Alien: Out the Shadows

Then she hears another sound from above that makes her start climbing again. Her sense of well-being has been scrubbed away by that sound, and the moment of perfection dissipates as if it has never been felt at all. The sky is no longer cloud-free. The hill’s wildness is now brutal rather than beautiful.

The sound was her child, crying.

Ripley reaches the top, clinging to the hillside now, terrified that she will fall and even more afraid of what she’ll see if she does not. When she pulls herself up and over onto the summit, she blinks, and everything is all right.

Then she really sees Amanda, standing there just a few yards away with one of those monstrous things attached to her face, tail tightening, pale fingers gripping, body throbbing. Ripley reaches out, and her daughter’s chest comes apart—

* * *

“…Go in there!” Hoop said.

“What?” Ripley asked, blinking away the fog of confusion. It was harder to do this time, the debilitating sense of loss clinging to her more persistently. They’d reached the top of the staircase—she knew that, even though she had almost been elsewhere—but she took a moment to look around before realizing what Hoop was saying.

“But look at it!” Baxter said. “We can’t just ignore that.”

“I can,” Hoop said. “I can, and I am!”

The head of the staircase opened into a wide area with two exits. One led up again, perhaps toward a hatch in the ship’s hull, or perhaps not. There was no telling. The other was closer, much wider, and like nothing they had seen on the ship before.

At first she thought it was glass. The layers of clear material were scarred and dusty with time, but still appeared solid. Then she saw it shimmer as if from some unfelt breeze, and knew it wasn’t glass. She didn’t know exactly what it was, but it was there for one purpose.

Lachance grabbed Baxter’s flashlight and shone it ahead. The light smeared across the clear surface and then splashed through the large space beyond. Some of what it illuminated Ripley recognized. Some she did not. None of it made her want to go any closer.

“More eggs,” she said.

“But different,” Baxter said. He hobbled closer and pressed his face to the barrier. It rippled as he touched it.

Lachance played his light around, and Hoop added his own.

“Oh,” Baxter said. He turned around slowly.

“What is it?” Ripley asked. We just need to leave!

“I think we just found where your queen friend came from.”

Ripley closed her eyes, sighed, and there was a terrible, unrelenting inevitability to this. She did not feel in charge of her own actions. She was long past thinking, Maybe this is all a dream. No, she wasn’t asleep, but she didn’t feel entirely awake, either. The more she tried to take control of events, the more they ran away from her. And here she was again, needing to go in one direction, yet drawn relentlessly in another.

Hoop shone his light back down the staircase they’d just climbed. No movement. Then he turned back to the new room beyond the clear enclosure.

“I’ll go first,” he said.

* * *

The second thing Ripley noticed was that the tech here was far more recognizable—and more prevalent—than it had been anywhere else in the ship. There were at least six separate movable workstations where the equipment appeared largely identical, ranging from sizeable units to smaller, more intricate devices. There was very little dust, and everything had a sharpness, a clarity, that the rest of the ship was lacking. Time had not paid this place so much attention.

The first thing she noticed was the eggs, and the things that guarded them.

There were sixteen eggs, each one set apart from the others within a waist-high, circular wire enclosure. The enclosures were set around the room’s curved perimeter, leaving the center open for the mobile workstations. The eggs looked similar to the others they had found and destroyed, though there were subtle differences in color, tone, and shape. They were rounder, fatter, and their surfaces seemed to be more thoroughly networked with fine veins. Ripley thought perhaps they were newer, or simply better preserved.