by Diane Carey
“Goddamnit,” Nate said again, sounding pretty convincing for an amateur actor, “this is all wrong, Corgan!”
“I am your captain and you’ll follow orders!” Corgan snapped. He turned back to Kyu Kim who was looking at him with an unnerving skepticism. But it didn’t matter. All he was doing here was stalling them close to the deck entrance till the moment came…
“You will show us this secret control panel, and you will be treated fairly and properly afterward. You will not be harmed,” Kyu said. “Now—enough of this stalling! It is of no use! Proceed!”
He pointed his pistol menacingly…
“Captain—!” Nate shouted angrily, grabbing his arm. “Don’t show them!”
Corgan jerked free and Nate made as if this threw him off balance. He fell to one side, off his flyer, yelling as he went down with a thump on the floor. And the sound of the yell covered up the sound of the sonic key as Corgan reached into an unzippered pocket and activated it. Corgan didn’t want them knowing about it.
The key whistled, under cover of Nate’s cursing, and the entrance opened in the deck not ten meters away, the sudden darkness just opening in the deck catching their eye more readily than just leaving a hole there. Ashley looked at it—gasping. “Oh no! They’ll…”
“Ashley shut up!” Corgan barked.
Ashley turned guiltily away—a little better at acting than Nate—successfully prompting Chou to look sharply at the entrance in the deck, so that he shouted in Sino-Multi to his boss.
Commander Kim said something in a wondering tone in his own language and drifted over to the gap, followed by Chou and the female soldier as—harangued unintelligibly by one of their sentries—Nate got back up on his diamond-flyer and hovered in place. Corgan was looking right down a missile launcher pointed at him from a meter away by the other sentry. He wondered if he was taking too big a chance.
“What is this? This entrance in the floor! You did not tell us about this!” Chou said, turning to shout at Corgan.
Corgan shrugged sullenly. “Didn’t know about it.”
“Liar! The woman knew! You tried to silence her! Now speak! What is it!”
“I dunno, Commander. It’s probably nothing of any significance. But—if you want, we’ll all go down and explore it. We can go ahead of you, in case it’s not safe down there.”
He made as if to approach the entrance in the deck so he could float down into the shaft…
The tallest of the guards watching him, the one who was closer to Nate, shouted angrily in his language and aimed his own missile launcher at him. Now there were two pointed at him.
Corgan stopped, and raised his hands. “Okay, whatever.”
Kyu Kim looked at Corgan suspiciously. “You cannot go down there ahead of us—the only way down, as far as I can see, is on these flying things, and you could fly away at the bottom, if there was any place to go to, before we could catch up. You could escape! No. I will go with Sergeant Ho and Private…” A name Corgan couldn’t quite make out. Hu-chan? “And Lieutenant Zheng—” he indicated the woman, a lank, perpetually frowning female with short cut black hair, taller than average, “—will remain with Chou and these two others to keep you under observation.” He spoke to the others in Sino-Multi, and Zheng nodded. Then he turned back to Corgan. “I have told them to not worry about damage to the ship if there is any problem with you. Nor to worry about collateral damage. If there is a problem with you—they are to open fire!”
“I understand,” Corgan said, bowing slightly.
Kyu Kim sniffed as if he doubted that Corgan understood much. “Now… to lower myself down this shaft… But best if…” The rest in Sino-Multi to Sergeant Ho. Nervously, Ho made the passes he’d learned over the control beams of the diamond-flyer, and it moved forward and then down the shaft, ahead of Kyu Kim.
Corgan wondered what awaited the CANC soldier down there… He had his suspicions. If Reynolds had left it open, it couldn’t be good.
Moments later the man shouted up at them. “‘Life! Something alive!’” Kyu Kim translated. “Now we will see what you have tried to hide from me, Captain Corgan!”
Eagerly, Kyu Kim followed Ho down, and was followed by the other designated man—who looked miserably scared as he went.
Nate drifted slowly, slowly closer to the entrance of the shaft, as if curiously looking down. One of the soldiers guarding him said something in Sino-Multi and gestured for Nate to hold still.
