Alien: Out of the Shadows

10 SKIN

“What the hell is that?” Hoop asked.

“Looks like… hide, or something,” Lachance said.

“They shed their skins.” Ripley came to stand beside them, charge thumper aimed forward. “It happens when they grow. And you’ve seen how quickly that is.”

“How many are there?” Hoop almost went forward to sift through the drift of pale yellow material with his boot. But something held him back. He didn’t even want to touch it.

“Enough,” Sneddon said. She sounded nervous, jumpy, and Hoop was already wondering whether she should really be in charge of the other spray gun.

Then again, they were all scared.

They’d made their way across the storm-lashed landing pad and into the tunnel entrance without incident. The violent winds, blasting sand, and screaming storm had been almost exciting, primal conditions that they could never grow used to after living on climate-controlled ships.

Inside the tunnel the illumination was still functioning, and halfway along there were signs of a fight. An impromptu barricade had been formed from a selection of storage pods and canisters, all of which had been knocked aside, trampled, broken, and blasted. Impact marks scarred the metal-paneled walls and ceiling, and a dappled spread of flooring was bubbled and raised. The acid splash was obvious, but there was no sign of the wounded or dead alien that had caused it.

They reached the end of the tunnel, facing the heavy, closed blast doors that opened directly into the mine’s surface dome. And no one was eager to open them. They all remembered what had happened the last time.

“Any way we can see inside?” Ripley asked, nodding at the doors.

“Baxter?” Hoop asked.

“I might be able to connect with the mine’s security cameras,” the communications officer said. He put his plasma torch down carefully and pulled a tablet computer from the wide pockets of his suit.

The storm rumbled against the tunnel’s upper surface, sand lashing the metal with a billion impacts, wind roaring around the grooved, curved metal shell. It sounded like something huge trying to get in. The tunnel and metal dome had been constructed to provide the mine with protection against such inimical elements. A huge investment had gone into sinking this mine almost thirty years ago, and its maintenance had been a headache ever since. But the allure of trimonite was great. Its use in industry, its allure as an ultra-rare jewel, ensured that the investment paid off. For those with a monetary interest, at least.

As usual, it was the workers—braving the elements and facing the dangers—who gained the least.

“Can you tell whether systems are operational?” Ripley asked, her voice impatient.

“Give me a chance!” Baxter snapped. He knelt with the tablet balanced on his thighs.

All good so far, Hoop thought, but they hadn’t come that far at all. There could be anything beyond these doors. The mine’s upper compound might be crawling with those things. He imagined the surface buildings and dome’s interior as the inside of a huge nest, with thousands of aliens swarming across the ground, up the walls, and hanging in vast structures made from the same weird material they’d found inside the Samson.

He shivered, physically repelled at the thought, but unable to shake it.

“Got it,” Baxter said. Hoop waited for the man’s outburst of disbelief, a shout of terror, but none came. “Hoop?”

He moved beside Baxter and looked down at the screen. Across the top were several thumbnails, and the main screen was taken with a view of the dome’s interior, as seen from high up on one side. The lights were still on. Everything was motionless.

“Thumbnails?” Hoop asked.

“Yeah. Other cameras.” Baxter touched the screen and images began to scroll. They were from differing angles and elevations, all showing the dome’s interior. Hoop was familiar with the ten or so buildings, the vehicles scattered around, the planet’s geography altered and flattened inside the dome’s relatively small span. Nothing looked particularly out of place. It all seemed quite normal.

“Can’t see any damage,” Lachance said.

“Don’t like this at all,” Kasyanov said. Fear made her voice higher than normal. It sounded like impending panic. “Where are they? What about the other miners, the ones left behind?”

“Dead down in the mines,” Sneddon said. “Taken deep to wherever those things were found, maybe. Like wasps or termites, gathering food.”

“Oh, thanks for that,” Kasyanov said.

“It’s all just maybes,” Ripley said.

Hoop nodded. “That’s all we’ve got. Baxter, keep in the middle of the group, and keep your eyes on that screen. Scroll the images, watch out for any movement that isn’t us. Shout if you see anything.” He moved to the door controls and checked the control panel. “All good here. Ready?”

Baxter held back, and the others stood in a rough semicircle around the big doors, weapons held at the ready. Not weapons, Hoop thought. They’re tools. Mining tools. What do we even think we’re doing down here? But they were all looking to him, and he projected calm and determination. With a single nod he touched the switch.

A hiss, a grinding sound, and the doors parted. A breeze whistled out as pressures equalized, and for a moment a cloud of dust filled the tunnel, obscuring their vision. Someone shouted in panic. Someone else moved quickly forward and through the doors, and then Hoop heard Ripley’s voice.

“It’s fine in here,” she said. “Clear. Come on through.”

He was next through the doors, spray gun at the ready. The others followed, and Kasyanov closed the doors behind them. They were much too loud.

“Sneddon?” Hoop asked.

“Air’s fine,” she said. She was checking a device slung onto her belt, its screen showing a series of graphs and figures. She slipped off her helmet and left it hanging, and the others did the same.

“Baxter?” Hoop asked.

“I’ll tell you if I see anything!” he snapped.

“Right, good. Just keeping you on your toes.” He nodded at a bank of steel containers lined up along the dome wall beside the door. “Okay, let’s get these suits off, secure them in one of these equipment lock-ups. We’ll pick them up on the way back.” They stripped the suits quickly, and Hoop piled them inside one of the units.

“Mine entrance?” Ripley asked, and Hoop pointed. There were actually two entrances, both housed inside bland rectangular buildings. But they were going for the nearest.

Hoop led the way. He carried the spray gun awkwardly, feeling faintly ridiculous hefting it like a weapon, even though he knew their enemies. He had never fired a gun in his life. As a kid, living in a more remote area of Pennsylvania, his Uncle Richard had often taken him out shooting. He’d tried to force a gun into Hoop’s hands—a vintage Kalashnikov, a replica Colt .45, even a pulse rifle illegally borrowed from a neighbor on leave from the Colonial Marines’ 69th Regiment, the Homer’s Heroes.

But Hoop had always resisted. The black, bulky objects had always scared him, and his kid’s knowledge of what they were for had made the fear worse. I don’t want to kill anyone, he’d always thought, and he’d watched his uncle’s face as the older man blasted away at trees, rocks, or homemade targets hung through the woods. There had been something in his expression that had meant Hoop never truly trusted him. Something like bloodlust.

His uncle had been killed years later, just before Hoop’s first trip into space, shot in the back on a hunting trip into the woods. No one ever really knew what had happened. Lots of people died that way.

But now, for the first time ever, Hoop wished he’d taken one of those guns and rested it in his hands. Weighed the potential uses he might have put it to, against the repulsion he felt for the dull black metal.

An acid spray gun. Who the fuck am I kidding?

This had always been a strange place, beneath the dome. Hoop had been here several times now, and he always found it unnerving—it was the planet’s natural landscape, but the dome made it somewhere inside, the climate artificial and entirely under their control. So they kicked through sand and dust that the wind no longer touched. They breathed false air that LV178’s sun did not heat. The structure’s underside formed an unreal sky, lit in gray swathes by the many spotlights hung from its supporting beams and columns.

It was as if they had trapped a part of the planet and tried to make it their own.

Just look where that had got them.

As they neared the building that enclosed the first mine head, Hoop signalled that they should spread out and approach in a line. The door seemed to be propped or jammed open. If one of those things emerged, best it was faced with an array of potential targets. All of them armed.

They paused, none of them wanting to be the first to go through.

“Hoop,” Ripley whispered. “I’ve got an idea.” She slung the charge thumper over her shoulder by its strap and darted quickly toward the building. Beside the half-open door she unbuckled her belt and pulled it loose of the loops.

Hoop saw what she was about to do. His heart quickened, his senses sharpened. He crouched low, ensuring that the gun’s nozzle was pointing slightly to the left of the door. If something happened, he didn’t want to catch Ripley in the acid spray.

Ripley fashioned a loop at the end of the belt and edged forward, feeding it over the top of the door’s chunky handle. She looked back at the others, acknowledging their slight nods. Then she held up her other hand with three fingers pointing, then two, one…

And she pulled.

The door screeched across accumulated grit. The belt slipped from the handle, and nothing emerged.

Before Hoop could speak, Ripley had swung the charge thumper from her shoulder and edged inside.

“Baxter!” Hoop said as he ran forward.

“No cameras in there!” Baxter responded.

It wasn’t as dark inside as Hoop had expected. There was a low level illumination coming through the opaque ceiling—artificial light borrowed from outside—and the lift’s internal lights were still powered up. The lighting was good.

What it showed was not.

There was a dead miner in the lift. Hoop couldn’t distinguish the sex. In the seventy days since they had died, bacteria brought to the mine by the humans had set to work, consuming the corpse. Environmental control had done the rest; the damp, warm atmosphere providing the ideal conditions in which the microorganisms could multiply. The result caused the corpse’s flesh to bloat and sag.

The smell had diminished until it was only a tang of sweet decay, but it was enough to make Hoop wish they’d kept their suits and helmets. The unfortunate victim’s mouth hung open in a laugh, or a scream.

“No sign of what killed them,” Kasyanov said.

“I think we can rule out heart attack,” Lachance quipped.

Hoop went to the elevator controls and accessed them. They seemed fine, with no warning symbols on the screen and no sign that there were any power problems. The small nuclear generator in one of the other surface buildings was still active, and doing its job well.

“It’s working?” Ripley asked.

“You’re not seriously expecting us to go down in that?” Sneddon said.

“You want to take the stairs?” Hoop asked. There were two emergency escape routes leading out from the mine, a series of rough staircases cast into holes sunk adjacent to the lift pits. Almost five thousand feet deep, and the idea of descending seven thousand steps—five hundred flights—appealed to no one.

“Can’t we at least move them out?” Ripley asked. She and Kasyanov went forward and started shifting the body. Hoop had to help. It didn’t remain in one piece.

With the lift cage to themselves, they all entered, taking care to avoid the corner where the corpse had been. Hoop found it even more disturbing that they couldn’t tell who it was. They had all known the victim, that was for sure. But they didn’t know them anymore.

What had happened struck Hoop all over again. He liked to think he was good at coping with emotional upheaval—he’d left his kids behind, effectively fleeing out here into deep space, and on some levels he had come to terms with why he’d done that—but since the disaster, he had woken sometimes in a cold sweat, dreams of smothering and being eaten alive haunting the shadows of sleep. His dreams of monsters had become so much more real. He thought perhaps he cried out, but no one had ever said anything to him. Maybe because almost everyone was having bad dreams now.

“Hoop?” Ripley said quietly. She was standing beside him, staring with him at the lift’s control panel.

“I’m okay.”

“You’re sure?”

“What are those things, Ripley?”

She shrugged. “You know as much as me.”

He turned to the others. There were no accusing stares, no smirks at his momentary lapse of concentration. They all felt the same.

“We go down to level 4,” he said, “get the power cell, then get out as quickly as we can.”

A few nods. Grim faces. He inspected their make-do weapons, knew that none of them were in the hands of soldiers. They were just as likely to shoot each other.

“Take it easy,” he said softly, to himself as much as anyone else. Then he turned to the control panel and ran a quick diagnostic on the lift. All seemed fine. “Going down.” He touched the button for level 4. The cage juddered a little and the descent began.

Hoop tried to calm himself and prepare for what they might find when the doors opened again, yet his stomach rolled, dizziness hit him, and someone shouted out.

“We’re falling. We’re falling!”

The elevator began to scream.

The old stone farmhouse in northern France, a holiday home for her family for as long as she could remember. She is alone right now, but not lonely. She can never be lonely with her daughter so close.

The silence is disturbed only by the gentle breeze, rustling leaves in the woodland far at the bottom of the garden, whispering in the few scattered trees that grow closer by. The sun blazes, scorching the sky a lighter shade of blue. It’s hot but not uncomfortable—the breeze carries moisture from Ripley’s skin, slick from the sunblock she’s been careful to apply. Birds sing their enigmatic songs.

Far above, a family of buzzards circles lazily, eyeing the landscape for prey.

Amanda runs to her through a freshly harvested field, the crop stubble scratching at her legs, poppies speckling the landscape red, and her smile countering even the heat and glory of the sun. She is giggling, holding aloft a present for her mother. Amanda is such an inquisitive little girl. Often she emerges from the small woodland with snails attached all over her arms and shoulders, small frogs captured in her hands, or an injured bird nursed against her chest.

As her daughter climbs the low wooden fence between garden and field and starts across the lawn, Ripley wonders what she has brought home this time.

Mommy, I found an octopus! the girl shrills.

A blink later and she is on the lawn at Ripley’s feet, shivering and shaking as the long-legged thing curls its tail tighter around her sweet throat, and Ripley is trying to hook her fingers beneath its many legs, prise it off, pull it away from her angel without tearing Amanda’s hair off with it. I’ll cut it, she thinks, but she’s worried that the acid will eat into the ground, and keep on eating.

And then from the woods there comes a series of high-pitched screeches. Shadows fall. The sun retreats, birds fall silent, and the buzzards have disappeared. The garden is suddenly plunged into twilight, and those shadows that have always haunted her emerge from among the trees. They are looking for their child.

It’s mine! Ripley shouts, kneeling and protecting Amanda with her own body. Whatever’s inside her is mine!

The shadows stalk closer. Nothing is beautiful anymore.

“Ripley!” Hoop shouted, nudging her. “Grab on to something!”

She shook her head. The vision had happened in an instant. And then it was gone, leaving only a haunting sensation.

The elevator plunged, screeching against its control framework, throwing sparks that were visible through the cage walls, vibrating violently, shaking her vision so much that everyone and everything around her was a blur.

She heard the thud of weapons hitting the floor and dropped her own, staggering back until she was braced against the wall. But there was nothing to hold onto. And even if there had been, it would have made no difference.

Her stomach seemed to be rising and rolling, and she swallowed down the sudden urge to vomit.

Someone else puked.

Hoop hung onto the long handle set into the wall beside the door, one hand curled through it and the other working at the controls.

“What the hell—?” Baxter shouted.

“I’ve got it!” Hoop cut in. But it was clear to Ripley that he didn’t have it. She edged across to him, afraid that at any moment she and the others would actually lift from the floor and start to float.

We can’t be going that fast, she thought. We’d have struck bottom by now! Five thousand feet, Hoop had said. She turned the figures over, trying to calculate how long they might have at freefall, but—

“There are buffers,” Hoop shouted. “Each level. We’ve passed the first four already, barely felt them. Approaching five…”

Thud!

A heavy vibration passed through the lift, thumping Ripley in the chest.

“We’re not slowing!” she shouted.

“We will!” he responded. “Dampers were fitted over the bottom two levels, in case of—”

“This?”

He looked at her. Beside him she could see a flickering set of figures on the control panel. Their depth approached 2,500 feet, the numbers flipping too fast for her to see.

“It’s one way to test them,” he said.

Ripley felt a flood of emotion. They were helpless, and that was a sensation she hated. In space, there were so many variables that presented countless levels of danger, but usually they were countered by some mechanical, electrical, or psychological means.

Even with that thing stalking them on the Nostromo they had gone on the offensive, hunting it, seeking to drive it toward the airlock. And after Dallas was gone and Ash was revealed for what he was… even then they had been acting in their own best interests.

Here, now, she could only stand and wait to die.

They flashed past levels 6 and 7, and each time the impact of safety buffers seemed harder. Was their descent slowing? Ripley wasn’t sure. Sparks flew all around the cage’s outsides, metal whined and screeched, and at the speed they were going now, she figured they’d know nothing about reaching level 9.

She contemplated that final moment, the instant when the elevator struck, crumpled, and they were all smacked into the solid floor, mashed together… and she wondered if she’d feel anything at all.

The brief waking nightmare seemed somehow worse.

“We’re slowing!” Hoop said. They thudded past the buffer on level 8, and then a heavy grinding sound commenced.

Ripley and the others were all flung to the floor. A rhythmic clanging began, resounding explosions from all around that vibrated through the cage’s structure. Bolts, screws and shreds of metal showered around her, and Ripley expected them to burst apart at any moment.

The noise became almost unbearable, pulsing into her ears, her torso, and the vibrations threatened to shake her apart bone-by-bone. Lying flat on the floor, she managed to turn her head toward Hoop. He was sitting propped in the far corner, head tilted to one side so he could still look at the control panel.

He glanced across, saw her looking.

“Dampers working,” he shouted.

Then they struck bottom. Ripley’s breath was knocked out of her as she was punched into the elevator’s floor. Something heavy landed on her leg. A scream was cut off, but someone else grunted and started to moan.

The lift mechanism was smoking, filling the air with an acrid haze. Lights flickered off and then came back on again, buzzing and settling into an even glow. The sudden silence was more shocking than the noise and violence had been.

Ripley pushed herself up onto hands and knees, breathing hard and waiting for the white-hot pain of cracked ribs or broken limbs to sing in. But apart from an array of bruises, a bloodied nose, and a sense of disbelief that they had somehow survived, she appeared to be fine.

“Are we still falling?” Sneddon asked. “My guts tell me we are.”

“Nice landing,” Lachance said, nodding at Hoop. “Make a pilot out of you yet.” Hoop smiled back.

“I think…” Baxter said. He stood, then howled, slipping sideways and falling again. Kasyanov caught him. “Ankle,” he said. “Ankle!” The doctor started examining him.

“Anyone else hurt?” Hoop asked.

“Only my pride,” Lachance said. His suit was speckled with vomit, and he brushed at it with one gloved hand.

“Best pilot in the galaxy, my ass,” Ripley said, pleased to see the Frenchman smile.

“We okay?” Sneddon asked. “We’re not just hanging here waiting, to fall the rest of the way, are we? The way our luck’s been going, you know.”

“No, we’re down,” Hoop said. “Look.” He nodded at the cage doors, then pulled a small, narrow flashlight from his tool belt. It threw out a surprisingly bright beam. He aimed it past the bent bars of the deformed cage, revealing the smoother metal of more solid doors.

“Level 9?” Ripley asked.

Hoop nodded.

“And the elevator’s fucked,” Baxter said. “That’s just fucking great.” He winced as Kasyanov probed around his foot and lower leg, then groaned when she looked up.

“Broken ankle,” she said.

“No shit,” Baxter replied.

“Can you splint it?” Hoop asked. “He’s got to be able to walk.”

“I can walk!” Baxter said, a little desperately.

“We can help you,” Ripley said, aiming a warning stare at Hoop. “There are enough of us. Don’t panic.”

“Who’s panicking?” Baxter said, looking desperate, eyes wide with pain and terror.

“We won’t leave you,” Ripley said, and he seemed to take comfort from that.

“Everyone else?” Hoop asked. Sneddon nodded, Lachance raised a hand in a casual wave. “Ripley?”

“I’m fine, Hoop,” she said, trying not to sound impatient. They were down, battered and bruised, but they couldn’t afford to hang around. “So what now?”

“Now we have two choices,” Hoop said, glancing at Baxter again. “One, we start climbing.”

“How many stairs?” Kasyanov asked.

“We’ve struck bottom at level 9. Seven thousand steps to—”

“Seven-fucking-thousand?” Sneddon spat. Baxter remained silent, but he looked down at the floor close to his wounded foot and ankle. All his weight was on the other foot.

“Choice two,” Hoop continued, “we make our way across to the other elevator.”

Silence. Everyone looked around, waiting for someone else to speak.

“And whatever they found was down here, where they were working the new seam,” Baxter said. “On level 9.”

“There’s no choice,” Kasyanov said. “How far is the other elevator shaft?”

“In a straight line, a little over five hundred yards,” Hoop said. “But none of the tunnels are straight.”

“And we have no idea what happened down here?” Ripley asked.

No one answered. They all looked to Hoop. He shrugged.

“All they said is that they found something horrible. And we already know what that was.”

“No we don’t!” Kasyanov said. “There could be hundreds!”

“I don’t think so.” They looked to Sneddon, who was looking down at the spray gun she’d picked up once again. “They hatch from people, right? We’ve seen that. So by my reckoning—”

“Eighteen,” Ripley said. “Maybe less.”

“Eighteen of them?” Kasyanov asked. “Oh, well, that’s easy, then!”

“We’re better prepared now,” Ripley said. “And besides, what’s the alternative? Really?”

“There is none,” Hoop said. “We make it for the other elevator, up to level 4 for the cell, then back to the surface.”

“But what about—” Kasyanov began, but Hoop cut her off.

“Whatever we find on the way, we handle it,” he said. “Let’s say positive. Let’s stay cool, and calm, and keep our eyes open.”

“And hope the lights are still working,” Lachance said.

As they picked up their weapons, and Kasyanov did her best to splint Baxter’s ankle with supplies from her med kit, Ripley mulled over what Lachance had said. Down here, in the dark. Feeling their way along with the aid of weak flashlights, a billion tons of planet above them.

No, it didn’t bear thinking about.

When she blinked, she saw Amanda in a floral dress thrashing on the sweet, green grass with one of those monsters attached to her face.

“I’ll see you again,” she whispered. Hoop heard, glanced at her, but said nothing. Perhaps they were all finding some way to pray.

11 MINE

As she exited the remains of the elevator—wondering whether they were incredibly lucky to have survived, or incredibly unlucky for it to have happened in the first place—Ripley realized with a jolt that this was the only planet other than Earth on which she had ever set foot. The voyage aboard the Nostromo had been her first, coming soon after she’d been licensed for space flight, and even after landing on LV426 she’d never actually left the ship.

She had always assumed a moment like this would have brought a moment of introspection. A rush of wonder, a glow of joy. A deep grounding of herself and her place in the universe. Sometimes, after having traveled so far, she’d feared that she would have no real stories to tell.

But now she only felt terror. The rock beneath her feet felt just like rock, the air she breathed was gritty with dust, stale and unpleasant. There was no epiphany. The beasts had ruined everything for her—any chance of joy, any scrap of innocent wonder—and quickly the fear was replaced with rage.

