fic: the scars that silence carved (aliens)
shipswap ficathon: 
abluegirl requested an AU "what if" scenario that had Newt and Hicks survive the crash landing on the penal colony in Aliens 3, but yet somehow an egg traveled with them, so the Alien threat is still present.
STATUS: Complete
SUMMARY: Little penetrates outside of the singular fact that they're alive. All three of them.
RATING: R
CLASSIFICATIONS: Ripley/Hicks
ARCHIVING: Do not archive. Thank you.
NOTES: Unbeta'd.
WORDS: 6,661
DISCLAIMER: Not mine. Don't sue.
Copyright anr; April 2014.
The Scars That Silence Carved by anr
She wakes the sound of metal and glass against the same, to the smell of bleach and antiseptic, to feel of rough linen sheets and a too-thin mattress and knows, instantly, she's no longer in hypersleep.
The man who's woken her -- a medical officer, he says, Clemens -- provides enough information through the fog of sleep drugs and god-knows-what-else coating her veins for her to get her bearings but little penetrates outside of the singular fact that they're alive.
Rolling out of the bed, she catches her first sight of Newt and Hicks since before this, their cots lined up beside hers, chests rising in sleep, and steadies herself against Hicks' bed, her fingers curling into his sheets.
Behind her, Clemens is still talking, something about shaving her head and the after-effects of a sudden hypersleep awakening and she cuts him off absently. "Yeah, I'll be sick for a couple of weeks." She studies first Hicks then Newt. "Will they be okay?"
"The girl swallowed a considerable amount of sea water during the crash, while the Corporal's wounds appear to have been caused prior to your arrival here. I have given them both a cocktail of antibiotics and expect they should awaken in due course."
It's good news, great even, and better than almost every alternative she can think of, but something in what the doctor's been saying... "Crash?" she echoes. Then, louder, "I have to see the ship."
The ship is a tangled mess of wires and twisted support structures. Sitting beside Newt's cryotube, she stares at the girder that came thisclose to impaling Hicks, at the cracks in the glass covering her own tube, and tries to make sense of how they came to be here, on this miserable rock, beaten and battered and --
There's acid-pitting on the side of Newt's tube.
Her heart stops.
Newt and Hicks are both still asleep when she bursts into the infirmary, Clemens hard on her heels.
"Ripley!"
Ignoring him, she heads straight for Newt and peels back the sheet covering her, studying the slight rise and fall of her chest, her abdomen, for something... foreign, alien.
"Lieutenant!"
"She needs a chest x-ray," she says without looking at him. "I need -- I have to see inside her."
"Out of the question."
"I have a very good reason for --"
"And perhaps you'd like to share that good reason?"
She can't think straight, can't see anything except those burns on the outside of Newt's tube, and when she takes a breath for a moment she's sure she can smell the melting plastic of Brett's pen. "Possible contagion," she manages.
"What kind of contagion?"
She shudders and tries to think of something fast, some infection that will justify --
From behind her, a raspy voice says, "Cholera."
Hicks. With one hand on Newt's bed for balance, she turns to stare at him like she hasn't seen him in a thousand years or more.
Clemens scoffs even as he moves to Hicks' other side. "There hasn't been a case of cholera in over 200 years, Corporal." He checks Hicks' pulse, flashes a light across his eyes. "In any event, there are no x-ray facilities here. Nor," he adds before either of them can say anything else, "any other kind of imaging equipment. This is a prison not a medical facility."
The buzz from the intercom fills the air suddenly, the sound echoing off the tiles, and Clemens straightens.
"Now, if you'll excuse me, the Superintendent will be wanting a status report."
While Clemens is gone, she fills Hicks in on what she knows of their situation so far. It's a short report -- crash, prison, acid.
"We checked the Sulaco," he says, grimacing as she helps him to sit up. "I remember that much."
"We must have missed something, an egg maybe, something." Her fingers itch to peel back the bandages covering his chest, to see how his skin grafts are healing. He's no good to her wounded, not here, not if... "The pitting on the tube -- it was from acid."
From their time on LV426, short and horrific as it was, she knows he won't try to tell her that she's mistaken in what she saw... but that doesn't mean a part of her is not also expecting him to tell her she's mistaken in what that means. Her psych-evaluator back on Gateway spent months labouring those distinctions to her, educating her on the Company line.
He doesn't. "We'll check her," he says, closing his eyes. "Anyway we can."
Newt wakes, finally, while Clemens is still away, giving Ripley the chance to examine her as best she can. She uses the medical officer's slim-light and tongue depressors to check her mouth and the back of her throat for anything that might suggest a face-hugger's presence, palpitates her abdomen for anything such a presence might have left. The checks are a poor substitute for a proper scan and her fear doesn't really start to abate until Newt coughs once and then suddenly vomits up what looks like a good half-gallon of sea water.
On Kane, the face-hugger had breathed for him, sealing off his oesophagus to the unbreathable atmosphere of LV426. For Newt to have swallowed that much sea water...
"She wasn't... protected... by one," she says to Hicks, eyes shining, while she rubs Newt's back. "If she had, she wouldn't have almost drowned."
It seems ridiculous and almost cruel to be so pleased that Newt almost died, slowly and inexorably, but she can see Hicks gets it.
"Way to go, kid," he says, pride in his voice. "Nice one."
Her retching finally abating, Newt curls into Ripley's side and gives Hicks a weak thumbs up.
Ripley grins.
When Clemens does finally return, he brings food and what looks like juice with him. Ripley would have preferred coffee (and a cigarette) but this is probably better.
"I see the little Miss is awake," he says, holding out a tray towards her. "And unsurprisingly absent of any cholera symptoms."
Newt scoots back on her bed so Ripley takes the tray from him and passes it to her before taking a tray for herself. "What's going to happen to us?"
Clemens hands the final tray to Hicks but before he can answer her, another two men enter the room.
"Superintendent Andrews," the older man says promptly, introducing himself. "I have notified Weyland Yutani of your presence here and requested a rescue team. It should arrive within the week."
Beside her, Newt is spending more time scratching her scalp then eating.
"In the meantime," Andrews continues, "you are to remain here in the infirmary and avoid the local population as much as possible. There are twenty-five inmates here, all thieves, rapists, murderers and child molesters, and just because they've taken on religion doesn't make them any less dangerous. I would prefer as few ripples in the water as possible."
Hicks' tone is wry. "For our own personal protection, naturally."
Andrews' is not. "Quite."
After Andrews and Aaron -- the other man with him -- have left, and they've finished eating, Clemens looks Newt over and provides her with a dose of his stabiliser cocktail. He then shows the three of them to the nearby showers. Hicks' movements are slow and cautious, but they are his own movements and for that Ripley is beyond relieved.
While Hicks no doubt has more practice at it, she is the one to shave first Newt's head, then hers, then his.
"Alright?" she asks before she leaves him for the showers, and he nods from where he's sitting on the long bench against the wall.
"Yeah." He scratches at the edge of the bandage on his chest. "Just tired still. It'll pass."
She knows how he feels -- the food and Clemens' stabilisers have helped, but her system still feels groggy from the hypersleep, and probably will for another couple of days at least.
Behind her, Newt is already exploring the showers. Hicks smiles after her, and leans back against the wall, before looking up at Ripley. "Don't be gone long," he says softly.
She remembers the last time he said that to her, adrenaline and belief -- belief in her -- coating every word, and smiles a little in return.
"Ripley!" calls out Newt.
She walks away.
There is little to do in the infirmary apart from sleep and eat and stare at the walls. In the morning, Clemens leaves to check on one of prisoners, she thinks, but he doesn't say exactly and neither she nor Hicks ask.
Newt had resettled her bed against the wall the previous night, draping her blanket over the edges much like she did in Medical back on LV426. Though Newt never says so explicitly, Ripley's pretty sure the Sulaco was her first ever hypersleep and their rough awakening hasn't made her body's ability to process the sleep drugs any easier. While she naps in her little cave, Hicks and Ripley sit on his bed. He's playing with some of the tongue depressors and suture thread from the nearby medical cart and, after awhile, Ripley realises he's making a stick figure from them, a doll. She smiles.
"Casey version two?"
He shrugs, and she gets the feeling he's a little embarrassed.
She touches his knee. "She'll love it."
