Alien - Alien: Colony War E-Book

David Barnett

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 447

Beschreibung

Political conflicts on Earth erupt into open hostilities between their colonies in space, with Xenomorphs as the ultimate weapon. Political tensions boil over on Earth, spreading to the outer fringes of known space as the UK colony of New Albion breaks with the Three World Empire. When an oil-drilling facility on nearby LV-187 is destroyed, its French colonists slaughtered, the British are blamed. Military forces arrive from the Independent Core Systems and combat erupts. Trapped in the middle are Cher Hunt and Chad Mclaren. Cher is trying to find out who was responsible for the death of her sister, Shy Hunt (of McAllen Integrations from Alien: Into Charybdis). At the same time Mclaren, accompanied by the synthetic known as Davis, follows in the footsteps of his late wife, Amanda Ripley, seeking to stop the weaponization of Xenomorphs. When a horde of the deadly aliens overwhelms both groups, however, their only hope may lie with Royal Marine Corps unit known as "God's Hammer."

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

The Complete Alien™ Library from Titan Books

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

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Acknowledgements

About the Author

Alien: The Roleplaying Game

THE COMPLETE ALIENTM LIBRARY FROM TITAN BOOKS

THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATIONSBY ALAN DEAN FOSTER:

ALIEN

ALIENS™

ALIEN3

ALIEN: COVENANT

ALIEN: COVENANT ORIGINS

ALIEN: RESURRECTION

BY A.C. CRISPIN

ALIEN: OUT OF THE SHADOWS

BY TIM LEBBON

ALIEN: SEA OF SORROWS

BY JAMES A. MOORE

ALIEN: RIVER OF PAIN

BY CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN

ALIEN: THE COLD FORGE

BY ALEX WHITE

ALIEN: ISOLATION

BY KEITH R.A. DECANDIDO

ALIEN: PROTOTYPE BY TIM WAGGONER

ALIEN: INTO CHARYBDIS

BY ALEX WHITE

ALIEN 3: THE UNPRODUCED

SCREENPLAY BY WILLIAM GIBSON

AND PAT CADIGAN

THE RAGE WAR BY TIM LEBBON:

PREDATOR™: INCURSION

ALIEN: INVASION

ALIEN VS. PREDATOR™:

ARMAGEDDON

ALIENS: BUG HUNT

EDITED BY JONATHAN MABERRY

ALIENS: PHALANX BY SCOTT SIGLER

ALIENS: INFILTRATOR BY WESTON OCHSE

THE COMPLETE ALIENS OMNIBUS

VOLUME 1

BY STEVE AND STEPHANI PERRY

VOLUME 2

BY DAVID BISCHOFF AND ROBERT SHECKLEY

VOLUME 3

BY SANDY SCHOFIELD AND S.D. PERRY

VOLUME 4

BY YVONNE NAVARRO AND S.D. PERRY

VOLUME 5

BY MICHAEL JAN FRIEDMAN AND DIANE CAREY

VOLUME 6

BY DIANE CAREY AND JOHN SHIRLEY

VOLUME 7

BY B.K. EVENSON AND S.D. PERRY

THE COMPLETE ALIENS VS.

PREDATOR OMNIBUS

VOLUME 1

BY STEVE PERRY AND S.D. PERRY

ALIEN: 40 YEARS 40 ARTISTS

ALIEN: THE ARCHIVE

ALIEN: THE BLUEPRINTS

BY GRAHAM LANGRIDGE

ALIEN: THE ILLUSTRATED STORY

BY ARCHIE GOODWIN AND WALTER SIMONSON

ALIENS: THE SET PHOTOGRAPHY

BY SIMON WARD

THE ART OF ALIEN: ISOLATION

BY ANDY MCVITTIE

THE ART AND MAKING OF ALIEN:

COVENANT BY SIMON WARD

ALIEN COVENANT: THE OFFICIAL

COLLECTOR’S EDITION

ALIEN COVENANT: DAVID’S

DRAWINGS

BY DANE HALLETT AND MATT HATTON

THE MAKING OF ALIEN

BY J.W. RINZLER

ALIENS—ARTBOOK

BY PRINTED IN BLOOD

ALIENS VS. PREDATOR REQUIEM:

INSIDE THE MONSTER SHOP

BY ALEC GILLIS AND TOM WOODRUFF, JR.

AVP: ALIEN VS. PREDATOR

BY ALEC GILLIS AND TOM WOODRUFF, JR.

THE PREDATOR: THE ART AND

MAKING OF THE FILM

BY JAMES NOLAN

ALIEN NEXT DOOR

BY JOEY SPIOTTO

JONESY: NINE LIVES ON

THE NOSTROMO

BY RORY LUCEY

ALIEN: THE COLORING BOOK

ALIEN: THE OFFICIAL COOKBOOK

BY CHRIS-RACHAEL OSELAND

PREDATOR: IF IT BLEEDS

EDITED BY BRYAN THOMAS SCHMIDT

THE PREDATOR:

HUNTERS AND HUNTED

BY JAMES A. MOORE

THE PREDATOR

BY JAMES A. MOORE & MARK MORRIS

PREDATOR: STALKING SHADOWS

BY JAMES A. MOORE & MARK MORRIS

THE COMPLETE PREDATOR OMNIBUS

BY NATHAN ARCHER, SANDY SCHOFIELD

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ALIEN™: COLONY WAR

Print edition ISBN: 9781789098891

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789098907

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

First edition: April 2022

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© 2022 20th Century Studios.

David Barnett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

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.

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To Mum. I promised myself I’d dedicate the next bookto you. Sorry it’s all monsters and killing.

