by Tim Lebbon
“How are you feeling?”
“Tell me what’s going on, and I’ll decide.”
Hoop glanced at Garcia, who nodded.
“Yeah, she’s fine,” the medic acknowledged.
“See?” Ripley said. Fine, apart from the sick feeling of dread in her stomach.
“Okay,” Hoop said. “So, here it is. You’ve hardly been rescued. We spotted your shuttle on our scanners just over fifteen hours ago. You were on a controlled approach.”
“Controlled by whom?”
Hoop shrugged.
“You drifted in, circled the Marion once, then docked at the one docking arm we have left.” Something passed across his face then.
That’s something else to ask about, Ripley thought, if he doesn’t volunteer it. The docking arm.
“The shuttle has proximity protocols,” she said.
“Auto docking?”
“If it’s programed to do so.”
“Okay, well, that’s academic now. Our situation— and now yours—is... pretty grim.” He paused, as if to gather his thoughts. “We suffered a collision eleven weeks ago. Lost a lot of our people. It’s knocked us out of geostationary orbit, and we’re now in a decaying pattern. We figure less than fifteen days before we start burning up in the atmosphere.”
“Atmosphere of what?”
“LV178. A rock.”
“The planet you’re mining for trimonite,” Ripley said, and she was amused at the look Hoop threw Garcia. “It’s okay, she didn’t tell me anything else. Like, anything important.”
Hoop held out his hands.
“That’s it. Our antenna array was damaged, so we couldn’t send any long-distance distress signals. But after the collision we sent a call for help on a high frequency transmitter, and it’s still being transmitted on a loop. Hoping it would be picked up by someone within rescue distance.” He frowned. “You didn’t hear it?”
“Sorry,” she replied. “I was taking a nap.”
“Of course.” Hoop looked away, stroking his hands together. Two other people entered med bay, both of them ragged, unkempt. She recognized Kasyanov, the dark-skinned ship’s doctor who had given her the initial examination. But the man she didn’t know. Heavily built, a sad, saggy face—his name tag said Baxter. He sat on another bed and stared at her.
“Hi,” she said. He only nodded.
“So what happened to you?” Hoop asked.
Ripley closed her eyes and a rush of memories flooded in—the planet, Kane, the alien’s birth, its rapid growth, and then the terror and loss on the Nostromo before her escape in the shuttle. That final confrontation with the devil. The memories shocked her with their violence, their immediacy. It was as if the past was more real than the present.
“I was on a towing vessel,” she said. “Crew died in an accident, the ship’s core went into meltdown. I’m the only one who got away.”
“Nostromo,” Hoop said.
“How do you know that?”
“I accessed the shuttle’s computer. I remember reading about your ship, actually, when I was a kid. It’s gone down in the ‘lost without trace’ files.”
Ripley blinked.
“How long was I out there?” But she already knew the answer was going to be difficult. She’d seen that in Garcia’s reaction, and saw it again now in Hoop.
“Thirty-seven years.”
Ripley looked down at her hands, the needles in her forearms.
I haven’t aged a day, she thought. And then she pictured Amanda, her sweet daughter who’d hated the idea that she was going away, even for seventeen months. It’ll make things so easy for us when I get back, Ripley had told her, hugging her tight. Here, look. She’d pointed at Amanda’s computer screen and scrolled through a calendar there. Your eleventh birthday. I’ll be back for that, and I’ll buy you the best present ever.
“Going to tell her about Samson?” Baxter said.
Ripley looked around the room.
“Who’s Samson?”
No one replied.
Baxter shrugged and walked across to her bed, laying a tablet computer on the sheet.
“Fine,” he said. “Easier to show her, anyway.” He tapped an icon. “The Samson is locked into our other surviving docking arm. Has been for seventy-seven days. It’s sealed. These things are inside, and they’re also the reason we’re fucked.”
He swiped the screen.
