Predator - Incursion (13 page)

The idea of harnessing such beasts, weaponizing them,
controlling
them, was one defense against the unknown. As well as against the beasts themselves.

I still don’t believe I was an afterthought. I simply think that Wordsworth assumed I was safest where I was, drifting alone until all preparations were made and the Founders were ready to depart. I was
vital
to them. These current events illustrate that—in ways more terrible, more tragic, than I could ever have imagined.

For that, my guilt runs even deeper.

Beyond the Human Sphere
July 2692
AD

“In the deep, in the dark, let light blossom to illuminate our way home.”

The messages had been designed to instill hope. Two years before, even as she had sent the first of them as instructed by Beatrix Maloney herself, Liliya had grasped onto the notion that this was all for the good.

The messages said so.

Sent on a sub-space frequency that could only be known to descendants of those left behind over two centuries before, they spoke of a great return, a welcoming into a brave new world, and they seeded a promise that had originally been left behind.
We will come back for you
.

Now, they
were
coming back, but Liliya knew that it wasn’t hope they brought. Halfway through sending the final message, suspicions aroused, she discovered that the messages communicated far more than mere words.

“You were never forgotten,” she said. The room she stood in was circular, warm, comfortable, grown rather than built. Just another part of the incredible technology the Founders had discovered out among the stars, and which the Rage were now carrying back in their starships. “You were always fresh in our minds, while we traveled and explored, while we discovered and developed. In the centuries since we left we have grown, and now that return is at hand, our growth will be your future.”

Liliya had a script but did not need it. The messages were memorized the first time Beatrix recited them to her, and the lies were clearer than ever as she spoke them aloud. Her words were recorded into the transmission bubble, alive in the air before her, loaded and ready to send.

There was something else in the transmission bubble that her words could not have put there. An infestation, like a smear on the air. Perhaps Beatrix assumed she would never see it, and if Liliya hadn’t been so suspicious, so jaded by all that was happening and what she suspected would happen in the near future, maybe she wouldn’t have seen it.

Her senses were more open and alert than ever before, looking for deception, and her mind was so much greater than it had ever been. Beatrix had seen to that, almost without realizing it. More than three hundred years old, Liliya might well be the oldest synthetic in the galaxy. In her unnaturally long existence, she had learned so much.

“For now, our return is your secret, and it must remain so,” she said, her words coalescing and dancing, merging with the errant message in the transmission bubble, readying to be sent.

How did I not notice this before?
she thought.
If it was there all those other times, how could I not see it?
Maybe she hadn’t been looking with enough suspicion, and with such corrupted thoughts.

Everything that should have been right had gone wrong.

“Listen to these words. Revel in them. They are your prayer.”

Her speech finished, Liliya stepped back to the edge of the room and whispered, “Store.” The transmission bubble shrank down to nothing, and then the unit at the center of the chamber issued a soft red glow. The message was ready.

Liliya paused.

What else was in there?

Her orders were to dictate the message, and then send it immediately, and like every other time, she almost did just that.

Almost.

But in her three centuries, she had also become cranky. She had her own mind, her own desires, and following orders was something she only did if she saw fit. She always gave the
impression
that she was doing as instructed, but sometimes she paused, took a breath, and analyzed her actions.

Even after so long, she was still becoming human.

She accessed the ship’s Brain and assessed where Beatrix was right now. Close, and moving toward her. But not
too
close.

Liliya crossed the room and pressed her hand against the glowing unit. She closed her eyes and retreated into her own mind, that old computerized consciousness that now merged with the even more complex element that she liked to call her
soul
. She probed deep, listening to the speech she had just spoken.

Deeper, and there was something else there, arcane and confusing. At first she thought the message was corrupted, and that perhaps the alien technology the Rage had adopted was intruding into their reality once more.

But then she analyzed what she found, and realized that this was in fact a very human subversion.

She gasped and stepped back, wiping her hand on her trousers. Biological programming! Alien technology, far beyond the comprehension of any of them. Too dangerous, too unknown to be used—but Beatrix Maloney was using it anyway.

“Stupid,” Liliya said. Biological programming was the building and programming of nano-devices crafted from existing living matter. The prompt-coding could be applied in many ways—directly, intravenously, by airborne contagion…

Or by suggestion.

Buried beneath the surface message of hope her transmission carried was a command. Liliya did her best to understand it, and her suspicions of what to expect probably helped. Combined with her spoken message, the covert transmission would initiate a process of nano-construction, control, and eventual destruction.

“All lies,” she said, and then she heard the familiar sound of Beatrix Maloney’s approach. The gentle hum of her platform drifting through the air and then, as she grew closer, the gurgle and swish of her suspension system.

“Liliya?” she called even before she entered the room. “Have you finished?”

“No,” Liliya said, “and I won’t.”

Beatrix entered. Her platform floated through the doorway and hovered, holding the thin, ancient woman two feet above the floor. Propped in a sitting position, torso and limbs suspended in the clear gel containment suit, she presented a pathetic image, but Liliya knew that she was anything but pathetic. With strength came power, and Beatrix had plenty of both.

