After leaving Earth, Newt appointed a sense
of optimism regarding the state of things. Years in the asylum, drugged up, dreaming,
isolated from the world left her feeling that she wasn't really part of the world, anyway. The dreams even subsided for some time into
their journey. The optimism may have been shortlived, and
Newt became to question her place in the universe once more, and the man - or- synthetic she
had come to love. I should have guessed the first time I was
with him. Everything was so - perfect. Skin- hair - musculature -- all of it meticulously
designed and synthesized. I could imagine his designer relaxing behind
a gentic schematic, adding and subtracting features with the arbitrary twist of a dial. He was an android construct - a replica. I think he was as surprised as anyone else
was to learn the truth. It was almost funny Bueller was the first
man who ever loved me - and he wasn't a man at all. I had to keep my mind on our situation. Everything about this ship was wrong. Preprogrammed navigation - no weapons -- capable
of recieving communications but not transmitting - what they hell were they doing? The storeroom she used as her sleeping quarters
was private, a three-meter-by-two-meter box, but since it was next to the ship’s internal
power and heating system, it was also hotter than most spots onboard. She stripped to her undershirt and panties,
lay down, and leaned back against the bulkhead that served as a pillow. Sweat slid down her bare skin, dampened her
clothes, and made her feel sticky. Still, it wasn’t unbearable. And it was damn sure better than the company
she’d have to endure otherwise. She was dozing when Hicks appeared in the
doorway. She hadn’t bothered to slide shut the hanging
curtain she’d rigged. His sudden presence startled her. “Make some noise when you move, Hicks. You scared me.” e stepped into the room, his feet nearly touching
hers. Ssomething about the way he stood there made
her nervous. “Everything scares you, Newt,” he said. She blinked sweat away, wiped at her eyes. “What are you talking about?” He moved closer. Knelt. Reached out and caught her shoulders. “When you were a kid you were scared of
dying. Later, you were scared of living.” “Jesus, Hicks, back off—”
He grabbed her wrists, leaned against her. His face was only centimeters from hers now. She could smell his sweat. “You really prefer that thing in the computer
room? Wouldn’t you rather be with a real man? One who has all the right equipment?” She felt something hard poke into her belly. Christ, was he going to rape her? “Hicks! Stop it! Why are you doing this?” He jerked back,
“Why? Because I’m going to make you face yourself. What you’re afraid of. Love. Passion. Caring. People.” Newt looked down, and saw that the bulge she’d
felt wasn’t what she’d thought. It was his belly
With his scream, his abdomen burst outward in a spray of flesh and gore and a full-size
adult alien came forth. Impossible, it wasn’t physically possible! It smiled at her, showing the sharp carnivore’s
teeth. Slime and blood dripped as it reached for
her… * * * Oh my god, the dreams again. Oh, fuck. A dream. Only a dream! But she knew better. It wasn’t a dream. It was a vision. A… communication. It was too real, it went too deep. They were here. On the ship. Newt grabbed her clothes and ran. Hicks was fiddling with the program that ran
the external pickups, hoping to figure a way to magnify images visually when Newt rushed
in. She was half into her coverall, drenched in
sour sweat. “Hicks, they’re here. On the ship!” She grabbed at his shirt. “Take it easy, take it easy! You saw one?” “She dreamed about it,” Bueller said quietly. "Christ, Newt. They're dead. Like Earth. Like us." "Maybe you're burned out. Maybe you WANT to die, but not me! Not by one of those things." “Look, Newt, it doesn’t make sense—”
“Where is the gun, Hicks? If you won’t help me find them, I’ll do
it myself!” “All right. You want to play marine? We’ll play marine. But I’ll keep the gun. We’ve only got part of one magazine left.” What the hell, Hicks thought, it was something
to do. So far, it had turned up exactly what he thought
it would, zero. They’d been through all the ship big enough
to hide a small dog and so far hadn’t seen even an insect. Sometimes you got a few bugs on a ship, despite
