Alien vs. Predator: Armageddon, page 3
Mashima stood and squeezed the handrail that circled his observation platform. The threat of failure—the mere idea of it—rarely touched his mind, and perhaps blind confidence was one of his faults. But in his years serving the Rage, failure had never been considered a possibility. He believed that made him strong. Perhaps in truth it made him naive.
The view from one of the Rage attack ships brightened momentarily, holo screen crackling with the power of its illumination. Then it went blank, and the screen folded away.
“Is that a ship lost?” Mashima asked. No one on the bridge responded. They were checking, and it took a few moments for Jacobs to confirm ship-to-ship communications.
“One ship down,” he confirmed. “General, there are Yautja ships defending that space station, as well as mercenaries.”
“Yautja?” That didn’t worry him, because they’d confronted and defeated Yautja elements several times over the past few decades. But it did surprise him.
The space station suddenly grew huge on one of the screens as Kilmister took his ship in close. A barrage of laser fire took out a docking arm, the sudden explosion and decompression setting the station into a complex spin.
The battle continued. Data streams ran above Jacobs’ control point, but Mashima kept his eyes on the displays, frank and honest representations of the confusion and chaos of battle.
The large enemy battleship took a direct hit from a Rage eon blast, its superstructure immediately beginning to melt and flow as its subatomic structure was disrupted. The effect’s spread was immediate and unstoppable. Some of its ordnance must have been detonated as a last-ditch attempt to take out more enemies, but it only resulted in a spectacular, almost beautiful blast that expanded over a dozen miles, bright yellow and white at its center, red and purple further out, like a rapidly developing bruise on the canvas of infinity.
Mashima’s concern bled away after that, and for the rest of the battle he enjoyed watching the consummate skill and effectiveness of the Rage pilots, ships, and advanced weaponry.
It took fifteen minutes.
“Station is secure,” Kilmister said from his remote position. “All mobile defenses destroyed, station’s weapon arrays out of action. Sensors indicate over a hundred survivors on board. I’m about to match the station’s spin, and then land troops.”
“Good work, Captain,” Mashima said. “Send those troops immediately. We don’t want the drophole damaged in any way, or deactivated.”
This was the moment Mashima had been waiting for. The moment when he watched his children work.
They floated through space. Fired by brief pulses of air that pushed them from the attack craft, more than a hundred Xenomorphs drifted quickly between the ships and the space station, unfurling themselves as soon as they landed, skittering across the surface, seeking entry. Some of them crept in through the destroyed portions of the docking arm and various blasted weapons arrays, while others sought hatches and windows and forced entry that way.
In several places trapped bubbles of atmosphere burst outward as seals were broken, and here and there struggling humans were visible as they were pushed away from the structure.
Even with the thousands of miles between them, Mashima could feel each and every Xenomorph linked to him, sense their fury and excitement, and he channeled his feelings to instruct and encourage them all. They knew their mission—to board the vessel, hunt, and kill. As he closed his eyes and allowed his senses to join more fully with their own, the scope of his surroundings began to fade, and his awareness opened up. Hot and cold no longer registered, movement and stillness became facets of the same state of being. He was no longer simply a faux human.
He was Xenomorph.
The slaughter ended quickly. Once they penetrated the station, there was little resistance. Most people on board had already died due to explosive decompression, and those who had managed to slip on suits were quickly overcome by the Xenomorph hordes. Suits were torn and tattered, oxygen escaping in clouds of diamond-ice. Blood sprayed, freezing into dark globes in the airless confines. Soon, the only living things left on the station were those deadly Rage soldiers.
“The station is secure,” Kilmister said.
“Yes,” Mashima said. “I know. We’ll be there imminently. Withdraw the troops, take a defensive orbit.” He drew back into himself and initiated an open channel. “All crews, prepare for a drop within the next fifteen hours.”
Mashima looked around the bridge, pleased at another successful engagement. The loss of an attack ship was troubling, especially as they still had another drop to make after this one, and then the approach to Weaver’s World might be heavily defended.
“General Mashima to Berlioz,” he said. “I’m coming down to the birthing hold.”
“Of course, General,” the woman responded. Behind her soft voice he heard the sounds of soldiers being born.
Screams. Cracking, tearing. A cry.
Sometimes, Mashima needed nothing more than to welcome a new group of offspring into existence.
* * *
Berlioz met him in the entrance area leading to the birthing hold. This was one of three massive holds on board the Aaron-Percival, each of them filled with thousands of humans who had been kept in cryo-sleep for centuries. Their story was an incredible one and, if Mashima had been prone to periods of introspection, probably a sad one, too. However, although he could understand the tragedy in their fate, any sense of sadness was smothered beneath the glory of what they were enabling, what their sleeping bodies were hosting, and what they birthed.
These bodies had been sealed within cryo-pods many centuries before anyone now alive was born—even Mistress Maloney, ancient though she was in human terms. Without them, the Rage could not fulfil their destiny.
Sent out from home to inhabit the stars, these explorers were returning to Earth with death nestled beneath their ribs, among their organs. Glorious, wondrous death.
