Aliens Omnibus 4

by Yvonne Navarro

  The burst of rounds shattered the bug, its abdomen suddenly a churning explosion of fire and evaporating fluid. Its guts were obliterated, the shards of exoskeleton blowing backward to clatter on the stairs.

  The M56 tracked the scattering pieces as the animal collapsed, pitching back and landing heavily in a smoking pool of its own blood a few steps down. Pulaski eagerly checked the sensor, primed for a firelight—

  “One stinkin’ bug,” he said, and sighed. “Stairs is clear, goin’ down.”

  He stepped over one massive curled claw, kicking at it in disgust. Bugs was ugly, skinny muscled legs and arms, huge claws and feet, tall enough to look down on him, even. There weren’t eyes in that dusky banana-shaped head, just teeth within teeth—the inner jaws could extend outward and catch, lightning fast.

  He moved down, past the hissing, smoking mass of dead drone, alert again for movement and sound; one bug and a handful of face-huggers were at least a start. This wasn’t like going into the heat, but it wasn’t too bad; beat the crap outa hanging out at some vacation spot, anyway.

  The Candyman reached the foot of the stairs and stepped through the open doorway of the command center area, getting a good look as he swept for life.

  “Ya’ll better come take a look at this,” he said softly, and in spite of his desire to see some action, the view chilled him; blowing up bugs was fun, it revved him up, made him feel like a man.

  Seeing what they could do, though, on a scale like this one… the coppery scent of blood was thick in the humid air. Pulaski looked away and waited for the team to meet him.

  13

  Lara stepped into the command center lounge behind Teape and felt her stomach tighten, threatening to upload the soup she’d grabbed for dinner. She put a hand to her bruised throat and stopped, forcing Jess to walk around her from the stairwell.

  “My God… said Jess quietly. They stood in a loose grouping by the door, taking in the huge and bloody chamber.

  The command center was actually a series of rooms, all connected to this one by a series of short corridors— communications, maintenance, and operations rooms would be directly connected to this “lobby,” a spacious area with the capacity of a midsize docking bay. There were orange padded couches scattered throughout, a few tables and chairs, even a series of hedgerows set into wall inserts, green and lush, if ragged. Apparently the watering system was still hooked up…

  The smells of blood and decay came from the remains of a vicious battle that spread across the north end of the vast room; it had been a slaughter.

  Jess walked slowly across the-space, boots echoing hollowly in the still air. Lara and the others followed, examining the wreckage as it unfolded in a story of ambush and terror.

  Next to one of the orange couches was a huge, jagged hole that revealed part of the dark deck below. It was perhaps three meters across, the erose edges stained with human and alien fluids; a dead man lay next to the yawning gap, a 9mm automatic not far from the reaching white fingers of his right hand. For a moment, Lara thought that his other arm was hanging into the opening—but as she passed, she saw that most of his left side was just missing, melted away along with the deck. His blank and cloudy eyes stared up at nothing, his white skin puffy and moist looking.

  Looking away, Lara saw a dead drone, still mostly intact except for the holes in its bony throat; there was a responding hole in the floor just beneath, acid damage. Perhaps a meter away was the woman who must have killed the bug, facedown, a small-caliber handgun still clenched in one blood-spattered fist. Her attacker must have come from behind as she’d killed the drone, scissoring her in half with a slashing tail; the woman’s legs were nowhere to be seen. Her blond hair was matted with dust and flecks of matter that Lara couldn’t identify.

  She stopped and counted, taking into account the disembodied parts that were strewn around almost casually and dried to the floor in tacky puddles. A single arm, watchband still around its hairy wrist; a lower leg with the boot still on, shredded muscle spilling out where the knee should have been. One of the orange couches was stained a drying brown, only small patches of the original color showing; in the middle was part of a human torso, headless and limbless, still wearing tatters of a dark coverall.

  Eight people, maybe nine… no barricades, no alien bodies except the one… The technicians here had been attacked without warning and somehow hadn’t managed to get out a distress signal. Except DS terminals were supposed to have all kinds of emergency backups and procedure programs for dealing with hostile takeover, alien or otherwise; how could this have happened without anyone knowing?

