Her finger contracting spasmodically on the rifle’s trigger, she fired without thinking. The single shot went right into the Alien’s skull. Letting out a screech, it drew back, seriously injured.
Pursuing without hesitation, she leaned out over the edge of the platform. Ignoring the ground that was receding beneath her, she hung there propped at a sharp angle as she continued to fire. The series of shots drove the creature back, away from her. If she could keep it up, she told herself, if she could just continue to drive it back, it would run out of room in which to retreat—or stumble into the incinerating flare from one of the engines.
* * *
Still battling to control the angle of ascent, Tennessee saw that he wasn’t going to clear one of the towering, brooding Engineer statues. All he could do was fight the controls and shout a warning.
“Hold on!”
He tried to will the lumbering lift to port, but neither his curses nor his limited manual control succeeded in quite pulling it onto the course he desired. The vehicle was offline by only a little, but that served as small satisfaction when it clipped the monolith. The impact knocked him sideways in his seat. Behind him, Walter steadied himself with one hand, while stabilizing the prone Lopé with the other.
* * *
Outside, having neither bulkhead nor chair against which to brace herself, Daniels was thrown to the smooth surface of the platform.
As Tennessee compensated, the tethering cable jerked her sideways, knocking the breath out of her. Scrabbling for a grip, she found none on the flat deck. To her horror, she found herself sliding, sliding—until she sailed right off the edge of the platform.
Even as the lift continued its slow ascent, the cable held. Dangling upside down in her harness, she screamed as the Alien came toward her. Somehow, maybe because she was transfixed with fear, she had managed to hold onto the rifle. She used it.
Struck yet again by at least a couple of shots, the creature recoiled, retreating from her across the underside of the lift. Awkward though it was, the craft had been thoroughly juiced by Ricks prior to departure. That extra power now asserted itself as Tennessee accelerated.
The world tilted crazily beneath Daniels as she hit the auto-retract on the tether. It winched her rapidly upwards until she found herself pulled back over the edge of the platform. Her relief was short-lived as she glanced at her weapon.
“I’m out of ammo!” she announced.
A tower loomed directly ahead, and Tennessee almost slammed into it. The engines roared as he struggled to alter course and get around it or over it.
The sharp shift of trajectory caused Daniels to fall again. This time she lost her grip on the rifle. Landing on the deck it slid away from her, spinning and tumbling until finally it disappeared over the side. She viewed its disappearance with more resignation than dismay. Out of shells, it wasn’t going to do her any good anyway.
But she needed—something. Retreating into the cab wasn’t an option. Not as long as the creature might still be clinging to the lift.
She used the tether to pull herself back toward the cab as the vehicle narrowly cleared the tower ahead of it, smashing away some of the roof in the process. Built tough, the lift held together and stayed aloft as Tennessee continued to wrestle with the balky instrumentation. She yelled toward the cab.
“Throw me the ax!”
A moment later Walter unsealed the door to the cab and appeared in the portal, holding the primitive tool. Intended to help clear brush when the lift was on colony ground, it had the virtue of requiring no electronics or external power source other than human muscle.
Gripping it tightly, she rechecked the cable attached to her harness. It was still secure. Then she moved again to the edge of the platform, leaned over, and scanned the vehicle’s underside as best she could. Previous experience had shown her that the Alien’s absence couldn’t be trusted.
“Tilt to forty-five degrees!” she shouted into the comm.
“Tilting to forty-five!”
Daniels tightened her grip on the ax as she walked slowly toward another edge of the platform.
“Danny!” Tennessee shouted. “Forward port thruster!”
“I see it!”
The Alien was scrambling away from her, toward the front of the wildly bobbing craft. As she turned and hurried across the platform in its direction, she drew some small satisfaction from the knowledge that, if nothing else, it considered her a sufficiently dangerous opponent to want to avoid her. She wasn’t about to let that happen.
Not now and not here.
* * *
The horror that suddenly appeared outside the cab in front of Tennessee’s startled face was one that he hadn’t yet seen close up. Moving with incredible speed, the creature had scrambled around underneath the platform and come up directly ahead.
It began digging at the tough laminated window, then battering at it with its blunt, curving skull. The transparent alloy flexed under the repeated impacts, threatening to shatter at any moment.
It didn’t need to break, he knew. One crack, and the instant they left planetary atmosphere for orbital space, the internal pressure in the cab would blow the window out into the emptiness, along with everything not fastened down. Even if the cracked transparency somehow held together, air would leak out faster than the lift’s limited backup supply could replace it.
* * *
Turning to see the assault on the cab, Daniels prepared to take a run at the creature. Then she spotted another piece of equipment, mounted on the rear of the deck.
Racing across the platform to the massive loading crane, she fumbled a moment with a compartment latch until it popped open to reveal a pair of remote control units secured inside. Snatching one of the devices from its bracket, she flicked a control to make sure it was functional, then yelled into her suit pickup.
“Release the crane arm!”
Across the platform she could see the Alien clearly now. Ignoring her, it continued to hammer at the cab’s forward window. Designed to flex without breaking, the transparent material was still holding—but it was impossible to tell how much longer it would continue to do so underneath the creature’s ceaseless battering.
