Tim Lebbon: Alien: Out of the Shadows

I only need her. The others cannot come. I will allow what she has requested. In truth, it’s perfect. She will not remember how determined I remain to fulfill the mission. She will not remember the things I have done.

On waking, she will not even know I am still here.

She will be weak, disorientated, and I will guide her back to the Narcissus .

Hoop moved quickly through the ship toward the bridge. More than ever it felt like a haunted ship. He’d always known the Marion busy, the crew going about their tasks, the off-duty miners drinking or talking or working out. It had never been a silent place. There was always music emanating from the accommodations hub or rec room, a rumble of conversation from the galley and bar.

He felt a pang as he missed his friends, and Lucy Jordan, his one-time lover. She had become more than a friend, and after their romance had dwindled—sucked away, she’d joked without really joking, by the cold depths of space—their friendship had deepened to something he’d rarely felt before. They had trusted each other completely.

And she had been one of the first to die.

Hoop had never given way to loneliness. As a child he’d enjoyed his own company, preferring to spend time in his room making models or reading his parents’ old books, and when he was a teenager he’d kept a small circle of friends. Never one for team sports, his social life had revolved around nights at their houses, watching movies or drinking cheap booze. Sometimes a girl would come onto the scene and take him or a friend away for a time, but they’d always returned to the familiarity of that small, closed circle.

Even as an adult, after marrying and having children and then losing it all, he had rarely felt lonely.

That only happened after the aliens arrived.

Every step of the way toward the bridge, he thought of Ripley. He so hoped she would live, but a different woman was going to emerge from the med pod. If the unit worked well, she would remember little or nothing from the past few days. He would have to introduce himself all over again.

Even though the creature had to be dead, he remained cautious, pausing at each junction, listening for anything out of place. A constant vibration had been rippling throughout the ship ever since the explosion in Hold 2, and Hoop guessed the blast had somehow knocked their decaying orbit askew. They were skipping the outer edges of the planet’s atmosphere now, shields heating up, and it wouldn’t be long before the damaged docking bays started to burn and break apart.

He needed to find out just how long they had.

The bridge was exactly as they’d left it less than a day earlier. It seemed larger than before, and he realized that he’d never actually been there on his own. Lachance was often on duty, sitting in his pilot’s seat even though the Marion rarely needed any manual input. Baxter spent a lot of time at his communications console, processing incoming messages for miners or crew and distributing them as appropriate throughout the ship’s network. Sneddon sometimes spent long periods there, talking with Jordan, and their security officer, Cornell, would sometimes visit.

Other people came and went. The place was never silent, never empty. Being there on his own made it seem all the more ghostly.

He spent a few minutes examining readouts on Lachance’s control panels, consulting the computers, and they told him what he needed to know. He reached into a drawer and pulled out a small data drive, uploading a data purge program before dropping it into an inner pocket.

Insurance , he thought.

Then he quickly made his way down through the accommodations hub. It was a slight detour, but it was much closer to the galley and rec rooms. They needed food, and there wasn’t time enough to go to where most of it was stored.

He found what he sought in various private quarters. Everyone kept a stash of food for midnight hungers, and sometimes because they just didn’t feel like eating with the others. He grabbed a trolley and visited as many rooms as he could, finding pictures of families who would never see their loved ones again, witnessing all those personal things that when left behind seemed like sad, incomplete echoes of what a person had been.

As he gathered, it dawned on him that they’d never be able to take enough to sustain them. But Kasyanov had said there was a large supply of food substitutes and dried supplements stored in the med bay. They’d make do. There would be rationing.

He tried to concentrate entirely on the here-and-now. The thought of the journey that lay ahead would cripple him if he dwelled on it for too long. So he kept his focus on the next several hours.

Leaving the laden trolley along the route that led down to the docking bays, he made his way back up to the med bay. Kasyanov was sitting on one of the beds, jacket cast aside and shirt pulled up to reveal her wounds. They were more extensive than Hoop had suspected; bloody tears in her skin that pouted purple flesh. She quivered as she probed at them with tweezers. There were several heavy bags piled by the door, and a stack of medical packs. She’d been busy—before she took time to tend herself.

“Bad?” he asked softly.

She looked up, pale and sickly.

“I’ve puked blood. I’ll have to use the med pod. Otherwise, I’ll die of internal bleeding and infection within a day.”

“We’ve got maybe two hours,” Hoop said.

“Time enough,” she replied, nodding. “She’ll be done in fifteen minutes.”

He had seen the unit working before, but it never ceased to fascinate him. Ripley looked thin and malnourished, battered and bruised. But the med pod had already repaired most of her major wounds, and several operating arms were concentrating on the rip in her stomach. They moved with a fluid grace, lacking any human hesitation and targeted with computer confidence. Two delved inside, one grasping, another using a laser to patch and mend. Its white-warm glow reflected from the pod’s glass cover and gave movement to Ripley’s face, but in truth she was motionless. Back down in the depths of whatever dreams troubled her so much.

They, too, would soon be fixed.

The arms retreated and then her wound was glued and stitched with dissolvable thread. A gentle spray was applied to the area—artificial skin, set to react over time as the natural healing processes commenced. When she woke up, there would be little more than a pale pink line where the ugly slash had once existed.

Bumps and bruises were sprayed, her damaged scalp treated, an acid splash across her left forearm and hand attended to, after which the pod’s arms pulled a white sheet from a roll beneath the bed and settled it gently across Ripley’s body. It was almost caring.

Kasyanov glanced at Hoop, and he nodded. She initiated the next process. Then sighed, sat back, and closed her eyes as the interior of the med pod changed color. Rich blue lights came on, and arms as delicate as daisy stems pressed several contact pads against Ripley’s forehead, temples, and neck. The lights began to pulse hypnotically. The pod buzzed in time with the pulsing, emitting a soporific tone. Hoop had to look away.

He turned to Kasyanov. Her breathing was light and fast, but she waved him away, nodding.

“I’m good,” she said.

“You’re shit.”

“Yeah. Well. What’s that, a doctor’s analysis?”

Hoop could barely smile. Instead, he went to the bags she’d left by the med bay’s door and opened the first to check inside.

“Antibiotics, viral tabs, painkillers, sterilization spray,” Kasyanov said. “Other stuff. Bandages, medicines, contraceptives.”

Hoop raised an eyebrow.

“Hey. Forever is a long time.”