by Diane Carey
He passed Corgan the printout. Corgan read:
Discovery Journal Entry Fourteen.
Pheromone extract may be hormonal alarm, request for help defending xenomorph colony. Instinctual emission, instinctual response. Have extracted surprising amount from arthropodic stage ones. Very potent. Even diluted should attract xenomorphs. Could be used to deter the Very Troublesome… They will respect me, one way or another… My associates will be interested—must be careful as to what to divulge to them when they arrive system… Keep some till Beijing…
“Oh Jesus,” Corgan said, re-reading it. “You don’t think he set up Buxton and…”
“Hell yes he did,” Nate said. “Put it together with the sabotage and his taking himself off on his own and… what the fuck is this about: ‘My Associates… when they arrive system… Keep some till Beijing’? I mean—we’re already in the system. Who does he mean? His colleagues from UNIC aren’t in Beijing, man. You know who is in Beijing. The fucking guy is…”
And then O’Neil screamed and Ashley started toward the door, gun in hand, calling out, “O’Neil?”
“Ashley, no!” Corgan yelled. “Get back here!” He grabbed his own rifle and ran after her, dragged her back, stepped through the door ahead of her—and saw the thing tearing O’Neil’s body to pieces, like an angry child ravaging an old doll. Bits and pieces of O’Neil flew to stick on the walls and ooze down…
O’Neil hadn’t gotten off a shot.
Corgan popped the assault rifle to his shoulder, wishing he’d brought one of the flamethrowers instead, squeezed the trigger, realized that the safety was on. He flicked it off and the creature took that moment to leap—a burst from just behind him caught its left shoulder and it came down awkwardly, slashing at him, and Corgan threw himself back, at the same time pushing Ashley and Nate back into the bridge. The alien, dripping sizzling yellow acid, charged blur-fast into the bridge, hissing and slashing, and Corgan saw Hesse go down.
Nate had a flamethrower in his hand, was flicking it on—
“Careful of the bridge controls!” Corgan shouted as the alien spun away from the blood-gushing wreckage of Hesse, and Corgan looked for a way to shoot it without destroying his ship.
The alien leapt at the ceiling, clung—the flamethrower fire flared out, its plume striped with black smoke, licking over the xenomorph, making it squeal as it ran across the ceiling. Corgan tracked it with his assault rifle—but Ashley opened fire at it first…
Catching it square in the teeth. The back of its head blew out… all over the control panels. Which sizzled as acid burned through them. Sparks flew, flames rose from the panels. The ship began to shudder…
The inter-ship radio went out, but just before it gave up the ghost they caught a final transmission, a voice with a Korean accent saying: “UNIC ship 8775 this is Chinese/Asian/ Nation Cooperative exploratory vessel Glorious Sun, Dr. Kyu Kim in Command. Prepare to be boarded…”
16
Reynolds had discovered a wonderful thing.
Exploring the axis tunnel running the length of the gigantic steel egg—the alien vessel which, in his journal, he had dubbed “Reynolds’s Discovery”—he’d found that about a kilometer aft of the area where they’d destroyed the egg sacs, the big pipelike conduit opened out into a large, cathedral-shaped chamber where tubes from the conduit split out like legs from a squid, ending in an array of enormous transparent globes. The globes, throbbing with internal light like giant Christmas ornaments, dominated the room; tenuous red-green filaments of energy flashed between the roughly circular array. Beyond the globearray was another larger, blue-gray globe, around which was a series of rods ending in clusters of crystal, like the ones they’d seen in the second room; from the larger globe extended another horizontal column, in line with the axis-tunnel, which penetrated a sparkling grid built into the back bulkhead. After considering the whole for a while, and consulting imagery he found—almost at random—in a holographic computer workstation on the deck below the blue-gray globe, Reynolds decided the axis conduit and the devices in this great sternward room was the greater part of the ship’s drive, now barely active. He speculated that when Reynolds’s Discovery was accelerating, the chamber was a riot of intense energies. He noted a curved transparent shield of some synthetic material between the workstation and the array, doubtless to protect an engineer from those energies.
