Alien

by Tim Lebbon

  Apart from being bigger than the others, there were other, more subtle differences. The length of its limbs, the shape of its head.

  “What the hell is that?” Hoop asked, pointing. “There, at its ass-end.”

  “Oh, well, that’s gross,” Lachance said.

  The alien’s abdomen had burst open, spilling a slick mess across the floor. It sizzled and spat as the acid-pool spread, but it was the things lying in the pool that drew Ripley’s attention. Scores of them—maybe hundreds— spherical and each roughly the size of her thumb. They glimmered moistly beneath the flashlight beam, sliding over one another as more poured from the wound.

  “I think we killed a queen,” Ripley said.

  “You’re sure?” Hoop asked from behind her.

  “Pretty sure—it’s the only thing that makes sense. They’re eggs. Hundreds of eggs.” She looked back at him. “We nailed a fucking queen.”

  She examined the rest of the creature, playing her flashlight across its blasted and slashed body. Though bigger than any they had so far seen, something about it was also almost childlike—its features were larger, the spiked and clawed limbs not quite so vicious. Ripley felt a strange frisson, a sense of likeness. But she was nothing like this thing.

  Nothing at all.

  “I think she’s young,” she said. “Imagine just how big...?” She shook her head. “We need to go.”

  “Yeah,” Hoop agreed.

  “My eyes are improving,” Kasyanov said. “I can move quicker. I’ll stay behind you. But let’s get the hell out of this pit.”

  They moved on, the corridor still erring upward. They were more cautious now, Hoop and Ripley shining their lights ahead across walls, floor, ceiling. At every junction they paused to listen before moving on. And when they reached another staircase leading up toward what might have been an opening in the ship’s hull, he handed Ripley another charge magazine.

  “Last one,” he said. “Five charges left.”

  “And I’m almost out of bolts,” Lachance said.

  “My plasma torch is still almost full,” Kasyanov said.

  They were being worn down step by step, Ripley knew. Whether or not this was an intentional act by the aliens, whether they could even consider something that complex, she didn’t know. But the fact remained.

  “That’s the way out,” she said, nodding up at this new, shorter staircase.

  “How d’you know that?” Lachance gasped. His knees were shaking from Sneddon’s weight. He was almost exhausted. And Baxter, leaning against Hoop, was looking up at the new, waist-high steps with something approaching dread.

  “Because it has to be,” Ripley said.

  They started climbing—

  * * *

  She is panting, sweating, exhausted, ebullient. It’s one of those moments that opens up and out into a perfect, neverto-be-repeated time, so rare that its blooming is like that of the planet’s most precious flower. She is filled with a sense of well-being, an all-consuming love for her daughter that is so powerful that it hurts.

  This time, now, she thinks, doing her best to consign that instant to memory. The cool heather beneath her hands as she clasps onto the hillside and pulls herself higher. The heat of the sun on the back of her neck, sweat cooling across her back from the climb. The deep-blue sky above, the river below snaking through the valley, vehicles as small as ants passing back and forth along the road.

  The slope steepens as they approach the hill’s summit, and Amanda giggles above her, pretending that she didn’t know. It’s dangerous—not quite mountain climbing, but it’s a hands-and-knees scramble, and if they slip it will be a long tumble down. But Ripley can’t be angry. Everything feels too good, too right, for that.

  So she climbs harder and faster, ignoring the feel of empty space pulling her back and down from the hillside. Amanda glances back and sees her mother moving quicker. She giggles again and climbs, her teenager’s limbs strong and supple.

  I’ve never actually been here and seen this, yet it’s the best moment of my life.

  Amanda reaches the summit and shouts in triumph, disappearing over the top to lie back on the short grass and wait for her mother.

  Ripley pulls herself up the natural steps in the slope. For an instant she feels terribly alone and exposed, and she pauses in her climb. Shocked. Cold.

  Then she hears another sound from above that makes her start climbing again. Her sense of well-being has been scrubbed away by that sound, and the moment of perfection dissipates as if it has never been felt at all. The sky is no longer cloud-free. The hill’s wildness is now brutal rather than beautiful.

