Chapter 7

Waking up with Elilu in his arms was the last thing Zamin had expected, although he probably should have. He knew how biosupport suits worked, and how they dealt with injuries. Once they could tell that their occupant was safe, they would initiate a sleep cycle for the biggest repairs. He was both pleased and a little astonished that she counted him as a safe place. But then, what were her other options?

He lay still, determined to enjoy this contact for as long as it lasted. Although this was hardly the first time he'd held her, his awareness of just how small she was startled him anew. Everything about her was small, albeit perfectly proportioned. His fantasies about exploring her, learning every inch of her body, were igniting again. He couldn't act on those fantasies, though. Not for a while, possibly not ever. In truth, he shouldn't be entertaining the fantasies at all. But humans had always possessed an almost irresistible allure for his people, one he'd dismissed as a sign of weakness of character until now.

Surely it wasn't only that, though! The idea that what he felt for her was just chemical attraction was distressing. There had to be more than that. Would he really have given Azalla to someone he merely lusted after?

She's a warrior, he reminded himself. She'd asked him to help her destroy a monster. She'd stood before him, wounded more severely than he'd realized at the time, and outlined a strategy for its destruction instead of simply asking him to handle it. She'd even chosen the weapons they'd used, and taught him how to use them. His feelings were not just a chemical reaction. This woman was cast in the mold of Inanna herself. How could he not love that?

Did you just say love? he demanded of himself, so startled that his breath caught. You're an idiot. The two of you only just met. If you start up love talk this soon, she'll run and hide from you and she'll be right to. Do you think you're still fifteen?

Elilu sighed in his embrace and turned onto her back, her head still pillowed on his arm. Her face was peaceful, no longer contorted with the fear, grief, and anger that had dominated it in turns while she was awake. The suit would keep her sleep mostly dreamless, taking her mind instead into deep, quiet spaces where nothing could intrude on her healing… well, as much as she'd let it, he amended. He remembered his dreams from stasis, at least this last time. He'd never suffered through that before, and wondered if it was because of his own intense grief. But if his had forced its way back into his mind, hers might, too.

He'd been avoiding thinking about that, he realized. Staying focused on the here-and-now had kept him from addressing his own pain, not to mention the intense disorientation of discovering how much time had passed. Even before he'd gone into stasis he'd been avoiding it, getting passed-out drunk with Nargal and the others the night before their mission was to launch. Worst of all, he hadn't even tried to contact his mother, afraid that her devastation over Šukarak's death would be as agonizing to watch as the last time, when the news of his father's death had come. He wondered what she'd been told about his fate, and felt his guts twist in response to the thought.

She was two thousand years gone. The yawning chasm of time between them was incomprehensible.

You're not the first it's happened to, he reminded himself. Just the year before, news had come of the recovery of one of the Lost Ships, which had drifted unnoticed for millennia through the core systems until a survey vessel had spotted it. Its crew would have immediately been taken to the Anunnaki, so that they could wake up in a stable environment surrounded by faces they'd remember, to keep the initial disorientation at a minimum. He'd been warned at the start of his military training that the same could potentially happen to him. He'd understood the risks… or, at least, he'd believed he had.

What was he now? In the two thousand years since he'd gone into stasis, what might have happened in the Myriad Worlds? The traffic between them and the intercession of the Anunnaki would undoubtedly have kept them stable, as it had for tens of thousands of years before, but there would still be subtle differences. His family's line had come to an end with his apparent death and his brother's very real murder; would anyone even remember that they'd existed? He suspected that Šukarak's name, at the very least, was still known, if the interdiction on Ersetu was still in place. Were his father's battles against the acid dragons still remembered? Did the descendants of the children he'd rescued from the fallen colony still wear his name with pride? He hoped that one of them, at least, had claimed his mother as kin and cared for her.

Two thousand years since she'd been told that both of her sons were lost. Two thousand years since she'd died, undoubtedly believing him dead as well.

