Alien

by Tim Lebbon

  The eruption ended as quickly as it had begun, and Baxter jumped to his feet and backed away.

  “Sorry, sorry, I heard—”

  “Damn it!” Hoop hissed. He was tugging at his trousers, getting more frantic with every moment. “Damn it!”

  Lachance pulled a knife from his belt, knelt beside Hoop, and sliced his trousers from knee to boot, dropping the knife and tearing the heavy material apart. Then he picked up the knife again.

  Hoop had started shaking, breathing heavily.

  “Hoop,” Lachance said, glancing up. “Keep still.” He didn’t wait for a response, but held the leg and jabbed at it with the knife’s tip.

  Ripley heard the hardening pellet of rock strike the ground. She smelled the sickening-sweet stench of burnt flesh. Then from in the shadows behind them once more, another long, low hiss.

  And the clack of terrible teeth.

  “Let’s go,” Hoop said. He was looking past Ripley, back into the shadows. When she saw his eyes widen, she didn’t have to look. “Let’s go!”

  They ran, down into the cavern and toward the sloping wing structure that curved up out of the cavern floor. Hoop groaned as he went, limping, his tattered trousers flapping around his injured shin. Baxter hobbled, one arm over Lachance’s shoulder. The others hefted their weapons and moved quickly, carefully, across the uneven floor.

  There was only one direction they could take, and the blasted opening into the ship’s interior looked darker than ever.

  Ripley’s single thought brought only terror.

  They’re herding us...

  12

  CATTLE

  ...Toward the ship, Hoop thought. Driving us like cattle. And we’re doing exactly as they want.

  There was no other explanation. The aliens hadn’t attacked, but instead were slinking around the party of survivors, moving through shadowy fissures in the rock, making themselves known yet not exposing themselves. Everything Hoop had seen of them—everything he knew from what had happened aboard the Marion, and to Ripley more than thirty years ago—pointed to the creatures being brutal and unthinking monsters.

  This was different. If he was right, they were planning, scheming, working together. That thought terrified him.

  His leg hurt, a deep-seated, white-hot burn that seemed to smolder in his bones, surge through his muscles, filter around his veins. The whole of his lower right leg felt as if it had been dipped in boiling water, and every step was an agony. But there was no choice but to run. He knew that the damage was minimal—he’d looked—and the wound was already likely cauterized by the glowing globule of molten stone that had caused it.

  So he did his best to shut the pain away.

  His son had visited the dentist once, terrified of the injection of anaesthetic he’d require for a tooth extraction. On the way there, Hoop had talked to him about pain, telling him it was a fleeting thing, a physical reaction to damage that he knew would do him no harm, and that afterward he wouldn’t actually be able to remember what the pain had felt like.

  Pain was a difficult concept to conjure in memory, Hoop had said. Like tasting the best cake ever. Such thoughts only really meant anything when the tasting— or the pain—was happening.

  He tried it now, repeating a mantra to himself as they ran across that strange cavern’s floor. It doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t mean anything. He tried to analyze the sensation, take interest in it instead of letting it take over. And to an extent, it worked.

  Kasyanov and Sneddon went ahead, Sneddon aiming her spray gun in front of her. Baxter and Lachance were bringing up the rear, Baxter looking determined through his own agony. Ripley stayed with Hoop, glancing frequently at him as she kept pace. He did his best not to give her cause for concern, but he couldn’t hold back occasional grunts or groans.

  Responsibility weighed heavy. That he couldn’t rationalize away. He was in command, and although the Marion’s survivors, with Ripley in tow, were acting more like a leaderless group, he still felt in every way responsible for their fate.

  Even as they ran he racked his brains, trying to decide whether he had made all the right decisions. Should they have remained on the Marion for longer, spending more time preparing? Should he have assessed both elevators, before deciding which one to take down into the mine? Perhaps if they’d taken the other one, they would be on their way back to the surface already, precious fuel cell pushed on a trailer between them. But he couldn’t deal in “what if” and “maybe.” He could only work with what they had. The definitives.

