Chapter 103: You Dare to Bite an Alien?
"Nobody move," Rango said.
He said it quietly, in the register that didn't require volume to communicate that it was not a suggestion.
Everyone stopped.
The cave was the specific silence of somewhere that contained something large that was currently asleep, and in which everyone present had just collectively decided that keeping it asleep was their primary objective.
Rango had prepared, mentally, for a significant range of outcomes when the floor gave way. He'd run the catalog on the descent — Hell Legion remnants, something from the Cabin's lower-level taxonomy, one of the thirty-one entries from the Rare Devil Records that he hadn't encountered yet, possibly something entirely new that would require Amos to spend three hours explaining the classification.
He had not prepared for this.
The Alien Queen was four stories tall in the specific way of something that had been designed — not evolved accidentally, but designed, by whatever process produced H.R. Giger's specific nightmare — to be exactly as large as it needed to be for everything it needed to do. The skull was the elongated dome of the 1979 original, scaled up. The secondary jaw was visible even at rest. The claws were the specific architecture of something that had developed them for a purpose and the purpose was not decorative.
She was chained.
Heavy chains, not the rusted iron of the door above — something different, the metal carrying a faint blue charge that pulsed at irregular intervals, the specific quality of technology that was not medieval Christian craftsmanship.
Which raised questions that Rango was not going to address right now.
The tail sac was the thing he was looking at most carefully.
Bulging. The specific distension of something that was full of things that were almost ready to not be inside it anymore. He'd seen Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) enough times to know what the tail sac meant, and he'd seen Alien enough times to know what the oval shapes distributed across the cave floor meant.
He counted.
He stopped counting around forty because the number was large enough that the precise figure wasn't useful information.
"Mavis," he said, barely audible.
She leaned close to his ear.
"The oval shapes on the floor," he said. "Don't touch them. Don't go near them. Don't make any sound near them."
"What are they?" she breathed.
"Eggs," he said.
She looked at the oval shapes.
Looked at the Queen.
Looked at Rango with the expression of someone who has just recalibrated her understanding of what adventure meant when she'd been dreaming of it from a hotel tower for a hundred and eighteen years.
"Oh," she said.
"Yeah," he said.
He turned to the group — the specific low-register communication of someone managing a situation that required everyone to be excellent simultaneously. "We're leaving. Quietly. Toothless carries Jones and Lara to the ledge first, then comes back. Nobody touches anything. Nobody makes any sound that isn't necessary. And nobody—" he looked at Lara, who had her camera in her hand — "takes any photographs."
"The documentation value of—" Lara started.
"Lara."
"I understand the situation," she said.
"Do you have the camera down?"
She lowered the camera.
"Thank you," Rango said.
The extraction went well for approximately four minutes.
Toothless moved with the specific aerial care of something that understood the assignment — no plasma charge, no wing-beats that produced more downdraft than necessary, the Night Fury operating at the intersection of speed and silence that the films had established as his particular gift. Jones and Lara to the ledge. Back for Annabeth and Tyson.
Victor was already on the ledge, which he had reached via blood-mist transit without anyone asking him to or telling him it was an option. He was standing at the cave wall looking at the Queen with the specific expression he wore when he was running his very long memory against something and finding a match that he had complicated feelings about.
Rango filed that for later.
The Queen was still asleep.
The eggs were still closed.
The chains were still pulsing with their irregular blue charge.
Everything was going to be fine.
Lara raised her camera.
The flash was automatic — she'd had it set for the low-light conditions of the underground spaces above, and she hadn't thought to turn it off, and in the specific silence of a cave containing a dormant Alien Queen and forty-something eggs, the flash was approximately as subtle as a flare.
The Queen woke up.
Not gradually. The specific all-at-once activation of something that didn't have a groggy intermediate state — one moment dormant, the next moment fully operational, the roar arriving before anyone had time to process that the situation had changed.
The chains held.
The eggs did not.
The cross-shaped fissures appeared in the oval shells with the speed of something that had been waiting for an activation signal and had received one. The facehuggers came out in the specific wave of Aliens (1986) — not one, not a few, the mass emergence that the sequel understood was worse than the original's single creature because the math became impossible.
Rango looked at Lara.
Lara looked at the camera.
"I thought I'd turned off the flash," she said.
"Clearly you hadn't," Rango said.
"In my defense—"
"Toothless, go."
Toothless went.
The Night Fury's wings caught full extension and they were moving — up, toward the cave entrance above, the speed of something that had decided on a direction and committed. Jones, Lara, Annabeth, Tyson, Ted, and Mavis aboard, the gold altar secured to Toothless's back with the rope that Rango had tied with the specific knots that Lara had taught him on the yacht and that he was grateful for right now.
Rango looked back.
