The Complete Aliens Omnibus Read online

  “Looks like a normal hive to me,” said Michaels. “I hope this is a by-the-book.”

  “Only these xenos want to be stars. I bet they’re all wearing sunglasses and sporting tans!” said Garcia.

  “Well, this is the only take we’re going to have on this production,” said Alex, bringing up her rifle. “Lights, camera, action, guys.”

  They came up to a narrower passage that dived downward.

  “The tank won’t fit,” barked the machine’s operator into her ear.

  “Yeah,” said Alex. “I figured as much. Okay, you stay here. Sentinel duty. The rest of us—we go down. Looks routine to me, but expect the unexpected anyway. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir!” chimed the voices of the units cacophonously in her ear.

  “Good. I want the short rangers out on the horn tip.”

  Two men with Mark Five Crankers—the equivalent of high-tech sawed-off shotguns—trundled up to take the lead, and they were off to see the lizards.

  Within twenty-five yards, the tunnel opened up into a large underground chamber—the remains of a huge vault basement, daubed with alien gunk.

  “Gimme some light!” said Alex, and the guys obliged her by turning up their suit lanterns. The chamber blazed with incandescence, but as usual in these kinds of places, Alex Kozlowski wasn’t crazy about what she saw.

  Against one of the tenebrous walls hung people.

  Alien egg sacks.

  Live people, impregnated with alien young. Chest-bursters that looked like they were about to blow at any minute. The victims—ten men, five women—hung at the edge of death, dangling like corpses that had forgotten to rot.

  “Agents,” said Garcia.

  “What?” said Kozlowski.

  “Hollywood agents. That building got overrun by bugs last week down the road.” The dark-skinned man nodded toward the ropy remains. “The Creative Talent Agency, one of the diehards of the entertainment industry that stuck it out here in LA.” He walked forward to have a closer look, remaining cautious.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I remember,” said Michaels. “Whole building blew up. The assumption was that everyone was killed.”

  “Looks like they’re still making deals,” said Kozlowski.

  One of the agents, a woman in a shredded dark black jumpsuit, her hair a mat of grease, slimy green threads clamped into her skull, seemed in some netherworld of delirium. She had on an ear-tab that sprouted artfully into a thin microphone, and she was mumbling dramatically into it.

  Garcia stepped back into ranks, clucking his tongue. “Too far gone. All of them.”

  Kozlowski nodded. She’d suspected as much. If you caught an egger early, you had a pretty good chance of squeezing out the spark of new life in it. But this far along, a baby xeno was so linked up in its parasitic position amid vital tissue that even if you were able to yank the X out without it boring a hole in you, there was no way you could save the donor.

  Kozlowski knew what had to be done. There were precedents. She’d done it before, and would probably do it again. She was just following orders. Orders that made sense.

  That didn’t mean that she liked it.

  “Needles,” she whispered.

  Three of the men were certified executioners in this kind of circumstance. They brought out their air pistols, tapped in cartridges of darts filled with a fast-acting poison that shut down the nervous system first, then destroyed the body. Two of the men had grim frowns as they aimed. The other man, Dickens, was an LA native. Dickens had been a writer and producer and actor in LA.

  Dickens was grinning.

  “Put the poor bastards out of their misery,” commanded Kozlowski.

  Thwip! Thwip! Thwip!

  Three of the hanging bodies shuddered, and then were still.

  Quickly, the executioners finished their task, then stepped back. “Okay, quick—before the bursters hit their ejection buttons!” Kozlowski screamed.

  Two men had readied themselves. They stepped forward. One sprayed a thick fluid on the bodies, stepped back. The other, with a high-density flamethrower, stepped forward and with fire condensed to incredibly high temperatures immolated the dangling egg sacks.

  When the smoke cleared, all that was left was blackened, incinerated ashes.

  “Good. Now let’s go slag the Xes that did this!” barked Kozlowski.

  “Amen,” said Lieutenant Michaels, pale, with sweat shining on his brow.

