Standing in the shadows of another person had, for the most part, been a fairly accurate description of Elizabeth's life to date. Many, many hours had been sunk into ruminating on her perpetual right-hand status, whether it was the unfortunate family extra in the wake of her parents' respective deaths, damn-near-permanent second-best throughout her experience in the field, or simply Charlie's Wife. No matter how much effort she put into something, she had almost always found herself playing second fiddle to someone else.
Though the doomed Prometheus mission had all the promise of being different, given these were her theories and her findings that had landed them here – oh, and how swimmingly that had gone! – she had, predictably, found herself being overshadowed once again by Charlie, then by David, left as the stuffy voice of reason as everyone else set about adventuring, sticking their fingers where they didn't belong, and making almost every decision throughout the mission despite her musings to the contrary. The few decisions she had made seemed to end in pain of some variety, such was the degree to which she had gone into this woefully underprepared.
Idly, quietly, she had wondered whether this was all fate, or whether she had a hand in it at all. There was always talk of controlling one's destiny, being the master of one's own fate, but she remained unconvinced – especially in light of recent events. She had, for all intents and purposes, thrown herself at this mission with all of her tiny might, and still been denied agency. It was as though she was destined to either remain in the shadows or dice with death.
Right now, quite literally, she was doing exactly the former. Even with the death of Charlie and the incapacitation of David, she was not the one calling the shots. Even as the only Human left alive on this piece of rock, she was relegated to follower. It would have been a lie to say it didn't bother her, but what choice was there? With the sun hanging heavy in the afternoon sky, rather than squint in the glare its golden rays as it bounced off the imperfections in her helmet, she had opted to stand in the huge shadow Za'il cast as he attempted, for a third time, to gain access to the crashed Engineer ship via the hidden pinpad that apparently refused to cooperate. Doing so had, despite its immediate practicalities, thrown her mind into the sort of self-deprecating, overthinking mode she preferred to avoid if at all possible; she especially preferred to avoid it when the trigger for it was still currently happening.
And yet, here they were. Little more than Human baggage, she had ample time to muse her dancing to the beat of the Engineer's drum.
An irritated sigh from beneath the elephantine mask above her finally stole her from her spiral of thoughts. Energetically shaking his head with raised, questioning hands, Za'il had apparently given up on using logic to gain access and had resorted to shouting at the airlock instead.
What a fantastic day this had turned out to be.
For a moment, she found herself hoping they would turn around and return to the lifeboat for a much-needed and much-deserved evening of rest. It was certainly impossible to know what he was thinking as he stared down at her from above, his bizarre helmet completely obscuring his face and rendering him absolutely unreadable. It occurred to her that, in the absence of spoken language, she had been projecting Human emotions onto his numerous facial expressions and hoping they stuck; without even that at her disposal, she couldn't quite swallow the welling of cold, roiling fear in the pit of her stomach – the very same fear that had stalked her from the moment she first laid eyes on him, the fear she thought she'd almost successfully shaken.
Perhaps she simply wasn't evolved enough a Human to be interacting with alien life forms, she reasoned. It had been painfully evident over the past week that she certainly had no business being out here, and couldn't fathom why she thought she should be in the first place. For the billions of people occupying the distant blue planet, for the hundreds of thousands of whom were directly involved in the art of Space, the study of things beyond the confines of Earth, it seemed laughable that an Archaeologist of all things was to lead the first major expedition in history bound for a planet supposedly teeming with life.
The Engineer got halfway through saying something to her in the most measured, even tone he could muster before trailing off with a huff, shaking his head again, and instead motioning for her to follow him as he turned to march alongside the starboard arm of the fallen vessel toward the stern.
He was grumpy, that much she could discern; if not for his stubborn march into the wind, shoulders squared and tense as he sped off ahead without her, his balled fists gave it away. His was the gait of a determined man, urgent but lacking any palpable arrogance about it, entirely fixated ahead and in an inordinate hurry to reach his target. The more she thought about it, the more it seemed he was rightfully irritated; perhaps grumpy was the wrong word.
