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

by Steve Perry

  Billie sighed. “It’s always something, isn’t it, Wilks? Never boring, being around you.”

  “That’s me. Life of the party.”

  * * *

  In his cabin, Spears laid out his uniform for the initial upcoming battle on Earth. He’d saved one dress uniform, the billed cap with the gold braid and his star, the regulation black silks with his ribbons and medals, the evershine orthoplast over-the-calf boots. He’d wear a belt with his two antique revolvers, and the uniform’s dress sword. Strictly speaking, of course, it wasn’t SOP to wear dress blacks and ceremonial weaponry into a combatsit, but while he was going to be on-scene, he wasn’t going to lead the new troops into battle. No, he would command from the rear this first time, he was too valuable to risk himself in this foray. Too bad. He’d never considered himself a REMF—a rear echelon motherfucker—no armchair commander. But in this case, he would have to forgo the pleasure of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his men when the guns began to speak. He would be the most valuable man on the field not simply because he was the only man on the field, but because if something happened to him the war was over. Only he and the queen could command these soldiers and he could hardly trust her to continue the fight if he were gone.

  No, he would stand back, this once, until he had more troops, more humans to help him. He was, after all, the commanding general of the Colonial Marines now, indeed, commander-in-chief of all military forces. And why not? Once he brought back records of his success, once he showed whoever was left how the job had to be done, who would dare to deny him the rank? And if anybody could be that stupid, a wave of his hand would remove the obstacle. Sic ’em, boys.

  Spears smiled. It was all going so well. Aside from a couple of minor glitches back at Third Base, nothing the historians would linger over unduly, everything had run as smoothly as lube on glass. It was only a matter of days now. All the years of preparation were about to pay off.

  He rehung the uniform, put the sword and boots away.

  He had decided to land in South Africa, a northeastern section of which was once called the Natal province. In the late 1800s, the area had been ruled by a native named Cetshwayo, who commanded a large army of warriors known as the Zulu. They were fierce fighters, the Zulu, and there had been a lot of them, but even so, they’d been no match for the technologically advanced British when it came to war. In one famous battle, a small unit of British soldiers withstood an assault against a vastly superior number of Zulu for some days, due to their better weapons, tactics, and training.

  Spears related to that. A tiny force, well directed and focused stopped an entire army. All things being equal, it was the commanders who decided battles. The aliens were fierce, savage, hard as iron, but they fought like ants. They had not learned the arts of war as had men, and few if any men knew those arts as well as Spears did.

  Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the galaxy, Spears thought. He had his place. His lever flew in the ship behind him. He was so full of anticipation he could hardly breathe.

  27

  “You awake?”

  Billie rolled over on the pad and looked up. She was in her underwear, the room was warm enough so she didn’t need any covers, Wilks stood there, dressed in a spacesuit liner, white stretch that fit him like paint.

  “I am now.”

  “We’re decelerating,” he said.

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Yeah. Time to get dressed for the party, kid.”

  * * *

  Only a week away now, Earth loomed large ahead of Spears. He tried to settle down with a history of the Gladitorial War, but the text did not hold his interest. Over the years he’d forced himself to learn patience, to wait, but it was hard now that he saw the goal so tantalizingly close. Here was the light at the end of the tunnel, the finish line for a race run long and hard. He found himself staring at the image on the viewer and when that wasn’t enough, lifting the outer armor and looking directly at the distant planet through the thick, hardened glass.

  Don’t worry, I’m coming to save you. I’ll be there soon. A few more days and your liberation will begin.

  * * *

  Wilks knew he couldn’t think of everything that might go wrong. And even if he could he didn’t really want to anyhow. If he knew all the pitfalls, he probably wouldn’t go. But hey, fuck it. If you sat around worrying all the time, you’d never get anything done. Get a plan and move on it, that was the way.

