Aliens vs. Predators, page 10
Finally ready, the riftwings dove as one, wings flattening along their bodies for maximum speed. Their screams—
JAI-REEE! JAI-REEE! JAI-REEE!
—split the air when they converged on their target. When they struck, another sound rolled in with theirs—a horrific mix of screech and growl. The battle went on for half a minute as everything else in the rift went silent with fear.
Then it was finished.
* * *
Things in the air.
Fast.
Attack prey.
Defend.
Not prey.
Predator.
Feed.
21
Well, here she was again.
Hanging from a cable, Enid shifted her position on the grid. The air she breathed through the mask was stale and hot, stifling. She thrust her harvesting vacuum at an open Khatura bloom, her movement jerky enough that she hit the side of the flower. More pollen sifted down than went into the opening. Wasteful—that’s what the bosses would say—but they couldn’t see her, they couldn’t feel what she felt.
She wasn’t sure why, but the smooth buzz in her bloodstream from this morning’s quota of Khatura was almost gone. Usually it was plenty enough to last through her time slot and past lunch, when she and the other harvesters were required to eat the slop masquerading as food. If they didn’t eat, they didn’t get their mid-afternoon fix—that was the rule. No one in Control made any effort to make the so-called food palatable. The only prerequisite was that it contained the bare minimum of nutrients needed to keep them alive.
Truth be told, they were never hungry anyway.
At least not for food.
Now her veins felt itchy, like tiny insects were crawling inside them. It wasn’t debilitating—yet—but it was damned uncomfortable, and just a little pollen could alleviate it. Knowing that was enough to drive her crazy.
Her gloved hands found the mask and yanked at it. No good—it was locked in place. If she could only move it a little, just enough to get a single, pollen-dusted finger between it and her skin… but no. Clayton was an old hand at suiting up her harvesters. None of her workers would ever come off their shift high.
Fetch was about twenty feet to her right. Ever the compliant addict, he was dutifully harvesting, moving his vacuum slowly around the pollen-swollen flowers as though he was hypnotized. Hell, he probably was—still high from his morning dose, going on autopilot. He might be bigger than her, physically, but he was also younger. A baby addict who hadn’t built up the tolerances that a hardcore user like Enid had.
It wasn’t hard to remember when she’d been like that. Even wearing the hated mask, with a buzz in her system, Enid had loved watching the red pollen swirl from the center of the bloom and into the nozzle of the vacuum.
Now…
Now all she felt was the addiction, a sort of hot swelling that started in her chest and spread through her system, growing into fire the longer she had to go between doses. As time passed, the periods between these attacks grew shorter, her addict’s body responding with chills, spasms and shakes bad enough to make her drop the vacuum. Yeah, there was a backup attachment, but now and then the yanking motion would disassemble the vacuum and the container of pollen would drop into the rift—a serious enough offense, but a supreme infraction if it was full of pollen.
The cartel was like a mother doling out treats to her brats. Always providing, but holding out until the last minute, the equivalent of waiting until the kid was screaming and twisting on the floor.
Enid swallowed and tried to focus, despite the sweat pooling along the inside edges of the mask and making the skin of her face itch mercilessly. Another full dose would only come if she managed to fill at least half of the vacuum’s container, and she still had a ways to go.
Fetch had been lowered at the same time, and she could see that his vacuum’s basin was bright red a third of the way up its side. He was showing her up in a big way: if she didn’t catch up, she’d pay for it up top when Clayton measured the load. She just needed to find a rhythm like Fetch had, and if she didn’t have the high to fuel it, she’d just have to manufacture one. An old song, maybe, something catchy that her arm could—
In the blackness below, the rift exploded with sound.
A maelstrom of noise, almost indescribable—animalistic screams, shrieks so high-pitched they made her eardrums sing with pain. Somewhere in the mix was the familiar screeching of riftwings, but there was something else, too, something new and… unspeakable.
