Predator - Predator: Eyes of the Demon E-Book

Bryan Thomas Schmidt

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

Seitenzahl: 555

Beschreibung

A brand-new anthology with fifteen exclusive short stories offering taut and dramatic tales set on Earth and in dark reaches of space, featuring the ultimate hunters, the Yautja—also also known as Predators.The diverse lineup of authors includes Stephen Graham Jones, Linda Addison, Jonathan Maberry, Scott Sigler, Peter Briggs, and many more.Fifteen original, never-before-seen short stories set in the expanded Predator universe from the first film, featuring the ultimate hunters, the Yautja from the movie Predator. Set in the recent past, the present, and the future, these edge-of-your-seat adventures by many of today's top SF and horror authors take place on Earth and in the dark, unforgiving reaches of space. The diverse, multi-ethnic group of authors includes New York Times bestsellers, Stoker Award winners, and acclaimed contributors to the Alien and Predator universes. Included in this volume are Native American award-winning horror author Stephen Graham Jones, Linda Addison— the first African American to win the Stoker Award, Peter Briggs, screenwriter for Hellboy, New York Times bestselling author and visionary podcaster Scott Sigler (Aliens: Phalanx), award-winning author Ammar Habib (The Heart of Aleppo), New York Times bestseller Jonathan Maberry, Emmy nominated writer Joshua Pruett of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Tim Lebbon, author of the Aliens vs. Predators "Rage War", and many more.Featuring Stephen Graham Jones, Linda Addison, Jonathan Maberry, Scott Sigler, Peter Briggs, Tim Lebbon, A. R. Reddington, Robert Greenberger, Ammar Habib, Gini Koch, Kim May, Yvonne Navarro, Joshua Pruett and Bryan Thomas Schmidt.© 2021 20TH CENTURY STUDIOS

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

The Complete Predator™ Library from Titan Books

Title Page

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Copyright

Dedication

INTRODUCTION by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

THE TITANS by Tim Lebbon

THE DISTANCE IN THEIR EYES by Stephen Graham Jones

AFTERMATH by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

PROVING GROUND by Linda D. Addison

LION OF THE HIMALAYAS by Ammar Habib

THE FIX IS IN by Jonathan Maberry

BITTER HUNT by Kim May

FIELD TRIP by Robert Greenberger

CANNON FODDER by Gini Koch

LITTLE MISS NIGHTMARE by Peter Briggs

THE TROPHY by A. R. Redington

THE MONSTER by Michael Kogge

GHOST STORY by Joshua Pruett

SLY DARK IN THE DAYLIGHT by Yvonne Navarro

DEAD MAN’S SWITCH by Scott Sigler

EDITOR & AUTHOR BIOS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE COMPLETE PREDATOR™ LIBRARY FROM TITAN BOOKS

Predator

If It Bleeds edited by Bryan Thomas SchmidtThe Predator by Christopher Golden & Mark MorrisThe Predator: Hunters and Hunted by James A. MooreStalking Shadows by James A. Moore & Mark MorrisEyes of the Demon edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

The Complete Predator Omnibus by Nathan Archer & Sandy Scofield

The Rage War

by Tim LebbonPredator™: Incursion, Alien: InvasionAlien vs. Predator™: Armageddon

Aliens vs. Predators

Ultimate Prey edited by Jonathan Maberry & Bryan Thomas SchmidtRift War by Weston Ochse & Yvonne Navarro

The Complete Aliens vs. Predator Omnibusby Steve Perry & S.D. Perry

The Official Movie Novelizations

by Alan Dean FosterAlien, Aliens™, Alien 3, Alien: Covenant, Alien: Covenant Origins

Alien: Resurrection by A.C. Crispin

Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplay by William Gibson & Pat Cadigan

Alien

Out of the Shadows by Tim LebbonSea of Sorrows by James A. MooreRiver of Pain by Christopher GoldenThe Cold Forge by Alex WhiteIsolation by Keith R.A. DeCandidoPrototype by Tim WaggonerInto Charybdis by Alex WhiteColony War by David BarnettInferno’s Fall by Philippa BallantineEnemy of My Enemy by Mary SanGiovanni

Aliens

Bug Hunt edited by Jonathan MaberryPhalanx by Scott SiglerInfiltrator by Weston OchseVasquez by V. Castro

The Complete Aliens Omnibus

Volumes 1–7

Non-Fiction

AVP: Alien vs. Predatorby Alec Gillis & Tom Woodruff, Jr.Aliens vs. Predator Requiem: Inside The Monster Shop by Alec Gillis & Tom Woodruff, Jr.Alien: The Illustrated Story by Archie Goodwin & Walter SimonsonThe Art of Alien: Isolation by Andy McVittieAlien: The ArchiveAlien: The Weyland-Yutani Report by S.D. PerryAliens: The Set Photography by Simon WardAlien: The Coloring BookThe Art and Making of Alien: Covenant by Simon WardAlien Covenant: David’s Drawings by Dane Hallett & Matt HattonThe Predator: The Art and Making of the Film by James NolanThe Making of Alien by J.W. RinzlerAlien: The Blueprints by Graham LangridgeAlien: 40 Years 40 ArtistsAlien: The Official Cookbook by Chris-Rachael OselandAliens: Artbook by Printed In Blood

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PREDATOR: EYES OF THE DEMON

Print edition ISBN: 9781803360294

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803360416

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd 144

Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: August 2022

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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 responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

© 2022 20th Century Studios.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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TITANBOOKS.COM

For Jess T. and Johnny Ortiz—fans, friends,cheerleadersAnd for May, who’s everything

INTRODUCTION

BY BRYAN THOMAS SCHMIDT

Thirty-five years ago on Friday, June 12, 1987, action and science fiction fans converged on darkened theatres to see a new science fiction action movie.

The concept of soldiers moving through a jungle was hardly new, but their opponent was the likes of which fans had never seen before. The Yautja, the Hunter, the Predator—he goes by all these names, and what happened next gave birth to a franchise that still thrives three and a half decades later, with a number of films, numerous books, comic books, and more.