Lingering somewhere between a trot and the cusp of a jog, Shaw found herself all but skittering after the immense creature as he continued to pull distance between the two of them. If it weren't for the pack slung over both shoulders, stuffed with equipment for the task ahead, she'd have considered simply turning back and heading for the couch aboard the lifeboat. He was still in an enormous rush and unamused by the setbacks so far, and having a Human tailing him was simply slowing him down. Perhaps it was better if she just–
The Engineer skidded to a halt without warning, turning on a heel as he looked back over his shoulder at her. With the language barrier alive and well, and being unable to read his face in lieu of comprehensible words, she was left trying to pick apart what body language showed through his heavy, intricate armour. There was the slightest hint of a slump as he turned to face her, arms hanging patiently – patiently? – by his side as she broke into a jog to catch up.
Tilting his head to the side as she reached him, by now puffing from running and able to smell her own sweat within the confines of the suit and helmet, he stole a moment to regard her from above before setting off again at a far more reasonable pace.
It struck her that whenever she had begun spinning into a vortex of self-deprecation, pre-planning an act of rejection or violence from him, he managed to surprise her with an uncharacteristically gentle or thoughtful gesture – just as he seemed to jolt her with an unpredictable outburst whenever she thought she had begun to understand him. Not exactly the most healthy of relationships, is it? Amazing what one will do to just bloody survive.
Wherever it was she was being led, she'd hoped this wasn't going to be it. He had stopped clear of any entrances along the hull, instead pausing below the overhang of the rear of the vessel quite a number of metres above, staring up at the looming lip directly above with the sort of intent she knew could only mean one thing.
Two huge hands leaning over her and wrestling with her pack confirmed her suspicions; as if this trip hadn't been action-packed and intrepid enough, they were now going full Indiana Jones and making the sort of entrance reserved for the fodder of movies. The repeated clank of mountaineering equipment being pulled free and tossed onto the ground left her grinding her teeth. Ain't no rest for the wicked, Doctor. Aren't you glad you did that godforsaken abseiling course a decade ago?
He cast her another drawn glance before handing her one of the harnesses and ascenders with noticeably less haste than he'd applied in the last few minutes. As she set about equipping herself, the wondered if her own tense, apprehensive facial expression had given her away; he certainly had the advantage of being able to actually see her with her clear helmet.
In the next breath, she found herself learning a new word in his language; the short, sharp syllable shouted at her was clearly a warning of some kind, and having looked upward as he darted aside, she'd immediately narrowed the possible meanings down. The clawed hook at the end of the rope he'd thrown had bounced off its intended target and come straight back down, landing right where she'd a moment earlier stood and rebounding against solid stone with a resounding clang.
Another familiar word followed – a meek apology, followed by a frustrated huff.
"They have a bit of a personality on them," she smirked knowingly, reflecting on a dozen similar failed attempts of her own over the years. After all, not every dig was in an easy-to-access, open pit; more than once she'd found herself armed with this equipment day after day, climbing for a significant portion of each day to access the most difficult-to-find ruins. "Let's see if I remember how it's done."
Ejecting the hooked end after a determined spin, Elizabeth seemed to have a little more luck than her enormous companion; with a tink and a familiar scrape, the hook snatched at the surface above and found purchase as the rest of the equipment deployed and latched on. It wasn't often that she found herself scaling rocks like this, but, for once, she was glad she had; she gave the rope a quick tug, then, as it stayed put as intended, she dragged the rest of her weight against it to make sure it wasn't going to drop her on her arse the moment she was high enough for a fall to do damage.
The Engineer murmured something quietly, offered a nod, and adjusted his throw to something far more like hers – with apparently more success, as was immediately evident as the device deployed alongside Shaw's.
Wasting little time, she set about hauling herself up the blasted rope and getting this expedition over and done with.
It was hardly surprising that he'd made quicker progress than her, longer and stronger limbs notwithstanding. Apparently he'd expected the same, having pulled himself up and over the ledge with swift, military form before poking his head back over it to see where she was – evidently he wasn't expecting her to be right behind him, because she could have sworn she heard a short gasp as he recoiled, their helmets mere inches from touching as he'd peered over.
Offering a hand as she reached the edge, he grasped her arm and hoisted her upward as if she weighed nothing. At this point she wasn't going to turn down a helping hand; the extra weight of the pack had left her gasping.
Another airlock sat at the end of a short corridor leading into the vessel; this one, much to her relief, yielded on the first try and hissed open. Muttering something that sounded distinctly like it contained some of the profanity he'd spewed on several occasions to date, Za'il stepped inside and waited for her to follow suit as he held one gloved hand over the door jamb, then set about marching down the corridor and along a route etched into hard-wired memory.
