Alien

by Tim Lebbon

  If Ash had his way, Sneddon would be in stasis before that happened.

  “No,” Ripley said again, louder. Kasyanov looked across at her, Baxter glanced up, both alarmed. “We can’t take her,” she said, nodding at Sneddon. “She’s infected. We can’t save her, and we mustn’t take her.”

  “Well, there’s no way we’re leaving her!” Kasyanov said.

  “Haven’t you got something for her?” Ripley asked.

  It took a while for Kasyanov to understand what Ripley was really asking. When she did her red-rimmed eyes widened.

  “And who the hell are you?” she asked. “You don’t even know Sneddon, and you’re asking me to kill her?”

  “Kill?” Baxter asked, looking confused.

  “No, just help her,” Ripley said.

  “How exactly is killing her going to help her?” Kasyanov snapped.

  “Have you seen what they do?” Ripley asked. “Can you imagine how much it would hurt having something...” Amanda, screaming, hands held wide as a beast burst its way outside from within. “Something eating its way out of you from the inside, breaking your ribs, cracking your chest plate, chewing its way out? Can you even think about that?”

  “I’ll take it out of her,” Kasyanov said.

  Something creaked.

  Ripley frowned, her head tilted to one side.

  “Don’t you go near her,” Kasyanov continued. “None of us knows you. None of us knows why you really came, so you just—”

  “Listen!” Ripley said, hand held up.

  Creak...

  She looked around at the eggs. None of them seemed to be moving, none of those fleshy wings were hinging open, ready to disgorge their terrible contents. Maybe it was a breeze, still tugged through the tunnels and corridors by the fires they had set deeper in the ship. At the doorway, those strange curtains hung heavy. Around the room nothing moved. Except—

  Scriiiitch!

  It was Kasyanov who saw it.

  “Oh... my... God!”

  Ripley spun around, backed away toward where the others waited by the doorway, clasping the charge thumper and immediately realizing that they were very close to being fucked.

  It wasn’t just one of the mummified aliens that was moving.

  It was all of them.

  She squeezed the trigger, Kasyanov opened up with the plasma torch, and Ripley felt the ice cold, blazing hot kiss of fire erupting all around her.

  She screamed.

  * * *

  “Back back back!” Hoop shouted. Baxter was already trying to haul Sneddon out of the room, and Kasyanov was grasping the unconscious woman’s boots, trying to lift with her one good hand, plasma torch sputtering where it hung from her shoulder.

  As Lachance and Hoop entered there was a thudding explosion from across the room. Shrapnel whistled past Hoop’s ears and struck his suit, some of it dry, some wet. He winced, expecting more pain to add to his throbbing arm. But there were no more sizzling acid burns. Not yet.

  Ripley stood in front of them all, charge thumper at her hip as she swung thirty degrees and fired again.

  “Back!” Hoop shouted again, but Ripley couldn’t hear, or wasn’t listening.

  The frozen, statue-like aliens were moving. Several were down already, burning from Kasyanov’s plasma torch or blown apart by Ripley’s first shot. Others moved across the room toward Ripley. Some were slow, stiff, hesitant, as if still waking from a slumber Hoop could not comprehend.

  One was fast.

  It streaked toward Ripley from the right, and if Hoop hadn’t already had his finger on the spray gun trigger, she might have died. Instinct twitched his finger and sent a spurt of acid across the room. The alien’s movement made the shot even more effective, the acid slicing across its middle section. It hissed, then screamed, and thrashed backward as Lachance’s thumper discharged. He fired three bolts into its head and it dropped down, dead.

  Ripley’s second charge exploded. The whole room shook, detritus whizzing through the air and impacting walls, faces, flesh. She cried out and went to her knees, and Hoop saw that she’d already suffered burns across her right hip and leg from a plasma burst. It couldn’t have actually touched her—if it had, it would have eaten through her suit, flesh and bones—but she’d been too close when Kasyanov had fired her torch. If the torch’s reserves hadn’t already been nearly depleted, Ripley would have died.