On October 17, 2017, I made my first professional contribution to this fantastic universe with the anthology Predator: If It Bleeds, celebrating, in part, the thirtieth anniversary of the franchise, so it gives me a thrill and is a high honor to come back now with this new anthology to celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary.

We’ve taken a slightly different approach to the stories this time. Almost everything takes place in the present—or close to it—and the future. Yet what these authors did was a lot of fun for me as a fan, editor, and reader. Unique takes that show us new sides of the story. More than ever you will see stories from the Yautja point of view. You’ll discover new species that challenge the Yautja like never before. There are new settings galore and several appearances of female predators.

I spent the last four years talking with fans and listening to their wish list, and with Eyes of the Demon, I think we’ve delivered something truly special that will excite and please you like never before. We even have the return of a few old friends and a few connections and expansions of the universe that tie things together in new ways.

I hope these sixteen stories are as fun to read as they were to edit. We worked hard to get the details right, too, so hopefully we succeeded. And in the process we have the Yautja appearing in stories like you’ve never seen him—orher—and in ways I think you’ll find unforgettable in the best way. How better to celebrate thirty-five years of our favorite franchise than with new, unique stories unlike what you’ve seen before?

So sit back in your most comfy chair, grab your favorite beverage, and get ready for a few hours’ reading pleasure as you revisit your old friend, the Predator, sixteen more times. I hope you find it worth the wait, and a worthy successor to If It Bleeds, which one fan group graciously deemed “the best Predator book ever released.” Personally, I hope this one steals that title. But now I leave that up to you.

With humble gratitude to my fellow fans,

Bryan Thomas Schmidt, Ottawa, KS, December 2021

THE TITANS

BY TIM LEBBON

Jeremiah Beck has always enjoyed being a Corporal in “The Unluckies,” because he’s young and cocky and has delusions of immortality, and he never believes their title might come home to roost. He’s proud that countless other regiments know of the 13th Spaceborne by such a name, especially considering the 13th have one of the most successful operational records since the initiation of the marines’ Spaceborne contingent. The nickname has become a badge of honour, so much so that at least half of the 13th have various forms of Unluckies tattoos, from the grunts right up to Major Ashley Hughes herself. Beck’s tattoo is around his left bicep, fashioned in the stylized mask of a Predator dripping blood both red and green, human and alien. He was inked on Francilia’s second moon on his twentieth birthday, three days after he’d helped take out his first Predator in a firefight close to the moon’s colony of space archaeologists. That day, he felt like a hero.

Now he might just be the unluckiest motherfucker in his whole squad, because he’s the only one left alive.

His tattoo has been ripped by shrapnel and scoured by fire, along with much of the flesh of his left arm and shoulder. His space suit is melted into the mess, torn and leaking, and if it weren’t for his combat armour feeding him high doses of trauma suppressant he’d have passed out from the pain.

It would have been better if I had passed out.

There’s a steady, destructive vibration thudding through Rankin Station’s superstructure, and it could be that which is blurring his vision, though he thinks maybe it’s the sudden rush of pain-blocker from his suit. Explosions thump in the distance and roar closer by. Once the hull is compromised and starts venting to space, he’ll be dead in a matter of minutes.

He makes his way along corridors strobed by emergency lighting. He tries to shake the memory of his fellow Unluckies dying, six of them taken out in the first surprise attack by the band of Predators who’d been hiding on the station, Melton and Lincoln dead from wounds sustained in their decisive and suicidal counterattack.

I should have fought harder by their side. We might have killed them all. Not left that one alive. Luna, carrying the crescent moon wound on her face where my shotgun blast smashed away her damaged helmet.

But he can’t forget seeing them die. Their deaths are etched on his memory, just as aspects of their lives together will always be carried inside. They’d been serving together as a platoon of nine on their strike-ship Aragorn for over four years, and now they’re gone, and Aragorn is rolling away from the station with a hole in her belly, spinning for eternity, empty of life and devoid of purpose.

Beck struggles towards Rankin Station’s escape hub, hoping there’s a pod left for him. And as he hurries through corridors flashing with warning lights and scarred with the echoes of battle, he sees her, the one he now calls Luna. The sight of her pain is the only balm to his loss.

That’s not true. I didn’t see her. She was already dead from the self-destruct the Unluckies set… fighting fire with fire… or she died when I left the station and it came apart.

She is waiting for him up ahead, badly wounded just as he is, spilling green blood on the same buckled flooring where his own red blood spatters, as if his tattoo is finally coming apart. She sways, taking up the whole height and width of the corridor. Maybe her swaying is the motion of Rankin Station as it shakes itself apart. Maybe it’s his own failing eyesight.

Beck raises his gun, though he knows he’s out of ammo. Luna steps forward, broken plasma scythe spitting at the air between them.

If I had seen her on the way to the escape hub, we’d both be dead. I made it there and blasted away like the coward I always feared I might be. Alive, while they were all dead. Alone. Adrift.

An explosion. Fire dancing in zero gravity now that the station’s artificial gravity has malfunctioned, the flames beautiful and deadly as they spread and consume like a burst blossom. Shrapnel flying as the station starts to break up.

An escape pod, targeted away from the planet because there’s nothing down there to escape to.

The heavy thud of launch, and then the mechanized prodding and caresses of the robo-pod preparing Beck for hypersleep. The brief engine burn is already over, and he’s been accelerated away from the planet and into deep space. Beacon pulsing. Chance of rescue minuscule.

Perhaps that’s why he hangs onto his pained, tortured wakefulness––

But no, I did sleep. I did. I wasn’t awake for all that time. If I was I’d have been driven mad.

––for the first few days and weeks, and then the years that start to slip by, frozen into the escape pod and unable to move, simply lying there breathing fluid and hearing nothing, just thinking… thinking… dreaming of Luna and that wound he gave her, and the good, dead friends further behind with every never-ending moment that crawls by.

*   *   *

Beck woke up in the same small room he’d been living and sleeping in for over sixteen years, and for those first few moments it was a strange place, and the horrible memories from five decades before were where he still dwelled. Then his nightmare began to dissipate and reality asserted itself. With a groan, he sat up on the edge of his bed and waited for feeling to return to his aged limbs.

