Nostromo

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

"Meteorological conditions on Earth have deteriorated rapidly, with the almost perpetual cloud cover resulting in over 700 inches of new snow in Washington DC, and 1400 inches in Boston. 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 within 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 the ice completely encapsulates all arable landmasses, and 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 have been 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."

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, and with this file I am hereby transferring command of the NSF to, I assume, Admiral Denton Ripley -- or his duly registered successor if Admiral Ripley is no longer in command. There is no longer any civilian command and control network presiding over the NSF, and 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."

Stanton paused and looked up into the camera.

"Denton, of course I'll never know how all this turned out, but I wonder about the Tall Whites. Would they have made good allies? Could they in the future?"

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..."

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 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 like by that point 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 many popular uprisings against this new monarchy," Judy sighed.

"Yes," Lars added. "They have entombed their opposition on the planet."

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

"Gee, Denton, I thought you'd never ask..."

+++++

Ellen Ripley was confused and suddenly felt off balance; this was the first time in her life that this particular Walter unit hadn't been by her side, and without him she realized she felt lost. 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.

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 her docking display but found she was having trouble with even the most basic adjustments to the ship's velocity vectors.

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

"Ripley? You got that drift?"

"Ripley, watch your rate of closure!"

"Ripley! Roll rate! Now!"

Then Mother intervened: "Captain, I think I take over now."

"Ripley!" he 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 at Dallas 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 mated the two ships, and with that done Lambert 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 my cabin, on the double!"

"Oh, great," she muttered as she popped clear of her harness and walked aft -- 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 just earned.

"Coffee?" Dallas said as she came in and sat at the round table.

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

"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 out?"

"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."

+++++

Denton Ripley had decided on showing the Stanton recording to Davis and Ferrell first -- so he could gauge their reaction more than anything else -- but also because he didn't want to precipitate a war. 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 end 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.

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 are constantly in use."

"But if there are survivors, aren't they, well, wouldn't they now be entombed under the ice?"

Again Ripley shrugged. "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 conditions are true, from there the question their existence poses to us is a simple one. 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."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa...Admiral, we have to be careful not to put the cart before the horse right now," Farrell sighed.

And Neal Davis nodded in agreement. "Denton, we really need some place to take these people, assuming they want to leave, and we need some way to move a large number of them..."

"Plus, we have to assume these BAPists might not want us to interfere right now, and if they attack what do we do?"

"Well, let's tackle these one at a time," 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 we can come up with..."

C1.4

In a strange twist of fate, Denton Ripley read Nostromo's orders before Ellen had a chance to -- and now he'd never felt more helpless.

The order, decoded as Special Order 937, had just been intercepted by his COMMs team, and the message had been directed to the ore processing tug Nostromo that was currently en route from Thedus to Sparta. The Company had just activated a distress signal on LV-426, a planet near the tug's current projected course, but after reading through the dispatch Ripley now knew that the tug's crew -- explicitly deemed expendable in the instructions sent to the tug's Science Officer -- was being sent to collect specimens of the organism.

And with that knowledge now in hand, Denton Ripley was confronting the single most devastating decision he'd ever faced.

He knew how the organism gestated, and how it managed to spread, so if the Nostromo's crew was considered expendable the immediate reason was that the crew would be used as incubators. His daughter Ellen's fate, in other words, had been dictated in that message.

But now he knew that the tug had also been redirected to take an Earth return trajectory, so the tug would not take the organism to Sparta. And that meant the Company planned on releasing the organism in the caverns currently housing Earth's surviving population -- and he was duty-bound to protect the lives or prevent the deaths of the remaining population within the United States.

But then the final, and the most devastating blow of all -- the psychic scar that would result from abandoning his daughter to the fates. For though he now possessed the means to use the Tall White's FTL drive to jump directly to this planet, this LV-426, he could not alter the effects of relativistic time travel. He could jump to the planet in minutes, yet years would transpire before his arrival in real-time. Whatever rescue mission he could mount would arrive years too late to prevent transmission of the organism, while at the same time, his sworn duty was to protect the citizens of the United States. So, simply put, he knew the outcome of any utilitarian calculus meant he would have to remain in Earth orbit, but deep in his gut, he wanted to ignore that obvious conclusion and try to save his daughter.

But he knew he couldn't. The physics of relativity prevented any other outcome.

And if the laws of physics prevented action, the implicit law behind the oath he had sworn also prevented any other course of action.

So now that the decision had been made, he also had to decide whether to tell Judy, his wife, about the Special Order -- and the most likely outcomes of its implementation. If he told her then she too would be haunted by the choice for the rest of her life; as it was now, only he had to shoulder this particular burden. Was such deception the humane choice, or was deception ever truly allowed in marriage?

