Predator - Incursion (29 page)

“Oh, no,” McIlveen said.

Palant stood.

“I think she’s coming,” she said.

McMahon and the other indies rushed to the doors. Even then they glanced back at Palant, uncertain, hands clasping by their sides as if in memory of what had once been there.

More clicking. More fury.

“Isa, she’s coming,” McIlveen shouted. “She’s charging!”

“Yes,” Palant said to McMahon, nodding down at the laser rifle propped against the wall beside the soldier.

“Everyone hide!” McIlveen shouted.

From the far end of the hangar a blast erupted, a wall panel shattered inward in a shower of metal shards, wind and rain, and a man screamed long and loud.

“Everyone hide!” Palant screamed, echoing McIlveen’s words even as he grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the back of the structure. She tripped and shrugged him off, almost falling, finding her feet again, running, and then skidding to a halt and turning back.

The datapad!
Everything they’d heard the Yautja saying, every translation, was recorded on that small, antiquated device. Svenlap’s attack had meant there was no cloud storage and no quantum fold, only a hard disc—and she could not lose what she knew.

From her left came a shout and then a bright, sparkling burst of laser fire. Voices called out in panic, then harsh whispers as survivors hunkered down behind old, rusted equipment.

“Isa!” McIlveen hissed.

She ran. Another fusillade of fire, and the building’s structure screamed and rattled where it was holed. As she reached the small bench where they’d been working there was a pause in the furious action.

Grabbing the device and ripping wires from it, Palant looked around.

McMahon and several other indies were crouching with their weapons ready, turning slow circles. She caught McMahon’s eye and the woman nodded once, hard, indicating that she should hide.

Across the hangar she saw a dead soldier rise into the air, lifted by something she could not see, but was starting to know so well.

“There!” she said, pointing.

McMahon saw. She braced her legs and let off a sustained burst of laser fire. The dead soldier was ripped in two, viscera splashing across the wall as his torso was flung aside. The whole corner of the hangar was lit up as the rest of the indies opened fire.

A heavy thump sounded from somewhere and a plasma burst shone bright, the glare too harsh to look at. As Palant ran toward an old loader the shine faded, and she looked to her right to see a huge hole where the hangar’s front and side walls met.

The ceiling slumped down, molten metal edges drooping, harsh steam clouds erupting where the heavy rain was blown in by the storm. Superheated metal creaked and clanged where water splashed across it.

Palant skidded to a halt behind the loader. She was alone, but twenty yards away she could see a couple of others from the station, including McIlveen. He stared at her wide-eyed, and she held up the datapad. He shook his head in disbelief.

Wendigo made herself heard.

The roar was loud and long, an ululation of rage and exultation, and if she had been injured she voiced no hint of pain. Other screams accompanied her, cries of fear from the survivors as they awaited their doom. Footsteps pounded around the hangar, thumping on the rough concrete floor, then there was clanging against the already damaged walls.

The storm howled through rents in the metal cladding. Rain lanced in, sheets of dashing light slicing across the space. Lights flickered and then died as cables were torn and smashed, until the hangar was lit only by a few low-level lamps and the stark flashing of laser bursts. Palant saw an indie close to her flip an eyepiece down from his helmet as they switched to infrared.

A moment later that same indie fell, his head parted from his body and bouncing toward Palant’s hiding place.

She clapped her free hand over her mouth and used her feet to push herself closer to the loader, wishing she could crawl into the narrow gap beneath it, bury her face in her hands, and unsee every terrible thing she had seen.

The indie’s severed neck gushed blood as his head came to rest against her left boot. The infrared sight was still lowered over his right eye, and she wondered whether he saw anything, just for another second.

To Palant’s left, looming over her, Wendigo glittered like the star-speckled depths of space as rain was blown across her cloaked body. Her eyes were visible, piercing points of light staring down at this weak, pitiful human.

“I know what you said,” Palant whispered. For that moment everything else pulled away from her, to an impossible distance that made space seem like home. McIlveen, McMahon, the survivors, the ruined base, every moment in her history and everyone she had ever known, they all became nothing in the face of her first encounter with a living creature from another world.