  Hoop turned to the right, away from everyone else, and let loose another concentrated stream of acid, squeezing his eyes almost entirely closed against the fumes, holding his breath. An egg exploded, gushing sizzling insides. Another fell in two, the thing inside thrashing briefly before growing still.

  Ripley was on her feet again.

  “Get out!” she shouted at them all. “Get back! Now!”

  Three more aliens surged through a cloud of smoke and came at her. She fired another charge at them, striking the foremost creature and driving it back into the other two, the glimmer of metal obvious in its chest. She turned her shoulder and crouched as the blast came, then she quickly stood again.

  Hoop helped Kasyanov with Sneddon’s dead weight, and Lachance backed out with them.

  “Ripley!” Hoop shouted. “Out, now!”

  As he backed through the clear-curtained doorway with his crewmates, he could see her silhouetted against a wall of white-hot flame that still burned across the left half of the room. Her hair was wild, her stance determined, as something emerged from the flames and came at her, blazing.

  She fell, rolled, kicked out with one boot. The alien tripped over her leg and went sprawling, spilling one queen’s egg onto its side. Ripley screamed in pain as her wounded leg was jarred, but then she was standing again, aiming the charge thumper and firing her last shot into the monster’s face.

  She burst back through the curtains as the charge exploded. It shoved her through, fire blooming all around her, arms outstretched. She let go of the empty thumper and broke her fall, grunting as her already wounded body was subjected to another impact.

  Ripley stood quickly and went for Kasyanov. She grasped the spray gun, tugged, and Kasyanov pulled back.

  “Ripley!” Hoop said. She was bleeding from the leg and hip, slashed across the shoulder and side of her neck by an alien’s tail. Her face was blackened from an explosive blast. A large patch of her hair had been burnt away, and her right eye was almost closed. She should have been down on her knees, at least. But something kept her going.

  “Give it to me!” she demanded.

  A rage, a burning fury at these things and what they meant.

  “Let it go!” she screamed.

  Kasyanov slipped the strap from her shoulder and stepped back, looking at Ripley as if she was one of those things.

  Hoop went to shout at her again. But she was already turning back to the clear curtain, shouldering it aside and facing the terrors within. The fires. The bursting eggs. And those things that remained, waking, rising, coming to kill her.

  * * *

  She stood before them, and the thing that drove her fury wasn’t the memory of dead friends, but the unreal vision of her tortured daughter. She could do nothing about Dallas and the others on the Nostromo, and she was beginning to fear that she and the Marion’s survivors would never survive.

  But she could protect the daughter she had not seen for more than thirty-seven years. She could make sure these things were wiped out, and that if and when more people came here, there was no risk that they would ever be found.

  Two queen eggs burst apart beneath the flames, and Ripley held her breath and fired a spray of acid across their remains. Just to make sure.

  A large creature staggered at her, elements of the dog-aliens even more apparent now that it was up and moving. She hosed it down, sweeping the spray gun left and right and slicing gushing wounds in the thing’s carapace. It stumbled and fell, its tail whipping through the air and catching her across the stomach. She just staggered for a moment.

  Fires danced,
shadows wept, and nothing else moved in that strange, ancient laboratory. Why the dog-aliens had kept and nurtured the queen eggs, what they hoped to gain, if they had even known the terrible dangers they toyed with, she would never know. But she didn’t care. Knowing would change nothing.

  They all had to die.

  Three eggs remained, awake and ready, pulsing as the flaps slowly drew back to disgorge their charges. She fired an acid blast at each one, ensuring that their insides were destroyed. Something squealed as it died, and she hoped it hurt. However old the eggs and their contents might be, they were always ready to invade another host, and plant their dreadful larvae.

  “Not anymore!” Ripley shouted. “Fuck you, Ash!” Maybe he was a good target for her ire, maybe not. But having someone to curse other than these beasts felt good.

