Alien: Sea of Sorrows E-Book

James A. Moore

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Serie: Alien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 430

Beschreibung

SEA OF SORROWS As a deputy commissioner for the ICC, Alan Decker's job is to make sure the settlements on LV178 follow all the rules, keeping the colonists safe. But the planet known as New Galveston holds secrets, lurking deep beneath the toxic sands dubbed the Sea of Sorrows. The Weyland-Yutani Corporation has secrets of its own, as Decker discovers when he is forced to join a team of mercenaries sent to investigate an ancient excavation. Somewhere in that long-forgotten dig lies the thing the company wants most in the universe - a living Xenomorph. Decker doesn't understand why they need him, until his own past comes back to haunt him. Centuries ago, his ancestor fought the Aliens, launching a bloody vendetta that was never satisfied. That was when the creatures swore revenge on the Destroyer... Ellen Ripley.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also Available from Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

1 Black Sand

2 Unsure Footing

3 The Scent

4 Adrift

5 Home Again

6 Paranoia

7 The Hunted

8 Awakening

9 Witness

10 Business as Usual

11 Decker

12 Descent

13 For Love of Money

14 Breakfast

15 The Ship

16 Wetworks

17 Necropolis

18 Upping the Ante

19 Upward Toward Darkness

20 A Moment’s Peace

21 Everywhere

22 Data Stream

23 Labyrinth

24 Examinations

25 Dark Tides

26 Trapdoor Spiders

27 Negotiations

28

29 Dignity

30 Wounds

31

32 Pandemonium

33 Surprises

34 Regrouping

35 Boom

36 Shadows

37 Red Sand

38 Wrecked

39 Communications

40 Search and Rescue

41 Good News

42 Escape Velocity

43 Nests

44 Breeding Grounds

45 Mother-of-Spiders

46

47 Falling

48 Love

49 Differences

50 The Long and Winding Road

51 A Side Trip

52

53 Payback

54 Burdens

55 Samples

56 Plain Sight

57 Deliveries

58 Plagues

59 Letters Home

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

ALIEN™: OUT OF THE SHADOWS

ALIEN: RIVER OF PAIN (NOVEMBER 2014)

THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATIONS

ALIEN

ALIENS™

ALIEN 3

ALIEN ™ : SEA OF SORROWS

Print edition ISBN: 9781781162705E-book edition ISBN: 9781781162712

Published by Titan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: July 20141 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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.

Alien ™ & © 2014 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.All Rights Reserved.

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PROLOGUE

He knew what they were.

The shapes looked wrong in his mind, all swollen out of proportion and twisted by sensory input that made almost no sense, but he recognized the outdated EVA suits for what they were.

* * *

See how they run.

They scatter as we approach, hidden within their artificial skins.

The tunnels are dark to them, they cannot see as well as they should. They cannot feel the air currents or taste the fear of their prey. They cannot understand the simplest things, like how important it is to find the right ones for furthering the race.

They flee, with no concern for anything but individual survival. There is no sense of community for them. They are weak. They are easily moved in the right directions.

That one.

Its breaths come in a constant, panting wheeze. Its heartbeat is a wild flutter of desperation and the need for survival. There is fear, yes, but strength as well, and a powerful sense of aggression.

* * *

The sensations came into his head unbidden, unwanted.

He tried to open his eyes. The lids refused him. He tried to shake his head but nothing happened.

He felt the body under him struggling, felt his own repulsion at the way it moved and smelled and felt beneath his hard shell and he knew that was wrong. There was nothing about the sensations that made sense.

They weren’t his.

* * *

It tries to escape. It pushes another of its own kind out of the way, knocks it down and crawls over it, dust falling from its body as it shakes free of the collapsing barriers. It is strong. It is fast. It wants to live.

It will live.

It screams as it is taken down, pinned to the ground. Struggles, beating its hands against the hard flesh until it becomes necessary to bare teeth in warning… and then it struggles all the more. Beneath the shell of hard synthetics there is another face that shows wild eyes and a mouth stretched open silently. If it could break the hide with its hands it would be a threat. Instead it can merely scream again as the teeth bite and peel back the soft skin of the closest limb.

The blood is hot and stinks of weakness, but it will suffice. It will serve the need it must. We break the shell around the soft face and it gasps, unable to breathe the atmosphere.

The life-giver moves closer, ready to plant the seed. Strong fingers clutch the soft face that chokes and exhales in desperation.

It will—

* * *

Alan Decker woke with a jerk, and stared at his distorted reflection as it gazed back with wild eyes.

Reflection?

There was a translucent glass surface inches from his face. There were lights flashing, and his breath blasted against the confining surface.

Waking inside of a hypersleep chamber should have been familiar, given how many times he’d traveled between worlds. But the dreams—damn them—the dreams made him panic. He couldn’t control the feelings. They were simply too vivid, too primal.

It was getting so he couldn’t remember what life had been like before.

His hands pushed at the interior, fumbling for the manual release that would free him. He could still feel the tunnels, the weight of what seemed like a mountain above him, pressing down as he stalked the—

No. Not me. I didn’t stalk anyone. I don’t hunt for…

For what?

