Chapter 1: Cold Case

Jones stirred, opening his eyes and trying to blink away his blurred vision.

Something was wrong.

Like waking from a dream, he slowly came to, attempting to sit up on the soft padding beneath him. Pain shot down one of his legs, his muscles trembling, his body responding to his commands with worrying sluggishness. His thoughts were still muddled, and he tried to remember what had happened and where he was, dredging up the memories like he was fishing scum out of a pond.

He was in a stasis pod, and its canopy was open. He could see the reflection of the red warning displayed on an adjoining computer console flashing intermittently, illuminating the room with brief pulses of eerie crimson. Why were there no lights on?

It was a fight to get out of the pod. He had to swing one leg onto the floor, finding it painfully cold beneath his bare feet, one hand gripping the edge of the machine for stability. His body was emaciated – he had lost weight and muscle mass. Nausea gripped him in its icy fist, and he was compelled to double over, painful cramps wracking him as he tried to retch up the non-existent contents of his empty stomach.

Still trying to get his bearings, he turned to examine the pod. The protective padding inside was still pristine, but the open canopy was caked in a layer of thick dust, and the same was true for the nearby monitoring equipment. It looked like an open sarcophagus from some ancient tomb. There were more such pods lined up to the left and right of it – Jones could see them in the gloom, but they quickly dissolved into the inky darkness. Everything smelled musty and old, and he could see his breath forming little clouds of condensation. No lights, no heating, no power.

He moved over to the console beside his pod, keeping a hand on its metal frame to brace himself, still unsteady on his feet. The flashing red lettering on the bulky display explained why he had been woken up.

Power interruption. Emergency resuscitation protocol engaged. Medical teams have been alerted.

“Apparently not,” he muttered to himself, glancing around the dingy room.

The first thing he needed to do was find some clothes before he froze to death. All he was wearing were his skinnies.

Remembering that he should have some belongings stashed in the locker beside his pod, he opened it up. It was supposed to be locked, and there was no way he could have remembered the combination for the digital lock in his present foggy state of mind, but the door simply swung ajar without power. Inside were a few sundries and a bundle of clothes. It was a lab suit – environment-sealed and insulated. It would do nicely.

Putting it on was a struggle in itself, his stiff limbs and weak muscles fighting him all the way, the dizziness from his stay in the pod lingering. The suit was designed to protect the wearer in clean rooms and labs, made from a plastic-like material in shades of white and hospital green. It could be sealed, it had a mask with a rebreather, and it was equipped with a heating element. The battery had drained over time, but there was enough juice to protect him from the cold and to turn on the small LED flashlight mounted beside the visor.

Jones swept the thin, pale beam across his surroundings, watching it reflect off the motes of dust that choked the air. Some of it was starting to come back to him now as the suit staved off his lethargy.

He was standing in the stasis room, a dozen pods just like his own lined up from wall to wall. The place was a mess. It looked like a bomb had gone off – the cables and pipes that should have delivered power and water hanging limply from the ceiling, the nearby work surfaces and computer consoles caked with dust and ice. The CRT on his pod was still flickering, and it seemed to be the only device in the room that still had power.

He tapped at the keyboard, but he couldn’t access any of the functions. All it did was throw out another error message – emergency battery banks depleted.

“How long was I out?” he muttered, checking a nearby pod to see if it was occupied. He wiped the dust from the glass with a gloved hand, finding nobody inside.

Now that his mind was starting to sharpen, the gravity of what had happened to him became apparent. His weakness and atrophy, his growing hunger, his brain fog – he must been in stasis for far longer than was healthy. Judging by the state of the room and the lack of any medical response, years could have passed. Just where the hell was everybody else?

Jones remembered his name, which meant that his brain hadn’t been completely fried, and he lifted the ID card that was attached to his chest to read it off.

“Senior lab technician, exobiology department,” he murmured to himself. “Okay, I’m a scientist. Yeah, I remember now...”

He had been assigned to a research base on some backwater colony, though he couldn’t remember why. It was coming back in brief flashes, like flipping through a gallery of old photos. What he needed was some food, then his metabolism might kick in.

