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

by Steve Perry

  Spears popped another chunk into his mouth and chewed it thoughtfully. “Been in combat against them in several theaters, correct?”

  “That’s right, General.”

  The man nodded. His eyes seemed to take on a brighter gleam. “Good, good.” He looked at Bueller. “And you, Issue, your injury was sustained in combat as well, was it not?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “These men are military, marines, I know about them. What about you, little lady?”

  Wilks saw that Billie couldn’t bring herself to speak. “Sir,” he put in, “Billie was on Rim during first contact with the aliens. The only survivor.”

  The general raised one of his thick eyebrows. “Is that so?”

  Dumbly, Billie managed a nod.

  “She survived on her own for more than a month,” Wilks said.

  The general’s other eyebrow went up. “Really? Most resourceful. How old would you have been then?”

  “Ten,” Billie managed.

  Another of the face-threatening smiles. “Excellent.” He ate another bite of the meatless meat. “I envy you three, you know. You’ve been in combat against the toughest enemies, the most dedicated soldiers men have ever faced. Perfect troops, fearless, tough, almost unstoppable. Your survival is quite an achievement. A fluke, really, but no less heroic for that.”

  He pushed his plate away, less than half of the meal eaten. An orderly zipped from the doorway, removed the plate, refilled the general’s wineglass, and vanished almost without a sound. Spears leaned back, sipped at the freshened wine. “The only way to beat an enemy as hard as the one man now faces is to use troops of equal vigor! Ones who can match the ferocity of the opposition.”

  That got through to Billie. “You’re trying to raise tame aliens here?”

  “With the proper leader, my troops could spearhead the retaking of Earth,” Spears said. “Think about it. What better way? The wild strain behave like ants. With troops of equal caliber plus proper strategy and tactics, they wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  Billie started to say something. Wilks kicked her under the table. She closed her mouth.

  “Great idea, sir,” Wilks said.

  The general nodded, pleased. “I knew you would see it so,” he said. “You’ve been up against them, you know how little chance humans or even specially bred androids have.” He nodded at Bueller, gestured with his wineglass.

  “How can we help, sir?” Wilks said.

  Billie looked at him as if he had lost his sanity. He kicked her under the table again without changing his expression.

  If Spears noticed Billie’s look it didn’t seem to register. “Your experience, Sergeant. I have computer-generated scenarios, recordings of battles on Earth, theories. You three have been there, you know the reality. I want your advice, your knowledge. My troops must be as well prepared as they can be when I formulate my strategy.”

  “Certainly, sir,” Wilks said. Stretched his own scarred face into a smile. “Bueller and I are marines before anything else. And Billie wants to help, too, isn’t that right, Billie?”

  Billie nodded. “Right.”

  Spears was practically beaming now. He raised his wineglass. “A toast, then—”

  But before the general could offer the toast, the major came in via the same door the orderlies had used.

  Spears frowned. “What is it, Powell?”

  “Sorry to disturb your meal, sir. A security breach. The guard on the South Lock has been assaulted, the outer door burned open. One of the land crawlers is missing.”

  The general waved one hand. “Oh, that.”

  Powell blinked. “Sir?”

  “This is my base, Major. I try to keep up.” He looked at Wilks. “You have to stay on top of things when you’re the CO. Enjoy the rest of your meal. You are free to go anywhere on Third Base; you have full clearance. If you have any questions, Major Powell will be happy to answer them. I suppose I should go and see to the malcontents who have destroyed military property.”

  With that, he stood, gave Billie a military bow that was barely a nod, and left with Powell.

  Wilks stared at the general’s back as he left. Wished he had a gun at that moment.

  * * *

  In the hallway, Spears said to Powell, “Keep an eye on them. Put the android in rehab, see if we can give him mechanicals or whatever so he can be ambulatory.”

  “Sir.”

  “And that guard from South Lock, put him in the egg chamber. He fucked up.”

