Alien

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  Picking up her coffee, Amanda took a sip from it.

  “The worst-case scenario,” he continued, “is that we travel to Sevastopol and it turns out not to be—” Samuels smirked, the first time his facial expression had changed since he arrived. “—a piece of the ‘one true cross.’ Then you return here to Tranquility—or wherever else you wish to go—with considerably more money in your account. But the best-case scenario is that this really is the Nostromo’s flight recorder, and you can finally find out what happened to your mother.”

  Amanda smirked back. “And you find out what happened to your very expensive ship.”

  “Also, yes,” he said, “but we’re concerned about the entire crew—not just WO Ripley, but also CO Dallas, XO Kane, SO Ash, and the rest. Now, you—”

  She held up a hand. “Relax, Samuels, you had me at double my current pay. ’Course, twice nothing is still nothing, but I’ll take what I can get. Just promise me you don’t use any equipment from Lagdamen?”

  “I cannot speak for every item on the Torrens, but Captain Verlaine has a sterling reputation. I can say with some certainty that she uses reliable equipment.” Samuels gave her a knowing smile at that.

  “Fine.” She shrugged out of the Mazursky’s pack and placed it next to the helmet on the worktable. For this, for a real possibility of finding her mother, she’d finally take the company up on their long-standing offer of employment.

  “When do we leave?”

  Encrypted Transmission

  From: Captain Constantino Blane, USCSS Rover

  To: Captain Diane Verlaine, USCSS Torrens

  Date: November 19, 2137

  Re: Nav Officer

  Verlaine, you on the lookout for a navigational officer? I have a friend that’s just lost his ship and he’s looking for work. I can vouch for him, he’s got good papers. Same old story: the megacorps undercut him, picked up all his clients. Contracts are getting harder to come by for the smaller companies and I’m thinking of getting out myself while I still have something to sell.

  Sounds like you’re doing okay, though. Dropped by the docks and heard you just shipped out. Sevastopol Station—what a shithole. Still, I hear Weyland-Yutani pay well. Good luck to you. If you can’t beat them, right?

  Let’s catch up when you get back.

  This message and any attachments are confidential, privileged and protected. If you are not the intended recipient, dissemination or copying of this message is prohibited. If you have received this in error, please notify the sender by replying and then delete the message completely from your system.

  5

  USCSS TORRENS

  DECEMBER 2137

  Dreams while in cryosleep were surprisingly ordinary for Amanda.

  Under normal circumstances, her slumber was a chaotic mess, as if someone had eaten her entire life and puked it up onto a brightly colored carpet.

  The night before she boarded the Torrens, for example—right after she gave Dmitriy notice and sent Zula a message letting her know where she was going—her dreams were a cacophony of images and sounds. Some familiar, others not so much. The deafening noise made by her Mazursky welder. An Earthrise as seen from Luna’s observation port, only the Earth was as red as Mars. Coffee spilling over a giraffe that looked like the one that had kissed her on a safari trip when she was a kid.

  The very next day she stripped down to her underclothes, climbed into the cryochamber, and heard the pneumatic hiss of the seal. The machine slathered her in cryogel, the anesthetic put her under, and she fell into stasis. Once there, her dreams were amazingly straightforward as her mind hearkened back to her earliest memories…

  * * *

  …her mother holding newborn Amanda in her arms, singing.

  “O little lotus flower in the shadow of the wall. O little lotus flower, far far away. O little lotus flower shines like the moon. O little lotus flower, gone, gone too soon.”

  * * *

  …trying to sleep while Mommy and Daddy are fighting.

  “What is that you’ve been feeding her?”

  “It’s called Newtrients. It’s got everything she needs.”

  “So you’re not breast-feeding her?”

  “We agreed I wouldn’t be.”

  “No, you decided. I just went along.”

  “That’s agreement, Alex. If you disagree, you have to say something.”

  * * *

  …Mommy taking her home from the park.

  “Alex, are you here? Alex? Alex!?

