Alien: Covenant 2: Part 5

Author's note: Earth was no accident (does a farmer go out and sow seeds onto the ground and not check back to see if they have taken root?)

The Alien Engineers may have been farmers, but then, if a crop goes bad, or maybe becomes threatening, maybe it is time to yank it out and start over.

Were the Engineers found on LV-223 actually our ancestors (?), or maybe they were of a different race, a warrior race? Maybe they were a rival group sent out to annihilate the seeds of another? So many questions...

*******Daniels-The Subtleties ***********

Daniels Branson was in a location next to the engine-room. She knew the heat generated by the pulse system would not allow David to find her. She had only escaped her cryo-pod a few cycles ago and her main concern, until now, was to avoid detection, to keep David from finding her. She was planning her next move whenever she realized that Tennessee was still in his cryo-unit.

"What if David thinks of that? He certainly could use the pilot as leverage against me. Take him hostage."

She sat down at a monitor to check the cameras to the cryo-room. First of all, she knew that David couldn't shut off the O2 to the ship, any part of the ship. It may not allow her to burn flares, and it may kill her, but he would also be taking the risk of wiping out the colonists (hosts that he needed in his diabolical plan).

(The Covenant would allow its controller to shut off oxygen supply to certain compartments, in case of fire. However, the Colonist Cryo-Arena wasn't one of them, and neither was the crew-quarters. These areas would always have air supply. There were other parts of the ship too, that had to have air flow or the instrumentation would overheat and fail. The cryo-units of the crew were different than those of the colony-pods. They were of a different design. And that's why the crew chambers were separate. They would need to be revived at more frequent intervals)

Anyway Daniels checked the room. She could see no sign of the renegade robot inside the chamber.

"Good you son-of-a-bitch," she said aloud. "You haven't thought of that yet have you?"

Daniels was still berating herself for not seeing the truth, the fact that Walter was not Walter. No two things can exist exactly the same. Even identical twins aren't identical, just ask their mother. She can always tell the two apart. There are always subtleties, things that are different. If she had thought to ask "Mother", was Walter the true Walter, then maybe things would have been different.

Anyway, androids may be able to hide their scars, the things of their physical nature. However it's their personal traits, the personalities that are formed after their casting, that make them unique, human-like. Those are the things that equate to developing their own identities.

Her intuition had told her that something wasn't right, still she'd allowed her vigilance to be compromised, and, she'd almost paid the full price. Origae-6 would have become a breeding ground for David's pets.

With two-thousand colonists aboard he would have certainly become overlord of his own domain. And, he wouldn't have stopped there? The bot thought of himself as a god.

Daniels exited her chamber. She was in a rush to return to the crew-chamber and release Tennessee. Still, if David was trying to track her she needed cover. She had a backpack full of flares. In the supply-compartment she'd found cases of them, and she'd secured as many as possible. She'd hidden them in a separate location.

Daniels knew that David would think of the supply room and too, he may try to deny her access to certain parts of the ship.

She had introduced her security code into "Mother", a code that each of the crew had to keep the ship from being shut-down by any single occupant.

"Star Crazy", a derivative of "Stir Crazy", a term which had been coined, and given to cosmic travelers who'd been out in the void too long.

Let's face it, humans weren't meant to be housed in a "Chicken-Coop", a slang phrase used by the crew of the Covenant to describe the cryo-colonists (yeah, let's make fun of people while they're asleep. It's a human trait).

Anyway, Daniels was on her way to the crews' sleep chamber. She would pause in select areas and drop a flare, or turn on certain equipment that would generate heat. All intended to keep the android guessing.

When she was near the cryo-unit she accessed the door to "Diagnostics", a room around the corner. She went inside and again checked the cryo-cameras to make sure that the robot wasn't inside. He was nowhere in sight. When she opened the portal to exit there stood...

"DAVID...!?"

"Hello my friend."

Before Daniels could react the bot reached up with a syringe in his hand. He plunged the needle into her shoulder and injected its fluid. Daniels felt faint. She felt instantly exhausted. She felt herself slipping, slipping to the floor.

"Goodnight," she heard him say, "Dream of that cabin by the lake."

And...then all went dark.

END PART 5