Sapience

by Voice From the Abyss

What is sapience? Is it the capacity to love? The capacity to feel lonely? Xenomorphs are very clever, but we would still consider them mere animals. There is, however, one exception— one Xenomorph with a conscience. Through one-in-a-million circumstances, and a certain Human woman, we'll see what happens when a Runner grows self-aware Limes. SubscribeStar-link on my profile

15. Chapter 14: BBBB

If it seems like something very specific is being critiqued in this chapter, that's probably because it is.

Chapter 14: Bridge Burning, Bridge Building

Zazin-Vor'mekta's patience was running very... very low.

After his small outburst — which (though relatively mild) drew a look of utter confusion from the female Yautja — he'd asked the woman what Vo'grat-Guan had exactly told her. The response had been precisely what Zazin' didn't want to hear…

Put succinctly, the woman in front of him had been in pursuit of a suitable mate for a certain amount of months, and had been given Zazin's' description and "résumé" by Vo'grat-Guan, via "a friend of a friend".

Zazin' assumed that the woman had heard about this expedition, came aboard this Hunting Ship, and had been looking for him for the past few days. How she hadn't ran into him until now might have been a mystery, were it not for the fact that Zazin' only ever left his quarters to eat... or to have his clothes cleansed... such was the disease known as It.

In any regard, Zazin-Vor'mekta promptly told the woman, to her face, "the answer is `no`". He then shoved the jerky in his hand into his fur-sack, snatched it up, hoisted it over his shoulder, and began to leave the mess hall. He would have to retreat to his quarters to eat his meal in peace, it seemed.

Of course, he didn't expect the matter to be that easily solved, so it came as no surprise when, upon shutting the mess hall door behind him and walking off down the hall, he heard and felt loud, angry footsteps begin to drum through the floor, in pursuit.

He audibly sighed, and stopped walking. He gave the ceiling a glance, just before he turned around, as though to ask the Gods what the point of this nonsense was.

Upon turning about on his heel, he was met with the face of a very cranky female. She glared at him, her lower mandibles coming within Ooman centimeters of his own. He gave her a deadpan look, not even blinking as he slowly dropped his fur-sack to the floor at his feet. He could already tell that it was going to be a long night.

A tense few seconds passed, in which Zazin' fully expected to be screamed at or assaulted, before he decided to ask, nonchalant but clearly irritated, "can I help you, ma'am?".

The female blinked, as though she only just realized what she was doing, and squinted at him, obviously thinking of something to say. He imagined that her first impulse upon his rejection was to puff herself up and get in his face, but that she hadn't quite thought through her actual plan of action.

Not very bright, are you?, he thought to himself.

The woman leaned back and stood a bit straighter (at a more appropriate distance away), crossing her arms, and sternly demanding, "why?". He assumed she meant "why is the answer `no`?".

A lot of male Yautja would have also asked him, at this moment in time, why he'd rejected a chance to mate. A lot of Yautja would have also asked why his current (and only) mate had apparently intended to "share" him with other "competing" females.

Zazin-Vor'mekta was a man who had many, many secrets, most of which even Vo'grat-Guan did not know. However, the one that she was very aware of, was the secret to how and why he chose to only mate with her and her alone, and why he always turned down other offers. Vo'grat-Guan, unlike everyone else in the Great Spiral, knew why her "husband" chose not to stray from her where there was nothing stopping him.

Vo'grat-Guan's misguided, though heartfelt, attempts at fixing the "problem" and helping Zazin': came in the form of cherry-picking female acquaintances that she felt would work, and sending them Zazin's' way. For breeding negotiations.

Zazin', as much as he appreciated the gesture — he knew that to do so was intensely contrary Vo'grat-Guan's own instincts and desires — was getting very, very sick of it. Vo-Gua had pulled something similar to this at least thirteen times. It hadn't worked out the last twelve times, and there was no reason it would turn out any better, here.

Each and every stab that Vo-Gua took at "matchmaking" almost always resulted in a verbal argument between two-to-three people, and/or somebody returning to their home with more than a few injuries to show for it. The only reason Vo-Gua herself hadn't been put at risk for said injuries, was because she orchestrated these escapades in such a manner that they only ever happened when Zazin' was away from home.

He couldn't say that he blamed her, exactly, though. She was making her own sort of sacrifice, by doing this, and he knew for a fact that it hurt for her to do so, on each attempt. Emotionally, to be specific. It also wouldn't have helped the look of her reputation for her to be so... "generous". It had taken more than a few bribes to make certain that no blackmail occurred.

This latest fiasco, he knew, would probably end in tears. Vo-Gua's, the newest "prospect's"... his, maybe. Figuratively speaking, at least... Yautja don't possess tear-ducts.

So, when the woman in front of him asked him "why?", as they always did whenever he told them "no", he found himself yet again in a position where he couldn't properly come up with an actual answer to that question— he couldn't come up with an excuse that wouldn't immediately trigger the start of a brawl… or, worse, an Honor-Duel.

As such, barely a beat after she'd asked, he haphazardly threw out the phrase "don't feel like it", in a tone that was convincingly effortless, but which made for no true deception. It was technically true— he didn't feel like being made to wrestle and struggle and bleed for a few meaningless milliseconds of euphoria. But because that wasn't nearly the entire truth, his thoughtless response made it easy for the woman to detect a lie. A lie of omission, but still a lie.

The female scowled in barely-contained spite, blatantly growling. Her plaits began to vibrate as her mandibles flared outward. She was getting very, very annoyed. From her perspective, it probably seemed inconceivable that a male would A) refuse to mate, and B) lie to her face. In which case, Zazin-Vor'mekta would be remiss to inform her that she should join the damn club.

Please, just see the tracks and pick a different target, Zazin' thought, thoroughly unenthused, either that or skip the preamble and just punch me— that's probably what's waiting for us at the end of this game-trail, anyway...
He'd honestly have preferred a straight up fight before an argument. The woman clearly wasn't very old (he'd estimate her to be around two-hundred-fifty), and was far too brash to possibly be higher in rank than a standard Hunter. So... he wasn't too afraid of pissing her off.

There were only two things in Yautja society that gave one person authority over another: age and Honor. Age is self-explanatory, but Honor is most-commonly measured by the amount of Trophies one has, and the standing they have reached. Many would also argue that being female also carried some authority, and not without cause...

The general rule of thumb about females is: be initially deferential upon meeting one, at least until you learn their actual rank. If you happen to have higher standing, do as you please. If you are of the same standing, try to stay on her good side, if only for the sake of professionalism. If she's of a higher rank than you, be ready to run some errands. Zazin' had his reasons for not bothering to conform to this sort of standard.

Female Yautja, upon being born, are automatically given the rank of Blooded. Male Yautja must earn that rank by passing a Chiva— a life-or-death "final exam" they were all forced to take, should they wish to have any right to sire pups. The logic being that, by giving birth and reproducing, a female grants the father in question a form of immortality through his continued bloodline. That immortality shouldn't be given to just anyone. Thusly, females have the right to bear children by default, "because reasons", while males have to earn that privilege or die trying. This holds true across almost all Yautja Clans— and probably the Hish Clans, too.

This has been the case for the past eleven-thousand years (with similar traditions holding true for many more millennia before that) all the way back to the first Council of Ancients. No one could precisely name where the phrase "a form of immortality" came from in regard to the act of reproduction, or what it truly meant, but it was an aphorism that had been sticking around for a very, very long time.

Zazin' had been told, all his life, "cater to every female you come across, even if you technically outrank them". He'd been told all his life that you're lucky to even live past your Chiva, let alone mate with anybody, at all. He was told throughout childhood that having children, in and of itself, is "a blessing he barely deserved". He had found... extremely little real-world evidence to say that any of it was correct or true.

According to his studies, reproduction was a comically-easy affair for most creatures. Mindless beasts get through it just fine, without any fanfare, ceremony, or medicine; for the male, it takes a bit of exercise and chemical high, and for an egg-laying female, mostly painless. Even in species that gave live birth, like Yautja, the entirety of labor and child-birth could be done while in a coma— the same for Oomans and other sapients. A healthy woman could successfully deliver a healthy newborn while she was completely, utterly unconscious or even brain-dead.
This led Zazin' to conclude, more or less, that something simply shouldn't be praiseworthy if one can literally do it in their sleep— there's no "creation of life" going on (as far as he'd ever seen), just the incubation of it. How exactly having children was supposed to be "impressive" or accolade-worthy, Zazin' would never know, and if it was impressive or worthy of worship, somehow: he had to wonder why then that ninety-nine of all Yautja births went without any form of ceremony and why up to thirty percent of them went completely undocumented, annually.

The percentage of males that survive their Chivas had been steadily increasing throughout history. It was already around sixty percent, even in the earliest accounts, and had now risen to eighty-eight. Truly, most failed Chivas, these days, were due to prior birth-defects or crippling injuries. In which case, the males in question shouldn't have been allowed to undertake the task, but were permitted anyway, out of pity— likely due to them being suicidal, to begin. Zazin' felt nothing but sympathy for those men that were born in such a sorry state— or abused to the point of becoming invalids.
How, precisely, the Chiva made a man any more worthy of the right to reproduce than he was before: Zazin' couldn't see it. If the idea of meeting a certain standard of performance in Hunting was the entire point, then he saw no reason that it had to be a life-or-death affair that all were shoehorned into complying with.

Zazin-Vor'mekta had lived for three-hundred-seventy-three years (five-hundred-ninety-six years, in Ooman terms). Of the thousands of female Yautja he'd encountered, spoken with, and known in his time: only six had ever truly earned his respect. Vo'grat-Guan and her mother were at the "top" of that six. He knew this because he kept very close count. Granted: barely more than a few dozen males had ever earned his respect by those same standards, but he felt that his standards were fairly simple to meet.

All of that combined made hearing various Elders and parents repeat the same old platitudes to the every new generation disappointing at best and enraging at worst. A young child, barely in control of himself, is liable to be lashed or thrown into a river by their trainer for so much as speaking informally to a woman, or even another female trainee— "respect your betters, runt!", or some variation of it, usually spat by someone or another. "Know your place!", was also a popular one— he should know, he'd been on the receiving end of it more than once.
That the same reprimands could be expected if one disrespected or dishonored anyone of higher rank didn't make it better, in Zazin's' eyes. He was of the opinion that there should be a distinction made between an Inherent Blooding (the rank given to all female Yautja upon birth) and Earned Blooding (that which is gained by passing a Chiva).

