Chapter Text
From top to bottom, Sevastopol Station was a single, giant goddamn maze, but Seegson Synthetics might be the section that epitomized that best of all. Its dark, winding passageways would've been dangerous enough by themselves, but now the scattered piles of violently dispatched Joes left in varying levels of consciousness made matters even worse. Ripley was grateful that someone had already disposed of APOLLO's welcome party, but she had to wonder how all those androids ended up in that state. She at least had a good idea who was responsible, but that guilty party was nowhere to be found. More than the watchful surveillance cameras or deathly silence, that was what worried her.
Ripley paused her search for a moment. With a flick of the dial on her earpiece, she switched her headset from 'receive' to 'transmit'.
"Ricardo."
"Yeah?" His grainy voice filtered into her ear. "What's up?"
"You still reading activity on your end? I can't find Samuels anywhere."
"The alerts stopped a few minutes ago, actually," he told her.
"Damn it..." Ripley hissed, biting her lip. Why hadn't Ricardo told her? He still sounded pretty shaken-up from whatever he'd witnessed in the marshal's station; she should try to go easy on him. "Okay. Call me right away if anything else changes."
"Sure, Rip."
There weren't many reasons why Seegson's security alerts would have gone quiet. Either Samuels (or some unknown party) had turned them off, he had hidden himself from detection (making it more difficult for Ripley to find him as well), or something had gone wrong. There were hundreds of ways that could've occurred, far too many variables for Ripley to parse through, so there wasn't much left for her to do except power forward, uncover the truth, and carry on.
She marched ahead, searching by both sight and motion tracker; searching for Samuels in every darkened corner, every hiding spot. As she moved deeper into the complex the carts of diagnostic equipment seemed to close in around her; she wove through overturned exam tables and crammed her body through narrow vents. Eventually Ripley emerged inside a storage room stocked with supplies and electrical components. She pocketed the ones that looked useful and kept pressing onward.
Past the stock room she discovered a spacious reception hall overlooked by a desk. The receptionist who'd once greeted clients there sat dead in her chair, spatters of blood covering the papers on the console in front of her. A deactivated Joe also lay in a pool of hydraulic fluid in the center of the room. Except for those two corpses, the room was unoccupied.
Ripley approached the doorway at the room's far end, passing between two long rows of conspicuously empty pedestals. The door swept aside and she was momentarily blinded by KG348's sun cresting over the gas giant's surface, a brutal sunrise unfiltered by atmosphere. The light shone through a tall, expansive window on the room's far wall. Ripley shielded he eyes with one hand and raised her motion tracker with the other. Still nothing. She continued searching the area, circling around an arrangement of white leather couches in the center of the room, a peculiar touch of luxury on an ugly, utilitarian station.
Ripley stopped for a moment, watching a piece of misshapen debris tumble past the window, and as she did her sneaker splashed into a puddle of liquid. She looked down to discover that she’d stepped into another pool of white hydraulic fluid that had leaked from the stump of an android's severed arm. But before she could disregard it as another dismantled Joe, the color of its sleeve caught her eye: olive green instead of Seegson grey. Ripley bent closer. She recognized the embroidered patch stitched onto its bicep, and the hand extending from the cuff of the sleeve looked startlingly human; its slackened pink fingers were fully adorned with neatly trimmed fingernails. Ripley inhaled a quavering gasp.
She'd found Samuels.
She followed a separate smear of blood and discovered his torso, or rather what was left of it; it had been decapitated, bisected, and torn savagely open. A mess of white tubes and strands of translucent, pearly orbs trailed across the floor from gaping wounds. His legs had been thrown into the far corner of the room, and his other arm had somehow ended up on the cushions of one of the couches.
"Oh god..." Ripley whispered. As she looked over the gore her stomach churned and she swallowed thickly. She should've been desensitized to these kind of gruesome scenes by now - she must've stumbled across dozens of corpses on this station, and just as many deactivated androids - but no, this was different. This was a colleague, a friend, and he'd died in one of the worst, most agonizing ways that a person could die. This was all Waits' fault. He was the one who'd convinced Samuels to venture out here by himself. Now, Ripley almost wished the marshal was still alive just so she could storm back to the Bureau and kill him herself.
"God damn it..." Ripley cursed, blinking back angry tears.
In reply a quiet voice, distorted by a layer of electronic haze, echoed in the empty room. "Hello?"
Ripley 's motion tracker clattered to the floor.
"Is someone there?" the voice called out again as Ripley scrambled to recover her tracker. Wait… she recognized that voice. She should've recognized it anywhere, distortion or no, after it had served as her lifeline in that hellish hospital, guiding her to safety.
"Samuels?" her voice wavered almost as badly as his did.
A beat. "Ripley?" he ventured.
All of the breath left her lungs in one relieved sigh, leaving her dizzy. "Samuels, what the hell...?"
