“Something on your mind, Mister Decker?”
“You never said anything about the ship,” he said. “Why keep it from me?”
“We thought we’d give you a little time to adjust to your new… circumstances.” Which he took to mean, “We didn’t want you to freak out, and try anything stupid.” But he didn’t say any of the things he wanted to say.
“If this goes right, then what do I get out of it?” he continued. “Monetarily, that is. I mean, aside from not getting screwed in a court of law.”
She looked surprised, but the expression was fleeting. He was speaking her language.
“I’ll look into the details,” she said. “As long as you deliver, I’m sure we can arrange something, shall we say, suitably generous.”
He nodded, and turned to follow the mercenaries. As far as he was concerned, they were better company.
12
DESCENT
There was nothing fun about free-fall in a drop ship. Discussing it during many late night drinking sessions with Rand and the rest of the old crew, Decker had realized that his aversion came down to a lack of control. He didn’t like having his life in the hands of someone he didn’t know.
And that was what you did every time you hit the atmosphere and rode the air currents through the gravitational pull of a planet, all the while hoping the pilot of the deathtrap you were riding would be capable of landing safely.
So he had a white-knuckle grip on the handholds on either side of his seat. He wasn’t alone. Several of the mercenaries were looking pretty green, and broadcasting nervousness that added layers to his own feelings of edginess. Knowing the cause helped, but he couldn’t exactly ask them to calm down.
Adams sat across from him, and seemed unfazed. Dave, the man who never seemed to have anything to say, sat to her left. She stuck her foot out, reached across the narrow space between them, and tapped at Decker’s boot. He looked her way, and she winked.
“Pritchett likes to shake things up,” she said.
“He the pilot?”
“Yeah.”
“Remind me to kick his ass, will you?”
Adams chuckled, and next to her one of the guys groaned.
“Get in line,” the groaner said. “I’m gonna gut the bastard one of these days.” The name on his fatigues said “Piotrowicz.” He was lean and hard and scruffy. The Colonials would have likely kept him shaved and showered, but being a “freelancer,” he chose to look like a sheepdog.
Decker remembered the name, and repressed an instinct to hold a grudge. Piotrowicz was one of the kidnappers.
“Petey threatens to gut everyone,” Adams said. “He thinks it’s charming.” She shook her head. “It’s not.”
Piotrowicz shot her a one-fingered salute. She punched him playfully in the arm. Though apparently “playfully” was different among the mercenaries, because she hit him hard enough to bruise, and both of them laughed.
The entire ship bounced and rattled and lurched hard to the right. Piotrowicz groaned again, and given their first meeting, Decker couldn’t muster much sympathy. Manning looked toward the pilot’s cabin as if he was considering heading up there and breaking heads. He might have, too, but it would have meant risking bouncing across the cabin. Instead he reached for the radio he already had strapped to his shoulder.
“What the fuck are you doing, Pritchett?” he demanded.
“Got turbulence, boss,” was the tinny reply.
“No shit, man,” Manning said. “What, are you trying to find it?” He grimaced as the whole thing rumbled and rolled again. “I think you might have missed some there.”
“Bad atmospheric storms. I didn’t find them, they found us.”
Decker didn’t like the sound of that. He remembered the New Galveston weather being sedate at the worst of times. It had rained, true, but not often in the daylight hours. That might mean they were heading down at night—which bothered him even more.
Some things see better in the dark. He scowled at the thought. He didn’t need to do that to himself. He had enough crap going on in his head. Too much.
A few moments later the worst of the turbulence faded, and the people around him relaxed a bit. Piotrowicz shook his head.
“Seriously. I need to mess him up.”
“Well, he said there were storms,” Decker offered.
“Just seems like, no matter where we go, he finds the worst weather. No one’s that unlucky all the time.”
“Yeah?” Adams elbowed her neighbor with less force than she’d punched him. “Then how do you explain your love life?”
Before Piotrowicz could respond, the ship veered sharply and then slowed its descent.
“How’s the weather, Pritchett?” Manning sounded annoyed. He looked it, too.
Decker was okay with that.
“Weather looks good, chief. But there might be a problem.”
“What sort of problem?” The head mercenary’s frown deepened, and his craggy face looked like stone.
“I’m not getting any responses to my hails.”
“Think it’s the storm?”
“Negatory. I’m picking up commercial signals, but I’m not getting anything from the site where we’re landing.”
“Maybe your weather did in their communications.”
“Yeah, about that,” came the response. “There wasn’t exactly a storm.” Pritchett sounded guilty.
Adams chuckled. Muller waved a fist in the air, but he grinned as he did it. Dave said nothing.
Piotrowicz mumbled something murderous.
“We’ll discuss that later,” Manning said. “For right now, just get us landed, and let’s see what we find.”
* * *
Pritchett put them down gently, and they did, indeed, land at night. As they disembarked, the air was pleasantly cool, if a bit damp. It had been raining and the Sea of Sorrows was a leveled playing field of darkness.
