Chapter 4 - Alien: Colony War

“What’s your business in the Shires?” the soldier said, frowning at Chad McLaren from beneath his polished metal helmet. His uniform was serge green and there was a patch over one breast that proclaimed him to be a junior officer in the New Albion First Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. Over his shoulder was slung a standard issue projectile rifle, and two other guards, watching the interaction, bore the same weapons.

Chad’s flyer had been pinged on the flight over the rough, mountainous scrubland just about half a world away from the New Albion colony, and as requested, he’d put down on the checkpoint—just a wide landing platform and guard hut, really. There’d been a cursory search of the flyer, though Chad had made sure there was nothing to find anyway, and those on board had been requested to disembark. Which amounted to Chad and the dog.

The soldier looked curiously at the dog as Chad said, “I’m on a scientific research mission. Looking at possible ore deposits in the Shires.”

“What sort of dog is it?” the soldier said, giving the electronic permissions and papers a cursory glance on his tablet screen. Chad was glad of that, considering they were forged. Expertly forged, of course, but ultimately fake nonetheless.

“Cockapoo,” Chad said, leaning forward to ruffle the dog’s head. It growled warningly at him.

“You’re American,” the soldier said with that way the British seemed to have of pointing out the blindingly obvious. “Cockapoo. Funny old name. Sounds more like a bird.”

The other two soldiers laughed. Chad looked around the wind-whipped platform, at the low mountain range they’d called the Pennines. Aside from this checkpoint, New Albion had done nothing here, and had no other presence. Which was good news for him.

“Cross between a cocker spaniel and a poodle,” he said. “Used to be popular a couple of hundred years ago.”

“Well, have a good trip, sir.” Apparently satisfied, the soldier tapped at his tablet and Chad felt his comms unit shiver, the green-light approval for onward travel registering on it. “Hope you find something useful out there for the furtherance of the glory of New Albion. Stay safe.”

“To say nothing of the dog,” Chad said.

“To say nothing of the dog,” the soldier agreed. “What’s his name, anyway?”

“Scooby,” Chad said, ushering the dog up the steps into the flyer and climbing up behind him.

“Best of British to you both!” the soldier said, standing back and waving as Chad fired up the flyer and lifted off with a whine of engines, pointing the nose toward the grey shale of the hills.

* * *

“I understood both of those references,” the dog said once the checkpoint was far behind them. “To Say Nothing of the Dog; a 1997 novel by Connie Willis which deals with the concept of time travel. And Scooby-Doo, a mid-twentieth century originating animation series for children in which the titular dog and a group of teenage humans investigate paranormal activity which generally turns out to be the work of villainous adults who are invariably unmasked at the close of each installment.”

“Of course you get the references, Davis,” Chad said, glancing down at the map on his comms screen. “You’re a synthetic with an artificial intelligence brain that can access the sum of human knowledge.”

Davis cocked his furry head on one side and regarded Chad, who caught the dog staring at him and glared back.

“A dog can’t out-stare a human,” Chad said. “So don’t try. What’s up, anyway?”

“I’m not quite sure I like being a Cockapoo,” Davis said. It wasn’t strictly necessary for Davis to move the dog’s jaws to ape the physical act of speech; he could simply transmit his voice through the speakers in the dog’s collar. But Davis seemed to enjoy doing it. Maybe he didn’t mind sharing a body with the AI of a dog, at least not as much as he claimed.

“It’s good cover,” Chad said. By his estimations, they had about an hour’s flying into the depths of the wasteland New Albion called, rather romantically, the Shires. Everything they’d done to this planet was with some kind of pastoral, idealistic, rose-tinted vision of an England that had been lost, or more likely never existed except in the fevered imaginations of latter-day patriots. “Nobody suspects a dog.”

The dog raised one eyebrow at him. “I am a Weyland-Yutani corporate security drone,” Davis said. “Being a dog feels somewhat… beneath me.”

“You were a Weyland-Yutani corporate security drone,” Chad corrected. “Then you went and developed free will and a conscience and the ability to transfer your AI into practically any network or system. Now you’re… well, I don’t know what you are, really. Something new.”

“Something new with an age-old problem,” Davis said, looking out of the window at the landscape unfolding ahead of them with dreary monotony. Could a dog look wistful? Davis certainly seemed to pull it off, Chad thought.

“Davis… don’t,” he said. “I don’t want to think about it right now. We have to concentrate on the job at hand.”

