Damon pressed himself against the glass, holding the object against the barrier where it could easily be seen, but Vance was intent on her strategy, a series of short, carefully aimed bursts of electricity that were slowly driving Mozart to the right and away from the entrance of the tunnel closest to her. A fine plan, and if only the woman would look at him and see the object in his hand, she could not help but realize that it was only a useless fantasy.
“Time to die, Darcy,” Damon said aloud. He looked at the object in his hands and tried to focus on it, knowing the wrong choice at this point could destroy everything he’d worked for, bring the project to an untimely and forever incomplete ending.
A small metal box, four modest square buttons below different colored lights, ON, OFF, POWER INCREASE %, POWER DECREASE %. Right now the green light above the ON button was glowing steadily and a small red LED display told him that the “power” was set at fifteen percent. Before his forefinger moved to the off button, Damon touched the raised yellow letters across the top of the small box solemnly and raised his gaze to the woman and the creature battling earnestly six yards away.
ELECTROSTUN REMOTE
22
In the recesses of her mind, Darcy still had hope that she would survive this ordeal.
She was not a drug addict or an alcoholic—she didn’t even drink coffee. Nothing she had ingested would chemically cloud her mind or reflexes, the lump on the back of her head notwithstanding. Added to that was the fact that the alien had given her the ghost of an advantage by not immediately attacking, and she had a strategy that seemed to be working.
She was only three feet from the mouth of the tunnel when the Electrostun rifle ran out of power.
Scratch that—it didn’t slow down as it would do in the course of normally losing its charge; it simply quit. Darcy wasn’t stupid and she didn’t need more than a millisecond to know that Eddington had shut if off via remote control. He didn’t want her to survive any more than he’d wanted any of Mozart’s other victims to ultimately escape. She, they, were all fodder—meals for the alien, musical fuel for Eddington’s madness. With the others he had wanted the game played out for as long as possible and had been furious with Ahiro the one time the ninja had dared to tilt the odds in favor of the alien. Darcy, however, was the one test subject whose death Damon Eddington coveted as surely as he sought that special alien scream for his grand finale.
At nearly the same instant as the rifle died, a monstrous whine of feedback squealed through the speakers above Mozart’s enclosure, clawing its way along every nerve ending in Darcy’s body and making her teeth involuntarily clench. Mozart felt it, too, and he roared and tossed his massive head in protest, arching his back until he looked like he might bend completely backward. Darcy didn’t wait for him to recover; she grabbed the opportunity to scuttle sideways another meter along the wall and damned near got inside the circular entrance to the passageway before the alien swung his dripping mouth back in her direction and double-snapped at her. She twisted out of range—barely—and realized that the time of playing was over: the creature was going to attack. Now that she was defenseless, it would be his final assault. But she would not just stand here and meet death placidly. She would fight to the end, damn it, and instead of waiting or readying herself for the deadly slash of his claws, Darcy took the offensive and charged him, her puny voice boiling out of her lungs in a high, desperate shriek as she flung the useless Electrostun rifle at the alien’s eyeless head.
It struck him squarely in the forehead, and, incredibly, Mozart stumbled backward.
Like Pavlov’s dog, the life-form had come to associate the Electrostun rifle with raw, electrifying pain, and he had no clue that it would not cause that same agony without the aid of a human hand. Darcy still didn’t know how he identified the things in his world—by smell or something else—but she wasn’t going to wait for another invitation to make her move. At the same time as the alien recoiled from the weapon, she made a crazed dash for the entry into the closest tunnel; a moment later, Mozart scrambled after her.
Darcy realized immediately that she was at a distinct disadvantage inside the tunnel.
She and Michael had not planned for this, had not factored in the possibility that amid his wanderings in and out of the dual-entranced passageway Mozart would line it so thoroughly with the sticky, moisture-laden resin that was found in such abundance in the nests the creatures had constructed on Homeworld. Who would have thought that Mozart, existing alone, would manage to attach his secretions to the Teflon-coated walls of the passageways, or would successfully twine the entire length of the circular corridor with yard after yard of the gummy brown substance?