  Jess interrupted her thoughts. “You catching all this, Pop? Over.”

  Pop’s gruff voice was cool and even. “Affirmative. It doesn’t look pretty from here, either. Take care, over.”

  Lara touched her injured throat again and collected herself, refusing to let herself think about Pop. It wasn’t the time or place, as she’d already found out; distraction could mean death on this station. Already she feared for her dreams tonight, the thick and smothering feel of the face-hugger’s tail around her throat…

  She made herself look down at the small remote screen on her arm and then nodded to Jess. “Communications should be through there, first on the left,” she said, and pointed to a closed door in the northwest corner of the lobby.

  They moved toward the corner, stepping carefully past the remnants of mutilated bodies. Pulaski swept the door and then lowered his rifle.

  “Nada, folks.” He seemed disappointed.

  Jess opened the door and they stepped in to a much smaller corridor, the ceiling low and gray, the floor empty. It was lined with a half-dozen closed doors and stretched perhaps twenty meters ahead to a dead end. Lara saw a random scattering of bullet holes and a few acid burns on the walls, but no bodies.

  They waited tensely while Pulaski checked, Lara noticing that it was cooler here; she hoped vaguely that the bugs hadn’t infiltrated the entire command center, but knew that it was unlikely. The alien breed that the H/K teams specialized in were thorough if nothing else.

  Pulaski shook his giant head, scowling. Jess tapped the controls and the door slid open.

  It wasn’t as bad as the lounge area, at least in terms of body count. In the long, low room filled with silent monitors and computers, Lara saw only one dead man, seated at a single-screen console. His head rested on the keyboard, arms dangling at his sides—except for the ragged exit wound that had taken out one side of his skull, he could have been asleep. The suicide weapon was an ancient .25 semi, small, a personal sidearm; it still hung from the stiff fingers of one hand.

  Lara went ahead, already scouting for the station’s internal console as she assessed the damage. The main computer bank in the center of the room had been partially destroyed, a large section of the overhead paneling ripped away, and at least three smaller consoles had been smashed. Not good, but it could have been a lot worse; Lara let herself relax a fraction as she spotted the console she wanted, just below a nine-block monitor system. It looked untouched.

  “Teape, watch our backs,” said Jess. He and Pulaski walked into the room behind Lara, Pulaski heading straight for a small supply area in the corner. Teape stationed himself at the entry, facing out.

  Lara crouched down in front of the console and removed her pack, sliding out the computer relay that she would hook through to Nemesis. She activated her headlamp and popped the panel, pulling the retractable cords out of the relay and plugging them in to the override.

  She worked quickly, calling up audio and visual reads and running a check on the main transmitter. The station’s emergency power wouldn’t be enough to adjust camera angle and such, but the internal monitoring system was still intact and usable.

  The check came back for the DS transmitter, and Lara frowned; it was no wonder that they hadn’t sent any messages. The condenser, the decoder, the accelerator—all of it was shot.

  But why didn’t the station send a message as so
on as they knew there was trouble? They should have had hours, maybe days before they were completely overrun… If the damage was done by drones, why hadn’t the Company received initial distress calls?

  It didn’t make sense, but it wasn’t her job to figure it out at the moment. Lara went back to feeding in coordinates for the internal, silently urging the crippled system to work faster.

  “Sure looked after themselves pretty good,” said Pulaski, rummaging through a small refrigeration unit. He came up with a large glass bottle, and held it up, grinning.

  “Champagne, the real thing! Hey, Pop, how ’bout I bring back some of this to celebrate?”

  “You know the rules, Candyman. No alcohol on—wait. Lara, I got a command menu on-screen, over.”

  “That’s what we came for, over,” she answered, and slid the relay hookup into the open panel.

  Lara stood up and flipped on the console monitors, each of the screens showing a different section of the station. Pulaski put the champagne back in the refrigerator and walked over, Jess already leaning back on one of the tables to take a look.