And in his gut, he knew the answer to that question, too.

He'd have to tell her.

The blue light on his COMMs panel started blinking, and the blue light meant that the Lars Jansen avatar had something important to tell him. Ripley leaned forward and swiped the reply button on his screen and the usual ghostly swirl began to take shape onscreen -- as Jansen's form slowly consolidated and took shape -- and Denton drummed his fingers on the duraplast desktop while he waited for this extra little bit of melodrama to play out.

"Admiral? I'm sorry, but you look distraught. Are you concerned about your daughter?"

"I am, yes."

"I understand. That is called a Double Bind, is it not?"

"Yes. But I was thinking Catch-22 might be more appropriate."

The avatar paused while it retrieved the necessary information, then 'Lars' spoke again. "The reference directs to a novel by Joseph Heller, an anti-war novel?"

"That's the one. What's on your mind, Lars?"

"Two items, Admiral. The most pressing is an indication that the Spartan fleet is mobilizing. As they are utilizing sub-light travel between multiple Alderson Jump Points we should not expect their arrival for at least six weeks."

"Noted."

"Shall I pass this information on to Admiral Davis?"

"No. We'll have all the captains over to discuss the implications and work up a plan of action. What's the other item?"

"Do you recall the directed energy weapon deployed inside the Sun during our initial departure from Earth?"

"Yes, of course," Ripley sighed, remembering that it was on that day that the real Lars Jansen had passed away, drowning in his own vomit.

"I have found strong indications that this weapon has been deployed on at least two other occasions in this system, and both times involving the Earth."

"What?" Ripley sat up abruptly in his chair. "What were these impacts?"

"The first use I have detected was more than a hundred years ago, in 2030, and the impact was quite simple. The weapon was deployed directly under the Cascadia subduction zone, triggering the eruptions of Mounts Baker, Rainier, St Helens, Hood, and Shasta. These eruptions..."

"...triggered the first impacts of the current Ice Age," Ripley sighed.

"Exactly so, yes. The weapon was deployed again, and from the evidence I have uncovered it would appear to have happened almost immediately after our combined fleets left the solar system..."

"And that triggered additional eruptions, I take it?"

"Yes, Admiral, along the ring of fire in both the Southwest and Northwest Pacific."

Ripley shook his head. "So, as soon as the Hyperion Battle Group departed for the Mintaka system, and our battle group was out of the way, too."

"Yes, Admiral. So," Lars continued, "there were three events in total. One at Earth almost a hundred years ago, then the hit on our Sun, then again on Earth, and right after our departure."

"Lars, did anyone on Earth have the capability to do this a hundred years ago?"

"Without a deeper understanding of the weapon, Admiral, such conjecture is meaningless."

Ripley nodded. "Okay. First things first. Who benefitted most as a result of the first deployment?"

"Private space launching entities, primarily the Weyland Group, as it was then known, as well as SpaceX and Blue Origin."

"Anyone else?"

"The BAPist cult would have to be seen as the prime beneficiaries over the long term."

"Lars, can you find any evidence that there were BAPists within the Weyland interests a hundred years ago?"

"There is both direct and indirect evidence to support that conclusion."

"Does it appear that interests within the original Weyland Group made efforts to conceal such associations?"

"Yes, Admiral. That is what I meant by indirect evidence."

"So. Indirect evidence versus guilt by association. That's not firm enough, Lars. I need something that ties the BAPists to the use of this weapon..."

"Records from the period in question, from the era before the first eruptions, are limited by accessibility issues, Admiral. It is possible that more records could be within the caverns below, but that is not known."

"So, it's time to go down and initiate contact. God...I hate to imagine what those poor souls have been through."

"Yessir. I have been able to locate several possible access points, Admiral. The survivors have deployed ingenious elevator-like air processing ducts, so as the depth of the ice increases the air ducts increase in height." Lars put several images on screen. "There also appear to be structures near these ducts used by, I assume, maintenance teams. It would seem logical that our ground teams approach the survivors through these access portals." More images appeared, and Ripley studied them one by one, then scrolled back through them a few times before speaking.

"When these survivors went underground...is there...damn, how do we approach them, Lars? If they were forced underground by the BAPists, wouldn't they consider anyone trying to contact them to be hostile, too?"

"I can only speculate, Admiral."

Ripley steepled his fingers on his chest as he leaned back in his chair. "Any evidence these different cavern groups are communicating with one another?"

"Of course!" Lars shouted. "How did I miss that? Look at this image, Admiral..."

"That's a radio antenna, Lars," Ripley said as new images flooded his screen. "Actually, no, this image shows a rather complex antenna farm. Short-wave and long-wave antennas here, and I see both UHF and ULF antennas here, early twentieth-century stuff, but..."