River of Pain

by Christopher Golden

  Draper scoffed. “And what are you gonna do when one of these things tries to drag you off, and plant you with a baby? No sterile room for you to hide in down here.”

  The pain in her eyes was unmistakable. She put on a smile that fooled no one.

  “Why, I suppose I’ll die, Sergeant Draper,” she replied. “Though if you’d do your best to prevent that…”

  Draper swore and glanced away.

  “Aw, Doc,” Stamovich said.

  Brackett studied her. He knew plenty of women who were formidable warriors, but Dr. Hidalgo was an older woman who had spent most of her life contemplating the universe instead of fighting.

  “You know how to fire a gun?” he asked.

  “Basically,” Dr. Hidalgo said. “My father taught me when I was a girl, but it’s been years.”

  Brackett unholstered his sidearm and handed it to her, butt first.

  “Don’t shoot anyone human.”

  When she took the gun from him it hung in her hand with a terrible weight, but then she adjusted her grip and nodded at him.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  25

  SECRETS AND LIVES

  DATE: 26 JUNE, 2179

  TIME: 1346

  Simpson led the way with his tracker, its green light casting a ghastly glow on his face. Brackett and Draper flanked him as they made their way deeper beneath the main cooling towers, moving toward the primary heating stations.

  Lights flickered and generators clanked. The ceiling was so high down here that the darkness swallowed what little illumination the piss-poor fixtures gave off. Furnaces groaned as their fires kicked up higher, pushing heat through the ducts. Brackett wiped sweat from his forehead, just beneath the rim of his helmet, and wondered if the heat had attracted the aliens—if it made a better breeding ground in which to nurture their eggs.

  “Eeh, nasty,” one of the marines muttered behind him.

  “Cap, take a look at this,” Stamovich said. “This shit is disgusting.”

  Brackett gestured for Draper to stay with Simpson and dropped back to shine a light on a thick, sticky fluid on the floor. The marine who’d stepped in it lifted his boot, and strands of the stuff stretched like a spiderweb between floor and heel. Brackett glanced up at Dr. Hidalgo.

  “Science lesson later,” she said, mopping her brow with a sleeve. “Try not to let them vomit on you.”

  The marines all reacted in revulsion, but nobody said a word. The one who’d stepped in it wiped his boot as best he could on a dry section of floor, and they kept moving. A short time later, Draper pointed at the walls and Brackett shined his light around to discover that the resin had been spread everywhere. In places it seemed to have hardened.

  “It looked like this inside the derelict,” Draper whispered, “but way more extensive.”

  They really are building some kind of hive, Brackett thought.

  Abruptly Hauer let out a cry of alarm, loud enough that it could be heard over the furnaces and generators.

  “Hauer, what’s… shit! They’re here!” Sixto shouted.

  Brackett spun to see Hauer being hauled upward, feet kicking. One of the aliens had its tail wrapped around his waist. In the flickering light Brackett could make out its silhouette in the darkness, on top of a rumbling generator. The alien drew Hauer toward it, wrapped an arm around him, and began to slip away.

  “No!” Stamovich screamed, and opened fire, strafing the generator and the darkness above it with bullets.

  Several others lost their cool and let loose with battle cries and volleys of bullets, shooting into the shadows above and around them.

  “Cease fire!” Brackett roared. “God damn it, cease fire!”

  Draper grabbed the barrel of Stamovich’s gun and aimed it upward, shouting into his face.

  When the gunfire died, Draper shoved Stamovich back.

  “You idiot, you could have killed Hauer!”

  Stam gaped at him. “Killed him? That thing just—”

  “Took him,” Draper said. “You don’t know we can’t get him back alive.”

  “You didn’t even like Hauer!” Stamovich snapped.

  “I don’t know about you,” one of the other marines said, “but I’d rather be dead than have one of those things on my face. You’re dead anyway.”

