Jeff closed his eyes. He knew that what Mac was saying was true. What would have been the point of all the deaths, the suffering, the fear, if he gave up now?
Jeff opened his eyes again and wiped Mac’s spit from his face. He pressed his lips together and stood up.
“All right,” he said hoarsely.
“Finally,” Mac said, and backed off.
“We’ll keep going,” Jeff commanded. “Get the equipment sled ready.”
“I’m afraid that won’t work,” Green said.
“And why not?”
“Because it’s still with the crazies down in the cavity,” Castle said. “We had to leave it behind when we fled.”
Jeff bit his tongue. All that was left was the medical kit that Joanne had on her back. Their supplies, water, and lots of useful equipment were all on the sled. On the other hand, Jeff had no desire to go back. The mob would probably attack them immediately.
“We’ll continue without it,” Jeff said. “We’ll activate our suits and rely on their supplies.”
Shorty suppressed a groan.
Jeff turned to Joanne. “How far still to the center, and what route do we need to take?”
Joanne took out her handheld. She swiped across the screen, then pointed to one of the exits. “If we go out that way, we’ll soon reach a corridor that’s about ten miles long and leads directly to the center of the ship.”
“Ten miles,” Jeff repeated. “That’s doable. And then we’re at our destination?”
Joanne hesitated. “That takes us to a large room directly bordering the central area. I can’t say what lies beyond it, because the hologram doesn’t show anything.”
“How big is the central area?” Castle asked.
“It’s got a diameter of sixty miles,” Joanne answered. “When we reach the border and find a way in, it’s thirty miles to the actual epicenter of the ship.”
God only knew what awaited them there.
They would find out soon enough. “Let’s go.”
As he led the way, Jeff activated his suit’s remaining systems. A hologram appeared in front of his face that only he could see. It consisted of a few displays and a series of status lights that alternately switched from red to yellow and finally to green. He shuddered as the catheters for urine and feces were activated.
The next room was round, and the door on the far side was much bigger than the other ones. Joanne led the way into the long, high, corridor.
“We need to go this way.”
They continued along the dark corridor in silence. Joanne marched alongside Jeff, but they didn’t speak. Jeff was lost in his own thoughts. The encounter with his father already seemed like a surreal dream. He and his mother had mourned deeply for his father. Then as the months passed, he had slowly come to terms with the fact that his father was dead and that he would never see him again. And now this unbelievable encounter—only to be immediately parted from him again. What power in the universe could be so cruel?
He tried hard to suppress his dark thoughts and to concentrate on what lay ahead. Today they would reach the center of the ship. What awaited them there? Would they finally learn something useful? Find some answers … some way of steering this ship back to where they wanted to go … or would they be confronted by a new catalog of horrors?
Jeff expected one of those pale light aliens to appear in front of them at any moment. Then it would all be over, in any case. There didn’t seem to be any turnoffs from this corridor down which they could escape.
But thankfully, none of the sinister creatures appeared.
As if in a trance, Jeff trudged on and barely noticed the time passing. Finally they were standing in front of a big, gray, metal gate. They waited for Joanne, who had fallen behind a little. She was pale and her eyes were bloodshot.
“Everything OK?” Jeff asked her.
She looked at him with glazed eyes, and Jeff was about to repeat his question when she answered. “I’m fine. Got a bit of a headache, that’s all. We can go on.”
Jeff hoped it was just a headache, and touched the square next to the door. The door slid up and retracted into the ceiling with a loud hissing noise. It opened into a large room.
Jeff wanted to go through the opening, but Green grabbed him by the arm and held him back. “What is it?” Jeff asked.
“Careful. Something’s not right here.”
“What do you mean?”
Green pointed at a yellow line on the floor, then at a ladder, which appeared to be mounted horizontally along the wall. The engineer took a concentrate bar from his pocket and threw it into the room. As the bar flew over the yellow line it didn’t fall down, but accelerated upward towards the opposite wall, as if magnetically attracted by it.
