Alien: Out of the Shadows Read online

  COMING SOON FROM TITAN BOOKS

  ALIEN™: SEA OF SORROWS (JULY 2014)

  THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATIONS

  ALIEN (MARCH 2014)

  ALIENS™ (APRIL 2014)

  ALIEN3 (MAY 2014)

  ALIEN

  OUT OF THE SHADOWS

  TIM LEBBON

  TITAN BOOKS

  ALIEN™: OUT OF THE SHADOWS

  Print edition ISBN: 9781781162682

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781781162699

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: January 2014

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2014 by Tim Lebbon. All rights reserved.

  Alien ™ & © 2014 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  Contents

  Epigraph

  Yearly Progress Report

  Part 1: Dreaming of Monsters

  1: Marion

  2: Samson

  3: Ripley

  4: 937

  5: Narcissus

  6: Family

  7: Shadows

  8: Vacuum

  9: Drop

  Part 2: Underground

  10: Skin

  11: Mine

  12: Cattle

  13: Aliens

  14: Builders

  15: Offspring

  16: Majesty

  17: Ancients

  18: Elevator

  19: Cells

  Part 3: Nothing Good

  20: Home

  21: Pain

  22: Chess

  23: Forgetting

  24: Revenge

  25: Gone

  About the Author

  “The universe seems neither benign

  nor hostile, merely indifferent.”

  CARL SAGAN

  YEARLY PROGRESS REPORT:

  To: Weyland-Yutani Corporation, Science Division

  (Ref: code 937)

  Date (unspecified)

  Transmission (pending)

  My search continues.

  PART 1

  DREAMING OF MONSTERS

  1

  MARION

  Chris Hooper dreamed of monsters.

  As a youngster they’d fascinated him, as they did all children. But unlike children born generations before him, there were places he could go, destinations he could explore, where he might just find them. No longer restricted to the pages of fairy tales or the digital imagery of imaginative moviemakers, humankind’s forays into space had opened up a whole galaxy of possibilities.

  So from a young age he looked to the stars, and those dreams persisted.

  In his early twenties he’d worked for a year on Callisto, one of Jupiter’s moons. They’d been hauling ores from several miles below the surface, and in a nearby mine a Chinese team had broken through into a sub-surface sea. There had been crustaceans and shrimp, tiny pilot fish and delicate frond-like creatures a hundred feet long. But no monsters to set his imagination on fire.

  When he’d left the solar system to work in deep space, traveling as engineer on various haulage, exploration, and mining ships, he’d eagerly sought out tales of alien life forms encountered on those distant asteroids, planets, and moons. Though adulthood had diluted his youngster’s vivid imagination with more mundane concerns—family estrangement, income, and well-being—he still told himself stories. But over the years, none of what he’d found had lived up to the fictions he’d created.

  As time passed he’d come to terms with the fact that monsters were only monsters before they were found, and perhaps the universe wasn’t quite so remarkable as he’d once hoped.

  Certainly not here.

  Working in one of the Marion’s four docking bays, he paused to look down at the planet below with a mixture of distaste and boredom. LV178. Such an inhospitable, storm-scoured, sand-blasted hell of a rock that they hadn’t even bothered to give it a proper name. He’d spent three long years here, making lots of money he had no opportunity to spend.

  Trimonite was the hardest, strongest material known to man, and when a seam as rich as this one was found, it paid to mine it out. One day he’d head home, he promised himself at the end of every fifty-day shift. Home to the two boys and wife he’d run away from seven years before. One day. But he was beginning to fear that this life had become a habit, and the longer it continued, the harder it might be to break.

  “Hoop!” The voice startled him, and as he spun around Jordan was already chuckling.

  He and the captain had been involved briefly, a year before. These confined quarters and stressful work conditions meant that such liaisons were frequent, and inevitably brief. But Hoop liked the fact that they had remained close. Once they’d got the screwing out of the way, they’d become the best of friends.

  “Lucy, you scared the shit out of me.”

  “That’s Captain Jordan to you.” She examined the machinery he’d been working on, without even glancing at the viewing window. “All good here?”

  “Yeah, heat baffles need replacing, but I’ll get Powell and Welford onto that.”

  “The terrible twins,” Jordan said, smiling. Powell was close to six foot six, tall, black, and slim as a pole. Welford was more than a foot shorter, white, and twice as heavy. As different as could be, yet the ship’s engineers were both smartasses.

  “Still no contact?” Hoop asked.

  Jordan frowned briefly. It wasn’t unusual to lose touch with the surface, but not for two days running.

  “Storms down there are the worst I’ve seen,” she said, nodding at the window. From three hundred miles up, the planet’s surface looked even more inhospitable than usual—a smear of burnt oranges and yellows, browns and blood-reds, with the circling eyes of countless sandstorms raging across the equatorial regions. “They’ve gotta abate soon. I’m not too worried yet, but I’ll be happy when we can talk to the dropships again.”

