Curiously, it was the little things that caught Shaw's attention over the rasp of her breath in her throat, over the drumbeat of her racing heart against her ears. Pressing the shadows that lurked at her toes from her mind amongst the familiarity of these dark, expansive caverns carved into the rock, her eyes instead plucked at the details she hadn't noticed in her previous few passes amongst crewmates at the other end of the base. She knew crisp, cool, impossibly fresh air flooded these corridors, but she now knew better than to remove her helmet as their entire landing party had done multiple times while they were still alive; rather, she preferred to squint at the powdery white accumulation in the fragments of rock which had softened and obscured the seemingly organic curves etched into the walls. She admired the razor-edge flatness of the path at her feet, though she stole only a momentary glance at the wisps of dust they disturbed with each pace. She idly wondered, as she drank it all in, how it had come to be.

Despite the hulking great tower perched upon the landscape above, her initial response had been to assume it all to be a natural formation – limestone caves, torn into existence by thundering rivers or searing lava, and worn smooth by aeons. She had meandered plenty of these in her time on a far more familiar planet, wide-eyed gaze plucking apart the intricacies carved into the rock over time, experience drawing the man-made from the natural, leading her from one discovery to the next as she planted her footsteps over those placed millennia ago and washed into the abyss.

Even in the darkness, it had quickly become apparent that these walls were too uniform, too deliberate, to be anything other than designed. The mystery of the virgin atmosphere within left little doubt of that, but now that she paced these halls with days – weeks? – of wisdom colouring her vision, it became immediately obvious just how uniform they were. At this point, there was little doubt in her mind that they were carved and reinforced by machine. No hands, no matter how large and strong, could have forged these mighty arches into rock.

Still, the moment of realisation in all its black, tarry horror clung to her psyche as she marched through the sweeping right-hander beyond the warship they had left behind. With the very much living, breathing Engineer a mere pace behind her as she pushed forward into the unknown, the crumpled, beheaded corpse they had stumbled upon stained her vision, refusing to leave. Bodies weren't something she had expected to find on this voyage. There was little she had been expecting, but bodies were close to the bottom of the list.

Mind you, so were many of the other things they had found.

Apparently the one, singular corpse she had found wasn't the only one; she recalled Janek mentioning, in passing, the almighty stack of bodies Fifield and Millburn had stumbled upon during their final misadventure, piled impossibly high into a wall of carnage. As much as she would never wish such a fate upon anyone, she supposed it was somewhat fitting that Fifield's reaction to their initial discovery would be met with many more in kind. Had they just stuck together…

...they would have found another way to die, of this much she was certain.

Goddamn this forsaken place.

The weight of the Engineer weapon in her grasp was substantial, tugging at her shoulders and leaving the familiar warmth of lactic burn in her biceps as she held it against her chest with both hands, but it most certainly didn't feel as heavy as the immense bloody thing looked. There was little doubt in her mind it was constructed with vastly bigger people in mind, and although it wasn't impossible to lift, the sheer size of it would without a doubt make it challenging to operate in an emergency.

Curious how the warlike often arrived at similarly violent outcomes. She had absolutely no idea what the weapon would even do when she pulled the trigger, but despite the fact that it was manufactured as far from Earth as she could imagine, it was patently obvious from the outset what it was and how to operate it. A familiar form-factor – one that had stolen hundreds of millions of lives on her own planet, and one she was loathe to have anything to do with.

To that end, Za'il hadn't introduced her to such things until minutes ago, handing it to her with chilling nonchalance just as they stepped from the warship's bridge. Even when threatened with an intruder, he had simply handed her one of her own peoples' flamethrowers as self-defense and gone to task himself. It struck her that not only had he apparently limited his own aggression in her presence – at least, in comparison to his catastrophic awakening – it seemed he'd actively limited her exposure to violence entirely. There was little reason to ponder his motivations; given he hadn't outright killed her when he'd had the opportunity, it was safe to assume a soldier's role here was hardly different to a soldier's role back on Earth, running toward danger to defend the less robust.

Assumption, she was slowly learning, was the mother of all...you know.

It left her wondering just how much wisdom was in Janek's assumption that this was potentially a weapons facility. Za'il himself had confirmed her suspicions that it was a military base, but to what end? What were those vials they stumbled upon in that temple-like room? What had they oozed? Had she been given the opportunity to explore, safely, for weeks or months, there was little doubt she would have emerged with a fairly solid idea of what the answers to all these questions were, but that hadn't been how fate had directed her, had it?

