The Complete Aliens Omnibus Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also Available from Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Aliens™ Book I: Genocide

  Dedication

  Prologue

  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

  Epilogue

  Aliens™ Book II: Alien Harvest

  Dedication

  Captain Hoban’s Prologue

  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

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  Hoban’s Afterword

  About the Authors

  Also Available from Titan Books

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  THE COMPLETE ALIENS™ OMNIBUS

  VOLUME 1

  VOLUME 3 (DECEMBER 2016)

  VOLUME 4 (JUNE 2017)

  VOLUME 5 (DECEMBER 2017)

  VOLUME 6 (JUNE 2018)

  VOLUME 7 (DECEMBER 2018)

  THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATIONS

  ALIEN™

  ALIENS

  ALIEN3

  ALIEN RESURRECTION

  ALIEN

  OUT OF THE SHADOWS

  SEA OF SORROWS

  RIVER OF PAIN

  THE RAGE WAR

  PREDATOR: INCURSION

  ALIEN: INVASION

  ALIEN VS. PREDATOR: ARMAGEDDON (SEPTEMBER 2016)

  The Complete Aliens Omnibus: Volume 2

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783299034

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783299041

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: June 2016

  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 © 1993, 1994, 2016 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

  For the Haldemans—

  Jay and Vol

  Joe and Gay

  Thanks for everything, folks!

  PROLOGUE

  The planet was not hell.

  It just looked and smelled and tasted like it, according to the marines who had come there and raped it.

  Its denizens were not demons.

  They were far worse.

  The marines simply called it Hiveworld, although the navigators of hyperspace had an obscure numbered tag for it. They had come here, to this blighted planet, and they had plundered it, stealing its queen mother.

  Without the psychic bonds of the ruler to guide the lives of her minions, genetic drift occurred. Different queens, pretenders to the throne, developed and flourished.

  All were killed by the most dominant of the bunch, a traditional creature who could have been an identical twin to the queen mother who had perished in a nuclear blast in the Pacific Northwest of Earth.

  Call them “black.”

  Call her the “black queen mother.”

  And the new group, the changelings.

  Call them “red,” though they were not red. To a casual observer, they looked identical. But to the “blacks,” through touch and smell and morphic fields, they were anathema. Strangers, aliens. Freaks that had to be destroyed.

  Leader of this new brood, living against all calculable probability, was the “red” queen mother.

  Bearer of recessive genes, any sign of whose chromosomal changes had brought instant death in the hive before.

  The red queen mother and her minions fled. In the confusion of reorganization, they escaped and they established a new hive far enough away to thrive.

  The red queen mother spawned, using the herds of animals that roved this bleak planet.

  A new rival kingdom was created and for years the kingdoms lived in peace.

  But each knew instinctively that the other hive was the enemy, that this peace would not last long. And when war came, the principle weapons would be in the numbers of warriors.

  And so the creatures bred… and bred… and bred.

  While others of their ilk were hunted under different suns…

  1

  The alien hive was exactly at Hollywood and Vine.

  The god of the bugs alone knew if the sliming, sucking, skulking bastards knew the cultural significance of the intersection they’d chosen. In truth, that section of La-La land wasn’t exactly what it had once been, but then nothing in Los Angeles was these days. And the fact that they chose to infest the old creaking bank building, in what after all was comparatively open territory, testified to the fact that this batch’s IQ seemed rather low.

  Still, thought Captain Alexandra Kozlowski as she stood a block away from the sun-faded concrete dialing the polarizing filter down on her faceplate against the grim and gritty southern California sun. You could count on each and every
one of the merciless mother-killers being just as mean and nasty and ornery as the worst of the last hive she’d exterminated for Uncle Sam.

  Who ya goin’ to call?

  Bug Busters!

  Oddly enough, it felt good to be back in an E-suit, clunky helmet and all.

  She turned to the hunky lieutenant to her left, already sweating in his armor.

  “Got your jock strap on tight, Lieutenant Michaels?”

  “You want to check?” The square jaws grinned defiantly and the blue eyes crinkled.

  “Maybe later.” She winked and chinned her radio. “Approaching hive zero zero nine, LA sector B forty-seven.” She chinned her radio off and gave a significant look to the platoon under her command: 69th platoon. AOE. Alien Occupation Eradication. The toughest soldiers in the biz. They all looked back at her, smiles covering what she knew was fear.

  A fear she felt in her own heart.

  A fear every time she got near the things.

