Fear the Alien

by Christian Dunn - (ebook by Undead)

Drusher got up, tucked in his shirt and put on his shoes. The building was quiet and dead. He went into the hallway and tapped on the door of Macks’ office. When he got no reply, he let himself in and started to rummage amongst the dossiers piled on the wire carts.

  He heard a metallic click behind him and turned. Macks, her hair tousled, stood behind the desk. The sidearm she had aimed at him was slowly lowering.

  “It’s you,” she grunted, her eyes puffy with sleep.

  “Throne!” he said. “Where were you?”

  Rubbing her face, she gestured at the floor behind the desk, where Drusher could now see a few seat cushions and a crumpled blanket.

  “You were sleeping on the floor under your desk?” he said.

  She cleared her throat and holstered the sidearm in her belt pouch. She looked pissed off and weary. “Well, you got my bed, didn’t you?” she snapped.

  “Oh,” he said.

  Macks picked up her boots and shuffled across to the office door. She leaned out and yelled, “Watch officer! Two caffeines before I shoot someone!” Then she sat down on the rug and started to pull on her footwear.

  “What time is it?” she asked Drusher grumpily.

  “Early yet. I’m sorry.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “I wanted to check the autopsy files. From the victims. There was something I wanted to look at.”

  “That pile there,” Macks said. “No, the other end.”

  Drusher started to look through the files, wincing at some of the more grisly picts he encountered. Macks left the room, presumably to kill whoever it was that was being slow with the caffeine.

  When she returned, he’d spread a dozen of the dossiers out on the rug, and was making notes with a slate and stylus he’d borrowed from her desk.

  “Macks,” he began. “There’s something here that—”

  “Get your jacket,” she said.

  In daylight (though daylight was a loose term) Tycho didn’t look any better. From the side window of the speeding transporter, Drusher could now starkly see what had been merely spectral ruins the night before. There had been a melancholy air to the place in the darkness. Now everything was blunt and crass: the scars of fire, the pitting of assault weapons, the water-filled cavities of craters, the shock-fractures on slabs of rockcrete. Weeds furred the city ruins, thick and unlovely, reclaiming the wasteground between tenements and stacks. The Gardens of Tycho were everywhere now, Drusher thought. The wild was reclaiming the city.

  They drove in convoy with two other Magistratum vehicles, rattling down the empty thoroughfares.

  “Fresh kill,” was all Macks would say. “In the Commission of Works.”

  Falken was already on site, with four armed troopers in tow. Drusher wouldn’t have been able to tell that the building before him was the Commission of Works. Penetrator shells had caved in the facade and chewed curiously geometric shapes out of the roof. The rear of the building was a dark cave-system of intact rooms.

  “In here,” said Falken, shouldering his riot-gun and leading them into the mangled ruins. “Routine sweep picked it up about thirty minutes ago.”

  They clambered over fallen beams, disturbing the thick white dust. The body lay in a nest of broken floorboards.

  “Civilian volunteer,” Falken said. “He was on a registered night watch here. He had a weapon, but it doesn’t seem like he got the chance to use it.”

  The man lay on his side, facing them as they approached with a face that was no longer there. Something had severed his skull laterally in a line from the point of the chin to the apex of the skull. It looked to Drusher like an anatomical crosscut pict from a surgery text manual.

  Drusher knelt down beside the body. The linear precision of the bite was baffling.

  “Did you sweep?” Macks was asking Falken.

  “A brief look. Rimbaud thinks he heard something.”

  Macks looked at the trooper. “Really?”

  “Up at back, ma’am,” Rimbaud said. “There was definitely something moving around. I think it’s still here.”

  “Is that likely?” Macks asked Drusher.

  He shrugged. “If it was disturbed before it could feed… I suppose so.”

  “Let’s go,” she ordered. She and Falken moved ahead, weapons lowered. “Valentin, you’re up,” she called back. “Stick with Edvin. The rest of you cover the front. Rimbaud, show us where.”

