Aliens Omnibus 4

by Yvonne Navarro

  Keene stood and fingered his tie uncomfortably. Here was an element of risk he hadn’t figured into the stupid Symphony of Hate equation. He should still be safe, though; nothing that he could think of tied him to Eddington beyond that one telephone call about the egg—and he’d made that from a pay telephone in Spanish Harlem while his chauffeur had stood ready with an Electrostun pistol. In fact, Keene hadn’t spoken with Eddington since that night, nor had the musician been in his office since last year. It rankled the hell out of Keene that Ahiro didn’t respect him enough to act on his orders without having them preapproved by that bastard Yoriku, but at least Keene felt that he was reasonably isolated from the project and its potential ramifications. Had Yoriku found out about something, perhaps Keene’s failed MedTech interview? Maybe… but probably not. Still, if someone over there had talked, it would go a long way toward explaining why Yoriku had acted so bent out of shape on the VidPhone. On the other hand, Yoriku might be extremely unhappy with Eddington right how. With Synsound’s pet “arteest” on the road to addictive damnation, Yoriku would have to start cultivating another alternative musician for that small but profitable—and growing—quiet niche in Synsound’s customers that Damon Eddington didn’t realize indeed existed for his work.

  Keene grinned to himself. That was a blow Yoriku wasn’t going to get over anytime soon. Rumor had it—and gossip certainly procreated well in the heart of Synsound— that Yoriku liked Eddington’s music so much that he had it piped into his penthouses and private offices. The thought made Keene shiver; how could anyone listen to that stuff if they didn’t have to? Damon Eddington’s early classical renaissance pieces had been pleasant, if not vaguely dull, but in Keene’s opinion the later compositions had deteriorated into something that sounded like banshees being tortured. Any fool who would willingly listen to that crap deserved to be laughed at.

  Keene laughed all right, every time his monthly pay slip was delivered and one twelfth of his six-figure salary settled nicely into his healthy global market fund. How contemptible that he would pocket so much of Synsound’s money when less than two years ago he had longed to breathe the sterilized air of MedTech, Synsound’s fiercest corporate rival. Now he hated both companies: Synsound for trapping him in a position undermined by the instability of Yoriku’s continuously changing whims and refusal to share even a tidbit of his power, MedTech for handing him a humiliating rejection after six months of intense interviewing for a vice presidency slot in their marketing and development department.

  “We’re very sorry, Mr. Keene. We know the interviewing has been extensive and time-consuming. In the long run, however, the process empowers us all by giving us concrete details on which to base the conclusion, as unfortunately we did in your case, that a candidate such as yourself would not be suitable for the executive position that is currently available.”

  The royal we, the royal us. Presumably Keene was included in neither since his opinion that he would be a valuable asset to MedTech was summarily ignored. Twenty-three months since he had walked out of that building for the last time, and the degradation and rage still felt as fresh as it had when the words had first slammed into his brain.

  So Keene sat in his mediocre-masquerading-as-plush office in the Synsound Building, and he laughed at MedTech as well, chuckled long and hard every time he thought of how he had made those self-serving and conceited sons a bitches look like basic horses’ asses by engineering and seeing to completion a corporate theft the likes of which the company had never dreamed would take place. Too bad he hadn’t been there to enjoy the expression on their uppity, blueblood faces the morning they showed up for work and realized their most secret project had been violated, their alien watchdogs were dead—not to mention the human security guards—and one of their precious alien eggs had disappeared.

  And the game wasn’t over yet. Revenge was like that; a pawn here, a rook there, sometimes bending the rules to keep the tournament never-ending. But always…

  One piece at a time.