“Won’t?”

“Beatrix,” Liliya said sadly, shaking her head.

“You’ve known all along,” the old woman said. “Since Wordsworth died and I took over, you’ve always known what my final aim would be.”

“I’ve always known that returning was your plan,” Liliya responded. “Of course, but not like this. What message are you sending? What are you asking people to do? I never expected our return to be so
aggressive
.”

“And why not?” Maloney countered. “They drove us away in the first place. Banished us to deep space—to the cold, the dangers.”

“The Founders fled of their own accord!”

“Do you really think that, Liliya?”

“I
know
that. I was there.”

“And so was I. While you were floating in your escape pod for decades, I saw what it was like for the Founders, two centuries ago. Persecuted. Vilified for their beliefs. Driven out, and now we’re taking back what should always have been ours.”

“Wordsworth would have never done it like this.”

“Wordsworth is dead!” Maloney spat, her suspension fluid bubbling as if in reaction to her mood. “And he was weak.”

“If what you say is true, we should return in peace. Share what we’ve found… all that knowledge, that technology.”

Beatrix laughed, a surprisingly light, airy sound from someone so old, so strange.

“You think they’ll welcome us with open arms?”

“Why not? We’ll be bringing technology and advances the likes of which they can’t dream.”

“They’ll steal it from us. All of it—you know that as well as me.
Better
than me. You were there when it all began, and if it weren’t for you—”

“Don’t say that. Don’t pretend I’m responsible.”

“I’m not pretending, Liliya. If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t have
them
!”

Them
, Liliya thought bitterly.
I can’t accept that I made them.

“Send the message, Liliya.”

“And what will happen?”

“It will smooth our return.” The old woman smiled, a wrinkled grimace that split her face.

“It’ll corrupt those who hear it. You
know
it will build biologically based nano-bots to reprogram their minds. What will it make them do? What destruction will it cause?”

Beatrix floated closer, and Liliya stepped between her and the unit. The room felt suddenly much smaller, as if the walls had grown inward. This old woman, this one-time friend, now meant her harm. Liliya could see that in her eyes. She could see madness there, too, had recognized that for some time. In her foolishness she’d believed that she might be able to temper it.

“What’s the point in finding utopia if you can’t take it home?” Beatrix said.

“You call this utopia?” Liliya laughed, shoving against the floating platform and sending Beatrix clattering against the wall. They both froze. Liliya had never struck out at her before.

“Liliya—”

“I won’t allow it,” Liliya said. “I can’t!”

“You’ll do as I tell you.”

“No,” she said. “I’m not cowed by you, Beatrix. I’m not a machine, like your followers.”

Maloney sneered, but then seemed to see something in Liliya’s expression that gave her doubt.

“Guards,” she whispered.

* * *

Liliya could have fought. She might even have been able to take down the two Rage troopers and cancel the sub-space broadcast, but she couldn’t halt it forever, and right then a new idea was already blooming. In truth, it had been there since Wordsworth’s murder by this woman’s hand.

Liliya allowed herself to be pulled aside and watched as Beatrix drifted forward, reached out with her gel-supported arm, and sent the message.

“We’ll be there soon,” the Rage leader said to Liliya. “Make up your mind.”

I already have
, Liliya thought.

It was time to steal, and flee again.

Love Grove Base, Research Station, LV-1529
July 2692
AD

“So is he as much of a prick as you’d feared?”

“I can’t help liking him.” Isa shrugged and took another swig from Rogers’s hip flask. She imported coffee beans, he brought in single malt. As he sometimes said, they were made for each other. “He’s a Company man through and through, but he’s as excited about the Yautja as I am.”

“Weird,” Rogers said, seat reclined, feet on the rover’s steering column. “I can just picture the two of you, alone in that lab. Those dead things there, naked. Your dilated pupils, those surgical gloves…”

“Shit, Rogers, is there anything on your mind other than sex?”

“Only occasionally,” he said. He frowned, staring through the windscreen at the storm raging outside. The rover rocked slightly where it was parked.

Palant took another swig, then passed the hip flask back to her friend. He saluted her and drank—kept looking at her and smiling, and she knew that he’d missed her. It took a trip away from the base to make her realize that she’d missed him, too. Almost fifty days had passed since the two dead Yautja had been delivered, and she had worked every day since, sometimes fourteen hours each day.

Milt McIlveen had arrived twelve days after Marshall’s communication with her, and had worked with her ever since. Her entire existence had become focused on the bodies. For a while, she forgot where she was.

It had taken a lot of persuading from Rogers to get her out here again, but now she was so glad that she’d relented.

“You look pale,” he said. “Tired and overworked.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“Why do you think I pull this duty as much as I can?”

“Oh, yes, aren’t we supposed to be patrolling the boundary?”

“Nothing to patrol it against.”