The PROMETHEUS Novelization Project

  CHAPTER ELEVEN “Abandoned” David walked around the huge platform and sat down in the central alien throne; like some toy out of place and scale to the chair it sat in. The controls in front were incomprehensible; even to the synthetic man who, at this point in time, was the most knowledgeable being in the galaxy on the subject of the extinct Engineers. There were no buttons, only a lifeless holographic emitter and two long rows of yellowish balloons filled with some sort of gelatinous matter. David pressed one of his fingers firmly into one of them at random; the throne spun forty-five degrees and an emission matrix spread outward in a virtual explosion. From the corner of David’s right peripheral, he saw two holographic renditions of Engineers walk into sight onto the platform. Both of the Engineers held a helmet under one of their massive arms. At long last, David heard their grave voices speak in the Indo-European that he had studied so diligently. “Is everything in place?”

  CHAPTER TEN “Gestation” Dr. Holloway woke up before his lover the following morning. He felt absolutely awful; his head pounded, he was covered in sweat, his mouth was dry, he ached all over, his stomach and bowels burned from assumedly all of the low-end white wine Holloway had consumed. He went over to the sink on the other side of the quarters he shared with Dr. Shaw, turned on cold water and rinsed his face two times over before looking at himself in the mirror. He looked about as horrible as he felt, that was true enough; but as he looked at himself, Holloway felt something that was not synonymous with the symptoms of a hangover. He felt an unusual coursing, a sort of warm movement, behind one eye and then the other. Holloway leaned in so that his face was inches from the mirror just above the small, mental sink. He used the pointer fingers on both of his hands to pull apart the top and bottom eyelids of his bloodshot left eye. He leaned in closer… and for one brief moment, H

  CHAPTER NINE “Contamination”   Dr. Charles Holloway sat alone at the far end of the rec room pool table; dejectedly rolling the billiard balls into one another by hand with his head resting on one arm. He was now feeling quite drunk; having resolved to drink a copious amount of white wine straight from the bottle in a short duration of time, during the examination of the Engineer head that his girlfriend had so selfishly almost thrown her own life away to recover. Yes, their work was important… but important enough for one of the two lovers to give their lives? In Holloway’s mind, nothing was more important than the love he shared with Shaw and the life they had together. He felt betrayed that Shaw was willing to throw her own life away from the head of the Engineer. The fact that they had learned virtually nothing from the head was merely the salt in Dr. Holloway’s still-fresh wound. After all this time and searching, after all of this hard work, he felt as though everything th

CHAPTER EIGHT “Small Beginnings”   As if Fifield and Millburn hadn’t already encountered enough terror for the afternoon, they were in for another horrible surprise. Once they had turned a corner, their beams of artificial light fell upon an enormous, piled-up mass of Engineer cadavers. Each corpse with its chest visible showed the same grievous wound; flesh and bone had exploded outward, which left each chest with a primordial, blackened cavity. What could have possibly driven these crafters of worlds and designers of civilizations to crawl over one another like Earth rats escaping from a blazing fire? “What… are those things? Are they real?!” Millburn blurted out idiotically. “Of course they’re bloody real!” Fifield yelled. “Jesus Christ, look at the pile! Look at how high up they are!” The rapidity of each man’s breathing increased noticeably. The beams of light tremored in mortal fear as they moved over the mound of space-ready Engineer bodies. “Yeah… it sure looks like they were

  CHAPTER SEVEN Mortal After All   “We’ve been here before Fifield!” “I don’t know,” Fifield offered, “it all looks the same to me.” “Boys this is the captain, listen up…” Janek’s began via the coms in the helmets of Fifield and Millburn. “Between the static electricity and the wind speed, there ain’t no safe way to come get ya.” The Biologist and the Geologist exchanged looks of silent, frustrated defeat. “The temperature is dropping rapidly, so get your helmets on and stay warm until the storm passes.” “Captain, can you get a message to the scientist and that zealot girlfriend of his? You got a pen nearby?” The voice of Fifield filled the cockpit. “No, I think we can remember it, what’s the message?” “Tell them I said ‘go fuck yourselves,’ copy?” Janek, Chance and Ravel burst into laughter. “Copy that.” Janek assured. “All right boys, keep your heads down and we’ll come get you in the morning.” Almost immediately upon the return of the expedition team,