Tim Lebbon - Alien - Out of the Shadows

“Safe in bed where you want me?” Ripley said. “Asking no questions?”

“Please,” Hoop said without turning. He didn’t elaborate, but Ripley sat back down. In truth, she did so before she fell down, because she still felt like crap. She propped up the pillow and tucked the sheet beneath her arms.

“You’re safe to look now,” she said.

Hoop smiled and came to sit on the foot of her bed.

“How are you feeling?”

“Tell me what’s going on, and I’ll decide.”

Hoop glanced at Garcia, who nodded.

“Yeah, she’s fine,” the medic acknowledged.

“See?” Ripley said. Fine, apart from the sick feeling of dread in her stomach.

“Okay,” Hoop said. “So, here it is. You’ve hardly been rescued. We spotted your shuttle on our scanners just over fifteen hours ago. You were on a controlled approach.”

“Controlled by whom?”

Hoop shrugged.

“You drifted in, circled the Marion once, then docked at the one docking arm we have left.” Something passed across his face then.

That’s something else to ask about, Ripley thought, if he doesn’t volunteer it. The docking arm.

“The shuttle has proximity protocols,” she said.

“Auto docking?”

“If it’s programed to do so.”

“Okay, well, that’s academic now. Our situation— and now yours—is… pretty grim.” He paused, as if to gather his thoughts. “We suffered a collision eleven weeks ago. Lost a lot of our people. It’s knocked us out of geostationary orbit, and we’re now in a decaying pattern. We figure less than fifteen days before we start burning up in the atmosphere.”

“Atmosphere of what?”

“LV178. A rock.”

“The planet you’re mining for trimonite,” Ripley said, and she was amused at the look Hoop threw Garcia. “It’s okay, she didn’t tell me anything else. Like, anything important.”

Hoop held out his hands.

“That’s it. Our antenna array was damaged, so we couldn’t send any long-distance distress signals. But after the collision we sent a call for help on a high frequency transmitter, and it’s still being transmitted on a loop. Hoping it would be picked up by someone within rescue distance.” He frowned. “You didn’t hear it?”

“Sorry,” she replied. “I was taking a nap.”

“Of course.” Hoop looked away, stroking his hands together. Two other people entered med bay, both of them ragged, unkempt. She recognized Kasyanov, the dark-skinned ship’s doctor who had given her the initial examination. But the man she didn’t know. Heavily built, a sad, saggy face—his name tag said Baxter. He sat on another bed and stared at her.

“Hi,” she said. He only nodded.

“So what happened to you?” Hoop asked.

Ripley closed her eyes and a rush of memories flooded in—the planet, Kane, the alien’s birth, its rapid growth, and then the terror and loss on the Nostromo before her escape in the shuttle. That final confrontation with the devil. The memories shocked her with their violence, their immediacy. It was as if the past was more real than the present.

“I was on a towing vessel,” she said. “Crew died in an accident, the ship’s core went into meltdown. I’m the only one who got away.”

“ Nostromo ,” Hoop said.

“How do you know that?”

“I accessed the shuttle’s computer. I remember reading about your ship, actually, when I was a kid. It’s gone down in the ‘lost without trace’ files.”

Ripley blinked.

“How long was I out there?” But she already knew the answer was going to be difficult. She’d seen that in Garcia’s reaction, and saw it again now in Hoop.

“Thirty-seven years.”

Ripley looked down at her hands, the needles in her forearms.

I haven’t aged a day, she thought. And then she pictured Amanda, her sweet daughter who’d hated the idea that she was going away, even for seventeen months. It’ll make things so easy for us when I get back , Ripley had told her, hugging her tight. Here, look. She’d pointed at Amanda’s computer screen and scrolled through a calendar there. Your eleventh birthday. I’ll be back for that, and I’ll buy you the best present ever.

“Going to tell her about Samson?” Baxter said.

Ripley looked around the room.

“Who’s Samson?”

No one replied.

Baxter shrugged and walked across to her bed, laying a tablet computer on the sheet.

“Fine,” he said. “Easier to show her, anyway.” He tapped an icon. “The Samson is locked into our other surviving docking arm. Has been for seventy-seven days. It’s sealed. These things are inside, and they’re also the reason we’re fucked.”

He swiped the screen.

At that moment, Ripley doubted everything. The fact that she was awake. Her being there, the feel of sheets against her skin, and the sharp prick of needles in her arms. She doubted the idea that she had survived at all, and hoped that this was simply her dying nightmare.

“Oh, no,” she breathed, and the atmosphere in the room changed instantly.

She started to shake. When she blinked her dreams were close again, the shadowy monsters the size of the stars. So was it just a dream? she wondered. A nightmare? She looked around at these people she did not know, and as panic bit in she wondered where they could have come from.

“No,” she said, her dry throat burning. “Not here!”

Kasyanov shouted something, Garcia held her down, and another sharp pain bit into the back of her hand.

But even as everything faded away, there was no peace to be found.

“She knew what they were,” Hoop said.

They were back on the bridge. Kasyanov and Garcia had remained in med bay to keep Ripley under observation, with orders to call him back down the moment she stirred. He wanted to be there for her. Such an ordeal she’d suffered, and now she’d woken into something worse.

Besides that, she might be able to help.

“Maybe she’ll know how to kill them,” Baxter said.

“Maybe,” Hoop said. “Maybe not. At the very least, she recognized them from that.” He nodded at the monitor. It held the final image they’d gleaned from the Samson ’s internal camera. Then they’d lost contact, thirty days ago.

Jones had been long-dead by then. The things had dragged him back into the passenger hold and killed him. They’d grown into dark, shadowy shapes that none of them could quite make out. The size of a person, maybe even larger, the four shapes remained all but motionless. It made them even more difficult to see on the badly lit image.

Baxter scrolled back through the views of Bay Three— images they’d all come to know so well. The trio of cameras Welford and Powell had set up showed the same as ever—no movement, no sign of disturbance. The doors remained locked and solid. Microphones picked up no noise. They’d lost view of the inside of Samson , but at least they could still keep watch.

And if those things did smash through the doors, and burst out of the docking bay? They had a plan. But none of them had much faith in it.

“I’ll go and see how Powell and Welford are getting on,” Hoop said. “Shout if there’s anything from med bay.”

“Why do you think she came here?” Baxter said.

“I’m not sure she knows.” Hoop picked up the plasma torch he’d taken to carrying, slung it over his shoulder, and left the bridge.

The torch was a small, handheld version, used in the mines for melting and hardening sand deposits. The biggest ones they had down there ran on rails, and were used for forming the solid walls of new mine shafts— blast the sand, melt it, and it hardened again into ten-inch-thick slabs. The smaller torches could be wielded by a miner to fix breaches.