The Complete Aliens Omnibus, Volume 3

by Sandy Schofield

  “The old adage about omelets and breaking eggs?” Cray said.

  “Exactly,” the Professor said. “All progress has its price. A necessary attitude, I think you’ll agree. Logic and truth leave little room for moral posturing.”

  “I suppose,” Cray said. “So from the way you sound I can assume you have had some success?”

  The Professor smiled, pleased. He pulled a small instrument from his pocket, then turned to the wall in front of the airlock and started keying a command sequence into the control panel. “I’ll show you some of my progress. It is quite extraordinary, if I do say so myself.”

  He finished keying his commands into the door panel, then turned to face Cray. “However, I admit I have yet to produce the equivalent of a queen. Royal jelly alone doesn’t prove to be enough.”

  The airlock slid open with a clang.

  Hot, stinking air hit them both and the Professor took a deep breath, relishing the odor as if his mother were baking his favorite pie.

  Cray, on the other hand, choked and seemed on the verge of throwing up. Most humans hated the smell of aliens, but the Professor loved it. That wonderful smell signified his work.

  He was making history.

  “We’re going in there?” Cray said, looking into the dark, slime-covered corridor ahead, obviously not happy with the thought.

  The Professor laughed softly. “It’s good to respect your fears, but don’t let them rule you. Any good soldier should know that. And that’s what we are, isn’t it? Soldiers in the war against the aliens?”

  “I suppose you might call us that,” Cray said as he took a shallow, shuddering breath and hesitantly followed the Professor into the dimly lit corridor.

  “Stay close to me,” Kleist said. “No matter what happens, make no sudden noises or movement.”

  “Don’t worry,” Cray said.

  The Professor raised the small device he had fished out of the pocket of his lab coat. It looked like a toilet paper tube, only with a few buttons on top.

  “Interesting device, this.” He held it up for a moment, but Cray seemed more intent on watching the shadows and the slime-covered walls where aliens had formed stringy, slick shapes and dark round pockets.

  “I stumbled on its potential quite by accident,” the Professor went on. “It somehow disrupts the impulses of what passes for the alien central nervous system. I’ve devised a larger version for securing wild specimens for study called a Sound Cannon by the Marines. This small one works more like a dog whistle.”

  He pointed it down the hall and pulled the trigger. It seemed that nothing happened, but he could feel the device in his hand humming.

  A slight rustling started in the dark shadows down the corridor, like a den of snakes being disturbed on a hot summer day.

  “Down there,” Cray said, his voice a loud, insistent whisper.

  “Keep calm,” the Professor said. “They’re coming.” He continued to hold the trigger down until the black shadows at the end of the hall separated and became clear alien forms. Then he clicked it off and put the tube in his pocket.

  The overpowering stench grew stronger and Cray took a step back toward the open airlock.

  The Professor moved forward.

  “Come on,” the Professor said, talking to the forms in front of him, forgetting Cray and the open door behind him. “Don’t be scared. It’s only me.”

  Cray had backed step by step to the open door and stood watching, his mouth open in shock.

  Two small aliens separated from the shadows and moved toward the Professor.

  “Come to Daddy,” the Professor said.

  Both aliens crawled on the floor in front of Kleist like slaves in front of a master until the Professor finally reached down and stroked the hard shells on the back of their heads.

  “There my good children,” the Professor said softly, over and over. “There my good children.”

  5

  Grace, the Professor’s android secretary, walked silently up to where the Professor sat in the large white lab, intently studying his latest experiment on the computer monitor. Shoulders hunched, his gaze intent on the image of the alien on the screen, he seemed to be oblivious to all the other work going on around him. Grace stood silently behind him, waiting for him to acknowledge her. Everyone knew not to disturb the Professor until he wanted to be disturbed. And he had the uncanny ability to know who was behind him at any given moment.

  After a full two minutes he finally said, without looking up, “Only ten more hours, Grace. Did you know that?”

  “Yes, sir, I did.”

  “Ten more hours until I finally succeed. Ten more lousy hours until the course of human history is changed forever.”

  “Yes, sir,” Grace said. “Ten more hours.”

  The Professor sighed and pushed his chair back from the computer monitor. “Now why should I hope to get a reaction from an android, especially when it comes to helping humanity? I must be losing touch with reality.” He shook his head, half laughing at himself. “What did you need to report, Grace?”

  “You told me you wanted to know when the possible subject is on the move. He is on the move now.”

  “Wonderful timing,” the Professor said, clapping his hands and standing quickly. “Inform Larson that I would like him to meet me in the lower storage area. We might as well give our guest a personal welcome, wouldn’t you say?”

  “If that is what you want,” Grace said.

  The Professor looked at Grace, then sighed. “Yes. That’s what I want. Get Larson.”

  He walked away shaking his head.

  Grace smiled at his back. She loved doing that to him.

  * * *

  It took over two thousand convicts fifty years to hack the thousands of kilometers of tunnels known as Charon Base out of the cold hard rock. Over two thousand men who dug their own graves as they went along. All but a very few of those convicts still remained in the tunnels and caverns, their mummified remains filling the sleeping bunks carved into the ice-cold stone walls.