A cold shiver ran down her spine as her eyes traced the immense arches of dark ribs lining the interior of the vessel. Staying aboard the lifeboat for the last few days had, she realised, done wonders for her state of mind; the familiar, quantifiably Human design of the vessel was a salve for the torment of the days prior, spent picking around indescribably alien surroundings that had quickly become one with absolute terror and only gotten worse from there. This place, too, had immediately become synonymous with doom. Certainly the cargo hold was filled with it, for reasons still a horrifying mystery. Asking him about it couldn't end well, as much as she still wanted her answers.
The Bridge, too, was an altar to death in a far more literal sense. As Za'il paced ahead, clearly occupied with what remained of the navigation array, she froze in place when a glint of blue and orange flickered in the corner of the room below one of the malfunctioning, sparking lights. Limp, swollen, the three bloated corpses heaped against the wall had clearly been dead for several days. This was not what she wanted to see when coming here–
An almighty exclamation of disgust echoed about the walls; gasping as she turned on a heel, she quickly noted that the Engineer had his removed his helmet – and had promptly thrown it on the ground as he clamped both hands over his nose and mouth. More profanity followed, along with a wet-sounding, violent retch that damn-near left him doubled over.
That'll happen when you leave dead bodies on your Bridge, she mused, unable to shake the bitter expression that clawed at her features. Maybe less wholesale murder next time, if you don't like the smell.
Pulling a distinctly upset grimace, the Engineer swallowed hard and set about what he was doing, one hand remaining clamped over his nose and mouth. Pushing aside a mass of exposed cables, he clambered up the ruined navigation array and busied himself with a plethora of buttons.
With plenty of reason to keep her helmet on this time, Shaw set about searching for the other remains strewn about the place. The place where David's body had fallen was smeared with thick, white muck in a significant enough quantity that if he were Human, she mused, he would surely have bled to death. The far edge of the spattered puddle of ooze had been smeared off toward the edge of the room, away from the decomposing bodies. Perhaps at least his body was down there...
A blast of white and pale cyan enveloped her as she set about looking for the head; a shriek escaped her amongst the blinding, swirling haze of light. Behind her came the thud of two boots hitting the ground – she could barely make out the immense figure pacing across the room amongst the flurry of holographic worlds orbiting shimmering stars etched in beads of light, with only the gleam of the top of his head visible above the hubris of searing colour.
He must have noticed her fly-catching gawp; despite the horrific smell sullying the air, he offered a faint quirk of a grin as he reached into the swirling mass, pinching one of the floating planets with the tips of his fingers and dragging it down toward her. Cork-like, it bobbed as if floating on water as he released it, hovering a few inches from her nose as it resumed its languid rotation about its axis. Behind her, the Engineer gently batted another aside as he silently sank down into the Captain's chair.
Mouth still agape, she raised her own hand to gently paw at the orb; it had the same faint tingle about it as the holos from the projector he'd brought aboard the lifeboat, albeit far more noticeable given the vast scale of them and, she imagined, the far more powerful equipment aboard the vessel.
She twisted and turned the grapefruit-sized planet in her grasp, studying the rich features etched into its surface. At first it appeared to simply be white continents against cyan oceans, but as her eyes adjusted to its intense glow, the faint ridges of mountain ranges and canyons crawling across the numerous land masses became far easier to spot. The continents themselves quickly followed as her vision began to discern their edges. South America, Australia, Africa...it didn't take long at all to recognise it.
Shooting the Engineer a quizzical look over her shoulder, she cradled the tiny Earth between both hands as she clutched it close to her chest. She knew he was headed for it the moment this entire endless debacle launched into full swing, and she knew his people had planned a strike against them two millennia before they had awoken him, but there was something so incredibly undeniable, so absolute, about him identifying the planet amongst the hundreds of other holographic words floating around them and handing it to her.
The look he returned was probably intended to be reassuring, she reasoned, when she could find only warmth, no malice, in his eyes. His gaze lingered for a few seconds before shifting back to the console before him, leaving her to become consumed by the tiny Earth between her fingers.
Having become intimately familiar with the perils of assumption in the past few days, she was more than a little reluctant to resort to it at this point – however, it felt like the slick, understated gesture was almost a concession of some sort. It had been so casually executed, as if it wasn't intended to mean much, and yet…
Was he bequeathing the planet back to her as some sort of admission? Was he acknowledging a catastrophic misjudgement of her people, or a change of plan? Was he handing back control of the situation, or merely suggesting the planet was no longer a target?