Gazing up at the glowing array in awe mingled with a feeling of godlike personal power, Reynolds activated his hand-held digital recorder and began to intone:
“Journal Entry Twenty-Three. I believe I’ve found the drive dynamo of the Reynolds’s Discovery. The Giff ship… actually, I’m going to have to find another term for the shipbuilding aliens, since that one comes from Corgan’s feeble effort at naming them, deriving from a repetitive sound they made, which might be a sneeze for all we know. For now they might perhaps be called Eloids—after myself, Eli Reynolds. Perhaps in analyzing their computer data we can eventually come up with the name they use for their species. Of course, the scientific name is something that will wait until I can do a really thorough dissection of ‘Eloid’ remains.” He paused to clear his throat, making his voice portentous for the great announcement. “The discovery of the ship’s drive feels like the unfolding of destiny! I was intended to find it—and I will decrypt its controls and take command of the ship! I will pilot it to Earth’s orbit! I will… ah… of course that will require… require…” His voice trailed off as he realized that he was no navigator, and that space was very big—and relative to the vastness of the solar system, Earth was very small. “Ah well. Surely so sophisticated a ship will have an autopilot system—and I know it must have a setting for Earth, for it has been there! I found a chamber in which human bodies from Earth were preserved—the oldest are Phoenician, I think—evidently taken from some ancient battlefield. Sword strokes are still visible, in one case the sword still protrudes from the victim’s chest. It looks as if they monitored Earth till they found a battlefield, and then looted the bodies from it, for study. Many of them have been dissected. None appear to have been taken alive—though I can’t say for sure…” He chuckled. “Wouldn’t Captain Corgan and his compadres be shocked at that sight. But I doubt they live long enough to see it. Radio chatter I picked up from their communication boosters suggests they may already be dead or taken prisoner… I must take steps to see to it that the intruders from the CANC vessel don’t interfere with my plans on the Reynolds’s Discovery.”
He paused and gazed up at the glowing array, adding softly, “They all must die, in their turn.”
* * *
They nearly escaped in the landers…
Just three of them left, Daryl Corgan, Nate Eusebius, and Ashley Norton. They were in Lander One, Corgan and Ashley in the pilot and co-pilot’s seats, Nate looking over their shoulders. All of them armed.
They’d left Hesse’s vivisected body behind. He’d been quite dead when they’d left the bridge, in a hurry to escape the CANC boarding party—and the remaining xenomorph.
In some part of himself, Corgan knew that he’d undergone a change in attitude, he’d experienced a shift familiar from the war in Pakistan. He’d walled off his feelings. He was all analysis and reaction now. He wouldn’t allow himself to feel he’d let Hesse down, along with the others. He wouldn’t allow himself to feel much at all…
Emotional reactions had to shut down, so he could get the job done. He knew it was a kind of loss. A surrender of a portion of his humanity. But it was necessary. He’d never get through this, otherwise.
They had the landers prepped, and were about to depressurize the hangar, when ten CANC boarders strode onto the hanger deck. Corgan counted eight heavily armed CANC soldiers, in military spacesuits with the dun color and red shoulder-markings that were a variation of CANC Orbital Army uniforms, and a couple of men who might be civilian overseers, in more generic spacesuits. One of these was Commander Kim, he suspected—he’d referred to his doctorate. Hobbled by
their spacesuits, the soldiers ran clumsily but aggressively to surround the landers. They must have forced top hull airlock three, Corgan figured.
There was one way to get rid of the CANC invaders fast. Since they were all wearing spacesuits depressurizing the hangar wouldn’t kill them—not immediately. But Corgan knew that if he ordered an emergency depressurization— which meant simply opening the hangar bay door without draining the atmosphere out first—the men surrounding the lander would be sucked into space, flung on fast trajectories that would probably take them into the Saturnian moon’s gravity well, and thence to lethal impacts on the surface of Iapetus.
