Alien, page 15
“Kenny,” he said as he approached. “Go get some sleep. I’m taking over. Roots, go grab something to eat, and then come back here.”
“Copy that,” Elkins said, and he took off. Roots followed right behind him. Alec took up the spot where Roots had been leaning against the wall, near the doorway. The hall on the other side was quiet and empty.
“Sergeant Brand,” Dr. Fowler said. Alec turned, and saw that the scientist was giving him a sly smile. “You look refreshed. I trust you slept well?”
“I slept,” Alec said. “That’s good enough.”
The men stood across from each other, looking down the hall beyond the quarantine door. It was empty and silent.
“So,” Fowler said after a time, “I take it you approve of Dr. McCormick—Siobhan—and her intention to commit grand larceny?”
Alec didn’t answer.
“By stealing a corporation ship, I mean. As a marine, you’re comfortable with that?”
“I am.”
“Now, don’t get me wrong. I understand that you all want to get off this moon. The Weyland-Yutani corporation—and I, of course—would naturally want to assist in this terrible situation… correct the UA’s error in judgment, and all that. But don’t you think deliberately taking and forcibly rerouting the ship, without notifying the corporation, without consulting the fuel reserves and life support system’s capacity… that it’s all a little irresponsible?”
Alec turned on him, his eyes flashing with anger.
“Responsibility is a funny thing, Doctor Fowler.”
Fowler was quiet for a moment. “You’re a man of few words,” he said. “Few but meaningful ones, when you utter them. In my experience, people avoid talking because they’re too stupid or too afraid to. You don’t seem to be either. You seem like a reasonable man. So it surprises me that you would so adamantly defend this criminal action you’re all planning.” He waved vaguely toward the medpods. “You strike me as a man with a backbone and a brain, a rare combination.”
“I think you and I are done talking,” Alec said as calmly as he was able. “About criminal actions, or anything else.”
“Sergeant Brand—”
“If you say one more word,” Alec replied in a low voice, his gaze still fixed on the hallway, “I will shoot you where you stand. One shot to the head, before you can even exhale. No one will ever know.”
Dr. Fowler held up his hands in a gesture of surrender, pushed off from the wall where he was leaning, and walked away.
Alec thought of the Gaspar, the colony ship of his youth. He’d been registered in the ship’s log under his father’s last name, despite the fact that his mother had only known him for the brief time he’d been stationed in El Hoyo. The name Brand, his mother thought, might make the people running the ship treat him better, as the son of a USCMC sergeant and not just some poor kid from El Hoyo.
It hadn’t mattered, though—not really. The colonists had been kind to the kid traveling alone, looking for a new life. The people who ran the ship—Weyland-Yutani—hadn’t cared whether he was a marine’s son or a poor kid from a tiny village. To the corporation, they were all fodder for experiments with the aliens.
They had been people like Dr. Fowler, who really didn’t see the hypocrisy in labeling inconveniences “irresponsible” or “criminal,” while they played at being dark gods all across the galaxy. Alec was pretty sure that given the opportunity, Dr. Fowler would sabotage their plans, even kill them if he had to, in order to protect what he had developed for his bosses.
If it came to that, Alec thought, he’d kill the man. He’d be doing humanity a favor.
* * *
Around eight a.m., Roots and Elkins rejoined Siobhan, Alec, Kira, Fowler in the quarantine area by the medpods. They’d each had a turn at sleep, though no one looked particularly well-rested. The moon had been restless that night, groaning and twisting beneath the facility. The gravity had shifted again, and they could feel the pull of it in their bones, in the queasy lumps in their stomachs, and in the heaviness of the air in their lungs.
The pressure had given Siobhan a lightheadedness that had settled grumpily into another headache. There would be no time to load up the Weyland-Yutani ship with the boxes of their belongings, so they gathered up supplies and whatever personal items they could carry in one bag each. They made one exception, though: Alec and Roots went to the barracks and brought back Mr. Bones and some clothes from Kira’s things. Siobhan’s eyes misted at the sheer joy that lit up Kira’s face upon seeing the stuffed dog, and at the way she hugged it.