  “Roger, it’s a go, Captain,” crackled the command voice over her radio. “Commence exploratory and extermination. Backup targeted.”

  In Captain Alexandra Kozlowski’s humble opinion, the “backup” should have been all that was necessary. A couple of borer missiles with multi-K payloads, primed to go off when the sensors were buried in alien hive musk. Just burn the bastards, erase them, destroy. However, with the numbers of aliens so significantly reduced on this, the eighteenth year following the Alien-Earth War, scientists and private interests wanted carcasses, pickled eggs, photographs, and any royal jelly that could be scarfed up.

  This meant Personal Delivery. Service with a Death Grin. Rock and roll and kill.

  Well, it kept a lot of lads out of gangs, anyway. The other twenty members of this assault squad had the same radios in their suits and heard the same message, but Kozlowski gave the hand signal anyway, just to reinforce her command—and to assure herself of it as much as to remind her “bug guys.”

  They rolled out. They were just foot soldiers marching alongside the anchor vehicle, a Mark 23 Access Tank. In this kind of operation, if you needed extra ammo or just a quick ham sandwich, not to mention a little close-up heavy artillery, it was nice to have a Big Metal Brother along. The metal treads chewed up old concrete and worn metal stars on the Walk of Fame as the troop approached their objective. Almost immediately they broke through the ribboned “perimeter” that had been staked out when the authorities for what was left of Los Angeles had determined the existence of the hive in the old Bank of America Building. Basically, this informed the natives that this was a danger zone, that if they trespassed—no sweat off legal backs—they were likely to become egg-fodder.

  Even here, fifty meters from the objective, Kozlowski could see the hardened ooze of the hive stuff filling up the building’s windows and frozen down the side.

  “Hey, Koz!” said Lieutenant Michaels. “Why did the bug cross the road?”

  “To get to the other side, wreak havoc, kill and spread its kind, and generally give ‘life’ a bad name, you asshole,” she barked back.

  “You heard it before!”

  “You know I hate jokes while I’m working.”

  “Just smart-ass remarks.”

  “As long as they’re mine, subordinate officer Michaels.”

  He glared at her and she started defiantly as they marched along. It was a way they’d found they could get up for a heavy mission like this. Afterward, when the acid got sluiced from their suits and any wounds were mended, she and Michaels also had another tradition.

  Strip and hump each other’s sweaty bodies like bloody bunnies.

  Ain’t love grand? thought Kozlowski as she let her keening hormones blend with adrenaline and regulation Army boosters for what brewed up to be a regular Kamikaze Cocktail. She and Michaels had been an item for a year now, which in this Idiot’s Army was just about a lifetime. The favorite gag around the barracks was that if the captain and the lieutenant ever got hitched and pregnant, the spawn would come charging out its birth parent (it was still up in the air in the minds of the privates as to who that would be) with a flamethrower in one hand, a missile launcher in the other—and a grenade in its mouth.

  As for Kozlowski, she was always just glad that they could spend any time together at all.

  They’d met in the service and he fit her like a hand in a glove. He was a couple years younger than her twenty-eight, an army brat who’d spent his younger years first in a safe area on Earth, then offworld after the evacuation. He was smooth and fit, a devotee of exercises and sports, a big blond package of sexuality that she never grew tired of unwrapping. Captain Alex’s muscles—and scars—had been earned in the field. Even before she’d joined the army she’d been battling the aliens. Her parents—landowners in Montana—had stayed and battled the things. She’d lost her brothers to the monsters, her mother had died of a broken heart—and her pop… Well, her pop was a tangle of mean gristle and bone and determination, eternally guarding his ranch under the big blue sky against the critters from beyond.

  And Alex? Well, Alex was just a chip off the old tendon, a small-breasted, big-hipped storm cloud of a gal, feisty as an undefeated bantam-weight fighter. She had a brunette haircut from the Bowl-on-the-Head Salon, dark eyebrows like accents over burning hazel eyes, and a pair of scars like parentheses over a classically cut face. She could fight or make love with equal abandon. She just wasn’t sure which she liked better.

  A burnt stench was hanging over the area, moving down from the Cahuenga Pass like a curse. Smog hung over the rest of the city like a stubborn spirit condemned to hell but staying put. The squad rolled along with practiced ease to the hole that was the principle entrance to the nest.

  Ten meters from the entrance, she chinned her radio and commanded a halt. “Okay. Main thrust force. Double line. Let’s move it.”

  However, before they could even assemble, the defenders struck.

