He was almost certain Braley was lying. The only problem was that to Kramm Braley always sounded like he was lying, even when he was telling the truth. Assuming he actually did sometimes tell the truth. Did it matter anyway? What exactly was wrong? Shouldn’t he go in and take a look and get it over with as quickly as possible so that he could be frozen again and go back to not existing?
It was then that he began to think What if I’m still frozen after all? What if he had never woken up, but was instead still lying on the brink of death inside his plastic sheath, frozen, dreaming very, very slowly, days in the frozen world going by with each minute of this one? Could he be imagining all of this?
Maybe that was what was wrong.
“Well?” asked Braley.
Kramm stepped forward and touched the keypad. The door slid back to reveal a transparent wall that looked somewhat like gelatin. He reached out and touched it. It felt warm and tingly through his glove, nothing more. He pushed his hand in, watched it sink, but then was surprised to see his fingers coming out again, toward his face, as if his hand had been bent back against itself.
“I should have told you,” said Braley. “It’s a toros field. Instead of setting up a barrier it bends space. The farther you go into it, the farther out of it you come.”
“Kind of a trip, no?” said Frances.
Kramm nodded. He pulled his hand out, looked at it. It looked just like a normal hand. I must still be asleep, he thought.
“Frances has half the deactivator. I have the other half,” said Braley. “Just to keep us both honest.”
“To keep you honest, you mean,” said Frances.
Braley shrugged. His fingers disappeared with a crackling sound into his holo-suit and came back out again with what looked like a small steel orb. He flung it at the translucent wall. It hung there, suspended. A moment later a second orb followed, thrown by Frances. Instantly, the toros field vanished, the two orbs clattering to the floor.
Braley scooped them up. Kramm took a step up and over the threshold, and was in.
* * *
The motion sensors immediately turned the lights on, harsh fluorescents. The building itself seemed an ordinary prefab, very little about it to resemble a scientific research station of any sort he had seen. There they were, six bodies arranged roughly in a row, the same line of boots he had seen on the vid. The puddle of blood the last boot touched was no longer a puddle now but a dried flaking oval, as if the floor itself had scabbed over. He glanced at the series of ruptured chests, quickly looked away.
“There,” said Braley. “You can see some blood, right there on the wall.” He pointed and wandered toward it. Kramm followed. The inside of his mouth was dry, his heart beating uncomfortably fast.
There was indeed blood on the wall, but long whips of it, filamental—not the sort of extreme spatter pattern he remembered having seen an Alien leave. And there wasn’t enough blood—apart from the blood on their chests and around the one boot, there was almost no blood at all.
“All scientists?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Braley. “Didn’t Frances tell you? A promising lot. The best training and credentials. It won’t be easy to replace them.”
Kramm nodded. He began to walk around the bodies, slowly spiraling closer.
“Have they been moved?” he asked.
“Moved?” said Braley. “Of course not. This is precisely how we found them.”
“Are you sure it was Aliens?” asked Kramm.
“I was under the impression that you were going to tell me.”
“All right,” said Kramm, and only then turned back for a better look.
There was, he saw, a mucuslike goo, dollops of it here and there near the bodies. In consistency, it was close to the goo the Aliens secreted, but it didn’t strike him as being quite right. It was thick, too viscous. Maybe another subspecies, a slightly different variety of Aliens? Maybe something about the atmosphere of the planet itself? Maybe because it had dried? But the goo didn’t dry. Kramm knew from experience.
And there were acid burns as well: a few places where the floor of the prefab was pocked and weakened and one place where it had burnt mostly through. Acid was acid, there was no arguing with that, but there were also no plasma burns on the ceiling or walls, no clear signs of one of the creatures having been shot. Also, no real spatter pattern to the acid, as if it had been simply dribbled about by someone out of a glass beaker.
“And they fought back?” asked Kramm.
“That one did,” said Braley, and pointed. “You can see where the creature got him. That’s his pistol over there. It’s been fired.”
Kramm moved closer to the body. It was gashed here and there, but with very little blood around the wounds, almost as if they had been made once the man was dead or dying. He bent down. The wounds themselves looked wrong as well, too jagged and gaping, not like wounds he’d seen on any Aliens victim before. Again, nothing definitively wrong but a lot just not quite right.
“We just want to do the right thing,” Braley was saying. “If it’s Aliens, we are willing to follow your lead.”
“Cut the crap, Braley,” said Frances.
“No, I mean it,” said Braley. “We’re committed to—”
“You’re forgetting I used to work for the Company,” said Kramm. He stood up straight, knees cracking. “I know exactly what you really want.”
Braley opened his mouth, closed it again.
“This is it?” asked Kramm. “These six?”
Braley nodded. “And a synth,” he said. “He’s in the other room.”
“Still functional?”
“Hardly,” said Braley, and smirked. “Have a look for yourself.”
Kramm shrugged, started for the inner portal, Frances behind him, Jolena and Bjorn behind her. Braley and the company men stayed where they were.
“Not coming?” asked Kramm.
“I’ve seen it already,” said Braley, and suddenly his face grew taut and pale. “I’ll stay here with the real dead if it’s all the same to you.”
