Dallas

God, Mother can be such a bitch sometimes.

Like when she wakes us up from hyper sleep without telling us why. That type of information is for my eyes only since I'm the captain of the Nostromo. Then the whole crew hates me for their sleep getting interrupted as if it were my fault.

Bullshit on that. I was as much out of it as all of them. I remember having a party to celebrate finishing a bitch of a mining job on a forsaken rock. I'd gone off for some private time with Ripley who I thought swung the other way at first.

But no, she's definitely straight.

We didn't talk much, just screwed each other in one of the bunks that we sleep in when we're not hibernating for months when going to and from a mining job. The damn company put some clause in our contracts that we have to investigate any hint of an intelligent life form.

So Mother woke us up and I went to talk with her and sure enough, she'd picked up some damn beacon signal on LV-426. She said it sounded like a distress call and we'd been dispatched down to the dusty planet to check it out and report back.

I asked Ash about it when I saw him in the hallway outside the command room but he seemed noncommittal. He said we had to send out a team of three people to track it down and try to decide how to handle whatever we encountered at its origin.

He and I called the rest of the crew together in the mess room and broke the news to them. Parker and his shadow Brett were the most pissed off about it until I explained to them with some help from by the company manual Ripley that if they bailed on it, they'd forfeit any points or shares they had coming.

That got them on board pretty fast. I decided that I'd be heading the team down there with Lambert doing communication and navigation and Kane being backup as second in command. So after that meeting broke up, we all did what we had to do to drop down onto the rock.

LV-426 is pretty inhospitable to life form including humans. It's mostly toxic in its environment so we'd need suits and to pressurize them to avoid getting crushed like old beer cans. We'd freeze without them as the temp could fall 100 degrees below zero centigrade.

Ripley shook her head looking at me.

"I should go…instead of Kane."

"No…I need you here to watch the ship," I said, "Remember the rules…"

"I know…everything from securing the ship to quarantine. Got it. But watch yourself out there…and watch Kane. He's impulsive and that can be dangerous."

I knew that. I had to sit him on his ass and discipline him more than once.

"I'll keep an eye on him and I know Lambert will."

She rolled her eyes at me and I got it right off.

"That's not the kind of watching I mean…you know about the two of them don't you?"

"Yeah I do…and they both might be screwing but they're also professionals…"

She sighed and I knew that she'd never liked Lambert all that much and didn't have much use for Kane. Hell, she didn't seem to hold me in high regard either but she knew what she wanted in between the sheets.

"Get ready then and I'll get Ash ready to brief you."

She had that edge in her voice that reminded me of the conversation we had when we first boarded nearly a year ago. She'd been new to my crew and so had Ash, both last minute replacements. My last science officer, McDermott had been someone who'd earned respect and trust, as much as someone holding that title could among a blue collar work crew of rough necks.

Ripley, all the rest of them hated her, pretty much on sight and nothing she did since endeared her to them.

I went to suit up to protect myself from freezing, imploding or being asphyxiated among other fates the planet had in store for us. We'd landed after hitting a hell of a lot of rough chop plowing through the thick atmosphere surrounding the planet.

Kane had stripped to the waist and laid his suit out. He'd been hungry but only grabbed a recycled bar to force down.

"Where's Lambert?"

I shrugged.

"You should know better than I do."

Kane scowled.

"I only did her that one time," he said, "She's too needy for a guy like me. You and Ripley?"

I cast him a look warning him to go no further. What I did in private, I kept private. I finished putting on my suit and Kane started putting on his own. He moved towards his head gear then paused.

"What do you think's out there?"

"Don't know…hopefully nothing that will keep us down here for long."

Kane chuckled.

"Maybe it's some hot alien chick."

I shook my head putting on my boots. Kane had a two-track mind. Food was his other obsession. The first walked into the room in the form of Lambert. She was too skinny for my taste, her hair too short and spiked on the ends. Hell of a navigator but not much else.

"Ripley says it's time to get a move on," she said, "Our window of time's not long before what passes for a sun sets."

I nodded knowing that already from talking with Ash. I saw that Kane was about to put on his headgear and I did like before we all walked towards the hatch of the ship.

Awaiting its opening so we could explore a hostile new world.