The Plague Forge [ARC] (47 page)

No response came. Not even static. She swallowed. Perhaps the curved hallway was an architectural feature after all, and they were under acceleration. For all she knew Tim was already a million kilometers behind them and fading by the second. Tim, Skyler, Earth … Everything.

Tania felt suddenly buried under the arrogance and the lack of scientific rigor that marked their forays into this place. In urgency real or imagined they’d acted no better than the explorers who’d entered so many sacred tombs in Egypt hundreds of years earlier, tracking in sand and grime, grabbing at every shiny object with their bare, sweaty hands.
We’re fumbling about here, proving ourselves idiots.
She recalled Skyler’s sarcastic remark that the Builders were playing some kind of elaborate hoax out of sheer intergalactic boredom, and suddenly she could imagine it, too. Imagine them snickering somewhere behind these walls.

“Is he gone?” Vanessa asked.

The words snapped Tania back to the present. The sounds of alien laughter in her mind faded. “We need to get closer to the hull. But which way?”

“I’ve no idea,” Vanessa admitted.

Tania considered the choices. “The curved hall would keep us at this position on the length of the ship,” she said. “But it might get us away from whatever is causing the interference. Closer to the hull, away from the key room. I say we try that first, then come back.”

At Vanessa’s emphatic nod, Tania tucked her damaged helmet under one arm and stepped into the curved tunnel.

The walls and ceiling resembled what Tania considered “classic” Builder material: dark gray, nonreflective in the extreme, and laced with a fine pattern of geometric grooves. The floor differed only because its grooves shimmered with a dim white light. Tania recalled her theory that the lit floors marked the direction of apparent gravity, and started to like the idea more and more. Given that this direction would change often in a mobile starship as it accelerated, decelerated, or cruised, she could see how such an indicator would be useful.

The illusion of gravity via spin became evident when the curved hallway always seemed to be curving upward at the same gentle pace. Had they been under acceleration, the hall would have quickly become a slope impossible to climb. For this at least Tania felt grateful. She mentally rendered the image of Earth floating off to one side, just where it would have been if she were aboard Anchor Station, and found surprising comfort there. “So we’ve spun up,” she said, ostensibly for Vanessa’s benefit but mostly because she found it easier to think if she talked aloud. “We’re at Earth-normal gravity it seems, breathing air that approximates our planet’s atmosphere. Even dressed as we are, the temperature is comfortable. The odds are astronomical that the Builders live by the exact same parameters we do, so I think we can assume they’re doing this for us.”

Vanessa said nothing. They strolled along in the near darkness, barefoot and dressed in wholly inappropriate fashion for first contact. Tania suddenly recalled a campy movie poster from the presensory Golden Age,
Earth Girls Are Easy,
and could not suppress her smile.
Sorry, Mom. You always taught me to rely on my mind and yet, alas.
“Decorum and modesty will be your greatest ally in staving off those drawn only to appearance,” her mother had said on Tania’s sixteenth birthday, forcing her to wear a simple blue sari instead of the short gold dress she’d pined for. It hadn’t helped. Tania knew even then why boys and even most men looked at her the way they did, and the blue sari if anything heightened their lustful stares. Only the loose jumpsuits worn in space ever seemed to dampen such looks, though she liked to think that had been due to the company of scientists and thinkers.

“The question I have,” Tania went on, “is why now? Why not spin up when the first object was installed? Or when all five were present?”

“Maybe it has something to do with what Tim saw. The thing those Elevator cords were lifting.”

Tania hadn’t considered that and she liked the theory instantly. Whether Skyler played a role in it or not, whatever those cords were lifting to space had come from the ground. A synchronization of air and gravitational needs made at least some sense. “We’ll know soon enough, I suspect, but I’d sure like to hear from Tim first.”
If anything just to know he’s still there, waiting.

She tried the comm again, heard nothing, and kept walking.

Ahead an intersecting hallway came into view. Tania slowed and strained her senses. It took a moment to be sure her eyes were not playing tricks, but soon she felt sure there was a dim pulsating light coming from within. A glance at Vanessa indicated the same realization in her eyes. Tania took the lead and crept until she could peer around the corner.

