The Complete Aliens Omnibus

by B. K. Evenson

You couldn’t have saved me, said the marine. But at least you could have tried.

  He was still thinking about the dream when they touched softly down. Why did it matter what he had done if doing something else wouldn’t have made a difference?

  At least you could have tried, he heard the ex-marine say again in his head.

  He looked around him, at the other six people on the bridge, all webbed safely in. Seven of us here, he thought. Seven dead in the alien attack that Braley faked. Coincidence?

  Maybe, maybe not. How many of us will be dead before nightfall? How many of us will live through the next day? Probably none, he thought.

  Everybody unwebbed. They sent out a probe and scanned the area as best they could. On the screen, Kramm saw his former house, more or less the same, discolored with dust, half-buried on one side. It was all the same, he thought, only more so.

  “I don’t think I can go in there,” he said.

  “We may have to,” said Frances.

  “I hope not,” said Kramm, feeling a certain amount of despair.

  There were two other settlers’ houses, each at a little distance from Kramm’s, each in the same state of disrepair. There were also two ships, both of them wrecks and quite mangled, both partly buried.

  “We’ll look there first,” said Frances. “See if they have anything we can use.”

  They sent the probe over the colony compound, which was much different than it had been when Kramm had been there. The walls were still there, enclosing it, but in addition there was now a dome, stretching from wall to wall, making the complex an entirely enclosed space.

  “Fly the probe over again,” said Kramm.

  They did, moving it more slowly this time. The dome was all metal and plexene, the metal gleaming, the plexene tinted. They couldn’t make out much of anything inside of it. There was one portion of the roof, however, that on the second pass Kelly realized was on tracks, geared to slide back, big enough to allow a ship to pass in and out.

  “That’s near where the command center used to be,” said Kramm.

  “If there’s a ship inside the complex, it’ll be there,” said Frances. “Any chance we could go in through the roof?”

  They took the probe around the walls again. They were ten meters high, the walls sheer and slanting slightly outward, no easy projections or access ladders, made to keep whatever was outside the complex outside.

  “Maybe we can put something together from the ship,” said Gavin. “A makeshift ladder, a grappling hook.”

  “Even if we do,” said Jolena, “what’s to say that we’ll be able to get in?”

  “It’s worth a try,” said Gavin. “And maybe we can put together something from one of the wrecks.”

  “Could there still be survivors inside the compound?” Frances wanted to know.

  “They evacuated the planet,” said Kramm. “At least that’s what they claimed they were doing. But the dome has been built since I was last here.”

  “So they didn’t evacuate after all,” said Jolena.

  “Or they came back,” said Frances.

  “But why?” asked Duncan.

  “What we’re looking at,” said Kramm after a long moment’s thought, “is an Alien farm. You heard what Braley said. The Alien and the two eggs came from here. The bastards are growing them.”

  “That being the case, I for one think we should stay clear of the complex,” said Gavin.

  “And do what?” asked Frances. “Starve?”

  “At least we should take a look at the settlers’ houses and the wrecks,” said Kelly. “Before we commit to the complex, we should see if there’s anything useful outside of it.”

  “All we need is a controller for the navigator,” said Duncan. “Maybe we can even modify one from a refrigerator or something.”

  “We need food too,” said Frances. “Even if only a little.”

  “I’m not going in there,” said Kramm. “Too many ghosts.”

  “Maybe it’d help you to go in,” said Frances gently.

  “I’m still in there,” said Kramm. “What’d help me is figuring a way to get out.”

  Frances nodded. “A quick sortie in, then,” she said. “A reconnaissance of the three houses and the two wrecks. Kelly, Bjorn, Jolena. Kramm, you don’t have to go.”

  “Thank you,” said Kramm.

  “Don’t mention it,” said Frances.

  Kelly, Bjorn, and Jolena armed themselves and, scooping up the three breathers, left. They exited the deck through the forward hatch, went down the forward ladder and out onto the planet. The remaining four watched on the monitors as they moved slowly away and toward the first settlers’ prefab, the one that had belonged to Kramm.

