by Diane Carey
“Reynolds?”
Then he took the squeeze bottle out, shook it up, uncapped it, and squeezed a mist into the interior of the tube-array. It would last for awhile, it would cling there— and anyone working in the array would get some of it on them, unknowingly.
“Reynolds! Are you okay? Captain, maybe he’s been—” Reynolds walked over to the ventilator duct—and, the bottle held well away from him, squeezed a little of the vapor into it.
“Yo, Reynolds! Last call!”
He moved hastily back from the duct, closed the bottle up, put it away, and, with extraordinary care, peeled off the gloves, so he didn’t touch their outsides with his fingers, and he dropped them down inside the interior of the tube-array, where no one would see them.
Then, he picked up his rifle, and kept it ready as he hurried out. He had some hope the xenomorphs were still in a quiescent stage. If he moved quickly enough he should avoid them.
Maybe not everyone would be so lucky.
Well. They should have been more respectful.
13
Nate insisted on taking point. Corgan was second, then Ashley—who’d shoved quietly in front of Buxton—then Buxton, Dorea, O’Neil, Dinswood, Chang, Dix, and Hesse. There was just room to walk side by side in the narrow corridor, but the assault rifles made it awkward. All of them were wearing radio headsets.
The others had wearied of waiting for Reynolds—and Corgan figured if he wasn’t responding, he was probably dead. What other reason would he have for not answering the comm?
“What happens if the CANC vessel gets here while we’re in the middle of this?” Ashley asked. “Shouldn’t there be a team on the Giff ship? There’s one there to hunt down anyway…”
“We missed these creatures last time, unless they decided to go out the airlock,” Corgan said dryly. “We need all of us to make sure we don’t miss ’em this time. Unless maybe… the bots in the smaller passages malfunctioned…”
Ashley shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
They’d gotten to Heim Drive Engineering, on the lowest deck, just behind the lower out-scan array. It was divided into two large rooms, one on either side of the corridor.
“We’re splitting into two groups here,” Corgan ordered. “Ashley, Harl, Dorea, Dix, go with me to port side. The rest of you check out the starboard drive room, under Nate’s command. Stay frosty.”
A clattering noise behind them in the corridor made Dix turn and fire his weapon, an outsized sound in the corridor, echoing metallically—a maintenance robot at the far end of the hall retreated; one of its lifting pincers, which Dix had half shot away, left hanging by a wire.
“Goddammit, Dix, don’t do that!” Nate snapped.
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry—I’m jumpy!” Dix muttered, popping another clip in his rifle.
Corgan spoke into his radio. “Corgan to MR Seven… I think that was seven… report to my transmission. No one’s going to shoot at you again.”
The robot—reluctantly, it seemed to Corgan—rolled back around the corner, and toward him, so that the others had to press against the walls to let it pass. It was as tall as he was, a middle section shaped like a man’s torso, but with wheels instead of legs and two metal arms ending in cunningly articulated metal hands; it had a basketball sized perceptual globe in place of a head. Bayfield, at some point, had painted a grinning clown-face on the globe, with the red and yellow paint they used for maintenance signs; Corgan found the clown face disquieting, especially now that the face’s eyes were almost entirely flaking away.
It rumbled up to him, the damaged arm swinging pendulum-like with the motion. “Proceed ahead of my signal into portside Heim engine room,” Corgan said.
“Pro-ceeding,” the robot said, in an older woman’s voice. Or, actually, more like Bayfield’s voice imitating an old woman’s voice.
“Voice always reminds me of my old Aunt Ginnie,” Hesse said. “Face is more or less the same too. She always did use too much makeup.”
The others smiled. Hesse was trying to ease the tension. Corgan followed the robot into the port engine room, his team with him. MR Seven stopped in the center of the room to wait for further orders.
The room was roughly oblong, the back section dominated by three rows of Heim generators, six in each row. The Heim generators, being based on the more esoteric principles of physics, were externally skewed stacks of metal plates, each stack with oddly shaped, irregular configurations. It was as if you took numerous decks of giant playing cards, each card a meter long, sprayed them silver, then twisted the stacks this way and that so the cards went randomly out of alignment. From the top of each crooked, asymmetrical stack extended translucent dark green-metal tubes, slanting into the inverted-cone receptors on the ceiling. Nearer was an assessment panel—a workstation standing alone. The walls writhed with a tangle of piping, flattened boxes and conduits, much of which was a mystery to Corgan. The other engine room across the corridor was virtually identical.
