Miss Campbell was curled in one corner of the square room, between a desk and a cot.
“Come on, we have to go—now!” Amotz demanded.
“What’s happening?” Daniel asked, calm and clear-eyed.
“I have to get you to your daddy, okay? He wanted to come, but I gave him a job to do so he had to do it, understand?” She took his hand firmly in her free one, toeing the door back open and scanning the hall. “Take Miss Campbell’s hand too.”
“No,” the aide said dully.
Amotz barely glanced at her, preoccupied with setting herself up for a sprint. “Fine, don’t take his hand.”
“I’m not going out there.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
Campbell hugged her knees to her chest, burying her face against them. “I’m not going,” came her muffled whimper.
“Look, I’m not in the habit of convincing people to do what I say. I give orders, marines follow them, it’s as simple as that.”
“I’m not a—”
“I know. So you get to choose: come with me, or die here.”
A long pause followed. Come on, Amotz silently urged, get up! I can’t save you if you aren’t willing to be saved!
“I’ll… I’ll just wait here. Someone will come.”
“I came. No one else is about to.”
Campbell looked up, her gaze unfocussed, voice steady. “I said no!”
Amotz wasn’t going to treat her like a child. Maybe a person with less sense and a bigger savior complex would have forced her on her feet, but not the General. She knew you couldn’t make a flailing man swim, and you couldn’t make a grown woman choose a death-push over hiding. Amotz respected that. But she also had an obligation to Daniel. They couldn’t hesitate any longer.
Hell, maybe Campbell was right. Maybe someone else would rescue her. Amotz could only hope.
She squeezed Daniel’s hand tighter. “You ready, kid?”
His wide eyes locked with hers as he nodded, looking half his age and twice as delicate.
“Don’t let go of my hand, no matter what else you do, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Ready? We’re going to run real fast. You let me know if you see any critters, okay?” She took a deep, cleansing breath. “Three… two… one!”
Daniel stumbled almost as soon as they were out the door. She yanked him up by the arm, half dragging him along, but she could see that this wasn’t going to work.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” he gasped immediately, eyes watering. Amotz was sure Campbell hadn’t explained to him what the sirens were for, but the kid wasn’t stupid. He knew bad shit was going down. He was trembling and trying to hurry, but it wasn’t enough.
“Hey, I’ve got an idea!” she said. “Can you hold on tight if I give you a piggy-back ride?” He was too big to carry on her hip, and she needed her hands free for the rifle.
He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Yeah.”
“Good. Up then.” She crouched for him.
They weren’t more than two meters away from the door, were moving too slow and making too much noise. Three facehuggers rounded a corner, sneaking out from beneath a flap of brittle plastic—two tailless wonders and one fully-functioning baby maker.
“Quicker, Daniel! Quick! Hold on! Hide your face! Whatever you do, don’t look up. Head down!” She rose to her feet before he was fully in place, and his little shoes scrambled against her sides. “Hold on. Hold as tight as you can!”
The ’huggers legs stuttered against the pipes of the ceiling, tapping out a harsher staccato pattern the closer they came.
Amotz got her hands fixed on her weapon at the same time Daniel stopped squirming. She fired in rapid succession, taking all three out. Acid dribbled onto the deck as though from a leaky faucet, while the alien corpses still clung to the ceiling.
She skirted her way around it. The boy bounced against her back as they ran, and his forearm cut tight across her throat, making it difficult to breathe.
But their pace was good. They could make it. One hall down, then two. A few more corners and they were halfway to home.
“Hang on, kid!” she choked out, trying to sound as reassuring as possible.
Her breaths came high and tight, and a half-sizzle half-roar swelled in her ears—whether it was her veins throbbing or a side effect of hyperventilating, she couldn’t say. The bow in her spine ached, and her knees wobbled, but she knew she could make it. She could keep putting one foot in front of the other and get Daniel to safety.
She came to the last corner, around which lay the lab-hall and the final stretch to the docking bay.
“Almost the—” The elation died on her lips as she skidded to a halt.