The thousands littering the crashed warship's cargo hold left her with few leads...leads that would forever be lost on this nightmarish world, one she was intent on leaving behind as soon as possible given the horrors it had bestowed upon the one, singular Prometheus survivor.

To be fair, that was exactly where they were headed.

Seemingly endless, the immense, snaking corridor sprawled onward with enough monotony that with each step less and less of her focus was on the potential for danger, and increasingly upon her internal musings as she noted the details of the monstrous, sunken doorways that sporadically appeared against the curved walls with patterns etched into their surfaces at seemingly regular intervals, the subtle downhill gradient of the path as it wove deeper and deeper toward the centre of the base.

What was obvious at this point was just how accurate the projections of the base layout had been. The walls undulated in exactly the manner she had noted on the various holograms the Engineer had projected, with doorways smattered here and there as they marched onward and little else. There had been no extra corridors intersecting their path save the one that led back into the base from the two hangars at its outer reaches, just as the map had shown. That, she noted, they hadn't reached yet – the door sealing that path had appeared vastly more significant than those they had passed thus far.

Accuracy was something she could appreciate, as a scientist. The devil was in the details, and Za'il had provided plenty with his repeated scans, an inordinate focus placed upon one singular blip. That devil, as much as she was loathe to think of it, was conspicuously absent thus far.

Just what that pale cyan blip was, she shuddered to think. The lull of blissful ignorance was strong, no matter how much her intelligence begged her to consider the increasing likelihood that it was simply waiting for them further along, to consider the absolute certainty that it, whatever it was, stood between them and salvation.

We'll deal with it when it comes, she told herself again and again, her throat tightening as that time drew closer with every thud of their boots against the dusty path.

As they trudged on in silence, the monotony of the tunnel's increasingly familiar features was briefly broken by the dull glint of a metal pole obscured within an alcove along the left wall. Its surface had withstood the ages but not entirely unscathed, somewhat blackened and tarnished against the dim illumination within as it hung in the shadows beyond the corridor.

Za'il's voice was barely above a whisper, but in the pindrop silence it still echoed against the walls and sent a half-hearted jolt through Shaw's tense body. He silently slunk past her as she froze in place.

"He says to stay still, Doctor," David's voice whispered from within the pack as the Engineer paced forward.

Raising his weapon toward the grimy, lone pole, he tapped at a series of buttons with a finger until it emitted a soft, white cone of light in the direction of the alcove; far too dim to be any truly useful light source, she supposed it was something else entirely that he was trying to achieve. Scanning, perhaps. Regardless, it was enough light for her to see that it was not one singular pole she was staring at but the closest arm of a towering frame, easily taller than an Engineer and broad enough that its expanse filled the nook in which it resided.

Little more than a massive, dust-caked rack, its series of dark, metallic arms reaching toward the roof of the corridor distantly reminded her of the great forks of a logging trailer – especially as, upon further inspection, it appeared to hover a half-foot off the ground, the glint of rusty, circular orbs below suggestive of wheels. For what she could make of it, it seemed to be akin to an immense trolley.

A perfect hiding place.

Za'il's apprehensive, cautious investigation of the trolley was quite rightfully thorough, blips of cyan flashing before Shaw's mind's eye as her overzealous imagination filled in the blanks in the dim haze of torchlight. There was little space for any creature to hide from his search as he inched closer, examining its underside with a crouch that ought to have been far more awkward given his payload, peering past its bounds against the alcove's wall, pawing at the rear wall with the weapon's thin beam of light.

Finally, after what felt like an age, the mighty Engineer expelled a long breath and flicked the light off with a poke of his thumb. Motioning with the barrel of the weapon, he murmured something in little more than a whisper before marching onward at a pace she would have no trouble in quickly matching.

"He seems to think there was no danger to be found back there," David whispered as she drew level with the pack slung over Za'il's shoulder, "But he insists you keep your wits about you."

"Understood," she replied quietly, easing past and skipping ahead. It was safer for her up front, so the theory went; Za'il had insisted upon having her in his sight for the whole journey, and she found little reason to disagree.