1

Private Towing and Salvage Vessel: Clara

Crew: Five

Cargo: 300,000 tonnes of mineral ore plus unidentified bio-material samples

Course: The Hub

The first thing Gambell thought was that the new diet Kathryn had him on was working, because he’d never before come out of cryosleep not feeling like he’d gone ten rounds with a particularly malicious heavyweight who took great delight in punching him in the gut until his insides turned to water.

As he sat up in the pod, rubbing his eyes and pulling off his monitors and catheter, he actually felt great. No cryo-hangover meant no lost, achy, blurry days when they made planetfall, and maybe he could actually take Kathryn out for their wedding anniversary tomorrow night for the first time in he couldn’t remember how long.

The other pods radiating out from the central life-support hub weren’t yet hissing and opening. Gambell’s always opened first—captain’s prerogative. His daddy always said that the skipper should be up first to welcome the crew in good times, and to protect them in bad. Well, it was good times at last for the crew of the STSV Clara, and for Gambell Reclamations.

The lights on the cryodeck were at full strength already. Gambell could hear them buzzing and flickering to life in the corridors that led off to the communal areas, quarters, and flight deck. Seemed like the Clara was recovering more quickly, as well. Gambell gingerly stepped out of his pod to test the strength of his legs—surprisinglygood—and wondered if Kathryn had the old girl on a diet as well.

Gambell yawned and stretched and reached for the stew of post-sleep nutrients that was already gushing into the paper cup in the vending hatch at the front of his tube. He needed to pee, which he knew was totally a psychological thing, because the cryotube had been draining his bladder for the best part of the past three months. Then a shower, and a shave, and get out of these sleep shorts and vest… He sniffed at the front of his vest, suspiciously. Had Kathryn’s diet stopped him sweating?

There was something else, as well.

Was it too quiet?

“Mother?” Gambell called, his voice croaky and his throat dry. “Where’s my wake-up song?”

There was a hum and a pause, and then it started. “The Lark Ascending” by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Gambell’s daddy had always come out of cryosleep to it, and so did he after taking over the family business. MU/TH/UR said nothing, though. Gambell’s frown deepened. Was she sulking about something?

She’d always been a bit temperamental, that old computer. For a crazy moment, he wondered if Mother was jealous, then barked a laugh out loud that surprised even him. Computers didn’t have feelings—but she would have seen on the bioscans what Gambell saw after finishing the last planet-side job, before they all went into the chambers. He was glad to have his skipper’s hour before the rest of the crew woke up, to think about it, and decide whether he should tell Kathryn.

“Coffee in my quarters, Mother,” Gambell called, his legs now steady enough to take him out of the sleep deck. “I’m going to freshen up. Start waking the others in fifteen minutes.”

*   *   *

To be honest, the job had come as a godsend for Gambell Reclamations. They’d been cruising around the Frontier for the best part of five years, picking up bits and pieces of legit work, acting on rumors and tip-offs. Sometimes they were the first to the sites of salvage opportunities, more often than not second or third. It had been a pretty hand-to-mouth existence.

Gambell wasn’t even sure why they’d been approached to do the job on the tiny little satellite at the ass-end of nowhere. It had come through a third-party commissioner, and he neither knew nor cared who was the prime client. It was a lucrative little number, retrieving a cargo of oil-rich minerals from a crashed freighter. They were being paid handsomely, but not a fraction of the worth of the stuff sloshing about in the containers they were towing. After the Oil Wars had cooled off, the old black gold had been in great demand all over the colonies, as well as on Earth. Those that had it were keeping hold of it, and selling it for top dollar.

More than once since they’d done the straightforward salvage job, Gambell had flirted with the idea of just going dark and selling it themselves. But he guessed that whoever was behind the contract had the kind of influence and muscle to make things very, very difficult for them if that happened. Best to stay aboveboard.

Plus, there was the matter of the unexpected bonus they’d picked up on that barren rock.

Gambell toweled off and inspected his face in the mirror. He had the space-farer’s pallor, accentuating the lines on his face and the bags under his eyes. When was the last time he’d seen some sun, other than filtered through the viewing screens? Five years was a long time to be zipping about the frontier. He wondered if he should shave his beard, then decided to leave it. They were all due a break, and after what he’d seen when he put the others into cryosleep—”Be the last man to sleep and the first man to wake,” he heard his daddy’s voice say—there were some serious talks to be had.

Question was, what was the protocol on this? It felt only right that it should be Kathryn to tell him she was pregnant, not the other way round, but when you knew something like that, what were you meant to do? Wait another month or however long it took her body to tell her what was going on, and then act surprised when she told him?

He dressed in his fatigues and buckled on his watch. Mother should have started the wake-up for the crew thirty minutes ago. They’d be emerging from cryosleep now.

“Mother, get some coffee on in the mess.”

Gambell felt that dry, electric pause again, that hum of almost… uncertainty? Which was ridiculous. MU/TH/UR was an old AI, nothing like the sophisticated ones they had now—and which Gambell could never afford. He’d grown up with her. She was attuned to his ways, and knew more about him than even Kathryn. Even so, she was still just a—

The lights dimmed and switched to a slowly pulsing red, just as an alarm began to sound in a low, insistent, whoop-whoop-whoop.

“Mother? What the hell?” Gambell said, pulling on his boots. But it wasn’t Mother that answered. The intercom crackled into life and it was Currie’s deep, Southern voice that rumbled out.

“Skipper? You dressed? Either way, you better get your ass to the flight deck pronto.”

*   *   *

“And where the hell is that?” DJ said, running a hand through her close-cropped hair and glaring at the viewing window as though the planet filling it was some kind of personal affront.