  “Dammit. He couldn’t even leave a note…”

  * * *

  …going to school.

  “Why isn’t Mommy taking me to school, Daddy?”

  “Because your mother has a job.”

  “Oh. Do you have a job, Daddy?”

  “You don’t have to call me ‘Daddy,’ baby girl, I’m not your father, you know.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t remember Daddy much, and I like you as my daddy.”

  “That’s sweet, baby girl. Anyhow, I don’t have a job right now. I’m still looking.”

  “I thought you were an eng’eer!”

  “That’s engineer, baby girl, and I can’t be one yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I have to go to school.”

  “Like me?”

  “Kind of, yeah. I’ll get to do it someday.”

  * * *

  …her mother playing with her in the park.

  “Catch the ball, sweetheart!”

  “I got it! Hey, isn’t that Daddy?”

  “What? No, of course not, Daddy’s at work. He—”

  “That is Daddy!”

  “Paul?”

  “Ellen, hi. Um—”

  “Why aren’t you at work?”

  “Because they escorted me out of the building when they fired me—”

  “Dammit.”

  “—last week.”

  “Last week?”

  “Look, they were all morons there.”

  “And you just had to tell them that they were morons, didn’t you?”

  “C’mon, the job was beneath me, and everyone knew it.”

  * * *

  …getting up in the middle of the night to fetch a glass of water from the kitchen. Amanda hears the apartment door slide open, wondering who it is in the middle of the night.

  “Where the hell’ve you been, Paul?”

  Her mother is mad.

  “Out.” “Doing what? Oh, fuck, never mind, I can smell it on your breath.”

  “I just needed t’relax.”

  “Horizons Beyond ends next week, and the only thing I’ve got lined up is the Saturn run on the Kurtz.”

  “Thought you weren’t gonna take that.”

  “I wasn’t—when you weren’t drinking away the rent money. And don’t deny it, because that’s the only money we have at this point.”

  * * *

  …sitting on a hard bench while Mom talks to a police officer.

  “Look, Ms. Ripley, we can let Mr. Carter off with a fine, but if you can’t pay it, we’re going to have to keep him.”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  “Mom?”

  “What is it, sweetheart?”

  “Are we bringing Dad home?”

  “I hope so. Officer, I’ll pay the fine.”

  “All right. And you might want to suggest to your husband not to pick fights with people twice his size.”

  * * *

  …sitting on the other side of the door to her room, eavesdropping on her parents.

  “I’m done, Paul. I can’t keep doing this. I want a divorce.”

  “You can’t do that, Ellen!”

  “Really? Then try and stop me. By the way, you’ll need a lawyer, which you can’t afford.”

  “Neither can you.”

  “And whose fault is that?”

  * * *

  …packing her things in her mother’s apartment.

  “I don’t want to go to Paul’s!”

 
; “Amanda, sweetheart, I’m going to be on the Sephoria. We’re going to the Oort Cloud and back, and that’ll take a few months.”

  “Why can’t I go with you?”

  “I think you’d put me over my weight allotment.”

  * * *

  …hiding in her room, waiting for Paul to stop yelling at nobody and pass out so she can go to the kitchenette and make dinner.

  * * *

  …Paul coming home after a job interview.

  “I didn’t really want that job anyhow…”

  * * *

  …her mother, back from the Sephoria with enough money to pay off all their debts, then getting into another argument with Paul over all the new debts he’d racked up in nine months.

  * * *

  …a year with her mother on paid parental leave. She told the company that she was a single mother, even though Paul was legally her stepfather because they were married so long.

  “It was just a white lie…”

  * * *

  …her mother talking, but Amanda can’t hear her because of the loud noise—

  * * *

  —the pneumatic hiss of the cryochamber as the lid swung back. It felt as if she’d only just gone into stasis, yet like she’d been under for half of her life.

