The Complete Aliens Omnibus, Volume 6 Read online

  “Maybe he doesn’t care about his reputation,” Ned warned.

  “But he cares about his license.” Adam had an answer for everything. “And everybody cares about reputation.”

  Ned shrugged and went about the business of wiping his hands on a clean piece of paper towel. And another. And a third. “What’s wrong with that? He’s getting paid for us to get experience in the way a ship runs.” He looked at his fingernails critically and added, “May have to sandblast…”

  “Just leave them dirty,” Adam recommended. “They can be your trophy. Prove you were here.”

  Ned shook his head. “That it will.”

  Annoyed that his niggling was getting no response, Adam pushed off the wall against which he’d been leaning and stalked toward the middle of the salon. “Doesn’t it bother you that Pangborn hates us?”

  “It doesn’t,” Ned told him. “Let him hate me if it does something for him.”

  Adam gave him a disdainful glower. “How did you get like this? What a buffoon you are. If you don’t care about your own reputation, why do anything? Don’t you have any hope? Any plans?”

  “I plan to grow into these arms, is one.”

  They moved apart as Captain Pangborn abruptly appeared in the forward hatchway, materializing as if he had always been there. Had he? Was he eavesdropping on them?

  The captain paused to look at both boys in turn, making them uneasy by saying nothing—well, Ned, anyway—and finally turning to study the condition of his bell.

  Ned’s whole body turned cold. He wasn’t sure why. He crunched his hands into the wad of paper towel he was still holding.

  The captain said nothing. He tipped his head to look at the back of the bell.

  A moment later, Mr. Nielsen came in, then Luke, closely followed by Dustin and Roscoe, one of the engineers, then Cathy, a medical and dental technician, and Zimmer, a caulker. They were an ordinary looking group, as average as people could be, and Ned imagined that they represented the bulk of the merchant fleet working billet bank, people with skills but few command ambitions. The teens didn’t know them well, but had been taught at some point by each of them about the execution of their duties. The assumption was that, as the weeks passed, the adults and the teenagers would merge into a cohesive body of professionals and apprentices, and that with time the skill gap would shrink. It was already shrinking.

  For all but Ned, who was now an expert in polishing the bell.

  “All hands, amidships,” the captain commanded.

  Dustin touched a com link that broadcast throughout the ship. “All hands, muster amidships.”

  Ned knew it was a show, because all the other hands had already been notified and were flooding into the salon. Pete, Nitro, Luke, Spiderlegs, and the other teenagers. The cook and cadets were carrying heat-retaining trays of food, but they were covered, so there was no guessing what the meal would be—which Adam Bay would be missing.

  They milled about for a minute or two. More of the working crew poured through the two hatches—Maxwell, who was the boatswain; Cheater, the cockswain; Patty, Antoine, and Noreen, all some form of engineer or maintenance crew which Ned hadn’t managed to get clear yet; and three others whose names he didn’t even know. As they came into the salon, some through the galley, others through the aft hatch, Ned realized that they had not integrated with their cadet crew as he might have expected. They hadn’t been eager to say so much as hello. Why? Who had set the tone for such segregated behavior?

  But he knew.

  “Everybody here?” Captain Pangborn glanced around, counting heads, and continued speaking while Spiderlegs and the cadets prepared the table and laid out the food. “We’re about to engage in a beautiful mating of ships. The whole process is completely run by computers, so we get to watch the remarkable show of human ingenuity. It’s likely we won’t even have to communicate with the captain and crew of the Virginia, other than formal greetings, which are done mechanically, so we can legally log the meeting. The merchant fleet is in the process of going to full-automation, so we tend to avoid contact, other than a few text notes, because we’re all still in the experimental stage. That means this autoload is a test case. We’re helping perfect the process for the future. I mean, occasionally, if there’s time, we might have dinner, but that won’t be happening this time. We’re on schedules that take us down to minutes of specific delivery time. The cargo we’re accepting, much of it, is time-sensitive. There are containers full of seawater with living sealife, segments of coral reefs, and highly sensitive support systems which can’t be frozen. In the cryo-containers, we have animals which are rare, special, hybrid, and stressed in their current static condition.”

