The doctor swung the gun back, shoved it roughly into her cheek, making her wince. “Shut up!” he screamed. “I said shut up!”
Just then, Purvis felt a horrible tearing in the center of his chest, just below his rib cage. He looked down at his own belly. A spot of blood blossomed against his shirt, and he stared at it, uncomprehending.
Everyone else stopped, too, even Wren.
Then Purvis understood. The thing inside him. It was time for it to be born. He hadn’t been frozen in time and now it was too late. This monster was going to rip its way out of his body and kill him. And this son of a bitch Wren, this motherfucking scientist, was responsible. The Betty crew might’ve done the kidnapping, they might’ve delivered him here, but this entire project of spawning these hell creatures inside living human hosts was this man’s doing.
Purvis’s rage boiled up in him, stronger even than the Alien who was killing him. Purvis lunged upright, glaring at Wren.
Wren must’ve recognized some of what Purvis was feeling on his face, because he swung the gun away from Call, aiming it now at Purvis. Not that Purvis cared. It was just a gun. All it could do was kill him and it would be a gift if it did.
Purvis forced himself to his feet, lurching like a zombie. He staggered toward Wren, who was frozen with horror. It pleased Purvis inordinately to see that expression of terror on that smug bastard’s face. Purvis jerked forward, fighting his agony—literally, a man possessed.
Terrified, Wren fired.
The bullet hit Purvis hard in the other shoulder, knocking him back a step, but not stopping him. The creature inside him was moving so frantically now, chewing itself free so urgently, that Purvis couldn’t feel anything else, not even bullets hitting him at point-blank range. He was dimly aware of blood seeping over his belly, over his shoulders, down his back. But he was too focused to care. His entire universe had narrowed, and there was only Wren…
Wren fired again and again, hitting Purvis each time. The doctor’s grip on Call loosened, and in one quick, practiced move, she slammed an elbow into his chest, at the same time as she grabbed the pinkie of the hand holding her and wrenched it back so hard it snapped with an audible crunch.
Wren screamed and released her, and as she fell away from him, his next shot went wild, thudding into a padded chair.
Then Purvis was on him, driving a fist full into his face so hard he could feel the nose shattering beneath his knuckles. The gun went flying, and dimly, Purvis was aware of Johner diving for it to keep it out of Wren’s reach.
Purvis somehow found the power to hit that hated face again, again, again, until blood flowed freely from the nose, the mouth, the split lips, the broken teeth. Then he hit him some more.
Struggling to escape the ferocious blows, Wren fell, and flipped over onto his stomach, trying to crawl away from Purvis’s unrelenting fury. Purvis straddled his back like a demon obscene lover, and grabbed a fistful of Wren’s hair, yanking his head up.
“NO!” Wren screamed. “No! No! NO!”
Purvis used the grip on Wren’s hair to pound his face into the floor once, twice, three, four times until Wren was sobbing, moaning, helpless in his hands.
Vriess suddenly shouted, “Call! Johner! Soldier! Heads up!” and tossed the crew rifles that had been secreted beneath the command console.
Clinging to Wren’s hair, and slamming his face into the flooring, Purvis felt the terrible pain in his gut cresting. Burying both hands in Wren’s hair, he gripped the feebly struggling doctor’s head hard, harder than Wren had ever clutched Call.
The scream started deep in Purvis’s gut, and he wondered if it was the creature’s scream, the scream of birth, as the sound pushed its way up through his body and out of his throat. He felt the thing moving, chewing, fierce little teeth eating him from the inside out, gnawing through his organs, up through his diaphragm, his lungs, cracking his very ribs.
His chest bulged outward, the bloodstain on his chest blooming, growing, erupting in a rush of blood and bones and organs. With one massive, final effort of hatred and vengeance, Purvis yanked Wren’s head against himself, pinning it to the bloody spot on his chest. Now both of them, Purvis and Wren, were shrieking.
Wren swung his arms, trying to dislodge his captor, but Purvis was inexorable in his death throes.
Purvis felt his ribs snapping outward. He held Wren’s head tightly, knowing it was almost over. It would end here. But his way. One thing would end his way.
