Predator - Incursion (11 page)

Lucy-Anne fell to her knees, stood again, and followed the Marine back toward Mark. Mommy would be there. Mommy with her sad eyes and far-away look, sitting awake at night listening to things Lucy-Anne couldn’t hear. Bringing stuff home she did not recognize. Making things she didn’t know.

“Mommy!”

Mark exploded. She saw its entire supporting arm fracture, and the air pressure inside the accommodation pod split its hull apart. Sparkling flames soon guttered out in the vacuum of space, and a flood of bodies spewed out from one rupture carried in a cloud of escaping atmosphere, impacting each other, grasping on, glistening frostily as air turned to ice around them.

Mommy!
she tried to scream again, but her voice was swallowed by terror.

She ran. The Marine was ahead of her, sprinting, but already everything felt wrong. Lucy-Anne’s stomach dropped, she felt suddenly lighter. A deafening whistling sound filled her head.

All around her, outside the clear walkway, the darkness of space was filled with glimmering, spinning, horrific debris.

Just as the Marine reached the doorway leading into Mark, the whole walkway before him erupted. He disappeared. The glass walls sang as they were ripped apart, and still trying to shout for her mother, Lucy-Anne was grabbed by an invisible hand and tugged toward infinity.

Charon Station, Sol System
July 2692
AD

General Paul Bassett, commanding officer of the entirety of the Colonial Marine forces, including all Spaceborne, Terrestrial, and Excursionist units, was a prick.

Gerard Marshall had long thought this, since before they’d met face to face, and now that he was on Charon Station—the General’s command center—they had met many, many times, giving Marshall cause to consider and revise his initial assessment.

The General was a
complete
prick.

Like now. Being summoned to his rooms by a combat droid, instead of the General finding time to call him personally.
General Paul Bassett requests your attendance in his command suite at eleven hundred hours for a
… A quick holo message from the great man himself would have sufficed. It wasn’t as if they had different agendas. There should have been agreement between them, a common ground. Instead, this clash of personalities that seemed to grow every time they met.

Marshall tried to analyze it dispassionately, and he’d come to the conclusion that they simply rubbed each other up the wrong way. That wouldn’t have been a problem if they were just two plebs or grunts bickering their way through the day, but when one of them was a general in charge of quarter of a million troops, and the other was one of the Thirteen, the Weyland-Yutani company board, there was so much more at stake.

Neither of them could let their egos get in the way of what they were here for, and Marshall feared that being summoned to the command suite could only mean more bad news.

Charon Station was huge. Orbiting the Sol System every thirty years at almost four billion miles from the sun, it had been the Colonial Marines’ main command base for almost sixty years. In that time it had been expanded and upgraded to such an extent that it was now more of a complex of interconnected space stations than one single structure. Seven individual vessels housed barracks, hangars, storage holds, communications, offices, and other essential needs that went to serve as a permanent home for more than seven hundred staff, as well as a rotating garrison of a thousand Marines along with their weapons, equipment, and craft.

Almost forty years earlier, a whole section of Charon Station had been destroyed by an asteroid impact, with the loss of four hundred lives. It was a huge blow to the Colonial Marines, and it came at a time when skirmishes had broken out across the Human Sphere between the Colonials and several rogue military units seeking independence. When the catastrophe occurred, doubt and paranoia had bitten in hard, but all evidence had always pointed to a freak accident. Since then, sweeper ships were stationed several thousand miles ahead of the station’s orbit, destroying any space debris that was considered even a vague threat to the station.

Gerard Marshall had been here for more than twelve weeks, and he hated the place. He hated being anywhere that involved breathing conditioned, artificially manufactured air, walking with the aid of faux gravity, eating food processed from bacteria and bugs and insects, and where a slight accident could result in him being sucked into the cold vacuum of a painful demise. As one of the Thirteen, he knew far too much about what could go wrong in space. He had covered up enough disasters, after all. He’d even initiated a few.

It was starting to look like he’d be here for a long time more. He hated the idea of that, but he could also not contain his excitement. As chief officer of the Thirteen, covering alien technology and weaponry acquisition, and director of ArmoTech, recent events meant that this was an exciting time to be alive.

The Thirteen wanted him close to Bassett. In all the military, the General was the man they trusted most. Yet complete trust wasn’t something that the Thirteen allowed, and so Marshall was here to observe, oversee, and if it became necessary, to intervene.

Bassett’s rooms were at the center of the command pod, one of the smaller sections of Charon Station, yet also the most heavily defended. A Sleek-class destroyer was docked permanently against the pod, crewed around the clock and ready to launch within thirty seconds, if the need arose. The pod itself was triple-constructed, possessed cloaking technology the equal to the Arrow-class ships used by Excursionists, and if the need arose it could break away and become its own individual spacecraft.

The first time Marshall had crossed one of the 450-yard-long connecting bridges to the command pod, Bassett had taken pleasure in telling him that each bridge was equipped with a series of explosive rings that could split it in half in milliseconds. Bad enough that the bridges were completely transparent.

Yes, Basset really was a prize prick.

“Who goes there?” The big Marine standing at the end of the bridge brought his nano-rifle to bear.

“Really?” Marshall asked.

“Second warning, Mr. Marshall.”

“You just told me my name.”

The Marine took a step back into a shooting stance, the nano-rifle’s control panel casting a faint blue glow onto his faceplate. Marshall could only make out his eyes behind the visor, all other facial features hidden. He never liked the threatening impersonality of combat suits, but supposed that was one of their more subtle weapons.

“Third warning.”

