Alien 3 is owned by Disney/20th Century Fox.

Novelisation owned by Alan Dean Foster and Titan Books.

Original characters are owned by me.

Beta'd by AlphaLima1980

Gamma'd by DarthTenebrus

Alien 3: Not Alone

Prologue

The planetoid Acheron turned slowly and quietly despite the storms below. While above the USS had been planetside for many hours, their mission being to make contact with Hadley's Hope, the colony on the surface. Contact with the colony had been lost several weeks prior, with the last transmission being made by a botanist who told of a horde of alien creatures threatening to overrun the colony and slaughter everyone. The unnerving nature of the message had prompted the United States Colonial Marines to take matters into their hands. Now one of its warships sat patiently in low orbit over the colony complex, waiting for the return of the strike team.

Unbeknownst to the Sulaco's crew, hidden in the shadow of the planet hovered another craft, which had remained silently static for the past several hours, utilizing cutting-edge stealth technology. The small freighter turned survey ship USCSS Costaguana, an M-Class design similar to older models but with updated specs and technologies, had arrived shortly after the marines had deployed from their vessel, lying in wait like a predator ready to pounce on its prey. Its mission, given secretly to its mercenary crew by high-level officials within the Company under the strictest confidence, was to tie up loose ends.

Aboard the Costaguana was a strike force of around a dozen mercenaries, many of them either former military, law enforcement, or in a few cases, convicted criminals with a choice of either service on board or service on one of Weyland-Yutani's prison planets.

Their boss and the ship's captain was a man by the name of D.T. Douglass, though none of his men knew what D.T. stood for. Given his reputation as a competent commander, they had all assumed jokingly amongst themselves that it stood for "Dark Terror", which he had heard before, given his former reputation as a military commander. Since it amused him somewhat, he allowed the joking to persist as long as it didn't interfere with discipline and good order amongst his crew. Douglass himself was a former Colonel for the US Army Rangers - he had suffered a literal bad break in the form of a broken leg on his last deployment that had sent him into early retirement at only 45, but just a few months into the start of his retirement he had been contacted by an old friend in Weyland-Yutani, who gave him a new life leading mercenaries into top black operations, with no red tape to worry about.

His executive officer was a man by the name of Al Loera, a more modest individual in comparison to Douglass' more robust and loud personality. Loera was former law enforcement, being a detective in the Chicago police department before a small political scandal involving the Police Chief's wife. Loera, however, had utilized his quick-thinking mind to cover his tracks and successfully avoid any criminal proceedings with the required amount of blackmail. Weyland-Yutani, having gotten wind of this, had paid off the appropriate people who might have made his life less manageable, and had then quietly contracted him for his organizational skills as well as his ability to slip out of tight spots like the scandal with the police chief's wife.

On the bridge of the ship, Loera sipped on his coffee, jotting down notes on his datapad on the activity of the Sulaco. Douglass walked up from behind, a cup of coffee in hand and a cigar in his mouth. His thick Texas accent broke the silence of the bridge.

"Anything, Al? Been sipping on this piss for a month of Sundays!" he groused.

"Hmm? Oh, no sir. Nothing, not since the first shuttle. If they've made it back to the ship, then they must've somehow gotten their hands on a teleporter," Loera answered humorously.

"Cut the shit, Loera, we're on the clock. Sooner we tie up this loose end the better. Get the crew ready, we're planetside in two hours." Douglass ordered, walking away with a grunt as Loera typed a few commands into a console to his left, taking a sip of his coffee and a few bites of his biscuit. He got up and moved to the crew quarters just as the remaining team members began to waken from hypersleep, their profiles coming to life on the screen.

...

Weyland-Yutani Corporation

Security Contractor Force #519-A

Call Sign "Shark Pack"

Shark One: D.T. Douglass (Team Leader)

Shark Two: A. Loera (Team Second)

Shark Three: B. Strouman (Heavy Gunner)

Shark Four: A. Kaufman (Technical Expert)

Shark Five: J. Knight (Explosives Expert)

Shark Six: M. Banks (Communications)

Shark Seven: D. Akula (Marksman)

Shark Eight: I. Bonang (Rifleman)

Shark Nine: D. Jacobson (Rifleman)

Shark Ten: M. Sears (Rifleman)

Shark Eleven: A. Denney (Science Tech)

Shark Twelve: G. Riggs (Med Tech)

Commencing Automatic Wake Up Protocol...

In the crew quarters, the remaining cryochambers opened, with each chamber's light illuminating the waking forms of the crew.

Bryan Strouman was a former athlete who had bottomed out on a betting debt, one that Weyland-Yutani willingly paid in return for his services. At 6'10" and well over 300 pounds, he was the biggest and strongest on the team and thus given duty as the heavy gunner, equipped with the corporate model of the Armat M56 Smartgun used by the Colonial Marines and the U.S. Army. The only difference, Strouman had noted, between the so-called corporate model and the military model was that the corporate model seemed more like a freshly manufactured toy gun for kids than a metallic killing machine.

