Predator - Incursion (6 page)

“It’s held it together fine so far.”

Knowing that wasn’t quite true, Palant made sure her straps were secure, and she held the handle above her seat. They’d had to stop twice on the way out to the boundary, and Rogers had donned his protective suit both times to venture outside and strap up the loose exhaust. First time it was clogged with dust, second time it was split right open, and now it coughed and growled like an angry cat.

She’d wanted to help, but admitted ignorance when it came to anything mechanical. That just wasn’t her field. Keith Rogers had been an engineer in the Colonial Marines and knew what he was doing. An indie now, he was a vital asset to Love Grove Base. Ostensibly there as part of their security force, he spent most of his time helping the base technicians keep the place running.

“Couple of miles to go,” he said. “You want me to slow down?”

“You still trying to encourage me to park up somewhere quiet, Corporal Rogers?” she teased.

“Miss Palant, I knew from the beginning I had the wrong junk between my legs for you.”

“Christ, you’re beautifully subtle.”

“I’m ex-military, as you keep reminding me. We thrive on subtlety.”

Palant gave her deep, throaty laugh that drew so many people to her. She
enjoyed
laughing, did it as much as she could, and Rogers had proven to be an unexpected source of inspiration. She’d never have believed she could be such good friends with someone who was essentially a mercenary, but he had defied her expectations—humbled her in a way. A scientist, she welcomed every lesson, life lessons most of all. Her parents had made sure of that.

“Still, maybe a hand job…” he mumbled, and she leaned across the cab and punched him in the arm. “Ouch!”

“Big hard soldier.”

“You’re stronger than you look.”

Palant noticed that he’d slowed the rover down. She smiled. He knew just how much she liked getting out here. It wasn’t only to experience the true ruggedness of the place she had grown to call home, but also to clear her mind. She spent so much time at her work that she had to remove herself sometimes—not only from the lab, its samples, her computers and theories, but also the base itself. It flushed the accumulated debris away from her mind, and lent her a fresh perspective.

Still, every time she closed her eyes she saw the Yautja.

“Atmosphere processors,” Rogers said.

“Where?” She peered through the windscreen. The self-cleaning perspex was working hard, smeared with droplets of filthy rain, scratched with years of impacts from dust-laden winds and heavier gravel thrown by the occasional twisters that leapt up in the vicinity of the base. She squinted, then between sweeps of the wiper arms she saw the first blinking lights high atop the westernmost of the three processing towers.

The design of atmosphere processors had hardly changed in the last century—vast pyramidal structures powered by nuclear-fusion reactors, their technology way beyond her understanding. Though a scientist, Palant always maintained that paleontology demanded an artist’s mind. Some people saw the processors as beautiful things, but to her they were clumsy man-made edifices struggling against nature. Every gain they made was hard-won, and they weren’t always successful. Nevertheless, recent analyses predicted that LV-1529 would be a Class 2 planet within fifteen years, and Class 1 in seven decades.

“Getting back to your monsters this afternoon?” Rogers asked.

“Yeah, why not. Got some ideas.”

“What’re you working on now?” He’d seen the samples in her lab, the bio-frozen remnants of Yautja gathered from various contacts made over the last decade. A hand, one finger missing, the tattered stump of its wrist cauterized by the laser-rifle blast that had blown it off. The lower jaw, tusks long and sharp, inner teeth loosened where a new set had started to push through, and the various samples of blood and bodily fluids. Sad things, he sometimes thought. Other times, scary.

“I’m trying to find out how their blood helps in wound repair and regeneration,” she said. “It’s something we only discovered recently with Eve.”

“Ah, yeah, the only Yautja kept in captivity. Didn’t it kill itself?”

“That’s still debated. I believe it did. They found it dead in its cell, and I think it willed its hearts to stop beating.” Palant so wished she’d had a chance to meet Eve—to talk, ask its real name. Attempting their language was another aim of her research, although the strand that had advanced the least. Company scientists had treated it more as a vivisection experiment than what it should have been—contact with an intelligent, highly advanced alien species.

