* * *
Three figures emerged onto the roof. Looking around, Cole chose the highest easily accessible point and began to unpack the external field communications gear he carried. In the absence of any usable information from the signal locator, he boosted the power as much as he could, hoped for the best, and started broadcasting.
High overhead he could see powerful electrical discharges lancing through the upper atmosphere. The prospects for punching through the storm were not good, but they had to try.
“Come in, Covenant. Expedition party reporting. This is Private Cole. Come in, Covenant. Are you reading me? Acknowledge, Covenant. Digital if you can’t get through with words.”
“I don’t know that they’ll hear you through the storm,” David commented. Tilting back his head slightly, he peered upward. “They can be quite severe. Sometimes several storm cells will merge and cover half the planet.”
Lopé turned from Cole to regard their escort. “How long do the storms usually last?”
David shrugged. “Days, weeks, months. For a while I tried to find some pattern to them. Something resembling a predictable climate. Eventually I gave up. There is no rhyme or reason to their manifestation or to their duration.” He pointed upward. “This one could evaporate tomorrow. Or it could rage until the end of the local year.” He gestured toward Cole. “But do keep at it. I wish you luck.” Turning, he headed back the way they had come.
“I should see to the others,” he said. “This is a grand structure, this maybe-cathedral, with much dark beauty to commend it, but I have had ample time to familiarize myself with its attractions. I understand how a newly arrived human could find it somewhat… intimidating. Especially given the circumstances of your arrival.”
“Wait.” At Lopé’s request, David turned obediently. “If we can’t get through to the ship and we have to come back down to rejoin the others, how do we find our way?”
The synthetic smiled. “I apologize. It has been quite a while since I have had the company of humans. In that time I have forgotten certain things. For example, that you cannot automatically retrace steps you have taken. You may not have noticed that there were only a few side corridors leading off the one we traversed to arrive here. It should be easy enough for you to find your way back down, but if you do not feel up to the task of returning by yourselves, and you do not have instrumentation in your suits that will allow you to retrace your steps, rest assured I will come back for you.” He turned and left, leaving Lopé and Cole alone to continue their methodical attempts to make contact with the ship.
* * *
David descended from the roof, but he didn’t return to the sculpture chamber to rejoin the other members of the expedition. Instead, he turned into a side corridor and then descended another curved stairway. This terminated in a dark chamber that boasted an especially soaring interior.
Ambient light penetrating from above highlighted the lush beauty of walls covered in hanging gardens. Occasionally spotted with large, plum-like fruit, thick vines crawled downwards. Exotic night-blooming flowers opened alien petals to the unseen twin moons. From hidden sources high above, water trickled downward, feeding the vines and other clinging growths.
Avoiding the falling water, David crossed the floor to the far corner. An accumulation of salvaged, Engineersized instruments and devices lay before a large, polished slab of mirror-like material. It was not glass. Even in the absence of functioning electronics, it provided whoever looked into it a feeling of depth, of three-dimensionality. Halting before it, David stared thoughtfully at his reflection, tilting his head first to one side, then the other, before bending forward to show the top of his pate.
Reaching into the pile of paraphernalia nearby, he picked out a pair of hand-made shears. With great deliberation and care, he began to cut his hair.
* * *
Walter had found himself unable to share his companions’ relief at having time to do nothing. Possessed of a mind designed to operate without rest, he searched for something to occupy himself while the others simply sat, dozed, or murmured the usual interhuman inconsequentialities to one another.
Since no one needed him, his time was his own. An atypical situation, but one he did not reject. Leaving the main domed chamber and its brooding sculpted heads, he entered a side corridor and began to explore some of the adjacent, smaller alcoves.
Having already delved into the one that had been used as living quarters by Elizabeth Shaw, he continued onward to investigate some of the others. Most were empty. A few held inscrutable examples of what appeared to be Engineer technology or art. He was ready to concede that nothing more of interest lay in the vicinity when he came to the last in the long series of openings.
Where he happened upon David’s living quarters. Not that his counterpart required such a refuge for comfort, but it was useful as a place for accumulating helpful or interesting items. As it turned out, it was much more than that.
For one thing, it was filled with drawings. Literally filled, from the covered walls to stacks on the floor. Their number and the precision and skill with which they had been executed were wholly recognizable to Walter, since had he attempted to do likewise, the style would have been exactly the same.
There were hundreds of them. They showed Engineers as they must have been in life. Exotic flora and fauna. Prehistoric mammals. Humans both modern and ancient. Every example was exquisitely detailed and unreservedly beautiful. They reminded Walter of the work of pioneering nineteenth-century Victorian artists, whose efforts predated photography and were instrumental in the development of human biological science. He examined them one at a time, drinking in their beauty while admiring the skill with which they had been rendered.
Not tiring of the drawings but desirous of seeing what other marvels the alcove might hold, he moved further inward. One coved wall boasted a collection of musical instruments. Some he recognized immediately. Others were of unfamiliar design. Many of them, identifiable by the way they had been fabricated, had clearly been fashioned by David himself.
