Alien (aliens universe)

by Alan Dean Foster

  IV

  As the hidden sun continued to rise, the bloody red colour of the atmosphere began to lighten. It was now a musty, dirty yellow instead of the familiar bright sunshine of Earth, but it was a vast improvement over what had been.

  The storm had abated somewhat and the omnipresent dust had begun to settle. For the first time, the three foot weary travellers could see more than a couple of metres ahead.

  They'd been climbing for some time. The terrain continued hilly, but except for isolated pillars of basalt it was still composed of lava flows. There were few sharp projections, most having been ground down to gentle curves and wrinkles by untold aeons of steady wind and driven dust.

  Kane was in the lead, slightly ahead of Lambert. Any minute now he expected her to announce they'd regained the signal. He topped a slight rise, glanced ahead expecting to see more of what they'd encountered thus far: smooth rock leading upward to another short climb.

  Instead, his eyes caught something quite different, different enough to make them go wide behind the dirty, transparent face of the helmet, different enough to make him shout over the pickup.

  'JESUS CHRIST!'

  'What is it? What's the mat. .?' Lambert pulled up alongside him, followed by Dallas. Both were as shocked by the unexpected sight as Kane had been.

  They'd assumed the distress signal was being generated by machinery of some sort, but no pictures of the transmitter source had formed in their minds. They'd been too occupied with the storm and the simple necessity of staying together. Confronted now with a real source, one considerably more impressive than any of them had dared consider, their scientific detachment had temporarily vanished.

  It was a ship. Relatively intact it was, and more alien than any of them had imagined possible. Dallas would not have labelled it gruesome, but it was disturbing in a way hard technology should not have been. The lines of the massive derelict were clean but unnatural, imbuing the entire design with an unsettling abnormality.

  It towered above them and the surrounding rocks on which it lay. From what they could see of it, they decided it had landed in the same manner as the Nostromo, belly down. Basically it was in the shape of an enormous metallic 'U', with the two horns of the U bent slightly in toward one another. One arm was slightly shorter than its counterpart and bent in more sharply. Whether this was due to damage or some alien conception of what constituted pleasing symmetry they had no way of knowing.

  As they climbed closer they saw that the craft thickened somewhat at the base of the U, with a series of concentric mounds like thick plates rising to a final dome. Dallas formed the opinion that the two horns contained the ship's drive and engineering sections, while the thicker front end held living quarters, possibly cargo space, and the bridge. For all they knew, he might have everything exactly reversed.

  The vessel lay supine, displaying no indication of life or activity. This near, the regained transmission was deafening and all three hastened to lower the volume in their helmets.

  Whatever metal the hull was composed of, it glistened in the increasing light in an oddly vitreous way that hinted at no alloy ever formed by the hand of man. Dallas couldn't even be sure it was metal. First inspection revealed nothing like a weld, joint, seal, or any other recognizable method of cojoining separate plates or sections. The alien ship conveyed the impression of having been grown rather than manufactured.

  That was bizarre, of course. Regardless of the method of construction, the important thing was that it was undeniably a ship.

  So startled were they by the unexpected sight that none of them gave a thought to what the seemingly intact derelict might be worth in the form of bonuses or salvage.

  All three were shouting at the same time into their helmet pickups. 'Some kind of ship, all right,' Kane kept repeating inanely, over and over.

  Lambert studied the lustrous, almost wet shine of the curving sides, the absence of any familiar exterior features, and shook her head in wonder. 'Are you positive? Maybe it could be a local structure. It's weird. .'

  'Naw.' Kane's attention was on the twin, curving horns that formed the rear of the vessel. 'It's not fixed. Even allowing for alien architectural concepts, it's clear enough this isn't intended to be part of the landscape. It's a ship, for sure.'

  'Ash, can you see this?' Dallas remembered that the science officer could see clearly via their respective suit video pickups, had probably noticed the wreck the moment Kane had topped the rise and given his shocked cry.

