Fear the Alien

by Christian Dunn - (ebook by Undead)

  The front of his face, and most of his throat, had been bitten away. Parts of the skull structure had gone along with the soft tissue. Cleanly severed, like industrial shears had…

  Drusher gagged, and looked aside.

  “Animal, right?” Macks said.

  Drusher mumbled something.

  “Was that a yes?”

  “It would appear to be a bite,” Drusher said, his voice very tiny. “Very deep and strong. And then… the suggestion of some feeding. Around the face and neck.”

  “Animal, right?” she repeated.

  “I suppose. Nothing human could have… bitten like that.”

  “I measured the bite radius. Just like you taught me. Remember, in Outer Udar? I measured it.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Twenty centimetres. And I checked too. No tooth fragments. This was clean. I mean, it just bit his face right off.”

  Drusher turned slowly. “Macks? What am I doing here?”

  “Helping my investigation,” she said. “I thought we’d covered that. I’m in charge down here in this neck of the woods, with plenty enough problems to contend with, I can tell you… and then this crap happens. I look for an expert, and lo and behold I find Magos Biologis Valentin Drusher, my old pal, working as a teacher in Kaloster. So I thought, Macks, that’s perfect. We worked together so well before, and this clearly needs a biologis expert.”

  “That’s great…”

  Valentin, cheer up. “There’s money in this. I’ll bill your hours out to the Magistratum, and you’ll get three times what the Administratum was paying you. Expert witness and all.”

  “You’re running the Martial Order programme here in Tycho and you pull strings like that to get me to consider one case?”

  “No,” said Macks. “I should have explained that too, I guess. This isn’t the only victim.”

  “How many others?” he asked.

  Macks made a vague gesture that encompassed all the other gurneys in the chamber. Twenty-five, thirty, maybe more.

  “You’re joking?”

  “I wish I was. Something is chomping its way through the population.”

  Drusher steeled himself and turned back to the exposed corpse, switching his standard glasses for his reading pair. “A fluorescing lamp, please. And a close glass.”

  She handed him the glass from the autopsy cart and held the lamp up, bathing the dead man’s devastated skull with blue light.

  Drusher picked up a steel probe and gently excised the lip of one of the revealed bone edges. He fought to keep his gorge down.

  “No tooth fragments.”

  “I told you.”

  “I mean nothing,” he said. “Not even the bacillus residue one would expect from the wound mark of a predator. This wasn’t an animal. It’s not a bite.”

  “What?”

  “It’s too clean. I’d say you were looking for a man with a chainsword.”

  Macks shook her head. “No.”

  “Why no?”

  “Because if there was a maniac with a chainsword running around downtown Tycho, I’d know about it. This is animal, Valentin.”

  “How can you be so sure?” he asked.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

  The headlamps of her transporter picked out the sign over the wrought-iron gateway. The Gardens of Tycho.

  “Well-stocked before the civil war,” she said, pulling on the wheel. “The biggest xenozoological exhibit on the planet. The local governor had a thing about exotic animals.”

  “And?”

  “And, Valentin, it was bombed during the war. Some animals were killed, but many more escaped. I think something from here is roaming the ruins of Tycho, hungry, neglected, killing people.”

  “And that’s why…” he began.

  “That’s why I need a magos biologis,” she finished.

  They pulled up and got out. The gardens were dark and quiet. It was still two hours before dawn. There was an awful damp reek in the air, emanating from the empty cages and the dank rockcrete pens.

  Macks had given Drusher a stablight, and carried one of her own. They walked together, their footsteps gritty and crisp on the ground, playing the beams around.

  The Gardens of Tycho had not been a sophisticated collection. Drusher remembered the spectacular xeno-fauna halls of Thracian Primaris that he had visited as a young man. There, the pens and enclosures had been encoded to create perfect habitats for the precious specimens, often with their own atmospheres, their own gravities even.

