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

by Steve Perry

  Wilks’s footsteps echoed hollowly as he walked across the sheetcrete flooring toward The American. The cargo bay door was still open, and the ship’s internal lights were off. He walked up the expanded-metal incline and slapped the light button. It was a little warmer inside the ship, the fuel cells’ heat sinks radiating their excess warmth into the air.

  Wilks moved deeper into the cargo hold, found an empty hex storage crate, and sat on it. It was very quiet, only the low hum of power units audible. After a few seconds Wilks heard what he expected: boot steps outside the ship.

  Whoever was following him was approaching.

  Wilks flexed his hands, rolled his shoulders. Prepared himself to move, if he needed to move. The footsteps drew nearer.

  * * *

  Billie worked her way toward the medical section. She wanted to see what they were doing to Mitch, if she could.

  On the other side of a clear door inside a smallish chamber that looked like an anteroom combined with an airlock, there was a short, fat man dressed in a lab cloak and what looked like white paint. She touched the plastic wall and it was very cold. He spoke to her through an electronic pass-through. “This area is Clean,” he said. “You want to come inside, you have to be deloused first.”

  Billie blinked. “Deloused?”

  “Chem- and electro-instillation,” he said. He waved at a horizontal cylinder about the size of a coffin on a metal frame against one wall. “All your internal and external flora and fauna get zapped. No stray bacteria allowed. Then you get spray-suited.” He rubbed his leg with one all white hand. “Osmotic, lets your skin breathe air, keeps everything else in—including sweat.”

  That would explain why it was so cold in the room, maybe. “Seems like a lot of trouble.”

  “Regulation sterile technique. Can’t have some wild micro-animal messing up experiment protocols. Even though the UV overheads usually catch any we miss, you never know. If you’re just planning to satisfy idle curiosity, better you should look at it on the holoproj. That’ll save you a lot of B-time.”

  “B-time,” Billie said.

  “As in ‘bidet.’ When all of your intestinal bacteria get fried, it tends to do interesting things to your bowels. After your first delouse treatment, you tend to get a real fulminant diarrhea that lasts about a week. Cuts down on your personal mobility, it does.”

  “Ah. I’m looking for the Artificial Person who came here with us.”

  “The ’droid? He’s in mechlab. They’re molding him for an exobase and walker. Won’t take all that long. I can connect you on the com.”

  Billie thought about it for a moment. “No. That’s okay. I’ll talk to him later.”

  “No problem. You need anything, just ask. I do what I’m ordered, no mistakes.”

  As Billie wandered away, she thought about what the fat man meant by that last remark. It had been another long day. She was tired. All she wanted to do was lie down and sleep.

  No, not sleep. Not with the aliens here to infect her unconscious mind and make it churn out nightmares.

  She had thought the hospital awful. Had feared for what they planned to do to her mind, the chemical lobotomy the medics had decreed.

  Given all that had gone on since she’d escaped, a mind-wipe didn’t sound so bad.

  10

  Wilks saw the man step into the cargo bay, but not who he was—the hangar lights were dim and the ship’s standby lamps were not much brighter. The man looked around.

  “Over here,” Wilks said.

  The man tensed, dropped his hand toward his hip and the handgun clipped there, then froze. He straightened, then moved closer.

  “I thought it might be you,” Wilks said.

  It was Powell.

  “What do you—?” Wilks began.

  Powell gave him a cut wave. Wilks shut up. Watched as the major pulled some kind of electronic sniffer from his belt and touched a control on it. A green LED lit on the little black plastic rectangle. “Okay, clear.”

  “Walls have ears?” Wilks said.

  “And the ceiling has eyes. Everywhere on the base, except in here. Another few days and this ship will be bugged, too.”

  “Spears.”

  “He’s as paranoid as they come. Crazy as a spider on a hot griddle, you know.”

