Cher was eight years old, and Shy had just turned ten. Cher was the bookish sister, the one happy with her own company, the girl who could contentedly sit indoors lost in made-up worlds while her older sibling Shy tore her jeans and scuffed her knees and muddied her face in the stream and woods back of the Hunt place in Oregon.
Different as chalk and cheese. Cher was darker, her hair and eyes and olive skin. Shy was a shade or two paler, and prettier, at least everyone said, but they had one thing in common: a voracious appetite for news. That was their daddy Ken’s doing. Every day at six o’clock he would stand on the porch and call out to them.
“Cheyenne! Cherokee! Time to come in!”
Not for dinner, though that would be served up soon after, but for the six o’clock news. It didn’t matter that breaking news was served up 24/7 on every single screen they might carry or in their house or office or car or flyer. Ken Hunt always insisted that they sit down together as a family—or what was left of their family—to watch the news on the live-stream TV at six o’clock. Then they would talk about what they’d seen, and discuss the politics behind it all.
Some people thought politics were boring, Ken Hunt said, but those folks didn’t realize that politics were everything. They were behind everything and in front of everything and under everything and over everything. Politics put food on your table, or not. They gave you a job, or not. Need a highway running past your town? That would be a political decision by somebody.
Everything was a political decision. Choosing what to wear when you got out of bed was a political decision. Deciding what to eat for your dinner. Calling your children Cheyenne and Cherokee, even if they shortened those names to Shy and Cher, that had definitely been a political decision on Ken Hunt’s part. They had First Nations blood flowing in their veins and they had to honor that every day—because wiping out the Native Americans? That was sure as shit a political decision.
Even Momma’s death had been a political decision. Sure, nobody actually decided she should get cancer and take to her bed and wither away like a little sparrow, but maybe if there had been better healthcare and cancer drugs were cheaper and Ken Hunt hadn’t lost his job two years before and, and, and…
Yeah, everything was politics.
Even Cher standing in the shadow of the massive grain silo on the edge of Old Man Nesbitt’s farm, shielding her eyes from the sun and looking up at Shy, gripping a narrow steel bar that ran around the silo top, her feet perched on a narrow ledge, fifteen meters up. Cher hadn’t wanted to go play on Nesbitt’s Farm. She was halfway through a new book she’d got from the library and desired nothing more to sit aside and finish it, but it was a glorious summer day and Shy had threatened to try to flush her book down the toilet if Cher didn’t go with her.
“Where are we going?” Cher had whined, listlessly following her sister over the fields. “And why?”
“We’re going for an adventure,” Shy said. “You gotta stop reading about them, and start having them.” Which was all well and good until Shy’s adventuring got her into a place that she couldn’t come down from.
“You’ve got to come up, Cher,” Shy hollered, her voice shaking. Cher watched her sister with interest. She’d never seen Shy look scared before. It was a new thing. She liked new things. So she said nothing and just stared up at her.
“Cher, I’m not screwing around! Just climb up the goddam ladder!”
“Why?” Cher said.
Shy seemed to do a little dance, her tippytoes scrabbling for purchase on the narrow ledge. She took a deep breath.
“Because I can’t go any further, and I can’t go back unless you reach out and grab my hand and pull me round.”
“I still don’t know why you went up there, Shy.”
“Because I wanted to see if I could get all the way ’round the silo, dummy.”
Cher thought about it. “But why, Shy?”
Shy said a bad word, one Cher had never heard Daddy say but had heard sometimes on movies or videos. She added, “Because it was there and I wanted to find out. Jesus, Cher, come on!”
Cher considered it a bit more and went to the foot of the ladder that was bolted on to the side of the silo. She looked up and could see that Shy had gone up the ladder and stepped out on to the tiny ledge, but handholds had run out about two meters along.
“And you want me to climb up there and hold out my hand and pull you back to the ladder?”
“Yes, baby girl,” Shy said tremulously. “Come on, you can do it.”
“OK.” Cher put a foot on the ladder and gripped it with both hands.
The first three or four rungs were fine. Then she started to get a tingling feeling in the soles of her feet. Her hands felt sweaty and slippery. She went up a few more rungs and looked down. She was twice her own height already. She looked up. Shy seemed impossibly high.
“I can’t do it.”
“Sure you can!” Shy said. “Just a little further.”
Cher tried, but she started to feel sick, like she was going to throw up. She looked up at where Shy, her face contorted in what looked like pain, gazed down at her, and shook her head.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’ll go get Daddy.”
“There’s no time, Cher! I can’t hold on…”
Cher started to steadily descend the ladder, her mouth dry, tears pricking her eyes. She couldn’t do it. Her sister would just have to hold on a bit longer.