  Such expertise—and the money to realise it—had not been available on Tycho. These were simple cages and, in places, armoured holding tanks, where exotic creatures from the far-flung corners of the Imperium had lived out their days on Gershom in miserable confinement.

  Drusher knew exactly how they felt.

  “If it’s been caged like this, Macks, it will perhaps have become psychotic,” he said.

  “The animal?”

  “The animal. It’s common in poor conditions such as these. Animals held in crude cages often develop behavioural problems. They become unpredictable. Violent.”

  “But if it’s a predator anyway…” she began.

  “Even predators have patterns. The need to hunt, to breed, to territorialise. Limit those things, and you break the pattern.”

  “That’s important why?” she asked.

  “If this animal is a carnivore, and I would suspect as much, it isn’t feeding on its kills. Well, only minimally. It is killing simply to kill.”

  “Like the hill beast?” she murmured, thinking back to that haunted winter in Outer Udar.

  “No,” he said. “That beast was different. Killing was its behaviour. Here we have aberration.”

  As they walked further, Drusher began to see the awful damage done in the course of the war. Bomb-shattered pens, mounds of rubble, plasteel cages shorn from their mounting blocks.

  And bones.

  There were corpses in the intact pens too. Limp sacks of dried flesh, scattered vertebrae, the lingering stench of dung and decay. A row of wire domes that had once held rare birds was now littered with bright feathers. Tufts of down caked the wire mesh, evidence of frantic, starving attempts to be free. They reminded Drusher of Baron Karne’s poultry stoops.

  “We thought everything had died,” Macks said. “The stink when we first came down here. I mean, nothing had been fed or cleaned out in months. Everything in a sealed cage was dead, except some kind of emaciated dromedary horse, which had been living off its own fat deposits, and even that died a few days after we freed it. And everything in the bombed cages we figured was wiped out, although there are some finch-monkeys loose in the Lower Bowery, freaking little things, and Falken swears he saw a grazer on Lemand Street one night, though I say he was drunk.”

  “So if something’s loose, it came from the bomb-damaged cages?” Drusher said.

  She shrugged. “Unless some well-intentioned citizen came along during the war, and let something out and then locked the cage again. Some of them seem to be empty, though the collection’s manifest doesn’t say if they were just unstocked pens. It’s years out of date.”

  “You have a manifest?”

  Macks nodded and produced a data-slate from her coat. “I’ve highlighted any item that was caged in the bombed area, and also anything connected to an empty cage. Throne, Valentin, I haven’t the first clue what half of them are. So glad to have an expert on board.”

  He started to look at the list. “So it could be anything highlighted, or anything at all, given the fact that the stock might have been changed or rotated after this list was made?”

  She was about to reply when her vox-link chimed. The sharp little note made Drusher jump. Macks took the call.

  “We have to go,” she said, turning to head back to the exit. “I’ve been called in. Some drunken idiots brawling in a tavern after curfew.”

  “Do I have to come?” he said.

  She turned back
and shone her stablight in his face. “No. Why, would you like to stay here?”

  Drusher glanced around.

  “Not really,” he said.

  They drove through streets that were deserted but for burned-out vehicles and the occasional Magistratum transport rushing off on a response. He sat in the passenger seat, studying the slate, rocked by the jolts of the uneven roadway. Relief was beginning to seep into him, relief that he wasn’t bound for disgrace and a custodial sentence after all. A little part of him hated Falken for his trick, but a greater part despised himself for being so foolish. Gershom wasn’t his nemesis. Valentin Drusher was his own worst enemy, and his ruined life was testament to the way he had studiously taken every wrong turn destiny had ever offered him.

  “Your hair’s gone grey,” Macks said, her eyes on the road.

  He looked up. “I stopped dyeing it.”

  “You dyed your hair?” she asked. He didn’t reply.

  “So you’ve matured out of that vanity, then, Valentin?” she smirked.

