Wren could actually feel the color draining from his face. He glanced about nervously, swallowing a hard lump in his throat. Wetting his dry lips, he said quietly, "Father; reboot systems on forty-five-vee. Authorization 'starling.' "
He was met with a thunderous silence. Wren broke out in a heavy sweat, despite the fact that he felt chilled. Could the Aliens have done this? Caused a power breakdown so vast, or a computer failure so complete that...?"
"Father; locate power drain. Report." More silence. "Father?"
The voice that answered him from the computer's speakers was young and feminine. "Father's dead, asshole."
He recognized it instantly. It was the voice of that little terrorist, Call, the one he'd discovered in Ripley's cell. He spun around, trying to see her. But the voice was everywhere, just like Father's always had been.
The door he'd been trying to open suddenly slammed back down, narrowly missing his toes. The locks clicked back into place. The sound was final, irrevocable.
Wren just stood there, staring stupefied at the door, at the entire ship that had just become his sworn enemy.
Behind him, a different door opened. He could see the emergency light pulsing along toward him, like an arrow pointing in his direction. Dammit, that was the wrong door, the totally wrong door. There was no way he could get to the Betty through that door.
Call's voice echoed throughout the ship. "Intruder on level one. Intruder on level one. All Aliens please proceed to level one. Dr. Wren is there."
Wren gasped in panic, then turned away from the door and began running back down the corridor.
Ripley watched as Call pulled the cord out of the port in her arm. "You've got a mean streak," she said offhandedly. "I like that."
Call avoided her gaze. "It's done. That should hold—" Her voice track slipped again, sounding more mechanical. "Dammit!" She dug around in her chest cavity, trying to fix it.
Ripley leaned over, thinking she might help. "Let me see—"
Call flinched away, still not facing her. "Don't touch me.
Stung, Ripley sat back, putting space between them. The rejection hurt, and it angered her that it did.
"You must think this is pretty funny," Call grumbled, her voice still off, sounding strange. She lifted her face, met Ripley's gaze. Call's was defiant. Angry.
Ripley sighed, suddenly very tired. "Yes. But I'm finding a lot of things funny lately. And I'm not sure they are."
Call glared at her, suddenly furious. "Why do you go on living? How can you stand it? How can you stand... yourself?" Her mechanical voice, still slipping, sounded more and more bizarre.
Ripley shrugged. "Not much choice." She'd never really had choices, not from the moment she'd been roused prematurely from cryosleep on a ship called the Nostromo. Anyway, Call was really only talking about herself, not Ripley at all.
Call turned her attention inward again, fighting with whatever parts of her controlled her vocal mechanisms. "At least there's a part of you that's human! I'm just— I'm just ... Fuck. Look at me...."
Ripley did then, stared at the hole in her chest, the white oozing mass of torn and sticky fibers. There was something so familiar.... She blinked, remembering Bishop, his courage, his humanity.
"I'm disgusting...." Call complained bitterly. Her voice was slowing down, sounding low and eerie like a badly recorded overdub. Ripley knew the problem was mechanical, but to her ears it sounded just like despair.
"Why weren't you destroyed along with the others?" Ripley asked.
Call faced her squarely. "To kill you, remember?" She paused for a moment, then went back to repairing herself. "Before the 'recall'—before everything fell apart for us—I accessed the mainframe. The Defense mainframe. Every dirty little covert op the government ever dreamed of was in there. Even this one. The plans, Perez's involvement, the Aliens, you.... Even the plans to hire the Betty crew. And I knew, if they succeeded, it would be the end of them." Her voice was clear again, the right timbre, the right speed. "The End Of Humanity."
Ripley felt herself smiling. There was something terribly funny in all this. "Why do you care what happens to them!"
"Because I'm programmed to, okay?" Call snapped. Ripley started to laugh. "Are you programmed to be such an asshole? Are you the new asshole model they're putting out?"
Call couldn't help herself, she started smiling back, then laughed along with Ripley. But then she sobered again, and when she spoke, this time, there was a level of caring that she hadn't been willing to reveal before.