  * * *

  Of course, they weren’t just here to slag xenos.

  Nope, that would be too easy.

  In this day and age, in a disintegrating place like the City of Angels, theoretically you could just slip a limited nuke down a nest and skedaddle. Easy, quick, and a minimum of lost soldiers. However, although that nuclear holocaust up in the Pacific Northwest years back had certainly turned the tide in the Alien-Earth War, giving humanity a hope of getting its planet back, such extreme measures weren’t used these days, for more reasons than just the glowing glands they tended to produce in neighboring villages.

  No, these xenos had their uses these days.

  And damn them for it.

  “Okay. Fall out. The chamber’s probably down that tunnel there,” called Kozlowski. “Garcia?”

  “You got it, sir,” said the grizzled vet. “These bugs haven’t changed that much, and this tunnel looks like the anteroom to where we’re headed. What I ain’t seen though is enough bugs. These hellhounds know we’re here. I don’t get why they didn’t try and protect their progeny. Something stinks.”

  “Could be they’re out somewhere,” said Michaels. “Could be lots of things.”

  Garcia grunted. “Yeah. Lots.”

  “We’re here, we’ll do what we came to do, and second-guess later. We’ve got artillery guarding our asses, and we’ve got firepower. Now move it!” Kozlowski growled in a low, no-bullshit voice. She’d perfected it when she realized she had to order men around. Lowered voices worked well with dogs and human males.

  The troop descended quickly but cautiously, illumination lamps picking out their direction for them down the foul, mucousy passageway.

  Kozlowski would have liked these missions much better if she could just obliterate all the xenos. However, there were two things that the Army wanted her to haul out these days.

  A couple of bug bodies, dead of course.

  Random DNA samples.

  And whatever royal jelly from the queen’s chambers they could tap. Gold from outer space, some of the top brass were calling it these days. Bug juice. The lab coats were going absolutely nuts with it, and there was talk about all kinds of new possible uses for the stuff. With the U. S. government pretty much busted, private industry had suddenly become the main financial backer for the armed forces. Drug companies, mostly, along with other medical and scientific researchers. The government wanted their share, of course, but when push came to shove, the interest groups holding the biggest bucks in their outstretched hands got the biggest shovelsful of goop.

  Alien royal jelly.

  The stuff that made the right land of drones into queens. Food of the xeno gods. Kozlowski wasn’t entirely sure what they needed it for. Hell, it could just be gab, and they were collecting the stuff for nothing. But it was what the upper brass told them to do, and so they did it, without questioning.

  The scuttlebutt that she heard was this:

  Each hive was based around a queen. Queens bred drones. However, only a certain kind of bug could breed queens—the so-called queen mother. None of which existed on Earth now. Rumor had it that it was the queen mother royal jelly that was the primo stuff. Regular jelly had its uses, but it was nothing compared to the Q-M gunk. In truth, though, Kozlowski had other more important things to think about. Like staying alive.

  There were all kinds of differences between alien hives and insect hives on Earth. Scientists didn’t really understand the full activities of the beasties. Was their communication telepathic, or some weirder somatic buzz? It had already been established
that the wavelengths of a queen’s call could be picked up by human dreamers. One of the best ways of scoping out obscure hive locations was listening to these sensitive dreamers who acted as receivers, and in the best circumstances as locators.

  Just what did the monsters want? Where had they come from? What were they doing? Where were they going? What was their cosmic destiny?

  Were they so grouchy because the race had gotten up on the wrong side of their galactic beds in some prehistoric starday?

  Kozlowski had a theory.

  They’d accidentally eaten all their males, and were on one hell of a PMS jag. The theory wasn’t exactly scientific, but it did explain a lot. Here were all these hysterical bugs, with no men to scream at.

  Anyway, the core truth of what they were doing down here was the tanks in the cart that Private Henderson drove. Of course, to get to the jelly, you had to off the royalty first, and this was probably the most onerous task anybody could want in this kind of situation.

  Corporal Michelin’s head snapped up from a radar set.