“I see. Thanks,” Jeff said. Clearly the gravitational vector had changed yet again.
He crossed the threshold tentatively, then grabbed the nearest rung of the wall-mounted ladder with both hands. Then he took another step forward. His legs were suddenly flung upward. He was only able to hold onto the rung with great difficulty, and his feet slammed into the ladder.
His coordinate system had changed from one moment to the next. The floor had turned into the wall, and the opposite wall into the floor, at least fifty feet below him. If Green hadn’t warned him, he would have fallen to his death.
“Watch out! You have to be really careful here,” he warned the others.
A cylindrical-shaped corridor led out of the small room and was so narrow that Jeff had to crawl down it. As he squeezed his way along it, he was repeatedly pushed to the side. It took him a moment to realize the direction of gravity was changing again. After a few feet, he looked back and saw Shorty bringing up the rear, crawling along the ceiling of the corridor. He immediately felt dizzy, and focused on looking ahead before he was actually sick. The ceiling had now turned into the floor.
He forced himself to continue. Again and again, in his mind’s eye, he saw his father burning alive. And every second his mind wasn’t overwhelmed by this image, the same questions kept popping up: How had his father gotten here? Had it really been his father, or just a deceptively similar illusion created by this nightmarish ship?
He reached a closed hatch and waited a moment for the others to catch up before opening it. Like an iris diaphragm, the individual sections of the hatch disappeared radially into the wall. He blinked as he was dazzled by a bright blue light.
Shit! A light alien!
He rolled to the side and pulled his pistol from his holster.
But then he realized the light was simply emanating from the new room. He clambered out of the tunnel and stood up. Except for the cavitys, it was the first illuminated room since leaving their quarters; the first sign that here, in the center of the ship, something was different. The room was spacious, like a warehouse. But Jeff couldn’t see the source of the light, it seemed to be coming from every direction at once. The walls were white and smooth, with narrow, rectangular hatches embedded on the left- and right-hand sides.
He helped to pull the others out of the tunnel, and noticed that Joanne looked worse than ever. He wondered if they should set up a camp for the night here, but he wanted to find an entrance to the central part of the ship. Then they could have a rest before going any further.
“Joanne, how are you feeling?”
She coughed slightly, shaking her head as if it might dispel her drowsiness. “I feel dizzy. Like I drank a couple of glasses of champagne. But I’m OK.”
“Sure?”
Instead of answering, Joanne studied her handheld. “We can go through either of the hatches. They both lead directly to the center of the ship—which is only few feet away from here.”
Jeff nodded. “OK.” He chose the hatch on the right and headed straight for it. The others followed and took up position behind him.
He reached out a finger, but didn’t speak. Turning around, he studied the faces of his shipmates. Joanne looked dazed; Mac and Shorty were clearly exhausted
; Green’s eyes were fixed on the ground; and Castle appeared tense. Somehow, he felt he ought to say something and took a deep breath.
“We’ve reached our destination. We’ve nearly made it to the center of the ship. I don’t know what’s behind this door, but I’m sure of one thing. If we’re going to find a way to get back home, the answers to our questions will be behind this door.” He hesitated. “In any case, I want to thank you for following me here.”
Joanne nodded tiredly. Mac looked him in the eyes, hesitated a moment, then nodded too. The others didn’t react, and just waited.
Jeff took another deep breath and pushed the button next to the hatch. He heard the inner hatch closing behind them.
Then a loud alarm tone sounded from the loudspeaker of his helmet. Several indicator lights on his neck console flipped to red and he heard a cracking sound in his ears.
“Shit!” Castle screamed.
The emergency release on Jeff’s helmet activated. The molded plastic cover shot out of his neck, wrapped itself around his head and locked with the ring round his neck.
