The Complete Aliens Omnibus

by David Bischoff

  “You have done admirably,” Stan said. “That’s quite an array.”

  “And, of course, I also have the light tracker, a heavy-duty communicator. As well as the suppressors to get us past the aliens undetected.”

  “Very important, that last,” Stan said. “What range do the inhibitors have?”

  “They’ll dampen at close to one-hundred-percent strength for approximately three meters in all directions.”

  “And how long will they last?”

  “That’s the bad part,” Gill said. “They may be good for half an hour at full strength, but it could be less.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to move quickly and hope we have some luck. Julie, have you reached Captain Hoban yet?”

  “Just getting him now.” Julie spoke into her wrist enunciator. “Can you hear me, Hoban?”

  “Loud and clear,” Hoban’s voice came back to them. “I was beginning to worry. What happened to you people?”

  “Nothing good,” Julie said. “But we’re on AR-32 and we’re still alive and in one piece. Three pieces, I should say.”

  “What are your plans?” Hoban asked.

  Julie turned to Stan. He said, “We have to get out of the pod, Captain. The storm is shaking it to pieces. What news do you have about your mutiny?”

  “The mutineers grabbed our backup lander and took off for AR-32. It’ll be a miracle if they weren’t destroyed on their way down.”

  “A miracle for us if they were,” Stan said. “Captain, we have our suppressors and there’s only one thing we can try that’ll bring this off. We’re going to go through the hive, following Norbert’s trail. That’ll get us out of the storm, which will destroy us otherwise. We should be able to follow Norbert’s trail to the far side, where the harvester is. We’ll board that and come up to you. You, meanwhile, will take geosynchronous orbit at the harvester’s coordinates. I’m transmitting those coordinates digitally. Please acknowledge.”

  Stan’s fingers flew over the computer’s keys. Soon he heard Captain Hoban’s acknowledgment. “I’ve got it, Dr. Myakovsky.”

  “Good. What do you think of the plan, Captain?”

  “It seems to me the best, given the circumstances. Does Gill concur?”

  The android nodded. “There’s really nothing else to do,” he added in a quiet voice.

  “It’s perfect,” Julie said. “What have we got to lose but our lives?”

  “Signing off, then, Captain,” Stan said. “See you in an hour or so, I hope.”

  He turned to Gill. “Have you any objections?”

  “As I said, Doctor, given the circumstances, there’s nothing else to do.”

  “But you wouldn’t have gotten us into this fix in the first place. Is that it?”

  “I didn’t say that, sir.”

  “You didn’t have to.” Stan looked out the port at the lurid sunset that had just begun flaming behind the upthrust bulk of the hive. He reached into an inner pocket and brought out a small aluminum case, like a cigar case only slightly larger. Opening it, he extracted an ampoule of royal jelly.

  “Well,” he said, “time for a little ride down the street of dreams, eh?” He looked at Gill and Julie, who were watching him. “I need it,” he said defensively. “It’s the pain…” Abruptly he pulled himself together. He returned the ampoule to the case and put the case back in his pocket.

  “No, I’ll do it straight,” Stan said. “That ought to be ever so much more amusing. Ready, then? Gill, crack the port!”

  Gil undogged the hatch. It took his and Julie’s combined strength to push it all the way open against the wind pressure. And then it was done, and the three of them staggered out into the raging storm.

  59

  There was no easy way to hold a conversation as Stan, Julie, and Gill made their painful march across the wind-whipped plain toward the great rounded mound of the hive. Behind it the sunset flared, sending streamers and columns of radiance around the basalt-blue solid-looking clouds that seemed to march across the plain like giants.

  Julie looked at the sunset in awe. She did not consider herself a nature lover, yet this kindling of shapes and colors that seemed too intense to be natural almost brought tears to her eyes. The display touched off a memory.

  She was a little girl in the high, carven house of Shen Hui. It was one of his holiday houses in Shan Lin Province, and there was a pool in the garden in which golden carp moved back and forth, and a wind chime in a nearby temple sent forth a sad melody that seemed to speak of ancient days and old-fashioned manners.

  It was only then that Julie thought of her mother, whom she had never known, but who visited her almost nightly in dreams whose memory she lost upon awakening.

  They walked for a long time, bent into the driving wind, and came at last to the base of the hive. Looking up at the great, pitted, gray-brown surfaces covered with branchlike vines, Stan saw that it resembled some exotic plant. It was pockmarked with puckered holes, many of which were large enough to admit a man. Stan wondered if the hive might not be an organism in its own right, symbiotically connected to the aliens, coexisting with its own weird life-forms.

  It was an interesting fancy, but Stan thought it was more logical to assume that the aliens had constructed the hive, following instinctual instructions laid down in their DNA eons past.

  Still, it pleased his fancy to imagine that the hive and the aliens were two different types of living matter. What a startling possibility! He could see the headlines now, heralding his discovery…

  He smiled wryly and reminded himself that his only job now was to stay alive, to keep on going until he could find the pure and unadulterated royal jelly that might extend his life—if there was any truth to his conjectures.