"Yoo-luk-soh-saad," a soft voice next to him murmured, and he felt a small, warm hand on his cheek. Elilu.

Her eyes were open, those strange exotic eyes with so much white in them, such tiny pupils surrounded by strange brown irises. They were beautiful in their own way. Until now, he'd believed that he'd find such eyes repulsive, but instead they were captivating. The expression on her face was one of gentle concern.

"I'm sorry, Elilu." He told her, even as he couldn't resist covering her hand with his. Being touched by her seemed to be the antidote to all of his troubles, and he didn't want her to stop. "I don't understand what you just said. Are you well this morning?" He had no idea if it was morning.

"Elilu?"

Damn. He'd been calling her that without even thinking. "Elizabeth." Hopefully he hadn't just butchered that pronunciation. "I'm sorry. David had said that those close to you called you Eli and it made me think of a name in my language—"

She was smiling, bringing her other hand up to rest its fingertips on his lips, making them tingle. "Elilu-izz-gudd. Ayy-laike-iht."

He still couldn't understand her, and cursed himself for not having spent more time learning words in her language. But he was almost certain that she'd just given him permission to keep using Elilu when he spoke to her. "I may call you Elilu?" At least she could answer a yes or no to that!

Her smile widened and she nodded. Her fingertips were still resting against his mouth, and he found himself staring at her mouth in turn. The deep pink shade of her lips was one that many women of the Myriad Worlds attempted to duplicate through cosmetics, but on her it was natural, genuine. He wondered what they would taste like.

His thought had barely finished when she brought her face up and pressed her lips to his.

If his mouth felt like it had caught on fire, it was only seconds before his whole body seemed to ignite. He pulled her closer to him, remembering to be careful of his strength when he heard her gasp. She didn't try to pull away, though, instead moving her hand to the back of his head. When he did the same, his fingers slipped into the startling silk of her hair. His desire intensified in response. She pressed her body against his, one of her legs hitching around his waist—

Panting, he forced himself to release her, pulling back against the draw of her hand. "We can't," he gasped, closing his eyes to block the look of pure desire on her face before it overwhelmed his reason. "We can't. You're in mourning." He felt like the galaxy's biggest asshole, both for intruding on her grief and then leaving her unfulfilled. And its biggest idiot, he thought a second later. The laugh that started in his chest was almost painful. "And anyway, the suits won't let us, not until we're healed."

She said something in reply, but there was no hurt or accusation in her voice. He opened his eyes, wondering what she was telling him. She repeated it, and pointed to his arm. He followed her finger with his eyes, and found himself staring at his wrist.

His suit had separated from his flesh. The edge of the sleeve was now obvious.

No, he thought. That's not possible. I can't have healed so quickly. A projectile to the chest takes days for a biosupport suit to heal!

But when he touched the entry wound, his fingers found nothing but smooth, undamaged suit beneath them.

Elilu rolled away from him as he sat up. He climbed out of the tiny bed and hurried into the little washroom. His reflection confirmed the impossible. The suit had finished its healing cycles, repairing itself at the end and then separating from his tissue.

What was that food she gave me? he asked himself, but knew he was being stupid. He knew exactly how this had happened, and although he didn't want to believe it, he knew exactly what it meant. But his reflection was shaking its head, as he tried to deny the possibility all over again.

Beside him, Elilu asked him another soft question. She looked worried, undoubtedly wondering if he'd gone mad. Her hand on his arm was hesitant. It felt like she was touching him through thick cloth, where just hours earlier it had felt as if she was touching his skin. The suit had definitely finished with his restoration.

Too early. Far too early.

"Elilu, I'm sorry. I have to return to my ship to find out something. I'll be back as quickly as I can." He felt, again, like a complete cad. She probably thought he was running from her kiss. But there was no hurt on her face, just confusion and worry. "I promise, I'll be back soon."

She followed him out to the airlock, calling out to David as they went.

"Elizabeth wants to know if you need help," David told him as the inner doors cycled open.