He clears his throat. "How do you like your new haircut?"
Now it's her turn to feel self-conscious, and she rubs a hand over her scalp. "It's okay."
She watches his fingers wind the thread around the depressors, the movements deft but sure, and remembers, suddenly, the press of his hand on her hip, the lean of his body against hers, back on LV426 when he was showing her how to operate the pulse rifle.
"It suits you."
She's pretty sure he's attracted to her, and she knows she's attracted to him --
"I've been out here a long time," she says before she can censor herself.
His hands pause, a heartbeat of stillness that lingers. "Yeah," he says in a low tone, looking up and meeting her gaze. "Me too."
Across the room, the prisoner assigned to guard them is flicking through a magazine that looks older than her. When he shifts in his seat, his chair scrapes a little on the concrete.
Hicks' eyes dart from hers to their guard, then back to his hands. His fingers start to move again, and Ripley tries not to feel cheated.
Forcing herself to look away, she focuses on a spray of graffiti scraped into the wall above Newt's bed -- ITS TIME 4 THE JUDGEMENT -- and says, more to fill the silence than anything else, "It's some sort of apocalyptic, millenarian, Christian fundamentalist religion. The inmates started it about five years ago when they decided to remain here."
"This is a foundry, right? Something about lead sheeting."
"Right. Weyland Yutani were going to close the facility down but the hard timers didn't want to leave -- said they'd keep the pilot light on."
"And the Company agreed?"
Ripley shrugs. "Apparently. They left Superintendent Andrews in charge, Aaron as his second, and Clemens as the medical officer."
"A former prisoner?" Off her look, Hicks clarifies, "he has a barcode on the back of his neck."
She's not all that surprised but before she can say as much, Clemens himself walks into the room.
"I came to check up on you all." He looks around. "Where is--?"
The intercom sounds before he can finish, and they all listen as Aaron requests Clemens presence elsewhere in the facility.
"Something serious?" asks Clemens.
"You could say that," replies Aaron. "One of the prisoners has been diced."
Stepping away from the intercom, Clemens looks over at them almost apologetically. "When I return, then."
He hasn't been gone more than a few minutes when Hicks says, suddenly, "the EEV's flight data recorder."
She looks up and nods. "If there was an alien on the ship --"
"Do you remember how to get to it?"
She does, but. "One of us will have to stay here. With Newt." Their guard has barely looked twice at any of them but that doesn't mean she trusts him, and it certainly doesn't mean she trusts any of the other inmates who might be around.
"You go," he says. From his pocket, he pulls out a scalpel obviously lifted from the medical tray. "We'll be fine."
It's easy enough to slip out of the infirmary and find her way back to the ship. The flight data recorder is undamaged from the crash, its protective coverings not even scratched. She's checking the input codes when a voice surprises her, and she looks up to see Clemens standing above her.
"You know, wandering around without an escort is really going to piss Superintendent Andrews off."
Shaking away the burst of adrenaline he'd caused, sneaking up on her like that, she asks, "will you tell me about your accident?"
"One of the prisoners has been killed."
"Really? How?"
"In the air shaft. Poor soul backed into a nine-foot fan." Clemens circles her slowly, watching her every reaction to his words way too closely for her liking. "I found something at the accident site, though, just a bit away from where it happened. A mark. A burn. Rather like the one you found on the girl's cryotube."
She can't prevent her reaction to that. Looking up, she stares at him, a thousand possibilities suddenly flooding through her mind. With Newt showing no symptoms, she'd begun to convince herself that while, yes, there probably was an alien on the Sulaco that had somehow caused their crash landing here, it had stayed on the Sulaco. If what Clemens is saying is true, however, if there are acid burns now appearing in ventilation shafts nowhere near the crash site --
Clemens crouches in front of her. "Look, I'm on your side. I want to help, but I need to know what's going on, or what you and the Corporal think is going on."
She doesn't trust him, not yet, but she does believe that he believes he wants to help. "If you really want to help, find us a computer with audio capabilities so I can access this flight recorder."
He shakes his head. "We don't have anything like that here."
God. "Well," she thinks fast, "what about Bishop?"
"Bishop?"
"The droid that crashed with us."
Clemens sighs. "I can point you in the right direction." He stands and helps her up too. "Best I can do."
The rubbish dump Clemens directs her to is not as big as she'd feared and it doesn't take her long to find Bishop. He's little more than a head and severed torso, and she shakes away the memory she has of Ash in a similar condition while she wraps him in the section of blanket she'd brought with her and hoists him over her shoulder.
The group of prisoners blocking her exit, however, is not so easily dismissed.
Backtracking, she tries for the other exit she'd seen but that way is similarly blocked and she feels, for the first time in what feels like forever, fear for something other than the aliens.
No.
They overpower her too easily, slamming her body into and then over a piece of railing and holding her there while one of the men kicks open her feet. She's fought the aliens too many times, has fought that beast of a queen and won, but this...
There's a roar behind her, a terrible human sound to match the alien ones she hears in her nightmares, and then --
She hits the ground hard, barely able to comprehend that she's free, even as one of the prisoners asks if she's okay. As she gets up, he tells her to leave, that he has to re-educate his brothers, and she thinks he's the head prisoner Clemens had mentioned to her once before -- Dillon maybe? -- but he doesn't introduce himself and she has no desire to stick around.
She does, however, have one urge, and that one she gives in to easily.
The man on the ground closest to her... she breaks two of her knuckles when she punches him out.
It's worth it.
Hicks takes one look at the way she's holding herself when she gets back to the infirmary -- she thinks she bruised some ribs in the attack; her side is aching -- and is off the bed a second later. "What happened?"
She shakes her head. "It was nothing." She looks at Newt's bed. "Okay?"
He nods. "Still asleep. The guard went to eat. You get the flight recorder?"
She nods and briefly recaps her meeting with Clemens and what he'd told her about the prisoner's death.
"Fuck," says Hicks, when she mentions the acid burns he'd found.
"Yeah."
While Hicks closes the curtains around the bed they've chosen on the other end of the room, and switches on the nearby bedside light, she hooks up Bishop to the flight recorder. It's not the worst patch she's ever seen -- some of the ones Brett and Parker used to do back on the Nostromo take that title -- but it's pretty close. Despite that, Bishop's servos whir as soon as she connects the battery.
"Hey," she says.
"Ah, Ripley." His one working eye rolls in its attempts to focus. "Hicks."
"Hi Bishop," says Hicks. "How you feeling?"
"My legs hurt," he answers without any hint of humour.
"I'm sorry," Ripley apologises, and Bishop brushes it aside with a toaster quip.
"How are you?" His head lifts off the bed slightly. "Oh, I like your new haircut. Yours not so much, Hicks."
Hicks smiles a little. "We're fine. Newt too."
"Bishop," says Ripley, "can you access the flight's data recorder?"
"No problem."
There's a brief pause while Ripley inputs the access codes. Then --
"I'm home," says Bishop.
"What happened on the Sulaco? Why were our cryotubes ejected?" asks Hicks.
Bishop's voice changes to that of the Sulaco's, complete with the echo of alarms going off in the background. "Stasis interrupted. Fire in cryogenic compartment. Repeat, fire in --"
"What happened?" interrupts Ripley. "What started the fire, Bishop?" When he doesn't answer immediately, she pushes. "Can you hear me?"
Behind her, Hicks places his hand on her shoulder.
Bishop refocuses. "The fire was electrical. It was in the subflooring."
"Did the sensors pick up anything moving around on the ship prior to separation?"
"It's very dark here, Ripley," he answers. "I'm not what I used to be."
"Just tell me. Does the recorder indicate anything? Was there an alien on board?"
At Bishop's simple, "yes," Hicks tightens his grip.
She forces herself to ask the next question. "Is it on the Sulaco still, or did it come with us on the EEV?"
Bishop focuses on Hicks first, then Ripley. "It was with us all the way."
The Company knows there was an alien on board.
While Bishop asks Hicks to disconnect him, this is the thought that won't leave her head.
The Company knows.
She's not sure what's worse -- the knowledge that they brought it down here with them, or that the Company will be coming to try and recover it.
"They want it," she says again, after Hicks removes Bishop from the battery. "That's what they'll be coming for -- it. We may as well have died in the crash, or with the others back on LV426, for all we'll be worth to them."