  Andy Carrier had learned that the bodies were still there two months earlier over a poker game. The guy who told him had claimed to have helped in the original conversion of the base from a prison camp to a research facility and had seen dozens of convicts’ bodies.

  Two days later Andy had started searching, mostly on his days off from the kitchens, exploring the tunnels with a stolen oxygen mask. He would sneak through an old air vent into the unoccupied sections of the station, the areas not converted to the luxury needed by the Professor and his workers, or the walled-off and sealed sections of the alien hive. Thousands of kilometers of tunnels and caverns, carved out of solid rock simply for the purpose of keeping convicts busy and shortening their lives in the process.

  And Andy wanted to explore it all.

  In the black, cold tunnels Andy Carrier looked for the bodies of the dead.

  Andy Carrier was a grave robber, a sideline that could turn the strongest stomach, but Andy was a practical man. Working the kitchen had given him a healthy disregard for dead meat. Besides, he figured the convicts didn’t need the rings and gold teeth they took to their graves. They were dead. He wasn’t.

  And his “hobby,” as he liked to call it, had turned out to be fairly simple and very, very profitable. Most of the lower tunnels had been carved in a clear pattern that made searching easy. Unlike the larger caverns in the upper areas, two levels below the human section the tunnels were in mostly square patterns in the horizontal directions with vertical shafts cutting up one side wall of each tunnel intersection.

  These intersections were usually no bigger than a large living room, with four black doors—one on each wall—and a large hole in both the floor and ceiling near one wall. If you left an intersection and then kept turning left every time you came to a new tunnel, you would find yourself back where you started. The distance between the tunnel intersections sometimes varied from as little as fifty meters to as much as two hundred meters. />
  The tunnels never seemed to be exactly straight, but yet seemed to go in a fairly uniform direction. And the tunnels varied from normally wide enough for two people to walk side by side on the flat floor without ducking to large caverns with stone tables and bunks carved into the walls.

  It was those larger caverns that Andy searched for.

  Today, the shift in the kitchen had been shorter than usual, so he had a little more energy. Twenty minutes after hanging up his apron he had the oxygen mask draped around his neck, was bundled in his heaviest coat, and was working his way down the stone ladder one level lower into the caverns than he had ever been before. Seven levels down total. He had no idea how deep this place went, but he’d have time to find out eventually. He had three more years on his shift before heading back to Earth.

  Down here it was colder than the higher levels and he could see his breath. The air smelled dry and stale, as if nothing had moved it in years.

  Andy was used to that smell, and to the dusty, almost paperlike smell of the mummified corpses. But today, as he reached the seventh level, there was a new smell, faint yet distinct. The smell of antiseptic fought with the stale smell. It brought back memories of his mom taking him to the doctor when he was a kid back on Earth.

  Andy flicked the beam of his light around on the floor, looking for any sign of disturbance. Nothing. It was clear that his boot prints were the only ones in the light dust No one had been down here in longer than he wanted to think about.

  He shook off the smell and memories of his childhood doctor and shone his light first down the dark tunnel to the right, then to the left. To the right, if he went far enough, he would approach the sealed-off sections of the alien hive. Andy, when given the choice, always went in the opposite direction, away from the alien hive. Robbing dead human bodies was one thing. Meeting an alien in a cold, dark tunnel was quite another.

  Andy turned left and moved along, taking his time, not pushing himself too fast in order to conserve oxygen. Usually there was enough in the tunnels, but he had learned quickly the first time down here that taking an oxygen bottle along never hurt, especially on the long climb back up. And on the first trip down he’d learned about how cold it really was down here. Now he wore his thickest coat and gloves and the cold still got through.

  Two corners and a short hike down a tunnel with an unusually low ceiling, he finally found a wide area with sleeping bunks carved into the stone wall on the left.

  As the convicts had dug deeper and deeper into the rock, they carved new bunks closer to where they were working. As convicts fell ill, or died in accidents, or were shot by the guards, they were placed in the abandoned bunks and left to mummify in the extreme cold, dry air. This room had three bodies, one seemed fine, one had a missing arm, and a third had its head severed and placed on its chest. The head had a massive amount of damage to the bones where his nose and eyes used to be and the neck bones were crushed, not sawed or cut. The day Andy found the first bodies he hadn’t touched them and he hadn’t slept a wink that night. But intrigued by a large gold ring on one of the bodies, after a week he had gone back, rationalizing that the convict sure didn’t need that ring anymore. Now, after months of finding bodies, Andy had seen so many that this scene didn’t even bother him.

  He first checked the hands of all three bodies, finding only one silver wedding ring. Then he dug into the pockets and found only empty wallets and worn and faded family pictures. Then he checked the teeth, finding two silver caps in one and in the head that had been severed three gold fillings among the shattered teeth.

  A fairly decent find. Whistling, he continued on down the tunnel, noticing now that the odor of antiseptic was getting stronger and stronger, even blocking out the intense cold. Chances are it was coming down a ventilation shaft from one of the Professor’s labs.

