Another quickie today, hardly time for tea.

[Pulp \\ The Trees]

C.3

“Where is she, Denton?” Judy asked her husband.

“I’m not sure,” he sighed as he looked over the dispatch he’d just received from COMMs. “A planet called Thedus, but it’s not in our database, so of course it’s not on our star charts, either. She’s been working on a bulk ore carrier…”

“A…what? You’re kidding!”

Then the blue light on the admiral’s intercom panel blinked rapidly – meaning that the Lars Jansen avatar was ready and waiting to talk – so Ripley hit the ‘ENABLE’ button and watched the boy’s mesmerizing blue-swirling form take shape on his desktop monitor…until it finally snapped into sharp focus. 

“Ah, Admiral Ripley, I’m glad to see Judith is with you. I have new information that concerns you both.”

“You look happy, Lars. What have you been up to?”

“Walking on a beach, I think. But there are times when it is hard to discern.”

“Uh-huh. No sand between the toes? And how many girls were with you this time?”

“I think I’ve moved beyond that phase of life, Admiral. I was walking with a…I do believe it was an otter. Yes, it was a sea otter, and he was telling me all kinds of things.”

“A talking sea otter. Lars? You doin’ okay in there? I mean, I know this all came as a surprise…”

“Oh, yes, I understand, Admiral, and thanks for asking. I appreciate your concern, but yes, I am most happy in here. I was always an awkward sort, if you know what I mean, but so many of us are. Now if I want companionship all I have to do is think about it and there it is. Talk about instant gratification!”

“Have you met any others like yourself?”

Lars seemed reluctant to talk about that right now. “It is hard to be sure, Admiral,” he finally said.

Ripley smiled. “I’ve had that problem myself, I think,” Ripley sighed. “So, you have news?”

“Yes, Admiral. I have found something of immediate importance. A video file left by Admiral Stanton. I found it on a drive located in an IT nexus in Armstrong City, I believe it was originally recorded on a personal storage device left by the Admiral Stanton before his…well, you’ll understand after you watch the recording.”

“Is it a personal message, Lars?”

“Some of the information is of a personal nature, sir, but most concerns the immediate situation we are now facing. The information is self-explanatory, sir, though I would say that many parts will need to be viewed by all the other captains in the fleet.”

“Okay, I’m putting you on the large screen.”

“Ah, Judith,” Lars said amiably after he popped up on a large, wall-mounted display. “Nice to see you again.”

“Hello,” she replied uneasily, still not sure what to make of the dead boy’s memories roaming free throughout the ship’s various computer systems. “Nice to see you, too.”

Lars noted her reticence as he pulled up the file. “I would recommend that you remain seated, both of you. Some of the material is – a little graphic.”

“I see,” Denton said. “Okay, start playback.”

A dark blue USNSF seal popped up on a pale blue background, then a recording date of 15 November, 2122 appeared, followed by a Top Secret classification and encryption warning, and that the material in this file was ‘TSC-Eyes Only’ and encoded to the Flag Officer(s) in charge of Agamemnon and/or the Enterprise Battle Group; a moment later Admiral Stanton’s steely-eyed visage appeared onscreen.

He was shuffling note cards but then looked up suddenly, and his eyes looked care-worn and anxious: “Denton, things aren’t going well here at the moment, but I’ve covered that in an earlier recording; there have been some positive developments recently, so I hope you find those files before you see this one. First things first. I’ve enrolled Ellen at the Merchant Marine Academy high school in Musk City, and I sent Walter with her. She’s about to finish her first term and I hear she’s doing well. I’ve done my best to shield her from events here, but I may not have been entirely successful on that front; more on that in a minute.”

Stanton flipped to the next page in his notes before continuing:

“Meteorological conditions on Earth have deteriorated rapidly – and much more quickly than anticipated, with the almost perpetual cloud cover resulting in over 700 inches of new snow in Washington DC, and 1400 inches in Boston last winter. The permanent ice line has now moved as far south as Raleigh-Durham to St Louis to Denver to Sacramento, and the icepack is growing exponentially now so we expect total ice coverage with the decade.”

Another page turned:

“All civilian governments on Earth are collapsing rapidly, and about the only thing that matters now is launch capacity. We’ve converted all warship construction to the manufacture of colony ships, and existing shuttles are running people up to these ships as quickly as they can be serviced and turned around. Still, with current projections it looks like we’ll be lucky to get a half billion people off world before ice completely encapsulates the arable surface, and I guess I don’t need to tell you but that will be that.”

