River of Pain Read online

  He lowered his voice and glanced around to make sure he wasn’t overheard.

  “My point is that they tend to recruit daredevils and dimwits as colonists, not to mention people who are looking for a new start because they’ve burned all their bridges back home.”

  “You like the Jordens, though,” Hansard said.

  Al shrugged. “I like ’em fine, but they’re too cavalier, too desperate to earn bonuses. The science team uses wildcatters because they’re willing to take risks. I just worry they’re going to put us all at risk one of these days. We’ve got a lot of years to go before this colony is fully established and populated. A decade or more. With that kind of time, anything could go wrong.”

  He looked over at Anne Jorden, who cradled her new baby close, kissing her soft cheeks and whispering love into her ears. Russ had knelt down beside young Tim, who pouted with his arms defiantly crossed, apparently upset over something to do with the baby.

  “Mark my words,” Al said, “if we ever have any serious trouble on this dirtball, it’s gonna be because of people like them.”

  4

  ARRIVALS

  DATE: 16 MAY, 2179

  For the first time in Jernigan’s career, it looked like he’d claim salvage on a ship he hadn’t even been looking for. He stood in the airlock that led into the retrieval bay and suited up, watching his two companions and wondering what they were thinking.

  Not that it was hard to imagine what Landers would be thinking. The greedy bastard would just be eager to see what goodies the drifting vessel might contain. Fleet, though… he was an enigma. Jernigan had spent three years and four expeditions trying to figure him out. Landers laughed and said he should give up, that Fleet was almost an alien species. But Jernigan wasn’t a quitter.

  “Target ship gathered,” a buzzing voice said in his earpiece. Moore, up on the flight deck. He was their eyes and ears right now, and Jernigan was comfortable with that.

  “Any indication of its origins?” Jernigan asked.

  “Negative. No beacons, no transmission, no signs of life. I’ve hailed another dozen times since you guys went to suit up. Nothing. No auto-response from on-board computers, no sign that it’s even picking up my transmissions. Quiet as the grave.”

  “So what do you think?” Landers asked. “Some old military shuttle?”

  “Not military,” Moore said, and Jernigan saw Landers’ disappointment in the way he slumped. Anything military wasn’t legally salvage, but way out here there was no one to police what they stripped out, packaged up, and sold to the highest bidder. Usually they went for ships or orbiting stations that they knew had been damaged or abandoned. The information was sent by the company who owned the wreck, or sometimes by private contacts who knew who to speak to, and how much a good salvage could net.

  There was often dubious information passed on from shady sources, and several times he’d found himself boarding vessels that showed signs of forced abandonment or criminal activity. Once he’d found the remains of a firefight.

  Deep-salvage had never been the most respectable of professions, but Jernigan really didn’t give a shit what people thought. He had his own moral code, and he was quite proud to do a job that most people wouldn’t.

  Sometimes they’d reach a target vessel and find survivors on board. That changed everything. They still charged the company the cost of time and transport, but there was never a cut of anything larger. Even Landers had never raised any objection when they pulled back from stripping or towing in a ship that still had a living crew member or passenger.

  Not quite respectable, never quite criminal.

  “Not military,” Jernigan said. “But no indication where it comes from? No ship’s signature attached?”

  “No, but it is old,” Moore said. “Don’t think I’ve seen anything like it outside of history holos.” He paused, then added, “Right, just docking and pressurizing. Hold onto your nuts.”

  A soft vibration passed through the ship, and when Jernigan looked through the viewing port he saw moisture condense rapidly on the other side, turning quickly to ice. He made sure his suit’s climate control systems were set to a comfortable level, then waited for all of the lights to turn green.

  Landers and Fleet were experienced salvage workers, and Jernigan had no hesitation about working with either of them. They’d boarded at least twenty vessels and stations together, and seen each other through a few hairy moments. This one would go like clockwork.

  He was sure of it.

  As always, he felt the seed of excitement. One day, he was certain, they’d find something amazing.

