“Ssssst.”
At the sound, which came from behind me, I spun and brandished my weapon, only to find there was nothing at which I could fire. Nothing but glass and skulch. But I knew I’d heard something. I knew.
The prospect of being stalked shot through me like electricity and that pounding heart darned near stopped. The wall of pillars, almost a solid wall before me, rippled and shimmered with such vigor that I was sure my vision was leaving me.
The planetscape before me turned flat, turned two-dimensional, and began to separate from itself, coming apart as if it were being unzipping from the top. My eyes were blinded by a sudden blue light, completely uncharacteristic for the land and sky here, obviously artificial and harsh. I wanted to stumble back, but my legs froze and now I couldn’t even see.
I made another mistake—took one hand off my weapon to shield my eyes from the blue light. In that shameful instant the weapon flew out of my grip and I was defenseless. Forces grabbed me from both sides, both arms, and I was propelled forward into a sudden coolness. The sheet of sweat on my face turned abruptly chilly and I fell forward, knocked flat by the forces at my sides. Twisting over onto my back, I lashed out with both feet and nearly panicked when my weapon was yanked out of my hands.
“It’s okay, Rory! Rory, stop! Stop! Knock it off!”
Clark’s voice. He sounded okay, in some control.
My eyes cramped at the blue light and the sudden dimness around me. Somebody hauled me to my feet. Clark leaned on me from the right, and total strangers from the left. I shook them off.
“We’re secure, Rory,” Clark told me. “We’re in a blind of some kind, hidden. We’re completely masked.”
“Did you—see those—things that went by?” I shook my head, as if that would help my eyesight. “They weren’t five feet away!”
“I saw ’em. Big suckers, aren’t they?”
“Where are the Marines?”
“We have them in our south blind, down the hill,” one of the strangers said. “Hi . . . I’m Neil, the camp director.”
I blinked, and focused on a bald head, bushy blond eyebrows, and thin lips. Camp Director?
“What is this thing?” I asked. “What are we inside of?”
“It’s a specialty cloaking hideaway,” Neil said. “Our secondary camp site. The drapings of the camp are made up of thousands of micro-projectors that broadcast constant video of the landscape. It also masks sound and light. It’s a good thing you moved close enough for us to pull you in. We don’t want to give our position away.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” I asked.
I pushed Clark aside to look, as well as I could manage, at the people who had until now been mysteriously absent. The researchers of the Malvaux Special Observation Expedition Team.
And there they were, seven . . . eight of them, standing before me. Like toddlers or gorillas, they gawked at me without the slightest social restriction. The rangy gaggle of researchers were all dressed in worn khakis, torn red rags in the shape of ponchos, or some kind of neon blue jumpsuit that I didn’t recognize as field gear. How anybody could skulk around on a red glass planet in a blazing blue suit, I had no idea. Several of them wore those bracelets and anklets made of the glass-beaded macramé I’d seen on the body in the hut.
And here they were, bearded, scruffy, beaded, hair grown out, no combs in sight, faces pale from lack of exposure. Like missionaries living in a remote jungle tribe, they’d gone native.
And right in the middle of them, as if standing a post, was my sister. For a second I didn’t recognize her. Her hair was twice as long as the last time I’d seen her, and braided in three long strands, one hanging over each shoulder, and, as she turned to glance deep into a man-made corridor to her left, another braid down her back. Rebecca of Scarybrook Farm.
“Gracie,” I said. “Hey.”
She scoured me with cold eyes. “You’re out of your mind to come here.”
“You too. Where’s M’am?”
“She’s on her way from the south entrance, with your clunky asshole clubfooted triggerhappy military hit-men whose lives we just had to save at our own expense.”
I sighed in relief. “They’re not dead? How many?”
“Two. And they should be, along with you and your klutzy pal, here.” She gestured at Clark, who dipped his head in embarrassment.
Only two. There were three Marines out—MacCormac, Carmichael, and Brand.
