Alien: Isolation (1st POV Ripley Edition)

#9

I sat down on a chair, took some food from the marshal's food reserves and started snacking while listening to Marlow's story.

Fun, isn't it? And not really, because his story was not very happy.

But even our first contact was not at a certain height, so...

- Marlow?

- Who wants to know?

- I'm Ripley, from the company.

- Wow. You guys are really keen, I give you that.

- I am here for personal reasons. My mother was on board the Noastromo when it disappeared 15 years ago.

- Really? Shit. Well...shit. We never found the ship, only the flight recorder.

- But obviously, there's no fucking doubt you've found something else, right? Start talking. I want to hear everything.

And the food, no matter how good it was - and the marshal's supplies were really invigorating (all kinds of energy bars, juices and pleasurable injections for instant health regeneration - couldn't cheer me up enough.

And as bad a storyteller as that disillusioned tattooed guy in the cell was, I was perfectly successful (unfortunately!) in getting a sense of what happened to him and his crew.

It was much more horrifying than expected. Probably because it was such an ordinary story, told in ordinary everyday language.

They discovered a flight recorder that recorded the location where the ship Nostromo was at one point. A moon of the planet Calpamos, called LV-426, also known as Acheron. In the Zeta Reticuli system, of course.

They were expecting something, although not very much. He described to me a bleak half-hour walk in suits across a grey, windswept landscape full of ravines, dead landscapes, caves and ubiquitous volcanic geysers (gravitational influence of the giant planet Calpamos, apparently). But they did not walk aimlessly. They followed a signal that, amazingly, activated only when they set foot on the moon.

It was as if it had become aware of their presence. It sounds creepy, but after everything I've been through, something like that seems quite normal to me.

And they walked up to some huge wrecked ancient ship of strange design and unknown architecture. I didn't understand if it had the door open or not, but his team went inside. Pipes, fumes and nothing but them. He said they found some central chamber with what looked overwhelmingly like a petrified humanoid pilot sitting behind a cannon - or cockpit, whatever.

Marlow himself walked up to the engine room and saw with his own eyes the device transmitting the signal. He touched it (touching unknown alien objects, how stupid) and the signal went off. And they knew they had stumbled upon something big. They found something from a Nostromo crew member and started investigating.

They discovered a cave under the main part of the ship - which had the same similar interior design as the ship on the surface. That sounded strange. Were the ship and the place where it landed made by the same civilization? Or was the cave also part of the ship? But who cares, really.

They walked up to what looked like a nest full of giant eggs (like dinosaurs eggs, I imagine) and started scanning them. But before they could hope to sell them to the highest bidder, the egg opened and some small parasite with a tail and tentacles like human fingers jumped out and clung to his wife's spacesuit dome. Moreover, it decomposed it with some kind of slime and attached itself to her face.

They put her back in the ship and headed for the nearest possible help - the Sevastopol station. Then his story slowly came to an end, and everything else was more or less clear to me. The creature hatched and grew into a monster, started killing everyone and everything at the station and that's pretty much about it.

At the end of the story, he looked at me stoically, as if he had nothing left to lose. Except for his life, but he didn't seem to care much about it.

Having finished eating and drinking, I said:

- And your ship, Anesidora? I want to know the codes to bring it closer to the station remotely.

- Maybe we could work something out if you arrange for my release by the marshal?

- It won't work, Marlow.

- Really? Well, you know where I am.

I sighed in annoyance, cleaned up the chair and went to Marshall. But not to appease to Marlow's wishes but for some other reason - Waits invited me to get the flamethrower. A weapon that can intimidate and scare the xeno, he said, because the thing is a beast, and beasts are afraid of fire.

- Let's hope you're right - I said and took it.

This just keeps getting better, I thought as I listened his plan to capture the creature and launch it into space, as far away from the station as possible. I rested for a few minutes before continuing to do my part of his masterful plan.