“Two buddies on the road without their womenfolk.” Davis sighed. He lifted a brown paw and held it out. “But you’re right. Let’s not talk about them. ‘Pals before gals,’ eh, Chad?”

“If you say so, Davis.” Chad fist-bumped the dog’s paw. They sat quietly for a while, each of them in a bucket seat in the cockpit.

“Funny how entertainment in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was so concerned with impossible things,” David said. “They were in the midst of a white-hot explosion of technology, yet they dreamed about time travel and monsters, as though the wonders they were creating were never quite enough.”

“Well, they were right about one thing,” Chad said. “Monsters do exist.”

Neither of them said anything else, until Davis jumped off the bucket seat. “I am going to let this synthetic’s programming be dominant for a while. It is important to do that to stop it becoming permanently corrupted.”

“Why do you care?” Chad asked. “At some point, you’ll have no further use for it.”

“I just do.” Davis looked back at him. “Like you said, I’m something new. I will be resting for the remainder of the journey. In accordance with this synthetic’s directives, I may shortly lick my genitals and simulate the appearance of sleep. See you soon, Chad.”

“Why wouldn’t he like being a dog?” Chad muttered quietly. “Sounds like the dream life, to me.”

* * *

The crash site was located in a wooded valley overhung by a large rock outcropping on the western side of the mountain range, which was both a blessing and a curse. It was good because providence had put the ship down in a place that was practically invisible from above, save for the damage to the landscape as it had made violent planetfall, so it hadn’t been picked up by anyone who wasn’t specifically looking for it.

Perhaps because nobody was looking for it, Chad thought… at least not on LV-593. Its location was bad, however, because the area was completely inaccessible for his flyer due to the dense foliage, which meant they’d had to land several kilometers away on the edge of the forest and hike through woods where no human had trod before.

The flora wasn’t too dissimilar from what was found on Earth, and so far they hadn’t encountered any problems with the fauna. A few small mammals that had skittered out of their way, some dull-plumed birds that Davis had run at, barking. He seemed to delight in them flapping noisily away. Sometimes it was hard to tell if Davis’s AI was in charge, or the dog’s.

Trust the British to find a temperate world that was ineffably safe and dull, he mused. Much like the tiny rain-soaked island from which they’d orchestrated their domination-seeking affairs for generations, back on the home planet.

“Is the dog still dominant?” Chad asked as Davis chased yet another grey bird away, then cocked his leg against the trunk of the nearest tree.

“No,” Davis said, “but I am getting a certain satisfaction from the things in which it finds joy.”

The dog didn’t find joy in anything, really, or at least, nothing that wasn’t included in its programming. It was a synthetic, of course—a very nice little job from what Chad was certain wasn’t a strictly legal operation. Once synthetic capabilities had been developed for research and military use, it was inevitable that it would be repurposed for other things. The sex industry, always an early adopter in any new tech, had jumped on it, of course, but there was also a little grey-market economy in replicating—for those who could pay the eye-wateringly high prices, of course—formerly living creatures.

The Cockapoo had been the faithful companion of a grand old dame who was the head of an organized crime family, and when the critter had died she had been inconsolable. Until she found a synthetic technician to bring poor Fido back to life with a nearly perfect synthetic AI personality. For those with enough money, word was there were no limits to what could be remade in synthetic form.

As a result Fido—or whatever the mutt’s name had been—had come to be the repository for the weird misfit of the AI world that was Davis. Her loss had become a unique asset—and besides, at the time it had been their only viable option.

The dense woodland broke suddenly, and their path was crossed by a wide avenue of scorched earth where the ship had come down and careened through. Chad looked to the right and saw a tangled mess in the lee of the overhanging rocks, a kilometer distant. They’d found it.

“Lovely place, this,” Davis said, trotting to heel beside Chad. “We should bring the ladies when everything is sorted.” He scampered ahead, saying loudly, “For now it’s just us couple of swells, out on the town.”

Chad frowned as he picked up the pace, following the dog. Davis wasn’t exactly what you’d call a normal synthetic—he was in that uncharted, fuzzy, grey zone somewhere between AI and human, a synthetic with free will and agency and, yes, emotions. Or something very much approaching them. In the time that Chad had known him, however, Davis had become more… erratic, he supposed. Quirky, at best. Disturbingly unpredictable at worst. It was as though… Chad didn’t really know.

As though Davis was trying a little too hard to be human, perhaps.

