Predator - Incursion by Tim Lebbon Read Free Book Online Page B

time for adventurers.”
    “You should get that on a T-shirt.”
    “They’re really an amazing species,” Palant said, ignoring his comment. As usual, when away from her lab, she was becoming anxious to return. Her life seemed to be one of contradictions. She valued this limited time away, then yearned to go back. She sought knowledge and dreamed of some sort of peaceful, mutually beneficial contact, yet worked for the Company whose stated aim was the furtherance of what it called the “science of war.”
    Her father had once explained it to her when she was still a dreamy teenager.
    The Company are scared
, he’d said.
We’re pushing out into the galaxy, incredibly slowly, yet we already know we’re far from alone. We’ve met other intelligent lifeforms, interacted, and made contact. Sometimes they’re friendly, sometimes indifferent. On occasion, we’ve had to fight. There are the Yautja, who might have been visiting us for millennia, and the further we expand, the more they notice us. The Xenomorphs haunt the darker extremes of space. And there will inevitably be other, perhaps even more deadly civilizations. The further we go, the more we might discover, and the more we will be noticed.
    Weyland-Yutani know that, and they’re doing the best they can to protect humanity against any threat. The problem is… that intention is easily corrupted. With so much at stake, and so many fortunes to be made, benevolent intentions can easily be drowned out.
    She had never forgotten his words and the lesson they were meant to impart. Working for Weyland-Yutani now, she was more careful than ever to hold them close.
    “Battening down the hatches,” Rogers said. They were closing on Love Grove Base, and Isa could see windows and doorways covered with their heavy gray shields. Nestled in a small valley a mile from the nearest processor, it had been established by the facility builders almost fifty years ago, as a base from which they could construct and then maintain. After the processors’ completion, the place had been adapted and expanded over the past twenty years by ArmoTech, the branch of Weyland-Yutani given to research into alien weapons and technology. Another example of their effectiveness at cost-cutting. Just one drophole away from the Outer Rim, it was regarded as an ideal place for Yautja research.
    The base had been named by one of the foremen building the processor plants, a bittersweet take on his memories of better times and a kinder place. It was said his home had been Love Grove, a religious commune on Triton, Neptune’s largest moon.
    “Storm coming in,” Palant said, and though the base was an ugly construction with very few nods to aesthetics, she was always pleased to see it. It was home, after all.
    Palant’s parents had been on their way here seventeen years before when they were killed. The report called it a freak accident. As their dropship descended from the orbiting military transport, two weather systems had clashed, resulting in violent electrical storms and two hundred miles-per-hour winds. The ship was tossed around the sky and flung to the ground like a toy, and all eighteen people on board had died. A great loss, but space was dangerous, everyone knew that.
    Five years later Palant had followed her parents to Love Grove Base, landed safely, and had only been away a handful of times since.
    Rogers guided the rover in between the buildings. The external doors slipped open, he maneuvered down into a subterranean garage, and the doors closed quickly behind them. Even though the atmosphere this close to the processors was breathable, the harsh weather conditions meant that sojourns outside were rare, and dangerous.
    They parked, then Rogers wound down the rover’s engine and set it in park.
    “Drink this evening?” he asked.
    “Sure. O’Malley’s at eight?”
    “It’s a date.” He always made that joke, ever since he’d first asked her out. Whatever he claimed, he
hadn’t
known