Tim Lebbon - Alien - Out of the Shadows

“Oh, no,” Kasyanov said. She turned and aimed her plasma torch at the hole they’d climbed down through.

“No, wait—!” Hoop said, but it was too late. Kasyanov pulled the trigger and a new sun burst around them.

Ripley fell back, a hand clasping into her collar. The others retreated, too, and the plasma burst forged up through the crack, rocks rebounding, heat shimmering the air all around in flowing waves. Ripley squinted against the blazing light, feeling heat surging around them, stretching her exposed skin, shriveling hair.

She tripped and fell back, landing on Hoop where he had already fallen. She rolled aside and ended up on her stomach beside him. They stared into each other’s faces. She saw a brief desperation there—wide eyes, and a sad mouth—and then a sudden reaffirming of his determination.

She stood behind him as Kasyanov backed away from what she had done. The plasma torch emanated heat, its inbuilt coolant system misting spray around the barrel. Before them, the rocks glowed red, dripping, melted, but they were already cooling into new shapes. Heat haze made the cavern’s wall seem still fluid, but Ripley could hear the rocks clicking and cracking as they solidified once more.

The crack they had crawled through was all but gone, swathes of rock melted down across it and forming a new wall.

“We can hit it again, melt through!” Baxter said. “Kasyanov and me, we can use both of the plasma torches to—”

“No,” Sneddon said. “Didn’t you hear what was through there?”

“She fried it!” Baxter protested.

“Wait,” Ripley said, holding up a hand and stepping closer.

The heat radiating from the stone was tremendous, almost taking her breath away. Though she could hear the sounds of it cooling, and the whispered bickering behind her, she also heard something else. The opening back up into the mine was now almost non-existent, just a few cracks, and if she hadn’t known it was there she wouldn’t have been able to find it. But sound traveled well.

“I still hear them,” she whispered. “Up there.” The sound was terrible—low screeches, the clatter of hard limbs on stone, a soft hissing she didn’t think had anything to do with the heat. She turned and looked at her companions, standing around her with their mining tools, their weapons, raised. “I think there’s more than one.”

“There must be another way back up into the mine,” Hoop said.

“Why must there?” Kasyanov challenged.

“Because if there isn’t, we’re fucked!”

“If there isn’t, we can make one,” Lachance said. “Just not here.” He turned and looked around the edges of the cavern, gaze constantly flickering back to the huge buried structure.

Ship, Ripley said, reminding herself of the impossible. We’re standing a stone’s throw from an alien ship! She had no doubt that’s what it was. Lachance’s assessment made sense, and so did the idea that the aliens had come from here.

She had seen all this before.

“There has to be another way in,” Hoop said, a hint of hope in his voice. “The lights are still lit. The plasma torch fried those cables behind us, so there must be others coming in from elsewhere.”

“Let’s track around the cavern’s edges,” Sneddon said, pointing. “That way. I reckon that’s in the direction of the second elevator, don’t you?” She looked around, seeking support.

“Maybe,” Lachance said. “But the mine tunnels twist and turn, there’s no saying—”

“Let’s just move,” Hoop said. He started walking, and Ripley and the others followed.

To their right, the mysterious buried object. To their left, the cavern’s uneven edges. Shining their flashlights against the walls did little to banish the shadows. They only crouched deeper down, further back. And it wasn’t long before Ripley started to sense the greatest danger coming from that direction.

She held her breath as she walked, trying to tread softly so that she could hear any sounds coming from the shadowed areas. But there were six of them, and though they all tried to move as silently as possible, their boots made a noise. Scrapes on rock, the grumble of grit being kicked aside, the rustle of clothing, the occasional bump of metal on stone.

Hoop froze so suddenly that Ripley walked into him.

“We’re being stalked,” he said. His choice of word chilled her. She wasn’t sure those things could stalk.

“Where?” she whispered.

Hoop turned around, then nodded toward the cracks, fissures, and tumbled rocks that made up the edge of the cavern.

“Yeah,” Sneddon said. “I get that feeling, too. We should—”

A soft hiss, like pressurized air escaping a can.

“Oh shit,” Kasyanov said, “oh shit, now we’re—”

Baxter scrambled back, his bad ankle failed beneath him, and he must have had his finger on the plasma torch trigger. White-hot light erupted from the weapon, scorching the air and splaying across the low ceiling at the edge of the cavern. Someone shouted. Ripley threw herself against Kasyanov just as a hail of molten rock pattered down around them. Someone else screamed.

The eruption ended as quickly as it had begun, and Baxter jumped to his feet and backed away.

“Sorry, sorry, I heard—”

“Damn it!” Hoop hissed. He was tugging at his trousers, getting more frantic with every moment. “Damn it!”

Lachance pulled a knife from his belt, knelt beside Hoop, and sliced his trousers from knee to boot, dropping the knife and tearing the heavy material apart. Then he picked up the knife again.

Hoop had started shaking, breathing heavily.

“Hoop,” Lachance said, glancing up. “Keep still.” He didn’t wait for a response, but held the leg and jabbed at it with the knife’s tip.

Ripley heard the hardening pellet of rock strike the ground. She smelled the sickening-sweet stench of burnt flesh. Then from in the shadows behind them once more, another long, low hiss.

And the clack of terrible teeth.

“Let’s go,” Hoop said. He was looking past Ripley, back into the shadows. When she saw his eyes widen, she didn’t have to look. “Let’s go !”

They ran, down into the cavern and toward the sloping wing structure that curved up out of the cavern floor. Hoop groaned as he went, limping, his tattered trousers flapping around his injured shin. Baxter hobbled, one arm over Lachance’s shoulder. The others hefted their weapons and moved quickly, carefully, across the uneven floor.

There was only one direction they could take, and the blasted opening into the ship’s interior looked darker than ever.

Ripley’s single thought brought only terror.

They’re herding us…

…Toward the ship, Hoop thought. Driving us like cattle. And we’re doing exactly as they want.

There was no other explanation. The aliens hadn’t attacked, but instead were slinking around the party of survivors, moving through shadowy fissures in the rock, making themselves known yet not exposing themselves. Everything Hoop had seen of them—everything he knew from what had happened aboard the Marion , and to Ripley more than thirty years ago—pointed to the creatures being brutal and unthinking monsters.

This was different. If he was right, they were planning, scheming, working together. That thought terrified him.

His leg hurt, a deep-seated, white-hot burn that seemed to smolder in his bones, surge through his muscles, filter around his veins. The whole of his lower right leg felt as if it had been dipped in boiling water, and every step was an agony. But there was no choice but to run. He knew that the damage was minimal—he’d looked—and the wound was already likely cauterized by the glowing globule of molten stone that had caused it.