Further disclaimer: I don't own the Alien, or any of its developmental stages, nor any of the characters from that series I might mention.
"…Now I'd appreciate it if you could return my soldier, and if you could tell me what the hell is going on, that'd be great."
Mal paused for a moment before speaking. "…Uh, he's dead. You can have what's left of him back, but don't plan on holdin' any long conversations with him."
Andrews scowled into the lens. "We had an agreement, Captain."
"Wasn't us. Some…thing…burst outta his chest and ran away into my ship." Mal clenched his teeth at the recent memory, the smell of blood still stuck in his nostrils. He didn't even think it had sunk in properly yet. "I think it's got somethin' to do with those things in the crate. But…we can't be sure."
Andrews was thoughtful, and then swung the camera onto the body of one of his men. The creature that had burst from the closed pods in the crate was wrapped around his face, its tail around his neck. One of Andrews' crew was trying to pry it off, but the harder he pulled, the tighter the tail gripped.
"These things are nasty; it looks like they're feeding off my men. I'm going to return to my ship, figure out what's happening to them. I'll send you a wave once we have a controlled situation. Andrews out."
The screen blinked to darkness, and Serenity's crew were left alone again.
After a long silence, Simon was the first to break it.
"I have the scanner data we retrieved with Captain Harvey. I can analyse it, see if we can get any more information on what's happening."
"Where is it, Doctor?"
Simon paused. "The infirmary."
The lowest point of the ship, save the passenger dorm. A Firefly was small, and the thought of venturing out to where that creature might be hiding was unnerving.
"Well," said Mal after a moment's hesitation, "We'd better go get it. Jayne, you're with Simon and me. Zoe, you have the conn. Everyone else…try and keep it together, this'll be over soon. We'll be back shortly."
He nodded at the other two men as Zoe took the pilot's chair, and they moved towards the locked hatch.
"Any direction?" asked Zoe, and Mal had to think for a few seconds.
"Just keep us away from the Alliance. A fringe world would be good."
"Aye, sir."
"Well then," he said to the men nervously assembled by the door. "Let's go."
"Mal," said Inara suddenly, and the captain turned to face her. "Be careful."
He nodded as reassuringly as he could, flipped the lock and threw the hatch open. "Lock this behind us," he instructed Inara, and then turned to leave.
Jayne was first through, Vera clutched to him both as an offensive weapon and as a child might hold a stuffed toy for security in times of distress. Mal padded down the hallway as Jayne stopped, giving him cover, and Simon moved to the point between them. The hatch to the bridge slammed shut behind them.
Mal looked back and nodded tensely at Jayne, who moved past him to the entrance of the mess. Mal moved up to join him, and they swept the mess with their gaze, trying to pick out prime locations where small, aggressive creatures might be hiding.
The door that lead to the engine room was still reassuringly shut, but the creature could have come back around via the other hallway, so Mal didn't want to take any chances.
The captain stepped inside the room, and cautiously moved around to the kitchen, gun drawn ahead of him, finger tensed on the trigger. Shadows that lurked beneath counters and behind appliances seemed to gleam with rows of teeth and razor sharp claws. He almost shot the kettle, which was a suspiciously similar colour to the creature they were looking out for.
Jayne almost tiptoed in behind him, and after a few moments they established that the mess was devoid of any non-human presence. A quick glance dissolved some of the tension that had almost paralysed both men's shoulders, and their relief in turn made Simon relax.
Cocky now, Jayne swaggered around the table, although not yet brave enough to take in Harvey's mutilated body that still lay butchered on the table.
"What are we gettin' so worried about anyhow?" he asked. "It's only a little thing, after all. Just the way it made its entrance is all. I reckon we can catch it easy enough, throw it outside and let the vacuum deal with the rest."
Simon brushed past the worktop attached to the kitchen and accidentally knocked off a plate that was balanced precariously near the edge. It clattered to the ground noisily, and Jayne, as well as the other two men, jumped wildly at the sound. The big man squeezed the trigger of his weapon, and a couple of rounds burst out of the muzzle into the deck, and each of them were startled even more severely by the loud reports.