At the far end of the hall, wires and flex-pipes dangled out of the ceiling like vines in a titanium jungle. They swayed to and fro with the movement of dozens of facehuggers skittering up and down the ridged surfaces. Coolant leaked from several pipe-ends, forming a pool below that was quickly covering over with a temperature-induced haze. Most of the bugs were neutered, but a handful of healthy ’huggers climbed up and down the “vines” in double-time, walking over their siblings, using them as surer footing.
They created a curtain that spanned the entire width of the hall.
They know! Somehow those breeding, parasitic bastards know this is our escape route.
“Remember what I said, Daniel. Don’t look up.”
Amotz thought back to when they’d first arrived. She’d taken a cursory glance at the layout of the station. Were there any other completed portions that led to the bay? Any at all?
Maybe. Yes. There was one, I think. It’s a long way around, but—
But what other choice did she have?
Pivoting on her heel, her boots squeaking against the grates, she rounded the corner again—
And gasped.
“What’s happening?” Daniel demanded.
The hall was coated in facehuggers. It was three-hundred-and-sixty degrees of writhing, pale forms, all hurrying in her direction. Collectively, they gave the impression of a giant, gulping throat ready to swallow her down.
So many.
Too many.
“You gotta trust me, kid. Please trust me.”
He nodded against the back of her neck.
She spun again, sprinting for the vines.
The curtain of facehuggers quivered, excited shivers of anticipation coursing through them in communal delight. One of the breeders swayed, rocking the flexible pipe back and forth before it tensed, flinging itself at her like a rock from a sling.
Biting out, yelling behind her clenched teeth, she fired. She shot the sucker out of the sky, and kept firing. She blew hole after hole into the mass of dangling station-innards net, still running full force.
By the time her firearm was empty, a fall of acid and wire-scraps rained down across the floor, eating away the deck and creating a dangerous chasm. As the bits and pieces of the broken creatures that still clung near the ceiling oozed more acid, the hole grew wider. The gap in the floor stretched to eight feet across, then broadened to ten.
This is gonna hurt so—
Dropping the rifle, she swung Daniel off her back, swiveling his arms around her neck so she could clutch him to her chest instead. She kept sprinting. Another few steps and she’d have to dive or fall.
Three… two… one.
Her boot slipped on the liquidized floor, tripping her, stealing her momentum as she sailed over the gap. Acid sprinkled her back, searing her spine, burning her muscles from the outside just as panic and rush had burned them from within.
At the last moment she gave Daniel and extra shove, violently propelling him to the other side of the hole.
The edge of the melted floor struck her squarely in the midriff. Dregs of acid that still remained on the metal tore at her stomach, but she hooked her fingers into the grooves of the flooring grates and pulled, hauling herself onto steady ground.
Mind fogged,
body aching, skin sizzling, all she wanted to do was stay where she was. To rest. For it to be over now. Shock tried to overtake her. There was too much pain in too many places. She shut her eyes.
But then there were hands on her shoulders and neck. Small hands and big hands. Shouts. Demands. Something like, “Hurry, hurry, they’re coming!”
It was Ribar, and the ship pilot.
“Come on, get up!” Ribar demanded, his son now in his arms. “They’re still coming!”
Amotz felt like all she could do was crawl. Now that the kid was safe, everything seemed worth it. They could leave her and she’d—
He slapped her face, right across her new acid-scars. “Damn it, General! It’s my job to keep you alive and I haven’t failed yet!”
One more push. You can do it. You’re a goddamned General in the US Colonial Marine Corp. You can get up off your ass and stay alive.
She accepted the pilot’s hand, struggling to get up. Her legs didn’t want to work anymore. Acid on the back of her knees had burnt out the joints.
Ribar leant a hand, helping to drag her.
The skittering of facehugger feet drew closer and louder, nearly drowning out the emergency siren.
The bay door opened just as the first alien attempted to leap across the chasm. It landed stealthily on the other side. Five, ten, twenty followed.
Amotz kicked her useless legs, trying to gain some purchase, trying to go faster.
