XXVI
The silence that followed was… awkward, to say the least. Thankfully, it was also understandably brief. Less than a few seconds, all told. Nathan looked on in shock and horror at the sight before him. I tried to put myself in his shoes for a moment; to know and understand what was going through his mind right now. Unfortunately, it wasn't good. I knew that this time I had truly overstepped the mark. There was no way in this world, no way in this galaxy, even, that I could explain my way out of this one. Nathan had seen too much to accept any possible excuse I could offer. So what the fuck was I going to do?
"Nathan…" I started slowly, cautiously taking a step towards the awe-struck man. "Before you-" But before I could even finish my sentence, Nathan had vanished. He bolted off down the corridor like a shot, presumably to get the others.
"Nathan!" I shouted, running out into the corridor to try and stop him. But it was far too late for that. By the time I reached the doorway, he was long gone.
"Bollocks!" I exclaimed. I looked back into my room, where Xena was still rooted to the spot. She appeared confused, and worried, and somewhat regretful, although of course I was equally at fault for what had happened. Even so, now was not the time for bandying blame around. Now was the time for action, and fast.
"Come on," I began, dashing back into the room and grabbing Xena by the arm. "We're leaving." At this point in time, I was hardly thinking straight. I hadn't considered what we'd do after we escaped: What we'd eat, where we'd go. But right now, there was no timeto think. Right now, we had to leave. As soon as Nathan told Alan and Ryan, they'd be on us in a flash. And then, they'd kill both of us. Luckily, Xena didn't need to be told twice. As soon as I announced our departure, she bolted out of the room, dragging me along with her, as I still had my hand around her arm.
"Jesus Christ, Xena, slow down!" I yelled, my back scraping against the cold metal floor as she pulled me along. As soon as I said this, she stopped immediately, but sadly, I didn't, and continued to slide along the floor until my head made sharp contact with a wall. The pain was reasonably excruciating, but I didn't have time to recover right now, so I got back to my feet.
"Look, Xena," I began, rubbing the top of my head. "Clearly your 'run' and my 'run' are two very different 'runs'. So perhaps it'd be better if I led the way, alright?" She nodded apologetically, and I sympathetically placed a hand on her shoulder. But alas, we had to press on. No doubt Nathan had already reached the others by now. It was only a matter of time before they tracked us down, and then we were done for.
Gathering my bearings, I quickly assessed the choice of routes available to us. I established that the quickest and safest way to go would be through the engine bay, up the steps of the maintenance gangway, down one of the upstairs corridors and into a Syracusia escape craft. Without any further hesitation, I set off down the corridor, with Xena following close behind. I opted for a slower approach than she did, preferring stealth over speed, but even so we moved at a fair pace. Before long, we reached the heavy door which led into the lower engine bay. I pushed the button on the adjacent wall, but found that nothing happened. I pushed the button again, only to achieve the same result. Then, I suddenly realised that getting upstairs and escaping the ship might be harder than I'd first thought…
"Uh, slight problem." I told Xena. "I forgot that my door privileges have been revoked." She shot me an annoyed expression, apparently thinking that I should have been intelligent enough to have considered something like this happening in the first place. I smiled gingerly, shrugging my shoulders. But in all seriousness, we now had to come up with another means of escape. And fast. I looked around the thin corridor, hurriedly trying to think of a way to get upstairs without using any doors. My eyes fell to a small ventilation hatch on the wall. Now, I was no engineer by any means, but I knew that all the air ducts aboard the ship were linked, so there had to be a way to get to the upper floor through the vents. It wasn't the most dignified means of escape possible, of course. Crawling through a maze of claustrophobia-inducing shafts and tunnels. But hey: If it was good enough for Brad, it was good enough for us. We were in a pretty tight spot, after all.
"In there." I said, pointing to the hatch, although Xena was already one step ahead. She crouched down by the fine-toothed aperture, already rearing to go as I walked over to join her. I gazed down at the sealed portal, reaching out a hand in an attempt to pry back one of the spindly metal teeth. Eventually, the resilient metal began to loosen up, and soon relented, sliding away into the wall. The other pieces immediately followed, and the aperture opened up.
