Muller hit the damned thing again, then a third time, and it ignored him too, as it pulled Decker closer, crawling over him. Its tail lashed sideways and slapped Muller in the chest hard enough to send him flying.
Dave reached for his pistol. All Decker could think about was how badly that blood was going to burn him, unless of course the monster got him first. He rolled over as best he could with the thing trying to claw its way up his body. Its mouth opened in what looked like a smile of triumph and the teeth parted, revealing a second mouth that drooled and steamed.
Just as those hellish mouths tried to take off Decker’s face, Dave grabbed at the thing’s tail and hauled it backward. Muller hit it again, this time with a full pack worth of gear. The force was enough to send it sprawling.
“Move!” Manning bellowed, and the mercenaries rolled out of the way, scrambling over seats and diving as far from the thing as they could. Decker pulled into a fetal position, ignoring the flaring pain in his calf as best he could.
A stream of silvery foam washed over the creature, splattering the floor around it and coating its body. It had the consistency of shaving cream, but even from a few feet away Decker could see how it stuck.
Manning kept a stream of the thick foam flowing as the creature fought to get back to its feet. Muller flung his pack as hard as he could and nailed the thing in the chest as it tried to rise. The pack was coated in an instant, and stuck where it hit.
The stream of foam stopped, the canister sputtering empty.
The bug screeched and flailed and tried to throw the pack away. And then it slowed down. More and more, the foam was hardening, sticking to the creature as it tried to get away.
Still the monster tried to reach Decker. It lunged and peeled itself partially from the floor, and pushed and came for him again, the hatred unending, a hellish hammering rage that would never stop until he was dead.
Or it was dead.
Maybe not even then.
Manning walked closer to the thing, dropping the bulky metal canister. It hit the deck with a loud clang and rolled a bit. Manning placed the two prongs of the shock-stick against an exposed part of the creature’s head and hit it with enough volts to kill a man. It screamed and shuddered. It lunged and fell—or tried to. It never made it to the deck. Manning laid on the charge a second time and a third. And then stepped back.
“There’s a cage in the hold. Let’s move fast, before this damn thing wakes up.”
Muller and Dave went to work with unsettling efficiency while Decker panted and stared.
“You’re going to leave it alive?” His voice cracked as he spoke.
Manning’s eyes scanned his face. He was once again like stone, his features unreadable. When he spoke it was with unsettling calm.
“The contract says alive pays better,” he replied. “So we bring it back alive.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“No. This is a job, same as any other.”
Emotion welled up inside of Decker, heating him with raw, primal anger.
“Manning, you’ve got to kill these things! All of them!” He was standing before he thought about it. His calf pulsed with pain but that didn’t matter. He needed to make the man understand. The spider-things on Adams and Elway, the bug that Muller and Dave were putting into a heavy steel case, they had to die.
They had to die now.
Manning shook his head.
“Not happening. Not today.”
Decker looked around, as if searching for something that would convince the man of how serious he was. The thing wanted him dead. It wouldn’t stop. Couldn’t Manning see that? Couldn’t he feel it?
Decker’s heart was hammering away and he was sweating again. This was never going to stop, not as long as any of the creatures were alive. They’d come after him. They’d come after Bethany and Ella and Josh! When the damned things were done with him, they’d still come after his children!
He looked to Elway and felt nothing, but when he looked at Adams there was a flash of regret. Still, it had to happen. They had to die. Those things would come out of them, and the entire goddamn nightmare would start again. They would find him, no matter where he was.
He knew that now.
“Put it down, Decker!” Manning’s voice. He was bellowing. Decker realized then that he had a death grip on something. He looked down and saw the reaper in his fist.
“I can’t,” he said. “They have to be stopped.”
Decker pulled the trigger, Elway and the spider-thing on his face were dead in his sights.
The hammer clicked on an empty chamber. He hadn’t reloaded. That realization came to him at exactly the same time as Manning’s fist smashed into his head.
“… lost your fucking mind!” He tried to shake away the pain, tried to find the words to explain, but before he could so much as wet his too dry lips, Manning’s boot found his stomach.
57
DELIVERIES
Flanked by four security personnel, Andrea Rollins waited patiently as the drop ship’s doors opened. Two of the mercenaries climbed out, their faces drawn. They looked at her and said nothing. A moment later Manning pushed Alan Decker through the walkway and let him fall. Then he disappeared back into the vessel.
Decker couldn’t stand up by himself, as he was bound at the ankles and his wrists were strapped behind his back. She gestured to the two men with her, and they picked him up. He was injured. No real surprise there.
Manning came back a moment later carrying a woman. She was incapacitated and her face was hidden behind a mask of hard flesh and long legs that clutched her skull.
Adams. Her name was Adams. He set her on a gurney.
“How is she?” Rollins asked.
“You need to fix this.” Manning’s voice was as calm as ever.