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  “He lives for his scheme of retaking the Earth and being the hero of the millennium. He thinks everybody is out to get him. He runs a poison scan on his food and still makes an orderly taste it first; he sees conspiracies everywhere. In normal times the mindbenders would be lining up to write books about him.”

  “Normal times,” Wilks said. “Been a while since then.”

  Powell nodded. “Yes.” The man paused, sighed, seemed to gather his thoughts. “Maybe we’re beyond reason as a species. Maybe what mankind needs is a sociopathic psychotic killer to match the aliens.” He shook his head.

  “But you don’t believe it,” Wilks said.

  “No. It would be a step backward, a return to the caves. We’re… better than that. We have achieved civilization, the stars. We can’t go back.”

  “Not to defend Spears, but dialogue doesn’t seem to work too well on these things.”

  “I understand that. But the queens are intelligent. They can be communicated with—we’ve done it here. Our queen is cooperating, after a fashion. They want what we want, to survive, to thrive.”

  “If you’re preaching the ‘Brotherhood of Life’ line, Major, you’re wasting your time. I’ve seen my friends slaughtered by these fuckers. I was on Earth just before they nuked a big chunk of it rather than get eaten alive.”

  “I know, I know. I’m not saying we should hug the aliens and expect smiles all around. Sharing the same world with the aliens isn’t likely, they’re too much like we were half a million years ago, too egocentric to think of life forms other than their own. No, I’m not suggesting any such thing. But we are supposed to be intelligent, to be civilized. War is stupid, annihilation of an entire species is barbaric.”

  “Funny, coming from a major in the Colonial Marines.”

  “Not all military men are killers, Sergeant. Neither are all officers automatically savage morons.”

  “Could have fooled me,” Wilks said. But he grinned. Powell was somebody with a conscience, and he was obviously trying to do something here. Wilks wasn’t sure just what, yet, but he had a feeling he was going to find out.

  “They didn’t nuke it, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Earth. Didn’t happen. No major atomics, nothing but tacticals, according to our feeds.”

  “Probably because your friendly neighborhood aliens ate the guy supposed to push the button.”

  Powell shrugged.

  “Okay, so, what’s the scat, Major? Why are you telling me all this and risking your own ass?”

  Powell nodded, and took a deep breath.

  * * *

  The atmosphere plant was never going to produce a surface nitrogen-oxy mix thick enough so unaugmented humans could use it for breathing purposes, unless they crawled in the bottoms of deep craters. True, the planetoid was big enough to hold some gases down with its feeble gravity but the term “terraforming” was something less than exact in this case. Unless you thought of humans as moles or perhaps prairie dogs.

  No, the civilian colony was here because there were a vast number of underground caverns that could be sealed tight, filled with air, and used either as shelter or to grow enough food to sustain a permanent population. Once the tiny world became self-supporting, there were plenty of uses for it: expanded military bases, mining, an escape-proof prison. It was to those ends the terraformers worked. What the atmosphere plant produced was, save for venting, pumped into the ground.

  The stolen crawler approached the plant, slowed. Came to a stop. Inside the small craft the trio of deserters were four days from a bath and out of food.

  “We made it,” Renus said.

  “Yeah, so far,�
�� Magruder added.

  The crawler’s pilot at the moment, Peterson, nibbled at his lip, but said nothing.

  “Radio’s still quiet, ’cept for stray stuff from Third Base,” Renus said.

  “Spears would have them on a war footing, no transmissions—like there’s anybody out there who gives a roach’s ass.”

  “Yeah,” Peterson said, “but we ought to be picking up suitcoms or Doppler or something this close.”

  “This isn’t a place where people go out for a picnic, now, is it, dickhead? They’re all underground.”

  Peterson glared at Renus, looked as if he were going to come up from the seat and take a swing at him.

  “Bury it,” Magruder said. “We made it, that’s the important thing. Spears didn’t even come looking in this direction; we didn’t see any flyovers. We’re home free.”

  “I’ll feel better when I’m inside,” Peterson said. “Be a hell of a lot easier to steal a ride offworld here.”

