Alien
Page 17
“Easy,” Amanda said, holding up both hands.
“Identify yourself!” Waits demanded.
She rolled her eyes. “I’m Amanda Ripley. I was on the Torrens with these two.”
“Peachy,” Waits said, lowering his weapon. He shook his head. “I’m glad you made it out of the lobby, but it would’ve served you right to get fried.”
Shrugging off her backpack, she pulled out the first aid kit and knelt down next to Taylor, who was moaning and trying very hard to stay awake. Samuels knelt down next to her.
“I was getting these medical supplies for Taylor.” She pulled out the antiseptic. “It’s not like I had much of an alternative.”
“That’s not the point,” Waits said. “I warned you people not to even come here. I sent very clear instructions not to dock or send anyone over, but you barreled on in anyhow.”
“Your directive was far from clear, Marshal,” Samuels said tartly, and Amanda had to suppress a smile. “Your message was incomprehensible gibberish on our end. We’d no idea what was happening, and we’re here for a very specific purpose.”
Samuels was more adept at first aid than she was, so Amanda left him to take care of Taylor, stood up, and faced Waits. His heavily lined face bespoke great age, great stress, or both. Given how Sevastopol was falling apart, her money was on both.
“What the hell’s going on here, Marshal?” she demanded. “Where’s your security force?”
“Me and Ricardo are all that’s left,” Waits said bitterly. “The rest are dead or gone AWOL, and we’re doing the best we can. Hell, I would’ve killed that damn thing if it wasn’t for you fucking it up.”
“I didn’t fuck anything up, Marshal. I’ve seen that creature up close—too close, as far as I’m concerned—and it’s gonna take a lot more than a few charges to stop it. All your little explosion did was annoy it.” She didn’t know that for sure, but she wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction.
“Peachy.” Waits threw up his hands. “It’s not like we’ve got a ton of other options. So fucking glad we let the Anesidora onto the station.”
Samuels looked up. “You say the Anesidora brought this creature on board?”
“Yeah, the first mate had a parasite on her face, and Marlow—he’s the captain of the boat—took her to the infirmary. Broke every goddamn quarantine reg, which is why I threw his ass into the brig, and here we are. Living fucking example of why we have quarantine regs. Whatever that parasite injected into Foster, it turned into our friend the alien.”
It was good news, of a sort, that Foster wasn’t the captain, and that Marlow might still be alive. Now she had two reasons to beat the shit out of him.
“Is there anywhere left that’s safe?” she asked. “I mean, there’s the creature, and there’s the androids running amok, too.”
“Goddamn androids,” Waits muttered.
“Ripley,” Samuels said, “Taylor needs more attention than I can give her here.”
“I’m afraid medical’s out of the question,” Amanda said fervently. “We won’t want to get anywhere near there again. Besides…” She shot Waits a look. “…some nutjob torched the lobby.”
“Kiss my entire ass, Ripley,” the marshal responded. “I’m trying to hold this place together with my bare hands.” He held up one of them to cut off Amanda’s reply. “Forget it! Look, we’ve got a life-support unit back at HQ.”
“Great,” she responded, and she reached for her backpack. “Let’s go.”
“Yeah, slight problem. The transit system’s down.”
“Gee, what a shock.” At this point, Amanda would have been more surprised to learn that something on Sevastopol was working.
“Fuck the marshals,” indeed.
“Samuels says you’re an engineer,” he said.
“He said that?” She shot the Weyland-Yutani exec a look.
“I did,” Samuels said without looking up. He was applying the EpiSeal to Taylor’s wound. “You have the skills of an engineer, Ripley, seems to me you should call yourself that.”
Amanda turned to Waits. “I’m not certified as an engineer.”
“I could give a fuck about certified,” Waits said. “If you know how to change a goddamn light bulb, you’re already light-years ahead of me and Ricardo here. If you can get up to Transit Control and get it working, we can all get back to HQ where it’s—well, safer, anyhow.”
