by Bob Mauldin
“Well, the computer on the shuttle did say it was over thirty-eight hundred feet long,” Gayle said, following her two friends along.
Simon began pacing along the next wall until they came to four more doors. “This area should coincide with the hanger bay we arrived in. How many shuttles do these folks need at one time?”
“These doors do look like the one on the other side,” Kitty commented. “That one should be an elevator if the little panel is the same, but these are separate.” She walked up to the nearer of the three remaining doors and knocked on it to hear the clang. “Why are there three separate doors over here and just one on the other side?” She gripped the wheel in its middle and spun the wheel until it stopped. “For once, I’m opening the door for you, Simon. Be my guest, but be careful.” She bowed facetiously and swept her hand in the direction of the new room.
Simon shook his head, an unreadable smile on his lips and turned to the new room. He instantly dubbed the three ships they found on that side of the bay ‘fighters,’ each having its own launch bay. And what beauties these little ships were! Sleek and deadly in appearance, they looked for all the world like Vipers out of the old TV show Battlestar Galactica. Noting the open cockpits, Simon itched to sit in one and see how it felt. Acceding to his desire to find out for sure if anyone else was aboard, he passed on the idea. Reluctantly, he closed the door and began to count paces again while Kitty made a notation on her pad. They passed the door they had tentatively identified as an elevator and kept walking.
Arriving back at their starting point, they took stock. “We are in a rectangular room about two thousand, three hundred feet long, by about six hundred feet wide not including the shuttle bays,” Kitty read in the dim light. “This end has two bays with seven ships: three shuttles, one weird one, and three fighters. There are two banks of three elevators each at this end of the room and one each at the far end. No other doors that we saw. Correct?”
“That’s the way I figure it, Dear. The big question is why does such a huge space exist? Twenty-five feet to the ceiling give us a lot of square footage.” Simon looked thoughtful.
“Something like thirty-four million, plus, square feet of space.” Kitty looked up from another page of the legal pad she was fast running through.
“Are we ready to take a ride upstairs?” Simon asked.
“Not me,” Kitty announced. “At least, not yet. I don’t know about you two, but I need to get a bite to eat. And I am in serious need of a bathroom. Not necessarily in that order, either. Why don’t you two go to the Jeep and let me take care of other things for a minute, okay?”
“Hold on and I’ll join you,” Gayle said. “I don’t think we should run around here alone. Simon can fix us something to eat and I’ll get the necessaries.” Minutes later, she walked back out of their shuttle carrying the porta-potty. “Simon will be okay for a few minutes. Let’s find a corner. I guess I’m glad this happened on a camping trip, or we’d be in deep ... trouble,” she finished lamely. Her resolution to quit cussing often caused her to have to stop and think before she said something.
Returning to the Jeep, the two women found that Simon had lunch ready. “Cold cuts, cheese, crackers, and pop,” he said. “Comfort food.”
The two women took their time, dragging the meal out until Simon got up in frustration and began to pace toward the shuttle cockpit. Gayle looked at Kitty and raised one eyebrow. Kitty frowned and just nodded her head once. Gayle wiped her hands on her jeans in lieu of the napkins Simon had forgotten and went after him.
“Hey, Simon,” she said when she found him. “Let’s talk a minute, okay?”
“Sure,” he replied, idly running his hands over the arms of the pilot’s chair.
“I’m really not up to any more exploring today,” Gayle confessed. “And Kitty isn’t either. She told me when we went ... Anyway, I’ve had enough shocks for one day. I’d suggest we take a nap or something,” Gayle advised, motioning Simon to follow her. “Look at your watch. It’s almost midnight,” she said over her shoulder, leading Simon back to the Jeep. “I know I’ve had a long day. And if any aliens show up, it’s a safe bet that they will wake us up. We can close the ramp on the shuttle and get that much extra warning. It does make a racket opening up. The more I think about it, the more sure I am,” she said, getting into the front seat and reclining it a bit. “Besides, don’t you want to be at your best if that alien was wrong and we finally do meet his friends? You go close the door, Simon. It’s lights out for me.”
