by Tim Lebbon
“Strap in, ladies and gentlemen,” Lachance said. He checked readouts, stroked his hand across the projected nav controls in front of him, and then settled back in his seat.
Ripley and Hoop went back to their seats and secured their safety straps. She waited for him to check her clasps again, and saw Sneddon looking from her to Hoop, and smirking. Ripley stared back.
The science officer looked away.
The Samson shook as retros fired. Moments later there was a heavy bump, and then the engines started to cycle down.
“There,” Lachance said. “Told you I was good.”
Hoop exhaled, and from across the cabin Ripley heard Kasyanov mutter something that might have been a prayer. Straps were opened, they stood and stretched, then gathered at the front of the ship to look outside.
Lachance had landed them facing the dome. The line of the partly buried tunnel was obvious, leading from their pad to the dome, and the storm suddenly seemed more intense now that they had touched down. Maybe because there was more sand to blow around at low level.
“Suit up,” Hoop said. “Grab your weapons. Lachance, you take point with me. I’m going to be opening doors and hatches. Baxter, you bring up the rear.”
“Why do I have to come last?” the communications engineer asked.
“Because you’re a gentleman,” Sneddon said. Kasyanov chuckled, Baxter looked uncertain, and Ripley wondered at the complex relationships between these people. She’d barely scratched the surface—they’d been here so close together for so long.
The inside of the Samson suddenly seemed so much safer. Through her fear Ripley was determined, but she couldn’t shake those terrible memories. Not the new ones, of Powell and Welford being killed by those fast, furious things. And not the old ones, back on the Nostromo. She couldn’t help feeling that even more terrible memories were soon to be forged.
If she lived to remember.
“Let’s stay close and tight,” she said. No one replied. Everyone knew what was at stake here, and they’d all seen these things in action.
“We move fast, but carefully,” Hoop said. “No storming ahead. No heroics.”
They fixed their helmets, checked each other’s suits and air supplies, tested communications, and hefted the weapons. To Ripley they all looked so vulnerable: pale white grubs ready for the aliens to puncture, rip apart, eat. And none of them had any real idea about what they were about to encounter.
Perhaps the uncertainty was a good thing. Maybe if they knew for sure what they would find down in the mine, they would never bring themselves to enter.
Breathing deeply, thinking of Amanda, who probably believed her mother to be dead, Ripley silently vowed that she would do anything and everything necessary to stay alive.
Lachance opened the outer hatch, and the storm came inside.
PART 2
UNDERGROUND
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 determinat
ion. 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.