Was she gratuitously over-thinking the gesture? Perhaps he was simply acknowledging where she came from.
She wouldn't have to agonise over it for long. With an anticlimactic bzz, the entire display – including Earth – blinked out of existence, leaving her overtaxed vision stumbling about the cavernous Bridge in the dark; moments later, a far smaller, dimmer hologram took its place in the very centre of the room, its increasingly familiar tunnels and towers gradually snaking their way outward from the fallen vessel's present position. This, she quickly recognised, must be the in-depth scan he had mentioned earlier.
Indeed, this holo was vastly more detailed than the last; these tunnels had doors and airlocks, their adjoining rooms filled with fixtures. Docked ships were more than mere outlines, and as the scan progressed, a few even began to show internal systems in fractured smatterings, tiny details slowly crawling outward in glowing, ant-like trails. And, troublingly, the coloured blips occupying many of the corridors no longer seemed round.
Shaw's eyes remained welded to one of the greenish blobs closest to her, lingering in a hallway at the farthest reaches of the third tower as quiet footfalls approached from behind. The Engineer crouched alongside her, out of arm's reach, pointedly holding his breath as he consciously kept his breathing shallow. The smell in the room must be obscene, she reasoned.
Grasping the illustrated corridor closest to them with the fingers of both hands, he drew the pinched points apart to enlarge the holo before them. The blip sitting to its far wall took shape as he enlarged the display again, with intricate contortions of sinew and structure forming across its surface; its unrecognisable shape reminded her of a fossil, huddled in a confusing mass of limbs and spines as if immortalised in amber.
After a moment the scanners made another pass, fleshing out detail throughout the hologram with a nearly imperceptible ripple of motion. The green thing took on a more intricate form, the straps of sinew becoming arms and legs distorted into the most horrifying of contortions. The elongated, smooth mass along the top of the nest of limbs must have been the creature's head – it looked no different to the sketch Za'il had made days earlier. Those details must have been burned into his brain, much as a mere glance had seared them into her own.
A mighty, visceral shudder wracked the Engineer's body from head to toe as his fingers released the hologram. At a glance, his expression had grown grim. She was certain it wasn't just because of the stench of death permeating the atmosphere.
Swallowing hard, he grasped at the display as he stood, quickly shrinking it back down to a size that the room could contain. As he tweaked it to and fro, studying its outer reaches as data continued to flesh it out with fine detail, Shaw decided that one look was more than enough. There was no way she wanted to see these creatures in the flesh, and for the time being, she refused to acknowledge that they would likely run headlong into the lone cyan blip lingering in the tunnel between the two ships that awaited them at the far end of the complex. Leaving the Engineer to study the map alone, she slunk away to continue looking for pieces of android.
As much as she didn't want to be anywhere near the swollen corpses heaped away from the navigation array, she needed to ensure there wasn't a decapitated body beneath them. With the way they were stacked, she was fairly certain they had fallen there during the crash rather than intentionally discarded; the tangle of limbs was too haphazard, too arbitrary. There were only enough for three bodies, too – it was safe to assume she wouldn't need to check beneath them.
The tendrils of debris strewn below the centre of the Bridge made for extra hazards as she searched. Some of the conduits hanging from smashed panels appeared to be wiring, barely recognisable in their alienness; one emitted a brief spark of electricity when she inadvertently disturbed nearby clutter. Another, torn from the roof and dangling limply by the far wall, occasionally sparked and popped in a similar manner, unbidden. The sheer state of carnage on that side of the room simply screamed hazard at her, and if David was over there, she could bet he would be in no state to–
Another burst of light from the sparking conduit illuminated a strap of orange on the far side of the Bridge. Two recognisably Human hands stretched up from the floor, barely peeking above the central ridge she was standing on and seemingly reaching toward something, toward nothing, perpetually frozen exactly where they'd ceased to animate. There you are.
Resolving to collect him later, she quietly slunk back to the severed head gaping into the abyss behind her. His body was larger than hers and contained a Hell of a lot more heavy components; she would need help carting him back, especially if they were going to exit in the same fashion as they entered.
The head was lifeless, she noted as she rolled it to face upward. Eyes open, unseeing, his expression had been frozen in resigned thought. Perhaps this was the uncanny valley people spoke of when ruminating the ever-decreasing gap between Human and not-quite-Human; David was so incredibly realistic to both the look and touch, but frozen in mid-thought as he was, he was neither a torpid corpse nor a living, breathing being. Something barely sapient within her was suddenly so mind-bendingly revolted, so primally upset, her hands jerked away from the synthetic skin as if burnt as she suppressed an unhappy groan.
