Aliens Omnibus 4

by Yvonne Navarro

  Morez cursed as he missed his target. He was armed with a LaserFire .385 pistol, an excellent choice of weapon, but the alien’s movements were too fast, and trying to follow with the laser beam as the creature bounded erratically across the floor invariably left a smoking streak across some hapless man or woman. McGarrity’s aim with the scope on his Redsteine .440 was better but still ineffective; the bullets of laser light did little beyond make surface stings on the alien’s teeth and carapace that only served to enrage him more. Every time a bullet hit, it seemed like the creature swiped at the spot in fury, then clawed at some poor schmuck as retaliation.

  McGarrity’s swear words joined his partner’s. “Damn it! I wish we could make armor out of whatever it is that makes up his teeth. You better get the grenade popper together quick, Chief—they’re dying by the bunch!”

  “Almost… there,” Rice affirmed. He had opened the plastic backpack and was now concentrating on the contents spread on the littered floor at his feet. He pulled out a number of items and swiftly screwed them together. “Just… a few more… seconds—” A firm turn of his wrist and the final weapon was loaded.

  “Ready.”

  His men automatically moved back as Rice leaned one elbow on the balcony railing to steady his arm. With a flick of his hand, he plugged in the visual sight that ran from the launcher to his helmet. When his point of view found the alien, the carnage around the creature made him grimace. Mozart had just finished crushing the head of an unfortunate man in a suit who would be lucky to be identified later on. “Time to say good night,” Rice said under his breath as the creature flung the man aside like a broken doll. Rice’s forefinger sought the trigger, then fell comfortably into position. The sight from the eyepiece of his helmet showed the long silver barrel stretching in front of him; he moved it slightly to the right and the alien’s form filled the target. In another second he’d locked on, the visor showing him a bloodred spot centered on the alien’s chest.

  “There’s plenty more where you came from, pal.”

  Rice fired.

  There was a sound like a mini-rocket launching as the explosive-filled red and green grenade shot from the launcher. Before the smell of the acrid smoke left in its wake could sink into their sinuses, the streak of fire found its mark and plunged into the alien’s chest cavity, biting easily through the protective rib cage. A millisecond later, in time with Mozart’s blistering death scream, the grenade exploded. The sound of the blast made everyone in the concert hall, Rice and his men included, instinctively duck.

  Sometimes, Rice thought as he struggled back to his feet and leaned over the railing to stare below, the cure could be as bad as the illness. This situation was a classic example, as the concertgoers with the misfortune to be within splashing distance who weren’t hit by flying pieces of shrapnel and jagged chunks of alien carcass and carapace were showered with globules of the creature’s acid blood. Wails of agony joined the feedback still blaring from the speakers and the shrieks of those caught between panic and flight. With an abruptness that left a hollow ringing in their ears, all sound from the speakers stopped—somebody in the control room, finally pulling the master switch. From somewhere outside, carrying through the layers of the building by flung-open doors, they heard a multitude of sirens screaming toward the concert hall.

  McGarrity and Morez joined Rice at the railing, peering over to make sure the battle was finished. Bodies littered the floor amid the smoking puddles of alien blood, too many tangled limbs to count from their positions. “What do you think?” McGarrity said. “Should we help clean it up?”

  “Hell, no. We’ve done what we could, and more than the Synsound bastards deserved.” Rice stood and swung the grenade launcher over one shoulder, then bent to pick up the backpack. “They made the mess, let them straighten it out.” He looked at his men with a grim expression on his dark face. “Now it’s time to go get ol’ Blue and find out what the hell this was all about.”

  27

  Amid the chaos, no one saw Ahiro and his best two men slip into Presley Hall through one of the many back entrances and swiftly make their way down to the apiary. They’d received the alert via Morton’s silent signal, and while Ahiro didn’t know the details of what the situation was, Presley Hall’s chief of security hadn’t been ordered to carry a satellite beeper linked to Ahiro so he could call the Japanese man for trivial matters. The summons could mean only one thing: Something was endangering the apiary, and Ahiro could not allow that to happen.