  Ned caught the captain’s eye, though he didn’t mean to. Should he look away? Or was it best to meet the gaze?

  Before he could decide, Pangborn released him and continued talking to the others.

  “Sending them in that condition is a risk, and part of our contract involves a hasty delivery. It’s the main reason the Umiak and the Virginia will spend no social time hanging out here in space. We don’t have it to spare. In space these things are carefully planned and executed by computers. All right, dismissed for lunch, but make it fast. Everybody to the midships observation deck in twenty-five minutes.”

  As Spiderlegs began serving pieces of a huge slab of lasagna in a deep tray, the captain stepped past Ned on the way to the hatch.

  The captain paused, looked at Ned, looked at the bell, and gave it an uneasy ten seconds before speaking.

  “After the autoload,” he said, “you can come back here and finish.”

  He left.

  Ned stood there with his hands and shoulders aching, his elbows stiff, and his throat raw from the fumes. He looked at the beautiful bell, its deeply polished brass shining, its copper mermaids’ tails burnished, and its broad skirt reflecting the red, white, and green bands of the salon lights. He saw the etched ivy leaves, bright and clean, without the slightest edge of tarnish. The mermaid’s hands, as clean and fresh as his sister’s. The thin copper inlaid band around the top of the bell, which he had never noticed before, but now knew intimately.

  Finish?

  Only at this moment did he realize how truly exhausted he was. He closed his eyes tightly and gave his neck a twisting stretch. More of this?

  With a raw sigh, he accepted his fate and turned toward the table. At least there would be lunch, and a break to watch the loading.

  As he turned, he found two people watching him, for completely different reasons. His sister, and Adam Bay.

  9

  Seafarers and spacefarers knew any voyage could abruptly turn deadly. While routine was the critical way of life from the time of the earliest explorers, when “because” was a good enough reason, the wilderness always had something else in mind… to break the routine with bursts of excitement.

  Now there were better reasons than “just because,” but risk was still the ’farer’s bunkmate. And here they were.

  Nicholas Alley forced himself to work through the spiny panic chewing at his innards as he climbed the access ladder to the next level, the level where the pilothouse waited for his orders. There, if he made it, he would stop the ship here, deep in space, without a tracer signal, so it wouldn’t go off and meet the Umiak and infect them, and so it could probably never be found. He would, if he had time, put out a warning and distress signal, but that was secondary. If he had time.

  Those people in the engine room… were they dead by now? Had the invaders broken through? He felt bad about lying to them, telling them his mission was the distress call more than saving the lives of other ships and colonies. The Virginia was now Typhoid Mary. She had to be stopped. Their lives were all forfeit. Unless miracles happened— and he knew they could.

  Every suicide jumper changes his mind halfway down.

  He stopped calling out Dave LaMay’s name, though he burned for the sound of a human voice, even his own. They must’ve gotten well ahead of
him. Good boy, Dave! Don’t look back! Keep moving!

  In his mind he paced out the number of steps to the pilot house. Other than a short curved corridor, two hatches, and the tool alley, the pilot house was almost over his head. He kept climbing.

  Three-quarters of his way up the ladder, which had never until today seemed so very long, he stopped with one hand hovering in front of him, not quite to the rung. He heard something.

  “Aaaaaahhh… ahh… ahhh…”

  Mechanical? Had one of the lube tubes sprung a leak?

  “Aaaahhhh… aaaaahhhh!… aaaaaahhhhh!”

  No… that was air. It had the same weak-strong-weak noise of air flowing unevenly, trying to fill a space before it ran out the other end.

  “Aaaahh… aaaaahhhh! Aaaahhhh!”

  That was human!

  “Dave!” Alley called.

  “Aaaaaaaaaahh! Aaaaaaah!” The pitch grew higher, more insistent.

  Alley started climbing again, faster. “Dave! Where are you?!”

  The terrible cry came again and again, unevenly, desperately.

  Wild imaginings of torture blew through Alley’s mind. He tried to banish them, to concentrate, focus, climb.