Hicks runs a hand over his scalp but before he can say anything, there's a bunch of shouting from the door to the infirmary.
Body tensing, Ripley's gaze flashes to Hicks'. Now what?
Hicks switches off the light.
They listen in silence as the men -- she recognises Clemens, Dillon, Andrews and Aaron's voices -- discuss an attack. Two of the prisoners are dead, and Andrews is leaning towards a third having killed them.
"It wasn't me, it was the dragon, it wasn't me..."
She doesn't know that voice but it's easy to work out that it's the third prisoner in question.
And she has a pretty damn good idea of what he might call a 'dragon'.
With Hicks at her side, she moves towards the curtains and pulls them open. "He's telling the truth."
The men fall silent as she steps closer to where they have the prisoner wrapped in a straightjacket on the far bed, his face sheeted with blood.
"And I'd like to talk to him about this dragon."
Andrews refuses to let her talk to the prisoner but agrees to talk to both her and Hicks in his quarters. Once there, his reaction to what they tell him is far from unsurprising.
"Sir, I don't think the child shou--"
Ripley doesn't even glance at where Newt is sitting in the corner of the Superintendent's office, playing with the doll Hicks made her. (There was no way they were going to leave her behind in the infirmary with a blood-stained and raving prisoner, even if they do believe him.) To Aaron, she says, shortly, "she's fine."
Andrews leans back in his chair. "Let me see if I have this correct, Lieutenant. It's an eight-foot creature of some kind, with acid for blood, and it arrived on your spaceship. It kills on sight and is generally unpleasant. And, of course, you expect me to accept this on your word."
"No," she agrees tiredly. "I don't expect anything."
Not anymore. She's done this song and dance too many times now.
"Then tell me, Lieutenant, Corporal. What would you have me do?"
Hicks steps forward from where he's been leaning against the wall near where Newt sits. "What kind of weapons do you have?"
Andrews smiles like Burke, all insincerity. "This is a prison. It's not a good idea to allow prisoners access to firearms."
"Well what keeps them from killing you?" he asks.
"Fear. There's no way to escape. With the arrival of the next supply ship, the Company would eliminate them."
Impossible. "This is a maximum security prison," she says slowly, disbelievingly, "and you have no weapons of any kind?"
The Superintendent's gaze shifts to the side briefly before returning to hers. "We're on the honour system."
God. She turns back to Hicks, defeated. "We're fucked."
In the corner, Newt strokes the cotton-swab hair on her doll and whispers, "aye-firmative."
Aaron escorts them back to the infirmary where, on Andrews' orders once again, they are to remain. Hicks and Newt walk ahead of them and she notes the length and ease of his strides is slowly increasing. He's not a hundred percent yet, and his skin grafts are still paper-thin as they heal, but he is healing.
"She doesn't say much," Aaron says suddenly, nodding towards Newt, "does she?"
Ripley doesn't reply.
Aaron scratches at his neck. "I have a kid back home," he admits. "Couple years younger. Looking forward to seeing him again soon."
They've reached the infirmary.
"Right," says Aaron awkwardly when she still doesn't say anything. "In you go then."
Inside, Clemens pulls away from the prisoner -- Golic, his name is Golic -- to join them. Newt disappears under her bed.
"Isn't there any way off of this place? Some way to escape?" she asks him without preface, taking one of the mugs he offers.
Clemens laughs. "No. Supply ship comes every six months."
"And that's it?" asks Hicks.
"That's it."
"Fuck," she says.
"They are sending somebody to pick you up quite soon, I gather," Clemens adds then.
Hicks leans forward. "What's soon?"
Clemens shrugs. "I don't know. Within the week, I think? Nobody's ever been in a hurry to get here before." He eyes them both carefully. "I don't suppose you'd care to tell me what you and the good Superintendent discussed."
Hicks looks to her. She looks at Golic who is staring at them all unashamedly from his bed across the room, listening to their every word. "Not right now, no," she says pointedly.
Golic grins at her, all blood and teeth, and whispers, "You're gonna die too."
She and Hicks might be the only ones who believe that he saw a dragon, but he's still a mad-man, a murderer and a rapist, and after the day she's had so far...
She smiles back, as sweetly as she can. "You first."
Clemens gives them all another stabiliser shot. Before Newt can disappear back into her cave, Hicks suggests a trip to the bathroom. Ripley watches them leave for the next room just as the intercom buzzes with a general announcement for all the men to meet in the mess hall.
"You're not going?" she asks Clemens, when he makes no move towards the door.
"Someone has to stay here," he says simply.
"Right."
She watches him clear away the syringes from the tray before returning to stand in front of her, and she knows he's going to ask about their meeting with Andrews again, and she knows this time she's probably going to tell him, and --
Behind him, behind the semi-opaque curtain half-drawn between this bed and Golic's, a dark form appears, familiar and terrifying in equal measure.
Her blood freezes.
Clemens dies quickly, that much she sees for sure, even as she's scrambling off the bed she'd been sitting on and slips under Newt's bed.
She has barely a half-second to think, maybe it didn't see m-- before the entire bed flips to the side, the alien less than a foot away.
She doesn't scream, doesn't even breathe as it stalks towards her, so the shout that catches its attention then can't be hers. Impossibly, she hears it dart away, and back up into the ceiling, Clemens' curtain-wrapped body with it, but that makes almost no sense at all so she does the only thing she can do.
She runs.
Hicks is just inside the door to the infirmary -- it must have been his shout that distracted the alien -- while Newt is flat against the wall outside, terror shining in her eyes. With Hicks less than a step behind her, she grabs Newt's hand and pulls her into a sprint down the corridor towards the mess hall.
It takes them seconds to get there.
It takes them forever.
"It's here!" she manages to warn as she swings around open doorway, Newt colliding into her and almost knocking them both down. "It got Clemens!"
She thinks Andrews was in the middle of saying something to the prisoners, but he doesn't even blink as he rounds on her instead. "Stop this raving immediately! Stop it!"
Sweat rolls into her eyes, stinging like mad. "I'm telling you, it's here!"
She stumbles down the handful of steps into the room proper, Newt and Hicks with her, even as Andrews yells for Aaron to take them back to the infirmary --
-- and then there's just yelling.
They retreat to the central stairwell. The prisoners are freaking out, trying to decide what to do next, and who's in charge, but Newt, Ripley and Hicks simply sit off to the side in silence. She -- they -- have done this before.
Someone hands Ripley and Hicks a cigarette each, and she lights hers with gratitude. Finally.
From behind them, Dillon calls out, "Hey, brother, sister, what about you? You're officers."
Hicks meets her gaze. Neither of them move.
Dillon says, "How about showing us a little fucking leadership?"
Aaron tries to step up then and is shouted down by the prisoners who want Dillon instead.
He refuses. "I just take care of my own."
Ripley tries not to smile at that. She's been doing the same thing for how long now? And where has that got her?
Right back where she started is where. The Nostromo on land. A foundry instead of a refinery.
One of the prisoners asks, "Well, what does this fucking beast want? Is this mother going to try for us all?"
Easiest question in the universe. At that she finally turns, finally speaks.
"Well, yeah."
Aaron and the prisoners summarise their situation quite succinctly in the end. They're in a ten mile square installation with six-hundred air ducts running to the surface, no video surveillance, and no way to seal off the area they're in.
So. fucked.
"What I wouldn't give for a pulse rifle," murmurs Hicks.
Right now, she'd settle for one of Hudson's sharp sticks. As the prisoners continue to talk about their chances, about what they can do, she says, "I haven't seen one like this before. It moves differently."
"You think that might help us?"
"Probably not. It's just... odd." She falls silent as one of the prisoners approaches her. Hicks tenses beside her and she shakes her head slightly.
"-- no entertainment center, no climate control, no video system, no surveillance, no freezers, no fucking ice cream, no rubbers, no women, no guns. All we got here is shit!" He gets right up in her face, all about spitting the last word, but when she doesn't react, he turns back to the others. "Oh, what the hell are we even talking to her for? She's the one that brought the fucker. Why don't we just get her head and shove it through the fucking wall!"
She doesn't smile, not quite, but it's close. "Well, if you think that would help..."
