Lex tore at the cocoon with her hands, but it was futile. The surface was as hard as marble. Lex drew a piton and hacked at the enveloping shell, gouging out a few splinters before the steel spike blunted and bent in her hand.
“No!” Sebastian gasped. “It’s too late. You have to stop these things.”
Sebastian convulsed. The tendons in his neck bulged as his head jerked from side to side. His mouth gaped open, and blood flowed from his nose.
“Lex… They can’t reach the surface…” he moaned, struggling.
The Predator appeared behind Lex. Gazing impassively at the dying man, he rested his huge hand on Lex’s shoulder. She shrugged it off and lunged at the cocoon, beating it with her fists.
“Don’t worry, Sebastian. I’m getting you out of there!”
Scar gripped her shoulder again, far less gently now. The Predator dragged her back, away from the cocoon, as she struggled against him.
“Get off me,” Lex cried, eyes wet. “I have to help him.”
The emotion she’d buried in order to survive overwhelmed her now. She’d watched Max Stafford and Charles Weyland die, and she was not about to give up on Sebastian. Not without a fight.
But still Scar pulled her away.
“Let me go,” she screamed.
“Make it to the surface…” The Predator’s modulated voice replayed Lex’s own words to her again.
“I said get off me!”
“Kill me!” Sebastian cried out with the last of his strength. “Do it.”
He convulsed again. The pale, naked flesh under his heart began to stretch and bulge. Crimson rents appeared as his skin split open and blood gushed everywhere. Then the man threw his gaze heavenward and cried out in agony.
“I’m sorry,” Lex murmured.
She raised the handgun and fired at Sebastian’s head. His tormented screams came to an abrupt end.
Lex dropped her head. The Predator stood next to her, watching the dead man, waiting…
Suddenly a creature clawed its way out of the dead man’s abdomen and launched itself at Scar. With lightning-fast reflexes, the Predator caught it in his hand. He held it firmly in its grip and turned it from side to side, examining it. The tiny creature squirmed to free itself, its jaws snapping at Scar’s face.
Casually the Predator snapped its neck between his fingers as if it were a matchstick.
The Aliens came from every corner of the pyramid, singly, in pairs, and in clusters large and small. Like a rippling tide of black oil, the swarm flowed down sheer walls and deep shafts, and made their way through drainage tunnels and narrow air spaces between the thick walls. Tittering and hissing, they instinctively responded to the maternal cries of their Queen.
In a great living tsunami the creatures surged into the Queen’s chamber, hastening to the edge of the misty, frozen pool. Others crawled down the stone walls or scampered down the long, barbed chains that held their Queen captive.
The largest group of Aliens was led by the alpha-Alien with the net-ravaged hide. They poured in, filling the chamber, hissing and squabbling. Then all movement ceased as the brutes bowed their eyeless heads to their matriarch. For a long time the Aliens remained still, quiet, respectful—a jet-black sea of shining, chitinous hides and slavering jaws, their cylindrical heads bowed and swaying from side to side in supplication.
The Queen rattled her chains and cried out in a sustained, sibilant hiss that inflamed her spawn and spurred them into action.
In a flurry of gnashing teeth and ripping jaws, the creatures attacked their matriarch. Leaping from the edge of the frozen pool, most caught hold of the great harnessing machine that rendered the hive mistress immobile during her reproductive labor—though a few plunged screeching to their death through the rising mist into the vapor pool.
Crawling over one another in a maniacal press to rip their mother’s flesh, the monsters moved as a single, sweeping entity, descending the walls and clinging to the chains, while others swooped down from the high ceiling like raptors.
The things caught hold of the Alien Queen in a thousand places and tore at her hide incessantly with tooth and claw. When the tittering mass reached the Queen’s head, slobbering jaws gnawed at her great horned crown, cracking the bony crest and tearing the barbed hooks loose from their moorings. Fountains of acid blood flowed in rivulets down the Queen’s ravaged frame, splattering her offspring and inflaming them to further savagery.
At last the final hook was torn from her crest in a shower of splintered bone. Although the Queen’s head was free and her jaws were more than capable of destroying any of the gnawing, rending creatures within her reach, she still did not fight back. Instead she hung there—manacled arms outstretched, head erect—as if inviting her children to feast on her flesh and drink her blood in a blasphemous orgy of matricide.
The Queen bled from a score of wounds, her boiling blood splattering everywhere. Suddenly there was a shower of sparks as the big machine that held her lower extremities began to melt. Ravaged by the Queen’s acid blood, chain metal began to twist, wires snapped and cables buckled.
Triumphantly, the Queen yanked the chain restraining her right arm, casting several of her children into the frozen mist. Fearing for their own lives, the rest of her panicked offspring reversed their course, leaping onto the floor far below, hopping onto the walls, or dangling from the remaining chains like rats escaping a sinking ship.
When both arms were free, the Queen used her claws to shred the semi-molten machine that had enslaved her for so long. Freeing her gangly legs, she still struggled against the great clamp that imprisoned her tail and reproductive organs.
Tension rippled her massive form, jaws locked and teeth clenched as the Queen ripped her trembling tail free. Then, with a snap of cartilage and a flood of bubbling, caustic slime, the Hive Queen tore her own birth canal from her body.
Free at last, the Queen leaped from the shattered platform. Chains dangled from her limbs, clattering as she moved.
Quivering with both rage and triumph, she threw up her ravaged arms and let loose a shriek that vowed vengeance and retaliatory pain….
The Alien Queen’s bloodcurdling scream echoed through the pyramid.
“What was that?” Lex cried.
She turned to Scar and witnessed a first—a frightened Predator.
“It’s
Scar touched her arm, echoing her recorded words once more like a mantra. “Keep it together…. Make it to the surface.”
But Lex shook her head. “We can’t let these things get out of here.”
Acting as if he understood her words, Scar removed a complicated and bulky device from his wrist. On its crystalline face, Alien characters glowed. Scar tapped several keys, and a cluster of symbols appeared. He thrust the device under Lex’s nose and tilted his head—his “Get it?” pose.
“I don’t understand.”
The Predator pointed to the wrist computer. Then he held out a tight fist and turned it upside down. Watching Lex, the Predator slowly unfurled his fist.
“An explosion. That thing is a bomb?”
Then she recalled the mural in the hieroglyphics chamber, which depicted a Predator with its arms raised, then a mushroom cloud.
“It is a bomb!” Lex cried.
Lex took the device from Scar’s hand. It was heavy, and she could feel it vibrate as mechanisms turned within.
“Well,” she said, “I hope it kills every fucking one of them.”
Lex tossed the bomb through the stone grate, where it plunged deeper into the heart of the pyramid.
“Keep it together. Make it to the surface,” Scar’s computer-generated voice repeated.
They started to run.