  17

  Michael was reluctant to admit it, but Darcy was right about Damon Eddington. Sure, he had tried to defend the composer and trivialize Darcy’s idea that he was on jelly, but Michael hadn’t really believed that a man with such a fine mind would let himself be dragged down the road to chemical insanity. Now, however, the evidence could not be denied. The musician was taking something, and it probably was jelly; while Michael dearly wanted to attribute the ups and downs of the musician’s disposition to how well his Symphony of Hate was coming along, the drastic changes in personality were too apparent to be explained away by that. Now Eddington barely talked to the bioengineers, and Michael was sorely and constantly disappointed about that. At first Eddington had been fairly open with him, maybe a little flattered that his music was known to Michael; Darcy hadn’t made any points by not being familiar with Eddington’s work, but it hadn’t been a prerequisite for the position either. He wished that Eddington would involve him more in the process of his composition, ask for his thoughts, let him listen to a segment or two and offer encouragement. But Michael didn’t have the nerve to ask for any of that—after all, he was a man of science who, while he liked to listen to music and had plenty of ideas, possessed no real-world knowledge of how to combine the notes, how the instruments worked, or of what might sound good mixed with something else. In the reality of Eddington’s Symphony of Hate, Michael Brangwen was nothing.

  Jelly junkie or not—and Michael was somewhat mollified by the impression that the younger man had deteriorated only a little—watching Eddington work on a day-to-day basis was a fascinating thing, a privilege for the uneducated. Totally dedicated, Eddington worked as though the music were a physical thing into which he could submerge, drowning himself with whatever exquisite vibrations were being fed into his eardrums through the headphones. At other times it seemed as though the sounds that played in his headphones could be shaped by those fine, long-fingered musician’s hands, sculpted into something that all could see as well as hear. Eddington worked his way methodically through all six tapes of the alien’s sounds, using everything—even the one that contained only the noise from Mozart’s short-lived episode with the cat and the dog and the hot hiss of the alien as they were destroyed. For some reason, those sounds stuck in Michael’s head above all the others; in those, he believed Eddington had been correct; it was easy to imagine he heard Mozart’s total disdain for all of them. Eddington was fitting every sound Mozart had ever made into the structure of his masterpiece, and Michael shuddered when he thought of hearing Mozart’s insulting, steamlike tone at the base of some obscure piece of fine classical music.

  While Damon stayed at his recording console, Darcy tended to Mozart. From his perspective, Michael was content to handle the paperwork and import the data that was constantly being jotted down on Darcy’s computer pad. The young woman was a working machine, and reports were generated by the dozens. The laser printers ran almost constantly, their quiet hum sometimes undercut with the sharper metallic ring of the dot matrixes as they replicated simple bio readouts for distribution amid the myriad Synsound channels.

  Darcy’s devotion to Mozart captivated Michael nearly as much as Damon’s commitment to his music; obviously she had been serious about the theories of attachment they had talked about while waiting for the embryo to grow inside Ken Petrillo. They were back to offering the creature normal food now, and she insisted on feeding the alien herself, shoving everything from thawed cloned turkeys to heavy slabs of nutrient-injected meat substitute through the slanted feeding tube. Her nimble fingers pumped out dozens of analysis reports every day outlining what she perceived to be Mozart’s reactions to her presence as her soft voice droned through the speaker that she kept in the on mode every time she was near the cage and she continued to direct smiles at his eyeless face. It frightened Michael inexplicably to see the Homeworld life-form uncoil itself and move to the glass every time Darcy walked within two feet of the cage, regardless of whethe
r it was time to be fed or whether the speaker was on or off. Everything they knew about these creatures suggested they couldn’t see, at least in the way that mankind understood sight and optical recognition to work. The aliens did not think; they ate, they reproduced, and they killed, pure animalistic instinct in alien form. Why then, if the alien had no sight or sense of familiarity, did Mozart always know when Darcy was close?

  Brangwen checked the wall calendar for the second time in less than ten minutes. It had been nearly three full days since Ahiro had promised Eddington a new animal for Mozart to fight. What would he bring back? A bit of a computer hack, Darcy had told him about an unsigned memo she’d come across in the data files that hinted the next creature might be a polar bear or something like it. The idea of a polar bear worried Michael; an immense creature, a polar could top twelve hundred pounds or more and would be nearly three times Mozart’s mass. It might die in the process, but what if it managed to crush Mozart? A grizzly might be worse; it was well known that a wounded grizzly was one of the most dangerous animals on earth. It was doubtful that Mozart would be able to kill it with one blow, and an injured grizzly bear could very well go mad and rip the alien to pieces despite exposure to the creature’s acid blood. And weren’t Alaskan brown bears even bigger? Beyond some kind of bear, Michael just couldn’t imagine what Ahiro had in mind, and that, perhaps, was the most terrifying thing of all.

