“Well you know what they say, Reverend Ashe,” Jude muttered silently as the lift car began making its return ascent, “In like a lion, out like a lamb.” Gabriel Ashe stood under the vaulted dome of the First Chamber, the door into the rest of the Ship at the far end of the room open invitingly. He looked at the slab of stone decorated with alien runes and glyphs. It could only be Angelic Script that He saw, for only the Angels of the Lord could possibly command this Chariot. He admired it, knowing that soon enough He would be able to read this text and speak the Angelic Tongues. This majestic chariot represented but one of the wonders of the Kingdom of Heaven that would be given unto Him. That it had been here waiting for Him for so long could only mean that it was the least of the Kingdom’s wonders. Gabriel Ashe made His way down the corridor at the back of this vestibule, knowing where He was to go just as the Angel had instructed. Behind Him the crystal egg ascended once more, but it was of no consequence to Him now.
As Jude descended in the lift to the inner hull of the Ship, even he who had helped capture or destroy so many alien artifacts throughout the other bitter campaigns he had waged, felt humbled by the majesty and grandeur of the Ship’s interior. He looked out over the airframe, the bulkhead walls lining the inner hull, the city-sized constructs that ringed the inner hull and was awestruck. Such a display as this pulled even at his heart, long since locked away so that he could be the best soldier possible. It stirred yearnings for adventure that he hadn’t felt since he was a boy. How could such a thing as this Ship even be built, he wondered, how could it stand up under its own weight, let alone fly? The time for his idle speculations and daydreams was over, for the lift car was now dropping into the inner hull and it was time for the hunt to continue. The lift opened up onto the deserted First Chamber. Control had taken the time to downlink the known specs of the interior of the Ship. Jude moved straight down the hall into the Second Chamber. It was a dead end; the as-yet undeciphered language lab left no hiding place and Jude was startled a moment when he realized that Ashe was not within. He turned around, racing back to the First Chamber. Ashe had nowhere to go. Jude chambered a round into his rifle, allowing the mechanism to make as much noise as possible so that the echo announced his presence to Ashe. Jude stepped back into the First Chamber and was astonished to see Ashe standing on the other side of the second doorway, the door rising shut. Jude fired, but all Ashe had to do was drop to the deck to avoid the shots. The door rose completely into its frame. Jude approached the door. It remained shut. This wasn’t possible. The SSE hadn’t yet been able to open this door, so how in the Christ had Ashe? Jude turned, noticing the keypad to the left of the door. It was covered with runic script and numeric glyphs and though Jude had seen these very same characters on several artifacts he’d acquired in service to the Defence Intelligence Agency, they made no sense to him. Nor could he understand just how Gabriel Ashe had been able to determine what sequence was needed, to open the now-sealed door before him.
Many mistake the end of chaos and the soothing of terror for the resolution of crisis. In fact, during a period of purgative change like that caused by the Ship’s Unearthing, the end of chaos is often merely the beginning of the crisis.
THIRTEEN
DESCENT
“The doors are now sealed,” The Minister said, “The Committee is now called to order. Let everything said within these walls stay within these walls.” He looked at the console screen before him then up at the faces of the Committee members seated before him, gathered for the Minister’s first meeting as Chair. It was a meeting at which a lot of recovery and catch-up would be played. The Night of Blood had resulted in the World Ship Preserve being sealed to all but heavily guarded and scrutinized supply runs. Now there was little chance of the Committee sending in a team to pillage the Ship. However, Colonel Jude’s disappearance inside the gargantuan vessel constituted the next best thing.
“There is pressing business on the agenda tonight,” The Minister continued, “According to the Chairman we have not had contact with our subsidiary operative since he entered the Ship in pursuit of Gabriel Ashe. We also have an increasingly rare item of equal import on the agenda: something that isn’t Ship-related. It is my understanding that our Liverpool facility has at long last succeeded in properly synthesizing the mimetic metal found so long ago at the Roswell crash site. Mister Chairman, I’ll invite you to address us first, given how urgent it was to order Gabriel Ashe’s execution. Madam Minister, you will have the floor following the Chairman.” As the Minister finished speaking, the British Minister nodded. The Chairman cleared his throat and spoke:
“Approximately twenty two hours ago Colonel Isaac Jude pursued Gabriel Ashe into the Ship under orders issued to him by the Committee through our blind, General Roy Harrod,” The Chairman began, “Since that time we have had no news from Jude. His troops are monitoring the situation but are under orders not to enter the Ship. There has been no sign of Gabriel Ashe since Jude followed him into the Ship.”
“The situation is at the moment, fairly well contained,” MI-6 added, “As the World Council has suspended the activities of the Ship Survey Expedition until hearings on the matter are concluded.”
“We can expect that the SSE will continue operations shortly.” The Curator said, his image and voice piped into the meeting via console.
“Not necessarily,” The Solicitor countered, “One of the items the World Council and the World Ship Summit are scheduled to discuss is whether or not exploration of the Ship should be suspended altogether. There is a vocal and growing minority that blames the Ship for the madness we’ve witnessed in the last two days.”
