As she was closer, Cally swiftly clambered into the dark opening. She could see nothing beyond the hatch. Cally tested with her numbed feet for a firm surface. There seemed to be a hard, flat platform just inside, so she manoeuvred carefully until her whole body was through the hatchway.
She helped Blake through, and they stood together on a small landing. It was a metal square, at the side of which the looped handles of a ladder led down into darkness. The storm sounds were already starting to recede.
‘Blake? Are you all right?’
He had climbed in behind her. ‘I’m fine.’ She could hear him struggling with something. ‘Switch your torch on. I’m just pulling the hatch shut.’
Cally had a torch positioned in the hood of her suit. She switched it on, and a sharp cone of light spilled out into the dark chamber.
Above her, the storm sounds ceased abruptly as Blake pulled the metal hatch shut with a resounding clang. The echo spoke of depths beyond the platform on which they now stood. In the comparative quiet, the sound of air moving was like half-heard whispers from an unseen group of people. But she and Blake were alone in the darkness.
Blake exhaled a huge breath. She wasn’t sure if it was the effort, or simple relief to be out of the gale. ‘You should be more careful,’ Cally warned him. You could have reopened your wound.’
‘I think I’d prefer that to plunging into icy water.’ He clutched for a hand-hold as his feet slipped from under him.
‘Steady, Blake.’ She angled her torch to show where they were standing. Although the platform was made of corrugated metal, the storm had washed enough icy water over the lip of the hatch to make the surface treacherous. ‘You wouldn’t want to slip over the edge.’
Where it wasn’t covered in slush, the platform showed as heavily oxidised metal. There was no rust, but there were rock fragments and dust. The only marks that disturbed this powdery covering were their footprints. No-one else had been here for a very long time. The platform and the ladder suggested it had been designed by humans – or at the very least, designed for humans.
Blake tugged his hood down, and took off his goggles. Cally fumbled to remove her own goggles, hampered by the thick gloves and lack of feeling in her fingers. The goggles caught on the edge of her suit and jiggled out of her grasp. They bounced once on the platform, and then dropped over the edge.
Cally groaned in annoyance. She stood looking angrily in the direction they had vanished, as though that might make them reappear. Some seconds later, she heard the distant clatter as the goggles finally hit a lower surface.
‘Wow,’ said Blake. ‘That’s some drop.’ He nodded towards the ladder behind Cally. ‘How deep d’you reckon it is?’
Cally removed her gloves to adjust her torch. The cone of light splayed out wide to illuminate the whole platform. She edged towards the ladder, took a hold of the guide rail, and peered down cautiously.
It was a narrow shaft, dropping vertically straight through the rock in a roughly hewn passage. The ladder was thin, with no guide rails beyond the first half-dozen rungs. Far below, perhaps forty metres down, Cally thought she could make out another metal platform. She relayed this information to Blake, before swinging her legs out onto the ladder and beginning her descent.
Above her, she could hear Blake preparing to follow. ‘Hey, wait for me!’
Initially, Cally carefully tested each step. The platform above her had shown little sign of deterioration, but she didn’t trust that every rung in the ladder was sound, nor that any one of them might not be treacherously covered in dust from a rock fall. Not even that every section of ladder was securely fastened to the wall.
Sensation gradually returned to her feet. The thermal suit clearly coped better in here, away from the savagery of the ice storm. If anything, the effort of her descent meant it was getting uncomfortably hot. With both hands on the ladder, there was no safe moment to adjust the temperature level. Cally decided to persevere, anticipating her next opportunity would be at the next platform below.
Blake seemed to have had the same idea. His boots thumped onto the rungs above her, getting nearer and nearer.
‘Don’t rush!’ she called up to him. Away from the entrance hatch, now, the echo was deadened by the rock walls that surrounded them on all sides.
‘Don’t fuss!’ he called back at her.
Cally stopped for a moment. She reached up to his oncoming boot, and slapped the side of it with her palm to indicate how dangerously close to her he was getting. ‘Why do you insist on defying good advice?’