  Brackett whipped around, swinging his pulse rifle in an arc, shining his light into the darkness. Simpson and Dr. Hidalgo moved closer to him, fear and doubt etched in their expressions. The captain nudged Dr. Hidalgo back toward the other marines. Simpson glanced down at his device. Beyond him, where a huge door led through into the reactor, the darkness began to unfurl.

  “Movement!” Brackett shouted. “Twelve o’clock!”

  They all began shouting then, as the shadows came alive. Stamovich screamed as an alien dropped from the ceiling and landed on top of him. Brackett turned, firing in bursts. He saw a marine die when one of the bugs impaled him from behind, throwing his arms out wide as if he’d been crucified.

  Draper ran at Brackett, taking aim with his plasma rifle.

  “Get down!”

  Brackett hurled himself down and toward Draper, twisting as he landed on the floor, bringing his own gun up as the black contours of an alien lunged toward them. Draper shot the hell out of it, acid blood spattering the floor, its carapace cracking with a brittle crunch at every impact.

  “Shit, it was there all along!” Brackett shouted. He’d been fifteen feet away from the thing, and it had clung so cleverly to the side of a furnace that he’d thought it was a part of the machinery.

  Dr. Hidalgo appeared at his side, trying to help him up. She had his pistol in her hand and it looked pitifully small, totally useless. He glanced up into her eyes and saw a strange calm.

  “There’s something you need to know,” she said loudly.

  “Can’t it wait?” he shouted, thinking she had lost her mind. They were in the middle of a firefight, people dying around them. Marines dying—his squad.

  Brackett scrambled to rise as gunfire hammered at his eardrums, blocking out all other sound. How many aliens had been waiting for them? He tried to make sense of it, and while he did, he saw Al Simpson turn and run. An alien crept out from behind a generator to block his way. Simpson shouted and tried to backpedal, but too late. It took him, dragging him back into the darkness of the labyrinthine machinery.

  Brackett shot him dead before the two figures could vanish. The demon dropped his corpse and whipped toward the marine captain, hissing. He and Draper both opened fire on it, but the alien ducked into the shadows. Brackett heard a clanking and scratching, and he caught a glimpse of its tail rising. The damn thing scaled the side of the generator. From up there, it could drop down on them any time.

  “Fall back!” he shouted, waving for the squad to retreat. “Let’s move!”

  A quick scan showed him six marines still standing. Sixto held his side, blood spilling between his fingers, but he was still alive. They’d killed at least three aliens but there were others… the darkness seethed with their presence.

  He turned to take Dr. Hidalgo’s hand, and saw an alien standing behind her. She must have seen the shock in his eyes, because she spun around, took aim, and fired three bullets into its head. Blood splashed her, hissing as the acid ate into the flesh of her chest and right arm and shoulder.

  Brackett bellowed, partly to block out the sound of Dr. Hidalgo’s agonized shrieking. He wrapped his left arm around her waist and dragged her backward as he blew the alien apart.

  “Go!” he shouted to Draper and the others.

  They were marines. Retreat wasn’t in their blood, but they went, swift and careful, firing shots into any darkness that might hold an enemy. Dr. Hidalgo staggered alongside Brackett and he helped her tear off her jacket and the body armor she’d been given. The acid had been slowed by the armor, but not stopped, and as he watched it sizzled into her flesh. The stench would stay with him for as long as he drew breath.

  “Listen…”
she said.

  “Shut up!” he snapped. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and lifted her into his arms. She weighed almost nothing. That thin, birdlike body, chest rising and falling so quickly, made him want to scream again.

  Brackett ran with her in his arms. Draper and the other marines shouted to him, exhorting him to hurry. As he ran, he looked down at her face and saw a single spot on her right cheek where the alien’s blood had hit her. A hole had formed and even now it hissed and smoked, the acid eating down through her face like the slowest bullet in the universe.

  She was going to die.

  “Listen to me,” she rasped.

  More shouts came from ahead. The machinery vanished as he stumbled toward the two service elevators. The clanking and groaning continued but now all he could see was Draper and the others waving him forward. His heart hammered in his chest as he raced toward them, the dying scientist in his arms, and counted the heads of his surviving marines.

