by Tim Lebbon
“You’re sure?”
She paused. “No.” It was a gamble—they all knew that—but they could learn so much from this thing that they could not possibly leave it behind. Even the Yautja had known that.
Marshall knew it, too. He knew what the Company could glean from the tech this android carried within it.
They worked their way back through the ship, Sprenkel launching occasional rearguard actions when Xenomorphs found them. They were a tight unit, and they made it back to the place where they’d entered the ship, and did so unscathed.
There was no sign of the Yautja.
Into the airlock formed by the two blast doors, they vented the air and prepared to start drifting back toward the Pixie. Xenomorphs smashed against the doors, but only for a few seconds.
Then all was silent.
“It’s as if they know there’s only vacuum out here now,” Palant said.
“I’m sure they do,” McIlveen said.
Sprenkel stood guard while the others drifted across to the Pixie, and fifteen minutes later they were all on board.
Sprenkel and Bestwick sealed the android into a suction bag, a clear container that was used for vacuum packing equipment and clothing to make the best use of space. Its damaged limbs were drawn in, body compacted, head held on a tilt with its eyes open. It was so tightly contained that it could not blink, and Palant felt its strange gaze upon her as they strapped it down in the rec room.
She wished they’d turned it over before securing it to the hull.
“We need to blow that ship,” Halley said.
“Fucking right,” Sprenkel said.
“Good work back there, guys,” Halley said. It might have been the highest praise Palant had heard the Major give her crew, and she saw them all bristling with pride.
“Palant, McIlveen, you’d best message your friends and tell them of our intention.”
As the crew hustled to the flight deck, Palant and McIlveen accessed their program and prepared a short transmission. Minutes after sending it, the two Yautja ships lifted from behind the Fiennes ship, and seconds later they accelerated away.
By the time the Pixie had swung around into an attack vector, fifty miles from the crippled Fiennes ship Cooper-Jordan, the Yautja vessels were a thousand miles away.
“Ready?” Halley asked.
“Three nukes,” Sprenkel said. “Fore, amidships, aft. There’ll be nothing left but dust.”
“Hit it.”
They hit it.
* * *
With artificial gravity on the Pixie enabled, Palant felt weighed down with greater worries than ever before.
Huyck remained on the flight deck, keeping careful watch over their trajectory in case they needed to compensate for the Pixie’s damaged guidance systems.
The rest of them gathered in the rec room—some seated, some standing—with the android at the center of their attention.
It remained strapped to the wall in the vacuum bag. The bag flexed and writhed, very slowly, and the android’s damaged body and leaking wounds made for a grotesque sight.
“It doesn’t look like it’ll take kindly to interrogation,” Bestwick said.
“It looks like something the Yautja Woman puked up,” Sprenkel said. He glanced at Palant. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Palant said. The Yautja had given them this catch. They all knew that.
“So, what now?” Bestwick asked.
“Now, we get this thing to a Company lab,” Halley said. She was pacing the room. Palant had already seen her doubt, and now it was palpable.
“They won’t get anything from it anyway,” Sprenkel said. “What a mess.”
“They’ll get plenty from it,” Palant said. “Marshall has our best scientists at his disposal. ArmoTech labs are filled with people itching to get their hands on this.”
“So they’ll find out how it ticks, right? How it controls the Xenomorphs? Help us win the war?”
“Yeah, help us win,” Palant said. “Then what?”
“What do you mean?” Bestwick asked. “Then we take out the Rage, whoever or whatever they are. Clear up the mess.”
“And they start singing songs about us?” Palant asked.
Bestwick raised her eyebrows but said nothing.
“Then the Company will have something they’ve been after for a long, long time,” Halley said. “A Xenomorph army, under their control.”
“Yeah, but that’s a good thing, right?” Sprenkel asked.
“How in any way would that be a good thing?” Palant asked.
“’Cause… well, Weyland-Yutani are human, and they’re in charge. This’ll make them even more powerful.”
The rec room fell silent. The android squirmed, one eyeball rolling wetly against the tight clear packaging as if trying to see them all.
“Even more powerful,” Palant said.
“Are we even disputing this?” McIlveen asked. He’d been quiet up to now, watching the exchange. “What we’ve just been through on that ship, what we saw, we can put a stop to all that.”
“Yeah, you know the Company better than any of us,” Halley said. “ArmoTech will be coming in their pants if we tell them about this.”
“If we tell them?”
More silence. Palant stared at the android and saw hate in semi-human form—an alien, unknown power stewing in its own leaking juices and its desperation to kill them all. Whatever was behind it had such advanced knowledge, which they used only for war. She wondered how peace might benefit from such science. Or if it ever could.
“McIlveen, you and I can take this thing apart and find what we need to know,” Palant said. It was a brash statement, loaded, heavy with an idea that she knew the crew would find hard to accept—disobeying orders.
All attention focused on her. She was confident of being able to do it, but just voicing the idea suddenly made it ten times more daunting.
“We’ll need to find a suitable lab, but we can do that. It’ll be quicker than getting it into Weyland-Yutani hands. We can find how these things control the Xenomorphs, how they self-destruct, maybe even come up with a way of triggering it ourselves.”
