Grabbing the cup, he sucked down the rest of its contents—or rather, the portion that didn’t stream down his face and wet his chest. He could feel the moisture spreading through his tissues like an elixir. It opened his throat enough for him to speak more easily.
Trying to catch his breath as he thrust the cup back at Angie, Pandor croaked, “More.”
She gave him more and he guzzled that down as well. And a third cupful, at which point he realized it was Shepherd supplying the water. And a fourth, after which he stopped counting.
At last, he lay back into his pillow and asked, in a more lubricated voice, “What happened to me?”
Angie frowned. “I was about to ask you the same thing. Shepherd found you laid out in the supply bay with some kind of creature attached to your face.”
Pandor felt his cheek. It was irritated, tender to the touch. A creature? On my face? But outside of Rex, there were no creatures in the Domes. “Where did it come from?”
“You don’t remember?” asked Shepherd.
Pandor gave him a look. If I knew, would I have asked?
“We think it arrived in the cryo shipment,” Angie told him. “There was a big, leathery egg tucked into one end of the tube. Its top was split open and its insides were coated with a sticky, white goo—the same kind we found on the creature.”
“You have it?” he asked. “The creature, I mean?”
“It’s dead,” said Angie, “but yes, we have it.”
“I want to see it,” he told her.
“You will,” she assured him.
“How do you feel?” asked Shepherd.
“Awful,” said Pandor. “My joints especially. Like I’ve fallen down a flight of steps and hit some of them twice.”
“Probably all you need is rest,” said Angie. She glanced at Shepherd. “We’ll let him sleep.”
But Pandor didn’t feel the least bit sleepy. He said so. “What I really need is—”
“More water,” said Shepherd, anticipating.
“No,” said Pandor, “food. All of a sudden, I’ve got a pit in my stomach the size of a nickel excavation.”
“In that case,” said Shepherd, “you’re in luck. Dinner’s in forty five minutes.”
Forty five … ? Pandor shook his head. “I can’t wait that long.”
Shepherd smiled sympathetically. “Don’t worry. I’ll dig something up for you.” He glanced at Angie. “That is, if it’s all right with your physician.”
Angie mulled it over for a moment, then shrugged her narrow shoulders. “I don’t see why not. Just go slow, all right? You haven’t had anything in your stomach for a long time.”
Out of curiosity, Pandor asked, “How long exactly?”
Angie frowned. “Two days.”
Pandor swallowed. Two days? “Are you kidding?”
She shook her head from side to side. “To be honest,” she said, a pang evident in her voice, “we weren’t completely sure you were going to make it.”
“But he did,” Shepherd interjected. “And that’s the important thing. Now get some rest,” he told Pandor, “and I’ll see what I can dig up in the way of something edible.”
“All right,” said Pandor.
And he lay back in his bed. But he found he wasn’t comfortable closing his eyes—because as much as his senses told him otherwise, he still had the feeling he was drowning.
* * *
In Ripley’s recurring nightmare, she was only half-conscious, but she could feel herself locked in an intricate lattice of hot, hard flesh, a seething mass in which every seemingly random movement was balanced by some other.
Perfect harmony, she thought. If she allowed herself to drift a little deeper, she would be hopelessly and irretrievably lost.
As it was, a carefully buried part of her responded to the ebb and flow of the lattice. It longed to writhe as the bodies around her were writhing, with languid ease and an almost sexual abandon.
The scent in her nostrils was sharp, fragrant. So compelling she could barely resist it.
But she didn’t belong there. She was human, dammit.
Forcing her eyes open, Ripley looked around. She was immersed in a wall-to-wall hive full of slumbering aliens— the one to which she had woken years earlier, after she had been wrenched from the company of Call and the others and dragged down to the Hades of Auriga’s waste chamber.
The bodies around her slid restlessly, moving independently but as one—a nest of cold-blooded serpents taking pleasure in the sinuous proximity of their kind. They were alien, unknowable …
And yet unspeakably familiar.
A queen towered over the nest, imperious, angular, and alert—and burdened by a belly so immense and bloated it seemed independent of her. It was hard to believe a creature like the queen had ever been a passenger in Ripley’s body. In fact, that was the reason Ripley had been created from a smear of blood—to give birth to the queen lodged in the original Ripley before she died.
Suddenly the queen arched her spine with a to-that-point unknown kind of pain. A shriek tore from her mouth and echoed in the chamber, signaling that her long-waited birth pangs were upon her.
The nest shuddered with her. She was about to produce the next generation of killing machine, the next wave of silent, slavering death, and there was a subtle celebration of the prospect in the aliens’ rhythms.
It’s a dream, Ripley reminded herself, shrinking from the queen’s obscenely swollen belly and the ripples visible under its flesh. Just a dream. You’ve been through this before.
The queen in the waste chamber had given birth to a monstrosity—an alien male corrupted with Ripley’s human DNA, his cavernous eye sockets and gaping maw giving him the aspect of a living death’s head. Confused by the conflicting signals in his brain—Love? Protect? Kill?— he had basked in the presence of the female who gave him life, then lashed out with his claw and cut her open.
