Alan Dean Foster - Alien - 3

Ripley gave him a sideways look. ‘What exactly are you waiting for?’

The big man didn’t miss a beat. Or a forkful. ‘We are waiting,’ he told her in all seriousness, ‘for God to return and raise his servants to redemption.’

She frowned. ‘I think you’re in for a long wait.’

Later Clemens showed her the assembly hall, pointing out inconsequential he thought she might find of interest.

Eventually they sat, alone in the spacious room. Prisoner Martin quietly swept up nearby.

‘How much of the story of this place do you know?’

‘What you’ve told me. What Andrews said. A little that I heard from some of the prisoners.’

‘Yeah, I saw you talking to Dillon.’ He poured himself a short whiskey from the metal flask he carried. The distant ceiling loomed above them, four stories high.

‘It’s pretty interesting, from a psychosocial point of view.

Dillon and the rest of them got religion, so to speak, about five years ago.’

‘What kind of religion?’

Clemens sipped at his liquor. ‘I don’t know. Hard to say.

Some sort of millenarian apocalyptic Christian fundamentalist brew.’

‘Ummmm.’

‘Exactly. The point is that when the Company wanted to close down this facility, Dillon and the rest of the converts wanted to stay. The Company knows a good thing when it sees it. So they were allowed to remain as custodians, with two minders and a medical officer.’ He gestured at the deserted assembly hall. ‘And here we are.

‘It’s not so bad. Nobody checks on us, nobody bothers us.

Regular supply drops from passing ships take care of the essentials. Anything we can scavenge we’re allowed to make use of, and the company pays the men minimal caretaker wages while they do their time, which is a damn sight better than what a prisoner earns doing prison work Earthside.

‘For comfort the men have view-and-read chips and their private religion. There’s plenty to eat, even if it does tend to get monotonous; the water’s decent, and so long as you shave regular, the bugs don’t bother you. There are few inimical native life-forms and they can’t get into the installation. If the weather was better, it would almost be pleasant.’

She looked thoughtful as she sipped at her drink. ‘What about you? How did you happen to get this great assignment?’

He held his cup between his fingers, twirling it back and forth, side to side. ‘I know you’ll find this hard to believe, but it’s actually much nicer than my previous posting. I like being left alone. I like being ignored. This is a good place for that.

Unless somebody needs attention or gets hurt, which happens a lot less than you might think, my time here is pretty much my own. I can sit and read, watch a viewer, explore the complex, or go into a holding room and scream my head off.’ He smiled winningly. ‘It’s a helluva lot better than having some sadistic guard or whiny prisoner always on your case.’ He gestured at her bald pate.

‘How do you like your haircut?’

She ran her fingers delicately across her naked skull. ‘Feels weird. Like the hair’s still there but when you reach for it, there’s nothing.’

He nodded. ‘Like someone who’s lost a leg and thinks he can still feel his foot. The body’s a funny thing, and the mind’s a heck of a lot funnier.’ He drained his glass, looked into her eyes.

‘Now that I’ve gone out on a limb for you with Andrews over the cremation, damaging my already less than perfect relationship with the good man, and briefed you on the humdrum history of Fury 161, how about you telling me what you were looking for in that dead girl? And why was it necessary to cremate the bodies?’ She started to reply and he raised his hand, palm toward her.

‘Please, no more about nasty germs. Andrews was right. Cold storage would have been enough to render them harmless. But that wasn’t good enough for you. I want to know why.’

She nodded, set her cup aside, and turned back to him. ‘First I have to know something else.’

He shrugged. ‘Name it.’

‘Are you attracted to me?’

His gaze narrowed. As he was wondering how to respond, he heard his own voice answering, as though his lips and tongue had abruptly chosen to operate independent of his brain.

Which was not, he reflected in mild astonishment, necessarily a bad thing.

‘In what way?’

‘In that way.’

The universe, it appeared, was still full of wonders, even if Fiorina’s perpetual cloud cover tended to obscure them. ‘You are rather direct. Speaking to someone afflicted with a penchant for solitude, as I have already mentioned, I find that more than a little disconcerting.’

‘Sorry. It’s the only way I know how to be. I’ve been out here a long time.’

‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘So have I.’

‘I don’t have time for subterfuges. I don’t have time for much of anything except what’s really important. I’ve had to learn that.’

He refilled both cups, picked up his own, and swirled the contents, studying the uninformative eddies which appeared in the liquid.

The fan blades were each twice the size of a man. They had to be, to suck air from the surface and draw it down into the condensers which scrubbed, cleaned, and purified Fiorina’s dusty atmosphere before pumping the result into shafts and structures. Even so, they were imperfect. Fiorina’s atmosphere was simply too dirty.

There were ten fans, one to a shaft. Eight were silent. The remaining pair roared at half speed, supplying air to the installation’s western quadrant.

Murphy sang through the respiratory mask that covered his nose and mouth, filtering out surface particles before they were drawn off by the fan. Carbon deposits tended to accumulate on the ductway walls. He burned them off with his laser, watched as the fan sucked them away from his feet and into the filters. It wasn’t the best job to have, nor the worst. He took his time and did the best he could. Not because he gave a damn or anticipated the imminent arrival of Company inspectors, but because when he finished with the ducts they’d give him something else to do. Might as well go about the cleaning as thoroughly as possible so it would kill as much time as possible.

He was off tune but enthusiastic.

Abruptly he stopped singing. A large deposit had accumulated in the recess off to his left. Damn storage areas were like that, always catching large debris that the surface filters missed. He knelt and extended the handle of the push broom, winkling the object out. It moved freely, not at all like a clump of mucky carbon.

It was flat and flexible. At first he thought it was an old uniform, but when he had it out in the main duct he saw that it was some kind of animal skin. It was dark and shiny, more like metal foil than flesh. Funny stuff.

Stretching it out on the floor he saw that it was big enough to enclose two men, or a young calf. What the hell. .?

Then he knew. There were a few large native animals on Fiorina; poor, dirt-hugging primitive things with feeble nervous systems and slow response times. Obviously one had somehow stumbled into an air intake and, unable to get out again, had perished for lack of food and water. It couldn’t use the ladders, and the roaring fan constituted an impenetrable barrier. He poked at the empty skin. This desiccated husk was all that remained of the unfortunate visitor. No telling how long it had lain in the recess, ignored and unnoticed.

The skin looked awfully fresh to have contained an old, long since dried out corpse. The bugs, he reminded himself. The bugs would make short work of any flesh that came their way.

It was interesting. He hadn’t known that the bugs would eat bone.