The Complete Aliens Omnibus Read online

  “Ready to waste some bugs, folks?”

  A roar of approval greeted her words.

  “Good. But remember, that’s incidental to our mission. Our priorities are inside that nest… our appointment with the queen mother!” She sipped at the strong black coffee. The caffeine helped her cope with the downer she was experiencing from withdrawal from Fire. She’d put some regulation pills into her suit, things her system was used to. She didn’t want to jeopardize the troops or the mission by lack of performance. She did not, however, want to fall back on Fire. Although the decision put her on edge, the boost in spirit and self-determination more than made up for it.

  “Anybody see Daniel Grant around?” she asked.

  “Last I saw him, he was talking to Hastings about something,” said Corporal Henrikson.

  “He’d better get his tail down here, or it’s going to get left on the Razzia… and no big loss.” She ambled over to Fitzwilliam and Tanarez, the lieutenants who’d been pegged as pilots for this boat. They were huddled over their banks of controls, doing final diagnostics of their system arrays. “How’s it doing, guys?”

  Fitzwilliam grinned at her. “I’m telling you, Colonel. We’ve got one mean machine here. Backup systems galore… Lovely and elegant.”

  “Yeah,” said Tanarez, not looking up from a screen he was reading. “War with the xenos has given us a boost in technology. We’ve got some pretty stuff in here. Gives me a huge boost of confidence, I’ll tell you that.”

  “Too bad this thing can’t just do the dirty work,” said Fitzwilliam.

  “What… robot-controlled? And miss all the fun?”

  Laughter from the troops. A good sign. Ever since she’d shown them the acid-neutralizing suits, they’d seemed to perk up quite a bit. Without the big threat of the alien blood eating through you, this was a much less dangerous mission, and the troops seemed to realize that.

  As though he’d taken it as a cue, the last passenger hurried on, lugging a sack closed by a zipper. He quickly stowed it where the other stuff had been placed.

  “All right, people,” Daniel Grant said. “You can close the access port.”

  The door closed behind him after a touch of a pilot’s finger.

  “Thank you. I just want to say quickly that this is the most exciting day of my life,” he said, in a voice that had been clearly exercised much at after banquet speeches. “Down there,” he said, pointing out a port toward the pearl and cerulean clouds swirling above a continental mass. “Down on this strange world are the secrets that will strengthen our country… Perhaps even point us all toward a better future. Down there are the brethren of the creatures that not only are a threat to humanity—but who devastated our beloved homeworld.” He paused for dramatic impact. “It’s in our hands now. In our power. Let’s do our mission and do it well.”

  A roar of approval arose from the ranks.

  Grant, smiling like a politician, took his grav-chair and belted himself in.

  Kozlowski gave him the thumbs-up signal.

  Well, Grant you goat, she thought, get ready for the panty raid of your life.

  16

  Docking struts released, the half-million-ton lander first parted from the mothership Razzia on retros. When it was at a safe distance, its powerful impulse thrusters in, pushing it down and away, deeper into the hold of the Hiveworld’s gravity.

  The U.S.S. Anteater descended.

  This was still the part of space travel that Kozlowski had never gotten used to: planetfall.

  She remembered when she was a little girl, before the aliens came, she had taken a ride on a roller coaster at an amusement park. She’d thought for sure, despite the strong and reassuring presence of her father, when the coaster took a long angled dip that she was going to fall out. Now, as the lander tilted down and began its powered descent, as her heart filled her throat, that was the way she felt here.

  Only if she fell, she knew it would be forever.

  She desperately wanted a tab of Fire. Maybe she was going to need it, she thought. Maybe Kozlowski now, without her drug, would be a crippled foot to the mission.

  Later, she told herself. She’d make that decision later.

  Initially, parted from the faux gravity of the Razzia, there had been the heady feeling of null gravity. But then, as the ship descended, she felt the butterflies flutter into her stomach and then chute up the back door to climb her spine.

  Then the gees started kicking in.