Another page:

“Top Secret stuff here. Unknown how many people made it, but at least three large caverns in North America were converted into underground cities. Looks like there are in Kentucky, South Dakota, and New Mexico. I have no idea how successful these efforts have been, but if you get a chance you might look them over and see if you can lend a hand.”

The next page seemed troublesome to Stanton, and he stopped and sighed a few times before continuing:

“The Space Force has ceased to be. Simply shut down. The Naval Space Force is, well, I hate to say it but whatever remains of your fleet will constitute the remainder of the USNSF fleet, and with this file I am hereby transferring command of the NSF to, I assume, Admiral Denton Ripley – or his duly registered successor, if Ripley is no longer in command. There is no longer any civilian command and control network presiding over the NSF, neither is there any legitimate military organization with any right to command the NSF. Your only assigned duties are the protection of Earth and whatever might remain of the United States of America; if those entities no longer exist then as a practical matter it would be my recommendation that you take the fleet to a new world and start over. Do not get involved with this new civilian government…these BAPists. Denton, take my word for it…they are going to be real trouble.”

Stanton paused and looked up into the camera.

“Denton, of course I’ll never know how all this turned out, but I can’t help but wonder about what happened out there? Now, about Ellen…”

Then there came banging on the door behind Stanton, and his mood changed.

“Well, it looks like the BAPists have found me again,” he sighed. “The NSF tried cooperating with them, but in the end it’s my belief that these people are the common enemies of humanity. They make no bones about it, Denton. They plan to enslave us all in the service of some kind of pagan spiritualism that, well, frankly, I don’t understand. I can’t tell you how to deal with them but I’ve tried to resist…”

And at that point the door behind Stanton was blown open by some sort of explosive device and Stanton could be seen reaching for something on his desk, but then he disappeared in a hail of machine-gun fire and the file simply stopped at that point – and Lars came back on the main screen.

“From my reconstruction, Admiral, it appears he was closing the file when agents of the crown broke down the door. I did find the notes he was referring to and about the only thing he wasn’t able to convey to you was that an apparent alliance between the BAPists and the Weyland Corporation might not have been a recent event.”

“Meaning what?”

“That the BAPists within the Company may have been calling the shots for a long time, potentially for decades.”

“Of course…but that makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? I mean, it looks, by that point, anyway, like the Company controlled almost 90 percent of the shuttle capacity, so the BAPists inside the Company would have been in THE perfect place to make sure that only their adherents and supporters made it off world, and so only their supporters would make it to one of these new worlds.”

“So that’s why there haven’t been any popular uprisings against this new monarchy,” Judy sighed.

“Yes,” Lars added. “They entombed their opposition on the planet, so how could there be?”

“So, Lars,” Denton said, looking at the blue avatar on his screen, “have we been scanning areas near those caverns in North America?”

“Gee, Admiral, I thought you’d never ask…”

+++++

Ellen Ripley was confused and suddenly felt very off balance; this was the first time in her life that this particular Walter unit hadn’t been by her side, and she realized that she now felt quite lost without him. He’d been with her almost from the moment of her birth, he’d acted as her first teacher even before she started school, been there for all her birthdays and Christmases, and while she felt it might not be completely accurate to say she had feelings for Walter, she did regard him as something much more than a simple fixture that passed into and out of her life. While he, or it, wasn’t exactly the parental figure that Admiral Stanton had been, Walter had represented the pure, nonstop continuity that so much of human flourishing depends on, and now she felt that as an acute stab in the back.

Sitting on the bridge now, maneuvering the Nostromo into docking formation with the massive ore processing ship, she tried to concentrate on the readouts on the main docking display but found she was having trouble with even the most basic adjustments to the ship’s velocity vectors.

And now she was sure that Captain Dallas was noticing her distracted state of mind.

“Ripley? You got a handle on that drift?”

“Ripley, watch your rate of closure!”

“Ripley! Roll rate! Now!”

Then Mother spoke up: “Captain, I think I ought to intervene now.”

“Ripley!” Dallas shouted. “Ship’s control to automatic!”

Ellen flipped the switch and buried her face in her hands. Lambert smelled blood in the water and smiled. Kane looked up and shrugged. Dallas stormed off – but not before letting slip a long string of expletives.

And so the Nostromo maneuvered under the refinery ship and in short order the docking clamps joined the two ships, and with that done Ripley loaded the first waypoint into the current NAV computer and hit the ‘EXECUTE’ button. A thousand feet behind the bridge three drives flared, and the Nostromo started the first leg of her long journey to Sparta…

“Ripley!” Dallas’s voice cried out over the intercom. “Report to the wardroom, on the double!”  