He thrust the thought aside. The damned dreams were so real, so pervasive that sometimes he could understand why the shrinks had such a field day with him back on Earth.

1

BLACK SAND

The air was nearly perfect. The temperature had just hit 74 degrees Fahrenheit, with moderate humidity and a gentle breeze coming from the southwest. The land in that direction was fertile, with lush green grass and the glimmer from a stream that said it would stay that way. The smell on the wind spoke of new life.

The people who’d paid for the terraforming project had spent enough money to guarantee that their colony would be perfect. But one glance to the north of that picturesque landscape, and the notion of perfection went straight to hell.

Over the span of just a few acres the grass yellowed and died, then was replaced by almost sixty miles of black sand and the sort of stench that was guaranteed to ruin property values. It wasn’t actually necessary to wear a hazmat suit, but it sure looked and smelled like it should have been.

On the bright side, they’d had rain the night before and the soft sand was packed down from the extra moisture. Normally when you walked out into it you sank a couple of inches. But now—for at least a little while—they would be able to stand up without feeling as if they were about to sink out of sight.

Decker studied the screen on his hand-held, reviewing reports on the latest samples from the area. He frowned. To all appearances, whatever was happening, it wasn’t natural. And more often than not, in a situation like this, anything unnatural meant negligence. The Interstellar Commerce Commission was in charge of maintaining certain guidelines for safety and commercial equity on Earth, in the growing Colonies and along the Outer Rim. As a Deputy Commissioner in the ICC, Decker got to make sure that all procedures were being followed properly. That meant dealing with paperwork of a magnitude that guaranteed him both job security and major headaches—in the form of a long list of counter-arguments from the company that had to be responsible.

Lucas Rand stood next to him and was reading the same results, but Rand was smiling—something that didn’t often occur. The difference was that while Rand could understand what the results meant, he didn’t have to fill out the endless forms. Rand was an ICC Engineer. He was paid to fix problems that Decker found. Someone else—heaven alone knew who—then got to bill the companies that had their problems fixed. Bureaucracy in action.

It was a living.

Decker glanced at him and frowned.

“Don’t go getting all excited about how easy your life is,” he said. “I may have to deal with the bureaucracy, but you get to figure out how to fix this mess.”

Rand’s smile faltered a bit.

“Not sure if we can fix it.” He scowled as he looked at the sand. When he wasn’t grinning, he scowled a lot, but it was only because his face was designed that way. Luke Rand was probably one of the nicest guys Decker knew. He just looked like he ate bears for breakfast. He was a big man, too, though not nearly all of it was muscle.

“Yeah. But I don’t catch the flak for your shortcomings,” Decker said, and it was his turn to grin. “You do.”

Rand scratched at the back of his hairy neck and looked out toward the Sea of Sorrows. That was the name land developers had been using for centuries to describe a place like this—where builders had spent their blood, sweat, tears, and money, but to no avail. Where the ground itself seemed determined to thwart their efforts, and send them packing.

This particular Sea of Sorrows shouldn’t have existed. Designation LV178, New Galveston, had been terraformed by people who knew what they were doing. All anyone had to do was look in almost any direction to see how damned good they were. It had started out as a nightmare planet, with raging storms and an unbreathable atmosphere. There’d been no potable water, and before the current project began, the only thing that had grown here was debt from failed attempts to establish a viable base.

Then Weyland-Yutani had come along.

Thirty years had passed since the first settlers had landed and begun the project, and for the most part New Galveston was an example of what happened when things went right. Three major cities were already in place, all connected by a network of high-speed trains, and each with enough viable farmland to ensure that the colonies could sustain themselves without having to resort to endless shipments of canned goods and other expensive imports.

Everything was golden, as Rick Pierce liked to say. Pierce, the man who’d established the colony in the first place, had been delighted with New Galveston. Then the Sea of Sorrows had appeared.

It hadn’t been there when Weyland-Yutani had completed their efforts. The atmosphere processing engines had done their job, everyone had been pleased, and all was right with LV178. Until contractors had begun to lay the foundations of what was intended to be the fourth major city. In the midst of that development had come the discovery of a few acres of soft ground.

Immediately it had begun to grow, slowly at first, then faster. Soon it became an obstacle, and then a bane. Where the sands took over, nothing would grow. There were toxins present, and where they spread, there was no way for the land to support a viable colony.

Then the closest thing to growth had appeared, in the form of silicon nodes. The hollow black, glassy clusters of fused sand had sprouted, coming from somewhere down below, and they weren’t just annoying. They were difficult to detect, and dangerous. Four separate prefabricated structures had been started, and all of them had collapsed because the silicon wasn’t durable enough to support the weight.

Since pre-fabs were essential to the city-building efforts of the New Galveston Collective, this presented a serious problem.

No, the planet’s next city simply wasn’t going to happen unless Decker and his team could figure out what had gone wrong. If they failed, and the sands continued to spread—perhaps to one of the established population centers—the entire LV178 project might be in jeopardy.

