The Dark Ship

by Phillip P. Peterson

“You shouldn’t have left him alone,” Mac snapped at Green.

  “I was trying to find Jeff.” Green appeared nonplussed.

  Mac snorted. It was obvious whose death he would have preferred.

  “You should have gone in search of Jeff together,” Joanne said calmly but reproachfully. Green shrugged and turned away to pick up the remains of Finni’s handheld.

  “All three of you might have died,” she continued. “And we would have had to come searching for you in this labyrinth and possibly never found you.”

  Jeff pursed his lips and nodded. Joanne was right, of course. It had been a dumb decision to split up the group. He had wanted to save time, and now Finni was dead. If he had made a different decision two hours ago, his shipmate would still be alive now. Never mind the fact that the damn hatch had crashed down behind him wasn’t his fault, and the same thing might have happened if they’d all come to the lobby as a group.

  Green shouldn’t have gone looking for him alone, but Jeff hadn’t really established any rules for that kind of scenario. He would lay down some ground rules now, but that didn’t change the fact that Finni was dead.

  Jeff pulled a thin, striped blanket from the equipment sled. He stepped gingerly into the pool of blood, which was unpleasant, but it was so big, he had no choice if he wanted to reach the body. Then he spread the blanket gently over the body of his shipmate and placed his backpack with his personal belongings beside him. He touched the blanket where Finni’s shoulder must be, and muttered a short prayer. Although most of his family had been churchgoers, he had never really been a believer, and the prayer gave him little relief.

  He retreated slowly to the lobby. “Does anyone else want to say something?” he asked quietly.

  When he got no answer, he hit the square on the wall and the door slid down.

  “I don’t get it.” Joanne was standing just behind Jeff.

  He turned around. “What don’t you get?”

  “The light alien that you saw.”

  “What about it?” Jeff asked.

  “Why it ran away when Green turned up?”

  “Maybe they only dare to attack us when we’re alone. Remember—the one we saw when we were together also didn’t attack.”

  “You said you shot at the creature and the bullet went straight through it,” Castle said.

  “Yes,” Jeff nodded.

  “If our weapons have no effect, why should they be afraid?”

  “I don’t know,” Jeff admitted.

  “And if they’re immaterial like ghosts, how can they cut people up like that?” Owl asked.

  Joanne frowned. “Maybe it’s some kind of protective light shield, which they can turn on and off at will.”

  “Or only their weapons are material,” Castle suggested.

  “God help us …” Joanne whispered.

  “I don’t believe they’re intelligent, technically advanced beings. If they were, things on this ship would look different,” Mac said.

  Jeff shook his head. They’d been over this a thousand times. They just went round and round in circles. “Let’s face it, we have no idea, and that’s one of the reasons we’re going to the center of the ship. To try and find some answers.”

  “If we haven’t all been killed by the time we get there,” Mac said phlegmatically.

  “I think it’s a bad idea,” Owl whined. “We should have gone to the shell and blown our way out. It’s not too late—we could still go back.”

  Shorty nodded grimly.

  Now the arguments were going to start all over again—which is exactly what Jeff wanted to avoid. Not that it was surprising, in light of Finni’s horrific death. “Come on! We’ve got this far. We’ve nearly reached the center of the ship. We can’t give up now.”

  Mac gave a shrill laugh. “This far? We’ve only gone about sixty miles. We’ve still got another two hundred and fifty ahead of us.”

  “I say we turn around before we’re all dead,” Owl said.

  Jeff’s gaze roved over the faces of his team. Owl, Mac, and Shorty were in favor of returning to the outer shell. Jeff was sure Owl and Mac would have no qualms about disobeying him, but would they be prepared to commit mutiny without the backing of at least one officer?

  “I’m also not sure if we should go further into this hellish ship,” Castle said.

  Shit!

  As if Mac and Owl had been waiting for this, they immediately swung round to the WSO.

  “Then we’ll go back!” Mac announced. “Let Boy Wonder here go and explore the ship alone, if he’s so crazy to see what’s there.”