At that moment, Ripley doubted everything. The fact that she was awake. Her being there, the feel of sheets against her skin, and the sharp prick of needles in her arms. She doubted the idea that she had survived at all, and hoped that this was simply her dying nightmare.
“Oh, no,” she breathed, and the atmosphere in the room changed instantly.
She started to shake. When she blinked her dreams were close again, the shadowy monsters the size of the stars. So was it just a dream? she wondered. A nightmare? She looked around at these people she did not know, and as panic bit in she wondered where they could have come from.
“No,” she said, her dry throat burning. “Not here!”
Kasyanov shouted something, Garcia held her down, and another sharp pain bit into the back of her hand.
But even as everything faded away, there was no peace to be found.
* * *
“She knew what they were,” Hoop said.
They were back on the bridge. Kasyanov and Garcia had remained in med bay to keep Ripley under observation, with orders to call him back down the moment she stirred. He wanted to be there for her. Such an ordeal she’d suffered, and now she’d woken into something worse.
Besides that, she might be able to help.
“Maybe she’ll know how to kill them,” Baxter said.
“Maybe,” Hoop said. “Maybe not. At the very least, she recognized them from that.” He nodded at the monitor. It held the final image they’d gleaned from the Samson’s internal camera. Then they’d lost contact, thirty days ago.
Jones had been long-dead by then. The things had dragged him back into the passenger hold and killed him. They’d grown into dark, shadowy shapes that none of them could quite make out. The size of a person, maybe even larger, the four shapes remained all but motionless. It made them even more difficult to see on the badly lit image.
Baxter scrolled back through the views of Bay Three— images they’d all come to know so well. The trio of cameras Welford and Powell had set up showed the same as ever—no movement, no sign of disturbance. The doors remained locked and solid. Microphones picked up no noise. They’d lost view of the inside of Samson, but at least they could still keep watch.
And if those things did smash through the doors, and burst out of the docking bay? They had a plan. But none of them had much faith in it.
“I’ll go and see how Powell and Welford are getting on,” Hoop said. “Shout if there’s anything from med bay.”
“Why do you think she came here?” Baxter said.
“I’m not sure she knows.” Hoop picked up the plasma torch he’d taken to carrying, slung it over his shoulder, and left the bridge.
The torch was a small, handheld version, used in the mines for melting and hardening sand deposits. The biggest ones they had down there ran on rails, and were used for forming the solid walls of new mine shafts— blast the sand, melt it, and it hardened again into ten-inch-thick slabs. The smaller torches could be wielded by a miner to fix breaches.
Or, Hoop thought, to drive away unwanted guests.
He didn’t know if it would work, and he’d seen the effects when one had been discharged in the Delilah. But in the larger confines of Marion, if one of those things came at him, he’d be ready.
Sneddon was in the science lab. She spent a lot of time in there now, and sometimes when Hoop paid her a visit he felt as if he was intruding. She’d always been a quiet woman, and quietly attractive, and Hoop had often enjoyed talking to her about the scientific aspects of their work. She’d once worked for Weyland-Yutani on one of their research b
ases orbiting Proxima Centauri. Though she didn’t work directly for them any more, the company still funded science officers on many ships, and for any sub-divisional company who wanted them. The funding was very generous, and it would often go a large way toward bankrolling a mission.
He liked Sneddon. He liked her dedication to her work, and her apparent love of it. It’s an endless, wonderful playground out there, she’d said once when he asked her what she hoped to find. Anything is possible.
Now Sneddon’s childlike imagination had taken a hit.
At the same time, Hoop’s childhood dreams had found reality.
When he reached the lab, Sneddon was sitting on a stool at the large central island. There were a couple of tablet computers in front of her, and a steaming mug of coffee. She held her head in her hands, elbows resting on the counter top.
“Hey,” Hoop said.
She looked up, startled.
“Oh. Didn’t hear you.”
“Everything cool?”
Sneddon smiled softly. “Despite the fact that we’re slowly spiraling to our deaths, set to crash on a lifeless sand-hell of a planet? Yes, everything’s cool.”