Jones located a door with his flashlight and made his way over to it, his boots leaving footprints in the dust as though it was a carpet of fresh snow. Just like the locker, the electronic lock was disabled without a power source, the door creaking open on stiff hinges. He stumbled out into a corridor that was in the same sorry state as the stasis room, the panels on the walls falling off to expose wiring in places, the metal grate beneath his feet caked in dirt.

He popped open his visor, taking in a breath of frigid, stale air before raising his voice.

“Hello?” he rasped. “Is anyone there?”

God, he might not have exercised his vocal cords in years. He sounded like a chain smoker.

As he continued through the derelict hab, it became more apparent that he might well be completely alone. There was a difference between disrepair and complete abandonment, and it was obvious that nobody had set foot here in a very long time. Without any active computer terminals, he couldn’t check the date, and he couldn’t even recall when or why he had entered stasis.

He rounded a bend in the corridor and came across a window, stopping to glance out. The glass was grimy on the inside, and even after wiping it clean with his glove, the outer pane was so covered with frost that he could scarcely see through it. All he could make out were brief glimpses of blocky, industrial buildings whose drab architecture made them blend into their surroundings, the sky painted in shades of ugly gray. It was barren, without a leaf or blade of grass in sight. Hadn’t there been an atmospheric processing plant? He remembered something about that...

Come to think of it, nuclear reactors didn’t exactly run out of juice. If the whole colony wasn’t a radioactive sinkhole, and assuming that the power interruptions were due to disrepair and not someone manually shutting the plant down, maybe there were still powered structures inside the complex.

His intuition soon took him to the galley, and he stepped through another unpowered door into a larger room filled with tables and chairs. It was as much habit as it was memory, so he must have walked these halls many a time before being put under.

As he swept his flashlight across the plastic chairs and vending machines, he saw something new. Along with the loose panels and hanging cables that he had come to expect, there was some kind of growth on the walls, its slick surface reflecting the light. At first, he wondered if it was dark ice, but it proved to be organic when he took a closer look. Was it some native fungus or algae mat? It almost resembled melted resin, like someone had spilled a vat of half-cured printer filament, the substance bunching up into bulbous shapes and forming web-like strands in places. It was oddly elastic, too, resisting him when he pressed down on it. Something about its black, oily appearance filled him with a sense of foreboding, and he couldn’t articulate why.

Skirting around the strange structures, he headed for the kitchen, passing through a pair of swinging doors that sectioned it off from the galley. All of the refrigerators were unpowered, and he didn’t want to know what horrors might lurk within them, but there should be some canned and packaged food. If anything, the cold conditions would work in his favor.

After rummaging through some of the cupboards, he managed to find some pre-packaged meals. They were synthetic crap – not the most appetizing – but he was hungry enough that it didn’t matter. Once his belly was full, he felt strong enough to continue his explorations of the facility. The next item on his agenda was finding a power source.

Jones happened upon a map mounted on the wall in the hallway outside, wiping it clean to see a color-coded representation of the facility. As he had suspected, he was in a prefab building, which was one of many that must have been set up to form the colony. Shake and bake colonies – he’d heard that term somewhere.

This was a laboratory, apparently. That made sense – this must have been where he worked, according to his name tag. There was another word on the laminated card that read Weyland-Yutani. That rang a bell, and it wasn’t his name. Could that be his employer? The same lettering was present on the map.

Once he had located the exit, he set off, soon arriving at a jammed door that led to the colony. He was feeling a little stronger and sharper after his meal, so he managed to pry it open with a piece of discarded pipe, stepping out onto the planet’s surface.

Immediately, the howling wind began to tear at his suit, the gale almost strong enough to tip him over. Torrential rain hammered him, coming at him almost sideways, his feet sinking a good inch into the wet earth. He turned his head as he took in his surroundings, finding himself on a kind of main street formed by two rows of habs that extended in both directions, the dirt road between them strewn with wreckage and debris. He could even see a damaged APC that had been reduced to a burnt-out husk, its angular chassis partially buried beneath the twisted metal of a collapsed prefab. There had been fighting here, but who had been the aggressor?

