Chapter Text
For the first time in a very long time, Myrine was fighting a losing battle.
Her vision was warped, smoke coiling in a glass, a sepia-toned hell of black walls dripping. Bodies drifted past her, rag-doll approximations of life wearing shredded utility suits, company-issued white tank tops, and unflattering underwear like they’d crawled out of their cryo pods just to die.
Faces were obscured by yellow pallor spiders, their limbs segmented like the knuckles on a hand. A final embrace. She didn’t need to bother with a closer examination to understand them; she recalled them in action on that awful, dreary planet. Watched through the cameras on the acquisition units as the skittering infection reduced the crew to hosts, screams cut off into silence, segmented tails cinching around fragile necks, air bladders swelling. Knew of the assets successfully brought aboard. Silent things, patient, waiting.
The dream – and it must be a dream, a summation of experience and appropriated assets, for this was not a place she knew – rippled. Her attention shifted up to the thing coiled in the dark above her head. Serpentine, gliding, saliva glistening in the light that had no origin. Caught the approximation of a shape, an ovoid, oblong head, a tail, segmented like a spine. Long claws, spread in a caress against stone.
Myrine watched it as much as it watched her. Felt something like burgeoning awareness, a touch of air whispering along her temples. Faint suggestions of a memory that didn’t belong to her crawling in – warmth like a womb, the bird-like flutter of a heart, gasping, screaming for air, the crunch of something shattering, elation –
She shot upright from her bed, company-issued sheets and their manufactured itch a barely there sensation, too focused on the hammering of her heart. The ugly, coiling warmth was building in her stomach, muscles quivering with adrenaline. Heaved the stale, recycled air.
The same dream. Again.
They’d been getting more frequent since the last of the specimens were brought aboard. More vivid. Something she hadn’t accounted for in the initial experiment. It was too consistent to ignore, the details were always the same, even if the scene changed. Perhaps–
No.
She shook the thought away, reaching for the notebook carefully tucked beneath her pillow. Flipped through the various pages, charts, and demarcations. Quiet, late night musings, biological speculation – mostly on T. ocellus, clever clever thing, rambling on about muscular hydrostats and limitations – and her personal project. Measurements, biological change, a scattered mix of variables marked in loose numbers and symbols. She added another mark beneath the poorly stamped poppy on the page, red and dried with old blood.
It was such a shame she’d have to burn this once they landed. All that data, lost.
“Whitlock,” A panicked voice called through the door, interrupting her musing. “You’re needed in the Med Bay.”
“What’s wrong?” She called, tucking the journal away and slipping off the bed, feet slipping into the discarded utility suit she had left on the floor. A bad habit, perhaps, but useful. Less time spent searching for it in the closet.
“It’s the Captain and Bronski. God, I don’t know how you slept through the alarm!” Clems voice was warbling, young, and perhaps a little frantic. “They’re trying to remove them, but they didn’t do it right, and since, y’know you study them I figure–”
“Clem,” Myrine cut through, door sliding open so she could look at him. Scruffy, a little listless, and wide-eyed. Staring at her without really seeing her. “What do you mean by ‘remove them’?”
“There was a fire in the cargo bay, and the clam things got out. You know, the octopus ones, with all the fingers –”
“The ovomorphs hatched?”
“What? Man, no, that’s not– look, Myra, they got the Captain, and Bronski. And now the Captain's dead and –”
“Go wake up Morrow, if you haven’t already.” Myrine didn’t bother listening to the rest of his rambling, lips pursed in mild agitation at the nickname he insisted upon. A useless thing. Too personal, intimate. They should know better.
Given the last snippet she heard from Clem, before she turned the corner, it seemed Zaveri and Bronski didn’t. She wanted to be surprised, but it wasn’t worth the effort. She breathed against the sharp flare of irritation building at her temples, felt the soft clicking in her throat, and shoved the information away with all the other examples of incompetent decision-making that marked her unfortunate companions.
The first thing she bothered to process at the sight of the Med Bay was how unnecessary it all was. The blaring of the alarm, the yammering of Rahim and Chibuzo as they repeated yet another loop of the same conversation, Zaveri’s overly expressive face giving away things best silenced.
It was always the same with these people. Messy, overly emotive, exaggerated comedy in a misplaced setting.
Myrine hadn’t done much more than shoo Rahim away from Dinsdale’s cooling corpse upon her entry, more interested in the deceased specimen clutched to his face. Manumala noxhydria, the evil hand, rising from its jar of night. She hadn’t had the opportunity to pluck one apart before this. Was forced to preserve the one intact specimen they had in an alkaline mixture, untouched.