Purvis felt its birth. As his lungs were destroyed, he stopped screaming, but Wren’s voice was loud enough for them both. The Alien embryo burst out of him, slamming into the back of Wren’s skull.
With his last gasp of consciousness, Purvis watched something small and snakelike burst from Wren’s forehead right through his brain. The scientist’s screams scaled up and up, resounding like the combined shriek of every hibernator that had been kidnapped, every soldier who’d been captured by the Aliens. To Purvis, Wren’s screams were a sweet anthem of vengeance.
The birth of the Alien sprayed the onlookers with blood and tissue and they recoiled. The translucent creature writhed in Wren’s face, trying to free itself from the tight prison of Wren’s skull. It shrieked defiance at the armed crew. Wren’s scream was a terrible echo.
Just as everything before him went dim, Purvis watched the Betty’s crew engage their weapons. He wished he could say “thank you,” as they opened fire.
* * *
The four survivors pumped round after round into the dying men and the screeching Alien, making the bodies jerk and dance, spattering the interior of the Betty with blood, both human and Alien.
But then, finally, the silhouettes of Wren and Purvis collapsed, and the Alien chestburster had been so totally disintegrated there was nothing left of it.
Call walked over to the bodies, openly sobbing. She kicked the dead Wren out of the way savagely, wanting to shoot him a few more times, but resisting. As Johner would say, it would just be a fucking waste of ammo.
Then she knelt by Purvis, and touched his face gently. “He… he looks almost grateful…” she sniffled.
Johner’s big hand gripped her shoulder. “He was, Annalee. He knew we were trying to do him a favor. He trusted us to do it.”
She looked up into the scarred man’s face. It had grown soft just for this moment. She patted his hand and nodded.
“Come on,” Distephano said gently. “We gotta get out of here. We can ditch the bodies when we’re free of the Auriga.”
Yeah, Call thought dismally. If we can get free of the Auriga.
14
Gediman swung slowly in his webbing, back and forth, back and forth. He looked bizarre, still dripping random fluids into the grisly mire beneath him. His missing skullcap and brain made his face appear inhuman through the streaks of blood. The doctor’s eyes were open, but the only thing they might be seeing would have to be the afterlife, if there were one for bastards like him. After all, he’d already died in hell.
While the Newborn had been devouring his brain tissue like so much pudding, a small chestburster had exploded from Gediman’s rib cage—to the Newborn’s complete indifference—and skittered off into the pool of blood while Gediman thrashed and twitched in his death throes.
It was a scene Ripley knew she would never forget. Not in this incarnation, or—she fought back the urge to laugh hysterically—the next.
Ripley still crouched on the floor of the waste tank, trying to make herself small and unnoticed. She knelt there quietly, perfectly still, as still as the remaining cocooned humans who were, luckily for them, still unconscious. Ripley envied them.
She didn’t move a muscle, afraid to blink, afraid to breathe. She remained motionless, waiting for the Newborn’s attention to turn elsewhere, now that it was finished with Gediman’s corpse.
The creature looked about the tank, at the milling Aliens, at the rendered corpse of its mother, at the still swaying Gediman. And then the massive head turned slowly and grinned
hideously—at Ripley.
Slowly, the Newborn approached, spider-agile, creeping along the waste tank wall, using the resinous fibers for hand and footholds.
Ripley struggled to control her breathing, her fear. The closer the monster drew, the more clearly Ripley could see its features—which was not an advantage. The being’s face was spattered with blood and pink brain matter, some of it stuck in its massive teeth. As it breathed into Ripley’s face, the woman could clearly smell the fresh blood.
The monster was barely a handbreadth away from her face now. Ripley trembled, fighting to contain her fear, her instinctive urge to panic and bolt.
Part of her couldn’t believe it had come to this. All the struggling. All the fighting. Would she have to go through it yet again, in some other incarnation? Would the malign thug of a God who’d ruled her various lives insist she keep getting reincarnated into the same nightmare over and over? Hadn’t she earned a second chance in some other lifeform after all this?
The Newborn’s mouth opened, and it extended a long, sinuous tongue. Ripley tensed, trying not to think about having her skull ripped off, her brain consumed.
