As they approached the opposite wall, Reg looked up into the gloomy light and saw that there was a series of large rectangular openings, each one a doorway to a new level of the ship. On either side of the portals were massive, swollen structures that looked like the roots of some enormous tree. They were grayish white and stood out against the rest of the dark wall.
Rahim stopped the truck near the portal on the ground floor and everyone climbed out. The Peacekeepers switched on their flashlights and inspected the rootlike structures. It quickly became apparent that they were hollow inside and formed a natural staircase to the portal doors above.
“They are growing a lot of plants in here,” Miriyam observed. Reg nodded as he studied the way the hollow structure twisted its way up the wall, but it looked as much like a thick vein as it did a root. He was quickly coming to realize that the ship was composed largely—if not completely—of organic materials. He and Miriyam walked past a group of Saudi soldiers who were standing near their trucks and smoking cigarettes, until they came to the place where the towering wall joined the floor. Reg knelt down and inspected the corner.
“What do you see?” Miriyam asked him.
“Look at the way the cracks ran through the floor and travel up the walls.”
“What about it?”
“It means they’re built from one piece of material. This whole room,” he said, gesturing toward the massive hallway, “was cut from a single block. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless it was grown.”
“If it was grown,” Miriyam said, “it means we are inside a large animal. That the whole ship was living at some time.”
“Not a very comforting thought, is it?” Reg moved his hand over the wall. Despite the hairline fractures running in all directions, the surface was smooth and hard. The texture was closer to leather than metal. It gave like soft wood when he drove his thumbnail into it and left a mark.
Some of the Peacekeepers had climbed up the hollow rootlike structures and were beginning to investigate what lay behind the portal doors. Rahim yelled up at them that those areas had already been searched. They were identical in every detail to the room on the ground floor, the next stop on the tour he was giving them. As the Frenchmen began to climb down, Rahim led the way through the floor-level portal into an area he called the room of the barrels.
Inside, under a low ceiling, was another huge room. Battery-powered work lights were switched on to reveal a series of low walls that reached halfway to the ceiling and formed a kind of open maze. Rahim led the way to a hexagonal tank that was four feet deep and twelve feet across. The soldiers peered over the edge and saw themselves reflected in a shallow pool of silver liquid. Half-submerged in the shiny solution was a large pale body, an alien exoskeleton. It had long, powerfully built arms and legs. Instead of feet, it had a pair of hooked toes that curled forward like a ram’s horns. The hands were similar to human hands. Each one had three bony fingers that reached lengths of up to twelve inches. But the part of the body that drew the most attention was the giant clamshell that composed the head and thorax region of the animal. It was split open along the seam running from the pointed crest of down to its abdomen. As LeBlanc had noted earlier, there were no internal organs. The interior walls of the shell were pinkish gray muscle. At the bottom of the tank, there was a piece of machinery that looked like a harness or mold. When the ship crashed, the body had torn free of the harness, and most of the fluid had sloshed out of the vat.
“This one, it is more smaller than the ones we found outside,” LeBlanc pointed out. The body was about six feet long.
“Yes, yes,” Rahim agreed. “It is still young, still growing. We believe this entire area is a farm to grow these creatures. They tell me this liquid is a growth culture. A preliminary chemical analysis shows a balanced pH and many hormones and nutrients.”
“They’re growing these bodies the same way our scientists culture cells?” Reg asked.
“Exactly,” LeBlanc said, “but the level is very sophisticated, far beyond our ability.”
“Is it alive?” Mohammed asked, peering down at the alien.
“No,” Rahim answered definitively. “All of them are dead. We are certain of this.” To prove his point, he took out a pistol and shot into the tank. The large body remained as lifeless as it had before.
“Remarkable,” LeBlanc gasped. He shook his head in awe of the alien scientific accomplishments. “They have done what we cannot do: pluripotent cell differentiation. This is something we humans cannot do. Maybe in one hundred years.”
Miriyam was puzzled. “I don’t understand how a species of animals can exist if they have to be grown like this. Don’t they have sex?”
LeBlanc looked at her with his stray eye from the opposite side of the tank. “You have to understand that this one is not the real alien who drives the ship and fires the weapons. This one, it is only an armor, an empty body for the real aliens. They sit inside the shell like a little… how do you say?… the little man who rides the horse.”
“Jockey?”
“Exactly. The real alien sits inside this empty body like a jockey. Without the little one inside, this one is without the life. C’est brillant, n’est-cepas?”
“Yeah,” Miriyam replied sarcastically. “They’re real geniuses.”
Guillaume glanced curiously around the mazelike room of the barrels. “All of these pools have bodies in them?”
“Yes,” Rahim said. “And the same on the floors above. There are thousands of these barrels.”
As they talked, the long fingers of an exoskeletal hand lifted over the side of the tank and reached into the air. An “alien” voice called out, “Aidez-moi! Je suis mort!” It was Richaud, the same baby-faced soldier who had joked with Reg in the truck. He had found a severed arm lying nearby and was using it to put on a show for the others. No one found his impromptu puppet show particularly amusing. After a sharp word from Guillaume, Richaud tossed the arm away.
