The reaction was immediate. The bugs turned their full attention on Manning, and moved to block him from having another clear shot.
“Damned if you aren’t right again.” Manning fired at the closest bug, and it whipped back and away, narrowly missing becoming another victim. “Now tell me what good that does us.”
“You’re the fucking tactician,” Decker replied. “You tell me!” He could feel them clearly moving toward the area from different directions.
“There’s more of the damn things coming from the main corridor,” Decker added. “They’re going to block us in here.”
“Then let’s open a path,” Manning shouted. “Twelve o’clock, people—give it all you’ve got.”
Manning opened fire, and the rest of his team did the same, concentrating on the ones in front of them, trying to clear a path. When the bugs came too close, Manning shot another of the victims, hanging on the wall. Instantly the creatures shifted toward that spot, as if driven purely by instinct.
Using that method the mercs began to move.
“I don’t like this. It stinks of a setup.” Bridges spoke and drew his pistol with his free hand. The shocker zapped attackers on his right, and the pistol kicked and boomed from the left. Another bug died.
And then one was on him before he could say anything more. It dropped from above and landed on the big man’s shoulders, biting into the back of his neck and ripping its claws down the length of his body. He fell hard, and did not get back up.
The bug climbed off of him and scuttled toward Decker, keeping low to the ground. Adams fired and missed, and then ducked out of the thing’s way as it came on. Decker let out a bellow and swung his baton at the glistening black face. The hard metal rod broke the thing’s head open, but that wasn’t enough. It kept coming, teeth bared and secondary teeth snapping as they dashed for him.
Someone pulled a trigger and the thing blew up, spraying a mist of its blood across Decker’s left hand and chest. He wiped the burning viscera from his hand and then frantically pulled at the vest. The pain was enough to cast aside the numbing effects of whatever Adams had injected him with.
No one helped him. They couldn’t afford to. Manning pushed forward and the things cleared out of his way, letting him go. Everyone who could do so followed, one by one stepping over Bridges’ corpse as they moved.
From behind them came new sounds, the noises of more of the things coming their way. There was nowhere to move but forward.
Decker pushed past the dead mercenary and the web of living and dead miners. He wasn’t the only one close to panic. He could feel it coming from several sources now, and much as he wanted to ignore it, he could not.
The pain in his hand grew worse, and he wiped it again and again on his pants, trying to remove it. But even with the acid wiped away, the enraged nerve endings did not care.
The creatures in front of them kept backing up, and Manning fired on one that wasn’t fast enough. Several of the mercenaries were facing behind the group now, keeping their eyes on the way they’d come in case any of the damned things appeared. They would, too. No one doubted it.
One of the miners hanging from the wall bucked and twitched, and a moment later there was blood flowing down his chest. As they watched, something writhed there, and they could see the vague form of one of the creatures, its face pressing against skin and cloth alike.
Adams brushed Decker aside as he stared, and pumped a single round of plasma into the miner’s chest. The human host didn’t react. The parasitic thing in her chest let loose a weak yowl of pain, and Decker knew in that instant that she’d killed it.
The reaction from the bugs was immediate. They attacked en masse, the ones from the corridor coming in fast and prepared to kill every last person. One of the mercenaries called out a warning and threw something at the seething tide of dark chitin. A moment later an explosion tore the things apart. Many of the pursuers were shredded by the impact, but a few came out mostly intact, and continued on.
One by one, the freelancers blew them away.
Up ahead the narrow corridor within the silicon hall opened into a larger area, and when he reached it, Manning stopped dead.
“Everyone!” he shouted, a new edge to his voice. “Get in here now, and bring the plasma!”
Even before he caught up Decker, too, froze in place. The rest came fast, moving around him. But he couldn’t do it—wouldn’t take another step. He couldn’t yet see what had stopped Manning, but he felt it. Felt the rage, so much brighter than anything he had felt before, so clearly defined. He did not see it, but he knew it. Knew it from the worst of his nightmares, the dark places he didn’t want to remember.
The bugs were bad, but this thing?
This thing would be worse.
A noise came from that chamber, and it was vile. A deep, throaty hiss combined with a high-pitched squeal that screamed stay away! The sound dug at his senses and pushed into his brain and it was more than just a noise. There was something past the five senses in that screech.
But then the sound changed, and the new note almost sounded like the growl of a predator.
The thing knew he was close and it wanted him. It wanted him very badly.
Behind him more of the bugs were coming, moving along the ground and crawling over their dead brethren. Slipping along the walls and the ceiling above, lean and hungry. For a brief moment he blocked out the obscenity beyond the next wall. He let his survival instinct drive him toward Manning, and the rest of the mercenaries and their weapons.
Once he was past that final barrier, the pursuers seemed to stop, as if unwilling to carry the fight any further. And he saw why.
He saw his every nightmare given form.
45
MOTHER-OF-SPIDERS
Vast, ovular masses rose from the ground, wreathed in a low-lying mist that had no right to exist in a mine. He did not know if the shapes created that mist, or if it came from the abomination behind them.
