Had there been a third? Or fourth?
How many had come down to Fury with Ripley, Hicks and the girl? How many had survived the crash? How many had escaped into the frozen wasteland of this world?
Was that what the Chinese worked out? Had they come here in the hopes of finding something that wasn’t on board the lifeboat, but which had escaped from it?
That handprint seemed to be a mocking, ironic statement. It told us that everyone involved in this op was stupid. Suicidally stupid. Even knowing what we knew about these creatures, we had underestimated them. Time and time again. On the Nostromo, on Acheron. On the Sulaco. On Fury 161.
Mistakes every step of the way, because civilizations as technologically advanced as ours make those kinds of mistakes. What do they call it? Hubris? Something like that. Us thinking we’re smarter than Nature, and when has that ever been the case? We should have learned that lesson in the twenty-first century when all those diseases they thought they’d beaten came back because people used antibiotics the wrong way. What was the death toll in the 2020s and 2030s? Sixty-five million? Something like that. The same for the first Mars colonies, when they thought they’d be able to do workarounds to the problems of radiation and bacteria in the ice there. I visited the graveyard once. Out of the first fifty colonists they sent, forty-eight of them died of cancer or infections from unknown bacteria.
We’re fucking idiots. A lot of the time.
“What’s the call, boss?” asked Bax, but I didn’t answer right away. Instead I looked from that open door up to the clouds. Our mission was to secure the location but to also secure any and all biological samples.
Of this?
“Jesus Christ,” I said, and the others cut me sharp looks.
I kept my gun pointing at the line of darkness between door and hatch.
“I want you to listen to me,” I said very softly. And I told them exactly what I’d been thinking. All of it. They stood their ground and listened.
“We’re not on the policy level, boss,” said Bax.
“I know.”
“We’re here to do a job,” said Lulu.
“I know.”
Deep inside the ship we heard a sound. A single human scream. Of pain. Of use and a terrible resignation, as if something was being done to body and soul that the mind could not escape but could not bear. Then the voice cried out something in Chinese that none of us could understand. Except that we did. Not the words, but the meaning. The intent. It was a prayer, screamed out so loud it was hard to tell if the voice belonged to a man or a woman. A piercing shriek that was way past the point where it was begging for mercy. It was begging for release. The scream rose and rose and then it disintegrated into wetness.
And then silence.
Absolute and awful.
Bax licked his lips. “And that’s what they want us to take back to Earth?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“God,” he said.
“Yeah.”
Bax held his gun firm but he took a single step backward. Not a retreat exactly. More like a statement. Lulu turned sharply toward him.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
Bax didn’t answer, but he took another step backward.
“We have a job to do.”
“Yes we do,” I said. Now she turned to me, frowning because of something she heard in my voice. She started to say something but there was a new sound from inside. A different kind of shriek. High, but not human.
No, not human at all.
We listened. It came again, and it was closer this time.
“Boss…?” asked Lulu, and now there was doubt in her voice.
Another scream, and another. No… two of them, overlapping. Not one creature. We listened. We heard them.
Them.
The screams, and beneath that sound was a scraping, slithering, clicking jumble of noises. Coming toward us from the deep black beyond that narrow opening.
“They want us to bring this back to Earth.”
This time it was Lulu who spoke. Her voice was hushed. All of the bravado was gone. When I turned to look at her I saw that she had backed up and stood beside Bax.
“Yeah,” I said.
“No,” she said.
“No,” said Bax.
I put the stock of my rifle against my shoulder.
“No,” I said.
DISTRESSED
BY JAMES A. MOORE
Perkins was looking right at Callaghan when her head exploded inside the hard shelter of her environment helmet. Her eyes had an instant to bulge and then there were bits of her skull slipping down the interior of the visor along with the blood and grey matter.
“Fuck me!” Pho let out his usual battle cry and cut loose on the metallic demon coming their way. The PAR-320 fired hot pulses of burning plasma all over the bloodied limb that was even now trying to rip Perkins from the armor. She was already dead, but Callaghan couldn’t stop hearing her screams.
Three hours ago they were en route to Liddiwell Habitat for R&R. Ten minutes later they had the distress call from the Shiname Maru. Being Colonial Marines, they responded, even though most of them were due for a rotation out of the stink of their armor. The suit from Weyland-Yutani, the company that owned the supply ship in distress, promised a bonus if the work was handled quickly. Never let it be said that credits couldn’t grease a few gears.
From the outside the ship looked just right as long as you ignored the eye-aching lights coming off of whatever the hell had hit it. Not a ship of any known kind, but according to the captain, it was bigger than what they saw and at least half of it was spilling out light in spectrums no human eye could see. Those same lights were causing the pain. They couldn’t be seen, but they could burn out a retina in under two minutes without protection.
The suit from Weyland-Yutani wanted samples of that, too. There would be bigger bonuses. Callaghan loved incentives.
All of which meant exactly shit when the thing from inside that vessel came for them.