  “What do you think?” Castle asked Joanne.

  “You’re a damned idiot,” Joanne hissed and came and stood next to Jeff.

  “Private Short! Private McGuinness,” Green suddenly spoke in an icy tone that would tolerate no contradiction. Even Jeff started. “Captain Austin is our commander, and he has decided we will continue to the center of the ship. We will all obey his order, is that clear?”

  Mac stared at him open-mouthed. Jeff had never seen this side of the usually phlegmatic Green. Maybe Finni’s death had hit him harder than he thought. Or maybe he had a bad conscience because he’d deserted Finni.

  “Is that clear?” Green repeated.

  “Yes, Sir,” Owl answered flatly.

  Mac said nothing but lowered his head and nodded.

  Jeff let out a sigh of relief. If Green hadn’t reacted so quickly, he might have had a mutiny on his hands. Now it was important for him to take control again. “We will spend the night here in the lobby, and tomorrow we’ll go in search of the cavity,” he said. He made an effort to sound firm, but all that came out of him was a feeble croak. “To prevent another attack, we will stay together from now on and not split up on any account. From tonight, we will always have two people on watch. Any questions?”

  “Who’ll be next?” Owl muttered, so quietly that Jeff pretended he hadn’t heard him. But if he was honest with himself, he was wondering the same thing.

  21.

  “These are supposed to lead to the cavity?” Castle asked, gazing up at one the huge gates in front of him. He rapped his fist on the metal, but all that came back was a hollow clanging sound. The doors must be very thick.

  Jeff yawned. He was having trouble concentrating. Another—sleepless—night had come and gone. But what did “night” even mean in this strange place, where the only source of light came from their headlamps and flashlights. When they were switched off, they were surrounded by utter darkness. While Jeff had been slipping in and out of sleep during the night, he’d had the surreal feeling that time in this ship was literally frozen. He flinched when Joanne tapped him lightly.

  “Don’t fall asleep,” she whispered, before walking over to Castle with her handheld. “At least this is the right direction—if we can trust the hologram in the map room. We can’t be more than forty feet away from the cavity.”

  “Now all we need to know is how to get these things open,” Shorty said.

  Jeff looked over at Mac and Owl, who were standing by the metal stairs talking to one another in subdued voices. They kept glancing in his direction. He had won yesterday’s dispute, but clearly they were scheming. He would have liked to separate them, but in the circumstances that wasn’t possible.

  “How will we get them open?” Shorty repeated his question.

  “I have no idea,” Jeff admitted. “If this is really some kind of transit hub, there must be a control system—a switchboard or something.”

  “We’ve searched the whole place already—there’s nothing” Castle said.

  “Apart from these small squares,” Joanne said, pointing to the one next to the gate in front of her.

  “Which we all know work flawlessly …” Castle said sarcastically. To prove his point, he punched one of the squares on the wall. Nothing happened.

  “Maybe they changed everything to remote control after renovating the ship,” Shorty suggested.

  Jeff shrugged
. Another wild guess.

  “If this was some kind of security control area, then it was for living beings to pass through. After they all left the ship, it would have become obsolete. So why would they have needed to change anything?” Joanne asked.

  “If this was a security control,” Castle said quietly and went over to one of the long tables. He ran his hand over the metallic surface and looked around again. “It looks like something else to me.”

  “Oh?” Joanne said. “Like what?”

  The weapons expert scratched his head. “I could be wrong, but I think it’s a kind of airlock.”

  “An airlock?” Joanne asked, unimpressed. “Why would they need an airlock inside the ship?”

  “Perhaps as a security measure,” Castle answered. “In case the ship was damaged and the air escaped, you could safely enter the evacuated area here wearing a space suit. Look at the thick doors. Everything about this place is designed for a big change in pressure.”

  Jeff gazed around the room and nodded. Even the little door through which they’d entered was extremely thick and had membrane seals.

  Joanne looked skeptical. “Even if you’re right, how’s that going to help us open the gates?”