Outside the lift was a wide-open area, propped at frequent intervals with metal columns. Along one side stood a line of lockers, most doors hanging open. There were also storage boxes stacked against a wall, marked with symbols she didn’t understand. Most of them were empty, lids leaning against their sides. Trimonite boxes waiting to be filled, perhaps. Ripley found them sad, because they would never be used.

Lighting was supplied by several strings of bare bulbs, all of them still illuminated. The cables were neatly clipped to the rough rock ceiling.

At first, looking around, Ripley caught her breath, because she thought the walls were lined with that strange, organic, extruded compound they’d found in the ship. But when she moved closer she saw that it was rock that had been melted and resolidified, forming a solid barrier against the loose material that might lie behind it. There were still props and buttresses lining the walls and ceiling, but the bulk of the strength lay in the altered rock. They’d used the bigger, tracked plasma torches for that, she supposed. Their heat must have been incredible.

“Everyone good?” Hoop asked, breaking the silence. He was standing close to a set of plastic curtains that led into a tunnel beyond.

No one spoke. Hoop took that as confirmation that, yes, they were all good, and he pushed the curtains aside.

Ripley quickly followed. Out of all of them, Hoop felt the safest. The strongest. She wasn’t even sure why she believed that. But she went with her instincts and decided to stay close to the engineer. If they ended up in a fight, she wanted to fight beside him.

The corridor beyond the elevator compound was narrower and more functional. The lights continued along the ceiling. The walls were slick and held strange, almost organic flow patterns where they’d been plasma-torched. Shallow ditches were cut into the floor at the base of each wall, and water so dark it was black glinted there. It was motionless, stagnant, inky. Ripley wondered what it contained.

Hoop waved them on.

Baxter hobbled with one arm over Kasyanov’s shoulder. He grunted, gasped, and though he couldn’t avoid the pain, Ripley wished he wasn’t making so much noise. Every sound he made was amplified, echoing along the rock-lined tunnels much louder than their careful footfalls.

They’ll know we’re here, she thought. They probably know anyway. If anything’s going to happen, it’s going to happen, and being cautious won’t prevent it.

They reached a junction. Hoop paused only for a moment, then took the left fork. He moved quickly and carefully, holding his flashlight in one hand, the spray gun in the other. The additional light helped illuminate contours and trip hazards on the ground.

It wasn’t far along this tunnel that they came across the first sign of the aliens.

“What the hell is that?” Baxter asked. He sounded tired, and on the verge of panic. Maybe he thought that at some point they’d be forced to leave him behind after all.

“Something from the mine?” Lachance suggested. “Mineral deposit left by water?”

But Ripley already knew that wasn’t the case.

It started gradually. A smear on the wall, a spread of material on the floor. But ten yards from them the alien material lined all surfaces of the tunnel in thick layers, strung like natural arches beneath the ceiling and lying across the floor in complex, swirling patterns.

A gentle mist floated on the air. Or perhaps it was steam. Ripley tugged off a glove and waved her hand before her, feeling the moisture but finding it hard discerning whether it was hot or cold. Another contradiction, perhaps. These strange structures were impressive, and even vaguely beautiful in the same way a spider’s web was beautiful. But the things that had made this were the opposite.

“No,” Sneddon said. “It’s them. We saw something like this on the Samson.”

“Yeah, but…” Lachance said.

“That was a much smaller scale,” Ripley said. “Not like this.” She was breathing fast and shallow because she could smell them here, a faintly citrus stench that clung to the back of her throat and danced on her tongue.

“I don’t like this,” Baxter whispered.

“Me neither,” Lachance said. “I want my mommy. I want to go home.”

The tunnel narrowed ahead of them where the substance bulged out from the walls, up from the floor, down from the ceiling. Here and there it formed stalactites and stalagmites, some of them thin and delicate, others thicker and looking more solid. There were hints of light deep within the alien structure, but only here and there. The ceiling lights still worked, but were mostly covered up.

Hoop stepped a little closer and shone his flashlight inside.

Ripley wanted to grab him and pull him back. But she couldn’t help looking.

The light didn’t penetrate very far. The moisture in the air was revealed more fully by the flashlight beam, skeins of light and dark shifting and waving with a gentle breeze. Whether that breeze was caused by their presence, their breathing, or that of another, Ripley didn’t want to find out.

“I’m not going in there,” Sneddon said.

“Yeah,” Kasyanov said. “I’m with you on that one.”

“I’m not sure we’d get through anyway,” Hoop said. “And even if we could, it’d slow us down.”

“It’s like a nest,” Ripley said. “A giant wasp nest.”

“Is there another way to the elevator shaft?” Baxter asked.

“This is the direct route,” Hoop said. “The spine of this level. But all the mine sections have emergency exits at various points. We’ll go back, take the other fork, then cut back toward the elevator as soon as we find an exit.”

Ripley didn’t say what she knew they were all thinking. What if all the tunnels are like this? But she caught Baxter’s eye, and the truth passed between them—that he could never climb so many stairs. Maybe none of them could.

Not quickly enough.

They headed back, turned into the other fork of the corridor, then dropped down a series of large steps carved into the floor. Water flowed more freely along the gutters here, tinkling away at various points into hidden depths. Walls ran with it. It provided a background noise that was welcoming at first, but quickly became troubling. Behind the sound of flowing water, anything could approach them.

“I think this is the most recent mine working,” Hoop said. “They’ve been at this particular vein for two hundred days, maybe more.”

“So this is where they found them,” Sneddon said. “Somewhere along here.”

“Maybe,” Hoop said. “We don’t know the details. But we don’t have much choice.” He moved on, and the others followed.

There were several side corridors, smaller with lower ceilings, and as Hoop passed them by, Ripley guessed they were also mine workings. She had no idea how a mine functioned, but she’d been told that the quantities of trimonite found here were small compared to most ore mines. This wasn’t mining on an industrialized scale, but rather prospecting for hidden quantities of an almost priceless material. Digging through a million tons of rock to find half a ton of product.

She hoped that Hoop would know an emergency exit when he saw it.

Behind her, someone sneezed, uttering a quiet, “Oh!” afterward. Amanda had used to sneeze like that—a gentle sound, followed by an expression almost of surprise.

Amanda is eleven years old. Ripley knows because her daughter wears an oversized badge on her denim shirt, all purple and pink, hearts and flowers. I bought her that, she thinks, and although she can remember accessing the site, ordering the card and badge and the presents she knew Amanda wanted for her birthday—remembers the small smile of satisfaction when she confirmed “place order,” knowing that everything her daughter wanted was on the way—there is also a sense of dislocation, and the knowledge that this never happened.

Family and friends are there. And Alex, Ripley’s ex husband who left them when Amanda was three years old and never, ever came back. No calls, no contact, no sign at all that he was still alive; Ripley only knew that he was through a friend of a friend. Inexplicably, even Alex is there, smiling at Ripley across a table laden with birthday food and cake, with an “Isn’t it a pity we never made it” smile.

And Ripley, also inexplicably, smiles back.

There are other faces, other names, but they are clouded in memory, ambiguous in dreamscape. There’s singing and laughter, and Amanda smiles at her mother, that honest, deep smile of love and adoration that makes Ripley so glad to be alive.

The birthday girl’s chest explodes open. The “I am eleven” badge flicks from her shirt and goes flying, skimming across the table, striking a glass of orange juice and tipping it over. The denim shirt changes from light to dark. Blood splashes, staining everything, and when it strikes Ripley’s face and blurs her vision she wipes it away, staring at her juddering daughter—no longer beautiful, no longer pristine—and the thing clawing its way from her chest.

The monster is impossibly large. Larger than the innocent body it bursts from, larger than the people sitting around the table in a frozen tableau, sitting, waiting to be victims to the beast.

Ripley goes to scream.

It had been an instant, that was all, leaving a sense of dread which also slowly faded. But not entirely.

The person who sneezed was still drawing the postsneeze breath, and Hoop glanced back past Ripley, not even concerned enough to tell them to keep quiet. Ripley caught his eye and he paused, frowned, seeing something there. But she offered him a tight smile and he went on.

Ten minutes, maybe more. They stalked forward, Hoop taking the lead with the spray gun that might or might not work against the aliens, the others following close behind. These tunnels were less well formed, and Ripley supposed it was because this was one of the mining tunnels of level 9, not the spine passageway itself. But she was worried. If there had been alien evidence back in the main passageway, wasn’t there a good chance that they’d probed everywhere?

Even up?

The deeper they moved, the more signs of mining emerged. The tunnel widened in places, low ceilings shored with metal props as well as being melted hard. Walls showed evidence of mechanized excavation, and scattered along the tunnel were heavy, wheeled, low-profile trolleys that must have been used for disposal of the excavated material. They passed a spherical machine with several protruding arms tipped with blades and scoops.

Ripley wondered why they hadn’t been using more androids down here, and realized that she hadn’t actually asked. Maybe some of those who’d died in the dropships had been androids.

Of those survivors, it was only Sneddon who had proved her humanity to Ripley. And only because she had been challenged.

It didn’t matter. Her issues with Ash—and whatever Ash had become, once his AI had infiltrated the shuttle’s computer—should not jaundice her view of these people. They were all fighting to survive. Even Sneddon, with her obvious fascination for the deadly creatures, only wanted to get away.

Paranoid, much? Ripley thought. But at the same time, she wasn’t sure that paranoia was a bad thing right now.

Hoop had moved perhaps ten yards ahead. Suddenly he stopped.

“Here,” he said.

“Here?” Ripley asked.

“Emergency tunnel?” Lachance said from directly behind her.

She scanned the tunnel ahead, around Hoop and beyond, but though the lighting was adequate, there were still just shadows. Maybe one of them hid the entrance to a side-tunnel, doorway, or opening. But she thought not. All she could see was…

Something strange.

“No,” Hoop breathed. “Here. This is what they found. This is where it changed.” He sounded off. Awestruck, scared, almost bewitched. And for a painful, powerful moment, all Ripley wanted to do was to turn and run.

Back the way they had come, as fast as she could. Back to the staircase, then up, then to the Marion where she could hide herself away in the Narcissus, live the final moments of her life snuggled in the stasis pod with Jonesy and memories of better times.

But her memory already seemed to be playing tricks on her. She was starting to doubt that there had ever been better times.

She went forward until she stood next to Hoop, and the others followed.

“Through there,” he said. “Look. Can’t you feel it? The space, the… potential.”

Ripley could. She could see where he was pointing—a widened area of tunnel just ahead, and a narrow crevasse at the base of the wall on the left—and although there was only the faint glow of light from within the crack, the sense of some wide, expansive space beyond was dizzying.

“What is it?” Sneddon asked.

“It’s what they found,” Hoop said. “A nest. Those things sleeping, perhaps.”

“Maybe they’re still down there,” Kasyanov said. “We should go, we should—”

“If they were, they’d have heard us by now,” Lachance said.

“Then where are they?” Baxter asked. None of them replied. No one had an answer.

Hoop started forward toward the wall and whatever lay beyond.

“Hoop!” Ripley said. “Don’t be stupid!” But he was already there, kneeling and looking down into the crack. She could see cables now, leading into it, proof that the miners had gone that way, too. Hoop slid through, flashlight in one hand, spray gun in the other.

“Oh, my God,” he said. “It’s huge!”

Then he was gone altogether. There was no sign that he had fallen or been pulled through, but still Ripley was cautious as she approached the hole, crouching low and aiming the charge thumper.

She saw light moving in there, and then Hoop’s face appeared.

“Come on,” he said. “You’ve got to see this.”

“No we don’t!” Kasyanov said. “We don’t have to see anything!”

But the look on Hoop’s face persuaded Ripley. Gone was the fear she had grown used to so quickly. There was something about him now, some sudden, previously hidden sense of wonder that almost made him a different man. Perhaps the man he was always meant to be.

So she dropped to her behind and eased herself down into the crack, feeling for footholds and allowing Hoop to guide her down. She dropped the last couple of feet, landed softly, and then moved forward to allow the others access.

The breath was punched from her. Her brain struggled to keep up with what her senses were relaying—the scale, the scope, the sheer impossible size and staggering reality of what she was seeing.

The vast cavern extended beyond and below the deepest part of the mine. The miners had done their best to illuminate it, stringing light cables along walls and propping them on tall masts across the open spaces. The ceilings were too high to reach, out of sight in places, like dark, empty skies.

And they had also climbed over the thing that took up much of the cavern’s floor.

Ripley found it difficult to judge just how huge the place was. There was no point of reference. The thing inside the cavern was so unknown, so mysterious, that it could have been the size of her shuttle or on the scale of the Marion. At a rough guess she would have put the cave at two hundred yards across, but it could have been less, and perhaps it was much, much more. She thought the object was some sort of carved feature, hewn from the base rock long, long ago.

She had the impression that it had once been very sharp, defined, each feature clear and obvious. But over time the structure had softened. Time had eroded it, and it was as if she looked through imperfect eyes at something whose edges had been smoothed over the millennia.

She heard the others dropping down behind her, sensed them gathering around her and Hoop. They gasped.

“Oh, no,” Kasyanov said, and Ripley was surprised at the wretchedness her voice contained. Surely they should have been feeling wonder. This was amazing, incredible, and she couldn’t look at the structure without feeling a sense of deep awe.

Then behind her, Lachance spoke and changed everything.

“It’s a ship,” he said.

“What?” Ripley gasped. She hadn’t even considered that possibility. Buried almost a mile beneath the planet’s surface, surely this couldn’t be anything but a building, a temple of some sort, or some other structure whose purpose was more obscure.

“Down here?” Hoop said. There was silence again as they all looked with different eyes.

And Ripley knew that Lachance was right.

She was certain that not all of the object was visible—it quite obviously projected beyond the edges of the cavern in places—but there were features that were beginning to make sense, shapes and lines that might only be of use in a vessel built to fly. The entire left half of the exposed surface might have been a wing, curving down in a graceful parabola, projections here and there seemingly swept back for streamlining. There were cleared areas that might have been entrance gantries or exhaust ducts, and where the object’s higher surfaces rose from the wing, Ripley could see a line of hollows seemingly punched into the curved shell.

“It’s not like any I’ve ever seen before,” Lachance said quietly, as if afraid his voice might echo out to the ship. “And I’m not sure. But the more I see, the more certain I become.” No wisecracks now. No casual quips. He was as awestruck as the rest of them.

“The miners went close,” Hoop said. “They strung those lights up and all across it.”

“But we’re not going to make the same mistake, right?” Baxter said. “They went closer, and look what happened to them!”

“Amazing,” Sneddon whispered. “I should be…” She took a small camera from her hip pocket and started filming.

“But how can it be all the way down here?” Kasyanov asked.

“You’ve seen enough of this planet,” Hoop said. “The storms, the winds, the moving sands. This looks old. Maybe it was buried long ago. Ages… ten thousand years. Sank down into the sand, and storms covered it up. Or perhaps there was some way down here, a long time back. Maybe this is the bottom of a valley that’s long-since been filled in. Whatever… it’s here.”

“Let’s go,” Baxter said. “Let’s get the hell—”

“There’s no sign of those aliens,” Hoop said.

“Not yet, no! But this must be where they came from.”

“Baxter…” Kasyanov started, but she trailed off. She couldn’t take her eyes off the massive object. Whatever it was, it might have been the most amazing thing any of them had ever seen.

“Ripley, is this anything like the one your guys found?” Hoop asked.

“Don’t think so,” she said. “I wasn’t on the ground team that went there, I only saw some of the images their suit cameras transmitted. But no, I don’t think so. That ship was large, but this…” She shook her head. “This looks enormous! It’s on a much different scale.”

“It’s the find of the century,” Sneddon said. “Really. This planet’s going to become famous. We’ll be famous.”

“You’re shitting me!” Baxter replied. “We’ll be dead!”

“There,” Lachance said, pointing across the cavern. “Look, where it rises up into what might be the… fuselage, or the main body of the ship. Toward the back. Do you see?”

“Yeah,” Ripley said. “Damage. Maybe an explosion.” The area Lachance had pointed toward was more ragged than the rest, smooth flowing lines turned into a tattered mess, tears across the hull, and a hollow filled only with blackness. Even this rough, wrecked area had been smoothed somewhat over time. Dust had settled, sand had drifted against torn material, and everything looked blurred.

“Seriously, I think we should get back,” Baxter said. “Get ourselves away from here, and when we reach home, report everything. They’ll send an expedition. Colonial Marines, that’s who need to come here. People with big guns.”

“I agree,” Kasyanov said. “Let’s go. This isn’t for us. We’re not meant to be here.”

Ripley nodded, still unable to take her eyes from the sight, remembering the horrors of her waking nightmares.

“They’re right,” she said. She remembered her crew’s voices as they’d approached that strange extraterrestrial ship, their undisguised wonder. It had quickly turned to dread. “We should leave.”

And then they heard the noise behind them. Back through the tumbled section of cavern wall, from where they’d just dropped down. Back in the tunnels.

A long, low hiss. Then a screech, like sharp nails across stone.

A many-legged thing, running.

“Oh, no,” Kasyanov said. She turned and aimed her plasma torch at the hole they’d climbed down through.

“No, wait—!” Hoop said, but it was too late. Kasyanov pulled the trigger and a new sun burst around them.

Ripley fell back, a hand clasping into her collar. The others retreated, too, and the plasma burst forged up through the crack, rocks rebounding, heat shimmering the air all around in flowing waves. Ripley squinted against the blazing light, feeling heat surging around them, stretching her exposed skin, shriveling hair.

She tripped and fell back, landing on Hoop where he had already fallen. She rolled aside and ended up on her stomach beside him. They stared into each other’s faces. She saw a brief desperation there—wide eyes, and a sad mouth—and then a sudden reaffirming of his determination.

She stood behind him as Kasyanov backed away from what she had done. The plasma torch emanated heat, its inbuilt coolant system misting spray around the barrel. Before them, the rocks glowed red, dripping, melted, but they were already cooling into new shapes. Heat haze made the cavern’s wall seem still fluid, but Ripley could hear the rocks clicking and cracking as they solidified once more.

The crack they had crawled through was all but gone, swathes of rock melted down across it and forming a new wall.

“We can hit it again, melt through!” Baxter said. “Kasyanov and me, we can use both of the plasma torches to—”

“No,” Sneddon said. “Didn’t you hear what was through there?”

“She fried it!” Baxter protested.

“Wait,” Ripley said, holding up a hand and stepping closer.

The heat radiating from the stone was tremendous, almost taking her breath away. Though she could hear the sounds of it cooling, and the whispered bickering behind her, she also heard something else. The opening back up into the mine was now almost non-existent, just a few cracks, and if she hadn’t known it was there she wouldn’t have been able to find it. But sound traveled well.

“I still hear them,” she whispered. “Up there.” The sound was terrible—low screeches, the clatter of hard limbs on stone, a soft hissing she didn’t think had anything to do with the heat. She turned and looked at her companions, standing around her with their mining tools, their weapons, raised. “I think there’s more than one.”

“There must be another way back up into the mine,” Hoop said.

“Why must there?” Kasyanov challenged.

“Because if there isn’t, we’re fucked!”

“If there isn’t, we can make one,” Lachance said. “Just not here.” He turned and looked around the edges of the cavern, gaze constantly flickering back to the huge buried structure.

Ship, Ripley said, reminding herself of the impossible. We’re standing a stone’s throw from an alien ship! She had no doubt that’s what it was. Lachance’s assessment made sense, and so did the idea that the aliens had come from here.

She had seen all this before.

“There has to be another way in,” Hoop said, a hint of hope in his voice. “The lights are still lit. The plasma torch fried those cables behind us, so there must be others coming in from elsewhere.”

“Let’s track around the cavern’s edges,” Sneddon said, pointing. “That way. I reckon that’s in the direction of the second elevator, don’t you?” She looked around, seeking support.

“Maybe,” Lachance said. “But the mine tunnels twist and turn, there’s no saying—”

“Let’s just move,” Hoop said. He started walking, and Ripley and the others followed.

To their right, the mysterious buried object. To their left, the cavern’s uneven edges. Shining their flashlights against the walls did little to banish the shadows. They only crouched deeper down, further back. And it wasn’t long before Ripley started to sense the greatest danger coming from that direction.

She held her breath as she walked, trying to tread softly so that she could hear any sounds coming from the shadowed areas. But there were six of them, and though they all tried to move as silently as possible, their boots made a noise. Scrapes on rock, the grumble of grit being kicked aside, the rustle of clothing, the occasional bump of metal on stone.

Hoop froze so suddenly that Ripley walked into him.

“We’re being stalked,” he said. His choice of word chilled her. She wasn’t sure those things could stalk.

“Where?” she whispered.

Hoop turned around, then nodded toward the cracks, fissures, and tumbled rocks that made up the edge of the cavern.

“Yeah,” Sneddon said. “I get that feeling, too. We should—”

A soft hiss, like pressurized air escaping a can.

“Oh shit,” Kasyanov said, “oh shit, now we’re—”

Baxter scrambled back, his bad ankle failed beneath him, and he must have had his finger on the plasma torch trigger. White-hot light erupted from the weapon, scorching the air and splaying across the low ceiling at the edge of the cavern. Someone shouted. Ripley threw herself against Kasyanov just as a hail of molten rock pattered down around them. Someone else screamed.

The eruption ended as quickly as it had begun, and Baxter jumped to his feet and backed away.

“Sorry, sorry, I heard—”

“Damn it!” Hoop hissed. He was tugging at his trousers, getting more frantic with every moment. “Damn it!”

Lachance pulled a knife from his belt, knelt beside Hoop, and sliced his trousers from knee to boot, dropping the knife and tearing the heavy material apart. Then he picked up the knife again.

Hoop had started shaking, breathing heavily.

“Hoop,” Lachance said, glancing up. “Keep still.” He didn’t wait for a response, but held the leg and jabbed at it with the knife’s tip.

