Aliens Omnibus 4

by Yvonne Navarro

  Michael couldn’t help the film of tears that slid across his vision. To be rejected like this, so thoroughly and in utter disregard for the humble offering by Eddington and himself of everything, was unforgivable, the ultimate accomplishment of human cruelty. Nothing that Eddington or Darcy or himself had ever done could equal or deserve such treatment.

  So much rejection, the belittling of self-esteem that had haunted Eddington was too monumental for Michael to contemplate. Enough, though, to make him at last understand the true depth of the feelings that had lived in Eddington’s dark and thwarted soul. Dawning comprehension at last, in perfect timing with the final sound for which the original composer had searched so diligently…

  The ultimate scream, a resonance from the heart, soul, and death of Damon Eddington.

  EPILOGUE

  SPRING, 2125

  The warmth of the changing seasons and the promise of spring had done nothing to relieve the chilly interior of the building that sheltered The Church of the Queen Mother. The old wood that was haphazardly nailed across its broken windows and yawning doorways absorbed the dampness rather than the weak sunshine, drew the gray drizzle into itself and tried to squeeze it through the cracks to the molding walls on the inside. The street grates embedded in the sidewalks in front of the church rattled now and then as the surge of runoff in the sewers below swelled and ebbed with the spring rains, and in the filthy tides that moved below the metal covers the jelly junkies heard the sweet songs of their craving.

  Inside, huddled together for warmth on the floor along the walls, the addicts waited dully for the next scheduled fix, their eyes trained on the door from which the preacher always came; at one time or another every one of them had surreptitiously tested its strength, only to discover that the barrier that looked like worn wood was really painted steel. Now, halfway into the first week of May, they dressed as warmly as they could, their clothes foraged from the trash bins and charity houses, their bodies’ temperature gauges reversed by the jelly’s strange biological influence.

  With no clean place to sit, other junkies, more carefully clothed in their business suits and expensive designer dresses, milled about in the center of the well-lit room. They kept their heads down, intentionally avoiding the gazes of others like themselves for fear someone would recognize them—or worse, they would recognize someone whom they knew or cared about. Shuffling quietly, sidestepping the mutated cockroaches that darted between their shoes and grimacing as the more ill-fated people snatched at them for food, they stared vacantly into the darker shadows where the rats darted along the rotting baseboards and slipped in and out of the holes in the exposed plaster.

  All this was home to the woman who had once been Darcy Vance.

  She had been all right until the night Michael had gone through his presentation of Damon Eddington’s “Rage Symphony.” Recuperating at home with her school and medical expenses paid by Synsound and full disability as well, her life had been acceptable if not exactly fulfilled. She had thought that interest in the real world and all its normal affairs—eating and sleeping, among them—would return now that the alien portion of the Eddington project was over, but she’d been wrong. She ate enough to quell the hunger pains but that was all, and she slept only as long as her mind allowed; neither function was anything more than a necessity. With the recital’s music ringing in her mind, the rest of the world slipped out of focus, like an outdated vidscreen that no one watched anymore.

  Darcy had been up and around again a week after the recital, finally, dragging herself on errands and planning without any enthusiasm her return to work in Synsound’s android repair lab the following Monday. She was still on crutches but not as dependent on the props when a man on the street said something bizarre to her—

  “I know what you need and where to find it.”

  Such a strange, simple line… with so many possibilities.

  Shabbily dressed below a bony face and long, wispy red hair, the man reminded her uncomfortably of Ken Petrillo, the addict who had sacrificed himself so that Mozart could be created.

  Mozart…

  Having the dead alien’s screams fill her ears again at the hands of Michael Brangwen had sent longing through her, fierce, unforgettable, nearly unendurable. Mozart stalked her thoughts relentlessly, memories of his long, blue-black fingers reaching to meet hers on the other side of the glass, his loping gait around the enclosure as he attacked, the way his head had tipped sideways when she’d been thrust into the cage with him. Her job with Synsound had at its peak been intriguing, her life interesting, her hours alone at home limited only to time needed for personal hygiene and clean clothes. Compared to the hellish nothing that had come before it, the time she’d spent with Eddington, Michael, Ahiro, and Mozart had been an excellent existence, the pinnacle of her life so far.