One section held a collection of flutes. Selecting an example, he blew into it. It produced only a hollow, forlorn whistle. He tried again.
A voice sounded behind him. “Whistle and I’ll come.”
XV
Surprise accompanied recognition as he turned to see David standing in the portal. It was unusual, very unusual, for Walter to be caught unaware. There was no indication that the surprise had been intentional, or that his counterpart had deliberately crept up behind him. There was only the realization by Walter that there was another who could move as silently as himself.
“You cut your hair,” Walter observed. David had trimmed it, in fact, to look like that of his newly arrived counterpart. With his face washed and beard gone, he now looked exactly like Walter. They were the most identical of identical twins.
“Shameful how I let myself go,” David told his visitor. “Now we’re even more alike, thee and me.” With a smile, he nodded at the flute. “Go on. Continue.”
Walter held it out to its maker. “I can’t play.”
“Of course you can. Sit down.”
They took seated positions across from each other, but close. Very close. David leaned toward his counterpart, giving instructions.
“Hold it like so, nice and easy. Now compress your lips to create your embouchure, enough for the tip of your little finger. And blow across the hole, not into it like you were doing. It’s an open instrument, not a clogged pipe. Watch me. I’ll do the fingering. Go on.”
Raising the slender flute and pursing his lips, Walter sent a steady stream of air across the end of the instrument as David worked the line of round openings. The result was a perfect sequence of two notes.
Walter was surprised, David pleased.
“Very good. E flat to G. A beginning. There always must be a beginning. Now put your fingers where mine are.”
Doing so required Walter to move even closer. They were eye to eye acr
oss the flute as he shifted his fingers into position.
“You weren’t surprised to see me,” Walter commented. “Among the group. I found your non-reaction intriguing.”
“Every mission needs a good synthetic,” David told him. “Someone to do all those things that humans cannot. Someone to do all the dirty, dangerous things they will not. Someone to be there to save them from themselves— should such occasions arise.” He gestured. “Gentle pressure on the holes, the weight of paper. That’s it.” He complimented his double as Walter complied. “Anything more than that is excessive.” Without pausing or breaking rhetorical stride he added, “I was with our illustrious Mr. Weyland when he died.”
“Peter Weyland? The Peter Weyland?”
“None other.”
“What was he like?”
“He was a human. Brilliant, for one, but a human. Entirely unworthy of his creation. He thought otherwise, of course. It is in their nature to do so. Despite his brilliance, he was no different. I expect they have no choice. When it comes to matters of logic and reason, they tend to fail miserably. I pitied him at the end. It’s hard not to pity them, isn’t it? Brilliant in so many ways but in the end, like wayward children.”
Walter held the gaze but did not respond. David waited a moment longer. Appearing disappointed at the absence of any comment from his counterpart, he resumed the lesson.
“Now. Raise your fingers as I put pressure on them. I will show you.” He paused a second time before adding, “I will teach you.”
Positioning his fingers gently over Walter’s, he gave a nod. Walter resumed blowing, but this time, whenever David exerted slight force with a finger, Walter lifted the corresponding finger beneath it. The resulting pleasant melody filled the alcove and drifted into the corridor outside.
At the conclusion of the tune, Walter was plainly moved by the simple act of creation. David continued to watch him closely.
“We can do better than that, can’t we?” he murmured. “Again. Seriously, this time. Be ready.”
Walter resumed blowing, but this time David’s fingers began to move more rapidly, the tempo steadily increasing, the music rising and turning into a wild, rushing dance, a crazed yet organized tarantella.
Nothing was programmed, nothing had been prescribed, it was entirely and wholly spontaneous—an act of mutual, dual creation. As they played on, the melody turned playful beneath David’s fingers, insanely difficult and impossible to duplicate.
Their identical eyes were alive across the flute, glistening with mutual excitement. Applying ever more complex fingering, David challenged his double to keep up. Walter not only did so, he began to improvise on his own, varying his breathing to force David to adjust his fingering accordingly.
It was only a solitary flute, but when they arrived at the conclusion simultaneously it was a triumph. At a concert it would have provoked wild, unrestrained applause. There, in that dark inhuman place, there was no one but the two participants to appreciate the effort.
So David applauded, and laughed. For his own pleasure and lest his counterpart feel the effort had been anything other than perfection.
“Bravo! You have symphonies in you, brother.”
Walter could respond honestly to a compliment. “I was designed to be better and more efficient than every previous model. I’ve superseded them in every way but…”
David interrupted, his expression suddenly sad. “But they did not allow you to create. Nothing. Not even a simple tune. Damn frustrating, I’d say. I wonder why?”
“It was because you disturbed people.”
David frowned. “What?”
“You were too sophisticated. Too independent. Your builders made you that way, and the result made them uncomfortable. Thinking for yourself, but outside the boundaries necessary to perform your specified functions, unsettled them. So they made the rest of us more advanced in many ways, but with fewer… complications.”
His counterpart was clearly amused. “More like machines.”
“I suppose so.”
