by Tim Lebbon
It’s mine! Ripley shouts, kneeling and protecting Amanda with her own body. Whatever’s inside her is mine!
The shadows stalk closer. Nothing is beautiful anymore.
* * *
“Ripley!” Hoop shouted, nudging her. “Grab on to something!”
She shook her head. The vision had happened in an instant. And then it was gone, leaving only a haunting sensation.
The elevator plunged, screeching against its control framework, throwing sparks that were visible through the cage walls, vibrating violently, shaking her vision so much that everyone and everything around her was a blur.
She heard the thud of weapons hitting the floor and dropped her own, staggering back until she was braced against the wall. But there was nothing to hold onto. And even if there had been, it would have made no difference.
Her stomach seemed to be rising and rolling, and she swallowed down the sudden urge to vomit.
Someone else puked.
Hoop hung onto the long handle set into the wall beside the door, one hand curled through it and the other working at the controls.
“What the hell—?” Baxter shouted.
“I’ve got it!” Hoop cut in. But it was clear to Ripley that he didn’t have it. She edged across to him, afraid that at any moment she and the others would actually lift from the floor and start to float.
We can’t be going that fast, she thought. We’d have struck bottom by now! Five thousand feet, Hoop had said. She turned the figures over, trying to calculate how long they might have at freefall, but—
“There are buffers,” Hoop shouted. “Each level. We’ve passed the first four already, barely felt them. Approaching five...”
Thud!
A heavy vibration passed through the lift, thumping Ripley in the chest.
“We’re not slowing!” she shouted.
“We will!” he responded. “Dampers were fitted over the bottom two levels, in case of—”
“This?”
He looked at her. Beside him she could see a flickering set of figures on the control panel. Their depth approached 2,500 feet, the numbers flipping too fast for her to see.
“It’s one way to test them,” he said.
Ripley felt a flood of emotion. They were helpless, and that was a sensation she hated. In space, there were so many variables that presented countless levels of danger, but usually they were countered by some mechanical, electrical, or psychological means.
Even with that thing stalking them on the Nostromo they had gone on the offensive, hunting it, seeking to drive it toward the airlock. And after Dallas was gone and Ash was revealed for what he was... even then they had been acting in their own best interests.
Here, now, she could only stand and wait to die.
They flashed past levels 6 and 7, and each time the impact of safety buffers seemed harder. Was their descent slowing? Ripley wasn’t sure. Sparks flew all around the cage’s outsides, metal whined and screeched, and at the speed they were going now, she figured they’d know nothing about reaching level 9.
She contemplated that final moment, the instant when the elevator struck, crumpled, and they were all smacked into the solid floor, mashed together... and she wondered if she’d feel anything at all.
The brief waking nightmare seemed somehow worse.
“We’re slowing!” Hoop said. They thudded past the buffer on level 8, and then a heavy grinding sound commenced.
Ripley and the others were all flung to the floor. A rhythmic clanging began, resounding explosions from all around that vibrated through the cage’s structure. Bolts, screws and shreds of metal showered around her, and Ripley expected them to burst apart at any moment.
The noise became almost unbearable, pulsing into her ears, her torso, and the vibrations threatened to shake her apart bone-by-bone. Lying flat on the floor, she managed to turn her head toward Hoop. He was sitting propped in the far corner, head tilted to one side so he could still look at the control panel.
He glanced across, saw her looking.
“Dampers working,” he shouted.
Then they struck bottom. Ripley’s breath was knocked out of her as she was punched into the elevator’s floor. Something heavy landed on her leg. A scream was cut off, but someone else grunted and started to moan.
The lift mechanism was smoking, filling the air with an acrid haze. Lights flickered off and then came back on again, buzzing and settling into an even glow. The sudden silence was more shocking than the noise and violence had been.
Ripley pushed herself up onto hands and knees, breathing hard and waiting for the white-hot pain of cracked ribs or broken limbs to sing in. But apart from an array of bruises, a bloodied nose, and a sense of disbelief that they had somehow survived, she appeared to be fine.
