At the next landing Hoop stopped again, staring, frozen.
Ripley moved up beside him. She was ready to act quickly—grab him, fall back and down if the alien pounced. But to begin with she couldn’t see anything out of place, and she touched his shoulder and squeezed to get his attention.
Hoop swung the charge thumper around and down, pointing its wide barrel at something on the landing. A clear, viscous slime, splashed down on the landing and the first tread of the next flight, then smeared across the textured metal.
“Which level is the bridge?” she whispered in his ear. She was confused, lost.
He pointed up, held up one finger.
“We have to get out of the stairwell,” she said. “Get up there some other—”
Hoop ran. He pushed off with a grunt, leaping up the staircase two at a time, weapon held out before him. He moved so quickly that he took Ripley and the others by surprise, and by the time she started after him he was already on the next half-landing, swinging around the corner without pause. She grabbed the handrail and pulled herself up.
We should be going slow and quiet! she thought. But she also knew exactly what Hoop was feeling. He wanted to get to the bridge and warn Lachance and Baxter before the alien got there. And if they arrived and the other two had already been slaughtered, he wanted to kill the fucking thing.
Ripley saw him pause briefly at the doorway leading onto the next deck, then he touched the pressure pad and the door whispered open. He pushed through, crouched down low, looking all around as Ripley and the others closed on him. With a quick glance back at them, he moved on.
Ripley finally recognized where they were. As they approached the main entrance that led onto the bridge she dashed on ahead, pausing by the doors and listening, one hand hovering over the pressure pad. She couldn’t hear anything from inside, but then perhaps the doors were soundproofed. Maybe the screaming was contained.
Nodding to Hoop, she counted down with her fingers.
Three… two… one…
She stroked the pad and the door whispered open. They went in together, Hoop on the left, Ripley on the right, and the joy and relief was almost overwhelming when she saw Lachance and Baxter huddled around the communications desk.
“What the fuck?” Baxter asked, standing and sending his chair spinning across the floor. “We lost contact and…” He saw their faces then, and read the terror.
“What happened?” Lachance asked.
“Secure the bridge,” Hoop said to Sneddon and Kasyanov. “Lock the doors. All of them.”
“What about the others?” Baxter asked.
“How long ago did you lose contact?”
“Just when they—when you were opening up the airlock,” Baxter said. “I was about to come down, but…”
“There are no others,” Hoop said. “Secure the bridge. Then we’ll decide what the hell to do next.”
Their grief was palpable.
They’d already lost so many friends and colleagues, but these eight survivors had existed together for more than seventy days, striving to make the Marion safe, hoping that their distress signal would be picked up by another ship. Living day by day with the constant, hanging threat of further mechanical malfunction, or a break-out of those monsters from the Samson. Fighting against the odds, their determination had seen them through. Perhaps they hadn’t all liked each other, but what group of people could claim that? Especially under such stress.
Yet they had been the survivors. And now three of them were gone, slaughtered in a matter of moments by those bastard creatures.
Ripley gave them their silence, retreating to a control panel and sitting in the upholstered chair. It was a navigational control point. She browsed the system, noting the other planets and their distances, orbits, makeup. The sun at the system’s center was almost half a billion miles away.
No wonder it feels so fucking cold.
“We’ve got to find it,” Sneddon said. “Track it down and kill it.”
“Track it down how?” Kasyanov asked. “It could be hiding away anywhere on the Marion. It’ll take us forever, and we only have days.”
“I saw it,” Sneddon said. At the sound of her voice— so filled with dreadful awe, quavering in fear—everyone grew quiet, still. “It came out like… like a living shadow. Garcia didn’t even know what hit her, I don’t think. She didn’t scream, didn’t have time. Just a grunt. Like she was disagreeing with something. Just that, and then it killed her and ran. Just… brutalized her, for no reason.”
“They don’t reason,” Ripley said. “They kill and feed. And if there’s no time to feed, they just kill.”
“But that’s not natural,” Sneddon said. “Animals kill for a purpose.”
“Some do,” Ripley said. “Humans don’t.”
“What is and isn’t natural out here?” Hoop asked, and he sounded angry. “Doesn’t matter. What matters is what we do.”
“Track it down,” Sneddon said.
“There’s no time!” Kasyanov said.
“That acid ate through the vestibule windows and floor in no time,” Hoop said. “We’re lucky the doors are holding—they’re blast doors, not proper external doors.”
“So how the hell do we get to the Samson now?” Lachance asked.
“That’s another problem.” Hoop was the center of attention. Not only in command, he was the only engineer left alive.
“Suit up,” Lachance said.
“Exactly what I was thinking,” Hoop said.
“Yeah,” Baxter agreed. “The Samson’s environmental systems will recompress, once we’re inside.”
“We’ll need to form another airlock,” Hoop said.
“But we can’t just leave that thing roaming around the ship!” Kasyanov shouted. She was standing, fists clenched at her sides. “It could chew through cables, smash doors. Do god-knows-what sort of damage.”
“We can leave it.” Hoop looked at Ripley, as if seeking her agreement. And suddenly the others were watching her, as well.
Ripley nodded.
“Yeah. It’s either that, or we hunt the thing through the ship and put everyone at risk. At least this way we have a chance.”
“Yeah, a chance,” Kasyanov scoffed. “What are the odds? I’m taking bets. Anyone?”
“I don’t gamble,” Ripley said. “Listen, if three of us keep watch while the other three work, it’ll still take a while to get into the Samson. Then when we return, straight into my shuttle and away.”
“What about supplies?” Baxter asked. “Food, water. Lube for all that lovin’ we’ll be doing.”
“Are there stocks down at the mine?” Ripley asked Hoop.
“Yep.”
“But that’s where they came from!” Sneddon said.
Ripley nodded. No one else spoke. Yeah, we’ve all been thinking about that, too, she thought.
“Right, so I’ll call it,” Hoop said. “I’ve got an idea of how we can get through the decompressed rooms to the Samson. We all go, and follow the plan. And if that thing causes us problems when we come back, we deal with it then.”
“One cataclysm at a time, eh?” Baxter said.
“Something like that.”
“We need more weapons,” Ripley said. “We lost most of them down there when…”
“We can divert to Hold 2 on the way down,” Sneddon said. “Plenty of charge thumpers and plasma torches there.”
“Easy,” Lachance said.
“A walk in the park,” Baxter agreed.
“We’re all going to die,” Kasyanov said. And she meant it. She wasn’t making a joke. Ripley had been impressed when she leaped into action in the docking arm, but now she was the voice of pessimism once again.