‘Oh, it’s advice, is it?’
Cally recognised a familiar, slightly indignant tone in Blake’s voice. He was used to being in command on Liberator. And it clearly aggravated him to think that he was being given instructions by a member of his own crew.
‘Is my advice not welcome?’
‘You’re full of questions me for me today, Cally.’
‘Am I?’
He chuckled at this. ‘Is that why you ignored Avon’s advice? Why you’re here on Megiddo?’
Cally stared up at him. Or as much of him as she could see from this angle. ‘I do not know what you mean.’
Blake twisted so that he could look down at her. The torch in his hood spilled onto the rock wall. The light from Cally’s torch softly illuminated his face. She could see he wasn’t chuckling any more.
‘What I mean is…’ he continued. ‘Well, everything you said before. Back on Liberator. In the medical unit. About destroying Star One.’
Cally gave a little sigh. This wouldn’t be the moment she’d have chosen for this conversation. She thought about how long it would take to complete the remaining few hundred rungs before they reached the next platform. Perhaps he’d have changed his mind in that time.
‘You were prepared to destroy the Federation,’ she began. ‘But you didn’t question whether that would cause the deaths of innocent people, too.’
Blake pondered this for a moment. ‘You’ve fought,’ he said. ‘And you’ve killed. Do you question that now?’
That didn’t seem fair to Cally. ‘I have always faced those to whom I brought death.’ She continued climbing downwards, foothold by foothold, hand after hand. It only reinforced her feeling that this conversation needed to happen later.
‘That’s never been a problem for the Federation,’ said Blake. ‘A faceless administration that exerts anonymous control over its citizens.’ He must have realised that she was moving away from him, because he raised his voice. ‘Only they weren’t citizens, were they, Cally? They were numbers. They were head count.’
Cally stopped again. She suddenly felt hotter, and it wasn’t just the thermal suit causing it. For a moment, she thought about climbing back up to Blake, to face him directly.
‘Is that how you see the people in those ships?’ she snapped. ‘The ones just arriving. What’s the difference now between their pilots, whether they are from the Federation or the frontier worlds?’
Blake didn’t reply at once. She hoped he was reflecting on what she’d said. Eventually, he said quietly: ‘I’m not sure any more, Cally.’
They clung to the ladder in silence for a moment.
‘Yesterday,’ said Blake eventually, ‘those people lived at the sufferance of the Federation. It enforced surveillance, military access… It even decided the weather!’
Cally shook her head. ‘You say surveillance and military access. But from another perspective, the Federation also monitored transport safety. Secured supply routes for food. It protected people from extreme climates…’
‘It’s not that simple!’ he snapped at her.
Cally started down the ladder again. ‘That is exactly what I mean about perspective.’
Their descent continued largely in silence. She thought she could hear Blake muttering to himself, but whether it was his grumbling or just stifled grunts of pain, she would have to wait to discover.
The shaft seemed to widen out. From the mental count she’d been
making of the number of rungs, Cally decided it was worth risking a look down. Sure enough, another metal platform was about five metres below her. In the scattered light from her torch, she could just make out the cracked lenses of her lost goggles.
When she reached it, the platform was secure and dry, with the now-familiar covering of dust and scattered rocks. Cally checked for the platform edges. Was there a further ladder and another drop into pitch darkness? Instead, it appeared to lead through a rock archway.
She stepped carefully to one side, and allowed Blake to descend the remaining rungs. His boots thudded onto the metal surface, and Cally could now hear how the sound echoed. It was clearly a large space.
They angled their torches over the rock wall beside the ladder. The metal of the platform extended up one stretch of wall. A panel of old-fashioned switch-levers was set into it.
‘What do you think?’ Blake asked, walking over to the controls.
Cally wasn’t sure. ‘The lights?’
‘Or the self-destruct? Only one way to find out.’ He reached out, and pulled down every one of the levers.
Cally stumbled forward to stop him. ‘Blake!’