The tongue snaked out, then ever so gently touched Ripley’s face, cleaning off some resinous goo that had fallen there. The woman blinked, waiting for the inevitable. The creature licked her again, like some monstrous cat, over and over, cleaning her face, her neck, her shoulders of some of the waste and offal that had been smeared on her. Tenderly, the Newborn cleaned her. It moved slowly, careful not to pull at tender skin, or tug at strands of hair. Even its clawed, terrible hands were gentle where they touched her, as if checking for wounds, or to ensure that she was safe. The gestures were reminiscent of a faithful pet, a dog greeting its master at the end of the day, a cat begging to be petted.
And as the monster cleaned her face, and touched her body, as it denied her the death she had imagined, Ripley looked into eyes that were her shade of brown and saw something there.
That was when the telepathic connection slithered through, touching her mind, whispering to her of genetic bonds she could not deny. And then it was all right there. Her longing for the steaming warmth of the crèche, the strength and safety of her own kind. Just a moment before she had suffered the aloneness of her own individuality. But now she was given the chance, again, to join them, rejoice with them. She was in the crèche. She could reunite with the warriors, and serve as the Queen, nurturer of the Newborn. That was why she had lived.
Because this shell that was human, this Ripley, was the mother of them all. The first womb. The first warrior. And she had lived long enough to know it all, to share the glory with them. Ripley was the keystone of the hive. The nurturer of the crèche. The foundation of the Newborn.
This was the answer to the question she’d been asking. Why? This was why.
She gazed into the liquid brown eyes that could have been her own, and reached out a hand, placing it on the Newborn’s skull. Her hand slid over the long, Alien head, patting it as she once had done to Amy’s, stroking it as she once had done to Newt. This was her child, just as they were.
The Newborn uttered a soft mewling sound, and gazed at her, and Ripley felt the telepathic connection deepen, grow stronger. It was so different from the others, yet the same. But there was something more in this contact, something undeniably human. It was like being connected to a part of herself, a warped, malevolent part that was bonded to all her fierce self-preservation, all her intense determination.
The perfect organism.
Perfect for—?
And then a voice touched her from her memories, the memories the Aliens themselves had inadvertently given her. And she heard Newt’s voice, just as she’d first heard it in the incubator.
My mommy always said there were no monsters—no real ones. But there are.
Ripley shuddered, still bombarded by the intensity of the Newborn’s telepathic contact, at the terrible Alienness of the creature wanting her allegiance.
The Newborn parroted Newt’s words. I knew you would come.
To hear that loving phrase from this travesty of a living being made her ill.
Then she heard Call’s distorted, mechanical voice. “Why do you go on living? How can you stand it? How can you stand… yourself?”
“Not much choice,” she’d answered, believing that. She’d never had any real choice, not since she’d awakened from cryosleep on the Nostromo in the wrong part of space.
But she had a choice now. For once, she had a real choice.
She had asked Call, “Why do you care what happens to them?” meaning humans. But now Ripley wondered herself, why did she care? What had they ever done for her to make her care so much for them? Maybe Ripley was the new asshole model…
She searched for the connection to her own kind, trying to find who and what she was, so that she could make the right choice. She searched to find the strength and safety of the crèche, but it was not there. And in its place was nothing but pain, and terrible loss. She felt hollow. Empty. The way she’d felt since her birth.
As she reached out telepathically, she heard deep inside her the voice of children, two girls, human children, calling to her from across the years, Mommy! Mommy!
Ripley stared into the watery, reptilian eyes of the Newborn and moved her hand away. With a groan of loss, she made her choice.
She had her answers. They were locked in her very genetics. In spite of the lure of the Aliens, in spite of their power and strength, their purity of purpose, she knew she would have to endure. To save humanity. That was her purity of purpose, made stronger by the infusion of their genes.
She was Ripley. It was who she’d always been, the only thing she could ever be. Ripley. She would destroy them. She would do it by force.
Taking a deep, steady breath to calm her nerves, Ripley stood cautiously, straightening up. She kept her mind clear, watching the Newborn, thinking kind thoughts toward it and the suddenly leaderless warriors who were trying to figure out what to do, now that their Queen was dead.