“Nate!” Corgan said. “Get away from there!”
“You know what? Fuck you, Captain!” Nate snapped.
Corgan drifted over to Nate as if to force him to get back…
The two soldiers drifted closer. One of them was looking curiously down the shaft. His weapon now was turned away from Corgan. Zheng was in close, worried conversation with Chou. There wasn’t going to be a better moment…
Corgan put his hand on the sonic key in his pocket.
There came a scream from down in the shaft. A long, gurgling, blood-chilling scream.
The sentries who’d guarded them crowded round the entrance, staring down in alarm—Zheng and Chou looked over, wide eyed, mouths open. A moment of uncertainty… Should they go down immediately, to investigate? But if so should they take their prisoners?
That moment was just enough. And Corgan nodded briskly to Nate.
Corgan and Nate jumped off their diamond-flyers, jerked the flyers out from under the two sentries, and kicked the off-balance CANC soldiers so they tumbled down the shaft—even as Ashley slammed her diamond-flyer into the woman, Lieutenant Zhang, the two of them tumbling into Chou. All three of them went down, Zhang’s missile launcher clanking away.
The two sentries had vanished down the shaft, warbling in fear as they went, and Corgan activated the sonic key, so that the gap in the floor closed. Just as if it’d never been there. The shaft was sealed up. The two sentries, Kyu Kim, and the men who’d gone with him were, for the moment, sealed into the shaft. Corgan just hoped there was no sonic key to be found down there. If there wasn’t, the men from CANC would probably be trapped.
He turned to see Ashley facing Zhang, who was crouching as if about to charge—and Ashley slammed Zhang in the jaw with an impressive roundhouse right. Zhang staggered back.
“Wow,” Nate muttered admiringly. “Some science officer, that Ashley. They teach her to punch like that in post-grad astrophysics?”
“Tae kwon do,” Corgan said, scooping up the fallen missile launcher. “She’s a brown belt.” Nate had another that one of the sentries had dropped—the third weapon had gone down the shaft.
Zhang was on her keister, one hand on her bleeding nose, yelling an order in Sino-Multi at the stunned, frightened-looking Chou—probably trying to get him to jump Ashley— as Corgan and Nate leveled the weapons. “Hey!” Corgan shouted. They fell silent, staring at him, Zhang still sitting, legs splayed, on the deck. Corgan grinned, feeling better than he had for awhile. “We might need you two to get control of that vessel of yours… So don’t make us kill you. I’d hate to do that. You speak English, Chou. You understand?”
Chou nodded, looking stunned. He muttered a translation to Zhang.
“Now—you two get on your flyers, but you stay close to the ground and move slow or I splash you all over the deck with this thing. And don’t use your radios. We’ll be disabling them shortly…”
Chou conveyed the order to Zhang—who shook her head, and asked a question in her own language. “She wants to know about what happened to her commander,” Chou said. “Please—we must know.”
“I told Kyu there was a xenomorph on this ship—your buddies ran into it. And it killed them.”
“But—why did the… the hole in the floor… why did it close?”
“I don’t know—why did it open in the first place? Now translate and get your ass on your bike or I’ll shoot you where you stand. For all you know, Kim’s alive.” Corgan suspected that if Kyu Kim was alive, he’d be better off dead. “And if he is, he’
s gonna need you, later on. You’re of no use to him dead.”
They obeyed and drifted up ahead of Corgan, Nate, and Ashley, down the center of the big room, between glass panels.
Corgan was puzzling over his missile launcher—some Asian variety he’d never fired. The seven shells in the big clip sticking out from the breach of the launcher, just in front of the trigger guard, were not much bigger than a hand grenade, but sleeker and more powerful. He was pretty sure he knew how to trigger a launch but he didn’t know anything about its recoil, its effective range, the size of the exploding shell’s blast-bubble. Wing it, he thought. He switched off what he hoped was the safety—the Chinese ideogram next to the switch wasn’t helpful.
“Goddamn, there the little son of a bitch is, large as life!” Nate shouted, with a sudden passion. He jumped to the deck from his flyer and popped his missile launcher to his shoulder.
