She ran up to the creature and grabbed his arm. The Predator turned sharply, nearly knocking her off her feet.
“You hear me, you ugly son of a bitch,” Lex cried. “I’m coming with you.”
The Predator stared at Lex.
For a long moment, nothing happened. Then Lex simply opened her hands. The Predator stared at the human, arms outstretched. Then, with a grunt, Scar reached into its armor, drew out a knife and placed it into her hand.
CHAPTER 27
No sooner had Scar handed Lex the weapon than the Alien horde swarmed out of the dark in a second attack. Hissing angrily, scrabbling over broken masonry, and running along the walls and ceiling like giant insects, they advanced on Lex and Scar.
Lex backed out of the chamber, into the passageway where she’d killed her first Alien. Its carcass was still there, the melted spear sticking out of its guts.
Lex looked up at the Predator. “A short partnership, but a sweet one.”
If Scar heard her, he did not respond. Instead the Predator’s long-fingered hands traced the elaborate hieroglyphs running along the side of the doorway.
Lex watched as he tapped several symbols in quick succession, obviously entering a sophisticated code. Each character Scar touched began to glow with an inner light, just like the buttons on an elevator or the features on the star map in the sarcophagus chamber.
Lex glanced up from the ancient keypad to see the Aliens hurling toward them, hopping over one another as they approached. The alpha-Alien, now freed from the rocks that had buried him, was in the lead. Its hide was ripped and pierced and seeping battery acid blood. Out of all of them, he looked the most pissed.
“If you’ve got a plan, you better damn hurry,” Lex said, taking a step back.
The Predator seemed to understand her meaning, if not her words, and redoubled his efforts until practically the entire wall was illuminated.
“Very pretty. But what does it do?”
Then she heard a now-all-too-familiar rumbling within the walls. The Predator took a step back, pulling her along. With a deafening crash, a huge stone slab plunged out of the ceiling and slammed down in front of the Aliens, just as the alpha’s raking claws were about to close around Scar’s throat.
Lex blinked, amazed to be alive.
There was a loud crash on the other side of the slab as the Aliens slammed into it and beat the stone with their claws. Although they couldn’t penetrate the walls themselves, their demonic cries of rage and frustration did.
Lex listened to their shrieks and shuddered. Fearing the dark, she drew her fading flashlight and played the feeble beam around the passageway. Her heart sunk when she realized the corridor was a dead end. Lex was trapped. Her only companion was a savage hunter from the stars, and the only way out appeared to be through an angry Alien horde.
“Great idea you had locking us in here.”
Scar grunted.
Unceremoniously, the Predator began stripping off his pitted body armor, some of it still smoking from the Alien’s corrosive blood. As each heavy piece clanked to the ground, more of Scar’s strange, reptilian anatomy was revealed.
“Whoa, slow down, tiger,” said Lex.
Of course she didn’t expect Scar to get the joke. Like most of the males she’d known, Scar had a mind of his own, and a temper, too. He was definitely the strong, silent type.
Lex ignited a flare—startling the Predator, who snarled at her angrily.
“It’s just light. Light,” she said, placing it on the floor.
Scar made that same clicking sound in his throat that Lex had heard these creatures utter before. It reminded her of a frog’s chirp. Meanwhile the Predator continued to tear off segments of armor plate.
Lex dropped her backpack and squatted in the corner, as far away from the dead Alien as these narrow confines would permit. In the wavering light, she observed Scar’s behavior and tried to deduce the creature’s origins.
The Predator’s hide was reptilian, but not scaled. At least not scaled the way terrestrial reptiles were. But it was still possible that Scar’s epidermis had tiny, near microscopic scales on it. If only she could get close enough to see. Of course, she had no intention of trying. His flesh tone was a pallid gray with a green tinge, though in the flickering light of the bright yellow flare colors could not be easily discerned.
The humanoid’s eyes were close together and set forward in its skull. They were the eyes of a hunter. Terrestrial prey—small birds, rodents, deer, oxen—possessed eyes on the sides of their skulls. Earthbound predators—felines, owls, and humans—all had forward-looking eyes that enhanced depth perception and hand-eye coordination.
Scar’s eyes were set deep in its massive skull, with a bony forehead to protect them, an evolutionary feature that most reminded Lex of dinosaur anatomy.
The “dreadlocks” that framed either side of Scar’s face were puzzling. He never removed them, yet the dangling appendages didn’t appear to be natural, either—they had metal tips, for one thing. Perhaps they were some sort of biomechanical aid, a fusion of flesh and technology. Or perhaps they were just what they appeared to be—the Predators’ version of hair.
The crablike mandibles around the Predator’s mouth were an evolutionary riddle as well. They resembled a feature on an aquatic animal more than the feature of an animal that walked on land. Was Scar an amphibian? If he was, that still wouldn’t explain the mandibles. Insects chewed with mandibles, but Scar had teeth for that. Some insects—or was it arachnids?—also used their mandibles as sensory organs, but that didn’t make sense to Lex either.
Were they an atavistic trait that had outlived its biological usefulness, like the human appendix? Or perhaps the mandibles were necessary for reproduction or mating rituals—an unsettling thought, but from her knowledge of biology, Lex knew that violence during copulation was not uncommon among Earthbound species.
The Predator’s hands certainly resembled reptilian appendages—long, slender fingers, partially webbed, with two central digits that were much longer than the others. But there were differences, too. Reptiles had nostrils, though they lacked noses, and many species of reptiles had olfactory organs in their tongues. Scar had a flat, hard ridge where a nose should be, with no breathing slits that she could discern, and she wasn’t sure the Predator even
Lex noted that Scar wore a kind of mesh underwear under his plated armor and that the Predator was careful to discard as little of that material as possible, though Scar did detach a damaged bit of it, discarding it within Lex’s reach. When he was otherwise occupied, Lex casually lifted the mesh and fingered it. It was made of some kind of flexible metal and was quite hot to the touch. Even more peculiar was the fact that the material remained hot long after it was separated from its power source and, presumably, from Scar’s body heat—if indeed he had any. All this led Lex to the conclusion that the mesh was some sort of heating source and was probably as vital a piece of equipment to Scar as an Aqua-Lung is to a human deep-sea diver.
If the Predator’s species had evolved from some type of extraterrestrial reptile, then they were most probably ectothermic—meaning their body temperature was regulated by external climactic conditions.
Mammals generated their own body heat, but reptiles depended on external temperatures for thermoregulation and maintaining a balanced metabolism, which was why most reptiles thrived in hot climates and eschewed places like the polar regions. In fact, weird things happened to some species of reptile if exposed to a cold environment: They became sluggish and less aggressive, and females sometimes gave birth to live young instead of laying eggs in a nest and hatching them externally.
