Predator - Incursion

by Tim Lebbon

  An ocean stretched out before him. The light blue sky, endless above the azure waters, was streaked with high clouds caught in some invisible airstream. Waves broke against the sandy beach. Waters foamed, bubbles slid across the smoothed sand, crabs scuttled into cover, retreating from the blazing sun.

  Marshall stood in the shadows of overhanging palm trees and he took a few quick steps forward, groaning when he felt the sunlight on his skin. There was nothing like it. Life-support systems, air conditioning, direct heating panels set in his rooms, none of them could match the honest feel of true sunlight.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Bassett said. He was sitting in a beach chair close to where the waves reached, the chair’s feet and his own sunk in the sand. Almost seventy years old, he was one of the fittest men Marshall had ever seen. Toned and tall, his torso a relief map of knotted muscle, his limbs strong and lean, he carried no spare ounce of fat, and performed no unnecessary movements. He looked as though he’d been born with the claw scar that split his nose and right cheek. From a bug hunt, he’d said the first time Marshall had asked him about it. Like his poor eyesight, he chose not to have corrective surgery to remove the gruesome battle wound.

  The most surprising thing about the scene was that Bassett was crying.

  “Where are we?” Marshall asked. He had no wish to mention the tears.

  “Weaver’s World,” Bassett said. “Eastern shores of Ellia, its largest continent. Just on the equator. It’s an hour ’til sunset, and soon you’ll see one of the three moons manifest out over the sea. It’s eclipsed up to now by one of the other moons. Quite a beautiful sight. I’ve sat here and watched it three times today.”

  “Is everything all right?”

  Bassett looked away from Marshall, out across the sea. Trees rustled behind them, the breeze reaching down and lifting Marshall’s hair. If I close my eyes, it’s real, he thought, but he was afraid to do so. He didn’t like these VR suites. They were a lie, and in a few minutes he’d have to step out onto a deck again, the freezing indifference of space all around. Space only wanted him dead.

  Bassett whispered some command and the imagery faded quickly away, replaced by something else. The transition was disconcerting and dizzying, and Marshall staggered a few steps to his right. Sand between his toes, then cool metal, and then the silky swish of grass.

  He gasped and took in a couple of quick breaths. The beachy scent was replaced with the perfume of wild flowers, and the hint of heat or burning. The landscape was wide and lush, a flowing grassy plain giving rise to impossibly tall trees in the distance. To his left was a range of peaks so high he couldn’t see their summits, hidden in the haze of distance. To the right, the plains gave way to rolling hills, and beyond them were the unmistakable stacks of atmosphere processors. Marshall squinted, trying to see through the haze.

  The processors looked strange.

  “Gonzalez Six,” Bassett said. He was standing now, still in his swimming shorts. There were other scars on his body that Marshall had not seen before. He wondered whether they were from the same bug hunt. “Formerly LV-204. One of the first worlds successfully terraformed, although to be fair it was already almost there. The processors…” He pointed at them, mountainous constructs in the distance. “They were decommissioned and abandoned almost a century ago. Apparently they’re home to a species of beetle now. Billions of them.”

  “General, why did you call me here?”

  “I’m not a sentimental man,” the soldier said. He issued a command and the noise faded away to nothing, leaving them standing in an incredible, aromatic, utterly silent landscape. “I can’t afford to be. Sentimentality gets in the way of duty. But then, you wouldn’t understand that.”

  “I wouldn’t?”

  “You don’t have it in you to be sentimental.” There was no judgement there, only a statement of fact. Marshall started to object, but realized that he couldn’t. Unlike many Company people he worked with, he prided himself on his honesty.

  “I lost my son today,” the General said. “We vacationed as a family on Weaver’s World once, spent three months traveling up the eastern coast of Ellia by hovercraft. When he was older, he and I went on a hunting trip to Gonzalez Six. We didn’t catch anything.”

