ALIEN: Manticore
Alien: Covenant Forum Topic
Blackwinter-witch
MemberPraetorianApril 04, 201737218 Views194 Replies
UPDATE: September 05 2017***************
ALIEN: Manticore is now past the 110,000 word mark. :D
That's why I've been so scarce around here, busy-busy-busy with writing and housekeeping, Life's usual hurdles, etc..
There's also short-stories coming soon-ish. They're being worked on, but have to be adjusted as the Main story progresses to eliminate continuity errors and such other annoyances.
One short-story ties-in to a work found here having to do with Walter's fate on 'Paradise'.
The other gives my views on the origin of The Alien, which I am titling ALIEN: Origins and it's far more deserving of that title than Alan Dean Foster's Covenant prequel.
A third short-story is loosely-related to the ALIENverse, but will be available for reading also.
END UPDATE*******************
I'll be posting little excerpts and teasers here, entertaining questions (though some I may not be able to answer) and I hope you guys enjoy this little window into my perspective on the ALIENverse. :) This is all partially-edited material, so it's going to be rough and have flaws.
This little bit calls-back to something Ridley Scott wanted for ALIEN, the 'flying mouse drones'. I love the idea, and as a nod of Respect and Appreciation to R. Scott, here they are in their scene.
" The ship tended itself, and it’s hibernating crew conscientiously. It constantly monitored everything aboard and outside, surveilling the cosmos via it’s sensor arrays and their sophisticated instruments. It watched, listened, and in some ways it ‘smelled’ ‘touched’ and ‘tasted’ the universe around it.
In the engine section and elsewhere throughout the vessel, the hundreds of tiny drones that swarmed and flitted about only in the absence of the crew had once again emerged, performing their tasks tirelessly. They were semi-autonomous mouse-sized extensions of the mainframe intelligence, it’s roving eyes, ears and hands, ever-vigilant over their country of darkened, cold, minimal-gravity, nitrogen-filled corridors, rooms and chambers.
As the ship came into range of comm relays, it established contact, checked for messages and other items of information the crew had stated preferences for. It collected what there was to be had, flagged items for each member of the crew and continued it’s vigil and voyage.
Sometime later, a signal impinged on antennae sensitive enough to pick up the extremely weak radio-frequency emission, one in the sub-milliwatt range, and conforming to no known comms protocol. It ran, there was a break of precisely twelve seconds, then the signal repeated again.
The computer recorded it, worked out a fix on the emission-point, and flagged it for the Captain’s attention.
Weeks later, it detected a new signal, from the same emission-point as the earlier one. This one was stronger and clearer: A standard-format distress beacon and Emergency Location Beacon.
The artificial intelligence double-checked the emission-point, re-analyzed the earlier, now silent, beacon and compared it to the Interstellar Trade and Commerce Commission standard beacon it had detected. It examined the distances involved to the nearest comm relay, worked out how many years the EM signal would take to reach it at the light-speed limits of radio transmissions.
Manticore did not possess the ITCC-mandated overrides that would force it to go to the distress beacon. The laws on Shadowfall dictated that responding to a distress beacon was strictly ‘Captain’s Discretion’.
In accordance with that, the computer began restoring the ship to Human Habitation standards, altering course to the star system that the emissions were coming from and bringing the Captain out of hypersleep."
IN SPACE THERE IS NO WARNING
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Replies to ALIEN: Manticore
Very glad you're finding the 'feel' as while I did enjoy working things to preserve and project the Fell of this universe, it's always nice to know from outside perspectives if one has indeed managed to do what one wished to accomplish. :)
You won't have to wait too much longer, things are in the home-stretch about laying out/writing the story. :D
Then, a final edit-pass to ensure details and continuity are aligned properly as well as adding in some extra details where there might be too little.
Then, one final-check pass and then it'll be available. :)
YES, I love how you phrased that regarding the Maintenance 'Mice' and the quiet, dark ship!!! :D I really wanted to try to capture what I felt when I first heard how R. Scott envisioned them and the opening scenes!!
You phrased the feeling and tone BEAUTIFULLY!!! TY for posting those thoughts!!