There was a scream and a sudden rush of moving air past Cher’s face, and Shy reached the ground before Cher did.
* * *
“You let me down,” Cher muttered to herself, blinking in the strip-lighting of the concrete room in the Ritz, reaching for her watch to see what time it was.
That was what Shy had said to her in hospital, after they’d plastered up both her broken legs. She missed a whole summer of adventures because of that fall, and never really forgave Cher. The memory still stung, crying by her sister’s hospital bed, promising never to let her down again.
Cher sat on the edge of the hard bed, rubbing her face. She couldn’t spend many more nights in this horrible, airless box. The dream had knocked her sideways.
You let me down.
She always had bad dreams for a couple of days after hypersleep. She’d be happy if she never had to go through it again. There was a movement on Earth called “Real-Lifers,” who refused to ever undertake faster-than-light travel. They just wanted to live out normal lifespans, their three-score years and ten or whatever, and believed it was wrong for humans to indulge in the longevity granted by the cryotubes. They were mainly cranks, but Cher had a little sympathy for their general position. Every time she went into hypersleep she could only think of those horror stories of things going wrong and people sleeping for centuries, lost out in space.
Cher pushed the thought away. She had more concrete things to concern her today. She reached for the envelope that had been left for her, the note on top of it.
THIS IS WHY
YOUR SISTER DIED.
It was time to shower and go and find out exactly what that meant.
* * *
There had been an encrypted comms tag scrawled on the back of the photograph. She sent a curt message, and a response had come back with a time and a place. Noon at the Queen’s Head. Cher got there half an hour early, walking through the rain for ten minutes from the Ritz, stopping to buy an umbrella from a woman selling them from a rickety stall set out in front of a convenience store.
Along the way there were screens set into the concrete walls, promising a glorious future for New Albion, a return to the greatness of Empire, and seemingly endless sunshine. Cher, huddling under her umbrella, wondered if they were going to terraform the climate to be more like the idyll on the simulations than the reality of the planet.
Like the cabbie said, they’d had their priorities straight. Even on the short walk, Cher had passed two takeout shops selling battered fish and chunky fries, the hot, greasy air emanating from their open doors making her stomach rumble.
They’d made a bit more effort with the Queen’s Head, which was clad with dark wood and had overflowing flower baskets on the windowsills. A sign hanging over the door bore a painting that Cher recognized to be Queen Victoria. The pub was well-lit inside, a polished wooden bar with mirrors behind it reflecting the open space filled with round tables and short stools, about half of them occupied by small groups of mainly men. Most of them glanced up at her as she walked in, shaking her umbrella, and scoped the place out. Along the side wall were a series of booths, and she spotted an unoccupied one that gave her a good view of the main doors.
Behind the bar, a young man in a white shirt and a black apron around his waist appraised her as she walked up. “What’ll it be for the lady? Half of lager with a dash of lime? G and T?” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Or is it Prosecco o’clock?”
“Just a coffee, black, no sugar,” Cher said, pointing to the empty booth. “I’ll take it over there.”
She had almost finished her coffee when, on the stroke of twelve, the doors opened and a man walked in, with a small, fluffy brown hound that shook the rain off its fur, causing a volley of complaints from the men around the nearest table. Could this be him? He was tall, with dark, thinning hair, sturdy looking. Cher watched him slough off his raincoat and walk to the bar. Both he and the barman—and the dog, Cher noted—looked in her direction. She tensed a little on the wooden seat. Yes, this was him. She concentrated on her coffee cup as the man walked over and stood by the table.
“Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday rain?” she said, glancing up at him. The dog stuck its nose over the top of the table.
“I’m American, like you,” the man said, and he slid into the booth across from her. “I took the liberty of ordering you another coffee.”
“Who are you?” Cher said.
“I need to know I can trust you before I tell you that.” The dog jumped up on to the bench beside the man and sat down, regarding her with an unnerving stare.
“Why did you send a postcard from Hasanova?”
“So you’d know that I know what happened to your sister.”
“Why drag me halfway across the galaxy to this godforsaken place?”
The man shrugged. “I had to come here. I thought it would be a good place for us to meet.”
Cher paused as the barman brought them both coffees. When he walked away she took the envelope out of her bag and pushed it across the table toward the man. “And what the actual fuck is this meant to be?”
He sipped his hot coffee carefully, never taking his eyes off Cher.
“Let me tell you a story,” he said eventually, “from a little over sixty years ago. It’s about a ship, a commercial towing vessel called the USCSS Nostromo, and a signal it received from LV-426, later known as Acheron, a moon orbiting Calpamos in the Zeta Reticuli system…”
* * *
Cher listened to him for thirty minutes, then stood up and started unfurling her umbrella.
“What are you doing?” said the man.
