Aliens Omnibus 4

by Yvonne Navarro

  “Pop, Lara, you catch that? Over.” Jess’s voice, offscreen. Apparently he was in charge of reporting to ops.

  Ellis felt a flush of excitement as the strange material slid up and off his screen, the lift dropping past. That was the alien secretion, the foamy webs they used to build nests and hold their victims; he’d heard about it but never seen any. As far as he knew, no Company scientist had even figured out what it was made from; saliva and some unknown internal substance produced by the drones.

  Pop sounded unusually tight. “Copy, team leader. Get the motion sensor on the door, over.”

  The lift suddenly jerked, a heavy metallic clank as it hit bottom. They were at the midway, the connecting shaft. Teape held up a tracker as the steel mesh went up, the three men stiff and poised, rifles still. Dull red light filtered in from somewhere, the emergency backups. The glow made the scene surreal and strange, blurring the edges of the void ahead.

  “Pickin’ up something on the meter—” Teape’s tense whisper seemed impossibly loud in the still lift. “It’s small, looks like six meters away, barely moving—”

  He stepped out of the hoist, tracker raised. Pulaski and Jess were just behind him to either side, weapons slowly panning back, and forth. The rifle lamps gave the impression of a huge open space, a corridor that led off into nothing. Ellis could see what looked like another lift directly in front of them and pieces of equipment scattered around haphazardly.

  “Got it! Five meters, that way…” Teape looked to his right and then stepped out of view.

  Ellis clenched his fists, searching the screen for some movement, wanting to help. Max was still inside the lift, unable to see.

  Silence, only a faint beeping from Teape’s tracker. And Ellis heard it at the same time they did, a tick of rapid claws against metal.

  “Face-hugger!” Teape screamed.

  “I got it—!” Pulaski?

  A flashing muffled light, the thrumming pulse of an M41— and a squealing shriek, inhuman, cut short by the blast.

  A minute passed, then two. Ellis heard slow footsteps but saw only the red tunnel, the mute machinery. When Jess and the others stepped back into view, Ellis let out his breath, relieved.

  “The Man took out a baby on the overhang, but nothin’ else moving, area secure. It must’ve crawled up on its own, over.” Jess sounded as calm as ever, almost relaxed. Ellis shook his head in amazement.

  “We got a face-hugger up here, we’re probably dealing with a full-blown hive,” said Pop. “Jess, locate the break on the deep hoist cable and override. Teape can set up the fail-safe, and, Candyman, take the tracker. Let’s do it careful and let’s do it double-time, people!”

  Jess was directly in front of the Max as Pop spoke, so Ellis’s screen was the only one that picked up the team leader’s expression. Ellis smiled as Jess silently mouthed the words “fuck you, Pop,” and rolled his eyes; maybe their commander wasn’t so popular after all.

  His smile faded as the men went to their tasks, washed in the crimson light of a dead mining operation. That shrill and furious cry of the alien larva still echoed in his mind. And deep in the ground beneath their feet, there would be dozens more, and the queen that gave them life.

  * * *

  Jess found the faulty cable in record time, less than two minutes, and reconnected around it in another two. The subsequent test of the deep hoist went smoothly, and positioning the fail-safe simply meant locking the heavy disk to the wall.

  They were ready in just under five minutes. Teape felt sick.

  Jess shouldered his rifle and Pulaski handed over the tracker; Teape held it loosely in one unsteady hand, glad for the poor lighting.

  “We’re set up, Pop, over,” said Jess.

  Pop sounded pleased. “Good, all right! Arming failsafe…”

  Teape heard the click and hum of the nuclear device as the timer switched on.

  “You now have eight hours before your butts turn to taco sauce, boys. Get to it. Over and out.”

  They stood in silence for a moment; Teape could tell that the others were looking at him, watching him, but didn’t care. He stared at the Max and thought about prison.

  He’d knocked twelve years off his sentence in just over one year as a volunteer; eight more runs and he was free, home to wherever he wanted it to be. Maybe near his sister and her kids, maybe a decent job and a woman who liked the gaunt and witty type. Of course, he’d blown all chance of a legal credit rating, but he could have a life.

