Alien, page 10
They were not, and once again, Weyland-Yutani was behind it all.
A rush of anger came on him like a wave of heat in his face, neck, and chest. His fists clenched. That bastard Fowler—all those soulless sons of bitches at the Weyland-Yutani lab—didn’t care who they hurt, who they killed. Even after all these years, they hadn’t learned that they had no control over this thing, this force they wanted to possess. This streamlined and efficient killing machine that they wanted to both somehow get under their control and unleash wildly on the galaxy.
They had failed so many times in trying to control it, although they’d certainly done their best to spread the plague of Xenomorphs as far and as widely as they could. He hated them for that.
Setting the lids down on each of the crates, he locked them, and then piled them up with the other boxes to be loaded onto the evacuation ship in the morning. It felt jarringly final to do so, like he was cauterizing a wound rather than letting it heal naturally.
Alec had managed to get McGowan’s dog tags off his body just after the alien had killed him, but they hadn’t been able to recover Compton’s body. He knew the ranks and serial numbers of his squad by heart, but he would have liked to have been able to give those dog tags to Compton’s husband, or her sons. She and McGowan had been good soldiers. They deserved better.
Tomorrow, on the ship, he’d begin the reporting and notification processes, and he was damn sure he’d make it known what his squad members had died fighting against.
Walking over to his desk, he sat, propping his socked feet up on it, then leaned over and opened a side drawer where he kept a bottle of whiskey. There was less than half a bottle left, no doubt from the squad taking the occasional nip—off-duty, of course—but Alec didn’t care. He had to be up in a few hours, and as exhausted as he was, he knew he wouldn’t be able to fall asleep without a little help. He unscrewed the cap.
An alarm went off throughout the labs.
“Shit.” He swung his feet off the desk, put the bottle aside, and pulled on his boots. He noticed a small spatter of blood—McGowan’s, probably—on one of the toes. He stood and grabbed his gun, thinking of Siobhan, and was out the door.
* * *
Siobhan was nearly asleep when the alarm went off. She sat up, disoriented and anxious. The shrill sound coming over her comms produced both a jarring pain in her head and a knot in her stomach.
Exhausted when they’d gotten back, she had managed to change into a tank top and sweatpants, pull up her hair, and brush her teeth before crashing on her bed. If she’d dreamed, she did not remember, and suspected that was probably a good thing. Now, with the alarm sounding, she blinked to clear her vision of sleep, threw back the blankets, and pulled on her boots, then made her way to the door.
Camilla stood outside, hand raised as if to knock.
“What’s going on?”
“I’m not sure,” Camilla said with a small frown. “However, the quarantine alarm appears to have been activated by Lance Corporal Elkins.”
Siobhan’s heart sank. The research volunteer, Cora…
Fifteen percent of the test subjects, Fowler had said, did not respond to the damned drug he’d created. He’d sworn Cora wasn’t one of those people.
He’d sworn…
She and Camilla hurried down the corridor toward the quarantine area. A door at the end of a side hallway opened and Siobhan let out a little cry. It took her a moment to recognize the silhouette stepping in from the dark outside. It was Alec.
“What’s happening?” he asked, rushing toward them, his gun already drawn.
“An alarm was set off—Camilla says it was Elkins, at the quarantine lab,” Siobhan replied with a grim nod in that direction. “So I can hazard a guess.”
“That son of a bitch,” Alec muttered.
Then they were on the move again.
* * *
They found Elkins and Roots picking themselves up in the hallway leading to the lab. Elkins had his gun trained on Dr. Fowler. Roots had some nasty wounds on one cheek. What was left of Cora lay on the floor. Blood splattered a nearby wall, streaking toward a vent. Siobhan took the sight in, that knot in her stomach pulling tighter.
“What the fuck happened?” Alec’s eyes blazed as he glared from the body of the girl to Dr. Fowler.
