AVP: Alien vs. Predator

CHAPTER 3

Mount Everest, Nepal

Climbers had two ways to ascend the Khumbu Ice-fall. The sensible route up the four-thousand-foot frozen waterfall was with Sherpa “icefall doctors.” These expert mountaineers would scout ahead, lay aluminum ladders across deep crevasses, plant anchors, and string rope so that climbers could proceed with some amount of caution—accompanied, of course, by their experienced Sherpa guides.

The reckless way to conquer the single most hazardous site on Everest was to go onto the ice alone, stake out a point at the base of the waterfall and start your ascent, placing your own anchors and stringing your own ropes as you went, hoping there weren’t any deep crevasses that needed bridging. In this type of climb, anyone who became trapped by an ice slide, buried by an avalanche, or swallowed by a crevasse that opened then closed without warning (all pretty much daily occurrences on Khumbu) would likely remain frozen in place until global warming thawed the entire planet.

This was how Alexa Woods chose to make her ascent.

After hours of hard climbing, the young woman’s lone slender form appeared as a mere speck on the vast, shimmering wall of ice. Buffeted by fifty-mile-an-hour winds, she now dangled less than a hundred feet from the icefall’s summit.

With a controlled swing of her leanly muscled arm, Lex buried the head of a Grivel Rambos ice axe into the frozen waterfall. As the blade bit into the ice, water trickled around its head, reminding Lex that underneath this icy shell, tons of fresh water poured off the mountain. Nearly half the fatalities on Everest occurred right here on the Khumbu’s shifting wall, but she did not let this thought linger or break the rhythm of her climb. For Lex, the universe and all its stressful potentialities had condensed themselves into a few economical motions—swing the axe, kick the crampon, pull on the rope and move up. Every move was calm, deliberate and careful.

Wrapped from head to toe in extreme-cold-weather gear, Lex sank the spiked crampons strapped to her boots into the icy wall. As a gush of fresh, cold water continued to bubble out of the hole her axe had gouged, Lex anchored her safety line with an ice screw and paused to rest. Risking frostbite, she pulled off the face mask that covered her delicate features and put her lips near the ice.

The bracing, near-frozen water refreshed and restored her. After drinking her fill, Lex stuffed her long, dark curls under her thermal mask and pulled it down over her face. Hanging on the rope with the safety harness pressing against her breasts, Lex listened to the constant wind and the steady sound of her own heartbeat.

Below her icy perch, the magnificent and brutal topography of this rugged ecosystem appeared uninhabitable—a trackless expanse of snow and ice broken only by black granite mountains so high their summits towered over the clouds themselves. Yet Lex knew this seemingly unlivable landscape was inhabited. In fact, it was the ancestral homeland of the Sherpas, the “People of the East” whose society and culture were as old as Tibet. Thousands of Sherpas dwelled in the forbidding Khumbu Valley, planting potatoes and herding yak in the shadow of the mountain they revered.

Before the coming of Westerners, the Sherpas had guided yak trains across the mountains along dangerous, shifting routes to trade wool and leather with the people of Tibet. Today their descendants routinely risked their lives leading groups of international tourists who flocked to Everest up the mountain—and rescuing those who ran into trouble.

A short, stocky people with Mongolian features, the Sherpas were the backbone of any mountaineering expedition attempted in the Himalayas. Called “the Gods of the Mountain,” their skill and stamina were legendary. And though they had constant contact with the modern world, the Sherpas retained their traditional religion and customs; Lex admired them for that.

Tibetan Buddhists of the Nyingmapa sect, Sherpas still grew or raised most of their food. Herds of yaks provided wool for clothing, leather for shoes, bone for toolmaking, dung for fuel and fertilizer, and milk, butter and cheese for consumption.

Most Sherpas who worked on the mountains spoke English, and Lex had shared many a meal of daal bhaat—rice and lentils—and a savory yak-and-potato stew called shyakpa with the bold icefall doctors and pathfinders, the bearers and guides, and the emergency rescuers who lived at the base of Everest. Open and giving people, the Sherpas were as generous with their trade secrets as they were with their heavily sugared tea, which they drank from Western thermos bottles, or the rice beer, called chang, that each Sherpa household brewed.

Much of the kinship Lex felt with the Sherpas was a result of their shared profession. Her work—providing survival training and guidance to scientific expeditions into the Antarctic wilderness—was the modern equivalent of the Sherpas’ age-old livelihood. And like the Sherpas, what Lex did for a living was risky. If she made a mistake, and even if she didn’t, in the extreme climate of the Himalayas, death was always hovering near, always a possibility.

Mount Everest, though tamer now than at any time in her grim history, was still an unpredictable killer and always would be. Hundreds of corpses were scattered across the rocky pinnacles of the higher elevations, or buried under tons of ice and snow, where they would never be found. Most of those corpses belonged to Sherpas.

For Lex, her own death now held little terror. She had watched others perish, including those she’d loved, and on several occasions she’d almost died herself. Facing death so often had somehow blunted its power and diminished its dread. Personal extinction was something Lex could face and accept. What she could not abide, however, and what she would never accept was the death of another human being in her charge.

A blast of unexpected wind and a rain of dusty snow set Lex’s adrenaline flowing. She cocked her head and listened for the telltale rumbling that would herald an avalanche. When it didn’t come, she took a deep breath and prepared to resume her climb.

That was the moment the GSM phone rang on her belt, bursting into the epic landscape of this natural world like some kind of mechanized explosion.

Silently, Lex cursed a string of obscenities. Then she hung her axe over her wrist and reached down to check the device’s digital screen. Lex didn’t recognize the number blinking there and was tempted to ignore the call. But the phone continued to ring, so she tore off her mask and placed the hands-free receiver over her head and into her ear.

“Who is this?” she demanded.

The voice on the other end was liquid velvet, cut with a precise English accent.

“Miss Woods? A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Lex tucked her mask into a pocket and resumed her climb without a reply.

“My name is Maxwell Stafford,” the man purred. “I represent Weyland Industries.”

“Let me guess,” spat Lex as her axe bit into the ice. “You’re suing us again?”

“You misunderstand. I speak for Mr. Weyland himself.”

“What’s one of the world’s biggest polluters want with us?”

“Mr. Weyland is interested in you personally, Ms. Woods.”

Lex kicked her crampon into the ice and grabbed the safety line with both hands.

“He’s offering to fund the foundation with which you are associated for a full year,” said Maxwell Stafford. “If you’ll meet with him.”

Lex hesitated a moment. As a professional guide and explorer, she had long ago committed herself to the Foundation of Environmental Scientists, an international group that actively advocated the preservation of all life on Earth—human and nonhuman. Species were disappearing from this world at an alarming rate. Lex agreed with the foundation’s members who strongly believed that the loss of even one species put those that remained at greater risk.

Like the rope from which Lex dangled, the foundation was a lifeline for many—the deciding factor between the certainty of life and the finality of death. And though this offer sounded like a deal with the devil, she couldn’t help but ponder what a deal it was. With Weyland’s money, the foundation she loved, in danger of extinction itself, would be in a position to do some truly remarkable work.

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”