“Sure as hell not where we’re supposed to be,” Simpson said, his thin, pale hands cupped around his coffee.

DJ turned her gaze on him. “No shit,” she said witheringly. “Why is it you’re on this crew again? It ain’t for your incisive insights or your sparkling personality or your—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Currie said, hunched over a monitor and saving Gambell the job of intervening in the endless, infinite squabble-fest that Paul Simpson and DJ Roberts had been carrying on as long as they’d been on the crew.

“David, where are we?” Gambell said to Currie. He glanced at Kathryn, standing with her arms folded over her stomach, silhouetted in front of the big viewing window, against the yellow orb of the planet that was most decidedly not the Hub.

“LV-593,” Currie said, looking up at him. “Weyland Isles System.”

“The fuck?” DJ said. “That means we’re… what, six fucking weeks out from the Hub?”

“Eight, more like,” Simpson said. He turned his thin face to Gambell. “Why’d you wake us up, skip?”

It was a damn good question. Gambell felt Kathryn looking at him. They’d not had much chance to talk since she woke, but she had mentioned that she’d been throwing up. She put it down to a bad cryosleep, yet Gambell thought he knew better. Now wasn’t the time, of course, but he felt more disquiet than usual that things weren’t following the ordained path.

“Mother,” he said measuredly. “Why’d you wake me early?”

That pause again. Like she wanted to tell him something, but didn’t know how. He pushed the thought away. At least he knew why he hadn’t got the usual cryo-hangover now. He’d only been under for a little over a fortnight.

“I had an overriding… directive,” Mother said.

Gambell frowned. “From?”

“I… cannot say.”

“The fuck?” DJ spat.

Gambell suddenly had a very bad feeling. “DJ, Simpson, go and check the cargo.”

“I checked it,” Currie said. “We’re still towing.”

“Not that cargo.”

DJ nodded, hauled the thin frame of Simpson off his stool, and dragged him off the flight deck.

“Mother,” Gambell said evenly. “Who did the override come from?”

“I… cannot say,” Mother repeated. “I’m sorry, Jamie.”

Jamie. Mother hadn’t called him that since he was a kid. Did she sound… sad?

“There’s something wrong,” Kathryn murmured, sliding on to the stool Simpson had vacated. “Something doesn’t feel right.”

“It’s fine,” Gambell whispered. “As soon as we get to the Hub, I’ll get Mother looked at and—”

“I don’t mean that, Jamie,” Kathryn said. She still had her arms wrapped around her waist. “I mean something feels different… inside. Inside me.”

Gambell opened his mouth to say he had no idea what. Then the intercom spluttered.

“Skip,” DJ crackled. “We have one fuck of a problem.”

*   *   *

In the cargo bay there was a bank of mini-cryotubes, mainly for the transportation of small animals. Sometimes the colonies traded livestock, and one time the Clara had been paid a ridiculous amount of money to take a rich old lady and her five Chihuahuas to Earth. They’d used twenty-seven of them for the unexpected little bonus cargo they’d found in that crashed freighter.

All of them were now empty, the plasteel fronts smashed.

Gambell stared wordlessly for a moment at the carnage. The planet where they’d salvaged the freighter had a sub-Earth atmosphere, but they’d suited up fully anyway, given the storm that had been raging and the marked acidity of the precipitation. Which was fortunate, because in the hold of the freighter, which they’d given a cursory sweep after attaching the towing containers filled with ore, they’d found… well, he didn’t know what they were.

Which was the whole point.

Eggs, had been his first thought. Soft and organic. Pulsing slightly. About as tall as his waist. Not hugely pleasant to handle, even with their thick gloves. There were twenty-seven of them in total, and both Currie and Kathryn had wanted to leave them, but Gambell had a hunch. Whatever these things were, they were going to be worth something to somebody. Biotech was quite the thing at the moment. Everybody had heard the tales of black goo raining down on frontier worlds, even if nobody really knew what it was or what happened afterward. But the word in the bars and on the salvage chatter streams was that everybody was looking for bioweapons.

True, these egg things didn’t appear particularly dangerous, but what was he, an expert in this kind of shit? Never look a gift horse in the mouth, his daddy always said. So Gambell had had the crew load them up into the mini-cryos for the journey to the Hub. Once he’d delivered the ore he’d start putting the feelers out to find a buyer for whatever the hell these things were.

Or at least, that had been the plan. Now there were twenty-seven busted mini-cryos, and no eggs.

“Maybe they hatched,” Simpson said, looking around warily. As though he expected to see… Gambell had no idea what sort of thing would come out of an egg like that, if they were indeed eggs. A bird seemed doubtful. He got a mental image of something spider-like, which he brushed away.

“Mother!” Gambell yelled. “What am I looking at, here?”

It seemed as if there was a trembling in the air, but Mother said nothing. Gambell felt Kathryn’s heavy stare on him, and did his best to ignore it.

“The fucking things hatched and broke out and they’re running around somewhere,” Simpson said, his eyes wide.

“Dick.” DJ sighed. “If they were eggs there’d still be eggs wouldn’t there? Even if they’d hatched. Or… eggshells.”

“What fucking things?” Currie said, an undertone of menace in the big man’s voice. “What do you know, Simpson?”

“I hear stuff,” Simpson said, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “We all hear stuff, right?”

Kathryn was standing by one of the empty mini-cryos, fingering the glass shards in the broken panel. Gambell wanted to yell to her to put it down. God knows what those things were, and what… what chemicals were on them. She had to be careful now. In her condition.

“Jamie,” she said, turning to him and frowning. “Most of the glass is on the inside. Nothing broke out of these cryos. Someone smashed them from the outside.”