the zap fields supposed to keep ’em off. Some guys made pets out of them. “That’s it, Newt. End of sweep. Nobody home.” “What about the aft cargo storage?” Hicks leaned the carbine against the wall
and scratched a sweaty itch on his shoulder. “Can’t get into it. Coded lock. We can’t get in, nothing can get out, either.” “Come on, Hicks. I’ve seen these things operate. So have you.” “We could take a look at the door, that’ll
make you happy.” “It won’t make me happy, but we have to
check.” The corridor leading to the aft cargo hatch
was narrow and dimly lit. But Hicks could see down its length that the
hatch door was shut and the LED on steady red-lock. Like all inner doors, it was airtight and
proof against sudden decompression or hammering of fists—if somebody got on the wrong side
of it during an emergency. Standard duralloy plate, six or seven centimeters
thick. Even the aliens could have trouble clawing
through that. “What’s that smell?” she asked. Hicks sniffed. Something burned. It smelled acrid, like… cable insulation. A short somewhere? Could be easy enough, given how this ship
was put together. “It’s stronger over here,” she said,
pointing toward the side corridor they’d just passed. “Better check it out—”
A lazy wisp of smoke crawled from the corridor, a heavy vaporous snake that stayed low, hugging
the deck. “Better grab an extinguisher,” Hicks said. Suddenly there came a loud metallic scream,
the blare of a Klaxon. Foam from a ceiling fire suppressor sprayed
into the corridor ahead of them, gushing from the cross-corridor. They walked parallel to the aft cargo compartment,
and it only took a couple of meters to find the source of the smoke. A dangling cable, burned through, still smoking. “Hicks.” He turned to see what Newt wanted. There was a hole in the wall between the corridor
and the aft cargo hold. A ragged, melted gap big enough for a man
to walk through without touching the edges. Melted by acid. Lying on the floor was an alien. Part of the deck beneath it was eaten away
by its blood, a fluid so acidic as to defy belief. One theory Newt had heard in the ’casts
was that it made the things taste bad. That was fairly horrifying. What kind of creature could possibly eat these
monsters? Along with the dead alien, the main cargo
in the hold seemed to be four hypersleep chambers. Each had once contained a person. What was left of the four bodies wouldn’t
add up to one full-size corpse. The lids of the chambers were cracked and
blood-spattered, human blood from the look of it, and long dried. Hicks examined one of the control panels next
to a ruined chamber. He turned back to Newt, who was glancing quickly
around, expecting an attack at any second. “These four were deep into it,” he said. “Iced as cool as you can get without killing
them. I think maybe somebody knew they were infected. Trying to keep the things growing inside the
humans dormant. Looks like it didn’t work.” “Why? Why would somebody do that?” Hicks shook his head. “Dunno.” He looked around, the carbine held ready. “Politics. Profit. We can talk philosophy later. Way I figure it, there were four aliens. Three of them killed the fourth and used its
acid blood to eat themselves an exit. They’ve finished off breakfast”—he waved
the carbine at the mostly eaten bodies—“and they’ll be out looking for dinner.” “Mitch!” “Don’t worry about Bueller, they don’t
much like the flavor of android. We figured that out on the trip to their homeworld.” He turned, brought the carbine up. Something hissed. The thing stepped out into the light. Three meters tall, gleaming black. If the monster had eyes, they were hidden
from view as always, but whatever senses it used, it knew they were there. The external jaws opened and drool dripped
from the rows of finger-thick needles that were its teeth. The spiky tail lashed back and forth like
that of a cat about to pounce. “You son of a bitch,” Hicks shouted at
the creature. "Maybe we brought it on ourselves, maybe things
like you really are the next evolutionary step. I just don't give a shit anymore!" The boom! of the carbine was loud in the cargo
hold, a blast that bounced from the hard walls and hurt Newt’s ears. The alien fell backward, Newt saw the top
of its head ten centimeters behind the jaws burst outward, tiny chips of armor flying
as the bullet tore through. A thin stream of yellowish liquid spewed,
