The creature stiffened before me, hunkering into a threat position. Its claws clicked inches from my face.
A soft, long noise began on a finger of wind. It came from over the rocks, through the glass spires, from far away, like thunder.
No, not thunder . . . this sound was like the low hum of a brass instrument, a baritone or trombone, or two together making a chord. I thought at first it was the sound of my blood running cold. Then I knew it was real sound and I was really hearing it.
The alien before me raised its head and turned the great long skull as if trying to hear the location of the trombone call. Its companions did the same, each turning its head in the same direction.
Was I still alive? For a few seconds, I honestly wasn’t sure.
The long moaning call grew in intensity over the land. The aliens around me straightened to their full heights and extended their tails horizontal with the ground. Inside the smoke-glass tops of their skulls, the flesh of their brains— or whatever that was—began to ripple and buzz in answer. The buzz increased and became the same low, moaning, brassy call.
The alien in front of me stepped back. It lowered its hands and tail, shoulders and snorkels. I recognized the passive stance. For creatures I hadn’t wanted to be anywhere near, never thought I would get to know, I recognized a lot all of a sudden.
Through the long moaning call, I head the shouts of human voices. At the crest of the flume, Colonel MacCormac appeared with Clark, flanked by Carmichael, Edney, Pocket, Bonnie, and Tad, and in the middle of them, oddly out of place, appeared my mother. She was yanking MacCormac’s arm just as he raised his weapon, and Edney had to kick at Tad to get him to leave her alone with her weapon raised. I got the idea they’d charged out of the blind against her orders, and she and Tad had been sucked out with them, trying to stop them. Carmichael and Edney raised theirs also and prepared for MacCormac’s order to volley.
I raised my hand in a signal to them. Stop.
MacCormac, ever alert, caught the motion and held fire. The other Marines, well-drilled, did the same.
The fluttering inside the alien’s braincases became softer, all at once. It was as if they were all singing in a choir, being directed by some conductor in the sky. They lowered their heads and drew up their tails, let their arms down and became sordidly calm, reminding me of black storm clouds.
I motioned again to the others to stand still, not break the sorcery. What were we seeing?
The alien right in front of me, the one who had been about to take my head off, relaxed suddenly. The deep sound of horns tapered off and echoed into nothing. The land was once again still in the last vestige of sunset. The last ray of the sun lay on the head of this alien.
I pushed myself up off the stump and braced my legs, standing before the animal in a truly eerie equality. This was like being haunted.
Armored by the heady drug of having accepted my death, I was emboldened to reach out. I slapped the animal in the head.
Its head tipped sideways, then came back straight. It made no moves to retaliate. It didn’t want the fight I was trying to pick. Didn’t want—or wasn’t allowed. I didn’t know which.
I took off my right gauntlet and slammed the creature right in the mouth.
It shook that great head almost the way a horse shakes its withers. But it wouldn’t attack me.
“Well, dang,” I grumped.
I wanted, strangely enough, to ask my mother what she thought of this. Maybe she knew.
As if called by a mental signal, M’am moved forward from the others, leaving MacCormac and the Marines, Bonnie, Clark, Pocket, and Tad stood poised to run, shocked by the stillness. My mother came closer, daring to step between two aliens, who simply turned their eyeless faces toward her and stepped back to let her pass.
“What’s happening?” I choked. “What . . . what is this?”
M’am’s petite body, in khakis and still build like the ballet dancer she had been in her youth, turned in a delicate pirouette of study.
“I’ll tell you what’s happening,” she murmured. “This is a giant leap forward.”
As my chest ached with plain old terror, she came to the center of the circle of aliens. She raised her wrist to her lips, and touched the communication link strapped to it.
“All of you, come out. It’s safe to come out. Graciella, bring everyone out. This is history. You must see this.”
In mere moments, the other researchers, led by my astonished sister, appeared in the line of humans at the crest of the flume. My sister stared, poised for something she couldn’t predict, and with her came Diego, Zaviero, Chantal, Dixie, Neil, Oliver, and the others. Amazing, really. They had all actually come out at my mother’s call, without the slightest question. Were they more afraid of her than of the aliens? Could that actually be true?
