A Protocol for Monsters: Dave vs the Monsters

by John Birmingham

  Significantly, he thought, Dunleavy did not immediately reply to that.

  “Okay,” he said at last. “Send me the full briefing on the hostiles as soon as Ashbury has finished slicing and dicing. But file a separate report on this energy source. This gravity thing.”

  “Graviton, yes.”

  “Okay. It does sound like something that falls within your purview,” Dunleavy conceded.

  Compton almost did a little happy dance.

  “And what about Metcalf?”

  “I’ll get him out of your sandlot.” Dunleavy sighed.

  And then Compton really did do a little happy dance.

  # # #

  Emmeline let Wally breach the bone cage with the giant shears. Her arms were still shaky from the effort of removing the skull and dermis, and even Metcalf begged off the job.

  “Let the kid do it,” he said. “Everyone’s gotta crack open their first monster sometime.”

  Wally Hicks set to the job with thin-lipped determination. It was no easier than cutting through the armored hide had been. When the thick latticework of cartilage was peeled back Emmeline could see the unusual, alien arrangement of unknown organs inside.

  “I think we should put its two little friends on ice,” she said. “Send them back to the mainland for proper imaging, we’ll do X-ray slices, PET and CAT scans. Build a digital model.”

  She turned to Cadence Ramsay, who was working at a series of laptops across the makeshift mortuary.

  “How’s your bug hunt going Cady? Anything nasty?”

  The microbiologist shook her head.

  “Nothing unusual,” she said. “Some staphylococcus, streptococcus, enterococci and pseudomonas aeruginosa. Nothing we can’t handle.”

  “Seriously?”

  Ramsay stood up and removed her helmet with a hiss of escaping air, occasioning protests from everyone but Emmeline. If Cady was taking off her helmet, then Cady obviously knew there was no danger of infection.

  “Seriously,” she said, holding her helmet up awkwardly to speak into the microphone. “These things don’t have Hell cooties.”

  “Or immunity to our plain old cooties?” asked Metcalf.

  It was really Cady’s question to answer, but everyone turned to the Exploit team leader, Emmeline.

  “Who knows? I suppose we’ll have to catch a live one and sneeze on it.”

  ###

  The thing she most enjoyed about dissections was the meditative aspect. There was a rhythm to them. Once she was in the zone, Emmeline didn’t want to stop. You couldn’t rush a major procedure like this. You would miss something, or cut your fingers off. After a while she simply went with the flow, breaking down the first carcass.

  They had emptied the torso, sampled and bagged all of the individual organs, many of which she neither recognized nor understood. On Cady’s say-so they’d dialed back the biohazard protocols but everyone still wore heavy rubber gloves, aprons, masks and goggles. The xenomorphs were packing some nasty bodily fluids. The acid from their stomachs was particularly dangerous.

  Emmeline had peeled back the skin over the major muscle bundle, a caudofemoralis-analogue running from a stumpy tail down through the thigh.

  “Interesting,” she said, mostly to herself. “It’s like a Komodo dragon. Watch. When the bundle contracts, it pulls the leg back and pushes the xenomorph forward. So the tail is part of the hind-limb, and the dermis is thin there.”

  “So shoot it in the ass?” Cady said, not joking.

  “Or here, where the bone cage thins out,” Emmeline said, pointing with the scalpel. “Or in the face, aiming for the nasal cavity.”

  She returned to the caudofemoralis, cutting it away and laying it out like a giant chicken breast on a specimen tray for Wally to photograph and measure. He recorded the dimensions, the weight, the length of its fibers, and the angle at which they entwined. The data would help determine the fast twitch speed, the range of motion and how much force the creature could exert, but Emmeline could already guess at that.

  It would be many times stronger and faster than a man.

  “What do we know about this fellow who killed it?” she asked.

  “His name is Hooper.”

  She looked up, surprised.

  Compton had joined them.

  “Heath needs to talk to us, if you can spare a few minutes from the butcher’s block,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you for over an hour.”