Ashley saw Corgan reaching for the red flip-up cover of the emergency depressurization switch, under the lander’s comm panel. It would transmit a signal from the lander to the hangar door controls. “Captain… Daryl… you’re not really going to do that, are you? We’re not exactly at war with those people. Anyway it’s a cold war, not a shooting war. We’re not sure what they’re going to do here. That’d be murder! I mean, besides just the thought of… of what’d happen to them…”
When Corgan hesitated—thinking only of legal repercussions, and not moral or emotional considerations— Nate reached for the flip-up cover himself and his voice was a rasp as he said, “I’ll take responsibility! It’s gotta be done!”
“No, Nate—she’s right,” Corgan said resignedly. “Belay that. So far, it’s illegal for us to kill them. They’ve got to attack us first—or threaten us with death. I’ve got no desire to get through this thing and spend the rest of my life in a maximum security—”
“This is expedition Commander Kim!” interrupted a peremptory, East-Asian accented voice from the lander’s radio. “There are eight heavy weapons trained on your landing craft! Do not attempt to deploy it!”
It was true: every one of the soldiers encircling the lander had a vacuum-ready shoulder launcher, looking like a complicated bazooka, aimed at the lander.
There’s the threat that might make lethal force legal, at least from the UNIC point of view, Corgan thought. But it was too late now. Nate articulated the reason.
“We waited too long,” Nate growled in frustration. “You open it now, at least one of them is going to get off a shot before he’s sucked outboard…”
Corgan shook his head. “How come they get vacuum-ready missile launchers and we get assault rifles that only fire in a pressurized vessel?”
He didn’t really expect an answer. He touched the comm control. “Commander Kim, this is Captain Daryl Corgan of the United Nations Intersteller Corps vessel Hornblower. You have entered this vessel illegally and without permission. You are not in compliance with interstellar protocol and you are in direct violation of the Shared Space treaty. I insist that you withdraw.”
Nate snorted and rolled his eyes.
Corgan added, “And I must warn you, Commander Kim, that you are in danger you know nothing about.” He wasn’t sure how to begin telling them about the xenomorphs…
“It is you who have violated protocol,” came Kim’s dismissive reply. “You have invaded our property. We have been tracking the alien vessel for some time. We have claimed it and the surrounding space to five hundred kilometers, in all directions. You have invaded the vessel which was claimed by the Chinese/Asian-Nation Cooperative, you have intruded your vessel into proscribed space. Hence, your own vessel is forfeit. I ask that you immediately open the hatch of—”
He broke off and they heard someone in the background speaking urgently in what was probably the emerging Asian language, Sino-Multi, largely Mandarin Chinese with elements of Korean, Japanese, Malaysian, Tibetan dialects, and English in it.
“Captain!” Kyu Kim’s voice was now sharp with anger. “Open the hatch of the lander now, this instant, or we will open fire! I’ll give you ten seconds! You had best drop your weapons before we get in!”
Corgan growled to himself. He didn’t see he had a choice. He opened the lander’s hatch and the three of them put their weapons on the deck. The entry ladder extended automatically to the hangar deck, and in under a minute Kyu Kim was standing in the narrow entry to the lander’s cockpit, his helmet and gloves removed, and a high-magnum pistol in his hand. He was a stocky Asian, his face almost as oval as round, his black hair thinning, his dark eyes flinty, his expression coldly furious. Behind him, leaning to one side with a missile launcher in his hands, was a dour young Asiatic soldier. Absurd for him to point that missile launcher in this small space, of course, since if he fired it in here they’d all be killed.
“It has just been reported to me that the occupying patrol we sent to your bridge is under attack!” Kyu Kim announced bitterly. “Three of my men—ambushed and killed! The attacker appears to be robotic or some sort of biotech creation…” He broke off as his suit’s radio, audible from the now-open collar of the spacesuit, gave off a crackle and another confused, frantic monologue in Sino-Multi. Kim shook his head in disgusted wonder. “And now another is dead, they say! What is it that attacks my men, Captain? How are you controlling it?” He hefted the pistol meaningfully.
“Commander,” Corgan said, mildly, inwardly struggling with mixed feelings about this development, “we are not controlling it. Your people are being attacked by an extraterrestrial life form we discovered on the alien vessel. It is a very long story as to how it got loose in our ship. We’ve lost all but four crewmembers to these things. If your men are on the bridge they can find the body of one of those men on the deck… ask them! Clearly he was killed by the same thing that’s killing your men.”
