At the end of the concourse she's decided the room full of corpses was perhaps the least unsettling thing she's seen. Empty bays, fixtures that are still operational, a strange dearth of further artifacts or decoration -- heaps of corpses would have improved the place. From the columns of inscriptions these are social spaces, which would be fascinating and quite revealing, in a safer setup and with adequate tools. The furnishings are stripped to a bare minimum, without grand monoliths or the elegant working of the clasps on the garments exhibited anywhere else. The greatest discovery was a discarded cloak stripped of clasps, rotting in a pool of standing water. The one overt sign of disarray is the structure itself, and whatever its cooling systems are -- they regularly groan and rattle in ways that sound unnervingly organic. The walls are damp, and the wildlife -- as unpleasant as they were -- has thinned out to just scurrying iridescent beetles and the occasional cluster of worms -- feeding on what, exactly? Several doors are not operational, no matter how deftly David determines their keysigns; the atmosphere is still breathable but has risen a degree or two in temperature. This is slightly worrying, but with no sign of fire or anything yet to indicate a less-than-closed system, they rest, briefly, and continue onward.

They find another bank of controls in a smaller room; they find an engine room obscured from floor to ceiling with steam that almost scalds David and fogs up Shaw's helmet from 10 feet away. That door is quickly closed again, as fascinating as an understanding of what systems are propelling them would be. They find an echoing assembly hall that reminds Shaw most strangely of Weyland Sr.'s little briefing at the beginning of their voyage, the crew all gathered together to be briefed by a supposed ghost -- but again, empty. Empty, empty, empty, like a mental patient's vision of an evacuated airport concourse.

She sleeps an hour or two with her helmet against David's room-temperature shoulder, and they walk on.

"Dr. Shaw, I think this suite is inhabited. I advise caution."

"You're joking."

"Go to that panel and trace this -- Two hooked, one bar from left to right. Wait for another recording."

She does so, trying to make the strokes deft and firm, as if that will make up for some freak error, and then presses back into the wall to observe. A hologram prickles to life, in blue stars.

No one was running this time; the hallway is as desolate as it now stands. Only one figure stands in the room with them, shrouded and erect like a priest, and its arm passes through her like a cold mist. (Groping to open the compartment? activating some protocol she's not familiar with?) A cup is in its hand, like the rest of the crew, but as the Engineer halted in the doorway, it crushed it to shards between its fingers like a Styrofoam cup and cast them aside. With a strangely homely movement, it lowered its head to step inside. The recording ceases. The unnerving outline of floating lights vanishes, like a computer glitch.

"Their captain didn't participate with the rest of the crew. If it was an emergency quarantine measure, why wouldn't he make an escape? Why isn't he in the control room?"

"She," David corrected quietly. "They may not have been aware of what they were participating in. Their captain may have never had the chance. The rest of the ship has been looted, if you hadn't noticed -- perhaps she lacked the inclination to return home."

David rises up on tiptoe to access another, smaller panel above the first.

"Then let's wake her up."

The room is shallow, an outcropping like Vickers' self-contained suite. Its contents fill it from wall to wall.
The woman Engineer -- God knows how David had assigned it a gender -- is narrower than the other one had seemed but no less bulgingly grey, its featureless breast bared by a cracked breastplate. The scenery would appear to confirm the looting hypothesis; all around the sleep-pod and the two of them, android and Engineer, are carefully arranged spoils, fine cloaks and gleaming collars. Half-buried in dove-colored cloth and gold is a massive corpse. So perhaps she isn't the captain, some kind of tyrannical first officer. When it straightens up from its retching, its eyes fix on them.

The Engineer corpse, which the Engineer knocks over with a broad swing of her foot as she advances toward them is mottled green under the gold. Broad slices have been cut out of the flesh of its chest. Bracelets clatter on the ground.

David steps forward and kneels. The thing takes a halting step back, staring down at him with an expression of unreadable alertness. Shaw's spine only straightens, petrified. Once again, android speaks to god.

Speech pours out of him steadily, complex sentences and phrases, the fragments Shaw can recognize and fix her mind on have a great deal of potential in context but no comfort. Man, child, closed-off place. Sleeping place. Shaw is transfixed with dread, but not so paralyzed that she can't back away. Her back is to the wall, and she gropes in memory for the characters that had made up the passcode. If she stretches, she can reach it--

David turns his head to her and articulates neatly, in English, "Run."

Shaw doesn't need to be told twice. In a moment she's found her bearings and she's off like a shot, heading east.

"Is it safe to come back for you?"

For a moment she can hear only crackling.

"Return to door 8B.

"Y-yes, understood."

The trip back, without hyper-aware panic to fuel her, is an arduous trial. Twice she fears she's going in circles; Shaw limps along propped against the wall, sucking the last of the jelly from her life-support rig and counting doors until 8B is in sight. Or it should be, in the eerie twilit glow of her backlight. When will that run out of battery? Glancing around, she can hear something, a clicking almost, but see nothing. Elizabeth removes her helmet cautiously, and the pool of light around her spreads a little.

Suddenly, a voice that isn't over the comm link.
"Now come over here."

(Who had decided to make David an Englishman?) Shaw turned, heart still rattling around in her chest. The reasons he hadn't spotted him from outside the niche was because the android was on the ground, in pieces.

"David? Oh my God, David--"

"This is a fine state of affairs, isn't it?"

His abdomen is stove-in, collapsed in a boneless-looking way that jars even more with his human appearance. Glistening cables studded with glass nodes trail out behind him, where he's pulled himself free. The door has sheared him off -- crushed him? -- from about the waist down. The end of his hip joint is sparking violently, and something thin and acrid is filling the air.

She scrapes at the few wires that are still caught underneath the door's weight. Those that won't come unsnagged she hacks at with her safety knife, cutting away shreds of blue jumpsuit. One of David's arms keeps knocking against her frantically, presumably involuntarily.

"The escape pod has been deployed," David repeats in French and then in English again, audio choppy like his teeth are chattering. "She closed the airlock door on me. This might be a little much to repair, Dr. Shaw. I suggest you empty my pockets."

"I need you to pilot this thing, I thought you said you would help me--"

"Our course is set. You should be at your destination soon enough, if you sleep through it. There's no more piloting to be done."

"With Weyland dead, you're free to do as you like, but I need you to accompany me.I need you with me."

Artificial tears are running freely from his eyes, too freely to be a mechanism of grief; they're another disturbing malfunction. Still she tries to wipe them away with her gloves, fix his hair, which is damp and glistening from the silicone.

"You're all I have right now, David."

Tears are running into his mouth as he smiles.

"Likewise."

On impulse she kisses his forehead, presses the chain with her cross and Charlie's ring to the top of his head like a blessing.

"I'm taking you with me. Come on, then."