[Aliens 01] - Earth Hive

by Steve Perry - (ebook by Undead)

  Wilks hugged her. “Easy, kid. Let it go. We know what happened.”

  Billie sobbed. Tears flowed. That was one of the memories she had buried the deepest. Not even the worst of her nightmares had dredged it up before now.

  Hate filled her brain, but it was not her own emotion. It was from the space traveler floating outside the APC, the giant whose fellow being had died and crashed into Rim.

  She didn’t want to remember, but the space traveler pulled at it, drawing it into view. The child she had been, watching the monitors. Watching her father lean over one of the eggs. Seeing all over again the opening and the crablike embryo that flew out and latched on to her father’s face. Seeing her mother and Gene drag him out. Listening to the screams…

  “No! Get out of me! Go away!”

  Hate. Gut-churning, black, molten hate, sloshing over and filling Billie to her toes. How this thing hated these creatures!

  “It saved us,” Wilks said.

  “Not because it likes us,” she said. “Because it can’t stand them.”

  Blake said, “Sarge, we’ve got to get the ship spaceworthy. We’ve got what? three hours?”

  Billie thought about the bombs that would drop, what would happen to the planet when they did.

  She felt a sudden interest from the spacesuited figure. It understood her thoughts well enough to hear that message.

  “The thing is leaving,” the crewman said. “Just floating away.”

  “It knows about the bombs,” Billie said.

  “Yeah, well, while I’d like to be an ambassador to a new species and all, we have to get the APC fixed or we’re going to be atomic dust ourselves.”

  Wilks stood, leaving Billie sitting on the deck of the little craft. Next to her, Mitch opened his eyes. He didn’t speak, and Billie had nothing she wanted to say to him. The alien presence left her suddenly, a sharp sensation as if a knife were pulled from her brain.

  It was hard to breathe, their eyes burned and their noses ached and dripped, but the repairs took only an hour.

  The APC lifted, made orbit, and managed a safe rendezvous with the Benedict. Wilks made very certain there were no unwanted passengers on the APC before he pulled into the bay, and even then, he had the cleaning lasers scorch every bit of the landing craft’s exterior before he let them leave the docking area.

  Blake plugged Bueller into some kind of life-support system designed for androids.

  The crewman—Billie didn’t know his name and didn’t care if she ever did—went to do checks on the ship.

  Wilks went to do something, he didn’t say what.

  Billie sat at a table, staring at the wall. It was over. They had come to the aliens’ world. They had survived pirates and attacks by the creatures; they were about to smash the planet back to a pre-life stage. They were going home.

  It was all over.

  And she didn’t give a damn.

  26

  Orona sat in his office, watching the three corporation executives seated across from him. The doctor was named Dryner; he couldn’t remember the others’ names, but thought of them by the clothing they wore: Red and Green. The room walls were shielded, even the windows were lined with breakup softwires so a laser listener couldn’t pick up conversations from outside. Orona suspected that at least one of the three corporation men carried some kind of scrambler to block electronic eavesdropping, maybe they all did. They’d been scanned, but there were some remarkable plastics around these days that could mimic just about anything. A shoe, a kneecap, whatever. Conversations held at this high a level were best done with great care. Nobody would be collecting Orona’s words, either.

  “All right, gentlemen, let’s not do an elaborate mating dance all around it. We all know why we’re here.”

  Green and Red exchanged quick, shielded glances, no expressions to read. They’d be good poker players, Orona figured. The medical VP was also cool, but a bit more nervous. He tapped a finger lightly against his thigh.

  “Perhaps we should reconsider having attorneys present,” Red said.

  “Nobody is talking about prosecution,” Orona said. “Let’s not insult each other’s intelligence. I’m government and you’re private, my hammer is bigger, and I’d play hell whacking you with it, we all know that, too. At least right now, anyway.”

  Red and Green smiled, identical expressions. They knew that.

  “So let’s skip the scat and get to the bottom line,” Orona said. “You had one of the aliens tucked away down in your SA lab and some religious fanatics broke in and got themselves impregnated by the thing’s embryos. We all know that.

  “Your specimen got cooked in the explosion that destroyed the lab. The fanatics got away. We know that because we are still getting reports of the nightmares, so some of the damned things are still alive.

  “Am I telling you anything you don’t know?”

  Red and Green smiled slightly, as one. Men of the world had certain sources. No point in denying it.

  The doctor, Dryner, shook his head. “We, ah, are aware of this.”

  “I thought you might be. Got a tap in our mainframe. But you don’t have a line tied to our Tac Unit.”

  He looked at them. Red shrugged, the barest hint of a moment. Orona read that as a “no.”

  “Well, we’ve found one of the attackers.”

  The doctor leaned forward, eager. “With the implanted embryo?”

  “Unfortunately, no. This man’s chest had been burst from the inside. He’d been dead for half a day when our team uncovered him in New Chicago. There was no sign of the newborn alien.”

  The doctor leaned back. “Shit,” he said. His voice was soft.

  “I share your sentiments, Doctor. We would very much like to collect these things ourselves. But I’m afraid our worry is now larger than simply who’ll be the first to get a potential weapons system, no matter how valuable that might be.”