And there she was, arms raised in honor of the creatures standing here in the small area with us. You must see this, she had said. What she really meant was, you must see me.
“Come,” she said to the audience. “Come, witness all of you . . . and you who were ready to exterminate them . . . you, who can now go home. Witness this evolutionary leap! I told you it would happen. Nature is controlling them.” A necromancer performing her danse macabre, she raised her graceful hands. “We can walk among them!”
* * *
I don’t believe in my life or any time in history I’ve heard of a more fulfilled human being than my mother at this arcane moment of transcendence. For her, this was a religious experience. The gods had opened the doors and invited her in.
She was allowing us to see, to be her witnesses, not exactly to walk in with her.
We all stood stupefied, waiting for the spell to be broken and chaos to erupt. For a while it didn’t. Then, it did.
Just as we were beginning to believe that we might be safe through some bizarre favor of providence, a chittering noise broke the enchantment. I heard Bonnie gasp. She clapped her hands to her mouth. MacCormac spun to his right, then left. Carmichael and Edney brandished their weapons.
Suddenly, leaping from glass pillar to glass pillar, came a squall line of face-huggers on the attack. Pocket grabbed Bonnie and shoved her toward me, toward the middle of the circle of Xenos. Tad and Gracie came together into what might very well be a final embrace. The huggers moved with breathtaking speed, sensing that several of them could fulfill their genetic goal today, to impregnate a creature with their seeds of doom down some poor sap’s throat. And here we were, sitting ducks.
“Oh, God,” Gracie croaked. “A trap . . . ”
Our mother twirled again, looking now at the horrid position we were all in. Thanks to her, we were all in it together. She’d brought everyone out to witness the wonder.
MacCormac shouldered his weapon in a quick movement, but at the same instant the parasites began to leap—all at once. No volley could get them all without also killing all of us. All he could hope to do was take ballisticshots and maybe bring down a few of them before they overwhelmed—
For the third time today I prepared my self to die, and again I got a shock. The aliens flanking my mother turned and snatched the face-huggers out of the air by their fingers, by their tails, by the body like lobsters snatched from nets. More and more face-huggers attacked, only to be snatched out of the air by their own adult soldiers. High-pitched shrieking drove us to cover our ears and writhe toward the ground while the adult Xenos ripped into the huggers, whipping them like toys, smashing them into rocks, tearing their limbs off and casting them away to flop in desperation on the ground. Acid spurted and bones snapped as loudly as firecrackers as the butchery gained momentum. What moments ago had been an unspoiled clearing now became a slaughter zone. Face-huggers tried to leap to reach us, and I saw Bonnie, then MacCormac pointedly rescued at the last moment by the adult aliens. It was sheer deliberate butchery.
Instead of attacking us, they were attacking their own.
9
“Come on!” MacCormac waved the dir
ection back toward the blind, then snatched my mother by the wrist and dragged her out of a tornado of aliens slaughtering their own offspring. I dodged between two slashing tails and scrambled in the same direction just as a parasite was swung through the air by its tail, eight fingers scrambling, and was splattered on a glass pillar like a bug hitting a window. I dodged sideways into a jet of spittle from one of the adults as it sprinted to catch a face-hugger just as the grabby little bastard would’ve clamped onto my head. The hugger squealed and was dragged back into the cockfight.
We out-of-place humans dodged toward each other, trying to get out of the middle of the maelstrom. MacCormac took a few shots and blew away one or two huggers, as the other Marines quickly coordinated an escape through the catfight of aliens.
Pocket was there to pull me over the crest. “What’d you do?” he yelped, his ponytail bouncing between his shoulderblades.
“Pissed ’em off somehow! Move!”
Tad dragged Gracie, Clark pushed Bonnie, MacCormac hauled M’am, the other Marines led the way, and we ran for our silly little lives from the deliberate extermination of seeds by the very tree that had borne them.
