Ripley stared at the scene before her in dumbfounded shock.



She'd expected missing colonists, destruction, blood and horror. She'd come prepared for war, she'd come prepared to do anything to help the Marines wipe THEM out.



This was…not what she'd expected.



First, the colonists of Hadley's Hope seemed okay. Happy, even, going about their usual business on one of Acheron's very rare sunny days, the attenutated sunlight from the distant primary giving everything a pleasant, late-afternoon-in-autumn sort of atmosphere.



Second…were the xeno-pony-morph things. She stubbornly couldn't quite bring herself to call them "ponies" but she didn't know what else to call them. There were dozens of them, trotting around underfoot, some of them carrying pieces of equipment and tools in their mouths and assisting, or standing around chatting with each other, or trotting alongside one human colonist or another. Some had horns, like unicorns, others had wings, some had neither. Some of them had bits of shiny black or brown ribbing on their midsections, or long tails that ended in a spike, showing off their kinship with the—the THING that had murdered her friends and ruined her life.



But beyond that…



As she watched, one of them walked by with a young girl, one of the colonist's children, sitting on its back, both of them apparently as content as…well, as a pony carrying around a little girl can be. They were talking animatedly to each other. So…they speak English. That's special. A chattering group of them were busy painting a brightly-colored mural on the walls of one of the prefab buildings. Another was helping some of the local colonists plant flowers in beds beside some of the other structures.



"So…these ain't the things you saw," said Vasquez, from beside her. "The things that killed your crew."



"I don't…no," said Ripley. She rubbed at her eyes. She should be happy about this, she should be thrilled, they'd come all this way and spent weeks in hypersleep expecting to find a dead colony infested with monsters, and she WAS, really, but…she didn't understand what was happening. She NEEDED to know what was happening, dammit. And until she did, she'd be waiting for the other shoe to drop. "Whatever these…these things are, they aren't IT. Related, maybe? They look like they're cousins, but- I don't know. I don't know anything."



One of the marines—Hudson, she thought his name was—was playing an improvised game of hacky-sack with two of the creatures. She wanted to yell at him to stop, to get away from them, but she couldn't quite bring herself to.



The younger woman nodded slightly. "I could tell. The other guys, they didn't really buy it. They still don't, more than ever, but I could look at you and tell. You believed it, and I believed you. Right now you don't believe what you're seeing. You're glad that nothing seems to be wrong here, but you're still scared. Even more scared because this happy-crappy peaches-and-ice-cream shit isn't what you thought we were gonna find. I get it. The other guys might not, but I know right where you're coming from."



Gorman, Hicks and Burke (she didn't like that guy) were speaking with one of the colonial administrators, and she overheard part of their conversation. "Yeah, the comm array was struck by lightning," she was saying. "Guess how we found out we didn't have enough ground protection on the damned thing? OR spare cores in the inventory? Morons shipped us spare sewer pipe instead of comm cores. Then we found the derelict, and these little guys in cargo bay 2."



"So…no monster face-eating bugs?" Hicks asked.



"No, those were in Bay 1." Burke's eyes narrowed slightly at this news. "As soon as these guys woke up, the first thing they did was wall it completely off from the outside or the rest of the ship. Then they started helping us break down the wreck around it, leaving the cryo-coolers intact and running. The alien comm core still works, sort of, and we were going to try to use it. You got here about one day ahead of our first test. If it didn't work, well, we were hoping that someone would figure out that we were off the grid and send someone to check."



"So what were you planning to do about Cargo Bay 1?" asked Burke casually. Ripley REALLY didn't like that guy.



The administrator sighed. "We weren't sure. Out little helpers here were all for helping us open it back up and immediately dropping a pony nuke—sorry, little joke there—into the middle of it, then running away as fast as possible, but we don't have enough refined fissionables to build one yet. Maybe you guys can help us out with that."



"You know, I wouldn't be so hasty about that " Ripley didn't quite hear whatever the company rep was about to say when she felt a small tug on her pants leg. She looked down. A tiny, huge-eyed foal was sitting beside her, its wings folded against its sides, blinking at her earnestly. "Umm, hi?" it said uncertainly.



The things were adorable. She didn't want them to be so adorable. Why did they have to be so fucking CUTE? Damn. Helplessly, she reached down and scritched its ears. They were soft, warm, fuzzy, and it hummed in pure contentment, its eyes going to half-mast as she scratched it. It leaned against her leg like a happy cat.



"No," said Ripley as she scratched, confounded. "Whatever I was expecting, this isn't it."