Alien Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  The Complete Alien™ Library From Titan Books: The Official Movie Novelizations by Alan Dean Foster

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  THE COMPLETE ALIENTM LIBRARY FROM TITAN BOOKS

  THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATIONS by Alan Dean Foster:

  ALIEN

  ALIENS™

  ALIEN 3

  ALIEN: COVENANT

  ALIEN: COVENANT ORIGINS

  ALIEN: RESURRECTION BY A.C. CRISPIN

  ALIEN: OUT OF THE SHADOWS BY TIM LEBBON

  ALIEN: SEA OF SORROWS BY JAMES A. MOORE

  ALIEN: RIVER OF PAIN BY CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN

  ALIEN: THE COLD FORGE BY ALEX WHITE

  ALIEN: ISOLATION BY KEITH R.A. DECANDIDO

  ALIEN: PROTOTYPE BY TIM WAGGONER

  ALIEN: PHALANX BY SCOTT SIGLER (FORTHCOMING IN 2020)

  ALIEN: INFILTRATOR BY WESTON OCHSE (FORTHCOMING IN 2020)

  THE RAGE WAR SERIES BY TIM LEBBON:

  PREDATOR™: INCURSION

  ALIEN: INVASION

  ALIEN VS. PREDATOR™: ARMAGEDDON

  ALIENS: BUG HUNT EDITED BY JONATHAN MABERRY

  THE COMPLETE ALIENS OMNIBUS, VOLUME 1

  BY STEVE AND STEPHANI PERRY

  THE COMPLETE ALIENS OMNIBUS, VOLUME 2

  BY DAVID BISCHOFF AND ROBERT SHECKLEY

  THE COMPLETE ALIENS OMNIBUS, VOLUME 3

  BY SANDY SCHOFIELD AND S.D. PERRY

  THE COMPLETE ALIENS OMNIBUS, VOLUME 4

  BY YVONNE NAVARRO AND S.D. PERRY

  THE COMPLETE ALIENS OMNIBUS, VOLUME 5

  BY MICHAEL JAN FRIEDMAN AND DIANE CAREY

  THE COMPLETE ALIENS OMNIBUS, VOLUME 6

  BY DIANE CAREY AND JOHN SHIRLEY

  THE COMPLETE ALIENS OMNIBUS, VOLUME 7

  BY S.D. PERRY AND B.K.EVENSON

  THE COMPLETE ALIENS VS. PREDATOR OMNIBUS, VOLUME 1

  BY STEVE PERRY AND S.D. PERRY

  ALIEN: THE ARCHIVE

  ALIEN: THE BLUEPRINTS BY GRAHAM LANGRIDGE

  ALIEN: THE ILLUSTRATED STORY

  BY ARCHIE GOODWIN AND WALTER SIMONSON

  ALIEN: THE SET PHOTOGRAPHY BY SIMON WARD

  THE ART OF ALIEN: ISOLATION BY ANDY MCVITTIE

  THE ART AND MAKING OF ALIEN: COVENANT BY SIMON WARD

  ALIEN COVENANT: THE OFFICIAL COLLECTOR’S EDITION

  ALIEN COVENANT: DAVID’S DRAWINGS

  BY DANE HALLETT AND MATT HATTON

  THE MAKING OF ALIEN BY J.W. RINZLER

  A NOVEL BY TIM WAGGONER

  TITAN BOOKS

  ALIEN™: PROTOTYPE

  Print edition ISBN: 9781789090918

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781789092202

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: October 2019

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Alien and Aliens TM & © Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from

  the British Library.

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  www.titanbooks.com

  DEDICATION

  This one’s for Lance Henriksen, science fiction and horror’s

  MVP.

  Chronology note: This novel takes place between

  the novel Alien: Isolation and the comic book series

  Aliens: Resistance.

  1

  “Holy shit.”

  Tamar Prather said the words so softly, someone would’ve had to be crouching alongside her to think she’d done more than exhale. Normally, her self-control was so complete that this slight lapse was the equivalent of screaming at the top of her lungs. Given the cause, she decided she could forgive herself this once.

  The stasis pod had no identifying marks—no manufacturer’s symbol, no serial number—but it was top-of-the-line tech. Likely a Weyland-Yutani product. The container was three feet high and just as wide, basically square, although its edges were rounded. Probably for aesthetic effect, Tamar guessed. The company’s designers were big on extra touches like that, thought it set their products apart from their competitors.

  She’d found the pod hidden in a storage compartment built into the floor of the captain’s quarters. Although “hidden” was a misnomer. She’d spotted the seams in the floor the moment she’d walked into the cabin, hadn’t even needed to use the omniscanner she held in her left hand. Employing the tool to unlock the compartment, she removed the top panel and then scanned the pod to determine what lay inside. The shielding prevented a detailed readout, but the result, though woefully incomplete, displayed on the screen.

  One word: biomatter.

  This could be it, she thought. The holy fucking grail.

  “How’s it going, Tamar? You find anything—”

  Jumping a bit, she turned her head to see Juan Verela standing in the open doorway. He was tall and muscular, with a shaved head and a black mustache and goatee that were badly in need of trimming. He wore black pants and boots, but his pride was an ancient brown leather jacket held together with generous applications of insta-seal and prayer.

