Alien, page 2
It seemed possible to make it there, at least.
After all, even with accelerated maturation, it would take the Xenomorph time to grow large enough to be a threat to a grown man. That was what had Fowler told him—at least an hour, maybe two, before the creature posed any real danger. Right?
He thought about the bodies in the medbay, the way the blood of the Xenomorph had eaten through the ruptured abdominal cavity of that poor research volunteer, and shook his head as if to shake the memory loose, then cast it away.
Volunteer. That was a laugh. Had anyone really volunteered? Had anything Dr. Fowler told him about the project been on the level?
There was a crash from the room behind him, and he flinched. A meaty, crunching kind of thump followed, as if something or someone had been thrown against a wall. Watkins slipped into one of the armored jackets, gripped the gun, and slid the safety off.
There were other people spread elsewhere throughout the facility—Weyland-Yutani’s last guard, the lab’s essential personnel—and most of those people didn’t know anything about Dr. Fowler’s work. Research assistants, scientists in other departments, janitors, private military contractors—people who might never see the Xenomorph coming. They’d be unarmed, unaware, unprepared…
…and there was nothing, really, that he could do. He couldn’t save anyone. Watkins wasn’t a hero, and he knew it. He’d only die trying. All he was good for, as far as he could see, was running like hell.
When he heard another crash, followed this time by Dr. Fowler screaming, Watkins did exactly that.
* * *
In the shaft that ran between the large specimen storage room and the rest of the facility, the Xenomorph crept toward the sound of movement. Its muscles ached as they stretched—it was growing fast, its arms and legs taking shape, its claws forming—but that didn’t slow it down. The ache was dull enough and served only to sharpen its senses.
Tunnels and holes let it move in darkness throughout the metal hive. Sometimes the tunnels led to warm, living things. Sometimes they did not. Some tunnels led to a new nest. There were eggs in the nest, and it tore away the metal around them so the eggs could sense new hosts.
* * *
In the twelve years that Dr. Sarah Shirring had worked for Weyland-Yutani, she had become familiar with emergencies. Much of what the corporation paid big money for was of a sensitive and therefore secretive nature, skating along the fine edges in legal, moral, and scientific propriety. Sarah had justified her work over the years as innovative, daring, necessary to move the human race forward in its desire to populate across the stars, and that kind of work came with risks.
Often in her career, Sarah had both participated in and organized safety and emergency drills. She had been strict, almost militant in her insistence that her staff memorize the protocols and procedures put into place should an emergency arise. They worked with volatile chemicals, and one could never be too careful.
Sarah had even experienced a number of real emergencies—biochemical mishaps, perimeter breaches by well-meaning idiots only half in the know, trying to free a test subject or stop what they saw as corporate vice. She had always taken emergencies seriously. To fail to do so meant people got hurt.
Of course, that was before the last couple of months, when the impending destruction of the moon had begun to make even the most trivial systems unreliable. Plumbing had gone on the fritz. Lights flickered. Important data, when logged on the computers, could be lost to a power surge or dip. It was absolutely maddening.
Even Sarah had had enough.
When the alarm sounded and the robotic voice over the loudspeakers told all Menhit employees to make their way calmly to the storage area, she didn’t bother. Sarah assumed the catastrophe was no worse than one of the interns—they’d been left with the corporation’s B-team—spilling a vial and panicking prematurely. In fact, when the loudspeaker system crackled a few minutes into the alarm loop and the robotic voice cut off, she assumed the problem had been solved, if there had even been a problem at all.
It was, in Sarah’s opinion, a good thing the corporation was getting them off that godforsaken moon, because between the incompetent “specialists,” the skeleton support crew, and the systems failing all over the facility, it was impossible to do any real work. How much time would be lost with this most recent hiccup, sending working scientists to the storage area to hunker down when they could have been working? Maybe even locking them in there because of some electrical failure?
Twenty minutes?
Thirty minutes?
How many samples would go bad while unattended? How many time-sensitive experiments would fail?
When, thirty minutes later, the robotic voice began to blare the warning again overhead, Sarah rolled her eyes and went back to putting the test-tube samples back in the mini-fridge. In fact, she ignored it for another good ten minutes before that nagging little doubt in her, the part of her that still, on some level, respected protocol even on moons where protocol had fallen apart, compelled her to lock up the fridge and strip off her gloves.
The voice again instructed employees to move toward the storage area. She turned from her counter along the wall, and sighed.
There was a sound.
Before she could look up, something large and bony reached down, clamped over her mouth, and lifted her off the ground. Her eyes went wide and she struggled, but it paid her no mind. She couldn’t turn her head to see the thing but she could smell a kind of acrid scent and feel heat and a dripping wetness on her neck and shoulder.
The thing dragged her into the vent and toward the storage room, it seemed. Arriving there, it thrust her against a wall, her feet dangling, and began secreting a kind of webbing to encase her. She struggled but soon couldn’t move. The effort sapped her strength. She winced, but found she didn’t have the breath to cry out.