Alexis Kaufman was a short, mean girl from Cleveland, Ohio. She had a juvie record as long as her platinum blonde hair, due to her rebellious attitude through her teenage years living in what she had often referred to as the "Mistake on the Lake". She joined Weyland-Yutani for two reasons. One was the pay, and two, there weren't any regulations against her having long hair.

Jordan Knight was a former unexploded ordnance disposal expert from Los Angeles. He was wounded at the pinnacle of his career at just 32 when a small bomb went off due to the incompetence of his superiors not having informed him properly in advance. He had lost both of his hands in the subsequent surgery, but someone at Weyland-Yutani saw that he still had potential, and instead of allowing him to sit idly by and just barely get by on the pension he would have received, they had given him a new lease on life, with new, fully functioning powered prosthetic hands and a unique array of cutting-edge explosive technology. If they could make artificial people, Knight had mused often enough, then they certainly give him a new pair of hands that worked like his original hands, and they had come through in spades, for which he had been and still was quite grateful.

Mercedes Banks was the daughter of the Boss of a notorious crime family from New Jersey; however, the family had been all but wiped out by a rival faction. Left as an orphan, she had learned the craft of assassination from a lone Frenchman who had eventually given his life to protect her while she had used her new skills to take bloody revenge. With no more need to avenge her family, she had eventually moved into witness protection and promised to turn state's evidence on the promise of immunity from prosecution, and she eventually went to college to pursue a career in politics. Instead, she was swayed to join the Weyland-Yutani Innovators Academy in Paris, where she succeeded in acquiring not one, but two degrees in communications. Wey-Yu had kept their eyes on her throughout her scholastic career, occasionally contracting her to do clandestine wetworks operations against their competitors and keeping everything off the books.

Devin "Dev" Akula was a former big-game hunter and trophy shooter. He had never really considered Weyland-Yutani as a career path, but when he saved one of their executives from a mutant crocodile, he was hired on the spot for his shooting skills. Though he kept to himself, he'd caught the eye of Kaufman early on, the strong silent type being a significant turn on for her.

Ian Bonang was a former rugby player from Christchurch, New Zealand, who had been banned from his team, the All Blacks, and from the sport in general for gambling. He also had been given a second chance by Weyland-Yutani, one that brought a good paycheck and an opportunity to see the stars, something he couldn't do stuck in Christchurch after the ban had taken effect.

Derek Jacobson was a total badass, a bounty hunter from Texas and quite fond of stomping mudholes in criminals. It didn't help that he very closely resembled a certain wrestler whose penchant for doing the same things in the squared circle was nearly identical to his own, although secretly, he idolized the man known commonly in his time as Stone Cold Steve Austin. He had taken several jobs for the company over the years, and now he was a member of one of their elite strike teams, though he was more of a lone wolf kind of guy.

Marcus Sears was a member of the Alaskan Scouts, born in raised in Wasilla; he was used to the most extreme cold. After suffering a bear attack, he had taken to walking with a cane, rotting away in an Anchorage office building. Wey-Yu didn't come to him; in desperation and generally being fed up with being anything less than his best, he had gone to them, answering an advertisement to be a counselor at one of their kid camps. Although he had been turned down for the post, his survival skills had not gone ignored, and he had been selected by Douglass himself when Douglass' Shark Pack needed new members. Having been given along the way, as a perk of joining the crew, a new drug that sped up his recovery, he burned the cane in his fireplace shortly after that.

Abigail Denney was the resident xenobiological expert; she raised animals of every description, and she took care of horses in particular, joining Weyland-Yutani after they helped fund the International Zoo of Discovery to keep them from having to file for bankruptcy to keep the equines from nearly going extinct. This act of faith had impressed Denney enough for her to show interest in their scientific exploration corps, where she learned about and even discovered a few minor alien species. She had been briefed on some aspects of Weyland-Yutani's desired xenomorph, and although she was naturally horrified by the nature of this species, her horror was outweighed by her simple yet intense curiosity at encountering a new biological life form.

Gerrit Riggs was an unscrupulous and generally avaricious career Weyland-Yutani man, joining at the young age of 18 right out of high school. Having been a medical and scientific prodigy all through his scholastic career, he was an expert medical professional with doctorates in all forms of medicine, his college education having been paid for by a curiously large number and dollar amount in Weyland-Yutani grants. He was moved to the Special Services Division and Sharkpack a few years prior. He had still held some moral objections to Weyland-Yutani's practices, but the paycheck appealed to the money-hungry aspect of him and made him easily forget.

