The Predator

by Christopher Golden

  * * *

  On the pursuit ship, the strange Predator—enormous even by the standards of its race—punches in a new code. The interior of the ship spasms. The seat beneath him trembles, but it is the outside of the ship that truly trembles. It shimmers and enters stealth mode. To the naked eye, or even to any instruments, it is now invisible…

  * * *

  Rory grinned, awash with sudden understanding. He would have preferred the AI solution, but this was fun, too. It’s a game, he thought. He had seen enough of these cryptic symbols, scribbled enough of them down and gotten a basic translation worked out, so that he now understood how to revise the sequence of the code to reverse a command, which was precisely what he did.

  * * *

  In space, the pursuit ship decloaks. What issues from the strange Predator’s mouth then, in clicks and spittle, is what passes for profanity on its home world.

  * * *

  “You okay down there, kiddo?”

  Rory froze. He stared at the device, at the helmet and the gauntlet, and then at the steps that led up from the basement. This would be a bad time for his mom to come down to check on him.

  “Just playing games, Mom!” he yelled, trying to make everything sound normal.

  For a few tense seconds he waited, wondering if she would reply—or even whether he’d hear the clump of her descending footsteps. But there was silence from up above. She must have gone away.

  His hunched shoulders lowered slowly as he relaxed.

  * * *

  The only thing Anya Martin didn’t like about her job was that she could never tell the truth about what she did. Not that she worked for the CIA or anything—she wasn’t going to have some Russian spy shoot her in the back of the head on a street corner, or poison her food in a London restaurant. Although eating in London restaurants did seem wonderfully exotic to her. It depressed her when her train of thought chugged down these particular tracks, because then she got thinking about traveling the world, and though the job of Tracking Analyst sounded fancy, her salary was anything but.

  Whine, whine, whine, she thought to herself, sitting in front of a whole bank of radar and tracking arrays. Truth was, Anya made more than a decent living. If she hadn’t been a single mother, saving for her daughter’s college, she probably would have done plenty of traveling by now. She fantasized about various European river cruises, got all the catalogs and emails, and didn’t even care that she’d probably be the youngest person on board by thirty years or more.

  Someday, she’d do all that traveling.

  For now, though, at least she loved her job. Many of the programmers she had gone to college with would surely be making more money than she did by this point in their lives. Others would be managers by now. Maybe executives.

  The good news was that the US Air Force had paid for Sergeant Anya Martin’s education. She had no college loans.

  Also, she spent her days watching the skies for signs of alien invasion, or any other unidentified flying objects— anything that might indicate that alien enemies were approaching or traveling through Earth orbit. The military wanted forewarning of any possible threats. But here in her very comfortable chair in the 6th Space Warning Squadron’s headquarters in Sandwich, Massachusetts, Anya just loved the idea of aliens. She pretended to be quite serious about the work—as serious as the title Tracking Analyst implied—but in the end, really, it was all about Dana Scully and Fox Mulder and late nights watching The X-Files when her parents had told her to go to bed.

  It didn’t hurt that she got to live half a mile from the ocean on the coast of Cape Cod.

  Blip.

  Anya’s heart jumped. She stared at the radar screen and then glanced at the PAVE PAWS tracking monitor. The blip vanished, and then reappeared. It repeated the pattern again. Quickly, she went through her protocol, including identifying its location and trying to make radio contact with the object, to no avail.

  “Sir?” she said, gesturing toward the Lieutenant General.

  He came across, a man so wiry she wouldn’t have been surprised to find that his gray hair was made of steel. “What you got, Sergeant?”

  “Weird-ass bogey, sir.”

  They watched together as the blip vanished and reappeared sporadically.

  “One second they’re on the grid, the next they’re ghosting,” Anya said, trying to hide her excitement. She’d caught plenty of weird shit during her time in this job, but this was odd as hell.

  “Radio contact?” the Lieutenant General asked.

  “Negative, sir.” She narrowed her eyes, skin prickling with ice as her thoughts filled with wonder. “But it seems to have an ion trail.”