  “Incoming!” he said. “Twenty-five yards ahead. Sensor range. Picking up five bogies, coming in at five klicks per hour. Same direction.”

  Kozlowski was almost relieved. This dead silence was getting to her. “Okay, dig in, and I want a man with his weapon trained on the ceiling. Adams—you can shoot skeet. I’ve seen them break through and jump down from above. If they do that, I want ’em dead before they hit the ground.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  She didn’t have to notify the front or rear guards.

  They were already down and dug in, ready for the attack. Kozlowski threw a beam of light down on the floor. Solid-looking enough, but she was ready if any of the bastards popped up from that direction. With bugs, you just didn’t know where they could pop from. They couldn’t teleport, that much was known. But for all of that, sometimes it seemed like they could. And the commanding officer who underestimated them usually ended up just as dead as her men…

  Or worse.

  In this case, though, what the sensors showed was all the hive was throwing at them.

  Five bugs.

  Plenty, though.

  As soon as they scrabbled into view, the frontmost boys let loose a barrage of fire. Down here in the claustrophobic darkness, Kozlowski felt the familiar tug of total irrational fear. Trapped-in-a-coffin fear. Preternatural mammal-hiding-from-the-dinosaur fear. That was one of the unnerving intellectual aspects of the bugs. They seemed to have been designed specifically to grip those hard claws deep into the softest parts of your soul. And squeeze.

  The bugs dodged the first bolts. Awareness of human weapons was either bred or trained into them by their maturity these days. These were Earth bugs and they were ready to scrap with Earth people.

  However, the soldiers had also been trained, and better. Countless simulations gave them a sense of exactly where the things would hop in their erratic jumps.

  A bolt hit one. The explosion shattered it, splattering its viscous blood over the whole corridor.

  “Duck, dammit!” cried Kozlowski, hitting the dirt as the acid blood sprayed every which way The stuff could bore through the best armor if you got enough on you. She peered up through the smoke. The boys were still firing away, but crouched low and off to the side. “Knees and head!” she cried. “Knees and head.”

  You hit the head, the things died with a minimum of acid splatter. You hit the knees, you had the bug on the ground and a good chance for the head.

  Alex Kozlowski immediately saw that she was going to have a chance to show them. A bug minus a right arm had broken loose and was scampering along the side wall. Alex lifted her weapon and squeezed off two quick but carefully aimed shots. The first missed, exploding far away. But the second caught the left knee dead on, shattering the joint and causing the alien to go down.

  Garcia’s next shot caught it right in its banana brain with a satisfying thud and soft ker-plow, like an M-80 in a gourd.

  With this guidance, the boys calmed down and picked off the rest of the things. The fire boys cleaned up the wiggling jaws and claws with a dose of concentrated high temp, and then applied a splash of acid-neutralizing spray to get through.

  Kozlowski allowed herself a smile. They’d killed lots of aliens already, without so much as a stubbed toe. “Good work, chums, but don’t get cocky. The toughest part is straight down there, in the general direction of hell.”

  “Hey, don’t we know it!” said Michaels.

  “Pretty dumb bunch of bugs, though,” said Garcia.

  “They’re not exactly known for their high IQs,” said Kozlowski. “But then neither are grunts, so I don’t want any slackers. Move it! We’re not exactly in unfamiliar territory now.”

  Chances were the xenos were about as ready as they could be for the attack, but that didn’t mean it was good for the men to rest on their laurels. Best to use the adrenaline and the other performance-augmenting drugs while they were peaking.

  They traipsed over the dead, crackling things in the tunnel, trundling into the darkness.

  The corridor widened, and their lamps illuminated a chamber.

  In the center, like a giant flower bulb of chitinous flesh, grew the “throne”—the storage place for the royal jelly and home of the spawning queen.

  Kozlowski had been in these places before. That didn’t mean she was used to them. The hole was like Death’s uterus, with hubs and cordings and odds and ends of effluvia that while biological seemed antilife. Every cell in her body rebelled at the sight presented here. Training and experience and resolve fought with a deep instinct in her to turn and run.

