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11
LORENZ SYSTECH SPIRE, SEVASTOPOL STATION
DECEMBER 2137
Amanda didn’t dare close her eyes. Every time she did, she was assaulted by a cascade of images. The body in the cage, lying in a pool of his own blood. Axel’s bullet pulping the head of his assailant. Or the large tail bursting through Axel’s chest.
She should have just stayed on Luna. There she had work, she had Zula, she had food, she had light, and—best of all—nobody died. Instead, she’d left all that behind for a fool’s mission and a nightmare that likely would lead to her death.
Three dead bodies in the course of half an hour. Prior to this, the only other dead bodies she’d ever seen had been in funeral homes.
Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out the water bottle she’d gotten from Axel’s little bolthole and drank down the rest of it.
Death had always been a threat, especially once she started working off-Earth, but while she knew of people who had died, she’d never been present for any of it.
The transit car lurched to a halt.
“Station serving Seegson Communication Technologies, Tech Support Services, and Gemini Exoplanet Solutions.”
As soon as the door slid open Amanda jogged out into the transit hub. This one was more wide-open than the one in the other spire, yet just as dark and dank and empty and miserable as the rest of the fucking station. It was quiet, too—so much so that it put her nerves on end. Walking through the receiving area, she saw more graffiti.
Be good!
Apollo is Watching!
Another example, done in huge letters on the floor, made her smile grimly.
SEEGSON
NO FUTURE
ALONE
It was a riff on the company’s slogan—“Tomorrow, together”—and it showed how low morale had gotten.
On the walls, few of the advertising screens were working—though there was one that flickered on a frozen image of the Working Joe androids. They did the grunt work for APOLLO, the artificial intelligence that was supposed to be running Sevastopol. Aside from the graffiti, however, Amanda had seen no evidence that APOLLO was even functioning.
A map console was flickering on and off. Amanda walked up to it and smacked it on the side, at which point the image stabilized into a layout of the spire. She quickly determined there was a flight of stairs at the far end of the hub that would take her right to the SysTech lobby.
Let’s just hope the comms are there, and working better than the rest of this scrapheap.
Jogging up the stairs, she found herself in a reception area. Several screens were active, but filled with static. Here, for the first time, Amanda saw personal effects: coffee mugs, pictures, broken NohtPads, and more. Further in, she found a luggage trolley that had been knocked over. Half of the cases had been opened, and someone had rifled through the contents. Someone had been scavenging, much like Axel had.
Axel… Again she saw his death in her mind’s eye, heard the squelching sound of his organs being pulped by the tail, felt his hot blood spraying onto her face. Shaking her head to banish the sensory memories of his sudden, violent end, Amanda continued to move forward, trying to find some indication of the comms center.
“What the hell is wrong with this thing?”
The voice came from ahead. Peering through the dim lobby, she could make out a female figure who was kicking a bulkhead.
“Work, damn you!”
As Amanda passed by a kiosk it lit up, activated by a motion sensor.
“Welcome! Please register here!” The screen showed the outline of a hand and the appropriate instructions.
PLACE YOUR RIGHT HAND
WHERE INDICATED
As Amanda complied, the kiosk’s recorded voice got the woman’s attention, and she turned, raising a pistol.
“Shit!” Amanda cried as she dove behind a couch.
“Stay back!” the woman yelled as she pulled the trigger twice. There was the whiz of the bullets as they flew over her head. “Guys, over here! Someone’s here!”
The woman’s voice seemed to fade as she spoke, and Amanda risked looking up. Sure enough, the woman was running away from her. Leaving the registration screen to complete its task without her, she gripped the K92 in her left hand, hoping she could wield it menacingly enough to make an armed opponent pause. Then she went to the bulkhead where the woman had stood.
There was a tiny table there, with some tools, one of which was a Halfin AW15, used to access electronic signals. While they were created for diagnostic use, most people used them for hacking.
The bulkhead itself, though, was of more interest. It was an elevator, and according to the status board above the doors, it went to several different locations—including the Seegson Communications Center, three flights up. It was also offline, and the woman who’d shot at her must have been trying to hack it.
She tried to turn the Halfin on, but the indicator light didn’t work. Flipping it over, she popped the panel on the back to reveal the AW15’s internal circuitry, which she quickly realized included a fried energy cell.
No wonder it wasn’t working.
Before she could consider where to find a new cell, though, she heard the familiar voice of the woman who’d shot at her.
“She’s up here!”
Shoving the Halfin into one of her pockets, she ran toward a staircase that led downward into darkness. It wasn’t the ideal place to go, but if she went back the way she had come it would give the woman a clear shot at her.
Moving as quietly as she could, she padded down the stairs. If she moved too quickly they’d hear her footfalls, especially given how fucking quiet it was here. She heard the woman and another person.
“She was right here!”
“Maybe she was scavenging, like us.”
“I think she went downstairs. C’mon.”