The tunnel spanned only a few meters before exiting into a larger space. Much, much larger. One slow step at a time, Tania crept forward until she stood on a pathway within a place that defied explanation.

“My God,” she whispered.

Nothing in human experience could have prepared her for the scale of it, much less the contents.

She stood on the floor of a gigantic cylindrical room. Not a room, she corrected herself: a world. Multiple worlds.

Tania closed her eyes and forced herself to look again as a scientist, taking in details with clinical detachment.

The far end she guessed was at least two kilometers distant, and the diameter must be at least five hundred meters, meaning it represented a hollow portion of the Key Ship’s hull.

There were two distinct halves, split lengthwise down the center of the cylinder by no physical barrier Tania could see. On the bottom half within which she stood were hundreds of aura-tower-like structures protruding upward. Their positions seemed to be wholly random, though there were square areas every hundred meters or so that were completely devoid of the structures.

Snaking throughout this forest of dark sentinels were thousands of conduits, varying in size from perhaps a meter diameter to as thin as a space elevator cord. Cables or pipes she couldn’t be sure. Multicolored, though all muted, and some glowed faintly. Most protruded from the same floor as the towers, and weaved around the silent obelisks and reaching upward like tentacles until they touched that invisible yet starkly obvious barrier that separated this side of the space from the other.

The other.

Tania swallowed. The other half of the space, starting a few hundred meters above her head and continuing all the way to the far end, were what appeared to be cotton clouds. A hazy murk of swirling white fog, filling exactly one-half of the cylinder as if someone had inserted a glass sheet down the center and flooded one side with a thick mist. The cloud was not, she noted, an even and organic thing, but rather a segmented construct. Each segment spanned a few hundred meters in length, marked only by the perfect point of division between one and the next. A thick white cloud here, a thinner gray cloud in the next section down. Farther off, toward the far end of the massive space, Tania could see one section that appeared to have no cloud at all.

She glanced straight up and watched the cloud above her swirl like smoke against a pane of glass.

“Tania,” Vanessa whispered. The woman had come to stand next to her, and Tania realized belatedly they were holding hands, the pair of them subconsciously seeking something familiar in the face of such an alien view. “Tania,” the immune repeated, “what is it?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“It’s like those towers are holding up a ceiling of clouds.”

Tania’s view still remained held by the chaotic cloud pattern directly above her head. She was about to say something, but before the words formed she glimpsed something through the mist, and paused.

She knew, then, and smiled. “Not a ceiling,” she said, and tilted her head on one side. “We’re spinning, remember? Think of the entire outer edge as a floor.”

Vanessa mimicked the tilt of Tania’s head, and gasped as realization dawned on her, too.

“Those clouds aren’t being held to a ceiling,” she went on, “they’re pools. I think the towers, and all those pipes, are what created them.
Are
creating them.”

“Incredible,” Vanessa whispered.

“And look there.” Tania pointed directly above them, and kept pointing until the mists parted again, just enough to reveal small disks of green.

“What are those?” Vanessa asked.

Tania squeezed her friend’s hand. “Treetops.”

The mists grew and receded, sometimes revealing as much as half of a grove of tall, dark green pines.

A minute passed in near-absolute silence. Tania gradually became aware of a constant background noise that reminded her of the air processors on the Platz-built space stations.

Abruptly Tania remembered their pressing need. “Let’s go back,” she said. “This clearly leads toward the nose of the ship, away from Tim. And I suspect it would take weeks to explore.”

“I agree.”

Tania took the lead again, ducking back into the ring hallway and continuing onward. The passage curved along for another twenty meters before she spied another junction. This one ran aft, toward Tim.

She pulled to a stop before the corner and leaned to peer within. Disappointment registered first: The passage spanned only thirty or forty meters before ending at a blank wall.