But there was no distinction made, and so it was all too common for a teenage girl to be treated with the same reverence and deference as a man who'd passed his Chiva; because, hey, they're both technically "Blooded"! Because that made so much sense!
And he knew that this was all a bad thing— he knew that all of this was detrimental, because he, himself, had to retroactively unlearn an entire cadre of assumptions that he'd developed throughout childhood when he finally passed his Chiva. He had to be taken aside by the Elder presiding over his test, and he had to be told that he now had the same rank and standing as all females, simply because it had been so ingrained into him that he was inherently inferior for all his life, beforehand. The Elder who gave him this disclaimer, ostensibly, was giving him life-advice because, quote, "no female finds groveling attractive". But Zazin' also took away something far more important from that lesson... hence, where he stood, now.

It certainly didn't help that, typical of most Yautja upbringings, Zazin' and his blood-brothers were relentlessly bullied and ridiculed by their blood-sisters. To the point of it cultivating outright hatred. It had been two centuries since the last time Zazin's' eldest blood-sister had said anything remotely demeaning to him... and he'd still not forgiven or spoken to her, since. For most males, getting the chance to mate after passing their Chivas and prove the insults wrong was revenge enough— enough to begin repairing bridges.

But Zazin's' bridges had all been thoroughly burnt to ash... and he wasn't keen on building new ones, anytime soon. He was the type of person who never forgot a show of disrespect. He had a long memory, and many, many bones to pick with the very people who were supposedly his family— who were allegedly supposed to be his closest confidants.
There he was, told from as early as he could speak, that his life was in his hands, and that he would probably die before he ever got to speak to potential mate, and all his sisters could muster for him was contempt and ridicule. Betrayal... was something Zazin-Vor'mekta could not and would not stomach. And betrayal was the most fitting term he could come up with for it. Even to this day he resented the constant humiliation and... hauntings...

Ironic that, out of all of his blood-brothers, he was the calmest and most level-headed. But... he knew he wasn't alone in how he felt. His blood-brothers carried similar grudges as him, and he'd heard whispers of many similar situations among the Youngbloods aboard this very ship. If he didn't know any better, he'd say that there was some sort of change coming about in the newer generation.

If anyone ever found out what went on in his head, he'd get so many challengers and Honor-Duel declarations, day-in and day-out, that he'd likely collapse from exhaustion long before any contestant could land a killing blow. He'd be called a Bad-Blood, a degenerate, an idiot— every insult and curse under the twin suns.

And all of that was just "icing on the cake" compared to the aforementioned "secret"— the memory that made him reject the propositions of nearly every woman he'd ever been approached by...

So, now, here was Zazin', standing before a Yautja woman (who was currently doing a wonderful job of validating every single stereotype he'd ever heard of), in a situation he didn't want to be in, and in a position where he couldn't quite "win"… just escape from by the skin of his tusks.

So, what to do?

What he always did: roll with the punches. Though, not literal ones— yet.

The woman in front of him ceased her growling and appeared to make a bit of effort to keep herself collected. He anticipated that she was about to try and make another attempt—

She straightened up, and looked down at him between her mandibles, as though she were talking to some merchant or non-Yautja. She proclaimed, as if she were some stern, authoritarian royal, "I came onto this Hunting Ship to have an Elite sire my pups. You are the only Elite on this ship, and a suitable mate was assured to me by an honored female of the Dark Blade Clan".

Zazin' was a Spear-Master and an Elite... he could shank her in the ribs (or anywhere else) for speaking to him that way, if he felt like it, and anyone who took issue with him doing so would need to also be Elite and/or an Elder for their word to mean anything. But something she'd said caught his attention...

She's not of the Dark Blade?, he pondered, wondering why she'd so specifically mentioned the Clan's name. Each Clan's female population, due to genetic drift, had a slightly different seasonal mating cycle in which breeding could be done successfully, tantamount to Ooman menstrual cycles. Interbreeding between Clans could be... complicated, so most don't bother for the sake of convenience.

Unless this female had already lived among the Dark Blade Clan for a matter of months (which he doubted, given that blue and orange jewelry is not fashionable within the Dark Blade), the only other Clan she could be from is...

Oh..., Zazin' realized, suddenly much more curious than annoyed, you're a Bright Spear!

Being the Dark Blade's "Sister-Clan", closely tied together in origins, with one being an offshoot of the other, the Bright Spear Clan's population(s) would have a similar enough breeding season for interbreeding to be casually viable.

Why a female from the Bright Spears would go out of her own way to seek to breed with a "rival" was a mystery to him, but for the moment, he was significantly less irritated. It didn't last long, though, as the woman in front of him seemed to realize what she'd just let slip. Her expression turned into one of shock for a split second, before she recovered herself and spoke, once more, to hide it.

"Therefore...", she gestured with her left hand and struggled to find the words, for a moment, "... you should at least consider my proposition before dismissing me!", she concluded. She then seemed to stare at him and wait for a response— almost as though she wasn't certain who's "move" it was supposed to be.

He raised an eyebrow. Something else, aside from her Hish heritage and Bright Spear affiliation, was going on. If he didn't know any better… he'd say that this was her first attempt at a mating proposition. Only a complete neophyte would say... something like that...

Oh, dear Cetanu, this is her first attempt!, he internally wailed. No wonder she's so belligerent and blunt! And that opening line she used earlier in the mess hall is so textbook— why didn't I realize?!

Zazin-Vor'mekta's mandibles gnashed together in thought. Now... now he felt a bit... guilty. This woman was justifiably naïve about this sort of affair, and he'd been... well, a bit of a prick...

Then his mandibles flared as he scowled.

That doesn't mean I want to deal with her priggishness. Nor am I in any mood to wrestle and bleed just because this "princess" feels entitled to a night in the cabin.

But then, like it had been conjured by the Gods as a gift in his time of need: he had an idea... one that was almost guaranteed to work.

Zazin', out of the blue, pulled his mandibles into a wry smile. He held up an open hand, as he spoke, "to clarify... you want an Elite to give you children, yes?".

The woman's glowing, orange eyes glanced to the left, and darted about the features of his face, wondering what he was getting at, before she answered, dryly, "yes, that's what I just said...", with a nod.

Zazin's' smile widened— mandibles pulling together and folding more tightly against his face. He could tell that she found his sudden confidence unsettling, but he unflinchingly offered, "what if I could get you someone better than an Elite? Someone aboard this very ship, who would gladly give you what you want?". His tone was justifiably arrogant, but not from her perspective.

She squinted at him, mandibles pulling back into a resting position from their previous frown. She responded, "who do you have in mind?".

Zazin', wanting to sell this spiel, puffed out his chest and clasped his hands behind his back, still smiling, "the Clan Elder in charge of this expedition— a Disc-Master named `Yak-a'Shen` would suit your needs well, I think", he stated.

He wasn't surprised at the woman's blink and perplexed tilt of the head. Many Clan Elders, hence their title, were past the point in their lives where their seed was at its most virile. But Zazin' wasn't quite finished...

"Ah, but Yak-a'Shen isn't truly elderly—not by a long shot. No, no, no— he's only two-hundred, seventy-one years old!", he uttered, almost blatantly hamming up the performance with feigned amazement. It seemed to do the trick, though, as the woman in front of him was now visibly intrigued.

He brought his hands around to his front to clasp them together, and tilted his head as though he were thinking very carefully as he spoke, "well... I'd say it's more than likely that he could very well end up on the Council of Ancients by the time he's five hundred, given his progress!".

The woman took in all he'd said, seemed to think on it, and slowly started nodding to herself, before she finally decided, "alright, I accept. Bring me to him", sounding rather content.

Zazin' almost struggled to contain an impish grin as he turned about on his heel, leaning down to scoop up his fur-sack, once more, replying, a bit too eagerly, "gladly, madam! We'll have you squared away in no time...". He began to walk away, deciding that the perfect place to check first would be Yak-a'Shen's private quarters. He knew for a fact that the Elder wasn't on the command bridge, at the moment.

In all honesty, he was embellishing Yak-a's "résumé", a bit, but he wasn't saying anything that he hadn't heard others already say. Besides... someone had to have allowed this Bright Spear woman onto the ship, and who better but to blame her arrival on than Yak-a'?

Wait... did I ever catch her name?, Zazin' asked himself, realizing that he would have to introduce the woman to her new mate.

He could hear the woman following behind him, so he glanced over his shoulder and asked, flippantly but curiously, "what might I call you, by the way?".

"Hult-nah'Mei-jadhi", he heard her respond.

Huh... "observing sister"? Odd. Wonder how she earned that...

---

"We're here...", Anteros suddenly declared. The pair had been walking in relative silence until he said it, at which point he took a left turn at a junction and stopped. He waited for Samantha to come around the corner and see for herself.

They were now stood in front of an abandoned security-check station that stood between them and the door to the hangar bay that they'd placed all of their hopes on. Now that Samantha could see it, she recognized this to be the entrance to what was called a "domestic service port". It was, as far as she knew, one of many government-owned hangar bays that would be commonly leased out for temporary ownership by particularly wealthy buyers. Technically, anyone could rent one of these for their own private use, but functionally speaking, it was mostly the very rich or large conglomerates that bought out these things.

Just as well, considering the fact that most people could not afford a space-worthy ship of any sort, in the first place. This... gave Samantha reason to dread. Whoever owned this place had likely used it as an escape when the Infestation kicked off, and since even rich people could rarely own more than one shuttle... she was not optimistic.

Given its privatized nature, the only actual security blocking the way was a single metal-detecting doorway and a somewhat small conveyor belt with an x-ray scanner attached. She imagined that it took, at most, two people to manage the set-up, given that it was small enough to fit in this seven-foot-wide hallway. One person to hold a service-pistol and look tough, and another person to operate the scanning machine.

The hallways leading up to the hangar were no different than anywhere else in the Apartments, oddly enough. Even up to and including the security check. The door, at the end of this hallway, however, was unique. It was a mechanical, split-apart-down-the-middle kind of affair. It actually looked like an elevator door, except that it took up ninety-five of the wall space, and it had no buttons or arrow-signs near it. Just a single, one-handed lever on the right-hand wall.