The sound had not gone unnoticed. A loud gasp echoed about the Bridge over the scuffle of boots against metal as the Engineer scrambled to his feet, mouth agape in apparent horror as she snapped her attention toward the enormous being.
That horror didn't last long, quickly twisting into something far more familiar; her blood froze in her veins as he spat several angry, accusing words that reverberated against the walls and clawed at her eardrums. His voice was as deep as it was alien, louder than she'd ever heard it, black like his eyes as they narrowed to a furious squint.
She became aware that her hands were shaking as he scrutinised her, righteous fury contorting his features. His own were balled into fists by his sides. She'd forgotten to breathe; it snagged in her throat with a whimper as she stole a gasp.
With that, a torrent of rage exploded from the Engineer. Even if she could understand his language, she mightn't have understood a thing of what he shouted at her here, fumbling with words as he spat them, gesticulating wildly with both hands, pacing back and forth as he interrupted himself with an endless stream of consciousness, barely breaking for a breath.
Perhaps the worst of it, the last vestige of intelligent thought mused from the farthest reaches of her mind, was that he seemed to all but refuse to look at her. Immense gloved hands clawed at his head in apparent outrage before gesticulating violently in her direction, back and forth as he ranted on. Her ears rung, the furious shouting competing only with the hammering of her own heartbeat in her throat.
The demise of the head beneath her hands stained her vision, the android's decapitation playing over and over again before her as the creature shouted; her former crewmates' untimely ends followed, repeatedly, replaying every time her terrified eyes caught a glimpse of his face. As temperamental as he seemed to be, that was the last time she had seen him nearly this angry. He'd been half as outraged back then and he'd torn them to pieces.
There was no doubt in her mind that this, this of all things, would be her final moments.
She didn't even know why.
She supposed it was only fair. Her need for answers had led seventeen people to their horrific, agonising, unfair deaths; it seemed only right she would be sent to her own with a million more questions, more than she could have answered if she'd lived, the most pressing of which would be her last.
At least one would be answered. How would she die? Would it be blunt force trauma like Weyland, Jackson and Ford? Would it be a crushed skull? Would it be from being flung against the walls of the Bridge? Would it be instant, or, in such a state of rage, would he drag it out, make her suffer for her unknown crime?
The Engineer stopped dead in the midst of his tirade, hunched over balled fists, mouth wide as he gasped for breath. Something in his expression changed, staining the rage that had gripped him with...with…
Every thought in her head screeched to a grinding halt as his glare tore her limb from limb. It wasn't rage at all, was it? No...it was mortal offense. For all the distaste woven into his expression, she may as well have delivered the worst insult known to mankind then slapped him across the face. It was unmistakable; there was hurt in his eyes. Betrayal.
He fractured the silence with another string of words, far quieter but no less accusational. Lips drawn thin, he drew a breath and turned on a heel to begin marching toward her. At that pace, he would cross the Bridge in seconds.
Seconds left, Doctor, and you have no answers; well done.
Her breath hitched in her throat as she squeezed her eyes shut, head dipping as she awaited the end. I guess this is how I leave this foetid rock, after all.
There was no sudden, violent contact; he did not grab her throat, nor did he shatter her helmet and crush her skull. He did not grab her suit and wrench her from her knelt, crumpled position on the deck, or thrust her across the room.
She felt a jolt as huge hands grabbed her backpack, tugging her a mere few inches forward as he ripped at the zipper. The metal complained at the force exerted against it and yielded; immediately there was rough fumbling against her back as he rifled through the pack's contents. One of the movements nudged her forward. Her helmet bumped his knee. What on Earth is he doing?
It was over as quickly as it started; after yanking something from the pack he turned and marched several paces away. Her ears still rang from the hubris earlier, barely able to hear his angry, ragged breaths over her own panicked gasps and thundering heart. Squeaking one eye open from her bowed, defeated hunch, she spotted him standing near the navigation array; a thousand emotions were etched into his face, lips drawn beneath a concrete scowl as he floundered with the tablet in frustrated swipes and jabs.
Before she had a chance to consider this newest turn of events, he stepped toward her again and shoved the tablet at her, screen-first.
Somehow he'd managed to force it to display just one word alongside its English translation.