The touch switch for the door wasn’t working, the battered door stuck a few centimeters open. Kramm tried to work his fingers into the crack and force it back further into the wall slot, but couldn’t get it to budge.
He felt someone tap his shoulder, turned to find Bjorn close behind him, holding a small prybar.
“Allow me,” the man said in his strange and unplaceable accent.
Kramm stepped aside and watched Bjorn move slowly and deliberately forward, squaring himself in front of the door. He worked the blade of the bar into the crack and began to pry, the muscles in his neck and back tensed and visible through the fabric of his suit. Kramm realized suddenly and with a certain wonder how strong this man really was. The door didn’t slide back on its track and into the wall, but by the time Bjorn was done with it, it didn’t matter: he had buckled it and crimped the edge enough that they would have no problem squeezing through.
Kramm went first, pushing his way in, shining the flashlight in front of him. The walls were spattered with a milk substance, lubricant from the synth. There were puddles of it on the floor as well, here and there, skimmed over with dust.
At first he thought the synth was nowhere to be seen, but then he realized that the truth was just the opposite: it was everywhere to be seen. Bits and pieces of it were spread about, the strips of synthetic flesh or fragments of plastic compounds or shards of metal now small enough that it was nearly impossible to imagine that they had ever come together to form a man.
“Good Lord,” said Frances from behind him.
Kramm just nodded. After a while, he approached the biggest puddle of lubricant, dragging his boot through it. What came out was an ear, still attached to a strip of scalp and a hunk of fake hair, a slurry of circuitry clinging to it as well. It looked uncannily familiar to him.
“What do you make of it?” Frances whispered from just behind his ear.
He started. He hadn’t realized sh
e was so close. “Looks like he went through a shredder,” he said.
“I hadn’t realized that Aliens could do this,” she said.
“No, literally,” said Kramm. “It looks to me as though someone forced him through a shredder. Aliens wouldn’t do this; it’s too careful, too regular. A synth is of no interest to them: they can’t incubate in it. See that spume there?” he said, and pointed to the milky spray on the wall. “And how the floor here is relatively clean? My guess is that they set a shredder up here and then fed him in.”
“Who?”
“Somebody who wanted to make sure we wouldn’t be able to put him back together again.”
“Was he alive when they did it?”
Kramm shrugged. “He was a synth,” he said. “It’s debatable whether he was ever alive at all. Maybe they disconnected him first. Maybe they didn’t.”
They found, splattered against the wall behind the bed, tatters of the synth’s face, one of the eyes nearby. Kramm bent down and tore it free, shaping the remnants over his hand so that it looked almost human again. He felt Frances grab his shoulder.
“He’s one of ours,” she said.
“You’re sure?” said Kramm. “Maybe another of the same model as yours, same face?”
“I’m sure,” said Frances. “We own the patent on that face. There was only one of him.”
“You can patent faces now?” asked Kramm.
“Of course,” said Frances. “What, is that a new thing?”
Kramm just shook his head, draping the face over the edge of the bed.
“He was a spy then?” he asked.
“We don’t like to use that word,” said Frances. “It has a lot of negative connotations. Let’s just say he was here gathering information.”
Kramm remained crouched, staring into the emptied face. What exactly had gone on here? he wondered. Not Aliens, certainly: it was supposed to look like Aliens, was a reasonably good simulation for someone who had never been through an attack, never seen it first hand. But everything was slightly off, slightly wrong.
Unless, he thought, it’s me. Unless I’m the one who is slightly off. He felt the doubts slowly begin to claw their way up inside of him again. He’d been asleep for thirty years: who knew what that could do to a person? Maybe the whole world felt off as a result.
“We should go,” Frances said, and touched his shoulder again. It was strange how sensitive his shoulder felt. But then again he hadn’t been touched much in the last thirty years.
He stayed crouched, pushing the synth’s metal-and-polymer crushed eyeball about with one finger. It clicked. After a moment he picked it up, shook it, regarded it more closely. It clicked again. Suddenly he felt the black device in his pocket vibrate briefly, then stop.
“Coming?” asked Braley from the door. “Haven’t seen enough yet? There are still six other real corpses to mull over.”
Palming the eyeball, Kramm stood up. He followed Frances out.
4
Between examining bodies he managed to slip the synth’s eye into his pocket. He could feel it pressing against his thigh as he kneeled down, the black device pressing his other thigh in a similar way. He wanted to tell Frances about the eye, about the clicking it had made and the way the box had responded—if it had in fact been responding to the eye after all, rather than it being simply a coincidence.
The bodies were a puzzle. A lot of details were off—acid spatter pattern, too little goo, the careful lining up of the corpses—but the one thing that was hard to explain away was the burst chests. That detail seemed right. That was how he remembered it looking, the chests ruptured and cracked open from the inside, an upwelling of innards and blood. It really did seem that the bodies had been ruptured from the inside out, that that was what had killed them. How could that have been effectively faked?
He stared at the first and second bodies for a long time, trying to envision something else happening, trying to fit the evidence that seemed to ring true together with all the other little things that rang false.
“Anything wrong, Mr. Kramm?” asked Braley.
