Aliens

II

It was not the best of times, and it certainly was the worst of places. Driven by unearthly meteorological forces, the winds of Acheron hammered unceasingly at the planet's barren surface They were as old as the rocky globe itself. Without any oceans to compete with they would have scoured the landscape flat eons ago, had not the uneasy forces deep within the basaltic shell continually thrust up new mountains and plateaus. The winds of Acheron were at war with the planet that gave them life.

Heretofore there'd been nothing to interfere with their relentless flow. Nothing to interrupt their sand-filled storms nothing to push against the gales instead of simply conceding mastery of the air to them — until humans had come to Acheron and claimed it for their own. Not as it was now, a landscape of tortured rock and dust dimly glimpsed through yellowish air, but as it would be once the atmosphere processors had done their work. First the atmosphere itself would be transformed, methane relinquishing its dominance to oxygen and nitrogen. Then the winds would be tamed, and the surface. The final result would be a benign climate whose offspring would take the form of snow and rain and growing things.

That would be the present's legacy to future generations For now the inhabitants of Acheron ran the processors and struggled to make a dream come true, surviving on a ration of determination, humour, and oversize paychecks. They would not live long enough to see Acheron become a land of milk and honey. Only the Company would live long enough for that The Company was immortal as none of them could ever be.

The sense of humour common to all pioneers living under difficult conditions was evident throughout the colony, most notably in a steel sign set in concrete pylons outside the last integrated structure:

HADLEY'S HOPE — Pop. 159

Welcome to Acheron

Beneath which some local wag had, without official authorization, added in indelible spray paint, 'Have a Nice Day. The winds ignored the request. Airborne particles of sand and grit had corroded much of the steel plate. A new visitor to Acheron, courtesy of the atmosphere processors, had added its own comment with a brown flourish: the first rains had produced the first rust.

Beyond the sign lay the colony itself, a cluster of bunkerlike metal and plasticrete structures joined together by conduits seemingly too fragile to withstand Acheron's winds. They were not as impressive to look upon as was the surrounding terrain with its wind-blasted rock formations and crumbling mountains, but they were almost as solid and a lot more homey. They kept the gales at bay, and the still-thin atmosphere, and protected those who worked within.

High-wheeled tractors and other vehicles crawled down the open roadways between the buildings, emerging from or disappearing into underground garages like so many communal pillbugs. Neon lights flickered fitfully on commercial buildings, advertising the few pitiful, but earnest entertainments to be had at outrageous prices that were paid without comment. Where large paychecks are found, there are always small businesses operated by men and women with outsize dreams. The company had no interest in running such penny-ante operations itself, but it gladly sold concessions to those who desired to do so.

Beyond the colony complex rose the first of the atmosphere processors. Fusion-powered, it belched a steady storm of cleansed air back into the gaseous envelope that surrounded the planet. Particulate matter and dangerous gases were removed either by burning or by chemical breakdown; oxygen and nitrogen were thrown back into the dim sky. In with the bad air, out with the good. It was not a complicated process but it was time-consuming and very expensive.

But how much is a world worth? And Acheron was not as bad as some that the Company had invested in. At least it possessed an existing atmosphere capable of modification Much easier to fine-tune the composition of a world's air than to provide it from scratch. Acheron had weather and near normal gravity. A veritable paradise.

The fiery glow that emanated from the crown of the volcanolike atmosphere processor suggested another realm entirely. None of the symbolism was lost on the colonists. It inspired only additional humour. They hadn't agreed to come to Acheron because of the weather.

There were no soft bodies or pallid, weak faces visible within the colony corridors. Even the children looked tough. Not tough as in mean or bullying, but strong within as well as without. There was no room here for bullies. Cooperation was a lesson learned early. Children grew up faster than their Earthbound counterparts and those who lived on fatter gentler worlds. They and their parents were a breed unto themselves, self-reliant yet interdependent. They were not unique. Their predecessors had ridden in wagons instead of starships.