Several people came out to meet them. Among them was Lucas Rand, whose bulldog face fell into a slack look of shock, and then lit up with a fierce smile. Before Decker could do much of anything, the heavy man had him in a bear hug, and was lifting him easily off the ground.
“Good to see you, brother!”
Alan felt a wash of affection run through him. He hadn’t realized how much he liked the other man until he saw him again. They had always worked well together, but sometimes Decker forgot that. He tended toward forgetting anything but the work, on most occasions. It was easier that way.
The mercenaries made a few snide comments, but Decker ignored them for the moment and walked with his friend.
“What the hell’s been going on around here, Luke?”
“You name it, it’s been happening, man.” He shook his head and pointed at a dark patch on the long run of sand. A silhouette clearly defined the edges of a Quonset hut, illuminated by a few ground lights, and nothing more. “Remember the trimonite? It wasn’t a fluke. There was a lot of it. Apparently it’s a really rich vein, and even though you kind of pissed off a lot of people, your report led the company right back to the mine they used to have here. As soon as we went down, we found the old shafts.
“They’ve already started to bring it up. The processing will have to take place off-planet, of course—too many toxins.”
“You found the original mine shafts?”
The tunnels are dark to them…
“Yeah, but your guess is as good as mine where they lead,” Rand replied. “Apparently there was some sort of collapse, and they decided the mine wasn’t viable. The next thing you know, the records got buried.” Decker had his doubts about that—it was too convenient. “The boys from Weyland-Yutani claim they didn’t even know they had a mine here, until you fingered them for negligence.” Luke looked at him askance. “How’s that working out for you? Any time I heard from them, they sounded pretty pissed off.”
“We’re… coming to an agreement.” He couldn’t tell Rand the truth. Telling the truth had already cost him too
much. No way he was going to add anyone else to the collateral damage.
“Good.” Rand smiled. “To be honest, they’ve been pretty cool about all of this. I mean, finder’s fees and the whole thing.”
“Finder’s fees?”
“Yeah. We’re being kept on as consultants. Well, some of us. A few of the team have already moved on, but the people with the technical skills have been hired on as subcontractors.”
Decker looked at his friend and frowned. That didn’t sound right. Before he could comment, however, Manning bellowed for his attention. He turned to look back at the main group, and the leader of the mercs gestured for him.
“We have a meeting, Mister Decker,” he said. “If it fits into your busy schedule. Let’s get this done!”
* * *
Ten minutes later they were settled in a prefabricated hangar large enough to park several different heavy loaders and drills. Most of the area was filled with silent, hulking machinery, but a corner had been set up with tables, chairs and a coffee machine.
Thank God, Decker thought as he made a beeline for it.
The mercs loaded their cups before the discussion began. The group included all of the mercenaries, several of the men with whom he’d worked on the colonization project, and a number of the mining staff.
A Weyland-Yutani company man named Willis looked everyone over and nodded, apparently satisfied. He had the air of a bureaucrat with a side of dictator—a little short, a little round at the hips and desperately trying to cover up a growing bald patch on the top of his head.
“Rollins gave me a full recap of what she’d discussed with you, but the information she had was dated,” he said, addressing the newcomers. “We’ve resumed our mining operations. Earlier today we made some new discoveries at the dig site and the location of the buried vessel.”
He waited a few seconds, during which time Adams settled herself to Decker’s right and took a swig of her coffee. He tried not to be obvious as he glanced over at her.
“So here’s the situation,” Willis continued. “Near as we can figure out, we were wrong on our initial beliefs regarding the ship and its occupants.”
“What do you mean?” The question came from one of the mercs, a hulking brute named Krezel, with dusty brown hair and a mustache that would have shamed a walrus. He shut up as soon as he spoke, skewered by a look from Manning.
“Well, initially we believed that the ship must have crash landed on the planet a long while back. We’re talking upwards of a thousand years, though it’s hard to say. Before the colonization began, there were a lot of violent storms, and according to the Terraforming Survey Team, there’s a very strong possibility that heavy tectonic shifts occurred regularly, back in the day.” Nothing surprising there, since Decker had taken part in the writing of that report.
“So it might be a few hundred years, or it might be a thousand. Whatever the case, the further we dig, the more it looks as if the ship was in the process of taking off when it crashed.”
Manning spoke up this time. “Taking off from where?”
“Hard to say, but there’s evidence that there might have been a settlement here—possibly even a fully functioning base of some sort.” He smiled tightly. “That means that the technologies we were hoping to find might be substantially more extensive than we’d originally hoped.” He paused to look around, taking in the entire group. “So you can expect a heightened level of security.
“And depending on what you find, you might also expect substantially larger bonuses, as well.”
Before anyone had the opportunity to respond, Willis continued.
“Effective immediately, no one goes to town. No one takes the trucks or the rails. All communications are in full lockdown. We’re talking a find that may be bigger than anything we’ve run across since first contact with the Arcturians.”
