Alien: Out of the Shadows

1 MARION

Chris Hooper dreamed of monsters.

As a youngster they’d fascinated him, as they did all children. But unlike children born generations before him, there were places he could go, destinations he could explore, where he might just find them. No longer restricted to the pages of fairy tales or the digital imagery of imaginative moviemakers, humankind’s forays into space had opened up a whole galaxy of possibilities.

So from a young age he looked to the stars, and those dreams persisted.

In his early twenties he’d worked for a year on Callisto, one of Jupiter’s moons. They’d been hauling ores from several miles below the surface, and in a nearby mine a Chinese team had broken through into a sub-surface sea. There had been crustaceans and shrimp, tiny pilot fish and delicate frond-like creatures a hundred feet long. But no monsters to set his imagination on fire.

When he’d left the solar system to work in deep space, traveling as engineer on various haulage, exploration, and mining ships, he’d eagerly sought out tales of alien life forms encountered on those distant asteroids, planets, and moons. Though adulthood had diluted his youngster’s vivid imagination with more mundane concerns—family estrangement, income, and well-being—he still told himself stories. But over the years, none of what he’d found had lived up to the fictions he’d created.

As time passed he’d come to terms with the fact that monsters were only monsters before they were found, and perhaps the universe wasn’t quite so remarkable as he’d once hoped.

Certainly not here.

Working in one of the Marion’s four docking bays, he paused to look down at the planet below with a mixture of distaste and boredom. LV178. Such an inhospitable, storm-scoured, sand-blasted hell of a rock that they hadn’t even bothered to give it a proper name. He’d spent three long years here, making lots of money he had no opportunity to spend.

Trimonite was the hardest, strongest material known to man, and when a seam as rich as this one was found, it paid to mine it out. One day he’d head home, he promised himself at the end of every fifty-day shift. Home to the two boys and wife he’d run away from seven years before. One day. But he was beginning to fear that this life had become a habit, and the longer it continued, the harder it might be to break.

“Hoop!” The voice startled him, and as he spun around Jordan was already chuckling.

He and the captain had been involved briefly, a year before. These confined quarters and stressful work conditions meant that such liaisons were frequent, and inevitably brief. But Hoop liked the fact that they had remained close. Once they’d got the screwing out of the way, they’d become the best of friends.

“Lucy, you scared the shit out of me.”

“That’s Captain Jordan to you.” She examined the machinery he’d been working on, without even glancing at the viewing window. “All good here?”

“Yeah, heat baffles need replacing, but I’ll get Powell and Welford onto that.”

“The terrible twins,” Jordan said, smiling. Powell was close to six foot six, tall, black, and slim as a pole. Welford was more than a foot shorter, white, and twice as heavy. As different as could be, yet the ship’s engineers were both smartasses.

“Still no contact?” Hoop asked.

Jordan frowned briefly. It wasn’t unusual to lose touch with the surface, but not for two days running.

“Storms down there are the worst I’ve seen,” she said, nodding at the window. From three hundred miles up, the planet’s surface looked even more inhospitable than usual—a smear of burnt oranges and yellows, browns and blood-reds, with the circling eyes of countless sandstorms raging across the equatorial regions. “They’ve gotta abate soon. I’m not too worried yet, but I’ll be happy when we can talk to the dropships again.”

“Yeah, you and me both. The Marion feels like a derelict when we’re between shifts.”

Jordan nodded. She was obviously concerned, and for an awkward, silent moment Hoop thought he should say something more to comfort her. But she was the captain because she could handle situations like this. That, and because she was a badass.

“Lachance is doing spaghetti again tonight,” she said.

“For a Frenchman, he sure can cook Italian.”

Jordan chuckled, but he could feel her tension.

“Lucy, it’s just the storms,” Hoop said. He was sure of that. But he was equally sure that “just storms” could easily cause disaster. Out here in the furthest quadrants of known space—pushing the limits of technology, knowledge, and understanding, and doing their best to deal with the corners cut by the Kelland Mining Company—it didn’t take much for things to go wrong.

Hoop had never met a ship’s engineer better than him, and that was why he was here. Jordan was an experienced flight captain, knowledgeable and wise. Lachance, cynical and gruff, was an excellent pilot who had a healthy respect for space and all it could throw at them. And the rest of their team, though a mixed bunch, were all more than capable at their jobs. The miners themselves were a hardy breed, many of them experienced from stints on Jupiter’s and Neptune’s moons. Mean bastards, with streaks of sick humor, most were as hard as the trimonite they sought.

But no experience, no confidence or hardness or pig-headedness, could dodge fate. They all knew how dangerous it was. Most of them had grown used to living with the danger, and the close proximity of death.

Only seven months ago they’d lost three miners in an accident in Bay One as the dropship Samson came in to dock. No one’s fault, really. Just eagerness to be back on board in relative comfort, after fifty days down the mine. The airlock hadn’t sealed properly, an indicator had malfunctioned, and the two men and a woman had suffocated.

Hoop knew that Jordan still had sleepless nights over that. For three days after transmitting her condolences to the miners’ families, she hadn’t left her cabin. As far as Hoop was concerned, that was what made her a great captain—she was a badass who cared.

“Just the storms,” she echoed. She leaned past Hoop and rested against the bulkhead, looking down through the window. Despite the violence, from up here the planet looked almost beautiful, an artist’s palette of autumnal colors. “I fucking hate this place.”

“Pays the bills.”

“Ha! Bills…” She seemed in a maudlin mood, and Hoop didn’t like her like this. Perhaps that was a price of their closeness—he got to see a side of her the rest of the crew never would.

“Almost finished,” he said, nudging some loose ducting with his foot. “Meet you in the rec room in an hour. Shoot some pool?”

Jordan raised an eyebrow. “Another rematch?”

“You’ve got to let me win sometime.”

“You’ve never, ever beaten me at pool.”

“But I used to let you play with my cue.”

“As your captain, I could put you in the brig for such comments.”

“Yeah. Right. You and which army?”

Jordan turned her back on Hoop. “Stop wasting time and get back to work, chief engineer.”

“Yes, captain.” He watched her walk away along the dusky corridor and through a sliding door, and then he was alone again.

Alone with the atmosphere, the sounds, the smells of the ship…

The stench of space-flea piss from the small, annoying mites that managed to multiply, however many times the crew tried to purge them. They were tiny, but a million fleas pissing produced a sharp, rank odor that clung to the air.

The constant background hum of machinery was inaudible unless Hoop really listened for it, because it was so ever-present. There were distant thuds, echoing grinds, the whisper of air movement encouraged by conditioning fans and baffles, the occasional creak of the ship’s huge bulk settling and shifting. Some of the noises he could identify because he knew them so well, and on occasion he perceived problems simply through hearing or not hearing them—sticking doors, worn bearings in air duct seals, faulty transmissions.

But there were also mysterious sounds that vibrated through the ship now and then, like hesitant, heavy footsteps in distant corridors, or someone screaming from a level or two away. He’d never figured those out. Lachance liked to say it was the ship screaming in boredom.

He hoped that was all they were.

The vessel was huge and would take him half an hour to walk from nose to tail, and yet it was a speck in the vastness of space. The void exerted a negative pressure on him, and if he thought about it too much, he thought he would explode—be ripped apart, cell by cell, molecule by molecule, spread to the cosmos from which he had originally come. He was the stuff of the stars, and when he was a young boy—dreaming of monsters, and looking to space in the hope that he would find them—that had made him feel special.

Now, it only made him feel small.

However close they all lived together on the Marion, they were alone out here.

Shaking away the thoughts, he bent to work again, making more noise than was necessary—a clatter to keep him company. He was looking forward to shooting some pool with Jordan and having her whip his ass again. There were colleagues and acquaintances aplenty, but she was the closest thing he had to a good friend.

The recreation room was actually a block of four compartments to the rear of the Marion’s accommodations hub. There was a movie theater with a large screen and an array of seating, a music library with various listening posts, a reading room with comfortable chairs and reading devices—and then there was Baxter’s Bar, better known as BeeBee’s. Josh Baxter was the ship’s communications officer, but he also acted as their barman. He mixed a mean cocktail.

Though it was sandwiched back between the accommodations hub and the sectioned holds, BeeBee’s was the social center of the ship. There were two pool tables, table tennis, a selection of faux-antique computer game consoles, and the bar area with tables and chairs scattered in casual abandon. It had not been viewed as a priority by the company that paid the ship’s designers, so the ceiling was a mass of exposed service pipework, the floor textured metal, the walls bare and unpainted. However, those using BeeBee’s had done their best to make it more comfortable. Seats were padded, lighting was low and moody, and many miners and crew had copied Baxter’s idea of hanging decorated blankets from the walls. Some painted the blankets, others tore and tied. Each of them was distinct. It gave the whole rec room a casual, almost arty air.

Miners had fifty days between shifts on the planet, so they often spent much of their off-time here, and though alcohol distribution was strictly regulated, it still made for some raucous nights.

Captain Jordan allowed that. In fact, she positively encouraged it, because it was a release of tension that the ship would otherwise barely contain. It wasn’t possible to communicate with any of their loved ones back home. Distances were so vast, time so extended, that any meaningful contact was impossible. They needed somewhere to feel at home, and BeeBee’s provided just that.

When Hoop entered, it was all but deserted. These quiet times between shift changes gave Baxter time to clear out the bar stock, tidy the room, and prepare for the next onslaught. He worked quietly behind the bar, stocking bottled beer and preparing a selection of dehydrated snacks. Water on the ship always tasted vaguely metallic, so he rehydrated many of the treats in stale beer. No one complained.

“And here he is,” Jordan said. She was sitting on a stool by one of the pool tables, bottle in hand. “Back for another beating. What do you think, Baxter?”

Baxter nodded a greeting to Hoop.

“Sucker for punishment,” he agreed.

“Yep. Sucker.”

“Well if you don’t want to play…” Hoop said.

Jordan slid from her stool, plucked a cue from the rack and lobbed it at him. As he caught it out of the air, the ship’s intercom chimed.

“Oh, now, what the hell?” Jordan sighed.

Baxter leaned across the bar and hit the intercom.

“Captain! Anyone!” It was their pilot, Lachance. “Get up to the bridge, now. We’ve got incoming from one of the dropships.” His French accent was much more acute than normal. That happened when he was upset or stressed, neither of which occurred very often.

Jordan dashed to the bar and pressed the transmit button.

“Which one?”

“The Samson. But it’s fucked up.”

“What do you mean?” In the background, behind Lachance’s confused words and the sounds of chaos from the bridge, Hoop heard static-tinged screaming. He and Jordan locked eyes.

Then they ran, and Baxter followed.

The Marion was a big ship, far more suited to massive deep-ore mining than trimonite extrusion, and it took them a few minutes to make their way to the bridge. Along the curved corridor that wound around the accommodations hub, then up three levels by elevator. By the time they bumped into Garcia and Kasyanov, everyone else was there.

“What’s going on?” Jordan demanded. Baxter rushed across to the communications center, and Lachance stood gratefully to vacate his chair. Baxter slipped on a pair of headphones, and his left hand hovered over an array of dials and switches.

“Heard something coming through static a few minutes ago,” Lachance said. “The higher they climb, the clearer it gets.” They called him “No-Chance” Lachance because of his laconic pessimism, but in truth he was one of the most level-headed among them. Now, Hoop could see by his expression that something had him very rattled.

From loudspeakers around the bridge, frantic breathing crackled.

“Samson, Captain Jordan is now on the bridge,” Baxter said. “Please give us your—”

“I don’t have time to fucking give you anything, just get the med pods fired up!” The voice was so distorted that they couldn’t tell who it was.

Jordan grabbed a headset from beside Baxter. Hoop looked around at the others, all of them standing around the communications area. The bridge was large, but they were all bunched in close. They showed the tension they had to be feeling, even the usually unflappable science officer, Karen Sneddon. The thin, severe-faced woman had been to more planets, asteroids, and moons than all of them put together. But there was fear in her eyes.

“Samson, this is Captain Jordan. What’s happening? What’s going on down at the mine?”

“…creatures! We’ve—”

The contact cut out abruptly, leaving the bridge ringingly silent.

Wide viewing windows looked out onto the familiar view of space and an arc of the planet below, as if nothing had changed. The low-level hum of machinery was complemented by agitated breathing.

“Baxter,” Jordan said softly, “I’d like them back online.”

“I’m doing my best,” he replied.

“Creatures?” The ship’s medic Garcia tapped nervously at her chin. “No one’s ever seen creatures down the mine, have they?”

“There’s nothing living on that rock, other than bacteria,” Sneddon said. She was shifting from foot to foot. “Maybe that’s not what they said. Maybe they said fissures, or something.”

“Have we got them on scanner yet?” Jordan asked.

Baxter waved to his left, where three screens were set aslant in the control panel. One was backlit a dull green, and it showed two small points of light moving quickly toward them. Interference from electrical storms in the upper atmosphere sparked across the screen. But the points were firm, their movement defined.

“Which is the Samson?” Hoop asked.

“Lead ship is Samson,” Lachance said. “The Delilah follows.”

“Maybe ten minutes out,” Jordan said. “Any communication from Delilah?”

No one answered. Answer enough.

“I’m not sure we can—” Hoop began, then the speakers burst back into life. Let them dock, he was going to say.

“—stuck to their faces!” the voice said. It was still unrecognizable.

Baxter turned some dials, and then a larger screen above his station flickered to life. The Samson’s pilot, Vic Jones, appeared as a blurred image. Hoop tried to see past him to the inner cabin of the dropship, but the vibration of their steep ascent out of LV178’s atmosphere made a mess out of everything.

“How many with you?” Hoop asked.

“Hoop? That you?”

“Yeah.”

“The other shift found something. Something horrible. Few of them… ” He faded out again, his image stuttering and flickering as atmospherics caused more chaos.

“Kasyanov, you and Garcia get to sick bay and fire up the med pods,” Jordan said to the doctor and her medic.

“You can’t be serious,” Hoop said. As Jordan turned on him, Jones’s voice crackled in again.

“—all four, only me and Sticky untouched. They’re okay right now, but… to shiver and spit. Just get… to dock!”

“They might be infected!” Hoop said.

“Which is why we’ll get them straight to sick bay.”

“This is fucking serious.” Hoop nodded at the screen where Jones’s image continued to flicker and dance, his voice cutting in and out. Most of what Jones said made little sense, but they could all hear his terror. “He’s shitting himself!”

Kasyanov and Garcia hustled from the bridge, and Hoop looked to Sneddon for support. But the science officer was leaning over the back of Baxter’s chair, frowning as she tried to make out whatever else Jones was saying.

“Jones, what about the Delilah?” Jordan said into her headset. “Jones?”

“…left the same time… something got on board, and… ”

“What got on board?”

The screen snowed, the comm link fuzzed with static, and those remaining on the bridge stood staring at each other for a loaded, terrible few seconds.

“I’m getting down to the docking level,” Jordan said. “Cornell, with me. Baxter, tell them Bay Three.”

Hoop coughed a disbelieving laugh.

“You’re taking him to back you up?”

“He’s security officer, Hoop.”

“He’s a drunk!” Cornell didn’t even meet Hoop’s stare, let alone respond.

“He has a gun,” Jordan said. “You stay here, supervise the bridge. Lachance, help guide them in. Remote pilot the dropships if you have to.”

“If we can even get a link to them,” Lachance said.

“Assume we can, and do it!” Jordan snapped. She took a few deep breaths, and Hoop could almost hear her thoughts. Never figured it would fuck up this bad, gotta be calm, gotta be in control. He knew she was thinking about those three miners she’d lost, and dreading the idea of losing more. She looked straight at him. He frowned, but she turned and left the bridge before he could object again.

There was no way they should be letting the Samson dock, Hoop knew. Or if it did dock, they had to sever all external operation of the airlock until they knew it was safe. There had been twenty miners taken down to the surface, and twenty more scheduled to return in the dropships. Two shifts of twenty men and women—but right now, the ten people still on the Marion had to be the priority.

He moved to Baxter’s communication panel and checked the radar scanner again. The Samson had been tagged with its name now, and it looked to be performing a textbook approach, arcing up out of the atmosphere and approaching the orbiting Marion from the sunward side.

“Lachance?” Hoop asked, pointing at the screen.

“It’s climbing steeply. Jones is pushing it as hard and as fast as he can.”

“Keen to reach the Marion.”

“But that’s not right…” Lachance muttered.

“What?” Hoop asked.

“Delilah. She’s changing direction.”

“Baxter,” Hoop said, “plot a course trace on the Delilah.”

Baxter hit some buttons and the screen flickered as it changed. The Delilah grew a tail of blue dots, and its projected course appeared as a hazy fan.

“Who’s piloting Delilah this drop?”

“Gemma Keech,” Welford said. “She’s a good pilot.”

“Not today she isn’t. Baxter, we need to talk to Delilah, or see what’s happening on board.”

“I’m doing what I can.”

“Yeah.” Hoop had a lot of respect for Baxter. He was a strange guy, not really a mixer at all—probably why he spent more of his time behind the bar than in front of it—but he was a whiz when it came to communications tech. If things went wrong, he was their potential lifeline to home, and as such one of the most important people on the Marion.

“We have no idea what they’ve got on board,” Powell said. “Could be anything.”

“Did he say there’s only six of them on the Samson?” Welford asked. “What about all the others?”

Hoop shrugged. Each ship held twenty people and a pilot. If the Samson was returning less than half full—and they had no idea how many were on Delilah—then what had happened to the rest of them?

He closed his eyes briefly, trying to gather himself.

“I’ve got visual on Delilah!” Baxter said. He clicked a few more keys on his computer keyboard, then switched on one of the blank screens. “No audio, and there’s no response to my hails. Maybe…” But his voice trailed off.

They all saw what was happening inside Delilah.

The pilot, Gemma Keech, was screaming in her seat, terrified and determined, eyes glued to the window before her. It was haunting witnessing such fear in utter silence. Behind her, shadows thrashed and twisted.

“Baxter,” Hoop whispered. “Camera.”

Baxter stroked his keyboard and the view switched to a camera above and behind Keech’s head. It was a widescreen, compressing the image but taking in the entire passenger compartment.

And there was blood.

Three miners were kneeling directly behind the pilot. Two of them held spiked sand-picks, light alloy tools used for breaking through compacted sandstones. They were waving and lashing at something, but their target was just out of sight. The miner in the middle held a plasma torch.

“He can’t use that in there,” Powell said. “If he does he’ll… he’ll… what the fuck?”

Several miners seemed to have been strapped into their seats. Their heads were tilted back, chests a mess of blood and ripped clothing, protruding ribs and flesh. One of them still writhed and shook, and there was something coming out of her chest. Pulling itself out. A smooth curved surface glimmering with artificial light, it shone with her blood.

Other miners were splayed on the floor of the cabin, and seemed to be dead. Shapes darted between them, slicing and slashing, and blood was splashed across the floor, up the walls. It dripped from the ceiling.

At the back of the passenger cabin, three small shapes were charging again and again at a closed door. There was a small bathroom back there, Hoop knew, just two stalls and a washbasin. And there was something in there the things wanted.

Those things.

Each was the size of a small cat, and looked to be a deep ochre color, glittering with the wetness of their unnatural births. They were somehow sharp-looking, like giant beetles or scorpions back home.

The bathroom door was already heavily dented, and one side of it seemed to be caving in.

“That’s two inch steel,” Hoop said.

“We’ve got to help them,” Welford said.

“I think they’re beyond that,” Sneddon said, and for a moment Hoop wanted to punch her. But she was right. Keech’s silent screaming bore testament to that. Whatever else they had seen, whatever the pilot already knew, the hopelessness of the Delilah’s situation was evident in her eyes.

“Turn it off,” Hoop said, but Baxter could not comply. And all six of them on the bridge continued to watch.