Darcy clawed her way frantically along the knobby surface, her hands and clothes tangled in ropy, wet strands of sticky resin. The absurd thought that she was a fly fighting its way along the surface of flypaper was bouncing madly around in her thoughts and Mozart was close behind her and gaining when she rammed facefirst into something hanging from the ceiling. She screamed and instinct tried to make her recoil, but she fought the urge and won, instead wrapped her arms around the cocooned and putrefying corpse of the blond-haired MedTech executive and pulled it free of its gluey hold on the wall. Darcy caught a glimpse of the other Electrostun rifle that was entwined with him but had no time to extract it; she barely managed to duck past as the bloated cadaver spilled onto the rounded floor in a heavy lump, gaining her a precious few seconds to reach the smaller side tunnel the dead man had tried so hard to find but never achieved. Lit from within by a muted purplish glow, it was a tunnel large enough for a human, but far too small for the oversize alien.
She almost made it unscathed.
Half a foot, six measly inches. Darcy would have thanked God, again, for getting her to safety and making Mozart’s claws have only a tenuous hold on her ankle as she slid headlong down the angled, smaller escape shaft—had the alien not slashed the vulnerable skin of her ankle to the bone before she was out of reach.
Wailing with pain, Darcy pulled herself deeper into the tunnel, far beyond the stretch of Mozart’s searching arm and fingers. Out of the creature’s physical range at last, Darcy could still look back and see him, her treasured alien prodigy and deadly experiment, as he raged impotently at the mouth of the tunnel, vainly clawing at the titanium-ringed opening. Her foot felt wet—I’m bleeding, a lot—but warm and faraway, and as each second dragged past it hurt less as a slow and comforting numbness spread upward from the wound. A bend in the tunnel and she was out of Mozart’s sight as well, her fingers fumbling with a recessed catch that Eddington didn’t know existed. Ahiro had known but paid little attention to her and Michael— they’d thought—when they had insisted on the last-minute inclusion of this small escape panel in the renovation plans, their faith in the gas that was used to sedate Mozart being less than complete. She heard the manual lock release and pushed weakly with her finger-tips—they had purposely constructed the panel so that it could only be opened manually by a human hand—and it finally slid aside.
She barely had the strength to haul herself over the opening and hardly felt the hard landing when she dropped stiffly through and into the small area below floor level. She knew she should slide the overhead door closed but she was so tired; a dim but more reasonable portion of her thoughts told her frantically that it was because she was bleeding badly and she needed a tourniquet, but really, the alcove was so small and she had no first aid supplies… she could hardly just reach down and fix it, now could she?
Darcy could see the alarm button on the underside of the floor next to the opening. She would be able to reach it easily… but later, after Eddington had given her up for dead and left the apiary. Someone would come then, Synsound workers whose job it was to remove Mozart to whatever facility for disposal or further experiment that they no doubt already had planned, and then she would press the button that in turn would trigger an alarm light on nearly very console in the apiary. Then she would be rescued,
and they would fix her ankle, and she could take a hot shower to wash away the smell of blood and the stench of Mozart’s dead victims.
In the meantime, she would close her eyes and rest awhile.
23
“Any second now.” Damon was so excited he was wheezing and dripping with sweat. “Any moment. It’ll be beautiful, so new and different—”
He could no longer see Mozart or Vance; both had disappeared into the escape tunnel and Damon couldn’t help feeling rather proud of her, in a twisted, fatherly sort of way. Besides being the sole woman to face Mozart and a bioscientist with no survival training at all, she had the distinction of being only the second human who’d made it to the tunnels—quite a feat, considering not all of her predecessors were junkies or drunks. When he’d cut the power to her Electrostun rifle, Damon had been convinced the combat would be over immediately. But still she had succeeded, surprising Damon as much as she had startled Mozart by throwing the weapon at the creature and striking it on the head.
