The Complete Aliens Omnibus
Page 1
Contents
Cover
Also Available from Titan Books
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Aliens: Book I Original Sin
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Aliens: Book II DNA War
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
About the Authors
THE COMPLETE
OMNIBUS
VOLUME 5
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
THE COMPLETE ALIENS™ OMNIBUS
VOLUME 1
VOLUME 2
VOLUME 3
VOLUME 4
VOLUME 5
VOLUME 6 (JUNE 2018)
VOLUME 7 (DECEMBER 2018)
DON’T MISS A SINGLE INSTALLMENT OF THE RAGE WAR BY TIM LEBBON
PREDATOR: INCURSION
ALIEN™: INVASION
ALIEN VS. PREDATOR:
ARMAGEDDON
READ ALL OF THE EXCITING ALIEN NOVELS FROM TITAN BOOKS
ALIEN: OUT OF THE SHADOWS
ALIEN: SEA OF SORROWS
ALIEN: RIVER OF PAIN
THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATIONS
ALIEN
ALIENS
ALIEN3
ALIEN: RESURRECTION
ALIEN: COVENANT
ALIEN: COVENANT - ORIGINS
ALIEN ILLUSTRATED BOOKS
ALIEN: THE ARCHIVE
ALIEN: THE ILLUSTRATED STORY
THE ART OF ALIEN: ISOLATION
ALIEN NEXT DOOR
ALIEN: THE SET PHOTOGRAPHY
THE COMPLETE
OMNIBUS
MICHAEL JAN FRIEDMAN AND
DIANE CAREY
TITAN BOOKS
The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume 5
Print edition ISBN: 9781783299096
E-book edition ISBN: 9781783299102
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: December 2017
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
™ and © 2005, 2006, 2017 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.
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A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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THE COMPLETE
OMNIBUS
VOLUME 5
For Ellen and Mike, who support me in my madness
PROLOGUE
Earth, Ripley thought.
More specifically a long, golden strand of beach in New Zealand, the first flat, open piece of land she and her companions had spotted in their wary, wide-eyed descent. But they could hardly have chosen a more sun-dazzled, pristine place to set down.
Johner, surprised to find there was still a square meter of terra firma left undeveloped, had gone to do some exploring in a pine forest upland of the beach. That left Ripley, Call, and Vriess to secure the Betty, which hadn’t taken very long.
Now, they sat—Ripley and Call cross-legged in the sand like children, Vriess ensconced in his motorized wheelchair—and watched Earth’s setting star paint the seaward horizon a soft, spectacular vermillion.
“Unbelievable,” said Call.
She had changed her jumpsuit to conceal the hole beneath her ribs through which her stringy guts were all too visible. Somehow, Ripley thought, we’ll have to get her fixed up, though it might be hard to find someone willing to break laws to do the job.
Call didn’t seem too worried about it at the moment. She was too busy soaking in the facts of where they were and how they had come to be there.
Vriess was less comfortable about the situation, if the knot of flesh gathered above the bridge of his nose was any indication. Ripley could imagine what he was thinking easily enough.
What the hell am I going to do here? How does someone like me fit in on Earth? And so on.
Ripley was thinking the same things—and more. For instance, what would Earth’s government do when it realized who and what she was? How would the military react, now that she had escaped their secret little science project?
Would it disavow all knowledge of the stupidity that doomed the Auriga? Or would it try to snuff Ripley out before she said too much about it?
Of course, she could try to elude the government and the military. There were ways to do that even on Earth, or so she had been told.
According to Call, there were enclaves on the home world that might be willing to take them in—people who had discarded their corporate existences in favor of a life in harmony with nature. It might be comforting to live among such people.
And to forget about death for a while.
Out of necessity, it had been Ripley’s companion for years—hundreds of them, apparently. But it didn’t need to be that way anymore. She had earned a respite by destroying the alien threat.
True, Ripley had believed it destroyed before, and it had still managed to reassert itself—first on Acheron, then on Fiorina 161, and finally in the military laboratories of the Auriga. But as far as she knew, the last drops of alien blood in known space were the ones flowing in her own veins.
And for lots of reasons, she wanted them to stay there.
As for the Betty, she had been useful to them, no question, but Ripley wouldn’t care now if the ship were peddled for scrap. The Betty’s owner, a razor-edged man named Elgyn, had been thoroughly gutted by an alien on the Auriga. They could leave his ship on the beach like a monstrous shell washed up by the tide, and no one in the galaxy would balk.
Except Johner, maybe. After all, he had a shopping channel habit to feed. If he let the Betty go for nothing, he would be passing up an opportunity to line his pockets.
