Alien alien 3, p.27
Alien--Alien 3, page 27
“Why not?” Jackson sounded slightly less belligerent.
“Because Weyland-Yutani’s an octopus with a thousand arms,” Hicks told her, “and at the end of each one is another thousand arms. Grease one and it’ll just grow back. I doubt anyone could destroy them.”
“No human could,” Spence piped up from behind him. “But there are some non-humans I wouldn’t bet against.”
Her words gave him another chill, more intense and apparently too real to rate a wisecrack from Hudson. He wouldn’t have bet against the aliens, either, Hicks thought, and they wouldn’t stop at Weyland-Yutani.
Rosetti had reached the door and was entering a code into a small keypad on the wall beside it, or trying to. Instead of the door opening, a buzzer would sound and an electronic voice would tell him to try again. It took him half a dozen tries before the door finally slid open.
Hicks blinked at the brightly lit room, unaware that he and the rest of the group had stopped halfway down the hall. Rosetti had picked one hell of a big lifeboat—he could see racks and racks of vacuum suits, all immaculate white except for rings of color at the elbow and knee. Each had a matching, solid-color helmet. Like solid-colored billiard balls, Hicks thought, or Anchorpoint’s favorite brand of plastic crates.
The idea dug into Hicks’s brain and stuck there while he stared at the grotesque tangle of shiny black aliens amid the mess of overturned racks and crumpled vacuum suits in the center of the room. Bodies and limbs and heads protruded from the snarl at absurd angles, making it impossible for Hicks to tell how many aliens he was looking at. It was revolting, monstrous, but worst of all, unprecedented—he’d never seen them do anything like this—and still his mind held onto the matching crates.
Rosetti let out a terrified bellow and fled back up the corridor.
42
Hicks pushed Tatsumi into Talisa’s arms and put himself in front of Jackson and Spence. Blind with panic, Rosetti shoved past them, tripped over his own feet, and fell face-down. Spence stepped over him as he lay on his side gasping for air to stand next to Hicks as if she belonged there. Before he could yell at her to run, she raised her arm and a bright red streak flew down the hallway, hitting the squirming alien mass dead center.
The tangle of aliens burst into flame and broke apart, screaming and raging while the now too-familiar chemical stink of burning alien flesh and acid-blood overwhelmed the smell of smoke. Hicks’s stomach gave a warning lurch as he herded everyone back up the hallway, helping Talisa drag Tatsumi while turning to shoot at the fiery mess behind them.
“Rosetti!” Hicks yelled as they hit the reception area. “Dammit, where are you?”
Out on the main thoroughfare, Jackson beckoned to them frantically. “This way—hurry!”
Twenty feet farther on, Hicks saw Rosetti punching an entry code into another door; this one took him only one try.
“Good going, Colonel!” Hicks called as he and Talisa dragged Tatsumi faster.
Rosetti looked over his shoulder and his expression said it all. Hicks shouted at him to stop but Jackson was already there. She gave the colonel a hard shove into the room and stood guard to make sure the rest of them got inside before she slammed the door and locked it. A second later, something big slammed into it, making them all jump.
Lights flickered, almost came on, and failed. Hicks swept the flashlight on his rifle around the room. Jackson had Rosetti backed up against the wall, shining her own flashlight directly into his eyes.
“The son of a bitch was gonna lock us out.” Jackson drew the service pistol and pressed the barrel hard against the swollen side of Rosetti’s face. “I oughta kill you for that, you fucking bastard—”
“Don’t,” Hicks ordered her. Pulling her away took a great deal of effort. “You’d just be doing him a favor.”
Jackson’s expression said she thought Hicks was out of his mind. “How?”
“I’ve seen it before,” he told her. “In combat.”
It took a moment for Jackson to get it. Disgusted, she turned her back on Rosetti and he sidled away from her, keeping close to the wall and giving Hicks a resentful look. Tough shit; if the son of a bitch wanted to die, he could grow some balls and do it himself, Hicks thought as he continued shining the flashlight over the floor and walls. Amazingly, there wasn’t any smoke in here but the smell was in the air, along with a hint of something worse.
“What is this, an office?” he asked.
