Chapter 14
The total crew compliment for the Sulaco on this mission was thirty two. Ripley joined them in the recreation room for the briefing; the first person she came across was Bishop.
"Ripley," he smiled, "good to see you again."
"Same here Bishop," she smiled back, "good to see you're in one piece again."
"How's Newt?" he asked.
"She's really good, really bonded with Jonesy my cat."
"That's great, has she had trouble with her experience?"
"Yes, but it has been getting better and she's starting to live a normal life, I'm calling her later, would you like to talk to her?"
"Yes, yes I would, very much so."
"Okay then."
Suddenly, Dr Phillips walked to the podium at the front of the recreation room.
"Excuse me," he said, "excuse me everyone! Can we all please take our seats?"
The conversations amongst the crew stopped and everyone took their seats.
"Thank you," said Dr Phillips, "I am Dr Wayne Phillips and I will be conducting this little briefing so as to bring you all up to speed regarding this mission, first of all welcome aboard the Sulaco, our estimated travel time to LV426 is fourteen days, six hours and twenty three minutes.
As you have noticed, there are no hibernation beds as we don't need them, though I imagine some here would prefer, but we have enough food, water and air for well over a year and we have arranged for supply ships to come every three months during the mission.
How long the mission will be, we don't know depends on how quickly we get the data we need to better understand these animals that we call Acid Bloods and how to best combat them should we encounter them again.
Now our team of head researchers here are Dr Victor Charelli Exo Biologist, Dr Victor Cheng, Biological Weapons Expert, Dr Raymond Musan, Microbiologist, Dr Stephanie Wilson, another Exo Biologist and Dr Anna Volstron, Major in Chemistry. Now, I know some of you here, especially Ripley, maybe concerned why Dr Cheng is here. Don't worry, his speciality is developing counter measures for biological weapons and as we are dealing with what we believe is a biological weapon, it just seemed logical to have a biological weapons expert with us.
We also have our two artificial persons in Bishop, who you all know was on the last ill fated expedition to LV426 and had a too little close an encounter with the Queen Acid Blood, but he is fully functioning and his experience will be invaluable. The other artificial person is Beck and he is the latest model of android intelligence.
Now, we also have Sergeant Dwayne Hicks who also survived the LV426 mission and will have invaluable information and experience in fighting these things."
Dr Phillips paused, "Then of course there is Flight Lieutenant Ellen Ripley from both the Nostromo and the previous mission to LV426. If you haven't seen the video of her fighting the Acid Blood Queen with the loader, I suggest you watch it, no one has had more experience with these things then she has and we thank her for coming on this expedition, hopefully this will be her last experience with them.
Now, let me make this clear, no one and I mean no one is going down to the surface, if any one wants an exclusive it will be a one way trip down there with no retrieval until the cleanup crews turn up long after we have destroyed the animals . As you may have notice, we have descent vehicles only that will be carrying these."
Dr Phillips bought up a three d image of a robot.
"These are the C31 robots, in many ways they are the same as our artificial persons, but not fleshed out, they have the ability to think for themselves and do whatever we program them to do. Also we have these," another three d hologram appeared of a weird looking creature that basically had a mouth and looked like a living torso. "These are our biologicals and we have twenty of them.
It is our hope that when we place these near an egg, it will trigger a response and we place others throughout and near the ship so that we can get a functioning colony. We don't believe they will attack our C31's as they will have no life signature and the creatures should ignore them.
Now in closing, we have also discovered something fantastic recently regarding why the Nostromo was sent to LV426 in the first place and I have been authorised to release this information now. The Nostromo was sent due to a signal that had been picked up by a scout craft that had passed LV426 a few years earlier. Unfortunately, the company originally disguised what this signal was because they wanted to get one of these creatures for the bio weapons division.
As we know now, it was very fortunate that Ripley insured that this did not happen. However, analysis of this message was discovered by one of our top computer scientists Dr Nakama hidden deep within the company's data base. The message was a warning from the android known as David of the lost ship Prometheus. We are hoping we may find something there of him to and solve a ninety plus year mystery of what happened to that ship."
A murmur went through the people gathered there and then Dr Phillips said, "any questions?"
Just about everyone's hand in the room went up.