Predator: Incursion

by Tim Lebbon

  There were more than three hundred Arrow ships currently in service, patrolling beyond the furthest extent of a Human Sphere whose outer area was now something like three million square light years. At full speed it would take an Arrow more than two hundred years to circumnavigate the Sphere, during which time it would require almost a million tons of trimonite. Only just over half a million tons had ever been mined. It was postulated that there were almost limitless reserves buried on asteroids and planets, but the great irony was that ships, equipment, and people had to reach these places to mine it.

  Humanity had still only ventured across one percent of the Milky Way galaxy. At unimaginable speeds, still the scales of cosmic travel were staggering.

  That’s where the dropholes came in. While FTL travel still entailed actual movement through space—albeit on planes and levels of existence beyond most people’s ken—the dropholes worked on a very different basis. The science had been mooted since the late twentieth century, so long ago, but the reality and the ability to harness the science and put it to work hadn’t occurred until a little over a century before. The dropholes weren’t exactly holes, but more like the ends of an infinitely long, yet instantaneously traveled tube. They were folds in space, meaning that a ship could enter one end and emerge at the other at exactly the same moment.

  To Mains, that sounded easy. But the dropholes needed to be built using methods way beyond his understanding involving particle accelerators, anti-matter generators, and other tech he wouldn’t even recognize if it landed on him. The holes themselves were contained within vast circular structures, necessitating huge amounts of materials and years of construction.

  Even after all this time, only about one in three drophole initiation attempts worked, and around one in fifty resulted in cataclysmic explosions, the first couple of which had taken out thousands of people and dozens of ships. Since then, the moment of implementation was performed remotely. Dropholes only worked one way. In one hole, out of the other, with no return journey. Matching holes were attuned to the same frequency, and the in-holes all required different activation codes. Thus, they provided rapid jumping points around the Sphere, but there were also huge distances to travel between locations, because two holes could not be created close together. As Titan ships pushed the Outer Rim of the Human Sphere ever further, so they paused to build new dropholes.

  Over time, communities had built up around these ports. Some were official, manned research and maintenance stations commissioned by Weyland-Yutani and funded by the Company. Many more were unofficial, congregations of people, ships, and space stations, some of them charging for use of a hole, some protecting them.

  The dropholes became the oases of space. They became home to roving travelers and explorers looking for a place to rest in the company of others—pirates and mercenaries, haulage vessels, and military convoys.

  Though they used the dropholes, the Excursionists never hung around afterward. They preferred their own company.

  * * *

  Once resupplied from a W-Y Darkstar vessel, the Ochse powered up and headed back out. After all systems were set, Mains and the rest of the crew retired to their suspension pods while Frodo did all the work.

  Mains didn’t like being in suspension. The pods’ concept was similar to cryo-pods in that they essentially paused their user’s biological clock, holding them at a moment in time while vast distances could be traversed. One vital difference was that an Arrow’s suspension pods had to buffer the users against physical and temporal forces so extreme that they were barely understood. There were stories, perhaps apocryphal, of the first test pilots who had edged past ten-times light speed, deciding not to immerse in their suspension pods until too late. At journey’s end the two test pilots, still conscious and barely breathing, were raving, insane, and estimated to have a brain-age of over seventeen thousand years. Unable to move, unable to do anything for the seventeen real-time days of travel, they had lived one hundred and seventy centuries of nothing.

  A cautionary tale which Mains didn’t care to think about too much. But he still didn’t like the pods. The sensation when they were flooded with gel was akin to drowning, and he’d never been able to breathe in the compound until he was almost passed out from holding his breath.

  It was always a great relief, then, when the diamond-glass lid slid aside and he puked his guts up.

  He leaned over the side of the pod and coughed, bringing up more of the gel from his gut and lungs. On contact with the air it dissolved to nothing, enabling his first couple of breaths to clear his lungs, but the part-digested remnants of his last meal before suspension remained. McVicar had cooked them a great jambalaya, and he watched chewed prawns and peppers shifting in and out of focus as he caught his breath.

  “Hey, L-T, you really need to get another job.”

  Mains looked up, snot dribbling from his nose.

  “Lieder, how are you always up and about first? Why do you always look so… fresh.”

  “Eww,” his pilot said, pulling on her underwear. “Brown snot. That’s not an image I’ll sleep on.”

  “You’ll sleep on whatever I fucking order you to.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” She turned the other way. “Hey, Corp, my superior officer is making what I believe to be lewd and improper suggestions toward me!”

  Cotronis was just slipping from her own pod. She was renowned as being the worst sleeper of them all, and the grumpiest upon waking.

  “Eat me out, Lieder,” she said.

  Lieder laughed, Snowdon hurled, and the suspension bay echoed to the sounds of banter and puking, groaning and shuffling feet, and then the crew slowly getting dressed. None of it was forced, but the chatter was more ebullient than usual, and they all knew that they were making more noise to make up for the two of their comrades who were missing.

  “Okay, let’s get ourselves back up to speed,” Mains said. “Disengage artificial grav. Systems check, weapons check, silent running. You know the drill.”