"Jayne, what the hell are you doing?" demanded Mal, his nerves tattered. "Just…calm down, everyone. Jayne's right, it's only an animal, 'bout the size of a small dog, I'd say. Easy enough to grab and eject. We'll wrap it up in some bed sheets and lock it in the cargo bay."
"I was thinkin' bout doing that after we'd shot it a few times," admitted Jayne. Simon shook his head forcibly.
"No. You mustn't shoot it. Look at the deck below you." Jayne glanced down; saw the blackened, pitted holes in the metal there. "When Mal shot it while it was escaping from us, some fluid inside it did that to the alloy. If you shot a bigger hole in it, the fluid could work right through the ship and make a breach, or if not, damage one of the systems like life support."
"The doc's right," agreed Mal. "In fact, it's probably a bad idea us even carrying these around, in case we have a reaction like Jayne just did." He deactivated his weapon and placed it on the kitchen work surface. Jayne glowered at him.
"I ain't leavin' here without Vera."
"Jayne, don't make me tell you to do it," glared Mal.
Jayne met his eyes for a few more moments, and then arrived at a happy compromise in his head. He took the clip from the weapon, ejected the round in the chamber, and clutched the rifle to his chest, his eyes daring Mal to say something about it. The captain glowed with hidden amusement, as best he could under the circumstances, but allowed Jayne to continue with the weapon in its current state.
Jayne was right – they had all been so unnerved by the creature's grand entrance that they had failed to take into account the threat it now presented to them. While it looked like a dangerous animal, and there was no doubt it was, it was a lot smaller than they were, and they had weapons, tools, and the home field advantage. As he had previously thought, Firefly was a small ship, and there were only a limited number of places it could be hiding.
The smell of the mess caught more strongly in his nostrils, evaporating some of his confidence. He'd need to get the place fumigated once they reached port; it smelled like a butcher shop in here.
"Alright, we're almost there. Let's do this quickly, quietly, and carefully. We don't want any accidents."
Approaching the hatch to the engine room, his newfound confidence all but disappeared. This was the doorway the creature had disappeared into, and so this was more than likely the place they'd run into it. He breathed steadily once, and then flipped the handle to unlock the door.
He swung it open, expecting to be met with some kind of screeching, beastly attack cry, but all he saw was the corridor that led to the heart of the ship. After a few moments of waiting, as if his patience would reveal the sight of the monster, he nodded back to Jayne and the mercenary marched in ahead of him.
Mal was down the stairs after Jayne nodded back to him, and from there into the infirmary. All three men breathed a silent sigh of relief, having ran into no creatures lurking behind the couches and chairs of the common area. Simon moved immediately to the console he had been studying after Harvey arrived and set to work.
"They're here," he said, referring to the data discs, as if he had been expecting them to be missing; that the creature might have moved them to prevent the crew from learning its secrets.
"Well then, get to work," said Mal unnecessarily. Simon provided no reply. "Jayne, watch the door." The man sat on the examination table and pointed Vera at the entrance to the room, despite the fact the weapon had no ammo. Mal trusted Jayne would remember that, should trouble find them here.
The intercom crackled, setting Mal's nerves on edge slightly.
"Sir, are you there?"
He moved to the panel near the rear of the room and activated it. "That's affirmative. No contact with our little friend, though."
Inara's troubled voice floated to Mal's ears. "We heard gunshots."
"That was just Jayne being…uh…slightly excitable. Everything's as we left it," he added significantly, communicating to Zoe, and anyone else who put as much thought into what he had said, that Harvey's body was still on display. Anyone with a sensitive disposition, please turn away now, thought Mal.
"Cap'n?" It was Kaylee this time. "I'm gonna work with the others, see if we can get any further on crackin' the encryption on these files. We might get some answers."
"Good work, Kaylee. Well then, we'll stay down here; see if the doc can rustle up some ideas on how we get rid of this thing. You know how to reach us."
Just as he was about to deactivate the comms panel, the ship juddered beneath his feet, and he felt something shudder to a stop above him. "Report!" he barked, all business.
"Our port engine just died," said Zoe over a flurry of activity.
"The main line to the dorsal cluster just broke," said Kaylee. "We lost power to the port engine, to the cargo bay and some of the scanners."
