Chapter 6 - The Sacred Chamber
“Do you have the carbon reader?”
Dr. Shaw had not taken her eyes from the dead giant as she
made her request. Seconds later, she was blindly accepting the device with her
right hand as she knelt.
“Thanks,” she said, not knowing who had handed it to her.
“How long has it been dead?” Dr. Holloway asked as if his
girlfriend didn’t know what purpose she had kneeling next to a long-dead corpse
with a carbon reader ready in hand.
“Two thousand years… give or take,” Shaw announced after
taking her reading.
“Jesus…”
“I wonder… what it was they were running from,” Ford
supposed with a hint of apprehension.
Holloway exhaled laughter from his nostrils.
“Well, if it’s been two-thousand years, whatever it was
ain’t here now,” he assured Dr. Ford.
A series of mechanical clicks accompanied by unfamiliar,
computerized tones drew the attention of the members of the team fawning over
the decapitated Engineer. David was punching the ancient keypad… and not as one
carelessly would do so. There was very little, if any, mystery to whether or
not the android knew exactly what he was doing.
“David, what are you doing?” Shaw called out to him.
“I am attempting to open the door.”
“Wait! We don’t know what’s on the other side!”
Before Dr. Shaw had finished the final syllables of her
plea, the door slid open loudly. A smug half-smile formed on the face of David
as he looked her in the eyes.
“Oops… sorry,” he offered drolly.
A gust of freezing air bellowed into the corridor where the
team stood, nearly knocking Millburn and Shaw from their feet. David calmly
stepped forward into the dark chamber, stopped, and then turned to face the
rest of the group. Lying at the android’s feet was a huge, circular mass. The
beams of the remaining flashlights fell upon the object, and though there was
no reason not to expect to find what they had found, the breath of each person
caught in their throats at the sight.
“Look, Ford! It’s the head!” Shaw said as she moved into the
newly discovered room.
Ford and Shaw knelt beside the decapitated head. It held the
exact resemblance, aged as it was through the passing of at least twenty
centuries, to that of its holographic rendition. Its color and texture
resembled something like the sea corral of Earth’s waters; a coarse,
yellowish-brown surface that did not break away when Ford laid her forefinger
upon it. The sides of the head possessed sets of bone-like protrusions that ran
from behind where the ears of a man would have been, all the way to both front
cheeks. In place of a nose or mouth, the Engineer possessed a massive, downward
proboscis that proved totally inflexible to the deliberate pressure Shaw’s
eager fingers put on it. The eye of Elizabeth Shaw’s mind recalled the
spectacle of the recorded behemoths in their desperate sprint – the trunk-like
appendages did not dangle or sway when they were in full movement. The eyes
were like a pair of menacing abysses; likely just as dark and unforgiving as
they had been during the life of the Engineer.
“An amazing state of preservation!” Ford offered, still
conquering her outward amazement.
“We will take it in.”
While the mortal members of the team were gawking over the
severed head, David had gone on ahead of them deeper into the chamber. He came
to a large, dome-shaped room. Before long, the android found himself carefully
stepping around dozens of vase-like canisters; about two feet in height,
comprised of some sort of jet black stone or metal – likely the same substance
that comprised the entire temple interior. As the synthetic looked from one
ampule to the next, not a one looked to be degraded the way the head had been.
Something triggered in David’s core processors; he stood for a moment the way a
dumbstruck human would, staring at the vases. His full consciousness returned
just as soon as he had recognized the unfamiliar sensation. Every concern David
had entered the temple with had been utterly pushed aside and in their place
stood a single motive – getting one of the ampules back to the Prometheus and
running his own tests on it. The synthetic would assist Dr. Shaw and Dr. Ford
with full discretion in their examination of the head… but under no
circumstances would they be involved with the examination of the black vases.
David’s flashlight lifted to join the rest of the beams illuminating the
colossal stone-carved, hairless head a few dozen paces in front of him. This
head looked nothing like the heads of the Engineers they had encountered thus
far. On any other given day, the statue would have been the most remarkable
discovery that Shaw and Holloway could have possibly hoped for. But with the
holographic recording they had accidentally triggered, as well as discovering
the Engineer corpse, the spectacle provided by the ominous stone head was
significantly dampened in comparison.
“Remarkably Human…” David said dryly.
As the team continued moving their flashlights over the huge
head, David pointed his light straight up. His artificial eyes were met with
yet another piece of alien art.
“A beautiful painting.”
At David’s prompt, the rest of the team aimed their beams up
to collectively illuminate the ceiling.
“It’s a mural!” Shaw corrected the android.
The unnerving, blackened mural began with one of the
‘elephant-faced’ Engineers ceremoniously forcing another being, similar to the
Engineers in every way with the exception of its head resembling that of
something much more Human, to kneel face-first into some sort of round,
floral-looking object. Something has wrapped itself around the face of the
unfortunate figure; a creature that a denizen of Earth could only describe as
some unholy conjoining of a spider, long-tailed crustacean and a Human hand.
