Aliens

Occasionally her fingers would flex as though they were stil gripping the controls of her smartgun. Watching her would have made Ripley nervous if she wasn't already as tense as it was possible to be without snapping like the overwound mainspring of an ancient timepiece.

It got to the point where Vasquez knew she could say something or start tearing her hair out. 'All right, we can't blow them up. We can't go down there as a squad; we can't even go back down in the APC because they'll take us apart like a can full of peas. Why not roll some canisters of CN-20 down there? Nerve gas the whole nest? We've got enough on the dropship to make the whole colony uninhabitable.'

Hudson was pleading with his eyes, glancing at each of them in turn. 'Look man, let's just bug out and call it even okay?' He glanced at the woman standing next to him. 'I'm with Ripley Let 'em make the whole colony into a playpen if they want to but we get out now and come back with a warship.'

Vasquez stared at him out of slitted eyes. 'Getting queasy Hudson?'

'Queasy!' He straightened a little in reaction to the implicit challenge. 'We're in over our heads here. Nobody said we'd run into anything like this. I'll be the first one to volunteer to come back, but when I do, I want the right kind of equipment to deal with the problem. This ain't like mob control, Vasquez You try kicking some butts here and they'll eat your leg right off.'

Ripley looked at the smartgun operator. 'The nerve gas won't work, anyway. How do we know if it'll affect their biochemistry? Maybe they'll just snort the stuff. The way these things are built, nerve gas might just give them a pleasant high I blew one of them out an airlock with an emergency grapple stuck in its gut, and all it did was slow it down. I had to fry it with my ship's engines.' She leaned back against the wall.

'I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit and the whole high plateau where we originally found the ship that brought them here. It's the only way to be sure.'

'Now hold on a second.' Having been silent during the ongoing discussion, Burke abruptly came to life. 'I'm not authorizing that kind of action. That's about as extreme as you can get.'

'You don't think the situation's extreme?' growled Hudson He toyed with the bandage on his acid-scarred arm and glared hard at the Company representative.

'Of course it's extreme.'

'Then why won't you authorize the use of nukes?' Ripley pressed him. 'You lose the colony and one processing station but you've still got ninety-five percent of your terraforming capability unimpaired and operational on the rest of the planet. So why the hesitation?'

Sensing the challenge in her tone, the Company rep backpedaled flawlessly into a conciliatory mode.

'Well, I mean, I know this is an emotional moment. I'm as upset as anybody else. But that doesn't mean we have to resort to snap judgments. We have to move cautiously here. Let's think before we throw out the baby with the bathwater.'

'The baby's dead, Burke, in case you haven't noticed.' Ripley refused to be swayed.

'All I'm saying,' he argued, 'is that it's time to look at the whole situation, if you know what I mean.'

She crossed her arms over her chest. 'No, Burke, what do you mean?'

He thought fast. 'First of all, this installation has a substantia monetary value attached to it. We're talking about an entire colony setup here. Never mind the replacement cost. The investment in transportation alone is enormous, and the process of terraforming Acheron is just starting to show some real progress. It's true that the other atmosphere-processing stations function automatically, but they still require regular maintenance and supervision. Without the means to house and service an appropriate staff locally, that would mean keeping several transports in orbit as floating hotels for the necessary personnel. That involves an ongoing cost you can't begin to imagine.'

'They can bill me,' she told him unsmilingly. 'I got a tab running. What else?'

'For another thing, this is clearly an important species we're dealing with here. We can't just arbitrarily exterminate those who've found their way to this world. The loss to science would be incalculable. We might never encounter them again.'

'Yeah, and that'd be just too bad.' She uncrossed her arms 'Aren't you forgetting something, Burke? You told me that i we encountered a hostile life-form here, we'd take care of it and forget the scientific concerns. That's why I never liked dealing with administrators: you guys all have selective memories.'

'It just isn't the way to handle things,' he protested.

'Forget it!'

'Yeah, forget it.' Vasquez echoed Ripley's sentiments as wel as her words. 'Watch us.'

'Maybe you haven't been keeping up on current events, Hudson put in, 'but we just got fragged, pal.'

'Look, Burke.' Clearly Ripley was not pleased. 'We had an agreement. I think I've proved my case, made my point whatever you want to call it. We came here for confirmation of my story and to find out what caused the break in communications between Acheron and Earth. You got your confirmation, the Company's got its explanation, and I've got my vindication. Now it's time to get away from here.'

'I know, I know.' He put an arm over her shoulders, carefu not to make it look as if he were being familiar, and turned her away from the others as he lowered his voice. 'But we're dealing with changing scenarios here. You have to be ready to put aside the first reaction that comes to mind, put aside your natural emotions, and know how to take advantage. We've survived here; now we've got to be ready to survive back on Earth.'

'What are you getting at, Burke?'

Either he didn't notice the chill in her eyes or else he chose not to react to it. 'What I'm trying to say is that this thing is major, Ripley. I mean, really major. We've never encountered anything like these creatures before, and we might never have the chance to do so again. Their strength and their resourcefulness is unbelievable. You don't just annihilate something like that, not with the kind of potential they imply You back off until you learn how to handle them, sure, but you don't just blow them away.'

'Wanna bet?'

'You're not thinking rationally. Now, I understand what you're going through. Don't think that I don't. But you've got to put all that aside and look at the larger picture. What's done is done. We can't help the colonists, and we can't do anything for Crowe and Apone and the others, but we can help ourselves. We can learn about these things and make use of them, turn them to our advantage, master them.'

'You don't master something like these aliens. You get out of their way; and if the opportunity presents itself, you blow them to atoms. Don't talk to me about "surviving" back on Earth.'

He took a deep breath. 'Come on, Ripley. These aliens are special in ways we haven't begun to understand. Uniqueness is one thing the cosmos is stingy with. They need to be studied carefully and under the right conditions, so that we can learn from them. All that went wrong here was that the colonists started studying them without the proper equipment. They didn't know what to expect. We do.'

'Do we? Look what happened to Apone and the rest.'

'They didn't know what they were up against, and they went in a little overconfident. They got caught in a tight spot. That's a mistake we won't make again.'

'You can bet on that.'

'What happened here is tragic, sure, but it won't be repeated When we come back, we'll be properly equipped. That acid can't eat through everything. We'll take a sample back somehow, have it analyzed in company labs. They'll develop a defence, a shield. And we'll figure out a way to immobilize the mature form so it can be manipulated and used. Sure, the aliens are strong, but they're not omnipotent. They're tough but they're not invulnerable. They can be killed by hand weapons as small as pulse-rifles and flamethrowers. That's one thing this expedition has proved. You proved it yourself,' he added in a tone of admiration she didn't believe for an instant.