So why do you write? Simoni asked himself.
“I guess,” he said, “it’s because I like it when people listen to me. Hardly anybody did that when I was growing up, except when I knew something they didn’t. So I found things out and had some fun talking about them. I still do.”
It surprised him that he could figure it out so quickly. But then, the answers seemed to be lying there just below the surface, waiting for him to pluck them out.
“For fun?” Ripley echoed.
“More or less,” he said. “I mean, I get paid too. Pretty well sometimes, depending on what I come back with.”
Her nostrils flared. “And this time, you were going to come back with me.”
Well, yeah, Simoni thought. But he didn’t believe it would be a good idea to say so. On the other hand, silence didn’t seem like such a good idea either.
“That’s right,” he said at last
She stared at him for a long time, making him wonder what she was going to do to him. But in the end, she didn’t do anything. She just turned and left, leaving Simoni feeling exactly as she had found him.
Unsatisfied.
* * *
As Elijah Pandor manipulated the controls of the freestanding console in the center of the colony’s supply bay, he reflected that he wasn’t the sort of man to be bothered by someone else’s shortcomings—even when that some-one was as presumptuous and irresponsible as Tristan Benedict.
So when Pandor got the call to check out the cryo tube from Gamma, he agreed to do it, no questions asked. Even though he knew Benedict had been asked to do it first.
It wasn’t the first hook Benedict had managed to wriggle off and it wouldn’t be the last—not as long as Philip insisted on treating his old friend better than he treated his other colleagues. Pandor didn’t understand it. Benedict wasn’t any nicer to Philip than he was to anyone else, but Philip continued to coddle him.
This time, at least, there was a bright side to Benedict’s shenanigans. Instead of replacing filters in the ventilation ducts, as Pandor did every six weeks to the day, he would be the first to see what goodies Gamma had sent them.
With that enticement in mind, he watched as the doors to the airlock below him swung open, allowing a metal-alloy cradle to elevate until it came flush with the deck. The silver cryo tube, which was secure in the cradle’s embrace, glinted in the light from the overheads.
Still working at his console, Pandor unfolded a pair of mechanical claws from the ceiling and used them to relieve the cradle of its burden. Then he had the claws pivot on their ball-and-socket joints and place the tube on a stainless steel gurney.
Even before the cradle finished descending into the airlock and the claws finished retracting into the ceiling, Pandor was peering at the red-lettered readout that served as the tube’s manifest.
Violets, he thought, noting the first item on the list. Gogolac would be happy. She had a thing for violets—said they reminded her of a man she had once dated.
Not that Pandor believed Gogolac had ever dated anyone, in the presence of violets or anything else. However, he wasn’t going to be the one to cast doubt on the woman’s story. There was enough friction in a colony as it was, enough bickering over things that hardly mattered. The last thing he wanted to do was add to it.
Pressing a dark blue stud beside the readout, he deactivated the cryogenic system that had preserved the plants in transit. Then he pressed a second stud, this one a bright green, to open the tube.
As the hatch swung open, there was a soft exhalation of moist, fragrant air. Yes, the botanist thought, definitely violets. It was only after the hatch was open all the way that he saw there was something else inside besides plants.
It was on the end of the tube to his right. An ovoid, almost too big for the space the tube could afford it. It was blue-black in color and leathery in texture, with ridged patterns running from top to bottom. At first, it seemed to the botanist that it was a melon of some kind.
Then he reconsidered.
Because as he looked on, something happened to the top of it. The leathery surface began to split in an x-shape, as if some invisible knfe were slicing it open. Then the resulting flaps—all four of them—folded back at the same time, revealing something inside.
It was white and sticky-looking. And lumpy. Pandor bent over to get a better look at the stuff.
“What have we here?” he asked out loud.
Suddenly, something leaped up at him from the ovoid, clamping itself over his face. Staggering backwards, he felt himself falling, felt his head hit something hard.
Get it off! he thought, and tried to rip it away with his hands.
But it wouldn’t be dislodged. The harder he tugged, the harder it fought to maintain its grip.
A spurt of panic rising in his throat, Pandor gave into it and started to scream. But he had to stop almost as soon as he started—because something was trying to force its way into his mouth.
No! he thought desperately, knowing he would choke to death if he let it get inside.
Despite the way the thing clung to his face, he was able to draw air through his nostrls and down his throat. This will work, he assured himself. If I can breathe, I can last until someone finds me.
Pandor was beginning to find comfort in that hope when he felt a terrible pressure around his throat. It was as if someone were trying to strangle him. Someone powerful.
Frantic, he moved his hands down to where the pressure was and felt a hard, muscular tendril. Clawing at it, he attempted to loosen it so he could breathe again.
But it wouldn’t give an inch. It kept strangling Pandor, kept starving him for life-giving breath. Finally, he couldn’t keep his lips pressed together anymore. He had to part them, if only a little, and try to drag oxygen down his tortured windpipe.
Only a little …
But it was enough for the thing digging at his mouth to insinuate itself between his lips. Too late, he tried to clamp them down again. But by then, the thing had forced its way inside and was filling his mouth with its hard, insistent probing.