“Where are they?”
“Right here, sir!” Private Carmichael’s voice drew my attention to a man-sized opening in the blind’s back wall. This whole room, which seemed like a central gathering area, was maybe twenty feet by twenty, probably made to fit a natural opening in the cave formation. My mother was always good at making use of existing land features. There were three tunnel openings, leading off who-knows-where. The place didn’t seem all that secure, shielded from the dangerous outside by basically a hightech curtain, but then survivalists learn to be comfortable with flimsy cloaks.
Carmichael came out first, grinning with fascination at our surroundings, then MacCormac, and right beside MacCormac’s big over-dressed bulk was the diminutive and yet dominating form of my mother, the elegant and attention-commanding luminary Jocasta Malvaux.
She was smaller than I remembered. Growing up with her, she’d always seemed about six feet ten. One day as a teenager I overtook her, and discovered that she just acted tall. Walked tall. Made people believe she was tall. She had golden hair done like an old-time movie star, shoulder-length and off the brow. She was one of those people whose bone structure and complexion, the set of her lips and brows were classic enough that she could step out of a sauna, half melted, and look stunning. Everyone in the room became very still, as if royalty had entered, and she played off that. Being the center of attention was her best thing. Her glamorous and gracile elegance came out in a magical charisma that made people want to be near her and “yes” her and somehow chip a word of approval from her. Even unadorned in this wilderness environment, she was striking. Face to face with her, I was suddenly eight years old again.
“You wanted him,” Gracie said to her. “Here he is. Now how do we get rid of him?”
Our mother never took her eyes off me. Her expression was complex, a combination of nostalgia and dismay. She spoke in that scholarly and slightly removed Quebec accent that was almost not there at all, but just present enough to punctuate her words with a francaise patina.
“Graciella,” she lubricated, “be more welcoming to your only brother.”
Gracie shrugged. “Yes, M’am.”
Our mother created a special zone for herself as she moved forward through the gaggle of researchers, to approach—but not too close—me.
“Rory,” she began. “Are you well, dear?”
“M’am,” I greeted flatly. “Why didn’t you answer our hails when we first arrived?”
She tipped her head. “Anger at first sight.”
“We’ve lost people already. They’d still be alive if you’d spoken up.”
“We don’t run the wide-range transceivers unless we have to. We’ve been in seclusion for months. Why waste the energy?”
“And nobody heard or felt the ship land?”
“Actually, no. We were napping.”
I sensed Clark and the two Marines as they measured every nuance, and decided I couldn’t win. She’d have an answer for everything.
“Well, roll everybody out of bed and give me a head count,” I said, “because we’re leaving now.”
“We have to launch soon, Mrs. Malvaux,” Clark instructed without embellishment. “Every additional minute on this pla-net is risky.”
“The sooner, the better,” she agreed. “But you won’t be making any actions outside the blind yet. The Xenos are on the move. You have to wait until after sunset, when they go underground for the ambient radiation during the cool night. Then, we’ll be happy to accommodate your hurry. Your appearance here has compromised our work.�
�
“How’s that?”
“Your clumsy arrival has risked our carefully constructed veil of secrecy and stirred up the local population of animal life. We’ve been in ideal seclusion for many months, Captain. Time and great care have been taken to retreat into the environment so efficiently that the Xenos have forgotten we’re here at all. Unable to find us, they ultimately went back to their natural behavior and we’ve been able to study them interacting with each other instead of int—”
“How many of your team were killed,” I interrupted, “before those creatures ‘ultimately’ went back to nature?”
My mother’s sophisticated eyes narrowed slightly, as if scolding me. The look was too familiar. “Your ship’s landing and your crass actions have tipped them off to our presence here. You’ve disrupted months of exacting behavior on our parts. We’ve learned to completely disguise our presence h—”
“I want to know, and right now, how many out of the original fifty-two are still alive. Tell me now, M’am. This isn’t a visit.”
