teeth.

  Through the vault door slid a brownish-green egg, looking like the skin might flake but the tissues would give under one’s touch—like a dried-out corpse. Only there was nothing dry about the ovomorph. Long strands of amniotic goo trailed over and around the egg like so much saliva.

  Amotz unconsciously raised her hand to her throat, gulping down harshly.

  “There are three known types of stimulants that signal to the egg and facehugger that a receptive host is nearby,” said Jones, as though describing something as benign as a bake sale. “Not all ’huggers respond to the same stimulants, so we employ them all. One: movement of a warm body.”

  The mannequin inside the cage did a terrible parody of a dance.

  “Two: mammalian pheromones.”

  The “tail” robot shot across the room, as if it meant to spear the ovomorph. Instead it spritzed a heavy mist over the quad-fold lips of the egg, which gave no signs of stirring. Amotz imagined that she could smell musk in the air.

  “And three: Carbon dioxide emissions. It’s the same way bed-bugs find their victims.”

  And with a puff of gas from another robotic extension, the pliant lips unfurled.

  Amotz tensed as a single, bony leg inched its way above the folds, twitching once as if testing the air. In the next instant it sprang, leaping at the mannequin with legs splayed wide, like a giant, grasping hand.

  The dummy welcomed it with a deranged grin, as the slimy, whip-like tail of the creature noosed itself around its throat. Moments later the ’huggers arms were wrapped around the thing’s head, with its reproductive organs plastered grotesquely to the mannequin’s mouth.

  “Watch!” Jones insisted.

  Seconds in, the creature began violently seizing, a few of its legs twitching away from the mannequin’s head as though it longed to let go. From above, a thin beam of red sliced through the knot of the alien’s tail, cauterizing the wound as quickly as it cut.

  Facehuggers could not scream. They made only autonomic sounds. But it was clear from the way it thrust itself away, falling back onto the floor with its legs curling in the air like a dead spider, that it was in pain.

  “We cauterize the proboscis—the tube that implants the parasitic cells which help morph the host tissue into a chestburster—and remove the tail. As you can see, robbed of its ability to complete its biological imperative, the ’hugger becomes docile and safe to work with.”

  As Jones droned on, a set of black-metal pincers entered the cage to retrieve the animal.

  It twitched as the arm clutched around it, like a bug poked with a stick. It remained half-curled, still as death, until the arm was within reach of the tank. Sensing, somehow, that it was about to be imprisoned with the rest of its kind, the ’hugger jerked violently, again and again. Its claw-tipped legs scraped at the pincers, scratching long silver lines into the arm. The creature twisted and squirmed, and the technician tightened the grip.

  Big mistake.

  One leg pinched and tore, extruding a glob of yellow-green blood that foamed and sizzled as it sank into the softening metal. The arm gave an abortive jolt, still heading for the tank but now listing to the side. The technician lost control and it careened into the glass, cracking the side. The pincers popped open, dropping the flailing creature unceremoniously onto the floor.

  Cortez and Ribar immediately un-holstered their side-arms, and the station guards at the end of the hall jolted to attention.

  Simultaneously, a siren blared out and flashing yellow lights filled the space.

  “It’s all right,” Jones said, holding out his hands, moving between the marines and the windows. “We have containment procedures. It’s fine. We have to be prepared for accidents when working with animals. The lab’s on lockdown. We’ve gone through this before. It’s fine.”

  “Look, General!” Cortez pointed frantically at the tank, where a handful of facehuggers had begun to swim at the crack. One after the other, they threw themselves at the weak point, but to no avail.

  “It’s fine,” Jones wheezed.

  It didn’t look fine. Amotz’ heart began to skip beats, thumping harder first in her ears, then her belly, as if it was clamoring for a way out.

  More ’huggers joined the assault. More and more of the supposedly-docile, supposedly-incapacitated aliens banged themselves in unison against the crack, widening it, sending little spider-web fractures through the tank until—

  The tank shattered, sending a great whooshing wall of liquid spilling into the lab proper. Hundreds of ’huggers scrambled through the flood, shaking themselves like dogs, their breathing flaps expanding a
nd contracting lightning-quick to produce droplets of the preservation fluid.

  Hundreds of them. Hundreds. All clammy skin and knobby joints with no desire but to breed, breed, breed.

