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

by Steve Perry

  “Thank you, Billie. You don’t know how glad I am to hear that.”

  “No guarantees,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know what exactly is going to come of it.”

  “Anything is better than nothing,” he said.

  She felt uncomfortable. She was still pissed at him, but the idea of dying or of his dying didn’t feel good. Not at all. “Okay, listen, I’ve got to discom. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “You be very careful,” he said. “I don’t want anything to happen to you. I—I—”

  “Don’t say it, Mitch. Not yet.”

  She shut the com down.

  Behind her, Wilks and Powell had begun yelling at each other.

  “Listen,” Wilks said, his voice hard, “get the fucking locks covered! Weld them shut, especially the cargo doors! You don’t know what kind of codebreaking gear Spears might have. He might have access to the mainframe from out there.”

  “Impossible, the system is shielded, the internal modems are hardened—”

  “Dammit, Powell, this man is a soldier, career military, and he suckered us once. If he gets inside and starts blasting, a lot of people are going to die. You didn’t know about the second hopper, did you?”

  Powell’s jaw was set tight, his lips thinned and white, but he shook his head. “No.”

  “You can tape it that he’s got something else up his sleeve. We’re self-sufficient here, all he’s got outside is field rations and gear. If we can keep him outside long enough, we win.”

  Powell blew out a short breath. “All right. I’ll give the order.”

  Wilks nodded. Looked at Billie. Billie didn’t know much about military matters, but it seemed as if the next move was up to Spears. She didn’t like that very much. The man was crazy. There was no telling what he was going to do. All they could do was wait.

  * * *

  In his C-suit, Spears led his platoon along the wall under the sinks toward the East Lock. The traitors would have lost the hopper when it veered north and would probably be expecting an attack from that quarter. True, they probably could have gone in at the North Lock as easily as the East, once the fifth column struck, but Spears was thinking about posterity now. If he could finish this without losing too many of his troops, it would look better to one viewing historical tapes. What an amazing commander, they would say. How adept.

  Spears nodded to himself as he reached the hiding spot next to the East Lock. Nobody knew they were here. He had his demolitions expert set the explosive charges on the lock door itself, stressing great care, using only hand signals and helmet-to-helmet conduction, all radios were off.

  The charges set, his men in readiness, Powell pulled the special transmitter from his tool belt and looked at the covered button. He had not expected it would ever really come to this, but no man would ever be able to say that General Thomas A.W. Spears had been caught with his pants down in this combatsit.

  He flipped the button cover up with his gloved thumb and pressed the control once, hard. Grinned behind his faceplate. Powell and his little band of would-be heroes were about to have something to worry about in there.

  Yes, sir, right now, the security door to the queen’s chamber would be sliding up, along with the protective covers holding twenty-five of the drones captive.

  And a tiny holographic image of Spears would be standing behind the queen, waving a torch in his hand, urging her out of her chamber.

  Spears chuckled, imagining the queen’s surprise. And Powell’s surprise, too.

  “Dinnertime,” Spears said. “Come and get it.”

  18

  “Motherfucker!” a man screamed. Gunfire rattled.

  In the CC, Wilks said, “Powell—?”

  “It’s the guard at the queen’s chamber,” Powell said, touching controls on the monitor. The picture splashed into life in full color, the holoproj of the security cam revealing the guard firing his weapon at something offscreen.

  Powell fiddled with the controls; the view shifted slightly. Revealed the open door.

  “Oh, man!” Wilks said.

  The guard screamed again. The man who had been so nasty to Wilks and Billie when they’d gone to see the chamber.

  A spiked tail shot into sight, impaled the screaming trooper, punched through his chest as easily as a needle pierces thin cloth. The man went slack, his weapon falling. The massive ridged tail snapped like a whip and the man flew out of the frame.

  “Sweet baby Jesus,” Powell said.

  “He’s turned the queen loose,” Wilks said. “Spears.”

  Other reports began flooding in over the opchan.

  The queen had company.