IN SPACE THERE IS NO WARNING
As you said, to paraphrase, there's more people out there doing things than just the Corporate and Government types. And as we've seen in Star Trek (too many times) there's no real angst when you can lose your ship and there's no real problems.
I just couldn't work with that, as it really dulls the flavour of Risk and Peril which are key elements of the ALIEN 'Feel'.
Manticore, they need to make a living and ship's burn money. They have lives, they work for a living, and while they are intelligent, skilled, experienced and very capable people...at the end of the day, they are Ordinary Folks like you, me and most people and who are trying to cope with something way outside their realm of experience, and the Captain has the added pressure of trying to keep his crew safe vs. wholly unknown risks and juggling time spent pursuing Great Mysteries vs Operational Expenses. Life without Company backing, means having much more freedom and MUCH more Responsibility.
I will cheerfully admit that Firefly did lend itself to inspiring thing regarding Manticore, as did the opening cutscenes of ALIEN: Isolation where Captain Verlain is discussing the Torrens. :D
IN SPACE THERE IS NO WARNING
ALIEN: Manticore (Excerpt) SEPT 05 2017
EXCERPT START***********
Meers was in agony, the explosion of the flamethrower’s fuel tank had scorched his legs badly, but that was irrelevant in the face of deeper, more visceral agonies wracking his body.
He prayed for death, to any and all deities that might choose to listen, be they good, evil or inscrutably indefinable. No answers to his pleas came, and he wept for himself, for his fate, uncaring about anything beyond his own hell of suffering which grew steadily worse with glacial progress.
He didn’t truly understand what was happening to him on anything but the most basic level. He’d watched it happen to some others from the last expedition he’d led from the lander, horror-struck and silently begging to go insane, or die, so long as it was an escape from the vile reality he was being made to accept.
He’d seen the people he knew brought in by the creature, screaming, struggling and having no effect on them whatsoever as they were handled with an effortlessness that spoke of terrible strength. He’d seen limbs broken with accidental ease that made Humans seem as fragile in comparison to the creature as a daddy longlegs spider was to a Human.
One by one, they’d been brought here, pushed into thick nests of some kind of strange resinous material that adhered instantly, and the victim’s struggling merely ensnared them more while the creature would mold the strange, acridly plastic-smelling material around the person’s forcibly fetal-folded legs as well as their shoulders, as had been done to him. Then it would harden, slowly, seemingly in response to the person’s struggles until you couldn’t move at all except to squirm helplessly in the grip of it.
Then, the creature would return, so close that the reek of something like a cross between freshly-made polymers in a factory and ammonia-laced shrimp that was turning bad. It’s tail would come up, the sharp hooklike tip would rise, then stab forward lightning-fast, into the unfortunate person’s abdomen, not too deeply, but deep enough to hurt terribly.
He remembered it, the sudden stabbing pain, then the sensation of it pulsing in the wound, and something coldly-liquid moving inside him from it. As bad as the act of penetration was, when the hooked tip was removed as quickly as it had entered was worse, and it left behind a clot of a dull green substance that rapidly gelled to a rubbery consistency in seconds, plugging and covering the wound.
Then, some time later, he’d felt a crawling sensation within him moving through his abdomen. He’d developed a fever with a skull-splitting headache, severe aches in his bones, torturous muscle spasms and a sensation like itching that spread throughout the inside of his abdominal region and up along the insides of his chest cavity. The pain and other unwanted sensations grew steadily worse as time passed. He’d listened to the others alternately swearing, screaming, shrieking, sobbing, begging for mercy, relief and death.
Time, hours or days he didn’t know as he lapsed in and out of consciousness, it grew quieter and quieter. Now, there was only the sound of his own desolated weeping and devastated moans in the almost-perfect darkness. He didn’t know where he was, only able to suspect it was some lower part of the alien building, and he could hear dripping, which told him there was a large body of water somewhere near in the darkness.
