“Which way?” asked Duncan.
“Kramm?” said Frances. “Any preference?”
Kramm shook his head. “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said.
She hesitated a moment and then gestured left. Bjorn and Jolena led the way, Bjorn effortlessly hefting a big gun which Kramm wasn’t certain he’d even be able to pick up. They pursued the curve of the corridor slowly along the wall to the point where, a few dozen meters later, it ended in a pressure door, this one creased and discolored.
“All right, Kramm,” said Frances.
Kramm stepped forward, placed his palm against the touchpad.
Anders Kramm, it read. Abandon hope all ye who enter here. The pressure door hissed and slid back into its track. It opened on a large chamber made of rusted iron, quite tall, the roof consisting of a slanting portion of the dome, lit through by the evening sky. There was the weary smell of dust and old decay.
The iron of the walls was only partly visible, the walls being mostly obscured by the slick and wet-looking secretions that Kramm had seen so many times before and that indicated the beginnings of an Alien hive. They had an irregular and knotted surface, like a half-formed nightmare, the gnarled and meandering shapes suggesting organic forms just beginning to resolve themselves or perhaps just beginning to come asunder. A darkness without color, a color without a shape, a shape without a body. And then Kramm began to realize that there were bodies after all, human forms, grafted and sunk into the architecture of the whole: here, a bloody head, there, obscured, a white ghastly apparition. He had seen it before but not on such a scale—a night, an empty nothingness that somehow contained everything, the forms of the wall and the bodies forced into this wall serving as phantasmagorical representations that gave the illusion of rising up and disappearing even as they remained motionless—all the more terrifying for the impression it gave Kramm that what he was looking at were half-formed thoughts that existed in a long, bloody smear along the inner walls of his own skull.
“Maybe we should have gone to the right?” said Bjorn.
They tracked their way back down the corridor, the door closing with a loud clank behind them. They moved without speaking, following the curve back the way they had come and then beyond, until they came to another pressure door, identical in every respect to the one they had just opened. Kramm pushed his palm against the touchpad.
Anders Kramm, the readout read. You have already made your choice. The door remained shut.
He tried again, without success.
“Well,” Frances sighed. “Left it is.”
* * *
Inside the chamber they stood in a tight group as the door closed behind them, this time locking shut. There were, Kramm realized, literally several dozen bodies plastered into the walls, and closer examination revealed that the vast majority had had their chests burst open from within. There were also old dirty circles overlapping here and there on the floor that at first confused them, but which, Kramm gradually realized, must date back to when eggs had been attached to the floor here.
He touched the walls, found them coated in a thick layer of dust.
“This used to be an egg chamber,” he said. “A breeding ground. But it hasn’t been used for a long time.”
“It looks fairly elaborate,” said Duncan.
“It is elaborate,” said Kramm. “Much more elaborate than I’ve ever seen.”
“Where are they?” asked Frances.
“I don’t know,” said Kramm. “Deeper in.”
“How many do you think there are?” asked Kelly.
“Judging just from these bodies,” said Kramm, “there could be as many as twenty or thirty. Perhaps many, many more, depending on how many other bodies we come across.”
“Maybe we should take our chances outside the complex,” Duncan said. “In the world outside.”
“There’s no food out there,” said Frances. “Besides, you heard the pressure door lock.”
“I could open it,” said Bjorn.
“Also, the air’s bad out there,” said Frances. “It should only be a last resort.”
“So we move on,” said Jolena.
Frances nodded. “We move on.”
There was only one way to go, a narrow tunnel in the far wall, its sides rounded. They had to crouch going into it. Bjorn, in front, knocked against it on all sides.
Even with all the others there with him, even with the flashlights that, once shaken, came on and flickered about in the tunnel, Kramm had to steel himself to go in. That feeling of the light slowly fading around him, the narrowing of the space, the sensation of having to hunch over, and then hunching over further, was almost too much for him. Perhaps it was worse too to be in the middle, behind Bjorn and Jolena and with the others in turn crowding in behind him, rather than being at either the front or the back of the line. It felt claustrophobic.