  The Lieutenant General had a pen in his hand. He started to chew on the back of it while he stared at the monitor. Then he turned and scouted the room for Anya’s supervisor, Lieutenant Crain.

  “Where’s the 325th?” he asked.

  “Tyndall, sir,” Crain replied.

  The Lieutenant General’s gray eyebrows crinkled in a deep frown. “Let’s scramble some jets. I don’t want to take any chances.”

  Sergeant Anya Martin couldn’t hide her smile. This was getting good. It was even more exciting than being poisoned to death in a London restaurant.

  10

  Casey could smell Traeger’s cologne, not overpowering or even unpleasant, but strange under the circumstances. She was bent over an electron microscope, doing her job, and Traeger stood a little too close behind her. His proximity wasn’t so intimate that it had become unprofessional, nor so close that she could turn around and tell him to back off. But still, it made her uncomfortable. Despite— or perhaps because of—his handsome features and the grin he’d flashed earlier, she thought maybe he was the kind of man who took power from making people feel unsettled around him. Not just women—anyone.

  It had grown quiet in the lab, and silent between them, and that added to her discomfort with his nearness. She was relieved when Traeger’s aide, Sapir, appeared, rushing up to them with a look on his face like his grandmother’s ghost had just whispered sweet nothings in his ear.

  “Sir,” Sapir said, “NORAD’s reporting a two-oh-two anomaly.”

  The weighted look that passed between the two men pissed Casey off.

  “Look,” she said, bristling. “I know I’m new, but it’d be swell if somebody would kinda, sorta, I don’t know… tell me what the fuck is going on here?”

  A visible calm descended on Traeger. He’d decided how to handle her.

  “This isn’t the first Predator we’ve encountered.”

  Casey waited for more. From the file she’d seen, and the information they’d already given her, that much was obvious. She cocked an eyebrow, inviting him to continue.

  “Apparently,” he went on, “they use Earth as a kind of hunting ground. We’ve even got unconfirmed reports of them abducting people. For sport.”

  And? she thought. Haven’t we already established all this? Try telling me something I don’t know.

  But it was Dr. Keyes who spoke next. He had been hovering on the periphery of the conversation, but now he stepped closer, as if worried that Traeger might not give a fulsome enough account of the situation.

  “They’ve left things behind,” Keyes said. “Evidence. Weapons. You saw some on the way in.”

  “Your point?” she said, unable to conceal her frustration. Now it was Keyes’ turn to bristle.

  “The point, doctor,” he said in a clipped voice, “is that our satellite defense stations have just tracked a new UFO.” He nodded grimly toward the dormant Predator. “Our friend here might have some company coming.”

  The words were barely out of his mouth when klaxons began to blare throughout the complex. Casey’s pulse quickened.

  “What’s happening?”

  Traeger glanced over to where his aide had already picked up an internal phone receiver. The guy grew even paler as he covered the mouthpiece and turned to stare, wide-eyed, at his boss.

  “Pr
oximity alert, sir!” the aide called. “Bogey’s inbound! Range two hundred miles!”

  To her horror, Casey saw the supposedly dormant Predator’s eyes suddenly snap open. Her mouth opened in an ‘O’ of astonishment, and she let out a cry of alarm, but didn’t think anyone had heard her over the klaxons. The Predator’s eyes were calm and alert, and she wondered if it understood English—if it had been listening to them the entire time—or if the alarm had been the signal it had been waiting for.

  She leaped backward, heart thundering in her chest, but her mind orderly, calculating, assessing the variables. Earlier she’d seen a wall rack with several tranquilizer rifles and now she took one and raised it to her shoulder, backing away and taking aim.

  “Everybody, get out!” she barked. “Now!”

  All eyes had turned to her, and then to the Predator. Agent Church must have seen it faster than the others, for he was the first to move. He bolted across the room toward the nearest exit—the hatch for the decontamination chamber—and put his hand and eye to the scanners.

  “Church, Thomas J.— ” he began.

  The Predator snapped its restraints as if they were made of paper and began to sit up. Guards went for their sidearms in what seemed like slow motion. Keyes backed away, taking cover behind Traeger.

