'How many?' Ripley asked.
'Can't tell. Lots. Hard to tell how many of them are alive and which are down. They lose arms and legs and keep coming until the guns hit them square.' Hudson's gaze flicked to another readout. 'D gun's down to twenty rounds. Ten.' He swallowed. 'It's out.'
Abruptly all firing ceased as the remaining gun ran out of shells. Smoke and mist obscured the double pickup view from below. Small fires burned where tracers had set flammable material ablaze in the corridor. The floor was littered with twisted and blackened corpses, a biomechanical bone-yard. As they stared at the monitors several bodies collapsed and disappeared as the acid leaking from their limbs chewed a monstrous hole in the floor.
Nothing lunged from the clinging pall of smoke to rip the silent weapons from their mounts. The motion- sensor alarm was silent.
'What's going on?' Hudson fiddled uncertainly with his instruments. 'What's going on, where are they?'
'I'll be. ' Ripley exhaled sharply. 'They gave up. They retreated. The guns stopped them. That means they can reason enough to connect cause and effect. They didn't just keep coming mindlessly.'
'Yeah, but check this out.' Hicks tapped the plastic between a pair of readouts. The counter that monitored D gun rested on zero. C gun was down to ten—a few seconds worth of firepower at the previous rate. 'Next time they can walk right up to the door and knock. If only the APC hadn't blown.'
'If the APC hadn't blown, we wouldn't be standing here talking about it. We'd be driving somewhere talking with the turret gun,' Vasquez pointed out sharply.
Only Ripley wasn't discouraged. 'But they don't know how far the guns are down. We hurt them. We actually hurt them. Right now they're probably off caucusing somewhere, or whatever it is they do to make group decisions. They'll start looking for another way to get in. That'll take them awhile, and when they decide on another approach, they'll be more cautious. They're going to start seeing those sentry guns everywhere.'
'Maybe we got 'em demoralized.' Hudson picked up on her confidence. He had some colour back in his face. 'You were right Ripley. The ugly monsters aren't invulnerable.'
Hicks looked up from the console and spoke to Vasquez and the comtech. 'I want you two walking the perimetre. Operations to Medical. That's about all we can cover. I know we're all strung-out, but try to stay frosty and alert. If Ripley's right they'll start testing the walls and conduits. We've got to stop any entries before they get out of hand. Pick them off one at a time as they try to get through.'
The two troopers nodded. Hudson abandoned the console picked up his rifle, and joined Vasquez in heading for the main corridor. Ripley located a half cup of coffee, picked it up, and drained the tepid contents in a single swallow. It tasted lousy but soothed her throat. The corporal watched her, waited unti she'd finished.
'How long since you slept? Twenty-four hours?'
Ripley shrugged indifferently. She wasn't surprised by the question. The constant tension had drained her. If she looked half as tired as she felt, it was no wonder that Hicks had expressed concern. Exhaustion threatened to overwhelm her before the aliens did. When she replied, her voice was distant and detached.
'What difference does it make? We're just marking time.'
'That's not what you've been saying.'
She nodded toward the corridor that had swallowed Hudson and Vasquez. 'That was for their benefit. Maybe a little for myself too. We can sleep but they won't. They won't slow down and they won't back off until they have what they want, and what they want is us. They'll get us too.'
'Maybe. Maybe not.' He smiled slightly.
She tried to smile back but wasn't sure if she accomplished it or not. Right then she'd have traded a year's flight salary for a hot cup of fresh coffee, but there was no one to trade with, and she was too tired to work on the dispenser. She slung the flamethrower over her shoulder.
'Hicks, I'm not going to wind up like those others. Like the colonists and Dietrich and Crowe. You'll take care of it, won't you, if it comes to that?'
'If it comes to that,' he told her softly, 'I'll do us both Although if we're still here when the processing station blows it won't be necessary. That'll take care of everything, us and them. Let's see that it doesn't.'
This time she was sure she managed a grin. 'I can't figure you, Hicks. Soldiers aren't supposed to be optimists.'
'Yeah, I know. You're not the first to point it out. I'm a freakin' anomaly.' Turning, he picked something up from behind the tactical console. 'Here, I'd like to introduce you to a close personal friend of mine.'
With the smoothness and ease of long practice he disengaged the pulse-rifle's magazine and set it aside. Then he handed her the weapon.
'M-41A 10-mm pulse-rifle, over and under with a 30mm pump-action grenade launcher. A real cutie-pie. The Marine's best friend, spouses notwithstanding. Almost jam-proof self-lubricating, works under water or in a vacuum and can blow a hole through steel plate. All she asks is that you keep her clean and don't slam her around too much and she'll keep you alive.'
Ripley hefted the weapon. It was bulky and awkward stuffed with recoil-absorbent fibre to counter the push from the high-powered shells it fired. It was much more impressive than her flamethrower. She raised the muzzle and pointed it experimentally at the far wall.
'What do you think?' Hicks asked her. 'Can you handle one?'
She looked back at him, her voice level. 'What do I do?'
He nodded approvingly and handed her the magazine.
No matter how quiet he tried to be, Bishop still made noise as the portable flight terminal and his sack of equipment scraped along the bottom of the conduit. No human being could have maintained the pace he'd kept up since leaving Operations, but that didn't mean he could keep going indefinitely. There were limits even to a synthetic's abilities.
Enhanced vision enabled him to perceive the walls of the pitch-dark tunnel as it continued receding ahead of him. A human would have been totally blinded in the cylindrical duct At least he didn't have to worry about losing his way. The conduit provided almost a straight shot to the transmitter tower.
An irregular hole appeared in the right-hand wall, admitting a feeble shaft of light. Among the emotions that had been programmed into him was curiosity. He paused to peer through the acid-etched crack. It would be nice to be able to take a bearing in person instead of having to rely exclusively on the computer printout of the service- shaft plans.
Drooling jaws flashed toward his face to slam against the enclosing steel with a vicious scraping sound.
Bishop flattened himself against the far side of the conduit as the echo of the attack rang along the metal. The curve of the wall where the jaws had struck bent slightly inward. Hurriedly he resumed his forward crawl. To his considerable surprise the attack was not repeated, nor could he sense any apparent pursuit.
Maybe the creature had simply sensed motion and had struck blindly. When no reaction had been forthcoming from inside the duct, there was no reason for it to strike again. How did it detect potential hosts? Bishop went through the motions of breathing without actually performing respiration. Nor did he smell of warmth or blood. To a marauding alien an android might seem like just another piece of machinery. So long as one didn't attack or offer resistance, you might be able to walk freely among them. Not that such an excursion appealed to Bishop, since the reactions and motives of the aliens remained unpredictable, but it was a useful bit of information to have acquired. If the hypothesis could be verified, it might offer a means of studying the aliens.
Let someone else study the monsters, he thought. Let someone else seek verification. A bolder model than himself was required. He wanted off Acheron as much for his own sake as for that of the humans he was working with.
He glanced at his chronometre, faintly aglow in the darkness. Still behind schedule. Pale and strained, he tried to move faster.
Ripley had the stock of the big gun snugged up against her cheek. She was doing her best to keep pace with Hicks's instructions, knowing that they didn't have much time knowing that if she had to use the weapon, she wouldn't be able to ask a second time how something worked. Hicks was as patient with her as possible, considering that he was trying to compress a complete weapons instruction course into a couple of minutes.
The corporal stood close behind her, positioning her arms as he explained how to use the built-in sight. It required a mutua effort to ignore the intimacy of their stance. There was little enough warmth in the devastated colony, little enough humanity to cling to, and this was the first physical, rather than verbal, contact between