Ripley heard the hardening pellet of rock strike the ground. She smelled the sickening-sweet stench of burnt flesh. Then from in the shadows behind them once more, another long, low hiss.

And the clack of terrible teeth.

“Let’s go,” Hoop said. He was looking past Ripley, back into the shadows. When she saw his eyes widen, she didn’t have to look. “Let’s go!”

They ran, down into the cavern and toward the sloping wing structure that curved up out of the cavern floor. Hoop groaned as he went, limping, his tattered trousers flapping around his injured shin. Baxter hobbled, one arm over Lachance’s shoulder. The others hefted their weapons and moved quickly, carefully, across the uneven floor.

There was only one direction they could take, and the blasted opening into the ship’s interior looked darker than ever.

Ripley’s single thought brought only terror.

They’re herding us…

12 CATTLE

…Toward the ship, Hoop thought. Driving us like cattle. And we’re doing exactly as they want.

There was no other explanation. The aliens hadn’t attacked, but instead were slinking around the party of survivors, moving through shadowy fissures in the rock, making themselves known yet not exposing themselves. Everything Hoop had seen of them—everything he knew from what had happened aboard the Marion, and to Ripley more than thirty years ago—pointed to the creatures being brutal and unthinking monsters.

This was different. If he was right, they were planning, scheming, working together. That thought terrified him.

His leg hurt, a deep-seated, white-hot burn that seemed to smolder in his bones, surge through his muscles, filter around his veins. The whole of his lower right leg felt as if it had been dipped in boiling water, and every step was an agony. But there was no choice but to run. He knew that the damage was minimal—he’d looked—and the wound was already likely cauterized by the glowing globule of molten stone that had caused it.

So he did his best to shut the pain away.

His son had visited the dentist once, terrified of the injection of anaesthetic he’d require for a tooth extraction. On the way there, Hoop had talked to him about pain, telling him it was a fleeting thing, a physical reaction to damage that he knew would do him no harm, and that afterward he wouldn’t actually be able to remember what the pain had felt like.

Pain was a difficult concept to conjure in memory, Hoop had said. Like tasting the best cake ever. Such thoughts only really meant anything when the tasting— or the pain—was happening.

He tried it now, repeating a mantra to himself as they ran across that strange cavern’s floor. It doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t mean anything. He tried to analyze the sensation, take interest in it instead of letting it take over. And to an extent, it worked.

Kasyanov and Sneddon went ahead, Sneddon aiming her spray gun in front of her. Baxter and Lachance were bringing up the rear, Baxter looking determined through his own agony. Ripley stayed with Hoop, glancing frequently at him as she kept pace. He did his best not to give her cause for concern, but he couldn’t hold back occasional grunts or groans.

Responsibility weighed heavy. That he couldn’t rationalize away. He was in command, and although the Marion’s survivors, with Ripley in tow, were acting more like a leaderless group, he still felt in every way responsible for their fate.

Even as they ran he racked his brains, trying to decide whether he had made all the right decisions. Should they have remained on the Marion for longer, spending more time preparing? Should he have assessed both elevators, before deciding which one to take down into the mine? Perhaps if they’d taken the other one, they would be on their way back to the surface already, precious fuel cell pushed on a trailer between them. But he couldn’t deal in “what if” and “maybe.” He could only work with what they had. The definitives.

They had to reach the other elevator, and soon.

And yet the aliens were behind them, pushing them forward. Hoop hated feeling out of control, unable to dictate his own destiny, all the more so when there were others relying on his decisions.

He stopped and turned around, breathing heavily.

“Hoop?” Ripley asked. She paused, too, and the others skidded to a halt. They were close to where the craft’s wing rose out of the ground, though the distinction was difficult to discern.

“We’re doing what they want,” he panted, leaning over.

“What, escaping?” Kasyanov asked.

“We’re not escaping,” Hoop said, standing straighter.

“He’s right,” Ripley said. “They’re herding us this way.”

“Any way that’s away from them is fine by me,” Baxter said.

“What do you—?” Ripley asked, and for that briefest of moments Hoop might have believed they were the only two people there. Their eyes locked, and something passed between them. He didn’t know what. Nothing so trite as understanding, or even affection. Perhaps it was an acknowledgement that they were thinking the same way.

Then Sneddon gasped.

“Oh my God!” she said. Hoop looked back over his shoulder.

They were coming. Three of them, little more than shadows, and yet distinguishable because these shadows were moving. Fast. Two flitted from somewhere near where the survivors had entered the cavern, the third came from a different direction, all three converging.

Lachance crouched, bracing his legs, and fired his charge thumper. The report coughed around the cavern, lost in that vast place.

“Don’t waste your time!” Baxter said. “Maybe if they were a few steps away.”

“If they get that close, we’re dead!” Lachance said.

“Run!” Hoop said. The others went, and he and Ripley held back for just a moment, again sharing a look and each knowing what the other was thinking.

They’re driving us forward again.

The surface underfoot changed only slightly as they headed up onto the craft’s huge, curving wing. It still felt to Hoop as though he was running on rock, although now it sloped upward, driving a whole new species of pain into his wounded leg as he relied on different muscles to push himself forward.

Over the time this thing had been buried down here, sand and dust must have dropped onto it and solidified. Boulders had fallen, and this close he could see a series of mineral deposits that formed sweeping ridges all across the wing, like a huge ring of expanding ripples, frozen in time.

Each ring came up to their knees, and leaping over each ridge made Hoop cry out. His cries echoed Baxter’s.

“It’s only pain,” Ripley said, and she looked surprised when Hoop coughed a laugh.

“Where to?” Sneddon called from up ahead. She had slowed a little, then turned, spray gun aiming back past them.

Hoop glanced back. He could only see two aliens now, their repulsive forms skipping and leaping across the ground. They should be closer, he thought, they’re much faster than us. But he couldn’t worry about that now.

He looked around for the third creature, but it was nowhere in sight.

“That damaged area,” he said, pointing. “It’s the only way we know for sure we’ll get inside.”

“Do we really want to get inside?” Ripley asked.

“You think we should make a stand here?” Hoop asked. Sneddon snorted at the suggestion, but Hoop had meant it. Ripley knew that, and she frowned, examining their surroundings. There was nowhere to hide—they would be exposed.

“Not here,” she said. “Far too open.”

“Then up there, where the fuselage is damaged,” he said. “And remember, there’s another one somewhere, so keep—”

The third alien appeared. It emerged from shadows to their left, already on the wing, manifesting from behind a slew of low boulders as if it had been waiting for them. It was perhaps twenty yards away, hunched down, hissing and ready to strike.

Ripley fired her charge thumper, and if hatred and repulsion could fuel a projectile, the alien would have been smashed apart just by the energy contained in the shot. But he didn’t even see where the shot went, and if the creatures really were herding them toward the old ship, it likely wouldn’t even react.

Ripley held her stance, looking left and right. Hoop hefted his spray gun. The others pointed their weapons.

The nearest alien crawled sideways, circling them but never coming closer. Hoop’s skin prickled when he watched it move. It reminded him of a giant spider… although not quite. It more resembled a hideous scorpion… yet there were differences. It moved with a fluid, easy motion, gliding across the rough surface of the giant wing as if it had walked that way many times before.

He fired the spray gun. It was a natural reaction to his disgust, a wish to see the thing away. The staggered spats of acid landed in a line between him and the monster, hissing loudly as the acid melted into dust and stone, and whatever might lie beneath. And even though the fluid didn’t reach the alien, the creature flinched back. Only slightly, but enough for him to see.

Breath held against any toxic fumes, Hoop backed quickly away. That pressed the others into motion, as well.

“We could charge it,” Ripley said.

“What?”

“All of us in one go. Run at the thing. If it comes at us we all shoot, if it slips aside we move on.”

“To where?”

“A way out.”

“We don’t know a way out!” Hoop said.

“It’s better than doing what they want, isn’t it?” Ripley asked.

“I’m for going where they aren’t,” Baxter said. “They’re that way, I’m going this way.” He turned and hobbled again toward the ship’s main fuselage, right arm now flung over Kasyanov’s shoulder.

“We have to stay together,” Hoop said as they all followed. But he couldn’t help thinking that Ripley had been right—charge, take the fight to them—and he hoped he wouldn’t have cause to regret his decision later.

The ground rose steeper before leveling again, the curve of the wing still scattered with boulders and those strange, waved lines of mineral deposits. Hoop thought perhaps this whole cavern had once been under water, but there was no way of proving that right now. And such knowledge couldn’t help them.

What could help them was a place to stop. Somewhere easy to defend, a position from which they could make a stand. A route around or through the strange ship, leading back up into the mine.

A fucking miracle.

Maybe he should make a stand, here and now. Just him. Turn and charge the alien, spray gun spitting acid, and who knows, maybe he’d get lucky. The creature was just an animal, after all. Maybe it would turn and run, and he and the others could push home their advantage and charge back the way they’d come. Using the plasma torches, it wouldn’t take much to open up that access again.

One glance back told him everything he needed to know.

The three aliens were stalking them, spiked shadows dancing across the massive wing’s surface, flitting from boulder to crevasse as they sought natural cover. They moved silently and easily, their fluid motions so smooth that their shadows flowed like spilled ink. They were hunters, pure and simple. Having their quarry suddenly turn and charge would not faze them at all.

Fuck that.

He wasn’t about to sacrifice himself for nothing.

“Faster,” he muttered.

“What?” Lachance asked.

“We should move faster. Quick as we can, get there as soon as possible, find somewhere to defend. Perhaps that’ll throw them, a little.”

No one replied, and he read doubt in the silence. But they all ran faster, nonetheless. Even Baxter, hopping, swearing under his breath, and Kasyanov, sweating under the man’s weight. Whatever Hoop thought of his comm officer, there was a stark courage there that he couldn’t help but respect. And Kasyanov’s fear seemed to be feeding her determination.

Hoop’s leg was a solid weight of pain now, but he used it to fight back, slamming it down with each step, forging forward, driving events toward what he hoped would be a good resolution. He’d never been the praying kind, and faith was something he’d left behind with other childhood fancies. But he had a strange sense that this was all part of something bigger. However unlucky they’d been—the Delilah crash, the Marion’s damage, the beasts on the Samson, and now the elevator’s malfunction and their descent into this strange place—he couldn’t help feeling that there were larger hands at play.

It might have been the effect of their discoveries. This ship was an incredible, undeniable sign of alien intelligence, the likes of which no one had ever seen before. It had opened a doorway in his mind to greater, wider possibilities. But there was something more. Something he couldn’t quite pin down.

Ripley was part of it, he was sure. Maybe finding someone like her in the middle of all this was fucking with his mind.

Someone like her? he thought, laughing silently. It had been a long time since he’d really cared about someone. Jordan had been a fling, and she’d always remained a good friend. But with Ripley there was more. An instinctive understanding that he hadn’t experienced with anyone since…

He thought briefly of home, his estranged wife, and his children left behind. But there was too much pain and guilt to hold that thought for long.

Baxter was crying out with each step, the foot of his broken ankle dragging along behind him. Yet he still bore the plasma torch at the ready. As they neared the steeper slope up onto what must have been the ship’s main fuselage, Hoop began to look ahead.

The broken area they’d seen from a distance was larger than he’d thought. It extended from above the wing and back over the soft curve of the vessel’s main body, its skin torn apart and protruding in stark, sharp sculptures across the extent of the damage. It wasn’t one large hole, but a series of smaller wounds, as if something had exploded inside the ship and blasted outward, rupturing the hull in several places. Even after so long, there were scorch marks evident.

“That first hole,” he said, pointing. He darted forward quickly and looped his arm through Baxter’s, careful to let him wield the plasma torch. “You okay?” he asked quietly.

“No,” Baxter said, but there was a strength to his voice.

“Hoop, they’re following closer,” Ripley said from behind.

He let go of Baxter’s arm, tapped him on the shoulder, then turned around. Down the slope the three aliens were creeping forward, their casual gait as fast as the human’s sprint. And they were closer.

“Go on,” he said to the others. He and Ripley paused, looking back.

“Shot across their bows?” Ripley asked.

“Yeah.”

She lifted and fired her charge thumper at the closest creature. As it paused and skipped aside, Hoop fired the spray gun at it. The spurts didn’t quite reach the target, but they impacted across the sloping wing close to it, sizzling, scorching. Yet again he saw the beast cringe back away from the acid.

Ripley fired at the other two as well, shots echoing around the massive cavern, the sounds multiplying. They shifted aside with amazing dexterity, dancing on long limbs. Beneath the echoing reports he heard their hissing. He hoped it was anger. If they were riled up enough, they might charge to within range of the spray guns and plasma torches.

“Come on,” Hoop said to Ripley. “We’re almost there.”

As they climbed the steeper slope, the surface beneath their feet changed. It became smoother, and the feel of each impact was different as well. There was no give, no echo, but still a definite sense that they were running on something hollow. The ship’s interior almost bore a weight.

As they reached the first of the blasted areas, Hoop ran ahead. The miners had strung a series of lights along here, some of them hung on protruding parts of the ripped hull. And looking down inside, he saw a similar array.

This was where they had entered the ship.

His concern intensified. He shook his head, turning to face the others, ready to suggest that—

“Hoop,” Ripley said, breathing hard. “Look.”

Back the way they had come, several more shadows had appeared. They were moving quickly across the wing’s surface. From this distance they looked like ants. The analogy didn’t comfort him one little bit.

“And there,” Sneddon said, pointing higher up the slope of the ship’s fuselage. There were more shadows back there, less defined, yet their silhouettes obvious. Motionless. Waiting.

“Okay,” he said. “We go inside. But don’t touch anything. And first chance we get, we fight our way out.”

“Ever get the feeling you’re being used?” Sneddon asked.

“All the time,” Ripley muttered.

Hoop was first down into the ship.

13 ALIENS

Maybe she’s nine years old. There’s a doorway leading down into the old ruin, steps worn by decades of tourists and centuries of monks long, long ago. A heavy metal grille is fixed back against the wall, the padlock hanging unclasped, and at night they close off the catacombs, allegedly to prevent vandals from desecrating their contents. But ever since they arrived, Amanda has been making up stories about the night-things they want to keep locked in.

When the sun goes down, she says, the shadows down there come alive.

Ripley laughs as she watches her daughter creeping down out of the sun, putting on a faux-scared expression, clawing her hands and growling. Then she shouts for her mother to follow her, and Ripley is aware of the people crowding in behind her. These are popular ruins, one of the city’s main tourist venues, and there is rarely a quiet time.

The shadows envelop her. They carry a curious chill, and the damp, musty smell of places never touched by sunlight. Amanda has disappeared ahead of her. Ripley doesn’t feel the need to call, but then she looks back and sees that she is alone.

Alone down here, in the shadows, in the darkness.

Someone cries out. She edges forward, running one hand along the sandy wall. The floor is uneven and she almost trips, then her hand touches something different. Smooth, lighter than rock, more textured.

There are skulls in the wall. The skulls are the walls, thousands of them, and each one has a massive trauma wound—a hole, a smashed face. She fancies that she can see tooth marks on the bones, but perhaps that’s only—

My imagination, she thinks, but then the cry comes again. It’s Amanda, and recognizing the voice seems to conjure the girl. She is held back against the wall across a small, bone-lined room, clasped around the arms, shoulders and legs by the gnarled skeletal fingers of the long-dead.

She sees her mother, but there is no joy in her eyes.

Her chest explodes outward beneath her loose dress, and teeth bite their way through the material. Jagged, terrible teeth.

“Holy shit,” Ripley breathed, and she looked down into the darkness. For a while she was lost, not knowing where or when she was, and whether that had been a bastardised memory, or a vision of the future. Time swirled, uncertain and inelegant. I’m not sure how much more of this I can take.

Kasyanov frowned at her and began to speak, but Ripley turned away.

“Come down!” Hoop shouted up out of the ship. “There are lights. And it’s… weird.”

“Weird how?” Ripley asked, thinking, Worn steps and skulls and bones in the walls…

“Just come and see.”

She dropped down beside Hoop, still trying to shake the dregs of that brief, horrible vision from her mind.

The miners had been this way. That didn’t comfort Ripley at all, though the lights they’d strung up inside this damaged portion of ship did help. The explosion had blasted a hole through the ship’s skin, and inside it had scoured along the interior levels, knocking down partitions and clearing anything that might have been in the way. It reminded Ripley of a wasp’s nest, layer upon layer laid out to some fluid symmetry, and from where they now stood—at the epicenter of the exploded area— they could see at least four lower levels exposed.

She supposed that if the Marion were sliced in half, something similar would be revealed.

But the walls, floors, and ceilings of this ship were nothing like the Marion. Thick tubes ran between levels, and where they’d been ruptured, a solidified flow hung from them. It looked like frozen honey, or fine sand caught mid-pour. The walls had rotted back to bare framing, the struts themselves bent and deformed by the ancient explosion.

The levels were not as equidistant as she’d first thought, and this didn’t seem to be a result of the damage. It seemed that they had been formed this way.

“This is… weird,” Sneddon echoed, her fascination obvious. Filming with her camera again, she moved forward, climbing down a slope of detritus toward the first solid floor. Its surface was uneven, pitted in places, lined here and there, looking very much like age-worn skin.

“I’m not liking this,” Ripley said. “Not one bit.”

She’d heard it said that nature did not like right angles, and there were none in evidence here. The material in the walls and floors was a dark gray color, but not consistent. Here, there were patches where it was lighter, and appeared to be thinner. There, it was almost black, as if blood had pooled and hardened just below the surface, creating a hematoma. It resembled the mottled skin of an old corpse.

“Great way to make a ship,” Lachance said.

“What?” Baxter asked. “What do you mean?”

“Growing it,” Sneddon said. “This wasn’t built, it was grown.”

“No way…” Kasyanov said, but when Ripley looked at the doctor, she saw wide-eyed fascination reflected in the Russian’s eyes.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Ripley said.

“We can’t go back out there,” Hoop said.

“But they drove us in here! Are we just going to do what they want?”

“How can they want anything,” Lachance protested. “They’re just dumb animals, and we’re their prey!”

“None of us knows what they are,” Ripley said. “Sneddon?”

Sneddon only shrugged.

“I’ve told you before, I’ve never seen anything like them. Their apparent viciousness doesn’t mean they can’t act and think together. Back in prehistoric times, velociraptors hunted together, and there are theories that posit advanced communication between them. But…” She looked around, shaking her head. “I don’t think this is their ship.”

From outside came the sounds of hard claws skittering on the ship’s skin. They all looked up, and Ripley saw a shadow shifting back from the damaged area by which they’d entered. The silhouette stretched up for a moment, flickering across the cavern’s high ceiling before disappearing again.

“They’re waiting up there,” she said. She felt so helpless.

“We’ve got to go,” Hoop said. “Inside. Follow the lights that are still working, moving as fast as we can. Then as soon as we find another way out, we take it.” He looked around at them all, and his face was drawn from the pain. “I don’t like this anymore than the rest of you, but there are too many of them out there. If we can trick them, instead of fight them, I’ll be happier with that.”

“But something happened to the miners down here,” Sneddon said.

“Yeah, but we have an advantage. We know some of what happened, and we know to be careful.” He waited for any words of dissent, but there were none.

I don’t like this one bit, Ripley thought. But she looked up again, at the ragged opening in the ship’s strange hull, and knew that they had no choice. The option of climbing back up there, with those things waiting just out of sight… it wasn’t an option at all.

Hoop went first, taking the small flashlight from his pocket again. The string of bulbs hung by the miners continued to work, but Hoop’s light penetrated the shadows they cast.

The group moved quickly. Almost confidently.

Ripley tried to shake the recent vision from her mind. Those other daytime nightmares had been more surreal, but less troubling, featuring Amanda at an age when Ripley had never known her. But this one was the worst yet. Her daughter was young, sweet, innocent and beautiful, exactly as she remembered her. And Ripley’s inability to protect her daughter against the monsters still rang true, settling into her soul like a canker of guilt, eating, consuming, as if it had all been real.

She even felt herself starting to cry. But tears would only blur her surroundings, making everything more dangerous. She had to keep her wits about her.

She had to survive.

As they moved inward from the damaged area of the extraterrestrial ship, the surroundings became even stranger. Ripley thought of the old story of Jonah in the heart of the whale, such a disturbing image when translated to their current situation. Much of their surroundings showed distinctly biological features— uneven floors lined with inlaid tubing that resembled veins; skin-like walls, hardened over time yet still speckled with dust-filled pores and imperfections.

Then they began to encounter objects that must have formed some sort of technology. One narrow corridor opened into a gallery viewing area, looking down over a deep pit. It was ringed with a waist-high barrier. On the gallery stood several identical metallic units. They might have been seats surrounded by control equipment of some kind, the details obscure, arcane. If they were seats, then Ripley couldn’t easily identify the shapes of the beings meant to fill them.

The pit was filled to a few feet below the gallery by a glassy fluid of some kind, its upper surface scattered with grit and dust. The ceilings and walls were smooth, and Ripley could only assume that the dust had blown in from outside over the eons.

“Which way now?” Ripley asked.

The gallery led around three quarters of the pit, and there were at least six openings leading off from it, including the one they had just come through.

Hoop was peering at the opening through which they’d just come. From back that way came the sound of scuttling, hissing things.

“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Baxter said, sweating, trying to hide away his pain. Even standing still he was shaking. Ripley couldn’t imagine the agony he was working through, but knew there was no alternative. She only hoped a time didn’t come when he physically couldn’t go any farther.

What then? she wondered. Leave him behind? Kill him? She turned away, just as Hoop spoke.

“Let’s change this game,” he said. “Kasyanov, Baxter, get ready with the plasma torches.” He nodded at the opening they’d come through. “Bring it down.”

“Wait!” Sneddon said. “We have no idea what effect the plasma torches will have on this stuff. We don’t even know what the ship’s made of! Whether or not it’s flammable.”

Ripley heard more hissing, and back along the tunnel shadows shifted, casting spidery shapes along floors and walls.