"Ladies first…" I remarked, gesturing to Xena to go ahead. She clambered into the tiny shaft, a tight squeeze indeed considering that she was a good eight feet tall and perhaps three feet wide, shoulder-to-shoulder. I quickly crawled in after her, and even I felt cramped in the narrow duct, although considerably less so than she probably was.
"Right." I said, looking around the dark shaft. The light coming from the corridor through the open hatch provided a dim glow of light, which revealed that the duct continued in either direction.
"This way." I told Xena, pointing in the direction of the front of the ship. Then, I began to move slowly through the narrow tunnel, pulling myself along on all fours. I heard Xena doing the same behind me, her tail scraping loudly against the cold metal floor as we moved. As it turned out, taking the vents might not have been as stealthy an idea as I first thought. But, it was still the only way to get upstairs without using any doors, so… beggars can't be choosers, I guess.
For the next few minutes, Xena and I crawled along through the ventilation shafts without so much as a single word exchanged between us. The labyrinth of tunnels continued to twist and turn for what seemed like ages, barely inclining less than a few degrees. Eventually, we did reach a vertical shaft, which, after a long struggle, we both managed to scale, and at last found ourselves on the upper deck of the ship. Well, under the floor of the upper deck of the ship, to be exact. We couldn't be far from the shuttlecraft docks by now. The question was: How far were the others from the shuttlecraft docks? If we didn't make it aboard a craft before they caught up with us… it didn't bare thinking about what they'd do. To me. To Xena. It was too late now for explanations, of course. Perhaps if I'd told the crew everything from the outset, they'd have come to accept it. But what had I done instead? I'd lied to them, deceived them. In some ways, I was no better than Ryan: a manipulative conman who covered up the truth. And now, thanks to me, here we were. Running (or crawling, in this case) for our very lives.
After another five minutes or so, we finally reached our destination. At least, I thought it was our destination. Throughout our claustrophobic journey along the ship's air circulation system, I'd been mentally mapping our position on the ship. As far as I could tell, the hatch that Xena and I were now crouched under was the one just in front of Archie's control hub. The same one that I'd climbed up yesterday when I'd followed the trail of blood Bradley had left in the vents. The same one, therefore, that Bradley had been ragged through by the other Xenomorph on the day that he died. From the thin shafts of light which shined through the gaps in the corners of the hatch above, I could just make out faint blotches of dried blood on the walls of the tunnel, which only confirmed that this was the hatch we were looking for.
"Ok, Xena, this is it." I whispered, reaching up to grab the handles on the underside of the hatch. "All we need to do is get from here to one of the shuttlecraft bays. After that, we're clear. Then we can start worrying about where we're actually going to go. Got it?" She might have nodded at this point; she might have not. It was too dark to be able to tell. Regardless, we didn't have time to discuss it any further. We had to move. Tightening my grip on the handles above my head, I pulled back hard, until the hatch flew open, light pouring into the vent from the corridor above. I hoisted myself up, then turned back to help Xena. She clambered out on all fours, slowly getting to her feet as I looked around to see that the coast was clear.
"Alright?" I asked, looking back at Xena, who now stood at full height. She nodded back at me, eager to keep moving. I turned in the direction of the port-side corridor, which led to the Syracusia 1 Shuttlecraft Bay. But no sooner than I had taken a single step forward, I heard a sound that stopped me dead in my tracks. It was the sound of a gun being cocked.
"Going somewhere, Matthew?" Alan called out. I looked down the central corridor behind us, and saw him and Nathan standing, guns in hand, less than a few metres away from Xena and myself. Nathan had a look of sheer disappointment on his face. Alan's was more a look of anger. I noticed a distinct lack of ex-Weyland-Yutani scientists in the group, though, although at this point, I was kind of relieved to have only two people pointing their guns at me rather than three.
"Now, then…" Alan continued, lifting the gun higher with his remaining arm. "You'll stay right where you are…"