Damn, that was a bad one. He’d had the same nightmare ever since he’d been rescued, though as time went by so the frequency decreased. This was the first in over six months. He was grateful for that. It always left him feeling like shit, and remembering his dead friends from the Unluckies made him sad. He hardly recalled their faces––though fresh in his nightmares, they quickly faded away once he woke up––but their voices were more solid. He stood from his bed and heard his knees click, and Lincoln sang her dirty limericks. He walked into the bathroom pod and took a piss, and Poonam waxed lyrical about the bread her mother used to bake. He heard the heart in Lincoln’s voice, smelled Poonam’s mother’s bread.

Sometimes when he had the nightmare he thought this long life was all in his imagination, and he had spent the last five decades on that shuddering, burning, dying space station.

He went through a morning ritual that sometimes eased the pain of his injuries, sometimes not. His left arm and shoulder had been built back up with artificial flesh, similar to that used for androids. It sometimes itched like hell, but he grudgingly admitted that it was a good match. He moisturised and massaged to get his old blood flowing through this new flesh, enjoying the tingling sensation as feeling returned. He changed his stoma bag. He’d lost half of his stomach in an explosion during his final moments on the burning station and, unable to treat his wounds, the escape pod had put him straight into hypersleep in order to pause any more degeneration to his damaged body. Combined with the medical circuits in his combat suit, it had saved his life. He tended his other wounds, and then last of all he removed his eye patch and chose his eye for the day. Running his hand back and forth over the glass eye box in his bathroom cabinet, he paused over the white orb with a jet-black pupil, and smiled. It was his favourite. He was too old and decrepit to try new things.

Beck left his bathroom pod and something flashed across his vision, a fluid shadow that had once been so horribly familiar. His heart fluttered, and though he knew it was the dregs of his dream, for a moment he saw Luna standing in the corner of his small apartment. She was bent over because she was so tall, her facial wound leaking across his small table and the books scattered there, her breath coming in wet grunts, and for a moment he could even smell her, a sweet-sour tang underlying warm musk. He stared at her and she stared back, and then he blinked and she was gone.

“Fuck’s sake,” Beck muttered, and he went about preparing breakfast. Powdered egg on toast, coffee strong enough to require a new chemical classification, and a handful of vitamin supplements. Same every morning, same as it had been for the sixteen years he’d lived here. Beck was nothing if not a man of habit.

Ready for work, he opened his apartment door and left that familiar nightmare behind.

*   *   *

Beck took some pride in knowing that out of two hundred permanent residents, he was Hamilton Base’s oldest, not only in age but the time he’d been there. Seventy years old, and he’d been Hamilton’s librarian for the last sixteen of those years. His younger life was separated from his life now by the nightmare he’d just woken from, and much as he missed his dead marine squad, he was more than happy living out his time in such a safe, familiar environment. Boring, he sometimes heard Poonam saying to him. Alive, he replied.

He limped along familiar hallways, nodding to people he passed, exchanging brief pleasantries with some. Windows were shielded, as usual, but here and there some of the shading had only half-fallen, and beyond he could see ghost images of Titan’s inimical landscape as sharp ice storms pounded from all sides.

There was a young woman waiting outside the library door when he arrived. He didn’t recognize her.

“Jeremiah Beck?”

“You can go in, you know,” he said.

“It’s not locked?” She seemed surprised, which told him immediately that she was a new arrival.

“Why would I lock up a room full of knowledge?”

The woman shrugged. She was nervous, too. Probably facing her first shift on Titan, and if that were the case he understood her nervousness. Beck had ventured out from the base and onto the moon’s surface a few times, and counted them as a few too many.

“Come on in,” Beck said. “It takes me seven minutes to walk to work––though almost eight today, and it’s been getting longer lately, which doesn’t make me happy––and I’m always ready for another coffee when I get here. You?”

“Me? I only got here two days ago, I’m heading out for the atmos processor in a few hours so… and I came from crew quarters, it’s just…” She waved back over her shoulder towards the station’s accommodation arm.

“I mean, coffee?” Beck asked.

She smiled, nodded.

“So, you know my name…”

“Oh, sorry. I’m Bindy.”

Beck nodded and entered the base’s only library. He liked his apartment, but this was the place where he felt most at home. He’d made it that way. His time as a marine was decades in the past, even though over three of those decades had been spent in hypersleep, and though his experiences had dictated what his life was now, they did not define him. The space was warm and comfortable, and as far from a room on a functioning terraforming base as he’d been able to make it. Genuine old books lining the walls gave the library depth and peace, stealing away all but the deepest purring from life support. Comfortable chairs with sagging upholstery were scattered around the room, and he kept the viewing ports permanently shaded. Old lamps sat on rickety tables. Much of the furniture he’d made himself from scrap metal, painting it to give the appearance of wood. He had a chair of his own, behind a low metal desk, and sometimes he slept in there. He breathed in deeply and the smell of old books made him close his eyes.

“Were you really on the Aragorn?”

Beck opened his eyes again, and sighed. He turned around and Bindy stood in the centre of his library, staring at him, focused on the jet-black pupil of his false eye. He wondered if she’d ever held a real book in her hands, let alone opened one. She was about to embark on her first shift out on the surface, throwing her lot in with some of the hardiest grafters in Sol system—braving the ice storms and hostile environment to tend the atmosphere processors, living in small subterranean cells, risking death every moment of their ten-day shift before enjoying three days back at Hamilton Station––and all she could think about was meeting him. He should have felt humbled.

“I was, and my story’s archived in the holo room on Deck C. I was going to write a book about it, actually, but––”

“And you really killed seventeen Predators?”

“Me and my platoon, yes.” He blinked and saw Poonam again, and Melton, and the others slaughtered in the first surprise attack, and he felt nothing but sadness and a lingering dread. That was the dream, he supposed. Luna’s eyes on him as he fled, even though he was certain––reasonably certain–– that he’d not seen her again after that time he shot her. She was probably dead before he even turned away. If not, she’d died minutes later in that final explosion when the station came apart. “Soon as we arrived, we knew we could never beat them in open combat. No one had encountered that many before, in one place. So we did the only thing we thought might work and set the station to self-destruct. Last resort.”

