Morrison risked shouting. “Skysky? Are you there, Skysky?”
Nothing.
“Watch yourselves, boys,” Morrison said. “I think we got trouble.”
It made no sense, Morrison thought, but it seemed like an alien must have grabbed Skysky, broken his neck before he could do any more than gurgle, and taken his body away.
The suppressors were supposed to hide them from the aliens.
But Skysky was definitely gone.
So, one of two things. Either Skysky's suppressor had failed, or he had walked right into an alien, and that close, it had been able to figure out what Skysky was.
A six-foot breeding organism.
Don't think about that.
“You gotta really watch hard,” Morrison said, as if the men needed to be told. “Skysky must have gotten careless. The mist is lifting again. Maybe we can find someplace to hide.”
The mist dissipated swiftly. The men could see about fifty yards on all sides of them. The visibility continued to improve, and Morrison told them to fan out. The men complied and, following Morrison's lead, continued to move steadily toward something that looked like a brown breast on the horizon.
They were passing groups of aliens, but now were able to keep a better distance. The aliens continued to ignore them.
Until one alien stopped ignoring them.
It stopped in midstride, swiveled, turning its huge head slowly, and then locked in on something. It turned toward it and began to run.
When Styson looked to his left, he saw an alien coming straight for him — not for anyone else in the group, but him. He threw up his rifle and fired. The caseless round broke through the alien's shoulder, almost severing the arm at the shoulder joint. It just seemed to make the creature angrier than it already was. Aliens start out angry and build from there.
Ignoring the arm dangling from its side, it grabbed Styson around the waist with its good arm. Styson screamed and tried to get the carbine into line. The alien opened its jaws. The secondary jaws looked out for a moment, then rammed into Styson's face.
Styson had tried to duck at the last instant, so the secondary jaw caught him in the left eye rather than the mouth. The tooth-lined mouth punched through to Styson's brain, and when it withdrew, it took a fair amount of gray matter along with it. And then the alien turned away from Styson and revolved its head again.
The other four men had frozen into position, not daring to move while the alien was prowling around Styson, unable to shoot without hitting their comrade.
It turned out that shooting wasn't necessary. Not at that moment, anyhow. The alien turned and loped away, rejoining the group it had left earlier.
Morrison got the men moving again.
51
Their breathing space was short. Aliens continued to stream past the three crewmen. But now, some of those closest to the humans were slowing down, turning their heads this way and that. Morrison prayed that they had stiff necks or something. But no such luck. Two of the aliens turned away from the stream and started toward the group. After a moment a third one joined them.
“Shit!” Morrison said. There was no doubt where that bunch were going. Straight at him. He started firing when they were still thirty yards off, then pushed the selector and fired a grenade. In fact, he fired off all his grenades, something he hadn't meant to do, but he wasn't used to these weapons, which were military style. The grenades went lobbing in the air, and most of them came down behind the aliens. Morrison's last one hit an alien in the chest and, a moment later, exploded in its face. The alien was thrown backward by the force of the explosion. He picked himself up, but his face, such as it was, was ruined. His mouth was gaping open, and through his jaws protruded the smaller secondary jaws. They hung limp at the end of their muscular tube. The tube appeared to have been bitten through. The alien was not out of it yet, though. Shaking its head, it moved again toward Morrison, limping but still deadly.
Morrison didn't have time for that one yet. The two closer ones were coming up fast. He took the one to his left, blasting caseless projectiles into its chest. He could hear firing near him. It was Eka Nu, who had moved up to join him. Farther away, Larrimer tried to join them, but a long black arm came out of nowhere and caught him in midstride. He jerked around like a trout on a hook as the alien brought him close to his face. Then it released the facehugger, and Larrimer fell to the ground, moaning and twitching. The alien hoisted him to his shoulder. Larrimer knew he was going to have the worst death he could have imagined, hanging just barely alive from a wall in the hive while a newborn grew within him, getting ready to eat its way out.
Morrison and Eka Nu had their hands full with the two aliens, who were coming at them at a full charge. Morrison saw his projectiles slam into the alien, and still it kept coming. He fired until the magazine was empty. He fired the last rounds with his eyes closed. When he opened them, the alien was dead at his feet. Eka Nu hadn't been so lucky, however. The alien on his side had kept on coming on all fours, had grabbed Eka Nu around the shoulders, hugged the crewman to him, then turned him. The two stared face-to-face for a moment, then the facehugger hit and Eka Nu knew no more.
Morrison found himself alone. He was panting, exhausted, trembling. The guys were all gone. He looked around. He didn't see any aliens. Maybe they had left Maybe he could still find …
Then something moved on the ground. It was the alien he had winged. He was still coming, crawling. And behind him, half a dozen others were starting over.
Yes, Morrison thought, I guess you could say the suppressors had failed. No other explanation.
I did the best I could, he thought as he turned the carbine so its muzzle faced him. He preferred a slug in the mouth to a facehugger.
The harvester's entry lock gave way under repeated blows from the outside. The door flew open. Big-bodied, ghastly, and weird, three aliens crowded into it, their eager, evil faces turning at all angles on short powerful necks, checking out the place, alert for danger. They ignored Norbert, protected by his suppressor. The dead crewmen from the harvester required no attention.
Stan, watching from the lander, said, “All right, Norbert. Do it now.”
Norbert lifted Mac, removed his collar into which a suppressor was built, and handed him to one of the aliens. The alien showed no surprise, quietly accepted Mac from Norbert's arms.
Handling the dog carefully, the alien turned, left the ship, and joined the others outside. Then, as if in response to an inaudible signal, they all started marching across the plain. Stan, Gill, and Julie watched on their screen as Norbert fell into line behind the group of aliens carrying Mac. Watching from the lander through Norbert's vision sensors was uncannily like being within the robot alien himself, feeling his body sway and move as it negotiated the uneven ground. Stan had to adjust the audio because the wind out there on AR-32's plain had risen swiftly after the mist dissipated and now was shrieking like a banshee, pushing and pulling against the line of aliens, slowing but not stopping them as sand was alternately pushed into mounds in front of them and then suddenly scoured away.
They were moving toward the hive, which was now and then revealed as Norbert changed the angle of his vision from the ground immediately in front of him to the hazy horizon line. The hive was still quite a long way away, perhaps a hundred yards, when the aliens stopped and began looking around.
Stan leaned close to the screen and stared but he couldn't tell what they were looking for. A specially coded pheromone signal, perhaps, because they fanned out and continued searching, their heads turning back and forth like hounds following a scent.
At last one of them found something. A silent signal seemed to pass between him and the others, and they all moved together to a piece of ground that looked no different to Stan's eyes than any other. Rooting in the soil, the leading alien dislodged a large flat piece of stone, revealing a shallow tunnel leading into the earth.
The tunnel sloped downward for perhaps twenty feet, then leveled out. It had been made with some care.
