Silently we crept out into the hallway, checking left and right for attackers.

As the girls tiptoed out, Mr. Hansen grabbed the door handle, pulling it to the closing position, but I whispered no, the audible click would compromise our position worse than an open door, and the thin wood didn't offer much protection anyway.

He didn't agree, accusing me of setting a trap. I sighed and said he could close it if he wanted, but quietly.

The click of the lock and the jingle of his keys were anything but.

"Hurry!" I pushed the girls in the direction of the stairs. "(Halleluiah)."

When I set one claw on the hollow metal steps, I actually cursed. It would be akin to walking on a drum set. "Shit."

Sarah snickered.

"Ernie said a bad word!" She mouthed, but Rebecca looked too anxious to share her mirth.

"What's wrong?"

"(Lord), stairs too loud."

Mr. Hansen, oblivious to my concern, pushed past us, stomping loudly down the steps.

"Fools rush (amen), rush in where even angels dare to tread," I muttered. "C'mon."

We reached the foot of the stairs, entering a drab gray hallway lined with doors to apartments like Mr. Hansen's.

Something banged loudly in the room upstairs. It would only be a matter of time before my relatives came down and attacked us.

We let ourselves out through an exit at the end, with a little too much noise for comfort.

From our position, I could watch the floor above, but a staircase obscured the view from the balcony opposite. The blind area made me uneasy.

"Where are we going?" Sarah whispered nervously.

Mr. Hansen marched off to the right. "To see your mother. What do you think?"

I darted out from behind the staircase, sniffing and searching the upper floor with my heat vision, but I only got cinnamon scents and infrared psychedelia. "(Uphaz) stay next to the wall!"

Everyone did. Even Mr. Hansen was smart enough to figure that one out.

A loud clank startled me.

Thinking my companions had done something, I whirled and frowned at them.

Not their fault. Behind a glass window, the humans had a gym, men and woman making a lot of noise lifting weights.

Audio camouflage, I suppose, if hiding a chicken in a Kentucky Fried Chicken could be considered camouflage. I urged Mr. Hansen to move faster.

A few yards down, we reached the life support control system, full of humming electronic sounds, then the water reservoir, a naturally formed rock wall penetrated by hundreds of steel and plastic PVC pipes, all branching off to various areas of the base.

Signs in the lounge and crew quarters said to pour all liquids into the proper water reclamation centers, and another in the showers mentioned something about automatic shutoff after the ideal bathing time of eight minutes had elapsed. They even had special drainage mats. It seemed some of those pipes drained into the reservoir while the others drained out, almost like a human heart.

I thought the loud, endlessly gurgling water to be good cover, but would it be enough to shake my sisters off our trail?

I glanced up just in time to see a dark shape sniffing over the balcony.

I froze. "Stay very still. (Chair)."

Ss'sik'chtokiwij aren't great about detecting motionless targets. At least, not in hunting mode. Even I have to sort of `squint' (if that's the right term) to read.

I hoped and prayed that, whoever it was, didn't notice the man and little girl shaped heating vents hidden on the lower floors.

The dark shape sniffed two more times, then disappeared. That could be good or bad.

"C'mon!" I hissed. "Hurry! (Jehoshaphat)."

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We reached a corner, one side branching off into a cavern, which, if memory served me, led to a labyrinth of other caves with chambers dropping abruptly into pools of toxic mercury.

We kept going straight.

Hydroponics stood behind a rock wall. Two windows, small, circular, half caked with spinach green algae, provided the only views in.

Through the glass, we could only see blobs of green, indistinct and blurry through the humid fog of irrigation machines and plant perspiration.

Mr. Hansen scanned his badge (no keypunch this time), and we were in, a dense jungle of broad leafed plants six or seven feet in height, trees only a few feet taller, corn and soybeans, automated machinery busying itself churning soil and planting seeds.

Plant sprayers hissed noisily, filling the air with a damp fog. The thought of what those sprayers could do to my exposed brain made me anxious, but the place felt safe.

A spiral staircase connected to an upper story and a balcony, the lower portion illuminated by fluorescents and mirrors reflecting light from heavily reinforced windows on the upper floor.

I stared at the place in amazement. I'd only visited hydroponics one time. Mom didn't like it because of the noise and damp. Distracting, she said.

Water droplets rolled over the rims of my prod wounds, making phantoms dance before my eyes, and vanish just as suddenly. I had to get this problem fixed!

Covering my head, I followed Mr. Hansen and the children between racks of potatoes, carrots and red beans nourished by tube lights, arriving at a cluster of large concrete huts concealed by foliage. A thirty year old blonde woman in a tan jumpsuit knelt on the ground nearby, spraying chemicals onto the leaves of a withered looking geranium.

"Mom!" Sarah cried, running to her.

