Signing Off
Space is peaceful. That's one thing Ripley welcomes. There's no urgent beeping of a motion sensor, synthetic footsteps on her tail, or ominous clanging sounding in the vents. It's just her and the soft cadence of her breathing, a slow and steady countdown until her oxygen runs out.
The alien has gone. Right now it's hurtling off towards the star at the heart of the system, the turbulence from ejection having sent them each on different trajectories with no hope of stopping. Ripley hopes it burns.
Sevastopol has been swallowed up, consumed by a fireball as it hurtled into the planet's atmosphere and taking the remaining xenomorphs with it, along with the last of the survivors. Ripley can't help but wonder what it was all for. After everything she endured to stay alive, this is how it's going to end. Every civilian that had been on board the station is dead. Verlaine must surely be gone, after the alien found a way on board the Torrens, and Ripley herself is drifting through the vacuum of space like one more piece of Sevastopol's debris. In the end, there were no survivors.
She almost wants to cry from the futility of it all, if she weren't so tired. Her body aches, covered in bruises and lacerations from the endless pummelling it had taken aboard the crashing station, and a weariness has seeped into her very bones. She just wants to sleep, let it all be over.
In the end, she supposes she got what she came for. Her mother's voice sounds in her head, intimately closer than the distant memory she's carried for years. "I'm so sorry, sweetheart…" Maybe that's enough, that she has some form of closure if she's going to bow out like this. She isn't expecting to last much longer. The company might send a ship to investigate eventually, but Ripley isn't holding out hope.
With her eyelids growing heavy, she turns to glance towards the drifting wreckage hanging in the sky one final time. In the distance, she thinks she can see a blip against the green glow emanating from the system's central star. It might be the alien, or it could just be one more piece of space junk. It doesn't matter now.
"I got you," she whispers softly, drawing some small victory from the fact that if she's going to die, she's taking the alien with her. "I got you, you son of a bitch."
By the time the blockish spacecraft emblazoned with the logo of a Y embedded in a W drifts by, her eyes have long slipped closed.