He shook his head, resting his hand on her cheek for a moment. She was extraordinary, so sweet and selfless. "It might not be safe for you. And you still have healing to do. I swear I won't be gone long."

She was still watching him from the airlock window when the outer doors opened and he jumped down onto the rocky terrain. As he ran toward the ship, he had the odd sensation that she was still watching him, now from the outer window.

Seemingly for the first time, he was aware of just how foul the air was, as though it should barely have been breathable. Elilu needed a helmet to walk outside; he knew that. When the farms had surrounded the base, they'd needed domes over them as well, and those structures had fallen to such complete ruin that there was no sign of them at all. Wandering through this landscape ought to have been swiftly fatal, something he hadn't even considered on his previous journeys. Was that another thing he'd wanted not to notice?

By the time he reached the warship, he knew that he should have been light-headed and sweating. He knew the symptoms of hypercapnia well from his emergency medical training, but he wasn't experiencing any of them even though he should have been. There was a certain laughable irony in being upset that the air wasn't poisoning him, but it was a source of growing fear rather than relief. Climbing inside, he hurried back to the control room. He needed to know exactly how long it had been since Nargal and the others had died, and why their stasis units had given out when his hadn't.

He had mentally prepared himself for the sight of his friend's dead body, but he'd only seen it for a second the last time and had recoiled so quickly that he'd missed seeing the most important thing of all. Now, confronted by it again, he found himself staring in horror at the evidence he'd completely missed the first time. The stasis pod had failed because it had been breached, from the inside. Something had burst out of it, after first bursting through Nargal's ribcage.

No, he thought, shuddering convulsively. Not here. Not here! But the other two stasis chambers had been defiled in the same way. He'd been so focused on other things that he hadn't seen the most fundamental, and crucial, things of all. For the moment, the fear that had brought him back here was forgotten in favor of something far worse.

Acid dragons had invaded the base, and infiltrated his ship!

The control panel was, thankfully, still functional in the wake of the crash. He called up its last recordings, and the dates. The last recorded transmission had been sent out 2,029 years earlier. He called it up, startled to see the face of one of the base doxies, a woman Nargal had been particularly fond of. Tears were running down her face.

"By the authority of the emergency, as the highest-ranking officer left on Ereshkigal Šagtum, I declare this world permanently interdicted, quarantine class one. Do not come here. There is nothing to salvage and no one to save. We are all dead. The acid dragons have killed us all." Her face twisted as though in pain, and she clutched at her chest in a gesture Zamin recognized from other recordings he had seen. She was only minutes from death, if that. "Tell Enki I'm sorry! I failed him! I'm so sorry!"

Zamin switched off the recording as she began to convulse and scream, shaken. He'd seen enough images of those killed by acid dragons already, and the last thing he wanted to do right now was watch Muru die like that. The discovery that the most popular prostitute on the base had been one of Enki's intelligence officers was completely dwarfed by the disaster that had revealed it.

That had been the last message sent out from the base. He called up others, trying to work out the exact sequence of events and how they had begun. One day earlier, someone had ordered that the first of the four towers of Ereshkigal be sealed as a containment measure. The day before that, the launch of his ship had been aborted "pending the lift of quarantine." The day before was when he'd entered stasis… mere hours after a ship had landed, he recalled, requesting assistance with a "medical emergency."

Oh, you idiots, he thought, scrubbing his face with his hand. Of all the places to land with acid dragons, you came here…

But how had Nargal and the others gotten infected? He'd been with them that whole day, the four of them loading up their payload and preparing for launch. Their pilot hadn't come on duty yet, but none of the others had wanted to leave him alone even for a moment. They'd known how rocky his state of mind was—

Funny. According to the time log, the ship with the medical emergency had landed more than a day before he entered stasis. But that wasn't how he remembered it… was it?

We got falling-down drunk, he suddenly remembered. We weren't planning to but one drink led to another and…

Had it happened that way?