  Five large bugs, the sun gleaming sickly on their carapaces, their prehensile skeletal tails snapping behind them, scuttled from the frontmost tunnel, just below the crooked sign that read BANK OF AMERICA.

  “Jesus! Guns!” she cried, unstrapping her own .45mm blaster. “Rodriguez… Swivel and fire. Take cover!”

  Like the crack team they were, the soldiers broke ranks and took positions as though this were all in the plan. Even as Kozlowski lowered her rifle, the turreted guns of the tank angled and aimed. A nanosecond later, they spoke, hurling a frenzied hail of fire at the enemy.

  Kozlowski found her crosshairs, aligned them on the closest alien—a twisted thing with a burned or deformed forelimb—and squeezed off a charge.

  The stream of fiery energy tore off its feet at what served as its kneecaps. The thing acted as though losing its limbs was an everyday affair. Slavering as though in anticipation of burying its secondary jaws in Kozlowski’s throat, the xeno raced onward.

  The others let loose with their own weapons, only staggered beats behind Kozlowski and the tank.

  The resulting fire tore the X’s apart. Arms and heads and deadly acid blood flew and splattered. Entrails blew across the street. One of the banana-shaped heads rolled toward them like a lobbed bomb.

  Instinctively Kozlowski aimed and fired, crushing and rendering the thing a charred, fragmented skull.

  She gave them a moment to play a little more fire at the things, just in case, and then ordered a cease.

  The smoke slowly cleared, revealing the scattered, steaming remains of the bugs.

  “What the hell was that?” said Michaels, taking in a hoarse breath, sweat now pouring down his temples.

  Ultimately, as always, it was their trained reflexes that saved them. This kind of offensive action in midday hardly ever happened with the aliens.

  Kozlowski shook her head. “Don’t know. These bugs… they’re getting weird.”

  “Big sons of bitches,” muttered Sergeant Garcia, lifting his helmet to spit onto the street.

  “Yes,” said Michaels. “May
be we’d better send a robo in there.”

  “Right? You think the Army’s going to waste good robots when they’ve got cheap soldiers?” Kozlowski snorted disgust, lifted her faceplate, hawked and spit out a gob of phlegm on one of the smoking bodies. “C’mon. These xenos have got something in there they don’t want us to have. Which makes me want it!”

  Michaels nodded, but Alex detected a glint of fear in his eyes, of vulnerability and foreboding. A pang of empathy sprang inside her: the poor guy. Spiking the X’s wasn’t second nature to Peter Michaels. He hadn’t jammed his instinctive horror and terror of the things back into a rock-hard ball to use against them. For a moment she wanted to hold him. Hold him and tell him that it would be okay, that this was just a destructive game and when it was over, she’d soothe his hurts and make everything all right.

  But she couldn’t. She was in charge here. She was the dominant, and she had to pretend she’d left her femininity back in the makeup case in the locker.

  “All right, groaners. Pop ’em if you got ’em, and let’s get in there while their carapaces are around their ankles!”

  A halfhearted cheer sounded in her earphones as she dialed out a pill for herself. One second, two seconds. Hold the nose, open the gums—look out, stomach, here it comes. She opened her mouth just in time to accept the dosage of Wail. Getting it intravenously was faster, but the designers of these suits hadn’t figured out how to safeguard soldiers from accidentally getting jammed with drug-filled needles.

  Pills were just fine with Koz. She had an oral fixation anyway. She took lots of pills. Oodles. The higher-ups not only didn’t mind, they helped supply them. Yep, things were sure different in This Gal’s Army.

  “All right, assholes. Let’s roll!”

  Holding her gun at the ready, she waved them on and the mechanical pack kicked into motion again, heading for that door into X-land.

  By the time they made it to the otherworldly entrance, the drugs had kicked in. Kozlowski felt a power, an elation—a sense of belonging and an Army urge to fuse her forces into a brilliant battering ram and crush out this threat to Earth. Primal territorial urges were tapped. She was the leader of a Neanderthal pack, guarding her tribe from saber-tooths. She was the head of a village on the English coast, guarding her kin from marauding Vikings, broadsword gleaming in the lightning. She was Gaia, guarding her precious brood from cosmic crawly interlopers.

  The suited soldiers entered the hole into the bank building without incident. They continued down the tunnel. It was like a tube through a cancer. Noxious drippings oozed along the sides. X-holes always had an acrid, unnerving stench. Alex had already kicked in her filters.