I knew a window of opportunity when I saw it, as did we all. For the first time since leaving Earth, everybody on this planet was of one mind. We flew back the way we’d come, to the curtained entrance to the blind, and I guess we just hoped none of the aliens was watching to see where we went. Sometimes you just have to make the dive and hope for the best.
I was the last one in. I pulled the delicate curtain closed, remembering only at the last moment that it was actually delicate, and took a last look over the crest of the flume. No aliens appeared to see our hideaway. Still, I could hear them. The noise of the holocaust going on over the hill was accompanied by a smothering odor of acid and oil.
“Shut it, shut it!” Clark panted at my side. He pushed the curtain closed. “You haven’t seen enough?”
“I wish I knew what I just saw! Where’s my mother? M’am!”
“Yes. Here.” She was lost in the crowd of taller people. “Keep your voice down.”
With Herculean effort, I dialed down the volume as I pushed between Tad and Gracie to face her down. “What did we just see? What was that all about?”
Gracie edged between me and our mother. “Don’t speak to her in that tone.”
“Tone? What did we just witness out there? Why would the adults rip their own young to shreds?”
M’am began to pace quietly. “Their priorities have shifted, obviously.”
“We have to test this,” Gracie said anxiously. “Make experiments . . . design trials . . . compare—”
I growled, “How about if we evacuate and worry about comparisons a long time from now?”
Our mother snapped her fingers at us. “Be quiet, I told you. You could risk all our lives with your noise.”
“Aw, I wouldn’t want to do that! Admit that you’ve lost control of this situation, if you ever had it.”
She raised her green eyes to me. “Not at all.”
“What’s going on, M’am?” I demanded. “They not only didn’t kill us, but they refused to fight with us. What makes consummate predators suddenly sublime?”
“It was like a feeding frenzy,” Bonnie pointed out, “except with their own kind. In a frenzy, anything is fair game. They were very particular about what they killed. One of them deliberately pulled a spider-thing off my leg and broke it in half.” She showed the torn trouser near her ankle.
I nodded and pointed at Bonnie’s leg. “That’s right. Why did they kill their own kind? Why did they protect us?”
Clark, now sitting exhausted on a crate, raised his head. “They did protect us, didn’t they?”
Bonnie parted her lips to speak, then held back, no doubt intimidated by my mother and sister, who were such experienced scientists while Bonnie felt she was just starting.
“Say it,” I charged her.
She flinched. “Oh . . . I . . . ”
“Go ahead.”
She floundered briefly under the scrutiny of these experts. “Aggressive predators only protect three things . . . their young, their territory, and their prey.”
“Oh, that’s helpful,” Gracie snarled. “As informative as an afterschool special.” She waved her hand at me. “This is the kind of experts you bring along and you have the gall to question us?”
“Are you even going to ask about Rusty?”
M’am faced me with a bitter glare. “Rusty was incautious. He took too much time. Because of you, no doubt.”
My mother continued her pacing, with her arms folded and one hand pressed to her lips. “This is new,” she admitted. “Behavioral changes like this are scientific gold. There’s no record of any such behavior en masse. Life is fighting back.” She paused in front of Clark and faced him. “You must take your ship and go. My team can’t leave now. This could go on for months. Years. I can study them. Catalogue unimagined volumes of information. We’ve stumbled upon a treasure. Everything is different. They’ve accepted us.”
Bonnie’s eyes got big with recognition as the fantasy began to flag and she finally saw my mother for the obsessed phantom she was. I didn’t like seeing the illusion die, but was glad to have Bonnie entirely on my side.
“Whatever happens,” my mother went on, “no one must leave the blind until the area is completely clear. We have no way to define this behavior—”
“Oh, wrong,” I said. “If we can walk through them, then this is the perfect time to leave.”
“This is the time to stay,” M’am countered. “Nature has given us a doorway. This shift in focus could go on for months. Years! We can study them and they will even protect us!”
“A team of synthetics can do this work!” I said, matching her tone. “It’s time to cash in our chips and honor the people who have died here and move out. All of us should head straight for the ship and get the bejeebers out of here. Tonight.”
“Seconded!” Pocket supported.