“It was a great victory,” Bindy said with a naive, childlike glee. Beck went from feeling annoyed to sad.

“Not really,” he said.

“Huh? But you wiped out a whole load of those bastards! If Aragorn hadn’t been there, attacked them, just think of the planets or ships or habitats that would have fallen victim to them.”

“True, seems they were using the abandoned Rankin Station as a staging post. But I mean it’s not a victory. I’ve told a hundred people the same thing in this very room. The more you defeat them in combat, the more respect they have for you. And the more they keep coming back.” Beck went to his coffee machine and pressed a button, enjoying the sound and smell as it brewed.

Bindy stood behind him, motionless and silent. She knew he had more to say.

“I could point you towards a dozen attacks by Predators over the past fifty years that I think might be a direct result of our so-called victory. We wiped them out, yeah, but there’s a code of honour amongst their clans. A desire for challenging combat, a need for revenge. How do you beat an enemy like that?”

He handed her a coffee. She was frowning. “Maybe you don’t win.”

Beck paused with his coffee half-raised to his lips. He’d never heard that before, from those many fascinated people who’d come to see him and quiz him rather than borrow his precious books. He’d thought it himself, of course, and sometimes he wondered if he really had won. If by surviving, he had achieved anything at all.

Luna, watching him as he staggered with terrible wounds, her own wounds carried with a sense of honour and pride.

“Guess I’ll never know,” he said. And then fate came to spill his coffee, and shake his hand, and make him and Bindy stagger and fall to their knees, as a powerful explosion ripped through Hamilton Base.

“What?” Bindy said, panicked. “What the hell?”

Between blinks Beck could only see the shimmering corridors of Rankin Station as fire took hold, and the smears of green blood. His own wounds throbbed and sang out.

“What?” Bindy shouted again.

He went to his library’s viewing ports and unshaded them for the first time in years, letting the stark reality of outside into this small, comfortable room echoing with the past. And he saw just what he’d always known he would see, one of these days.

On one of the station’s landing pads, a Predator ship. It was battered and scarred, like an old relic emerging from the past. As wounded as him.

It’s taken her so long to find me.

“Run,” he said to Bindy. “Hide.”

“What about you?”

He could not answer that. He didn’t yet know.

*   *   *

Beck moved against the tide.

“Turn around, Beck!”

“Other way, Jeremiah!”

It was the first time he’d run anywhere in years. His old wounds hurt, a reminder of his violent past, and the artificial flesh of his left arm ached.

“Someone said it’s a Predator, Beck! You don’t wanna be going that way, man.”

Beck already knew what it was. Who it was. His dreams had told him, her eyes holding him frozen there in the burning, ruined gangways of Rankin Station moments before his escape. Pinned against that vast expanse of space and time beyond the outer reaches of the Heliosphere with a promise that she would see him again. He’d always done his best to persuade himself it was only a dream. And deeper, within that dream, he had always known that she was real.

His life that had been on gentle pause, awake and asleep—a pause he had come to enjoy, over time––was moving on, and now that Luna had come for him, he knew that he could not let her take anyone else.

Chief Stannard hurried towards him, a familiar face, but his usual calm expression had slipped.

“Bill, what’s the damage?” Beck asked.

“Infiltration through landing pad three,” Stannard said. “Looks like the door was blown open from the outside, no real damage, but…” He shrugged.

“I know what it is,” Beck said.

Stannard caught his eye. He knew Beck’s history; they’d talked about it a few times over a bottle of bourbon, when the level was closer to the bottom than the top. Beck never wanted to say too much, because he hated the way some people looked at him. Just because he was last survivor of the Aragorn didn’t make him a fucking hero.

“How can you be sure?” Stannard asked.

I dreamt of her again last night, he could say. Or, It’s just a feeling and I’m old enough to trust them, or, I’ve always known my past would catch up with me. But he didn’t say anything.

“I never thought it’d happen here,” Stannard said. “I mean, here. There’s nothing here for them. No challenge. We’re just a bunch of techies and labourers and…” His eyes settled back on Beck, growing even wider. He was the librarian, and Stannard enjoyed reading old horror novels by Tremblay and Ward, spooking himself in the dead of night. Now it was Beck who had spooked him.

“You have a weapons locker,” Beck said.

“In my room,” Stannard said. “Box under the bed, locked.” He nodded, as if agreeing with some internal dialogue. “Come on, I’ll––”

“Bill!” Beck said. “You need to help as many people as you can. You know this base better than anyone. Hunker down, hide. Be no threat.”

Stannard only hesitated for a moment before dropping a set of keycards into Beck’s hand.

“What’ll you do?”

Beck slapped him on the shoulder, then started running against the flow once again towards the landing pad, where he was certain his past had caught up with him at last.

On the way he ducked into Stannard’s room close to the central hub tower. It smelled of oil and cigars. He pulled a battered metal box out from under the bed, opened it, found an old pistol that was probably worth a fortune on the collectors’ market and a well-maintained knife almost as long as his forearm. He hadn’t expected much more, and he knew that more wouldn’t matter.

He had no intention of fighting.

Once back out of Stannard’s room, Beck found his instincts kicking in without any conscious effort. He could never move like he used to––he was too old, too worn down by his past––but his senses came alight, time seemed to slow, and he stalked forward through Hamilton’s emptying corridors with his perception shifting. He knew how to see her, even if she had no wish to be seen.

A scream wailed in from somewhere ahead. Beck froze and raised the pistol. It had eleven rounds in the magazine, and he wondered when it had last been fired. The scream faded quickly, replaced by a silence filled only with the station’s steady background hum.

Beck hurried forward, no longer cautious. He was afraid of what that scream meant. Moments later, rounding another corner, he knew.

A woman wearing a surface technician’s suit sat against the wall beside an open door. Her stomach was also open, insides turned out, throat slit. A slick of blood was spreading across the floor around her, making an island of the handgun she had dropped. At least she had died quickly. He didn’t know her name, but she liked reading old 20th-century history books.