  They had to reach the other elevator, and soon.

  And yet the aliens were behind them, pushing them forward. Hoop hated feeling out of control, unable to dictate his own destiny, all the more so when there were others relying on his decisions.

  He stopped and turned around, breathing heavily.

  “Hoop?” Ripley asked. She paused, too, and the others skidded to a halt. They were close to where the craft’s wing rose out of the ground, though the distinction was difficult to discern.

  “We’re doing what they want,” he panted, leaning over.

  “What, escaping?” Kasyanov asked.

  “We’re not escaping,” Hoop said, standing straighter.

  “He’s right,” Ripley said. “They’re herding us this way.”

  “Any way that’s away from them is fine by me,” Baxter said.

  “What do you—?” Ripley asked, and for that briefest of moments Hoop might have believed they were the only two people there. Their eyes locked, and something passed between them. He didn’t know what. Nothing so trite as understanding, or even affection. Perhaps it was an acknowledgement that they were thinking the same way.

  Then Sneddon gasped.

  “Oh my God!” she said. Hoop looked back over his shoulder.

  They were coming. Three of them, little more than shadows, and yet distinguishable because these shadows were moving. Fast. Two flitted from somewhere near where the survivors had entered the cavern, the third came from a different direction, all three converging.

  Lachance crouched, bracing his legs, and fired his charge thumper. The report coughed around the cavern, lost in that vast place.

  “Don’t waste your time!” Baxter said. “Maybe if they were a few steps away.”

  “If they get that close, we’re dead!” Lachance said.

  “Run!” Hoop said. The others went, and he and Ripley held back for just a moment, again sharing a look and each knowing what the other was thinking.

  They’re driving us forward again.

  The surface underfoot changed only slightly as they headed up onto the craft’s huge, curving wing. It still felt to Hoop as though he was running on rock, although now it sloped upward, driving a whole new species of pain into his wounded leg as he relied on different muscles to push himself forward.

  Over the time this thing had been buried down here, sand and dust must have dropped onto it and solidified. Boulders had fallen, and this close he could see a series of mineral deposits that formed sweeping ridges all across the wing, like a huge ring of expanding ripples, frozen in time.

  Each ring came up to their knees, and leaping over each ridge made Hoop cry out. His cries echoed Baxter’s.

  “It’s only pain,” Ripley said, and she looked surprised when Hoop coughed a laugh.

  “Where to?” Sneddon called from up ahead. She had slowed a little, then turned, spray gun aiming back past them.

  Hoop glanced back. He could only see two aliens now, their repulsive forms skipping and leaping across the ground. They should be closer, he thought, they’re much faster than us. But he couldn’t worry about that now.

  He looked around for the third creature, but it was nowhere in sight.

  “That damaged area,” he said, pointing. “It’s the only way we know for sure we’ll get inside.”

  “Do we really want to get inside?” Ripley asked.

  “You think we should make a stand here?” Hoop asked. Sneddon snorted a
t the suggestion, but Hoop had meant it. Ripley knew that, and she frowned, examining their surroundings. There was nowhere to hide—they would be exposed.

  “Not here,” she said. “Far too open.”

  “Then up there, where the fuselage is damaged,” he said. “And remember, there’s another one somewhere, so keep—”

  The third alien appeared. It emerged from shadows to their left, already on the wing, manifesting from behind a slew of low boulders as if it had been waiting for them. It was perhaps twenty yards away, hunched down, hissing and ready to strike.

  Ripley fired her charge thumper, and if hatred and repulsion could fuel a projectile, the alien would have been smashed apart just by the energy contained in the shot. But he didn’t even see where the shot went, and if the creatures really were herding them toward the old ship, it likely wouldn’t even react.