Enid gasped and her whole body jerked on the cable, her hand instinctively closing tighter around the handle of the vacuum. She twisted and tried to see into the darkness, but it was too far down. The cacophony had broken through Fetch’s ridiculous fascination with his task, and he was lurching wildly on his line as he tried to figure out what was happening. He’d lost his grip on his vacuum and it dangled precariously at the end of its safety cord, banging into his thigh every time he turned.
There was no sense trying to yell at him about his vacuum, since their comms weren’t connected—harvesters weren’t allowed to talk to each other while in the rift. The cartel thought there was too much of a chance they’d work out a way to reach each other, and find a way to dislodge their masks.
Right then, Enid was a whole lot more concerned with whatever the hell was happening down on the rift floor. She wouldn’t have thought it possible, but the level of noise increased, spiraling, up and up and up as if the devil himself had turned up the volume on Hell’s own symphony.
The desire to clap her hands over her ears was almost as strong as the desire to get the fuck out of here. The ’get the fuck out’ urge finally won. Turning her face upward toward the daylight, Enid fought the need to look down, to see what kind of beasts were below. Instead she smacked at her comms.
“Clayton!” she cried. “Clayton, get us out of here! There’s—”
Enid could just make out the merc’s silhouette, moving to the edge of the rift about ten meters overhead. Clayton’s response was immediate and harsh.
“Get back to work, addict.”
“No! There’s something going on below us! Ask Fetch—he’ll tell you!”
But Fetch was useless. As she’d feared, his thrashing had caused the base of his vacuum to come loose—it was gone, probably shattered on the ground far below. The idiot had somehow managed to get himself thoroughly twisted in the cable. Snagged like that, there was no way it would retract—one of the mercs would probably have to come down and cut him out of it.
She didn’t waste time thanking God that she wasn’t him.
“There are things fighting with each other down there,” she shouted into the comm. “What if they decide to come up? You’ve seen what they did to Margo! What if they want to eat us? Can’t you hear them?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear,” Clayton snapped back. “The riftwings are fighting—big fucking deal. Let ’em kill each other. You stay where you are and keep working, or you can twist and sweat all night in your cot and go down tomorrow sober as shit. Got it?”
Enid glanced below again, but couldn’t see a damn thing. She looked up, straining her neck as though that would somehow get Clayton to start reeling in her cable.
“Please,” she begged. “I don’t want to die down here. Please, pull me up.”
When Clayton answered, her voice was thick with sarcasm. “Oh, I see. The same shit you claimed about Khaleed. Monsters again, right? Well, I’m not that simple-minded, not like that loser Shrapnel, so you can just—”
Whatever Clayton was going to say ended in a wheeze as something with a body three times as thick as a riftwing and a wingspan twice as wide blotted out the sky behind her.
Then it—along with Clayton—was gone.
22
On the rift floor, another Xenomorph—the largest and most mature—lifted its elongated head as the battle between the two winged creatures and the smaller Xenomorph above came to its bloody conclusion. It had waited all this time, listening and learning about its environment, and finally, it was ready to hunt.
Stirring, it shifted and unfurled its long, ink-colored body. That triggered more movement, and a whole group of shining black forms unrolled from the shadows and crevices where the rift wall met the ground, gliding around and over each other until the creatures covered the rocky bottom like a pit of oily snakes. In the end there was nowhere to go but up, and when the alpha started to climb, the others instinctively followed.
The walls were slick and hard, and their first attempts saw the Xenomorphs simply slide back down, their razor-like claws unable to puncture the hardened rock. The alpha tried again, this time more carefully. Scattered along the surface of the walls were areas of low-growth foliage where seedlings had taken root and stubbornly held on. Not bushy or thick, but resilient enough to stretch beneath the weight and movement of the winged creatures that had perched there.
The Xenomorphs were heavier than the winged creatures, and as they stretched and clawed their way upward, so too they learned—often the hard way—to test each grip before trusting it to bear full weight.
