Aliens Omnibus 4

by Yvonne Navarro

  But ultimately Michael went along with it, because he must. Sometimes he felt like Mozart, trapped in the belly of the Synsound beast, being slowly digested by the hungry corporate machine. While Mozart slept soundly in one corner, the silent Japanese men worked with admirable speed and efficiency, putting up steel walls and welding slick metal tubes as they followed a blueprint that Michael and Darcy carefully laid out using a DesignCad program on the one freestanding computer in the apiary. The subbasement was extensive beyond the original walls of the alien’s cage, and in Michael’s opinion the steel walls that they requisitioned were manufactured and delivered with outlandish speed, then installed with a skill that seemed out of place in men also trained to perform such tasks as hijacking alien eggs and kidnapping men. Perhaps some of the men’s swiftness in the renovation had to do with the alien slumbering not-so-peacefully at one end of the room; like a dog chasing a rabbit in its sleep, the creature periodically twitched and hissed and made the workers jerk with nervous fright.

  At last the new cage was completed. The men withdrew and Darcy removed the mouthpiece she’d fitted over Mozart’s face; forty-five minutes later—a significant miscalculation regarding the sedative’s projected time frame that made Darcy scribble furiously on her computer pad—Mozart stirred. When he was fully awake, he hunkered down and swung his head to and fro, testing the smells and sensations of his new home.

  “Some studies claim the aliens use an echolocation system that resembles that of Megachiroptera,” Darcy said thoughtfully as the four of them watched the life-form maneuver into one of the larger tunnels.

  “What’s that?” Ahiro asked. It was the first time he seemed curious about anything.

  “Bats.” Darcy flipped a switch near the feeding entrance and sound, painstakingly recognizable, began coming through the speakers—Mozart, hissing and slipping along the smooth, round walls of the corridors that now branched in several directions from the main compartment of his enclosure.

  Michael stared into the cage, waiting for Mozart to reappear at the mouth of a corridor that appeared to lead to an escape, but in reality circled around and ended up back at the center chamber. “Wouldn’t that require projected noise?” he asked.

  “It would explain why they hiss constantly,” Darcy pointed out. “The same noise, all the time, even when they rest. While the human ear can’t normally hear the alien’s at-rest sound unless leaning practically into the alien’s mouth, our microphones easily pick it up. Surely you’ve noticed how exaggerated Mozart’s hissing becomes during a conflict.”

  “I’ve noticed him doing a number of things,” Michael said dryly.

  “Yeah, well,” Eddington cut in impatiently, “he screams, too. And that’s what counts.”

  “Anyway, it’s just another theory,” Darcy said softly, more to herself than anyone else.

  Eddington pressed against the glass, trying to peer farther into the cage. “These tunnels,” he said for the tenth time, “you say he can’t get into all of them?”

  Michael answered him… again. “Positive. As you specified, we set them up so that there are several places inside where someone can squeeze into and be out of Mozart’s reach. At seven and a half feet tall, it’s physically impossible for the alien to get into them. None of those areas are permanent solutions, of course, because they’re all dead ends. Eventually thirst, hunger, or the belief that they’ll find an escape route will bring them out. False hope,” he finished bitingly. “It seems rather cruel to me.”

  The others ignored his comment. “I was worried about disorientation, but Mozart looks like he feels quite comfortable with the changes,” Darcy said, her gaze sharp as she watched the alien explore. “No hesitation whatsoever.”

  “Then we should be ready, right?” Eddington was so excited he sounded like he was in danger of losing his voice.