Kim’s eyes narrowed but he spoke again into the radio, and received a reply that was evidently an affirmative. “It seems you’re telling the truth—the thing is killing your men too. They’ve seen the body and it’s been killed much the same way. How intelligent are these creatures? Do they speak? Do they carry weapons?”
“We don’t know if they use language—or how intelligent they are. They seem to use technology only for camouflage. They are weapons, Commander Kim. They’re extremely dangerous. Living killing machines. They killed most of our crew…”
“You referred to four crewmembers—I see only three.”
“One of our people, whom I believe you were expecting to find here, is now on the alien vessel. That would be Doctor Reynolds. I suspect you know full well who he is. All the others are dead. We do not believe these xenomorphic organisms are the… the same as those who built the vessel. They appear to have been an infestation. The original builders were dead for centuries—the ship is essentially a gigantic derelict.” I’m telling them more than I need to, Corgan thought. Why give them free information? But then, the xenomorph on the alien ship might help dissuade them from taking over the steel egg. “The alien vessel, Commander, is very dangerous…”
Kyu Kim looked at him skeptically. “And where were you going, eh, but to that vessel! There is no place else you can go!”
Corgan shrugged. “The Hornblower, as you must have discovered by now, has been crippled. Its controls are wrecked, its out-scanners blinded. We are expecting another UNIC ship shortly…” That was not exactly true. “… But in the meantime it’s not safe to remain on this vessel. So we’re leaving here and going there, yes. Temporarily. If we had another choice, we would have gone somewhere else— because the alien ship is not safe.”
Kyu Kim considered, making a hm, hm, hm noise deep in his throat, then tapped his wrist comm activator, spoke in Sino-Multi to someone. Then he turned his attention back to Corgan. “I have informed my men that the attacker is allegedly a dangerous extraterrestrial. They appear to have had little luck destroying these… these organisms with the weapons they have.”
Nate nodded at that. “Missile launchers are too slow to hit those things…”
Kim ignored him. “And I have ordered them to retreat to our own Detachment Vessel. This ship will be subjected to Priority Quarantine. So—you have found a way into the alien craft?”
Ashley chuckled dryly. “I though
t you said you’d already claimed it. You must know how to get in yourself, then.”
Commander Kim scowled at her. “We claimed it without… without actually boarding it. Some time ago.”
Corgan shook his head. “You’d have been here before us, if that were true. You’d have set up a beacon, CANC flags on the hull, the whole thing. But I suggest we let the administrative conclave on Earth decide—we will present our evidence…”
“Enough, enough,” Kyu Kim said. “We have ownership and we will maintain it by any means necessary. It is a… what is the French term? Fait accompli? But you can expedite our exploration in the interests of good international relations… you can show us the entrance. I will bring four of my soldiers on this lander, and the others will follow on our own detachment vessels. Seal your hatch, and when my people are clear, you will open the hangar bay door and we will go, together, to the alien craft…”
17
As the autopiloted Lander One descended to the rim of the “navel” of the steel egg—with Commander Kyu Kim and a number of his soldiers crowded in the back, Kim himself close behind Corgan, covering him with a pistol—Corgan found himself wondering what Commander Kim had meant by “Priority Quarantine.”
He found out what was meant moments later, when Ashley gasped and pointed at the reverse viewscreen. Corgan saw that the Hornblower was being forced by EAEs—external attachment engines—out of orbit around Iapetus. His ship was being driven directly into the inexorable gravitational grip of the gas giant, the planet Saturn. At that speed it would fall out of orbit, and would soon be drawn into Saturn’s atmosphere, to burn, crumple, and merge with the murky innards of the ringed planet.
Priority Quarantine was evidently a euphemism for complete destruction.
The EAEs had originally been developed to steer approaching asteroids away from Earth. But they’d only been used that way once, and this smaller model, each moved into place by extra-vehicular robots, was designed to push derelict spacecraft without risking a tow-ship. They looked roughly like jet engines detached from a jet, but they were powered by hydrogen cells, and their programmable rocketry burned the latest liquid oxygen variant.