  “No. I just couldn’t afford the treatment anymore.”

  She laughed, but he was sure he detected some sympathy in her tone.

  “I like it,” she said after a while. “It’s distinguished.”

  “You haven’t changed at all,” he said.

  She pulled the vehicle to a halt outside a battered townhouse where Magistratum officers were attempting to restrain nine or ten brawling men. There was blood on the pavement, and the air was lit by the blinking lamps of the armoured patrol vehicles.

  Macks got out. “Stay here,” she said. She peered back at him through the open door. “So, is that a good thing?”

  “What?” he asked.

  “The fact that I haven’t changed?”

  “I never thought you needed much improvement,” he replied, immediately appalled that he’d made such a bold remark out loud.

  Macks laughed, then slammed the door.

  In the sealed quiet of the transporter, Drusher watched for a while as she waded in with her riot baton and brought order to the scene. Then he turned his attention back to the data-slate.

  Time passed.

  The driver’s door opened, and the transporter rocked on its springs as she clambered back in.

  “I think we’re looking for a carnodon,” he said.

  “Yeah?” she said, gunning the engine and throwing the vehicle forwards in a rapid acceleration.

  “Yes. I mean, working from the details here. I could be wrong if the specimens were changed after this list was made up, but it’s a simple process of elimination.”

  “Is it?” she asked, throwing them round a street corner so fast the tyres squealed.

  “There were only four predators listed in the bombed-out pens. Discount the Mirepoix treecreeper because it’s an injector, not a biter.”

  “A what?”

  “It injects its prey with a long proboscis and dissolves the internal organs, sucking them out.”

  “Enough.”

  “I mean, it doesn’t have a mouth.”

  “All right, all right.”

  “So, no bite wounds.”

  “Right.”

  “Right, so the saurapt from Brontotaph is off the list as well.”

  Macks changed down and raced them along another empty boulevard. “Because?”

  “Because it’s the size of a hab block. Falken wouldn’t have had to be drunk to spot it already.”

  She grinned.

  “And the pouncer here, from Lamsarotte, we can cross that off too. It’s a felid, but far too slight to cause the wounds you showed me. Besides, I doubt it would have lasted long in this climate outside a heated pen.”

  “So we’re left with the, what did you call it?” she asked.

  “Carnodon. From Gudrun. Throne, there shouldn’t have been one in captivity here. They’re virtually extinct, and listed on the Administratum’s prohibition order. It’s a felid too, but big, and from temperate habitats.”

  “How big?”

  “Five or six metres, maybe eight hundred kilos. Quite capable of biting off a man’s face.”

  “So, magos biologis, how do we catch a carnodon?” she asked, heaving on the wheel.

  Drusher looked up. “We’re… we’re going rather fast, Macks,” he said. “Another call?”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “Another breach of curfew?” he asked.

  Macks shook her head. “Question stands, Valentin. How do we catch a carnodon?”

  The habs were clustered together at the northern extremity of the town, gathered in tight, conspiratorial knots. Acres of wasteland surrounded each stack, littered with the flotsam of war and poverty. Much of the intense fighting during the civil war had taken place in this shell-damaged suburb.

  Macks slowed the transporter and guided it in between piles of shattered bricks. They were approaching one of the most ramshackle towers. Ahead, the lamps picked out a pair of Magistratum transporters, parked near the stack’s loading dock. A heavy morgue carrier was pulled up beside them, its rear hatch gaping.

  “Come on,” Macks said.

  Drusher got out into the cold, pre-dawn air. The rectangular habs stood stark against a sky slowly paling into a gold sheen. He smelled the sweet rot of garbage, and the unpleasant odour of wet rockcrete.

  “Bring your stablight,” she said, making off across the rough ground to the group of Magistratum officers waiting by the stack entrance. She spoke to a couple of them, then signalled Drusher to follow her.

  They entered the wide doorway and began to climb the crude stairwell.

