Aliens, p.18
Aliens, page 18
A soldier nearby made to ask a question.
“Now!”
They did, closing the door to the second chamber with a heavy, metallic thud, then moving quickly to the exit while the shots and yells outside slowly faded.
“What’s happening, Sergeant?” she said into her mic.
“It—it got past, Commander. We are in pursuit.”
Su clenched her jaw and looked up at the ceiling, mind buzzing.
“Commander,” someone said. “Commander.”
It was Corporal Chen, face was close to hers; he’d put his mirrored visor up. She could see the fear in his eyes.
“Twenty,” he said.
“What?” she asked, trying to get her thoughts straight.
“Twenty. Only twenty in the second chamber, including the dead one.”
The equation became clear. “We’re missing two.”
“We’re missing two,” the corporal echoed.
She surveyed the first chamber. The organic waste, human and alien. The blood. The half body of one of her men.
“Get that body out of here, take it down to medical.” The soldiers nearby nodded and set to work. “Evacuate the room. We are going to burn it.”
Her soldiers replied in affirmation, relief evident in their voices. She watched as the squad exited, still scanning for that last chestburster. It didn’t matter if she didn’t find it. They had nineteen live specimens in the next room, more than enough for whatever their scientist had planned—and what Captain Zhang sought to achieve.
Su Wong made to leave.
There was a tapping sound behind her.
What?
She turned, pistol out. The double doors were closed. Nothing moved.
Tap tap, tap tap.
The box. The metal container. That’s why the spare safety net had been pulled out and dumped. Something was in there. It was too small for a person. One of the face-huggers, perhaps? There was a pile of them quite close to it, but were these creatures intelligent enough to dump out the contents and hide?
No. It couldn’t be.
Tap tap, tap tap.
Seventy by seventy centimeters. Maybe even less. Perhaps a small person could fit in there. She holstered her pistol, drew her shock stick, and raised her shield. With one hand, she opened the lid.
There was a girl. Tiny. Curled up into an impossible ball, somehow fitting into that tight space. The girl squinted, head turned, avoiding the light. Su breathed a sigh of relief. This was the twenty-second crew member. One black demon was on the loose, not two.
She lowered her shield and the girl was on her, jumping out like a jack-in-the-box, and there, under her chin, pressure—cold hard metal. The Vietnamese woman was whispering fiercely, her eyes wide open, pupils dilated, a madness about her. Su hesitated and the woman pulled her hair, yanked it down, and Su grunted in pain. The cold metal—a pistol, that’s what it was—pressed harder into the soft flesh under her jaw.
The commander held her hands out, dropping the shock stick and the shield. They clattered to the ground. Behind her, the shouts of her men, but Su made stand down motions with her outstretched hands, unable to look away from the young woman. The eyes were bloodshot, and there were bags under them. Where Su Wong had heard horror over a comms system, this young thing had lived through it, seen it.
Perhaps been driven mad by it.
The woman said something in Vietnamese, and Su staggered as the girl started pushing her backward toward the vault door. She kept her hands out to the side to calm her men, and to calm this wild young girl.
The commander was a hostage.
XUAN NGUYEN
49
She couldn’t tell how long it took for the screaming to stop. It was as if a heavy blanket had been thrown over her mind, and everything was muffled and distant. Her senses could not quite process what was happening, and her understanding of the passage of time had fallen away. All she truly had was the darkness, and once she had accepted the darkness and sought its embrace, she knew contentment.
So Xuan did not know when the screaming ended and the sound of feeding began. Wasn’t quite sure when that realization hit—that the gnawing, wet, squelching sound was her comrades being eaten. At some point she understood that her crew members were being fed upon, but she just retreated further into the darkness and listened to other sounds instead. She focused instead on the liquid flushing through the walls. An alkaline solution, someone had told her—but it wasn’t.
It was the rain running off rooftops in a storm.
