“Gerard didn’t know anything else about it, but that was enough. I knew that Salvaje had his own system.
“So I went to his place when he was visiting the pregnant whore and broke in.”
The man on the table laughed. “His security was not so good as he thought. I got inside. Ran a download program and copied all his files. Took them home; he would never know I had been there.
“I found out where his messiah came from when I ran an AV he had buried in a mathematical program.”
The agent waved his hand and the image froze, floating silently in the air. “You’ll want to see this while Pindar talks,” he said. “We found it in his computer.”
The agent touched some controls. The man on the table vanished and was replaced by a somewhat grainy picture of Bionational’s logo. The logo was overstamped by a naming red sign that said: Authorized Personnel, REQUIRED CLEARANCE TS-1, Bionational Internal AV 42255-1, composite.
Pindar’s voice continued.
“It was a bad induction copy of a Bionational top-secret AV, for internal view only. Salvaje must have stolen it or had somebody steal it for him. Whoever had done it screwed it up, they lost part of the visual and all of the audio track, so there’s no sound.”
The image blurred, then resolved into a view of a clean room. A man lay on a table, bucking against a field. A spot on his solar plexus tore open and what appeared to be an eel’s head the size of a man’s fist emerged, flashing bloody needle-sharp teeth. Three men in cleansuits stood over the thing. The eel like creature shot out of the man on the table like a dart and latched on to one of the cleansuited men. It ripped a hole in his suit.
“The first part of the recording showed the birth of one of the things. Showed it attacking another man.”
The camera’s view switched to another pickup, zoomed in on the eel as it disappeared into the cleansuit. The pickup pulled back to show the terrified face of the man in the suit. He was screaming, but there was no sound. The image blurred, lost a couple of seconds, then re-formed.
Orona stared, fascinated.
The suited man ran. The camera lost him.
Two men fell as they tried to follow the fleeing one.
The image changed again. Armed guards stood in a corridor. A door opened and the cleansuited figure ran into view, slapping at a hole in his suit front. He lost control, shambled away.
The image jiggered. Another camera. The running man.
“They couldn’t let it get away,” the voice said.
The running man’s head exploded, the clean-suit’s helmet ballooned out, split, sprayed gore.
The image held, an angle on the body on the floor.
“Now,” the agent said. “We switch to…”
A huge room. Armored walls. Looked like a containment vessel for controlled fusion experiments. Suspended from cables was a naked man’s body. No doubt that he was dead; most of his head was gone.
A telemetry crawl ran across the image, but the figures and words were not those of a human.
“I didn’t see it at first,” came the voice. “But I figured it out fast enough when I saw the recording. They left the thing inside the guy they’d shot. He was a doctor, by the way, I saw that on the screen. Had been head of a division of Bionational before he became baby food.
“They put it in a place where it couldn’t get out and they watched it.”
The picture of the dead man froze.
“This is edited,” the agent said. “Apparently this Salvaje couldn’t get the other recordings, so this only hits the high points. Though he seems to have a hell of an organization, coded names and payouts, we’re still working on those.” He touched his control pad.
The image faded into another.
“Here’s what it looks like about halfway grown,” the agent said.
Orona stared. The thing appeared pretty much like the reconstruction on his own informational AV. But wait—half grown?
“Here is Salvage’s messiah,” Pindar said. “It isn’t a computer image as I thought, it is real.”
The image faded again, went blank.
“Apparently neither Salvaje nor the technician were able to get past this point in the recording,” the agent said. “But there is more. Our people have state-of-the-art recovery gear. We were able to pull another set of visuals from it.”
The blank image faded in again.
This time the monster was larger, shaped slightly differently, with a massive cranial plate that branched antler-like. It had an extra set of smaller arms coming from its chest area. The creature was huge, there was a scale built into the edge of the holo. The walls of the room were now covered with convoluted loops of shining black material, and the floor was dotted with garbage-can-sized eggs.
“My God,” Orona said. “It’s a queen!”
“One that doesn’t need to be fertilized, apparently,” the agent said.
Orona shook his head. “This could confirm my theory that a queen can develop from a drone as needed to continue the species. Some kind of hormonal change, perhaps.”
The monster showed teeth, looking directly at the observation camera. The image faded and went blank again.
Orona waited.
“That’s all there is of the stolen recording, I’m afraid,” the agent said.
“Sweet baby Buddha’s left nut,” Orona said. “We’ve got to get it and those eggs. I’ll make some calls, we’ll seize the Lima laboratory in the interests of Terran Security.”
The agent shook his head. “Too late for that.”
Orona blinked. “What? What do you mean?”
“Watch.”
The agent’s hands did their magic with the control pad. The air lit with new pictures.
“These are from Bionational security monitors at the Lima complex. Note the date.”
Orona looked at the red numbers in the corner of the image. Yesterday. Last night, from the hour.