  The decontamination hatch whooshed open. She could hear Church thanking God over the blaring klaxons, even as the Predator snatched up a scalpel from an operating tray beside it and flicked its wrist. The scalpel flew unerringly across the room and embedded itself in the back of Church’s neck, just at the base of his skull. Sliced right through the brain stem, Casey thought numbly, even as Church collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut.

  She saw her moment, and she took it. With the Predator turning to focus on the guards, she lunged across the room and jumped over the fallen Church, careening into the decon chamber just as the hatch shushed closed again. Sweating, all the air inside her wanting to burst out in a scream—and yet with a tiny voice of awe muttering in the back of her head—she pounded on the outer hatch. She had to get out of not just the lab, but the entire complex. Project: Stargazer was just about as compromised as it could be.

  “Chamber secure,” said the pre-recorded voice. “Remove garments.”

  “Fuck!” Casey snapped. She put down the tranquilizer rifle and fumbled at the catches of her hazmat suit with her heart thundering in her ears. She stared at the sign on the wall—STERILE IN, STERILE OUT.

  Inside the main lab, security guards rushed the Predator. It ducked and parried. Snapped a guard’s arm. Hurled a screaming man aside and then tossed another across the lab to crash against a wall full of shelved samples and instruments. Things clattered down, and the guards flew like rag dolls.

  “Come on, come on!” she muttered as she kept glancing into the lab.

  Terror rose within her, like her courage had sprung a leak and fear had come rushing in, flooding her insides. The Predator moved with mind-numbing speed and agility, dispensing violence and death with an efficiency and ruthlessness that was almost obscene, and suddenly all Casey wanted was to get the fuck out of there, to be anywhere but here, to forget she had ever met Agent Church—who lay dead just outside the decon chamber, glassy eyes wide and accusatory.

  Breath coming in short gasps, pulse throbbing at her temples, she struggled to tear off the hazmat suit. A spray of blood arced across the examination room and splattered the glass window of the decontamination chamber, making Casey jump. She glanced past the dripping stain and saw the Predator’s swift handiwork. Corpses littered the floor. It had to know she was there—had to be perfectly aware of her presence—but it ignored her and marched across the lab to the table where its gear had been laid out. Chest armor, gauntlet, a kind of chainmail.

  The Predator dressed quickly, even as Casey tore off her own clothes. She saw the way it paused and tilted its head very slightly, hand freezing over the array of gear as if noticing that something was missing.

  Then the decon chamber muttered something overhead and the spray came down. Casey stood and let it burn off yet another layer of her skin. It had barely finished when she kicked aside the hazmat suit and snatched up her street clothes, bundling them against her chest. With the other hand, she grabbed the tranquilizer gun.

  In her peripheral vision she saw the Predator stalking across the examination room toward a man cowering behind an upturned bench, his knees drawn up to his chest, his back pressed against the wall as if he wished he could melt into it, pass right through. It was only when the man, sensing the Predator looming over him, glanced up and let out a yelp of terror that she realized it was Keyes. As the Predator leaned over, grabbed him by the hair and lifted him into the air as if he weighed nothing, Casey thought of how the son had continued the father’s work, of how the family obsession had had such disastrous consequences for them both. Waiting helplessly for the outer door of the decon chamber to open, she could only watch with sick horror as the Predator scooped up another scalpel and used it, with one swift and devastating sweep of its massive arm, to cut off Keyes’ screaming head. As the body fell like a sack of wet cement, the alien stooped and unhesitatingly sliced off the scientist’s right hand. Now carrying its spoils, Keyes’ head in one taloned hand, his severed hand in the other, the Predator crossed to the door of the decon unit and pressed Keyes’ body parts to the retinal and fingerprint scanners.

  Hideous though this was, even more grotesque in a way was when the Predator opened its mouth and spoke in a voice that was a perfect imitation of the dead scientist’s.

  “Keyes. Shawn H.”