“We run or we do it, that’s all!” she said. She braced herself to fire her charge thumper.

“Ripley.” Hoop handed her something from his waist pack, a chunky object about the size of a computer tablet. “Load it through the top. Real charges.”

“We can’t just fire those things at random,” Lachance said.

“Not at random,” Ripley said, plugging the container into the top of the thumper. “At them.” She braced again, took aim, and fired. The charge clattered along the tunnel, its echoes sounding strangely muffled as it ricocheted from the walls.

Ripley frowned.

Hoop grabbed her arm. “Time delayed,” he said as he pulled her to the side.

The explosion thudded through their feet and punched the air out of Ripley’s lungs. Behind the rumbling roar of the mining charge, she was sure she heard the aliens screeching in pain, and a shower of debris burst from the tunnel, pattering from her suit, scratching her face.

Smoke blasted after it, driven in streaming tendrils by the rush of air. Ripley swallowed to try and clear her ears, gasped at the stinging sensation across her face. Even as she stood up, Kasyanov and Baxter were at work with the plasma torches.

The entire gallery was brightly illuminated by the scorching plasma. Looking down, Ripley could see a network of slow ripples playing back and forth across the surface of the pit. The blast must have resounded through the ship. It was so thick, the surface so heavy, that the ripples moved like slow snakes, colliding and interfering, making complex but strangely beautiful patterns.

The stench was terrible, almost like burning flesh. The structure all around the opening slumped down, flowing, echoing the lazy ripples from below.

“Hold off!” Hoop shouted, and Kasyanov and Baxter ceased fire. Flames flickered all across the surfaces, fluttering out here, reigniting there, as the heavy framework dipped down until it met the bubbling floor. It had already started to harden again, effectively closing off the opening. The air shimmered from the incredible temperatures. Ripley’s lungs burned.

“Now we decide which direction to take,” Hoop said.

An alien’s curved head forced through the melted doorway. There was no warning—none of them could see beyond, and the opening itself was all but obscured by the melted structure. The creature’s smoothed dome pushed through the hardening material, its teeth stretching and gnashing. It seemed to struggle for a moment, shoving forward, and at either side its long-clawed hands sliced through.

But then it was held fast, the cooling material steaming where it bit into its mysterious hide.

“Everybody back,” Hoop said, and he aimed his spray gun.

Ripley backed away across the gallery and held her breath, fascinated yet terrified. The alien was still struggling to move forward, and all around it the melted and re-set material stretched, changing color and tone as the tension changed. Perhaps five seconds earlier, and the monster might have burst through, catching them unawares and causing chaos.

But now the creature was held fast.

Hoop fired a burst of hydrofluoric acid directly at the head.

Smoke, steam, sizzling, hissing, screeching. Everything was obscured by clouds of vapor, but Ripley had the definite impression of frantic, thrashing movement.

“Back,” she said. “Hoop, get back!” They all retreated across the gallery, and Ripley felt the waist-high barrier against her back. She edged along it toward the far end. The others were going in the same direction, and Hoop turned and ran toward her.

Behind him, something exploded.

He’ll be splashed with it, the acid, and I’ll have to watch him die, Ripley thought. But though Hoop winced and ducked down as he ran, the spattering remains of the alien’s head splayed across the gallery in the other direction. Part of it bounced across the floor, leaving sizzling patches behind, and dropped down into the pit. What struck the surface floated there for a moment, then sank with a final angry hiss.

Hoop reached them, grinning.

“Well, at least we know they don’t like this acid,” he said. “Come on. Let’s get the hell out. Baxter—”

“Don’t even ask,” Baxter said. “The way things are going, I’d beat you in a race. I’m fine.”

He was far from fine, though. He couldn’t touch his left foot to the floor, and if it weren’t for Kasyanov, he’d fall. His face was strained, damp with sweat, and he couldn’t hide his terror.

He’s still afraid we’ll leave him behind. It was a horrible idea, but one they all had to be contemplating.

“Don’t know how long that will keep them back,” Sneddon said, nodding back at the melted opening. It was still smoking. They couldn’t see any remains of the alien, but the place where it had forced through was seared with acid scars.

“Come on. This way,” Hoop said. He headed for an opening at the far end of the gallery, as far from their entry point as they could get. He fixed his flashlight to the spray gun’s strap so that he could aim both in the same direction. They all followed, none of them questioning him.

Entering a narrow, low-ceilinged tunnel, Ripley couldn’t escape the idea that they were being swallowed once again.

They entered areas that the miners had not lit. They ran, flashlights held out in front or strapped onto their weapons, shadows dancing and retreating. And not long after leaving the gallery, they found the first bodies.

The tunnel-like corridor opened up into another wide space, and there was something different about it. The smooth curves were the same, the non-regularity of something biological, but the sheets and swathes of material hanging across walls and from the ceiling didn’t belong here. Neither did the things hanging within it, like horrible, rotting fruit.

There might have been six bodies there, though Ripley found it difficult to tell where one ended and another began. The darkness, the decay, the way they’d been hung up and stuck there, fixed in place by that strange extrusion that had filled one of the mining tunnels far above—it all blurred the edges of what they saw. And that wasn’t a bad thing.

The stench was awful. That, and the expression on the first face upon which Hoop shone his flashlight. It might have been a woman, once. Decay had shrunk the face, drawn in the skin, hollowed the eye sockets, but the scream was still frozen there. Clawed hands stretched on either side, reaching—unsuccessfully—for what had been happening to the victim’s chest.

The hole was obvious. The clothing was torn and hanging in shreds. Protruding ribs were splintered.

“Birthing ground,” Sneddon said.

“They just hung them here,” Kasyanov said. “It’s… a nursery.”

On the floor in front of the hanging, dead people stood a group of egg-like objects, upright and shaped like large vases. Most of them were open. No one stepped forward to look inside.

They passed quickly through the larger space. Every instinct urged Ripley to look away, but sick fascination— and her determination to survive, to learn about these monsters and use everything she could against them— made her look closer. She wished she had not. Maybe somewhere on the Nostromo there had been a similar scene, with Dallas hanging there, stuck in place like the victim in a massive spider’s dense webbing.

“Where are you taking us?” Lachance asked Hoop. “This isn’t the way out. We’re just going deeper.”

“I’m taking us as far as I can away from them,” Hoop said, pointing back over his shoulder with his thumb. “And up, as soon as we can. There must be ways into and out of this ship, other than the hole blasted in its hull. We just have to find them.”

Before long the spaces they passed through—corridors in a spaceship, Ripley knew, though she could only think of them as tunnels—were clear of the alien material once again, and back to the old, gray, mottled surfaces. Still strange, but not so threatening. If there had been time, she might even have admired what they were seeing. It was amazing, it was extraterrestrial. But all she had time for was escape.

They drove us down here to be like the miners, she thought, trying not to imagine how awful it must be. To find yourself trapped in that webbing, watch the egg opening in front of you, feel the legged thing settling over your face. At first you blacked out, like Kane, but then came the waking and the waiting. Waiting for the first sign of movement from inside. The first twinge of pain as the alien infant started to push, claw, and bite its way out.

She thought of Amanda again, and groaned out loud. No one seemed to hear, or if they did it simply echoed their own despair.

They moved quickly, flashlight beams dancing around them. Hoop led the way, and Kasyanov and Baxter were behind him. They’d found a rhythm to their movements, and although Baxter’s left foot was all but useless, Kasyanov supported him well enough that he could hop with an almost graceful motion.

They all grasped their weapons. Ripley’s charge thumper had three explosive charges left. She’d seen the effect one charge could have, and she knew she’d never be able to fire it if they were too enclosed. But it still gave her a sense of protection.

Wherever they went through different areas of the massive ship, everything seemed to be made from the same strange material. Or grown, perhaps. Gone were the hints of technology. They passed many openings where thin, opaque sheets seemed to act as doors. Most were sealed, a few torn and tattered, but the small group kept to the wider passageways.

There were more gallery areas, more pits with smooth-surfaced fluid at varying levels. Ripley wondered what they were for, these pits—fuel, food, environmental facilities of some kind? Were they storing something?

At one point they climbed a curved stairway, the risers as deep as their waists, and they had to clamber up almost thirty stairs until the route leveled out again. Here the surfaces felt slick and sticky, and there so smooth that they took turns slipping while hauling themselves up. Ripley kept wiping her hands on her clothing, but though they felt slick and wet, they were actually dry.

Another mystery to this place.

Away from the nursery, the air smelled quite neutral, apart from an occasional breeze that worked through the hallways bringing a hint of decay. There was no telling what caused such a breeze this deep down beneath the ground. Huge doors opening elsewhere in the ship, Ripley thought. Something large and unseen moving around. Something big, sighing in its sleep. None of the possibilities were good.

They encountered one large open space containing several tall sculptures made of the same material as the walls and floor. The shapes were ambiguous, fluid amalgamations of the biological and the mechanical. As elsewhere in the ship, time had softened their edges and made it more difficult to see any details. They were carvings being hidden again beneath time’s camouflage. There was an undeniable beauty to them, but lit by the flashlights they threw tall, twisting shadows that were also intensely troubling. An alien could have been hiding behind any one of them.

“We can’t have lost them that easily,” Hoop said, but no one responded. Ripley had been thinking that, and she was sure the others had, too. But Hoop had become their leader. No one liked to hear the person in charge casting such doubts.

They left the hall of sculpture, and soon after Hoop had cause to speak again.

“More bodies,” he said from up ahead. But there was something wrong with his voice.

“Oh, my…” Kasyanov said.

Ripley moved forward. The passageway here was quite wide, and she and the others added their flashlight beams to Hoop’s.

For a while none of them spoke. There was very little to say. Shock worked its way around them, and they all dealt with their own thoughts and fears.

“I think we’ve found the ship builders,” Ripley said.

14 BUILDERS

As they had moved through the ship, Hoop had been building a mental picture of the aliens who might have constructed it.

His imagination had dipped once again into that childhood fascination with monsters. Such tall stairs implied long limbs. High arched openings could hint at the aliens’ shape. This ship, its nature, indicated something almost beyond understanding. It was either so technologically advanced that it was barely recognizable, or the technology was so different from any he knew that it made it futile to try to interpret it.

What he saw before him dispelled any such guesswork. There was a sadness to their appearance that invited only pity, and he realized that their story was just as fear-filled, as tragic, as what was being played out now.

“Poor things,” Ripley said, echoing his thoughts. “It’s not fair. None of this is fair.”

There were three dead creatures lying in front of them—two that must have been adults, and one child. They cradled the child between them, protecting it with their bodies, and that’s how they had died and decayed. The mummified infant’s corpse was nestled between its parents’ torsos, an expression of love that had lasted for countless years. Their clothing had remained relatively whole, a metallic material that still lay draped across prominent bones and between their long, thick limbs.

From what Hoop could make out, they each had four legs and two shorter, thinner arms. The leg bones were thick and stocky, the arms much more slender and delicate, hands protruding from narrow sleeves. The hands were skin and bones, digits long and fine, and he saw what might have been jewelry on one adult’s fingers. Their torsos were heavy, contained within suits that were reinforced with a network of metallic ribs and struts.

It was difficult to see how much of the bodies remained whole. The skin or flesh that Hoop could see was mummified, grown dusty and pale over time.

Their heads were the most uncertain part about them, because each had been smashed and holed by an impact. Hoop thought he knew what the impacts had been. Lying beside one adult’s outstretched hand was a weapon of some kind.

“They killed themselves?” Sneddon asked.

“One of them did,” Hoop said. “Killed their partner, child, then themselves. Rather that than be fodder for those things, I reckon.”

The skulls still retained shreds of skin and waves of fine hair. It looked as if they’d had a small snout, two eyes, a wide mouth containing several rows of small teeth. Not the teeth of a carnivore. Not the bodies or the appearance of monsters.

“They look like dog-people,” Lachance said. “Only… big.”

“I wonder what happened here,” Ripley said. “How did the aliens get on their ship? What took the ship down?”

“We might figure it out one day, but not today,” Hoop said. “We need to keep moving.”

“Yeah,” Baxter said. “Keep moving.” He was starting to sound weak, and Hoop was concerned that he’d start slowing them down. There was nothing to do about it if he did—nothing but reduce speed for him to keep up.

Kasyanov threw him a brief frown. She was also exhausted.

“Let me,” Hoop said, but she shook her head.

“No way,” she said. “I’ve got him.”

Past the bodies, the passageway started to grow wider and taller. Their flashlights gradually lost effectiveness, and the further they went the darker their surroundings. Footsteps began to echo. Baxter coughed and the sound carried, reverberating back to them, rumbling on and on.

“What is this?” Hoop asked as Sneddon walked beside him.

“No idea,” she whispered. “Hoop, we’re getting lost in here. I think we should go back the way we came.”

“And run straight into those things?”

“If they’re still looking for us, I’m sure they’ve found another way past that gallery by now.”

“What do you mean, if they’re still looking?”

Sneddon shrugged. “Just can’t help thinking they’ve stopped following because we’re doing exactly what they want.”

“Or because I killed one of them as it was coming for us, maybe they’re holding back. More cautious, now that they know we can kill them.”

“Maybe,” Sneddon said, but he knew better. She didn’t think that at all. And really, neither did he.

“So, what?” he asked. “I’m doing my best here, Sneddon.”

“We all are.” She shrugged again. “Dunno. Let’s just move on, stay sharp.”

“Yeah,” Hoop said. “Sharp.” He swung the spray gun left and right, the attached flashlight doing little to pierce the darkness. There seemed to be nothing but wide space around them, and he wondered whether they were in a hold of some sort. If so, then this ship had taken off without cargo.

Or without large cargo, at least.

It was as the walls and ceilings started to close in again that they found what might have been the way out.

Lachance saw it first, a break in the wall to their left with a hint of those large steps rising into shadow. They went to investigate, and with their combined flashlight power they could see the top of the staircase, maybe forty yards up. What lay beyond was unclear, but it was heading in the right direction.

Hoop started climbing, and the others followed.

After a few stairs they started taking turns pulling Baxter up behind them. It gave Kasyanov a rest, but then halfway up even she needed some help. She had exhausted herself, and Hoop only wished she had something in her medical bag that could help. Pain inhibitor, energy booster, anything.

By the time they reached the head of the large staircase, they were all panting with exhaustion. They were met with what appeared to be a blank wall, and Hoop turned quickly, looking back down the way they’d come and expecting an ambush. We have the high ground, he thought, but then realized that wouldn’t matter. If there were enough of them, no fight would last very long.

“Hey, look,” Sneddon said. She’d gone to one side of the wall and touched a series of projections. Without warning, a heavy curtain of some undefinable material was slowly sliding open. It jerked, grinding as it moved, and parted in the middle. Beyond lay more shadows.

“Enter freely,” Lachance drawled. “You’re velcome to stay the night.”

“I’ll go first,” Hoop said. But Ripley was already through.

He heard her sharp intake of breath even as he stepped through the ancient doorway into what lay beyond.

“It’s a birthing ground,” Ripley said, echoing Sneddon’s comment from earlier. But this was much, much different.

There was no telling what the room had once been intended for, but it had been turned into a vision of hell. All along one side and the far end, at least fifteen of those long-limbed dog-aliens were cocooned against the walls, trapped there by clumps and swathes of alien extrusion. Most were adults, but there were two smaller shapes that might once have been children. Their exposed chests were burst, thick ribs broken and protruding, heads thrown back in endless agony. They might have been there a hundred years or ten thousand, bodies dried and mummified in the dry air. It was awful to behold.

Even more awful were the things scattered around the middle of the room. Most stood upright, the height of an adult’s waist. More eggs, one for each victim fixed against the wall. They all appeared to have hatched.

“Don’t get too close!” Sneddon said as Lachance edged forward.

“They’re ancient,” Hoop said. “And they’re all open. Look.” He kicked at a petal-like flap on the egg nearest to him and it crumbled and fell away. “Fossilized.”

“Fucking gross,” Baxter said. “This just gets worse and worse.”

“We’re going that way?” Ripley asked. She was aiming her flashlight across the wide room toward a shadowy doorway in the far wall.

“Yeah,” Hoop said. “This is all ancient history. Just don’t look.” He started across the room, aiming his flashlight and spray gun at the ground ahead so that he didn’t trip.

He saw movement inside an open egg close by, and froze, readied to spray it with acid. But it had only been a shadow. Shit, he was on edge.

As he started to move again, he felt almost like an intruder in this ancient tableau. Whatever had happened here was between those dog-aliens and the monsters that still infested the ship—a confrontation that had apparently occurred long before Earth had discovered technology, and while its people were still farming the land and looking to the stars with superstition and fear. Even then, these things existed.

It made him feel very small and ineffectual. Even bearing the spray gun he was just a weak creature needing a weapon to protect him. Those aliens were their own weapons, perfect hunting and killing organisms. It was almost as if they were created as such, though he had no wish to imagine the creator.

Hoop had never been a God-fearing man, and he regarded such outdated beliefs as ignorant and foolish. But perhaps there were gods other than those the human race had once known.

Light flickered around the large room, casting movement into the eggs, into the eye sockets of the dog-aliens, and into corners where anything could be hiding. He sensed everyone’s nervousness, and he felt it himself. This was far more than any of them had expected.

“We’ll get through this,” he said softly, but no one answered. None of them could know that for sure.

At the end of the room, passing through the opening to whatever might lie beyond, they came close enough to touch one of the cocooned victims. Hoop passed his flashlight over the dead thing and paused on its face. The creatures they’d found back in the tunnels had been deformed by the weapon that had ended them, but apart from their chest wounds, these were whole.

This one looked agonized and wretched. Hoop wondered at a universe that could still express such pain, after so long.

He shone the light into the space beyond and then entered.

Another tunnel, another corridor, another hallway. The walls were curved, the floors uneven and damp. The dampness was a new thing, and he paused to sweep his foot across the surface. Fluid was bubbled on the floor, as if the surface was greasy, and his boot broke a thousand bubbles into a smear.

“Slippery in here,” he said back over his shoulder. Ripley was there again, shining her flashlight past him.

“The smell’s changed, too,” she said. She was right. Until now the ship’s interior had smelled of age—dust, staleness, air filtered in from the atmosphere-processed mine to lift scents from all around. But here it was different. He breathed in deeply and frowned, trying to place the smell. It was subtle but foul, slightly tangy, like someone who had gone unwashed for a long time. There was also something underlying it that he couldn’t place at all. Not a smell, but a sensation.

“It’s warmer,” Ripley said. “Not the air, but… it smells warm.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Like something alive.”

“The ship?” Ripley asked.

He shook his head.

“I think if it ever was alive, in any form, that was long ago. This is more recent. This is them.”

He heard Ripley passing the word back—Go careful, stay sharp!—and then he moved forward once again. Always forward. Going back was still an option, but it also felt like it would be a mistake.

Responsibility weighed down heavier than ever, gathering mass the more time that passed without incident. He’d never been a great decision maker—it often took him a long while just to choose dinner from the Marion’s limited menu—but he feared that if he decided they should turn back, the act of making that choice might doom them all.

Better to forge forward.

As they moved on, the dampness and the smells in the air increased. The inside of his nose started to sting. He was sweating, the humidity rising, nervousness drawing moisture from his body. His mouth was parched, his throat sore.

“We shouldn’t be going this way,” Baxter said. “This is bad. This is wrong.”

“It’s all wrong!” Lachance said sharply. “But this is up towards the top of the ship again, and that’s good enough for me.”

“What about the things they hatched?” Sneddon asked, and Hoop stopped dead. Something’s been bugging me and that’s…

“Where are they?” he asked, turning around to look at the others.

“That was a long time ago,” Ripley said.

“We don’t know how long they live. The ones in the Samson waited for weeks, so maybe they can hibernate for years. Or longer.”

“So there could be a lot more down here than just those hatched from the miners,” Sneddon said.

“It doesn’t change anything,” Hoop said, and he waited for any response. But everyone was looking at him. “Changes nothing. We’re here now. We go forward, up, and out.”

They continued on, but the corridor—twisting and turning, erring only slightly upward—ended at another wide, dark room.

Oh, no, Hoop thought. This is it. This is what they found, or some place like it.

It was another birthing ground. There was no telling how many places like this there were in the ship, nor how big the ship even was. As they paused at the edge of the hold, he found himself shaking with a deep, primeval fear. This was a danger beyond humanity, one that had existed since long before humans even knew what the stars were.

“They’re unopened,” Sneddon said. She pushed past Hoop, slinging the spray gun over her shoulder and taking something from her pocket.

“Don’t get too close!” Hoop said.

“Mummified. Preserved.” The room was lit with a bright flash as Sneddon started taking pictures of the eggs. “They’re almost like fossils.”

Hoop swept the spray gun and its attached flashlight from side to side, searching the extent of the chamber and looking for an exit. He saw one at the far side of the room, a tall, framed opening. He also saw something else. He aimed his flashlight up.

“Look.”

The string of lights was slung from wire supports fixed into the room’s high ceiling. Some of the lights were smashed, others seemed whole, but no longer worked. Or they had been intentionally deactivated.

Hoop didn’t like that one little bit.

“Look here!” Sneddon said. She was at the far edge of the room now, standing back from one of the eggs and taking photographs. The flashes troubled Hoop—for a second after each one his vision was complete blackness, his sight returning slowly every time. He didn’t like being blind, even for a moment.

The egg before her was open. Unlike the others, it didn’t look old and fossilized, but newer. Wetter.

She flashed off another shot, but this time Hoop blinked just as the light seared around the room, and when he opened his eyes again his vision was clear. In the final instant of the flash, he saw that the old-looking eggs were opaque beneath the camera’s flash. Inside, there were shapes. And he was certain that some of those shapes were moving.

“Sneddon, don’t get too—”

“There’s something—” Sneddon said. She took one step closer.

