Predator - Incursion

by Tim Lebbon

  “And the Company keep pumping resources at what you do?”

  “Sure they do. BioWeapons and ArmoTech love me.”

  Rogers said nothing. They’d talked about this many times before, and he knew that her intentions were far more pure and honest. She was utterly fascinated with the Yautja, dreamed of making meaningful contact with them, and the best way to do that was to take advantage of the Company’s ongoing desire to benefit from their various warlike technologies.

  “Doesn’t it bug you, playing the system to do what you want to do?” he asked at last. The Company paid his wages, too, and it was unusual to hear him vocalize what she knew he already thought.

  “I don’t see it like that,” she said. “I just have wider horizons. It’s still a great time for adventurers.”

  “You should get that on a T-shirt.”

  “They’re really an amazing species,” Palant said, ignoring his comment. As usual, when away from her lab, she was becoming anxious to return. Her life seemed to be one of contradictions. She valued this limited time away, then yearned to go back. She sought knowledge and dreamed of some sort of peaceful, mutually beneficial contact, yet worked for the Company whose stated aim was the furtherance of what it called the “science of war.”

  Her father had once explained it to her when she was still a dreamy teenager.

  The Company are scared, he’d said. We’re pushing out into the galaxy, incredibly slowly, yet we already know we’re far from alone. We’ve met other intelligent lifeforms, interacted, and made contact. Sometimes they’re friendly, sometimes indifferent. On occasion, we’ve had to fight. There are the Yautja, who might have been visiting us for millennia, and the further we expand, the more they notice us. The Xenomorphs haunt the darker extremes of space. And there will inevitably be other, perhaps even more deadly civilizations. The further we go, the more we might discover, and the more we will be noticed.

  Weyland-Yutani know that, and they’re doing the best they can to protect humanity against any threat. The problem is… that intention is easily corrupted. With so much at stake, and so many fortunes to be made, benevolent intentions can easily be drowned out.

  She had never forgotten his words and the lesson they were meant to impart. Working for Weyland-Yutani now, she was more careful than ever to hold them close.

  “Battening down the hatches,” Rogers said. They were closing on Love Grove Base, and Isa could see windows and doorways covered with their heavy gray shields. Nestled in a small valley a mile from the nearest processor, it had been established by the facility builders almost fifty years ago, as a base from which they could construct and then maintain. After the processors’ completion, the place had been adapted and expanded over the past twenty years by ArmoTech, the branch of Weyland-Yutani given to research into alien weapons and technology. Another example of their effectiveness at cost-cutting. Just one drophole away from the Outer Rim, it was regarded as an ideal place for Yautja research.

  The base had been named by one of the foremen building the processor plants, a bittersweet take on his memories of better times and a kinder place. It was said his home had been Love Grove, a religious commune on Triton, Neptune’s largest moon.

  “Storm coming in,” Palant said, and though the base was an ugly construction with very few nods to aesthetics, she was always pleased to see it. It was home, after all.

  Palant’s parents had been on their way here seventeen years before when they were killed. The report called it a freak accident. As their dropship descended from the orbiting military transport, two weather systems had clashed, resulting in violent electrical storms and two hundred miles-per-hour winds. The ship was tossed around the sky and flung to the ground like a toy, and all eighteen people on board had died. A great loss, but space was dangerous, everyone knew that.

  Five years later Palant had followed her parents to Love Grove Base, landed safely, and had only been away a handful of times since.

  Rogers guided the rover in between the buildings. The external doors slipped open, he maneuvered down into a subterranean garage, and the doors closed quickly behind them. Even though the atmosphere this close to the processors was breathable, the harsh weather conditions meant that sojourns outside were rare, and dangerous.

  They parked, then Rogers wound down the rover’s engine and set it in park.

  “Drink this evening?” he asked.

  “Sure. O’Malley’s at eight?”

  “It’s a date.” He always made that joke, ever since he’d first asked her out. Whatever he claimed, he hadn’t known her preferences. Not then.

  “Thanks for the ride. Did me good.”

  “Back to work, Yautja Woman!”

  They parted ways in the garage area, and Palant made her way up into the base’s main levels. Angela Svenlap met her in the central distribution area, holding a coffee clutched in both hands and leaning against the railings around the wide stairwell. Palant could see that she’d been waiting for her.

  “Hey, Isa! Gerard Marshall signaled a transmission for you.” She handed her the coffee.

  “He did?”

  “Only three times.” Svenlap smiled. She looked tired and drawn, but had still come here to deliver her message—and who wouldn’t? It wasn’t every day that one of Weyland-Yutani’s main executive officers, and one of the Thirteen, made a personal call to one of their employees.

  “Okay, I’ll call and accept.”

  “It’s a two-way.” Svenlap seemed excited, and smiled slightly at Isa’s surprise.

  “From Sol system?”

  “Yeah. You know he never leaves. I’ve heard the Thirteen have been developing tech to conduct real-time conversations through sub-space.”

  “The energy that must take…”

  “Guess he really wants to talk to you.”

