Tim Lebbon - Alien - Out of the Shadows

Ripley laughs as she watches her daughter creeping down out of the sun, putting on a faux-scared expression, clawing her hands and growling. Then she shouts for her mother to follow her, and Ripley is aware of the people crowding in behind her. These are popular ruins, one of the city’s main tourist venues, and there is rarely a quiet time.

The shadows envelop her. They carry a curious chill, and the damp, musty smell of places never touched by sunlight. Amanda has disappeared ahead of her. Ripley doesn’t feel the need to call, but then she looks back and sees that she is alone.

Alone down here, in the shadows, in the darkness.

Someone cries out. She edges forward, running one hand along the sandy wall. The floor is uneven and she almost trips, then her hand touches something different. Smooth, lighter than rock, more textured.

There are skulls in the wall. The skulls are the walls, thousands of them, and each one has a massive trauma wound—a hole, a smashed face. She fancies that she can see tooth marks on the bones, but perhaps that’s only —

My imagination, she thinks, but then the cry comes again. It’s Amanda, and recognizing the voice seems to conjure the girl. She is held back against the wall across a small, bone-lined room, clasped around the arms, shoulders and legs by the gnarled skeletal fingers of the long-dead.

She sees her mother, but there is no joy in her eyes.

Her chest explodes outward beneath her loose dress, and teeth bite their way through the material. Jagged, terrible teeth.

“Holy shit,” Ripley breathed, and she looked down into the darkness. For a while she was lost, not knowing where or when she was, and whether that had been a bastardised memory, or a vision of the future. Time swirled, uncertain and inelegant. I’m not sure how much more of this I can take.

Kasyanov frowned at her and began to speak, but Ripley turned away.

“Come down!” Hoop shouted up out of the ship. “There are lights. And it’s… weird.”

“Weird how?” Ripley asked, thinking, Worn steps and skulls and bones in the walls…

“Just come and see.”

She dropped down beside Hoop, still trying to shake the dregs of that brief, horrible vision from her mind.

The miners had been this way. That didn’t comfort Ripley at all, though the lights they’d strung up inside this damaged portion of ship did help. The explosion had blasted a hole through the ship’s skin, and inside it had scoured along the interior levels, knocking down partitions and clearing anything that might have been in the way. It reminded Ripley of a wasp’s nest, layer upon layer laid out to some fluid symmetry, and from where they now stood—at the epicenter of the exploded area— they could see at least four lower levels exposed.

She supposed that if the Marion were sliced in half, something similar would be revealed.

But the walls, floors, and ceilings of this ship were nothing like the Marion. Thick tubes ran between levels, and where they’d been ruptured, a solidified flow hung from them. It looked like frozen honey, or fine sand caught mid-pour. The walls had rotted back to bare framing, the struts themselves bent and deformed by the ancient explosion.

The levels were not as equidistant as she’d first thought, and this didn’t seem to be a result of the damage. It seemed that they had been formed this way.

“This is… weird,” Sneddon echoed, her fascination obvious. Filming with her camera again, she moved forward, climbing down a slope of detritus toward the first solid floor. Its surface was uneven, pitted in places, lined here and there, looking very much like age-worn skin.

“I’m not liking this,” Ripley said. “Not one bit.”

She’d heard it said that nature did not like right angles, and there were none in evidence here. The material in the walls and floors was a dark gray color, but not consistent. Here, there were patches where it was lighter, and appeared to be thinner. There, it was almost black, as if blood had pooled and hardened just below the surface, creating a hematoma. It resembled the mottled skin of an old corpse.

“Great way to make a ship,” Lachance said.

“What?” Baxter asked. “What do you mean?”

“Growing it,” Sneddon said. “This wasn’t built, it was grown.”

“No way…” Kasyanov said, but when Ripley looked at the doctor, she saw wide-eyed fascination reflected in the Russian’s eyes.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Ripley said.

“We can’t go back out there,” Hoop said.

“But they drove us in here! Are we just going to do what they want?”

“How can they want anything,” Lachance protested. “They’re just dumb animals, and we’re their prey!”

“None of us knows what they are,” Ripley said. “Sneddon?”

Sneddon only shrugged.

“I’ve told you before, I’ve never seen anything like them. Their apparent viciousness doesn’t mean they can’t act and think together. Back in prehistoric times, velociraptors hunted together, and there are theories that posit advanced communication between them. But…” She looked around, shaking her head. “I don’t think this is their ship.”

From outside came the sounds of hard claws skittering on the ship’s skin. They all looked up, and Ripley saw a shadow shifting back from the damaged area by which they’d entered. The silhouette stretched up for a moment, flickering across the cavern’s high ceiling before disappearing again.

“They’re waiting up there,” she said. She felt so helpless.

“We’ve got to go,” Hoop said. “Inside. Follow the lights that are still working, moving as fast as we can. Then as soon as we find another way out, we take it.” He looked around at them all, and his face was drawn from the pain. “I don’t like this anymore than the rest of you, but there are too many of them out there. If we can trick them, instead of fight them, I’ll be happier with that.”

“But something happened to the miners down here,” Sneddon said.

“Yeah, but we have an advantage. We know some of what happened, and we know to be careful.” He waited for any words of dissent, but there were none.

I don’t like this one bit, Ripley thought. But she looked up again, at the ragged opening in the ship’s strange hull, and knew that they had no choice. The option of climbing back up there, with those things waiting just out of sight… it wasn’t an option at all.

Hoop went first, taking the small flashlight from his pocket again. The string of bulbs hung by the miners continued to work, but Hoop’s light penetrated the shadows they cast.

The group moved quickly. Almost confidently.

Ripley tried to shake the recent vision from her mind. Those other daytime nightmares had been more surreal, but less troubling, featuring Amanda at an age when Ripley had never known her. But this one was the worst yet. Her daughter was young, sweet, innocent and beautiful, exactly as she remembered her. And Ripley’s inability to protect her daughter against the monsters still rang true, settling into her soul like a canker of guilt, eating, consuming, as if it had all been real.

She even felt herself starting to cry. But tears would only blur her surroundings, making everything more dangerous. She had to keep her wits about her.

She had to survive.

As they moved inward from the damaged area of the extraterrestrial ship, the surroundings became even stranger. Ripley thought of the old story of Jonah in the heart of the whale, such a disturbing image when translated to their current situation. Much of their surroundings showed distinctly biological features— uneven floors lined with inlaid tubing that resembled veins; skin-like walls, hardened over time yet still speckled with dust-filled pores and imperfections.