Alien

by Alan Dean Foster

  The Company would of course claim any such discovery, since it was being made with Company equipment and on Company time. But it could mean some generous bonuses. Their unintentional stop here might turn out to be profitable after all.

  Wind drove at them, hammering them with dirt and dust, a solid rain.

  'Can't see more than three metres in any direction,' Lambert muttered.

  'Quit griping.' That was Kane.

  'I like griping.'

  'Come on. Quit acting like a couple of kids. This isn't the place for it.'

  'Wonderful little place, though.' Lambert wasn't intimidated. 'Totally unspoiled by man or nature. Great place to be. . . if you're a rock.'

  'I said, that's enough.' She went quiet at that, but continued to complain under her breath. Dallas could order her to stop talking, but he couldn't keep her from grumbling.

  Abruptly, her eyes brought information that momentarily took her thoughts away from their steady condemnation of this place. Something had disappeared from the screen of the finder.

  'What's wrong?' Dallas asked.

  'Hang on.' She made a slight adjustment to the device, made difficult because of the bulky gloves. The line that had vanished from the face of the finder reappeared.

  'Lost it. I've got it again.'

  'Any problems?' A distant voice sounded in their helmets. Ash was voicing concern.

  'Nothing major,' Dallas informed him. He turned a slow circle, trying to locate something solid within the storm. 'Still a lot of dust and wind. Starting to get some fade on the finder beam. We lost the transmission for a second.'

  'It's still strong back here.' Ash checked his own readouts. 'I don't think it's the storm. You might be entering some hilly terrain. That could block out the signal. Watch yourselves. If you lose it and can't regain, switch the finder to trace my channel back toward the ship until you can pick up the transmission again. Then I'll try to direct you from here.'

  'We'll keep it in mind, but so far that's not necessary. We'll let you know if we run into that much trouble.'

  'Check. Ash out.'

  It was quiet again. They moved without talking through the dust-laden, orange limbo. After a while, Lambert stopped.

  'Lose it again?' Kane asked.

  'Nope. Change of direction.' She gestured off to their left. 'That way now.'

  They continued on the new course, Lambert keeping all her attention on the finder's screen, Dallas and Kane keeping theirs on Lambert. Around them the storm grew momentarily wilder. Dust particles made insistent ticking noises as the wind drove them against the faceplates of their helmets, forming speech patterns within their brains.

  Tick, tick . . . let us in . . . flick, pock . . . let us in, let us in . . .

  Dallas shook himself. The silence, the cloud-enveloped desolation, the orange haze; all were beginning to get to him.

  'It's close,' Lambert said. Suit monitors simultaneously informed the distant Ash of their suddenly increased pulse rate. 'Very close.'

  They continued on. Something loomed ahead, high above them. Dallas's breath came in short gasps now, from excitement as much as exertion.

  Disappointment . . . it was only a large rock formation, twisted and grotesque. Ash's guess about the possibility of them entering higher country was proven correct. They took temporary shelter beneath the stone monolith. At the same time, the line vanished from Lambert's finder.

  'Lost it again,' she told them.

  'Did we pass it?' Kane studied the rocks, tried to see over them, and could not.

  'Not unless it's underground.' Dallas leaned back against the rock wall. 'Might be behind this stuff.' He tapped the stone with a suited fist. 'Or it might be just a fade due to the storm. Let's take a break and see.'

  They waited there, resting with their backs to the scoured wall. Dust and mist howled around them.

  'Now we're really blind,' said Kane.

  'Should be dawn soon.' He adjusted his pickup. 'Ash, if you hear me. How long until daylight?'

  The science officer's voice was faint, distorted with static. 'Sun's coming up in about ten minutes.'

  'We should be able to see something then.'

  'Or the other way around,' Lambert put in. She didn't try to hide her lack of enthusiasm. She was damn tired and they had yet to reach the source of the signal. Nor was it physical weakness. The desolation and eerie colouring were tiring her mind. She longed for the clean, bright familiarity of her console.

  The increasing brightness didn't help. Instead of raising their spirits, the rising sun chilled them by turning the air from orange to blood. Maybe it would be less intimidating when the feeble star was completely up. . . .

  Ripley wiped a hand across her brow, let out a tired breath. She closed the last wall panel she'd been working behind after making certain the new components were functioning properly, put her tools back in the satchel's compartments.

  'You ought to be able to handle the rest. I've finished the delicate stuff.'

  'Don't worry. We'll manage,' Parker assured her, keeping his tone carefully neutral. He didn't look in her direction, continued to concentrate on his own job. He was still upset over the chance he and Brett might be left out of whatever find the expedition might make.

  She started for the nearest up companionway. 'If you run into trouble and need help, I'll be on the bridge.'

  'Right,' said Brett softly.