Abomination.
Once again she found herself lost for words. With all her preparation for imminent demise, she hadn't readied herself for another frantic to-and-fro with that blasted language game; she doubted she was even capable of figuring anything out in this state. Her hands were quaking against the tablet so hard she could barely read it.
What was the abomination – was it her, was it something she said or did? How had he gone from calmly showing her results from the scan to outright screaming at her in incandescent outrage? What had changed?
A glint of gold between her knees caught her eye as she groped at the device.
I'm inclined to agree, she mused blackly as she pressed her lips tight. But I would call that an overreaction.
Hands still shaking too violently to be truly useful, she carefully slipped the pack from her shoulders to hunt for the pad of paper and a pen. Unsure if he was content to wait, she snatched it from the pack the moment she spotted it, immediately penning an apology from memory with her right as she fumbled for words on the tablet with her left. The weight of his glare clawed at her flesh. She wished she could acknowledge his patience, thank him for it; there were a million-and-one ways things could have gone, but this wasn't among any she could have projected.
The pen barely stayed in her grasp as she wrote. A constant drumbeat of mortality had woven itself into her psyche, once again returning into the perpetual wait for death that had clawed at her shadow for every moment aside from the last…
For how long had she found any semblance of peace? Had it been a mere day or two?
This was no time for this sort of distraction! Penning the last of her response, she offered the pad and pen to the Engineer. The obvious, visible rage had ebbed from him, but what remained was no better; he still seemed offended, disappointed. Disgusted.
I'm so sorry. I can't fly the ship alone. I need this.
Still tense, scrutinising the page through narrowed eyes, he sighed and shook his head. Once again testing the patience that seemed to show up at the most opportune of moments, he shot her an accusatory glare before mulling a response, then put it to paper with hasty, irritated pen strokes and tossed both back at her feet. Refusing to look at either her or the severed head before her, he turned on a heel, paced back toward the navigation array, then stopped dead and clawed at his face with both hands, unable to suppress a groan of unbridled frustration.
You can't have these things. Don't your people know this? No good can come of this.
The Engineers had most likely experimented with such creations in the past, she figured; it was but one of infinite forms of life, of creation, and given the immense strides she imagined – couldn't imagine – they'd made, it made sense that they'd had some form of Android amongst them at some stage. And, given David's unpredictable nature throughout the Prometheus expedition, given his bizarre behaviour and, frankly, irrefutable untrustworthiness, it didn't take much to imagine the plethora of misfortunes that may have unfolded to leave his people, or even him personally, unhinged with contempt at the mere suggestion of such synthetic life.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I can't fly and I need his help. He is just a machine.
After a quick glance across the page, Za'il drew a heavy breath and exhaled hard, momentarily pressing his eyes closed before setting his gaze upon her once more. The distaste was still there, staining his features, but the rest was a mystery; once again she felt like a naughty child that had failed her parents, caught red-handed doing something stupid. Perhaps there was an element of truth to it – she, indirectly, on behalf of the Human race, had sinned before their creators, and their creators were angry. Disappointed. Had expected more of them, clearly.
His dark eyes darted between the page and the head by her knees, a thousand thoughts flickering before them as the pen lingered above the page. Confusion appeared to be vying for dominance over the plethora of other angry, upset emotions he was displaying, whipping words away from the tip of the pen as they formed. Finally he murmured something at her, his voice thin and bewildered, then sighed and shook his head as he filled the rest of the page with a note.
The abomination could do untold damage. You should destroy it. I can teach you to fly, it's not hard.
She let out a heavy sigh as she finished translating the message, casting the inanimate head by her knees a glance before flipping to a fresh sheet where she succeeded in pressing the nib against it several times, embossing the page in a series of dots, and little else. She knew the latter thought was a lie, a dirty, transparent lie; there would be nothing easy about flying a vessel like this, even ignoring the gaping chasm in her understanding of the process itself and her non-existent familiarity with the technology. It was unlikely she could even reach the controls, given their apparent overhead position at arm's reach – for an Engineer. Unless the smaller vessel had a vastly different setup, she was going nowhere without David.
There was also the not-inconsequential detail of her inability to speak any language other than English with useful fluency, and her overwhelming fragility compared to damn-near everything else in the universe. As much as she distrusted the android, as much as she had already seen that the Engineer was absolutely right in his brutal assessment of him, she would be too vulnerable without the protection of the larger, stronger artificial lifeform.