It helped to think of oneself as a pioneer. It sounded much better than a numerical job description.

At the centre of this ganglion of men and machines was the tall building known as the control block. It towered above every other artificial structure on Acheron with the exception of the atmosphere processing stations themselves. From the outside it looked spacious. Within, there wasn't a spare square metre to be found. Instrumentation was crowded into corners and sequestered in the crawl spaces beneath the floors and the serviceways above the suspended ceilings. And still there was never enough room. People squeezed a little closer to one another so that the computers and their attendant machines could have more room. Paper piled up in corners despite unceasing efforts to reduce every scrap of necessary information to electronic bytes. Equipment shipped out new from the factory quickly acquired a plethora of homey scratches, dents, and coffee-cup rings.

Two men ran the control block and therefore the colony One was the operations manager, the other his assistant. They called one another by their first names. Formality was not in vogue on frontier worlds. Insistence on titles and last names and too much supercilious pulling of rank could find a man lost outside without a survival suit or communicator.

Their names were Simpson and Lydecker, and it was a toss-up as to which looked more harried than the other. Both wore the expression of men for whom sleep is a teasing mistress rarely visited. Lydecker looked like an accountant haunted by a major tax deduction misplaced ten years earlier Simpson was a big, burly type who would have been more comfortable running a truck than a colony. Unfortunately he'd been stuck with brains as well as brawn and hadn't managed to hide it from his employers. The front of his shirt was perpetually sweat-stained. Lydecker confronted him before he could retreat.

'See the weather report for next week?' Simpson was chewing on something fragrant, which stained the inside of his mouth. Probably illegal, Lydecker knew. He said nothing about it. It was Simpson's business, and Simpson was his boss Besides, he'd been considering borrowing a chew. Small vices were not encouraged on Acheron, but as long as they didn't interfere with a person's work, neither were they held up to ridicule. It was tough enough to keep one's sanity, hard enough to get by.

'What about it?' the operations manager said.

'We're going to have a real Indian summer. Winds should be all the way down to forty knots.'

'Oh, good. I'll break out the inner tubes and the suntan lotion. Heck, I'd settle for just one honest glimpse of the local sun.'

Lydecker shook his head, affecting an air of mock disapproval. 'Never satisfied, are you? Isn't it enough to know it's still up there?'

'I can't help it; I'm greedy. I should shut up and count my blessings, right? You got something else on your mind Lydecker, or are you just on one of your hour-long coffee breaks?'

'That's me. Goof off every chance I get. I figure my next chance will be in about two years.' He checked a printed readout. 'You remember you sent some wildcatters out to that high plateau out past the Ilium Range a couple days ago?'

'Yeah. Some of our dreamers back home thought there might be some radioactives out that way. So I asked for volunteers, and some guy named Jorden stuck up his mitt. I told 'em to go look if they wanted to. Some others might've taken off in that direction also. What about it?'

'There's a guy on the horn right now. Mom-and-pop survey team. Says he's homing something and wants to know if his claim will be honoured.'

'Everybody's a lawyer these days. Sometimes I think I should've gone in for it myself.'

'What, and ruin your sophisticated image? Besides, there's not much call for lawyers out here. And you make better money.'

'Keep telling me that. It helps.' Simpson shook his head and turned to gaze at a green screen. 'Some honch in a cushy office on Earth says go look at a grid reference in the middle of nowhere, we look. They don't say why, and I don't ask. I don't ask because it takes two weeks to get an answer from back there, and the answer's always "Don't ask." Sometimes I wonder why we bother.'

'I just told you why. For the money.' The assistant operations officer leaned back against a console. 'So what do I tell this guy?'

Simpson turned to stare at a videoscreen that covered most of one wall. It displayed a computer-generated topographical map of the explored portion of Acheron. The map was not very extensive, and the features it illustrated made the worst section of the Kalahari Desert look like Polynesia. Simpson rarely got to see any of Acheron's surface in person. His duties required him to remain close to Operations at all times, and he liked that just fine.

