Contents
Cover
Also by Alan Dean Foster
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
About the Author
Also Available from Titan Books
Coming Soon from Titan Books
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS
ALIEN™: OUT OF THE SHADOWS
ALIEN: SEA OF SORROWS (JULY 2014)
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THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATIONS ALIEN
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Print edition ISBN: 9781783290192
E-book edition ISBN: 9781783290208
Published by Titan Books
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First edition: May 2014
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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.
™ & © 1992, 2014 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.
All rights reserved.
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ADF
I
Bad dreams.
Funny thing about nightmares. They’re like a chronically recurring disease. Mental malaria. Just when you think you’ve got them licked they hit you all over again, sneaking up on you when you’re unprepared, when you’re completely relaxed and least expect them. Not a damn thing you can do about it, either. Not a damn thing. Can’t take any pills or potions, can’t ask for a retroactive injection. The only cure is good sound sleep, and that just feeds the infection.
So you try not to sleep. But in deep space you don’t have any choice. Avoid the cryonic chambers and the boredom on a deep-space transport will kill you. Or even worse, you’ll survive, dazed and mumbling after the sacrifice of ten, twenty, thirty years of useless consciousness. A lifetime wasted gazing at gauges, seeking enlightenment in the unvarying glare of readouts of limited colours. You can read, and watch the vid, and exercise, and think of what might have been had you opted to slay the boredom with deep sleep. Not many professions where it’s considered desirable to sleep on the job. Not a bad deal at all. Pay’s good, and you have the chance to observe social and technological advance from a unique perspective. Postponing death does not equate with but rather mimics immortality.
Except for the nightmares. They’re the inescapable downside to serving on a deep-space vessel. Normal cure is to wake up. But you can’t wake up in deep sleep. The machines won’t let you. It’s their job to keep you under, slow down your body functions, delay awareness. Only, the engineers haven’t figured out yet how to slow down dreams and their bastard cousin the nightmare. So along with your respiration and circulation your unconscious musings are similarly drawn out, lengthened, extended. A single dream can last a year, two. Or a single nightmare.
Under certain circumstances being bored to death might be the preferable alternative. But you’ve got no options in deep sleep. The cold, the regulated atmosphere, the needles that poke and probe according to the preset medical programmes, rule your body, if not your life. When you lie down in deep sleep you surrender volition to the care of mechanicals, trusting in them, relying on them. And why not? Over the decades they’ve proven themselves a helluva lot more reliable than the people who designed them. Machines bear no grudges, engage in no animosity. The judgements they render are based solely on observation and analysis. Emotion is something they’re not required to quantify, much less act upon.
The machine that was the Sulaco was doing its job. The four sleepers on board alternately dreamt and rested, speeding along their preprogrammed course coddled by the best technology civilization could devise. It kept them alive, regulated their vitals, treated momentary blips in their systems. Ripley, Hicks, Newt, even Bishop, though what was left of Bishop was easy to maintain. He was used to being turned on and off. Of the four he was the only one who didn’t dream, didn’t have nightmares. It was something he regretted. It seemed like such a waste of time, to sleep but not to dream. However, the designers of the advanced android series to which he belonged would have regarded dreaming as an expensive frivolity, and therefore did not apply themselves to the resolution of the problem.
Naturally no one thought to inquire of the androids what they thought of the situation.
After Bishop, who technically was part of the ship and not the crew and therefore did not count, Hicks was the worst off of the sleepers. Not because his nightmares were any more severe than those of his companions, but because the injuries he had recently suffered did not lend themselves to extended neglect. He needed the attention of a modern, full-service medical facility, of which the closest example lay another two years’ travel time and an enormous distance away.
Ripley had done what she could for him, leaving final diagnosis and prescription to the efficient judgement of the Sulaco’s medical instrumentation, but as none of the ship’s medical personnel had survived the trouble on Acheron, his treatment was perforce minimal. A couple of years locked in deep sleep were not conducive to rapid healing. There was little she’d been able to do except watch him slide into protective unconsciousness and hope.
While the ship did its best his body laboured to repair the damage. Slowing down his vitals helped because that likewise slowed down the spread of potential infection, but about the internal injuries he’d suffered, the ship could do nothing. He’d survived this long on determination, living off his reserves. Now he needed surgery.
Something was moving in the sleep chamber that was not a part of the ship, though in the sense that it too was wholly driven by programming it was not so very different from the cold, indifferent corridors it stalked. A single imperative inspired its relentless search, drove it mindlessly onward. Not food, for it was not hungry and did not eat. Not sex, for it had none. It was motivated solely and completely by the desire to procreate. Though organic, it was as much a machine as the computers that guided the ship, though it was possessed of a determination quite foreign to them.
