Alien: Out the Shadows

“Huh?” Was she back on Nostromo? But then she remembered the blazing star that massive salvage ship had become. Rescue, then?

Someone had found her. The shuttle had been retrieved and boarded. She was saved.

She was Ellen Ripley, and soon she’d be reunited with—

Something moved across her stomach. A flood of images assaulted her, so vivid compared to those she’d had since waking that they startled her into movement and kicked her senses alive—

—Kane thrashing, his chest ripping and bursting open, that thing emerging—

—and she reached to her own chest, ready to feel the stretching skin and the agony of ribs rupturing outward.

“Hey, hey,” the man said, reaching for her.

Don’t you understand what’s going to happen? She wanted to shout, but her voice was trapped, her mouth so dry that her tongue felt like a swollen, sand-coated slug. He held her shoulders and stroked her chin with both thumbs. It was such a gentle, intimate gesture that she paused in her writhing.

“You’ve got a cat,” he said, smiling. The smile suited his face, yet it looked uncomfortable, as if he rarely used it.

“Jonesy,” Ripley rasped painfully, and the cat crawled up from her stomach to her chest. It stood there, swaying slightly, then arched its back and clenched its claws. They scratched Ripley’s skin through her thin vest and she winced, but it was a good feeling. A pain that told her she was still alive.

She reached for Jonesy, and as she stroked him a feeling of immense well-being came over her. She had risen up out of the shadows, and now that she was home—or near to home, if she had been recovered by a larger ship—then she would do her best to leave them behind. The terrible, mournful memories were already crowding in, but they were just that. Memories.

The future was a wide-open place.

“They found us,” she whispered to the cat as he growled softly in his throat. Her arms barely felt like her own, but she could feel fur against her fingertips and palms. Jonesy stretched against her. She wondered if cats could have nightmares.

“We’re safe now…”

She thought of Amanda, her daughter, and how pleased they would be to see each other. Had Ripley missed her eleventh birthday? She sincerely hoped not, because she hated breaking a promise.

Sitting up slowly, the man helping her, she groaned as her nerves came to life. It was the worst case of pins and needles ever, far worse than she’d ever had following any previous hypersleep. Upright, she sat as motionless as possible as the circulation returned, her singing nerve endings finally falling silent.

And then the man spoke.

“Actually… you’re not really that safe, to be honest.”

“What?”

“I mean, we’re not a rescue ship. We thought you were the rescue ship when we first saw you on our scopes. Thought maybe you’d answered our distress signal. But…” He trailed off, and when Ripley looked up she saw two other figures behind him in the shuttle’s confined interior. They stood back against the wall, warily eyeing her and the stasis pod.

“You’re kidding me,” one of them, a woman, said.

“Can it, Sneddon.” The man held out his hand. “My name’s Hoop. Can you stand?”

“Where am I?” Ripley asked.

“Nowhere you want to be, that’s for sure,” the man behind Hoop said. He was very tall, thin, gaunt. “Go back to sleep, Miss. Sweet dreams.”

“And that’s Powell,” Hoop said. “Don’t mind them. Let’s get you to med bay. Garcia can clean you up and check you over. Looks like you need feeding, too.”

Ripley frowned, and her mouth instantly grew dry again. Her stomach rumbled. She felt dizzy. She grabbed the side of the stasis pod, and as she slowly slung her leg over the rim and tried to stand, Hoop held her arm. His hand seems incredibly warm, wonderfully real. But his words hung with her.

Jonesy snuggled back down into the foot of the stasis pod, as if eager to find sleep again. Maybe cats really do know everything, she mused.

“Where…?” Ripley asked again, but then the shuttle began to spin, and as she fainted the shadows closed in once more.

* * *

Garcia was a small, attractive woman who had a habit of laughing softly after everything she said. But Ripley didn’t think it was an endemic shyness. The ship’s medic was nervous.

“You’re on the Marion,” she said. “Orbital mining freighter. We work for the Kelland Mining Company. They’re owned by Prospectia, who are a sub-division of San Rei Corporation, who are—like pretty much everything— owned by Weyland-Yutani.” She shrugged, chuckled. “Our ship’s built for harvesting large core deposits, really—the holds are huge and there are four extendable towing decks stacked back beneath the engine room. But we mine trimonite. Hardest substance known to man. It’s fifteen times harder than diamond, and extremely rare. We have little more than three tons of it on board.”