"We're drifting to port," announced Zoe.
"The systems are fine, it's just like the line…broke…" said Kaylee, realisation hitting her.
"Zoe, meet me in the mess," ordered Mal. "Power down the engines, we aren't goin' anywhere for a while."
As he marched out of the infirmary, Jayne was alarmed behind him.
"Mal, where are you goin'?"
"To find that thing and get rid of it. Stay here and keep an eye on the doc."
Sprinting up the stairs, he found Zoe, arms folded across her chest, waiting for him.
"Leave that here," said Mal, indicating the rifle she had placed on the table. "But I guess you already knew that."
She didn't acknowledge him other than nodding. But after a moment of standing pensively, she spoke her mind.
"What aren't you tellin' us, sir?"
Mal paused in mid-stride, thrown off guard by the question. "Nothin'," he said earnestly.
She arched an eyebrow, as if to tell him that he of all people should know better than to try to deceive her. Finally he relaxed his shoulders minutely.
"Look, it's nothin'. I've just got a bad feelin' about all of this."
She stared at him quizzically, and then looked significantly at Harvey's body. "More than the rest of us?"
He shook his head. "Like I said, it's nothin'. I just think that we haven't heard the last of it. I mean…Blue Sun? Why were they shippin' that crate around so unprotected? All we got was a stern warning before we left Aries."
"That crate was going to open anyhow."
"Yeah, but it just doesn't add up. How far along was Kaylee with those files?"
"She was makin' some progress," said Zoe. "But she got distracted by the broken cluster."
Mal nodded, nothing left to say. It all hinged on Kaylee cracking those computer files. He'd never figured her to be that good with computers, that her talent lay on the opposite technical pole. But, it wouldn't be the first – or last – time he'd be surprised by one of his crew.
He jerked his head, and he and Zoe exited the mess towards the dorsal cluster.
Kaylee's brow creased more and more with concentration, and when it appeared it would finally break in two, she stood and grunted in exasperation. The computer screen blinked at her mockingly, denying her access to the information locked inside for the umpteenth time.
"What's wrong?" asked Inara.
"I can't do this," the girl exclaimed in frustration. "I'm a gorram engineer, not an analyst."
Inara moved to Kaylee's side, rubbing her arm reassuringly. Neither of them noticed River glance inquisitively at the now unoccupied console.
"Of course you can, Kaylee. Remember what we used to talk about – don't try and figure out the answer, try to remember the answer."
"But I can't do this," she repeated, some of the strength leaving her. She slumped against the wall, and Inara was left to gaze worriedly at her. "I don't know where we went so wrong. Crates with monsters in 'em, people wantin' to gas planets in the name of the capn's cause, the Alliance doin' their same old thing, soldiers who wanna…who wanna do bad things to you… Now it looks like the company whose cereal I eat every mornin' set out to have us killed! All while there's a…" She hesitated, as if unsure whether or not to use the term. "…Night Stalker loose on our ship. Our home! It's come into our home and violated us."
The normally serene Inara was troubled by Kaylee's outburst, and before she could think of anything to say that would come close to quelling the fear even one of the engineer's points evoked, help came from another source.
"Zero point algorithm," said River from the console. She typed a few commands into the system and segments of the file that were being displayed coalesced into plain English. Her trauma temporarily forgotten, Kaylee moved, amazed, to River's side.
"River?" she asked in wonder. "How do you know how to do that?"
The girl looked up with a complete lack of self-consciousness. "It's all just up there," she said, tapping her forehead.
Kaylee leaned in to read what River had revealed. "This is amazing. River, can you decrypt the rest of the files?"
River nodded. "I can." She input more commands, and some more of the file was translated from the code.
Kaylee pulled up the files that River was decoding on another screen and started to scan the entry. She briefly read through the files.
At the same time, Mal called to her on the comm.
"Kaylee? We're at the duct lookin' into the dorsal cluster. Seems like our new friend busted it up with some of that acidic stuff he burst all over the deck of my mess hall. Looks pretty toasted."Momentarily distracted from reading through the files, she broke from her task. "You sure? I fixed up the ol' girl from a few nasty scrapes before now…"
"Nah, I don't think so. There's not much of it left, and what's there is pretty much ashes. That yellow stuff is hella strong. Have you made much progress?"