  The big man’s eyes fixed on the storage pod still resting in the open floor compartment, and his mouth stretched into a wide grin.

  “I love stasis pods,” he said. “Especially when they’re hidden like that. Means there’s something important inside, and that means credits. Lots and lots of—”

  Tamar’s body acted on its own, with no input from her conscious mind. She jumped to her feet and spun, drawing the Fournier 350 from her side holster. No need to disengage the weapon’s safety; she never left it on. The pistol was set to silent mode—a must in her line of work—and the weapon emitted two soft chuffs as she put a pair of bullets into Juan’s forehead.

  The man stiffened, a look of confusion on his face, which seemed only natural since he’d just had his brains turned into slurry, and then he crumpled as if he were a synthetic experiencing a complete system shutdown. Prather was strong, but Juan was too massive for her to catch. Instead, she dashed forward, rammed him with her shoulder, and directed his falling body onto the bunk. He hit the thin mattress with a thud, but the impact was muffled, and she doubted an
yone else on the ship could hear it.

  She gazed down at Juan’s corpse. He’d landed face down and hung halfway off the side. Not the most dignified of deaths, but Tamar had seen—and caused—worse in her career. She had acted on instinct, but if she’d taken the time to consider her actions, the result would have been the same. There was no way she could let her companions know what was—what might be—inside the stasis pod.

  Still holding her gun, Tamar crouched next to the open storage compartment and touched the omniscanner to the pod’s surface again. The pod’s control system was locked, of course, but the scanner—while not as good, perhaps, as a Weyland-Yutani product—was more than capable of granting her access.

  After several seconds she was in, and she used the scanner’s touch screen to send the pod a command. Servomotors engaged, small black wheels emerged from the pod’s bottom and sides, and the pod began to climb out of the compartment. Stasis pods this size were too heavy to lift, so they came equipped with movement-assist tech. Tamar stood and faced the open doorway as the pod made its way up and onto the cabin floor. Tucking the omniscanner into a loop next to the comm on the side of her belt, she kept her gun trained on the door in case any more of her crewmates decided to make an appearance.

  Tamar was six and a half feet tall, lean and muscular. She had sharp, hawkish features that were striking, if not especially pleasing, and wore her blond hair cut short—long hair gave an opponent something to grab. A sleeveless khaki T-shirt covered a nusteel undergarment, along with tan slacks and knee-high black boots. She looked more like an athlete than she did a pirate, and while her crewmates wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that she was a competition-level martial artist, they would’ve been very surprised to learn she’d just killed their captain.

  When the stasis pod finished climbing out of the storage compartment, Tamar stepped out into the corridor and looked both ways to make sure it was empty. It was. She jogged down the corridor, pistol in her right hand raised and ready to fire, the stasis pod whirring along behind her like an obedient pet. She wished she could speed up the damn thing, but it was designed to be sturdy, not fast. She had to force herself to keep from running full-out.

  This had started as another routine smash-and-grab job. The Manticore was a pirate vessel, and the crew had thievery down to a science. They frequented well-known intersystem trade routes, constantly broadcasting a false distress signal. Eventually a ship responded—only the most cold-hearted people would abandon a crew out here in the cold, dark vastness of space.

  The Manticore waited until the Proximo was in range, and then fired its rail gun. The weapon used electromagnetic force to send multiple projectiles at great speeds, with devastating effect. They’d targeted the ship’s engines and communications array, and once the boat was dead in the water, they’d docked and boarded. The crew of the defending ship had been ready to put up resistance, but the pirates of the Manticore were prepared for that. They came wearing breathing masks and throwing gas grenades.

  There was an exchange of gunfire, but it didn’t last long, and the Manticore’s crew were able to round up their wheezing, red-eyed victims and escort them to the ship’s brig. After that, it was a simple matter to ransack the ship, searching for anything that could be sold on the black market. Tamar had served on the Manticore for the last seventeen months, and during that time the crew had raided a dozen different ships, but none of them had ever presented such a prize as what she suspected lay inside the stasis pod.

  This was the reason she’d joined the Manticore’s crew in the first place. She wasn’t a pirate, and preferred to think of herself as a professional in the field of “freelance information acquisition.”

  Put simply, she was a spy.

  The galaxy—at least, the small portion of it that humans had settled—was in a state of constant upheaval, but the nature of large-scale conflict was different now. No longer did nations strive against one another for control of territory and resources or to increase their global status. Out here, there were no countries, no governments, no rulers. There were only the mega-corporations, constantly struggling to outcompete each other and increase their wealth and power. Tamar had been hired by one of the mega-corps—Venture—and tasked with infiltrating a pirate crew to keep an eye out for any stolen items which the corporation might turn to its advantage. It was boring work, but it paid well enough, and she’d only signed on to two years with the Manticore and its crew.

  There were nine months left before Venture gave her a new assignment—hopefully, a more exciting one. During her time on the pirate vessel she hadn’t discovered a single thing that might be of even minor interest to her employers, and she’d all but given up hope.