“I… I don’t know,” Dr. Fowler replied. “I don’t understand.” He looked genuinely shaken, but his glance kept slipping toward the exit and his body language was guarded. He looked more worried about himself, Siobhan thought, than about the mutilated remains of his research volunteer lying on the floor.
She crouched beside the body. The chest cavity looked to have been blown outward from the inside; broken fragments of her ribcage jutted up, blood dripping off the shredded skin that had caught on the jagged ends. Inside, what Siobhan could make out of the lungs looked pretty torn up; it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began.
A wave of dizziness swept over her, and she sat back on the floor.
“Von, are you okay?” Alec’s voice came from above her.
Siobhan nodded. “I—whew. I’m fine.” She swallowed a few times to sink the gorge that tried to rise in her throat. “I’m fine.” She waved away the hand extended to help her—it seemed important that she find it within herself to get up on her own—and rose slowly. Then she turned to Dr. Fowler. It took just as much effort, if not more, to control the anger she was feeling.
“You said she was not a risk.” Siobhan leveled a gaze smoldering with rage at the man. “You were responsible for her. You claimed she was not—not—part of that fifteen percent.” Dr. Fowler looked from her to Alec to Elkins and Roots, then back to her again.
“I—I swear I didn’t know. You have to believe me—”
“Believe you?” She kept her voice even, but her hands clenched into fists. “Every single thing you’ve told us since we met you has turned out to be a half-truth or a flat-out lie. I wouldn’t believe you if you told me my own name.”
“I didn’t mean for this—I didn’t know,” he insisted. “She showed all the clinical signs of the serum working.”
“What you meant to do,” Siobhan said, “was say anything you had to, in order to get you and your cargo off this moon.” She took a step closer. “Where is it?”
“Where is what?”
“The Xenomorph, you son of a bitch,” she replied through gritted teeth. “Where. Is. It?”
Dr. Fowler didn’t answer. Her gaze swung to Elkins, then Roots, who seemed to shrink in the withering gaze of her anger. None of them said anything.
“We need to find it,” she said, “and we need to kill it.”
12
Outside, the moon rumbled and groaned. Beyond the Gatelands, more fissures opened in the ground, splitting rock and dirt along the road between the Menhit Lab and the oasis of the Seegson Pharmaceuticals lab.
It was as if BG-791 sensed the alien infection that was spreading on its surface, and was attempting to heave it up and out, but the effort wasn’t enough. The moon was being pulled apart. The vurfur sensed their own extinction. The Xenomorphs were just one more cancerous tumor in an already dying body.
For the humans on BG-791, time was running out.
* * *
Inside the Seegson lab, that electric tension of a world dying outside added to the strain inside. It hummed beneath the group’s heated debate. It was an underlying presence in every look, every word, every movement, pulling at everyone and everything with its own gravity.
“Tell me what you know about the Xenomorphs,” Siobhan said to Alec. “What do we need to know to kill them?”
“Or contain them,” Dr. Fowler ventured, but this only drew the muzzle of Roots’s gun on his chest.
Alec considered Siobhan’s question a moment. “I know that outside the host, the chestbursters grow quickly, so there will only be so many places it can hide. They’re built to survive, to adapt… but they’re still just animals, and like any animals, they don’t like fire. They don’t like jolts of electricity, explosions, that sort of thing. And they can be buried alive.”
“Sergeant Brand is correct,” Fowler interjected. “They move away from pain, as any animal would, and while our serum may slow the gestation of the alien inside the host, it seems to accelerate their growth once outside. So no, they are not indestructible, but they are also far more aggressive.”
“Meaning?” Roots jabbed the gun into the scientist’s chest, and the latter grunted.
“Meaning,” Fowler said, pushing his glasses up his nose, “that these specimens don’t just kill to protect themselves, their Queen, or their young. They kill in rage, kill for the sake of killing. They are driven by that aggression as much as by the will to survive.”
“So, on top of everything else,” Roots said, “they’re assholes.”
“Yes, I suppose you could say that,” Fowler replied, grimacing.
