Alien, page 4
Prison world Nungal 734 was legendary, as were the prisoners incarcerated there, comparable only to the long-closed Fiorina “Fury” 161. The inmates on Nungal 734 would make quick and likely brutal work of the Solokov woman and children, sent there as the result of a “bureaucratic error.” This, in turn, would instill in Maxim’s mind fear of the UA’s power.
Sarge hadn’t been sure who’d given the order to Vaughn, but he’d heard the person’s voice—its chilly efficiency, its callous indifference—and it had genuinely scared him. That cold fear had remained with him ever since. When he approached his squad with a plan to smuggle Katya and her kids to freedom, outlining the risks to their careers and possibly their lives, all of them had agreed.
Compton herself was a mother of two, and back then Elkins had a baby on the way. And Roots… well, he’d been assigned riot duty on Nungal, and swore he’d rot in prison before subjecting a woman and two innocent children to that.
Sarge and his squad had managed to get Katya Solokov and her kids to a planet where neither the UA government nor Maxim Solokov were likely to ever find her, but despite their careful planning, Vaughn and her ops team had discovered who was behind the escape. Brand and his squad had been lucky, very lucky. Expecting to be sent to prison—or worse—instead they’d been demoted and reassigned to BG-791.
Hygieia.
Nothing explained the “mercy” they’d received, though McGowan shared Sarge’s suspicions that there may have been pressure from the ICS Contractor’s Coalition, an organization funded and run by one man.
Maxim Solokov.
“We did the right thing by her and those kids.” Sarge shrugged, but the sag in his shoulders gave away his agreement.
“I’d do it again if I had to,” McGowan replied. “It’s just… well, sometimes I wonder if Vaughn somehow knew about this place, ya know? Like she knew BG-791 was going to collide with the Big H, and maybe she was hoping we wouldn’t get out of here in time.”
“She couldn’t know,” Sarge said, but he didn’t sound convinced.
“Vaughn’s the one running security for this summit meeting,” Elkins offered. “You know, since she’s done such a bang-up job keeping peace and all.” Elkins snorted. “Maybe she and the other joint chiefs are hoping we’ll be a problem that gets cleaned up with the moon itself.”
Sarge looked away. “Well, if that’s the case, they’re gonna be disappointed. We’re out of here tomorrow, boys. The ship is coming.”
“Yeah, sure,” Elkins said. “They’re sending us right back into the jaws of the joint chiefs.”
McGowan frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You wanna tell him?” Elkins gestured to Sarge.
“They’re sending us to LV-846.” Sarge leaned back in the chair. “Where the summit’s going to be held.”
“No shit?” McGowan gaped a moment at the news. “You’re kidding me.” Elation fought with a new fear, mixed with anger.
“Nope.” Sarge shook his head. “If all goes well, we’ll be there by the start of the festivities—just in time to join security duty.”
“On whose orders?” McGowan felt a tightness in his gut. It sounded like a set-up.
“Our number one fan,” Elkins said. “Assistant Commandant General Vaughn. The military scientists think those pathogen bombs aren’t of human origins—you know, the ‘black goo’ someone’s dropping on the colonies. Not the US or the UPP, sounds like, and not the ICS.”
“So what the fuck does that have to do with us?”
Sarge leaned forward and looked McGowan in the eye. “They want us to make sure there are no surprises—no riots, no bomb threats, no crazy people—and they want it to go smoothly. We’re good, McGowan, and they know it. This is a big deal. They’re talking peace treaties, ceasefires across all the colonized planets. This might put your careers back on track. And me, shit—maybe after, they’ll finally let me retire in peace.” He sat back and added, “With a pension.”
“Hell, if it’s money, I’m in,” Elkins said with a shrug. “Sarge can have his beachfront bungalow and his fishing boat on some nice, quiet planet, like he’s always talking about, but I’ve got a kid, and kids aren’t cheap.”
“Not like your wife, at least,” McGowan said with a small grin, and Elkins shoved him.
“You’re funny. Real funny,” Elkins said without looking at him. “Play, already, so I can kick your ass.”
