Free Alien 3 by Alan Dean Foster Page B

disconcerting.’

    ‘Sorry. It’s the only way I know how to be. I’ve been out here a long time.’
    ‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘So have I.’
    ‘I don’t have time for subterfuges. I don’t have time for much of anything except what’s really important. I’ve had to learn that.’
    He refilled both cups, picked up his own, and swirled the contents, studying the uninformative eddies which appeared in the liquid.

    The fan blades were each twice the size of a man. They had to be, to suck air from the surface and draw it down into the condensers which scrubbed, cleaned, and purified Fiorina’s dusty atmosphere before pumping the result into shafts and structures. Even so, they were imperfect. Fiorina’s atmosphere was simply too dirty.
    There were ten fans, one to a shaft. Eight were silent. The remaining pair roared at half speed, supplying air to the installation’s western quadrant.
    Murphy sang through the respiratory mask that covered his nose and mouth, filtering out surface particles before they were drawn off by the fan. Carbon deposits tended to accumulate on the ductway walls. He burned them off with his laser, watched as the fan sucked them away from his feet and into the filters. It wasn’t the best job to have, nor the worst. He took his time and did the best he could. Not because he gave a damn or anticipated the imminent arrival of Company inspectors, but because when he finished with the ducts they’d give him something else to do. Might as well go about the cleaning as thoroughly as possible so it would kill as much time as possible.

    He was off tune but enthusiastic.
    Abruptly he stopped singing. A large deposit had accumulated in the recess off to his left. Damn storage areas were like that, always catching large debris that the surface filters missed. He knelt and extended the handle of the push broom, winkling the object out. It moved freely, not at all like a clump of mucky carbon.
    It was flat and flexible. At first he thought it was an old uniform, but when he had it out in the main duct he saw that it was some kind of animal skin. It was dark and shiny, more like metal foil than flesh. Funny stuff.
    Stretching it out on the floor he saw that it was big enough to enclose two men, or a young calf. What the hell . . .?
    Then he knew. There were a few large native animals on Fiorina; poor, dirt-hugging primitive things with feeble nervous systems and slow response times. Obviously one had somehow stumbled into an air intake and, unable to get out again, had perished for lack of food and water. It couldn’t use the ladders, and the roaring fan constituted an impenetrable barrier. He poked at the empty skin. This desiccated husk was all that remained of the unfortunate visitor. No telling how long it had lain in the recess, ignored and unnoticed.
    The skin looked awfully fresh to have contained an old, long since dried out corpse. The bugs, he reminded himself. The bugs would make short work of any flesh that came their way.
    It was interesting. He hadn’t known that the bugs would eat bone.
    Or maybe there’d been no bones to dispose of. Maybe it had been a . . . what was the word? An invertebrate, yeah.
    Something without bones. Wasn’t Fiorina home to those too?
    He’d have to look it up, or better yet, ask Clemens. The medic would know. He’d bundle the skin up and take it to the infirmary. Maybe he’d made a discovery of some kind, found the skin of a new type of animal. It would look good on his record.
    Meanwhile he wasn’t getting any work done.
    Turning, he burned off a couple of deposits clinging to the lower right-hand curve of the duct. That’s when he heard the noise. Frowning, he shut off the laser and flicked on the safety as he turned to look behind him. He’d about decided that his imagination was starting to get to him when he heard it again -
    a kind of wet, lapping sound.
    There was a slightly larger recess a few metres down the duct, a sometime storage area for