“It’s a surprise,” says Braley. “And we haven’t even reached the finale to this act yet.”
He entertains himself, as Marshall watches, by making shallow cuts in LaFargue’s side, watching the milky lubricant ooze slowly out.
And then the guards are back, carrying between them a large metal box with a slotted opening on the top of it and a sort of chute in the back. Braley is on his feet, directing them to set it up in the middle of the room, the slotted opening close to the door, the chute facing the back wall.
“This is just a safety precaution,” says Braley. “Just in case we missed anything.” He turns on the machine, which makes a loud, rumbling noise. He grabs LaFargue under the arms and drags him to his feet. With the help of one of the guards he lifts him, fitting him feet first into the slotted opening. They begin to push down on his shoulders.
A grinding noise starts, which quickly turns to a whine, an opaque fluid starting to gush from LaFargue’s mouth. A jet of fluid and mangled bits hardly bigger than a thumbnail begins to spray out of the chute and over the floor and wall. Slowly, still sentient, head moving back and forth, LaFargue is dragged down into the machine. Soon he is gone.
Frances is digging her fingers into his arm, Kramm suddenly realizes.
The machine has gone back to making the dull rumbling sound. There is no longer any trace of LaFargue beyond the milky substance and the glinting fragments scattered about. One of the guards touches the machine’s faceplate and it turns off. Four men each take a corner of the machine, and carry it off.
“No part longer than two centimeters,” Braley is instructing the guards still in the room. “And no footprints, no signs of us ever having been here.”
The men set about their task. Braley reaches his hand toward Marshall, guides him out of the room.
“As you can see,” says Braley. “We’re very serious.”
“You don’t have to kill me for me to believe it,” says Marshall. “You can stop with the synth.”
Braley mimes looking hurt. “But I want to kill you,” he says. “It’s no bother,” he says. “Besides, I do have to kill you.”
“But why?”
“For reasons you’ll never know,” says Braley. He pats him on the shoulder, gives him a friendly smile. “You’ll just have to take my word for it.”
“He’s a real bastard,” says Kramm. Frances, still gripping his arm, just nods.
“But you seem like a bright boy, Tobin. There’s no point in letting you be the next to die. We’ll give you a chance to see the second act. If you think the first act was something, this next one will really blow your mind.”
And then suddenly Marshall is running across the floor, striking his head repeatedly against the wall. Trying to kill himself, Kramm realizes, or at least beat himself unconscious. There are shouts, a flurry of arms and faces and then he is on the floor, looking up. A few moments later, he has been hauled up and strapped onto a chair, head lolling.
“Not very sporting of you,” says Braley, very close to the camera now. “On the other hand you’ve demonstrated that you yourself are not a synthetic, both by expressing the most genuinely human emotion—fear—and by bleeding all over the walls. You’ve got spirit. Which will make this all the more fun.”
Marshall spits in Braley’s face. Braley goes white, and then his face darkens, his eyes glittering with hate. It is a struggle, but slowly he masters himself. He wipes the spittle away with one hand, smoothing his hair back with the other.
“Shall we move on,” says Braley, voice cold now. “You see before you, yourself excluded, five men, all drugged, lying variously prone on the floor. Which one do you pick to be the first to die?”
Marshall refuses to answer.
“Don’t want to choose, eh? Can’t see them well enough to make a choice?” He snaps his fingers and the guards drag the five men into a line.
“Leave a gap,” he says. “Right in the middle. For our good friend Tobin.”
They remove the tubing from the men’s wrists and feet.
“As you can see,” says Braley, lifting a man’s arm and letting it fall, “they’re drugged. No danger of them waking up any time soon. They can hear everything we’re saying, though. Whether they’ll be able to feel what’s going to happen to them is difficult to say, an open question. We can always hope.” He moves down the line, holding up the head of each man in turn for Marshall to see. “How about this one?” he says, picking a head up by the hair. “No?” He lets the head thunk against the floor. “This one?”
“Still don’t want to choose?” says Braley. “Shall we just go down the line then, moving from left to right, like a reader?”
Without waiting for an answer, he approaches the man farthest to the left. A guard brings him a flat case, about the length and width of a man’s forearm. There is a thumbprint lock on it, as well as a retinal scanner, as well as an old-fashioned combination lock. He opens one lock, then another, then the third. Then he opens the case.
Inside are a series of narrow metal strips, bendable and thin as paper, a strange glimmer to them. Braley sits on the floor behind the drugged man. He slowly works his leg under the man’s neck until the man’s head is tipped back, his throat straight, his mouth gaping slightly.
And then he begins to feed a metal strip down the man’s throat with his fingers, pushing it down as far as it will go with his fingertips. When he can’t push it anymore, he pushes in another strip, manipulating it until it touches the other strip and pushes this further down.
“You may be wondering why I’m filling a paralyzed man’s stomach with metal, Tobin. An odd hobby, perhaps? A strange pastime?” He pushes another strip in and then another. “Once these come into contact with stomach acid,” Braley explains, “the strips are governed by a nanotechnology that causes them to rearrange themselves into a larger constellation, one no doubt that you will not be familiar with but which goes in the vulgate by the name of chestburster.”