  Spears felt a happy satisfaction at watching Powell swallow dryly when he gave him that order. The universe had become a place where only the strong, the ruthless, could survive. Sentiment was for another time. In the past and, someday when he had won this war, in the future. Meanwhile, somebody had to make the hard choices and Spears was the man to make them.

  * * *

  Billie found she was shaking. She wasn’t sure if it was because she was afraid or angry. She stood, but Wilks was right there. He hugged her, and before she could do more than stiffen and start to pull away, he whispered, “Play along, Billie. They probably have a cam on us and a voice recorder.”

  She relaxed a little. “What?”

  “If we don’t do what this guy says, he is going to feed us to his monsters. Play along.”

  The thought of that turned her bowels to lumps of dry ice. For a moment she couldn’t even breathe.

  A marine private entered the dining room and started to wheel Mitch away. Billie turned quickly. “What are you doing?”

  “Major’s order, ma’am. Taking the AP to Rehab.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t ask me, I’m just doing what I’m told.”

  “It’s okay, Billie,” Mitch said. “It’s like putting your flitter into the shop for repairs.”

  Billie stared at him. The marine wheeled him away.

  “Relax,” Wilks said, his voice at normal volume. “The general just wants to make sure his troops are cared for properly. I don’t know what kind of facilities they have here, but my guess is they can fit Bueller into some kind of lower body exoframe, at least, so he can get around on his own.”

  Billie couldn’t think of anything to say. This was all so damned weird.

  “Come on, let’s explore a little. Might as well get acquainted with our new home, eh?” He winked at her.

  Billie nodded. She understood. The more they knew about this place, the better. “Yeah,” she said. “Good idea.”

  9

  Days passed; Wilks and Billie explored the base. It was like a dozen such places Wilks had been on in his career, standard hardware from the lowest bidder, as cheap as it could be and still work. The one thing he noticed that bothered him wasn’t the gear, but the people. There didn’t seem to be enough of them for a base this size. If anything, the military usually had too many troops for the work needed, a larger command being what officers liked to wave at each other. Warm bodies meant more than cold rock. Given the extent of the base, almost as big as a very small town, there ought to be several hundred more people staffing it.

  Eventually, Wilks and Billie worked their way into places not so easy to find or reach.

  “What’s in there?” Wilks asked the guards posted in front of a large double door.

  The two troopers, one male, one female, wore holstered sidearms but they didn’t seem particularly worried that they would need them. The man, who looked to be almost two meters tall, smiled down on Wilks and Billie.

  Wilks said, “The general has given us the run of the base. You want to open the door?”

  Now the woman grinned. “You don’t wanna go in there, Sarge. Show him, Atkins.”

  The tall man touched a control on the wall.

  Billie gasped.

  “Fuck,” Wilks said.

  “Hell, she don’t even have to do that,” the woman said. “She’s fertile all by herself.”

  The projection floated in front of the wall. A queen alien occupied the center of a huge room, a m
onstrous sac jutting from her rear like some obscene, translucent intestine. The sack, webbed with supports that ran to the convoluted ceiling and walls, was obviously full of eggs, and as they watched, the queen deposited yet another onto the floor already thick with the things. A pair of attendant alien drones stood in a puddle of fluid near the sac’s sphinctered opening, and they gently moved the fresh egg to one side as the queen began to lay another one.

  “Still want me to open the door?”

  “Why are you even guarding it?” Wilks managed.

  “Pan right,” the woman said.

  The taller guard stroked a slide control. The holoproj shifted as the camera panned.

  Webbed against a wall in front of a neat row of eggs were ten humans. The cottony material holding them in place hid most of them, leaving only the faces bare. Some of the people were awake, eyes wide. Were they already infected, or still waiting for the horror yet to come?

  “Turn it off,” Billie said.

  As Wilks and Billie walked away from the stomach-turning scene, the tall marine, obviously enjoying himself, said, “Have a nice day, folks.”

  They weren’t there to keep anybody from getting in.

  They were there to keep anybody from getting out.

