There was a hiss of air as the pressure seal was broken. Grunting as you helped the leveraging mechanism lift the hatch out of the way, you were left peering down the long, dark maintenance shaft, motes of dust illuminated by your flashlight dancing in the beam. It was more than the claustrophobic confines contributing to your sense of unease staring at the darkness. People were dying. Something was on board this station and it was a killer. You'd only glimpsed it. Black and sleek with a body that almost seemed mechanical, perfect for it to be lurking blended in with the piping running parallel to the duct, an elongated phallic-looking head and a slavering mouth, alien was the only way to describe whatever lifeform it was.

"Go on. I'll be right behind you," Ripley said.

You looked at her, incredulous. Life as a mid-level technician aboard the Weyland-Yutani Seymour Memorial outpost that service the WY freighters plying corpo trade along the frontier wasn't glamourous, but it had paid the bills and been reasonably safe. Trouble had come with this woman, Ellen Ripley, when she'd arrived in a lifeboat shuttle with her daughter Amanda aboard in cryo, pleading for help. Scuttlebutt went around that when they brought the young woman out of hypersleep, something ripped right through her chest. It didn't take a genius to make the connection once bodies started piling up and systems all across the station began to fail.

As much as you could blame Ripley for bringing the monster to the station, she seemed forthright enough about how a similar creature had slaughtered her friends and coworkers in the past. As the sole survivor, she had some measure of how to tackle the situation, having you yank the motion tracker out of a utility drone to give you some situational awareness. How she had rigged the pest control incineration unit into an impromptu flamethrower and swung the thing around authoritatively suggested she knew what she was doing, but the fishiness of the situation was almost enough to override your terror at ever clank of the deck plating or gush of steam into the corridor from the moisture exchange system. You'd managed to access a working terminal and dug up hard facts that the ship she'd talked about, Nostromo, was a real case of all hands reported lost, but it had been fifteen years since it was lost. Out of the handful of people that had banded with you and Ripley to try to to get out of here alive, only the two of you were left and the common denominator was that they had put their trust in this stranger.

You glanced down at the motion tracker. Its flickering green display was faulty and unreliable, but you weren't willing to take the chance on the distortion at the edge of the readout being just a blip. "Ladies first."

The strong-jawed woman stared at you before shaking her head in a huff. "Fine," she said, crouching down into the opening. With her back turned, you took the chance. Hoisting your slim yellow wrench, you brought it down on her shoulder blade, intending she'd bang her head against the bulkhead and go out cold. She fell forward, but you'd used more force than you realized and the angle she was at meant her neck hit the metal lip of the opening at an oblique angle. Her head twisted sideways in a way that made your stomach curl, tearing free from skin and spine as her body flopped down and began to seize in convulsions. Jesus Christ, you hadn't meant to kill her!

Instead of a spout of red blood, white fluid gushed from her neck. As you dared to look at the wound, the organs seemed inhuman, made of pale plastics. A goddamned android.

Your heartbeat calmed slightly at the relief that you weren't a murderer, but a new can of worms had just been opened. You lifted Ripley's decapitated head by her curly hair and set it on a nearby table, white goop leaking all the way. You jumped some of the wires hoping your intuition was right and her eyes fluttered open, her expression forming a disgusted glare up at you. "Congratulations," she said. "Lucky shot."

You wanted answers, not banter. "Start talking,"