"You're all right? Oh, thank god, I'd hoped it was you! I'm over here, by the way, next to the window-"
She wasn't entirely sure if she wanted to see what waited for her next to that window, but she still followed the source of his voice and found him... or, more accurately, found the final piece of him. His head rested on its side facing the window. Unable to move himself or turn away, he was forced to stare into the glaring light flooding through that window. A pool of white fluid had gathered under his throat, seeping from that ragged edge where his neck had been torn from his shoulders.
"-news that you had been launched from the station, I feared that all was lost," he continued to chatter away in what sounded suspiciously like relief as Ripley approached, "And you made it here, after all that; I'm amazed that-"
He kept talking as she knelt next to him, only going silent when she grasped the sides of his head and turned him to face her. He felt alarmingly light in her hands. Far too fragile. How could an entire person be contained in something so small?
"What the fuck happened to you?" Ripley tried once more to stop her voice from wavering, and failed.
His chestnut-brown eyes scanned over her, focusing on her bruises and split lip. Seeing his facial features animating themselves, detached and independent of anything below his neck... yeah, she was gonna have nightmares about this. One more item to add to that rapidly-lengthening list.
"I was ambushed by a group of Working Joes," Samuels said, sounding, for some reason, contrite. "Eight total. I destroyed one of them and damaged two others, but Amanda, that means there are still seven of them moving around the complex. One of them had a keycard; by now, they could be anywhere. We can't stay here long-"
"Shh. Samuels," she interrupted. He was rambling. As much as Weyland-Yutani assured its customers that its synthetics weren't capable of ’true’ emotions such as fear, here was Samuels, rapidly convincing her otherwise. "I don't..."
Ripley glanced at his disemboweled torso that still sat quiescent a few feet away and swallowed, resisting another surge of nausea. "Your body's in pretty bad shape. Even if we had time, I... I don't think I could repair it."
"That's fine," he said brightly, "Leave it."
"...What?"
"Just take my head with you." He sounded far too chipper for someone who'd been torn limb from limb, "I can be fitted with a new body once we make it back to a repair facility."
She gaped at him.
"You want me to... carry you around." Ripley stated again to confirm the absurdity of it. "Just your head."
"With your permission. It would be unwise for you to backtrack to retrieve me later. You may need my help to access APOLLO, anyway. I'll probably fit inside that bag of yours..."
"Oh my god." Ripley cradled her forehead in one hand.
"Does that disturb you?" Samuels backpedaled immediately, "I'm sorry. If you find this too distressing I can wait here."
"No, I'm NOT leaving you behind. God, no. It's just..." She sighed in resignation. With a heave she wrested her bag of supplies and weapons from her shoulder and set them on the floor. "This might be the most fucked-up thing I've ever had to do... and that's saying something, considering how this trip’s gone up to now."
Halfway through the task of clearing a space for Samuels inside her bag of supplies, Ripley paused in thought. A different idea occurred to her. She began unzipping the top half of her flight suit instead.
"What are you doing?" Samuels followed her hands with his eyes as she peeled the first layer away, revealing the denim shirt underneath. She began unbuttoning this next.
"I changed my mind. I'm making a sling to carry you."
"Ripley, we don't have time for this," he said, his impatience finally overcoming his anxiety, "Just put me in the bag, I'll be fine."
"This won't take long, calm down," she chided, "I'm not gonna keep you crammed inside there. That's..." Cruel? Dehumanizing? Could you dehumanize someone who wasn't human in the first place? The idea rubbed Ripley the wrong way no matter how she spun it. "...it's stupid. Plus, how're you supposed to help me if you can't see anything I'm doing?"
She finally wrestled her arms out of her denim shirt and, left with the simple black tank top underneath, was rewarded with a rush of cool air against the sweat-slick skin of her shoulders and back. After a few minutes of effort she managed to rip the denim shirt into long, uneven strips.
"Okay. I'm picking you up now," she warned before lifting Samuels from the floor, taking care not to touch any of the exposed wiring of his spinal cord. The strands of his hair parted smoothly around her fingers as she held him, just like a human's. The utter normalcy of that tiny detail made the entire situation somehow even creepier. She smoothed his hair back into place as she tucked him against her left hip, then used the top half of her flight suit to form a kind of hammock, tying the sleeves together over her shoulder and firmly securing him with strips of repurposed denim. Once finished, she adjusted the straps that looped over her shoulder and across her chest and rose to her feet.
"How's that? Doing okay down there?" she lifted her elbow to look down at him.
"All's well on this front," he smiled up at her in reply. He couldn't tilt or rotate his head more than a few degrees - most of that musculature had been severed along with the rest of his body - but he could still lift his eyebrows until his gaze met hers.
She raised one eyebrow at him in return. "You seem way too happy about this arrangement, can I just say that?"
"Well, before you arrived, I had been preparing myself for a most grim fate indeed."
"More grim than being carried around as a head? Jesus Christ... this fucking place…"
Ripley trailed off into disgruntled mutters as she bent over to retrieve her bag. She had to hold Samuels’ forehead in place with one hand to keep him from spilling out of the sling as she did so.
"Come on, let's get the hell out of here." They just had to keep pushing forward. Just a little longer, and all of this would be over.