On Sarge’s desk, the transmission terminal bleated the code that indicated an internal transmission. They all jumped. Any transmission nowadays might bring bad news at best, and carry a death sentence at worst.
Words appeared on the monitor. Sarge wheeled around in his chair and leaned closer to read the incoming message.
ALEC…
DISTRESS CALL FROM W-Y LAB… SOUNDS BAD.
DEATHS… MAYBE QUARANTINE.
CAN YOU BRING YOUR SQUAD SO WE CAN
CHECK OUT THE SITUATION?
SIOBHAN
Sarge pressed the “received” button, then began to type.
WILL ROUND THEM UP.
ON OUR WAY.
STAY PUT UNTIL WE GET THERE.
ALEC
“You’ll have to finish your game later, men.” Sarge rose and picked up his gun. “We’ve got to get back to the lab.” Surprised, both Elkins and McGowan stood and grabbed their weapons, as well.
“Problem, Sarge?” Elkins asked.
“Not ours. Weyland-Yutani. Radio Compton and Roots and have them meet us at the garage. Siobhan says the situation sounds bad.”
“Bad enough to pull them off rounds?” McGowan said.
Sarge paused but did not look at them. “We’re going to have to grab our quarantine gear.” Elkins and McGowan exchanged glances as he made his way to the door. “Move out,” Sarge barked over his shoulder.
As they were trained to do, the two fell in behind him.
4
She and Camilla had just about finished packing the fiber bandages, medicines, and portable medical tools into the M577 Armored Personnel Carrier when Siobhan caught the figures of Alec and his squad approaching over the crest of a hill. When Alec spotted her in the doorway of the APC, he jogged a little way ahead of the rest.
“So, what’s going on? What are we looking at?” he asked as he joined her by the personnel carrier. “Storm damage? Tremors?”
“I don’t think so,” Siobhan replied. “We got a video transmission from William, a synthetic over there, and it sounds like something happened inside the facility itself.”
“Friend of yours? From the factory, maybe?” Roots asked Camilla with a humorless smirk. Siobhan started to say something, then held her tongue. She’d heard that Roots had once been in a battle where a synthetic had malfunctioned and killed a number of humans, as well as destroying another synth. Since then, he’d harbored a mistrust of them, and didn’t usually try to hide it. He managed—though barely—to be polite to Camilla, but occasionally his cynicism slipped out.
Camilla smiled, seemingly unaware of the tone in Roots’s voice. In Siobhan’s experience, Camilla didn’t quite get cynicism or sarcasm, and although she understood them intellectually as concepts, she rarely picked up on them when talking to humans.
“No, Private First Class Rutiani. I can’t say I’ve ever met William.”
“Anyway,” Siobhan continued before he could reply, “a lot of the message came through. It was distorted, but he looked badly damaged. Hurt,” she said to Camilla, almost apologetically. “I couldn’t make out all of what he was saying, but it sounded like there had been a serious accident at the lab.” She held up a little rectangular message drive about the size of her thumb. “I’ll show you.”
Ducking inside the APC, Siobhan headed toward the front, and the others followed her. On the dashboard sat a small portable transmission terminal, and Siobhan slid the message drive into a slot in its side.
The man who materialized behind the static onscreen was clearly and severely injured; the whitish fluid that powered through a synthetic’s systems like blood was leaking from a deep cut on his forehead, out his nose and ears, and the corner of his mouth. The message camera was angled slightly down. The synthetic, William, had to be on the floor, although the camera angle had only caught him from the waist up. Between the static and the close framing, it was hard to make out the scene behind him.
“Please,” William said in a croaking, robotic voice. His speed and sound modulators must have been damaged by whatever had happened to him. “Please, help them.” There was a loud crash behind him and a burst of sparks, but the synthetic paid it no more than a cursory glance.
“There was an accident,” he continued. “I cal-cal-calculate… dead… at least twenty-three dead. Two injured. Am shu… tting down. Irrep-rep-reparable damage to lab. Research comprom-ommmm-mised. Please help. Help the survivors. An accident. Help… damage… samples escaped. Help surv-v-vvivors. Please.”
