The Complete Aliens Omnibus, Volume One (Earth Hive, Nightmare Asylum, the Female War)

by Steve Perry

  “I’m clear!”

  Fire blossomed, yellow-orange heat and light that nearly opaqued her faceplate as the polarizers turned the plastic dark against the wash of brightness.

  She imagined she could hear the alien scream as it pinwheeled away from the ship, wrapped in a mantle of burning fluids, cooking within its shell. She took joy in watching it roast. Found herself grinning wolfishly. Yes. Fry, you son of a bitch, fry.

  “Billie?”

  “Nice shot, Mitch. Score another one for the good guys.

  “Now I’m coming in.”

  5

  Two days after Billie blasted the last alien into space Bueller picked up radio transmissions. The signals were on the military band and coded, so they didn’t know what was being said, but from the strength, they had to be close. Unfortunately, the ship did not have any transmitters they could use, only receivers.

  It didn’t take Wilks long to figure out where the signals originated. “Hello,” he said. “Lookie here.”

  Billie leaned over his shoulder as Wilks played with the computer screen. “Got us a planetoid. Not much bigger than a moon, but in direct orbit around the local primary. Been on the opposite side of the sun from us pretty much since we left the chambers, that’s why we couldn’t see it.”

  Numbers crawled up the screen. Wilks did something and the tiny blotch expanded and took on a roughly spherical shape, overlaid with grid lines.

  “Colonial Marine base?” Bueller said.

  “Yeah, that’d be my guess. Inflate a few pressure domes, pump ’em full of breathable, bury a couple gravity generators, and you got all the comforts of home. Provided you grew up in a barracks. Military has hundreds of these bases scattered around the galaxy. Or did have.”

  “Is that where we’re going?” Billie asked.

  “I don’t see anywhere else, kid. If these crappy range finders can be believed, we’ll be there in a couple more days.”

  The three of them stared at the computer-augmented image. Billie wondered if they were thinking the same thing she was: Was this a place of refuge? Or were they leaping from the frying pan into the fire?

  It looked as if they were going to find out soon.

  * * *

  These damned gravity drives were something, Wilks had to admit. They were moving at speeds the old reaction ships couldn’t touch. As they approached the planetoid—it was about the same size as Terra’s moon—the constant drone of the engines shut down. The ship turned and began to retro, slowing their descent toward the only sizable chunk of real estate around for a hundred fifty million klicks. There was some rumble from the rockets, but compared to the thrum of the gravity drives, the ship was quiet. He had tuned the vibrations out, but now that they were still, he missed them.

  “Might as well use what water we have left to clean up,” Wilks said. “We want to look good for the party.”

  “Yeah, especially since they aren’t expecting company,” Billie said.

  He shrugged.

  Despite his banter, Wilks was nervous. They were a long way from what any of them knew as home. Their reception was questionable.

  * * *

  The ship fell toward the tiny planet. The gravity increased as the military-industrial-strength generators on the base enveloped them in their fields. Bueller shut off the ship’s faux gee and it got a little more comfortable.

  The landing was rough; the ship fell straight in on its tail, the retros firing. Apparently it navigated some kind of gigantic hatched roof and wound up in a bay. The ship vibrated as compressors pumped air into the bay; when there was enough atmosphere, they could hear the machinery.

  His back was still pretty tender, but Wilks could walk on his own. Bueller rode in his cradle strapped to a wheeled hand truck Billie had found. The aft cargo bay registered breathable air, and the three passengers made their way into it as the loading ramp was lowered from outside. The hydraulics whined as the back of the ship yawed wide and the ramp grated to a halt. It was cold, but the air felt fresher than what they’d been used to.

  A quad of Colonial Marines in combat gear stood there, carbines held ready. At the sight of them, the four marines snapped their carbines up. Behind them, an officer sat in an electric cart, a fat cigar stuck in his mouth. He wore duty fatigues, and the gold braid on his visored cap identified him as a light general, a brigadier.