Chatter erupted throughout the group, and Decker felt a sudden wave of excitement that washed over him like a wave. The Arcturians had been the first alien race mankind had encountered, and those initial meetings had marked a turning point for the human race. Especially for commercial entities like Weyland-Yutani. Research and development had burgeoned, and most of the company’s holdings had been invested in developing new technologies.
The intensity of their reactions surprised him—euphoria mixed with unmistakable greed. Apparently several people were expecting to get very rich off of this expedition.
Decker shook his head to clear it of the incoming emotions.
“That’s probably a bad idea—cutting ourselves off from the rest of the planet,” he said. “If we encounter any living creatures down there, from what I’ve been able to tell, they’re not going to welcome us with open arms. Things could go very wrong, very fast, and we won’t have any backup.”
A couple of the mercenaries snorted their derision, and Rollins turned toward him.
“That’s why we’ve brought this very capable group of freelancers, Mister Decker,” she said, playing to the crowd. “We have every confidence that they will be up to the task, and deal with every eventuality.”
The mercs echoed her confidence, and he fell silent. Willis spoke up again.
“So it’s business as usual tomorrow, everyone,” he said to the miners. “But before anyone goes anywhere that hasn’t yet been explored, Mister Manning and his team go in to examine everything. Steer clear, and give them room to do their jobs.”
That yielded more reactions, and not all of them were happy. Decker made a conscious effort to shut down the sensations—it was a little like closing his eyes until he was squinting. The feelings were still there, but not as intense.
Rand was looking at him and frowning. Decker didn’t need to read minds to understand that his friend was wondering how much he knew. But neither of them spoke—there would be time later.
Maybe.
The group broke into clusters, the largest of which gathered around Willis. A few of the more disgruntled men and women—all mining staff and subcontractors—were pressing him for information. A few voices were raised, and he held up his hands in the attempt to quiet them down.
As he digested what had been said, he found his mind wandering. Like most people, he was fascinated by the concept of alien species. As the human race moved further and further out among the stars, new colonies proliferated, and provided him his bread and butter. But he had never encountered evidence of extraterrestrials—not on his own.
And now, even if he failed to locate anything that was alive, he would get to see the remains of an alien vessel first hand. As exciting as the prospect might be, it also filled him with dread.
Strong fingers clutch the soft face that chokes and exhales in desperation. Decker tried to shake the thought away. Not fingers. Legs. Not hands, something worse.
As if she had been reading his mind, Adams leaned in and spoke to him.
“I’ve never seen anything alien,” she said. “This should be amazing.”
“I sure as hell hope so.” He knew he should sound more enthusiastic, but the sensation wouldn’t go away.
Darkness, teeth, a low hissing sound and the scrabble of claws. The images wouldn’t stop, flashes that made no sense, that came from somewhere else and tried to make themselves at home in his mind.
It was the old feeling, back again—that something was out there and looking for him. Not just for prey, but for him in particular. He shook his head and focused, but nothing changed.
It must have been written on his face, too. The look Adams cast his way wasn’t subtle.
“Wow, Decker. You need to get laid as badly as me.”
That did the trick. For a moment, at least, the idea of being stalked faded from his mind.
“That an invitation?” he asked. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Adams eyed him silently for a moment. One eyebrow went up.
“Tell you what,” she said. “Buy me a drink, and we’ll talk.”
13
FOR LOVE OF MONEY
Rand watched the mercenaries heading for the dig site.
Decker was with them. Alan Decker, the man he’d sold out. Guilt was an ugly thing, and it was certainly doing ugly things to him while he watched his friend, heading toward the Quonset hut with a battalion of some of the scariest people he’d ever seen.
Marines were bad.
Mercenaries were worse. Mercenaries didn’t have to follow the rules.
Rand thought about that, and felt his stomach do a few back flips. If Decker knew about what he’d done—how he’d sold him out for a profit—well, there might be a little extra money in the pockets of a few mercenaries.
Yeah, Rand thought, he’d better watch his step, as long as they were around.
The Sea of Sorrows was an awful lot of sand, and there were places down below where a body could disappear. He’d learned about a few of them when he was hired on by Weyland-Yutani, as a consultant. Rand knew things about the company. The difference between him and his friend was that he was smart enough to not report the things he knew.
And what did that get him? A nice retirement package, and a few opportunities to make even more money.
Andrea Rollins was somewhere in orbit over the planet. He knew that. He knew that because she had been responsible for his current employment. And because the last time she’d been around—after Decker’s accident got him taken away—she’d asked him to assist her. First, by pointing a finger when the time came, and second, by placing a few additional pieces of equipment around the mines when he was inspecting the site for “environmental issues.”
He didn’t ask what the devices were. He didn’t need to know.
Rollins knew about the mines. Well, not true. She knew that there had been mines in the past. She knew where they were because of the message Rand had sent her, shortly after Decker’s mishap. One man’s misfortune was another man’s opportunity. He had never once wished ill toward Decker. He just didn’t let his friendship stop him when the time came to further his own personal goals.
And there it was, that little dig of guilt that twisted his guts around and around.
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