* * *
In the hallway to the toxicology lab, Dr. Ana Thayer, eight-and-a-half months pregnant, made her way slowly down the hall. Unexpectedly, her body shuddered. She felt a sharp pain just beneath her breasts, and at first thought the baby was kicking hard, showing her its readiness to come out. She put a hand on the place from which the pain was spreading, a cold-burn kind of pain that didn’t feel right. Her fingers felt something sharp protruding just above the swell of her stomach. She looked down.
The thing was coated with blood.
Her blood.
She tried to suck in a breath to scream, and found she couldn’t.
The sharp thing was the cause of the pain, coming straight through from her back to her chest, and she tried to turn but that only sent bright sparks of agony down through her stomach. The baby kicked inside of her.
Dr. Thayer couldn’t breathe or think. She tried to pull and then push the thing out of her, the sharp little segment that cut her fingers when she tried to grasp it, slick with her blood. The segment disappeared suddenly, pulled out of her. It drew all the strength away with it, and she sank to the floor. Already the room around her was getting hazy.
“My baby,” she tried to say, and looked up to see a monster. She had a moment to recognize the bloody segment as part of a longer tail before it jabbed her in the eye, and everything went dark.
Moving back into the shaft, the one which provided access between the storage room and the medical bay, the creature followed more sounds of movement and voices.
* * *
Research assistants George Miller and Lena Forster slept on the twin cots set up in the rec room. At first, the overhead voice seemed far away to Lena, cutting through the haze of sleep in urgent tones rather than words. She could have—would have—kept sleeping. It seemed lately that the changes in the gravity and magnetosphere of the moon were taking their toll, making her limbs hurt, her head hurt. She felt heavy, weighed down.
The cots had been set up specifically to offset some of the exhaustion the remaining crew at Menhit experienced, although that had been Dr. Watkins’s doing, not Weyland-Yutani’s. The company had made it clear that time was precious. It took time to get results, and results were the only thing buying the crew’s way off that moon.
The voice blared, a sound from another time, another place. It took Lena a moment to realize the voice was the lab’s warning system. It was instructing them that there was a security breach, and that all personnel were to report to the storage room. It reminded them that external lockdown procedures were already under way, and that internal procedures would commence in ten minutes and thirty-seven seconds.
“George? George, wake up.”
The man groaned in the cot beside her, and Lena shook him harder.
“George,” she said. “Come on. Get up. There’s something wrong.” He sat up, listening a moment to the robotic voice overhead. Then the sleepiness in his face dissipated and he stood with a jolt.
“Let’s go. We can’t stay here.”
“What is it, do you think?” she asked as she followed him out into the hall.
“I don’t know. I—” George’s eyes grew wide.
A silhouetted creature about the height of a man stood at the far end of the hallway. It was hunched over, shuddering. There was a large cracking sound that made Lena flinch, and the creature’s arms seemed to grow. Another round of cracks and the thing seemed to unfurl, standing taller.
Lena found her voice and screamed. As she did, the creature stopped shuddering and turned its long, curving head in their direction.
“Run,” George said in a dry, rasping voice. Then louder, “Run!”
Lena tried to run. At first her legs refused to get the message, until the thing charged down the hallway toward them, its long tail snapping back and forth. Then, Lena turned and ran.
There were more cracking and crunching sounds behind her, but this time George’s screams followed. When she turned to see why, she saw only a bony, square jaw within a much larger maw. Then there was pain in her head and blackness.
* * *
In the storage room, the Xenomorph spun those who had survived its attacks in hive-webbing, placing them near the arrangement of eggs.
When it had run out of prey, it found a way out of the metal confines of the facility. Outside, the Xenomorph discovered a different lifeform.
* * *
Along the outer south-facing wall of the Menhit facility, the majority of the generators and power grids were housed behind steel fences. The roar they produced was loud—loud enough that Wesley Lombardo, a private military contractor on guard, didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary.
A blur of gray moving swiftly along the top rail of the chain-link barrier dropped down on him. Lombardo fired off one shot, more from surprise than any real reflex, before something grabbed him by the biceps and lifted him off the ground. Twisting around, he got a look at his attacker. The elongated head had no eyes, but seemed to see him all the same. Its rictus grin, full of teeth, parted wide, and for a moment, all Lombardo could see was the salivating darkness inside.
Then, an inner mouth shot out and punched a hole in his forehead, straight through skin and bone to his brain.
Wes Lombardo’s body dropped. The alien scaled the fence and leaped down among the generators, swiping at the casings. Its long claws tore through the metal and at last, both light and sound faded.
Moving like a shadow, it made its silent way back into the facility.
* * *
Back in the chamber from which it had emerged, the Xenomorph drone, grown nearly to full size, darted back down the maze of hallways to the new nest, where it had finished secreting enough hive webbing to secure the living bipeds.
There was no Queen, but instinct drove the creature to protect the eggs, to secure for them the hosts which would incubate the face-hugging hatchlings. Then instinct sent it back up into the vent above the nest, into the cool darkness there where it could rest for the time being and be safe.