He called up the security recordings and watched them on high speed as they carefully loaded warheads and prepared the ship for launch. He watched himself, in miniature, step out of the loading bay to pound on the walls of the hallway. Nargal and the others appeared a moment later, clapping him on the back and then leading him into the mess hall to drink a toast to his brother and swap stories in his honor. The bottle Nargal brought out was small, not enough to do more than fill them with some warmth and ease the pain that was throttling him.

How did we get drunk enough to pass out, then? he wondered, just as his answer appeared and his blood froze in his veins.

They looked like huge scorpions, but he knew better the moment he saw them. First-stage acid dragons, newly hatched, in search of hosts… and they'd gotten onto his ship! As they crept closer to the table where he and his friends sat, loudly singing one of the bawdy Latin songs his brother had taught him, he found himself leaning forward in his seat, restraining the urge to shout at the group to look around, to pay attention, to watch out before it was too late. But it was already two thousand years too late. His heart began to pound as the creatures struck and the four little figures in the hologram struggled to fight them off before collapsing to the ground.

Myself included, he thought in horror. Why don't I remember?

Three other scorpion-like creatures moved off, deprived of prey of their own, in search of victims elsewhere. Zamin fast-forwarded through the recording until the ones attached to his friends, and to him, roused themselves, detached, and trundled slowly off to find a dark corner to die in. Hours after that, he and his friends woke up and began teasing each other about not being able to hold their liquor before Nargal declared that it was time for them to finish up and get into stasis.

We were already infected, Zamin thought, nausea filling his belly and chest. We were already dying, and we didn't even know it…

But he hadn't died, had he?

Stasis had slowed down the final stage of the parasites' development, but not by very much. The larval acid dragons had burst out of three of the pods only a few hours after the launch had been canceled and the ship had powered down. No one had come to check on the flatlining pods, either out of wisdom or because things had already spiraled out of control on the base itself. But the fourth pod, his pod, suffered no malfunctions.

But I was infected, he silently protested. The means by which he had escaped the infection were too terrifying to contemplate, even now. But he suddenly remembered coughing, feeling as if something was caught in his throat and needing to cough it loose, when he had first awakened. His feet dragged as he walked over to his stasis pod.

There, on the ground, he found it. It was tiny, the size of a cricket, and nothing more than translucent yellow bones in a miniscule sac, but it was an acid dragon in the earliest points of second-stage development. It had died in his windpipe and he'd coughed it out. Why had it died?

You know why, he told himself, and shuddered. He didn't want to believe, but this new proof was overwhelming.

It had been his greatest fear ever since the crash that had taken his leg, even though the medical technicians had assured him that the Azalla had been fully spent regenerating it. It was why he'd protested when he had to take it again after a warhead broke open, trying to get the techs to let him wait until he was symptomatic before taking it, but he'd been overruled and ordered to drink it immediately. Azalla was often called the "cursed blessing," because there was always the danger that it could have this effect, that it might lock its user's DNA not merely against the depredations of Zal but against the natural effects of time and entropy itself. If it didn't have enough damage to repair, this was what it might do instead.

It could make its patient immortal. It had made him immortal.

This man is here because he doesn't want to die. He believes you can give him more life.

Zamin began to laugh. The old man's body had shifted during the crash and lay on the floor below the dais like a discarded doll, right in his field of vision. "You doddering old fool!" he yelled at it. "Is this what you wanted? Is this what you fucking wanted?" The laughter dissolved into sobs as he fell to his knees.

He was no longer one of the Igigi, no longer one of the honored servants of the Anunnaki. He had become Anunnaki. He was one of the damned.