“Fine. Tell me where to go, and you protect these two, okay?”
“Of course,” Waits said, as if it was the most natural thing, and Amanda supposed it was—normally, at least, but this was way past normal. And she wasn’t even a little reassured that Mr. Macho would protect Taylor and Samuels.
The marshal turned to his subordinate. “Ricardo, get a lock on her radio so we can keep in touch.”
Without saying a word, Ricardo walked over to her. She removed her headset and handed it to him. The security guard was drenched in sweat even more than Amanda was, and he smelled like old cigarettes. As he made a few adjustments, he smiled wryly.
“You figure out yet that coming aboard was a bad idea?”
“Figured that out before I got here.” Amanda took advantage of the lull to drink from her third water bottle.
“Yeah.” He handed the headset back. “Here you go.”
She nodded her thanks, pocketed the bottle, put the headset back on, and walked over to Samuels.
“Are you all right, Ripley?” Samuels asked. Staring back at Waits, she said, “Peachy.”
19
LORENZ SYSTECH SPIRE, SEVASTOPOL STATION
DECEMBER 2137
She moved down the corridor, Waits’s reedy voice in her ear.
“Keep going down that way until you reach the T-intersection. Go left there.”
“Okay. How far do I go?”
“About fifty yards, then there’ll be a staircase that leads up.”
Sure enough, fifty yards after she made the left turn, she saw a metal staircase. There was an ad for Working Joes on the wall, and someone had placed a rather large pair of breasts over the Joe’s chest.
“Adorable,” she muttered.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing, just admiring the local artwork. What’s upstairs?”
“The control room,” Waits said.
There were sounds from above, though she couldn’t quite make them out. Amanda checked the motion detector. There was something moving upstairs. Pocketing the detector, she gripped the K92.
Reaching the top, she found herself in yet another darkened room, but there was the muffled sound of someone banging on something. The noise was coming from a storage closet, the door of which had been closed and locked. Whatever the motion detector had picked up was behind that door. They weren’t making any headway, though, as they were hitting solid metal. It’d take years to even put a dent in it.
Unless you were a monster.
Next to the closet was an elevator which had been deactivated—not even a red light over it, but complete darkness. It hadn’t just been shut down, it was shut off. There was a desk to her left and a console at the back of the room. The latter was as dark as the elevator except for a single button that glowed white, and words glowing in a couple of languages.
SEEGSON TRANSIT CONTROL
Gotta love your basic on-off button. Amanda pushed it, which should have turned the whole thing on. Instead, a small display appeared.
ERROR: SECURITY LOCK IN PLACE
This isn’t just a disaster shutdown. Amanda frowned. Someone went to serious effort to shut this off.
At the same time as the security alert displayed itself, the elevator hummed to life. Looking over, Amanda saw the light above the elevator flicker on into a red light, while the buttons also lit up. A second later the red light turned green, and she could hear the hydraulic whine of the elevator starting up.
Great, someone’s coming to see who tried to turn this on. The person in the closet must have heard the elevator, too.
On the other hand, it was still dark. She’d probably just waste bullets shooting blindly. Besides, she was here to start the transit system back up. Throwing bullets might do more harm than good.
The elevator arrived and the door slid open.
The new arrival turned toward the closet door and shouted at the rhythmic banging. “Calm down in there, you android fuck!”
That was followed by a distinctive clicking sound.
Which told Amanda several things.
One, that it was a Working Joe in the storage room, which meant it wasn’t likely to listen to the instruction to calm down. Indeed, it didn’t, as the banging continued nonstop.
Two, she recognized the voice as belonging to Mahoney, the guy the three idiots—Fred, Petersen, and Francis—were talking to on the radio.
And three, based on that click, Mahoney had a weapon. He’d just taken the safety off.
“Hello?” Mahoney cried out. “C’mon, I know someone’s in here! The button didn’t push itself.”
