Alien

by Tim Lebbon

  When the sun goes down, she says, the shadows down there come alive.

  Ripley laughs as she watches her daughter creeping down out of the sun, putting on a faux-scared expression, clawing her hands and growling. Then she shouts for her mother to follow her, and Ripley is aware of the people crowding in behind her. These are popular ruins, one of the city’s main tourist venues, and there is rarely a quiet time.

  The shadows envelop her. They carry a curious chill, and the damp, musty smell of places never touched by sunlight. Amanda has disappeared ahead of her. Ripley doesn’t feel the need to call, but then she looks back and sees that she is alone.

  Alone down here, in the shadows, in the darkness.

  Someone cries out. She edges forward, running one hand along the sandy wall. The floor is uneven and she almost trips, then her hand touches something different. Smooth, lighter than rock, more textured.

  There are skulls in the wall. The skulls are the walls, thousands of them, and each one has a massive trauma wound—a hole, a smashed face. She fancies that she can see tooth marks on the bones, but perhaps that’s only—

  My imagination, she thinks, but then the cry comes again. It’s Amanda, and recognizing the voice seems to conjure the girl. She is held back against the wall across a small, bone-lined room, clasped around the arms, shoulders and legs by the gnarled skeletal fingers of the long-dead.

  She sees her mother, but there is no joy in her eyes.

  Her chest explodes outward beneath her loose dress, and teeth bite their way through the material. Jagged, terrible teeth.

  * * *

  “Holy shit,” Ripley breathed, and she looked down into the darkness. For a while she was lost, not knowing where or when she was, and whether that had been a bastardised memory, or a vision of the future. Time swirled, uncertain and inelegant. I’m not sure how much more of this I can take.

  Kasyanov frowned at her and began to speak, but Ripley turned away.

  “Come down!” Hoop shouted up out of the ship. “There are lights. And it’s... weird.”

  “Weird how?” Ripley asked, thinking, Worn steps and skulls and bones in the walls...

  “Just come and see.”

  She dropped down beside Hoop, still trying to shake the dregs of that brief, horrible vision from her mind.

  The miners had been this way. That didn’t comfort Ripley at all, though the lights they’d strung up inside this damaged portion of ship did help. The explosion had blasted a hole through the ship’s skin, and inside it had scoured along the interior levels, knocking down partitions and clearing anything that might have been in the way. It reminded Ripley of a wasp’s nest, layer upon layer laid out to some fluid symmetry, and from where they now stood—at the epicenter of the exploded area— they could see at least four lower levels exposed.

  She supposed that if the Marion were sliced in half, something similar would be revealed.

  But the walls, floors, and ceilings of this ship were nothing like the Marion. Thick tubes ran between levels, and where they’d been ruptured, a solidified flow hung from them. It looked like frozen honey, or fine sand caught mid-pour. The walls had rotted back to bare framing, the struts themselves bent and deformed by the ancient explosion.

  The levels were not as equidistant as she’d first thought, and this didn’t seem to be a result of the damage. It seemed that they had been formed this way.

  “This is... weird,” Sneddon echoed, her fascination obvious. Filming with her camera again, she moved forward, climbing down a slope of detritus toward the first solid floor. Its surface was uneven, pitted in places, lined here and there, looking very much like age-worn skin.

  “I’m not liking this,” Ripley said. “Not one bit.”

  She’d heard it said that nature did not like right angles, and there were none in evidence here. The material in the walls and floors was a dark gray color, but not consistent. Here, there were patches where it was lighter, and appeared to be thinner. There, it was almost black, as if blood had pooled and hardened just below the surface, creating a hematoma. It resembled the mottled skin of an old corpse.

  “Great way to make a ship,” Lachance said.

  “What?” Baxter asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Growing it,” Sneddon said. “This wasn’t built, it was grown.”

  “No way...” Kasyanov said, but when Ripley looked at the doctor, she saw wide-eyed fascination reflected in the Russian’s eyes.

