Alien

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  The moment she’d been picturing in her head since her eleventh birthday.

  Her heart pounded like a triphammer, and a small voice in the back of her head told her that this was going to be another dead end. That this was going to be bullshit, or another fake. That Marlow was fucking with her, or just plain nuts. Hadn’t she learned her lesson from Okeke’s con, and Vanini’s uselessness, and Mendez’s lies, and the flight recorder’s lack of data?

  But maybe this will be for real.

  There’s only one way to find out.

  She tapped the key.

  And then, for the first time since the Sotillo log five years ago, she heard her mother’s voice.

  “Added report, personal message,” Ellen Ripley said. “This is for my daughter. Hi, Amanda. I’m recording this for you, sweetheart, and I hope you get to hear it one day. You see I—I got into trouble. My ship—there was an accident, sweetheart, and um, we found an alien creature. It was very dangerous and the only way we could stop it was to destroy the ship.

  “I’m okay, I’m stuck on this lifeboat a long way out, but we had to destroy the ship. We had to destroy the Nostromo. We just couldn’t risk bringing that thing home with us. I needed to protect you.”

  As she heard her mother’s voice break, Amanda palmed away the tears that streamed down her cheeks.

  “Don’t worry—d-don’t worry about me. I—I’m sure I’ll see you very soon. I love you, sweetheart, and I hope to still see you on your eleventh birthday.”

  The recording went silent, and MESSAGE ENDS scrolled across the screen.

  “My God,” she muttered.

  Her mother was alive.

  Her mother had fought that fucking creature and killed it and lived. She’d destroyed the Nostromo, and Captain Dallas and that crew she’d talked about, they were all dead, but Mom was alive!

  Nobody had found her, but nobody was looking for a tiny lifeboat—they were looking for a massive cargo ship. Maybe now that they knew to look for one of the Nostromo’s lifeboats, they might find something.

  Or they might not. Space was really big, and lifeboats were very small.

  Still, her mother was alive. For so long, she’d been trying to find out what happened to her. Since standing at Tereshkova Terminal on her eleventh birthday, she had lived in a void, not knowing what happened to Ellen Ripley. Now she knew.

  Her mother was a hero.

  She’d stopped the monster before it could kill anyone else.

  Except, Amanda realized, there were more of them, thanks to the idiot in charge of this ship.

  Marlow finally spoke again.

  “Now you understand. I’m going to overload the fusion reactor and then ram Sevastopol.”

  “What?” Amanda looked up. “That’s insane! Marlow, you’ll turn this ship into a goddamn nuke!”

  “No shit, Ripley—that’s the point. It’ll take out the ship, the station—and annihilate every trace of that creature. It’s the only way. I can’t let it live, and I’m sure as fuck not letting the company have its damned location. They’ll just start the whole damn thing over again.”

  “Listen to me, we don’t have to do this,” Amanda said as she climbed back to the bulkhead to try to get it open.

  Taylor made herself heard again. “Marlow, please! Don’t do this!”

  “You heard what your mother did, Ripley,” Marlow said, ignoring his captive. “She understood. She destroyed the Nostromo to keep this thing away from the rest of the galaxy. If she was here, she’d be helping me blow them up. Trust me, it’s the only way to be sure they’ll be destroyed… forever.”

  “There are still people alive on the station!” Taylor cried out. “Marlow, please!”

  “Foster’s not.” Marlow’s voice almost broke. “She was my wife. I loved her and I killed her.”

  Amanda tried another bypass of the security lockdown, and this time it worked. The bulkhead rose up and Amanda started running as best she could down the narrow corridor toward the engine room. It was the only place Marlow could be implementing his plan.

  “You bastard!” Taylor said. Then Amanda heard a clunk, followed by the unmistakable sound of a body falling to the deck.

  “Marlow, what happened?”

  “It’s—it’s Taylor,” the lawyer said. “Oh my God, what have I done?” At that moment Amanda arrived in the engine room, which had a large window looking onto the reactor. Another one of the bulkheads was down, blocking the door.

