Alien: Covenant - The Official Movie Novelization

XX

Two figures carefully worked their way through the silent chamber. Both soldiers advanced with caution and determination. Neither remarked on the independent ambient lighting that had come to life when they had entered. As they moved between the tables, Lopé called out softly but firmly, repeating the same query every half-minute or so.

“Captain Oram? Sir, if you are here and can make a sound, please respond.”

There was no response. There were no sounds. Here below ground level there was no movement, no noise. Despite their training both men were uneasy.

Advancing slowly among the raised platforms laden with preserved specimens, Lopé found himself simultaneously horrified and fascinated by the things his laser sight picked out. While some of them were marginally recognizable, others resembled nothing he had ever seen before, not even in training manuals. He noted right away that all were examples, however distorted, of fauna. There were no collections, no cabinets, devoted to plant life.

As he slowed to more closely examine one particularly gruesome deformity, Cole’s light settled on an open stairway. While the private headed down to see where it led, Lopé continued to reflect on the gruesome surroundings. And all the while, the quiet dead surrounding him remained dead quiet.

While Daniels lamented having to work in the presence of Rosenthal’s broken body, the high-ceilinged room with the hanging gardens was the only place they had found running water, and it was easier to fill their bottles from a stream than to labor with the container in the central chamber.

Forcing herself not to look in the corner where the private’s corpse had lain untouched since its discovery, she busied herself filling the team’s containers, taking water from one of the numerous slender cascades. Having drunk deeply from the well, she did not wonder about the liquid’s purity. Besides, each bottle was self-filtering and self-purifying.

Ankor’s carbine stood nearby, where she had propped it up close at hand.

Of all the chambers and alcoves they had explored, only this one offered a respite from the building’s persistent murk as well. Daylight dappled the garden’s upper reaches with gold and shadows, proving that the world of the Engineers had not been all dark corners and looming massifs.

What had they been like, really? Had they simply existed, or had they been driven by more than just the need to survive? What had prompted—or perhaps provoked—them to create such dreadful biological mutations? She realized that answers to her wonderings might never be forthcoming.

They certainly wouldn’t be, she reminded herself, if she didn’t get off this world before being terminally impregnated by the pathogen that continued to survive on its surface.

She was about to fill the last of the bottles when movement caught her eye. Curtains of a kind, diaphanous and fashioned of some unfamiliar material, lined portions of the lower walls. Intermittent breezes generated by the mix of warming air from above and falling cool water occasionally bestirred the fabric. There was no reason for this motion to catch her interest, and it did not.

What did draw her attention was the revelation of depth behind one softly billowing drape.

Filling the last bottle and setting it carefully aside, she picked up her weapon and moved slowly toward the shadow. It was indeed an opening, one hitherto unexplored. Could Oram be inside, perhaps unconscious or injured? She whistled softly a couple of times. If anything alive lurked within, it might respond. When nothing emerged she resumed her advance, using one hand to draw the lightweight textile aside.

There was enough light in the garden room to illuminate the alcove, albeit weakly. She was immediately drawn to one wall in which had been excavated rows of small cubbies, as if it had been chewed out by a clutch of stone-eating insects. Many of them were filled with carefully rolled scrolls. She was reminded of pictures she had seen of ancient Roman libraries.

But this wasn’t the world of the Roman Empire, and there were no scribes here, not of any species. Additionally, the scrolls were of a length and diameter that appeared too small to have been fashioned by the massive hands of Engineers.

She sniffed, rubbing at her nose with her free hand. The room was rank with mold and deep dust. Choosing a scroll at random, she extracted it from its resting place and unrolled it.

She couldn’t have been more shocked. The face of a woman stared back at her—a face with which she was instantly familiar from the Weyland archives.

Dr. Elizabeth Shaw.

Except… it was more than that. Shaw’s countenance was beautifully depicted, exquisitely executed in a style with which Daniels had only recently become acquainted. The drawing was plainly David’s work, rendered in his free-flowing naturalistic hand. Mechanical, yet informed by something more than a desire to simply reproduce photographically. It was a perfect, loving interpretation of someone admired…

And of Hell.

The portrait had been embellished. Tendrils crept around the edges of Shaw’s face and entwined in her hair. Tubes penetrated her neck and head while one ran up her left nostril. Emerging from the sides of the scroll, claw-like fingers reached for her, as if straining to seize the portrait, the person, the soul that lay within. It was unnerving to look upon, a perverse mix of the ordinary, the scientific, and the erotic.

Dropping it, she pulled out another scroll and hastily unrolled it. The images revealed were even more disturbing than those of its predecessor. She continued the process, viewing scroll after scroll, her hands moving faster, dumping the drawings one atop another onto the dust-laden floor. Some of the images were so upsetting she tossed them aside with scarcely a glance.

Breathing hard, she finally stopped. No more, she told herself. No more. But she could not avoid seeing, in her mind’s eye, those she had already unrolled. They lay scattered on the floor, most of them lying open and inescapable. Elizabeth Shaw experimented upon. Elizabeth Shaw vivisected. Elizabeth Shaw penetrated…

Mouth agape in horror, she took a step backward, preparatory to fleeing the room and all that it implied.

A voice startled her.

“Remind me,” David murmured softly as she whirled to see him standing much too close behind her. “What is that about curiosity and the cat?”

Her eyes not leaving him, she edged past until she had re-emerged into the garden hall. Forcing herself not to run, she walked as casually as possible back toward the cascade from which she had refilled the team’s water bottles. As he followed, his pace measured, she could feel his unwavering gaze on the back of her neck.

“Elizabeth Shaw didn’t die in the crash,” she said flatly.

“No.” There was a tinge of reminiscence in his voice. Reminiscence, but not regret. “We had been through a great deal together. As a consequence, I held her in the utmost respect. But eventually that was lost to time and necessity. I kept her alive for quite a while. I like to think that was another testament to my creativity, although she might have disagreed. She was my most beautiful subject.

“Until now, of course.”

The carbine was where she had left it, propped against a wall. Close now. So close—but not close enough. Not yet. She knew what he was capable of, physically. She had to distract him somehow, even if just for an instant. If such a thing was even possible.

Whirling, she yelled as loudly as she could, “What did you do to her?”

He smiled anew. The smile of the damned. “Exactly what I’m going to do to you, Danny.”

She lunged for the rifle. Resting on its butt end, it was facing the wrong way as she grabbed it by the barrel, spun, and swung it in a wide arc. It slammed him right across the face, knocking his head sideways.

He straightened, and smiled back at her. “That’s the spirit. Pity I don’t know how to make use of such intangibles. But I’ll work on it. You can help me.”

She tried to swing the rifle around into firing position. Her finger was sliding toward the trigger when he grabbed her face, his synthetic fingers squeezing hard enough to grind her teeth against one another, and flung her backward to the floor.

She hit hard, the pain lancing up her spine. Her head banged against the unyielding pavement and bounced once as the rifle went spinning from her numbed fingers.

He was still smiling as he bent over her.