  “We shouldn’t be doing this,” Ripley said.

  “We can’t go back out there,” Hoop said.

  “But they drove us in here! Are we just going to do what they want?”

  “How can they want anything,” Lachance protested. “They’re just dumb animals, and we’re their prey!”

  “None of us knows what they are,” Ripley said. “Sneddon?”

  Sneddon only shrugged.

  “I’ve told you before, I’ve never seen anything like them. Their apparent viciousness doesn’t mean they can’t act and think together. Back in prehistoric times, velociraptors hunted together, and there are theories that posit advanced communication between them. But...” She looked around, shaking her head. “I don’t think this is their ship.”

  From outside came the sounds of hard claws skittering on the ship’s skin. They all looked up, and Ripley saw a shadow shifting back from the damaged area by which they’d entered. The silhouette stretched up for a moment, flickering across the cavern’s high ceiling before disappearing again.

  “They’re waiting up there,” she said. She felt so helpless.

  “We’ve got to go,” Hoop said. “Inside. Follow the lights that are still working, moving as fast as we can. Then as soon as we find another way out, we take it.” He looked around at them all, and his face was drawn from the pain. “I don’t like this anymore than the rest of you, but there are too many of them out there. If we can trick them, instead of fight them, I’ll be happier with that.”

  “But something happened to the miners down here,” Sneddon said.

  “Yeah, but we have an advantage. We know some of what happened, and we know to be careful.” He waited for any words of dissent, but there were none.

  I don’t like this one bit, Ripley thought. But she looked up again, at the ragged opening in the ship’s strange hull, and knew that they had no choice. The option of climbing back up there, with those things waiting just out of sight... it wasn’t an option at all.

  Hoop went first, taking the small flashlight from his pocket again. The string of bulbs hung by the miners continued to work, but Hoop’s light penetrated the shadows they cast.

  The group moved quickly. Almost confidently.

  Ripley tried to shake the recent vision from her mind. Those other daytime nightmares had been more surreal, but less troubling, featuring Amanda at an age when Ripley had never known her. But this one was the worst yet. Her daughter was young, sweet, innocent and beautiful, exactly as she remembered her. And Ripley’s inability to protect her daughter against the monsters still rang true, settling into her soul like a canker of guilt, eating, consuming, as if it had all been real.

  She even felt herself starting to cry. But tears would only blur her surroundings, making everything more dangerous. She had to keep her wits about her.

  She had to survive.

  As they moved inward from the damaged area of the extraterrestrial ship, the surroundings became even stranger. Ripley thought of the old story of Jonah in the heart of the whale, such a disturbing image when translated to their current situation. Much of their surroundings showed distinctly biological features— uneven floors lined with inlaid tubing that resembled veins; skin-like walls, hardened over time yet still speckled with dust-filled pores and imperfections.

  Then they began to encounter objects that must have formed some sort of technology. One narrow corridor opened into a gallery viewing area, looking down over a deep pit. It was ringed with a waist-high barrier. On the gallery stood several identic
al metallic units. They might have been seats surrounded by control equipment of some kind, the details obscure, arcane. If they were seats, then Ripley couldn’t easily identify the shapes of the beings meant to fill them.

  The pit was filled to a few feet below the gallery by a glassy fluid of some kind, its upper surface scattered with grit and dust. The ceilings and walls were smooth, and Ripley could only assume that the dust had blown in from outside over the eons.

  “Which way now?” Ripley asked.

  The gallery led around three quarters of the pit, and there were at least six openings leading off from it, including the one they had just come through.

  Hoop was peering at the opening through which they’d just come. From back that way came the sound of scuttling, hissing things.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here!” Baxter said, sweating, trying to hide away his pain. Even standing still he was shaking. Ripley couldn’t imagine the agony he was working through, but knew there was no alternative. She only hoped a time didn’t come when he physically couldn’t go any farther.