She paused. “You’ll interpret the information negatively.”
“You’re avoiding the inevitable.”
“It’s my responsibility to avoid misunderstanding of our work here. There are always casualties.”
“How . . . many . . . are dead?”
“M’am,” Gracie uttered.
I couldn’t tell whether she meant to encourage or to warn.
“Nine,” my mother said. “We’ve lost nine.”
“The same nine we found at the camp? That nine?”
Her cheeks flushed, but only a little. I thought I might have caught her in a lie, and watched the others as a barometer. Nobody else flinched. I scanned them quickly, looking for bad poker faces.
“Nine,” she said.
“How did they die? We saw what happened to the bodies inside the huts. How did they get caught so quickly? And what happened to the ones outside?”
“They made mistakes,” she told me openly. “This environment takes getting used to.”
“What kinds of mistakes? We need to know right now, so we don’t make them.”
My direct questions bothered everybody, I could tell. This wasn’t the socially approved norm, where you walk in and take a while to get to know what’s going on and gradually inquire about a few things at a time. Her followers were shocked by my grilling of this iconic woman whom they so completely respected and whom they asked for permission to ask a question before asking it.
My mother kept her cool, though I could sense the seething fury below the surface, only by experience.
“Our chemist, Amelia Forbish, went out without her scent masking. Donald Kent and Richard Hochleitner went out after her without checking the area first for stalkers. Several weeks later, Samantha North tried to make an impression upon us by setting up more video feeds than she had been assigned. She was always too bold. Niko Refinado went out alone after we made a policy of a buddy system. He never respected them enough. He made mistakes. Then he made one too many. It goes on like that. I will give you all the information you need for your records. You have no cause to cross examine before there has been an examination.”
She was good. I couldn’t think of a response. It’s hard to grill a person who is seeming to cooperate.
“The arrival of your ship has compromised our work,” she went on. “Hiding will be much harder now that you’ve tipped them off. We made hiding an art. A way of life. If you’d kept away, we could’ve gone on for years. Now we have to deal with this setback. Unfortunately, we do have something of yours.” She turned to a very large bearded gentleman with a decidedly Bigfoot countenance, “Zaviero, show them.”
Bigfoot glanced at Clark, at me, then MacCormac and Carmichael. “You sure they won’t get mad?”
“Well, of course they’ll get mad, dear,” Ma’m said soothingly, but logically. “Go ahead. They won’t be mad at you.”
Could this prehistoric lox actually be a scientist of some kind? Or was he just the bouncer?
“Just don’t want anybody to be mad.” Zaviero stomped to a storage area with several tote-able containers with the same footprint, many covered with black tarps. He pulled back one of the tarps with a swish, like a magician’s assistant making a dramatic reveal.
There, on top of a group of unevenly stacked containers, lay Marine Private Brand, dumped there on his side. His eyes were closed and his mouth slightly open, as if he were sleeping. He wasn’t. Around his throat was a long, segmented, whiplike cord, very familiar since we’d just had a few hundred of them whipping at us during the crawler stampede. At the end of the garrote hung a dead face-hugger, its fingers hopelessly broken in several places so that they splayed out in every unlikely direction.
Clark moaned. “Another one . . . ”
“How did this happen?” MacCormac demanded, boiling with rage. “Did this thing kill him?”
“We think they killed each other,” my mother explained. “He must have been a very good soldier to break all its limbs while it was strangling him. You should be proud.”
MacCormac grimaced in bitter dismay. He seemed tragically helpless.
I stepped closer, but Zaviero suddenly moved to block me from getting too close to the body. He seemed to want to protect the dead man from disrespect or disturbance.
“Where was he found? Inside or outside the ship’s protection grid?”
