The Complete Aliens Omnibus Read online

  “Still reflex?” the woman’s voice said.

  “Maybe,” said the low voice. He felt his cheeks being massaged lightly.

  “But what was he doing, then?”

  “What?” asked the low voice.

  “If he wasn’t glued to the wall, what was happening to him?”

  “Probably something much, much worse.”

  He felt something soft and wet touch his eyelid. A finger pulled the top lid of one eye up, blinding him.

  “Mr. Kramm,” said the low voice. “Are you in there?”

  Slowly the brightness began to congeal, to take shape and form. He saw the hand holding his eyelid open and beyond that a man’s face, a dark goatee. At first the face was overexposed and he couldn’t make out its features and then, very slowly, they began to stand out. A ruddy face, round, with brown hair that had been cropped short, narrow glasses—an affectation, probably, Kramm thought; nobody needed glasses anymore when they could have implants. He blinked, felt his other eye open as well, blind at first but quickly adjusting.

  The man smiled. Kramm tried to smile back but could tell from the other man’s suddenly concerned look that his facial muscles weren’t quite working properly yet.

  “Anders Kramm, I presume,” the man said. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”

  * * *

  But it was hours before he felt fully alive again. First, he spent a lot of time watching them bend his limbs back and forth and then encouraging him to try doing it himself. After a while, he could get them moving again, but then came several hours spent sick and shivering in a blanket.

  “It’s like withdrawal,” one of the technicians claimed as Kramm’s teeth chattered. “Your body gets used to being just a hair shy of death, even starts to crave it. And then you kick it alive again and it goes through hell.” He reached up and tapped a bag of fluid hanging above the bed and running through a tube into Kramm’s arm, then made a notation on a digital handpad. “Your body wants to be dead right now,” he said.

  “That’s something my body and I can agree on,” said Kramm, through his shaking.

  The technician smiled. “Usually it’s not this bad,” he said. “Usually we take you off more slowly. But we had to go quicker this time.”

  “Quicker?”

  “They need you,” said the technician. “Don’t ask me what it’s all about; I’m just a technician. Besides, you signed a waiver.” He tapped on his handpad and turned it around. Kramm saw an image of a form, a signature that might have been his on the bottom.

  “When did I sign that?” he asked.

  “Somewhere around thirty years ago,” said the technician. “I was three at the time.”

  “I’ve been out for thirty years?”

  The technician nodded.

  “Hell,” said Kramm. “Why couldn’t you have kept me out for another thirty?”

  * * *

  The psychiatrist behind the desk was wearing earth tones. He had dark hair that had been carefully mussed and a dark beard that had begun to run to gray down the middle. He looked at Kramm a long moment, then knit his brows and began scribbling on a digital pad.

  “Anders Kramm,” he said aloud. “Antisocial tendencies, depressive. Blames himself for the death of his family. At times verging on the suicidal. I’m summarizing from a file, Mr. Kramm. Care to dispute any of it?”

  “No,” said Kramm. He was in a wheelchair now, wrapped in fabric that was like aluminum foil on the inside and which was holding the heat in. He wasn’t shaking so much anymore, but he still felt a strange craving. For death, the technician would have said.

  “That about sums you up?” said the psychiatrist.

  “Far as I can see,” said Kramm.

  “You told one of the technicians a few hours back you wanted to be dead,” said the psychiatrist. “Then, later, you told him you wished you’d been frozen another thirty years. Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Which is it, Mr. Kramm? Dead or frozen?”

  Kramm shrugged.

  “If you want to be dead, why didn’t you just kill yourself thirty years ago?”

  “I don’t know,” said Kramm.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Do I have to talk to you?” asked Kramm.

  The psychiatrist threaded his fingers together. He watched from the other side of the desk, silent. Kramm found himself strangely uncomfortable in his gaze.

  “What’s this all about?” asked Kramm. “Why did they wake me up?”