  “I’m sorry,” Marshall said, but at the same time he thought, What has this got to do with me?

  “Close down,” Bassett said, and the VR suite wound itself down. From an uncanny representation of a world over a hundred light years away, to a metal cube lined with tech and buzzing with leftover energy, all in the space of a few seconds.

  “What happened?” Marshall asked.

  “Murder,” the General said. He seemed to have gathered himself now, wiping openly at his eyes and then standing tall, staring Marshall in the eye. “Mass murder, in fact. Come through to my office. I’ll show you.”

  * * *

  The image in the holo frame wasn’t very clear. It had been taken from seventy miles out, by a ship on its final approach to Swartwood Station 3. But it was clear enough.

  As the huge space station came apart in a glow of shimmering debris, Marshall realized that he was holding his breath. The footage ended, the frame clouded to its neutral form, and General Bassett slumped down in his large leather seat.

  “Who would do something like this?” Marshall asked. “Red Four?” He had personal experience of the anti W-Y terrorist group. One of his ex-subordinates was now one of the leading Four of the organization’s name, a ratty, devious man whose dislike of expansionism and big business had led him to others of the same ilk, and from there to radicalization.

  “They don’t have the capability—not any more—and much as I hate those fuckers, I really don’t think they’d attempt something so… grotesque.”

  “Probably not,” Marshall agreed. He glanced at the General, hesitant to verbalize his next thought. “Accident?” he asked softly.

  “Not according to a blast signature recorded by three ships within a thousand mile radius. It was a small device, probably plasma based, but planted in a position that indicates a good structural knowledge of the station. These things are built to withstand blasts, and airlock doors should have ensured the survival of as many staff as possible. But… whoever did it, they knew what they were doing.”

  “How many?” Marshall asked.

  “One thousand, nine hundred and thirty.” Bassett shrugged. “Give or take a couple of ship’s crews.”

  “Fucking hell.”

  “My son, Harry, had been based there for six months. He was a flight trainer. Two of the others survived, they were out on flights, but he was off-duty, probably asleep. Six hundred children.”

  Marshall sat heavily into a sofa. “I’m sorry, Paul.”

  The General seemed surprised at the use of his given name, and he nodded once.

  “So what is this?” Marshall asked.

  “We’re still investigating. I’ve issued a level one alert to all Colonial Marines, as well as support staff and organizations. I suggest you advise the Thirteen to do the same for Weyland-Yutani.”

  “Of course. You don’t think this is anything to do with…?”

  “Yautja?” Bassett didn’t scoff, as Marshall had been expecting. Instead he tapped his fingers on his desk, tracing the deep groove across his nose with his other hand. “We’ve had more attacks from them in the last three months than the past three years combined. Something’s happening with them, and we have people trying to work out what. I know you do, too. Isa Palant?”

  “She’s one of our best, yes,” Marshall said, “and I’ve sent someone from my own staff to aid her research.”

  “Yautja are weird. Slave to tradition and history, which I suppose is natural given the age they can reach. Maybe there’s a religious aspect to their increased attacks, a species anniversary of some kind. Something in their calendar that suggests they have to take more skulls, win more trophy hunts. I hate the bastard things, and I have good cause, but the increased attacks ar
e mostly across the Outer Rim. They’ve never tried anything like this. I honestly don’t think they would. Where’s the honor in murdering two thousand innocents at a distance, with a bomb?”

  “No honor,” Marshall said, cringing inwardly. Bassett hadn’t needed his question answered.

  “We need to remain vigilant,” Bassett said. “We’ll track down those responsible, but in the meantime our priority is to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.”

  “Of course,” Marshall said. “Will you be…?”

  “Compassionate leave?” Bassett said, laughing without humor “My ex-wife will arrange a memorial. I won’t be there. I have quarter of a million children, Marshall.”

  Marshall nodded and stood, stepping forward and holding out his hand. The General surprised him by shaking it.

