Alan Dean Foster: Alien

'Lose it again?' Kane asked.

'Nope. Change of direction.' She gestured off to their left. 'That way now.'

They continued on the new course, Lambert keeping all her attention on the finder's screen, Dallas and Kane keeping theirs on Lambert. Around them the storm grew momentarily wilder. Dust particles made insistent ticking noises as the wind drove them against the faceplates of their helmets, forming speech patterns within their brains.

Tick, tick. . let us in. . flick, pock. . let us in, let us in. .

Dallas shook himself. The silence, the cloud-enveloped desolation, the orange haze; all were beginning to get to him.

'It's close,' Lambert said. Suit monitors simultaneously informed the distant Ash of their suddenly increased pulse rate. 'Very close.'

They continued on. Something loomed ahead, high above them. Dallas's breath came in short gasps now, from excitement as much as exertion.

Disappointment. . it was only a large rock formation, twisted and grotesque. Ash's guess about the possibility of them entering higher country was proven correct. They took temporary shelter beneath the stone monolith. At the same time, the line vanished from Lambert's finder.

'Lost it again,' she told them.

'Did we pass it?' Kane studied the rocks, tried to see over them, and could not.

'Not unless it's underground.' Dallas leaned back against the rock wall. 'Might be behind this stuff.' He tapped the stone with a suited fist. 'Or it might be just a fade due to the storm. Let's take a break and see.'

They waited there, resting with their backs to the scoured wall. Dust and mist howled around them.

'Now we're really blind,' said Kane.

'Should be dawn soon.' He adjusted his pickup. 'Ash, if you hear me. How long until daylight?'

The science officer's voice was faint, distorted with static. 'Sun's coming up in about ten minutes.'

'We should be able to see something then.'

'Or the other way around,' Lambert put in. She didn't try to hide her lack of enthusiasm. She was damn tired and they had yet to reach the source of the signal. Nor was it physical weakness. The desolation and eerie colouring were tiring her mind. She longed for the clean, bright familiarity of her console.

The increasing brightness didn't help. Instead of raising their spirits, the rising sun chilled them by turning the air from orange to blood. Maybe it would be less intimidating when the feeble star was completely up. .

Ripley wiped a hand across her brow, let out a tired breath. She closed the last wall panel she'd been working behind after making certain the new components were functioning properly, put her tools back in the satchel's compartments.

'You ought to be able to handle the rest. I've finished the delicate stuff.'

'Don't worry. We'll manage,' Parker assured her, keeping his tone carefully neutral. He didn't look in her direction, continued to concentrate on his own job. He was still upset over the chance he and Brett might be left out of whatever find the expedition might make.

She started for the nearest up companionway. 'If you run into trouble and need help, I'll be on the bridge.'

'Right,' said Brett softly.

Parker watched her go now, saw her lithe form disappear upward. 'Bitch.'

Ash touched a control. A trio of moving shapes became sharp and regular, losing their fuzzy halos, as the enhancer did its job. He checked his other monitors. The three suit signals continued to come in strong.

'How's it going?' a voice wanted to know over the intercom.

Quickly he shut off the screen, hit his respond. 'All right so far.'

'Where are they?' Ripley asked.

'Getting close to the source. They've moved into some rocky terrain and the signal keeps fading on them, but they're so close I don't see how they can miss it. We ought to hear from them pretty soon.'

'Speaking of that signal, haven't we got anything fresh on it by this time?'

'Not yet.'

'Have you tried putting the transmission through ECIU for detailed analysis?' She sounded a touch impatient.

'Look, I want to know the details as badly as you do. But Mother hasn't identified it yet, so what's the point in my fooling with it?'

'Mind if I give it a shot?'

'Be my guest,' he told her. 'Can't do any harm, and it's something to do. Just let me know the instant you hit on anything, if you happen to get lucky.'

'Yeah. If I happen to get lucky.' She switched off.

She settled a little deeper into her chair on the bridge. It felt oddly spacious now, what with the rest of the bridge crew outside and Ash down in his blister. In fact, it was the first time she could recall being alone on the bridge. It felt strange and not altogether comfortable.

Well, if she was going to take the trouble to work her way through ECIU analysis, she ought to get started. A touch of a switch filled the bridge with that tormented alien wail. She hurriedly turned down the volume. It was disquieting enough to listen to when subdued.

She could easily conceive of it being a voice, as Lambert had suggested. That was a concept more fanciful than scientific, however. Get a grip on yourself, woman. See what the machine has to say and leave your emotional reactions out of it.

Aware of the unlikelihood of having any success where Mother had failed, she activated a little-used panel. But as Ash had said, it was something to do. She couldn't bear to sit and do nothing on the empty bridge. It gave her too much time to think. Better make-work than none at all. .

As the hidden sun continued to rise, the bloody red colour of the atmosphere began to lighten. It was now a musty, dirty yellow instead of the familiar bright sunshine of Earth, but it was a vast improvement over what had been.

The storm had abated somewhat and the omnipresent dust had begun to settle. For the first time, the three foot weary travellers could see more than a couple of metres ahead.

They'd been climbing for some time. The terrain continued hilly, but except for isolated pillars of basalt it was still composed of lava flows. There were few sharp projections, most having been ground down to gentle curves and wrinkles by untold aeons of steady wind and driven dust.

Kane was in the lead, slightly ahead of Lambert. Any minute now he expected her to announce they'd regained the signal. He topped a slight rise, glanced ahead expecting to see more of what they'd encountered thus far: smooth rock leading upward to another short climb.

Instead, his eyes caught something quite different, different enough to make them go wide behind the dirty, transparent face of the helmet, different enough to make him shout over the pickup.

'JESUS CHRIST!'

'What is it? What's the mat. .?' Lambert pulled up alongside him, followed by Dallas. Both were as shocked by the unexpected sight as Kane had been.

They'd assumed the distress signal was being generated by machinery of some sort, but no pictures of the transmitter source had formed in their minds. They'd been too occupied with the storm and the simple necessity of staying together. Confronted now with a real source, one considerably more impressive than any of them had dared consider, their scientific detachment had temporarily vanished.

It was a ship. Relatively intact it was, and more alien than any of them had imagined possible. Dallas would not have labelled it gruesome, but it was disturbing in a way hard technology should not have been. The lines of the massive derelict were clean but unnatural, imbuing the entire design with an unsettling abnormality.

It towered above them and the surrounding rocks on which it lay. From what they could see of it, they decided it had landed in the same manner as the Nostromo, belly down. Basically it was in the shape of an enormous metallic 'U', with the two horns of the U bent slightly in toward one another. One arm was slightly shorter than its counterpart and bent in more sharply. Whether this was due to damage or some alien conception of what constituted pleasing symmetry they had no way of knowing.