Alien, p.23
Alien, page 23
She wasn’t.
23
The Necromorph left behind the human’s torn and mangled form as it loped away. Its body was designed to function in the harshest conditions, and it had no trouble with the atmosphere out here in the open. It had to fight to keep from being knocked over by the powerful winds, and dirt and sand pelted its exoskeleton like sideways hail. The constant flashes of lightning and accompanying thunder were disorienting.
It preferred to hide or lurk in the shadows as it stalked its prey, but it did feel good to be out in the open like this, free and unfettered, running as fast as it could—which was very fast indeed. Still, its instincts warned that it was heading in the wrong direction, that it should be trying to find a way to get back to where the humans were.
It needed humans to fulfill its dual drives—to procreate and to spread disease. There were none of them here, and it was racing farther away from the place where they gathered. It had managed to leave an egg in the warehouse—which it had hidden to mature unmolested—but it hadn’t successfully secured a host.
The Necromorph wanted to go back, needed to, despite the resistance it had encountered. It had to hunt and kill and feed and procreate and spread contagion. It had no other purposes, could have no others.
Running as it was, it approached another series of shapes similar to the ones that had sheltered its prey. It angled toward them, determined to find a new source for hosts.
* * *
“Damn it!”
Zula smacked her hand against the inner airlock door. Brenna was dead, and—one way or another—so was Tamar. The Necromorph was now loose on the planet’s surface.
“At least the goddamned thing is outside,” Virgil said. “The Lodge is safe.”
Zula turned away from the airlock door and walked over to where he and the other trainees had gathered. They looked tired and in shock, and she would’ve liked nothing more than to tell them they could stand down and get some rest, but they still had work to do.
“No one’s safe yet,” Zula said.
“How long can the Necromorph last out there?” Angela asked. “It might be tough, but it can’t survive in an atmosphere like that.” She paused, and then added, “Can it?”
“I’ve seen the damn things survive in a vacuum,” Zula said. “A little carbon dioxide isn’t going to give ours any trouble.”
“So it’ll live,” Ronny said, “but it won’t be able to get back into the Lodge, so we can take our time to hunt it down, do it right.”
“Yes,” Masako agreed, “and we’ll bring better weapons—ones that can get through its armored hide. It might take us a day or two, but we’ll find the thing.”
“And exterminate it with extreme prejudice,” Donnell said.
Ray glanced at Brenna’s skeletal remains. “This will give us time to see to our dead,” he said.
“You still don’t understand what we’re dealing with,” Zula said. “Xenomorphs aren’t like other creatures. They don’t kill when hungry or threatened. They kill because they’re driven to—it’s their sole purpose for existing. Our Necromorph will do whatever it takes to kill more people, as soon as possible, and it won’t stop until there’s none of us left on the goddamned planet. Remember, the Lodge isn’t the only human facility on Jericho 3.”
The trainees looked to one another with dawning comprehension.
“The proto-colony,” Ronny said.
“We’re going after it, aren’t we?” Ray asked.
Zula showed them her teeth.
“You bet your ass we are.”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later they were inside EVA suits, armed with pulse rifles and carrying extra ammo clips. They climbed into a skimmer, a low-altitude flying vessel, and within just a few moments it was being buffeted by gale-force winds.
Everyone was strapped into a seat or holding onto whatever they could to steady themselves. Ronny sat at the skimmer’s controls, guiding the craft, Zula in the seat next to him. She might’ve flown the skimmer in a pinch, but not in rough weather. Ronny, however, had piloted aircraft for Venture before electing to join the Colony Protection Force, and he had more experience than the rest of them operating a craft like this.
He’d need every bit of that experience to keep them airborne in this storm. Zula had never experienced so much turbulence before. The craft swayed from side to side, dipped left or right then back again. It juddered and bounced, and whenever thunder clapped nearby the entire ship rattled as if it might shake itself to pieces. She was beginning to wish they’d taken ground transport. It would’ve been steadier, safer, but slower too. Before they could arrive by ground, the colonists might be dead, or worse, implanted with Necromorph larvae. Traveling by air, dangerous as it was in this storm, was their best chance to reach the colony in time.
Zula wished she had some meds, though, to calm her gut.
They were down three people: Miriam, Nicholas, and Brenna. Five if you counted Brigette and Tamar. That left Ronny, Masako, Ray, Genevieve, Donnell, Angela and Virgil. She wondered how many more might fall before the Necromorph was dead. Though she prayed they’d all make it, she knew there were no guarantees—especially not when Xenomorphs were involved.
There was a new cohesiveness among the trainees, something they’d never had before. Shared battle—and shared loss—brought soldiers closer together in ways non-military personnel could never understand. She was glad to see the change, although she wished it could have happened under different circumstances.
Davis was with them, too, if only virtually. He had fired up the skimmer remotely and readied it for them as they’d suited up and acquired their rifles from the armory. Now that he had control of the Lodge’s systems, he was able to use its power to boost his carrier signal, and Zula could hear him despite the storm’s electrical interference. Sometimes his words were interrupted by pops and hisses of static, though.
