The Complete Aliens Omnibus, Volume 6 Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also Available from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Complete Aliens™ Omnibus Volume 6

  Aliens™ Book 1: Cauldron

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  Aliens™ Book 2: Steel Egg

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  About the Authors

  Also Available from Titan Books

  THE COMPLETE

  OMNIBUS

  VOLUME 6

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  THE COMPLETE ALIENS™ OMNIBUS

  VOLUME 1

  VOLUME 2

  VOLUME 3

  VOLUME 4

  VOLUME 5

  VOLUME 6

  VOLUME 7 (DECEMBER 2018)

  DON’T MISS A SINGLE INSTALLMENT OF THE RAGE WAR BY TIM LEBBON

  PREDATOR: INCURSION

  ALIEN™: INVASION

  ALIEN VS. PREDATOR:

  ARMAGEDDON

  READ ALL OF THE EXCITING ALIEN NOVELS FROM TITAN BOOKS

  ALIEN: OUT OF THE SHADOWS

  ALIEN: SEA OF SORROWS

  ALIEN: RIVER OF PAIN

  ALIENS: BUG HUNT

  ALIEN: THE COLD FORGE

  THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATIONS

  ALIEN

  ALIENS

  ALIEN3

  ALIEN: RESURRECTION

  ALIEN: COVENANT

  ALIEN: COVENANT - ORIGINS

  ALIEN ILLUSTRATED BOOKS

  ALIEN: THE ARCHIVE

  ALIEN: THE ILLUSTRATED STORY

  THE ART OF ALIEN: ISOLATION

  ALIEN NEXT DOOR

  ALIEN: THE SET PHOTOGRAPHY

  THE COMPLETE

  OMNIBUS

  DIANE CAREY

  AND JOHN SHIRLEY

  TITAN BOOKS

  The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume 6

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783299126

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783299119

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: June 2018

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  ™ and © 2007, 2018 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Did you enjoy this book?

  We love to hear from our readers. Please email us at [email protected] or write to us at Reader Feedback at the above address.

  To receive advance information, news, competitions, and exclusive offers online, please sign up for the Titan newsletter on our website

  www.titanbooks.com

  THE COMPLETE

  OMNIBUS

  VOLUME 6

  BOOK 1

  CAULDRON

  DIANA CAREY

  Special thanks and devotion to Captain Alley and my shipmates aboard the Pilot Schooner Virginia, for drawing a wayward seafarer back to Chesapeake Bay.

  And there we were…

  1

  Pan-Galactic Cruiser Virginia

  Chesapeake Class, Near-Space Registry Tango Lima Fox 33

  Dual Classification 200-Pack

  Captain Nicholas Alley, Special Override Authority

  Heat doesn’t rise. Cold sinks. Everybody knows that.

  Nobody admits it.

  A punch in the ship’s side would confirm the whole theory and wreck a pretty good day.

  “Jonsy, adjust the pitch! Correct the amplitude right now, right now!”

  The captain’s call skittered under the whine of the ship’s engines in the grip of oscillation. Jonsy Coyne perspired over the helm console that spoke to him in that sonorous female robot voice: “Transverse oscillation on longitudinal axis thirty-two degrees. Correct now, correct now, correct now.”

  “We’re not supposed to have a center of gravity yet!” Jonsy spat, that little wedge of spittle formed in the right side of his mouth, the same as when he was a teenager trying to apply for a job.

  “It’s that moon,” Captain Alley called over the howling mechanical struggle. “We’re too close. The ship thinks we’re trying to land on it. Track the imbalance. Find our gimbal. Give the ship a new protocol. Hurry up!”

  Droplets of sweat fell from the end of Jonsy’s hooked nose and slapped onto the console, just as a second band started flashing and the warning vixen droned, “Transverse axis pitch through center of gravity forty-four degrees. Correct now, correct now, correct now.”

  Oily palms twisted the gimbal joysticks. Jonsy shouted “There goes the pitch amplitude!”

  The captain’s voice cut through to Jonsy’s rattling brain. “Breathe through your nose and ignore it or we’re going to be dead in about thirty seconds.”

  “I’m not ready for dead!”

  “You’re halfway there, skeleton boy.” Nicholas Alley squeezed his compact form past Jonsy to the helm support station, his hands flashing across the switches and keys like they did on the strings of his old guitar. “Keep an eye on our apparent altitude. Tell me if there’s a change. Stay calm, stay calm, lean into it… close that circle of declination. Not too fast—”

  Jonsy blinked at the captain’s talent for dispensing humor and horror at the same time. His pale eyelashes picked up beads of sweat from his cheeks and flipped them up into his eyes as he burned with hatred for Alley’s contagious stability. He managed to slow down and push the right buttons in the right sequence. He didn’t want to be the only one who panicked! Plain embarrassment was the final force that held Jonsy down to a job when all his senses said, “Scream and run, idiot!”

  But Nick Alley was a longtime tug skipper and tight maneuvers were a way of life for him. The crew of the Virginia had heard all about those days. Suddenly, those days were today.