The return to the monotony of the corridor's intricate ribbing was a welcome one, with nowhere for things to hide from their nervous eyes as they resumed their march toward the second hangar. The distraction had served as a timely reminder, she supposed; this place had always been far more dangerous than any of them had thought, and through the razor-sharp lens of hindsight, she could scarcely believe the absurd risks the away team had indulged in. Why had they marched straight into an unexplored structure and yanked their helmets off within moments of arriving on an alien world? Why had she thought it so imperative to explore that vast, uncharted network without weapons? Why had anyone thought it safe to allow the team to split up after discovering an ancient, beheaded, decomposed corpse? Why?

All these questionable decisions to reflect upon, though they hadn't felt like decisions at the time – all these unfathomable risks she was now painfully, painfully aware of, and yet, the presence of the most questionable decision's outcome pacing along behind her served as the only reliable barrier she could imagine to that danger. It went without saying that Jackson and his band of gun-toting mercenaries would have simply opened fire on any threat they could have stumbled upon and promptly gotten them all killed. The rest of the Prometheus crew had been even less useful in the face of calamity, save David.

Oh, David.

He had demonstrated, on several occasions, his superior strength and dexterity over his Human companions. His greater memory and quicker thought processes went without saying, and his purpose – what a concept that was to unpick – was merely to serve. Realistically, he ought to have been that reassuring presence she had long since attributed to Za'il. In fact, upon reflection, she realised that perhaps she had tried to do exactly that in her determination to retrieve and revive him.

Fat lot of good that had done, she mused, suddenly aware of the sound of the limp limbs behind her, the heels of his boots gently tapping against each other with each of the Engineer's broad, languid strides. The android had proven a trivial, momentary irritation for the mighty giant, that much she would never scrape from the forefront of her memory. It wasn't the first time she had considered his inadequacy for the task of exploring space, its relative equality with her own somewhere near the proverbial barrel scrapings, but as time droned on, it became that much more meaningful.

Realistically, the broken body slung over Za'il's shoulder had also proven more trouble than she could have anticipated; as much as he bowed to the demands of one Meredith Vickers and indeed Peter Weyland himself, as much as he appeared entirely composed and unflappable even as the Engineer severed his head, there had been a nagging discomfort about his presence that she hadn't put an awful lot of thought into. Perhaps she hadn't wanted to – but with the looming reality that she was about to be stuck in a foreign, alien vessel with him, alone and dependent on his skills, perhaps she ought to do exactly that.

He had shown utmost obedience toward those he was built to serve. He had saved Shaw's life as she chased the corpse's head from the Prometheus' loading dock with nary a thought for his own life and had been exceedingly polite about the whole ordeal. But in stark contrast to the benevolence he had displayed that day, she couldn't help but circle back to the equally as polite but far more disturbing obsession he had displayed over the monster growing within her.

Come to think of it, he hadn't exactly been good at obeying her orders – just those of Vickers and Weyland. Amongst the wonder and chaos that had ensnared the entire crew from the moment they set foot on this wretched rock, she'd almost forgotten just how many times she'd asked David what on Earth he thought he was doing, and watched on in irritation as he'd either ignored her or murmured something intended to reassure her, and proceeded with his task anyway.

A cold shiver gripped her spine as she marched onward. As much as she intended to simply reassemble her fellow survivor once they were in orbit, somehow she found herself increasingly convinced by the words of the Engineer, a complete – and violent – unknown, over the mysterious motivations of what remained of her own crew.

The monumental arc of the doors leading from the corridor and into the main tunnel toward the heart of the station were hard to miss. They could have easily flown the lifeboat through its reaches with Za'il standing on top of it, and as she craned her neck to observe the intricate details of the hooped frame encompassing its breadth, she had to wonder if that was, in fact, its intention. The corridor itself had gradually widened enough that it might have fitted such enormous things within its significant expanse, as had its second half leading into the abyss before them, but the port they'd entered from was nowhere near as wide. Logistics, she quickly decided, and chalked it up to another mystery she would never gain the answers to.

Za'il had paused to examine its outer reaches with the dim torchlight on the upper side of his weapon, helmeted face craning toward the distant roof to the same degree as hers had; there were far, far less places a creature of any kind could hide here as far as she could see. Anything that could, she reasoned, would be small – far smaller than the screeching behemoth she had watched the Engineer face.

That I saved him from, she quietly corrected herself. With half my insides threatening to fall out.