No alarms went off, no aliens woke them up at blaster-point. But the lighter gravity did make for some interesting dreams. Simon stretched the kinks out of his back and legs, grateful for the sleeping bags and air mattress. “Okay ladies, rise and shine,” Simon called. “If you can’t shine, then just rise. I’ll be right back.”
Visions of alien pilots herding this shuttle around for hours on end made him go back to the cockpit, roll of paper in hand. “Even aliens gotta go sometime, damn it.” Rapping on a blank section of bulkhead, he finally found what he was looking for by putting pressure on a section of plating the size of his hand. The door receded about an inch, then slid silently into the wall. The facilities thus revealed were strange, to be sure, but keeping his new mantra in mind, he made them work.
Feeling more than a bit pleased with himself, Simon strolled back to the Jeep. “Guess what I found, ladies. Here’s a clue,” he teased, aiming the roll of toilet paper at the back of Gayle’s head.
Gayle, closer to being awake, got the picture first. “Cool! I don’t guess you can imagine how I felt last night. I had dreams of being caught with my pants around my ankles by a bunch of snickering aliens. Where is it? Kitty! Potty call!” Groaning, Gayle crawled out of her sleeping bag and limped around. “My foot’s asleep! Shit! Kitty! Let’s go! Your man has made himself useful and found a bathroom!” No one said anything about her lapse into profanity.
Returning to the Jeep to find breakfast almost ready, the two women smiled at each other. “I guess we’ll keep him around for a while,” Kitty said. “He does have his moments.”
Breakfast finished, Simon strapped his ever-present pistol on his hip, and said, “Let’s go, ladies. The elevators await. Kitty, got your pad?” At her nod, he set off down the bay and opened the door. When the ramp stabilized, the three of them went to the still open bay door. “We’re going to have to come up with names to call things around here until we get set straight by whoever is aboard. Although, at this late date, I’m beginning to believe that we really are alone. Someone should have come to see why a shuttle docked and no one got off if there was anyone left aboard. Shuttles, fighters, launch bays, and the big empty room, so far. Okay?”
“Any preference as to which elevator we want to use in the big empty room, boss?” Gayle questioned frivolously.
“Nope. The closest one will do,” Simon said, pointedly ignoring Gayle’s tone. “They all had the same strip inside the door. I counted them. Apparently this ship has eighteen levels. I hope we don’t have far to go before we locate someone.”
With Kitty scribbling furiously, the three stepped into the elevator. “Press the top button, Gayle. That’s the obvious place to start. Not that obvious means anything in a situation like this, but it’s as good a place as any.” Simon didn’t really expect to find much on the top level, he hadn’t seen anything that related to windows as they neared the immense ship, but his ingrained training made him want to start at the top and work his way down.
Gayle pressed the top button on the strip, and they felt the weight of a swift ascent as the chamber moved up. The door opened to more red light and still no occupants. They stepped out into an empty corridor and stood there uncertainly. Closed doors met their gaze along the corridor with a door just a few feet to their left and stretched off to their right and ending in a bulkhead door. “I really expected to find someone here,” Kitty said peevishly. “Regardless of what that alien said. How could everybody on
a ship this big die of a plague? Can it really be that fatal?”
“Anything’s possible, Kitty,” Gayle said. “There are documented instances of entire tribes dying of smallpox back in the eighteen hundreds. From infected blankets issued by the Army if I recall.” She shivered. “It wasn’t an easy death, either. It’s possible that whatever killed these people was extremely effective. But if that’s true, there should be bodies, right?”
Kitty froze. “Thanks for that mental image, girlfriend.” She turned left and went to the door in the bulkhead and inspected it. “No airtight seals here, guys. Just one of those plates like in the shuttle. Well, here goes nothing.”
