“Hi.” Neil, the camp “director,” and I would’ve like to know what kind of directing he did, came around a stack of drum containers. “Can I show you around?”
Okay, maybe I’m too suspicious, but I wondered if he’d been sent by my mother to keep his eye on us. Would he show us everything or was there a tacit list of things he was allowed to show us?
Yeah, yeah, paranoid. Maybe. I’d lived with Jocasta Malvaux a lot longer than any of these folks had.
“Sure,” Clark took up the offer. “We’re just standing around.”
“What I’d like to know,” I asked, “is how you knew where we were when you gave us directions to come down the flume.”
“Oh, that’s easy.” Neil seemed relieved by the question. I couldn’t interpret that. Not yet, anyway. “The displays are right over here.”
He led us through a maze of stacked containers, stacked higher than I was tall. Inside a quartered-off cubby which could be seen from the dinner area but not from the projector curtain, was a seating area of three inflatable chairs arranged around a shimmering scaffold of viewing monitors. I counted twenty-six monitors, each the size of a lady’s evening bag, each showing a different location on the landscape out there. The quality of the pictures wasn’t very good, often tending to flicker or become grainy. The equipment might not be holding up to the environment, but that was just a guess. One screen showed the nose section of the Vinza where she sat in her parking place. Another showed one of her stabilizer wings and part of her tail section. A third showed the camp huts where we’d found the dead people. So they’d been able to see us all along. A shiver ran across my shoulders, knowing that they had seen us and not spoken up. Rather than make trouble about it now, I kept my mouth shut. A glance from Clark made me wonder if he wasn’t thinking the same thing.
Other screens showed various locations I didn’t recognize, pathways, entrances to caves, views from inside caves out onto the red land, views from halfway up pillars that looked down upon tracts of land. Some showed different kinds of terrain than I’d seen so far—more lush areas with brushy yellow grasses, high red and blue ferns, and stick structures that looked like trees in winter, except they were white, not brown. There was an unrestricted quality to these places, like children’s drawings of places they’d never seen.
“How are you getting these pictures?”
“We’ve been gradually installing video equipment throughout the terrain, one or two at a time. They’re curious, but after a while they start to ignore the new installations.”
I made a sound of admiration. “Must be dangerous to secure cameras in some of those places.”
“Oh, it’s dangerous. We lost six people just setting up the cameras.”
“Six, huh . . . ”
I might’ve pursued that, but something else caught my eye and stiffened my limbs. On four or five of the monitors, there were adult aliens moving along through a slight mist rising to their shoulders. They moved mostly in shadow, and in single file. Some rolled, some walked.
“Wow, look at ’em,” Clark murmured.
“How close are they?” I asked
Neil sighed. “They’re still in the vicinity, but moving way. That’s the tribe that walked past you while you were under the slab. It’s a good thing you hit the ground when you did. If they’d seen you, I bet they’d have found our opening here. Usually they don’t pass this close.”
“Are they migrating or what?” Clark asked. “Hunting?”
“We’re not sure why they’re moving around so much. Usually they don’t move much during the day. Lately they’ve been . . . hey . . . who’s that?”
We followed his gaze to the upper right corner of screens. Two screens in the top corner showed movement. Humans . . . three of them, dressed in standard gear except for the single Marine. It was Edney.
With her was Pocket, the bosun, loaded down with a medical backpack, and leading the way was the last person in the universe that I had wanted to come out of that ship again.
“Bonnie!”
While we stood there frozen in shock that they had dared to leave the ship again and were outside the protective area, our horrors were confirmed as we saw, as we hid here in our protective nest, a single face-hugger crawl up around the trunk of a pillar. After it, came two more. Then two more. The spider-legged fingers moved one at a time, a sight somehow even more ghastly than when they moved quickly.
I grabbed Clark by the sleeve. “They’re being stalked!”
6
“Get out of my way!”