“Mother!” Gambell roared, looking around as though he could see the presence of the invisible AI in the air around him. “Who has been on my ship? Were we boarded?”

“Override forbids—”

“Mother!”

They all looked at him, head thrown back, fists clenched, the scream dying on his lips.

“Jamie, I’m scared,” Kathryn whispered.

“I’m sorry,” Mother said, and Gambell couldn’t deny sensing a sadness in her electronic voice. “I’m sorry. You should make your peace with your gods and say your goodbyes.”

The Clara had been bought by Gambell’s father Dennis when his wife died and he sold up every inch of property they had on Earth, ploughing his last cent into setting up Gambell Reclamations. Dennis had left his only son with his sister until Jamie was nine, and then took him out into space and taught him the ropes of the business he would inherit when the old man died—which happened ten years ago.

Gambell could barely remember his mother, and couldn’t recall their life on Earth much at all. He’d been brought up on the ship, he’d spent most of his life in space. The Clara was his home.

Whump!

The charges clamped to the drive at the rear of the ship exploded, setting off a chain reaction that caused the Clara to list sharply to starboard, ripping a hole in the hull. The ship went into a spin toward the planet below them, a series of smaller explosions bursting through the vessel, taking all the major networks and life-support systems off-line.

When the lights went out in the cargo bay, Gambell drew Kathryn close to him and told her he loved her, and would always love her, and that he was sorry for what had happened to her, to him, and to the life that grew in her belly. And he held her tight as she fought and wailed until it was all over, and the Clara was no more.

2

Everyone told her to leave it alone, which of course only made her more determined not to.

Even her daddy, weary and grieving and with the stuffing knocked out of him, sighed when she told him what she was planning and rubbed his eyes.

“Cher, honey, just let things lie.”

It took four commissioning editors saying no before one said, “Yes, well, maybe, let’s just see what you turn up. I can’t give you a commission, but I can promise to look at what you get. You know you’re poking a hornet’s nest here, right?”

She wasn’t at all surprised to find a handwritten note under her windshield wiper two days before she left Earth, written in solid block capitals.

SMART MONEYSAYS DROP IT

It was like nobody really knew Cher Hunt at all.

One person who would like to know her better was the guy with the beer belly and triple chin who’d been casting lascivious glances at her as they climbed into the cryosleep pods, just after leaving Earth’s atmosphere. Not for the first time did she wish she had enough money to fly business class instead of coach. At least then she’d get a private cryo chamber and not have to feel self-conscious in the stupid grey vest and pants they made you wear on the communal sleep deck. It was only three weeks out to the Weyland Isles anyway. She’d have been happy to sit that out awake.

But RyanSpace ran its vessels on a shoestring and didn’t have the crew or on-board infrastructure to deal with non-sleeping passengers. So here she was, waking up with her usual cryo hangover and the first person she sees is Mr. Beer Belly, staring at her from the tube opposite hers, rearranging himself in his shorts. She knew “cryo-wood” was a thing for guys, which is why they always usually stalled a bit getting out of their tubes until the women had cleared out. She swore to God that if the guy didn’t stop rummaging around in his shorts and staring at her, she was going to go over and kick his ass.

While she stood in line for the showers, Cher scrolled through the news feeds, more hungry for updates than her stomach was for food. They said a week was a long time in politics; three weeks was a lifetime in journalism. Another reason she hated cryosleep. Yes, her body was only minutes older than when she’d set off from Earth, but the political situation back home and across the colonies hadn’t been frozen in the same way.

There was a joint-agency effort underway to reclaim the outer suburbs of Canberra and rid them of radiation poisoning, three years after the end of the Australia Wars. A Globe Corporation whistleblower who claimed that her former employer was locked in a “silent war” with rivals Weyland-Yutani had been found dead in a New York alleyway.

Nothing about her sister Shy.

Nothing about Hasanova. Not that there was any reason there should be. It had been six months since the hearing at The Hague concluded that Captain Kylie Duncan of the Colonial Marines had nothing to answer for in the wake of the widespread deaths on the Iranian colony, including those of Shy Hunt and the rest of her colleagues at McAllen Integrations, who were only on Hasanova to set up environmental systems for the massive data storage facility there.

Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? The whole thing had been a total whitewash, and while nobody was talking about the actual events on Hasanova, the ripples were still spreading out through the colonies. The Independent Core Systems Colonies had declared war on the United Americas over the desultory inquiry, and while it had been more of a war of words than all-out Armageddon, as some had feared, the political crisis was rumbling on, and showing no signs of reaching any kind of resolution.

On Earth, at least. There was news filtering in from the outer colonies that things were a lot less diplomatic there. Raiding missions, ships being shot down, and the endless third-, fourth- and fifth-hand tales of bioweaponry being deployed, the black goo raining down on remote colony worlds. Nobody knew what it was or who was supposed to be throwing this shit around, or even what it did. There were no direct reports of what was happening.

Just rumors.

Often being a journalist was like holding up a set of weighing scales and trying to achieve some kind of balance between the conspiracy nuts on one side, who believed and talked about anything, and on the other side the stuff that was actually happening but which was being suppressed.

But black goo wasn’t Cher Hunt’s responsibility, or even of any interest to her, at least not right now. What was her responsibility was finding out exactly why her sister had died on Hasanova. The official line was “collateral damage during a covert Colonial Marines operation.” That might do for the final report, to be filed away and never looked at again, but for Cher it raised more questions than it answered.

What happened on Hasanova wasn’t just the latest salvo in an age-old spat between America and Iran. It was something else. And, after the final day of the hearing in the Hague, she had vowed to find out what.

