Alien, page 6
“Try the panel, Elkins,” Alec said in a low voice. Elkins pushed the button, but nothing happened. Roots stepped around Siobhan, and he and Elkins threw their shoulders into sliding the door open manually. The backup generators, located outside the facility, should have kicked in auxiliary power to work the doors and lights. If they hadn’t, Siobhan thought, it might mean that whatever was wrong inside the facility had found its way out.
After a time, the door gave way, groaning as it slid back along its track. Beyond was another shorter, featureless hallway, and a door at the far end leading to the medical area.
“Compton, McGowan—you two stand guard out here. Keep an eye on things. We’ll look around in here.”
“Got it, Sarge,” Compton said.
“Keep your eyes open. We don’t know what we’re dealing with yet.”
Something in his voice told Siobhan he wasn’t being entirely truthful, but both McGowan and Compton nodded. She kept her tongue.
“Don’t worry, Sarge,” McGowan said. “Whatever’s in here, it won’t get past us.”
Seeming satisfied, Alec gave them a nod, and he and the others slipped through into the medical area.
* * *
The antechamber to the medical bay was a small room with a desk in the corner to the right of the door. A row of chairs wrapped around most of the two far walls. Much of the room was empty, except for the occasional grisly reminder that something bad had happened here. Beneath one of the chairs Siobhan saw a boot with what looked eerily like part of a lower leg, the calf muscles chewed. It was still inexplicably standing upright.
A bloody handprint on the wall struck her as wrong somehow; it was upside-down, for one, with the fingers pointing down, and smeared upward toward the air vent near the ceiling. Siobhan forced herself to look away. Though not squeamish by nature, she thought herself fairly empathetic, and with each room they cleared, the likelihood of finding survivors in any shape to save seemed to be diminishing.
To the right of the desk stood an open door. Moving toward it, Alec silently motioned for them to follow. Elkins gestured for Siobhan and Camilla to move ahead of him so he could protect the rear. Siobhan was barely through the doorway when Alec grabbed her arm and tugged her to one side. She suppressed a cry.
“Be careful,” he told Camilla and Elkins as they stepped in after Siobhan. All of them followed his gaze to the floor. There was a small spatter of something yellowish-green around a hole in the floor near Siobhan’s shoe. Whatever the substance was, it had eaten through the tile, the wooden subfloor, and even the metal beneath that. Something shiny and dark at the bottom of the hole had caught what was left, arresting the corrosion further, and the substance pooled and foamed there. There was an acrid smell in the room which might have been the substance itself or the mix of melting solids with which it had come in contact.
“Don’t let it touch your shoes,” Alec said. He waved them along a path around other holes of various sizes, lighting the way with his flashlight.
“What is it, Sergeant?” Camilla took a delicate step around the hole and stood next to Siobhan.
“Honestly? It’s… uh… blood.” He glanced around, picked up a metal tool that looked like a large clamp, and dipped it into the yellow stuff. Immediately, it began smoking and bubbling, eating through inch after inch of it in seconds. “It has to be them.”
“Come again, Sarge? I thought you said ‘blood’.” Elkins looked skeptically down at the half-eaten metal clamp.
“I did.” Alec shone the flashlight around. In the passing glow, Siobhan saw medical pods with bodies in them. That explained the foul smell in the room, a nauseating mix of corrosion and rot. These also looked as if something had exploded from within the chest cavities, tearing through internal organs, meat, and muscle, and dragging along whatever they couldn’t blast through.
Ripped through, a voice in her head corrected her. Something had torn its way out from inside the bodies. Although she couldn’t have pinpointed why just then, she was sure of that fact. They have samples. Samples they can use as weapons. DNA…
Another pass of the light showed even larger holes in the floor and more of that yellow acid that had eaten through the floor around the medical pods.
“Blood can’t do that,” Siobhan said, shaking her head. “I don’t care what kind of experiments they’re doing here. How could any living thing have blood like that?”