I shoved Neil aside, drew my plasma pistol, and veered through the stacked containers toward the projector curtain. Through it I could just see Bonnie step into the vicinity some thirty feet out from the entrance, on the other side of the slab with its low-lying hiding place that had saved my life.
“Stop!” Neil called, but he couldn’t hold Clark and I was already dodging for the projector screen.
“I see ’em, I see ’em!” Tad came shooting through the east tunnel and slammed right into me. His neon-blue suit made him look like a cartoon superhero. With strong purpose he knocked me back. “Stay here!
“T’hell with you!” I found my feet and followed him out the projector curtain.
Behind me I heard Clark battle with Zaviero and Neil, who were managing to stop him from following. I heard him shout my name—or part of it—before someone muffled his mouth.
As I passed through the stealth curtain, there was somebody at my side—young Carmichael, the baby Marine, with his big ballistic weapon.
There must be twenty things wrong with what I was doing, but I didn’t take the time to analyze. I plowed out into the black drifty skulch and ran up the grade behind Tad. Carmichael was so close to me that my heels kicked the cereal-like skulch up into his face. He held his weapon in one hand and used the other hand to claw his way up the flume and keep up with me. I wanted to shout a warning—should I dare? Would noise turn a stalking into an attack?
During those moments between watching the monitor and gaining the crest of the flume, I almost had a coronary with panic. I couldn’t see whether Bonnie and Pocket and the brave but wounded Edney had been hit yet and the suspense practically pulled my skin off. All I could see in my mind was MacCormac as he blew poor Axell’s head off, along with the face-hugger that had clamped onto him. The idea that Bonnie—that Pocket—
I ran harder, afraid that just our frantic scramble was trumpet enough to set off an attack. In my periphery I saw Tad pull a blue neon hood over his head, then all the way down over his face until he looked like a big blue posable artist’s mannequin. That’s when we heard the FOOM-crack of Edney’s weapon being fired over the hill. It had started.
I ran so hard that he and I crested the hill together despite his head start, with Carmichael, in the flower of almost teenaged strength, right behind us.
Only ten feet from us, Bonnie and Pocket were huddled against the trunk of a tree-sized pillar, while Edney fired away, round after round, tightly firing but each ballistic shot carefully and instantly considered. Four face-huggers lay writhing on the ground, two of them blown in half, while maybe a dozen others had appeared and seemed to know their cover was blown and were trying to rush the victims. Carmichael skidded to Edney’s side and together they began volleying the energy beam.
I fired my plasma gun, adding my short, popping blasts to theirs. I almost missed every other time because the face-huggers were covering the distance now by jumping from pillar to pillar. Edney and Carmichael shifted back to ballistics and blasted away at the crawlers who got too close.
Too close! Hell, they were all too close!
“Run!” Tad bellowed as he tore right toward them.
Because he was now in our line of fire, the three of us shooting had to pause. “Get down!” I ordered to him, but he kept running right for them, pushing buttons on some kind of wristband on a pair of gauntlets he’d pulled on somehow between the blind and here. Head to toe, his blue suit be
gan to glow like the sign on a cheap motel. Sparks flew from the suit. Each spark let off a second spark just as it hit its fizzle-point. Tad snapped, crackled, and popped his way right into the center of the hugger phalanx. Just as he reached them, he tossed a grenade of some kind over his shoulder, which landed near us and exploded into a huge—and I mean huge—ball of white stenchy smoke.
There was a squeal, several squeals, which to my untrained ear sounded a whole lot more like anger than surprise. I didn’t want to wait around to see how angry those things could get.
“Retreat!” Edney called.
Carmichael grabbed Bonnie and I grabbed Pocket.
Bonnie tried to pull away. “The ship! It’s that way—”
“No ship! Come on!”
Pocket gulped, “Where—”
“Don’t argue!” I took hold of his ponytail and cranked his head in the direction I wanted him to go, then put a knee in his butt to encourage him along.
I cast a quick look behind us at the slowly dissipating cloud of stink and saw the huggers turn and flock after Tad, who disappeared down a gulley. The face-huggers were after him now.