That wouldn’t make a difference to Walter, and she didn’t know if Tennessee had brought a helmet with him, but neither she nor Lopé had one. There was no way they could survive the short trip back to orbit.
“Tennessee—” she bellowed, “release the crane arm!”
“I can’t!” The towering, glistening nightmare in front of him continued to batter at the window, denting it, bending it, threatening to smash it inward at any moment. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. But Daniels…
“If I blow the arm it’ll unbalance us,” he said. “I’m having enough trouble sustaining a level ascent as it is!”
“Tennessee, we can’t let this thing on the ship,” she said. “We can’t go back with it aboard! Do it!”
* * *
She was right, he knew. Either they rid themselves of the monster, or they went down with it. Nothing could be allowed to imperil the colonists, fast asleep on the Covenant.
Mission first, last, and always.
How many times had he sworn to uphold that credo, never thinking he might one day have to act on it? He reached for the emergency controls. As he triggered them, he wasn’t thinking about himself, or Daniels, or Lopé, or Walter, or even the mission.
He thought about Faris.
See ya soon, darlin’.
* * *
On the far side of the platform a series of explosive bolts fired simultaneously. Several huge clamps that held the crane arm in place sprang from their positions. Quivering slightly as it was released, the powerful mechanism remained where it had been locked down.
Given the unpredictable movements of the cargo lift and Tennessee’s difficulty holding it steady, there was no telling how long the crane would remain fixed in position—or for that matter, attached to the platform its
elf.
This was a chance she had to take.
The crane’s controls were as familiar to her as those of the lift itself. She manipulated them quickly and expertly. What she was attempting to do wasn’t going to be pretty, and it wasn’t to be found in the operator’s manual.
Released from standby position, two tons of unlocked crane arm abruptly swung free and came straight toward her. Dropping to the deck, she flattened herself but did not close her eyes. Sure enough, the precise instructions she had entered into the remote proved accurate.
Shooting past over her prone form, the arm missed her by a meter or more as it extended toward the Alien that continued to pound on the window of the cab. Lying flat, she yelled frantically into her suit pickup.
“Hard tilt to port, Tennessee,” she cried. “Hard tilt to port! Now!”
“Hold on!” he shouted back at her as he obliged by jamming the necessary controls. Overriding the limited capacity of the lift’s internal automatic stabilizers, he turned the dorsal side of the ship back toward the surface below.
Caught by the surprise maneuver, the Alien lost its grasp on the smooth front of the cab and started to slide. Daniels slid as well, but instead of trying to stabilize herself she continued working the remote. In mid-thrust toward the cab, the massive grasping jaws of the crane opened wide.
At that moment the alien life-form faced two options. Get pushed off the lift, or attack the oncoming mechanism. It proved an easy choice.
Bounding away from the cab, it effortlessly made the leap into the gaping mouth of the oncoming crane. It struggled to maintain its balance as the arm began to swing around. The lift continued to tilt wildly, coming dangerously close to flipping over.
If that happened, there would be little chance of regaining control. The craft would fly, straight and true, down to a decidedly uncomfortable landing.
“Hold on! Hold on,” Tennessee shouted. “Trying to compensate!” He added a few choice words that had nothing to do with piloting or engineering. Though they were old words, they had not lost any of their usefulness.
There was nothing for Daniels to grip. As the lift continued to tilt dangerously toward a hundred eighty degrees, she slid down the deck, heading for the far edge. The portside edge. Where the Alien awaited, easily maintaining its provisional position in the open jaws of the crane.
As she sailed off the edge of the lift, her fall was arrested by the safety tether. Swinging on it like the weight on the end of a pendulum, her trajectory brought her smashing into the top of the crane arm, close to the terminus. Close to the jaws.
Effortlessly retaining its grasp on one half of the open metal maw, the Alien slithered around to face her. Gripping the indentations in the crane arm, she started to scramble clear. She had no chance of making it. She was too close to the creature.
A powerful ebony claw reached up, out, and grabbed her left foot. She could feel the strength behind it as it started to drag her back down, toward the waiting set of double jaws. She all but snarled at the creature as her thumb slid over a contact on the remote.
Too fast to avoid, the jaws of the powerful machine slammed shut, catching the Alien’s midsection. Letting out a screech unlike any that had preceded it, the creature writhed for a second in the inescapable grasp of the machine. Then the titanium alloy jaws came together and locked.
Cut in half, blood spraying from its torso, the Alien fell away in pieces, tumbling from the metal jaws that had held them. The two halves were still writhing independently of each other as they fell back toward the planet below.
Daniels cast a silent prayer in the direction of the distant, unnamed contractors who had built the lift, then she hit the control for the cable. Smooth as a spider’s silk it drew her back up and onto the platform. It was beginning to stabilize. Having finally succeeded in regaining a semblance of control, Tennessee had righted it.
Clipping the crown of one last, towering structure, he boosted them skyward, finally clear of the alien metropolis.
Daniels gathered herself before finally making her way over to the cab. Still somehow holding onto the crane remote, she used it to retract the machine’s arm and swing it back into position for travel. Since they had blown the lockdown clamps, she couldn’t properly secure the device for the climb back to the ship, but with luck it would remain in position until the lift was once again inside the Covenant’s cargo hold.
