The Complete Aliens Omnibus, Volume 6

by Diane Carey

  The others gathered in a group. “Okay, we rush him!” Dorea said. “When I say three. One…”

  But she broke off as Beresford’s eyes widened. And he said, in a squeak: “I’ve… got it!” His face was white as a sheet, his eyes glazing with shock. But manically determined, he kept pulling. Pulling. His hand twisting and pulling. And he jerked something out…

  Was that his lung he was pulling out? His heart?

  Lungs don’t have legs. This thing did. It had an odd little body like an armored infant dragon, almost, crossed with an insect. Difficult to see because it was covered with blood and mucus, some excrement, clots of random tissue.

  And then he’d jerked it into view and… it was alive.

  And he screamed as it opened its steel-colored teeth, its steel-colored jaws, and bent over double to snap them shut hard on his hand, like a bear trap, biting deep, breaking bone and severing fingers, so that fresh blood spurted and he screamed and hammered at it…

  “Get it off meeeeee!”

  Buxton slammed at the thing with the butt of his rifle, knocked it flip-flopping to one side—somehow it came down squarely on the deck. He fired at it, bullets hammering the deck, rebounding, zinging around the room, one of them smacking into Beresford’s back… but Beresford was already dying, sinking to his knees, slumping over, eyes drooping, closing…

  While Collinsdale was huddled in a corner, face pressed in his drawn-up knees, his head covered by his arms, rocking, whispering to himself.

  And Buxton had missed the creature. An endoparasite, Dorea figured dazedly. It scuttled off with blurry rapidity, and leapt to the torn-open vent grating, caught the edge, vanished inside.

  Dinswood and Buxton ran to the vent and fired into it, the electrocharged rounds sizzling through the air of the vent.

  “I don’t think we hit it,” Buxton muttered, standing on tiptoe to peer into the vent shaft. “It’s… gone. Fucking thing was fast.”

  “That’s the second one of those evil little fuckers,” Nurse Julie said dully, as she and Dorea—both of them almost hyperventilating with fear and uncertainty but moving with sheer willpower—pulled Beresford up onto an examining table, and covered his dead face in a paper sheet. The blood immediately began to soak through the sheet. “Two got away, and we figure…” Dorea watched the blood spread across the white field with a numb fascination.

  Nurse Julie didn’t finish saying what it was she figured. But everyone, Buxton and Dinswood and Julie and Dorea, turned to look at Collinsdale.

  Suddenly he seemed to feel their appraisal. He looked up at them in open-mouthed terror. “What… what are you going to do with me?”

  “I think…” Nurse Julie said, “… we could put you into an artificial coma. I have an injection. It’s for certain types of brain trauma. A temporary thing. And maybe that’d drug that… thing in you too. Keep it from… you know… developing more. Breaking out. Then we can set up some kind of surgery. Or get you to somewhere… uh… where… where they can…”

  Her lip quivered. It was all too much and she looked like she was going to fall apart. “I just… failed to… to help and they… two of them are dead and those things… I didn’t realize… The scans were… you couldn’t really see them, just a kind of… it was like it was camouflaged or…”

  Dorea put her arm around Julie, pulled her to lean close. “You were working with an unknown. Did what you could, Julie. None of us could’ve done anything. That’s a good idea, about the injection…”

  Dorea felt shaky, sick herself. Splashed with blood. Blood everywhere…

  But Dinswood was the one who threw up—he leaned his rifle against the wall, sloppily so that it fell clattering to the floor, and ran to a low-grav fluid receptor on the wall and puked noisily.

  “Oh Jeez…” Buxton said, looking at the blood-splashed vent, visible through the open door to the next room. “We’ve gotta get the captain back up here. Nate, our security… Oh fuck… and Reynolds.”

  “Reynolds!” Nurse Julie said bitterly. “I think he was holding out…”

  She turned toward the pharm cabinet, moving with almost mechanical steps to open it. “The coma… coma-inducing drug… I’ll get a… an injection ready… you’ll sleep, Horus, you’ll…”

  “No!” Collindale shouted, suddenly, jumping up, frantic. “You’re going to drug me and cut me apart and let me die!”

