Alien: Covenant - The Official Movie Novelization

XII

Ahead of the others and sprinting flat-out through the last of the tall grass, Oram and Daniels stumbled to a halt as the night lit up in front of them. As they gaped at the ball of flame rising from the devastated lander, he caught a glimpse of a white shape bounding off on all fours away from the blaze and into the darkness.

Karine, he thought wildly.

He resumed running toward the lakeshore with Daniels close on his heels. The conflagration that now engulfed the lander felt even hotter in the chill and damp that followed sunset. Somewhere within the inferno were his wife and Faris, somewhere trapped, burning…

As he drew close the intense heat threatened to blister his exposed skin. He didn’t care. He had to go in, had to find Karine, had to get her out.

He went down, tackled from behind by Daniels. Scrambling to get on top of him, she struggled to hold him down as he fought to rise.

“Karine… Karine!” He began sobbing uncontrollably.

“Chris!” Daniels was all but jumping on him in her fight to keep him pinned. “Stay back, stay here!” He kept trying to crawl out from under her, his eyes fastened on the flaming landing craft.

She threw up her arms to shield her face as a secondary explosion scattered pieces of the ship in all directions. Those that landed in the lake hissed in counterpoint to the crackling of the flames. The exterior of the lander could not burn, but it could be scarred. The fact that the majority of the blaze was contained within the fireproof shell only made the flammable materials within burn that much hotter.

Blackened and consumed in flame, a figure emerged from the interior. Tottering down the landing ramp, it staggered a couple of times before collapsing at its base. Letting out a strangled moan, Oram fought to rise. Somehow Daniels kept control of him, pressing his head down so that he wouldn’t, couldn’t see.

A series of additional explosions caused the remains of the lander to implode as a blast of heat swept over Daniels and Oram. The ship was built to withstand a flaming re-entry, not to contain exploding military ordnance. With its internal superstructure bent and crumpled, there was nothing to prevent it from collapsing in on itself.

Weeping, Oram gave up trying to throw Daniels off his back. He dug his gloved hands into the dirt, clutching the soil as if he could somehow strangle the planet itself. In front of them, the blaze began to die as the last of the flammable materials within the lander burned themselves out.

As a result, they had no trouble hearing the scream that sounded behind them.

Daniels scrambled to her feet, turning to peer into the gathering dusk back the way they had come. Less than a hundred meters behind her and the captain, beams wove crazy patterns in the night as Hallet’s comrades clustered around him. The sergeant was on the ground, convulsing and contorting wildly, his body arcing and twisting as if trying to throw off some unseen demon.

Lopé was beside him, trying to hold his partner steady, but Hallet’s spasms were too violent even for the senior sergeant to control.

“Tom!”

As strong as Sergeant Lopé was, he was unable to keep the other man pinned down. With a spasmodic arch of his back, Hallet threw his partner off, then continued jerking and bouncing on the ground. When Rosenthal and then Ankor tried to get close and help, Hallet’s wildly flailing limbs kept them at a distance.

Seeing what was happening, Daniels was torn between running to offer assistance and staying with the distraught Oram. Now off the captain’s back, she stood and watched him as he rose to his knees. When, tears streaking down his face, he stayed in that position, no longer trying to run toward the ruins of the craft, she turned and rushed to rejoin the others.

Emotionally as well as physically exhausted, she could only hope that Oram would see the futility of trying to get anywhere near the still-flaming wreckage.

When she reached the others, Hallet was on his back, his spine bending into a curve no human vertebrae ought to have been able to realize without breaking. He was choking, gasping weakly for air. Moving in and ignoring the other man’s thrashing arms, Lopé tried once again to get control of his partner. To Daniels it looked as if every nerve in Hallet’s body had been short-circuited.

His head went back, then forward as he heaved out a gout of blood in such volume that not even Lopé could withstand it. Yet again he was forced to let go and fall back. Hallet’s eyes bulged and Rosenthal let out a scream as the sergeant’s neck expanded hugely. His mouth opened wide, wider, until the mandible and maxilla split apart from one another. The extreme distention would have been normal in a feeding snake. In a human, it was a grotesque distortion worthy of Bosch.