Ten minutes away they got the skinny on the situation: Whatever had hit the ship had taken out command, intentionally or not, no one could say, but the piloting crew was likely dead, the command center was ruined and most of the surviving crew reported being locked in the back of the Shiname Maru along with the supplies to start terra-forming another planet. At least fifteen dead or missing and the ship was bleeding atmosphere everywhere that wasn’t sealed away with the remaining crew.
The marines were going in hot and they were going in sealed in their cans. They were also going in without much visual back-up. The same lights that hurt their heads also fragged their helmet cams. Du Mariste, the ops station runner was doing what he could, but there wasn’t much he could offer except what could be seen from outside the Shiname Maru. So far that was enough to let them know that whatever was out there was bigger than it looked.
Two minutes inside and all they saw was blood, broken bits of frozen corpse, shattered machinery and debris moving around inside the main deck. The artificial gravity was shot, and everything that wasn’t sealed in place was bouncing around at different speeds. It was like being inside a madman’s snow-globe.
Mag-boots kept them standing on the surfaces of their choice. Most took the floors just for familiarity sake. Fifty percent standard gravity, which didn’t hurt when you were locked in environmental armor.
Perkins had tapped her portable workstation into the ship and was trying to assess all of the details when the metallic limb telescoped down the corridor leading to the breach and punched a hole through hardened armor and her head.
Pho, one of the biggest men Callaghan knew, had let out his fuck me and started shooting. And now seemed as good a time as any to join into the fray.
Plasma strobed down the corridor and fried whatever it touched. The bursts were small, they had to be in closed environments, but they did their work well enough. A stray shot melted Perkin’s armor to her leg. She was too dead to complain, but whateve
r had hold of her didn’t seem to care. The metallic limb kept pulling her down the length of the ship, toward the breach.
The Shiname Maru was nothing remarkable. Typical industrial grade freight hauler, with preformed walls in the areas where the crew lived and worked. The rest of it was metal and more metal with just enough insulation to protect the pipes from clumsy human hands.
The walls were white polymer shielding that flashed past as they ran after what was left of Perkins.
Captain Ogambe yelled through the com-link, “Don’t get yourselves killed in the hunt, assholes! A little caution!” Ogambe was a soldier, same as them. They tended to listen, but whatever was taking Perkins away had killed one of theirs and that left a bad taste in Callaghan’s mouth. Pho had been on over fifty missions with Perkins. The sergeant referred to her as “little sister,” when he wasn’t busy trying to get her naked.
Pho was beyond pissed.
He charged hard down the starboard corridor. The port side split from near the airlock and left a lot of room for sleeping quarters and mess hall. Starboard side was where the glowing thing had punched through the hull.
Their magnetic boots clanked with each step, but the standard sound was missing. The mags didn’t lock down with a full gravity. They did about a half. Running was easier than it should have been. Pho came from a colony where the gravity was almost fifty percent higher than Terra-Norm. It was a wonder he hadn’t smashed his head into the ceiling above him.
Behind them the rest of the squad was heading along, and damn near every one of them was pissing and moaning into the ’com about how badly they were going to fuck up the Xenomorph that had killed Perkins.
Callaghan did his best to stay chilled. Angry made for sloppy. A little anger was okay, it helped keep you alert, but more than that made you focus on the wrong things.
Pho caught a reminder of that when a second limb rolled out from the corridor ahead of them and tried to punch through him. He managed to slip to the side and got cut along his chest, but it was only a grazing wound. Still, the nanofibers in the armor started weaving the holes shut. Good thing or he’d be dead in two minutes from exposure and lack of atmosphere.
It sobered him up though. Took the rage down to a better place.
“Fucking hell,” Pho grumbled.
“Easy goes it.” Callaghan slowed down, looked his companion over and nodded. His armor was doing what it was supposed to do. Pho had painted several characters in Chinese on the armor. He’d be touching up a few of them. The skull he’d sprayed above his helmet’s visor glared at Callaghan with as much fury as Pho’s eyes offered.
“Go after her!”
“She’s dead, mate.” Callaghan shook his head. “We’re going after her, but don’t rush so much. Cap’s right. Getting killed won’t do you any good.”
He checked his clip and prepared a back-up. Ten rounds and he’d have to pull. It wasn’t as easy in the bulky armor, but he’d practiced the maneuver for that reason.
Pho looked him up and down, his head moving behind the visor. “I’m good.”
“Then let’s go.”
The others were coming up fast. If they didn’t move they’d be called back into formation. Now they were dogs off the leash, but Ogambe wouldn’t let them stay loose if he caught up with them. They would already get chewed up and spit out when everything was over, but the captain understood the value of not actively screaming at anyone who was acting out if they acted out in ways that benefited the company.
As far as Callaghan was concerned, they’d just volunteered to be scouts.
Pho stood up and shook it off. There was a little red around the edges of the new seals on his armor, but it was holding and he wouldn’t bleed out. He wasn’t stupid enough to try running if the injuries were too deep.
The magnetic boots rattled and clanked as they hauled ass, and both of them activated the flashlights on their helmets, giving them a better view of what was ahead.
It was enough to slow them down.
