Aliens

Ripley switched off the room light and started to rise. A smal hand grabbed her arm with desperate force.

'Don't go! Please.'

With great reluctance Ripley disengaged her arm from Newt's grip. 'It'll be all right. I'll be in the other room, right next door. I'm not going to go anywhere else. And don't forget that that's there.' She indicated the miniature video pickup that was imbedded over the doorway. 'You know what that is, don't you? A small nod in the darkness.

'Uh-huh. It's a securcam.'

'That's right. See, the green light's on. Mr. Hicks and Mr Hudson checked out all the securcams in this area to make sure all of them were operating properly. It's watching you, and I'll be watching its monitor over in the other room. I'll be able to see you just as clearly in there as I can when I'm right here.'

When Newt still seemed to hesitate, Ripley unsnapped the tracer bracelet Hicks had given her. She slipped it around the girl's smaller wrist, clinching it tight.

'Here. This is for luck. It'll help me keep an eye on you too Now go to sleep — and don't dream. Okay?'

'I'll try.' The sound of a small body sliding down between clean sheets.

Ripley watched in the dim light from the instruments on standby as the girl turned onto her side, hugging the doll head and gazing through half-lidded eyes at the steadily glowing function light imbedded in the bracelet. The space heater hummed comfortingly as she backed out of the room.

Other half-opened eyes were twitching erratically back and forth. They were the only visible evidence that Lieutenant Gorman was still alive. It was an improvement of sorts. One step further from complete paralysis.

Ripley leaned over the table on which the lieutenant was lying studying the eye movements and wondering if he could recognize her. 'How is he? I see he's got his eyes open.'

'That might be enough to wear him out.' Bishop looked up from a nearby workbench. He was surrounded by instruments and shining medical equipment. The light of the single highintensity lamp he was working with threw his features into sharp relief, giving his face a macabre cast.

'Is he in pain?'

'Not according to his bioreadouts. They're hardly conclusive of course. I'm sure he'll let us know as soon as he regains the use of his larynx. By the way, I've isolated the poison. Interesting stuff. It's a muscle-specific neurotoxin. Affects only the nonvital parts of the system; leaves respiratory and circulatory functions unimpaired. I wonder if the creatures instinctively adjust the dosage for different kinds of potential hosts?'

'I'll ask one of them first chance I get.' As she stared, one eyelid rose all the way before fluttering back down again. 'Either that was an involuntary twitch or else he winked at me. Is he getting better?'

Bishop nodded. 'The toxin seems to be metabolizing. It's powerful, but the body appears capable of breaking it down. It's starting to show up in his urine. Amazing mechanism, the human body. Adaptable. If he continues to flush the poison at a constant rate, he should wake up soon.'

'Let me get this straight. The aliens paralyzed the colonists they didn't kill, carried them over to the processing station, and cocooned them to serve as hosts for more of those.' She pointed into the back room where the stasis cylinders held the remaining facehugger specimens.

'Which would mean lots of those parasites, right? One for each colonist. Over a hundred, at least, assuming a mortality rate during the final fight of about a third.'

'Yes, that follows,' Bishop readily agreed.

'But these things, the parasitic facehugger form, come from eggs. So where are all the eggs coming from? When the guy who first found the alien ship reported back to us, he said there were a lot of eggs inside, but he never said how many, and nobody else ever went in after him to look. And not all those eggs may have been viable.

'The thing is, judging from the way the colony here was overwhelmed, I don't think the first aliens had time to hau eggs from that ship back here. That means they had to come from somewhere else.'

'That is the question of the hour.' Bishop swiveled his chair to face her. 'I have been pondering it ceaselessly since the true nature of the disaster here first became apparent to us.'

'Any ideas, bright or otherwise?'

'Without additional solid evidence it is nothing more than a supposition.'

'Go ahead and suppose, then.'

'We could assume a parallel to certain insect forms who have a hive-like organization. An ant or termite colony, for example is ruled by a single female, a queen, who is the source of new eggs.'

Ripley frowned. Interstellar navigation to entomology was a mental jump she wasn't prepared to make. 'Don't insect queens come from eggs also?'

The synthetic nodded. 'Absolutely.'

'What if there was no queen egg aboard the ship that brought these things here?'

'There's no such thing in a social insect society as a "queen egg", until the workers decide to create one. Ants, bees termites, all employ essentially the same method. They select an ordinary egg and feed the pupa developing inside a special food high in certain nutrients. Among bees, for example, it is called royal jelly. The chemicals in the jelly act to change the composition of the maturing pupa so that what eventually emerges is an adult queen and not another worker Theoretically any egg can be used to hatch a queen. Why the insects choose the particular eggs they do is something we stil do not know.'

'You're saying that one of those things lays all the eggs?'

'Well, not exactly like one we're familiar with. Only if the insect analogy holds up. Assuming it does, there could be other similarities. An alien queen analogous to an ant or termite queen could be much larger physically than the aliens we have so far encountered. A termite queen's abdomen is so bloated with eggs that she can't move by herself at all. She is fed and tended by workers, mated to drones, and defended by highly specialized warriors. She is also quite harmless. On the other hand, a queen bee is far more dangerous than any worker bee because she can sting many times. She is the centre of their lives, quite literally the mother of their society.

'In one respect, at least, we are fortunate that the analogy does not hold up. Ants and bees develop from eggs directly to larvae, pupae, and adults. Each alien embryo requires a live host in which to mature. Otherwise Acheron would be covered with them by now.'

'Funny, but that doesn't reassure me a whole lot. These things are a lot bigger than any ant or termite. Could they be intelligent? Could this hypothetical queen? That's something we never could decide on back on the Nostromo. We were too busy trying to keep from getting killed. Not much time for speculation.'

'It's hard to say.' Bishop looked thoughtful. 'There is one thing worth considering, though.'

'What's that?'

'It may have been nothing more than blind instinct attraction to the heat or whatever, but she did choose assuming she exists, to incubate her eggs in the one spot in the colony where we couldn't destroy her without destroying ourselves. Beneath the heat exchangers at the processing plant If that site was chosen from instinct, it means that they may be no brighter than your average termite. If, on the other hand, it was selected on the basis of intelligence, well, then I think we're in very deep trouble indeed.

'That's if there's any reality to these suppositions at all Despite the distance involved, the eggs these aliens hatched from might have been brought down here by the first ones to emerge. There might be no queen involved at all, no complex alien society. Whether by intelligence or instinct, though, we have seen that they cooperate. That's something we don't have to speculate on. We've seen them in action.'

Ripley stood there and considered the ramifications of Bishop's analysis. None of them were encouraging, nor had she expected any to be. She nodded toward the stasis cylinders.