Vomiting forth from deep within Hallet’s body, the placenta-like sac landed on the ground with a wet smack. Glistening with lubricating ooze, it burst as it struck the surface. From within emerged something small, whitish, bipedal, and highly mobile. An elongated eyeless skull quickly surveyed its surroundings. Letting out a high-pitched shriek, it displayed incredible speed and mobility as it dashed past them and into the darkness of the nearby undergrowth.

By the time any of them had sense enough to raise a weapon, it was gone.

Daniels stood staring at the patch of forest where it had disappeared. When she had convinced herself it wasn’t coming back, she took stock of her colleagues. All stood motionless, in various degrees of shock.

Worst off was Lopé. The tough, gruff security chief was staring at the shattered body of his life partner. As a soldier he had seen his share of violent death, but that had come at times and in ways for which some precedent existed. Hallet’s demise had been as vile as it had been unexpected. Looking away from the emotionally overwhelmed sergeant, Daniels once again let her gaze roam the nearby woods and undergrowth.

Oram had hoped this world might prove a better candidate for settlement than the more distant Origae-6, and in its cold, antiseptic way, she had to admit that the planet itself was truly beautiful.

A spider web was also beautiful.

Positioned in geosynchronous orbit, the Covenant drifted peacefully, clear of the chaos that had broken out on the world below. Stretching between it and those who were now trapped on the surface, the ionospheric storm raged on unabated.

On the bridge, Tennessee and those around him did everything they could to re-establish contact with the expedition team, short of falling to their knees and imploring unseen gods. Every channel was sampled, every frequency explored. Signals were boosted to the edge of comprehensibility. Nothing worked, but they kept trying. There was nothing else to do but keep trying.

On the other hand, hovering above the central navigation console, holo projections of the storm were plentiful and crisp. Sick of looking at it, Tennessee had come to regard it as a persistent enemy, an inorganic affront not only to the mission but to him personally. He also knew that such thoughts were entirely irrational, but he wasn’t feeling especially rational at the moment. Perhaps that’s why he finally voiced what he’d been thinking.

“We’re going down after them.”

Looking up from her station, Upworth gaped at him.

“I’m sorry, Tennessee. What did you just say?”

Peering over at her, he repeated himself, making sure he spoke clearly. He did not try to keep emotion out of his voice. Oram would have presented the proposal differently, but Oram wasn’t here, and Tennessee was acting captain.

“Down. We’re going down. To pick them up.”

Upworth indicated the nearest holo of the upper atmospheric tempest. “I don’t see any lessening of storm intensity.” She quickly checked a readout. “Same wind speeds, same probabilities of turbulence. Severe turbulence,” she added for emphasis. “If anything, the weather system has increased in extent. It’s now covering a good part of this portion of the northern hemisphere.”

“Then we fly through it.”

She was openly aghast. “We can’t! The Covenant isn’t a landing craft. You know that it’s not supposed to enter atmosphere, except for final unloading prior to official decommissioning. She wasn’t designed for handling heavy turbulence.”

“But she’s capable of it.”

Upworth didn’t hesitate. “Technically, and from an engineering standpoint, yes. She has to be, if the world chosen for colonization proves unsuitable and another has to be found. A deep atmospheric drop and subsequent orbital re-entry has never been done with an actual colony ship. Only in simulations.”

“But it works in the official simulations.”

She had to concede the point. “Yes. In the simulations.” She indicated the holo once again. “I don’t recall any simulations that involved a drop into weather like this. We can’t do this. Tennessee, you’re a pilot. Forget simulations and design specs for a minute. You know what the tolerances are.”

He was silent for a moment.

“Fuck the tolerances.”

That was enough for Upworth. Tennessee was the acting captain, but she knew him much better as a colleague, and that was how she replied to him.

“Fuck your personal concerns!” she spat back. “I’m just as worried about the team as you are, Tee, but it’s a goddamn hurricane down there! Have you looked at the sustained wind speeds in the upper atmosphere lately? Not to mention the frequency of potentially damaging electrical discharges.” She stabbed a finger at the holo of the storm. “We try to descend through that weather and, fucking simulations aside, I’m telling you we would break up. That would do a fat lot of good for the team, plus everyone on board, wouldn’t it?” She paused for breath. “There’s nothing we can do. We have to wait it out.”

