The Complete Predator Omnibus, page 41
Schaefer landed flat on his back, then slowly sat up. His plastic jumpsuit pulled away from the hot metal only reluctantly, leaving an oval of sizzling goo—the outer layer of the plastic had melted away.
Ligacheva had landed on her side and had climbed quickly back atop the fallen boulder, burning the palm of one hand in the process and scorching a long streak of black onto her overcoat. The ship was hot.
Schaefer joined her atop the rock before the rest of his suit could melt away, and the two of them crouched there, staring at the opening into the ship’s interior, scarcely a dozen meters away.
“Do you think anyone heard that?” Ligacheva asked.
“You could have been front row center at a Who concert and heard that,” Schaefer said. “If there’s anyone still aboard, let’s just hope they’re too damn busy with repairing everything that’s busted in there to come check out another rockslide.” He pointed at a few scattered rocks that had apparently fallen onto the ship earlier as the ice had melted. Then he hefted the pack that he had somehow managed to hang on to and scanned the sides of the ravine.
He didn’t see any suspicious shimmer, but that didn’t mean much—it was dark up there.
It was light inside the ship, though—the red glow was almost alluring from this angle. And if that one he had spotted was the only one left, if there had only been two aboard this ship, then right now the ship was deserted.
Even if there were others aboard, they might be too busy with repairs to notice intruders. They certainly wouldn’t expect intruders—walking straight into the enemy’s home would surely seem insane to them.
Hell, it probably was insane, but that didn’t bother Schaefer at all.
“As long as we’re on their front porch,” he said, “let’s drop in.”
Ligacheva turned to stare at him. Schaefer hefted the pack full of C-4.
“And while we’re in there,” he said, “we’ll give them a little something to remember us by.”
29
“He must be here someplace,” Kurkin said as he peered down an empty corridor, his AK-100 at the ready. His breath formed a thick cloud in the cold air, and he suppressed a shiver. “He wasn’t with the others, and we didn’t find any tracks in the snow…”
“This is mad,” Afanasiev said as he swung his own weapon about warily. “He could be anywhere in the entire complex! How can so few of us hope to search it all without letting him slip past us? Especially when one of us must guard the other Americans!”
“And what would you have us do instead?” Kurkin asked sarcastically.
“Let him go!” Afanasiev said. “He is only one old man—what can he do?”
“One man with a weapon can do quite enough…” Kurkin began. Then he stopped. “Listen!” he whispered.
Afanasiev stopped and listened. “Voices,” he said. “But… do I hear two voices?”
“The radio room,” Kurkin said. “He’s in the radio room, and he has contacted his people—perhaps with his own satellite link, perhaps with our equipment. That’s the other voice you hear.”
Afanasiev frowned thoughtfully. “That room has only one door, yes?”
Kurkin nodded.
“We have him trapped, then.”
“Let us take no chances,” Kurkin said. “I have had enough of these damned Americans and their tricks. I say we go in shooting.”
Afanasiev considered that, then nodded. “I have no objection,” he said.
“On my signal, then.”
Together they crept up toward the radio-room door, AK-l00s at the ready. The voice from the radio grew louder as they approached.
“…read you. Cold War One, and acknowledge your situation. We reiterate, new orders per Cencom, the mission has been scrubbed, repeat, scrubbed. Over.”
Kurkin’s rusty schoolbook English wasn’t enough to make sense of any of that—he could only pick out about one word in three with any certainty.
He hoped that whatever the voice was saying wasn’t of any real importance to anyone.
The radio voice stopped, and the trapped American didn’t reply—he was undoubtedly, Kurkin thought, considering his answer.
The silence was unacceptable, though—if they waited, the American might hear their breath or the rustle of clothing. Kurkin waved.
The two of them swung around the door frame, weapons firing in short bursts as they had been taught. A dozen slugs smacked the concrete walls, sending chips and dust flying in all directions.