  “At ease!” the general yelled. He stepped from the cart. He was medium height, but powerfully built, with the body of a weight lifter. He wore an opchan command headset, the bonephone and mouthpiece a single sculptured unit. He had an antique stainless 10mm auto pistol with full santoprene grips in a hip holster. The sleeves of his fatigues were rolled up to reveal several tattoos on his forearms: on the left, a rampant screaming eagle and chains; on the right, the Colonial Marine emblem and a dagger-and-banner. A rainbow holopatch shimmering on his left breast said T. Spears.

  The general moved to stand in front of them. “I didn’t expect to see you ambulatory,” he said.

  Wilks blinked. Nobody knew they were on the ship. If the general was expecting to see somebody not ambulatory, then he had to know about the human cargo.

  “If you’re talking about the four people in the freezers, that isn’t us,” Wilks said. “Sir.”

  The general raised one bushy eyebrow. “Say what, marine? Download it.”

  “We just came along for the ride,” Wilks said.

  The general nodded. “All right.” To the marines standing by, he said, “Maxwell, Dowling, go check on the cargo.”

  “If you’re talking about the four men in the sleep chambers, you’re wasting your time,” Billie said. “They were infected by aliens.”

  Billie wasn’t slow. Wilks realized she also understood what the officer meant.

  “ ‘Were’ infected?”

  “The aliens ate their way out. The men are dead.”

  Wilks could see the general didn’t care a lizard’s ass about the men. The general frowned. “What about the aliens?”

  Before Wilks could stop her, Billie said, “We killed them.”

  The general’s jaw muscles bunched. Wilks thought he was going to bite his cigar in half. “What? You killed my specimens?”

  It was Billie’s turn to blink. “Your specimens?”

  “It was them or us,” Bueller put in.

  The general stared down at Bueller. “Listen, vat-scat, I’ve got a base full of people, I don’t need any more. What I needed were those Terran-bred specimens! I needed to have my R&D people studying possible mutations! There’s a war on, mister, in case you haven’t heard. You just fouled up a Priority One mission. I could have you shot for that.”

  Wilks stared at the general.

  He pulled the cigar from his mouth, tapped ash from it. “Put these three in isomed and scan them,” he said. “Maybe they’re infected and trying to hide it. We might salvage something yet.” He tapped the command headset. “Powell! Get down here, we got a snafu.”

  The barrel of the carbine jabbed Wilks in his tender back. He fought the urge to spin and smash the marine who’d prodded him. He managed to keep a grip on himself. No point in getting blasted by one of his own after coming all this way. He’d go along. Maybe later he could figure out what the hell was what.

  * * *

  One of the marines pushed Bueller’s carriage, the other kept his weapon trained on Billie and Wilks. Billie didn’t understand what was going on. They went down a descending corridor. When they rounded the end, they were on the edge of a large room.

  Billie gasped.

  Against the far wall was a row of clear cylinders. The six tubes were four meters tall, perhaps two and a half meters in circumference. There was some kind of pale bluish, transparent liquid in the containers.

  Each of the cylinders contained a full-size alien drone.

  Billie found that she was digging her fingers into Wilks’s arm.

  “Jesus,” Wilks said.

  The marine with the carbine pointed at
him said, “Not to worry, Sarge, those babies are in suspension. That’s fluropolymer fluid. They’re alive, but they ain’t going nowhere.”

  Billie saw a dozen smaller containers lined up on a long table nearby. Each of those had one of the crablike alien hatchlings in it, ovipositors drooping limply under the fingerbonelike jointed legs. Several techs in osmotic clean suits stood or sat at the table. Billie, who had spent years in hospitals, recognized microscopes, surgical lasers, autoclaves, and other medical impedimenta.

  Billie felt a wave of nausea. They were doing research on the aliens. Why? To learn how to kill them better?

  That had to be it, didn’t it? Why else would they be doing it?

  6

  The forklift rolled across the floor, thick slunglas tires silent on the smooth sheetcrete. The powerful electric motor hummed louder as the driver slid the special hoop clamps around the specimen container and lifted it. Carefully—the driver knew that breaking a container was a shooting offense—she backed off slightly, then pivoted the fork and headed for the queen’s chamber.

