Alien: Out the Shadows

She examined the rest of the creature, playing her flashlight across its blasted and slashed body. Though bigger than any they had so far seen, something about it was also almost childlike—its features were larger, the spiked and clawed limbs not quite so vicious. Ripley felt a strange frisson, a sense of likeness. But she was nothing like this thing.

Nothing at all.

“I think she’s young,” she said. “Imagine just how big…?” She shook her head. “We need to go.”

“Yeah,” Hoop agreed.

“My eyes are improving,” Kasyanov said. “I can move quicker. I’ll stay behind you. But let’s get the hell out of this pit.”

They moved on, the corridor still erring upward. They were more cautious now, Hoop and Ripley shining their lights ahead across walls, floor, ceiling. At every junction they paused to listen before moving on. And when they reached another staircase leading up toward what might have been an opening in the ship’s hull, he handed Ripley another charge magazine.

“Last one,” he said. “Five charges left.”

“And I’m almost out of bolts,” Lachance said.

“My plasma torch is still almost full,” Kasyanov said.

They were being worn down step by step, Ripley knew. Whether or not this was an intentional act by the aliens, whether they could even consider something that complex, she didn’t know. But the fact remained.

“That’s the way out,” she said, nodding up at this new, shorter staircase.

“How d’you know that?” Lachance gasped. His knees were shaking from Sneddon’s weight. He was almost exhausted. And Baxter, leaning against Hoop, was looking up at the new, waist-high steps with something approaching dread.

“Because it has to be,” Ripley said.

They started climbing—

* * *

She is panting, sweating, exhausted, ebullient. It’s one of those moments that opens up and out into a perfect, neverto-be-repeated time, so rare that its blooming is like that of the planet’s most precious flower. She is filled with a sense of well-being, an all-consuming love for her daughter that is so powerful that it hurts.

This time, now, she thinks, doing her best to consign that instant to memory. The cool heather beneath her hands as she clasps onto the hillside and pulls herself higher. The heat of the sun on the back of her neck, sweat cooling across her back from the climb. The deep-blue sky above, the river below snaking through the valley, vehicles as small as ants passing back and forth along the road.

The slope steepens as they approach the hill’s summit, and Amanda giggles above her, pretending that she didn’t know. It’s dangerous—not quite mountain climbing, but it’s a hands-and-knees scramble, and if they slip it will be a long tumble down. But Ripley can’t be angry. Everything feels too good, too right, for that.

So she climbs harder and faster, ignoring the feel of empty space pulling her back and down from the hillside. Amanda glances back and sees her mother moving quicker. She giggles again and climbs, her teenager’s limbs strong and supple.

I’ve never actually been here and seen this, yet it’s the best moment of my life.

Amanda reaches the summit and shouts in triumph, disappearing over the top to lie back on the short grass and wait for her mother.

Ripley pulls herself up the natural steps in the slope. For an instant she feels terribly alone and exposed, and she pauses in her climb. Shocked. Cold.