But this newborn would be different. Ripley knew that with a certainty that transcended any reasonable method of gathering and processing information.
As the queen’s progeny punctured her sac and began her ferocious birth-struggle, Ripley tried desperately to squirm away from it. But she couldn’t. It was her destiny to remain there, to bear witness to this awful and momentous event.
After all, she was the queen’s mother, in a way. Whatever came out of the alien was Ripley’s responsibility as well.
The Queen shrieked, knowing something was wrong. But she couldn’t do anything about it. She was as spellbound as Ripley, as transfixed by the birth taking place before her.
Little by little, the newborn wrestled itself out of the alien’s belly, its neck muscles standing out like steel cords, its naked pallor covered only with a veneer of viscous, yellow-white glop. Only when it had pulled its foot out and was entirely free did it look around at the world it had entered, its head making little jerking movements as it took it all in.
But this thing that had emerged into the darkness wasn’t alien at all. It was infinitely worse, infinitely colder and crueler than any alien ever spawned.
It was a man.
And not just any man. It was the one called Wren, who had schemed to grow a Ripley clone from preserved cells so he could obtain the alien gestating inside her—the bastard who had ignored the pain and infirmity of helpless, twisted beings in single-minded pursuit of his unholy objective.
Because before Wren created his perfect Ripley, he spawned a generation of failed attempts, each one wracked by its mixed alien-and-human heritage in a different way. All but one of these grotesqueries died in burbling agony.
The unlucky one lived—until Ripley stumbled on her and incinerated her. She could still see the flames devouring the poor, hideous thing, enabling her to escape the misery of her existence.
But none of that had mattered to Wren. All he cared about was the recognition he would get, the accolades that would be due him as the man who resurrected the aliens.
If Ripley had a father,
it was Wren. And she hated him as she had never hated anyone else.
Now she glared at the all-too-human monster hunkering on the queen’s punctured belly. He grinned as he had when she first met him, confident in his superiority.
Ripley’s anger rose into her throat and stuck there, leaving her to choke on it. She could tolerate a life-form driven by instinct to kill, but Wren had chosen to inflict pain and death— and in Ripley’s eyes there was no excuse for that.
In her dream-logic, she decided she couldn’t let him live to bring pain to others. She had to end his existence then and there, finally and irrevocably.
Slowly, so Wren wouldn’t notice, she slipped free from the press of alien bodies. Then she crawled across them as lightly as she could, careful not to disturb any of them.
Wren, meanwhile, turned to the queen and bestowed a big smile on her—a smile of gratitude, apparently, for giving him life. Then, like the newborn on the Auriga, he slashed her throat open with a swipe of his claw, sending her blood flying across the room in gouts of metal-eating acid.
Ripley felt it eat into her skin, gouging it to the bone. But she ignored the pain, knowing her flesh would grow back. It was her opportunity that might be lost forever.
While Wren was still gloating over his kill, she continued to negotiate the shrugging sea of bodies. Little by little, she bridged the gap separating her from her objective, until finally she came within striking distance.
Gathering herself, she sprang—but before she could sink her nails into Wren’s neck, he whirled and snatched her by the throat. Then he grinned in her face—insanely, maniacally.
“How’s our Number Eight today?” he asked her, as civilly as if they were having tea.
Ripley clawed at his hand but couldn’t budge it. He was too strong, too determined. Gradually he cut off her air, inviting the darkness to close in on her.
No, she thought. Kill you. Kill you …
Wren ran his hand across the protruding ribs of his cavernous torso, obviously pleased with what he found there, and said, “You should be very proud.”
Ripley kicked at him, tattooing his chest with her fury. But it didn’t help. Wren just stood there choking the life out of her, until the darkness closed down altogether.
But even then, she struggled. And as she did so, she heard a voice. Not Wren’s, she realized. Someone else’s …
“Ripley?” it said.
She followed it through the darkness, hunting it, drawn by it … and opened her eyes to the pale spill of starlight through the unshielded observation port by her bed.
Why am I awake? she wondered.
“Ripley?” came a voice over the intercom.
Vriess, she thought. He had pulled helm duty that night.
Instantly, she came alert. She could see everything, hear everything, smell everything. And feel everything—even the soft, almost imperceptible caress of ventilation on her naked flesh.
“What is it?” she asked.
“They’re here,” said Vriess.
Ripley knew exactly what he meant by they. “How long do we have?”
“Ten minutes. Maybe a little less.”
Ten minutes. After anticipating this moment for years. “Tell the others,” she told him.
“Right away,” said Vriess, and cut the link.
Ripley swung her legs out of bed, got to her feet, and walked across the room. En route, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror that had belonged to Elgyn, the Betty’s previous captain.
By human standards, she was impressive—tall, hard-muscled, agile—what Wren had called “an unparalleled blend of strength and coordination.” She could do things other humans couldn’t, endure punishment that would kill anyone else.
When it came to alien standards—because she could apply those just as easily—she was equally impressive. But not because of her physical attributes—the aliens didn’t have sight organs, after all. To them, she was impressive because she could think.