  “Still fine,” Jones insisted, grabbing Cortez’ wrist, yanking it away from his weapon. “They’re contained, and you have to remember they’ve been neutered. They are harm—”

  A wave of them rushed at the glass, sensing the warm bodies beyond. Their burnt-out reproductive organs thumped at the pane, smearing it with a combination of fluids. Their nails scraped like little rat feet at the glass and at each other. The pile grew as more and more of them leapt onto one another in a crazed push to get at the humans.

  As the marines raised their guns, taking steady aim, the General signaled for the guards to join them. “You two, come on—and get more men down here! We’re going to need all the firepower we can get!”

  “General,” Jones complained, “this is unnecessary, we are—” She grabbed him by the collar, yanking him off balance. “If you say ‘fine’ again, so help me I will break your ratty little nose.”

  The pile grew and grew until all one could see was a mass of legs, legs and more legs. Three facehuggers pinned themselves flat against the glass, sprawled out completely to extend to their full wingspan. They formed a triangle that looked… deliberate.

  “Shit’s going to happen real, quick,” she spat at Jones. “I know strategizing when I see it, and those things aren’t just some dumb bugs. So you better find a hole to crawl into.” She dismissed him with an expression of total disdain.

  He straightened his shirt. “I’m not going anywhere. I have full confidence in the Company, and in our lockdown procedures.”

  “Look around,” she snapped. “You’re the only one.”

  “If you shoot them, you will destroy this facility. Their blood will eat through everything!”

  “I’m not the one who thought it was a good idea to bring sentient acid-bombs aboard and then piss them off!”

  Cortez shouted as the three splayed ’huggers were simultaneously speared through by their comrades. The creatures tore at their legs, their backs, their breathing flaps. In moments, the sacrificial aliens were obscured by the volume of blood splattered across the massive swath of window.

  The glass fell away like so much melting sugar, leaving nothing but dead air between the humans and the horde of angry parasitoids.

  “Fire!” commanded the General, gesturing for everyone to back away down the hall as they shot. The high-pitched crack! of a hand gun was underscored by the bass-booms of the guard’s rifles. Creatures leapt into the air, their legs outstretched, clamping down wherever they landed. Others scrambled up the walls, and the rest darted out under foot.

  Chaos reigned and everything blurred. There were so many bodies, so many legs. They carpeted the surfaces, pouring over one another, flowing like an eager sea of spiders—only much worse.

  Mr. Jones literally wet his pants, and the rank scent of ammonia mingled with the sour smell of corroding metals.

  Acid flew all around. Barrels flashed, ozone burned. Ribar cried out in agony as a long glob of yellow blood hit his shin, searing it down to the bone. As he stumbled Amotz took his weapon from him.

  “Call the ship in,” she commanded him. “We have to get out of here. Let them know it’s an emergency evacuation situation.” He opened up a link.

  Their ship sat in orbit around the planet, waiting for their day aboard the station to be completed. It was supposed to take them all back to Earth. All of them, even—

  Ribar’s kid.

  Shit.

  “Don’t let a single one out of here,” she yelled. “We have to protect the rest of the base.”

  A facehugger leapt at Cortez, just as he emptied his clip. He flung his arms in front of his face and the alien latched onto his gun. He tossed it away.

  A guard tripped and a ’hugger clamped around his knee, ineffectually trying to tongue at him with the cauterized stump of its probiscus. After a moment it pulled itself tighter, curling in, putting extra pressure right on his kneecap until—crack!

  The man’s screams echoed down the narrow hall.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Amotz saw a new shape in the melee. It wasn’t bony and knobbed, not heavy and fleshy. It was long. Like a whip. Like a—

  Tail.

  “They’re not all neutered!” she breathed, sure no one could hear her over the racket of shots-plus-acid-fizzle. Some of the ’huggers must have burned their way into the egg vault—clawed their way into the unopened eggs.

  One with a tail sprang from the floor two feet in front of her. “Watch out!” she yelled to no one in particular. The creature’s target lay behind, over her shoulder.

  She whipped around just in time to see it clamp down on Mr. Jones, his last words smothered by the coil around his neck and the tube down his throat. Whatever he’d been about to say, fine wasn’t it.

  Mr. Jones went limp, his body collapsing like a sack of loose bones. He hit the deck before Amotz could loose another yelp.

  “Protect your mouths!” Amotz ordered. “We have live ones. Live ones!”

