Alien Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: Discovery

  1: Salvage Vessel Anesidora November 2137

  2: Salvage Vessel Anesidora, In Orbit Around LV-426 November 2137

  3: LV-426 November 2137

  Part One: Determination

  4: Tranquility Base, Luna November 2137

  5: Uscss Torrens December 2137

  6: Vancouver, Canada, Earth July 2120

  7: Uscss Torrens December 2137

  8: Solomons Habitation Spire, Sevastopol Station December 2137

  9: Solomons Habitation Spire, Sevastopol Station December 2137

  10: Solomons Habitation Spire, Sevastopol Station December 2137

  11: Lorenz Systech Spire, Sevastopol Station December 2137

  Part Two: Isolation

  12: Vancouver, Canada, Earth April 2127

  13: Vancouver, Canada, Earth April 2127

  14: Lorenz Systech Spire, Sevastopol Station December 2137

  15: Lorenz Systech Spire, Sevastopol Station December 2137

  16: Silverstein’s Bar & Grill, Seattle, North America, Earth June 2129

  17: Lorenz Systech Spire, Sevastopol Station December 2137

  18: Lorenz Systech Spire, Sevastopol Station December 2137

  19: Lorenz Systech Spire, Sevastopol Station December 2137

  20: Tranquility Base, Luna May 2132

  21: Tranquility Base, Luna May 2132

  22: Lorenz Systech Spire, Sevastopol Station December 2137

  Part Three: Redemption

  23: Gemini Lab, Sevastopol Station December 2137

  24: Scimed Spire, Sevastopol Station December 2137

  25: Scimed Spire, Sevastopol Station December 2137

  26: Tranquility Base, Luna October 2137

  27: Sevastopol Station December 2137

  28: Salvage Vessel Anesidora December 2137

  29: Sevastopol Station December 2137

  30: Sevastopol Station December 2137

  31: Sevastopol Station December 2137

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  THE COMPLETE ALIEN™ 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 BY ALEX WHITE

  ALIEN: ISOLATION BY KEITH R.A. DECANDIDO

  ALIEN: PROTOTYPE BY TIM WAGGONER (FORTHCOMING)

  ALIEN: LEGION BY SCOTT SIGLER (FORTHCOMING)

  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 (DECEMBER 2016)

  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 ILLUSTRATED STORY

  BY ARCHIE GOODWIN AND WALTER SIMONSON

  ALIEN: THE ARCHIVE

  THE ART OF ALIEN: ISOLATION BY ANDY MCVITTIE

  ALIEN: THE SET PHOTOGRAPHY BY SIMON WARD

  THE ART AND MAKING OF ALIEN: COVENANT

  BY SIMON WARD

  KEITH R. A. DECANDIDO

  A ORIGINAL NOVEL BASED ON THE HIT VIDEO GAME

  FROM 20TH CENTURY FOX

  TITAN BOOKS

  ALIEN ™ : ISOLATION

  Mass-market print edition ISBN: 9781789093070

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781789092158

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: July 2019

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  TM & © 2019 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 the 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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  To Sigourney Weaver, who gave us Ellen Ripley, one of the greatest heroes of science fiction

  PROLOGUE:

  DISCOVERY

  1

  SALVAGE VESSEL ANESIDORA

  NOVEMBER 2137

  Henry Marlow sat in the cramped mess hall of the salvage vessel Anesidora and tried to come to grips with his seventeenth straight meal of slop. The company that manufactured it called it “FoodStuf,” and the container label went on at great length about how it served all your nutritional needs.

  It was slop.

  Marlow, the shipmaster of the Anesidora, bought FoodStuf in bulk because it took up very little space, two cases could feed his crew of five for months, and because it was dirt cheap.

  That was the most important criterion. With each year he made less and less salvaging, yet his clapped-out old ship needed more and more maintenance. As it was, he’d cut off atmo and gravity to the cargo hold to save money.

  Marlow was taking a break while the rest of the crew sorted through the latest pile of garbage they’d pulled from space in the hope that there was something valuable. There usually wasn’t, but Marlow lived in hope. That was all he had left. If they didn’t find anything good in this haul, he was seriously going to have to consider turning his five-person crew into a two-person crew.

  He held the spoon of processed food up near his face, but found he couldn’t bring himself to put it in his mouth. His brain, his tongue, his taste buds all rebelled at the notion of being subjected to this tasteless, odorless collection of off-white molecules with the consistency of snot.

  Desperately, Marlow tried to conjure up a memory of what real food tasted like. When he was kid, he’d loved grapes. They couldn’t always afford to get them, but his parents nabbed him some when grapes became available, and they could swing the price. It didn’t happen very often, so it was a special occasion when they did.