  The retros roared, slowing them down. Ablation reddened the hull slightly before a force shield kicked in. Landers went down much too quickly for Kozlowski’s taste. She much preferred the mollycoddling you got on a passenger shuttle. A slow, smooth descent. Friggin’ Marine landers, though, acted like sperm charging out of the gate for an appointment with a pretty egg.

  They were still well above the clouds, but the atmosphere started buffeting the lander, shaking it like a toy. Kozlowski gritted her teeth. She looked over. The other troops looked intent. Some just had their eyes closed. Daniel Grant looked a bit green at the gills. Kozlowski suspected that she didn’t look all that great herself but there was no place to powder her nose now.

  The suits had temp controls, but they were open now and the air-conditioning wasn’t on. The cabin’s air control wasn’t working well, and it was a bit hot and humid. Kozlowski could smell her own sweat. It was a comforting smell. What she didn’t like much was the sweat from the others.

  “Turbulence!” called Fitzwilliam, up in the pilot blister, with the best view. She’d chosen Lenny Fitzwilliam herself. He was a top expert at this kind of planetfall, a ranging muscular guy with a Texas accent who could have been the reincarnation of one of those crazy pilots who broke the barrier between Earth and space back in the twentieth century. His wife had just died, and this was his way of getting back some life in himself, in what he knew best.

  “No shit, Sherlock!” said Tank Tanarez. He flipped on the PA. “No smoking. No trips to the can. Fasten seat belts. All that stuff. It’s going to be a rocky one.”

  “Going to be?” said Grant weakly. Tanarez never exaggerated. He was a short, stocky guy with a buzz cut and a two-dimensional way of looking at the universe which made him a gem in this kind of piloting situation. With his fierce concentration branded in those dark eyes of his below that sloping brow, he cut straight through problems to the solutions. He could drink everyone under the table but herself. Kozlowski knew. He’d tried. He had a mordant sense of humor that was just what Kozlowski needed to hear now.

  “I’m reading some pretty fierce mid-atmospheric activity. This place ain’t exactly paradise.”

  The lander began to rock and jerk violently.

  This continued for some minutes. Kozlowski suspected that there were going to be some gouges in the armrests after this from the digging in of fingers. Including hers. Nobody puked though. That was something.

  The twirling lengths of gray cottony clouds seemed to reach up like an ocean of mist and absorb them. The rattling and rocking continued, and then calmed down.

  “Okeydokey, folks,” said Fitzwilliam. “We’re through the worst of it. We should be done in about thirty-five minutes. So sit back and enjoy the flight.” Fitz was clearly from the Chuck Yeager school of pilots. Fly by the seat of your pants, but even if your wings had sheared off and your elector was jammed, at no time abandon your laid-back Texas accent.

  Kozlowski took a luxurious breath of bad air. It tasted good through slightly less constricted lungs.

  “Can’t see a goddamned thing,” said Argento, the dark-haired mustached sergeant who sat behind her. Argento’s brooding eyes and bushy eyebrows and bushier mustache made Tanarez look like the Blue Boy. He was like a Neanderthal with all that hair and stolid attitude. But there wasn’t a man in the Corps who knew his way around artillery, light or heavy, better. Kozlowski had worked with Argento the year before, and when the possibility of his coming along arose, she grabbed it. He had a rich, deep voice that inspired con
fidence in him from the git go. He was a man’s man and a fine poker player, too.

  “Do you really want to?” said Jastrow, suddenly talkative. “If ignorance is bliss, let’s enjoy it for another half hour, huh? Me, I’m just going to rest my eyes.”

  That seemed like a good idea to Kozlowski. Unfortunately, she was too high-strung to give herself even that much of a treat. She had to see it all. Somewhere, in this hellish cloud cover, might be something she needed. In the first break, when she got the lay of the land—that might make a change in her strategy that might save lives, might give this mission the edge it needed for a thorough success.

  So, for long minutes she watched as the lander pierced the cloud cover.

  Occasional comments arose from the troops, but generally there was silence.