“Yeah. I found a desk,” Jackson said. “And a lamp, if it works…”
It did, and Hicks was amused to see it was a reproduction of an antique banker’s lamp with a green shade. Over half the offices he’d ever been in had one of these. The warm, golden light was supposed to eliminate eyestrain. Hicks had no idea if it really helped tired eyes but it was definitely better at throwing shadows than dispersing them.
There was another hard slam against the door and they all jumped again. Things were getting more absurd by the moment, Hicks thought. Monsters were running loose out there, but in here everyone was safe from eyestrain.
Another hard bang on the door, followed by an enraged scream. Hicks motioned for all of them to stand back and put a hand on the door, to see if he could tell how long it would hold. It was surprisingly solid and he realized this was also a safe room, large enough to shelter maybe a dozen people along with whoever sat behind the desk. It was a great idea, with one major problem: now that they were in, they weren’t getting out.
It figured. Life-support for a dozen people in here would last for only so long. The Company designed space stations with the assumption that in an emergency, rescue had to arrive in a timely fashion or not at all. You didn’t rescue the dead, you mourned them.
Hudson popped into his head, grinning more smugly than ever. Don’t be so morbid, jarhead. Wait till you’re really dead, like me. In spite of everything, Hicks chuckled inwardly.
The door would hold for a while. How long depended on how many aliens threw themselves against it trying to get at the soft human filling inside. Hell, the surrounding wall might go before the door gave—not that it would matter either way if the air went first.
Sitting on the edge of the desk, Hicks let out a long breath. Unlike certain very young Marines he knew of, he’d never had grandiose dreams of dying heroically in combat, but after everything he’d been through with the group, sitting around in a safe room and waiting to suffocate was a real letdown.
“Hicks?” Spence said in a small, unhappy voice. She was standing next to a room divider. He frowned; it was a large office but this seemed pretentious.
Going over to her, he discovered the divider had been put up to sequester a workstation. He was looking at it from the back but he could tell it was an elaborate custom-job with multiple screens and industrial-strength processors that ran at light-speed, all built into a compact desk. Apparently, whoever worked here felt putting up an extra barrier within the office would enhance concentration. It probably did but Hicks still thought it was a bit pretentious.
The heavy copper smell hit him just as his torch beam found the dark stain on the carpet, most of it around the left side of the chair behind the workstation. It would be an ergonomic chair, very comfortable for someone who spent long hours at a workstation, although the person sitting there would be past caring about good lumbar support. Motioning for Spence and the others to stay back, Hicks moved around to the other side of the workstation, weapon raised in case something less dead was lying in wait.
The dead woman slumped in the fancy ergonomic chair was wearing a lab coat. A quarter of her head was gone, blown off by the automatic in the hand now at rest on her thigh. Hicks estimated it hadn’t been even an hour since she had opted out. But first she had smashed all three workstation screens.
“That’s Dr. Trent,” Spence said, standing a few meters away on the other side. “Dr. Adele Persephone Trent, MD, PhD times three. Or four, I keep forgetting. Head of the Exobiology Department.”
From where Spence stood, Hicks knew she could see only the undamaged part of the woman’s face. Sadly, she had an unobstructed view of the blood, brain, and bone splattered on the workstation, the walls, even the ceiling. Whatever Dr. Adele Persephone, MD, Ph.D., etc. had seen on her monitors had been so awful that she had smashed all of them before using the automatic on herself.
The state of her body told Hicks she had pressed the barrel under her chin and almost chickened out. Not unusual—lots of aspiring suicides ended up with a faceful of flash-burns after pulling the gun away at the last moment. In Adele Trent’s case, however, her trigger finger had been faster than her change of heart. Hicks was sure she’d never imagined that this would be how she’d quit her job; no one ever did. He felt a lot sorrier for her than he ever had for Rosetti.
The thought of the colonel was a sudden hot surge of anger. “Hey, Rosetti! Come here!” he yelled.
Rosetti’s gray face appeared over the top of the partition on Hicks’s left and became even grayer when he saw Trent’s body.
“See that? Do you?” Hicks demanded.
Rosetti glanced at him warily but didn’t move.