Corgan called Nate on his radio. “Yo—how’s it look?”
“Nothing here I can see. What you doing with that crippled robot? Using it for a decoy?”
“That’s one possibility. MR Seven, come with me, proceed ahead.”
“I’m your bitch,” said the robot, in its Auntie voice.
“What the fuck,” Corgan muttered, staring at it.
Dix chuckled sadly. “That’s my man Bayfield, did that. Liked to reprogram them. You know—stuff to keep us amused, gets dull working down here, Captain.”
Corgan sighed. “Whatever.” He started toward the drive units and the robot trundled ahead of him, its damaged arm swinging crazily. Corgan paused, peering between the rows of crooked steel stacks. Nothing back there. “MR Seven, maintain the same distance, when possible. Stay in front of me when I move.”
“I’m all yours, girlfriend,” the robot said.
Corgan ground his teeth and tried not to damn Bayfield to hell, since he might be there already. He took a step forward and the robot, monitoring him, moved forward too. He glanced up at a set of dark striated pipes and metal chassis wrapped around the top of the third set of generators, walked past it, was aware in his peripheral vision that one set of pipes might have stirred, ever so slightly, but the perception didn’t reach his conscious mind until he’d come to the end of the row of machines and thought:
That particular piece of equipment isn’t on the other engines.
Did I just see it move?
He felt a long slow shuddery chill go through him, from the nape of his neck to his groin, and his fingers tightened on the gun. He spun and, as if the sudden motion alerted the creature that it had been detected, it uncoiled itself from the top of the generator, and poised to spring from just two meters away…
It was one of the creatures from the alien hologram—a full-grown xenomorph, big as a man, with its elongated head, its permanently bared silvery teeth dripping transparent ichor, its spiny back, its lean dark exoskeletal body, its claws and spiked tail… and no eyes. Yet it regarded him balefully, somehow, from within that blunt forehead that reminded him of the front end of a whale.
A moment’s hesitation… The alien tensed…
Then robot MR Seven, as per Corgan’s instructions, rolled to get in front of him and the alien leapt at it, evidently believing it an enemy, wrapping itself around the robot, tearing at it. Corgan’s tactic, using the robot as a shield and decoy, had worked.
“Contact!” Corgan yelled, firing at the alien.
But he aimed too high—he was afraid of hitting the Heim generator and crippling the ship, unable to get a clear shot with the robot partly in the way—and the rounds struck the alien glancingly on the side of its head—as well as pocking the robot—making the xenomorph hiss and contort, and knocking the robot over.
The xenomorph recovered. A living mechanism of coiled fury, its taloned feet barely touched the deck before it leapt at him. Corgan threw himself to one side but felt its claws raking his left shou
lder, a burning pain, and then he’d gotten his feet under him and spun to fire at it again, the two crackling rounds smacking nastily into the creature’s side, cracking its exoskeletal armor, the electrical charge in the bullets making the wounds smoke and sizzle. The impacts didn’t seem to slow it much—it merely changed direction, was running along the wall, using the pipes for handholds, choosing another target: it sprang at Buxton, who was staggering back, assault rifle waving wildly, shouting incoherently, stumbling and falling so that by sheer chance the alien missed him, dove right through the spot where he’d been standing. It landed on the deck and instantly lunged at Dix who screamed and turned to run, dropping his gun.
The xenomorph swarmed in pursuit, and bore Dix down from behind, knocking him flat on his belly. It poised on his back for a moment as Corgan tried to get his rifle into play in a way that wouldn’t hit Dix or Ashley—she was just beyond Dix—and then the alien slammed its head down like a hammer on a nail, its proboscoid inner jaws pistoning out between the gaping outer jaws, punching through the back of Dix’s head like his skull was papier-mâché. Blood fountained, sprayed up to paint the alien’s head a glossy red.
