Alien: Prototype E-Book

Tim Waggoner

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

When an industrial spy steals a Xenomorph egg, former Colonial Marine Zula Hendricks must prevent an alien from killing everyone on an isolated colony planet. Venture, a direct rival to the Weyland-Yutani corporation, will accept any risk to crush the competition. Thus, when a corporate spy "acquires" a bizarre, leathery egg from a hijacked vessel, she takes it directly to the Venture testing facility on Jericho 3. Though unaware of the danger it poses, the scientists there recognize their prize's immeasurable value. Early tests reveal little, however, and they come to an inevitable conclusion. They need a human test subject… ENTER ZULA HENDRICKS A member of the Jericho 3 security staff, Colonial Marines veteran Zula Hendricks has been tasked with training personnel to deal with anything the treacherous planet can throw their way. Yet nothing can prepare them for the horror that appears—a creature more hideous than any Zula has encountered before. Unless stopped, it will kill every human being on the planet.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

The Complete Alien™ Library From Titan Books: The Official Movie Novelizations by Alan Dean Foster

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

Acknowledgments

About the Author

THE COMPLETE ALIENTM LIBRARY FROM TITAN BOOKSTHE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATIONS by Alan Dean Foster:

ALIEN

ALIENS™

ALIEN 3

ALIEN: COVENANT

ALIEN: COVENANT ORIGINS

ALIEN: RESURRECTION BY A.C. CRISPIN

ALIEN: OUT OF THE SHADOWS BY TIM LEBBON

ALIEN: SEA OF SORROWS BY JAMES A. MOORE

ALIEN: RIVER OF PAIN BY CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN

ALIEN: THE COLD FORGE BY ALEX WHITE

ALIEN: ISOLATION BY KEITH R.A. DECANDIDO

ALIEN: PROTOTYPE BY TIM WAGGONER

ALIEN: PHALANX BY SCOTT SIGLER (FORTHCOMING IN 2020)

ALIEN: INFILTRATOR BY WESTON OCHSE (FORTHCOMING IN 2020)

THE RAGE WAR SERIES BY TIM LEBBON:

PREDATOR™: INCURSION

ALIEN: INVASION

ALIEN VS. PREDATOR™: ARMAGEDDON

ALIENS: BUG HUNT EDITED BY JONATHAN MABERRY

THE COMPLETE ALIENS OMNIBUS, VOLUME 1BY STEVE AND STEPHANI PERRY

THE COMPLETE ALIENS OMNIBUS, VOLUME 2BY DAVID BISCHOFF AND ROBERT SHECKLEY

THE COMPLETE ALIENS OMNIBUS, VOLUME 3BY SANDY SCHOFIELD AND S.D. PERRY

THE COMPLETE ALIENS OMNIBUS, VOLUME 4BY YVONNE NAVARRO AND S.D. PERRY

THE COMPLETE ALIENS OMNIBUS, VOLUME 5BY MICHAEL JAN FRIEDMAN AND DIANE CAREY

THE COMPLETE ALIENS OMNIBUS, VOLUME 6BY DIANE CAREY AND JOHN SHIRLEY

THE COMPLETE ALIENS OMNIBUS, VOLUME 7BY S.D. PERRY AND B.K.EVENSON

THE COMPLETE ALIENS VS. PREDATOR OMNIBUS, VOLUME 1BY STEVE PERRY AND S.D. PERRY

ALIEN: THE ARCHIVE

ALIEN: THE BLUEPRINTS BY GRAHAM LANGRIDGE

ALIEN: THE ILLUSTRATED STORYBY ARCHIE GOODWIN AND WALTER SIMONSON

ALIEN: THE SET PHOTOGRAPHY BY SIMON WARD

THE ART OF ALIEN: ISOLATION BY ANDY MCVITTIE

THE ART AND MAKING OF ALIEN: COVENANT BY SIMON WARD

ALIEN COVENANT: THE OFFICIAL COLLECTOR’S EDITION

ALIEN COVENANT: DAVID’S DRAWINGSBY DANE HALLETT AND MATT HATTON

THE MAKING OF ALIEN BY J.W. RINZLER

A NOVEL BY TIM WAGGONER

TITAN BOOKS

ALIEN™: PROTOTYPE

Print edition ISBN: 9781789090918

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789092202

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: October 2019

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Alien and Aliens TM & © Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available fromthe British Library.