“Most can’t,” Alec said, and Siobhan saw that look in his eyes again, that deep-rooted worry which so rarely surfaced. “In fact, only one creature I’ve ever seen has blood like that.”
“Wait, you don’t mean…?” Roots raised his gun, swinging it around the dark lab. “I kinda thought they were myths.”
“What were myths? What’s going on here, Alec?” Becoming exasperated, Siobhan searched his face. “What did… that… to those people?”
“An XX121,” he replied. “A Xenomorph.”
6
“So, McG, what do you think we’re looking at here?” Compton asked as the two stood guarding the hallways. She leaned against the wall across from McGowan, but kept her gun raised. The only light came from the flashlights affixed to their shoulders, and it made weird shadows which darted, swelled, and receded behind them. “Virus?”
McGowan likewise leaned against the doorway and glanced in the direction they’d come, into the near-impenetrable gloom, then shifted the gun to his other shoulder.
“Nah,” he said, “that don’t seem right to me. The damage we’ve seen, those bodies—a virus didn’t do that.”
Compton nodded. “So what, then? Super-soldier? Genetically engineered animal?”
McGowan shrugged. He’d experienced violence before—colonial uprisings, protests gone sour, and prior to joining the USCMC, a hell of a lot of street fights. He’d seen shootings, stabbings, beatings, stranglings, and even a drowning once, but nothing like he had seen here at the Menhit Lab. The air practically crackled with tension, and not just from him and Compton, who seemed determined to fill the silence in the empty hallway with talk.
As if to echo his thoughts, the floor rumbled beneath his feet.
Just the fucking moon, he thought.
Whatever had happened here had left a mark. It had a kind of ghostly permanence. Maybe it was even still happening in some other part of the building, which didn’t sit right with McGowan. Not at all. Sarge seemed off, too, like something had gotten his hackles up, and that was never a good sign.
“I think—”
A creak and a thud from back the way they’d come brought them both to attention, their guns raised.
“What was that?” McGowan searched the dark, trying to make out movement. There was nothing.
“I don’t—oh wait.” Compton took several steps forward, squinting. “It’s a vent plate. Looks like it fell off the wall. No big deal.”
“Compton…” McGowan’s voice trailed off. He wasn’t sure what he meant to say—some warning, maybe, not to go too far into the dark down there… but he couldn’t have said why. It was a gut feeling, which he usually trusted, but in this place, somehow it seemed distorted. They’d cleared that end of the hallway and found the remnants of the threat, but no threat itself. That was gone, whatever it was.
“What?” Compton turned around. She clutched her gun tighter. “What is it?”
“I—I don’t know,” McGowan said. “I just… I got a bad feeling, ya know?”
She nodded.
Behind her, in the dark, a shape swelled from the ceiling and dropped, then rose up. Compton didn’t notice.
“I know what you mean. I—”
“Look out!” McGowan raised his weapon as Compton dived out of the way. The light from his shoulder fell on the thing. It was about seven feet tall and had a shiny dark gray exoskeleton, like an insect. Its head was long, arcing back behind it, with no apparent eyes or nose, and its mouth was pulled into a wide, lipless snarl.
It appeared to be bipedal, with a narrow, bony frame and limbs lined with ridges and joints ending in spikes. Its hands—or maybe they were paws?—were overlarge, as were its arched feet, and all four ended in sharp claws. Spines protruded from its back, starting between its skeletal shoulders. Its spiked, segmented tail whipped behind it, some six feet long.
For several moments, McGowan couldn’t move, couldn’t fire. He could only stare at the thing. He’d seen the training videos, had heard the horror stories, always about friends of friends. Few who had ever encountered one of these things lived to tell about it themselves.
It was an XX121. One of the deadliest killing machines in the known universe, and it was standing close enough that McGowan thought he could smell the sickly sweetness of its breath and feel the vapor of its saliva every time the thing exhaled.
The alien pulled back its hand as if to swipe at him.