It was so large, so vast, that he almost thought it had to actually be a construct—the cathedral where the demons worshipped. In his nightmares he had dreamed of spiders, but that had been driven by the limits of human experience. The thing had spidery aspects, yes, but was alien beyond comprehension. Massive limbs held the body upright. Vast legs spread above the main body, spreading far and wide, and braced the thing in mid-air.
If the body was the cathedral, then surely the vast head of the beast was the altar. There was a vulgar symmetry to it, a deadly, graceful shape that drew the eyes toward the mouth, where the lips peeled back and bared crystalline teeth that gleamed within that maw.
The great head of the beast turned as he entered the cavernous space and though he again saw nothing like eyes, he felt it looking at him, sensed the probing fingers of the thing’s mind. If the rage of the bugs was a crawling heat, then the hatred emanating from this great beast was a swarming mass of fire burning into his mind.
He was aware of motion around him, but he could barely hope to comprehend the things going on at the corners of his eyes. He was too fixated on the thing that shuffled slowly to get a better view of him. It could not go far. The vast body was locked in place by a huge abdomen that writhed and heaved and pumped of its own accord, and vomited another glistening lump to the ground.
Lump. He felt himself edging toward hysterical laughter. Lump. That was rich. That was priceless!
Decker broke away from looking at the monster for a moment, because he had to share the joke.
“That’s their mother,” he said to Manning, and Adams, and the rest. “She’s laying eggs. All around us. Those are fucking eggs.” And the worst of it? He didn’t think she was the only one. He couldn’t see the others, but he felt a distant glimmer, an echo of what came from her in different places beneath the Sea of Sorrows. There was more than one of these great nightmares.
Not one of the mercenaries paid him the least bit of attention. They were transfixed by the monster. So he looked away from Ada
ms, away from Manning and the rest, and stared at the eggs themselves. There were things moving in them, and some of the oval shapes were jittering as the crests at their tops split open.
Nightmares crept from those eggs.
They were not like the bugs or the great mother of all bugs. They were a different sort of demon entirely. These things did not hate him, did not care about him. They had one agenda that mattered, one desire that was brilliant and cold and horrifying.
“Facehuggers,” the files from Weyland-Yutani called them. His mind screamed that they were spiders, the source of his recent arachnophobia. He knew what they wanted. Knew what they did, and that made the sight of them all the worse.
Decker stepped back and his back hit the wall. He tried to push his way through that unmoving surface, and was rebuked for his efforts.
“Oh, fuck me,” he muttered.
One of the things scuttled across the ground and jumped, jumped, and even as it moved, the great monster behind the vast array of eggs let out a roar that shook through human and rock alike. Without fail they all looked—there was no choice really.
Long white legs like impossible fingers spread from the arachnoid body and a vast, thick tail whipped with deadly accuracy. Decker tried to reach Adams in time, but he failed. He lunged even as the thing wrapped its limbs around her face and that tail bullwhipped around her neck as tight as a noose.
Adams dropped her rifle, reaching for the thing on her face. Clawing at it.
Even as she did, another of the damned things jumped for Manning. He fired and the body exploded, washing across the ground and his lower legs as its remains pattered down.
The mercenary started to burn. He reached for the knife on his belt and pulled it free, rapidly cutting at his pants, sawing through the tough fabric. But Decker hardly noticed.
Adams!
Decker looked at the woman on the ground, fighting to free herself from the thing wrapped around her face. Odd bladders on the sides of the creature quivered and flapped and Adams bucked, her fingers failing to get any sort of purchase worth noticing.
He felt the horror she felt, lancing into his senses. A great, suffocating repulsion flowed from her, an utter inability to breathe, carried along the tide of her fear and violation.
The great mother of all nightmares let loose another roar.
The mercenaries didn’t come to Adams’s aid. Nor did they help Manning. Instead they opened fire on the enormous thing that screamed for their deaths. Explosive rounds and streams of bullets blasted into the shape, cracking through the thick hide and shattering chitinous armor. The mother-spider-beast reared back, almost shocked by the audacity of the tiny creatures that dared attack her. He was hit by the monster’s surprise. She was meant to be worshipped. She was meant to be a queen and a goddess and mother to all.
Decker could feel that from her mind, if it could be called that.
The bloated demon shrieked and roared, and behind them the bugs reacted. There was no hesitation. There was no delay. She commanded and they obeyed, utterly willing to throw themselves between her and the enemies. They charged toward Decker and the freelancers and he did the only thing he could think of. He grabbed the plasma rifle from the ground in front of Adams and fired at the first of the things that got too close.
A tiny sun burned the air and missed the intended target. Instead the light cut through the surface of one of the eggs and lit the interior as the crab-thing inside it caught fire and boiled within its shell.
The queen lunged forward and snapped her face toward Decker. She glared at him and the heat of her hatred opened wide.