  Until today.

  She needed to get the stasis pod off this ship without any of her surviving companions stopping her. Tamar preferred not to hurt any of them, though. Several of them had been her lovers at one time or another. There was a lot of downtime on a spaceship, and if you weren’t passing a trip in cryo-sleep, you had to find some way of occupying yourself. She was too much of a professional to allow herself to become emotionally attached, but she’d prefer to avoid killing any more of them.

  Doing a quick mental rundown of the surviving Manticore crewmembers, she guessed where they were most likely to be. Lia Holcombe was guarding the Proximo’s crew in the brig, and Tamar wouldn’t pass near there on her way to the docking port. Kenyatta Lehman might still be busy with the ship’s computer system, reviewing the official cargo manifest and searching for an unofficial one, an encrypted list of off-the-books cargo. If she’d finished with that, though, she might have joined Sid Chun in the cargo bay so they could start assessing which of the Proximo’s goodies they should take and which—due to size and weight constraints—they would be forced to leave behind.

  The cargo bay was located near the docking port, though Tamar could avoid it by taking a more circuitous route through the ship. Doing so would mean adding time to her journey, and she didn’t know if she should risk it. If one of the surviving pirates tried to contact Juan, they’d receive no reply. They wouldn’t be too concerned at first—comms malfunctioned, after all—but then they would go in search of their captain. If they found his corpse in the cabin Tamar had been searching, they’d come looking for her, guns out and ready.

  No doubt she could take them if they came at her one at a time, but if they approached her as a group? She was less certain of her odds in that scenario. Worse, if they started shooting, the stasis pod—and more importantly, its contents—might be damaged in the crossfire.

  Tamar opted for the most direct route, past the entrance to the cargo bay. Sid and Kenyatta might be too busy to notice her walking by, stasis pod in tow. More likely they’d hear the pod’s goddamned whirring, and step into the corridor to see what was up.

  Jogging down the corridor, she headed in the direction of the cargo bay. Once she reached the Manticore, she’d undock and depart with her prize. Her crewmates would be stranded, but at least they’d be alive.

  Most of them, anyway.

  As she neared the bay she slowed to a walk, and the stasis pod slowed to match her pace. She was fit—she’d made sure to exercise regularly during her time on the Manticore—but she still felt winded, and her pulse thrummed in her ears. Nerves, she thought, and she focused on calming herself. Being nervous was okay. Looking nervous could arouse suspicion, and that could be deadly. Reluctantly, she holstered her gun. If either Kenyatta or Sid glanced at her as she passed, it wouldn’t do for them to see her with weapon in hand.

  By the time she reached the cargo bay she was breathing normally, and her pulse had slowed. The entrance was open, and she risked a quick look. The bay was filled with large mining equipment—drills and haulers, mostly—but there were also containers of electronic components and medical supplies. These would be easiest to transport and sell. Harder to track, too. She hoped to see Sid and Kenyatta moving among the equipment and storage containers, cataloguin
g and discussing their finds. Instead, they both stood several feet back from the open doorway, gripping their pistols.

  As Tamar came into view, they trained their weapons on her, and she froze. The stasis pod halted, sensing that she’d stopped moving.

  “Going somewhere?” Kenyatta asked. She smiled, but there was no mirth in her gaze. The woman was of African descent, tall and lean, hair cut close to her skull. She had delicate, almost doll-like features that belied her true nature. She could be utterly ruthless when the situation demanded it.

  Sid Chun was a full head shorter than Kenyatta, and stocky. He wore his long black hair in a ponytail, and his Asian features were overlaid by the tattoo of a skull. He didn’t say anything, but his gaze was, if anything, colder than Kenyatta’s.

  Tamar forced herself to stay relaxed and she made sure to keep her hand well away from her gun.

  “I’m taking the pod to the ship,” she said. “Juan’s orders.”

  “Really?” Kenyatta looked at the pod, but she didn’t lower her gun.

  “Yes, really.” Prather acted annoyed. “Any particular reason you two are pointing your guns at me?”

  Sid spoke in a voice like ice.

  “Juan’s orders,” he said.

  Tamar felt a stab of fear, but kept her expression neutral.

  “Juan started having doubts about you a few weeks ago,” Kenyatta said, “when we hit that trading vessel on the edge of the Kassa system.”

  Tamar frowned. She remembered the job well. The trader had been carrying a hold full of fruits and vegetables grown in the hydroponic gardens of one of the Mars colonies. Not quite fresh produce from Earth, but close enough. The Manticore had a small refrigerated storage facility, so the crew had taken only a small portion of the food, and they’d eaten most of it themselves. They’d sold what was left over, but it didn’t bring in enough credits to come close to paying for the fuel they’d expended during the job.

  Hardly a major score. Tamar quickly reviewed her memories of the theft, but she couldn’t recall doing or saying anything that would arouse Juan’s suspicions.

  “As soon as you saw that the ship only carried produce, you lost interest,” Sid said. “A real pirate would’ve gotten a raging hard-on, seeing that many fruits and vegetables.”