  * * *

  Spears watched the image of Wilks and the woman as they turned away from the projection outside the egg chamber. They were weak, like most people were weak. But he could use them. That was the important thing.

  He looked at his chronometer. “Ah, the mice are about ready. Time for the cat to wake up and move.” He touched a control on his desk. “This is Spears. I want First Platoon, A Company, saddled up and ready to ride ASAP. Full combat gear, full field rations. I’ll be at the South Lock in ten minutes. Better not keep me waiting, marines.”

  * * *

  Wilks went to shower, water being one of the few things they had plenty of on the station. Piped up from some deep underground cave as ice chunks and melted on the way up by heaters in the slurry conduits, SOP for this kind of operation. One of the few perks even grunts got.

  Alone, Billie wandered down narrow hallways, feeling as if she were being watched. God, this was all so insane. Having spent years in a mental hospital because the authorities thought her memories were hallucinations, Billie had some experience with madness. This was right up there. Spears ought to be in a silicone room somewhere, doped to the hairline, scheduled for a full mental revision. Who were those people in there with the queen alien? What had they done to deserve such a fate? No crime could be so awful as to rate that kind of sentence. Spears was bug-fuck crazy and he should be put away. Instead, he commanded troops and had a personal nest full of the deadliest things man had ever encountered. What kind of deity would allow that kind of lunacy? Only one that was crazy itself.

  She came to a door marked Communications. It slid open as she approached.

  A tech sat, a comhelmet covering half her head, staring at a series of flat screen monitors. The tech looked over, saw Billie. “I heard we got visitors. Come on in, I got a notice says you’re cleared for this area.”

  Billie stared at the woman. Why the hell not?

  The door closed behind her.

  * * *

  Wilks sluiced the cleaner from his body, enjoying the feel of the hot water against his skin. They were in deep shit here, no doubt about it, but you had to take it as it came. He had expected to fertilize the flowers on the alien homeworld. Hell, he’d been living on borrowed time since the first time he’d run into these fuckers on Rim all those years ago. He should have died with his squad then, it was a miracle he hadn’t. And the years of trying to hide from it and from the nightmares that wouldn’t go away since hadn’t been all that pleasant. He had been ready to pack it in, to take the Big Jump and the hell with it, but before that happened, he got pissed off. He’d blown the aliens’ homeworld flat and that hadn’t been enough. Somehow, for some reason, he was still alive. It didn’t make any sense. He’d never been a religious man, but it was like he had some kind of higher purpose driving him. He’d been too lucky, as if somebody had looked out for him. He was tired, he wanted to tube the whole mess, but he couldn’t. It was as if he had been given the responsibility to take care of this little problem—the extermination of all those monsters that had nearly wiped out humans.

  It wasn’t fair, nobody could expect one broken-down chem-head marine to do that, but while he couldn’t pin it neatly to any logical wall, Wilks felt as if that was exactly what he was supposed to do: save mankind.

  Damn. And he couldn’t even float very well, much less walk on fucking water…

  * * *

  The old man was white-bearded, his left arm bandaged crudely from wrist to elbow, his clothes dirty and torn. A dark and grimy baseball cap was pulled down over his head and whatever hair he might have left. He had an antique rifle lying next to him, something that appeared to be blued steel and worn wood, an old-style bolt-action piece, probably a hunting weapon from a hundred years past. Back when people hunted for sport and not for survival. He sat cross-legged, leaning against a pile of rubble, mostly broken furniture and shattered building material; a small campfire burned in front of him, the flickers from it painting the old man’s face yellow-orange.

  A girl of about six leaned against the old man’s side, her face dirty, long hair matted.

  “Here comes Air Sammy,” the old man said. He pulled a vial from his jacket pocket, sprinkled a powder from it into the campfire. The fire sputtered and the flames turned a bright blue-green. “I hope the bastards have their spookeyes on.”

  Overhead in the night, the running lights of military attack jets appeared, red and green against the smog that was mostly smoke. The rumble of their engines increased.

  “Will they see us, Uncle?” the little girl asked.