  “Get to the starships,” Wilks said, his face grim. “This base is contaminated. We’re all dead if we stay here.” But at least the son of a bitch’s plan was also shot. He’d play hell rounding up the monsters with the men he had left.

  * * *

  Five minutes after the queen and her brood were set free and encouraged to kill anything in their way, Spears nodded, and the demolitions man blew the hatch. The shaped charge was silent in the absence of air, but the metal of the lock peeled open and the oxy inside spewed out, freezing into powdery white crystals in the cold night.

  “Go!”

  Guards inside began firing, the ones who hadn’t been knocked sprawling by the concussion, at least. Spears’s men had the advantage of surprise, however, and only one of his troops went down before the lock was secured. They were in, the enemy was in disarray, and this mission was going as well as anybody could expect. All the feeds from his men were going into the hopper’s recorder. He would edit them later, for the sake of continuity, of course. He would look heroic enough; after all, he wasn’t an armchair commander, and the record would show him right in the thick of things.

  And he wasn’t done yet, oh, no. Those who had crossed him would regret it, assuming they lived long enough for that thought.

  Inside the inner lock, he motioned for his troops to open their faceplates. “Let’s move,” he said. “Keep your suits patent, they’ll probably try to mess with life support. Go to opchan six, scrambled. No point in radio silence now they know we’re here.” With that, he snapped his own faceplate shut. “Try to keep some of them alive,” he said. “Shoot low.”

  * * *

  Wilks ran, carbine held ready to fire, Billie and Powell right behind him. The station’s battle alarm screeched, a high-low wee-wanh that repeated itself over and over. Red lights flashed at every turning of the hallway, and men and women ran in panic, fleeing something most of them knew about but hadn’t encountered yet.

  Most of the ones who’d encountered the aliens would likely be unable to flee, Wilks knew. Spears had let the goddamned things out, somehow, and they would be in a feeding frenzy, collecting every human they could get their claws on, given what he knew about them.

  Billie had found a portable com and was using it.

  “Mitch! Mitch, answer me! Get out of there, meet us at the ship bay! The aliens are loose! Spears is in the station! Mitch!”

  If Bueller heard her, he wasn’t responding. Wilks didn’t have time to worry about it at the moment.

  An alien lurched out into the hallway from an open door, turned toward the three of them, and opened those hellish jaws. Slime dripped from the teeth in long strings.

  “Fuck you,” Wilks said. He popped the carbine up, found the manual front sight—no time to mess with the laser—and fired a quick burst.

  The armor-piercing rounds smashed the alien’s face, shards of its hard chitin flew, acid sprayed. It fell sideways and backward, hit the wall, slid to the floor.

  The blast of the caseless rounds hit Wilks’s ears like a flat slap from a heavy hand. His ears rang. Damn. Should have put his plugs in. Oh, well. If he lived long enough to worry about growing deaf in his old age, he could deal with that.

  The liquid on the floor bubbled and sent up clouds of stinking smoke as it ate through the treadplate.

  “Watch the
blood, don’t step in it!”

  They ran.

  * * *

  A trooper came around the corner with his weapon up. Spears was the first one to see him. He drew his pistol, brought it up and smacked his gun-hand into the waiting palm of his other hand, hit a classic isosceles stance and fired three times. The technique was called the Mozambique Double Tap, the name having to do with some ancient police action in some African country before space travel. It was a standard pistol procedure: two in the heart, one in the head, always in that order. Spears guessed that it dated from a time when body armor was sometimes hidden under regular clothing and to make certain of a kill, a backup shot was taken at an unprotected target.

  The unfortunate trooper wasn’t wearing armor, so any of the three shots would have been sufficient to kill him.

  As the man fell, Spears felt that sense of triumph, that rush of survival he always got whenever he killed somebody one-on-one. It brought back old memories. All the way from when he’d been a boy and had taken out his first opponent ever—

  * * *

  Tommy hid in the supply closet, among the brooms and vacuum cleaners and fragrant tubs of cleaneze. The granular cleaning compound made his nose itch, made him want to sneeze, but he pinched his nostrils shut so he wouldn’t.