The elements had not been kind to the colony, and many of the structures were listing, the wind and rain taking their toll. A pyramid-like structure loomed above the surrounding buildings, only just visible through the oppressive storm clouds. It was the reactor complex. It was still online – he could see a few faint aircraft warning lights piercing the haze, helping to pick out its shape.

He couldn’t make it there right now – not in this weather. Instead, he spotted a nearby building that still seemed to have power, a neon sign on its street-facing facade advertising a bar. Jones knew that sign – it sparked memories of him drinking and laughing with colleagues, though he couldn’t remember their faces.

Stumbling his way through the mud and rain, he tripped over something, falling face-first into a puddle. As he collected himself, struggling to his feet, he turned to see that it was a person who had been almost completely buried in the wet earth. They were lying on their back, still wearing their weather-beaten environment suit, a pair of empty sockets staring back at him through the grimy visor.

Jones ran the rest of the way to the bar, pulling himself up the short flight of steps that led to its front door and slamming it closed behind him. The sound of the storm faded, replaced with the labored breathing that filled his helmet. He popped open the visor and retched, leaning over a nearby table, but he managed to keep his meal down.

“What the hell happened here?” he demanded, as though the empty bar and scattered chairs could answer him.

That body – the rate of decomposition – it had to have been there for years. Years with nobody sent to retrieve it. Maybe help had already come, but they had missed Jones’ pod?

His suit was the more pressing matter. The heating element was already starting to fail, and if the sign outside was still powered, there must be a live charging port somewhere nearby.

On the other side of the counter, he found a standard outlet, extending a cable from his suit’s sleeve and plugging it in. He breathed a sigh of relief, watching the battery meter start to fill. There were still a few bottles left on the dusty shelves, and he reached for the nearest one, popping open his visor and twisting off the cap with his teeth. The amber liquid warmed his belly, its heat making him gasp. A little whiskey was just the pick-me-up he needed.

“Right,” he muttered, glancing around at the deserted bar as he waited for his suit to charge. “My name is Jones,” he continued, lifting his laminated badge as though needing to reassure himself. “I am a lab technician, and I work for Weyland-Yutani. Wey-Yu ... yeah, that sounds familiar. I’m on a colony planet,” he said, lifting his eyes to the filthy window that looked out over the street. “Something very, very bad happened here, and I got left behind. I was in stasis ... and I can’t remember why because I was in there too long. Maybe years. I have food, and I have power, so what’s next?”

The next step should be to figure out where and when he was. If there was power, maybe he could find a terminal and figure out what had happened on the colony – maybe get a distress signal out to hail passing ships. All things considered, his situation could be a lot worse.

“Silver linings,” he mumbled, taking another swig from his whiskey bottle to steady his nerves.

Something colorful caught his eye, and he spotted a jukebox off in one corner of the room. More indistinct memories resurfaced – the scent of cigarette smoke, the sound of jovial voices and laughter joined by music, the now scattered seats filled with people drinking and chatting. This bar had been the social nexus for the colony. It was a place where all the workers and employees came to relax and spend their scrip after a long day.

Workers and employees...

Where were they now? A colony of this size should have had a couple of hundred residents. The bar was a wreck, and it looked like someone had upturned some of the tables to use as cover, the street-facing windows pocket with bullet holes that let in the frigid air. Who had attacked them? Could it have been pirates, maybe some kind of rebellion?

There was more of that strange black substance, too, an organic pillar of the stuff climbing the right wall and spreading its tendrils across the ceiling. The air was oddly humid, droplets of moisture misting his visor, condensation dripping from the growth. It had to be some kind of native plant species – maybe his job had been to study it?

With his suit charged, Jones continued his explorations, making a point of finishing the last of the whiskey first. He checked the storeroom of the bar, finding no evidence of any colonists, then moved to the bathroom. It had been overtaken by the black growth, the stuff coating the walls and ceiling to create a pocket of dark, fleshy material. It was tangibly warmer inside, like the thing was putting out heat.