He smiled wryly.
“So what do you think about Ripley?”
“It’s obvious she’s seen these things before,” Sneddon replied, a frown wrinkling her forehead. “Where, how, when, why, I haven’t got the faintest clue. But I’d like to talk to her.”
“If you think it’ll help.”
“Help?” Sneddon asked. She looked confused.
“You know what I mean,” Hoop said. He laid the plasma torch gently on the bench.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about that,” she said, smiling. “I know you’re in charge, and I’m pretty sure I know what you’ve been thinking these past few days.”
“Do you, now?” Hoop asked, amused. He liked that she smiled. There were far too few smiles nowadays.
“Escape pods,” Sneddon said. “Maybe try to regulate their nav computers, land within walking distance of each other and the mine.”
Hoop drummed his fingers on the bench.
“Reach there together, there’ll be enough food and supplies down there for a couple of years.”
“And those things, too.”
“Forewarned is forearmed,” Hoop said.
“With that?” Sneddon said, nudging the plasma torch. Her bitter laugh wiped the smile from her face.
“There might not be any more things down there at all. They might have all come up on the Delilah.”
“Or there might be a dozen, or more.” Sneddon stood and started pacing. “Think about it. They were hatching from the miners. We saw that. Just... breaking out of them. Implanted by those things attached to their faces, perhaps. I don’t know. But if that is the case, we have to assume that anyone left behind was infected.”
“Sixteen on the Delilah. Six on the Samson.”
Sneddon nodded.
“So eighteen left in the mine,” Hoop said.
“I’d rather go down on the Marion,” Sneddon said, “if it came to that. But now it doesn’t have to.”
“You know something I don’t?”
“No, but maybe I’m thinking about things in a different way.”
Hoop frowned, held out his hands.
“And?”
“Her shuttle. It’s a deep space shuttle! Used for short-distance transfers of personnel, or as a long-term lifeboat.”
“And one stasis pod for nine of us.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Sneddon said. “Look.” She slid one of the tablets across to Hoop. At first he didn’t really understand what he was seeing. It was an old, old image of a lifeboat. Lost at sea back on Earth, crammed with survivors, a sail rigged from shirts and broken oars, wretched people hanging over the side, or eating fish, or squeezing drinking water from hastily rigged moisture catchers.
“Today, I’m stupid,” Hoop said. “In charge, yes. But stupid. So just tell me.”
“One stasis pod between the nine of us,” Sneddon said. “But we pack the shuttle with as many supplies as we can. Program a course toward Earth, or at the very least the outer rim. Fire the engines until the fuel’s out and we’re traveling as fast as we can. A good proportion of light speed. Then... take turns in the stasis pod.”
“Take turns?” he said. “She’s been drifting out there for thirty-seven years!”
“Yeah, but something’s very wrong with that. I haven’t checked yet, but the shuttle computer must have malfunctioned.”
“There was no indication of that when I checked its log.”
“You didn’t go deep enough, Hoop. The point is, we can survive like that. Six months at a time, one of us in stasis, eight others... surviving.”
“Six months in a tightly confined space? That shuttle’s designed for five people, max, for short trips. Eight of us? We’ll end up killing each other.” He shook his head. “And how long do you figure it’ll take?”
Sneddon raised an eyebrow.
“Well... years.”
“Years?”
“Maybe three until we reach the outer rim, and then—”
“It’s impossible!” he said.
Sneddon tapped the tablet’s screen again, and Hoop looked. She’d certainly done her homework. Examples manifested and faded on the screen—lifeboats at sea, strandings on damaged orbitals, miraculous survivals dotting the history of space disasters. None of the timescales were quite what Sneddon was describing, but each story testified to the will of desperate people to survive, whatever the situation.
However hopeless.
“We’d need to check the shuttle’s systems,” he said. “Fuel cell, life support.”
“And you’re chief engineer, aren’t you?”
Hoop laughed. “You’re serious about this.”