  The nightmares, though. The Voice. What he was about to go through was already etched deeply enough in his mind to cause consistently horrible dreams and thoughts, and they were becoming a part of his soul, for lack of a better term. Things were getting worse.

  There was quitting. Walking out of it now, back to prison—

  —sure, only eight years left. Trapped, in a cage, being beaten and harassed by violent men. Eight more missions including this one, eight months, you walk out.

  There wasn’t really a choice. Eight more years locked up would drive him insane in a different way, and Jess and Pulaski were waiting. Pop wouldn’t turn off the fail-safe until they were completed and clear; knowing that there was a nuclear explosion riding on one’s actions was a big incentive to get started.

  Teape sighed. Max looked as deadly as ever, and Ellis had said all systems go; it would have to be enough. He walked to the repaired deep hoist.

  “Bugs are gonna get you, Teepee!” Pulaski called.

  The Candyman’s own special rendition of “break a leg,” probably; swell.

  “That’s the general idea,” he returned and nodded to Jess, who pulled down the gate and stood at the controls.

  Jess hesitated. “Stay alive, man.”

  Teape smiled; nice of him to say, anyway. He hooked the tracker to his upper arm and activated it. Locked and loaded, relays stocked, first single offshoot opening to the gate. There was nothing left to do.

  Jess pushed the button.

  6

  They all watched the deep hoist go down on Lara’s map, a blinking red light on her screen that stopped at one of the shaft’s offshoots. Seconds passed. She didn’t envy Teape his job at the moment, alone and in the dark, watching a tracker for alien attack. His screen showed a trembling motion sensor surrounded by murky redness.

  “I’m at the spur,” Teape finally said. His voice was high and shaky, a match to his pulse reading. “I can’t see all the way to the end, but I got nothing moving.”

  Pop didn’t hesitate. “Leave it for the team. Move on down, Teape.”

  “You’re sending him in alone?” asked Sturges.

  “Obviously you haven’t heard much about Berserker units,” said Pop. “We can’t maximize Max’s effectiveness if we don’t know what we’re up against. Teape is the Nemesis’s point man, it’s his job to find out.”

  Jess and Pulaski had Max set up by the deep hoist shaft; Lara heard the lift hit bottom from Teape’s pickup and then the echo through the shaft from the others’—a hollow metal thunder that rolled up and out into the connecting tunnel.

  “I got something here—!” Behind Teape’s quaver was the steady beep of the tracker.

  Lara checked the plans and punched in coordinates. “It’s holding still, looks like two point five at—”

  Sturges gasped. Lara snapped her head up to see gaping alien jaws plunge through mesh and straight at Teape, straight at them on the monitor. The dark creature was slowed by the steel gate; Teape’s rifle whipped up and fired in a burst of explosive light.

  The black, sloping dome of the XT drone skull ripped away, brain torn to shreds by the flat, rapid patter of armor-piercing rounds. Teape kept to short, solid bursts, and the long, lithe metal of the alien flesh burst backward in jagged pieces. Blood hissed against steel and the impossibly tall body dropped away, all in a matter of seconds.

  Sudden silence over the ’com as they all waited for Teape to report. They could hear him breathe in, slow and ragged.

  A
shaky laugh. “That’s one we don’t have to worry about. Maybe that was the whole problem, a lone renegade, what do you think? We could just take off? Over.”

  Teape was cooler inside than he sounded, he had to be. He quickly pulled his mask up and then laid his weapon on the floor of the hoist. He turned and stepped out of the cage, still inhaling and then exhaling deeply, part of his training. A few paces away into the dark, he extinguished his shoulder lamp and knelt on the ground. Lara could only make out a dark blur of strange symmetry, alien in nature. The emergency lights were shrouded behind walls of ropy secretion.

  “Calling flare, over.”

  “Copy that, Teape, we hear you.” Lara hoped that he’d remember that and take what comfort he could.

  The black tunnel stretched out ahead of him. Teape raised a single flare tube, the movement blurred in the red shadows.

  “Flare!”

  The gently arcing sphere of long-burning chemicals lit a green-gray path down the shaft’s corridor. The clear and sudden picture was merciless in detail. Walls so thickly strewn with matte secretions that the tunnel seemed organic, the fluid alien architecture like black curving bones and sinews. Support beams dripped with the viscous stuff. Lara caught a dark flash of movement, two—shapes that rushed and capered from the shadows.

