Alien: Out of the Shadows

by Tim Lebbon

  “Yeah. Not much change, those things are just sitting there. One of them... it sort of stretched for a while, like shadows were growing out of it. Weird lighting in there, and the picture’s not great, but it looked like it was shedding its skin.”

  Another voice muttered something that Hoop missed.

  “What was that?” he said.

  “I said it looks like it’s grown,” Powell said. “The one that shed its skin. It’s bigger.”

  “What about Jones?” Hoop asked, deeply troubled. Bigger? Impossible in such a short time, surely.

  “Still there,” Baxter said. “I can only see his arm, shoulder, head. He’s still shaking.”

  “Record the images,” Sneddon said.

  “For later viewing pleasure?” Lachance asked, but no one replied. No time for humor, even if it was tinged with sarcasm.

  “We’ll be back in a few minutes,” Hoop said. “Lachance, get the computer to categorize damage. I’ll prioritize when we get there, then we’ll pull together a work schedule. Baxter, has a distress signal gone out?”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s the other fun bit,” Baxter said. “Some of the wreckage must have fucked the antenna array. So the computer says the signal is transmitting, but I don’t think it is.”

  “Right. Great. Fucking wonderful.” Hoop shook his head. “Any meteors heading toward us? Black holes opening up? Anything else to worry about?”

  “The bridge’s coffee carafe was smashed,” Powell said, his voice deep and deadly serious.

  Hoop started laughing. By the time he got his hysteria under control, tears smeared the inside of his helmet’s visor.

  * * *

  By the time they reached the bridge, Kasyanov and Garcia had made their way back from the medical bay. The few personnel left aboard the Marion were either dead or sporting minor injuries, so there was little for them to do down there.

  “It was creepy, just the two of us,” Garcia said. “So we shut everything down. Figured it would be safer up here, with everyone together.”

  Just how safe that might be, Lachance revealed to them all.

  “The only blessing is that the Delilah’s fuel core wasn’t compromised during the crash,” he said.

  “So where is it?” Hoop asked.

  Lachance was still in his pilot’s seat. “Out there somewhere,” he said, “floating around.” He waved his hand, a cigar clutched between two fingers. Hoop and most of the others hated the stink of the things. But with everything that had happened, it seemed almost comical to ask him to put it out.

  “We saw plenty of wreckage close to the ship,” Welford said. “Maybe it was compromised and it’s just floating somewhere nearby, overheating and ready to blow.”

  “In which case, c’est la vie,” Lachance said. “Unless you want to throw on a suit and take a space walk.” Welford looked away, and Lachance smiled. “And anyway, we have more immediate concerns—things we can do something about.”

  “The Samson?” Powell asked.

  Hoop looked at the screens. The interior of the dropship was unchanged: shadows. Shadows flickered, Jones shook. They all wanted to turn it off, but Hoop had insisted keeping it on. They needed to know.

  Lachance shrugged.

  “We have to consider that safe, for now. But the sensors have identified atmosphere leaks in five blast doors, which probably means another five we don’t know about. Decks five and six have vented completely into space, and the damage will need to be isolated and repaired. The chunk of the Delilah that’s caught onto the ruin of the docking bays needs freeing and sending on its way. Otherwise it’ll cause more damage.”

  “And the Marion’s positioning?” Hoop asked.

  “Decaying. I’m... not sure there’s much we can do about it. The crash has damaged more of the ship than we can see. I suspect there’s some severe structural trauma. And it appears as if both fuel cell coolant systems have been damaged.”

  “Oh, great,” Powell said.

  “How bad?” Hoop asked.

  “That’s something that needs checking manually,” Lachance said. “But there’s more. Heaven has been corrupted.”

  “What with?” Hoop asked. His heart sank. Heaven was their bio pod, a small but lush food-growing compound in the Marion’s nose section, where many of the miners and crew went for their green therapy. After years in space—and working down in the sterile, sandblasted hell of LV178—the sight of a carrot head or a wall of green beans did more than any drug cocktail to alleviate depression.