Something leapt from the egg. In an instant it wrapped itself around Sneddon’s face. She dropped the camera and it started flashing on automatic, the white-light searing the room at one second intervals as she grabbed the thing and tried to force her fingers beneath its grasping claws and the long, crushing tail that coiled around her neck. And then she dropped to her knees.

“Holy shit!” Lachance said, swinging the charge thumper up and toward her.

Ripley knocked it aside.

“You’ll take her head off!”

“But that thing will—”

“Keep her still!” Hoop said. Then he was beside Sneddon, trying to assess what was happening, how the thing had attached, what it was doing to her.

“Oh, shit, look at those things!” Kasyanov said.

Other eggs were opening. Even beneath the shouting and panic Hoop could hear the wet, sticky, almost delicate sounds of the flaps peeling back, and the slick movements of the things inside.

“Don’t get too close to any of them!” he said. “Get over here, everyone get close to—”

“Fuck that!” Kasyanov said, and she fired her plasma torch across the room. Sneddon’s still-flashing camera was nothing compared to the blazing light. The doctor swept it from left to right, the fire rolling in a white-hot wave across the space, and beneath its concentrated heat the eggs began to burst. They split apart and wriggling, thrashing things emerged, sliding out in a slick of fluid already bubbling beneath the heat, their legs and tails whipping for purchase. Then they began to shriek.

It was a horrible sound, ear-splitting, far too human.

“Help me drag her!” Ripley said, trying to grab Sneddon beneath one arm. But the science officer slumped forward, her shoulder striking an egg, before falling onto her side. “There!” Ripley shouted, nodding at the opening across the room. “Help me!”

Lachance pulled the spray gun from Sneddon’s other shoulder, grabbed her beneath the arm, and began to haul.

The egg that Sneddon had nudged against opened. Hoop saw it, and without thinking he swung the spray gun to bear. Ripley saw the barrel aiming at her and opened her mouth to shout a warning, but then she sensed the movement as well, turned, and swung the charge thumper from her shoulder.

“Not yours!” Hoop shouted. He’d given her real charges, and if she fired one in this confined space, it might kill them all.

Lachance was quick. He dropped Sneddon, stepped back, and fired his own charge thumper, loaded with nonexploding ammunition. The egg shuddered as something passed through it, and the flaps drooped as a thick, viscous fluid leaked out.

“Don’t step in it!” Ripley warned as she and Lachance grasped Sneddon again.

Kasyanov was staring at her handiwork. Half of the room was ablaze, plasma having stuck to the walls and the eggs and seeded multiple fires. Several more eggs— the ones not caught in the initial blast—burst open, their boiling insides spraying across the room. Kasyanov winced back, wiping at something that had landed on her forearm and glove.

“Don’t spread it!” Hoop shouted.

The doctor glanced back at him, shaking her head and holding up her gloved hand.

“It’s okay, it’s not acid,” she said. “I think it’s…” Then her face changed, as the suit material began bubbling and smoking as the liquid started to eat through.

Kasyanov screamed.

“Let’s go!” Hoop shouted. Ripley and Lachance dragged Sneddon, Baxter hopped as best he could, and Hoop went for Kasyanov, reaching for her while trying not to touch the parts of her that were affected. She saw him coming and tried to be still, but a heavy shudder was passing through her body. Her teeth clacked together so hard that he thought they’d break, and she was starting to foam at the mouth.

She reached out her good hand and grasped his.

“I… can’t… see…” she managed to croak, and Hoop squeezed her hand. Her eyes looked fine, but there wasn’t time now to examine them closely. The room was heating up. He needed to get away.

The face-hugging things were still bursting from their eggs, cooking in the fire, screaming.

They made it across to the opposite doorway. Ripley went first, lighting the way with her own flashlight. Hoop guided Kasyanov in last, leaning her against the dripping wall and trying to say some comforting words in her ear. He couldn’t tell whether or not she heard.

Then he stood in the opening and faced back into the room. The waves of heat were intense, drawing in air from behind him to feed the flames. The sounds of the blaze were incredibly loud—the roar of air alight, the crackle and pop of eggs bursting and burning. The stench was foul, scorching his nose and throat as the whipping limbs of flames threatened his clothing, face, and hair.

But there were still several eggs that were untouched.

As he leveled the spray gun and braced himself, he glimpsed something glimmering across the other end of the room. A shine, coming from the shadows. He aimed the flashlight that way, and saw.

“Ripley!” he said, trying not to shout too loud. “Lachance, Baxter! They’re here.”

15 OFFSPRING

“We’re killing their children,” Ripley said.

And though she wasn’t certain just how accurate this assessment was—where the eggs came from, what laid them, how these beasts procreated—somehow she felt it was right. Any species would go to great lengths to protect its offspring. This was nature’s way.

Across the burning, smoking, spitting pit of the egg chamber, the first alien stepped from the shadows.

Hoop’s acid spray gun wouldn’t reach that far, so Ripley didn’t hesitate. She braced the charge thumper against her hip and fired. It was a lucky shot. The projectile struck the alien low down on one leg, knocking the limb from under it and sending it sprawling to the left, rolling across two burning eggs. It shrieked and stood, shaking off the flames like a dog shaking water from its coat.

…One…

Ripley counted in her head. The only other time she’d fired an explosive charge from the thumper, the time delay had hit five seconds, and now—

…two…

“Hold your breath!” Hoop fired three spurts of acid across the right-hand side of the room.

…three…

The acid splashed from the wall, landed across the floor and several eggs, and immediately started hissing. One egg was sliced immediately in two, red smoke boiling up from its ruined insides.

…four…

The alien was on its feet again, one arm-like limb slapping at its legs where the small, metallic charge had penetrated and stuck.

“Down!” Ripley shouted. She turned her back to the flames and crouched.

The explosion reverberated across the room and through the ship’s structure, the floor punching up at their feet, air thumping at their ears. She gasped, swallowed, then spun around to face the room again.

The alien was all but gone, most of its torso and lower limbs blown away. Its head had rebounded from the roof and landed close to where it had been standing, and the next two aliens rushing into the room kicked it aside.

Hoop was gasping next to her. She glanced at him, saw the blackened split in his suit’s right arm.

But there was no time.

“Run!” she shouted. The two aliens had parted, stalking between the flames, and she only had one charge left. Someone shouldered her aside and the world turned white. She squeezed her eyes closed and slid down the wall, feeling the heat on one side of her face as more fire erupted through the egg room.

A wind roared past them to feed the fire, and then someone was squeezing her hand. Hoop was there, trying to pull her away and urge her to run.

Baxter stood above them, one leg firm and the other foot barely touching the ground. He had his back to them as he tracked one of the aliens, loosing another quick burst from the plasma torch and catching the creature across the head. It screeched, squealed, and darted across the room from one wall to the other, streaking fire behind it. When it struck the wall it slid to the floor and did not move again.

Ripley couldn’t see the other one.

“There’ll be more!” Hoop said.

“I’ll stay…”

At least that was what Ripley thought Baxter said. It was difficult to tell, his back still to them, plasma torch drifting left and right as he sought new targets. The room was a sea of flames now, the wind of the firestorm almost strong enough to knock him down. He was silhouetted against the flames.

“Don’t be fucking stupid,” Hoop said. He ducked down and took Baxter’s arm over his shoulders. “Ripley, can you guide Kasyanov?”

“I’m…” Kasyanov said. “I can walk… just not see…” She still shivered, one hand held out in front of her. It barely resembled a hand anymore.

“Your eyes aren’t damaged,” Ripley said.

“Fumes…” she said. “My belt, hip pocket. Red capsules. For… pain.”

“Hurry!” Hoop said. Ripley knew he was right, there’d be more aliens, but they needed Kasyanov on her feet. With Baxter hobbling and Sneddon down, they were rapidly getting to the time when they’d have to leave someone behind. And she sure as hell wasn’t about to decide who it would be.

She rooted through Kasyanov’s belt pockets and found a strip of red injection capsules. She removed three, popping the top from one and ramming the needle through Kasyanov’s suit into her right forearm. Then she popped the other, knelt, and jammed it into Baxter’s leg. Hoop was last, the needle pressed into his shoulder.

“Ouch!” he yelled, and Ripley laughed. She couldn’t help it. Baxter grinned, and Hoop smiled sheepishly.

Then she stood, took Kasyanov’s good hand and placed it on her own shoulder.

“Hold tight,” she said. “Stop when I stop, go when I go. I’ll be your eyes.”

Kasyanov nodded.

“Lachance?” Hoop said.

“I’m okay for now,” the Frenchman said, kneeling and slinging Sneddon over one shoulder. “She’s light. But we won’t get far like this.”

Ripley stared at the thing on Sneddon’s face, and between blinks she saw Kane lying in sick bay on the Nostromo, Ash and Dallas hovering without any idea what to do. Maybe she shouldn’t get far, she thought. Already that thing might be planting its egg inside her. But the idea of leaving her was too sick to contemplate.

With Sneddon’s spray gun lost and Kasyanov’s plasma torch hanging from one shoulder, they were down on their weapons. After the one charge she had left, Ripley would be firing bolts again. She had no idea how long the plasma and acid would last.

Kasyanov clasped her shoulder hard. Like her life depends on it! Ripley thought, smiling grimly. Then the flashlight strapped to Lachance’s charge thumper went out.

“One down,” he said, already gasping beneath Sneddon’s weight.

“Hoop, Lachance is right. We can’t get far like this,” Ripley said.

“We have to,” he replied.

He was right. That was the only answer. This wasn’t one of those situations where a miracle would suddenly present itself. They had to get as far as they could, and there was no use waiting for something else to happen. One foot in front of the other, defending themselves, fighting when they had to, moving quickly when they didn’t.

And if and when we get back to the Marion, there’s Ash, she thought. She wondered just how far that bastard had gone. He’d dragged her with him through the cosmos, searching for alien life, and once he’d found it, he’d tangled her up in all this. Commitment she could understand, but his determination went way beyond that.

Maybe he’d even…

She barked a short, bitter laugh.

“What?” Hoop asked, shooting her a sideways glance.

“Nothing,” she said. And it was nothing. Even if Ash had been responsible for the shuttle’s fuel cell decay, that meant nothing right now. But if they ever made it back to the Marion, they’d have to be careful. That was all.

One foot in front of the other… step by step.

The corridor rose steadily, as wide as any they’d yet followed, and they started passing openings on either side. Hoop slowed before each opening and fired a quick shot from his spray gun every time, but nothing shrieked, nothing came at them from the shadows.

They didn’t even know there was an opening above them until they heard the scream.

It was different from the other alien noises they’d heard, a deeper cry as if from something larger. The shriek was somehow more measured, almost more intelligent. It was haunting.

Ripley stopped and crouched, and Kasyanov did the same behind her. She looked upward. There was a wide, darker shadow in the ceiling above them that swallowed light, and it was only shining a flashlight directly up that revealed the shaft rising above them. High up in that shaft, something moved.

Hoop was ahead with Baxter, both of them already aiming their weapons. But neither of them fired. Acid and fire will drop back down, Ripley thought.

“Back!” Ripley said. She and Kasyanov backed up, and behind them she heard Lachance grunting with the effort of reversing with Sneddon still slung over his shoulder. Hoop and Baxter moved forward, further along the corridor, so that the opening in the ceiling was now between them. Ripley and her group pressed tight against the wall, giving the leaders as wide a field of fire as they could.

But not wide enough.

“Come on!” Ripley said. “Quickly!” And she ran. Kasyanov clasped her shoulder firmly and moved with her, perfectly in step. Lachance struggled along behind, keeping up with them as they passed beneath the gap in the ceiling. Ripley risked a glance up…

…and saw the moving thing much closer now, falling, limbs knocking sparks from the shaft’s sides, no longer screeching but growling, keening, its mouth extended and open, ready for the kill.

She shrugged Kasyanov’s hand from her shoulder, pushed her to keep moving, then crouched and fired her charge thumper up. Then she rolled backward without waiting to see where the charge had gone.

“Run!” Hoop said. He grabbed Ripley by the collar and hauled her to her feet, then helped Baxter stagger along the corridor. The charge will fall, Ripley thought, bounce off that thing and land behind us, and when it blows it’ll knock us down, knock us out, and then—

The explosion came from behind them. She could tell by the sound that the charge had detonated up in the shaft somewhere, but then seconds later its effects powered down and along the hallway, shoving them all in the back. Kasyanov grunted and stumbled forward, falling with her arms outstretched and screaming as the damaged hand took her weight. Ripley tripped face-first into Hoop’s back, hands raking across his shoulders for purchase and knocking him down. As they fell she thought of his spray gun and what would happen if its reservoir burst beneath them.

Hoop must have been thinking the same—he braced his hands in front and pushed sideways, spilling Ripley against the wall and landing on his side. The wind was knocked from her and she gasped, waiting long seconds for her breath to return. And while she waited she watched—

Lachance dropping Sneddon, tipping forward, rolling, and then coming to his feet again, pivoting on his left foot and swinging his charge thumper up to aim back toward the blast.

Ripley turned to look as she gasped in a breath, and what she saw drove the air from her lungs again, as surely as any explosion.

The alien had dropped from the shaft and was blocking the corridor—the entire corridor. One of its limbs and part of its torso seemed to have been blown away, and acid hissed and bubbled across the floor and walls. It staggered where it stood, one of its sturdy legs lifting and falling, lifting and falling, as if putting weight down gave it pain.

It was larger than any other alien they had ever seen. Its torso was heavier, head longer and thicker.

It hissed. It growled.

Lachance fired.

Two bolts struck the alien’s wounded side, smacking shreds of shell-like skin and bubbling flesh back away from them. It shrieked and flailed its remaining limbs, striking deep scratches across the walls. Lachance’s next two shots hit it directly beneath its raised head.

The shrieking stopped. The beast froze. Hoop stood and aimed the spray gun, but he didn’t fire. Even the drifting smoke from the explosion seemed to go still, waiting for whatever might happen next.

“One more,” Ripley whispered, and Lachance fired again. The bolt struck the alien’s abdomen, but it was already slumping to the ground, limbs settling, its damaged head resting against the corridor’s side. And then slowly, slowly, it slid down as its acid-blood melted a depression in the wall.

Hoop tensed, ready to fire his acid-gun, but Ripley held up a hand.

“Wait!” she said. “Just a bit.”

“Why?” he asked. “It might not be dead.”

“Looks dead to me,” Lachance said. “Half its head’s blown off.”

“Yeah, well…” Ripley said. They waited like that, watching the motionless creature, the smoke drifting down from the vertical shaft, drawn back along the corridor toward the burning egg chamber. She couldn’t feel the breeze anymore, but the fleeting smoke indicated that the fires were still blazing. They listened for more movement, but heard none. And all the while she tried to see what was different about this dead beast.

Apart from being bigger than the others, there were other, more subtle differences. The length of its limbs, the shape of its head.

“What the hell is that?” Hoop asked, pointing. “There, at its ass-end.”

“Oh, well, that’s gross,” Lachance said.

The alien’s abdomen had burst open, spilling a slick mess across the floor. It sizzled and spat as the acid-pool spread, but it was the things lying in the pool that drew Ripley’s attention. Scores of them—maybe hundreds— spherical and each roughly the size of her thumb. They glimmered moistly beneath the flashlight beam, sliding over one another as more poured from the wound.

“I think we killed a queen,” Ripley said.

“You’re sure?” Hoop asked from behind her.

“Pretty sure—it’s the only thing that makes sense. They’re eggs. Hundreds of eggs.” She looked back at him. “We nailed a fucking queen.”

She examined the rest of the creature, playing her flashlight across its blasted and slashed body. Though bigger than any they had so far seen, something about it was also almost childlike—its features were larger, the spiked and clawed limbs not quite so vicious. Ripley felt a strange frisson, a sense of likeness. But she was nothing like this thing.

Nothing at all.

“I think she’s young,” she said. “Imagine just how big…?” She shook her head. “We need to go.”

“Yeah,” Hoop agreed.

“My eyes are improving,” Kasyanov said. “I can move quicker. I’ll stay behind you. But let’s get the hell out of this pit.”

They moved on, the corridor still erring upward. They were more cautious now, Hoop and Ripley shining their lights ahead across walls, floor, ceiling. At every junction they paused to listen before moving on. And when they reached another staircase leading up toward what might have been an opening in the ship’s hull, he handed Ripley another charge magazine.

“Last one,” he said. “Five charges left.”

“And I’m almost out of bolts,” Lachance said.

“My plasma torch is still almost full,” Kasyanov said.

They were being worn down step by step, Ripley knew. Whether or not this was an intentional act by the aliens, whether they could even consider something that complex, she didn’t know. But the fact remained.

“That’s the way out,” she said, nodding up at this new, shorter staircase.

“How d’you know that?” Lachance gasped. His knees were shaking from Sneddon’s weight. He was almost exhausted. And Baxter, leaning against Hoop, was looking up at the new, waist-high steps with something approaching dread.

“Because it has to be,” Ripley said.

They started climbing—

She is panting, sweating, exhausted, ebullient. It’s one of those moments that opens up and out into a perfect, neverto-be-repeated time, so rare that its blooming is like that of the planet’s most precious flower. She is filled with a sense of well-being, an all-consuming love for her daughter that is so powerful that it hurts.

This time, now, she thinks, doing her best to consign that instant to memory. The cool heather beneath her hands as she clasps onto the hillside and pulls herself higher. The heat of the sun on the back of her neck, sweat cooling across her back from the climb. The deep-blue sky above, the river below snaking through the valley, vehicles as small as ants passing back and forth along the road.

The slope steepens as they approach the hill’s summit, and Amanda giggles above her, pretending that she didn’t know. It’s dangerous—not quite mountain climbing, but it’s a hands-and-knees scramble, and if they slip it will be a long tumble down. But Ripley can’t be angry. Everything feels too good, too right, for that.

So she climbs harder and faster, ignoring the feel of empty space pulling her back and down from the hillside. Amanda glances back and sees her mother moving quicker. She giggles again and climbs, her teenager’s limbs strong and supple.

I’ve never actually been here and seen this, yet it’s the best moment of my life.

Amanda reaches the summit and shouts in triumph, disappearing over the top to lie back on the short grass and wait for her mother.

Ripley pulls herself up the natural steps in the slope. For an instant she feels terribly alone and exposed, and she pauses in her climb. Shocked. Cold.

Then she hears another sound from above that makes her start climbing again. Her sense of well-being has been scrubbed away by that sound, and the moment of perfection dissipates as if it has never been felt at all. The sky is no longer cloud-free. The hill’s wildness is now brutal rather than beautiful.

The sound was her child, crying.

Ripley reaches the top, clinging to the hillside now, terrified that she will fall and even more afraid of what she’ll see if she does not. When she pulls herself up and over onto the summit, she blinks, and everything is all right.

Then she really sees Amanda, standing there just a few yards away with one of those monstrous things attached to her face, tail tightening, pale fingers gripping, body throbbing. Ripley reaches out, and her daughter’s chest comes apart—

“…Go in there!” Hoop said.

“What?” Ripley asked, blinking away the fog of confusion. It was harder to do this time, the debilitating sense of loss clinging to her more persistently. They’d reached the top of the staircase—she knew that, even though she had almost been elsewhere—but she took a moment to look around before realizing what Hoop was saying.

“But look at it!” Baxter said. “We can’t just ignore that.”

“I can,” Hoop said. “I can, and I am!”

The head of the staircase opened into a wide area with two exits. One led up again, perhaps toward a hatch in the ship’s hull, or perhaps not. There was no telling. The other was closer, much wider, and like nothing they had seen on the ship before.

At first she thought it was glass. The layers of clear material were scarred and dusty with time, but still appeared solid. Then she saw it shimmer as if from some unfelt breeze, and knew it wasn’t glass. She didn’t know exactly what it was, but it was there for one purpose.

Lachance grabbed Baxter’s flashlight and shone it ahead. The light smeared across the clear surface and then splashed through the large space beyond. Some of what it illuminated Ripley recognized. Some she did not. None of it made her want to go any closer.

“More eggs,” she said.

“But different,” Baxter said. He hobbled closer and pressed his face to the barrier. It rippled as he touched it.

Lachance played his light around, and Hoop added his own.

“Oh,” Baxter said. He turned around slowly.

“What is it?” Ripley asked. We just need to leave!

“I think we just found where your queen friend came from.”

Ripley closed her eyes, sighed, and there was a terrible, unrelenting inevitability to this. She did not feel in charge of her own actions. She was long past thinking, Maybe this is all a dream. No, she wasn’t asleep, but she didn’t feel entirely awake, either. The more she tried to take control of events, the more they ran away from her. And here she was again, needing to go in one direction, yet drawn relentlessly in another.

Hoop shone his light back down the staircase they’d just climbed. No movement. Then he turned back to the new room beyond the clear enclosure.

“I’ll go first,” he said.

The second thing Ripley noticed was that the tech here was far more recognizable—and more prevalent—than it had been anywhere else in the ship. There were at least six separate movable workstations where the equipment appeared largely identical, ranging from sizeable units to smaller, more intricate devices. There was very little dust, and everything had a sharpness, a clarity, that the rest of the ship was lacking. Time had not paid this place so much attention.

The first thing she noticed was the eggs, and the things that guarded them.

There were sixteen eggs, each one set apart from the others within a waist-high, circular wire enclosure. The enclosures were set around the room’s curved perimeter, leaving the center open for the mobile workstations. The eggs looked similar to the others they had found and destroyed, though there were subtle differences in color, tone, and shape. They were rounder, fatter, and their surfaces seemed to be more thoroughly networked with fine veins. Ripley thought perhaps they were newer, or simply better preserved.

Crouched beside the eggs were things that at first glance resembled statues. But she knew not to take anything down here at first glance. They were aliens, their spiked limbs dulled, curved heads dipped and pale. Slightly larger than others they had seen, yet so different from the queen they’d so recently killed. It was Lachance who hit it on the head.

“They look like… the ship’s builders.”