Halfway up, with a bright slice of sky widening above them, one of the Xenomorphs on the edge of the group caught the scent of fresh food not far away. Its enormous head turned in that direction, searching for a way to get to it. The food was hanging, but out of reach, with almost no usable vegetation on which the Xenomorph could climb. It would have to go above and drop, so it continued its measured ascent with the rest of its kind.
The alpha, too, sensed the presence of food. It began to angle toward the prey’s position, the rest of its kind intuitively moving with it. The thick mesh that held their prey would provide a much better opportunity to climb than the walls, and although the greenery to which they clung was taking them around and over it, anticipation was producing excitement. Focused on what they perceived to be a meal, they were overhead and ready to leap…
The winged creatures attacked.
They were outnumbered, but they treated the Xenomorphs as prey. Their assault was fast and brutal, but so was the response—a vicious defense that quickly turned offensive. The winged creatures clutched at the thrashing black forms and tried again and again, without success, to stab and puncture with their proboscises.
In turn, the Xenomorphs lunged at the winged attackers, jaws snapping and tails lashing. They tangled in the web and the strands that hung from above, bodies thrashing and wings beating as they fought and slammed repeatedly against the walls.
Every hit showered thick, red dust into the air, every flailing appendage swirled it around the combatants. In a matter of seconds, the bodies of the winged creatures and Xenomorphs were dusted with it.
The winged creatures seemed to show no effect from the red dust, but the alpha Xenomorph became disoriented, off-balance, enraged, and confused by its own loss of coordination. So did the others, and they lashed out at anything within reach. Their attacks doubled, tripled, tails slashing and sharp, dripping teeth seizing whatever flesh it found. Xenomorph turned on Xenomorph in uninhibited violence.
Their broken bodies struck the chasm wall, spraying everything around them in green, liquid pain, and all the while the winged creatures dodged and probed and tried to feast. But the blood accomplished more than the fight, searing holes in the wings and bodies of the predators.
Then the disorientation began to abate, and the alpha’s rage began to calm. Around it, a half dozen of its kind were dead. Where their broken bodies had struck the wall, the caustic blood pitted the surface.
With the retreat of the winged creatures, the remaining Xenomorphs turned again to the fading slice of light above and began to climb.
23
Enid was going insane with fear.
She was trapped in a swarm of monsters on two sides, and they were fighting. Most were black and shiny, like huge mantids—all head and elongated legs—with tooth-filled, dripping mouthparts. The rest were riftwings, nothing short of giant mosquitoes with four enormous, leathery wings that supported their weight and tube-like tongues that could break through a fragile human body with one good lunge.
She twisted this way and that on the harvesting net, wailing uselessly into the comms. But who would hear her? Clayton had been taken by… something, and the mercs never tuned in to any of the harvesters except the ones assigned to them that day. Unless someone had seen Clayton snatched off the ground, her absence would go unnoticed until the pollen collected by the addicts was unpacked from the vacuums, weighed, and reported. The best hope for that was an hour or two from now, when her boxes and tallies on the end-of-day record were supposed to be reported.
Enid wasn’t stupid. She’d be dead long before then.
She wanted desperately to go up, get to the surface and run the fuck as fast as she could away from the rift. She yanked frantically on the cable, but with Margo gone there was no one to activate the lift mechanism—she was stuck here, like a fly in the biggest web in the universe.
Red Khatura pollen spun around her, shaken free by the creatures smashing against the blooms as they fought. It seemed to be causing some kind of reaction among the bug-things with the big, stretched heads—they were fighting the riftwings and their own kind, dying as they lost their grips and fell, lifeless, to the rift floor. Where they landed, the ground steamed.
Maybe the pollen would kill them all.
Then her hopes were dashed as the monsters seemed to shake off its effects. The ones that remained alive stopped fighting. If the pounding of her heart wasn’t overwhelming enough, Enid wanted to faint with the realization that, at any second, she would become the center of their attention.