"Yeah, it turns out River can decrypt classified military files," she said, relieved that the burden of the task had been lifted but at the same time disappointed she hadn't been able to do it herself. "I'll read ya the bits that mean somethin' to us."
"Okay, I'm listenin'. Pipe it down to the Infirmary, so the others can hear too."
She fiddled with some buttons so she could be heard in the medical centre, and then started to summarise what she had read.
"Turns out that the dummy front set up by Blue Sun ain't a dummy front at all. Back on Earth-That-Whatever-It-Is-Now, it was a major player in pretty much every part of life, kinda like the way we're realisin' Blue Sun is now. Some of it's less well publicised activities," and she quoted directly from the file, "'Included weapons research, which in turn comprised genetic experimentation, nuclear testing and weaponising biological agents.' Long story short, they found the creature we've got on the ship and tried to make it into a weapon, but it backfired."
Mal and Zoe were hunched over the duct that led into the bowels of the ship, peering at what was left of the dorsal cluster. Kaylee's voice crackled over the earwigs they both wore.
"First they tricked a ship into lookin' on the planet they detected the…" and here she paused, obviously encountering a word she had difficulty processing. "…The alien on remotely, and all but one of that crew were killed when they realised they'd brought it back on board."
Mal and Zoe exchanged a significant glance upon hearing Kaylee's last words.
"The survivor drifted for decades in cryo-stasis until she got picked up by a salvage crew and returned to Earth. This was about the time our great great granddaddies were on their way here. They sent a bunch of soldiers back to the planet to check it out, because they'd set up a colony there and lost contact with it. The mission went wrong, near all of the rescue team died, and the company covered it up as terraforming event. They renamed the planet Erebus but never returned there."
"This company have a name?" asked Mal, now curious. He had previously shushed Simon, assuming the core company would be the most vital information, but now the history of the 'dummy' front could hold the key to what was going on.
"Weyland-Yutani." Something in Mal's memory whirled, and it took him a few moments to remember why the name sounded familiar. Then it came back to him – he'd seen the end of an infomercial about the company being played in the bar where they had ran into Harvey. He recalled the company slogan; Building Better Worlds.
"It's not here, sir," said Zoe, and Mal nodded his agreement. The duct was too narrow for them to crawl into past the access point to the cluster, and the creature had burrowed through it, escaping their grasp.
"We'll catch it down the line," said Mal, and they started back towards the bridge.
Down in the infirmary, neither of its occupants were paying much attention to Kaylee's report. Simon was too busy concentrating on his research, and Jayne didn't trouble himself over the details; someone would give him an abridged version later, and he would start listening if his subconscious picked up anything that registered about killing it.
"I take it Blue Sun bought Weyland-Yutani at some point?" asked Mal.
"…Yeah. Says here there was an aggressive buyout about forty years ago."
"And Blue Sun picked up right where they left off."
"That's the long and short of it."
"Captain," said Simon suddenly. "I think you'll want to come and take a look at this."
"On my way. Carry on, Kaylee."
"That's pretty much it," said Kaylee. Jayne started as he thought he saw something flicker in the shadows outside. He moved to the doorway of the infirmary, but upon closer inspection he found nothing. The engineer carried on talking, oblivious to Jayne's unease up on the bridge.
"It doesn't have anythin' that can help us out really, just says where this thing's been seen before. And…looks like everyone died whenever they did."
"Well, they weren't us," said Mal as he entered the infirmary. "And sounds like we've already got a better idea on what's what than they did already. What's wrong, Doctor?"
Simon looked up from his console. "The chief examiner on the Independent base wrote this report. Considering he knew nothing of what was happening, he made some fairly competent guesses in the right direction.
"There was a black smudge on the scans of the men in the room we found. At first, he thought it was a malfunction, but when it appeared on all four scans, and after he had ordered a diagnostic ran on the scanner and found nothing wrong with it, he began to suspect something was amiss."
"Four scans?"