The creatures smashed through the bathroom door and squeezed inside, and figures jerked and thrashed.

One of the miners holding a sand-pick flipped up and forward as if his legs had been knocked from beneath him. The man with the plasma torch slumped to the right, away from the struggling figure. Something many-legged scuttled across the camera, blotting everything from view for a blessed moment.

When the camera was clear again, the plasma torch was already alight.

“Oh, no,” Powell said.

The flare was blinding white. It surged across the cabin, and for a terrible few seconds the strapped-down miners’ bodies were sizzling and flaming, clothes burning and flesh flowing. Only one of them writhed in his bindings, and the thing protruding from his chest burst aside, becoming a mass of fire streaking across the cabin.

Then the plasma jet suddenly swept back and around, and everything went white.

Baxter hit his keyboard, going back to the cockpit view, and Gemma Keech was on fire.

He switched it off then. Even though everything they’d seen had been soundless, losing the image seemed to drop an awful silence across the bridge.

It was Hoop who moved first. He hit the AllShip intercom button and winced at the whine of crackling feedback.

“Lucy, we can’t let those ships dock,” he said into the microphone. “You hear me? The Delilah is… there are things on board. Monsters.” He closed his eyes, mourning his childhood’s lost innocence. “Everyone’s dead.”

“Oh, no!” Lachance said.

Hoop looked at him, and the Frenchman was staring down at the radar screen.

“Too late,” Lachance whispered. Hoop saw, and cursed himself. He should have thought of this! He struck the button again and started shouting.

“Jordan, Cornell, get out of there, get away from the docking level, far away as you can, run, run!” He only hoped they heard and took heed. But a moment later he realized it really didn’t matter.

The stricken Delilah ploughed into the Marion, and the impact and explosion knocked them all from their feet.

2 SAMSON

Everyone and everything was screaming.

Several warning sirens blasted their individual songs— proximity alert; damage indicator; hull breach. People shouted in panic, confusion, and fear. And behind it all was a deep, rumbling roar from the ship itself. The Marion was in pain, and its vast bulk was grinding itself apart.

Lucy and Cornell, Hoop thought from his position on the floor. But whether they were alive or dead didn’t change anything right now. He was senior officer on the bridge. As scared and shocked as all of them, but he had to take charge.

He grabbed a fixed seat and hauled himself upright. Lights flashed. Cords, paneling, and strip-lights swung where they had been knocked from their mountings. Artificial gravity still worked, at least. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, trying to recall his training. There had been an in-depth module in their pre-flight sessions, called “Massive Damage Control,” and their guide—a grizzled old veteran of seven solar system moon habitations and three deep space exploration flights—had finished each talk with, But don’t forget YTF.

It took Hoop until the last talk to ask what he meant.

“Don’t forget…” the vet said, “you’re truly fucked.”

Everyone knew that a disaster like this meant the end. But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t fight until the last.

“Lachance!” Hoop said, but the pilot was already strapping himself into the flight seat that faced the largest window. His hands worked expertly across the controls, and if it weren’t for the insistent warning buzzers and sirens, Hoop might have been comforted.

“What about Captain Jordan and Cornell?” Powell asked.

“Not now,” Hoop said. “Is everyone all right?” He looked around the bridge. Baxter was strapping himself tight into his seat, dabbing at a bloodied nose. Welford and Powell held each other up against the curved wall at the bridge’s rear. Sneddon was on her hands and knees, blood dripping onto the floor beneath her.

She was shaking.

“Sneddon?” Hoop said.

“Yeah.” She looked up at him. There was a deep cut across her right cheek and nose. Her eyes were hazy and unfocussed.

Hoop went to her and helped her up, and Powell came with a first aid kit.

The Marion was juddering. A new siren had started blaring, and in the confusion Hoop couldn’t identify it.

“Lachance?”

“Atmosphere venting,” he said. “Hang on.” He scanned his instruments, tapping keyboards, tracing patterns on screens that would mean little to anyone else. Jordan could pilot the Marion if she absolutely had to. But Lachance was the most experienced astronaut among them.

“We’re screwed,” Powell said.

“Shut it,” Welford told him.

“That’s it,” Powell responded. “We’re screwed. Game over.”

“Just shut up!” Welford shouted.

“We should get to the escape pods!” Powell said.

Hoop tried not to listen to the exchange. He focussed on Lachance, strapped tightly into the pilot’s seat and doing his best to ignore the rhythmic shuddering emanating from somewhere deep in the ship. That doesn’t feel good, he thought.

The four docking bays were in a protruding level beneath the ship’s nose, more than five hundred yards from the engine room. Yet an impact like that could have caused catastrophic structural damage throughout the ship. The surest way to see the damage would be to view it firsthand, but the quickest assessment would come from their pilot and his instruments.

“Get out,” Powell continued, “get away before the Marion breaks up, down to the surface and—”

“And what?” Hoop snapped without turning around. “Survive on sand for the two years it’ll take a rescue mission to reach us? If the company even decides a rescue is feasible,” he added. “Now shut it!”

“Okay,” Lachance said. He rested his hands on the flight stick, and Hoop could almost feel him holding his breath. Hoop had always been amazed that such a huge vessel could be controlled via this one small control.

Lachance called it The Jesus Stick.

“Okay,” the pilot said again. “Looks like the Delilah took out the port arm of the docking level, Bays One and Two. Three might be damaged, can’t tell, sensors there are screwed. Four seems to be untouched. Atmosphere is venting from levels three, four, and five. All bulkhead doors have closed, but some secondary safety seals have malfunctioned and are still leaking.”

“So the rest of the Marion is airtight for now?” Hoop asked.

“For now, yes.” Lachance pointed at a schematic of the ship on one of his screens. “There’s still stuff going on at the crash site, though. I can’t see what, but I suspect there’s lots of debris moving around down there. Any part of that could do more damage to the ship. Rad levels seem constant, so I don’t think the Delilah’s fuel cell was compromised. But if its containment core is floating around down there…” He trailed off.

“So what’s the good news?” Sneddon asked.

“That was the good news,” Lachance said. “Marion’s lost two of her lateral dampers, three out of seven starboard sub-thrusters are out of action. And there’s this.” He pointed at another screen where lines danced and crossed.

“Orbital map?” Hoop asked.

“Right. We’ve been nudged out of orbit. And with those dampers and subs wasted, there’s no way to fix it.”

“How long?” Powell asked.

Lachance shrugged his muscular shoulders.

“Not quick. I’ll have to run some calculations.”

“But we’re all right for now?” Hoop asked. “The next minute, the next hour?”

“As far as I can see, yes.”

Hoop nodded and turned to the others. They were staring at him, and he was sure he returned their fear and shock. But he had to get a grip, and keep it. Move past this initial panic, shift into post-crash mode as quickly as he could.

“Kasyanov and Garcia?” he asked, looking at Baxter.

Baxter nodded and hit AllShip on the intercom.

“Kasyanov? Garcia?”

Nothing.

“Maybe the med bay vented,” Powell said. “It’s forward from here, not far above the docking bays.”

“Try on their personal comms,” Hoop said.

Baxter tapped keyboards and donned his headpiece again.

“Kasyanov, Garcia, you there?” He winced, then threw a switch that put what he heard on loudspeaker. There was a whine, interrupted by staccato ragged thudding.

“What the hell…?” they heard Kasyanov say, and everyone sighed with relief.

“You both okay?” Baxter asked.

“Fine. Trapped by… but okay. What happened?”

“Delilah hit us.” Baxter glanced up at Hoop.

“Tell them to stay where they are for now,” Hoop said. “Let’s stabilize things before we start moving around anymore.”

Baxter spoke again, and then just as Hoop thought of the second dropship, Sneddon asked, “What about the Samson?”

“Can you hail them?” Hoop asked.

Baxter tried several times, but was greeted only by static.

“Cameras,” Sneddon said.

“I’ve got no contact with them at all.”

“No, switch to the cameras in Bay Three,” Sneddon replied. “If they’re still coming in, and Jones sees the damage, he’ll aim for there.”

Baxter nodded, his hands drifting across the control panels.

A screen flickered into life. The picture jumped, but it showed a clear view out from the end of Bay Three’s docking arm.

“Shit” Hoop muttered.

The Samson was less than a minute away.

“But those things…” Sneddon said.

I wish you were still here, Lucy, Hoop thought. But Lucy and Cornell had to be dead. He was in charge. And now, with the Marion fatally damaged, an even more pressing danger was manifesting.

“We’ve got to get down there,” Hoop said. “Sneddon, Welford, with me. Let’s suit up.”

As Welford broke out the emergency space suits from units at the rear of the bridge, Hoop and Lachance exchanged glances. If anything happened to Hoop, Lachance was next in charge. But if it got to that stage, there’d be very little left for him to command.

“We’ll stay in contact all the time,” Hoop said.

“Great, that’ll help.” Lachance smiled and nodded.

As the three of them pulled on the atmosphere suits, the Marion shuddered one more time.

“Samson is docking,” Baxter said.

“Keep everything locked,” Hoop said. “Everything. Docking arm, airlock, inner vestibule.”

“Tight as a shark’s arse,” Lachance said.

We should be assessing damage, Hoop thought. Making sure the distress signal has transmitted, getting down to med bay, doing any emergency repairs that might give us more time.

But the Samson held dangers that were still very much a threat.

That was priority one.

Though he was now in command, Hoop couldn’t help viewing things through the eyes of chief engineer. Lights flickered on and off, indicating damaged ducting and cabling on several of the electrical loops. Suit sensors showed that atmosphere was relatively stable, though he had already told Sneddon and Welford that they were to keep their helmets locked on. Damage to the Marion might well be an ongoing process.

They eschewed the elevator to climb down two levels via the large central staircase. The ship still juddered, and now and then a deeper, heavier thud rattled in from somewhere far away. Hoop didn’t have a clue what it might be. The huge engines were isolated for now, never in use while they were in orbit. The life support generators were situated far toward the rear of the ship, close to the recreation rooms. All he could think was that the superstructure had been weakened so much in the crash that damage was spreading. Cracks forming. Airtight compartments being compromised and venting explosively to space.

If that was the case, they needn’t worry about their decaying orbit.

“Samson’s initiating the automatic docking sequence,” Baxter said through their suits’ comm link.

“Can you view on board?” Hoop asked.

“Negative. I’m still trying to get contact back online. Samson has gone quiet.”

“Keep us informed,” Hoop said. “We’ll be there soon.”

“What do we do when we get there?” Welford asked from behind him.

“Make sure everything’s locked up tight,” Sneddon said.

“Right,” Hoop agreed. “Sneddon, did you recognize those things we saw on the Delilah?” He said no more, and his companions’ breathing rattled in his headset.

“No,” Sneddon said. Her voice was low, quiet. “I’ve never seen or heard of anything like them.”

“It’s like they were hatching from inside the miners’ chests.”

“I’ve read everything I can about alien life-forms,” Sneddon said. “The first was discovered more than eighty years ago, and since then everything discovered through official missions has been reported, categorized wherever possible, captured, and analyzed. Nothing like this. Just… nothing. The closest analogy I can offer is a parasitic insect.”

“So if they hatched from the miners, what laid the eggs?” Welford asked. But Sneddon didn’t answer, and it was a question that didn’t bear thinking about right then.

“Whatever it was, we can’t let them on board,” Hoop said, more determined than ever. “They’re not that big— we lose one on the Marion, and we’ll never find it again.”

“Until it gets hungry,” Welford said.

“Is that what they were doing?” Hoop asked. “Eating?”

“Not sure,” Sneddon said.

They moved on silently, as if wrestling with thoughts about those strange, horrific alien creatures. Finally Hoop broke the silence.

“Well, Karen, if we get out of this, you’ll have something to report,” he said.

“I’ve already started making notes.” Sneddon’s voice sounded suddenly distant and strange, and Hoop thought there might be something wrong with his suit’s intercom.

“You’re just spooky,” Welford said, and the science officer chuckled.

“Come on,” Hoop said. “We’re getting close to the docking level. Keep your eyes open.” Another thud shook through the ship. If it really was an explosive decompression—one in a series—then keeping their eyes open would merely enable them to witness their doom as a bulkhead exploded, they were sucked out into space, and the force of the vented air shoved them away from the Marion.

He’d read about astronauts being blasted into space. Given a shove, they’d keep moving away from their ship, drifting until their air ran out and they suffocated. But worse were the cases of people who, for some reason—a badly connected tether, a stumble—drifted only slowly, so slowly, away from their craft, unable to return, dying while home was still within sight.

Sometimes a spacesuit’s air could last for up to two days.

They reached the end of the entry corridor leading down into the docking level. A bulkhead door had closed, and Hoop took a moment to check sensors. The atmosphere beyond seemed normal, so he input the override code and the locking mechanism whispered open.

A soft hiss, and the door slid into the wall.

The left branch led to Bays One and Two, the right to Three and Four. Ten yards along the left corridor, Hoop saw the blood.

“Oh, shit,” Welford said.

The wet splash on the wall spur beside the blast door was the size of a dinner plate. The blood had run, forming spidery lines toward the floor. It glistened, still wet.

“Let’s check,” Hoop said, but he was already quite certain what they would find. The door sensors had been damaged, but a quick look through the spy hole confirmed his suspicions. Beyond the door was vacuum. Wall paneling and systems ducting had been stripped away by the storm of air being sucked out. If the person who had left that blood spatter had been able to hang on until the blast doors automatically slammed shut…

But they were out there now, beyond the Marion, lost.

“One and Two definitely out of action,” Hoop said. “Blast doors seem to be holding well. Powell, don’t budge from that panel, and make sure all the doors behind us are locked up tight.”

“You’re sure?” Powell said in their headsets. “You’ll be trapped down there.”

“If compartments are still failing, it could fuck the whole ship,” Hoop said. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

He turned to the others. Sneddon was looking past him at the blood spatter, her eyes wide behind the suit glass.

“Hey,” Hoop said.

“Yeah.” She looked at him. Glanced away again. “I’m sorry, Hoop.”

“We’ve all lost friends. Let’s make sure we don’t lose any more.” They headed back along the opposite corridor, toward Bays Three and Four.

“Samson has docked,” Baxter said through the comm.

“On automatic?”

“Affirmative.” Most docking procedures were performed automatically, but Hoop knew that Vic Jones occasionally liked to fly manually. Not this time.

“Any contact?”

“Nothing. But I think I just saw a flicker on the screen. I’m working to get visual back, if nothing else.”

“Keep me posted. We need to know what’s going on inside that ship.” Hoop led the way. The blast door leading to Bays One and Two was still open, and they moved quickly through toward the undamaged docking areas.

Another vibration rumbled through the ship, transmitted up through the floor. Hoop pressed his gloved hand hard against the wall, leaning in, trying to feel the echoes of the mysterious impact. But they had already faded.

“Lachance, any idea what’s causing those impacts?”

“Negative. The ship seems steady.”

“Compartments failing, you think?”

“I don’t think so. If that was happening we’d be venting air to space, and that would act as thrust. I’d see movement in the Marion. As it is, her flight pattern seems to have stabilized into the slowly decaying orbit we talked about. We’re no longer geo-stationary, but we’re moving very slowly in comparison with the surface. Maybe ten miles per hour.”

“Okay. Something else, then. Something loose.”

“Take care down there,” Lachance said. He wasn’t usually one to offer platitudes.

They passed through two more bulkhead doors, checking the sensors both times to ensure that the compartments on the other side were still pressurized. As they neared bays Three and Four, Hoop knew they’d have a visual on the damage.

The docking bays were contained in two projections from the underside of the Marion. One and Two were contained in the port projection, Three and Four in the starboard. As they neared the corridor leading into bays Three and Four, there were viewing windows on both sides.

“Oh, hell,” Hoop muttered. He was the first to see, and he heard shocked gasps from Sneddon and Welford.

The front third of the port projection, including the docking arms and parts of the airlock structures, had been swept away as if by a giant hand. Bay One was completely gone, torn aside to leave a ragged wound behind. Parts of Bay Two were still intact, including one long shred of the docking arm which was the source of the intermittent impacts—snagged on the end of the loose reach of torn metal and sparking cables was a chunk of the Delilah. The size of several people, weighing maybe ten tons, the unidentifiable mass of metal, paneling, and electrics bounced from the underside of the Marion, swept down, ricocheted from the ruined superstructure of Bay Two, then bounced back up again.

Each strike gave it the momentum to return. It moved slowly, but such was its weight that the impact when it came was still enough to send vibrations through the entire belly of the ship.

The Delilah had all but disintegrated when it hit. Detritus from the crash still drifted with the Marion, and in the distance, silhouetted against the planet’s stormy surface, Hoop could see larger chunks slowly moving away from them.

“That’s a person out there,” Welford said quietly, pointing. Hoop saw the shape pressed against the remains of Bay Two, impaled on some of the torn metal superstructure. He couldn’t tell the sex. The body was badly mutilated, naked, and most of its head was missing.

“I hope they all died quickly,” Sneddon said.

“They were already dead!” Hoop snapped. He sighed, and raised a hand in apology. His heart was racing. Seventeen years in space and he’d never seen anything like this. People died all the time, of course, because space was such an inimical environment. Accidents were common, and it was the larger disasters that gained notoriety. The passenger ship Archimedes, struck by a hail of micro meteors on its way to Alpha Centurai, with the loss of seven hundred passengers and crew. The Colonial Marine base on a large moon in the Outer Rim, its environmental systems sabotaged, resulting in the loss of over a thousand personnel.

Even further back, in the fledgling days of space travel, the research station Nephilim orbiting Ganymede suffered stabilizer malfunction and spun down onto the moon’s surface. That one was still taught to anyone planning a career in space exploration, because every one of the three hundred people on board had continued with their experiments, transmitting data and messages of hope until the very last moment. It had been a symbol of humankind’s determination to edge out past the confines of their own planet, and eventually their own system.

In the scheme of things, this tragedy was small. But Hoop had known every one of those people on board the Delilah. And even though he couldn’t identify the frozen, ruined body stuck against the wrecked docking bay structure, he knew that he had spoken, joked, and laughed with them.

“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.

“So where is it?” Hoop asked.

Lachance was still in his pilot’s seat. “Out there somewhere,” he said, “floating around.” He waved his hand, a cigar clutched between two fingers. Hoop and most of the others hated the stink of the things. But with everything that had happened, it seemed almost comical to ask him to put it out.

“We saw plenty of wreckage close to the ship,” Welford said. “Maybe it was compromised and it’s just floating somewhere nearby, overheating and ready to blow.”

“In which case, c’est la vie,” Lachance said. “Unless you want to throw on a suit and take a space walk.” Welford looked away, and Lachance smiled. “And anyway, we have more immediate concerns—things we can do something about.”

“The Samson?” Powell asked.

Hoop looked at the screens. The interior of the dropship was unchanged: shadows. Shadows flickered, Jones shook. They all wanted to turn it off, but Hoop had insisted keeping it on. They needed to know.

Lachance shrugged.

“We have to consider that safe, for now. But the sensors have identified atmosphere leaks in five blast doors, which probably means another five we don’t know about. Decks five and six have vented completely into space, and the damage will need to be isolated and repaired. The chunk of the Delilah that’s caught onto the ruin of the docking bays needs freeing and sending on its way. Otherwise it’ll cause more damage.”

“And the Marion’s positioning?” Hoop asked.

“Decaying. I’m… not sure there’s much we can do about it. The crash has damaged more of the ship than we can see. I suspect there’s some severe structural trauma. And it appears as if both fuel cell coolant systems have been damaged.”

“Oh, great,” Powell said.

“How bad?” Hoop asked.

“That’s something that needs checking manually,” Lachance said. “But there’s more. Heaven has been corrupted.”

