Alien, page 22
“Oh my God,” Siobhan said, her voice reduced to a whisper. “What have you done?”
“We should have killed you on the platform,” Elkins said.
“We could kill him now,” Roots suggested.
“Won’t do any good,” Fowler said through gritted teeth. “She’s coming whether you kill me or not.”
Alec raised a gun to Fowler’s gut. “Not if I can help it.”
Fowler backed away toward the convention center. “Roots was right, you know. Only a Xenomorph—a Queen—would stand a chance against the biodrones. I’m carrying the only weapon you’ve got. If you kill me, you’re killing yourselves.”
Alec hesitated, and Fowler took that moment to dart toward the building. Alec fired at him, but he dodged to the left and then sprinted until he reached the doors. They saw him yank the door open, slip inside, and then stumble out of view.
“Should we go after him, Sarge?” Roots gestured with his gun.
“Wait,” Siobhan said. “Please.” She looked around at the surprised faces and said, “As much as I hate to admit it, and as crazy as it sounds, Fowler is right. We don’t stand a chance against dozens of biodrones—enough to kill a ship full of marines. We need something to even the odds for us. I’d rather take on one Queen than thirty drones, wouldn’t you?”
“Having seen a Queen,” Alec said softly, “I think it’s debatable.”
Siobhan nodded. “Even so, we’re outnumbered. We’re stranded. We’re tired and hungry, and we’re down two marines and several civilians. This planet appears to be prone to sudden, violent electrical storms,” she said, looking up at the gray clouds gathering again, “and I keep coming back to something Fowler told us. He said the biodrones are hostile to the Xenomorphs. If we let them fight Fowler’s Queen, maybe they’ll kill each other off, and the problem is solved from both sides.”
“I don’t know, Siobhan,” Alec said. “It seems very risky.”
“It is, but honestly, I don’t see any other way,” Siobhan replied. “If we can verify that there are, in fact, biodrones inside the conference center, I think this Queen is our only real solution.”
“I think Dr. McCormick is right,” Gavin said. “For what it’s worth. You go in, verify there are drones that haven’t died off, then you let them and the Queen wear each other out. Whoever’s left will be much weaker—tired or hurt, maybe—and then you swoop in and kill whatever has survived.”
“I’m with the captain,” Sam agreed.
Alec looked from Siobhan to the crew to his own men, then back to Siobhan.
“Okay. But let’s make sure there are actually biodrones still left in there, okay?”
“And while we’re in there, we can switch off the recording and send a live distress call along the same channels,” Sam said.
“Let’s do it,” Siobhan said, clutching the flamethrower. “Alec, lead the way.”
* * *
Martin Fowler felt the first tearing of his internal organs just as he reached one of the conference rooms, a boxy white space with a cool gray carpet, bright lights, and a digital whiteboard against the wall by the door. To Fowler, the room itself was a blur somewhere outside the pain. It felt like there was a knife of fire inside his chest, slicing into him.
The Queen was coming.
He staggered to and around the central conference table, a massive piece of furniture cut from the wood of the surrounding jungle, carved with the gods of the colonists’ ancestors. Once it might have fascinated Fowler, that touch of ancient history, but in his haze of agony, it just felt to him like rough wood. He tried to pull himself to a chair but the need to vomit overtook him, and he violently threw up the blood that had been pooling in his stomach.
His knees buckled, and he clapped the table for balance as another round of burning pain sliced across his midsection. She was big, very big by the feel of it. His hands, then his arms, then his whole body began to spasm, jerking him up and away from the table. He stumbled backward and hit a corner of the walls, sliding to the floor. The pain was excruciating, exquisite in its intensity. His body shook.
A split opened up in his chest. Quickly, it tore down the length of his torso to his stomach. He felt the ribs along it crack and snap, the sound as full and loud in his skull as it was outside of it. A bloody head, elongated and eyeless, with a crown of bony spikes in the back, emerged from the split in his skin. He tried to raise his hands to grab the creature, to strangle it, but his arms wouldn’t move. It wormed its way out of him, climbing onto what was left of his ruined chest and straddling the hole there, the claws of its feet gripping the edges of rib bone as it stalked toward his face.