  “Yeah, you and me both. The Marion feels like a derelict when we’re between shifts.”

  Jordan nodded. She was obviously concerned, and for an awkward, silent moment Hoop thought he should say something more to comfort her. But she was the captain because she could handle situations like this. That, and because she was a badass.

  “Lachance is doing spaghetti again tonight,” she said.

  “For a Frenchman, he sure can cook Italian.”

  Jordan chuckled, but he could feel her tension.

  “Lucy, it’s just the storms,” Hoop said. He was sure of that. But he was equally sure that �
��just storms” could easily cause disaster. Out here in the furthest quadrants of known space—pushing the limits of technology, knowledge, and understanding, and doing their best to deal with the corners cut by the Kelland Mining Company—it didn’t take much for things to go wrong.

  Hoop had never met a ship’s engineer better than him, and that was why he was here. Jordan was an experienced flight captain, knowledgeable and wise. Lachance, cynical and gruff, was an excellent pilot who had a healthy respect for space and all it could throw at them. And the rest of their team, though a mixed bunch, were all more than capable at their jobs. The miners themselves were a hardy breed, many of them experienced from stints on Jupiter’s and Neptune’s moons. Mean bastards, with streaks of sick humor, most were as hard as the trimonite they sought.

  But no experience, no confidence or hardness or pig-headedness, could dodge fate. They all knew how dangerous it was. Most of them had grown used to living with the danger, and the close proximity of death.

  Only seven months ago they’d lost three miners in an accident in Bay One as the dropship Samson came in to dock. No one’s fault, really. Just eagerness to be back on board in relative comfort, after fifty days down the mine. The airlock hadn’t sealed properly, an indicator had malfunctioned, and the two men and a woman had suffocated.

  Hoop knew that Jordan still had sleepless nights over that. For three days after transmitting her condolences to the miners’ families, she hadn’t left her cabin. As far as Hoop was concerned, that was what made her a great captain—she was a badass who cared.

  “Just the storms,” she echoed. She leaned past Hoop and rested against the bulkhead, looking down through the window. Despite the violence, from up here the planet looked almost beautiful, an artist’s palette of autumnal colors. “I fucking hate this place.”

  “Pays the bills.”

  “Ha! Bills...” She seemed in a maudlin mood, and Hoop didn’t like her like this. Perhaps that was a price of their closeness—he got to see a side of her the rest of the crew never would.

  “Almost finished,” he said, nudging some loose ducting with his foot. “Meet you in the rec room in an hour. Shoot some pool?”

  Jordan raised an eyebrow. “Another rematch?”

  “You’ve got to let me win sometime.”

  “You’ve never, ever beaten me at pool.”

  “But I used to let you play with my cue.”

  “As your captain, I could put you in the brig for such comments.”

  “Yeah. Right. You and which army?”

  Jordan turned her back on Hoop. “Stop wasting time and get back to work, chief engineer.”

  “Yes, captain.” He watched her walk away along the dusky corridor and through a sliding door, and then he was alone again.

  Alone with the atmosphere, the sounds, the smells of the ship...

  The stench of space-flea piss from the small, annoying mites that managed to multiply, however many times the crew tried to purge them. They were tiny, but a million fleas pissing produced a sharp, rank odor that clung to the air.

  The constant background hum of machinery was inaudible unless Hoop really listened for it, because it was so ever-present. There were distant thuds, echoing grinds, the whisper of air movement encouraged by conditioning fans and baffles, the occasional creak of the ship’s huge bulk settling and shifting. Some of the noises he could identify because he knew them so well, and on occasion he perceived problems simply through hearing or not hearing them—sticking doors, worn bearings in air duct seals, faulty transmissions.

  But there were also mysterious sounds that vibrated through the ship now and then, like hesitant, heavy footsteps in distant corridors, or someone screaming from a level or two away. He’d never figured those out. Lachance liked to say it was the ship screaming in boredom.

  He hoped that was all they were.

  The vessel was huge and would take him half an hour to walk from nose to tail, and yet it was a speck in the vastness of space. The void exerted a negative pressure on him, and if he thought about it too much, he thought he would explode—be ripped apart, cell by cell, molecule by molecule, spread to the cosmos from which he had originally come. He was the stuff of the stars, and when he was a young boy—dreaming of monsters, and looking to space in the hope that he would find them—that had made him feel special.

  Now, it only made him feel small.

  However close they all lived together on the Marion, they were alone out here.

  Shaking away the thoughts, he bent to work again, making more noise than was necessary—a clatter to keep him company. He was looking forward to shooting some pool with Jordan and having her whip his ass again. There were colleagues and acquaintances aplenty, but she was the closest thing he had to a good friend.