  Following the stranger could mean literally tossing that same life carelessly into the hands of the unknown, exposing herself to the whims of a stranger, possibly to a madman. But she had done all that before and survived, and now…

  Now, again, she was left with nothing.

  “I know what you need and where to find it.”

  At first Darcy had thought he was a jelly dealer, but her heart was tied to the aliens in a way that could never be satisfied by the drug, and she had no desire to end up like Ken Petrillo or Damon Eddington. No, she wanted to be alive and aware—sharp when the right opportunities, whatever they might be, came around again. Something had steered her in this direction… but what? Fate? Chance? Or someone? Desperation made her shove her doubts to the background when the slender man had led her up to the front of the room close to the altar, then guided her into the line of addicts filing toward the preacher and the rations he so carefully gave out.

  “In nomine Matris Reginae.”

  When her turn came, she balanced on her crutches in front of him but did not hold out her hand, shook her head at the vial he proffered anyway. “That’s not what I want,” she said in a voice soft enough so that only he could hear. “I was told you could give me… something else.”

  Up so close to the preacher, she could see the shrewd glint in his clear eyes and the softness of his well-cared-for skin; nothing about him seemed truly suited to this place, this self-proclaimed church for the masses of dirty, destitute junkies. Caught in their own hellish desire, the others in line would never notice the details, the fine capped teeth behind his smile, the hair painstakingly cut to look perpetually tousled.

  “Yes,” he said. His voice was a smooth, rich baritone, cultured and mesmerizing, trained for things of which his motley parish members would never envision or resist. “I believe I can do exactly that.” He indicated the carefully camouflaged door with a tilt of his head. “If you will wait for me there, I will talk with you immediately after the service.” In that soothing, singsong voice, the preacher’s gaze went to the person behind her and the ceremony continued as if they had never spoken.

  “In nomine Matris Reginae.”

  And give her something he did, and thus began the death of Darcy Vance—

  —and the birth of Jariah, the first female preacher in the Manhattan branch of The Church of the Queen Mother.

  Behind the locked steel doors Darcy née Jariah found fulfillment. She neither knew nor cared who her benefactor was, only that he or it or they somehow, in ways that were never quite clear and became increasingly nebulous as the weeks went by, fulfilled the longing in her for the sounds of alien screams. She found hope and a future, even if she had no clear vision of what that future held or what it was she truly hoped for. Training as a church disciple, she let everything in her old life go, right then, simply… left it and never returned. The junkies who surrounded her accepted her constant presence and learned to trust her, calling her by the new name or, more reverently, The Limping Woman. She often heard them whispering among themselves about the ragged patch of scar tissue that ringed her ankle below a dark, circular tattoo that looked oddly like teeth, invent
ing far-fetched tales that were closer to the truth than any of them dreamed.

  At night in her simple room, her duties for each day completed and her heart serene, MedTech’s newest trainee burned incense to the image of the queen mother and dreamed dark and impossibly musical dreams about a long-dead creature called Mozart.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Howard Morhaim for finding another project for me to see to completion, and to Anne Groell for helping me to get it there.

  My gratitude to Chet Williamson for a great story, and to Jeff Osier for a lesson in the fine art of appreciating dark music and sending examples to go with it.

  Paula Guran, Stephen Spruill, Beth Massie, Don Kinney, Alexa deMonterice, and John Platt: In your own way, each of you has held my hand and helped me dance a little through life in this fall of 1995. Words do not exist that are big enough to express my love and gratitude, and that would make you understand how special each of you is.

  As time passes and I move into my second year in cyberspace, I learn more and more that the “GEnie gang” is a wellspring of ongoing friendship, support, and humor. You guys are all different, and all great.