“Explain something to me, Doc,” Elkins said. “This thing is itching to kill, right? But we have guns. So it’s hiding, maybe figuring it’ll pick us off one by one—”
“I wouldn’t say it’s ‘figuring’ anything. These are not reasoning creatures, any more than, say, the vurfur reason that weak prey is easier to kill and eat than strong prey.”
“That’s what I’m getting at,” Elkins said. “Right now, it’s small and weaker than it will be. Its first experience was Roots firing at it. But like you said, it’s growing. It’s adapting. This itch to kill will eventually bring it out of hiding, right? So what should we be keeping an eye out for, behavior-wise? Where do we look for it?”
Dr. Fowler shrugged. “I rather think your synthetic here—”
“Camilla,” Siobhan broke in.
“Camilla, yes. I think she would be able to provide you with more accurate information than I could, by employing her bio-scanner. I studied the Xenomorphs in their gestational stage. That was my expertise—what I could do to slow their growth inside a human host.”
“Yeah, great job you did there, Doc,” Roots said with a small snort.
“Sergeant,” Fowler said, turning to Alec. “I understand that your men are upset, but I see no reason why I need to be subjected to their relentless disrespect.” All eyes turned to Alec. He had been staring off down the hallway, his gaze tracing the paths between the vents and the floor.
“You want respect?” he said finally. “Help us kill this thing.”
“Hey, look,” Roots cut in. “Sun’s coming up, right? The ship will be here soon. Maybe the answer is, we hole up somewhere that we can defend until we can get off this rock. It’s only a few hours. We should be able to stay alive for a few hours.”
“We can’t,” Siobhan said, a growing horror dawning on her. “Not yet. We’ve got the residents. We have to see if they’re okay.”
The others went quiet. Besides the five of them, there were seven other people still to account for—essential researchers and the family members who refused to leave BG-791 without them. Siobhan had been given the task of getting them all safely off the moon, and it was a responsibility she took seriously.
There was an elderly couple, the Hernandezes, with a young granddaughter named Kira for whom Siobhan had a particular soft spot. She knew how hard it had been as an adult—let alone being the only child in the colony—to move star systems away to a cold, inhospitable moon with hostile plants and animals, an alien sun, and none of the amenities of home. Kira had lost both her parents a few years before, and despite the tragedy and all the upheaval, she was a bright, mostly happy girl with a shy fascination for science and a tender hand when it came to plants and animals.
Siobhan had always hoped Kira would have more than a lonely existence on BG-791, and now more than ever, it seemed imperative that she get the girl off that moon.
“There were no communications from the residential pods as of two minutes ago,” Camilla said, breaking the silence. “This is not necessarily worrisome, though; it is late, and the alarm was limited to the laboratory facility. The residents are likely sleeping, provided there has been no breach.”
Siobhan turned to Alec. “We need to check on them.”
Alec looked into her eyes. “Right.” He nodded slowly. “We sweep the residential pods, wake everyone, and bring them back here—quick and quiet. Then we do like Roots suggested and find a place to lock down until the ship arrives.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Elkins said.
“I love this job.” Roots shouldered his gun. “Oorah. Let’s go save some colonists.”
* * *
It had been a long night for Hank Hernandez. His granddaughter, Kira, had been excited all the previous day about finally getting off BG-791. The prospect of taking a big UA ship to another planet was a thrill in and of itself; it had been a long, long time since she’d even left the Seegson complex, let alone the moon on which they lived.
She’d chattered enthusiastically about the new school she would be going to and the new friends she would make and about living on a planet with real seasons and parks and movies and candy and on and on… and Hank had been happy to listen to her, to feel delighted because she was delighted. All her toys and clothes and books were packed and waiting in the barracks to be loaded onto the ship. She’d even bravely packed away her favorite stuffed animal, a floppy dog named Mr. Bones, claiming she wouldn’t need him for that last night, and would feel better knowing he was aboard the rescue ship and not accidentally left behind somewhere.