  He spouted orders one after the other, deliberately speaking clearly and even slowly, so he wouldn’t have to waste time repeating. “Colleen, lose the draggers. We need speed. Gunny, compensate wi
th thrust. Dave, give us more aft thrusters, favor starboard. Power astern, one quarter… bow thrusters, one half—everybody work together, quick! Jonsy, keep that helm equalized! Rockie, make sure all the coms are in sync. No blackouts, now. Make sure everybody can hear me. Compensate for engine noise!”

  From the aft quarter where she was supposed to be working the intra- and inter-ship communication grid, Jonsy’s wife Rockie blurted, “Why can’t we just land?!”

  “Only if you want to retire here,” Alley responded, his eyes scanning back and forth, back and forth, flitting from one display unit to the next and back. “You, me, and the Board of Interplanetary Trade.”

  “Once we’re down we can’t launch again!” Jonsy cranked the gimbals, gaining some ground before the enormous transport ship slipped sideways to starboard. He wanted to stop fighting the ship and hand over the problem to somebody else, but how would that look? Rockie would never respect him. Rockie’s respect came dear.

  Even in the midst of action, impending destruction, he stole a glance at her, to appreciate her slick black hair, cut in a bowl around her dark exotic face, two carefully trimmed strands curving just under almost perfectly round cheekbones. In a world of homogenous genetics, where people looked more and more ordinary and races blended to a medium-tan, Roxanne Coyne was an exotic star. How did I get her? How did I deserve her?

  “If we go down another fifteen degrees, we’ll have to land,” the chief mate warned from the stabilization cube. Nobody knew Clyde very well yet, but he was a friend of the captain’s and that got him a command job aboard. He seemed to know his stuff and wasn’t pushy, a good quality in a career sailor who had just stepped aboard a matter of days ago. “Nick, you want me to calculate an approach?”

  “No, I want to fight it!”

  “Fight’n it, aye.” He tapped the communications grid on the arm of his chair. “All hands, no approach, no approach. Push for rafting maneuvers, everybody!”

  Jonsy tried to feel part of the amalgamous body of effort, the whole crew working in sync at stations all over the massive cruiser. The cooperation to save their ship and each others’ lives, their passengers and cargo, was cut now by Rockie’s glare as she cast her resentful eyes at Clyde. Jonsy saw it. Suddenly he was suspicious, too.

  Rockie stumbled forward and gripped the back of Jonsy’s chair with her long brown fingers, as if she could control the situation if she controlled Jonsy. But the chair pivoted and almost threw her off her feet. Jonsy wasn’t putting enough weight into the chair to stabilize it, but was instead working the controls at a crouch. His knotted thighs pressed back against the edge of the seat, and for a moment it was as if Rockie were the ventriloquist and Jonsy the puppet.

  Captain Alley saw something on a monitor and reacted. “Shift four degrees lateral port, Jonsy. Clyde, give him thruster support aft. Move, move, hut, hut. Let’s save our behinds!”

  How did he do that?

  Clyde, almost reclining now in his chair—a bizarre vision for a moment of action—pressed his knees forward into the cushioned bar below the thruster panel, gritted his teeth as if he were physically moving the ship with his body, and pressed into his task. Spikes of perspiration made his short-cropped hair gleam like a helmet. Straight blond brows were drawn over a pair of unblinking keen eyes. To Jonsy, Clyde looked like one of those kids’ action-figure toys, with a small wiry body and two strong arms protruding from wide shoulders, always held in a ready-to-strike pose.

  Why can’t I have arms like that? And hair that glistens at the right moments? Why can’t I be shorter and quicker? Is Rockie looking at him? Jonsy’s whole body made a single tremendous shudder, a sympathetic vibration that buzzed through the whole ship from the cargo holds to the flank bays, and up to the pilot house. For a moment he couldn’t believe what he saw and felt—the Virginia heaved like a big horse finding that last bit of energy to levitate itself from a ditch.

  Was it true? Did he see what he thought he was seeing? Yes!

  “Gimbals are stabilizing,” Jonsy rasped.

  “How are we doing with the moon?” Alley asked.

  “Losing its grip,” Clyde reported, victory lacing his choked voice.

  Jonsy almost whooped, but his joy was swallowed by a huge black shadow that crossed two of his screens. “Collision! Captain—!”

  Nick Alley was suddenly at his side. Together they scanned the twelve high-resolution screens showing different parts of the Virginia’s black exterior, bare processed metal gleaming with day-glow markings. No longer in the grip of the moon’s gravity, the elephantine ship swung freely toward the twenty-deck Mequon.

  “Brace yourselves!”

  Almost immediately on Alley’s words came the collision, a grinding crunch as the thousand-foot Virginia knocked hips with the Mequon. Both ships were enormous bulk carriers, but hanging in space, without the grip of the moon, there was no resistance except for the mass of the ships themselves. The triple-hulled Virginia swung over and jammed into Mequon’s port quarter. Kinetic energy transferred in a thrumming bongongong down the sides of both ships and they began to swing through space together, like a giant bell and its clapper.