“Originally I thought it might have been killed with nano-tech, and I spent a long time trying to look into that. Artificial tech first, then when I found no evidence of that I looked into bio-tech.”

“Huh?”

“Naturally created nano-bots. W-Y have been researching it for years, without any real success. Essentially it takes tweaking genetics to create nano-bots from biological material already extant in a body, then programming those genes for specific tasks.”

“Right,” Rogers said. “I wonder what’s for dinner.”

She smiled, but knew he was joking. Rogers was brighter than he liked to let on, and they’d been friends long enough for him to understand what she talked about more than most. Sometimes she thought of inviting him to become her assistant, but she liked their relationship, and that kind of friendship required distance.

In her lab, she became far too intense.

“Thing is, after a long time looking into that, I started to think it was too basic. Old-fashioned thinking. I wasn’t giving their biology the respect it deserved. I was looking more at tech than at an evolved natural ability. So now I’ve gone back to basics, comparing their blood to other creatures that can regenerate. Newts, starfish, flatworms. The axolotl, an amazing creature. Even mammals like deer, which can regrow their antlers, and some bats that can repair damaged wings.”

“And the Company keep pumping resources at what you do?”

“Sure they do. BioWeapons and ArmoTech love me.”

Rogers said nothing. They’d talked about this many times before, and he knew that her intentions were far more pure and honest. She was utterly fascinated with the Yautja, dreamed of making meaningful contact with them, and the best way to do that was to take advantage of the Company’s ongoing desire to benefit from their various warlike technologies.

“Doesn’t it bug you, playing the system to do what you want to do?” he asked at last. The Company paid his wages, too, and it was unusual to hear him vocalize what she knew he already thought.

“I don’t see it like that,” she said. “I just have wider horizons. It’s still a great time for adventurers.”

“You should get that on a T-shirt.”

“They’re really an amazing species,” Palant said, ignoring his comment. As usual, when away from her lab, she was becoming anxious to return. Her life seemed to be one of contradictions. She valued this limited time away, then yearned to go back. She sought knowledge and dreamed of some sort of peaceful, mutually beneficial contact, yet worked for the Company whose stated aim was the furtherance of what it called the “science of war.”

Her father had once explained it to her when she was still a dreamy teenager.

The Company are scared
, he’d said.
We’re pushing out into the galaxy, incredibly slowly, yet we already know we’re far from alone. We’ve met other intelligent lifeforms, interacted, and made contact. Sometimes they’re friendly, sometimes indifferent. On occasion, we’ve had to fight. There are the Yautja, who might have been visiting us for millennia, and the further we expand, the more they notice us. The Xenomorphs haunt the darker extremes of space. And there will inevitably be other, perhaps even more deadly civilizations. The further we go, the more we might discover, and the more we will be noticed.

Weyland-Yutani know that, and they’re doing the best they can to protect humanity against any threat. The problem is… that intention is easily corrupted. With so much at stake, and so many fortunes to be made, benevolent intentions can easily be drowned out.

She had never forgotten his words and the lesson they were meant to impart. Working for Weyland-Yutani now, she was more careful than ever to hold them close.

“Battening down the hatches,” Rogers said. They were closing on Love Grove Base, and Isa could see windows and doorways covered with their heavy gray shields. Nestled in a small valley a mile from the nearest processor, it had been established by the facility builders almost fifty years ago, as a base from which they could construct and then maintain. After the processors’ completion, the place had been adapted and expanded over the past twenty years by ArmoTech, the branch of Weyland-Yutani given to research into alien weapons and technology. Another example of their effectiveness at cost-cutting. Just one drophole away from the Outer Rim, it was regarded as an ideal place for Yautja research.

The base had been named by one of the foremen building the processor plants, a bittersweet take on his memories of better times and a kinder place. It was said his home had been Love Grove, a religious commune on Triton, Neptune’s largest moon.

“Storm coming in,” Palant said, and though the base was an ugly construction with very few nods to aesthetics, she was always pleased to see it. It was home, after all.