*   *   *

They were six hours out of LV-593, which filled the monitor screen in the passenger liner’s cramped arrival deck. Remarkably Earth-like in appearance, though a tenth of the size of home. It had been a dream of a find for the Three World Empire, located square in the habitable zone of a yellow sun. She could see why the British loved it. As if on cue, the image of the approaching planet fizzed out on the big screen and was replaced by a promotional video for their destination.

“Welcome to New Albion!” a voice declared in a plummy, upper-class English accent. The seat-belt sign above her flashed on and Cher fastened up for the descent. “You are imminently about to arrive on the jewel of the Weyland Isles colony world network, a temperate paradise that’s just like home!”

The camera swooped through a very polished but very obvious artificial representation of the New Albion colony. There was a wide river flowing right through the middle of a green, lush park, surrounded by ordered avenues lined with trees, and streets full of widely spaced townhouses. There was even a recreation of Big Ben set against the blue sky, and in the hazy distance a ring of high-rise apartment blocks surrounded the city center. Cher was reminded of New Delhi back on Earth, where the British raj had tried to recreate an idealized vision of London in the stifling heat of a land that was not theirs to claim.

“Throughout its long and illustrious history, Britain has hada reputation of expanding throughout all possible territories, bringing peace, technology and our great sense of fair play to people and lands at first on Earth, and now across the galaxy. The British pioneering spirit has been forged into a relentless drive to colonize space and disseminate our values far beyond the limits of the home planet over which we once held sway with a benign and magnanimous rule.”

Jeez, Cher thought. She knew that New Albion had been basically colonized by a clutch of the richest Old Money families from Britain, but not that they were buying so much into the old British Empire bullshit. Cher knew her history. Far from being a “benign and magnanimous rule,” the British Empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been essentially a mass invasion of pretty much every country on Earth outside of Europe, wherever they could get boots on the ground.

The footage changed to a procession of faces smiling at the camera and trotting out platitudes about how wonderful it was to live and work on New Albion. A lot more diverse than the old British Empire, Cher guessed. There, the black and brown faces would have been either crushed underfoot in their homelands or put to work, actually or practically slaves, to feed the money-sucking beast of London.

“I work in data analysis,” an Indian woman said.

“I work in transport,” a black man said.

“I work in the coal mines,” a young white man said with a cheeky grin.

“We work for New Albion,” the three said in unison, and the camera pulled back to reveal a huge crowd of them, waving and cheering. “We all work for New Albion!” the whole group of them chorused, and the picture cut to an animation of the breeze rippling through the trees in an idyllic park.

“They work for New Albion… Why not join them, and make New Albion work for you?” the plummy voice said. “Immigration applications are now open. And the best of British to you!”

The monitor switched back to the planetary image, now filling the screen. Cher would have to endure that promo film at least another half dozen times before they made planetfall. Flying coach with RyanSpace meant she was crushed up against passengers on either side of her, both of whom had resolutely laid claim to the armrests with their elbows. Across the aisle she saw Mr. Beer Belly hollering in a southern English accent to one of the hosts, demanding that they bring him a gin and tonic.

Cher dug into her pocket and pulled out a sleep mask.

This was going to be a long six hours.

*   *   *

Cher didn’t know exactly what she was going to find on New Albion, but she did know she had to be there. Four weeks earlier, a postcard had arrived at her home in New York—an actual paper postcard, sent by actual post across the galaxy. Three questions had occurred to Cher when she received it and looked on the front image of the raging whirlpool known as Charybdis.

How long had this taken to get from Hasanova?

Why the hell did Hasanova even have postcards, which suggested an actual goddam gift shop, in a data storage facility?

And, of course, who the hell had sent it?

On the back, in the space to the left opposite Cher’s address, it simply said “NEW ALBION” in blocky handwritten capital letters.

From that point it had taken her a week to get the commission—and arrange funding that would allow her to book passage to LV-593—and now here she was, waking from an uneasy doze as the trademark tooting horn recording of RyanSpace announced that they had landed at the terminus.

“This is your captain speaking, thank you for flying RyanSpace to New Albion, where the local time is 10:23 AM and the weather is rain with an outside temperature of 16 degrees Celsius. We hope you enjoyed your flight and wish you well on your onward journey.”

Cher filed off the ship with the rest of the passengers, putting space and bodies between her and Mr. Beer Belly, who—with six hours’ worth of gin and tonic inside him—was weaving unsteadily and bouncing off the walls. Through the windows of the tube that led from the ship to the terminus, she tried to get a glimpse of her destination, but saw only rain sluicing the windows and the indistinct, grey shapes of squat buildings on the perimeter of the transport hub.

As the passengers were conveyed by escalator down toward immigration, wall-mounted screens sparked to life, each one with an attractive young person in the red, white, and blue livery of the Union flag welcoming them to the colony, each message finishing off with a resounding, “Best of British!”

“Jesus fucking Christ, save me from this,” Cher muttered, getting ready to approach the biometric station that would read all her documentation from her thumbprint and retinal scan.

“You’re American!” a voice boomed right in her ear, making her at first jump, and then her heart sink. Mr. Beer Belly.

“Excellent deduction, Dr. Watson,” Cher said, sighing.

“Barry,” Mr. Beer Belly said, holding out a sweating hand. Cher ignored it, turning her face away from his alcoholic breath. “You here for a holiday? Business? Moving here? I reckon we could do with a few more beauties like you to liven the place up.”

“Give me fucking strength,” Cher breathed. It was her turn at the immigration station, and she held her head still while she was scanned, then placed her thumb on the keypad.

“You need a guide, give me a shout,” he pressed. “Here, let me ping you my comms details.”