Swallowing the lump in her throat, she moved on from the gargantuan doors and into the second arm of the corridor as she was left to consider the ramifications of that encounter, too. If asked of her, she doubted she would be able to pull the same stunt again; how on Earth she'd managed it in the first place was a mystery even to her, given the state of her at the time. Faced with a towering murderer and an abyss of flailing tentacles, by all rights she should have high-tailed it in the opposite direction and left them to it.

Ah yes, of course: she'd been convinced she would die regardless. Far be it for her to ignore the cries of something so very, very Human in the face of certain death.

A deep gasp rattled against the halls as they proceeded onward. Freezing in place, she whipped her head about to gaze upward at the Engineer standing behind her; he too had come to a juddering halt, weapon raised and pointing down the hall.

At a quick glance she noted they'd barely moved on from the mighty doors, their thick frame still visible at its closest edge around the curve of the hall. Before them lay the darkened expanse of poorly-lit hall, shadows cast from the right-hand wall as it disappeared around the corner into an abyss of black–

Those were not shadows.

Those were not bloody shadows.

Tearing her eyes from the tangle of limbs cluttering the path, she quickly diverted her attention back to Za'il. He hadn't moved an inch, still transfixed upon the ancient carnage before them. It was as though the sight had taken him completely by surprise…

...but of course. He hadn't seen what they had seen in their explorations. He hadn't seen any bodies beyond those of his own crew, their fates confined to the sarcophagi on the Bridge of the downed warship. For all he knew, the station could have been evacuated and the ships left idle and full of hibernating crews forgotten.

Another thing she would never know the answer to.

A shuffle of boots against the powdery path had her snapping her gaze back toward her enormous companion. A whisper escaped him, his voice wavering as he spoke. Two more paces toward the pile of bodies and he murmured something further, his voice barely audible beneath his heavy helmet. His grip on his weapon was unsteady.

"David, what's he saying?" She asked near-silently, her knuckles white beneath their gloves as she gripped the oversized rifle in her hands. Stacked high against the wall and into the alcove of a door, the veritable mountain of huge bodies draped over one another lay in a display of wretched, hopeless chaos, twisted limbs splayed across the path in frozen horror.

"He is...expressing dismay at what he's seeing," the android responded. After a pause, he added to the observation. "What is he seeing, Doctor?"

"Bodies," he whispered hastily, swallowing the lump in her throat. "This must have been just like what Fifield and Millburn stumbled upon. There...there must be at least thirty of them."

"Engineer, I presume," David murmured in return. His voice had become somewhat easier to hear through the thick canvas of the bag as Za'il took another pace forward, standing between Shaw and the pile of corpses. "In a similar state of decomposition as the one we found, are they?"

Squinting in the darkness, Elizabeth fought the roiling waves of nausea in the pit of her gut and focused on the carnage before her; several of the hands closest to them, she noted, were little more than pearlescent-white skeletons, the flesh having long since decayed from its bones and leaving thick tendrils of biosuit to collapse over what remained after tissue had turned to dust. Others had, much to her own dismay, apparently been torn from their bodies, leaving the severed remains of bones dangling amongst the tatters of their suits.

She hardly dared to look further, but as curiosity tightened its grasp around her, she stole a glance at the rest of what remained. Amongst the sea of macabre detail was a baffling mix of stained helmets and bare skulls, as though not everyone had managed to clamber into armour amongst whatever panic had ensued two millennia ago; a similar mix of biosuits and the armour Za'il himself currently wore had been scattered throughout, the nightmare of twisted body parts having obscured that observation until she'd resisted the urge to look away for long enough to spot it.

Upon further observation, her eyes caught one final detail that left her blood freezing in her veins; almost every single biosuit, every armoured chest piece, had been torn open as if detonated from inside. Some had the sides ripped out of them by something sizeable, the ribs within shattered along their length, while others had been defiled from beneath the sternum with explosive force.

Something truly ghastly had befallen these poor souls.

Swallowing once again, Shaw scrambled for words. Her voice shook despite her resolve, thin and alien against her ears, hardly her own. "Worse. They're skeletons, some are torn up...they all look as though they were breached from within."

"Breached, Doctor?"

"Something's exploded out of them." She drew a shaky breath. "Something else must have ripped some of them apart after they died."

Za'il's voice, still a whisper, interjected as he reached down and nudged the chest of the nearest corpse with the barrel of his rifle, gingerly drawing a line from the hole torn in the side of the torso to the tattered mess hanging over the vertebrae of the neck. From there he locked up again, his armour barely moving as the breath froze in his chest. Without knowing him she couldn't determine whether he was processing a veritable tsunami of information, or simply dissolving into a state of shock.

