ALIENS
Acidum Sanguinem
(Acid Blood)
Chapter 1
Carrie Ireland had been on the payroll of Weyland Yatani for nearly twenty years. She had made her way up the ranks and was part of the senior management looking after terra forming and off world communities.
As a member of the investigative committee looking over the Nostromo Incident and its sole survivor Ellen Ripley, she was sceptical of Ripley's story about an unknown species of alien life form killing all members of the crew and forcing her to set the Nostromo on self destruct.
However, after they lost contact with LV 426, she was playing it safe, which is why she recommended sending a squad of Colonial Marines to the new planet to ascertain what had happened. She was monitoring the progress of the Sulaco as it approached the planet and the last information she got was the drop ship had left the mother ship to descend to the planet.
There was, to her surprise no follow up communication for nearly forty eight hours until inexplicably, a request came from the settlement for the second drop ship. This she assumed could not be good news, but she hoped for the best as she waited for more information. To calm her nerves she lit another cigarette and enjoyed the nicotine fix that it provided.
Suddenly, data started coming through the link with Sulaco, the second drop ship had returned and it seems Bishop, the synthetic was interfacing with the ships computer to send details of the mission.
However what she saw was a nightmare scenario for the company. The shock of the information made her mouth open widely and caused the burning cigarette to fell to the floor.
"Son of a bitch," she said to herself as more information streamed through. She bent down and recovered her cigarette, but the information just kept getting worse.
"God damn son of a bitch!" she exclaimed and immediately pulled out Van Leuwen's card and placed it into the video phone. The phone rang a few times then the image of a half asleep Van Leuwen appeared on the screen.
"Jesus, Carrie it's two thirty in the morning what the hell is it?" he asked angrily.
"Sir, it's the Sulaco, I am receiving data on the mission from LV426 sir."
"Yes, so what's so important to wake me at this Godforsaken hour?"
"Sir, it's bad, it's very, very bad I think you should come in now, we have an absolute disaster sir, there are only three human survivors from both the colony and the marines."
"What!" he exclaimed.
"They're all dead sir, Ripley's aliens were real sir, they were all too real."
"Shit! Alright I will be in as soon as I can."
It took Van Leuwen half an hour to get there; he appeared unshaven and dishevelled looking tired and angry for being dragged into the office at this time.
"What the hell happened Carrie?" he asked as he sat down to look at the data.
"See for yourself, the whole damn colony is gone, as I said this is a disaster." She replied.
"Aww, holy shit!" he exclaimed, "we don't need this shit, not after everything was going so smoothly, alright, we'll call an emergency board meeting this afternoon, get this crap to legal first thing when they get in, let's see how deep into shit we are. Also take it over to the bio labs, I want their input on these creatures, shit, things that bleed acid, must be some bad mother fuckers. I'll be in my office, need a shower and a change, plus need to make some calls. This is going to be a bad day."
An emergency board meeting was called for at two thirty that afternoon, at each chair was a summary of the data that Carrie and Van Leuwen had been up most of the night deciphering and collating. It did not paint a pretty picture and this meeting was to determine what sort of damage control the company could initiate to save as much as it could from the upcoming lawsuits they were bound to be facing.
All ten members of the board were seated by two twenty and at two thirty Van Leuwen stood up.
"Glad you could all make it, I'm afraid as you will see from the summary Carrie and I have prepared; we are not meeting under good circumstances, to explain it better I'll hand over to Carrie now."
Van Leuwen sat down and Carrie took up the position at the head of the board table.
"Okay, as you all know, we lost contact with the colony on LV426 just on 6 months ago. You also know that we despatched a squad of Colonial Marines together with the survivor from the Nostromo Ellen Ripley and fellow board member Carter Burke to investigate, just on a month ago.
Well last night, we finally started receiving data back from the Sulaco via our synthetic Bishop on the outcome of the mission.
Now as we all know it takes nearly forty eight hours for these transmissions to reach earth, which means the Sulaco is already on her way back and we expect her back in around twenty days time.
The data from Bishop is nothing short of disastrous, the colony with the exception of one young girl, was wiped out by the Aliens that Ripley described in her hearing here seven months ago. "
"You mean those creatures were real" interrupted one of the board members.
"Yes Jack,' replied Carrie, "too real. Now as I was saying, the only other survivors of the rescue mission were Ripley and Corporal Hicks, and our synthetic, though he has been badly damaged."
"Jesus" said another board member.
"Yes a disaster, but it gets worse, the atmospheric processor exploded wiping out the entire colony, and fortunately the nest of these aliens, but we are going to have to send a cleanup crew in to neutralise the radiation from the blast.
The only good news I have is that the processor had virtually finished its job and we can start putting in plants onto LV426 as soon as possible to make it more liveable."
"Excuse me Carrie?" asked another female member.
"Yes Sue?" she replied.
"If I remember, Ripley said there was a ship with eggs in it, do we know the status of that, and who authorised someone to go look for it?"
"Good question Sue, the answer to the first part of the question and as far as we can figure out is that the ship probably survived the blast, so I would recommend straight away that we vote to send a robotic mission to LV426, find this ship, do some basic analysis on these eggs if there still there, and destroy them."
"Destroy them!" exclaimed another member.
"I'll get to that in a minute George, as for the second part of Sue's question that is the only other good bit about this scenario, it appears Carter Burke overreached his position and sent a family out to find this ship and the eggs. Carter Burke was hoping to bring one back to have it analysed by the weapons division in the hope for exclusive rights to any weapons that could be produced from it," murmur went around the boardroom, "therefore, we can pin a good deal of the blame on him, but we are still going to get hammered in lawsuits over this.
Now back to you George, the reason for destroying them, it is in fact the recommendation from the synthetic Bishop as based on his research he was able to do on the specimens the colonists had been able to obtain, he could only conclude that these organisms were genetically engineered. They already were a weapon and one the inventors I suspect lost control of.
Therefore, they should be destroyed and images of the eggs and all stages of these things life cycle be put on notice to all interstellar craft as warning to avoid at all costs. There is video from the mission that will give you no doubt as to how dangerous these creatures are. Once Bishop is back, and after our robotic mission to LV 426 is completed, I recommend that we get our weapons division to come up with a defence against these creatures just in case they ever do get to any other populated colony, let alone earth.
Now I'll hand it over to David if legal, who I briefed before, as to how we best deal with the legal fall out we are bound to experience, David."
With that Carrie returned to her seat as David started explaining what they should say to the press and their legal options.