Then they stopped shooting as they both realized they had no target. The radio room was empty. The radio was on, and a metal case stood open on a table with wires and a small dish antenna projecting from it—the American’s satellite uplink, obviously.
The American wasn’t there.
“Where is he?” Afanasiev asked, baffled. He stepped into the room.
The open door swung around hard and slammed into him, knocking him off his feet, and before Kurkin could react, he found himself staring at the muzzle of an M-l 6. He had lowered his own weapon and could not bring it up in time.
He couldn’t understand what the American said, but the situation was clear enough. He carefully placed his AK-100 on the floor, then stood up again, hands raised.
Afanasiev, on the floor, turned and sat up—and saw the man with the M-16. He put down his AK-100 as well.
“You boys are noisy,” General Philips remarked. “I heard you coming a hundred yards away. Took you long enough to get here.” He kicked the AK-l00s away, then looked over his two prisoners. He frowned.
“Ordinarily,” he said, “I wouldn’t do this to unarmed men, but you did come in with guns blazing.” He flipped the M-16 around and smashed the butt against the standing Russian’s temple.
Kurkin dropped.
Afanasiev cringed, and Philips paused. He took pity on the man and settled for tying him up, using a rifle strap to bind his wrists and a glove held in place with the helmet’s chin strap as a makeshift gag.
Then he turned back to the radio.
“Cold War to base,” he said. “Sorry about the interruption. Please repeat last message.”
“Base to Cold War,” the radio said. “There have been major changes in the operational dynamic. NORAD has tracked a special Russian transport on approach to your position; intelligence sources place a high-ranking political official on board. Further, Moscow has threatened full-scale military retaliation if there is any incident on Russian soil that violates their national security. The secrecy of the mission has been compromised.”
“Shit,” Philips said.
“You are hereby instructed to gather your men, avoid further hostile contact with alien life-forms, and permit their vessel to depart without interference. We don’t want the Russians to get their hands on that alien technology—better both sides lose it. Understood?”
“Shit!” Philips said, more forcefully.
“Say again, Cold War?”
“Understood,” Philips said. “We pack up and get out and let the bastards go.”
“Affirmative.”
“And what if they don’t leave?” Philips muttered to himself. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.” Aloud, he said, “Acknowledged. Cold War One out.”
He shut down the transmitter, packed up the equipment, picked up the two AK-l00s, then waved a farewell to the two Russians. He figured the unconscious one would wake up before too much longer, and the bound one could work his way loose, but neither one was going to be an immediate threat.
Taking a lesson from the pair of them he moved as stealthily as he could the entire distance from the radio room to the maintenance area under the pipeline where his men were being held at gunpoint—their captors hadn’t relied on walls and doors this time.
All the same, it wasn’t hard for Philips to get the drop on the Russians; the guards had been watching their captives, not their backs.
“Freeze!” he shouted as he stepped out of the shadows with the M-16 at ready.
The Russian guards probably didn’t understand the word, but they got the message and stood motionless as the Americans took their weapons. Everyone there was half-frozen already, and fighting spirit was in short supply.
Once the weapons had changed hands and it was settled who was once again in charge for the moment, Philips addressed his men.
“I’ve been in touch with Cencom,” he began. “Our mission’s been…” He stopped, blinked, then said, “Wait a minute. Where the hell is Schaefer?”
“Who cares?” Wilcox asked. “Let’s toe-tag these alien geeks and get the hell out of here before we freeze our fucking balls off!”
“He split with that bitch lieutenant when the shit came down,” Lynch said.
“Damn him!” Philips growled. He chewed his lip, considering, for a few seconds, then announced, “Look, we have new orders. The cat’s out of the bag—someone let the Russkies know we’re here, and we’re shifting to CYA mode. Some kind of Russian big shot is coming up here for a look-see, and Cencom doesn’t want him to find us. We’ve been instructed to abandon our mission and hightail it home without engaging either Russian or extra-terrestrial fire. Well, if I know Schaefer, he’s out there kicking alien butt, and he isn’t going to quit just because we tell him to. We need to stop him before he starts World War III.”