Putting her words into action, Kitty pressed the plate and watched the door slide into the wall. Ahead of her, the corridor, some twelve feet wide, stretched off into the distance. “Simon, start pacing off distances, please,” Kitty asked as she began walking down the corridor. “We go as far as this hall will let us, then start looking into rooms, I guess. Does anybody else notice how much we’re saying that? ‘I guess?’ Quite a bit, I guess.” She giggled and that set Gayle off.
“Not this early, please, Kitty,” Gayle chuckled.
The corridor they traveled ended at a t-type intersection. “Five hundred feet, Kitty,” Simon offered. “You do realize that the length of this section of the ship is in addition to the big empty room downstairs? Down below? Whatever. This section adds to the length of the ship as a whole.”
Kitty noted the figure on the map. “That makes it twenty-eight hundred feet long, so far,” she said. “We’ve passed ten cross-corridors. Let’s go left,” Kitty said.
An hour later, the three were more confused than ever. “This whole floor is mostly what looks like weapons sections with a few sets of living quarters for personnel. Dozens of rooms, and not one of them look like they have been used recently. No personal possessions, no pictures, no nothing. I really don’t get it. Could it be empty? How can someone lose a ship this big?” Simon sat down on a bed that he would have killed for the night before: a metal shelf extruded from the wall covered with a thin, yet amazingly comfortable mattress.
“At least we won’t have a problem finding bathrooms again,” Kitty quipped. “This really bothers me, though. What if this thing really is empty? Let’s go down to the next level.”
As the threesome headed back toward the elevators, Gayle said. “Remember how the computer said this thing was thirty-eight hundred feet long? I want to know about the missing thousand feet.”
“Probably the engine room, or section or whatever,” Simon said. “About the last place we’d be likely to find survivors, if any. Which I’m beginning to believe less likely by the minute.”
The second level proved to be simply sleeping rooms, exercise rooms, judging by the odd-looking equipment scattered around the floors, large rooms with over-sized tables and benches that the trio thought were eating areas or gathering places. After a more than cursory, less than complete, inspection, they moved to the third level.
This time the elevator doors opened onto a larger corridor than the other two. Kitty’s heartbeat went up the instant she stepped into the corridor. There was a feel to this level that she hadn’t sensed on the first two. She watched Simon’s hand brush his pistol, an automatic response to an unknown situation, the need to know that one’s weapon was close at hand. She recognized the incongruity of his response and snorted quietly, an action that didn’t go unnoticed by Simon.
“So, what’s the drill here, boss?” Kitty deliberately deferred to Simon’s expertise. She had listened to more than one story of recon in enemy territory and was unsure whether she was glad she was unarmed or not.
Simon glanced around him. The abnormally wide corridor, compared to the only other two they had seen so far, stretched out ahead of them like the other two, but where corridors branched off leading to blocks of housing and communal areas, this one seemed to have a more ... managerial ... air to it. Straight and direct it ran, with only two cross corridors until it reached a set of double-doors that were the first of their kind so far.
The two previous decks had rooms with doors marked by different symbols above a series of other figures painted beside the door and just above a plate that, when pressed, opened the door. These doors had their designations fronted directly on them although the now-familiar hand-sized plate was still set beside each door.
A more thorough investigation of this particular level turned up rooms dedicated to things the three humans could only guess at. In some rooms, consoles sat dark beneath blank panels or screens, in others, the control panels flickered with electronic life, the displays scrolling along faster than the human eye could comfortably follow. Other rooms gave no clue to their reasons for being that the three could identify.
Gayle placed her hand on the now-common panel found beside most doors, expecting another room full of more questionable items. The door slid into the wall revealing a sight that caused her to hesitate. Her eyes flickered around the room taking in as much as she could without passing over the threshold. She finally managed to break away from the scene and turned to find Simon just coming out of a room across the corridor. “Simon, come here,” she said excitedly. “This whole level has been work-spaces and labs and stuff. This room looks like a secretary’s office. Maybe we’re getting close?”
