ALIEN THE COLD FORGE Page 11

  The tech quickly finishes his query and brings up footage of the same chimp, strapped to a different table. Its hair is matted at the back where the spider’s fingers gripped it hard enough to break skin. Its eyes flutter open, and it looks confused.

  “What happened to the claw thing?” Dorian asks.

  “The face-hugger? It slips off after a day or so and dies. We find them withered up on their backs.”

  Abruptly, the chimp cries out onscreen, and Dorian jumps. His full attention returns to the video. The animal shakes and screams, frothy saliva blowing from its throat and covering its face like snowflakes. It struggles against the restraints, terror etched on its face, then freezes as though it’s having a grand mal seizure.

  A lump rises in the skin of its belly, and Dorian’s breath catches.

  The lump stretches thin until a phallic protrusion breaks the surface in a spraying gout of blood. The chimp convulses once more, then goes limp. The fleshy, wormlike creature stands upright, its long arms questing into the air as they drip with blood and mucous. Its tiny teeth glisten as though made of metal, and it screams aloud—the sound of steam hissing from a small pipe.

  “Oh,” the tech says, interrupting Dorian’s reverie, “we did, you know, run an autopsy, and find that the hosts were iron deficient, so we think, like maybe… maybe the snatcher scrapes metals from the host bloodstream. We’re calling that stage the, uh, chestburster.”

  “Very literal names you’ve got here. No poetry.”

  Footsteps. Dick Mackie steps over the threshold behind them, a beer in each hand.

  “That’s what came with our source documentation. Shipped with the samples. No species names, no indicated origins. Just ‘egg,’ ‘face-hugger,’ ‘chestburster…’ We had to name the big buggers, ourselves.”

  “Yeah. ‘Snatchers.’ Wouldn’t have been my first choice.”

  “You’re welcome to come up with something better.” Dick passes one of the beers to Dorian and he checks it out. It’s a shitty American pilsner, but Dorian hasn’t had a beer in ages, so he’s grateful. It’s unopened, which is a relief. He often wonders if a crew would have the balls to try and do away with him.

  Onscreen, the chestburster burrows back into its host, and rivers of blood and bile pour from chimp’s open chest cavity. The animal’s body jolts as the chestburster gnaws its way upward.

  Dick waves away the tech, who seems all too happy to leave.

  “Two things about the chestbursters, mate. One, if they can’t find a hole in their cages, they dig in and eat for a day. Two, they take on the characteristics of the host. All of the adults in our cages have got chimp proportions, and they favor loping on all fours. They don’t look like the file drawings that Weyland-Yutani sent with the egg samples.”

  “How so?”

  Dick takes a long swig of his beer, then winks. “Those drawings had human proportions, cobber. Wouldn’t want to be the poor sod who discovered these things.”

  Dorian feels a pang of jealousy toward the chimpanzee. He has no desire to die, but he imagines leaving his genetic legacy to such a worthy beast as the snatcher. He has never wanted a child, but he briefly imagines the creature that might come from his DNA and it gives him chills.

  “You seem like a man who appreciates these animals for what they are,” Dick observes.

  The beer is cool on Dorian’s lips, and the sugar and yeast bring him calm after a rough day.

  “They’re fine art, plain and simple. Predation perfected.”

  Dick winks. “Thought you might say that.” He keys in another code, and the monitors all switch to the live broadcasts from inside the cells. “It’s feeding time. Why don’t you kick back here while me and the boys handle the rest?”

  Pleased with Dick’s offer, Dorian puts his feet up on the table and sips his beer, sharp eyes scanning every monitor for signs of activity. Within a few minutes, a small slit opens up on each cell, and chunks of bloody meat pour inside.

  Each creature’s routine is the same: attack the slit, grab the meat, gorge upon it with jaws distended. Their bloody hands rove their bodies as they eat, covering themselves with gore like birds bathing in a fountain.

  He watches them for hours, these marvelous children of the stars. And slowly, Dorian drifts off into a peaceful slumber.

  INTERLUDE

  LUCY

  “Where were you?” the young woman asks as Lucy comes huffing up the stairs into Juno’s cage. It’s Carrie, one of the Silversmile techs.