“One wonders if they aren’t right in that assumption,” The British Minister commented, “But the Ship is hardly something the world can forget or ignore. It’s a Pandora’s Box, opened now and not something that can simply be closed.”
“I’d have compared it to a Lament Configuration, myself.” MI-6 muttered, recalling a classic story he’d read in school.
“The question is what are we to do about Colonel Jude and Gabriel Ashe?” The Minister interjected, “There’s been no official announcement made about Ashe. We have to tell the world something and we also have to deal with the reality of the situation.”
“I move that we tell them Gabriel Ashe died fleeing the US Army in Salado Gulch,” The Chief of Staff replied, “That there was a gunfight and Ashe was killed. We can doctor images of one of the actual victims of the strike to look like Ashe.”
“But we don’t know if Ashe is dead,” The Minister objected.
“We don’t know that he isn’t,” MI-6 said, “And it’s far better than telling the world he may still be at large. If he resurfaces, we’ll deal with him ourselves.”
“Then you are seconding the Chief’s motion, MI-6?” The Minister asked. The older gentleman nodded.
“Then the matter is put to a vote; all in favour?” The motion passed unanimously but for his vote; the Minister had never doubted that it would.
“And what of Colonel Jude’s status?” the Minister asked.
“Colonel Jude’s men will set up a hidden base overlooking the Ship,” the Chairman said, “And monitor the situation in case either he or Gabriel Ashe re-emerges.”
The Solicitor asked, “How long would you intend on keeping them out there?”
“Until Jude is recovered,” the Chairman said, “Or until it can safely be presumed that he and Ashe are dead.”
“On to the next item of business,” The Minister continued, “Madame Minister?” On everyone’s consoles the image shifted to a minor montage of shots from the Roswell crash of 1947, images of the mimetic metal, its chemical signature and images of the lab work that led to its synthesis.
“What we are looking at is the first parcel of successfully Human-engineered polymimetic metal,” The British Minister began, “By the use of different electrical currents we can induce three states in the metal: plastic, inert and liquid. With the application of electrical
current one, the metal becomes plastic in texture and can be shaped into whatever form we need. When electrical current two is applied for a set period of time, the metal will become inert and remain locked in its current shape. If damaged, reapplication of the plasticization current will revert the shaped metal to its undamaged shape. The metal can be completely reset and reshaped into a new configuration by turning it into a liquid, through the application of electrical current three.” As she spoke, images of the testing of the finished metal were shown on their consoles.
“Needless to say,” the British Minister said, “The practical applications of this metal are nearly limitless…” New images appeared on their screens and the British Minister began discussing them. But even as they listened to the presentation they were all still concerned with the Ship, with Gabriel Ashe and with the missing Colonel Jude.
♦♦♦
Things had started falling apart twenty hours earlier, after the door sealed between him and Ashe. Jude stood there one long moment, dumbly stunned that Ashe had been able to work the door mechanism. Jude had no idea what any of the symbols meant and if he was to wrap this up quickly he had no time to learn. Among the equipment he carried was an aerosol bottle of chemical compound designed precisely for the purpose of defeating keypad locks. He sprayed the aerosol on the keypad. Instantly, five of the keys fluoresced with green smudges, which were obviously fingerprints. The good news was that Jude now knew which keys Ashe had pushed. The bad news was he had no idea of the sequence. Each key had only been entered once; that was some help, limiting the number of possible combinations. The keys tainted with Ashe’s fingerprints were spread out across the keypad in such a way that Jude suspected there were deliberate rows and columns involved in the logical process. But did the alien text read from right to left, left to right, or did it read vertically? Jude wished he had at least some inkling of what the alien symbols meant. He knew the circles represented numbers and the runes either syllabic sets or whole concepts, but that gave him little by way of actual insight; five keys, too many possibilities. Jude flipped open his mini console and held it in one hand, using the other to enter the numbers. Each failed sequence was written down on his console, each symbol represented by numbers one through five. And so it went until the door finally unlocked, allowing him to continue the hunt.
Another short hall was beyond the second door, which rolled shut behind Jude as he crossed its threshold. Jude quickened his pace. The burnished gold of the corridor curved outwards to a large vaulted ceiling. Jude found himself standing on a balcony overlooking another large, round chamber below. Twin spiral ramps snaked their way gently down the sides of the balcony to the deck. In the center of the chamber beneath him Jude witnessed a towering sculpture, intricate in its beauty and hard to look at for all its alien geometry. Jude descended the ramp. There were no visible exits and no sign of Gabriel Ashe. Ringing the chamber in a definite horseshoe was a deep, wide channel. The two ends of the large “U” bordered the ramps down from the upper level. Jude looked around. The channels were barred by irises not unlike the one that guarded the lift car tube in the Pyramid. The familiarity to the lift tube and the general atmosphere of the chamber made Jude suspect this was a transit station. And as he approached the platform, a transport car shot out of the far end of the channel, racing around the back of the track to stop neatly in front of him.