“Nate—don’t!” Corgan yelled.
But it was too late, Nate had fired at Reynolds, who was floating near the ceiling of the big room, and the missile was soaring upward. Reynolds was darting away, down toward the door. The round exploded against the bulkhead above him and though Reynolds swayed and yelped on his flyer, he didn’t fall. Somewhat wobbly, he kept going, and vanished through the door—just as Nate sent another round after him. It exploded against the wall above the door, blackening the bulkhead but doing no appreciable damage. Corgan breathed a little easier, seeing that the wall wasn’t breached. He’d been afraid the round might puncture the ship and they’d all be sucking vacuum.
“Fuck—!” Ashley said. “Look!”
She pointed at the other door. While she, Corgan, and Nate had been staring at Reynolds, Zhang, and Chou had lofted up, around and darted back there on their diamond-flyers. They were heading to the next room aft.
Nate aimed his launcher—but the range was too much.
“No, Nate—you’ll miss ’em from here,” Corgan pointed out. “And we’re gonna need those little missiles, man.”
Nate reluctantly lowered his weapon. “Go after them?”
“They can hide for days in this big thing. And the comm boosters are set up—they were using them earlier, when we first came in. They can call their ship for reinforcements now. Should have torn out their radios first thing. No. We’re gonna go to ground… I know just the place.”
19
Reynolds was rattled—he’d come near being blown to smithereens. He was wounded, too. A bit of shrapnel from the mini-missiles had torn into the outside of his left thigh. Hiding in a vent he’d found at the top of Room One, he’d pried out the shrapnel, sprayed bandages on the wound. It throbbed—but the discomfort only intensified his purpose, his sense of mission.
It occurred to him, as he approached the nutrient cultivation room again, that they’d tried to kill him with a powerful weapon—and they had failed! Surely he was protected by the hand of destiny!
Now he passed slowly, carefully through the door, his eyes flicking right and left, looking for enemies, ready to retreat at the sight of any human being—or xenomorph. No one there. He approached the entrance to the shaft in the nutrient cultivation room, saw no indication of anyone near the place where the shaft had been. As he’d expected, in the intervening three hours, Corgan and his two deranged followers had gone somewhere, were hiding from him and the communists. They were all ultimately powerless against him. That much was obvious. He must be careful of the communists, of course, as there were a great many of them and there were limits to even his power. At least— there were limits to it so far. Later perhaps when he had the technology of an advanced alien race at his disposal, any appreciable limit would vanish.
He was confident that the queen and her young had disposed of Kyu Kim and his party. As for the others, he would get the means of dealing with them—with all his enemies. He would get it from the room at the bottom of this shaft.
He must be careful not to get too close to the xenomorphs himself. He had brought along the specimen bag—which he’d treated to resist acid—that he’d carried over from the Hornblower. The late, great Hornblower! He was glad the UNIC vessel was destroyed—it had been so restrictive of him, so confining, its routines so much a reflection, in its organization, of Corgan’s stiff-necked, military way of looking at reality. He himself would organize things differently, on Earth, when the time came.
He floated near the entrance, activated the sonic key. The entrance opened.
And Reynolds descended, very carefully…
When he got near the bottom of the shaft, he stopped and then resumed going down very, very slowly, kneeling on the diamond-flyer so he could peer around the room without—he hoped—being in reach of a xenomorph. He saw the CANC explorers almost immediately. One of them was pasted to the wall nearby—how, he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t seen the process the queen used. The man was whimpering, feebly struggling. He supposed they were put there to be food for the chest-bursting stage twos. The others were lying on the floor, on their backs, with the face-hugging stage ones covering their faces, their tails taut around the necks. One of them was the man Reynolds guessed was Kyu Kim.
Good. Very good. Now he had only to wait for the stage ones to finish implanting the stage twos. When it dropped off he would take its remains to be dissected for more extract. He’d have to be careful, grab its remains quickly, and get hurriedly away—the queen was watching him from the shadows… He could feel her there, even without looking.
