Alien: Out the Shadows

Tim Lebbon ALIEN Out of the Shadows

“The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.”

CARL SAGAN

YEARLY PROGRESS REPORT:

To: Weyland-Yutani Corporation, Science Division

(Ref: code 937)

Date (unspecified)

Transmission (pending)

My search continues.

PART 1 DREAMING OF MONSTERS

1 MARION

Chris Hooper dreamed of monsters.

As a youngster they’d fascinated him, as they did all children. But unlike children born generations before him, there were places he could go, destinations he could explore, where he might just find them. No longer restricted to the pages of fairy tales or the digital imagery of imaginative moviemakers, humankind’s forays into space had opened up a whole galaxy of possibilities.

So from a young age he looked to the stars, and those dreams persisted.

In his early twenties he’d worked for a year on Callisto, one of Jupiter’s moons. They’d been hauling ores from several miles below the surface, and in a nearby mine a Chinese team had broken through into a sub-surface sea. There had been crustaceans and shrimp, tiny pilot fish and delicate frond-like creatures a hundred feet long. But no monsters to set his imagination on fire.

When he’d left the solar system to work in deep space, traveling as engineer on various haulage, exploration, and mining ships, he’d eagerly sought out tales of alien life forms encountered on those distant asteroids, planets, and moons. Though adulthood had diluted his youngster’s vivid imagination with more mundane concerns—family estrangement, income, and well-being—he still told himself stories. But over the years, none of what he’d found had lived up to the fictions he’d created.

As time passed he’d come to terms with the fact that monsters were only monsters before they were found, and perhaps the universe wasn’t quite so remarkable as he’d once hoped.

Certainly not here.

Working in one of the Marion’s four docking bays, he paused to look down at the planet below with a mixture of distaste and boredom. LV178. Such an inhospitable, storm-scoured, sand-blasted hell of a rock that they hadn’t even bothered to give it a proper name. He’d spent three long years here, making lots of money he had no opportunity to spend.

Trimonite was the hardest, strongest material known to man, and when a seam as rich as this one was found, it paid to mine it out. One day he’d head home, he promised himself at the end of every fifty-day shift. Home to the two boys and wife he’d run away from seven years before. One day. But he was beginning to fear that this life had become a habit, and the longer it continued, the harder it might be to break.

“Hoop!” The voice startled him, and as he spun around Jordan was already chuckling.

He and the captain had been involved briefly, a year before. These confined quarters and stressful work conditions meant that such liaisons were frequent, and inevitably brief. But Hoop liked the fact that they had remained close. Once they’d got the screwing out of the way, they’d become the best of friends.

“Lucy, you scared the shit out of me.”

“That’s Captain Jordan to you.” She examined the machinery he’d been working on, without even glancing at the viewing window. “All good here?”

“Yeah, heat baffles need replacing, but I’ll get Powell and Welford onto that.”

“The terrible twins,” Jordan said, smiling. Powell was close to six foot six, tall, black, and slim as a pole. Welford was more than a foot shorter, white, and twice as heavy. As different as could be, yet the ship’s engineers were both smartasses.

“Still no contact?” Hoop asked.

Jordan frowned briefly. It wasn’t unusual to lose touch with the surface, but not for two days running.

“Storms down there are the worst I’ve seen,” she said, nodding at the window. From three hundred miles up, the planet’s surface looked even more inhospitable than usual—a smear of burnt oranges and yellows, browns and blood-reds, with the circling eyes of countless sandstorms raging across the equatorial regions. “They’ve gotta abate soon. I’m not too worried yet, but I’ll be happy when we can talk to the dropships again.”

“Yeah, you and me both. The Marion feels like a derelict when we’re between shifts.”

Jordan nodded. She was obviously concerned, and for an awkward, silent moment Hoop thought he should say something more to comfort her. But she was the captain because she could handle situations like this. That, and because she was a badass.

“Lachance is doing spaghetti again tonight,” she said.

“For a Frenchman, he sure can cook Italian.”

Jordan chuckled, but he could feel her tension.