Dillon calls for the prisoner -- Morse -- to back away from her.
Ripley looks at Aaron. "What about a blueprint?"
In the end what they do have a solid steel bunker with six foot thick walls, fire and flares, and enough accelerant -- quinitricetyline -- to set the world on fire.
"How do you even know it's in this area?" asks Aaron.
Ripley shrugs. "It's like a lion. It sticks close to the zebras."
"Zebras?" repeats Aaron. It takes him a moment to get it. "Oh, right."
As she watches him head off to speak to Dillon, Hicks approaches her, Newt his silent shadow.
"Anything?"
Hicks shakes his head. "Handful of batteries for a couple of flashlights. That's about it."
Crap. Though it had been an impossibly long shot, she'd been hoping for a miracle in the supply room.
Hicks nods after Aaron. "Did find out why the inmates keep calling him 85 though."
"Yeah?"
Hicks gives her a wry smile. "It's his IQ."
Ripley rolls her eyes. "Great."
The plan is relatively simple -- burn the alien out of the pipes using the quinitricetyline and straight into the bunker. It's no different to what she did on the Nostromo, when they closed off the vents behind Dallas, and what she and Hicks did on LV426, sealing off each of the junctions into the command center.
She tries not to dwell on how each of those times turned out.
They leave Aaron to hand out the flares, Dillon to organise the men into groups, and take a mop each themselves.
"Careful, Newt," she says, watching as the girl helps to paint the corridor they're in with the accelerant. "Don't get any on you."
Newt nods and pushes her mop a little further away from her body.
In the distance, there's the clatter of something falling. A bucket maybe. She and Hicks both look towards the sound at the same time but it's Hicks who shouts, "get down!" as he tackles her and Newt to the ground.
The air in the tunnel vanishes, sucked into a hellish fireball that roars above their heads.
Beneath her, Newt screams.
They lose ten of the prisoners in the inferno before the sprinklers can turn on. She's the least visibly injured out of her, Newt and Hicks, just a few bumps and bruises from where Hicks slammed her into the ground, but Newt has a nasty burn running along her forearm, and the bandage on Hicks' neck is starting to show small blooms of blood from where his new skin has torn.
The camaraderie and fragile hope the prisoners had shown while they painted the corridors starts to fracture in the aftermath. As she listens to them start to argue, to shout and curse, she leans against one of the walls and tries to catch her breath.
Her chest hurts.
Hicks leaves the men to their arguing and steps closer to where she and Newt stand, concern on his face. "You okay?"
She shakes her head. If her ribs had ached before, after the attack in the rubbish dump, now they're positively on fire. She can hardly draw in a full breath.
He takes one of her hands in his, Newt's in his other. "C'mon."
They head to the EEV and she's surprised Hicks knows the way.
"Checked it out on the way back from the supply room. Was hoping the weapons locker had survived."
She hadn't even known the EEV had a weapons locker but it makes sense. The Sulaco is -- was -- a military vessel after all. "Nothing?"
"The locker was in the section the most damaged by the crash. Doesn't even exist anymore."
Figures.
Hicks continues, "but the neuroscanner for Newt's tube is still functional."
She could kick herself for not thinking of that sooner. "I never even thou--"
He nods. "Me either." He grimaces. "Damn 'sleep sickness."
"Newt --"
"Already checked her out. Clean from head to toe. Not even a haemorrhage stain."
Best fucking news all day.
Hicks helps her to remove her jacket and boots, and to lie down in the tube. Newt sits on the floor beside them and pulls her doll out of her pocket again. One of its tongue depressor arms is now shorter than the other, the end having snapped away, but the rest is remarkably intact.
Running the keyboard, Hicks starts the biofunction cycle.
"Anything?" she asks.
"Hang on," he says, "I need to enhance the--"
When his words trail off, a chill races down her spine. She licks her lips.
"What is it?"
He doesn't respond.
"Hicks?"
She has three broken ribs and a punctured lung. The scanner diagnoses a pneumothorax.
"Christ," she mutters, as Hicks scrambles to find one of the EEV's med kits. "Just what we need."
"Got it," says Hicks.
How he's managed to find a kit with an intact needle is probably the only miracle they'll ever get on this godforsaken rock.
She accepts it gladly.
Once he's relieved the air pressure in her chest, he wraps her ribs with a strip of lining from the inside of her jacket, and then lets her push him into the tube for a scan of his own. Apart from the small bleeds where his skin has torn, he's fine.
Aaron finds them as Hicks is pulling his boots back on.
"We, uh, we just received an update from the Network. Rescue ship will be here in ten hours."
She looks at him in surprise. "I thought they were still a few days out."
Aaron shrugs. "Guess they decided to hurry."
The message from the Network is still on the terminal when they get to the Superintendent's quarters.
"Fuck," she mutters, reading it. "Andrews must have told them something after all."
Aaron looks confused. "But isn't this what you wanted? A way off --"
"They're not coming for us anymore."
"But --"
"They want it."
"Bioweaponry," says Hicks.
Ripley chuckles humourlessly. "They still think they can control it." Running a hand over her face, she moves towards the terminal. "Give me the code. I'll tell them the entire place has gone toxic. That the creature's been destroyed."
Aaron flinches. "You can't do that!"
"Watch me."
"But it's still out there." With a quickness she hadn't expected from the guy, he clears the screen. "Look -- you're okay. I like you. But I'm getting rescued. I don't give a shit about these stupid prisoners but I've got a wife, a kid. I go home on the next rotation!"
"Yeah," she agrees bitterly. Hudson was four weeks short, and she had Amy waiting for her. "Everybody's got something."
Newt's hungry, they all are, so they head to the mess hall. One of the prisoners had started to clean up Andrews' blood initially but they'd done a piss poor job of it and most of it is still there.
In the shelves behind the prep area, Newt searches out some cereal and powdered milk.
Hicks takes a bowl with only a hint of reluctance. "Well, at least it isn't cornbread."
They find the prisoners down below, outside the furnace. Dillon's rallying them one more time, Plan B, get the creature into the lead mold and smelt the fucker down, and Ripley tries to look optimistic but it's hard.
"This thing's been in my life so long," she says under her breath, "I can't remember anything else."
Beside her, Hicks takes her hand in his.
It takes a while to convince the men that they have to do this, that if they wait for the Company to show up -- Aaron's idea of a plan -- it won't be the creature the Company tries to kill, it will be them, crew expendable. But it's not an easy sell and it gets worse when they realise what they'll be using for bait to lure the alien out of the channels and into the mold.
"You're all gonna die anyway," Dillon says to his men. "So it may as well be fighting."
Too soft for the others to hear, Hicks whispers, "Hoorah."
She couldn't have put it better herself.
They leave Newt on the furnace control platform up above.
It's the first time neither she or Hicks have had her in sight since they landed here, but there's no other choice. Even if she'd wanted to, she's too small and groggy still to play hide and seek with the alien.
Down in the main channel, waiting for the screaming to start (and there will be screaming, she's as sure of that as she is of her own heartbeat), she tells herself that if any of these prisoners even think about looking twice at Newt, the alien'll be the least of their problems.
She's nuked half a planet before. She's got no qualms about recreating that event with the two dozen barrels of quinitricetyline still left.
From one of the feeder corridors, a voice shouts out, terrified. "It's in here!"
And the screaming starts again.
Afterwards, while they wait for the Company's landing craft to arrive -- T minus 2 hours and counting -- she can't help but dwell on those final moments in the furnace. The prisoners' screams as they'd run, helplessly, through the chambers. Dillon's screams, as he'd kept the creature in the mold while she and Hicks climbed free. The hiss of the pouring lead and the alien's high-pitched squeals as it cooked in its own exoskeleton, and, finally, the hideous shatter of its body when Hicks had reached the sprinkler system first and turned it on.
She knows she'll be seeing this night, this planet, all over again in her nightmares tonight, a new feed to match the ones already in circulation.
"Was it just the one?" asks Newt quietly. "Are you sure?"
Ripley can't blame her for asking. Or Morse and Aaron, the only other two survivors, for the way they flinch and swivel to stare at them, fear on their faces at the idea that this might not be over after all.
Beside her, his hand tight around hers, Hicks nods, all military calm and assurance. "We're sure."
(She hopes.)