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DEDICATION

This one’s for Lance Henriksen, science fiction and horror’sMVP.

Chronology note: This novel takes place betweenthe novel Alien: Isolation and the comic book seriesAliens: Resistance.

1

“Holy shit.”

Tamar Prather said the words so softly, someone would’ve had to be crouching alongside her to think she’d done more than exhale. Normally, her self-control was so complete that this slight lapse was the equivalent of screaming at the top of her lungs. Given the cause, she decided she could forgive herself this once.

The stasis pod had no identifying marks—no manufacturer’s symbol, no serial number—but it was top-of-the-line tech. Likely a Weyland-Yutani product. The container was three feet high and just as wide, basically square, although its edges were rounded. Probably for aesthetic effect, Tamar guessed. The company’s designers were big on extra touches like that, thought it set their products apart from their competitors.

She’d found the pod hidden in a storage compartment built into the floor of the captain’s quarters. Although “hidden” was a misnomer. She’d spotted the seams in the floor the moment she’d walked into the cabin, hadn’t even needed to use the omniscanner she held in her left hand. Employing the tool to unlock the compartment, she removed the top panel and then scanned the pod to determine what lay inside. The shielding prevented a detailed readout, but the result, though woefully incomplete, displayed on the screen.

One word: biomatter.

This could be it, she thought. The holy fucking grail.

“How’s it going, Tamar? You find anything—”

Jumping a bit, she turned her head to see Juan Verela standing in the open doorway. He was tall and muscular, with a shaved head and a black mustache and goatee that were badly in need of trimming. He wore black pants and boots, but his pride was an ancient brown leather jacket held together with generous applications of insta-seal and prayer.

The big man’s eyes fixed on the storage pod still resting in the open floor compartment, and his mouth stretched into a wide grin.

“I love stasis pods,” he said. “Especially when they’re hidden like that. Means there’s something important inside, and that means credits. Lots and lots of—”

Tamar’s body acted on its own, with no input from her conscious mind. She jumped to her feet and spun, drawing the Fournier 350 from her side holster. No need to disengage the weapon’s safety; she never left it on. The pistol was set to silent mode—a must in her line of work—and the weapon emitted two soft chuffs as she put a pair of bullets into Juan’s forehead.

The man stiffened, a look of confusion on his face, which seemed only natural since he’d just had his brains turned into slurry, and then he crumpled as if he were a synthetic experiencing a complete system shutdown. Prather was strong, but Juan was too massive for her to catch. Instead, she dashed forward, rammed him with her shoulder, and directed his falling body onto the bunk. He hit the thin mattress with a thud, but the impact was muffled, and she doubted anyone else on the ship could hear it.

She gazed down at Juan’s corpse. He’d landed face down and hung halfway off the side. Not the most dignified of deaths, but Tamar had seen—and caused—worse in her career. She had acted on instinct, but if she’d taken the time to consider her actions, the result would have been the same. There was no way she could let her companions know what was—what mightbe—inside the stasis pod.

Still holding her gun, Tamar crouched next to the open storage compartment and touched the omniscanner to the pod’s surface again. The pod’s control system was locked, of course, but the scanner—while not as good, perhaps, as a Weyland-Yutani product—was more than capable of granting her access.

After several seconds she was in, and she used the scanner’s touch screen to send the pod a command. Servomotors engaged, small black wheels emerged from the pod’s bottom and sides, and the pod began to climb out of the compartment. Stasis pods this size were too heavy to lift, so they came equipped with movement-assist tech. Tamar stood and faced the open doorway as the pod made its way up and onto the cabin floor. Tucking the omniscanner into a loop next to the comm on the side of her belt, she kept her gun trained on the door in case any more of her crewmates decided to make an appearance.

Tamar was six and a half feet tall, lean and muscular. She had sharp, hawkish features that were striking, if not especially pleasing, and wore her blond hair cut short—long hair gave an opponent something to grab. A sleeveless khaki T-shirt covered a nusteel undergarment, along with tan slacks and knee-high black boots. She looked more like an athlete than she did a pirate, and while her crewmates wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that she was a competition-level martial artist, they would’ve been very surprised to learn she’d just killed their captain.

