The Complete Aliens Omnibus

by Michael Jan Friedman

  He blinked, first surprised, then perplexed, and soon looked the way you’d expect him to look.

  I pulled the wedding ring from my belt pack. “You probably want this.”

  He stared at the ring, but didn’t take it. I had to reach out, nudge him, and place the ring in his hand. He simply stood there, looking down at it.

  “Amelia dreamed of having an adventure for a honeymoon,” he admitted. “Starting our lives by doing something like . . . something . . . historic.”

  “You did,” I told him. “You had the guts to live your dream.”

  One shoulder went up, then sank again. “She died of dreams.”

  “Most dreams are dangerous,” I said. “You’re not the first.”

  He gazed at the ring until finally his fingers closed over it. “Thanks for bringing it to me. I thought about going for it. I couldn’t make myself go in there.”

  “Now you don’t have to.”

  I left him with his memories and went around a tall set of packed shelves to the next person. This aging bibliophile looked as if she lived in books and didn’t know how not to. She was thin and flat, like a cut-out. I could’ve broken her by tripping those spindly legs. Yet, here she was, chosen for some reason of value to my mother’s discerning eye, and she’d actually come all the way out here. I wondered whether she—or any of them—really comprehended the kind of life they’d been offered, and were living out here. Had she talked to them about heroism and groundbreaking glory? About being the pioneers of science? No doubt.

  Something told me my mother had left out the inglamorous bits, like having to bury your own excrement and peeing into special containers for re-purification later, then having to drink it.

  Then again, maybe she’d been completely honest and they were just jerks.

  “Hi, there. What’s your name?” I asked.

  She was afraid to answer, so she didn’t. Probably hadn’t spoken to anyone she didn’t know for years.

  “Go ahead, tell me,” I prodded. “I have to check you off the list. I’ll get in trouble if I don’t. Help me out, huh?”

  “I’m . . . Yuki. Tech and data specialist.”

  Anybody sensing a pattern? They each gave me a name, only one, and a specialty.

  “Those are nice bracelets and the other beaded things there,” I bridged. “How long have you been making those, Yuki?”

  “Beading? I was eleven and a half. My aunt and uncle were hucksters. They had booths. Carnivals, shows, festivals . . . When I was bored my aunt showed me how to string beads. I guess I was talented, guided by spirits, just had a touch. Because my hands always pick the rights things . . . glass and stone . . . hemp . . . How did you know it was me who made them?”

  “Your fingers are stained pink with the glass dust.”

  “That’s really good.” She smiled, showing little white pointy teeth. “Observant. You’re really good.”

  “Have you been making much progress in this outpost?”

  “With the beading?”

  “Actually with the aliens.”

  “The Xenos?”

  “What do you do concerning them? I mean, you’re not here to make bracelets, are you?”

  “No!” she laughed a little birdy laugh. “No, no! I mostly catalogue the new data. Dates and information, numbers, microdata analysis, complex applications . . . I process it all with programming . . . do comparisons . . . log results . . . crunch numbers . . . ”

  “Keeping you busy, huh?”

  “Oh, yes, very.”

  “So do you get out much? Go outside?”

  “Oh, never. Never. I never go out.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  “I’d get killed. They won’t let me go out.”

  “Protecting you, huh?”

  “Sure. The other tech specialist is gone.”

  “Gone . . . ”

  “Long time ago.”

  “I see . . . so they need you.”

  “I’m very important.”

  “Bet you are. I might want to talk to you later. Would that be okay?”

  “Talk about what?”

  “Maybe you could show me some of what you do here.”

  “Oh. I don’t know if I should do that.”

  “Well, we’ll see. Okay?”

  I left her, more disturbed than before. The idea that my mother would bring somebody like this woman out of the relative safety of Earth and lock her up in this bizarre clinic . . . I felt all my buttons pushing themselves.