But then, almost as quickly as he began to think these things, the tunnel opened up again, into another chamber. It was much like the first but the walls were less encrusted with secretions. It was lit, but dimly, large banks of lights hanging from the ceiling, half of them no longer functional. Here, too, hitting them suddenly, was a stronger stench of the dead. Fresher too.
There were three openings, one in each wall. The first, straight ahead of them on the farthest wall, was a tunnel much like the one they had entered through, the others, to the left and right, were more conventional corridors.
“Where now?” asked Duncan.
But Frances hushed him. She was staring at a particular spot on the wall, slowly easing the safety off her plasma pistol. Kramm looked closer. At first he couldn’t see anything, just the same baroque and twisted secretions. But then, suddenly, he realized the wall was alive.
It was an adult Alien, almost perfectly camouflaged, about three meters up the wall, clinging sideways. Its shape faded naturally into the fluid flutings and gnarled fistulae of the secreted wall itself. It was waiting, he realized, for them to go past. After that, it would start to trail them, would wait for its chance and then grab one of them, cull one of them out, carry him away.
Which made him wonder, even as he slowly drew his own pistol, if there had been other Aliens, similarly camouflaged, in the room behind him.
The creature moved slightly and Frances shot it in the back, between the shoulder blades. It hissed and was suddenly running, scrabbling sideways along the wall. Frances fired another shot and missed and then it turned and headed back, running hard, on the floor now, toward them.
Kramm waited half a second until it had committed to a direction then quickly squeezed off a shot—started to anyway; before he could, he heard a rattle beside him and then the thunk-thunk as old-style hollow-points entered the creature’s body and spattered it over the wall. He turned and there was Bjorn, smiling, stroking his gattler.
“An old gun but a good gun,” he said. “It does the job.”
“That was easy,” said Jolena. “A cakewalk.”
Frances shook her head. “It was just one. Now the others know we’re here, if they didn’t know that already. It’s going to get worse.”
“It already is worse,” said Kramm. “Where’s Duncan?”
They looked around them, but Duncan seemed to have vanished without a sound.
“Ah, hell,” said Jolena.
“Come on,” said Kramm, and rushed back into the tunnel leading to the first chamber. By the time he got through it, the Alien was halfway up the wall, an unconscious Duncan slung in one arm as the creature worked to make a space in the wall for him.
“Hey!” shouted Kramm. “Down here!”
The creature half turned and seemed to look at him. It scuttled higher up the wall, pulling Duncan along with it. Kramm leveled his pistol. Then the others came through the tunnel as well, and were all around him, shouting.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” yelled Frances. “You’ll either hit Duncan or the beast will drop him. It’s too far a drop.”
Kramm lowered his gun.
“What are we supposed to do, then?”
“Let him work Duncan into the wall, get him stuck, and then we can kill it,” said Frances.
Duncan was conscious again and had started to scream and struggle. The creature dragged him a little further up the wall.
“Don’t fight, Duncan!” shouted Frances. “Go limp!”
But Duncan didn’t seem to be able to stop screaming. He kept struggling, the Alien having a little bit of a difficult time keeping hold of him and the wall both.
“Stop, Duncan!” yelled Frances. “Keep it up and that thing is going to kill you.”
He paid her no attention.
“You shall kill it,” said Bjorn. “I shall catch him.”
“Oh,” said Frances. “All right.” She lifted her gun and fired.
The blast went wide, sizzling into the wall. The creature cuffed Duncan and then started to slip off the wall, caught itself. Frances aimed again, but was stopped by Jolena.
“I got it,” she said, and adjusted the setting on her pistol. She took careful aim, fired.