The ICC didn’t like risky situations, and Weyland-Yutani—a corporation that worked hard at maintaining the appearance of a spotless record—didn’t like failure, especially at such tremendous expense.

So he and Rand had their marching orders. Decker was here to monitor every aspect of the process, and report every excruciating detail back to their corporate overlords.

Rand and his crew were here to repair the damage.

* * *

Not far away, two of the men ostensibly on Decker’s crew were struggling with a probe that didn’t seem to want to settle properly on the unstable surface. A few other workers were milling about, further away—most likely on a break.

All in all, thirty-seven people were currently working out what had gone wrong, using the latest in spectral analysis and chemical geo-forensics. The machinery wasn’t quite as impressive as the terraforming engines that had redesigned the world, but it cost almost as much.

The weight distribution was tricky, and though it was damp, the sand was hardly ideal. The platform they were using to support the core sampler had too small a base—they should have added extensions to compensate. But he held his tongue. These guys were stubborn, and as far as they were concerned, he wasn’t their boss. He’d been assigned to work with them, but they just didn’t give a damn. Tempers flared if they thought he was trying to tell them how to do their jobs, and these were men who thought first with their fists.

Decker wasn’t the sort to back down from a fight, but this was the kind of grief he didn’t need—in more ways than one. Still, they had to pull up the core samples, if they were going to get this particular cluster un-fucked.

He scanned the screen again, and his jaw clenched. Something about this screamed catastrophe. He’d dealt with situations on dozens of different worlds. You can’t reshape the biosphere of an entire planet without flirting with disaster. Yet most times the fixes were easy, as long as you approached them from the right angle.

This time?

Not so much. Not if he was right.

The ground had gone sour, and in most of the cases he’d run across in the past, that pointed to a human factor. Dig deep enough, look far enough into the records, and the truth would come out. Someone had screwed up here, royally, yet there were no records.

That smelled like a cover-up.

Decker clenched his teeth at the very thought. No matter how he looked at it, he was going to be leveling a finger at one of the biggest dogs in the corporate pack.

It wouldn’t be the first time, though. Good as they were, Weyland-Yutani had a track record. This would be his third run-in with them, and if the last two had been any indication, his life was about to get “interesting,” in the Chinese sense of the word. The company didn’t like getting egg on their collective faces, and their lawyers would cause as many waves as possible in an effort to stay clean.

Rat bastards.

Rand pointed to a line in the readouts.

“Trimonite? Seriously?” He looked up. “That could explain a lot.” His usual scowl was back, and in spades.

“Yeah,” Decker said. “It might.” Trimonite was a wonderfully dense mineral used in the manufacture of a lot of heavy equipment. It was costly to extract, and thus carried a hefty price tag.

But trimonite alone shouldn’t have presented the problem. Before it could be used for industrial purposes, trimonite had to be refined, and it was this refining process that often caused any toxicity. So if the source of the trouble was the trimonite beneath the Sea of Sorrows, why was it poisoning the soil? And where did the silicon fit in?

He looked again at the readouts, and nodded.

“We need to dig deeper. Literally,” he said. “Do you suppose there could have been a mining colony around here?”

Rand shook his head.

“That’d fit with the toxicity readings,” he replied, “but we checked the ICC records backward and forward. Bupkis. If there was one, though, why the hell would anyone want to build over the top of it? That’s just asking for trouble—planting a colony on a toxic waste dump. You’d need to be really stupid, or just not give a shit.”

True that, Decker mused. In the case of Weyland-Yutani, he was pretty sure which it was.

“We need to look into it,” he replied. “I’m not saying it would explain everything, but it’s a starting point.”

Rand snorted, made a face, and then spit into the black sand.

“Even if there’s a mine, it still doesn’t explain this shit.” He swung his foot and pushed enough away to reveal one of the glass lumps. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Planting his boot, he applied pressure until the clump of glass started to break. The things grew like cypress knees back home, thrusting up from below, and were often hollow. Some were very fragile, and when they broke, the openings they revealed stretched far into the darkness below.

“Those things may be a worse problem than the trimonite.” Decker shook his head. “What the hell kind of industrial waste causes tubes and nodules to pop up out of nowhere, and almost overnight?” He stared at the glass lump as if he expected it to bite him.

“Well, like you said—” Rand’s grin was back. “—I don’t have to explain them. That’s all you, bubba. I just have to try and fix ’em.”

Decker responded with an obscene gesture and a smile. He might have actually come up with a proper retort, but he was hit with a sudden wave of nausea that almost threw him to the ground.

2

UNSURE FOOTING

A few hundred feet away two of the techs were starting to argue. Even though Decker couldn’t hear them, he knew it for a fact.

Felt it.

He didn’t know what the problem was. That wasn’t the way it worked. But he could tell they were getting angrier by the moment. So he shot a look in their direction and frowned, even as he regained his equilibrium.

Bronson and Badejo. The two men had never liked each other, but they usually managed to work together without too much trouble. Apparently this was the exception that proved the rule, though. Bronson was pointing repeatedly at Badejo, and the dark-skinned engineer was staring at his counterpart’s finger as if it was a snake about to bite him. His expression was a sneer of contempt.

