Apart from being bigger than the others, there were other, more subtle differences. The length of its limbs, the shape of its head.
“What the hell is that?” Hoop asked, pointing. “There, at its ass-end.”
“Oh, well, that’s gross,” Lachance said.
The alien’s abdomen had burst open, spilling a slick mess across the floor. It sizzled and spat as the acid-pool spread, but it was the things lying in the pool that drew Ripley’s attention. Scores of them—maybe hundreds— spherical and each roughly the size of her thumb. They glimmered moistly beneath the flashlight beam, sliding over one another as more poured from the wound.
“I think we killed a queen,” Ripley said.
“You’re sure?” Hoop asked from behind her.
“Pretty sure—it’s the only thing that makes sense. They’re eggs. Hundreds of eggs.” She looked back at him. “We nailed a fucking queen.”
She examined the rest of the creature, playing her flashlight across its blasted and slashed body. Though bigger than any they had so far seen, something about it was also almost childlike—its features were larger, the spiked and clawed limbs not quite so vicious. Ripley felt a strange frisson, a sense of likeness. But she was nothing like this thing.
Nothing at all.
“I think she’s young,” she said. “Imagine just how big…?” She shook her head. “We need to go.”
“Yeah,” Hoop agreed.
“My eyes are improving,” Kasyanov said. “I can move quicker. I’ll stay behind you. But let’s get the hell out of this pit.”
They moved on, the corridor still erring upward. They were more cautious now, Hoop and Ripley shining their lights ahead across walls, floor, ceiling. At every junction they paused to listen before moving on. And when they reached another staircase leading up toward what might have been an opening in the ship’s hull, he handed Ripley another charge magazine.
“Last one,” he said. “Five charges left.”
“And I’m almost out of bolts,” Lachance said.
“My plasma torch is still almost full,” Kasyanov said.
They were being worn down step by step, Ripley knew. Whether or not this was an intentional act by the aliens, whether they could even consider something that complex, she didn’t know. But the fact remained.
“That’s the way out,” she said, nodding up at this new, shorter staircase.
“How d’you know that?” Lachance gasped. His knees were shaking from Sneddon’s weight. He was almost exhausted. And Baxter, leaning against Hoop, was looking up at the new, waist-high steps with something approaching dread.
“Because it has to be,” Ripley said.
They started climbing—
She is panting, sweating, exhausted, ebullient. It’s one of those moments that opens up and out into a perfect, neverto-be-repeated time, so rare that its blooming is like that of the planet’s most precious flower. She is filled with a sense of well-being, an all-consuming love for her daughter that is so powerful that it hurts.
This time, now, she thinks, doing her best to consign that instant to memory. The cool heather beneath her hands as she clasps onto the hillside and pulls herself higher. The heat of the sun on the back of her neck, sweat cooling across her back from the climb. The deep-blue sky above, the river below snaking through the valley, vehicles as small as ants passing back and forth along the road.
The slope steepens as they approach the hill’s summit, and Amanda giggles above her, pretending that she didn’t know. It’s dangerous—not quite mountain climbing, but it’s a hands-and-knees scramble, and if they slip it will be a long tumble down. But Ripley can’t be angry. Everything feels too good, too right, for that.
So she climbs harder and faster, ignoring the feel of empty space pulling her back and down from the hillside. Amanda glances back and sees her mother moving quicker. She giggles again and climbs, her teenager’s limbs strong and supple.
I’ve never actually been here and seen this, yet it’s the best moment of my life.
Amanda reaches the summit and shouts in triumph, disappearing over the top to lie back on the short grass and wait for her mother.
Ripley pulls herself up the natural steps in the slope. For an instant she feels terribly alone and exposed, and she pauses in her climb. Shocked. Cold.
Then she hears another sound from above that makes her start climbing again. Her sense of well-being has been scrubbed away by that sound, and the moment of perfection dissipates as if it has never been felt at all. The sky is no longer cloud-free. The hill’s wildness is now brutal rather than beautiful.
The sound was her child, crying.
Ripley reaches the top, clinging to the hillside now, terrified that she will fall and even more afraid of what she’ll see if she does not. When she pulls herself up and over onto the summit, she blinks, and everything is all right.
Then she really sees Amanda, standing there just a few yards away with one of those monstrous things attached to her face, tail tightening, pale fingers gripping, body throbbing. Ripley reaches out, and her daughter’s chest comes apart—
“…Go in there!” Hoop said.
“What?” Ripley asked, blinking away the fog of confusion. It was harder to do this time, the debilitating sense of loss clinging to her more persistently. They’d reached the top of the staircase—she knew that, even though she had almost been elsewhere—but she took a moment to look around before realizing what Hoop was saying.
“But look at it!” Baxter said. “We can’t just ignore that.”
“I can,” Hoop said. “I can, and I am!”
The head of the staircase opened into a wide area with two exits. One led up again, perhaps toward a hatch in the ship’s hull, or perhaps not. There was no telling. The other was closer, much wider, and like nothing they had seen on the ship before.
At first she thought it was glass. The layers of clear material were scarred and dusty with time, but still appeared solid. Then she saw it shimmer as if from some unfelt breeze, and knew it wasn’t glass. She didn’t know exactly what it was, but it was there for one purpose.
Lachance grabbed Baxter’s flashlight and shone it ahead. The light smeared across the clear surface and then splashed through the large space beyond. Some of what it illuminated Ripley recognized. Some she did not. None of it made her want to go any closer.
“More eggs,” she said.
“But different,” Baxter said. He hobbled closer and pressed his face to the barrier. It rippled as he touched it.
Lachance played his light around, and Hoop added his own.
“Oh,” Baxter said. He turned around slowly.
“What is it?” Ripley asked. We just need to leave!
“I think we just found where your queen friend came from.”
Ripley closed her eyes, sighed, and there was a terrible, unrelenting inevitability to this. She did not feel in charge of her own actions. She was long past thinking, Maybe this is all a dream. No, she wasn’t asleep, but she didn’t feel entirely awake, either. The more she tried to take control of events, the more they ran away from her. And here she was again, needing to go in one direction, yet drawn relentlessly in another.
Hoop shone his light back down the staircase they’d just climbed. No movement. Then he turned back to the new room beyond the clear enclosure.