[Aliens 02] - Nightmare Asylum Read online

  Nightmare Asylum

  Aliens - 02

  Steve Perry

  1

  Outside in the dead vacuum of space there was no sound; but inside the robot ship, the steady drone of the gravity drives vibrated like a low note played on some deep-throated musical instrument. It went through the flesh, to the bone; right to the soul; it had been there since the sleep chambers clamshelled up to expose their inhabitants to it. A mechanized om that lulled, as if calling them back into the long sleep, no chambers needed.

  Billie sat in the makeshift kitchen, staring at what passed for coffee. The color was right, but that was about all. The taste was almost nothing, hot water with some vague taint to it. She watched it cool, stuck in the post-hypersleep lethargy, her own animation still feeling somewhat suspended. It was like the flu, you couldn’t cure it and it just seemed to hang on forever sometimes. The coffee vibrated, making tiny ripples that lapped against the circular wall of the cup.

  Behind her, Wilks said, “Tastes like shit, don’t it?”

  “That would be an improvement,” Billie said. She didn’t turn to look at him as he moved into the room. He sat on the bulkhead roll-out to her right and watched her for a few seconds before he spoke again.

  “You okay?”

  “Me? Yeah, I’m fine. Why shouldn’t I be okay? I’m on a robot ship going God knows where, leaving behind an Earth overrun by alien monsters, in the company of half an android and a marine who is probably a borderline psycho.”

  “What do you mean ‘borderline’?” he said. “Hey, I’m certifiable on any world you want to name.”

  Billie glanced at him. Couldn’t stop the grin that matched his. Shook her head. “Jesus, Wilks.”

  “Hey, cheer up, kid. It’s not as if things are really bad. We got each other. You, me, and Bueller.” There was silence for a moment. Then: “I’m gonna go monitor the ’casts. You want to come along?”

  Billie shifted on the crate she was using for a chair. Looked at Wilks. The burn scar on his face was something she almost never noticed anymore, but in this light, it gave his features a kind of wry malevolence. Like some minor demon out to play practical jokes. “No,” she finally said.

  “Suit yourself.” He stood.

  Billie sipped at the tepid liquid. Made a face at the nontaste. “Wait. I changed my mind. I’ll go along.”

  It wasn’t as if there was an awful lot to do on this tub. Since they’d awakened, a week had gone past, with no sign of stopping. Their monitoring gear was crappy, but even so, if there were any human-inhabited places around, they should have spotted them. The gravity drive was a lot faster than the old reaction sprayers, but if there was a planetary system, Wilks couldn’t find it. There were better ways to die than starving on a ship going nowhere.

  She should go and see if Mitch wanted to come with them. Mitch. She had trouble with that even now. Yeah, she loved him, but what a can of worms that turned out to be. Maybe not worms exactly, but whatever plumbing androids had installed sure looked verminlike. She loved him, but she also hated him. How was that possible, to have two such opposing feelings at once for someone? Maybe the medics in the hospital where she’d spent all those years were right. Maybe she was crazy.

  The ship was fairly large, most of it was given over to cargo. They hadn’t really gotten around to exploring all the nooks in it yet. Billie supposed that if they were stuck in it much longer, she’d get around to serious poking about, but the urge hadn’t really come upon her; she wasn’t quite bored enough. Why bother? Who gave a shit?

  The control room was tiny, barely space for two to wedge their way into it. The designers had only to leave enough room for a repair tech, since the thing had been built to be run by the computer and a few service robots. The ’cast screens were blank, save for the two running ship data in computer language. “Showtime,” Wilks said. He wasn’t smiling.

  A man who looked like Albert Einstein at sixty said, “Have we got it? Have we got the uplink—okay, okay, listen, anybody out there, this is Hermann Koch in Charlotte; we’re out of food, we’re almost out of water, we’re overrun! The damned things are killing or kidnapping everybody! There are only twenty of us left alive—!”

  The man went away and abruptly there was another place. Outside, a bright and sunny day, spring flowers in bloom, bright green leaves sprouting on the trees. Only something hideous wrecked the scene:

  One of the aliens carried under its arm a woman, as a man might carry a small dog. The alien was three meters tall, light gleaming from its black exoskeletons its head was shaped like a mutated banana; it looked like some obscene crossbreed between an insect and a lizard. Boney, notched spars protruded from the thing’s back like exposed ribs, three paired sets. It walked upright on two legs, a fact that seemed impossible given the way it was constructed, and a long, vertebrae-flanged, and pointed tail swept the pavement behind it as it moved.

  A bullet spanged off the thing’s head, doing no more damage to the hard surface than a rubber ball bouncing on a plastecrete sidewalk. The alien turned and looked at the unseen shooters.

  “Aim for the woman!” somebody screamed. “Shoot Janna!”

  Before the alien kidnapper could flee with its prey, three more shots boomed. One of them missed completely. One of them hit the alien’s chest, flattened on the natural armor, did no harm. The third bullet hit the woman, just above the left eye.

  “Thank God!” the unseen speaker said.