The tunnels had been plunged into absolute blackness, accentuated by barriers that had dropped into place, but after a time lights came on. The utter silence was punctuated by vibrations here and there. The section that had held the eggs made empty, futile clicks.
The cocooned prey were locked in place with the eggs placed nearby. They emitted a steam that drifted through the nest, glowing in the new, dim light.
Then the eggs began to hatch.
2
Panic spread through the Hygieia Colony.
The wobble in BG-791’s orbit had become increasingly erratic over recent months, and the scientific data was grim. It was only a matter of time—weeks, perhaps days—before the changes in the gravitational forces would begin exerting a strain on the moon itself, tearing portions of it away first in small pieces, then in larger chunks. Whatever was left would crash into Hephaestus, the planet it orbited.
For going on twelve years Dr. Siobhan McCormick had been assistant director of research with the Seegson Pharmaceuticals lab around which the Hygieia Colony was built. First she had noticed the changes in the behavior of the vurfurs, the vicious deer-like mammals that hunted along the colony’s perimeter. They had become anxious, more prone to attacking any colonist who wandered out to the Gatelands.
Then she had seen it in the frenetic and confused migratory patterns of the scant bird life on the moon. They seemed confused, flying in circles and cawing anxiously. She was a botanist, though, not a biologist or geologist; plants were her primary field of expertise, and she had seen some of the most telling signs in the seismic activity that displaced large areas of soil, rock, and surface vegetation. Relatively minor at first, the tremors grew in strength until it had become dangerous for her to conduct her research.
Lightning storms increased, and changes in the magnetic field led first to widespread irritability, then to outright violence as people lashed out at one another, often for little or no reason. Travel restrictions were implemented so that the traders who brought supplies, news, and gossip from the more populated worlds stopped coming. Eventually trade ceased entirely. Before long, communication transmissions began to address evacuation and relocation, and even there, news was sparse. Seegson Newscore updates all but ceased.
With each ship that departed, the population decreased, and no one new was brought in. Once a colony of seventy, Hygieia was reduced to essential personnel and those members of their immediate families who chose to remain, or who had no choice in the matter. For months, the remaining few were cut off from the rest of colonized space.
Counted among those who hadn’t been selected for evacuation, Siobhan had never felt true dread before, but it was there now. At first it had been subtle, that fear, but it grew a bit every day until it seemed to wash in and out and over her like some invisible tide, pulling her and the rest who remained into its undertow. The sensation only got worse whenever they asked about the status of the evacuation.
Her boss, Arthur Benton, looped her in on negotiations. The man was a good director of research, but not so great a people-person, so the organization and dissemination of information for any project often fell on Siobhan’s shoulders. The United Americas government protocols for evacuation were no exception. She—well, she and Camilla, the synthetic who had worked beside her for years—were tasked to make sure all the colonists were where they needed to be when they needed to be there, and that they followed all the UA procedures down to the last crossed “t” and dotted “i.”
Siobhan read through the latest UA transmission again, which outlined the logistics. The next ship was slated to evacuate a group of fourteen people, including herself, and one synthetic. The UA would do so in exchange for data relating to plant extraction and refinement techniques Seegson Pharmaceuticals had been developing on Hygieia.
Seegson was forced to agree.
Despite the conditions placed on them, Siobhan counted herself lucky that the Seegson administrators cared enough about their people—even those far on the outer rim, on Independent Core System colony planets and moons—to negotiate a relatively quick and safe evacuation. She hadn’t quite understood, however, why the task fell to the government. The company had put them on the moon easily enough, and it seemed as if they could remove them just as easily. She assumed it had to do with money. Things like this always did.
Frankly, she didn’t much care who sent the help, as long as someone did, and quickly.
Frowning, Siobhan slipped the printout into the drawer of the desk on which her personal terminal sat. She didn’t look at the other ones—the transmissions from Erik, which had been so frequent at first and then trailed off to nothing. The quick note from her sister back on Earth, sent hours before she’d died… the last few ties to a homeworld that was so remote, so different to her now, that it had ceased to be home.
Eventually she’d have to add those to her unfinished packing. Like the rest, she would be subject to the directive that allowed only two traveling containers per person. People were to bring only what they couldn’t do without, and she had made certain that was understood. Things they needed for day-to-day survival, like food and toiletries, would be replaced. Thus the relics and remnants of fourteen lives and one synthetic’s existence sat in travel cases waiting to be loaded onto the rescue ship.
Only Siobhan’s belongings—things like those transmissions—remained, most of them in the same places where she’d kept them for more than a decade. She packed a little every night, but it was hard to empty even so desolate a place of the few things that made it bearable.
The Seegson Pharmaceuticals lab on BG-791 was all she’d known, all she’d had, for so long. The company’s promises of lateral positions and job transfers after evacuation were ephemerally comforting, but Siobhan couldn’t help but wonder what she was doing. She was thirty-eight, single, childless, with no family and few friends, and a home and career that was literally about to go up in smoke and flames. Did a transfer to another planet, another moon, really matter? She’d been proud once at the thought of contributing to a process that saved lives, but the hero-high had long ago faded with the day-to-day minutiae of their work.