More than any other terrestrial creature it resembled a horseshoe crab with a flexible tail. It advanced across the smooth floor of the sleep chamber on articulated legs fashioned of an unusually carbon-rich chiton. Its physiology was simple, straightforward, and designed to carry out but one biological function a
nd to do that better than any comparable construction known. No machine could have done better.
Guided by senses that were a unique combination of the primitive and sophisticated, driven by an embedded imperative unequalled in any other living being, it scuttled determinedly across the chamber.
Scaling the smooth flank of the cryonic cylinder was a simple matter for something so superbly engineered. The top of the chamber was fashioned of transparent metallic glass. Within slept a small organic shape; half-formed, blonde, innocent save for her nightmares, which were as sophisticated and frequently more extensive than those of the adults sleeping nearby. Eyes closed, oblivious to the horror which explored the thin dome enclosing her, she slept on.
She was not dreaming. Presently the nightmare was concrete and very real. Far better that she remained unaware of its existence.
Impatiently the thing explored the sleep cylinder, beginning at one end and working methodically up to the head. The cylinder was tight, triple-sealed, in many ways more secure than the hull of the Sulaco itself. Though anxious, the creature was incapable of frustration. The prospect of imminent fulfilment of its biological imperative only excited it and drove it to greater efforts. The extensible tube which protruded from its ventral side probed the unyielding transparency which shielded the helpless body on the unreachable cushions, proximity to its quarry driving the creature into a frenzy of activity.
Sliding to one side, it eventually located the nearly imperceptible line which separated the transparent dome of the cylinder from its metal base. Tiny claws drove into the minuscule crack as the incredibly powerful tail secured a purchase on the instrumentation at the head of the cylinder. The creature exerted tremendous leverage, its small body quivering with the effort. Seals were strained. The thing’s effort was unforgiving, its reserves of strength inconceivable.
The lower edge of the transparent dome snapped, the metallic glass splitting parallel to the floor. A sliver of the clear material, sharp as a surgical instrument, drove straight through the creature’s body. Frigid air erupted from the cylinder until an internal emergency seal restored its atmospheric integrity.
Prone on her bed of uneasy dreams Newt moaned softly, her head turning to one side, eyes moving beneath closed lids. But she did not wake up. The cylinder’s integrity had been restored just in time to save her life.
Emitting periodic, unearthly shrieks the mortally wounded crawler flung itself across the room, legs and tail flailing spasmodically at the transparent sliver which pierced its body. It landed atop the cylinder in which reposed the motionless Hicks, its legs convulsively gripping the crest of the dome. Shuddering, quivering, it clawed at the metallic glass while acidic body fluids pumped from the wound. They ate into the glass, into the metal base of the cylinder, into and through the floor. Smoke began to rise from somewhere beneath the deck, filling the chamber.
Around the room, throughout the ship, telltales winked to life, warning lights began to flash and Klaxons to sound. There was no one awake to hear them, but that did not affect the Sulaco’s reaction. It was doing its job, complying with its programming. Meanwhile smoke continued to billow from the ragged aperture in the floor. Atop Hicks’s cylinder the crawler humped obscenely as it continued to bleed destruction.
A female voice, calm and serenely artificial, echoed unheard within the chamber. ‘Attention. Explosive gases are accumulating within the cryogenic compartment. Explosive gases are accumulating within the cryogenic compartment.’
Flush-mounted fans began to hum within the ceiling, inhaling the swirling, thickening gas. Acid continued to drip from the now motionless, dead crawler.
Beneath the floor something exploded. Bright, actinic light flared, to be followed by a spurt of sharp yellow flame. Darker smoke began to mix with the thinner gases that now filled the chamber. The overhead lights flickered uncertainly.
The exhaust fans stopped.
‘Fire in cryogenic compartment,’ the unperturbed female voice declared in the tone of something with nothing to lose. ‘Fire in cryogenic compartment.’
A nozzle emerged from the ceiling, rotating like a miniature cannon. It halted, focusing on the flames and gas emerging from the hole in the floor. Liquid bubbled at its tip, gushed in the direction of the blaze. For an instant the flames were subdued.
Sparks erupted from the base of the nozzle. The burgeoning stream died, dribbling ineffectively from the powerhead.
‘Fire suppression system inactivated. Fire suppression system inactivated. Exhaust system inactivated. Exhaust system inactivated. Fire and explosive gases in cryogenic chamber.’
Motors hummed to life. The four functioning cryonic cylinders rose from their cradles on hydraulic supports. Their telltales winking, they began to move to the far side of the room. Some smoke and intensifying flame obscured but did not slow their passage. Still pierced through by the chunk of metallic glass, the dead crawler slid off the moving coffin and fell to the floor.