  Palant lifted the cup in thanks and took a sip. Svenlap paused, as if debating whether to say more. Then she smiled again and wandered away, and Palant took a moment to breathe in the base’s familiar, sterile atmosphere.

  Marshall. He’d taken an interest in her research from the start, and she’d never felt comfortable talking with him. She had never met him face to face, but seeing him in the holo frame always sent a shiver down her spine. He tried to present the attractive human face of the Company, but she knew some of his story. And it was ugly.

  The coffee was scalding hot and bitter, not at all how Palant liked it, but Svenlap had gone to the trouble of bringing it, along with the message. She hadn’t needed to. She was quiet, as unassuming as she was clever, her pale, sad face hiding a startling intellect.

  Her area of interest was Yautja history, and so their research and analysis often benefitted from regular crossover. Much of the story Svenlap was building came from human history—ancient texts, more recent suspected contacts, and comparing known Yautja behavior—interactions with humans, and methods to historical situations. Palant found it fascinating, and while history also played a part in her research, she took much more of a hands-on approach.

  Walking to her labs, she wondered why Marshall had been trying to contact her. He’d called three times. It must have been something urgent. Nevertheless, she was still relaxed from the twenty-hour trip with her friend, and her mindset was somewhat refreshed. She spent far too long immersed in research in one of the three rooms that made up her lab, breathing the same air, seeing the same sights, eating the same food. Sometimes, the weight of the nothingness all around them was suffocating. The irregular jaunts she made with Rogers usually enabled her to reset herself for the next bout of work. The base looked fresher after such trip, and her future seemed brighter.

  She’d heard tales of people going mad in space. Data was unreliable, and probably distorted, but a good percentage of those who lived such a life suffered mental illness of some kind, ranging from slight personality disorders to suicidal tendencies. Evolution was struggling to keep up with humanity’s progress. Palant’s parents had often lamented about how people were
designed to look at a green world with blue skies, and not this. Not inimical alien landscapes being tortured into shape by man-made technology. Not the shattering horror of infinity.

  Outside the lab doors she breathed in the scent of cooling coffee, closed her eyes, and brushed her hand across the entry pad.

  Inside, everything had changed.

  * * *

  “Fucking hell.”

  Palant rarely found the need to swear.

  “Fucking, fucking hell.”

  In the main room, several heavy tables had been dragged together into the center, their scattered contents taken off and piled on a unit in the lab’s far corner. Her initial thought was, How dare they? That accumulated debris consisted of a large part of her research for the past several months.

  A tablet had been dropped on the floor, one corner dented, holo screen flickering with a trapped image. A stand of glass pipettes had tipped from the table and lay shattered. One of the lab’s several safety drones had applied safety foam to the scattered glass, producing a clear, solidified bubble mass that was designed to isolate any dangerous or toxic elements let loose in a spill.

  The pipettes had been empty. She had long wished for something to place in them.

  It looked as if that wish had been granted.

  The two Yautja corpses were still encased in their vacuum-packed coffin bags, a heavy white material stronger than steel hugging every contour of the bodies. Though they weren’t visible, the nature of the bodies was obvious. Palant knew them so well.

  One was taller than the other, almost as long as the nine-foot table it lay upon. Their bodies were broad, legs long, feet heavy and clawed. Both had arms crossed over their stomachs, but the one on the right seemed to be lacking something there. As for their heads, so broad and distinctive, one was bare, the long tusks tenting the tight material. The other seemed to still be wearing its helmet, though the shape was all wrong, with a deep depression in the left-hand side and a good portion of its mass missing.

  They kept the helmet on to hold in what was left, she guessed.

  She knew now why Marshall had been so keen to contact her. Palant could imagine him, smarmy and confident, breaking the secret to her face to face and enjoying the reaction she would try to control. She was glad she’d stolen the surprise from him.

  Breathing hard, she entered the lab and closed the door behind her, sealing herself inside with these two majestic corpses.

  She had seen plenty of body parts, studied data from other scientists, examined so much footage of Yautja attacks—most of it confused, much of it caught by Colonial Marines’ combat-suit sensors—that she had even started to convince herself that she knew them well.

  But she had never known them well. They were an enigma to her, and the more she studied and discovered, the more questions she had to ask herself. Now, perhaps some of those questions could be answered.

  “Computer, what’s the status of the bodies?” She had never felt the need to personalize her lab computer, not even granting it a name. Their relationship seemed to benefit from that.

  “Afternoon, Isa. They’ve been out of stasis for just more than three hours. Decay rates—sample one, four percent; sample two, six percent.”

  “Too much,” she said. “Prepare the pods.” Her heart was beating fast, her senses alive. She thought she could smell decay in the lab, though that was impossible. She blinked and imagined one of the coffin bags moving. “Contact Central, tell them to send three technicians to help get them shifted. Are the pods functional?”

  “Of course. I maintain them regularly and run daily tests. They’ll be ready in seven minutes.”

  “Thanks.” In one small room off the lab there were three stasis pods, two full-sized, one smaller, kept available for instances such as this. They were specially adapted to accommodate the Yautja physiology, and she had always dreamed of filling them.

