Aliens

by Jonathan Maberry

  Hudson pulled out a knife. “You’re gonna love this game.”

  And he was right.

  I think I’m broken, Bishop thought, as he slammed the knife faster and faster between his spread fingers, to Hudson’s crows of delight. For no reason, he remembered Dr. Sasaki’s finger hovering over a data tablet, ready to send him to recycle, and his hand blurred even faster, until even his eyes could barely track it.

  Maybe I’ve always been broken.

  That was all right. It made him… happy.

  RECLAMATION

  BY YVONNE NAVARRO

  The first time Dwayne Hicks saw the woman he would ask to marry him was in the cantina on base, after his graduation from boot camp. He had made a lot of friends in the Colonial Marines, both before and after signing up, and he’d sworn he wouldn’t be like them—hooked up with the first cute face he met (and most definitely not another jarhead) while his plans to explore space on the government’s payroll went down the drain thanks to a ring and a couple of kids.

  Then he saw Rachel Miller fifteen feet away, just as she slammed the point of her Ka-Bar into the table in front of her, right through the hand of the guy who’d run his palm down the curve of her uniformed backside.

  How could he not fall in love with a woman like that?

  * * *

  PFC Rachel Miller became PFC Rachel Miller-Hicks not quite eight weeks later, in a small ceremony in the base chapel. They had their First Sergeant’s approval, with the explicit understanding that there would be no special treatment. A Marine was a Marine, and they would do what they were told. The only concession to their status was they would be stationed together. They each got two rank promotions and spent eleven great months with each other before Rachel’s squad got sent on a mission to investigate a small moon believed to be hiding pirated spacecraft. “No big deal,” she told Hicks. “The ship’s called the Paradox. Two months to get there, a week or two to find out what’s going on and clean it up, two months back. Six months at the most. We got this.”

  * * *

  The first time Hicks got a video message from Rachel was seven weeks in, at the end of her squad’s hypersleep. The grainy black and white image on his screen showed his dark-haired wife with her short hair flattened around her head like a halo—forty-nine days of not moving your head will do that. She looked groggy as she rubbed her face, trying to bring sensation back, and she was the most beautiful thing Hicks had ever seen, even though he was seeing the past—standard transmission time from her locale to Earth was about twelve hours.

  “Hi, baby. Just woke up so I hope this makes sense. We’re five or so days out, Gunny says nothing new came in about the place while we were under. If it’s been quiet all this time, I’m not sure what the big deal is. But hey, I just follow orders. Hoorah.” Rachel stopped and rubbed her face again, then grinned at the vid-camera. “Glad I don’t grow hair on my face. The rest of these guys look like scraggly apes. I’ll send another message tomorrow. Love you.”

  He couldn’t answer her, but her messages to him came in like they were on a timer, and if they weren’t exactly exciting, they were reassuring in their sameness:

  “Hi, baby. Nothing new on the moon front, just that bare piece of rock getting closer in the view screen and us doing prep. Like mama always said, no news is good news, right? Out until tomorrow. Love you.”

  There wasn’t much for an E-3 in the Corps to do at night other than drink and raise hell, but although Hicks had a long way to go before he became an old married man, he did want to be home each night when Rachel’s transmission finally came through. His evenings became as routine as his wife’s were somewhere in the vastness of space: his duty day ended, he ate a plate or two of unidentifiable slop at the mess hall, then he went home. There he shucked his uniform, showered, and sat in front of the television until the com program chimed. On this particular Tuesday evening, he wasn’t expecting anything different. Of course, when you’re least expecting it is when the shit always falls out of nowhere.

  “Hi, baby. Gunny says this has to be quick. We’re down on the surface—been here for about five hours, I guess—but we haven’t found anything yet. We have a location lock on a ship’s beacon, but it’s another sixty klicks. Not sure if it’s a valid vessel or pirated, but I guess we’ll find out.” The Rachel onscreen tonight was geared up and rolling in full kit: helmet, body armor, eye gear, weapons. Hicks didn’t know why the sight suddenly unnerved him; after all, he’d trained with her countless times and he knew she was capable of taking care of herself and kicking major ass. And—this made him grin—don’t forget the first time he’d set eyes on her.