Next to the men stood what had to be the source of their conflict. The core sampler was tilted at a ludicrous angle, far too severe to allow for them to pull up a proper sample. The drill would never go beyond a hundred feet down unless they anchored its platform in the sand. That required finesse.

But finesse would be the last thing they’d accomplish. If anything, the argument was heating up.

So Decker pulled himself together, and prepared for what was sure to come. Despite the distance, he could feel the strong emotions emanating from the two men as easily as his eyes could see and his ears could hear. It was something he’d had to deal with for years. When he was younger, it had filled him with doubt, but his father had helped him put it into perspective.

“There’s nothing wrong with being able to know what other people feel,” he said. “But some people won’t understand it. They’ll think you’re invading their privacy. It’ll make them angry, and they’ll do everything they can to hurt you. So it’s best if you just don’t tell anyone, hold it tight inside you.”

One of the first things Decker had learned in life was that his dad knew best. He’d never had reason to break from that belief, and so his little “talent,” as they called it, remained a secret.

“Hey, Decker, you okay?” Rand asked. “Leave it. They’re just—” But before he could say anything else, the argument escalated to a shouting match, and he turned his attention toward Badejo and Bronson.

* * *

“Put that damn finger away unless you want to lose it, boy,” Badejo snarled, towering over his co-worker.

“Who the hell are you calling a boy?” Though he was stubborn, Bronson wasn’t usually aggressive, but now he took a step toward the larger man, his face reddening.

Decker started across the sands, heading for the two men with a growing sense of unease. This wasn’t going to help anything. More paperwork, that was all it would come down to, and he was the one who’d have to fill out the incident reports. As he got closer, his head began to throb, and he called out to them.

“Seriously, guys, can’t you just calm down and finish the job?” He forced a conciliatory note he didn’t feel, but if they heard it, they didn’t acknowledge. The pain was only getting worse as he got closer to them. Their anger was like a living thing now, growing to the point where violence was all but a guarantee.

Rand followed without questioning what was happening. He could see it now. Even the other men had taken notice, and were moving closer—most likely for a better vantage point. A fight was coming.

And sure enough, Bronson swung first. Decker would have put money on Badejo being the aggressor, but the smaller man surprised him and hooked a left into the side of the engineer’s jaw.

Instead of going down, Badejo just grinned evilly. He grabbed Bronson’s arms and hauled the smaller man in close enough to cause some serious harm.

Behind the men, the platform shifted on the sand as they tussled. It wasn’t a major shift, as far as Decker could see, but it was going to become a problem, if they didn’t calm down.

“Guys! Watch it!” Rand called, moving faster. Decker rushed toward them. Things were about to get ugly in the worst possible way.

They reached the duo at about the same time. Rand grabbed for Badejo and caught his arm. Badejo yanked free and drove his fist into Bronson’s face, sending the smaller man stumbling backward. If there had been any more power to the swing, it probably would have cracked Bronson’s skull. Even so, it was a solid strike that might have ended the fight. But Bronson shook it off and came back, bracing his foot against the core sampler’s platform and pushing away.

The machine tilted even further.

“Knock it off, you two.” Decker caught Bronson before he could properly retaliate. Yet the little bastard was wiry, and he was enraged, his emotions boiling over into a blind fury that seemed to scream inside Decker’s head. He wanted to pull back from the sudden waves of emotion, but he couldn’t give in to that impulse—not if he was going to defuse the situation before it got worse.

So he planted himself and shoved, throwing Bronson back. He was stronger than the engineer, having worked on planets that boasted gravities half again that of Earth. New Galveston was a decent-sized rock, but it was closer to Earth’s density, so his over-developed muscles gave him an edge.

But the little man just kicked against the platform again, and the sands shifted enough to make the entire weighty affair slide a few more degrees to the side.

“I said knock it off!” Decker growled.

Badejo pushed against Rand then, so that he fell back a bit, bumping into Decker. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. Something shifted under his leg.

Crap!

And then he was sinking fast.

One of the silicon tubes, he realized. It has to be.

“Shit, Luke, get help!” he managed, just as the tube broke under his weight. His leg dropped several inches and he snatched at the platform, reaching out instinctively.

Big mistake. He knew it immediately. Damn it, what a stupid move.

The weight of the platform shifted, and the entire contraption slipped toward him. He felt the sand drop, the weight slide even more, and then it was just too damned late.

3

THE SCENT

Decker screamed as the platform pressed down on him, the weight driving him lower into the soft sands.

Fear was part of it, because the possibility of being crushed under the machinery was terrifying, but the real problem was the unexpected pain. Something below the ground—it had to be one of the damned tubes—punched into his leg, and when the weight dropped he felt an agonizing stab.

Immediately he felt a hot stream of wetness running down into his boot. But he hadn’t pissed himself.