Daniel made it through the door, then Ribar, then the pilot. Ribar started closing the doors before the General’s legs were through it. If the doors closed on her legs, they’d jam, and the facehuggers would have a way in.
The order for them to leave her was on the tip of her tongue. Run, go! I’m already dead, you don’t have to die! Ribar had tried. She couldn’t ask for more. He’d done his damned job.
A ’hugger grabbed her boot. The beginning of the horde had reached her. She registered the sharp crack of Ribar’s service pistol firing long before she noticed the hole in her foot. Hell, what was one more bit of flesh gone? What was one more—?
Her body got tired of fighting. Tired of consciousness.
She blacked out.
* * *
When she came to, the half-constructed space station was in their rear window. Her ears rang with the new silence, and her body felt light. She’d been laid out on a surgical table. White bandages covered nearly every inch of her from head to toe. Every bit of her was numb. Whatever drugs they’d given her were damned strong and, she had to admit, damned effective.
Ribar sat nearby with Daniel on his lap. Both of the boy’s arms were bandaged from where the acid had caught him when they dove.
“We didn’t think you were gonna make it,” Ribar admitted to her.
“Neither did I.”
“So much for our ‘quick tour,’ eh? I would guess that we’ll no longer be endorsing the Company’s new construction techniques.”
She managed a dry chuckle. “Yeah. And you know what else? I’m never going on a milk run again.”
Ribar smiled. “No kidding. How are you feeling, General?”
She pursed her lips and set her jaw. She felt fuzzy, spacey, mad at the world, and very much like she knew too intimately how hotdog meat was made. She was glad to be alive, but also a little tired of actually having to be alive. She felt so many things at once, she couldn’t pick one.
Amotz shrugged, let out a little sigh, and said, “I’m fine.”
She wondered what a lie detector would make of that.
DEEP BLACK
BY JONATHAN MABERRY
We came in low and fast, using the storm to hide us. Lightning crackled us and heavy winds tried to knock us down, but Lulu was on the stick and she could pilot a falling star through hell itself.
Was it a good landing?
No, but we didn’t die, so put it in the win category.
I wanted to bring a full platoon with me, but during the mission briefing it was determined that a three-man team had a better chance than a platoon or even a squad. What they called a low-impact intrusion for surveillance and intelligence gathering with potential for targeted response. Typical military action-report language that basically meant we had to go in, see what was what, and either come out with intel or pull some triggers. No possible estimates of the risk levels because we didn’t know what we were dealing with.
Fiorina “Fury” 161 wasn’t our world. It didn’t belong to the suits at Weyland-Yutani. Not anymore. Long time ago it had been a mining facility run by a W-T private prison firm, with the inmates doing hard labor mining raw minerals—mostly lead and iron—and then smelting, forming and shipping it off-world. When they found lead on seven hundred asteroids and dwarf planets, all of which had lower gravity and therefore less cost to put product into orbit, the big world-based mines got shut down. The Fury miners were mostly shipped out, but a group elected to stay. A bunch of religious assholes who’d found Jesus and wanted to wait for Jesus on a rock that was as close to salvation as a pimple on the Devil’s taint. For some reason that made sense to them, but they were double-X losers so don’t look too close at the logic or you’ll hurt yourself.
After W-T dropped its claim, Fury fell even farther off the public radar. The lease expired. No one gave a boiled shit about it.
Until an escape pod crashed there ten years ago. That never made the news feeds. No sir. That was need to know and most people didn’t need to know. The Company did, of course, but only select groups within it.
I never heard of it before last Tuesday. Not a word, not a peep. Until I needed to know.
I’d just brought my team in from a dirty little job on a dirty little floating lab orbiting a planet where the NeoNorse religious fruitcakes were building a new kind of hyperspeed torpedo for use against mercantile transports. Why they thought Odin would care about interstellar trade is beyond me. I was told to shut them down and we shut them all the way down. Didn’t lose a man—or woman, for that matter—but we rained down hell on them. Good practice for some of my greener shooters, because the NeoNorse were pretty tough.
