Tim Lebbon - Alien - Out of the Shadows

It made him feel very small and ineffectual. Even bearing the spray gun he was just a weak creature needing a weapon to protect him. Those aliens were their own weapons, perfect hunting and killing organisms. It was almost as if they were created as such, though he had no wish to imagine the creator.

Hoop had never been a God-fearing man, and he regarded such outdated beliefs as ignorant and foolish. But perhaps there were gods other than those the human race had once known.

Light flickered around the large room, casting movement into the eggs, into the eye sockets of the dog-aliens, and into corners where anything could be hiding. He sensed everyone’s nervousness, and he felt it himself. This was far more than any of them had expected.

“We’ll get through this,” he said softly, but no one answered. None of them could know that for sure.

At the end of the room, passing through the opening to whatever might lie beyond, they came close enough to touch one of the cocooned victims. Hoop passed his flashlight over the dead thing and paused on its face. The creatures they’d found back in the tunnels had been deformed by the weapon that had ended them, but apart from their chest wounds, these were whole.

This one looked agonized and wretched. Hoop wondered at a universe that could still express such pain, after so long.

He shone the light into the space beyond and then entered.

Another tunnel, another corridor, another hallway. The walls were curved, the floors uneven and damp. The dampness was a new thing, and he paused to sweep his foot across the surface. Fluid was bubbled on the floor, as if the surface was greasy, and his boot broke a thousand bubbles into a smear.

“Slippery in here,” he said back over his shoulder. Ripley was there again, shining her flashlight past him.

“The smell’s changed, too,” she said. She was right. Until now the ship’s interior had smelled of age—dust, staleness, air filtered in from the atmosphere-processed mine to lift scents from all around. But here it was different. He breathed in deeply and frowned, trying to place the smell. It was subtle but foul, slightly tangy, like someone who had gone unwashed for a long time. There was also something underlying it that he couldn’t place at all. Not a smell, but a sensation.

“It’s warmer,” Ripley said. “Not the air, but… it smells warm.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Like something alive.”

“The ship?” Ripley asked.

He shook his head.

“I think if it ever was alive, in any form, that was long ago. This is more recent. This is them.”

He heard Ripley passing the word back —Go careful, stay sharp !—and then he moved forward once again. Always forward. Going back was still an option, but it also felt like it would be a mistake.

Responsibility weighed down heavier than ever, gathering mass the more time that passed without incident. He’d never been a great decision maker—it often took him a long while just to choose dinner from the Marion’s limited menu—but he feared that if he decided they should turn back, the act of making that choice might doom them all.

Better to forge forward.

As they moved on, the dampness and the smells in the air increased. The inside of his nose started to sting. He was sweating, the humidity rising, nervousness drawing moisture from his body. His mouth was parched, his throat sore.

“We shouldn’t be going this way,” Baxter said. “This is bad. This is wrong.”

“It’s all wrong!” Lachance said sharply. “But this is up towards the top of the ship again, and that’s good enough for me.”

“What about the things they hatched?” Sneddon asked, and Hoop stopped dead. Something’s been bugging me and that’s…

“Where are they?” he asked, turning around to look at the others.

“That was a long time ago,” Ripley said.

“We don’t know how long they live. The ones in the Samson waited for weeks, so maybe they can hibernate for years. Or longer.”

“So there could be a lot more down here than just those hatched from the miners,” Sneddon said.

“It doesn’t change anything,” Hoop said, and he waited for any response. But everyone was looking at him. “Changes nothing. We’re here now. We go forward, up, and out.”

They continued on, but the corridor—twisting and turning, erring only slightly upward—ended at another wide, dark room.

Oh, no, Hoop thought. This is it. This is what they found, or some place like it.

It was another birthing ground. There was no telling how many places like this there were in the ship, nor how big the ship even was. As they paused at the edge of the hold, he found himself shaking with a deep, primeval fear. This was a danger beyond humanity, one that had existed since long before humans even knew what the stars were.

“They’re unopened,” Sneddon said. She pushed past Hoop, slinging the spray gun over her shoulder and taking something from her pocket.

“Don’t get too close!” Hoop said.

“Mummified. Preserved.” The room was lit with a bright flash as Sneddon started taking pictures of the eggs. “They’re almost like fossils.”

Hoop swept the spray gun and its attached flashlight from side to side, searching the extent of the chamber and looking for an exit. He saw one at the far side of the room, a tall, framed opening. He also saw something else. He aimed his flashlight up.

“Look.”

The string of lights was slung from wire supports fixed into the room’s high ceiling. Some of the lights were smashed, others seemed whole, but no longer worked. Or they had been intentionally deactivated.

Hoop didn’t like that one little bit.

“Look here!” Sneddon said. She was at the far edge of the room now, standing back from one of the eggs and taking photographs. The flashes troubled Hoop—for a second after each one his vision was complete blackness, his sight returning slowly every time. He didn’t like being blind, even for a moment.

The egg before her was open. Unlike the others, it didn’t look old and fossilized, but newer. Wetter.

She flashed off another shot, but this time Hoop blinked just as the light seared around the room, and when he opened his eyes again his vision was clear. In the final instant of the flash, he saw that the old-looking eggs were opaque beneath the camera’s flash. Inside, there were shapes. And he was certain that some of those shapes were moving.

“Sneddon, don’t get too—”

“There’s something—” Sneddon said. She took one step closer.

Something leapt from the egg. In an instant it wrapped itself around Sneddon’s face. She dropped the camera and it started flashing on automatic, the white-light searing the room at one second intervals as she grabbed the thing and tried to force her fingers beneath its grasping claws and the long, crushing tail that coiled around her neck. And then she dropped to her knees.

“Holy shit!” Lachance said, swinging the charge thumper up and toward her.

Ripley knocked it aside.

“You’ll take her head off!”

“But that thing will—”

“Keep her still!” Hoop said. Then he was beside Sneddon, trying to assess what was happening, how the thing had attached, what it was doing to her.

“Oh, shit, look at those things!” Kasyanov said.

Other eggs were opening. Even beneath the shouting and panic Hoop could hear the wet, sticky, almost delicate sounds of the flaps peeling back, and the slick movements of the things inside.

“Don’t get too close to any of them!” he said. “Get over here, everyone get close to—”

“Fuck that!” Kasyanov said, and she fired her plasma torch across the room. Sneddon’s still-flashing camera was nothing compared to the blazing light. The doctor swept it from left to right, the fire rolling in a white-hot wave across the space, and beneath its concentrated heat the eggs began to burst. They split apart and wriggling, thrashing things emerged, sliding out in a slick of fluid already bubbling beneath the heat, their legs and tails whipping for purchase. Then they began to shriek.