Alien Presence

Loud banshee shriek, steel frame buckling, then tearing like the sound of aluminum foil, (whip, whip, whip), oxygen rushing, a hurricane, escape pods bleeding out, cabin ripped apart and blown out into vacuum, a torrent of debris, then the abrasive heat when the hull hits the atmosphere. Lieutenant major Danica Miles managed to get her suit on and sealed before she was flung against the wall---or was it the floor, all of the angles had changed---and she lost consciousness.

Danica Miles woke up to her own breathing, amplified through the intake valves of the helmet. The light was trickling through what appeared to be some kind of oily substance smeared across her faceplate. Trying to lift her right arm, she realized it was pinned down by something. She lifted her left arm instead to wipe the oily smear from the glass. Sunlight trickled down through the remains of her escape pod. It looked like being inside the rib cage of a desiccated, half-eaten animal.

Everything in the pod had broken free from their secured lockers and had now buried her in a mound of debris. It was a miracle she was still alive. She tried to wiggle free, her appendages seemed fine, but with mounting horror, she realized that she was buried underneath the detritus and couldn't do more than wiggle her arms and legs. So she was going to live, after all, only to die on this unknown planet, either suffocation or if the suspended animation program switched on unconscious starvation.

Her radio squealed. "Getting a distress signal from an emergency survival suit down there. If you're alive, don't move. This ship is coming apart around us. Wait for me to come get you out."

An emergency hatched opened up at an odd angle. So that's the floor above me then, thought Danica, abstractly. She recognized in her strange thought processing the onset of shock. She struggled to push it down deep inside. She needed to take command.

She hit the side of her helmet with her head to switch on the intercom. "This is Lieutenant Major Danica Miles, acting captain of the Pegasus, I'm ordering you to come down here and unbury me. Can you hear me?"

There was some quiet breathing on the other line as if the person was thinking about how to respond. "Danica Miles. Well, Well, Well. I'll be right down, Captain."

Danica didn't like how the voice had called her captain. The tone sounded more like "Princess."

A nylon rope dropped over the edge of the hatch, and a man in an emergency survival suit crawled out legs first and began to belay down the side of the dark corridor.

She cursed.

She recognized the voice now as Chief Engineer Akimbo Gonzalez. She was well versed in Akimbo Gonzalez's history aboard the Pegasus, Dark Space exploration vessel. Akimbo was a Kesslerite, a new earth colonist, which was already a strike against him. He had all the disrespect of authority and especially women in authority common to their culture.

He had a long history of insubordination on the Pegasus, involving himself in the black market, stealing from the commissary (there were even rumors that he ran a ring of escorts from the lower decks that could never stick). Danica had long since tried to convince her Captain to lock him in the brig and ditch him at the next spaceport, but the captain considered Akimbo too valuable. He was insubordinate and reckless, but no one knew dark space or the inner workings of spacecraft like him. Kesslerites understood space like Orcas understood the deep sea.

Akimbo dropped onto the pile of debris and got to his knees. Danica's helmet, the only part of her uncovered, was level with his lower chest.

"Get me the fuck out of here." She snarled.

His gloved hand moved out and gave her a hard rap on the helmet. The loud crack and kinetic force shocked Danica like a slap in the face. "Now you be quiet, Belle, and don't cause a ruckus and Akimbo will get you out of there in no time, but if you start to panic and move about, we both be dead, so best stay quiet that is good for you."

Danica gritted her teeth; if they got out of there alive, she would have her opportunity to get him back. Akimbo began to brush the cabin junk off her. The larger items he would slowly pull off of her, then consider the best place to put them, then drop them softly in a halo of broken parts around her body.

The ship moaned and creaked like a dying animal. Danica was unburied to her waist.

Occasionally, the whole thing would shudder and Danica would be partially buried again, as a wave of debris, rolled down the hill on top of them. Danica's face burned and she hoped Akimbo couldn't hear her scream through the helmet. She was already ashamed of how weak and helpless she appeared. She had to marvel a little though at how patiently Akimbo continued to unearth her from the ship.

"You're free now, I think," he said through the radio, breathing deeply, "Try to pull your legs out."