"I couldn't let them do it," she told Ripley. "I couldn't let them annihilate themselves. Does that make any sense? Do you understand?"
Ripley thought about that. "I did, once." She looked around the chapel, seeing flashes of faces, names, and events that were more a jumble in her head than coherent memories. "I ... I tried to save... people.... Didn't work out. There was a girl. A little blond girl. She had bad dreams. I tried to help her... and ... and she died.... And I can't remember her name."
Call patted her hand, then pulled away again.
Just then Distephano entered. "I guess we're almost there."
"Right," Ripley said.
As the soldier left the chapel, the two women walked toward the door after him.
"Do you dream?" Ripley asked, curious.
Call hedged. "I ... we have neural processors that run through...." She stopped, started over again. "Yes."
"When I sleep," Ripley said, closing her eyes, "I dream about it. Them. Every night. It's like they're all around me. In me." She remembered the little girl saying, I don't wanna sleep. I have scary dreams. "I used to be afraid to dream, but I'm not anymore."
"Why?" Call asked.
Ripley stared at the stained-glass window for a moment. "Because no matter how bad the dreams get ... when I wake up, it's always worse."
Ripley wondered what kind of supreme being might listen to the prayers of a robot, then she wondered whether it would mind listening to the prayers of a clone as well....
The two of them quietly left the chapel. As they did, the ship's computer voice—now permanently programmed as Call's voice—calmly sounded over the intership RA.
"Ventilation systems stabilized. Oxygen at forty-three percent."
Call seemed surprised. "Is that my voice?"
Ripley nodded. "Ships are supposed to be female anyway."
12
They walked hurriedly, if cautiously, through the halls, Johner on point, Distephano and Call carrying Vriess, Purvis behind them, and Ripley taking the rear.
Ahead of her, Ripley heard Distephano tell them, "Not far now."
Purvis sighed. "God, I'm so tired...."
"Yeah, well," Johner snapped, nerves frayed, "we'll sleep when we're dead."
That was when Ripley felt something squish under her foot. She stopped, looked down. There was a clear, gel-like goo under her booted toe. The others discovered it, too, when they stepped in it.
She fought the urge, then yielded, bending to touch it with her fingers, making sure. The mucus dripped stickily from her hand. Yes. Them.
Purvis glanced at them. "Uh, this is bad, right?" Ripley looked back the way they'd come, then ahead again. "We must be near the nest." Instinctively, she knew the Aliens were gathered there, though she didn't know why or how she knew.
"Well," Vriess said impatiently, "then we go another way."
Distephano nixed that. "There isn't one. This is it." Johner was nearly twitching with fear. "Wo! Okay, now, fuck you! 'Cause I ain't goin' in there!"
"Soldier's right," Call said, sounding subdued. "I did a diagnostic on the ship. This has to be the way.... Unless we go all the way back."
"I can live with that," Vriess announced. "We could go back...."
"We don't have enough time," Call said simply, in that same subdued tone. She looked at Ripley.
"We got near ninety minutes!" Johner insisted.
Call paused, then shook her head, "Not anymore." "What are you saying?" Dist
ephano asked.
Johner caught the look going back and forth between the two women and nearly exploded. "What did you do, Robot?"
"Forget it!" she ordered Johner.
But Johner was beyond listening to her. He moved forward, threateningly, pointing at Ripley. "Hey, you wanna die here with your little brothers and sisters, that's fine. But I plan to live past today and if this hunk of plastic is pulling some shit"—he jerked a thumb back at Call—"I'm gonna kill her."
He rounded on Call next. "Kill you! Does that fucking compute? Or do you want me to..."
Ripley was on him before he could finish, before he could draw another breath. Her hand shot out and grabbed his moving tongue as her other hand anchored his jaw in place. He froze, unable to move, unable to speak. Ripley got nose to nose with his ugly face.
"It would make a hell of a necklace," she purred, tugging threateningly on his tongue. Then she released it.