  Spears watched, nodding to himself as the specimen was carted away. The driver was good, she deftly avoided the hoses and power lines connected to the bases of the other containers in the vast storage room. Spears had more than a hundred of the alien drones undergoing suspension here, each of which had a complex chemical bath being pumped into it full-time. According the R&D scientists, the hypnotic chem flowing through the special drones should match their particular chemistry enough to affect them. To make them more amenable to outside suggestion.

  Spears grinned, chewed on the end of his cigar. It was real tobacco, vat-grown and illegal as hell, but that didn’t mean shit. Out here, he was the law. The cigar wasn’t as good as those made from sun-raised and barn-dried leaf, but it was what he had. Oh, he still had six of the precious Jamaican Lonsdales left, maduros and dark as they came, each sealed in its glass tube of inert gas. But those were worth a fortune, he could get ten thousand credits apiece if he wanted to sell them.

  He chuckled. As if money meant anything. Money was nothing, money was only a means to an end, the only reason you needed it at all was for supplies, equipment, to get things done. Here at Third Base, they didn’t even use the stuff. The troops took what they were given and liked it or lumped it. The cigars had come from a vault in Cuba, a gift from a rich man who had been grateful to Spears for saving his ass in some dinky banana republic revolution. There had been eight of the valuable smokes. He’d smoked the first on the day he got his stars and command of Third Base. He’d smoked the second when his tame medicos had succeeded in bringing forth an alien queen and establishing her in a controlled hive. He planned to smoke the third after he won his first battle against the wild-strain aliens back on Earth.

  Thomas A.W. Spears had plans, big plans, and they amounted to no less than the retaking of man’s homeworld, using the deadliest soldiers a man had ever commanded.

  He turned and strode toward his office, trailing smoke as he walked. A military man was bred for war, and in his case, it was truer than usual. He’d been among the first to be incubated in an artificial womb—he proudly kept the middle initials he’d been given at his decanting signifying just that—and it had been on a marine base where the first live births of AW children occurred. He’d been raised in a creche with the other children, nine of them, and all but one had become Colonial Marines. The other one would have, if he hadn’t been killed in an accident when he was still a prepube. Sure, the bulge-brains had come up with androids later, but he wasn’t vat-scat, he was a real man, all his chromosomes in place, not a stray gene among ’em. A man who knew what he could do. What he must do.

  The general paused next to one of the specimen containers. Put his hands on the thick Plexiglas. It was cold to the touch. The alien inside didn’t move, but he imagined it could feel him, was aware of him, even in its suspended state. Mark me, Spears thought at it. I’m your master. You live or die at my whim. Obey and live, disobey and die.

  He moved away from the container, took another look at the killing machine within. Hell of a soldier, this thing. Would destroy or die for its queen without hesitation. He nodded at the alien, then walked away.

  He rounded the corridor’s end and marched to the small office from where he ran the base. Damned civilian authorities on Earth had bollixed it up, just like they always did. Tried to fight a forest fire with little buckets of water, tried to extinguish a raging conflagration with spit and prayer. The only way to kill a big fire was to use a bigger blaze. Burn its fuel, choke its oxy off, eat what it would eat and starve it. Sure, you could punch holes in the aliens with armor-piercers, could blow ’em up with bombs, but that was wasteful. What better way to fight a beast than with another beast of equal ferocity? Something that could hunt the enemies down because it knew how they thought, because it was like them? Like a king snake will kill a poisonous viper or tame dogs will track a wild animal, the solution to the problem was painfully obvious. He hadn’t believed that at first, until he got to know how the aliens operated. Now he was the strongest believer. The powers-that-were had been eliminated; now, it was up to him to carry on alone. No problem.

  Spears reached his office, opened the old-style hinged door, stepped inside.

  Major Powell, his first officer, stood next to the gunny running the computer terminal, peering down at the holoprojection that floated above the desk. Spears could read the words, even reversed and backward, if he wanted, but his first reaction was surprise and a little anger.