Amanda didn’t move.
“Show yourself, and I’ll make it quick.”
Some incentive.
Reaching into one of her pockets, she pulled out the Halfin. Activating it, she tried to see if it could override the lockout on the console. The device only made a little noise, and it was being drowned out by the Joe pounding on the door.
Sure enough, the AW15 found the code that would disable the security lockout and turn the console on. The entire room suddenly lit up, and Amanda had to blink spots out of her eyes.
“Oh, fuck, no, what did you do?”
Mahoney sounded positively panicked.
She heard a different clicking sound, and then that of a door swinging open. Apparently the security lockout included keeping the storage room door locked. Immediately, the Joe spoke in its electronic monotone.
“You are not authorized to be in this room.”
Several shots rang out from Mahoney’s weapon, making her cringe.
“Fuck you, metalhead!” he bellowed. “I—” Suddenly all that came out were strangled noises, and something thudded to the floor.
Shit.
Abandoning her hiding place and holding the K92 firmly in her hand, Amanda jumped out from behind the desk to see the Joe with its hands wrapped around Mahoney’s neck. The Joe’s left eye was missing, the wiring under it exposed. Crossing the space between them in an instant, she smashed the Weinshelbaum K92 into the android’s head. This time she had leverage.
It fell to the deck.
So did Mahoney.
As she knelt down to check him, Waits’s voice sounded in her ear.
“Ripley? Transit’s back up and running. We’re waiting for you.”
“Taylor can’t wait,” she said, “so go ahead without me. I’ll catch up.”
“Your call.”
Mahoney had no pulse, and he wasn’t breathing.
Dammit.
As she straightened, her head swam.
Fuck, I haven’t eaten anything since I woke up from cryo. If she didn’t find some food soon, she was going to collapse. As it was, the Weinshelbaum felt as if it weighed a ton.
Then she noticed a familiar red wrapper sticking out of the pocket of Mahoney’s jacket. Kneeling back down—more slowly this time—she reached into the corpse’s jacket pocket and pulled out a Fremon Bar. Cheap, small, full of nutrients, and actually delicious, Fremon Bars were pretty much what Amanda survived on, especially during long jobs where she wouldn’t get a break. Even if she got a break, she often couldn’t afford to buy lunch. The Fremon Bars did the trick, and the sight of one now actually brought her joy for the first time—
Truth be told, Amanda couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt joy about anything. It was probably the second-to-the-last message from Mom on the Nostromo, before they went into cryo. She hadn’t been happy to receive the last one, because she knew it was the last.
Looking back on two and a half decades of life, the only joyous memories she had were associated with her mother.
So, naturally, she left me. Thanks, Mom. All I’ve got left is trying to find you in the fond hope that I might actually have a life worth living again.
Dolefully, she tore the red wrapping off the Fremon Bar and chewed off about a third of it. While she did, she moved to the console and called up a map to locate the nearest transit stop. After swallowing the last of the bar, she turned and gave Mahoney’s body a last look.
“Should’ve stayed where you were. Coming near me just means you die. Or disappear forever. Or just get drunk a lot.” Dropping the red wrapper on the body, she added, “Thanks for the Fremon Bar.” Then she got into the elevator Mahoney had used to come up. Her mouth, already dry from exertion, was even more so after eating the bar, and she polished off her third water bottle.
The elevator took her down two levels. It was about a hundred yards to the transit hub. Jogging along silently, she hugged the wall when she heard voices as she approached the entryway to the hub.
“Hey, look, transit’s workin’ again!” a squeaky voice said.
“Hot shit, let’s get the fuck outta here,” a scratchy voice replied.
“The mall!” Squeaky said. “Those assholes got, like, a shit-ton’a supplies up ’ere.”
“We’ll clean out the mall later.” That was a deeper, more authoritative voice. “Sinclair radioed in. He wants us back at the base.”