“Apparently Salvaje had Pindar under a loose surveillance. Or perhaps an informant in the local police. Whatever. He must have found out we were closing in on him. Before Pindar’s questioning had been completed, this is what happened at Bionational’s Peruvian labs.”
The scene was of a fenced perimeter. A guard kiosk. Two men sat inside.
“Hey, look at that!” one of them said.
Both guards jumped up. The road camera caught the approaching vehicle. An old-style windjammer thirty-ton cargo truck approaching the gate. At speed.
“Stop, you asshole!” one of the guards yelled.
The truck slammed into the gate. The gate was durasteel mesh and solid wrist-thick bars and had not been designed to withstand the impact of a multiton cargo truck moving at fifty kph. The metal bent, bolts tore loose, wire stretched… but even so, it held. The truck slewed to a halt against it.
From the ruined cab of the vehicle, a single battered woman crawled out, managed to stand. She wore a robe. The security computer locked a wide-angle camera onto her. Her face was bloody. Her hands were empty but she had something strapped to her chest, a blocky circular device about the diameter of a dinner plate.
One of the guards hit the panic button and the alarm Klaxon started hooting. The other guard pulled his sidearm and ordered the woman to halt.
She kept coming. As the guard raised his weapon to fire, the woman exploded. The image washed white.
“Buddha,” Orona said.
“We IDed the bomb as a five-ton building demolition charge,” the agent said. “It took out the kiosk, the truck, and twenty-six meters offence.”
A patrol robot provided the next segment of recording.
The POV shot as the robot approached the destroyed entrance to the compound was a little shaky, despite the minicam gyros in the bot, because of the rubble it was traversing, the agent said.
Orona watched, fascinated.
The bot broadcast its security warning as a stolen passenger bus stuffed full of people roared past it. Since a security alert had been called the bot
’s guns were armed and it was authorized to fire upon intruders. It sprayed the bus with twin 10mm machine guns; its cameras picked up the holes as the rounds pierced the heavy plastic sides of the bus. People were dying inside, that was apparent, and the bot continued firing, aiming for the operator. A warning light began flashing on the bot’s proximity detectors, and the bot reacted to the new target, shifting on its axis, just in time to be smashed by a speeding aircar. The driver, who died in the subsequent explosion as he and the car and the bot were engulfed in a yellow flash, died smiling.
“This next piece we got from a spysat we had footprinting the area,” the agent said.
The view was from overhead, and had that too slick look that an augmentation computer added to a pixilated image. Three buses approached the large building centered in the frame. Security robots fired on the vehicles, and return fire came from the buses at the defensive bots.
The first bus reached the complex’s entrance. Ten or twelve robed figures scrambled out and ran for the door. From the angle, Orona couldn’t tell if they were men or women, but it didn’t matter, because they were cut down by gunfire from within the building.
Another dozen figures boiled forth from the bus.
Yet more from the next bus that arrived, and a fourth wave from the final bus. Nearly all of them were slaughtered, too.
Nearly all of them.
One of the figures tottered to the door.
The spysat’s niters cut down the white blast as the figure blew apart. Smoke and debris sprayed from the building.
“Got the door and the guards there,” the agent said. He spoke as if he were talking about what he had for lunch.
More figures emerged from the buses.
The images wavered.
“Spysat moved out of range there,” the agent said. “We didn’t have anything else we could shift over for another few minutes. This piece is from the building’s security comp. Watch.”
A lone guard, one of his legs missing, lay on the floor, a suppressed machine gun in his hands. He fired the weapon, waving it back and forth.
The wounded guard’s targets were robed figures, men and women, smiling as they walked into the hard sleet of bullets. Ten, fifteen, maybe a score of them fell before the guard’s gun ran dry.
The camera caught perfectly the woman who bent over the wounded guard and put a thin knife blade through his eye. She was smiling as if this were the funniest thing she had ever seen.
More figures moved into view.
“Freeze frame,” the agent said.
The moving figures turned into an oil painting, clear, sharp, still. “Nice optics,” the agent said. He pointed at the hologram. “See that one, second from the right?”
Orona nodded.
“Salvaje.”
Orona regarded the bearded man. He didn’t look like a fanatic. But then—what exactly did a fanatic look like? Was he supposed to be drooling and foaming at the mouth?
“Resume play.”
More robed people arrived. Orona estimated there must be at least thirty-five or forty of them who had survived the attack.
“Thirty-seven passed this camera,” the agent said, as if reading Orona’s thoughts.
The image cut to a view of a door. DANGER, it said in ten-centimeter-high letters, BIOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT. Authorized Personnel Only.
A pair of dead guards lay on the floor. One of them had a thin knife stuck in his eye. Five robed figures sprawled near the guards.
“Thirty-two of them left,” the agent said.
Another angle. Inside the chamber. Orona recognized the ropy exudate on the walls. A translucent mist fogged the ground, partially covering rows of eggs.