They liked that about her. Respected her for it.
It was what had enabled her to survive the onslaught of the aliens on the Auriga, and that of the newborn in particular. And it was what would enable her to survive the present threat.
Continuing to the other side of the room, she removed her clothes from a hook and slipped them on. Then she picked up her hand burner and tucked it into her belt.
Ready, she thought.
But then, she had been born ready. Literally.
9
Simoni woke to find Rama sitting up in bed, saying something about Ripley. At least he thought it was about Ripley. The cobwebs in his head were so thick it was difficult to say.
Talking in his sleep, Simoni thought. Again. Rama had done it almost every night.
Except he wasn’t slurring his words this time. He was speaking quickly and precisely. And as the reporter listened, he realized someone was answering.
It was Vriess. “You ask me,” said the little man, “it’s about time. Let’s get it over with.”
“My sentiments exactly,” said Rama, pulling aside his covers. “I’ll see you in a moment.”
“What’s going on?” Simoni asked.
“We’ve got company,” said Rama, reaching for the pants hanging from a nearby hook and pulling them on with some urgency. “Stay here. I’ll let you know when it’s safe to come out.”
He should know me better than that, Simoni thought. You tell me to stay somewhere, I’m leaving first chance I get.
He waited until Rama opened the door and left the room. Then he got out of bed, poked his head into the corridor, and saw which way the engineer was headed.
Toward the cockpit, apparently. Simoni gathered his clothes, pulled them on, and followed.
When he opened the door to the cockpit, three people turned to look at him. None of them seemed especially pleased to see him.
“What the hell are you doing here?” asked Vriess.
“You should have stayed in the room,” said Rama, glancing up from an instrument bank aft of the pilot’s seat.
Simoni took it upon himself to peer over Bolero’s shoulder. He could see a red blip moving from upper right to lower left on the screen of her central monitor.
“What’s that?” he asked. “A ship?”
“That’s right,” said Bolero, though her attention was clearly focused on her monitors.
“Friendly?” he wondered.
“Not likely,” she told him matter-of-factly.
He felt a chill crawl his spine. “What do they want from us?”
Bolero swiveled in her chair to face a different section of her instrument panel. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
Not very helpful, Simoni thought. But then, he didn’t think “helpful” was what she was going for.
“Anyway,” he said, “it’s okay if they’re not friendly, right? We have defenses?”
“Some,” Bolero confirmed. “Of course, the best defense would be to hightail it out of here.”
“So we’re going to run?” Simoni asked. It was only after he drew a disapproving look from Vriess that he realized how disparaging it sounded. “I mean, not that there’s anything wrong with it.”
Bolero didn’t respond. She just kept scrutinizing her monitors, her dark eyes flickering from one to the other.
But she wasn’t running. That much was clear, even to Simoni. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked.
Rama looked up at him, his expression one of annoyance. “Do me a favor,” he said, “and shut up, will you? We’re a little busy, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Sorry,” said Simoni.
But he wasn’t sorry. Whatever was going on had something to do with all the secrecy lately—that was pretty obvious. And he was determined to know what it was.
* * *
All the warning Call got, as she inspected a worn power coupling in the cargo bay, was a jolt that nearly knocked her off her feet. Then the bay doors snapped open like a pair of giant jaws�
�which was insane, because it was supposed to be a vacuum out there beyond them—and a squadron of black-masked figures swarmed through the gap.
“Shit,” she said beneath her breath.
There was no time for her to find a shock rifle, so she grabbed the nearest thing at hand—a big, carbon-covered wrench. As the intruders approached her, she swung the thing in a wild arc, attempting to hold them all at bay.
But they were too quick for her. Before she could swing the wrench back in the other direction, one of her adversaries closed with her and grabbed her arm. The next thing she knew, the wrench was clattering on the deck and the bastard had her elbow jammed up hard behind her back.
“Let me go!” Call growled.
Her captor didn’t answer. He just held her there as his companions moved past her. Opening the door that led to the ship’s central corridor, they disappeared through it.
“You bastard,” she said, her voice thick with frustration. “You won’t get away with this.”
Still no answer—not a verbal one, at least. But suddenly, the business end of a pistol was pressed against her skull.
The message was clear: Don’t move a muscle. So Call stayed where she was, silent and quiescent, and waited for events to play themselves out.
* * *
From her hiding place under the tight metal grid that served as a floor in the Betty’s engineering alcove, Ripley could see the intruders walk over her in their black, rubber-soled boots.
Two of them, she noted. Armed with shock rifles. Military trained, judging by the way they’re holding their weapons.
If she made even the slightest sound, the intruders would realize where she was and fry her, and confined as she was it would be impossible for her to escape. So she didn’t make any sounds.
She just waited until they were well past, lifted the section of grid concealing her, and set it on a neighboring section. Then she crept out of her concealment the way one of her alien forbears would have done it—silently and efficiently.
And with a fire in her blood.
It wasn’t the scent of warm, sweet meat that that drove her forward, or the need to provide host bodies for the offspring of her queen, or the instinctive joy of killing. But she felt propelled all the same.
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 9