Should I help? I shoved Pocket after Carmichael, Edney, and Bonnie, and stumbled for a moment at the edge of the stink cloud. Where had Tad gone? They were all after him—those god-awful things.
“Rory, let’s go, man!” Pocket called as Carmichael hooked his arm and pulled him away.
“Right . . .” Reluctantly I turned and ran back toward the blind.
* * *
“Bonnie! What the devil in a bowl of spice are you doing here!”
Clark’s voice boomed in the otherwise quiet hideout.
The blind felt cold now compared to the outside, and it seemed dark to my stinging eyes. I stumbled in after Carmichael, to find Clark already confronting Bonnie.
Pocket collapsed onto a box and sat there sucking air mechanically, while Bonnie, pasty pale with fear, blinked up at Clark. Neil and Zaviero made sure the projector veil was closed behind us.
“Tad’s still out there!” I gasped.
“He’ll be okay,” Neil said. “He’s cloaked.”
“What ‘cloaked’? He was running!”
“It’s a distracting technique. Here, look.”
He led us like a gaggle of baby ducks to the wall of screens and pointed at a screen in the middle, which showed Tad in his totally blue glowing suit, now standing perfectly still in a grotto. He stood in the open, and around him a dozen huggers clawed and scratched at the ground, hunting and snooping, but finding nothing. Or at least, seeing nothing. Did they have eyes? Sensing nothing?
“Can they see?” Clark asked.
“Somehow, they do,” Neil said. “It’s more than just sensing, because they’ve been known to jump at people from behind glass, which means they see.”
“Why aren’t they seeing him?”
“It’s the suit.”
“But he’s standing right there,” Clark pointed out.
“Somehow they can’t see past the blue glow. We tested a whole bunch of spectral combinations. There are two they can’t see. As long as he stands perfectly still and the projectors on the suit don’t flicker, they’ll lose interest.”
Bonnie shivered and hugged her medical pack. “I can’t believe he’s standing so still!”
“It takes practice,” Zaviero said from way up there at the top of his body. “Tad’s talented.”
I fought to calm my aching lungs. “What were the sparks?”
“Those, they can see,” Neil said. “The sparking creates a movement, and they don’t like the stink bomb, so sometimes we can get them to run in a particular direction.”
“Sometimes?”
Neil wobbled his head. “Yes . . . most of the time. Sometimes.”
“Okay, okay,” Clark began, and turned to Bonnie and Pocket. “Okay, I’m calm. Now, what are you doing here and why did you leave the ship against orders?”
Pocket glanced at Bonnie, then back to Clark. “What do you mean, what are we doing here?”
“Should I say it in Spanish?”
“We got your message to come out,” Bonnie said. “A distress call.”
“What distress call? We didn’t send any.”
Bonnie blinked and faltered. “Y—yes, you did. Somebody did . . . Theo picked it up in the scrambler. When we unscrambled it, we got a signal of distress with flash for rescue.”
Clark shifted his weight and hung his hands on his hips. “We didn’t send anything.”
Pocket, Bonnie, and Edney were mystified.
“We’re not stupid,” Pocket said. “We got a signal.”
“By voice?”
“Yeah, but garbled. We couldn’t tell whose voice it was.”
“Male or female?” I asked.
Pocket rubbed the back of his neck. “Huh?”
“I’m gonna get to the bottom of that,” Clark huffed angrily. He started to go toward the table, to ask around, but I pulled him back with a move so sharp that it drew attention. I waited a second, until that attention faded back.
“Don’t say anything about it,” I instructed.
He frowned. “Why in hell not?”
“Just don’t. Something’s going on here and I’d like the chance to figure out what it is.”
“Aw, there’s just some screw up and I’m gonna kill it.”
“Does it hurt to shut up for a while?”
He paused, partly to calm down and partly to consider the fact that I was asking him to do something completely illogical. He trusted me and in that moment I felt gratified. “I don’t know,” he said. “Does it?”