painted the floor. It seemed to fall in slow motion, collapsing
into a heap onto a hatch set flush into the deck. “You got it!” The hatch began to smoke where the stream
of acid landed. More liquid pooled from the punctured skull. “Out, Newt, out! That’s a dump hatch, it leads to a lock
between here and the hull! If that shit eats through the outer door—”
Newt didn’t need to be told. She jumped for the door in the bulkhead behind
her. Hicks was right on her heels. She was two meters ahead of Hicks when another
alarm, more strident, began to blare. That would be the hull breach warning. The floor-to-ceiling hatch five meters ahead
began to slide down, a light next to it lit and flashed red. Unless something plugged the hole in the hull,
all the air on this side of the hatch was going to piss itself into the vacuum. Anybody on this side of the hatch was going
to die trying to breathe nothingness. Newt dived at the closing hatch, made it through,
hit the deck. She saw that Hicks wouldn’t make it. He tried. He dived, stretched out full length, slid. But the door came down across the small of
his back. Newt saw it press into his flesh. He screamed in agony. Newt managed to override and re-open the hatch,
releasing Hicks, who collapsed. "So cold," managed to say. "Can't catch my breath." He had been exposed to open space, and suffering
from the bends. Newt leaned in to help. "You killed it. It's over." "No- two left," Hicks said. Hicks carried Hicks back to Bueller, to report
the events. “We’ve got company,” she said. “Maybe next time you two will listen to
me when I tell you something.” Hicks began playing with the internal video
cams. They weren’t much, basic and cheap bottom-of-the-line
Cambodian units. Terran regulations required such equipment,
even on robot ships, and for once, Hicks was glad to see union politics doing something
useful. No motion sensors or infrared, but something
was better than nothing. “We figure there are two of them left,”
Newt said. She leaned against the back of Hicks’s chair,
watching the monitors as Hicks brought up the various views. Nothing in the main corridor. “How did they get on board?” Hicks said, “Somebody had four demi-stiffs
in chambers in the aft cargo hold. Infected.” The midline cargo bay was clear. “Why would anybody do that?” “Good question. Fuck if I know.” No monsters in the makeshift head. Hicks brought up another view, this time of
the kitchen they’d rigged. Nobody home. Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Then: they spotted the aliens. They were on the ceiling of the corridor just
outside the midline cargo section. If Hicks hadn’t known they could do that,
latch themselves to the ceiling, he wouldn’t have had the camera doing full pans, but he’d
seen the things come off the walls and ceilings of their nests. They weren’t moving and if he hadn’t known
better, they looked like some kind of sculpture hung by a modern artist. “There they are,” Hicks said. "Open the hatch" Bueller opened the cargo hatch, sending the
xenomorphs out in a vaccuum, and one of them out into the cold of space. The other, however, had managed to claw itself
onto the exterior of the ship. One threat remained against the crew of The
American. It was then that Something started banging
on the hull. The pounding that vibrated through the ship
changed to a scraping noise, like giant claws scratching on metal. Bueller instantly recognized the severity
of the situation. “I’ll go,” Bueller said. “Wait a second,” Newt said. “Why does anybody have to do anything? It’s outside. It doesn’t have any air, it will freeze,
it will die!” Hicks shook his head. “It’s not human, Newt. We don’t know what kind of oxygen or energy
reserves it has tucked away. It might survive a long time. Any of us would already be history out there.” “So? Fuck it, let it croak slowly.” Bueller picked it up. “This isn’t a combat ship, Newt. No armor. There are things it could damage out there. Heat tiles and hydraulic sheathing will protect
against atmospheric burns and space dust, but not against what that creature can do.” Newt shook her head. “Great. Just fucking great.” “We have a couple of inspection suits,”
Bueller said. “Umbilicals. I’ll see if I can rig one to fit me.” Newt stared at him. She took a deep breath. Hicks and Bueller were in condition to go,