“What with?” Hoop asked. His heart sank. Heaven was their bio pod, a small but lush food-growing compound in the Marion’s nose section, where many of the miners and crew went for their green therapy. After years in space—and working down in the sterile, sandblasted hell of LV178—the sight of a carrot head or a wall of green beans did more than any drug cocktail to alleviate depression.

“I’m not sure yet,” Lachance said. “Jordan was the one who…”

Lucy loved her gardening, Hoop thought. They’d made love in Heaven once, down on the damp soil with only the fruit trees and vegetable patches bearing witness.

“We have dried foods,” Hoop said. “Is the water storage undamaged?”

“As far as I can tell.”

“Okay, then.” He looked around at the remainder of Marion’s crew. They were all shocked by how quickly and badly everything had gone to shit. But they were also hard, adaptable people, used to living with constant dangers and ready to confront the impossible to survive. “Welford, Powell, get the full damage report from Lachance and prioritize. We’ll need help. All of you can use spanners and push welding kit.”

“But there’s something else to do first,” Baxter said.

“Yep. And that’s down to me. I’ll record the distress signal, then you do everything you can to make sure it’s sent.”

Looking across Baxter’s control panel, Hoop’s gaze rested on the screen that was still showing the Samson’s interior. Jones’s shoulder and head was the only thing moving, shivering in the bottom left corner. Beyond lay the motionless shadows of dead people. Sitting beside them, those small, indistinct aliens.

“And I think you can turn that off,” Hoop said. “For now.”

3 RIPLEY

She dreams of monsters.

Sharp, black, chitinous, sleek, vicious, hiding in shadows and pouncing, seeding themselves in people she loved—her ex-husband, her sweet daughter—and then bursting forth in showers of far too much blood. They expand too quickly, as if rapidly brought in close from distances she can barely comprehend. And as they are drawn nearer through the voids of deep space they are growing, growing—the size of a ship, a moon, a planet, and then larger still.

They will swallow the universe, and yet they will still leave her alive to witness its consumption.

She dreams of monsters, stalking the corridors of her mind and wiping faces from memory before she can even remember their names.

In between these dreams lies a simple void of shadows. But it offers no respite, because there is always a before to mourn, and an after to dread.

When she starts to wake at last, Ripley’s nightmares scuttle back into the shadows and begin to fade away. But only partly. Even as light dawns across her dreams, the shadows remain.

Waiting.

“Dallas,” Ripley said.

“What?”

She smacked her lips together, tried to cough past her dry throat, and realized that it couldn’t be. Dallas was dead. The alien had taken him.

The face before her was thin, bearded, and troubled. Unknown.

He stared at her.

“Dallas, as in Texas?” he asked.

“Texas?” Her thoughts were a mess. A stew of random memories, some of which she recognized, some she did not. She struggled to pull them together, desperate for a clue as to who and where she was. She felt disassociated from her body. Floating impressions trying to find a home, her physical self a cold, loose thing over which she had no control.

Behind everything loomed a shadow… huge, insidious.

“Great,” the man said. “Just fucking great.”

“Huh?” Was she back on Nostromo? But then she remembered the blazing star that massive salvage ship had become. Rescue, then?

Someone had found her. The shuttle had been retrieved and boarded. She was saved.

She was Ellen Ripley, and soon she’d be reunited with—

Something moved across her stomach. A flood of images assaulted her, so vivid compared to those she’d had since waking that they startled her into movement and kicked her senses alive—

—Kane thrashing, his chest ripping and bursting open, that thing emerging—

—and she reached to her own chest, ready to feel the stretching skin and the agony of ribs rupturing outward.

“Hey, hey,” the man said, reaching for her.

Don’t you understand what’s going to happen? She wanted to shout, but her voice was trapped, her mouth so dry that her tongue felt like a swollen, sand-coated slug. He held her shoulders and stroked her chin with both thumbs. It was such a gentle, intimate gesture that she paused in her writhing.

“You’ve got a cat,” he said, smiling. The smile suited his face, yet it looked uncomfortable, as if he rarely used it.

“Jonesy,” Ripley rasped painfully, and the cat crawled up from her stomach to her chest. It stood there, swaying slightly, then arched its back and clenched its claws. They scratched Ripley’s skin through her thin vest and she winced, but it was a good feeling. A pain that told her she was still alive.

She reached for Jonesy, and as she stroked him a feeling of immense well-being came over her. She had risen up out of the shadows, and now that she was home—or near to home, if she had been recovered by a larger ship—then she would do her best to leave them behind. The terrible, mournful memories were already crowding in, but they were just that. Memories.

The future was a wide-open place.

“They found us,” she whispered to the cat as he growled softly in his throat. Her arms barely felt like her own, but she could feel fur against her fingertips and palms. Jonesy stretched against her. She wondered if cats could have nightmares.

“We’re safe now…”

She thought of Amanda, her daughter, and how pleased they would be to see each other. Had Ripley missed her eleventh birthday? She sincerely hoped not, because she hated breaking a promise.

Sitting up slowly, the man helping her, she groaned as her nerves came to life. It was the worst case of pins and needles ever, far worse than she’d ever had following any previous hypersleep. Upright, she sat as motionless as possible as the circulation returned, her singing nerve endings finally falling silent.

And then the man spoke.

“Actually… you’re not really that safe, to be honest.”

“What?”

“I mean, we’re not a rescue ship. We thought you were the rescue ship when we first saw you on our scopes. Thought maybe you’d answered our distress signal. But…” He trailed off, and when Ripley looked up she saw two other figures behind him in the shuttle’s confined interior. They stood back against the wall, warily eyeing her and the stasis pod.

“You’re kidding me,” one of them, a woman, said.

“Can it, Sneddon.” The man held out his hand. “My name’s Hoop. Can you stand?”

“Where am I?” Ripley asked.

“Nowhere you want to be, that’s for sure,” the man behind Hoop said. He was very tall, thin, gaunt. “Go back to sleep, Miss. Sweet dreams.”

“And that’s Powell,” Hoop said. “Don’t mind them. Let’s get you to med bay. Garcia can clean you up and check you over. Looks like you need feeding, too.”

Ripley frowned, and her mouth instantly grew dry again. Her stomach rumbled. She felt dizzy. She grabbed the side of the stasis pod, and as she slowly slung her leg over the rim and tried to stand, Hoop held her arm. His hand seems incredibly warm, wonderfully real. But his words hung with her.

Jonesy snuggled back down into the foot of the stasis pod, as if eager to find sleep again. Maybe cats really do know everything, she mused.

“Where…?” Ripley asked again, but then the shuttle began to spin, and as she fainted the shadows closed in once more.

Garcia was a small, attractive woman who had a habit of laughing softly after everything she said. But Ripley didn’t think it was an endemic shyness. The ship’s medic was nervous.

“You’re on the Marion,” she said. “Orbital mining freighter. We work for the Kelland Mining Company. They’re owned by Prospectia, who are a sub-division of San Rei Corporation, who are—like pretty much everything— owned by Weyland-Yutani.” She shrugged, chuckled. “Our ship’s built for harvesting large core deposits, really—the holds are huge and there are four extendable towing decks stacked back beneath the engine room. But we mine trimonite. Hardest substance known to man. It’s fifteen times harder than diamond, and extremely rare. We have little more than three tons of it on board.”

“What’s the problem with the ship?” Ripley asked. She was still tired, and feeling sick, but she had her wits about her again. And she knew something here was very wrong.

Garcia glanced aside, her laughter almost silent.

“Couple of mechanical issues.” She reached for some more sterile gel and started rubbing it along Ripley’s forearm.

“Are we heading home?”

“Home?” Garcia asked.

“The solar system. Earth.”

The medic suddenly looked scared. She shook her head.

“Hoop said to treat you, that’s all.” She started working on Ripley again, chattering away to cover her nervousness, talking inconsequentialities, and Ripley let her. If Garcia could somehow make her stop feeling so shitty, it was a small price to pay.

Time to rest a little, perhaps, before she found out what the hell was going on.

“Saline drip,” Garcia said, picking up a needle. “Old world medicine, but it’ll aid rehydration and have you feeling much more energetic in half an hour. Small scratch.” She slid the needle expertly into a vein on Ripley’s arm and taped it in place. “I’d recommend small amounts of liquid food to begin with—your stomach hasn’t dealt with food for so long, and its lining has become quite sensitive.”

“So long?” Ripley asked.

A pause, a small laugh.

“Soup. Lachance makes a good soup, for such a cynical bastard. He’s in the galley now.” She went to a cupboard and brought back a white bag. “We have some clothes for you. I had to dispose of your underwear, I’m afraid.”

Ripley lifted the sheet covering her and realized she was naked. On purpose? Maybe they didn’t want her just getting up and running around.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll dress now.”

“Not yet,” Garcia said, dropping the bag and shoving it beneath the bed with her foot. “More tests. I’m still checking your liver and kidney functions. Your pulse seems fine but your lung capacity appears to be reduced, probably due to holding a sleep pattern for so…” She turned away again to a medicine table. “I have some pills and medicines for you to take.”

“What for?”

“To make you better.”

“I’m not ill.” Ripley looked past Garcia and around the med bay. It was small, only six beds, and some of it looked basic. But there were also several hi-tech pieces of equipment that she didn’t recognize, including one sizeable medical pod in the center of the room bearing a familiar name badge on the side.

A cold hand closed around Ripley’s heart.

I was expendable, she thought. She felt a fierce pride, and an anger, at being the only survivor.

“You didn’t say you were actually a Weyland-Yutani vessel.”

“What?” She followed Ripley’s gaze. “Oh, no, we’re not. Not officially. I told you, our company is Kelland Mining, an offshoot of San Rei. But Weyland-Yutani makes a lot of equipment used in deep space exploration. Difficult to find a ship without something of theirs on it. And to be honest, their med pods are just about the best I’ve ever seen. They can do amazing stuff, we once had a miner with—”

“They’re a big company?”

“The biggest,” Garcia said. “They practically own space. The parent company owns countless others, and San Rei was bought up by them… don’t know, maybe twelve years ago? I was working at Kelland’s Io headquarters then, hadn’t gone out on any flights. It didn’t change much, but it did open our eyes to all the diverse missions that were being launched.” She chattered on as she prepared medicines, counted out pills, and Ripley let her.

“They’re investing in terraforming companies now, you know? They set up massive atmosphere processing plants on suitable planets, do something to the air—clean it, treat it, I don’t know, I’m a medic—and it takes decades. Then there’s materials acquisition, prospecting, mining. I’ve heard they’ve built massive ships, miles long, that catch and tow small asteroids. Loads of research stations, too. Medical, scientific, military. Weyland-Yutani have their fingers in lots of pies.”

Maybe times haven’t changed so much, Ripley thought, and it was the measure of “times” that was bothering her. She sat up and slipped one leg out of bed, pushing Garcia aside.

“I feel fine,” she insisted. The sheet dropped from her and Garcia looked away, embarrassed. Ripley used the advantage and stood, reaching down for the bag of clothes.

“Oh…” A voice said. She looked up. Hoop stood at the entrance to the medical bay, staring at her nakedness for just a few seconds too long before looking away. “Shit, sorry, I thought you were—”

“Safe in bed where you want me?” Ripley said. “Asking no questions?”

“Please,” Hoop said without turning. He didn’t elaborate, but Ripley sat back down. In truth, she did so before she fell down, because she still felt like crap. She propped up the pillow and tucked the sheet beneath her arms.

“You’re safe to look now,” she said.

Hoop smiled and came to sit on the foot of her bed.

“How are you feeling?”

“Tell me what’s going on, and I’ll decide.”

Hoop glanced at Garcia, who nodded.

“Yeah, she’s fine,” the medic acknowledged.

“See?” Ripley said. Fine, apart from the sick feeling of dread in her stomach.

“Okay,” Hoop said. “So, here it is. You’ve hardly been rescued. We spotted your shuttle on our scanners just over fifteen hours ago. You were on a controlled approach.”

“Controlled by whom?”

Hoop shrugged.

“You drifted in, circled the Marion once, then docked at the one docking arm we have left.” Something passed across his face then.

That’s something else to ask about, Ripley thought, if he doesn’t volunteer it. The docking arm.

“The shuttle has proximity protocols,” she said.

“Auto docking?”

“If it’s programed to do so.”

“Okay, well, that’s academic now. Our situation— and now yours—is… pretty grim.” He paused, as if to gather his thoughts. “We suffered a collision eleven weeks ago. Lost a lot of our people. It’s knocked us out of geostationary orbit, and we’re now in a decaying pattern. We figure less than fifteen days before we start burning up in the atmosphere.”

“Atmosphere of what?”

“LV178. A rock.”

“The planet you’re mining for trimonite,” Ripley said, and she was amused at the look Hoop threw Garcia. “It’s okay, she didn’t tell me anything else. Like, anything important.”

Hoop held out his hands.

“That’s it. Our antenna array was damaged, so we couldn’t send any long-distance distress signals. But after the collision we sent a call for help on a high frequency transmitter, and it’s still being transmitted on a loop. Hoping it would be picked up by someone within rescue distance.” He frowned. “You didn’t hear it?”

“Sorry,” she replied. “I was taking a nap.”

“Of course.” Hoop looked away, stroking his hands together. Two other people entered med bay, both of them ragged, unkempt. She recognized Kasyanov, the dark-skinned ship’s doctor who had given her the initial examination. But the man she didn’t know. Heavily built, a sad, saggy face—his name tag said Baxter. He sat on another bed and stared at her.

“Hi,” she said. He only nodded.

“So what happened to you?” Hoop asked.

Ripley closed her eyes and a rush of memories flooded in—the planet, Kane, the alien’s birth, its rapid growth, and then the terror and loss on the Nostromo before her escape in the shuttle. That final confrontation with the devil. The memories shocked her with their violence, their immediacy. It was as if the past was more real than the present.

“I was on a towing vessel,” she said. “Crew died in an accident, the ship’s core went into meltdown. I’m the only one who got away.”

“Nostromo,” Hoop said.

“How do you know that?”

“I accessed the shuttle’s computer. I remember reading about your ship, actually, when I was a kid. It’s gone down in the ‘lost without trace’ files.”

Ripley blinked.

“How long was I out there?” But she already knew the answer was going to be difficult. She’d seen that in Garcia’s reaction, and saw it again now in Hoop.

“Thirty-seven years.”

Ripley looked down at her hands, the needles in her forearms.

I haven’t aged a day, she thought. And then she pictured Amanda, her sweet daughter who’d hated the idea that she was going away, even for seventeen months. It’ll make things so easy for us when I get back, Ripley had told her, hugging her tight. Here, look. She’d pointed at Amanda’s computer screen and scrolled through a calendar there. Your eleventh birthday. I’ll be back for that, and I’ll buy you the best present ever.

“Going to tell her about Samson?” Baxter said.

Ripley looked around the room.

“Who’s Samson?”

No one replied.

Baxter shrugged and walked across to her bed, laying a tablet computer on the sheet.

“Fine,” he said. “Easier to show her, anyway.” He tapped an icon. “The Samson is locked into our other surviving docking arm. Has been for seventy-seven days. It’s sealed. These things are inside, and they’re also the reason we’re fucked.”

He swiped the screen.

At that moment, Ripley doubted everything. The fact that she was awake. Her being there, the feel of sheets against her skin, and the sharp prick of needles in her arms. She doubted the idea that she had survived at all, and hoped that this was simply her dying nightmare.

“Oh, no,” she breathed, and the atmosphere in the room changed instantly.

She started to shake. When she blinked her dreams were close again, the shadowy monsters the size of the stars. So was it just a dream? she wondered. A nightmare? She looked around at these people she did not know, and as panic bit in she wondered where they could have come from.

“No,” she said, her dry throat burning. “Not here!”

Kasyanov shouted something, Garcia held her down, and another sharp pain bit into the back of her hand.

But even as everything faded away, there was no peace to be found.

“She knew what they were,” Hoop said.

They were back on the bridge. Kasyanov and Garcia had remained in med bay to keep Ripley under observation, with orders to call him back down the moment she stirred. He wanted to be there for her. Such an ordeal she’d suffered, and now she’d woken into something worse.

Besides that, she might be able to help.

“Maybe she’ll know how to kill them,” Baxter said.

“Maybe,” Hoop said. “Maybe not. At the very least, she recognized them from that.” He nodded at the monitor. It held the final image they’d gleaned from the Samson’s internal camera. Then they’d lost contact, thirty days ago.

Jones had been long-dead by then. The things had dragged him back into the passenger hold and killed him. They’d grown into dark, shadowy shapes that none of them could quite make out. The size of a person, maybe even larger, the four shapes remained all but motionless. It made them even more difficult to see on the badly lit image.

Baxter scrolled back through the views of Bay Three— images they’d all come to know so well. The trio of cameras Welford and Powell had set up showed the same as ever—no movement, no sign of disturbance. The doors remained locked and solid. Microphones picked up no noise. They’d lost view of the inside of Samson, but at least they could still keep watch.

And if those things did smash through the doors, and burst out of the docking bay? They had a plan. But none of them had much faith in it.

“I’ll go and see how Powell and Welford are getting on,” Hoop said. “Shout if there’s anything from med bay.”

“Why do you think she came here?” Baxter said.

“I’m not sure she knows.” Hoop picked up the plasma torch he’d taken to carrying, slung it over his shoulder, and left the bridge.

The torch was a small, handheld version, used in the mines for melting and hardening sand deposits. The biggest ones they had down there ran on rails, and were used for forming the solid walls of new mine shafts— blast the sand, melt it, and it hardened again into ten-inch-thick slabs. The smaller torches could be wielded by a miner to fix breaches.

Or, Hoop thought, to drive away unwanted guests.

He didn’t know if it would work, and he’d seen the effects when one had been discharged in the Delilah. But in the larger confines of Marion, if one of those things came at him, he’d be ready.

Sneddon was in the science lab. She spent a lot of time in there now, and sometimes when Hoop paid her a visit he felt as if he was intruding. She’d always been a quiet woman, and quietly attractive, and Hoop had often enjoyed talking to her about the scientific aspects of their work. She’d once worked for Weyland-Yutani on one of their research bases orbiting Proxima Centauri. Though she didn’t work directly for them any more, the company still funded science officers on many ships, and for any sub-divisional company who wanted them. The funding was very generous, and it would often go a large way toward bankrolling a mission.

He liked Sneddon. He liked her dedication to her work, and her apparent love of it. It’s an endless, wonderful playground out there, she’d said once when he asked her what she hoped to find. Anything is possible.

Now Sneddon’s childlike imagination had taken a hit.

At the same time, Hoop’s childhood dreams had found reality.

When he reached the lab, Sneddon was sitting on a stool at the large central island. There were a couple of tablet computers in front of her, and a steaming mug of coffee. She held her head in her hands, elbows resting on the counter top.

“Hey,” Hoop said.

She looked up, startled.

“Oh. Didn’t hear you.”

“Everything cool?”

Sneddon smiled softly. “Despite the fact that we’re slowly spiraling to our deaths, set to crash on a lifeless sand-hell of a planet? Yes, everything’s cool.”

He smiled wryly.

“So what do you think about Ripley?”

“It’s obvious she’s seen these things before,” Sneddon replied, a frown wrinkling her forehead. “Where, how, when, why, I haven’t got the faintest clue. But I’d like to talk to her.”

“If you think it’ll help.”

“Help?” Sneddon asked. She looked confused.

“You know what I mean,” Hoop said. He laid the plasma torch gently on the bench.

“Well, I’ve been thinking about that,” she said, smiling. “I know you’re in charge, and I’m pretty sure I know what you’ve been thinking these past few days.”

“Do you, now?” Hoop asked, amused. He liked that she smiled. There were far too few smiles nowadays.

“Escape pods,” Sneddon said. “Maybe try to regulate their nav computers, land within walking distance of each other and the mine.”