Late afternoon storm, after a long day in the close humid heat, when the traffic inched along and tempers flared. Where she ignored the sour and empty looks of the sweat-sheened men sitting in the bia hois, and the constant blaring of the scooter horns, and made her way home.
Before she got there the skies opened. Water everywhere, all at once, roaring off tin rooftops and car hoods and washing over the streets, washing them clean. Xuan would hold her head back and let the rain drum down on her, into her open mouth, trickling down her back. She’d always feel liberated, and she’d laugh, and the city felt that way, as well. Clean and new, somehow, and happy.
Voices.
Someone was speaking over the darkness and the rain and it was not Vietnamese, so she tried to ignore it. Yet the voices kept on, so she came back to the box. It was cool in there. So cool. She was shaking, teeth chattering.
Why was it so cold in here?
The cold pulled her from the dark and comforting place, and she listened to the voices and their strange words. Xuan began to realize, distantly, that the effects of starvation and shock were weighing on her mind, like a chain. She finally understood that the voices were speaking in Mandarin. She balled her fists, one of them holding something hard and cold, and tried to concentrate. They were real. They had to be real. If they were real then the Chinese had done something about the creatures, and she was going to live.
That was the problem with thinking. The problem with having a clear mind. An image of Hao came to her, pleading, begging to be shot. The hard thing in her hand, she realized, was a pistol. One she’d been too cowardly to use. She bit the back of her hand, willing herself not to cry again.
Xuan tried to think, her mind spinning. Flashes of life back on Earth, of the faces of her crew, of the bloody spray as those beasts burst forth from their bodies. She had to think. The Chinese had led them into this trap. Why? Some sick and unthinkable experiment? Xuan didn’t know much about how the military worked, but she knew they loved their secrets. The UPP leadership thrived on them.
They wouldn’t let Xuan live. They couldn’t.
She thought of Hao, and did not feel sorrow anymore. She thought of him, and her crew, and instead felt rage. She was going to die here. Xuan was going to die, but she would not go quietly. She would not let her brothers and sisters be treated so, like an experiment, and give nothing back in return.
No. She was going to fight.
Her body ached and cramped and lacked the fuel for revenge, but she had something for all that. The voices outside continued, and every now and again a stronger voice, a louder one—a woman—would snap commands. Xuan felt around in her med-kit until she found the adrenaline. Something to jolt her into action, give her focus, if only enough to get her out of this box and among her enemies.
She jabbed herself in the thigh—
And gasped.
A pressure built in her chest, her back straightened, and her head hit the side of the container. She gasped again, trying to breathe, a white noise rising in her mind like a thunderstorm.
She rapped on the side of the box.
Tap tap, tap tap.
50
Xuan Nguyen hadn’t meant to take a hostage. She’d meant to shoot these sons-of-bitches with a scream of rage in her mouth. As many as she could. That’s all. When she’d burst from the box, however, only the pale-faced Chinese officer was there, and suddenly she had a hostage.
Bare feet freezing on the hard metal floor, hobbling from the acid burn, dizzy from the dehydration—but all of that was distant. The pressure in her chest and the pounding in her ears were closer, and the gun pressed against the Chinese woman’s neck, closer still.
Ten to twenty minutes the adrenaline would keep her going—if her heart didn’t explode first.
The Chinese officer yelled to her men, who were hovering behind her at the big door, each holding some kind of electrified rod. A couple had pistols out, but Xuan was small, and the officer was a good shield. She shouted at them to get back, and perhaps the pale-faced woman was yelling the same, because the soldiers backed out of the room. She followed them out, indicating for them to gather to one side. They did.
The officer was facing her, and staggered sometimes as Xuan pushed or pulled her. She fixed her eyes on Xuan, and to her credit she seemed calm. Her face was flat, and she was staring down at her assailant, despite the gun jammed into her neck. Three drops of bright red blood shone on the woman’s pale forehead. From one of Xuan’s murdered brothers or sisters, no doubt.