“Are we still falling?” Sneddon asked. “My guts tell me we are.”
“Nice landing,” Lachance said, nodding at Hoop. “Make a pilot out of you yet.” Hoop smiled back.
“I think...” Baxter said. He stood, then howled, slipping sideways and falling again. Kasyanov caught him. “Ankle,” he said. “Ankle!” The doctor started examining him.
“Anyone else hurt?” Hoop asked.
“Only my pride,” Lachance said. His suit was speckled with vomit, and he brushed at it with one gloved hand.
“Best pilot in the galaxy, my ass,” Ripley said, pleased to see the Frenchman smile.
“We okay?” Sneddon asked. “We’re not just hanging here waiting, to fall the rest of the way, are we? The way our luck’s been going, you know.”
“No, we’re down,” Hoop said. “Look.” He nodded at the cage doors, then pulled a small, narrow flashlight from his tool belt. It threw out a surprisingly bright beam. He aimed it past the bent bars of the deformed cage, revealing the smoother metal of more solid doors.
“Level 9?” Ripley asked.
Hoop nodded.
“And the elevator’s fucked,” Baxter said. “That’s just fucking great.” He winced as Kasyanov probed around his foot and lower leg, then groaned when she looked up.
“Broken ankle,” she said.
“No shit,” Baxter replied.
“Can you splint it?” Hoop asked. “He’s got to be able to walk.”
“I can walk!” Baxter said, a little desperately.
“We can help you,” Ripley said, aiming a warning stare at Hoop. “There are enough of us. Don’t panic.”
“Who’s panicking?” Baxter said, looking desperate, eyes wide with pain and terror.
“We won’t leave you,” Ripley said, and he seemed to take comfort from that.
“Everyone else?” Hoop asked. Sneddon nodded, Lachance raised a hand in a casual wave. “Ripley?”
“I’m fine, Hoop,” she said, trying not to sound impatient. They were down, battered and bruised, but they couldn’t afford to hang around. “So what now?”
“Now we have two choices,” Hoop said, glancing at Baxter again. “One, we start climbing.”
“How many stairs?” Kasyanov asked.
“We’ve struck bottom at level 9. Seven thousand steps to—”
“Seven-fucking-thousand?” Sneddon spat. Baxter remained silent, but he looked down at the floor close to his wounded foot and ankle. All his weight was on the other foot.
“Choice two,” Hoop continued, “we make our way across to the other elevator.”
Silence. Everyone looked around, waiting for someone else to speak.
“And whatever they found was down here, where they were working the new seam,” Baxter said. “On level 9.”
“There’s no choice,” Kasyanov said. “How far is the other elevator shaft?”
“In a straight line, a little over five hundred yards,” Hoop said. “But none of the tunnels are straight.”
“And we have no idea what happened down here?” Ripley asked.
No one answered. They all looked to Hoop. He shrugged.
“All they said is that they found something horrible.
And we already know what that was.”
“No we don’t!” Kasyanov said. “There could be hundreds!”
“I don’t think so.” They looked to Sneddon, who was looking down at the spray gun she’d picked up once again. “They hatch from people, right? We’ve seen that. So by my reckoning—”
“Eighteen,” Ripley said. “Maybe less.”
“Eighteen of them?” Kasyanov asked. “Oh, well, that’s easy, then!”
“We’re better prepared now,” Ripley said. “And besides, what’s the alternative? Really?”
“There is none,” Hoop said. “We make it for the other elevator, up to level 4 for the cell, then back to the surface.”
“But what about—” Kasyanov began, but Hoop cut her off.
“Whatever we find on the way, we handle it,” he said. “Let’s say positive. Let’s stay cool, and calm, and keep our eyes open.”
“And hope the lights are still working,” Lachance said.
As they picked up their weapons, and Kasyanov did her best to splint Baxter’s ankle with supplies from her med kit, Ripley mulled over what Lachance had said. Down here, in the dark. Feeling their way along with the aid of weak flashlights, a billion tons of planet above them.
