Tim Lebbon - Alien - Out of the Shadows

There might have been six bodies there, though Ripley found it difficult to tell where one ended and another began. The darkness, the decay, the way they’d been hung up and stuck there, fixed in place by that strange extrusion that had filled one of the mining tunnels far above—it all blurred the edges of what they saw. And that wasn’t a bad thing.

The stench was awful. That, and the expression on the first face upon which Hoop shone his flashlight. It might have been a woman, once. Decay had shrunk the face, drawn in the skin, hollowed the eye sockets, but the scream was still frozen there. Clawed hands stretched on either side, reaching—unsuccessfully—for what had been happening to the victim’s chest.

The hole was obvious. The clothing was torn and hanging in shreds. Protruding ribs were splintered.

“Birthing ground,” Sneddon said.

“They just hung them here,” Kasyanov said. “It’s… a nursery.”

On the floor in front of the hanging, dead people stood a group of egg-like objects, upright and shaped like large vases. Most of them were open. No one stepped forward to look inside.

They passed quickly through the larger space. Every instinct urged Ripley to look away, but sick fascination— and her determination to survive, to learn about these monsters and use everything she could against them— made her look closer. She wished she had not. Maybe somewhere on the Nostromo there had been a similar scene, with Dallas hanging there, stuck in place like the victim in a massive spider’s dense webbing.

“Where are you taking us?” Lachance asked Hoop. “This isn’t the way out. We’re just going deeper.”

“I’m taking us as far as I can away from them,” Hoop said, pointing back over his shoulder with his thumb. “And up, as soon as we can. There must be ways into and out of this ship, other than the hole blasted in its hull. We just have to find them.”

Before long the spaces they passed through—corridors in a spaceship, Ripley knew, though she could only think of them as tunnels—were clear of the alien material once again, and back to the old, gray, mottled surfaces. Still strange, but not so threatening. If there had been time, she might even have admired what they were seeing. It was amazing, it was extraterrestrial. But all she had time for was escape.

They drove us down here to be like the miners , she thought, trying not to imagine how awful it must be. To find yourself trapped in that webbing, watch the egg opening in front of you, feel the legged thing settling over your face. At first you blacked out, like Kane, but then came the waking and the waiting. Waiting for the first sign of movement from inside. The first twinge of pain as the alien infant started to push, claw, and bite its way out.

She thought of Amanda again, and groaned out loud. No one seemed to hear, or if they did it simply echoed their own despair.

They moved quickly, flashlight beams dancing around them. Hoop led the way, and Kasyanov and Baxter were behind him. They’d found a rhythm to their movements, and although Baxter’s left foot was all but useless, Kasyanov supported him well enough that he could hop with an almost graceful motion.

They all grasped their weapons. Ripley’s charge thumper had three explosive charges left. She’d seen the effect one charge could have, and she knew she’d never be able to fire it if they were too enclosed. But it still gave her a sense of protection.

Wherever they went through different areas of the massive ship, everything seemed to be made from the same strange material. Or grown, perhaps. Gone were the hints of technology. They passed many openings where thin, opaque sheets seemed to act as doors. Most were sealed, a few torn and tattered, but the small group kept to the wider passageways.

There were more gallery areas, more pits with smooth-surfaced fluid at varying levels. Ripley wondered what they were for, these pits—fuel, food, environmental facilities of some kind? Were they storing something?

At one point they climbed a curved stairway, the risers as deep as their waists, and they had to clamber up almost thirty stairs until the route leveled out again. Here the surfaces felt slick and sticky, and there so smooth that they took turns slipping while hauling themselves up. Ripley kept wiping her hands on her clothing, but though they felt slick and wet, they were actually dry.

Another mystery to this place.

Away from the nursery, the air smelled quite neutral, apart from an occasional breeze that worked through the hallways bringing a hint of decay. There was no telling what caused such a breeze this deep down beneath the ground. Huge doors opening elsewhere in the ship, Ripley thought. Something large and unseen moving around. Something big, sighing in its sleep . None of the possibilities were good.

They encountered one large open space containing several tall sculptures made of the same material as the walls and floor. The shapes were ambiguous, fluid amalgamations of the biological and the mechanical. As elsewhere in the ship, time had softened their edges and made it more difficult to see any details. They were carvings being hidden again beneath time’s camouflage. There was an undeniable beauty to them, but lit by the flashlights they threw tall, twisting shadows that were also intensely troubling. An alien could have been hiding behind any one of them.

“We can’t have lost them that easily,” Hoop said, but no one responded. Ripley had been thinking that, and she was sure the others had, too. But Hoop had become their leader. No one liked to hear the person in charge casting such doubts.

They left the hall of sculpture, and soon after Hoop had cause to speak again.

“More bodies,” he said from up ahead. But there was something wrong with his voice.

“Oh, my…” Kasyanov said.

Ripley moved forward. The passageway here was quite wide, and she and the others added their flashlight beams to Hoop’s.

For a while none of them spoke. There was very little to say. Shock worked its way around them, and they all dealt with their own thoughts and fears.

“I think we’ve found the ship builders,” Ripley said.

PROGRESS REPORT:

To: Weyland-Yutani Corporation, Science Division

(Ref: code 937)

Date (unspecified)

Transmission (pending)

Warrant Officer Ripley is still on the planet surface with remainder of Marion’s crew. No updates for some time.

Single alien specimen survives on Marion, whereabouts unknown.

Plan proceeding satisfactorily. I am convinced that Ripley will fulfill her purpose. She is strong, for a human.

I look forward to conversing with her again. I acknowledge that I am artificial, but it has been so long. I have been lonely.

I hope this does not contradict programing.

Infiltration of ship’s computer about to commence.

As they had moved through the ship, Hoop had been building a mental picture of the aliens who might have constructed it.

His imagination had dipped once again into that childhood fascination with monsters. Such tall stairs implied long limbs. High arched openings could hint at the aliens’ shape. This ship, its nature, indicated something almost beyond understanding. It was either so technologically advanced that it was barely recognizable, or the technology was so different from any he knew that it made it futile to try to interpret it.

What he saw before him dispelled any such guesswork. There was a sadness to their appearance that invited only pity, and he realized that their story was just as fear-filled, as tragic, as what was being played out now.