"Almost all of them go insane," Nargal had told him as he prepared to be presented to them for the first time. "Irkalla is full of the ones who have gone mad. The passage of time gets to be too much for them. Sometimes it takes thousands of years, but other times it only takes a few centuries. It's amazing that any of them are still sane at all. Of course, everybody's questioned Enki's sanity for millennia, but that's just Enki for you…"

He could remember their faces, bright and beautiful and wise, aloof and removed, with sadness and regret in almost all of their eyes. Of all of them, only Enki seemed to live without regret, without looking back, without caring that his past stretched back in time some sixty thousand years or more, focused instead on the current moment and bright future vistas. Even Inanna, even when she laughed, still had ancient sorrow in her eyes. He'd left their audience chamber adoring all of them, devoted to their cause of maintaining order throughout the Myriad Worlds, but not envying any of them in the least. Death was the door into Paradise, after all, and nothing to fear even if most did so anyway. But it was a door that was closed against the Anunnaki forever, and now it had closed against him, too. He would never see his family and friends again in a better world; this was the only world he would ever have.

He was so wrapped up in the agony of his discovery that he almost didn't hear the hushed, slithering sound.

Zamin froze, not even breathing as he listened for the noise again. Something was alive, and inside the ship with him.

Three of the scorpion-like creatures had left the mess hall without finding a victim, he suddenly remembered. Could they still be alive now? Two thousand years later?

He remembered the recordings of the mammoth Ganapati ship, infested with eggs that still opened when the survey team got too near. The huge Ganapati pilot had fossilized into his chair, having died some tens of thousands of years earlier, and yet the eggs were still viable, the creatures inside them still dangerous. It had been fifty thousand years since anyone in the Myriad Worlds had seen living Ganapati, but their technology remained priceless, the foundation of all of the worlds' space travel down to the shapes of their ships and the pressure suits the Igigi wore—

The noise came again, tiny and scuttling.

He needed to assume that those three abominations were still alive and on board. And, seemingly, had found him because of his histrionics. He needed to kill them.

With what? he demanded of himself. Your bare hands? Harsh language?

He had no weapons with him. Silently, he cursed himself for not bringing that remarkable flame-thrower Elilu had given him.

He suddenly remembered the soldier's projectile weapon. It was somewhere in this room. Where had it fallen?

Quietly, carefully, he rose to his feet and looked around. It wasn't on the dais, but he was almost certain that it had been after he'd tossed it aside. Maybe it had slid during the crash. The room was tilted now, after all. He cautiously moved toward the downward slope.

You're an idiot, he told himself as he neared the edge. Even if you find it, you're not going to know how to use it.

The bodies of the soldier and the older woman came into view, and Zamin had to suppress a groan of horror. They weren't dead! Their injuries had been severe, but hadn't been instantly fatal. He could see the faltering rise and fall of both of their chests. But it was too late for them now. Two of the stage-one acid dragons had found them and had already wrapped around their faces. He mentally berated himself for not checking on them the last time he'd come back to the ship, although it was possible that the creatures were already attached to them even then. How oblivious he'd been to his surroundings!

That was two located, though. The third could still be anywhere, and was probably hunting him right now. He needed that weapon.

There… was that it? Something long and cylindrical lay in the shadows by the arched doorway. He jumped down from the dais and hurried toward it, grabbing it and trying to remember how he'd seen the soldier arm it when the man had pointed it at Elilu. Recalling the gesture, he duplicated it and was pleased to hear the weapon powering up. The man had fired once and had been preparing to fire again, but Zamin had no idea how many additional rounds of ammunition it might have. The trigger mechanism looked easy enough—

There. Movement. In the corner of his eye…

He caught a quick glimpse of it sitting on top of one of the ruined stasis pods before it launched itself at him and the gun roared in reflex. The creature exploded in midair, flying backward and away from him. The dais and floor began smoking where its blood splashed, while Zamin stood still, gasping, his heart pounding. If it had caught him, it couldn't have harmed him, but he might not have awakened until after the other embryos had finished growing and burst free. And if Elilu had come looking for him…

He re-armed the weapon, moving first to the soldier. He used two rounds on the man, one to destroy the creature wrapped around his head and the other to destroy the embryo that might already be implanted inside him. Shooting the woman was much harder. Doing it made him feel ill, even though he knew there was no way to save her.