At this rate, it would simply land on the list of yet more she would never have answers for.

Taking cautious strides toward the mass of limbs, she hung close to the far wall as she remained transfixed. "David, ask him who they were."

A brief exchange ensued, David's voice impeccably polite and even-toned in contrast to the thin, breathless, staccato response he received.

"They were posted to the station, he believes," the android eventually replied. "But he can only guess as to what they are doing here."

Drawing a deep, rattling breath, the Engineer finally stepped past his fallen compatriots, though his rifle remained trained on the path before them. He murmured something in a whisper as he paused on the other side of the morbid sight, momentarily casting Elizabeth a glance.

"He again insists we must leave this moon with haste," David whispered through the confines of the bag, "Should either of you wish to avoid the same fate."

A crippling chill rattled her frame as she followed suit and stepped past, her grip on the alien weapon intensifying. She had to wonder, as much as she'd actively put the concept far from her consciousness, if that was the fate that awaited her had she not resisted the Prometheus crew's attempts to put her into hypersleep. The thing within her would certainly have had the strength to rip her apart given just a little more time to grow...would she have been conscious for those final moments? Something about the harrowed final resting positions of the Engineer corpses left behind her told her that she just might have been.

As the pressed on in silence with a renewed fixation on the microcosm of dust and corridor surrounding them, only one thought nagged at her psyche despite her intense focus. Should either of you wish to avoid the same fate.

A sick, twisted corner of her mind was left wondering just what David would do should they both perish and leave him as the sole survivor of this ordeal – would be find a way out of that oversized canvas bag, and over to his body? Or would he have the unenviable joy of listening to the pair of them die horrible deaths for the days his cranial batteries lasted, then blink out of existence himself until more unwitting passers-by succumbed to curiosity and stumbled upon this place once more? What would he feel, if anything, as he witnessed their final moments?

There was smugness in his tone as he whispered that off-handed comment, wasn't there?

Stop catastrophising, Elizabeth, she scolded herself as they pressed on. There's no point in putting words in anyone's mouths!

There were a few things she would need to discuss with the wretched creature before she agreed to reassembling him. The fact that she was increasingly questioning his motivations was proof enough to her that something was awry, and they would need to agree to a code of conduct between them that both would be comfortable with. There was little doubt he would have points to raise himself, having been subjected to a life of servitude by now, but she had to be comfortable with his decision-making before she could allow it to go unchecked. Though, had their positions somehow been reversed, she would likely find the concept of such a discussion rather offensive as she sat, beheaded, willing to say anything as she waited to be reassemb–

Skitter skitter.

Despite the impossibility of such a phenomenon, Shaw was absolutely certain that, for a brief moment in time, her blood had frozen in her veins as her heart seized still.

Behind her, the heavy bootsteps had ceased.

There was nothing but complete, utter silence apart from the rapid thu-thud in her chest, pounding against her ears.

Had...had she imagined that sound?

Daring to glance behind her, she found Za'il frozen in place. Feet locked in a broad stance and rifle trained on the hallway they'd just traversed, there was little doubt he had heard it too.

This time, she realised, there was no FTL-capable hull standing between her and the source of the sound. This time, she was left with little option other than to use the weapon pressed between her palms.

Skitter skitter.

There was no way to tell where the thing was in the darkness. Its proximity was yet another mystery to add to the list. Though, having been trapped in this network of corridors for God-knows-how-long, she doubted it would leave her wondering for long; maybe this was one of the few mysteries she would ultimately discover the answers to.

The morbid voice had returned. Perhaps this is the way I die.

Over her own heartbeat, she could make out the slow, ragged breaths from within the Engineer's oversized helmet – deliberate and controlled, he seemed to maintain the grip of control over the situation as he stole one pace forward, gaze swivelling about the corridor before the barrel of his rifle. The last of her remaining optimism was convinced his demeanour spoke to the situation's gravity, that whatever it was would be well within his abilities to neutralise. The rest, having withstood a lifetime's worth of horrors upon this planet's sorry surface, presumed he was simply remaining deadpan-calm to avoid sending her into a purposeless panic.

Barely audible, a whisper in an alien tongue permeated her own helmet. In a breath, David elaborated in hushed tones. "Keep marching forward, Doctor, and if you see anything move, call out."

