Tim took a pair of black buds from his ears and set his tablet aside, then rose and made his way back into that corridor.
“Hello again, Annie,” Brackett said once Tim had gone. Careful. Neutral.
Apparently at a loss for words, she opened her mouth to speak, but could only utter a short sound that sounded like half-laugh and half-sigh. She wetted her lips with her tongue and glanced away, shaking her head.
“I shouldn’t have come?” Brackett asked.
“To my quarters, or to Hadley’s Hope?”
“Neither, I’m guessing. Or both.” He shrugged one shoulder. “But I’m here anyway.”
Anne rolled her eyes, a familiar smirk on her lips.
“You’re an exasperating man, Demian—always have been—but I’m glad you’re here. It really is a wonderful surprise. I thought I’d never see you again—or anyone else from home.”
He gazed at her a moment, so many things unspoken, demanding to be said. But years had passed, her children were nearby, and her husband might walk in at any moment. So all he did was smile.
“Happy I can still surprise you,” he said, and he turned to go.
“Wait!” Anne said, reaching out to grab his arm.
The contact made them both freeze… both look down at the place where her fingers touched his forearm. Anne drew her hand back as if she’d been scalded, her eyes sad and uncertain. Then she gave that same sighing chuckle.
“Thanks for bringing Newt home,” she said.
“She’s a wonderful kid.”
Anne nodded. “She is. A handful, though.”
“Just like her mom.”
A terrible sadness engulfed him, and he knew she saw it in his eyes, saw the way he deflated.
“Demian,” she said carefully, “you knew…”
He waved the words away.
“Don’t. I’m fine. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still feel something between us, but I didn’t come here for you, and I damn sure have no intention of interfering with your life or your happiness. I just…”
“Just?” she echoed, her voice barely above a whisper, eyes full of history and could-have-beens.
Brackett gave her a lopsided smile.
“I’ve got to go. You’ve got beautiful children.”
He wanted to tell her that it was impossible for him to look at Tim and Newt and not think that, if only they had made different choices years before, they could have been his. His and Anne’s, together. He wanted to tell her that it hurt him, because he could so easily imagine the family they might have had.
But that wouldn’t have been fair to anyone. Way back in boot camp, he had learned that sometimes there was no safe path, no decision from which one could emerge unscathed. In those cases, he had been taught to take the path of honor, even if it led to pain or death.
“I’ve got to transmit a report,” he said. “See you around, Annie. Tell Newt I look forward to our date for freeze-pops.”
Brackett left without looking her in the eyes again, not wanting to see if there were possibilities there. Not wanting her to see the possibilities in his.
12
NOSTROMO MYSTERIES
DATE: 12 JUNE, 2179
Maybe they’re just doing this to torture me, Ripley thought. But all it’s doing is pissing me off.
She’d emerged from hospital care, only to discover that she had become something of an oddity on Gateway Station—almost a celebrity, with her shockingly long hypersleep and tale of survival. The company had told her not to say anything, of course. Not to discuss anything of her experiences with anyone who might be unauthorized. But there were still whispers and rumors.
There always were.
And now they were showing her the faces of the dead.
She’d seen them a dozen times already today, but still she stared, trying to draw them nearer in her memory. It seemed the right thing to do, but they had all been dead and gone for more than half a century. However recent and fresh her grief might feel, they were fading into history.
Them and her daughter, too. Her whole life was informed by grief.
Screw it.
“I don’t understand this,” she said, turning around to face the group who had gathered for the official inquiry. “We have been here for three and a half hours. How many different ways do you want me to tell the same story?”
Van Leuwen—another company man, but smarter than Burke by a long shot—sat at the end of the long table. He was overseeing the inquiry, and sitting on either side of the table were eight others: Feds, interstellar commerce commission, colonial admin, insurance guys… and Burke.
He had tried to school her in how to approach this, what to say.
Bloody weasel.
“Look at it from our perspective, please,” Van Leuwen said. He invited her to sit once again, and Ripley, frustrated with the whole process but starting to see that perhaps playing it their way was the way to go, submitted. She sat, slowly, and listened to what she’d already heard several times before.
“Now, you freely admit to detonating the engines of, and thereby destroying, an M-Class star freighter, a rather expensive piece of hardware.”
The insurance guy spoke up.
“Forty-two million in adjusted dollars.” He smirked at Ripley. “That’s minus payload, of course.” I could wipe that smirk off his face, she thought, a little startled at the image of lashing out at him. He wasn’t her enemy. None of these people were. Her enemy was dead, and the most frustrating thing was that no one here seemed to believe it.
The memory of her slaughtered friends demanded that she force them to believe. The undercurrent was that something suspicious had happened, something that she was trying to cover up with this outlandish story, and she was determined to put them right.
“The lifeboat’s flight recorder corroborates some elements of your account,” Van Leuwen continued. “That for reasons unknown, the Nostromo set down on LV-426, an unsurveyed planet at that time. That it resumed its course and was subsequently set to self-destruct, by you, for reasons unknown—”
“Not for reasons unknown!” Ripley said, again. One more time, she thought. The more she told her story, the less they seemed to believe it, and the more terrible it became to her. “I told you, we set down there on company orders to get this thing which destroyed my crew. And your expensive ship.”