“Leaving,” Cher said. “Going to book passage on the next available ship back to Earth. Where I’ll continue my search for the truth about what happened to my sister without being hindered by some fucking maniac peddling horror stories for what I can only guess is his own sick amusement.”
“It’s all true,” the man said quietly. “Sit down. Please.”
Cher leaned over the table toward him. “You really expect me to believe these… these…”
“Xenomorphs.”
“These Xenomorphs exist, and that Weyland-Yutani, one of the biggest and most successful corporations in the entire universe, has been covertly conducting experiments to create the ultimate bioweapon and has managed to keep this completely quiet?” Cher could feel her anger rising. “And furthermore you want me to believe that my sister died because there was an infestation of these things on Hasanova, and Captain Kylie Duncan was actually heading up a secret squad called the Midnighters deployed to collect specimens of them, and leave no witnesses alive to tell the tale?”
“It’s all true,” the man again said, and her anger didn’t seem to phase him. “Look. My name is Chad McLaren. I worked for Weyland-Yutani. I… saw the things they did. To both Xenomorphs and humans. They’ve got no conscience, Cher. No boundaries. They’ll stop at nothing.”
Cher sat down again. “Why did you come to me? Philanthropy? Just wanted to do a good deed by letting me know how my sister died?”
“Not quite,” Chad said. “You’re a journalist. You have connections. We need to get this out there. Are you really going to walk out on the biggest story of your career? The biggest story in history?”
Cher thought about it. “Why not just go to the media yourself?”
“Because I’m a dead man walking,” Chad said quietly. “I tried to turn whistleblower. Weyland-Yutani wants me terminated. I know too much. I break cover for even a second, and I’m gone like I never existed.”
“You said we, earlier. ‘We need to get this out there.’ Who’s we?”
Did the dog sigh? Can dogs even sigh, Cher thought, then she turned her attention back to Chad.
“There’s a bacterial research facility,” he said. “The Tark-Weyland Station. I’ve got a few other scientists there, thinking of coming over to our side. That’s why I’m here on New Albion, trying to find some proof to get them fully committed to the cause. And there’s Amanda and Zula…”
Again with the dog. Cher glared.
“Is your mutt really sighing? What’s this some party trick you’ve trained him for?” She looked back to Chad. “Amanda and Zula who?”
“Amanda is the daughter of Ellen Ripley, who was the only survivor of the Nostromo incident. She’s devoted her life to blowing open Weyland-Yutani’s Xenomorph research. Zula Hendricks is a former Colonial Marine who… worked with Amanda to destroy the Company’s Xenomorph experimental facilities.”
“Maybe I should be talking to them, then,” Cher said. “Mr. McLaren, I appreciate you coming to me, but your story is just bullshit, and I can’t let myself get sidetracked. I’m… I’m sorry.”
Everything was politics. So Cher made herself a political decision, and stood up again. She tossed a few New Albion shillings on the table for the coffee and walked toward the doors, without looking back.
Thankfully the rain had stopped, so she left the umbrella folded and headed back to the Ritz, where she would make arrangements for the next ship off this dump. Her emotions see-sawed between fury and despair. She’d barely gone a dozen meters.
“Ms. Hunt!”
Cher turned but there was no one there. No one except Chad McLaren’s dog, sitting on the wet sidewalk, wagging its tail. Cher frowned and looked around. There were some people walking along the sidewalk on the other side, but nobody near who could know her or would have said her name.
“Ms. Hunt,” the dog said. “Please. Just listen to us.”
“You have to be shitting me,” Cher said, glancing around. “What is this, ventriloquism? You guys should be doing children’s parties, not peddling bullshit monster stories. Where are you, McLaren?”
“He’s still in the pub,” the dog said. “Come back. Please. My name is Davis, and I’m a Weyland-Yutani security drone. Well, I was. I just currently inhabit this synthetic… Cockapoo. It’s a long story. Everything to do with this is a long story, but we need you, Ms. Hunt, and you need us. To help prove why Shy died, and to get justice for her.”
“You let me down,” Cher heard Shy say again from her hospital bed.
“It’s really all true?” Cher said suspiciously.
The dog—Davis—nodded. “We can show you more. Pictures. Video. We’ve got it all. Just listen to us.”
If she’d had a single other lead to go on, Cher would have kept on walking. But she didn’t. There was something about that horror on the picture, that shiny, black, skeletal grotesquerie, saliva dripping from its maw, crouched like a coiled nightmare, something that spoke to her deeply, and made her shudder. She wanted it to not exist, but her soul seemed to tap into some other, stronger truth, and screamed to her that it did.
“OK,” Cher said. “I’ll come back. I’ll listen.” As Davis began to lead her back to the Queen’s Head, she muttered, “But you start humping my leg, and all bets are off.”