“Ripley, you wouldn’t be going in with the troops. I can guarantee your safety.” At least it seemed he could say more than one word at a time.
“These Colonial Marines are very tough hombres,” Burke said. She turned her back on him and poured herself a drink. Her heart was thudding as the memories grew more real. “They’re packing state-of-the-art firepower; there’s nothing they can’t handle,” Burke went on. “Lieutenant, am I right?”
“That’s true. We’ve been trained to deal with situations like this.”
“Then you don’t need me,” Ripley said. “I’m not a soldier.” She hated the fact that her voice wavered, but the fear was rich and real. She couldn’t hide it. Maybe she shouldn’t even try.
“Yeah, but we don’t know exactly what’s going on out there,” Burke said. “It may just be a downed transmitter, okay, but if it’s not, I’d like you there as an advisor. And that’s all.”
Ripley stood and approached Burke. He was a company man, Weyland-Yutani, so he’d told her many times.
“What’s your interest in this? Why are you going?”
“The corporation co-financed that colony, along with colonial administration. We’re getting into a lot of terraforming now, building better worlds—”
“Yeah, yeah, I saw the commercial,” Ripley said. “Look, I don’t have time for this. I’ve got to get to work.”
“Yeah, I heard you’re working in the cargo docks.”
“That’s right.”
“Running loaders and forklifts, that sort of—”
“So?”
“I think it’s great that you’re keeping busy, that it’s the only thing you could get. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
Son of a bitch, Ripley thought. She was letting him get to her, and that made her even angrier.
“What would you say if I told you I could get you reinstated as a flight officer?” he asked. “The company has already agreed to pick up your contract.”
She looked sidelong at Gorman—inscrutable, silent—then back to Burke.
“If I go,” she said.
He nodded. “Yeah, if you go. Come on, it’s a second chance, kiddo! And personally I think it would be the best thing in the world for you to get out there and face this thing. Get back on the horse—”
“Spare me, Burke, I’ve had my psych evaluation this month.”
“I know,” he said, standing and invading her personal space. “I’ve read it. You wake up every night, your sheets are soaking wet—”
He was reminding her of the nightmares, the dark places where she was chased by the beast, and that darker place that still weighed heavy within her when she was awake.
“Damn it, Burke!” she shouted in his face. “I said no, and I mean it! Now please leave. I am not going back, and I am…” She swallowed, caught her breath. “I would not be any use to you if I did.”
“Okay,” Burke said softly, as if suddenly he was talking to a child. Ripley lit another cigarette, shaking, and heard Burke drop something on her table. A comms card, she guessed.
Screw him. Screw him for making me feel like this.
“Want you to do me a favor…” he said. “Just think about it.”
“Thanks for the coffee,” Gorman said. He smoothed his buzzcut, put his cap back on, and led the way from her cabin. Burke closed the door softly behind them.
Ripley was shaking, and it wasn’t because she was drinking too much coffee. She knelt and stroked the cat, and wondered whether he had nightmares, too.
* * *
DATE: 6 JULY, 2179
They were chasing her. No longer just one, now there were many beasts, and the corridors weren’t just those of a dank spacecraft. She bounded from rough stone, slick with a viscous layer from which she shrank away. She tripped over coiled things that looked as though they belonged inside a body. She tried to scream.
I have to warn them. They’re coming, they know we’re here, and I have to warn the others!
She did not know what “others.” Not Dallas and Lambert, not Kane—they were all dead and gone—but those other others who belonged somewhere else, somewhere deep in that dark, heavy memory that threatened so often to burst free and reveal itself fully.
So she ran. The beasts hunted her, and she knew without a shadow of a doubt that they would run her down and tear her to shreds before she found any friend ever again.
* * *
Ripley started awake, shouting, gasping, sweating, taking a few seconds to realize that she was no longer being chased and that, in fact, she was as safe as she’d ever been.
Almost.
Almost as safe, because the nightmares carried on. She was haunted by them, and as much as she hated to admit the psych evaluations—desired to prove them wrong—she knew that she was damaged. Her mind was not her own. The gravity of that dark potential within her was slowly, inexorably crushing her to its will.
She splashed water on her face and down her neck, washing away the sweat of the nightmares, but not their taste. Then she stared into the mirror and knew what she had to do.
Burke’s comms card was where he’d left it. She plugged it into the unit and buzzed him. He responded, sleep-addled and confused. It took him a moment, then he spoke.
“Ripley?” He glanced at the clock behind him, saw how early it still was. “You okay?”
“Just tell me one thing, Burke,” she said. “You’re going out there to destroy them. Right? Not to study. Not to bring back. But to wipe them out.”
“That’s the plan. You have my word on it.”
She paused for a moment, and her life rested on a ledge. Stay as she was and she would eventually fall off. Confront her fears—face those nightmares—and perhaps one day she could move on.
“All right,” she said. “I’m in.” Burke went to say something else, but she broke the connection and sat back in her chair.
She felt lighter. Different. The weight from inside, that dark star… it was gone. Whatever it had been, it was lifted from her, and though confused, she did not mourn its passing. Whatever memories she had been reliving in those deep, dark nightmares were gone forever, and she was glad.