  It’s a fucking mockingjay, Casey thought, as a green light beeped. At the same moment, the outer door finally opened behind her. But now it was too late to run, because the door at the other side of the decon chamber was also opening, and the Predator, making a horrible Geiger-counter-like clicking sound, was ducking forward to step through it. All but naked, Casey spun to face it, clutching the tranq rifle.

  Trying to control her trembling hands, Casey leveled the rifle at the alien hunter. She pulled the trigger and the weapon did nothing more than utter a dry click. Whether it was jammed, or empty, she had no idea, but either way she knew she was about to die. Desperate, she lifted her gaze to stare at the Predator.

  It cocked its head, regarding her. Its mouth—the mandibles, the razor teeth inside—if the thing could smile, it seemed to smile at her, almost indulgently. Then it swept past her, sparing her, as if it had already forgotten she had been there at all.

  Casey stared at the weird ‘dreadlocks’ on the back of its head as it strode away. Her breath thawed, and she inhaled ragged, short, terrified breaths. She set down the tranq gun and started to dress in a panic, even as she saw the Predator fitting its one wrist gauntlet onto its arm.

  A guard came around the corner at a run. His eyes widened in terror as he raised his machine gun. Had he seen what Casey had seen, he wouldn’t have bothered even trying to take aim. The Predator smashed the gun barrel aside and picked him up, then slammed his skull against the wall with a wet, horrifying crunch.

  Two more of Stargazer’s mercenary goons rounded the corner, their rifles up. Weaponless, the Predator seemed to shrug as it stomped on the stock of the machine gun that had spilled from the dead guy’s hand. The weapon flipped upward like a yard rake and the Predator snatched it in its talons, lifted the gun, and opened fire. The guards fired as well, but too late, and inaccurately. Bullets raked their flesh, driving them backward to topple in a bloody pile in the hall.

  Casey tugged her shirt on, darted her gaze around for her left shoe—the last piece of her wardrobe—and slipped into it. Only then did she hear the shushing thunk behind her. She glanced back and saw that the inner hatch door hadn’t closed all the way. It opened slightly and then slid again, trying to shut—blocked by Dr. Keyes’ severed head. The Predator must have simply dropped the head when it was no longer any use, and now the door was jerking open and closed, pummeling th
e severed head each time it did so. Casey felt bile burn up the back of her throat, but she forced her gorge back down. Her life depended on self-control now.

  She nearly bolted then, but her gaze paused on the centrifuge inside the lab, and the vial of clear liquid that remained perhaps miraculously unbroken, dangling above it.

  Now that the Predator had left her behind, her thoughts had begun to slow, to seek order, and, more particularly, answers. Staring at the vial, she found herself wondering how many answers the liquid inside it might contain.

  * * *

  The Predator strides along the corridor with purpose, disposing of irritations and intrusions as they present themselves. The guards are neither a concern nor a challenge. Only when he passes the display case near the front of the complex does his inexorable march toward freedom halt. With a click of satisfaction, he turns to look at the wide plexiglass window of the case and to admire what is displayed there.

  He shatters the glass and reaches inside.

  The bio-helmet does not belong to him. It was collected by these humans from some historic hunt years before. He can only assume the hunter who’d worn it had met an honorable death. The facemask is scarred and pitted from battle and the Predator tells himself it is an honor to acquire this mask, though he did not earn that damage himself.

  He lifts the mask aloft and holds it over his face, taps the side. The eyeholes light up with their familiar internal readout and he taps again, making a connection. A personal connection. The bio-helmet adjusts to this Predator’s bio-signature and abruptly the internal readout blurs and shifts to static, and then a viewpoint reveals itself. The Predator wants his own gear back, his own bio-helmet, and most importantly his missing wrist gauntlet, and the vital tech sealed within it.

  Matching his bio-signature, this mask connects to his own—though it is many miles from here. The two masks sync, and now through this one, he can see through the eyes of the other. See what it sees.

  Through the eyes of that mask, he sees a human child. A boy. Somehow his own bio-helmet has fallen into the child’s possession and he needs to locate it immediately. Too much depends upon it, and the urgency overrides any other concerns he might have. There is no hunt, no battle, no hunger more important than this.