The team all woke up with various grumbles and complaints of not having enough sleep in their opinion, though technically they had gotten over three weeks of rest in their cryochambers. It felt instead like a few hours of sleep to the team who now were suffering from the head-cold/hangover cocktail.

"Oh God! Five more minutes, or weeks," Knight stated as he held his throbbing head. Banks took notice as her full head of luxurious and vibrant sapphire blue hair emerged from her chamber.

"Ugh, you said it, Iron Man... I need my beauty sleep," Banks added as Strouman hopped up immediately, stretching his bulging muscles.

"Sooner we get fed the better, this big old bear needs feeding!" he commented happily as he flexed his strong pectoral and arm muscles.

"Bonang! Akula! Get your asses up, boys! Time to roll!" Jacobson growled in his trademark gravelly voice, grabbing his baseball cap from nearby as he marched past the two younger operatives.

"Oh God, Rattlesnake, this early?" Bonang asked as he coughed a few times, using Jacobson's nickname.

"Damn straight, son! I'll always be on y'all's asses! Now let's go, you too, Sears!" Jacobson shot back, rubbing Sears short brunette hair.

"Right J," Sears grumbled, cracking his neck, and lighting a cigarette immediately.

"Up and at 'em, ladies! Kaufman, Denney. Sooner you're up, sooner we'll get some hot coffee in you!" Riggs shouted out, trying to encourage his cohorts out of their cryo-induced grogginess.

"Alright, alright, I heard ya Doc! Just crank the noise down a little! Dickhead..." Kaufman mumbled as she got out of her chamber.

"Just when I thought I was getting used to these things... feels like I got run down by my horse back home," Denney admitted, rubbing her close-cropped, white-haired head. Douglass walked in then, looking over his crew and smiling.

"Well, well, that's a fine sight. Sharkpack! I want all y'all naked bunch showered, dressed and in the mess hall in twenty for briefing. No sleeping in, ya lazy bums! That means you, Akula!" Douglass called out with a glare at the cryotube containing Akula while tapping spare ash off his cigar.

"Should quit that habit, Boss...bad for your lungs... " Akula replied in his smooth as silk voice, causing Douglass to walk up to him.

"Yer right, maybe I should put it out in your eye..." Douglass responded with a smirk. Akula returned it as he extended his hand for Douglass to grasp, which he obliged.

"Get moving now, chow hall in two-zero mikes...Kaufman! Come get your boy and get him washed up!" Douglass ordered as Kaufman came running over.

"Right, Boss. Come on, Dev!" Kaufman smiled, dragging Akula with her to the snickering of the team. They had always known that Kaufman had had a thing for Akula since their initiation into the team, evidenced by her frequent use of the epithet of "Dickhead" - to them it just indicated how much she wanted Akula's manhood. The chortling and innuendo continued as she dragged him off to the showers just as Loera walked up to Douglass.

"They all seem like their usual eager selves."

"Yeah, which means we'll have our hands full again, Al. Keep an eye on Kaufman, she seems a little too eager if you get my drift," Douglass whispered back. He hadn't missed the fact that Kaufman was keen on having Akula all to herself as soon as she can manage. "If they got time to play they got time to work, but just the same, I hope she and Akula can resolve their sexual frustrations sooner rather than later. An elite team like this can't afford the distraction."

The strike team gathered within the mess hall, more extensive than most other dining compartments on M-class freighters. It looked more like a council conference room than a typical mess hall, with a large holographic projection tablet located in the center of the rectangular table.

Some of the team came in wearing bathrobes from having just showered, while the others wore their casual clothing. The unit itself had been active for over a year, and the members had gotten close, their various histories notwithstanding. Their salaries were more than enough to keep them in the Company's employ, and each of them knew not only how to do their respective jobs well, but also to keep quiet about them amongst anyone that did not belong. They had deployed as a team in multiple classified operations, completing their missions with the skill and the discretion that had earned them their call sign. In between ops, they acted more like a brood of siblings, bickering sometimes about various and sundry things, and sometimes offering advice or comfort in tough times. Here in the Costaguana's dining compartment, times weren't exactly tough, with the one thing in abundance being food doled out by the ship's autochef. It was tasteless and bland, but it met their nutritional needs, if not the desires of their individual palates.

"Goddamn corn bread again," grumbled Bonang. "When will that blasted autochef dish us out some real food?"

"You mean like pizza?" offered Banks. "Cause I could sure go for a deep dish," she smiled. She might have come from New Jersey, but she loved some New York food.

"Y'all don't know what real food is, do ya?" Jacobson growled at them in his trademark Texas drawl. "Good country food from good country living, that's the thing. You want some mustard greens, some black-eyed peas, a bowl of red beans and rice, some jalapeño corn bread and a big old glass of sweet iced tea. That'll settle y'alls stomach real good."