He turned away. She was right. He knew she was right. A part of him hated her for being right, but the dread he was feeling—for the members of the expedition—was outweighed by his knowledge of the ship’s tolerances. A crash landing would be worse than no landing. Even if they could put the Covenant down safely, there was a very good chance she would never be able to lift off.

It was just that waiting, when he knew that his wife and friends might be in danger, was… so hard. It was one reason, he told himself, why he had never wanted to be a captain.

He turned toward a pickup.

“Mother, how long until the storm clears enough to reestablish communication with the surface?”

The ship replied immediately. “Given prevailing atmospheric conditions and based on preliminary predictions for continued development or cessation over the next half-day cycle, secure surface communications might be possible in anywhere from twelve to forty-eight hours.”

He was silent. Even twelve hours was… too long. Forty-eight hours was an eternity. For Mother, the prediction was unusually non-specific. He could hardly blame the AI, though. Weather prediction always had been and still was an imprecise science—let alone on a newly discovered world.

Seeing his distress, Upworth offered the only words she could. “I’m sorry, Tee. You know it’s the right decision. It’s the only decision. A Covenant descent, even in perfect conditions, would be tricky. In that storm…” Her words trailed away.

Moving to the port, he gazed down at the new planet and its raging atmosphere. There was no one to blame for the weather. From Earth, they couldn’t predict the climate conditions on Origae-6, either. Only read the atmosphere and guess that the seasons might be amenable. For that matter, conditions here might prove ideal, too, save for the occasional berserking in the ionosphere.

“She was scared,” he muttered, more to himself than anyone else. Only Upworth was close enough to hear him. “I’ve never heard my wife scared.”

Oram sat hunched in front of the still blazing lander, his eyes glazed, utterly shell-shocked. Had anyone brought up the subject, he would never have imagined that the ruined vessel contained so much flammable material. Worst of all—worse even than the losses the team had suffered—was the inescapable realization that at its heart, he was at fault.

They would not even be here, on this malign planetary surface, if not for his insistence. It was knowledge he would have to live with for the rest of his life.

At that moment, he didn’t care if there was going to be a rest of his life. All he could hear in his mind was Karine’s voice. All he could see was her face. Gone now.

Looking nothing like the confident, authoritative head of ship security, Lopé sat on the ground beside the corrupted body of his dead partner, holding one of Hallet’s limp hands. Trying to do everything he could to save his lifemate, in the end he had been able to do nothing.

Daniels knew the sergeant was being too hard on himself. He was as human as the rest of them, and therefore just as subject to shock. But he was taking it hard.

She saw that Walter was recording it all, his gaze traveling from human to human, and she wondered what he was thinking. Or calculating. The line between the two was a thin one that no human could parse.

If the security chief was emotionally devastated and temporarily unable to function at full efficiency, at least the members of his team responded professionally. While sparing the occasional glance for their bereft leader, Cole, Ankor, and Rosenthal were on full alert. Their eyes scanned the smothering darkness and they held their weapons at the ready. They might want for leadership, but in its absence their training took hold. They didn’t know what had killed Hallet, and they didn’t know what was now out there, but they were as ready for it as they could be.

It struck her that those on the Covenant had no idea what had just happened on the ground. With Lopé grieving and Oram barely functioning, someone had to try and make contact. Moving away from the group, but not so far as to attract the attention of the edgy security detail, she tried to organize her thoughts without spending every other second imagining horrific white shapes slipping silently through the nearby grass.

Crouching down with her back to the still flaming lander, she checked to make sure that her suit link to the colony ship was open.

“Come in, Covenant. Come in, Covenant. Are you reading us? Please come in, Covenant. This is Daniels. Do you read, Covenant?”

She broke off. While trying not to imagine things, she couldn’t help but notice that there actually was something moving out there. It was fast, pale white, and just at the edge of her vision. Zeroing in on it, she caught her breath as it paused, studying the group with eyeless curiosity. Like the rest of it, the creature’s means of visual perception was utterly foreign.

It vanished anew, swallowed up by the night and the tall grass. She had begun to resume the attempt to make contact with the ship when a shape came charging straight toward her.

Walter.

“Daniels! Behind you!”