[Aliens 01] - Earth Hive Read online

  The probe attached a small charge to the hatch and retroed back a hundred meters. The charge flared silently in the vacuum and the hatch shattered.

  “Knock, knock. Anybody home?”

  “Go see. And try not to bang the probe up too bad this time.”

  “That wasn’t my fault,” Lyle said. “One of the retros was plugged.”

  “So you say.”

  The tiny robot ship moved in through the opening in the derelict ship.

  “Inner hatch is open.”

  “Good. Saves time. Move it in.”

  The probe’s halogens lit as it moved into the ship.

  The radiation alarm chimed on the computer’s screen. “Kinda hot in there,” Lyle said.

  “Yep, hope you like your soypro well done.”

  “Mmm. I guess anybody in this baby would be toast by now. We’ll have to give the probe a bath when it gets back.”

  “Chreesto, look at that!” Barton said.

  What had been a man floated just ahead of the probe. The hard radiation had killed the bacteria that would have rotted him, and the cold had preserved what the vacuum hadn’t sucked out of him. He looked like a leather prune. He was naked.

  “Lordy, lordy,” Lyle said. “Hey, check the wall behind him.” He touched a control and the visuals enhanced and enlarged. Something was written on the bulkhead in smeary brown letters: KILL US ALL, it said.

  “Damn, is that written in blood? Looks like blood tome.”

  “You want an analysis?”

  “Never mind. We got us a flip ship.”

  Lyle nodded. They’d heard about them, though he himself had never opened one. Somebody went nuts and wasted everybody else. Opened a port and let the air out, or maybe flooded the ship with radiation, like this one. A quick death or a slow one, but death, sure enough. Lyle shivered.

  “Find a terminal and see if you can download the ship’s memory. The meter is running here.”

  “If the batteries are still good. Oops. Got motion on the detector.”

  “I see it. I don’t believe it, but I see it. Nobody can possibly be alive, even somebody in a full rad suit would cook in this tub—”

  “There it is. It’s just a cargo carrier.”

  A short, squat robot crawled along a line of Velcro against the ceiling.

  “We must have jolted it awake when we blew the hatch.”

  “Yeah, right. Get the memory.”

  The probe floated toward a control panel.

  “Damn, look at those holes in the deck. Looks like something dissolved the plastic. Radiation wouldn’t do that, would it?”

  “Who knows? Who cares? Just dump the memory and pull the probe so we can blow this sucker. I have a date tonight and I don’t want any overtime.”

  “You’re the commander.”

  The probe connected to the control board. The ship’s power was almost gone, but sufficient to download the memory.

  “Coming in,” Lyle said. “Here’s the ID scan, onscreen.”

  “No surprises here,” Barton said. “Type five nuke drive, lotta deep-space time, bad shields, dead core. No wonder they junked this bucket. That’s it. Shove it sunward, set the 10-CA and let’s go home.”

  Lyle touched more controls. The probe placed the small clean atomic against a wall where it adhered. “Okay, three minutes to—aw, shit!”

  The screen went blank.

  “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything! The camera’s gone out.”

  “Switch to memory drive. We lose another probe and the Old Man’ll chew our asses to pulp.”

  Lyle touched a button. The computer took over the probe. Since it had memorized every centimeter of the flight in, it could retrace the flight and bring the probe back.

  “It’s clear,” Lyle said a moment later. “Burning more fuel than it should, though.”

  “Maybe it snagged on something coming out. Doesn’t matter.”

  “Probe docking. Outer hatch open. Let me see if I can get an eye on the sucker and see why it’s wallowing so bad.” Lyle ran his practiced hands over the controls.

  “Holy fuck!” Barton said.

  Lyle just stared. What the hell was that? Some kind of thing sat on the probe as it approached the ship. It looked like a reptile, no, a giant bug. Wait, it had to be some kind of suit, no way it could live in vac without a suit—

  “Close the hatch!” Barton yelled.

  “Too late! It’s inside.”

  “Flood the bay with antirad! Pump the air out! Blow it back through the fucking door!”

  A clang vibrated through the ship. Like a hammer smashing metal.