  Ahead, the tunnel turned sharply to the right, then back to the left, and Andy found himself facing an open heavy metal door, much newer than the original tunnel construction. Beyond the door the tunnel turned again sharply to the left and Andy could see a faint light.

  “What the hell?” he said to himself, snapping off his own light. Slowly he moved through the door and onto the now smooth concrete floor of the tunnel. The floor in this area had been swept clean of dust and he was leaving gray footprints.

  The smell of antiseptic now completely filled the air. Carefully, Andy stuck his head around the corner and looked into the bright lights of what appeared to be a lab of some sort just beyond another open airlock-style door. He could see white-tiled floors, shelves, and some lab equipment on a far wall, but not much else.

  He waited a few breaths but no one moved, and no sound came from the lab, so he crept silently forward.

  He’d heard a lot of strange rumors about the Professor and what went on behind the closed doors of this station, but he had made it a point not to pay attention. He figured it just wasn’t his business.

  But something open like this down here seemed just plain wrong, and he moved forward until he could see the contents on the shelves ahead of him.

  Now, in robbing graves, he had seen a lot of human bodies, but it still took him a moment to register what he was seeing.

  Shelf after shelf of human heads, all with wires and tubes leading from them into instrument panels, filled the room. The skin on most of the parts was a deep blue or black, and some had large patches of flaking. But yet they seemed full of fluid and somehow alive.

  Andy moved slowly forward until he stood between five shelves of human heads on the right and three shelves of human heads on the left. He stopped in front of one head with brown hair and looked at it closely. The hair was long and matted and the skin tone on this one seemed to be a pasty white. What looked to be an oxygen mask covered the nose and mouth and wires ran from about twenty different places on the side and forehead. The head was secured by a rubber ring around the neck that seemed to surge every few seconds. Obviously a liquid of some sort was being circulated through the head and brains.

  “What the hell…?” he said out loud.

  His hand shaking, Andy slowly reached out and pulled the head up slightly by the hair.

  The eyes opened.

  Blue eyes.

  The blue eyes of his old poker-playing buddy Charlie. Charlie, who had supposedly left for Earth unexpectedly, six months earlier.

  Andy screamed and jumped backward square into the waiting arms of Larson. The man’s grip on his shoulders felt like steel clamps and he fought in panicked kicks and twists to get free, to run away from those heads and those chilling blue eyes.

  With one quick arm twist Larson took Andy to his knees in sharp pain.

  Andy quit struggling. He just kept staring at the now sad blue eyes of his old friend, as if the head could understand what was happening, could recognize him, was somehow still thinking.

  “Well,” the Professor said, moving forward out of the shadows of the shelf of heads, most of whose eyes were now open and watching.

  Green eyes. Blue eyes. Brown eyes. They all watched.

  “It seems we have another volunteer for our program,” the Professor said.

  “Seems that way to me,” Larson said, yanking Andy’s hair back and making him look up at the Professor.

  “What—what are you doing here?”

  Kleist glanced around and then laughed. “I need these alive to keep the bodies in my labs alive. For some reason I can’t fool the face-huggers without having the real head still hooked up.” He gave Andy a good looking over. “He seems to be in good physical condition. Get him ready. His body just may be the one to carry our new queen. Now wouldn’t that be a privilege, Andy?”

  Andy screamed like a wildman and struggled to free himself, to force his way to his feet.

  To run to the safety of the dark, cold tunnels and the dead convicts.

  But he was no match for the cold, brute strength of Larson. With a quick blow to the back of the neck, Larson sent Andy into blackness.

 
; Most of the heads on the shelves closed their eyes as if they had witnessed this sad sight before and didn’t want to watch it again.

  As indeed, many of them had.

  The next time Andy opened his eyes, he looked down from the second shelf, the closest position to the door into the tunnels on the left.

  He could still feel his body alive, somewhere else. He could feel his heart pumping blood, his arms floating, and something growing inside him.

  * * *

  The blackness of space and the faint light of a thousand stars filled the bubble ceiling of the observation lounge. The room had been designed and built by the Professor, stuck five hundred meters down a long stairway out on a rock outcropping so that it could be above the base. It had cost a great deal extra, but the Professor and the designers from the corporation thought it worth the cost.

  From almost every square foot of the lounge the view of the rocky surface of Charon Base and the stars was spectacular. The emptiness of the rough surface of asteroid bathed in the faint light from the sun and the even fainter light from the sky full of stars.

  But the lounge was very seldom used after the first few months. It seemed that no one wanted a reminder that they were living like rats in tunnels under hundreds of meters of rock. And they didn’t want to think about how far they were from Earth and the black sky full of stars reminded them of that. Many felt that if they didn’t think about it, it didn’t bother them.

  Going to the observation lounge made them think about it, made them realize they were trapped.

  So after six months of very little use Kleist closed the bar that had filled one corner and just left the lounge open to the few stragglers or the occasional lovebirds. At one point the place had been filled with plants, but even those were gone, moved out or allowed to die off. Now only the empty containers remained, making the furniture and booths seem naked under the faint light The overall feel was of a deserted living room or a forgotten old house.