Danica gritted her teeth and pulled her legs from where they were buried, inch-by-inch, as intense pain coursed through her body. Finally, she was free and she grabbed a hold of Akimbo suit as she almost fell down the hill. "Easy, Easy, Sleeping Beauty, your legs be damaged. Suit diagnostic says left knee dislocated and administering an anesthetic. It's also reading some bruises and contusions, but nothing too bad."

Danica Miles pulled out her sidearm from her utility belt and stuck it his face.

"You need to address me as Lieutenant Major Miles, according to my rank, and I will call you Auxiliary Engineer Gonzalez, do I make myself clear? Now I am giving you an order. Get me out off this damn ship, right now."

Through the dark glass of his helmet, Danica could only see his eyes, illuminated by the suit HUD, appraising her coldly.

Her radio hissed: "Yes, Second Officer Miles. You'll need to hold onto me while I run the motorized crank on the cable."

Danica Miles put her arms around his waist, carefully holding her pistol, against his armpit, as Akimbo turned on the motor, and the cable he climbed down on, began to wind back up, taking them with it.

When they got to the ledge, Akimbo reached out and grabbed it, and with incredible strength and agility pulled them both over the lip and into the hatch. For a few minutes, they both lay there and breathed deeply. Danica's leg was pretty much numb and useless, but pain began to radiate from every other organ in her body. It felt as if every inch of her had been beaten and wrung out.

"Lieutenant Miles, have the suit inject more pain blockers at level two, makes the pain less distracting, and you be mobile."

"I can handle it." Said Danica, but she had the suit inject her. The pain ebbed enough for her to concentrate on their task.

"How do we get out of here?"

Gonzalez pointed to a hatch. "I came through that door earlier. On the other side, it looks like something took a bite out of the ship, there's a big enough tear to get out."

"Well then what are we waiting for" Said Danica. She got to her feet, and pointed her pistol, chambered with chemical rounds, at him, "You first. I know your kind can't be trusted."

"Every spacer I ever met kept his word." Said Gonzalez, but he started walking.

Like he had said there was a huge hole in the ship. A bright yellowish-red sun blasted through the hole, almost blinding Danica. Her helmet darkened to compensate and she could see that the ground looked like it was sharp glassy silica, almost like obsidian daggers.

"Be careful going through the hole," Said Gonzalez, "Sharp wires coming out of the walls. If they puncture your suit, you depressurize."

Danica just signaled with the gun. Gonzalez stepped through the hole in the ground and was illuminated by sunlight. His suit was covered with dents and scratches. There were two large survival packs piled on the ground beside him. He signaled with his hands for her to come through, and Danica signaled him to back off.

She stepped through, her bad leg almost giving way, and her body almost falling on torn sheet metal, before she caught herself. She pulled herself out of the ship and onto the hard cragged surface. The ship made a large high pitched squeal and tilted upward, and then started to roll down the mountain, breaking apart in the fall into several pieces.

With a sense of vertigo, Danica realized that the ship had crashed onto a long shelf along the side of a jagged dagger-like mountain and had been hanging there half on and half off the ledge the entire time they were inside. She could see down far below them sputtering fires and strewed ship debris and realized how close she came to a sudden, terrifying death.

"I'm a survivor," she thought, "I'm highly trained and I am tough. I got myself out and I can survive this."

"We need to get off this ridge and down into that valley," Called Akimbo. "There are parts to make a radio beacon powerful enough to pierce this atmosphere on that ship if we can salvage it."

She nodded. There were thin ridges and serrations in the glassy rock-face, a natural path that winded down into the valley below them, where the remains of the ship were. "Pick up the bags and we'll go." She said.

************

Danica kicked a small Anthracite-hued stone, (in her head, she couldn't help envisioning herself as a small, pouting child) and watched it bounce skittishly across the rocky terrain and bounce off some metallic wreckage. The planet's atmosphere was whipping up tiny eddies of sand that broke around her suit. Spots of chemical fires lit broken metal pieces, like giant sculptures, illuminated Akimbo kneeled over a nest of wiring and electronics.

He was cursing under his breath through the intercom, a creative narrative of expletives that seemed off. It was typical of Kesserlites, a piece-meal culture, even their curse words couldn't decide on what planet to land on. He was hunched under a large metal disk, a signal relay, in a web of electrical wiring, trying to put together an electrical circuit with a soldering iron. It didn't seem like it was going so well.