“No way I’m going down there.”
“She’s got my hack tool!”
“You didn’t know how to work the stupid thing, anyhow. We’ll find another way up—we been here too long as it is.”
The further Amanda moved down the stairs, the harder it was to understand what they were saying. This was comforting, because it meant they weren’t following.
Good, she thought, and I’m better off with the AW15 anyhow. You jerks couldn’t even tell what’s wrong with it, much less work out how to fix it.
It always annoyed her when people tried to use things they didn’t understand. She knew “professionals,” allegedly certified as engineers, who were clueless when operating a perfectly normal piece of equipment. That drove her up the wall. She’d lost track of the number of times she’d been forced to work under idiots like that, who were getting paid a lot more than she was.
Reaching the bottom of the staircase she found a long corridor and continued forward. With even fewer emergency lights to guide her, she had to squint to read the signs on the doors.
works archive
tech support
facilities control
What she needed was another staircase or elevator that would take her back up the four flights she needed to reach the comms center. She also needed protection. For the moment, the best she could to do was whack someone on the head with the K92. It seemed like everyone else on this shithole was armed, and she needed to be as well—preferably with something better than a Weinshelbaum.
Gingerly opening the door and moving into the Tech Support room, she almost tripped on equipment that was scattered across the floor, most of it broken. Most likely anything useful had already been taken. Switching on her flashlight, she saw walls lined with inert screens, safety instructions, and a poster of a Working Joe android that had a big X
drawn in black over its face, and smaller X’s over its eyes.
Subtle.
She spied a small piece of paper on the floor, and picked it up. There were hastily scrawled instructions on how to make a smoke bomb using ethanol, sensors, a bonding agent, and a few more items. Those components were among the items scattered across the floor, still in their containers.
Someone’s been improvising. Under other circumstances, Amanda would have admired the ingenuity. Here she just found it threatening.
In another room she found a broken security camera and—to her delight—a revolver. Stunned that so useful an item had been left behind, Amanda picked it up, figuring it to be empty. It was another Jacobs 1070, just like Axel’s. Levering the cylinder out, she was amazed to see that it had all six bullets in the chamber.
Whoever it was, they must have left here in a real hurry.
She flipped it closed and placed it in one of the zippered pockets near her hip, to keep it there as a last resort. Amanda had no desire to increase the number of dead bodies—three was more than enough. One of those smoke bombs would’ve been more her speed.
Switching off the flashlight she moved back out into the corridor, then, listening for any hint of pursuit, she stepped into the next room. It was unmarked, and boasted several cabinets with their doors torn off, along with a big table in the center. There were four items there.
There might as well have been only one.
It was a bright red flight recorder. Holding her breath, she picked it up and examined it more closely in the light of her headlamp. Sure enough, there were letters and numbers stenciled along one side.
USCSS NOSTROMO
reg 180924609
Sonofabitch!
All thoughts of Axel’s horrible death, of people shooting at her, of people being shot, of darkened graffiti-stained corridors, of Taylor and Samuels and Verlaine and Connor, of weird creatures with stabby tails—all of it fell completely out of her head. For several seconds she just stared, mouth hanging open.
Regaining her composure, she began to examine her find. The top of the flight recorder had been forced open, probably by the crew that had salvaged the recorder in the first place, trying to get at it. No professional would cause such unnecessary damage. But they wouldn’t have had the Weyland-Yutani code needed to access the data, beyond basic identifying markers and navigational data.
This is it. This is really it.
I finally got my piece of the one true cross.
She would finally find out what happened to her mother. Why she hadn’t fulfilled her promise to be there for Amanda’s eleventh birthday. Why she’d abandoned Amanda to be stuck with Paul. She’d almost thought, to be raised by Paul, but her stepfather had done absolutely nothing of the kind, beyond giving her a place to live. A place where she spent most of her time either scared or angry. Or both. By paying for her counseling and some of her education—not to mention bail that one time—Weyland-Yutani did as much parenting as Paul did.
With no idea how long she’d been caught up in her thoughts, she shook her head to clear it. Hefting the box, she found no other overt damage, and moved toward the table. Setting the recorder down, she located the keyboard and quickly touched the sequence of keys that was required to unlock the data.
The recorder buzzed.
Nothing happened.
“What!?”
Amanda took a breath. She’d probably just entered the code wrong, or too fast. More deliberately, she entered the code key again. This time the recorder made a beeping sound, as it was supposed to.
And then two words scrolled across the screen.
NO DATA
“No,” she said, then, “No!”
She entered the code again, but the same thing came up.
NO DATA
“Goddammit!”
Why did I do it? she cried out inside her head. Why did I let myself hope? I told Taylor I didn’t hope anymore because the universe would just fuck me, and then I let myself hope for just a second, and sure enough—
Goddammit.
A wave of fatigue washed over her.
It was another scam. Another false lead. Another round of bullshit designed to get her hopes up just long enough to slap her down.