'Tell him,' he informed Lydecker, 'that as far as I'm concerned, if he finds something, it's his. Anybody with the guts to go crawling around out there deserves to keep what he finds.'

The tractor had six wheels, armoured sides, oversize tyres and a corrosion-proof underbody. It was not completely Acheron-proof, but then, very little of the colony's equipment was. Repeated patching and welding had transformed the once-sleek exterior of the tractor into a collage composed of off-colour metal blotches held together with solder and epoxy sealant. But it kept the wind and sand at bay and climbed steadily forward. That was enough for the people it sheltered.

At the moment it was chugging its way up a gentle slope, the fat tyres kicking up sprays of volcanic dust that the wind was quick to carry away. Eroded sandstone and shale crumbled beneath its weight. A steady westerly gale howled outside its armoured flanks, blasting the pitted windows and light ports in its emotionless, unceasing attempt to blind the vehicle and those within. The determination of those who drove combined with the reliable engine to keep it moving uphill. The engine hummed reassuringly, while the air filters cycled ceaselessly as they fought to keep dust and grit out of the sacrosanct interior The machine needed clean air to breathe just as much as did its occupants.

He was not quite as weather-beaten as his vehicle, but Russ Jorden still wore the unmistakable look of someone who'd spent more than his share of time on Acheron. Weathered and wind-blasted. To a lesser degree the same description applied to his wife, Anne, though not to the two children who bounced about in the rear of the big central cabin. Somehow they managed to dart in and around portable sampling equipment and packing cases without getting themselves smashed against the walls. Their ancestors had learned at an early age how to ride something called a horse. The action of the tractor was not very different from the motion one has to cope with atop the spine of that empathetic quadruped, and the children had mastered it almost as soon as they learned how to walk.

Their clothing and faces were smeared with dust despite the nominally inviolable interior of the vehicle. That was a fact of life on Acheron. No matter how tight you tried to seal yoursel in, the dust always managed to penetrate vehicles, offices homes. One of the first colonists had coined a name for this phenomenon that was more descriptive than scientific. 'Paniculate osmosis,' he'd called it. Acheronian science. The more imaginative colonists insisted that the dust was sentient, that it hid and waited for doors and windows to open a crack before deliberately rushing inside. Homemakers argued facetiously whether it was faster to wash clothes or scrape them clean.

Russ Jorden wrestled the massive tractor around boulders too big to climb and negotiated a path through narrow crevices in the plateau they were ascending. He was sustained in his efforts by the music of the Locater's steady pinging. It grew louder the nearer they came to the source of the electromagnetic distur bance, but he refused to turn down the volume. Each ping was a melody unto itself, like the chatter of oldtime cash registers. His wife monitored the tractor's condition and the life-support systems while her husband drove.

'Look at this fat, juicy, magnetic profile.' Jorden tapped the small readout on his right. 'And it's mine, mine, mine Lydecker says that Simpson said so, and we've got it recorded They can't take that away from us now. Not even the Company can take it away from us. Mine, all mine.'

'Half mine, dear.' His wife glanced over at him and smiled.

'And half mine!' This cheerful desecration of basic mathematics came from Newt, the Jorden's daughter. She was six years old going on ten, and she had more energy than both her parents and the tractor combined. Her father grinned affectionately without taking his eyes from the driver's console.

'I got too many partners.'

The girl had been playing with her older brother until she'd finally worn him out. 'Tim's bored, Daddy, and so am I. When are we going back to town?'

'When we get rich, Newt.'

'You always say that.' She scrambled onto her feet, as agile as an otter. 'I wanna go back. I wanna play Monster Maze.'

Her brother stuck his face into hers. 'You can play by yourself this time. You cheat too much.'