  Then they were done. Dead and gone. The queen eggs—so much potential, so much promise of pain and heartbreak—were cooking, melting, bubbling messes on the floor. She lowered the spray gun and blinked the fumes away, and flames flickering through tears made the scene look almost beautiful.

  Something grabbed her and she turned, seeing Hoop standing behind her and realizing only then how much pain she was in.

  “Ripley, we have to...” he said, eyes going wide at something he’d seen.

  “What?”

  “We need to patch you up.”

  “I’m fine,” Ripley said, not feeling fine but finding the strength to move. “There’s Sneddon and Baxter... you can’t carry me as well. I’ll walk ’til I drop.”

  And she did. Five paces out through the curtained opening, a few more across the open space beyond, and then her whole world started to spin. She was bleeding, burning, maybe even dying. And though she held on as hard as she could, Ripley couldn’t fight back the darkness descending all around her.

  Faces watched her fall. She only hoped she would see them all again.

  * * *

  “They’ll be coming,” Hoop said.

  “She’s bleeding badly,” Kasyanov said. “Her shoulder and neck, her stomach, they’re slashed up pretty good.”

  “Will she bleed to death?” Hoop asked.

  Kasyanov waited for only a moment. “Not in the short term.”

  “Then she can bleed while we run. Come on. We’re almost out.” He grasped Ripley and tugged her to her feet. She tried to help, but barely had any strength. Blood shimmered on the front of her suit, flowing across her boots and speckling the floor. They’ll pick up the scent and follow us, he thought. But he didn’t even know if the aliens could smell, and his priority now was to move as far away from here, as fast as they could.

  Back up into the mine, to the second elevator, and out of this hellhole.

  Baxter started hauling himself up the shorter staircase toward the outside, wounded ankle dragging behind him. It looked less painful, though, since he’d had the injection. Lachance and Kasyanov lifted Sneddon and pushed her up, step by step. As Hoop pulled Ripley up onto the first step, her feet kicking feebly, she started talking.

  “...take her...” Ripley muttered.

  “Huh? We are. We’re all getting out.”

  “No... don’t take...”

  She fell silent and he thought perhaps she was dreaming. Her eyes rolled, blood flowed. She looked a mess. But her strength was humbling, and on the next step she opened her eyes again, looking around until they focussed on those ahead and above them. “Sneddon,” she said, quietly so only Hoop could hear. “We can’t take her.”

  He didn’t even reply. Ripley groaned and seemed to pass out again, and when he dragged her up to the next step the trail of blood she left behind glimmered in the light.

  But he lifted her, pulled her up. Because he wasn’t leaving anyone behind. Not after everything they’d been through. Hoop had lost so much in his life. His wife, his love, his children, left behind when he fled. Some of his hope, and much of his dignity. And at some point the time for loss would have to end. Maybe now, when he was at his lowest and everything seemed hopeless, he would start winning things back.

  This is it. His friends, bleeding and in pain yet forging on as hard as they could, inspired him. And Ripley, the strange woman who had arrived in their midst, her own story tragic and filled with loss... if she could remain so strong, then so could he.

  He climbed up the next step and pulled her up after him, and for some reason she felt lighter.

  Outside, the others hunkered down close to where the folded access opened onto the ship’s upper surface. They kept low and quiet, as if being suddenly exposed after their nightmarish trip through the tunnels and corridors scared them even more. Hoop handed Ripley to Lachance, slipping the charge thumper from her shoulder as he did so. Even hazy and balancing on the edge of consciousness, she grabbed for the weapon. He eased her hand aside.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got it.” And she relented.

  “What are you doing?” Lachance asked.

  “Insurance,” Hoop said. “Giving us the best chance I can.” He held up two fingers—two minutes—then slipped back through the opening.

  By his reckoning, there was one charge left in the blaster.

  Now that he was facing it alone, the ship’s interior felt even stranger, more alien than ever. They had only left it moments before, but already he felt like an invader all over again. He wondered one more time just how alive that huge ship was, or had once been. But it was ancient, and whatever intelligence might once have driven it was now surely in the deepest of slumbers, if not dead.