  “It’s trying to open the inner hatch!”

  Frantically Lyle tapped controls. “Antirad spray on full! Evacuation pumps on!”

  The banging continued.

  “Okay, okay, don’t worry, it can’t get in. The hatch is locked. Nobody can break through a sealed boron-carbon hatch with his bare hands!”

  Something crashed, ringing loudly. Then came the sound spacers fear more than anything: air rushing out.

  “Close the outer hatch, goddammit!”

  But the dropping air pressure tugged at Lyle. The cabin was filled with loose items being sucked toward the rear of the cutter. Light pens, coffee cups, a hard-copy magazine fluttering madly. He lunged at the controls, missed the emergency button, lunged again.

  Barton, also half out of his chair, stabbed at the red button, but hit the computer override instead. The ship went to manual drive.

  The cabin pressure raced toward zero. A hatch-sized hole blew air into space real damned fast. Lyle’s eyes bulged, began to bleed. One eardrum popped. He screamed, but found the control for the external hatch.

  “I got it! I got it!”

  The outer hatch cycled shut. Emergency air tanks kicked on. The faux gravity pulled the two men back toward their seats. “Goddammit! Goddammit!” Barton said.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s closed!”

  “Coast Guard Control, this is the cutter Dutton!” Barton began. “We have a situation here!”

  “Oh, man!” Lyle said.

  Barton twisted.

  The thing stood right fucking there!

  It had teeth! It came toward them. It looked hungry.

  Barton tried to get up, fell, and hit the drive control. The ship was still on manual. The drive kicked on. The acceleration threw the monster backward, drove Lyle and Barton into their seats. Even though they couldn’t move, the thing somehow managed to drag itself onward.

  It was a nightmare. It couldn’t be real.

  The thing ripped chunks out of Lyle’s seat as it pulled him from the chair. Blood sprayed as its clawed hands punctured his shoulders. It opened its mouth and a rod shot out, so fast Barton could hardly see it. The rod buried itself in Lyle’s head like his skull was putty. Blood and brain tissue splashed. Lyle screamed in total terror.

  The cutter, still under acceleration, headed directly toward the radioactive hulk in front of it.

  The monster jerked that hellish thing from Lyle’s skull. It made a sucking sound, like a foot pulled out of mud. The creature turned toward Barton.

  Barton drew breath to scream, but the sound never came out—

  At that instant the cutter smashed into the scuttled freighter—

  —and the bomb the probe had set went off.

  Both ships were destroyed in the explosion. Virtually everything was shattered into tiny bits that spiraled in a long loop toward Sol.

  Everything except the blue box.

  Wilks stared at the screen as it washed white.

  Amazing how well the blue boxes were armored, to survive even a close atomic blast like that.

  He looked at the guard bot. “Okay, I’ve seen it.”

  “Let’s go,” the bot said.

  They were alone in a conference room in MIL-COM HQ. Wilks stood, and the bot led the way. If he’d had a gun, he would have shot the bot and tried to run. Yeah. Right.
/>   As they walked along the corridor, Wilks put it together. So this was why they’d never kicked him out of the Corps. It was only a matter of time before humans stumbled across the aliens again. They hadn’t wanted to believe him about what had happened on Rim, but the truth machines wouldn’t let them off the hook that easy. The brain strainers had pulled it out of him, and the Corps never threw anything away that might be useful someday.

  His belly clenched around a cold knot, like somebody had jammed a blade of liquid nitrogen into his guts. The bomb on Rim hadn’t gotten them all. The military found itself in need of an expert on these things and Corporal Wilks was what it had. Probably didn’t make them very happy, but they would make do.

  He wasn’t looking forward to this meeting. It certainly wasn’t going to do him any good. Not at all.

  3

  Salvaje’s place was almost directly under the huge reactor shield for the Southern Hemisphere Power Grid Switching Station. The PGSS field was big enough so it sometimes created its own weather. Mostly that was rain. Day and night, steady, unrelieved, dreary-as-shit rain. The building was eon-plas prefab, proof against the more or less constant downpour, a dull gray material that blended in against a sky the color of melted lead. It was a good place to hide. Nobody came here unless they had a reason, even the ground police avoided the rain when they could.