leaving her as their best possible hope to eliminate the alien threat that could cause
fatal damage to the ship at any moment. She volunteered for the task. Newt stripped to her undershirt and panties. The lock was chilly, the suit stiff and bulky
as she stepped into the bottom half and worked it up her legs. Hicks had drilled her half a dozen times in
how to put the suit on, how to test the seals, make sure everything was in working order. If he could have moved, he would have been
here checking it. Of course, if he could have moved, he would
have gone himself. The suit had a voxcom; Hicks’s voice came
over it as Newt lowered the hard plastic helmet into place. Armed with the carbine, Newt made her way
out into space, to eleminate the alien threat. She instantly recognized her vulnerability. "I could hear the air hissing out of the chamber. The fabric of my suit rippled as the pressure
dropped. The silence was loud. Like a scream. I could feel them outside. Their patience was their strength. Humans measure time in minutes, seconds, microseconds. Time never mattered to the alien. Only survival. God help me, I was beginning to understand
them." She knew what she was dealing with, she had
a gun that could kill it, she was brighter. The drones were like big ants or bees, they
were nasty and deadly, but stupid. That’s what everybody said. Relentless, yes; smart, no. Faux grav was confined to the inside surfaces
of the ship. Outside, the thing would float away if it
wasn’t very careful. Newt could walk on the hull with her boots;
the alien would have to have something to hold on to. And it wasn’t going to be her. The local sun was shining, but on the opposite
side of the ship. Newt moved to the entrance. Leaned out and looked to the sides. The ship had running lights and the faint
glow was enough for her to see the immediate area was clear. “Nobody in sight. I’m going out.” “The magnets are stronger under the arch
of your foot, weaker at the ball and heel,” Hicks said. “Walk as normally as you can and the boot
will peel up and replant okay. It’ll feel like you’re stepping on something
real sticky. Just take it slow, keep one foot down at all
times.” “Hicks, you already said that. It wasn’t that long ago; my brain hasn’t
gone dead yet.” Newt moved her other leg outside of the ship,
triggered the magnetics on the left boot. Felt a sudden dizziness as she stood “up,”
extending from the side of the ship like a thorn stuck into it. She attached the magnetic ball of the umbilical
to the ship as a backup. “You’ll probably feel like you’re falling,”
Hicks said. “That’s okay, don’t let that bother
you, you’ll adjust in a little while.” Newt looked around. God, it was so big! Despite the fear she felt, a sense of wonder
flowed into her. There was a kind of razor-edge beauty to it. “It’s a real E-ticket ride out here.” “Ain’t it, though,” Hicks said. “You never forget your first EVA.” “Assuming you survive it,” Newt said. Walking was, as Hicks said, not too hard. A little awkward, but not bad once you got
used to it. There was a little light on top of her helmet,
and she switched it on. She felt as if she were the only person in
the entire universe. “I’m going to walk toward the back of
the ship. I’ll stay near the right edge so I can look
down the side.” Newt started moving. She held the carbine ready to fire, her finger
on the trigger. You weren’t supposed to do that, you weren’t
supposed to touch the trigger until you were ready to fire the weapon, but she wasn’t
going to risk fumbling in the damned gloves when she couldn’t feel anything through
them. The umbilical ball rolled soundlessly along
behind her. She started to turn back and peer over the
side of the ship when she caught a glimpse of movement in her peripheral vision. The alien flew toward her like some malignant
retro-bird, arms extended, taloned hands spread wide to catch her. She screamed, something wordless and primal,
and snapped the carbine up: no time to aim, just point it and shoot—! The recoil from the first shot peeled her
free of the ship. She couldn’t tell if she hit the alien or
not. The second shot’s recoil spun her backward
in a flip, her lower body and feet blocked her view of the onrushing monster. The umbilical created drag; the magnetic ball
held. Instead of finishing the flip or sailing straight
back, she arced downward toward the ship. Went over the side, still connected to the