I’m bleeding. As the rest of the crew shouted his name, he forced himself to stay calm. Panic wouldn’t help at all. It might even make a bad situation fatal. “Badejo, I need you to get to the other side of the platform,” he said, “and find a way to anchor this thing. It’s going to crush me otherwise.”

Badejo didn’t waste time. He nodded and ran, calling to a couple of others at the same time. They all knew what was at stake. Fully loaded, the platform weighed close to a thousand pounds. If it shifted any more, he’d be lucky if all it did was sever his leg. More likely, it was going to crush him.

He needed the damn thing stabilized.

Bronson sprinted toward the main camp and the medics, his anger forgotten. Rand settled next to Decker.

“Talk to me,” he said. “What’s going on down there?”

“I’m bleeding,” he said. “It’s bad.” Decker winced. He forced a few more deep breaths. “You want to tell me to mind my own business again?”

“Not this time.” The man shook his head and looked down at him. “Should I try to pull?”

“No!” The thought sent shivers through him. “No. I’m caught good. I think if I shift too much, it’s gonna tear something.”

“Right.” Luke blanched a bit at that. “No moving for you.” He looked around, and shouted. “Come on! Get the damn thing anchored!”

Badejo and someone else called out, but Decker couldn’t hear the words over the rushing in his ears. He couldn’t feel the ground under his boot, either. He couldn’t feel any pressure at all where his foot should be resting, which either meant he was treading air, or his leg had gone numb. He didn’t like either idea very much. Without a foundation to support his weight, he was in a worse situation than he’d imagined. If the silicon tubing broke any further, the entire platform might fall in his direction and crush him.

On the other hand, if his foot had gone numb, it could either mean permanent nerve damage or—worse—that his leg already had been severed.

No, he didn’t think so. While he couldn’t feel anything under it, his leg hurt too damned much to be gone. It was the first time he’d ever appreciated pain.

The platform groaned and shook above him, and the core sampler shuddered, wagging more than industrial equipment was supposed to.

“Shit,” he said, his voice rasping. “This is a damn stupid way to die, Luke.”

“You’re not dying. You owe me too much money.” Rand stood up and looked at the far end of the platform. “They’re working on getting this thing secured.”

You lose a few bets at poker, and a man never lets you forget.

The platform above him wobbled again, but this time it actually moved away from him. Decker let out his breath in a long whoosh, hoping for the best. There was still a rushing in his ears, but it had lessened. Then he saw movement off to his left.

Markowitz and Herschel were coming his way. Markowitz was carrying a med-pac, and had a worried look on her face. She almost always did. Herschel was as calm as ever. The man was decidedly cold, but in Decker’s experience that seemed to come with being a medic.

Herschel pointed to Rand.

“You think you can lift him when I ask?”

Rand nodded and dropped to his knees. Herschel called out to Badejo,

“You secure over there?”

“Yah!” came the reply. “You know it!”

Badejo sounds like he’s lying. Probably that was Decker’s stress talking, but maybe not. They all seemed pretty damned nervous, and he figured it was because he was looking a little like death. He could see his hands, and they were paler than they had been—sort of a gray-white. Just how much blood have I lost? He couldn’t tell, but his head felt fuzzy in all the wrong ways.

More than just his leg, he felt as if his entire body was floating.

“Think I might be going into shock here, guys.” His voice sounded tinny.

Markowitz nodded her head and started fishing around in the med-pac. Herschel dropped next to Rand and loomed, his face inches from Decker’s. It would have been a lot more enjoyable to look at Markowitz that close up, but beggars couldn’t afford to get all choosy when they were dying.

Nervous energy came off Herschel in waves, but his face was calm as he lied.

“You’re just fine, Decker,” he said. “Quit whining. We’ve got you.”

Decker nodded his head. He couldn’t speak any more.

* * *

The air was stale, dead. Not that they cared in the darkness. For they had been sleeping, though from time to time one or two would awaken long enough to investigate their surroundings before descending back into slumber.

Sleep required less fuel. It left them weak, but alive. That was what mattered. Life. Life for the colony.

Frequently there were vibrations above them. The scouts ventured forth, and saw the storms that ripped at the environment on the surface, constantly hammered the world into new shapes. That violence was one of the reasons they slept.

What the scouts knew, they all knew.

They had created the nest to let them know when the time was right. When new sources of food and life had appeared.

* * *

Suddenly the stale air gave way to fresh. Just a hint, and it still was not enough to wake them. It was what followed that made the difference.

Blood.

The odor of blood arrived, redolent with promise. Still, that trace of bloodscent might not have been enough to rouse them from their hibernation. No, there was something more. The streamer of silicon that brought them air and the scent of blood also brought with it something they could not have resisted under any circumstances—the spoor of the enemy.

In the hidden chambers and passages they had created over decades of slow activity, the stench rippled through their consciousness, drove home the need to awaken, and to defend themselves.

They moved, and in moving they became aware.

And as they became aware they felt the presence.

Their hatred bloomed.

Had the fire of their rage possessed heat, they would have burned away the entire world.