  What then? she wondered. Leave him behind? Kill him? She turned away, just as Hoop spoke.

  “Let’s change this game,” he said. “Kasyanov, Baxter, get ready with the plasma torches.” He nodded at the opening they’d come through. “Bring it down.”

  “Wait!” Sneddon said. “We have no idea what effect the plasma torches will have on this stuff. We don’t even know what the ship’s made of! Whether or not it’s flammable.”

  Ripley heard more hissing, and back along the tunnel shadows shifted, casting spidery shapes along floors and walls.

  “We run or we do it, that’s all!” she said. She braced herself to fire her charge thumper.

  “Ripley.” Hoop handed her something from his waist pack, a chunky object about the size of a computer tablet. “Load it through the top. Real charges.”

  “We can’t just fire those things at random,” Lachance said.

  “Not at random,” Ripley said, plugging the container into the top of the thumper. “At them.” She braced again, took aim, and fired. The charge clattered along the tunnel, its echoes sounding strangely muffled as it ricocheted from the walls.

  Ripley frowned.

  Hoop grabbed her arm. “Time delayed,” he said as he pulled her to the side.

  The explosion thudded through their feet and punched the air out of Ripley’s lungs. Behind the rumbling roar of the mining charge, she was sure she heard the aliens screeching in pain, and a shower of debris burst from the tunnel, pattering from her suit, scratching her face.

  Smoke blasted after it, driven in streaming tendrils by the rush of air. Ripley swallowed to try and clear her ears, gasped at the stinging sensation across her face. Even as she stood up, Kasyanov and Baxter were at work with the plasma torches.

  The entire gallery was brightly illuminated by the scorching plasma. Looking down, Ripley could see a network of slow ripples playing back and forth across the surface of the pit. The blast must have resounded through the ship. It was so thick, the surface so heavy, that the ripples moved like slow snakes, colliding and interfering, making complex but strangely beautiful patterns.

  The stench was terrible, almost like burning flesh. The structure all around the opening slumped down, flowing, echoing the lazy ripples from below.

  “Hold off!” Hoop shouted, and Kasyanov and Baxter ceased fire. Flames flickered all across the surfaces, fluttering out here, reigniting there, as the heavy framework dipped down until it met the bubbling floor. It had already started to harden again, effectively closing off the opening. The air shimmered from the incredible temperatures. Ripley’s lungs burned.

  “Now we decide which direction to take,” Hoop said.

  An alien’s curved head forced through the melted doorway. There was no warning—none of them could see beyond, and the opening itself was all but obscured by the melted structure. The creature’s smoothed dome pushed through the hardening material, its teeth stretching and gnashing. It seemed to struggle for a moment, shoving forward, and at either side its long-clawed hands sliced through.

  But then it was held fast, the cooling material steaming where it bit into its mysterious hide.

  “Everybody back,” Hoop said, and he aimed his spray gun.

  Ripley backed away across the gallery and held her breath, fascinated yet terrified. The alien was still struggling to move forward, and all around it the melted and re-set material stretched, changing color and tone as the tension changed. Perhaps five seconds earlier, and the monster might have burst through, catching them unawares and causing chaos.

  But now the creature was held fast.

  Hoop fired a burst of hydrofluoric acid directly at the head.

  Smoke, steam, sizzling, hissing, screeching. Everything was obscured by clouds of vapor, but Ripley had the definite impression of frantic, thrashing movement.

  “Back,” she said. “Hoop, get back!” They all retreated across the gallery, and Ripley felt the waist-high barrier against her back. She edged along it toward the far end. The others were going in the same direction, and Hoop turned and ran toward her.

  Behind him, something exploded.

  He’ll be splashed with it, the acid, and I’ll have to watch him die, Ripley thought. But though Hoop winced and ducked down as he ran, the spattering remains of the alien’s head splayed across the gallery in the other direction. Part of it bounced across the floor, leaving sizzling patches behind, and dropped down into the pit. What struck the surface floated there for a moment, then sank with a final angry hiss.

