Aliens

The grinding noise was overpowering as they slowed. She listened intently as she brought the big vehicle to a halt.

'Don't ask me for an analysis. I'm an operator, not a mechanic.'

Hicks cocked an ear in the direction of the metallic gargling 'Sounds like a blown transaxle. Maybe two. You're just grinding metal. Actually I'm surprised that the underside of this baby isn't lying back on B-level somewhere. They build these things tough.'

'Not tough enough.' That was Burke's voice, filtering up to them from somewhere in the passenger compartment.

'Nobody expected to have to face anything like these creatures. Ever.' Hicks leaned toward the console and rotated an exterior viewer. The APC looked terrible on the outside, a smoking, acid-scarred hulk. It was supposed to be invulnerable. Now it was scrap.

Ripley spun her seat, glanced at the empty one next to her and then turned to stare down the aisle that led back through the personnel carrier.

'Newt. Where's Newt?'

A tug on her pants leg. Not hard, so she didn't jump. Newt was squeezed into the tiny space between the driver's seat and the APC's armoured bulkhead. She was trembling and terrified but alert. No catatonia this time, no withdrawal from reality No reason for an extreme reaction, Ripley knew. Doubtless the girl had been witness to much worse when the aliens had overwhelmed the colony.

Had she been watching the Operations bay monitors when the soldiers had initially penetrated the alien cocoon chamber? Had she seen the face of the woman who had whispered in agony to Dietrich? What if the woman had been. '

But she couldn't have been. If that had been Newt's mother the girl would be beyond catatonia by now. Gone, withdrawn and unreachable, perhaps forever.

'You okay?' Sometimes inanities had to be asked. Besides she wanted, needed, to hear the child respond.

Newt did so with a thumbs-up gesture, still employing selective silence as a defence mechanism. Ripley didn't push her to talk. Keeping quiet while everyone around her was being killed had kept her alive.

'I have to check on the others,' she told the upturned face 'Will you be all right?'

A nod this time, accompanied by a shy little smile that made Ripley swallow hard. She tried to conceal what she was feeling inside, because this wasn't the time or place to break down. They could do that when they were safely back aboard the Sulaco.

'Good. I'll be right back. If you get tired of staying under there, you can come back and join the rest of us, okay?' The smile widened slightly and was followed by a more vigorous nod but the girl stayed put. She still trusted her own instincts more than she trusted any adult. Ripley wasn't offended. She unbuckled herself and headed back down the aisle.

Hudson was standing off to one side inspecting his arm. The fact that he still had an arm showed that he'd only been lightly misted by the alien acid. He was reliving the last twenty minutes of his life, replaying every second over and over in his mind and not believing what he saw there. She could hear him muttering to himself.

'—I don't believe it. It didn't happen. It didn't happen, man.'

Burke tried to have a look at the injured comtech's arm, more curious than sympathetic. Hudson jerked away from the Company rep.

'I'm all right. Leave it!'

Burke pursed his lips, wanting to see but not willing to push 'Better let somebody take a look at it. Can't tell what the side effects are. Might be toxic.'

'Yeah? And if it is, I suppose you're going to check stores and break out an antidote in a couple of minutes, right? Dietrich's the medtech.' He swallowed and his anger faded. 'Was our medtech. Stinking bugs.'

Hicks was bending over the motionless Gorman, checking for a pulse. Ripley joined him.

'Anything?' she asked tightly.

'Heartbeat's slow but steady. He's breathing the same way. It's the same with the rest of his vital signs: slowed down but regular He's alive. If I didn't know better, I'd say he was sleeping, but it ain't sleep. I think he's paralyzed.'

Vasquez pushed both of them aside and grabbed the unconscious lieutenant by his collar. She was too furious to cry 'He's dead is what he is!' She hauled the upper half o Gorman's body upright with one hand and drew back the other in a fist, screaming in his face.

'Wake up, pendejo! Wake up. I'm gonna kill you, you useless waste!'

Hicks inserted his bulk between her and the frozen lieutenant. Same soft voice employed, but with a slight edge to it now. Same hard eyes staring into the smartgun operator's face.

'Hold it. Hold it. Back off-right now.'

Their eyes locked. Vasquez continued to hold Gorman half off the deck. Something basic cut its way through her fury Marine—she was a Marine, and Marines live by basics. The basics in this case were simple. Apone was gone and therefore Hicks was in charge.

'It ain't worth bruising my knuckles,' she finally muttered She released the lieutenant's collar, and his head bounced off the deck as she turned away, still cursing to herself. Ripley didn't doubt for an instant that if Hicks hadn't intervened, the smartgun operator would have beaten the unconscious Gorman to a pulp.

With Vasquez out of the way Ripley bent over the paralyzed officer and opened his tunic. The bloodless purple puncture wound that marred his shoulder had already sealed itself.

'Looks like it stung him or something. Interesting. I didn't know they could do that.'

'Hey!'

The excited shout made Hicks and her turn toward the Operations bay. Hudson was in there. He'd been staring morosely at the biomonitors and videoscreens, and something had caught his eye. Now he beckoned to his remaining companions.

'Look. Crowe and Dietrich aren't dead, man.' He gestured at the bio readouts, swallowed uneasily. 'They must be like Gorman. Their signs are real low, but they ain't dead—' His voice trailed off, along with his initial excitement.

If they weren't dead and they were like Hudson, that meant The comtech started to shake with a mixture of anger and sorrow. He was standing on the thin edge of hysteria They all were. It clung to them like a psychic leech, hanging on the fringes of their sanity, threatening to invade and take over the instant anyone let down his mental guard.

Ripley knew what those soporific bioreadouts meant. She tried to explain, but she couldn't meet Hudson's eyes as she did so.

'You can't help them.'

'Hey, but if they're still alive—'

'Forget it. Right now they're being cocooned, just like those others. Like the colonists you found in the wall when you went in there. You can't do a damn thing for them. Nobody can That's the way it is. Just be glad you're here talking about them instead of down there with them. If Dietrich was here, she'd know she couldn't do anything to help you.'

The comtech seemed to sag in on himself. 'This ain't happening.'

Ripley turned away from him. As she did so, her gaze met Vasquez's. It would have been easy for her to say 'I told you so to the smartgunner. It also would have been superfluous. That one look communicated everything the two women needed to say.

This time it was Vasquez who turned away.

IX

In the colony medical lab Bishop stood hunched over an ocular probe. Beneath the lens was a stretched slice of one of the dead facehugger parasites, extracted from the specimen in the nearest stasis cylinder. Even in death the biopsied creature looked threatening, lying on its back on the dissection table The clutching legs looked poised