Hoop drummed his fingers on the bench.

“Reach there together, there’ll be enough food and supplies down there for a couple of years.”

“And those things, too.”

“Forewarned is forearmed,” Hoop said.

“With that?” Sneddon said, nudging the plasma torch. Her bitter laugh wiped the smile from her face.

“There might not be any more things down there at all. They might have all come up on the Delilah.”

“Or there might be a dozen, or more.” Sneddon stood and started pacing. “Think about it. They were hatching from the miners. We saw that. Just… breaking out of them. Implanted by those things attached to their faces, perhaps. I don’t know. But if that is the case, we have to assume that anyone left behind was infected.”

“Sixteen on the Delilah. Six on the Samson.”

Sneddon nodded.

“So eighteen left in the mine,” Hoop said.

“I’d rather go down on the Marion,” Sneddon said, “if it came to that. But now it doesn’t have to.”

“You know something I don’t?”

“No, but maybe I’m thinking about things in a different way.”

Hoop frowned, held out his hands.

“And?”

“Her shuttle. It’s a deep space shuttle! Used for short-distance transfers of personnel, or as a long-term lifeboat.”

“And one stasis pod for nine of us.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Sneddon said. “Look.” She slid one of the tablets across to Hoop. At first he didn’t really understand what he was seeing. It was an old, old image of a lifeboat. Lost at sea back on Earth, crammed with survivors, a sail rigged from shirts and broken oars, wretched people hanging over the side, or eating fish, or squeezing drinking water from hastily rigged moisture catchers.

“Today, I’m stupid,” Hoop said. “In charge, yes. But stupid. So just tell me.”

“One stasis pod between the nine of us,” Sneddon said. “But we pack the shuttle with as many supplies as we can. Program a course toward Earth, or at the very least the outer rim. Fire the engines until the fuel’s out and we’re traveling as fast as we can. A good proportion of light speed. Then… take turns in the stasis pod.”

“Take turns?” he said. “She’s been drifting out there for thirty-seven years!”

“Yeah, but something’s very wrong with that. I haven’t checked yet, but the shuttle computer must have malfunctioned.”

“There was no indication of that when I checked its log.”

“You didn’t go deep enough, Hoop. The point is, we can survive like that. Six months at a time, one of us in stasis, eight others… surviving.”

“Six months in a tightly confined space? That shuttle’s designed for five people, max, for short trips. Eight of us? We’ll end up killing each other.” He shook his head. “And how long do you figure it’ll take?”

Sneddon raised an eyebrow.

“Well… years.”

“Years?”

“Maybe three until we reach the outer rim, and then—”

“It’s impossible!” he said.

Sneddon tapped the tablet’s screen again, and Hoop looked. She’d certainly done her homework. Examples manifested and faded on the screen—lifeboats at sea, strandings on damaged orbitals, miraculous survivals dotting the history of space disasters. None of the timescales were quite what Sneddon was describing, but each story testified to the will of desperate people to survive, whatever the situation.

However hopeless.

“We’d need to check the shuttle’s systems,” he said. “Fuel cell, life support.”

“And you’re chief engineer, aren’t you?”

Hoop laughed. “You’re serious about this.”

“Yes.”

He stared at her for a while, trying to deny the shred of hope she’d planted in him. He couldn’t afford to grab hold of it.

“Rescue isn’t coming, Hoop,” she said. “Not in time.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

“So you’ll—”

“Hoop!” Kasyanov’s voice cut in over the intercom. “Ripley’s stirring. I could sedate her again, but I really don’t want to pump her full of any more drugs.”

Hoop leapt to the wall and hit the intercom button.

“No, don’t. She’s slept enough. I’ll be right down.” He smiled at Sneddon, and then nodded. “I’ll speak to Ripley, get her access codes.”

As he left the science lab and headed for med bay, the ship’s corridors seemed lighter than they had in a long time.

4 937

Not only was she still light years from home, but she’d docked with a damaged ship in a decaying orbit around a hellhole of a planet, alongside a dropship full of the monsters that haunted her nightmares.

Ripley might have laughed at the irony.

She’d successfully shaken the idea that it was a dream, or a nightmare—it had taken time, and convincing herself hadn’t been easy—but the explanation still eluded her.

How was this all possible?

Perhaps the answers were on her shuttle.

“Really, I’m ready to walk,” she said. Kasyanov—a tall, fit woman who obviously looked after herself—shot her a disapproving look, but Ripley could see that the doctor held a grudging respect for her patient’s stubbornness.

“You’ve barely walked for thirty-seven years,” Kasyanov protested.

“Thanks for reminding me. But as far as my body’s concerned, it was yesterday.” She’d already stood from her bed and dressed while Kasyanov and Garcia were elsewhere, determined to prove herself to them. And she’d been pleased at how good she actually felt. The sedative was still wearing off, but beneath that she was starting to feel her old self again. Whatever Garcia had done for her— the saline drip, the other drugs—was working.

“Patients,” Kasyanov said, rolling her eyes.

“Yeah, who’d be one, right?” Ripley stood from the bed, and as she was tying the boots that had been given to her, Hoop breezed into the bay.

“Oh, you’re dressed.” He feigned disappointment, then said, “You’re looking good!”

Ripley looked up and raised an eyebrow. “I’m twice your age.”

“I’ve had a few long trips myself, you know,” he replied without missing a beat. “Maybe one day we can have a drink, compare sleeps?” He smiled as he spoke, but maybe he was a little bit serious, too.

Ripley laughed despite herself. Then she remembered. The image was never far away, but for a few seconds here and there she could forget. A burst of laughter, a smile, a friendly comment would hide the memory beneath the mundane.

“I’d like to take a look at the Narcissus,” Hoop said.

“You and me both.”

“You haven’t spent long enough in it already?”

Ripley stood and stretched. She was tall, lithe, and she enjoyed the feel of her muscles finding their flexibility again. The aches and pains meant she was awake and mobile.

“I’ve got some questions for the computer,” she said. “Like why the hell it brought me to this shit hole.”

“Thanks,” Hoop said.

“You’re welcome.”

Ripley saw the doctor and medic exchange glances, but couldn’t quite read them. She hadn’t yet worked out the dynamic there. Kasyanov, as the doctor, was clearly in charge of med bay. But she also appeared nervous, scared, and Garcia seemed to be the one most at ease.

“Come on,” Hoop said. “I’ll walk you to the docking bay.”

They left med bay together, and Hoop remained silent. Waiting for my questions, Ripley thought. She had so many. But she was afraid that once she started asking, none of the answers could satisfy, and nothing he said would be good.

“You say you don’t know why you docked with us?” Hoop asked finally.

“I was asleep when the shuttle docked, you know that.” Something troubled Ripley, nudging at her consciousness like a memory trying to nose its way in. A suspicion. An explanation. But her mind still hadn’t completely recovered from hypersleep, and she didn’t think she’d like what it had to say. “What’s that?” she asked, nodding at the heavy object draped over Hoop’s shoulder. It looked like a stumpy, box-shaped gun.

“Plasma torch,” he said. “In case they get free.”

Ripley laughed. It burst from her in a rush, like she was vomiting disbelief, and she couldn’t stop. Her eyes burned. Tears ran down her face. She thought of Hoop trying to scorch an alien with his box-gun, and the laughter turned hysterical. Between breaths it sounded like she was trying to scream, and when she felt Hoop’s hands on her shoulders she lashed out at him, seeing only his shadow through tear-distorted eyes—long arms, spiky edges.

She saw an alien bearing down and clasping her to its chest, that long curved head raising, mouth sprouting the silvery, deadly teeth that would smash through her skull and free her at last from her nightmares.

“Ripley!” Hoop shouted.

She knew who he was, where she was, but the shakes had set in. Trying to believe they were physiological, she knew the truth. She was scared. Properly, completely fucking terrified.

“That?” she said, gasping and swiping at the plasma torch. “You really think…? Have you seen one of them, close up?”

“No,” he said softly. “None of us have.”

“No, of course not,” Ripley said. “You’re still alive.” The hands squeezed harder and she leaned into him. To her own surprise, she welcomed his embrace, his smell, the feel of his rough beard against her neck and cheek. She took great comfort from the contact. It made her think of Dallas.

“But you have,” he said.

Ripley remembered the time in the shuttle, moments after the Nostromo had bloomed into nuclear nothingness and she’d believed it was all over. The alien, slow and lazy for reasons she didn’t understand, but for which she gave thanks. Because it’s just fed? she’d wondered at the time, Parker and Lambert fresh in her mind. Because it thinks it’s safe?

She nodded against his shoulder.

“Where?” he asked, quietly but with urgency. “When?”

“I can’t answer that right now,” she whispered. “I… I don’t understand. But soon I will.” She pulled back from him, wiped angrily at her eyes. It wasn’t appearing weak in front of him that troubled her—it was feeling weak in herself. She’d seen that thing off, blasted it into space, and she should no longer be afraid. “The shuttle. There are answers there.”

“Okay,” Hoop said. He looked down at the plasma torch, went to shrug it off.

“No,” Ripley said, pressing her hand over his on the torch’s barrel. “It might help.”

Hoop nodded, frowning. He’s seen some stuff himself, she thought. Maybe once she’d found out exactly how and why she was here, the two of them could talk properly.

“Right,” he said. “Besides, we’re passing close to the docked dropship.”

“But everything’s secure,” Ripley said. “Isn’t it?”

“We’re keeping a close eye on things,” Hoop said, nodding. “The image we showed you is the last we’ve seen inside the Samson. But it’s safe.”

“Safe,” Ripley said, trying the word. On this dying ship it seemed so out of place.

Hoop led the way, and at the end of a corridor they turned to go right. He nodded to the left, where a heavy bulkhead door had been welded shut with a dri-metal seal. “The Delilah crashed into the ship through there, taking out Bays One and Two. We were lucky the fuel cell didn’t rupture, but we had to cut it loose afterward. It was snagged on the wrecked superstructure, wrapped up a load of other tattered ship parts. Me, Welford, and Powell went out there and spent three hours with cutting torches. Shoved it aside. When we came back inside we watched for an hour while it floated away.”

“And this way?” Ripley asked, pointing right. They continued, and she noticed Hoop taking a tighter grip on the plasma torch.

“Bay Three’s through there,” he said, nodding toward a door. Its control panel had been removed and wires and connectors hung loose.

“What’s with that?” Ripley asked.

“No way of opening it without fixing the controls.”

“Or smashing the door down.”

“That’s six-inch triple-layered polymer-inlaid steel,” Hoop said. “And there are three more doors and a vented airlock between here and the Samson.”

Ripley only nodded. But the word “safe” still eluded her.

“Come on,” Hoop said. “Your shuttle’s through here.”

Ripley was surprised at how comforted she felt, ducking through Bay Four’s open airlock and entering the Narcissus. She had no good memories of the vessel— only of the alien, and her terror that it would take her, too. But Jonesy was there, snuggled up in the open stasis pod as if still in hypersleep. And there were memories of the Nostromo and her crew. Dead for almost four decades, now, but to Ripley it felt like yesterday.

Parker, slaughtered on the floor. Lambert, hanging where the alien had slung her after ripping a hole through her face. All that blood.

“You okay?” Hoop asked.

Ripley nodded. Then she moved through the cramped shuttle and sat in the pilot’s seat. She was aware of Hoop walking, slowly, around the shuttle as she ran her fingers across the keyboard and initiated the computer. Mother was gone, but the Narcissus’s computers still had a similarly constructed interface, designed so that the user felt as if they were actually talking to a friend. With technologies that could make an android like Ash, it had always seemed strange to Ripley giving a faceless computer a human voice.

She entered her access code. Morning, Narcissus, she typed. The reply appeared onscreen.

Request reason for Narcissus’s change of course.

“Huh,” Ripley said.

“Everything okay?” Hoop asked. He was examining the stasis pod she’d spent so long in, stroking Jonesy who was slinking back and forth with his back arched, tail stretched. He might well have been the oldest cat in the galaxy.

“Sure,” she replied.

Hoop nodded, glanced toward the computer screen, and then started looking around the rest of the shuttle’s interior.

Request records of incoming signals received over the past one thousand days. Ripley expected a streaming list of information—space was filled with beamed communications, and most ship’s computers logged and discarded them if they were not relevant.

Request replay of distress signal received from Deep Space Mining Orbital Marion.

“Fuck you very much,” Ripley muttered as she typed, Because of Special Order 937?

Emergency Command Override 100375.

Ripley frowned. Tapped her fingers beside the keyboard. Stared at the words on the screen. Even Mother had never communicated in such a conversational tone. And this was just the shuttle’s computer. Weird.

Request data of timescales and travel distances since Nostromo’s detonation?

Unavailable or withheld?

The computer did not reply.

Such evasiveness wasn’t possible from this machine. Not on its own. It was a functional system, not an AI like Mother. And Mother was gone.

The only other person who’d had access to Mother was Dallas. Dallas and…

…and after Dallas had been taken, and she’d quizzed Mother herself, she remembered her shock at that other presence in the computer room.

Screw you, Ash, Ripley typed.

The cursor blinked.

But the computer didn’t respond. Not even a “Does not compute.”

Ripley gasped. She hit the shutdown, and the text on the screen faded to a soft, background glow. Yet still she felt as if she was being watched. The computer’s arrogant silence seemed to ring through the interior of the shuttle, almost mocking.

“What was in your distress signal?” Ripley asked abruptly.

Hoop was rooting around in the rear of the shuttle, examining the space suits still hanging in the locker back there.

“Huh?”

“The distress signal you sent after the crash!” Ripley said. “Did you mention those things? The creatures? Did you say what they were like, what they did?”

“I… Yeah, I think so.”

“You think so?”

“It was more than ten weeks ago, Ripley. I recorded it hours after I’d seen lots of friends die, and witnessed what happened—”

“I need to hear it.”

“What’s wrong?”

She stood and backed away from the interface. It was stupid—there was no camera there—but she felt observed. She took off her jacket and dropped it across the screen.

“The alien on my ship wasn’t an accident,” she said. “And I don’t think it’s an accident that I’ve come here, either. But I need to know. I need to hear the signal.”

Hoop nodded and came toward her.

“I can patch in from here,” he said, nodding down at where her jacket covered the keyboard.

“You can?”

“I’m chief engineer on this jaunt, and that covers all the infotech systems, too.”

Ripley stepped aside and watched as Hoop moved the jacket, sat, and worked at the interface. The words she saw on the screen—the interaction—seemed innocent enough.

Hoop chuckled.

“What is it?”

“These systems. Pretty old. I had more computing power than this to play VR games, when I was a kid.”

“You don’t see anything odd with the computer?”

“Odd?” He didn’t look up, and Ripley didn’t elaborate. “Here we are,” he said. “I’ve patched into Marion’s computer, and here’s the message. It’s on a loop.” He scanned the control panel, and Ripley leaned forward to switch to loudspeaker.

Hoop’s voice came through. There was an edgy tone to it—the fear was palpable.

“… decaying orbit. Second dropship Samson is docked and isolated, those things in there hopefully contained. They… laid infants or eggs inside the miners, burst from their chests. We are not contaminated, repeat, not contaminated. Estimate ninety days until we hit LV178’s atmosphere. All channels open, please respond. Ends.

“This is DSMO Marion, of the Kelland Company, registration HGY-64678, requesting immediate aid. Crew and mining teams down to eight surviving members. Miners discovered something on the surface of LV178, attacked, dropship Delilah crashed the Marion. Many systems damaged, environment stable but we are now in a decaying orbit. Second dropship Samson is docked and isolated…”

Hoop tapped the keyboard to turn off the replay, then glanced back at Ripley.

“Ash,” she whispered.

“What’s Ash?”

“Android. Weyland-Yutani. He was tasked with finding any alien life forms that might have been of interest to the company. His orders… crew expendable. My crew. Me.” She stared at the computer again until Hoop dropped her jacket back across it. “He’s gone, but he must have transferred part of his AI programing to the Narcissus.

He’s here. He’s in here now, and he brought me to you because of those aliens.”

“I’m not sure it’s possible that an AI could—”

“I should have been home,” Ripley said, thinking of Amanda and her sad, wet eyes when she’d watched her mother leave. She hated herself for that. Even though she should have been home with her daughter for her eleventh birthday, and nothing that had happened was her fault, Ripley hated herself. “I should have never left.”

“Well, maybe some good can come of this,” Hoop said.

“Good?” Ripley said.

“Your shuttle. Sneddon and I think we can get away on it, all of us. And that’ll leave the Marion and those fuckers on the Samson to burn up in the planet’s atmosphere.”

Ripley knew that for any extended voyage the shuttle was only suitable for one, with only a single stasis pod. But she didn’t care. Any way to distance herself from those aliens—any way to deny Ash from fulfilling his Special Order—was good for her.

“Maybe,” she said. “I’ll run a systems check.”

“You’re not alone anymore, Ripley,” Hoop said.

She blinked quickly, and nodded her thanks. Somehow, he seemed to know just what to say.

“You’ll stay here with me for a while?”

Hoop feigned surprise.

“Do you have coffee?”

“No.”

“Then my time here is limited.” He stood away from the control desk and started looking around the shuttle again. It was cramped, confined—and way, way too small.

Ignoring the computer, Ripley started manual processing of systems information.

It only took three minutes to realize how screwed they were.

5 NARCISSUS

Hoop had worked with androids before. In the deep asteroid mines of Wilson’s Scarps, they were often the first ones down and the last ones back. They’d been perfectly reasonable, amenable, quiet, honest, and strong. Safe. He couldn’t say he’d liked them, exactly, but they’d never been dangerous or intimidating. Never scheming.

Occasionally he’d heard of malfunctions in some of the earlier military-grade androids, and there were unconfirmed reports—little more than rumors, really— that the military had suffered human losses as a result. But they were a different breed of android, designed for strength but with a built-in expiration date. They were easy to spot. Their designers hadn’t been too concerned with aesthetics.

That must have been the case on Nostromo. And now, assuming Ripley was right, the AI had somehow followed her, and was still using her for its programed mission. As his team discussed their options, she looked wretched— taking in the conversation, looking at each crew member who expressed an opinion, and yet remaining silent. She smoked cigarette after cigarette, and drank coffee.

She must think she’s still dreaming, he mused, consumed by nightmares. And every now and then she glanced across at him as if checking that he was on board with all of this.

Because it turned out that they were more royally screwed than any of them had thought.

The plan they were slowly forming—crazy as it was— seemed to be the only way out. It was a last chance, and they had no option but to grab it.

“You’re sure about the timescales?” Powell asked. “Only a few days until we start skimming the atmosphere?”

“Sure as I can be,” Lachance replied.

“I thought we had a couple of weeks left,” Kasyanov said, voice raised as fear clasped her.

“Sorry. I lost my crystal ball in the collision.” Lachance rested in the pilot’s chair, turned around to face them all. The rest sat or stood around the bridge, in seats or leaning against equipment terminals. It was the first time Ripley had been with all eight of them together, but Hoop couldn’t sense any nervousness in her. If anything, she was too distracted for that.

“And there’s nothing you guys can do?” Kasyanov said, looking at Powell, Welford, and then Hoop. He didn’t like the accusation in her eyes, as if they hadn’t done their best. “I mean, you’re engineers.”

“Kasyanov, I think I’ve made it pretty clear,” Lachance said. “Our attitude control is damaged beyond repair, retro capability is down to thirty percent. Several containment bulkheads are cracked, and there’s a good chance if we initiate thrust we’ll just flash-fry ourselves with radiation.” He paused briefly.

“We do still have coffee, though. That’s one positive.”

“How do we know all that’s true?” Kasyanov asked. “It’s getting desperate here. We should go outside, look again at all the damage.”