  He almost felt relieved when he heard the apiary’s entry door slide open. Eddington was out of his chair in a flash and striding eagerly toward Ahiro, then he paused and took a step back. Curious, Michael and Darcy moved to his side and saw the reason for Eddington’s hesitation. Ahiro had been sent to bring back a beast that would provide a battle for Mozart, but instead of a single covered cage like the one in which he’d brought the panther, five wooden crates, solid but not that large, were lined up along the outer hallway wall. Waiting silently next to each was one of Ahiro’s men, ready to push them aside.

  “What’s in them?” Eddington asked excitedly. “Can we look inside?”

  Rather than answer, Ahiro lifted one end of the nearest crate. It came free easily, obviously not held in place by nails or catches. In an unhurried move, he pulled the side piece free and set it against the wall.

  Inside, unconscious and nearly naked, was a man.

  “This is the first of five,” Ahiro said without preamble. “They have all been sedated and fitted with shunts through which the required tranquilizer dosage is automatically being led. The drug will keep them asleep until they are needed.”

  Eddington’s face went white below the widow’s peak on his high forehead, throwing the ebony of his hair and the darkness of his eyes into startling relief. “You’ve got to be joking!” he exclaimed. “You’ve seen what Mozart is capable of—how can you expect a man to survive a battle with a thing that can kill bulls and panthers within minutes?”

  Ahiro reached into the space between the two front crates and pulled something out. “With this,” he said flatly.

  Michael felt like he was going to choke. He recognized the weapon in Ahiro’s hands from the NewsVids; the National Guard used Electrostun rifles regularly on looters in disaster areas, and it was a favorite for riot control. Before he could protest, Darcy beat him to the punch, though obviously for different reasons.

  “Absolutely not,” she said heatedly.

  “It will not produce enough electricity to kill or permanently injure the alien,” Ahiro assured her as he set the rifle down. “But it will cause it great pain and make it very angry. And it will even the odds… somewhat.”

  Michael finally found his voice. “Wait a damned minute here! Never mind the alien—these are people we’re talking about throwing into that enclosure. Where did these men come from? You—you kidnapped them, didn’t you?” The older man felt dizzy from shock.

  Eddington cleared his throat nervously. “Well, look at this one. He’s a mess—obviously they… uh, came from the worst bars and drug clubs in the city. They certainly aren’t model citizens.”

  “Obviously nothing. We can’t just go around abducting people,” Michael insisted as a vein began throbbing nastily in his temple. He looked around the lab area desperately, wishing Darcy would back him up. As usual though, his needs and stark reality were at odds; she stood off to the side, her face professionally neutral now that she’d been reassured that the Electrostun rifles weren’t set to kill. What were the men in these crates to her but larger lab animals, made available simply for scientific use? Her empathy was only for her project and Mozart. “We’re still talking about human beings.”

  “You were not so sensitive about Ken Petrillo’s wellbeing,” Ahiro said pointedly. “Now you have become the shining wellspring of humanity?”

  “Petrillo was a cultist,” Michael said stubbornly. “He wanted to die, remember? Hell, you found him in The Church of the Queen Mother. You told him ahead of time what we wanted, and he came here of his own free will. No one dragged him.”

  Ahiro’s black eyes didn’t waver. “And these men are drunkards and addicts and criminals.” One hand sliced through the air in the direction of the crates in a dismissive motion and he folded his arms stoically. “Left on their own, most of them will be dead within the year anyway. They will expire unnoticed, and their demise will have no objective and serve no one. The city and mankind will be that much better off. At least here, their ends can serve as research.”

  “Perhaps.” Darcy’s gaze flicked thoughtfully between the Electrostun rifle and Mozart. “But do we really need them? We have the technology that will make the alien scream in and of itself. Why must we sacrifice human life, too?”

  Damon hesitated, but Ahiro laughed. “A creature that screams for no reason does so without passion, Ms. Vance, like a petulant child throwing an impulsive temper tantrum or a primate that beats its chest in the jungle simply to hear the sound that announces its territory. Motivation is the driving force behind any true experience. Is that not so, Mr. Eddington?”