  Six. Draper included. No sign of Pettigrew. They had left him behind to guard the elevators and the aliens had taken him.

  Of course they did, Brackett thought. I might as well have handed him over.

  Dr. Hidalgo began to choke. The acid on her chest had burned its way down into her lungs. She rasped and coughed.

  “You… have to… listen!” she said.

  Draper raced back to them, covering them as they moved toward the open elevator. The other marines were already inside, one of them keeping the doors from closing.

  “There’s a… ship,” Dr. Hidalgo said, her eyes rolling in her head. “Science team… the company gave us… a ship. Authorized personnel door… between the med lab and…”

  Brackett looked down at her.

  “Here on Acheron? There’s a ship here?”

  He glanced up at Draper, who stared at her.

  “An evac ship? Holy shit!” Draper said. “That son of a bitch Reese! How much room, Doc? How many passengers can she hold?”

  Brackett felt her sag in his arms, and her head lolled back as she exhaled her last, rattling breath. For the first time it occurred to him that the acid might not stop, that it could eat its way through her and into him, and he dropped to his knees and placed her gently on the floor.

  An evac ship, he thought. Somehow Weyland-Yutani had known. Hell, he thought, maybe that’s why they picked this place.

  No, they hadn’t known for sure, he realized, or they would have brought a thousand people to scan every inch of the surface. But they’d had an inkling that somewhere in this system they might find something ugly. They’d given their science team a way off of this godforsaken moon, with the intention that everyone else—children included—was expendable.

  Newt, Brackett thought. Anne.

  They didn’t have the firepower to destroy the aliens, not when at least a couple of dozen had already bred. The odds against anyone leaving Acheron alive were growing… anyone who didn’t have an evac ship.

  He was a marine. He had a mission and a duty to these people and the Corps. But if he could save the lives of a handful of them—including the woman he loved and her children—surely that was more noble than letting them all die here.

  He touched Dr. Hidalgo’s left cheek, wishing that she could be aboard that evac ship, silently thanking her. Now he understood the guilt he’d seen in her eyes earlier.

  Brackett staggered to his feet and turned just in time to see the elevator begin to rise.

  Draper gazed back at him through the cage, his eyes stone cold.

  How many passengers can she hold? he had asked.

  Brackett couldn’t blame him really. Marvin Draper had proven his courage in combat, but if Brackett could have made a list of people to bring off-planet on that evac ship, Draper wouldn’t have been on that list.

  The elevator rattled upward and vanished into the upper levels.

  Brackett hit the call button for the other elevator and peered up through the shaft.

  Behind him, the darkness came to life.

  26

  ONE BY ONE

  DATE: 26 JUNE, 2179

  TIME: 1346

  When Anne heard the hammering at the storage area door, she knew things had gone sideways. Half of the colonists flinched and scrambled away from the entrance, but she recognized it as the sound of a fist pounding to be let in. Aliens didn’t knock.

  Newt clutched her Casey doll and grabbed a fistful of her mother’s shirt.

  “Stay with Tim, honey,” Anne said.

  “Mom, no!” Newt cried, reaching out for her. “You said—”

  “Just one second!”

  Anne raced toward the door. Several people shouted for her to stop. Lydecker darted forward and beat her to it.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.

  She ignored him. Palm flat against the door, she called out, “Who’s there?”

  “Lieutenant Paris!” came a voice.

  A twist of sick dread knotted itself in her belly, and her heart began to gallop. She swore under her breath as she shoved aside boxes that had been piled up, and ratcheted back the double locks. Lydecker didn’t argue. He’d heard Paris’s voice and knew the woman was alive and desperate, or she wouldn’t have come knocking.

  Anne threw open the door and Paris backed in, with Pvt. Yousseff behind her, both women training their weapons on the corridor behind them. Dressed in full body armor and helmets, they had sweat streaks on their faces and their eyes were wide with urgency.