  Emmeline looked up at the big clock on the wall behind her. It was well after midnight.

  She blushed.

  She’d completely lost track of time, caught up in her own little xenomorph abattoir. Her team members looked exhausted, as must she, Em supposed. But none of them reproached her. They were all just as fascinated by the process.

  “Oh, I am sorry,” she said, more to them than Compton. “We should have taken a break ages ago. We have more of this to do tomorrow. You should rest. We’ll get started fresh on the big boy in the morning”

  “It’s cool,” Cady and Wally said in tandem. The others muttered and a few of them yawned. She looked around for Jack Metcalf but realized she hadn’t seen him nor heard from him in over an hour, possibly longer.

  Compton was holding up his wrist, tapping his watch, the internationally recognized symbol of an impatient dickhead.

  “Just give me another five minutes to finish up and get clean,” she said.

  “He’s on the satellite now,” Compton said. “It’s important.”

  “Go on,” said Cady. “We can finish up here. You scrub down.”

  Emmeline realized what a mess she was, covered in xenomorph bodily fluids and small pieces of random monster offal.

  Roger of House Penrose probably wouldn’t have been deterred, though.

  # # #

  Heath had been ambushed. This, thought Compton, was excellent news. His previous disgruntlement was quickly evaporating. Another creature—a third, entirely new type from Heath’s report—had attacked the small convoy transporting the engineer, this David Hooper, from New Orleans to the transit depot.

  “Is the information contained?” Compton asked.

  “Yes, Professor,” Heath answered. Both of the scientists could hear the weariness and stress in his voice, even through the compression and encryption algorithms carrying his words over the secure connection. Compton had taken over an office for the duration of their stay on the rig. Hooper’s office in fact, from the name written on a piece of gaffer tape stuck to the door. It afforded him some privacy, and even some amusement at the disapproving look on Emmeline’s face as she took in the engineer’s unrivaled collection of pornography. He could tell part of her unusual mind was attempting to reconcile the fact of the centerfolds with the workplace harassment policies a large corporation was sure to have in place.

  “I left a team behind to deal with the local LEO’s and Mister Hooper suggested a workable cover story.”

  “So he’s not just a pretty face,” Compton said.

  “No, he also seems to be something of a pervert and a sexual harasser,” Emmeline said, still fixated on the wall art.

  Bingo.

  Compton pushed on, hiding a smug little victory smirk at having been able to read Ashbury so well. Once you understood her condition she was like a wind-up toy.

  “Anyway, I don’t much care about LEO,” he said. “We can always bring the hammer down on local law enforcement. It’s media I’m worried about. Conventional and social. You’re sure nothing got out?”

  Heath’s voice sounded flat coming out of the speaker on Compton’s phone. Compton could tell the navy man was pissed off with him, but this was important. They had to control events, or they would be controlled by them.

  “There were civilians in another car,” Heath answered. “They all died. Instantly, in the crash. And none of my people were on Instagram during the fight.”

  Even Ashbury appeared to get the sarcasm. Hard not to, even for her, thought Compton. Heath had laid it on with a
trowel.

  “We’re sorry, Michael,” she said, rescuing him. “Professor Compton would apologize for being such an arse, but of course you must understand, he is a complete and utter arse about these things.”

  Okay, not so much with the rescuing him, then. But Compton did understand that his excitement had got the better of him.

  “Oh yes, sorry, Captain,” he improvised. “Your men, I didn’t forget about them. It’s just things are very strange out here. Moving very quickly. I don’t think this is going to be like Boston or Taymyr. We need to ride this wave or get dumped.”

  It was something he’d heard one of Heath’s non-coms say more than once. The odd Christian surfer dude. Heath seemed to value the man’s opinion and Compton hoped to add a little of that value to his own thoughts.

  Heath’s voice crackled back out of the speakerphone.

  “I understand. My apologies for being so…abrupt.”