  As he left Bassett’s rooms and passed back through the huge control globe, Marshall paused on the walkway and looked with new eyes. In one holo frame halfway across the globe, the exploding Smartwood Station 3 appeared again, slowed down to a tenth of its true speed while two people observed the footage, probing with thin laser filaments, changing and dissecting the image and viewing the data.

  Elsewhere, a group of Marines huddled around a comms point, listening intently. Closer to where he stood, a frame floated above two seated Marines, the image within showing a sweating, agitated soldier imparting information while shadows darted back and forth behind him. There were flames. He was bleeding.

  The female marine who’d brought him here appeared at the end of the walkway, closing the distance quickly.

  “This way,” she said.

  “Just a minute.” Marshall knew that Colonial Marines kept their business close, but she knew who he was, and she would never attempt to hurry him on.

  There was a buzz throughout the globe that he’d not noticed before, a sort of restrained energy pulsing for release. People walked smartly to and fro. Holo frames showed desperate faces, desolate scenes, or blankness. In the center of the vast room glowed a clear image, five yards across. A representation of the Human Sphere, thousands of points of white light glimmering, and here and there red lights bloomed. Perhaps he was looking at a map of Yautja contact, and if so there were more than he had expected.

  Marshall realized with a cool rush that the Colonial Marines were already on a war footing.

  “What happens now?” he whispered, not realizing that the marine had sidled up to him.

  “Now we do what we’re trained for,” she said. “Come on, Sir. I’ll show you back to the bridge.”

  Marshall followed her from the control globe, leaving behind those red flaring lights and urgent sub-space communications from scores or hundreds of light years away. He had a report to make to the Thirteen. Along with Xenomorphs, the Yautja were a species whose secrets had long eluded Weyland-Yutani.

  And war was often profitable.

  7

  LILIYA

  Testimony

  When I was young—in age, not appearance, because I’ve always looked this way—I worked with a small group of scientists chasing comets. There were three they were targeting, two of which were back in the Sol System for the first time in centuries. They had landed probes on them decades before, but those had long since run out of power.

  The scientists wanted to retrieve the three probes in order to download all experimental data they had been unable to transmit. They were good people, as independent as anyone can be involved in deep space travel and exploration. They took me along because of my ability to work in hostile environments. They knew I was different, and they never let that go.

  “We’re looking for the origins of life in the universe,” one of them said to me one day. “Comets might carry the blueprints. Knowing where we come from, that would be a profound moment—but then, I don’t suppose that worries you that much. You already know where you came from.”

  He didn’t say it in a cruel way. It was matter-of-fact. But it struck home with me. My age approximated my appearance about then, and already I was starting to question.

  When I was adrift in that escape pod after leaving the Evelyn-Tew, waiting to be picked up by Wordsworth and his Founders, with all that time on my own, my questions turned to deep musings. As the years passed by, and then the decades, before they finally came for me, I found myself sleeping and dreaming of where I had come from and what I was supposed to do.

  Androids were never meant to dream.

  It’s difficult to comprehend spending that amount of time alone. I was adrift for almost forty years. Wordsworth had told me it would be months at most, but he encountered problems, so they left me. They knew that I had left the system, traveling perpendicular to the orbital plane and venturing into deserted space, and the Founders believed that was the safest place for me. It was highly unlikely that I’d be found at random. They were right.

  Forty years, alone in an escape pod too small to move around in. No viewing portals. No navigational system. Once I launched from Evelyn-Tew and programmed a fuel burn, I was set on my course.

  I had to close down most of my systems, but my consciousness remained—sometimes awake, sometimes absorbed in what approximated sleep. Dreaming. I lived every day of those forty years alone.

  That gave me plenty of time to think.

  I was confident that I’d done the right thing. Though I had caused many lives to be lost, I always considered the Founders’ philosophies to be admirable. To begin with, they were pure in intent and outlook, and that was something I respected so much. Even forty years later, when an older, wiser Wordsworth and his people finally found and retrieved me, there was an ebullience about them, a confidence and excitement about what they were doing and where they were going. I was caught up in that, then as before.