She looked at Jonesy, still sitting at the bottom of the bed.
“And you, you little shithead. You’re staying here.”
Jonesy looked very fine with that.
31
THE CRUELEST TRICK
DATE: 27 JULY, 2179
TIME: 0900
“We’re on an express elevator to hell, going down!”
The ship dropped toward Acheron. Someone shouted whoop, but Ripley had her eyes squeezed shut, and she was concentrating hard to hold onto her dinner. The whole dropship rattled and shook, metal creaked, marines grunted, and she clasped onto her armrests so hard that her fingers cramped.
This was the most aggressive of atmosphere entries—an assault more than a landing—and Ripley had never trained for any of this.
But she’d been through worse. She opened her eyes, stared at the ceiling, and wondered what was to come.
* * *
DATE: 27 JULY, 2179
TIME: 0958
They’d done a fly-by of the colony. It still had power, the outer structure looked undamaged, and the giant atmosphere processors remained operational. Other than being so quiet, it didn’t look like a colony that had suffered any mishaps.
But there was still no contact. If the colonists had heard the dropship circling around, surely they’d have emerged by now to welcome it?
Ripley was nervous as hell. The silence and stillness troubled her.
“Man, it looks like a fuckin’ ghost town,” one of the marines whispered.
She felt a chill go through her.
If they are all dead, then it’s far from a ghost town, she thought. It’s a monster town.
The lieutenant issued the order to land. Ripley, Burke, and the marines were in the ground assault vehicle held in the dropship’s belly, with the android Bishop at the controls.
“I prefer the term artificial person myself,” he’d said to her, but screw him. Bishop, Ash—different names for the same bastard, as far as she was concerned.
Seconds after the dropship ramp touched the landing pad, Bishop hit the gas. The atmosphere had changed now, going from bullish bravado to steady and calm, loaded with a readiness that almost set Ripley at ease. Almost. She’d seen the firepower these guys packed, and the professionalism with which they had prepared. But she also knew what could be inside this complex.
I should never have come, she thought for the thousandth time. But once out of hypersleep on the Sulaco, she’d decided to join the away team on their journey down to the surface. The Sulaco remained in unmanned orbit, and she had no desire to be left up there all on her own. She’d been alone for too long.
“Ten seconds people, look sharp!” another grunt bellowed. “All right, I want a nice clean dispersal this time.”
The ground assault vehicle skidded to a halt and the door slid open.
Ripley held her breath. The marines streamed out and the door slammed shut. Gorman remained, along with Burke and Bishop. All she knew was what appeared on the display screens of Gorman’s control center. She felt immediately cut off from the rest, as if they were somewhere far away.
It was raining heavily, the ground thick with muddy ash. There were several abandoned vehicles in the midst of the complex. One solitary sign, bar, glowed a steady red, the only sight that wasn’t a bland gray.
The team spread out around a wide vehicle doorway labeled “North Lock.”
“First squad up online,” Gorman said. “Hicks, get yours in the corridor, watch the rear.”
Ripley watched on various head-cam monitors as the first squad approached the door. They proceeded with steady, economical movements, quickly and calmly. Hudson ran a bypass on the door’s locking mechanism, and then the heavy metal barrier started to slide open.
“Second squad move up,” Gorman said. “Flanking positions.”
The doors opened.
Inside, all was shadow.
The marines entered the complex grouped in close formation, checking corners, using attached shoulder-torches to illuminate their way. The inner lock doors were jammed half closed, and two marines pulled them all the way open.
Vasquez moved forward, and then Ripley saw what was revealed.
The corridor beyond had been ripped apart. Ceilings were down, wall paneling shattered, spewing guts of tattered pipes and hanging wires. Water dribbled from a ruptured channel.
Oh shit, Ripley thought.
“Second team move inside,” Gorman said. “Hicks, take the upper level.”
As the second squad moved up a staircase just inside the opened doors, the first squad edged deeper into the complex. The damage to the corridor was even more apparent now, and there were a few scattered piles of furniture that might have been blockades of some sort.
If so, none of them had worked.
“Sir, you copying this?” Apone asked. “Looks like hits from small arms fire, with some explosive damages. Probably seismic survey charges. Are you reading this? Keep it tight, people.”
Ripley checked Hicks’s head-cam and saw that he’d just reached the head of the staircase. The corridor beyond was equally dark, and also showed signs of damage.
“Okay, Hicks, Hudson, use your motion trackers,” Gorman said. As Ripley saw the two men look down at devices in their hands, a chill went through her. Ash had designed units very like these to help them hunt the beast aboard the Nostromo. These units looked sharper and more solid, but she guessed that the technology was much the same.
The teams advanced. Ripley felt sweat trickle down her back. Burke watched with her, and Bishop stood back a little, observing the operation. She was stuck here with an android and two men she didn’t like, and she started to wish she’d gone with Hicks.
“Quarter and search by twos,” Gorman said.
It was Hudson who saw movement on his tracker. He called it in, and he and Vasquez advanced slowly along the dark corridor, guns at the ready. Hudson’s heart rate increased. Vasquez’s barely changed.