Not that Chad could blame him for going a little off the rails after what had happened to him. After his synthetic body was destroyed, he—by accident or by design of his own—had managed to live on as an invisible cloud of AI technology, inhabiting and controlling other tech systems, even spaceships. He’d been destroyed and cheated whatever passed for synthetic death many times.

Oh, and he was in love.

Lost in thought, Chad almost tripped over his stationary companion. They were at the crash site, the ship folded up into a crumpled wreck against the foot of a steep cliff.

“I wish Zula and Amanda could see us now.”

“Davis, will you shut up?” Chad glared at him. “Can we just get on with the job?”

The dog looked at him with a mournfulness that made Chad think that somewhere along the line rogue animators must have been involved in designing the goddamned synthetic.

“Sorry, Chad. I know. It hurts us both.”

Stop trying so hard, Chad thought, then immediately regretted his harshness, unspoken as it was. Instead he said, “Come on, let’s get inside.”

* * *

The STSV Clara had been a private towing and salvage vessel, licensed to a small family-run business called Gambell Reclamations. It had run into difficulties close to New Albion when one of the engines blew. The ore they had been towing had been cut free by the explosion and presumably still drifted in space, or had been picked up by opportunistic salvagers or pirates. The ship had crashed planetside. No distress call had been sent out. The crew of five had died before impact.

This was all in the Clara’s black box, accessed by Davis as they stood in the tangled mess of what had once been the bridge.

“What does Mother say?” Chad asked, looking around the twisted metal of the flight deck. “About what really happened?”

“Mother is being unusually quiet on the subject,” Davis said. The dog looked at Chad. “You could say she is keeping mu—”

“No.” Chad put up a hand. “Enough. What exactly do you mean? Mother is refusing to speak to you? It’s been destroyed?”

“It… deactivated itself before impact. As far as I can tell from the files. Due to a manual override.”

“From the crew of the Clara?”

“No.” Davis looked up at Chad. “They were boarded. While the crew were in hypersleep.”

Chad nodded. “Makes sense. Do the files or the manifests mention anything about their cargo?”

“Just the 300,000 tonnes of mineral ore they were towing.”

Well, he knew for a fact they’d been carrying more than that. “Let’s search the ship. Did they have cryo storage facilities for cargo?”

Davis scanned for a moment. “In the hold.”

They picked their way through the folded Clara and climbed up into the hold. There wasn’t much left of it, but enough for Chad to see the remains of the rows of cryotubes. A few had survived the crash, and all had their plasteel fronts shattered.

“Did you locate any human remains?”

“Most were obliterated in the explosion or the crash. Only one of any substance is left.”

“And it’s just human?” Chad said.

“Yes.” Davis nodded, an action that Chad still found it difficult to get used to. “There was no infestation on the Clara. There were by my reckoning twenty-seven of these cryotubes used for storage of Ovomorphs. I don’t think any of them hatched.”

“So someone boarded the Clara while the crew were asleep, took the eggs, planted explosives to destroy the ship, and reprogrammed Mother to cover their tracks.”

“It appears to be the case.”

“The question is, who?”

“Isn’t that obvious?” Davis said. “Weyland-Yutani.”

As a scientist, Chad McLaren had to agree with him. Very often the most obvious answer was the most obvious answer because it was the right answer. Yet as a human being, he’d learned—sometimes the hard way—that nothing was as it seemed. Especially once you dipped a toe into the murky pantomime that was being played out behind the scenes of real life.

When it came to dealing with Xenomorphs, and the human agencies that would control them, nothing at all was certain. It was a situation Weyland-Yutani had controlled for decades, but it was getting more and more difficult for them to keep a lid on it. And everybody seemed to have dollar signs in their eyes.

“Maybe you’re right,” Chad said, letting himself down from the wrecked hold and clambering back to the burned earth in the shadow of the ruined ship. He helped Davis down and added, “But something doesn’t quite add up here.”

Chad had never seen a dog shrug before.

“Weyland-Yutani commissioned Gambell Reclamations—through several partners—to recover the eggs from the crash site out on the frontier,” Davis said. “That much we know. Then, to distance themselves completely from the operation, they boarded the Clara before it reached its destination, took their cargo, and destroyed the ship.” Davis walked on and looked back at Chad. “So the question isn’t who did this, but how we can prove it?”

Chad’s comms unit pinged. He glanced at it.

“Well, we might have some help on that score. Cher Hunt is on New Albion. She received the package. She says she’s ready to meet us.”