Predator - Incursion (7 page)

Outside the lab doors she breathed in the scent of cooling coffee, closed her eyes, and brushed her hand across the entry pad.

Inside, everything had changed.

* * *

“Fucking hell.”

Palant rarely found the need to swear.

“Fucking, fucking hell.”

In the main room, several heavy tables had been dragged together into the center, their scattered contents taken off and piled on a unit in the lab’s far corner. Her initial thought was,
How dare they?
That accumulated debris consisted of a large part of her research for the past several months.

A tablet had been dropped on the floor, one corner dented, holo screen flickering with a trapped image. A stand of glass pipettes had tipped from the table and lay shattered. One of the lab’s several safety drones had applied safety foam to the scattered glass, producing a clear, solidified bubble mass that was designed to isolate any dangerous or toxic elements let loose in a spill.

The pipettes had been empty. She had long wished for something to place in them.

It looked as if that wish had been granted.

The two Yautja corpses were still encased in their vacuum-packed coffin bags, a heavy white material stronger than steel hugging every contour of the bodies. Though they weren’t visible, the nature of the bodies was obvious. Palant knew them so well.

One was taller than the other, almost as long as the nine-foot table it lay upon. Their bodies were broad, legs long, feet heavy and clawed. Both had arms crossed over their stomachs, but the one on the right seemed to be lacking something there. As for their heads, so broad and distinctive, one was bare, the long tusks tenting the tight material. The other seemed to still be wearing its helmet, though the shape was all wrong, with a deep depression in the left-hand side and a good portion of its mass missing.

They kept the helmet on to hold in what was left
, she guessed.

She knew now why Marshall had been so keen to contact her. Palant could imagine him, smarmy and confident, breaking the secret to her face to face and enjoying the reaction she would try to control. She was glad she’d stolen the surprise from him.

Breathing hard, she entered the lab and closed the door behind her, sealing herself inside with these two majestic corpses.

She had seen plenty of body parts, studied data from other scientists, examined so much footage of Yautja attacks—most of it confused, much of it caught by Colonial Marines’ combat-suit sensors—that she had even started to convince herself that she knew them well.

But she had never known them well. They were an enigma to her, and the more she studied and discovered, the more questions she had to ask herself. Now, perhaps some of those questions could be answered.

“Computer, what’s the status of the bodies?” She had never felt the need to personalize her lab computer, not even granting it a name. Their relationship seemed to benefit from that.

“Afternoon, Isa. They’ve been out of stasis for just more than three hours. Decay rates—sample one, four percent; sample two, six percent.”

“Too much,” she said. “Prepare the pods.” Her heart was beating fast, her senses alive. She thought she could smell decay in the lab, though that was impossible. She blinked and imagined one of the coffin bags moving. “Contact Central, tell them to send three technicians to help get them shifted. Are the pods functional?”

“Of course. I maintain them regularly and run daily tests. They’ll be ready in seven minutes.”

“Thanks.” In one small room off the lab there were three stasis pods, two full-sized, one smaller, kept available for instances such as this. They were specially adapted to accommodate the Yautja physiology, and she had always dreamed of filling them.

What else do I need to do?
Palant was breathing faster, tapping her left hand against her leg as she contemplated how much these corpses would feed her future. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe slower, imagining what her parents would say. It was nothing she could say aloud, not in a Company facility. They had always seen Weyland-Yutani as corrupt and morally bankrupt, and Palant had always felt a flush of shame at coming to work for them after her parents’ deaths.

“But I can learn so much,” she whispered, filling the lab with her hope.

“Sub-space comms incoming from Gerard Marshall, signal source Charon Station.”

“Block it, I don’t want to talk to—”

“Sorry. He’s using his override.” The mobile holo frame lifted from the far wall and drifted across the lab to her, and as it did so the space contained within blurred, flickered, and then changed.

Gerard Marshall smiled at her. He was visible from the shoulders up, leaning back in a chair with a fake background of waving grass, sunny skies, and flitting birds. Sub-space quirks distorted his image a little, flickering, giving him a ghostly echo to left and right that didn’t quite mimic his own movements. She always found it strange talking to someone who was so far away. Almost five hundred light years, in this case. Somehow, the impossibility of it made the distances involved even more shocking.

“Isa Palant,” he said, with what seemed like genuine affection. It made her skin crawl. “How are things on the edge of space?”

Isa waited for him to say more.

“You can answer,” he said. “You know the Thirteen have been developing sub-space channels open for real-time conversation.”

“Yes,” Isa said. “Right. Things are…” She glanced past the frame at the two bodies, then smiled. “Well, you know how they are.”

His three-dimensional image leaned closer, growing larger. “I hope you like them. Isn’t it exciting? I tried talking to you earlier, I wanted to tell you all about them myself.”

“I was off base,” Palant said.

“Yes, well. You’re back now.” His replies were a little delayed, and they didn’t match his image’s movements. It was all very disconcerting.

She’d researched Marshall, as much as she could without being obviously and traceably intrusive. Though a senior executive at the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, he’d never left the Sol System, and he rarely traveled into environments without proper atmospheres—Earth, Titan, Mars, and the other system moons that were still being terraformed. She didn’t know whether it was fear or need of comfort that made him an unwilling space traveler.

Now he was on Charon Station, the massive space habitat orbiting the home system at roughly the distance of Pluto’s furthest orbit. It was known as the Colonial Marines’ main control base and home for General Paul Bassett, the Marines’ commander.

It was so strange, being able to have a real-time conversation over such a vast distance. Stranger still that the Thirteen kept such tech to themselves and a few close confidantes.