  “Just, uh—” Lucy stammers, catching her breath. “Just checking on the progress of Blue’s server decryption.”

  Carrie smirks. “Girl, you’ve really got it in for her.”

  “Screw her.” Lucy takes a sip of diet soda. “This whole station is going to be better after she’s gone.” She checks her watch again. Everything is taking too long. She’s ready to get the fuck out of here.

  “I’m just saying we ought to stick together,” Carrie says. It shocks Lucy to hear her talking that way. They’ve been working together for a few years, moving from project to project, and Carrie is always the first to go knives-out.

  “That’s the problem.” Lucy reclines in her chair, tipping the can toward Carrie as though it was a beer. She wished to god it was a whiskey and Coke—she could certainly use one. “We were sticking together. She played us all, and now look at us.”

  Carrie gives her a concerned look. Lucy has been getting too many of those lately.

  “You want to change the subject?” Carrie asks. “How is your mom, anyway? Still worried about her?”

  “She’s fine,” Lucy snaps back, because if she talks about her mother after what she’s been doing on the Cold Forge, she’s going to cry. “Let’s just stick to the task at hand.”

  Juno’s server chamber is normally the nicest room in the whole SCIF, and the best place to relax. There are no exterior windows in this part of the station, but Juno’s command view over the central area gives it a panoramic feeling. Plus, the chairs are a lot cushier than the ones in the lab. She’s caught Javier sleeping here plenty of times.

  “Don’t you think we’re a little to blame for this situation?” Carrie asks, raising an eyebrow. “I wrote the code for the flash tool. Maybe I ought to be fired.”

  “What? No,” Lucy says. “Javier should’ve checked the tool before plugging it into a main. And you’d better watch what you say. If Director Sudler heard you talk like that…” She runs a thumbnail across her throat like a knife.

  “Maybe I want to get fired,” Carrie persists, standing and moving to the next bank of readouts. She unslings a portable terminal from her shoulder, flips it open, and begins checking numbers. “Or just, you know, laid off. I’m tired of this shithole, Lucy. I want to go home.”

  But Lucy doesn’t agree. She’d broken up with her last boyfriend before taking the assignment. He wanted marriage and a baby. She wanted freedom, and on the Cold Forge, Lucy met Kambili. The sex was good, consistent, and without obligation, and after a few months of it she’d begun to understand why people wanted children.

  On Earth, she’d be nothing to Kambili. Missus Okoro claimed the entire planet—and her husband—for herself. In the light of Kaufmann, Lucy can be anything she wants for him.

  His bandaged face springs to her mind. Even with the latest medical science, Kambili will never look the same again. She considers all the long nights they’ve spent talking, the way he looks at her after they make love, and she knows she will lie with him again after the bandages come off. She loves him, and soon they’ll all be going home. A bitter part of Lucy hopes Kambili’s wife will cast him aside when they arrive.

  “Shit,” Carrie says, pulling Lucy back into the present. “Motherfucking bullshit!”

  “What?”

  “How the fuck did it get back out?” Carrie frantically types in queries and checks the results, eyes raking desperately over the display. “All our hard work!”

  Lucy sits up, taking her feet off the desk.
“How did what get out?”

  “Silversmile!” Carrie glances over to Lucy. “Juno just lost comms with the kennels!”

  Lucy shakes her head. “Got to be a bug with the reinitialization. We scrubbed those drives thoroughly. This is a factory-fresh cloud.”

  “Well, okay, but that means Javier didn’t get the lines working like he said he did.” Her voice is a combination of anger and something else. Fear.

  Lucy rolls her eyes. “I double-checked, and Javier can’t afford to make any mistakes. I know he did it right.”

  Carrie puts her terminal down and slides it toward Lucy, where it almost knocks over her soda. Lucy has never seen her tech so worked up, and it’s almost comical. She smiles and leans over the terminal, certain that there is a rational explanation.

  “The cells aren’t wired up,” Carrie says, pointing to a row of red “NSC” icons lining the side of the screen. “They’re showing ‘no status connection’ errors.”