* * *

Decker watched Herschel’s deft hands cutting away his pants to reveal the bloody, gaping wound in his upper thigh. There was a flash of irrational dread as he thought of Markowitz seeing him this way. There was nothing less attractive than a man made completely vulnerable, and at the moment Decker was exposed in more ways than one.

But there was nothing he could do about it. Markowitz moved her hands over the wound, quickly numbing his flesh with a topical and then with three fast injections. His skin felt cold, and then it felt nothing. That was for the best. He could feel their worry as they looked at his ruined leg. However bad he imagined it, the medics seemed to agree.

Still, the two of them worked fast and with the sort of efficiency that came from long association. They called to each other with words and gestures, and each time their hands came into view the blood that covered their gloves seemed more plentiful.

Rand was there, too, whispering bullshit, telling Decker he was going to be just fine and that everything was going “good as gravy”—whatever the hell that meant—but Decker could feel the lie of it.

Gradually, however, he felt the shift in their emotions. Whatever they were doing as he stared at the sky, they were relaxing. That has to be a good thing, right? Maybe it was a sign that they were somehow managing to repair the damage. He hoped so. There was no pain, but the sensation that he was floating hadn’t gone away. He licked his lips. His tongue felt as if it was glued to his teeth and the roof of his mouth.

His head slipped to the left and his field of vision changed. Instead of the sky he was looking directly at Markowitz. Her hands reached for him, her body leaned half over him affording a lovely view of her cleavage. But her sleeves were red halfway to her elbows, and there was a disconcerting mountain of bloodied gauze next to her. The expression on her face was more serious than he’d ever seen before.

“Got it. Finally!” Herschel’s voice sounded excited—and incredibly distant. The man was right there. Decker knew it for a fact, but he could have been talking from the Rutledge Township limits, a hundred miles away.

“Thank God,” an equally distant Rand intoned.

Markowitz said nothing, but she exhaled to a very dramatic effect. He sort of wanted to make a salacious comment—they had that sort of relationship—but he couldn’t make his mouth work, and couldn’t think of anything even halfway clever.

She leaned back then, and looked down at him, her dark brown eyes softening. Her relief was immense and he felt a rush of affection coming from her. Not love for him, and definitely not lust, just affection. Too bad, really. She smiled and said something he couldn’t quite make out.

He liked the way her lips moved.

He relaxed and felt himself fading into darkness. Sometimes, just now and then, it was good to relax and drift.

The hatred hit him like a tidal wave.

* * *

The enemy!

The vile thing that burned and killed and took. It was all that was wrong in their world, distilled and personified. It was death.

The face was soft, as pale and weak as the faces of the new hosts, the new living things that had been sacrificed in order to give life to the hive.

Still, this one was different. This one was marked.

This one…

* * *

What the hell? Decker’s head jerked, and he shuddered. Something was happening and whatever it was sounded like an explosion somewhere deep in his mind. He felt it, saw it, tasted it, but not with his senses.

He felt the roaring coming his way, a wave of sensations that simply did not connect, did not fit within his ability to understand. Except for one message that came to him very clearly.

* * *

This one has to die.

* * *

There was an overwhelming sense of malevolence. It was worse than drowning, because he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t let anyone know what was going on. He could only feel that nest of serpents writhing into his brain, a swarm of loathing mixed with fear and… something else.

It felt oily in his mind and left an aftertaste in his soul. The hatred pulled at him, sought to crush him. He shuddered and tried to scream but nothing happened. His body remained frozen. His eyes moved beneath eyelids that he couldn’t open. There was a ringing in his ears, as clear as a finger running along the rim of a crystal wineglass, that drowned out everything but the garbled sound of Markowitz crying out in alarm.

And still that hatred pushed at him, struck him like lightning carving its way through his mind, his body.

Decker tried to speak, but his teeth clenched.

He tried again to breathe, to get a decent gulp of air, but nothing happened. He could neither inhale nor exhale, and instead his chest shuddered and hitched.

His feet pushed and the pain in his leg—distant now as a rumble of thunder coming from the far end of a valley—roared back into life. There were noises again, sounds of alarm, and he felt hands grabbing his leg in a world so far removed that he could only feel the pressure, and not the source of it.

His hands gripped at the sand, clawed for purchase in a desperate attempt to find a way to drag himself from the vast, growing pit of rage that tore everything else away and swallowed it whole. Had there ever been a hatred as strong? Not that he knew of. Not that he could imagine.

Decker tried again to scream and instead his body heaved, thrown into a seizure that arched his back and rolled his eyes into his head. His jaw loosened, then locked down again, teeth biting into his tongue, bleeding hot red into his mouth to gag him with his wretched fear.

Words were not possible, but he let out a low moan through bloodied lips. Muscles tensed to the point of tearing, and he flopped and writhed as the emotion boiled through his soul.

At last the darkness he’d been drifting toward crashed into him, eclipsed him and knocked him into a silence filled with nothing but more hatred—and a deep knowledge that something out there wanted him dead.

4

ADRIFT

He woke up in the wrong place.

He’d expected to open his eyes and see the familiar ceiling of his cramped quarters. Instead he was looking at a polished, stainless steel surface above a small and decidedly uncomfortable bed. He knew the type, of course. He was onboard a ship, and that wasn’t at all where he was supposed to be.

