Aliens

by Jonathan Maberry

  “This Ripley bitch likes blowing shit up,” observed Lulu. “Kind of dig her.”

  Bax shook his head. “Why do I have a feeling that from now on, every time you blow something up you’re going to be saying you’re ‘going full Ripley’?”

  Lulu thought about it, shrugged, nodded. “Could happen.”

  Sid ignored them and told us about how the Xenomorph had somehow infected Ripley during hypersleep and because these fuckers had molecular acid for blood, the smoke from burning plastic triggered fire alarms and the life pods. The tubes containing the three survivors were transferred to a life pod and dropped into the atmosphere of the closest non-vital planet. Guess where?

  Fury.

  “Fuck me,” said Lulu. “Is this a rescue mission for them?”

  “After all these years?” asked Bax. “We’re coming pretty late to the prom.”

  “No,” said Sid, “Hicks and the girl were reported KIA when the pod crashed. Ripley was rescued by the prisoner miners, but there was at least one Xenomorph on the pod. It escaped and killed most of the prisoners and all of the staff.”

  “Fuck me,” whispered Bax. “Just one?”

  “Just one,” said Sid.

  “What about Ripley?” I asked.

  “Dead, too. A Xenomorph impregnated her and she committed suicide to prevent the birth of a queen of that species.”

  “‘Impregnated’ how, exactly?” asked Lulu. “She get tired of blowing them up and decide to do the nasty with one?”

  “I don’t need that image in my head, thanks,” said Bax.

  Sid explained about the life process of the Xenomorph.

  “Well fuck me blind and move the furniture,” Bax muttered, and he looked a little green.

  “Did Ripley blow up the mine, too?” asked Lulu.

  “Not this time,” said Sid, and he explained how she organized the prisoners to try and destroy the alien by entombing it in molten lead. It hadn’t worked, but she killed it anyway. To prevent anyone from harvesting the queen inside her, Ripley had thrown herself into the lead. There was nothing of her left to harvest. There was one survivor from the prison, but he was a nobody and he vanished off the official record.

  Weyland-Yutani sent three separate science teams to scour the area, but they came up dry each time. The file on Fiorina 161 was closed and filed away as an expensive waste of time and opportunities.

  “So who’s down there?” asked Bax.

  “Unknown,” said Sid. “The Company left some satellites in orbit and they started ringing bells.”

  “Squatters?” asked Lulu.

  “Unlikely.”

  “Even so,” she said, “how’s this our gig? We roll out to protect civilians and protect W-T assets, but nobody who signs our paychecks owns a stake in Fury anymore, so why are we all the way the fuck out here?”

  Sid said, “We’re picking up heat signatures from the mine and from a large supralightspeed craft. It has stealth sheathing that’s almost good enough to hide it from our sweeps.”

  I grinned. Almost is a fun word. Stealth tech is rampant, and some of it’s good enough so some of the rival planets and rival corporations can’t find each other. We can find nearly everyone and no one—no-fucking-body—can find our birds. W-T developed it for the military, but they’ve been using it for their private ops, too. Like ours.

  “The fact that someone is bankrolling an expensive operation means they’ve found something important on Fury. If it’s important then it legally belongs to W-T.”

  “‘Legally’?” echoed Bax, one eyebrow raised.

  “Ethically, then,” conceded Sid. Then he seemed to consider the weight of that word, too. “The Company never formally relinquished the planet and have since paid retroactive taxes and fees to fully reinstate their claim.”

  “They own it,” I said. “Whose ship are we talking about?”

  “It’s anyone’s guess as to which corporation put a ship down there,” said Sid. “Whoever it is has money, though. No group of squatters could buy a ship like that.”

  “If they can afford that tech,” said Bax glumly, “then they can afford shooters to protect it.”

  “Agreed,” said Sid.

  Lulu gave him a killer’s smile. Thin, and hard and ice cold. “Fuck ’em.”

  * * *

  Lulu drove the drop ship.

