The Complete Aliens Omnibus

by Michael Jan Friedman

  When I heard Gracie’s voice in one of the lab chambers, I stayed in the tunnel without coming out into the chamber. She was talking to someone. This wasn’t the voice of the shrill sycophant nor the gruff defender of science I’d heard earlier. This was much softer, more fearful, fraught with passion and urgency. I couldn’t make out the words, but the emotions were there. I’d heard enough impassioned whispering in jail cells and interrogation rooms.

  I peeked into the chamber, taking a chance. There they were—in silhouette against a bank of working screens that showed the activities of the day, aliens and huggers, replays of my adventures and Bonnie’s, speed-takes of MacCormac and the Marines in action, like flashes of bad dreams. The pictures glowed behind the forms of my sister and the stealth guy, Tad, locked in an embrace and whispering to each other.

  I tried to hear what they were saying. No good. They were too good at being quiet and still getting their messages across. They probably lived like this all the time, sneaking kisses, murmuring in corners, no privacy, no future.

  What could I overhear, anyway? Lovers’ promises?

  I backed up into the tunnel, then made a big deal out of stomping my way into the chamber. When I unfolded myself and coughed to make sure they’d heard me, they were on two sides of the chamber, with Gracie seated at the monitor bank. Tad did a poorer job of disguising their tryst.

  “Hi,” I said amiably. “Hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “We’re awake,” Tad said coldly. He looked at Gracie. “I’m gonna go.”

  “Okay,” she agreed.

  “You want me to stay?” He looked at me, but he was talking to her.

  She glanced at me. “No, I can handle him.”

  He would rather have stayed, but didn’t. I gave him ten seconds to get way down the corridor and watched to make sure he wasn’t lurking around as I had.

  I tugged a bulk food crate up to the monitor bank and sat down on it. “Gracie, I need your help. No fireworks, okay?”

  Her face was patched with moving lights from the screens, and she self-consciously checked the snaps on her shirt to make sure they were closed all the way to her collar. “Oh, I’ll jump right up, then.”

  I tried to calm her by using a very even tone. “This isn’t sibling rivalry. This is official business. I need your help getting these people off the planet. You can influence M’am.”

  “Think so?”

  “You have to evacuate. Everybody. All we want is for you to evacuate without a fight.”

  “That’s all,” she lilted sarcastically. “Gosh, why didn’t you say so? Until you showed up in that carnival wagon, with all your calliopes chiming, we were successfully hiding and observing a hive of Xenos in their natural environment—”

  “Cut the toe-dancing,” I said more sharply. “This isn’t their natural environment. They came here as aliens, same as us. They’re on a slaughter mission, same as us. Has anybody studied them? Did you do autopsies? Analyses? Did any of you try to figure out how to fight them?”

  “We don’t want to fight them. We want to live with them.”

  “That only works if they agree. They’re closing in. You’re all doomed if you stay. That means I can’t allow you to stay.”

  “We’ve been successfully hidden for months. They didn’t know we were here until you—”

  “They knew you were here all along. They’ve spent those months closing the noose. Haven’t you looked at Ethan’s crowd control data?”

  “They don’t know to close any nooses. You’re making that up.” She hunched her shoulders and tapped at her keyboard, communicating that the work was far more important than anything I had to say. “You’re just uncomfortable because you’re not the top of the food chain anymore. You think they’re ugly because they’re a different kind of parasite than humans are. If we can grow beyond our parasitic ways, who’s to say another species can’t grow beyond theirs? They’re beautiful animals and they’re here living their lives, unless we gum it all up for them. You and your genocidal robots—”

  “Why is it any animal, all the time? Why don’t humans ever come first?”

  “Because they don’t deserve to.”

  “‘They’? What are you, a corn flake? You never give Human-ity credit for doing anything good.”

  “Oh, like what?”

  Bless me, I actually had the answer. “Like cherishing culture while embracing change.”