The fact that the lights going down this one, particular hall were shut off, as well as the presence of orange, emergency lights that were dimly shining in intervals along the hall's length, told her that this hangar was one of the few places where power had been shut down. Which meant that the door wouldn't open.

She was, again, not optimistic.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sight of Anteros abruptly bounding his way forward, and effortlessly leaping over the length of the conveyor belt. She began to follow, walking through the metal-detector. She watched him as he slowly padded toward the silver-chrome door, and rose up to his hind legs in front of them.

She made to step up to Anteros's flank, but was halted by his voice, "step back, a bit".

She did so: taking one, long step backwards, and watching him, curiously.

Anteros had only one way of getting through this door in any particularly easy fashion. He could feel cold liquid gathering up in the back of his throat, and opened his maw as wide at it could manage, his Piston-Jaw extending outwards.

Quick as a thrown dodge-ball, a tennis-ball-sized globule of acid was jettisoned from his extended pharyngeal jaw, smacking into the middle of the metal door, at its seam. The action was preceded with a mild retch, followed by what sounded like a hiss being cut short by a cough, and voilà: the obstacle was now being eaten away by acid. As the acid began to slowly burn itself out, creating a medium-sized hole in the middle of the metallic surface, Anteros upchucked a second glob of acid and fired it just to the right of his first shot. Then a third shot, a bit to the left, then a fourth, down from the middle...

The smoldering, warped door would take a bit of time to be removed, completely. The twin sheets of metal were likely at least a foot thick, so they would have to wait. With acrid, yellow-green smoke and the sound of a hundred sizzling soda-cans to accompany the duration. Anteros stood there and waited for the acid to burn itself into nonexistence, as Samantha overcame her surprised, and asked, "you can spit acid?".

Anteros made a show of lackadaisically glancing over his shoulder at her, before answering, "yep".

A few moments passed...

"Why've you never done it, before?", she asked.

"Didn't need to", he replied, with dry succinctness.

An awkward silence followed...

"How do you spit acid, and not Hive Resin, by accident?", she asked, pertinently. "Is it a valve in your throat, or something?".

"S'a bit like the difference between spitting and coughing, I guess...", he began to reply, but was cut off.

All of a sudden, Anteros doubled over and made an odd coughing sound. She frowned in concern, as he appeared to soundlessly dry heave, multiple times, as something bulged in his throat. He was starting to drool. His mouth opened, as he crouched down, and his Piston-Jaw punched outward.

Samantha was simultaneously amazed and disgusted as she witnessed an unseen mass be pushed along the tube-like weapon, and toward its opening. A scant few seconds later, and a crystalline, greenish-yellow object was dropped wetly to the carpet, covered in drool and... what seemed to be some sort of oil...

Anteros seemed to loudly gasp for air, heaving in a hissing manner, as he scrambled away from the thing that had (apparently) been blocking his airway. He backed up against the "input" end of the conveyor belt and set about rubbing his mouth and face against the carpet to clean himself of his own fluids. She watched him as he repeatedly extended his Piston-Jaw out of his mouth, seeming to stretch it, before he sat down on his haunches. As Anteros idly rubbed at his own sore throat with his left hand, shaking his head, Samantha looked to the object that he'd upchucked and stepped forward to examine it.

It wasn't smoking or making a hole in the floor, so it seemingly wasn't dangerous. She crouched near to it, and slowly prodded it with a pinky finger. Warm to the touch, and moist. She wiped off her finger on the carpet, frowning at the odd crystal. It was smooth, very dull, and not see-through. The same color as Xenomorph blood…

"What the Hell is this?", she muttered, to no one in particular.

"No clue. This is the first time I've seen anything like it...", Anteros admitted, outright, and a bit bitter-sounding. He clearly didn't like this thing— understandably.

Samantha squinted at the tennis-ball-sized, oval-shaped, glassy thing and picked it up with tips of her fingers. It slipped through her grip, so she grabbed it with her palm and grimaced at the slimy feeling it had. She stood up and turned around, holding it up to the light from the end of the hallway. The examination yielded no insights... but she wasn't about throw it away.

Samantha frowned at the object in her hand, looked to her left and right, then sighed.

She stepped away from the burning door, placed the thing on the ground, wiped her hand off on her jeans, and took off her tank-top. She then used the soft, absorbent clothing to pick up the crystal and began to dry it of its slime.

As she went about this... she heard a wolf-whistle chime in her head, and snorted, laughing at what she assumed to be a joke on Anteros's part. "Really, now?", she asked, dryly, shaking her head.

"Oh, yeah. Isn't it every man's dream to see a pretty girl dry off his regurgitated acid crystal?", he replied, equally dry, in tone. She laughed.

"And here, I thought you were complimenting my beach-body. I even have a bikini-top on!", she commented, feigning offense, and chortling to herself. It was technically just a bra, but still.

"Well, that too, but that would be a bit too blunt. And I did just call you `pretty`. Besides, I already know what you look like naked, so, meh", he answered, nonchalant. He stood up to his hind legs, as she frowned at him, sharply, her composure breaking in surprise.

"You don't know what I look like naked!", she accused, incredulous, a bit confused. She pulled the tank-top away from the crystal to see if it was dry enough...

"Now, I do", he shot back.

For a split second, she was confused, but then she blushed, as she realized that he probably did, now. She dropped her tank-top on the floor.

Fucking telepathy, she thought. She rolled her eyes and clicked her tongue, in a vain attempt to hide her embarrassment, before she said, "whatever— you haven't seen me naked in person, yet, so it doesn't count", a bit childishly.

Without missing a beat, the response came. "`Yet`?", Anteros questioned, sounding genuinely surprised. He wasn't, really, but he was pleased that the trap had been sprung successfully. He wasn't sure why he enjoyed this sort of banter so much, but he chose to simply keep having fun with it.

Samantha froze, and stared off into space for a few moments, teetering on the edge of being embarrassed, her blush threatening to intensify. But a flip switched in her mind as she resolved to "win" the exchange, and her expression abruptly turned deadpan. She looked Anteros in the "eye" and shrugged, as she said with a nod, "you know what? Yes". She looked down at the "acid crystal" in her hands, scratching it with a nail. "Lucky you, huh, Anty?", she mumbled, feeling smug at her little victory.

"`Anty`?", Anteros questioned, laughingly, knowingly taking the bait.

"Yup", she said, turning the crystal around in her hands, "nickname".

"`Anty`...", he repeated, "is— is that what we're going with?".

"I think it sounds cute", she said, shrugging again, and smelling the crystal— it caused a mild sting in her sinuses, and reminded her of chlorine. Whatever it was, it was now dry and didn't seem like a hazard. It was probably just some kind of waste-product of some sort, but it also looked cool and for all she knew, it could be valuable. If nothing else, it could be a neat paper-weight...

"I don't know how I feel about being `cute`. I also don't know how I feel about someone calling me their aunt", Anteros joked.

"Aw, it'll be fine, Anty— we'll keep it just between us!", Samantha soothed him, theatrically, winking at him.

"You're on thin-fucking-ice, missy", he quipped, voice turning dark and vaguely Scottish, as he pointed a talon at her.

Samantha tsked, pretending to roll her eyes. "Oh, shuddup— you know you love me", she said, finally putting the acid-crystal-ovoid-thing in the back-pocket of her jeans.

Her attention was then brought to her tank-top, and she held it out in front of her to assess the damage. It wasn't exactly ruined, but it still had a large damp spot that she wasn't keen on touching. She leaned in a bit and sniffed. Salt... burning plastic... and the faintest whiff of Xeno-blood. She wrinkled her nose at the thing and haphazardly twisted the top into a taut rope, stuffing one end into her left front-pocket.
Anteros walked past her, without her noticing.

"Samantha...", she heard Anteros say. She looked about and realized that he was behind her, standing near the burning doorway, once more. She then also realized that the sound of burning acid had long-since ceased, and spun about on her heel. Like magic, the metal doors that had been there before were gone, and her view into the prized hangar was unobstructed.

It was utterly pitch-black. The only exception being a few distant, dim, orange, emergency lights, off in the distance... and a very bright, white one... shining from the opened cargo ramp of a very large vehicle, straight ahead.

Samantha began to grin, like a madwoman, with excited, sudden glee. "Anteros...", she began to utter.

"Yeah. I see it", he agreed.

Anteros crouched low to the ground and easily jumped across the four-foot gap in the floor, entering the gargantuan room. There must have been a motion-sensor, because when he did, the entire hangar bay lit up with bright, white, industrial spotlights. The change in lighting somewhat blinded her, and she held a hand in front of her face.

A few moments later, her next sight was of Anteros sprinting forward, toward what could only be their salvation.

Excitedly, and beginning to giggle, ignoring the chest-pain she knew she'd get, Samantha stepped back a few paces, and then sprinted forward, jumping across the gap, herself. She began to run to catch up to him, but as she took in the sight of the entire, immense room, she slowed to a halt...

The hangar bay, it seemed, must have been at least six hundred feet long, a hundred feet tall, and five hundred feet wide, because the vehicle that Anteros was now starting to sprint laps around was surprisingly large.

Completely gunmetal-gray, with black and yellow accent paint, what stood before her was a giant space shuttle. Samantha began to slowly walk to her left, as Anteros sprinted past her. She jogged her way around to the space-craft's left side, studying it, intently.

It was... it looked like a large, rectangular box, with a slant cut into its back end, wings slapped onto both sides of it, very large, powerful VTOL engines on all four its corners, a massive airplane-turbine-looking-thing where a tail-fin should be (forming an overhang above the cargo-bay ramp), and a triangular cockpit put on the front. No dorsal-fin.

Despite the geometric shapes she'd used to describe it, the vehicle was very sleek and organic-looking. Very unusual for space-craft. A hundred-fifty feet long from nose to cargo-bay entrance, forty feet deep, and about fifty feet wide, not counting the wings which both added an additional thirty. Pretty much the size of a warehouse building, and likely had enough interior space to be divided up into at least five apartments. Whatever on Earth the giant engine at the back was, it was clearly very powerful. Big enough to fit a mobile-home van inside of. She'd never seen anything like it, before.

All of this told Samantha that whatever this thing was: it was very, very, very expensive.