  Parker watched her go now, saw her lithe form disappear upward. 'Bitch.'

  Ash touched a control. A trio of moving shapes became sharp and regular, losing their fuzzy halos, as the enhancer did its job. He checked his other monitors. The three suit signals continued to come in strong.

  'How's it going?' a voice wanted to know over the intercom.

  Quickly he shut off the screen, hit his respond. 'All right so far.'

  'Where are they?' Ripley asked.

  'Getting close to the source. They've moved into some rocky terrain and the signal keeps fading on them, but they're so close I don't see how they can miss it. We ought to hear from them pretty soon.'

  'Speaking of that signal, haven't we got anything fresh on it by this time?'

  'Not yet.'

  'Have you tried putting the transmission through ECIU for detailed analysis?' She sounded a touch impatient.

  'Look, I want to know the details as badly as you do. But Mother hasn't identified it yet, so what's the point in my fooling with it?'

  'Mind if I give it a shot?'

  'Be my guest,' he told her. 'Can't do any harm, and it's something to do. Just let me know the instant you hit on anything, if you happen to get lucky.'

  'Yeah. If I happen to get lucky.' She switched off.

  She settled a little deeper into her chair on the bridge. It felt oddly spacious now, what with the rest of the bridge crew outside and Ash down in his blister. In fact, it was the first time she could recall being alone on the bridge. It felt strange and not altogether comfortable.

  Well, if she was going to take the trouble to work her way through ECIU analysis, she ought to get started. A touch of a switch filled the bridge with that tormented alien wail. She hurriedly turned down the volume. It was disquieting enough to listen to when subdued.

  She could easily conceive of it being a voice, as Lambert had suggested. That was a concept more fanciful than scientific, however. Get a grip on yourself, woman. See what the machine has to say and leave your emotional reactions out of it.

  Aware of the unlikelihood of having any success where Mother had failed, she activated a little-used panel. But as Ash had said, it was something to do. She couldn't bear to sit and do nothing on the empty bridge. It gave her too much time to think. Better make-work than none at all . . .

  IV

  As the hidden sun continued to rise, the bloody red colour of the atmosphere began to lighten. It was now a musty, dirty yellow instead of the familiar bright sunshine of Earth, but it was a vast improvement over what had been.

  The storm had aba
ted somewhat and the omnipresent dust had begun to settle. For the first time, the three foot weary travellers could see more than a couple of metres ahead.

  They'd been climbing for some time. The terrain continued hilly, but except for isolated pillars of basalt it was still composed of lava flows. There were few sharp projections, most having been ground down to gentle curves and wrinkles by untold aeons of steady wind and driven dust.

  Kane was in the lead, slightly ahead of Lambert. Any minute now he expected her to announce they'd regained the signal. He topped a slight rise, glanced ahead expecting to see more of what they'd encountered thus far: smooth rock leading upward to another short climb.

  Instead, his eyes caught something quite different, different enough to make them go wide behind the dirty, transparent face of the helmet, different enough to make him shout over the pickup.

  'JESUS CHRIST!'

  'What is it? What's the mat . . .?' Lambert pulled up alongside him, followed by Dallas. Both were as shocked by the unexpected sight as Kane had been.

  They'd assumed the distress signal was being generated by machinery of some sort, but no pictures of the transmitter source had formed in their minds. They'd been too occupied with the storm and the simple necessity of staying together. Confronted now with a real source, one considerably more impressive than any of them had dared consider, their scientific detachment had temporarily vanished.

  It was a ship. Relatively intact it was, and more alien than any of them had imagined possible. Dallas would not have labelled it gruesome, but it was disturbing in a way hard technology should not have been. The lines of the massive derelict were clean but unnatural, imbuing the entire design with an unsettling abnormality.

  It towered above them and the surrounding rocks on which it lay. From what they could see of it, they decided it had landed in the same manner as the Nostromo, belly down. Basically it was in the shape of an enormous metallic 'U', with the two horns of the U bent slightly in toward one another. One arm was slightly shorter than its counterpart and bent in more sharply. Whether this was due to damage or some alien conception of what constituted pleasing symmetry they had no way of knowing.

  As they climbed closer they saw that the craft thickened somewhat at the base of the U, with a series of concentric mounds like thick plates rising to a final dome. Dallas formed the opinion that the two horns contained the ship's drive and engineering sections, while the thicker front end held living quarters, possibly cargo space, and the bridge. For all they knew, he might have everything exactly reversed.

  The vessel lay supine, displaying no indication of life or activity. This near, the regained transmission was deafening and all three hastened to lower the volume in their helmets.

  Whatever metal the hull was composed of, it glistened in the increasing light in an oddly vitreous way that hinted at no alloy ever formed by the hand of man. Dallas couldn't even be sure it was metal. First inspection revealed nothing like a weld, joint, seal, or any other recognizable method of cojoining separate plates or sections. The alien ship conveyed the impression of having been grown rather than manufactured.