With what looked like maximum effort, William reached up onto the desk, likely going for the terminal’s stop button. One wrist was broken, bent at an unnatural angle. With his other hand, he managed to lift his bulk toward the top of the frame—his remaining bulk, Siobhan saw with horror, as glowing white entrails dangled from where his bottom half should have been.
A blur of dark gray flashed across the screen, too quick to make out.
Then the screen went black.
“What the ever-loving hell was that?” Roots asked as Siobhan removed and pocketed the drive. “Sarge?”
Alec’s squad was looking at him, as much for explanation as instruction. From the expression on his face, though, Siobhan could tell he had no answers to give them.
“I guess we’ll find out,” Alec said. “Let’s roll.”
* * *
Siobhan sat up front with Lance Corporal Kenny Elkins, who was driving. Outside, the sky was streaked with black and gray. It had begun to rain, and occasional bolts of lightning lit the horizon, followed by rumbles deep enough that she could feel them in her chest.
She had liked thunderstorms until she’d been assigned to BG-791, where the lightning was three times as intense as on Earth, and the rain sometimes felt sharp enough to cut through clothes. The thunder alone was a great beast roaring across the sky. She’d experienced enough other planets that Siobhan had thought she’d seen it all, but nowhere was the indifferent and destructive strength of a storm more evident than on this moon—which itself was slowly being torn apart.
A bolt of lightning hit a ridge several miles ahead, sending vibrations through the ground and up into the vehicle, and she flinched. Kenny glanced at her and tried to give her a smile that conveyed confidence. The whiteness of his knuckles on the steering wheel of the APC didn’t do much to allay her fears, though.
Siobhan had never been to the wildlands before, and as they crossed the rough terrain its gray clay dust kicked up in swirls around the APC, defying the downpour and obscuring the view. Even so, she saw that she hadn’t missed much. Tall, tree-like brambles packed into dense forests sprung up occasionally along the sides of the APC’s path, coming out of the black, illuminated for a passing moment in the APC’s arcing lights, then blurred by rain. Occasionally she caught glowing eyes reflected in pairs, deep in the brambles.
There were no real roads on BG-791. Positioning technology was useless in a storm like this. Even the mile markers, indicating the direction of the pathway, were the makeshift kind. At times the wind would kick up, the storm would obscure both the path and the markers, and Elkins would have to slow their progress.
“Kind of like looking out into the ocean at night, huh?” Kenny said, his eyes on the road. “Darker than space, in a way.” Something in his tone gave her the impression that he found a kind of thrill in navigating the vehicle through the wildlands, that maybe he liked the tension of white-knuckle driving in such hostile conditions. She knew the man as well as she knew any of Alec’s squad, which was to say as a friendly, casual acquaintance, and she supposed it made sense. Long ago she’d gotten the impression that no one in the squad—including Alec—gave much thought to danger, or even death.
“Yeah,” she replied. “It’s sort of overwhelming.”
“Nah,” he said lightly. “It’s just dirt out there. Dirt and a little rain. And deer.”
Roots poked his head between them, and she jumped.
“So what do you think they were doing?”
“The deer?” Elkins glanced at his squad member with a small smile.
Roots punched him lightly on the shoulder. “No, you dumbass. The science nerds over at the Weyland-Yutani laboratory,” he said, then added with a sheepish shrug, “No offense, Dr. McCormick.”
“None taken.” She smiled and turned halfway in her seat to better see Roots and the rest of the squad. “And I have no idea. We haven’t really had any reason to compare notes with them. They keep entirely to themselves. Honestly, I thought they’d forgotten we were here, and I guess we sort of forgot about them, too.”
A bump in the road jostled the carrier, and Roots grabbed Elkins’s seat. When he’d regained his footing, he socked Elkins in the shoulder again.
“Maybe they really are making those pathogen bombs the terrorists have been dropping on the colonies,” McGowan said from one of the seats in back. “Maybe they sell them off to whichever government pays more.”