It wasn’t lost on Hank that they were fleeing, but he did his best to match Kira’s excitement of the day, to make it seem more like an adventure than an escape.
Come nightfall, though, it had been another story. Kira hadn’t wanted to go to sleep. Her bedroom—once warmly decorated in shades of pink and purple and packed with toys, clothes, and games—stood nearly empty. Her nightlight, which she had been too old for just the night before, now cast its faint glow on the bare wall. In the morning, they’d be leaving the nightlight behind, as they would the bed pod and nearly all the big furniture.
Maybe it was the shadowy emptiness of the place or the absence of Mr. Bones, but all the exhilarating new possibilities of the day had morphed into nighttime uncertainties, doubts, and fears—not least of which was whether or not the ship would actually come and take them off the moon before it crashed.
The ground trembled outside and the wind leaned on the housing complex, making it groan. The skies looked angrier and more dangerous than anything the little girl could imagine in the endless starry space beyond it.
For him, this would mark the sixth interplanetary move in his life, not counting the various places he had been stationed years ago as a Colonial Marine. He’d always figured there’d be one more big move, maybe to somewhere sunny and warm; someplace where he and Victoria could retire and live out the rest of their days fishing and sunning themselves on a quiet beach. What he hadn’t figured on was evacuating a moon about to skew its orbit and crash into its planet.
And he hadn’t figured on having Kira.
Hank had been an agricultural scientist for the Seegson Pharmaceuticals lab for almost forty-three years. His and Victoria’s only daughter, Melanie, was grown and busy with a job and new family of her own, and Hank hadn’t been ready to retire just yet. He had another ten years or so left in him, he’d thought, and Vickie was always up for a new adventure. It was one of the things he loved about her.
When Seegson had offered him the position on BG-791, which included payment of relocation costs and a benefits package with a number of bonds he could leave his infant granddaughter someday, he’d agreed. He and Vickie would be off on yet another adventure.
The moon itself had been rough terrain; they’d arrived when the Gatelands oasis was still wild. The housing pods had been ready for moving in, but parts of the lab were still under construction. There had been few animals and fewer people, and none of the amenities of the settled planets. “No place to go and nothing else to do but work, huh?” Vickie had said with a small smile, but he had gotten her meaning. Seegson had put them someplace where there were no distractions, nothing to focus on but work.
It had been exciting all the same. There was a new lab and new surroundings, a new sky above their heads, and plenty of time in the evenings for wine and chats over the wire with their daughter and her husband, Keith, and the new baby, Kira. From a work standpoint, there’d been exotic new plant life to study, which had always been a thrill to him.
They’d been living on BG-791 for about a month when an industrial accident killed Keith and put Melanie in the hospital. Her situation had been critical; she hadn’t survived the night. She’d died alone in a sterile medpod. Hank was given three weeks’ leave to fly to LV-809 for the funerals and bring back Kira.
He loved his granddaughter; he’d loved her from the moment he’d first held her, in a whole, profound, pure way. When he’d held her in that hospital, a tiny little pink, perfect person so much like his daughter, he’d been conflicted, overcome with emotions both sad and elated. It probably hadn’t been a good move for Kira to live on BG-791, but neither he nor Victoria could bear to leave her with anyone else. They would make it work.
Vickie had been an elementary school teacher before the move, so she could homeschool Kira, and Hank’s job with Seegson would provide them with food, medicine, clothes, and any of the other important things they might need. Plus, they loved her. They could take good care of her—Hank knew that, but he also knew they couldn’t really give her much of a life.
With this next move, though, off BG-791, he and Vickie could finally give Kira all the things she hadn’t been able to have before. She’d have all those things she mentioned and more, and maybe most of all, she’d have friends to be there for her and look after her. He and Vickie weren’t going to live forever, after all, and Hank wanted to know that at the very least, if anything happened to him and Vickie, Kira could have the life she deserved. The life her mother never really got to have.