  “Oh, sure, we embrace a lot,” she spat, rewarding me with a cold glower. “What have we got to show for ourselves in the galaxy? We’ve wiped out entire cultures of our own kind, killed ancient languages—Gaelic, Sanskrit, Assyrian—”

  “Or,” I punctuated, “maybe they just played themselves out and weren’t needed anymore. Did you ever think of that? Maybe the unification of language is the great victory of cultural Oneness you always wish for. Or you say you do. You hate when it really happens. Maybe the fading away of ancient cultures means we’re finally getting together. People are always sentimental about the wrong things!”

  “Don’t yell. Hold your voice down. You never had any self-control.” She went back to poking at the keyboard and adjusting the screen, which showed several windows of data that could’ve been critical or could’ve been nonsense. No idea which.

  I had to admit she was right about that. If I’d had any self-control, I’d have turned down this mission in favor of an enforcement officer who could be dispassionate about my mother, my sister, and the dubious sides of their work.

  “I came here to get as far from Humanity as I could,” she continued, almost musing. “Humanity is the only species that wipes out other species.”

  “Gracie, that’s eco-head crap.” I was even quieter this time. “How jaded can you get? You sound like M’am on meth. Species have been getting wiped out for millions of years without Humanity’s help. It’s the natural cycle. Thousands of species lived for eons and died natural deaths before Humanity ever appeared. Who can say that’s not a success?”

  “I can say it.”

  “And I say keeping them going artificially is a travesty. It can’t be done. You can only keep that sort of thing going for so long. Remember the Chinese panda? The millions of dollars poured into the futile effort to save them? Never was there a species more determined to go extinct. They couldn’t breed, they only ate one thing—”

  “Why don’t you write an article or go on a concert tour?”

  “You can waste your life protecting a tree, but eventually it’ll die its own death in its own time and you can’t stop it. And you shouldn’t. Maybe our being here, Clark with his payload, maybe we are the natural chain of events playing out. Maybe we’re the hand of nature this time. Have you ever thought of that?”

  “You’re not the hand of nature, Rory. You’re just another passionate murderer.” She twisted in her chair to face me and leaned forward to make her point. “We know what you did, you know. M’am and I. We know how you did it. Mr. Law Enforcement, Mr. Detective, Mr. Defender of the People. When push came to shove, you abandoned the law. You cut that man’s arms off and let his life bleed out. No trial, no due process, you just took the law into your hands and carried out a sentence. And wasn’t it brutal, too. Wasn’t it ugly and cruel. Wasn’t it savage. You’re the real monster. Not them. Not us.”

  How far could I get with this barricade between us? She was bitter and angry on a deep level, deeper than the things she was saying. This fury went back to our childhoods.

  Determined to keep the issue in the moment, I shifted gears—a little. “Okay, I’m a monster. As long as we’re monster-building here, maybe you can tell me what happened to Rusty’s stealth suit.”

  Her eyes narrowed and her brows came down. She paused. “What about his suit?”

  “It stopped working at a critical moment. Right when the alien was standing in front of him, it stopped masking. That’s interesting timing, to me.”

  “Of course it is, yeah, malfunctions never just ‘happen’ in Rory Malvaux’s
world of order. We’ve had lots of them here in the real world.”

  I hesitated. “How many?”

  She retreated from that line of questioning. “Some.”

  I watched her for a moment, trying to get something out of that odd expression. “M’am ordered a fresh power pack just before he went out. The suit ran out of power. Take the blinders off, Gracie. She doesn’t care about anybody around here. Don’t you notice that with her it’s always ‘I’ am doing this, ‘I’ will be recognized? When’s the last time she used the word ‘we’ or talked about ‘our’ work? She doesn’t even know you or these other disciples are here except to provide her with information and do the dishes. She’ll go back to Earth some day and take credit for all—”

  “And she’ll deserve it!” The passion in my sister’s expression almost knocked me off my crate. She poked me in the chest with a finger that I’m pretty sure she’d rather were a dagger. “Our mother is the Dian Fossey, the Jane Goodall, the Charles Darwin of this age. You don’t see it because you’ve always resented her. You’ve spent your whole life avoiding things that make demands or warrant loyalty.”