  The sound was her child, crying.

  Ripley reaches the top, clinging to the hillside now, terrified that she will fall and even more afraid of what she’ll see if she does not. When she pulls herself up and over onto the summit, she blinks, and everything is all right.

  Then she really sees Amanda, standing there just a few yards away with one of those monstrous things attached to her face, tail tightening, pale fingers gripping, body throbbing. Ripley reaches out, and her daughter’s chest comes apart—

  * * *

  “...Go in there!” Hoop said.

  “What?” Ripley asked, blinking away the fog of confusion. It was harder to do this time, the debilitating sense of loss clinging to her more persistently. They’d reached the top of the staircase—she knew that, even though she had almost been elsewhere—but she took a moment to look around before realizing what Hoop was saying.

  “But look at it!” Baxter said. “We can’t just ignore that.”

  “I can,” Hoop said. “I can, and I am!”

  The head of the staircase opened into a wide area with two exits. One led up again, perhaps toward a hatch in the ship’s hull, or perhaps not. There was no telling. The other was closer, much wider, and like nothing they had seen on the ship before.

  At first she thought it was glass. The layers of clear material were scarred and dusty with time, but still appeared solid. Then she saw it shimmer as if from some unfelt breeze, and knew it wasn’t glass. She didn’t know exactly what it was, but it was there for one purpose.

  Lachance grabbed Baxter’s flashlight and shone it ahead. The light smeared across the clear surface and then splashed through the large space beyond. Some of what it illuminated Ripley recognized. Some she did not. None of it made her want to go any closer.

  “More eggs,” she said.

  “But different,” Baxter said. He hobbled closer and pressed his face to the barrier. It rippled as he touched it.

  Lachance played his light around, and Hoop added his own.

  “Oh,” Baxter said. He turned around slowly.

  “What is it?” Ripley asked. We just need to leave!

  “I think we just found where your queen friend came from.”

  Ripley closed her eyes, sighed, and there was a terrible, unrelenting inevitability to this. She did not feel in charge of her own actions. She was long past thinking, Maybe this is all a dream. No, she wasn’t asleep, but she didn’t feel entirely awake, either. The more she tried to take control of events, the more they ran away from her. And here she was again, needing to go in one direction, yet drawn relentlessly in another.

  Hoop shone his light back down the staircase they’d just climbed. No movement. Then he turned back to the new room beyond the clear enclosure.

  “I’ll go first,” he said.

  * * *

  The second thing Ripley noticed was that the tech here was far more recognizable—and more prevalent—than it had been anywhere else in the ship. There were at least six separate movable workstations where the equipment appeared largely identical, ranging from sizeable units to smaller, more intricate devices. There was very little dust, and everything had a sharpness, a clarity, that the rest of the ship was lacking. Time had not paid this place so much attention.

  The first thing she noticed was the eggs, and the things that guarded them.

  There
were sixteen eggs, each one set apart from the others within a waist-high, circular wire enclosure. The enclosures were set around the room’s curved perimeter, leaving the center open for the mobile workstations. The eggs looked similar to the others they had found and destroyed, though there were subtle differences in color, tone, and shape. They were rounder, fatter, and their surfaces seemed to be more thoroughly networked with fine veins. Ripley thought perhaps they were newer, or simply better preserved.

  Crouched beside the eggs were things that at first glance resembled statues. But she knew not to take anything down here at first glance. They were aliens, their spiked limbs dulled, curved heads dipped and pale. Slightly larger than others they had seen, yet so different from the queen they’d so recently killed. It was Lachance who hit it on the head.

  “They look like... the ship’s builders.”

  And they did. They were a monstrous blend of alien and dog-creature. More limbs than other aliens, each with a chunkier body, thicker legs, and a more prominent head, still they possessed the same chitinous outer shell, and one had slumped to the side with its grotesque mouth extended, the glimmering teeth now dulled. Ripley was glad she hadn’t seen them alive.