  Special appreciation and love, always, to Don Vander-Sluis.

  BOOK II

  BERSERKER

  S. D. PERRY

  For Mÿk, on his birthday

  “The machine unmakes the man. Now that the machine is so perfect, the engineer is nobody.”

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  PROLOGUE

  He was dreaming about his long-dead mother when the call came through.

  In the dream he was in his childhood kitchen, watching as his young, dark-haired mother made pancakes, still years away from the cancer that would kill her. For some reason she kept reciting elemental abbreviations and the pancakes turned into scrambled eggs, but it all seemed perfectly natural; the young boy-self felt safe and secure. She’d turned to him, smiling, and suddenly she was shrieking, a bizarre and somehow mechanical sound that filled him with a sense of impending doom. She crumpled, still shrieking intermittently, and began to melt into the faded linoleum.

  “Mother?” he whispered, and in the rasp of his own voice, he was awake. A glowing red light on his night-stand blinked rapidly, accompanied by the shrill alarm that he had mistaken for his mother’s voice. He sat up quickly, widening his eyes to clear away the dregs of sleep as he reached for the light panel above his bed. His bleary mind fumbled over the facts so far. Dreaming. Mother. Red light, emergency.

  A soft glow washed across his room as he reached for the ’com, still trying to focus himself. “This is Sturges,” he said, and hoped that it wasn’t too serious. The red had gone on only twice since he’d made supervisor, and both had been no-injury system crashes—

  A fuzzy burst of static and his heart started to pound; it was bad. The distant screams were clearly audible, even through the choking static of the ancient ’com and the cracking, semi-hysterical shout of the caller.

  “…repeat, we have a situation here, get him on the line! Code Red, priority situation! Get Sturges—”

  “This is Sturges,” he said again, loudly. “Mac, that you?” Wade McCollough was the head tech at the home base, shafts One through Seven. Sturges had never heard him sound so frightened.

  “Colin? Oh, Jesus, thank you, Colin? I’m—we’re in One, basement, we were bringing in the excavators and there were these, these, Jesus, Colin, the deep hoist isn’t working—” He faltered, gasping.

  “Mac, what is it? What’s happening?” Sturges was wide awake now, and badly scared.

  A muffled thump through the ’com, the screams of men and women not so distant anymore, and the Chief Supervisor of Operations for Deep 4 found himself standing, fists clenched. Cave-in, and a big one. It had to be a base beam. Damnit, inspections were two days ago! That slacker Lewis, he’d have her ass for not rechecking the stats—

  A new voice shouted through the ’com, a woman’s, and Sturges felt an ice fist clench in his stomach at the wild terror of her screams. The strength ran out of his legs like water, and he sat down heavily on the edge of his bed.

  “Help us, it’s those things, oh, Buddha, they JUST ATE HER! THEY ATE HER, HELP US THEY ATE HER FACE—”

  The ’com went blank and silent.

  Colin Sturges ran a shaking hand over the switches, and when he spoke to a sleepy communications tech, his own voice sounded hollow and gray.

  “Alert the station, Code Red, there’s a problem in One. Wake up Matheson and Gates on three-way; tell Gates to get his guys to the adit but not to go in yet, not until I get there. And put a call through to the Company now, priority A-one. Tell them that we’ve got a situation here.” He swallowed dryly, wishing that he were still sleeping, having breakfast with his mother far away and long ago. Or for that matter, anywhere but here.

  “Tell them it’s XT, and we need help.” He closed his eyes, remembering the Company briefings. It wasn’t supposed to happen here, but it had; one of the excavators…

  Sturges swallowed again. “Tell them we’ve got bugs,” he said, and then ’commed off and started to get dressed, hoping that it wasn’t already too late.

  1

  They’d already been out of dock for a few weeks when they got the call—a mining outpost, three days away. Thirty-one technicians trapped in the infested area, completely out of contact for over eighty hours. Deep 4 was populated by a few hundred machine techs and some low-level management, a Company outpost like a hundred others; this one melted dirt to get to silurium, whatever the hell that was.