It all became clear as she finally noted the giant white and yellow lettering on the ship's convex underside. "Weyland-Yutani".

All at once, she knew exactly what this was. A company vehicle, meant for one-to-twenty people, for use in company business-trips. She'd done a few odd-jobs for Wey-Yu on a few occasions, including on Guardian. They always paid very well, and her past experience with them had given her some insider-knowledge.

This was Weyland-Yutani's latest model of private shuttle (she'd forgotten the actual model number), and was liable to be utterly state-of-the-art and comprehensive for the easy-access of non-pilots. Not every company employee knew how to pilot a shuttle, so the manufacturers likely took extra effort to have the entire thing be very intuitive to navigate with. Shuttles like this often had very advanced engine systems, as well as a Heim Gravity-Muting Drive, as opposed to the Tachyon-Shunt Hyperdrives in far larger vessels.

She... wasn't really all that attuned to the scientific jargon of it, but as far as she understood: Heim Drives create negative space in front of the vessel (using "negative energy" or "anti-gravity fields" or some other such gobbledygook) to induce a displacement of the space ahead of the ship in-question and draw it forward to reach FTL speed, requiring that the vessel itself build-up a significant velocity beforehand, such that the displacement wouldn't simply tear the ship in half if it were too slow; the drawback being that one could not effectively use an Alcubierre Drive on vessels above a certain mass, as building up to the prescribed velocity would be far more difficult. Hence why, on a lot of the larger vessels, you'd have a Tachyon-Shunt Hyperdrive, which essentially converts the entirety of the vessel and all of the molecules therein into tachyon particles for a few milliseconds— effectively "shunting" the vessel past the FTL "barrier".

Tachyon-Shunt drives offered a cruising speed of around one lightyear a day on average, while Heim Drives capped out at around zero-point-seventy-five lightyears/day. It was extremely confusing, to her, as to why going faster causes one's localized time to slow down, but as far as she understood it: TSH's necessitated the use of hypersleep, and Heim Drives did not, at the cost of taking longer for the same journey. She remembered hearing something about the way Heim Drives work somehow preserving the space-time relativity and not stretching time, but for the life of her, she couldn't remember the exact mechanics of it...

Samantha, in her days as a Shuttle-Shifter, had mostly hitched rides on Heim Drive shuttles like this one before her, as many were used in a fashion similar to taxis or delivery-trucks— largely used for short-range trips. She didn't like the idea of having to sleep for years on-end for no good reason, and had thus largely avoided having to use Tachyon-Shunt vessels. The obvious caveat being that Heim Drive-ships were typically owned by large corporations who were actually capable of turning a profit with said vessels. Which brought into question why one of Weyland-Yutani's ships was just sitting in a random hangar in the middle of the Infestation... and why it ended up here, in the first place.

Samantha was too puzzled by the presence of the vehicle in front of her to smile, like she felt like doing. She examined the massive vehicle with a concentrated frown on her face. Why did the company have one of its agents here, on Guardian? And why was the ramp to the cargo-bay opened and extended? And how on Earth had she and Anteros gotten this damn lucky?! Enough to just... stumble upon an extremely expensive space-vessel?

Anteros sped past by her at Mach three, making her jump, and she hurriedly stormed over back to the ship's backside, making her way to the ramp that was already wide open. She walked up the ramp, studying the white-gray interior closely... and yelped when her eyes saw the reason for the ship's indisposed, abandoned state...

Holy fuck...

A gray, collapsed, spread-eagled skeleton occupied a disheveled, white lab-coat, green sweater, and jeans, in the middle of the cargo-bay's floor. Next to what had been a man's bones... was what seemed to be a dark, months-old blood-trail leading away from it. Spreading out from the skeleton, across the steel deck, was a patch of black-red-yellow residue and grime, which she could only surmise was the remnants of the flesh and organs having liquefied. As the local area was relatively dry, and not all that humid, the bones were probably only beginning to break down. Another few weeks, and they would start turning to dust...

Her hand covered her mouth, and she took a step back in shock. She remembered the story Anteros had told her about this place. She should have realized that the body wouldn't exactly disappear after the parasite punched its way out. Her eyes traced the blood-trail, following its direction, and saw what seemed to be something like a scrap of plastic, hanging on the edge of the cargo-bay ramp—

She jumped and yelped in fright, as Anteros suddenly walked in behind her. She sighed, exasperated, and scowled at him, half-heartedly, before refocusing onto the skeletal fragments on the floor, a mere five feet away.

"Oh... that's grim...", Anteros commented.

Samantha "hm"ed in agreement, slowly stepping forward as shock was eaten away by morbid curiosity. She'd never seen the results of Xenomorph birth, first-hand, and her biologist-brain soon took over. She crouched next to the remains, taking care not to step on the residue. She assumed it was a male skeleton because Anteros had said that it was a man who escaped the Hive, in his story.

She noticed that the skeleton's sweater had a hole in it, in the middle of the chest. She leaned forward and stretched forth a hand to tug at the sweater, and found that there was a large, ugly hole where the sternum should be. Most of the ribcage was caved in, likely due to flesh-decay. And the green of the fabric was stained black with long-dried blood. She shivered in disgust, and noticed a name-tag on the sweater that read: "F. Garrow, Senior Research Officer". It didn't mean anything to her, but it was still disturbing to think that a corpse was just... lying here for six months, being eaten away by bacteria.

She stepped away, and looked back over to the "plastic" hanging off the edge of the cargo-bay ramp. It didn't take her long to surmise that it was a piece of discarded molt, from the supposed Chestburster having grown.

"What exactly are the chances that the Hive-Mate you mentioned could have starved to death, in the six months it was trapped in here?", she asked him, gesturing at the molted skin, fifteen feet away.

"Extremely unlikely", he admitted, "from everything I've seen and heard and felt: we are all born having taken enough nutrients from our Hosts to not need food for at least a week. And following that, we are able to... well— I'm not sure what you would call it, but we can enter into type of... very deep sleep that allows us to last... pretty much indefinitely, without food or water. Maybe even without air".

She blinked at him, suddenly very concerned that they might not be alone in this place, "how do you know that?".

"I... I just do. I just know it", he said, sitting on his haunches, "I don't really have a nuanced explanation".

"Okay", she said, nervously, "so, where could it have gone?".

"I'm not sure. I haven't seen or smelled a thing, in this room. No movement, no psychic presence, no bioelectrics anywhere. Heartbeats, especially Xenomorph heartbeats, pulse at a different rhythm than lights or machines, and I don't see anything other than just... lights and low-level electrics in the ship. The place seems deserted", he explained.

Samantha pursed her lips. "You're sure that we're the only ones here?", she asked.

It took him a few moments to respond, but he eventually concluded, "if there were one of my Hive-Mates asleep anywhere nearby, they would have detected us, woken up, and tried to contact me, by now. I don't feel any other mental presences, in the area".

"Either way, better safe than sorry", he said, confidently, "I'll search around the interior of the shuttle, just to make sure. You wait out here, and I'll come running the instant you sense a threat".

She thought about the plan, found no better alternative, and agreed, "alright. Stay safe". She proceeded to drop down and sit facing out of the shuttle's cargo-bay, crossing her legs.

"Of course", he promised, deliberately brushing his length on her shoulder before he trotted ahead, further into the ship. She smiled without realizing it, and concentrated on listening for anything and everything, keeping her breathing steady...
It took a surprisingly short amount of time for Anteros to return to her and give the all-clear.

Samantha sighed to herself, relatively pleased, "well. Looks like we have a way off-planet!".

"Looks that way", he assented.

"It's... genuinely fucking crazy that we had enough luck to just find a shuttle this expensive and top-line, but I'm not about to complain yet", she said. She then looked at the decayed corpse of the man who had apparently escaped the Hive all those months ago. "Though, it'll... probably be best to clean that up...".

"Hm", Anteros volunteered, "I'll handle it. You go on inside and see if you can get everything sorted. I'm at less risk of contracting a disease from this thing, anyway".

She smiled at him, thankful not to have to dispose of the skeleton, and turned around to look about the cargo-bay as Anteros continued the clean-up. She... had a lot of ground to cover, and upon realizing that, she became very, very paranoid that something would be wrong or that there was some sort of "catch" to them finding this prize of a ship. She'd found that Murphy's Law tended to be good practice with these sorts of things, and so she was now motivated to root out the inevitable "problem" that would undoubtedly be hiding around the corner...

Looking about the cargo-bay, she could already see a potential cause for concern. It was completely empty. No boxes or crates. Which meant that it was very possible that the shuttle might lack other supplies. Whoever had organized this ship's storage obviously hadn't been planning any long flights...

The sleek, stylized interior of the ship had a clean design with a smooth, plastic-y and metal material— all of it with a sterile white, gray, black, and sky-blue paintjob. It was a far cry from the utilitarian, retro-esque design philosophy present in most larger vessels— and in a lot of Guardian's own cities. Said design was intentionally reminiscent of technology from the 1980s, mostly because such appliances would be easy to repair while on a long voyage from earth. Here, though, this shuttle appeared to have been made to look very "advanced", in comparison to other space-craft. It was poultry compared to many of the wealthier real-estate on any given planet, but it was impressive...

This was all the hallmark of some very, very deep pockets— whoever it was that owned Wey-Yu. She heard multiple times that the money used to make these sorts of spacecraft could be used to buy the all the land of a colony-world's hemisphere.

Samantha, sighing, knowing that she'd be going to bed very late, tonight, fast-walked toward the door that was the entrance to the rest of the ship. On the bright side, the cargo-bay itself was sixty feet wide, with a ten foot ceiling, and eighty feet long, so... plenty of space to run around for exercise. And plenty of space to throw any trash. She knew that this room was likely the largest on the entire ship, so she had to wonder what else was possibly crammed into this thing. It seemed relatively high-end, so... who knows?

---

One hour later…

"Ho. Lee. Shit. This. Boat. Is. Stacked…", Samantha murmured to herself in half-amazement, half-dismay. Dismay? Why, yes! It had taken her an entire hour to search the whole of the shuttle, and she would be the first to tell you: she was in dread of something turning out horribly wrong the entire time! A fuse blowing out and exploding? A room being devoid of power? Some variety of chemical being spilled and turning the air into cyanide? None of the above had occurred. Which she was glad for, but... well, now she was just plain exhausted.