"Go crawl back under a rock, Rattlesnake," smiled Banks, leaning across the table. "At least some of us know what real food is. Definitely better than this soypro bullshit…" she finished as she took another bite of her corn bread, chewing it halfheartedly as she grimaced.

"Now there I'll agree," nodded Jacobson. "Only things the autochef ever gets right are corn bread and coffee," he intoned as he took a healthy draught of the bitter, black beverage in a mug before him, which to him might have substituted for nectar.

They continued murmuring over their stale, plastic food just as Douglass walked up to the table from his station on the bridge, having just put together their briefing packets and transmitting them through the ship's intranet to each of their consoles in the dining compartment. He looked them over as each of them slowly, but with the increasing rapidity that was the trademark of the team, transitioned to full wakefulness and alertness. He nodded, partly to himself for having trained such a team for so long as this, that they could look as ragtag as this but when the time came, they could function together with superior skill and synchronicity to any Colonial Marine unit. Partly he nodded to Strouman, whose attention he had just gotten.

"Hey, Boss! What's the story on our shit assignment?" Strouman asked, munching on the autochef's latest attempt at reconstituted bacon.

"You'll find out soon enough," Douglass responded, finally pressing his cigar out into an ashtray.

"Long as the pay's good, that's all I care about." Banks commented to Knight, who sat next to her, his aviator frames sitting on his head.

"Is that all you care about Banks? Money?" Sears argues from afar.

"Everyone's got a weakness, mine just happens to be money...that's not too bad, right? I mean we all have our weaknesses; I mean Boss likes cigars." Banks argues

"Not, just any cigars Banks, Boss likes Cuban cigars, which just happen to be the only ones you can't get on the common market for a low price." Riggs points out.

"Strouman likes scotch..." Kaufman adds.

"Bonang likes scotch; I like whiskey...get it right." Strouman yells

"I thought Bonang liked Kaufman?" Denney asks.

"Akula likes Kaufman; Bonang likes tattoos!" Sears argued.

"I don't..." Akula begins.

"Aww, you do care," Kaufman says, putting Akula in a tight headlock.

"Alright, break it up! Loera brief them on the who and what." Douglass orders as Loera presses a few buttons on the console.

"Alright, everyone this is LV-426, or more colloquially known as Acheron. It's a nice mixture of Antarctica, the Sahara, and the Amazon rainforest. Minus the forest, of course."

"More importantly, a few decades ago, Wey-Yu funded a terraforming colony, located here..." Loera states as he presses a few buttons to showcase the colony's location.

"Hadley's Hope...established in 2157. Its main purpose was to get the planetoid terraformed in a few decades, make it a profitable endeavor...in other words build a better world." Loera says, sipping his coffee gingerly at having repeated Weyland Yutani's motto.

"And the drinking game begins..." Jacobson says, smirking brightly.

"I suppose you'll be buying the drinks then!" Bonang suggested with a smirk.

"Alright, quiet down. Loera, continue." Douglass barked.

"Right, so...the colony was doing well, turning a profit, the terraforming was complete, some reports even of them having success with some soil samples until about a month ago, when Weyland-Yutani - or rather Mr. Weyland himself - gave the go-ahead for a top-secret project. For more on that, Denney, it's all yours..." Loera nods to Denney, who put on her glasses to read her notes.

"Yes...project J.C. 1986. The project's primary goal was to acquire a living specimen of Xenomorph XX121. A highly aggressive endoparasitoid extraterrestrial species, whose main purposes are simply to reproduce and kill."

"Sounds like Strouman..." Sears points out, with a few laughs coming from the team, Denney continues.

"It is born via fertilization from a parasitic organism, it gestates inside the host's body until it grows big enough to exit the body, usually from the chest...if the host is human. Emergence of the larval form, which we've designated a 'chestburster', is always traumatic, and always fatal to the host. The Bioweapons division has been looking for live specimens for years, with no real results. There have been past attempts to capture one, with mixed results."

"Do I even want to know what's considered to be a mixed result in company terms?" Banks asked hesitantly.

"If you must know, several freighters...including the USCSS Nostromo, an entire space station, as well as a few colonies, have disappeared or in many cases been destroyed," Denney answered reluctantly and emotionlessly listing off Weyland-Yutani's repeated failures at capturing the elusive alien creature.

"Yeah, I heard about the space station... Sevastopol, the damn thing fell out of the sky into a gas giant." Jacobson muttered.

"It's a highly aggressive species like she said, it's structurally perfect...it's blood is...well, it's the equivalent to carborane superacid, it'll melt through any ship's hull...and if the tiniest drop touches human flesh...the subject would be in extreme...discomfort," Riggs adds, having researched the project's target extensively.