Xuan set her jaw.
The pressure in her chest eased after she left the chamber, that bloody chamber. They were in a long corridor. New, clean. A red light flashed overhead, above the vault door. Another vault just like it opposite, though closed. The Chinese officer said something—ordered something—to the soldiers behind her. Xuan’s finger tensed on the trigger, but they moved away, gave her space.
Taking a step backward, she pulled the woman with her, keeping her in between Xuan and the soldiers as a shield. The woman spoke again, motioning to something in her top pocket. Xuan hesitated, then nodded. She pressed the pistol up a little harder, to make her point in an international language: don’t mess with me.
With thumb and forefinger, the officer pulled a slender black square from her pocket and flipped it open. It had a single green digital line on an otherwise blank black surface, a line that warbled at any sound. The woman said something, and a few seconds after, the machine translated.
“You cannot escape, comrade. There is nowhere you can run. This is a warship.”
“I don’t care,” Xuan hissed.
The officer listened to the translation, then replied.
“We will not experiment on you. Our objectives have been met. I can guarantee your safety.”
“Objectives?” Xuan asked, her voice strange to her own ears. It was hoarse and bitter. “Objectives? You Chinese dog.” She took another step back, pulling the woman with her. The mass of red armor, down the corridor, shifted and stepped forward. Xuan yanked at the woman’s hair again. “Tell them to stay back.”
When the translation came through the metal square, she yelled it herself. “Stay back! I’ll shoot this pale bitch. Back.”
“Do as she says,” the officer instructed.
The soldiers paused. Xuan kept backing away. No plan in her mind. Nothing driving her anymore but adrenaline and fear. Her first instinct had been to fight, and now it was to flee. She tried to swallow, but her throat was too dry.
“It doesn’t have to be this way, little sister.”
Xuan stopped and their eyes locked. There was something in the woman’s face. Maybe it was sincerity. Maybe the woman meant it, but all that did was build the pressure in Xuan’s chest again, brought her mind back to that first betrayal.
“No,” she said with a ragged voice. “It didn’t, but you trapped my crew and fed them to monsters. And so this—” she twisted the gun in her hand, making the woman wince as the barrel dug into her throat “—is the way it is now between us. The way of the gun.”
When Xuan moved again, she stumbled slightly, on nothing but her own dizziness, and the other woman acted. The Chinese officer yanked the pistol aside and struck Xuan in the throat with her free hand. Xuan choked, releasing her hostage and firing the gun upward on instinct. The Chinese woman ducked and ran.
It all happened in a second.
Two.
A brief struggle, gunfire, and Xuan, eyes wide, had a hand to her throat where she’d been struck. They’d kill her. She knew it. The soldiers would gun her down, but the female officer was in the way for a few seconds more, and despite everything, despite not being able to breathe, Xuan found the strength to run.
COMMANDER SU WONG
51
“We need to drop from faster-than-light now, sir,” Su said.
Captain Zhang’s glass was empty. He regarded her, his mouth a fixed line, while he sat in his comfortable chair behind his wood-paneled desk.
“Is that so, Commander?”
“The Xenomorph has been loose for two hours. According to our scientist, it will be reaching full size soon.”
“I am aware,” the captain said. “It should never have come to this.”
No, it shouldn’t, she thought. We should never have used our comrades as the subjects of a sick experiment. We should never have risked the safety of this vessel with those monsters.
Captain Zhang continued, “But you could not do one simple job properly, and now the success of our mission is threatened.”
Su said nothing.
Zhang carefully placed his white, gold-braided hat on his head, and stood. “Perhaps not threatened, but certainly delayed. This vessel is the tip of the sword in our campaign to regain our lost colonies. I agree that it cannot be jeopardized. Put everyone on a ship-wide sweep for the Xenomorph,” he said. “And make sure Tolstoy is focused on either tracking it or predicting its location.”