“No thanks,” Cher said curtly as the gateway turned green and the barrier swung back to let her through.

“Frigid cow,” Mr. Beer Belly said behind her as she followed the signs for the baggage reclamation. “You might change your mind once you’ve seen New Albion, mind. It’s nothing like they show on the videos.”

*   *   *

For all his many faults, Mr. Beer Belly wasn’t a liar, at least not about New Albion. It was nothing like the promo video suggested.

Cher stood on the apron of the terminus with her suitcase, peering out from under the verandah at the rain-soaked panorama of the colony’s capital city. No Big Ben, no parks, not even a river, though there was a wide ditch in the process of being dug right through the colony center. No townhouses bathed in golden sunlight, just a series of low concrete buildings flanking a network of wide roads, all made indistinct by the precipitation pouring from leaden clouds.

“Not what you were expecting?” a voice said, and Cher blinked and looked around to see a man standing by a flyer. It had a round, black chassis and an illuminated yellow sign over the cockpit that said TAXI.

“Not what I’d been led to believe it was, no,” Cher said, allowing the driver to take her case and put it in the trunk of the cab.

“New Albion’s what you might call a work in progress,” the cabbie said, opening the door so Cher could scoot into the back and avoid the rain. He let himself into the front. “It’s the big vision, innit? Ambitious plans. We’re good at that, us Brits. Ambitious plans. Bold ideas.” The flyer whined into life and jerked forward and up. “It’s putting them into practice that gets us a bit tangled up sometime. Where can I take you?”

“I’m staying at the Ritz,” Cher said.

The driver guffawed. “You ever seen the Ritz in London?”

Cher nodded. “Never stayed there, though. Out of my price range. Was surprised it was so cheap here.”

“That’s because it’s sod all to do with the Ritz back home,” the driver laughed. “Lawsuit waiting to happen.” He wheeled the cab over the heavy plant digging out the ditch in the middle of the colony. “That’s going to be the Thames when they ever get it finished.” He pointed into the rain-soaked distance. “That’ll be where Big Ben is. Except did you know it’s not called Big Ben really? That’s actually the name of the bell. Just called it the Clock Tower, didn’t they?”

From the window Cher could see utilitarian housing blocks and, in the distance, the blocky shapes of what she presumed were factories and processing plants.

“We got coal mines, tin mines, oil mines, the works,” the cabbie said, as if reading her mind. “Most of it in the north. Some nice farmland up in the Midlands. Good trade deals going on top of that.”

“But no rivers or parks or Big Ben or townhouses,” Cher said. “What exactly do you do for fun on New Albion?”

The cabbie grinned over his shoulder at her. “We might not have all the bells and whistles they show on those promotional films yet, but we got our priorities right. Pubs and chip shops. Them we got in spades.”

*   *   *

The cabbie had been right. The Ritz was, in the local parlance that Cher was picking up very quickly, a right shit-hole. Little more than a concrete box filled with other concrete boxes.

“Bit of a joke, love,” the stout woman said from behind the reception desk. “The Ritz, innit? Enjoy your stay.” As Cher headed for the elevator the woman called after her. “Oh, something came for you.” She handed over a letter-sized envelope with a hand-addressed label.

CHER HUNT℅ THE RITZ HOTELNEW ALBION

She recognized the handwriting, the same blocky capitals as on her Hasanova postcard.

Cher stuck the envelope between her teeth and got into the elevator to the seventh floor, then negotiated the gloomy corridor to the equally gloomy and claustrophobic room. She found a bed that might not have been made out of concrete, but was just as hard. A sink and toilet, the tiniest possible shower cubicle, and no window. There was barely room to slide her case between the bed and the wall. Once she had, she sat on the bed and ripped open the envelope.

A small handprinted note fell out first.

THIS IS WHYYOUR SISTER DIED.

Cher felt her breath catch in her chest, and reached into the envelope, feeling the glossy surface of a printed photograph. She slid it out and stared at it for a long time, not quite sure what she was looking at.

“Sweet holy fuck.”

3

“What did the men want, Mama?”

From the observation deck window in the canteen, Merrilyn Hambleton watched the shape of the departing ship disappear into the relentless, raging storm. Her daughter’s hand was held tightly in her own.

“I don’t know, Little Flower,” she said, watching until the vessel was completely gone from sight. She glanced down at Therese, only five years old, her Pinky Ponk dangling from her hand. The soft toy was filthy with grime and oil stains. Everything on this planet was filthy with grime and oil, but Merrilyn had to try to stem the rising tide of filth. To not try was to surrender. She would put Pinky Ponk through the wash. “And speak in French, now the men have gone.”

“Yes, Mama,” Therese said, switching back to her native tongue. She paused and said, “I wish I could go with the men. I don’t like it here very much.”

It broke Merrilyn’s heart to hear that, but it was true. LV-187 was no place to bring up a child. It was so small nobody had even bothered to give it a name. A storm raged perpetually, days pale and pitiful, with the light from the wan sun barely penetrating the thick, roiling clouds that unleashed rain, hail, and sometimes shards of ice like knife-blades. Yet what LV-187 lacked in comfort and pleasantness it made up in something else: oil.

The Independent Core Systems Colonies had been on an aggressive oil hunt for decades, and that had been only accelerated by the Oil Wars. Thank God, LV-187’s supplies had not been tainted by the sabotage she had heard about on other colony worlds, where entire stocks had been destroyed by a bacterial agent that broke down the petroleum’s composition. And now the Oil Wars were effectively over. With the ICSC brokering major trade deals in return for plentiful supplies, her work here was more important than ever.