“Sounds firm to me,” MacCormac chimed.
Gracie rounded on him. “Great, coming from a man who led them into this mess without knowing what he was facing. Why don’t you just plan the next picnic too?”
“You can leave,” our mother said, unmasking some of the bitterness she held toward me. “But in the morning, when things are calmer. This area is dangerous now, you foolish boys. This is not the time to listen to my son’s juvenile defiance.”
“I thought you said they go underground where they pick up ambient something at night, so night is better for moving around. Do you know these creatures or not?”
“I agree with Mr. Malvaux,” the Colonel said. “We’re going to bug out as soon as possible and all the researchers are going to be compelled to come with us. The situation’s too volatile to leave anybody here.”
M’am’s eyes narrowed and shifted to him, but she said nothing. Behind her Gracie wrinkled her nose in contempt. Tad slipped his hand onto her shoulder, but he also said nothing.
“I need a chance to think this through,” Clark uttered. “We sure can’t go out there right now. They could just as easily turn on us again.”
“You will wait until they move on,” my mother said. “Decisions about your ship can be made in the morning. In a compound such as this, you learn to be patient and wait things out.” She sought out the crowd of confused and spooked people. “Neil—dear, be sure all the video feeds are recording. We’ll want to have records of this new behavior. Chantal and Ethan, be sure to process all the data as soon as possible. If there are large flocks moving, we must know the dynamics and behavioral subtleties. Paul, we will need readings of atmospheric changes, if any. Diego, Dixie, all of you . . . don’t be so overwhelmed that we miss opportunities. Monitor your posts. Gather data. Find answers.”
Neil, pale and shaken, glanced around self-consciously and acted as if he couldn’t believe he was being asked to do something so mundane at this monumental moment. He went off into
the maze of chambers, followed by Chantal and Ethan. After a few seconds, Paul, the weather and rock guy, went off into another tunnel. Diego, the bacteria guy, lingered a little, then he too went somewhere. Zaviero looked uneasy, then trundled off to do something about bugs. Before long, only Bonnie, Clark, Pocket, and the Marines were left here with me, my mother, my sister, and Tad. The smaller group seemed more intimate, more manageable.
I stalked away, knowing that I needed to get control and think clearly. My mother always brought out the worst in me, even when she wasn’t trying.
“Hey—Rory,” Clark called. He got up and came to me, took me by the arm and turned me so he could look at the side of my leg. “You’re bleeding.”
I twisted around to look at the back of my right thigh. Yeah, ripped supersuit and blood. “Okay, thanks.”
“You want attention?” Bonnie asked. “I have—I have my kit—somewhere . . . ”
I gazed down at my bloody thigh. Clark held my arm, and we paused there, each thinking about different things. During that moment of calm, a little oasis of time during which my wildly ranging thoughts began to coalesce, I suddenly fell silent and just stared at my leg. Predators . . . prey . . . territory . . . prey . . . prey . . .
But nobody knew whether the aliens ate humans. We just knew they used humans. We might not be prey. We were something else. Not prey, not their young, not their territory . . . what were we to them? In the big scheme, why would they protect us?
“You okay?” Clark asked.
I blinked at him. His honest face and tousled red hair, pure concern for me in the middle of possibly losing his dream and ending up maybe dead . . . this was one pure and simple guy.
“Simple,” I murmured. “There has to be a simple answer.”
They all watched me. I felt like an egg about to hatch.
“Like what?” Clark asked.
Just as the pain finally hit me and my leg started to throb, I uttered, “I don’t know yet. But what if they snap out of it?”
The answer seemed to float just outside my reach.
“Graciella,” my mother spoke up, “and Tad, please, check the perimeters. Do a heat-seek check. Secure all the openings and post watchers. I think we’re safe for now. This behavior could continue indefinitely. We have a new chapter, and we must take the responsibility of careful data keeping. Nothing will happen until morning, and then we will escort these intruders back to their ship.” She looked at Clark, then at me. “They cannot legally terraform a planet with potentially intelligent life. The problem is over. They will leave us in peace.”
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 40