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"New directive," Andy murmurs half into her ear, his chin tucked down to his chest and his hand gripping her thigh. "Us."
There's a swoop in her stomach at his words, taking away what little breath she still had in her chest under the pressure baring down on them with the Corbelan's ascent.
In the doorway, on the other side of the cockpit from them, Bjorn angles the stretched flame from his torch to just lick the tip of his cigarette, finishing it in the one go. Around them she hears half dead laughter while Bjorn stumbles past, making his way back to his seat, jostling Andy on his way past.
Her ears pop, head spinning from the change in pressure as much as Andy's words. She coughs, throat thick and tears gathering heavily in the corners of her eyes.
Us.
A half-hopeful promise framed by a nightmare so terrible it couldn't be anything but true, she recalls bleakly.
She'd never seen a birth, heard one in the close quarters that Weyland-Yutani provides for its mine workers, yes, hours of moans and screams booked marked by the audible relief that the silence afterwards implies. But it was never fast like it was with Kay, the babies then where never a chunk of horribly deformed alien flesh that spit acid as it split open.
"Us," she repeats, leaning into Andy as much as she can while strapped down, their heads knocking together.
The pressure drops away as they breach the thermopause, leaving Jackson's Star behind for the Renaissance.
Like before, in the dream, the sun shines through the front window, bathing the six them in undiluted light for what should be the first time. It just feels like a threat, if not a taunt, about what waits for them in the Romulus half of the space station as it moves to block out the sun.
As they draw nearer to the Renaissance their ship’s system comes to life, a warning about the nearness of LV-410’ rings.
She knows the question before it’s asked, and the answer before it inspires anger.
“What’s that?” Rain asks without a second thought.
“Just, the belts are closer than I thought,” Tyler admits.
Immediately Navarro follows up with, “How long?”
“It’ll be thirty-six hours give or take.”
“’Til what?” It’s Bjorn this time, not her like it was before.
“Before the station crashes against the rings.”
“Wait, what? What’d you say? That doesn’t sound very good.”
Andy’s hand in hers' tightens, causing her to turn away from Tyler, Navarro and Bjorn’s conversation, catching Kay’s warry eyes for a moment.
“Thirty-six hours?” Rain hears Tyler say incredulously from behind her, “We should be in and out in thirty minutes.”
“Andy?”
His head tilts to the side, acknowledging her, eyes shifting to the doorway of the cockpit over her shoulder in silent question.
“Yeah,” she says automatically, moving to stand with Andy at her heels.
She thinks of the conversation they’d had in the nightmare, the offer to turn back she’d wanted Andy to agree to as much as reject, even though she knew he’d only ever make one decision.
They don’t need to do that here; Andy remembers the nightmare too.
In that same alcove, down the hall from the cockpit, it’s Andy that asks questions instead of her.
“Did you make it?” He says with that sad frown that stays more on his face than she would like.
“Ye-yes,” Rain stumbles over her words to confirm, “I brought you back to the ship, we were in cryosleep chambers.” As an after thought, and only for herself, she says, “I was going to fix you.”
“But you never saw Yvaga?”
“No.”
The silence stretches between them for a moment.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Andy questions. “Again?”
Rain laughs softly to herself for a moment, caught off guard. “It’s you who’s going into the Renaissance, do you want to do it again? After all that happened before?”
Andy smiles, “I only have one directive, do what’s best for us, and I’m happy to help.”
Rain feels the tears prickle in the corners of her eyes again, and with an uneven sigh she closes the gap between Andy and herself to embrace him. “Be careful out there.”
•
Through the cameras Rain watches Tyler and Bjorn prepare to enter the station with Navarro and Kay at her side. Still as a statue, is Andy amongst it all, stepping forward without any prompt from Tyler needed to grant them entrance to Romulus. He keeps his back to the camera the whole while, even at the congratulations from Tyler and Bjorn, his head turning for a moment as if to look back at her through the camera, before catching himself and following the other two.
It's all the same as the nightmare, a tight crawl, the gravity generators cutting in and out, and the pods less than half full on the crew deck that Tyler drops for them to pick up while he and the others go and looking for usable power sources.
“Oh, she didn’t tell you?” Bjorn’s falsely sympathetic voice comes from the console in time with the video.
Andy isn’t confused like he was before, he didn’t bother telling the joke for Bjorn, she recalls, or defend what words should be used to describe him.
She thinks about it then, a slimy bitter idea about how Bjorn had doomed them all for Navarro, and she’d died anyways. The rest of them would have gotten out without any further issue from the aliens, but because a synthetic he’d never met had chosen the survival of others over his mother he decided to abuse and condemn the one person who would be responsible for getting them out of Weyland-Yutani’s grasp, no matter how logical.
And when the three are stuck in that room, again, where the alien’s first appeared, Rain wants to scream. Why hadn’t Andy taken the chip for himself from the other synthetic, or even stood outside the door? But she knows that it just wouldn’t make sense for him to do if he didn’t already know what was going to happen.
So, her and Navarro troop down to them to help, but on that same earlier thread Rain thinks that maybe Navarro doesn’t have to get infected this time. So, she keeps her eyes open for anything to use on those smaller aliens when they come crawling out behind Tyler, Bjorn, and Andy.
Unsurprisingly with the state the whole space station is in, her foot catches on a thin piece of metal pipe, sending it skittering out in front of her as she rounds the table towards the abandoned synthetic. She doesn’t hesitate to grab it.
"Bjorn! Tyler" Navarro shouts as she runs ahead. "They're in there," turning away from the window Navarro asks, "Rain, what are you doing?"
"If his module is still working I can try and transfer his credentials to Andy." Rain explains, on her knees dragging the torso back from the hole in the floor. "A higher clearance should open that door."
It’s with her hand twisted up in the crusted port behind the synthetic’s ear that he jumps to life in a final attempt at defense, just as she’d been expecting. Navarro jumps on him to hold his head in place for Rain to get the module free with little direction.
Without any further issue Rain pulls the module from the almost-dead-synthetic’s neck and the credentials disk out from within that, snatching her new-found weapon back up from the floor as she stands before running to the half-cracked doorway.
Rain steps back, watching Andy lock up as he reboots, she knows in her gut that the things are in the water now if they weren’t before.
It’s begun.