“But that’s not what we were ordered to do!” McIlveen said. “Isa, we’re under orders. And these are Colonial Marines, not indies. In the Marines, you follow orders.”
“They didn’t follow orders when we sent that first transmission to the Yautja,” Palant said. “If anything, they could have been court-martialed.”
“No,” Halley said, “we did what was right.”
“Yes, you did what was right, and stopped a war,” Palant said. McIlveen shifted from foot to foot, looking from Palant to Halley and back again. I don’t really know him at all, Palant thought. She’d grown to like him far quicker than she usually grew close to anyone, but perhaps that had been brought on by the desperate times in which they found themselves. He’d seemed like a Company man with sense, not someone blindly following orders.
Now, she wasn’t so sure.
“We have our orders,” he said again.
“We do,” Palant said, “but imagine what happens if we follow them. We hand this thing over to the Company, they backward engineer it and retrieve whatever tech it carries, win the war.”
“Yes!” McIlveen said, nodding.
“Then we face a Weyland-Yutani that can field armies of Xenomorphs. A Human Sphere policed by those things. Uprisings put down by monsters that don’t think, aren’t afraid. You know the old saying—with power comes responsibility. From what I know of Company history, what we all know—”
“Fuck this,” McIlveen said. The laser pistol was in his hand.
Palant laughed. It was so unexpected, so ridiculous, that she stood and took one step forward, still smiling in disbelief.
McIlveen swiveled only slightly as he turned the gun on her.
“Really?” she asked. “Milt, really?”
Nobody moved, but Palant felt a shimmer of tension run through the rec room,
a thrumming of potential violence.
“Do you know what could happen if you fire that in here?” Halley said.
“So don’t make me fire it,” McIlveen said. “Billy, plot a course for the nearest drophole.”
The ship’s computer did not answer.
“Billy!” McIlveen said. His face dropped as he realized what he had done, how he had doomed himself, but beneath that was a deeper fear. Fear of failure, perhaps.
“What did Marshall promise you?” Palant asked.
It was almost as if McIlveen hadn’t heard.
“You going to hold that gun on us for the next forty days?” Palant asked.
“No,” McIlveen said. “Not all of you.”
Palant gasped softly as she realized what he’d said, what he meant, but Marshall’s man was already squeezing the trigger, turning the laser pistol on Major Halley and squinting against the flare to come.
Nothing happened.
Huyck stepped through the doorway from the flight deck, clinched his left arm around McIlveen’s neck from behind, and plunged his combat knife into the man’s back. McIlveen’s eyes bulged as he slumped. Huyck let him go, tugging the knife out and slicing it quickly across his throat. Then he kicked McIlveen onto his stomach and bent to wipe his blade on the twitching man’s jacket.
“My God,” Palant said. She wanted to turn away, close her eyes, but she was suddenly terrified of these soldiers. Bestwick was still seated, expression unchanged as she watched McIlveen bleeding out. Major Halley was retrieving the laser pistol.
“Not a misfire,” Palant said.
“Of course not.”
“Did you not trust me either?”
Halley came to her and plucked the pistol from her belt holster, tossing them both to Bestwick. “Guess we’ll never know.”
“You’ve just killed Gerard Marshall’s man,” Palant said.
Halley ignored her. “Billy, set course for the nearest drophole.”
“Where are we going?”
“You mean what you said?” Halley snapped, the only sign of the immense pressure now bearing down on her. “About being able to find out about that thing?”
“Yes. Given the right lab, equipment, and time.”
“And you can do it without him, right?” She nodded to McIlveen, motionless and dead in a spreading pool of his own blood.
“You could have asked me that thirty seconds ago.”
Halley grunted, then stepped over the body and onto the flight deck.
Isa Palant closed her eyes at last.
19
LILIYA
Space Station Hell
November 2692 AD
Liliya was dreaming.
She rarely slept. She needed occasional downtime so that her systems could run diagnostics and perhaps reboot, and there were times when she felt what she supposed was “tired,” but sleep was an entirely optional function. As such, her brain had a sleep mode that she could switch into if desired. It mirrored a human’s sleep in many regards, but still ensured that a small part of her remained conscious and alert.
She called it her “standby mode.”
Over the decades she had learned to master this human-like sleep aspect of her old, old mind, and she took pleasure in allowing herself to sink into those mind-freeing realms. For an android, control was everything. In her efforts to make herself as human as possible, Liliya enjoyed surrendering control, and allowing true randomness to steer her mind.
* * *
Wordsworth is walking beside her along a long, wide corridor. It’s like nowhere she has ever been before—white walls, clean floor, a sterile environment the likes of which is never seen on a ship. It’s so bright and clean that she finds it dazzling, yet Wordsworth seems accustomed to such brightness.
“Not this,” he says. He’s pointing to a doorway. She hadn’t even noticed that there were doors, but now that he indicates this one she sees a whole wall of them, set at intervals all along the corridor, stretching into the far, hazy distance.
He’s still pointing at the door, waiting for her to step forward and see what lies beyond.