“We know nothing about your ship’s blasters,” my mother denied. “He was found at the bottom of a gradient. He seems to have fallen while fighting for his life. He almost tumbled right into one of our holographic projectors. It would’ve been a disaster for the rest of us if he had. He could’ve compromised our entire southern blind system. Gracie, it’s time for dinner. Oliver, make sure we have enough for our guests and that they have a chance to clean up. I’m sorry there’s neither water nor is there hot food, but we can offer cleansing methods and sustenance. We eat only indigenous plant fibers and curds. We take protein supplements, but there’s no cooking because of the chance of compromising our scent masks.”
Clearly disturbed and out of his element, Clark fell back on his responsibility as the flight captain of this mission. I felt for him as he cleared his throat and forced himself to speak. “Mrs. Malvaux, I have a court order—”
“Please,” she said sharply. “No discussions yet. We must eat dinner. You must understand, Captain, that we keep our sanity through our human social rites. We eat, we pray, we retain our humanity. You cannot go back to your ship until there is quiet in the countryside. Until then, please try to relax and mourn your loss. He will be disposed of in our way, appropriately, and in a sanitary manner that attracts no attention. Oliver is our chef and will be serving dinner in forty-five minutes.”
A little spooked at my mother’s ability to speak so fluidly of dead people and dinner in the same breath, Clark shifted on his feet. “Well . . . I’ll have to notify my chief mate about what’s going on.”
“You may not make any communication,” my mother told him. “The Xenos have methods of wave detection. We must not take that risk. Our lives depend upon silence. Your crew in the ship will not venture out on their own, correct?”
“They’re not supposed to . . .”
Clark eyed me. I made a little warning scowl. I knew he expected me to ask her about the people in the huts, why they were locked inside. I didn’t want to play that hand yet. There was too much emotion involved—the image of watching each other go through the abomination of being used as an incubator for the ulcerous little alien larvae, or whatever they were, watching your friends’ bodies blown open and the pests scurrying out to freedom. It was a wonder they hadn’t all hanged themselves.
“Then, fine. They’ll wait.” She made some nods and motions to her staff which I couldn’t interpret. Some people stayed, while others disappeared through the three passages that linked this chamber to whatever else they’d built. I felt like I was inside a stomach. The dim place, lit by blue and whi
te lanterns, was particularly unwelcoming. They seemed to settle down, but weren’t comfortable with our presence. One by one they found some way to occupy themselves with whatever they did here to pass time, or work, or whatever.
MacCormac and Carmichael stood side by side, looking at their dead comrade. Brand lay there on his side, guarded by Zaviero, in death with his assailant, looking horrendously like a child curled up with a favorite toy.
“One more for your count,” Clark rasped at me. “Hope you’re keeping track.”
* * *
The chef, Oliver, and two or three others began to set up a dining table made out of boxes and panels. I found it a little Jocasta-esque that they had a “chef” and not just a “cook.” She had an odd talent for glorifying the menial. I think it was a way to elevate people in their own eyes, make them think she thought they were more valued by her than they actually were.
They obviously did this every night, like a ritual. There wasn’t much chit-chat, but that might have been because we were here. MacCormac and Carmichael settled down in desolation and waited out whatever would come next.
I watched all this for a few minutes, and decided to work the room. I started with a sad-sack character with a bad left eye. His right eye did the looking, and his left one kind of went off on its own, but that wasn’t what had drawn me to him. He was dressed in the red rags with some kind of glittering dust on them, which I assumed was some kind of crude camouflage, not exactly the height of technology. Probably one of the first things they developed, and now it had become fashion. Or just comfort, like a bathrobe.
The sad man just stood there uneasily as I approached him, and I flashed back to my days as a superskyway cop. Like somebody who didn’t know why he’d been stopped, he seemed both guilty and bewildered.
“Hi,” I said, as friendly as possible. “I’m Rory Malvaux. What’s your name?”
He hesitated, moving his mouth some, as if he weren’t sure it was okay to speak to strangers. “Diego . . . bacteriology and virology.”
“Funny last name.” When he didn’t smile, or even react, I ignored my own joke and let him off the hook. “Sorry about your wife.”
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 32