Alan Dean Foster - Aliens

'You okay?' Sometimes inanities had to be asked. Besides she wanted, needed, to hear the child respond.

Newt did so with a thumbs-up gesture, still employing selective silence as a defence mechanism. Ripley didn't push her to talk. Keeping quiet while everyone around her was being killed had kept her alive.

'I have to check on the others,' she told the upturned face 'Will you be all right?'

A nod this time, accompanied by a shy little smile that made Ripley swallow hard. She tried to conceal what she was feeling inside, because this wasn't the time or place to break down. They could do that when they were safely back aboard the Sulaco.

'Good. I'll be right back. If you get tired of staying under there, you can come back and join the rest of us, okay?' The smile widened slightly and was followed by a more vigorous nod but the girl stayed put. She still trusted her own instincts more than she trusted any adult. Ripley wasn't offended. She unbuckled herself and headed back down the aisle.

Hudson was standing off to one side inspecting his arm. The fact that he still had an arm showed that he'd only been lightly misted by the alien acid. He was reliving the last twenty minutes of his life, replaying every second over and over in his mind and not believing what he saw there. She could hear him muttering to himself.

'—I don't believe it. It didn't happen. It didn't happen, man.'

Burke tried to have a look at the injured comtech's arm, more curious than sympathetic. Hudson jerked away from the Company rep.

'I'm all right. Leave it!'

Burke pursed his lips, wanting to see but not willing to push 'Better let somebody take a look at it. Can't tell what the side effects are. Might be toxic.'

'Yeah? And if it is, I suppose you're going to check stores and break out an antidote in a couple of minutes, right? Dietrich's the medtech.' He swallowed and his anger faded. 'Was our medtech. Stinking bugs.'

Hicks was bending over the motionless Gorman, checking for a pulse. Ripley joined him.

'Anything?' she asked tightly.

'Heartbeat's slow but steady. He's breathing the same way. It's the same with the rest of his vital signs: slowed down but regular He's alive. If I didn't know better, I'd say he was sleeping, but it ain't sleep. I think he's paralyzed.'

Vasquez pushed both of them aside and grabbed the unconscious lieutenant by his collar. She was too furious to cry 'He's dead is what he is!' She hauled the upper half o Gorman's body upright with one hand and drew back the other in a fist, screaming in his face.

'Wake up, pendejo! Wake up. I'm gonna kill you, you useless waste!'

Hicks inserted his bulk between her and the frozen lieutenant. Same soft voice employed, but with a slight edge to it now. Same hard eyes staring into the smartgun operator's face.

'Hold it. Hold it. Back off-right now.'

Their eyes locked. Vasquez continued to hold Gorman half off the deck. Something basic cut its way through her fury Marine—she was a Marine, and Marines live by basics. The basics in this case were simple. Apone was gone and therefore Hicks was in charge.

'It ain't worth bruising my knuckles,' she finally muttered She released the lieutenant's collar, and his head bounced off the deck as she turned away, still cursing to herself. Ripley didn't doubt for an instant that if Hicks hadn't intervened, the smartgun operator would have beaten the unconscious Gorman to a pulp.

With Vasquez out of the way Ripley bent over the paralyzed officer and opened his tunic. The bloodless purple puncture wound that marred his shoulder had already sealed itself.

'Looks like it stung him or something. Interesting. I didn't know they could do that.'

'Hey!'

The excited shout made Hicks and her turn toward the Operations bay. Hudson was in there. He'd been staring morosely at the biomonitors and videoscreens, and something had caught his eye. Now he beckoned to his remaining companions.

'Look. Crowe and Dietrich aren't dead, man.' He gestured at the bio readouts, swallowed uneasily. 'They must be like Gorman. Their signs are real low, but they ain't dead—' His voice trailed off, along with his initial excitement.

If they weren't dead and they were like Hudson, that meant The comtech started to shake with a mixture of anger and sorrow. He was standing on the thin edge of hysteria They all were. It clung to them like a psychic leech, hanging on the fringes of their sanity, threatening to invade and take over the instant anyone let down his mental guard.

Ripley knew what those soporific bioreadouts meant. She tried to explain, but she couldn't meet Hudson's eyes as she did so.

'You can't help them.'

'Hey, but if they're still alive—'

'Forget it. Right now they're being cocooned, just like those others. Like the colonists you found in the wall when you went in there. You can't do a damn thing for them. Nobody can That's the way it is. Just be glad you're here talking about them instead of down there with them. If Dietrich was here, she'd know she couldn't do anything to help you.'

The comtech seemed to sag in on himself. 'This ain't happening.'

Ripley turned away from him. As she did so, her gaze met Vasquez's. It would have been easy for her to say 'I told you so to the smartgunner. It also would have been superfluous. That one look communicated everything the two women needed to say.

This time it was Vasquez who turned away.

In the colony medical lab Bishop stood hunched over an ocular probe. Beneath the lens was a stretched slice of one of the dead facehugger parasites, extracted from the specimen in the nearest stasis cylinder. Even in death the biopsied creature looked threatening, lying on its back on the dissection table The clutching legs looked poised to grab any face that bent too close, the powerful tail ready to propel the creature clear across the room in a single pistoning leap.

The internal structure was as fascinating as the functional exterior, and Bishop was glued to the probe's eyepiece. By combining the probe's resolving power with the versatility of his own artificial eye, he was able to see a great deal that the colonists might have missed.

One of the questions that particularly intrigued him, and which he was anxious to answer, involved the definite possibility of an alien parasite attempting to attach itself to a synthetic like himself. His insides were radically different from those of a purely biological human being. Would a parasite be able to detect the differences before it sprang? If not and it attempted to utilize a synthetic as a host, what might be the probable results of such an enforced union? Would it simply drop off and go searching for another body, or would it mindlessly insert the embryonic seed it carried into an artificial host? If so, would the embryo be able to grow or would it be the more surprised of the couple as it struggled to mature within a body devoid of flesh and blood?

Could a robot be parasitized?

Something made a noise near the doorway. Bishop looked up long enough to see the dropship crew chief roll a pallet ful of equipment and supplies into the lab.

'Where you want this stuff?'

'Over there.' Bishop gestured. 'By the end of the bench wil do nicely.'

Spunkmeyer began unloading the shipping pallet. 'Need anything else?'

Bishop waved vaguely without taking his gaze from the probe.

'Right. I'll be back in the ship. Buzz me if you need anything.'

Another wave. Spunkmeyer shrugged and turned to leave.

Bishop was a funny sort of bird, the crew chief mused as he wheeled his hand truck down the empty corridors and back out onto the landing tarmac. Funny sort of hybrid, he thought correcting himself and smiling at the pun. He whistled cheerfully as he snugged his collar higher up around his neck The wind wasn't blowing too badly, but it was still chilly outside without a full environment suit. Concentrating on a tune also helped to keep his mind off the disaster that had befallen the expedition.