  * * *

  What was almost as bad as making the journey into the house itself, Kramm realized, almost a quarter of an hour later, was watching someone else make it and not knowing what might be happening to them. He had watched his three shipmates get smaller and smaller and then, finally, disappear through his door. And then they were simply gone. Frances tried to hail them, getting one static-laden reply before the signal was cut off. After that, there was nothing to do but wait.

  But it was all Kramm could do to wait. He remembered what he himself had seen when he had passed through the door, remembered the moment he had realized something was wrong. And there was his wife, on the bed, confused, and then the moment when, after killing the Alien, he had to kill her. Not to mention all that had followed later in the darkness below.

  He stayed at the front console, eyes glued to the screen. They would never come out, he couldn’t help but feel. Now that they had entered the house, they would be in it forever.

  And then Frances was beside him, trying to get him to relax, trying to keep him from worrying. When he shrugged her off she just sat there, silent, and watched the screen with him. How could anyone bear to be there for him? he wondered. He both appreciated her and resented her all at once.

  Probably only a few minutes later, there they were, all three of them, stumbling out again, starting the trek toward the next settlers’ prefab. And he found he could breathe again.

  “Do you think they found anything?” asked Gavin.

  “If they’d found something they’d come back here instead of going on to the next one,” said Frances.

  They all watched the trio growing smaller again, slowly disappearing, and finally entering the pre-fab. This one they were inside of for just a few minutes before they reappeared. They started for the third one.

  “It doesn’t look good,” said Frances. “Kramm, why don’t you and Duncan go out and take a look at the complex wall, see if you think there’s any way up it.”

  “All right,” said Kramm, holstering a gun. “Where’s a breather?”

  “There isn’t one,” said Frances, looking away from the screen. “They took all three. You could suit up in a deep-space suit or you could just go out as you are. You’ll be okay. Just don’t stay out too long.”

  Kramm nodded. He and Duncan made their way to the airlock, stepped into it, then opened the hatch and climbed out.

  * * *

  It was hot outside, a wind whipping the dust up and about them. At first he didn’t notice anything different about the air and then, gradually, he began to feel short of breath.

  “Come on,” Duncan said, already padding out across the sand toward the complex. It was a few hundred meters, not far, but by the time they were halfway across Kramm felt winded. His head had started to quietly throb.

  “What got you involved with Planetus?” asked Kramm.

  “I needed a job,” said Duncan. “Planetus seemed the only company even remotely bearable. They were green, intergalactically conscious, morally responsible. I should have known it was too good to last.”

  They continued on walking slowly, silent for a moment.

  “What about you?” Duncan asked. “Originally, I mean.”

  “I don’t know,” said Kramm. “I kind of fell into it, I guess
. At first I was taking measurements and readings from a safe spot and then I was going along as support for an investigatory team and then I was a member of the team itself. It all happened gradually.”

  “Do you regret any of it?” Duncan asked.

  “I regret almost all of it,” said Kramm. “I’d be a fool not to.”

  They reached the walls. They were smooth, an oiled metal of some kind. It all looked slightly unreal, perhaps because of the lack of oxygen. The walls leaned outward a little, making them impossible to scale. They were rounded and smooth on the top, just where the dome started, which might make it difficult if not impossible for a grappling hook to catch hold. Duncan fished a cold chisel and hammer from a pocket, tried to gouge the metal with it. The metal rang when he struck the chisel, but the only result was to dull the chisel’s blade. The wall seemed unaffected.

  “It doesn’t look good,” said Kramm.

  “If we can scrounge up the right tools and the right equipment on those two wrecks we might be able to throw together a makeshift ladder,” said Duncan. “But the pitch of the wall is wrong, and the height makes it difficult as well. It’s not going to be easy.”