“Oh, great,” she muttered as she popped clear of her harness and walked aft – and past a gloating Lambert – to the crew’s mess, passing her cabin on the way and wanting to duck inside to avoid the inevitable tongue-lashing she knew she’d earned.

“Coffee?” Dallas said as she came in and sat at the round table beside the galley.

She shook her head, crossed her arms over her chest and waited.

“What’s our departure clearance look like? Any inbound traffic?”

She shook her head. “No, we’re clear all the way to the outer rim.”

“No new Outie activity in the sector?”

“Nothing reported.”

Dallas sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Parker says the ship is ready for sleep, but that means keeping Mother on ‘auto’ for the duration, and you know how I feel about being on autopilot cruising through a system. Any system.”

“Yessir?”

“It would mean an extra ten days out of the chamber, but we have more than enough food to stand a two-man watch all the way out to the rim. You mind staying up?”

“No, not at all. I’ve got some correspondence to get through, and some studying to do.”

“So, how are you feeling about Walter?”

“I’m not really sure yet, Captain. Lonely one minute, like I’ve lost a friend, then I remember he’s a synthetic and wonder if my emotions have been misplaced all these years, which only…”

“Yeah, I can see that becoming a feedback loop. You get any sleep last night?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I can’t leave Lambert out with you, so what about me? You feel comfortable enough with that?”

“Comfortable enough? What’s that mean, Captain?”

“Oh, you know. The whole man-woman thing, being alone with me for an extended period. That kind of comfortable.”

“Yeah, I’m comfortable.”

“Yeah? Well, okay. Let’s have dinner then we can put everyone else in their slow-cooker. You know, maybe read ‘em a bedside story before we tuck ‘em in.”

Ripley shook her head. “You’re twisted, you know that?”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way, Kiddo.”

+++++

He’d decided on showing the Stanton recording to Davis and Farrell first – so he could gauge their reaction first more than for any other reason – but also because he didn’t want to precipitate a war within the fleet. Judy asked to stay in the room while he played Stanton’s message – and his murder – again, and he’d reluctantly agreed. He knew he could count on her for moral support if nothing else, but he didn’t want to edit out the personal bits and pieces and open himself up to charges of manipulating the data.

And as the recording came to its grisly conclusion Ripley found himself watching Neal and Dean and their reaction when the machine guns opened up.

“Goddamn it to Hell,” Davis growled under his breath – just before he turned away and wiped away a tear or two.

Farrell’s reaction was almost the exact opposite. “I’m surprised they let him get any kind of message off to us, no matter how it might be delivered,” Stavridis’s captain said. “Technically, that was a mistake on someone’s part…unless it wasn’t…?”

“Meaning?” Ripley said, his voice flat and gruff.

“Unless someone wanted him to get off a warning to us,” Farrell added.

“Then why cut him off in mid-sentence,” Admiral Davis sighed. He and Stanton had become friends after Davis had served on the admiral’s staff for a year, so the murder had hit him hard.

Dean Farrell simply shrugged. “What about the caverns? Any signs of life?”

Ripley nodded. “At all three of the big ones. Fairly big heat blooms near the last charted entry points, and an initial analysis points to reactors of some kind being constantly in use.”

“But if there are survivors aren’t they, well, wouldn’t they now be entombed under the ice?”

Again Ripley just nodded. “Sure, but these survivors would also have unlimited water and the machinery needed to punch boreholes through the ice, so they’d have air as well as water. With enough lead time we can assume they set up hydroponic gardens and even factories to make the bare necessities, so assuming those are all true, from there the question their existence poses to us is quite simple. We need to ascertain the number of survivors down there, and we need to come up with a plan to get as many of them off world as we can.”

“Denton, we have to be careful not to put the cart before the horse here,” Farrell sighed.

And Neal Davis nodded in agreement. “Admiral, we really need some place to take these people, assuming they want to leave, and we need someway to move them…”

“And you know what?” Ripley said, grinning. “It just so happens we know someone who can help us with both of these problems.”

“Oh yeah?” Farrell said mockingly. “Like who?”

Ripley punched the intercom button and waited, then – after Louise Brennan appeared onscreen – he smiled and nodded. “Why don’t you and your boyfriend come on in, and let’s see what you two came up with…”

(c) 2023 adrian leverkühn | abw | fiction, plain and simple

[What Is and What Should Never Be]