* * *
Images plowed through him, sent, he knew, by the thing that loomed above him. Ellen Ripley’s face flashed in his mind, distorted by the Xenomorph’s utterly inhuman senses. It saw but not with eyes as he understood them. It tasted and felt and heard, but none of those words were quite enough to show the differences.
In his dreams he had tried to interpret the minds of the Xenomorphs. Here, this close to the queen of the hellish things, the images were unfiltered, raw and painful.
He saw, and as much as he could, he understood. They were connected in ways that humans had often sought, yet failed to achieve. They were a colony, a hive. They shared thoughts on levels that people could not, and he was a part of that now. They had touched his psyche and marked him through his bloodline.
Ellen Ripley was marked in their minds. She was the Destroyer and because of their relationship, Decker too was the Destroyer.
He shut his thoughts down to the alien thing, terrified that somehow it might manage to learn of his children.
* * *
The great demoness screeched, her breath washing over his face. Decker aimed and fired, and missed.
All around him the mercenaries did a better job. Most of them took on the things that were closing in on them, but a couple—Manning among them, despite the burns now visible on his bared skin—attacked the largest of the creatures that were surging forward.
Decker fired again and again, and he found his mojo. Streaks of light ripped from the front of the rifle and buried themselves in targets. Three of the eggs exploded. He changed targets rapidly as the mother screeched and snapped at him. But he did not fire at her. He could not make himself look at her because seeing her made her too real, and his mind already wanted to go running away.
So he looked past her head and to her body, at the swollen collection of eggs she carried within her. And that was where he concentrated his fire.
Knowing his intent, her rage boiled over. The great beast broke free and lunged toward him pulling herself across the floor of the chamber, moving over her eggs in an effort to stop him.
Manning and the remaining four mercenaries kept firing, hitting her with round after round of destruction. Her body broke. Her face shattered. The great crest above her mouth split in two places and bled more acids that burned the soil, yet did nothing to the eggs it touched.
She roared and lurched forward again, reaching for Decker. He did not step back, however, and he prepared himself for death. He needn’t have bothered. The great shape writhed and crashed to the ground. Even so, Manning didn’t let up. He unloaded every shell he had into the still form, and then reloaded with the efficiency afforded only to longtime shooters.
For one long moment the bugs remained motionless, as their mother-queen collapsed. And then they went mad.
Decker did the only thing he could. He aimed and he fired. All around him the mercenaries did the same, as the tide of monsters swept forward. They attacked. They fought. And one by one they were dying. There was nowhere to go, no way to escape from them.
There was only the fight, as the horrors from his dreams came forth to drown them all.
46
Their rage could burn no brighter, but their sorrow was bottomless.
The enemy had killed the queen and he had to be stopped but instinct and hatred do not always mix. The feeling rose hotter and brighter and much as they wanted revenge, there were the breeders to consider. Without breeders the colony would die, and that could not happen.
Several of them fought instinct and defended against the invaders, attacking the enemy and the ones that sought to protect him. As if to prove their instincts right those that tried to attack were killed. Their deaths did not matter. The only death that mattered was the death of the queen. The only survival that mattered was that of the colony.
The breeders had to be saved and so they worked quickly, lifting the eggs, pulling them from the ground and moving with the heavy burdens, seeking another spot away from the flames of the enemy.
The queen was dead.
The colony would live.
47
FALLING
Pritchett called several times for permission to land, and had no luck.
Barring combat scenarios, he wasn’t used to landing without permission. He didn’t like not getting confirmation, because that sort of shit led to paperwork. Neverthe
less, he knew where to go. He dropped from the sky and very carefully settled on the hard surface of the landing pad. The black sands had covered most of the markings, and they were revealed again as thrusters stabilized the ship and then slowed the descent to a crawl before he felt the great bulk come to a stop.
He made sure to do everything by the book, from checking the atmosphere and weather conditions to powering down into standby mode. No chance in hell was he giving Rollins an excuse to be pissed at him.
The engine went into sleep mode, and the lights dimmed appropriately.
No one came to greet him when he touched down. It was creepy. The damned place was too big not to have someone on duty, and by now they should have repaired whatever was wrong with their communications.
Looking out the window he could see the rain coming down, and guessed that might be a part of it, but it wasn’t like they were dealing with a hurricane. Still, no one showed up. So he settled himself in his seat. For now he got to play the waiting game while the people around him continued with their mission.
He tried using several different frequencies to catch up with the others, but nothing came back. When that failed, much as he hated the notion, Pritchett called on his boss.
“Safely landed down here,” he told Rollins over the comm. “It’s just a matter of waiting now.” At first there was silence, making him wonder if she had heard him. Then she responded.
“Keep yourself prepared, Mister Pritchett,” she said. “The situation has heated up substantially.”
What the hell does that mean? He didn’t ask how she knew what was happening on the surface, and below the surface. He really didn’t want to know. He just wanted this done.
He wasn’t the sort to give in to superstitious ideas, but he had a very bad feeling about the whole situation.
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