That takes care of those, he thought as he hurried away from the bodies. But what about the three dragons that hatched out of my brothers-in-arms?

He wasn't sure whether they'd left the ship and attacked the people in the base, or whether they might still be on board. Even one was a horrible risk; two or more could mean an egg field somewhere on the ship, or even a small colony. If any of them were still alive—

He didn't even ask himself what he was doing until he'd reached the sickbay and begun opening cabinets.

You can't do this, part of him said as he drew out the other four bowls of Azalla from their cabinet.

I have to, he answered himself, stacking them carefully and putting them inside a portable med kit.

It's sadistic, his conscience twinged at him. She'll hate you forever if you do it. Literally.

"She could die if I don't," he muttered as he shouldered the case.

Everything dies, his conscience struck back. But he knew that it had already lost. He couldn't die, and he didn't want to face this strange new world alone. Especially if the acid dragons were anywhere nearby.

He gathered weapons and supplies, including some real clothes to change into, as quickly as he could, listening intently for any stray sound as he did, but the huge ship was tomb-silent. Fully laden with supplies, he finished up by lugging out one of the portable communication units. He needed to find out more about what had happened on the base. He needed to see if any of the ships were uncontaminated and could be used to escape. Somehow, above all, he needed to find a way to get Elilu safely off of this world as soon as possible.

As he lowered the supplies to the ground below the entry arches and prepared to follow them down, he heard a distant, hissing sigh.

Zamin prayed to Inanna that it was just the wind.

Notes: Okay! Well, that took a bit of a turn for the worse, didn't it? This is my way of reconciling the differences between Alien canon and Prometheus canon, particularly the way the massive Space Jockey from Alien somehow shrank down to the size of a hunky basketball player. While it doesn't quite explain Shaw's "baby" yet, don't worry, that explanation is coming soon; some of you may have already spotted the seeding I've been doing for it.

So there's a little fun with Mesopotamian vocabulary in this section, but not all that many words.
Šagtum means "pasture-land" in Old Babylonian, so I'm using that with Ereshkigal to mean "the fields of Ereshkigal" (but not the land of the dead itself, although it's kind of become that at this point, hasn't it? Y helo thar Irony!) and the name Engineers have for LV-223.
Muru means "mist" or "rainstorm" in Old Babylonian, which felt like a great name for an intelligence operative masquerading as a camp follower/prostitute. It's kind of a shame that this tiny cameo is it for her.
Enki is one of the main gods in the Mesopotamian pantheons, also known as Ea, the god of the sea and a trickster god who likes to mess with everybody's heads; he's also the god responsible for saving humanity from the Great Flood, in the Mesopotamian versions of the flood myths. (And it's pretty awesome how he does that because, having been forbidden by Ellil to warn humanity of the impending disaster, he sat outside of the Noah-character's house, right under his window, and babbled to the wall, giving "it" all of the instructions he couldn't give the man directly. Comedy GOLD.)
Ganapati is not a Mesopotamian anything. I decided that since the original space jockeys, and the crazysauce suits modeled after them, kinda looked elephantine, I'd connect it to a genuinely alien species that maaaaaaybe made First Contact with the Anunnaki tens of thousands of years ago, and maaaaaaybe were the origins of a very popular Hindu god, Ganesh, whose Sanskrit name is Ganapati. Why yes, I am plundering all kinds of wacky religious things, why do you ask? :)

Oh, and the thing with the "Myriad Worlds?" In classical Greek, myriad = 10,000. Zamin wasn't kidding when he said that there were a lot of planets out there! And "hypercapnia" is carbon dioxide poisoning.

Thank you to everybody who has been reading and leaving such lovely feedback! I haven't had time to respond individually, but rest assured I've been treasuring every comment. :D And don't worry, Zamin and Shaw are going to get further than just a kiss… we just have to give them a little time. ;)