Alien 3 (23 page)

His eyebrows rose. ‘Oh, yeah? Why not?’

She sipped at the glass. ‘It can’t nail me without risking the health of the embryonic queen. And while I know that one of them can reproduce others of its kind, it may not be able to produce more than a single queen. Not enough of the right genetic material or something. I don’t know that for a fact, but the proof is that it hasn’t tried to kill me so far.’

‘You really want to bet this thing’s that smart?’

‘Smarts may not have anything to do with it. It may be pure instinct. Damage the host and you risk premature damage to the unborn queen. It makes sense.’ She met his gaze. ‘It could’ve killed me twice already, but it didn’t. It knows what I’m carrying.’ She rubbed her chin thoughtfully.

‘I’m going to find it,’ she announced suddenly. ‘We’ll see how smart it is.’

He gaped at her. ‘You’re gonna go look for it?’

‘Yeah. I got a pretty good idea where it is. It’s just up there in the attic.’

He frowned. ‘What attic? We don’t have an attic.’

‘It’s a metaphor.’ She finished the water.

‘Oh.’ He was staring at her.

‘Wanna come?’

He shook his head. She smiled, put the glass back in its holder, and turned to exit the communications room. Aaron followed her with his eyes.

‘Fuck me,’ he murmured to no one in particular.

The access corridor was empty. Pausing, she jammed the torch she’d been carrying into a seam in the wall, studying the line of aged, rusting pipes nearby. Grabbing the nearest, she braced herself and yanked hard. The metal snapped and bent toward her. A second yank broke it free. Satisfied, she continued on.

The infirmary seemed more deserted than ever. She paused for a look around, half expecting to see Clemens bent over his workstation, glancing up to grin in her direction. The computer was dark and silent, the chair empty.

It was hard to pull herself up into the overhead air duct while manipulating both the five-foot length of pipe and the flashlight, but she managed. The duct was dark and empty.

Adjusting the battered flashlight for wide beam, she flashed it behind her before starting off in the opposite direction.

Exactly how long or how far she crawled before she started calling, she didn’t know; only that the faint light from the infirmary had long since faded behind her. Her shouts were muted at first, then louder as fear gave way to anger. Her fate was inevitable. She just had to know. She had to see that thing face-to-face.

‘Come on! I know you’re here!’ She advanced on hands and knees. ‘Come on. Just do what you do.’

The air vent bent sharply to the left. She kept moving, alternately muttering and shouting. ‘Come on, you shithead.

Where are you when I need you?’

Her knees were getting raw when she finally paused, listening intently. A noise? Or her own imagination, working overtime?

‘Shit.’ She resumed her awkward, uncomfortable advance, turning another corner.

It opened into an alcove large enough to allow her to stand.

Gratefully she climbed to her feet, stretching. The alcove was home to a decrepit, rusting water purification unit consisting of a thousand-gallon tank and a maze of neglected pipes.

Behind the tank the ventilation duct stretched off before her, an endless, difficult-to-negotiate tube of darkness. As she stared a fresh wave of nausea overcame her and she leaned against the tank for support.

As she did so an alien tail flicked out and knocked the flashlight from her fingers.

It landed on the concrete floor, spinning but staying lit. Ripley whirled, a feeling of desperation creeping up her spine.

The alien peered out at her from within the network of pipes and conduits where it had been resting. It regarded her.

‘You fucker,’ she muttered as she gathered her strength.

Then she rammed the metal pipe directly into its thorax.

With an echoing roar it exploded from behind the maze, metal pipes giving way like straws. Fully aroused and alert, it crouched directly in front of her, thick gelatinous saliva dripping from its outer jaws.

She held her ground, straightening. ‘Come on, fucker. Kill me!’ When it didn’t react she slammed at it again with the pipe.

With a roar it reached out and slapped the pipe away, stood glaring at her. Sweat pouring down her face, she continued to stare back.

Then it whirled and bolted into the darkness. She slumped, gazing after it.

‘Bastard.’

Dillon found the lieutenant in the assembly hall, seated by herself in the huge, deeply shadowed room. She sat with her head in her hands, utterly exhausted, utterly alone. The fire axe dangling from his right hand, he walked over and halted nearby. She must have been aware of his presence, but she did nothing to acknowledge it.

Ordinarily he would have respected her silence and moved on, but conditions had passed beyond ordinary.

‘You okay?’ She didn’t reply, didn’t look up.

‘What are you doin’ out here? You’re supposed to be lyin’

low like everybody else. What happens if that thing shows up?’

Her head rose. ‘It’s not going to kill me.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’ve got one of them inside of me. The big one won’t kill its own.’

Dillon stared at her. ‘Bullshit.’

’Look, I saw it an hour ago. I stood right next to it. I could’ve been lunch, but it wouldn’t touch me. It ran away. It won’t kill its future.’

‘How do you know this thing’s inside you?’

‘I saw it on the cat-scan. It’s a queen. It can make thousands like the one that’s running around out there.’

‘You mean like a queen bee?’

‘Or ant. But, it’s just an analogy. These creatures aren’t insects. They just have a crudely analogous social structure. We don’t know a great deal about them. As you may have noticed, they don’t make for an easy study.’

‘How do you know it’s a queen?’ he found himself asking.

‘For one thing, the shape of the skull is very distinct. It’s backed by a large, upsweeping frill. The beginnings of that were clearly visible in the scanner images. For another, the gestation period for the warrior-worker analogs is quite short, in some cases only a day or so. They mature through their different stages with incredible speed.’ She looked rueful.

‘Very effective survival trait.

‘If this was an ordinary worker it would have come out by now, emerging through the sternum region. Also, it’s gestating in the uterine cavity instead of the chest. Since a queen is a much more complex organism it apparently requires both more space and time to mature. Otherwise I’d be dead by now.