  Castle frowned and rubbed his chin. Suddenly his eyes widened. He grinned and pointed upward with his right forefinger. “Watch!” He sprinted toward the open gates on the other side of the hall.

  Jeff watched him in confusion. What was he doing?

  Once the WSO had arrived at the gates at the far end of the room, he punched one of the squares on the wall. With a loud grinding sound, a thick metal door emerged from the ceiling and began to slide down, eventually hitting the ground with a crash. Castle did the same with the other gate. Then he came back to them. “Close the other doors as well. We need to close them all.”

  Mac shrugged and climbed a short metal staircase to close an open door at the top.

  Now Jeff understood what his shipmate was doing. He went back to the door through which they’d entered the room and closed it, trying to ignore the queasy feeling in his stomach. He hadn’t forgotten his encounter with the light alien, when he had been unable to open the door from the inside. But in any case, for now they didn’t want to go back, but forward, to the center of the ship.

  “Will it work?” Joanne wondered.

  “If it’s an airlock, it might be a safety mechanism,” Castle said, after they’d reconvened at the gate they wanted to pass through. “Maybe both sides can’t be opened at the same time.”

  “You reckon the big gates will open now?” Owl looked doubtful.

  “We’ll find out in a few seconds,” Castle said and headed for the closest of the big gates. His smile suggested that he was pretty sure it would work.

  But nothing happened.

  Castle turned around abruptly and scratched his chin. “I thought the gates …”

  “You were wrong,” Mac snapped caustically.

  “Psst,” Joanne hissed. “Do you hear that?”

  Jeff and the others fell silent and listened. Yes, there was a noise. A low whistle, although Jeff wasn’t sure which direction it was coming from.

  “What is that?” Shorty asked.

  Suddenly Jeff’s ears popped.

  Oh shit!

  He realized immediately that they had made a dreadful mistake.

  The color drained from Castle’s face. “Oh God, the pressure is falling. The air’s escaping.”

  “There must be a vacuum on the other side,” Joanne screamed. “We’re going to suffocate.”

  Owl ran to the nearest door and whacked the square on the wall in desperation. But nothing happened. They could no longer stop the process they’d started.

  “Our suits!” Castle screamed. “We have to activate our suits!” Frantically, he fiddled around with the controls on the arm of his combat suit.

  Jeff didn’t even try. The micro-reactors of their deactivated suits would take several minutes to power up. The life-support systems would take even longer before they started to supply any air. He cursed inwardly. They should have left their suits on standby the whole time, however uncomfortable that may have been. Now it was too late.

  Jeff was already having trouble breathing. His pulse was racing and his chest felt tight.

  Mac grabbed Castle by the collar. “You fucking asshole! You’ve killed us all!”

  “Wait,” Joanne said. “It’s stopping. Do you feel it? It’s stopping.”

  Jeff was struggling to keep calm. But then he also noticed the whistling had stopped.

  “The air pressure has stopped falling,” Green announced. He had remained surprisingly calm throughout the ordeal and was now swiping around on his handheld. “The pressure is 600 hectopascals.”

  “Shit,” Castle groaned. “I thought we were all going to bite the dust.”

  “We nearly did,” Mac roared. “It’s an airlock, for Christ’s sake!”

  “I’m sorry,” Castle said. “I wasn’t expecting a change of air pressure. I thought it was just an emergency safety measure integrated by the builders.

  “Next time we talk things through first,” Jeff said, addressing the whole crew and not just Castle. “No rash decisions, is that clear?”

  “Why is the pressure different on the other side?” Joanne asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  A loud metallic grinding noise reverberated around the room—as if a huge, rusty bolt were being drawn. Then the left-hand gate slowly rose up in fits and starts and with an almost unbearable screeching noise. Jeff covered his ears.

  A reddish light flooded the room. A gust of wind ruffled Jeff’s hair and the stench of rotten eggs filled his nose.

  Joanne choked loudly.

