Alien: Out the Shadows

Then Hoop closed the stasis pod and watched its controls flash on as the Narcissus’s computer took control. By the time he was standing by the shuttle’s door, plasma torch slung over one shoulder, Ripley was almost into hypersleep.

* * *

Amanda is in her late teens, lithe, tall and athletic, just like her mother. She stands by a stone wall somewhere dark and shadowy, and her chest bursts open, spilling blood to the floor, a screeching creature clawing its way out from the wound.

Ripley turns away because she doesn’t want to see. Behind her, a monster spews hundreds of flexing eggs from its damaged abdomen.

She turns again and sees a blood-spattered metal wall, tattered corpses at its base. More aliens crawl toward her, hissing, heads moving as if they are sniffing her, and she understands their age-old fury in a way that only nightmares can allow. It’s as if they have been looking for her forever, and now is the moment of their revenge.

She turns back to Amanda, and her daughter is maybe fourteen years old. She coughs and presses her hand to her chest. Rubs. Nothing happens. Ripley turns a full circle. More blood, more aliens, but now it’s all more distant, as if she’s viewing things through a reversed telescope.

Those beasts are still coming for her, but they’re a long way off, both in time and memory, and becoming more distant with every moment that passes.

Amanda, she tries to say. But though she knows this is a dream, still she cannot speak.

25 GONE

Three more minutes and she’ll be gone.

Hoop shoved the empty fuel cell out through the airlock, then returned to the Narcissus and closed the hatch behind him, flicking the lever that would initiate its automatic sealing and locking. He heard the heavy clunks and then a steady hiss, and Ripley was lost to him. There wasn’t even a viewing panel in the door. He would never see her again.

The Marion was in her death-throes. The ship’s vibrations were now so violent that Hoop’s heels and ankles hurt each time the deck jerked beneath him. He moved quickly through the airlock, plasma torch held at ready in case that last alien had survived, and in case it was coming for him still.

Two minutes. He just had to live that long, in order to release Ripley’s shuttle. He hoped to survive for longer— and a plan was forming, a crazy idea that probably had a bad ending—but two minutes was the minimum. After that, after Ripley would be safe, things would matter less.

He reached the vestibule and closed the airlock behind him, sealing it and leaning to one side to look at the Narcissus through one of the viewing windows. All he had to do now was to hit the airlock seal confirmation, and the ship’s computer would know it was safe to go.

His hand hovered over the pad. Then he pressed it down.

Almost instantaneously a brief retro burst pushed the Narcissus away from the Marion, and the two parted company. More retro exhalations dropped the shuttle down beneath the ship’s belly. It fell through veils of smoke and sheets of blazing air, buffeted by the planet’s atmosphere, before its rockets ignited and it vanished quickly toward the stern.

And that was it. Ripley and the Narcissus were gone. Hoop was left alone on the Marion, and he knew the ship he’d called home was moments away from dying.