  When they glided silently through the main entrance to the secret laboratory, however, what they found brought all three to a halt.

  Then Ahiro strode to where Michael Brangwen stood, staring down at the mangled remains of Damon Eddington. “What happened here?” Ahiro demanded, looking from the dead man to the alien squatting complacently within the holding area. “How did—wait! That is not the same beast!” Dismayed, he stared at the thing on the other side of the glass.

  “No,” Michael agreed, “it’s not.” There was no question about it; the creature in Mozart’s cage was bigger and older, with a darker cast to his carapace that made it more midnight-blue than Mozart’s black color. Behind the bracket of some kind of muzzle, its teeth were long and yellowed with age, and its sinewy arms were held firmly at its sides by a series of mesh sheets that connected in a sort of harness. Three long poles were connected to the harness at various points, and a thin tube made of steel and plastic fibers was embedded deep into the rear of the alien’s lower jaw; at its opposite end, the tube terminated in a small gray box with a bright red button on it. Except for his steady hissing, the alien, which had a more elongated and scarred shell covering its huge head, was strangely calm.

  Ahiro hooked a finger onto the material of Brangwen’s coat and pulled the bioengineer to face him. “Then where is Mr. Eddington’s alien?” he asked. Thoughts spun in his head: the need to find the alien, not for Eddington but for Yoriku; the mystery of how they would return the creature to its cage, since Ahiro knew only how to kill them, not capture. Most of all, a sense of burgeoning shame at his failure to keep safe one of the possessions that Yoriku treasured so highly. He had thought Eddington was through with his musical project now that the last of the five men had been sacrificed to Mozart. What insane thing had the artist tried to do that had brought about this destruction?

  “I think Mozart’s upstairs,” Michael told him. The older man’s face was pale and covered with perspiration, lined with the ravages of fear and shock. He waved his hands at the composer’s mutilated corpse. “I don’t know how it got out—Eddington must have done that, but I don’t know why. I can’t even find Darcy. But the alien was upstairs in the concert hall, Ahiro—just… slaughtering everyone in its way. It was terrible, death everywhere, people screaming and dying. I-I ran, but I didn’t know where else to go except back down here to see what happened. When I was leaving the balcony, there were three men just going in…”

  At the sound of clattering footsteps behind them, Ahiro and his men automatically whirled and raised their swords. He heard only part of Michael’s next words—“Yes, those three!”—before he dismissed the presence of the older bioengineer from his mind. Three against three, he thought clearly. But as Ahiro and his men dropped instinctively into a fighting stance and began to move forward to close the forty-foot distance between them and their targets, he also knew they would never win.

  “My life for you, Yoriku,” Ahiro whispered. “My destiny, for my friend, and my savior.”

  Sacrifice time.

  * * *

  “Hold it right there,” Rice ordered coldly. “Don’t move a muscle.” There were three of them, dressed in historical ninja garb and holding wicked-looking swords. Rice didn’t know whether to be afraid or to laugh now that he was actually seeing them… ninjas? What kind of a corporate covert security team was that? Then again, he had heard that Synsound’s CEO was a traditional kind of guy who still held to centuries-old Japanese customs. Never underest
imate, he reminded himself as he remembered the dead alien watchdogs back in the secret lab at MedTech; these guys were probably handpicked killers. Come to think of it, their swords were just the thing to succeed against one of the Homeworld creatures. Slice and dice on those arm and leg joints and a man could dance a jig around an alien, so long as he stayed out of range of that nasty double-mouthed head.

  Still, sword against firepower left a lot of room for failure.

  In spite of Rice’s warning, the three ninjas began a soft, fleet-footed advance, knees bent and swords upraised. Rice wasn’t about to let them get too close—and the combination of a trained martial arts leap and the full-armed swing of a hand bearing a sword meant they had about… oh, eighteen inches leeway.