“Chibuzo,” Myrine cut in before the woman could make another inane comment. “Get me a surgical tray.”
Slowly, Myrine coaxed the digits of the specimen loose, mindful of the glaring hole in its tail. The latex of her gloves would do nothing in the face of an acid that was liable to eat through the hull if it was disturbed. It had, thankfully, ceased its output once Dinsdale’s vitals flatlined.
Myrine hadn’t seen that particular reaction before. Perhaps the acid derived a particular component from active tissue? Pain stimulating a compound in the blood that, when exposed to air, ensures its corrosiveness? Or was it like that all the time?
“What do you-” Chibuzo started, eyes squinted and her shoulders hunched from the argument being bandied about. Always so eager to keep the peace, then clamming in on herself when confronted with command.
Myrine might be more inclined to give the woman a spare sliver of her sympathy if she hadn’t actively watched Chibuzo eat and drink in a lab full of parasitic lifeforms.
“While you waste time arguing back and forth on whether you can, or cannot, remove the parasite from Bronski,” Which they couldn’t, but they hadn’t watched the footage, had they? Hadn’t combed over the grainy, static images of carnage, bent ribcages, and splattered flesh as the parasite broke free from its host. Hadn’t watched rangey, roping bodies scuttle – as much as something with no limbs could scuttle – away into dark corners to grow. So squeamish in the face of discovery. Why they bothered with science on the dime of Weyland-Yutani was a mystery, even to her. “I would like to take the dead specimen to the lab and examine it. So, Chibuzo, if you would be so kind, bring me a surgical tray.”
She wanted a little more than the noxhydria. She wanted Dinsdale’s corpse as well. If she pried him open, what would she find? How quickly could the implanted parasite grow in just a few scant hours? She also knew that the crew's sentiment would prevent it. Wasteful, but not an argument worth having.
She knew enough about the Facehuggers – really, such an ugly name – to know they prioritized the host above themselves. She could hear the other one, clasped to Bronski’s skull, the hiss-thump of air bladders swelling beneath the alarm. The guttural, dying gasps of a chest forcing air in and out despite the obstruction in the esophagus. But what about what was left behind? How did the embryo ensure its survival?
“Myra, you can’t possibly mean–” Chibuzo sounded almost as baffled as she looked.
Myrine could feel the sneer wanting to build, sharp teeth eager to bite, but whatever she wanted to say quickly silenced itself as the alarm’s wailing ceased and Morrow's voice cut through the resulting silence.
“What happened?” Stalwart, and perhaps a little furious. Ever the company man.
“ Mr. Morrow,” Zaveri startled, “You’re in your underwear.”
“I said, what happened?”
“Captain’s dead,” Rahim declared, apropos of nothing, as if the mangled state of Dinsdale’s throat wasn’t enough evidence. A burned, slick mess, slathered in soft bubbling acid, trying to neutralize itself.
“I can see that.” Morrow’s flat affect almost made it comedic, Chibuzo and Rahim still spitting quietly at each other between every gap in the conversation.
Myrine didn’t bother attempting to get Chibuzo’s attention again, while Rahim explained the exact circumstances leading them up to this point. Instead, she plucked the myriad of surgical tools off their tray, gloved fingers whisking the traveling tabletop with her in a clatter of metal.
“Whitlock, what are you doing?” Morrow again, less frustrated than before. He finally had enough answers to satisfy his displeasure, perhaps. Hardly her concern. He would do what was best for the company, and she would do what was best for her.
“Retrieving the specimen,” She raised a sardonic brow at his tone, glancing up at him from beneath her lashes for a moment, before she set her hands around the noxhydria and pushed. Hummed in delighted pleasure as the muscles warped beneath her hands, those long, spindly phalanges suddenly splaying wide and the tail releasing in a cord of rubbery flesh. “I would, however, concur with Chibuzo regarding protocol. The cold should slow, if not halt, continued gestation in Bronski.”
The suction from the proboscis was profound, Myrine found, as she slowly worked it free of Dinsdale’s throat. It was an ugly thing, a pink ribbon of flesh, longer than her forearm. Thoracic implantation, then? That suggested the implanted parasite didn’t move far from the site it was deposited.
“Should?” Zevari butted in, concern evident.
