"Would you like to have a look?"

They proceed to doorway B14 -- her gloved hand in David's as he proceeds in front of her, fielding for potential pitfalls. It's not a very intimate gesture through six layers of protective material, but it's reassuring all the same. It's something to keep a grip on, a reassurance that he won't skate off and abandon her as long as she maintains that contact. David's carefully noted annelids and arthropods scurry from under their feet, audible but unseen, and Shaw's muscles are braced to send her fleeing at a moment's notice. Her life has become a horror film.

David politely frees his hand from hers to produce his flashlight and to trace the keysigns to open the door, and Shaw is more than ready to hang back and let him make the initial entrance.

It's less cavernous, more intimate than the hall they'd so blithely trooped into that had held the monolith. Its ceilings are lower, squared-off at strange angles; there are deep niches in the wall, narrow pits with blunted edges -- sleeping arrangements? Graves? Perhaps the one had become the other. Some of the cells were partially or entirely sealed -- like individual cells in a honeycomb, they were blocked up with something dull and waxen that refracted the light. Others had lids like the primitive cryopod had. For a human on her own scale they would have been a claustrophobic fit -- for Engineer-sized bodies they are as comfortable as the drawers in a morgue. All the architecture has the same unnerving, skeletal quality as the last ship -- with its unpronounceable and unmemorable name -- but it's all the more claustrophobic for being carefully arranged. As ghastly in retrospect as the canister room had been -- row upon row of poisons, nerve agents, whatever the thing had been that had killed Charlie -- the presence of heaped corpses at least gave an indication of a struggle.

David traces along a mural with his flashlight beam, left to right, and Shaw holds her breath. The beam of light is quaking slightly, like there's a tremor in his arm.

The sight is dizzying. It's a terrible sight, but a strange awe floods over her that makes it difficult to think, to speak. Shaw has always been a visual person, even her worst dreams are saturated with color, but the ashy greyscale of alien interiors, the echoing near-silence, is overwhelming to the senses.

The anguished figures knot together, packed tightly together like something suggestively rotten. They are indescribably surreal, but static, dead, but not threatening. Shaw can hear her own breath -- even within her helmet something about the sight makes her reluctant to exhale too forcefully. (Thank God there is no smell, not even the moist mustiness of filtered air in the belly of the first ship.) The only recognizable scene featured is a narrow band of illustration nearest to the ceiling. Its scenery is just as indistinct, sharp and riblike, but it distinctively portrays a scene -- some abrupt drop-off, a cliff or a riverbank, and a long swath of tightly packed lines curling and knotting to evoke tides. The sky is featureless as a child's drawing, without even a sun, let alone the star-map her brain was still primed eagerly to expect. There were three figures, elongated and a touch over life size even for the Engineer race -- one upright and two on the ground. Overall, when she could force her eyes to focus, it was strongly reminiscent of each of the paintings she and Charlie had found and compiled -- not in medium but something about the style, the content.

"They're kneeling by the water?"

A vivid swell of memory returns to her, of the gaunt alien creature in the belly of the other ship with its arms pulled out wide. Maybe it's thoroughly unscientific, some kind of pareidolia brought on by her own cherished hopes, but the figure had evoked a crucifixion. This is some kind of anguished baptism. More than ever she feels the painful significance of water.

"No, not kneeling." The beam of light redirects with a flick. "His leg's broken. See there? In half."

"... very astute, David. Show me where you found what you brought back."

He leads her to a rectangular bench directly opposite the door, not remotely sheepish. It resembles nothing so much as the shelf of Vickers' luxury bar -- a narrow shelf lined with alabaster jars and narrow canisters. There are half a dozen shallow dishes stacked next to them -- bowls, cups? One of them has rolled away and broken in two; when she gestures at it he grimaces. The beams of their flashlights catch a spilled powder on the ground, like ash.

"And the bodies, David?"

He gestures to another row of cells, and crosses over to a respectful distance on the far wall.

Their bodies, enormous and unhelmed in death, are in vastly different positions than the ones who had fled the outbreak. Almost all of them seem carefully arranged, arms at their sides, heads turned to the side. They were certainly, visibly dead -- without the bloated encephalitic look of the sample they'd taken, the one that had exploded in a fermented splatter under the biosafety cabinet. Their faces were sunken to the point of looking caved in, the same shade of funereal gray as David's precious cloth, which almost all of them wear in one form or another -- tucked, knotted or tied. Their clothing is in more disarray than their limbs, showing chitinous armor underneath on several of them, but it is spotless. Whatever had occurred, it hadn't been a violent death. No wounds, no obvious discoloration -- but she won't get close enough for a full examination. Every one of them that she can peer in at has a shallow bowl beside it, resting in a slack granite hand or resting on its abdomen. Some of them have fallen from their niches and shattered on the floor.

She proceeds with caution.

"David, I would wager they committed suicide."

"It would seem so," he says, with great dignity.

"Anything in here could be covered in pathogens. How did you decide it was appropriate to bring these things to me? I'm --" Happy, pleased, glad? "--not ungrateful that you did, but I don't understand."

"Having gathered the specifics of the situation to the best of my ability, I felt justified in arriving at a conclusion. If you were going to die without consenting to go into stasis, I imagine you would like to be comfortable when you did so."

God bless David's logic.

David reaches in through a place where the seal has crumbled on a sealed chamber, and peers inside. Shaw's breathing stops. His fingers trace the indistinct outline of a ridged exoskeleton, silhouetted in the flashlight's beam. His expression when exploring new things is blissful, but she knows he must be noting details and specifics for later reference. She knew a woman with an eidetic memory once -- but it wasn't a point of pride for her, merely a fact. David enjoys all the things he's capable of.

Something white and slick extends a tendril up his sleeve. Shaw freezes.

David tranquilly withdraws his arm slightly, straightens up and looks at the thing. It's probing, feeling, nudging around with its blind albino body like it's seeking an opening to crawl inside, or seeking heat. Smelling him, perhaps. It's moist-looking and pale, very stark against the blue of his sleeve. Shimmering muscles coursed under its skin for a moment, visibly even from some distance. He's -- admiring it.

David shakes the thing off with a fluid and calm moment, and it falls in a neat coil to the floor. The moment the serpent hits the ground, David brings his heel down it, and it splatters. One of the extremities slinks off like a droplet of oil, and with another calm step he crushes that as well, to a smear of cells.

"Harmless," he sneers -- not at her, but at the thing, and having now sullied his boot. "Merely unpleasant. I hope I didn't frighten you."

"I think that's our cue to move on. Thank you for this, David."