Within seconds, the air had been sucked out of the room, creating a vacuum. The lights flickered briefly. If they hadn’t activated their suits in advance, they would have all been dead by now. In front of Jeff, the hatch went up, revealing a narrow staircase illuminated by strips on the walls that emitted a pale white light.
Jeff took a deep breath and looked around. His shipmates all had the plastic visors of their helmets pulled down in front of their faces.
“Lucky again,” Green said laconically.
“Let’s go,” Joanne said.
Jeff began to climb the stairs. They led up just a few feet. One step at a time, Jeff climbed the stairs until he was standing on a wide platform.
What a view!
“Oh my God!” Castle said.
The platform was curved and made of pale-gray metal. Jeff felt like he was inside a huge bowl or a giant balloon. The strangest thing, however, was the enormous dark-gray sphere hovering above them, which took up almost the entire sky. It was covered in a regular pattern of fine black lines. Here and there on its surface were faint dots of lights and black areas. Some of them looked like they might be doorways.
“What the hell …?” Mac whispered.
“What is that? I don’t get it! What are we looking at?” Shorty ogled the hovering orb.
“That,” Joanne began, “is the spherical center of the ship.”
“What?” Mac was confused. “Above us? But …” He trailed off.
Jeff understood, although it was completely unintuitive. “They work with artificial gravity. We’ve seen that already. There is no direct access to the central area. They’ve separated it from the surrounding central area of the ship with a vacuum.
“Let me get this straight,” Shorty said. “That huge sphere above us is the epicenter?”
“Yup.”
It really was breathtaking. The whole orb was bathed in a soft light. The horizon of the rising floor merged with the outer shell of the epicenter, which was perhaps twenty or thirty miles away.
“How can it just float there like that?” Mac pondered.
“It’s probably gravimetrically coupled,” Castle replied.
“What?” Jeff asked.
“Imagine a steel ball suspended from metal springs,” the weapons expert explained.
“And?” Mac asked impatiently.
“Replace the metal springs with gravitational fields.”
Jeff could picture it.
“How far away is it?” Shorty asked.
“Almost exactly six miles,” Green said.
“How do you know that?”
“You can calculate it from the angles,” he replied. “If you take the tangent from the big—”
“OK, OK,” Shorty gave a dismissive wave. “Forget it.”
“I’m wondering something completely different,” Castle said.
“Yup,” Jeff nodded. “How do we get across?”
“The gravity is too strong for the jets on our spacesuits,” Joanne said.
Jeff thought feverishly, but couldn’t come up with a solution. Was their long journey going to end here? Had it all been for nothing?
No, there had to be a way!
“Maybe there’s a bridge or some kind of crossing over there,” Shorty suggested brightly.
“Take a look around,” Mac grunted. “All as smooth as a baby’s ass. There are no bridges here.”
“You can’t be sure,” Shorty grumbled. “Maybe beyond the horizon.”
“I don’t think so,” Green said thoughtfully. “I think they isolated the central orb from the rest of the ship for a good reason.”
“And what reason is that?” Castle asked.
But Green just shrugged.
If the engineer was right, they had failed.
“Shit!” Mac cursed.
They stood there for some time, staring silently up at the silver sphere, so near and yet so far away.
“There is one possibility,” Shorty said finally. “But nobody will like it.”
Jeff swung around.
“Out with it,” Castle said.
Shorty sighed. “On the equipment sled, there are four levitation belts. We could use them to take turns pulling ourselves over.
Jeff closed his eyes.
“No!” Mac cried. “I’m not going back to those lunatics.”
It was also the last thing Jeff wanted. But it was probably their only chance of reaching their goal. “Come on,” he ordered the others and started back down the stairs.
“Where are you going?” Castle asked.
“Back to the antechamber. We’ll close the hatch, let the air back in, and rest for a few hours.”
“And then?”
“Then we’ll go back to the cavity and get the levitation belts.”
Mac put his head in his hands. “Holy shit!”
29.