  By the time I came around to a chubby, large-eyed black man whose age was indeterminate because of his porky face and body, which tended to distort a good judgment of age, he was already expecting to be next. He was slightly overweight, but I could tell he had been more overweight before and now had sallow, hanging jowls and wide but sallow eyes. He was tapping information into a computer module, but mostly he was watching me.

  I sat down next to him on a makeshift bench.

  “Hi. I’m Rory.”

  “You’re Jocasta’s son,” he said. He had a very friendly tone. “When I first heard of you, I thought it would be stimulating to be her son.”

  “You probably are, more than I am. What’s your name?”

  “Ethan. Crowd and traffic dynamics.”

  “Hey, that’s great. I’m a cop, so I’m always grateful for good traffic management. What do you do here?”

  “I’m a traffic control technician. I analyze and predict crowd flow. Large numbers of individual components and how they move . . . stadiums . . . highways, airways, pedestrians, traffic . . . crowds . . . ”

  “Why would you be here, though? There’s no traffic, is there? No crowds?”

  “I count things. I keep track of things.”

  “Like those scorpion finger-runner aliens?”

  “How . . . do you know about . . . ”

  “We were almost overrun by a stampede of them.”

  He pushed back in his chair, both hands fixed on the edge of the table. “You were? How many?”

  “Not sure . . . hundreds.”

  “How wide was the channel?”

  “I guess about twenty-five feet . . . why?”

  He tapped his keyboard furiously, using nine fingers, because his middle finger on the right hand was missing at the knuckle. The stump had no bandage and was pink, but not red, so the wound wasn’t recent. On the screen was a display of a twenty-five-foot-wide simulated canal. He must’ve had hundreds of such visuals programmed in, and without my telling him specifically where we had been when the crawlers assaulted us, he still pulled up a display of the right place. At least, it looked the same. Might’ve been my memory playing tricks, but I didn’t usually get things like that wrong.

  He tapped more, and suddenly the simulation was peppered with hundreds of little pencil drawings of the crawlers, once more racing at me. When the crawlers in front came through, the program automatically filled in more behind them.

  “Did it look like this?” he asked.

  “It sure did . . .”

  He looked at me with some emotion stirring. “I’ve never seen them do that before.”

  “How many are there in your simulation?”

  “If it looked like this, about seven hundred to fill the passage and bottle up at that point. You can see on the simulation that they’re not slowing down and bottlenecking, but actually climbing up the walls and pillars to keep the same pace constantly flowing. They’re working together, even though only one or two of them had a chance of implantation.”

  “Is that a sophisticated behavior, do you think?”

  “Very sophisticated. I’m going to write a paper on it.”

  “Do they always behave that way?”

  “I actually don’t know. I’ve never seen them do this before.”

  I looked at him. “This is the first stampede?”

  “The very first.”

  “Really . . . Listen, thanks for telling me this, and I’d love to see more of your research when we get
the chance.”

  He shrugged and seemed proud. “If Jocasta clears it.”

  “Oh, of course. No problem.”

  He shrugged, jogged his shoulders, nodded. “You are her son. I guess I can show you some things.”

  “I’d love to see what you do.” Actually, I got the idea he was dying to show me his work. Isolated as they were, these people never got to show off. And there was that little added factor which I didn’t fail to pick up—being Jocasta’s son just might work to my advantage. Ethan was having trouble saying no to me, and had quickly decided to say yes.

  One by one I made my way through them. Oliver, the chef. Tad, stealth tech. Sushil, microbiology. Neil, the camp director. Rusty, a chemist with a Cromwell haircut. Paul, the meteorologist and planetary geologist. Dixie, biology. It went like that. One person, one specialty, not much conversation. They either didn’t want to chit-chat, or didn’t remember how to. Or something else. Zaviero, it turned out, was some kind of entomologist savant. Bugs. He couldn’t spell his own name, but he was an encyclopedia on insects and arachnids, larvae and worms and their behavior—kind of like weevils and scorpions, right?