  It’d been years since he’d had a grape.

  Or any fruit,
for that matter.

  He tried and failed to imagine that the mush in his spoon was a grape. Or grape juice. Or grape-flavored mush.

  Suddenly the intercom crackled with static, startling Marlow enough for him to drop the spoon to the deck. Unconcerned with the loss of the “food,” he went over to the ’com and tapped the call button.

  “Marlow. Say again.”

  Another burst of static, but this time it sounded like the voice of Dean Lewis, the engineer. After a few moments he gave up trying to figure out what the man was saying.

  “I’ll be right down,” he responded, hoping that was what Lewis wanted. And if it wasn’t, too bad.

  Ducking his head to exit the tiny room, Marlow squeezed through the narrow corridor and headed toward the engineering bay. There he found Lewis bent over his worktable, which was piled with various bits of detritus they had gathered.

  “When the fuck are you gonna fix the intercoms, Lewis?” Marlowe said without preamble.

  “What are you talking about?” the engineer replied. “They work fine. I heard you loud and clear.”

  “Makes one of us,” the shipmaster said. “I couldn’t hear you for shit.”

  “Speaker in the mess hall’s probably blown. I’ll get to it.”

  Lewis always said he’d “get to it,” but he rarely did anything without having to be reminded, and repeatedly. It was one of the many things Marlow hated about the man, though the thing that bugged him most was Lewis’s huge beard, which was so thick you could hide a nest of birds in it. Marlow was about to say something rude when he noticed that the item on the worktable looked familiar.

  “That what I think it is?” he asked. “There was a flight recorder in with that junk?”

  He tried not to sound too optimistic. Ships in distress often dropped their flight recorders, but he’d been burned before by finding recorders for boats that had long since been recovered or destroyed. Sure, someone was likely to pay something for it, but it was too much to hope that it would lead to a bigger salvage.

  “Oh yeah.” Lewis grinned underneath his ridiculous facial hair. “And it’s the fucking motherlode.”

  “Yeah, right.” Folding his tattoo-covered arms in front of a barrel chest, the shipmaster just glared. “The only ‘motherlode’ I know of is the Nostromo. With what the company’s been offering for—what—forever, every scavenger out here wants a piece of that one. So don’t even…”

  Suddenly, Marlow realized the man was still grinning.

  “No shit,” he said. “You’re screwing with me.”

  Lewis just gestured. “Take a peek.” He pointed at the object and, for the first time, Marlow took a real look at what had held Lewis’s attention. It was a red box with a small data screen, and an even smaller keypad. There was something stenciled on the side.

  USCSS NOSTROMO

  reg 180924609

  “Holy fucking shit.”

  “Right?” Lewis clapped his hands. “The fucking motherlode!”

  “Damn… Weyland-Yutani’s been looking for that boat for, what, fifteen years now? Shit.” Marlow shook his head. His mind was flooded with images of a cargo hold filled with actual food. With a full crew instead of five people doing six jobs each. Hell, of a new ship that actually had parts made in this decade.

  Then he noticed that the screen on top of the recorder was blank.

  “Any luck breaking into the thing?” He had a sinking feeling that he knew the answer.

  Lewis shook his head. “Nah, it’s Weyland-Yutani encryption. They have the money to pay the good programmers. Working on it, though. I got the nav data—they never encrypt that, since they want the ship to be found—and I sent it up to your wife.”

  “Good,” Marlow said. “Maybe we can find the ship—get to it before everyone else—and, even if we can’t, the company’ll pay through the nose and the ass, just for this.”

  The ship’s intercom let out a loud squawk of static and they both jumped. It was followed by a stream of static. As he walked to the wall unit, he glared back over his shoulder.

  “Loud and clear, huh?”

  Lewis just shrugged and scratched his chin. Marlow swore he’d lose his hand in there someday.

  “You know, I’d rip that beard off if I didn’t think it’d take for-fucking-ever.” He tapped the intercom. “Marlow.”

  A voice crackled back at him. “Get up here, now.” It was barely recognizable as his wife, Catherine Foster.

  “Why, what happened?”

  “Just get up here!”

  Lewis chuckled. “You been married how long, and you still don’t jump when she calls? That ain’t the way holy wedlock works, boss.”

  “More than likely she just didn’t want to fuck with this shitty intercom,” the shipmaster said. “Fix it, Lewis, or I promise you I’ll set aside half a day, and I really will rip your beard off.”

  “Screw that.” Lewis pointed at the intercom. “It works now! You heard her, didn’t you? Loud and clear, like I said.”

  Rolling his eyes, Marlow decided it wasn’t worth the effort to argue, and headed for the hatch.