Jeff awoke to find Castle shaking his arm.
“What is it?” Jeff looked at his watch blearily. He had only slept four hours and didn’t feel in the least refreshed.
“It’s Joanne” Castle said. “I’m really worried about her.”
“What’s wrong?” Jeff asked, but he had already sprung up.
Joanne was lying in the corner with her arms wrapped around her chest. Her lips were trembling.
When Jeff looked into her dilated pupils, he got a shock. “Joanne!” He leaned over her.
“We’re all going to die,” she whispered. Saliva was dribbling from the side of her mouth.
Jeff stood up again and pulled Castle over to a corner. “It’s just like Owl. That’s how it started.”
“What can we do?” the WSO asked.
“We need to make sure she doesn’t harm herself, we need to watch her vigilantly.”
“What about that drug?” Castle asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The stuff she gave the woman in the cavity. Maybe it’ll work on her.”
“I’m just wondering—” He heard a noise beside him and whirled round.
Damn it, what the—?
He was looking into Joanne’s contorted face. She was holding a knife in her hand. Jeff jumped backward, stumbled, and fell to the ground. Castle screamed and threw up his arms.
Jeff tried to get up, but his boots kept slipping on the floor. Then the blade pierced Castle’s neck. His scream turned into a gurgle. Blood gushed from a huge wound in his throat. He fell to his knees and then collapsed in a heap.
Joanne took a few steps back. Her eyes were wide open. Her face was splattered with drops of blood. As if in slow motion, she raised her hand with the knife.
“No!” Jeff screamed, finally getting to his feet as she guided the blade to her own neck. “Don’t do it!”
But Mac was already by her side. He grabbed her and pulled the knife out of her hand. Then he pulled her hands behind her back. The blade clattered to the ground.
“Give me s
omething to tie her up with,” Mac shouted.
With trembling hands, Shorty handed him a strap from Joanne’s backpack. Mac tied her hands together behind her back.
“Give me another one,” he ordered Shorty, and tied her feet together.
Joanne was completely spaced out. Saliva dribbled down her chin.
Jeff turned to Castle. Green was already kneeling beside him. “He’s dead.”
“No! No!” Mac wailed.
Jeff covered his face in his hands. This couldn’t be happening. Not another one! And not Joanne! He stumbled forward a couple of steps and thumped the walls with both fists. “Jesus fucking Christ!” he screamed. “You fucking ship from hell. Leave us alone!” His knees gave way. Leaning back against the wall, he slid to the floor and began to sob. “I can’t take any more. I’ve had it.” He tipped his head back and whimpered.
He wasn’t sure how long he sat there like that, but finally he got to his feet. He had to support himself against the wall as he got up. He looked around the group. Mac and Shorty were sitting next to Joanne. Shorty’s eyes were red, he must have been crying, too. Mac was staring at the ground rubbing his wrists. A bit further away, Green was leaning against the wall staring at them all blankly.
Jeff’s anger turned into cold hatred. Hatred for this damn ship, these damned aliens.
The reason for all this misery, all this pain, all this horror, dwelled in the center of this ship and was waiting patiently for them. He wanted to go there and kill it. Whatever it was.
“Mac! Shorty! Green!” he spoke in a rasping voice.
“Yes, Sir?” Shorty asked weakly.
“Get up. We’re going back to the cavity to get the levitation belts.”
“What about Joanne?” Mac asked.
Jeff ran his fingers through his hair. They couldn’t possibly drag her all the way back, bound up like that. But they also couldn’t leave her here.
What to do?
“I’ll wait here with her until you get back,” Green said.
Jeff looked up. He didn’t want to separate the group. Every time they had done it before, something dreadful had happened. But what choice did they have?
“Are you sure?”
The engineer nodded. “I don’t think we’re in any danger here. It’s been a while since we’ve seen one of those light aliens. I’ll look after Joanne till you get back.”
The Dark Ship Page 27