Space Beast

ALIEN: A Whisper in the Dark Wiki

**Space Beast**

by Robert Morse

I'm writing this book because it's what happened. I'm a bad person and I'll spend the rest of my life banged up, but one thing I do have that most of you stupid lags don't is that I survived the end of the world. A monster came and ate all my mates. It sounds like a fairy story, but it's exactly what happened, and since it doesn't matter a tin shit whether or not you believe it, you might as well. I'm a lag, but no liar.

A jolt in the C-Max [Class-C work correctional unity] on Fury [Fiorina 161] wasn't as bad as you might think. Superintendent Andrews was a sod, but he was all right for a hack. He tried to be fair and keep us double-Y's from killing each other. We always knew when one of the lags fucked up; Andrews would pull everyone together, squeeze his handball, and announce, "This is rumor control; here are the facts..." After that he'd talk too much and think he solved everything. He always called us Mister. I was Mr. Morse to him, never Robert. He thought it gave him authority and control, but we all knew it was because he didn't have the stones to use our Christian names. If he did, we could call him Harold, and then we were equals. That hack wasn't the equal of any one of us, even Golic, but like I say, he wasn't the worst.

Dillon was a true convict: he had pride; he had influence. He weren't no preacher, but he knew God, and he made sure the rest of us knew God, too. When Fury was a prison, we had our own little group -- watched each other's back, kept each other in line. When the prison went back to smelting lead, the company let us stay and take care of the place. We were still lags and the place was still stir, but we had more freedom. We prayed to God and took care of each other... because none of us were getting out. Ever. We all bitched, whether the end of the world came or not. Killers, rapists, kiddie fiddlers, burners, beaters, nonces, thieves, 90 percent of us double-Y's. And Dillon kept us in line. He never started a fight and never back away from one. *He* was the leader, not Andrews. Some days he kept us in line with words and some days with a lead pipe, but he always kept us in line.

Clemens was a real doctor. Most prison docs are medtechs at best, but Clemens was actually a doctor, though a proper fuckup like the rest of us. He killed eleven people, got drunk, and gave out too much morphine or something. Another promising career, lost to numb fuckery. Too bad, that. After he served his time, he stayed on. He wasn't one of the brothers and was maybe a bit of a toff sometimes, but he looked the other way if no one was getting hurt. And he didn't get on with Andrews or 85 [Francis Aaron], and that worked in his favor.

After the woman [Lt. E. Ripley] arrive, we was all doomed. Andrews knew it. Dillon knew it. Andrews tried to keep her locked in the infirmary -- didn't work. Dillon told her how unwelcome she was and how important it was for her to stay away from all the prisoners, but she didn't hear him. He told her how we'd all taken a vow of celibacy, implying that she'd be raped if she didn't herself away... from the lags like Junior for sure. Him and a few others tried to have a go at Ripley out on the tip, until Dillon re-educated them with a pipe. Even after her close call with Junior, she was still walking around like she had nothing to lose.

Murphy was the first to find what Ripley was looking for, what she'd brought with her. Everyone thought he was daft enough to fall into a ventilation fan while cleaning the tunnel -- and he was, too, but that's not what happened. It didn't make sense. Everyone knew it didn't make sense, but nobody was willing to say so. We'd all done that job, and suddenly Murphy forgets the nine-foot fan twenty paces away that will paint the walls with your innards if you fall into it? Un-fucking likely.

Boggs and Rains were next. They went into the into the tunnels with Golic, and only Golic came back. Golic was always mental, and now he was covered with blood and raving about a dragon. Poor bastard's mind finally went completely under. Even after Dillon talked to him, Golic still insisted it was a dragon that got Boggs and Rains. He wasn't wrong, though, was he? Dragon, Xenomorph.

Andrews called everyone to the mess and started one of his rumor-control speeches, and then Ripley burst in, saying the beast had gotten Clemens and Golic in the infirmary. Nobody liked Golic but Dillon and me. He stank and was a real nutter, but he didn't deserve to be eaten. I also hated to hear about Clemens. Dying in a shit-hole like Fury was beneath him.

Ripley looked right terrified and Andrews went aggro on her, and the beast reached down through a hole in the ceiling and snatched him up. It lifted the man by his head and shredded him. Blood was everywhere. I've killed a few men, seen more killed -- by gun, knife, big stick, whatever was at hand -- but I've never seen so much blood. I've also never seen anyone picked up by their head before. The beast was strong. Andrews was a fat bastard and the beast lifted him right into the air. After what happened to Andrews, we all knew we was fucked -- proper fucked.

Turned out the thing came out of Spike, Murphy's dog. Poor old Spike. Didn't deserve Murphy, anyway, so getting fucked by a monster was over the top. Wouldn't wish that end on a dog, though better a dog than me.

We went to the hall and talked about our options. 85 said he should take over now that Andrews was gone, so that was hilarious. Ripley wanted guns, she wanted a video tracking, she wanted all sorts of technology we didn't have. I got mad, then, thinking that she was the one who brought the fucker to us, weren't she? What I wanted was to put her head through a wall, and I said so, in no uncertain terms. That part didn't sit too well with brother Dillon, though. I let it drop, for reason politic.

Ripley told us the beast was afraid of fire and not much else. She told us how the beasts she'd seen moved different. The one we had walked on all fours 'cause of Spike being the incubator, and the others she'd seen walked only on two legs. Ours could run on the walls and ceiling as easily as on the floor. Dear Christ, I've never seen anything move so fast. It was like a spider on four legs. It moved and leaped like nothing should be allowed to.