“I… know… what…” Wendigo growled in sickening mimicry… and then the world exploded.

Laser blasts streaked in, screaming from the loader’s chassis, knocking the Yautja back and down and peppering the wall ten yards away. The alien’s shoulder blaster fired, missing Palant by inches where she had huddled down against the old vehicle’s tracks. She felt the heat singe her hair and stretch the skin on her hands and cheek, and the loader’s cab disintegrated in a shower of shards and molten metal.

The Yautja leapt to its feet and ran, its damaged cloaking device throwing strange sparks that seemed to reflect its whole body in motion, scattering a thousand tiny images of itself behind as it sought cover.

Two indies appeared around the front of the loader, glanced at Palant, then chased the Yautja. One of them braced himself with legs parted, and fired a plasma charge. Whatever he thought he was firing at, he missed, the charge exploding against the small locked room where they kept the bodies of the dead.

Metal warped and flew. Fire ate inward. Flesh was burnt, adding a sickening warmth to the metallic tang on the air.

“Isa!” McIlveen called, waving her over. She knew she wouldn’t be any safer there than where she crouched, but she suddenly felt the need for contact, human company, and a sudden affection for the Company man made her eyes water.

She ran, glancing left and right. The fight moved to the far end of the hangar now, close to where the building’s corner had been blasted open and its roof and walls slumped down to the ground. The darkness burst apart again and again, and averting her face from the glare, she looked to her right.

Standing in the open doorway, Shamana was watching her.

Palant paused in the open. A streaking, errant laser blast whipped past her, so close that her sleeve flicked and skin sizzled, pain bleeding up her arm and into her shoulder, but she barely noticed. The Yautja stared. Palant lifted the datapad, suddenly desperate to make contact in any way not involving guns and pain, bloodied blades and death.

Without looking she typed,
I know
, then whispered, “Translate.” She held up the datapad, turned up the volume, and when it issued a throaty slick and a series of growls, a shiver ran down her spine.

Shamana moved slightly, tilting his head as if listening. Then he stepped aside and melted into the storm, moving away from the chaos of the hangar, not toward it.

Palant slumped to her knees.

I made contact!
she thought.
I spoke to him. I reached him!
But she could not know for sure.

Someone ran toward her. An indie, her clothes burning and hands slapping at the fire that was eating into her face.

McIlveen and several others darted from cover and tripped the woman, rolling her in an attempt to extinguish the flames, but the burning material had melted in deep, and the woman issued only a bubbling groan as she grew still, then curled into a tight ball as her tendons contracted in the heat.

“Isa… here!” McIlveen shouted. She needed no more invitation. She ran to him, and they moved toward the shadows at the rear of the hangar.

As they crouched, Wendigo ran into the open. She was slower than before, trailing a slick of bright green blood that also sprayed from several points on her body. Two indies followed her, pumping laser blasts at her until she fell and squirmed on the ground.

McMahon approached. She was blooded down one side of her face, left arm held across her chest, but she still carried her rifle in her right hand.

“Step back!” she warned, the other two obeying instantly.

Wendigo wore something slick and red around her neck. Palant thought it belonged inside someone, not outside. She was laughing, a deep, throaty sound.

“McMahon!” Palant shouted, thinking of the tales of Yautja suicides. “Her hand! Don’t let her touch—”

McMahon reacted instantly, raising her rifle and blasting the Yautja’s hand away from her arm. It skittered across the floor like a huge spider, flipping onto its back, clawed fingers curling inward and pressing into the palm.

The Yautja grew still and silent. Perhaps dead, perhaps not, but McMahon made sure. There was no sense of victory, and no gloating in the coupe de grace. Remaining at a distance, she fired three short bursts at the alien’s head. The helmet split and skittered across the floor, and Wendigo twitched once as she died.

“Regroup!” McMahon said, motioning. “You at the door, you two over at that corner! The other one could be here at any moment.”

I don’t think so
, Isa wanted to say, but she couldn’t be sure, and she would not risk anyone else’s life. At least three indies lay dead. Their shelter was blasted open in several places, exposed to the inimical elements, and one of her research subjects was no more.