The Newborn stepped away from her now that she was erect. Ripley reached up, seizing strands of the webbing that draped everywhere on the walls of the tank. As she gripped some of the stronger, more elastic ropes of webbing, she kept an eye on the Newborn, as the half-Alien creature cocked its misshapen head, trying to understand Ripley’s actions.
The woman looked down into the pool of blood and waste below her. She wet her lips, and another memory surfaced—a molten cauldron of white-hot lead. So, okay… She’d jumped into worse things—but not this time.
Wrapping the webbing around her wrists, Ripley used it like an acrobat, swinging up, clambering against the walls, finding handholds and toeholds, even as her eyes searched the ceiling. All the while, the Newborn watched curiously as Ripley kept her mind calm, and her thoughts neutral.
As Ripley moved higher up the wall of the tank, the Newborn waded out to a spot where it could watch Ripley better. Two warriors approached the Newborn, moving through the liquid like crocodiles, tails undulating, as though they, too, were curious.
Slowly, so as not to startle the Aliens, Ripley clambered higher and higher, searching for a telltale seam of light. She was dripping with sweat as she finally spied it, struggling all the while to keep calm. She began to hum a song she suddenly remembered to keep her mind from betraying her to the Newborn.
“You… are… my… lucky… star—”
Finally, she saw what she’d been searching for. She climbed, moved forward, touched the ceiling of the waste tank and found the handle that released the trapdoor there. As she shoved the trapdoor open onto an upper floor of the Auriga, Ripley jerked around to face the Newborn.
In her head, she could feel the shocking surprise of her betrayal in the beast’s mind. The monster drew itself up as tall as it could, stretched its arms threateningly, and screamed its challenge at its betrayer.
The monster leapt onto the nearest wall and began scrambling after the woman, but Ripl
ey was too far ahead of it. Shoving herself through the trapdoor, Ripley slammed it shut behind her and latched it, praying it would hold the enraged monster.
Even through the closed trap door, Ripley could hear the creature scream in fury, as she scrambled to her feet, turned, and ran.
* * *
“We ever gettin’ outta this thing?” Johner asked, and Call could hear the edge of panic in his voice.
“We’ll make it, son,” Vriess said calmly, but Call could hear the edge in his words as well. “Just keep your pants on.”
The planet Earth filled the entire view screen. It was still a predominantly blue world with a scattering of clouds across its surface. But almost two-thirds of it was obscured by a giant orbiting latticework of metal, part of the extensive space operations run by corporations and the planetary government in cozy cooperation. The grid was like a partial shell that rotated slightly faster than the planet itself. Call knew how many people lived there—and could access the minute-by-minute update anytime she wanted—but she didn’t like to think about those kinds of numbers. About the only people who actually lived on Earth were the disenfranchised and unemployed. Most meaningful work now was in space and on the colonies. It wasn’t hard to pick a location on the planet that was completely uninhabited to crash the Auriga. Johner hadn’t lied; Earth really was a slum.
She talked to the Betty through the port in her arm, working out the timing of their ejection from the Auriga. She’d already set the big ship up to avoid the grid completely, and hit the surface of the planet in the most remote part of the central Australian outback.
It wouldn’t be long now. They’d be leaving soon and all this would be behind them.
Call sighed. She still hadn’t accepted leaving Ripley behind as well.
Outside the ship, the Betty’s wings rotated up as the ship prepared to separate from her berth.
Call looked over her monitors even as the Betty fed her information through her arm.
Both she and Vreiss were monitoring a flood of information on the Betty’s current condition. The stabilizer in the cargo hold was doing its job, indicating that the repairs she and Vreiss had done before docking with the Auriga were holding. There was some slight problem with hydraulic pressure in the airlock doors’ system that might be caused by a small leak. Must’ve been something that happened when they shot up Purvis’s Alien embryo—either a bullet nicked a line, or a small spray of Alien acid caused a pinhole leak somewhere. In a ship this size, any loss of pressure could affect the systems throughout the vessel. Well, the airlocks were all sealed, so it shouldn’t stop them from getting free of the Auriga—
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