The corridor was wrong. That was the only way to put it. The preformed walls were distorted. There was something causing them to bubble and break down, so the walls close to them seemed normal but only a dozen feet away the material was expanding and bubbling outward like badly blistered flesh.
“Fucking walls have herpes,” Pho spat.
There was still a lot of debris in the air. Most of it had been human at one point. It was cold enough to have frozen the meat and blood and bone, but the stuff was still careening around the hallway like a bloodied snowstorm.
It wasn’t helping with seeing what they were looking for.
“Whatever took her is coming back. You can bet your credits on that.”
“Why you say?” Pho looked his way, scowling.
“It took her for a reason. Whatever it wants, it cut up everyone it could and it tore Perkins apart. It’s coming back.”
“I got a grenade.”
“Me too, but I’m not blowing the ship apart. Company takes that sort of stuff personally.” Callaghan started forward again, trying to squint past the floating matter he didn’t want to think about too carefully. “Besides, I want that bonus.”
“Bonus don’t matter if you’re dead.”
“Not planning on dying.”
Lights flickered in the distance, the same sort that flickered outside the ship. Every bit of flotsam and jetsam in their way was highlighted by the strobes, turned black and white before it became Technicolor again.
“Messing with my eyes!” Pho squinted and continued on. Callaghan followed after him, letting his friend’s bulk save his eyes from the worst of the lights. Even with Pho in the way the strain was immediate. He’d heard of visors that automatically compensated for extra glare. They were not standard issue. You wanted them, you paid. If the bonus was big enough…
The metal slammed down the corridor at high speed and both Pho and Callaghan ducked instinctively. There were joints to the thing, but it was mostly just a long run of metal with cables attached. Here and there along the entire length were spots where the metal seemed to vanish and others where the lights were too bright to see properly.
Pho shot at it anyway and punched three holes close enough together to sever the thing.
What had already gone past them ricocheted and wobbled as it filled the corridor. The part that was still connected further on down the hallway continued on.
Pho got up and Callaghan followed and they ran now, hauling ass down the hallway to see what the limb was attached to. It kept coming slipping past them. It was close to a hundred feet in length if he was right.
From behind them more lights strobed. These were different. They knew the signature flare of plasma rounds when they saw them.
“Fucking hope they don’t hit us!”
Before Callaghan could answer the thing came for them.
He knew parts of it wouldn’t be seen by his eyes. That didn’t help him out at all, because it was big enough to fill most of the corridor.
Whatever it was made of, it was covered in burnt blood and worse nightmares. There were too many limbs to count coming off the thing, most of them much shorter than the telescoping thing Pho had cut in half. They were all shapes and sizes and about half of them were ramming into the walls, cutting through the plastic to gain purchase as it humped and thudded its way toward them.
Rather than focus on the whole of the thing, Callaghan aimed for the parts that were lit up and started firing. Pho peppered the surface of the behemoth coming their way. Neither of them seemed to cause much damage, but it came at them even faster than before.
Every time it moved, more of the lights showed.
There was no symmetry to the thing. It had moving parts, but they made as little sense as the vast number of arms it used to shuffle forward.
Then one of the limbs pistoned out and cut off Pho’s arm just below the shoulder. The metal blurred and Pho screamed and then there was fresh, warm blood spilling through the air even as a secon
d limb reached out and wrapped three skeletal metallic fingers around Pho, pulling him toward the main mass. The armor Pho wore did its job again and the nanofibers started sealing the wound in the armor, likely sealing the source of the bleeding at the same time.
Pho didn’t fire this time. The blood flow was too sudden and the damage too severe. He was either in shock or unconscious.
Callaghan looked around to see if back-up was there yet. “This fucking thing just took Pho! Where is everyone?”
Bendez and Ogambe came toward him at a trot. Ogambe spoke into the com-link. “The others are finding another route. We want to flank it if we can.”
He took command that quickly and moved right past Callaghan with large strides. The captain was armed with a Hemming 450 assault cannon. He braced himself before he fired off ten rounds.
Ahead of him the metal thing shuddered and fell back as each round hit and exploded, taking parts of the mechanical beast off with each shell. Big parts. By the time Ogambe was done there were several new holes that had nothing to do with shining lights.
Ogambe looked back at Callaghan with a very pissed off expression. “You want to tell me where Pho is?”
“That fucker took him, that’s all I know.”
It came forward again, new lights flaring into existence as it moved. Both Bendez and Callaghan flinched at the pain. Ogambe kept going. His visor had gone dark. Somebody was smart enough to get the upgrades before they met the damned thing. The captain fired again, bracing himself and pounding out another ten rounds.
“One of you get up here and back me up! I have to reload!”
Callaghan moved forward, pulling his empty clip and slapping the replacement into the slot without hesitating. Ogambe took up a lot of room but not enough to fill the entire hallway. He leaned around the man and opened fire, aiming at a dark spot where the machine was already damaged. Each round lit the interior of the thing. He could see Pho’s armor locked into the center of the creature, but it was too late to stop his plasma rounds. If Pho was alive, Callaghan killed him. He saw the plasma searing through armor like it was butter.