Suddenly there was gunfire, the lightning of an M41A pulse rifle from McGowan’s left. The alien screeched, its bright yellow-green blood spraying back at Compton. Some of it landed on her gun, and the metal began sizzling and melting. Some of it landed on her face shield and began eating away at that, as well. When it reached her skin an instant later, her own screaming matched that of the creature.
The alien dove at Compton and tore off the arm holding the gun. Blood shot from her shoulder stump, spraying the floor, the wall, and McGowan, and pouring down the side of her body. The gun skittered across the floor into the dark.
Compton’s screaming stopped. Her eyes grew wide with horror as she watched her arm dangling from the claws of the creature above her. She turned her head toward McGowan, but whatever fight was left in her was swiftly draining from her face.
McGowan raised his gun and fired at the creature. He was far enough away to avoid direct contact with the thing’s blood, but it pattered onto the floor in front of him, eating through it.
The XX121 shrieked in anger. It speared Compton through the chest with its long tail and whipped her at McGowan. Her body connected hard with his chest and he flew backward, the base of his skull cracking against the wall behind him. He fell heavily, and for several moments, the hallway swam in front of him.
Blinking, he saw blurred shapes—the alien stalking toward him, large gray hands reaching down, Compton’s body lifted from his lap, and then both the alien and Compton were sideways, up on the wall, moving away into the darkness.
Everything went black.
* * *
For a moment, Siobhan was too shocked to say anything.
“A Xenomorph killed those people?”
“At least one,” Alec said, sounding almost apologetic. “There could be more.”
She had heard about Xenomorphs, but as nightmare monsters in stories told to children to scare them into being good. She’d read the files, seen artists’ renderings of the beasts, had even heard that the USCMC had initiated training to recognize and exterminate them, in theory… but in real life? Siobhan had never met anyone who had actually seen a real Xenomorph, let alone had any kind of interaction with it.
Sure, there were legends—salvage crews and the Svarog miners who had battled the Xenomorphs and survived—but those were stories from faraway worlds, places more ephemeral, in a way, than the aliens themselves.
She was surprised to find that it wasn’t blinding terror that immediately rose to the surface of her conscious thoughts, though she certainly was terrified. Rather, it seemed critical just then to understand what she was up against. Maybe it was the scientist part of her, or maybe it was survival instincts kicking into gear.
Either way, she needed to know.
Siobhan surveyed the room. The bodies in the medpods seemed to support the incubation stories she’d heard about. She noted a broken laser mount on the ceiling, and with a quick scan of the floor, she saw the cracked casing of the laser. It looked to her as if they had been incubating and birthing aliens in the medpods, then cutting them down with lasers. But why?
“What kills them?” she asked, her voice surprisingly calm.
“Well, shooting them is no good, at least in close quarters,” Elkins said, gesturing at the floor. “Their acid blood. Still, they can be killed—crushed, torn apart, all that. Fire’s supposed to be real good for killing them. They’re highly adaptable, extremely efficient killers, but they’re still just beasts.”
Siobhan looked from Elkins to Alec, who nodded, then looked away.
“Best way to stay alive,” Roots said, “at least according to what they told us, is to put as much distance as possible between us and them. And if you can’t do that—”
“—consider everything non-essential to be expendable,” Alec finished in a low voice.
A heavy silence followed. A Xenomorph outbreak the day before evacuation from a dying moon set to collide with its planet…
It was almost too much for Siobhan to process. How did the changes on the moon affect the Xenomorphs? They couldn’t possibly survive the collision with Hephaestus… Would they sense impending death and try to stave it off? Or escape. What if one of them made it onto the evacuation ship?
“Siobhan,” Camilla said, breaking into her thoughts, “I think you should see this.” She was standing by a large stasis case where biological samples were usually kept. The glass doors had been shattered. One large, leathery egg, split open on top, appeared to have hatched. Judging from the large concave bases lining the shelf, there had been others, but they were gone.
“Yeah,” Roots said, and he looked down, kicking something over to the others that, in the glow of the flashlight, looked like a shed snakeskin with too many tails. “At least one of the facehuggers latched on to someone.”