Marshall sighed. “Gerard Marshall, seventh chair of the Weyland-Yutani Thirteen, ID code seven-one-gamma-three-november.”

The marine stood to attention again, and Marshall heard the distant whisper of his combat computer confirming the identity of the man standing before him.

“Thank you, Sir. General Bassett is expecting you. You can find him in the VR suite of his control room.”

“Right.” Marshall walked past the marine toward the doorway, which faded open, then he paused. “Don’t you ever…?” The marine turned to look down at Marshall, faceplate giving nothing away. The combat suit was silent. The rifle still glowed, and Marshall wondered what setting it was kept on. He’d seen such rifles fired before in demonstrations, had witnessed their firepower. Immense, and horrific.

“Never mind,” he said. “Carry on.”

The door grew dark and solid again behind him, a containment field more impregnable than three-inch steel, and he was in the command pod.

As he moved through the command pod, several other marines watched him pass them by, then a female marine minus her combat helmet nodded and accompanied him along an elevated walkway that skirted the main control globe. The room was huge, fifty yards across, bustling, filled with holo frames, computer terminal points, and people drifting back and forth on air chairs. It never failed to send a shiver down his spine. This was the beating heart of the Company’s military machine, and an uncomfortable truth beat through this place with every pulse.

The Marines were the only reason that W-Y had once again become the power it was today.

No organization could reach such a wide-ranging ubiquitousness without a powerful force behind them.

“You’ll know where to find him,” the marine said, and she handed Marshall a pair of swimming briefs.

“Really?” he asked.

The woman smiled. He was glad. Any sign of humanity among these people comforted him.

Maybe she was an android.

Marshall took the briefs and stepped through into the VR control room staging area. It was empty, apart from a small pile of neatly folded military clothing, a pair of boots, and a set of glasses. Bassett was one of the few people Marshall knew who eschewed corrective surgery for his defective eyesight. Perhaps because the glasses made him distinctive.

Marshall stripped and pulled on the briefs, feeling self-conscious of his sagging stomach and weak limbs. If he’d spent a long time in space he might at least have been able to blame his weakness on muscle and bone degeneration. Yet there were treatments to deal with that, and exercises, and everyone knew he preferred the sensation of solid ground beneath his feet. He had a great mind, but his physical laziness was apparent.

Bassett’s rooms behind the control globe were mostly functional and sparse, but the VR suite itself was a huge indulgence, an extravagance the General enjoyed courtesy of the Company. Marshall had been in there several times before, and he found it disconcerting. This time, he had no idea what to expect.

Pushing through the darkened air lock and emerging into the suite, the scene took his breath away.

An ocean stretched out before him. The light blue sky, endless above the azure waters, was streaked with high clouds caught in some invisible airstream. Waves broke against the sandy beach. Waters foamed, bubbles slid across the smoothed sand, crabs scuttled into cover, retreating from the blazing sun.

Marshall stood in the shadows of overhanging palm trees and he took a few quick steps forward, groaning when he felt the sunlight on his skin. There was nothing like it. Life-support systems, air conditioning, direct heating panels set in his rooms, none of them could match the honest feel of true sunlight.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Bassett said. He was sitting in a beach chair close to where the waves reached, the chair’s feet and his own sunk in the sand. Almost seventy years old, he was one of the fittest men Marshall had ever seen. Toned and tall, his torso a relief map of knotted muscle, his limbs strong and lean, he carried no spare ounce of fat, and performed no unnecessary movements. He looked as though he’d been born with the claw scar that split his nose and right cheek. From a bug hunt, he’d said the first time Marshall had asked him about it. Like his poor eyesight, he chose not to have corrective surgery to remove the gruesome battle wound.

The most surprising thing about the scene was that Bassett was crying.

“Where are we?” Marshall asked. He had no wish to mention the tears.

“Weaver’s World,” Bassett said. “Eastern shores of Ellia, its largest continent. Just on the equator. It’s an hour ’til sunset, and soon you’ll see one of the three moons manifest out over the sea. It’s eclipsed up to now by one of the other moons. Quite a beautiful sight. I’ve sat here and watched it three times today.”

“Is everything all right?”

Bassett looked away from Marshall, out across the sea. Trees rustled behind them, the breeze reaching down and lifting Marshall’s hair.
If I close my eyes, it’s real
, he thought, but he was afraid to do so. He didn’t like these VR suites. They were a lie, and in a few minutes he’d have to step out onto a deck again, the freezing indifference of space all around. Space only wanted him dead.

Bassett whispered some command and the imagery faded quickly away, replaced by something else. The transition was disconcerting and dizzying, and Marshall staggered a few steps to his right. Sand between his toes, then cool metal, and then the silky swish of grass.

He gasped and took in a couple of quick breaths. The beachy scent was replaced with the perfume of wild flowers, and the hint of heat or burning. The landscape was wide and lush, a flowing grassy plain giving rise to impossibly tall trees in the distance. To his left was a range of peaks so high he couldn’t see their summits, hidden in the haze of distance. To the right, the plains gave way to rolling hills, and beyond them were the unmistakable stacks of atmosphere processors. Marshall squinted, trying to see through the haze.

The processors looked strange.

“Gonzalez Six,” Bassett said. He was standing now, still in his swimming shorts. There were other scars on his body that Marshall had not seen before. He wondered whether they were from the same bug hunt. “Formerly LV-204. One of the first worlds successfully terraformed, although to be fair it was already almost there. The processors…” He pointed at them, mountainous constructs in the distance. “They were decommissioned and abandoned almost a century ago. Apparently they’re home to a species of beetle now. Billions of them.”