To summarize: she'd combed and surveyed every single room she found (made easy by very comprehensive and easily-understood signage in every hallway, ladder, and doorframe), avoided the cockpit until last, flipped every single light-switch on and off to make certain everything was working, briefly tested all of the appliances she knew how to use, checked every cabinet and storage she found in each and every room, and was eventually joined by Anteros at the end of it.

And now, utterly exhausted, Samantha was climbing the ladder up to the third floor, where the cockpit was. She'd found a digital clock in the shuttle's dormitory, and, apparently, it was already ten at night. The only reason she knew that the search had taken an hour is because of Anteros's impeccable internal clock, as she'd asked him.

Her head was still swimming with the rooms and signs and all of this newly-learned gobbledygook.

Let's see, then…

There was the cargo-bay (obviously), which lead into an airlock/ready-room (presumably for the crew to don space suits and walk out of the cargo-bay into a non-atmosphere). After that was something of an armory or equipment storage— she'd found that the metal lockers and plastic bins were filled with oxygen tanks, blowtorches, solders, welding masks, zero-g environmental hazard suits, Service Pistols, ammunition for the Service Pistols, wood-chopping axes (for some reason?), pickaxes, scanning equipment, walkie-talkies, and even a few sticks of dynamite. Almost none of which she had any clue how to use.

In any case, after that, she was faced with what seemed to be... a lounging area? There were a bunch of cushy chairs, all situated around a coffee table, with warm, yellow lighting that heavily contrasted with the harsh, blueish-white illumination in the previous two rooms. Some ottomans up against the walls... she imagined a crew of Wey-Yu employees taking the time they had before having to go out on some sort of assignment by chilling in this little in-between "waiting room". The first floor, so far, seemed to be the place where most of the "boots-on-the-ground" affairs were squared away.

Each room, thus far, had been about forty feet wide, taking up most of the space there was, but after "the lounge" was a small, cramped, circular hallway with padded, white walls. It had a ladder, going upwards all the way to the third floor. The sign next to it indicated that the third floor was where the cockpit and captain's quarters were, so Samantha opted to check through the second floor, first.

The moment she stepped off the ladder, she knew that there were a lot more rooms to cover on the second floor than the first. The hallway here split into two, leading to different paths. She got the (correct) impression that the rooms on the second floor were about half the size of the rooms on the first (making them about twenty-five feet by thirty feet, on average?), and that they were situated in two distinct lanes, running down the length of the ship. She chose to go right, first.

The right lane contained, in this sequential order: a dormitory, a bar/"proper lounge", a communal-shower room, a "personal storage room", a kitchen/pantry, and a training room.

The dormitory was essentially just a narrow hallway with sixteen bunk beds built into either wall (eight on each side) and small cabinets next to each one. This, also, had some cozier, yellow-ish lighting and also a carpeted floor. The bar was... well, just that. It honestly looked as though Wey-Yu had taken the interior of a sports bar, shrunk it, and shoved it into this shuttle. A pool table, a bunch of TVs, a bar that was stocked with every color and percentage of alcohol you could think of, and a large leather couch. It was... sufficiently cozy that she almost felt the urge to get a drink and fall asleep on a bar-stool.

The communal showers were exactly as they sounded. Not much to say, other than the presence of privacy dividers between each shower head.

The "personal storage room" was really just a locker room. Since no one was here, anyway, and there were no signs of any more than one person having been here, she considered cracking open the one locker that had a name on it— "Frederick Garrow". But... she didn't know the combination and didn't want to risk using dynamite on the thing. Plus, she was tired and figured Anteros could bust it open, later.

The kitchen... appeared to be a very modern, contemporary kitchen set with all of the bells and whistles a chef could want. Dishwasher, massive fridge and freezer, oven, cooker, grill, microwave, rotisserie, food-processor, juicer, coffee maker, a kettle, a toaster, a waffle-machine, a soup maker— everything. Literally everything. That was only half of the room, though. The other half was made up of wooden cabinets and wardrobes— clearly the pantry. Those had been the first thing she checked, after the fridge, which itself contained raw beef, raw sausage, a bunch of broccoli, carrots, beets, Brussels sprouts, cheeses of various origin, every condiment, sauce, and topping you could imagine, a cake, pre-workout protein mix, and milk. The freezer had some sorbet ice cream and a lot of ice trays. The pantry... contained nothing but military MRE's (and a bunch of spice-shakers. Salt, pepper, oregano, etc.).

The training room was a breath of fresh air, for her. Treadmills, a few weight machines, a stack of dumbbells and barbells, some benches— even a rowing machine. Padded flooring, along with a boxing ring in one corner, and some punching bags near to it. The plastic bins that were placed near the entrance contained all of the items you'd want in a gym. Water bottles, energy drinks, fingerless gloves, knee-pads, elbow-pads, and shin-pads, boxing gloves, mouth-guards.
This was a dream-come-true for Samantha. She'd always wanted something like this in a home, but had had to settle for basic push-ups, sit-ups, and crunches. She'd never had much money... or her own home. Just barely enough to rent an apartment and support herself and... Charlie...

Well, after spoiling her own mood, she made her way back to the ladder and took the left lane. She was met with what could only be called a tiny, shoe-box-esque "clean room". Some hazmat suits, latex glove dispensers, soap dispensers, white lab coats hung up on a rail. There was even a chemical shower that stood in the way of the door to the next room. Whatever was beyond this point must require some serious sterilization.

Sure enough, the next room was a small med-bay. A metal examining table, a CAT-scan machine, a surgery table, a gurney completely stacked with scalpels and other cutting implements. Another gurney, equipped with drills of varying size and shape, was also there. An array of robotic arms, tipped with lights and microscopes and other doo-dads (she was pretty sure that at least one of them was a high-voltage laser) hung from a central disc in the ceiling, which... she couldn't find the controls for, despite a twenty minute search. And off in one corner was a mountain of cabinets, filled to the brim with samples of various drugs and chemicals and needles and gauze and bandages and all manner of other medical supply. It all sort of blended together as she'd looked through it.

At this point, her paranoia was at an all-time high. There was simply no way that their luck could be this good— no, sir. There was definitely a crazed serial killer in one of these closets...

She found it odd that the med-bay wasn't on the first floor, given that bringing an incapacitated person up a ladder is basically impossible. But then again... it probably suited Wey-Yu that any grievously injured employees simply die off. Cheaper to lose the employee altogether and send the families a condolence cheque than it is to pay for exorbitant medical bills and possibly get sued.

The next three rooms in the left lane were a dining area, a laundry room, and... an indoor-pool.

The dining area was what she assumed it was, a long-table with chairs around it. It could just as easily be used for meetings, or something.

The laundry room was... fairly standard. Washers and dryers, all lined up in twin rows. The various wardrobes present did have some spare changes of men and women's clothing, though. Mostly business suits and underwear.

The indoor pool, though... that was a novelty. The room was roughly twice the length of any other room on the second-floor. The pool itself was covered by a massive sheet of corrugated plastic, probably to keep it from causing a flood while taking off or landing in an atmosphere, but it was definitely a pool that took up eighty-percent of the floor space. A fifteen-by-thirty foot pool to swim laps in? Not bad Weyland-Yutani, not bad. They certainly knew how to persuade their own employees. There was even a bunch of radiators against the left wall, and fresh towels draped on them.

Samantha was just about ready to drop dead from exhaustion at this point, and as she made her way back to the ladder, she was surprised to see Anteros standing in the med-bay. She asked him how he'd climbed up the ladder (she knew it was too small a space for him) and in response, he succinctly pointed to the opened vent on one side of the room, the metal grating placed neatly against the wall, nearby. The vents certainly were very large, it seemed.

The pair of them exchanged what they'd learned and done, since parting. Anteros handed her some things that he'd found on Garrow's corpse— a wallet and an earpiece of some kind. Samantha pocketed them and made her way up the ladder, to search the so-called "captain's quarters".

It was at that point that she knew where she was going to sleep. And spend most of her time.

The captain's quarters, in and of itself, was basically a room and a half on its own. It, in as succinctly as she could put it, was a luxury suite ripped straight from a high-class, five-star hotel. Walking in, one would see the king-size bed up against the far wall, the deep, blue carpet, and a large, leather couch, sat in front of a massive television set, which itself, was just to the right of the door.

On the left-hand wall was a very, very large, wooden, crescent-shaped desk with a cushy office chair. It appeared to be a study, and thus, there was a small laptop, and printer on the desk's left side. The cabinets under the desk were filled with pens, pencils, clear paper, lined paper, and graph paper, respectively.

There were, of course, night-stands on either side of the bed, both with blue and orange lava lamps, plugged in, but not turned on. The bed itself was big enough to fit three people, and was mostly white and gold, in terms of its dressing. To the right of the bed was a huge, walk-in closet, and to the left was... a very big fish-tank. No water or fish in it, though. Just as well, as it would have been months since anyone fed the things.

On the right-hand wall, there was a ceiling-high shelf-stand lined with what seemed to be various books— mostly classics. The bottom shelf had a bunch of popular movies, obviously meant for the ninety-inch television that only a blind toddler could miss.

At this point in her observations, she heard a creak and looked up to see that the slanted-grate of a vent in the ceiling was being pushed on by a bronze hand. It came loose with a metallic screech and fell to the floor, bouncing once. Out of the vent, dropped Anteros. She knew what to expect from him at this point, so she continued her searching, unabated. He set about finding a place to put the discarded vent grate, not a word spoken.

Samantha investigated the single door on the right-hand wall. It was smoky, non-see-through glass with holes punched through it in a checkerboard pattern. Obviously, to let out steam, seeing as though, when she opened the door, it was a bathroom. White tile floor, marble shower-stall, toilet, bathtub, full-length mirror on the right wall, and sink— all equally as expensive as the rest of the captain's quarters. Samantha was sufficiently pleased with all of this, though you wouldn't know it by looking at her. She was simply too tired to smile, much, at the moment.

Wordlessly, she rubbed her eyes as she made her way out of her new bedroom, intending to complete the survey of the shuttle by investigating the cockpit.

It was... about the same size as an airplane cockpit. Somewhat similar-looking, too. None of the buttons or dials or gauges meant anything to her, but what did, was the sight of a large, black duffel bag, sat between the two pilot chairs. She surmised that Mister Garrow must have left it there, just before succumbing to the Chestburster. Anteros's story did make it seem like the guy was in a hurry, after escaping the Hive.