“Yes.”
He stared at her for a while, trying to deny the shred of hope she’d planted in him. He couldn’t afford to grab hold of it.
“Rescue isn’t coming, Hoop,” she said. “Not in time.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
“So you’ll—”
“Hoop!” Kasyanov’s voice cut in over the intercom. “Ripley’s stirring. I could sedate her again, but I really don’t want to pump her full of any more drugs.”
Hoop leapt to the wall and hit the intercom button.
“No, don’t. She’s slept enough. I’ll be right down.” He smiled at Sneddon, and then nodded. “I’ll speak to Ripley, get her access codes.”
As he left the science lab and headed for med bay, the ship’s corridors seemed lighter than they had in a long time.
4
937
Not only was she still light years from home, but she’d docked with a damaged ship in a decaying orbit around a hellhole of a planet, alongside a dropship full of the monsters that haunted her nightmares.
Ripley might have laughed at the irony.
She’d successfully shaken the idea that it was a dream, or a nightmare—it had taken time, and convincing herself hadn’t been easy—but the explanation still eluded her.
How was this all possible?
Perhaps the answers were on her shuttle.
“Really, I’m ready to walk,” she said. Kasyanov—a tall, fit woman who obviously looked after herself—shot her a disapproving look, but Ripley could see that the doctor held a grudging respect for her patient’s stubbornness.
“You’ve barely walked for thirty-seven years,” Kasyanov protested.
“Thanks for reminding me. But as far as my body’s concerned, it was yesterday.” She’d already stood from her bed and dressed while Kasyanov and Garcia were elsewhere, determined to prove herself to them. And she’d been pleased at how good she actually felt. The sedative was still wearing off, but beneath that she was starting to feel her old self again. Whatever Garcia had done for her— the saline drip, the other drugs—was working.
“Patients,” Kasyanov said, rolling her eyes.
�
�Yeah, who’d be one, right?” Ripley stood from the bed, and as she was tying the boots that had been given to her, Hoop breezed into the bay.
“Oh, you’re dressed.” He feigned disappointment, then said, “You’re looking good!”
Ripley looked up and raised an eyebrow. “I’m twice your age.”
“I’ve had a few long trips myself, you know,” he replied without missing a beat. “Maybe one day we can have a drink, compare sleeps?” He smiled as he spoke, but maybe he was a little bit serious, too.
Ripley laughed despite herself. Then she remembered. The image was never far away, but for a few seconds here and there she could forget. A burst of laughter, a smile, a friendly comment would hide the memory beneath the mundane.
“I’d like to take a look at the Narcissus,” Hoop said.
“You and me both.”
“You haven’t spent long enough in it already?”
Ripley stood and stretched. She was tall, lithe, and she enjoyed the feel of her muscles finding their flexibility again. The aches and pains meant she was awake and mobile.
“I’ve got some questions for the computer,” she said. “Like why the hell it brought me to this shit hole.”
“Thanks,” Hoop said.
“You’re welcome.”
Ripley saw the doctor and medic exchange glances, but couldn’t quite read them. She hadn’t yet worked out the dynamic there. Kasyanov, as the doctor, was clearly in charge of med bay. But she also appeared nervous, scared, and Garcia seemed to be the one most at ease.
“Come on,” Hoop said. “I’ll walk you to the docking bay.”
They left med bay together, and Hoop remained silent. Waiting for my questions, Ripley thought. She had so many. But she was afraid that once she started asking, none of the answers could satisfy, and nothing he said would be good.
“You say you don’t know why you docked with us?” Hoop asked finally.
“I was asleep when the shuttle docked, you know that.” Something troubled Ripley, nudging at her consciousness like a memory trying to nose its way in. A suspicion. An explanation. But her mind still hadn’t completely recovered from hypersleep, and she didn’t think she’d like what it had to say. “What’s that?” she asked, nodding at the heavy object draped over Hoop’s shoulder. It looked like a stumpy, box-shaped gun.