  “I hope so, honey. They should.” He waved at the blue fire.

  The fiery lance of a missile erupted from one jet, then other rockets followed. Like meteorites, the missiles streaked and died quickly, to be replaced by a brighter flash of light followed by artificial thunder as the rockets exploded.

  “Stupid fucking airheads,” the old man said.

  The little girl covered her ears with her hands as more explosions rocked them. A blast wave streamed the little fire as might a man blowing gently on a candle.

  A woman moved into the circle of firelight. She looked a worn fifty, her clothes were smudged with ashes and dirt, and she had an airpump shotgun on a sling over her shoulder. She squatted next to the little girl. “Hey, Amy. You okay?”

  The little girl looked up. “I’m okay, Mom. Did you find anything to eat?”

  “Not this time, honey. Maybe Leroy did. He should be back soon. Damn!”

  This last followed a louder boom and brighter flash of light. Dust and small bits of debris swirled over the trio, and the fire flattened briefly under the blast.

  “Why do they bother?” the woman asked. “They hardly ever kill any of them and the damned things just don’t get scared.”

  “Fucking airheads,” the man said. He glanced around. “We’d better move out, Mona. The things will probably start their sweep after Sammy shears off.”

  “What about Leroy?” the little girl asked.

  “Don’t worry about him, baby. He will meet us at the reservoir. He knows we can’t stay here.”

  The old man looked across the fire, and spoke as if there were an unseen watcher sitting there. “That’s it for now, sports fans. Tune in again tomorrow, same time, same satellite, for another exciting episode of Life in the Ruins of Earth. We’ll sign on at 1900, if the bugs haven’t eaten us. Summer’s over and it’ll be getting dark sooner. That’s a dislink and endit—”

  He pointed an old-style IR remote control at the unseen watcher and the three people vanished…

  * * *

  Billie gripped the arms of the plastic form-chair tightly and found she had been holding her breath as the image on the viewscreen went blank. She f
orced herself to relax. To breathe.

  “They’re regulars,” the tech said. “Amy, Mona, Uncle Burt. Sometimes Leroy—he’s Chinese, we think. The kid looks to be about six. Our guess is that her mother is in her late twenties, some of the stuff she talks about. The old guy is maybe seventy, probably not related, though the kid calls him Uncle.”

  “God,” Billie said.

  “I don’t know why they bother ’casting,” the tech said. “It’s not like anybody is going to drop down and help them.”

  Billie shook her head. “Maybe it’s all they have left. It matters that they try. People do that.”

  The tech shrugged, scanning for another image. “Or did it. This base location is classified information,” she said, “but I can tell you that the ’cast we just saw is history. Even in cold sleep and with full race gee drives going through the hypercut we are a long way from Earth. The little girl could be years older by now. That, or worm food. It’s a message in a bottle.”

  Billie’s insides clenched. She knew just how that little girl must feel.

  * * *

  Something about being clean and in fresh fatigues made a man feel better. When you faced death as often as Wilks had, minor shit like crazy generals didn’t seem so bad. While he couldn’t say he felt the same detachment about the Long Nap some of the Zen martial arts boys had, Wilks had looked Death square in the face enough times so it didn’t scare him. You lived or you died, that was how it went, and when your number came due, you got collected. He’d thought his was at the top of the pile several times but Death had only grazed him when he reached for another. Fuck it. A hot shower and clean clothes, however, were tangible, something you could relate to in the here and now. The ground might open up and swallow you next step, a stray comet could zip in and squash you like a bug, one of the aliens could hop from behind a garbage can and eat your face off, but those were in the unseen future. Right now, Wilks felt pretty damned good. One second at a time.

  Being cooped up on that drone ship hadn’t given him any love for it, but Wilks found himself walking toward the vessel because he had an idea. The thing had been unloaded and it would need new fuel cells and probably some repair before it had any chance of being spaceworthy again. It sat in the middle of one of the big prefab storage areas, a mostly dark and very cold room that apparently wasn’t worth spending more than the minimum on for light and heat.