She became curious, and knelt down to open up the bag. Inside was one of the largest stacks of documents and papers she'd ever seen in her life. Thick enough to comprise three phonebooks stacked on top of each other. There was also a PDA tablet...

She squinted at the thing. It obviously belonged to Mister Garrow, "Senior Research Officer" of Weyland-Yutani. There was no telling what sort of secrets were hidden in that one sheet of glass and wires. What sort of classified information would a Weyland-Yutani mover/shaker have, one wonders? And why so many papers? She wasn't aware of any large business deals going on between Wey-Yu and any of Guardian's conglomerates...

Something here's fishy..., she thought, pertinently. She may have been averse to rummaging through a dead-man's personal locker, but that courtesy didn't exactly apply to something as... juicy as this...

I mean... you'd have to be stupid not to look, right?

But that could wait, she decided, absently taking the acid crystal, wallet, and earpiece out of her pockets and chucking them into the duffel bag. Right now, she needed to find a way to get this ship off of the ground and in space...

Which reminded her that the hangar wasn't open, and that the massive doors blocking their path to the skies would need to move...

She quickly rummaged through the cabinets that were built into the walls, near the door. It took a few minutes, but eventually she'd identified and picked out the manuals and instructions that would help her get this ship moving. It was... a fairly large stack of reading material. A cursory glance through the pages of each field-manual revealed unforgiving walls of text that gave her a headache. It may have been comprehensive and intuitive to learn, but that didn't mean it was simple or easy.

She frowned heavily at the papers in her hands. A large part of her, usually restrained by logic but unleashed by her fatigue, wanted nothing to do with the workload ahead of her. It squirmed away from the idea of responsibility and made her seriously consider having Anteros do all of it, somehow. "You're too tired", it said. "You can't be bothered", it pointed out. "This isn't your forte", it reminded her.

Realizing where her mind was going, she bit her own cheek and scowled at herself.

If you were a man, and you gave that kind of excuse to someone, you'd be laughed at and told to suck it up! Don't be a cunt, Samantha, she scolded herself, becoming very bitter, it's just some reading and learning. You've done it before; you've enjoyed it before: so just pull yourself together and do it. You can sleep when you're done...
She now intended to use her anger to push herself through the problem, seeing as her stamina was clearly failing her, at the moment. They had to leave the planet, the sooner the better, and they still didn't know where that unaccounted-for Xeno was— get it done, get this boat airborne, then relax...

She stormed her way back into the captain's quarters and angrily slumped into the swivel chair, slapping the manuals onto the desk. Anteros was sitting nearby, busying himself with sniffing around the place...

She began to read the first few pages of one volume, before realizing it wasn't the right one to start with, and searching through the others before finding the first she needed. Anteros sat quietly by as she started to work, but eventually it soon became apparent to him that there was a problem...

A very tense few minutes of her glaring at the first page of How to Perform a Systems Check, and she was becoming more and more frustrated. She kept losing focus. She kept having to reread the same few lines, over and over and over. Her headache was getting worse by the second, and she was starting to huff through her nose. Her forehead was in agony, not helped by her scowl. Her eyes kept drying out and she was getting very, very annoyed.

Anteros... was fairly certain that the rabid, seething pulses thumping in Samantha's mind were not very healthy. It seemed rather obvious that she needed a good night's sleep before she was going to be reading anything remotely detailed.

He'd been sitting at the foot of the bed, and now began to make the ten-foot trip toward the desk she was sitting at. He padded over on all fours, near silently. Once he was just behind her chair, half a tail's length away, he spoke, calmly, "Sam".

She didn't respond, but he could tell that she knew what he was going to try and do, and that she was already miffed with him for it. It was the kind of angry that one became when you knew that the person was just trying to be helpful, but you really didn't have any patience for it, at the moment.
He spoke, again, "Samantha", a bit more sternly. He sidestepped to the right, coming around to her side, as she groaned in the back of her throat.

She responded, grinding out a belligerent "what?", between her teeth. She was pouting, now, a bit childishly. No less miffed, though.

Anteros spoke in a calm tone, "I think you need to rest".

The woman grimaced at the paper, and blinked multiple times, "no".

Anteros, not to be deterred, pressed, "you're not going to make any progress when you're this tired. We should both sleep. We can handle all of this in the morning", he stated, evenly.

Samantha, rubbing her eyes, and becoming exasperated, proclaimed, a bit too loudly, "I'm fine, Anteros. Go to sleep, if you want, but I need to work on this".

"We both know that you haven't gotten past the third paragraph", he pointed out. "If you get some rest, you'll be in a much better state to read through those things", he reiterated, patiently.

Samantha's scowl deepened, and she clenched her jaw, shooting back, "maybe if you weren't bothering me, I'd be able to get this done, and we could leave...".

Oh, come on, now— that's just petty, Anteros thought.

"You're being kind of childish, right now, Sam", he remarked. She knew he was right, and that frustrated her even more than being interrupted in the first place. She all but growled, her gaze finally pulling away from the papers on the desk, as she rolled her eyes and clasped her face. No longer were her thoughts marshalled into a single focus, like usual— now, a thousand different things rattled in her mind like angry popcorn.
She wanted them to be safe, she wanted to rest, she wanted to get the shuttle flying, she wanted to get through the all the books quickly, she wanted not to have to read the books at all, she wanted her time on Guardian to be over, she wanted Anteros to stop talking to her, she wanted Anteros to keep talking to her (only in a helpful way), she wished her dog were still around, she wished she could listen to some music, she wished she could just be in silence.
It was as fascinating as it was baffling, to him, that a simple build-up of fatigue could have such a drastic effect on the way her mind worked.

Nonetheless, he kept at it, for her sake.

"If you got some sleep, and tackled this in the morning, you'd be way better off than you are, at the moment", he said.

She glared at the ceiling, before looking at him with an expression bordering on a scowl, "Ant'ros... I'm a grown-ass woman, alright? I can decide when I need to sleep. Don't try to control me".

If Anteros were Human, he was pretty sure he would have done an honest-to-God double-take at her— where is that coming from?!, he thought. "Control"? I'm just trying to help...

The storm of what was increasingly resembling nonsense, in her mind, was dragging her thoughts down increasingly irrational and unexpected paths. Part of her liked that he was concerned for her, but it was soundly drowned out by the part of her that was suddenly incredibly resentful of it— of anything that tried to be an authority. Other parts of her were hoping he would put his foot down or force her hand in some way (which Anteros found particularly odd), and other parts still wanted to at least get through one task before considering sleep— all while more and more of her was simply frustrated and wanted to expel it.

"I'm not trying to control you, Samantha", he said, "I'm just trying to tell you what I think would be most efficient for both of us".

She scoffed and pinched the bridge of her nose, hunching over. "And how do you know that, precisely?", she asked, somewhat-rhetorically, somewhat-genuinely, somewhat-spitefully.

"I can see it", he said, "it's taken you ten minutes to finish the first page, your heartbeat is all over the place, your mind is frenzied, and you haven't actually understood any of what you're reading".

She twisted in her chair to face him, face halfway between a sneer and a galled gape, "oh, really? Is that a fact?".

"Yes", he insisted, "without looking, tell me what the first word of the last sentence you read was".

She stared at him— it took a second or two for her to process the question, another few seconds to even begin to humor it, and another few for her to blink and realize she didn't know the answer. However, instead of admitting it...
"Well, maybe if you weren't distracting me, I would know the answer, wouldn't I?", she said.

"You read it, ten seconds ago", he pointed out.

She sighed, and held her head in her hands, on the desk. Her thoughts grew yet more confused and disorganized. She didn't know what she even wanted, at this point— did she agree with him? Did she disagree with him? What was her plan, again? All of it seethed and simmered.

"Just leave me alone", she mumbled, despite the fact that she didn't actually want him to leave her alone. "I need to do this. I need to—", she started to say, before a yawn yanked open her mouth in a wide grimace.

He didn't remark on it, which a part of her was grateful for, even if she couldn't hear it, at the moment.

"You really need to sleep, Sam", he said. "Nothing is going to get done while you're in this state".

She groaned and ignored him, trying once again to read the page over again. Perhaps to try to prove him wrong, perhaps to try to prove to herself that she wasn't weak— the reasonings and rationale were all over the place.

"Sam, come on. Just go to bed, yeah? Nothing says you have to do it all in one night". A pressure built in her throat, and she stamped on an inexplicable urge to cry.

"What if I don't?", she said through gritted teeth, not knowing what she expected in the way of an answer.

"I'll keep saying it until you realize I'm right".

She ignored him and didn't respond for another two minutes— her hands getting shakier, her eyes getting more and more irritated. There was stress building under the skin, as though she felt she were on a time-table— but the words on the page didn't get any easier to understand, and that, in turn made her more stressed.
Her fist balled up in her hair, her foot its heel at break-neck pace, and every inch of her skin felt like it was itching.

"Samantha", Anteros said, once more...

A beat passed. Her sinuses stung, her throat closed up.

And in the next moment she stood from her the desk and whirled on him— her chair sent wheeling away and smacking into the couch.
Samantha turned, only to find Anteros's featureless face inches from her own.

He had stood tall, and met her advance, the instant her feet had pushed on the floor...

Fierce eyes met an implacable, domed surface, her nose almost touching his chin. He kept his lips sealed, not a fang showing, and stood his ground. He wasn't sure what she was expecting to prove, nor how he expected to respond to it— he simply acted, doing what came naturally.
For a few, feverish moments, her hands twitched at her sides— her mind seethed with the urge to do something. Smack him, punch him, kick at him, shove him in his chest, or even just reach out and touch him to provoke some sort of action...

But then, a chime rang in her head, and a wave of clarity silenced the fatigue and frustration and bitterness. The shot of adrenaline in her system from having almost raised a hand apparently pushed her over an edge... and Samantha averted her gaze from him, looking at the floor, crestfallen.

All at once, she felt... ashamed. She thought on what she was actually doing, in this moment— what had led up to it, and what it probably would look like to an observer, and her urge to cry doubled. But she kept a tight lid on it— she already felt pathetic enough. What was she even doing?! Squaring up with a Xenomorph — with her friend — over something so trivial? How childish could she be?!