The facehuggers were on the walls.
This was the part of the Alien franchise that the sequels had established and that made the original's single creature feel almost manageable by comparison — the specific horror of something that could cover a vertical surface at the same speed it covered a horizontal one, that found the laws of friction to be a framework it declined to participate in.
They were fast.
Victor was still on the ledge.
He was looking at the facehuggers with the expression — Rango caught it in the pumpkin head's red light as they ascended — of someone who had been alive for two hundred years and had encountered many things and was looking at this specific thing and thinking something that his face was not fully containing.
Then he did something that nobody had briefed as a possibility.
He stepped forward.
He hit the nearest facehugger with an open palm strike that produced a red flash at the point of contact and separated the creature from its structural integrity with the specific efficiency of a two-hundred-year-old Vampire Elder who had been doing violence for longer than most countries had existed.
The facehugger went down.
Three more came.
Victor moved through them with the fluid economy of something that operated in the space between human reaction time — ghostly, the vampire's specific speed, there and not there and there again, and where he appeared something was no longer functional.
He was, objectively, extremely good at this.
And then he bit one.
Rango saw it happen from above. The specific motion of a vampire feeding — not the performance of it, the actual biological reflex of something that processed threat by consuming it, that had been doing exactly this for two centuries and whose body had decided this was the appropriate response to something that was attacking and was also biological.
The fangs went in.
The Alien's blood went the other direction.
Green. Acidic. The specific corrosive quality that the Alien franchise had established as one of the creature's primary defensive mechanisms — not a feature of its offense, a feature of its biology, the xenomorph equivalent of a poison dart frog's skin.
Victor made a sound.
It was not the sound of someone enjoying what they had bitten.
His mouth — the specific visible damage of something that had encountered molecular acid at close range — was no longer the shape a mouth was supposed to be. The fangs, which had presumably survived two centuries of use without significant wear, were gone.
Not broken.
Dissolved.
Victor looked at what his mouth was now.
He looked at the Alien he had bitten.
He looked at Rango, who was above him on Toothless, watching this sequence of events with the flat expression of someone who had predicted a bad outcome and was watching the bad outcome unfold on schedule.
"The blood," Rango said, "is acid."
Victor spread his wings — actual bat wings, the full Vampire transformation that he had apparently been holding in reserve — and came up from the cave floor with the urgent energy of something that has made a significant error and is relocating while it processes the error.
He landed on the ledge beside Rango with the specific dignity of someone choosing not to discuss what had just happened.
"You bit it," Rango said.
"I'm aware," Victor said.
"You bit an Alien."
"I said I'm aware."
"Two hundred years," Rango said. "Two hundred years of operational experience. And you bit the thing with acid for blood."
Victor looked at what remained of his lower face and said nothing.
"The acid blood," Ted said, from Rango's shoulder, "is documented in the 1979 film. Which has been publicly available for forty-five years."
"I don't watch films," Victor said, with the stiff dignity of someone saying something that has become significantly less defensible in the last thirty seconds.
"That," Ted said, "seems like an oversight."
The facehuggers reached the cave entrance before them.
This was the Aliens problem — the thing that made the sequel's hive engagement fundamentally different from the original's single-creature hunt. Individual xenomorphs were manageable with the right approach. A hive operated on different math. They were at the cave entrance, covering the walls, covering the ceiling, and the ones that hadn't reached it yet were on their way, and the ones on the walls behind them were doing the xenomorph thing of looking at the people on the dragon and conducting what appeared to be a strategic assessment.
"Toothless," Rango said. "The ones at the entrance."
Toothless already knew. The plasma charge built between his teeth — the blue-white energy that wasn't fire in the ordinary sense, that operated at the molecular level and produced results that regular combustion didn't — and hit the entrance cluster in a sustained burst that cleared a significant portion of the problem.
The ones who weren't hit saw what happened to the ones who were hit.
They did the thing that Rango had not expected and that was not in the 1979 original or the 1986 sequel.
They self-destructed.
Not all of them — the ones at the edges of the plasma's range, the ones that had done the math and concluded that getting hit by whatever the Night Fury was using was worse than the alternative. They detonated in the specific way of something whose biology included this as an option, and the green acid blood came down in a dispersed spray that covered a much larger area than a single creature's blood would have covered.
"That's not in the films," Annabeth said, from Toothless's back.
"No," Rango agreed. "It's not."
"Do the ones in the films do that?"
"They do not."
"So these ones have a capability that the documented version doesn't."
"Correct."
"Which means our reference material is incomplete."
"Also correct," Rango said. "We're updating it in real time."
Annabeth looked at the acid rain coming down from the self-destructed cluster and at the specific problem of being suspended in open air with no cover and more xenomorphs making the same calculation above them.