  They moved into the dark, crumbling hulk of the ruin, every footstep kicking up dust. Falken, Rimbaud and Macks made their way up a staircase that was hanging off the remains of a supporting wall. Edging forwards with the trooper named Edvin, Drusher could hear the others walking about on the floor above, creaking the distressed floor, sifting dust down at them in hourglass trickles. Drusher could also hear Edvin’s vox, turned low.

  “To your left now.” That was Falken.

  “Don’t get too far ahead,” Macks replied.

  “Something! No, false alarm.”

  Edvin glanced nervously at Drusher. “Okay there, sir?” he asked.

  Drusher nodded.

  “Some kind of cat?” the trooper asked.

  “Some kind,” Drusher replied. He was becoming very aware of the beat of his own heart.

  When it happened, it happened with such ferocity and speed, Drusher barely had time to react. There was a fantastic, booming detonation—in hindsight, presumably Falken’s riot-gun discharging—swiftly followed by a series of pistol shots on auto. At the same time, the vox went mad with strangulated calls. The floor above Drusher shook with a violent frenzy. There was an impact, a crash. A scream. Two more blasts from a riot-gun.

  “What the Throne—” Edvin began, raising his weapon and looking up.

  The floor above them caved in. Drusher and Edvin were knocked flat and almost buried in a cascade of broken joists, planks and falling bricks. Mortar dust filled the atmosphere like a fog, choking and stifling. Another gunshot.

  Drusher struggled to his feet, pushing the broken floorboards off his legs. He could barely breathe. Edvin was on his face, unconscious. Something heavy had come straight down through the floor and landed on him, half-crushing him.

  Drusher blinked. “No!” he cried.

  The something heavy was the body of a Magistratum trooper, faceless, blood jetting forcibly from severed arteries. The blood sprayed up the walls, gleaming like rubies in the dust.

  “Macks!” he cried. “Macks!”

  He tried to reach her, though he knew it was far too late. Then something else came down through the hole in the floor. Something fast and dark and feral. It was the animal, the killer, trying to find an escape route.

  It slammed Drusher over hard with one flailing limb and he crashed into a plasterboard wall that shattered like old marzipan icing.

  For a moment, just a fleeting second before he passed out, he glimpsed it. The shape.

  The shape.

  He came round staring up at Falken’s face. “He’s all right,” Falken spat and turned away wiping dust off his face.

  Drusher sat up fast, his head pounding. “Macks? Macks?”

  “What?” she asked.

  Drusher saw her, crouched in the rubble in front of him. Falken was getting the dazed Edvin back on his feet.

  “Macks?”

  She was leaning over the body. Drusher got up, and could see now the mutilated corpse was Rimbaud.

  “It got away,” Macks murmured. “It got Rimbaud and then it got away.” Falken was shouting for the other troopers to sweep the rear of the building.

  “What happened?” Drusher asked.

  “I didn’t see it,” Macks said. “Falken saw something move and fired. Then it all went to hell.”

  “It came down this way. After it had…” Drusher paused. “It followed Rimbaud’s body down.”

  “You see it?”

  “I didn’t get a proper look,” Drusher said.

  Macks cursed and walked away. Drusher crouched down beside the trooper’s body and
turned it slightly so he could look at the wound. The same clean, ghastly cut right across the face. But this time, a second one, abortive, made behind the line of the excising blow, as if the predator had been in a frenzy—alarmed, perhaps—and had made a first hasty strike before following it up. Even so the first strike, deep and into the side of the neck and head, would have killed Rimbaud outright.

  But even in haste, so clean. So straight.

  “A cat? A cat did that?” Drusher looked round. Edvin, blood dribbling from a cut above his left eye, was staring at his friend’s body.

  “That’s what the experts say,” Drusher replied.

  They drove back to the Magistratum HQ in silence. The sweep had picked up nothing. The killer had melted into the ruins beyond the Commission of Works as fast as frost in summertime.

  “You thought it was me, didn’t you?” Macks asked finally.

  “What?”

  “The body. I heard you cry out. You thought it had got me.”