She saw that Alec was also carrying McGowan’s dog tags, which he slipped into his bag.
There was still no sign of Camilla. When Kira asked Siobhan if Auntie Cam would be joining them on the big ship, Siobhan honestly didn’t know how to respond. Camilla had never done anything like this, and her absence made no sense. The synthetic was unable to feel fear or guilt, so she wouldn’t be deliberately avoiding them, and Dr. Fowler seemed pretty certain that a Xenomorph would have no interest in attacking a synthetic unless it somehow got in the creature’s way.
Had that happened? Had Camilla gotten between them and a Xenomorph?
Siobhan knew the others were angry with the synthetic, blaming her for getting their evac ship cancelled, but she knew better. Despite the setback it had caused, Camilla had done what she had to, what was logical and right in her logical, right mind. It hadn’t been an emotional decision, because as often as Siobhan thought otherwise, Camilla simply wasn’t capable of emotion. At least, Siobhan thought, if she’d been destroyed, she hadn’t been afraid to die.
On their way to the armored personnel carrier, a general quiet settled over the group. Words were few and spoken in low voices. It had been a long couple of days, and they were starting to wear on everyone. There was a general sense that they were heading into the mouth of the beast by going back to the Weyland-Yutani lab. The truth was, though, that at this point, there was no safe harbor anywhere.
Overnight, deep cracks had opened in the ground. Many of the tree-sized brambles beyond the Gatelands had been uprooted, and the anxious vurfur, likely sensing their own impending demise, pawed and stamped at the brambles’ edges. Birds moved uneasily from branch to branch, but often faltered in their flight. They felt the gravity, too, and the approaching end.
Siobhan could only look so long before she had to turn away. There hadn’t been much life on BG-791, but what there was had reached its end and, on some level, knew it. Both the scientist and the human in her hurt to think of their extinction.
As they loaded themselves and their belongings into the APC, Siobhan noticed the scratch marks from the giant Xenomorph with the antlers that had chased them down. She touched one of the furrows in the metal and felt a surge of both grief and anger. The two, she noticed, were becoming interchangeable.
Kira sat up front with Elkins, and Siobhan sat in back with Alec, Roots, and Dr. Fowler. Siobhan could hear Elkins telling Kira all about the controls, giving her a kind of crash course in driving the APC. The girl asked all kinds of questions.
“What does this button do?”
“Why do you need to pull that?”
He fielded each one with enthusiasm that Siobhan was pretty sure was both genuine and meant to keep the girl’s thoughts occupied. Anything was better than dwelling on and dreading what they might find at the Menhit Lab.
* * *
It took almost two hours to reach the Weyland-Yutani facilities, navigating around downed branches and the carcasses of dead vurfur. Siobhan was once again impressed with Elkin’s control of the vehicle, and how he managed to divide his focus between the road and the little girl beside him.
They pulled up to the front entrance, and Elkins put the APC in park.
“Okay,” he said, turning around in his seat. “Last stop on this train. Menhit Station, dead ahead.”
“What’s a train?” Kira asked.
Elkins smiled at her. “You’re going to see, once we get to the new planet.”
They collected their things.
“The platform where the ship will pick us up is out back,” Dr. Fowler said. “Not quite as big as your Gatelands, but it does the job. We can—”
Before he could finish, a tremor rocked the APC. Dr. Fowler was knocked against the side of the vehicle, and Kira fell back into her seat. Siobhan staggered to the front windshield to see the damage. Pieces of the mountain behind the lab were splintering and tumbling down the cliffside. A rock nearly as big as the APC itself landed directly in front of them.
Alec joined her at the window as an avalanche of large rocks tumbled to the path around the side of the facility, effectively cutting it off from the front. The other side of the building, Siobhan saw, had already been buried in loose rocks from the cliffs on that side.