The End
FEEDBACK: Always appreciated. *g*
abluegirl requested an AU "what if" scenario that had Newt and Hicks survive the crash landing on the penal colony in Aliens 3, but yet somehow an egg traveled with them, so the Alien threat is still present.
STATUS: Complete
SUMMARY: Little penetrates outside of the singular fact that they're alive. All three of them.
RATING: R
CLASSIFICATIONS: Ripley/Hicks
ARCHIVING: Do not archive. Thank you.
NOTES: Unbeta'd.
WORDS: 6,661
DISCLAIMER: Not mine. Don't sue.
Copyright anr; April 2014.
The Scars That Silence Carved by anr
She wakes the sound of metal and glass against the same, to the smell of bleach and antiseptic, to feel of rough linen sheets and a too-thin mattress and knows, instantly, she's no longer in hypersleep.
The man who's woken her -- a medical officer, he says, Clemens -- provides enough information through the fog of sleep drugs and god-knows-what-else coating her veins for her to get her bearings but little penetrates outside of the singular fact that they're alive.
Rolling out of the bed, she catches her first sight of Newt and Hicks since before this, their cots lined up beside hers, chests rising in sleep, and steadies herself against Hicks' bed, her fingers curling into his sheets.
Behind her, Clemens is still talking, something about shaving her head and the after-effects of a sudden hypersleep awakening and she cuts him off absently. "Yeah, I'll be sick for a couple of weeks." She studies first Hicks then Newt. "Will they be okay?"
"The girl swallowed a considerable amount of sea water during the crash, while the Corporal's wounds appear to have been caused prior to your arrival here. I have given them both a cocktail of antibiotics and expect they should awaken in due course."
It's good news, great even, and better than almost every alternative she can think of, but something in what the doctor's been saying... "Crash?" she echoes. Then, louder, "I have to see the ship."
The ship is a tangled mess of wires and twisted support structures. Sitting beside Newt's cryotube, she stares at the girder that came thisclose to impaling Hicks, at the cracks in the glass covering her own tube, and tries to make sense of how they came to be here, on this miserable rock, beaten and battered and --
There's acid-pitting on the side of Newt's tube.
Her heart stops.
Newt and Hicks are both still asleep when she bursts into the infirmary, Clemens hard on her heels.
"Ripley!"
Ignoring him, she heads straight for Newt and peels back the sheet covering her, studying the slight rise and fall of her chest, her abdomen, for something... foreign, alien.
"Lieutenant!"
"She needs a chest x-ray," she says without looking at him. "I need -- I have to see inside her."
"Out of the question."
"I have a very good reason for --"
"And perhaps you'd like to share that good reason?"
She can't think straight, can't see anything except those burns on the outside of Newt's tube, and when she takes a breath for a moment she's sure she can smell the melting plastic of Brett's pen. "Possible contagion," she manages.
"What kind of contagion?"
She shudders and tries to think of something fast, some infection that will justify --
From behind her, a raspy voice says, "Cholera."
Hicks. With one hand on Newt's bed for balance, she turns to stare at him like she hasn't seen him in a thousand years or more.
Clemens scoffs even as he moves to Hicks' other side. "There hasn't been a case of cholera in over 200 years, Corporal." He checks Hicks' pulse, flashes a light across his eyes. "In any event, there are no x-ray facilities here. Nor," he adds before either of them can say anything else, "any other kind of imaging equipment. This is a prison not a medical facility."
The buzz from the intercom fills the air suddenly, the sound echoing off the tiles, and Clemens straightens.
"Now, if you'll excuse me, the Superintendent will be wanting a status report."
While Clemens is gone, she fills Hicks in on what she knows of their situation so far. It's a short report -- crash, prison, acid.
"We checked the Sulaco," he says, grimacing as she helps him to sit up. "I remember that much."
"We must have missed something, an egg maybe, something." Her fingers itch to peel back the bandages covering his chest, to see how his skin grafts are healing. He's no good to her wounded, not here, not if... "The pitting on the tube -- it was from acid."
From their time on LV426, short and horrific as it was, she knows he won't try to tell her that she's mistaken in what she saw... but that doesn't mean a part of her is not also expecting him to tell her she's mistaken in what that means. Her psych-evaluator back on Gateway spent months labouring those distinctions to her, educating her on the Company line.
He doesn't. "We'll check her," he says, closing his eyes. "Anyway we can."
Newt wakes, finally, while Clemens is still away, giving Ripley the chance to examine her as best she can. She uses the medical officer's slim-light and tongue depressors to check her mouth and the back of her throat for anything that might suggest a face-hugger's presence, palpitates her abdomen for anything such a presence might have left. The checks are a poor substitute for a proper scan and her fear doesn't really start to abate until Newt coughs once and then suddenly vomits up what looks like a good half-gallon of sea water.
On Kane, the face-hugger had breathed for him, sealing off his oesophagus to the unbreathable atmosphere of LV426. For Newt to have swallowed that much sea water...
"She wasn't... protected... by one," she says to Hicks, eyes shining, while she rubs Newt's back. "If she had, she wouldn't have almost drowned."
It seems ridiculous and almost cruel to be so pleased that Newt almost died, slowly and inexorably, but she can see Hicks gets it.
"Way to go, kid," he says, pride in his voice. "Nice one."
Her retching finally abating, Newt curls into Ripley's side and gives Hicks a weak thumbs up.
Ripley grins.
When Clemens does finally return, he brings food and what looks like juice with him. Ripley would have preferred coffee (and a cigarette) but this is probably better.
"I see the little Miss is awake," he says, holding out a tray towards her. "And unsurprisingly absent of any cholera symptoms."
Newt scoots back on her bed so Ripley takes the tray from him and passes it to her before taking a tray for herself. "What's going to happen to us?"
Clemens hands the final tray to Hicks but before he can answer her, another two men enter the room.
"Superintendent Andrews," the older man says promptly, introducing himself. "I have notified Weyland Yutani of your presence here and requested a rescue team. It should arrive within the week."
Beside her, Newt is spending more time scratching her scalp then eating.
"In the meantime," Andrews continues, "you are to remain here in the infirmary and avoid the local population as much as possible. There are twenty-five inmates here, all thieves, rapists, murderers and child molesters, and just because they've taken on religion doesn't make them any less dangerous. I would prefer as few ripples in the water as possible."
Hicks' tone is wry. "For our own personal protection, naturally."
Andrews' is not. "Quite."
After Andrews and Aaron -- the other man with him -- have left, and they've finished eating, Clemens looks Newt over and provides her with a dose of his stabiliser cocktail. He then shows the three of them to the nearby showers. Hicks' movements are slow and cautious, but they are his own movements and for that Ripley is beyond relieved.
While Hicks no doubt has more practice at it, she is the one to shave first Newt's head, then hers, then his.
"Alright?" she asks before she leaves him for the showers, and he nods from where he's sitting on the long bench against the wall.
"Yeah." He scratches at the edge of the bandage on his chest. "Just tired still. It'll pass."
She knows how he feels -- the food and Clemens' stabilisers have helped, but her system still feels groggy from the hypersleep, and probably will for another couple of days at least.
Behind her, Newt is already exploring the showers. Hicks smiles after her, and leans back against the wall, before looking up at Ripley. "Don't be gone long," he says softly.
She remembers the last time he said that to her, adrenaline and belief -- belief in her -- coating every word, and smiles a little in return.
"Ripley!" calls out Newt.
She walks away.
There is little to do in the infirmary apart from sleep and eat and stare at the walls. In the morning, Clemens leaves to check on one of prisoners, she thinks, but he doesn't say exactly and neither she nor Hicks ask.
Newt had resettled her bed against the wall the previous night, draping her blanket over the edges much like she did in Medical back on LV426. Though Newt never says so explicitly, Ripley's pretty sure the Sulaco was her first ever hypersleep and their rough awakening hasn't made her body's ability to process the sleep drugs any easier. While she naps in her little cave, Hicks and Ripley sit on his bed. He's playing with some of the tongue depressors and suture thread from the nearby medical cart and, after awhile, Ripley realises he's making a stick figure from them, a doll. She smiles.
"Casey version two?"
He shrugs, and she gets the feeling he's a little embarrassed.
She touches his knee. "She'll love it."
