“Is that a building of some sort?” Lachance asked. “A wall?”
“We’ll see,” Hoop said. “But not yet. Come on, we need to get the others.”
“And wipe out those eggs,” Lachance said.
“Yeah.” Hoop took one more lingering look around the cavern—the huge, buried vessel, like no ship any of them had ever seen; the massive cavern formed above and around it; and now this vast wall that seemed to loom over the ship, burying it, smothering the parts of it they had yet to see. It was almost as if the ship had crashed into the structure, rupturing it, ploughing through until it wedged to a halt.
Whatever had happened here, they’d never know the full story. He’d bet money on it.
Because even after wiping out those eggs, there were more measures they could take. Already he was making plans.
They ducked back inside the ship, descended the steep steps, and reached the open area at the head of the longer staircase.
First came the flash of plasma fire from the lab ahead of them.
Then the scream.
Lachance was first across the landing, ducking through the clear curtain into the lab, thumper coughing as he entered. Hoop was right behind him. Ripley started without us! he thought, but as he entered and saw what was happening, he knew that wasn’t the case.
They should have been more careful.
Ripley waited. She walked a complete circuit of the center of the room, careful to give the dead miner a wide berth. None of the eggs gave any signs of opening, there was no sound or movement, yet she remained alert. If one of them so much as twitched or pulsed, she’d open fire.
Baxter had crouched down beside Sneddon and the two of them were motionless, unconsciously mimicking the mummified aliens. Kasyanov continued to blink quickly, touching at her eyes with her good hand and wincing as her gloved fingertips brushed against the swollen red eyelids. Her acid-burnt hand was held in front of her, shaking. She’d need attention back on the Marion—they all would—but they had to get there first.
Apart from the one that had opened, the alien eggs seemed untouched, and almost immune to any effects of time. Perhaps the wire enclosures formed some sort of stasis field, letting the eggs and their monstrous cargo sleep until the time came for them to wake.
That time was when a host, a victim, was brought before them.
Finger still stroking the trigger, Ripley moved closer to one of the hybrid figures. Though they repulsed her, she couldn’t deny that she was also fascinated. This one must have been birthed from one of the dog-aliens that had built this strange ship. Which meant that the aliens seemed to take on some of the attributes of whomever or whatever they used as a host for their gestation. Did Kane’s alien have some of Kane in it?
Would Amanda’s?
“No,” Ripley breathed. “They’ll never leave here. None of them.” She looked at Sneddon where she sat slumped close to the doorway, that huge spider-like thing still clamped tight to her face, tail around her throat. Soon it would die and fall off, leaving an egg inside her chest that would quickly gestate and become one of them. Then the pain, the terrible agony of her death, and the new monster would emerge.
If Ash had his way, Sneddon would be in stasis before that happened.
“No,” Ripley said again, louder. Kasyanov looked across at her, Baxter glanced up, both alarmed. “We can’t take her,” she said, nodding at Sneddon. “She’s infected. We can’t save her, and we mustn’t take her.”
“Well, there’s no way we’re leaving her!” Kasyanov said.
“Haven’t you got something for her?” Ripley asked.
It took a while for Kasyanov to understand what Ripley was really asking. When she did her red-rimmed eyes widened.
“And who the hell are you?” she asked. “You don’t even know Sneddon, and you’re asking me to kill her?”
“Kill?” Baxter asked, looking confused.
“No, just help her,” Ripley said.
“How exactly is killing her going to help her?” Kasyanov snapped.
“Have you seen what they do?” Ripley asked. “Can you imagine how much it would hurt having something…” Amanda, screaming, hands held wide as a beast burst its way outside from within. “Something eating its way out of you from the inside, breaking your ribs, cracking your chest plate, chewing its way out? Can you even think about that?”
“I’ll take it out of her,” Kasyanov said.
Something creaked.
Ripley frowned, her head tilted to one side.
“Don’t you go near her,” Kasyanov continued. “None of us knows you. None of us knows why you really came, so you just—”
“Listen!” Ripley said, hand held up.
Creak…
She looked around at the eggs. None of them seemed to be moving, none of those fleshy wings were hinging open, ready to disgorge their terrible contents. Maybe it was a breeze, still tugged through the tunnels and corridors by the fires they had set deeper in the ship. At the doorway, those strange curtains hung heavy. Around the room nothing moved. Except—
Scriiiitch!
It was Kasyanov who saw it.
“Oh… my… God!”
Ripley spun around, backed away toward where the others waited by the doorway, clasping the charge thumper and immediately realizing that they were very close to being fucked.
It wasn’t just one of the mummified aliens that was moving.
It was all of them.
She squeezed the trigger, Kasyanov opened up with the plasma torch, and Ripley felt the ice cold, blazing hot kiss of fire erupting all around her.
She screamed.
“Back back back!” Hoop shouted. Baxter was already trying to haul Sneddon out of the room, and Kasyanov was grasping the unconscious woman’s boots, trying to lift with her one good hand, plasma torch sputtering where it hung from her shoulder.
As Lachance and Hoop entered there was a thudding explosion from across the room. Shrapnel whistled past Hoop’s ears and struck his suit, some of it dry, some wet. He winced, expecting more pain to add to his throbbing arm. But there were no more sizzling acid burns. Not yet.
Ripley stood in front of them all, charge thumper at her hip as she swung thirty degrees and fired again.
“Back!” Hoop shouted again, but Ripley couldn’t hear, or wasn’t listening.
The frozen, statue-like aliens were moving. Several were down already, burning from Kasyanov’s plasma torch or blown apart by Ripley’s first shot. Others moved across the room toward Ripley. Some were slow, stiff, hesitant, as if still waking from a slumber Hoop could not comprehend.
One was fast.
It streaked toward Ripley from the right, and if Hoop hadn’t already had his finger on the spray gun trigger, she might have died. Instinct twitched his finger and sent a spurt of acid across the room. The alien’s movement made the shot even more effective, the acid slicing across its middle section. It hissed, then screamed, and thrashed backward as Lachance’s thumper discharged. He fired three bolts into its head and it dropped down, dead.
Ripley’s second charge exploded. The whole room shook, detritus whizzing through the air and impacting walls, faces, flesh. She cried out and went to her knees, and Hoop saw that she’d already suffered burns across her right hip and leg from a plasma burst. It couldn’t have actually touched her—if it had, it would have eaten through her suit, flesh and bones—but she’d been too close when Kasyanov had fired her torch. If the torch’s reserves hadn’t already been nearly depleted, Ripley would have died.