We figured we could trap it in an unused [toxic wasted storage] tank -- one way in, one way out. We'd cover the area around the tank with quinitricetyline, get it into the area, light the quini, drive it into the tank, and close the door on it. Either we'd trap it or burn it. We thought it was a good plan. It was a shit plan. The beast was smart enough to stay away from the quini, and one of my idiot mates managed to light the quini while we was all still in it. The trap did nothing to the beast, and it burnt up ten of my pals. I hated and every one of those fuckers, but they was my mates and it was a bad way to go.

After that, 85 wanted to wait for rescue, and more than a few of the lags agreed. Sounded right, but Ripley filled us in on the Company view of the beast. She told us, it was all crew expendable with trained military and the likes of her crew, all valuable members of society. She said, why would W-Y give a shit about a handful of lifers who found God at the arse end of space? She was for killing the fucker. She was dumb about men maybe, but she wasn't no fish, and she had more bottle than a good lot of us. Nice tits, too. Perky, like.

Anyways, Dillon told us he'd rather die on his feet fighting than on his knees begging. Nice speech, all stirring, but basically he was saying how we'd all be twats if we didn't help kill the bug. The easiest way to get a con to do something is to tell them they're twats if they don't. Dillon wanted to lure it into the foundry and drown it in molten lead, with us as bait. We all agreed. Everyone but 85, but he was a twat, anyway.

I had a private talk with Dillon, then, just him and me, and I told him I thought 85 might have a point. They were hot for Ripley, the Company, sending an emergency evac team the second they knew she was on Fury. I said if we contained her, right, and waited, big dicks with guns was coming to sort us out. Dillon said with the end coming anyway we had to act like men, the same shite he was always spouting, about how God don't love us and it's up to us to walk the righteous path. I told him I didn't see how getting slaughtered was such a righteous path, but he was a nutter about God, and he meant to get right with himself. He wasn't listening to sense.

So we planned out a great tag-team race to lead it through the maze of tunnels to where we'd dump the lead. Brilliant except some of the doors didn't work. It was a bodge job. Some of the lags got lost, and some got scared, and some got eaten. It was a bad time. It was cold, and dark, and it smelled like petrol and smoke from the torches, and blood. Every twenty seconds, screams would echo through the tunnels; sometimes directions, sometimes instructions, sometimes just screams. Sometimes the screams stopped suddenly, sometimes they went on and on. We all prayed to God that the next [screams] weren't going to be ours. The thing was fast. It seemed to know what we were doing, but it couldn't help chasing after every man who ran. When it wasn't chasing, it was waiting -- waiting in the shadows, waiting to jump out of a dark tunnel. You could hear the clattering of its funning feet, echoing over the screams. What a fucking nightmare.

By the time Ripley and Dillon lured it into the mold, we were the only ones still alive. 85 was hiding in Andrews' office and shitting himself, I guess. I was at the controls to pour the lead, at the gantry platform. Ripley climbed out of the mold, and Dillon held the beast inside while it tore him up. Dillon was the toughest of us all; not even the beast could bulldog that convict. I dumped the lead on both of them, much as it gutted me. Dillon was dead; he just didn't know it yet. It was a mercy, and what he wanted, and the heat washing up was unbelievable. I was burning just close to it. Nothing could have survived -- and then that fucker leaped from the molten lead, the beast, still alive. How could something created by God survive fucking molten *lead*?

It climbed straight for Ripley -- climbed like a monkey burning hellfire. I told Ripley to open the sprinklers, to dump cold water on it. She got them open, doused the fucker. The creature cooled so fast that it popped like a bug on a windscreen. My idea. You'd think W-Y would have shown some appreciation that I saved their team from being eaten by a roasted monster, but no joy. That's part of the reason why I want this story out, to clearly make the point that Weyland-Yutani is a bunch of ungrateful fuckers.

See, that's when the Company men showed up. Some Company twat who called himself Bishop kept telling Ripley he wanted to help, "You can still have a life," he says. "We're here to help", he says. The only way I've survived so long in a C-Max was to know who I could trust. That Bishop was a lying shite, even 85 could see it. Ripley could see it, too.

Ripley and I pulled away from him on the control gantry, and one of the bastard troopers shot me in the leg, for no good goddamn reason. I liked Ripley. She was tough and never talked down to us double-Y's, but I would have smacked her on the head and carried her over to the Company men if they wouldn't have shot me. No deals, though, so fuck them. 85 agreed. 85 hit Bishop in the head with a wrench; took his ear half off, too, and bang, that was the end of 85. Poor dumb wanker. Bishop bled like a stuck pig, still trying to get Ripley to give herself up.

I was focused so hard on the men with the guns that I didn't see Ripley jump. I saw her fall, though. She'd been acting dicky, and I guess she was still fucked up from the EEV crash. Turns out she had a little version of the beast growing inside her. She was implanted, and she knew it, that's why she jumped -- so the Company wouldn't get it. The little beast crawled straight out of her chest, screaming like a newborn baby. It tried to get away but she held it in place. Held on to the little creature until both of them hit the furnace. That mare was tough.

They packed me up right quick after that. I've been moved to another C-Max to stir with another batch of double-Y chromos... I get by, but I don't sleep so good. Sometimes I hear someone should down the hall after lockdown and I'm right back there, in the dark, my chest tight, waiting for my turn to run with the stink of blood all around. I don't pray to God anymore; I don't believe. I can't, knowing that monsters like that exist. Dillon was wrong about God. It doesn't matter what we do or don't, the end comes for all of us.