  “I’m not sure yet,” Lachance said. “Jordan was the one who...”

  Lucy loved her gardening, Hoop thought. They’d made love in Heaven once, down on the damp soil with only the fruit trees and vegetable patches bearing witness.

  “We have dried foods,” Hoop said. “Is the water storage undamaged?”

  “As far as I can tell.”

  “Okay, then.” He looked around at the remainder of Marion’s crew. They were all shocked by how quickly and badly everything had gone to shit. But they were also hard, adaptable people, used to living with constant dangers and ready to confront the impossible to survive. “Welford, Powell, get the full damage report from Lachance and prioritize. We’ll need help. All of you can use spanners and push welding kit.”

  “But there’s something else to do first,” Baxter said.

  “Yep. And that’s down to me. I’ll record the distress signal, then you do everything you can to make sure it’s sent.”

  Looking across Baxter’s control panel, Hoop’s gaze rested on the screen that was still showing the Samson’s interior. Jones’s shoulder and head was the only thing moving, shivering in the bottom left corner. Beyond lay the motionless shadows of dead people. Sitting beside them, those small, indistinct aliens.

  “And I think you can turn that off,” Hoop said. “For now.”

  3

  RIPLEY

  PROGRESS REPORT:

  To: Weyland-Yutani Corporation, Science Division

  (Ref: code 937)

  Date (unspecified)

  Transmission (pending)

  Distress signal received. Sufficiently relevant to divert.

  Expected travel time to LV178:

  Current speed: 4,423 days.

  Full speed: 77 days.

  Fuel inventory: 92%

  Initiating thrust.

  She dreams of monsters.

  Sharp, black, chitinous, sleek, vicious, hiding in shadows and pouncing, seeding themselves in people she loved—her ex-husband, her sweet daughter—and then bursting forth in showers of far too much blood. They expand too quickly, as if rapidly brought in close from distances she can barely comprehend. And as they are drawn nearer through the voids of deep space they are growing, growing—the size of a ship, a moon, a planet, and then larger still.

  They will swallow the universe, and yet they will still leave her alive to witness its consumption.

  She dreams of monsters, stalking the corridors of her mind and wiping faces from memory before she can even remember their names.

  In between these dreams lies a simple void of shadows. But it offers no respite, because there is always a before to mourn, and an after to dread.

  When she starts to wake at last, Ripley’s nightmares scuttle back into the shadows and begin to fade away. But only partly. Even as light dawns across her dreams, the shadows remain.

  Waiting.

  * * *

  “Dallas,” Ripley said.

  “What?”

  She smacked her lips together, tried to cough past her dry throat, and realized that it couldn’t be. Dallas was dead. The alien had taken him.

  The face before her was thin, bearded, and troubled. Unknown.

  He stared at her.

  “Dallas, as in Texas?” he asked.

  “Texas?” Her thoughts were a mess. A stew of random memories, some of which she recognized, some she did not. She struggled to pull them together, desperate for a clue as to who and where she was. She felt disas
sociated from her body. Floating impressions trying to find a home, her physical self a cold, loose thing over which she had no control.

  Behind everything loomed a shadow... huge, insidious.

  “Great,” the man said. “Just fucking great.”

  “Huh?” Was she back on Nostromo? But then she remembered the blazing star that massive salvage ship had become. Rescue, then?

  Someone had found her. The shuttle had been retrieved and boarded. She was saved.

  She was Ellen Ripley, and soon she’d be reunited with—

  Something moved across her stomach. A flood of images assaulted her, so vivid compared to those she’d had since waking that they startled her into movement and kicked her senses alive—

  —Kane thrashing, his chest ripping and bursting open, that thing emerging—

  —and she reached to her own chest, ready to feel the stretching skin and the agony of ribs rupturing outward.

  “Hey, hey,” the man said, reaching for her.

  Don’t you understand what’s going to happen? She wanted to shout, but her voice was trapped, her mouth so dry that her tongue felt like a swollen, sand-coated slug. He held her shoulders and stroked her chin with both thumbs. It was such a gentle, intimate gesture that she paused in her writhing.