  She saw Taylor holding a bloodstained wrench, Marlow lying on the deck, bleeding profusely from a head wound, and a fusion engine well on its way to an overload.

  It had taken Amanda the better part of three minutes to override the security on the flight deck door, and there was no guarantee it would work a second time—and from the looks of it, she didn’t have that kind of time. As if to prove it, the ship’s computer issued an automatic message.

  “Warning: fusion reactor overload in progress. Critical overload in T minus two minutes.”

  Amanda stared at the glass.

  “Hey, Taylor, focus.”

  Taylor looked up at her, stricken. Amanda suspected she’d never raised a hand to anyone before in her life.

  “We need to stop that overload,” Amanda said.

  “‘We’?” the lawyer replied. “You’re the engineer, and there’s this rather large door in the way.”

  “I can get it open, but not until after it’s too late.” She fought to keep calm. “I’ll guide you through it.”

  “Guide me—?” Taylor stared at Amanda as if she had grown a second head. “Are you mad? I’m not a certified engineer!”

  Amanda smirked. “Neither am I.” Even though she faced imminent destruction, she couldn’t help herself.

  For the first time since her eleventh birthday, Amanda had hope. After all, her mother was alive! She would get out of this, she would destroy the creatures—her way, not Marlow’s way—and she would find Mom, dammit!

  Looking around, she spotted a maintenance terminal.

  “Look, all I need you to do is transfer control out here.” She tapped some commands, which designated the corridor station as auxiliary control. “Okay, I need you to transfer power to auxiliary control. On the main reactor, there should be a button that says ‘aux’.”

  Taylor looked helpless for a second.

  “Found it!”

  “Good, hit that.”

  The terminal confirmed that control had been transferred to her console, but that was only half the problem. She needed the command codes to shut down the reactor. Pulling out the Halfin AW15, she hoped that the command codes were easier to hack than the security codes.

  “Ripley, hurry!” Taylor cried, which wasn’t doing anything to make her go faster. She supposed it made Taylor feel more useful, so why the hell not. The Halfin gave her the command codes, and she entered them.

  Nothing.

  Then the readings changed.

  The reactor powered down.

  Releasing a breath she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding, Amanda collapsed against the bulkhead.

  “Um, Ripley?”

  Taylor sounded a bit panicked, and Amanda didn’t see why.

  But of course something else was wrong. That had been the way of things since they got to Zeta Reticuli.

  “What is it, Taylor?” she asked, pushing herself off the bulkhead and coming back to the window.

  “There’s something here, a status update.” She read off the screen. “‘Primary system-wide collapse. Total system-wide cascade failure.’”

  “Fuck!” Amanda kicked the bulkhead. “Marlow forced an overload. The ship’s going to tear itself apart. We’ve got to get out of—”

  The ship shuddered as conduits in the bulkheads overloaded. She braced herself, and peered through the window.

  “We’ll have to—”

  There was a massive explosion in the engine room, which sent Taylor careening into the window on her side. A crack splintered across th
e glass as her body struck it with a bone-breaking impact.

  Taylor fell to the deck right next to Marlow. She wasn’t breathing.

  Fuck!

  There was nothing she could do now, so she bolted for the door.

  Encrypted Transmission

  From: Jefferson Sinclair

  To: All Security Personnel

  Date: December 2, 2137

  This is Sinclair. You guys took too long down there. I had to power down this facility and take the last transit. We can’t afford to keep the sanctuary wide open.

  All it’ll take is one creature to get in and all the supplies and weapons we’ve taken will come to jack shit. Me and mine are going to sit this out until the rescue comes. Sorry, but when you started chasing after a ship that’ll never come you broke with the plan.

  Sinclair, out.

  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.

  29

  SEVASTOPOL STATION

  DECEMBER 2137

  Vibrations rippled through the shuttle as the Anesidora exploded.

