It doesn't take much time to cross through hallways and out an intact hatch that leads out onto one of the catwalks suspended over the open ocean floor below. The way down is torn and wrecked, but the way up looks clear. Up a few flights of stairs, another hatch leads back into the ship and into what looks like a bunkroom. A few lockers lined the walls, one of which has been knocked to the floor in the ship's collision, but there's also bunk beds, a deck, and some shelves. Through a window into a hallway, there's a sign visible saying "Escape Vessel" and pointing up a ladder. Unfortunately, there's no door next to the window, only out another wall and into a short corridor.

She's at least going to try getting to that ladder via doors before she considers getting through the window. What's down that corridor?

Down the hall, the corridor ducks around a corner. On the left is a small workroom. If there was any doubt about the infiltration of the WAU, the growth in the corner seems to answer it--it's definitely here, too. There's a skull, and what looks like part of the rest of a body on the slab. But only part, even with the decay. To the right, a hatch leads into some kind of...lounge, apparently, some of the furniture and couches scattered against the walls. The room is lit in red by a screen on the wall, showing flickering views of towers of smoke and flame. A voice is repeating on a loop, barely audible through the water. "...sky is pitch black with smoke. The ocean is dark, incredibly dark. In the distance, I can see land. According to navigation, it's Lisbon and the coast of Portugal. The flames...everything's on fire. The flames are reaching up into the sky, it's unreal." There's a tingle up Margaret's spine, and it takes a moment to realize it's a static twinge of the feeling the monsters give her, not nerves.

Everyone's dead, everyone's dead . . . she's going to be dead too if she doesn't keep moving. There's not a lot of room to dodge, in here, and she can't afford to let the stranger get between her and the escape vessel.

The Curie is a tight warren of passages, and the lounge lets out through two doors. Coming to the second, the twinge up her spine becomes a roiling electric burn and her vision starts to flicker. There's a sound in the hallway, just beyond the second door out of the lounge, the one further from the one she came in from. Clump. Clump. The thing is in the hall. 

If she just holds still the thing might go past without coming in here (and holding still is easier than trying to move with her brain feeling like it's melting), but if she doesn't get lucky she's going to have to go back the way she came in a hurry. She holds still in a corner and hopes her awful spider-sense doesn't go both ways.

The footsteps in the hall continue, and for a moment, Margaret can see the light from the glowing head of something like the monster from earlier, before it goes around the corner. The way out the second door is clear for the moment.

She forces herself to wait a little longer, give it a bit more time to get out of earshot miscellaneous sensory ranges or give herself a bit more head start, but then she goes for it. Slowly and stealthily, because being faster than most things down here in a straight line doesn't help as much when she doesn't have a known clear path.

The hallway leads around the lounge, back towards the area where she saw the ladder marked. Off to the sides, short corridors and closed doors promise other rooms, and a door (unlocked) apparently, blocks her way ahead. For the moment, whatever that thing was seems to have missed her.

Good. She is so missable. She is boring and uninteresting and definitely doesn't taste good. Straight ahead seems most promising if the door will open, either immediately or with the omnitool.

The door slides open as she pulls on it, and for once the sound-deadening of the water works for her, muffling any rattle the already-rusting door might have had. It takes two heaves to haul the door open enough to get past, and beyond she can see the hallway with the ladder access.

Great. Now there just has to actually be a working escape vessel where the sign says there is.

The ladder access holds the answers, hopefully, but unfortunately, it's currently raised through a hatch that looks like it's for when the ship is oriented the other way--a ladder runs along the ceiling in mind-bending fashion. There's a wheel on the wall to lower it.

Time to lower the ladder as quickly as possible and hope it doesn't creak loud enough to wake the undead!

The ladder drops loose with a rattle, hits the deck with a clank, and there's a screeching from down the hall.

Yeah that was a stupid hope even by recent standards of the stupidity of hope. Up she goes at top speed, aiming to get to the top and pull the ladder up behind her. At least she still has the increased upper body strength.

The way up passes through a narrow constriction--some kind of thicker bulkhead--before leaving her on a deck straight out of an Escher painting, with a staircase across the room, a ladder on the floor, and a disorienting arrangement of hatches and doors. Behind her, there's a grunting moan, and the light of the entity's...head. It's human, or it was. There's a human body sticking out of a mass of the structure gel, coating its head and arms, with glowing spots all over it. It doesn't seem to be human intelligence now, though--it doesn't look up as it surveys the corridor below, it doesn't even look hard at the newly lowered ladder.

So a zombie, as opposed to the earlier vampire. Stupid fake taxonomy later, pulling up the ladder and getting to the escape vessel now. She considers trying to clap prime numbers at the entity first, in case there's a mind in there and the not climbing the ladder is more of a dexterity thing, but--the last couple strange language-users she met tried to attack her. This one might only be confused about where she's gone. And she's so scared and lost and exhausted in a way that electricity can't fix and she just. Can't handle trying to establish communication with an alien mind right now. She turns around and moves on.

The room she's in is some kind of storage space, with a corridor on her right that looks, dizzyingly, like it's a stairwell in the other orientation. A door to the left offers a set of corridors, and just down the hall is a passage up and to the escape vessel. It's just like the one outside Lambda, except this one is in better condition, with a little less barnacles and weeds inside it.

That's a relief. She plugs in Catherine and asks, "So, the humans with giant blobs of gel on their heads, what is their deal?"

"What?" Catherine asks. "Oh, you found another escape vessel, good. I don't know what their deal is, they're just like...exploding with electromagnetic energy."

"Oh, is that why they make me feel ill, like they're magnets and I'm a CRT . . . wait, you've probably never heard of CRTs, it's the future. Um. Anyway. Does this escape vessel look functional to you?"

"It looks better, let's see if we can't get this thing moving," Catherine says. "Uh, wait, what. Safety locks are blocking the vessel's release? How much more of an emergency can it be in? It's on the bottom of the ocean!"

"Argggghhhh." So many remembered engineering lectures about Design Principles and graceful failure and what things should or shouldn't have manual overrides, with the main takeaway being 'for all x there are circumstances in which x is awful'.

"Is there a way to release it anyway? Including by finding the sensor that's objecting and either breaking it or shorting it?"

"Take a look at the engine room, maybe you can figure it out. Maybe there's an override or something."