He’d told Zula how to connect Tamar’s tracking device to the skimmer’s onboard computer so that it could continue monitoring the Necromorph’s location despite the storm. Sure enough, the damn thing was headed straight for the proto-colony. One good thing about Xenomorphs—at least they were consistent.
As Ronny did his best to maneuver through the storm, Zula checked in with Davis.
“How are you holding up?”
“As well as can be expected. The Lodge’s AI is still behaving itself, but I am beginning to feel the strain of remaining connected to the facility’s main computer system. Although it’s an imprecise comparison, I suppose you could say that I’m becoming tired.”
Davis had a tendency toward understatement, so his admission worried her more than it might have if it had come from someone else.
“If you get to a point where you’re in danger of suffering serious damage, you sever the connection, no matter what’s happening to me. Got it?”
The only reply she heard was a series of clicks and whistles. Interference from the storm or Davis pretending he couldn’t reply because he didn’t want to answer her? She had no way of knowing, but if their situations had been reversed, she knew nothing could force her to abandon her friend, even the threat of her own death.
Ride or die, she thought. That’s us.
“How much longer until we reach the colony?” she asked Ronny.
He answered through gritted teeth, hands gripping the flight controls so tightly his knuckles were white.
“Nearly there,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the storm, we’d be able to see it now.”
Zula peered through the skimmer’s windscreen, searching for the structures in the darkness. A triple burst of lightning occurred then, followed by a deafening peal of combined thunder. In the instant the landscape was illuminated she saw the rows of domed buildings, all much smaller than those of the Lodge. She didn’t see any sign of the Necromorph, but the tracking device said the creature was there. Zula wondered how long it had been there—it had gotten a good head start on them—and what damage it might’ve done already.
“Set us down as close as you can, as fast as you can.”
The man nodded grimly but didn’t take his eyes off the dash’s controls.
“How about safely, too?” Donnell asked.
“You’re a member of the Colony Protection Force,” Zula said. “Safety isn’t part of the job description. Stay frosty, everyone. We’re going in.”
With a sickening lurch, the craft started downward. Zula gripped the chair’s armrests and held her breath. Land or crash, they’d be on the ground in the next few moments. She hoped they wouldn’t be too late.
* * *
Valda was worried.
The storm had turned out to be stronger than the Lodge meteorologist had predicted, and the constant roar of wind, punctuated by explosive bursts of thunder, had become maddening.
She could live with that. What concerned her was that Renato was exposed to the storm. The wind had battered their occasionally malfunctioning outer airlock door so hard that it had sprung open, allowing wind and dust to strike the inner door. If the pressure kept up like this—or worse, increased—the inner door might not hold. Valda and Renato had both donned their EVA suits—she as a precaution, he so he could venture outside and see if he could get the outer door to close and stay closed.
She stood near the airlock, waiting in case Renato needed her help. Not that there was much she could do. From time to time she heard a banging as he used a hammer to try to get the door to move. As if that would help.
Electrical storms weren’t uncommon on Jericho 3, but this was the worst they had experienced. The engineers who’d designed the habitat domes insisted that the structures could withstand anything the planet could throw at them, but she wondered if the engineers had ever set foot off Earth, much less encountered a storm as bad as this. She prayed Renato would get the outer airlock door closed again. At least then they’d have an extra buffer against the planet’s fury.
Valda had dreamed about their faulty door—bad dreams that left her anxious. Really, it was the same dream each time, with only minor variations. It was the middle of the night, and both she and Renato were sleeping. In the dream she woke suddenly, startled, but unsure why. Renato continued sleeping, snoring softly, oblivious to whatever had woken her. She sat up in their round bed, listening. Then she heard it: a low, grinding metallic sound, one she somehow knew was the sound of the outer airlock door being pried open. It hadn’t closed all the way again, and someone was trying to get in.
The grinding continued for several moments before suddenly ending with a loud bang, as if the door had finally slid free and opened all the way. Terrified, she shook Renato in an attempt to wake him. In real life he was a light sleeper, but this was a dream, and no matter how hard she jostled him he continued snoring.
The red light glowed in the dark of the room, indicating the inner airlock door was sealed. She’d come to think of it as a night-light, and found its crimson illumination to be a comfort. But then the red light winked out and the green one turned on. Slowly, tortuously, the inner airlock door began to slide open.
She didn’t know who or what was on the other side, only that whoever or whatever it was, it had come to do terrible things to her and Renato. Awful, unspeakable things. She sat frozen, heart pounding, not breathing, and waited as the door continued sliding open bit by bit. Eventually, she saw part of a dark, featureless silhouette, and when the door opened wide enough a shadowy hand slipped through the opening and came toward her, the arm it was attached to stretching as if it were made of black rubber.
As the hand drew close, she saw the fingers were long and had too many joints. She felt a scream building deep inside her, and just as it was about to come out the hand covered the rest of the distance between them in a rapid motion, and those multijointed fingers wrapped around her throat.
And that’s when she would wake up.