“General, I hear we’re another step closer,” Berlioz said. A strange woman, more comfortable alone with her sleeping charges than with anyone else. Mashima found communicating with her awkward. He’d once asked Jacobs whether it was because he was an android, and the response had surprised him—a laugh, and then an admission that she was like this with everyone.
“She’s less human than you, General.”
“We’re dropping soon,” Mashima said. “I just came to look.”
“To look,” Berlioz said. Her constant, cool smile twitched just a little.
“Things are going well?” he asked.
“Very well,” she said. “Better than… ever.”
An awkward silence. Then Mashima said, “I’d like to see.”
“Of course!” Berlioz stood aside from the doorway and gestured for him to enter, glancing away as her smile dropped. Mashima understood. It was obvious. These holds were Berlioz’s domain, and anyone else paying a visit was an intruder. Even him.
“I never dreamed it could be so wonderful,” she said. “I never expected to be birthing so many at once and… it’s glorious. I haven’t slept for three days. There’s so much to do!”
Mashima stepped onto a floating platform that stood beside the door and urged it aloft. Berlioz stepped on with him, and when they were drifting closer to the ceiling than the floor, he looked out on her work. She was right. There was so much being done.
Their impending assault on Weaver’s World would require every Xenomorph they could birth, and Berlioz was taking her task seriously. The hold had become a production line of birth and death, and until the start of this mission Mashima had never before witnessed it happening on such a scale.
To his left were the hosts, row upon row of pale, slick humans, naked and still gleaming with cryo-gel. Their pods were kept in one of the adjacent holds. When the occupants were removed, they were sent through on a suspension field, bobbing softly as they nudged against the pile of sleepers that lay ahead of them. All were still in cryo-sleep, though some were shifting slowly, limbs flexing, stomachs sucked in as their organs regained function and their brains slowly, slowly began to rise from the deepest, longest slumber any of them had ever experienced.
Few of them were given the chance to wake fully.
While in their pods, they had each been impregnated with a Xenomorph embryo. Now those were waking, too.
Below and in front of where Mashima and Berlioz hovered lay the birthing zone. It was a wide area cleared long ago when the ship first was captured and its sleeping denizens harvested, its basement structures readjusted and molded by the Faze. As the pre-programmed suspension field drew individual sleepers into the space, hovering robot drones directed subtle charges down into their chest cavities. Each gentle hiss galvanized the sleepers closer to full wakefulness and, more importantly, urged the creatures they carried out toward the air, and the light.
Nine times out of ten, the birthing happened before the host was truly awake.
Just occasionally, some of them opened their eyes.
Mashima watched as several Xenomorphs were born each minute. The withered human bodies shook and shivered as ribs were smashed from the inside, chests stretching and then ripping open, bloody flowers splattering across the red-soaked floor. Some of them groaned, and one or two of them screamed before dying. The sound was a constant background symphony to the wonderful moment of birth.
Sighing, groaning, cracking, ripping, screaming, gasping, dying… and then the gentle squeals of the newborn, given to the world at last.
Mashima felt their arrival. Already impregnated with the controlling nanotechnology that linked every one of these Xenomorphs to him, they came into the world his servants, his soldiers. Some of them even seemed to turn his way as if sensing him, and perhaps that was the case.
“My children,” he whispered, and he was not shocked when Berlioz echoed that sentiment.
The Xenomorph young were gathered by a larger floating drone and transported across the hold to the raising pens that lay beyond, hidden away in those dark, damp places where the beasts would rapidly grow to their full forms. These individual, bubble-shaped spaces were designed to grow with their occupants, constantly providing nutrients. Once they reached their full size, the Xenomorphs would receive the branding on their exoskeleton that marked them as belonging to him.
“How many so far?” he asked.
“Since leaving the Macbeth, I have birthed almost seven thousand,” Berlioz said.
“Yes,” Mashima said. “I feel the power of them. Strong. Healthy.”
“Of course they are,” she said. “I look after them, and feed them well.”
Mashima could hear the food being made. After birthing, the dead humans were flushed down through vents in the floor and into great mixing vats below. There, grinders and then blenders did their work, crushing and mixing the remains into a stew that was supplemented with vitamins and then pumped through to the raising pens. Nothing was wasted.
“I want four thousand more by the time we arrive,” Mashima said.
“General, I intend to complete all birthing within the next fifteen days.”
Mashima raised an eyebrow.
“Another twelve thousand,” she added. “An army sixteen thousand strong.”
“All under my command,” Mashima said. He closed his eyes and briefly considered the future, waves of Xenomorphs flowing across the surface of Weaver’s World and killing anything, everything in their path.
It was glorious.
It was red.
3
ISA PALANT
Gamma Quadrant
December 2692 AD
The most surprising thing about the Yautja asteroid base was that so much of it was familiar.
We always believed they used other alien tech to create and expand their own, Isa Palant thought. This pretty much proves us right. Within the asteroid, with the massive landing bay doors closed, they could have been inside any large Colonial Marine base. Carved out of the body of the asteroid, the cavern was huge. Lighting systems hung from ceilings and walls, as well as monitoring equipment and grappling arms, and several ships were moored at various points around the large space.