  “You’ve got a cat,” he said, smiling. The smile suited his face, yet it looked uncomfortable, as if he rarely used it.

  “Jonesy,” Ripley rasped painfully, and the cat crawled up from her stomach to her chest. It stood there, swaying slightly, then arched its back and clenched its claws. They scratched Ripley’s skin through her thin vest and she winced, but it was a good feeling. A pain that told her she was still alive.

  She reached for Jonesy, and as she stroked him a feeling of immense well-being came over her. She had risen up out of the shadows, and now that she was home—or near to home, if she had been recovered by a larger ship—then she would do her best to leave them behind. The terrible, mournful memories were already crowding in, but they were just that. Memories.

  The future was a wide-open place.

  “They found us,” she whispered to the cat as he growled softly in his throat. Her arms barely felt like her own, but she could feel fur against her fingertips and palms. Jonesy stretched against her. She wondered if cats could have nightmares.

  “We’re safe now...”

  She thought of Amanda, her daughter, and how pleased they would be to see each other. Had Ripley missed her eleventh birthday? She sincerely hoped not, because she hated breaking a promise.

  Sitting up slowly, the man helping her, she groaned as her nerves came to life. It was the worst case of pins and needles ever, far worse than she’d ever had following any previous hypersleep. Upright, she sat as motionless as possible as the circulation returned, her singing nerve endings finally falling silent.

  And then the man spoke.

  “Actually... you’re not really that safe, to be honest.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, we’re not a rescue ship. We thought you were the rescue ship when we first saw you on our scopes. Thought maybe you’d answered our distress signal. But...” He trailed off, and when Ripley looked up she saw two other figures behind him in the shuttle’s confined interior. They stood back against the wall, warily eyeing her and the stasis pod.

  “You’re kidding me,” one of them, a woman, said.

  “Can it, Sneddon.” The man held out his hand. “My name’s Hoop. Can you stand?”

  “Where am I?” Ripley asked.

  “Nowhere you want to be, that’s for sure,” the man behind Hoop said. He was very tall, thin, gaunt. “Go back to sleep, Miss. Sweet dreams.”

  “And that’s Powell,” Hoop said. “Don’t mind them. Let’s get you to med bay. Garcia can clean you up and check you over. Looks like you need feeding, too.”

  Ripley frowned, and her mouth instantly grew dry again. Her stomach rumbled. She felt dizzy. She grabbed the side of the stasis pod, and as she slowly slung her leg over the rim and tried to stand, Hoop held her arm. His hand seems incredibly warm, wonderfully real. But his words hung with her.

  Jonesy snuggled back down into the foot of the stasis pod, as if eager to find sleep again. Maybe cats really do know everything, she mused.

  “Where...?” Ripley asked again, but then the shuttle began to spin, and as she fainted the shadows closed in once more.

  * * *

  Garcia was a small, attractive woman who had a habit of laughing softly after everything she said. But Ripley didn’t think it was an endemic shyness. The ship’s medic was nervous.

  “You’re on the Marion,” she said. “Orbital mining freighter. We work for the Kelland Mining Company. They’re owned by Prospectia, who are a sub-division of San Rei Corporation, who are—like pretty much everything— owned by Weyland-Yutani.” She shrugged, chuckled. “Our ship’s built for harvesting large core deposits, really—the holds are huge and there are four extendable towing decks stacked back beneath the engine room. But we mine trimonite. Hardest substance known to man. It’s fifteen times harder than diamond, and extremely rare. We have little more than three tons of it on board.”

  “What’s the problem with the ship?” Ripley asked. She was still tired, and feeling sick, but she had her wits about her again. And she knew something here was very wrong.

  Garcia glanced aside, her laughter almost silent.

  “Couple of mechanical issues.” She reached for some more sterile gel and started rubbing it along Ripley’s forearm.

  “Are we heading home?”

  “Home?” Garcia asked.

  “The solar system. Earth.”

  The medic suddenly looked scared. She shook her head.