"Alright," she whispered in turn, cringing as her thin, shaking voice betrayed her.

Eyes fixed upon every tiny detail in the hall before her, one foot silently falling in front of the other, she pressed on with a renewed urgency that left every silly musing to date in her wake. Nothing could get by her at this point. If she lost focus, they would all die.

Pad-pad-pad. Scrape.

Za'il's footfalls had been inaudible since that first sound, she noted, as she briefly shot a glance over her shoulder toward him. Rifle raised in his free hand, he too had turned to glance behind him as he matched her pace.

Shaw found herself swallowing hard, her mouth dry, her throat threatening to clamp shut. At this pace there was little of the hall left to traverse, but it remained inescapable that every pace led them closer to...to…

Skitter. Scraaaape.

Whispering the same word once, twice, a third time, the Engineer reached down with the hand balancing David's body to gently nudge her onward as he turned toward her, rifle still trained on the corridor behind them. She reflexively continued onward as she offered a nod.

The beads of sweat stung her eyes as they flooded her vision.

Every shadow, every change in the monotonous detail of the corridor, immediately became a threat as she noticed it. Her own rifle held high, its muzzle aimed squarely at anything that grabbed her attention, she suddenly remembered just how she had tackled the monstrosity in the medbay with an axe.

The corridor curved around to the right quite sharply, gradually narrowing to the height and breadth of the airlock doors they had passed through earlier. It wasn't far now; this, she recalled, happened in the latter third of the tunnel before it exited into a hangar.

Scrape. Scrape.

Barely audible, the sounds were not getting further away. Like the encounter days ago, it was undoubtedly the sound of two incredibly hard substances, one particularly sharp, coming into contact and sliding against each other. Claws against rock, Elizabeth. It's claws against rock.

The pounding of her heart in her throat did little to drown the sound out.

Was it in front of them, or behind them?

The shadows of the hooped walls leapt out one after another, each falling under the scope of her weapon as they revealed themselves. Something her size could fit in any of those alcoves. Hell, she could probably hide in one of them, briefly.

The dust-caked path before her seemed undisturbed in decades, a perfect film of grey powder coating the hall from wall to wall. The fine particulate whipped about their ankles as they marched toward their safe harbour.

Leaving a trail. If it's behind us, we're leading it straight to us.

Forcing herself to swallow, she pressed on with the quickest of glances back over her shoulder. The Engineer appeared to be striding almost sideways, his weapon aimed behind him as he scanned back and forth.

Skitter skitter.

All but holding her breath, she noted the sound seemed closer – but it seemed to come from neither behind or before them. Where is it, where is the fucking thing…

Scrape. Scrape.

The corridor straightened back out again. In its shadows, nothing. No disturbed powder. No movement.

Her grip on her weapon tightened once more.

Scrape. Skitter. Scrape scraaaaaape…

KTHUNK.

Whirling around, Shaw was met with a plume of dust. No more than ten metres away, a mess of sinewy detail faded from obscurity in the middle of the corridor as the powder settled.

In a flurry of motion, the thing unfurled itself from a nightmare of twisted limbs and scrambled into an inhumanly hunched position; in a breath it lurched forward, skeletal limbs propping it up beyond the Engineer's height as it barreled toward them with a bone-shattering screech.

The roar of an alien weapon followed immediately thereafter. The flash from Za'il's rifle was utterly blinding, as was the resulting blue-stained bolt of plasma against the enormous creature.

With one hit, the beast staggered backward.

With the second it capitulated, flying rearward and landing with a heavy, scraping thunk.

She did not wait for a third before her legs finally reacted. Boots pounding against the dust with an urgency alien to her, the details of the corridor were all but impossible to make out in the haze burned into her vision. The creature was behind her after all. It was behind her, and the hangar before her.

Her breath seared in her chest as she raced onward, the distant vestiges of the scientist within plucking at the horror she had just witnessed. Unlike the behemoth she had carved from her ruined uterus days earlier, it had not been a terror of tentacles flailing mindlessly toward them. It had been humanoid, undoubtedly humanoid, with impossibly thin limbs undeniably arms and legs, its monstrous head towering almost her height again above her. Sickly blue, it was immediately recognisable as the first of the monsters Za'il had drawn; its head elongated and claw-like, a face made entirely of teeth, there was little doubt in her mind it would tear her limb from limb with ease.