A loud bang from the observation room on the other side of the medical bay made them all jump.
“Something’s in there,” Camilla said, looking at her wrist. “Something alive.”
7
Roots crept to the control panel. Despite the carnage around it, the unit for opening the observation room door appeared to be undamaged. He glanced back at Alec, who nodded, then he pushed the sequence to open the door.
It skittered half-open, issuing a low grinding noise where it stuck in its track. Roots and Elkins gave it a hard shove and it finally slid into the wall. The room beyond lay dark and silent. Roots and the other marines raised their guns, motioning for Siobhan and Camilla to stay close behind them.
Siobhan glanced back at the long, splintering crack in the observation window, then slipped through the doorway.
The observation room was just large enough to house an L-shaped desk with a computer terminal on it, three tall filing cabinets for assorted message drives and paper files, and a long control panel that climbed the wall by the door and showed dials, knobs, switches, and buttons. Siobhan had never seen a medical facility like it before; it was more like a military control room. She thought of the ceiling mount for the laser and realized there had probably been a lot more control than observation taking place in here. She shivered at the implications.
“Hey! Hey, we got people here!” Roots stood across the room next to a man slumped beneath the control panel. The man appeared conscious but disoriented, his eyes blinking against the marine’s light. Blood had dried in a small rivulet down the left side of his face, and when he held up a hand to shield his eyes from the flashlight’s glare, Siobhan saw several broken fingers.
Lying on the floor with her head in the man’s lap was a younger woman who appeared to be unconscious. The blood from a head wound had turned her short blonde hair a shade of pink.
Siobhan crossed the room and knelt by the man, examining him. She had no medical training beyond the basic first aid offered to Seegson scientists, but she was tired of feeling useless on this excursion.
“Hi,” she said in a low, soothing voice. “I’m Dr. McCormick from Seegson Pharmaceuticals. We received your distress signal. We’re here to help.”
The man blinked at her. A smudge of blood obscured the right lens of his old-fashioned glasses. His dark hair, run through with gray, bristled wildly, as did his moustache and beard. His skin was pale. The wound to his head seemed superficial—a cut on his forehead—but the look of terror and confusion ran deep in his eyes.
“Signal?” He glanced from Siobhan to the marines. “Oh, yes—William. He probably sent it.”
“Your synthetic?” Roots frowned down at him. The man didn’t answer. He absently stroked the hair of the woman in his lap. If he knew his fingers were broken or felt any pain, he didn’t show it.
“Can you tell us who you are?” Siobhan continued in the same soothing voice. “What happened here?”
“I… I’m Dr. Fowler. Martin Fowler. I run the bioweapons research division. This…” he gestured with his broken hand, indicating the woman, “…is Cora Lanning, a research volunteer.”
“What happened here, Dr. Fowler?” Siobhan repeated. He gazed at her, studying her a moment. He shook his head slowly.
“The research… it was important. We were so close.”
“You let one of those things loose, didn’t you?” Alec cut in overhead. The rage in his voice was barely reined in, Siobhan noted. “An XX121. You were doing some fucking experiment with it, and it got free.”
Dr. Fowler didn’t look at him, but he nodded. “We were working on something revolutionary—something that would have saved lives.”
Roots snorted. “You know, Doc, I always get a kick outta hearing guys who make weapons meant to kill, when they talk about how they’re saving lives. Does that company-line bullshit ever actually work on anyone?”
Dr. Fowler glared at him, and the disorientation seemed to dissipate.
“I—we—were developing a serum for the infected. When the Ovomorphs hatch, they attach to people and—”
“We know what they do,” Alec said.
“The incubation period varies,” Dr. Fowler continued, undaunted. “We’ve seen the facehuggers take as little as two to as much as eight hours to implant an embryo inside someone. And from infection, the embryo takes less than two hours to burst through the host—naturally, that is. The serum we developed extends that incubation time to up to three weeks. Three weeks! That’s more than enough time for evacuation to a medical facility.”