Not tough enough.
We got to the way station expecting a three-day pass and a serious assault on the alcohol stores, but they were waiting for us with orders. Go to Fury 161 and find out who had landed at the old mine and turned on the lights.
No one knew who was there.
All we knew is that it wasn’t us.
So, fuck it.
We shipped out on a Starslip F-430. Yeah, one of the new ones. Looks exactly like a bullet. Big, blunt, ugly, fast. They loaded us into a launch platform and pulled the trigger.
When we woke up we were in orbit over the target.
* * *
Four people on the ship.
Three of us and a pilot.
Pilot was a synthetic named Sid who looked like my mother in guy’s clothing. Not intended, just happened that way. Sid wasn’t one of the chatty kind. He drove the boat, handled the wake-up call from hypersleep and handled the post-transit briefing. I was first on deck and had to answer the usual questions after waking up, just to make sure my brain hadn’t turned to iced decaf.
“Name?” asked Sid.
“Alyn Harper.”
“Rank?”
“Master Sergeant, United States Colonial Marine Corps Force Recon.”
Went through the rest. Serial numbers, mother’s maiden name, first pet.
Lulu Hoops and Bax Patel came out next. Both E5 sergeants; both old friends. We’d all walked through the Valley of the Shadow more times than I could count. Reliable, steady, lethal as fuck. Bax was the nice one—as far as that goes; Lulu was nasty as shit. They were our version of good cop/bad cop, but when it got real they were both marines, which meant they took zero shit from anyone on the wrong side of the line.
I’d picked them because we’d worked three-man gigs enough times to be halfway psychic with one another. Not really, but the way soldiers are. There’s a thing that happens when people wit
h the right training and enough practical experience can read each other with perfect clarity. A glance is a whole conversation. You know them all the way down to the marrow and you’ve been in so many dicey situations that you are one hundred percent positive you can trust them. Gets to the point where even in a firefight we’re all so aware of each other that we’re handing over a fresh magazine before the guy next to us fires his last round. Like that.
Once we’d shaken off the effects of the four-week in-flight sleep, we clustered around Sid and he briefed us on the latest intel. Our ship was in a wide and irregular orbit, making use of all the orbiting space junk left over from the mining days. The Starslip was the latest generation of stealth tactical craft, so unless someone knew how to look for us all they’d see is more junk among the junk.
“Certain elements of the mission have been marked restricted until we established orbit,” explained Sid. “Here’s what we know…”
And he told us the real backstory to the crashed escape pod. The story didn’t start on Fury. It started long before I was born. It started with a mining ship called the Nostromo and it involved a horror-show alien species, a true Xenomorph. Sid told us about the only survivor of that ship, a flight officer named Lieutenant Ellen Ripley, a nobody who managed, somehow, to survive an encounter with a uniquely aggressive species. That was how Sid described it. Uniquely aggressive. I saw Lulu and Bax swap looks. We hadn’t heard any of this shit.
Sid told us about Ripley destroying her ship after all of the crew had been killed and escaping in a life pod. He told us about Ripley being in hypersleep for fifty-seven years, about her getting found by a deep salvage team, about her being kicked to the curb by the Company because no one believed her insane story—especially after she blew up her ship. And then how the colony on Acheron LV-426 went dark, which is the exomoon of Calpamos where Ripley’s team had first encountered the Xenomorphs.
Then Sid told us the part that made my balls want to climb up inside my chest cavity. A team of Colonial Marines had been sent by W-T to Acheron to assess the situation. And, let’s face it, to obtain the Xenomorphs. The bioweapons division guys must have been creaming their jeans at the thought of what they could do with one of those. But everything went to shit. By the time the expeditionary force got there the colonists were dead and the monsters were off the chain. Everyone died except one marine—a corporal named Hicks—a little girl who was the last surviving colonist, and—no shit—Ellen Ripley. And she nuked the whole atmosphere processing plant and turned a good chunk of that planet into a glow-in-the-dark back porch of Hell.