When the stasis pod finished climbing out of the storage compartment, Tamar stepped out into the corridor and looked both ways to make sure it was empty. It was. She jogged down the corridor, pistol in her right hand raised and ready to fire, the stasis pod whirring along behind her like an obedient pet. She wished she could speed up the damn thing, but it was designed to be sturdy, not fast. She had to force herself to keep from running full-out.

This had started as another routine smash-and-grab job. The Manticore was a pirate vessel, and the crew had thievery down to a science. They frequented well-known intersystem trade routes, constantly broadcasting a false distress signal. Eventually a ship responded—only the most cold-hearted people would abandon a crew out here in the cold, dark vastness of space.

The Manticore waited until the Proximo was in range, and then fired its rail gun. The weapon used electromagnetic force to send multiple projectiles at great speeds, with devastating effect. They’d targeted the ship’s engines and communications array, and once the boat was dead in the water, they’d docked and boarded. The crew of the defending ship had been ready to put up resistance, but the pirates of the Manticore were prepared for that. They came wearing breathing masks and throwing gas grenades.

There was an exchange of gunfire, but it didn’t last long, and the Manticore’s crew were able to round up their wheezing, red-eyed victims and escort them to the ship’s brig. After that, it was a simple matter to ransack the ship, searching for anything that could be sold on the black market. Tamar had served on the Manticore for the last seventeen months, and during that time the crew had raided a dozen different ships, but none of them had ever presented such a prize as what she suspected lay inside the stasis pod.

This was the reason she’d joined the Manticore’s crew in the first place. She wasn’t a pirate, and preferred to think of herself as a professional in the field of “freelance information acquisition.”

Put simply, she was a spy.

The galaxy—at least, the small portion of it that humans had settled—was in a state of constant upheaval, but the nature of large-scale conflict was different now. No longer did nations strive against one another for control of territory and resources or to increase their global status. Out here, there were no countries, no governments, no rulers. There were only the mega-corporations, constantly struggling to outcompete each other and increase their wealth and power. Tamar had been hired by one of the mega-corps—Venture—and tasked with infiltrating a pirate crew to keep an eye out for any stolen items which the corporation might turn to its advantage. It was boring work, but it paid well enough, and she’d only signed on to two years with the Manticore and its crew.

There were nine months left before Venture gave her a new assignment—hopefully, a more exciting one. During her time on the pirate vessel she hadn’t discovered a single thing that might be of even minor interest to her employers, and she’d all but given up hope.

Until today.

She needed to get the stasis pod off this ship without any of her surviving companions stopping her. Tamar preferred not to hurt any of them, though. Several of them had been her lovers at one time or another. There was a lot of downtime on a spaceship, and if you weren’t passing a trip in cryo-sleep, you had to find some way of occupying yourself. She was too much of a professional to allow herself to become emotionally attached, but she’d prefer to avoid killing any more of them.

Doing a quick mental rundown of the surviving Manticore crewmembers, she guessed where they were most likely to be. Lia Holcombe was guarding the Proximo’s crew in the brig, and Tamar wouldn’t pass near there on her way to the docking port. Kenyatta Lehman might still be busy with the ship’s computer system, reviewing the official cargo manifest and searching for an unofficial one, an encrypted list of off-the-books cargo. If she’d finished with that, though, she might have joined Sid Chun in the cargo bay so they could start assessing which of the Proximo’s goodies they should take and which—due to size and weight constraints—they would be forced to leave behind.

The cargo bay was located near the docking port, though Tamar could avoid it by taking a more circuitous route through the ship. Doing so would mean adding time to her journey, and she didn’t know if she should risk it. If one of the surviving pirates tried to contact Juan, they’d receive no reply. They wouldn’t be too concerned at first—comms malfunctioned, after all—but then they would go in search of their captain. If they found his corpse in the cabin Tamar had been searching, they’d come looking for her, guns out and ready.

No doubt she could take them if they came at her one at a time, but if they approached her as a group? She was less certain of her odds in that scenario. Worse, if they started shooting, the stasis pod—and more importantly, its contents—might be damaged in the crossfire.

Tamar opted for the most direct route, past the entrance to the cargo bay. Sid and Kenyatta might be too busy to notice her walking by, stasis pod in tow. More likely they’d hear the pod’s goddamned whirring, and step into the corridor to see what was up.

Jogging down the corridor, she headed in the direction of the cargo bay. Once she reached the Manticore, she’d undock and depart with her prize. Her crewmates would be stranded, but at least they’d be alive.