  She always drives like she’s running from a bank heist. Bax kept praying to Ganesha and I kept rechecking my safety harness. Stupid, I know, because if we crashed at the speeds she used all I’d be is a well-secured corpse.

  There was an ice storm turning the region around the mine into a winter wonderland. Twenty-two below, with winds that turned snow into a fusillade of ice crystals. Lulu was singing some old-ass song about weed, whites and wine. She steered with the shifts of the wind so that if anyone was looking we’d fade into the background motion dynamics like a piece of blown debris. If we showed up at all. With storm winds there was always the chance of a shield panel flying off.

  “Hold onto your sacks, boys,” yelled Lulu, “’cause this is going to be a bumpy landing.”

  She wasn’t joking. Or underestimating.

  We hit the ground hard enough to make the impact suppression system cry out in protest. Everything rattled, from the deck bolts to the fillings in my teeth. When we deployed onto the surface I thought Bax was going to fall down and kiss the dirt.

  Lulu grinned as she strolled out after us. “Pussies,” she said.

  “Kiss my… brown… ass,” said Bax, but his voice trembled so bad there was no emphasis.

  “Okay,” I snapped, “cut the chatter.”

  I pulled up an area map on the tactical computer strapped to my forearm. Lulu and Bax touched theirs to mine to establish a dedicated team Wi-Fi and synch up the telemetry. We couldn’t risk using satellite uplinks because of the danger of detection. We had a good path to the mine, and by good I mean it was a hardscrabble pain in the balls. The kind of path no one in their right mind would ever use, which made it a good choice for coming up on the blindside of whoever was here.

  Took us five hours to go six kilometers.

  Along the way we encountered rocks, more rocks, ice, more rocks, snow, and more motherfucking rocks. Once Bax saw a creature darting through a drift, but when Lulu popped it with a single silenced round, it turned out to be some kind of long-haired six-legged something that none of us had ever seen before. It wasn’t a Xenomorph, though, so we left it in a bloodstained patch of snow and moved on. The winds were at our backs, which was some mercy because they were so strong it would have doubled the march time to walk into them. As it was they pushed us forward.

  When we were half a klick out we stopped for warm water from our flasks and a full protein and electrolyte bar. Lots of calories, all the right nutrients, but they tasted like ass. Greasy, gritty ass, too. Small wonder they never caught on in civilian markets. We could feel the recharge, though, and after a fifteen-minute rest we were ready to rock and roll.

  We crept to the top of a ridge of stone that rose from the shoreline of a frigid ocean and studied the tableau below.

  “Yeah,” said Bax, “definitely not squatters.”

  The mining building was vast. More like a medieval castle back on Earth. Huge towers of stone and iron that rose into the stormy sky. Ice seemed to reach up its sides like clutching fingers. There were snow-covered heaps of ancient trash and shapeless chunks of metal. Nearby, a ship squatted on eight powerful legs. It was a design I’d read about but never encountered. A Bái lóng-class exploration cruiser. Nine hundred feet, with a two hundred foot forward beam that tapered back to a slender tail. It was painted to look like its name, a white dragon. Teeth and all. Massive fusion engines, and an impressive and intimidating collection of gunports and rocket pods pointing in every useful direction.

  I didn’t like it, but now I understood it. Or, some of it, anyway. Outside the reach of planetary government or star-system alliances there was no real law. Everything be
yond the core systems was run by whoever could afford to provide infrastructure and protection. The Weyland-Yutani Company owned big, gaudy chunks of that real estate, but space was—let’s face it—really fucking big. There was plenty of room and plenty of resources out there to encourage competition and an entrepreneurial drive on an epic scale. After W-T there were some dozen next-tier corporations, and on the tier below that maybe three hundred smaller ones. The only company that offered any real competition to W-T was the Jǐngtì Lóng Corporation, based on New China. They had twelve star systems and business interests in everything from novelty genetically engineered pets to heavy metals mining to pharmaceuticals. Total number of employees was sixteen million, give or take. So, yeah, big.