  A bent, insane frieze of alien sculpture, a mockery of life.

  Otherwise the chamber was empty.

  “What the hell?” said Michaels. “Where are they?”

  Garcia looked like if he hadn’t had a helmet, he would have very much liked to have scratched his head. “I don’t understand. Where’s the freakin’ queen?”

  “Off at the Hollywood high spots?” quipped a jokester.

  “I don’t like it,” said Kozlowski. “Get back. The queen doesn’t leave her chamber unless there’s a damned good reason.”

  Michaels shook his head. “Look. We’ve got a pot full of royal jelly waiting to be tapped. Half the time, the stuff gets blown up or burnt.” He grabbed a tapper and started walking toward the bulb. “I say let’s get this stuff tanked right now and we’re assured a good supply, no matter if we take out these bugs or not!”

  “Michaels! Halt!” screeched Kozlowski. “I’m not certain that junk is all that valuable. It’s certainly not worth the extra risk. You’re not going anywhere—and that’s an order.”

  Michaels stopped in his tracks. He turned around, his eyes flaming. Kozlowski could see the drugs in those eyes, and the male pride. Don’t do this to me, Koz, said those eyes. Don’t be so damned protective.

  “Yeah! Lover boy might get himself a boo-boo!” said a veiled voice in baby talk.

  “What have you got on the sensors?” Kozlowski demanded.

  The private looked up from the telltale board. “Activity, but nothing close.”

  “Come on, Captain. I could have started tapping by now!”

  “Yeah. We get our quota, we get extra leave!”

  She didn’t like it. Not one bit. But there wasn’t any good reason to say no. And if she didn’t let Michaels do this, the other jerks here would call favoritism, and she couldn’t deny that.

  “Okay, but I want the rest of you to back him up. And, Daniels… you go along.”

  “No problem,” said the tough Army man.

  Damn it, Peter. Why are you doing this to me?

  “The rest of you. Fan out and check for other exits.”

  The men, grateful for action, spread out.

  “What do you think, Garcia?” she asked the sergeant as Lt. Michaels strode for the huge bulb.

  “I don’t know, sir. It’s not like the bugs to leave their jelly unguarde
d.”

  The soldier walking off to one side looked up from his instruments. “Sir! I’m reading lower rooms. They’re chambers, sir, and just as big as—”

  The lieutenant was just driving in the tap, connected to a couple of storage tanks. Daniels had slung his rifle in order to help with the tricky manipulation.

  It came to her like thunder.

  This wasn’t the main chamber. And if it wasn’t what they were really after, then it was a—

  “Michaels! Daniels!” screamed Kozlowski. “Get away from—”

  Trap!

  The bulb split open like a pregnant belly. And the baby was deadly as death itself.

  “Jesus!” cried Daniels, leaping back, pulling his rifle down.

  The emerging bug struck with the speed that still was astonishing to see, even though Kozlowski had seen it many times before. It grabbed Lieutenant Michaels by the arms and pulled him up.

  It had been hiding inside. The alien was just waiting for them to tap.

  Michaels screamed as he was hoisted upward in the claws. The secondary jaws, slathering drool, rammed against the reinforced helmet, cracking it.

  Michaels screamed again.

  Automatically Daniels fired his rifle.

  Only yards away, the shell hit its mark. The mark, though, was the torso of the beast. A gory hunk of creature was torn away, and like a burst vessel, alien blood pumped.

  The secondary jaw whacked into Michaels’s helmet again, cutting a hole before the thing began to crumple. Michaels fell under it, and Kozlowski, helpless, watched as the alien blood spouted into the interior of her lover’s helmet.

  Directly into his face.

  The scream ratcheted through the radio, until the radio was killed. It seemed to grow louder and more horrible carried only by the fetid air.

  The acid worked with amazing quickness upon the face. It was as though she were watching time-lapse photography. The skin sizzled off, snapping with gooey bubbles. The eyes boiled and melted.

  The screaming stopped.