And now it is Kramm whose nails are digging into Frances’s arm as the vid continues, Braley feeding the metal strip by strip down the man’s throat.
“Just a few more,” Braley says. The man’s stomach is already expanding and contracting, something clearly happening just under the surface of the skin.
“And then,” says Braley. He gestures, and with an earsplitting crack the man’s chest bursts apart, a small robotic version of a chestburster thrusting its way out. Braley continues to speak calmly despite being spattered with blood. The man, drugged, does nothing but slowly die, his open shirt darkening with blood, blood pooling in his chest cavity.
“Hey, little guy,” says Braley, a lightness to his voice now, like he is talking to a pet or a small child. “Look at you. Look how pretty you are.” He carefully lifts the chestburster out of the ruptured chest, puts it on the floor where it remains motionless beside him.
“It can assemble itself and then thrust upward,” he says. “That’s it. Later models might well manage a few more tricks. Fetch, roll over, play dead—the usual things. But even without those tricks it’s still a technological wonder. Aren’t you?” he says to it in baby talk. “Aren’t you?”
“You’re insane,” says Marshall.
“At least I’m not dead,” says Braley and smiles in a way that shows all his teeth. “Unlike you,” he says. He reaches out and strokes the metal chestburster, petting it lightly, and suddenly it dissolves back into a sheath of metal strips again.
“Well,” he says. “Who shall we kill next? Still left to right?”
“Why are you doing this?” asks Marshall.
“It’s strictly business,” says Braley. “It’s not personal.”
“What kind of business could demand this?”
“You’d be surprised,” says Braley. “With everything in business there’s an easy way and a hard way to do something. Generally we prefer to go with the easy way. Profits are high, almost nobody gets hurt, and everybody, more or less, is happy. Even those who aren�
��t happy are more or less happy. But every once in a while we have to do things the hard way. Either there aren’t enough profits to spread around for the easy way to work out or else our competitors think they’re one step ahead of us or else the laws are such that we feel too constrained by them.”
“And this is the hard way?”
“Let me finish,” says Braley. He scoots across the floor to the next body, begins to arrange his leg under the neck. “Sometimes there’s another way. It’s not the easy way and it’s not the hard way and it’s not a way that ninety-nine percent of people would even think of as a possibility, and that’s part of its beauty and brilliance. It’s a way of running rings around your competitors without them even realizing you’re doing it. It’s the best way precisely because nobody in a million years could believe you are actually doing what you’re doing. That’s what this is. The best way. It’s a shame you won’t live to see the shape of it.” He laughs.
“Open wide,” he says to the unconscious man with his head in his lap, and then begins slipping metal strips down his throat.
The vid continues, and though Kramm and Frances already know what will happen they can’t help but let it play out to the end. They watch Braley slip metal down the second man’s throat—Benjamin, Kramm thinks it is—then the stomach begins to roil and stretch, then there is an upgush of blood as the bones crack and the chest explodes. Braley, still balancing the man’s head on his leg, licks the blood off his lips and begins to speak to his pet again, in baby talk again, then he strokes it until it collapses. He moves along to the next man.
In the middle of the third man, Marshall starts screaming and won’t stop. At first Braley seems to enjoy this, chatting jovially at him, though the words can’t be understood over the screams, as he continues to force the narrow metal strips down the man’s throat.
But when he realizes that Marshall can’t stop, he grows irritated, starts shouting and gesturing to the guards. In a moment Marshall has been thrown to the floor and is being held down, a guard with a hypodermic approaching him.
Kramm and Frances watch as his screams slowly become rounded out around the edges, growing mushy and then reducing themselves to an odd mangled thrumming. And then that stops too. A guard slaps him softly on the face and he doesn’t respond.
“He’s ready,” says the guard.
And then he is lifted up and carried. A moment later the camera is looking up at the ceiling and, then, into Braley’s face.
“I’d been hoping to save you for the end,” says Braley. “But here and now will do just fine. You can hear me of course? Just nod your head and say yes,” says Braley, and then laughs.
How must it be, Kramm thinks, to know you’re going to die but not to be able to do anything at all about it? What is it like to be trapped in your own body? Terrible, he thinks. Maybe even worse than fighting things in the dark you can’t see.
On the screen blurred strips of metal pass across the frame. Kramm realizes that time is short. Then the last strip passes by and Braley’s head is there, smiling above him.
“I guess this is goodbye,” Braley says, and laughs.
Then he lifts Marshall’s head so that his eyes are staring at his own stomach. “You’re going to want to see this,” he says.
The stomach seems to swell and flex, and for a bare instant Kramm feels he can see, through the flesh, the outline of the chestburster’s tiny skull-like head. Next to him, Frances is holding her own stomach. The flesh of Marshall’s belly bulges and stretches, and then suddenly the bulge is moving upward, into the chest. The chest heaves up and down, like someone hyperventilating, and then there is a creaking sound, a groaning, and with a crack and a burst of blood, the small, gleaming metallic head appears within the blood-spattered frame.