"This fuck thing is fuck for shit," growled Akimbo, pulling himself out of the wreckage. With his armored boot, he kicked the metal disk over. "Everything burned out and triple fucked."

On the horizon, dark clouds were rolling down from the cliffs and then rising, blotting out the bloody sky. Danica didn't like the look of that. "We are going to need shelter soon. Before that storm hits."

"Yeah," Said Akimbo, "and I am going to have to convert the chemical lab units on our suit to see if we can filter in some oxygen from the chemical soup this planet calls an atmosphere."

Suddenly, on her suit HUD, a message was projected over her eyes SIGNAL FOUND (EXECUTE?). What the hell, thought Danica, the suit automatically scanned the radio waves for emergency signals, and according to this, had found one. She accessed the file and a blurry topographical map was projected on her screen. There was a blinking dot, a few clicks to the west, towards a ridgeline.

"There's a signal coming from not too far from here. Could be a research station."

"There's no research station on this planet. I've seen the astrogation files. No one's ever bothered to land here." Akimbo sounded skeptical. "Too expensive to terraform, and too small to mine."

Danica was staring down the horizon to the west. It would only take a couple hours to hike over there and they would need to find shelter soon. "Apparently, your astrogation charts were wrong."

"Hold on," said Akimbo, "I got it too, looks like a signal pulse repeating itself every few minutes. Wait for a second; it's an audio signal. Let me tap into our intercom."

There was a squeal of noise as the sound was switched over. At first, Danica thought, it was noise from the static, but slowly through the asynchronous transmission, she started to pick up patterns. A low sound like the grinding of teeth underneath high pitched screams suddenly cut off, the strangeness of the transmission sent a pulse of fear through Danica's body. This didn't feel like an invitation, it felt like a warning.

"This doesn't sound human. Do you think this is a xenomorphic signal?"

Danica shook herself out of her trance. "We're going to need to check it out anyway." She pointed the gun at him. "Alright, you first."

*********

Three hours of trudging, the storm front closing in behind and around them, they finally arrived at the cave. The entrance was a dark maw in the side of a steep, jagged cliff-face about one hundred meters high. Rocks and boulders ringed the floor of the cliff, but the area around the entrance appeared almost swept clean of stones, it was hard packed clay, with dunes of rock and gravel, rising up around it like a funnel, beckoning them in. The signal was coming from directly inside the opening.

"This has to be a xenomorph. Fuck, I hate xenomorphs. They're unpredictable. You never know if they are going to eat your face, and lay eggs in your chest, or evangelize some bizarre mathematical religion." Said Gonzalez.

Danica could almost see the look of disgust through his visors. At least she would get some enjoyment of dying on this planet.

"Right," He muttered, looking up at the hole. "Fuck it." He started walking towards the entrance with Danica following behind. For a few seconds, he stood at the lip of the cavern, his body illuminated in front of the pitch-black opening, and then he cautiously ran his hand through the doorway, momentarily looking armless while his limbs were cut off front any light. Danica's breath stopped as she half expected some kind of indigenous monster to reach out and pluck Akimbo up.

Nothing happened and Akimbo turned on his headlight. Danica stepped up behind him. The entrance turned into a sheer round tunnel, the keening of the radio seemed to explode in modulation as she stepped closer. The light of Akimbo's lamp traveled down the circler walls and bounced against a far wall thirty meters in where the tunnel seemed to veer suddenly to the right.

"Let's go," said Danica. She nudged Akimbo in the shoulder with the barrel of her gun. Akimbo stepped into the entrance and Danica followed. "We need to keep going." She insisted.

"Whatever you say, boss. I just hope it eats you next." He started walking forwards with Danica behind him. The light of his headlight bobbed and weaved as it pierced the shadows and Danica could see the merging of their shadows against the grainy walls.

Suddenly, the sunlight was gone and they were cloaked in darkness. Then the radio gave a high-pitched scream that reverberated through Danica's spacesuit like the inside of a bell. She fell to her knees, oblivious to her own screams, the loud reverberation sending bolts of pain through her brain.

She realized she was on the ground tangled up with Akimbo's suit. There was a ringing in her ears and beyond that the sound like someone yelling at her from a long distance away.