  He and Julie walked around the hive until they found an opening. It loomed ahead of them, a dark and ragged hole that plunged into the depths of the hive.

  “Are you ready for this?” Stan asked.

  Gill didn’t answer. Julie said, “If that’s where you want to go, I’ll go with you.”

  60

  There seemed no way into the hive. They found what looked like a pathway that spiraled up its side.

  They climbed up the long, narrow ramp that looked to be part roadway, part vine. It went up the side of the hive in long sloping curves, and there were rough-barked vinelike things along the side that served as handholds, and other things that looked like snapped-off tree limbs and might have provided footholds for taloned feet.

  Using these as handholds, they half hiked, half climbed, up the side of the hive. The storm was still buffeting them, its wind gusts swirling in from all directions. The slanted rain made the footing slick and unsafe. When Julie was able to spare a glance to the side, she saw the great plain of AR-32 spread out below, all bathed in strange red-and-violet sunset colors, cut through here and there with deep, black fissures.

  She was leading the way, with Stan in the middle and Gill bringing up the rear. Stan was short of breath already, and Julie, listening to him labor as he walked, decided it didn’t augur well for the future.

  She was worried about Stan, but he had gotten them into this situation. She just hoped he was well enough and sane enough to get them out of it.

  Then they reached an opening camouflaged against the side of the hive by a dense growth of vines. They pushed inside and found a broad roadway that curved inward and upward.

  The spiraling roadway terminated in a wide opening that seemed to lead deeper into the hive. Julie was less than ten feet away from the opening when something within it, a darkness against the darkness, stirred and moved.

  She whispered, “Oh, shit,” and froze.

  Stan noticed that she had stopped and also halted.

  Gill stopped, too, peering upward, trying to make out what was the matter.

  As Julie waited, barely breathing, an ugly dark head with a long backward-sloping cranium poked out of the hole above her. Its fangs were clearly visible, gleaming white, impossibly sharp and
packed together, dripping with green matter.

  Then the alien’s muscular body came out slowly, foot by foot, and its claws grasped the spiraling track on which Julie and the others were standing. The alien began to descend, moving directly into their path.

  “I think it can’t see me,” Julie said, praying that it was true. The indicator on her suppressor showed less than half an hour left in the batteries.

  Well, she thought, half an hour is a long time. But then she wondered, What if the gauge is simply stuck at the half-hour mark?

  The alien came right up to her, so close she could smell the acrid tang of its hide.

  Julie moved to the far edge of the narrow pathway. Taking a grip on one of the vines at the side, she leaned far over, giving the creature room to pass.

  Its ferocious blind-looking face passed within inches of her, its hard black flank brushed her side, and then it was past, descending toward the ground.

  Stan and Gill, below her, moved to give it room.

  Julie slipped into the opening at the top of the hive, the others following close behind. The passageway widened out to a tube about ten feet in diameter. It curved downward and to the left, and soon there was only a ghostly memory of light for them to see their way by.

  About twenty feet down, the tunnel widened into a cave. It was difficult to make out its dimensions in that shadow-infested place, perhaps fifty yards long by twenty wide, but it could have been twice that, the remaining dimensions lost in the gloom.

  There were things growing between the floor of the cave and its low ceiling. Then they moved into a wider area, where they could stand upright.

  Stan and his party paused here to redistribute their loads, make a final check of their weapons, take a drink of water, and have a last conference before plunging deeper into the hive.

  Stan was disturbed that Norbert had been unable to lay down an electronic trail. But he was too tired to worry about it much.

  He lay down on the uneven ground. He needed a moment to catch his breath. It was tough going, there was no doubt about that. His chest burned incessantly. It had been a long time since he’d had a dose of royal jelly. The case with the ampoules was still in his pocket; it felt comforting there. He wanted one now, badly. Anything to get out of this incessant pain, which seemed to radiate out from his chest and course down his arms and legs, following the pathways of his arteries and veins.

  He pulled out an ampoule and hastily swallowed its contents. And then he had to scramble to his feet as he heard sounds from somewhere in the tunnel.

  They had to depend on searchlights now to find their way, for the last of the natural light was cut off as they rounded another turn.

  And came face-to-face with another alien.

  It was moving toward them on all fours, its ugly head questing right and left, seeming to be sniffing the stale, earth-flavored air. It was clear that it had picked up a scent or cue, but apparently it couldn’t tell where it was coming from. The creature slid past them like liquid black iron, and they moved on in silence.

  There was a sort of grim interminability about that nightmare journey into the hive. Julie felt that time itself was standing still as they proceeded into the silence of that awesome construction. She felt she was on a dream descent into depths that corresponded in some way that she didn’t understand to the depths of her own being.

  Abruptly she came back to attention. Her searchlight picked out incomprehensible shapes as she moved ahead. There seemed to be huge things with tall stooped shoulders and folded wings towering above them. There were oval things scattered here and there, like ostrich eggs, only with a strange cross-hatched texture of fine lines. There were plants with wide, white faces, and they turned toward the searchlight beam as if it reminded them of something they had once known a very long time ago.

  Stan said, “This is some weird place, huh, Gill?”