  Outside the dark closet, Jerico Axe prowled the dim hall, looking for Tommy. It was past quench-light, everybody was supposed to be asleep, the adult marines and medicos would be in bed by now, but not Jerico.

  Jerico was a stupid asshole, Tommy knew, but he was a big stupid asshole and he was mean. Tommy had gotten on Jerico’s shit list, he didn’t know how, and now every time the bastard saw him out of an adult’s sight, he would proceed to kick Tommy’s ass. Not that Tommy didn’t fight back, he did, but Jerico had been decanted first, he was older, ten kilos heavier, and six months ahead of Tommy in martial arts skills. Tommy got in a few licks now and then, he’d broken the cocksucker’s nose once, but that had cost a broken arm of his own, plus two teeth had to be reimplanted and fifteen staples over his left eye.

  What Tommy wished was that Jerico would take a hike along the Deep Rim and trip, bouncing all the way to the bottom where he’d rot in the hot sun and not be found until the carrion birds were finished with him.

  Might as well wish for a commission while you’re at it, dickhead, he told himself. Jerico wasn’t that stupid.

  Tommy sat in the closet, hoping Jerico wouldn’t think to look for him in here. He was tired, he wanted to go to bed, to get some rest before drill at dawn, but here he was having to hide to keep from getting pounded.

  Bare feet slapped the floor outside the closet. Jerico had taken his boots off, but he still lumbered like a broken robot, making plenty of noise. Tommy heard the bathroom door creak as the thug went to look for him in there.

  Shit. He would look in here, too. There was no real place to hide, unless he wanted to climb into the cleaneze bag mounted on the roller bin. Sure, if he dug down through the dirty cleaner, crouched real low and buried himself in it, Jerico wouldn’t see him.

  Tommy stood, started to put one leg over the rim of the bag, then stopped. Abruptly a rage filled him, a hot anger that bubbled up through his legs and groin, flooded into his chest, swirled fluidly into his skull.

  Fuck this!

  It wasn’t right! He shouldn’t have to hide from dicklick Jerico Axe, just because he was bigger and stronger and better trained than Tommy. It wasn’t right.

  With only the glows coming from the instrument panels of the cleaning bot parked next to the door, the room was dark, but there was just enough light for Tommy to see the baseboard scraper mounted in the bot’s accessory rack. It was a little over half a meter long, an aluminum rod nearly as thick as Tommy’s wrist, connected to a dull blade set at an angle. The bot used the tool to clean the grit from the baseboards, it looked kind of like a garden hoe somebody had bent crooked.

  Tommy peeled the scraper from the bot’s rack. Hefted it. It was fairly heavy.

  When Jerico opened the door, Tommy was ready.

  The larger boy had time to blink, his eyes going wide, as Tommy jumped and buried the blunt corner of the blade in Jerico’s skull. Hit him just over the right eye. It made a satisfying chunk!

  Jerico screamed—that was nice, too—and stumbled backward across the hall until his back smacked into the far wall. He slid down, tugged the scraper from his head, moaned as the blood poured into his eye. He looked up at Tommy, stunned, as if he couldn’t understand what had happened.

  Tommy moved toward Jerico. “Here, gimme that,” he said. He grabbed the scraper. Jerico let it go. What he thought, Tommy didn’t know, but the fear he had felt, the shame of being afraid, his rage, all combined into something he’d never felt before. He felt a great strength now, a power, at having defeated his enemy.

  “I’m bleeding!”

  “Not for long,” Tommy said.

  He raised the scraper again and moved in.

  Tommy Spears was nine years old the night he killed his first enemy—

  * * *

  “Holy shit!” one of Spears’s marines yelled.

  The general snapped out of his memory fugue and looked past the fallen soldier. Amazing. The entire memory had flashed past, maybe five seconds in realtime, all jammed and compressed like a squeezed data file on a modem squirt.

  One of the alien drones stood there, readying itself to attack.

  Spears stepped forward so an overhead light shone directly down on his face. Saw the alien see him.