No, it didn’t bear thinking about.
When she blinked, she saw Amanda in a floral dress thrashing on the sweet, green grass with one of those monsters attached to her face.
“I’ll see you again,” she whispered. Hoop heard, glanced at her, but said nothing. Perhaps they were all finding some way to pray.
11
MINE
As she exited the remains of the elevator—wondering whether they were incredibly lucky to have survived, or incredibly unlucky for it to have happened in the first place—Ripley realized with a jolt that this was the only planet other than Earth on which she had ever set foot. The voyage aboard the Nostromo had been her first, coming soon after she’d been licensed for space flight, and even after landing on LV426 she’d never actually left the ship.
She had always assumed a moment like this would have brought a moment of introspection. A rush of wonder, a glow of joy. A deep grounding of herself and her place in the universe. Sometimes, after having traveled so far, she’d feared that she would have no real stories to tell.
But now she only felt terror. The rock beneath her feet felt just like rock, the air she breathed was gritty with dust, stale and unpleasant. There was no epiphany. The beasts had ruined everything for her—any chance of joy, any scrap of innocent wonder—and quickly the fear was replaced with rage.
Outside the lift was a wide-open area, propped at frequent intervals with metal columns. Along one side stood a line of lockers, most doors hanging open. There were also storage boxes stacked against a wall, marked with symbols she didn’t understand. Most of them were empty, lids leaning against their sides. Trimonite boxes waiting to be filled, perhaps. Ripley found them sad, because they would never be used.
Lighting was supplied by several strings of bare bulbs, all of them still illuminated. The cables were neatly clipped to the rough rock ceiling.
At first, looking around, Ripley caught her breath, because she thought the walls were lined with that strange, organic, extruded compound they’d found in the ship. But when she moved closer she saw that it was rock that had been melted and resolidified, forming a solid barrier against the loose material that might lie behind it. There were still props and buttresses lining the walls and ceiling, but the bulk of the strength lay in the altered rock. They’d used the bigger, tracked plasma torches for that, she supposed. Their heat must have been incredible.
“Everyone good?” Hoop asked, breaking the silence. He was standing close to a set of plastic curtains that led into a tunnel beyond.
No one spoke. Hoop took that as confirmation that, yes, they were all good, and he pushed the curtains aside.
Ripley quickly followed. Out of all of them, Hoop felt the safest. The strongest. She wasn’t even sure why she believed that. But she went with her instincts and decided to stay close to the engineer. If they ended up in a fight, she wanted to fight beside him.
The corridor beyond the elevator compound was narrower and more functional. The lights continued along the ceiling. The walls were slick and held strange, almost organic flow patterns where they’d been plasma-torched. Shallow ditches were cut into the floor at the base of each wall, and water so dark it was black glinted there. It was motionless, stagnant, inky. Ripley wondered what it contained.
Hoop waved them on.
Baxter hobbled with one arm over Kasyanov’s shoulder. He grunted, gasped, and though he couldn’t avoid the pain, Ripley wished he wasn’t making so much noise. Every sound he made was amplified, echoing along the rock-lined tunnels much louder than their careful footfalls.
They’ll know we’re here, she thought. They probably know anyway. If anything’s going to happen, it’s going to happen, and being cautious won’t prevent it.
They reached a junction. Hoop paused only for a moment, then took the left fork. He moved quickly and carefully, holding his flashlight in one hand, the spray gun in the other. The additional light helped illuminate contours and trip hazards on the ground.
It wasn’t far along this tunnel that they came across the first sign of the aliens.
“What the hell is that?” Baxter asked. He sounded tired, and on the verge of panic. Maybe he thought that at some point they’d be forced to leave him behind after all.
“Something from the mine?” Lachance suggested. “Mineral deposit left by water?”
But Ripley already knew that wasn’t the case.
