2 Desperate Alliance

Armed with a smart-gun and a confidence more tenuous than actual, Warrant Officer Second-Class Beverly M. Rogan made careful, tense progress through the poorly-lit corridors of the ship. The massive, bulky weapon was slung low on her hips, sophisticated servomechanisms whining softly in the darkness, adjusting to the clenching of her abdominal muscles as she took deep, controlled breaths. Her long, flowing hair fell around her face, obscuring her full lips and deep brown eyes, wide with the effort of peering into the darkness, pupils dilated.

A sudden noise wheeled her around, gasping, to the black expanse of mocking silence. Her motion sensors registered nil, but she remained, waiting for the sounds to continue.

There! Unmistakable now, the furtive scuffling drifting crisply through the air to her ears. Through that door, she was sure of it. Long muzzle trained to the floor before her, Beverly crept alongside the cabin's threshold, fight or flight instincts imperceptibly quickening her pulse. She dropped one hand from the weapon to operate the door, bracing for the attack...

With a whoosh! of hydraulics and an outrush of steam, the hatch slid down, Beverly sidestepping into the aperture, gun training to the figure, her trigger finger tensing...

"Oh God shit no!" Hudson blurted, flinching from the expected fusillade.

But she gasped in surprise, yanking on the barrel of the gun, forcing it away to point at the wall. Hudson opened his clenched eyes, realizing his doom had been averted, calming down. He watched her look at him, around the room, then back to him. She stepped into the room, nearly crushing the remains of the facehugger, and jumping back in disgust. She cried out.

"It's okay, it's dead! Take it easy." He was up now, on unsteady legs, putting on lower armour plates to cover his nakedness.

"What the hell happened here?" She spoke calmly, smoothly. Hudson looked up at her, for the first time taking her in, and liked doing so.

"Ah... guess I had a bit of... alien trouble."

She gave him a critical look. He thought about the stupidity of what he'd just said, and gave a shaky laugh. C'mon soldier, he thought, you've just looked death in the face twice in the space of two minutes. The least you could've done is come up with a snappy comeback. He laughed again, his laughter giving way to coughing and uncontrollable spluttering. Flecks of red phlegm spattered onto the floor before him.

"Oh Jesus," she said, moving over to him concernedly, eyeing the dissolved flesh around his collarbone, "you okay?"

He gained control of his throat spasms, swallowed something lumpy. "Yeah, fine," he croaked.

"Listen, we don't have much time. I've just come from A deck, there's no-one…" She cleared her throat, gained composure, "I'm the only crew member left. Marines have been evacuated. That means we're on our own."

He nodded, donning a chest plate and tightening it. She moved over to the charge rack and tried to remove the pulse rifle.

"There's an emergency over-ride panel for the airlocks with the atmosphere cooling units. That's level four, but I don't know if Mother's included the airlifts in the auxiliary power." She jiggled the pulse rifle on the charge rack, trying to pull it off. "How do you-"

"Forget about it, it's not charged. So what if she hasn't?"

"What? Oh, there's a service tunnel that runs under that whole maintenance complex. It's great for-"

"And it's also the first place they'll secure for themselves. It's got the greatest mobility and it's at the perfect temperature."

She blinked. "Who are 'they'?"

Hudson sighed.

"Just how much experience have you had with xenomorphs, Ms...?"

"Beverly, just Beverly. Ah, well, none really."

"Uh-huh."

She looked uncomfortable.

"I'm sorry, don't take it personally. Look, there's not much-"

Mother's warning droned on again. Beverly made quieting motions.

"Warning. Emergency airlocks on decks E and C, floors one, two, three and four are now in place. Emergency over-ride available for T minus eleven minutes, fifteen seconds. Depressurization on these sections is imminent. Warning..."

"Well, there you go," she said, "not much at all."

He grabbed his Hammerli Target handgun and chambered in a fresh clip.

"Let's go kill us some aliens."

Back in the battlefield, Hudson was surprised at his steely resolve, the total control he had over himself despite the situation. In a way it was all so familiar; the adrenaline, the power coursing through his veins, the way the gun felt like an extension of himself, capable and deadly and full of fluid, sleek grace. Just like the battles he'd fought before. Just like the eight months he'd served on Martian Outpost Stevenson, when the civil war had flared up so suddenly and violently.

Only this time there was one, important difference. The enemy.

The enemy had the advantage. The enemy had the same fluid, hideous grace, the same steely resolve, the superior accentuated sensory capabilities, and the black, alien soul, devoid of emotion beyond the constant drive of survival. They were self-aware to a limited degree, comprising of a whole consciousness, each worker's thoughts and actions stemming from the Queen and the Hive. Such tactical precision resulted in unsurpassed teamwork, and although each individual lacked in intellectual faculties, a group of xenomorphs resembled a dynamic, synchronized tactical assault team.

They were fast, too, lithe and agile in a way no Earthly being could imitate. Hudson remembered the facehugger he'd fought in the shower, remembered the horrified fascination he'd experienced as it scuttled - no, flew - along the wall towards his face. The bigger ones could do that too, for them, the ceiling was just as easily a wall as the floor a ceiling. Their armaments, slime-lubricated talons and biomechanical jaws, could tear through D-grade titanium steel like a laser-wire through human flesh.

There was only one downfall to these perfect-killing machines: their strength and stamina. While a human could quite easily sustain a few pulse shots to the chest, a xenomorph's physical structure would lose integrity and fly apart in a shower of acid. Also, their internal temperature regulators were not as sophisticated as that of the human being. The heat generated from a steaming pool was enough to cause discomfort.

But when taken into consideration with their number, dexterity, and team-minded simplicity, these were minor quibbles. Put a human in a pitch-black room with a xenomorph, neither with any weapons but the physical capabilities of each species, there was no question as to who would survive. The xenomorph was designed for killing. Pure and simple. It killed to live and lived to kill. And in an environment with nowhere to run and everywhere to hide, it was of little surprise that Hudson was starting to get so goddamned jumpy...