Fowler tried to form the word die, but couldn’t get more than a blood-misted exhale past his lips. The creature opened its mouth, and from within, a tinier mouth thrust outward, chattering at him.
The last thing Dr. Fowler saw before the world went white and then black was that creature, the newly born Xenomorph Queen, leaping onto the table and scurrying off.
* * *
They made their way cautiously to the external sliding glass doors, which were closed. Upon opening them, the difference in temperature was immediate; the climate control had set the rooms at a cool 68 degrees. Soft instrumental music played over an overhead speaker.
They saw immediately that the front lobby was empty. No one sat at the front desk or on the sleek couches across from it. No one—at least so far as the arcs allowed vision down the hallway—was traveling to a meeting room.
The Pushan Conference and Business Complex was designed as two large concentric wheels, with the main conference room itself located at the hub, while spokes led to numerous other meeting rooms jutting off the encircling hallways. At the front of the building, in the outermost circle, was a lobby, and beyond it the first spoke leading inward. Hallways also arced to the left and right.
Kira stood close to Elkins, echoing his movements. There had been some discussion about leaving her behind with the Astraeus, where it might be safe, but as a group they decided against that. When a Xenomorph was loose, there was no safety except maybe in numbers, and no safe place except with one another. Kira was adamant that she wanted to stay with Elkins, anyway. With him, she felt safe. Her desperation to be near him broke Siobhan’s heart in new places.
“We’ve spent a lot of the last week creeping down hallways,” Roots remarked as they moved toward the left-side hallway.
“Running down them, too,” Elkins said. “I hope they reassign us to some nice, calm national park. Outdoors. No more tight spaces.”
“These are pretty big hallways,” Sam said with a small smile.
“No hallway’s big enough when the thing you’re trying to shoot has acid for blood,” Elkins replied.
“Is that what we’re up against?” Gavin peered into one of the conference rooms where a door stood open. “That what these biodrones have?”
“Seems like a reasonable assumption,” Alec replied. “If they’re like the Xenomorphs, they’re pretty much deadly inside and out.”
They kept moving.
It didn’t take long to find Martin Fowler’s corpse. The splatter of blood on the walls and ceiling drew their attention to one of the conference rooms on the left, against the outer wall. A splash of blood on the conference table, as well as a bloody handprint, showed that Fowler had probably tried to make it to one of the chairs and collapsed. He had stumbled to the far-right corner of the room and sat there, waiting for the thing to finish eating its way out of him. Most of his chest had burst outward, with bloody, broken ribs bent up like an open cage. Siobhan couldn’t help but look inside the empty cavity. The viscera there was shredded, as if by tiny foot-claws scrambling to escape.
Fowler’s eyes were open, already cloudy with the cataracts of death. His lower jaw hung limply against his chest. It was a horrible sight, all the more awful somehow because it was becoming a familiar one. Siobhan shook her head. On some level, she felt bad for Fowler. He might have had family, loved ones on some faraway world, though she doubted it. He might even have loved someone else, though she doubted that as well. Still, the part of her that felt sympathy for other human beings could see that it had been a painful and likely terrifying death, a full-circle vengeance of the universe come back to collect.
For that, she felt some pity.
What eclipsed the pity, though, was fear. It was the unspoken fear they were all thinking—that now, a Xenomorph Queen was loose somewhere in the building, and that such a horror might be their only chance to survive.
“The Queen will probably stay in these outer halls until she’s matured,” Siobhan said. “I think we should go to the central conference room. Given its importance, the walls are likely to be reinforced. If the biodrones chased down the Joint Chiefs and other government officials… well, they would have run there, hoping the walls would keep the biodrones out until help arrived.”
“Makes sense to me,” Alec said. “Let’s go.”