  “You know who I am,” he said. He pulled a control from his belt. “And the queen knows what this is.” He waved the transmitter. The floor of the egg room was wired with explosives and this control would set them off. Spears had made sure the queen knew that. Of course, by now, she would have her drones hauling the eggs out, hoping to find a safer place for them, but she wouldn’t have had time to move them all yet, and besides that, she couldn’t know if Spears had wired the whole fucking station so he could blow it all into orbit.

  What the drones saw, the queen knew.

  The drone hissed, then turned and ran the opposite way.

  “Holy shit,” the trooper said again. “It was scared of you!”

  “Damn straight,” Spears said. “With good reason. Let’s go.”

  The platoon never hesitated.

  * * *

  “Powell?”

  “This way” the major said.

  Wilks turned to look at her. “I’m fine,” Billie said, though she was out of breath. “But Mitch—”

  “—tastes bad,” Wilks said. “If he stands still, they’ll walk right past him.”

  “Spears won’t,” Powell said.

  “Thank you, Major.” To Billie, he said, “Look, he knows where we’re going, he’ll do what he can to make sure we make it and then he’ll be along.”

  “I can’t leave him here,” Billie said.

  “Fine. We’ll wait for him. I promise.”

  Billie nodded. It would have to do. She didn’t have a lot of choice. She would have to trust Wilks.

  Somebody screamed behind them, a sound that trailed off into a liquid gurgle.

  “The clock is running, folks.”

  It seemed to Billie that she had been running most of her life. This was not the time nor the place to stop and take stock. “Go,” she said. “I’m right behind you.”

  They went.

  19

  Wilks was not afraid to die. He ran toward what he considered the safest place on this tiny planet, but if he didn’t make it, well, too bad. He’d been living on borrowed time since his first meeting with the aliens, so long ago. What had it been? Twelve, fourteen standard years? Billie had been ten, he’d have to ask her how old she was now. He should have died with his squad then, but he hadn’t, and he’d spent a great deal of drink and chem trying to forget it. Fate hadn’t wanted that, the powers-that-be in the universe, not to mention the Colonial Marines, had thrown it all back into his face. Somewhe
re along the way he had come up with a new purpose: to wipe the aliens out, down to the last drone, the last egg. Getting himself killed here would prevent him from accomplishing his mission, and that bothered him more than dying. Once in his life there had been personal fear, but those days were long gone.

  A few years back during one of his two-week chem binges, Wilks had been picked up in an alley by civilians. He was naked and his ID implants had been fuzzed by the people who’d robbed and then tried to kill him, to keep the authorities from identifying the body. Not knowing he was military, the civilians had stuck him into a medicenter and given him the standard life-support treatment, which included sessions with psychiatric types. It had been a teaching hospital and there were plenty of young medics eager to work with such an obviously depressed patient; surely that unrevised scar on his face bespoke worlds of mental impairment?

  It didn’t take long for them to peg him as a career marine and diagnose his problem. But while waiting for the medical MPs to come and fetch him, they hustled to get as many budding head-benders as they could exposed to him. Chances like this didn’t come along very often.

  In one of these sessions, with an attractive young woman he would have tried to bed under other circumstances, he first heard about the Doc Holliday Syndrome.

  Holliday, it seemed, had been some kind of medical man in the Terran frontier times, a dentist or some such. He developed a fatal and, at the time, incurable illness.

  “So,” the young doctor said, “he packed up, moved to a drier climate, which was supposed to offer some symptomatic comfort for his remaining days, and became a professional gambler and outlaw. He engaged in a number of gunfights, and although he wasn’t a particularly adept shooter, always managed to prevail over his opponents. There is an instance, for example, where M. Holliday fired upon a man inside a public drinking establishment using a period weapon called a six-shooter. He was within seven meters of his opponent, emptied his weapon, and missed entirely. Given that the six-shooter was supposedly accurate to a range of fifty meters in the hand of an expert, this was considered poor marksmanship. He later switched to a weapon called a shotgun, which, I am informed, is dangerous over a somewhat wider area.”