There was a crackle of electricity and a flash of light behind them. Blake tapped his finger on a notice next to the switches that read Main Lighting. His grinning face was lit by a growing illumination.
‘Interesting,’ said Cally. ‘The language of that label shows that this whole thing was constructed by humans.’
But she seemed to have lost Blake’s attention. Could he hear the same distant whispering that she could? ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.
Blake wasn’t grinning any more. He stared over her shoulder, his jaw slack with amazement.
Cally turned to look. And found that she was lost for words, too.
Chapter 11
Going Out With a Bang
‘I think this one might be better.’ Vila tugged at the sleeve of the hull suit. It stayed attached, which was a good sign, he decided. But then, it looked a bit battered.
Jenna glared at him. She had arrived in the airlock antechamber after Vila, but was already almost completely dressed in her own hull suit. She had seized the first one she saw, and tugged it on in double-quick time.
‘Is this suit the one I used last time?’ he asked her.
‘How would I know?’ she replied, and started to fit her gloves.
‘Only I thought that one might have had a faulty pressure seal. It sounded like it was leaking air.’
‘It’s when you can’t hear air hissing in your suit that you need to start worrying.’
Vila fingered the sleeve of suit that hung on the next peg along. ‘You can’t be too careful.’
Jenna rolled her eyes. ‘I think you’re making a very concerted effort to be too careful.’
‘This one, then.’
‘Oh come on, Vila!’ she snapped at him. ‘This is just displacement activity. You can’t put it off forever.’
‘I can try,’ he muttered.
Vila didn’t like hull-crawling. For the most part, it was unnecessary, because the auto-repair systems conveniently handled the day-to-day maintenance of the ship’s externals. Even after a major skirmish with Federation pursuit ships, Liberator seemed perfectly capable of reinstating any damaged sections without the need for human intervention. The automatics just got on with it, calmly returning systems to a perfectly restored condition, while Vila stayed safely inside restoring himself to a different kind of calm with a perfectly mixed drink.
That was all fine until the auto repair systems themselves needed repairing. Or if Avon needed them to calibrate the Liberator‘s equipment into a new configuration. Zen could be unhelpfully reluctant to facilitate any change other than the presumed factory defaults. And that was when the crew had to suit up and go out to handle the adjustments manually.
Perhaps, Vila thought to himself sourly, that was why there were so few safety features. No attachment lines, for example. He dreaded the prospect that he might be separated from the hull in mid-repair and float off into the void. Though even that might just be preferable to Avon’s brutal mockery if Vila had to be retrieved and brought back safely.
Jenna was completely ready, and Vila had only just stripped off his shoes and tunic. ‘Hurry up,’ she insisted. ‘We need to remove those things from the hull.’
‘They’re not going anywhere,’ he said.
‘Neither are we. Here…’ Jenna thrust the nearest hull suit into his hands. ‘Put this one on, or I’ll open the airlock and you can go out there in just your underwear.’
In the end, she helped him into the bulky suit. She clipped the helmet shut and, sure enough, he could hear the steady hiss as a cool stream of oxygen played over his face.
They stepped through the nearest door, and the antechamber door slid silently shut behind them. Vila knew it was foolish to feel claustrophobic in the small airlock, when he was already fully encased in his hull suit.
Jenna’s voice crackled over the comms in his helmet. ‘Ready, Vila?’
‘No,’ he replied.
‘Good. Here we go. Don’t forget your toolkit.’
The outer airlock door dropped away to one side, and the darkness of space beckoned them.
Jenna led them out. Vila attached the toolkit to his belt, and used both hands to haul himself out onto the hull.
Frightened as he was of the prospect of another space walk, Vila had to admit that the view it afforded was beautiful. The last time he’d done this was to realign the rear sensor array. They had been in orbit around an uninhabited world. The force wall was deactivated at the time, and so there’d only been the transparent shell of Vila’s suit helmet between him and the swirling green surface of an unknown planet. When he had worked his way around the hull that time, and looked back out into space, the stars had glittered back at him from the pitch blackness with a clarity he had never before witnessed. Even the burnished orange-gold surface of Liberator‘s hull could look beautiful in the unfiltered illumination of a nearby sun.