They made their way back through the lobby and down the central hall to the inner circle of conference rooms. It was there that the evidence of real carnage began. Blood had dried on many of the walls, and despite the temperature-controlled rooms, the smell of decay was cloying. Much like at the Menhit Lab, the few actual bodies they found were mangled, with dozens of small slashes across the faces, necks, chests, and limbs.
Some had missing arms and legs. Others were missing eyes or whole heads. None had the burst chests, but to Siobhan, that made sense. Unlike the Xenomorphs, the biodrones weren’t focused on looking for incubators. They were killing whatever they saw, period. No doubt it was how Fowler and his boss had designed them.
As they covered the last few yards to the central chamber, they began to hear the chittering, faintly at first, from the other side of the double doors. They moved silently, listening for anything on their side of the portal, and anything that might give them a sense of what they were up against on the other side.
Alec and Siobhan moved toward the cool silver metal. Siobhan pressed an ear to it. Alec stood ready with his gun.
Beyond were sounds of movement—a lot of it. The biodrones weren’t as quiet as their natural counterparts; maybe, thinking they were the victors, they saw no reason to be. She could hear a series of call-and-response chirps and squeals, anxious and rapid, as if they were communicating. She was pretty sure they didn’t have anything so sophisticated as a language, but bees and wasps on Earth communicated with each other, didn’t they? Predators of the jungle and the forest organized hunts and warned each other of danger. Crows called out enemies, wolves followed an alpha leader, and hell, some creatures even mimicked the sounds of their prey.
She strained to hear anything that would indicate human survivors—anybody at all who might still be alive in there—but heard nothing to indicate living people. No human voices, no whimpering or whispering, nothing.
If there were no humans inside the room, then it probably wouldn’t be long until the biodrones decided to move out of it.
She pulled away from the door and mouthed, They’re in there. I can hear them, and illustrated with gestures.
Alec mouthed back, Survivors?
Siobhan shook her head no. Biodrones.
Alec frowned, then nodded. Okay. He gestured back the way they’d come. Shortly they rejoined the others.
“Anyone left alive?” Sam whispered, glancing at Kira as if afraid the answer would be too hard for her to hear.
“Doubt it,” Alec replied in the same hushed tone. “Siobhan heard the biodrones. I doubt they know how to work those doors, but they had to have a way in. I’d like to get out of here, all the same.”
They had just turned to go when the pounding on the double doors began. It thundered through the hallway, and around the sound were squeals of anger and frustration. The pounding went on for a few minutes, during which the group backed away.
Then, abruptly, it stopped.
In the silence that followed, the group froze, listening.
A sudden, sharp squeal from the other side of the door made them jump. It was followed by a loud metallic bang, and then a sizzling sound, like frying bacon—at least, that’s what Siobhan thought of at first.
“What the hell is that?” Elkins asked.
A moment later, the sour tang of burning metal met their noses, and then it dawned on Siobhan just what the sizzling sound was.
“It’s their blood,” she said, both horrified and amazed. “They must have killed one of their own. They’re using its blood to melt through the door.” As if to verify the theory, a black spot appeared in the center of one of the doors.
“Son of a bitch,” Gavin said. He sounded impressed, in spite of himself. The dark stain spread, a cancerous irregular area growing larger and larger until the metal at its center bubbled and disintegrated.
“Run. Now,” Alec shouted. “Go!”
They all took off down the corridor.
The sizzling grew louder behind them, and then the spine-jarring sound of hideous squeals came pouring into the hallway. Siobhan slowed and turned, laying down a line of flame between the galloping biodrones and her group. There were so many of them. They looked to her like a rushing river of shining black and gray, a flash flood washing toward her. She cried out, spraying the hallway again with the flamethrower.
The carpet caught, and a phalanx of fire blazed up. Some of the biodrones turned and pulled back. Others ran through or leaped over the flames. Siobhan felt a tug on her arm and turned to see Alec.
“Forget it,” he said. “Just run!”
