The Complete Aliens Omnibus, Volume 3

by Sandy Schofield

  And about aliens.

  “John,” Linda said softly and touched his arm.

  Her soft touch calmed him somewhat and he stopped. Angrily he twisted the key to off and turned to face his beautiful bride in the faint light from the dashboard.

  He could see the worry on her face. Her long blond hair was pulled back tight making her face like a small, white moon in the faint light. Her clean soap smell filled the car like a fine perfume. All he wanted to do was hold her, curl up in a warm bed, tell her they would be fine.

  But they wouldn’t be fine until somehow they reached the spaceport and joined the evacuation off Earth. In this area of the planet that was their only hope and they both knew it.

  He reached out and patted the soft skin of her leg, doing his best to fight down his panic and reassure her, as well as himself. “If we stay here and keep quiet we should be all right until someone comes along.”

  She nodded. She had trusted him since the first night they had met at the Christmas party. She worked as an account executive for the Grant Corporation, the same corporation he did troubleshooting work for on computers. The same company he spied for after this night.

  “If there’s no traffic tonight, we’ll walk at first light. We should be able to make it to the port in a few hours. The corporation will have enough ships to get us to Earth orbit.”

  She was about to say something when, as he watched in shocked terror, an alien appeared out of the dark shadows directly behind her.

  It was a huge creature with a black bony shell and thousands of teeth in saliva-filled jaws.

  Before he even had time to scream a warning it smashed the window behind Linda and with a four-fingered hand around her chest yanked her back against the door.

  “No!” He frantically reached for her, straining against the seat belt he still wore.

  “John!” she screamed. Her eyes were wide with terror and disbelief. “John!” She fought at the hand on her chest fighting to pull the slick black fingers off her.

  Behind her the alien hissed deep and long.

  Another alien hand snaked in the window on the other side of her, and the awful smell of sulfur and rotten eggs filled the car like a choking gas.

  He grabbed for her, but the seat belt still held him and all he could touch across the car was her leg. He grabbed it and tried to pull her away from the bug as she fought madly to pry the hands away from her.

  Then, with a sudden hard yank from the alien, she was bent over double, her skin pulled roughly from his grasp. Her seat belt snapped, and with her head between her legs, she was pulled roughly through the window. Her legs and back left bloody strips of skin and cloth on the broken glass.

  “No!” he screamed again, fighting to free himself from the safety belt. But it seemed snagged on something, or he wasn’t pushing the right area of the clasp or something. It wouldn’t release. He fought at it, ripping at it, struggling to free himself so he could save his wife.

  But the nightmare continued.

  The belt wouldn’t let him go.

  Linda’s screams were cut off in the dark night beyond the car as he fought with that buckle, twisting at the straps, struggling to be free.

  The nightmare continued.

  “He’s coming around,” a voice said through the thick blackness and the terror.

  The horror retreated slightly, only to be replaced by the memory of Charon Base and another nightmare. A nightmare of a mission gone bad.

  “Good,” another voice said from his other side. “Did you get anything?”

  “Nothing of any worth.”

  John Cray struggled back to the reality, the sounds of Linda’s screams still echoing in his mind.

  He was totally nude with large straps holding his arms and his legs like firm, rough hands. Another strap held his forehead tight against the back of a huge padded chair. Tubes ran from both his arms, the area above his heart, and the sides of both legs to nearby machines. His penis and balls were encased in what looked to be a large suction hose that extended under his ass. Three needle inserts had been stuck into his brain and a mass of wires ran from them to something he couldn’t see behind him.

  “He still denies everything,” Larson said, “and he is somehow blocking the mind probes.”

  Cray opened his eyes, letting the image of Linda go for the moment.

  In front of him stood Professor Kleist in a white smock. He looked huge, like a white judge standing at the pearly gates as Linda’s screams faded totally away in the back of his mind.

  The Professor smiled when he noticed that Cray’s eyes were open. He knelt down so he could look at his captive directly. “Why are you doing this?”

  Cray just blinked, not responding. He tried to think of the good times with Linda, but they just wouldn’t come. Only being trapped by that seat belt in the middle of that awful night. It was the only thought of her that he had at the moment.

  “We know you’re not really working for Z.C.T., but for Grant Corporation, so you can stop pretending. Just tell us what you know and you’ll die painlessly. I can promise you that.”

  Cray thought of how he had finally freed himself from the seat belt during that awful night. It had been too dark to follow Linda and the alien’s tracks, but he had still tried, over and over, scrambling through the brush and trees, calling her name, begging for her to be all right. But he never saw her again, and her body was never found.

  He had been sitting in the middle of the road shouting and crying when the Marine transport had picked him up.

  The Professor glanced up over Cray’s shoulder at Larson, then, disgusted, he turned back to Cray. “Continue to try my patience and you’ll suffer beyond all imagining.”

  Cray focused on the Professor. “I… I don’t know… don’t know what you want.”