  Ripley held her stance, looking left and right. Hoop hefted his spray gun. The others pointed their weapons.

  The nearest alien crawled sideways, circling them but never coming closer. Hoop’s skin prickled when he watched it move. It reminded him of a giant spider... although not quite. It more resembled a hideous scorpion... yet there were differences. It moved with a fluid, easy motion, gliding across the rough surface of the giant wing as if it had walked that way many times before.

  He fired the spray gun. It was a natural reaction to his disgust, a wish to see the thing away. The staggered spats of acid landed in a line between him and the monster, hissing loudly as the acid melted into dust and stone, and whatever might lie beneath. And even though the fluid didn’t reach the alien, the creature flinched back. Only slightly, but enough for him to see.

  Breath held against any toxic fumes, Hoop backed quickly away. That pressed the others into motion, as well.

  “We could charge it,” Ripley said.

  “What?”

  “All of us in one go. Run at the thing. If it comes at us we all shoot, if it slips aside we move on.”

  “To where?”

  “A way out.”

  “We don’t know a way out!” Hoop said.

  “It’s better than doing what they want, isn’t it?” Ripley asked.

  “I’m for going where they aren’t,” Baxter said. “They’re that way, I’m going this way.” He turned and hobbled again toward the ship’s main fuselage, right arm now flung over Kasyanov’s shoulder.

  “We have to stay together,” Hoop said as they all followed. But he couldn’t help thinking that Ripley had been right—charge, take the fight to them—and he hoped he wouldn’t have cause to regret his decision later.

  The ground rose steeper before leveling again, the curve of the wing still scattered with boulders and those strange, waved lines of mineral deposits. Hoop thought perhaps this whole cavern had once been under water, but there was no way of proving that right now. And such knowledge couldn’t help them.

  What could help them was a place to stop. Somewhere easy to defend, a position from which they could make a stand. A route around or through the strange ship, leading back up into the mine.

  A fucking miracle.

  Maybe he should make a stand, here and now. Just him. Turn and charge the alien, spray gun spitting acid, and who knows, maybe he’d get lucky. The creature was just an animal, after all. Maybe it would turn and run, and he and the others could push home their advantage and charge back the way they’d come. Using the plasma torches, it wouldn’t take much to open up that access again.

  One glance back told him everything he needed to know.

  The three aliens were stalking them, spiked shadows dancing across the massive wing’s surface, flitting from boulder to crevasse as they sought natural cover. They moved silently and easily, their fluid motions so smooth that their shadows flowed like spilled ink. They were hunters, pure and simple. Having their quarry suddenly turn and charge would not faze them at all.

  Fuck that.

  He wasn’t about to sacrifice himself for nothing.

  “Faster,” he muttered.

  “What?” Lachance asked.

  “We should move faster. Quick as we can, get there as soon as possible, find somewhere to defend. Perhaps that’ll throw them, a little.”

  No one replied, and he read doubt in the silence. But they all ran faster, nonetheless. Even Baxter, hopping, swearing under his breath, and Kasyanov, sweating under the man’s weight. Whatever Hoop thought of his comm officer, there was a stark courage there that he couldn’t help but respect. And Kasyanov’s fear seemed to be feeding her determination.

  Hoop’s leg was a solid weight of pain now, but he used it to fight back, slamming it down with each step, forging forward, driving events toward what he hoped would be a good resolution. He’d never been the praying kind, and faith was something he’d left behind with other childhood fancies. But he had a strange sense that this was all part of something bigger. However unlucky they’d been—the Delilah crash, the Marion’s damage, the beasts on the Samson, and now the elevator’s malfunction and their descent into this strange place—he couldn’t help feeling that there were larger hands at play.

  It might have been the effect of their discoveries. This ship was an incredible, undeniable sign of alien intelligence, the likes of which no one had ever seen before. It had opened a doorway in his mind to greater, wider possibilities. But there was something more. Something he couldn’t quite pin down.