  Of the nine screens, eight showed alien activity—dark movement, ropy secretion, or both. The ninth was a lonely shot of a headless male corpse in the main dining hall, spread-eagled across a bloody floor.

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Jess softly, and as they turned to leave, Teape’s tracker suddenly ticked on.

  * * *

  Teape stared down at the motion sensor, then stepped into the communications room, narrowing the range. It was inside somewhere, small and moving fast.

  “Face-hugger,” he said, and turned toward the west wall, not certain where to aim. There was an air shaft near the ceiling, the grill hanging off a single rivet. Seven meters and closing.

  “Leave it,” said Jess. “Let’s go.”

  Teape barely heard him. He raised his M41 and targeted the shaft. Four meters now, and he imagined he could hear the tiny claws, scrabbling against thin metal. There was nowhere else it could be coming from, it had to be the shaft, and he was going to make sure it didn’t go any farther…

  “Teape, you hear me? Leave it!”

  Teape glanced over at Jess and the others, standing out in the corridor now, and then back at the air shaft. And although it had been silent since they’d set foot on the station, the Voice suddenly eased into his mind as if it had never left.

  Yeah, Teepee, leave it, what’s the difference? It doesn’t matter what you do anyway, it never has.

  Two meters.

  “Teape!”

  He backed away from the wall, lowering his rifle. When he reached the door, Jess took his arm gently and pulled him out, then tapped the control panel.

  Just as the doors slid closed, Teape saw a flurry of long-legged movement burst out of the shaft—but then the panels were sealed and they were turning back the way they had come.

  Jess frowned and hung back, letting Pulaski and Lara get a few steps ahead. “You okay?”

  Teape forced a smile onto his face. “Yeah, sure, you know. Little tense in here.”

  Jess nodded. “I hear that. What say we get outa this morgue? I do believe we got some R and R comin’ our way.”

  Teape stretched his smile to show teeth, but didn’t feel it. There was a sinking in his belly, a sudden sense of foreboding that seemed to suffuse his entire being. He’d felt so good blowing away those face-huggers in the elevator shaft, as if he were ensuring his survival on future missions; he knew it was ridiculous, but leaving that single creature alive in the communications room felt bad, like…

  …like a death sentence, Teepee. Like maybe that was the one with your name and number, like a thousand others, still waiting for you on a thousand planets. Like you just blew your only chance to get out alive and now you can’t be sure of anything…

  No. The Voice was wrong, one face-hugger was no different from any other and they were leaving now, mission completed. DS 949’s problem was too big for them to mess with; it would be a nuke-from-orbit, and the Nemesis would be leaving soon for a well-deserved break.

  He tried to hold on to these thoughts as he followed the others back into the lounge, not really seeing the blood or noticing the stink as they moved toward the stairs, but the sense of dread wouldn’t leave him. What difference did any of this make? The alien breed was everywhere, would still be everywhere long after he had time-served; even with a thousand Max units operating around the clock, stations like this one would continue to be overrun, the people slaughtered as if they were cattle.

  That’s what I’ve been telling you all along, cooed the Voice, just how useless you really are in the grand scheme of things. And when you finally die on a nameless rock in the corner of nowhere or in some abattoir like this one, what difference will that make?

  Teape pretended that he hadn’t heard, but knew that the Voice was stronger now than it ever had been. Jess had been pushing for him to take one of those three-day psych programs when they hit time off; maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea.

  Pulaski led, followed closely by Jess. Lara brought up the rear as they started up the curved stairs that would lead them back to the shuttle.

  “All clear!” Pulaski called back, and as Teape neared the blasted drone that lay across the damaged steps, he found himself unable to look away. Maybe H/K teams weren’t so useless after all—

  With a gurgling hiss, the dead drone reached out and wrapped its dark talon around his leg.

  Teape screamed and fell heavily to the steps. His rifle clattered away and he screamed again, suddenly certain that he had lost his mind as the alien claw pulled, incredibly strong and very much alive.