  On the screen, Rachel looked over her shoulder, as if making sure no one else was within earshot. Her image vibrated with the ship’s movement. “There’s something hinky about this place. I can’t put my finger on it but I can tell the others are feeling it, too. Not much here but rocks and small mountains, no atmosphere, so it’s not like anything alive is out there. But sometimes the shadows look… I don’t know. Funny, like they move just out of the corner of your eye as we pass.” Suddenly she laughed. “Listen to me, right? I sound like a baby. First time jitters, that’s all.” She looked over her shoulder again, and this time Hicks heard someone else speak, although he couldn’t make out the words. “Okay, gotta go. We’re getting close to the mark. Love you.”

  The screen flickered out and for the first time in all these transmissions, Hicks heard himself whisper back, “Love you, too.”

  * * *

  The last message came the next night. By military standards, it was late (if you’re early, you’re on time; if you’re on time, you’re late) and Hicks had been waiting for it, pacing in front of a silent television because he couldn’t stand the mindless babble coming out of the actors’ mouths—every word seemed to cut into his already tattered nerves. The truth was he’d been walking the rounds in the small living room for almost an hour, way before Rachel’s nightly transmission.

  “But sometimes the shadows look… I don’t know. Funny, like they move just out of the corner of your eye as we pass.”

  He couldn’t get those words out of his mind and he wasn’t buying into her comment about it being initial mission jitters—Rachel wasn’t like that. She was always the first one to react in an emergency. Even if it was just training, she was the coolest head and the steadiest hand, made the best decisions. Her brain would calculate the solution, her green eyes would focus on whatever steps were needed to do it, and that was it—mission accomplished. There was no reason to think that wouldn’t be the case here. Except…

  “But sometimes the shadows look… I don’t know… Funny, like they move just out of the corner of your eye as we pass.”

  The coms chimed and Hicks jerked around and stared at the computer across the room. Then he was there and clicking on the icon, leaning forward as if that could make him better able to hear his wife.

  “Just a quick one, Dwayne. I shouldn’t be taking the time to make this recording and Gunny’ll have my ass if he catches me, but I don’t care. We’re under attack by some kind of alien. We can’t get a full sighting so we don’t have enough info to feed into the database and identify it. We think it’s black—hell, everything around here is black—and big. We’re shooting at shadows and sometimes we hear these crazy screaming sounds, but other than that… nothing. The sensors show motion all around us but we can’t pinpoint anything. We sent out a two-man forward patrol but that was an hour ago and we haven’t gotten a single thing back from them.”

  Suddenly gunfire erupted somewhere off-screen. Rachel stood and swung her pulse rifle into position as someone, a man, first yelled, then screamed. Hicks had never heard such a sound in real life—it sounded like the Marine was being burned alive. Another noise cut over it all, a shrieking that Hicks felt in his ears like nails being dragged across an old-fashioned chalkboard. It made him pull in and hunch in front of his computer, and he couldn’t imagine what it was like in real-time. His w
ife’s rifle fired once, twice, a half dozen times; he could see her uniformed back and the way the rifle punched into her body each time. Abruptly she turned and her hands scrabbled for the keyboard. “We’re under attack. I’ll—”

  Something huge and dark rolled across the view of the camera and Rachel leapt away. There was more gunfire, an impossible amount, more shouts, more screams, then…

  Nothing.

  Hicks watched helplessly, fists clenched, waiting, hoping, praying for it to be over and for his wife to return to the recording console. A minute, then two, three, more—

  A hand, bruised and splotched with black-looking blood, flashed into view. Hicks had time to register the Claddagh wedding band that matched his own before Rachel slammed her hand onto the SEND button.

  That was the last time Dwayne Hicks ever heard from his wife.

  * * *

  FIVE YEARS LATER

  Someone hadn’t been paying attention.