  Pindar the holotech splashed through puddles, ankle deep despite the drainage pumps’ attempts to clear the water. If Salvaje didn’t have so much spare money he was willing to part with, Pindar would have avoided this scum hole. The building walls were thick with mold, even the retardant paint couldn’t stop it, and there were rumors that you could catch a mutant strain of flu here that would kill you before you could get to a medic—which wouldn’t help anyhow because even recombinant antivirals couldn’t touch the stuff. Nice.

  The door slid open on creaky runners as Pindar walked up the incline to Salvaje’s place.

  “You’re late,” came the ghostly voice from within.

  Pindar stepped inside, stripped off the osmotic rainfilm that kept him dry, dropped the torn bits of spiderweb-thin plastic onto the floor. “Yeah, well, between my day job and this shit, it’s lucky I can find time to sleep.”

  “I care nothing for your sleep. I pay well.”

  Pindar looked at Salvaje. He was ordinary enough. Medium height, hair slicked straight back in some kind of electrostatic hold, a little beard and mustache. He could have been thirty or fifty; he had one of those faces that don’t seem to age much. He wore a plain black coverall and flexboots. Pindar wasn’t sure what a holy man ought to look like, but Salvaje sure wasn’t it.

  “There,” Salvaje said, pointing.

  Pindar saw the cam on a table. “Damn, where’d you get that antique? It looks like an old ship’s monitor—”

  “Where I got it is not important. Can you use it to tie us into the Nets?”

  “Senor, I can tie you into the Nets with a toaster and a couple of microwave cooker circuit boards. I am a very good technician.”

  Salvaje said nothing, only stared at Pindar with those cold gray eyes of his. Pindar repressed a shudder. Gave him the crawlies when he did that. “Si, I can put you on the air. But visual and auditory only. No sublims, no subsonics, no olfactories. Be pretty tame compared to what your competition is throwing at the GU.”

  “The Great Unwashed will hear the truth of my message without trickery. And they will see the image of the True Messiah. Such things will be enough. Behold!”

  Salvaje touched a control on an old projector on the table next to him and a hologram shimmered to life behind him.

  “Madre de Dios!” Pindar said softly.

  The image was perhaps three meters from the tip of its pointed, spiky tail to the top of its banana-shaped and grotesque head. If it had eyes, they seemed recessed just behind twin rows of needle-tipped teeth. Pindar stepped to one side and saw what appeared to be thick external ribs jutting from the thing’s back, and overall, it looked as if some god playing a joke had created a manlike thing born of giant insects. The monster was a dull black or dark gray, and Pindar would not wish to meet such a thing under any circumstances. He didn’t know what the Messiah was supposed to look like, either, but he would bet all the iron in the Asteroid Belt that this wasn’t it.

  “I can put you on the air in five minutes,” Pindar said, bending to pick up the antique camera. “Along with your… messiah. It is your money. But I wonder that anyone will look upon this thing and think it might deliver them, senor. I myself would expect to see it in Hades.”

  “Do not blaspheme about that which you do not understand, technician.”

  Pindar shrugged. He accessed the camera’s computer, tied it into a shunt, and rigged a relay transmitter. He moved quickly to the power unit and control console, tapping stolen codes into an orbiting broadcast satellite. He held off on the last digit, then turned to Salvaje. “When I input the final number, you will have three minutes before the WCC locks its trace of our signal. Two more minutes and they will find the dish I hid in Madras, and two minutes after that they will find this place. Best you hold your transmission to five minutes. I have an automatic cut off thirty seconds after that. I will have to find another bounce dish if you wish to broadcast again.”

  “Esta no importa,” Salvaje said.

  Pindar shrugged. “Your money.”

  Salvaje reached up, as if to stroke the dreadful image of the hologram floating in the air behind him. His fingers passed through the image. “Others will have heard the call. I must speak to them.”

  Crazy as a shithouse rat, Pindar thought. But of this he did not speak aloud. “All right. In four seconds. Three. Two. One.” He input the final number.

