I stared at Craig in surprise, tail wagging like a dog. "A walk? Where to?"

"To pay your grandmother a little visit, of course."

"No! You don't want to do that! It's dangerous!"

"We've already lost four colonists. We've managed to capture all the larvae, but the situation is getting out of control. We'd prefer to nonviolently remove your grandmother from the premises intact and place her in a safe containment facility rather than resort to the use of explosives and brute force. At the very least, we need to get her out from under the main power conduit, so that if and when we need to use physical force, we don't kill everyone in the base with a thermonuclear detonation."

He opened my cell.

"I'd like to help. But I don't think I'll be of much use."

"We'll see."

Two androids unhooked me from the wall, leading me out of my prison and the lab.

I must have presented a strange sight to passing colonists. Two identical looking women leading a large black thing by a leash like some kind of pet, followed by a tiny man in a lab coat. We got many stares as we strode down the hexagonally shaped corridors.

"You said you wanted to put her in a containment facility," I said as we passed a row of crew lodgings. "Did you figure out how to make a null entropy field?"

He just stared at me in bafflement. "I'm...not sure what you're talking about. I only planned something like your cell. Maybe close off a cavern and lock her in it."

I just shook my head.

The hallways all looked the same. Once or twice, some clever person would put up a fake street sign that would say Hollywood Boulevard, Mockingbird Lane or Elm Street, but, generally I could only gauge my location by olfactory landmarks, strong cleaning chemicals around the Weyland Yutani offices, burnt popcorn near a break room. Mmmm, hamburger near a cafeteria we walked around.

That, and the carpet stains, the spilled colonist manufactured Cheerios near the kindergarten, babies crying in the nursery (spoiled infant formula - one of the most nauseating smells I've ever encountered) and the piercing wail of steel cutting lathes in the machine shop.

I felt sorry for the humans. They mostly had to go by the base's convoluted door numbering system.

Onward we marched. "It was very foolish of your people to build a large machine on top of my grandmother's home. I would have warned you, but my advice was not sought."

"The atmospheric processing station was built on that location for a very specific reason. Your grandma's home contains an incredibly sophisticated power source, one which, unfortunately, we were unable to extract from the ground without compromising the integrity of the equipment. In fact, this is the very reason why I have brought you along. I need you to get your grandma to instruct us on how to safely deactivate, repair and transport the machinery."

I purred with mirth. "You're wasting your time. We didn't build that ship. Grandma was only...a stowaway. I believe that's the right term, isn't it?"

Craig stopped in his tracks, rubbing his chin. The robots froze in place, holding me back. "That is...unfortunate."

He shook his head. "Regardless, we can at least attempt to evict her from the premises so we can go in and safely make repairs. We've already lost a Bishop unit on an egg removal mission, and our Call is badly damaged. The least you can do is help us with that!"

"Mom couldn't even get her to share her corpses. I don't think this is going to work." I swallowed. "You say there have been four deaths?"

Craig nodded. "Two attacks, two fatal impregnations."

"All right. I'll try to convince her to go, but she can be stubborn. It is her home, after all...It's like that program you showed me about the Indians."

"It's a spaceship, Ernie, it's not the damned Trail of Tears. She can crawl in a nearby cavern for all I care. Just get her out of the plant and tell her not to touch any colonists."

"I'll try," I repeated.

We resumed our march, passing through a section of corridors with windows overlooking the muddy landscape of partly terraformed Archeron. They'd retracted the storm shields due to the mild weather. No plants yet, just a goopy swamp.

As we passed an intersecting hallway, Roger approached us, swaddled in blankets. "Hey! Where are you guys going?"

I stared in astonishment. He had lost a lot of weight.

Craig explained his plans.

"Can I come along? I mean, I'm as good as dead anyway..."

Craig sighed, pausing in front of a door. My escorts stopped too. "Fine. You can come along. I just know I'm going to regret this."

Roger grinned. "Great! Do me a favor. Stay right there for a minute. I've got something I want to show you."

Craig shot him a skeptical look. "This had better have some relevance to our current mission."

Roger's widening grin seemed an ill fit for such a skeletal looking face. "Oh it does, it does! Just a minute."

He disappeared into a room, returning with a cel phone. "You may have assumed that I have been goofing off all these weeks, but I actually made productive use of my time. You see, ever since I scanned the lexicon of the...Xenomorph Alphabet, I've been slowly but surely piecing together a sort of universal translator, based on algorithms of existing autotranslation bots. I've used numerous recordings of Ernie, and...her friend, comparing the non-English dialog with the lexicon."