Most of them, anyway.

As she neared the bay she slowed to a walk, and the stasis pod slowed to match her pace. She was fit—she’d made sure to exercise regularly during her time on the Manticore—but she still felt winded, and her pulse thrummed in her ears. Nerves, she thought, and she focused on calming herself. Being nervous was okay. Looking nervous could arouse suspicion, and that could be deadly. Reluctantly, she holstered her gun. If either Kenyatta or Sid glanced at her as she passed, it wouldn’t do for them to see her with weapon in hand.

By the time she reached the cargo bay she was breathing normally, and her pulse had slowed. The entrance was open, and she risked a quick look. The bay was filled with large mining equipment—drills and haulers, mostly—but there were also containers of electronic components and medical supplies. These would be easiest to transport and sell. Harder to track, too. She hoped to see Sid and Kenyatta moving among the equipment and storage containers, cataloguing and discussing their finds. Instead, they both stood several feet back from the open doorway, gripping their pistols.

As Tamar came into view, they trained their weapons on her, and she froze. The stasis pod halted, sensing that she’d stopped moving.

“Going somewhere?” Kenyatta asked. She smiled, but there was no mirth in her gaze. The woman was of African descent, tall and lean, hair cut close to her skull. She had delicate, almost doll-like features that belied her true nature. She could be utterly ruthless when the situation demanded it.

Sid Chun was a full head shorter than Kenyatta, and stocky. He wore his long black hair in a ponytail, and his Asian features were overlaid by the tattoo of a skull. He didn’t say anything, but his gaze was, if anything, colder than Kenyatta’s.

Tamar forced herself to stay relaxed and she made sure to keep her hand well away from her gun.

“I’m taking the pod to the ship,” she said. “Juan’s orders.”

“Really?” Kenyatta looked at the pod, but she didn’t lower her gun.

“Yes, really.” Prather acted annoyed. “Any particular reason you two are pointing your guns at me?”

Sid spoke in a voice like ice.

“Juan’s orders,” he said.

Tamar felt a stab of fear, but kept her expression neutral.

“Juan started having doubts about you a few weeks ago,” Kenyatta said, “when we hit that trading vessel on the edge of the Kassa system.”

Tamar frowned. She remembered the job well. The trader had been carrying a hold full of fruits and vegetables grown in the hydroponic gardens of one of the Mars colonies. Not quite fresh produce from Earth, but close enough. The Manticore had a small refrigerated storage facility, so the crew had taken only a small portion of the food, and they’d eaten most of it themselves. They’d sold what was left over, but it didn’t bring in enough credits to come close to paying for the fuel they’d expended during the job.

Hardly a major score. Tamar quickly reviewed her memories of the theft, but she couldn’t recall doing or saying anything that would arouse Juan’s suspicions.

“As soon as you saw that the ship only carried produce, you lost interest,” Sid said. “A real pirate would’ve gotten a raging hard-on, seeing that many fruits and vegetables.”

“Out here,” Kenyatta said, “fresh produce is worth its weight in gold.”

“Twice that,” Sid added.

“And you didn’t give a damn,” Kenyatta finished.

“That’s because we didn’t have anywhere to store it on the Manticore,” Tamar replied, “and that made it worthless, at least for us.”

“You didn’t even try,” Kenyatta said. Tamar remembered how Juan, Kenyatta, Sid, and Lia had tossed around ideas for preserving the produce. The stupidest—offered by Lia—had been to jury-rig the cryo-sleep chambers to act as makeshift refrigerators.

“So I didn’t have an orgasm, seeing a hold full of greenery,” Tamar said. “Juan decided I was… what?” She knew the answer, of course, but she needed to keep playing the part until she could figure a way out of this situation.

“He figured you for a spy,” Sid said.

“Looking for stuff she could bring to her employers,” Kenyatta added.

“Juan took me and Kenyatta aside and told us of his suspicions,” Sid continued. “Not Lia, though. She’s too soft-hearted, and Juan figured she’d give you a heads-up.”

Smart move, Tamar thought. Lia hated conflict among the crew, and functioned as their self-appointed peacemaker. There was an excellent chance she would’ve told Tamar about the captain’s doubts.

“So what did Juan tell you to do?” Tamar asked. “Keep an eye on me?”