  “Loyalty is for people who think of others first.” My voice grew rough, and I forced myself to hold it down. I had to find something that would work on her, appeal to her common sense, if she had any left. I knew she did. Gracie’s common sense was always fighting with her idealism—she’d always been like that. I just had to tap it. “Do you actually believe that if you just learn enough, you can actually live among them? Live real lives? Have families? Grow? Do anything other than hide or die?”

  We fell silent for a moment, just glaring at each other. I was sorry I’d tipped my hand about Rusty’s suit. I’d hoped to release that information with a little more finesse. Now I’d lost that trump card.

  Gracie’s face was flushed and hot, shiny with perspiration in the red glow of the night lights. She looked overworked, exhausted, deeply stressed, and ready to fall apart, yet somehow was holding herself together and fighting for stability. She didn’t have our mother’s coolness. She’s never had it.

  “She’s walking among them,” my sister vowed. “You were wrong and she was right.”

  “Okay, she might be right,” I accepted. “I don’t know. I’m not a scientist. But I can tell you other things that might happen. Some day, tomorrow or fifty or a hundred years from now, some innocent ship from some innocent race will land here, not knowing what’s waiting for them. The cosmic hitchhikers will take advantage of that and find their way to space again. Maybe to Earth. Maybe to some other innocent civilization. Then those things will start killing again. You want an image of genocide? Try that one. These aliens are acting differently from anything anybody seems to know about them. I think you should tell me right now the full scope of the pile we’ve stepped in.”

  The bald demand disarmed her. She had no pre-recorded sarcastic response this time.

  I don’t know which part got to her. I felt as if I’d spilled my pebbles to have told her about the suit. Had I shocked her?

  Then, something worse occurred to me. Because she didn’t look so shocked.

  I flashed on Pocket’s face during our last card game— which he won, as usual. “No poker face at all, Malvaux, my man. Hand it over and let’s go again.”

  “Please leave me alone,” my sister requested. She seemed weakened and wasted. Was she thinking about her own future, about possibly someday having a life, kids, a home, maybe with Tad?

  Was she thinking there was no future for her?

  “Okay,” I said miserably.

  Should I slap the cuffs on now or later?

  After pushing the food crate back where I’d found it, I left her alone in her cubicle to pretend to keep working.

  Played out and empty, I slunk back through the tunnel, moving more slowly than necessary, trying to think. With all the weird activity outside, even Pocket couldn’t run odds on whether any of us would survive. The scientists were clearly befuddled, and when experts are befuddled, the rest of us are just plain lost.

  I was lost. Clumsy. I’d blown my one advantage, and now didn’t even know whether I was on the right track. My instincts were all clogged up. Sentiment and memories were clouding my brain. Was I ever the wrong man for this job.

  The next chamber was the place where Chantal had taken me to see her “collection.” There, I stopped.

  Before me, the stuffed Xenomorph stood in elegant repose, positioned for the edification of human eyes, its outer teeth held open to emit the distended inner jaws. It would probably stand there forever, or until this fortress were breached. Its own kind would find it someday, perhaps soon, and circle it in a confusion of wonder. Would they pick at it and feel its cables and armor, sniff and poke it the way elephants did to the bones of their own dead? Would they try to make it move and come back to life? Or would they know somehow that it was a trophy?

  How intelligent were they . . . really?

  “It’s beautiful in its way.”

  I spun around and almost knocked into the creature. “Bonnie!”

  Bonnie sat on the foam floor with her legs folded, tucked back into a nook. She clapped her hand to her lips. “Oh! I scared you!”

  “Scared me?” My own hand was on my chest, nursing the coronary. “Just a mild infarction.”

  With a guilty smile she said, “I guess this isn’t the place where you should surprise anybody.”

  “What are you doing in here?”

  “Just thinking.”

  “With this thing?” I gestured at the big alien.