'Do not!' She put small fists on unformed hips. 'I'm just the best, and you're jealous.'

'Am not! You go in places we can't fit.'

'So? That's why I'm the best.'

Their mother spared a moment to glance over from her bank of monitors and readouts. 'Knock it off. I catch either of you two playing in the air ducts again, I'll tan your hides. Not only is it against colony regulations, it's dangerous. What if one of you missed a step and fell down a vertical shaft?'

'Aw, Mom. Nobody's dumb enough to do that. Besides, all the kids play it, and nobody's been hurt yet. We're careful.' Her smile returned. 'An' I'm the best 'cause I can fit places nobody else can.'

'Like a little worm.' Her brother stuck his tongue out at her.

She duplicated the gesture. 'Nyah, nyah! Jealous, jealous. He made a grab for her protruding tongue. She let out a childish shriek and ducked behind a mobile ore analyzer.

'Look, you two.' There was more affection than anger in Anne Jorden's tone. 'Let's try to calm down for two minutes okay? We're almost finished up here. We'll head back toward town soon and—'

Russ Jorden had half risen from his seat to stare through the windshield. Childish confrontations temporarily put aside, his wife joined him.

'What is it, Russ?' She put a hand on his shoulder to steady herself as the tractor lurched leftward.

'There's something out there. Clouds parted for just a second, and I saw it. I don't know what it is, but it's big. And it's ours. Yours and mine — and the kids'.'

The alien spacecraft dwarfed the tractor as the big six-wheeler trundled to a halt nearby. Twin arches of metallic glass swept skyward in graceful, but somehow disturbing curves from the stern of the derelict. From a distance they resembled the reaching arms of a prone dead man, locked in advanced rigor mortis. One was shorter than the other, and yet this failed to ruin the symmetry of the ship.

The design was as alien as the composition. It might have been grown instead of built. The slick bulge of the hull stil exhibited a peculiar vitreous luster that the wind-borne grit of Acheron had not completely obliterated.

Jorden locked the tractor's brakes. 'Folks, we have scored big this time. Anne, break out the suits. I wonder if the Hadley Cafe can synthesize champagne?'

His wife stood where she was, staring out through the tough glass. 'Let's check it out and get back safely before we start celebrating, Russ. Maybe we're not the first to find it.'

'Are you kidding? There's no beacon on this whole plateau There's no marker outside. Nobody's been here before us Nobody! She's all ours.' He was heading toward the rear of the cabin as he talked.

Anne still sounded doubtful. 'Hard to believe that anything that big, putting out that kind of resonance, could have sat here for this long without being noticed.'

'Bull.' Jorden was already climbing into his environment suit flipping catches without hunting for them, closing seal-tights with the ease of long practice. 'You worry too much. I can think of plenty of reasons why it's escaped notice until now.'

'For instance?' Reluctantly she turned from the window and moved to join him in donning her own suit.

'For instance, it's blocked off from the colony's detectors by these mountains, and you know that surveillance satellites are useless in this kind of atmosphere.'

'What about infrared?' She zipped up the front of her suit.

'What infrared? Look at it: dead as a doornail. Probably been sitting here just like that for thousands of years. Even if it got here yesterday, you couldn't pick up any infrared on this part of the planet; new air coming out of the atmosphere processor is too hot.'

'So then how did Operations hit on it?' She was slipping on her equipment, filling up the instrument belt.

He shrugged. 'How the heck should I know? If it's bugging you, you can winkle it out of Lydecker when we get back. The important thing is that we're the ones they picked to check it out. We lucked out.' He turned toward the airlock door 'C'mon, babe. Let's crack the treasure chest. I'll bet that baby's insides are just crammed with valuable stuff.'

Equally enthusiastic but considerably more self-possessed Anne Jorden tightened the seals on her own suit. Husband and wife checked each other out: oxygen, tools, lights, energy cells all in place. When they were ready to leave the tractor, she popped her wind visor and favoured her offspring with a stern gaze.