He clears his throat. "How do you like your new haircut?"
Now it's her turn to feel self-conscious, and she rubs a hand over her scalp. "It's okay."
She watches his fingers wind the thread around the depressors, the movements deft but sure, and remembers, suddenly, the press of his hand on her hip, the lean of his body against hers, back on LV426 when he was showing her how to operate the pulse rifle.
"It suits you."
She's pretty sure he's attracted to her, and she knows she's attracted to him --
"I've been out here a long time," she says before she can censor herself.
His hands pause, a heartbeat of stillness that lingers. "Yeah," he says in a low tone, looking up and meeting her gaze. "Me too."
Across the room, the prisoner assigned to guard them is flicking through a magazine that looks older than her. When he shifts in his seat, his chair scrapes a little on the concrete.
Hicks' eyes dart from hers to their guard, then back to his hands. His fingers start to move again, and Ripley tries not to feel cheated.
Forcing herself to look away, she focuses on a spray of graffiti scraped into the wall above Newt's bed -- ITS TIME 4 THE JUDGEMENT -- and says, more to fill the silence than anything else, "It's some sort of apocalyptic, millenarian, Christian fundamentalist religion. The inmates started it about five years ago when they decided to remain here."
"This is a foundry, right? Something about lead sheeting."
"Right. Weyland Yutani were going to close the facility down but the hard timers didn't want to leave -- said they'd keep the pilot light on."
"And the Company agreed?"
Ripley shrugs. "Apparently. They left Superintendent Andrews in charge, Aaron as his second, and Clemens as the medical officer."
"A former prisoner?" Off her look, Hicks clarifies, "he has a barcode on the back of his neck."
She's not all that surprised but before she can say as much, Clemens himself walks into the room.
"I came to check up on you all." He looks around. "Where is--?"
The intercom sounds before he can finish, and they all listen as Aaron requests Clemens presence elsewhere in the facility.
"Something serious?" asks Clemens.
"You could say that," replies Aaron. "One of the prisoners has been diced."
Stepping away from the intercom, Clemens looks over at them almost apologetically. "When I return, then."
He hasn't been gone more than a few minutes when Hicks says, suddenly, "the EEV's flight data recorder."
She looks up and nods. "If there was an alien on the ship --"
"Do you remember how to get to it?"
She does, but. "One of us will have to stay here. With Newt." Their guard has barely looked twice at any of them but that doesn't mean she trusts him, and it certainly doesn't mean she trusts any of the other inmates who might be around.
"You go," he says. From his pocket, he pulls out a scalpel obviously lifted from the medical tray. "We'll be fine."
It's easy enough to slip out of the infirmary and find her way back to the ship. The flight data recorder is undamaged from the crash, its protective coverings not even scratched. She's checking the input codes when a voice surprises her, and she looks up to see Clemens standing above her.
"You know, wandering around without an escort is really going to piss Superintendent Andrews off."
Shaking away the burst of adrenaline he'd caused, sneaking up on her like that, she asks, "will you tell me about your accident?"
"One of the prisoners has been killed."
"Really? How?"
"In the air shaft. Poor soul backed into a nine-foot fan." Clemens circles her slowly, watching her every reaction to his words way too closely for her liking. "I found something at the accident site, though, just a bit away from where it happened. A mark. A burn. Rather like the one you found on the girl's cryotube."
She can't prevent her reaction to that. Looking up, she stares at him, a thousand possibilities suddenly flooding through her mind. With Newt showing no symptoms, she'd begun to convince herself that while, yes, there probably was an alien on the Sulaco that had somehow caused their crash landing here, it had stayed on the Sulaco. If what Clemens is saying is true, however, if there are acid burns now appearing in ventilation shafts nowhere near the crash site --
Clemens crouches in front of her. "Look, I'm on your side. I want to help, but I need to know what's going on, or what you and the Corporal think is going on."
She doesn't trust him, not yet, but she does believe that he believes he wants to help. "If you really want to help, find us a computer with audio capabilities so I can access this flight recorder."
He shakes his head. "We don't have anything like that here."
God. "Well," she thinks fast, "what about Bishop?"
"Bishop?"
"The droid that crashed with us."
Clemens sighs. "I can point you in the right direction." He stands and helps her up too. "Best I can do."
The rubbish dump Clemens directs her to is not as big as she'd feared and it doesn't take her long to find Bishop. He's little more than a head and severed torso, and she shakes away the memory she has of Ash in a similar condition while she wraps him in the section of blanket she'd brought with her and hoists him over her shoulder.
The group of prisoners blocking her exit, however, is not so easily dismissed.
Backtracking, she tries for the other exit she'd seen but that way is similarly blocked and she feels, for the first time in what feels like forever, fear for something other than the aliens.
No.
They overpower her too easily, slamming her body into and then over a piece of railing and holding her there while one of the men kicks open her feet. She's fought the aliens too many times, has fought that beast of a queen and won, but this...
There's a roar behind her, a terrible human sound to match the alien ones she hears in her nightmares, and then --
She hits the ground hard, barely able to comprehend that she's free, even as one of the prisoners asks if she's okay. As she gets up, he tells her to leave, that he has to re-educate his brothers, and she thinks he's the head prisoner Clemens had mentioned to her once before -- Dillon maybe? -- but he doesn't introduce himself and she has no desire to stick around.
She does, however, have one urge, and that one she gives in to easily.
The man on the ground closest to her... she breaks two of her knuckles when she punches him out.
It's worth it.
Hicks takes one look at the way she's holding herself when she gets back to the infirmary -- she thinks she bruised some ribs in the attack; her side is aching -- and is off the bed a second later. "What happened?"
She shakes her head. "It was nothing." She looks at Newt's bed. "Okay?"
He nods. "Still asleep. The guard went to eat. You get the flight recorder?"
She nods and briefly recaps her meeting with Clemens and what he'd told her about the prisoner's death.
"Fuck," says Hicks, when she mentions the acid burns he'd found.
"Yeah."
While Hicks closes the curtains around the bed they've chosen on the other end of the room, and switches on the nearby bedside light, she hooks up Bishop to the flight recorder. It's not the worst patch she's ever seen -- some of the ones Brett and Parker used to do back on the Nostromo take that title -- but it's pretty close. Despite that, Bishop's servos whir as soon as she connects the battery.
"Hey," she says.
"Ah, Ripley." His one working eye rolls in its attempts to focus. "Hicks."
"Hi Bishop," says Hicks. "How you feeling?"
"My legs hurt," he answers without any hint of humour.
"I'm sorry," Ripley apologises, and Bishop brushes it aside with a toaster quip.
"How are you?" His head lifts off the bed slightly. "Oh, I like your new haircut. Yours not so much, Hicks."
Hicks smiles a little. "We're fine. Newt too."
"Bishop," says Ripley, "can you access the flight's data recorder?"
"No problem."
There's a brief pause while Ripley inputs the access codes. Then --
"I'm home," says Bishop.
"What happened on the Sulaco? Why were our cryotubes ejected?" asks Hicks.
Bishop's voice changes to that of the Sulaco's, complete with the echo of alarms going off in the background. "Stasis interrupted. Fire in cryogenic compartment. Repeat, fire in --"
"What happened?" interrupts Ripley. "What started the fire, Bishop?" When he doesn't answer immediately, she pushes. "Can you hear me?"
Behind her, Hicks places his hand on her shoulder.
Bishop refocuses. "The fire was electrical. It was in the subflooring."
"Did the sensors pick up anything moving around on the ship prior to separation?"
"It's very dark here, Ripley," he answers. "I'm not what I used to be."
"Just tell me. Does the recorder indicate anything? Was there an alien on board?"
At Bishop's simple, "yes," Hicks tightens his grip.
She forces herself to ask the next question. "Is it on the Sulaco still, or did it come with us on the EEV?"
Bishop focuses on Hicks first, then Ripley. "It was with us all the way."
The Company knows there was an alien on board.
While Bishop asks Hicks to disconnect him, this is the thought that won't leave her head.
The Company knows.
She's not sure what's worse -- the knowledge that they brought it down here with them, or that the Company will be coming to try and recover it.
"They want it," she says again, after Hicks removes Bishop from the battery. "That's what they'll be coming for -- it. We may as well have died in the crash, or with the others back on LV426, for all we'll be worth to them."