TotalEnergies had been one of the first Big Oil corporations to invest heavily in off-world mining, and as one of their leading petroleum geologists Merrilyn had known it was only a matter of time before she was asked to head up a colony operation. She’d have liked her first major posting to be a little more hospitable than LV-187, but it was only for a year. And at least she could bring Therese.

“Where did you get the lollipop?” Merrilyn said suddenly, noticing for the first time the candy in her daughter’s hand.

“The man gave it to me,” Therese said. “He was nice.”

“You shouldn’t take things from strangers without asking Mama first,” Merrilyn chided, but the visitors had been pleasant. An ad hoc trade mission, on their way to somewhere else, calling at LV-187 to take a little bit of rest time and to inquire about the chances of some business between their colonies. This was not uncommon these days on oil-producing worlds. Plenty of smaller settlements wanted to strike under-the-counter deals to get them the oil they needed.

But the mission had been told to go through the proper channels and contact the ICSC. They had taken it in good humor and left. Even such a small kindness as a lollipop for a child was something to cling to in these dark days.

*   *   *

Merrilyn turned from the window, the memory of that day—the last day—aching in her chest. Now the canteen was empty, no drilling crews just come off their shift enjoying steak and frites. No hubbub of conversation, no clanging of cutlery, no music.

No Therese.

She looked down at Pinky Ponk in her hands. She always brought the toy out on a foraging mission. It gave her luck. She’d secured the canteen three days ago, and in that time there had been no incursions. But the supplies were running low, even though she’d been eking them out as best she could. Power systems were on minimal, the canteen—the entire colony—dark but for emergency strip-lights. The big freezers had failed and the food spoiled, though the smaller refrigerators were still working.

With a churning gut, Merrilyn knew that soon she was going to have to venture out of the safety of the canteen and her little hideaway in the store cupboard, not just for food but to get to the comms center and send out an SOS. The next supply vessel wasn’t due for a month. She would not last that long, and not just through lack of food.

Merrilyn turned back to the window. The last time she’d been here she’d been watching that ship leave, with Therese. Now she was alone, scanning the storm-ravaged sky for a sign of a vessel, someone coming to help. Surely by now someone must have noticed that there had been no contact from LV-187.

Surely help was on its way, even without a formal distress call.

*   *   *

The worst thing was the silence.

Well, not the worst thing, obviously, but after the colony had been so alive with people, so full of noise and chatter and the clanking of the wells and the music and laughter—because the French could make any place vibrant and vital, even such a cold, barren rock as this—the quiet gloom was eerie. Conducive to nightmares, both sleeping and waking.

More than once Merrilyn had stopped dead, certain she’d heard a skittering or scrabbling of claws above or below her, and she’d stood statue-still for long seconds, stretching into minutes, until she was sure the sound had either been in her imagination, or the source of it had moved on.

She didn’t know still what put her in danger. Sound? Movement? Scent? Just the act of being alive, and therefore in danger of being dead? Once, while rifling through the kitchens, she’d simultaneously thought she heard something in the roof space above and dropped a big Le Creuset pot, which smashed to the tiles and sent a reverberating, discordant note echoing around the space. Yet nothing came for her. So, she had started to risk making a little bit of noise, specifically by using one of the big video screens in the canteen to access the security camera feeds.

It took a lot of juice and she didn’t know when it would run out for good. But she told herself that it was necessary, to keep a close eye on the rest of the colony’s hub. Most of the time she saw nothing. Sometimes there’d be a darting shadow or a swift movement too fast for the eye to catch, and when she’d swept the remaining working cameras, she often scrolled back to watch some archive footage.

Which, she knew, was the real reason she was sitting there now, eating from a can of cold soup, surprised still at the time-stamp on the shot of an empty corridor. It was dated just seven days earlier. Was that all it had been? It felt like a lifetime.

The footage wasn’t empty for long. A figure moved into the shot, and the camera started tracking. Small, swaddled in a big coat and woolly hat. As the camera swiveled to follow the figure—who had absolutely no right to be in this service corridor on the east flank of the colony—something else came into view in the bottom left corner.

Merrilyn could only think of it as an egg, but this was soft and pliable, pulsating almost imperceptibly, as if it was breathing through the vaguely obscene puckered opening on its top.

There was a sound coming from the figure as it moved inexorably toward the egg, which was about the height of an adult’s waist. A tuneless, high-pitched singing. An old tune that was imprinted on Merrilyn’s cortex, the mother of all earworms. “Joe Le Taxi.” She’d always found it hilarious how Therese had sung the song, got her to stand up on the table in the canteen once and perform it to the raucous cheers and roaring applause of the drillers joyfully drunk on pastis.

Now it turned her stomach and chilled her heart. “Joe Le Taxi.” Prelude to apocalypse. The song cut off as Therese, on the screen, stopped dead, suddenly seeing the egg thing for the first time. She pulled off her hat as though to see it better, frowning as she peered at it.

“Hello,” she said clearly on the tape. “What are you? Are you lost?”

Merrilyn’s chest fluttered. So caring, that girl. So thoughtful. She knew what was coming next, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away as Therese dropped her hat on to the floor and walked cautiously over to the egg.

“Don’t do it, Little Flower,” Merrilyn whispered again, as if she could reach back in time through the video screen by some act of magic, and alter the course of events, like when she used to pile rocks in the stream near her home on the hillside of Ramatuelle and divert the flow of the water. But time was not water. It could not be dammed or diverted, stopped or frozen or boiled. It simply went on, and left in its wake things that could never be changed.

On the screen, Therese was standing by the egg, almost as tall as her. She was concentrating hard, Merrilyn knew, trying to work out if she knew what this thing was. She was pulling her thinking face, with her eyes screwed up and her tongue stuck out and her top teeth exposed like a rabbit. You can sometimes be very ugly for a pretty girl, Merrilyn used to say to her, which always made her laugh.