  “How long have they been here, do you think?” Baxter asked.

  “Long time,” Kasyanov said. “That one almost looks like it’s mummified. But these eggs... maybe the damned things can never die.”

  One egg was open, and on the ground close by it was the body of one of the miners.

  “Nick,” Lachance said quietly. “He owed me fifty dollars.”

  Nick’s chest was open, clothing torn, ribs protruding. He looked fresher than the other corpses they’d found, yet Ripley thought he’d probably died around the same time. The atmosphere in this section was cleaner, and perhaps lacking in the bacteria of decay.

  “Only one egg has opened,” she said. She blinked softly, trying to take control of the feeling that was slowly enveloping her. It was an urgency driven by disgust, a pressing desire fed by hatred.

  “And we just popped the bastard that came from that,” Hoop said. “You think so?”

  “Yeah, popped it,” she said. She looked around at the other eggs and the things that had settled to guard them, long ago. If all these eggs were queens—if that’s what the creature they’d just killed had been—then they had the potential to produce many, many more aliens.

  Thousands more.

  “We have to destroy them all,” she said. She lifted the charge thumper.

  “Wait!” Kasyanov said. “We haven’t got time to—”

  “We make time,” Ripley said. “What happens if we don’t survive? What happens if a rescue mission eventually arrives, comes down here? What then? There are thousands of potential creatures in this one room. We’ve fought off a few of those things. Imagine an army of them.”

  “Okay, Ripley,” Hoop said. He was nodding slowly. “But we need to take care. Lachance, come with me. We’ll check the other opening, make sure that’s really the way out. Then we’ll come back and fry these fuckers.” He looked at Ripley, and held up a hand. “Wait.”

  She nodded, but with one glance urged him to hurry. She wouldn’t wait for long. Her finger stroked the trigger, and she imagined the eggs bursting apart, spilling their horrendous cargo to the clear gray floor.

  Fuck you, Ash, she thought, and she almost laughed. He’d done everything he could to procure another one of these monsters for his Weyland-Yutani bosses. And she was doing everything she could to destroy them all.

  She would win. Of that she had no doubt. The burning question was, would she also survive?

  “I will,” she said.

  Perhaps thinking she was replying to him, Hoop nodded.

  Sneddon was slumped beside the door, creature still clasped across her entire face. Baxter stood resting against the wall, plasma torch cradled in his arms. Kasyanov blinked the pain from her eyes, also holding her plasma torch.

  As Hoop and Lachance left, Ripley had a flash-image of Amanda on top of that hill.

  I’ll save you, baby. I’ll save you.

  16

  MAJESTY

  “We’re getting out of this. Right, Hoop?”

  “What do you expect me to say to that?”

  “That we’re getting out of this.”

  “Okay, Lachance. We’re getting out of this.”

  Lachance exhaled and wiped his brow. “That’s a relief. For a minute there I thought we were fucked.”

  “Come on. Let’s see what’s up here.” They crossed the open area at the head of the steep staircase, and Hoop paused to look back down. His light didn’t seem to penetrate quite so far, now, its power starting to wane. He couldn’t quite see the bottom. There could have been anything down there, crouched in the shadows and staring up at him, and he wouldn’t know.

  Lachance moved through the opening and started up the shorter staircase. Hoop followed. There were only five tall steps before the walls seemed to close in, forming a blank barrier. But Lachance leaned left and right, looking at varying angles.

  “Hidden opening,” he said. “Clever.” He ducked through a fold in the strange wall material.

  Hoop glanced back and down. There was no noise down there, no hint that anything had gone wrong in that strange lab with the queen eggs. Yet he still couldn’t shake the idea that they were making a mistake here. That splitting up, even for such a short time, was a stupid thing to do.

  Ripley was stronger than ever, yet he could sense a ripple of danger emanating from her now. A need for some sort of vengeance, perhaps, that might well put them all in peril. She was a logical woman driven by the instinct for survival, intelligent and determined. But as she was shooting that queen, he’d seen something in her eyes that had no place with logic. Still instinct, perhaps. But the instinct for attack, rather than defense.