Palant’s parents had been on their way here seventeen years before when they were killed. The report called it a freak accident. As their dropship descended from the orbiting military transport, two weather systems had clashed, resulting in violent electrical storms and two hundred miles-per-hour winds. The ship was tossed around the sky and flung to the ground like a toy, and all eighteen people on board had died. A great loss, but space was dangerous, everyone knew that.

Five years later Palant had followed her parents to Love Grove Base, landed safely, and had only been away a handful of times since.

Rogers guided the rover in between the buildings. The external doors slipped open, he maneuvered down into a subterranean garage, and the doors closed quickly behind them. Even though the atmosphere this close to the processors was breathable, the harsh weather conditions meant that sojourns outside were rare, and dangerous.

They parked, then Rogers wound down the rover’s engine and set it in park.

“Drink this evening?” he asked.

“Sure. O’Malley’s at eight?”

“It’s a date.” He always made that joke, ever since he’d first asked her out. Whatever he claimed, he
hadn’t
known her preferences. Not then.

“Thanks for the ride. Did me good.”

“Back to work, Yautja Woman!”

They parted ways in the garage area, and Palant made her way up into the base’s main levels. Angela Svenlap met her in the central distribution area, holding a coffee clutched in both hands and leaning against the railings around the wide stairwell. Palant could see that she’d been waiting for her.

“Hey, Isa! Gerard Marshall signaled a transmission for you.” She handed her the coffee.

“He did?”

“Only three times.” Svenlap smiled. She looked tired and drawn, but had still come here to deliver her message—and who wouldn’t? It wasn’t every day that one of Weyland-Yutani’s main executive officers, and one of the Thirteen, made a personal call to one of their employees.

“Okay, I’ll call and accept.”

“It’s a two-way.” Svenlap seemed excited, and smiled slightly at Isa’s surprise.

“From Sol system?”

“Yeah. You know he never leaves. I’ve heard the Thirteen have been developing tech to conduct real-time conversations through sub-space.”

“The energy that must take…”

“Guess he really wants to talk to you.”

Palant lifted the cup in thanks and took a sip. Svenlap paused, as if debating whether to say more. Then she smiled again and wandered away, and Palant took a moment to breathe in the base’s familiar, sterile atmosphere.

Marshall.
He’d taken an interest in her research from the start, and she’d never felt comfortable talking with him. She had never met him face to face, but seeing him in the holo frame always sent a shiver down her spine. He tried to present the attractive human face of the Company, but she knew some of his story. And it was ugly.

The coffee was scalding hot and bitter, not at all how Palant liked it, but Svenlap had gone to the trouble of bringing it, along with the message. She hadn’t needed to. She was quiet, as unassuming as she was clever, her pale, sad face hiding a startling intellect.

Her area of interest was Yautja history, and so their research and analysis often benefitted from regular crossover. Much of the story Svenlap was building came from human history—ancient texts, more recent suspected contacts, and comparing known Yautja behavior—interactions with humans, and methods to historical situations. Palant found it fascinating, and while history also played a part in her research, she took much more of a hands-on approach.

Walking to her labs, she wondered why Marshall had been trying to contact her. He’d called three times. It must have been something urgent. Nevertheless, she was still relaxed from the twenty-hour trip with her friend, and her mindset was somewhat refreshed. She spent far too long immersed in research in one of the three rooms that made up her lab, breathing the same air, seeing the same sights, eating the same food. Sometimes, the weight of the nothingness all around them was suffocating. The irregular jaunts she made with Rogers usually enabled her to reset herself for the next bout of work. The base looked fresher after such trip, and her future seemed brighter.

She’d heard tales of people going mad in space. Data was unreliable, and probably distorted, but a good percentage of those who lived such a life suffered mental illness of some kind, ranging from slight personality disorders to suicidal tendencies. Evolution was struggling to keep up with humanity’s progress. Palant’s parents had often lamented about how people were designed to look at a green world with blue skies, and not this. Not inimical alien landscapes being tortured into shape by man-made technology. Not the shattering horror of infinity.