  “I’m only going to tell you this one time. I am not fucking around,” Rice warned again. “Halt or we’ll fire.” He dropped the grenade launcher—reloaded on the way back here—into position from its strap on his shoulder but their three opponents kept coming, the two in the rear following at the heels of their hard-headed leader. Their stubborn silence was eerie; was it just in the antique movies that ninjas made those screaming noises when they attacked? As the leader took another step and tensed to leap, Rice decided not to find out.

  McGarrity and Morez had learned through the years to follow Rice’s body language, and their shots were nearly simultaneous with their chief’s. With just under twenty feet separating the two groups, the swords were no competition for the MedTech team’s heavy firepower; had the laser beam and bullets not found their marks— and they did—Rice’s grenade would have finished the Japanese trio anyway.

  A four-second burst of light and noise, and the distinctly one-sided battle was over.

  “Now there’s a waste of your life,” Morez said in disgust as he lowered his LaserFire pistol. “What the hell did they fight for? We would’ve let ’em go.”

  “Bah—who knows how those weirdos think?” McGarrity pushed the edge of one of the dropped swords to the side with the barrel of his Redsteine. “They’re living in the wrong time period, and still trying to fight the same way.”

  Rice snorted. “You see how much good it did them. Technology wins again and they bite the big one for nothing.” He flicked the power switch on the grenade launcher to OFF and didn’t bother to load it again, then his gaze swept the room. It was full of dead bodies—the three fools who had tried to attack them, the other man several feet away by the entrance to the cage that they’d put ol’ Blue into. Given the choice, Rice thought he would have preferred to die the way the ninjas had—it actually looked more merciful. The dark-haired guy on the floor resembled a rag doll that had been turned inside out.

  Standing silently a few feet away was someone Rice and his men hadn’t seen before, an older man with thick white hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. Dressed in clothes that seemed too young for him, his glassy, shocked eyes were wide above the grim line of his mouth. It was doubtful the guy had simply wandered in here, so he must know something about what was going on—who the dead men on the floor were, why this place had been constructed, and who had engineered it, who had stolen MedTech’s egg. Why, this man was the answer to a whole slew of questions that had been eating at Rice for quite some time.

  As the man finally seemed to regain the ability to focus on his surroundings, Rice met his gaze and found himself beginning to smile.

  28

  “I’m Chief Phillip Rice, MedTech Security. I think we need to have a little conversation,” the security officer said. His teeth were very white and in perfect, enviable condition as he smiled. There was nothing friendly about the expression. “And there are some minor matters that need to be cleared up, Mr—” He looked at Michael pointedly.

  In Presley Hall, the thundering of the weapons discharging as Michael had fled had been swallowed up by the crowd, simply more big noises amid the screams. There the weapons of the white-suited men had sounded like airhammers and the whine of the laser bullets ricocheting off the walls had made Michael’s teeth ache until he’d escaped the frenzy and fled back here.

  But the nightmare wasn’t over; now it faced him in the form of this brawny black man with the commanding voice who was wearing what Michael ultimately recognized as the power uniform of MedTech’s Elite Security Force.

  “Brangwen,” Michael finally managed to choke out.

  “Brangwen.” The smile was already gone, replaced by a look that would have frozen boiling water. “We can start with the identity of the person who stole the alien egg.”

  Michael wasn’t going to be senseless enough to pretend he didn’t know what the man was talking about; instead, he decided to try a different tactic. “Do you have jurisdiction here?” he asked uncertainly. “You’re from MedTech, not the metro police—”

  “Anything involving an alien—from the egg to the jelly to the creature itself—is considered a drug investigation and falls within our purview. So you can answer our questions here or… let’s just say I can make life really miserable for you. If I decide to let you live.” The flashing smile reappeared, then dropped off his face again with alarming swiftness. “I’m getting pretty fucking tired of all these games. It’s your choice, old man,” he said frostily. “What’ll it be?”