Pull them out, Ripley thought. She almost said it, but realized how panicked it seemed. They’d come this far, over such a vast distance, to discover what had happened here and to help anyone that had survived. So they had to go on.
But that didn’t prevent her from being terrified.
Hudson kicked a door in and… gerbils. They skittered away in a panic.
“Sir, we have a negative situation here,” Hudson drawled. “Moving on, sir.” Ripley couldn’t tell whether or not he sounded sarcastic.
Something caught her eye on another screen. The view from Hicks’s head-cam swept across a corridor and Ripley saw something amiss, a series of dark, uneven patches on the floor.
“Wait! Wait, tell him to…” She snatched up a headset. “Hicks. Back up. Pan right.” He did as she said and revealed the acid burns across the floor. Metal grill flooring, melted away as if it were made of ice. “There.”
Like ice, her blood chilled. She felt sick.
“You seeing this all right?” Hicks said, looking at them through Drake’s head-cam. “Looks melted. Somebody must have bagged one of Ripley’s bad guys here.”
Ripley glanced back at Burke. She didn’t know why, wasn’t even sure what she was expecting of him.
“Acid for blood,” he said, apparently amazed at this confirmation of everything Ripley had told him.
“If you liked that, you’re gonna love this,” Hudson said. He and Vasquez had found a much larger burn site, a hole melted through several levels and wide enough for a man to fall through. Maybe if one of them was blown apart, Ripley thought. Maybe then.
“Sir, this place is dead,” Apone said. “Whatever happened here I think we missed it.”
Gorman scanned the screens and the bio readouts of his marines.
“All right, the area’s secured, let’s go in and see what their computer can tell us.”
“Wait a minute,” Ripley said, that familiar panic rising again, “the area’s not—”
“The area is secured, Ripley,” he said, dismissing her without a look. “First team, head for operations. Hudson, see if you can get their CPU online.”
“Affirmative.”
“Hicks, meet me at the South Lock,” Gorman said. “We’re coming in.”
I bet they feel safer already, Ripley thought. She considered arguing with Gorman, telling him that there was no way the area could be declared secure until his teams had performed a full sweep. Though huge, vicious and violent, she also remembered how the beast had hidden itself away on board the Narcissus, remaining so still and quiet that she hadn’t noticed it for some time.
Those corridors she’d seen on the head-cams—the warren of rooms, the stairwells—there could be a hundred Xenomorphs in there. But the assault vehicle was already moving, and soon they had skirted around the edge of the colony and pulled up at the South Lock.
I’m being drawn in, Ripley thought. I should have stayed on the Sulaco, but I didn’t want to be alone. And now she should sit tight, right where she was… but she wouldn’t. She would go with Gorman and Burke.
I can’t not go.
She had to see what had happened to the colonists. Like it or not, she knew more about the Xenomorphs than anyone else on this mission.
* * *
It was still raining heavily as they exited the vehicle and approached the South Lock. Hicks and another marine were waiting for them there, and Gorman and Burke entered ahead of her.
Ripley slowed to a halt, still outside, a short distance from the open door.
I can still turn around, she thought. But in truth, she had come too far already.
“Are you all right?” Hicks asked. He’d turned, noticed her standing there, and come back for her. She liked him for that.
“Yes,” Ripley said softly.
She stepped inside, and the doors slid shut behind
her.
* * *
DATE: 27 JULY, 2179
TIME: 1003
In the maze of ducts, out scavenging for food, Newt heard voices.
They frightened her, those voices, but they also gave her hope and that made her angry. She had learned the hardest way imaginable that hope was the cruelest trick she could play on herself.
Hope might get her killed.
Still, she slipped through the ducts, following the voices…
…and she hoped.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I saw Aliens when it first hit theaters, right around my birthday in July of 1986. I was nineteen years old and it was the first time a movie ever gave me nightmares. Thanks to James Cameron for those nightmares. Deep thanks to my editor, Steve Saffel, for watching my six, and to the entire team at Titan for their dedication to this new voyage into the Alien canon. Special thanks to Josh Izzo at Fox for his passion and for reminding me to stay frosty, and to James A. Moore and Tim Lebbon for friendship and brainstorming. Finally, my gratitude, as always, to my fantastic family for their support, and to my agent, Howard Morhaim, for navigating the universe with me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN is the New York Times #1 bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of such novels as Of Saints and Shadows, The Myth Hunters, The Boys Are Back in Town, Strangewood, and Snowblind. He has co-written three illustrated novels with Mike Mignola, the first of which, Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, was the launching pad for the Eisner Award-nominated comic book series Baltimore. As an editor, he has worked on the short story anthologies The New Dead, The Monster’s Corner, and Dark Duets, among others, and has also written and co-written comic books, video games, screenplays, and a network television pilot. The author is also known for his many media tie-in works, including novels, comics, and video games, in the worlds of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hellboy, Angel, and X-Men, among others. Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His original novels have been published in more than fourteen languages in countries around the world. Please visit him at www.christophergolden.com
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