His eyes had grown accustomed as much as they could to the thick darkness, and he could turn his head enough to see where the others had been, now held nothing he could make out or recognize as human, save for the top of a head and corresponding face of someone he couldn’t recall the name of. Below the still, discloroed face was an ovoid, like the egg-pods he’d found along with others under the blue, glowing mist. The four flap were like two sets of lips, they were reaching up and he could see that in time they’d cover the top of the person’s head and then the ovoid pod would look exactly like the ones he’d seen before.
The sight prompted a thought, dread and he looked down at himself, seeing the same kind of pod, it’s still-growing flaps at the top of his chest, and then he knew in what manner was his fate to be. He mustered a weak, gaspy scream of rage and helpless frustration that ended in a horrid bout of mucous coughing, spitting and drooling slime from mouth and nostrils, realizing that he could no longer even feel his limbs, except from the pain that came from them.
He thought he saw something bright through the bleariness of his eyes, blinked rapidly to clear them, and realized it was a light, small and powerful, as well as a rotating orb covered in glowing red LEDs. The figure that walked below him seemed somehow familiar, recognizably female, with red hair long and tousled. She held something besides the light in her hands, but he couldn’t remember what it was called.
He tried to speak, succeeded in only making a wretched, mucous-bubbling sound, tried again, then again until finally he managed two words, whispered and desperate but not begging, it was a command he expected obedience to.
“Help. Me.”
Katherine stared in horrified wonder at the egg pods, some still incompletely formed. She could tell just by seeing what was happening, even if the science and specifics were beyond her current education. However she’d read through Smythe’s notes about the creature and his suspicions about it’s reproductive cycle.
The creature that they’d awakened had been busy. It’d been capturing survivors who’d remained in the building and brought them here, where it was semi-cocooning them, and did something to them that was converting their living body’s biomass into the same kind of egg-shaped pods they’d found above.
No mating, no hassles. It was just simple, straightforward, no-frills reproduction. She could see the advantage it would give a species as the number of offspring to replace and expand the population would be much lower. With every creature able to reproduce on it’s own, needing only a living host, the potential population growth characteristics would be enough to contest the mortality rate of even the most vicious environment imaginable.
As she scanned around with her light it appeared that the nest, or lair was seemingly unguarded, she guessed that it meant whichever of the creatures had made this one didn’t feel that others of it’s kind were a threat to it’s offspring, nor anything else being so either.
“Help. Me.” She heard in a weak but familiar voice as she brought her light back to the least-transmorphosed of the luckless people, then moved closer, eyes searching for details under the lank, sweat-soaked hair obscuring the badly discoloured face.
“Meers?” She inquired, not so transfixed by the discovery of him that she failed to continue minding her surroundings.
Two wretched-sounding attempts yielded an answer to her query.
“Yeah.” Meers bubbled, strangling on mucous again.
“You want me to help you, get you some medical?” She asked.
“Yeah, y’fuckin’ deaf, or…” He started to sound angry, then a bout of dreadful, thick-sounding coughing stopped his reply as he sounded as if he was trying to retch up his lungs.
She was certain now that it was without a doubt the man she hated the most in the universe, and a cruel smirk twitched at the corner of her mouth.
“Meers, it’s Katherine. You remember, don’t you? You liked to call me ‘Red’.” She said to him, managing to see his eyes and make eye contact through the fall of his hair over his face.
“Get me outta here, bitch.” Meers said, actually managing to sound threatening even with such a weak and slime-throated voice.
Katherine smirked fully, enjoying the sight of Meers finally achieving a state of usefulness in life.
“No.” She said, managing to compress an entire tirade about how he’d essentially killed everyone she ever cared about before being taken in by Captain Du’Maur and his crew. She would do anything to keep Meers from ever setting foor aboard Manticore and likely repeating his single-mindedly self-obsessed plans to achieve stellar wealth and fame in salvaging all he could from this world and the left-behind workings of the Engineers.
She eyed the other pods and the entire surroundings as far as her light could reveal as Meers strangled and choked in his rage, trying to speak past a clogged throat as he raged helplessly. She saw a blood vessel in the rotten-looking discoloured skin at his temple burst slightly, a heavy drip-run of blood happening down the side of his face. She could smell it, blood, but it had a foul, plastic smell to it as well, and also something like bile. It was thick in air that had formerly smelled only of water, age and stone.