Not that his superior strength had done him any good in his first encounter with that particular Engineer, mind.
Still, she would be easy pickings out there in the wider galaxy. Any Human would, that much was screamingly obvious after the last calamitous week.
Unless, of course, she went with Za'il – wherever he was headed. It seemed he had different plans though, she realised, remembering him pointing out two empty vessels. Besides, it would arguably be just as dangerous to hitch a ride with a being more than twice her size and a frightening, unpredictable temper. If the last few days were anything to judge by, she would be bald from stress by the time they arrived at any particular destination.
Even so, perhaps she could simply shut up, get back into learning mode, and shadow him back to the Engineer homeworld. If she could avoid pissing him off, he might even be patient enough to teach her his language, actually teach her to fly the vessel, and teach her how to stop poking every single button that seemed to set him off on explosive diatribes. The fleeting windows of sanity they had experienced in transitioning from one drama to the next certainly left her curious as to who he actually was beneath the bluster, beneath the armour. If she could overcome at least some of the barriers and actually get to know him...
Assuming she could mitigate every one of these significant pain points, it was unlikely he wanted her company. He seemed to tolerate her at best, after all – the only exception she could think of was the brief few minutes she'd indulged in playing the piano aboard the lifeboat, though that in and of itself was one of the biggest generator of these damned infernal questions that clawed at her psyche through every waking moment.
No, she needed to revive David and set him to work flying the ship.
Enough meaningless dots; she pressed the pen to the pad once more.
I've never flown anything before. And the 'abomination' speaks one of your languages.
She hoped the latter would help underline David's usefulness as she handed the pad back to the Engineer.
At this point the more vivid of his emotions had washed away, leaving him in a far more familiar state of calm despite the distaste that lingered like a bad smell. Perhaps that was the reason behind the grim expression – unlikely, she quickly decided.
His response, after a delay, was a single word.
Badly.
At any other time, she'd have interpreted that as an attempt at humour; here, now, she wasn't sure his kind – or he, at least – even possessed such a thing. She searched his eyes for any hint of what he was thinking, as difficult as that was when he towered over her and refused to stand near, having taken several steps away every time they exchanged notes. Devoid of humour, rage or insult, there was, in its place, almost a sense of resignation about him.
With a sigh, he leaned down and tugged the pad and pen from her grasp. He watched her from above for an age, dark eyes lingering beneath a heavy scowl, scrutinising her every feature until she felt bare, exposed...she wondered if the promise of a decapitated translator was looking more tempting to him at this point as he tried to pry something, anything meaningful from her. For every question she had of him, he undoubtedly had just as many of her – especially after whatever the Hell had transpired here.
Finally, as the silence had once again begun to claw at her sanity, he pressed his eyes closed as he chewed on his bottom lip, then penned a response.
This goes against my better judgement. Against everything I know. But I won't stop you from keeping your abomination.
Author's Note: Sorry for the delay in posting, folks. I've been doing 6 day weeks lately...not good for the writing. Arguably okay for the wallet.
This chapter was another difficult one to write for some reason, but this time I came prepared with an outline. Turns out I'm having to do that a lot more lately, as we start to get to the meat of the story. Believe it or not, this chapter makes up less than HALF of what I'd outlined to go down in Ch11...it would have blown out to something near 12,000 words if I'd continued. So we're cutting here.
On the plus side, I have plenty of material to launch into. Once I'm no longer working 50-60 hours back-to-back fml.
Also, thank you everyone for your kind feedback on the direction of this story. I'm one of those writers that takes immersion incredibly seriously, and if it's fanfiction, changing so little about the source material that the reader might just forget it's not actually canon. That's the aim, anyway. Call it decades of doodling around with Star Trek. I've got so many plans for where I'd like to take the Engineers as a species, as a people, and it scares the poop out of me that it's all going to be deprecated by the new movie when it comes out. However, you all make a great point...why not do it anyway, it's all just fiction at the end of the day...and IF it has potential to go further, take it from there!
I'll keep pumping this out as intended. We're about three-quarters of the way through now, then we're onto some pretty rapid universe expansion with a sequel where the cast is significantly larger and there's a lot more angst - there WILL be somewhat of a delay when that drops, because I'll be releasing the final chapter alongside the (re)launch of the sequel, and that second version I keep banging on about.
You're all wonderful and I've been absolutely loving the feedback. It inspires me to keep going, even after hellish weeks like this!