  Lucy blinks at the screen. It’s true. The table header indicates the kennel cells—but that can’t be right. It had better not be right. She types in a query and pings the central cell database gateway. It pongs quickly and reliably. Two of the cells are green with “LKD” icons.

  Why would two of the cells be responding correctly if the rest aren’t? Her heart freezes in her chest, and her trembling hands refuse to type another stroke. Her breath won’t come. Her eyes water. The server only reports the status of the cells. Only a human can open them.

  “Lucy?” Carrie asks, but her voice seems so far away. “Lucy, what’s wrong?”

  “‘NSC,’” Lucy responds. “It… doesn’t mean ‘no status connection.’” Tears roll from her eyes as she looks up.

  “It means ‘Not Secured.’”

  The kennels are open.

  12

  QUARANTINE PROTOCOL

  A warm, red light passes over Dorian’s closed eyes, then again, and again. His legs ache from sleeping in the stupid chair, and he’s about to have a nice stretch when a deafening klaxon fills the air.

  He stumbles backward out of his chair and rolls to the ground, banging his forehead on the deck. Lights dance behind his eyes, and he crawls to his hands and knees, shaking off the pain.

  A melodic voice booms through the cavernous depths. It’s Juno.

  “All personnel, evacuate the kennels immediately. Containment failure. Repeat, all personnel, evacuate the kennels immediately.”

  He repeats the words in his mind.

  All fog of sleep vanishes.

  Between the howls of the klaxon, he listens. He’s disoriented, and in the hours since he was escorted down here, he can’t remember the way out. A wrong turn will mean death.

  Pounding footsteps approach, the sound of a full-tilt sprint, and Dorian scrambles to his feet. The gait is one of a man, and he’s surprised to see the video tech from earlier go tearing past like a star mid-fielder.

  “Hey! Was that announcement—” The man doesn’t stop. Dorian wanted to confirm, but the man’s blind panic is confirmation enough. He sprints after the tech, muscles aching with the lack of limbering up. When a hissing sound fills the gap between klaxons, Dorian gets as limber as he’s ever been.

  The pair hurtle down the corridors, Dorian glancing behind him into the depths. Red alert light mixes with green paint, tinting everything orange-brown. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, and when Dorian looks again behind him, he finds a black shape rounding the corner, cleanly cut from the light. He misses some of the details, but he catches the important bits: claws, teeth, hateful lips, an elongated gray head glimmering in the warning lamps.

  The tech screams, and Dorian redoubles his sprint. With each footfall, he expects to feel knives slicing the skin of his back into ribbons, those long teeth on his neck. It’s coming closer, its thunking bony feet rattling the deck with each loping stride.

  Dorian closes ranks with the tech, but it’s right on him. He can’t look back or it’ll catch him. His thighs burn and his lungs ache. He hasn’t run this fast in years, but it won’t be enough.

  He shoves the tech hard to one side, sending the man stumbling.

  Dorian doesn’t bother to watch, but he hears it. The beast falls upon its prey, the tech’s scream descending into gurgling begging. Instead of going for the killing blow, it tears at the man, prolonging his suffering.

  Sprinting away, Dorian is thankful for his dedicated fitness regimen—except he’s still lost, and his guide is dead.

  “Juno! Navigate to escape pods!” he pants, and a glowing line appears on the ground. He bursts from the corridor to find a vast, open area, and relief washes over him. He recognizes his surroundings. If he turns right, he’ll move past the lab encampment where they were extracting Blue’s secret server. He heads that direction, rounds the corner, and stumbles to the ground in shock.

  Blood fills the hallway, black against the green paint, massive sprays and washes against every blank wall. Tables lie toppled, wires splaying across the ground in all directions. A severed arm rests upon the floor where it had spun away from the chaos.

  Five of the creatures feast upon bodies, reveling in the thrill of the kill. They’re a writhing mass of oil, snapping and clawing, pulling chunks of meat away from bone as they yank corpses to and fro.

  His feet fight his brain. He wants to run, but the morbid part of his mind urges him to identify the victims. He peers down at them, searching for any sign of who they might have been. One of the snatchers nips at the neck of its prey, severing the head from its shoulders. The head spins in place, and Dorian, in the red-alert light, recognizes Josep’s face.