  “Aah-aaaaaaaaah!”

  Definitely a human voice, but not an inspired scream. He couldn’t figure it.

  “I’m coming—coming, coming—” Soaked with sweat, he leaped to the top of the ladder and crushed the stock of the Firebolt into his shoulder and rounded the curve and jumped through the first hatch.

  And there he met his enemy.

  * * *

  Sub-human or superhuman?

  In the cloistered niche of the tool alley, the otherwise friendly and useful place where the crew stored racks of maintenance equipment in lockers, the wicked witches were lit horribly from below by suffering amber footlights. Still half in shadow, the insectoids turned their eyeless head cases and greeted him with their renowned attitude. From their smiling mouth parts clear liquid resin drained, puddling the floor which was already awash in blood. On the deck, Lena’s petite body lay face-down, cleaved almost in half the long way, cut from the back of her neck to the crack in her bottom. Her white spinal column was completely exposed, slightly humped and bent in a strange S. Her face was burned in coagulating resin and a pool of blood.

  Between the two aliens, clasped in their long claws hands, was Dave. His once-infectious smile was now a permanent grimace.

  But it wasn’t Dave, Alley digested as he blinked sweat out of his eyes. It was half of Dave. Below the thorax, Dave’s pelvis and legs were completely missing. Part of his left arm was gone, except for the denuded bone which went from elbow to wrist, ending in a skeletal thumb and forefinger.

  Part of Dave’s skull had been bitten off. His brain case leaked gray matter into what was left of his wonderful platinum hair.

  But his eyes were moving… terror-fraught, and he was crying out, “Aaaaaahh! Aaaaaaahhhh!”

  “Dave!” Alley gasped.

  The invader behind Dave had its hand up inside Dave’s ribcage and its mouth parts embedded into the back of his neck, somehow forcing air into his body. The other creature stood slightly to the side, its hand pressed to Dave’s chest, pushing the air out of his lungs through his voice box as the other creature blew it in. They had turned Alley’s shipmate into a grisly puppet.

  They knew something about humans. They knew Alley would answer the call.

  “Stop it,” Alley wept, dissolving. “Stop making him do that… stop doing that to him… that’s not fair.”

  With its arm up Dave’s thorax, the alien in back raised its head. Dave ceased his baleful cries. The last foreign breath gurgled from his mouth. His lips quivered. His demolished head sagged forward.

  “He’s coming with me, scarecrow!” Alley choked. His weapon came up and he opened fire.

  A bolt of knotted flame streaked from the muzzle and smashed LaMay in the chest and went through him as if he were a snowman. Behind the torso, the puppeteer looked down at its own chest. The chest was gone.

  Acid blew onto the bulkhead and burned through to bare circuits. A fan of white sparks drenched the two creatures and for an instant confused them.

  Before Alley could move the barrel for a second shot, the other one was on him. Its tail coiled around his buttocks and they pivoted in a bitter dance with the Firebolt caught pointing upward between their bodies.

  “Hah!” Alley shouted. “Eat fire!”

  He snarled in that way men do when they’ve given up on their own lives and suddenly there’s fresh strength. He used his pelvis to shove the Firebolt’s muzzle up under the creature’s chin and found a notch in the curved underside of the cucumber-shaped skull-thing, and he pulled the trigger.

  The huge head came clean off. Clean off.

  There wasn’t even any acid. He was left dancing with the stupified body, its claws digging into his arms, still tearing at his flesh. Dead, and still fighting.

  “Yeah! Shove off, Icabod!” He twisted his shoulders and fell out of the embrace.

  The alien collapsed at his feet. He stood over it, yelling down.

  “Damn interstellar post-nasal drip! Are you proud of yourself? You’re nothing but gangsters! Your mama should’a slapped you early! Vulgar leeches… just keep dying. I’m going in here. You just… just stay there and… just die.”

  He extricated his feet from the remains and strode, proudly casual, through the hatch and into the pilot house. A force struck him in the side of his face—but it was only the side edge of the hatchway. He’d run right into it. His eyes weren’t working very well. The space around him swam and wavered as if he were under water. He shook his head, but that didn’t help. In fact, the delirium was suddenly worse.