“He copied us on any orders he gave you,” Sid said. “That way we could make sure you did what you were told—or not—and report back to him.”

“If we caught you doing anything naughty,” Kenyatta said, “he told us to stop you any way we thought was necessary.”

“Juan didn’t order you to take anything back to the ship—let alone a stasis pod,” Sid said. “So when we heard the pod’s motor…”

You knew it had to be me, coming down the corridor, Tamar thought. Lia wouldn’t leave her post, and Juan would bring the pod to the bay, where we’d load it all at once. That was why Juan had come to the captain’s cabin—to check on her. He’d suspected her of being a spy—correctly, as it turned out.

She was glad she’d killed him.

It made sense, now that she thought about it. Juan, Kenyatta, and Sid had been stiff toward her over the last few weeks, although Lia had treated her the same as ever. She hadn’t thought much of it, though. When people spent a lot of time together in cramped quarters, they tended to run hot and cold. Especially given the… intimacies involved. She’d thought that was all. She’d been wrong, and now that mistake might cost Tamar her life.

“What’s in the stasis pod that’s so special?” Kenyatta demanded. “Must be damn good to make you risk moving it onto the Manticore by yourself.”

“And where the hell did you think you were going to hide the damn thing, once you got it aboard?” Sid said. “It’s not like we have a ton of extra space to…”

Understanding came into his gaze.

Kenyatta figured it out then, too.

“You weren’t planning to hide it, were you?” the woman said. “You were going to leave us here, weren’t you?”

This was it. One or both of them would take a shot at her in the next few seconds. Tamar could sense it. If either of them had been closer, she would’ve gone on the offensive, but this wasn’t an action vid. Even the most skilled martial artist was no match for a gun, let alone a pair of them—and while she was fast on the draw, both Kenyatta and Sid would get shots off before she could pull her gun clear. She wasn’t helpless, though.

Looking at Sid, she let out a long sigh.

“I guess the jig’s up, partner.”

Sid’s eyes widened in surprise.

“Partner? What the hell are you talking about?”

“There’s no point in pretending any longer. Juan’s a smart businessman, though. Maybe we can make a deal with him, get our bosses to cut him in on the action.”

“Our bosses?” Sid’s eyes practically bulged from their sockets, and Tamar wouldn’t have been surprised if he had an embolism in the next few seconds.

“What are you saying?” Kenyatta looked from Tamar to Sid and back again, brow furrowing. “You and Sid are both spies?”

“That’s bullshit!” Sid protested. “Don’t listen to her! She’s just trying to confuse you to save her ass!”

“Listen, you sonofabitch.” Tamar’s face clouded with faux anger, and she took a step forward. “I’m not going to let you do this to me. If I’m exposed, you’re exposed. Got it?” As she said this, she moved her left hand to the omniscanner on her belt, keeping her gaze fixed on Sid.

Kenyatta looked back and forth one more time, then trained her gun on Sid.

“Maybe we should go find Juan and let him sort this out,” she said.

Sid’s face went red with anger and frustration.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he said. “You’ve known me for what now? Six, seven years? This bitch is trying to divide so she can—”

Tamar chose that moment to tap a control on the omniscanner. The stasis pod whirred to life and began spinning in circles. Kenyatta’s and Sid’s attention was immediately drawn to the machine, and in that instant Tamar drew her pistol and fired.

She shot Sid first, then Kenyatta. They were fast, sloppy shots, and she didn’t have time to aim. The bullet that hit Sid struck him in the throat, and the one that hit Kenyatta got her in the left shoulder. Before they could fall, Tamar stepped forward and quickly shot each of them between the eyes. The two pirates hit the deck and lay still as blood began pooling around their bodies.

Tamar tapped the omniscanner once more, and the stasis pod stopped moving. She let out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. That had been a close one.

Her comm device chirped.

“Tamar? You there?”

It was Lia.

“I’ve been guarding the crew for almost two hours now, and I haven’t heard from anybody. Is everything okay? I’m starting to get a little worried.”

Tamar gazed down at the dead bodies of her former companions as she took the comm from her belt and raised it to her mouth.

“Everything’s fine.”

* * *

It would take twenty-three days for Tamar Prather to reach Jericho 3. Not so long that she really needed to enter cryo-sleep, but she had nothing to occupy her during the trip, and she didn’t feel like sitting in front of the flight console watching data that never changed.