“I’ve not exactly had a chance to subject the parasite to extreme temperatures, Zevari. Hence,” Here, Myrine gently tapped a finger to the side of the creature, slowly placing it down onto the silver tray, topside up. It wouldn’t do to reactivate the acid by giving it new material to burn through. “So if it’s all the same to you–”
She hefted the tray, stepping around the examination bed and breezing past the gathered crowd, hearing distressed complaints. Clem and his weak stomach, Zaveri barking after her with something like reprimand, Chibuzo’s placating desire to ‘neutralize’ the living specimen. Nothing came, however, from the most important voice on the ship. Nothing pointed in her direction, anyway.
Permission enough. Myrine and Morrow both knew, after all, that it was exactly the sort of thing Yutani would approve of.
What Myrine actually intended for the noxhydria, well. That was best kept between her and the dead.
The lab was a cold, clinical mother.
Expectation came with the demand for perfection. Sterile steel lined in neat, perfect rows. Glass beakers and small pipettes required an economy of motion, not a bubble captured, not a drop spilled. Everything was finite and infinitesimal in its limitations.
MU/TH/UR reigned quietly, a tight, mechanical fist that smelled like disinfectant and the afterburn of circuit boards, cooling fans whirring like the ticking of a metronome. Glass cages rattled in their hold, little bodies pattering against the unforgiving slopes with a desire to be free.
Machines murmured here, diagnostics, diagrams, data files cataloguing every experiment Myrine had the fortune of conducting. It was a clean space, and yet the filthiest. Intention left a stain, bloody splatters and animal shrieking. Lifeforms, once their behavior hit its expiration date, became corpses. Bodies to pluck apart, information scavenged under her hands as she stooped, vulturelike.
The noxhydria was no different.
Slowly, Myrine peeled its skin apart. Fleshy layers of adipose and muscle, the small, exaggerated collection of alveoli developing along the curve of each air bladder. There was no stomach. No organs, no eyes. The dreadful little beast existed entirely for one purpose. Implant, and die.
The proboscis, however, was fascinating. The mucosal lining, run through MU/TH/UR’s system, implied something mutagenic. Cancerous. A slick, running line of DNA folded into every inch of the system, a single code made to consume and adapt.
Was the host more than a place to gestate, then? A donor, genetic code laid bare, sucked up by a parasite acclimizing to whatever environment it found itself in. Hijacking pre-existing evolution, for the best chance possible at survival, by integrating the most viable alleles into a pre-existing genome.
All of the Ovomorphs had been uniform in size. The noxhydria, what few specimens she could reliably measure, also were the same. A uniformity that deviated upon gestation of the embryo.
Truly, it was such a shame she couldn’t have Bronski as well. If they’d let her, she could open him up, probe at the embryo gestating within. Slip samples from the parasite, test the DNA as it progresses.
A small noise caught her attention, forceps and scalpel pausing in their pursuit. Gentle, like a beak, tap tap tapping away. She glanced up and met the Eye.
“Hello, ‘Cella.” She murmured, watching the strange little creature’s pupil split, a whirl of observation rotating underneath her attention. Set her tools on the hydrophobic tray off to the side; small beads of acid had collected along the glass blade of the scalpel, spitting before settling into something inert.
She lifted her pinky, clean unlike the rest of her latex-clad fingers, and gently tapped against the glass. Watched the segmented pupils flex, expanding to swallow up the light, before a small tendril pointedly rapped against the glass in return.
Despite her research on Xenomorphs, Trypanohyncha ocellus was her favorite among the specimens they’d collected. Had been there in person, for its capture, watched it scrape flesh from the face of one of the crew – she hadn’t bothered to remember their names, the expedition proving again and again that there was no point– and burrow into the woman's empty socket after Ocella had ripped the offending eye free.
It had taken a considerable amount of effort to bring her aboard.
She remembered those moments in the Med Bay, dozens of voices crowing in disgust, spitting filth about retribution. Myrine had been more focused on coaxing Ocella free from the woman’s socket. The memory of the creature's weight in her palm, slick and warm through her glove, as she eased Ocella into the glass containment tube. The humid feeling of her breath fogging against the face shield she had worn during the process, that foggy high of silent success.
Ocella had looked like a bright point of light in that container, so shiny and new.
Ocella was far too intelligent for its own good, strong, as well. Myrine had watched those deceptively slender arms crack open a vertebra she had inserted in the tank, scraping the intervertebral disc clean from its hollow, and bone marrow from the vertebral body. It reminded her of old research on orangutans, when apes were still the subject of human interest, and the theories regarding their longer muscle fibers. Of cephalopods and their curling limbs, ferreting their way into tight spaces, carving room where there was none.
“Hmm?” Myrine murmured, curious what had caught Ocella’s attention. It was usually a passive observer regarding her actions, content to watch Myrine’s experiments, inoffensive in a manner her co-workers never seemed to manage.