Rahim led the group through the labyrinth of half-wall partitions until they arrived at an open pit. It was as big around as a manhole leading down to a sewer. Turning to LeBlanc, he gestured toward the hole in the floor. “The plant you found outside is also here.” When flashlights were pointed into the opening, they saw what he meant. The same glassy vines were clinging to the walls of the round shaft, writhing and wriggling in slow motion.
“Maybe there’s water down there,” Reg said, “or some other source of moisture.”
“Perhaps,” said the doctor, leaning over the opening with a flashlight and trying to measure the depth of the shaft. “Or perhaps there are more bodies.”
“It’s nice and dark down there,” Miriyam said. “It’s a place survivors would hide.”
“We’ve got to find a way down to the lower levels,” Reg said to Guillaume.
“I already thought of that.” The Frenchman grunted. “My scouts have found an opening. Follow me.”
Not far from the large door they’d stepped through to enter the room of the barrels, there was a long rip in the floor just wide enough for a large man to slip through. The floor of the next level was visible about twenty feet below. The Peacekeepers broke open their backpacks and began unpacking the gear they would need.
Lieutenant Rahim thought Reg and Guillaume were crazy for wanting to go belowdecks with such a small force, but he could see he wasn’t going to be able to stop them. Reluctantly, he decided to join them.
Using ropes, the Peacekeepers were lowered through the opening two at a time. Guillaume ordered two of them to stay behind and keep an ear to the radio. Reg, Mohammed, and Miriyam were the last ones down. When they assembled on the lower level, they found themselves in a wide, rectangular passageway. The first thing Guillaume did was to order thermal and sonic scans, both of which came back negative. The weak light filtering down through the shaft cast a dim glow on the floor. Otherwise, they had only their flashlights. The floor felt spongy under their feet.
Both it and the walls appeared to be made of muscle or some other living tissue. Thick bundles of the sinuous, fleshy material were coiled around one another, the color of granite and as flat as a brick wall. The material looked as if it had been pressed and compacted. But as LeBlanc pointed out, the walls had probably been grown that way, through the use of molds. As the group set off, Reg had the uneasy feeling he was moving through the bowels of some enormous living creature.
“I think you were right,” he said quietly to Miriam, who was walking beside him.
“About what?”
“If there’s anything still alive in this ship, this is where we’ll find it.”
“I felt much braver about all of this ten minutes ago,” she said.
“Too late to turn back now. Where’s the kid?”
“Leading the way, I think.”
Moving in a loose line behind Guillaume and his two advance men, they walked fifty yards before they came to an opening in the wall. It looked like a sphincter muscle and stood three times as tall as a man. A thick lip of tissue lined the opening, floor to ceiling. The advance men went forward to inspect it, moving the last few feet on their stomachs and peering over the bottom of the lip. After a moment, they stood up and went into the chamber beyond. When they waved the others forward, they found a large, roughly oval chamber. The walls were made of the same material as in the passageway, with one conspicuous difference: They were full of small, rough-hewn caves that looked as if they’d been chopped, or eaten, out of the walls. Some were twenty feet long and had two doorways. Others were shallow depressions in the face of the wall. The soldiers found matting and shreds of dried vegetation in the deeper caves, which led them to conclude they had discovered sleeping quarters. But there were no bodies, no physical trace of the aliens they were hunting, so they moved on.
Farther down the passageway, they found a similar chamber, and then another. Their progress was slow because Guillaume insisted that each chamber be approached and examined with caution. Mohammed and Rahim both grew impatient. Mohammed because he was eager to find something that was still alive, and Rahim because he wasn’t. He was anxious to get back to his own work, and pointed out the obvious: The passageway gave onto only one sort of room. Since there were no signs of survivors, he suggested they return to the surface.
“No. They are here,” Mohammed said. “We must find them.” He turned and led a hurried march toward the next opening. Along the way, they found a place where the wall had torn away from the floor, opening a gap to the next floor down. Reg had a claustrophobic moment when he saw that the gap was wide enough to slip through. He knew they were going to descend to the next level.
“Are there any signs of life?” Guillaume asked the first man through the crack. When he replied in the negative, the leader of the Peacekeepers looked at Reg. “Maybe we have gone far enough.”
The last thing Reg wanted to do was wriggle into the hole and descend yet another level, but he shook his head. “We have to keep going,” he said. “King Ibrahim and several hundred civilians are heading out here from At-Ta‘if. We’ve got to make sure there won’t be any surprises.”
“And quickly,” Rahim added. “There are many preparations still to be made before the king’s arrival.”