  “Please, no zero grav until I’ve finished here,” Cotronis groaned, then puked.

  Lieder leaned back against the wall.

  “Bunch of pussies.”

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, slowly spinning in the zero-G shower, Mains looked up when Lieder hauled herself in through the sealed entrance. She eyed him up and down, frowning.

  “You’re putting on weight.”

  “McVicar’s cooking.” He turned off the shower and passed his hand over the dryer, choosing medium heat. He deserved a bit of comfort. “What’ve you got?”

  “Flight time was ninety-eight days, distance three point nine light years. We’ve wound down to sub-light speed and we’re sixteen billion miles from the habitat. Frodo engaged our cloak seventeen minutes ago—we’re an asteroid again. No sign we’ve been seen.”

  “And the SpaceSurfers?”

  “The hunt took seven days. They neutralized the two Yautja, but lost their corporal. Golden took a spear through the shoulder and carried on fighting. Finished the Yautja one-on-one.”

  “Hard bastard.”

  “Strange there were two contacts at the same time, though.”

  “Yeah.”

  Mains nodded and started dressing. His flight suit had come adrift from the velcro wall fasteners and got wet. He cursed inwardly, then shook his head. A wet flight suit. It would dry in a few minutes. It wasn’t as if he was dead.

  “You okay, Johnny?” All the quips aside, Lieder’s concern was obvious. The affection between them was deep, and try as he had to veer away from it, Mains found himself being drawn in. He thought Lieder did, too. It wasn’t something either of them could discuss. The generally accepted rule—the essential position—was to have fun but keep your distance. But they’d progressed from energetic fucking to passionate lovemaking, and sometimes afterward they wrapped themselves in a silence so loaded, so heavy with unsaid things, that it felt suffocating.

  “I’m fine,” he said, pulling on his clothes.
He pushed across the small shower room and bounced slowly from the wall.

  “Sure?”

  “I’m as fine as the rest of you,” he amended, then he grabbed the wall and held himself steady, pushing softly so that he drifted toward Lieder. She remained where she was, halfway through the entrance skin, and he pressed his forehead against hers. A soft kiss, a silent moment.

  “Clean your teeth, L-T,” she said, smiling as she pushed back through the doorway.

  Mains waited a moment before following her through.

  The rest of the crew were on the flight deck. Lieder lowered herself into the pilot’s seat, Faulkner sat at the main weapons array, the others were strapped into their relevant seats around the cramped area. The empty seats were painfully obvious.

  “So what have we got, Frodo?” he asked.

  The cool, welcoming voice of the ship’s computer filled the flight deck.

  “Nice to see you, L-T. There’s no sign of any change in the Yautja habitat. Its course and orbit remain the same as before, I detect no drive trails in the vicinity, but until we get closer I won’t be able to view the habitat itself.”

  “That’s fine. What about chatter?”

  “The usual Yautja communications. Sparse, short bursts. I’m running through the most up-to-date translation programs I have, but the dialects are barely recognizable. Only one anomaly I think you should know about, a repeating signal that feels out of place.”

  “What sort of signal?”

  “The best I can make out, it sounds like a countdown.”

  “To what?”

  “Sorry, L-T, I really can’t tell. It’s a complex self-repeating symbolic system I’ve never seen from them before.”

  “How do you know it’s a countdown?”

  “Just a hunch,” the computer said.

  “Thanks, Frodo. Is all this on the mainframe?”

  “Of course.”

  Mains took his seat behind and to the left of Lieder. “Snowdon?”

  “Already on it,” she said. Snowdon was their self-professed Yautja expert. She’d been fascinated with the species since she was a kid, and claimed it was their martial society that encouraged her to sign up to the Colonial Marines. She not only kept up to date with intelligence, but spent some time forming theories and opinions of her own.

  They ran silently for a while. Mains looked around the flight deck at his crew, his family, and his eyes lingered only for a moment on Reynolds’ and Willis’s seats. Their unscheduled excursion, the huge distances traveled for brief, shatteringly violent moments of combat, seemed to have energized them all.

  The deck buzzed with excitement.

  “Enough fucking around,” he said. “Let’s move in closer.”

  2

  ISA PALANT

  Love Grove Base, Research Station, LV-1529

  May 2692 AD

  Isa Palant needed the violence, the brutality, the fierce atmospherics, and violent electrical storms of LV-1529, to remind her of where she really was.

  In truth, there was no need for her to be out here at all. Terraforming was a slow, dangerous process, and no planet wanted to accept its forced change. She could be safe and sound in Love Grove Base, enjoying the comfortable levels of life support, ensconced in her lab with her antique coffee machine, specially imported roasted coffee beans from Weaver’s World, and a cot so that she could sleep with her work.

  Her work was everything to her, as it had been to her parents. It took up every waking moment and most of her dreams, and that was precisely why it was good to get away.

  “Bit of a bumpy ride coming up,” Rogers said.

  “I have every confidence in your driving skills.”

  “Me, too. It’s this piece of shit rover I’m not sure about.”

  “It’s held it together fine so far.”