She took one last look at Meers, the rage on his face, bared teeth and tears in his eyes then turned and walked toward the doorway leading back the way she’d come, the coughing and choke-strangling noises receding behind her as she left ‘captain’ Meers to his richly-deserved destiny as he tried and failed to curse her as she left him in the darkness.
In seeing Meers, she now realized that she had a mission to the people that comprised her future. Her job was to locate and find her people, then do all she could to get them and herself back to the ship safe and sound.
The past would die with Meers, down here in the darkest, loneliest place there was in the universe, and she was content to leave it there as she went forward to rendezvous with her future, scouter in tow.
EXCERPT END********
IN SPACE THERE IS NO WARNING
Thank-you for reading!! :) Thank-you also for your kind words and praise, I'm glad you enjoyed it!!
The egg-morphing, to me it is a Signature element of the franchise, as it's so ALIEN, and breaks from the 'comfortably terrestrial' models and ideas of reproduction.
I know I've been away of late, so I wanted to show folks that I've not been idle. :D
IN SPACE THERE IS NO WARNING
PROGRESS UPDATE: 122098 word count at present. It's coming closer and closer to being finished. It's approximately 90% complete, maybe more, but 90% at Minimum.
Then, just a quick editing pass to check for spelling errors and related other flaws, after which it'll be published. :D
EXCERPT*********
After an hour, Sin had reached the side of the cistern opposite to where he’d entered it. He’d spotted some unusual deformations on a wall section close to a doorway and had gone with his gut instinct, moving in with total caution, rifle up, finger on trigger. As he’d gotten closer, the deformations had resolved into abstract shapes, then his eyes had found order within the abstract, seeing the profile of egg-shaped pods.
Not all were fully-so, some were a disturbing tableau where it looked like one of the large ovoids was in the process of swallowing a human being, and in some cases one of the small hominid creatures. Even at a distance he could hear a low, woeful and desolate moaning through his helmet’s open-air auditory pickups.
Moving closer, he studied what he saw, but still kept watch around himself for threats. They’d all figured the nightmarish creature sheathed in obsidian-colored chitin was merely a predatory lifeform, none of them had ever given any real consideration to how it reproduced.
“Manticore, I’ve found something. Stand by.” He said into the comms and considered how to proceed. He didn’t want to try juggling his phone and rifle to snap some still pics and video. He decided to try his helmet camera system, not expecting much after the damage his suit had sustained in the grenade explosion.
There was no useful response, and after another sweeping scan around himself he took out his phone, selected the functions one-handed and began snapping still images and video, cradling his rifle’s forestock across his left elbow so he could still use it effectively while operating his phone, the rifle‘s taclight supplying enough light for good image-quality.
It was the longest five minutes of his life before he stopped recording, quickly putting the phone away, then checking around again. One of the persons trapped in one of the bizarrely-molded resinous pod-nests seemed aware of him, as he saw the head raise and could see the person looking at him. Moving closer, he could make out that it was a man, who bore a close resemblance to Meers as seen in some of Katherine’s suit-camera still-images.
The man tried to speak, his lips moved, then he coughed and weakly and vomited a small gout of green-brown mucous. His face, covered in darkly-discoloured patches that looked to be decomposing, squeezed it’s features together in evident agony, and Sin heard the moan the man gave. The lips of the egg-pod were up around the man’s neck, and Sin glanced over at the other pods that weren’t complete yet, seeing one where the the still unclosed lips left the top of a person’s head still visible.
“Sin, what’s going on?” Came Selina’s voice over his comms.
“I’ve found a nest, larger than what you and Declan found on the wildcatter. Took some pics and video for Smythe, heading out to find Katherine. I’ve had enough of this fucking horrorshow.” He replied, doing a quick check around, and freezing as his taclight revealed the substance of nightmares not six feet from him, caught in the act of reaching for him with it’s large, dual-thumbed hand.
END OF EXCERPT*********
IN SPACE THERE IS NO WARNING
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