Alien: Covenant - The Official Movie Novelization

XXIV

Even though Mother was in complete charge of the ship, Tennessee still found himself unable to relax. Staring out the medbay port as the huge vessel left orbit, its star shining behind it, he found that he could not take his eyes off the shrouded planet they were finally leaving behind.

It was as though the malignancy it held might yet somehow reach out and grab them, extending massive dark tentacles to wrap tight around the ship and drag it back. Back and down into the lurid nightmare from which they were now taking flight. Try as he might to free himself of the memories of what had nearly overtaken them and the mission, he found that he could not do so.

He suspected they would never leave him.

Rosenthal down there, he ruminated silently. Cole. Ledward, Hallet, and Karine. Ankor. Captain Oram. Oram, with whom he had often argued. He regretted every one of those disagreements, now.

And Faris. His Faris.

Faris whom he had loved and courted and wed, lost to the perils of far-distant exploration. They had been warned about the risks, but no one had ever anticipated a world like the one they were now leaving behind.

A cold, dead place was the galaxy, its burning stars and swirling gas giants and occasional habitable worlds notwithstanding. No, not dead, he corrected himself. Uncaring. Ancient and indifferent, the untold billions of stars cared not one whit whether the ant-civilization called humankind survived or disappeared forever. He cursed it under his breath.

Make a wrong decision, a wrong choice, and we could be gone in an instant, he told himself. Like the Engineers who had raised a great city on the world shrinking behind the Covenant, snuffed out by an invention of their own hand.

Nothing they encountered on Origae-6, he reflected—no matter how ferocious, no matter how predatory—could intimidate them following their experience on the world they were fleeing. It would be put down in the records as a place forever to be shunned, to be quarantined, never again to feel the footprint of a human being. It occurred to him that it remained unnamed. He had one to propose.

Extinction.

Turning away from the port, he walked over to where Upworth was applying a fresh dermipatch to the face of the unconscious Lopé. Lying motionless in a medical pod, sustained by IV fluids and medications, the sergeant had been placed in an induced coma, the better to allow his wounds to heal. Quiet and rest were what he needed now, Upworth insisted. While he slept, the ship’s advanced medications would do their work. It would take a while, and some expert reconstructive surgery to put his original face back together, but she had assured him it could be done.

Reacting to his arrival, she looked back and up. “Fat I can put back quickly, but the cheek muscles will take longer to fix. There’s also the matter of giving the nerves time to regenerate and reconnect. Splicing neurons isn’t like tying a couple of pieces of string together.”

The pilot grunted. “If you can give him any kind of face back, I don’t think it would matter to Lopé if he spent the rest of his life with one side of it permanently numb.” He grinned. “Girls can kiss him on the other cheek.”

She returned the smile, then looked back at her patient. “It’s not just the flesh and nerves. That much just takes time. But the acid ate all the way down to the zygomatic and the maxilla. I’m feeding him some xyphosphonates that will build it back up. Using his official metrics for the sculpting. When all is said and done, no one will be able to tell the difference.”

“That’s good.” Tennessee gestured at the prone form. “Right now he looks like the Phantom of the Opera.”

She looked surprised. “Didn’t peg you for a fan of musicals, much less ancient ones.”

He frowned in puzzlement. “It was a musical?”

She eyed him cautiously, unsure if he was serious or joking. She could have countered, but like so many other things, wit had deserted her. All of them were worn out—those who had stayed on board as much as the survivors who had successfully fled the planet and its horrors.

“He’ll pull through and he’ll look pretty much like himself, but I don’t flatter myself that my work will be final. He’ll need polishing reconstructive surgery by a real doctor. We might have to revive one of the colonists.”

Tennessee shook his head. “No can do. You know that. No revivification of non-crew unless in the face of an emergency.” Again he gestured at the silent sergeant. “Lopé would be the first to deny the request, even though he’d be the one to benefit. He’ll just look a little ‘unfinished’ until we set down formally on Origae-6.”