A huge boulder bounced down the side of the mountain and onto the roof of the facility to the left, caving it in. Another brought down most of the back of the building in a cloud of dust. Finally, the moon stopped shivering, and the rocks stopped falling.
All was quiet and still.
“Damn it,” Dr. Fowler said through clenched teeth. Siobhan hadn’t even noticed that the man had joined her and Alec at the window. “We can’t go around that way to get to the platform. We’ll have to go through the building.”
“If that’s the only way,” Alec said, “then let’s move out. Elkins, Roots, take point. Dr. Fowler, we’ll need you to guide the men up front through the facility. I want this safe, quick, and quiet. If you have to fire, get them at a distance, and aim for the soft parts.”
“Do 121s even have soft parts?” Roots asked.
“Everything’s got a soft part somewhere,” Elkins replied.
“You’d be surprised, gentlemen,” Dr. Fowler said. “You’d be surprised.”
They opened the APC door and climbed out into the stark quiet of the facility. Even at noon, the sun didn’t quite penetrate the hazy gray clouds above. Without the benefit of the hazmat suits, the air so far from the terraformed area of the Gatelands was thinner. It made Siobhan’s headache pulse in her temples.
“The two fastest and safest ways,” Dr. Fowler said, eyeing the facility like it was a beast in a flimsy cage, “would have been that path to the right and the side door over there, both buried in rock. So, my recommendation is that we take the tunnels underneath.”
“Come again?” Roots said, shouldering his gun. “I thought you said that the safest way is… underground?”
“I did,” Fowler said, sounding defensive. “We have a network of… well, for want of a better phrase, escape tunnels. Evacuation routes should an emergency ever arise. They run the length of the facility, all the way to the platform. By my estimation, this is as much of an emergency as this facility will ever face, so now is as good a time as any to use them.”
Roots still looked at him as if he were insane. “You know they’re hive creatures, right?” the private said. “They like tunnels and dark places.”
Dr. Fowler waved aside his concern. “There are no vents in the tunnels that would give them access, and all the ways in and out are locked. The creatures likely aren’t even aware that the tunnels are there.”
Roots opened his mouth to protest further, but Dr. Fowler cut him off.
“Since you know so much about them, you must know that while the Xenomorphs can adapt to extreme cold with little difficulty, they eschew fire. Our tunnels have weapons caches—M240 incinerator units. Flamethrowers, ladies and gentlemen.” He paused for what Siobhan could only guess was dramatic effect. “The idea was that under certain circumstances, there might be a need to… cleanse and disinfect, so to speak. To eliminate the spread of contagion in one’s wake. So if, by some chance, the Xenomorphs should follow us into the tunnels, the M240s will be an effective deterrent.”
“How do you know the tunnels didn’t cave in,” Elkins said, “like the building?” He looked skeptical.
“We can be reasonably certain that’s not the case,” Fowler replied coolly. “The tunnels were constructed using materials developed here at the lab—they’re quakeproof, fireproof, and built to withstand extremes in temperature and pressure. Even a direct explosion would cause minimal damage. Rocks falling above the ground probably didn’t even make a dent.”
He seemed to be waiting for more challenges, but the rest remained silent.
Finally, Siobhan spoke. “Are you sure they’re down there? The flamethrowers, I mean.”
“Yes, I am certain. No one who knows about those tunnels is left alive. Except for me, of course, and I have one of the only key cards that will open the access door.” He shrugged. “This is your plan, though, Dr. McCormick. If you can think of a way over those rocks or through them, then by all means, I’d love to hear it.”
Siobhan glanced at the others. They were watching her expectantly, even Alec. It was her plan, and it was a desperate one, but it was the only option they had. The tunnels seemed like the only way off this moon.
“Okay. Tunnels it is, then.”
“Dr. McCormick—” Roots began, but when Siobhan turned to him, he stopped.
“We have no choice,” she said. “That Weyland-Yutani ship is our only way off this moon, and the tunnel is the only way to get to it.”