Ocella’s gaze shifted, fixing on the left of her arm, where the sleeve of her utility suit lay rolled. This time, as if to emphasize its point, two tendrils slapped against the glass.
Myrine followed the direction and paused. The only thing on her arm was a needlemark, placed along her basilic vein, a highway into her circulatory system. She stared back at Ocella, brows furrowed. She hadn’t realized that Ocella was watching when she had administered the injection.
“What?” A whisper, like a secret shared, floated between them. Ocella stared, the way few creatures ever would, and collapsed her various pupils. A seven-petal flower full of intent. Watched as one of those pale, curling limbs lifted to swipe against the hard shell protecting the soft, malleable sclera.
It took her a moment, a slow, long breath escaping her as she tried to grasp what exactly was being conveyed. Watched Ocella pointedly blink, a milky secondary lens wetting the surface, and swipe across its pupils again.
Surely it couldn’t mean…
Myrine glanced down, towards the shiny, warped surface of the stainless steel counter. Saw the rabbit-like scrunch of her sharp nose, the furrow of her brow drawing tighter, lips pulled just enough to show the white splash of a fang. Her sclera, luminescent and sterile under the flourescents, spiderwebbed with agitated veins. The silver of her eyes flat against the surface, a barely there differentiation. The same as they always were.
Except–
There, if she leaned just a little closer to the surface, there was a deviation. A thin ring around her pupil, gold in color– no, no, not gold. Yellow. The deep, predatory kind.
That hadn’t been there this morning.
Myrine huffed a laugh, soft and disbelieving, shifting her hand to run her knuckles smoothly along the glass of Ocella’s container. Lips tugged in a small, toothless smile and a murmured thanks. Clever little creature. One with long-term memory, at that, if it remembered what Myrine’s eyes were supposed to look like, and enough critical thinking skills to assume the source of the change.
How fascinating!
“I don’t understand how you can stand that thing,” Chibuzo muttered from the other side of the table, water bottle – how many times did Myrine have to correct Chibuzo about her deplorable habits before the lesson stuck?– clutched in her hands as she watched the interaction. “It’s unsettling.”
Ocella’s iris split, seven individual pupils manifesting, staring back at Chibuzo.
“And the ticks aren’t?” Myrine scoffed, glancing at the container Chibuzo had been working with. Watched as one of the long-bodied creatures sank its exposed head into the flesh of a dead rat, the leech-like pull of its small fangs, the thick glutting of off-color blood swelling its horrible little body.
They were the most uninteresting thing in the lab. She couldn’t understand why they bothered with them. A tick was a tick, the capability to spin webs hardly justified the wasted space. But whatever Yutani wanted, Yutani got, and for one reason or another, the ticks made that list.
“At least they don’t stare.” Chibuzo emphasized the point by slamming her open bottle down, the clang of metal on metal agitating.
Myrine watched the water splash from its confines, human spit and contaminants splattering on the sterile steel surface. Felt something in her back lock up, a seething sort of attention that had her drawing up from her curious slump. Clenched her teeth, if only to prevent them from grinding and shredding her inner cheeks again.
Bread, innocuous, synthetic, miserable, white bread was in her lab. Right next to the active, ongoing examination of a tick, drinking blood.
Slowly, hands quivering slightly with tension, she slid the dissection out of her immediate range of motion. Peeled the gloves from her fingers, ignoring the tacky snap and cling of the latex against her sweating palms, and delicately dropped them in the hazard bin off to her left.
“Chibuzo,” Anger had never felt warm to Myrine. No, it was a cold thing, a burning in the throat and the lungs. A deep-seated loathing that whited out everything but the object of her ire. “Do you think you’re exempt from your own rhetoric?”
Chibuzo stuttered, half turned towards Myrine, eager to open her mouth and failing just as quickly.
How many times had they had this conversation? Five? Six? Too many. Too fucking many.
“Do you think safety regulations are suggestions, Chibuzo, to be engaged and ignored at a whim?”
“N-no, no, but look–” Chibuzo waved her hand, elbow brushing daringly close to the specimen container in front of her. “I can’t eat with all the smoking, alright? What do you want me to do?”
Myrine had never understood the deep-rooted aversion Chibuzo had to cigarettes. Her increasing desire to see Rahim and Teng stop smoking. Cigarettes were a dime a dozen, back on Earth, an agent of control, a persistent addiction that preached pleasure, when all it did was cut the edges off things. Made it numb. Hazy.