  They call their special operators Wúgōng, which means centipedes. Comes from the type of combat rig they wear that has a lot of extra extendible arms capable of using autonomous-fire weapons. I’ve gone toe-to-toe with some of their teams on disputed asteroids and planets. They buried some of my boys, and I buried a bunch of theirs. We failed to bond.

  “Fuck me,” murmured Bax, because he lost ten inches of intestine three years ago after a dust-up with a Wúgōng kill team.

  “Sweet,” said Lulu, because she didn’t like anyone and was always turned on by the prospect of a fight with someone worth fighting.

  I said nothing. This was a day on the job and they don’t pay me to have opinions.

  Beyond the ship was an area that had been cleared off by bulldozers and in the center of it was the squat, ungainly and clearly damaged hulk of a Type 337 EEV military lifeboat. It was one of those old-fashioned ones that didn’t look like it was deigned to do anything but fall. Badly. Small portable field work-shelters had been erected and interior light made them glow.

  We saw no one moving.

  “Maybe they’re all inside to get out of the storm,” suggested Bax.

  “Lulu,” I said, “thermals.”

  She flipped down her visor and tapped the temple controls to cycle from ordinary vision to thermal scan. “Got ’em.”

  “How many and where?”

  “Nothing in the lifeboat. Nothing in the work tents. But a shit-ton in the ship.”

  “Give me a count.”

  She chewed her lip. “Can’t lock down a hard number. Some in the forward part of the ship. Call it eighteen, but most of the signals are soft. Like they’re cooling. Some trace signatures, too. Dozens of those, but I can’t get an active read on them.”

  “Could be the shielding messing with the sensor,” suggested Bax.

  “Maybe,” I said. “What else?”

  “There’s a cluster in the engine room, but that’s even muddier. I think they’re clustered around the reactor.”

  “Clustered?”

  “Looks like it. Jammed in so tight I can’t count individual signatures. Best guess is ten.”

  I squinted at the ship. “That’s a seventy-man boat.”

  “Big damn ship to land,” said Lulu. “I’d love to see what they have under the hood.”

  “Where’s the crew?” asked Bax.

  “In the mine?” ventured Lulu, then she shook her head. “No. Even with interference from the structure I’d get something and it’s stone cold dead in there.”

  It was a bad choice of words and she realized it as soon as she said it.

  “What’s the play, boss?” she asked to cover her words.

  “We didn’t come out here to be bystanders,” I said. “We go down. Scout the ground and then see about getting onto that ship.”

  “Rules of engagement?” asked Bax.

  I nodded to the lifeboat. “That came off a Marine Corps ship, which means it’s our property. The mine and everything else belongs to the people we work for. Which makes everyone on that ship looters. Personally I do not play well with kids who try to steal my toys.”

  Lulu and Bax smiled. They weren’t nice smiles. I doubt mine was, either.

  * * *

  We came down quietly, making maximum use of cover, guns up and out, taking turn running point whenever we changed direction. We went to the Sulaco lifeboat first and peered inside. I expected it to be a charred mess, but I was wrong. We paused to stare at what had been done to it.

  It was a shell. Every piece of equipment, every control panel, every inch of wiring was gone. The Jǐngtì Lóng science geeks had done the most thorough job of stripping a ship that I’ve ever seen.

  “I don’t get this, boss,” said Bax very quietly. “Why strip it out? The boat crashed, some of it burned. Nothing left inside was of any use even in a fire sale.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Lulu, “long damn way to come to get used parts.”

  “Which means it’s not why they came,” I said. “Ripley got implanted with the alien embryo aboard that boat, and there had to be at least one of those face-hugger sons of bitches on board.”

  “Sure,” said Bax, “but I thought W-T science teams have been all over this stuff.”

  “Maybe they missed something,” said Lulu with a shrug.

  “Or maybe they have better ways of looking,” I said. “You know how Jǐngtì Lóng operates. They always take a weird left-field approach to everything. They’ve jumped the line in tech development a lot of times, so maybe they figured out how to do what the W-T nerd squad failed to do.”