  “So what are you waiting for?” Renus said. “Move in.”

  The crawler started forward.

  * * *

  In the hold of The American, Powell said, “He’s been feeding the experimental subjects all kinds of chem the scientists say might have some effect on the things. We don’t know if it’s working or not. The body chemistry of these creatures is astounding.”

  Wilks touched the scar on his face without conscious thought. He realized what he was doing, dropped his hand, said, “Yeah. I noticed. Acid blood probably fucks up your basic tranquilizer pretty good.”

  “We’ve done some conditioning exercises with the queen. She doesn’t appear particularly concerned with the fate of individual drones—we’ve killed them and she doesn’t display distress in any way that shows. But if we threaten or destroy any of her eggs, she becomes very agitated.”

  “Fetch the stick or we squash the babies?”

  “Something like that, yes. It seems to work. And the queen controls the drones—we aren’t sure how, some kind of telepathic or extremely low frequency radiopathic waves, something. We—ah—we’ve put a single human subject into a chamber filled with alien drones, given him an egg and a blowtorch with which to threaten it, the queen watching, and none of the aliens touched the man.”

  “Jesus, you’re cold-blooded fuckers.”

  “It wasn’t my idea, Wilks. Spears runs the show here.”

  “Why doesn’t somebody put a bullet into him? Shove a grenade under his bidet?”

  “He has his supporters. And like I said, he’s very careful.”

  Wilks shook his head. “He trust you?”

  “Not really.”

  “But you could put him away. Then you’d be in command.”

  “I’m not a killer, I told you that.”

  “Yeah. Go on,”

  Powell went on.

  * * *

  Billie was in the room they’d issued her, a closet-sized cube big enough for a bed and chair, the sink, shower, and toilet all in a walk-in space inset in one wall. She’d just finished cleaning up. She didn’t want to sleep, but she was so tired she knew it was going to happen soon. One of the medics she’d talked to had given her a tablet he said would help. She wasn’t the only one on the base who had bad dreams, so it seemed.

  She was staring at herself in the tiny mirror over the sink, wondering who this thin, hollow-eyed woman was.

  “Billie?”

  She turned. Mitch.

  They had repaired him, after a fashion. He was held in a bipedal frame by shoulder straps and a wide band across his chest and waist. The platform began where his body ended, and extended into a pair of hydraulic struts, pistons and stainless steel and stressed plastics that terminated in oval pads nothing like human feet. They hadn’t tried very hard to match his proportions—he was about eighteen or twenty centimeters shorter than he’d been with his own body intact, so his hands dangled at the mechanical knees of the legs. Billie’s flash image was of a man who had been stripped of flesh from the waist to his toes, then had his skeleton chrome-plated and hung with cables.

  “So,” he said. “Is it me, you think?”

  The joke fell flat and it broke her heart that he tried it. But if that was how he wanted to play it, she would give it a shot.

  “I think the flitter salesman sold you a demonstrator. You should have held out for next year’s model.”

  The silence began, stretched too long. He broke it, finally. “They don’t have an AP vat-works here, this is the best they can do.” Another moment stretched, a spiderweb made of silken time hit by an insect in slow motion. “You okay?”

  “Now that you ask, no. My homeworld is in ruins, my love life is for shit, I’m stuck on a military base with a guy who thinks he can keep monsters in a kennel like pets. The galaxy is going to hell in a hearse, Mitch, or hadn’t you noticed?”

  She turned away, so she wouldn’t have to look at him.

  “Billie, I’m sorry.”

  “Why? None of it is your fault, except the love life part. In the grand cosmic scheme of things, that doesn’t count for a whole lot anyhow. Forget it.”

  “Billie…”

  “What, Mitch?” She spun around and glared at him. “What are you going to do about it? Did the technicians hide a nice little expandable dick in that thing?” She pointed at the exoframe. “Pump it up and it stays hard all night?”