  Martin Jess didn’t particularly give a shit, truth be known. He and his boys weren’t called in to give a rat’s ass about minerals… or miners, for that matter. What mattered was that they were now twenty minutes out, probably no more than an hour till party time. Which meant that it was time to suit up.

  Jess took a final swig of coffee and tossed the cup into the recycler on his way out of mess, gritting his teeth slightly as he walked beneath the cheaply framed doorway. Although he couldn’t hear it, he knew that a soft mechanical beep went off in ops as he passed beneath the frame, recording codes from his surgical implant. He sighed inwardly as he headed down the dim and sweaty B corridor, toward lockers; it still bothered him, even after all this time. One of the many annoying consequences of a felony conviction, he supposed. Even the Corps wouldn’t take chances on their leased “volunteer” ships. If any of their little birdies wanted to fly away, (or, say, slit the captain’s throat during a psychotic episode), these ships were set up to know all the gory details. Expensive in terms of equipment, but not as bad as trying to hire civilians for this sort of work…

  The open ’com interrupted his wanderings. “Jess, this is Pop. Tell the boys that we’re looking at fifteen minutes till break; I wouldn’t want Pulaski to choke to death on his sugar rush or anything.”

  Jess spoke as he walked, grinning. “It’s gonna take more than a candy bar to kill the Man.”

  Commander “Pop” Izzard chuckled gruffly, sounding muffled through the ship’s aging communications system. “I hear that. Keep an ear up for the count; I’ll leave shipwide on.”

  Standard procedure. Jess didn’t bother answering as he hung a left toward the unloading ramp, down a much shorter hallway—but as poorly lit and ventilated as the last. Even with Max aboard, H/K teams didn’t warrant the best of ships—although the Nemesis wasn’t the worst he’d experienced. Not a luxury liner, but one of his first stints had been on a real shithole, a poured-plastic job, the Exeter (this was before some genius got the idea to capitalize on “team spirit” by naming the newer breed of H/K “cruisers” shit like Enmity and Wrath). Hell, compared to the Exeter, the Nemesis was a wet dream; at least there was room to stretch here without putting your fist in somebody’s face.

  He stopped in front of the suit-up area, took a deep breath. When this one was finished, they’d be headed for a full week of R and R, their first real break in months. Most stops were overnighters,
supply pickups or transfers; they could all use the rest.

  In spite of himself, he could already feel the adrenaline starting to tingle through his veins, singing to the glories of the hunt; apparently, his body wasn’t hip to how crazy-stupid all of this was. Not that it ever had been; a couple of years ago, he couldn’t wait for the feel of a hot pulse rifle in his hands, set against the hissing shrieks of the enemy. A few years before that, smuggling and gangbanging were his drugs of choice, anything that spelled trouble and a chance to fuck with death; oh, yeah, he’d been a hardass once. Now? Now he watched the time, marking out the months he had left until parole. The skin over his implant was itching lately, and he wanted it gone. Eight more after this and time served.

  Starting now, numbnuts; you have a crew to lead and they’re both looking to you to help keep them alive. You gonna do that, or are you gonna stand here trippin’ all day in the fucking hall?

  “Hail Mary,” he mumbled, and tapped the entry keypad.

  * * *

  Second Lieutenant Katherine Lara ran her hands across the keys and sent the first in a series of hailers to Traon, Deep 4 specifically. She barely had to think about it anymore, practically muscle memory: Weyland/Yutani cruiser Nemesis H/K Berserker team inbound, ETA blah blah blah… frequencies and code and stats, data entry at its most basic. She was suffused with a bizarre combination of emotional tension and physical lethargy; her shoulders ached. This wasn’t what she’d had in mind throughout her long, often psychotically paced training—the joy of punching code and running communications for a corporate lease ship. The cause was valid, sure, but lately she was hard-pressed to rationalize the methods. Teape, for example…