‘All personnel report to EEV,’ the voice insisted, its tone unchanged. ‘Precautionary evacuation in one minute.’
Moving in single file the cryonic cylinders entered a transport tube, travelled at high speed through the bowels of the ship until they emerged in the starboard lock, there to be loaded by automatic handlers into the waiting Emergency Escape Vehicle. They were its only occupants. Behind the transparent faceplate, Newt twitched in her sleep.
Lights flashed, motors hummed, the voice spoke even though there were none to hear. ‘All EEVs will be jettisoned in ten seconds. Nine…’
Interior locks slammed shut, externals opened wide. The voice continued its countdown.
At ‘zero’ two things happened with inimical simultaneity: ten EEVs, nine of them empty, were ejected from the ship, and the proportion of escaping gases within the damaged cryonic chamber interacted critically with the flames that were emerging from the acid-leached hole in the floor. For a brief eruptive instant the entire fore port side of the Sulaco blazed in fiery imitation of the distant stars.
Half the fleeing EEVs were severely jolted by the explosion. Two began tumbling, completely out of control. One embarked upon a short, curving path which brought it back in a wide, sweeping arc to the ship from which it had been ejected. It did not slow as it neared its storage pod. Instead it slammed at full acceleration into the side of the transport. A second, larger explosion rocked the great vessel. Wounded, it lurched onward through emptiness, periodically emitting irregular bursts of light and heat while littering the immaculate void with molten, shredded sections of its irrevocably damaged self.
On board the escape craft containing the four cryonic cylinders, telltales were flashing, circuits flickering and sparking. The EEV’s smaller, less sophisticated computers struggled to isolate, minimize, and contain the damage that had been caused by the last-second explosion. The vehicle had not been hulled, but the concussion had damaged sensitive instrumentation.
It sought status clarification from the mother ship and when none was forthcoming, instigated a scan of its immediate surroundings. Halfway through the hasty survey the requisite instrumentation failed but it was quickly rejuvenated via a backup system. The Sulaco had been journeying far off the beaten photonic path, its mission having carried it to the fringes of human exploration. It had not travelled long upon its homeward path when overcome by disaster. Mankind’s presence in this section of space was marked but intermittent, his installations far apart and few between.
The EEV’s guiding computer found something. Undesirable, not a primary choice. But under existing conditions it was the only choice. The ship could not estimate how long it could continue to function given the serious nature of the damage it had suffered. Its primary task was the preservation of the human life it bore. A course was chosen and set. Still sputtering, striving mightily to repair itself, the compact vessel’s drive throbbed to life.
Fiorina wasn’t an impressive world, and in appearance even less inviting, but it was the only one in the Neroi
d Sector with an active beacon. The EEV’s data banks locked in on the steady signal. Twice the damaged navigation system lost the beam, but continued on the proscribed course anyway. Twice the signal was recovered. Information on Fiorina was scarce and dated, as befitted its isolation and peculiar status.
‘Fiorina “Fury” 361,’ the readout stated. ‘Outer veil mineral ore refinery. Maximum security work-correctional facility.’ The words meant nothing to the ship’s computer. They would have meant much to its passengers, but they were not in a position or condition to read anything. ‘Additional information requested?’ the computer flashed plaintively. When the proper button was not immediately pressed, the screen obediently blanked.
Days later the EEV plunged towards the grey, roiling atmosphere of its destination. There was nothing inviting about the dark clouds that obscured the planetary surface. No glimpse of blue or green showed through them, no indication of life. But the catalogue indicated the presence of a human installation, and the communications beacon threw its unvarying pulse into emptiness with becoming steadiness.
On-board systems continued to fail with discouraging regularity. The EEV’s computer strained to keep the craft under control as one backup after another kicked in. Clouds the colour of coal dust raced past the unoccupied ports as atmospheric lightning flashed threateningly off the chilled, sealed coffins within.
The computer experienced no strain as it tried to bring the EEV down safely. There was no extra urgency in its efforts. It would have functioned identically had the sky been clear and the winds gentle, had its own internal systems been functioning optimally instead of flaring and failing with progressive regularity.
The craft’s landing gear had not responded to the drop command and there was neither time nor power to try a second approach. Given the jumbled, precipitous nature of the landscape immediately surrounding the beacon and formal landing site, the computer opted to try for a touchdown on the relatively smooth sand beach.
When additional power was requested, it developed that it did not exist. The computer tried. That was its job. But the EEV fell far short of the beach, slamming into the sea at too acute an angle.