Just like Okeke had when she was a teenager.
Encrypted Transmission
From: Chief Dion Porter
To: Marshal Jethro Waits
Date: November 12, 2137
Re: Flight Recorder
Look, there’s nothing on this thing, Waits. We’ve broken Christ knows how many corporate confidentiality agreements and come up with zip—nothing except the Weyland-Yutani logo and an empty readout.
These things are built to last, so either someone on board the Nostromo asked its MOTHER core to wipe it clean, or somehow the data’s been corrupted before it got here. Care to fill me in on why this was a priority job?
Come find me in SysTech when you’re done in Medical.
This message and any attachments are confidential, privileged and protected. If you are not the intended recipient, dissemination or copying of this message is prohibited. If you have received this in error, please notify the sender by replying and then delete the message completely from your system.
PART TWO:
ISOLATION
12
VANCOUVER, CANADA, EARTH
APRIL 2127
Amanda Ripley stared across the desk. She had received a message in her queue to report to the principal’s office after her last class of the day at Delaj Technical Institute. No reason had been provided, though Amanda assumed the worst. She generally didn’t get called to the principal’s office for a good reason.
Principal Fatmata Bieo stared at her computer screen. She spoke without looking up.
“Are you aware of why I summoned you, Ms. Ripley?”
Amanda shrugged. “I assume I’m in trouble for something.”
“Not precisely.” Bieo finally looked away from the screen and regarded Amanda with her brown eyes. “What is it that you are doing here?”
Amanda blinked. “You haven’t told me yet.”
Shaking her head, Bieo said, “Forgive me, I mean what is it that you are doing here at Delaj?”
Amanda was completely confused. Bieo’s tone wasn’t accusatory, and she didn’t sound like she was delivering a reprimand.
“I—I’m sixteen?” she said tentatively. “This—this is where I go to school?”
Bieo shook her head. “You received an assignment from Professor Rodriguez to create a schedule for repairing a Bundaberg 27Z generator.”
Amanda nodded.
“There were twelve of you in the class, and Professor Rodriguez provided all of you with a generator of that make and model. Each was in some form of disrepair, though no two had the same issue that required fixing. Rather than complete the assignment as given, you…” She peered again at the screen, as if consulting something there. “You instead chose to repair the generator, as well as the eleven other generators issued to your classmates. ‘For good measure,’ you said when asked.”
Amanda shrugged again. “I was bored, and the assignment was dumb. You only create a schedule if someone else is gonna do it, and I figured it made more sense to just do it myself.”
Bieo looked straight at her, and she seemed agitated.
“Again, Ms. Ripley, I must ask why you are attending my school. We are a trade school. Our students tend to become low-level repair technicians and machinists, at best. You have tremendous skills, Ms. Ripley, plus you worked an internship at Pascoe-Keane last summer, which I doubt any of our other students would have qualified for, much less excelled at.”
She paused, as if gathering her thoughts. “I am proud of our school, Ms. Ripley, do not mistake me. We provide opportunities for people who may not have high aptitude for specialized work, but might be trained to perform tasks that could be of benefit to society—and which would provide greater remuneration than the unskilled labor that wou
ld likely await them without Delaj’s tutelage.”
Amanda shifted uncomfortably in the metal guest chair. “I—I know all this, ma’am.”
Bieo smiled, showing impressively perfect teeth. “Ms. Ripley, allow me to be direct. You do not belong here. You should be attending an engineering school.”
“Those schools cost money, ma’am. More money than Delaj.”
Bieo frowned. “I seem to recall that the first payments for your enrollment here came from the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. Surely, they—”
“They wanted me to go elsewhere—just like you do.” Suddenly realizing that she’d interrupted the principal, she quickly said, “I’m sorry, ma’am!”
Waving her off, Bieo said, “It’s all right. Continue, please.”
“The company…” Amanda hesitated. “They were helpful when my mother went missing, but I didn’t like the strings that started to become attached to their help. Their paying for me to go to an engineering school would force me to work for them when I graduate—and probably for the rest of my life. I’d rather not be so—so tethered.”
“Why not apply for scholarships? The forms are not complicated.” She smiled again. “Your response to Professor Rodriguez’s assignment proves quite handily that you are able to navigate complicated matters.”
Amanda shook her head. “Weyland-Yutani’s support over the years means that the scholarship funds all assume I have sufficient finances to pay my own way.” She sighed. “Maybe when my stepfather gets his settlement, he can afford it.”
“Settlement?” The principal folded her hands on the desk.
“He got hurt on the job, not long ago.” Amanda squirmed in the chair. “He—he’s supposed to have his hearing tomorrow, and he says he should get a good settlement.”
That was probably a lie, she knew. Paul wasn’t that badly hurt, though it was enough to keep him from being able to work. His back was messed up enough that he couldn’t lift things, or even stay standing for very long. At least that was what he said.
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