Behind her, a third bolt had been fired; its distinctive crackle against the halls ripped at her ears and left them ringing as she charged on. In a heartbeat the sound had been joined by the heavy pounding of far larger boots against the dusty path, and after what seemed only a flash, an ear-shattering, inhuman scream.

As she raced on, the scrape of hardened claws against the path penetrated the static in her ears, only this time, its rap-rap-rap against the ground left little doubt the creature had survived Za'il's weapon. It was pursuing them. And with comparatively tiny legs, she would be the first for it to happen upon.

Resisting every ounce of common sense and daring to glance over her shoulder, she spotted the armoured silhouette of the sprinting Engineer closing in on her rapidly. Through the chaos she was certain he had shouted her name; briefly pausing in her dash as he slid to a halt against the slippery hallway, he raised his weapon and fired it back down the hallway. As the bolt hit the ground and exploded with a crackle she could feel, Za'il suddenly crouched before her.

Leaving her no time to consider his motives, he slammed his shoulder into her gut and swept her upward with frightening force as another tremendous screech echoed about the halls.

As she fought for breath, her grasp on her weapon somehow surviving the assault, she noticed just how much higher she was than the previous moment. Glancing about as a huge hand clamped down against her back, all became clear; he had taken off at a sprint with her over his shoulder.

She doubted he'd intended to knock the wind out of her. He was hardly to blame for forgetting her relative fragility in the heat of the moment. With one arm looped around each smaller body, Za'il had thrown his own weapon down and left it as it fell against the dusty path.

Behind them, the scampering sounds had grown louder. Beyond doubt the rap-rap-rap of claws was drawing closer. What was this creature made of!

A great rumble vibrated against her belly. The entirety of her focus on the creature closing in on them, it took a moment to realise the Engineer had spoken. Voice raised to a deafening bark, he had shouted – no, screamed – something at her repeatedly.

The creature, in all its blue, harrowing glory, had rounded the corner behind them.

With a mighty leap, it transitioned from sprinting on two feet to galloping on all fours.

"Fire, Elizabeth! Fire!"

David had finally translated the Engineer's message, just as the larger man had descended into deafening, angry, quick-fire ramblings.

Weapon gripped between both white-knuckled hands and braced against Za'il's shoulder, Shaw pulled the trigger.

The kickback from the blast almost ripped the rifle from her grasp, the flash staining her vision white as her ears rang. Not a moment later the charge hit, erupting against the path in an explosive flare that ignited the racing silhouette before her in a haze of blue static.

The beast momentarily staggered, hunching before the blast before crying out with a serpentine hiss and launching itself from its crouch once more.

She pulled the trigger again, swinging the barrel an inch higher as she braced herself against the armour below.

Again it missed its mark, detonating in the monster's path. It leaped through the resulting haze with one powerful bound, closing the distance between them once more.

Her third shot hit the creature square in the chest. An ear-piercing shriek erupted against the corridor walls as it crumpled to the ground, reflexively curling its skeletal limbs around the oozing wound in its chest.

Muzzle still trained on the creature as it remained hunched, she watched in horror as, yet again, it forced itself to its feet and took off toward them in a laboured, bipedal run. The rifle was searing hot, the waves of warmth radiating from the barrel even as the Engineer's pace down the hall left wind racing past it. Again she squeezed the trigger, and again, bracing every muscle in her body against the armoured shoulder below as the weapon bucked in her grasp.

The first blast struck the ground in front of the monster. This time it did not wait for the burst to hit it; with an ethereal hiss it thrust itself into the air, leaping over the charge as it struck the path and resumed its pursuit on all fours. The second hit beside it, sending it careening into the wall in a clatter of limbs.

As the creature slowly staggered back to its feet in a woozy haze, Za'il had skidded to a sudden, jarring halt. Elizabeth's heart froze in her chest. They had stopped. Why had they stopped? Why had they bloody stopped?

His grasp against her back relented, the wake of his hand leaving a print of cold-sensitive flesh that spanned the width of her torso. Still they weren't moving. The monster had pushed itself to its feet, pacing forward at a determined march with a profound limp, its sinewy arms clutched against its wounded chest.

The world around her ground to static as she watched the alien monster slowly advance on them. It had backed them into a corner, hadn't it? They had run out of corridor, run out of places to hide, and it would take its dear, sweet time plucking them to pieces. After presumed years trapped in this tunnel, alone, it could have its way with them at its leisure.