“You know because I’m the best pilot who’s ever worked for Kelland,” Lachance said. “And the fact that Hoop, Welford, and Powell have kept us all alive for this long is a fucking miracle. Fixing the hull breaches, repressurizing the vented sections of the ship. That’s why you know it’s true.”

Kasyanov started to say some more, but Garcia put a hand on her arm. Hoop didn’t think she even squeezed— just the contact was enough to silence the doctor.

“However much we wish it wasn’t true, it is,” Hoop said. “And we’ve got no more time to waste. We think we have a plan, but it’s not going to be easy.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Kasyanov asked.

“Me, Sneddon, Ripley.”

“Ripley? The stranger who just woke up from half-a-century of snoozing? What’s she got to do with this?”

Ripley glanced across at Kasyanov, then away again, looking down at the coffee cup in her hand. Hoop waited for her to speak, but she remained silent.

“This isn’t a conspiracy, Kasyanov,” he said. “Hear us out.”

The doctor drew in a breath and seemed to puff herself up, ready to say something else, challenge him some more. But then she nodded.

“I’m sorry, Hoop… everyone. Just so strung out.” She and Ripley exchanged weak smiles.

“We all are,” Hoop said. “It’s been over seventy days, waiting for some sign that our signal’s been picked up, acknowledged and relayed onward, and that someone’s coming for us. Maybe the frequency’s been frazzled, and we’re just coming through as background fuzz. Or maybe someone’s heard us, but we’re too far out, and it’s too expensive to mount a rescue.”

“Or there’s just not the time,” Baxter said. “Changing course, plotting a route, estimating the fuel requirements. Anyone who did catch the signal would have a lot to do before they even got here.”

“Right,” Hoop said. “So we’re running out of time, and now we’ve got to help ourselves. More than we have been. More than just patching up problems while we wait.”

“Escape pods?” Powell asked.

“We’ve talked about that,” Lachance said, waving the suggestion aside.

“Yeah,” Sneddon said. “That’s just a slow death. We’re in a drifting orbit now, and even if we could rig a way to steer the pods more accurately, to land as close to the mine as possible, we could still go down miles away. We’d be scattered, alone, and vulnerable.”

“The Samson, then.” Baxter had mentioned this before, putting it forward as their only real option, if the individual escape pods wouldn’t work. They could open the doors, kill the aliens, then take the Samson away from LV178.

But it was a dropship, built for short-distance transport to and from the surface of a planet. It wasn’t equipped for deep space travel. No stasis pods, no recycling environmental systems. It was a no-go.

“We’d starve to death, suffocate, or end up murdering each other,” Lachance said. He looked at Baxter, wearing a deadpan face. “I’d kill you first, you know.”

“You’d try,” Baxter muttered.

“Yeah, sure, the Samson,” Powell said. “And who’s going to stand by those doors when we open them? We can’t see what those things are doing inside.”

“We can’t escape on the Samson,” Hoop said. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t need it. Ripley?” She looked uncertain, but she stood, stubbed out her cigarette, and lit another.

“Hoop and Sneddon came up with this,” she said, taking the first drag. “It might work. The Narcissus is a lifeboat as well as a deep space shuttle. Environmental systems, carbon dioxide recycling capability.”

“But for nine of us?” Welford asked.

“We take turns in the stasis pod,” Ripley said. “But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. There’s another problem.”

“Of course there is,” Powell said. “Why should anything be easy?”

“What’s the problem?” Lachance asked.

“The shuttle’s fuel cell is degraded,” Ripley said. “Less than ten percent charge left, which is nowhere near enough.”

“Enough to get us away from the Marion, surely,” Kasyanov said.

“I’ve run the figures,” Hoop said. “Lachance, Sneddon, I’d like you both to check them. But we need enough power to get the overloaded shuttle away from Marion, out of orbit, and accelerated to a speed that’ll get us back within the outer rim before we’ve died of old age. I figure we need eighty percent of a full charge, at least. Any more than that just means we can accelerate to a faster speed, get there quicker.”

Welford snorted, but then Ripley spoke again.

“It’ll be real-time,” she said. “Even sharing the stasis pod means there’ll be eight people at a time just… sitting around. Growing older.”

“We estimate eighty percent cell charge will get us past the outer rim within six years,” Hoop said. “Give or take.”

There was a stunned silence.

“So I do get to murder Baxter,” Lachance said.

“Fucking hell,” Powell said.

“Yeah,” Kasyanov agreed. Her voice shook.

“Welford’s feet smell,” Garcia said. “Lachance farts. Hell, we won’t survive a year.”

No one laughed.

“Is there a precedent?” Lachance asked.

“We’d be setting it,” Sneddon said.

The bridge was silent for a time while they all thought about what it really meant.

“You said we still need the Samson,” Lachance said. “For its fuel cells?”

Hoop shook his head, and looked to Ripley again.

“Won’t power my shuttle,” she said. “Completely different system design. The Marion’s might, but Hoop tells me they’re damaged and dangerous. He says there are more down in the mine, though—spares, stored remotely, just in case. So we have to take the Samson down to the surface. We bring a couple back up, adapt one, and fix it into the Narcissus. Load the shuttle up with as many supplies as we can, then blast off before your ship starts to burn.”

More silence.

Ripley smiled. “Then all we need is a deck of cards.”

“Piece o’ cake,” Lachance said.

“Yeah,” Powell said, voice quavering with panic, “no problem. Easy!”

“Well…” Hoop said. “There’s more.”

Powell muttered something, Kasyanov threw up her hands.

“What?” Lachance said. “Another problem? Don’t tell me. The shuttle’s made of cheese.”

“It seems Ripley’s been having some computer malfunctions,” Hoop said. “Maybe it’s best if I let her tell you about it.”

Ripley raised her cup of cold coffee in a toast. He shrugged apologetically. Sorry, he mouthed. She gave him the finger.

He liked Ripley. She was strong, attractive, confident in the same self-deprecating way Lucy Jordan had been.

Damn it.

“Ash,” Ripley said. “He was an android aboard my ship.”

She told the entire story, and something about it felt so unreal. It wasn’t the strangeness of the story itself— she’d witnessed everything, knew it all to be true. It was the idea that Ash had followed her. He’d expressed his sympathies, and Parker had burned off his face, but by then he must have already insinuated himself into the shuttle’s computer, just in case things went wrong aboard Nostromo. How could he have been so prepared? What sort of paranoid programing had he been given?

She spoke about him now as if he could hear every word. She was only sorry that he couldn’t feel shame.

“So as far as I can tell, he’s the reason I’m here,” she concluded. “And he’s not going to be happy unless I bring one of those things back with me.”

“That’s just really fucking dandy,” Powell said. “So we clear one ship of fucking great big rib-busting monsters so we can escape on another ship piloted by a psychotic AI. Wonderful. My life is complete.”

“I don’t think it’s that much of a problem anymore,” Ripley said. She lit another cigarette. The smoke burned her throat. They were harsh Russian cigarettes, brought along by Kasyanov. Of the Marion’s crew that survived, only the doctor smoked. “Because of Ash, I’m here instead of home. I haven’t been able to access detailed flight logs yet, but… it could be he’s just kept me floating around out here. Waiting for another sign that these aliens are still around.”

“But why keep you alive, if that’s the case?” Sneddon asked.

“Because he needs someone for the alien to impregnate. He’s seen how violent the fully-grown creature is, there’s no way he could get one back to Weyland-Yutani. Not on board the Narcissus.” She exhaled smoke and waved it away. “Anyway, that’s beside the point. Can’t undo what that bastard has done. But back then he was mobile, tactile. Hell, we all thought he was human. He interfered in our decision-making, steered events toward his secret agenda. And when things got out of his control, he went on the rampage.

“Now… he’s not really here anymore. He’s just code. Ethereal.” She blew smoke again, but this time didn’t wave it away. “And we know where to find him.”

“So we just shut down Ripley’s shuttle’s computer until we’re ready to go,” Hoop said. “Then when we’re underway, and before we initiate main thrust, I’ll do my best to purge Ash from the systems. Or at least to isolate him to certain drives.”

“God knows you’ll have plenty of time,” Powell said.

“Right,” Ripley said. “And there’ll always be someone awake, to monitor any changes in the shuttle’s programed flight. Incoming signals. Whatever.”

“So Ash is just floundering,” Sneddon said. “Following his programing, but without a plan.”

Ripley shrugged. She wasn’t sure. He’d been so deceitful, so scheming back on Nostromo, that she didn’t want to underestimate him now. But whatever part of Ash still survived, he could no longer intrude in their actions. Not physically, at least.

Soon, she would return to the Narcissus to find out more.

“So that’s the plan,” Hoop said. “Lachance, I need you to plot the Marion’s trajectory around the planet; let us know when we’ll be closest to the mine. But it’s gotta be soon, like in the next couple of days. Powell, Welford, I need you to gather as much of the mining equipment as you can. We need plasma torches, sand picks, anything else you can find.”

“There are the thumpers,” Garcia said. “They use them to fire charges deep into loose sand.”

Hoop nodded.

“Can we really use them in the Samson?” Baxter asked.

“We don’t have to use the explosive charges,” Welford said. “Substitute bolts, or something, and you have a pretty good projectile weapon.”

Ripley was looking into her cup of cold coffee, listening to the discussion, trying to take it all in. But her mind was elsewhere. Somewhere dark, claustrophobic. Stalking the steam-filled corridors where lighting flashed, the countdown siren wailed, and the alien could have been waiting around any corner.

“How many are in there?” she asked. The conversation was too loud, so no one heard her. She tried again. “Hey!” That quieted them down. “How many are in the Samson?”

“We think four,” Hoop said.

“Fully grown?”

He shrugged. Looked around.

“Last time we saw, they looked big,” Baxter said. “Just shadows, really. They were still, hunkered down at the back of the passenger compartment.”

“Maybe they were dead,” Kasyanov said hopefully. Nobody responded to that. Their luck wasn’t going that way.

“They have acid for blood,” Ripley said.

“What?” Sneddon asked.

“Dallas—our captain—said it was molecular acid of some sort. It ate through two decks before its effect slowed down.”

“Oh, man,” Powell said, laughing in disbelief. “Do they fire lightning out of their asses, too? Do they cum nuclear jelly? What else, huh?”

“Ripley, that’s…” Sneddon stopped, and shook her head. Ripley looked up in time to see her glance at the others, eyebrows raised.

“I’m not making this up,” Ripley said.

“No one said you were,” Hoop said.

“Hoop, come on!” Sneddon said. “Acid for blood?”

There was a long silence on the bridge. Ripley smoked the last of her cigarette and dropped the butt into her coffee mug. It sizzled out. She was feeling an increasingly urgent need to get back to the Narcissus, alone, find her own space. Talk with Ash. She wasn’t sure it would solve anything, but it might make her sense of betrayal easier to bear.

She’d promised Amanda she’d be home.

Closing her eyes, she willed back the tears. She’d already cried too much. Now it was time to survive.

“If you want to use the Samson, best draw them out before you kill them,” she said. “That’s all I’m saying.”

“We’ll work on a plan,” Hoop said. “In the meantime—”

“Good. I’m going back to my shuttle.” Ripley stood, but the science officer blocked her path.

“Now wait,” Sneddon said. She was six inches shorter than Ripley, but she stood her ground. Ripley respected that. “None of us knows you. You come here for whatever reason, start telling us these stories about rogue AIs and aliens with acid for blood. And now you want to go back to your shuttle?”

“Yeah, why?” Powell asked. “Hoop, we can’t just let her wander round.”

“What, you’re afraid I’m going to damage your perfect little ship?” Ripley asked. “God knows, we wouldn’t want to scratch the paint.”

“Let’s just chill,” Hoop said. But Sneddon’s blood was up.

“What are you going back for?” she demanded. “You’ve just come from there with Hoop.”

“You’re welcome to come,” Ripley said. She was staring Sneddon down. She waited until the shorter woman averted her gaze, then smiled. “I’m just going to feed my cat.”

As it turned out, Jonesy wasn’t hungry. Ripley laid out some reconstituted chicken, and though he crept from the stasis pod and sniffed at it, he turned his nose up and slinked away. But he stayed in the shuttle.

Maybe he can smell them out there, Ripley thought. Maybe he knows more than the rest of us.

The acid-for-blood thing troubled her. What she’d witnessed had been just a drop, spilled from the thing hugging Kane’s face when Ash and Dallas tried cutting it off. She didn’t know whether the fully-grown alien carried the same blood, or whether wounding one would result in a similar effect. Really, she knew so little. But though the reality of her experience had been terrifying, the alien had taken on larger, darker connotations in her sleep.

Thirty-seven years of nightmares, she thought. And now that I’m awake, the nightmare has woken with me.

She moved around the cramped space, again wondering just how the hell nine people would survive in here. Even with one in the stasis pod, there’d barely be room for the rest to sit down. There was a small bathroom behind the equipment locker, so at least there’d be privacy for toilet and limited washing. But existing together here for more than a few days hardly bore thinking about.

For months? Years?

She finally found Jonesy again in the suit locker, snuggled down in one of the big EVA boots. He took some coaxing, but eventually he miaowed and climbed out, letting Ripley pick him up and hug him to her. He was her link to the past, and the only solid proof that any of it had actually happened. She didn’t really require such proof— she was confident that she could distinguish reality from nightmare—but the cat was a comfort nonetheless.

“Come on then, you little bastard,” she said. “You gonna help me?” She held the cat up and looked into his eyes. “So why didn’t you spot anything wrong with that bastard Ash? Damn fine ship’s cat you are.”

She sat in the pilot’s seat, Jonesy on her lap, and rested her fingers on the keyboard. She took a deep breath. Ash had tried to kill her, but he was just a machine. An AI, true. Created to think for himself, process data and make his own decisions, act on programed responses and write and install new programs based on experience— essentially learning. But a machine nevertheless. Designed, manufactured, given android life in the labs of Weyland-Yutani.

Suddenly Ripley felt a rush of hatred for the company. They had decided she and her crew were expendable, and four decades later they were still fucking with her life.

It was time for that to stop.

Hello Ash, she typed. The words appeared on the screen before her, flashing green, the cursor passing the time as a response was considered. She didn’t actually expect one, assuming a resounding silence as the AI strived to hide its continued existence. Instead, the reply was almost instant.

She sat back in her seat, stroking the cat. The sensation returned—the feeling of being watched. She didn’t like it.

You brought us here in response to the Marion’s distress signal?

Crew still expendable in accordance with special order 937?

Answer the question, Ash.

“Nice,” she breathed. Jonesy purred in her lap. But I know where you are now, Ash. You can’t control things anymore. You’re without purpose.

Ripley looked at those words and thought about what they meant. The Nostromo’s crew, brutally killed by the thing Ash had allowed on board. Her decades in hypersleep, away from her daughter and home.

Fuck you, Ash, she typed.

The cursor blinked back.

Ripley punched the computer off and then sat back in the chair. Jonesy stretched and allowed himself to be scratched.

6 FAMILY

The Marion drifted, Lachance computed, and he decided that four days after Ripley’s arrival would be the optimum time to drop back down to the mine. It would entail a thousand-mile, three-hour drop, four hours at the mine retrieving the spare fuel cells, and then an hour’s blast back into orbit. If all went well they’d be away from Marion for around eight hours. If all didn’t go well…

Everyone knew what the results of that would be.

Hoop suggested that they open up the Samson a day before they were due to drop. That would give them time to tackle the creatures inside, clear out the ship, and prep it for travel. If there was damage, they could do their best to repair it.

No one mentioned the possibility that it might be damaged beyond their ability to repair. There were so many things that could go wrong that they didn’t bear discussing, and as such the survivors lived in a miasma of false positivity. The only talk was good talk. Everyone kept bad thoughts to themselves.

Baxter was the only one who was openly pessimistic, but then they were used to that with him. Nothing new.

Hoop was becoming more and more impressed with Ripley. That first day she’d been woozy and uncertain, but she soon found her feet. She came across as strong, resilient, yet damaged—tortured by what she had experienced. She’d once mentioned her daughter, but never again. He could see the pain in her eyes, but also the hope that she would see her child again.

Hope in the face of hopelessness, he supposed, was what kept them all going.

And she was attractive. He couldn’t get away from that. She looked to him first when they had group conversations, and he didn’t think it was because he was ostensibly in command. Maybe it was because, having both lost their children, they had something in common.

Hoop often thought about his two sons, and how he and their mother had watched a marriage dissolve around them. Neither of them had been able to rescue it. His job was the prime cause, she’d told him. It’s dangerous, she said. You’re away for a year at a time. But he’d refused to accept all of the blame.

It’s well-paid, had been his response. One more long job, then we’ll be able to buy our own business back on Earth, be self-sufficient.

And so it had spiraled, until eventually he had retreated to the one thing he knew was utterly indifferent, not caring how and what he was.

Space.

I ran away. The thought dogged him constantly, and it was the last thing the woman he loved had said. You’re running away.

Ripley’s presence made him feel more guilty than before, because in his case it had been a willing decision. She should only have been away for eighteen months.

He and Ripley spent some more time in the Narcissus, talking about the journey they would undertake together, being positive, discussing how nine people could live in a shuttle designed for three or four, at most. For years. Perhaps many years.

All the time there was a quiet hysteria lurking behind everything they said, a shared understanding that this was a crazy, unworkable idea. But it was their only idea. Sometimes it felt cramped with just the two of them in the shuttle, although Hoop wondered whether that was just him.

They also discussed their families. Hesitatingly at first, but then with an increasing openness. They talked of guilt, and how incredible distances did nothing to dull the sense of loss. He didn’t pity her, and he thought she was thankful for that. She gave him understanding, and he was grateful. They were both cursed by distance and time, and the staggering loneliness that both could instill in a person. They were getting to know each other. And while it was a good feeling, there was also something delicate about every connection made.

They were both tentative, guarded. Their situation meant that they could be ripped apart at any moment.

They also talked about Ash. Hoop was quite the computer expert, and he didn’t mind saying it. But though he was relatively confident about being able to purge Ash’s AI from the shuttle’s computer—or at very least, compartmentalize it so that it could no longer exert any control—he and Ripley decided that he should wait until they were away from the Marion and headed home. They would need the computer untouched and undamaged in order to program their route, and it was possible—albeit remotely—that his efforts to remove Ash might corrupt a wider swathe of the systems.

Besides, the disembodied Ash could do them no harm.

Those three days passed quickly, and there were tensions in the group. There always had been, and those that were familiar Hoop cast to one side. The relationship between the doc and Garcia was weird—he thought they were probably lovers, as well as colleagues—but they were always efficient, and professional when it was needed. Powell complained. Sneddon was quiet and steadfast, a gentle bravery shining through. She would be a rock for them all.

The others bickered, though no more than usual. But it was Ripley’s presence that caused the greatest waves.

“But I can’t help being fascinated by them,” Sneddon said. She was scrolling through stills from inside the Samson again, the tablet propped against her coffee mug. It had been almost three weeks since they’d last seen inside the dropship. None of them knew what to expect when they opened it up.

“They’re monsters,” Ripley said. She was leaning against a work counter. The science lab was small and compact, and with the three of them in there it was already growing warm. Hoop had suggested that they conserve power and turn off any unnecessary environmental systems.

“We’re not catching them, Sneddon,” Hoop said. “That door opens and we kill them.”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” Sneddon replied without looking up. “But have you considered just how?”

“Of course. The plasma torches, sand picks, and charge thumpers.”

“Right,” Sneddon said. “So torch them with plasma and their skin, or whatever they have, bursts open. Acid spills. Sand picks hack at them… open them up. Fire projectiles with the charge thumpers… more acid.”

“What else do you suggest?” Ripley asked, an edge to her voice.

“I suggest that we come up with something else,” Sneddon said. “Trap them somehow. Hold them until we can—”

“We need to kill them, or they’ll kill us,” Ripley said. “If they’re anything like the one we had on Nostromo they’ll be eight, nine feet tall, incredibly fast and strong, and utterly vicious. And you want to trap them? How? You got a box we can bait with some cheese?”