"The fuck is this carborane superbullshit any damn way?" Jacobson growled in disbelief.

"Ever hear of hydrofluoroantimonic acid?"

"Ever work in the chemical plants in Texas, Riggs? You know, some of us don't have a chemical engineering degree like you do - you'd fit right in at Dow, BASF, or Freeport LNG. They'd take you in a heartbeat."

"It's all Weyland-Yutani nowadays any damn way, Jacobson," grumbled Riggs, "they've got a lock on just about everything on Earth, including the governments…but to get back to my point, HFA, as I've termed it, is some pretty goddamned corrosive stuff. Some of the most corrosive chemicals that occur naturally can be found in the stomachs of living animals, aiding in food digestion, and HFA tops out as the worst among them. Carborane superacid is one of the most corrosive compounds humankind has ever produced in a laboratory. It doesn't even rate on the pH scale, it's so damn strong. It takes a complex equation to figure out its true strength. HFA ain't shit compared to the strongest carborane. These aliens' blood, though? Nobody knows what it's made from but it's about a dozen to twenty times stronger than the strongest carborane superacid. All this is in your briefing packets, of course."

Nobody had actually looked at the relevant files at this point, as each member of the Shark Pack looked at their briefing packets on their own time while preparing for deployment. But at Riggs's statement, they picked up their datapads as one and looked up the file on the Xenomorphs, causing nothing less than frightened murmuring and some denial-fueled swearing amongst the team.

"Holy fuck, are we reading this right?" Banks exclaimed in almost a whisper. "That's some fast acting shit!"

"Discomfort's just a fun way of saying excruciating pain, right?" Bonang asked as his eyebrows went up.

"Precisely," Riggs confirmed.

"I don't get it, though. If it works that fast on metals, alloys and composites, we shouldn't be able to feel it if it comes in contact with flesh. If it destroys nerve endings that quickly, we should just feel cold, right?" Banks postulated.

Riggs shrugged his shoulders. "I'm just speculating here, but there has to be some component of the species' blood that works well against metals and composites, but not nearly so well against living tissue, and that has to be why a living subject would suffer to such an extent. Hey, all I did was research the topics, I didn't experiment on them, so I'm not an expert."

"Fucking shit is just all kinds of wrong…" Strouman frowned in disgust

"Alright, you assholes, knock it off!" Douglass barked, clearly in no mood for the crosstalk.

"Continue, Denney."

"Right… so, the acidic blood also dissolves the body completely, hence the reason why no corpses have been found to study. It's almost a perfect predator; it can blend in with just about any environment, including urban and mechanical, it can stay perfectly still while waiting to attack... it has razor-sharp claws and a secondary pharyngaeal jaw that shoots out with extreme force from its primary jaw, usually to puncture a victim's skull. Its skin is an extremely dense and strong form of chitin - it can put a sizeable dent in six-inch-thick composite steel, but modern weapons can do some damage...once again, I don't recommend engaging them at close range." Denney finishes.

"Thank you, Denney," Loera nodded. "Now the project was designed to achieve the goal of recovering an intact, living specimen through more alternative means, as you know the aspect of a perfect killer was something the company could use. The Weyland-Yutani reps back on Earth gave a tip to some of the prospectors about a location to some premier salvage, to which they would hopefully stumble upon a few...specimens. That was a little over a month ago. Not long after that, Gateway received this message from the colony," Loera intoned, tapping his datapad to start playback and causing a recorded voice to emit from each of their datapads.

"This is Doctor Elizabeth Ripley...I'm an exobotanist at the Hadley's Hope colony on the planet Acheron, common designation LV-426, declaring a Code Black emergency. We have encountered a highly aggressive alien species; we request immediate military aid. Emergency code is NVR-223-43B. We have suffered heavy casualties and are currently under attack by this species. I say again; we need immediate military aid on LV-426!"

"Shit, guess things got pretty bad, pretty fast!" Knight remarked in awe.

"Right, within a few hours of that message being sent, the Colonial Marines were contacted by Carter Burke, representing Wey-Yu. Ironically, after receiving the Nostromo data he became one of the masterminds behind the project itself. With the problems in New Wembley, there weren't any larger units available, so they sent a single fire team of platoon size to investigate the colony, accompanying them was Burke, as well as an advisor...Ellen Ripley." Loera concluded, causing everyone to sit upright. With that name, he had gotten their full attention.

Ellen Ripley had become an infamous person in Weyland-Yutani's communication channels, as one of the two survivors of the Nostromo and, at the moment, the only one that was talking. When she did speak it was clear she had her suspicions about the company, proving it with her speech warning them about the derelict, and perhaps even inspiring them to greenlight the later section of the project finally.

"The chick from the Nostromo?" Kaufman asks.

