Author's Note: Thankyou for the wonderful reception of the first chapter. And... well that's pretty much it really.
Piusnex watched the human from the grill. He was soundly asleep, a perfect opportunity to finally kill the irksome human. Except she couldn't reach.
For the first time in two years the human's device had failed yet even now he was safe. From fifty foot above him all the praetorian could do was snarl and hiss as below her the surviving human slept on.
Perched even higher on one of the large of the plant's buildings Yeythwei couldn't help amusement at the hard-meat's frustration. The praetorian was a fine specimen and the predator look forwards to claiming it's skull. But that didn't matter. A praetorian meant a full blown hive. And a hive meant a Queen.
Tomorrow he would track down the hive's location and, with luck, kill the queen before the hard-meat were even aware of his existence. The praetorian was safe for now.
Stretching slowly Alec blinked as the sunlight coming through the grill blinded him for just a few moments. As his eyes adjusted he saw the creature standing atop the grill. It was a fine mesh grill so there was no way it could reach him. But that wasn't the problem.
'I'm dead.'
With a speed he'd never known he possessed he dived for the control panel and slammed the skylight controls. The metal plate slid closed sealing the xenomorph off from him. But it was too late.
'I'm dead.' The thought came again. He'd made a mistake, and now he was going to die.
The question was how long until that mistake caught up with him.
He walked over to one of the control boards, this one for power distribution and storage. It had been unusually cloudy yesterday, the solar collector's hadn't absorbed enough energy to keep the sonic disruption going all night.
He wondered how long the praetorian had watched him. A mere few minutes? A few hours? Nearly the whole night? It didn't matter, they knew exactly where he was and while the roof and grill were very acid resistant it wouldn't matter in the long run. They knew, and one day he would make another mistake and that would be it. He wondered what would happen. Would he be killed outright or dragged into the hive?
He'd seen it happen so many times in the last few years. It had been the oddballs and misfits who'd survived longest.
He remembered Mike, a real zen nutcase, he'd been able to slow his own heartbeat enough that the bugs didn't even notice him. Until one day he'd gone outside with a fever and lost control. Heart racing, they'd been on the poor guy in seconds. It had been such a small mistake.
Then there had been Emma. It had been between them that they'd created the repulsors. Then they'd begun identifying the different calls of the xenomorphs. She hadn't known the call she was testing was used to pass on the location of prey. A rather large mistake as mistakes went.
Then there had been Jaleel. He'd had it all sorted, food, fresh water, power, the drones and even a facemask and blades in case he was caught. It was pity he'd never checked the blueprints of one of the buildings or he'd have known that one of the main pipes for the sewer system ran right underneath it. It had probably taken them months to claw their way up through that much concrete, but they'd got him all the same.
Then there was Eric. And The Hacker – they'd never found out his real name. And Bill, 'Two Guns' Bill, David, Dai, Alex, Sidney, Rowan, Jimmy and Jimi, the list just went on back into infinity. One mistake; that was all it ever took.
Forcing himself out of the depressing trip down memory lane Alec got dressed, shrugged on his pack, set up the repulsor drones and left, he had a drone to retrieve and in light of recent events a few extra barricades to build.
The Queen grinned, which is to say her lips peeled back to reveal a set of razor sharp teeth. It wouldn't mean much to an observer, this was the standard expression for a xenomorph. This time however it really was a grin. They'd finally tracked down the human's lair. It was just a matter of time before one of the praetorian's or one of the older drones got the chance to kill or capture it. The predator however was another matter. There were drones patrolling the hive constantly, runners hung above the hive entrances. The hive was a seething bowl of nerves, wariness and anxiety but if the hunter stayed true to it's species' modus operandi then it would be dead as soon as it attacked the hive.
Author's Note: Once more shorter than I'd like but getting better.