There is no window. Instead, there’s a small viewing eye to which she has to press close in order to see what the door shuts off. There’s a small room beyond. Perhaps it’s a cell. Inside sit Roberts and Dearing, the man and woman whose deaths she was directly responsible for on the Evelyn-Tew centuries ago. Even though they cannot know that she’s there they look up, meeting her gaze. They don’t appear to be sad. There’s hardly any expression at all.
“It was an accident,” Liliya says, backing away from the door.
“Not this,” Wordsworth says again.
“I didn’t mean it,” she says. “It was an accident. It had to be done, otherwise I would never have escaped the ship and—”
They are walking again.
Wordsworth is silent, and she’s not used to that. He is always talking, a man filled with boundless enthusiasm and grand dreams. Some of her most precious memories involve just the two of them, sitting in his suite on board Macbeth discussing where they are going, and all that they have left behind. He carried a great sadness—he never called it regret—about leaving the Human Sphere, but insisted that they were going toward something better. That has always been Wordsworth’s intention. Something better.
“Not this,” he says. They’re at another door, exactly the same as the first. He’s pointing again.
She steps to the door and looks inside. The room is much larger than the first, and it is almost entirely filled with a monster. Liliya is not surprised at its presence. It turns its massive head as if sensing her, hissing, its huge mouth extruding another set of teeth, curved head gleaming with condensation as its suspended egg sac deposits another egg to the floor.
“Beatrix said it was for security,” Liliya says, wondering how she could have been so naive. “An army for protection. Not war.”
They are walking again.
The corridor never seems to grow shorter, and she can see many more doors along its length. She wonders if she has truly done so much wrong in her life, and the idea makes her despair. Liliya has always wanted to be a good person. The good part of that should have come naturally, and she has been working on the person part for what feels like forever.
“Not this,” Wordsworth says. Inside this room lies Erika, the Founder become Rage person who Liliya had murdered in her escape from Macbeth.
“Not this.” A much wider scene, a view that could not possibly fit inside one room, waves of Xenomorphs dropping from a cloudy sky onto a facility of some kind, unfurling, charging, killing the poor ranks of defenders who do not have a hope.
“I never intended—”
“Not this.” Behind this door lies Wordsworth, blood flowing from his slashed neck. Beatrix Maloney stands above him, blade in one hand, Wordsworth’s security pass in the other. There is nothing on her face. No expression, no eyes, no skin, but Liliya knows for sure it is Maloney. She has always known.
“I’m trying to help,” Liliya says despairingly. “I’m doing everything I can to help.”
Wordsworth starts walking again, but then he leans against the corridor’s blank white wall and slips down. Liliya is terrified that he is dying again, there in front of her, right now—but in fact he is crying, and somehow that is worse.
Liliya has let him down.
“I’m trying to help.”
* * *
She was snapped from her dreams and into reality, and her android’s mind switched instantly to the here and now.
“Did you hear me?” Jiango Tann asked.
“What?”
“I said there’re indications that the drophole has been activated. No sign of who’s used it yet, but it might be the ones chasing you.”
So soon! Liliya thought, and she glanced across the room at Hashori. They’d moved them to a larger space, at least, but the two of them remained under house arrest. There were guards. Nothing was being left to chance.
<
br /> She had never seen Hashori asleep. She wondered what the Yautja had been doing while she faux-slept. Watching her, perhaps. Guarding her.
“It’s them,” she said in Yautja, and Hashori stood to her full height, picking up her battle spear and heading for Liliya. As she did, two guards entered the room behind Tann.
They leveled their weapons at Hashori. The Yautja stood beside Liliya and paused, clawed hands clasping tightly around the spear. The pressure was palpable, potential violence simmering in the air.
“When do we leave?” Liliya asked.
“As soon as possible,” Tann said, “but the ship we’re using is still being prepared, and it might be a few hours.”
“We might not have a few hours!”
“The drophole’s almost a light year away. It’ll take them weeks to get here.”
“You don’t know them,” Liliya said. “You don’t know their ships, their capabilities. If Alexander somehow knows where I am, he could be here in a matter of days.” She translated the exchange for Hashori.
“We should leave in my ship,” Hashori said. “Follow me.”
As the Yautja turned for the door, two more guards appeared, guns leveled. They were big guns. Two were aimed at Liliya, two at Hashori, and she had no doubt that these people would use them.
“What did Hashori say?” Tann asked.
“That we should leave in her ship.”
“It’s not big enough.”
“I’d agree with you there,” Liliya said.
“That’s not going to happen,” Tann said. “You can understand why, can’t you?” The older man seemed twitchy and unsettled, and Liliya could tell that confrontation troubled him. He seemed like a good man. This situation had landed in his lap when all he wanted was peace and quiet, but she could not change what had happened. Neither could Tann.
“I can understand,” Liliya said. She reverted to Yautja. “Hashori, we can’t leave in your ship. They won’t allow it.”
“Then I’ll fight them until—”
“They are not your enemy,” Liliya said.
“If they stand in my way, they are enemies.”
“No!”
Hashori turned quickly, leveling her spear at Liliya. The guards behind Tann came in closer, looking nervous but determined, and she could not guess at how unsteady they were. They might shoot at any moment.