"Yes, Kaufman, the 'chick from the Nostromo.' She came along on the promise of reinstatement, plus she could give some advice, after all, she set foot on the same planetoid all those years ago." Loera finished.

"So, if the Marines got sent to deal with this mess, why are we here?" Sears asked.

Douglass stepped up to answer. "Simple, we're here to mop up the mess. Since most of you are former military, you know what they've been sent here to do. Kill anything not human; if they've stumbled upon the derelict, they're not going to secure it for study, they're going to destroy it. The same goes for any Xenos they find. So these are our objectives, firstly we deploy to the colony, set up base camp about two clicks away, infiltrate and locate any survivors." Douglass explained while tapping out ash from his cigar into an ashtray.

"Rules of engagement, Boss?" Strouman asked.

Douglass wasted no time in giving an answer. "Every person we encounter is expendable. Especially Ripley, she's a thorn that needs to be plucked from the company's flesh. She must be silenced," he emphasized, with various nods and agreeing replies said throughout the team.

"After the stragglers are dealt with, we move on to our second objective. Finding and securing the derelict; according to our information, the derelict should be here, a pretty good distance away from the colony, about 82 kilometers," Loera added.

"This is gonna take time then, plus we don't know how many of the colonists survived." Bonang points out.

"We'll deal with them accordingly; we've got the element of surprise, remember?"

"What's so important about this derelict?" Jacobson asks no one in particular, Denney answers.

"Besides the ship being the most important discovery of our generation? It contains an entire cargo hold...of eggs belonging to the parasite that implants the xenomorph into a host." Denney answered.

"We sure about all this?" Akula asked.

"Well, don't take our word for it...listen to this," Loera stated, typing several commands as another recording starts.

"PLEASE, you're not listening to me. Kane, the crewmember - Kane, who went into that ship, said he saw thousands of eggs there. Thousands!" Ellen Ripley's recorded voice played over the airwaves of the ship.

"Well, if she's insisting it's there, that's good enough for me..." Strouman replies.

"Exactly, though she was more or less telling them to stay away, though I doubt they listened," Riggs replied with a knowing smile.

"We're going to secure the derelict and the eggs within its cargo hold, then we're to set up a perimeter and wait at base camp till the science team arrives," Douglass spoke.

"How long will that take?" Jacobson asks both Loera and Douglass to exchange an all-knowing look.

"Two to three weeks..." Loera reluctantly answers, with various mirths of disapproval coming from the team.

"Wonderful..." Knight says. Just then, a beeping sound is heard coming from the bridge.

"Collision Alarm?!" Kaufman asked in sudden worry.

"No, no, no, Lexi! That's an urgent message ping. I know that head throbbing sound anywhere." Banks replied quickly to calm her down, practically skipping to answer the call from the bridge. Douglass followed with a few members of the team in tow, the rest of them remaining in the dining compartment.

Banks arrived at her station on the bridge, which is much larger than other decks since the team all have their respective stations. Banks hopped onto her chair; her station was dedicated to receiving and sending communications between ships, stations, and, most importantly, other Weyland-Yutani personnel. Banks turned a few switches and buttons as her console finished coming to life.

"Okay, let's see...looks like a one-way message, recorded about 10 minutes ago," Banks reported, donning a pair of headphones.

"From where and who?" Douglass asked, looking over the young bluenette's shoulders. Banks checked her dials, trying to double-check the confusing source of the message. Finally she turns around with a perplexed look on her face.

"Well... looks as if it's coming from, erm…. Hadley's Hope."

"You shitting me, Banks?" Douglass replied, coughing a few times when he exhales too fast.

"Eww...come on, boss; I know my comm signatures and that message is coming from the colony, as for who...looks like the message belongs to a Burke...Carter Burke." Banks confirms.

"Jesus, that's our man on the inside...play it, Banks!" Douglass ordered urgently as Denney and Akula looked on from nearby. After a few moments, Banks decrypted the message.

"Okie Dokey, one top-secret message, ready in 3...2...1" she answered, playing the message, and in less than a second Carter Burke's nervous voice came over through the speakers nearby.

"...Come on, you piece of crap...okay there we go...testing one two...aw screw it. This is Carter Burke, here on LV-426...I know you're there, Douglass, so you need to listen. The plan worked, a little too well...the colony's been taken over by our alien friends, most of the colonists are dead, only two survivors...plus half the Marines bit the dust when they tried to investigate the source of the problem. About a half dozen are left, a few of them are wounded...but that's not important, they know about the plan Douglass, they know about us tipping off the colonists, I've tried to buy us some time, tried to...protect our investment. But, you need to hurry, I don't think I can delay these grunts for long...you need to hurry...oh no..." Burke stops, and his voice becomes slightly distant, almost like he was turned away from the recorder.