But Damon’s concern had nothing to do with the visual aspects of this ultimate of Mozart’s kills; he didn’t need to see Darcy Vance die or watch the alien itself perform the deed. Damon lived for the sound, for the music, and now he quickly returned to the mixer console and jammed the volume slides to the maximum to ensure that the slightest, most elusive thing would not escape the microphones so carefully inset within the ceilings of the tunnels. Every bass, midrange and tweeter, all the amplifiers, everything went to the limit as Damon held his breath and waited for Mozart to give his most magnificent scream ever—
There was a humming, then a distant, metallic thud as the sound system circuit breakers overloaded and tripped. Wired on their own circuits, the medical consoles around the lab kept glowing cheerfully. Only Damon’s recording console was thrown into powerless darkness.
A two-second span of utter silence, then—
“No!” Damon bellowed. “Damn you to hell and back, not now!” He rammed a fist against the console, but of course it did no good; the machine sat there, its power cut, its magical abilities destroyed. Damon spun indecisively, fingers opening and closing so fast they began to cramp. The circuit box—where was it? Where? Brangwen had tried to tell him once, and he had waved the older man away impatiently, not wanting to be bothered with such trivial details; now Damon wanted to punch himself for his stupidity. The apiary itself was huge, with miles of metal-coated electrical wires and junction boxes that led to more junction boxes—he’d never identify the proper one on his own. And he couldn’t very well call the maintenance department and ask now, could he, with Darcy inside Mozart’s enclosure and the object of the alien’s less than desirable attentions at any second? What would he say? “By the way, could you get down here quickly before the alien kills her so I can get the sound on tape?” The creature’s pen was silent now, but undoubtedly Darcy’s screams would soon fill its tunnels.
There—on the table next to the plastic dishes and trash still left from their meal, was Brangwen’s portable syndisc player/recorder. He’d left it behind, knowing the Presley Hall entrance scanners would pick it up and confiscate it. A crude tool and outdated, too, barely fit to use… but unfortunately all that was available. Damon was desperate enough to resort to primitive methods, and there might be enough time to actually pull it off—
Damon raced to the table and snatched up the recorder, checked quickly to make sure the device worked and that there was a disc in place that could be recorded onto. The handheld microphone that Damon used to make vocal notes on his demo discs was dangling off the recording console and he jerked it free and plugged it into the portable recorder, sped to the feeder cage and—
Stopped cold.
The music was there, waiting for him as it had always been; but Damon abruptly realized that the only way to get Brangwen’s syndisc recorder inside Mozart’s cage to capture those elusive sounds was to…
Open it.
He stood outside the glass feeder cage as precious seconds ticked past, staring through the unbreakable panels at the yawning entry to Mozart’s realm. It would be so easy to do: just raise the feeder cage, walk to the open door and step inside, hold the recorder and the microphone out, and step back out when it was over, lower the feeder cage, and lock it up.
“So easy,” Damon repeated hoarsely, not realizing he was speaking out loud. “I’ll just step in and hold out the microphone so it catches the music. He’ll be… busy with Darcy in the tunnels, and I’ll… I’ll hear him screaming, hear him singing. He’ll never even see me, never know I’m there.”
Teetering on the edge of decision, swaying back and forth like the alien occasionally did inside his cage, first one way, then the other. It was dangerous, too dangerous, but… this was him, after all; Damon Eddington. He wasn’t like the others, the junkies and drunkards, or even the ignorant MedTech man that Ahiro had brought in for a reason known only to the Japanese man and those to whom he reported. Even Vance was different—she was there for him to use in his project in whatever way was necessary for him to deliver the results he had promised Synsound… hence the reason she was in there at Mozart’s mercy, and Damon was out here, on the controlling end. In this room, in his situation, Damon Eddington was the controller, the one in charge. The god.
Taking a deep breath, Damon carefully pressed the button to raise the glass feeder cage, knowing the well-lubricated hydraulics would raise the cage smoothly and quietly, without the screech of metal that always accompanied the sliding-back of the metal door that led directly into the alien’s enclosure and separated it from the glass feeder cage. There was a low, nearly soundless hum and Damon stared fearfully through the exposed entryway. Everything was quiet—there was no scrabble of chitinous nails against the slippery, curving tunnel walls that signaled Mozart’s advance, no telltale escalating hiss that marked the beast’s breathing. Damon let his air out in relief, still mindful of the sound his exhalation would make. A few cautious steps forward and he was bathed in the smell of Mozart’s corrupted meals, flesh turned putrid by the pseudo-tropical climate in which aliens were most comfortable. Best not to stay, Damon decided. I’ll just tuck the recorder into the corner where the wall and steel door meet, roll the microphone and its wire just past the threshold and into the alien’s cage. When the music was finished and Damon closed the door, the metal would sever the wires and then he could safely retrieve the recorder and its precious contents.