  Michael opened his mouth again, but Ahiro’s sharp wave of a hand and next statement effectively stifled his protests. “But the decision, after all, is Mr. Eddington’s. If he feels that to make use of this resource is unwise, improper, or… useless, then we will return these… animals to the precise locations where they were found.”

  Michael’s neck joints felt like they were trying to turn through hardening concrete as he looked to Eddington. Surely, he thought, the musician would not go this far, even for his art. Surely—

  But the look in Damon Eddington’s sienna-colored eyes clearly proclaimed his decision.

  * * *

  “This all has to be changed,” Eddington announced after the first crate had been resealed and all of the boxes carefully brought inside and stored against the wall of the apiary farthest from Mozart’s cage. “I want Mozart’s cage made bigger, more complex. Right now it’s nothing but a big carton—he runs around in it like a rat in a shoe box. It needs to have places where someone can dig in and defend himself decently. No one will fight for long if there’s no place they think they can escape the alien.” He opened his arms as if he were going to hug Mozart’s enclosure. “I need these fights stretched out to a more appropriate length of time. I don’t have to see the battles, and I don’t care if I can. As long as I can hear what’s going on, down to the remotest detail, I’ll have what I need.” Sensing the crowd gathered outside his cage, Mozart shifted restlessly, then stood, his long tail unfurling behind him like a huge, overly fast anaconda. Eddington frowned. “But how are we going to do it? Somehow I doubt Mozart will sit back and let us redecorate his house.”

  “We can use nerve gas,” Darcy said.

  “I never heard of such a thing.”

  Darcy looked thoughtful. “It’s something new, just developed by the army.”

  Eddington raised one eyebrow. “The army? How did we get it?”

  Darcy gazed at him, her eyes unreadable. “Probably the same way we obtained
the egg, Mr. Eddington. I wouldn’t know the details, and they don’t pay me to ask questions about anything that takes place outside of this laboratory.” When the musician said nothing, she glanced back toward the cage. “In an area that tightly sealed it will be easy to incapacitate him,” she continued. “Once he’s totally under, I’ll suit up and go in to custom fit a ventilation mask over his mouth that will keep the gas supply going only to him. He’ll stay out until about two hours after he inhales the last of the stuff.”

  Michael scowled at her but she ignored him; he’d known nothing about the nerve gas either—Darcy was much more heavily into alien research than he—and until now he’d had some hope of making the project so unlikely to succeed that the prisoners would be released back into whatever hell Ahiro had pulled them from. Now that Eddington knew there was a way that the alien could be disabled, Michael’s last hope of abandoning this crudest of phases had disappeared.

  And forge ahead he—they—did. Shortly after Ahiro had arrived with the man-crates, another unsigned data memo had come down from the executive floor, this time directing them all to stay within the apiary continuously until the completion of the project. That any one of the people involved with this project might have lives outside of Synsound was not a corporate consideration, and now even Ahiro and his men were with them almost twenty-four hours a day. Michael found more than a thing or two strange about the setup, and the fact that Ahiro and his team could work with raw steel and operate welders represented barely a fraction of his discomfort. The rest of it centered on the so-called “budget” that governed the Eddington Symphony of Hate undertaking. It was odd bookkeeping indeed that included exotic animals and equipment, massive amounts of steel, and unlimited overtime for bioengineers and service workers—or whatever Ahiro and his team were called—but not a single simple clone. At first Keene’s assertion that a million-dollar clone was too expensive in light of the apiary’s construction costs and the expenses of obtaining the egg had been a reasonable one, but that was before imported Indian guar and reconstruction, and certainly before the abduction of five men. Did their budget include jail bond for all of them if something went awry? Michael doubted it; it was far more likely they would all… disappear if the project and its horrible actions were exposed. Or worse, there would be some kind of paper trail that completely exonerated Synsound and its executives—and probably Ahiro—from any wrongdoing; he, Darcy, and Eddington would be the corporate sacrifices, the puny scapegoats for all the wrongdoing.