Hicks runs a hand over his scalp but before he can say anything, there's a bunch of shouting from the door to the infirmary.
Body tensing, Ripley's gaze flashes to Hicks'. Now what?
Hicks switches off the light.
They listen in silence as the men -- she recognises Clemens, Dillon, Andrews and Aaron's voices -- discuss an attack. Two of the prisoners are dead, and Andrews is leaning towards a third having killed them.
"It wasn't me, it was the dragon, it wasn't me..."
She doesn't know that voice but it's easy to work out that it's the third prisoner in question.
And she has a pretty damn good idea of what he might call a 'dragon'.
With Hicks at her side, she moves towards the curtains and pulls them open. "He's telling the truth."
The men fall silent as she steps closer to where they have the prisoner wrapped in a straightjacket on the far bed, his face sheeted with blood.
"And I'd like to talk to him about this dragon."
Andrews refuses to let her talk to the prisoner but agrees to talk to both her and Hicks in his quarters. Once there, his reaction to what they tell him is far from unsurprising.
"Sir, I don't think the child shou--"
Ripley doesn't even glance at where Newt is sitting in the corner of the Superintendent's office, playing with the doll Hicks made her. (There was no way they were going to leave her behind in the infirmary with a blood-stained and raving prisoner, even if they do believe him.) To Aaron, she says, shortly, "she's fine."
Andrews leans back in his chair. "Let me see if I have this correct, Lieutenant. It's an eight-foot creature of some kind, with acid for blood, and it arrived on your spaceship. It kills on sight and is generally unpleasant. And, of course, you expect me to accept this on your word."
"No," she agrees tiredly. "I don't expect anything."
Not anymore. She's done this song and dance too many times now.
"Then tell me, Lieutenant, Corporal. What would you have me do?"
Hicks steps forward from where he's been leaning against the wall near where Newt sits. "What kind of weapons do you have?"
Andrews smiles like Burke, all insincerity. "This is a prison. It's not a good idea to allow prisoners access to firearms."
"Well what keeps them from killing you?" he asks.
"Fear. There's no way to escape. With the arrival of the next supply ship, the Company would eliminate them."
Impossible. "This is a maximum security prison," she says slowly, disbelievingly, "and you have no weapons of any kind?"
The Superintendent's gaze shifts to the side briefly before returning to hers. "We're on the honour system."
God. She turns back to Hicks, defeated. "We're fucked."
In the corner, Newt strokes the cotton-swab hair on her doll and whispers, "aye-firmative."
Aaron escorts them back to the infirmary where, on Andrews' orders once again, they are to remain. Hicks and Newt walk ahead of them and she notes the length and ease of his strides is slowly increasing. He's not a hundred percent yet, and his skin grafts are still paper-thin as they heal, but he is healing.
"She doesn't say much," Aaron says suddenly, nodding towards Newt, "does she?"
Ripley doesn't reply.
Aaron scratches at his neck. "I have a kid back home," he admits. "Couple years younger. Looking forward to seeing him again soon."
They've reached the infirmary.
"Right," says Aaron awkwardly when she still doesn't say anything. "In you go then."
Inside, Clemens pulls away from the prisoner -- Golic, his name is Golic -- to join them. Newt disappears under her bed.
"Isn't there any way off of this place? Some way to escape?" she asks him without preface, taking one of the mugs he offers.
Clemens laughs. "No. Supply ship comes every six months."
"And that's it?" asks Hicks.
"That's it."
"Fuck," she says.
"They are sending somebody to pick you up quite soon, I gather," Clemens adds then.
Hicks leans forward. "What's soon?"
Clemens shrugs. "I don't know. Within the week, I think? Nobody's ever been in a hurry to get here before." He eyes them both carefully. "I don't suppose you'd care to tell me what you and the good Superintendent discussed."
Hicks looks to her. She looks at Golic who is staring at them all unashamedly from his bed across the room, listening to their every word. "Not right now, no," she says pointedly.
Golic grins at her, all blood and teeth, and whispers, "You're gonna die too."
She and Hicks might be the only ones who believe that he saw a dragon, but he's still a mad-man, a murderer and a rapist, and after the day she's had so far...
She smiles back, as sweetly as she can. "You first."
Clemens gives them all another stabiliser shot. Before Newt can disappear back into her cave, Hicks suggests a trip to the bathroom. Ripley watches them leave for the next room just as the intercom buzzes with a general announcement for all the men to meet in the mess hall.
"You're not going?" she asks Clemens, when he makes no move towards the door.
"Someone has to stay here," he says simply.
"Right."
She watches him clear away the syringes from the tray before returning to stand in front of her, and she knows he's going to ask about their meeting with Andrews again, and she knows this time she's probably going to tell him, and --
Behind him, behind the semi-opaque curtain half-drawn between this bed and Golic's, a dark form appears, familiar and terrifying in equal measure.
Her blood freezes.
Clemens dies quickly, that much she sees for sure, even as she's scrambling off the bed she'd been sitting on and slips under Newt's bed.
She has barely a half-second to think, maybe it didn't see m-- before the entire bed flips to the side, the alien less than a foot away.
She doesn't scream, doesn't even breathe as it stalks towards her, so the shout that catches its attention then can't be hers. Impossibly, she hears it dart away, and back up into the ceiling, Clemens' curtain-wrapped body with it, but that makes almost no sense at all so she does the only thing she can do.
She runs.
Hicks is just inside the door to the infirmary -- it must have been his shout that distracted the alien -- while Newt is flat against the wall outside, terror shining in her eyes. With Hicks less than a step behind her, she grabs Newt's hand and pulls her into a sprint down the corridor towards the mess hall.
It takes them seconds to get there.
It takes them forever.
"It's here!" she manages to warn as she swings around open doorway, Newt colliding into her and almost knocking them both down. "It got Clemens!"
She thinks Andrews was in the middle of saying something to the prisoners, but he doesn't even blink as he rounds on her instead. "Stop this raving immediately! Stop it!"
Sweat rolls into her eyes, stinging like mad. "I'm telling you, it's here!"
She stumbles down the handful of steps into the room proper, Newt and Hicks with her, even as Andrews yells for Aaron to take them back to the infirmary --
-- and then there's just yelling.
They retreat to the central stairwell. The prisoners are freaking out, trying to decide what to do next, and who's in charge, but Newt, Ripley and Hicks simply sit off to the side in silence. She -- they -- have done this before.
Someone hands Ripley and Hicks a cigarette each, and she lights hers with gratitude. Finally.
From behind them, Dillon calls out, "Hey, brother, sister, what about you? You're officers."
Hicks meets her gaze. Neither of them move.
Dillon says, "How about showing us a little fucking leadership?"
Aaron tries to step up then and is shouted down by the prisoners who want Dillon instead.
He refuses. "I just take care of my own."
Ripley tries not to smile at that. She's been doing the same thing for how long now? And where has that got her?
Right back where she started is where. The Nostromo on land. A foundry instead of a refinery.
One of the prisoners asks, "Well, what does this fucking beast want? Is this mother going to try for us all?"
Easiest question in the universe. At that she finally turns, finally speaks.
"Well, yeah."
Aaron and the prisoners summarise their situation quite succinctly in the end. They're in a ten mile square installation with six-hundred air ducts running to the surface, no video surveillance, and no way to seal off the area they're in.
So. fucked.
"What I wouldn't give for a pulse rifle," murmurs Hicks.
Right now, she'd settle for one of Hudson's sharp sticks. As the prisoners continue to talk about their chances, about what they can do, she says, "I haven't seen one like this before. It moves differently."
"You think that might help us?"
"Probably not. It's just... odd." She falls silent as one of the prisoners approaches her. Hicks tenses beside her and she shakes her head slightly.
"-- no entertainment center, no climate control, no video system, no surveillance, no freezers, no fucking ice cream, no rubbers, no women, no guns. All we got here is shit!" He gets right up in her face, all about spitting the last word, but when she doesn't react, he turns back to the others. "Oh, what the hell are we even talking to her for? She's the one that brought the fucker. Why don't we just get her head and shove it through the fucking wall!"
She doesn't smile, not quite, but it's close. "Well, if you think that would help..."