  Buxton was just raising his gun but Collindale rushed him, slammed a shoulder into him dead center, gasping hysterically all the while as he knocked Buxton against the wall, the rifle discharging the rest of its clip into the ceiling. Gunsmoke choked the air.

  Collindale scooped up Dinswood’s rifle and ran into the next room—even as Dorea snatched at him, and missed.

  He ducked through the hatch to the corridor and stopped, whimpering for a moment, looking right and left, not knowing where to go. Then he bolted toward the aft of the ship…

  “Goddamn it!” Dinswood shouted.

  Buxton looked after Collindale, hesitating—clearly afraid Collindale would shoot at him if he pursued, which wasn’t unlikely—and then set off after him, pausing only to shout over his shoulder, “Dinswood—take Dorea’s gun and come on!”

  “Screw that!” Dorea said. “I’m a better shot than he is!” She remembered that much from training.

  She went after Buxton and the two of them started toward the aft of the ship.

  Collindale was nowhere to be seen—but there was a jog in the corridor, that way, and around it was a lift that went to a motorized walk. By now Collindale had put half the ship between them.

  Where the hell was he going? Dorea wondered. And where are the two endoparasites that had run into the ship’s ventilation system? Suppose they vandalized life support? Suppose…

  Suppose they kept on growing.

  10

  The gigantic room was probably related to the anomaly’s fuel source, or its drive, but they couldn’t be sure. It might be synthetics or life support—or all three.

  Corgan scratched his head, looking around at the confusing interlacing tangle of gigantic pipes—pipes which suddenly bulged into spheres like snakes that had swallowed rabbits—the intricate, apparently random admixture of crystal nodes projecting on long rods between the pipes, the elaborate, cryptic alien signage on the encompassing walls, the criss-crossing catwalks, the landing platforms against walls with their control panels. In places, sections of pipe suddenly became transparent hourglass shapes, which drummed with liquid flaring with blue-green energy…

  “It just occured to me,” he said to Chang, standing beside him on a high catwalk overlooking the gigantic room, “that it could take years to interpret all this stuff. Especially doing it safely.”

  “Captain!” Ashley shouted. “We’ve found something down here! You’d better see this!”

  There was fear in her voice.

  * * *

  Corgan and Chang dropped on their diamond-flyers to join the others, at the farther end of the room, in a dark corner under a particularly tangled mass of piping and crystals…

  Where they found about twelve dead aliens plastered to the bulkhead with a white cocoon-like material, exposing their heads and sometimes their upper bodies.

  And there were brown, tattered husks collapsed, flattened on the floor at their feet.

  The Giffs glued, almost webbed to the wall, were facing the explorers as if looking down expectantly at them, the aliens drooping forward in various stages of deterioration—a few of them seemed almost intact, and Corgan shivered as he looked at those, feeling closer than ever before to the beings who’d built this ship.

  “You think… it’s normal for them to be, uh… like that?” Hesse asked. “I mean maybe it’s like their cocoon or something.”

  Corgan shook his head. “Somehow I don’t think so. This spot doesn’t seem like it’s intended for anything like that. Why would they pick some random spot? They’d have a room for… cocoons or whatever. And these things here… look
closer at them. Remember them from the video we took? They’re just all…”

  He kicked at the shriveled, flattened leathery forms— and one of them crumbled apart, revealing the brittle remains of an eight-fingered arthropod.

  “Egg sacs! Dozens of them!” Ashley said. “But it’s like… something killed them. Maybe a chemical spray of some kind—there’s some white stuff here…”

  “Don’t get any closer to that stuff,” Corgan ordered. “Move back.” He pondered the Giff pasted to the wall. “Could be those things attached the Giffs here… and another set of Giffs came along and killed the eggs… but…”

  “Yeah,” Nate said, “But they didn’t take those guys down from the wall. So something else urgent came up. They didn’t have time…”

  Corgan was thinking of something he’d seen in the warning on the Giff computer holography—

  When the call came in from the Hornblower. Cruz dead. Beresford dead. Collindale missing. And something loose in his ship.

  “We get back to the ship—now!” Corgan said.