  “They’ve held off so you can get the first look at the scene,” she said.

  Drusher took a deep breath. They climbed to the fifth floor.

  “Hurry up,” she called back to him.

  “Hang on,” he said. Drusher stooped to examine the rough wall, touching a dark patch amongst the lichen with his fingertips, then sniffing them.

  “You’ll catch something,” Macks said, coming back down the stairs to join him.

  “I thought that’s why you hired me,” he said. “Smell this. Ammonia, very strong. Other natural chemicals, pheromones. This is a territorial mark. The animal spranted here.”

  “What?”

  “It scent-marked the wall with urine.”

  “And you wanted me to sniff it?”

  Drusher looked up at her. “It’s textbook felid behaviour. The stain suggests quantity, so we’re looking at something large.”

  “Carnodon?”

  “It fits.”

  “See if this fits too,” she said.

  The derelict hab stack had become home for vagrants, and it was rare for these dispossessed souls to have any contact with the Magistratum. But one of them had been scared enough to raise the alarm, having heard a commotion on the fifth floor.

  The stack apartment was a four-room affair, a kitchen-diner, a bed vault, a lounge and a washroom cubicle. The place stank of mildew.

  And another smell Drusher hadn’t encountered since Outer Udar.

  Blood.

  The Magistratum crew had set up pole lamps to mark the scene, and it had been picted and recorded.

  “Watch your step,” Macks said.

  As they went in, the smell became more intense. The corpse was in the lounge area. Even Macks, hardened to the uglier aspects of life, had to turn aside for a moment.

  The body was that of an older female. The legs, swathed in filthy hose and support stockings, were intact. The torso had been stripped down to the bones, and these had been broken open so that something feeding could get at the soft organs. There was no head, no arms.

  “They tell me the head’s in there,” Macks said, indicating the kitchen area.

  Drusher peered in through the doorway, glimpsing a brown, cracked object that looked like a broken earthenware pot. Except that it still had a residue of grey hair.

  “What’s this?” Macks called. In the bedroom, her torch beam was illuminating a brown
, fractured stick.

  “Arm bone,” said Drusher. “Broken open to get at the marrow.” He was remarkably composed. This was perhaps the most horrific sight that had ever greeted his eyes, but a professional detachment was masking his revulsion. The magos biologis in him was fascinated by the killing.

  “I think she was already dead,” he said. “This is scavenging. A decent post-mortem will be able to confirm it. The feeder was big, but it took its time. Leisurely feeding, reducing the cadaver piece by piece, going for the most nutritional areas first. There was no struggle, no kill, although the carnodon probably made quite a bit of noise as it rendered down the carcass.”

  “Carnodon?” she said. “You’re sure?”

  “I’d stake my professional credentials on it,” he replied. “For what that’s worth.”

  “Okay.” Macks breathed heavily. “Can we get them in to clear this?”

  “Yes,” Drusher said.

  “And can you work up something? I don’t know—a library pict, maybe one of your dandy watercolour sketches, so we know what we’re looking for?”

  “Glad to,” he replied.

  “Good,” Macks said. “You look like you need sleep.” He shrugged. “Where is the Magistratum putting me up?” he asked. Macks replied, “We’ll find somewhere.”

  Somewhere turned out to be a torn couch in the empty room next door to Macks’ office. It appeared from the stale bedclothes that someone else had been sleeping there on a regular basis. Drusher was too tired to complain. Besides, as far as his relationship with the planet Gershom went, this was pretty much par for the course.

  He fell asleep within minutes of lying down.

  He woke with a start and found he’d only been sleeping for a couple of hours. It was barely dawn. As was often the case, rest had freed up his mind, and there was now an idea buzzing around in it so busily it had woken him. He felt strangely energised. After years of tedious dead-end employment, he was finally calling on his primary area of expertise again, using old skills that he had begun to believe had long since atrophied. He almost felt like a magos biologis.