White / Waggoner The Complete Alien Collection: Symphony of Death (The Cold Forge, Prototype, Into Charybdis)

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-80336-659-3
Verlag: Titan Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 932 Seiten

Collected together for the first time, this action-packed omnibus is filled with secrets, lies, and the silver smile of the deadly Xenomorphs. Across three epic novels, see how the Xenomorph doctrine of Weyland-Yutani and Venture is a short and angry road to hell. Cold Forge With the failure of Hadley's Hope, Weyland-Yutani has suffered a devastating setback-the loss of the Xenomorphs they aggressively sought to exploit. Yet there's a reason the company rose to the top. True to form, they have a redundancy already in place... the facility known as The Cold Forge. When Dorian Sudler is sent to assess their progress, he discovers that there's a spy aboard-someone who doesn't necessarily act in the company's best interests. If unmasked, this person may be forced to destroy the entire station... and everyone on board. That is, if the Xenomorphs don't do the job first. Prototype Corporate spy Tamar Prather steals a steals a Xenomorph egg from Weland-Yutani, taking it to a lab run by Venture, a direct rival to the Weyland-Yutani corporation. Unaware of the dangers it poses, the scientists come to an inevitable conclusion: they need a human test subject... Former Colonial Marine Zula Hendricks has been tasked with training personnel to deal with anything that gets thrown their way. Yet nothing can them prepare them for the horror that breaks out of Venture's lab. Unless stopped, it will kill every human being on the planet. Into Charybdis It was supposed to be an easy job for 'Shy' Hunt and the McAllen Integrations crew: set up environmental systems for the brand new Hasanova Data Solutions colony, an Iranian state-owned colony built on the abandoned complex known as 'Charybdis.' But the ruins have a darker history than any could imagine, and its depths harbor deadly secrets. The deeper they dig, the more Shy is convinced there's no one they can believe. When a bizarre ship lands on a nearby island, one of the workers is attacked by a taloned creature, and trust evaporates between the Iranians and Americans. The McAllen integrations crew are imprisoned, accused as spies, but manage to send out a distress signal... to the Colonial Marines.

Alex White was born in Mississippi and has lived most of their life in the American South. Alex is the author of The Salvagers Trilogy, which begins with A BIG SHIP AT THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE; ALIEN: THE COLD FORGE; and the forthcoming ALIEN: INTO CHARYBDIS. Currently residing in Atlanta, Georgia, they enjoy music composition, calligraphy and challenging, subversive fiction.

Autoren/Hrsg.

White, Alex

Waggoner, Tim

Leseproben

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 might be—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...