  When the lights were green, the three men left the airlock and entered the hold. Fleet fired up the remote cutting robot, trundling it across to the ship using a handheld control unit and igniting its cutting laser. He glanced at Landers, who’d taken position at a small panel close to where the salvaged ship had been gripped tight by a network of grappling arms.

  Landers did one more quick check across all systems, then nodded.

  “Clean as a virgin’s pussy,” he said. “Nothing in there to cause worry.”

  “And what would you know about virgins’ pussies?”

  Fleet asked.

  “Ask your sister,” Landers said. Fleet didn’t answer, or give any indication that he’d even heard. He steered the cutting robot toward the ship, used a scanner to measure the door and plan a cut. Then he hit deploy.

  It took the laser a minute to cut through. Jernigan swayed slightly from foot to foot.

  Weird-looking ship, he thought. Old shuttle, maybe. Not a lifeboat. There was evidence of damage around the door’s exterior—scrapes and scratches, and a blast-scar close to the engines. Like everything they found and salvaged, this vessel had a story to tell.

  The door fell inward with a heavy clang. Fleet withdrew the cutter and sent in a scanner. None of them expected that they’d find anything surprising, but they all knew the rules. Better safe than sorry.

  The scanner did its work.

  “Anything?” Jernigan asked.

  “Looks like a hypersleep capsule,” Fleet said.

  “Oh, man,” Landers said. “Anyone alive in there?” Jernigan hated the hint of disappointment in his colleague’s voice.

  “Can’t tell,” Fleet said. “Let’s check it out.”

  The scanner withdrew and Jernigan went first, the other two following him in. There was a space suit splayed over the flight chair, and what looked like some sort of grappling gun dropped on the controls. The single hypersleep pod was coated in a layer of frost.

  Jernigan brushed his hand across the curved canopy, revealing the striking woman inside. Hunkered down next to her was a cat. Holy cow. He hadn’t seen a cat since he was a kid.

  “Bio readouts are all in the green—looks like she’s alive,” he said. He slipped off his helmet and sighed. “Well, there goes our salvage, guys.”

  And that’s a face with a story to tell, for sure, he thought.

  * * *

  DATE: 10 JUNE, 2179

  TIME: 0945

  The hum of the dropship turned into a metallic groan as it hit the atmosphere of LV-426. Capt. Demian Brackett kept his boots flat on the floor and held onto the safety rig that kept him locked into his seat. The vessel slewed wickedly from side to side for several seconds before straightening out, and then it bounced like a speedboat skipping across high seas.

  Alarms began to sound, red lights blinking all over the cockpit up front.

  “What’ve we hit?” he shouted to the pilot.

  The woman didn’t turn around, too focused on keeping them on course.

  “Just the atmosphere,” she replied. “Acheron’s never smooth sailing.” She slapped a couple of buttons and the alarms died, though the lights continued to blink in distress.

  Brackett gritted his teeth as the dropship filled with the noise of atmospheric debris plunking and scraping the hull. There seemed to be a lot of it.

  “Am I missing somethin
g?” he called, raising his voice to be heard over the noise of the debris peppering the ship. “Haven’t they been terraforming this planet for fifteen years?”

  “More,” the pilot shouted. “You should’ve seen what it was like trying to land here ten years ago, when I first got here.”

  No, thanks, Brackett thought. He had a stomach like iron, but even he had begun to feel queasy. His jaw hurt from clenching his teeth. Gonna scramble my brains, he thought, as the whole dropship shook violently around him.

  For a moment the barrage ceased. He started to relax, and then the ship plummeted abruptly, as if their controlled freefall had just become a suicide run. Cursing silently, he braced himself and twisted around to try to see through the cockpit to the outside.

  “I’d rather not die on the first day of my command,” he called. “Y’know, if it’s no trouble for you.”

  The pilot glanced back at him, a scowl on her face.

  “Take a breath, Captain. Seven crashes, and I’ve never had a passenger die on me.”