  Ever the peacemaker, thought Compton. This guy was going to get nowhere in the bureaucracy. You had to wonder how he’d risen to the rank of captain.

  “Mister Hooper has been secured. I’ll have him to you after we run the tests tomorrow and establish some baselines.”

  “Is that really going to be necessary?” Compton asked. “He got lucky and brained one of these things. The others had no sign of trauma. They appear to have expired of unnatural causes unrelated to—”

  Heath cut him off.

  “I don’t think you understand, Professor. Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear before. We engaged the hostile with small arms, but Mr Hooper killed it with his bare hands. The weapons fire appeared to slow it down, but that’s all. Hooper beat it to an actual pulp. Smashed its head open like an old pumpkin a month after Halloween and kept punching until we asked him to stop in case he cratered the road surface.”

  “Oh,” said Compton, who had indeed misunderstood Heath’s initial explanation, which to be fair was rather terse and short on color.

  “So, a sexual harasser according to his police record and one employment complaint, and prone to violent outbursts,” Emmeline said, looking around the small office at the walls full of porn. Compton expected her to taunt him with her version of a sick burn—“You should get on well with him, Raymond”—but of course that was not in her nature. She was just stating the facts as they appeared to her.

  “He’s going to be difficult, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, I think so,” came Heath’s reply. “He is not normal. But he could be very valuable. The joint chiefs are already calling for daily briefings. Even putting aside what I saw him do to the creature, I’ve seen other evidence of extreme physiological responses. Zach Allen told me that Hooper cut himself at the hospital and the wound healed immediately. Same thing after the ambush. I’d have sworn he destroyed his knuckles and most of the bones in his hand punching that thing to jelly. A few minutes later, we washed off the blood and it was like he’d just had a damned manicure.”

  “Well that is fascinating,” said Ashbury. “I cannot begin to imagine an explanation for such a thing. Not a rational one, anyway.”

  Compton leaned back from the desk where he’d been hunched over the phone. He could hear the wind gathering strength outside, moaning through the steelwork of the rig.

  “I can see why JCS are so interested. Do you think this ability or facility he has is exploitable? Can we bottle him?”

  “I don’t know,” said Heath. “If we can, if you can…” he sighed, “well the implications are beyond me this late. But they’re huge. And not just the military applications.”

  “He could be a cure for everything,” Ashbury mused.

  Compton frowned, bringing the discussion back to more practical realities.

  “So do you think he’s been affected or even infected by exposure to the xenomorphs? Because we’ve seen nothing like that from any other survivors, or any of the marines or Professor Ashbury’s Exploit team out here.”

  “That’s true, Michael,” Ashbury confirmed. “In fact it’s very odd. The creatures don’t seem to carry any sort of microbial or viral load with them. Cadence Ramsay scrubbed them until their belly buttons shined when she was scanning for biohazards and she found nothing. We’ve just wound back the protocols to level two because of it.”

  Compton heard the heavily booted feet of a couple of marines stomping by on the deck plating outside Hooper’s office while he waited for Heath to reply. He hadn’t had time to think through Ramsay’s discovery, but the creatures very obviously came from a biome unlike any yet catalogued.

  “Well I have no comment on that,” Heath said at last. “I don’t know how he got to be a comic book hero. Just that he looks a lot like one, at least in his…abilities.”

  “Okay,” Compton said. “So test the limits of those abilities tomorrow. But do it quickly. He is the only human being we know of to survive a direct encounter with the hostiles. We very much need to interview him as an adjunct to Professor Ashbury’s work out here. And…” he paused, wondering how best to put this.

  “…I shouldn’t have to say this, but we also need to be mindful of retaining control of this situation, and this subject, within OSTP—with a reporting line straight to Defense, naturally,” he added for Heath’s benefit. “If these things are emerging all over the place, we don’t have time to waste on some inter-agency cage fight.”

  He could see Ashbury frowning at that.

  “Yes, Professor?”

