Alien: Out the Shadows

I really am in charge now, he thought. It weighed heavy.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s get to it.”

* * *

They followed Hoop’s plan.

In through the vestibule that served bays Three and Four, through the docking arm, then through the airlock to the outer hatch. Hoop and Welford went ahead, leaving Sneddon to close the doors behind them, and at the end of the docking arm the two men paused. Beyond the closed hatch lay a narrow gap, and then the Samson’s outer airlock door. There was a small viewing window in both hatch and door.

The inside of the Samson’s window was steamed up.

Hoop wondered whether the things knew they were there, so close. He thought of asking Baxter, but silence seemed wisest. Silence, and speed.

They quickly dismantled the hatch’s locking mechanism and disabled it, disconnecting the power source. It would need to be repaired before the hatch could be opened again. Much stronger than the bathroom door on the Delilah. The thought didn’t comfort Hoop as much as it should have.

They worked backward, and when they’d disabled the door mechanism between docking arm and vestibule, Welford purged the atmosphere. The doors creaked slightly under the altered pressures.

Outside the vestibule, Sneddon waited.

“Done?” she asked.

“Just this last door,” Hoop said. Welford went to work.

Five minutes later they were making their way back toward the bridge. There were now four sealed and locked doors standing between the Samson and the Marion, as well as a vacuum in the airlock.

He should have felt safer.

“Baxter, you still got a feed from the Samson?” he asked.

“Yeah. Not much change, those things are just sitting there. One of them… it sort of stretched for a while, like shadows were growing out of it. Weird lighting in there, and the picture’s not great, but it looked like it was shedding its skin.”

Another voice muttered something that Hoop missed.

“What was that?” he said.

“I said it looks like it’s grown,” Powell said. “The one that shed its skin. It’s bigger.”

“What about Jones?” Hoop asked, deeply troubled. Bigger? Impossible in such a short time, surely.

“Still there,” Baxter said. “I can only see his arm, shoulder, head. He’s still shaking.”

“Record the images,” Sneddon said.

“For later viewing pleasure?” Lachance asked, but no one replied. No time for humor, even if it was tinged with sarcasm.

“We’ll be back in a few minutes,” Hoop said. “Lachance, get the computer to categorize damage. I’ll prioritize when we get there, then we’ll pull together a work schedule. Baxter, has a distress signal gone out?”

“Oh, yeah, that’s the other fun bit,” Baxter said. “Some of the wreckage must have fucked the antenna array. So the computer says the signal is transmitting, but I don’t think it is.”

“Right. Great. Fucking wonderful.” Hoop shook his head. “Any meteors heading toward us? Black holes opening up? Anything else to worry about?”

“The bridge’s coffee carafe was smashed,” Powell said, his voice deep and deadly serious.

Hoop started laughing. By the time he got his hysteria under control, tears smeared the inside of his helmet’s visor.

* * *

By the time they reached the bridge, Kasyanov and Garcia had made their way back from the medical bay. The few personnel left aboard the Marion were either dead or sporting minor injuries, so there was little for them to do down there.

“It was creepy, just the two of us,” Garcia said. “So we shut everything down. Figured it would be safer up here, with everyone together.”

Just how safe that might be, Lachance revealed to them all.

“The only blessing is that the Delilah’s fuel core wasn’t compromised during the crash,” he said.

“So where is it?” Hoop asked.

Lachance was still in his pilot’s seat. “Out there somewhere,” he said, “floating around.” He waved his hand, a cigar clutched between two fingers. Hoop and most of the others hated the stink of the things. But with everything that had happened, it seemed almost comical to ask him to put it out.

“We saw plenty of wreckage close to the ship,” Welford said. “Maybe it was compromised and it’s just floating somewhere nearby, overheating and ready to blow.”

“In which case, c’est la vie,” Lachance said. “Unless you want to throw on a suit and take a space walk.” Welford looked away, and Lachance smiled. “And anyway, we have more immediate concerns—things we can do something about.”

“The Samson?” Powell asked.

Hoop looked at the screens. The interior of the dropship was unchanged: shadows. Shadows flickered, Jones shook. They all wanted to turn it off, but Hoop had insisted keeping it on. They needed to know.

Lachance shrugged.