It wasn’t as if Chibuzo had the kind of credit to live in a neighborhood that wasn’t choked through by underground ventilation and factory smog, no inbred excuse of vanity that turned its nose up at lesser pleasures. Chibuzo had crawled up out of the dirt, like every other sad, miserable wretch that was aboard the Maginot.
But no, no, it was the cigarettes that ruined her appetite. Not the cigars Morrow smoked on his rounds, or the synthetic dip Shmuel chewed. Just a tiny stick of white-orange inoculation that drove her to violate lab protocols in the name of ‘preserving her appetite’.
“Your job.”
A slap at the glass startled them both.
Myrine glanced down and saw Ocella’s iris slanted into something that almost looked… smug?
“That’s it,” Chibuzo muttered, reaching out and snagging onto Ocella’s container, the force jostling the eye. “I can’t deal with this.”
Whatever biting comment Myrine wanted to give – about how Chibuzo couldn’t deal with much, about her pandering insubordination and gelatin spine – died in her throat as Ocella stared at her over Chibuzo’s shoulder, one pale, pink shuddering tendril pressed against the glass, and Ocella’s gaze locked off to the right.
Myrine turned just quick enough to watch a tick – out of its cage– crawl onto the edge of Chibuzo’s bottle, long abdomen flexing, heard the soft splatter of something disturbing the still surface of the water. Watched it slide back down, its ugly, wriggling body squirming into the innocuous stack of bread.
A quiet part of her, human, fragile, murmured concerns. Things like loose asset and possible infection. Quailed at the idea of another unknown variable, the uncounted number of gestating larvae, they didn’t know how quickly the ticks took to grow.
The rest of her? The one stuck, day in and day out, with violated order? Chewing on her words, clawing for scraps of sanity, nights spent shaking with fevers she couldn’t let anyone know about? Smoothed out like a placid lake, furrowed brows relaxing, the irritated pinch of her teeth releasing the soft skin of her inner cheek, tongue swiping away the blood.
Action was finally meeting consequence.
She turned, plucking the tray holding the noxhydria’s stripped body and headed toward the freezer. There was already one parasite loose. Trapped in cryo, perhaps, but Myrine doubted it would stay there long. A fire in containment was one thing, but released specimens? All of the containment units in the cargo hold, especially the larger, more aggressive specimens, were on a different circuit. They wouldn’t have opened just because one system malfunctioned.
Somebody had wanted those specimens loose. A minor setback in close quarters was hardly going to stop them.
“Fucks sake!” Rahim’s voice cut through the slow, stilted silence.
“Oh! Oh god-” Chibuzo yelped behind her, as Myrine submerged herself in the deep freezer, sliding out a frozen tray to slot the dissected specimen into. Best practice and all that. She wouldn’t want to contaminate the other samples.
“Fucking bastard went for a walk,” The clang of metal tongs snipping, the strange, pitched squeal of what Myrine presumed to be the tick, and the hiss of a container slamming shut. “How’d it get out?”
“I don’t, I don’t know.”
“Must have left the top open.” Myrine interjected, hefting the containers top most seal. Swiped her tongue against the sharp points of her teeth in amusement as Chibuzo snatched it from her, snapping the ticks' containment unit shut.
“No, no, I always-”
“Doesn’t matter now, s’over now, yeah?” Rahim muttered around the cigarette in his mouth. “‘Sides, Zaveri wants everybody in the mess.”
“Has something happened?” Myrine queried, watching Chibuzo pick up the ticks and return them to containment along the far wall with the other specimens. Heard the buzzer as the locks slid in place, red light going green.
She hadn’t heard it earlier, had she?
“Bronski’s dead.” Came Rahim’s belligerent whistle, Chibuzo’s earlier frustration turning to panic in response, but all Myrine could do was stare at Ocella. Sitting patiently in the unsecured containment unit, the flower of its pupils staring back.
There was a soft ringing in her ears, a bubble of static that reduced the mechanical whining of the lab and muttering voices into nothing but cotton. Stared at the glaring red light above Ocella’s cage, shifting from one foot to the next.
Myrine shouldn’t.
She really, really shouldn’t.
So why was she smiling?
“Myra!” Rahim yelled from somewhere down the hall. “ Hurry it up!”
“Coming!” She called back, making one last scrap of eye contact with Ocella before she turned her back. Let the door to the lab slam shut.
Ignored the sound of glass shattering against the floor.
Ignored how her reflection, in the warped glass of the door, had too many teeth.
There was something laughably morbid about watching the crew fall apart.
Two dead men locked in cryo.
A fast-growing Xenomorph cut loose among the vacant halls of the Maginot.