  “How would I know, Mr. Kramm?” said the psychiatrist. “I’m an employee just like you; they don’t tell me anything I don’t need to know. I’m just here to make a judgment on your state of mind. If I mark you as ‘marginal but pass,’ you’ll go through that door behind me and be told why they’ve woken you up. If I mark you ‘fail,’ then we engage in a series of rehabilitory practices, probably hasty ones to be perfectly frank, until you are deemed suitable to be returned to me to have this conversation again.”

  “What do I need to do to be frozen again?”

  The psychiatrist sighed, rubbed his eyes. “That doesn’t appear to be an option, Mr. Kramm,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “You’re a sleeper, Mr. Kramm. Which means that Planetus has the right, since they’re paying for your upkeep, to unfreeze you any time there’s a problem that requires your special skills.”

  “And there’s been a problem?”

  The psychiatrist nodded at the door behind him. “Play the game and find out,” he said. “Why frozen and not suicide?”

  Kramm took a deep breath. “I was worried that there might be something after death,” he said.

  “An afterlife? Why would that worry you?”

  “I was worried that hell for me would be watching my daughter and wife die all over again. Followed by millennia of my scrabbling through the dark.”

  “Seems a little pessimistic, no?”

  Kramm shrugged.

  “And so cryonic storage was better?”

  Kramm nodded. “In storage, I didn’t feel anything at all. I didn’t even know I existed. There’s only one problem.”

  “What’s that, Mr. Kramm?”

  “In storage, time doesn’t pass for you at all. It felt as though I’d just closed my eyes when suddenly I was waking up again. For you, I’ve been asleep thirty years. For me, my wife and daughter died a few weeks ago. It’s still fresh.”

  The psychiatrist was regarding him keenly now. “Do you blame yourself for their deaths?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was my fault. I didn’t call the marines in when I should have.”

  “It says in the file,” said the psychiatrist, peering at his personal screen, “that Investigator Anders Kramm has been cleared of all charges. His actions were consistent with Weyland-Yutani company policy and well within the letter of the law.”

  “That’s just it,” said Kramm. “If I’d called in the marines when the first infestation was discovered, my family would still be alive. I had to choose between doing what was right and following company policy. I followed company policy. I made the wrong choice.”

  4

  They talked for a while more, the psychiatrist needling him, testing his responses. The entire time Kramm could feel the memories building up inside his head, becoming more and more vivid and corporeal as he struggled to ignore them: the way his wife’s body had looked afterward, the ghosts created by the flash of firing the pistol in the dark, the moment when, having wandered in the dark for he couldn’t say how long, he suddenly realized he could see very, very faintly, the shape of his mangled hand. He shook his head to clear it and the images rushed back into the shadows of his skull, then very slowly began to ooze their way out again.

  And then the psychiatrist had left his chair and was behind Kramm’s wheelchair. He pushed Kramm to the door, opened it, wheeled him through, and left him.

  He found himself in an o
ffice, the walls decorated with a hologram meant to simulate dark-stained, carefully carpentered cherry wood. It looked almost real, unless you got too close. In the middle of the room was a large desk, its top seemingly made of a single piece of old-growth oak, larger than any single piece of wood Kramm had ever seen: it had been illegal to harvest old-growth lumber for at least two hundred years. The desk was breathtaking. He rolled slowly toward it, ran his hand along it. It felt real and as if it truly were a single slab. He couldn’t see or feel any joints.

  “You’re wondering if that’s real,” said a low, familiar voice just over his shoulder, not far from his ear. It was all he could do not to jump. Instead he managed to turn slowly to look at the person behind him. It was the ruddy, round-faced man whom he had seen upon first waking up.

  “Yes,” said Kramm. “Is it?”

  “Yes and no,” said the man. “It was grown in a vat, very quickly, using a template and a modified microformer. Problem is, it was grown too fast. After a few weeks, it will start showing signs of wear. After a few months, the fibers will start to separate.”

  “That so?” said Kramm.