Sneddon sat back, looking calm and composed. She glanced at Ripley, then looked squarely at Hoop.

“Is she safe?” she asked.

“Safe as any of us are right now,” Hoop said. He looked at Ripley, frowned, tried to warn her off. But he could see that her outburst was driven by fear, not anger. For a moment it seemed as if she was seeing something very far away, and he wondered yet again at the nightmares she must still suffer. She’d told him about each of her dead crewmates—some of them her friends, the captain her occasional lover.

“Cargo netting,” Sneddon said.

Ripley coughed something between a laugh and a gasp.

“It’s strong enough to pack tons of equipment in the holds,” Sneddon went on. “Twisted steel core. It’ll hold them long enough for us to decide what to do with them.”

“How do you know it will work?” Ripley asked.

“How do you know it won’t?” Sneddon countered. “At least this way we don’t risk burning a hole right through the hull. If what you say about acid is true…”

“It’s true,” Ripley said. “What, you don’t believe me now?”

Sneddon sighed, swinging back in her chair. “I think we just need to be—”

“Who appointed you science officer?” Ripley asked.

“The company. Kelland.”

“Which is owned by Weyland-Yutani.”

“Very distantly, yes,” Sneddon replied. “So?”

“And you worked for Weyland-Yutani before that?”

“I served my apprenticeship with them, on Mars, yes.”

“Ripley?” Hoop asked. She seemed to be losing control, panicking. He didn’t like that. More than anything, it made his own subsumed panic start to simmer again. Without even realizing it, he thought perhaps he’d taken Ripley’s strength to feed his own.

“Don’t wrap me in your conspiracies,” Sneddon said quietly.

“This isn’t about gathering specimens,” Ripley said. “It’s about surviving!”

“I didn’t say I wanted to gather anything.”

“But you find them fascinating—you said so yourself.”

“And you don’t?” Sneddon asked. She slid the tablet across the bench, but Ripley looked away.

“No,” she said. “Horrifying. Repulsive. But not fascinating.”

Knowing what Ripley had told him about Ash, Hoop supposed he should have seen this coming. He wanted to defuse the situation, bring it back onto a calm footing. It had started as a friendly discussion about how the creatures could be tackled, but had descended into a standoff. He took a breath, ready to speak.

But Sneddon’s actions spoke for him.

She slid open an equipment drawer, plucked out a scalpel and nicked the top of her thumb. She squeezed the digit and smeared a droplet of blood across the white bench surface. Then she looked at Ripley.

Ripley sighed. “Sorry,” she said. “Really.”

Sneddon smiled. “Hey, I can’t blame you. Truth is, I’ve never liked androids myself.”

“Really?” Ripley said.

“I’m a science officer, but my basis is in biology.” She picked up a piece of gauze, and held it firmly over the cut. “I find them unnatural.”

“And now we can all be friends,” Hoop said. His own sigh of relief was unfeigned, and both Ripley and Sneddon laughed.

“So, these nets,” Ripley said. “Take me to see them.”

Even before Ripley arrived, they had taken to spending most of their time on the bridge. It was a large enough area to feel comfortable, with the various workstations, well-designed and spread out, but still small enough to talk with each other without having to shout. At least three of the surviving members of the Marion needed to be there at any one time, and each of them preferred being close to one another. Most of the time, at least. On those few occasions when tensions rose and tempers flared, they all had their individual cabins in the accommodations hub.

The rec room became dusty and unused, and on those few occasions when Hoop had cause to visit, the sight of it made him unbearably sad. He had never believed in ghosts, but he felt the echo of every dead friend in that silent room so used to laughter.

Six hours before they were planning on opening the Samson, they stood or sat around the bridge, all eyes focussed on him. He felt the weight of responsibility, even though they were all making the decisions now. He hadn’t forced his notional position of command on them. Since the disaster, he had simply been guiding, advising, and standing there to be shouted and screamed at if the stresses got too great.

Now, the pressure was almost unbearable. He knew that every single one of them felt it, because he could see it in their eyes, their taut expressions. He knew all of them so much more deeply than he had just seventy days before. Trauma had thrown them closer together, and now the time had come to try and make things better.

Hours of planning, scheming, suggestions and disagreements, drawing plans, and sick humor had led to this.

“We’re ready,” Hoop said. “We know that Baxter hasn’t managed to establish any visual connection back to the Samson, so there’s no saying what we’ll be facing when the doors open. Maybe those bastard things will have starved. Maybe they’ll be asleep, or hibernating, and we can just gather them up and blast them into space. Could be they’ll come out fighting. In which case we’ll be ready.” He nodded at the array of mining tools. “So, anything else? Have we missed anything? Any more questions, speak up now.”

None of them spoke. He looked around the bridge, giving them all a chance. His gaze rested on Ripley, and he saw something there that continued to give him hope—resilience, determination…

Anger.

“Okay,” he said. “You all know what to do.”

The vestibule to Bay Three was circular and fifty feet across, lined with ranks of dusty seating interspersed with equipment racks for those awaiting a dropship. Its smoothly curved side walls were partly glazed, and offered views over the destroyed Bays One and Two on the port side. The Narcissus was docked at Bay Four, off to starboard.

Through a heavy door at the far end was the airlock, a space large enough for ten people at a time to be strapped in and decontaminated while it was pressurized or vented. At the other end of it, another door led into the docking arm. This was a space only ten feet long, partly flexible, that fixed directly to the surround around the dropship’s outer hull hatch.

Baxter and Lachance remained on the bridge, Lachance to oversee master controls—airlock operation, environmental, and remote opening of the Samson’s hatch—and Baxter to ensure that communication channels were kept open. Everyone wore a headset and microphone, and they could all hear one another. For the moment, though, they were maintaining strict silence.

Hoop was in command, reasoning that someone needed to oversee the operation, and no one had objected. Ripley suggested that most of them were relieved it wasn’t them.

No one disagreed.

They waited nervously in the vestibule while Powell and Welford repaired the disconnected door mechanism leading into the airlock. Through the viewing windows, Ripley could see the flanks of the Samson about thirty feet away. The ship looked innocent enough. But what she knew, the images she had seen, were enough to make her terrified of it. That motionless, silent ship contained her nightmares, and they were preparing to let them out.

She was chilled with nervous perspiration, trying to level her breathing. She didn’t want them all to hear her fear.

She pulled her gaze away and looked to her left, toward the ruins of docking bays One and Two. Hoop had already shown her this, but it was still a sad, shocking sight. So many had died there. She was amazed the disaster hadn’t taken out the whole ship. Yet in a way it had, the ripples and effects of the crash still being felt at a much slower pace.

“Welford?” Hoop asked.

“Not long,” the engineer replied. “Lachance, ready to pressurize?”

“Ready,” Lachance said from the bridge.

“Like I said,” Hoop said, “as slow as you can. Don’t want to make any more noise than is necessary.”

In case they hear us, Ripley thought. Her heart hammered, and drips of sweat trickled down her back. Kasyanov had given her some spare clothing, and Ripley knew from its fit that they didn’t belong to the doctor. She wondered whose it had been. The shirt and trousers were tight but not uncomfortable, the jacket snug beneath the arms and across her back. She wore her own boots from the Nostromo. Probably collector’s items now.

The two engineers worked at the door, both efficient and quiet. Ripley had seen them arguing, and Powell more than anyone seemed to exude negativity. But they worked as a team, and there was something almost balletic about their movement, as if they were one body split in two. She wondered how long they had been working together out here. She should have asked. She should have got to know them better, before—

She took a deep breath to compose herself, and Hoop glanced across at her. He’d heard through her microphone. She didn’t return his glance, didn’t want him to see how afraid she was. She needed to be strong. Always had been, working with the crew of the Nostromo, most of them men. It was a trait she liked in herself, and she hated that fear was picking at its edges.

Ripley stood against the left wall of the vestibule, Hoop was in the middle, and Kasyanov and Garcia were to the right. Hoop carried the plasma torch—a serious bit of kit, he’d said—leaving her with a sand pick and the medics with charge thumpers. They were large and unwieldy, but packed a lot of punch. Sneddon was with the engineers, heavy cargo netting piled around her feet.

Ripley had examined the cargo netting, and it was stronger than she’d expected. Triple-core steel wrapped in epoxy-molded carbon fiber, and wound in compressed nylon strands. There were special cutting tools they used to slice the netting if they had to. She’d nodded, but had advised a healthy skepticism. They couldn’t assume that anything would hold the beasts.

“Done,” Welford said. “Lachance?”

“Pressurizing.”

There was an almost sub-audible hum as the airlock beyond the vestibule was filled once more with air. The lights above the heavy doors flickered softly, and after a minute all three glowed a soft green.

“Okay,” Lachance said. “Just check the pressures there, would you?”

Powell looked at the gauges beside the door. He held up his thumb.

“Open it up,” Hoop said.

Welford stroked a pressure pad, and the doors slid apart. Despite their care and the readings, there was still a sigh as the doors opened. Ripley swallowed and her ears popped. She looked across at Hoop, but he seemed unconcerned.

“Okay guys,” Hoop said, “slow and quiet.”

Nervously, Welford and Powell entered the airlock. Ripley moved sideways, so that she could see them inside. As soon as they reached the far door they started repairing the dismantled door mechanism.

Garcia and Sneddon went to work rigging the heavy cargo netting around the door that led from the airlock into the vestibule, leaving one side loose for the engineers to slip past once they were done.

Ripley frowned. No matter how she looked at it, the plan was as loose and woolly as ever. Remote-open the Samson, wait until the aliens came through and got caught in the netting. Use sand picks to hook the netting and drag them back through the vestibule and along the corridor to the ruined docking bays. Open the inner door, shove the creatures through, lock the door again. Blast them into space.

It was like catching a shark in a goldfish net.

Yet there were so many ways the aliens might not play ball. What if they stay in the Samson? Ripley had asked. Welford had suggested a remote drone they used for deep mine exploration. Sending it in, luring them out.

So woolly. So loose.

The others seemed just as nervous. Some of them had seen these things in action—on monitors, on the destroyed dropship, and aboard the Samson. But the ones they’d seen had been small. Not much bigger than the bastard that had burst from Kane at their last meal together. The grown ones, the adults, had existed on their screens as little more than ambiguous shadows.

She shook her head. Her breathing came heavier.

“This won’t work,” she said.

“Ripley,” Hoop whispered.

The others were looking at her, eyes wide.

“Not four of them,” she said. She hefted the sand pick. It was heavy, its end viciously barbed, but it felt insufficient. She swung it too slowly. Her shoulders already ached from holding it.

“We should think of something else,” she said.

“Damn it, Ripley!” Lachance said.

“Quiet!” Baxter hissed. “Welford and Powell have a headset, too!”

She knew they were right. The engineers were almost within touching distance of the dropship, and soon they’d have the last door ready to open.

They couldn’t change their minds now.

And the aliens had been in there for more than seventy days. Their only food source—the bodies of the six miners and dropship crew—had been rotting the entire time. Little food, no water. Nowhere to move and stretch. Maybe they would be tired and weak, and easy to drag away.

Maybe.

Ripley nodded to let the others know she had her fears under control. But really, she didn’t. Hoop knew that— she could see it when he looked across at her. He’s as scared as me.

Perhaps they all were.

But they were also desperate.

Welford and Powell retreated back through the airlock, ducking around the heavy netting that had been hung across the inner door. Welford nodded to Hoop.

“Okay, Lachance, airlock outer door ready to open.”

Ripley heard someone take in a sharp breath, then through the airlock she saw the docking arm’s outer door slide open into the wall. Beyond lay the Samson’s outer hatch. It was dusty, scratched, and docked perfectly central to the airlock.

“Last check,” Hoop said. “Baxter, no view or sound from inside?”

“Still nothing,” Baxter said.

“Welford, Powell, either side of the netting with the plasma torches. Remember, only blast them if you have to. Kasyanov, wait over there with the charge thumper. Ripley, you okay?”

She nodded.

“Good. Sneddon, Garcia, back through the doors into the corridor behind the vestibule. Once we start dragging them in the net, you lead the way to Bays One and Two. Open the blast doors as quickly as you can, then get ready to close them again. Lachance, once we’ve shut them in there, you remote-open the door leading to the ruined docking bays.”

“Easy,” Ripley said. Someone laughed. Someone else started swearing quietly, voice so soft that she couldn’t even tell whether it was a man or woman.

Wait! she wanted to say. Wait, we still have time, we can come up with something else! But she knew that they didn’t have time. That bastard Ash had brought her to this doomed ship, and now she was going to face them again.

The monsters from her nightmares.

Hoop whispered, “Go.” The Samson’s outer hatch squealed open, and the shadows came.

7 SHADOWS

Between blinks, Ripley’s world turned to chaos.

As soon as the Samson’s hatch was open the aliens surged out. They were so fast, so silent and furious, that she didn’t have time to count. Their limbs powered them along the docking arm and through the airlock, skittering on the metallic surfaces. Someone shouted in surprise, and then the creatures struck the heavy netting.

Ripley crouched down clutching her sand pick, ready to drag the creatures toward the vestibule’s rear doors. But something was wrong with the net. It held two of them tightly in a tangled jumble, but two more thrashed violently, limbs waving and slashing, tails lashing out, and those terrible teeth clacking together and driving ice-cold fear through her veins.

“Careful, they’re—” she shouted.

And then they were through.

The tightly coiled metal-cored netting ruptured, high-tension wiring thrashing at the air with a high-pitched whipping sound. Welford screamed as his features blurred. Blood splashed across the vestibule, painting the harsh white surfaces a startling shade of red.

Hoop shouted as he ignited his plasma torch. One alien surged at him, then kicked sideways against a rank of fixed seating, veering away from the waving flame.

Directly toward Ripley.

She crouched against the bulkhead and propped the long pick’s handle beside her, pointing it up and away from her at an angle. The alien—tall, spiked, chitinous, with razor nails and the curved head and extruding mouth that had haunted her for so long—skidded toward her, claws scoring ruts in the flooring as it tried to slow. But not quite quickly enough.

It squealed as the point penetrated its body somewhere just above it legs.

An acrid stench made Ripley gag. She heard fluid spattering onto metal, and then she smelled burning.

“Acid!” she shouted. She shoved forward with the sand pick. The alien stood its ground, crouched down with its hands clawed and waving, mouth snapping forward. But it was playing for distraction. Ripley heard the soft whoosh! of its tail, and ducked just in time.

The pick was snatched from her hands and sent clattering across the vestibule.

Ripley feinted left toward the airlock, then leapt to the right, following the curved wall toward the rear doors. She sensed the thing following her, and as she approached the doors Hoop shouted.

“Ripley, down!”

She dropped without hesitation. A roar burst all around her and she smelled hair singeing, felt the skin on the back of her neck and scalp and arms stretching as an unbelievable heat scorched the air above and behind her.

The alien squealed, high and agonized.

Ripley looked toward the open exit doors just as another shadow powered out through them. From beyond she heard an impact—wet, meaty, a thud and a grunt. Someone screamed.

Something grasped her hand and she cried out, rolled, kicking out, her heavy boot connecting with Hoop’s thigh. He gasped, then grabbed her tighter and dragged her across the vestibule.

The alien was still squealing as it burned, thrashing back along the curved bulkhead toward the airlock doors.

And toward Powell. He was standing over the two aliens still struggling in the net, aiming his charge thumper. There was something wrong with his face. Ripley saw the splash of blood across his chest and neck, saw it dripping from his features. He was totally expressionless. He waved the thumper back and forth, but didn’t seem to be seeing anything.

She glanced aside from him and saw what had become of Welford. He was meat.

“Powell!” she shouted. “Eyes right!”

Powell lifted his head. But instead of looking right at the blazing alien that was staggering toward him, he looked left at his dead friend.

Kasyanov leapt across two rows of seats, braced her legs, and fired her charge thumper at the burning alien. The shot was deafening, pulsing in Ripley’s ears and blowing the flames back from the creature’s sizzling hide.

It screeched louder. But it continued on toward Powell, falling on him, and Ripley didn’t quite close her eyes in time. She saw Powell’s head erupt beneath the impact of the burning thing’s silvery mouth.

“What the fuck?” Hoop shouted.

Kasyanov fired the thumper again, two more times, shattering the alien’s head and spreading its burning parts across the floor and wall on that side of the vestibule. Flames curved across the windows, smoke formed intricate patterns, and an acidic haze rose.

Hissing. Smoking.

“We need to get out!” Ripley said.

“Where’s the other one?” Hoop asked.

“Through the door. But the acid will—”

“Kasyanov, out!” Hoop shouted.

Kasyanov came for them. Ripley saw her disbelief, but also the determination that had smothered her terror. That was good. They’d need that.

One of the aliens trapped in the netting broke free, streaking toward them across the vestibule. It knocked seating aside, jumped over the back of a row of fixed equipment racks, and bore down on Kasyanov.

Hoop raised the plasma torch. But if he fired this close he’d fry the doctor as well.

“No!” Ripley said. “Hoop!” She sidestepped to the left, never taking her eyes off the alien. It paused briefly, and her selfish thought was, Not me, don’t come at me. Fear drove that idea, and moments later—as the alien leapt and Hoop fried it with the plasma torch—she felt a flush of shame.

But Kasyanov was alive because of Ripley’s quick decision. She’d acted on instinct, and her baser thoughts, more taken with self-preservation, had needed a moment to catch up.

The Russian nodded once at her.

Then one of the acid-splashed windows blew out.

The storm was instantaneous. Anything not fixed down was picked up and blasted toward the ruptured window, carried by the atmosphere gushing out into space under massive pressure. Broken chairs, dropped weapons, wall paneling powered across the vestibule and jammed against the window and bulkhead. The noise was incredible, a roar that threatened to suck Ripley’s eardrums from her skull. She tried to breathe, but couldn’t pull air into her lungs. She held onto a floor fixing for a row of chairs with one hand, reaching for Hoop with the other.

Hoop clung onto the door frame, Kasyanov clasping onto his flapping jacket.

Ripley looked over her shoulder. Two tattered bodies—all that remained of Welford and Powell—were pressed hard against the broken window, the two dead, burned aliens almost merged with them. The surviving creature, still tangled in netting, was clasping onto the airlock doorway, but as she watched its grip slipped and it impacted against its dead brethren. Things were drawn through the airlock and whipped around toward the breach—clothing, body parts, other objects she couldn’t identify from inside the Samson.

She saw Powell’s right arm and chest sizzling and flowing from spilled acid.

“We don’t have long!” she tried to shout. She barely even heard herself, but she could see from Kasyanov’s expression that she knew the terrible danger they were in.

For a moment, the storm abated a little. The blown window was clogged with furniture, body parts, and bulkhead paneling. Ripley felt the pressure on her ears and the tugging at her limbs lessening, so she started pulling herself along the floor fixings toward the doorway. With the acid eating away at the detritus, the calmer period wouldn’t last for long.

Hoop hauled himself through, helped by hands from the other side. Kasyanov went with him. Then they both turned back for her.

Jammed against the door frame and held from behind, Hoop reached for Ripley.

As he looked over her shoulders and his eyes widened, she got her feet under her and pushed.

Hoop grabbed her arms and squeezed, so tight that she saw blood pooling around where his fingernails bit into her wrists.

The entire bulkhead surrounding the shattered window gave way.

With a shout Ripley barely heard, Hoop pulled her toward him. The doors were already closing, and she was tugged through the opening moments before the edges met.

There was a loud, long whine, a metallic groaning, and then the growl of racing air fell immediately away. Beyond the door was chaos. But here, for a few seconds, it was almost silent.