  The two of them stood in the lock, mostly suited, carrying what they thought they would need. Strapped to them with cro-tape were extra oxy bottles, their carbines and ammo, all the squirters they could find. They were joined to each other by a three-meter length of cable, connected to lock rings on the hips, his on the right, hers on the left. There wasn’t really any way to judge their relative speed once they left the ship, hell, even while they were on the ship, but Wilks was hoping to move slowly, to make up the two klicks or so in an hour, no faster. They had enough air for three hours and if they hadn’t managed to get inside Spears’s ship by then, well, too bad. Wilks had rigged both suits with grenades from the carbine’s launcher. If he ran out of air, he wasn’t going to choke to death slowly out there. Move a protective cover and a sharp rap with the suit’s pliers and boom, end of story.

  “Billie?”

  She was fiddling with her crotch plate, still unsealed.

  “I can’t get this damned plug in right. Do I have to use it?”

  “Unless you want yellow globules floating up in front of your eyes if you have to pee, yeah.”

  “Doesn’t seem fair to me,” she said. “This operation must have been designed by a man.”

  “Nature of the plumbing, sorry. You need a hand?”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Maybe not,” she said. “If you do that, maybe we won’t get out of here for a while.”

  Well, there it was. Wilks nodded, managed a smile behind his faceplate. So the thought had crossed her mind, too. Made him feel a little better, for some reason he couldn’t quite figure out. Kind of like, well, if they both saw it, they didn’t have to follow up on it.

  Billie returned his smile, and Wilks felt as if she understood what he was thinking.

  “I’ve got it,” she said. “Yee, it’s a cold little devil.”

  “It’ll warm up. You ready?”

  “As I’m going to get, yeah.”

  “Okay. Seal it up and start your air flow. Might as well get this show on the road.”

  * * *

  Billie smiled at Wilks’s back as he moved to the outer door to open the lock. So that’s what all those push-ups were all about. He’d thought about sex, too.

  Maybe in this case the thought was better than the act. Not doing it, but afterward. Somehow the idea of waking up next to Wilks the morning after seemed utterly strange. And maybe what she had felt had something to do with putting her life on the line again. That urge to reproduce yourself when you thought you weren’t going to be around much longer. She’d learned about that in a class at the hospital. It was, so they had said, a common reaction to near-death experiences, especially in sudden and violent confrontations with the grim reaper. Something about releasing stress.

  The hatch slid open. A little flurry of air blew out and turned into white crystalline swirls. Wilks stepped out, used his magnetic boots, and stood on the side of the ship, sticking out like a thorn on a stem. Billie followed him.

  When they were both outside, free of the ship’s faux grav, Wilks turned so that his back faced the distant dot of the other ship. “You okay? Don’t speak, just nod or shake your head.”

  Billie nodded. He’d told her they’d be using line-of-sight laserlight corns, short range and focused in the same direction that the speaker was looking. That was so Spears couldn’t overhear them. If you can see Spears’s ship, Wilks had said, don’t open your mouth, don’t say a word. The coms were supposed to be good for a couple hundred meters, no more, but you never knew. If h
e knew they were out here, it could get real tricky real fast. If she wanted to speak to him, they had to take turns looking away from the Jackson when they did it.

  Wilks clumped along the side of the ship. Without anything to relate to, up and down didn’t have much meaning, and Billie quickly adjusted her mind-set so it seemed she wasn’t walking on the side of the vessel but on top of it.

  It took a couple of minutes to get to the front of the Macarthur. When they were perched on the nose like flies on the end of a banana, Wilks turned around to look at her. “Okay, you remember the drill?”

  Billie nodded.

  “All right. Cut the power to your boots and use the squirter, on three. One… two… three!”

  Billie shut off her magnetics and triggered the squirter. It looked like nothing so much as an indoor plant sprayer; there was a narrow neck with a lever, a kind of handguard loop over that, and underneath, a small thick plastic tank with the compressed gas in it.