"Fire out?..." he spoke before the recording went dead. Douglass stared at his three team-members, all waiting for their orders.

"Banks, send an encoded message to the nearest Wey-Yu comm buoy. Tell 'em that we're commencing our operation."

"Right, Boss."

"Everyone else prepares for planetfall. Let's get moving, Sharkpack!" Douglass ordered, marching off, placing his cigar in his mouth.

...

Little Chute, Wisconsin

A house, resembling a farmer's, a sizeable well-kept yard, a flower bed. A tire swing hung from a tree, swaying gently with the occasional chilly breeze. It was autumn, the leaves had already started to fall in anticipation of a harsh winter. A large window swung open outward leading to the bedroom of the owners.

The king-size bed was half empty, as one of its users had already awoken, leaving her companion alone, sleeping peacefully. His brown hair, once short, now lay down to nearly to his shoulders, his face clean-shaven, sleeping peacefully.

The man slowly opened his crystal grey eyes, groggily blinking a few times to wake himself up, though when he began to wake, he immediately took notice of his surroundings.

A bed? A real bed? He thought as he looks towards the open window.

Is this...Earth? Does it have to be? I know that smell, that's Earth's air, alright.

He sat up slowly, looking down towards his shoulder, the same place he'd been stabbed by the tail of that god-awful thing.

No blood. No bandage. Not even a scar.

The man slowly stood up, his legs stiff, not tired or sore. He moved towards the mirror in the corner; he immediately took his appearance in, the appearance of a chief tactical officer. A clean one? One untainted, untouched by the hellish experience he had on his ship.

Andrew Mils stared at himself in the glass, not knowing what to think of it, was this real?

Yes, it has to be, dreams don't move this slow, this real.

He pinched himself on the arm, and felt real pain; it was official, he wasn't dreaming. He moved over to the open window, looking out at the large yard, the swing set, a pile of raked leaves.

He was home; he was unharmed, but how? He tried to think, what was the last thing he remembered?

Ellen.

He remembered tucking her into her cryo-chamber on the Narcissus, did they make it?

They had to; this was Earth after all.

What if something went wrong?

What if they both died on the way back, and this was heaven?

"Don't think heaven's a farmhouse, though it is nice here," Mils said, closing his eyes as he let the cool morning breeze hit his face, as a feeling of relaxation, safety, and hope filled his body and heart.

They had made it, at least that's what he felt was real. He was so enamored with the breeze and sunlight that he didn't notice the woman standing behind him in the doorway.

"Bought time you woke up," the woman said, an icy shiver went down Mils spine, her voice made every hair on his body stand up, the sound of the woman he had come to love entered his ears, and into his mind came the flooding memories of the years they spent together in peace, as well as the war they had both suffered through on the Nostromo. He turned cautiously, like a coward towards a ghost, as standing the doorway was none other than Ellen Ripley.

She looked angelic, not covered in grime, sweat, or blood, which was a sight he had gotten used to, especially during the Nostromo's final hours. She looked spotless, clean, her hair full of curly volume, her skin and face smooth as an angel's.

In her white robe, she looked like one.

Maybe she was? He didn't care.

"Rip?" Mils said as she walked with stride towards him. He had automatically used her nickname, he would use it religiously before, only becoming accustomed to first names later on. All Ripley could do was smile and shake her head.

"After all this time, you're still using that pet name...good morning," Ripley responded as she handed Mils his coffee and kissed him on the lips. He returned it with equal effort, only for Ripley to stop the kiss eventually.

"Wow, easy tiger, it's still morning. Now get dressed, breakfast is waiting." She said, walking away down the hall.

Mils took no time in changing; the clothes in the drawer were clean, new, and unworn. He picked up a green long sleeve flannel shirt and a pair of jeans, donning each of them in turn.

He moved down the hallway, taking a look at the photos on the wall, pictures of him and Ripley, at various places, on vacation, even in Paris. He stops at another gallery, him and Ripley, with two children.

Could that be Ellen's daughter Amanda, and his son David? No way could this be happening

He slowly moved around the corner to see Ripley cooking.

Cooking? He had known Ellen Ripley to be many things; a cook was not one of them. He cautiously walked into the dining room, coffee in hand, taking a few tentative sips of his coffee, Mils was fixated on the site in front of him, he looked down at the vast spread of food on the table before him.

"How would you like your eggs?" Ripley asked, not turning around to face Mils.

"Umm...over easy. I didn't know you knew how to cook."

"Well, let's just say I've gotten better over the last couple weeks...not having to wake up to plastic food isn't exactly a bad thing." Ripley replied as she looked halfway over her shoulder.

"Yeah, look, Ellen, umm, how long have I been out...I mean asleep," Mils asked, quickly correcting himself.

"Well, I figured after the long day you had yesterday, I'd let you sleep in a little bit." Ripley states.