  It was a much smaller explosion than Marlow had intended, but big enough. Debris hit Sevastopol, and while nothing struck her ambulance directly, the shockwave did serve to push it toward the station much faster than intended.

  “Shit.” Amanda secured herself in the pilot seat and hoped they didn’t hit the dock too hard.

  “Hello, Sevastopol? Can you respond?” It was a voice she’d thought she would never hear again. “We just saw a ship blow on your starboard side,” Captain Verlaine continued. “Took out an entire orbital stabilizer array. We have no place to dock. Please tell us what’s going on in there. We can take survivors. I’ll leave this channel open. Torrens out.”

  Unfortunately, APOLLO’s comms lockout included the ambulance shuttles, so Amanda couldn’t reply. But she was glad that the Torrens was still out there.

  I might make it out of here alive.

  Which was more than could be said for the people with whom she had embarked on this mission. Or the people on the Anesidora, but there were some survivors on Sevastopol who deserved a chance to live, rather than stay and be killed. The aliens and the Working Joes weren’t the only threats, though—if the orbital stabilizers were down, that meant the station would plunge into the gas giant soon enough.

  The pilot’s chair was secure enough that the worst she got was her teeth rattled when the shuttle crashed into the docking bay. She couldn’t say the same for the shuttle and the bay itself, as she heard the distinctive sound of metal bending, scratching, and tearing.

  Releasing the restraints and stumbling toward the exit, she tapped her radio.

  “Ricardo, you there?”

  “Rip, thank heavens you’re all right,” he said. “When the Anesidora exploded…”

  “I’m fine, but Marlow and Taylor are dead.”

  “So will we be, and soon.”

  Amanda winced. “Yeah, I heard Verlaine’s message. The orbital stabilizer’s out?”

  “It’s worse than that—the explosion knocked us out of our regular orbit and into a lower one. We’ll be able to make maybe half a dozen more circuits before we fall into the gas giant’s atmosphere.”

  “That’s enough time to evacuate, at least,” Amanda said as she moved through the ruined medical bay. She’d figured they’d have more time than that, but it still might be enough, especially with Verlaine willing to help.

  “But we need to get in touch with Verlaine,” he said. “You any good at aligning Seegson communication dishes?”

  “Third job I did on Luna.”

  “Good. If you go EVA to the dishes, and realign them to the Torrens, you can contact them directly through your EVA suit’s radio. Thanks to the captain’s transmission, I’ve got the coordinates. I’ll send them to the terminal out by the dishes, and you can align them to that position.”

  “Will do.”

  Amanda ran toward the transit station, checking the motion detector. She had to take a circuitous route, to avoid both a creature that was moving through the lower decks, and the random patrols. It would be supreme irony if she was killed by the very people she was determined to save.

  When she got into the transit car that would take her to the dish array, she pinged Ricardo.

  “Yeah, the goons must’ve heard the Torrens’s message, as well,” he told her. “A couple of them passed through here—I hid under the desk.”

  Amanda actually smiled. “Smart man.”

  “I try to be. Judging from what they said, I think they’re trying to figure out a way to take the Torrens by force. Don’t worry, comms are locked out, so they’ve no way of managing.”

  “Hope you’re right.” The transit car came to a stop. Amanda got out and ran to the airlock that led to the outer hull. She climbed into an EVA suit that smelled like old salami.

  Fuck, who used this thing? And why didn’t they launder it?

  Depressurizing the airlock, she took an elevator up to the outer hull. Activating the magnetic boots, she walked across to the controls for the dishes. As promised, Ricardo had provided the position of the Torrens. With thick-gloved hands, Amanda adjusted the dials on the controls.

  Unfortunately, the movement of the dishes took much longer than the simple twisting of the dial. While waiting, Amanda distracted herself with thoughts of what she’d say to her mother when they were finally reunited.

  “So, Mom, turns out that there were lots more of those aliens, and I met a whole bunch of them on Sevastopol when I was looking for you.”

  “Did you use flamethrowers against it?”