And they did. They were a monstrous blend of alien and dog-creature. More limbs than other aliens, each with a chunkier body, thicker legs, and a more prominent head, still they possessed the same chitinous outer shell, and one had slumped to the side with its grotesque mouth extended, the glimmering teeth now dulled. Ripley was glad she hadn’t seen them alive.

“How long have they been here, do you think?” Baxter asked.

“Long time,” Kasyanov said. “That one almost looks like it’s mummified. But these eggs… maybe the damned things can never die.”

One egg was open, and on the ground close by it was the body of one of the miners.

“Nick,” Lachance said quietly. “He owed me fifty dollars.”

Nick’s chest was open, clothing torn, ribs protruding. He looked fresher than the other corpses they’d found, yet Ripley thought he’d probably died around the same time. The atmosphere in this section was cleaner, and perhaps lacking in the bacteria of decay.

“Only one egg has opened,” she said. She blinked softly, trying to take control of the feeling that was slowly enveloping her. It was an urgency driven by disgust, a pressing desire fed by hatred.

“And we just popped the bastard that came from that,” Hoop said. “You think so?”

“Yeah, popped it,” she said. She looked around at the other eggs and the things that had settled to guard them, long ago. If all these eggs were queens—if that’s what the creature they’d just killed had been—then they had the potential to produce many, many more aliens.

Thousands more.

“We have to destroy them all,” she said. She lifted the charge thumper.

“Wait!” Kasyanov said. “We haven’t got time to—”

“We make time,” Ripley said. “What happens if we don’t survive? What happens if a rescue mission eventually arrives, comes down here? What then? There are thousands of potential creatures in this one room. We’ve fought off a few of those things. Imagine an army of them.”

“Okay, Ripley,” Hoop said. He was nodding slowly. “But we need to take care. Lachance, come with me. We’ll check the other opening, make sure that’s really the way out. Then we’ll come back and fry these fuckers.” He looked at Ripley, and held up a hand. “Wait.”

She nodded, but with one glance urged him to hurry. She wouldn’t wait for long. Her finger stroked the trigger, and she imagined the eggs bursting apart, spilling their horrendous cargo to the clear gray floor.

Fuck you, Ash, she thought, and she almost laughed. He’d done everything he could to procure another one of these monsters for his Weyland-Yutani bosses. And she was doing everything she could to destroy them all.

She would win. Of that she had no doubt. The burning question was, would she also survive?

“I will,” she said.

Perhaps thinking she was replying to him, Hoop nodded.

Sneddon was slumped beside the door, creature still clasped across her entire face. Baxter stood resting against the wall, plasma torch cradled in his arms. Kasyanov blinked the pain from her eyes, also holding her plasma torch.

As Hoop and Lachance left, Ripley had a flash-image of Amanda on top of that hill.

I’ll save you, baby. I’ll save you.

16 MAJESTY

“We’re getting out of this. Right, Hoop?”

“What do you expect me to say to that?”

“That we’re getting out of this.”

“Okay, Lachance. We’re getting out of this.”

Lachance exhaled and wiped his brow. “That’s a relief. For a minute there I thought we were fucked.”

“Come on. Let’s see what’s up here.” They crossed the open area at the head of the steep staircase, and Hoop paused to look back down. His light didn’t seem to penetrate quite so far, now, its power starting to wane. He couldn’t quite see the bottom. There could have been anything down there, crouched in the shadows and staring up at him, and he wouldn’t know.

Lachance moved through the opening and started up the shorter staircase. Hoop followed. There were only five tall steps before the walls seemed to close in, forming a blank barrier. But Lachance leaned left and right, looking at varying angles.

“Hidden opening,” he said. “Clever.” He ducked through a fold in the strange wall material.

Hoop glanced back and down. There was no noise down there, no hint that anything had gone wrong in that strange lab with the queen eggs. Yet he still couldn’t shake the idea that they were making a mistake here. That splitting up, even for such a short time, was a stupid thing to do.

Ripley was stronger than ever, yet he could sense a ripple of danger emanating from her now. A need for some sort of vengeance, perhaps, that might well put them all in peril. She was a logical woman driven by the instinct for survival, intelligent and determined. But as she was shooting that queen, he’d seen something in her eyes that had no place with logic. Still instinct, perhaps. But the instinct for attack, rather than defense.

When she’d looked at him just now, he’d seen murder in her eyes.

He walked into Lachance, then realized why the Frenchman had stopped.

The hidden route emerged onto the huge ship’s wings close to the cavern wall. The miners’ lights were still strung across the cavern, shedding a weak light over the whole area. Looking back along the wing he could see the damaged area where they’d entered, several hundred yards away and seemingly so long ago.

“Can’t see any of those bastards,” Hoop whispered.

“If they’re up here, they’re hiding,” Lachance said. “But look. What is that?” He was pointing to the right, toward where the ship’s hull seemed to disappear beneath the cavern wall that rose high above them, curving eventually into a high ceiling hidden by shadows.

“That’s our way out,” Hoop said. There was a series of cracks in the wall above the wing, any one of which might have been a route back up into the mine.

“Yeah, but what is it?”

Hoop frowned, looked closer. Then he saw what Lachance meant.

“Holy shit…”

It wasn’t part of the ship. It was made of stone. Much of it had tumbled, but some still stood, a structure that at first glance formed the crevassed, cracked wall of the cavern.

“Is that a building of some sort?” Lachance asked. “A wall?”

“We’ll see,” Hoop said. “But not yet. Come on, we need to get the others.”

“And wipe out those eggs,” Lachance said.

“Yeah.” Hoop took one more lingering look around the cavern—the huge, buried vessel, like no ship any of them had ever seen; the massive cavern formed above and around it; and now this vast wall that seemed to loom over the ship, burying it, smothering the parts of it they had yet to see. It was almost as if the ship had crashed into the structure, rupturing it, ploughing through until it wedged to a halt.

Whatever had happened here, they’d never know the full story. He’d bet money on it.

Because even after wiping out those eggs, there were more measures they could take. Already he was making plans.

They ducked back inside the ship, descended the steep steps, and reached the open area at the head of the longer staircase.

First came the flash of plasma fire from the lab ahead of them.

Then the scream.

Lachance was first across the landing, ducking through the clear curtain into the lab, thumper coughing as he entered. Hoop was right behind him. Ripley started without us! he thought, but as he entered and saw what was happening, he knew that wasn’t the case.

They should have been more careful.

Ripley waited. She walked a complete circuit of the center of the room, careful to give the dead miner a wide berth. None of the eggs gave any signs of opening, there was no sound or movement, yet she remained alert. If one of them so much as twitched or pulsed, she’d open fire.

Baxter had crouched down beside Sneddon and the two of them were motionless, unconsciously mimicking the mummified aliens. Kasyanov continued to blink quickly, touching at her eyes with her good hand and wincing as her gloved fingertips brushed against the swollen red eyelids. Her acid-burnt hand was held in front of her, shaking. She’d need attention back on the Marion—they all would—but they had to get there first.

Apart from the one that had opened, the alien eggs seemed untouched, and almost immune to any effects of time. Perhaps the wire enclosures formed some sort of stasis field, letting the eggs and their monstrous cargo sleep until the time came for them to wake.

That time was when a host, a victim, was brought before them.

Finger still stroking the trigger, Ripley moved closer to one of the hybrid figures. Though they repulsed her, she couldn’t deny that she was also fascinated. This one must have been birthed from one of the dog-aliens that had built this strange ship. Which meant that the aliens seemed to take on some of the attributes of whomever or whatever they used as a host for their gestation. Did Kane’s alien have some of Kane in it?

Would Amanda’s?

“No,” Ripley breathed. “They’ll never leave here. None of them.” She looked at Sneddon where she sat slumped close to the doorway, that huge spider-like thing still clamped tight to her face, tail around her throat. Soon it would die and fall off, leaving an egg inside her chest that would quickly gestate and become one of them. Then the pain, the terrible agony of her death, and the new monster would emerge.

If Ash had his way, Sneddon would be in stasis before that happened.

“No,” Ripley said again, louder. Kasyanov looked across at her, Baxter glanced up, both alarmed. “We can’t take her,” she said, nodding at Sneddon. “She’s infected. We can’t save her, and we mustn’t take her.”

“Well, there’s no way we’re leaving her!” Kasyanov said.

“Haven’t you got something for her?” Ripley asked.

It took a while for Kasyanov to understand what Ripley was really asking. When she did her red-rimmed eyes widened.

“And who the hell are you?” she asked. “You don’t even know Sneddon, and you’re asking me to kill her?”

“Kill?” Baxter asked, looking confused.

“No, just help her,” Ripley said.

“How exactly is killing her going to help her?” Kasyanov snapped.

“Have you seen what they do?” Ripley asked. “Can you imagine how much it would hurt having something…” Amanda, screaming, hands held wide as a beast burst its way outside from within. “Something eating its way out of you from the inside, breaking your ribs, cracking your chest plate, chewing its way out? Can you even think about that?”

“I’ll take it out of her,” Kasyanov said.

Something creaked.

Ripley frowned, her head tilted to one side.

“Don’t you go near her,” Kasyanov continued. “None of us knows you. None of us knows why you really came, so you just—”

“Listen!” Ripley said, hand held up.

Creak…

She looked around at the eggs. None of them seemed to be moving, none of those fleshy wings were hinging open, ready to disgorge their terrible contents. Maybe it was a breeze, still tugged through the tunnels and corridors by the fires they had set deeper in the ship. At the doorway, those strange curtains hung heavy. Around the room nothing moved. Except—

Scriiiitch!

It was Kasyanov who saw it.

“Oh… my… God!”

Ripley spun around, backed away toward where the others waited by the doorway, clasping the charge thumper and immediately realizing that they were very close to being fucked.

It wasn’t just one of the mummified aliens that was moving.

It was all of them.

She squeezed the trigger, Kasyanov opened up with the plasma torch, and Ripley felt the ice cold, blazing hot kiss of fire erupting all around her.

She screamed.

“Back back back!” Hoop shouted. Baxter was already trying to haul Sneddon out of the room, and Kasyanov was grasping the unconscious woman’s boots, trying to lift with her one good hand, plasma torch sputtering where it hung from her shoulder.

As Lachance and Hoop entered there was a thudding explosion from across the room. Shrapnel whistled past Hoop’s ears and struck his suit, some of it dry, some wet. He winced, expecting more pain to add to his throbbing arm. But there were no more sizzling acid burns. Not yet.

Ripley stood in front of them all, charge thumper at her hip as she swung thirty degrees and fired again.

“Back!” Hoop shouted again, but Ripley couldn’t hear, or wasn’t listening.

The frozen, statue-like aliens were moving. Several were down already, burning from Kasyanov’s plasma torch or blown apart by Ripley’s first shot. Others moved across the room toward Ripley. Some were slow, stiff, hesitant, as if still waking from a slumber Hoop could not comprehend.

One was fast.

It streaked toward Ripley from the right, and if Hoop hadn’t already had his finger on the spray gun trigger, she might have died. Instinct twitched his finger and sent a spurt of acid across the room. The alien’s movement made the shot even more effective, the acid slicing across its middle section. It hissed, then screamed, and thrashed backward as Lachance’s thumper discharged. He fired three bolts into its head and it dropped down, dead.

Ripley’s second charge exploded. The whole room shook, detritus whizzing through the air and impacting walls, faces, flesh. She cried out and went to her knees, and Hoop saw that she’d already suffered burns across her right hip and leg from a plasma burst. It couldn’t have actually touched her—if it had, it would have eaten through her suit, flesh and bones—but she’d been too close when Kasyanov had fired her torch. If the torch’s reserves hadn’t already been nearly depleted, Ripley would have died.

Hoop turned to the right, away from everyone else, and let loose another concentrated stream of acid, squeezing his eyes almost entirely closed against the fumes, holding his breath. An egg exploded, gushing sizzling insides. Another fell in two, the thing inside thrashing briefly before growing still.

Ripley was on her feet again.

“Get out!” she shouted at them all. “Get back! Now!”

Three more aliens surged through a cloud of smoke and came at her. She fired another charge at them, striking the foremost creature and driving it back into the other two, the glimmer of metal obvious in its chest. She turned her shoulder and crouched as the blast came, then she quickly stood again.

Hoop helped Kasyanov with Sneddon’s dead weight, and Lachance backed out with them.

“Ripley!” Hoop shouted. “Out, now!”

As he backed through the clear-curtained doorway with his crewmates, he could see her silhouetted against a wall of white-hot flame that still burned across the left half of the room. Her hair was wild, her stance determined, as something emerged from the flames and came at her, blazing.

She fell, rolled, kicked out with one boot. The alien tripped over her leg and went sprawling, spilling one queen’s egg onto its side. Ripley screamed in pain as her wounded leg was jarred, but then she was standing again, aiming the charge thumper and firing her last shot into the monster’s face.

She burst back through the curtains as the charge exploded. It shoved her through, fire blooming all around her, arms outstretched. She let go of the empty thumper and broke her fall, grunting as her already wounded body was subjected to another impact.

Ripley stood quickly and went for Kasyanov. She grasped the spray gun, tugged, and Kasyanov pulled back.

“Ripley!” Hoop said. She was bleeding from the leg and hip, slashed across the shoulder and side of her neck by an alien’s tail. Her face was blackened from an explosive blast. A large patch of her hair had been burnt away, and her right eye was almost closed. She should have been down on her knees, at least. But something kept her going.

“Give it to me!” she demanded.

A rage, a burning fury at these things and what they meant.

“Let it go!” she screamed.

Kasyanov slipped the strap from her shoulder and stepped back, looking at Ripley as if she was one of those things.

Hoop went to shout at her again. But she was already turning back to the clear curtain, shouldering it aside and facing the terrors within. The fires. The bursting eggs. And those things that remained, waking, rising, coming to kill her.

She stood before them, and the thing that drove her fury wasn’t the memory of dead friends, but the unreal vision of her tortured daughter. She could do nothing about Dallas and the others on the Nostromo, and she was beginning to fear that she and the Marion’s survivors would never survive.

But she could protect the daughter she had not seen for more than thirty-seven years. She could make sure these things were wiped out, and that if and when more people came here, there was no risk that they would ever be found.

Two queen eggs burst apart beneath the flames, and Ripley held her breath and fired a spray of acid across their remains. Just to make sure.

A large creature staggered at her, elements of the dog-aliens even more apparent now that it was up and moving. She hosed it down, sweeping the spray gun left and right and slicing gushing wounds in the thing’s carapace. It stumbled and fell, its tail whipping through the air and catching her across the stomach. She just staggered for a moment.

Fires danced, shadows wept, and nothing else moved in that strange, ancient laboratory. Why the dog-aliens had kept and nurtured the queen eggs, what they hoped to gain, if they had even known the terrible dangers they toyed with, she would never know. But she didn’t care. Knowing would change nothing.

They all had to die.

Three eggs remained, awake and ready, pulsing as the flaps slowly drew back to disgorge their charges. She fired an acid blast at each one, ensuring that their insides were destroyed. Something squealed as it died, and she hoped it hurt. However old the eggs and their contents might be, they were always ready to invade another host, and plant their dreadful larvae.

“Not anymore!” Ripley shouted. “Fuck you, Ash!” Maybe he was a good target for her ire, maybe not. But having someone to curse other than these beasts felt good.

Then they were done. Dead and gone. The queen eggs—so much potential, so much promise of pain and heartbreak—were cooking, melting, bubbling messes on the floor. She lowered the spray gun and blinked the fumes away, and flames flickering through tears made the scene look almost beautiful.

Something grabbed her and she turned, seeing Hoop standing behind her and realizing only then how much pain she was in.

“Ripley, we have to…” he said, eyes going wide at something he’d seen.

“What?”

“We need to patch you up.”

“I’m fine,” Ripley said, not feeling fine but finding the strength to move. “There’s Sneddon and Baxter… you can’t carry me as well. I’ll walk ’til I drop.”

And she did. Five paces out through the curtained opening, a few more across the open space beyond, and then her whole world started to spin. She was bleeding, burning, maybe even dying. And though she held on as hard as she could, Ripley couldn’t fight back the darkness descending all around her.

Faces watched her fall. She only hoped she would see them all again.

“They’ll be coming,” Hoop said.

“She’s bleeding badly,” Kasyanov said. “Her shoulder and neck, her stomach, they’re slashed up pretty good.”

“Will she bleed to death?” Hoop asked.

Kasyanov waited for only a moment. “Not in the short term.”

“Then she can bleed while we run. Come on. We’re almost out.” He grasped Ripley and tugged her to her feet. She tried to help, but barely had any strength. Blood shimmered on the front of her suit, flowing across her boots and speckling the floor. They’ll pick up the scent and follow us, he thought. But he didn’t even know if the aliens could smell, and his priority now was to move as far away from here, as fast as they could.

Back up into the mine, to the second elevator, and out of this hellhole.

Baxter started hauling himself up the shorter staircase toward the outside, wounded ankle dragging behind him. It looked less painful, though, since he’d had the injection. Lachance and Kasyanov lifted Sneddon and pushed her up, step by step. As Hoop pulled Ripley up onto the first step, her feet kicking feebly, she started talking.

“…take her…” Ripley muttered.

“Huh? We are. We’re all getting out.”

“No… don’t take…”

She fell silent and he thought perhaps she was dreaming. Her eyes rolled, blood flowed. She looked a mess. But her strength was humbling, and on the next step she opened her eyes again, looking around until they focussed on those ahead and above them. “Sneddon,” she said, quietly so only Hoop could hear. “We can’t take her.”

He didn’t even reply. Ripley groaned and seemed to pass out again, and when he dragged her up to the next step the trail of blood she left behind glimmered in the light.

But he lifted her, pulled her up. Because he wasn’t leaving anyone behind. Not after everything they’d been through. Hoop had lost so much in his life. His wife, his love, his children, left behind when he fled. Some of his hope, and much of his dignity. And at some point the time for loss would have to end. Maybe now, when he was at his lowest and everything seemed hopeless, he would start winning things back.

This is it. His friends, bleeding and in pain yet forging on as hard as they could, inspired him. And Ripley, the strange woman who had arrived in their midst, her own story tragic and filled with loss… if she could remain so strong, then so could he.

He climbed up the next step and pulled her up after him, and for some reason she felt lighter.

Outside, the others hunkered down close to where the folded access opened onto the ship’s upper surface. They kept low and quiet, as if being suddenly exposed after their nightmarish trip through the tunnels and corridors scared them even more. Hoop handed Ripley to Lachance, slipping the charge thumper from her shoulder as he did so. Even hazy and balancing on the edge of consciousness, she grabbed for the weapon. He eased her hand aside.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got it.” And she relented.

“What are you doing?” Lachance asked.

“Insurance,” Hoop said. “Giving us the best chance I can.” He held up two fingers—two minutes—then slipped back through the opening.

By his reckoning, there was one charge left in the blaster.

Now that he was facing it alone, the ship’s interior felt even stranger, more alien than ever. They had only left it moments before, but already he felt like an invader all over again. He wondered one more time just how alive that huge ship was, or had once been. But it was ancient, and whatever intelligence might once have driven it was now surely in the deepest of slumbers, if not dead.

He edged down the first high step, then the second, and then he heard something that froze him to a halt. Everything in his world came to a standstill—the past, the future, his breathing, his thoughts. His heart skipped a beat, as if hiding from that sound.

A high-pitched keening, so filled with pain and rage that it prickled his skin, the sound itself an assault. He was chilled and hot at the same time, his soul reacting in much the same way as skin when confronted by intense heat or cold. He might burn or freeze with terror, but for a moment he couldn’t tell which.

What have we done? he thought. He could smell burning flesh, though there was no similarity to any meat he knew. He could hear the roar of the flames they had left behind, consuming what was left of the aliens, the eggs. And dropping down one more step, he could see the three creatures that had come after them.

They were the same as the first ones they had encountered, back on the Marion. No dog-like features, no attributes that might have made them a queen. Warriors, perhaps. Soldier aliens. And they were whining and keening as they stood outside the burning, ruined lab, swaying from side to side, their tails waving, heads dipping to the left and then right. It was a dance of death and mourning, and for the briefest of moments Hoop felt almost sorry for them.

The one in the middle bent to the ground and seemed to take a long, deep sniff of the blood trail there. Ripley’s blood trail. Then it hissed, a purposeful sound very different from the wails of grief, and the other two creatures also bent to the trail.

Got her scent now, Hoop thought. Sorry, Ripley, but if there’s anyone we have to leave behind…

He wasn’t serious. Not for a moment. But the aliens’ reactions set his own blood chilling. They hissed again, louder than before. They crouched and spread their limbs, adopting stances that suddenly made them look even more deadly.

Hoop started climbing back up the steps. They still had their backs to him, but they only had to turn a quarter circle to see him. They would be on him in two bounds, and even if he had a chance to fire the charge-blaster, the delay on the charge meant he’d be dead before it blew.

He wished he’d brought his spray gun, too.

He made the top of the steps, braced himself, checked that the route behind him was clear. Then he paused at the fold in the wall and aimed the charge thumper up at the ceiling.

Four seconds, maybe five. Did that give him time? Would they be up the steps and through before the charge went? He didn’t think so. But he also didn’t think he had time to worry about it.

They had Ripley’s scent, and Ripley had come this way.

He pulled the trigger, and the last explosive charge thumped up into the ceiling.

From beyond, down in the ship, he heard three high-pitched shrieks, then the skittering of hard claws as the aliens came for him.

Hoop sidestepped up through the opening and onto the ship’s surface.

“Down there!” he said, shoving Ripley ahead of him, sliding down the gentle slope, and Lachance and Kasyanov pushed Sneddon the same way. They slid through the dust, and then from above and behind them came a dull, contained thud. Loud enough, though, to send echoes through the cavern.

Hoop came to a stop and looked back. Dust and smoke rose from the opening, but nothing else. No curved head, no sharp limb. Maybe, just maybe, fate had given them a break.