“Hey!” Ripley heard someone call out.
Turning, she saw Johner descending a bluff, leaving long furrows in the rose-tinted sand. Speak of the devil, she thought, dredging up a phrase from her predecessor’s life.
Because I’m not really Ellen Ripley, am I? Not anymore than the beast they dug out of me was the embryonic queen I incinerated on the prison planet.
> “You’re not gonna believe this!” Johner chuckled as he got closer. “There’s nothing there—no towers, no roads, not even a frickin’ trash can. Just trees all the way around!”
Johner was the one who had originally called Earth a shit hole. As it turned out, he had never even seen Earth firsthand. All he knew of her was what he had heard from other cargo haulers, and seen on a few old vids.
“Sonuvabitch!” said Vriess. “I was hoping to get drunk in one of them fancy revolving restaurants and throw my guts up!”
Then the two of them laughed in each other’s faces.
“That’s amazing,” Call remarked. “Not so long ago, Johner was using Vriess for target practice, and Vriess was threa-tening to kill Johner in his sleep. Now look at them.”
Ripley looked. “Maybe there’s hope for the human species yet.”
Call nodded hopefully. “And if there’s a god, a little hope also for those who just look human.” She closed her eyes and let herself fall back into the sand. “We’re going to stay here, right?”
Ripley considered the question for a moment. She had arrived at the world that was home to Ellen Ripley. The aliens she had brought with her into this century were dead. Why not stay?
Forever, maybe.
BOOK I
ORIGINAL SIN
MICHAEL JAN FRIEDMAN
1
Johner had planted himself in Byzantium Station’s dim, poorly ventilated, metal-drum excuse for a mess hall with the sole purpose of getting into a fight, so he didn’t see any reason to waste time.
“Hey,” he called out, his voice as loud and coarse and belligerent as he could make it, “you with the ponytail!”
The cry cast a hush over the room, drawing the eye of every hard-drinking, narrow-eyed cargo hauler in the place. With one exception, of course—that of the mean-looking specimen Johner was trying to piss off, who continued to hold court among his pals as if nothing had happened.
Johner cleared his throat. Then he ripped off a second remark, making sure he was two notches louder and more obnoxious this time—both qualities on which he prided himself. He had a third barb locked and loaded just in case, but it became unnecessary when his chosen victim angrily followed a companion’s pointing finger and caught Johner in his sights.
Getting to his feet, the bastard glowered across the room at his unprovoked tormentor, his face the color of murder—and then some. So far, so good, thought Johner.
Being bigger and broader than most everyone he had ever met, he wasn’t often the underdog in a fight. But the sonuvabitch giving him the evil eye was a good twenty centimeters taller than Johner and thirty kilos heavier, with a badly flattened nose, a mane of greasy, black hair gathered in a long, crooked braid, and a cascade of bulg-ing muscles.
It’s okay, Johner thought. What’s life without a challenge?
“What’d you say?” Flatnose rasped, the muscles in his neck standing out like cords.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t caught Johner’s remark perfectly the first time. It was more of a notice to all the thirty-or-so cargo haulers in the place that he was justified in the pain he was about to inflict.
Johner smiled around the wet, swampy stump of his cigar and kicked away the chair that had supported his feet. It skidded wildly across the floor and clattered into a wall.
“What I said,” he replied slowly but unhesitatingly, “is if you’re gonna spend the night giggling like a little girl, you oughtta do it somewhere people can’t hear ya. It’s just embarrassing.”
The comment was greeted with bursts of laughter. But when Flatnose cast a glance around the room, it fell silent.
Yup, Johner told himself, you made the right choice.
“By the way,” he added, plucking his cigar out of his mouth and flicking it end over end in Flatnose’s direction, “I just love what you’ve done with your nose. Where can I get mine caved in that way?”
Right on schedule, the cigar hit Flatnose in the chest and plummeted to the floor. The bastard glared at Johner a moment longer, his nostrils flaring, his eyeballs wide and bloodshot. Then he started moving in the instigator’s direction.
Johner held his hands up and rose from his chair, as if he wanted no part of the bigger man. “Crap,” he said, “don’t tell me I’ve gone and offended you. I got a real unfortunate habit of doing that.”
As he spoke, he watched Flatnose’s friends. Their hands were slipping toward their weapons—which were concealed, of course, since safety regulations prohibited weapons on the station. Not that haulers didn’t ignore safety laws on a fairly regular basis.
“I’m gonna kill you,” Flatnose snapped, tossing aside a chair standing between them.
“I guess I have offended you,” Johner concluded.