  “Why in the hell did you go to LV-426, anyhow?”

  Her mother might not have the answer to that last question, though. Given the “Special Order 939” bullshit, and Taylor’s desire for more information about the creature, she suspected the company that owned the Nostromo—and, now, Sevastopol—had a firm hand in sending Mom’s ship to their doom. Desperately, she wished Marlow had provided the rest of the recording. It might have been somewhere on the Anesidora, but that was gone now, too.

  At least she heard her mother’s final message.

  Before she went sleepy-byes.

  Finally, the dishes stopped moving, and Amanda initiated a connection to the Torrens. The words came out of her in a rush.

  “Torrens, this is Ripley on the station, are you reading me,” she said. “Verlaine, please?”

  “Ripley? What the hell is going on over there?”

  For a moment, Amanda was unable to answer. How the fuck did she sum up what had happened over the past couple of hours? Finally, she settled on a woefully inadequate response.

  “Bad things, Verlaine. There’s a lethal alien organism running amok on Sevastopol. We need extraction, now.”

  “A what?”

  “I don’t have time to explain. Please, Verlaine, we need—”

  “All right, all right, but we’ve still got a problem. The dock’s shot and our cable was busted when you went over. There’s a towing platform down below, but our umbilical isn’t compatible with it.”

  Then why mention it? Amanda thought angrily, but Verlaine wasn’t finished.

  “Only way for it to work is for someone to extend the clamps from stationside.”

  So that’s why she mentioned it, she thought. “Give me fifteen minutes. Meantime, get the Torrens in position.”

  “Will do, Ripley. Hey—did Samuels and Taylor make it?”

  Amanda hesitated. “They didn’t, no.”

  “Damn. I’m sorry.”

  Belatedly, as she moved across the outer hull of Sevastopol, she realized that Verlaine probably interpreted Amanda’s words as meaning that Samuels and Taylor didn’t survive the smashing of the Sookdar.

  Fuck it, I’ll give her th
e whole story once the Torrens has taken us far away from Zeta Reticuli.

  “Ricardo,” she said as she boarded the elevator, ordering it back to the airlock, “get ready to move. We’re leaving.”

  “Best news I’ve heard in weeks, Rip. Maybe ever.”

  “I’ll swing by and get you, then we’re heading to the towing platform. We’ll board the Torrens from there.”

  “Perfect.”

  30

  SEVASTOPOL STATION

  DECEMBER 2137

  She entered the airlock and started the repressurizing sequence. Part of her figured it would save time to just keep this suit on, but the stale salami smell was starting to get to her. Besides, if she ran into a creature on the way, she didn’t want her movements to be encumbered.

  Hearing muffled reports of gunfire, Amanda looked out the inner door window. An alien creature was mixing it up with some of those goons Ricardo had mentioned. The goons were losing. Amanda watched helplessly as the monster tore into the four guards until there was nothing left.

  By the time the airlock was pressurized and the inner door opened, the alien had skittered off, leaving four corpses behind. Climbing out of the EVA suit, she stepped gingerly over the bodies and through their blood.

  “Ricardo, there’s—”

  She heard a thumping noise, and then dead silence.

  “You there? Ricardo?” she said.

  “Ricardo, answer!” Dammit.

  Running to the transit station, she slammed the call button, waiting impatiently for a car to take her back to the Marshals Bureau. It arrived, she dove into it, and hit the destination.

  The entire way over, she tried and failed to raise Ricardo. She hadn’t realized how much she had come to rely on his voice. Not until she lost it.

  “Ricardo, answer!”

  Fuck fuck fuck.

  When she got to the bureau, she saw his body. She didn’t see his face, because it was covered with one of those crab-like alien things that came out of the eggs.

  “Oh, Ricardo.”

  They were all gone.

  Samuels, who showed her compassion and invited her along, hoping to give her news of her mother’s fate.

  Taylor, who was kind of a twit, but who was at least friendly and good to talk to.