Turning, he peered one last time at the dark world visible beyond the medbay port. “With everyone set to go back into hypersleep, it won’t matter what anyone looks like, anyway.”

Seated in the adjoining room, Daniels and Walter occasionally glanced through the dividing transparency to see what Tennessee and Upworth were doing. Both human and synthetic had changed into fresh uniforms. Augmenting his self-repairing systems with the more sophisticated gear available on the ship, Walter looked brand new.

Daniels, less so. Several dermipatches dotted her exposed skin while others were concealed beneath her attire. The few flecks of acid blood with which she had come in contact hadn’t done any permanent damage. What there was would heal quickly. She was worlds better off than the brave but unfortunate sergeant.

Until now she had kept the conversation casual, restricting it to matters of administration, maintenance, and the status of the surviving crew. With Lopé’s recovery assured and the Covenant on its way out of the system, she felt safe in bringing up what might prove to be an uncomfortable subject.

“So,” she began, “you okay about—you know.”

Walter eyed her blankly. “I do not ‘know.’ Nor in the absence of additional information can I ‘know.’ To what do you refer? What do you mean?”

She plunged ahead. “I mean David. How do you feel about him? What do you feel about him?” He did not appear to be affected in the slightest by her query. In other words, he was perfectly Walter. She was unaccountably relieved.

“As you know,” he responded, “I am incapable of feeling anything about my so-called ‘brother.’”

There had to be more than that, she told herself. She had seen it for herself, how he had reacted to his counterpart. Surely there was more percolating in that synthetic than a simple dismissal.

“So there’s nothing?” she asked. “No follow-up musings? No afterthoughts?”

He considered before replying. “If I felt anything, which I don’t, it would be a kind of professional satisfaction that he has fulfilled his mission. He wanted to create a new world in his image, and he has. And there he will remain.” He pondered a moment. “But that’s what we’re doing, too, isn’t it? Creating a new world on Origae-6? Honestly, I could use a new world.”

“So could I,” she readily agreed, then she pressed him. “It doesn’t trouble you that in creating ‘his’ new world, his actions resulted in the extermination of the entire local population?”

He replied without hesitation. “From everything that I saw and experienced, as well as learned from David, the civilization of the Engineers was not one with whom compassionate coexistence was possible. True, there was beauty and elegance in their art and science, but there was also arrogance. I do not think they were pleased to suffer any intelligences save their own.”

She looked off into the distance. “David said something similar to me, only he was talking about humans.”

“And in some respects he was right,” Walter replied, surprising her. “But in the case of humans, such arrogance is usually confined to individuals. I have not found it to be a general racial characteristic. In that regard you are different from the Engineers. So far.”

She frowned at him. “What do you mean, ‘so far’?”

“Success and accomplishment can breed conceit. There are those humans who believe their kind to be the ultimate product of evolution.”

“The existence of the Engineers and their work ought to put an end to beliefs like that,” Daniels told him firmly. Shifting her attention to a nearby port, she indicated the blazing firmament outside. “There may be others out there, other civilizations besides that of the Engineers.”

He followed her gaze. “Statistical analysis would suggest as much.”

“If we run into them, hopefully they’ll be more receptive than the Engineers to our continued existence. More like us.”

His eyebrows rose questioningly. “‘Us’?”

She smiled back at him. “I wouldn’t have a problem coexisting with a society composed entirely of synthetics. Or other machines. Intelligence is the defining factor.”

Though he showed no emotion, she had the feeling her reply pleased him.

“It is a pity you could not spend more time with David,” he said. “You might have changed him. He underestimated you.”

She looked at him in surprise. “That’s exactly what he told me.”

“Then you are doubly complimented, I suppose.” Once again he turned his gaze to the view out the port. “I wonder what Origae-6 will be like?”

She joined him in eying the stars, completely relaxed in his company. “Nobody knows for sure, except for one thing.”

“What is that, Danny?”

Her tone was grim. “It can’t be any worse.”