"The barrier won't hold long against that concentration," she said.
"I know," Rango said.
She put both hands forward anyway, the Athena tactical intelligence already running the numbers on how long she could maintain it and what needed to happen before it failed.
The golden light came up around the group — not the shadow-hunter ancestral work that Clare had used on Staten Island, something different, the specific divine-adjacent power of a daughter of Athena operating at full extension. The acid hit the barrier and the white smoke came up where it made contact, the chemistry of it actively working on the defense.
She had maybe ninety seconds.
Rango looked at the Queen.
She was chained. The chains were holding. The blue charge in them was continuous — not the medieval Christians' work, something that predated the church above, something that had been here before the church was built over it and that the builders had found and incorporated into their containment attempt without fully understanding what it was.
The eggs were empty now. The facehuggers were all deployed.
The tail sac was intact.
If the Queen broke the chains, the tail sac would produce a second wave.
If the Queen didn't break the chains, the first wave was still the problem.
"The hive mind," Rango said. "In the films — the Queen directs the hive. The workers execute. If the Queen's coordination is disrupted, the workers lose their tactical coherence."
"They become reactive instead of strategic," Annabeth said, from behind the barrier. "Individual threat responses instead of coordinated assault. I read the case files from—" she paused — "never mind where I read them. The theory holds."
"So we hit the Queen," Rango said.
"She's chained and being electrocuted," Tyson said. "She's already disrupted."
"She's still coordinating," Rango said. He watched the facehuggers — the specific organized quality of their positioning, the way they were holding the entrance rather than simply swarming. "Look at the pattern. They're holding a perimeter, not attacking randomly. She's still running the operation."
He looked at the altar, secured to Toothless's back.
God Power. The same consecration as the Colt's rounds, vastly more of it, currently in the form of a solid gold altar rather than bullets.
He looked at his palm.
At the totem.
He didn't have time to reconfigure the altar into ammunition.
But direct contact was a different option.
"Toothless," he said. "Take everyone up. Get them through the entrance and into the pyramid. Then come back for me."
Ted made a sound.
"Ted—"
"I'm staying," Ted said. The specific tone of someone who has made a decision and is reporting it rather than proposing it.
"Ted, if I'm doing what I'm thinking about doing—"
"Then you need someone watching your angles," Ted said. "I'll watch your angles."
Rango looked at him.
The specific look of two people who had been through enough together that the argument had already been had and the outcome was already known.
"Fine," Rango said.
He looked at Mavis.
She was already shaking her head before he could say it. "Don't," she said.
"Mavis—"
"I have echolocation, bat speed, and I scared off an entire forest of dryads this morning," she said. "Don't Mavis me."
He looked at her.
At the hundred-and-eighteen-year-old vampire who had been locked in a hotel for her entire existence and who was, right now, in a xenomorph cave underneath a Nubian pyramid on an impossible island, and whose expression communicated that she would rather be here than anywhere she had ever been.
"Stay close," he said.
"Obviously," she said.
Toothless banked hard, dropped the others at the cave entrance ledge, and came back.
Rango put his hand on the gold altar.
The God Power came up through his palm — the same warmth as the consecrated rounds in the Colt, the same source, the same authority behind it, but three meters of solid gold rather than six bullets.
He looked at the Queen.
At the chains holding her.
At the facehuggers holding the entrance above.
"Here's the thing about hive minds," he said, to no one specifically, in the tone he used when he was working something out and talking helped him work. "The Queen is the problem. But the Queen is also chained. Which means the Queen is the solution."
Ted looked at him.
"You're going to give the Queen something else to think about," Ted said.
"I'm going to give the Queen something else to think about," Rango confirmed.
He looked at Mavis. "Echolocation. Give me her exact position relative to the chains' anchor points."
Mavis was already running it. "The primary chain anchor is on the far wall, approximately sixty feet. The Queen is suspended approximately eight feet off the ground. The chain slack — if she pulled toward us, she'd have maybe four feet of movement before the anchors engaged."
"Four feet," Rango said.
"Four feet," Mavis confirmed.
He looked at the gold altar.
At the totem.
At the xenomorphs holding the entrance above, waiting for the barrier to fail.
"Okay," Rango said.
He picked up the altar with both hands.
Dragon Heart engaging. The weight becoming the different kind of weight that it became when the characteristic was running — still heavy, but manageable, the way the Minigun had been manageable.
He looked at the Queen.
"Hey," he said, at a normal conversational volume.
The Queen's head turned toward him.
"Yeah," Rango said. "You. Come here."
He walked toward her.
[Power Stone Goal: 500 = +1 Chapter]
[Review Goal: 10 = +1 Chapter]
If you liked it, feel free to leave a review.
20+chapters ahead on P1treon Soulforger