The shot, a wide beam of plasma, severed the creature’s foot. It lost its balance and began to fall, and suddenly let go of Duncan. He fell end over end, only to be caught gently by the sprinting Bjorn. The creature fell, twisting around on itself on the way down, and struck the floor in a spatter of acid, scrambling with remarkable speed toward the tunnel’s mouth.
Kramm fired once, tearing a fist-sized hole in its head. It collapsed, limbs quivering, and then fell silent.
“Any more?” asked Frances.
They all scanned the walls, saying nothing. Bjorn, who had been holding Duncan crushed into his armpit like a doll, set him carefully down on the ground. He immediately collapsed, beginning to shriek and quiver.
“There, there,” said Bjorn, stroking his head as if he were an animal. “We have you now.”
“It was horrible,” Duncan was saying. “And none of you saw! It just took me and none of you saw! How could you?”
“Ah, no,” said Bjorn. “We came for you, did we not?”
“And then,” Duncan said, eyes rolling wide, “you were going to let it stuff me into the wall.”
“But you can see, I caught you,” said Bjorn, his voice soft and perfectly calm. “With these two hands. We will let you walk in the middle now. Would you like that, to walk in the middle?”
Duncan hesitated. He finally nodded, wiped off his face. Shakily he climbed to his feet.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I’m a mess.”
“It’s perfectly all right,” said Frances.
“It was just,” he said, and his face started to contort again. “I mean—you can’t know what it was like.”
“I know exactly what it’s like,” said Kramm. “Come on, we better get moving before it’s too late.”
They went back down through the tunnel, Kramm feeling his skin starting to tingle now. Two down, he thought. Two Aliens dead. How many more to go? That was the real question. And what would he and the others have to live through next?
Coming out of the tunnel, he looked behind him, saw Duncan’s pale and traumatized face, the fear in his eyes. He was gripping his pistol too tightly, his knuckles whitening. Is it safe for him to have a gun? Kramm wondered.
“All right,” Frances said. “Best guess for which passage is most likely to lead us in the right direction?”
“The tunnel,” he said, without hesitation. “But maybe we should stick to the manmade passages.”
Frances nodded. “Left then,” she said. “That’s the way we started. We might as well keep to it.”
They moved down the hall, Frances and Kramm in front this time, Jolena and Bjorn bringing up the rear. It was a long, open corridor and it stayed reassuringly square and even all the way down: human. Kramm, trying to keep track in his head of how far they went, was still surprised when the corridor reached a pressure door. When he opened it, he found himself looking into the common building.
This at least looked precisely as it had when he had lived on the outskirts of the compound: a large central hall with two tables running end to end, a large, open kitchen near the far wall, a set of stairs in the back leading up to the dormitory. It hadn’t changed much, except that the ground-floor windows were now covered with thick metal sheets.
They moved slowly in, shining their flashlights about. It seemed safe, even relatively clean, as if it had been lived in a few times over the last thirty years.
“I know this place,” Kramm said. “Frances, why don’t you and the triplets check the kitchen. Bjorn and Jolena, let’s take a look upstairs.”
They all moved forward, parting at the stairway. Kramm made his way slowly up the darkened staircase, feeling it creak under him, hearing Bjorn and Jolena behind.
The common dormitory was as it had always been, a series of narrow and neatly arranged bunks. Most were covered with dust except for two near the door, which had been slept in sometime recently. The windows weren’t covered over here, but had been replaced by a thicker-than-usual plexene.
Kramm looked out to see a craterlike area, oddly and dimly lit by the twin moons shining through the dome. It was unreal, filled with slow-moving shapes that were hard to make out, dips and protrusions and always, down within it, a sense of slow, aimless movement.
“What is it we see here?” asked Bjorn, suddenly beside him.
“I don’t know,” said Kramm. “It’s too dark to actually see it.”
“But it does not look good?” said Bjorn.
“You took the words out of my mouth, Bjorn,” said Kramm. “Good is the last thing it looks.”