  The squirter tried to pull itself out of her hand, but she tightened her grip and stiffened her arm and was lifted clear of the ship. She twisted slightly, saw Wilks pointing behind them, and aimed her squirter that way and depressed the control again.

  The gas made faint sparkles as it spewed and froze.

  It took a little adjustment but after a couple of minutes she and Wilks evened out and flew side by side, the thin coil of line connecting them left a bit slack. He faced forward more than Billie did, but she could shift her head enough inside the suit to peripherally see the ship ahead of them. All too quickly their own ship seemed to drop into the distance behind them, dwindling to the size of a toy model.

  Wilks puffed out a couple of short bursts on the squirter and turned himself so he could speak.

  “Might as well relax and enjoy the ride,” he said.

  Billie nodded. She realized she was breathing too quickly and made an effort to slow that down. It really was something, to be floating along in the middle of nowhere like this, soaring like some magical bird across the bleakness. Whatever else happened, this was truly something.

  * * *

  Unable to sleep and knowing he could not allow himself to become exhausted at this stage of the invasion, Spears used a soporific popper. The medicine felt cold as it blasted through the skin over the crook of his elbow. Within a minute he was feeling drowsy. He decided to fall asleep watching the approaching Earth, now a small half ball lighted on the “top.” That meant the sun was “above” it, relatively speaking, and bright enough even at this distance to cause the polarizers to darken the glass.

  The drug washed over him and he drifted on chemical tides into the doldrums of Morpheus.

  * * *

  Wilks could make out details on the ship; he guessed they were maybe six or seven hundred meters away. He’d already slowed them down twice, and it seemed they were still moving too fast, but now he figured they were either going to make it or they weren’t and fuck it.

  He’d laid it out for Billie that they were going to try for one of the aft locks. His reasoning was that if Spears was forward in the control area, where he ought to be, checking his damned sensors if he heard them coming, then it would take him a minute or two to get from the front of the vessel to the rear. It wasn’t a huge ship, but there wasn’t any reason for him to go aft unless he thought somebody was knocking on the door there and maybe that would buy them enough time. More iffy shit, but hey, there it was.

  Once they got into the ship, if they did, they’d shuck the suits, grab their carbines, and take Spears out.

  That was pretty much as far as Wilks had gotten with his plan. He assumed that Spears was alone, Bueller had seemed to confirm that, but maybe he had company. A bedmate or somebody. They’d look real carefully, if they got that far.

  Still, Wilks was optimistic. They’d gotten this far, hadn’t they? With some pretty good odds against them, they were still alive. Maybe they had a patron god with nothing better to do than watch out for them. Or maybe all the good luck was about to go sour. No way to know, nothing to do but keep on going.

  * * *

  Billie realized as they neared the ship through the void that she wasn’t ever going to get used to this. She had avoided death for what seemed like dozens of times in her life, from Rim until now. Somehow, she expected that she would become acclimated to it, like getting into a soak tub that was a bit too hot. Once you settled in and got still, your body adjusted itself.

  That wasn’t happening here. The rush of adrenaline through her, her rapid heartbeat and too quick breathing, those were the same. Her bowels twisted, her mouth was dry. And it was a good thing Wilks made her put that urinary plug in. It was as if fear had her in its grip and was squeezing her tightly. The closer they got to the ship, the more Billie wanted to turn and run away. Her conscious mind knew they had to do this, but some deep part of her, way beyond the Billie who was usually in control, that part wanted her to find a deep hole and crawl into it. Leave, it said. Flee! Hurry, before it’s too late!

  On the one hand she was more fatalistic about survival; on the other hand she was just as scared of dying. Not the dying itself so much as the way of it. Going to sleep at a hundred ten or twenty, surrounded by your family who loved you, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, that was not so bad. Being eaten by a mindless alien monster or running out of air in space were not such pleasant ways to end one’s short life.

  But there was nothing to be done for it. It was take the risk now and maybe die or for certain die later.

  Wait until later! her inner voice screamed. It’s always better to wait until later!