A failing fuel system.
A sabotuer.
Two additional specimens loose, one in the body of a boy – Myrine was starting to catch on to the rhythm of how, exactly, Weyland-Yutani selected the crew for this mission – and the other loose in the lab, patient, clever, and entirely avoidable.
The Maginot had been doomed from the start. A collective of odds and ends, barely competent enough to string together an intelligent conversation, let alone follow company protocol. Some had been pieces that had lived past their purpose: Teng, whose perversions escalated into ignored orders, Rahim, putting personal addiction over company deadlines. Others were replaceable, Shmuel, with his bent head and discontent mumbling. Malachite, young, poor, and hungry, plucked off the street, hand-fed words like ‘opportunity’ and ‘three square meals’. The kind of people who, when asked to jump, stalled. Stumbled.
Failures.
The only real outliers were Morrow and Myrine.
They’d both been given access to the crew's files for different reasons. Both more than aware of the red tape surrounding the other. The redacted information. Gifted personal directives from Yutani herself.
And somehow, in a summation of brilliant deductive reasoning, Morrow had thought that it would be a smart idea to hand her a gun.
She expected better of him.
She recalled various instances on the initial flight, the circumstances surrounding each captured specimen. The smooth, paternal draw to his brow, a false affect as he sniffed out weakness easily bent in the face of praise. Weaponizing humiliation, as he often did with Clem, to ensure the best possible results. The drawn spine of command settling easy, always the man with the plan. Who cared if there were a few setbacks, as long as he ensured they kept moving forward?
Better than Dinsdale, with his hands-off approach, letting Teng spread his filth in the dark because he was deemed ‘necessary’. As if MU/TH/UR would have let them drift off course. Did they really think Yutani trusted human hands? Certainly better than Zaveri, soft-hearted, violating company policy, compromising her authority for a few scraps of affection from a man who yammered on about love like a poet chasing a muse.
Myrine, distantly, was curious if Zaveri knew she wasn’t the first on the crew to fall for Bronski’s charm. There had been at least three during the first few years of their journey. All dead. One in particular, the Chief Medical Officer, had been a right mess.
Myrine could recall the one instance she’d caught the two of them just outside the lab, Bronski crowding the poor woman up against the wall with murmurs of the future on his breath. Myrine had been less than forgiving for the incident. Not that it had mattered, in the long run. The poor woman had killed herself not long after they brought the last of the Ovomorphs aboard, a bloody, pathetic thing curled up on the floor of the Med-Bay.
She couldn’t handle the guilt, Myrine supposed.
Some of Morrow’s behavior had to be organic. He’d been a father, once. A fool's choice, given who he worked for. Chiyo Yutani, who’d plucked his decrepit childhood form off the street and plied him with top-of-the-line cybernetics, was not a woman who suffered split loyalties. Ruthlessness was her trade, following Hideo and his rather articulate consumption of the Weyland Corporation following the… unfortunate incident with Peter Weyland and his pursuit of ‘God’.
Perhaps Morrow thought Myrine was like him? Bonded in mutual respect of a higher power, cleaved close to Yutani and her desires because there was nothing and no one left to cling to.
Not an impossible thought. Myrine had learned early on as a child that it was better to pretend. Button yourself up into the shape that was expected of you, perform perfection, duck your head, reduce yourself to ripples, and you could get away with just about anything.
Nobody liked a mess, all spit, heat, unwilling confessions. They liked something that was easily categorized. Placed in a box, reliable, unchanging. On what shelf had Morrow placed her, she wondered?
Chibuzo and Bronski had been rather clear in their view of her, clinical, unfeeling, empathy surrendered for efficiency. Eager to ignore ethics in the pursuit of knowledge. What was a few hurt feelings in the grand scheme of things? Such a shame they never listened to sense when it offered its hand.
Morrow must have thought much the same, handing her the gun as he had, in broad view of everyone else. Implicit trust placed in her hands. Two peas in the corporate pod. The specimens came first, everything else was just details.
She couldn’t help the soft, huffing laughter that escaped her as she swiped her ID through the panel of her room, the noise lost in the hiss of her door opening.
What a fool.
No matter, let Morrow have his interrogations. Myrine needed to clean up her mess, before they landed.
Or crashed.
Whatever came first.
She slipped her hands beneath her pillow, grasping the journal. Thumbed over the bland company logo on the front, and thought about the sky. Bland, ugly, slate grey. Watery sunlight filtered through the smog on a good day, and on the rest, the sun was traded for neon lights marking Weyland-Yutani billboards that promised to ‘Build Better Worlds’.
