Tim Lebbon - Alien - Out of the Shadows

“Then my time here is limited.” He stood away from the control desk and started looking around the shuttle again. It was cramped, confined—and way, way too small.

Ignoring the computer, Ripley started manual processing of systems information.

It only took three minutes to realize how screwed they were.

Hoop had worked with androids before. In the deep asteroid mines of Wilson’s Scarps, they were often the first ones down and the last ones back. They’d been perfectly reasonable, amenable, quiet, honest, and strong. Safe. He couldn’t say he’d liked them, exactly, but they’d never been dangerous or intimidating. Never scheming.

Occasionally he’d heard of malfunctions in some of the earlier military-grade androids, and there were unconfirmed reports—little more than rumors, really— that the military had suffered human losses as a result. But they were a different breed of android, designed for strength but with a built-in expiration date. They were easy to spot. Their designers hadn’t been too concerned with aesthetics.

That must have been the case on Nostromo . And now, assuming Ripley was right, the AI had somehow followed her, and was still using her for its programed mission. As his team discussed their options, she looked wretched— taking in the conversation, looking at each crew member who expressed an opinion, and yet remaining silent. She smoked cigarette after cigarette, and drank coffee.

She must think she’s still dreaming, he mused, consumed by nightmares. And every now and then she glanced across at him as if checking that he was on board with all of this.

Because it turned out that they were more royally screwed than any of them had thought.

The plan they were slowly forming—crazy as it was— seemed to be the only way out. It was a last chance, and they had no option but to grab it.

“You’re sure about the timescales?” Powell asked. “Only a few days until we start skimming the atmosphere?”

“Sure as I can be,” Lachance replied.

“I thought we had a couple of weeks left,” Kasyanov said, voice raised as fear clasped her.

“Sorry. I lost my crystal ball in the collision.” Lachance rested in the pilot’s chair, turned around to face them all. The rest sat or stood around the bridge, in seats or leaning against equipment terminals. It was the first time Ripley had been with all eight of them together, but Hoop couldn’t sense any nervousness in her. If anything, she was too distracted for that.

“And there’s nothing you guys can do?” Kasyanov said, looking at Powell, Welford, and then Hoop. He didn’t like the accusation in her eyes, as if they hadn’t done their best. “I mean, you’re engineers.”

“Kasyanov, I think I’ve made it pretty clear,” Lachance said. “Our attitude control is damaged beyond repair, retro capability is down to thirty percent. Several containment bulkheads are cracked, and there’s a good chance if we initiate thrust we’ll just flash-fry ourselves with radiation.” He paused briefly.

“We do still have coffee, though. That’s one positive.”

“How do we know all that’s true?” Kasyanov asked. “It’s getting desperate here. We should go outside, look again at all the damage.”

“You know because I’m the best pilot who’s ever worked for Kelland,” Lachance said. “And the fact that Hoop, Welford, and Powell have kept us all alive for this long is a fucking miracle. Fixing the hull breaches, repressurizing the vented sections of the ship. That’s why you know it’s true.”

Kasyanov started to say some more, but Garcia put a hand on her arm. Hoop didn’t think she even squeezed— just the contact was enough to silence the doctor.

“However much we wish it wasn’t true, it is,” Hoop said. “And we’ve got no more time to waste. We think we have a plan, but it’s not going to be easy.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Kasyanov asked.

“Me, Sneddon, Ripley.”

“Ripley? The stranger who just woke up from half-a-century of snoozing? What’s she got to do with this?”

Ripley glanced across at Kasyanov, then away again, looking down at the coffee cup in her hand. Hoop waited for her to speak, but she remained silent.

“This isn’t a conspiracy, Kasyanov,” he said. “Hear us out.”

The doctor drew in a breath and seemed to puff herself up, ready to say something else, challenge him some more. But then she nodded.

“I’m sorry, Hoop… everyone. Just so strung out.” She and Ripley exchanged weak smiles.

“We all are,” Hoop said. “It’s been over seventy days, waiting for some sign that our signal’s been picked up, acknowledged and relayed onward, and that someone’s coming for us. Maybe the frequency’s been frazzled, and we’re just coming through as background fuzz. Or maybe someone’s heard us, but we’re too far out, and it’s too expensive to mount a rescue.”

“Or there’s just not the time,” Baxter said. “Changing course, plotting a route, estimating the fuel requirements. Anyone who did catch the signal would have a lot to do before they even got here.”

“Right,” Hoop said. “So we’re running out of time, and now we’ve got to help ourselves. More than we have been. More than just patching up problems while we wait.”

“Escape pods?” Powell asked.

“We’ve talked about that,” Lachance said, waving the suggestion aside.

“Yeah,” Sneddon said. “That’s just a slow death. We’re in a drifting orbit now, and even if we could rig a way to steer the pods more accurately, to land as close to the mine as possible, we could still go down miles away. We’d be scattered, alone, and vulnerable.”

“The Samson, then.” Baxter had mentioned this before, putting it forward as their only real option, if the individual escape pods wouldn’t work. They could open the doors, kill the aliens, then take the Samson away from LV178.

But it was a dropship, built for short-distance transport to and from the surface of a planet. It wasn’t equipped for deep space travel. No stasis pods, no recycling environmental systems. It was a no-go.

“We’d starve to death, suffocate, or end up murdering each other,” Lachance said. He looked at Baxter, wearing a deadpan face. “I’d kill you first, you know.”

“You’d try,” Baxter muttered.

“Yeah, sure, the Samson,” Powell said. “And who’s going to stand by those doors when we open them? We can’t see what those things are doing inside.”

“We can’t escape on the Samson,” Hoop said. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t need it. Ripley?” She looked uncertain, but she stood, stubbed out her cigarette, and lit another.

“Hoop and Sneddon came up with this,” she said, taking the first drag. “It might work. The Narcissus is a lifeboat as well as a deep space shuttle. Environmental systems, carbon dioxide recycling capability.”

“But for nine of us?” Welford asked.

“We take turns in the stasis pod,” Ripley said. “But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. There’s another problem.”

“Of course there is,” Powell said. “Why should anything be easy?”

“What’s the problem?” Lachance asked.

“The shuttle’s fuel cell is degraded,” Ripley said. “Less than ten percent charge left, which is nowhere near enough.”

“Enough to get us away from the Marion , surely,” Kasyanov said.

“I’ve run the figures,” Hoop said. “Lachance, Sneddon, I’d like you both to check them. But we need enough power to get the overloaded shuttle away from Marion , out of orbit, and accelerated to a speed that’ll get us back within the outer rim before we’ve died of old age. I figure we need eighty percent of a full charge, at least. Any more than that just means we can accelerate to a faster speed, get there quicker.”