  Drusher nodded. He felt they might be about to have a moment, something honest that approximated intimacy. He was prepared to admit how much he would care if anything happened to her.

  “If you can’t tell the difference between me and a hairy-arsed male trooper,” she said, “I’m not holding out much hope for your observational expertise.”

  He looked over at her. “Screw you too, Macks.”

  She left him alone in her office, and let him get on with sorting the dossiers. A staffer brought him a cup of something over-brewed and over-sweetened late in the afternoon. By then, he was pinning things to the walls, and had switched to paper to make his notes. He accessed Macks’ cogitator, and called up some city-plan maps.

  Macks came back just as it was getting dark outside.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “There’s something I need to show you.”

  She seemed cheerful, upbeat. “Something I have to show you first,” she said.

  Macks led him down to the morgue. A crowd of officers and uniformed staffers had gathered and there was almost a party atmosphere. Falken was passing round bottles of contraband amasec so everyone could take a slug.

  “Here he is!” Falken cried. “Magos Biologis Dresher!”

  There was some clapping.

  “Drusher,” Drusher said.

  “Whatever,” Falken said, putting his arm around Drusher’s shoulders. “Couldn’t have done it without you, friend! Really, you were on the money! Eh? What do you think? Is this a… a…”

  “Carnodon,” Drusher said, painfully aware of how big Falken was beside him, squeezing him in the hug.

  The felid had been laid across four gurneys, heavy and limp in death. Its tusked snout seemed to grimace, as if it, like Drusher, wished it was somewhere else. Small, dark punctures in its belly showed where Falken had shot it.

  “May I?” Drusher asked, and Falken let him go over and examine the beast. The crowd turned back to toasting and laughing.

  It had once been a wonderful thing, master of its world, afraid of nothing. An apex predator. Drusher smiled sadly as he thought of the phrase. A big specimen too, maybe five and a half metres body length, nine hundred kilos healthy body weight. But at the time of its miserable, hunted death, it had been less than six hundred kilos, emaciated, its ribs poking out like tent braces. It was old too, post-mature. The coat was raddled by sarcoptic mange and laden with lice, fungus and parasites. Drusher ran his hand along its flank anyway. So knotted, gristly, starved. He peeled back the black lips and examined the dentition.

  “Where did you get it?” he called out to Falken.

  “In the cellars under the Lexicon,” Falken said, coming over. “We got a heads-up. We’d circulated your picture, you see. Thanks for that. I went in, saw it, and boom-boom.”

  Drusher nodded.

  “Truth be told,” Falken said, dropping his voice, “it didn’t put up much of a fight. But I wasn’t taking any chances.”

  “I understand.”

  Falken turned back to the crowd. “For Onnie Rimbaud, poor bastard!” he cried. “This one’s for you, son!”

  Falken offered the nearest bottle to Drusher. Drusher shook his head. “Thanks for your help, Dresher,” Falken said.

  “Drusher.”

  Macks came over.

  “I want to thank you on behalf of the division, Valentin,” she said. “You got us our result. I’ll bill the Administratum for a whole week, fair enough? Go get your things together. Someone will drive you home this evening.”

  Drusher nodded.

  “I have a transporter waiting,” Macks said. Drusher’s bags were in a neat stack beside the office door. He was just closing the last of the dossiers and sliding them back onto her carts. “Right,” he said.

  “Well, it’s been good to have you on board. Thanks. Like old times, right?”

  “Like Outer Udar, Macks? I get the distinct impression you remember that more fondly than I do.”

  “Things’ll work out, Valentin,” she said.

  “Before I go,” he said, “I’d like you to look at something.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s put it this way. I’d hate to have you come all the way up the coast to get me again.”

  Macks frowned. “What are you on about now?”

  “The killer wasn’t—isn’t—that cat.”

  Macks wiped her hand across her lips as if encouraging patience. “Go on.”

  “I said from the start it wasn’t an animal.”

  “You also told me to look for a carnodon.”