Amanda peered through the entryway that led into the hub. She saw three people in riot gear, SEEGSON SECURITY stenciled on their backs.
More incompetent guards, she thought darkly. Gotta love this place.
“Maybe Sinclair found a better site to raid?” Scratchy said.
“Or a way off this garbage-heap?” Squeaky added.
“We’ll see,” the man with the deep voice said. “Let’s stick together, though. Avoid splitting up. There’s safety in numbers.”
“I dunno,” Scratchy said. “That thing—it’s goddamn unstoppable.”
“Yeah? Gimme one good shot an’ I’ll stop the sonofabitch.” Squeaky’s bravado almost made Amanda laugh. He obviously hadn’t yet laid eyes on the creature. At that moment a transit car showed up, and the trio stepped into it.
Have fun, guys. She waited until the car was gone, and then went into the hub and called for another. It arrived within moments, and soon got her to the stop she wanted. Once there, she tapped her headset.
“Waits, I’m at the Marshal Bureau transit stop,” she said. “Where are you?”
The marshal’s voice sounded in Amanda’s ear. “Go to the top of the stairs, then turn right—you can’t miss it.”
“What, no welcome committee?”
“Just get up here.”
Amanda shook her head. She was already doing better now that she had eaten something, though she suspected that feeling was going to pass pretty quickly. Jogging up the stairs, she walked through an open door to find Waits sitting at a desk, reading a NohtPad. To her left was a large window that looked onto the life-support area. Taylor was lying asleep on one of the beds, an IV in her arm, and it looked as if her belly wound had been properly treated.
Samuels was sitting in a chair near her bed.
“How is she?” Amanda asked without preamble.
“Stable.” Waits didn’t even bother to look up from his NohtPad. “She’ll be up and walking around soon enough. And hey, you managed to get transit running, so I guess we’re even.”
“Kiss my entire ass, Marshal.”
That got him to look up, angrily at first, then a tired smile at the throwing of his own phrase back at him.
“Maybe when this is all over.”
“And when will that be, exactly?”
“When that fucking cockroach on steroids is
dead.”
“Amen,” Amanda muttered. “Your brigs are here too, right?”
“Yeah, why?” Waits squinted at her. “You making a citizen’s arrest?”
“No, you said you had the Anesidora captain.”
“Yeah, Marlow.” He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “You’re not fucking serious, are you, Ripley?”
“Marshal, the whole reason I came to this rotten tin can is because your prisoner found the flight recorder for the ship my mother served on. She’s been missing for fifteen years.”
For a moment, Waits just stared at her. Then he unfolded his arms.
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “I can see that. Fine, go and talk to him.”
“Thank you.” Amanda turned to leave.
“By the way…” Waits said.
She regarded him with curiosity.
“Asshole parked his boat in orbit of the gas giant, and won’t give up the command codes so we can tow her in. See if you can make him see reason.”
“Gee, Marshal, you haven’t been able to use your innate charm and wit to get him to talk? Or have you been too busy blowing up lobbies?”
Waits started to say something, then stopped. “Just go talk to the bastard, will you, please?” He pointed to the door behind his desk. “Through there.”
“Gladly.” She hesitated. “You need me to leave my stuff here?”
“Regs say yes.” Waits grinned. “I say, fuck it. Prisoner safety isn’t exactly high on the list of things I give a damn about right now.”
Amanda nodded and proceeded to the door. It slid aside to reveal a darkened corridor that led to a wider corridor with cells on both sides. Huge metal doors with large windows lined each wall. Only one of them was currently lit, and Amanda walked over to find a large, middle-aged man whose arms were covered in tattoos. He wore a jumpsuit very similar to the one that had been on the floor near Foster’s body.
The man was walking across the tiny cell to the tiny sink next to the toilet. He splashed some water on his face, then dried it with a ratty towel. While he sat down on the bunk, Amanda walked over to the control next to the door and pressed the large red button.