'Hold it. Hold it. Back off-right now.'
Their eyes locked. Vasquez continued to hold Gorman half off the deck. Something basic cut its way through her fury Marine—she was a Marine, and Marines live by basics. The basics in this case were simple. Apone was gone and therefore Hicks was in charge.
'It ain't worth bruising my knuckles,' she finally muttered She released the lieutenant's collar, and his head bounced off the deck as she turned away, still cursing to herself. Ripley didn't doubt for an instant that if Hicks hadn't intervened, the smartgun operator would have beaten the unconscious Gorman to a pulp.
With Vasquez out of the way Ripley bent over the paralyzed officer and opened his tunic. The bloodless purple puncture wound that marred his shoulder had already sealed itself.
'Looks like it stung him or something. Interesting. I didn't know they could do that.'
'Hey!'
The excited shout made Hicks and her turn toward the Operations bay. Hudson was in there. He'd been staring morosely at the biomonitors and videoscreens, and something had caught his eye. Now he beckoned to his remaining companions.
'Look. Crowe and Dietrich aren't dead, man.' He gestured at the bio readouts, swallowed uneasily. 'They must be like Gorman. Their signs are real low, but they ain't dead—' His voice trailed off, along with his initial excitement.
If they weren't dead and they were like Hudson, that meant The comtech started to shake with a mixture of anger and sorrow. He was standing on the thin edge of hysteria They all were. It clung to them like a psychic leech, hanging on the fringes of their sanity, threatening to invade and take over the instant anyone let down his mental guard.
Ripley knew what those soporific bioreadouts meant. She tried to explain, but she couldn't meet Hudson's eyes as she did so.
'You can't help them.'
'Hey, but if they're still alive—'
'Forget it. Right now they're being cocooned, just like those others. Like the colonists you found in the wall when you went in there. You can't do a damn thing for them. Nobody can That's the way it is. Just be glad you're here talking about them instead of down there with them. If Dietrich was here, she'd know she couldn't do anything to help you.'
The comtech seemed to sag in on himself. 'This ain't happening.'
Ripley turned away from him. As she did so, her gaze met Vasquez's. It would have been easy for her to say 'I told you so to the smartgunner. It also would have been superfluous. That one look communicated everything the two women needed to say.
This time it was Vasquez who turned away.
IX
In the colony medical lab Bishop stood hunched over an ocular probe. Beneath the lens was a stretched slice of one of the dead facehugger parasites, extracted from the specimen in the nearest stasis cylinder. Even in death the biopsied creature looked threatening, lying on its back on the dissection table The clutching legs looked poised to grab any face that bent too close, the powerful tail ready to propel the creature clear across the room in a single pistoning leap.
The internal structure was as fascinating as the functional exterior, and Bishop was glued to the probe's eyepiece. By combining the probe's resolving power with the versatility of his own artificial eye, he was able to see a great deal that the colonists might have missed.
One of the questions that particularly intrigued him, and which he was anxious to answer, involved the definite possibility of an alien parasite attempting to attach itself to a synthetic like himself. His insides were radically different from those of a purely biological human being. Would a parasite be able to detect the differences before it sprang? If not and it attempted to utilize a synthetic as a host, what might be the probable results of such an enforced union? Would it simply drop off and go searching for another body, or would it mindlessly insert the embryonic seed it carried into an artificial host? If so, would the embryo be able to grow or would it be the more surprised of the couple as it struggled to mature within a body devoid of flesh and blood?
Could a robot be parasitized?
Something made a noise near the doorway. Bishop looked up long enough to see the dropship crew chief roll a pallet ful of equipment and supplies into the lab.
'Where you want this stuff?'
'Over there.' Bishop gestured. 'By the end of the bench wil do nicely.'
Spunkmeyer began unloading the shipping pallet. 'Need anything else?'
Bishop waved vaguely without taking his gaze from the probe.
'Right. I'll be back in the ship. Buzz me if you need anything.'
Another wave. Spunkmeyer shrugged and turned to leave.
Bishop was a funny sort of bird, the crew chief mused as he wheeled his hand truck down the empty corridors and back out onto the landing tarmac. Funny sort of hybrid, he thought correcting himself and smiling at the pun. He whistled cheerfully as he snugged his collar higher up around his neck The wind wasn't blowing too badly, but it was still chilly outside without a full environment suit. Concentrating on a tune also helped to keep his mind off the disaster that had befallen the expedition.
Crowe, Dietrich, old Apone—all gone. Hard to believe, as Hudson kept mumbling over and over to himself. Hard to believe and a shame. He'd known them all; they'd flown together on a number of missions. Though he couldn't say he knew any of them intimately.
He shrugged, even though there was no one around to see the gesture. Death was something they were all used to, an acquaintance each of them fully expected to encounter prior to retirement. Crowe and Dietrich had early appointments, that was all. Nothing to be done about it. But Hicks and the rest had made it out okay. They'd finish their studies and clean up here and be out by tomorrow. That was the plan. a little more study, make a few last recordings, and get out of there. He knew he wasn't the only one looking forward to the moment when the dropship would heave mass and head back to the good ol' Sulaco.
His thoughts went back to Bishop again. Maybe there'd been some sort of subtle improvement in the new model synthetics or maybe it was just Bishop himself, but he found that he rather liked the android. Everybody said that the artificialintelligence boys had been working hard to improve personality programming for years, even adding a bit of randomness to each new model as it walked off the assembly line. Sure, that was it—Bishop was an individual. You could tel him from another synthetic just by talking to him. And it didn't hurt to have one quiet, courteous companion among all the boastful loudmouths.
As he rolled the hand truck to the top of the dropship's loading ramp, he slipped. Catching his balance, he bent to examine the damp spot. Since there was no depression in which rainwater could pool up, he thought he must have busted a container of Bishop's precious preserving fluid, but there was no tickling, lingering odor of formaldehyde. The shiny stuff clinging to the metal ramp looked more like a thick slime or gel.
He shrugged and straightened. He couldn't remember busting a bottle containing anything like that, and as long as nobody asked him about it, there was no point in worrying. No time for worrying, either. Too much to do so they could get ready to leave.
The wind beat at him. Lousy atmosphere, and yet it was a lot milder than what it had been before the atmosphere processors had started work here. 'Unbreathable,' the presleep briefing had said. Pulling the hand truck in behind him, he hit the switch to retract the ramp and close the door.
Vasquez was pacing the length of the APC. Inactivity in what was still a combat situation was a foreign sensation to her. She wanted a gun in her hands and something to shoot at. She knew the situation called for careful analysis, and it frustrated her because she wasn't the analytical type. Her methods were direct, final, and didn't involve any talk. But she was smart enough to realize that this wasn't your standard operation anymore. Standard operating procedure had been chewed up and spit out by the enemy. Knowing this failed to calm her however. She wanted to kill something.