Then Ripley’s hearing faded back in. She heard panting and groaning, and Hoop’s muttered curses when he saw Garcia’s mutilated body jammed through a doorway across the corridor. Her chest was a bloodied mess, bones glinting with dripping blood.

“One… one came through,” Ripley said, looking at Sneddon. The science officer nodded and pointed along the corridor.

“Into the ship,” she said. “It moved so fast. And it was huge. Huge!”

“We’ve got to find it,” Ripley said.

“The others?” Sneddon asked.

Hoop shook his head. “Welford. Powell. Gone.”

The chaos beyond the doors ended as quickly as it had begun.

Ripley stood up, shaking, looking around at the others—Hoop, Kasyanov, Sneddon. She tried not to look at Garcia’s damaged, pathetic body, because it reminded her so much of Lambert, hanging there with her arm still swinging, blood still dripping.

“We’ve got to track it down,” Ripley said again.

“Baxter, Lachance!” Hoop said. “One got free on the ship. You hear me?”

No reply.

“The decompression must have screwed the com connection,” Sneddon said.

Ripley reached for her headset, but it was gone. Ripped off in the violence.

“The bridge,” Hoop said. “All of us. We need to stay together, get up there as quickly as possible. Warn them. Then we decide what to do. But only after we’re all together. Agreed?”

Ripley nodded.

“Yeah,” Sneddon said.

Hoop took the last remaining charge thumper from Sneddon, and led the way.

They’d moved so quickly! Even after being trapped in the Samson for seventy days, they’d stormed out of there faster than Ripley could have imagined. She wasn’t really sure what she’d been expecting… To find that it had all been a bad dream, perhaps. To discover that the things in there weren’t really related in any way to the monster that had killed her crew, thirty-seven years before.

But it hadn’t been, and they were. Exactly the same. Giant, insectile, reptilian things, yet with a body that in certain light, from certain angles, could have been humanoid.

That head… those teeth…

Hoop held out his hand, palm up toward them. Ripley stopped and repeated the signal so that Sneddon could see, and behind her Kasyanov.

They were at a junction in the corridor. Across the junction was the door that led into the ruined docking bays, still solid and secure. Around the corner lay the route up into the main body of the Marion.

Hoop stood motionless, the charge thumper held across his body. It was long, unwieldy, and to aim it ahead of him as he stepped around, he’d have to move across the corridor.

The alien could have been anywhere. Any corner. Any shadow in the corridor walls, open doorway, hatch, side room. She’d seen it rush from the vestibule, heard it pause just long enough to kill Garcia, and then it had gone, ignoring Sneddon altogether. Maybe because she carried a weapon. But more likely, Ripley thought, because it sensed the vast ship to which it now had unrestricted access.

Maybe it had stopped a dozen steps away and was waiting for them. Drooling, hissing softly, anticipating its first real meal in so long.

Or perhaps it had dashed headlong into the depths of the ship, losing itself in unlit, unheated rooms, where it could plan what to do next.

Hoop slipped around the corner and Ripley paused for a second, holding her breath. But there was no explosion of violence, and she followed, drawing close to him once again.

They reached the end of the docking section and climbed a wide staircase into the main ship. She kept her eyes on the head of the staircase. It was well lit up there, yet she still expected to see the shimmering silhouette, all spiked limbs and curved head.

But they were alone.

Hoop glanced back, face tense. Ripley smiled and nodded encouragingly, and he returned her smile.

Behind her, Sneddon and Kasyanov remained close, but not so close that they might interrupt each other’s movements. Even though she’d lost her headset, Ripley could still hear their heavy breathing—part exertion, mostly terror. No one spoke. The shock of what had happened was still circling, held at bay by the adrenalin rush.

Soon it’ll hit us, Ripley thought, remembering the crunching sound as the alien bit into Powell’s head, the hissing, acidic stench as the destroyed creature’s blood splashed down across Powell’s and Welford’s ruined corpses.

Soon it’ll really hit us.

Hoop led them through a wider, better-lit corridor stretching toward a central circulation area. From there other corridors led off, as well as an elevator that rose up through the decks. Three doors were securely closed, shutting off deck areas that had decompressed during the initial disaster, all of which were now out of bounds. The other corridors, all leading toward the rear of the ship, were still open.

From where they stood they could see part of the way along each one. Doors stood in shadows. Staircases rose out of sight. Lights flickered from weak or interrupted power supplies, causing flinching movement where there was none.

Hoop indicated the elevator. Sneddon moved forward, quickly and silently, and pressed the call button.

“Baxter?” Hoop whispered again into his microphone. “Lachance?” He looked at Sneddon, then back at Kasyanov. They both shook their heads.

The lights above the elevator shone a flat red.

“Stairs?” Ripley asked.

Hoop nodded and pointed the way. They moved behind the elevator bank and toward the bottom of the widest staircase. Hoop immediately started climbing, charge thumper aimed up and ahead of him.

Ripley and the others followed. They trod quietly, moving as quickly as they dared, and at the next halflanding Hoop paused and peered around the corner. He moved on. The ship hummed and throbbed around them with familiar sounds and sensations.

At the next landing Hoop stopped again, staring, frozen.

Ripley moved up beside him. She was ready to act quickly—grab him, fall back and down if the alien pounced. But to begin with she couldn’t see anything out of place, and she touched his shoulder and squeezed to get his attention.

Hoop swung the charge thumper around and down, pointing its wide barrel at something on the landing. A clear, viscous slime, splashed down on the landing and the first tread of the next flight, then smeared across the textured metal.

“Which level is the bridge?” she whispered in his ear. She was confused, lost.

He pointed up, held up one finger.

“We have to get out of the stairwell,” she said. “Get up there some other—”

Hoop ran. He pushed off with a grunt, leaping up the staircase two at a time, weapon held out before him. He moved so quickly that he took Ripley and the others by surprise, and by the time she started after him he was already on the next half-landing, swinging around the corner without pause. She grabbed the handrail and pulled herself up.

We should be going slow and quiet! she thought. But she also knew exactly what Hoop was feeling. He wanted to get to the bridge and warn Lachance and Baxter before the alien got there. And if they arrived and the other two had already been slaughtered, he wanted to kill the fucking thing.

Ripley saw him pause briefly at the doorway leading onto the next deck, then he touched the pressure pad and the door whispered open. He pushed through, crouched down low, looking all around as Ripley and the others closed on him. With a quick glance back at them, he moved on.

Ripley finally recognized where they were. As they approached the main entrance that led onto the bridge she dashed on ahead, pausing by the doors and listening, one hand hovering over the pressure pad. She couldn’t hear anything from inside, but then perhaps the doors were soundproofed. Maybe the screaming was contained.

Nodding to Hoop, she counted down with her fingers.

Three… two… one…

She stroked the pad and the door whispered open. They went in together, Hoop on the left, Ripley on the right, and the joy and relief was almost overwhelming when she saw Lachance and Baxter huddled around the communications desk.

“What the fuck?” Baxter asked, standing and sending his chair spinning across the floor. “We lost contact and…” He saw their faces then, and read the terror.

“What happened?” Lachance asked.

“Secure the bridge,” Hoop said to Sneddon and Kasyanov. “Lock the doors. All of them.”

“What about the others?” Baxter asked.

“How long ago did you lose contact?”

“Just when they—when you were opening up the airlock,” Baxter said. “I was about to come down, but…”

“There are no others,” Hoop said. “Secure the bridge. Then we’ll decide what the hell to do next.”

Their grief was palpable.

They’d already lost so many friends and colleagues, but these eight survivors had existed together for more than seventy days, striving to make the Marion safe, hoping that their distress signal would be picked up by another ship. Living day by day with the constant, hanging threat of further mechanical malfunction, or a break-out of those monsters from the Samson. Fighting against the odds, their determination had seen them through. Perhaps they hadn’t all liked each other, but what group of people could claim that? Especially under such stress.

Yet they had been the survivors. And now three of them were gone, slaughtered in a matter of moments by those bastard creatures.

Ripley gave them their silence, retreating to a control panel and sitting in the upholstered chair. It was a navigational control point. She browsed the system, noting the other planets and their distances, orbits, makeup. The sun at the system’s center was almost half a billion miles away.

No wonder it feels so fucking cold.

“We’ve got to find it,” Sneddon said. “Track it down and kill it.”

“Track it down how?” Kasyanov asked. “It could be hiding away anywhere on the Marion. It’ll take us forever, and we only have days.”

“I saw it,” Sneddon said. At the sound of her voice— so filled with dreadful awe, quavering in fear—everyone grew quiet, still. “It came out like… like a living shadow. Garcia didn’t even know what hit her, I don’t think. She didn’t scream, didn’t have time. Just a grunt. Like she was disagreeing with something. Just that, and then it killed her and ran. Just… brutalized her, for no reason.”

“They don’t reason,” Ripley said. “They kill and feed. And if there’s no time to feed, they just kill.”

“But that’s not natural,” Sneddon said. “Animals kill for a purpose.”

“Some do,” Ripley said. “Humans don’t.”

“What is and isn’t natural out here?” Hoop asked, and he sounded angry. “Doesn’t matter. What matters is what we do.”

“Track it down,” Sneddon said.

“There’s no time!” Kasyanov said.

“That acid ate through the vestibule windows and floor in no time,” Hoop said. “We’re lucky the doors are holding—they’re blast doors, not proper external doors.”

“So how the hell do we get to the Samson now?” Lachance asked.

“That’s another problem.” Hoop was the center of attention. Not only in command, he was the only engineer left alive.

“Suit up,” Lachance said.

“Exactly what I was thinking,” Hoop said.

“Yeah,” Baxter agreed. “The Samson’s environmental systems will recompress, once we’re inside.”

“We’ll need to form another airlock,” Hoop said.

“But we can’t just leave that thing roaming around the ship!” Kasyanov shouted. She was standing, fists clenched at her sides. “It could chew through cables, smash doors. Do god-knows-what sort of damage.”

“We can leave it.” Hoop looked at Ripley, as if seeking her agreement. And suddenly the others were watching her, as well.

Ripley nodded.

“Yeah. It’s either that, or we hunt the thing through the ship and put everyone at risk. At least this way we have a chance.”

“Yeah, a chance,” Kasyanov scoffed. “What are the odds? I’m taking bets. Anyone?”

“I don’t gamble,” Ripley said. “Listen, if three of us keep watch while the other three work, it’ll still take a while to get into the Samson. Then when we return, straight into my shuttle and away.”

“What about supplies?” Baxter asked. “Food, water. Lube for all that lovin’ we’ll be doing.”

“Are there stocks down at the mine?” Ripley asked Hoop.

“Yep.”

“But that’s where they came from!” Sneddon said.

Ripley nodded. No one else spoke. Yeah, we’ve all been thinking about that, too, she thought.

“Right, so I’ll call it,” Hoop said. “I’ve got an idea of how we can get through the decompressed rooms to the Samson. We all go, and follow the plan. And if that thing causes us problems when we come back, we deal with it then.”

“One cataclysm at a time, eh?” Baxter said.

“Something like that.”

“We need more weapons,” Ripley said. “We lost most of them down there when…”

“We can divert to Hold 2 on the way down,” Sneddon said. “Plenty of charge thumpers and plasma torches there.”

“Easy,” Lachance said.

“A walk in the park,” Baxter agreed.

“We’re all going to die,” Kasyanov said. And she meant it. She wasn’t making a joke. Ripley had been impressed when she leaped into action in the docking arm, but now she was the voice of pessimism once again.

“Not today,” Ripley replied. Kasyanov snorted. No one else replied.

They moved, but not too quickly. On the relative safety of the bridge, they each took a few moments to compose their thoughts.

Beyond the doors lay only danger.

8 VACUUM

They made sure that the bridge was properly sealed before they left.

There was brief discussion that Lachance and Baxter might remain behind, but it was quickly dismissed, and they didn’t need much persuading that they should go with the others. Neither liked the idea of being left alone with the creature, especially if something went wrong on the planetary surface. Better that they all remain together. Besides, there was little that they could do aboard the orbiting ship, other than track its doomed trajectory.

Just before they left the bridge level, Hoop watched as Kasyanov approached Ripley, stretched on tiptoes, and planted a kiss on her cheek. She didn’t speak—perhaps words of thanks would have been redundant, or might have lessened the moment—but she and Ripley locked glances for a moment, and then both nodded.

“If you ladies are done smooching, maybe it’s time to get the fuck off this ship,” Baxter said. With the bridge doors locked and their mechanisms disabled, the six survivors moved off toward Hold 2. Sneddon volunteered to go first, asking for Hoop’s charge thumper. He didn’t object. They were all in this together.

They circled back around the accommodations hub, watching each door in the inner wall of the curved corridor. There were almost a hundred separate bunk rooms in the hub, and the alien could be hiding in any of them. Access doors were recessed into the gray metal wall and difficult to see, and subdued lighting gave the shadows added depth. It was a stressful journey. They took it slowly and reached Hold 2 without incident.

It was a huge space—high ceilinged, cavernous and partly filled with spare mining equipment. Two massive ground transport vehicles were chained down to the floor, and several smaller trucks had moved around during and immediately following the Delilah’s crash. Other equipment lay stacked or scattered. There were metal transport crates, tool racks, supply tanks and boxes, and all manner of smaller items. It formed a complex maze of walkways and dead ends, and Hoop suddenly wanted to turn and go back the way they’d come.

But they needed weapons. Not just in case they came across that bastard thing in the Marion’s corridors, but to face whatever they might find down on the planet. The miners had unearthed something dreadful down there, and there was no telling how many of the things might be waiting for them.

The thought almost paralyzed him with a sense of hopelessness. But he had to shake his doubts and hide them away beneath the stark knowledge that they had no other options.

He motioned the others close, and he led the way along the hold’s outer wall. When he reached a heavy green door he entered an access code. The door whispered open, and automatic lighting flickered on inside.

“All in,” he murmured.

They filed past him, Ripley bringing up the rear.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Workshop,” Hoop said. He was the last inside, backing in, watching the hold as he closed the door behind him. Only then did he turn around and relax.

Powell stood by the welding rig over in the far corner, complaining about something Welford had done, or something that grumpy bastard Baxter had said in the rec room, or maybe just finding an aspect of his own appearance to whinge about. Welford sat at the electronics island bench, goggles up on his forehead. He smiled at Powell’s constant, monotonous drone. A massive coffee mug emblazoned with the words “Engineers are always screwing” steamed by his elbow as he waxed lyrical on some subject or another, his voice a constant background buzz, a counterpoint to Powell’s deep tones.

Hoop blinked. He never thought he’d miss those two, not really. They’d died badly. He couldn’t hold back the memories. He’d spent so long down here with them, working on various repair and maintenance jobs, and although they’d been more friendly with each other than with him—his superior ranking, he thought, or perhaps just that the two of them were more alike—they’d still been a team of three.

“What a dump,” Baxter said.

“Fuck you,” Hoop said.

“Nice place you’ve got here…” Ripley smiled, and she seemed to understand. Maybe she’d seen it in his expression.

Hoop sniffed and pointed.

“There’s some stuff racked in the cupboards back there. Baxter, why don’t you and Lachance check it out? Sneddon, Kasyanov, come with me and Ripley.”

“Where?”

“Through there.” He pointed at a door in the side wall, closed and marked with a Hazardous Materials symbol.

“What’s in there?” Ripley asked.

“I’ll show you,” he said, smiling. “Wondering if we can fight fire with fire.”

Hoop punched in the access code and the door slid open. Lighting flickered on inside, illuminating a small, sterile-looking room, more like a research lab than the workshop that led to it. He’d spent quite a bit of time in here, toying with chemicals and developing various application methods. Jordan had always turned a blind eye to the engineers’ hobbies in research and development, because it relieved boredom and passed the time. But this had really been Welford’s baby. Sometimes he’d spent twelve hours at a time in here, getting Powell to bring him food and drinks down from the galley or rec room. Hoop had never been sure exactly why Welford had become so interested in the spray gun technology. Perhaps it was simply because it was something he excelled in.

“So what’s this?” Ripley asked.

“Welford’s folly,” Sneddon said. “I helped him with some of the designs.”

“You did?” Hoop asked, surprised.

“Sure. Some of the stuff he was using down here was… pretty cutting-edge, actually.”

Hoop hefted one of the units Welford had been working on. It looked like a heavy weapon of some sort, but was actually surprisingly light. He shook it, already knowing that the reservoir would be empty.

“We’re going to fight them with water pistols?” Ripley said.

“Not water,” Sneddon said. “Acid.”

“Fire with fire,” Hoop said, smiling and holding up the gun.

“The miners had been asking us for something like this for quite a while,” Sneddon said. “The trimonite is usually only found in very small deposits, and surrounded by other less dense materials—sands, shales, quartzes, and other crystalline structures. It’s always been a timeintensive process, sorting through it. The idea with this was to melt away all the other stuff with hydrofluoric acid, and keep the trimonite untouched.”

“Sounds dangerous,” Ripley said.

“That’s why it’s still just in the lab,” Hoop said. “We were looking for a way to make the application process safer.”

“And you found it?”

“No,” Hoop said. “But safe’s the last thing on my mind right now.”

“How do we know this will even bother them?” Kasyanov asked, negative as ever. “They have acid in their veins!”

“There’s only one way to find out,” Hoop said. “We have two units. Let’s get them primed, and we can get out of here.”

Ten minutes later they stood ready at the workshop’s locked doors. Hoop had shrugged a tool bag over his shoulder, packed with all the tools he thought they might need. He and Sneddon carried the spray guns, containment reservoirs fully loaded with hydrofluoric acid. Ripley and Lachance had charge thumpers, the charge containers loaded with six-inch bolts. They wore bolt belts around their waists, heavy with spare ammunition. Baxter and Kasyanov were carrying newly charged plasma torches.

They should have felt safer. Hoop should have felt ready. But he was still filled with dread as he prepared to open the doors.

“You all follow me,” he said. “Sneddon, take the rear. Eyes and ears open. We’ll move slow and steady, back around the hub, down the staircases to the docking deck. Once we get to the corridor outside Bay Three, that’s when I get to work.” He looked around at them all. Ripley was the only one who offered him a smile.

“On three.”

It took almost half an hour to work their way back around the ship’s accommodation hub and down to the docking deck. On a normal day it might have been half that time, but they were watching the shadows.

Hoop expected to see the surviving alien at any moment, leaping toward them from a recessed doorway, appearing around a closed corner, dropping from above when they passed beneath domed junctions. He kept the spray gun primed and aimed forward—it was much easier to manage than a charge thumper. There was no telling how effective the acid might be, but the thumpers were inaccurate as weapons if the target was more than a few yards away, and the plasma torches were probably more dangerous to them than the creature.

They’d seen that on the Delilah.

Hoop’s finger stroked the trigger. I should be wearing breathing apparatus, he thought. Goggles. A face mask. If any of the hydrofluoric acid splashed back at him, or even misted in the air and drifted across his skin, he’d be burnt to a crisp. His clothes, skin, flesh, bones, would melt away beneath the acid’s ultra-corrosive attack.

Stupid of him. Stupid! To think that they could take on the creature with a form of its own weapon. His mind raced with alternatives.

He should switch back to the thumper.

He should have Baxter take lead with the plasma torch.

They should stop and think things through.

Hoop exhaled hard, tensed his jaw. Just fucking get on with it, he thought. No more dicking around! This is it.

Descending the wide staircase into the docking level, they paused beside a row of three doors marked with bright yellow “Emergency” symbols. Baxter opened the first door and took out three vacuum-packed bags.

“Suits?” Ripley asked.

“Yeah, everything’s in there,” Baxter replied. “Suit, foldable helmet, compressed air tank, tether cable.” He looked around at the rest. “Everyone suit up.”