  “Any word from Simpson or Captain Brackett?” Paris demanded, turning on Lydecker.

  The man shook his head.

  Lt. Paris glanced around, cursing under her breath and not caring who heard her.

  “Where the hell is Dr. Reese?” she demanded. “This is his show now, so where the hell is he?”

  “Gone,” Anne told her.

  Yousseff snarled. “What do you mean, gone?”

  “He and Dr. Mori said they had vital data that needed to be secured,” Lydecker explained. “You want to tell me what the hell’s going on?”

  An icy shiver ran up Anne’s spine as she saw the desperate confusion in Paris’s eyes. Then the lieutenant slung her plasma rifle over her shoulder.

  “Yousseff, the door,” Paris said, and the other marine set about locking it up tight, sliding the crates back in front as a barricade.

  “Listen up,” Lt. Paris called, drawing the attention of the dozens of colonists clustered in the storage area. “None of the other marines set up around the sealed perimeter are answering on comms. At least three are dead that I know of, and we have to assume the aliens are inside the perimeter, picking us off one by one. They’re taking their time, removing the people who were protecting you, and then they’re coming in.”

  “How?” One of the wildcatters spoke up. “All but one of the doors have been welded and barricaded.” He hefted a heavy shotgun, and frowned. “I’ll blast the shit out of any one of those ugly bastards that tries to come near me or mine.”

  “Maybe you’ll get lucky, Meznick,” Paris said, “but I’m not sure your shotgun can do you much good. I’m telling you, I don’t think this place is secure enough.”

  Anne felt like she couldn’t breathe. This place wasn’t secure enough? Where else could they go, where so many people could wait for rescue—where they could sleep and eat?

  She glanced at her kids. Tim stood with an arm around his little sister, and she thought how proud Russ would have been of him.

  People shouted questions at Paris. Some refused to go anywhere without word from Dr. Reese or Al Simpson. But when Yousseff glanced nervously at the door they had just barricaded, practically vibrating with the fear that the aliens would be coming through at any moment, Anne knew there was no more time for hesitation.

  “I’m going,” she said, dashing toward her children. “Kids, come on.”

  “I’m scared,” Newt cried.

  “Me too, Rebecca,” Tim said. “But we’ll be okay. I’ll protect you,” he prom
ised.

  “Anne, don’t,” Bill Andrews said, taking her arm from behind.

  She shook him off.

  “Don’t be stupid, Bill,” she replied. “Don’t you see the fear in the eyes of these marines? You think Lieutenant Paris is wrong? This is a more comfortable place to hold out for rescue, but if we’re dead when it arrives—”

  “Where do we go then?” Andrews demanded, turning to Paris.

  “We have a couple of ideas,” the lieutenant said.

  Anne lifted Newt into her arms, and then took Tim’s hand as she barged toward the freshly barricaded door.

  “Up one level and a hundred feet along the southwest corridor,” she said. “The surveyors’ operations center. It’s right above the med lab, but it’s basically a big box. One way in and out. We get in there and weld ourselves in—”

  “And we starve to death in days,” Meznick said.

  “So carry what you can,” Anne snapped, “but at least there we’d have days to try to figure something out. Better than dying here tonight.”

  “I ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Meznick retorted. “We make a stand here, wait for Simpson and the others… far as we know, Brackett’s team has exterminated the whole damn hive.”

  “Suit yourself,” Anne said.

  “What about Demian?” Newt whispered in her ear.

  Anne swallowed hard but said nothing. All of her grand plans had gone up in smoke. She’d never make it to the hangar or the garage now—not with the kids, not if the marines who’d been guarding the perimeter were dead. Hell, she’d be lucky to make it to the operations center.

  It’s our only chance, she thought.

  She glanced around for Cale, Dione, or Russell, whom she’d seen quietly plotting together. None of them were in sight. She realized that somehow they—and who knew how many others—had slipped away without her noticing.

  Probably going for the Onager, she thought. Bastards. But she couldn’t really hate them for it. If she hadn’t been waiting for Demian… hoping…