  * * *

  Collindale listened at the door of the storage room. Quiet out there.

  He’d heard Dorea and Dinsdale and Buxton go by, a few minutes before, arguing over who should have Dorea’s gun. They’d gone right past storage to the lift, figuring he’d gone aft—maybe to the landers. They were right—he was going there. But not just yet.

  Collindale slipped out of the storage room, gun in hand—ready to shoot if he had to. He looked up and down the corridor, saw no one. That was a relief. He didn’t relish the idea of shooting crewmates. But he’d never felt particularly close to them—they hadn’t been working together long—and he wasn’t going to let anyone treat him like a lab animal, put him under and maybe dissect him. They were going to put him under and deal with it later— who knows what that might mean? It might mean putting him down like a dog at the vet.

  He hurried down the hall toward the infirmary. He didn’t trust them to “deal with it later.” This thing had to be gotten out of him—and fast, too. He’d seen what had happened to Cruz. There had to be a better way to get the thing out than Beresford’s. He was thinking maybe something like chemotherapy. Poison that doesn’t quite kill you might kill the endoparasite. Or maybe a more careful incision, a more professional operation. Beresford had done it in a panicky way. But if you had something to stop the bleeding—and anesthesia…

  He rushed into the infirmary—and accidentally knocked over Nurse Julie who was on her way out. He stood there awkwardly as she sobbed up at him—and then got up, pulling herself together.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I’ve lost two people I was supposed to be taking care of and another one just knocked me over with his rifle. That’d be you.”

  “I’m sorry—but I’ve got my mind made up. Get some anesthesia, local, the strongest you have—and I have to see the package, see what it is. And a set of scalpels. Forceps, all that stuff. Hand-scanner. Maybe some oxycontin. Yeah—definitely. Wound sealant, sutures, bandages. You got any chemo?”

  “Chemotherapy? No! If anyone developed cancer they’d go back to Mars Colony for treatment! We barely use it anymore—we use nanobots for cancers most of the time. That doesn’t work in the brain though, it’s mostly brain cancers that—”

  “All right—and stop stalling me here. Get the stuff I listed now, Julie, or I’ll knock you in the head and hope it doesn’t kill you. And then I’ll take it myself.”

  “They’ll be back here in a minute.”

  “It’ll take ’em longer than that.” He pointed the rifle at her. “I’m sorry. But I’m serious, Julie. Get it. Put it all in a bag. I don’t know how much time I have.”

  She wiped her eyes and went into the next room. He stood in the doorway. Smelling the blood and fear in the air. Seeing the inert bodies of his former shipmates lying there under red-stained paper.

  She came back with a medic’s bag and glowered at him. “Now what?”

  “Now you come with me.” He gestured with the gun. “Move. We’re going down to Maintenance One.”

  “You’re kidnaping me?”

  “I’m your patient. You want to take care of me or not? If the answer is no—then it’s kidnap. Now come on.”

  * * *

  Dix and Bayfield walked along maintenance corridor two, in segment three, talking softly. “Bayfield, if you get me in trouble, I’m gonna kick your ass.”

  “Hey you don’t have to have none of this brandy.”

  “Brandy! You get some canned peaches and ferment ’em a bit and call it brandy. More like fruit juice gone bad.”

  “No, dude, this stuff is primo—come on, if the kitchen bot’s done with the floor, let’s just go in. Last time it tried to scoop up my shoes and knocked my ass over.”

  “I don’t know—I coulda sworn I heard some weird shit from up forward. Echoing, like, down the corridor. Like somebody fired off their gun.”

  “We’re gonna face any weird shit we gotta be fortified…”

  The comm crackled as they went into the kitchen, a big well-lit room shaped like a half-moon, with stainless-steel floors and cabinets, processors and food heaters at the far end. “Bayfield? Dix?” It was Buxton’s voice.

  “We’re here, Buxton! Kitchen!” Dix replied, raising his voice so the comm would pick it up clearly.

  “We got a situation, we got two men down and one missing. If you see Collindale stay clear of him and call us. And we got something loose in the ship—just get your ass up to the infirmary and cover Nurse Julie, see if she’s okay. We called up there, she’s not answering.”