  “That is so,” said the man. “We’re a responsible company, Mr. Kramm, not one of the big monsters like Biotech or Weyland-Yutani. We like to do things right. No ‘company policy,’ just common sense.” He held out his hand. “Matthew Darby,” he said. “Official Planetus representative. Welcome.”

  Kramm just looked at him. Darby stood there a moment holding his hand out, then slowly withdrew it. His smile, if anything, became even warmer.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Kramm.”

  “Suppose you tell me what this is all about,” said Kramm.

  “Down to business, eh?” said Darby. “I admire a fellow who knows his own mind.” Darby moved to the other side of the desk, rubbing his palms together. He sat down. “No preliminaries, then? No, ‘How was your sleep, Mr. Kramm?’ Well then, business it will be.”

  He pulled a digital board close.

  “How would you describe your break with Weyland-Yutani?” asked Darby. He still had the same smile, but his eyes were more alert now, intent, sharply intelligent. Kramm suddenly felt this would be a bad person to have as an enemy.

  “I thought we had agreed to skip the preliminaries,” said Kramm.

  “Trust me, Mr. Kramm,” said Darby. “This is no preliminary.”

  “I’m sure you have it all in your files,” said Kramm.

  “But that’s just it,” said Darby. “May I be frank? Weyland-Yutani petitioned the court to have certain information about your role with them kept confidential. We’ve culled a fair amount, admittedly. We know that you served as an Alien investigator, know a thing or two about your battle scars. But there are still certain . . . gaps.”

  “Why should I trust you?” asked Kramm.

  “Why?” said Darby, and spread his arms. “Why shouldn’t you?”

  Kramm didn’t say anything.

  “Shall I send you back out for another chat with our resident psychiatrist? Feeling shaky still, Mr. Kramm?”

  Kramm sighed. “My break with Weyland-Yutani was a hostile break,” he said.

  “Care to elaborate, Mr. Kramm?”

  “I was an employee on special assignment,” he said. “Weyland-Yutani hired me to investigate Alien assaults. I determined whether to notify the colonial marines if there seemed a risk of continued Alien presence. I recommended an appropriate compensation for surviving relatives.”

  “A sort of insurance adjuster, then.”

  “More or less,” said Kramm, “but with a few additional necessary skills. I had to go in quietly and get out quietly, with a minimum amount of attention. If there were any suggestion of further Alien threat I was, officially speaking, supposed to call in the marines. Unofficially, I was supposed to take care of it myself.”

  “How?”

  “Kill or disable the creatures until they were all gone. Other times, I was simply to identify the location of the hive and then the company would send in their own troops to do a scrub and detox. What happened after that was none of my business. Sometimes they simply stripped the planet of as many resources as possible before reporting the infestation; other times the Alien presence just seemed to disappear. But in all cases, policy was never to call in the marines until the last possible moment. Calling in the marines would mean evacuating the colony and quarantining the planet. It would mean a major financial loss for the Company.”

  “So you never called the marines?”

  “I did once,” said Kramm.

  “When?”

  “After I found my family dead,” he said. “I should have called them in before that. I was investigating something halfway around the planet, a small abandoned outpost that was completely hived. Then I found another infestation, much closer to us. Still, I thought it was far enough away from everything to be containable. Obviously I was wrong.”

  Darby gave him a look filled with compassion. Kramm had a hard time deciding if it were real or faked. “And then?” Darby said.

  “I came up out of the dark and immediately called in the colonial marines,” said Kramm. “The planet was quarantined, all the colonists withdrawn. I was issued a citation for ‘not operating in the best interests of the Company,’ and my pay was docked. I withdrew from the Company and then lived through nightmare after nightmare. Finally, to try to escape it, I signed on as a sleeper for Omnitech, but I seem somehow now to be working for you. And I didn’t escape the nightmares.”

  “We absorbed Omnitech,” said Darby. “They weren’t so Omni after all. And thus we acquired you.”

  “So here I am,” said Kramm. “You woke me up. I’m assuming it wasn’t just so we could have a chat.”