“I’m here!” Beck shouted. Something moved to his right, along a corridor darkened beneath half-faded illumination, and he spun that way. Two small children huddled down in a service nook in the side wall, wide eyes catching the flickering light.

“Go!” Beck said. “That way!” He pointed back the way he’d come, stepping forward so that they could not see the mess of the dead woman. Maybe she’s their mother, he thought, but he couldn’t let that awful possibility shift his focus.

The kids ran. They didn’t look back.

“I’m here!” he shouted again. “Come on! This time I’ll take your fucking head off.”

Past the dead woman, where the corridor curved out of view around the base’s large central hub, the air shimmered. Beck blinked and looked again, focusing, seeing the walls bend with fluid grace and then grow solid.

He pointed the gun and pulled the trigger without aiming. It bucked in his hand and the bullet ricocheted from the metal wall with a flash of sparks. The sound shocked him, the smell ignited memories he did his best to veer away from, and as he blinked he saw his old squad laughing together, fighting, dying. The air rippled and then stilled once again as whatever had been there shifted to the left.

Beck stepped right and fired a second shot.

Shouts came from somewhere behind him, and he recognised Stannard’s voice. Good. He’d have heard the shooting and would know what to do. Hamilton’s command structure would have processes to go through in circumstances such as this, but the terraforming installation had been on site for over two decades without such an incident, and it wasn’t only some of the metal doors and staircase treads that were growing rusty.

Beck started along the hallway, watching the doors, sliding close to the wall, gun aimed ahead. He breathed through his mouth, hoping to hear any movement. His heart hammered, pulse thrumming in his ears. Steady and fast, Poonam said. Don’t trust two bullets when you can give them ten, Lincoln said.

The base’s audio system crackled and spat, and then a voice said, “All residents secure yourselves, lock yourselves in, there’s a Predator in the station and we have to––” The message ended as quickly as it had begun. Crackling, fumbling, as if a hand covered the microphone, and then Stannard’s voice came over, low and gravelly.

“Everyone hunker down and stay still,” he said. “And friend, there’s a Sandbug fuelled and prepped in Bay Two.”

Beck paused for only a moment before shooting along the hallway one more time, then turned and ran back the way he’d come. Stannard knew him so well and had guessed what he wanted to do, and why.

And he had given him a chance.

Beck moved through the discomfort and pain, listening for sounds of pursuit and gripping the pistol tight. The long knife in his belt slapped against his leg as he ran, as if reminding him of the wounds put there decades before. He ducked around corners, and along a couple of perpendicular corridors he saw shadows hurrying away and heard doors slamming. He prayed that none of them would be stupid enough to pick up a weapon.

At the wide entry doors to Bay Two of the parking garage, he paused to catch his breath and check behind him.

And there she was.

Luna stood thirty metres away, his nemesis and nightmare, his past and his destiny. She was not as tall or broad as he remembered, nor even as fearsome, but perhaps his memories and dreams had painted her that way. Time had weathered and worn her down as it had him. Her limbs were thin and mottled, her dreadlocks also speckled grey, her torso too small for the armour it bore. Her helmet was skagged and scarred, covering the damage his shotgun blasts had done to her fearsome face all those years ago.

As he thought of that half-moon wound that had named her forever in his soul, the Predator reached up and disconnected tubes and pipes from her helmet. Strange gases hissed at the air and then dissipated as she lifted it from her head. That scar was dark and livid, starting above her left eye and ending in the tattered upper mandible of her monstrous mouth. She breathed, heavy and broken, and stared at him with her one good eye.

We both took an eye, he thought, and held there by her glare, Beck was both a jaded seventy-year-old in pain, and a furious youth filled with rage and the need for revenge.

But it was not he who sought vengeance now.

He gripped the gun, but knew it would be pointless. The moment he lifted it, she would dodge, twist, and slice him in two with a blade from her forearm armour, or scorch him to smithereens with her shoulder blaster.

This was not about fighting.

“Took your time,” he said, and then he turned into Bay Two and slammed his hand on the door closure mechanism. As the old metal doors started grinding together, he heard Luna running towards him. He took a few steps back into the parking hanger and aimed at the narrowing gap between the doors. Closing, closing, at the last moment her arm thrust between the doors and bent at the elbow, hand slamming against one door face.

The mechanism grumbled and cranked as she began to push.

Beck shot her three times in the hand and arm. Her screech was loud and awful and sweet music to his ears, and as her arm withdrew the doors slammed shut. A smear of grim green blood dribbled down the tarnished metal.

He put a bullet into the door’s mechanism––just one; he didn’t want to make it too difficult for Luna to follow him–– and then ran for the Sandbug. His footsteps echoed through the hanger, brain racing almost as fast as he considered what he had to do. Start the Sandbug, drive for the doors, open them from inside the cab, what else, what else? He thought he had everything covered, and that if he moved fast enough––

A loud explosion boomed behind him, then another, and as he reached the Sandbug a third blast tore the doors’ closing edges, willing them apart from their magnetic lock and twisting them from their runners. One bounced and spun past him, missing the nose of the Sandbug by half a metre. He leapt for the open cab and tripped over the sill, landing half on the driver’s seat. He reached for the steering handle and pulled himself fully into the vehicle, other hand fumbling across the control panel for the starter button.

I don’t have long, seconds, she’ll blast the Sandbug and then take her time with me.

He had to get Luna away from Hamilton. He knew these beasts from the short time he’d spent killing them in his twenties, and the longer periods he had spent researching them since he woke from his decades in the escape pod. However long Luna had been searching for him, whatever circuitous route had brought her here, once she had settled her score with him her bloodlust would be up. She would turn back into the base, and if she met any resistance from the residents she would slaughter them. Beck’s friends were not soldiers. They wouldn’t stand a chance. Beck hit the starter and shoved the driving handle forward, hauling himself up into the driver’s seat as he did so. Only then did he risk a look towards the blasted doorway. Luna shoved through the hanging, torn metal doorway into the vehicle bay, her mutilated hand held pressed across her stomach. She glared at him and her blaster shifted his way, but it glitched, stuck in place for a moment or two, before aiming at the Sandbug.