  “Hoop said to treat you, that’s all.” She started working on Ripley again, chattering away to cover her nervousness, talking inconsequentialities, and Ripley let her. If Garcia could somehow make her stop feeling so shitty, it was a small price to pay.

  Time to rest a little, perhaps, before she found out what the hell was going on.

  “Saline drip,” Garcia said, picking up a needle. “Old world medicine, but it’ll aid rehydration and have you feeling much more energetic in half an hour. Small scratch.” She slid the needle expertly into a vein on Ripley’s arm and taped it in place. “I’d recommend small amounts of liquid food to begin with—your stomach hasn’t dealt with food for so long, and its lining has become quite sensitive.”

  “So long?” Ripley asked.

  A pause, a small laugh.

  “Soup. Lachance makes a good soup, for such a cynical bastard. He’s in the galley now.” She went to a cupboard and brought back a white bag. “We have some clothes for you. I had to dispose of your underwear, I’m afraid.”

  Ripley lifted the sheet covering her and realized she was naked. On purpose? Maybe they didn’t want her just getting up and running around.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll dress now.”

  “Not yet,” Garcia said, dropping the bag and shoving it beneath the bed with her foot. “More tests. I’m still checking your liver and kidney functions. Your pulse seems fine but your lung capacity appears to be reduced, probably due to holding a sleep pattern for so...” She turned away again to a medicine table. “I have some pills and medicines for you to take.”

  “What for?”

  “To make you better.”

  “I’m not ill.” Ripley looked past Garcia and around the med bay. It was small, only six beds, and some of it looked basic. But there were also several hi-tech pieces of equipment that she didn’t recognize, including one sizeable medical pod in the center of the room bearing a familiar name badge on the side.

  A cold hand closed around Ripley’s heart.

  I was expendable, she thought. She felt a fierce pride, and an anger, at being the only survivor.

  “You didn’t say you were actually a Weyland-Yutani vessel.”

  “What?” She followed Ripley’s gaze. “Oh, no, we’re not. Not officiall
y. I told you, our company is Kelland Mining, an offshoot of San Rei. But Weyland-Yutani makes a lot of equipment used in deep space exploration. Difficult to find a ship without something of theirs on it. And to be honest, their med pods are just about the best I’ve ever seen. They can do amazing stuff, we once had a miner with—”

  “They’re a big company?”

  “The biggest,” Garcia said. “They practically own space. The parent company owns countless others, and San Rei was bought up by them... don’t know, maybe twelve years ago? I was working at Kelland’s Io headquarters then, hadn’t gone out on any flights. It didn’t change much, but it did open our eyes to all the diverse missions that were being launched.” She chattered on as she prepared medicines, counted out pills, and Ripley let her.

  “They’re investing in terraforming companies now, you know? They set up massive atmosphere processing plants on suitable planets, do something to the air—clean it, treat it, I don’t know, I’m a medic—and it takes decades. Then there’s materials acquisition, prospecting, mining. I’ve heard they’ve built massive ships, miles long, that catch and tow small asteroids. Loads of research stations, too. Medical, scientific, military. Weyland-Yutani have their fingers in lots of pies.”

  Maybe times haven’t changed so much, Ripley thought, and it was the measure of “times” that was bothering her. She sat up and slipped one leg out of bed, pushing Garcia aside.

  “I feel fine,” she insisted. The sheet dropped from her and Garcia looked away, embarrassed. Ripley used the advantage and stood, reaching down for the bag of clothes.

  “Oh...” A voice said. She looked up. Hoop stood at the entrance to the medical bay, staring at her nakedness for just a few seconds too long before looking away. “Shit, sorry, I thought you were—”

  “Safe in bed where you want me?” Ripley said. “Asking no questions?”

  “Please,” Hoop said without turning. He didn’t elaborate, but Ripley sat back down. In truth, she did so before she fell down, because she still felt like crap. She propped up the pillow and tucked the sheet beneath her arms.

  “You’re safe to look now,” she said.

  Hoop smiled and came to sit on the foot of her bed.