They ran to catch up with the others, farther up the spoke of hallway. Elkins, Roots, and Kira turned down the hallway to the left while Sam and Gavin branched off to the right. She could feel the biodrones behind her, bearing down on her. A claw grazed her back, pulling her hair and slicing its way down her top. She screamed, but wrenched herself forward, away from the thing.
Gunshots from nearby echoed out in the hall; the screams of angry biodrones escalated, their blood hissing and bubbling on the carpet.
Just as she and Alec reached the inner circle of halls, Siobhan heard Sam cry out. She looked to the right to see that he had fallen forward. Three of the creatures immediately leaped onto his back, their razor-edged tails stabbing into him. His screams died quickly, and as they speared his spine over and over, he coughed and sputtered blood.
Gavin slowed and turned to help, but skidded to a stop when he saw the things on top of his co-pilot. He stared, shocked, at the body of his friend, and it only took that single moment for two others to pounce on him, knocking him down.
Alec fired at the things on top of Gavin. He caught the nearer one in the shoulder and its arm jerked back. It turned its head, screaming at him, then raked its clawed hand across Gavin’s face. It drew the same hand back and then dug those claws into Gavin’s jugular. Blood sprayed up from the wound and covered the biodrone’s bony chest.
The creature leaned over the dying man, and its own blood pattered down on Gavin’s forehead. Then its head snapped sharply in Alec’s direction. Its tail whipped and cracked, then darted at Alec’s mid-section. He dodged, but the point caught him in the side of his ribs, poking straight through. It drew back and stabbed again, this time catching Alec in the forearm and then the lower left thigh, by his knee.
Alec’s good knee buckled, and he reeled away.
Siobhan stepped between the creature and Alec and turned the flamethrower on it. The wail of the thing was ear-piercing as the flames wrapped around it. It stumbled backward and slammed into the wall before climbing it and taking off in the other direction. The creature next to it seemed to recognize fire as a danger, but also seemed fascinated by its effects. When its fellow biodrone was out of sight, it turned on Siobhan and Alec.
Other biodrones, seeming to discern on some level that the weapon in Siobhan’s hand meant fire, crept cautiously toward her and Alec from down the middle spoke of hallway. Those that had killed Sam had noticed, too, and moved like stalking panthers back toward where the pair stood.
She glanced behind her, in the direction the marines and Kira had gone, and saw that the hallway was clear.
“This way!” she shouted, spraying the hallway in front of her with flames. This time, she held the button down until the carpet caught fire, and the creatures hesitated. She got under Alec’s arm to support him and they backed away, then turned and ran after Elkins, Kira, and Roots.
24
The biodrones screeched and screamed, clamoring over and around each other to close the distance between them and Roots. He had kept stopping to lay down suppressive fire and slow the creatures’ pursuit, so Elkins and Kira were a little farther ahead.
The marines and girl had rounded a corner, and a biodrone dropped from the ceiling in front of them. Kira screamed. Elkins opened fire on it, aiming for the smooth curve of its head. The creature jerked with each hit, the wounds unleashing small geysers of particularly acrid blood. It recovered quickly, though, and charged Elkins, grabbing him by the neck with one hand and lifting him off the ground.
His feet kicked, and he smacked at the creature’s hand. His face turned red as he gasped for air.
Roots managed to bring down one of the biodrones and turned just in time to see Kira shout in fury, launching herself at the creature. Her tiny fists pounded its spiked, bony hip, and her voice, high and angry, lashed at the thing with nearly unintelligible words. Roots fired on the creature over Kira’s head, but the ammo seemed to just bounce off the creature’s bony spikes.
Suddenly, Kira stopped fighting and went silent. It took a moment for Roots to realize she was dangling from the bloody spike of the biodrone’s tail. In a moment, she was eye to eye with Elkins, her small face pale, her little lips parted as blood spilled from one corner of her mouth.
The horror was almost too terrible to comprehend. It was compartmentalized, though, as he noticed Elkins hanging, too, from the fist of the fucker that had killed the kid.