  Eddington turned to look at Ahiro, but he had already gone to the first crate and was wheeling it toward them on a small dolly. Reluctantly, Michael put his back into helping Ahiro lift the drugged man and place him inside the newly reconstructed feeding cage to Mozart’s enclosure. Sitting inside a garishly painted red square on the floor and slouched against the door before the glass box lowered, the captive looked absurdly like one of a dance club’s human decorations gone too far over the edge, now nothing but a drunken, nearly naked male performer on display inside a small glass elevator. When they were certain he was balanced against the back of the area, Ahiro reached down and tore the shunt from the back of the man’s bare shoulder. In a better life, their prisoner had been a redhead with a thick, enviable mustache and a thousand freckles spread over his skin; now it was hard to distinguish the blood blisters raised by the shunt’s removal from the freckles and the dirt ground into his flesh. If nothing else, he had not yet joined the ranks of the malnourished; while the man was clearly sliding toward the inside edge of slender, his frame was still sturdy enough to be considered fairly healthy.

  “The pain of removing the shunt will make him start to wake up,” Ahiro said matter-of-factly. He dropped the bloody piece of plastic to the floor, then absently kicked it aside and pulled the lever that would lower the glass cage over the groggy man. “It is a powerful but short-lived tranquilizer, and he will be fairly cognizant within five minutes.”

  As Ahiro had predicted, the redheaded man’s eyes began to flicker almost immediately, and it wasn’t long before he was trying to pull himself upright. When the captive looked like he could concentrate, Ahiro relayed his instructions, his tone even and, in Michael’s opinion, obscenely serene. “The weapon at your side is an Electrostun rifle,” Ahiro told him calmly. “It is effective only within three feet of the creature you will encounter when the door behind you opens.” The prisoner’s eyes widened and Michael saw that they were a bizarre shade of reddish-brown that almost matched his hair. Once this had been a handsome young man.

  As his predicament began to sink in, the man gasped and began slamming his hands against the front of his small prison. “No—please!” he cried. Twisting futilely within the small glass enclosure, the Electrostun rifle seemed to be the last thing he wanted to find. “Let me out—I won’t tell anyone, I swear to God!”

  “The harder you fight,” Eddington interrupted, “the longer you’ll stay alive. It’s your choice.”

  Disgusting, Michael thought belligerently as he crossed his arms, how easily Eddington falls into his new role as Executioner in the Name of Music. Look at him, relaxed… safe on this side of the world while someone on the other side faces death. The fool—he doesn’t have any idea what that really means. And Darcy—he didn’t know whether to shake her or slap her—but he thought the chances were good that neither would bring her back to her senses. In the scientific realm, she was as much into this endeavor as Damon Eddington was on the musical end. At this point, if there was anything in the world that she wouldn’t consider doing so that it would enable her to continue working with the alien, Michael couldn’t imagine what it was.

  Eddington pressed a button and a whine of hydraulics warned them that the feeder door was about to open. While Eddington hurriedly strode to his recording console, no one else on the outside of the cage moved. Inside, the redheaded man dropped into a crouch and whirled, eyes bulging as the door began to pull open. Barely two feet away, Mozart already waited on the other side, head cocked like a trained guard dog listening for someone to come into the house.

  Eddington’s voice came clearly through the overhead recording speakers, deep and pleasant as it was reproduced on the higher quality equipment. “If you remain in the small cage,” he said clearly, “the alien will kill you instantly. Leave, and you may survive.”

  Liar, Michael thought sourly. The poor schmuck in there had no chance, and he would die fighting solely on the belief that freedom lay just down one of the tunnels. Already the redhead was clutching the Electrostun rifle and—

  Finger on the trigger, the prisoner plunged out of the cage and faced the alien. Mozart r
eared on his hind legs and hissed, reminding Michael of a fully grown praying mantis he’d once seen in the aircycle garage here in the building. The bioengineer had wanted dearly to catch it—they were so rare and to find a live one in the midst of Manhattan! but he’d had nothing with which to trap it. His attempt to pick it up with his fingers had resulted in a miniature version of the thing that now faced off with a human being on the other side of the glass wall.