  One of the creatures jolts upright, and Dorian scrambles backward into the corridor, hoping he hasn’t been seen. In truth, he has no idea how the eyeless beasts locate their prey.

  There’s an armory station near him, which he’d ignored in his mad dash toward the exit. Dorian creeps over to the rollup door and pulls it upward, cursing every tiny noise that comes from the interlocking steel plates. Inside he finds a tall locker full of various rifles, flares, and handguns. He’s about to reach for one when he hears the clacking of claws on metal decking. He presses inside the locker, holding his shaking breath.

  The claw noises slowly close in, skittering death in the seconds between the blaring alarms. It’s stalking him. He can’t pull down the rolled steel shutter without it hearing. Pressed against the racks, he tries to feel his way to a handgun without knocking anything off the shelves.

  His fingers touch a rifle, then ammunition cases, then close around the squared-off barrel of a handgun. Without a sound he gingerly pulls it from the shelf, cursing inwardly as his fingers find the hollow of an empty grip and his other hand searches fruitlessly for a magazine.

  The creature draws closer. Dorian spots its shadow on the wall with each flash of the emergency lights. Its fingers grasp with deadly intent. It’s going to catch him. It’s going to pull him apart like bloody dough.

  Gunshots echo through the corridor.

  “Come on, you motherfuckers!”

  The snatcher rockets away in search of new prey. Dorian can’t quite make out the provenance of the voice, but it’s a man, maybe several men. More gunshots, this time distant. Panicked screaming. Whoever they were, they didn’t make it.

  Poking his head out of the locker, he finds only bloody tracks dotting their way toward him, then away. It had been within a yard of him.

  He turns back to the locker and fetches two magazines and a couple of flares, shoving them into his suit pockets. It’s not a comfortable fit, but he hadn’t expected to go to fucking war today. He looks down at his shitty little pistol and wonders if it’ll have any effect whatsoever on the creatures’ armored carapace. Judging from the deaths he hears echoing through the kennels, probably not.

  Still, he quietly chambers a round and switches off the safety. There may be other things that need shooting if he wants to get out of there alive. Removing his Italian calfskin dress shoes, he places th
em inside the locker. If they manage to contain the creatures, he’ll be coming back for them.

  The waxy concrete floor is cool against his feet, and he’s thankful for the silence of movement. He couldn’t make a sound if he tried, and he sets off in search of a safer shelter. Maybe he can hide inside one of the labs until he spies an opportunity to make a break for the door.

  Or maybe, if he does that, he’ll reach the docking area to find all the escape pods missing.

  “This is Lucy Biltmore.” Her voice comes over the loudspeakers. She has been crying, and Dorian absolutely begrudges her that. “To any crew inside the kennels, quarantine protocol is in effect. We’ve contained the outbreak by sealing off your area, but… there’s no way we can open the doors. If any of you are listening, if any of you can still hear me—” Her voice breaks into sobs.

  As she speaks, Dorian stalks from lab to lab, taking stock of his surroundings. Unfortunately, almost every one of them has a viewport for observation from the hallway. While the aliens are trained not to have an affinity for glass, Dorian expects they’ll have no trouble breaking into the unprotected spaces.

  Lucy finishes her speech. “I’m sorry,” she says, and it takes everything in Dorian’s self-control not to shout, “Fuck you, Lucy!” It isn’t the threat to his life that stings so much, it’s the fact that the cartoonishly bug-eyed bitch with a fragile ego fucked him over. If he dies here, he’s lost, and she’s won, and he refuses to let that happen.

  The klaxons die out, leaving him with far too much silence. Maybe Lucy thought he should have some peace for his last moments alive.

  He finally locates a network maintenance closet and keys the door-open button. It buzzes out an error code, louder than he’d like. He snaps up his gun and glances both ways down the hallway, waiting for the galloping black shape that will destroy him.

  This deep into the SCIF, maintenance doors shouldn’t be locked.

  He places his knuckles to the door and gently raps, “shave and a haircut.”