  'Yeah, I can see it. Not clear, but enough to agree with Kane that it's a ship.' Ash's voice sounded excited in their helmets. At least it was as excited as the science officer ever sounded. 'Never seen anything like it. Hang on a minute.' They waited while Ash studied readouts, ran a couple of rapid queries through the ship's brain.

  'Neither has Mother,' he reported. 'It's a completely unknown type, doesn't correlate with anything we've ever encountered before. Is it as big as it looks from here?'

  'Bigger,' Dallas told him. 'Massive construction, no small details visible as yet. If it's constructed to the same scale as our ships, the builders must've been a damn sight bigger than us.'

  Lambert let out a nervous giggle. 'We'll find out, if there are any of them left on board to give us a welcome.'

  'We're close and in line,' Dallas said to Ash, ignoring the navigator's comment. 'You ought to be receiving a much clearer signal from us. What about the distress call? Any shift? We're too close to tell.'

  'No. Whatever's producing the transmission is inside that. I'm sure of it. Got to be. If it was farther out, we'd never have picked it up through that mass of metal.'

  'If it is metal.' Dallas continued to examine the alien hull. 'Almost looks like plastic.'

  'Or bone,' a thoughtful Kane suggested.

  'Assuming the transmission is coming from inside, what do we do now?' Lambert wondered.

  The exec started forward. 'I'll go in and have a look, let you know.'

  'Hold on, Kane. Don't be so damned adventurous. One of these days it's going to get you into trouble.'

  'I'll settle for getting inside. Look, we've got to do something. We can't just stand around out here and wait for revelations to magically appear in the air above the ship.' Kane frowned at him. 'Are you seriously suggesting we don't go inside?'

  'No, no. But there's no need to rush it.' He addressed the distant science officer. 'You still reading us, Ash?'

  'Weaker now that you're on top of the transmitter,' came the reply. 'There's some unavoidable interference. But I'm still on you clear.'

  'Okay. I don't see any lights or signs of life. No movement of any kind except this damn dust. Use us for a distance-and-line fix and try your sensors. See if you can see or find anything that we can't.'

  There was a pause while Ash hastened to comply with the order. They continued to marvel at the elegantly distorted lines of the enormous vessel.

  'I've tried everything,' the science officer finally reported. 'We're not equipped for this kind of thing. The Nostromo's a commercial tug, not an exploration craft. We'd need a lot of expensive stuff we just don't carry to get a proper reading.'

  'So. . what can you tell me?'

  'Nothing from here, sir. I can't get any results at all. It's putting out so much power I can't get any acceptable reading whatsoever. We just don't carry the right instrumentation.'

  Dallas tried to conceal his disappointment from the others. 'I understand. It's not crucial anyway. But keep trying. Let me know the minute you do find anything, anything at all. Especially any indication of movement. Don't go into details. We'll handle any analysis at this end.'

  'Check. Watch yourselves.'

  'What now, Captain?' Dallas'ss gaze travelled the length of the huge ship, returned to discover Kane and Lambert watching him. The exec was right, of course. To know that this was the source of the signal was not sufficient. They had to trace it to the generator, try to discover the cause behind the signal and the presence of this ship on t
his tiny world. To have come this far and not explore the alien's innards was unthinkable.

  Curiosity, after all, was what had driven mankind out from his isolated, unimportant world and across the gulf between the stars. It had also, he thoughtfully reminded himself, killed the figurative cat.

  He came to a decision, the only logical one. 'It looks pretty dead from out here. We'll approach the base first. Then, if nothing shows itself. .'

  Lambert eyed him. 'Yeah.'

  'Then. . we'll see.'

  They started toward the hull, the superfluous finder dangling from Lambert's belt.

  'At this point,' Dallas was saying as they neared the overhanging curse of the hull, 'there's only one thing I can. .'

  Back aboard the Nostromo, Ash followed every word carefully. Without warning, Dallas's voice faded. It came back strong once more before disappearing completely. Simultaneously, Ash lost visual contact.

  'Dallas!' Frantically, he jabbed buttons on the console, threw switches, demanded better resolution from the already overstrained pickups. 'Dallas, do you read me? I've lost you. Repeat, I've lost you. . '

  Only the constant thermonuclear hiss of the local sun sounded plaintively over the multitude of speakers. .