  He blinked. Raised one hand, started some gesture, then dropped it. Shook his head. Turned and walked away. The quiet whine of the hydraulics grew quieter, the thumps of the pseudopods faded away.

  Billie sighed and it turned into a sob. Oh, man. She’d stepped over the line. Leapt over it like she was wearing rockets. She’d wanted to hurt him and she had. They apparently didn’t teach him how to fight when it came to emotional stuff and she fought dirty, going for the throat. Oh, man. How could she do that?

  How, came the little voice from deep within her mind, how could he make love to you, make you fall in love with him and not tell you he was an android?

  Was there any doubt about whose sin was the greater one here?

  Billie took the tablet the medic had given her, swallowed it dry, and fell on the bed. Pulled the flat and hard pillow over her head. Life was so unfair. What an original thought that was.

  * * *

  With the crawler docked, the three marines exited and found themselves in the antechamber of the air plant. The locks were coded but some helpful civilian had scribbled the admit number over the pad.

  “Christo, what a bunch of fuck-offs,” Renus said.

  “It’s not like they’re gonna get a lot of company out here, now is it?” Magruder said as he punched in the code.

  The inner lock slid open and the three padded inside. Once the door sealed behind them, they removed their helmets.

  “They might not take too well to visitors waving guns,” Peterson said.

  “Yeah, well, until we know which way the hydrogen fuses, I’ll feel a lot better holding on to mine.” He waved his carbine. An armed marine should be worth thirty unarmed civilian air farmers.

  “If they give us any flak, we go to plan B—the shuttle,” Magruder said.

  “Will that thing really get us anywhere else?”

  “It got the farmers here, didn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but who’ll fly it? Not you.” That from Renus.

  “Whoever flew it here,” Magruder said. “We’ll make him a reasonable offer.” He patted his own carbine.

  Peterson snickered.

  The corridor was wide, dark, with high ceilings. The lighting was bad.

  “Spooky in here,” Peterson said. “And hotter than the Devil’s dick, too.”

  “Some side effect of the gas generators,” Magruder said.

  “Who made you an expert on this shit?” Renus said.

  Their footsteps echoed as the trio walked down the corridor.

  “Where the fuck is everybody?” Peterson said.

  “Maybe they’re having a party,” Renu
s said. “An orgy. I sure could use a little pussy right now myself.”

  “Little is right,” Magruder said. “Hell, you couldn’t make a mouse groan.”

  “Hey, fuck you.”

  “Like I said, with what? Way I hear it, you have to rent a microscope to find it when you want to piss.”

  Peterson laughed, and Magruder chuckled at his own joke. They were feeling better, to judge from the banter. They’d made it to safety, the general hadn’t stomped them flat on the way. If the civilians didn’t cooperate, fuck ’em. They could steal their transport and full-wing it to worlds elsewhere.

  “What’s that on the wall?” Peterson said.

  “What? Where?”

  Renus tapped Magruder on the shoulder with his carbine. “Over there, to the left.”

  The three men moved.

  “Why the hell don’t they have any lights in here? Christo, it’s like a tomb.”

  Magruder pulled his flashlight and pointed it at the wall.

  The circle of light thrown by the bright halogen lamp showed a convoluted and ridged overlay on the wall, grayish, like flattened loops of intestine.

  “Some kind of sculpture?” Renus said.

  “Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck!”

  Renus and Magruder turned to look at Peterson. “What?” Magruder demanded.

  “I—it’s—I’ve seen this shit before!”

  “So?”

  “When—when I was on guard duty at the queen’s chamber.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Renus wanted to know.

  “The fucking alien queen’s chamber! This shit is all over the wall in her chamber!”

  Magruder shone his light farther along the corridor’s wall. The stuff continued, spread so it covered the entire wall from the floor to as far up as the light would shine, all the way to the ceiling.

  “Ahh!”

  Both Renus and Magruder spun, their carbines pointed at the third man.

  “What?!”

  Peterson wiped something from his face, a clear, slimy goo.