She leaned away from him, taking a step back. Awkwardness, anxiety, shame all blended together, as she suddenly feared a reprisal from him. Anteros took it in stride, and very gently pressed a hand down onto the desk. He bade her to look at him, and she eventually did through reddening eyes and shaky legs.

"I simply believe it would be best... for you to leave it 'til tomorrow, and get some sleep", he explained, "I'm not trying to control you. I don't want to control you. I'm only trying to help. Okay?".

She stared at him, processing his words, and through a sudden bout of dizziness, she croaked, "okay".

"Good girl", he approved, which successfully drew a pained laugh from her.

Samantha now looked very sad, and covered her face with her hands. She rubbed her temples, and began to explain, "you're right. I'm sorry. I just... I needed to...", she weakly gestured to the desk, but petered out, not knowing how to explain herself.

"Hey", he interrupted, "there's no need to be ashamed of yourself. I get it. You're tired, you've been running around for the past hour, and you want us to be safe. Anyone else in your position would have done the same thing".

Samantha took a deep breath, brushing her hair out of her face and nodding, not quite looking directly at him. "Yeah. Okay. I just... I don't know...".

A long moment passed. Anteros, offered, "Sam... ask yourself, honestly: `what do I need, right now?`".

She thought on his question for about seven seconds, before quietly mumbling, "to use the bathroom... and have a shower...". She abruptly scratched her throat, seeming to realize, "and I'm thirsty...".

Anteros nodded, "okay. You go and do that. I'll get you some water. Alright?", he asked.

She blinked, not quite looking at him, "... alright".

"Okay, then". Anteros then stepped forward and pulled her into a hug, which she promptly returned with surprising enthusiasm. She sighed into his chest, "m'sorry for being a bitch...".

He idly rubbed her back, "I know. You're forgiven".

... and now she was smiling! Which meant his job was done! He eventually pulled away, giving her a nod, before walking over to the vent he'd dropped in from. He knew that she was smiling at his back, as he jumped, up into the dark hole.

---

Anteros returned to the third floor just as the toilet flushed. He dropped from the ceiling vent (water bottle and heated towel, in tow) as she was in the midst of splashing water on her face at the bathroom sink. He noticed that her tank-top was on the floor, near to the room's exit. He assumed that she planned on taking it to the laundry room, later.

He heard the water from the sink stop running, and waited as Samantha dried her face with a towelette that was hung from a hook next to the sink. She stepped through the bathroom door, rubbing her eyes of sleep but significantly more awake, and all but bumped into him. At her look of surprise, when she stepped back in alarm, he offered the objects in his hands. She took the water bottle, but blinked at the towel.

"Found it in the pool-area. Thought you'd appreciate a heated towel", he commented, lightly. She mumbled a "thank you" and took the items from his hands, hanging the towel on her left shoulder and proceeding to hungrily chug the water bottle with all of the vigor you'd expect from someone lost in the desert. She didn't stop drinking to breathe, even as she got red in the face. And it was a large water bottle, too— at least a liter...

Once the entire bottle had been downed, the woman breathlessly handed the empty plastic to Anteros, panting. She turned around and sluggishly walked into the bathroom, hanging the towel on the metal rail that was attached to the shower-stall's glass, sliding door. She then catatonically trudged out of the bathroom and stood just outside it, seeming to forget what she was doing.

Humans get really weird when they're exhausted, Anteros thought, shaking his head. He tossed the water bottle in his hand toward the exit, intending to end up next to the tank-top. The bottle hit the wall above it, bounced off, then somehow ended up rolling its way back to his feet. Momentarily captivated at the inanimate object, Anteros kicked the bottle away from him, dropped to all-fours, and padded over to the bed.

"Your shower?...", he remarked, as he hopped up onto the blanket and laid down.

Samantha blinked, and looked at him, before remembering, and calling out, "right, yeah. Thanks". She turned about on her heel and was just about to grab the bathroom door-handle when she noticed something. The holes in this door... they were lined up perfectly to see right into the shower stall…

It was probably her fatigued mind, but she thought it odd that Wey-Yu would design the thing so that anybody who stumbled in could catch the captain of the shuttle in the shower.

"Yeah, about that...", he called out, making her look back to him.

"None of the doors in this shuttle are at all airtight. My echolocation is able to find its way through to just about every corner of this place, so... I'd be able to see you, even from the lower floors", he said. "Plus, I can see you through all the walls, anyway, and, uh... yeah. Electroreception, and all that".

For a long few moments, she blinked into space, contemplating what exactly that all meant.

"I can just get lost, if you want me to— leave the hangar-bay and come back in an hour, or something", he suggested. "Maybe scope out the area". She grunted noncommittally, thinking about it.

Anteros waited patiently. Some might have criticized him for making the woman paranoid, but others would have also criticized him for dishonesty, if he'd not said anything. So, he chose to put all of the facts on the table, such that Samantha could make an informed decision. He would go with whatever choice she made— if she made one, at all, that is. It's possible she wouldn't care. He didn't care, much, either.

Samantha... was less troubled than she thought she should be. He really wasn't lying, back during their walk through The Apartments, when he'd implied that she had no privacy anymore. At the time, though, she'd only thought of mental privacy... she'd never conceived that that would extend to physical, as well. She... supposed that that might have bothered her, were it not for the fact that Anteros was a witty, compassionate sweetheart who had saved her life several times, and whom she (pretty much) adored everything about.

So, she weighed her options...

She could tell him to put a few hundred feet between them for forty-five minutes, in a bid to see if she'd be out-of-range of his extra-sensory sight. Which... would swiftly become a hassle if they stayed here for more than a few days, and would be completely unfeasible for however long they would be flying this thing through the void of space...

Or... she could just get nude in front of him to "rip off the Band-Aid" and eliminate the problem without a fuss. That way... there'd be far fewer complications, in the future. She was already without a top— only the bra and her jeans/panties to go. It wouldn't even take that much time, and to be frank... when she honestly asked herself if she actually minded that much, at all... the answer was "no".

Samantha sighed, and stepped away from the bathroom door. She thought for a moment, before turning to the right, facing away from Anteros. The only issue would be the act of taking her clothes off— once it was done, she knew she'd be fine, but she had always been self-conscious.

After clenching and unclenching her fists, and taking deep breaths for a good ten seconds, she set about taking off her jeans, peeling them downward. She did so, almost painfully slowly. She could feel herself start to sweat with nervousness. She could hear her own heartbeat.

Brilliantly, once she'd gotten her leg-wear down to her ankles, lower-body completely bare, she heard a wolf whistle chime in her head. She froze, realized what position she was in (practically mooning a dangerous, alien beast whose judgement she had no reason to fear)... and she couldn't contain a loud, abrupt, delirious laughing fit. All at once, it was the funniest thing in the world to her! She must have stayed there, laughing her head off for at least a minute, straight, barely keeping her footing...

She eventually straightened back up to her full-height, still chuckling and shaking her head. With a loud sigh, she kicked her discarded jeans and panties away from her. When they landed on the couch, she mumbled to herself, "fuck's sake, Anty...", palming her forehead, still holding in a laugh and grinning like a Cheshire cat. He always seemed to find the fastest way to defuse a situation...

"Anytime!", she heard him quip.

Sufficiently exhilarated, and put in a good mood, the next step of unclipping her bra and tossing it onto the rest of her clothes was fairly easy. What wasn't quite so trivial was turning around.

She closed her eyes... and slowly pivoted on the spot. Once she was turned around... she took in a deep breath... and opened.

No eyes were there to greet her own, but even so... she could definitely feel... something scrawling across her skin... almost in a... wave-like pattern. The moment she mentally registered this, the sensation shifted, ever-so-slightly, such that it became less obvious, but she definitely felt it. That's when she noticed that Anteros's head was tilted slightly downward, in his usual "Anubis posture", and that she could see his torso rising and falling with deep breaths.

Somehow, in the molasses of her fatigued brain, she made the connection between "echolocation" and "breathing" and "waves", and successfully determined that Anteros was, indeed, taking a very close examination of her. She might have expected herself to feel daunted at the revelation, but...

Well, the next thing she knew, her confidence returned to her, in full, and she grinned. She put one hand on her hip, and the other one behind her head, posing like a magazine model, and asked, jovially, "like what you see?".

A pause, as Anteros's head inclined its angle, and his breathing evened out.

"Yep", he said, happily.

She raised an eyebrow at him, dropping her pose and crossing her arms over her stomach. "Oh, really?".

"Well...", he added, his head and neck twisted to the side, in a tone that said he was about to correct himself. "How to put it...".

His head abruptly snapped straight and locked onto her, and Samantha was honestly surprised that she didn't feel any urge to step backwards as Anteros got up, hopped off the bed, and walked to within arm's reach of her. He rose to his hind legs, getting face-to-face with her.

Her expression was neutral, and slightly wide-eyed for a few moments, but began to warm as he started to elaborate, "I don't really care one way or the other about you being naked. But... I appreciate the fact that we're comfortable enough around each other for this to not be an issue".

She smiled at him.

"I'm... thankful that you trust me this much. It's a... unique feeling, to be trusted around someone at their most vulnerable...", he ended.

Her smile widened, and she stepped forward to hug his torso. Her head rested against his collar bone. Anteros, for his part, hung his own head over her right shoulder, his chin touching her lower back, and wrapped his arms around her waist. He purred, the small vibrations in his chest making her chuckle.

They embraced in a comfortable silence... listening to the faint buzzing of the lights and the dripping water from the bathroom faucet...

"Plus, I've been naked this whole time, so at least now, we're even", he joked.

"Shut up", she laughed.

---

An hour later…

Samantha had just finished using some razors she found in a cabinet to shave, well, everything. She had finished her shower, and now stepped up to the full-length mirror. It had been six months since she'd last examined herself, properly.

Honestly, not much had changed since before the Infestation...

Her hair, which had gone down to her shoulder blades, was now all the way down to her ass. More than long enough for her to tape some of the locks in specific places and just about get away with walking in public, nude. It was still the same shade of deep, "void-of-space" black, though a bit less glossy, now. Showers and hair-conditioner weren't easy to come by, lately.