  Up next to the hull, the colossal scale of the alien vessel was more evident than ever. It curved above them, rising into the dust-heavy air and looking more solid than the broken rock it rested upon.

  'Still no sign of life,' Dallas murmured half to himself as he surveyed the hull. 'No lights, no movement.' He gestured toward the imagined bow of the ship. 'And no way in. Let's try up that way.'

  As they strode carefully over shattered boulders and loose, shaly rock, Dallas was aware how small the alien ship made him feel. Not small physically, though the bulging, overbearing arc of the hull dwarfed the three humans, but insignificantly tiny on the cosmic scale. Humanity still knew very little of the universe, had explored a fraction of one corner.

  It was exciting and intellectually gratifying to speculate on what might lie waiting in the black gulfs when one was behind the business end of a telescope, quite another to do so isolated on an unpleasant little speck of a world such as this, confronted by a ship of nonhuman manufacture that uncomfortably resembled a growth instead of a familiar device for manipulating and overcoming the neat laws of physics.

  That, he admitted to himself, was what troubled him most about the derelict. Had it conformed to the familiar in its outlines and composition, then its nonhuman origin would not have seemed so threatening. He did not put his feelings down to simple xenophobia. Basically, he hadn't expected the alien to be so completely alien.

  'Something's coming up.' He saw that Kane was pointing to the hull ahead of them. Time to set aside idle speculation, he told himself firmly, and treat with reality. This odd horn-shape was a spacecraft, differing only in superficial ways from the Nostromo. There was nothing malignant about the material it was formed of or ominous about its design. One was the result of a different technology, the latter possibly of aesthetic ideals as much as anything else. When viewed in that manner, the ship assumed a kind of exotic beauty. No doubt Ash was already raving over the vessel's unique design, wishing he were here among them.

  Dallas noticed Lambert's unvaried expression and knew there was at least one member of the crew who'd trade places with the science officer without hesitation.

  Kane had indicated a trio of dark blotches on the hull's flank. As they climbed nearer and slightly higher in the rocks, the blotches turned into oval openings, showed depth in addition to height and width.

  They finally found themselves standing just below the three pockmarks in the metal (or plastic? or what?) hull. Narrower, still darker secondary gaps showed behind the exterior ovals. Wind whipped dust and pumice in and out of the openings, a sign that the gaps had remained open for some time.

  'Looks like an entrance,' Kane surmised, hands on hips as he studied the gaps. 'Maybe somebody else's idea of an airlock. You see the inner hatch openings behind these?'

  'If they're locks, why three of them so close to each other?' Lambert regarded the openings with suspicion. 'And why are they all standing open?'

  'Maybe the builders liked to do things in threes.' Kane shrugged. 'If we can find one, I'll let you ask him.'

  'Funny boy.' She didn't smile. 'I'll buy that, but what about leaving all three open?'

  'We don't know that they're open.' Dallas found himself fascinated by the smooth-lipped ovals, so different from the Nostromo's bulky, squarish lock entrances. These appeared moulded into the fabric of the hull instead of having been attached later in construction with awkward welds and seals.

  'As to why they might be open, if they indeed are,' Dallas continued, 'maybe the crew wanted to get out in a hurry.'

  'Why would they need three open locks to do that?'

  Dallas snapped at her, irritated. 'How the hell am I supposed to know?' He added immediately after, 'Sorry. . that was uncalled for.'

  'No it wasn't.' This time she did grin, slightly. 'It was a dumb question.'

  'Time we got ourselves some answers.' Keeping his eyes on the ground and watching for loose rock, he started up the slight incline leading toward the openings. 'We've waited long enough. Let's move inside, if we can.'

  'Might be someone's idea of a lock.' Kane studied the interior of the opening they now were entering. 'Not mine.'

  Dallas was already inside. 'Surface is firm. Secondary door or hatch or whatever it was is open also.' A pause, then, 'There's a big chamber back here.'