  * * *

  The recreation room was actually a block of four compartments to the rear of the Marion’s accommodations hub. There was a movie theater with a large screen and an array of seating, a music library with various listening posts, a reading room with comfortable chairs and reading devices—and then there was Baxter’s Bar, better known as BeeBee’s. Josh Baxter was the ship’s communications officer, but he also acted as their barman. He mixed a mean cocktail.

  Though it was sandwiched back between the accommodations hub and the sectioned holds, BeeBee’s was the social center of the ship. There were two pool tables, table tennis, a selection of faux-antique computer game consoles, and the bar area with tables and chairs scattered in casual abandon. It had not been viewed as a priority by the company that paid the ship’s designers, so the ceiling was a mass of exposed service pipework, the floor textured metal, the walls bare and unpainted. However, those using BeeBee’s had done their best to make it more comfortable. Seats were padded, lighting was low and moody, and many miners and crew had copied Baxter’s idea of hanging decorated blankets from the walls. Some painted the blankets, others tore and tied. Each of them was distinct. It gave the whole rec room a casual, almost arty air.

  Miners had fifty days between shifts on the planet, so they often spent much of their off-time here, and though alcohol distribution was strictly regulated, it still made for some raucous nights.

  Captain Jordan allowed that. In fact, she positively encouraged it, because it was a release of tension that the ship would otherwise barely contain. It wasn’t possible to communicate with any of their loved ones back home. Distances were so vast, time so extended, that any meaningful contact was impossible. They needed somewhere to feel at home, and BeeBee’s provided just that.

  When Hoop entered, it was all but deserted. These quiet times between shift changes gave Baxter time to clear out the bar stock, tidy the room, and prepare for the next onslaught. He worked quietly behind the bar, stocking bottled beer and preparing a selection of dehydrated snacks. Water on the ship always tasted vaguely metallic, so he rehydrated many of the treats in stale beer. No one complained.

  “And here he is,” Jordan said. She was sitting on a stool by one of the pool tables, bottle in hand. “Back for another beating. What do you think, Baxter?”

  Baxter nodded a greeting to Hoop.

  “Sucker for punishment,” he agreed.

  “Yep. Sucker.”

  “Well if you don’t want to play...” Hoop said.

  Jordan slid from her stool, plucked a cue from the rack and lobbed it at him. As he caught it out of the air, the ship’s intercom chimed.

  “Oh, now, what the hell?” Jordan sighed.

  Baxter leaned across the bar and hit the intercom.

  “Captain! Anyone!” It was their pilot, Lachance. “Get up to the bridge, now. We’ve got incoming from one of the dropships.” His French accent was much more acute than normal. That happened when he was upset or stressed, neither of which occurred very often.

  Jordan dashed to the bar and pressed the transmit button.

  “Which one?”

  “The Samson. But it’s fucked up.”

  “What do you mean?” In the ba
ckground, behind Lachance’s confused words and the sounds of chaos from the bridge, Hoop heard static-tinged screaming. He and Jordan locked eyes.

  Then they ran, and Baxter followed.

  * * *

  The Marion was a big ship, far more suited to massive deep-ore mining than trimonite extrusion, and it took them a few minutes to make their way to the bridge. Along the curved corridor that wound around the accommodations hub, then up three levels by elevator. By the time they bumped into Garcia and Kasyanov, everyone else was there.

  “What’s going on?” Jordan demanded. Baxter rushed across to the communications center, and Lachance stood gratefully to vacate his chair. Baxter slipped on a pair of headphones, and his left hand hovered over an array of dials and switches.

  “Heard something coming through static a few minutes ago,” Lachance said. “The higher they climb, the clearer it gets.” They called him “No-Chance” Lachance because of his laconic pessimism, but in truth he was one of the most level-headed among them. Now, Hoop could see by his expression that something had him very rattled.

  From loudspeakers around the bridge, frantic breathing crackled.

  “Samson, Captain Jordan is now on the bridge,” Baxter said. “Please give us your—”

  “I don’t have time to fucking give you anything, just get the med pods fired up!” The voice was so distorted that they couldn’t tell who it was.

  Jordan grabbed a headset from beside Baxter. Hoop looked around at the others, all of them standing around the communications area. The bridge was large, but they were all bunched in close. They showed the tension they had to be feeling, even the usually unflappable science officer, Karen Sneddon. The thin, severe-faced woman had been to more planets, asteroids, and moons than all of them put together. But there was fear in her eyes.

  “Samson, this is Captain Jordan. What’s happening? What’s going on down at the mine?”

  “... creatures! We’ve—”

  The contact cut out abruptly, leaving the bridge ringingly silent.

  Wide viewing windows looked out onto the familiar view of space and an arc of the planet below, as if nothing had changed. The low-level hum of machinery was complemented by agitated breathing.