  Ripley was part of it, he was sure. Maybe finding someone like her in the middle of all this was fucking with his mind.

  Someone like her? he thought, laughing silently. It had been a long time since he’d really cared about someone. Jordan had been a fling, and she’d always remained a good friend. But with Ripley there was more. An instinctive understanding that he hadn’t experienced with anyone since...

  He thought briefly of home, his estranged wife, and his children left behind. But there was too much pain and guilt to hold that thought for long.

  Baxter was crying out with each step, the foot of his broken ankle dragging along behind him. Yet he still bore the plasma torch at the ready. As they neared the steeper slope up onto what must have been the ship’s main fuselage, Hoop began to look ahead.

  The broken area they’d seen from a distance was larger than he’d thought. It extended from above the wing and back over the soft curve of the vessel’s main body, its skin torn apart and protruding in stark, sharp sculptures across the extent of the damage. It wasn’t one large hole, but a series of smaller wounds, as if something had exploded inside the ship and blasted outward, rupturing the hull in several places. Even after so long, there were scorch marks evident.

  “That first hole,” he said, pointing. He darted forward quickly and looped his arm through Baxter’s, careful to let him wield the plasma torch. “You okay?” he asked quietly.

  “No,” Baxter said, but there was a strength to his voice.

  “Hoop, they’re following closer,” Ripley said from behind.

  He let go of Baxter’s arm, tapped him on the shoulder, then turned around. Down the slope the three aliens were creeping forward, their casual gait as fast as the human’s sprint. And they were closer.

  “Go on,” he said to the others. He and Ripley paused, looking back.

  “Shot across their bows?” Ripley asked.

  “Yeah.”

  She lifted and fired her charge thumper at the closest creature. As it paused and skipped aside, Hoop fired the spray gun at it. The spurts didn’t quite reach the target, but they impacted across the sloping wing close to it, sizzling, scorching. Yet again he saw the beast cringe back away from the acid.

  Ripley fired at the other two as well, shots echoing around the massive cavern, the sounds multiplying. They shifted aside with amazing dexterity, dancing on long limbs. Beneath the echoing reports he heard their hissing. He hoped it was anger. If they were riled up enough, they might charge to within range of the spray guns and plasma torches.

  “Come on,” Hoop said to Ripl
ey. “We’re almost there.”

  As they climbed the steeper slope, the surface beneath their feet changed. It became smoother, and the feel of each impact was different as well. There was no give, no echo, but still a definite sense that they were running on something hollow. The ship’s interior almost bore a weight.

  As they reached the first of the blasted areas, Hoop ran ahead. The miners had strung a series of lights along here, some of them hung on protruding parts of the ripped hull. And looking down inside, he saw a similar array.

  This was where they had entered the ship.

  His concern intensified. He shook his head, turning to face the others, ready to suggest that—

  “Hoop,” Ripley said, breathing hard. “Look.”

  Back the way they had come, several more shadows had appeared. They were moving quickly across the wing’s surface. From this distance they looked like ants. The analogy didn’t comfort him one little bit.

  “And there,” Sneddon said, pointing higher up the slope of the ship’s fuselage. There were more shadows back there, less defined, yet their silhouettes obvious. Motionless. Waiting.

  “Okay,” he said. “We go inside. But don’t touch anything. And first chance we get, we fight our way out.”

  “Ever get the feeling you’re being used?” Sneddon asked.

  “All the time,” Ripley muttered.

  Hoop was first down into the ship.

  13

  ALIENS

  Maybe she’s nine years old. There’s a doorway leading down into the old ruin, steps worn by decades of tourists and centuries of monks long, long ago. A heavy metal grille is fixed back against the wall, the padlock hanging unclasped, and at night they close off the catacombs, allegedly to prevent vandals from desecrating their contents. But ever since they arrived, Amanda has been making up stories about the night-things they want to keep locked in.