This wasn't how she planned to die.

Raising the barrel of the rifle, she aimed for the centre of the creature's chest and squeezed the trigger.

To her terror, the creature let out a hiss and lurched to the side; the blast ripped past it as it clung to the wall with all four clawed limbs, sinew rippling along its skeletal frame as a flash exploded further along the corridor behind it.

Standing back upright, albeit still in a pained hunch, the monster seemingly trained its attention on the rifle with a tilt of its bizarre, elongated head. In the next breath, the most unholy of roars began to echo against the walls as it hunched over further, parting its jaw to reveal a mouthful of pearlescent teeth; apparently straining for the briefest of moments, the roar raised in pitch as...as…

The only way she could describe what she saw was that a second set of jaws had erupted forth, far sharper-looking teeth jutting out of the creature's mouth.

Despite herself, she felt the bile rise in her throat.

Once more, she pulled the trigger.

The rifle bucked in her hands as another bolt of plasma burst from its muzzle. The creature roared as it lunged from the blast, briefly scampering across the dusty path before scrambling forward on all fours. As it advanced on them once more, the room was suddenly in motion; the Engineer's gloved hand had clamped back down on her back as he surged forward, all but knocking the wind from her as his shoulder dug into her torso. Struggling against the far larger man's motion, she aimed at the shrieking horror as best she could and fired once more.

She could swear she heard a woman's scream in her ears as the beast twisted free of the blast and surged forward, closing the gap between them on all fours as the Engineer sprinted onward.

It was almost on top of them, God, it almost on top of them.

And as soon as it had appeared, the beast disappeared with the resounding slam of metal doors right in front of her nose, almost clipping the barrel of the rifle in the process.

A second set of doors slammed shut in the blink of an eye as Za'il kept running, the air in the enclosed space thumping against her beneath his grip.

Her rifle remained trained on the creature, never wavering. They would not die like this.

They would not die like this.

The room around her twisted and shook, and beyond the ringing in her ears, the pounding in her throat, she found herself standing on her feet. Weapon raised, she remained transfixed on the steel-black door, ready to pump plasma into the creature until one or both of them finally dropped. Her boots were welded to the path, her finger to the trigger. She would not die like this.

In the back of her mind, a man's deep, panting voice was talking, his words incomprehensible. It was all irrelevant, totally irrelevant; any minute the creature would catch up to them, and she had to focus on that.

He kept talking after a pause. Somewhere in all of that was her name, she was sure of it. But she was busy trying not to die; they could wait.

Distantly, a more familiar voice echoed about the halls; his, too, called her name. Her grip on her weaponed tightened yet again as her breath echoed throughout her skull. Any minute, now.

The first voice, far deeper, spoke again.

A third voice entered the fray, its words borderline incomprehensible, and yet, clear as day. Through her fixation on the door, desperately awaiting beelzebub as the rifle shook in her grasp, its words echoed about her head meaninglessly as time slowed to a trickle before the barrel of her gun.

"Warning. One minute of oxygen remaining."

A/N:

Well, shit. It's been ages YET AGAIN. But you should all know me by now...I take a long time, then whinge about how hard these chapters are to write. Truthfully, there's far more fun parts of their story I can't WAIT to get on with...but at least we're now up to the final chapter of TWFF.

On that note, the next one will take a while to come. I'll be releasing two follow-ups alongside it, so I've realistically got three to line up before pulling the trigger.

As a side note, having done a lot of reading around and battling my inner Trekker, I can safely say we're going to diverge from canon to a noticeable degree. Too right this is fanfiction, and at this point I reckon I can do at least a more interesting take than the canon writers, and probably insult reader/viewer intelligence less as I go. But there are few die-hards that actually read fanfiction, so who really cares.

I absolutely love reading your kind words, thank you to everyone that leaves reviews. Here on FF it's difficult to reply; I can only flood the A/N with individual replies (not really my style) or send PMs, so I just want to say thanks. You guys are wonderful, and you drive me forwards. I do, by the way, respond to PMs if anyone feels like banter!

But yes. Final chapter is coming, but there's a few other bits and bobs to launch at the same time for linking purposes and so that y'all have something fresh to sink your teeth into, so it may be a month or two away.

PS: I legit feel bad for the Deacon here. Cannon-fodder isn't my style either, and I had a whole world for it to interact with, but alas, it is not our protagonist!