Before he knew it there was a fist in his face, snapping his head back and sending him sprawling over a table full of food. As the haulers seated around it scattered like cockroaches, Johner rolled and found his feet—just in time to absorb another bludgeoning, skull-rattling impact.
Coming up hard against a bulkhead, he tried to get his bearings. “Listen,” he said, “I shouldn’a made that remark, all right? No need to get your bloomers in a twist.”
Predictably, his choice of words made Flatnose even madder. He came after Johner with redoubled fury, his lips curled back from his teeth as if he were a wolf and Johner were his dinner.
But before he could connect again, Johner ducked— allowing Flatnose to crack his knuckles on the bulkhead instead. Pulling his fist back, the bigger man yowled with pain.
“That’s gotta hurt,” said Johner, moving at an angle away from the bulkhead so he had room to maneuver. “You want me to kiss the boo-boo?”
His eyes popping with fury, Flatnose heaved a table aside and moved on Johner again. But this time, he was a little more measured about it, a little more cautious.
“Come on,” said Johner, “don’t be shy.” He turned his cheek and pointed to it. “Go ahead, show me some love.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when Flatnose unleashed another attack. This time Johner deflected the blow with a flick of his forearm, stepped inside it, and drove home a point of his own.
It was as hard as Johner had ever hit anyone, and it sent blood flying from Flatnose’s mouth. But big as the bastard was, he didn’t go crashing to the floor.
He just stood there, a blank stare on his face, as if he were trying to remember who he was and why his face hurt so much. But Johner knew the guy wouldn’t keep blinking forever.
Before Flatnose could respond, Johner swung his foot into the bigger man’s crotch. With a squeal of pain, Flatnose doubled over. Then Johner stepped forward and launched an uppercut that flipped the bugger like an oversized flapjack.
Red stuff streaming from his mouth and nostrils, Flatnose hit the deck like a ton of ore. But Johner knew it wasn’t over—not as long as the sucker’s friends were around. When their boy was on top, they hadn’t lifted a finger to stop the fight. Now that he was stretched out on the deck, they would have business to take care of.
Right on cue, they pulled out their stun pistols and went for Johner. And though he had weapons of his own concealed beneath his jacket, it wasn’t going to save him from a three-against-one.
Not without some help.
“Come on,” he urged Flatnose’s friends, “blow me away—’cause if ya don’t, you might wind up like your sissy friend here!”
Suddenly two of the three went down face first, as if leveled from behind by an invisible hand. A moment later, Johner caught a glimpse of Vriess in his souped-up wheelchair, applying a palm-shocker to each of the fallen haulers. The poor bastards didn’t know what kind of muscle-twitching torture they were in for.
But Johner did. And though Vriess wouldn’t get any particular pleasure from applying the palm-shocker, the unabashedly sadistic Johner would get enough for both of them.
Meanwhile, one of Flatnose’s compadres was still standing. But the fall of his pals ha
d distracted him—and before he could get undistracted, he was drop-kicked by a blond man half his girth.
Krakke, thought Johner. Punctual as ever.
As Flatnose’s buddy fell, he wound up in the lap of an innocent bystander, who—less than pleased with the intrusion—grabbed him by his shirt and began pounding on him.
Which led to an altercation between two other haulers, neither of whom was associated with either Johner’s faction or Flatnose’s. Which inevitably resulted in a second skirmish, and a third.
Johner grinned. The more we do this, the better we get.
But then, haulers were always spoiling for a fight. It was simply a matter of lighting the fuse.
With both Flatnose and his buddies occupied, Johner could have just sat back and watched events unfold. But it was a party, and he wouldn’t be happy until everyone was having a good time. With that in mind, he walked over to an unsuspecting, liquor-addled spectator and sucker-punched him across a table.
“Hey,” a red-bearded hauler bellowed, “that’s my buddy, you lowlife piece of crap!”
“Do something about it!” Johner bellowed back, and braced himself for the hauler’s charge.
* * *
Still crouching silently behind a bulkhead at the intersection of two corridors, Call consulted her inner chronometer. By now, she noted, Johner should have brought things to a boil. But she hadn’t yet heard the crackle of the station’s intercom.
Call turned to look back at her burner-toting companion, who seemed a bit more feral than usual—a trick of the shadows carving hollows beneath her eyes and cheekbones. But the real hollows weren’t in the woman’s face, were they? They were in her soul.
Call frowned at the pretentiousness of her observation. Who am I to talk about souls?
Just then, the intercom around the corner came alive: “Security to the mess hall. On the double, assholes. We got ourselves a situation.”
Call craned her neck and peered past the edge of the bulkhead. She could see and hear the two security guards posted there exchanging predictably resentful remarks as they went pelting in the direction of the mess hall.