  Wordsworth himself nursed me back to health. After so long, many of my systems had failed, and much of my biological self had petrified. He donated his own cells and blood to help me and then…

  I’m getting ahead of myself.

  First, I need to tell you about the Founders. You might have heard about them, but probably not. They were one obscure religion among many, and when they disappeared it was probably assumed that Wordsworth and his followers had died, or lost themselves between the stars that existed within the Human Sphere. Many people had done so before, and some of them managed to set up their own independent communities and live out their lives on remote space stations, abandoned bases, on planets or moons, or constantly moving on captured Titan ships or other transports.

  Yet that assumption gives no credit to Wordsworth’s ambitions and drive, nor his abilities. He was a genius, and everything he stood for and achieved should be respected.

  The Founders saw themselves as pilgrims, seeking religious and philosophical freedom from the taint of the Human Sphere. They were a collective of much older groups once persecuted by Weyland-Yutani, as well as other corporations and organizations now faded into history. They were all working at the fringes of their fields, the edge of understanding, and sometimes the boundaries of acceptability.

  They were persecuted because they strived to bring themselves closer to God by almost becoming gods. They were comprised of scientists, forward thinkers, those disillusioned with humanity, and those who believed that its true purpose was to progress as far and fast as it could.

  As part of this they were experimenting with longevity—and succeeding. They had also developed a much more effective faster-than-light drive and kept it to themselves, viewing it as their potential means of escape. They did not believe that they had to share their great discoveries with everyone else. Looked down upon by the wider community, they became introverted. Some would say rightly so.

  I would agree.

  Much like the Pilgrim Fathers of Earth’s ancient history, they were seeking a new, free world, believing that they could establish a utopia away from the sphere of human influence. Thus they chose to flee—not just persecution, but the confines of humanity’s influence.

&nbs
p; Using their newly developed FTL drive they left the Human Sphere far behind, and were the first humans to explore far beyond.

  That was why I was taken with them, and why I did what I did. The advanced Xenomorph research I stole from the Evelyn-Tew was vital to the Founders’ future. They knew there were dangers out there, things unknown and perhaps unknowable. Legend had it Weyland himself had gone searching, and no one knew what became of him. The Founders required the means to confront these dangers as well as they could.

  The idea of harnessing such beasts, weaponizing them, controlling them, was one defense against the unknown. As well as against the beasts themselves.

  I still don’t believe I was an afterthought. I simply think that Wordsworth assumed I was safest where I was, drifting alone until all preparations were made and the Founders were ready to depart. I was vital to them. These current events illustrate that—in ways more terrible, more tragic, than I could ever have imagined.

  For that, my guilt runs even deeper.

  8

  LILIYA

  Beyond the Human Sphere

  July 2692 AD

  “In the deep, in the dark, let light blossom to illuminate our way home.”

  The messages had been designed to instill hope. Two years before, even as she had sent the first of them as instructed by Beatrix Maloney herself, Liliya had grasped onto the notion that this was all for the good.

  The messages said so.

  Sent on a sub-space frequency that could only be known to descendants of those left behind over two centuries before, they spoke of a great return, a welcoming into a brave new world, and they seeded a promise that had originally been left behind. We will come back for you.

  Now, they were coming back, but Liliya knew that it wasn’t hope they brought. Halfway through sending the final message, suspicions aroused, she discovered that the messages communicated far more than mere words.

  “You were never forgotten,” she said. The room she stood in was circular, warm, comfortable, grown rather than built. Just another part of the incredible technology the Founders had discovered out among the stars, and which the Rage were now carrying back in their starships. “You were always fresh in our minds, while we traveled and explored, while we discovered and developed. In the centuries since we left we have grown, and now that return is at hand, our growth will be your future.”