"What happened yesterday?"

"Well, since it had been a while since we last saw them, we met up with the old crew..." Ripley answered, walking over with the freshly made eggs.

"Old crew?"

"Oh come on, don't play dumb, Kane got it all put together," Ripley stated, causing Mils' heartbeat to quicken and his eyebrows to raise at hearing his dead friend's name.

"K-Kane? That's not possible...Ellen, after all, Kane..."

"Isn't much for parties, I know, but Brett and Parker insisted in their usual way, plus Dallas insisted...which was strange, I'm sure he told Lambert you'd be there...so that's why she came..." Ripley stated, taking a bite of her eggs, hiding an all-knowing smile behind the bite. Mils racked his brain, trying and failing to comprehend what his friend was saying. A recurring thought popped back into his head again.

"Ellen...are we dead? Because all those people... every one of them is dead, they were killed...on the Nostromo, remember?" Mils asked anxiously, getting more and more nervous that, above all things, he was dead, and this was his idea of heaven.

"What are you talking about, Andrew? We haven't been on the Nostromo in...God! How long has it been?" Ripley says, getting up and walking over to the calendar nearby, the calendar has a series of X's across the past days.

"54...55...56...57, we haven't been on the Nostromo in 57 days..."

"What? What about the signal?" Mils asks, trying to test his friend, seeing if she could remember for him what did and did not happen.

"The signal? Oh, that signal...well, we were going to check it out, but Helwig had the final say, so we ignored it. A few days later you went down to Engineering to check on Parker and Brett on Dallas's orders, you slipped on a puddle of some fluid and got knocked unconscious, and we had to put you in cryo like that. When Helwig evaluated you once we came out of cryo around Earth orbit, you had some memory dysfunction, talking about some monster that supposedly killed everyone except you and me, and blowing up the Nostromo...Helwig said you'd be in and out of it for a while, might even have a relapse at some point, and that we just had to be there for you while your brain repaired itself naturally," Ripley explained.

Now Mils was worried...he KNEW what he and Ellen had gone through, but was it all a dream, hours upon hours of torment and horror-filled into a nightmare?

"No, no...that's not right," Mils says, shaking his head, suddenly a loud muffled voice is heard from outside the house, almost like from a loudspeaker.

"BPM increasing...48 and climbing...his brainwaves are going crazy...get the Doctor..." The voice said, as the house started to shake, Ripley doesn't react; she just kept looking at Mils. Mils looked up at the home as it shook. He turned his gaze back to Ellen, who now looked completely different. Her curly hair had gotten shorter, and she was wearing a light blue jumpsuit. She strolled slowly up to him as the house stopped shaking.

When she spoke, her voice echoed...

"Andrew...it's Ellen. I don't know if you can hear me but...I'm leaving. I'm going back out there, and I'm going to try and put an end to all of this, to find answers, and hopefully to kill these things once and for all." She said as she appeared to try and hold back a tear.

"Go where Ellen, tell me! Where!" Mils asked, hoping and somehow failing to get his beloved's attention.

She took a breath and continued. "Things will be different when you wake up." Mils' body went cold with this statement, as the worst fears threatened to become a reality.

"We're in a whole new world. And get this - we're grandparents." Ripley continued, smiling, as Mils heart stopped...how?

"I...don't know how to explain this, but... our kids hooked up. Their children are simple enough, and they're already fully grown. One's a marine, and the other is on the colony we're going to...back on the planetoid. They call it Acheron or LV-426 now, and the colony, if it's still there, is called Hadley's Hope. I can't promise much, but I promise - I'll be here when you wake up. Take care, Andrew..." Ripley finished as she placed a gentle kiss on Mils' forehead. Mils grasped on to Ripley, not wanting her to go back to the same place where lay the biological time bomb that was that ship...and those eggs.

"No Ellen, don't..." He reached for her, to grasp at her, but his hands passed completely through her as though she didn't even exist...or he didn't. He didn't know anymore.

Was she a ghost? Was he?

Ripley sauntered, opening the door as a blinding white light shun through it, blinding Mils temporarily. When he regained his vision he looked on in shock as...the alien stood in the doorway, the same alien that had butchered the crew, and almost killed him - how could it be here?

Ellen looked back towards him as she walked through the door, and Mils somehow got up and charged after her.

"Noo!" Mils yelled as he entered the light-filled doorway.

...

After a few moments of what seemed like eternity, the blinding light began to fade away, or rather to pull away from his face, revealing a small flashlight held by a man in a white lab coat and glasses.

"Mr. Mils? Mr. Mils? Can you hear me?" The man, presumably a doctor or medtech, asked. He blinked a few times, nodding his head lightly, as reality had set in.

He was awake. He was alive, but where was he?