“Who the hell’s going to fight a war over a cop killing spacemen?” Lassen protested.
“Nobody,” Philips said. “But if he leaves an abandoned starship sitting out there on Russian soil, there’ll be one hell of a war over who gets to keep it. Now, come on, all of you! We’ll leave these boys tied up to give us a lead, and then head out and see if we can stop Schaefer before he does any more damage.”
* * *
Rasche looked out at the Siberian wilderness as the snow tractor plowed on through the darkness. He reached up and touched the window glass.
It was cold as hell out there; even with the heater on full blast, stinking up the cabin with engine fumes, the glass was so cold his fingertips burned where they touched it. Rasche was no hot-house flower, no California beachboy; he’d lived through a few subzero winters when the wind tore through the concrete canyons of New York like the bite of death itself. This, though—this cold was a whole new level of intensity.
Even worse than the cold, though, was the sheer desolation. The surface of the moon couldn’t have been any deader than the landscape beyond the glass. Rasche was a city boy, born and bred; until he’d moved out to Bluecreek his idea of roughing it had been driving through a town that didn’t have a 7-Eleven. He knew he wasn’t any sort of wilderness scout, but this place… this was the end of the Earth. This was the end of life and hope and light made manifest. It was hard to imagine anything surviving out there.
Even Schaefer.
Then one of the Russians patted his shoulder and pointed, and Rasche squinted through the fog on the windows, trying to see what the man was indicating.
There was some sort of structure ahead.
“The Assyma Pipeline,” Komarinets said. “We are almost to the pumping station.”
There was a sudden burst of noise from the front seat, the two men there were babbling excitedly in Russian and pointing to somewhere ahead.
“What is it?” Rasche asked, tensing. He was uncomfortably aware that he was unarmed; he had left his familiar .38 behind at the ambassador’s request, to avoid any international incidents. If those things, those hunters from the stars, were out there somewhere…
“The driver thought he saw something moving up ahead, on the horizon,” Komarinets explained.
“The aliens?” Rasche asked.
Then he remembered. They wouldn’t see anything if the aliens were out there. The aliens were invisible when they wanted to be.
At least, assuming their gadgets worked in weather this cold, they were invisible.
Komarinets shook his head. “I think he imagined it, or perhaps some bit of scrap paper or old rag was blowing in the wind.”
That statement, intended to reassure him, made Rasche far more nervous—perhaps those things were out there, but hadn’t activated their invisibility gadgets until they noticed the approaching convoy.
“Whatever he saw, there is nothing out there now,” Komarinets said.
“I hope so,” Rasche said with heartfelt fervor. “I really hope so.”
30
Schaefer took a cautious step onto the ship’s hull. “Warm,” he said, “but my boots seem to be holding up.”
“You told me they like the heat,” Ligacheva said.
“So I did,” Schaefer said, taking another step. “Didn’t know that included their ships. You know, the hull feels almost alive.”
“Maybe it is alive,” Ligacheva suggested. “We don’t know anything about it.”
“So if we go in there, we’d be walking down its throat?” Schaefer grimaced. “I can think of a few things I’d like to ram down their throats.”
“You want to make it warm enough for them, eh?” Ligacheva laughed nervously. “Well, why not?” She slid down off the boulder and began marching toward the opening, her AK-100 at the ready.
Schaefer smiled after her. “Why not?” he asked no one in particular.
Together, they walked into the ship.
Schaefer had expected some sort of airlock or antechamber between the opening and the ship’s actual interior, but there didn’t seem to be any; instead, they simply walked in, as if the opening were the mouth of a cave.