Pandor began to gag, his body reflexively trying to repel the invader. But it didn’t do him any good. And a moment later, drowning in horror and lightheaded from lack of air, he felt the appendage slither snakelike down his throat.
Ohmygod, he thought, get it out, please get it out—
* * *
Simoni was sitting on his bunk, talking to a sleeping Krakke—who wasn’t much more taciturn than a waking Krakke—when Call poked her head into the room.
“Hey, Simoni,” she said. “Come with me.”
He didn’t feel much like getting off his bunk. But he got the distinct impression that Call wanted to tell him something—and if that was the case, he was more than willing to listen.
“Where are we going?” he asked, dropping to the deck.
“The cargo bay,” Call told him. “I’ve got some work to do, some welding. On a ship like this, there’s always some damned thing that needs welding.”
He would take her word for it.
Call didn’t say anything as they made their way aft along the ship’s main corridor. Simoni didn’t either, at least until they got to the cargo bay.
“In the interests of full disclosure,” he said without preamble, “I don’t know the first thing about this stuff. So if you think I’m going to be helpful at all—”
“I don’t,” said Call, putting that concern to rest.
“Then I’m here for … some other reason?” Simoni asked hopefully.
Call didn’t answer. Instead, she went over to a control board set into the bulkhead and drew her finger across a touch-sensitive screen, which caused an empty metal table to slide across the room on a recessed track.
Patience, he told himself.
“The other day,” Call said at last, “Ripley asked you about your writing. You wanted to know why.”
Simoni felt a pang of reporter’s curiosity in his gut. “That’s right,” h
e responded, but not too eagerly.
With a pull of a toggle switch, she lowered a chain holding a piece of heavy machinery—something Simoni couldn’t have identified in a thousand years—until it settled onto the table. Then she moved to the table and unfastened the chain.
“It probably struck you as odd,” said Call, “that she would give a damn.”
“Well,” Simoni told her, “in all honesty, it did. She seems pretty focused on what’s important to her, and I was sure I didn’t fall into that category.”
“Strictly speaking,” said Call, “you don’t.”
Crossing the room to a compartment like the one the reporter hid in when he came aboard, Call removed a mask and a laser torch. Donning the former and igniting the latter, she approached the troublesome machine part.
Holding his hand up to block the glare of the torch, Simoni asked, “You always talk in circles this way?”
“Sometimes,” she said without the least hint of irony in her voice. “Anyway, it’s true she doesn’t give a damn about much. But every now and then, something gets her attention.”
Get to the point already, he pleaded. But he did so silently, recognizing that some fish had to be reeled in slowly.
Call frowned as she got to work, sparks flying where her torch hit the metal of the machine. “She wasn’t always like this, you know. She was human once. Completely human.”
“I know,” Simoni told her. I read the same books you did, remember? I know how she lived—and how she died.
“When Ripley signed on with the Nostromo, she was happy to be serving as warrant officer of such a large, commercially important ship. It was a big step for her. But she was conflicted, because she was leaving something equally important back on Earth.
“A daughter. Her name was Amanda.”
Simoni went numb. He’d had no idea.
“Amanda was ten years old when Ripley left. Ripley promised she would be back for the girl’s eleventh birthday. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out the way she planned. Her escape vehicle—”
“The Narcissus,” he bubbled, unable to stop himself.
“—went through the core systems undetected, and was picked up by a deep space salvage team. By the time Ripley was returned to Earth, it was fifty-seven years after she left the Nostromo, and her daughter had already passed away.”
Simoni shook his head. This is gold. This is frickin’ platinum. A daughter, for godsakes.
“As you can imagine,” said Call, “Ripley’s heart broke when she heard the news. Her daughter had lived a lifetime never knowing what happened to her mother— maybe hating her for never coming back. And Ripley never had the chance to know Amanda as an adult. She had missed the good times, the bad times, all of it.
“For a while,” said Call, “all Ripley did was dig through records, trying to learn what she could about Amanda— how she lived, who she loved, what she did with her life. What Ripley found was just a tease. Her daughter had married early in life, but divorced before the marriage could produce children. She had lived in a number of places, all of them on Earth. And she had died of a debilitating disease for which a cure was discovered seven years later.”
Simoni still didn’t understand why Ripley had asked him those questions. But he managed to keep his damned mouth shut, exercising all the patience he could muster.
“There was one other thing,” Call continued. “Amanda had worked for years as a journalist.”
Pay dirt, he thought.
Ripley’s daughter, whom she hadn’t seen since she left as warrant officer on the Nostromo, was a writer just like Simoni. It all made sense now.
Call paused in her work to look at him. “You understand why she might be curious about what you do.”
Simoni nodded. “I do now. Thanks.”
Call shrugged. “Don’t mention it.”
But he would. It was his job to mention everything.
* * *
When Aidan Shepherd was ten years old, his tomcat Daffy got himself lost in a mining tunnel. Though it was against regulations for children to enter the tunnels, his father— the colony’s chief of security—agreed to let young Aidan join the search.