  Knowing that wasn’t quite true, Palant made sure her straps were secure, and she held the handle above her seat. They’d had to stop twice on the way out to the boundary, and Rogers had donned his protective suit both times to venture outside and strap up the loose exhaust. First time it was clogged with dust, second time it was split right open, and now it coughed and growled like an angry cat.

  She’d wanted to help, but admitted ignorance when it came to anything mechanical. That just wasn’t her field. Keith Rogers had been an engineer in the Colonial Marines and knew what he was doing. An indie now, he was a vital asset to Love Grove Base. Ostensibly there as part of their security force, he spent most of his time helping the base technicians keep the place running.

  “Couple of miles to go,” he said. “You want me to slow down?”

  “You still trying to encourage me to park up somewhere quiet, Corporal Rogers?” she teased.

  “Miss Palant, I knew from the beginning I had the wrong junk between my legs for you.”

  “Christ, you’re beautifully subtle.”

  “I’m ex-military, as you keep reminding me. We thrive on subtlety.”

  Palant gave her deep, throaty laugh that drew so many people to her. She enjoyed laughing, did it as much as she could, and Rogers had proven to be an unexpected source of inspiration. She’d never have believed she could be such good friends with someone who was essentially a mercenary, but he had defied her expectations—humbled her in a way. A scientist, she welcomed every lesson, life lessons most of all. Her parents had made sure of that.

  “Still, maybe a hand job…” he mumbled, and she leaned across the cab and punched him in the arm. “Ouch!”

  “Big hard soldier.”

  “You’re stronger than you look.”

  Palant noticed that he’d slowed the rover down. She smiled. He knew just how much she liked getting out here. It wasn’t only to experience the true ruggedness of the place she had grown to call home, but also to clear her mind. She spent so much time at her work that she had to remove herself sometimes—not only from the lab, its samples, her computers and theories, but also the base itself. It flushed the accumulated debris away from her mind, and lent her a fresh perspective.

  Still, every time she closed her eyes she saw the Yautja.

  “Atmosphere processors,” Rogers said.

  “Where?” She peered through the windscreen. The self-cleaning perspex was working hard, smeared with droplets of filthy rain, scratched with years of impacts from dust-laden winds and heavier gravel thrown by the occasional twisters that leapt up in the vicinity of the base. She squinted, then between sweeps of the wiper arms she saw the first blinking lights high atop the westernmost of the three processing towers.

  The design of atmosphere processors had hardly changed in the last century—vast pyramidal structures powered by nuclear-fusion reactors, their technology way beyond her understanding. Though a scientist, Palant always maintained that paleontology demanded an artist’s mind. Some people saw the processors as beautiful things, but to her they were clumsy man-made edifices struggling against nature. Every gain they made was hard-won, and they weren’t always successful. Nevertheless, recent analyses predicted that LV-1529 would be a Class 2 planet within fifteen years, and Class 1 in seven decades.

  “Getting back to your monsters this afternoon?” Rogers asked.

  “Yeah, why not. Got some ideas.”

  “What’re you working on now?” He’d seen the samples in her lab, the bio-frozen remnants of Yautja gathered from various contacts made over the last decade. A hand, one finger missing, the tattered stump of its wrist cauterized by the laser-rifle blast that had blown it off. The lower jaw, tusks long and sharp, inner teeth loosened where a new set had started to push through, and the various samples of blood and bodily fluids. Sad things, he sometimes thought. Other times, scary.

  “I’m trying to find out how their blood helps in wound repair and regeneration,” she said. “It’s something we only discovered recently with Eve.”

  “Ah, yeah, the only Yautja kept in captivity. Didn’t it kill itself?”

  “That’s still debated. I believe it di
d. They found it dead in its cell, and I think it willed its hearts to stop beating.” Palant so wished she’d had a chance to meet Eve—to talk, ask its real name. Attempting their language was another aim of her research, although the strand that had advanced the least. Company scientists had treated it more as a vivisection experiment than what it should have been—contact with an intelligent, highly advanced alien species.

  “Originally I thought it might have been killed with nano-tech, and I spent a long time trying to look into that. Artificial tech first, then when I found no evidence of that I looked into bio-tech.”

  “Huh?”

  “Naturally created nano-bots. W-Y have been researching it for years, without any real success. Essentially it takes tweaking genetics to create nano-bots from biological material already extant in a body, then programming those genes for specific tasks.”

  “Right,” Rogers said. “I wonder what’s for dinner.”

  She smiled, but knew he was joking. Rogers was brighter than he liked to let on, and they’d been friends long enough for him to understand what she talked about more than most. Sometimes she thought of inviting him to become her assistant, but she liked their relationship, and that kind of friendship required distance.

  In her lab, she became far too intense.

  “Thing is, after a long time looking into that, I started to think it was too basic. Old-fashioned thinking. I wasn’t giving their biology the respect it deserved. I was looking more at tech than at an evolved natural ability. So now I’ve gone back to basics, comparing their blood to other creatures that can regenerate. Newts, starfish, flatworms. The axolotl, an amazing creature. Even mammals like deer, which can regrow their antlers, and some bats that can repair damaged wings.”