Aliens

by Alan Dean Foster

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

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

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

  Could a robot be parasitized?

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

  'Where you want this stuff?'

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

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

  Bishop waved vaguely without taking his gaze from the probe.

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

  Another wave. Spunkmeyer shrugged and turned to leave.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  'Of course it's extreme.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  'Forget it!'

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

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

  'Look, Burke.' Clearly Ripley was not pleased. 'We had an agreement. I think I've proved my case, made my point whatever you want to call it. We came here for confirmation of my story and to find out what caused the break in communications between Acheron and Earth. You got your confirmation, the Company's got its explanation, and I've got my vindication. Now it's time to get away from here.'

  'I know, I know.' He put an arm over her shoulders, carefu not to make it look as if he were being familiar, and turned her away from the others as he lowered his voice. 'But we're dealing with changing scenarios here. You have to be ready to put aside the first reaction that comes to mind, put aside your natural emotions, and know how to take advantage. We've survived here; now we've got to be ready to survive back on Earth.'

  'What are you getting at, Burke?'

  Either he didn't notice the chill in her eyes or else he chose not to react to it. 'What I'm trying to say is that this thing is major, Ripley. I mean, really major. We've never encountered anything like these creatures before, and we might never have the chance to do so again. Their strength and their resourcefulness is unbelievable. You don't just annihilate something like that, not with the kind of potential they imply You back off until you learn how to handle them, sure, but you don't just blow them away.'

  'Wanna bet?'

  'You're not thinking rationally. Now, I understand what you're going through. Don't think that I don't. But you've got to put all that aside and look at the larger picture. What's done is done. We can't help the colonists, and we can't do anything for Crowe and Apone and the others, but we can help ourselves. We can learn about these things and make use of them, turn them to our advantage, master them.'

  'You don't master something like these aliens. You get out of their way; and if the opportunity presents itself, you blow them to atoms. Don't talk to me about "surviving" back on Earth.'

  He took a deep breath. 'Come on, Ripley. These aliens are special in ways we haven't begun to understand. Uniqueness is one thing the cosmos is stingy with. They need to be studied carefully and under the right conditions, so that we can learn from them. All that went wrong here was that the colonists started studying them without the proper equipment. They didn't know what to expect. We do.'

  'Do we? Look what happened to Apone and the rest.'

  'They didn't know what they were up against, and they went in a little overconfident. They got caught in a tight spot. That's a mistake we won't make again.'

  'You can bet on that.'

  'What happened here is tragic, sure, but it won't be repeated When we come back, we'll be properly equipped. That acid can't eat through everything. We'll take a sample back somehow, have it analyzed in company labs. They'll develop a defence, a shield. And we'll figure out a way to immobilize the mature form so it can be manipulated and used. Sure, the aliens are strong, but they're not omnipotent. They're tough but they're not invulnerable. They can be killed by hand weapons as small as pulse-rifles and flamethrowers. That's one thing this expedition has proved. You proved it yourself,' he added in a tone of admiration she didn't believe for an instant.

  'I'm telling you, Ripley, this is an opportunity few people are given. We can't blow it on an emotional spur-of-the-moment decision. I didn't think you were the type to throw away the chance of a lifetime for something as abstract as a little revenge.'

  'It doesn't have anything to do with revenge,' she told him evenly. 'It has to do with survival. Ours.'

  'You're still not hearing me.' He dropped his voice to a whisper. 'See, since you're the representative of the company that discovered this species, your percentage of the eventua profits to be derived from the study and concomitant exploitation of them will naturally be some serious money. The fact that the Company once prosecuted you and then had the decision of the prosecuting board overturned doesn't enter into it. Everybody knows that you're the sole survivor of the crew that first encountered these creatures. The law requires that you receive an appropriate royalty. You're going to be richer than you dreamed possible, Ripley.'

  She stared silently at him for a long time, as though she were observing an entirely new species of alien just encountered. A particularly loathsome variety at that.

  'You son of a . . . '

  He backed off, his expression hardening. The false sense o camaraderie he'd tried to promote was sloughed off like a mask. 'I'm sorry you feel that way. Don't make me pull rank Ripley.'

  'What rank? We've been through all this before.' She nodded down the aisle. 'I believe Corporal Hicks has authority here.'

  Burke started to laugh at her. Then he saw that she was serious. 'You're kidding. What is this, a joke? Corporal Hicks? Since when was a corporal in charge of anything except his own boots?'

  'This operation is under military jurisdiction,' she reminded him quietly. 'That's the way the Sulaco's dispatch orders read Maybe you didn't bother to read them. I did. That's the way Colonial Administration worded it. You and I, Burke, we're just observers. We're just along for the ride. Apone's dead and Gorman might as well be. Hicks is next in the chain of command.' She peered past the stunned company rep. 'Right?'

  Hicks's reply was matter-of-fact. 'Looks that way.'

  Burke's careful corporate self-control was beginning to slip 'Look, this is a multimillion credit operation. He can't make that kind of decision. Corporals don't authorize nukes. He's just a grunt.' Second thoughts and a hasty glance in the soldier's direction prompted Burke to add a polite, 'No offence.'

  'None taken.' Hicks's response was cool and correct.

  He spoke to his headset pickup. 'Ferro, you been copying all of this?'

  'Standing by' came the dropship pilot's reply over their speakers.

  'Prepare for dust-off. We're gonna need an immediate evac.'

  'Figured as much from what we heard over here. Tough.'

  'You don't know the half of it.' Hicks's expression was unchanged as he regarded the tight-lipped Burke. 'You're right about one thing. You can't make a decision li
ke this on the spur of the moment.'

  Burke relaxed slightly. 'That's more like it. So what are we going to do?'

  'Think it over, like you said we should.' The corporal closed his eyes for about five seconds. 'Okay, I've thought it over What I think is that we'll take off and nuke the site from orbit It's the only way to be sure.'

  He winked. The colour drained from the Company rep's face He took an angry step in Hicks's direction before realizing that what he was thinking of doing bore no relation to reality Instead he had to settle for expressing his outrage verbally.

  'This is absurd! You seriously can't be thinking of dropping a nuclear device on the colony site.'

  'Just a little one,' Hicks assured him calmly, 'but big enough. He put his hands together, smiled and pushed them apart 'Whoosh.'

  'I'm telling you for the last time that you don't have the authority to do something like—'

  His tirade was interrupted by a loud clack: the sound of a pulse-rifle being activated. Vasquez cradled the powerful weapon beneath her right arm. It wasn't pointed in Burke's direction, but then it wasn't exactly aimed away from him either. Her expression was blank. He knew it wouldn't change if she decided to put a pulse-shell through his chest, either End of discussion. He sat down heavily in one of the empty seats that lined the wall.