  Gill shrugged. “I suppose this hive has been in existence for a long time. Centuries, maybe. It stands to reason that a lot of different life-forms would have tried to establish themselves here. It’s one of the few places on this planet that’s out of the wind.”

  “I wish I could get a videotape of this,” Stan said.

  “You planning to do a TV special?” Julie asked.

  “It would be a first. What’s that up ahead?”

  By the light of Stan’s searchlight, he saw that the floor of the cave abruptly declined and became a large hole. Stan approached it cautiously and played his light along it. The sides sloped down sharply for about five feet, revealing that the interior of the hole was filled with a mixture of substances. Stan’s flashlight picked out bones and body parts, vegetables in advanced stages of rot or desiccation, bits of wood and rock, and other kinds of debris he couldn’t make out.

  “What is it, Stan?” Julie asked.

  “It appears to be a midden. A garbage dump.”

  “Ugh!” Julie said.

  “No, it’s really very interesting,” Stan said. “A midden can tell you all about the life of the hive. Look at all that stuff! Isn’t that a cow carcass down there? And what’s that over there…?”

  He focused the searchlight beam and looked again.

  “It looks like a dog collar,” he said at last.

  The three of them were silent for a moment. The memory of Mac the dog hung in the air like something evil, something they would have preferred to forget.

  “I suppose this is where they threw Mac when the queen was through with him,” Stan said. “That’s certainly his collar with the suppressor attached. We can use that for ourselves.”

  He leaned over the pit to pick up the collar. Suddenly the ground crumbled beneath him. Stan scrambled for footing, fell backward, his arms windmilling wildly. Julie lunged for him and almost managed to grab his ankle, but lost her grip as Stan pitched over the edge with a bloodcurdling yell.

  For Stan, that moment of falling into the aliens’ garbage pit was so intensely terrifying as to be almost pleasurable. In the split second a million things flashed in front of his eyes like high-speed movie images. Some residue of the royal jelly in his veins kicked in, and he had a moment of pure illusion.

  He dreamed in that instant that he was on a mountaintop, and on all sides of him were birds and beasts, waiting to hear what he had to tell them. Mac was there in his dream, sitting up on his hind paws begging, his tongue lolling out. Stan himself seemed to be wearing a robe made out of a luminous golden material, and he was not entirely surprised to find a golden halo circling his brow, casting a mellow light of its own. He was about to address all of the birds and beasts, tell them it was all right, when he struck the bottom of the pit with a resounding jar.

  “Stan!” Julie cried. “Can you hear me?”

  Gill came up beside her. “Is he alive?”

  “I don’t know yet, Stan!”

  Stan stirred, then fell back.

  “Stan! Call out if you can hear me,” Julie cried.

  Stan didn’t answer, but something else did. Something that spoke in a sibilant hiss, with many overtones. It was not a single voice. It was many voices. The hissing voices were like the tumultuous waves of an acid sea. Julie tried to direct her light. Gill was beside her, his hand on her shoulder. Suddenly his grip tightened.

  “What is it?” she said, and then she saw it, too.

  There were passageways into the lower part of the midden. From them, heads peered; the characteristic heads of aliens. This was apparently a shortcut into a lower level of the hive. The aliens must have heard the noise Stan made while he was falling.

  The aliens had come out to investigate. It was like before when they had met the alien coming into the hive. Only this time something had changed. It took Julie a moment to figure out what it was. Then she shuddered in horror.

  “Gill, my God!” she said. “The suppressor must have quit. They can see him!”

  61

  When Stan recovered consciousness, he had one delicious moment of thinking he was ten ye
ars old and had just awakened from a particularly terrifying dream. How grateful he was to find himself in his own bed! There, just across from him, was his computer, a good one, which his parents had bought for his last birthday. His floppy-eared toy puppy was there, though of course he was too old to play with it. Still, Mr. Muggs watched while Stan did his experiments.

  Now Stan stretched luxuriously and tried to think how he’d spend his day. There were some spiderwebs down near the brook that he wanted to investigate…

  His outstretched fingers touched something wet and sticky. He recoiled, turned his head, looked. It was Mac, dead. He had pushed his fingers into the sticky wound in Mac’s throat. What he had thought was his computer was actually the skeleton of a cow. And there were aliens glaring at him, seeing him, and starting toward him…

  “Gill!” Julie screamed. “Start shooting! But for God’s sake don’t hit Stan!”

  Julie was firing as she spoke. She had unslung the plasma rifle she had been carrying by its strap over her shoulder. Red-orange flame lanced out from its muzzle, painting the garbage pit in lurid colors and huge dancing shadows.

  The concentrated fury of the plasma blast danced around the aliens, who had begun advancing on Stan from a passageway that led into the midden. Red, acetylenelike cutting flames poked and probed at them, lancing through their bodies, stabbing into arms and legs. Gill was firing simultaneously, caseless carbine rounds that blew the aliens off their feet, sending them halfway up the pit, to tumble back again in a welter of severed arms and heads.

  The plasma fire and the caseless rounds wove a dance of death around Stan’s recumbent body. The fire approached him and then, almost delicately, backed away again.