It started gradually. A smear on the wall, a spread of material on the floor. But ten yards from them the alien material lined all surfaces of the tunnel in thick layers, strung like natural arches beneath the ceiling and lying across the floor in complex, swirling patterns.
A gentle mist floated on the air. Or perhaps it was steam. Ripley tugged off a glove and waved her hand before her, feeling the moisture but finding it hard discerning whether it was hot or cold. Another contradiction, perhaps. These strange structures were impressive, and even vaguely beautiful in the same way a spider’s web was beautiful. But the things that had made this were the opposite.
“No,” Sneddon said. “It’s them. We saw something like this on the Samson.”
“Yeah, but...” Lachance said.
“That was a much smaller scale,” Ripley said. “Not like this.” She was breathing fast and shallow because she could smell them here, a faintly citrus stench that clung to the back of her throat and danced on her tongue.
“I don’t like this,” Baxter whispered.
“Me neither,” Lachance said. “I want my mommy. I want to go home.”
The tunnel narrowed ahead of them where the substance bulged out from the walls, up from the floor, down from the ceiling. Here and there it formed stalactites and stalagmites, some of them thin and delicate, others thicker and looking more solid. There were hints of light deep within the alien structure, but only here and there. The ceiling lights still worked, but were mostly covered up.
Hoop stepped a little closer and shone his flashlight inside.
Ripley wanted to grab him and pull him back. But she couldn’t help looking.
The light didn’t penetrate very far. The moisture in the air was revealed more fully by the flashlight beam, skeins of light and dark shifting and waving with a gentle breeze. Whether that breeze was caused by their presence, their breathing, or that of another, Ripley didn’t want to find out.
“I’m not going in there,” Sneddon said.
“Yeah,” Kasyanov said. “I’m with you on that one.”
“I’m not sure we’d get through anyway,” Hoop said. “And even if we could, it’d slow us down.”
“It’s like a nest,” Ripley said. “A giant wasp nest.”
“Is there another way to the elevator shaft?” Baxter asked.
“This is the direc
t route,” Hoop said. “The spine of this level. But all the mine sections have emergency exits at various points. We’ll go back, take the other fork, then cut back toward the elevator as soon as we find an exit.”
Ripley didn’t say what she knew they were all thinking. What if all the tunnels are like this? But she caught Baxter’s eye, and the truth passed between them—that he could never climb so many stairs. Maybe none of them could.
Not quickly enough.
They headed back, turned into the other fork of the corridor, then dropped down a series of large steps carved into the floor. Water flowed more freely along the gutters here, tinkling away at various points into hidden depths. Walls ran with it. It provided a background noise that was welcoming at first, but quickly became troubling. Behind the sound of flowing water, anything could approach them.
“I think this is the most recent mine working,” Hoop said. “They’ve been at this particular vein for two hundred days, maybe more.”
“So this is where they found them,” Sneddon said. “Somewhere along here.”
“Maybe,” Hoop said. “We don’t know the details. But we don’t have much choice.” He moved on, and the others followed.
There were several side corridors, smaller with lower ceilings, and as Hoop passed them by, Ripley guessed they were also mine workings. She had no idea how a mine functioned, but she’d been told that the quantities of trimonite found here were small compared to most ore mines. This wasn’t mining on an industrialized scale, but rather prospecting for hidden quantities of an almost priceless material. Digging through a million tons of rock to find half a ton of product.
She hoped that Hoop would know an emergency exit when he saw it.
Behind her, someone sneezed, uttering a quiet, “Oh!” afterward. Amanda had used to sneeze like that—a gentle sound, followed by an expression almost of surprise.
* * *
Amanda is eleven years old. Ripley knows because her daughter wears an oversized badge on her denim shirt, all purple and pink, hearts and flowers. I bought her that, she thinks, and although she can remember accessing the site, ordering the card and badge and the presents she knew Amanda wanted for her birthday—remembers the small smile of satisfaction when she confirmed “place order,” knowing that everything her daughter wanted was on the way—there is also a sense of dislocation, and the knowledge that this never happened.