'Attention. Emergency. All personnel must evacuate immediately. You now have fourteen minutes to reach minimum safe distance.'
The locator continued to track; range and direction spelled out lucidly by its LED display.
As she advanced, she blinked sweat out of her eyes. Steam swirled around her, making it difficult to see more than a short distance in any direction. Flashing emergency lights lit an intersecting passageway just ahead.
Movement. She whirled, and the flamethrower belched napalm, incinerating an imaginary demon. Nothing there Would the blast of heat from her weapon be noticed? No time to worry about maybes now. She resumed her march, trying not to shake as she concentrated on the locator's readouts.
She entered the lower level.
In the inner chambers now. The walls around her subsumed skeletal shapes, the bodies of the unfortunate colonists who had been brought here to serve as helpless hosts for embryonic aliens. Their resin-encrusted figures gleamed like insects frozen in amber. The locator's signal strengthened, leading her off to the left. She had to bend to clear a low overhang.
At each turning point or intersection she was careful to ignite a timed flare and place it on the floor behind her. It would be easy to get lost in the maze without the markers to help her find her way back. One passageway was so narrow she had to turn sideways to slip through it. Her eyes touched upon one tormented face after another, each entombed colonist caught in a rictus of agony.
Something grabbed her. Her knees sagged, and the breath went out of her before she could even scream. But the hand was human. It was attached to an imprisoned body surmounted by a face. A familiar face. Carter Burke.
'Ripley.' The moan was barely human. 'Help me. I can feel it inside. It's moving. '
She stared at him, beyond horror now. No one deserved this.
'Here.' His fingers clutched convulsively around the grenade she handed him. She primed it and hurried on. The voice of the station boomed around her. There was a rising note of mechanical urgency in its tone.
'You now have eleven minutes to reach minimum safe distance.'
According to the locator, she was all but on top of the target Behind her the grenade went off, the concussion nearly knocking her off her feet. It was answered by a second, more forceful, eruption from deep within the station itself. A siren began to wail, and the whole installation shuddered. The locator led her around a corner. She tensed in anticipation The locator's range finder read out zero.
Newt's tracer bracelet lay on the tunnel floor, the metal fabric shredded. The glow from its sender module was a bright, cheerless green. Ripley sagged against a wall.
It was over. All over.
Newt's eyes fluttered open, and she became aware of her surroundings. She had been cocooned in a pillar-like structure at the edge of a cluster of ovoid shapes: alien eggs. She recognized them right away. Before they'd been carried off or killed, the last desperate adult colonists had managed to acquire a few for study.
But those had all been empty, open at the tops. These were sealed.
Somehow the egg nearest her prison became aware of her stirrings. It quivered and then began to open, an obscene flower. Something damp and leathery stirred within. Transfixed by terror, Newt stared as jointed, arachnoid legs appeared over the lip of the ovoid. They emerged one at a time. She knew what was going to happen next, and she reacted the only way she could, the only way she knew how—she screamed.
Ripley heard, turned toward the sound, and broke into a run.
With horrible fascination Newt watched as the facehugger climbed out of the egg. It paused for a moment on the rim gathering its strength and taking its bearings. Then it turned toward her. Ripley came pounding into the chamber as it poised to leap. Her finger tensed on the pulse-rifle's trigger. The single shell tore the crouching creature apart.
The flash from the muzzle illuminated the figure of a mature alien standing nearby. It spun and charged the intruder just in time for twin bursts from the rifle to catapult it backward. Ripley advanced on the corpse, firing again and again, a murderous expression on her face. The alien jerked onto its back, and she finished it with the flamethrower.
While it burned, she ran to Newt. The resinous material of the girl's cocoon hadn't hardened completely yet, and Ripley was able to loosen it enough for Newt to crawl free.
'Here.' Ripley turned her back to the girl and bent her knees 'Climb aboard.' Newt clambered up onto the adult's hips and locked her hands around Ripley's neck. Her voice was weak.
'I knew you'd come.'
'So long as I could still breathe. Okay, we're getting out of here. I want you to hang on, Newt. Hang on real tight. I'm not going to be able to hold you, because I've got to be able to use the guns.'
She didn't see the nod, but she felt it against her back. 'I understand. Don't worry. I won't let go.'
Ripley sensed movement off to their right. She ignored it as she blasted the eggs with the flamethrower. Only then did she turn it on the advancing aliens. One almost reached her, a living fireball, and she blew it apart with two bursts from the rifle. Ducking beneath a glistening cylindrical mass, she retreated. A piercing shriek filled the air, rising above the pounding of failing machinery, the wail of the emergency siren and the screech of attacking aliens.
She'd have seen it earlier if she'd looked up instead o straight ahead when she'd entered the egg chamber. It was just as well that she hadn't because, despite her determination, she might have faltered. A gigantic silhouette in the ruddy mist the alien queen glowered above her egg cache like a great gleaming insectoid Buddha. The fanged skull was horror incarnate. Six limbs, two legs and four taloned arms, were folded grotesquely over a distended abdomen. Swollen with eggs, it comprised a vast, tubular sac that was suspended from the latticework of pipes and conduits by a weblike membrane as though an endless coil of intestine had been draped along the supporting machinery.
Ripley realized she'd passed right beneath part of the sac a moment earlier.
Inside the abdominal container countless eggs churned toward a pulsating ovipositor in a vile, organic assembly line There they emerged, glistening and wet, to be picked up by tiny drones. These miniature versions of the alien warriors scuttled back and forth as they attended to the needs of both eggs and queen. They ignored the staring human in their midst as they concentrated with single-minded intensity on the task of transferring newly deposited eggs to a place of safety.
Ripley remembered how Vasquez had done it as she pumped the slide on the grenade launcher: pumped and fired four times. The grenades punched deep into the flimsy egg sac and exploded, blowing it to shreds. Eggs and tons of noisome gelatinous material spilled over the floor of the chamber. The queen went berserk, screeching like a psychotic locomotive Ripley laid about with the flamethrower, methodically igniting everything in sight as she retreated. Eggs shriveled in the inferno, and the figures of warriors and drones vanished amid frenzied thrashing.
The queen towered above the carnage, struggling in the flames. Two warriors closed in on Ripley. The pulse-rifle clicked empty. Smoothly she ejected the magazine, slammed another one home, and held the trigger down. Her attackers vanished in the homicidal hail of fire.
It didn't matter if it moved or not. She blasted everything that didn't look wholly mechanical as she ran for the elevator, setting fire to equipment and destroying controls and instrumentation together with attacking aliens. Sweat and steam half blinded her, but the flares she'd dropped to mark her path shone brightly, jewels set among the devastation. Sirens howled around her, and the station rocked with internal convulsions.