Foster, Alan Dean – Aliens Vs Predator – War

Maybe it’s just that I didn’t see it coming. As fucked as the Company is, I still thought that they’d play us fair—and if I’d been paying attention, maybe I could have done some­thing.

Worthless thinking; it was already done. Jess sighed and glanced at his watch; he’d been out for five and a half hours, enough to be semisane for a while. He

felt tired and low, but better than when he’d sacked out. At least now, he’d be able to think straight.

And is that a good idea? Maybe you should just go back to sleep. Because if you think about what happened . . .

There it was, that deeply uncomfortable feeling that he’d avoided as long as he could. He knew what it was; anger, the kind that overwhelmed intelligence, that blocked out reason. Hatred with no outlet, no place to go but deeper inside. Those men had died be­cause some Company suit had wanted a download from one of the ships docked at 949, the ship that had brought the bugs inside, and the blind fury burning in­side of him would stay until he died—or until the Com­pany paid for what it had done. The former was a hell of a lot more likely, and that only fueled the red and melting heat of his frustrated rage.

And that scares the shit out of you, doesn’t it? his mind whispered. Dying angry.

Yes. He’d grown up angry, and that undirected rage was what had made him a volunteer in the first place; it had led him to murder a couple of lowlifes in a fit of passionate rage, it had led him to prison. He’d never been one to wallow in his past, coming to uneasy terms with what he’d done after a lot of introspection and a shitload of psych vids . . . but the emotion that had put him there . . .

What was so troubling was that he felt that he’d conquered it, that he’d learned how to ease himself out of his violent emotions. He could be angry without let­ting it rule him.

Yeah, right. No problem.

Thinking about what had happened to his team, that serenity he’d worked so hard to attain access to was gone. It was a feeling both familiar and terrible, a feeling that he had no control over his emotions. He was afraid of dying without any sense of calm, that hopeless fury bright and seething in his heart.

The Company. The goddamn Company.

Jess heard Lara and Ellis in the front, talking softly,

and decided that he’d stay where he was, just a mo­ment or two longer. He might not be able to come to terms with the great injustice that had been done to them before their time ran out, but he needed to try. He needed to at least navigate a path through the twist­ing bonds of his fury, whether or not he could walk it.

It was funny; even a year ago, he would have laughed himself silly over the idea that he’d spend his last hours trying to better himself. He’d gone from being a gun-running banger with little or no self-awareness to a con to an H/K volunteer—and some­where along the way, he’d figured out what being a man, what being a human was really about . . .

Jess shook his head, wondering where his sense of humor had gone. Fuck it. He was going to die, and hat­ing the Company felt good because it deserved to be hated.

That brought a smile to his lips; sometimes, simple was best.

After a time, he drifted back into a light, dreamless doze, thoughts of revenge keeping him warm as the shuttle spun through the endless black.

As they got closer to the egg chamber, the stink of moldy flesh grew, a smell like sickness and rot and the desperation of a slaughterhouse. Noguchi heard the soft hissing of hidden drones, but the only movement in the shadowy, blighted structure was their own. At­tack inside of a nest was highly unlikely.

In spite of their size, the Hunters moved with hardly a sound, only a whisper of padded armor brush­ing against itself and the occasional soft splash of a clawed foot in pooled and fetid water, those noises from the unBlooded. Xenophobic and violent, maybe, but an experienced Hunter had no equal in grace or stealth when he put his mind to it. There were no fe­male yautja Hunters that she knew of, although the males did speak of their counterparts respectfully; in truth, she simply didn’t know very much about the in-

tricacies of their culture, even after a year. She’d grown tired of asking after being openly ignored for so long . . .

Her mind was wandering. A defense against the smells and heat, against the memory of what had hap­pened on Ryushi. The alien queen accepted almost any large animal to act as incubator for her young; on Ryushi, it had been rhynth at first, the hatched face-huggers implanting the slow-moving, cattlelike ani­mals, the queen forming a makeshift nest on the transport ship Lector. Of course, humans had been next, and she’d met the Leader Dachande in the subsequent nightmare; he’d brought his students to the seeded planet, unaware of the human colony, and the un­Blooded males had decided to Hunt “ooman” after Broken Tusk had been wounded.

