'Don't worry. We'll manage,' Parker assured her, keeping his tone carefully neutral. He didn't look in her direction, continued to concentrate on his own job. He was still upset over the chance he and Brett might be left out of whatever find the expedition might make.
She started for the nearest up companionway. 'If you run into trouble and need help, I'll be on the bridge.'
'Right,' said Brett softly.
Parker watched her go now, saw her lithe form disappear upward. 'Bitch.'
Ash touched a control. A trio of moving shapes became sharp and regular, losing their fuzzy halos, as the enhancer did its job. He checked his other monitors. The three suit signals continued to come in strong.
'How's it going?' a voice wanted to know over the intercom.
Quickly he shut off the screen, hit his respond. 'All right so far.'
'Where are they?' Ripley asked.
'Getting close to the source. They've moved into some rocky terrain and the signal keeps fading on them, but they're so close I don't see how they can miss it. We ought to hear from them pretty soon.'
'Speaking of that signal, haven't we got anything fresh on it by this time?'
'Not yet.'
'Have you tried putting the transmission through ECIU for detailed analysis?' She sounded a touch impatient.
'Look, I want to know the details as badly as you do. But Mother hasn't identified it yet, so what's the point in my fooling with it?'
'Mind if I give it a shot?'
'Be my guest,' he told her. 'Can't do any harm, and it's something to do. Just let me know the instant you hit on anything, if you happen to get lucky.'
'Yeah. If I happen to get lucky.' She switched off.
She settled a little deeper into her chair on the bridge. It felt oddly spacious now, what with the rest of the bridge crew outside and Ash down in his blister. In fact, it was the first time she could recall being alone on the bridge. It felt strange and not altogether comfortable.
Well, if she was going to take the trouble to work her way through ECIU analysis, she ought to get started. A touch of a switch filled the bridge with that tormented alien wail. She hurriedly turned down the volume. It was disquieting enough to listen to when subdued.
She could easily conceive of it being a voice, as Lambert had suggested. That was a concept more fanciful than scientific, however. Get a grip on yourself, woman. See what the machine has to say and leave your emotional reactions out of it.
Aware of the unlikelihood of having any success where Mother had failed, she activated a little-used panel. But as Ash had said, it was something to do. She couldn't bear to sit and do nothing on the empty bridge. It gave her too much time to think. Better make-work than none at all. .
IV
As the hidden sun continued to rise, the bloody red colour of the atmosphere began to lighten. It was now a musty, dirty yellow instead of the familiar bright sunshine of Earth, but it was a vast improvement over what had been.
The storm had abated somewhat and the omnipresent dust had begun to settle. For the first time, the three foot weary travellers could see more than a couple of metres ahead.
They'd been climbing for some time. The terrain continued hilly, but except for isolated pillars of basalt it was still composed of lava flows. There were few sharp projections, most having been ground down to gentle curves and wrinkles by untold aeons of steady wind and driven dust.
Kane was in the lead, slightly ahead of Lambert. Any minute now he expected her to announce they'd regained the signal. He topped a slight rise, glanced ahead expecting to see more of what they'd encountered thus far: smooth rock leading upward to another short climb.
Instead, his eyes caught something quite different, different enough to make them go wide behind the dirty, transparent face of the helmet, different enough to make him shout over the pickup.
'JESUS CHRIST!'
'What is it? What's the mat. .?' Lambert pulled up alongside him, followed by Dallas. Both were as shocked by the unexpected sight as Kane had been.
They'd assumed the distress signal was being generated by machinery of some sort, but no pictures of the transmitter source had formed in their minds. They'd been too occupied with the storm and the simple necessity of staying together. Confronted now with a real source, one considerably more impressive than any of them had dared consider, their scientific detachment had temporarily vanished.
It was a ship. Relatively intact it was, and more alien than any of them had imagined possible. Dallas would not have labelled it gruesome, but it was disturbing in a way hard technology should not have been. The lines of the massive derelict were clean but unnatural, imbuing the entire design with an unsettling abnormality.
It towered above them and the surrounding rocks on which it lay. From what they could see of it, they decided it had landed in the same manner as the Nostromo, belly down. Basically it was in the shape of an enormous metallic 'U', with the two horns of the U bent slightly in toward one another. One arm was slightly shorter than its counterpart and bent in more sharply. Whether this was due to damage or some alien conception of what constituted pleasing symmetry they had no way of knowing.
As they climbed closer they saw that the craft thickened somewhat at the base of the U, with a series of concentric mounds like thick plates rising to a final dome. Dallas formed the opinion that the two horns contained the ship's drive and engineering sections, while the thicker front end held living quarters, possibly cargo space, and the bridge. For all they knew, he might have everything exactly reversed.
The vessel lay supine, displaying no indication of life or activity. This near, the regained transmission was deafening and all three hastened to lower the volume in their helmets.
Whatever metal the hull was composed of, it glistened in the increasing light in an oddly vitreous way that hinted at no alloy ever formed by the hand of man. Dallas couldn't even be sure it was metal. First inspection revealed nothing like a weld, joint, seal, or any other recognizable method of cojoining separate plates or sections. The alien ship conveyed the impression of having been grown rather than manufactured.
That was bizarre, of course. Regardless of the method of construction, the important thing was that it was undeniably a ship.
So startled were they by the unexpected sight that none of them gave a thought to what the seemingly intact derelict might be worth in the form of bonuses or salvage.
All three were shouting at the same time into their helmet pickups. 'Some kind of ship, all right,' Kane kept repeating inanely, over and over.
Lambert studied the lustrous, almost wet shine of the curving sides, the absence of any familiar exterior features, and shook her head in wonder. 'Are you positive? Maybe it could be a local structure. It's weird. .'
'Naw.' Kane's attention was on the twin, curving horns that formed the rear of the vessel. 'It's not fixed. Even allowing for alien architectural concepts, it's clear enough this isn't intended to be part of the landscape. It's a ship, for sure.'
'Ash, can you see this?' Dallas remembered that the science officer could see clearly via their respective suit video pickups, had probably noticed the wreck the moment Kane had topped the rise and given his shocked cry.
'Yeah, I can see it. Not clear, but enough to agree with Kane that it's a ship.' Ash's voice sounded excited in their helmets. At least it was as excited as the science officer ever sounded. 'Never seen anything like it. Hang on a minute.' They waited while Ash studied readouts, ran a couple of rapid queries through the ship's brain.
'Neither has Mother,' he reported. 'It's a completely unknown type, doesn't correlate with anything we've ever encountered before. Is it as big as it looks from here?'
'Bigger,' Dallas told him. 'Massive construction, no small details visible as yet. If it's constructed to the same