  * * *

  “Come on, come on, come on,” Damon urged breathlessly from the mixer console. Surely the man would fight— anything else was unthinkable. To let the alien just kill him outright—

  With a bellow of desperation, their prisoner fired his weapon and lightning leaped from the muzzle of the rifle. One hundred fifty thousand DC volts turned the interior of the custom-built cage—and Mozart—a bright, sizzling white, the color of the outside world during the most charged moments of a vicious electrical storm.

  Mozart rocked back on his feet and screamed as they had never heard him before. For a moment Damon literally lost his air; the sound boiled through them all like the soundtracks of the old NewsVids from the Homeworld War, raw footage shown on public stations to satisfy the public’s never ceasing demand for bloodshed. In the alien’s cry Damon heard the pain wails and curses of all the men wounded by fiery lead and cold steel, and the shrieking agony of a thousand women damned to be childless by mankind’s careless wartime use of chemical warfare upon its own brethren. It was timeless and indescribable, the frenzied souls of millions screaming at God from the heated depths of a hell they’d never believed existed.

  As the redheaded man vainly fought for his life, Damon heard Mozart’s shriek again, and again, and again. Like a hard-headed dog that refused to learn its lesson, the alien would pause for a ten- or twenty-second interval, sway in place like an enraged baboon, then try to attack anew. His prey was weak and slow, his movements dulled by drugs or booze or whatever his addiction of choice had been; there was no strategy to the Electrostun hits he gave the creature, no attempt to herd it in one direction or another. Shocked, exhausted within minutes, and nowhere near either of the tunnels where if he would not find escape, he might at least rest, the doomed man managed a final two-second blast before Mozart leaped on him and tore him apart.

  The alien’s final scream was everything Damon had ever wanted: agony and fury, the instinctive roar of a beast’s victory and revenge over a detested foe. It was dark and evil and fresh, and it pounded through him and everyone else in the room, giving of itself to them all, offering everything Damon had sought and everything he’d needed…

  But never enough…

  18

  By the time they opened the third crate, the group had learned the value of keeping the men in the feeder cage for an hour or two to clear their heads of the last effects of the supposedly “short-lived” sedative.

  The second man to go in was a drunkard rather than an addict. Everything about him seemed to shake or twitch, starting from his slack facial muscles to his continuously trembling hands and the jiggling gut that encircled his midsection like an overfilled balloon. Despite his yearning to get on with it, Damon heeded the advice of the two bioengineers and let the man sit inside the feeder cage for quite some time; besides, it was apparent from the way he kept staggering against the sides of the glass cage that the sedative had hit him harder than it had the first man, probably because of the alcohol residue in his system. If the chunky man hadn’t been sleeping it off in his crate for nearly a week in between his capture and the completion of Mozart’s enclosure, Damon would have sworn the guy was still stone drunk.

  Nevertheless, at the last instant the survival instincts kicked in and the captive gave it his best shot—feeble, short-lived, but enough of an effort and a lucky aim to make Mozart shriek with anger when the charge from the Electrostun rifle hit him full in the face. The sound was like white fire, sending heat racing along Damon’s nerve endings as he closed his eyes and let the sweet euphoria take him… until the man with the potbelly and thinning white hair met his final fate in the claws of the alien.

  Captive number three, while free of any aftereffects from the medication, was a coward and would have been an utter disappointment had not his screams had a pitch completely different from his comrades. Tall and thin, with dirty brown hair that curled onto his neck and muddy brown eyes that seemed unable to focus, he died the quickest of them all. His lisping breaths and shrill voice spiraled through the microphones to meld with Mozart’s music until, with unaccustomed humor, Damon thought the man and the alien were yodeling together. Their victim refused to leave the cage, and the only reason the outer glass walls weren’t smeared with blood and body matter was Mozart’s disinclination to squeeze into it; instead, one long, ropy arm ending in a taloned hand shot through the door and dragged the cowering man out.