He leaned right and steered that way, and the blast scorched along the side of the Sandbug and slammed into one of the two big Haulers parked in the bay. One of its huge pressurised wheels exploded, throwing a barrage of torn metal tread sections across the hanger to hammer into vehicles, walls and high ceiling. They fell with clangs that faded away with the blast’s echo.

Luna ducked from the shrapnel and debris, and Beck took the opportunity to steer for the external doors. He pressed the door operation button on the control dashboard and they began to rumble open, allowing in the violence of the ongoing storm beyond––swirling ice shards, and twisting spirals of noxious atmosphere. The sound added to the chaos in the parking garage, but the doors were opening too slowly. Beck peeked above the control panel and through the windscreen, eased back on the lever, and just as the Sandbug scraped and squealed through the widening opening, a shot from Luna’s plasma cannon struck one of the withdrawing doors. The bug’s left window shattered and it rocked onto its right wheels, heat blasting through the cabin, and Beck cried out as he nudged the steering lever and managed to bring the vehicle crashing back down onto six wheels.

He was out, into the inimical environment beyond Hamilton Base, and he leaned forward on the stick to accelerate away. He grabbed a mask from beneath the seat and slipped it over his face, clipping the straps behind his ears. It would give him oxygen for a while, but would not protect him from Titan’s fury for long.

He switched one of the viewing cameras to the rear and moments later saw what he had been hoping for–– Luna running after him. Mask off, body ravaged, tattered hand held across her chest, she sprinted after Beck and the Sandbug, striving to finish the journey of revenge she had begun five decades before.

“Come on,” Beck said, and he couldn’t help admire the old Predator. Such commitment, such need for vengeance and closure, was as admirable as it was terrifying. “Not long now,” he said. A prickle of sadness closed around him as he saw Hamilton behind Luna, swallowed by the violent storms as he lured her further and further from the base. It had been his home for sixteen years and he had made friends there.

That was why he was doing this. Without knowing it, he’d been moving towards this moment since blasting from Rankin Station in that last, desperate escape pod, sleeping on his journey even though he’d had nightmares about staying awake.

A flash of light, and an explosion took the Sandbug in the rear, lifting the vehicle and sliding it forward. Beck fought with the steering, tracked wheels skidded and spun when it crashed back down, and he powered forward even harder, not caring about where he steered or where he was going, only concerned that it was away from his friends and home.

He jigged left around an icy mound, and a blast took the ice apart. He turned right into the settling cloud of vapour and debris, and another shot took out one of the rear wheels, axle snapping and smashing up into the undercarriage.

Ahead he saw the edge of a former, shallow methane lake, at the far side of which was the first of the atmosphere processors. He didn’t want to go that far, because there were three shifts of workers down there and Luna might view them as prey.

Here, now, was where he would spend his final moments. And though the old soldier in him wanted to fight his enemy, he knew that there was a more certain way to achieve his aims.

He slowed the vehicle and opened the door to his right, and as another blast smashed into the Sandbug’s left flank he threw himself from the open doorway. He hit the cold ground hard, rolled, still grasping the gun even though he wasn’t sure how many bullets were left, if any. The Sandbug struck an ice mound sculptured by wind and tilted, balanced on two good wheels, and another shot from Luna sent it tumbling onto its side. Beck felt the wave of plasma heat close around him, hair sizzling, clothing crackling, and he squeezed his eyes closed. For an instant he was back on Rankin Station again, his mutilated arm simmering as the remains of his spacesuit settled into his denuded flesh.

Then he opened his eyes and Luna stood ten metres from him. In her uninjured hand she carried a glaive, heavy blades at both ends so sharp that they cut through time back to an older fight, an unfinished battle.

She watched him with her one good eye. It blazed, but Beck didn’t know whether it was with anger or triumph, or some other alien emotion he could not comprehend. Her shoulder weapon still glitched, shifting minutely left and right, but trained mostly on him. Her hand dripped blood onto the icy surface of this strange moon. She carried other scars, but the one that mattered was the crescent he had put onto her face. It hurt her, defined her. It was her fuel, and she had never been so alight.

Luna crouched and aimed her glaive at him, and Beck gripped the pistol.

Then he let the weapon go and held both hands above his head.

Maybe you don’t win, Bindy had said.

Luna shouted something in her strange language that he could never know, but he understood nevertheless––it was frustration. She had travelled so far and for so long for this confrontation, and now Beck had thrown up his hands. Surrendered. The old soldier who bettered her last time might have promised the glory of a final fight, but instead he was slouched in the ice, shivering and freezing, gun dropped by his side.

She screeched again, tattered mandibled mouth gaping wide, crouched down, limbs lifted in a spider-like pose, and a chill went through Beck that had nothing to do with the cold.

Luna closed the distance between them with two steps and slammed her glaive into his chest.

Beck stiffened, eyes wide and arms still aloft, waiting for the pain to come in. He looked down at the wide, heavy blade jammed between his ribs, blood blooming, his clothing pinched and wet around the weapon’s head. He groaned, and then roared as Luna heaved him aloft with her one good arm. Still he kept his arms raised above his head, fighting against every instinct to grasp the spear to try and ease the pressure, the agony, the flaming sun at the heart of him that ground against his spine and cracked ribs and spewed blood in a steady stream.

Luna growled with a sense of victory. He’d give her that, for now. For this brief moment. He caught her eye and stared, and she jarred the glaive to make it penetrate deeper, sliding him down the shaft closer to her. Even in the swirl of ice and wind he could smell her warm, spicy scent, mysterious and unknowable.

“You win,” Beck said, and Luna tilted her head back to roar in triumph.

Beck brought his right hand down. The knife slipped from his sleeve and he gripped the handle, sweeping the blade right to left across Luna’s exposed throat.

Stannard kept his knife well-sharpened. It sliced in deep, cutting off Luna’s mocking laughter. She dropped him and staggered back a few steps, and then a rush of blood poured from her throat.

Beck landed on his side, pierced all the way through by the cruel spear. His own blood soaked into the icy ground, and perhaps somewhere between them in this alien land their lifebloods might meet.

Luna dropped to her knees and reached for the control panel on her armour’s left forearm, and Beck felt a moment of terror and failure, because he had not considered this at all.