  “Seven what?”

  They hit another air pocket and the drop threw him forward a second before the atmosphere thickened again, jerking him back so hard he slammed his head against the hull of the ship.

  Son of a—

  “Here you go, handsome,” the pilot announced. The retro-rockets kicked in, lofted them up a dozen feet, and then began to lower them slowly. She guided the dropship gingerly forward and descended until it settled gently to the ground.

  A hydraulic hiss came from the ship, as if it were exhaling right along with him, and Brackett released the catch on his restraints. The emergency lights shut down and the cabin brightened into a blue-white glow.

  “Safe and sound, just like I promised,” the pilot said. She disengaged the door locks and stood up from her seat, a mischievous smile on her face. For the first time, Brackett noticed her curves, and the way she looked at him.

  “As good as your word,” he said. “Yet I just now realized that I don’t even know your name.”

  “Tressa,” she said, holding out her hand. “At your service.”

  “Demian Brackett,” he said as they shook.

  She stepped over to the starboard door and entered a code into a control pad. The door hissed open, and a short ramp slid out with a rattle, clunking onto the planetary surface.

  “So what crime did you commit to get stuck out here at the ass-end of the universe?” Tressa asked.

  Brackett smiled. “I’m a good marine,” he said. “I go where I’m told.”

  The wind began to howl, blowing a scouring dust into the ship. He took a look outside and his smile faded. Acheron was a world of black and gray, save for the growing colony whose buildings were mere silhouettes in the obscuring storm. After several seconds the wind died down again, giving him a better view, but there wasn’t much more to see. Box structures, a glassoid greenhouse hemisphere, and in the distance the towering, ominous, hundred-and-fifty-foot high atmosphere processor, belching oxygen into the air.

  “Home sweet home.”

  “Yeah,” Tressa said, “you’re not gonna get a lot of beach days. How long are you stationed here?”

  Brackett picked up the duffel filled with his gear and slung it over his shoulder.

  “Until they reassign me.”

  She tilted her head and cocked her hip and he flattered himself into thinking he saw regret in her eyes.

  “Well, I hope we meet again, Captain Brackett. Somewhere far from Acheron.”

  * * *

  DATE: 10 JUNE, 2179

  There was somebody in the room with Ellen Ripley. She kept her eyes closed. The smell of disinfectant filled the air, and she heard the comforting sound of medical machines. The sensation of sheets against her skin and a mattress beneath her back was luxurious.

  None of it prevented her from feeling like shit.

  She felt no danger from the presence, no threat, and yet in her memory there was a deep, heavy weight of darkness striving to break through. It was a solid mass somewhere within her, and its gravity was relentless.

  I’m so tired, she thought. But as she opened her eyes at last, she knew that she was lucky to be alive. A nurse bustled around her, checking readouts, fine-tuning the equipment, taking notes. As she watched the woman going about her work, Ripley caught sight of a window that had never been open before. It offered a wide, uninterrupted view out into space, the complex arms and habitation pods of a space station she did not recognize… and the surface of the planet below.

  A planet she recognized as home.

  Something warm flushed through her, spreading from her core and touching her cheeks. Happiness, and hope. She’d made it. She had survived the Nostromo, defeated the beast, and made it back home. She’d be seeing Amanda again soon.

  Yet something was far from right. She felt sick in the pit of her stomach, and not just as a result of being clumsily pulled out of hypersleep. That darkness in her memory was pregnant with terror, bulging with nightmares waiting to be birthed. It lured her in. She thought of Dallas, Kane and the others, and the terrible fate that had befallen them, and in her mind their faces were old and sad, like faded photographs found at the bottom of an old suitcase.

  She thought of the bastard Ash, and he seemed not so distant.

  There was something else, too. Something… closer.

  “How are we today?” the nurse asked.

  Ripley tried to speak, but her tongue felt swollen and dry. She smacked her lips together.

  “Terrible,” she croaked.