  The alien sensed something wrong. It lifted the woman up, held her at arm’s length, turned its head from side to side, as if examining her. The thing looked at the shooters. It dropped the dead or dying woman onto the sidewalk as if she were yesterday’s garbage. Began to run directly toward the shooters. Made a hissing, burbling sound as it came—

  Here, what was once a school classroom: but the rows of blank computer terminals were powerless; the only light was that which slanted in through a broken window. A human body lay on the floor, parts of it gone, eaten away, leaving a fly-blown swollen mass. Maggots squirmed in the rank remains, and the putrefaction had drawn ants and other small scavengers. The corpse was too far gone to say what sex it had been. Above the body, spray-painted on the wall in letters half a meter high the words: darwin estis korecto.

  Darwin was right.

  Had the dead person written those words as a final statement? Or had the human arrived later, to contemplate them, to seek after truth—before the higher link in the food chain came for its due? Words like these had power, but in the jungle, the sword, the tooth, the claw, were mightier than the pen. Always…

  A young man, maybe twenty-five, sat in a church, in the front pew. Religion hadn’t been doing so well on Earth in the last twenty years, but there were still places of worship. A soft glow from beneath a cross mounted behind the altar illuminated the young man, who sat in the first row of the otherwise empty church with his eyes closed, praying aloud.

  “…. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” he said. “For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.”

  Almost without pause, the young man began the prayer again, speaking in a monotone. “Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name…”

  A dim fuzzy shadow loomed suddenly on the wall at the end of the pew.

  “… Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done…”

  The shadow grew larger.

  “… on Earth, as it is in heaven…”

  There came a faint rasping on the floor, and if the young man praying heard it, he made no sign.

  “… Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors…”

&nb
sp; The alien rose from behind the praying man, clear slime dripping in jellylike strings from its jaws. The lips cleared the sharp teeth. Its mouth opened, revealing an inner set of smaller teeth, more like a claw in their function.

  “… And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil…”

  The inner set of teeth was mounted on a greasy ridged pole. The rod shot from the thing’s mouth with incredible speed and power. The sharp teeth punched a hole in the top of the praying man’s skull as if it were no thicker or harder than wet paper. Blood and brain tissue splashed. The praying man’s eyes snapped open in a final surprise and he managed one word: “God!”

  The alien caught his shoulders with its taloned hands and lifted him clear of the pew, the claws piercing flesh and drawing gouts of blood from a heart that didn’t know it was dead yet.

  The alien and its prey disappeared from view, leaving only a small puddle of congealing blood and a few flecks of gray matter on the pew to show they had been there.

  The pew stood empty and silent.

  God, it seemed, wasn’t taking deliver-us-from-evil petitions just now.

  Wilks leaned back and stared at the empty church on the screen. “Automatic camera,” he said. “Probably set to catch thieves. Wonder how the signal got this far?”

  Next to him, Billie’s face was streaked with fresh tears. “Jesus, Wilks.”

  “Amazing how people keep sending the ’casts out. Like they really expect help. Or maybe it’s like an old grave headstone, you know? The signals will go into space forever. Immortality as a radio wave. Maybe they think a million light-years from Earth somebody will pick them up and give a shit. You know, buy a bag of popcorn and watch the end of man, maybe on a double bill with a nature special.”

  Billie stood. “I’m going to see Mitch,” she said.

  “Give him my love,” Wilks said.

  She tightened, he could see her go tense, and he thought about softening it, but said nothing as she left. Fuck it. It didn’t matter.

  Wilks scanned the ’casts, looking for something different, but found only more of the same. Death. Destruction. Bodies rotting in the streets, animals feeding on them. A pack of dogs worried over a human arm. There wasn’t any sound, probably a traffic cam, but he could tell they were growling and snarling at each other. The arm was bloated and slug-belly white. Been out in the sun too long, Wilks figured. Well. Whoever had owned it probably didn’t have any use for it, might as well let the dogs eat it. It was just carrion now.

  He shut the feed from Earth off. It was all history now. Whatever he was looking at had happened already, was over with, done.

  He played with the scanners again, looking for wherever this ship might be bound. It was a crappy situation, the ship having been designed without passengers in mind. He’d managed to rig a few programs to get a read on the screens, which were only there for emergency backup anyhow, way he figured it. Probably cobbled together after things went bad on Earth, and as such was built with fence wire and prayer. After seeing the guy in the church, Wilks didn’t have a lot of faith in prayer. Not that he’d ever had much to begin with.

  The ship knew where it was going, maybe, but that didn’t help Wilks. There must be a planet or wheelworld out here somewhere; there was a G-class star less than two hundred million klicks away, but if it had satellites, he hadn’t spotted them yet. Had to be there, otherwise why would the sleep chambers let them out?

  Could be a malfunction, asshole, the little voice in his head said with a smirk. Could be you’re all gonna die.

  Fuck you, Wilks told the voice. I got business to finish before I die.

  And you think the universe cares about your business?

  Fuck you, pal. You and the id you rode in on.

  The voice rewarded him with a nasty laugh.