And yet if there was any manner of suffering or resistance involved, the figure
showed no sign of a struggle. In the second frame of the mural, assumedly the
same figure is shown lying down without the gangly thing covering his face. The
uncovered face is undeniably similar to that of the humongous stone head before
them. They were, in fact, the same being. Emerging from the being’s chest was
an eyeless, serpent-like creature. David’s beam of light stopped moving as soon
as he saw lines of the alien language – once again, the android kept the
translation of what it said to himself.
This is the Chosen One
who created our Lord.
This is his resting place, and the place we failed to recreate the blood of the
Deacon.
The third frame that they came to was the undeniable
centerpiece of the mural. Dr. Holloway was already examining it by the time
David came upon it. A figure occupied nearly the entire frame, one fully unlike all
of the Engineers. Its body was lithe and black, its head resembled a more
advanced version of the serpent bursting from the Chosen One’s chest in the
previous frame of the mural and was nearly the size of its entire torso. There
were no facial features present, or at least nothing that the Human eye could
possibly perceive as features. Its fingers were clawed, but both hands appeared
to possess the four fingers and opposable thumbs the creature’s ‘parent’
possessed. The entirety of the creature was a mish-mash of insectoid, humanoid
and serpentine features that looked as though they were extracted directly from
some fevered nightmare. To the bottom left and bottom right were two more
Engineer-like figures being attacked by the same embryonic, spider-like
creatures. In the first frame of the mural, there is a given sense of
acceptance as the Chosen One kneels next to the floral sack, whereas with these
two depicted figures, they are recoiling in noticeable horror and throwing both
of their hands out in front of them in an attempt to ward off their attackers.
David’s artificial eyes pick up another series of etchings on the central
paiting.
Our Lord came from the
Chosen One in a time when our race lost the ability to birth life.
The Deacon’s sacred blood was our salvation.
Through our lips, his sacred blood birthed life on entire worlds.
David knelt before one of the vases. He reached out to touch
it.
“Stop! Stop! Please don’t touch it!” Shaw pleaded.
The android met her gaze.
“Sorry,” David said with a half-smile.
The android continued examining the ampule. To his surprise,
the thin layer of ancient frost had been melted away in the few seconds time he
had spent looking to Dr. Shaw.
“It’s sweating…” David said to himself just barely above a
whisper.
David leaned in so that the top of the vase was inches from
his eyes. A streak of black liquid began leaking slowly down the side. He
quickly dipped his finger into the substance and held it up to his eyes.
“Organic…”
The synthetic moved his light across the rows of vases; each
one looked to be undergoing the same change as the one in front of him. Was
this a deliberate failsafe, as the warning on the door had promised, against
intruders? Or had the Humans contaminated the chamber simply by being there?
The walls and ceiling began to crackle and wither as the
artificial lights moved over them. The mural was deteriorating before their very
eyes.
“Oh no! The mural is changing!” Shaw said fearfully.
“Charlie, I think we’ve averted the atmosphere in the room! The head! Ford,
quick, help me bag the head!”
Shaw stumbled desperately toward the decapitated Engineer
head with Dr. Ford in tow.
Back on the Prometheus, Chance is checking the weather
readout – his facial response was not one that offered any sort of hope.
“Boss…”
“What you got?” Janek replied.
“We’ve got an incoming storm front. Silica and lots of
static, this is not good,” Chance said.
“I see it.”
Down in the depths of the Engineer temple, the captain of
the Prometheus spoke to the team.
“Ground crew, this is Janek. I need you to hustle back right
now. Ground crew, do you copy? I’ve got two-hundred kilometer winds of airborn
silica and enough static to fry your suit!
“Copy that sir, but we need more time here,” the obstinate
Dr. Shaw insisted.
Meredith Vickers edged her way to the microphone on Janek’s
console.
“I’ll be closing the outer doors in fifteen minutes. I
sincerely hope you can make it.”
“Charlie! David!” Shaw called out “We must leave now!”
Dr. Holloway took one final gaze around the room in complete
disappointment.
“This is just another tomb,” he said to himself angrily.
The android David finally had a moment out of the sight of
all of his Human colleagues. He knelt next to one of the ampules and pulled a
small device from his bag that resembled a military firearm, but also looked
like a medical contraption. David pressed it against the vase and activated it
with a loud hiss; the surface was instantly frozen solid once again. The black
fluid that started to leak from it had ceased. The android had perhaps twenty
minutes until whatever was inside the vase thawed. Returning to this sacred
chamber and retrieving another of the vases would hardly be possible. David
needed this specimen and he needed it right now while the Prometheus was not
flying through space. He did not yet know what exactly was inside of each of
the vases, but it was almost certainly something dangerous… at least to organic
life. Performing tests on the ship while it flew through space would not be
wise. If the contents of the ampule kill all of the crew of the Prometheus,
David would not be able to pilot the ship. Certain essential functions of the
Prometheus were executable by voiceprint only – only Janek could do them. David
needed to perform his tests while the ship was grounded. He stuffed the
canister into his bag.