  “There’s no reason to think it’ll be any easier to get in once we’re up there,” said Kramm. Duncan’s head, he was noticing, had a kind of halo around it, seemed weirdly distinct from the rest of the landscape. He shook his head to clear it, felt the ache within it start to clot into a migraine.

  “Anything wrong?” asked Duncan.

  “I’m starting to hallucinate,” said Kramm. “Maybe we should go back.”

  * * *

  Frances and Gavin helped them up the ladder, then helped them to sit down, waiting while the pair of them caught their breath. The knot in Kramm’s head started to smooth itself out again.

  “Well,” said Frances. “It doesn’t look like that’s the best way in.”

  A few minutes later, the other three returned, all of them slightly out of breath from the planet’s atmosphere, despite the breathers they had taken with them.

  “Find anything?” asked Frances, once they were settled.

  “Nothing on the two ships,” said Kelly, “unless it’s in one of the wrecked sections with a few tons of metal folded around it. They’ve both been salvaged, stripped of anything useful. One of them is a freighter, an Ought-Two class. Bad pun, I know, but that’s really what they used to call them. It’s named the Hume. Probably been there almost a decade. Black box had been stripped so there was no way to know much about the crew or their mission. The other was a stinger class cruiser, could hold up to four, about sixty years old. Called the Climacus. Judging from its condition it’s probably been here twenty or thirty. Stripped as well.”

  “There was one thing, though,” said Jolena.

  “Yes,” said Kelly. “A name and date written on the side of a panel of the second ship, fading letters written in what spectral analysis suggested was blood. ‘Memento Mori,’ it said. It’s Latin.”

  “Remember you will die,” said Frances.

  “Or remember your death,” said Kelly. “Which admittedly doesn’t sound all that much more promising.”

  “What about the prefabs?” asked Frances.

  “Two of the prefabs were empty,” said Jolena. “Salvaged and cleared as well. It didn’t look like anyone had been in them for a long time.”

  “What about the third?”

  “That one was Kramm’s,” said Kelly. “Nothing but a corpse. A hole in the closet, going down. We peered into it and then Jolena followed the tunnel down for a few hundred meters until she reached a cave-in, and then came back up again. The refrigerator was an old model. We took it apart but it was immediately clear that its card wouldn’t do us any good as far as the navigator was concerned.”

  “Any food?” asked Duncan.

  Kelly shook her head.

  “How old was the corpse?” Kramm couldn’t help but ask.

  “If you’re asking if it was your wife,” said Jolena. “It wasn’t. It was the corpse of a man.”

  “A man?” said Kramm. “But who?”

  “How should I know?” asked Jolena.

  “Maybe it was you, Kramm,” said Duncan.

  “Cut it out,” said Frances. “There’s no need for that.”

  “I was just trying to lighten the mood a little,” said Duncan.

  “Maybe it was someone like us,” said Bjorn.

  “But where’s my wife’s body?” asked Kramm.

  “Didn’t you take it?” asked Frances. “Didn’t you bury it?”

  I must have, Kramm realized, but he couldn’t remember doing so. He must have taken her off the planet, buried her, but from the time he had gone down into the dark until the moment when he had, on an entirely other planet, found them staring with a penlight into his eye, he couldn’t remember a thing.

  “Are you okay?” Frances wanted to know.

  “No,” said Kramm. “But I will be. Just give me a minute.”

  * * *

  “All right,” said Kramm once he had shaken it off. “There used to be a transmitter deep within the compound, in the main building. We can’t know for certain that it’s still operative, but if it is and we can reach it, we can both call for help and send the truth out about Weyland-Yutani.”

  “And if not?” asked Gavin.

  “If not, maybe there’ll be a controller card we can use.”

  “And if there isn’t?” asked Duncan.

  “Then we go to Plan B,” said Frances.

  “What’s Plan B?” asked Kelly.

  “Kill everything in our path until we are killed ourselves or find something that will help us to get the hell out of here,” said Frances.