It wasn’t the first time a pet had wandered downside. They were almost always discovered safe and sound, if a little strung-out from the experience. But then, even animals seemed to get nervous when they were left in the dark long enough.
Shepherd wasn’t sure when he realized his cat wasn’t coming home, or what tipped him off. Maybe it was the long, echoing silence of the tunnel, or the increasing pessimism in the expressions of his father’s colleagues, or the way the cold started seeping into his bones.
By the time they found the blood, he was certain of it. Something bad had happened. Something horrible.
Minutes later, he found out how horrible.
Daffy had ripped his belly open on a rusted bolt protruding from the floor of the tunnel. Little by little, his entrails had uncoiled and spilled out, but he hadn’t given in to the crippling reality of his plight. He had kept going, dragging his insides behind him for what looked to be fifty meters, until finally his heart gave out from loss of blood.
Shepherd had loved that cat. His eyes filled with tears and his throat closed painfully, but he couldn’t bring himself to touch Daffy. He was too glassy-eyed, too still, and the filthy red thing that had come out of him was too much for Shepherd’s child’s mind to contemplate.
From that time on, whenever someone was lost— either animal or human—a part of Shepherd feared the worst. Never mind the fact that all the colony’s subsequent searches had had happier endings. The little boy within him could still see his cat lying in a puddle of his own dark blood.
So why had Shepherd gone into security work like his father? Why had he placed himself in the position of seeking lost souls in obscure places? Maybe to prove to himself that he could. Or to assure himself that what happened to Daffy was an aberration, unlikely to repeat itself.
Especially in the Domes, where there was so little to fear in the way of injury and even less to fear in the way of violence. In the twelve years Shepherd had served there as safety officer, the worst he had seen was a non-displaced fracture of a leg bone—the result of some inebriated, late-night tree climbing.
And as he guided his all-terrain flivver through a palmetto grove, he had no reason to believe this instance would be an exception—even though Pandor hadn’t filed his report on the contents of the cryo tube, or responded to Philipakos’s attempts to contact him. More than likely his comm unit had simply malfunctioned, leaving him unaware that anyone was calling.
Yeah, that’s it. In fact, Pandor had complained about his unit, hadn’t he? And hadn’t Erica fixed it?
Of course, that was nearly a year ago. Erica was one of the few who had left the colony of their own volition, in her case because of an opportunity at an Earthside research lab.
Others came to the Domes intending to spend a year or two, but ended up staying somehow. And staying. And staying.
Like me, Shepherd thought.
Safety jobs weren’t easy to get, especially when one was starting out. Philipakos had had an opening and Shepherd had jumped at it. But he had figured on staying for only eighteen months, then looking for something more challenging.
Except Philipakos and the others had grown on him, and when the time came to leave he couldn’t do it. He had become a part of the Domes, like the rest of them.
Up ahead, the entrance to the supply bay loomed through the trees. Like the passages that gave access from dome to dome, it was a six-sided affair; unlike them, it was twice as high as Shepherd was tall, so the botanists could move larger items in and out of the bay.
There was one other difference between this passage and the others: the doors didn’t retract at the tripping of a proximity sensor. They had to be unlocked. Otherwise, Rex could have gotten in on his own, and the idea of letting a dog loose in the supply bay wasn’t a good one for him or anyone else.
Bringing the flivver to a stop just shy of the doors, Shepherd turned his engine off. Then he went over to a keypad set into the doorframe, punched in the requisite five-digit code, and watched the doors slide apart.
At first, he didn’t see anyone in the bay—just the open cryo tube in its metal-alloy cradle. It was only after he went inside that he found Pandor.
He was stretched out on the deck, his head cocked at an awkward angle. It was hard to tell because his face was turned away and covered with one of his arms, but he looked as if he might have broken his neck.
Crap, Shepherd thought, rushing to Pandor’s side.
He couldn’t tell how the botanist had hurt himself. No sign of a mechanical malfunction, he thought, his training kicking in. No sign that anything came loose above him.
But he could worry about the cause of the problem later. At that moment, he had to help Pandor.
Kneeling beside him, Shepherd reached under the botanist’s collar for his carotid artery, to get a reading on his pulse. But as he did so, he felt something bony— something that didn’t at all feel like the skin of a man’s neck, living or dead.
Pulling Pandor’s collar away a bit, the safety officer saw something thin and white and sharp at the end. What the hell … ?
Taking it between thumb and forefinger, he tried to remove it. But it wouldn’t budge. In fact, it seemed to adhere to Pandor’s skin that much more stubbornly.
And now that he looked at it more closely, it appeared it was part of something bigger. Something Shepherd couldn’t see because Pandor’s arm was draped over his face.
Knowing he wasn’t going to like what he saw, he took the botanist’s arm and gently repositioned it. Then he turned Pandor over until he was facing the ceiling.
My god, Shepherd thought.
Pandor’s face was completely covered with what looked like a big, pale spider. It had a series of skeletal ridges along its back, eight spindly legs that seemed to have locked themselves into place along the sides of Pandor’s head, and a tail that had wrapped itself around Pandor’s throat.
Shepherd swallowed. Hard.
“Elijah?” he said. “Can you hear me?”
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 7