  When Michael looked at him helplessly, the man nodded and folded his arms. “I thought so. I’ll keep it simple and to the point.” Suddenly the MedTech security officer was right in his face, and Michael could hear suppressed fury in the man’s voice as his hot, heavy breath washed over the bioengineer’s face. A few feet behind their chief, the other two men looked absurdly amused.

  “Who stole the egg, damn it?”

  Michael started to point at Damon Eddington, then realized that doing so wouldn’t be entirely truthful. If he lied now, he would be as guilty as any of the dead men, and it wasn’t his fault that the egg had been stolen; he was just a Synsound employee, one more flunkie worker in the hive. When the assignment to work on this project had come to his desk, he had packed up his materials and gone, the age-old employer/employee connection automatically coming into play: You want me to jump? How high? As far as he was concerned, the egg had been “procured.”

  “He—they did,” he finally answered, his damning finger moving from the direction of Eddington’s corpse to the blasted remains of Ahiro and his ninjas. “They were the ones who brought it here, anyway.”

  Rice’s gaze flicked from Ahiro to Eddington. “And who wanted it? Him?”

  Michael nodded. “He was going to make music from its screams—a symphony. He—”

  Rice waved his hand impatiently in the air and Michael shut up. Apparently this man didn’t care about the details, and who could blame him? With nearly everyone dead, the information Michael could fill in was limited anyway. The chain of command pretty much ended here with Ahiro; above him was Keene, but Michael would bet that slippery son of a bitch would simply point right back at the dead Japanese man and say that personally he’d known nothing about it. Any paper or computer trail would be obliterated—hell, it probably already had been.

  “And what about those people? Who were they?”

  Michael jumped, then flushed deeply when he realized that Rice was standing at the window to the alien enclosure, staring past the new alien to the scattering of bones inside. There was no disguising the fact that many… well, most… of the bones that were still recognizable were human. It was strange to see a Homeworld life-form sitting so quietly, not the slightest bit interested in its surroundings; Michael hadn’t realized they could be controlled like that. “I-I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “The first man was a jelly cultist who volunteered to hatch the egg. I was told the rest were drifters and addicts, people like that. I didn’t like it, but there was nothing I could do. I’m just an employee…” Michael heard himself starting to whine and closed his mouth abruptly. There remained the question of the identity of the man who Michael clearly remembered had claimed to be a MedTech executive, but what good would reveal
ing that do now? The project had already blown up in Synsound’s corporate face and the responsible parties, most of them at least, were dead. Who was left to prosecute for being involved in this—and there was no doubt that MedTech would prosecute if it discovered that one of its own employees had literally been fed to Mozart in some secret Synsound laboratory—besides him? Darcy perhaps, but he made himself believe that she was probably at home and knew nothing about what had happened here tonight. Anyway, why should the two bioengineers, the grunts of the whole project, take the fall for the high-powered businessmen? On the other hand, if the man questioning Michael found out later that he had lied…

  “Interesting,” Rice muttered. His eyes glittered as he looked at Michael, then back to the grisly contents of the cage. The older man’s heart thudded painfully. “It could be anyone in there. Maybe we should—”

  “Maybe we should give ol’ Blue in there another dose of dope if we’re going to stick around here much longer,” one of the other MedTech men suggested. “Before he starts to come out of it.”

  Rice glanced at the alien thoughtfully, then turned away from the glass with a shake of his head. “Nah—forget it. Let’s just pack him up and head back to MedTech. Listen to me carefully, old man.” He pointed emphatically at Michael, then at the dead men at their feet. “See what fucking around with MedTech and its property got these fools?” His hand went to his helmet and he pulled down a dark blue visor that covered half his face, but Michael could still see a hint of his dangerous gaze. “You tell Synsound not to try this kind of shit again unless it wants a full-fledged war. If they do, I’ll be happy to oblige.”