hull. Her weapon, however, had been lost. “Newt, goddammit, answer me!” “Okay, okay. It’s all right.” Newt went down the rear of the ship until
she was at the docking thruster. The main thruster was a hollow tube a good
three meters across, and it went far enough in so the other end of it was in complete
blackness. The only way she was going to see that far
was to lean over the rim and use her helmet light. Which meant that if anything was in there,
it was going to see her when she peeped over the edge. Then she saw the alien. It was crouched against the reaction tubes,
ready to spring. As if it had known she was coming. “Oh, shit! It’s in the thruster!” Newt scrabbled backward, trying to get back
over the rim. Her gloved hands slipped on the ceramic liner. In desperation, Newt realized she was trying
to do the wrong thing. There wasn’t any gravity out here. She didn’t have to crawl backward on the
ship, she just had to get out of the thing’s way. She was thinking in two dimensions, but now
she had wings. She shoved, as if she were doing a push-up. Flew away from the ship at a right angle—
“I’m clear!” Fire blossomed, yellow-orange heat and light
that nearly opaqued her faceplate as the polarizers turned the plastic dark against the wash of
brightness. She imagined she could hear the alien scream
as it pinwheeled away from the ship, wrapped in a mantle of burning fluids, cooking within
its shell. She. Found herself grinning wolfishly. The Alien enjoyed an ethical purity that transcended
morality. It didn't concern itself with human concepts
of good and evil -- it didn't have to. It bore no malice when it killed, and that
was where we were different. In the black vaccuum of space, death was the
only absolute. Survival was imperative -- and I took pleasure
in watching it burn. Two days after Newt blasted the last alien
into space Bueller picked up radio transmissions. The signals were on the military band and
coded, so they didn’t know what was being said, but from the strength, they had to be
close. Unfortunately, the ship did not have any transmitters
they could use, only receivers. It didn’t take Hicks long to figure out
where the signals originated. “Hello,” he said. “Lookie here.” Newt leaned over his shoulder as Hicks played
with the computer screen. “Got us a planetoid. Not much bigger than a moon, but in direct
orbit around the local primary. Been on the opposite side of the sun from
us pretty much since we left the chambers, that’s why we couldn’t see it.” Numbers crawled up the screen. Hicks did something and the tiny blotch expanded
and took on a roughly spherical shape, overlaid with grid lines. “Colonial Marine base?” Bueller said. “Yeah, that’d be my guess. Inflate a few pressure domes, pump ’em full
of breathable, bury a couple gravity generators, and you got all the comforts of home. Provided you grew up in a barracks. Military has hundreds of these bases scattered
around the galaxy. Or did have.” The three of them stared at the computer-augmented
image. Newt wondered if they were thinking the same
thing she was: Was this a place of refuge? Or were they leaping from the frying pan into
the fire? It looked as if they were going to find out
soon. In this series, I'm recounting the Earth War,
as depicted in the Aliens comics series, and the events leading up to it, as well as its
aftermath. The accounts are explored as originally published,
despite certain names, locations, and other events having been altered over time. For more on the Earth War, you can check out
the Accounts of the Earth War playlist on the endscreen, and stay tuned for the latest
videos. As always, I'd like to Thank you very much
for watching. I really appreciate it, and If you enjoyed
this video, please make sure to give it a like, and you can also subscribe for all the
latest videos from the channel A very, very special thanks goes out to Weyland
Yutani Executive EmYaruk, part of the Patreon Hive. I'd also like to thank our Hive's queen: Lady
Anne. If you'd like to join the hive and support
the channel, check out my Patreon page for exclusive posts and contests. In the meantime you can catch up with Alien
Theory over social media- follow @Alien_Theory on Twitter, and @AlienTheoryYT on Facebook
and Instagram for more. And until next time, this is Alien Theory,
signing off.