Once they were inside, though, the environment abruptly changed. The air stank, a heavy, oily smell, and was thick with warm fog, reducing visibility and making it hard to breathe. The light was a dull orange-red glow that came from the red walls, walls that were completely covered in elaborate, incomprehensible patterns. Whether those patterns were machinery, or decoration, or something structural, neither Schaefer nor Ligacheva could guess.
Whatever the patterns were, they were ugly. Schaefer didn’t care to study them closely. He felt sick and dizzy enough already.
He wondered whether there were forcefields or some other device that kept the foul air in, or whether it just didn’t want to mix with Earth’s atmosphere.
“It’s FM,” he said in English, remembering something an engineer had once told him. “Fucking magic.” He looked around at the ghastly light, the oozing, roiling fog of an atmosphere, the insanely patterned walls. He peered ahead to where the curving corridor opened out into a large chamber; patterned red pillars joined floor to ceiling, while other curving passages or rounded bays opened off every side. The place was a maze, all of it awash in baleful red light and stinking mist.
“No wonder they’re such jerks,” he said. “If I spent fifteen minutes tooling around in a madhouse like this, I’d want to kill something myself.” He hefted his AK-100. “In fact, I do.”
“Wait,” Ligacheva said. “Look over there.”
“What?” Schaefer asked.
Ligacheva pointed at one of the rounded bays. Schaefer followed her as she led the way into it.
He saw, then, what had caught her eye. One section of wall here was not entirely red. It was hard to be sure, in the hideous red light, whether the pieces they were looking at were green or gray or black, but they weren’t red.
The original red wall was torn open here; to Schaefer it looked as if something had exploded, but he supposed it might simply have been ripped apart by the aliens in their efforts at repair.
And parts of the pattern had been replaced, not with more of the red substance, but with ordinary pipes and valves and circuit boards. Schaefer could see Cyrillic lettering on several of them.
“Those filthy bastards,” Ligacheva said. “The attack on the refinery, the workers slaughtered, my squad, my friends, all of them killed for this?”
“Got to give them credit,” Schaefer said calmly. “They’re resourceful. Something blew out here in the crash, or maybe caused the crash, and they needed to make an unscheduled pit stop. Your little pumping station served as their version of Trak Auto.”
“But they killed all those men for a few pieces of machinery!” Ligacheva shouted. “It’s not even anything secret, anything special—just plumbing! They could have asked! They could have bartered! They could have just taken it without killing—we couldn’t have stopped them, and why would we care about junk?” She slammed the butt of her rifle against the pipes. “It’s just junk!”
Schaefer grabbed her around the waist and pulled her back. “Stop it!” he ordered. “Damn it, that’s enough!”
She struggled in his grip. “But…”
“Just shut up! There may be more of them aboard! If you want us to have a chance to do any good here, shut up before any of those things hear us!”
Ligacheva quieted, and Schaefer released her.
“Now, I admit,” he said, “that our friends here have not been on their best behavior during their visit to your country. I agree completely that before we leave their ship, we should make sure to leave them a little something to remember us by.”
“What sort of something?” Ligacheva demanded.
Schaefer hefted the pack. “Oh, a few of these toys in the right places ought to do wonders.”
Ligacheva stared at the pack for a moment, then turned to the makeshift repair job.
“Yes,” she said. “But…”
Before she could say any more, a blow from nowhere knocked both of them down. The choking mist seemed to be thicker down at floor level, and Schaefer was coughing even before the alien appeared out of nowhere and picked him up, one-handed, by the throat.
It was as big and ugly as any of the others Schaefer had ever seen. It wore no mask—presumably it had no need for one here aboard its own ship. Its yellow fingers and black claws closed on Schaefer’s neck, not tight enough to inflict serious damage, but tightly enough that it lifted him easily and inescapably.
Ligacheva came up out of the fog with her AK-100 in hand, but before she could squeeze the trigger, in the second she took to be sure she wouldn’t hit Schaefer, the monster slapped her back with its free hand. She slammed against the wall and slumped, dazed, back down into the mist.