  The dull blast of a pulse rifle and the claw convulsed and let go. Teape rolled over and scooted away, back to the wall, aware that he was moaning with each panting breath and unable to stop.

  Lara fired again, the maimed drone falling back, acid oozing from the holes in its shining skull. She lowered her smoking weapon and suddenly Jess and the Candyman were with her, all of them leaning over him.

  “Jesus, Teepee, I thought he was dead,” said Pulaski as he reached down to help him up. “Sorry, man, should’ve made sure.”

  Teape stood, sick and dizzy to his bones. He retrieved his rifle and tried to smile at Lara but couldn’t do it; he felt like he would never smile again. The Voice was right, nothing mattered.

  “Thanks,” he said weakly, and then fainted, the darkness claiming him with open arms.

  14

  “…he woke up when we were carrying him back to the shuttle and said he was okay, but I don’t know,” said Lara. She sipped from her coffee and sighed. “I’ve never seen him so… despondent, I guess.”

  Ellis pushed his glasses up on his nose and shook his head, not knowing what to say. They almost certainly wouldn’t be running an operation here, and he wasn’t sorry after hearing Lara’s account; he was just glad that no one had been injured, and wished that he knew Teape well enough to offer something helpful.

  Lara and Ellis sat alone in mess, drinking coffee in spite of the fact that it was well after midnight. The drop-ship had been back for several hours, but the team had gone straight to quarters and Lara had been busy setting up links to the station. Ellis had spent the time hanging around in the cold, silent cafeteria, eager to hear details but not wanting to get in the way.

  “So is the relay up and running?” Ellis asked.

  Lara nodded. “Yeah, for what it’s worth. Pop’s gonna pipe the feeds to Grigson in the morning, who’ll either send in the marines or tell us to nuke it—the infestation is too big to bother salvaging, in spite of the cost.”

  Ellis frowned. “There aren’t any survivors?”

  “The internal says no, although not all of the cameras are fully operational and a few of them are blocked. And we can’t get a clear picture in one of the main docking bays because the cameras there are covered with secretion; its gotta be the nest. If there’s anyone alive in there…”

  She trailed off
and sipped at her coffee again, looking tired. There was an ugly bruise darkening around her neck, and Ellis wished again that he felt more comfortable talking about personal matters. He wanted to express concern and support, but didn’t know how without sounding—inappropriate.

  “I just feel bad for Teape,” said Lara. “He shouldn’t even be here, you ask me.”

  Ellis took a deep breath and asked the question he’d wanted to ask since he’d come aboard. “Why is he here? I mean, it’s okay if you can’t tell me…”

  Lara smiled. “I was wondering when you’d ask. Disclosure’s against regs, but if you haven’t noticed, nobody here bothers much with Company policy. They all talk about it sometimes, except for Jess; he’s not big on his past behavior, you know?”

  Ellis nodded, relieved. He’d wondered about it a lot, and hadn’t wanted to embarrass himself in front of the team by asking unwanted questions.

  “Teape is serving twenty for armed robbery, a jewelry repair place; his partner shot the owner when she wouldn’t open the safe, put her in a coma. When she died a couple of weeks later, Teape actually turned himself in and then ratted out his partner; unfortunately, remorse doesn’t count for much in the system these days.”

  “God, that’s awful,” said Ellis.

  “Yeah. I think he took the Company assignment without really knowing what he was getting into; just one of those guys who isn’t cut out to be a criminal. I guess prison was really rough on him.”

  “What about Pulaski?”

  Lara smiled and frowned at the same time. “I don’t think ‘remorse’ is in his vocabulary. He was one of Senator Claypool’s personal bodyguards.”

  Ellis felt his jaw drop. “You’re kidding!”

  Lara shook her head. “Nope. It never came out who pulled the trigger on Linell, but Pulaski and two others were convicted for their involvement.”

  Ellis was surprised; the story of the incumbent senator who had put out a hit on his opponent had been big news for weeks, back when he was plowing through finals. Claypool had hanged himself in his cell the day before trial, and Ellis had forgotten all about the subsequent convictions.