All this effort, wasted, over what? Wanting a bigger share? Revenge? Companies didn’t bow to sheep.
Morons, the lot of them.
She tucked the journal close to her chest, stalking out of the room with quick steps. She hated the hallways, in truth. Too empty, open doors leading to hallways and hallways to doors, one after another.
A maze for rats, and now, the cat was loose. If the cat was twice the size of a man, and a perfected killing machine to boot.
Something rattled above her, a steel panel knocked by uneven weight.
She didn’t pause, even as she swallowed the next mouthful of air. Breathed out slowly, shakily. One foot in front of the other.
The vents above her warbled, huffing breaths coming from everywhere, nowhere.
It reminded her of the dreams, the ones that started after the first injection. The world saturated a cloudy green hue. Flashes of color, sunset red-oranges in the shapes of moving bodies, her body. Heat signatures, a world of sensation, unbothered by refined, distracting detail. Predator and prey. Hunter and hunted.
She didn’t feel hunted.
She felt considered, measured. Listened to the slow, gentle thumbs of a body more than capable of stealth, deciding to offer awareness. Heard the soft, clattering hiss. Felt the hair on her body rise at the noise. What did it sound like? Organic? Synthetic? Air whistling through an empty tube, wind on a sheer cliff, a knife sliding free from its sheath.
It didn’t stay long; there one moment, looking, watching, and gone the next.
She let go of the breath that had trapped itself in her chest, heaving and scrambling the rest of the way to the mess, nails digging into the plastic of the journal until it dented. Get rid of it. She just needed to get rid of it.
Everything else could wait.
The incinerator was a convenient piece of machinery. Hot enough to burn away the scraps and filth that clung to the dishware, but not so hot that it damaged the metal utensils. More than enough to scrape her ledger clean.
Myrine watched decades of work, snatched in the days she was out of cryo, go up in flames. Breathed in the smell of it, plant fiber and woodsmoke, the gagging plume of plastic melting into a patina of grease. Felt something in her waver, a quibbling, yowling thing that screamed it wasn’t fair. Nonsensical in its grief, directionless, because how do you punish yourself?
Slowly, with neglect.
Myrine smothered it, the desire. There would be time to recreate it if she survived. The records, analog, obsolete, didn’t just exist on paper. They existed within her, smooth stretches of space-pale skin, the anomalies slowly growing along her spine. The curl of her mouth, the teeth she’d lost and regained, the memory of muscle growth and carefully reigned-in strength.
It had taken a frustrating amount of time to relearn how to control it, hours of bruised skin and broken tools, reduced to a toddler strangling a chick in over-excited hands because her body insisted on betraying itself.
“Whitlock,” The intercom crackled, conveying a remarkable level of agitation. “Where are you?”
“The mess, why?”
“Petrovitch damaged the fuel pods, took out navigation. Malachite, Chibuzo, and Rahim are dead –”
“And how, exactly, did that happen?” Myrine interrupted. She’d seen Malachite drink from Chibuzo’s water while they held the meeting in the mess, and almost felt sorry for the poor boy. Almost.
“Ticks somehow got into Malachite. Rahim and Chibuzo ignored direct orders and tried to pry one off. Released some sort of gas, killed them all.”
Huh. That was quick.
She might have to reevaluate her earlier assessment of the ticks. Today was certainly shaping up to be a day of firsts.
“Clem and I are going to wake up the crew. I want you on the bridge—“
The sound of gunshots and a young man’s agonized scream cut the feed short.
They must have found Petrovich.
It made sense. He’d lost his… lover? Fiancee? Wife? During their visit to TF-12, where they’d acquired the Drosera specimens. A lifeform, somewhere between mosquito and dragonfly in its composition, had bitten the woman during the acquisition team's five-day trek through the jungle. Not long after, she had gone blind, larvae eating through every scrap of soft tissue they could reach.
She didn’t survive, and they had denied Petrovitch’s request to bring her aboard for a burial in space. A good excuse as any for Petrovitch’s inability to cope with reality among the stars.
She understood Morrow's reasoning about the bridge. Redirect fuel, prioritize life support in a small space, the impact shielding.
The problem with that, however, was everything else on the ship. All those bodies made for a nice meal.
Myrine headed toward the lab instead.
It would be more than enough to shield her in the event of a crash. Would be a higher priority for any recovery team Yutani would send, or whoever Petrovich sold them all out to. The specimens, after all, came first.
The halls were covered in blood.
A splatter here, a puddle there, scorch marks where live rounds had embedded in the walls. Something long and small left scrapes in a few of the puddles. Red dots collected in sets of eight.
