Our investment and belief in the station have never wavered. Be assured that Seegson’s APOLLO central A.I. and Working Joe androids will be there to serve Sevastopol until the last rivet is removed. We wish you all the best for the future.
After all, Sevastopol isn’t just a station. It’s people.
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16
SILVERSTEIN’S BAR & GRILL, SEATTLE, NORTH AMERICA, EARTH
JUNE 2129
“Can I help you?” the maître d’ asked when Amanda walked into the brightly lit bar on the outskirts of Seattle.
That’s a loaded question, she thought, but she found she couldn’t make her mouth actually form words. She was as nervous as she ever remembered feeling.
Which was ridiculous. She was just meeting someone, and in a public place. It was absurd to be nervous about it. Not a week ago she’d crawled around inside a malfunctioning Dietz 183 reactor core that, had things gone wrong, could have literally blown up in her face. Yet she was blissfully calm then, as she realigned the rods and repaired the broken junctions in a tiny crawlway.
Now, standing in an eatery 145 miles from home, she was almost breaking out in a cold sweat.
She’d spent the entire train ride down from Vancouver practically bouncing in her seat. Even when she’d asked Jajuan for the time off, she’d barely been able to get the words out. Jajuan had, at least, been understanding and willing, assuming that she wanted to celebrate her eighteenth birthday.
It was easier to just let him think that.
“Ma’am?”
Shaking her head to get out of her reverie, she looked at the maître d’ and found her voice.
“Sorry,” she said. “Um, I’m here to meet someone. Stefano Vanini?”
Nodding, the woman ran her fingers over a Pad. “Ah, yes, Mr. Vanini has already arrived, and he said he had a plus one. Follow me, please.”
They wove between several tables until they arrived at one in a back corner of the eatery. The restaurant wall showed a series of rotating captioned images of Seattle’s history throughout the past three hundred years, from the construction of the Squire Opera House and the Pioneer Building in the nineteenth century to pictures of Pike Place, the Space Needle, the World’s Fair, and the monorail in the twentieth century. The visuals continued with the Seattle Mariners finally winning their first World Series in the twenty-first century, to the opening of the Cox-Gilman Center for the Arts in the twenty-second.
Seated at the corner table was a man with salt-and-pepper hair, dark stubble on his face, and white hair sticking out of his ears. He was nursing a glass of red wine and picking dolefully at a bowl of assorted fish that smelled incredibly appetizing. Belatedly, Amanda realized that she hadn’t eaten since she left Vancouver, and suddenly she was starving.
“Thank you,” Amanda said to the maître d’.
“Enjoy your meal,” the woman replied and she headed back to the front of the restaurant. Amanda sat, and Vanini stared at her through rheumy eyes.
“So you’re Ripley’s daughter.”
“Yes. I’m Amanda.”
Vanini indicated a display on the edge of the table. “Go ahead and order. You must be starving after coming from—where’d you say you live, Vancouver?”
Nodding, Amanda scrolled through the display. The smell of his fish was heavenly, and she ordered that, along with a bottle of water. She wanted more, but even the fish bowl was straining her budget—already overburdened by the round-trip train passes.
Shaking his head, Vanini asked, “How old are you, exactly?”
“When the clock strikes midnight, I’ll be eighteen.”
“So you celebrate your birthday by taking a train to another city and meeting with me?” He popped a piece of squid into his mouth, then spoke while chewing. “When I turned eighteen, I was living in Firenze. I spent the whole night eating and drinking with my friends.”
“I can do that tomorrow.” Amanda didn’t bother to mention that she didn’t really have any friends, and the notion of going out drinking was one that had never appealed to her. Especially since she saw what her stepfather was like when he did that, which was pretty much nightly these days. Plus, this trip was draining her finances down to nothing, so she had nothing with which to pay for a celebration.
Though turning eighteen was certainly cause for celebration, as she officially stopped being a legal dependent of the man who was actually completely dependent on her. After tomorrow, she never had to even see Paul Carter ever again. She’d already arranged for her own place to live. It was just a sublet from someone with whom she worked, and would only be available for two months, but it was a start.
“So why did you come all this way to talk to me?”
“You knew my mother.”
Vanini shook his head and washed his squid down with wine. “I met your mother.”
A server delivered a bowl of fish that looked just like the one Vanini had, as well as a bottle of water and a glass. Amanda dove into the bowl with her fork, spearing a shrimp and a scallop.
Vanini chuckled. “You should drink wine, you’ll live longer.”
“Water’s fine.”
“So why do you care that I met your mother, back on Thedus?”
“The Nostromo went missing right after she left Thedus.”
“Yes, I remember.” Vanini sighed. “Very sad.”
“I’ve been trying to find out what happened to them,” Amanda said after swallowing another mouthful of fish. “It’s hard to get any kind of information out of Weyland-Yutani, and there’s not much publicly available either. But I found a manifest for the cargo crew on Thedus back in ’22, and then found the most recent manifest, and there were three names that weren’t on both. So I tried to find out where the three of you got to, hoping maybe one of you came back to Earth.” She realized she was talking quickly, and took a breath. “Aparna Bhatnagar died, and Chiro Nagashima transferred to Tanburro Station, but you came back home.”