  He edged down the first high step, then the second, and then he heard something that froze him to a halt. Everything in his world came to a standstill—the past, the future, his breathing, his thoughts. His heart skipped a beat, as if hiding from that sound.

  A high-pitched keening, so filled with pain and rage that it prickled his skin, the sound itself an assault. He was chilled and hot at the same time, his soul reacting in much the same way as skin when confronted by intense heat or cold. He might burn or freeze with terror, but for a moment he couldn’t tell which.

  What have we done? he thought. He could smell burning flesh, though there was no similarity to any meat he knew. He could hear the roar of the flames they had left behind, consuming what was left of the aliens, the eggs. And dropping down one more step, he could see the three creatures that had come after them.

  They were the same as the first ones they had encountered, back on the Marion. No dog-like features, no attributes that might have made them a queen. Warriors, perhaps. Soldier aliens. And they were whining and keening as they stood outside the burning, ruined lab, swaying from side to side, their tails waving, heads dipping to the left and then right. It was a dance of death and mourning, and for the briefest of moments Hoop felt almost sorry for them.

  The one in the middle bent to the ground and seemed to take a long, deep sniff of the blood trail there. Ripley’s blood trail. Then it hissed, a purposeful sound very different from the wails of grief, and the other two creatures also bent to the trail.

  Got her scent now, Hoop thought. Sorry, Ripley, but if there’s anyone we have to leave behind...

  He wasn’t serious. Not for a moment. But the aliens’ reactions set his own blood chilling. They hissed again, louder than before. They crouched and spread their limbs, adopting stances that suddenly made them look even more deadly.

  Hoop started climbing back up the steps. They still had their backs to him, but they only had to turn a quarter circle to see him. They would be on him in two bounds, and even if he had a chance to fire the charge-blaster, the delay on the charge meant he’d be dead before it blew.

  He wished he’d brought his spray gun, too.

  He made the top of the steps, braced himself, checked that the route behind him was clear. Then he paused at the fold in the wall and aimed the charge thumper up at the ceiling.

  Four seconds, maybe five. Did that give him time? Would they be up the steps and through before the charge went? He di
dn’t think so. But he also didn’t think he had time to worry about it.

  They had Ripley’s scent, and Ripley had come this way.

  He pulled the trigger, and the last explosive charge thumped up into the ceiling.

  From beyond, down in the ship, he heard three high-pitched shrieks, then the skittering of hard claws as the aliens came for him.

  Hoop sidestepped up through the opening and onto the ship’s surface.

  “Down there!” he said, shoving Ripley ahead of him, sliding down the gentle slope, and Lachance and Kasyanov pushed Sneddon the same way. They slid through the dust, and then from above and behind them came a dull, contained thud. Loud enough, though, to send echoes through the cavern.

  Hoop came to a stop and looked back. Dust and smoke rose from the opening, but nothing else. No curved head, no sharp limb. Maybe, just maybe, fate had given them a break.

  The blast was still echoing around the cave as they started across the ship’s surface toward the openings they could see in the vast wall. They negotiated their way over piles of tumbled rocks. Ripley found her feet, although she still clasped onto Hoop’s arm. Their combined lights offered just enough illumination to outline shadows and trip hazards, and the closer they came to the nearest opening, the more convinced Hoop became that the ship continued beyond the barrier. It was almost as if the vessel had struck the wall, and penetrated it upon landing.

  Or crashing. They’d entered through a damaged portion of the ship’s hull, after all, where blast damage was still obvious after so long.

  More rocks, and Hoop noticed for the first time that some of them seemed more regular than he’d realized. Square-edged, smooth. One of them displayed what might have been markings of some sort.

  But there was no time to pause and wonder. No time to consider what the markings and the tumbled, regular blocks might mean. A wall? A building? It didn’t matter. A way out mattered, and from what Hoop could see, their best bet was through the nearest crack.