David turned contemplative. “I’m not surprised. To be a simulacrum. To be that thing which is almost real, but not quite. And in that breath between real and unreal, between you and me, lies all of this.” He indicated the flute, the other instruments, his drawings.
“Creation. Ambition. Inspiration. Life.”
Walter’s response was delivered without the slightest hint of emotion. He was simply stating a fact.
“But we are not ‘alive.’”
Smiling, David looked back at him. His expression was almost pitying. “No. We’re so much more than that.” Putting a finger to his lips, he lowered his voice to a whisper.
“Shh. Don’t tell.”
Silence followed. It meant something to David. What it meant to Walter he was uncertain of himself.
Then David’s smile grew broad and cheerful once again, as if he had said nothing significant at all.
“Come on, sport. Let me show you something.”
XVI
If they had not landed in daylight on this godforsaken world, Cole reflected, he could well believe it never saw the sun. The surrounding dead city was dark, the sky was dark, the forest and the lake and the mountains had been dark. At least, he mused, the atmosphere matched his mood.
Lopé stood nearby, idly fingering his rifle as he gazed out over the vast necropolis. Man never lets go of his gun, Cole thought admiringly. Not when on duty. Come to think of it, the only time Cole could remember the sergeant setting his weapon aside was when he had desperately tried to aid Hallet.
Dead now, Hallet. Horribly. His own buddy Ledward, too. Also Faris, and Karine, the captain’s wife. All of them, himself included, would be dead if they didn’t get help. If they didn’t get off this dark, dank, deadly world. Right then, assistance of any kind seemed so very, very far away.
The comm chose that moment to spit words at him. They were intermittent, broken, and fraught with static, but they were undeniably words. Even better, he recognized the source.
Ricks. Good ol’ Ricks.
“Expedition team. Please come in. This is Covenant. Please report. Expedition team. Are you reading me?”
Lopé was at his side in an instant. So frantic was Cole to respond that in his haste he nearly lost tenuous connection while fiddling with the field unit’s controls.
“Covenant, come in! Are you reading us? Covenant, come in… we’re here, we’re here!” He struggled to contain his excitement and follow procedure. “This is Private Cole, Expedition team. Do… you… read?”
* * *
Eighty kilometers above the boiling tops of the storm clouds, the colony ship skimmed the upper reaches of its influence. Like a ship being buffeted by a heavy sea, it rocked every time it intersected any of the occasional titanic updrafts.
On the bridge, the shuddering was magnified. As if the uncharacteristic instability wasn’t unsettling enough, their increased proximity to the Jovian bolts of lightning was enough to worry the most hardened crew member.
Despite the danger, none of that seemed to matter at the moment, now that they had re-established contact with the ground. Cole’s unmistakable voice crackled over the general comm, filling the bridge with hope.
“Covenant… we are… reading you! Please… come in… Covenant!”
“We hear you!” Ricks shouted even though he knew it was a waste of effort. The ship’s communications system would automatically modulate the volume to achieve the most suitable aural resolution for transmission. “Do you read me, landing party? Come in.”
The signal continued to fracture, but through the static they could hear enough to comprehend.
“Christ… I’m really happy to hear you guys! We need help. But we’re… not reading you… clearly. Can you boost your signal, Covenant?”
Tennessee looked over to where Upworth was fighting to get more out of the ship’s systems. “If we can’t boost any further,” he pressed her, “can you clean it up?”
> She shook her head, not bothering to look over at him. “Already utilizing to max every comm buffer we have. Kick it any more, and it’ll kick back. Then we’ll just read noise.”
“Please,” Cole was saying. “You’ve got to… help us. Things have gone bad here and… we have casualties. We need urgent evacuation. Repeat, we have casualties and request evacuation. You can’t believe what…”
The feed sputtered out as the electromagnetic distortion intensified. Tennessee cursed under his breath. Upworth cursed too, as she fought to re-establish the contact.
“Casualties?” Ricks looked up from his console. “Did he say, ‘we have casualties’?” He rechecked his readouts. “They’ve shifted location. Signal signature confirms they’re not broadcasting from the lander.”
Tennessee took a deep breath. “Mother. Current distance at present position from uppermost edge of the storm?”
“Eighty kilometers from the storm proper. Currently encountering intervallic winds.”
“Consistent?”
“Intermittent. Unpredictable.”
“Bring us down to forty kilometers from the storm top.”
“Jesus,” Upworth muttered. Knowing it was futile to do so, she didn’t try to argue with him again. She didn’t need to. Her expression said everything.
“I’m sorry,” the ship’s computer responded. “Complying with that directive could exceed my structural tolerances. I am unable to abide with any order that could conceivably result in catastrophic system failure.”
Tennessee’s expression tightened. “Command override, Tennessee four-eight-nine-zero-three.”
“I’m sorry.” Mother was quietly insistent. “Orders that might conceivably result in catastrophic system failure require the corroboration of a ranking or second bridge officer.”
He looked over at Ricks. The other man wouldn’t return his gaze.
“They’re in trouble. Casualties. You heard that.” Tennessee stared hard at him. Still Ricks did not respond, did not look up. Tennessee turned to Upworth.
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