"Recordings you've accessed from a system you no longer have permission to access," Craig grunted.

"Perhaps, but it's for a good cause. I put in a back door. Plus I had some recordings left on the hard drive in my room. All of which, I might add, has been done solely for the interests of the department." Roger broke into a coughing fit.

Craig backed away. "Fine, fine. Show me what you've got."

"Okay." Roger eagerly showed him the device. "Watch this."

Craig snapped a medical mask over his face as he stared at the screen.

Roger rolled his eyes. "Must you wear that? I don't have Covid. You said yourself, it's only transmitted by fluid contact."

"I'm more concerned about the influenza," Craig mumbled through the filter. "If you get my xenomorph sick, by the way, there will be consequences."

"Whatever." Roger pushed a button and spoke into the device. "Hello, grandmother. May I have some cookies?"

The device responded with the same expression in Ss'sik'chtokiwij, more or less: "Greetings, grandmother, where are your food pieces? So I may have them. Please."

"If I were you," I said. "I would not put that much confidence in your device. It is not accurate."

"It's better at translating. Say something in your language."

Shaking my head, I tried a common phrase: "This is my carcass. You cannot have it."

The device translated it thus: "Where is the bathroom?"

I tried another: "Leave me and my nest of eggs alone."

It came out as "Welcome to my house!"

In English, I told them, "If these are your so-called `accurate translations', you will die."

Roger frowned at the screen. "Did the last one have something to do with eggs and nest?"

Seriously? I thought. "Yes!"

"And you...didn't have to pee."

"No."

He pushed some buttons. "I guess I'm going to have to eyeball the screen. I don't know why this isn't picking the right line..."

"We have our Indian guide, so to speak," Craig said. "We should be fine, either way. As long as it doesn't die from the flu."

"Yes, but if we're separated..."

"Then, as Ernie said, we'll be dead." Craig gestured for my escorts to move. "Keep testing it. If we're lucky, we won't need to use it."

We continued our walk, traversing a drab maze-like arrangement of long gray corridors and trailer buildings.

For the most part, I stayed on my best behavior, not diverging from the straight path Craig wanted me to walk. But when I spotted Rebecca with her mother and brother traveling down a connecting hallway, I strained against the leash so hard that the androids jolted me to the point of drooling.

I also got jolted when I tried to greet that curly haired kid I'd seen on a big wheel weeks earlier.

Down one corridor, we passed a group of workers arc wielding something on a bulkhead, while another man used a pneumatic drill to screw something down. I stopped, staring in fascination until Mara tugged on my leash.

Generally, no one let me go anywhere, so, although nice to stretch my legs, I got a little tired, due to being out of shape. I hadn't even practiced climbing walls, for fear of revealing my tactical advantage.

I laid down on the carpet about fifty yards before the north door.

"I kept telling you we needed to give him some exercise," Roger scolded.

"You want him to exercise?" his colleague snapped. "Fine. Tell you what. You do that, and when he gets a little too excited and decides to disembowel someone, I'll assign you the task of explaining the situation to the family!"

The androids tugged my leash, but I wanted to rest. Plus...really dreading this little family reunion.

Roger prodded my butt with his shoe. "C'mon, you weenie. Get up. I'm dying of AIDS and I've got better stamina than you."

When I didn't obey, he prodded me again. "C'mon! You really like getting shocked or something?"

The shouting strained his throat, and he broke into a coughing fit.

"Do you want more people to die, Ernie?" Craig asked me.

That got me back on my feet.

We passed through the door, and my spirits lifted. We were outside!

LV 426 looked different after the terraforming, the sky blue...well, steel blue. A fog rolled across the boggy landscape, obscuring the construction equipment and piles of scrap here and there.

Craig took a deep breath, enjoying the new luxury of inhalation unassisted by space suits and oxygen equipment.

I myself found the mud endlessly fascinating. The shapes it made, the sounds, the tracks we could make in it...plus the concept of pottery had captured my interest ever since I watched the movie Ghost. The scientists had to coerce me to follow them, reminding me of the lives were at stake.

The atmospheric processing station stood a fair distance away. For this reason, my captors were loath to proceed on foot.

Miles of underground cables, I've been told, connected the machinery to the base, providing all the electricity, including the power that ran many of the vehicles, but we did not have any sort of trains or shuttles to transport us to the place.