“That was Adele Trent,” Hicks went on. “She did herself. And if you don’t chill out quick, somebody’s gonna do likewise to you.”
“She was brilliant,” Rosetti said bleakly. “Dedicated to her work. And to the Company. Very ambitious.”
Spence gave a hard, scornful laugh. “Thanks for the testimonial! I’m sure it makes her feel a lot better about being dead.” She turned to Hicks. “Dr. Trent was a devoted scientist—not a Company meat puppet.”
“Yeah, I get it.” Hicks played the flashlight around the partitioned area, looking for something useful without knowing what it might be. There were two heavy thumps against the door, followed by two more.
“Hicks!” Spence gave the corpse a wide berth as she ran to him and grabbed his arm with both hands. “Look at the back wall!”
The flashlight showed a neat arrangement of shadow-box frames containing hardcopy certificates with shiny gold seals. Some were academic degrees, others looked like awards, or maybe that was just the one that kept flipping between a certificate and a 3D double helix. In the very center of the row, a white lab coat hung on a hook; there was a bit of Dr. Trent’s blood and brain tissue on one sleeve.
“Don’t you see it?” Spence said, even more excited.
Hicks blinked. “Gimme a hint—what am I supposed to see?” he asked.
Spence darted forward and ripped the lab coat down, revealing it had actually been hanging from a bright red handle. Hicks felt his jaw drop. Stunned, he watched as she knocked the box frames down and stood back. Block letters faded into existence on the wall, seemingly triggered by the flashlight beam:
EMERGENCY AIRLOCK
EXIT TO HULL SECTOR 308
“Now do you see it?” she shouted joyfully while another alien smashed against the door, hissing and screeching. “It’s an airlock—it’s a goddam airlock!”
For a moment, Hicks couldn’t move, couldn’t even speak. The seams of the hatch were all but invisible, but now that he knew, he could make them out even in the lousy light.
“It’s the only chance we’ve got,” Spence was saying. “If we get out on the hull, we can get into a lifeboat from the outside!”
Everyone was looking at him, waiting for the go-ahead. Hicks slung his rifle and sneaked a glance at his watch. 21:46. They’d get out of the airlock, but if Bishop had succeeded, they didn’t have a hope in hell of getting to a lifeboat in time. He could tell them that and watch them melt down to the soundtrack of aliens trying to smash down the door until whatever end finally came.
Or he could let them have purpose for the rest of their lives—all fourteen minutes of it. He hated to admit it, but Rosetti had been right about how people needed something to do more than they needed the truth.
“Okay,” he said, hoping the heartiness in his voice didn’t sound forced. “Saddle up, folks, it’s go time. Let’s do this thing!”
Spence used both hands to pull the red handle from upright to horizontal. There was a soft whisper as the door unsealed and slowly swung open. Inside, bright lights went on immediately.
“Inner door open”, a synthetic female voice announced. “This is a five-person emergency exit to hull sector 308. It is equipped with five Mark 12 emergency vacuum suits, suitable for a single use in an evacuation procedure.”
A safe room big enough for twelve people and only five vacuum suits in the airlock—typical Company math, Hicks thought. Although considering how well they’d camouflaged the escape hatch, he supposed it was a miracle there were any vacuum suits.
Talisa caught Hicks’s eye and nodded almost imperceptibly at Tatsumi, lying on the carpet. He put up a finger, telling her to wait. It was the only reply he could think of.
“Each Mark 12 suit is equipped with an automatic locator beacon, inter-suit communications, and adjustable-strength magnetic soles”, the synthetic voice continued. “Each is charged with an air supply set to last for approximately two hours of ordinary physical activity. Users are cautioned that elevated respiration and heartbeat consume air more quickly. By contrast, sedation can extend the air supply somewhat, though not indefinitely. If you experience difficulty with O-rings or if you have concerns about seal integrity, please activate the help file for additional advice.”
Jackson looked around at the group. “How to fit six people into five vacuum suits wasn’t on the engineering curriculum when I was in school,” she said. Her gaze landed on Rosetti, who had moved closer to the open airlock, ready to jump in. “If anyone has to stay behind, I nominate him.”