  “It’s amazing to be able to just look at one.”

  I sat down next to her and stretched my legs out, leaning back against the pressed-plastic wall. “According to my mother, you can just go outside and introduce yourself.”

  “No thanks!” Despite sitting quietly and seeming in control, she picked at her fingernails.

  “Any luck with your sister?”

  I sighed demonstratively. “Total titanium wall. The second generation is always worse than the first.”

  She didn’t seem to like the way I talked about my family.

  “Sorry,” I offered. “I know this pops the Jocasta bubble for you. Every silver lining has a cloud, y’know.”

  “That’s not very nice to say,” she scolded mildly. “She is your mother. Hasn’t she ever given you anything worth valuing?”

  “Like what? Life? Yeah, she gave me that. I was a . . . mistake.”

  “Mistake? You mean she didn’t want to get pregnant?”

  “Oh, yes, she wanted to. She was trying to have a girl. I was in-vitro. They thought I was a girl, but somebody screwed up in the lab.”

  “Oh, Rory . . . that can’t be true.”

  I shrugged. “It’s okay, I accepted it a long time ago. She never hid it from me.”

  “Sounds like the kind of thing you’d want to hide from your child.” Her empathy was charming.

  “It can’t be hidden in my family,” I explained. “All the wealth in my family comes down through the women. Our great-great grandmother had one daughter, our great-grandmother had two daughters, each of those had two daughters, and my mother, quite unintentionally, had a son. She never wanted any kids, but the family fortune had to be protected. She takes her obligations seriously. When I was born, she took one look and decided to try again as soon as she could. She had to have a daughter to leave the kingdom to. The queendom, really.”

  Bonnie’s face took on all the pain I’d avoided about this issue. I didn’t like making her feel so bad, when I really didn’t.

  “Are you sure you’re not reading this through a jaundiced eye?” she asked. “You’re diminishing your personhood so much!”

  “No, not really. We’re more than how we’re conceived.”

  She paused and thought back over what she’d just heard. “You mean, out of your mother’s incredible fortune and all her investments and holdings, you don’t . . . ”

  “Right. I don’t ge
t anything. Gracie gets it all. That’s why I can never get married.”

  “Why can’t you marry?”

  “Because the wife gets my inheritance. Womanhood trumps everything. I would never know for sure why anybody was marrying me. Technically, she could stay married to me for a year, ditch me, and keep the fortune. There’s no protection against that in our inheritance. No pre-nuptuals, no nothing. It’s some kind of bastardized protectionism for women as a ‘species.’”

  Bonnie’s eyes widened with amazement at the concept. “My goodness, that sounds . . . ”

  “Warped. I know. You’d have to know the women in my family. They’re kinda sick in the head.”

  “Rory, I’m so sorry . . . ”

  “It’s okay. Right now I wish it were all that’s twisted between my sister and me.”

  “You mean, that ‘second generation’ thing?”

  I nodded. “Lenin was bad. Stalin was worse. . . . Alexander the Great stood on the empire created by Philip of Macedon and really pushed too far. The French botched their own revolution and Napoleon was there to take advantage.”

  She tipped her head into my periphery. “What are you really talking about, really?”

  I didn’t want to voice my suspicions. They’d hardly had a chance to simmer. Bonnie’s sensitivity prodded me gently to think out loud, and somehow it was helping.

  “My mother’s obsessions have always been out in front,” I said. “She’s never thought she was wrong, so she never had to sneak around. As for Gracie . . . she can be heartless and single-minded. She takes seriously her role as the custodian of greatness, never believing she could ever be great herself. My mother always insisted on being the great one, and Gracie’s always bought into that. Nobody’s more ferocious than a child defending a parent.”

  “You mean a parent defending a child.”

  “No . . . I mean a child defending a parent. I’ve seen it before in my line of work. Horribly abused children will clam up and refuse to indict their own parents, and sometimes even defend the parents’ actions. It’s one of the little ways humans are different from other animals. The blindest of devotion. Gracie has it.”