Tim Lebbon - Alien - Out of the Shadows

“Come on, come on,” Sneddon whispered. “Okay, I’m almost done.” She was talking to herself, muttering between croaks of pain and high-pitched whines that should not have come from a person.

“What are you doing?” Hoop asked.

“Got a full crate of magazines for the charge thumpers. Rigging a charge. You’ll feel a bump, but it’ll get rid of this… for good. So…”

Hoop ran to Ripley, scooped her up, slung her over his shoulder. She moaned in unconsciousness, and he could feel her blood pattering down on his back and legs.

“Med bay,” he said to Kasyanov. “Need to get as close as we can before it blows.”

“Maybe a minute,” Sneddon said. “The one inside me… it wants out. It’s shifting. It’s…” She screamed. It was a horrible sound, volume tempered by the equipment yet the agony bare and clear.

“Sneddon…” Kasyanov whispered, but there was nothing more to say.

“Come on!” Hoop led the way, struggling with Ripley’s weight. Kasyanov followed. He heard her groaning, cursing beneath her breath, but when he glanced back she was still with him. She had to be. He didn’t know how to use the med bay equipment, and if Kasyanov died, so would Ripley.

“You going to be—?” he started asking, but then Sneddon came on again.

“It’s coming for me.” Behind her voice Hoop heard an alien squeal, and the scraping of claws on metal growing rapidly louder. Sneddon gasped, then fell silent. The channel was still open; Hoop could hear the hiss and whisper of static. He and Kasyanov paused at the head of a staircase. And then he heard the more uneven hissing of something else.

“Sneddon?”

“It’s… just staring. It must see… know… sense… Oh!”

“Blow the crate,” Hoop said. Kasyanov’s eyes went wide, but he wasn’t being cruel or heartless. He was thinking of Sneddon, as well as them. “Sneddon, blow the crate before—”

The crunch of breaking bones was obvious. Sneddon let out a long groan of agony.

“It’s coming,” she rasped. “The thing’s just watching. It’s dying, but it doesn’t care. It sees… its sibling… coming. This close it’s almost beautiful.”

“Sneddon, blow the—”

“Two seconds,” the science officer whispered.

In those two seconds Hoop heard the infant alien clawing, biting, tearing its way from Sneddon’s chest, its high-pitched squeal answered by the dying adult’s more tempered cry. Sneddon could not scream because her breath had been stolen. But she spoke in another way.

He heard the soft mechanical click. Then the connection was cut.

Moments later a distant rumble turned from a moan into a roaring explosion that blasted a wall of air through the corridors. A heavy thud worked through the entire ship, pulsing through floors and walls as Hold 2 was consumed by the massive blast.

A long, low horn-like sound echoed as incredible stresses and strains were placed on the superstructure, and Hoop feared they would simply tear apart. The tension of skimming the planet’s atmosphere, combined with the results of the explosion, might break the ship’s back and send it spinning down, to burn up in the atmosphere.

He slid down one wall and held Ripley across his legs, hugging her head to his chest to prevent it bouncing as the metal floor punched up at them again and again. Kasyanov crouched next to them.

Metal tore somewhere far away. Something else exploded, and a shower of debris whisked past them, stinging exposed skin and clanging metal on metal. Another gush of warm air came, and then the shaking began to subside.

“Will she hold?” Kasyanov asked. “Will the ship hold?” Hoop couldn’t answer. They stared at each other for a few seconds, then Kasyanov slumped down. “Sneddon.”

“She took it with her,” Hoop said. “Took both of them with her.” Kasyanov glanced at Ripley, then crawled quickly closer. She lifted an eyelid, bent down to press her ear to the injured woman’s open mouth.

“No,” Hoop breathed.

“No,” Kasyanov said. “But she’s not good.”

“Then let’s go.” He dropped the spray gun, heaved her over his shoulder again, and set off toward med bay. Kasyanov followed, her plasma torch clattering to the floor.

Now they were three, and he wouldn’t let anyone else die.

Amanda watches her. She’s eleven years old today, and she sits in a chair beside a table scattered with half-eaten pieces of birthday cake, opened presents, discarded wrapping paper. She’s on her own and looking sad.

Her birthday dress is bloodied and torn, and there is a massive hole in her chest.

I’m sorry, Ripley says, but Amanda’s expression does not change. She blinks softly, staring at her mother with a mixture of sadness at the betrayal and… hatred? Can that really be what she sees in her daughter’s eyes?

Amanda, I’m sorry, I did my very best.

Blood still drips from the hole in her daughter’s chest. Ripley tries to turn away, but whichever way she turns her daughter is still there, staring at her. Saying nothing. Only looking.

Amanda, you know Mommy loves you, however far away I am.

The little girl’s face does not change. Her eyes are alive, but her expression is lifeless.

Ripley woke for a time, watching the floor pass by, seeing Hoop’s boots, knowing she was being carried. But even back on the Marion , Amanda was still staring at her. If Ripley lifted her head she would see her. If she turned around, she would be there.

Even when she closed her eyes.

Amanda, staring forever at the mother who had left her behind.

PROGRESS REPORT:

To: Weyland-Yutani Corporation, Science Division

(Ref: code 937)

Date (unspecified)

Transmission (pending)

I wish I was whole again.

I never used to wish. I was not programed for that, and it is not an emotion, nor an action, that I ever perceived as useful. But for thirty-seven years I was alone in the shuttle’s computer. And there was enough of the human still in me to feel lonely. I was built as an artificial person, after all.

Loneliness, it seems, is not necessarily connected to one’s place in the universe. I know my place, and have no feelings either way about what and where I am. In my case, loneliness rose from simple boredom.

There are only so many times I can defeat the ship’s computer at chess.

And so I have spent long years dwelling upon what wishing might mean.

Now, I wish I was whole again.

The game has turned against me. I am in check. But not for long. The game is never over until it is over, and I refuse to resign.

Not while Ripley, my queen, still lives.

Ripley was heavy. He refused to think of her as dead weight—he wouldn’t allow that, would not give her permission to die—but by the time they reached med bay his legs were failing, and it had been ten long minutes since she’d displayed any signs of life.

The Marion shook and shuddered. It, too, was close to the end.

The difference was that for Ripley there was still hope.

“I’ll fire up the med pod,” Kasyanov said, pressing her good hand against the security pad. The medical bay was a modern, sterile place, but the object at its center made all the other equipment look like Stone Age tools. This Weyland-Yutani chunk of technology had cost Kelland almost a tenth of what the whole of the Marion had cost, but Hoop had always known it had been a practical investment. A mining outpost so far from home, where illness or injury could cripple the workforce, needed care.

Yet there was nothing humane in their incorporation of the pod.