  2

  Mitch rested in the cradle they had improvised for him, and from behind it appeared that he was sitting up. Given that there was nothing left of his body from the waist down, sitting wasn’t exactly possible. He stopped in the middle, almost literally half a man—half an android—a ragged medifoam blob sealing his innards shut. He had done the repairs on his circulatory tubules himself, shunting, reconnecting, so that he was once again a closed system. That was how he’d put it, a closed system. The other half of him had been left on the aliens’ homeworld, torn off by a maddened drone protecting its nest. That alien was killed and likely it and most of the others there were vaporized by the subsequent atomic explosions Wilks had left them as a going away gift. A man torn asunder as Mitch had been would have died on that hellish planet, from blood loss or maybe shock. Androids were built better.

  He heard her come in. This was the starboard computer access compartment, smaller even than the place where she’d just left Wilks. He heard her, but pretended he had not.

  “Mitch?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t get past the operating system,” he said. “Navigation access code is sixty-five digits, backed up by a second code of forty numbers. It would take forever to get it, given the hardware I’ve got. And where are the other ships? We left Earth in the middle of an armada. They should be somewhere around here, but they aren’t. We’re alone. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  She moved to stand next to his cradle. Resisted the impulse to stroke his hair. “It’s all right—”

  “No, it isn’t all right! We don’t know where we are, where we’re going, if we’ll get there alive! I have to, it’s my function to…” he trailed off. Shook his head again.

  Billie wanted to cry, something she’d done more of in the last week than ever in her life. His Function. She’d fallen in love with an android. Worse, maybe, he’d fallen in love with her. He was having more trouble dealing with the feelings than she was. When they’d gone into the sleep chambers, she’d accepted it, believed it would be all right, somehow. But when they’d come out, something had changed. Some of it was him. Some of it, she had to admit, was her.

  She didn’t think she was one of those people who carried her prejudices around like a club, bashing those who disagreed with her. She’d always paid lip service to equality. A person is a person, no matter if they’re born of woman, incubated in an artificial womb, or made in the android vats. Where you came from wasn’t important, only where you were going. Spend too much time looking back, you’d run into something and brain yourself, right? She’d always said that. Androids were people.

  Yeah, but would you want your sister to marry one?

  Or would you want to marry one yourself?

  Jesus.

  He hadn’t told her, that was his main crime. She’d only found out after they had become lovers, after she had let him into her heart. That hurt. She hadn’t thought she could ever get past that, but amazingly, she had. Or so she had thought. But now?

  It wasn’t just that he was less than he had been. With the proper facilities, Mitch could be made whole again. As good as new. Meticulously designed muscles, perfect skin, all the right equipment in the right places…

  Stop it!

  No, there was something else going on here and Billie didn’t know exactly what. The man—artificial or not—she had fallen in love with wasn’t the same as he had been. Something inside his mind was different. She wanted to understand, wanted to give him all the slack he needed, but he had become someone else, a cold, fearful person who wouldn’t let her in. Somebody who didn’t want to hear about her love or anger or needs. Hiding behind his wall, hands over his ears.

  Still, she kept trying.

  “Mitch, listen. I—” Now she did reach out and touch his hair. It felt as real as her own, was real in that it had grown from his scalp the same way, was made of protein so similar only a microscope could see the differences.

  “Don’t, Billie,” he said.

  She felt the words like a blast of frigid air, so cold it took her breath away. How could he do this? Not talk to her?

  “Billie, please. Try to understand. I—I’m not trying to hurt
you. It’s—it’s just that I don’t—I can’t—I… I’m sorry.”

  “I’m tired,” Billie said. “I’m going to try to get some rest now.”

  She walked away, nearly tripped as the faux grav fluctuated a hair. They’d had problems with that, nobody thought a robot ship really needed gravity in transit and that system, like many of the others, had been rigged by Wilks before they lifted. To hear him tell it, if somebody sneezed too hard, the ship would break up.

  The storeroom she used as her sleeping quarters was private, a three meter-by-two-meter box, but since it was next to the ship’s internal power and heating system, it was also hotter than most spots onboard. She stripped to her undershirt and panties, lay down, and leaned back against the bulkhead that served as a pillow. Sweat slid down her bare skin, dampened her clothes, and made her feel sticky. Still, it wasn’t unbearable. And it was damn sure better than the company she’d have to endure otherwise.

  She was dozing when Wilks appeared in the doorway. She hadn’t bothered to slid shut the hanging curtain she’d rigged. His sudden presence startled her.

  “Make some noise when you move, Wilks. You scared me.”

  He stepped into the room, his feet nearly touching hers. She sat up, drew her feet in. He’d seen her naked, but something about the way he stood there made her nervous.

  “Everything scares you, Billie,” he said.

  She blinked sweat away, wiped at her eyes. “What are you talking about?”

  He moved closer. Knelt. Reached out and caught her shoulders. “When you were a kid you were scared of dying. Later, you were scared of living.”

  “Jesus, Wilks, back off—”

  He slid his hands under her shirt before she could react. Cupped her breasts. “And you’ve always been scared of me,” he said.

  Her shock turned to anger. She grabbed his hands, pulled them from under her shirt. “Goddammit! What the hell do you think you’re doing!”