Fainting wasn’t an option—if she did, she would die all the sooner. Hanging from her cable and gasping behind her mask, she looked up but found any chance of freedom in that direction already blocked by a mass of struggling monstrosities. Even if someone was on the surface to operate the lift, Enid couldn’t go that way—in fact, she needed to get the hell off this cable.
Sideways on the net would be impossible: the cable kept her from going left or right, and even if she could, there was nothing beyond the net that would hold her weight.
The only way she could go was down.
The harvesting method wasn’t rocket science. Each merc masked up their addicts and dropped them down to a few feet below the top of the cable grid in their sector. From there, the workers moved along the netlike grid, harvesting Khatura pollen as they went. Although each cable was fixed to the grid on one side, it would allow workers to shift their positions so they could reach the swollen blossoms below them.
Forcing herself to move slowly, trying not to catch the attention of any of the monstrous lifeforms, Enid worked the cable’s release switch. The oiled mechanism limited her control, but let her glide silently downward a couple of feet at a time. She kept sending quick looks upward above to see if she was being tracked, but even as the conflict up there began to subside, she sunk deeper into the gloom.
The cable ended about a yard beyond the last level of the rope grid, at a point where a worker could vacuum the scrawniest of the Khatura blossoms. Enid had never been this far down before, and to her surprise she realized there was no safety stop at the termination of the cable—it simply ended. She saw it coming and figured there was maybe five meters between it and the rift floor, enough of a drop that she could end up seriously hurt.
Enid almost laughed.
Seriously hurt?
How about seriously dead if she didn’t go for it? She wondered if she could just hang down here on her cable until the monsters either killed each other or got tired and went away. Then she felt the cable tremble. It went all the way to the top of the rift—had one of them just bounced against it?
The cable moved again and this time it was a hard jolt, like something had grabbed it.
That forced a decision.
She thumbed the lowering apparatus all the way to OPEN, then gripped the cable as tightly as she could with one gloved hand, praying the ribbed, rubbery palm would hold. With her other hand, Enid quickly released the safety carabiners on her harness, one at a time. When she was hanging precariously by the last one, she adjusted her hold on the cable a final time, then undid it.
The drop happened faster and sharper than she expected, but she still managed to snag the cable with her other hand. For a long moment she just hung there, but her thin shoulders and arms began to throb with pain. Gritting her teeth, she loosened her fingers just enough to let herself slide down the cable until she saw the ragged metal ends.
Looking toward her feet, Enid could barely make out the ground, but she could tell it was uneven and rocky. It was going to be a hard landing, but at least nothing was moving down there. Stretched as far as her body would allow, she let go.
The impact traveled though her legs and all the way to her head. She folded up in the dirt, wheezing and trying to breathe through more pain than she had ever experienced outside of waiting for a fix that was way overdue. Everything in her body was in agony, and the pulsing in her skull was the least of it. Most of the shock had been absorbed by her hips and lower back, and that entire area was an oval of mangled nerve endings. Fire pulsed along the neural pathways like drummers in the devil’s own marching band.
Her upper back and arms had had hit hard against the rock-strewn bottom. It was difficult to consider herself lucky right now, but nothing seemed actually to be broken… just hellishly battered.
Panting, Enid unrolled her limbs and tried to sit up. She wouldn’t have thought it possible to hurt more than she did, but new pain skittered across her bruised muscles. Without thinking, she slapped a hand across her mouth.
Her mask was loose.
Fighting not to groan with the effort, her fingers scrabbled at the metal covering her nose and mouth. The device was cracked diagonally and, although the two pieces were still joined, the amount it moved told her it couldn’t hold. Enid pried at it, trying to be methodical in her movements when what she really wanted to do was claw at her face until she was fucking free. She got enough space between the mask and her skin that she could work a couple of fingers from each hand under each side, then pull, pull harder, and then—