  It was true enough. Even though Weyland-Yutani was the big dog in the technologies market, there was a good reason why Jǐngtì Lóng was constantly nipping at their heels. From what I’d read I figured it was an event split between really good R and D and really good corporate espionage.

  Bax and Lulu looked at the boat, then at the mine and then at me.

  “So what you’re saying,” Lulu began, “is that this whole thing is about these assholes trying to harvest aliens?”

  “Xenomorphs,” corrected Bax, but Lulu ignored him.

  “Maybe,” I said. “We don’t know but I think we’d better find out before they go and do something stupid.”

  As we moved off I could feel ice form in the pit of my stomach. Sid had told us a lot about the Xenomorphs and they were some nasty-ass critters. Hard as hell to kill, with that acid blood, some weird extendible mouth, strong, and apparently vicious in the extreme. If all they’d ever done was kill a flight crew on a cargo ship or the unarmed prisoners in a mine I wouldn’t be too worried; but they’d slaughtered an entire platoon of marines on Acheron. Our mission parameters included securing any specimens—in whole or part—for return to the W-T labs. But what trumped that was to make sure no one else walked off with so much as a fingernail from the creatures. That would give the competition something our team hadn’t yet managed to acquire, which would result in something a lot worse than stock drops when Jǐngtì Lóng developed it into a bioweapon. That could shift more than the economic balance of power. With Xenomorphs on the leash, Jǐngtì Lóng could start—and likely win—a war.

  We used the heaps of debris to hide our approach but then Bax tapped my arm and nodded to the security cameras mounted along the sides of the Jǐngtì Lóng ship. The small sensor lights were all dark. I looked around. All of the work lights in the camp were still on, but there wasn’t anything showing in the ship’s few portholes.

  “Is that good or bad?” asked Bax.

  “Nothing’s good on this rock,” I said.

  We did a complete circuit of the ship and found no trace of activity. The engine housing was still warm, but that would be on its own system because it takes too long to restart those babies and is easier and cheaper to leave them in idle. We ended our recon at the rear hatch and that’s where we found the blood.

  There was a lot of it.

  Too much of it.

  We stopped and stood at the edge of a wide puddle that could not have been made from what was in the veins of a single man. Six, seven, maybe. Lulu knelt and waved her hand to indicate hundreds of tiny islands in that lake of red. Shell casings.

  There were lumps of meat, too.

  I heard Bax mumbl
ing a prayer. “Om Gum Ganapatayei Namah.” It was a prayer of protection to Ganesh, the Hindu god who removes obstacles and offers protection. Lulu said nothing. She generally didn’t believe in anything, but she knew this wasn’t the moment to mock someone who was calling for support. No atheists in foxholes, especially on planets this far from home.

  We looked at the rear hatch. It stood ajar, and through the five-inch gap all we could see was a black nothing. Except on the door frame, on which was a bloody handprint.

  It was not made by a human hand.

  * * *

  We stood there, barrels pointed at the door, none of us speaking.

  I was scared, I admit it. We all were.

  The Chinese team had come here to find what the Weyland-Yutani guys had missed. An egg, maybe. A face-hugger. Some DNA. Something.

  And they’d found it.

  Or it had found them.

  I tried to do the math in my head based on the mission intel. From the sketchy data collected so far, we knew the Xenomorphs grew fast. Real fast. The one on the Nostromo went from egg to infant to full-sized killer in under a day. Scary thought. Very scary thought, considering that there were seventy or more people on the Jǐngtì Lóng ship.

  How’d they grow one, though?

  Did they find an egg hidden on the lifeboat? Unlikely. Our boys would have found something like that.

  Unless…

  When Ripley was rescued from the crashed boat it was days before the killings in the mine began, and even longer before the first W-T team arrived. We knew that one of the face-huggers must have gotten to Ripley because she was impregnated. Or whatever we should call what happened to her.

  There had to be a second face-hugger, because a Xenomorph began killing everyone in the mining facility.