“What?” said Kramm. “No, not at all,” he said. “Just trying to do a thorough job.”
But he caught Frances’s eye and realized she knew it was more than that. That there was something profoundly puzzling him.
He bent down and examined the next body. Same problem: most details didn’t add up, but then there was the burst chest, which was impossible to dismiss. Something had been inside each of these men and had burst out. Maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe there really had been Aliens here after all.
But how could he make that fit, for instance, with the relaxed look on each man’s face? He had seen enough human hosts who had been killed by Aliens to know that this just wasn’t remotely plausible: thirty years ago every dead face he’d seen had been contorted, twisted in pain, afflicted with a horrible death rictus. But these faces looked like they had fallen peacefully asleep.
Carefully, with Frances’s help, he took pictures of the wounds, collecting samples of the tissue inside the chests, not sure what it all added up to. Surely, he thought, there’s something here, some clue, to help me make sense of this. He kept looking for it, kept searching, without any success: just two mutually incompatible sets of evidence and no way to reconcile them.
Frances knelt down beside him, which had the effect of drawing Braley in close as well, curious and suspicious. Kramm watched her turn a dead man’s hand over, run her own hand along his palm.
“What can you tell us about their specific professions?” asked Frances.
“Their professions?” asked Braley. “Why, scientists.”
“What sort of scientists?” asked Frances.
Braley shrugged. “Does it matter?” he asked.
“It could matter,” she said. “Couldn’t it, Kramm?”
“Yes,” agreed Kramm hesitantly, though he couldn’t figure out how it possibly could matter, didn’t quite understand what Frances was driving at.
“There, you see,” said Frances. “Names and professions.”
“But I don’t see—” started Braley.
“—we’re not asking for industrial secrets, Braley, just the names and professions of the deceased. It may help us make sense of what can only be described as a grisly situation, and may help as well to give a sense of how the Aliens, assuming this is in fact the work of Aliens, came to be on this planet. We’re well within our rights to ask for such information, Braley.”
Braley started to open his mouth, then sighed, turned and opened his com-link.
“Thanks for going along with me,” Frances whispered.
“What’s it about?” asked Kramm.
“Probably nothing,” said Frances. “Just being safe.” She reached out and took Kramm’s hand, pulled it over to press it against the hand of one of the corpses. “Feel this,” she said.
He rubbed his hand back and forth against the corpse’s palm. “It feels like a hand,” he said.
“But does it feel like a scientist’s hand?” she asked. She handed him her com-link. “Take some fingerprints,” she said.
She stood quickly up, walked to where Braley was speaking into his com-link, arranging to download limited information for Frances for each of the dead men. Kramm watched them, still rubbing his hand back and forth against the dead man’s hand. And then suddenly he began to feel it: the roughness of the edges of the fingers, the calloused palm. It was the hand of a manual laborer, a farmer or a carpenter or something of that sort. What’s really going on here? he wondered again. And why can’t I see it?
He pressed the man’s index finger against the screen of Frances’s com-link, recording the man’s fingerprint, then moved to the next corpse, bending over it. Same slack, relaxed face, same burst chest. He recorded its fingerprint, then bent in to get a closer look at the chest cavity. As he did so, the black device in his pocket began to vibrate again, longer this time, continuing for nearly a full minute as he stayed crouch
ed over the body and pretended to examine it. When it stopped, he went on to the next body, then to the last, finally standing.
“Well?” said Braley. Frances was right behind him. Behind her the two company guards stood motionless, looking as though their batteries had run down or as if they had just been switched off. Bjorn and Jolena were a little farther back; she was talking and he was smiling at whatever she was saying.
“I’m done,” said Kramm.
“So, what do you think?” asked Braley. “Aliens is it? Looks like it to me, but you’re the expert.”
“Too early to say,” said Kramm. “I have to think through the data, make a little more sense of it.” And then he saw suspicion narrowing Braley’s eyes, caught as well Frances’s warning glance just past Braley’s shoulder. He swallowed. “But yes,” he said, looking Braley straight in the eye. “Everything suggests Aliens.”
Braley watched him expressionlessly for a long moment and then slowly forced his face into a smile. “I’m glad we agree,” he said. “Though of course now we’re faced with the more difficult question of what to do.”
“Not yet,” said Frances. “Wait for our official report, Braley. Don’t jump the gun.”
“Of course not,” said Braley, smoothly. “Wouldn’t dream of it. Shall we say an official report in twenty-four hours?”
“All right,” said Frances. “Don’t call us, Braley. We’ll call you.”
5
They flew back on Bjorn and Jolena’s flitter, leaving the other craft for Braley and his two minions. Bjorn flew the craft in a measured way, was a placid and slow driver, until Jolena got fed up and took over, speeding them quickly and expertly back toward the spaceport.
Several times he tried to bring up his doubts and mention the strange vibration of the black box, but each time he began to speak Frances pressed her fingers to her lips and quickly spun the conversation in a more anodyne direction. Finally, the third time, she shook her head and made a face, and he knew better than to start again.
“Back to sleep, is it?” she said, in a bright voice. “Back into storage to wait for the next invasion?”
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 26