A ripple seemed to pass through the people assembled there. Company people, some of them, but surely not all. She was essentially blaming the company for what had happened to the Nostromo, so she could understand some of them feeling uncomfortable with that. Van Leuwen, the woman from the bio division, and that creep Burke.
But all of them?
“The analysis team that went over the lifeboat centimeter by centimeter found no physical evidence of the creature you described,” Van Leuwen said.
“Good!” Ripley said, standing again. She was tall, imposing, and she liked the way a couple of the guys winced a little when she shouted. “That’s because I blew it out of the airlock.”
She sighed and looked down at her signed deposition, still feeling as if it lacked something. A story told, yet unfinished. She turned back to the screen to see Lambert staring at her—poor, scared Lambert who had died a dreadful death.
“Are there any species like this hostile organism on LV-426?” the insurance guy asked, turning to the woman from the bio division. She was sucking greedily on her cigarette, and it took her a few seconds to reply.
“No, it’s a rock,” she replied. “No indigenous life.”
Now it was Ash staring at her from the screen, mocking her for being here with these idiots.
“Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?” Ripley asked. “Ma’am, I already said it was not indigenous—it was a derelict spacecraft, it was an alien ship, it was not from there.” She stared at the woman, who had something of a smirk on her lips. “Do you get it? We homed in on its beacon—”
“And found something never recorded
once in over three hundred surveyed worlds,” the woman said. “A creature that gestates inside a living human host—these are your words—and has concentrated acid for blood!”
“That’s right!” Ripley snapped.
She was angry, frustrated, tired and hungry. But she could also see the looks on those faces around the table. Some were gently humoring her. Others looked aghast—not at what she was telling them, but at what they saw as a woman suffering a breakdown. Most of them seemed embarrassed to even be there.
“Look, I can see where this is going, but I’m telling you that those things exist.”
“Thank you, Officer Ripley, that will be all,” Van Leuwen said.
“Please, you’re not listening to me. Kane, the crew member…” She had a flash memory of Kane, laconic and nice, a sweet guy just looking to earn a decent wage to help his family. “Kane, who went into that ship, said he saw thousands of eggs there. Thousands.”
“Thank you, that will be all.”
“Dammit, that’s not all!” Ripley shouted. She couldn’t get through to them. Could they not see? Could they not understand? “’Cause if one of those things gets down here, that will be all, and this…” She grabbed the papers, copies of her deposition, evidence sheets. “This bullshit that you think is so important… you can kiss all that goodbye!”
Silence. Some of them even stared. She knew she’d gone too far, but fuck it. Her sweet daughter had died believing her mother was lost forever. Ripley was adrift. And all she had left to do was to make sure no one, no one, had to go through what she had been through. Never again.
Van Leuwen sighed and clipped the lid onto his pen. Then after a longer pause, he broke the silence.
“It is the finding of this court of inquiry that Warrant Officer E. Ripley, NOC 14472, has acted with questionable judgment, and is unfit to hold an ICC license as a commercial flight officer. Said license is hereby suspended indefinitely. No criminal charges will be filed against you at this time…”
He went on. Official speak, technical terms. Ripley stared at him, trying to will him to believe her, holding back her anger and grief to prevent herself blowing up one more time. But Van Leuwen’s mind was made up. He didn’t look like the sort of man who made such decisions lightly, and it would take more than Ripley’s gaze to change his mind.
In truth, she even agreed with him, partly. She wasn’t fit to fly. She woke up from fresh nightmares two mornings out of three. That sense of dark, heavy dread was still inside her. Sometimes it threatened to pull her and everyone around her into its embrace.
But this wasn’t about her.
She turned away, took a deep breath. As the others started to leave the room, the sleazeball Burke sidled up to her. She smelled his aftershave before she saw him, and both made her sick.
“That could have been… better,” he said. But instead of responding, she dismissed him, and turned to confront Van Leuwen as he left the room.
“Van Leuwen,” she said, doing her best to keep her voice level, to hold the madness down. “Why don’t you just check out LV-426?”
“Because I don’t have to,” he said. “There have been people there for over twenty years, and they’ve never complained about any hostile organism.”
No!
“What do you mean?” she asked. “What people?”
“Terraformers. Planet engineers. They go in and set up these big atmosphere processors to make the air breathable. Takes decades. What we call a shake-and-bake colony.”
She slammed her arm on the door, blocking his exit.
“How many are there?” she demanded. “How many colonists?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “Sixty, maybe seventy families.” He looked down at her arm. “Do you mind?”
She let him go. She had no choice. That sense of dread within her was blooming, a terrible secret she should know but could not grasp, could not open.
“Families,” she whispered, closing her eyes and seeing her sweet Amanda on those nights when the little girl had come into her bedroom, cold and scared of the dark, scared of monsters.
* * *
DATE: 19 JUNE, 2179
TIME: 1612
Dr. Bartholomew Reese kept mostly to himself.