Some of the attackers stripped off their robes, showing themselves naked underneath. They each had a tattoo of a drone alien on their bodies, extending from neck to pubis.
“Goddamn,” Orona said.
“We found the tattooist, he was one of them. Been making house calls for months, apparently. It gets better,” the agent said. “Check this part.”
The queen alien lumbered into view. She stared at the people, twisted her head to one side, then the other, as if puzzled.
Salvaje faced her. He said something, but only a few words were audible.
“—be one with you, Messiah!”
“Sorry about the sound,” the agent said. “We’re lucky we got this much. We found the blue box almost six klicks away.”
Orona looked at the agent. “What?”
“Ill explain. Watch.”
Some of the eggs began opening. Half of the invading people now stood naked, arms outstretched, eyes closed, waiting. The others remained well outside the room, one angle showed them. “We’ve cut together several views here,” the agent said.
The first one to open was in front of Salvaje. He stood with his arms wide, as did the others, but his eyes were open. He leaned down over the egg. The flaps glistened with strands of shining slime. Fingerbonelike legs emerged and caught the edges of the opened egg, hauling the primary-embryo stage of the alien’s crablike body onto the lip. It leapt at Salvaje, wrapped a muscular tail around his neck, jammed its ovipositor into his startled mouth, and clutched his face with the legs, pressing itself flat against his face.
Orona could see the terror grip the man, and he realized that in this final moment of truth, the reality was more than he had bargained for, for Salvaje tried to scream.
The sound was choked off by the tube rammed down his throat.
The scientist in Orona was intrigued, but the human part of him recoiled.
Other eggs splayed wide their fleshy openings, other primary-embryos leapt upon waiting faces.
The queen watched it all impassively.
Then, when all of the naked humans had been infected, the outermost eggs hatched and depleted of their inhabitants, the remaining robed people darted in and dragged their comrades away, adroitly avoiding, save for one, being attacked by the remaining eggs.
The queen did not approve of this, but she was anchored to her huge egg sac and could not move quickly enough to catch the scurrying humans.
“Normally there would be drones to hold them,” Orona said.
“What?”
“Nevermind.”
The door shut. The queen raged.
As the attackers hauled away their fellows, one of them spotted the watching camera. He pulled a handgun and fired at it. He missed three times, but the fourth shot wiped the screen.
“What happened?”
The agent shrugged. “The security system was overridden at this time. We have no more images of the fanatics.”
“Overridden?”
“One of Bionational’s chief security people sent a coded squirt to the system. Self-destruct code.”
“What?”
“Ninety seconds later the security system destroyed itself—along with the entire complex. Blew it to bits.”
“No! What about the alien? The eggs?”
“Scattered about the countryside in pieces the size of your little fingernail, Doctor.”
“Oh, no!”
Orona was stunned by the news. What a waste! He’d sent a ship halfway across the galaxy to obtain such specimens and if they’d been a few hours quicker, they could have had one right here on Earth! That explained the dreams people had been having! Damn! Damn!
Wait. Ninety seconds. Could that mean—?
“What about the fanatics? Did any of them get away? There were at least a dozen of them infected!”
The agent sighed. “We don’t know. Our people have been combing the country looking for them, but there’s no sign of them. The explosion was in the half-megaton range. There’s no way to tell from the wreckage how many people died in it, whether anybody got away.”
For a moment hope flared in Orona. There might be a chance.
“We hope none of them did,” the agent said.
“What? Are you crazy? These life forms are priceless!”
“Think ab
out it, Doctor.”
Orona was a brilliant man; he had always been at the top of any class he was in. It hit him, what the agent was trying to say. Yes, the aliens were priceless. But under controlled circumstances. Bionational knew that. That’s why the complex was rigged to blow up if there came a breach in security. If the alien somehow escaped, got free of captivity, that could be disastrous. Even a single egg was potentially dangerous. Given how quickly they could breed and come to maturity, given how they could change into queens if the need was there…
Orona nodded. Yes. He saw it.
A dozen queen aliens, hiding out, laying eggs, that could be a problem.
That could be a major problem.
17
Billie stood in front of one of the “viewing ports,” watching the streams of light strung like thin, crooked tubes of bright neon across the dark background. She hadn’t spent much time in space, not since she had been a child, and this kind of travel was new to her. She stared, trying to remember her parents during happy times, but their bloody end kept jamming itself into her thoughts. Since Wilks had come to see her that first time, the reality the doctors had tried to wipe kept bobbing to the surface like floats on a pond. The truth was rising and would not be denied. All the dreams that had been real…
“That’s an illusion, you know,” came a voice from behind her.
Billie turned and saw one of the marines, Bueller, standing there.
“The improved gravity drive means we can spend less time in hypersleep, but the multidimensional matrices of the butterfly field turn dots into lines. Something to do with some esoteric particle, chronons, or impiotic zuons or some such.”
[Aliens 01] - Earth Hive Page 10