Craig and Roger took seats on an ATV parked in front of a Quonset hut, the androids placing themselves on a bench in the vehicle's rear.

I tried to climb aboard with them, but an android pushed me back. Roger shook his head. "I'm sorry, bud. You're going to have to work those muscles a little. Try to keep up."

Craig scowled. "What, you're just going to drag him behind this thing?"

"It only goes like, maybe 25 mph tops? If worst comes to worst, we can drag him behind like a water skier. The ground's wet enough."

They started the engine, and I practiced the art of jogging.

Fortunately, I experienced what athletes call a `second wind,' so not too difficult for me to keep pace, despite the mud that sucked at my claws. In fact, I kept up with the vehicle so well that the robot with the leash had to turn and hold me off to the side to prevent me from jumping aboard.

The vehicle got stuck twice, but with the men and the robots, it easily got freed from entrapment.

Roughly twenty minutes later, we arrived at the processing station.

A little different from the pictures, definitely larger than what Mara showed me.

The stations resembled massive shiny chrome cones with flat tops, like upside down cake pans from a cooking show I watched. Lightning bolts shot between their metal towers, presumably to convert hydrogen compounds and toxic gas particles to oxygen and water.

We walked into the structure's narrow, foggy interior, down rows of catwalks housed in hex corridors, descended a metal staircase, crossed several more feet of metal grating, to a catwalk overlooking the biggest machines I've ever seen.

Giant towers of some kind, perpetually emitting bolts of electricity and bursts of steam. The bolts traveled up and down their lengths like Jacob's ladders, an awe inspiring but scary sight. I definitely didn't want to fall from that railing.

Traveling onward, we reached an industrial elevator with thickly reinforced steel doors, which we took down several stories, until, at last, I saw something familiar, the cellar of Grandma's house.

Few humans would appreciate the interior, the walls like a giant's rib cage, melded to an intestine and some other bodily organs, with a few car parts thrown in.

To me, it felt somewhat...homey.

I have a fairly good memory, so despite the passage of months, I knew where things were, for the most part.

If we went straight, we'd arrive in the `basement,' to the left, the walk in freezer, and to the right, a training room that the pale ones liked to use.

Craig sent us straight forward.

I swallowed hard. It had been a long time since I last spoke to Grandma. We hadn't parted on the best of terms.

We reached a fork in the path.

"I trust you are at least familiar with the layout."

"I am. I'm just not sure you're adequately prepared to meet my grandmother."

"Let us worry about that," Craig replied quite arrogantly.

"Fools rush in where even angels dare to tread."

I led the two through another intestine shaped passageway, into the basement.

The pale ones climbed up and down floors in their crafts by means of bone ladders and...a giant cylinder of glowing gelatin that we could never figure out how to use.

The room contained drums filled with some sort of disgusting ooze, and giant white snakes that both Mother and Grandma found delicious. The drums had been emptied, of course. Probably just as well, as they had the tendency of trying to drill a hole into your brain whenever they popped out.

Craig prodded a drum with his shoe. "What are these things?"

"Snacks. Be glad they're all gone. They can be quite aggressive."

We wove our way down another split tunnel...into Grandma's nest.

Grandma liked the basement den the best. Nice open space, eye pleasing decor, dimly lit, damp, musty and warm. A perfect place for laying eggs.

Speaking of which, she had been very busy. The video had not captured the extent of her business.

The chamber contained roughly thirty socmavaj eggs.

I stared at her, lurking in the dark.

Grandma had grown amazingly large on those frozen cadavers. What's more, she had become quite beautiful in her old age: Head plate expanding to a fine massive form, elaborate, reminiscent of Incan or Aztec royal crowns.

I gestured for the humans to stay back, giving Grandma a little wave.

"Why Sh'kassk'dwuissueblik," she breathed. "You at last came to visit your old grandma! To what do I owe this great honor?"

Behind me, Roger's phone verbalized an English translation: "Hello, Ernie. My homework is in the red folder." Pathetic. I decided to ignore it.

"It wasn't my idea. But it's nice to see you."

Roger's device responded thus: "I would like to purchase five oranges and a banana."

Grandma clapped her hands in delight. "Oh! And I see you've brought a few friends for dinner! How wonderful!"

The phone returned: "Where is the reference section? I would like to check out a book."

Roger frowned at the screen. "Did she just say what I think she said?"