The set her plant down. "Careful! Every time you stomp a leaf, that's one less minute you have to breathe." Her tone was scolding, but calm.

Sarah sighed, slowing down. "Yes, yes. I know."

Rebecca bashfully crept up to the woman. "Hi, Mrs. Hansen."

The woman brushed herself off, speaking in pleasanter tones. "What brings you girls here?"

Then she noticed me. "And Ernie! Are you taking him on a walk?"

Sarah wrapped her arms around her mother, crying into her chest.

The story came out in barely comprehensible sobs, but Mrs. Hansen seemed to understand it, flinching, blinking with surprise, asking specific questions she wouldn't know without understanding her. Parental intuition, I supposed.

She stroked her daughter's head, muttering soothing things.

"Hi, honey," Mr. Hansen said, giving his wife a kiss.

"Lou."

Click, clickety clack click. A long haired man with glasses limped out of the hut, a crutch attached to each wrist. His method of ambulation reminded me of videos I've seen of apes.

The beard and hippie hair, though, reminded me of Jesus.

Brice Pittman. I'd only seen the man once. Multiple Sclerosis had rendered him unable to use his legs.

When we first met, the man had clicked past my cage, stared at me, and laughed, commenting that the biologists had "gone batshit."

Having terrible luck with men so far, I kept quiet and watched for his reaction.

Putting all his weight on one crutch, he wiped condensation from his glasses. When he put them back on again, the shock of what he saw nearly sent him sprawling on the dirt. "What in the holy hell!"

"Relax." Mr. Hansen pointed the gun at me. "I got this."

Brice just shook his head, brushing his hair aside as he straightened himself. "So...Just out of curiosity, why on God's green earth did you bring that creepy son of a bitch down here?"

As rude and unfriendly as this stranger seemed, he amused me somehow.

"They all got loose," said Lou. "Doug and Keith are both dead."

"So you thought you'd bring him down here to give him a challenge." He lifted a crutch in the air. "A little treat on a stick."

The man had a dry wit. The casual deadpan way he said these things made it hard for me to stay angry at him. He was a Grouch on sticks.

"He saved the girls' lives.," Mr. Hansen muttered, reluctance clear in his voice. "They think it's a pet."

"Sucks to be you." Brice hobbled back a few feet, still staring at me. "What happened to his head? It looks like Swiss cheese!"

"Bad fight," I muttered. "(Hello)."

Brice laughed. "Serves you right, asshole! You don't fuck with an ex-Marine!"

"Ernie didn't kill him, Brice. It was the other ones."

Mr. Pittman rolled his eyes. "And that's supposed to make it all better?"

He hobbled sideways in a half turn. "If you'll excuse me, I've got some Portobello mushrooms to plant, and some deadly alien killing weapons to assemble."

He turned his back to me. "...Maybe some caustic chemicals to spray into Ernie's brain."

"Grouch," I muttered.

Sarah laughed.

Lou explained our situation to his wife. "Those things are going to kill everybody in the base if we don't find some weapons and get everyone to a safe place. Until the ship arrives, we're going to need to arm ourselves and build fortification. You're going to have to hack the code systems so we can get in Munitions."

The woman nodded, then furrowed her brow at me. "The xenomorph appears to be in danger of infection."

Mr. Hansen shrugged. "No skin off my butt."

Rebecca scowled at him. "We need him to be healthy. So he can protect us."

Sarah nodded. "Do you have any Band Aids? Bandages?"

I rolled my eyes, but nobody could see it.

"What? And waste good medical supplies?"

"It won't help," I groaned. "(Thanks) I wish I could just...salivate and cover the (hosanna), the hole like that `Fix A Flat' stuff (Jehoshaphat) Doug told me about."

Of course, I knew it wouldn't actually work like that. I drooped my head in resignation.

"I've heard some very good things about duct tape!" Brice joked.

Nobody found that particularly funny.

The man shook his head, grumbling something about living with a bunch of idiots as he hobbled away from us.

"Can you make patches from other things?" Sarah asked. "Like actual rubber?"

I wanted to hug her, but I had a gun pointed at me, so I just gently patted her on the shoulder. "You're a genius!"

Mrs. Hansen nodded like I asked for something ordinary. "I'll see if there's something in the shed."

I followed the woman into the hut, scanning its shelves and tables for something, anything of use.

The shelves held tools and bottles of strange substances like Rhizobium, Bacilius Subtilis and Metarhizium. Only the Rhizobium appeared to be opened and resealed, perhaps due to the fact that Archeron didn't have any naturally occurring mites, weevils or blights to contaminate the crops.

Below a shelf of seed, I found a puck shaped metal lid. "(Amen) can I take this?"

Mara examined it thoughtfully. "Yes. We currently don't have any use for that C3980. It's too damaged to rotate the planter arm."

