Alan Dean Foster - Aliens

Crowe, Dietrich, old Apone—all gone. Hard to believe, as Hudson kept mumbling over and over to himself. Hard to believe and a shame. He'd known them all; they'd flown together on a number of missions. Though he couldn't say he knew any of them intimately.

He shrugged, even though there was no one around to see the gesture. Death was something they were all used to, an acquaintance each of them fully expected to encounter prior to retirement. Crowe and Dietrich had early appointments, that was all. Nothing to be done about it. But Hicks and the rest had made it out okay. They'd finish their studies and clean up here and be out by tomorrow. That was the plan. a little more study, make a few last recordings, and get out of there. He knew he wasn't the only one looking forward to the moment when the dropship would heave mass and head back to the good ol' Sulaco.

His thoughts went back to Bishop again. Maybe there'd been some sort of subtle improvement in the new model synthetics or maybe it was just Bishop himself, but he found that he rather liked the android. Everybody said that the artificialintelligence boys had been working hard to improve personality programming for years, even adding a bit of randomness to each new model as it walked off the assembly line. Sure, that was it—Bishop was an individual. You could tel him from another synthetic just by talking to him. And it didn't hurt to have one quiet, courteous companion among all the boastful loudmouths.

As he rolled the hand truck to the top of the dropship's loading ramp, he slipped. Catching his balance, he bent to examine the damp spot. Since there was no depression in which rainwater could pool up, he thought he must have busted a container of Bishop's precious preserving fluid, but there was no tickling, lingering odor of formaldehyde. The shiny stuff clinging to the metal ramp looked more like a thick slime or gel.

He shrugged and straightened. He couldn't remember busting a bottle containing anything like that, and as long as nobody asked him about it, there was no point in worrying. No time for worrying, either. Too much to do so they could get ready to leave.

The wind beat at him. Lousy atmosphere, and yet it was a lot milder than what it had been before the atmosphere processors had started work here. 'Unbreathable,' the presleep briefing had said. Pulling the hand truck in behind him, he hit the switch to retract the ramp and close the door.

Vasquez was pacing the length of the APC. Inactivity in what was still a combat situation was a foreign sensation to her. She wanted a gun in her hands and something to shoot at. She knew the situation called for careful analysis, and it frustrated her because she wasn't the analytical type. Her methods were direct, final, and didn't involve any talk. But she was smart enough to realize that this wasn't your standard operation anymore. Standard operating procedure had been chewed up and spit out by the enemy. Knowing this failed to calm her however. She wanted to kill something.

Occasionally her fingers would flex as though they were stil gripping the controls of her smartgun. Watching her would have made Ripley nervous if she wasn't already as tense as it was possible to be without snapping like the overwound mainspring of an ancient timepiece.

It got to the point where Vasquez knew she could say something or start tearing her hair out. 'All right, we can't blow them up. We can't go down there as a squad; we can't even go back down in the APC because they'll take us apart like a can full of peas. Why not roll some canisters of CN-20 down there? Nerve gas the whole nest? We've got enough on the dropship to make the whole colony uninhabitable.'

Hudson was pleading with his eyes, glancing at each of them in turn. 'Look man, let's just bug out and call it even okay?' He glanced at the woman standing next to him. 'I'm with Ripley Let 'em make the whole colony into a playpen if they want to but we get out now and come back with a warship.'

Vasquez stared at him out of slitted eyes. 'Getting queasy Hudson?'

'Queasy!' He straightened a little in reaction to the implicit challenge. 'We're in over our heads here. Nobody said we'd run into anything like this. I'll be the first one to volunteer to come back, but when I do, I want the right kind of equipment to deal with the problem. This ain't like mob control, Vasquez You try kicking some butts here and they'll eat your leg right off.'

Ripley looked at the smartgun operator. 'The nerve gas won't work, anyway. How do we know if it'll affect their biochemistry? Maybe they'll just snort the stuff. The way these things are built, nerve gas might just give them a pleasant high I blew one of them out an airlock with an emergency grapple stuck in its gut, and all it did was slow it down. I had to fry it with my ship's engines.' She leaned back against the wall.

'I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit and the whole high plateau where we originally found the ship that brought them here. It's the only way to be sure.'

'Now hold on a second.' Having been silent during the ongoing discussion, Burke abruptly came to life. 'I'm not authorizing that kind of action. That's about as extreme as you can get.'

'You don't think the situation's extreme?' growled Hudson He toyed with the bandage on his acid-scarred arm and glared hard at the Company representative.

'Of course it's extreme.'

'Then why won't you authorize the use of nukes?' Ripley pressed him. 'You lose the colony and one processing station but you've still got ninety-five percent of your terraforming capability unimpaired and operational on the rest of the planet. So why the hesitation?'

Sensing the challenge in her tone, the Company rep backpedaled flawlessly into a conciliatory mode.

'Well, I mean, I know this is an emotional moment. I'm as upset as anybody else. But that doesn't mean we have to resort to snap judgments. We have to move cautiously here. Let's think before we throw out the baby with the bathwater.'

'The baby's dead, Burke, in case you haven't noticed.' Ripley refused to be swayed.

'All I'm saying,' he argued, 'is that it's time to look at the whole situation, if you know what I mean.'

She crossed her arms over her chest. 'No, Burke, what do you mean?'

He thought fast. 'First of all, this installation has a substantia monetary value attached to it. We're talking about an entire colony setup here. Never mind the replacement cost. The investment in transportation alone is enormous, and the process of terraforming Acheron is just starting to show some real progress. It's true that the other atmosphere-processing stations function automatically, but they still require regular maintenance and supervision. Without the means to house and service an appropriate staff locally, that would mean keeping several transports in orbit as floating hotels for the necessary personnel. That involves an ongoing cost you can't begin to imagine.'

'They can bill me,' she told him unsmilingly. 'I got a tab running. What else?'

'For another thing, this is clearly an important species we're dealing with here. We can't just arbitrarily exterminate those who've found their way to this world. The loss to science would be incalculable. We might never encounter them again.'

'Yeah, and that'd be just too bad.' She uncrossed her arms 'Aren't you forgetting something, Burke? You told me that i we encountered a hostile life-form here, we'd take care of it and forget the scientific concerns. That's why I never liked dealing with administrators: you guys all have selective memories.'

'It just isn't the way to handle things,' he protested.

'Forget it!'

'Yeah, forget it.' Vasquez echoed Ripley's sentiments as wel as her words. 'Watch us.'

'Maybe you haven't been keeping up on current events, Hudson put in, 'but we just got fragged, pal.'