Still—something didn’t feel right.
Looking down at herself, she saw that remnant droplets of Alien blood were dissolving away a portion of her vest. Like an alien pox, the holes that had appeared in the tough fabric had eaten almost all the way through. Working fast, she slipped out of the expedition suit and stepped clear.
A sudden movement behind her made her jump—but it was only the cabin door opening. Walter stood there, smiling encouragingly and beckoning. She needed no urging. As he helped her inside and sealed the portal behind her, she collapsed in exhaustion. From the operator’s chair, a somber Tennessee glanced back at her.
“Walk in the park.”
It took a moment for his words to penetrate. Then she smiled, and began to laugh, and to cry. Holding tight to the now-silent Lopé, to keep him still as an occasional atmospheric bump jolted the craft, Walter looked on quietly.
The lift rose through the first layer of clouds, accelerating rapidly as it headed toward orbit, and to safety.
XXIV
Even though Mother was in complete charge of the ship, Tennessee still found himself unable to relax. Staring out the medbay port as the huge vessel left orbit, its star shining behind it, he found that he could not take his eyes off the shrouded planet they were finally leaving behind.
It was as though the malignancy it held might yet somehow reach out and grab them, extending massive dark tentacles to wrap tight around the ship and drag it back. Back and down into the lurid nightmare from which they were now taking flight. Try as he might to free himself of the memories of what had nearly overtaken them and the mission, he found that he could not do so.
He suspected they would never leave him.
Rosenthal down there, he ruminated silently. Cole. Ledward, Hallet, and Karine. Ankor. Captain Oram. Oram, with whom he had often argued. He regretted every one of those disagreements, now.
And Faris. His Faris.
Faris whom he had loved and courted and wed, lost to the perils of far-distant exploration. They had been warned about the risks, but no one had ever anticipated a world like the one they were now leaving behind.
A cold, dead place was the galaxy, its burning stars and swirling gas giants and occasional habitable worlds notwithstanding. No, not dead, he corrected himself. Uncaring. Ancient and indifferent, the untold billions of stars cared not one whit whether the ant-civilization called humankind survived or disappeared forever. He cursed it under his breath.
Make a wrong decision, a wrong choice, and we could be gone in an instant, he told himself. Like the Engineers who had raised a great city on the world shrinking behind the Covenant, snuffed out by an invention of their own hand.
Nothing they encountered on Origae-6, he reflected— no matter how ferocious, no matter how predatory—could intimidate them following their experience on the world they were fleeing. It would be put down in the records as a place forever to be shunned, to be quarantined, never again to feel the footprint of a human being. It occurred to him that it remained unnamed. He had one to propose.
Extinction.
Turning away from the port, he walked over to where Upworth was applying a fresh dermipatch to the face of the unconscious Lopé. Lying motionless in a medical pod, sustained by IV fluids and medications, the sergeant had been placed in an induced coma, the better to allow his wounds to heal. Quiet and rest were what he needed now, Upworth insisted. While he slept, the ship’s advanced medications would do their work. It would take a while, and some expert reconstructive surgery to put his original face back together, but she had assured him it could be don
e.
Reacting to his arrival, she looked back and up. “Fat I can put back quickly, but the cheek muscles will take longer to fix. There’s also the matter of giving the nerves time to regenerate and reconnect. Splicing neurons isn’t like tying a couple of pieces of string together.”
The pilot grunted. “If you can give him any kind of face back, I don’t think it would matter to Lopé if he spent the rest of his life with one side of it permanently numb.” He grinned. “Girls can kiss him on the other cheek.”
She returned the smile, then looked back at her patient. “It’s not just the flesh and nerves. That much just takes time. But the acid ate all the way down to the zygomatic and the maxilla. I’m feeding him some xyphosphonates that will build it back up. Using his official metrics for the sculpting. When all is said and done, no one will be able to tell the difference.”
“That’s good.” Tennessee gestured at the prone form. “Right now he looks like the Phantom of the Opera.”
She looked surprised. “Didn’t peg you for a fan of musicals, much less ancient ones.”
He frowned in puzzlement. “It was a musical?”
She eyed him cautiously, unsure if he was serious or joking. She could have countered, but like so many other things, wit had deserted her. All of them were worn out— those who had stayed on board as much as the survivors who had successfully fled the planet and its horrors.
“He’ll pull through and he’ll look pretty much like himself, but I don’t flatter myself that my work will be final. He’ll need polishing reconstructive surgery by a real doctor. We might have to revive one of the colonists.”
Tennessee shook his head. “No can do. You know that. No revivification of non-crew unless in the face of an emergency.” Again he gestured at the silent sergeant. “Lopé would be the first to deny the request, even though he’d be the one to benefit. He’ll just look a little ‘unfinished’ until we set down formally on Origae-6.”
Turning, he peered one last time at the dark world visible beyond the medbay port. “With everyone set to go back into hypersleep, it won’t matter what anyone looks like, anyway.”
Alien: Covenant - The Official Movie Novelization Page 24