She turned and realized in horror that her pistol was lying on the ground between her and Akimbo, as he slowly turned over onto his arms and legs and looked up at her.

With sudden realization, he leaped, sprawling towards the gun between them, and she rolled over on top of the pistol, as he landed like a bag of rocks on top of her. He wrapped his arms around hers and started to yank her hands out from under her. With the other hand, he pushed down, grinding her faceplate into the stone floor.

Danica could feel an intense pain in the disk of her shoulder as he twisted it and forced her to turn onto her belly. He jabbed her in the gut, knocking the air out of her lungs. She could see his eyes, cold and hard, illuminated in the faceplate. He head-butted her and she was seeing stars. Suddenly, he stopped his hands in the air. Her gun was pointing directly at his head, miraculously attached to her shaking arm.

"Get the fuck off me, " she growled.

He pulled away slowly. She looked at the entrance. It was completely blocked, not a landslide of boulders, but as if the earth itself formed in around them, and became a solidified granite wall.

"How the hell," she gasped and then turned towards Akimbo, whose back was braced against the wall, his muscles tensed.

"Get the fuck on the ground." She jerked downward with her gun. "Hands on your head."

Akimbo silently kneeled in the dirt, his eyes still staring, flashing with anger. She moved along the wall to the entrance, warning him to stay still, and with a trembling hand, pressed against the barrier. It was rock solid.

"How the hell." The walls were granite, but perfectly walled without a seal, something had trapped them in. Suddenly, there was a bright light, coming from the entrance of a tunnel, a light, at first like an electric torch, but as Danica's eyes adjusted, it turned into a translucent blue sheet, flickering as it coursed down the hallway.

It passed over Akimbo, and suddenly his skeletal structure lit up for an instant like an x-ray machine. Akimbo clutched his heart and leaped back. The light passed through, she felt an electric pulse as it did, and her eyes burst white, and then it was passed her and gone. Akimbo got to his feet. He was touching buttons on the keypad of his space suit.

"Danica, check---"

"Shut up." She screamed, pointing her gun at him.

"Lady, check your environmental readout."

"Shut up."

"Lady, this place has air." Akimbo started to take off his helmet. There was a whirr as the seal depressurized and Danica could see his firm African/Eurasian features distinguished by his shaven head, scruffy with a few days growth. Akimbo took a deep breath and held it in, then he blew it out.

"Jesus," He said, "air, and it doesn't even taste like recycled ship. What is that smell?"

Danica took off her helmet. "It's flowers," she said.

It made sense Akimbo would have never smelled them. It was likely that he had never set his foot on earth, not without a spacesuit anyway. Suddenly, Danica had a vivid image of herself as a child, at a picnic. She was running, holding behind her a child's kite, shaped like a spaceship. Her father was off in the distance, in his captain's uniform.

"We need to keep going. And don't think I've forgotten what you've done. If I weren't sure that I might need you, I'd kill you right here."

Beyond the corridor resided a small, circular chamber with walls that sloped upward like the inside of an igloo. Strange glowing phosphorescence symbols were etched into the walls and glowed with enough brightness to keep the room visible.

In the center of the chamber was a small culvert, like a Roman bath, filled with a clear translucent liquid that seemed to shimmer and glow from light emanating from underneath.

The liquid appeared to be warm, steam rippled of the lightly lapping waves and soon Danica's exposed skin was covered with a film of moisture. Unconsciously, she licked her lips and then realizing what she had done, mentally cursed her stupidity, before her taste buds suddenly confirmed in delight what the liquid was: water.

"Water," She said, "Water, water."

"Yeah," Said Akimbo, while scanning with his atmosphere sensors. "Pure H2O and this broodmare replica of Terra. No coincidence. This environment was made for humans."

Danica walked around the bath until she was opposite of Akimbo, kneeled, and took a sip of water with the gloved palm. The water tasted sweet and soothing on her dry, swollen throat.

"Are we going to talk about that?" Asked Akimbo, pointing to the center of the bath, where two stalks, one patchy and dark like the skin of an avocado and the other white and opalescent, were intertwined and rose three to four feet to hang above the steaming water.

From the milky white stalks hung what looked like bulbous pods, milky translucence, covering a green chrysalis, fourteen altogether. From the black vine, there was one pod, dark brown and covered with small cilium hairs, about the size of an apricot.