“David! We are leaving!” Holloway bellowed maliciously.
The android stood up with his bag in hand and moved quickly
to reunite with Holloway and Shaw. As he began moving hastily to catch up with
his team, his left foot struck one of the thawing canisters. It toppled quietly
onto its side and was entirely ignored; as if a pack of children was making
their destructive exit instead of a high-trained team of experts. A tube of
black glass slid out and began slowly leaking the viscus fluid onto the soft,
organic ground of the sacred chamber. A pair of small brown and green insects,
not unlike the common worms of planet Earth, wriggled their way slowly into the
alien sludge.
Outside of the pyramid, the first buggy carrying the crony
hirelings of Vickers had already taken off at high speed back to the
Prometheus.
“Come on, damn it! They’ve already taken off!” Holloway
exclaimed in anger.
Holloway, Shaw, Ford and David quickly embarked and began
making speed of their own back to home base. Dr. Shaw looked behind them out of
the reinforced glass of the rear window. A violent storm swallowed the pyramid,
which had seemed unimaginably large moments before, like a biblical-sized swarm
of insects. The storm looked to be moving far quicker than Shaw would have
liked to admit. Suddenly, a voice was in their coms; the storm preventing each
set of ears from pinpointing which man it was.
“Prometheus to ground crew – you’re running out of time!”
The malicious storm was gaining on them; the cruel appendage
of a hostile alien environment reaching out to extinguish the lives of those
who came to this world unbidden. It was little more than one hundred yards from
overtaking the buggy now.
“Go faster!”
The final buggy reached the Prometheus with seconds to
spare. As soon as it hit the loading ramp, the sack containing the severed head
of the Engineer bounced from Dr. Shaw’s lap and began rolling down the loading
ramp of the ship.
“Charlie!” Shaw screamed. “The head!”
Shaw dumped herself out of the rear passenger seat onto the
loading ramp.
“Ellie, stop! What are you doing?!”
She did not listen. Elizabeth Shaw scrambled down the
loading ramp toward the still-rolling sack. The moment she had caught up to it
and had the huge head in her grasp, the storm hit her. Shaw was lifted into the
air and throws her against the landing gear. Even after she experienced the
second of the pair of violent, unanticipated impacts, Dr. Shaw still held fast
to the ancient alien head. Holloway did not finish climbing the loading ramp.
He had jumped from the driver’s seat almost immediately as he saw his
girlfriend leap prematurely from her own seat. David and Dr. Ford quickly
exited their seats and ran in the opposite direction of Shaw and Holloway. The
empty buggy slid back a few meters before being lifted effortlessly into the
air and sucked into the tumultuous storm; disappearing from sight, never to be
seen again by Human eyes.
“Shit! God damn it!” Janek said, the conflicting forces of
anger and fear doing battle for the dominion of the captain’s voice.
Dr. Holloway fell on top of Dr. Shaw, they both gripped a
metal bar desperately together with one hand each. Holloway’s spare hand was
wrapped around the woman he loved. The spare hand of Elizabeth Shaw still held
onto the black sack.
“I can’t hold on!” Shaw screamed over the deafening sound of
the storm.
“Let go of the bag, Ellie!”
“No! I can’t!”
“Ellie!” Holloway screamed as hard as he could. “Let go of
the bag!”
A door on the side of the Prometheus slid open, revealing
the android David tethered to a sturdy wire. He began slowly moving towards the
tangled duo of doctors. David knelt down and attached a pair of tethers to both
of their suits and began dragging them toward the ship. The trio stumble into
the loading bay interior, still breathing heavily from the fearful adrenaline pumping
through their bodies.
“Decontamination at Level Three,” a mechanized female voice said
over the small speaker on the ceiling.
“What the hell was that, Ellie? You could have compromised
the entire mission… not to mention almost killing yourself!”
Shaw shot her boyfriend a guilty look.
“Are you all right, Elizabeth?”
“Yes… thank you David,” Shaw said with appreciative spite.
“My pleasure,” the synthetic returned.
Dr. Holloway scowled at the haughty android. He had given
Shaw an out from answering for her totally irresponsible behavior. David turned
and walked out of the loading bay; looking back to give Holloway a contemptuous
smirk before making his exit. As Shaw and Holloway began removing their suits,
the captain of the Prometheus’s voice filled the ship’s speakers.
“All right doctors, it’s real good to have you back… but
where are Millburn and Fifield?”
Shaw and Holloway exchanged a look of concern.
“Aren’t they back yet?” Shaw inquired.
Janek grunted and cursed, then realized the com was still
open. He closed it.
“Ravel, get them up for me.”
“Yes, sir.”