  Green and Red perked up. Green said, “What do you mean?”

  .Orona stood, turned to look through the window at the city lights kicking on as darkness gathered in the dusk. Traffic zipped back and forth in the airlanes, glittering in the final rays of the setting sun. “Doctor, you understand how these things reproduce. Each one is a potential queen, is it not?”

  Dryner looked at the other two company men. They gave him those tiny shrugs. Go ahead.

  The doctor said, “Yes, that is possible.”

  “We don’t know how many of the fanatics escaped. Could be as many as a dozen. We’ve lost one of the newborn aliens. The others will all be hatching from their human “eggs’ shortly, if they haven’t already done so, is that not correct?”

  “Well, it would depend on which eggs delivered their implants. The queen laid them over several days.”

  “But at the most, several days plus or minus is all, correct?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Doctor, if there were, oh, say, five of them implanted, and each of them produces a queen and they all begin to lay eggs as soon as they reach maturity, how long do you think it might take before the damned things are swarming all over the place?”

  Dryner swallowed dryly. “I—there’s no way to be certain, that is to say—”

  Orona turned around. Felt the weight of the entire government on his shoulders. He was the expert, though these men might know as much as he did. He needed every scrap of knowledge he could get. “It’s rather like the hamster problem. If one mother and her litters all come to term and keep mating and having more babies who all survive, in a couple of years we’re knee-deep in hamsters.

  “Of course, that doesn’t happen. Some are killed by the mothers, some are eaten by natural predators, some get stepped on by things with big feet. But these aliens don’t have any natural predators on this world.

  “It takes armor-piercing military-grade weaponry to kill one and even then it isn’t easy. We have the reports from our Colonial Marines’ encounters with them. A Chinese farmer with a pitchfork, an Australian
bird hunter with a shotgun, they’ll be wasting their time trying to stop a full-grown alien with either of those weapons, correct?”

  The doctor swallowed again. The question was rhetorical.

  “In fact, just about anybody who comes against one of these things is going to regret it. They reproduce like hamsters, the queens don’t even need mates, they come of age real fast. We don’t know where they will start to pop up. The fanatics have spread out, we’ve gotten reports of them all over the globe. Some have to be discounted, of course, but if a tenth of the material is correct, we are going to start seeing these things making themselves known in both hemispheres from the equator to the poles. Chicago is a long way from Lima.

  “And, gentlemen, that means we will all be in very deep shit. I expect your cooperation in every way to stop that. Because if we don’t stop it, making that big end of the year bonus is going to be the last thing you have to worry about. These things will be killing so many people that you’ll hear the survivors’ outraged screams on Mars. And every one of them will be calling for heads to roll. I’ll give them yours. Then the government will give them mine.”

  The doctor licked dry lips.

  Even those two cosmopolitan men of the world, Red and Green, looked unhappy with that idea.

  Good. Orona had them. Now, he hoped it wasn’t too late. He didn’t express his own worst fear: that the things would get well established enough so the very survival of mankind on the planet would be in jeopardy. Of course, that was worst-case scenario, he didn’t really think that would happen, it was just a nightmarish worry. He hoped.

  27

  The giant elephantlike creature had gotten away, they saw the ion trail of its ship dispersing in the vacuum before they broke their own vessel out of its ellipse around the aliens’ world. Funny, the place didn’t even have a name, at least not one Wilks knew about. Not that he worried about it.

  There wasn’t anything down there to worry about.

  So. The hard rain began to fall upon the aliens’ planet, courtesy of the Colonial Marines and delivered by Sergeant Wilks. The chain-link nukes seeded from the Benedict dropped from their computer-designed orbits and drizzled across the harsh land; some fell into the sea, though the water harmed them not in the least.

  When the nukes chained and went off, they smashed at the planet as might a raging god grown angry with his creation.

  Sheets of atomic fire scoured the surface. Shock waves pounded trees and bushes and even some mountains flat. Volcanoes long dormant were shaken to life by the explosions, adding their blasts and lava spews to the chaos. The land groaned and responded with earthquakes that shook the surface harder than any man-made scale could register. Oceans boiled, steam rose; life in the sea, land, and air cooked where it swam or walked or flew. The world rattled to its very roots and whatever might have survived the initial devastation would fare poorly under the ensuing pall of the nuclear winter and radioactivity left by the deliberately dirty bombs. The aliens were hardy; they could survive in conditions that would kill most forms of life, but even they had to eat. Food was going to be scarce here for a long, long time.

  Wilks watched on the monitors, the cams shielded by filters, as the aliens’ planet spasmed and died. And he felt real good about it, too. He hoped they all lived long enough to starve. Slowly.

  He didn’t think he would be bothered much anymore by the nightmares he had lived with for so many years. He had struck back against the hellish things, and his punch had been a lot bigger than any they could throw. He had destroyed them. The last laugh was his.

  Yeah, there was the one left on Earth, but when he got back, he was going to see what he could do about that one, too.

  He wondered what the penalty for blowing up a whole planet was? Why, he might be court-martialed. Imagine that.

  It was worse than Orona had figured.