“They’re quite spectacular,” Palant said. She could hardly concentrate on the conversation. The bodies drew her attention.

“I hope you’ll be able to—” The image flickered, his face ghosted, versions of him that seemed both younger and older. Then it settled again. “—badly damaged? I was told not.”

“I can’t see yet, but they look quite complete. I can report to you later, after my initial examinations.” It was a tacit request that he let her go, but Marshal wasn’t yet finished.

“Please do. They were killed by a detachment of Excursionists on the Outer Rim. They’d attacked a medical research station, resulting in quite a few deaths. All very sad.” He sighed, not sounding sad at all. “Isa, we’ve spoken before about what we expect of you. Now, more than ever, those expectations need to be fulfilled.”

“Of course,” she said.

“Of course.” His smile grew thin. “I know your love of these things. I know that your intentions and desires are pure—but there has been a surge in attacks lately, across several sectors of the Outer Rim, and a few more deeper within the Sphere. Our prime concern, our number-one priority, is to understand as much as we can about Yautja weaponry and martial capabilities.”

“Yes,” she said.

“We’re sending someone to work with you on this.”

She raised her eyebrows, attention snapping back to Marshall.

“Milt McIlveen.” More ghosting. One of his images seemed to sneer at the other. Isa wanted to look away, shut down the transmission, but she could not. “—a good man. As fascinated in them as you.”

“But?”

“But…” That smile again, so two dimensional. “He has a true grasp of our requirements.”

“So do I, Mr. Marshall.”

“Yes. You do.” He went to sign off, then paused. “Isa, I know you see me as a Company man. And I am, through and through. My aims are pure in this. Can you imagine what would happen if the Yautja launched a true attack?”

“They’re not like that. Their society isn’t built or structured that way. They’re essentially loners, drawing together for special ceremonies, or mating, or perhaps other reasons we don’t know about yet, but they’re not conquerors. There’s no scheming in what they do. There’s an honesty to them.”

“That honesty killed over twenty station staff and two Excursionists at Southgate Station 12,” Marshall said. “And while I accept what you say, we can’t second guess them. We don’t know enough to do that. Keep your priorities in mind, that’s all I’m saying. Your assistant will be there in seventeen days.”

Palant smiled and nodded and kept smiling as Marshall’s image faded away. The holo frame drifted back to its dock on the far wall, and the room seemed unnaturally silent.

“Help is here,” the computer said. The doors opened behind her and three people stepped inside.

Palant crossed to the bodies and rested her hand on one of the coffin suits for the first time.

It was cold. Cold as space.

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

Since the first signal had arrived a little over two years before, Angela Svenlap’s life had been taking on meaning. Before that fateful moment, she had passed the days, months, and years with a mysterious hollowness inside. Highly intelligent, curious, eager to learn, she had long proven herself to be a forward-thinking and energetic person.

From her birthplace on Jupiter’s moon Io, her journey out into the Human Sphere had taken years, because wherever she stopped she found something else to fascinate her. After a fateful meeting on Addison Prime, the focus of her curiosity had narrowed toward the Yautja. The old man had been a survivor of a Yautja attack on a Titan ship over fifty years earlier, and she had sat and interviewed him for days.

Since then, Svenlap had become an authority on Yautja appearances throughout human history. The veracity of such reports dwindled the further back in time they went. For several hundred years before there were fairly reliable accounts, stored in free access quantum folds, storage streams, or even a few old hard discs she had come across or been sent by others who knew her interest. From before that, there were some books still in existence that recorded what
might
have been Yautja presences on Earth before interplanetary space travel.

Before that, only conjecture.

She liked investigating. It made her feel alive. But even while immersed in a new case, with every waking minute spent reading, cross-referencing, trying to match evidence with diverse and seemingly unconnected reportage and accounts, that hollowness within persisted.

Sometimes she tried to examine it. Assessing it from afar, the void averted its gaze. Looking directly inward at it made her depressed. It was as if she was uncertain who she was. As if the person she believed herself to be—the Angela Svenlap who had been building herself up around this dark hollow for the full fifty-seven years of her life—was merely a mannequin, constructed to camouflage something deeper and more shadowed.

Then that message—a few simple words that had brought meaning.

The Founders have not forgotten you
.

Her life had changed in an instant. That change continued.

It was the older sightings she enjoyed researching most. She had one scanned photograph, several questionable testimonies, and a doctor’s written report with much of its detail redacted. The photograph was black-and-white, out of focus, and hazed by battlefield smoke and chaos. The testimonies had been translated from their original Russian by a German soldier, and in turn translated again by an American academic several years after the end of World War Two. It had been a place of terror, a confused and hellish landscape, hardly the scene for trusted eyewitness accounts.

Finally, the doctor’s report had been hacked to pieces by his superiors. It was this more than anything else that convinced Svenlap that she might have something.

She stared at the photo on the holo frame before her. After putting it through every focusing, adjustment, and clarification process she could think of—and allowing her computer to assess it with several approaches that hadn’t even crossed her mind—she had returned the image to its original, seven-hundred-year-old form.

The shadow of a blasted building on the left. A street, piled with rubble and corpses and the blazing remains of a military vehicle of some kind. On the right, another ruined building, and framed in an open doorway, a figure. Too tall for the doorway, it seemed to be standing back and observing the chaos. Wide chest. Jutting jaw. The silhouette of a hairstyle quite unlike any worn by people of the time, men or women. In its lowered right hand, something that might have been a spear.