  * * *

  Spears stood near the new road built by the Royal Engineers at Laswari, the dark earth packed and rutted by the passage of horse-drawn cannon. Sir Arthur turned to him and said, “Well, old man, what do you think? Can we stop the bloody buggers?”

  Spears nodded. Sir Arthur wasn’t yet the Duke of Wellington—how Spears knew he would be wasn’t quite clear—but in the matter of the fight against the Sindhia and Bhonsle families of the Marantha, he knew the Indians would lose.

  “We’ll stop them.”

  “Then let’s have at them, shall we?”

  Sir Arthur waved at his officers, who had been watching him carefully for the signal.

  The cannons opened up, the muskets began to speak.

  God, Spears loved the smell of black powder in the morning.

  The wails of the dying Indians began to float over the battle scene. The screams of one poor soul in particular rose louder, a rapid series of yells, as though the man were screeching, pausing for breath, then repeating the same monotonic noise with machinelike regularity. Aaahh! Aaahh! Aaahh…

  Spears awoke to the sound of the proximity alarm’s intermittent and nerve-jangling wail. In his drugged sleep fog, the sound made no sense to him. He reached out and slapped the shut-off control. Closed his eyes. He had incorporated the sound into his dream…

  Spears struggled against the grip of the chemical urging him back to slumber. The proximity alarm.

  There was nothing threatening through the glass in front of him. Despite all the high-tech gear, that was the first place Spears looked, through the window. Then he began operating the sensor board.

  Nothing showed on the radar or the Doppler screens when he brought them up. But it didn’t take long to get the log showing what the problem was. Two man-sized objects had come to rest aft on the Jackson. A quick extrapolation determined that they had come from the Macarthur.

  As if there were anywhere else they could have come from.

  Well, well. His ship rats had decided to pay him a call. Obviously they were braver than he had figured. Odd, he hadn’t thought any of his troops would have been so—

  Spears grinned. Of course. He knew who they were. That damned sergeant! And since Powell was dead, it had to be the woman with him. Amazing. If in fact this was them again, they had more lives than a cat.

  Spears was glad they were here. This way he co
uld eliminate them without any risk to his cargo.

  Quickly he stood, grabbed the belt with his sidearm, and started aft. He didn’t know how long he’d slept after the proximity alarm had started blaring, but it was long enough for them to arrive on the ship’s hull. Since the locks weren’t coded to keep people out—who would expect visitors in deep space?—then they’d get onboard. He had to kill them before they did any damage—

  He slowed his pace. Hold on a moment. He had to figure they’d be armed, that they knew who was in command of this vessel. If he went barreling in, he might well be shot. That wouldn’t do. He stopped. No, cowboy heroics were not the way to go here. They were pests, he would treat them as such.

  Spears turned around and went back to the operations board. Unlike the Macarthur, he did have control of everything on this vessel. Air, power, even gravity. The rats had walked into a trap, only they didn’t know it yet. Time to roll the recorders again. The military historians of the future would love this.

  28

  “Now what?” Billie said. “Can we get out of these suits?” She had her faceplate open, as did Wilks, so they could talk, but it would only be the work of a second to slap it shut and seal it.

  “No. Because Spears hasn’t come blasting through the door doesn’t mean he doesn’t know we’re here. You can shuck the extra gear but keep your weapon ready.”

  Wilks was already checking his own carbine. The dry lube used in the mechanical part of the weapon was supposed to be more or less impervious to high or low temperatures but he cycled the action and ejected a couple of live rounds to be sure. It wouldn’t do to have the damned thing frozen solid by the cold vac if Spears did show up waving a gun of his own.

  “Okay, mine works,” Billie said.

  “Good.”

  “What now?”

  “Now we wait a little while and see what he does. If he knows we’re here, he’ll do something.”

  “Or maybe he’ll rig another concussion grenade like he did back on the base and wait for us to walk through and trigger it,” she said.