  What else do I need to do? Palant was breathing faster, tapping her left hand against her leg as she contemplated how much these corpses would feed her future. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe slower, imagining what her parents would say. It was nothing she could say aloud, not in a Company facility. They had always seen Weyland-Yutani as corrupt and morally bankrupt, and Palant had always felt a flush of shame at coming to work for them after her parents’ deaths.

  “But I can learn so much,” she whispered, filling the lab with her hope.

  “Sub-space comms incoming from Gerard Marshall, signal source Charon Station.”

  “Block it, I don’t want to talk to—”

  “Sorry. He’s using his override.” The mobile holo frame lifted from the far wall and drifted across the lab to her, and as it did so the space contained within blurred, flickered, and then changed.

  Gerard Marshall smiled at her. He was visible from the shoulders up, leaning back in a chair with a fake background of waving grass, sunny skies, and flitting birds. Sub-space quirks distorted his image a little, flickering, giving him a ghostly echo to left and right that didn’t quite mimic his own movements. She always found it strange talking to someone who was so far away. Almost five hundred light years, in this case. Somehow, the impossibility of it made the distances involved even more shocking.

  “Isa Palant,” he said, with what seemed like genuine affection. It made her skin crawl. “How are things on the edge of space?”

  Isa waited for him to say more.

  “You can answer,” he said. “You know the Thirteen have been developing sub-space channels open for real-time conversation.”

  “Yes,” Isa said. “Right. Things are…” She glanced past the frame at the two bodies, then smiled. “Well, you know how they are.”

  His three-dimensional image leaned closer, growing larger. “I hope you like them. Isn’t it exciting? I tried talking to you earlier, I wanted to tell you all about them myself.”

  “I was off base,” Palant said.

  “Yes, well. You’re back now.” His replies were a little delayed, and they didn’t match his image’s movements. It was all very disconcerting.

  She’d researched Marshall, as much as she could without being obviously and traceably intrusive. Though a senior executive at the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, he’d never left the Sol System, and he rarely traveled into environments without proper atmospheres—Earth, Titan, Mars, and the other system moons that were still being terraformed. She didn’t know whether it was fear or need of comfort that made him an unwilling space traveler.

  Now he was on Charon Station, the massive space habitat orbiting the home system at roughly the distance of Pluto’s furthest orbit. It was known as the Colonial Marines’ main control base and home for General Paul Bassett, the Marines’ commander.

  It was so strange, being able to have a real-time conversation over such a vast distance. Stranger still that the Thirteen kept such tech to themselves and a few close confidantes.

  “They’re quite spectacular,” Palant said. She could hardly concentrate on the conversation. The bodies drew her attention.

  “I hope you’ll be able to—” The image flickered, his face ghosted, versions of him that seemed both younger and older. Then it settled again. “—badly damaged? I was told not.”

  “I can’t see yet, but they look quite complete. I can report to you later, after my initial examinations.” It was a tacit request that he let her go, but Marshal wasn’t yet finished.

  “Please do. They were killed by a detachment of Excursionists on the Outer Rim. They’d attacked a medical research station, resulting in quite a few deaths. All very sad.” He sighed, not sounding sad at all. “Isa, we’ve spoken before about what we expect of you. Now, more than ever, those expectations need to be fulfilled.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Of course.” His smile grew thin. “I know your love of these things. I know that your intentions and desires are pure—but there has been a surge in attacks lately, across several sectors of the Outer Rim, and a few more deeper withi
n the Sphere. Our prime concern, our number-one priority, is to understand as much as we can about Yautja weaponry and martial capabilities.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “We’re sending someone to work with you on this.”

  She raised her eyebrows, attention snapping back to Marshall.

  “Milt McIlveen.” More ghosting. One of his images seemed to sneer at the other. Isa wanted to look away, shut down the transmission, but she could not. “—a good man. As fascinated in them as you.”

  “But?”

  “But…” That smile again, so two dimensional. “He has a true grasp of our requirements.”

  “So do I, Mr. Marshall.”

  “Yes. You do.” He went to sign off, then paused. “Isa, I know you see me as a Company man. And I am, through and through. My aims are pure in this. Can you imagine what would happen if the Yautja launched a true attack?”

  “They’re not like that. Their society isn’t built or structured that way. They’re essentially loners, drawing together for special ceremonies, or mating, or perhaps other reasons we don’t know about yet, but they’re not conquerors. There’s no scheming in what they do. There’s an honesty to them.”

  “That honesty killed over twenty station staff and two Excursionists at Southgate Station 12,” Marshall said. “And while I accept what you say, we can’t second guess them. We don’t know enough to do that. Keep your priorities in mind, that’s all I’m saying. Your assistant will be there in seventeen days.”

  Palant smiled and nodded and kept smiling as Marshall’s image faded away. The holo frame drifted back to its dock on the far wall, and the room seemed unnaturally silent.

  “Help is here,” the computer said. The doors opened behind her and three people stepped inside.

  Palant crossed to the bodies and rested her hand on one of the coffin suits for the first time.

  It was cold. Cold as space.

  3

  ANGELA SVENLAP