  The hiss died down, the dream images faded from her consciousness, and Amanda found herself chilled to the bone. Part of it was the nature of cryosleep, as the body’s metabolism slowed considerably, causing her to feel colder. Another part of it was the cryogel, the nature of which she neither understood nor cared about. She was happy to understand the machine itself, but the biological aspects were of little interest. As a mechanical engineer, she needed to know how to fix what was broken.

  As a passenger on a space ship, she was simply grateful that it wasn’t broken.

  Swinging her legs around to sit upright on the horizontal platform, she hugged herself, shivering uncontrollably. Goosebumps rose on her exposed arms and legs and her teeth chattered loud enough to wake the dead.

  Except there were no dead—nor were there any living. The other seven cryochambers were empty. Two had been empty from the start, and in fact they’d been deactivated. The remaining five had been assigned to Christopher Samuels, the Weyland-Yutani lawyer Nina Taylor, and the three members of the Torrens’s crew.

  The stasis pods sat in the center of the room, fanning outward from a central unit. Along the wall, across from each pod, there were control units with a central monitor flanked by two smaller ones. Each screen displayed the same phrase.

  USER SIGNED IN

  The only exception was the monitor that stood at the foot of her cryochamber. There the blinking message was clear.

  PLEASE SIGN IN

  Guess I’m the last one up.

  At the head of her cryochamber were a plain white towel and a keycard bearing her image and a barcode. After wiping as much of the cryogel off her as she could, she stepped onto the cold metal floor, then over to the terminal. There she inserted her keycard. As soon as she did, the command stopped blinking and changed.

  WELCOME

  A. RIPLEY

  She toweled herself off some more, and it helped, but she needed to locate some clothes or she was going to freeze her ass off.

  Padding through a doorway she found herself in the locker room adjacent to the cryochamber, and went to the locker that had been assigned to her. Just as it had when they’d set off from Luna, it opened at the touch of her keycard. Inside, right where she left them, were her clothes.

  Given her profession, Amanda generally preferred clothes that offered a full range of motion, could be put on and taken off easily, and offered places to put her tools of the trade. She climbed into a green jumpsuit with plenty of pockets, and zipped it up. Reaching into the locker again she pulled out a hair-tie, yanking her long blond hair back into a ponytail. She didn’t need to do that, strictly speaking, as she was just a passenger on this trip. Tying her hair back was something she did to keep it out of her face while working.

  Dmitriy had asked her once why she didn’t just cut her hair, since it got in the way.

  “One,” she’d replied, “tying it back isn’t that much trouble. Two, I hate the way it looks when I cut it myself. And three, you don’t pay me enough that I can afford to pay someone else to cut it.”

  On this run, though, the only “work” she’d be doing was getting her hands on the flight recorder, to find out if it was the real deal or not.

  A low throb behind her eyes reminded her that it had been weeks since she’d last had any coffee, so she headed over to the mess hall.

  * * *

  A short, prim-looking woman sat alone at the big round table in the center of the mess hall. She wore spectacles and was picking at a bowl of something that looked like glorified mush. Around her were a couple of place settings that had been abandoned—empty mugs, crumb-covered plates, and a few playing cards showing the half-hearted remains of a solitaire game.

  “Taylor,” Amanda said to the woman as she walked in and headed straight for the coffee dispenser. “Good morning.”

  Nina Taylor scowled up at her. “Ripley. It’s certainly not ‘good,’ and I very much doubt that it’s ‘morning,’ either.”

  Amanda said nothing as she retrieved a cup and poured coffee into it. As she moved to take a chair where someone had been playing solitaire, her companion’s expression softened.

  “I’m sorry,” Taylor said, her voice also softening. “I feel like death. I don’t know how you people put up with hypersleep regularly.”

  Shrugging, Amanda said, “You get used to it. I just focus on trying to remember what I can of the dreams.” She frowned as she realized her most recent ones had left only vague impressions.

  Taylor echoed her expression. “I don’t recall dreaming. I simply lay down in the chamber, the door closed. A moment later the door opened, and I felt as if someone had beaten me with a series of ballpeen hammers.” She poked at her food some more. “What do you recall from this trip?”