Su had already done both. “Yes sir,” she said. He stepped around the table and stopped quite near her, eyes level with hers.
“After this is done, we will discuss the nature of your ideological commitment. I have had some doubts, but suspicions are not enough, on their own. We must work on verifiable facts, not feelings. I will instruct Tolstoy to run a full analysis of your thoughts and behavior patterns. It will be able to predict any future deviations from the party line, and develop personalized countermeasures for you.”
Su felt sick, a sinking anxiety, in the pit of her stomach.
“You are a good officer, Commander,” the captain said, “but even good officers can become confused, be infected by wrong thinking. Your position is vital, so you must be held to a higher standard.” He pressed the panel, and his ready room door slid open. “This is for your own good, Commander. I know from experience that you will thank me afterward.”
With that, he was gone, and Su stood alone in a room that smelled faintly of wood and whisky. She couldn’t swear, or slam her fist on the table. There was a camera in the captain’s ready room, and Tolstoy would be watching everything she did. Trawling through recordings of everything she had done.
Su turned and left the room, her face set.
BISHOP
52
Michael did not speak to him the next day.
Bishop desperately wanted to apologize, but was never given the chance. Orthus was always there, between them. Michael spent his day in the quantum computer lab, recording the neural pathways for his memories. He did not ask Bishop to join him for meals, and so Bishop worked in the lab, or on the terminal in the corner while Michael ate.
His creator went to bed early, complaining of a headache. Orthus stood sentinel at meals, and over him as he slept. That seemed unusual, but Michael was an unusual man. A genius, who had forged new pathways for artificial humans, given them a place in the human world.
The screens showing the exterior of the ship had changed, indicating it had dropped out of faster-thanlight. Bishop spent a while looking at the view, enjoying the feeling of his mind turning over the constellations, and from these deducing the ship’s position and trajectory in the Middle Heavens. If the projection were true—and he had no reason to doubt it—they were approaching the Bao Sau Sector of UPP space.
The ship hummed under his feet. It was new and expensive enough that a human might not be able to feel it, but Bishop let his enhanced senses range out and relish the minute tactile vibrations.
Something plucked at his mind, a subroutine.
He glanced up at the sword on the wall, elegant and perfect even to his eye, then back out at the vista. Not only were they nearing the Bao Sau Sector, they appeared to be headed to Seventeen Phei Phei—a military outpost for the UPP. A few days out, by his estimate, which was also strange. If that was their destination, the FTL could have planted them right on the doorstep of the planetoid. The thoughts that came made him uncomfortable, so he tried to ignore them, but his mind whirred.
A fool despises his father’s instruction.
He glanced over at the terminal in the corner.
But whoever heeds reproof is prudent.
The Bible was a strange document, by turns insightful and stupid, profound and contradictory. Michael quoted it from time to time, but always with a smile on his face, as if he was only half-serious. Still, Bishop could not help but note that of the eighty-seven real books Michael kept on the three shelves in his bedroom, the Bible was one of them.
Bishop made a decision.
He sat down in front of the computer and began his work. It was difficult. Even with his new and powerful mind, it took him until early morning, just before Michael awoke.
53
Michael was happy, and this made Bishop happy. A steaming coffee in his hand, he stared at Bishop with his clear blue eyes.
“My son, today our real work begins.”
Bishop found himself mirroring the smile. “It does?”
“We have one.”
“One what?”
“A Xenomorph.”
Bishop’s smile faded. “That is wonderful, Michael. How?”
“Questions,” Orthus said.
“Always questions,” the other added. “In the face of such gifts.”
“Orthus, please,” Michael said. “‘Let him ask in faith, nothing wavering.’” He raised his chin, eyes shining. “Bishop, all will be revealed soon. Everything. We shall share our findings with the Combine, building trust, and soon this vessel will be in a safe place—beyond the clutches of Weyland-Yutani and its agents.” He gestured. “Follow me. Our work begins.”