“Good morning.”

He jerked. The soft voice came from his left.

He knew the words, but for just a moment they seemed like gibberish—foreign sounds coming from a source that made no sense. Where were the rest of the—

“How are you feeling?”

He looked over and locked eyes with a stout, fortyish woman. She was sitting down, so her height wasn’t easy to estimate, but she wore a white lab coat and her graying brown hair was pulled back in a bun.

“Am I on a transport?” he rasped. His mouth felt swollen, and his throat hurt like hell.

The woman nodded. She had blue eyes behind fairly thick glasses, and she studied his face carefully.

“You’re onboard the Carlyle, heading for Earth.”

Slowly but surely, it began to come back to him.

“How did I get here?” He should have hurt more than he did, so he looked. Sure enough, he was wearing a medical gown. Even from his position he could see his leg and the thick line of fresh scar tissue that now graced it. Someone had taken the time to shave his upper thigh, and the lack of hair made it look like a denuded forest in comparison to the rest of his limb.

“Do you remember your accident?” she asked, trying for neutral and failing. He could sense the apprehension in her. As Decker thought back on the last thing he could remember, he could see where she was going. The accident, the blood, the convulsions.

Hatred.

None of it was very clear, but even more than the pain, he remembered the feeling of anger that had overwhelmed him.

He let out a long shuddery breath.

“Yeah. I think so,” he said. “My leg got mangled. And I had some kind of attack.”

The woman smiled a very sterile and slightly patronizing smile.

“You had a seizure.” She looked at the hard-copy chart she was holding in her ample lap. “Actually, you had several, but according to this, the first couple were the worst of them.” She met his gaze, and then looked away, seeming uncomfortable with the way he was staring. “You flailed around, and almost bit through your tongue. Since then we’ve been monitoring you carefully and, of course, working on getting you fully mended.”

Almost bit through my tongue. No wonder it feels swollen. His words seemed to come out too slowly. “If I’m mending, then why am I on the way back to Earth?”

“The seizures are an… issue,” she replied. “We can’t find a reason for them.”

Darkness, and things stirring and looking toward him, and that sudden flare of raw, volcanic emotion.

“Aren’t there facilities on New Galveston where I could be examined?”

“Of course, but there are better ones at home.” She was lying. He would have known that, even without his empathic abilities. She didn’t have a face designed for lying. Still he couldn’t exactly push it.

“Did anyone pack my belongings?” he asked instead.

“Yes, a man named…” She took a moment to look over the papers on her clipboard. “Lucas Rand. He packed your things, and asked us to let you know that he’s sent along the latest information for you to use while making your reports.”

Decker nodded. That was good. He had plenty he needed to cover.

Without warning, a shudder crawled through his body. He closed his eyes for a moment, and his breathing came fast. It was as if he was being watched by something just beyond the edges of perception. He’d never been particularly paranoid—was that what this feeling was? He sure as hell felt like something was out to get him.

And it must have showed.

“Are you all right?” He opened his eyes. The woman was looking at him and frowning now.

He didn’t answer—just looked at his arm and the goose flesh crawling along the entire length. How the hell could anything make him feel this cold? This filled with dread?

“No,” he replied. “I don’t think I am.”

She nodded, as if his words justified whatever might come next.

“Well, we’ll get it sorted out soon enough.” She rose to her feet and looked down at him with that condescending smile that never quite made it to her eyes. “It’s a long trip back to Earth, and we’ll be entering stasis sleep soon.”

That thought didn’t make him feel any better. He’d never much liked the forced slumber of the sleeping chambers. He understood the reasons well enough, but he didn’t like the feeling of being trapped. Rather than edging toward calm, he felt the emotions increasing. Try as he might, he couldn’t slow his breathing.

“You’re sweating,” the woman said, frowning.

“I think I’m having a panic attack.” His pulse was hammering away merrily now and yes, he was sweating. He began to shiver.

“Are you prone to panic attacks?” she asked, placing a palm on his forehead.

“No.” He was trembling uncontrollably, and felt like an idiot.

“I’m going to get you a mild sedative.”

He shook his head, and offered the first excuse that came to him.

“I need to finish my reports,” he said. “I need to be able to concentrate.”

“That’s why I said a mild sedative,” she countered. “Just something to help you calm down. We’re still a few hours away from entering the chambers, so you should have plenty of time to finish up with anything that doesn’t require heavy lifting.”

That made him smile, and to his surprise, he was rewarded by a real smile in return.

Yet it didn’t help—if anything, his panic worsened. He tried to stamp it down, but nothing worked. His breath was coming in gasps, his throat was dry, and swallowing was a task. Sweat beaded on his trembling lips and forehead.

Seeing this, the woman turned without a word, left, and came back a few moments later with a plastic cup of water and a smaller cup containing two tiny white pills.

“Eat up,” she instructed brusquely. “These will help.”

Decker nodded and obeyed.