“We intend to, Mister Manning. I’ve already got the chambers set up to monitor both Ms. Adams and Mister Elway. We’ll take care of them.”
She gestured to the other two men and they immediately entered the ship. They knew what to do. She’d explained very carefully. The two of them carried Elway out as if he were made of glass, and placed him on a gurney.
Manning watched carefully the entire time. Then he pointed to the ship.
“One live specimen. It’s in the cage you provided and it’s glued in place.”
“Excellent work, Mister Manning.”
He looked at the ship and then at her.
“Costly work.”
“We knew that going in, didn’t we?”
“Yeah. We did.”
Rollins looked at the remaining mercenaries. Including Manning and the two hosts, there were a total of five out of the original thirty-five. But that was nothing compared to the loss of life among those who had been stationed at the base below.
“Do you need to rest right away?” she asked. “Or can I bother you to linger for a few more minutes?”
“I’ll survive,” Manning replied.
She smiled. “I just need to take care of a few details, and then we can finish this business.”
He sat down and stared hard at the ground in front of him. He could have been a statue, if he hadn’t breathed.
Rollins took care of arranging the placement of the alien’s cage. It would be locked into cryogenic suspension in a chamber devised for exactly that purpose. There would be no chances taken. Weyland-Yutani had sought these particular creatures for a very long time, and she wasn’t going to allow anything to go wrong.
Nor, frankly, did she much like the idea of anything that violent breaking loose.
When she was done she stood before the commander of the mercenaries and spoke softly.
“Walk with me, Mister Manning.”
He lurched to his feet, and followed as she started to lead.
When they reached the bridge, Manning looked down at New Galveston and the speck far below them that marked the Sea of Sorrows. The flight crew was active, moving about and preparing to leave orbit. The capt
ain, a dark-haired man with dark skin and an equally dark disposition, nodded a perfunctory greeting.
“How bad is it down there, Mister Manning?”
“You can’t let them live. If you do, I can pretty much guarantee they’ll own that planet in a year’s time, perhaps less. The three cities the company put so much money into building will be ghost towns.” He remained stoic as he gave his answer.
“Do you understand now why we warned about heavy losses?”
“Your pet, Decker, tried to kill my people at the end. He was scared that the things planted inside them would get out, I guess.” He paused, and added, “I’m not sure he’s wrong.”
“Well, in his defense that was a possibility. But both of your people are now in hypersleep chambers, and already in stasis.”
Manning nodded. He was silent for a long while.
Finally Rollins interrupted his reverie.
“So you recommend neutralizing the area?”
“Nuke it,” he said without hesitation. “Wipe that mine and everything in there off the map.”
“We’ll take care of it.”
“When?”
Rollins looked toward the captain of the ship. The man peered back at her and nodded his head. She turned back to Manning.
“Does right now suit you?”
“Yes. Right now is your best bet. Those things are smarter than you think.”
Rollins knew better. She knew exactly how smart they were. Judging from everything that had transpired below, they were very nearly the perfect soldiers.
“Captain Cherbourg, please handle the matter.”
The man nodded and spoke into his comm. What he said was too soft for her to hear, but the result was immediate. Four plasma warheads dropped from orbit and headed for the Sea of Sorrows. There was a time and a place for mercy. That time was not now.
The order to clear the area had gone out two days earlier, along with the statement that a viral strain had been located in the mines. No one on New Galveston questioned the instructions. The Sea of Sorrows was designated a hot zone, biologically speaking. It hadn’t been hard to convince the local doctors of the dangers of a pandemic. Every city on the planet was connected by the tube system. The mine wasn’t a part of that system, for which everyone was grateful.
The weapons would annihilate anything in the area to a depth of roughly twenty thousand feet.
“Within the hour the Sea of Sorrows will cease to exist, Mister Manning.”
Manning nodded his head. He seemed perfectly fine with the notion.
“I’m just going to stand here and wait, if that’s all right with you.”
Rollins smiled. “I thought you might like to be here for that. I am sorry for your losses, Mister Manning,”
Manning just looked at her.
“Keep the rest of them alive, Ms. Rollins. And keep your part of the bargain.”
“I always do, Mister Manning.”
She left him there, staring at the small spot that would soon be removed, a cancer on the skin of an otherwise healthy planet. Some tissues had to be cut out in order to be sure the cancer didn’t spread. Manning knew that.
58
PLAGUES
Decker tried breaking through the straps holding him in place, but it was a futile effort.
One of the men tending to his leg had been nice enough to inject him with a sedative that had him calm again. There was that at least.
He did his best to remain calm when Rollins showed up. She asked a few questions just out of his hearing range. One of the medics responded, nodded, and then they left. She pulled over a chair so she could be at eye level with him.
“You’ve been naughty, Mister Decker.”
He looked hard at her and tried to get a reading, anything to let him know how badly he had screwed himself over. Nothing. He might as well have been staring at a wall.
