Tim Lebbon: Alien: Out the Shadows

“We’ll have to cut that free,” Welford said, and at first Hoop thought he was talking about the corpse. But the engineer was watching the slowly drifting mass of metal as it moved back toward the shattered docking bays.

“We’ve got to do that and a lot more,” Hoop said. If they were to survive—if they got past this initial chaos, secured the Samson , figured out what the fuck was going on—he, Welford, and Powell needed to pull some miracles out of somewhere. “Gonna earn our pay now, guys.”

“Hoop, the Samson ,” Baxter muttered in his ear.

“What is it?” They couldn’t yet see the ship where it was now static on the other side of the starboard docking arm.

“I’ve got it… a picture, up on screen.” His voice sounded hollow, empty.

“And?” Sneddon asked.

“And you don’t want to open it up. Ever. Don’t even go near it.”

Hoop wished he could see, though part of him was glad that he couldn’t.

“What’s happening in there?” Sneddon asked.

“They’ve… they’ve hatched ,” Baxter said. “And they’re just… waiting. Those things, just sort of crouched there beside the bodies.”

“What about Jones and Sticky?”

“Sticky’s dead. Jones isn’t.” That flat tone again, so that Hoop didn’t really want to ask any more. But Sneddon did. Maybe it was her science officer’s curiosity.

“What’s happening to Jones?” she asked.

“Nothing. He’s… I can see him, just at the bottom of the picture. He’s just sitting there, seat turned around, back against the control panel. Shaking and crying.”

They haven’t killed him yet, Hoop thought.

“We have to seal this up,” he said. “All the doors are locked down anyway, but we have to disable all of the manual controls.”

“You think those things can open doors?” Welford asked.

“Hoop’s right,” Sneddon said. “We must assume the worst.”

“Can’t we just cut the Samson loose?”

Hoop had already thought of that. But despite the danger, they might still need the dropship. The Marion ’s orbit was still decaying. There were escape pods, but their targeting was uncertain. If they used them, they’d end up scattered across the surface of the planet.

The Samson might be their only hope of survival.

“We do that and it might drift with us for days,” Lachance said, his voice coming through a hail of static. “Impact the Marion , cause more damage. We’re in bad enough shape as it is.”

“Baxter, we’re losing you,” Hoop said.

“…damaged,” Baxter said. “Lachance?”

“He’s right,” Lachance responded. “Indicators are flagging up more damage every minute that goes by. Comms, environmental, remote system. We need to start fixing things.”

“Got to fix this first,” Hoop said. “We go through the vestibule, into the docking arm for Bay Three, then into the airlock. Then from there we work back out, disabling manual controls and shutting everything down.”

“We could purge the airlock, too,” Welford said.

“Good idea. If anything does escape from the Samson, it won’t be able to breathe.”

“Who’s to say that they breathe at all?” Sneddon said. “We don’t know what they are, where they come from. Mammal, insectile, reptilian, something else. Don’t know anything!” Her voice was tinged with panic.

“And it’s going to stay that way,” Hoop said. “First chance we get, we kill them. All of them.”

He wanted support from someone, but no one replied. He expected disagreement from Sneddon—as science officer, she’d see past the chaos and death to what these creatures might mean for science. But she said nothing, just stared at him, her eyes bruised, cut nose swelling.

I really am in charge now, he thought. It weighed heavy.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s get to it.”

They followed Hoop’s plan.

In through the vestibule that served bays Three and Four, through the docking arm, then through the airlock to the outer hatch. Hoop and Welford went ahead, leaving Sneddon to close the doors behind them, and at the end of the docking arm the two men paused. Beyond the closed hatch lay a narrow gap, and then the Samson ’s outer airlock door. There was a small viewing window in both hatch and door.

The inside of the Samson’s window was steamed up.

Hoop wondered whether the things knew they were there, so close. He thought of asking Baxter, but silence seemed wisest. Silence, and speed.

They quickly dismantled the hatch’s locking mechanism and disabled it, disconnecting the power source. It would need to be repaired before the hatch could be opened again. Much stronger than the bathroom door on the Delilah. The thought didn’t comfort Hoop as much as it should have.

They worked backward, and when they’d disabled the door mechanism between docking arm and vestibule, Welford purged the atmosphere. The doors creaked slightly under the altered pressures.

Outside the vestibule, Sneddon waited.

“Done?” she asked.

“Just this last door,” Hoop said. Welford went to work.

Five minutes later they were making their way back toward the bridge. There were now four sealed and locked doors standing between the Samson and the Marion , as well as a vacuum in the airlock.

He should have felt safer.

“Baxter, you still got a feed from the Samson ?” he asked.

“Yeah. Not much change, those things are just sitting there. One of them… it sort of stretched for a while, like shadows were growing out of it. Weird lighting in there, and the picture’s not great, but it looked like it was shedding its skin.”

Another voice muttered something that Hoop missed.

“What was that?” he said.

“I said it looks like it’s grown,” Powell said. “The one that shed its skin. It’s bigger.”

“What about Jones?” Hoop asked, deeply troubled. Bigger? Impossible in such a short time, surely.

“Still there,” Baxter said. “I can only see his arm, shoulder, head. He’s still shaking.”

“Record the images,” Sneddon said.

“For later viewing pleasure?” Lachance asked, but no one replied. No time for humor, even if it was tinged with sarcasm.

“We’ll be back in a few minutes,” Hoop said. “Lachance, get the computer to categorize damage. I’ll prioritize when we get there, then we’ll pull together a work schedule. Baxter, has a distress signal gone out?”

“Oh, yeah, that’s the other fun bit,” Baxter said. “Some of the wreckage must have fucked the antenna array. So the computer says the signal is transmitting, but I don’t think it is.”

“Right. Great. Fucking wonderful.” Hoop shook his head. “Any meteors heading toward us? Black holes opening up? Anything else to worry about?”

“The bridge’s coffee carafe was smashed,” Powell said, his voice deep and deadly serious.

Hoop started laughing. By the time he got his hysteria under control, tears smeared the inside of his helmet’s visor.

By the time they reached the bridge, Kasyanov and Garcia had made their way back from the medical bay. The few personnel left aboard the Marion were either dead or sporting minor injuries, so there was little for them to do down there.

“It was creepy, just the two of us,” Garcia said. “So we shut everything down. Figured it would be safer up here, with everyone together.”

Just how safe that might be, Lachance revealed to them all.

“The only blessing is that the Delilah ’s fuel core wasn’t compromised during the crash,” he said.