PART FOUR
ESCAPE ROUTE
1
Frances’s face was very pale, almost the face of a corpse. Kramm knew his must look much the same. They looked at one another for a long moment and then Kramm opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again. What was there to say? he wondered.
“I need a moment,” Frances said finally.
“Of course,” said Kramm.
She got up and left the bridge, closing herself into the lock between the bridge and the rest of the ship. Kramm himself stood and wandered the bridge, ending up staring into a corner at a utility panel. I was right, he told himself, it wasn’t Aliens. But he almost wished it had been. That, at least, was something he was familiar with.
Now what? he kept wondering. Now what? He could always file his report and go back into cryosleep, but would he be allowed to do that if he didn’t file the report Weyland-Yutani wanted? Would they come gunning for him, figure out a way to pull the plug on him while he slept? Planetus would at least be glad to know that the planet wasn’t infested by Aliens, that their investment was not in jeopardy, but what would they think of the other things Kramm and Frances had to tell them? What would they be able to do about it?
The last moment, he realized, that image of the artificial Alien breaking through Marshall’s chest, the alien facing toward the head instead of toward the feet, had been the image he’d seen, from a different angle, from above, on the ‘security tape’ that Weyland-Yutani had given them. There, the image had been granulated and carefully distorted so it couldn’t be identified as mechanical, though the gleam had still caught his eye, had still seemed wrong.
What are they up to? Kramm wondered. What is so important that they had to stage a fake Alien invasion to protect it?
* * *
Frances came out of the lock, looking less pale, more human again. Her mouth was set tight and determined.
“I’m all right now,” she said. “I just wasn’t prepared for that.”
“How could you be?” he asked.
“I know that bastard Braley well enough that I should have been prepared for anything,” she said.
He nodded and they sat down at the table. She disconnected the vid player, placing the black data device into her pocket.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“We do the right thing,” she said.
“All right,” he said. “And what’s that going to be exactly?”
“The way I see it,” she said, “we’ve got ten or eleven hours before Braley starts asking for his report. In the meantime, we contact Darby and brief him, try to get him to go public with the vid. If he won’t, we take it public ourselves.”
Kramm nodded. “What were they protecting?” he asked. “Why kill everybody?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “The technology for the new terraformer? Maybe it’s more revolutionary than anyone realizes.”
Kramm shook his head. “It doesn’t sound right,” he said. “Couldn’t they have protected it just as well by reassigning Marshall and LaFargue?”
“Maybe they want to send a message to Planetus, warning them to keep out of their business.”
“Maybe,” said Kramm. But he wasn’t too sure. “If that’s the case,” he finally said, “why not simply stage an accident in which both Marshall and the synth are destroyed? That’s what keeps bothering me: why kill everyone? There doesn’t seem to be any purpose to it.”
“It’s just like Braley,” she said, and her eyes narrowed. “He probably thinks of it as a work of art. He likes the symmetry of killing everyone.”
“Maybe,” said Kramm. “But why didn’t they find Marshall’s recorder?”
“Because they found a camera in each of LaFargue’s eyes.”
“Surely they should have realized that there might have been two spies, two cameras. It just doesn’t sit right.”
Frances just shook her head. “Just luck?” she said.
“No such thing as just luck,” he said. “Doesn’t Braley seem more cautious than that?”
“Maybe once he got caught up in the moment and realized what he could do to Marshall he let things slide,” she said. “One thing I know about Braley,” she said. “He li
kes an audience.”
“That’s true,” said Kramm. “Maybe that’s all it is.”
But there was something still nagging him, eating away at him. He kept turning it around in his head, trying to make sense of it. Frances in the meantime had fired up her com-link and was entering something into it.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Checking the names Braley gave me against the fingerprints you took,” she said. “Marshall said something that got me thinking. And what you said yourself made me think of it again.”
“What was it?”
“Just give me a minute,” she said.
He waited. A thought cohered in his mind and he let it drift onto his tongue.
“One more thing,” he said. “Expense.”
“Excuse me?” she said.
“Why would Braley go to the expense of staging an Alien invasion when an accident would have served just as well? That doesn’t sound like him, does it?”
“Frankly, no,” she said. “It doesn’t.”
“When the guard was shot,” Kramm said, “the first thing he raised was the cost of a new arm.”
“True,” she said, half distracted by the com-link.
“Which makes me think that he would take the cheaper route.”
“Unless there was a real reason to take the more expensive one.”
“Yes,” he said. “Not the easy way and not the hard way: the best way. What makes this the best way? That’s what we need to understand.”
“Here’s something interesting,” she said. “According to the names Braley gave us, all these men are high-powered scientists. According to their fingerprints, none of them are. Of the seven individuals killed in the complex, none of them, apart from Marshall and LaFargue, had been employed by the company for more than a year. None of them, if Marshall is to be believed, had irreplaceable skills. They all chart in at bottom-level jobs and low salary levels.” She looked up. “Expense again. He couldn’t bring himself to kill decent scientists when anybody would do. He had these guys killed because they were cheap to kill and no great loss to the company. They were all expendable.”
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 31