“It was just too much,” he said. “And those things… Those things were after me. Are after me. Do you understand that? They want me dead!” His voice was shaking by the time he was done, and he thought he might lose it, but he pushed that back.
She was a cold bitch. She simply nodded her head while staring into his face.
“I know,” she said. “I know they are. You should know that the entire area is being cleaned. There won’t be any of them left.”
“Except the ones you have onboard now.”
“That’s correct.” She stared at him. He looked away first, and he hated her for that. As if he needed another reason.
“You don’t know how bad it is,” he said. “You don’t understand at all. They’re insatiable.”
“Life is insatiable, Mister Decker.” She smiled thinly. He didn’t like her smile. It made him think of lizards, and her lips reminded him too much of the very creatures they were discussing. “Life fights to exist,” she continued. “Haven’t you realized that? No matter what the universe wants, life insists on surviving. Not just human life. All of it. We’ve encountered diseases on a dozen different worlds, and they’ve been burned away, only to show up in other places. Typhen’s Disorder, Arcturian Klerhaige, the Lansdale Plague. Doesn’t matter what we do, they come back. And they’re not alone.
“Life is persistent. Be grateful for that.”
He remained silent. She didn’t want to understand, and though he couldn’t read a single emotion from her, he knew her type well enough. Nothing he said would change her mind.
Finally he broke the silence.
“So what happens now?”
Rollins patted his restrained hand.
“Despite a few bumps, you kept your part of the bargain, and so will the company. You get your job back. You get your life back. You get a nice bonus as a finder’s fee. We get our prizes, and everybody wins.”
“No,” he replied. “As long as those things are around, everybody loses.”
“You’ll never see them again.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because you’re going back to Earth. They are going elsewhere.” She smiled again. “We’re not that crazy, Mister Decker. You don’t take something like this and drop it into the most populated place imaginable. You study it very carefully in an isolated, controlled environment.”
“What about Adams and Elway?”
She stopped smiling.
“I think that’s enough questions. You’re safe, Mister Decker. Your family is safe. Consider your debt paid.”
“You’re making a mistake,” he said. “I know you think you’re doing the right thing, Miss Rollins, but you’re making a horrible mistake.”
“You should rest now, Mister Decker. We’ll be leaving orbit soon.”
She left the room, and for a while Decker slept.
* * *
He woke up again when they came for him.
The two “escorts” were armed, but needn’t have bothered. He was still restrained, and kept that way until they reached the hypersleep chambers.
Manning was stripped down to his underwear and sitting on the edge of his coffin-like chamber.
“They burned,” he said. “I watched. I doubt there’s anything left down there. Hard to see past the plasma fires, but I think they’re all gone.”
Decker listened without a word. Before he could think of anything to say, Manning continued.
“I know what you were thinking. I get it. But you even think hard about going after any of mine again, and I’ll bury you on seven different worlds.”
Decker didn’t want to look the man in his eyes, but he made himself. He could have thought of a dozen things to say, but instead he just nodded.
Adams deserved better. That was the thing that kept going through his mind. Maybe they’d manage to save her and Elway, but he didn’t think so. Manning was pissed, and Muller and Dave—two men who’d saved his life a couple of times each—were staring at him with murder in their hearts. They were resentful. They felt betrayed.
He couldn’t blame them in the least. His actions at
the end were purely selfish. Screw money and everything else, he was looking after himself and his kids. The mercenaries would never understand that. They weren’t capable of that level of empathy.
One of the men who’d brought him into the chambers took the time to remove the restraints.
The other patted the weapon on his hip. It wasn’t a shock stick.
“Lie back, Mister Decker.” The man wasn’t making a request, and he took the hint. A moment later the lid was descending and Decker took a deep breath, same as he always did, not that it made any difference. The chamber sealed itself, and cold sterile air began cycling over his body.
He closed his eyes and felt the gases change. They weren’t taking any chances with him. He would be asleep and secured long before the ship left orbit.
He inhaled. He exhaled. He inhaled.
He slept.
59
LETTERS HOME
Rollins re-read her communiqué before sending it.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Success
Lorne,
I’m pleased to report what can only be called a resounding success.
In addition to successfully capturing one of the adults alive, we have also procured two separate parasites, already attached to hosts. Though we can’t be completely certain of the maturation cycles, it looks as if both have successfully implanted embryos within the host bodies. Judging from the levels of activity we recorded just before cryogenic suspension I would guess that they are only hours from hatching.
If you look carefully at the two separate files I’ve attached (See: Host One and Host Two), you will note that the two parasites exhibit several differences, in both size and shape. Of special interest, note that Host Two, the female, has attached to her a parasite that seems to have more than one embryo to administer. The embryo that has already been implanted is substantially larger than the implant in Host One, and is structurally different. Judging from the accounts of what the mercenaries encountered planetside, this could very well be a “queen.”
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