  The first infestations seemed easy enough to deal with. His Tac teams were primed for sudden mass disappearances, and whenever an area starting missing people, they went in. He mobilized transportation so that a fully equipped team could launch and parabola down to any spot on the globe in under three hours.

  The first nests were small, no more than fifty or a hundred eggs and a single queen. The Tac teams took no chances. They sterilized the area. The nests were razed, surrounding areas destroyed, suspected carriers picked up and detained. Those with implants were killed quickly and their bodies burned.

  New Chicago, Lesser Miami, Havana, Madrid—those nests were quickly discovered and eliminated.

  At first, Orona felt a certain smugness. True, there would be a lot of damages to cover and a certain amount of political heat to be endured, but the Planetary Security Act gave him a great deal of latitude. The things weren’t very bright; they were like termites or ants or bees; they built their nests and set up egg chambers and sent workers out to gather food. The behavior was instinctive; there was no great intelligence behind it. It had apparently worked for the things on their homeworld, but there they didn’t have such clever competition. For a time, Orona rested easier. He was the expert, and the military trusted him implicitly.

  Weeks went by. Months.

  More nests were kicked open: Paris, Moscow, Brisbane, Antarctic City. The things had spread far and wide as he had feared, but still they were easy enough to find and destroy. The infection was bad, but controlled. Like a staph boil lanced and cleaned, it would heal.

  But then things began to change.

  The Tac teams were getting good at their jobs, practice making them better, and maybe they started to get sloppy. Or maybe it was some kind of forced natural selection. Like rats or roaches who have been hunted and poisoned or smashed flat, the aliens began to vary their nest making.

  The hives got smaller and more numerous. The Tac teams would find only ten or fifteen eggs in a tiny chamber, and such places were harder to locate. And there were more of them. An area of Greater North Africa in the old Ivory Coast yielded no less than eighty small nests inside a fifty-kilometer circle. Some of the hives were in Abidan, in the basements of skyscrapers or old warehouses, but some of them were in the surrounding countryside, under the ground. Tac squads discovered implanted cattle, horses, and even goats in some chambers. Anything large enough seemed to work. And while people in civilized countries who went missing were usually reported, a farmer and a few dozen cattle in some rural area might not be noticed.

  It was as though the aliens were becoming smarter as a survival characteristic.

  Six months after the escape from the labs in Lima, Orona had to order a division-sized attack on a giant nest in Diego Suarez, on the northern tip of Madagascar. It was actually a series of several hundred smaller nests that had been tunneled and joined together.

  Eight months into the war, Orona was responsible for the nuclear destruction of Jakarta.

  A year after the war began, the continent of Australia was considered too infested to allow any travel to or from, and a full quarantine was instigated. Any ship, air vessel, or spacecraft trying to leave was shot down by Coast Guard laser satellites.

  It was no longer a matter of Tac units seeking alien hives to destroy. It was a matter of establishing perimeters and checking to make certain no carriers crossed into safe territories. It was truly war.

  Martial law was declared. All national boundaries were suspended. The Military Alliance came into being and civil liberties were put aside for the duration of the conflict. Suspected carriers of alien embryos could be legally shot by the command of any military officer above the rank of colonel. Then it dropped to majors and captains. Then sergeants. Pretty soon, any soldier with a gun could shoot anybody he damned well wanted to, and if the scan came up negative later, well, too fucking bad. War was hell, wasn’t it? A few civilians here and there to save the planet? Yes.

  Alien drones that were captured—a rare event—seemed to have gotten a little brighter. The smartest could barely keep up with an average dog, insofar as intelligence was concerned.
But the single queen captured in a battle that destroyed half of San Francisco’s downtown district tested out to nearly 175 on the Irwin-Schlatler scale. That made it smarter than most of the humans ever born.

  The nightmares had come true. Whatever Orona had felt before was nothing compared to the sinking, twisting coldness in his gut when that little bit of information arrived in his computer. They were getting smarter. Too smart.

  And humans were responsible for it.

  Onboard the Benedict, the survivors of the trip prepared for hypersleep.

  Bueller lay in his rigged device, alive and stable, according to Blake. Billie had avoided him, but she couldn’t get into her sleep chamber without a final confrontation. She had to speak to him.

  He was shrouded in a hyperbaric sleeve from the chest down to where the rest of him had been. From there up, he looked as he had before. He was awake when she entered the room. They were alone.

  “Mitch.”

  “Billie. I—I would rather you didn’t see me like this.”

  “Well, that’s too goddamned bad! How else would you have me see you? Like a man?”

  “I’m sorry, Billie. You can’t know how sorry.”

  “What was I, Mitch? A glitch in your programming?” She moved closer to him. She could have reached out and touched him. Could have. Would not.

  “No,” he said.

  “Then what?”

  “I should have told you. I tried, but I just couldn’t. I was afraid.”

  “Afraid?”

  “Of losing you.”

  She laughed, a short, sharp, bitter sound.

  “I can’t help what I am, Billie. I didn’t have a choice in how I was born.”

  “Right, but you decided to fool the stupid human bitch, didn’t you?”

  “No. Whatever I am, wherever I came from, I eat, I feel, I hurt. And, I found out, I love.”