Vanini gulped down the remainder of his wine before replying. “No, I came back to Earth. Home is Firenze, but I came back here so I could see the rest of Earth. Spent all my life in Italia and on Thedus, and after I retire, I think it’s best to see the whole world. I saw all of Thedus, and it is nothing, just a rock. This is a world, and I have the time and the money, so now I see it.”
“And when you came to Seattle, I got in touch with you. You were one of the last people to see my mother, and I was hoping…” She trailed off.
“Hoping what?” Vanini scrolled through the menu and ordered another glass of wine. “I don’t know what happened to them, Amanda. When I last saw the Nostromo, they’d taken on cargo and were on their way back to Earth to deliver it. They went into cryo, and the next time anybody was supposed to hear from them was when they were back here.”
“You didn’t notice anything strange or weird about them?”
Vanini shook his head and chuckled. “No more than any other hauler. Which is plenty of strange and weird right there. But no, they were good people, most of them. Your mother was, definitely, and I don’t just say that because you’re her daughter. Ellen Ripley really was good. So was the captain, and Ms. Lambert, too. That Mr. Kane was annoying, and I didn’t much care for Mr. Ash at all, but your mother, yes, she was good—smart, she ran the cargo load well.” He smiled, and Amanda blinked in surprise, as that smile brightened his entire face, transforming him from a tired old man to a happy person eating his dinner. “She cut through the bullshit, your mother did.”
Amanda couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Yeah, that sounds like Mom.”
The server returned with a glass of wine. “Are you folks okay? Everything all right?”
“Everything is beautiful,
grazie,” Vanini said.
Amanda just nodded, her mouth full of octopus. The server wandered off, and Vanini sipped his wine.
“I am sorry that you came all this way, Amanda, for I have nothing to tell you. You must already know who your mother was. I cannot tell you anything different, and I cannot tell you why they disappeared. The cargo loading went as smoothly as possible, everything was finished on time, and on the final night Chiro opened a bottle of sake for us to drink, and we celebrated. Your mother drank just enough to be sociable—and then had to escort Captain Dallas back to his cabin, as he drank far more than enough to be sociable.”
That got another smile out of Amanda. Somehow, she wasn’t surprised either that Mom kept her drinking to a minimum or that Dallas didn’t. The captain had struck her as the type who would be a fun drunk, as opposed to, say, her stepfather.
Grasping at whatever she could, she pressed. “Did she at least tell any interesting stories? Or did the crew tell stories about her?”
Vanini shook his head. “No, she just sat and laughed at what everyone else was talking about. Honestly, I don’t think she said much of anything during the party, except to tell the captain that it was time for bed.” He chuckled. “To tell the truth, what I remember most about Ripley is that she was the only person on the Nostromo who wasn’t either a child or an idiot. Or both. She was a—a grown-up.”
“Grown-ups keep their promises,” Amanda muttered.
“Eh? What was that?”
Amanda quickly regretted saying that out loud. “Nothing, I was just—nothing. Look, if there’s anything else you can tell me about her, please. I just—”
Shaking his head again, Vanini said, “I am sorry, Amanda. She was just one of a cargo crew. I only remember the Nostromo people at all because we got word that they went missing. And the company sent someone to talk to all of us, to see if we could give them any notion of what happened. I couldn’t tell them anything either, at least not that would help.” He let out a very long sigh, and then popped a shrimp into his mouth. “I am sorry. This is a very poor birthday present.”
“I already have my present,” she said, thinking about how she would get to live in her own place the next day. “This was just going to be extra.”
“I still feel as if you have travelled all this way for nothing.”
“Not nothing.” Amanda shook her head and washed down some fish with her water. “You saw my mother before she went away. That’s a perfectly good birthday present.”
The conversation veered off from there to other subjects. It was obvious to Amanda that Vanini had nothing new to say about her mother, and that it was making him uncomfortable, so she asked him how he was enjoying being retired. After he went on at great length about all the travelling he’d been doing, he asked her about where she went to school. She was evasive on that subject, saying she was working as a technical assistant and was hoping to get her certifications for engineering.
What she didn’t say was that she was about as likely to get those certifications as her mother was to walk into the restaurant and join them at the table.
After another hour or so they said their goodbyes. Vanini refused to let her pay for her half of the meal. “Consider this my birthday present to you, since I could not give you anything of use regarding your mother. And I wish you luck in your search.”
“Thank you,” she said sincerely, and she even gave him a hug when they parted ways outside the front door. With the money she’d saved, she could get a snack on the train home.
* * *
Once she’d boarded the train, the nervousness drained out of her, and she fell asleep as soon as she took her seat. Midnight came and went, and she was awakened by the train computer when it announced that they were approaching Vancouver.
She woke up as an eighteen-year-old.