  The Professor leaned back and half smiled. “Then I will tell you exactly what we know and what we want.” He again glanced over Cray’s shoulder and then back at Cray. “I will grant you,” he said, “that your plan was an audacious one. I admire that, to be honest with you, especially the holo of my old friend at headquarters. I’m amazed that he could keep a straight face when he was doing that for you. I even bet you were sitting in his office watching him record it, weren’t you?” Kleist smiled as Clay fought to keep the memory of that day in the Z.C.T. headquarters from his mind. But from the look on the Professor’s face, he hadn’t succeeded.

  “You were hoping,” the Professor said, after glancing again over Cray’s shoulder, “to make me so paranoid about infiltration that I’d hand you the Chimera Project data without a second thought.”

  The Professor laughed hard and sharp and then moved closer to Cray so he was looking him directly in the eye. Cray noticed the Professor’s breath smelled dirty and sour, as if his insides were rotting out. He could only wish.

  “You made one fatal mistake a long time ago,” the Professor said, grinning right in Cray’s face, gloating with brown teeth just inches from Cray’s face. “Z.C.T. agents above grade nine have a security code surface-coated on their right kidney. You, a supposed grade twelve, did not. That was clear when we checked you in decontamination when you first walked onto the station.”

  Cray struggled to think of his wife, of the night she died, anything but the implications of what the Professor had said.

  Kleist leaned back and laughed for what seemed to be much too long. Finally he caught his breath and faced Cray straight on again. “That’s right. We’ve known you worked for the Grant Corporation all along. For years now. We let you feed us the Taser and gel data to get our trust. Wasn’t that nice of us?”

  Again he laughed, but this time he cut it off quickly. “We wanted to know what you were after, who your contacts were. We’ve netted quite a haul thanks to you. Including Captain Palmer.”

  Cray fought against the belts to sit upright. “No, no. She’s not…”

  The Professor laughed. “I may be as mad as they all say I am, but I’m not stupid.” He n
odded to Larson who moved around into Cray’s line of sight. He was carrying a square box with instruments attached to one side.

  “We even came up with a plan to get you out here, away from any support you might have in the corporation. We even made it seem as if it was your idea. We needed you here so you’d tell us everything you know. And trust me, you will tell us.” The Professor glanced at Larson and nodded. Then he stared directly into Cray’s eyes. “Otherwise, you’ll soon discover there is such a thing as a fate worse than death.”

  Larson turned the box and held it inches from Cray’s face so that Cray could look directly into the small window. Then he turned the box so Cray could look directly into the slime-covered underside of an alien face-hugger.

  He turned the box so that Cray could see his own living death.

  “No!” Cray screamed as the box got closer.

  He fought against the belts on the chair, fought against the seat belt as Linda was hauled through the window of the car.

  Fought against the thought of that thing on his face.

  He lost all three fights.

  And the nightmare continued.

  8

  At the second corridor after leaving the airlock, Green had his men pull the metal grate off a large ventilation duct, then led them inside, shutting the grate behind them. The ducts in this area were carved out of solid stone like separate tunnels. Shoulder width and just barely tall enough for them to run in slightly stooped over, Green figured the ventilation tunnels were their best hope for the moment. They would have no chance at all in the main tunnels.

  In this area of the hive there were very few signs of alien habitation, and in this ventilation tunnel there wasn’t even any of the alien slime. That was a good sign, at least for the time being.

  He had no doubt that the aliens had penetrated the ventilation system, but there would be fewer of them. Plus he hoped the men could move more quietly through the ventilation system, staying away from any of the main chambers and as far away as possible from the queen. And if there was a fight, he would lose fewer men in a close quarter drill than in an open and high-ceilinged corridor.

  After three hundred meters the shaft suddenly widened into a small room with a grate leading back into the main halls, another shaft leading off in the direction they were going, and a shaft crossing vertically, dropping into blackness.

  Robinsen went into the room first, his light checking the corners and both up and down, then he signaled to the sergeant all-clear.

  Green entered the area and went to the vertical shaft. It dropped farther than the beam from his light would shine. Handholds were cut into the side of the rock going both up and down and Green studied them for a moment before nodding. They would work. Not as good as the ladders in the main corridors, but these would serve.

  Green pointed down and motioned for O’Keefe behind him to join Robinsen on the point.

  Green knew their only hope was down. He’d studied all the plans for the base, as well as the rough tunnel layouts left behind after the last of the prisoners were taken off. He knew there were vast levels of tunnels under both the human base and the alien sector, all sealed off. If somehow he could get his men into them they might be able to work their way back to the human section and pay the Professor a surprise visit.

  While they waited for Robinsen and O’Keefe to signal the all-clear for the next level, Green had lynch take apart one of their com units. It would be nice if they could use them, but until they were checked out he wasn’t going to chance letting the Professor know where they were or what they were planning.

  And that, for the moment, they were still alive.

  Lynch made fast work of the helmet and within a few seconds was pointing to a tiny black dot attached to the underside of the mouth guard. “Tracer bug,” he whispered. “There may be more.”

  Green nodded just as Robinsen signaled the all-clear.

  He pointed to four of his men and indicated they should take off their headsets and all body armor and leave them. All nodded and did what they were told, letting the armor lay like the discarded white skins of dead humans.