The blast was still echoing around the cave as they started across the ship’s surface toward the openings they could see in the vast wall. They negotiated their way over piles of tumbled rocks. Ripley found her feet, although she still clasped onto Hoop’s arm. Their combined lights offered just enough illumination to outline shadows and trip hazards, and the closer they came to the nearest opening, the more convinced Hoop became that the ship continued beyond the barrier. It was almost as if the vessel had struck the wall, and penetrated it upon landing.

Or crashing. They’d entered through a damaged portion of the ship’s hull, after all, where blast damage was still obvious after so long.

More rocks, and Hoop noticed for the first time that some of them seemed more regular than he’d realized. Square-edged, smooth. One of them displayed what might have been markings of some sort.

But there was no time to pause and wonder. No time to consider what the markings and the tumbled, regular blocks might mean. A wall? A building? It didn’t matter. A way out mattered, and from what Hoop could see, their best bet was through the nearest crack.

The mine wasn’t far above the cavern’s ceiling. He was sure of it. They were almost there.

“No sign of anything following us,” Lachance said.

“That’s what worries me,” Hoop said. “I think I’d rather see them than wonder where the fuck they are.”

“Yeah. Right.” Then Lachance nodded ahead. “What do you think?”

“I think we’ve got no choice.” They moved across the rubble field toward the opening in the cavern’s looming wall.

17 ANCIENTS

When he was a kid, Hoop’s parents took him to see the Incan ruins in Ecuador. He’d seen footage about them on the NetScreen, and read about them in the old books his parents insisted on keeping. But nothing had prepared him for the emotions and revelations he felt walking among those ancient buildings.

The sense of time, and timelessness, was staggering. He walked where other people had walked a thousand years before, and later he thought back to that moment as the first time mortality truly came knocking. It hadn’t troubled him unduly. But he’d realized that his visit to those ruins was as fleeting as an errant breeze, and would have as much effect as a leaf drifting in from the jungles and then vanishing again. The memory of his being there would float to the floor and rot away with that leaf, and fascinated visitors even a hundred years hence would have never heard of him.

It was humbling, but it was also strangely uplifting. We all have the same, he’d once heard someone say, one life. Even as a teenager more concerned with girls and football, that had struck him as deep and thoughtful. One life… it was up to him how well he lived it.

Looking at those Incan ruins, he’d vowed to live it well.

Staring at what was left of this strange, ancient place, he wondered what had gone wrong.

There was some property to the stone all around them that gave it a subdued glow. It was light borrowed from the flashlights, he was sure, subsumed and then given back as a surprisingly sharp luminosity. He’d shine his flashlight at one spread of stone, move it aside, and the stone would glow for a long while afterward. It helped them light their way. It helped them see where they were going.

This wasn’t part of the ship on which they had been. This was a building, a grounded structure built into the rock of the land. It was a ruin, yet one that was remarkably well preserved in places.

Fleeing though they were, Hoop couldn’t help staring around in wonder.

They’d entered through a badly damaged area, climbing over piles of rubble, some of the fragments the size of one of their boots, some five yards across. Anything could have been hiding in the shadows. From what they could see, nothing was, or if it was it remained hidden.

They soon found themselves on a curving, sloping path that led upward, and kicking aside dust and gravel Hoop could make out the fine mosaics that made up the paving. Swirls of color, unfaded by the immensity of time. Curling, sharp patterns, features he could not make out, splashed shapes that fought and rested in harmony with each other. He suspected the mosaic told a story, but it was too smothered with dust for him to make it out. And perhaps he was too short to appreciate the full tale. Those dog-aliens might have seen it better, with their longer legs, higher heads.

This was amazing. An alien civilization, an intelligence the likes of which had never yet been discovered in almost two centuries of space exploration, and many hundreds of star systems entered and charted.

“I don’t think I can process any of this,” Lachance said. “I don’t think I can think about it all, and run at the same time.”

“Then just run,” Hoop said. “You okay there?”

Lachance was still lugging Sneddon, slung across one shoulder so that he could still access his charge thumper with the other hand.

“All that time in the Marion’s gym is paying off.”

“Tell me if—”

“You’ve got enough on your mind.” And Lachance was right. Ripley still clung to Hoop’s arm, and though her eyes were open and he could see that she was taking some of this in, she was still bleeding, stumbling, fading in and out. They’d have to stop soon. Patch her up.

Baxter and Kasyanov were helping each other, arms slung over shoulders like casual lovers.

The curved path rose around a massive central column, like the largest spiral staircase ever. The huge building’s ceiling was high, damaged in places but still largely whole. Their flashlights lit some of the way ahead, and the glowing property of the stone helped level the illumination. But there were still heavy shadows in front of them, hiding around the bend, concealing whatever waited.

Hoop remained ready.

Doorways led off from the central spiral. There were intricate designs around these, beautiful sculptures showing dog-aliens in what must have been tales from their civilization’s past, real or mythical. He saw the creatures in groups and ranks, at war, bathing, creating an obscure form of art, exploring, and in some carved spreads they seemed to be interacting with other, even stranger looking creatures. There were star charts and the representations of aircraft, spacecraft, and giant floating things that might even have been living. This made him think of the buried vessel they had just left behind, and the implications…

They were staggering, yet still too dangerous to muse upon.

Concentrate, Hooper! he thought. Don’t look at the fancy decorations around the doors, think about what might come though them!

The curving, rising path ended in another vast open space. Huge columns supported a solid ceiling so high that the lights barely touched it, yet the material still became subtly luminous, retaining some of the light they aimed upward. They were creating their own starry sky, soft splashes of color and light retained and shining back down at them, if only for a time.

Around the nearest supporting column, upright objects cast long shadows.

“Is that them?” Lachance whispered. They all paused, panting from the climb up the spiraling ramp, some of them groaning softly from their wounds. Ripley was relatively alert again, right hand pressed tightly across the wound in her stomach.

“No,” she said. “Too big. Too still.”

“Statues,” Hoop said. “At least I hope so. Come on. We’ll stay near the wall, look for another way up.”

They kept close to the edge of the wide-open space. In truth the size of it scared Hoop. He’d rather move through corridors and tunnels than this inhuman cavern, where the lights couldn’t reach the other side and shadows might hide anything. But keeping close to the wall did something to hold back the agoraphobia.

As they closed on the massive column and the statues arrayed around its base, some of the detail became clearer. There were a dozen figures standing on high stone plinths. Several of them had lost limbs, one of them a head, but others remained virtually whole. They were all dog-aliens, with their stocky legs, strange torsos, bulky heads, and yet each was distinct. Some carvings wore different clothing that almost covered their bodies. Others stood on their hind legs and reached for the sky, or pointed, or held their limbs up as if gesticulating. Even their facial features were diverse. Hoop could see carved areas around the plinth’s bases, and he assumed it was their written language. Maybe these were famous persons—rulers, teachers, or explorers.

“No time,” he whispered, because he knew everyone would feel as fascinated as him. “Not now. Maybe we’ll come back. Maybe we’ll send someone back.”

“They’d just die,” Ripley said. She seemed stronger now, as if becoming used to the pain, but he could still see the dark dampness of blood across her suit, and a sheen of sweat on her forehead.

“We need to get you patched up,” Hoop said.

“No, we—”

“Now.” He refused to argue. Two minutes to bind and treat her wounds might save them half an hour if it meant she could walk under her own steam. “Guys, eyes and ears open. Ripley… strip. Kasyanov?”

Kasyanov gently laid down her plasma torch, wincing from the pain in her own terribly wounded hand, and unclipped her waist pack.

Ripley started peeling off her slashed and bloodied suit. Hoop flinched back when he saw the open wound across her neck, shoulder, and upper chest, but he didn’t look away. The edges of the wound pouted open, skin tattered, flesh and fatty layers exposed. Revealing them to the air made Ripley woozy again, and she leaned against him as the doctor set to work.

“This will hurt,” Kasyanov said. Ripley didn’t make a sound as Kasyanov sterilised the wound as best she could, washing out dark specks of dust and grit. She injected painkiller into six locations, then sprayed a local anaesthetic along the entire extent of the gaping cut.

While the anaesthetic went to work she tugged down Ripley’s suit to below her waist and examined the stomach wound. As Hoop glanced down he caught Kasyanov frowning up at him.

“Just do your best,” Ripley hissed.

Hoop hugged Ripley to him, kissed the top of her head.

“Hey,” she said. “Fast mover.”

Kasyanov treated the stomach wound, then stood again and started stapling the gash across her shoulder. The staple gun made a whispering click each time it fired. Ripley tensed but still didn’t make a sound. After fixing the wound closed, Kasyanov taped a bandage across it and sprayed it with a sterile solution.

Then she turned her attention back to the stomach wound, stapling it, as well.

“I’ll fix you up properly when we get back to the Marion,” she said.

“Yeah,” Ripley replied. “Right.”

“You’ll be able to move easier now. Nothing’s going to pop or spill out.”

“Great.”

Kasyanov taped her stomach, then stood again. She took a small syringe from her pack.

“This will keep you going. It’s not exactly… medicine. But it’ll work.”

“I’ll take anything,” Ripley said. Kasyanov pressed the needle into her arm, then stood back and zipped up her pack.

“You good?” Hoop asked.

Ripley stood on her own, tucking her arms into her suit and shrugging it on. “Yeah,” she replied. “Good.”

She wasn’t. He could see that, and hear it in her voice. She was in pain and woozy, and distracted, too. Ever since she’d wiped out those queen eggs she’d been somewhere else. But there was no time to discuss it now.

Hoop thought again about those aliens viewing their burning infant queens, sniffing Ripley’s blood, and howling.

“There,” he said, pointing along the base of the vast wall. “Openings. Whichever one leads up, we take it. Lachance, you take point. I’ve got Sneddon.” He knelt and took Sneddon’s weight onto his shoulder. As they moved out, he held back until Ripley was walking ahead of him. She moved in a very controlled way, every movement purposeful and spare.

When they reached the first of the openings, Lachance shone his light inside. Moments later he waved them on and entered, and they started up another curving ramp.

From behind, somewhere in the vast shadowy depths, something screeched.

The rough leaves tickle her stomach. They’re running across a field in France, weaving through the corn crop, arms up to push the stringy leaves aside and stop them scratching their eyes. She and Amanda are wearing their bathing costumes, and already she’s anticipating the breathtaking plunge into the lake.

Amanda is ahead, a slim and sleek teenager, darting between corn rows and barely seeming to touch the plants. Ripley isn’t so graceful, and her stomach feels as though it has been scratched to shreds by the leaves. But she won’t look down to check. She’s afraid that if she does she’ll lose track of her daughter, and something about this…

…isn’t right.

The sun shines, the corn crop rustles in a gentle breeze, there is silence but for their footfalls and Amanda’s excited giggling from up ahead. But still this is wrong. The lake awaits but they will never reach it. The sun is high, the sky clear, yet the heat hardly touches her skin. Ripley feels cold.

She wants to call, Amanda, wait! But the leaves slapping across her stomach and chest seem to have stolen her voice.

She sees something out of the corner of her eye. A shadow that does not belong in the cornfield, a shape too sharp and cruel. But when she looks it has gone.

Her daughter is further ahead now, pushing plants aside as she sprints the final hundred meters to the field’s edge and the welcoming water.

Something keeps pace with them off to the right, a dark shape streaking through the crop and smashing thick stalks into shreds. But looking directly at it means that Ripley can’t see it at all.

She’s panicking now, trying to run faster, trying to shout. Amanda has vanished ahead, leaving behind only swaying plants.

Ripley hears a high, loud screech. It’s not human.

Bursting from the crop at the edge of the field, she sees Amanda caught in a grotesque web between two tall trees, trapped there in the strange, solid material that appears to have held her there for an age. Her daughter screams again as the bloody creature bursts fully from her chest.

In her peripheral vision, Ripley sees those tall beasts moving out of the corn to pay homage to their newborn.

Amanda screams one last time—

“Ripley, fast!” Hoop shouted.

Ripley looked around, not shocked or surprised. She knew exactly where she was and why. The vision was a memory of a time that had never happened. But she still shed a tear for her cocooned, bleeding, screaming daughter. Terror mixed with anger, becoming a part of her, unwilling to let go.

“They can’t win, Hoop,” she said. “We can’t let them.”

“They won’t. Now run!”

“What are you—?”

“Run!” he shouted. He grabbed her hand and ran with her, but soon let her go again and fell back.

“Don’t be stupid!” Ripley shouted back at him.

“Argue, and we’ll all die!” Lachance called back. “Hoop knows what he’s doing.”

They climbed the ramp. It was steeper than the first, the turns tighter, and it seemed to grow narrower and steeper the higher they went. Soon there were steps built into its surface, and they had to slow down so that they didn’t trip. Lachance carried Sneddon again. Kasyanov helped, and Baxter was using his plasma torch as a crutch, lamming it down and swinging along on it with every step. She wondered what effect that would have if he had to fire it again. She wondered…

She turned and ran back down the ramp.

“Ripley!” Lachance called.

“Argue and we all die!” she said, and soon they were out of sight above her. For a while she was on her own, descending the ramp, illuminated by an already fading glow from the structure around her. Then she heard something running toward her and she crouched down close to the central spine.

Hoop appeared, lit up by her flashlight’s beam. Sweating, eyes wide, he tensed, but didn’t relax again.

“We really need to go,” he said.

“How many?”

“Too many.”

Ripley wasn’t sure she could run again. Her stomach ached, she could barely move her right arm, and she felt sick. But the booster Kasyanov had given her coursed through her veins, and every negative thought was dragged down and hidden away. There was a sensory distance around her. Though unpleasant, it was also protecting her, so she embraced it, losing track of her various agonies. She knew that they would be waiting for her on the other side.

From above, Lachance started shouting, but she couldn’t tell what he was saying.

“Oh, no,” Ripley said. Yet Hoop grinned and grabbed her hand, and before she knew it they were running up the ramp once more. She saw lights ahead of them, and the ramp ended in another wide space. This was more like a cave than a building—slopes of rocks, an uneven ceiling, walls that had only ever been touched by human tools.

At the far end, Kasyanov and Baxter held Sneddon up between them. The first thing Ripley noticed was the opening in the rock behind them.

Then Sneddon lifted her head and looked around, and Ripley saw that the face-hugger was gone.

18 ELEVATOR

When Hoop had broken away from the others, he’d seen at least ten of the aliens stalking through the massive room, searching between giant pillars, crouching by the statues and their plinths. There was enough fading light still emanating from the stonework, and as he’d watched their shadows had slowly merged into the surroundings.

He’d backed away slowly, light extinguished, and then run, finding his way by feel. Ripley’s flashlight had brought light to his world again.

Being back in the mine should have made him feel better. But Hoop knew that those things were still pursuing them, scenting blood, and that every second’s delay would bring them closer. The elevator was their salvation. Reach that, go up, and they’d be way ahead of the game. It was now a simple race. And for once, things seemed to be going well.

The thing had dropped from Sneddon’s face and died, and they’d left it back there in the tunnels. She seemed fine. Quiet, confused, a little scared, but able to walk on her own, and even keen to carry the spray gun that Lachance had been hefting for her.

With Sneddon on her feet again and Ripley patched up, it meant that they could move faster than before. Even Baxter seemed to have found his stride, using his plasma torch as a crutch. Hoop dared to hope.

If we get out of this I’m going home, he thought. The idea had stuck with him for some time, and he’d been thinking of his kids. He hadn’t seen them for seven years, didn’t know if they’d remember him, had no idea how much his ex-wife might have turned them against him. They were adults now, plenty old enough to ask why he hadn’t stayed in touch. No contact at all. Nothing on their birthdays, no messages at Christmas. How difficult would it be for him to explain, when he wasn’t even sure of the reasons himself?

But when this was over and they launched themselves back toward Earth, it would be his last time. To arrive back home would be so wonderful it was now all he could wish for.

And there was something else. Maybe he didn’t actually deserve hope, but Ripley did. She had been through far too much to just die out here.

The mine was familiar territory. The lights still worked, and as they moved through the tunnels of the lowest parts of level 9 toward the second elevator shaft, Hoop waited for their way to be blocked once again. Those things had been in here, building their strange constructions—nests, traps, homes. But maybe between here and the elevator it would be clear. Maybe fate had cut them a break.

But he knew the pursuing aliens would find their way. They had Ripley’s scent, and their blood was up, their hatred and fury, their ferocity, richer than ever before. He saw no need to tell the others, but he made sure they moved quickly, quietly. They all understood the urgency. They’d all been through too much to slow down now.

“It’s close!” Baxter said. “I recognize this place. Just around this next corner, I think.” He’d been down in the mines more than any of them, and Hoop hoped he was right. And when they turned the next corner, there it was.

The elevator shaft stood in the center of a wide-open area, ceiling propped by metal columns. It seemed whole, undamaged, untouched. The shaft was set in a heavy network of metal stanchions. The elevator car was parked on this floor, too, which meant the miners had all used the other one to flee to the surface.

“Something’s bound to be wrong with it,” Lachance said, and Hoop actually guffawed.

“Just live with the fact we’ve been given a break,” he said. “Come on. Everyone inside, quickly.”

He waited beside the elevator while Baxter checked the controls. Power was still on, and when he pressed at the buttons, the cage door slid open to reveal the elevator car. As with the one that had crashed, the walls were of mesh and struts, the floor a solid sheet. No mirrors, no music. There was no need for luxuries in a mine.

Sneddon stood close to Hoop, swaying slowly from side to side.

“You feeling okay?” he asked.

Sneddon nodded. “Thirsty,” she croaked.

“Won’t be long now.” He looked past her at Ripley. She was staring, frowning deeply. She’d placed herself at the far side of the elevator doors, and even as they started filing aboard, she kept her eyes on the science officer, and tried to steer clear of her.

“Ripley?” he asked softly. But she looked at him and shook her head. She knew as well as any of them that they had to leave this level. Anything else was of a lesser priority.

She’s carrying one of those things, Hoop thought, glancing at Sneddon again. She looked tired, but herself. He’d seen them on the viewing screen, from inside Samson, bursting from chests. He’d listened to Ripley’s story about the crew member on her ship, how he’d effected a miraculous recovery, only to be ripped apart an hour later.

Sneddon seemed fine. But she was living on borrowed time.

Maybe she knew that.

He stepped into the elevator, and instantly it felt as if they were rising. A weight fell from him. He slumped against the wall and sighed, closing his eyes, and as the doors slid closed he seemed to be waiting forever for the sound they made when they came together.

“We’re looking good,” Baxter said. “I think we might—”

The impact was massive, smashing against the doors, bowing them inward. A fresh crash came from another side, and another, and then all four sides of the enclosed elevator shaft were being assaulted from outside, aliens smashing against the mesh again and again. Metal creaked and tore, and Hoop heard the distinctive snap! as a set of teeth crunched together.

They all moved away from the walls, colliding in the center of the elevator and huddling there. Hoop trained his spray gun on the walls, the others aimed their weapons, but none of them could fire. Acid would splash and kill them all, plasma would surge across the inner surfaces. Closed away from the aliens at last, they also found themselves nalyseess.

“Press the fucking button!” Lachance screamed at Baxter.

More banging, rending metal, and the rage-filled hissing of the creatures trying their best to reach their prey.

Baxter didn’t hesitate. He lunged for the control panel and slapped his open hand on the button labeled “4”.

If he’d stepped carefully he might have been all right. If panic and fear hadn’t slammed him against the lift cage wall, perhaps he’d have been able to jump lightly back into the center. But the instant the car began to rise, an alien’s head burst through the gap between doors, bending and ripping them apart. It thrashed and twisted as it tried to force itself inside. Moments later its teeth flashed out and struck hard against Baxter’s right shoulder. They chewed so rapidly that they burrowed through his jacket, skin, flesh, and clamped tight around his scapular.

Baxter screamed, eyes wide. The alien pulled, tugging him halfway through the ragged hole it had created.

They were rising.

Hoop went to help, grabbing at the comm officer’s belt, Lachance doing the same on the other side. The alien’s clawed hand slashed in, and Hoop only just let go in time. He held Baxter’s legs instead, pulling as hard as he could, gritting his teeth, vision blurring with the effort.

The cage rattled violently.

Baxter began screaming because he knew what was to come. He was stuck fast halfway through the opening, and they pulled one way while the alien tugged the other, rising and dangling from the suffering man as the lift took its prey out of reach.

Whether or not the alien let go, Hoop did not know. But he closed his eyes as Baxter struck the first of the crossbeams forming the shaft’s superstructure. The man’s cry instantly cut off and was replaced with the most dreadful sound of ripping, tearing, crushing.

He suddenly became very light. Hoop turned around and let go as something splashed down onto the elevator’s floor.

“Oh, God!” someone said.

They continued rising. Below them the cacophony persisted as aliens smashed against the walls. But the elevator accelerated, rapidly passing level 8 and speeding up even more. Hoop’s stomach dropped. And when he turned around and looked at what was left of Baxter, he wasn’t the only one to fall to his knees and puke.

Ripley covered him up. He’d been torn in half just below his ribcage, and his legs and lower body had dropped to the elevator floor. She couldn’t keep her eyes off the broken ankle. Baxter’s foot lay at an odd angle, and the heavy padding they’d used to try and splint the break had come unraveled. He’d struggled so long on that, and for so far, because he wanted to survive.

Of course he did.

They all wanted to survive, and they’d do anything to do so. Baxter had run and walked on a broken ankle, going through untold pain. And now…

She only looked briefly before dropping her suit jacket across the ruined, open part of him. Things that should never be outside a body were splashed across the elevator floor, and her jacket covered most of them.

She was cold, her tattered thermal vest doing little to hold in her body heat. But she’d rather be cold than stare at what was left of that poor man. Her stomach rolled a little, more at the stench of vomit than what she had seen.

Am I just stronger? she thought. Have I just seen too much? Is it that I expect the worst, so it doesn’t worry me? She wasn’t sure.

Maybe it was because she had something more on her mind.