“You heard the lady,” Alec said. “Dr. Fowler, get us to the tunnels. You worry about the way ahead. I’ve got our backs.”
17
Dr. Fowler led them through the front entrance and into the lobby. The force of the falling rocks outside had cracked the walls down to the foundation. As they stood in the empty room, the building creaked around them. Siobhan suspected that at any time, a piece of ceiling could collapse or a room cave in.
Despite Fowler’s assurances, she couldn’t help but wonder what shape the tunnels would be in, after months of tremors and moonquakes. Given his tendency to lie or gloss over what he didn’t want to admit, she didn’t feel particularly confident in his assessment.
“Just as cozy as I remember it,” Roots said flatly, righting a fallen potted plant on the front desk counter. Then he followed as Fowler led them through the lobby and a doorway that opened into the gray hall beyond. Many of the pipes had cracked, the wires looping down. It made the hallway look like segmented tails and exoskeleton ribs.
The ceiling lights that had offered just enough glow to see by during their first incursion had since nearly gone out. What little light was left created shadows that looked distorted, flickering just on the periphery of vision.
At one of the locked doors, Dr. Fowler stopped, pulling a small ring of key cards from his pocket. He sorted through them until he found one with a light blue band across an edge, and he slipped it into the lock’s card reader.
Nothing happened.
He pulled it out and slid it in again, and this time, a green light on the top of the lock flickered for a moment, then came on. Fowler pushed open the door and led them into a stairwell. Metallic rails lined a concrete-alloy set of steps that ran down to a landing, with another set descending beyond that.
“This way,” he said.
Elkins and Roots descended the stairs, guns pointed ahead. For the moment they didn’t need flashlights. At the landing they swung their weapons toward the darkened stairs that continued down to the tunnels. After a moment, Elkins waved the others down, and they joined the marines on the landing. Behind them, Alec dragged the door shut, leaving them in darkness.
“Give it a moment,” Dr. Fowler said, “and the backup lights should go on down there.”
For several seconds, nothing happened. Then there was a series of clicks, followed by a flickering of light, and faint overheads came on in a wave along the length of the tunnel. Siobhan could see branching offshoots on both the left and right sides of the main corridor.
“You know which way you’re going?” Elkins asked Fowler. “Looks like a maze down there.”
“I know the way,” Fowler said. “It’s mostly just a straight shot forward.”
Elkins and Roots, with the scientist close behind, led the others down the steps and into the tunnel. The walls were rounded and looked, for the most part, intact. They had been painted gray-green and were lined with thin pipes of a darker shade. Much like the hallways upstairs, they looked to Siobhan like long ribs in the body cavity of some great animal.
As they moved down the tunnel, the marines checked the branches, nosing their guns into the shadows and listening. A series of numbers and letters in a much brighter yellow-green seemed to label entrances to the offshoots, but the lights down each branch remained dark. The illumination wasn’t much better in the main tunnel, but there was enough to make their way forward.
Occasionally they would hear the odd metallic ding, which would make the group jump and pause, waiting for the source to reveal itself.
Nothing came.
“Where do these branches go?” Kira asked as they walked. “Why are there so many?”
Dr. Fowler smiled. “There’s only one way in, like I said, but there are a few ways out. These side passages go to different parts of the campus beyond the lab itself, but like I said, all the ways are locked. The doors are a special titanium alloy—very strong. I don’t think the Xenomorphs could get through them, unless maybe—maybe—they bled their way through.”
Kira looked skeptical. “What about the earthquake?” she said. “Could an earthquake break any of those doors?”
Dr. Fowler’s smile slipped off his face. He didn’t answer.
They continued a little way in silence until a loud bang made them all jump, then freeze in place. The marines trained their guns on the branches to the left and right, waiting. A few other bangs echoed from farther away, and then dropped off.
After several moments of silence, Roots said, “They’re pretty quiet when they’re sneaking up on people, right? It couldn’t be just one of them, making that much noise.”