  “Powell, I thought I told you to get to docking and clean up that snafu.”

  “Sir. It’s as clean as it is going to get, sir.”

  “In my sanctum,” Spears ordered.

  The major nodded, said, “Continue, gunny,” and preceded Spears into the inner office.

  His office was spare, a chair, desk, comp terminal, couple of plaques on the sheet plastic walls. Spears circled the desk so that it was between him and Powell, but did not sit in the chair. “Well?”

  “The… specimen containers were… destroyed, sir. Apparently the lowest survivable setting on the sleep chambers was insufficient to keep the specimens themselves dormant. The, ah, containers were dead, usual exit mode, to judge from the blood spray patterns, and mostly consumed. The adult-stage specimens apparently killed one of their own and utilized its blood to burn free of the area in which they were contained.”

  “Very resourceful,” Spears said. He took his cigar from between his lips and looked at the cold ash on the end. He put the cigar down into the ashtray on his desk. “Continue.”

  “There were no signs of the other three—we assume all three survived—specimens. Acid burns in various places indicated a battle between the stowaways and the aliens. I have done a preliminary debriefing of the CM sergeant and from this report determined that one was killed by weapons fire onboard and the other two were ejected into space.”

  “Damn.”

  “Apparently the female stowaway went EVA and battled the remaining pair, who survived for some minutes in hard vacuum without apparent ill effect.”

  “The female did? Why not the marine?”

  “He suffered an injury during the fight.”

  “Hmm. Well, the space stuff, we already knew they can do that. The in-head compression chamber and the—what’s it called?”

  “Pseudohypothalmic regulator,” Powell answered.

  “Right. Heats up the acid and keeps ’em from freezing.”

  “The corpses of the two killed on-ship were ejected.”

  “Too bad. We might have gotten something from the DNA.” Spears looked at his dead cigar, thought about relighting it. “Two humans and half an android against four aliens in a close environment. I wouldn’t have thought they could survive. Their tactics might be interesting.”

  “Apparently the stowaways have some prior experience with the aliens.”

  “Oh?”

  “We don’t have anything on the woman—th
e bounce from Earth is shut down—but the military bibliocom is bringing up records on the marine and android. The android, by the way, is Issue.”

  “One of ours?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Interesting. Are any of them infected?”

  “Not according to the scan, no.”

  “Too bad. Let me see the squirt from bibliocom when it arrives.”

  “Gunny will have it in about eighteen minutes, sir.”

  “That’s all, Powell.”

  “Sir.”

  Once Powell was gone, Spears sat. He leaned back, put his orthoplast boots up on the desk. Picked up the cigar and relit it. Took a deep drag and blew the smoke out in a blue-gray cloud. The ventilators whirred and sucked the smoke from the air. Maybe there was something to be gained here after all. It was a truly bad battle if nothing was gained; even the illest of winds sometimes blew a breeze or two of good. He’d see what the library had to say about this marine and android. And if they didn’t have anything to offer, well, the techs could always use a couple more bodies in the hatching rooms…

  * * *

  “You okay?” Wilks asked Billie.

  “Yeah, fine.”

  “You shouldn’t have stomped on that guy’s foot. He was just obeying orders.”

  “Yeah? So was the guy who nuked Canberra during the ’82 Food Riots.”

  “How about you, Bueller?”

  “No new damage,” he said.

  Wilks looked around. The room was bigger than some cells he’d been in. Five meters by five, fold-out bunks now flush against the wall, reinforced sheetplast, a double-thick door with a simple snap lock. A chemical toilet rested in one corner, bare white, no seat, a roll of wipes perched on a sink with a single water tap next to it. Nice place. A guy handy with a sliver of spring steel or stacked carb could pop the lock easy enough. Thing was, on a world where everybody lived inside a pressure dome, where were you gonna go even if you did get out? They might steal another ship, but without some knowledge of navigation, not to mention knowing which human settlements were still untainted by alien infection, they wouldn’t have a clue about where to go.