  The gate disappeared into the ceiling with a resounding boom. On the other side, Jeff saw a short corridor, no more than a dozen feet long, but with a very high ceiling. An open doorway at the end of the corridor led into a room that was bathed in a dark, ruby-red light.

  Jeff moved forward hesitantly. The air was even warmer here than where they’d come from and far more humid, and immediately the sweat began to pour down his face. It was worse than the tropics. But worst of all was the revolting stench of rotten eggs.

  Sulfur!

  “Jesus, this is gross,” Shorty groaned.

  Castle pointed into the room. “What’s that over there?”

  They made their way forward tentatively, until they reached a platform. It was about the size of a small glider landing pad and was bounded by a railing along the front and sides. To the left was a kind of scaffolding that ended several feet above the platform. When Jeff looked up, he saw a reddish-gray sky … and a ruby-red sun.

  A sun? Here?

  It emitted a faint light that was mostly swallowed up by a hazy mist.

  Jeff looked over the railing, and immediately got vertigo as he gazed into the endless depths.

  “Where the hell are we?” asked Joanne, who had appeared at his side.

  Jeff looked down at a hostile, craggy landscape that appeared to consist of nothing but black volcanic rock. Here and there were little pools and lakes, from which gray vapors rose into the air. The landscape lay far below them. In the distance, the horizon was shrouded in mist.

  “Have we come out on a planet’s surface?” Shorty looked perplexed.

  “Of course not,” Castle shot back. “This is the cavity we saw on the hologram map. It’s so big that the other end is shrouded in mist.”

  “And why can’t we see the ceiling? How did they even get that sun up there?” Mac asked, wiping the sweat from his face.

  “God, we’ve been so dumb,” Joanne blurted out.

  “What do you mean?” Jeff asked.

  “We underestimated the dimensions of the cavity. It’s so big, the illusion of being on the surface of planet is perfect.”

  “A very grim planet …” Owl quipped.

  Joanne ignored him. “The room is so high, it practically goes beyond the atmosphere. That’s why we c
an’t see the ceiling. The sun is probably an oversized floodlight, fed directly from a reactor. It also explains why the air pressure is different here.”

  “Why?” Castle asked.

  Joanne spread her arms wide. “We came out quite a few miles above the ground. No wonder the air is thinner here.”

  Jeff nodded. It made sense. But only to an extent. “Why doesn’t the airlock lead directly to the bottom of the cavity?”

  Joanne shrugged. “Maybe there are other airlocks. We may even have been lucky. Imagine if we’d come out six miles further up.”

  “Then we’d be dead,” Owl said dryly.

  Jeff turned around and looked up. The gates were embedded in a smooth, dark-gray metal wall, the top of which was lost from view somewhere in the haze.

  “Maybe they lived here,” Castle speculated.

  “Who?” Mac asked.

  “The builders of the ship. Maybe they modeled these cavitys on their home planet so they would feel at home during their generations-long flight.”

  “You reckon their planet looked like this?” Owl was dubious.

  “It’s possible.”

  “Looks worse than where I come from,” Mac muttered.

  “It’s creepy. Really creepy.” Castle shuddered.

  “And now?” Owl asked.

  “We need to go down and walk about halfway across this cavity,” Joanne said.

  “Down?” Castle asked. “But how?”

  “This might be some kind of elevator,” Green said, examining the scaffolding-like structure. Jeff followed him.

  The engineer was right. In the middle of the scaffolding there was a smaller, square platform, at the end of which a control panel jutted out of the floor.

  “Come on,” Jeff called, waving his shipmates over to the platform. When everyone was standing on the elevator, Green pressed the only button on the panel.

  A small railing rose up from the floor, separating the elevator from the platform. Then a horn sounded and the platform began its descent with a loud rattling noise.

  “Well, it seems to work,” Mac commented dryly.

  “Or our journey would have ended here,” Owl said, with a hint of regret in his voice.

  “No it wouldn’t,” Joanne said. “We just would have had to look for another airlock further down.”