This was where the similarity to a Marine base ended, because these were so obviously Yautja ships. While no two were exactly alike, there were common features and designs with which Isa had become more au fait over the years—the deep gray coloring, sleek, fish-like designs to aid cloaking, weapon blisters on the ships’ hull instead of inside, always ready to be deployed.
There were databases in Weyland-Yutani quantum folds where any known examples of Yautja vessels were recorded and stored, from the basic appearance of those imaged from afar, to composite makeup and the macro and micro features of those few that had been captured or partly destroyed. Isa had never trusted the Company record to be complete, or fully open to outside inquiry, so years ago she had started her own fold.
Her fascination lay with their biology, society, and language, but these were inextricably bound to their technical and martial aspects. She suspected that she carried more Yautja information in her private quantum fold than anyone else in the Human Sphere.
If she so wished, she knew that fold could be expanded hugely in the coming days.
“Fuck me,” Bestwick said.
“All things considered, I’d really rather not,” Sprenkel responded.
“Yeah. I’m out of your league.”
“Look over there,” Huyck said. He was still in the Pixie’s pilot’s seat, but their ship had been surrounded by a suspension field, and they were slowly being drawn toward one edge of the large cavern.
“Welcoming committee,” Huyck said. “Don’t like that, boss. Not one bit.”
“I think it’s too late to think about what we like,” Major Akoko Halley said.
Palant’s stomach performed somersaults while the gravity fluctuated. The Pixie’s artificial gravity had been slowly reduced on their approach to the asteroid, on the assumption that a body so large—forty miles across at its widest point—would maintain some degree of pull.
However, the Yautja base itself used gravitational augmentation, and upon passing through the hangar doors they shifted through the effects of this field. She closed her eyes and tried to swallow down the queasiness. She hadn’t suffered from space sickness for a while. But then, until the recent destruction of her laboratory and the deaths of her friends, she’d hardly been away from solid ground in more than a decade.
As the Pixie approached a ledge in the rock, and the docking facility protruding from there, the ship’s computer, Billy, chimed in.
“All my sensors have been blocked. Communications arrays disabled, life and movement detectors jammed. We’re blind.”
“For now,” Palant said.
“Maybe they just want the ship,” Sprenkel said. “Fuck, this is Gerard Marshall’s personal craft, one of the most advanced in the fleet. Have we just delivered Pixie to the enemy?”
“We never even considered that,” Huyck said. He glared back at Palant. “We let her steer us, and now we’ve gone AWOL. We’re in the belly of the fucking beast and—”
“You’re the one who stabbed Gerard Marshall’s man to death,” Palant said softly. The murder was still fresh and terrible in her mind. She’d believed McIlveen to be her friend, but he’d threatened them all, ready to take control of the ship and fly them back to the Company.
The tattered android they had on board was filled with knowledge and tech the Company would kill for, and McIlveen had threatened to do just that.
Instead, they’d killed him.
“This is a decision we all made,” Halley said. Her troops called her Snow Dog, because sometimes she seemed cold. Not now, though. Now, she was fired up and angry. “We’re all in the same mess here, whatever it is. Infighting won’t help.” She stared at Palant. “I trust Isa to see us through this. We all have to trust her. She’s done it before.”
Palant nodded.
The ship juddered slightly as it docked, and then the sense of rolling calmed as the gravitational field settled. Silence fell.
Palant unstrapped and walked back through to the rec room. It was here they’d kept the android, strapped securely to the wall. None of them wanted it on the bridge where it could observe them, but they needed it where they could keep an eye on it.
She’d stood over the thing many times during their twelve-day journey to the asteroid. Vacuum-wrapped in a clear plastic storage bag, the android’s torn and broken body was curled in on itself, one arm almost detached and crushed across its chest, one leg shredded and pale like a fish’s half-eaten corpse. White fluid seeped and bubbled against the tensioned surface of the tight bag. Its hair was flat, each filament clearly defined. When they’d originally packed it like this, one eye had been pressed against the bag, half-crushed yet still swiveling in its socket.
Watching, wet, sickeningly intelligent.
A day after McIlveen’s death, Halley had pasted a med patch across the eye and shut it from view. Now, Palant grabbed the edge of the patch and tugged, ripping it away from the bag, standing back.
The eye stared directly at her, pupil shrinking beneath the sudden light.
She stared back.
“Time to find out what you know,” she said.
Something happened to the eye. Crushed as it was, expression should have been impossible. Yet Palant was certain that somehow, in some way, the damaged android had found a way to smile.
* * *
There were three Yautja waiting for them out on the ledge beyond the docking structure. Palant recognized one of them as the creature that had handed them the android aboard the crippled Rage ship Cooper-Jordan. It did not acknowledge them in any way, even when Bestwick and Sprenkel pushed the android out on a suspension field.
One of the others was shorter, but thicker-set. The third was tall and thin, heavily armored, and carrying an old Marine pulse rifle, toy-like in its left hand. All three wore their helmets, marked and scarred with the traces of old battles.