  The people I talked to were all in the nearest chambers, which apparently was two layers outside of the larger chamber where I’d been pulled in, and separated tunnel from tunnel by very exacting methods of lockdown. Not a sound would penetrate into the outer world, not a flicker of light, not a scent. Survival depended on very specific behavior, and generally the researchers didn’t tend to move about any more than absolutely necessary. They’d perfected the method of sitting around without being fidgety. Rusty, the round-haired chemist, told me that they practiced yoga in order to gain calmness and resist shuffling about. Except for the immediate chance of death, this was like a weird spa or a Zen retreat. He was among the friendly ones, anxious to be around us, but hesitant to talk much.

  My mother had given us forty-five minutes before dinner—slightly bizarre behavior, given the day’s activities so far, but okay, maybe they had to normalize quickly in order to not go nuts here. I was determined to use every possible minute. I zeroed in on a sprightly Oriental girl, or maybe Filipino, about twenty years old, with a China-doll haircut and the figure of a boy.

  “You’re . . . Chantal.”

  “Yes—hi.”

  “Zoology, right?”

  “And veterinary medicine.” She forced a smile, then dropped it. “I’m so sorry about your soldier friends. It’s such a tragedy.”

  “Yeah, our captain’s pretty shook up. So you’re a veterinarian?”

  “Will be some day. I’m here to learn.”

  “What kinds of things are you learning?”

  “It’s just amazing. We’ve been anatomically analyzing the Xenos and studying them physiologically. I do most of the measurements and weights.”

  “How do you study them without exposing yourselves to them?”

  “Oh, we have specimens.”

  “You meant you’ve captured some of them? Alive?”

  “Well, we get parts sometimes. You want to see our collection?”

  “I’d love to.” I started to follow her, then noticed that Tad, the stealth technologist who until now had pointedly ignored me, was also following me into the passage. I paused. “Got a problem?”

  Half-hidden in long stringy brown bangs, Tad’s eyes worked at being expressionless. “No problem. Just going along.”

  I thought he might be there to protect Chantal, playing the role of a big brother or a bodyguard. What the hell, didn’t bother me any. I wasn’t about to touch her.

  Chantal led the way through a bizarre maze of pre-fab tubular tunnels. They branched off from each other into a sophisticated anthill complex, some going upward, others down and others into curves. Sophisticated, yet still rough and spare. I was right about their following the natural cave structure. I had to be. There was no other way to set up something so complicated by digging all the tunnels themselves in a hostile area. This wasn’t an engineering crew. They didn’t have the expertise, the time, or the kind of environment where building would go unnoticed by the other residents, if you get my drift. The tunnels were oval-shaped, sectioned with ribs and connected by tough, flexible, and ultra-thin VyFlex, fancy new stuff just developed a couple of years ago for space and inhospitable environs. The whole tunnel, all fifty or so yards of it by the time we came to another chamber, packed in vacuum-sealed envelopes could probably fold up into about a square foot. These on-site living and work areas, impervious to weather extremes, moisture-proof, and easily rearranged, could be shipped in a single standard shipping container and still house hundreds of people. This team had probably packed their entire living complex into one duffel bag.

  Didn’t do much for claustrophobia, though, I’d have to say. By the time Chantal led me out of the tunnel, I was glad to be out, and glad to not have Tad pacing me from two feet behind, either. I’d had enough bad experiences in alleys that they weren’t my favorite places.

  And then we came all the way out, and I wished I were back in. I snatched at my plasma pistol.

  Before me was a full-sized adult Xenomorph. Arms flared, jaws open, it towered over us more than seven feet tall, its sausage-shaped skull turned sideways so the full profile showed itself. Long arms were down at its sides, slightly flared, its gracile feet spread for balance.

  “Don’t worry,” Chantal said. “It’s stuffed. I’m also the taxidermist.” She smiled in a pixie-ish way. “I’m really proud of it. I’ve never done anything as big as this.”

  “’Zat right . . . ”

  Overwhelmed by cold creeps, I slowly moved to the right, away from Tad, who paused there and stood like a castle guard. Not interested in him anymore, I circled the quite shocking presence towering in the middle of the chamber. As if the alien were the pivot at the center of an old-time vinyl music record and I were the edge, I moved around it, keeping as far to the circular wall as the limits of the chamber allowed. I wanted nothing to do with being near the monster.