‘I’ve seen how they work. It’s not very pretty. When full grown this thing is enormous, much bigger than the one we’ve been fighting here. It’s definitely going to be a queen, an egg layer. Millions of eggs. It’s not going to be anything like the one that’s out there running around loose.’ Her voice fell. ‘Like I said, nobody’s had any experience with a larval queen. I don’t know how long a gestation period it requires, except that it’s self-evidently a lot longer than an ordinary worker.’

He gazed down at her. ‘Still sounds like bullshit to me. If you got this thing inside you, how’d it get there?’

She was staring down at her hands. ‘While I was in deep sleep. I guess the horrible dream I had wasn’t exactly a dream.

I got raped, though I don’t know that that’s a wholly accurate term. Rape is an act of premeditated violence. This was an act of procreation, even if my participation wasn’t voluntary. We would call it rape, but I doubt that the creature would. It would probably find the concept . . . well, alien.’ She looked thoughtful, thinking back.

‘The one that got loose on my first ship, the
Nostromo
, was making preparations to reproduce itself, but it wasn’t a queen either. At least some of them must be hermaphroditic.

Self-fertilizing, so that even one isolated individual can perpetuate the species. A warrior-worker is capable of producing eggs, but only slowly, one at a time, until it can develop a queen to take over the job. That’s how this one was able to start a queen inside me. At least, that’s the best scenario I can come up with. I’m no xenologist.’

She hesitated. ‘Great, huh? I get to be the mother of the mother of the apocalypse. I can’t do what I should. So you’ve got to help. You’ve got to kill me.’

He took a step backward. ‘What the fuck you talkin’ about?’

‘You don’t get it, do you? I’m finished. I’m dead the minute it’s born because I’ll no longer be necessary to its continued survival. I’ve seen it happen. That I can live with, if it’s not too strict a contradiction in terms. I’ve been ready to die ever since I encountered the first one of these things. But I will be damned if I’m going to let those idiots from Weyland-Yutani take it back to Earth. They just might succeed, and that would be it for the rest of mankind. Maybe for all life on the planet. I don’t see why these things wouldn’t be able to reproduce in any animal of a size larger than, say, a cat.

‘It has to die, and in order for that to happen somebody’s got to kill me. You up to it?’

‘You don’t have to worry about that.’

‘It’s kind of funny, in a way. I’ve done so much killing lately and now I find I can’t manage just one more. Maybe because I’ve had to concentrate so hard on surviving. So you’ve got to help me.’ She met his gaze unwaveringly.

‘Just do it. No speeches.’ She turned her back on him. ‘Come on,’ she urged him, ‘do it! You’re supposed to be a killer . . . kill me. Come on, Dillon. Push yourself. Look back. I think you can do it, you big, ugly son of a bitch.?

He studied her slim form, the pale neck and slumped shoulders. A single well-directed blow would do it, cut through her spinal cord and vertebrae quick and clean. Death would be almost instantaneous. Then he could turn his attention to her belly, to the monstrous organism growing inside. Drag the corpse to the smelter and dump it all in the furnace. It would all be over and done with in a couple of minutes. He raised the axe.

The muscles in his face and arms tightened convulsively and the axe made a faint whooshing sound as it cut through the stale air. He brought it down and around full force . . . to slam into the wall next to her head. She jerked at the impact, then blinked and whirled on him.

‘What the hell is this? You’re not doing me any favours.’

‘I don’t like losin’ a fight, not to nobody, not to nothin’. The big one out there’s already killed half my guys, got the other half scared shitless. As long as it’s alive, you’re not saving any universe.’

‘What’s wrong? I thought you were a killer.’

‘I want to get this thing and I need you to do it. If it won’t kill you, then maybe that helps us fight it.’ She stared at him helplessly. ‘Otherwise, fuck you. Go kill yourself.’

‘We knock its ass off, then you’ll kill me?’

‘No problem. Quick, painless, easy.’ He reached up to tear the axe out of the wall.

The remaining men had assembled in the main hall. Aaron stood off to one side, sipping something from a tumbler. Dillon and Ripley stood side by side in the centre, confronting the others.

‘This is the choice,’ the big man was telling them. ‘You die sitting here on your ass, or maybe you die out there. But at least we take a shot at killing it. We owe it one. It’s fucked us over. Maybe we get even for the others. Now, how do you want it?’

Morse eyed him in disbelief. ‘What the fuck are you talkin’

about?’

‘Killin’ that big motherfucker.’

Aaron took a step forward, suddenly uneasy. ‘Hold it.

There’s a rescue team on the way. Why don’t we just sit it out?’

Ripley eyed him narrowly. ‘Rescue team for who?’

‘For us.’

‘Bullshit,’ she snapped. ‘All they want’s the beast. You know that.’

‘I don’t give a damn what they want. They aren’t gonna kill us.’

‘I’m not so sure. You don’t know the Company the way I do.’

‘Come on. They’re gonna get us out of here, take us home.’

‘They ain’t gonna take
us
home,’ Dillon observed.

‘That still doesn’t mean we should go out and fight it,’ Morse whined. ‘Jesus Christ, give me a break.’

Aaron shook his head slowly. ‘You guys got to be fucking nuts. I got a wife. I got a kid. I’m going home.’

Dillon’s expression was hard, unyielding, and his tone smacked of unpleasant reality. ‘Get real. Nobody gives a shit about you, Eight-five. You are not one of us. You are not a believer. You are just a Company man.’

‘That’s right,’ Aaron told him. ‘I’m a Company man and not some fucking criminal. You keep telling me how dumb I am, but I’m smart enough not to have a life sentence on this rock, and I’m smart enough to wait for some firepower to show up before we get out and fight this thing.’