“Somebody’s playing with us,” I warned.
“Come on, Rory, you’re looking for trouble. There’s some screw up or a malfunction. I need to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Baldly sarcastic, I chided, “I think we’ve been in some trouble so far, Clark.”
“Those were just terrible accidents. Don’t make more of it than it is.”
“Just keep quiet. I want to hear what M’am volunteers about it, if anything. Later you can tell me I was wrong. Deal?”
He drilled me with a glare, during which I think he was remembering that I’d been right about the researchers’ still being here and alive. He fought to control his frustration. “Mmm . . . well, deal, for now.”
He shook his head and wandered away to watch Tad stand absolutely still on the bank of screens. There were now only two huggers lurching around Tad’s glowing blue suit. The others had moved on their way, possibly still looking for us.
“You come with me,” he said to Pocket. They went around the other side of the stacked containers for some kind of captain-to-crew lecture.
Corporal Edney turned to Carmichael. “Let’s find the colonel and make a report.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the kid said, and followed her away. Neil stayed to monitor Tad’s statue imitation. Zaviero lost interest and wandered somewhere.
I turned to Bonnie, who looked confused and ashamed. “That was pretty brave,” I told her. “Brave, and nuts.”
“This whole thing is nuts,” she said with a sigh. “I kept thinking of what might happen to you and the captain out here, how you turned right around after we were attacked and you came right back out here . . . what would I think of myself if I didn’t do my part? I couldn’t go back to Earth and report to PlanCom that I hadn’t even tried to participate. When the distress call came in, I guess I . . . thought . . . providence had kicked in.”
“Like I said. Pretty brave.”
Embarrassed by the compliment, she looked kind of cute and sweet there, with her blond dirty hair all wild and her blue eyes rolling at her own risky behavior.
There was a commotion near the table, and we discovered that my mother and several of her team had come into the chamber with MacCormac and the Marines, and everyone was clamoring about the episode we’d just barely survived—again.
“Why did you rush out?” M’am demanded as soon as
she saw me. When she spoke, everybody else fell silent.
I shrugged. “They were in trouble.”
“We’ll handle the trouble from now on. You did it again—attracting attention to the wrong area. Now Tad’s having to stand-pet out there to distract them.”
“Stand-pet?”
“Petrified,” she clarified. “It’s a skill. You don’t have it.”
“Sorry,” I said, just to get it over with fast.
“Sure you are,” my sister commented. I hadn’t even seen her come in.
Our mother made a mighty show of controlling herself. “You must let us handle these things. This place is like a hospital. Things are done in exacting ways for good reason. First and foremost, you may not leave the blind without escort.”
“Tad was with us,” I wryly noted. Okay, so I was just being snotty.
“For the good of us all,” she said firmly, “while you live in our house, you follow our rules. All of you.” She turned to make eye contact with Clark, Pocket, and the Marines. “Is that clear?”
The Marines looked at MacCormac to speak for them.
After a moment, he did. “We’ll make every effort to comply, ma’am.”
M’am looked at Clark.
He nodded. “Okay, my crew will comply. But I need to contact the ship to confirm that they are not to exit under any conditions.”
“Graciella will help you do that without causing incorrect signals. Everyone, please clean your hands for dinner, using the dry cleaner which Neil will give to you.”
She motioned the gathering toward Neil, who waved everybody to the far end of the dinner table.
Then she turned to me and Bonnie. “Rory, will you introduce us, please?”
Bonnie was busy beaming and trying to mash down her insane hair.
“Oh, sure,” I said. “Bonnie Bardolf, this is my mother, Jocasta Malvaux.”
“Miss Bardolf. Pleasure to meet you.”
“Oh—me too!” Bonnie bubbled. “I’m such an admirer . . . I’ve read your books and watched your videos and I was hooked when you addressed Congress to push the Alien Species Act through!”
“Thank you most sincerely,” my mother said milkily. “You’re very sweet and devoted, I can tell. A medical specialist?”
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 35