  Salvaje smiled into the camera’s lens. “Good day, fellow seekers. I have come to you with the Great Truth. The coming of the True Messiah…”

  Pindar shook his head. He would sooner worship his dog than this hideous image, which had to be a computer simulation. Nothing could really look like that.

  The patient cafeteria was nearly empty, a dozen or so of the inmates shuffling their drug-calmed ways through the line with soft plastic trays. Billie moved in her own chemical fog, feeling tired, but unable to rest.

  Sasha sat at a table next to the holoprojection chair, using a fork made of linear plastic to stir some ugly noodles around on her plate. The tableware was strong enough to lift the food but would curl up like cardboard if you tried to stick somebody with it. Somebody like yourself.

  “Hey, Billie,” Sasha said. “Check out Deedee, she’s switching channels on the ’jector every three seconds. Why, I think that girl is mentally disturbed!”

  Sasha laughed. Billie knew Sasha’s history. She had pushed her father into a vat of jewelry cleaning acid when she was nine. She’d been here for eleven years because every time they asked her whether she’d do it again if she had the chance, she grinned and told them sure. Every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

  Billie glanced at Deedee. The girl was gazing at the “jector as if hypnotized. The tiny holograms blinked as she changed the channels. With four or five hundred choices, it would take even Deedee a while to see them all.

  “C’mon, have a seat. Try some of this worm puke, it’s real good.”

  Billie sat, almost collapsing.

  “You on blues again?”

  Billie sighed. “Greens.”

  “Crap, what’d you do, strangle a nurse?”

  “The dreams.”

  Billie glanced at the tiny viewer in front of Deedee. A deep-space ship flew across the void. Blink. A car chase on a multilane surface road. Blink. A documentary on feral elves. Blink.

  “C’mon, Billie,” Sasha said, “you only have what, a month left until your hearing?”

  “I won’t skate this time either, Sash. They can’t figure it out. They say my folks died in an explosion. I know better. I was there!”

  “Ease up, kid. The monitors—”

  “Hey, fu
ck the monitors!” Billie shoved her plate across the table, scattering the safety tableware and the noodles. The rubbery plate fell to the cushioned floor, bounced, but made hardly any sound. “They can send a ship a hundred light-years away to another system, they can make an android from amino soup and plastic, but they can’t cure me of nightmares!”

  Attendants appeared as if by magic, but Billie’s rage couldn’t stand any longer against the sedatives in her system. She slumped.

  Behind her, Deedee said quietly, “Hold channel.”

  The image of a man with slicked-back hair and a smallish beard shined in the air before her. And behind him, behind him was—was—

  “—join us, my friends,” the man’s voice spoke into the speaker implanted behind Deedee’s mastoid bone. “Join the Church of Immaculate Incubation. Receive the ultimate communion. Become one with the True Messiah.…”

  Deedee smiled as the attendants came and helped Billie to her feet. Billie didn’t see the True Messiah as she left.

  “Dammit, let go!”

  Then somebody pressed a green patch to her carotid and Billie stopped even that much of struggle.

  Wilks and the robot reached the security door leading into MILCOM HQ Intel One. A scanning laser tapped a red dot against his eye and by the time he had finished blinking, the door’s comp had IDed him and begun to roll open. The bot said, “Go on in. I’ll wait here.”

  Wilks did as he was told. He felt the pressure of stares against him, knowing he was being watched by computers and probably live guards, that his every move was recorded. Fuck it.

  There was only one other door in the corridor, so he couldn’t miss it. It opened as he approached. He stepped into the office. Nothing but an oval table, big enough to seat a dozen people, three chairs. Two of the chairs were occupied. In one was a full bird colonel, wearing interior regulations. No combat medals, a desk pilot. He’d be the MI officer in charge. There was an oxymoron, “military intelligence.”

  The other man was in civilian garb, and he had the look. Wilks would bet a month’s pay this guy was a t-bag—Terran Intelligency Agency. Any odds anybody wanted.

  “At ease, marine,” the colonel said. Wilks wasn’t aware that he’d been at attention. Old habits die hard.