Tim Lebbon - Alien - Out of the Shadows

Outside, the storm had dissipated to a gentle breeze. Wafts of sand still drifted across the landscape, and there were small mounds piled against the Samson ’s landing feet. In the distance, electrical storms played jagged across the horizon, so far away that the thunder never reached them. The system’s star was a vague smudge against the dusty atmosphere in the west, bleeding oranges and yellows in a permanently spectacular sunset.

The Samson remained untouched on the landing pad. Hoop climbed up the superstructure, brushed dust from the windows and checked inside. He couldn’t see anything amiss.

There was a moment of tension as they opened the external door and Hoop entered. Then he opened up the internal door and they boarded safely, taking great care when lifting the replacement fuel cell and securing it to the cabin rack. They relied on it completely, and any damage would doom them all.

Once they were all inside, Sneddon settled inside the small airlock, just as she’d promised. There was a window into that space, but no one looked. Not even Ripley. She closed her eyes as Lachance went through pre-flight checks, and didn’t open them again when they took off.

But she did not sleep. She thought perhaps she might never sleep again.

This is a real memory, Ripley thinks, but the division between real and imaginary is becoming more and more indistinct. If this is real, then why am I in pain? Why does she hurt from where an alien’s tail slashed across her stomach, a claw opened her shoulder to the bone? If this is real, then everything will be all right.

She is on a roller coaster with Amanda. Her daughter is nine years old and utterly fearless, and as she whoops and laughs, Ripley holds onto the bar across their stomachs so hard that her fingers cramp into claws.

I love it, Mommy! Amanda shouts, her words whipped away by the wind.

Ripley closes her eyes but it changes little. She can still feel the vicious whipping of gravity grasping at her, tugging her this way and that as the car slips down a steep descent, around a tight corner, twisting and ripping back toward a cruel summit. With every twist and turn, the pain shoots through her.

Mommy, look!

There’s an urgency to Amanda’s voice that makes Ripley look. There’s something wrong with their surroundings. Something so wrong, yet the roller coaster is traveling so fast now that she cannot seem to focus on anything outside the car.

People seem to be running across the park around them.

Screaming, dashing, falling…

Dark shapes chasing them, much faster than the people, like animals hunting prey…

Muh—Mommy? Amanda says, and because she sits beside her in the moving car, Ripley can focus on her.

She wishes she could not.

A bloom of blood erupts from her torn chest, a terrible inevitability. Amanda is crying, not screeching in pain but shedding tears of such wretchedness that Ripley starts crying as well.

I’m sorry, Amanda, she says. I should have been home to protect you. She’s hoping that her daughter will say that she understands, and that everything is all right. But she says nothing of the sort.

Yes, you should have, Mommy.

The infant alien bursts outward in a shower of blood that is ripped away by the wind.

As they reach the roller coaster’s summit the car slows to a crawl, and Ripley can see what has happened to the world.

“You’re crying,” Hoop said. He was squeezing her hand, shaking it until she opened her eyes.

Ripley tried to blink the tears away. This had been the worst episode yet. And with increasing dread, she knew it wouldn’t be the last.

“You in pain? Want another shot?”

Ripley looked across at where Kasyanov watched her expectantly. The doctor had bound her own hand and placed it in a sling. “No,” she says. “No, I just want to stay awake.”

“Your call.”

“How long ’til we get to the Marion?”

“Lachance?” Hoop called. The ship was shaking, buffeted from all sides as it powered up through the unforgiving atmosphere.

“Two, maybe three hours,” the pilot said. “Once we’re in orbit we’ve got to travel a thousand miles to the Marion.”

“Everything good?” Ripley looked at the fuel cell on the rack in front of them, shaking as the Samson vibrated.

“Yeah, everything’s good.”

“Sneddon?”

Hoop nodded. “Everything’s good.”

“For now,” Ripley said. “Only for now. Nothing stays good for long. Not ever.”

Hoop didn’t reply to that, and across the cabin Kasyanov averted her eyes.

“I’ve got to go help Lachance,” Hoop said. “You be okay?”

Ripley nodded. But they all knew that she was lying, and that she would not be okay.

Nothing stays good for long.

This was the first step of Hoop’s journey home. All the way home. He’d decided that down in the mine, and the more time that passed, the more he began to believe it. He had started thinking of his children again. This time, however, their faces and voices no longer inspired feelings of intense guilt, but a sense of hope. The fact that he’d left them behind could never be changed or forgotten—by them, or by him—but perhaps there were ways that damage could be fixed.

He had found his monsters, and now it was time to leave them behind.

“How long until the Marion enters the atmosphere?” he asked.

In the pilot’s seat beside him, Lachance shrugged.

“Difficult to say, especially from here. We might have a couple of days once we dock, it might only be hours. If we approach the ship and it’s already skimming the atmosphere, there’s a good chance we won’t be able to dock, anyway.”

“Don’t say that,” Hoop said.

“Sorry. We’ve always known this was a long shot, haven’t we?”

“Long shot, yeah. But we’ve got to believe.” Hoop thought of those they had lost, Baxter’s terrible death even though he had given the best he could, done everything possible to survive. To run through an alien-infested mine on a broken ankle, only to meet an awful end like that… it was so unfair.

But fairness had no place in the endless dark depths of the universe. Nature was indifferent, and space was inimical to man. Sometimes, Hoop thought they’d made a mistake crawling from the swamp.

“We’re going to do this,” Hoop said. “We’ve got to. Get away from this pit, get back home.”

Lachance looked across in surprise.

“Never thought you had anything to go back to.”

“Things change,” he said. Hopefully. Hopefully things can change.

“We’ve left them all behind,” Lachance said, relaxing into his seat. He scanned the instrument panel as they went, hands on steering stick, but Hoop heard such a sense of relief in his voice. “Who’d have thought we would? I didn’t. Those things… they’re almost unnatural. How can God allow something like that?”

“God?” Hoop scoffed. But then he saw something like hurt in Lachance’s eyes. “Sorry. I’m no believer, but if that’s your choice, then…” He shrugged.

“Whatever. But those things, I mean… how do they survive? Where’s their home planet, how do they travel, what are they for ?”

“What’s anything for?” Hoop asked. “What are humans for? Everything’s an accident.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“And I can’t believe otherwise. If your God made everything, then what was his purpose for them?”