  “We’ve hit the mother lode,” whispered Teape, and collapsed facedown on the floor as the aliens closed in.

  * * *

  Ellis watched from Max as Pulaski and Jess waited tensely for the hoist to come back up. The drones usually ran to the live bait, but there was a chance that one could be “assigned” to follow noninhabitant movement or some such criteria; he’d read that each nest varied in types of worker, just like ants.

  Teape had fallen silent after his final whisper. Watching from Max’s point of view, Ellis felt almost as though he were there, experiencing the tensions of the team as they waited for word. His earlier high-strung state had eased to a pleasant anticipation. He had graduated at the top of his class in synthetics and with high-percentile comprehension of the Company program; he wasn’t going to be any readier.

  The hoist pulled to a slow stop in front of the ground team. As the shredded mesh gate slid upward, Ellis tensed, but it was clear.

  Pulaski turned and looked at Max/Ellis with a scowl. He spoke in a hushed tone as he stared at its still face, just above the camera. “Whaddaya think he’s thinkin’?”

  “He ain’t thinkin’ zip. Probably the best thing for him.” Jess looked into the camera lens and spoke directly to Ellis.

  “Are the readings level on Max? Over.”

  “Affirmative, ground leader. Ready to fire, over.” He wondered if he should say something else, some words of encouragement. Nothing helpful came to mind.

  Lara spoke into his ear just as Sturges’s low voice came over the shipwide from ops. Ellis focused on Lara. “Contact made, stand by, over.”

  Sturges. “—he’s just letting them capture him?”

  Pop was also intership; he must have switched his mike off. Good thing, considering the topic; Teape certainly didn’t need to hear it.

  “The aliens’ prime motivation is to reproduce. To them, the human body is more valuable as a live incubator than dead meat. Provided he remains totally docile, they’ll carry him to the egg chamber—right to the queen herself. Any threatening moves, he’s ripped apart.”

  Ellis frowned. A concise speech, but not a very sympathetic one. Teape’s haggard breathing rasped over his headset, joined now by a soft hissing that Ellis could only just make out.

  The point man’s tortured whisper was transmitted clearly through the relays. “Takin’ me through an entrance, lights are lower… three drones on me, I’m on my side… can see hatched eggs, maybe a dozen…”

  Lara cut in. “Ellis, cut sedation back on Max; Teape’s in the chamber.”

  Ellis punched in numbers and Max’s tranquilizer count dropped. The man inside the machine wouldn’t wake up until dosed, but immediately REM took up as the heavy sedatives wore thin; the volunteer was dreaming.

  “Picture’s coining through nice and sharp, Teape, stay cool,” said Pop.

  “Oh, God. Mac, that’s Mac—” Sturges sounded pitifully forlorn. Ellis wondered who Mac was and how many others he was seeing, some surely still alive and suffering, impregnated by alien larvae.

  No sympathy from Pop. “Time to move, ground leader, we got visual confirmation on queen. Drop off at the first spur and decontaminate; send Max on down, over.”

  Jess and Pulaski moved quickly. Max was loaded and they were in the lift in fifteen seconds, weapons up. Ellis scanned the Max’s reads and took a deep breath as the hoist descended into the heat; this was it, his opportunity to show Pop that he wasn’t excess baggage and the ground team that he was worthy of their inclusion.

  The elevator stopped at the spur and Ellis could see walls encased with dark and dripping goo, shadows deep and cloudy.

  “Go get ’em, Max,” said Jess. He and Pulaski stepped off the lift. Jess tapped the controls and the hoist went down, Ellis’s last view of them obscured through murky gloom.

  The Max hit bottom and the gate lifted to an alien world. Ellis watched the sluggish pulse of Max’s dreams and waited for word.

  * * *

  The Candyman barely looked at his tracker as they moved through the deserted shaft offshoot. Those fuckers were hidin’, they knew what was good for ’em.