“Nah,” Compton replied from the seat across from him. “Word I heard is, they’re studying how to enhance the natural abilities of human soldiers—and if that’s the case, I wouldn’t mind a boost of whatever they’re cooking up over there.” She made a bicep muscle and squeezed it lightly. “Not that I need it.”
“Nah, it’s none of that,” Alec said. He sat in back with Compton and McGowan.
“Oh yeah, Sarge?” Elkins said, glancing back. “What is it, then?”
Alec didn’t say anything for several moments. Finally, he answered. “We should follow quarantine and contamination protocols when we get there. No fuckups.” His expression was serious. “Strictly by the rules. I mean it.”
“What do we have to be quarantined from, Sarge?” Compton leaned toward him.
“I don’t know.”
“Sarge—” Roots looked concerned.
Alec waved his hand dismissively. “I’ve just heard things, is all. The synthetic said it himself—they have… what did he call them? Samples. Samples they can use as weapons. DNA for hybrids, mutations, that sort of thing. Bio-weapons—that’s what they do.”
“Hybrids?” Siobhan frowned and turned further, stretching to look at Alec. “What do you mean? Hybrids of what?”
Before he could answer, the APC bounced hard over a bump in the pathway, drawing her attention back to the front windshield.
A moment after, the Weyland-Yutani outpost loomed into view over the sharp black outline of a hill.
The building which housed the lab was a series of dark, hexagonal buildings interconnected by tent-like tunnels. Both buildings and tunnels were made from a special alloy, hard as steel, fitted into six-sided panels that gave the building an odd, hulking shape that blended nearly perfectly into the tall, similarly shaped rocks behind it. Beyond the science facility, the residential buildings, squat cement alloy boxes, cowered in the dark.
“Bioweapons, huh?” Roots was between Siobhan and Elkins again, staring out the windshield. “Is that what they’re really doin’ in there? And what did the robot mean when he said they’d ‘escaped’?”
Just then there was a loud grinding sound as the ground shook beneath them. Siobhan heard a sharp crunch of rock, and the road in front of them split open.
“Oh shit!” Elkins swerved. “Hang on,” he said through gritted teeth. The APC fishtailed a little, sending Roots flying against the vehicle’s wall, and then it gripped the pathway again as the corporal swung the wheel the other way, bringing the carrier back on track on the other side of the split. Siobhan’s heart pounded in her chest as she calculated in seconds all the horrible things that could have happened if the APC’s wheel had been a few inches closer to the fissure in the road.
Overhead, the sky flashed and there was a crack, as if a great door was opening, letting in bolts of lightning and torrents of rain. The night clouds hung gray and heavy.
“Whatever we’ve got to do in there,” Siobhan said, her attention split between the facility ahead and the sky above, “we better do it quickly, and get the hell back to the lab.”
* * *
Elkins pulled the APC up to the entrance port of the facility. As soon as the vehicle had stopped moving, the others crowded behind him and Siobhan to get a look at the place before stepping outside.
There were no lights evident in the building, although old-fashioned LED lanterns swung in the gathering storm winds, hanging from posts leading up to the massive steel door. In the glare of the APC headlights, through the rain, Siobhan saw that the door was open. Deep scratches had dented the metal in long furrows, as if someone had used some kind of pronged tool to pry it open. Above it, in utilitarian type, the name of the place had been etched into a white metal sign.
MENHIT BIOWARFARE SCIENCE FACILITY
Whatever lay within, beyond the reach of the APC’s headlights, remained swathed in a near impenetrable blackness that seemed to move with the relentless onslaught of the rain.
“Get into your hazmat gear,” Alec told his squad. He stared at the door. In the years that he’d been serving as chief security officer for the lab, Siobhan had come to know the subtle differences in his mostly stoic expressions. The one he wore now was of distinct unease and suspicion. If he knew anything about what might have happened in that lab, he wasn’t telling them. Then again, if he wasn’t sharing what he knew, he probably had a good reason.