Dix gave one short sharp yelp and spasmed, dying, as the xenomorph turned toward Ashley—drawing in its pistonlike inner set of jaws, dripping with Dix’s brains, as if it were savoring the blood and gray matter. Corgan was afraid he was going to hit Ashley if he fired at the alien. He sidestepped left, taking aim—
Buxton was getting confusedly up, muttering, panicked—and the xenomorph—
It was crouched to jump… toward Ashley. Corgan had to take a chance, had to try to stop it whatever the risk of friendly fire. He squeezed the trigger, the gun bucked repeatedly in his hands, and the bullets again failed to find any significant purchase in the alien—glancing off its exoskeleton. You had to hit it square to really crunch through its protective skin.
Ashley jumped behind the workstation, crouching, as Dorea—moving so that Corgan wasn’t in the firing line— squeezed off a sloppy burst, blasting away part of the xenomorph’s clawed left hand. Acid dripped and sizzled. The xenomorph leapt upward, in a flurry of motion Corgan couldn’t follow, and he realized with amazement that it was running along the ceiling upside-down, using pipes and valves for handholds. It vanished into an upshaft that carried Heim energy along heavy conduits to the gravitational repulsor.
“Daryl!” It was Nate rushing in the door. He stopped to stare in horror at Dix’s body, his smashed skull.
“You run into one in there?” Corgan asked. He felt shaky in the knees, but made himself stand firm, made his voice authoritative and harsh so the others would have someone to turn to. Ashley was suddenly there, taking a bandage spray from one of her zippered pockets, spraying it on his wound. He winced, but the ache ebbed as the painkillers in the hardening bandage took hold.
“Yeah,” Nate said, his voice taut, his face drawn. “The other one hit us. Grown big like yours—gone the same way, up the conduit shaft. We lost Dinswood. It tore him up the middle. We blasted away at the fucking thing—I don’t know as we hit it square. Looked like it’s possible to hurt them but you have to really nail ’em good…”
“Oh God… two more of us dead in no time at all…” Buxton said, staring at Dix. Hesse and O’Neil were staring at Dix too, standing in the doorway as if they didn’t want to come in the room.
Nate was glaring up the conduit shaft, where the xenomorph had gone—raising his rifle to aim…
Then he lowered it again. “I can’t see dick up there… Don’t want to hit the conduits… I’d hate to be stuck out in the orbit of Saturn…”
“Dix was right,” O’Neil said thickly, coming in, the gun looking small in his big hands. He looked to Corgan, then, like a scared oversized child. “He knew they were going to get him if we went after them. They got two of us and… they weren’t armed. They had no guns! We outnumbered them! And they went through us and killed two of us! My God— the things can run on the ceiling! Did you see that?” He ran a shaky hand through his blond hair. “What… what are we going to do against that? Those things have armor!”
“O’Neil—knock it off,” Corgan said. “Whining helps nobody. We’ll get the fucking things—we’ll know how to deal with them better next time.”
“They can be killed,” Ashley said. “Look here… Some of that acid burned into the deck.”
“You think it’ll go through?” Corgan asked. “Maybe through the hull?”
She shook her head. “There’s insulation under here that’ll absorb pretty much any kind of corrosive leak, because the Heim generators use a powerful acid. But the acid bleed here shows we can hurt them…”
“The flamethrowers!” Corgan said suddenly. “We bring the flamethrowers into this. On the assumption they work as well with the big ones as the small ones. Rifles and flamethrowers—that might give us an edge.”
“And… did you see what it looked like?” O’Neil said. “It… the way it’s shaped… like it’s inside out and it’s bones are its skin and… that is a demonic thing, I’m telling you, a demonic thing, not any kind of natural—”
“You are quite full of crap, my friend,” said Reynolds, walking in, the rifle slung on his shoulder. “It is a natural organism, nothing demonic. Exquisitely evolved, adapted to unusual environments. Quite possibly adapted to space travel—in other species’ space vehicles.”
“Like rats on a ship,” Dorea said.
“Like man-sized rats with armor and a sort of deep cunning,” Hesse said.