  When she’d looked at him just now, he’d seen murder in her eyes.

  He walked into Lachance, then realized why the Frenchman had stopped.

  The hidden route emerged onto the huge ship’s wings close to the cavern wall. The miners’ lights were still strung across the cavern, shedding a weak light over the whole area. Looking back along the wing he could see the damaged area where they’d entered, several hundred yards away and seemingly so long ago.

  “Can’t see any of those bastards,” Hoop whispered.

  “If they’re up here, they’re hiding,” Lachance said. “But look. What is that?” He was pointing to the right, toward where the ship’s hull seemed to disappear beneath the cavern wall that rose high above them, curving eventually into a high ceiling hidden by shadows.

  “That’s our way out,” Hoop said. There was a series of cracks in the wall above the wing, any one of which might have been a route back up into the mine.

  “Yeah, but what is it?”

  Hoop frowned, looked closer. Then he saw what Lachance meant.

  “Holy shit...”

  It wasn’t part of the ship. It was made of stone. Much of it had tumbled, but some still stood, a structure that at first glance formed the crevassed, cracked wall of the cavern.

  “Is that a building of some sort?” Lachance asked. “A wall?”

  “We’ll see,” Hoop said. “But not yet. Come on, we need to get the others.”

  “And wipe out those eggs,” Lachance said.

  “Yeah.” Hoop took one more lingering look around the cavern—the huge, buried vessel, like no ship any of them had ever seen; the massive cavern formed above and around it; and now this vast wall that seemed to loom over the ship, burying it, smothering the parts of it they had yet to see. It was almost as if the ship had crashed into the structure, rupturing it, ploughing through until it wedged to a halt.

  Whatever had happened here, they’d never know the full story. He’d bet money on it.

  Because even after wiping out those eggs, there were more measures they could take. Already he was making plans.

  They ducked back inside the ship
, descended the steep steps, and reached the open area at the head of the longer staircase.

  First came the flash of plasma fire from the lab ahead of them.

  Then the scream.

  Lachance was first across the landing, ducking through the clear curtain into the lab, thumper coughing as he entered. Hoop was right behind him. Ripley started without us! he thought, but as he entered and saw what was happening, he knew that wasn’t the case.

  They should have been more careful.

  * * *

  Ripley waited. She walked a complete circuit of the center of the room, careful to give the dead miner a wide berth. None of the eggs gave any signs of opening, there was no sound or movement, yet she remained alert. If one of them so much as twitched or pulsed, she’d open fire.

  Baxter had crouched down beside Sneddon and the two of them were motionless, unconsciously mimicking the mummified aliens. Kasyanov continued to blink quickly, touching at her eyes with her good hand and wincing as her gloved fingertips brushed against the swollen red eyelids. Her acid-burnt hand was held in front of her, shaking. She’d need attention back on the Marion—they all would—but they had to get there first.

  Apart from the one that had opened, the alien eggs seemed untouched, and almost immune to any effects of time. Perhaps the wire enclosures formed some sort of stasis field, letting the eggs and their monstrous cargo sleep until the time came for them to wake.

  That time was when a host, a victim, was brought before them.

  Finger still stroking the trigger, Ripley moved closer to one of the hybrid figures. Though they repulsed her, she couldn’t deny that she was also fascinated. This one must have been birthed from one of the dog-aliens that had built this strange ship. Which meant that the aliens seemed to take on some of the attributes of whomever or whatever they used as a host for their gestation. Did Kane’s alien have some of Kane in it?

  Would Amanda’s?

  “No,” Ripley breathed. “They’ll never leave here. None of them.” She looked at Sneddon where she sat slumped close to the doorway, that huge spider-like thing still clamped tight to her face, tail around her throat. Soon it would die and fall off, leaving an egg inside her chest that would quickly gestate and become one of them. Then the pain, the terrible agony of her death, and the new monster would emerge.