  “Oh, I understand your reluctance to give up the golden goose, Raymond. But I don’t know that I’m the appropriate person to take the lead on—”

  “Nonsense,” he shot back, cutting her off. “You are an exobiologist. Or a xenobiologist, or whatever you people are calling yourselves this week. The hostiles are undeniably from somewhere outside the local biome. That makes you the lead and we will die in a ditch fighting to keep you there before I let some idiot from Homeland or CIA or Echelon blunder in and fuck everything up, probably by insisting these things are part of some ridiculous terror plot.”

  Ashbury seemed stunned and then embarrassed and finally she blushed like a schoolgirl. Compton had learned over the years that this was the way to manage her, with blunt, concrete statements that affirmed to her the importance of whatever it was he needed her to do.

  He was certain she would put aside her doubts and fight like a grizzly to retain her place as the lead. Heath on the other hand…

  “And you, Michael,” he said to the phone. “I’m going to need you to get Defense locked in behind us. Emphasis on behind. We will need resources but we’ll also need protection. Can you get them to buy in?”

  “Oh I think so,” came Heath’s reply. “The thing that tried to ambush us tonight was a warrior. Possibly some sort of giant insect soldier, but an enemy soldier nonetheless. Dealing with them is what we live for. And Hooper, of course. If they can bottle him, as you put it…”

  “Good,” said Compton. “I think we can move on then. Professor Ashbury will finish the post-mortem examinations here, as best she can given the facilities. You get Mister Hooper seen to, then get him to us. I have a few calls to make…”

  He paused then, partly for effect, partly to choose his words carefully.

  “Michael, if you wish, I could make the calls to the families of your men who were killed. They were on our dime. That makes it my responsibility.”

  “No,” Heath replied quickly, but without ill-feeling. “It’s my job. I’ll see to the arrangements tonight.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Heath hung up the phone, an old landline in the nurses’ station, routed through a hardened server to encrypt the connection to Compton. He squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed at them with his palms, trying to ease out the hot grains the sandman had sprinkled in there. It was nearly 0130. Hooper and the other survivors of the Longreach who’d ended up at Area 6 were all asleep in the next room. Hooper’s snoring was volcanic, but he supposed the rig monkeys were used to it. There wasn’t much prospect of sleep f
or Captain Michael Josiah Heath, however. He had some letters to write.

  He pulled a block of stationery towards him from the other side of the desk and tried to remember the name of Fratelli’s wife.

  # # #

  He was up before dawn, after just an hour and a half of sleep. Could have had two, but long experience had taught him that his sleep cycles averaged out at just over ninety minutes and he was better off grabbing one full cycle than one and a bit. The early start also gave him an opportunity to observe Hooper and two of his late-sleeping colleagues discussing the previous day’s events when they thought they weren’t being watched. Surveillance coverage of the small barracks in which they’d been housed was total, with multiple redundancies layered in. Hooper’s conversation with Vincent Martinelli and Juliette Jamieson, the chopper pilot who’d flown him out to the Longreach and evacuated a number of casualties, confirmed many of the details from the initial debrief of the rig workers.

  They might have lied to their debriefers—a gentle word for interrogators—but they obviously weren’t lying to each other. Hooper professed to recall nothing of the events after he confronted the xenomorph in the crew lounge. He even asked Martinelli and Jamieson if they knew what had happened.

  Heath watched the whole exchange on a computer screen in a bunker a hundred yards away. The voices of the two men and their female colleague poured out of the big Logitech speakers plugged into the monitor.

  “You killed it, Dave,” Martinelli said. “Smashed its fucking coconut. And there was this…I dunno…like a flash or something. And I went down. Man, I was vomiting and spinning out, and…and it was like the worst fucking hangover I ever had, back in the day. But it passed quick. I got up.”

  Martinelli leaned forward as if seeking Hooper’s blessing for his recollection. The woman simply gazed at him as though he was the second coming. When Hooper said nothing, Martinelli spoke again, in a hushed tone, as though imparting a secret. Heath heard every word.