Legally and officially an adult.
I’m free.
By the time she took the local rail home—or, rather, to Paul’s apartment, as it was no longer in any sense home— it was three in the morning. All she had to do was retrieve her toiletries and her stuffed tiger. Daniel was pretty battered and worn, but she didn’t want to give him up.
It came as a surprise when she waved her keycard in the lobby elevator bay and the computer made a harsh buzzing sound.
“Forty-first floor access unavailable due to police activity.”
Oh, great, someone on our floor got arrested? She supposed she could just go to her new place—she had a keycard for that, as well—and pick up her stuff tomorrow. Then the elevator door opened and an officer of the Vancouver Police Department exited, alongside a woman in a suit with a badge clipped to her jacket.
“Excuse me,” Amanda said.
“Yes, ma’am?” the officer replied. His nametag read ‘Chen.’
“I live on forty-one. Any notion as to when I’ll be able to get into my apartment?”
The detective stepped forward. “Which unit?”
“Twelve.”
She winced. “I’m afraid not anytime soon. Are you the occupant’s stepdaughter, Amanda Ripley?”
Shit.
“Y-yes.”
“I’m afraid I have some bad news. We had to arrest your stepfather. Paul Carter. He assaulted two off-duty RCMP officers in a bar in Anmore earlier this evening.”
Amanda tried to dredge up even a little bit of surprise. She failed.
“So what’s the bad news?”
“I’m sorry?”
She shook her head. “What did he do, Detective—?”
“I’m Detective Annushka Balidemaj.” The woman held out her hand.
Amanda returned the handshake. Balidemaj’s hands were frigidly cold.
“Your stepfather got into an argument with the two officers,” Balidemaj continued. “Something about when the next lunar eclipse will occur, apparently. When the officers identified themselves as RCMP, your stepfather made disparaging remarks about ‘Mounties,’ and the officers explained that they didn’t like to be called that.”
Amanda rolled her eyes. “Let me guess, Paul doubled down and called them Mounties over and over again to piss them off. Probably other things, too.”
“Um, yes.”
“Typical.”
Balidemaj seemed nonplussed by Amanda’s contempt. “He left the bar before city police could arrive, and RCMP had us take him into custody for them. He’ll be remanded to them sometime tomorrow.”
“They’re welcome to him,” Amanda said. “I turned eighteen three hours ago, and that means Paul is officially no longer my problem. I was just coming by to get some toiletries, but you know what? I don’t need them. I have somewhere else to sleep now.”
With that, she turned on her heel and left the building. It meant abandoning Daniel, as well, but that tiger was the companion of her youth. Vanini had said that her mother was the only grown-up on the Nostromo. With her gone and Paul drinking himself into oblivion—and now to prison—she had been forced to be the only grown-up in the house.
It was time she started acting like one.
Encrypted Transmission
From: Julia Jones, Sevastopol Station
To: Liliana Jones, Earth
Date: October 13, 2137
Hi Mom.
It looks like things are getting real here, and not in a good way. After numerous demands, Marshal Waits finally called a public meeting to address the rumors that have been circulating on Sevastopol. But instead of the answers we wanted, he continued to be evasive and after only a few minutes he and his team were pelted by anything the crowd could put their hands on.
A gun was fired, there was panic, and now Waits and what’s left of his team are forcibly ejecting us from the terminal. Feels like we’re on our own now. I hope this message gets to you. So far they don’t seem to be blocking us. See you soon.
I hope.
This message and any attachments are confidential, privileged and protected. If you are not the intended recipient, dissemination or copyin
g 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.
17
LORENZ SYSTECH SPIRE, SEVASTOPOL STATION
DECEMBER 2137
Paul had tried to get in touch with Amanda after his arrest, but she had refused any contact with him. She had missed Daniel, but that was the only thing in that apartment for which she had any positive feelings.
She’d hoped to come back from Seattle with something new, something she could follow, but as polite as Stefano Vanini had been, he was just another dead end.
* * *
Leaving Kuhlman to his fate, Amanda went back to the medical offices. It was possible there was a dispensary elsewhere in the tower, but at this point she wasn’t about to risk her life wandering the corridors on the word of someone who sent her off to become alien food. She decided instead to investigate the other offices she’d passed.
Soohoo’s office proved of little use—it was full of exercise gear—and the Halfin was unable to determine a code for Haimovitch’s office. However, she was able to get into Lingard’s, and discovered that she was the senior medical officer.
Bingo!
While there was no sign of Lingard or her body, there were some supplies that could be very useful, including proper bandages and antiseptic. Shrugging off her backpack she loaded the items, as well as a bottle that had a few standard pain meds. Based on the hole in her gut, Taylor was going to need much stronger drugs than this. Amanda needed to locate some EpiSeal.
Still, it’s better than nothing.
Slipping her arms into the straps of the much heavier backpack, she went over to Lingard’s terminal. As she did, Samuels’s voice sounded in her headset.
“Ripley, can you hear me?”
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