  Finally, the cloud cover started to break up.

  Kozlowski peered out through the port.

  As far as she could tell, they were still a couple miles up, but she could make out some of the landscape below. She’d seen pictures of it before of course in her studies of this godforsaken planet.

  Like Mars, the report had said. A few mountains, lots of volcanoes, but for the most part flat and peeked. More atmosphere than Mars. Breathable even. Not nice, though. Not nice at all.

  The pictures had clued her in to the starkness, the hellish wasteland quality this place had. There was something stricken about it, something unholy. Kozlowski wasn’t a religious person, but that was the first word that came to her mind.

  Unholy.

  Damned, was the second.

  Shakespeare could have used it for his “blasted heath” in the play Macbeth.

  “Still can’t see much down there through the cloud cover,” Fitzwilliam was saying.

  “Anything coming through the telemetry topography scan?” said Tanarez.

  “Hey. What do you know? Calculations totally correct. The sucker’s down there!”

  A thrill of elation filled Kozlowski.

  The moment the Razzia had entered parking orbit, its heavy-duty sensors, on full power, had gotten to work. The coordinates of the original alien hive were known. And sure enough, it didn’t take long to locate the ugly hive, poking up from the flat land like a huge unlanced boil.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “What?”

  “Just take a look, will you!”

  Begalli’s eyes grew bright with excitement. “I suspected as much!”

  About a hundred miles away from the original hive, there was another hive. A hive shaped differently from the original, according to the sensors.

  Sure enough, up close, the sensors were showing it was indeed an alien hive. So far so good. Now they just had to determine if it was the flavor alien they wanted.

  The misty clouds swirled away from the ship, and they got a better view.

  Somehow, even from way up here, Kozlowski could tell that things weren’t quite right.

  “Jeez,” she heard Tanarez say. “This unit checks out. So this reading must be correct.”

  “Yeah? So what’s it say?” Fitzwilliam shot back.

  “Well, judging from the surface activity.” She could hear the slight gulp in Tanarez’s voice, breaking up that Yeager effect. “There’s some kind of war going on down there!”

  * * *

  “Let me look!”

  Grant’s eyes were suddenly open and eager. He strained forward on his belt, his hands frantically scrabbling at the catches.

  “Grant!” she barked at him. “We haven’t landed. Keep your goddamned butt parked. We don’t want your brains all over the ceiling.”

  Grant halted his efforts to release himself. Nonetheless, his desire to see what was going on down there had not diminished. “What’s going on? Begalli! Talk to me! How does this work into your high-flown theories?”

  Begalli was wearing a shit-eating grin. “Couldn’t be sweeter, boss.”

  “We’re looking at aliens swarming like ants around a hive and that’s supposed to be sweet?” said Grant.

  Kozlowski wasn’t too worried. They had the technology to deal with this. Just a detail. The brass were going to like this—they were going to be able to check out how well the new stuff worked.

  “You bet. You ever hear of the xenos fighting among themselves wholesaler Colonel?”

  “Nope. Not the batch that came to Earth.”

  “Exactly. Because they were all the same breed, the same race. They smelled the same to each other. They worked together. The fact that there’s conflict down there tends to prove that what we suspected would happen, has.”

  “Like what?” demanded Jastrow, eyes round and a little protruding with fear.

  Kozlowski didn’t blame him. Looked like a goddamned African ant war down there. Hundreds and thousands of the bastards, swarming, swarming…

  “Okay, okay. Classified material. Sorry. Shouldn’t have brought it up in front of the troops,” said Grant.

  That pissed Kozlowski off, but she didn’t say anything. Wouldn’t do the soldiers any good anyway Would just take their minds off the job at hand. Nonetheless, she knew what Begalli was talking about, and dammit, it did make sense. She just hoped it wouldn’t complicate things, mucking over the mission beyond redemption.

  The theory was, of course, that aliens without a controlling queen would branch off into different packs. Breeding might (and apparently did) give rise to bugs with recessive traits. If these bugs were allowed to continue to breed, the result would be a new race… and hurry over to start up a new hive, complete with a new queen.