“Corporal Hicks!” Talisa said urgently. “Bring the light, something’s happening—”
Tatsumi was writhing on the carpet, eyes rolled back in his head and mouth gaping while something squirmed and twisted under the stained bandage on his leg. The poison-yellow fluid had saturated the dressing and was now soaking into the carpet. Suddenly the swelling bulged and there was an ugly ripping sound as a small chest-burster tore itself out of Tatsumi’s leg. Everyone jumped back as it scuttled off into the shadows.
Now they’re leg-bursters? Hicks thought, feeling surreal again. He started to track it with the flashlight but Talisa grabbed his hand and made him put the torch back on Tatsumi. Two spots of red had bloomed on his shirt; a second later, two more creatures broke through his chest but somehow couldn’t get more than halfway out, while a third emerged twisting and squirming from his mouth.
A strong hand yanked him backward roughly, putting him out of range when Tatsumi’s head exploded. The air was filled with the stench of acid-blood eating through walls and carpeting and flesh, and Hicks felt his stomach preparing to jettison everything in it. Then Jackson shoved him farther back from Tatsumi and shot the last two aliens before they could free themselves from his chest.
Hicks returned the favor by pushing her ahead of him toward the back wall. “Everybody into the airlock now!”
Rosetti dived through the open door like a swimmer. Hicks gathered Talisa and Spence into a clumsy huddle with Jackson, shoved them all into the airlock, and pulled the door closed behind him.
“Suit up!” Hicks ordered.
Everyone stripped quickly down to their underwear. Talisa reached for the one hanging nearest to her and then screamed as one of the things that had burst out of Tatsumi flopped out of the open front and fell at her feet.
“Nobody shoot!” Hicks threw himself against the hatch to force it open again before the seal activated. He managed to push it back about a third of a meter, where it stuck.
“Get that thing outta here!” he shouted, hoping someone would figure out how to do that before his strength failed. Jackson was reaching for something on a shelf when Rosetti stepped in front of her. In a single, smooth motion, he grabbed a yellow helmet and swung it underhand, as if he were bowling, and knocked the alien squarely through the gap. Hicks let go of the door. It slammed shut and the seals activated while everyone stared at Rosetti in stunned silence.
Abruptly, Spence raised both arms straight up. “Field goal—score! It’s good!”
There was nervous laughter from everyone except Rosetti, who was busy examining the helmet for damage.
“Hey, Colonel, that was great,” Spence said after a bit. “It really was. Thank you.”
Rosetti looked at her, then at the rest of the group, seemingly puzzled by their reaction. “I used to be a soldier,” he said, as if that was supposed to explain everything. Maybe it did.
Hicks hit pause on the evacuation procedure so they could all put on the vac-suits. Like the ones they’d seen earlier in less fortunate circumstances, each was white, with bands of color on the arms and legs that matched to a helmet. Rosetti stuck with yellow, Spence chose blue, and Jackson took green. Talisa picked orange after making sure there were no more nasty surprises in either the suit or the helmet, leaving Hicks with red. Appropriate that he should have the color of blood and guts, he thought. Well, it wouldn’t be much longer now.
He removed his watch, careful not to look at the time, intending to toss it aside but some impulse made him strap it to his wrist on the outside of his suit, although he still refused to look at the face.
After checking that everyone’s seals were secure, Hicks unpaused the airlock procedure. “The final stage of evacuation is confirmed,” said the artificial voice politely. “Please be seated and fasten your safety harnesses.”
Padded seats folded down on either side of the airlock at right angles to the hatch. Hicks and Jackson sat on one side facing Talisa, Rosetti, and Spence. “Comms test,” Hicks said. “Sound off with your name."
They all obeyed, except for Rosetti, who said, “Jackson."
Unbelievable, Hicks thought; they couldn’t even get through a simple comms test without Rosetti fucking it up.
Jackson groaned. “What kinda shit are you trying to pull now, Rosetti?"
“You were right, Jackson,” Rosetti said. “I should have tried to stop this. It wouldn’t have done any good—they’d have gone ahead anyway. But I should have tried, just for the record if nothing else."