  Didn’t matter. He was here. Maybe he should close the hatch. No time. Get to the code. The nav theatre wobbled in his gaze.

  “See? See, stupid? See this?” he shouted back. “I just punch in the code and you’re stuck here in the middle of bumfuck eternity! How’d you like that! You know what the abort code is? Six-four-six-A-Z-tilde-nine!”

  He moved to the starboard side and forced his blurring eyes to find the keyboard. He reached for it.

  “You don’t even know what a tilde is, do you? You’re so stupid… messed up my ship… turned my shipmate into a bagpipe… six-four-six-A-Z-tilde-nine. Here goes. Here it goes… this is it! This is the part where I win! Six… four… what—what the hell—what—the—hell—”

  His right elbow was working. He felt it work. But the keyboard just blurred with color before his eyes. No numbers came up on the screen. No questioning voice of the computer system asking him to confirm. Why? Why weren’t the numbers going in?

  Was it unplugged? Was the keyboard not hooked up?

  He dipped his head to look at the side of the keyboard, to see if it was still hooked up, but his eyesight went crazy and a sudden nausea flared up in his gut. His stomach rolled and he felt abruptly weak.

  “Oh, man…” he murmured. “Okay. Six-four—six… what the hell… is this?”

  He tried to push the buttons. Six. Four. Nothing happened.

  With his left arm, he tried to wipe the sweat out of his face. Instead, he ended up smearing his face with wet strings. He shook his head and looked at his left arm. But there was not an arm there. There was wet bone. Wet white bone. A tangle of bloody ligaments. The broken-boned hand of a skeleton.

  Just like Dave… they’d taken his flesh and sinew. They’d left him only bone.

  He turned the filleted limb before his fading vision. “Just going into shock, that’s all… I’ll just fight it.” He raised his voice. “Hear that, gangsters? I can fight it! Yeah… fought you, didn’t I? Yup… I’ll just do it with my other hand. Six… four… what the hell?”

  The keyboard turned red in front of him as if he’d spilled paint on it.

  “No, no, come on!” he shouted at it. “Six! Four! Six!”

  He stabbed at the keyboard again and again with his right han
d. Again, again… again…

  The display screens above on the nav bank flickered in confusion, registering all sorts of letters and numbers as he poked and hammered at the keyboard. Finally he realized it wasn’t the keyboard at all. He raised his arm to look at his right hand.

  “Not now!” he cried out. Before him there was only a torn and bloody stump of a forearm. The hand was completely missing, sliced off at the wrist. “Not now! No, no, not now!”

  Falling to his knees, he gritted his teeth and aimed the vulgar stump at the keyboard, stabbing again and again as his mind, deprived of blood, began to spin.

  “Nah! Nah!” he screamed. Defiance made him insane, furious. Sinking into the barbarism he needed to try one more time, he leaned forward and tried to punch the numbers with his tongue.

  His knee slipped and he fell sideways, jamming his chin on the console. His head reeled as if a prizefighter had punched him. Sliding sideways, further and further from the keyboard, he felt his strength flow away as the blood drained more and more from his wrecked arms.

  “Six!” he called. “Four! Six! A! Z!… come on! Tilde! Tilde!”

  But the computer wasn’t set up to abort by vocal command.

  As he slid deeper and deeper into the blanket of weakness that would be his last sensation, Nicholas Alley thought about the irony of that. It was for safety. So nobody could just talk the computer into stranding the ship.

  He wanted to talk to the ship. She was real, she was alive, and she was moving through space to her poisonous date with the innocents of the Umiak.

  And there was nothing left in the universe that he could do to stop it.

  10

  The autoload was all the captain promised it to be, and more. What sounded like a mundane industrial process turned out to be a stunning tour through human ingenuity. The Virginia had come toward them out of open space, right on time, without a hitch. The two ships, working on autopilot and run by computers, had made a marvelous linkup hanging right out here in space, without even a scratch of each other’s hulls. The technology was a marvel indeed.