'You kids stay inside. I mean it.'

'Aw, Mom.' Tim's expression was full of childish disappointment. 'Can't I come too?'

'No, you cannot come too. We'll tell you all about it when we get back.' She closed the airlock door behind her.

Tim immediately ran to the nearest port and pressed his nose against the glass. Outside the tractor, the twilight landscape was illuminated by the helmet beams of his parents.

'I dunno why I can't go too.'

'Because Mommy said so.' Newt was considering what to play next as she pressed her own face against another window. The lights from her parents' helmets grew dim as they advanced toward the strange ship.

Something grabbed her from behind. She squealed and turned to confront her brother.

'Cheater!' he jeered. Then he turned and ran for a place to hide. She followed, yelling back at him.

The bulk of the alien vessel loomed over the two bipeds as they climbed the broken rubble that surrounded it. Wind howled around them. Dust obscured the sun.

'Shouldn't we call in?' Anne stared at the smooth-sided mass.

'Let's wait till we know what to call it in as.' Her husband kicked a chunk of volcanic rock out of his path.

'How about "big weird thing"?'

Russ Jorden turned to face her, surprise showing on his face behind the visor. 'Hey, what's the matter, honey? Nervous?'

'We're preparing to enter a derelict alien vessel of unknown type. You bet I'm nervous.'

He clapped her on the back. 'Just think of all that beautiful money. The ship alone's worth a fortune, even if it's empty. It's a priceless relic. Wonder who built it, where they came from and why it ended up crashed on this godforsaken lump of gravel?' His voice and expression were full of enthusiasm as he pointed to a dark gash in the ship's side. 'There's a place that's been torn open. Let's check her out.'

They turned toward the opening. As they drew near, Anne Jorden regarded it uneasily. 'I don't think this is the result of damage, Russ. It looks integral with the hull to me. Whoever designed this thing didn't like right angles.'

'I don't care what they liked. We're going in.'

A single tear wound its way down Newt Jorden's cheek. She'd been staring out the fore windshield for a long time now Finally she stepped down and moved to the driver's chair to shake her sleeping brother. She sniffed and wiped away the tear, not wanting Tim to see her cry.

'Timmy — wake up, Timmy. They've been gone a long time.'

Her brother blinked, removed his feet from the console, and sat up. He glanced unconcernedly at the chronometre set in the control dash, then peered out at the dim, blasted landscape. Despite the tractor's heavy-duty insulation, one could still hear the wind blowing outside when the engine was shut down. Tim sucked on his lower lip.

'It'll be okay, Newt. Dad knows what he's doing.'

At that instant the outside door slammed open, admitting wind, dust, and a tall dark shape. Newt screamed, and Tim scrambled out of the seat as their mother ripped off her visor and threw it aside, heedless of the damage it might do to the delicate instrumentation. Her eyes were wild, and the tendons stood out in her neck as she shoved past her children. She snatched up the dash mike and yelled into the condenser.

'Mayday! Mayday! This is Alpha Kilo Two Four Niner calling Hadley Control. Repeat. This is Alpha Kil. '

Newt barely heard her mother. She had both hands pressed over her mouth as she sucked on stale atmosphere. Behind her the tractor's filters whined as they fought to strain the particulate-laden air. She was staring out the open door at the ground. Her father lay there, sprawled on his back on the rocks. Somehow her mother had dragged him all the way back from the alien ship.

There was something on his face.

It was flat, heavily ribbed, and had lots of spiderlike chitinous legs. The long, muscular tail was tightly wrapped around the neck of her father's environment suit. More than anything else, the creature resembled a mutated horseshoe crab with a soft exterior. It was pulsing in and out, in and out like a pump. Like a machine. Except that it was not a machine It was clearly, obviously, obscenely alive.

Newt began screaming again, and this time she didn't stop.