“Let’s go then.” Guillaume ordered two of his men to stay behind and maintain radio contact with the outside. Within minutes, the others had squeezed through the opening to the floor below. The new passageway was not straight and square like the one above. The walls were rough and curved like a mine tunnel and left only enough room for two people to walk abreast. The tunnel showed signs of use. The lower half of it, including the floor, had been worn smooth, and there were grooves and dents running continuously about three feet above the ground. The crack they had lowered themselves through was on the ceiling now, and it narrowed as they followed it a short distance to a door that blocked their path. It was a heavy, rounded shell that closed against a bulkhead partition. At the center of the door was a battered, copper-colored medallion about the size of a dinner plate. At one time, there must have been a flowerlike design etched into the metallic substance, but only traces of it remained around the edges.
“Open it,” Guillaume said to one of his scouts.
The man reached out and touched the medallion with one finger. The door flew open and slammed against the wall. Flashlights explored the next part of the tunnel until the door slowly began to move closed again. When Guillaume touched the medallion, it shot open again. He stepped across the threshold and waved the others to follow him.
“Wait,” Reg said. “Does that door open from the other side?” Guillaume, Mohammed, and the others who had stepped through turned and examined the door for a moment before it sealed behind them.
“That is a very good question,” Guillaume called back. His voice came through the crack in the ceiling that extended a few feet into the far part of the tunnel before ending. “Don’t touch the door. I will examine it.” A moment later, he shouted through the crack that there was no way to open it from the other side.
After warning Guillaume to step away, Reg reached up and put his hand on the medallion. He felt a small electrical shock as the door swung open and smashed against the wall again.
“This is a one-way street,” Miriyam observed.
“We’ll need to leave someone here to open it,” Reg said.
Guillaume posted two more guards and continued into the darkness of the next segment of the tunnel, Soon, they found a differently shaped door built into the sidewall of the tunnel. It was wider than the first one and slightly lower, but had the same copper medallion set outside it. Mohammed reached it first, but when he touched it, nothing happened. Others tried with the same result. They tried to force it open, but soon realized it was futile and continued to advance. They found several more of the side doors, none of which would open, before they arrived at another bulkhead. After posting another pair of guards to keep the door open, the remaining fourteen people stepped through.
Part of the ceiling had collapsed in the next segment of the tunnel. Without opening to the upper level, it drooped into their path. Two of the Peacekeepers ducked their heads and moved under it. They called out that one of the side doors had been forced ajar.
“See what is behind it,” Guillaume ordered.
“A side tunnel,” they reported.
“Check the first fifty meters.”
After a tense moment of waiting, the two men came out from under the sagging ceiling and said the tunnel led to a cavelike room. There were no signs of survivors.
“We are going very slowly,” Mohammed complained. “We have to find them fast and kill them.”
Guillaume snapped at him to shut up and keep out of the way. Mohammed was in no mood to back down. He took a menacing step toward the rough-looking Frenchman, but Reg caught him by his skinny arm before he could do anything foolish. He pulled the young Iraqi past Guillaume, ducked under the low part of the roof, and entered the side tunnel.
After only a few steps, the walls opened around them, and they were standing in a cave. It was more like an underground cavern, full of stalactites and stalagmites. There was a forest of them, hanging from the ceiling and rising out of the floor at regularly spaced intervals. The columns looked as if they had been built little by little, by accretion, the way coral grows or the way wax builds up at the bottom of a candlestick. But the precise distances between them made it obvious that they were not naturally occurring. Scattered around on the floor were small objects that appeared to be hand tools, and larger ones that looked like water troughs. The space felt more like a factory than a cave, and there were a million places to hide.
When thermal and sonic scans came back negative, LeBlanc broke away from the others and rushed up to examine the nearest column. It was a stalagmite about four feet tall, jade green, and composed of a crystalline substance. It showed signs of having been scraped, chiseled, and hacked at.
“Look at this,” the d
octor said eagerly. He had his flashlight pointed at the top of the tapering stump. “Growth rings, the same that you have inside a tree.” He looked up at Reg with his stray eye and nodded admiringly. “They were good farmers, these aliens.”
“I recognize that color,” Miriyam said.
“So do I,” Reg nodded. “The color of the light surrounding the firing cone.”
“Maybe they use this crystal as a power source.”
“Yes,” said LeBlanc. He took out a knife and used it to scrape off a layer of the material, then raked it into a sample bag. The others began to wander deeper into the chamber, finding various tools on the floor: rasps, chisels, machete-like blades—all of them smaller than human tools. The large objects that looked like water troughs were filled with small sacks made of a hard, flexible skin. When LeBlanc opened one of them up with his knife, he found it was filled with powder of the same jade green color. The doctor was convinced that the crystalline residue provided the aliens with a renewable, self-sustaining fuel that could be converted into enormous amounts of power. He pointed out that the sides of the trough matched the groove marks worn into the walls in the passageway outside. “So if we follow the marks on the walls, eventually…”
“Eventually, we’ll get to the engine room,” Reg finished the thought.
“We can learn how they converted this stuff”—he pointed to his sample of powder—“into such a great explosive. Maybe we will learn something good from them.”
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 66