Are we far enough away? he thought, but of course they were not. If Luna detonated her suit’s device, the blast would take out most of Hamilton and rumble down across the old lake bed. If it didn’t completely destroy the atmosphere processing plants, it would still leave the workers who survived down there homeless and doomed to an agonizing death.

Beck tensed, writhed, trying to stand and unable to do so. But there was no need. Luna’s right hand was too mangled, her fingers unable to find purchase. She soon gave up. Kneeling there close to him, bleeding, she and Beck stared at each other as time caught up with them, light faded, and eternity welcomed both old warriors into its final embrace.

THE DISTANCE IN THEIR EYES

BY STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES

A good hunt would be nice.

Or if these planets in this system were closer together. You can only get your blades so sharp, your targeting sensors so dialed in. And, while stalking back and forth along the lone corridor might feel like movement, Tel isn’t really getting anywhere with it, he knows.

But the slog between hunts would be worth it if the prey could just be worthy, could care about its own life enough to, if not fight back, at least run, maybe even hide.

This last drop, though?

Given a cycle or two, Tel could have harvested every individual on the planet. The way they submitted was against nature. He had initially been thrilled that the wavelengths their large eyes evidently had access to negated his cloaking, meaning he was going to actually have to use stealth, and strategy, and skill—one animal hunting another, the primal equation, as it should be.

But whenever one of them saw him creeping in, his presence would immediately circulate through the herd by pheromone or subvocalization or it doesn’t matter, and each individual in the village would drop whatever they were doing, look his way in wonder, the foliage transparent to them. Even the children would slow their activities, turn their large eyes Tel’s way. His first time stepping into one of their villages, the elders and bedridden had pulled themselves into their doorways to watch his approach.

It was like they were laying eyes on a god. Of course they’d never seen armor like Tel’s, painted with the blood of many hunts, and his bio-helmet was, as far as they knew, his actual head, but still, their wonder shouldn’t have overridden their instinctual fear, should it?

The one Tel identified as the leader—surely the trophy among them—he crept in close and skewered it with his wrist blades, coming up under the chin, the blades popping the top of the skull loose. This trophy’s overlarge eyes had been locked on his until the light glimmered out, at which point Tel was ready to call the hunt done.

Save for a sense that it had been too easy.

Perhaps size and bearing wasn’t what counted as the most fierce with this species?

To test it, Tel stalked and eviscerated the smallest and quietest.

Again, those overlarge seemed to look at him with gratitude.

Tel scowled, pushed this one away, and, though this wasn’t practice, the need for a trophy overrode convention, and he waded into the village, hunting right out in the open, taking whatever life presented itself. To an individual, the response was the same. No matter if he used the glaive or the scythe or the scimitar, no matter the iridescent blood of the whole village was pooling around his prey’s feet, no matter the stench of ruptured bodies permeating the air, this species never ran away from his blades, but just stood there awaiting their turn, as if he wasn’t killing them, but delivering them from their struggles.

What kind of species doesn’t protect its own life? What kind of species welcomes death like this?

It was an abomination.

Still, Tel had lined all seventy-four heads up on one of their low retaining walls and walked down that line, finally settling on the most symmetrical skull. Even when dead, this prey’s skin flayed from the skull as if in gratitude.

It was sick.

For the first time in all his hunts, Tel had gagged the littlest bit. Moral revulsion finding physical expression.

All he left behind on the planet, aside from the skulls, was a marker rolling along the top of the atmosphere, telling other Yautja not to bother. His sensors alerted him to the low-orbit moths drifting toward the curious aberration the marker must be to their antennae, but the creatures were so gossamer that, even at their size—their wingspan three times Tel’s height—they wouldn’t be able to alter the marker’s centuries-long tumble. Probably it would punch through their wings, send them spiraling down into the gravity that would pull them apart.

Good.

The flashing of their wings had been what had lured Tel in in the first place. Let them all die, and crumble down to the planet.

Tel wiped the holo warning away, stood, and, on the way to the trophy wall, grabbed that one skull he’d kept. Standing there, however, he found there was no place for it. It would disrespect the other hunts already memorialized—this skull wasn’t an artifact of another victory, but of a drop with so little challenge that it left a taste in his mouth like defeat.

After the coordinates for the next hunt were locked in—a harsh planet closer down to this planet’s star , sure to have spawned a biosphere built to survive—Tel tossed this one example of species 76re-0 into the wire basket in the corridor, where he sometimes spat in passing, or crumbled dried blood off his wrist gauntlet.

The specifics of the system 76re-0 hailed from, along with encodings of its genetic parameters and parentage, had already been logged and transmitted, so there was no reason to save the physical proof—this skull.

It would be a proper insult for it to fall to pieces in that bin, though, its empty eye sockets staring out, its face coated in spit and dried blood.

Yes, a good hunt would be nice. Some worthy prey.

For the first two days of the trip, Tel paced the corridor, for the next three days he watched enhanced particulars of his trophy hunts, and then for the next five days, with ten yet to go, he sat at the controls and stared out into the great emptiness, imagining it as a monstrous mouth he was steering into—the ultimate trophy animal.

Each time he passed the waste bin he now considered species 76re-0’s, he dragged the claws at the end of his glove across the hard wire, loudly.

What he should have done instead of leaving a marker, he knew, was set fire to the endless forest, just to see if that would make this species scurry away.

Next time, he told himself.

Except there weren’t going to be any disappointments like species 76re-0 again.

From here on out, it was just challenging prey. No more gambling that some unlikely backwater planet had, over the millennia, evolved something dangerous. No, for the next few cycles—maybe for all the cycles—Tel was only navigating to systems where life had to have evolved claws and teeth in order to survive.

Though, he had to admit, species 76re-0’s eyes had been a thing of wonder.

He wondered what they had seen him as, really. If their vision flayed him down to his own skull. If that was why they stared so long: because they were processing his vascular system, his nervous system. Maybe even tracing his synapses out, and tasting his memories.

Put that kind of visual rigging on something with a will to survive, and that’s a skull Tel would hang on his trophy wall.