She found she was gripping her seat as the puckered lips of the egg started to quiver and open when Therese leaned in for a closer look, her face illuminated by the faintest of sickly, pallid glows emerging from inside the object.

There was a frozen moment then, Therese looking into the egg with a curious, perplexed expression, and the egg—pod?—seeming to shiver slightly.

Then it happened.

And Merrilyn killed the feed.

*   *   *

After that, things had happened pretty quickly. The first day, people started to be reported absent from their stations or not returning to their quarters after their shifts. Just two or three at first, then more and more over the next two days, an exponential growth until the missing started to outnumber those left. And then…

Hell was visited upon LV-187.

By accident or design, the comms tower seemed to be the source of a major… infestation, Merrilyn supposed was the right word. She didn’t know if a m’aidez call had been put out. Even if it had been, a week may have been too little time to expect help. If an SOS hadn’t been sent… then it was a long time until the next supply run. LV-187 was quite literally off anyone’s radar. So long as it continued producing oil, no one gave them much thought. Maybe when the ICSC didn’t get their next shipment of black gold as expected, they might investigate.

She was certain she wouldn’t survive that long.

Merrilyn went back into the kitchens to get some bottled water for her inner sanctum and to use the toilet. She sat down in the end stall, listening for any tell-tale scratching in the spaces above and below. There was nothing, but she frowned. She couldn’t see anything or hear anything, or smell anything. Early on they’d discovered that while the things could be hurt, even in death they were deadly, with acrid, violent blood that stank and burned through anything and everything

Something hovered on the periphery of her non-physical senses. As though she wasn’t alone in the bathroom stall. It had to be her imagination. She’d bolted the door to the bathroom, and all the ceiling and floor panels were intact. She’d done a sweep of all the other stalls.

There was nothing—

Outside the stall, one of the bottles of water slapped to the tiled floor and rolled across the gap of the open door. She jumped, then leapt up, dragging up her fatigues, and was just about to pull the serrated kitchen knife from her belt when something closed around her ankle, and she screamed.

*   *   *

“Little Flower!” Merrilyn said sternly. “How many times have I told you not to go wandering on your own! I thought we were beyond this by now.”

“I’m sorry, Mama.” Therese held her hands behind her back, staring at her feet and the floor of the canteen. “I woke up and I didn’t know where you were and I wanted Pinky Ponk.”

Merrilyn sighed and handed over the toy. “I suppose you thought it was funny, sneaking your hand under the bathroom stall and grabbing me like that?” Therese smiled her little girl smile, the one that melted everyone’s heart.

“Did you think it was a—”

“Hush.” Merrilyn marveled at the child’s ability to take all this… this horror in her stride. The adaptability of the young never failed to astound her. Therese had blindly accepted Merrilyn’s instructions that they had to leave their comfortable—by LV-187 standards—quarters and now had to sleep in a nest of blankets inside a storeroom just off the canteen. The girl was basically programmed to trust her mother, which made Merrilyn’s insides turn to water. How long could she protect her? What would happen to her if Merrilyn was taken?

“Mama?”

“Yes, Little Flower?”

“I had a dream. About the egg.”

Merrilyn grunted noncommittally and started to stack the water bottles in a plastic carry-box. She didn’t like the girl dwelling on that too much.

“Mama, if I hadn’t found the egg, would everyone else still be here?”

Therese was learning guilt. Merrilyn didn’t want that to happen. She wanted her daughter to realize that actions had consequences, but not to have regrets. It was true that the service corridor into which Therese had wandered was pretty much unused most of the time, and if she hadn’t found the egg, then reported it to Merrilyn who sent a maintenance team to investigate… well, things might perhaps have been different. But only if that egg had been the only one on the colony.

As it turned out, it wasn’t. It was just the one that had been found first. What had happened on LV-187 was inevitable.

“Therese, don’t think like that.” Merrilyn squatted down in front of her. “You did exactly the right thing by coming to your mama about the egg. You were very clever and very brave, and that’s why you’re still here with your mama today. OK? Now what shall we have for dinner?”

“Trout!”

“No trout.”

“Steak!”

“No steak.”

“Ham!”

“No ham.”

Therese smiled slyly. “Elephant!”

It was a game they played every mealtime, with Therese finishing off with whatever exotic or extinct Earth creature she could think of. Merrilyn said, “Elephant it is.”

“You mean canned beans again, don’t you?” Therese giggled.

“I do,” Merrilyn replied. “Now you go and stand by the big window while I get our canned elephant and some more gas for the cooker. I’ll be two minutes. Have some water.”

She hadn’t even got to the swinging kitchen doors when Therese called her frantically. Merrilyn had the knife drawn from her belt before she had spun round, but it wasn’t her worst fear. Instead, Therese was jumping up and down and pointing out of the observation window, shouting.

“Mama! Mama! Mama!”

Merrilyn joined her and peered through the clouds, thick with rain and marbled with lightning. Then she saw what Therese’s keen eyes had already discerned, breaking through the storm.

“It’s a ship, Mama!”

Merrilyn felt the strength sap out of her, as though she was suddenly as weak and pliable as Pinky Ponk. Therese was right.

It was a ship.

4

“What’s your business in the Shires?” the soldier said, frowning at Chad McLaren from beneath his polished metal helmet. His uniform was serge green and there was a patch over one breast that proclaimed him to be a junior officer in the New Albion First Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. Over his shoulder was slung a standard issue projectile rifle, and two other guards, watching the interaction, bore the same weapons.