She wasn’t concerned that the Proximo would come after her. The damage done by the Manticore’s rail gun had been extensive—enough so that they’d require replacements parts unlikely to be kept on board. And even if they managed to get the ship space-worthy again, they wouldn’t have the tracking equipment needed to follow the Manticore’s ion trail. Besides, the Proximo didn’t have any weapons worth noting.

That didn’t mean she should throw caution to the wind. The first thing the Proximo’s captain would do, once Lia released her from the brig, was send out a distress signal. Then she would send a message to Weyland-Yutani. If the pod contained what Tamar thought it did, the company would do everything possible to retrieve it, and they had ships that were more than capable of tracking her. With weapons that made the Manticore’s rail gun look like a pea shooter.

So she charted a roundabout course that avoided standard shipping lanes. Otherwise, she could’ve reached Jericho 3 in a week. Setting the call sign on the Manticore to change randomly every few hours, she programmed the light engines to cycle down periodically to break the ship’s ion trail. She doubted these precautions would be necessary, though. Space was fucking huge, and the odds of anyone finding the Manticore before it reached its destination were, not to make a pun, astronomically small.

Still, she’d survived this long in the spy game by being careful to the point of paranoia.

Securing the stasis pod in one of the Manticore’s hidden compartments, she stripped down to her underwear, slathered cryo-gel onto her body, and slipped into one of the cryo-chambers. It sealed with a hiss, and within moments a familiar deep drowsiness came over her. As she sank into darkness, she thought about the bonus she’d get from Venture, and fell into cryo-sleep with a smile on her face.

2

Aleta Fuentes walked down the corridor with a brisk, no-nonsense stride, gaze fixed straight ahead, features set in a do-not-talk-to-me expression. She was the director of the V-22 facility, and as such, everyone wanted to talk to her, to ask for something, complain about something, or—most often—curry favor. It was one of the main reasons she only left her office when absolutely necessary. She hated interacting with people.

Most of them weren’t as smart as she was, and they almost always made her job harder than it needed to be. Not for the first time she wondered how she’d ended up in an administrative position, given her dislike for working with inferiors. But she was an employee of Venture, and one did as one’s corporate masters wished, if one wanted to advance. Since she hoped one day to become a master herself, she’d accepted her appointment with as much grace as she could muster.

She ran V-22—colloquially known as the Lodge by its workers—with determined efficiency, but she knew that doing an excellent job here wouldn’t be enough to distinguish herself in the view of her superiors. She needed to do something more. Something special. She needed to pull off a bona fide fucking miracle, and if what Dr. Gagnon had told her was true, it looked as if she was on the verge of just that.

V-22’s focus was on the development of new and improved space colonization technology. The first wave of colonists had already moved out into the galaxy, but they were merely a drop in the bucket for what was to come. They lived in small groups housed in cramped space stations, or equally cramped planet-based facilities, but soon larger missions would be looking for opportunities beyond the world of their birth. More ambitious settlements would be established—villages, towns, cities, and eventually entire nations. The future colonists would need better ships, better facilities, and better tools to help them survive, let alone work in the hostile environments they would encounter.

Venture intended to be the number one supplier of these needs, outcompeting all others, including the almighty Weyland-Yutani. Of course, Weyland-Yutani had a habit of buying out any corporation that came close to becoming a threat, but Aleta didn’t care about that. Their salary would spend just as well as Venture’s.

At a shade over five feet, Aleta wasn’t a physically imposing presence. She was fit but not rail thin, as were so many people who lived and worked in space. Conservation of resources was vital to survival, and that included food. She wore her black hair short, and used only minimal makeup, just enough to achieve an enhanced “natural” look. Most of Venture’s personnel wore the gray coveralls that served as the facility’s unofficial uniform. As chief administrator, Aleta was encouraged to dress the same way in order to visually demonstrate that there was no real difference between rank-and-file employees and management. She thought this was human resources bullshit, though, and wore a navy-blue suit jacket over a white blouse, with navy-blue slacks and less-than-stylish black flats. She liked to look good, but she wasn’t a fanatic about it. Although she would have liked the couple extra inches heels would have given her.

The complex was practically gigantic as planet-side facilities went, with five interconnected buildings and a staff of nearly six hundred. It was an old cliché that people were the costliest resource in business, but it was true, and doubly so off-world. There had to be air, water, food, and livable environments. Humans were fragile creatures, biologically unsuited to the harsh and all-too-often deadly conditions of space, and keeping them alive was damned expensive.