  “I like Plan B,” said Bjorn. “It has a beautiful simplicity.”

  “Here it is,” said Kramm, making a circle out of string on the floor. “There’s the entrance we’ll go through if we can. We don’t know how many Aliens there will be or what other sorts of things we’re likely to find inside, or if the basic layout has changed. The way it used to be, there were a few fields, then buildings here, here, and here: a common building, with a dormitory, a storage facility for farm equipment, and a third one whose function I’m not sure about. More buildings there and there: mostly colonial administration,” he said, gesturing to the left and right side of the circle. “The communications building is here,” he said, touching the circle at a point directly opposite the entrance but about a third of the way toward the center of the circle.

  “But it might have changed,” said Frances to the rest of them.

  “It probably has,” said Kramm. “Look at the dome.”

  “Before, there were fields?” asked Bjorn.

  “Yes,” said Kramm. “Various crops. But they may not be there now.”

  “How hard can it be?” asked Jolena.

  Kramm shrugged. “We should be ready for anything,” he said. “There weren’t more than a few Aliens on the planet when it was abandoned. Without hosts, since the planet was otherwise without advanced life forms, they won’t have spread. But with Weyland-Yutani farming them it’s anyone’s guess. It depends on how many they feel they can control at a given time. It could be a lot.”

  “All right,” said Frances. “Damn it, Bjorn, you can’t have all the guns. You need to share. Everybody grab a weapon. Let’s get the hell out of here, kill a few Aliens, and then find something to eat.”

  2

  It was a slow careful trek from the ship to the compound’s entrance, the seven of them passing the breathers back and forth in the waning light. The landscape was just as he remembered it: barren, dusty, unforgiving. It was windy, but the winds weren’t bad this time of the evening.

  They walked toward the gates, across the barren plane, through the dry dust. An unfinished land, Kramm couldn’t help but think. A land God has given up for lost. Though of course, he reminded himself, he hardly could be thought of as a believer.

  There were odd spots here and there, a few h
undred meters to either side of the path, disruptions of the landscape. Kramm, feeling his headache beginning to come back, squinted at them, trying to determine what exactly they were. They hadn’t been there before when he and Duncan had been walking, or had they? At least he hadn’t noticed them. Perhaps they had been covered by sand and had been uncovered by the wind. But it wasn’t until Kramm borrowed a pair of binoculars from the over-equipped Bjorn that he could see them well enough to realize what they were: the dead. Perhaps a half-dozen scattered corpses. He increased the magnification, saw then that their chests and bellies had been torn open. Most were dead longer, nearly skeletal, but one looked much more recent.

  He passed the binoculars to Frances. She stopped to peer through them for a moment, then gave them back to Bjorn.

  “Be ready for anything,” she said, and kept walking.

  The complex was odd, the walls as they got closer still consistently smooth and regular, unbreeched. What they could see of the dome was newer, still sparkling, unless that was just an impression created by the reflection of the light.

  The gate itself was nearly twice as high as any of them, two smooth panels that interlocked.

  They approached the gates; they didn’t open automatically. There was a touchpad beside the door that Frances pressed her hand against.

  Unauthorized user, it read. Access denied.

  “We may not be going in after all,” said Duncan.

  “Is there another gate?” asked Frances.

  “There used to be,” said Kramm. “Halfway around.”

  She turned and started walking.

  “Wait,” said Bjorn in his quiet voice. “Our Kramm, he should try.”

  Frances turned, looked back. “Well, Kramm?” she said.

  He holstered his pistol. Approaching the gate, he pressed his hand against the pad.

  Colonist Anders Kramm, it read. Please enter.

  The gates slid apart and they went in. Inside were not open fields as Kramm had thought they would find but a narrow corridor extending in slow inward curves to the left and the right, the horns of a bull.

  “Air seems okay here,” said Gavin, the first in, taking a deep breath. “It must be regulated.”