They took turns opening the bags and pulling themselves into the silver space suits. It was like being wrapped in thin crinkly plastic, with stiff sealing rings where the parts fit together. Fabric belts slipped through loops and kept the material from flapping too loosely. The helmets were similarly flexible, with comm units sewn into the fabric. The suits were designed for emergency use only, placed close to the docking bays in case of a catastrophic decompression. The air tanks would last for maybe an hour, the suits themselves intended purely to enable the user to get to the nearest safe place.

When they were all ready, they moved on.

Reaching the corridor outside Bay Three without incident, Hoop looked around at everyone else. They seemed more pumped up than they had before, more confident. But they couldn’t let confidence get the better of them.

“Baxter, Sneddon, that way.” He pointed past the closed doors and toward Bay Four, where Ripley’s shuttle was docked. “Close the doors in Bay Four, make sure as hell they’re secure, and keep watch. Kasyanov, Lachance, back the way we came. Close the corridor blast doors. Ripley, with me. Let’s hustle.”

When the others moved off he shrugged the tool bag from his shoulder and held the spray gun out to Ripley. “Just hold it for me.”

She took the acid gun from him, one eyebrow raised.

“Too dangerous for me to actually use, eh?”

“Ripley—”

“Show me. I can handle myself.”

Hoop sighed, then smiled.

“Okay, you prime it here, wait until this light is showing red. Aim. Squeeze the trigger. It’ll fire compressed jets in short pulses.”

“Shouldn’t we be wearing proper safety gear?”

“Definitely.” He turned away, knelt, and opened the tool bag. “I won’t need long,” he said. The space suit made normal movements a little more awkward, but he took a heavy portable drill out of the bag, fitted it with a narrow drill bit, and then propped it against one of the door panels.

Beyond, in the vestibule to Bay Three, lay the vacuum of space.

“You sure that door will hold?” Ripley asked. “Once you get through, and we start decompressing—”

“No!” he snapped. “No, I’m not sure. But what else do you suggest?”

Ripley didn’t answer. But she nodded once.

“Helmets,” he called. “Clip your tether lines close, and to something solid.” Ripley fixed her flexible helmet collar and turned on her air supply, and along the corridor in both directions he heard the others doing the same. When he was sure everyone was ready, he fixed his own helmet with one hand, then started drilling.

It was the loudest noise they’d made since opening up the Samson. The metal drill bit skittered across the door’s surface before wedging against a seam and starting to penetrate. Curls of metal wound out and dropped to the floor like robot hair. Smoke wafted, and Hoop saw heat shimmering the air around the drill’s head as the bit bored slowly into the door.

He leaned into the tool, driving it deeper.

It didn’t take long. The drill casing banged against the door when the bit pushed through, and Hoop turned off the power. A high-pitched whistling began instantly as air was forced through the microscopic gap between bit and metal.

He looked around at Ripley. She’d tethered herself to a door handle across the corridor.

“Everyone get ready,” he said into his helmet’s comm. “Here goes nothing.” He placed his gloved hand over the rapid release button on the drill and pressed. A thud, a shudder through the drill, and the bit was sucked through the door and into the vestibule beyond.

Hoop backed away, tying himself to the heavy door handle with the shortest lead possible, then kicked the drill aside.

A piercing whistle filled the corridor as air was sucked out through the tiny hole. The door vibrated in its heavy frame, but it remained solid and secure. Dust cast graceful shapes in the air, shimmering skeins wavering as the artificial lighting flickered with a power surge.

Soon the flow of air ceased, and they were standing in vacuum.

“Everyone okay?” Hoop called. Everyone was.

Which meant the time had come to make their way through to the Samson.

They were assuming there was nothing dangerous left inside. Four aliens had emerged. Two had been killed in the vestibule, another blasted into space when the window had failed, and the fourth was somewhere aboard the Marion. They were as certain as they could be that there had only been four, but there was no saying they hadn’t left something behind when they’d fled— eggs, acid sacs, or something else unknown. They knew so little about the beasts.

“Right. We can’t afford to use the plasma torch or spray guns in the Samson.”

“I’ll go first, then,” Ripley said. She handed the spray gun back to Hoop and hefted the charge thumper. “Makes sense.” And she was through the door before anyone else could speak.

Hoop followed her quickly through the ruined vestibule, past the airlock and along the short docking arm. She paused at the Samson’s open hatch, but only for a moment. Then she ducked, pushed the charge thumper ahead of her, and entered the dropship.

“Oh, shit,” she said.

“What?” Hoop pressed forward, senses alert. But then he saw what she had seen, and his stomach lurched.

“Going to be a pleasant journey,” Ripley said.

9 DROP

Before undocking with the Marion, Lachance assured them all that he was the best pilot on the ship. His brief display of humor did little to lighten the mood.

Even when Hoop leaned over to Ripley and informed her that the Frenchman might well be the best pilot in the galaxy, she still struggled to hold down her vomit.

Bad enough this was their one and only chance. But forced to make the journey in this dropship, it seemed as if fate was rubbing their faces in the worst of everything that had happened.

Once the internal atmosphere had been restored, they’d been forced to remove their headgear in order to conserve the suits’ limited oxygen supplies.

Anything not bolted or screwed down in the Samson had been sucked out during decompression. But there was still the blood, dried into spattered black smears all across the cream-colored interior paneling, the light-blue fixed seats, and the textured metal decking. And there was the stench of decomposition, still heavy even though the ship had been in vacuum for almost a whole day.

An arm was jammed beneath one row of seating, clawed fingers almost wrapped around the seat post, bones visible through scraps of clothing and skin. Ripley noticed the others doing their best to not look at it, and she wondered whether they knew who it had been. There were tattered insignia on the torn clothing, and a gold ring on one finger.

They should have moved it aside, but no one wanted to touch it.

And aside from the human detritus, there was what had been left behind by the aliens.

The interior of the Samson’s passenger hold was laid out with two facing rows of seating across an open space, twelve seats per side. In this open space were fixings for equipment storage—they’d secured their various weapons there—and a raised area containing low-level cupboards and racks. Even when sitting, passengers could see over this raised portion to communicate with one another.

At the rear of the cabin, two narrow doors were set into the bulkhead. One was marked as a bathroom, the other Ripley guessed led into the engine room.

They had all chosen to sit as close as possible to the slightly raised flight deck. Lachance and Baxter sat up there, with Ripley and Hoop on one side of the passenger cabin, Kasyanov and Sneddon on the other. None of them wanted to sit at the rear.

None of them even wanted to look.

In their time aboard the ship, the aliens had made the shadowy rear of the cabin their own. The floor, walls, and ceiling were coated with a thick, textured substance. It clung around the two doors, crossing them here and there, like bridges of plastic that had melted, burned, and hardened again. It looked like an extrusion of some kind, dark and heavy in places, glimmering and shiny in others, as if wet. There were hollows that bore a chilling resemblance to shapes Ripley knew well.

The aliens had made their own place to rest, and it was a stark reminder of what had been in here until so recently.

“I hope this trip is quick,” Sneddon said. Kasyanov nodded beside her.

“Lachance?” Hoop asked.

“Last checks,” the pilot said. He was propped in the flight seat, leaning forward and running his hands across the control panels. A screen flickered to life in front of him, two more in the bulkhead by his side. “Baxter? Have we got a link to the Marion’s computer yet?”

“Just coming online now,” Baxter said. In the copilot’s seat, he had a pull-out keyboard on his lap, hands stroking keys as a series of symbols flashed across the display suspended before him. “Just calling up the nav computer… Ah, there we are.” The windscreen misted for a moment, and when it cleared again it was criss-crossed with a fine grid display.

“Leave it off for now,” Lachance said. “I want to get away from the Marion first. I’m worried there’s still wreckage from the crash matching our orbit.”

“After so long?” Kasyanov asked.

“It’s possible,” Lachance replied. “Okay, everyone strapped in?”

Hoop leaned across Ripley and checked her straps. His sudden closeness surprised her, and she felt his arm brushing her hip and shoulder as he tightened the safety straps.

“Bumpy ride,” he said, smiling. “The atmosphere of this rock can be nasty.”

“Great,” she said. “Thanks.” Hoop nodded, caught her eye, looked away again.

What was that? she thought. Come on, Ripley, you’re dodging monsters at the edge of space, and you can still get horny? She chuckled soundlessly, and knew that he heard her exhalation.

“How’s it looking?” Hoop asked.

“All systems online,” Lachance said. “Inertial dampers are a bit glitchy, so the ride might be bumpier than usual.”

“Oh, super,” Sneddon said.

“How often have you guys been down?” Ripley asked.

“We’ve all been planetside a few times,” Hoop said. “Kasyanov for medical emergencies, the rest of us for various other reasons. But it’s mainly the miners who made this trip.”

“Soon you’ll know why,” Kasyanov said quietly. “This planet’s a regular shit-hole.”

“Okay, everyone,” Lachance said. “Thank you for flying Lachance Spaceways. Dinner will be served half an hour after take-off—today we have lobster ravioli and champagne. There’s a selection of in-flight entertainment, and your vomit bags are under your seats.” He chuckled. “You’ll be needing them. Dock disconnect in ten seconds.” He switched on an automatic countdown, and Ripley soundlessly ticked off the seconds.

Nine… eight…

“Electro-locks off, magnetic grab disabled.”

…six… five…

“Retros primed, fire on my mark.”

…three…

“Passengers might feel a slight bump.”

What the hell is a slight bump? Ripley thought. Hoop grasped her hand and squeezed. Sneddon and Kasyanov looked terrified.

“… one… mark.”

There was a moment of nothing. And then Ripley’s stomach rolled, her brain bounced against her skull, her senses swam, her breath was punched from her lungs, and a shattering roar filled the cabin.

She managed to turn her head and look past Hoop through the windscreen and onto the flight deck. As they dropped quickly away from the Marion, the extensive damage from the other dropship’s crash became even more apparent. She also saw the Narcissus docked at the other edge of the ship’s belly, and felt a curious anxiety at being away from her. Perhaps because that ship had been her home for so long, whether she’d been aware or not.

But the shuttle was locked up safe, and Jonesy would spend most of his time asleep. She’d made sure he had plenty of food.

A siren wailed, buzzers cut through the cabin, and the ship’s attitude changed. Lachance seemed to be calm and in control, stroking buttons and waving his hand across projected controls between him and the windscreen. The Marion moved out of sight to port, and LV178 came into view. With the vibration of the ship’s descent it was difficult to make out any real features—to Ripley it was little more than a yellowish-gray smudge beyond the windows.

A few moments later Lachance hit a button and heat shields rose to block out the view.

“Just about to start skimming the atmosphere now,” he said.

Artificial gravity flickered as it adjusted to the planet’s real pull. Sneddon puked. She leaned forward and aimed most of it between her legs. Kasyanov glanced sideways then ahead again, closing her eyes, gripping her seat arms so tightly that her knuckles were pearls of white on her dark skin.

Hoop’s grip almost hurt, but Ripley didn’t mind.

The Samson started to shake even more. Each impact seemed hard enough to tear the ship apart, and Ripley couldn’t hold back the gasps and grunts that came with each thud. It brought back memories of descending down to LV426 in Nostromo, but this was much worse.

She looked back at that strange swathe of material the aliens had left behind. It must have been quite solid to survive the decompression and remain intact, yet from here it looked almost soft, like huge spider webbing covered with dust and ash. The creatures must have hibernated in there. She wondered just how much longer the beasts could have slept, waiting, if they hadn’t decided to open up the Samson.

Her thoughts drifted, and she feared what was below them. Hoop figured that eighteen miners had been left behind down on the surface, and no one knew what had happened to them. There was no real information on what they had found, how the alien attack had happened, where they had been discovered. The trimonite mine was the last place in the galaxy she wanted to go right then, but it was the only place that offered any hope for their survival.

Get the fuel cells and get out again. That was Hoop’s plan. They’d all agreed.

It felt as if the ship was shaking itself to pieces. Just when Ripley believed all their worries might end there and then, Lachance spoke again.

“Might be a little turbulence up ahead.”

Sneddon leaned forward and puked again.

Ripley leaned back and closed her eyes, and Hoop squeezed her hand even tighter.

It seemed like forever, but it couldn’t have been more than an hour before they were deep in LV178’s atmosphere, flying a mile above the planet’s surface toward the mine. Baxter had fired up the nav computer and calculated that the facility was six hundred miles away.

“Just over an hour,” Lachance said. “I could fly faster, but the storm’s still pretty rough.”

“Let me guess,” Kasyanov said. “Might get bumpy?”

“Just a little.”

“How are we still flying?” Sneddon asked. “How is the ship still in once piece? How is my stomach not hanging out of my mouth?”

“Because we’re hardy space explorers,” Baxter said.

In truth, the vibrating and bumping had reduced drastically once they had entered the atmosphere and Baxter had plotted their route. Lachance gave control over to the autopilot, and then turned his seat around.

“Lobster,” he said.

Sneddon groaned. “If you ever mentioned food again, Lachance, I won’t be responsible for the consequences.”

“Okay, folks, we’ve got an hour,” Hoop said. “We need to talk about what happens next.”

“We land, get the fuel cell, take off again,” Ripley said. “Right?”

“Well…”

“What?” she asked.

“It might not be quite that simple,” Hoop said. “There are variables.”

“Oh, great,” Kasyanov said. “You can’t get much more variable that those monsters, can you?”

“Landing pad,” Hoop said. “Access to the mine. Air quality inside. Damage. And the fuel cells are stored several levels down.”

“So tell me what all that means?” Ripley said, looking around at them.

Sneddon held up her hands. “Hey, I’m just the science officer.”

“The planet’s atmosphere isn’t great,” Hoop said. “The mine and its surface complex are contained in an environmental dome. The landing pads are outside, connected by short tunnels. Inside the dome there are several surface buildings—stores, mess block, accommodations—and then two entrances to the mine, also enclosed for additional safety.

“Once down in the mine, in each entrance there are two caged elevators descending to nine levels. The first three levels are abandoned—they’ve been mined out. Level four is where the fuel cells are stored, along with a load more emergency stores. Food, water, equipment, stuff like that. Most of the emergency stores are belowground in case of a disaster, so they’ll be accessible to anyone down in the mine. And levels five through nine are the current working levels.”

“Then it’s on one of those levels they found the aliens?” Ripley asked.

“That’s a fair bet.”

“So we get in, descend to level four, get the fuel cells, and come back out.”

“Yeah,” Hoop said. “But we have no idea what state the mine’s in.”

“We take it all step by step,” Kasyanov said. “Whatever we find, we work through it as best we can.”

“And just as fast as we can,” Sneddon said. “Don’t know about you all, but I don’t want to be down here one minute longer than necessary.”

After that, silence hung heavy. Lachance turned his chair around again and kept an eye on the flight computers. Baxter scanned the nav displays. Ripley and the others sat quietly, not catching one another’s eyes, and trying not to look at the strange sculptures the aliens had left behind.

Ripley took the easy way out and closed her eyes.

And surprised herself when Hoop nudged her awake. Had she really slept? Through all that movement, buffeting, and noise?

“Sheesh, haven’t you slept long enough?” he asked. Anyone else and she might have been annoyed, but there was a lilt to his voice that said he almost understood. He sounded hesitant, too, almost sad.

“We there?”

“Just circling the complex now.”

“Lights are on,” Lachance said from the flight deck.

“But no one’s home,” Baxter replied. “Dome looks intact, can’t see any obvious damage.”

Ripley waited for a moment, sensing the subtle vibrations of the ship. Their flight seemed much smoother than when she’d fallen asleep. She hit the quick release catch on her straps and stood up.

“Ripley?” Hoop said.

“Just looking.” She moved forward and leaned against the back of the flight chair. The Frenchman turned lazily and squinted back at her.

“Come to see my cockpit??” he asked.

“You wish,” she replied.

The windscreen was hazed with dust, but she could still make out the segmented metallic dome below as the ship circled it. One side of it was almost buried with drifting sand, and across its surface were several blinking lights. There was no sign of clear sections, nor could she see any access points.

“Bleak,” she said.

“Wait ’til you get inside,” Baxter said.

“Where are the landing pads?”

Lachance leveled the Samson slightly and hovered, drifting sideways directly over the dome. He pointed. Ripley could just make out three bulky shapes on the ground, also half-buried by drifted sand.

“Get closer,” Hoop said, joining Ripley behind the two flight chairs. “We don’t know what happened down here, but it’s a fair bet they were pursued all the way to the ships.”

“How do you figure that?” Sneddon asked from where she was still strapped in.

“Because the Samson left so many behind.”

Lachance dropped them lower and closer to the landing pads. They were only a couple of hundred yards from the dome, and Ripley saw hints of the connecting tunnels that ran between them. Sheets of sand blew across the ground, driven by winds they could not feel in the Samson. The landscape was daunting but strangely beautiful, dust sculptures forming incredible, graceful shapes. Away from the artificial interruption of the mine, the desert looked like a frozen sea, flowing over years instead of moments.

Miles in the distance, electrical storms flashed deep inside looming clouds.

“How the hell are you going to land?” Ripley asked.

“The pads are usually cleared by the ground crews,” Lachance said. “Big blowing machines, sand scoops. It’ll be okay. I’m good.”

“So you keep saying,” she said. “I’m still waiting for proof.”

“No sign of any nasties waiting for us,” Hoop said.

“In this weather?” Baxter asked.

“There’s no saying what environments they live in, or even prefer,” Ripley said. She remembered Ash—before his true nature was exposed, when he was studying the alien—talking about remarkable adaptations to the ship’s environment. Maybe sand-lashed, storm-blasted landscapes were their preference.

“Strap in, ladies and gentlemen,” Lachance said. He checked readouts, stroked his hand across the projected nav controls in front of him, and then settled back in his seat.

Ripley and Hoop went back to their seats and secured their safety straps. She waited for him to check her clasps again, and saw Sneddon looking from her to Hoop, and smirking. Ripley stared back.

The science officer looked away.

The Samson shook as retros fired. Moments later there was a heavy bump, and then the engines started to cycle down.

“There,” Lachance said. “Told you I was good.”

Hoop exhaled, and from across the cabin Ripley heard Kasyanov mutter something that might have been a prayer. Straps were opened, they stood and stretched, then gathered at the front of the ship to look outside.

Lachance had landed them facing the dome. The line of the partly buried tunnel was obvious, leading from their pad to the dome, and the storm suddenly seemed more intense now that they had touched down. Maybe because there was more sand to blow around at low level.

“Suit up,” Hoop said. “Grab your weapons. Lachance, you take point with me. I’m going to be opening doors and hatches. Baxter, you bring up the rear.”

“Why do I have to come last?” the communications engineer asked.

“Because you’re a gentleman,” Sneddon said. Kasyanov chuckled, Baxter looked uncertain, and Ripley wondered at the complex relationships between these people. She’d barely scratched the surface—they’d been here so close together for so long.

The inside of the Samson suddenly seemed so much safer. Through her fear Ripley was determined, but she couldn’t shake those terrible memories. Not the new ones, of Powell and Welford being killed by those fast, furious things. And not the old ones, back on the Nostromo. She couldn’t help feeling that even more terrible memories were soon to be forged.

If she lived to remember.

“Let’s stay close and tight,” she said. No one replied. Everyone knew what was at stake here, and they’d all seen these things in action.

“We move fast, but carefully,” Hoop said. “No storming ahead. No heroics.”

They fixed their helmets, checked each other’s suits and air supplies, tested communications, and hefted the weapons. To Ripley they all looked so vulnerable: pale white grubs ready for the aliens to puncture, rip apart, eat. And none of them had any real idea about what they were about to encounter.

Perhaps the uncertainty was a good thing. Maybe if they knew for sure what they would find down in the mine, they would never bring themselves to enter.

Breathing deeply, thinking of Amanda, who probably believed her mother to be dead, Ripley silently vowed that she would do anything and everything necessary to stay alive.

Lachance opened the outer hatch, and the storm came inside.