Incident at Ida: Part Two (standard:science fiction, 2546 words) [2/3] show all parts
Author: Goreripper	Added: Mar 27 2001	Views/Reads: 2847/1921	Part vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Agents Bartlett and Slade continue their investigation into an alien incident on the binary Ida/Dactyl asteroid system.

As the agents headed through the facility on the way to their meeting
with Alphonse Cordeja, the system's appointed administrator, they were 
well aware of the attention that was being drawn to them. Very little 
of it was subtle. Groups of thugs and renegades crowded around the 
doorways to strip clubs and bars just simply stopped muttering amongst 
themselves to watch them go by. Pyle had spilled his guts about them, 
and it had not taken long for word to get around. Bartlett found 
himself wondering if anyone had put a price on their heads yet and 
smiled inwardly thinking of the consequences to Ida and Dactyl if any 
idiot tried to claim any such bounty. 

En route, Bartlett and Slade considered possibilities. In 150 years of
Solar System colonisation, only one genuine incident involving a 
violent xenomorph had been identified. That had been five years ago, 
when a salvage and recovery vessel had stumbled upon a seemingly 
harmless spherical object orbiting within Jupiter's rings. Intense 
excitement had surrounded the find, as it represented the first 
legitimate physical evidence ever of a sentinent extraterrestrial 
species: the object was of obvious manufactured origin, but not from 
any source known to man. While various items claiming intergalactic 
genesis had been presented over the decades, beginning in the 
mid-Twentieth Century, nothing had ever been proven until this 
discovery. When the sphere, which was as large as the old Apollo space 
capsules that had carried men to the Earth's moon, was finally opened, 
it was found to contain the cryogenic remains of three shockingly 
grotesque creatures. They were like huge-eyes spiders, with large dark 
sensory organs on their undersides and mammalian flesh, and numerous 
fingers instead of a talon on each end of their spindly appendages. 
Their sac-like bodies hung below their supporting legs, giving them the 
look of some atrocious travesty of the terrestrial harvestman. Little 
more could be learned about them because, although two were long dead, 
the lone survivor came to life and slaughtered the scientific team 
examining it. Studying the vidclips that chronicled the event, stored 
in remote databanks away from the facility itself, the creature 
appeared to have employed some form of sub- or hyper-sonic or mental 
attack that was able to cause agonising pain followed almost instantly 
by death. The laboratory's security computer took only two minutes to 
run the destruct program which vaporised it in a small controlled 
nuclear explosion, but every one in the place had already been killed 
by then. 

Considering the absolute rarity of a violent xenomorph manifestation
that actually turned out to be caused by a real xenomorph, it was 
highly likely that what had occurred on Ida was not the work of an 
alien entity at all. The little binary system was a contentious piece 
of property. Ortega had taken control of it, but every other major 
cartel between Earth and Saturn would do virtually anything to take it 
off his hands. It was just as possible that whatever had murdered the 
workers in the port below had been created in a biolab by some rival 
crime faction. If that was in fact the case, Bartlett and Slade would 
quite happily hand over the investigation to the Biological Science 
Control Division, whose policies on the abuse of gene- and bio-science 
were almost as strict as the XISB's. The development of 
genetically-enhanced or modified species for use as weapons was 
strictly banned by the Planetary Alliance, and punishment was death, 
though usually commuted to a term in a cryo-prison, which virtually 
amounted to the same thing. 

The two Alliance agents ignored most of the people they saw, although
they kept a look out for Christopher Pyle, and finally arrived at the 
central commuter shafts where they took a car up to Alphonse Cordeja's 
rooms. The reception area was well-appointed and carpeted in burgundy. 
A small, busty young woman greeted them at the antique desk beyond the 
lift lobby and ushered them into a large lounge bar. 

Cordeja was of Spanish descent, a thing which had come to mean virtually
nothing since the gradual erosion of national boundaries on Earth had 
begun in the early 22nd Century. It was therefore perhaps more 
appropriate to suggest that the asteroid's administrator was of Iberian 
background, which was now the official designation of the area once 
divided into Spain and Portugal. Nevertheless, like his boss Ortega, 
whose distant relatives had once had vested interests in the cocaine 
trade in what was then Columbia, he clung tenaciously to remnants of a 
nationalistic pride. An old Spanish flag from the late 20th Century 
hung above the door to the elaborately furnished lounge which formed 


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