  “Just a lot of memories bubbling up into my brain. You know how they say that when you’re dying, your life flashes before your eyes? My life flashes before my eyes when I’m in cryosleep.” Amanda took a sip of the coffee. Years of needing to caffeinate quickly had trained her to get used to drinking her coffee black. It also trained her to learn to hate the taste of bad coffee, which was pretty much all she got. The oil slicks she’d guzzled down on Luna were particularly bad. The Torrens’s coffee made her nostalgic for Luna’s sludge.

  “Well, perhaps your mind thinks you’re dying because your metabolism slows down.” Taylor sighed. “Who knows? I don’t do long-hauls very often. Most legal execs don’t travel further than the coffee machine. Speaking of which, that looks very refreshing.” She stepped over to the counter where the dispenser was located.

  “Looks are deceiving,” Amanda said dryly. “I’m surprised Weyland-Yutani felt the need to send legal along.”

  As Taylor got her own coffee together—dumping in a ton of sugar, though no dairy—her tone became enthusiastic, as if shop talk made her feel better.

  “The loss of the Nostromo and its cargo cost the company a lot of money,” she said. “It’s important we find out what happened. If I can close the case with a conclusive accident report, it will look gre—” Looking up, Taylor cut herself off and regarded Amanda apologetically. “I’m sorry,” she said, her words soft again. “That was insensitive. I realize your mother has been missing for fifteen years, and you—”

  “It’s okay.” Amanda waved her off. “You have your job, and I have mine.”

  “Yes, but I’m just doing a job.”

  “So’m I. Samuels is paying me and everything.”

  “Yet I imagine it’s more than that for you,” Taylor said, sipping from her cup. She made a face. “And you’re right, this coffee is dreadful.”

  “It really isn’t—more than that, I mean. Not that the coffee isn’t dreadful.” She paused, and
shifted gears. “Let’s put it this way, Taylor: I’m not really expecting you to come out of this with a conclusive accident report. This isn’t the first time I’ve been sent on a Nostromo hunt, and fifteen years of bullshit and disappointment have pretty much beaten expectations out of me.”

  “That’s terrible.” Taylor looked genuinely horrified.

  Amanda chuckled. “What, my life or the coffee?”

  “I wouldn’t presume to judge your life, Ripley,” the lawyer responded. “But you can’t give up hope.”

  “Hope just leads to disappointment. I’ve had enough disappointments, thanks. I prefer to expect the universe to fuck me over repeatedly. That saves time when it does so.”

  “That’s an awful attitude to have.”

  “It’s not all bad.” Amanda took a thoughtful sip of her coffee and flipped over one of the solitaire cards. It was a red two that she could place on a black three. “At least this time I’m the one getting paid, rather than some scam artist.” She looked up. “Like I said, far as I’m concerned, this is a job. Usually when I find a lead on what happened to Mommy, the money flows in the other direction. I like this way better.”

  “That’s sweet,” Taylor said.

  “Excuse me?” Amanda wondered what the fuck the woman was talking about.

  “That you still refer to Warrant Officer Ripley as ‘Mommy.’”

  “I did?” Amanda blinked, flipping over an ace and placing it above the other cards. “I didn’t realize. Fuck, I haven’t thought of her as ‘Mommy’ since I was six. Probably those bad memories I dreamed. When I remember my childhood, I remember my mother… not Ellen Ripley.”

  “Your father wasn’t on the Nostromo, was he?”

  “Which one?” Quickly, she added, “Not that it matters—neither one was. My biological father walked out when I was three. I don’t even really remember him. My stepfather is Paul Carter, but he wasn’t on the Nostromo either, and he and Mom divorced ages ago. Honestly, I haven’t spoken to him in years. I haven’t thought of him as ‘Dad,’ either, since the divorce. He’s been Paul, even after Mom disappeared and he made his half-assed attempt to raise me on his own. I’ve been on my own since I was eighteen.”