If he even survived to take that trophy.

He chuckled to himself, imagining a hunt like that.

Maybe this next system would provide something along those lines, right? It was funny how, when you found yourself navigating along a corridor like he was, that the life on each next planet would share attributes with the last. Perhaps species 76re-0, with different environmental stressors, could become something formidable. Or at least something to get this bad taste out of Tel’s mouth.

Passing by that basket again, Tel dragged his fingertips over the wire, rattling the whole apparatus, and he was five or eight paces down the corridor before it registered: where had those large eye sockets been?

Distinctly aware that he wasn’t wearing his armor, his helmet, even his dagger, Tel stepped back, confirmed.

The skull was gone.

Tel’s every sense came alive. His right hand snapped into a hard fist.

Instead of relying on his display for a reading, he flared his mandibles, sharpened his eyes, tightened his skin.

Nothing.

He was as alone as ever.

Still, the skull that was there before was most definitely not there anymore.

Tel chuckled, even grinned.

But don’t get too excited, he told himself. You don’t know for sure, yet.

He came back armored up, let his sensors deliver him a reading on the bin, to see if this skull, in keeping with the listlessness of its species, had given up, crumbled to dust.

Aside from Tel’s own spit and the dried blood from a nasty race of cave dwellers, though, there was nothing.

All the same, Tel wrenched the bin free from its mooring on the floor and slammed it against the opposite wall, daring this insulting skull to show itself.

His howl of rage filled every corridor of the ship, and came back to him almost as loud, almost as angry.

A hunt on his own ship?

Why not.

In the pilot seat, he lit the console up, dialing up every internal and external sensor way past tolerance, insisting they find this lost skull.

Except they didn’t. They couldn’t.

Tel slammed his gauntlet down on the control board, circuity gel bleeding from the display, and, seeing that weakness, he wanted to crush it into the floor. But if he destroyed his own navigation, that would be letting this skull win. That would be losing to species 76re-0.

And that, simply, was not an option.

For the next two cycles, Tel scoured the ship from nose to tail. Every crevice, every nook, every shadow.

Then, in what felt like desperation, though he would never admit such a thing, he dialed up the internal security feeds, on a different subsystem than the sensors, since… what use is a feed of yourself impatiently waiting for the next hunt?

But, if 76re-0 could see in different spectrums, then maybe it could move among them as well. Specifically, Tel hated to admit: maybe when dead, 76re-0 could move among the less common spectrums.

What kind of a life cycle would that be, though?

It would explain why 76re-0 hadn’t fought for its own life, he supposed. Death for 76re-0 could just be elevation to a different state.

If so, then perhaps 76re-0 was worthy prey after all. Perhaps the hunt had felt like failure because Tel had been hunting larvae.

At the control board, the display shuddering now from its uncorrected damage, Tel dialed and zoomed, shifted visible wavelengths, and finally caught up with himself doing this very search.

Which is when he saw it.

Not 76re-0, but the shuddering, partial display over his own shoulder.

For the flashing instant he was able to rewind to and heighten, the data he was being fed on this same screen he was looking at, it… it wasn’t what the camera was now seeing. No: what the camera had just seen.

This could only mean… Tel shook his head no, pushed away from the console, trying to wrap his hunter’s mind around it.

When that first individual 76re-0 had seen him moving in through the foliage, and instantly the rest of the village had known, they hadn’t been communicating via pheromones or subvocalization, but mind-to-mind, after some fashion.

And that must be the same ability now being used against him, to obfuscate the very readings he thought he could trust.

More important, on the recording, very partial, there was a holo representation of the skull.

Only now it was encased in some organic body again.

And—how could this be? It was no longer bipedal and upright, but thick, bulging, tapering down to a sharp tail that was probably a stinger of some sort.

Tel activated his vibration scanning.

He was breathing hard now.

The hunt was on. And not only could this prey see him through walls, probably see him down to the molecular level, but it could cloud his mind, too.

Only rarely did a species turn to fight.

Only rarely did Tel ever feel a rush like this.

The profile in his system was woefully incomplete, he knew now. Evidently the seeds of this next form 76re-0 was programmed for had been embedded deep in the bone, deep enough that it went beneath notice of the scans he had made while disappointed, while insulted, while only wanting this drop to be over with.

Tel nodded to himself and lowered his visor, told it to record and then show him that recording a tenth of a second later. This meant Tel would be moving slightly in the past, which would give this next iteration of 76re-0 the advantage, but that was just the way he liked it.

He told the lights in his ship—the ones that could be adjusted—to cycle across all the wavelengths, and keep doing it until he told them to stop. His hope was one of them would throw 76re-0’s shadow, which his targeting sensors could lock on.

This was a worthy prey indeed.

Tel stalked from room to room, corridor to corridor, and finally, after half a day of it, his display delivered him what he was looking for: a trail.

76re-0 left a slight depression wherever it went, evidently. As if it were scraping up the usable mass from whatever it came into contact with, and then adding it to its own.

Once Tel understood what spectrum to look for those trails in—they were everywhere.

76re-0 had been crawling over every surface of the ship, it seemed, and hiding in plain sight the whole time.

When Tel checked in on his life’s work, his trophies, he could only glare and mutter curses.

All the skulls from his previous hunts were gone, were part of 76re-0, now.

He slammed the side of his fist into the wall, and, to his surprise, that wall crumbled like ash.

Whatever molecular material 76re-0 was taking from the ship was leaving it structurally compromised.

Shaking his head no, Tel raced for the controls, strapped himself into the pilot’s seat, and called up readings and diagnostics, then, remembering that he couldn’t trust direct data, he pulled his visor down, looked at recordings of those readings and diagnostics.

A tenth of a second after it was actually happening, he saw a reduction of his ship coming apart at the seams, its indigestible parts drifting away from each other like an exploded diagram.

The ship was coming apart under him, all around him.

He floated ahead, still strapped into the pilot’s seat. He was in open space now.

His helmet sealed him in, fed him what breath it had, but it wasn’t going to be much, Tel knew.

What it was, as it turned out, was just enough for him to see the cocoon adhered to the outside of his ship cracking open.