It seemed as if it took forever, but after a while the pills helped. First the shaking subsided, then the sweating stopped. And finally, the feeling that there was something coming for him receded. It didn’t go away, but he felt as if he could live with it.

* * *

After about half an hour, by his reckoning, the woman rummaged through his things and brought out the hand-held he had been using to review the results of their testing. She adjusted his bed so that he was sitting upright, and then left him to his paperwork.

Always the paperwork. It was stupid, really, calling it “paperwork,” even though there was no paper. In fact, the only paper he had seen in a very long time was what the doctor had been holding. At least he assumed she was a doctor.

Does hard copy make it easier to hide the facts? he wondered. Or harder? Then he chuckled inwardly. Maybe I am becoming paranoid.

Sometimes he found the work monotonous, but right then he took great comfort in the details he had to examine, and the research he had to double-check. The more he did so, the less doubt he had in his mind—that Weyland-Yutani was responsible for the screw-ups in New Galveston. He dug deep into the past, and confirmed that there had once been a company-owned mining facility. No, not company-owned, exactly, but either they had been partners in the setup, or they had supplied a great deal of the equipment. “Kelland Mining” was the name on the documentation, but from what he could discern, W-Y either had an interest in Kelland, or had absorbed it somewhere down the line.

Either way, they should have known about the previous occupation of the planet. As far as he was concerned, that meant they were culpable.

His report to the Interstellar Commerce Commission would say as much.

He finished the report and sent it with a little over an hour to spare—it would be channeled through the ship’s communications systems, and reach Earth long before he did. Then the doctor retrieved him and led him to the bank of hypersleep chambers. Standard procedures still applied. Decker stripped down to his underwear—not that it took a lot of effort under the circumstances—and crawled into the round glass cylinder that seemed more like a coffin than anything else.

There was a hint of returning panic, but he quelled it. It was only a matter of moments before sleep came to claim him.

* * *

And with sleep came the nightmares.

Forty-seven days of nightmares as he rode toward Earth from New Galveston.

When you sleep, no one can hear you scream.

5

HOME AGAIN

In hindsight, it might have been a mistake.

The healing completed itself during the spaceflight back home. As soon as they landed, though, and disembarked in Chicago, Walter Harriman—the head of his department—sent him a video message. The man’s face showed up on the screen of his link, and told him that he needed to come into the office as soon as possible to discuss his findings.

Two hours later he was sitting in a chair and listening to a man he thought he knew, hemming and hawing his way through the reasons that the report wasn’t as good as it should have been. Decker might have believed the words, if he hadn’t been an empath. Walt was a talented liar, after all. He had that sort of face, incredibly good at looking as if it was made of stone. But he didn’t like lying to his people, and Decker felt the lie more than he saw it.

He was asked to “reconsider” his findings.

Decker swallowed his instinctive response, said that he would, and took Walt’s notes with him.

* * *

He tried. He really did.

He looked over every last piece of evidence, again and again, and still came to the same conclusion. Either Weyland-Yutani would’ve had to know about the mining colony, and the potential for poisons it would have left behind, or they hadn’t known about it, and were guilty of criminal stupidity. He reworded the report to sound a little less incriminating, but at the end of the day he had a job to do, and he did it.

Walt claimed to be okay with the changes, but his attitude didn’t match his words. Frost formed in the man’s voice and he told Decker to take a couple of days, “to recover from his ordeal.” That was Walt-Speak for, “get the hell out of my face while I think about how to handle this.”

Apparently he wants to handle it badly.

No. Decker shook that thought away. Ultimately it was more complex than that, and he knew it. There were politics involved, all the worse because they involved Weyland-Yutani. The corporation was gargantuan, and they had influence on levels that Decker tried not to consider. W-Y had deep, deep pockets, they worked hard to preserve their squeaky clean image, and they didn’t like getting poked.

He’d had a few issues with them in the past, but there had always been plenty of evidence to support his claims. They always knew when it was easier for them to settle, rather than try to fight a losing battle. So once again, he would just have to wait out the ripples, exactly as he had in the past.

* * *

Things had changed.

The nature of his job had always afforded Decker a certain degree of power and authority, the sort enjoyed by bureaucrats the world over. Fill out the proper forms, dot your I’s and cross your T’s, and the rest of the world fell into place. There was a comfort to that vantage point, locked away safely within the net of the status quo.

But that was before the seizures. Even after they began, he kept them to himself. By keeping his nose clean, he avoided giving anyone any sort of leverage over him, and maintained a comfortable degree of anonymity.

But he was no longer anonymous.

* * *

He arrived back home just in time to celebrate in the New Year. The millennium was approaching, and he hoped that 2497 would be less eventful than the previous year had been.

His kids were with his ex-wife and he wasn’t quite ready to see them. It broke his heart a little when he saw his children and realized how much older they were each time. That was the unfortunate side effect of working offworld. So instead of ringing in the New Year with family, Decker hit a few pubs and got a pleasant buzz going as the year wound down.

As often happened when he got a little tipsy, he decided to walk it off and while the sounds of celebrations came from a dozen different directions, he contemplated his predicament.