  Yet, there it was, free for the touching, the looking, from its raptor claws to its coiled cable-like tail. In fact, the whole creature was a construction of exterior cables and armor. Its ribcage was on the outside too, as were two huge shoulder fins which looked like they might have evolved to protect the sides of that long, long head. Its back was mounted with several snorkel-like extensions that didn’t look as if they were for breathing, but hardly seemed as if they would be for anything else.

  “Does it swim?” I asked.

  “It could if it wanted to,” Chantal said, gazing with adoration at her trophy. “There’s not much fatty tissue, so it might actually have trouble staying afloat. That is, unless its native planet has heavily salinated water that helps with buoyancy.”

  “I don’t see any eyes.”

  “The visual mechanisms are inside its helmet. It doesn’t have eyes as we know them, but it does sense visually.”

  “How well does it see?”

  “Compared to us? We’re not sure yet,” she said. “All other visually oriented beings from fish to higher predators have binocular vision. These have a kind of band that goes from where its ears would be if it were us, around the nose area and back again. At least, so far that’s what we think they see with.”

  I gripped my plasma pistol as if it were a security blanket and gazed up at the monumental iron-black creature. “Well, that’s . . . that’s just . . . huge . . . ”

  The creature’s enormously long skull was actually translucent on the top and I could see right through to a complex row of arched inner segments that didn’t look like brain tissue, but like more skull.

  Ultimately the laws of circles worked to bring me all the way around to where the creature’s mouth was turned to meet me. The pointed lower jaw was dropped to show a set of piranha teeth the length of my fingers, and showing inside them was some kind of square contraption.

  “Is that a . . . tongue?” I asked.

  “That’s not a ton
gue,” Tad said, almost as if he were warning me. “It’s a second set of jaws.”

  “Really . . . What do you suppose it would need a thing like that for?”

  “We don’t know.”

  Seemed to be a pattern here. Considering they’d been here a long time and doing all this studying, I’d heard more we-don’t-knows than answers.

  “How does it survive on this planet?” I asked.

  Chantal seemed briefly confused. “Survive? What do you mean?”

  I thought about Bonnie. “What do they eat? They have to consume, right, because they’re energetic? The young have to gain mass in ratio to their growth somehow . . . and they use human bodies for reproduction, we were told, so if there aren’t enough humans, then what do they do? That’s how they spread, isn’t it? With those face-hugger things—their young?”

  “Those aren’t actually the ‘young,’” Chantal eagerly explained. She seemed happy to be able to teach. “They’re the . . . more like sperm. They aren’t the seed, but they carry the seed. They’re receptacles for seed.”

  I laughed, mostly to let off the tension of being so close to . . . that.

  “Are you saying they’re fruit?”

  She smiled. “Yes, I guess so! Once they implant the seeds, they die off. It’s their only purpose.”

  “So they carry life,” I said, “but they don’t live a life.”

  She nodded, this time in silent thoughtfulness about what I had just said.

  “So they’ll use other animals,” I went on, trying not to push her. “Not just humans.”

  “Yes, they use the indigenous population of hosts. They impregnate a creature large enough to incubate one of their young. The smallest we’ve ever recorded was twenty-eight pounds—”

  “That’s just a rumor,” Tad quickly said. “It’s not confirmed.”

  “Other animals?” I asked for clarification.

  “Oh, yes!” Chantal bubbled. “This planet is loaded with life forms. Haven’t you seen them yet?”

  “We’ve seen the weevilly things, but we haven’t run into anything except the, uh—” I made a crawly motion with my hand.

  “That’s because the Xenos are on the move. Some of the native life has learned about them and clustered in the valley. We’ve noted a buffalo-sized animal moving in herds, and several types of homeothermic life and flightless birds, as well as a possible pre-mammal up to twenty-eight pounds—”