Johner shut his mouth with a snap, and was silent. Ripley turned to Distephano. "How far to the docks?"
"Hundred meters," the soldier estimated.
As one, they all looked down the forbidding corridor. It looked empty, but...
"So, what's the plan?" Vriess said tiredly.
Everyone glanced at one another. The feeling in the air was clearly, No choice. Again.
Without discussing it, Call and Distephano picked up Vriess, and every one of them burst into action, running down the corridor as fast as they could. It was the only thing left to do.
Ripley brought up the rear. She was running along with the others, watching behind them. Then, all of a sudden, it hit her. Them. Behind her eyes. In her brain. In her soul. Them. Coming for her. She staggered, tried to keep going, but couldn't. She fell to one knee.
Call must've handed Vriess off to Purvis, because suddenly she was standing over her, shaking her. "Ripley? Ripley? What's wrong?"
The terrible, insectile buzzing in Ripley's mind nearly made her deaf to Call's words. She shook her head, clamping her hands around her ears, grimacing in pain.
She tried to gasp out a warning. "Mistake...! Mistake...."
"Ripley!" Call yelled.
"I can hear them," the clone gasped, nearly weeping. The pain, the horror of it, was overwhelming. She was losing herself, her identity, her very humanity. They were overwhelming her. "The hive .... It's close. We're right over the hive...."
They were both so focused on Ripley's problem, neither of them saw the rivet drill itself out of the floor, right by Ripley's foot.
"I can hear them," Ripley choked, every word a razor in her throat. "So close .... So close."
"Jesus!" Call said, pulling at her nervously. "Come on!
But Ripley was glued in place, in too much pain and horror to move. "I can hear them .... The Queen!"
A second rivet popped out of the floor, still unnoticed.
"The what...?" Call asked.
Dimly, Ripley realized that Call didn't know anything at all about the family structure of the Aliens. And she was in no condition to explain details. "She's in pain...!"
Awareness of her own danger hit Ripley suddenly, as she heard something move beneath her. Glancing down, she saw an Alien hand shoot up through the grillwork, grab the floor panel, and yank down.
As the floor was pulled out from under her, Ripley staggered, then slid downward. She scrambled for purchase, lurched to grab the edge of the floor in front of her. She saw Call reach for her frantically, but it was too late. With a sickening plunge, Ripley fell.
Call nearly pitched headlong into the hole that had suddenly opened up in the floor as she reached for the disappearing Ripley.
"Ripley!" she screamed into the darkness under the floor. "RIPLEY!"
"What the fuck's goin' on?" Johner barked, running up beside her.
"I don't know! I don't know!" Call was frantic.
"Oh, Christ!" Johner moaned.
Vriess pulled himself up to the hole, grabbed the shoulder of her shirt as she leaned in. "Annalee, you'll fall! Get back!"
She didn't even register the concern in his voice. She was focused on only one thing, the black hole Ripley had disappeared into.
"Here!" Distephano said, slapping a flashlight into her hand.
She leaned back over the hole, but all she could see was a dim, distant glow. She could hear something screeching from far away, but it wasn't Ripley.
Call flicked on the small lamp.
What it illuminated was a vision straight from hell. At first Call thought she was staring into a bottomless snake pit, a viper's nest, but then realized that everything she was seeing, all the black, gleaming, moving parts all belonged to them. Aliens. Countless numbers, all working together, side by side, back to back. It looked like a huge tangle of tails, skulls, arms, all shining and moving like serpents entwined as they thrashed under the light of her lamp.
And in the center of that writhing, sticky, living mass, was Ripley, trapped, held, on her back, her arms outstretched. Call had the sudden image of the cross in the chapel and had to blink. She almost called out to Ripley, seeing the woman's eyes were wide open and staring up, but then realized Ripley wasn't seeing her. She was seeing only one thing—her future.
As Call and the others stared into the hole in horrified fascination, Ripley began to sink beneath the mass of moving Alien bodies, slowly, as if in quicksand....