Venture had been too ambitious when it built this facility, and so far the corporation’s return on its investment had been modest. If the situation didn’t improve—if V-22 didn’t start generating significant profits—there was an excellent chance the facility would be shut down and its staff either relocated or, if they proved to be less than essential employees, let go.

This situation, unknown to most of the staff, put her in a precarious position. She wanted the Lodge to be a stepping stone to bigger and better things, but if the facility failed while she was in charge, she’d be blamed, regardless of whatever factors were in play. If that happened, she’d be lucky to get a job cleaning lavatories. V-22 had to be a success. If she wanted to climb Venture’s corporate ladder, she needed to accomplish something that would make a big impression on her superiors and, ultimately, the board of directors.

This latest acquisition might be the answer to her prayers.

Aleta heard the sound of someone jogging down the corridor, and she turned to see Tamar Prather coming toward her. She groaned inwardly. This was the last thing she needed, but she put on a coolly professional smile as the woman reached her and came to a stop. There was a slight sheen of sweat on her forehead, but she didn’t appear winded. Aleta told herself that she needed to work out more.

“I went to your office to see you, but you weren’t there,” Tamar said. “Your assistant told me that you were on your way to Research and Development, so I started running, hoping I could catch up to you.”

“And you succeeded,” Aleta said drily. “What can I do for you?”

The question wasn’t necessary. Aleta knew damn well what Tamar wanted—the same thing she’d wanted since she’d landed the Manticore on the planet.

“Your assistant told me that you’re planning to speak with Dr. Gagnon. Dare I hope that he’s ready to share some information about the bio-specimen, so you’ll finally authorize my payment?”

Aleta made a mental note to fire her assistant the moment she returned to the office.

“I believe so,” she responded, “although he didn’t say. I’ll be sure to keep you apprised of whatever information he gives me, though.” She gave Tamar a cold smile. “Provided, of course, the company doesn’t consider it classified. I’ll have to run it through the proper channels, and if—”

“I’m not really a proper channels kind of person,” Tamar said. “Too many hoops to jump through. I’m more of a let’s get shit done girl. Since I’m already here, why don’t I go with you to Gagnon’s lab? That way you won’t have to deal with the hassle of proper channels. It’ll save us both some time.”

Aleta didn’t like Tamar. As a rule she disliked spies, although she understood their usefulness. Corporate spies had no loyalty, though. They worked for whoever paid them the most. Their allegiances were temporary and liable to change at the slightest shift in the breeze. Aleta believed in the sanctity of the contract. Once you signed with an employer, you gave them everything—mind, body, and soul. So long as the contract remained in force. Once it was terminated, all bets were off.

People like Prather—freelancers—were unpredictable, and because of that they weren’t trustworthy. More than that, Tamar got on Aleta’s nerves. She was pushy, persistent, and altogether unpleasant. More than any bullshit about proper channels, that made Aleta want to deny the woman’s request. Before she could, however, the woman spoke again.

“There are a lot of people who would be interested to know about the specimen,” Tamar said. “Especially Weyland-Yutani. I’m sure they’d love to know where their ‘lost’ property turned up.”

Aleta considered calling Security and having Tamar thrown in the brig, but she knew it was pointless. The woman would already have considered that possibility, and have a contingency plan in place. Perhaps an automated message that would be sent to Weyland-Yutani if she found herself behind bars. The threat wasn’t a bluff.

She let out a long sigh.

“Fine. You can join me.”

Tamar smiled.

“If you insist.”

* * *

An electronic tone sounded, indicating that someone was at the door. Millard Gagnon was on the other side of the large room, watching data stream across a terminal screen. Without looking up, he spoke to his assistant.

“Please let the director in.”

Brigette wasn’t any closer to the door, but she nodded, walked across the lab, and pressed a button on the wall keypad. The lab door slid open with a soft hiss of air, and Gagnon looked up from his work to watch Aleta Fuentes enter. This was expected. That Tamar Prather accompanied her was not. Gagnon wasn’t distressed by this, however. He liked it when things were unpredictable, even downright chaotic at times. Order might be comfortable, but chaos provoked change, and change provided opportunities. Change was unpredictable, messy, and at times dangerous, but as far as he was concerned it was the only reliable way to move forward in life. So he gave both women a smile as he left his terminal and went to greet them.