The ticks, then?
Quite a few of them, at that. Five, if she excluded the initial two specimens. Five free-roaming specimens, on top of the likely roaming Ocella and the very present Xenomorph.
Conveniently, however, the ticks were animals like any other animal. They wanted to eat.
And given the amount of blood drying on the base of the lab's floor, they had found it. It seemed Clem hadn’t quite made the cut, given the hole in his head. Clean, clinical. A merciful death, compared to the other options.
The ticks clearly didn’t mind the recently dead, their engorged bodies bloated, though not to full capacity. Yet. Time enough to move them, she hoped.
She picked her way around the body, counting them as she went. One on the wrist, two on the torso, another at the neck. The last had somehow wedged its way into Clem’s skull, its abdomen ballooning out of the ragged mess, incapable of inflating all the way due to the pressure of the bone.
Myrine was glad she had insisted upon at least one large specimen containment unit within the lab.
At first, it had been a matter of convenience. She hadn’t wanted to waste time walking back and forth from the Lab to the Cargo Bay, and neither had Chibuzo or Bronski. Somehow, in all the rotating doors of dead bodies, funerals, and specimen collection, only Bronski ever got the opportunity to use it. Privileges of being the botanist and having a viable, mostly nonviolent specimen to monitor.
The Drosera had been a strange find, entirely accidental.
They’d found both specimens on day five of the trek, the source of the alien insect that had killed Petrovich’s spouse. They’d been burrowing on the jungle floor, upright instead of the arboreal orientation they seemed to prefer in containment. Long, dexterous roots, hard fiber petals, and the stamen. Strange, aware, slipping the gaps between each petal to test the air like a snake's tongue.
It was a shame that the only time Myrine got to enjoy the possibility of a grown Xenomorph was when it had escaped containment. There had been no time to explore, given that Morrow had denied her access to the planet they had found the Ovomorphs on.
That was for the best. She might have never left. Lost herself in the winding pathways, cut off from the herd by her own insatiable appetite to understand.
She pulled gloves on, the latex smooth, grounding. There was no point in what-if’s. Retrospective thinking had never done her any good. It just became rumination. A beast with teeth, generating doubt. Doubt would get her killed. Valuable seconds lost to a might have or should have. Like now.
She hoped, thought, that she could move Clem and the ticks wouldn’t detach. Wouldn’t engage the strange, poisonous mechanism that had terminated those three in the Med Bay.
The tick that had been feeding on the dead rat earlier hadn’t moved, even as its cage-mate escaped. Had not so much as suggested it even knew the opportunity for freedom existed in the first place.
If she ignored the blaring of alarms in the distance, the sucking swell of insectoid mouths, the threat lurking in every shadow, she could almost convince herself the day was normal.
That the copper stench was just the blood of another specimen, mixing in with bleach and solvent. That this was just another experiment, controlled, all variables accounted for, no risks to be had.
She rolled the sleeves of her utility suit down, covering as much skin as she could. Tightened the cuffs until they chafed, hard fabric meant to stay clean even when she couldn’t.
Safety. At least where she was concerned.
Carefully, she eased Clem's body down onto the floor, one hand braced on the back of his neck, the other braced on his side.
He was still warm.
The ticks, thankfully, didn’t move. Just chittered, low and content, bodies wavering under the water content in their bodies. Didn’t do anything at all, as she dragged Clem’s corpse into the open containment unit.
Unresponsive feeders.
She didn't bother hiding the heave of relief that escaped her, back sliding against the glass of the containment unit. The chill was pleasant on her feverish skin.
Too much adrenaline was speeding up the injections' effects. Increased fatigue, body aches, the itch along her spine.
The alarms had cut off sometime during the time it took her to complete the task. She ran a gloved thumb over the gun holstered in her belt and popped the small leather flap that kept it secure.
It was unlikely she’d get the chance to use it.
She’d never had the makings of an excellent marksman, despite the steadiness demanded of her in dissections. Preferred her hands when push came to shove, more reliable. Couldn’t risk live ammo, with the Xenomorph and its acidic blood, not unless she felt particularly inspired and wanted to drink in the unforgiving cold of space. Doubted she could aim worth a damn, if Ocella decided she would be an excellent host. The little beast was far too quick for that.
The lab was silent, other than the ticking of a timer on MU/TH/UR’s interface and her stuttered breaths of relief.
There were supposed to be another two weeks between now and the Maginot’s landing back on Earth. Two long, slow weeks, crawling through the dark.
The timeline had been pushed up.
Four hours before the end.