. . . Until she completely disappeared, smothered under the bulk of the creatures who had claimed her at last.
At first Ripley felt shock, then horror, then revulsion as she landed in the midst of the lurching, undulating mass of Aliens. Then there'd been a terrible, bottomless panic as they moved against her, embracing her, accepting her, collecting her as one of them. But soon that dissipated, as the part of her that wasn't truly Ripley began to surface. And as the warmth of their bodies surrounded her, as she sank under their collective mass, she felt a great lethargy overwhelm her.
In the stillness of that moment, her eyes drooped, her body sagged, and she slipped into sleep unawares. And then it was there, waiting for her....
Her longing for the steaming warmth of the crèche, the strength and safety of her own kind. All this time, she had suffered the aloneness of her individuality. Only in sleep could she join them, rejoice with them. The time was here. They had built the crèche. It was time for her to join with other warriors and serve the Queen. It was why she lived.
In her sleep, the warrior, Ripley, lashed her tail, transmitting everything she thought and planned and felt to her Queen. And her Queen sent her love and approval back to her warrior. And her need. It would happen soon.
Call felt moisture on her cheeks, and realized with some remote, logical part of her brain, that her tear mechanism still functioned. She felt crushed, defeated. It hurt worse than being shot.
Had it all been for nothing, all Ripley's courage, all her fighting to regain her humanity, herself? If so, what could one damaged robot do to change anything?
The warrior moved toward the steaming warmth of the
crèche. The strength and safety of his own kind. He was no longer burdened with the aloneness of his special individuality. He had been honored by the Queen, selected because of his cleverness. He had been the first to escape, to free the others, to capture the first wombs, the first food. And so, he'd been chosen to serve his Queen once more. He had taken the Ripley away from the prey and carried her now through the nest to the crèche.
There were warriors enough to protect her there, where they had constructed the perfect crèche. There humans, those pitiful, soft humans, waited to be food for the Queen's young, and host to the new brood. It would happen. It would happen soon.
But the warrior was burdened with memories. Of unexpected chaos. Warriors screaming and dying. And fire. And the Ripley, standing firm, holding her own young in her arms. Causing death and destruction to the crèche.
The sweeping pain of loss—sickening, irretrievable loss—flooded his mind, his entire body. It meant
nothing—it meant everything. He searched for the connection to his own kind, and found the strength and safety of the crèche.
That had been a different nest, a different time. He would not think of it now, when his Queen called for his service.
In spite of their guns, in spite of their restraints, the humans had once again fallen to them. They fed them, and gave birth to the Queen's young. They had taken them by force. As they always had. As they always would. With the purity of their drive and their ferocity.
Our structural perfection is matched only by our hostility.
The big warrior lashed his tail, transmitting everything he thought and planned and felt to his brothers and his Queen. His Queen, his Mother, sent her love and approval—and her need. Her need for the Ripley he carried so very carefully in his arms. His Queen sent her love and approval back to her warrior.
And this shell that was human, this Ripley, was the mother of them all. The first womb. The first warrior. And she would live to know it all, to share the glory with them. The Queen had seen to it, and the warrior had made it happen—for Ripley was the keystone of the hive. The nurturer of the crèche. The foundation of the Newborn.
The Ripley twitched helplessly in her sleep, making soft sounds of protest and pain. The warrior breathed on her face, giving her air and warmth. Nurturing she who had nurtured them all. The Queen approved.
Call stood frozen over the open floor panel, unable to accept what had happened. She was aware of the others looking at one another, and realized what had happened had changed them. Somehow Ripley's strength, her courage, had knit the group together—but now Ripley was gone and they were on the edge of unraveling.
Even Johner was still, his throat working as if he were trying to swallow something too big.
Vriess was looking at her with so much sorrow in his eyes, so much sympathy for Call, that she knew if she met his gaze she'd fall apart.
Distephano glared, his jaw tight. He clutched his gun, his knuckles white.
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