  Three levels down he had seven more men take off their helmets, com links, and body armor and put them in a cross corridor outside a ventilation grate. He’d let Kleist think they were putting up a running fight, losing a few men at a time.

  The next level six more of the men did the same.

  At the lowest level of the alien hive he had the last com links and helmets left beside a grate going into a main hall, including his own. Now all twenty of them were only wearing their brown pants and combat boots, brown T-shirts, and ammunition belts strapped over their shoulders.

  Green had everyone stop and look for any more tracer bugs on any of the equipment and on their clothes. Like monkeys picking lice, they split up into pairs and inspected each other carefully, but quickly. Green checked Lynch while Lynch checked him.

  Everyone came up negative. It seemed all the bugs were on the armor. Good. Now if the Professor just bought his decoys.

  They had been running very silent and so far had been lucky not to be found by an alien. But if his memory served him correctly, on the next level down they were going to have to make some noise to get through a blockage. Enough noise to attract every damn alien in the place.

  Robinsen signaled the all-clear to the next level and one by one nineteen Marines went down the narrow shaft.

  In this small intersection the ventilation tunnel going on down had been sealed shut with what looked to be part of the wall carved to fit the hole exactly and then cemented into place. The plug on the hole could only be a meter thick, or it might be as wide as five meters.

  A thin layer of dust covered everything and the air smelled stale in the small intersection. They had been so long in the rotten egg smell of the alien hive that it wasn’t until one of the men coughed softly from the dust that Green even noticed the alien smell’s absence. They must be a long ways from the main dens and the queen. Maybe they’d get lucky, but he discounted that thought quickly.

  Green posted guards above and down both side tunnels, and told the men to conserve on the lights. Then he had Lynch and Robinsen gather around him.

  “Seems we’re a distance from the hive here,” he whispered. “But we need to keep going down.” He pointed at the sealed-off area. “Since we have no ammunition or explosives that I know of, anyone have any ideas how we can get down there quietly. Or if not quietly, quickly? And then seal it behind us?”

  “My ex-wife’s cooking would eat through that in a second,” Lynch whispered and shrugged. Robinsen punched him lightly and Green smiled.

  “Since, unfortunately, she’s not with us,” he whispered, “you two check with the others to see if they have any ideas.”

  Both nodded and silently moved away. With his men scattered around him Green went to the center of the small room and sat on the rock plug. He knew the longer they stayed in one place the more likely an alien would track them.

  But ten meters down through a solid rock plug was their best hope at long-term survival. It was worth a little time to find a way.

  While faint whispering from his men went on around him he closed his eyes and did his best to bring back up the vision of the rough prisoner maps he had looked at two years earlier. If they did get through, they were going to need his memory to keep them from getting lost in the maze of rock tunnels below.

  * * *

  “The Marines are gone,” Hank said to the five men gathered around him in the circle of bright lamplight The glow outlined the old tunnel carved out of rock six levels below the human section. The tunnel at this point was as high as his dad’s old barn roof and about as wide. The air was dry, thin, and biting cold. Hank could see his breath in the lamplight and a fog seemed to form in the center of their group as they talked.

  Bunk beds were carved in the rock wall opposite of where they gathered and one mummified prisoner’s body lay curled on a top one, his back to the me
eting. From where Hank stood the body looked peaceful and he envied it for that.

  Their footsteps in the dust were the only sign anyone had been down in this tunnel for years and years. The six of them had had three meetings before like this one, all in different sections of the old tunnels.

  “Gone?” Jonathan, the bartender, asked. “How? When?”

  “I went to find Private Choi, my contact, and their bunk room was cleaned out. The guy cleaning the floors there said they had been shipped home.”

  “They’re not totally gone,” Ray said softly. Ray was a quiet guy with dark hair and more doctorate degrees than the rest of them combined. He had been the one who had gotten the secret film on Jerry’s body. He worked with and around the Professor a great deal, as well as having access to the computers at times.

  Ray glanced around at the group in the lamplight and then went on. “The Professor promised them a flight home, then dumped them on the far side of the alien sector. They were alive when they landed, that much I do know. But I doubt if they’ll make it back here.”

  “Shit,” Jonathan said. “You got any proof of that on tape?”

  “Wish I did,” Ray said, shaking his head sadly.

  The silence in the tunnel seemed to grow louder, pressing in against the thin wall the light had put up around them, making the circle of safety seem ever smaller. Six men stood inside that circle, lost in what the news of the Marines being gone meant.

  Hank stared at the body of the prisoner in the shadows on the far wall. Gray coveralls hung over the body with a layer of white dust making his upper side look almost sun-bleached. It seemed so peaceful, yet Hank knew he hadn’t died in peace. Hank doubted the Marines would die easy either. If he knew them, and Sergeant Green, they wouldn’t go down without a fight.

  Hank kept staring at the mummified body, thinking about what it meant to wipe out an entire company of Marines. The Professor had done it almost without a fight in less than three years, and would probably get away with it. How could the six of them and a few other loyal friends now stop such a madman? It didn’t seem possible.