Today was very different. Way off to the one side of the ship, the satellite grid shimmered behind the silent sparks of distant conflict. The other direction revealed an even more isolating view of their home galaxy, impossibly far away and yet looking like he could reach out and touch it with his glove. It was a giddy thought.
‘I don’t like this, Jenna. When I look up, all I can see are stars. Distant stars. They make me dizzy.’ His own voice reverberated in his helmet. He was conscious again of the air hiss. He looked at the stars again, and knew he was alone. ‘Jenna? Jenna! Where are you?’
‘I’m right beside you, Vila.‘ Even over the comms, he could hear the exasperation in her voice. ‘Don’t shout. Just speak normally into your helmet microphone.’
Vila squinted at the device at the front of his helmet. ‘Oh. Yes, all right.’
‘And there’s a solution to the stars making you dizzy.’
‘It it drugs?’
‘No. Just stop looking at them. Keep your eyes on the hull.’
Vila adjusted his tool holder, and reached out for the next handhold. Jenna was right. If he just looked at the hull, it would be like a simple crawl along a corridor inside Liberator. He’d done that once or twice, depending on what sort of night he’d had.
Yes that was a helpful comparison. Only this was a very wide corridor. With a pronounced curvature to the floor. And no ceiling. The more he thought about this, decided Vila, the less encouraging the comparison became. And telling himself not to think about it wasn’t stopping him from thinking about it.
He focused on the surface in front of him. That was even less reassuring. He was appalled at what he saw.
The Liberator‘s hull no longer shone with a burnished brilliance. It had become dull, as if some huge flame had scorched across it. A trace of lines criss-crossed haphazardly, like slug trails over its surface. And everywhere, he could see the alien devices.
‘Can you see all those
limpet mines?’ asked Jenna.
‘There are dozens of them,’ he replied. There was one at the end of each slug trail, where the devices must have dragged along and come to rest. ‘And that’s just on this section.’ Vila pushed himself up with both hands, to look further over the horizon of the hull. ‘There could be hundreds. We’ll be here forever!’
‘Then we’d better get started.’ Jenna was already moving further along, towards the nearest of the devices.
Vila hesitated. He was in no rush to follow her, and eyed the first of the alien mechanisms with suspicion. ‘What if they go off while we’re removing them?’
‘If they do,’ she told him, ‘you’ll be seeing a whole load of different stars.’ She beckoned to him urgently with one gloved hand. ‘Come on! Bring your equipment, and let’s get started.’
Chapter 12
Down and Unsafe
Blake blinked in astonishment as the lights flickered on. He hardly heard what Cally was saying, because his attention was focused on what was being revealed before his eyes.
After the darkness of the climb down from the hatch, his eyes had become accustomed to the low light of their torches. Even when he had taken his goggles off, he could barely see further than a hundred metres. But now this…
The last of the illumination rippled into life across the room. If ‘room’ was the right word for it.
‘This place is…’ Blake could hardly find the words. ‘It’s huge! It must go back… what, half a kilometre?’
‘Maybe further.’ Cally had turned to look now. The stark lighting revealed to Blake very clearly that she was as dumbfounded as he was.
It was a natural cavern below the surface, stretching further than he could see. A bowl-shaped floor was criss-crossed with metal gangways that connected islands of equipment. Closest to them, maybe a hundred metres from the platform, were control desks. Empty chairs were dotted around them in a random fashion, some lying on their sides as though knocked over in a rush.
Next along were rows of rectangular boxes arranged in semicircles around another, solitary desk. In the further distance were huge devices that stretched up towards the high roof. Blake thought he could make out thick power lines, and possibly some antiquated but industrial-scale transformers and circuit breakers. At the far side was what looked like a cooling tower. At this distance, it was impossible to see where it vented.
Blake’s 7: Warship Page 6