Years before, at the urging of Dr. Hidalgo, the science team had arranged a weekly dinner, a sort of enforced socialization period for people who tended toward isolation and rumination. Dr. Reese supposed the Monday night rituals were a good thing, even necessary in a way—for himself, at least, he knew that too much time alone made him more impatient and more irritable with the rest of the world than he already was, and that was saying something. Still, he never quite enjoyed the meal and considered it a distraction.
Fortunately, tonight was Thursday—the Monday gathering still days away—so he did not have to suffer the presence of his colleagues, or pretend an amiability he had never felt.
Reese sat in a reclining chair in his anteroom, a glass of Malbec on a side table and a two-hundred-year-old edition of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man open in his lap. Most people eschewed the printed book, even scoffed at what they viewed as self-indulgence on his part for carting several boxes of books to Acheron when he had first been assigned here by the company. But in a savage, uncaring universe, Reese had always felt that a glass of wine and an open book were the best way to remind himself what it meant to be civilized.
A soft chime echoed through his quarters. He frowned and glanced at the door in irritation, wondering if he could ignore it. But no… nobody would interrupt him without good reason. He had no real friends, only colleagues, and they would not have come here without an urgent need.
Taking a sip of wine, he set the glass back down on the side table, slid a finger into his book to hold the page, and rose from the chair. As he crossed to the door, the arthritis in his knees singing out a painful reminder, the bell chimed again.
“Hang on!” he called.
He opened the door to find Dr. Mori on his threshold. In all of their time working together, Reese had never seen so wide a smile on the silver-haired Japanese biologist. The grin transformed him, and for a fleeting moment Reese had an image of what Mori must have looked like as a little boy.
“Bartholomew,” Dr. Mori said, “may I come in?”
Reese stepped aside and Dr. Mori practically lunged into the room. He steepled his hands in front of his face as if to hide his grin. Dr. Reese closed the door and turned toward him.
“You look as giddy as a lovestruck teen,” Reese said, with a hint of disapproval. “Whatever it is—”
“It may be the answer to the Nostromo mystery,” Dr. Mori said, lowering his hands to reveal his smile again. He shook his head with a small laugh.
Reese felt his heart jump, but restrained himself. This might be nothing. Wishful thinking at best.
“Explain yourself,” he said.
Dr. Mori nodded. “Al Simpson has just received a special order, copies of which were also transmitted to yourself and to me. In it, a Weyland-Yutani executive named Carter Burke has sent surface grid coordinates with instructions that a survey team be dispatched immediately to investigate the site. With that kind of urgency, Bartholomew, what else could it be?”
Dr. Reese lowered his gaze and stared at the floor a moment before uttering a small laugh.
He nodded.
“We’ve been here for years,” Reese said. “There can only be one rationale for urgency.” He narrowed his gaze. “Though you realize it may not be about the Nostromo at all. It might be some other indication—an atmospheric imaging array, revealing a geological depression that hints at the presence of ruins.”
“Then why the suddenness?” Dr. Mori countered. “Why go directly to Simpson?”
Dr. Reese contemplated Mori’s reasoning, and could not find fault in it. Still, he forced himself to breathe. Only a fool would allow himself to become overly excited before they truly knew the purpose for Carter Burke’s special order.
Decades ea
rlier, a Weyland-Yutani star freighter called the Nostromo had diverted from its course to respond to what the crew believed was a deep space distress call—one which could only have come from an alien ship—and subsequently vanished. It had long been believed that that distress call had come from one of the moons of Calpamos, with Acheron the likeliest candidate.
The science team’s primary work with the Hadley’s Hope colony had been to study Acheron and the way in which it had been changed by terraforming, as well as attempting to enrich the changing soil to support agriculture. At least, that was what the colonists, marines, and administrators had been told. Their less overt, higher-priority work was to examine all samples for any indication of alien life—native or visitor, past or present—on LV-426.
“Whatever has happened,” Dr. Mori said, “new information must have come to light.”
Reese nodded, his thoughts racing. He paced back toward his chair, considering the best way to handle the science team’s relationship with Simpson. The man would follow instructions from Weyland-Yutani as if they had come from his own government. The government and the company had founded Hadley’s Hope together, but Simpson’s paychecks bore the Weyland-Yutani logo. He knew for whom he really worked.
Spotting his wine glass out of the corner of his eye, Dr. Reese set down his book and picked up the glass. He swirled the Malbec around for several seconds before taking a thoughtful sip.
“The timing of Captain Brackett’s arrival is less than ideal,” he said, glancing up at Dr. Mori. “I’m confident I know what his superiors will tell him, but until he is commanded otherwise, his orders on the ground here will stand as he sees them.”
Dr. Mori frowned. “Why are you troubled by this?” he asked. “It isn’t the marines who ought to be going along on this sojourn, but one of us. I should go with them, or you should. Even Dr. Hidalgo…”
Reese arched an eyebrow. “You want to go and investigate an unknown alien presence without a marine escort? Someone with guns and a willingness to use them, who will die protecting you?”
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