Damon was still bending down when Mozart catapulted from the entrance to the tunnel, his mouths snapping in fury, his only sound a hissing more filled with rage than any the alien had ever voiced.
“No!” Damon’s voice was hardly more than a drawn-out rasp of denial. He turned to run and his feet slipped, then slipped again, dragging against his weight as though they were glued to the floor and stuck within that gaudy rectangle of red warning tape by a gooey dose of royal jelly. “Not me—NO!”
He made it out of Mozart’s enclosure and rammed the side of his hand against the button that would lower the feeder cage, then stopped its descent by panicking and slapping at it again, inadvertently toggling it off. The third time got it going and he tried frantically to hasten the descent of the glass enclosure into the locking grooves on the floor, hanging off the side as he used his weight in an idiot attempt to increase the drop speed. It was nearly down when Mozart’s terrifying, tooth-filled head filled Damon’s vision. Damon instinctively released his grip on the top edge of the feeder box and sprang backward, shouting in terror as Mozart’s dark, double-shelled fingers found enough room to slip under the edge of the glass cage before it could settle into the grooves in the floor and lock in place.
The cage, built on an open-close cycle for safety purposes, obligingly switched directions when the creature tried to heft it upward.
“Wait!” Damon screamed. “Not me, not ME! I’m the musician—”
He hardly felt it as the alien bounded from beneath the still rising glass box and lifted him until Damon’s chest w
as even with his huge, dripping mouth. Hissing swelled in his ears, his brain, his heart, blotting out everything but the thunderous beat of his heart. “No.”
Pain then, white hot and enough to make him scream beyond what he could have ever believed he was capable of, slamming through a rib cage that was nothing more than a fragile lace spiderweb against the teeth that split him from breastbone to gut and twice as deep. Writhing in agony in the grasp of the genius child-beast he had nurtured and hated and loved—
—Damon’s last, desperate hope was that the antiquated syndisc recorder still functioned, that its cheap, portable microphone somehow managed to chronicle his final, beautiful death cry.
24
It took damned near half an hour for ol’ Blue to sniff his way through a maze of dimly lit staircases and sublevels, but Rice refused to believe his watchdog was taking them on a useless chase. Something had the alien’s attention, and it wasn’t the normal influx of alien pheromones that generally mixed in the air of a place like this. As long as they were far enough away, those scents, diluted, impossibly scrambled, usually succeeded only in making an alien confused and vaguely hyper, unlike the concentrated assault that ol’ Blue had launched against the jelly dealer and his customer the last time Rice had taken him on the street. Now that he was inside the Presley Hall Building, ol’ Blue was clearly onto a specific scent, and the only indication that the smell was an old one was his tendency to change direction almost ponderously.
Finally, they stood in front of a closed door painted in garish orange and guarded by a keypad that required a security code. Nothing else about the door indicated that it was anything special; the floor-level announcement they had seen on their last elevator ride had said LEVEL 1A in innocuous letters. Rice could see the surprise in his team members’ eyes; the men had climbed up and down so many staircases, sidetracked on more than a few elevators, then twisted through so many halls that they had all been convinced they were considerably farther below ground. Now, however, it looked like they were no farther down than a regular basement, but damned if it wasn’t a hard place to find. Ol’ Blue was getting downright jittery and Rice felt the palms of his hands beginning to dampen around his unyielding grip on the guidepoles; finally, after all this time, he and his team were going to get their hands on the elusive egg thief. Frankly, he wasn’t surprised to find it was one of these Synsound slugs… he’d suspected Synsound all along, although he still couldn’t fathom what the music company would want with an alien or an unhatched egg.
Aliens Omnibus 4 Page 21