  “Use it!” Alley commanded. “Aft grapples, take in! Ease line four, take both spring lines!”

  Clyde stood up and reached for the sensitive dials. “Easing four… taking two and… three.”

  “Hold three… take one! Jonsy, help him!”

  Jonsy stumbled out of his seat and dived for the line dials. He caught a glimpse of Rockie’s eyes watching his every move.

  This went on for four minutes, easing umbilicals and taking orders. Each minute was a stepdown in the level of tension as the two ships shimmied against each other, bow to bow, stern to stern, flank bays touching, all buffered by auto-compensating gas-filled fenders and self-adjusting grapples that would keep compensating whenever they sensed drift. The ship groaned and endured hollow booms inside her massive boxy frame, her length almost proportional to her height, yet she had a series of sculpted curves that ran the length of her hull and gave her a streamlined, attractive appearance that worked well in ads because the human eye found them pleasing. Inside, the holds and bays were so big that echoes were unavoidable, despite considerable devotion to special sound-inhibiting structures, resins, and compounds. Virginia was a high-class VIP cruiser, posh and polished on her passenger decks, but she was also a state-of-the-art bulk carrier, and cargo was her real bread and butter.

  “Rafting complete,” Clyde reported. “All umbilicals taken in. Hardpoints established, fenders engaged. And… we… are… rafted.”

  “That is what we in the industry call ‘a narrow escape’!” the captain exuded, and clapped his hands together once in sharp punctuation. “Sheesh, what a morning! Can’t believe we didn’t die.” He put his nose to the monitor showing the panoramic gray side of the other ship and the giant painted letters M E Q and part of a U. “What the hell is going on over there? I want to talk to Butch Burton right now! What was the point of that?! They almost took us both down!”

  The pilot house fell into a busy silence for a few moments as Rockie did her only job—inter- and intra-ship communications, recordings, and network interface. She had been in training to do other things, but was too comfortable in her one duty to bother studying very hard for anything else. Besides, she had other plans.

  With a moment finally to spare, Jonsy cannily gazed at his wife, and noticed that she was watching Clyde.

  “I can’t get an answer to our hail,” Clyde reported, clearly annoyed. “Oh—there it is, here it is… They want to doa fully automated transfer. Right now it’s just the ship talking to us.”

  “Burton just doesn’t want us to see his face after that mess of a rafting,” Captain Alley deduced. “Fine! I’m not in the mood for a name-calling session. If they want to hide, let ’em. Jonsy, do your thing.” He handed Jonsy a flat plastic sealed case the size of a man’s palm. “Let’s board this zoo and get going for our rendezvous with the Umiak befor
e I rip off a binding strake and beat that guy to a pulp with it.”

  Jonsy accepted a grimy little rag from Rockie and mopped his face as he steadied himself before the intership coordination console. He gave his wife a glance of both relief and amazement that they weren’t now cleaning up from a major disaster. Falling back into routine felt good, but weird at the same time. He wished there were a cooling-down period. His voice betrayed his unsteadiness as he made the formal required announcement into the computerized loading system. “This is John C. Coyne, Chief Bosun, PCG Virginia, authorization Zebra Roxanne nine-four-five. Confirm identification and tie-in with PCG Mequon.”

  While the computer system happily processed his voiceprint and passcode, he cracked the plastic case by bending it slightly until it made a noise, which then released a compound inside. Once mixed, the compound began to glow bright green in narrow rows that spelled out a numerical and key-word code. Jonsy continued speaking into the system, the way a person talks to a machine. “Begin transfer clearance procedure of test cargo containers Alpha, Beta, Charlie, limited clearance code as follows: One. Yellow. Eight. Emerald. Three. Eight. Niner. Five. Everglade. Go for auto-check.”

  “That’s what I like!” Alley slapped Jonsy on the back, making Rockie jump half out of her jacket. “This is the fun part! Rockie, put me on shipwide. Thanks, kid.” The captain flexed his shoulders to shake off the morning’s stress and leaned over the communications relay. “Attention all personnel, passengers, guests, mascots, and stowaways, this is your intrepid captain speaking to you from the bridge of a sweetheart of a ship that just saved its own ass and yours too. Now you can tell your grandchildren that you once participated in a near-miss collision with a transfer vessel the size of a city block and almost got to write your name on a moon. So shake it off and go to your nearest viewing screen, open a can of your favorite lubricant, and kick back for the sideshow of all time, which will begin in roughly—”

  He looked at Jonsy.

  “Sixty-five minutes,” Jonsy supplied.

  “Approximately one hour, after we clear the first three as test containers. This is the best part, watching two gigantic spaceships co-mingle by doing all the work themselves. Ladies and gentlemen and other life-forms, I give you the brilliant human enterprise of fully automated supercontainer transfer! Autographs will be signed later in the VIP lounge where all bribes, tips, and kisses will be accepted with a somewhat craggy smile. We will be giving out a prize to the person who can answer the following question: What was the capital of Assyria? Yee-ha!”