She glanced at McIlveen, ashamed at the sadness she felt, but from the way he looked at her, she knew that he felt it too.

“Milt, I don’t think—”

“Here comes the second one!” an indie shouted, and Palant groaned as she backed away, McIlveen by her side. It seemed that in reality she knew nothing at all.

McMahon looked at Palant, exhausted and injured, and Isa began to speak. But then McMahon turned away and staggered toward the door, arm still clasped tight across her chest. Her rifle swung low and she swayed a little as she moved, but she was stocky and strong, her ginger-blonde hair flicking where it had escaped from beneath her helmet.

“Stop!” Palant shouted. “I can talk to him!” But McMahon didn’t seem to hear.

“Isa, we don’t know that,” McIlveen said. “And there’s no way you can risk—”

Gunfire erupted at the building’s ruined corner, flashing through the hangar. Rain drove in almost horizontally, spears of light resembling scattered laser fire.

McMahon stopped, lifting her rifle.

The wall in front of her smashed inward and Shamana burst through, shoving fractured sheet metal aside, sweeping his clawed hand and slashing McMahon from shoulder to hip. The indie dropped her gun and tried to back away, but Shamana clasped her to his chest, spun around and leapt back through the hole.

Several shots streaked across the hangar, chasing after the Yautja.

“You’ll hit McMahon!” Palant screamed. The indies ceased fire, Shamana and McMahon vanished out into the storm, and the building was plunged into a stunned stillness. Wind roared and whistled through the countless holes and gashes in the structure, rain slashed in, but compared to the screams, shouts, and explosions of battle, the silence almost breathed.

The remaining three indies huddled around the door, scanning outside with their infrared goggles.

Palant ran to them. They glared at her as if she were the enemy, eyes wide and shocked, one of them openly shaking.

“I can communicate with it!” she said. “If you go out there after it you’ll be killed.”

“You expect us to let
you
go?” one of the indies said.

“Do you give a shit?” she spat back. Palant was terrified and excited at the same time, heart thumping, and her fight-or-flight instinct pulled her both ways. Every animal part of her wanted to hide away from the danger, yet the intellectual heart of her—the part that drove every action she’d taken as an adult—craved to venture out into the storm and find the Yautja. Talk to it. Communicate with the alien in a way that had never been attempted before.

“Please,” she said, and then the long, high scream came from out in the storm. It was horrible, an expression of pure pain that could not be feigned.

An indie moved to rush outside. Another one stopped him.

One more scream, long and loud, ending suddenly.

And then Shamana roared in triumph. Somewhere in the storm, another trophy was being taken.

“You want to communicate with
that
?” the indie said to her. He sounded defeated now, almost resigned to his fate.

Palant had no answer. None that made sense to her, at least.

She had just listened to another good person die.

* * *

The hangar was a ruin. One end had slumped to the ground, its walls were holed from laser fire and explosions, and there were more bodies, with nowhere to keep them.

The remaining three indies were edgy and careless, stalking inside and outside the hangar with weapons at the ready. To Palant, they now seemed dangerous rather than protective. They’d lost their leader, lost their friends, and this relatively safe, comfortable posting had changed into a version of hell. She was certain that they would flee, if there was anywhere left to go.

But there wasn’t. Radiation levels were rising from the damaged reactor, and the storm showed no signs of abating. So the mercenaries prowled the area, waiting to fight, waiting to die.

Palant and McIlveen gathered the survivors and together they built what shelter they could in the undamaged end of the hangar, away from the ruined corner and the stench of burning bodies. There was very little food left. Drinking water was heavy with radiation, but they had little choice. They all took the maximum doses of radiation drugs, but the longer they were exposed, the more they were merely delaying the inevitable.

While the others gathered and salvaged what they could to survive, the two scientists saved as much of their research material as possible. Palant felt a little shamefaced doing so, yet it felt like the one good thing that could come of this situation. Whatever happened to them, if she could preserve everything she and McIlveen had discovered about the Yautja, independently and together, then perhaps their work might live on. Benefit humanity. Maybe even form the first uncertain foundation on which peace might be built between species.