Her eyes were a bright, saturated green. On very, very special occasions, she might bother to apply some eyeliner. But very little of it, and only ever in the "Egyptian" style. Not the Horus-eye thing, but the one that you see on almost every artistic depiction of Egyptian people in ancient Egyptian artwork. The minimalistic "s" line-thing just under the eyebrow. That was... the only type of make-up she could tolerate for any length of time without feeling ostentatious and trashy.

Of course, there was also the rest of her, which... she supposed wasn't bad.

Her skin, at birth, had been so utterly pale that the doctors thought she might have had some form of albinism. Literally "snow white". It was still the case, today, just that, now, she had very, very apparent tan-lines. The difference in shading between the tanned parts of her body and the un-tanned was probably wider than most would consider attractive… or healthy. Like caramel clashing with cream.
The actual tan-lines themselves were the result of a one-piece swimsuit. Going about a normal day, with regular clothing on, you'd never notice it, but if you ever went to the beach with Samantha, you'd probably be in for a shock. And some temporary blindness.

None of this had been intentional or unintentional, on her part. She'd just enjoyed sunbathing as a kid, into her teenage years, and this was the result she'd gotten. She didn't really care one way or the other about it.

Her physique was... noteworthy, she guessed? For one, she had a four-pack on her stomach. It had lost its definition during the Infestation, but it was still there. Her arms and legs were athletically toned. Her back was also very "cut"— she'd been an athlete ever since the fifth grade, after all. Mostly just track and a bit of race-sprinting. Samantha couldn't really say that she was particularly stronger than the average woman. All she could say with confidence is that she had much more stamina than average and was a lot more toned than average. Much more fit.

This had been intentional on her part. She'd dismissed make-up very early on, so she found a way to make herself stand out with something else. Fitness. Athletics. She'd be lying if she said that she didn't feel a bit superior to a lot of women, this way. She'd seen some girls be unable to lift a gallon of milk with one hand, and frankly, she was disgusted by it. And not just because of the influence of Idio-Galvanism on her early teenage years.
Plus, she knew a small secret. Being able to hold up your own weight, and being flexible, is very useful for sex and very attractive. She wasn't the type to just lay on the bed, with her legs open, like a beached whale, no sir— not today! She'd be damned before she ever got that lazy...

That... was probably also the Idio-Galvanism talking…

Her figure, removed from her fitness was... a mixed bag. She'd been called, in varying terms, "smoking hot" during her many travels. And, while each compliment did give her that pleasant, bubbly feeling in her gut, her response to such praise was usually something along the lines of a dead-pan "thanks". She didn't know how to take compliments in stride, very well. She could respond in-kind, and perhaps start flirting back with no issue, but given that she was never usually on any one planet for more than a year, relationships hadn't really been her shtick.

She just barely passed for hourglass. Her waist was only about... an inch narrower than her hips. Only just about noticeable, and not quite jaw-droppingly so. It seemed to do the trick, as far as she'd learned, however. As one has probably guessed, by now: her, quote-unquote, "lady-lumps" (she'd be loathe to speak the phrase, herself, out-loud, mind you— just thinking of it made her want to retch) were a good deal heftier than is considered normal, but certainly not to a "phenomenal" degree. It made conversation in a room briefly pause, but it didn't quite stop traffic.
In her case, specifically, it was much more "up front" than it was "in back", though the latter wasn't, by any stretch, "small". Last she checked, her bra-size was double-E? She might have been able to take pride in that... but the Idio-Galvanists strongly advised against putting on a pedestal traits that you have no control over— your genes.

If, however, there was any part of her that she felt she could be proud of, freely, it was her legs. Having been interested in sports from a young age, whenever Samantha had done weight-training, she mostly did so with a focus on her leg-muscles. They'd always been her favorite to work out, if only because she'd found it to be the easiest, at first. Each of her thighs was slightly bigger, in circumference, than a dinner plate, and almost entirely comprised of muscle. Her legs being as strong as they were was probably the main reason she actually had any backside to speak of— she'd been mostly flat, back there, until she'd began taking fitness particularly seriously. So, she could take pride in having worked for her glutes, at least.
Still, though: she supposed she couldn't take all the credit for the shape she was in. Genes still probably played a lot more of a role than she'd usually think. She knew of people who could fast for days on-end and only lose ten pounds, while other people had to vacuum in food every other hour just to stop from feeling exhausted. She had just been somewhat lucky to have been given a nice hand of genetic cards.

Though, while she chose not to think or feel very strongly about her "assets", other women seemed to do so, on their own. More than enough to last a lifetime. During her more nihilistic moments, she sometimes wondered if her generous "assets" were the reason why, after hitting puberty, the number of female friends she had quickly dwindled to zero. It got a bit better, during and after college, but not by much.

For the sake of maintaining her faith in Humanity, she chose not to believe that Human beings could be that petty and conceited. Though she knew, logically, they (more often than not) were. Other women, who were just as well-endowed as her, seemed to do just fine making friends, but she somewhat suspected that was due to them being somewhat airheaded.
Either that, or Samantha was simply arrogant. It was entirely possible that her isolation from other women was just due to her being stubbornly uncooperative with typical procedures of gossip. She heavily disliked all the social maneuvering and political cloak'n'dagger that typically constituted socialization. It all smacked of bizarre Spy vs. Spy-esque bullshit, to her, and she'd never liked it much.
Then again... maybe she'd just never made friends with the right people and she was entirely wrong. If you put a gun to her head, she'd probably just default to saying that her introversion and tomboyishness, combined with her beauty, had made making friends with other women difficult. But, even that felt a bit arrogant of her to think, so she'd never dedicated much thought to the topic.

She actually had a really long history of rocking the boat, with other women...

In any case...

Lastly, was her face.

The most prominent holdover of the Infestation was definitely the trio of parallel scars that dominated the right side of her face. The upper most and smallest of which ran from the corner of her eye to just above her lip. The largest and lowest went from just under her earlobe to framing her jaw and petering out just before it got to her chin. Each was very fresh, and a bit... gnarled. They'd faded from an angry red, to a shameful pink, then now, to an empty off-white color. If her face wasn't the color of caramel, and was still snow white, the scars might not have been visible...

But they were... and Samantha didn't know how to feel about them. They'd occurred early on in the Infestation, when a Drone slashed her three across the face and, well... that was the last time she'd tried to fight back when she was accosted by Xenomorphs...

The rest of her was scarred-up, too— a bunch striping her legs and obliques, and probably more than a few on her back. But none so egregious as these ones, right front and center. She knew they'd never really fade away. It was... depressing to think about. That despite her victories and eventual triumph in meeting Anteros, she would still have that, right there. Just there to remind her that she couldn't ever truly win... just escape by the skin of her teeth. That the Infestation, as much as she liked to think otherwise, had indeed gotten its pound of flesh. And that if it couldn't win, no one would. Not easily... and not without some scars to remember it by.

Of course, there was also the fact that the scars might make dating a hassle. That they might make her less attractive. An Idio-Galvanist would probably say something along the lines of: "that's a shame, and it probably will make things more difficult, but it's likely best to just be glad that you're alive, at all, even with some scars. You may have to fight a bit harder, every day, now, but that's nothing new. To breathe is to fight. To live is to fight. To persist, at all, is the greatest fight there is". While she technically agreed... there was still a part of her that was... melancholy about it. She may not have been a vain person, but she at least took some amount of pride in being presentable. In not looking "bad". But now... she wasn't sure if that was the case, anymore.

She raised a hand and lightly traced her index, middle, and ring fingers along each blemish, her brow furrowing. She sighed.
Apart from the scars, her facial features were... on the masculine end of feminine. Not quite close to androgyny, but noticeable.

She had pronounced cheekbones and concave cheeks, but also a larger nose and somewhat squared jaw. Her eyes were round, and her lips were full, but her brow was low, and her forehead: nearly flat. She had the sort of face that made you think she was very, very mature for her age, even if that wasn't strictly true. In short, she was a woman who the ability to look very stern, and very serious... without actually being particularly stern or serious. Fortunate, that she had a girlish smile, and blemish-free skin (aside from the scars, that is).

Samantha suddenly felt a chill, and shivered, pulling her from her thoughts. All of a sudden, she had goose-bumps all over. She rubbed her own arms, frowning.

Why am I so cold?

"Probably because you didn't quite turn off the shower and it's been leaking cold water for the past five minutes?", Anteros suggested. She turned about, but he wasn't in the room, nor in the doorway. He must have been listening to her thoughts.

She went and turned off the shower, and walked to the bathroom door. As she opened it and stepped through, a wave of tiredness that she'd been holding back came down on her and she yawned, loudly. She lazily stretched her arms above her head as she walked over to the bed.

Anteros had already removed the decorative sheet, and had prepared the real quilt, peeling half of it down such that she could slip right in with no hassle. The sight brought a smile to her face.

She crawled into bed, pulled the blanket up to her chin as she lay down, head on a pillow. Anteros still hadn't shown himself, yet, but she was confident that he would...

And she dozed off. Anteros was about to ask her where he should sleep, so... he settled for just sleeping on top of the bed's blanket. He'd been in the vents, opening up various pathways to make navigation through the shuttle easy. But right now... he was tired— almost as tired as Samantha.

He would wake her up in the morning... he'd probably have to drag her out of bed, but he wasn't dreading that...

---

Regarding how Faster-Than-Light travel works in the AvP universe, the following is what I was able to come up with: in the Colonial Marines Technical Manual, it is said that the hyperdrive (of at least the Sulaco) "shunts" the ship to the other side of the light speed "barrier" by turning the vessel itself into tachyons. It's sort of like how you can't cool something to 0° Kelvin, but under the right circumstances you can get negative-Kelvin temperatures.

HOWEVER: The official ALIEN RPG also explains FTL in a completely different fashion. In the RPG, it describes the FTL drive displacing space in front of the ship to draw the ship forwards (this sounds a lot like an Alcubierre Drive, which I had to look up). It also mentions that the ship needs to build up enough speed the old fashioned way before the displacement can take over. Considering this, it seems more mass makes it harder for the displacement field to pull the ship forward.

Given that both are, ostensibly, canon, and given that Weyland-Yutani has made FTL work for vessels about the size of a house which have been stated to supply 50 years of oxygen with or without hypersleep: I decided that both were true, and that the use of one or the other depended on the mass of the ship, in question. I'm not an astro-physicist, so... I can't say I care much to go into the nitty-gritty of it.