  Corporal Dwayne Hicks stared at the orders that had just come through, thinking that it was just too good to be true and shit like this never happened in real life. Some admin PFC’s stupid mistake? Undoubtedly. Coincidence? Maybe. Destiny?

  Fucking-A.

  His memories of the night of her last transmission were fragmented at best, crystalline at worse. When the transmission had stopped, he had careened out of his apartment with his phone plastered to his ear, alternately crying and shouting at his First Sergeant as he cut a madman’s route with his car to his headquarters. Then there were calls and conferences and video conferences, an endless array of bullshit that did nothing to fix the fact that all contact with Rachel and her entire squad had ceased, and there was no distress call, no ship’s locator beacon, there was nothing.

  Ever.

  Again.

  PFC Rachel Miller-Hicks, along with the Gunnery Sergeant in charge, two Corporals, and eight more PFCs, were officially listed as MIA. The brass in the Colonial Marine Corps flapped their lips and the memorandums were written, higher and higher up the chain, until the issue stopped somewhere and just stayed there. After all, it wasn’t the first ship the Corps had lost and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. It had been sent to investigate pirating, and the final ruling was that the crew had been hijacked and the ship likely brought down by superior firepower; its locator beacon had been disabled as it was stripped of useable parts. The crew was presumed dead but until the required seven years had passed, they would remain MIA.

  Hicks had lost track of how many emails and vid-messages he’d sent trying to find out why Rachel’s death—and he had no doubt she was dead—hadn’t been investigated. He didn’t need to know what had happened, because he had seen it… and so had dozens of other higher-ups in the Corps. He’d been told to let it go, that while the Corps wasn’t suggesting his wife or the other members of that crew weren’t important, it was too risky and expensive to go after the corpses and the remains of a ship that far from the border of the Core Territories. When he’d demanded to know why they’d sent Rachel’s squad in the first place, the response had always been the same bullshit: “That’s on a need to know basis.” His sarcastic responses about needing to know had gotten him three NJPs for insubordination; his First Sergeant had saved his ass each time, but the last one had been just that—the last. “You’ve hit your three times the charm, Hicks. Yeah, it’s fucked up what happened but I don’t have any answers for you. I know you won’t forget it but now you just gotta deal and move on.”

  That had been eight months ago and Hicks had taken the man’s advice to let it ride… on the outside. On the inside, beneath his I-don’t-give-a-shit expression and calm blue eyes, he seethed. And now…

  He stared at the orders again.

  The letter and number of the destination meant nothing to him other than he knew it by heart because he’d seen it on so much paperwork and it was four parsecs on the other side of Beta Trianguli Australis. The mission objective was to recover equipment abandoned on a previous operation; he wasn’t surprised to see there was no mention of bodies, the date of the first mission, or names. That was a screw-up and a good thing—had the names of the MIA crew not been left off, the database crosscheck would have eighty-sixed him from being a part of it and he would’ve never known they were going back. The departure date was eight days from now, and if you were a family man that wasn’t much lead time considering the length of the deployment. But Hicks wasn’t a family man; the potential for that had been stolen from him when his wife had been killed by someone—or something—in the same place these orders were sending him.

  Eight days felt like a lifetime.

  Hicks wished they were leaving tomorrow.

  * * *

  Dwayne Hicks woke up from hypersleep with his dead wife’s image in his mind and the skin of his lips stuck together. He forced his mouth open and discovered his tongue tasted like leftover chicken skin after it’d been in the garbage for a week. Every joint and muscle in his body fought his efforts to sit up, but it wasn’t the first time he’d been through this.

  Around him the other members of his squad were waking up with the predictable swear words and groans while the Gunnery Sergeant, a burly man by the name of Maxwell—Gunny Max—who had iron gray flattop, was already in uniform and working the command console. Everyone in this crew was new to Hicks and their ship was a medium-sized reclamation rig retro-fitted for speed. It had gotten them to mission and in landing position in a little over five weeks—travel time had improved since Rachel had made this, her final trip.