Jude dropped a small beacon transmitter next to the bizarre alien sculpture and switched on a locator band on his wrist. The beacon would hopefully be able to lead him back. Jude was going forward, following Gabriel Ashe. He stepped into the gold-floored, transparent-walled transit car. The doors shut seamlessly as they had in the lift tube. The car began moving, quickly picking up speed. There were no seats, but Jude felt no inertial shift as the car shot down the tunnel.
♦♦♦
The last two days had been sheer hell for Colonel Bloom. While Colonel Jude had been laying siege to the Church of the United Trinity, Bloom had been trapped on base overseeing salvage and rescue operations. She wanted to be by her daughter’s side; Laura was expected to come out of sedation in the next couple of days. She would likely be sent home to convalesce until her lung replacement surgery was scheduled, pending the outcome of the cloning procedure. Bloom’s place was with her daughter and she couldn’t go. The Ship Survey Expedition was on indefinite hold and all Bloom could do was play base commander while waiting for everything to settle.
Bloom was jogging down the track that ran partway around the Ship. This late in the year the sun was barely a glimmer on the horizon as she made her morning run. The Ship was luminous in the dark and the Shipsong still rang its chorus through the Preserve. Bloom stopped in mid-run just to listen. It sounded at once hypnotic, mournful, triumphant, divine, eerie, above all else inviting. It was omnipresent but never the type of sound that would fade into the background. How could it, when it was so alien? And it was a sound that Bloom realized may be as close as she ever got to returning to the Ship. Bloom leaned against the chain link fence, staring down at the Ship. She couldn’t help the tears in her eyes.
The madness, the insanity that the world was still cleaning up after couldn’t be blamed solely on the Ship. But although the violence may have died down, the hysteria wasn’t over; far from it. It had simply changed forums to the political arena. Now jowl-shaking, sanctimonious politicians were dictating stopgap and reactionary policies about the Ship, saying the whole damn thing should be re-buried, cordoned off, nuked, whatever, so long as mankind never went near it again. It was wrong. If the world turned its back on the Ship then Mark, the troops at her base, the innocents around the world…they would all have died for nothing. She could only hope that cooler heads would prevail and that—the sudden chime of her linx broke her chain of thought. She slipped her headset into her ear, toggling the “connect” button.
“Colonel Bloom here,” she said.
“Colonel,” came the response, “This is Doctor Kodo.”
“Hello Doctor,” Bloom replied, “What can I do for you?”
“Colonel, I just went into my lab to look over the tissue samples I’d taken from the lift iris and…are you accessed to a viewer right now?”
“Audio only,” Bloom replied, “I’m out for my run and I left the viewer boom in my quarters.” There was a pause, apparently as Kodo digested this.
“How soon can you get over here?” he asked at last.
“Give me about twenty minutes,” she said, “Why?”
“You’ll have to see it to believe it.”
When Bloom arrived, Kodo was showing Cole something on a microscope.
“Colonel Bloom,” Kodo said, “You’ll want to have a look at this.” Bloom looked into a Petrie dish that held a small, greyish sample sealed under its lid.
“This is a sample of the lift tube iris that Doctor Kodo took on our last trip into the Ship,” Cole supplied.
“What am I looking for?” Bloom asked.
“There’s still cellular activity going on,” Kodo replied.
“Is that unusual?”
“Certain cells can survive quite some time without their parent organisms, as long as they’re in some kind of nutrient-suspension fluid,” Cole explained, “These cells aren’t in any nutrient-suspension fluid at all.”
“At the very least some of these cells should be dead or dying. None of them are,” Kodo said, changing the slides under the scope, “This is actually a cross-section taken from the tissue sample I acquired. The only change I’ve observed is that the outermost cells in the tissue samples have developed a hardened membrane, essentially sealing in and protecting the rest of the cells in the sample.”
“And it’s been…what? Three days since you took these samples?” Bloom asked.
“Just about,” Kodo said, claiming another Petrie dish from his collection. He switched slides again. “What do you notice about this sample?”
“It’s almost identical,” Bloom said, hoping she sounded authoritative,
“But I honestly don’t know what I’m looking for.”
“This is the first sample from the lift tube iris I took,” Kodo said, “From the Ship Survey Expedition’s first trip down into the Ship. This tissue sample is still alive.”
“There’s been no tissue degradation,” Cole said, “Again, other than the hardened outer layer of cells there have been no real discernible changes. We’ve witnessed some cells dying, but they are almost always replaced by subsequent cell division.”
“How are the cells still alive?” Bloom asked.
“We don’t know,” Kodo admitted, “And what’s more, have a look at the cells themselves. Notice how uniform they are in appearance, size and shape? That’s almost unheard of in nature. Go up another couple of magnification levels and have a good look.” Magnification levels were one of the few things about a biology microscope Bloom knew how to work. She switched up by two lenses.
“Holy shit,” She said. Even she could see what was going on. Each of the cells had a near-perfect hexagon shape, interlocked uniformly throughout the sample.
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