She turned her back on Baxter, picked up his dropped plasma torch, and checked out Sneddon. The science officer seemed to be in reasonable shape, and there was even color in her cheeks again. She was quiet, leaning against the elevator wall and staring into some distance only she could see.

“How do you feel?” Ripley asked.

“Yeah,” Sneddon said. “Yeah, good. Weird dreams. But I’m okay.”

“You know what happened to you.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Yes, I know.”

Ripley nodded, looked around. The others were staring at her. I’m the stranger here, she thought. Her gaze rested on Hoop, and she couldn’t quite read him. They were all tired, shocked from Baxter’s gruesome demise. She couldn’t say anything yet. She just couldn’t.

“She’ll be fine,” Hoop said. “We have a med-pod on the Marion that can—”

“It’s okay,” Ripley said, turning away. She breathed hard. The sensation of movement from the elevator had been startling—still was—probably made worse by the walls distorted by the alien attack. She felt suddenly sick. But she swallowed, bit her lip, and willed it back down.

Sneddon couldn’t reach the Marion alive. Ripley knew that, yet she was uncertain how far she would go to prevent it. Ash was up there, ready and waiting to receive the science officer into his control. It didn’t matter that she was a human being. She was impregnated now, and she carried what Ash had been seeking for thirty-seven years.

Does he already know? She had to assume that was a yes.

Would he go to any lengths to protect and preserve Sneddon, and what she carried? Again, yes. She knew that, had witnessed Ash’s determination before.

Sneddon couldn’t be taken to the Marion. And Ripley could not kill another person. The problem circled, deep and heavy, and she closed her eyes, hoping that a solution would come.

Each level they passed was marked by a soft chime from the elevator’s control panel, and the voice of someone from far away and long ago reciting, “Seven… Six… Five.” The cage decelerated then, and Ripley experienced the strange sensation of being stretched, head and shoulders growing suddenly light. It made it easier to breathe, but did nothing to level her queasiness.

She did her best not to puke. Her stomach wound throbbed deep and cold, and she thought if she heaved the act might pop the staples holding her together. Her shoulder and arm were stiff, and she was sure she could feel the penetrating metal of the clasps there every time she moved. She thought of asking Kasyanov for another shot of anaesthetic or painkiller. But she was already woozy enough. If a flash of pain now and then was what she had to endure to stay awake, so be it. She needed all her wits about her. They all did.

The elevator slowed to a halt, and a different chime sounded from the control panel. Outside of the cage, all was blackness.

“Level 4,” Lachance said. “Lingerie, footwear, monsters, and beasties.”

“This level was mined out two years ago,” Hoop said. “Lots of deep tunnels, a complex network. One of the longest in the mine snakes away from here for over three miles.”

“Sounds lovely,” Ripley said. “So the fuel cells are here?”

“Yeah, we use this level for storage now. Lachance?”

“Spare fuel cells shouldn’t be that far away. We’ll need to find a powered trolley to carry one.”

“You okay?” Kasyanov asked, and it took Ripley a few seconds to realize the doctor was talking to her.

She nodded. Realized they were all looking at her.

“You were… mumbling to yourself,” Hoop said.

“I’m good,” Ripley insisted, smiling. But she hadn’t realized she was saying a word.

Waiting for Hoop to throw the doors open, she tried to analyze her wounds again, assess just how badly hurt she was. But the shots Kasyanov had given her made that quite hard to do. She was slightly removed from herself, a distance that made the pain bearable but which also furred the edges of her perception.

She’d have time for reality later.

I’m awake. I’m me. Stay sharp, Ripley!

Damaged as they were, Hoop had to force the cage doors open manually, and they shone their lights outside. They all waited in silence, playing the lights around the open area they revealed. Hoop edged forward and stepped outside, crouching low, turning his flashlight and spray gun left and right.

“Looks clear,” he whispered. “Wait here.” He crossed to a mess of dials and controls fixed onto a wall, flicked some switches, and with a buzz and a click the lights came on. As elsewhere in the mine, there were strings of bare lights slung tight to the ceiling, and more hung from hooks sunk into the walls. But basic though they were, everyone welcomed the illumination.

“Flashlights off,” Hoop said. “Conserve whatever charge you have left. We might need them again.”

Ripley and the other three survivors left the elevator and fanned out. The area was similar to that on Level 9, a wide space with metal props at regular intervals. There was more mining equipment discarded all around— tools, clothing, some water canisters, and several wheeled trolleys. Lachance checked out the trolleys and found one whose power pack was still half-charged. He stood on the small control deck, accessed the control panel, and rolled forward a few steps.

“How far in are the stores?” Ripley asked.

“Not far,” Hoop said, pointing at one of the tunnels leading off. “Just through there, hundred yards or so. Why?”

“And how many fuel cells are stored down here?”

“Three,” Lachance said. “Two spares for the Marion, and one for the mine’s power plant on the surface. The plant is designed so it runs off ship-grade power cells. We store them all down here, so we don’t lose the ship if they… malfunction.”

“Okay,” Ripley said. She looked around at them all, bloodied and desperate, holding their mining tools that had been turned into weapons. They weren’t soldiers. They weren’t even miners. But they’d survived so far, and if and when they got home, they would have a hell of a story to tell.

“We’ve got to bury the mine,” she said.

“What?” Lachance asked. “Why? We discovered something amazing down there! That ship was incredible enough, but those buildings we found… it can’t have been just one. It was the start of a city, Ripley. Maybe a thousand, even ten thousand years old. It’s…” He shrugged, at a loss for words.

“The most amazing discovery since humankind first came into space,” Ripley said.

“Yes,” he agreed. “That. Precisely.”

“But it’s contaminated,” she said. “Corrupted. Tainted by those things. Whatever deep history we witnessed down there was dictated by them, not by those dog-things who built the ship and the city. They might have been the amazing ones. That ship was remarkable, I can’t deny that. And we saw that they had wonderful architecture, and art, and knowledge and imagination that might put ours to shame. But am I the only one who thinks that ship might have been shot down? Maybe even by their own people?”

The others were watching her, listening silently.

“Everything went wrong. A disease came and destroyed all that they were, and we can’t let that disease escape.” She looked pointedly at Sneddon, who was staring down at her feet. “We can’t.”

“She’s right,” Sneddon said without looking up. “Yeah. She’s right.”

“I can set one of the fuel cells to overheat,” Hoop said.

“And blow us all to hell,” Lachance said. “No thanks, already been there, and now I’m keen to leave. One of those cells goes, it’ll be like setting a nuke off in here.”

“That’s exactly what it’ll be,” Hoop said. “And Ripley’s right. We can’t just escape from here and go on our way. We have to make sure no one else finds this place.”

“And they will!” Ripley said. “Have no doubt of that. Hoop?”

“Ash,” Hoop said.

“Your mad android?” Lachance asked.

“He’ll do his best to complete—”

“Thanks for bringing an insane AI to our ship, by the way,” Lachance said.

“Ash docked the ship!” Ripley said. “I was still in hypersleep. I’ve been used in this more than all of you together. But he’ll be logging whatever he can of this, recording details, constructing a full report for Weyland-Yutani. And damaged though your antenna array may be, he’ll find a way to send it, or take it back to the Company.”

“Unless I wipe him from the systems,” Hoop said. “I already told you I can do that.”

“And I firmly believe that you’ll try,” Ripley said. “But there was something different about Ash. Weyland-Yutani made him… devious. Capable of lying, of harming humans, of trying to kill me. So we can’t take any chances at all.” She held up her hands. “We blow the mine.”

“It’s simple enough,” Hoop said. “Start the fuel cell, initiate charging, disconnect damping and coolant systems. It can be done.”

“But there’s no accurate way to judge how long it will take to blow,” Lachance said.

“It doesn’t have to be accurate,” Ripley said. “As long as it gives us time to take off.”

Hoop and Lachance looked at each other, and in their silence Ripley heard their agreement. They saw why it needed to be done, and they could do it.

“Suits me,” Kasyanov said. “Quite happy to burn those fuckers, or bury them for all eternity.”

“Don’t forget there’s still that one on the Marion,” Sneddon said. She was still looking at her feet, and Ripley saw something in her that she’d never noticed before. A strange kind of calmness.

“We’ll tackle that when the time comes,” Hoop said.

“And only if we have to,” Lachance said. “With luck, it’ll just burn with the ship.”

“Right,” Hoop said.

They all stood in silence for a few moments. Then Hoop clapped his hands together, causing them all to jump.

“Let’s get to it, then!”

“Thank you,” Ripley muttered, so quietly that he probably didn’t hear. But he smiled nonetheless.

You’re all going to die, she thought, a silent message to those things raving down below. Maybe they were finding their way up through Level 7 now, coming for the people who had killed their queen, and all of their future queens, as well. But she was starting to feel better. Starting to feel good.

She hoped it wasn’t the drugs.

19 CELLS

Hoop was unsettled.

Their course of action was now clear—lift a spare fuel cell onto the trolley, set another one to fire up and overheat, get the hell back to the surface, the Samson, the Marion, then into Ripley’s shuttle before the ship hit the atmosphere and came apart, all while watching out for the alien that had escaped into the interior of the Marion.

Simple.

But one thing troubled him, and it was close at hand.

Sneddon. She looked and acted fine, though there was something… quieter about her now, something calm. Unnaturally so. She had one of their infants in her chest. Ever since that face-hugger had fallen from her and died, Hoop had been thinking, It’s okay, it’s fine, we’ll get her to the Marion and into the med-pod, get that thing taken out of her, lock it up somewhere and leave it to burn up with the ship.

But it couldn’t be that easy, and Ripley’s comments were starting to hit home. She was injured, and the shots Kasyanov had given her might have gone to her head, just a little. The muttering, the swaying. But she knew exactly what she was talking about.

She always had.

If they took Sneddon back to the Marion with them, what would happen? What if Ash had somehow infiltrated the ship’s systems? Hoop didn’t think it likely—the Marion was a comparatively new ship, and its computing systems were a hundred times more complex than they’d been when Ripley had gone to sleep. But the chance was always there, and if Ash somehow found out about what Sneddon was carrying…

That was just what the AI wanted. He’d been searching for thirty-seven years, and there was no end to what he might do to protect the object of his quest.

Yet Hoop had no answers. He couldn’t bring himself to leave Sneddon behind, however terrible the risk. And as they commenced working on the spare fuel cells, he watched Ripley, fearing what she had planned for the science officer.

She’d picked up Baxter’s plasma torch, apparently not even noticing the splash of his blood across its power housing.

“Ripley!” he said. She looked up. “Bring me that tool pouch, will you?” She came across to him, carrying a tool kit that had been hanging from a hook on the wall.

I’ll just work, he thought. Face those problems when the time comes. For now… just concentrate.

The spare cells hadn’t been stored in the best of conditions. There were three, each of them the size of a small adult. One wasn’t even propped up off the floor, and a quick inspection revealed signs of decay to some of its metal framework and mountings. One of the other two was being loaded onto the trolley by Lachance and Kasyanov, and Hoop set to work on the last cell.

Sneddon stood off to one side, watching, ostensibly listening for any of those things that might be approaching. Hoop was pretty confident they had some time before the beasts could make their way up through the mine. Both staircases had blast doors at every level that were kept permanently shut, and they wouldn’t know how to use the code keys on the control panels. But it gave Sneddon something to do.

He watched her. They all did, and she knew it. Yet she offered them back a gentle smile, as if she knew something they did not.

Hoop opened the cell’s metallic shell and placed the cover to one side. He set to work disconnecting three cooling loops, then removed the coolant supplies altogether, for good measure. He delved deeper, past wires and conductors to the governing capacitors. These were adjustable, and he turned them all up to full.

A soft hum rose from the core. Barely the size of his fist, still its potential was staggering.

“We’re almost good to go,” he said after a while. More adjustments, several wires snipped, and then he disconnected and rerouted the last safety failsafe, meaning he could initiate the cell without having to input its own unique code.

“How long do you think it will give us?” Ripley asked.

“I’m thinking nine hours until it goes critical,” he replied. “Plenty of time to get off this rock.”

“If those things haven’t made it out to the Samson and trashed it. Or if they’re not just sitting inside, waiting for us to board. Or—”

“Fuck it,” he said, cutting her off. “If they’ve done that, I’ll come and sit beside this thing and wait for it to blow, rather than die of exposure or starvation.”

“Let’s hope then, eh?” Ripley asked.

“Let’s hope. Hey, you okay?”

“Yeah. Flying high from the shots Kasyanov gave me, that’s all.”

Hoop nodded, then called over to where Lachance was fussing over the cell on the trolley.

“We good?” he said.

“Ready,” the pilot replied. He looked down at the cell that lay next to Hoop, its cover removed and half of its mechanical guts hanging out. “You’ve done a real butcher’s job on that.”

“I’m an artist,” Hoop said. “Everyone else good? Sneddon?”

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said.

“Right.” Hoop breathed deeply and held two bare wires, ready to touch them together.

What if I’m wrong? What if the overload happens in minutes, not hours? What if…? But they had come too far, survived too much, to pay any more attention to what-ifs.

“Here goes nothing,” he muttered, touching the two wires together.

A spark, a clunk, the sound of something whirring noisily inside the cell. Then a slew of lights flickered into life across its dismantled maintenance panel, some dying out, others remaining lit.

A red warning light began to pulse.

“Okay, it’s working,” he said. “In about nine hours, everything inside of a mile of here will become a cloud of radioactive dust.”

“Then let’s not hang around,” Ripley said.

The elevator still worked. Kasyanov had removed the remains of Baxter’s body. Even so, with the introduction of the fuel cell, things were cramped. They rose quickly to ground level and exited into the vestibule area, Lachance steering the trolley carrying the replacement fuel cell. They watched for movement, listened for the sound of running things.

Everything was suddenly going too smoothly, but Ripley tried not to question it.

Close to the tunnel entrance at the edge of the dome, they opened the metal storage container and donned their suits once more. They gauged oxygen supplies, then checked each other’s fittings and connections. Ripley felt constrained having to wear the suit again.

The lights were still on in the tunnel that stretched between dome and landing pad. They moved quickly, passing the place where the floor was bubbled from an acid spill, and when they were close to the external pad Hoop called a halt.

“Nearly there,” he said. “Let’s not get hasty. We’ve got plenty of time, it’s been less than an hour since I fired up the cell. Slow and careful from here.”

Ripley knew he was right. The aliens had chased miners this far and further, so they certainly couldn’t lower their guard just yet. But there was a small part of her, filled with dread, that whispered that they should never leave.

She ignored it.

She had to, because Amanda was still in her dreams, and haunting those occasional, shocking waking visions that seemed so real.

Her stomach hurt more and more, but she didn’t want another shot of painkiller. Once they were on board the Samson, launched, flying safely up toward the Marion in low orbit, perhaps then. But for these last moments on this wretched planet’s surface, she wanted all her wits about her.

Sneddon walked with them, carrying something that might kill them all. Didn’t they realize that? Didn’t they see what was happening here? Hoop had described to her the fate of their shuttle Delilah, and they knew it had been the hatching monsters that did that.

What if Sneddon’s beast hatched on their way up?

Ripley’s finger stroked the torch’s trigger. One slight squeeze and Sneddon would be gone. A moment of shock, another instant of awful pain as the burning plasma melted through her flesh and bone and turned her heart and lungs to cinder…

“Wait,” Ripley said. The word had a weight of finality to it, and when Hoop sighed and turned to look at her, she thought he knew.

Sneddon did not even turn around. She looked down at her feet, shoulders dropping.

“We can’t…” Ripley said. She was crying now, finally unable to hold back the tears that fell for everyone—her old, dead crew; the survivors with her now; Amanda. Most of all, for Sneddon.

“What, Ripley?” Lachance asked. He sounded tired.

Ripley lifted the plasma torch and aimed it at Sneddon’s back.

“We can’t take her,” she breathed.

No one moved. None of them stepped back, away from the area where the flames would spout. But none of them went to help, either. Maybe shock froze them all.

“You know what happened before,” Ripley said. “Same thing might happen to the Samson, when we’re partway there. If she hatches… if the thing bursts from her chest… how do we kill it on the shuttle? Can’t use this.” She lifted the plasma torch slightly, nozzle now aimed at the back of Sneddon’s head. “Can’t use the acid gun Hoop’s carrying, either. We’d fry everyone, burn a hole in the dropship. We’d be an easy target for it. So…” She sniffed hard, blinking to clear her vision.

“So?” Hoop asked.

Ripley didn’t answer. Sneddon still hadn’t turned around.

“Move, say something, damn it!” Ripley shouted. “Fall down! Start to shake, to scream, try to stop me—give me a reason!”

“I feel fine,” Sneddon said. “But Ripley… I know I’m going to die. I’ve known that since I woke, knowing what had happened to me. I’m a science officer, remember.” She turned around. “I know I’m going to die. But not down here. Not like this.”

Ripley’s finger tightened on the trigger. Hoop only watched, his face seemingly impassive. She wished he’d give her some sort of signal—a nod, a shake of the head.

Help me, Hoop!

“I’ll stay in the airlock,” Sneddon said. “The moment I feel something happening, I’ll blast myself out. But please, take me, and I’ll do anything I can to help. There’s still an alien on the Marion, remember? Maybe I can tackle it. Maybe it won’t do anything to me if it knows what’s inside me.”

Ripley blinked and saw Amanda, arms wide, face distorted with agony as a monster burrowed out from her chest.

“Oh, no,” she gasped. She lowered the plasma torch and went to her knees. Hoop came but she waved him away, punching out at his stomach. He hadn’t helped her before, she didn’t want him now. They watched her, and then they turned away when she stood again, wiping at her eyes.

“Okay. Come on,” Hoop said. “Let’s see if the storm’s still blowing.”

Ripley was last to leave the tunnel. And she was angry at herself. She hadn’t held off from firing because of anything Sneddon had said about traveling in the airlock, or helping them on the Marion. She had relented simply because she couldn’t kill another human being.

Maybe that made her good. But it also made her weak.

Outside, the storm had dissipated to a gentle breeze. Wafts of sand still drifted across the landscape, and there were small mounds piled against the Samson’s landing feet. In the distance, electrical storms played jagged across the horizon, so far away that the thunder never reached them. The system’s star was a vague smudge against the dusty atmosphere in the west, bleeding oranges and yellows in a permanently spectacular sunset.

The Samson remained untouched on the landing pad. Hoop climbed up the superstructure, brushed dust from the windows and checked inside. He couldn’t see anything amiss.

There was a moment of tension as they opened the external door and Hoop entered. Then he opened up the internal door and they boarded safely, taking great care when lifting the replacement fuel cell and securing it to the cabin rack. They relied on it completely, and any damage would doom them all.

Once they were all inside, Sneddon settled inside the small airlock, just as she’d promised. There was a window into that space, but no one looked. Not even Ripley. She closed her eyes as Lachance went through pre-flight checks, and didn’t open them again when they took off.

But she did not sleep. She thought perhaps she might never sleep again.

This is a real memory, Ripley thinks, but the division between real and imaginary is becoming more and more indistinct. If this is real, then why am I in pain? Why does she hurt from where an alien’s tail slashed across her stomach, a claw opened her shoulder to the bone? If this is real, then everything will be all right.

She is on a roller coaster with Amanda. Her daughter is nine years old and utterly fearless, and as she whoops and laughs, Ripley holds onto the bar across their stomachs so hard that her fingers cramp into claws.

I love it, Mommy! Amanda shouts, her words whipped away by the wind.

Ripley closes her eyes but it changes little. She can still feel the vicious whipping of gravity grasping at her, tugging her this way and that as the car slips down a steep descent, around a tight corner, twisting and ripping back toward a cruel summit. With every twist and turn, the pain shoots through her.

Mommy, look!

There’s an urgency to Amanda’s voice that makes Ripley look. There’s something wrong with their surroundings. Something so wrong, yet the roller coaster is traveling so fast now that she cannot seem to focus on anything outside the car.

People seem to be running across the park around them.

Screaming, dashing, falling…

Dark shapes chasing them, much faster than the people, like animals hunting prey…

Muh—Mommy? Amanda says, and because she sits beside her in the moving car, Ripley can focus on her.

She wishes she could not.

A bloom of blood erupts from her torn chest, a terrible inevitability. Amanda is crying, not screeching in pain but shedding tears of such wretchedness that Ripley starts crying as well.

I’m sorry, Amanda, she says. I should have been home to protect you. She’s hoping that her daughter will say that she understands, and that everything is all right. But she says nothing of the sort.

Yes, you should have, Mommy.

The infant alien bursts outward in a shower of blood that is ripped away by the wind.

As they reach the roller coaster’s summit the car slows to a crawl, and Ripley can see what has happened to the world.

“You’re crying,” Hoop said. He was squeezing her hand, shaking it until she opened her eyes.

Ripley tried to blink the tears away. This had been the worst episode yet. And with increasing dread, she knew it wouldn’t be the last.

“You in pain? Want another shot?”

Ripley looked across at where Kasyanov watched her expectantly. The doctor had bound her own hand and placed it in a sling. “No,” she says. “No, I just want to stay awake.”

“Your call.”

“How long ’til we get to the Marion?”

“Lachance?” Hoop called. The ship was shaking, buffeted from all sides as it powered up through the unforgiving atmosphere.

“Two, maybe three hours,” the pilot said. “Once we’re in orbit we’ve got to travel a thousand miles to the Marion.”

“Everything good?” Ripley looked at the fuel cell on the rack in front of them, shaking as the Samson vibrated.

“Yeah, everything’s good.”

“Sneddon?”

Hoop nodded. “Everything’s good.”

“For now,” Ripley said. “Only for now. Nothing stays good for long. Not ever.”

Hoop didn’t reply to that, and across the cabin Kasyanov averted her eyes.

“I’ve got to go help Lachance,” Hoop said. “You be okay?”

Ripley nodded. But they all knew that she was lying, and that she would not be okay.

Nothing stays good for long.