Tim Lebbon - Alien - Out of the Shadows

“I’ll show you,” he said, smiling. “Wondering if we can fight fire with fire.”

Hoop punched in the access code and the door slid open. Lighting flickered on inside, illuminating a small, sterile-looking room, more like a research lab than the workshop that led to it. He’d spent quite a bit of time in here, toying with chemicals and developing various application methods. Jordan had always turned a blind eye to the engineers’ hobbies in research and development, because it relieved boredom and passed the time. But this had really been Welford’s baby. Sometimes he’d spent twelve hours at a time in here, getting Powell to bring him food and drinks down from the galley or rec room. Hoop had never been sure exactly why Welford had become so interested in the spray gun technology. Perhaps it was simply because it was something he excelled in.

“So what’s this?” Ripley asked.

“Welford’s folly,” Sneddon said. “I helped him with some of the designs.”

“You did?” Hoop asked, surprised.

“Sure. Some of the stuff he was using down here was… pretty cutting-edge, actually.”

Hoop hefted one of the units Welford had been working on. It looked like a heavy weapon of some sort, but was actually surprisingly light. He shook it, already knowing that the reservoir would be empty.

“We’re going to fight them with water pistols?” Ripley said.

“Not water,” Sneddon said. “Acid.”

“Fire with fire,” Hoop said, smiling and holding up the gun.

“The miners had been asking us for something like this for quite a while,” Sneddon said. “The trimonite is usually only found in very small deposits, and surrounded by other less dense materials—sands, shales, quartzes, and other crystalline structures. It’s always been a timeintensive process, sorting through it. The idea with this was to melt away all the other stuff with hydrofluoric acid, and keep the trimonite untouched.”

“Sounds dangerous,” Ripley said.

“That’s why it’s still just in the lab,” Hoop said. “We were looking for a way to make the application process safer.”

“And you found it?”

“No,” Hoop said. “But safe’s the last thing on my mind right now.”

“How do we know this will even bother them?” Kasyanov asked, negative as ever. “They have acid in their veins!”

“There’s only one way to find out,” Hoop said. “We have two units. Let’s get them primed, and we can get out of here.”

Ten minutes later they stood ready at the workshop’s locked doors. Hoop had shrugged a tool bag over his shoulder, packed with all the tools he thought they might need. He and Sneddon carried the spray guns, containment reservoirs fully loaded with hydrofluoric acid. Ripley and Lachance had charge thumpers, the charge containers loaded with six-inch bolts. They wore bolt belts around their waists, heavy with spare ammunition. Baxter and Kasyanov were carrying newly charged plasma torches.

They should have felt safer. Hoop should have felt ready. But he was still filled with dread as he prepared to open the doors.

“You all follow me,” he said. “Sneddon, take the rear. Eyes and ears open. We’ll move slow and steady, back around the hub, down the staircases to the docking deck. Once we get to the corridor outside Bay Three, that’s when I get to work.” He looked around at them all. Ripley was the only one who offered him a smile.

“On three.”

It took almost half an hour to work their way back around the ship’s accommodation hub and down to the docking deck. On a normal day it might have been half that time, but they were watching the shadows.

Hoop expected to see the surviving alien at any moment, leaping toward them from a recessed doorway, appearing around a closed corner, dropping from above when they passed beneath domed junctions. He kept the spray gun primed and aimed forward—it was much easier to manage than a charge thumper. There was no telling how effective the acid might be, but the thumpers were inaccurate as weapons if the target was more than a few yards away, and the plasma torches were probably more dangerous to them than the creature.

They’d seen that on the Delilah.

Hoop’s finger stroked the trigger. I should be wearing breathing apparatus, he thought. Goggles. A face mask. If any of the hydrofluoric acid splashed back at him, or even misted in the air and drifted across his skin, he’d be burnt to a crisp. His clothes, skin, flesh, bones, would melt away beneath the acid’s ultra-corrosive attack.

Stupid of him. Stupid! To think that they could take on the creature with a form of its own weapon. His mind raced with alternatives.

He should switch back to the thumper.

He should have Baxter take lead with the plasma torch.

They should stop and think things through.

Hoop exhaled hard, tensed his jaw. Just fucking get on with it, he thought. No more dicking around! This is it.

Descending the wide staircase into the docking level, they paused beside a row of three doors marked with bright yellow “Emergency” symbols. Baxter opened the first door and took out three vacuum-packed bags.

“Suits?” Ripley asked.

“Yeah, everything’s in there,” Baxter replied. “Suit, foldable helmet, compressed air tank, tether cable.” He looked around at the rest. “Everyone suit up.”

They took turns opening the bags and pulling themselves into the silver space suits. It was like being wrapped in thin crinkly plastic, with stiff sealing rings where the parts fit together. Fabric belts slipped through loops and kept the material from flapping too loosely. The helmets were similarly flexible, with comm units sewn into the fabric. The suits were designed for emergency use only, placed close to the docking bays in case of a catastrophic decompression. The air tanks would last for maybe an hour, the suits themselves intended purely to enable the user to get to the nearest safe place.

When they were all ready, they moved on.

Reaching the corridor outside Bay Three without incident, Hoop looked around at everyone else. They seemed more pumped up than they had before, more confident. But they couldn’t let confidence get the better of them.

“Baxter, Sneddon, that way.” He pointed past the closed doors and toward Bay Four, where Ripley’s shuttle was docked. “Close the doors in Bay Four, make sure as hell they’re secure, and keep watch. Kasyanov, Lachance, back the way we came. Close the corridor blast doors. Ripley, with me. Let’s hustle.”

When the others moved off he shrugged the tool bag from his shoulder and held the spray gun out to Ripley. “Just hold it for me.”

She took the acid gun from him, one eyebrow raised.

“Too dangerous for me to actually use, eh?”

“Ripley—”

“Show me. I can handle myself.”

Hoop sighed, then smiled.

“Okay, you prime it here, wait until this light is showing red. Aim. Squeeze the trigger. It’ll fire compressed jets in short pulses.”

“Shouldn’t we be wearing proper safety gear?”

“Definitely.” He turned away, knelt, and opened the tool bag. “I won’t need long,” he said. The space suit made normal movements a little more awkward, but he took a heavy portable drill out of the bag, fitted it with a narrow drill bit, and then propped it against one of the door panels.

Beyond, in the vestibule to Bay Three, lay the vacuum of space.

“You sure that door will hold?” Ripley asked. “Once you get through, and we start decompressing—”

“No!” he snapped. “No, I’m not sure. But what else do you suggest?”

Ripley didn’t answer. But she nodded once.