There was a shout from down below and they started quickly for the stairs, guns out. By the time they got to the bottom they were hearing laughter. It was Duncan, dancing around, waving something. Lights were on now, they saw, the whole first floor lit.
“What is it?” asked Kramm. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” said Duncan. “We’ve found something to eat.”
It wasn’t much; four dusty packets of freeze-dried food in the back of one of the upper cabinets in the kitchen. And, under the sink, two plexene containers of water, each a liter or so. Kelly was preparing to open them when Gavin tried the sink’s faucet, got a spattering stream through it.
They divided up three of the freeze-dried packets, Frances saving the fourth and the two liters of water in case of emergencies. They sat at one of the common tables, slowly chewing what little they had, swilling it down with water.
It wasn’t much, but after a few days of not eating at all it was as much as Kramm could handle. It lay in his stomach heavy as a stone.
“We should sleep a few hours here,” Duncan suggested, “then go in search of the transmitter.”
“There’s something outside,” said Kramm. “Hard to see what at night. A crater of some kind. One of the nuclear generators must have gone reactive. And there’s something moving in it.”
“Aliens, probably,” said Duncan, and shuddered.
“Perhaps I’ll go up and take a look?” said Gavin. “I’ve been told I have excellent night vision.”
“Be my guest,” said Kramm.
Gavin headed up the stairs. While he was gone, Kramm splashed some water onto the table, tracing it into an oval. “This is the dome,” he said. “And this is the common building,” he said, marking it with a finger, “where we are now. We’re about a third of the way to the transmitter. About a fifth of the way to where we saw the sliding roof, I’d guess.”
“What would the most direct route be?” asked Frances.
Kramm shrugged. “Probably the tunnel still,” he said. “Did you find a back door down here? There used to be one.”
Frances shook her head. “If there still is one,” she said, “it’s behind one of the iron sheets.”
“Why put those up?” asked Kelly.
“Because you don’t want what’s on the other side getting in.”
“But why keep the hou
se intact at all?” asked Kramm. “Why not simply knock it down and put up the metal walls we’ve seen so far?”
“I don’t know,” said Frances.
Kramm shook his head. “It feels unreal, too odd. Is this real?”
“It feels real enough to me,” claimed Frances.
“How can I be sure I’m not dreaming all this?” asked Kramm. “How do I know I’m not still in cryonic storage?”
“This is hardly the time to wax philosophical,” said Frances. “Don’t be stupid.”
But how can I be sure? Kramm wondered. And how do I know that I’m not still down there in the dark, fighting for my life, and that I haven’t imagined all of this just as a way to keep from going irrevocably insane?
Gavin, real or not, came thumping back down the stairs. “Two things to report,” he said, sitting down at the long table. “What you were seeing out the window, Kramm, seems to be a swarm of Aliens, dozens of them. Lots of eggs too. All of them in a kind of crater. Tunnels run in and out of it on all sides. Somewhere in the middle there’s a cluster of complicated tunnels, a real honeycomb. There’s one Alien that’s much larger than the others as well.”
“Probably the queen,” said Kramm.
“Probably a queen,” said Gavin. “It came up to mess about with the eggs and then slipped back into the tunnels again. Across, on the far lip of the crater, is the building that must be the communications building you mentioned earlier. A building anyway. Beyond that and connected to it is a metal wall, running from one outer wall of the compound to the other.”
Gavin stretched. “Also,” he said, “I can’t be completely certain, but I think there are cameras hanging from the dome.”
“Cameras?”
“Yes,” said Gavin. “Twenty or thirty years old, bulky old things. They may or may not be functional.”
“But why?” asked Kelly.
“Why?” said Gavin. “Research, I suppose. Think of this as a giant ant farm. The cameras are the equivalent of the eyes of the ten-year-old boy peering in through the glass.”
“Which makes us part of the experiment too,” said Frances, frowning. “We’re test animals.”
Gavin nodded. “We’re being watched,” he said. “They’re monitoring us.”
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 37