  “Let’s go, boys and girls,” boomed Gunny as he stood and came over to pace in front of the sleeping pods. “Get your ass going and your blood flowing. Gonna set this bucket down on the surface in fifty-eight minutes and counting.”

  PFC Schmid hooked one leg over the edge of her pod and looked up muzzily as she scratched at her tousled dark hair. “No flyby first, Gunny?”

  “Time is money and the Corps is tighter than the high school bikini you don’t fit into anymore, Schmid.” He flashed a toothy grin.

  “The hell I don’t,” she countered, but she was already on her feet and swinging open her footlocker.

  Maxwell fixed his gaze on Hicks. “Call roll,” he ordered. “Make sure everyone came out of hypersleep in working order and gets something fast to eat. Then suit up.”

  Before Hicks could reply, PFC Laff cut in. “A shower—”

  “That’s funny, Laff,” snapped Maxwell. Someone—Vernon?—choked, trying to hide a chuckle. “Take a shower next month. We got a job to do.”

  “You heard Gunny,” Lance Corporal Horsley said quickly. “You’re down to fifty-six minutes.”

  “Respond when I call your name,” Hicks said in a voice loud enough to be heard down to the end of the sleeping area. He yanked up his pants with one hand and pulled a clipboard from his footlocker with the other. “And you’d better be bleeding out before you tell me you can’t be ready in time.” He began going down the list of names as he finished dressing. “Trexler.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Laff, I already know you’re fine. Addison.”

  “Here.”

  “I got you, Schmid. Strand?”

  “Yep.”

  “Kneezuh.”

  A good-looking blonde jerked her head in his direction, her blue eyes flashing. “It’s pronounced Nez,” she said sharply. Then she added, “Sir.”

  Hicks grinned to himself. He always appreciated people who stood up for themselves. “Right.” He ran down the rest of the names—“Knight, DePerte, Vernon, Hagerty”—and got responses from each. By then all were rummaging in their footlockers and focused on the upcoming landing.

  “Weapons?” asked Hagerty.

  “Absolutely,” responded Hicks. He shot a sideways glance at Gunny, but his superior didn’t contradict him. “Always.”

  * * *

  So far Hicks had done a badass job of hiding his emotions, but when the ship actually settled onto the bleak, dusty surface of the moon
where Rachel had said her last words, he felt his heart rate triple, not just in his chest but in his temples—that place where at his angriest, he could always pick up the thud thud thud of his racing pulse. He actively inhaled, trying to calm his nerves, but he wasn’t into that meditation crap and this was just too big, too important—

  Gunny’s voice ground through his helmet’s speaker. “Hicks, what’s up with you? Your vitals are through the roof.”

  “Just excited to be in the Corp, Gunny,” he answered. “An adventure every day, every hour.”

  “Very funny. You gonna pass out on me?”

  “Not this year.”

  Gunny didn’t respond but Hicks swore he could feel the tough old man’s gaze across the com waves.

  “Airlock is tight,” PFC DePerte said on the main channel. “Rear hatch opening in five, four, three, two, one.”

  The steamy sound of hydraulics filled everyone’s coms as the ship’s oversized rear hatch opened. The retrofit had made it wide enough to accommodate two drop ships side by side, in addition to lining the loading area with enough light to power a small town. The problem with that was no one could see jack past the line of illumination; there was brightness, then there was blackness.

  “Why here?” PFC Knight suddenly asked. “What’s out there?”

  “Time’ll tell,” quipped Strand. “We—”

  “Metal.” Even over the com, PFC Addison’s alto voice came across as vibrant. A striking and tall African-American woman, Hicks thought she was more suited to being an actress than a jarhead. That opinion notwithstanding, he wouldn’t want to face off with her in a fight. “I did a scan for near-vicinity metal and hit triple cherries. It picked up something that’s either big or in a whole lot of pieces.”

  “Could be a ship,” Vernon put in. “That’s what we’re after, right?”

  “Not much history on this mission,” Nezuh said. “But it seems pretty obvious we’re after whatever we can salvage after a crash. The question is how long ago did it happen?”