Simon glanced into the room and shrugged. “Could be. Extra chairs along the walls. A desk guarding the only other door in the room. Maybe the Captain’s outer office.”
Kitty turned up at Simon’s elbow, having finished looking over the room she had been assigned. “What have we got?” she asked peeking around the doorjamb.
“A mystery,” Simon replied. “What did you find?”
Kitty shrugged. “Nothing earth-shattering. I got one of the consoles to show me a few star systems. One of ‘em might be ours. The sixth planet was ringed, but it showed ten planets instead of nine.”
Gayle bowed at the waist and waved Kitty into the room. “Here’s our mystery. All the rooms we’ve seen so far have been dedicated to something specific, like your last room and the star systems. This room looks like it was designed for people to just sit in.”
Kitty walked in and stood beside the desk. She stared around the room then sat in the over-tall chair behind the desk. She ran her hands over the surface of the desk, along the sides, and under places she could easily reach. She turned a bemused look on her husband and friend. “This is a receptionist’s desk. I don’t know how yet, but she has a way to let her boss know who’s here. He’d be in there.” She thumbed over her shoulder at the door behind her. “This is a waiting room.”
Gayle grinned. “Told ya so. I’ve been in enough of ‘em.”
The next series of rooms, after figuring out the secretary’s door opener, proved to be a suite. And just as frustrating as all the other rooms had been. “What do these people have against personal effects?” Kitty complained. “Not one personal item anywhere. No pictures, recordings, clothing, games, toys, nothing. It’s as if there was never anyone aboard, but we have the alien’s story that there were more crew. And the computer said so, too.”
“Which we haven’t heard from in a while,” Gayle commented. “Computer?”
“Attending.” The same voice came from apparently empty air.
Gayle looked around the room she and her friends stood in, sat down on what was obviously a lounger, and said, “I’m not moving until I get some answers.” She glared at her friends. “We need to know things, damn it! How many people are needed to operate this vessel?”
The response, while immediate, wasn’t one any of them wanted to hear. “It requires one hundred thirty-seven crewmen to operate the engines and navigation systems. Seventy-five are assigned to sensor duty and record and input data to the computer continuously. One hundred are assigned to routine shipboard maintenance. Another seventy-five serve as cooks and other shipboard tasks. Five hundred thirty-one crewmen are assigned to
operate the factory section. The total complement of this vessel is nine hundred and eighteen.”
Simon sank into a recliner type chair, stunned at the number. Gayle’s mouth had dropped open during the recitation, and Kitty slowly sat down on the lounger opposite Gayle. Simon asked a question in turn. “What do you mean by factory section?”
“This vessel’s purpose is to go to a star system, preferably with an asteroid belt, manufacture the materials needed by a colony and deliver those goods to the planet selected for colonization. When the colonists arrive, basic shelter will already exist, and all other necessities will be stockpiled for their use.”
“So your builders were going to colonize our system?” Kitty asked angrily.
“No. Colonization directives dictate that only planets with non-sentient life are suitable for colonization. This vessel went off-course after the plague struck.”
Kitty had climbed out of the chair and was roaming the suite listening to the computer’s answers. She opened a door, stared for a few seconds and a smile flowed across her face. She leaned against the door-frame, one foot cocked over the other, arms crossed, and gazed around the room. Images out of Star Trek flashed through her mind as she took in the scene. Rectangular rather than circular like the Enterprise, this bridge had nine different stations, each composed of a pedestal-style control panel in front of a chair. Two faced the front of the room, if the front was defined by the several huge screens showing off-colored pictures of the Earth. The rest all managed to find space along the sides of the room, leaving one other chair set slightly apart and above the others. She stood away from the jamb and walked into the heart and soul of the titanic structure they were in.
Kitty was studying the view screens when she heard Simon and Gayle come in. All screens needed to be color-adjusted, but the center one was very obviously Earth. Florida and the Gulf of Mexico were proof positive. “We wondered what had happened to you. Whatcha got?” Gayle asked.