  Hoop reached them, grinning.

  “Well, at least we know they don’t like this acid,” he said. “Come on. Let’s get the hell out. Baxter—”

  “Don’t even ask,” Baxter said. “The way things are going, I’d beat you in a race. I’m fine.”

  He was far from fine, though. He couldn’t touch his left foot to the floor, and if it weren’t for Kasyanov, he’d fall. His face was strained, damp with sweat, and he couldn’t hide his terror.

  He’s still afraid we’ll leave him behind. It was a horrible idea, but one they all had to be contemplating.

  “Don’t know how long that will keep them back,” Sneddon said, nodding back at the melted opening. It was still smoking. They couldn’t see any remains of the alien, but the place where it had forced through was seared with acid scars.

  “Come on. This way,” Hoop said. He headed for an opening at the far end of the gallery, as far from their entry point as they could get. He fixed his flashlight to the spray gun’s strap so that he could aim both in the same direction. They all followed, none of them questioning him.

  Entering a narrow, low-ceilinged tunnel, Ripley couldn’t escape the idea that they were being swallowed once again.

  * * *

  They entered areas that the miners had not lit. They ran, flashlights held out in front or strapped onto their weapons, shadows dancing and retreating. And not long after leaving the gallery, they found the first bodies.

  The tunnel-like corridor opened up into another wide space, and there was something different about it. The smooth curves were the same, the non-regularity of something biological, but the sheets and swathes of material hanging across walls and from the ceiling didn’t belong here. Neither did the things hanging within it, like horrible, rotting fruit.

  There might have been six bodies there, though Ripley found it difficult to tell where one ended and another began. The darkness, the decay, the way they’d been hung up and stuck there, fixed in place by that strange extrusion that had filled one of the mining tunnels far above—it all blurred the edges of what they saw. And that wasn’t a bad thing.

  The stench was awful. That, and the expression on the first face upon which Hoop shone his flashlight. It might have been a woman, once. Decay had shrunk the face, drawn in the skin, hollowed the eye sockets, but the scream was still frozen there. Clawed hands stretched on either side, reaching—unsuccessful
ly—for what had been happening to the victim’s chest.

  The hole was obvious. The clothing was torn and hanging in shreds. Protruding ribs were splintered.

  “Birthing ground,” Sneddon said.

  “They just hung them here,” Kasyanov said. “It’s... a nursery.”

  On the floor in front of the hanging, dead people stood a group of egg-like objects, upright and shaped like large vases. Most of them were open. No one stepped forward to look inside.

  They passed quickly through the larger space. Every instinct urged Ripley to look away, but sick fascination— and her determination to survive, to learn about these monsters and use everything she could against them— made her look closer. She wished she had not. Maybe somewhere on the Nostromo there had been a similar scene, with Dallas hanging there, stuck in place like the victim in a massive spider’s dense webbing.

  “Where are you taking us?” Lachance asked Hoop. “This isn’t the way out. We’re just going deeper.”

  “I’m taking us as far as I can away from them,” Hoop said, pointing back over his shoulder with his thumb. “And up, as soon as we can. There must be ways into and out of this ship, other than the hole blasted in its hull. We just have to find them.”

  * * *

  Before long the spaces they passed through—corridors in a spaceship, Ripley knew, though she could only think of them as tunnels—were clear of the alien material once again, and back to the old, gray, mottled surfaces. Still strange, but not so threatening. If there had been time, she might even have admired what they were seeing. It was amazing, it was extraterrestrial. But all she had time for was escape.

  They drove us down here to be like the miners, she thought, trying not to imagine how awful it must be. To find yourself trapped in that webbing, watch the egg opening in front of you, feel the legged thing settling over your face. At first you blacked out, like Kane, but then came the waking and the waiting. Waiting for the first sign of movement from inside. The first twinge of pain as the alien infant started to push, claw, and bite its way out.