  'What about light?' Lambert fingered her own lightbar, slung at her waist opposite her pistol.

  'Seems to be enough for now. Save power until we need it. Come on in.'

  Kane and Lambert followed him through, down a short corridor. They emerged into a high-ceiling room. If there were controls, gauges, or any kind of instrumentation in this section of the ship they were concealed behind grey walls. Looking remarkably like the inside of a human rib cage, rounded metal ribbings braced floor, roof, and walls. Ghost light from outside danced on dust particles suspended in the nearly motionless air of the eerie chamber.

  Dallas eyed his executive officer. 'What do you think?'

  'I dunno. Cargo chamber, maybe? Or part of a complicated lock system? Yeah, that's it. We just passed through a double door and this here is the real lock.'

  'Mighty big for just an airlock.' Lambert's voice sounded subdued in their helmets.

  'Just guessing. If the inhabitants of this ship were to its scale what we are to the Nostromo, they'd likely need a lock this size. But I admit the cargo-hold idea makes more sense. Might even explain the need for three entryways.' He turned, saw Dallas leaning over a black hole in the floor.

  'Hey, watch it, Dallas! No telling what might be down there, or how deep it goes.'

  'The ship is standing open to the outside and nothing's taken notice of our entry. I don't think there's anything alive in here.' Dallas unclipped his lightbar, flipped it on, and directed the brilliant beam downward.

  'See anything?' Lambert asked.

  'Yeah.' Kane smirked. 'Like a rabbit with a watch?' He sounded almost hopeful.

  'Can't see a damn thing.' Dallas moved the light slowly from one side to the other. It was a narrow beam, but powerful. It would show anything lying a modest distance below them.

  'What is it?' Lambert had walked over to stand alongside him, kept a careful distance from the abyss. 'Another cargo chamber?'

  'No way of telling from here. It just goes down. Smooth walls as far as my light will reach. No indication of handholds, an elevator, ladder, or any other means of descent. I can't see the bottom. Light won't reach. Must be an access shaft of some kind.' He turned off his light, moved a metre away from the hole, and began unclipping gear from his belt and backpack. He laid it out on the floor, rose, and glanced around the dimly illuminated, grey chamber.

  'Whatever's downstairs will wait. Let's have a look around here first. I want to make sur
e there aren't any surprises. We might even find an easier way down.' He flicked his light on once more, played it over nearby walls. Despite their resemblance to a whale's insides, they remained gratifyingly motionless.

  'Spread out. . but not too far. Under no circumstances walk out of unlighted view of one another. This shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes.'

  Kane and Lambert activated their own lightbars. Travelling in a line, they started to explore the vast room.

  Fragments of some shattered grey material lay scattered about. Much of it was buried beneath the tiny dust dunes and finely ground pumice that had invaded the ship. Kane ignored the stuff. They were hunting for something intact.

  Dallas's light fell unexpectedly on a shape that was not part of wall or floor. Moving closer, he used the light to trace its outlines. It appeared to be a smallish urn or vase, tan in colour, glossy in aspect. Moving closer, he tilted his head over the jagged, broken top, shone the light inside.

  Empty.

  Disappointed, he walked away, wondering that something seemingly so fragile had remained relatively undisturbed while other more durable substances had apparently withered and cracked. Though for all he knew, the composition of the urn might test the melting ability of his pistol.

  He was almost ready to return to the shaft in the floor when his light fell on something complex and boldly mechanical. Within the semi-organic confines of the alien ship its reassuringly functional appearance was a great relief, though the design itself was utterly unfamiliar.

  'Over here!'

  'Something wrong?' That was Kane.

  'Not a thing. I've found a mechanism.'

  Lambert and Kane rushed to join him, their boots raising little puffs of animated dust. They added their own lights to Dallas's. All seemed quiet and dead, though Dallas had the impression of patient power functioning smoothly somewhere behind those strangely contoured panels. And evidence of mechanical life was provided by the sight of a single metal bar moving steadily back and forth on its grooved track, though it made, according to suit sensors, not a sound.