  “Just get me that data. I want to know the minute you’ve got it.”

  Slipping back through the narrow hatchway, he snaked his way through the Anesidora’s tight corridors and in a few minutes reached the flight deck. The ceiling there was too low for him to stand straight, so he dropped into his seat.

  “What’s happening?”

  “We got a signal,” Alan Meeks said. “Sounds like a distress call.”

  “Yeah, so?” Marlow sighed with irritation. “We ain’t the fuckin’ Marines, Meeks. Someone’s in distress, that ain’t our problem.”

  “No,” Catherine Foster said from her console at the very front of the deck, “but it might be to our benefit.”

  Marlow liked the arrangement of the bridge consoles, because he could see the back of Foster’s neck. He wasn’t sure what it was about the nape of her neck that turned him on so much, but seeing it always made him happy. He’d arranged the flight crew so that, when they were both on the flight deck, he had a great view of that particular curve.

  “Come again?” he said.

  She turned and he got to see her face, which he also enjoyed. “The distress call’s coming from LV-426. It’s a shit piece of rock, atmo’s not breathable, but get this—according to the data Lewis sent me, it was on the Nostromo’s flight path.”

  “Here’s the thing,” Meeks added. “I’ve spent the last half-hour digging up everything I can find about the Nostromo. All the official records, all the crazy-ass sightings, all of it.”

  “Wait, half an hour? When the fuck did you find out it was the Nostromo?”

  “Half an hour ago. Didn’t Lewis tell you?”

  “Yeah he did—five minutes ago.” He shook his head. “That asshole.”

  “Point is, boss, one thing’s for sure,” Meeks said. “Nostromo wasn’t supposed to make any stops on its way back to Earth. Way I figure it, something went wrong on the ship and they wound up on LV-426. Maybe crashed there? Distress call might be from them.”

  “Whaddaya think, Foster?” Marlow asked his wife.

  “Hell if I know.” She shrugged. “Decryption is Lewis’s thing, not mine.”

  “It’s encrypted?”

  “Well, I can’t make heads or tails of it.”

  Marlow shook his head. “Why the fuck would anyone encrypt a distress call?”

  “What part of ‘Hell if I know’ don’t you get? Either way, we should plot a course to LV-426, and check it out.”

  “I agree,” Meeks said. “This could be it, Marlow.”

  “The fucking motherlode.” He sighed when he realized he was using Lewis’s turn of phrase. “All right, Foster, set a course.”

  She and Meeks worked the controls and fired their thrusters to turn the vessel so that it was pointing in the direction of LV-426. The Anesidora wasn’t a new ship, and it was a laborious process. Finally, after about an hour’s worth of ma
neuvering, Meeks spoke up again.

  “Window’s open!”

  Foster fired the rockets, and the Anesidora shot toward their destination.

  “ETA three days,” Foster said.

  “Good.” Marlow rose from his chair and hunched toward the entryway. “Maybe by then, Lewis will have got something useful out of the flight recorder.”

  “Maybe by then, he’ll have fixed the intercoms,” Foster added.

  Meeks snorted. “And maybe by then, pink elephants will fly out my ass.”

  “Hope they do,” Marlowe said as he departed the flight deck. “Then maybe they can pull together that manifest for Seegson.”

  “Hey,” Meeks said in a whiny tone. “It’s almost done.”

  “You said that four days ago.”

  “It’ll be finished before we head back to Earth.” The navigator started waving his arms around. “Look, it doesn’t matter when I get it done. They won’t get it, and won’t pay us, until after we’re back home. So as long as I get it done before we head back, we’re fine.”

  Marlow didn’t reply, but just squeezed his way out of the cramped flight deck and into the slightly less cramped corridor. Meeks’s rationalizations were getting tiresome.

  He needed a drink.

  * * *

  An hour later, Marlow sat on the bunk in his quarters nursing a glass of bourbon—there was only one bottle left, and he wanted to make it last. There wasn’t space for a chair or a desk, just enough room for the closet where they kept clothes, a tiny commode, and the bunk.

  Foster came in and immediately pulled her shirt over her head, climbed out of her pants, and dropped onto the bunk with him, resting her head on his shoulder. Her body was nice and warm against his, and he smiled, wrapping an arm around her.

  “Any more bourbon left?” she asked.

  The smile fell. “Only if you want to finish it.”

  She grinned. “We’ll save it for when we salvage whatever’s on LV-426—which, by the way, is almost definitely not the Nostromo.”

  He looked down at her. “You sure?”

  “Pretty sure. Lewis decoded some of the data.”

  “Sonofabitch.” Marlow pulled out of the embrace and glared at her. “He was supposed to let me know the minute he got that done.”