I was in luck. The object could cover the gap, and with a generous amount of saliva, I could patch the hole without dripping molten slag into my brain. The pain was excruciating, but I clamped my mouth shut, reminding myself that I prevented worse pains later on.

"Do you have any more of those?" I gasped as the metal cooled.

Mrs. Hansen paused and stared blankly, reminding me of a human in Rosedale Square. "No...but I have some other things you could possibly use."

She offered me a coppery metal cog with a spring sticking out one side. "How's this?"

Tearing off the spring, I attempted to use the thing, but it only covered part of a wound. "You got anything else? (Maranatha)."

The woman gave me a jagged, appropriately sized scrap of tin, but when I attempted a patch job by melting it to the cog, something dripped in, and I found myself saying "Mother mother mother mother mother" for a solid minute.

Somehow I recovered, and Mrs. Hansen handed me more scrap. This time, I made sure to lay a strong patch foundation before melting anything.

As I started in on another, Lou sighed and crossed his arms impatiently. "Are you done yet?"

"Things like this take time!"

"Time is what we don't have." He glanced at his wife. "Mara, see what you can do to unlock Munitions."

"Yes, sir." The woman marched out of the hut.

Lou of course, remained where he was, watching me like a hawk, ready to pull the trigger if I made a single sudden move.

Sealing my last wound, I rested, waiting for the slag to cool.

Rebecca seated herself next to me. "Ernie, did you squawk like a bird because you hurt your head, or did you do that on purpose?"

I chuckled. "A little of both. (Chair)...I was thinking about one of Doug's books."

She chuckled.

Grouchsticks' crutches clicked behind me. "I wouldn't sit so close to that thing, Miss. Even if he doesn't tear you limb from limb, I'm sure even a playful love nip will give you an incurable disease."

"Why are you so mean to Ernie?"

"Who said I was mean? Do you think I'd intentionally piss off the alien version of a mountain lion? Believe me, you haven't seen my mean."

He swallowed and hobbled a step back. "That being said, I sure as hell wouldn't do anything to piss off Ernie or any of his friends. I've already lost the use of my legs. I don't want to lose anything else."

Mara dashed back into the storage hut. "Security system in Munitions has been switched to passive mode."

Lou gave her a wink. "Thank you, sweetie."

Brice rolled his eyes and looked away, muttering something about Mr. Hansen being pathetic and sad. I didn't understand, but I passed no judgments.

Lou glanced impatiently at his daughter. "Ready to go?"

"Only if Ernie's ready."

Frustrated sigh.

"I'm ready," I blurted. "(Yes) I think these (chair), these patches should hold."

Mr. Hansen grabbed Mara's hand. "Come with us."

"Lou, you know I can't. The needs of this base come first. As long as we have people here, my place is here. Oxygen levels must be maintained at all costs."

Lou frowned. "You sure you'll be safe in here?"

"Relax, chief," Brice said. "She'll be fine. You're looking at the MacGyver of Archeron."

The look on Mr. Hansen's face indicated he didn't share the man's optimism, but he nodded anyway. "With any luck, we'll be back in fifteen minutes or so. Keep safe and out of sight."

"Don't make any noises," I added, though I suspected Brice may try to do the opposite just to spite me.

"All right." Lou beckoned to the children. "Let's go."

He turned his back to the other two adults, marching to the exit.

"Lou," said Mrs. Hansen. "Wait."

He spun around. "Did you change your mind—?"

She silenced his question about changing her mind with a sloppy `French kiss'. "Be careful. Hurry back."

Brice again looked disgusted. Mere jealousy? I didn't know.

I and the children followed Lou out of the hut, through the corn and milo. We passed beneath sprayers, but the water only rolled off my patches. It seemed my hasty attempts at field medicine had worked.

"Ernie," Rebecca said. "Teach me your language."

I chuckled. "(Judas), you actually want to learn?"

She nodded, politely ignoring my verbal slip-up.

"Well..."

I didn't teach her how to ask for the bathroom or "How much do those tomatoes cost". Instead, I only taught her basic useful things, like how to say, "I am plague ridden, do not eat me", and phrases she might need to know when eavesdropping, such as "she is in here" or "I cannot find her."

Mr. Hansen froze, pulling back the hammer of his gun. "Did you hear that?"

I looked around, but my heat vision only gave me psychedelia, like backgrounds from 1970's music videos.

The leafy plants vibrated from constant showers from irrigation systems, and my smeller only gave me basic stuff any human can pick up. The vegetation, for example.

Mr. Hansen flinched as a spray of crimson exploded from his chest, splattering the produce. The man uttered a gurgling yell, and his gun went off, shattering a plant mirror.

His eyes grew wide with shock as he watched the shiny black barbs of a scimitar-like tail rupture his internal organs, ripping a jagged fissure through his clothing and pink flesh.

"Daddy!" Sarah screamed. "No!"