“Much more impressive than rats, I suspect,” Reynolds said. “I saw them on the monitor—efficiency in movement to the point of a superb grace.”
“Reynolds,” Nate growled. “Where the hell have you been? We thought you were dead!”
“I fell asleep in my quarters, I’m afraid. Exhaustion. I turned the cabin intercom off.”
“You might’ve been killed, alone in there,” Corgan said, inspecting the fallen robot. He shook his head, and summoned another one. “MR Four? Can you report to my signal? There’s a… there are two crewmembers down, I want you to move their bodies to the incinerator. Quarantine protocol.”
“I be fittin’ to do just dat, ya’ll,” the robot said, over the radio. “On my damn way.”
“Who the fuck screwed with those robots’ responses?” Hesse demanded. He was the computer expert and protective of the job.
“The late Bayfield,” Corgan said. “Let’s see if we can track those two—this shaft goes up to deck one…”
“I’ll… I’ll get on the flamethrowers,” Buxton said, seeming to realize he hadn’t been much use in the crisis.
The robot trundled into the room, pushing a hydraulic dolly ahead of it.
Same thing it uses to carry bags of supplies, Corgan thought, is what it’s going to use to carry Dix’s body, and Dinswood’s. Carry them to the incinerator, dump them unceremoniously in. Hit the incinerate button. And two guys I ate breakfast with yesterday will be turned into ashes—ashes that will be expelled into space. Probably become part of Saturn’s rings, eventually…
And the pool of blood around Dix slowly spread across the floor…
14
“Listen, uh, Captain,” Buxton said, in a low voice. He stood awkwardly, hands in pockets before Corgan who was sitting at the Captain’s bridge cockpit control. “I guess I… sort of panicked down there. I’m sorry. I’m… uh… not really your man-of-action type, and…”
“Forget it,” Corgan said distractedly. “No one’s trained for this…”
A maintenance robot waiting behind Buxton was holding the three improvised flamethrower units in its mechanical arms, like a man holding a load of firewood. Hesse and Nate went to unload them, while Ashley wheeled in refueling tanks for the flamethrowers. O’Neil, to Corgan’s left, was staring out of the port at Saturn, his lips moving and no sound coming out. Dorea was taking her life in her hands by hurrying out to the lavatory alone—he’d heard her mutter something about it�
� She could be caught alone and killed by the xenomorphs, Corgan thought.
“Ashley—go with Dorea, stand guard,” Corgan ordered. “Keep the rifle ready to fire.”
“Okay—then she can stand guard for me, I gotta pee bad.”
Corgan turned back to the ship’s security monitor, its screen broken up into fifteen windows, views on various decks. There were ten views missing. Blacked out. He suspected the aliens, acting on instinct or cunning, were sabotaging some of the surveillance equipment.
“Anyway,” Buxton went on, “I just wanted to say if there’ s anything I can, you know—”
“Maybe there is something,” Corgan said suddenly, turning to check the out-scanners screens on the other side of the cockpit.
The out-scanner monitors were dark. Offline.
“You can tell me what the hell is wrong with the out-scanners, Buxton…”
Corgan shook his head. If the out-scanners didn’t work, the Hornblower would have no warning about the CANC ship— which might well turn up despite the EMP decoys they’d sent out.
“Jesus,” Buxton said, going to the out-scanner monitor screen and tapping it as if to jar it into working. “Huh. Blacked out.”
Buxton turned to the mainframe station, keyed in an inquiry. It responded aloud: “Out-scanners offline.” He chewed a lip and looked at Corgan sidelong. “Uh—it should’ve reported this to us as soon as it happened. So the out-scanner status monitor has been disconnected too. That kinda says something to me…”
“You figure the aliens sabotaged it?”
“Maybe, Captain. Reynolds says he didn’t find any indication on the Giff ship that they know how to run equipment. But maybe they just tear shit up to fuck with you. They just figure it hurts you some way and they don’t need to know how. Maybe they stay away from life support and just get at the stuff that’ll help them if they take it offline…”
Corgan nodded. “I was thinking that too. Well—someone has to go down there and see if it can be reconnected.”
Buxton licked his lips. “I’ll go. But I’d rather not go alone.”