  “Yeah uh, copy that!” Dix said. He turned to Bayfield, who was digging in a cooler cabinet as if he hadn’t heard. “Bayfield, man—what you think of that? What’d he mean two guys down? Like down how? Like dead? Like… what?”

  Bayfield was taking a pull on an opened can he’d hidden behind some frozen pea-mash. “Oooh, not bad,” he said, scratching his crotch. “Here, try some of this. I’m telling you, dude, whatever it is we gotta be… hey, the bot must be broken, lookit that!”

  He pointed to the far corner of the kitchen. They hadn’t seen the debris strewn across the floor because the metal cube of the food mixer was projecting from the wall there, but from here they could see thirty or so torn-open cans, ripped open, gutted bags, and one of the big vat-meat bales—five hundred pounds of compressed vat-meat, just the shell of the bale left, and a few gobbets of protein. All over the floor.

  “What the fuck?!” Dix shouted, walking over to it. “Who got into this?! They busted it open and—most of it’s gone!”

  “Whoa…” Bayfield took another heavy slug of improvised brandy. “You know what? It was the bot—it went wrong again. Busted.”

  “The bot? This stuff has been eaten! Look there’s even teeth marks here in the… oh shit.” He broke off, staring at the teeth marks in the gobbets of protein. “What’d Buxton say? Something was… loose in the ship?”

  He and Bayfield looked at each other—then started toward the hatch to the corridor. But before they quite got there, Bayfield stopped by the cooler. “Wait, I got one more can fermented in here, I think…”

  “Bayfield, you moron, will you—”

  That’s when Dix saw that the vent over the cooler was broken open, and there was something crouching inside, up there, in the shadows. You couldn’t see most of it. The light caught only one little part of it.

  Just a set of silver, dripping teeth.

  And then it launched itself from the vent, straight at Bayfield—it wasn’t any bigger than a terrier, almost a fetal thing—but like an armored fetus, with claws and enormous teeth taking up most of its eyeless face, its jaws opening wide—amazingly wide!—and it was gnashing its jaws shut on Bayfield’s face, the way a hungry man will bite into a hamburger —and blood sprayed as he tried to pull it off him.

  And he screamed, “It’s eating my face, Dix—it’s eating my face!”

  The alien
was twisting its head from side to side like a shark ripping off a piece of a swimmer, tearing flesh loose—and Bayfield’s face came away in its choppers: the entire nose, lips, tongue, chunks of teeth, left eye, cheeks, and most of the frontal bones so that all that was left was a warbling, serrated-edged concavity of splintery bone and a single wildly rolling lidless eye.

  The thing clung to the front of Bayfield’s flailing body, and it chewed. It chewed his face, and it swallowed… Bayfield staggered, waving his arms.

  Dix was looking around for a weapon of some kind— and then he heard a sickening crunching sound. When he looked back at Bayfield he saw the thing had bitten into his shipmate’s forehead and had shoved a smaller, interior set of jaws into his brains…

  “Oh my fucking Lord…” Dix said hoarsely. He felt frozen to the spot. “Run…” he told himself. Hissing it aloud. “Run!” But he couldn’t, not yet.

  Then Bayfield collapsed, gurgling. The alien rode the collapsing body down, and crouched on his chest, chewing. Then it turned its eyeless face, bloody from Bayfield’s gore, toward Dix—and though it had nothing apparent to see with, he knew it was seeing him somehow. And he knew it wasn’t going to let him go.

  If I turn and run, he thought, it’ll jump on my back, and it’ll tear into the back of my head. It’ll bite right through the bone. It’ll eat through my fucking brain while I’m still alive and thinking about it.

  And as he was thinking that, the thing, with one of Bayfield’s eyes popping in its munching jaws, was tensing to spring at him…

  Then a clamoring, yammering, metallic racket came, as charged bullets ricocheted along the deck between him and Bayfield’s ravaged body. One of the bullets hit the thing, knocked it spinning. Dix screamed—the scream just came out of him all on its own—and backed away, as Dorea shoved him aside, aiming at the creature that was scuttling away, almost faster than the eye could follow, dripping blood, squealing, but not seeming badly hurt.