  It was a familiar scene; the dark tunnel was covered in alien crap and it stunk like dead bodies on a hot day. The humidity was always the killer; Pulaski felt trickles of sticky sweat slide down his arms and legs in spite of the heat-skivvies. It didn’t bother him, none of it; he took it all in, pumped for the release of fiery action in his hands, trigger finger under the guard. These fuckin’ bugs were badass and mean, they took shit that wasn’t theirs to take and killed civilians, and the Candyman was going to teach them a thing or two about losing.

  “Yeah, you better hide your sorry asses,” he said, but quietly. Jess had gotten on him last time about talkin’ in the heat.

  “Got movement in the back,” said Jess. “One o’clock high.”

  Pulaski grinned. Time for a close encounter of the bugs-watting kind.

  A few more steps and he saw it; the creature was wedged behind a loader, squatting in the dark like the giant insect it was. All teeth and metal, the nightmare hissed and unfurled its long tail to spring.

  The pound of pulse fire and the tunnel went strobe, alien body torn to shrieking acid by Pulaski’s weapon. Another drone clambered over its dead brother and stumbled screaming into a curtain of fire.

  Want some? Want some, here you bastards’ Eat it! Eat it—

  “Watch your back!”

  The Candyman spun, crouched, and opened up on a leaping drone. The long black metal of its grinning face blew apart; brain-jelly soup spattered in wet threads against the darkness. Pulaski laughed and spun again, joined in Jess’s fire against another slavering demon.

  Pulaski turned in a circle, eager for targets. He was amped, itching to blow up anything that moved, muscles tight and breathing hard. The haze settled slowly, the thick air silent and still. Nothing moved.

  Jess watched his tracker for a few seconds and then exhaled sharply. “That’s a wrap.”

  Shit. It was over before he’d even warmed up; four fuckin’ bugs and clear.

  Pulaski kept his weapon ready and walked to the deep shadows at the back of the tunnel to confirm, stepping over oozing black bodies to scout the darkness. Unfortunately, the machine didn’t lie.

  “Ease up, Candyman. Max sometimes throws us a bone, don’t he?” Jess smiled tight, then called through to ops.

  “Decontamination complete, got us four bugs in a secondary. No eggs, no civs, over.”

  “Copy that,” said Lara. “Drop a relay and stand by, we’re about to flush the Max. Over and out.”

  Jess pulled out a transmitter and nodded to Pulaski. “Take ten, Candyman, but keep
sharp. No fallin’ asleep, all right?”

  Pulaski sighed; it wasn’t even funny. He shouldered his rifle, then hunched down next to the loader and pulled a candy bar out of his belt pouch. The chocolate had melted, sticking in waxy clumps to the wrapper. He sighed again and stared across at a tangle of alien limbs, blood still bubbling weakly as it ate into the floor.

  Sometimes this job could be a real letdown. He bit into caramel and chewed sullenly while they waited for the Max to do his thing.

  * * *

  Lara checked the reads from Ellis and nodded to Pop, who adjusted his headset. Sturges hovered behind them, silent and haggard.

  “Flush him, Ellis,” said Pop.

  “Flushing.”

  Lara watched the numbers quickly drop to minimal as the sedatives were chemically expelled from the Max’s system. She glanced at the lab monitor. Ellis looked calm and steady, competent.

  The Max was still in the hoist. From its screen, they could clearly see a midsized nest, alien walls glimmering in the gray light of the incendiary flare. It looked like the inside of a decaying beehive blown to gigantic proportions, but with a symmetry truly alien in form.

  Lara searched for a better analogy, but could find none. It looked—insane, insane and unclean.

  “Kick in adrenaline,” said Pop.

  “Adrenaline, level one.”

  The Max jerked suddenly, and a handful of drones crept into view, hissing, talons extended. The muted light played off their improbably long bodies and skulls, seemed to accent the horror-vid surrealness of the infestation.

  “Hit him again,” said Pop.

  “Level two.” Ellis was doing well, no hesitation.

  Max shuddered, its heavy arms snapping up and away from the carrier. A new list of stats flashed on Lara’s screen as the Berserker’s scanners switched on.

  One of the drones lunged forward, shrieking.

  “Bring him to the boil, Ellis!”

  “Level three and fully functioning—”

  The Max took one massive step out of the hoist and became the wrath of God.

  7