  But it was no use. The newborn facehuggers were protected by their brethren. Wounded individuals took bullets for them. The group’s imperative to impregnate drove them like a hive-mind.

  First Jones went down. Then Cortez on her left. The capped guard on her right. The second guard turned to her, ready to shout something, when one leapt and caught the side of his mouth with three legs, yanking his lips wide before it burrowed in.

  Amotz took the last mag from Ribar, determined to protect him.

  “Daniel—” he choked, his fingers clawing at his bloodied leg.

  “You’ll see him again. You will!”

  The facehugger numbers dwindled, but not because they’d killed so many. Holes littered the floor like perfect, bug-sized escape hatches. She could only watch in horror as many crawled down and away, disappearing into the inner workings of the space station.

  “We have to get the hell out of here!” she gasped in Ribar’s ear. “Can you walk at all on your own? The docking bay’s not that far. The ship is on its way.”

  “But Daniel—”

  “I’ll get him. Me. You’d only slow us down.”

  As the last of the creatures wormed its way out of sight, she handed Ribar his service pistol.

  “No, I have to—”

  “You wanna play the hero, or do you want to give your kid the best chance of survival? I order you to get to the docking bay.”

  He nodded solemnly. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled before going. “It was supposed to be my job to protect you. To keep you alive.”

  “You haven’t failed yet. Get your ass out of here.”

  He saluted, then was gone.

  Minus a weapon, she inched her way toward one of the downed guards. The man’s lungs still worked steadily, but as she came closer, the alien on his face tightened its grip.

  “Easy, easy,” she whispered at it, crouching down to snake the rifle from the man’s fingers.

  She checked the mag—half empty.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, echoing Ribar. She knew the guard couldn’t hear her, knew he was dead already. The only thing he had to look forward to was a larval Xenomorph punching its way out of his diaphragm. “I’m sorry,” she said again, backing up a safe distance to take aim at his head and fire.

  She did the same for the other guard, and Jones, and Cortez, choking each time she pulled the trigger.

  Plastering herself to the wall, eyes darting, she carefully slid out of the lab hall and into the open causeway. Just six corridors separated her from the kid—but it was thousands of cubic-meters in which Murphy’s Law could have a field day.

  * * *

  Out on the causeways, all lay eerily still. Only the incessant emergency siren blared out, so constant and steady it was nothing but white-noise. She hunched as she moved, ready to fire or spring out of a ’hugger’s path an
y second. Sweat dripped from her hairline into her eyes. She felt too hot and too cold at the same time, and her gaze was never steady. Every moment that passed had her more skittish than the next. What if she didn’t make it in time? What if she got there and Daniel was already on the floor, a cold, eyeless mask of a creature covering his face?

  Ribar would have every right to blame her.

  She passed several such unfortunates on her way—bodies sprawled out, unwilling incubators for Xenomorph flesh. She didn’t have enough rounds to put them all down, and her chest constricted every time she made the choice to move on without ending someone’s pain.

  Many of the hallways were cordoned off with yellow tape, and a few areas were swathed in opaque plastic, behind which amorphous shadows faded in and out of the light. The scent of hot metal mixed with some kind of sour astringent taint in the air. Every time she caught an extra strong whiff of the acidic smell, she jerked away, sure it meant a ’hugger was upon her.

  Ten meters from her goal, one fully-functioning bug dropped from the ceiling. She dove for the floor, bruising her knees, but avoiding the clutch of long legs. Its nails sliced down her back in the miss, creating hot lines of pain.

  Swiftly, unthinkingly, blood pounding in her ears, she rolled over and fired, clipping the creature square in the center as it leapt for her face. Its bony body shattered on impact, and a light splattering of acid singed her right cheek. The acid bore little holes into her skin, creating deep open wounds, but she made no attempt to wipe it away. She knew she’d only get an injured hand for her efforts.

  It didn’t matter that it would scar, didn’t matter that she could feel it eating through to the wet flesh of her mouth. Nothing mattered—not pain, not time, not breath—until she reached Daniel.

  It was her fault he was here. It was her responsibility to get him out.

  The door, when she reached it, was locked. She wracked her brain for the aide’s name.

  “Miss—Miss Campbell? Open the door. It’s General Amotz.”

  A feral screech came from within, but the door snapped open. Blinking up at her from the other side was Daniel. Quickly she shuffled the boy inside, pulling the door behind her.