Alien: Isolation

Chapter Thirty One: Platform Maintenance

Feeling the wind and heat as the burning, runaway transit car passed within inches of her face, Ripley cried out while stumbling backwards. She tripped over a piece of metal debris and fell on her rear, her hands shaking and eyes wide until the transit car had passed completely. She had expected that a lot of Sevastopol's systems would be damaged by the Anesidora's explosion, but the transit cars going rogue hadn't even crossed her mind. There was no visible way to climb back up to where she was before falling with that spider-thing, and the Torrens was counting on her, meaning that she couldn't stay where she was.

"Okay, Amanda, you can do this." She said to herself as she got to her feet. "There's only a few transit cars on Sevastopol, and only about half of those could come through here."

Moving back into the doorway, and listening for the sound of anything approaching, Ripley sprinted across the tracks, before ducking down behind some more debris in the area between them in case any of those creatures were around. For the moment, the only things she could hear were the alarms and the constant crackling of the spreading fire, so she was about to head across the next section of tracks, when one of those creatures suddenly dropped down from a nearby vent.

Ducking back behind the debris again, Ripley watched as it kind of paced around the area, and she was trying to figure out the best time to make a break for it, when another creature appeared from further down the tunnel. This one also seemed contented to search around the area, probably looking for more people for the new nest, but this also made her think about something: With as obviously smart as these things were… did they even understand what was about to happen to the station?

Either way, she did understand what was happening, so Ripley needed to keep moving, but she also couldn't afford to let these creatures know that she was still alive, since they seemed to… have it out for her specifically. All of her weapons were gone, with her only remaining tool being the access tuner, and the only thing left in her pockets being a bunch of now useless bullets for the revolver. Oh well, even if she still had the weapon, she had seen how useless it was against them back in San Christobal, and even if it wasn't, they would just swarm her after firing a single…

Suddenly an idea popped into her head, causing Ripley to dig through her pockets until all of the bullets were in her hands. She then tossed them as far away as she could, where they landed in one of the larger enflamed areas, and now she just had to wait for them to heat up. For a while the creatures just continued pacing around, and as the first minute ticked by, she was worried that the plan had failed. So Ripley was trying to think of something else to try, when she jumped a little as the tunnels echoed with a bang…bang…bang.

The creatures also reacted to this, shrieking as they both ran toward the sound, and Ripley used all of this noise to cover the sound of her own sprinting as she took off across the tracks. So far the creatures didn't seem to have noticed her, and there were no transit cars coming that she could see, so she kept going until suddenly there was no floor beneath her. Thankfully she only fell about eight feet before landing on her side on the metal floor below, and it took her a second to realize that it was just a service pit for the tracks that she had fallen into.

There was no time to stay there, since with her luck the creatures would somehow figure out that the bullets were a decoy, so she scrambled to her feet, and looked for a way up. There was a maintenance ladder built into the side of the pit-wall, so Ripley ran over to it and climbed up, only to be knocked back down from the windy force of a transit car that passed over the pit at the same time. Landing on her back, and staring up at the burning vehicle as each of its cars passed by, she could only hope that its noise had been enough to cover the scream she had let out while falling.

"Too close." She whispered to herself. "Oh, Jesus… just let me make it through this."

Soon the transit car had passed, and Ripley climbed up the ladder again, although this time taking a second to look for any more cars before pulling herself out. There were only two more sections of tracks to cross over until she reached the other side, which happened without incident, and then it was a short trip down the edge of the tunnel before she found the entrance to one of the maintenance offices. The door was stuck halfway open, so she had to crawl under it, but more importantly than the office itself, was that it provided her with a staircase back to the level she had started at.

The shaking and explosions around the station were getting worse now, making it hard to keep her balance when she reached the top of the stairs and started down the corridor. However, luck seemed to be on her side, at least for the moment, since the next door she found just happened to have the words TOWING PLATFORM MAINTENANCE painted on the wall above it. The door was also stuck mostly closed, so Ripley had to drop down on her stomach and squeeze her way through it.

"Verlaine!" She called into the headset once inside. "Verlaine, please tell me you're still here!"

"Ripley, thank God." Verlaine's voice replied. "We're in trouble, here… when we didn't hear from you, we tried to maneuver the Torrens onto the towing platform manually so we could take on survivors… and it worked, but the gravitational pull has twisted the rig… we're being pulled down with Sevastopol."

It disheartened Ripley to inform the Torrens' Captain that there were no other survivors, not that it would matter if the ship got crushed in the gas giant along with Sevastopol, but thankfully Verlaine already had a plan. There was always an airlock on platforms such as this one for maintenance access, so if she could find an EVA suit, Ripley would be able to go outside and detonate the explosive bolts. So even if the Torrens was stuck on the platform, the platform would be separated from the station itself.

Not that she wanted to go outside again, but it was better than staying there, since the fire had spread all throughout the room. The smoke was also so thick that it was nearly blinding, meaning that Ripley had to stay crouched down in order to find her way to the airlock all the way on the far side. The fire hadn't quite reached the airlock yet, so she ran through and sealed the door behind her, before opening the suit locker and putting one on. The station was shaking even more now as she clicked her helmet into place, and after the depressurizing sequence was completed, she saw why.

Beyond the trapped Torrens, whose engines were firing at full thrust in order to slow the station's descent, all of the debris from Sevastopol was falling toward the gas giant… which was now a lot closer than it had been the last time Ripley looked out a window. The absolute last thing that Ripley wanted to do was follow along, so she attached her suit's safety ring to the guardrail, and began moving along the maintenance walkway.

The path branched out toward several areas of the platform, but the one she was after, the emergency release, was all the way out at the end. This made it really easy to navigate toward it, but spacewalking was slow… and the gas giant was approaching fast. The shaking was now becoming so intense that it felt like the station was going to rip itself apart, and its angle was tilting more downward as the whole tower which had been damaged by the Anesidora ripped itself away from the main body. It flew into the upper atmosphere and vanished just like the module containing the first creature had done, but by this time the emergency release system was in sight.

"I'm here!" Ripley shouted as she reached the end of the walkway. "I'll have you free in a second!"

"That's so good to hear, Ripley." Verlaine's voice replied. "I've set the Torrens' airlock to auto so you can get in once it's finished. See you soon."

Moving around the end of the walkway to the manual release system, she opened the control box, and quickly read through the instructions printed on the inside of the lid. It wasn't that complicated, actually; first she had to punch in a release code, and then use the handle-attachments to raise up four control cylinders. There was a little panel on each one that had to be opened, and once she pushed the command switch within, each had to be closed again for the system to lock. The control cylinders began to glow once activated, and then all that was left was one last button to…

Suddenly Ripley's thoughts stopped as something moved beyond the box, and when she looked up, she couldn't help but scream as she saw one of the creatures walking toward her. It was moving around in the vacuum of space just as easily as it had inside the station, and also without any kind of a suit or anything to protect it. The creature seemed to smile at her just like when they had sprung the trap with Ricardo, and then when two more creatures joined it by climbing over the rails, it clicked in her hear that these were probably the same three creatures that captured her before.

They slowly and carefully moved so that Ripley was surrounded, most likely meaning to put her back in the nest, but this time the advantage was hers. Unhooking her safety ring, she lunged forward and pressed the final button, clearly startling the creatures when the explosive bolts were fired, causing the whole platform to detach from the station. The creatures were sent flying toward the gas giant with the rest of the debris, but Ripley had grabbed the guardrail and pushed away from it at the last second, making a desperate leap for the Torrens as Sevastopol floated away.