  It was difficult, but they decided to wait a full twenty-four hours between each kill, wanting to keep the alien’s appetite just this side of hungry. Damon fretted but the bioengineers insisted, worried that too much food in a short period of time would make Mozart lax and leave him open to permanent damage from the Electrostun. When Darcy pointed out that they knew nothing about the prisoners or their pasts, and that any one of them could be a former military man and know the creature’s weak spots in battle, Damon acquiesced. With so far to go on the project, he didn’t want the alien severely injured or worse; starting over was something he instinctively knew Synsound would not do if Mozart were killed. Damon spent the time between the mini-combats as productively as possible, constantly plugged into his headphones and working the controls at the recording console as he mixed Mozart’s frenzied harmonies with the mood-shattering pieces he’d selected.

  Because the last one had been such a disappointment, to Damon the overnight interval felt more like a week. When Ahiro opened the crate, however, it was obvious the wait was going to pay off; the man inside was clearly the best of any of them so far. If his actions were on track with his appearance, he was going to be the prime candidate to substantiate Darcy’s reminder that any one of these so-called street hoods might have been professionally trained. Of average height, this man was nonetheless superbly muscled. Beneath a thick, shaggily cut head of blond hair, he was square-jawed, his face and hands streaked with dirt. Enough time had passed to let the swelling go down, but it was obvious by the deep purple bruises beneath his eyes and across the misshapen bridge of his nose that he’d given his kidnappers one hell of a fight. Blood from the busted nose had dripped down the light beard that had grown during his sleep and onto his chest, drying in spots on the only thing he was still wearing—

  “Boxer shorts?” Brangwen bent and peered at a wrinkled label sewn on the waistband of the colorful boxers, then frowned at Ahiro. His eyes were heavy with suspicion. “Tell me, what kind of a junkie wears designer silk underwear?”

  Ahiro shrugged as he slid his hands under the unconscious man’s arms. “One who steals from others,” he said. “Then uses what does not belong to him.”

  Brangwen made no move to pick up his end. “I don’t like this,” he said. His voice was starting to shake. “I—I’m not so sure this one is like the others—”

  A him glanced at Damon and made no move to release the captive. “Mr. Eddington?”

  Damon hesitated, but only for a second. Of course the man was an addict, or a drunkard, or a criminal like the three who had gone before him. It was just earlier in his chosen “career”, that’s all—thus it wasn’t as obvious. For all they knew, the young man could be a mobster or a dealer; perhaps he was one of the thousands of loan sharks who fronted money to people down on their luck and then brutalized them with impossible payback rates that compounded daily. “Don’t be absurd, Michael,” Damon said briskly. “Here—” He pulled off his headphones and dropped them on one of the console’s shelves. “If you have a problem with putting him in, I’ll help Ahiro do it.”

  Ten seconds of pulling and careful positioning,
and Ahiro and Damon had the blond-haired man in place within the painted square on the floor. Without waiting for further argument—and working with Brangwen all this time had taught him that the older man could drag a disagreement on for days—Damon reached over and pulled the lever that lowered the three-sided glass cage after Ahiro ripped the tranquilizer shunt free. With a whine of hydraulics the compartment settled onto the floor and locked into place within its grooves. Damon rubbed his hands together, then cracked his knuckles as he stared down at the immobile form inside. “Now all we have to do is wait for him to fully wake up.”

  “I still say—”

  Damon did his best to ignore Brangwen when he tried to follow Damon back to the recording console, effectively cutting off the bioengineer’s words by slipping the headphones back on and conspicuously sliding the volume lever up; his wager that the older man hadn’t a clue about when the console was on or off was true, and now all he heard in the headphones was Mozart hissing in anticipation within his territory, responding to the whine of the hydraulics. When Brangwen gave up trying to get his attention after a few minutes, Damon switched to his syndisc recording of Hovhaness with relief. Running mini-experimental mixes of Mozart’s music and selected cuts from those of the old masters was so routine now that he could easily keep an eye on Brangwen, Vance, and Ahiro without destroying his concentration while the prisoner slept off the last dregs of the sedative.