  Darby nodded. “We’re looking for a man who can’t be bought out from under us, someone who isn’t likely to be a mole or a spy for one of the big corps. You’re about the closest thing we have who is actually located close enough to the problem to do us any good. But I’ll give you a choice,” said Darby. “Far be it from me to force anyone into anything: if you’d like me simply to put you to sleep again, I will.”

  “What’s it all about?” said Kramm.

  “Weyland-Yutani,” said Darby. “Our competitor. I’m afraid I can’t say much more until I know if you’re on board.”

  Kramm just stared. Darby, on the other side of the desk, said nothing, calmly meeting his gaze.

  “All right,” Kramm finally said. “I’m in.”

  5

  It was a question of a planet purchased five years ago, shared property of Planetus and Weyland-Yutani, split down the middle. We couldn’t afford to buy the whole thing, claimed Darby, and before we knew it Weyland-Yutani had the other half. C-3 L/M was the name of the planet—Planetus and Weyland-Yutani couldn’t agree on a name, so the planet had kept its location section designator.

  “It’s the biggest thing we’ve ever bought. We had to go deep into our pockets for this one. Between us and Weyland-Yutani, there’s a certain amount of . . . shall we say, tension?” said Darby. “We’re just such different sorts of companies.”

  There was, however, now a sort of détente, a cold but semi-working agreement to ignore each other. They had a shared spaceport but each company had set up one small colonial town and several lesser outposts. Both companies had terraformers going full blast.

  “So what’s the problem, then?” asked Kramm. “Sounds like it works, more or less.”

  “There was an incident,” said Darby, a pained expression coming onto his face. “We’ve held the planet for five years, never a problem. Terraforming is moving along slowly but surely. And then we hear that Weyland-Yutani has the prototype for a new terraformer, much quicker and more stable than anything else available. They’re testing it out at a small new scientific outpost near the border of our territory. Naturally, we’re curious about it—who wouldn’t be—and curious as well as to why they’re choosing to test it so close to our territory. Are they w
orried that there are likely to be side effects? Are they thinking of crossing the line and encroaching on us? Is it more than just a prototype for a terraformer that they’re testing?

  “So, we do the paperwork and go through official channels to ask them to allow us to send a representative over. It’s a reasonable request—we’ve let them visit us countless times for similar reasons. But they deny it.”

  “Why?” asked Kramm.

  “Why? We don’t know. They’re not technically required to give a reason in their response. At first we let it slide, trying not to think about it, but then we start getting odd readings from our instrumentation near the site. Is it from the so-called prototype terraformer? Maybe. Is the story of the terraformer being used to mask some other operation? Could be.”

  Darby stood and walked to the far side of the room. He reached his hand through the hologrammatic cherry wood. When he drew it back out, it contained a drink, what looked like whiskey in a lead-glass tumbler.

  “I’d offer you some,” said Darby, “but the doctor says it’d be a mistake so soon after cryosleep. No offense.”

  “None taken,” said Kramm, eyes glued to Darby’s drink.

  “You know what it’s like to be curious, Mr. Kramm? To really want to know something? It’s a terrible thing, a sort of slow death. It starts to eat you up inside. Before long, it’s all you think about. If you’re not careful, you reach the point where you’d give almost anything just to know.

  “We file a second brief, document the change in our instrument readings, give probable cause for serious concern. Weyland-Yutani can hardly justify saying no without drawing attention from outside. So they don’t say no. Instead, they stall.”

  “Sounds like Weyland-Yutani,” said Kramm.

  Darby nodded. “We’re ready for this,” he says. “We take our case to the galactic level, demanding a response. ‘All right, all right,’ says the Weyland-Yutani representative, one Charles Braley. ‘You can come. Just give us two days to protect certain industrial secrets.’

  “So we wait. One day, then another. But before the second day is out, I have a call from Mr. Braley. There’s been a situation, he tells me. An incident. They’re going to have to postpone.