  “Let me show you something,” Drusher said. He held up a data-slate. The compact screen showed a display of the city, overlaid with rune symbols. “I’ve done some collating. See here? I’ve mapped all the sites where the victims were found. Thirty-two bodies.”

  “I did that myself, on an ongoing basis. I saw nothing. No pattern, no discernible spread.”

  “I agree,” said Drusher. “I mean, there’s a certain concentration of kill-sites here, in this crescent, but most of the others are too wayward, too random.”

  “So?”

  “That first body you showed me, in the morgue. So cleanly, so particularly cut. Minimal signs of feeding, if any at all. Just like the body today in the Commission of Works. And Rimbaud.”

  “Right. The face bitten off.”

  Drusher nodded. “Yes, except I don’t think it was bitten. Remember how clean I said it was? I mean almost sterile. None of the bacterial traces one would expect from an animal bite. Especially not from an old, diseased predator with gums receding from vitamin deficiency. Macks, I could wiggle that poor cat’s teeth out with my fingers.”

  Her face had gone hard. “Keep going, Valentin,” she said.

  “The body in the stacks we went to look at. That was the work of the carnodon. It had mauled and eaten the corpse away. I checked the autopsy files. Nine of the cases were just like that. Gnawed. The victims were all either dead already or helpless. Old, infirm. The carnodon had escaped from the zoological gardens, but it was weak and long past its hunting prime. It roamed the city, not preying, but scavenging. That was all it could do anymore.”

  “What are you telling me?” Macks asked quietly.

  “Look at the map again. Here.” Drusher flipped a switch. “Now I’ve taken away the bodies I can attribute to the cat. Cleans it up a bit, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  “The old carnodon was hungry and opportunistic. It had no pattern. It just roamed and fed where it could. What we’re left with is a much more precise zone. Almost territorial. The killings here were like poor Rimbaud—swift, savage, clean. No feeding.”

  “But it’s still an odd crescent-shaped spread. How can we triangulate from that?”

  “Look at the map, Macks. Territory is determined not just by hunter but also by prey. The crescent-shaped dispersal covers an area east of the Commission of Works. There are none to the west because that’s an area interdicted by the Martial Order Division
. It doesn’t kill there, Macks, because there’s no one there to kill.”

  “Oh, Throne…” she murmured.

  “And this is the good bit,” Drusher smiled. “Look what happens when I mirror the dispersal, projecting it as if there was quarry in all directions. The crescent becomes…?”

  “A circle.”

  “Right, a circle. There’s your focus. There’s your bloody pattern. That’s its territory. Right there.”

  Macks was driving faster than ever. In the back seat sat Edvin and a trooper called Roderin. Both were checking their riot-gun loads.

  “You’re sure about this?” Macks hissed.

  “I’ve very little left to stake on it,” Drusher replied, “my professional credentials being long since used up.”

  “Don’t get smart,” she warned. “You two ready?” she called over her shoulder.

  Edvin and Roderin both replied in the affirmative. Edvin leaned forwards. “I thought we’d got this thing, sir,” he said. “I mean, I thought Falken had plugged it.”

  “He got the cat,” Drusher said. “But the cat wasn’t it.”

  Macks began to slow down, and it was lucky she did. A second Magistratum transporter swung out in front of them from a side street and ploughed ahead.

  “Falken,” Macks whispered.

  They pulled up outside the Commission of Works. Falken had two troopers with him, Levy and Mantagne.

  “What the hells is this about?” Falken asked belligerently. He was still half-drunk from the party in the morgue.

  “We’re onto a lead,” Macks said. “Behave.”

  Falken looked at Drusher. “I got it, stone dead. Boom-boom. What is this crap now?”

  “Something else,” Drusher said.

  They spread out in a line, entering the weed-choked waste behind the Commission of Works.

  “Macks?” Drusher called. She came over to him.

  “I’d like a weapon.”

  “In the old days, you—”

  “I’d really like a weapon,” he repeated.

  Macks nodded, and lowered her riot-gun in one hand as she pulled the handgun from her holster. She handed it to him.

  “The safety’s by—”