Tania almost jumped out of her skin at the sudden hand on her shoulder. Vanessa pressed in behind her, taking in the view as well. “Perhaps there’s one of those hidden iris doors—”

Tania held up a hand. “Shh …”

Motion, a shift in the shape of the walls at the far end of the tunnel, became evident. Then a sound, too. She couldn’t place it at first, couldn’t relate it to anything she’d ever heard before, but as it grew louder the noise reminded her of the sudden expansion of elastic material, like a balloon being inflated, only a much deeper note. The motion grew and pushed toward Tania like a slow-moving wave.

“What is that?” Vanessa took a step back, fear in her voice.

Tania stood frozen, her fingertips white as she clutched at the corner of the wall. She could see it now. Depressions formed along the length of the short tunnel, like the half-dome cavity that had appeared to accept the objects they’d brought, only these were deeper, more complex. Portions of the wall simply recessed, creating new spaces.

Vanessa ducked away as the wave finally reached their end of the hall, but Tania couldn’t bring herself to look away. Not three meters from her she saw a portion of the tunnel sink inward. A square section, albeit with heavily rounded corners, stretching almost floor to ceiling. A few dozen similar openings ran the length of the hallway.

Whatever the purpose of all this was—these newly formed rooms, the gigantic biome chamber they’d just left—she had no doubt the alien mass within which she stood was altering itself, preparing itself, for something massive.

New light began to fill the hall. Purple in hue, now, and again starting at the far end and slowly marching toward her. The glow came from within the newly formed spaces along the hall. Some were more intense than others, and some shifted more to the red.

The space nearest her began to emit a bright, pure purple light.

Despite every instinct she had to flee, to hide, to escape, Tania Sharma crept forward and glanced in. The opening recessed only a few centimeters before expanding into something like a room. The space was egg-shaped, three meters in radius and perhaps five meters tall.

Inset within the floor sat a shimmering purple orb. Stared at directly the pearlescent surface looked as solid as marble. When Tania shifted her gaze to the walls or floor of the room, though, the glowing object seemed almost liquid.

“Tania,” Vanessa called out, her voice at once a whisper and a shout. “I hear something.”

“I know. That stretching sound. Come see this—”

“No, behind us. I hear voices.”

At first he’d thought his own little craft had started to move. Tim had panicked, groping wildly for the attitude controls, only to find everything in place, all systems nominal.

The motion that had caught his eye was the Key Ship itself, rolling like a basking whale. Under spin.

All he could do was stare at it in disbelief. Why under spin? Why now? Had Tania found a control of some sort, a way to turn on some gravity?

From what he knew of the key room’s layout, gravity would be something of a burden. He glanced down at his feet and closed his eyes, grappling with all the puzzle pieces that faced him, frustrated that they seemed to be piling up faster than he could wrap his mind around them.

Five more minutes passed. Once again, and with a growing dread for the task, Tim flipped on the microphone.

“Tania, come in. Please respond. Please, I …”

He clicked off, hating how feeble his own voice sounded.

In the miserable silence that followed he passed his time entertaining options. One of the displays in front of him indicated the tiny ERV had another sixteen hours of air, but that didn’t matter much. Tania and Vanessa would surely run out sooner, and he’d be damned if he was going to sit out here while they suffocated.

Asking for assistance felt like admitting to his own helplessness, but there seemed no other choice. A sigh escaped his lips as he tapped the comm’s shortcut link for Black Level. Above him, the craft’s tiny reception dish swung away from the hulking mass of the Key Ship and began to seek out a signal from the former endcap of Anchor Station. He wouldn’t hear Tania now unless she managed to get outside.

The twenty-second wait felt like a lifetime, and then the speaker crackled.

A flat, monotone voice came through. “Please state the nature of your emergency.”

“Huh?” Tim said.

“Please state the nature of your emergency, hu-man.”

Tim shook his head. “Is this Greg?”

“Please. Greg is not this good at voices. I’ll fetch him if you want, um, think he popped off to have a wank.”

“Marcus, listen—”

“At your service. What do you need? Pizza? We do deliver but there’s a minimum—”

“Knock it off,” Tim growled, surprising himself at the anger in his voice. “It’s an emergency. Stop goofing around and get Zane on the line.”