Then he did look. The queen was at the other end of the room. Her hooded, eyeless head was turned his way. She had spotted him—and he was sure she was watching him closely. Was doubtless thinking he would make a useful new addition to her offspring’s larder.
“Not me, my queen,” he said, making a genuflecting motion with his hand, like a flattering courtier. “But others I shall give you…”
She suddenly started his way, had crossed half the room in two seconds, was reaching for him even as he backed up and shot up the shaft on the flyer, to the room above. He was confident she couldn’t follow but his heart, anyway, pounded with fear and excitement.
Another second and she’d have grabbed him—torn him to pieces or pasted him to the wall. Destiny, once again, had protected him.
He ascended over the shaft entrance and went, room by room, toward the stern of the great steel egg. Toward the end of the alien craft there was another entrance to the center axis, where he kept his laboratory. He kept a weather eye out for the escaped man and woman from CANC—but he was sure they’d have found their way back to their CANC mothership by now. There was another airlock that could be found near the stern and they’d have radioed for pick-up.
The ship would soon be overrun by CANC personnel— perhaps as many as fifty or sixty, judging from his recollection of the size of their out-system exploratory vessels. But there was still time to prepare…
* * *
The same axis tunnel that Reynolds was heading for was already in use by two men and a woman who’d cheerfully see him dead.
Corgan, Nate, and Ashley had sagged in exhaustion at the other end of the axis tunnel, near the front end of the ship. The big conduit tube, filling most of the tunnel, bulked in front of them, extending straight left to right. Corgan, leaning back against the curved wall, could reach out and just manage to kick it with his toe, if he wanted to.
On Corgan’s right, Ashley had fallen asleep from physical and emotional exhaustion; she was lying back against the concave tunnel wall, snoring softly, her mouth open, her hair in disarray around her head. Nate was nodding off, sitting half slumped to Corgan’s left, leaning his elbows on the missile launcher laid across his lap.
About thirty meters farther on, the axis tunnel opened up into a circular chamber under the deck of the room containing the bridge; in the circular chamber, about twenty meters high, the central conduit multiplied into a series of smaller cables, of green, flexible transparent material, and what looked to Ashley like wireless transmitters…
They’d backed off the room, back into the tunnel for a more defendable position. It seemed to Corgan they could defend this uncomfortable, constricted space. It would be hard for the xenomorph—he suspected that term would soon have to be pluralized—to sneak up on him here; hard for the CANC soldiers to get the jump on them. But it was close enough to egress that they had a possible line of retreat.
Not that he felt like they were secure. They had lost their spacecraft, they were surrounded by enemies—CANC, the xenomorphs, Reynolds. Corgan and his companions had only a few supplies, tucked into the pockets of their spacesuits. They had limited weapons—and the launchers were dangerous enough they could end up killing themselves with them as easily as killing their enemy. And they were hugely outnumbered.
Corgan sighed, feeling tired and wired both. Wishing he could nap, himself. But he had to keep watch.
He looked at Ashley, and felt a little better, though. It was irrational. But somehow, just looking at her, he felt better. It was funny. He’d lost a number of good friends, horribly killed, recently. He’d lost his ship, he’d been betrayed. He was in danger of losing Ashley and Nate and his own life—but he didn’t feel much, about those things now. The familiar insulation had shut that part of him down. He’d feel it later, he knew, if he lived through this. There was a reason they called it post-traumatic stress—because you didn’t let yourself feel it at the time. It had to come out when there was time to process it.
But another feeling, what he felt for Ashley—it was still there, stirring in him. Strong in him. Somehow it was still there because of her capacity to fight like a soldier, right beside him. Feelings of esprit one fighting companion had for another had a special dimension, with her and him. Like a man and woman in pioneer times defending their cabin, fighting off Indians. Maybe, though, it’d be better if he smothered those feelings—they could interfere with his judgment. He was reliant on her—but he was also likely to try to protect her, which was going to interfere with his combat readiness. He’d fought beside women in the past, no problem, no issues. But Ashley was different. Because of the way he felt about her; because someday…