Sometimes she would cry out and wake Renato, other times she’d sit up silently, arms wrapped around her body to comfort herself as she shook with fear. Intellectually she knew that no one would ever break into their dome. Comparatively speaking there was hardly anyone on the planet, and no one but she and Renato knew about the faulty door. Except for the supervisor to whom he’d reported the problem, and the supply manager at the Lodge who’d turned down their request for a replacement.
So maybe there were a few people who knew about it, but Venture had psychologically screened the colonists on Jericho 3 to make sure they could handle the working conditions. She doubted any murderous psychos could make it through the screening process. Even if there was someone who wanted to break into their home, who would even try in this storm?
Waiting by the door like this wasn’t helping her anxiety. She needed to do something to occupy her mind while Renato saw to the repair. Turning from the door, she headed for her workstation. She’d already completed her weekly report, but she thought she’d write an addendum discussing how their pod was weathering this bastard of a storm. As she started toward her desk she glanced at the vid screen.
It was still set to window mode, and it showed a scene that, as far as she was concerned, was straight out of hell. The sky was dark as night but without any stars. Lightning flashed continuously, followed by crashing thunder. The electrical display lit up the landscape briefly, but the wind was blowing so much sand and dust that it was as if the ground was covered by a roiling, seething wall of dark fog.
The view was anything but comforting so she started toward the screen, intending to turn it off. Then something caught her eye. Stopping dead, she peered more closely at the screen, frowning. She thought she’d seen—there! A flash of movement in the midst of all that blowing sand. A dark silhouette that she swore looked like the intruder in her dream.
It was a ridiculous idea. No one would be foolish enough to go outside in these conditions. An EVA suit might withstand the gale, but any sharp-edged rocks thrown by that wind could tear a hole in a suit. No, there wasn’t anyone there. There couldn’t be. It was just her imagination. She’d been thinking about her dream, so it was only natural—
Valda saw it again.
Darker this time. Closer, and while its outline roughly resembled that of a human, it didn’t look quite right. The proportions were off, the way it moved was strange, and that head…
The figure darted off the screen then, and was gone.
For several moments she stared at the place where it had been. Without taking her eyes from the screen she spoke Renato’s name to open a channel between their suit comms.
Without preamble, she said, “Forget the door. Come back inside. Now.”
She heard the banging again.
“You were the one who wanted the damn thing fixed,” he said. “I’ve been working on it for fifteen minutes, and now that I’ve almost got it, you want me to give up?” He sounded irritated, and she responded to his tone with irritation of her own.
“Don’t ask questions! Just do it!”
She didn’t want to get into a fight with him, didn’t want to fall back into their dysfunctional ways of relating to each other. They’d talked earlier, and things had been good between them since then. They’d been nicer to each other, and had even made love for the first time in a long while. But she was too frightened by the shadowy thing she’d seen on the vid screen, and she couldn’t stop herself from snapping at him.
“Goddamnit, listen to me for once, will you?”
She expected him to yell back at her, but he didn’t. Maybe he’d heard the fear and tension in her voice.
“What’s wrong?” he said finally. “Is something—” He broke off and was silent for several seconds. Then he said, “What the hell?”
Then she heard the sound of the outer door opening all the way, followed by Renato’s screaming.
24
Rushing to the inner door, Valda didn’t stop to think. Renato was in trouble, probably hurt, judging from the sound of it. Hurt bad.
There was a whoosh as she opened it, pressure equalized and atmospheres mixed, but she refused to worry about that. They could restore the dome’s environment later. Stepping into the narrow space between the doors she saw that the outer one was open. Wider than where it usually got stuck when it malfunctioned—almost halfway.
“Renato!”
She called his name over the comm.
“Renato!”
No answer.
Her instincts screamed for her to go back inside the dome and close the inner door. She almost did it, but she couldn’t leave her husband outside if he needed help, especially in this storm.
Moving forward she hesitated for a moment, and stepped outside. She’d known the wind would be strong, but nothing could’ve prepared her for the reality of it. It slammed into her with such force that she felt she’d been hit by an ore hauler. She stumbled, went down on one knee, and had to steady herself by placing one hand on the ground to keep from being knocked over entirely.
A gap appeared in the dust swirling around her—just for a second—but it was enough for her to see the boot of an EVA suit lying on the ground. Was it Renato? Had he fallen and been unable to rise again? Had he struck his helmet’s faceplate and cracked it, or maybe torn his suit and was leaking O2? She scooted closer to the boot and took hold of it, intending to pull herself closer to her husband. Instead of feeling resistance from the weight of Renato’s body, the boot slid toward her.
What the hell?
Had he taken off his suit? What would’ve compelled him to do such a thing?
The dust parted again, giving Valda a clear look. The material where the boot should’ve connected to the rest of the suit was torn. It was also stained red.
Far worse were the two splintered bones sticking out of the boot.
The tibia and fibula, a distant part of her mind supplied.
She stared at those bones for a moment, noting the shreds of meat still clinging to them. Then the full horror of what she was holding hit her. She dropped the boot as if it were radioactive and pushed herself to her feet, fighting the wind the whole way.