  That was bizarre, of course. Regardless of the method of construction, the important thing was that it was undeniably a ship.

  So startled were they by the unexpected sight that none of them gave a thought to what the seemingly intact derelict might be worth in the form of bonuses or salvage.

  All three were shouting at the same time into their helmet pickups. 'Some kind of ship, all right,' Kane kept repeating inanely, over and over.

  Lambert studied the lustrous, almost wet shine of the curving sides, the absence of any familiar exterior features, and shook her head in wonder. 'Are you positive? Maybe it could be a local structure. It's weird . . .'

  'Naw.' Kane's attention was on the twin, curving horns that formed the rear of the vessel. 'It's not fixed. Even allowing for alien architectural concepts, it's clear enough this isn't intended to be part of the landscape. It's a ship, for sure.'

  'Ash, can you see this?' Dallas remembered that the science officer could see clearly via their respective suit video pickups, had probably noticed the wreck the moment Kane had topped the rise and given his shocked cry.

  'Yeah, I can see it. Not clear, but enough to agree with Kane that it's a ship.' Ash's voice sounded excited in their helmets. At least it was as excited as the science officer ever sounded. 'Never seen anything like it. Hang on a minute.' They waited while Ash studied readouts, ran a couple of rapid queries through the ship's brain.

  'Neither has Mother,' he reported. 'It's a completely unknown type, doesn't correlate with anything we've ever encountered before. Is it as big as it looks from here?'

  'Bigger,' Dallas told him. 'Massive construction, no small details visible as yet. If it's constructed to the same scale as our ships, the builders must've been a damn sight bigger than us.'

  Lambert let out a nervous giggle. 'We'll find out, if there are any of them left on board to give us a welcome.'

  'We're close and in line,' Dallas said to Ash, ignoring the navigator's comment. 'You ought to be receiving a much clearer signal from us. What about the distress call? Any shift? We're too close to tell.'

  'No. Whatever's producing the transmission is inside that. I'm sure of it. Got to be. If it was farther out, we'd never have picked it up through that mass of metal.'

  'If it is metal.' Dallas continued to examine the alien hull. 'Almost looks like plastic.'

  'Or bone,' a thoughtful Kane suggested.

  'Assuming the transmission is coming from inside, what do we do now?' Lambert wondered.

  The exec started forward. 'I'll go in and have a look, let you know.'

  'Hold on, Kane. Don't be so damned adventurous. One of these days it's going to get you into trouble.'

  'I'll settle for getting inside. Look, we've got to do something. We can't just stand around out here and wait for revelations to magically appear in the air above the ship.' Kane frowned at him. 'Are you seriously suggesting we don't go inside?'

  'No, no. But there's no need to rush it.' He addressed the distant science officer. 'You still reading us, Ash?'

  'Weaker now that you're on top of the transmitter,' came the reply. 'There's some unavoidable interference. But I'm still on you clear.'

  'Okay. I don't see any lights or signs of life. No movement of any kind except this damn dust. Use us for a distance-and-line fix and try your sensors. See if you can see or find anything that we can't.'

  There was a pause while Ash hastened to comply with the order. They continued to marvel at the elegantly distorted lines of the enormous vessel.

  'I've tried everything,' the science officer finally reported. 'We're not equipped for this kind of thing. The Nostromo's a commercial tug, not an exploration craft. We'd need a lot of expensive stuff we just don't carry to get a proper reading.'

  'So . . . what can you tell me?'

  'Nothing from here, sir. I can't get any results at all. It's putting out so much power I can't get any acceptable reading whatsoever. We just don't carry the right instrumentation.'

  Dallas tried to conceal his disappointment from the others. 'I understand. It's not crucial anyway. But keep trying. Let me know the minute you do find anything, anything at all. Especially any indication of movement. Don't go into details. We'll handle any analysis at this end.'

  'Check. Watch yourselves.'

  'What now, Captain?' Dallas'ss gaze travelled the length of the huge ship, returned to discover Kane and Lambert watching him. The exec was right, of course. To know that this was the source of the signal was not sufficient. They had to trace it to the generator, try to discover the cause behind the signal and the presence of this ship on this tiny world. To have come this far and not explore the alien's innards was unthinkable.

  Curiosity, after all, was what had driven mankind out from his isolated, unimportant world and across the gulf between the stars. It had also, he thoughtfully reminded himself, killed the
figurative cat.

  He came to a decision, the only logical one. 'It looks pretty dead from out here. We'll approach the base first. Then, if nothing shows itself . . .'

  Lambert eyed him. 'Yeah.'

  'Then . . . we'll see.'