"That's the next point. There were originally four men recovered from Captain Harvey's ship. The chief examiner ordered a sample withdrawn from the smudge on one of the men, but he died almost instantly afterwards. An autopsy revealed the presence of, and these are the exact words from the report, an undeveloped extra-terrestrial."
"An alien?"
"That seems to be the popular theory," nodded Simon, looking for all the 'verse like he was disgusted by what he was saying. "Personally, I think that the examiner was flirting with sensationalism by using that particular choice of words, however there is some truth in it. No life form like this has been discovered in all of the worlds we've settled on. Although I wouldn't use the term 'alien,' it's a close approximation."
"What happened to the fourth man?"
"Looks like some kind of internal haemorrhaging. When they cut into the creature inside of him, it burst with some kind of acidic substance. It burned him alive from the inside out."
"Outta all the words everyone's been yappin'," said Jayne, "None of 'em is tellin' me what I wanna know."
"And what's that, Jayne?" asked Mal, trying his best to be patient.
"How we're gonna kill it without tearin' a hole in the gorram hull."
Simon shrugged. "The airlock seems to be a safe option. Shooting it is a bad idea, as is stabbing it or otherwise rupturing its skin."
"Well, we gotta find it first," said Mal, who was beginning to realise the potential hiding places even his small ship afforded such a creature.
"Finally," muttered Jayne, relieved the talking was over. Mal, however, wasn't finished.
"Kaylee, see if you can find anythin' about Blue Sun in those files. I wanna know exactly how they ended up with that crate, and how it ended up in our hold. Somethin' still ain't adding up, and I need to figure out which of their officials I'm gonna tear a new…"
He trailed off, listening to something. A faint noise had disturbed his train of thought.
"Cap'n?" asked Kaylee, but he didn't answer her immediately, instead listening intently to his surroundings.
There it was again! A faint disturbance coming from above. Almost like…something was being dragged.
His eyes widened, and he broke for the door, running at full speed up the stairs. He rounded the corner into the doorway of the mess to see Harvey's feet disappearing around the side of the opposite door, being pulled by an unseen force. He ran to try and get a look at that force, but his old compatriot's corpse was yanked out of sight, and he heard the sound of it tumbling down metallic stairs.
As soon as he reached it, he wrenched the hatch to the stairs closed, and barked into his earwig. "Jayne, shut the door to the ruttin' cargo bay!"
Beneath him, the unruly mercenary dived from the infirmary and up the short flight of stairs, reaching the hatch just as the sight of something large and fleshy hitting the deck inside reached his eyes. Something small and…well, like the doc said, alien jumped atop of it, but Jayne grimaced and heaved the door closed, sealing it once it had slammed to.
Mal bounded up behind him, and started to call excitedly. "We've got it! Vent the cargo bay!"
Jayne got caught up in the excitement and pushed the control that would open the seal to the bay, letting in the vacuum of space. After several moments of blissful ignorance of reality, he realised that depressing the button repeatedly wasn't doing anything. He turned to Mal, uncomprehending. His captain's face was suddenly grim.
"The dorsal cluster," said Mal, bitterly disappointed and cursing himself for forgetting the vital piece of information in the heat of the moment. "The power to the bay is out."
"So…?" asked Jayne, peering into the cargo bay through the small window in the door. The creature was tearing small pieces of flesh from Harvey's body with its jaws. Jayne grimaced at the sight.
"So it means that we're stuck with our new friend for a little while longer."
The creature – the alien – suddenly looked up, as if sensing its observers. It seemed to look straight at them, and that eyeless, faceless head was more than enough to unnerve Mal. He almost felt Jayne shudder beside him.
It bounded away from the corpse and sought refuge among the few crates that were still left inside the bay, a captive in the enclosed space, but safe for now.
Next on Void
"What now…?"
Thanks to Tyramir, MAndrews, epm0001 and mbali for your reviews. I hope this chapter plugged the gaps for anyone who might have doubted the mesh of the two verses, and I'm glad the new development was well received! This would have been updated much earlier had the document uploader actually uploaded properly. But go figure, it didn't.
Edit: Had to update this when half of the italics exported with the original file, and half reverted to normal text! Something very strange is going on with the uploader...