  “Well, better than yesterday, at least,” the nurse said. She sounded so chirpy and upbeat, but there was something impersonal about her voice, too. As if she wanted to keep one step removed from her patient.

  “Where am I?” Ripley asked.

  “You’re safe. You’re at Gateway Station, been here a couple of days.” She helped Ripley sit up and rearranged the pillows behind her. “You were pretty groggy at first, but now you’re okay.”

  This is wrong, Ripley thought. Gateway Station? She’d never heard of it. She’d been away for a while, true, but unless this place was top secret, even military, she’d have known about it.

  “Looks like you’ve got a visitor,” the nurse said. Ripley turned around, and when the door opened it wasn’t the man she saw, but the cat he carried.

  “Jonesy!” she said, and her smile felt good. “Hey, come here.” She reached out for the cat and the man brought him forward. “Where were you, you stupid cat? How are you? Where have you been?”

  The guy sat as she made a fuss. She knew how foolish it looked and sounded, her talking to a cat. But it was Jonesy. Her link to the past, the Nostromo, and—

  And?

  That darkness inside, luring her in with its dreadful gravity. Maybe she just needed to puke.

  “Guess you two have met, huh?”

  Ripley looked at the man for the first time, and took an instant dislike to him. What he said next did nothing to dilute that.

  “I’m Burke, Carter Burke. I work for the Company.” He paused, then added, “But don’t let that fool you, I’m really an okay guy.”

  Okay? Ripley thought. Yeah, right. Smooth, shifty, slick, won’t meet my eyes. Dammit, I still feel like shit. She wanted him to go away, to leave her with Jonesy and her pains, and that thing inside—the memory, that terrible threat—which she had yet to understand.

  But he was Company, which meant that he was here for a reason.

  “I’m glad to see you’re feeling a little better,” he smarmed. “They tell me that all the weakness and disorientation should pass soon. It’s just natural side effects of an unusually long hypersleep.” He shrugged. “Something like that.”

  And there it is, Ripley thought. The beginning of the truth. Nothing can turn out fine. I’m not that lucky.

  “What do you mean?” she asked. “How long was I out there?”

  Burke’s slickness melted away, and he suddenly seemed uncomfortable. She preferred him
smarmy.

  “Has no one discussed this with you yet?” he asked.

  “No,” Ripley said. “But, I mean…” She looked from the window again. “I don’t recognize this place.”

  “I know,” Burke said. “Ahh… okay. It’s just that this might be a shock to you.”

  How long? Ripley thought, and Amanda stared at her from memory.

  “It’s longer than—” he began.

  “How long?” she demanded. Amanda, in her mind’s eye, was crying. “Please.”

  “Fifty-seven years,” he said.

  “What?”

  No. No, no way, that’s not possible, that’s not—But in her memory her crew were faded figures, whispers on the tip of her tongue. Ash, though. He was almost still there.

  “That’s the thing, you were out there for fifty-seven years. What happened was, you had drifted right through the core systems, and it’s really just… blind luck that a deep-salvage team found you when they did.”

  Ripley’s heart beat faster.

  Fifty-seven years.

  Amanda turned away from her, fading, becoming a shadow of a memory just like her old crew.

  No! Ripley thought. Amanda! I came through so much to get back to you and—

  What had she gone through? That weight within her pulsed, almost playful with the promise of sickening, shattering revelation.

  “It was one in a thousand, really,” Burke said, but his voice was becoming more distant, less relevant. “You’re damn lucky to be alive, kiddo.”

  Kiddo. She’d called Amanda “kiddo.” She tried now, but her voice would not work, and her little girl was lost to her.

  Lost.

  “You could have been floating around out there forever…” His words faded to nothing, all meaning stolen by what was happening inside her. That weight she carried, beginning to reveal itself at last.

  Ripley tried to catch her breath. Jonesy hissed at her. Cats saw everything.

  But when the unbearable weight broke open at last, it wasn’t a memory at all.