  This was a new hive here.

  Call them the Democrats.

  But apparently, the old fart bugs had gotten things together and spawned a new queen mother—and millions of workers. And although the new Democrat hive was a long way away, eventually they’d located it. Their queen mother had sent off her armies to destroy the interlopers into the genetic xeno broth.

  Call them the Republicans.

  She looked out at the troops. There were naked questions beside the fear and misgiving in their eyes.

  “What are you assholes looking at! Plan C takes this kind of situation into account.” She smiled grimly. “Just look at it this way… We’re going to be able to kill more bugs.”

  “Pardon us, Commander…” said Fitzwilliam. “Plan C starts the same way they all do… Land as close to the hive as possible. There are thousands of aliens down there now.”

  Colonel Kozlowski grinned. “And hopefully there will be thousands there when we land—only burnt aliens.”

  Grant shook his head. “Well, I guess those bugs aren’t the only specialists in genocide.”

  They continued their descent.

  17

  When they were a mile above the hive, the mist had cleared enough to use optical magnifiers to good effect.

  Sure enough, there was a war going on down there. As vicious a war as Alex Kozlowski could imagine. Thousands of struggling bugs going at each other.

  Fangs and talons.

  The ruddy landscape was running with alien parts, alien blood, spasming monsters.

  How long had this been going on?

  Kozlowski’s best guess, offhand, was that this was just the latest of many attacks. She saw alien skeletons littering the landscape. One more battle.

  That wasn’t all the crew of the Anteater saw, though.

  “Run this over with me again, Begalli,” said Grant.

  “Very quickly, sir, the creatures have had a freak genetic offshoot. Normally a queen mother would stamp this out immediately. With no queen mother, though, another colony has been allowed to take root and thrive. As for the possible difference caused by the recessive gene theory… we’ll just have to examine them closer, won’t we.”

  The most important thing the magnified view on the screen pointed out was that Begalli’s theories were entirely correct.

  One set of bugs had a vague reddish cast. The rest—the defenders, it could be seen, because they were the on
es streaming from the portals of the huge hive below—were the usual dark color that Kozlowski was accustomed to.

  Begalli whooped. “What did I tell you. And ten to one, they’ve got unpredictable internal differences. I can’t wait to find out. There’s also got to be other kinds of life on this planet that have learned to survive the xenos. If possible, I’d like to check on them.”

  “Celebrations later, fella. For what I’m not sure. They all look nasty as ever. And as for other forms of life—yeah, I guess the critters have got to eat something. But that’s not why we’re here, is it?” Kozlowski unhooked her belt and hurried up to a place beside the pilots. “Okay, fellows. I’ve got this wonderful idea. You usually use force impellers as well as a few retros to land, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Anything to stop us from using the thrusters to land? That should cook a lot of them pretty good.”

  “Sure. Lots of fuel consumption though,” said Fitzwilliam.

  “We just need enough to get back.”

  “We’ve got plenty to spare for that,” said Tanarez. “I could do a configuration of the primaries and tertiaries that would do the trick.”

  “Good. Then do it. Burn the bastards, and make sure they’re well done.”

  “Okay. That looks like the main entrance to the hive. Not as close as we’d like, but it’s the only option,” said Fitzwilliam.

  “That’ll be just fine,” Kozlowski said after studying the computer schematics that the pilot had called up on the screen to illustrate the lay of the land.

  “You’d better sit back down, Colonel, and buckle that seat belt. Rockets are a little bit rougher than force impellers…” suggested Fitzwilliam.

  “So I’ve noticed.”

  The craft was rumbling and rocking like a son of a bitch. Kozlowski stumble-walked back to her chair, strapped herself in again, and watched the action, eyes gleaming.

  The Anteater slowed down.

  There was a mighty wrenching as the rockets cut in. Fitzwilliam was right. It felt like they were riding a jackhammer down. She had to clench her teeth to keep them from rattling.