There were strict rules against Hunting intelligent species, she knew, but she also knew that there were many yautja who wanted those “laws” repealed; Bro­ken Tusk’s students had proved that clearly enough.

Together, she and the injured Leader had taken out the queen and saved most of the colonists, Broken Tusk slaying several of his students for what they had done. His dying act had been to engrave his jagged symbol between her eyes, the sign that she was worthy of Hunt . . .

. . . and you ‘re still trying to distract yourself, to keep your mind busy. Because you know what’s coming.

Topknot had already led the majority of the Hunt­ers around a curve ahead, the dark matter secreted by the drones forming extremely hard and somehow light absorbent walls, all of the hive as sleek and organic in appearance as she imagined melted rock would be. From the now nearly overpowering reek, she knew that they had reached the egg chamber. And while No­guchi was impatient to meet the queen, she wasn’t looking forward to—

—to this.

Holding her burner at the ready, Noguchi stepped

into the hot and shadowy, stinking lair, absorbing the environment as Topknot directed several of the stu­dents to unload their equipment. According to Hunter lore, the bugs had evolved on many worlds simultane­ously; it saved them from having to take responsibility for spreading the breed so that they might Hunt. And although she had worked not to concern herself with philosophies that she had no hope of changing, the re­sult of the yautja “seeding” was what was in front of them now. The incubators were different, but in almost every other respect, it was just like the Lector.

The ruptured bodies strung to the walls of the Lec­tor had primarily been those of rhynth; the creatures here were vaguely humanoid, four long, fleshy pink limbs, heads with two eyes, hands with digits. The slack, open mouths were filled with pointed teeth— open, perhaps, in expressions of pain and terror. The large empty shells in front of them, their fleshy petals peeled open, and the holes in their strange pink chests, burst out from inside, told the rest of the familiar story in simple strokes. Noguchi could see over a dozen of the life-forms from where she stood, hanging randomly from the walls like dead ornaments, and the chamber stretched off into shadows too deep for her to imagine how many more had been implanted. What little light there was came from small, uneven holes in the ceiling high above, filtering down in sickly streaks.

At least these are dead, they’re not suffering any­more . . .

A useless rationalization. Wherever the bugs went, the habitat was destroyed, certainly wiping out entire species; all kinds of indigenous life would suffer for un­told generations. And on a more immediate level, No­guchi could hear rasping, mewling sounds coming from somewhere across the vast space, soft and droning. The noises were not bug; she could only hope that the liv­ing incubators were deeply asleep, perhaps dreaming of life, spared the horror of their fates until the very end.

Topknot signaled and spoke, telling the chosen

eight to ready themselves. They hefted their coils of rope, a heavy, braided leatherlike material that was stronger than anything humans had. Topknot’s briefing aboard the ship had been fairly straightforward; the capture team would rope the queen and hold her down while the Leader cut her from her egg sac. The other four Hunters—herself included—would perform the basically unnecessary task of watching for drone attack. The Leader moved easily into the dark, veering left, the others falling into position behind him. Noguchi covered the right rear flank, her frustration eased only a little by the sight of Shorty covering right front. It was nice that the spotlight wasn’t on her for a change. As senior Hunters on the ship, Topknot, Scar, and Three-Spot were used to her, as were the regular crew— mostly Blooded yautja too old to fight anymore. How­ever they felt about it, they didn’t study her every move on Hunt. But with each new training group, No­guchi was made painfully aware of how unprecedented her presence was; they watched her as she might once have watched some animal performing tricks. By fuck­ing up. Shorty had taken some of the scrutiny off of her; his peers would be watching to see if he was com­petent, the unBlooded always eager to improve their caste—

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