“I’m sorry, Hoop… everyone. Just so strung out.” She and Ripley exchanged weak smiles.
“We all are,” Hoop said. “It’s been over seventy days, waiting for some sign that our signal’s been picked up, acknowledged and relayed onward, and that someone’s coming for us. Maybe the frequency’s been frazzled, and we’re just coming through as background fuzz. Or maybe someone’s heard us, but we’re too far out, and it’s too expensive to mount a rescue.”
“Or there’s just not the time,” Baxter said. “Changing course, plotting a route, estimating the fuel requirements. Anyone who did catch the signal would have a lot to do before they even got here.”
“Right,” Hoop said. “So we’re running out of time, and now we’ve got to help ourselves. More than we have been. More than just patching up problems while we wait.”
“Escape pods?” Powell asked.
“We’ve talked about that,” Lachance said, waving the suggestion aside.
“Yeah,” Sneddon said. “That’s just a slow death. We’re in a drifting orbit now, and even if we could rig a way to steer the pods more accurately, to land as close to the mine as possible, we could still go down miles away. We’d be scattered, alone, and vulnerable.”
“The Samson, then.” Baxter had mentioned this before, putting it forward as their only real option, if the individual escape pods wouldn’t work. They could open the doors, kill the aliens, then take the Samson away from LV178.
But it was a dropship, built for short-distance transport to and from the surface of a planet. It wasn’t equipped for deep space travel. No stasis pods, no recycling environmental systems. It was a no-go.
“We’d starve to death, suffocate, or end up murdering each other,” Lachance said. He looked at Baxter, wearing a deadpan face. “I’d kill you first, you know.”
“You’d try,” Baxter muttered.
“Yeah, sure, the Samson,” Powell said. “And who’s going to stand by those doors when we open them? We can’t see what those things are doing inside.”
“We can’t escape on the Samson,” Hoop said. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t need it. Ripley?” She looked uncertain, but she stood, stubbed out her cigarette, and lit another.
“Hoop and Sneddon came up with this,” she said, taking the first drag. “It might work. The Narcissus is a lifeboat as well as a deep space shuttle. Environmental systems, carbon dioxide recycling capability.”
“But for nine of us?” Welford asked.
“We take turns in the stasis pod,” Ripley said. “But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. There’s another problem.”
“Of course there is,” Powell said. “Why should anything be easy?”
“What’s the problem?” Lachance asked.
“The shuttle’s fuel cell is degraded,” Ripley said. “Less than ten percent charge left, which is nowhere near enough.”
“Enough to get us away from the Marion, surely,” Kasyanov said.
“I’ve run the figures,” Hoop said. “Lachance, Sneddon, I’d like you both to check them. But we need enough power to get the overloaded shuttle away from Marion, out of orbit, and accelerated to a speed that’ll get us back within the outer rim before we’ve died of old age. I figure we need eighty percent of a full charge, at least. Any more than that just means we can accelerate to a faster speed, get there quicker.”
Welford snorted, but then Ripley spoke again.
“It’ll be real-time,” she said. “Even sharing the stasis pod means there’ll be eight people at a time just… sitting around. Growing older.”
“We estimate eighty percent cell charge will get us past the outer rim within six years,” Hoop said. “Give or take.”
There was a stunned silence.
“So I do get to murder Baxter,” Lachance said.
“Fucking hell,” Powell said.
“Yeah,” Kasyanov agreed. Her voice shook.
“Welford’s feet smell,” Garcia said. “Lachance farts. Hell, we won’t survive a year.”
No one laughed.
“Is there a precedent?” Lachance asked.
“We’d be setting it,” Sneddon said.
The bridge was silent for a time while they all thought about what it really meant.
“You said we still need the Samson,” Lachance said. “For its fuel cells?”
Hoop shook his head, and looked to Ripley again.
“Won’t power my shuttle,” she said. “Completely different system design. The Marion’s might, but Hoop tells me they’re damaged and dangerous. He says there are more down in the mine, though—spares, stored remotely, just in case. So we have to take the Samson down to the surface. We bring a couple back up, adapt one, and fix it into the Narcissus. Load the shuttle up with as many supplies as we can, then blast off before your ship starts to burn.”
More silence.
Ripley smiled. “Then all we need is a deck of cards.”
“Piece o’ cake,” Lachance said.
“Yeah,” Powell said, voice quavering with panic, “no problem. Easy!”
“Well…” Hoop said. “There’s more.”
Powell muttered something, Kasyanov threw up her hands.
“What?” Lachance said. “Another problem? Don’t tell me. The shuttle’s made of cheese.”
“It seems Ripley’s been having some computer malfunctions,” Hoop said. “Maybe it’s best if I let her tell you about it.”
Ripley raised her cup of cold coffee in a toast. He shrugged apologetically. Sorry, he mouthed. She gave him the finger.
He liked Ripley. She was strong, attractive, confident in the same self-deprecating way Lucy Jordan had been.
Damn it.
“Ash,” Ripley said. “He was an android aboard my ship.”
She told the entire story, and something about it felt so unreal. It wasn’t the strangeness of the story itself— she’d witnessed everything, knew it all to be true. It was the idea that Ash had followed her. He’d expressed his sympathies, and Parker had burned off his face, but by then he must have already insinuated himself into the shuttle’s computer, just in case things went wrong aboard Nostromo. How could he have been so prepared? What sort of paranoid programing had he been given?
She spoke about him now as if he could hear every word. She was only sorry that he couldn’t feel shame.
“So as far as I can tell, he’s the reason I’m here,” she concluded. “And he’s not going to be happy unless I bring one of those things back with me.”
“That’s just really fucking dandy,” Powell said. “So we clear one ship of fucking great big rib-busting monsters so we can escape on another ship piloted by a psychotic AI. Wonderful. My life is complete.”
“I don’t think it’s that much of a problem anymore,” Ripley said. She lit another cigarette. The smoke burned her throat. They were harsh Russian cigarettes, brought along by Kasyanov. Of the Marion’s crew that survived, only the doctor smoked. “Because of Ash, I’m here instead of home. I haven’t been able to access detailed flight logs yet, but… it could be he’s just kept me floating around out here. Waiting for another sign that these aliens are still around.”
“But why keep you alive, if that’s the case?” Sneddon asked.
“Because he needs someone for the alien to impregnate. He’s seen how violent the fully-grown creature is, there’s no way he could get one back to Weyland-Yutani. Not on board the Narcissus.” She exhaled smoke and waved it away. “Anyway, that’s beside the point. Can’t undo what that bastard has done. But back then he was mobile, tactile. Hell, we all thought he was human. He interfered in our decision-making, steered events toward his secret agenda. And when things got out of his control, he went on the rampage.