“Welcome, welcome!” he said, shaking each of their hands in turn.

Brigette closed the door, then turned to regard their visitors with an interested, if dispassionate, gaze.

Gagnon looked nothing like the stereotype of a scientist. Yes, he wore a white lab coat over his equally white shirt, but otherwise he seemed more like a miner or someone who worked with heavy equipment. He was a big, rough-looking man, tall, broad-shouldered, with a loud, deep voice and thick black hair and beard. He’d been told he was handsome, but there was something in his brown eyes that bothered people. A cold detachment that—as a former lover once told him—made them think of a predatory insect. The description hadn’t bothered him. In fact, he’d taken it as a compliment. It was this detachment that made him good at what he did.

Brigette didn’t look the stereotype of a scientist, either, any more than Gagnon. She was a Venture Corporation synthetic, originally created for human sexual gratification, and as such, she had been designed to be physically appealing. She was slim, small-waisted, large-breasted, with fiery red hair that reached to the bottom of her back. Her lips were full and lush, and her green eyes were striking, almost seeming to glow with an inner light. Like Gagnon, she wore a white lab coat, but it did nothing to disguise her figure.

Gagnon viewed her as a highly sophisticated tool, little more than a mobile semi-autonomous computer. When he first came to the Lodge he’d requested a synthetic for an assistant, and he’d been surprised when Brigette arrived. She’d been repurposed after breaking the arms of a client who had tried to slice her skin with a straight razor. While he would’ve preferred a plainer-looking assistant, he had no complaints about her job performance.

“You have something to show me?” Aleta said.

He detected a challenge in her voice, along with more than a hint of frustration. He’d been employed by Venture for the better part of a decade, and was used to management types who expected quick results. They had no appreciation for the art of science, for the process. He felt sorry for them, really. Limited creatures.

“I do.” Gagnon turned to Brigette. “Prepare the demonstration, please.”

Brigette gave him a look which might have been disapproval. The specimen made her nervous, although she preferred the term cautious. He couldn’t understand her hesitation. The specimen was an exquisite creature, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. Brigette was intelligent, but she was a synthetic, and as such lacked vision.

Some are born to lead, and some to serve, he thought.

There were seven doors in the main lab, each of which led to different rooms—Gagnon’s office, supply storage, and several testing chambers. Brigette crossed to the far side and took up a position at a console, in front of what looked to be a blank wall. Her delicate hands moved confidently across the controls, and a moment later there was a soft hum as a panel in the wall slid upward. Behind it lay a thick layer of clear plasteel, the same material Venture used to create windows for the buildings in their proto-colony. They were strong enough to withstand the most intense planetary conditions, and Gagnon had ordered the window installed soon after the specimen was brought to his lab. He’d also had the walls, floor, and ceiling of the small chamber reinforced with nusteel, and he’d had a new interior door installed. Like the window, the door was designed for use in colony buildings, and it could take a direct hit from a high-intensity pulse cannon with only a scratch.

Gagnon supposed he was being overcautious, but if so, it wasn’t out of fear for his or Brigette’s safety—nor that of the rest of the Lodge’s personnel. Having access to such a specimen was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and he was determined to make sure absolutely nothing went wrong while he was working with it.

As Brigette activated the chamber’s lights and turned on the recording equipment, Gagnon escorted his visitors to join the synthetic.

“We repurposed one of the testing chambers we used during the last round of trials for our latest vaccine,” Gagnon explained. He oversaw every project that had biological or medical applications, but only took a personal hand in the research that especially interested him. One of these was the search for a universal vaccine that would strengthen the human immune system, to make colonists resistant to whatever diseases they might encounter when settling a new world. A pipe dream, perhaps—likely no more achievable than the legendary Philosopher’s Stone, which ancient alchemists believed could turn lead into gold, but it was interesting work, if not entirely practical. He’d had a difficult time convincing Fuentes to authorize and, more importantly, fund his experiments, but he’d put that program on hold the moment the specimen had arrived.

At that juncture there had been no problem getting funding. In fact, she practically fell over herself throwing credits at him. The change in their professional relationship had been refreshing, but if he didn’t show Aleta some significant progress today, they would be adversaries once again.

He preferred to avoid that, if he could.