Dillon calls for the prisoner -- Morse -- to back away from her.
Ripley looks at Aaron. "What about a blueprint?"
In the end what they do have a solid steel bunker with six foot thick walls, fire and flares, and enough accelerant -- quinitricetyline -- to set the world on fire.
"How do you even know it's in this area?" asks Aaron.
Ripley shrugs. "It's like a lion. It sticks close to the zebras."
"Zebras?" repeats Aaron. It takes him a moment to get it. "Oh, right."
As she watches him head off to speak to Dillon, Hicks approaches her, Newt his silent shadow.
"Anything?"
Hicks shakes his head. "Handful of batteries for a couple of flashlights. That's about it."
Crap. Though it had been an impossibly long shot, she'd been hoping for a miracle in the supply room.
Hicks nods after Aaron. "Did find out why the inmates keep calling him 85 though."
"Yeah?"
Hicks gives her a wry smile. "It's his IQ."
Ripley rolls her eyes. "Great."
The plan is relatively simple -- burn the alien out of the pipes using the quinitricetyline and straight into the bunker. It's no different to what she did on the Nostromo, when they closed off the vents behind Dallas, and what she and Hicks did on LV426, sealing off each of the junctions into the command center.
She tries not to dwell on how each of those times turned out.
They leave Aaron to hand out the flares, Dillon to organise the men into groups, and take a mop each themselves.
"Careful, Newt," she says, watching as the girl helps to paint the corridor they're in with the accelerant. "Don't get any on you."
Newt nods and pushes her mop a little further away from her body.
In the distance, there's the clatter of something falling. A bucket maybe. She and Hicks both look towards the sound at the same time but it's Hicks who shouts, "get down!" as he tackles her and Newt to the ground.
The air in the tunnel vanishes, sucked into a hellish fireball that roars above their heads.
Beneath her, Newt screams.
They lose ten of the prisoners in the inferno before the sprinklers can turn on. She's the least visibly injured out of her, Newt and Hicks, just a few bumps and bruises from where Hicks slammed her into the ground, but Newt has a nasty burn running along her forearm, and the bandage on Hicks' neck is starting to show small blooms of blood from where his new skin has torn.
The camaraderie and fragile hope the prisoners had shown while they painted the corridors starts to fracture in the aftermath. As she listens to them start to argue, to shout and curse, she leans against one of the walls and tries to catch her breath.
Her chest hurts.
Hicks leaves the men to their arguing and steps closer to where she and Newt stand, concern on his face. "You okay?"
She shakes her head. If her ribs had ached before, after the attack in the rubbish dump, now they're positively on fire. She can hardly draw in a full breath.
He takes one of her hands in his, Newt's in his other. "C'mon."
They head to the EEV and she's surprised Hicks knows the way.
"Checked it out on the way back from the supply room. Was hoping the weapons locker had survived."
She hadn't even known the EEV had a weapons locker but it makes sense. The Sulaco is -- was -- a military vessel after all. "Nothing?"
"The locker was in the section the most damaged by the crash. Doesn't even exist anymore."
Figures.
Hicks continues, "but the neuroscanner for Newt's tube is still functional."
She could kick herself for not thinking of that sooner. "I never even thou--"
He nods. "Me either." He grimaces. "Damn 'sleep sickness."
"Newt --"
"Already checked her out. Clean from head to toe. Not even a haemorrhage stain."
Best fucking news all day.
Hicks helps her to remove her jacket and boots, and to lie down in the tube. Newt sits on the floor beside them and pulls her doll out of her pocket again. One of its tongue depressor arms is now shorter than the other, the end having snapped away, but the rest is remarkably intact.
Running the keyboard, Hicks starts the biofunction cycle.
"Anything?" she asks.
"Hang on," he says, "I need to enhance the--"
When his words trail off, a chill races down her spine. She licks her lips.
"What is it?"
He doesn't respond.
"Hicks?"
She has three broken ribs and a punctured lung. The scanner diagnoses a pneumothorax.
"Christ," she mutters, as Hicks scrambles to find one of the EEV's med kits. "Just what we need."
"Got it," says Hicks.
How he's managed to find a kit with an intact needle is probably the only miracle they'll ever get on this godforsaken rock.
She accepts it gladly.
Once he's relieved the air pressure in her chest, he wraps her ribs with a strip of lining from the inside of her jacket, and then lets her push him into the tube for a scan of his own. Apart from the small bleeds where his skin has torn, he's fine.
Aaron finds them as Hicks is pulling his boots back on.
"We, uh, we just received an update from the Network. Rescue ship will be here in ten hours."
She looks at him in surprise. "I thought they were still a few days out."
Aaron shrugs. "Guess they decided to hurry."
The message from the Network is still on the terminal when they get to the Superintendent's quarters.
"Fuck," she mutters, reading it. "Andrews must have told them something after all."
Aaron looks confused. "But isn't this what you wanted? A way off --"
"They're not coming for us anymore."
"But --"
"They want it."
"Bioweaponry," says Hicks.
Ripley chuckles humourlessly. "They still think they can control it." Running a hand over her face, she moves towards the terminal. "Give me the code. I'll tell them the entire place has gone toxic. That the creature's been destroyed."
Aaron flinches. "You can't do that!"
"Watch me."
"But it's still out there." With a quickness she hadn't expected from the guy, he clears the screen. "Look -- you're okay. I like you. But I'm getting rescued. I don't give a shit about these stupid prisoners but I've got a wife, a kid. I go home on the next rotation!"
"Yeah," she agrees bitterly. Hudson was four weeks short, and she had Amy waiting for her. "Everybody's got something."
Newt's hungry, they all are, so they head to the mess hall. One of the prisoners had started to clean up Andrews' blood initially but they'd done a piss poor job of it and most of it is still there.
In the shelves behind the prep area, Newt searches out some cereal and powdered milk.
Hicks takes a bowl with only a hint of reluctance. "Well, at least it isn't cornbread."
They find the prisoners down below, outside the furnace. Dillon's rallying them one more time, Plan B, get the creature into the lead mold and smelt the fucker down, and Ripley tries to look optimistic but it's hard.
"This thing's been in my life so long," she says under her breath, "I can't remember anything else."
Beside her, Hicks takes her hand in his.
It takes a while to convince the men that they have to do this, that if they wait for the Company to show up -- Aaron's idea of a plan -- it won't be the creature the Company tries to kill, it will be them, crew expendable. But it's not an easy sell and it gets worse when they realise what they'll be using for bait to lure the alien out of the channels and into the mold.
"You're all gonna die anyway," Dillon says to his men. "So it may as well be fighting."
Too soft for the others to hear, Hicks whispers, "Hoorah."
She couldn't have put it better herself.
They leave Newt on the furnace control platform up above.
It's the first time neither she or Hicks have had her in sight since they landed here, but there's no other choice. Even if she'd wanted to, she's too small and groggy still to play hide and seek with the alien.
Down in the main channel, waiting for the screaming to start (and there will be screaming, she's as sure of that as she is of her own heartbeat), she tells herself that if any of these prisoners even think about looking twice at Newt, the alien'll be the least of their problems.
She's nuked half a planet before. She's got no qualms about recreating that event with the two dozen barrels of quinitricetyline still left.
From one of the feeder corridors, a voice shouts out, terrified. "It's in here!"
And the screaming starts again.
Afterwards, while they wait for the Company's landing craft to arrive -- T minus 2 hours and counting -- she can't help but dwell on those final moments in the furnace. The prisoners' screams as they'd run, helplessly, through the chambers. Dillon's screams, as he'd kept the creature in the mold while she and Hicks climbed free. The hiss of the pouring lead and the alien's high-pitched squeals as it cooked in its own exoskeleton, and, finally, the hideous shatter of its body when Hicks had reached the sprinkler system first and turned it on.
She knows she'll be seeing this night, this planet, all over again in her nightmares tonight, a new feed to match the ones already in circulation.
"Was it just the one?" asks Newt quietly. "Are you sure?"
Ripley can't blame her for asking. Or Morse and Aaron, the only other two survivors, for the way they flinch and swivel to stare at them, fear on their faces at the idea that this might not be over after all.
Beside her, his hand tight around hers, Hicks nods, all military calm and assurance. "We're sure."
(She hopes.)
The End
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