There were a narrow screen and three tiny keys next to it, as well as two large, round buttons. One was green, one red. The signal colors hadn’t changed their meanings in all this time, had they? If not, then it seemed clear enough. The green button would let them in, and the red one was for the way out. And what was Geralt doing? He was trying to decipher the words on the display.
Boris asked, “Could it be you’re making things more complicated than they need to be?”
“We’ve got to understand the system so we can use it safely.”
“In principle, I agree with you, but here there are exactly two options, in or out. We came from outside and we’re protected against anything inside, so what would happen if I just press the green button?”
He pressed the button.
“Boris, wait, I...,” Geralt said, but it was too late.
A red lamp started blinking rapidly. The blinking slowed, and finally the lamp switched off. The green button was now backlit. Boris looked at the back of his hand. Greater than 260 degrees. It had grown unusually warm. He could withstand more than 280 degrees only for a short period.
“Okay?” Boris asked, pointing at the inner door.
Jenna nodded.
He pressed against the door and it swung open. White vapor billowed out from the airlock. It appeared to be much colder in the interior of the ship than in the airlock. He had to hold the door open, as there was some kind of automatic closing mechanism, which seemed like a good idea for an airlock. Boris held the door open until the others could get into the ship.
“It’s freezing,” Geralt said, while he read values off the back of his hand, “but the air is breathable. Oxygen content is at fifteen percent. The air is unusually dry, however. Humidity is almost zero.”
Boris touched the white walls, which were covered with ice. That was why the air was so dry.
“My, how it glitters,” Jenna said. She shined her light on the walls, ceilings, and floors.
“Those are ice crystals covering everything,” Geralt explained.
Jenna knows that, of course, Boris thought. She just thinks it looks pretty.
“I know that, Geralt,” she said. “But isn’t it beautiful?”
Crazy, I can read her thoughts. And again, he started to feel warm. If he wasn’t careful, he’d begin heating up the entire ship.
“The temperature in here is good for Anna and me as it is now,” he said. “We could make it comfortable for you two later.”
“If we don’t figure out how to control the system, we’ll have to keep our suits on no matter what,” Jenna said.
They were standing in a long, curving corridor that went in two directions.
“What now?” Geralt asked.
“We need to find the command center,” Jenna replied.
“But where’s that?” Anna asked.
“I think it’d be at the top.”
“That’s obvious, Geralt, but which way is up?” Anna asked.
The corridor went in two directions, without a noticeable change up or down.
“Let’s split up,” Geralt said. “I’ll go to the left.”
“And I’ll go with you,” Anna said. She turned around, looked at Boris briefly, and gave him a quick wink.
“Okay, then I guess we’re going to the right,” Jenna said as she started off in that direction.
Boris followed her. But after only a short time it became clear that their direction was starting to go down. Should he say something? Then they would just turn around and catch up with the others. No, he wasn’t ready to go back yet.
The corridor got a little wider, so they could walk side by side. Now and then their arms touched by chance. Probably the passageway was winding in a downward spiral along the outer wall of the ship. It might take half an hour for them to cover the 60 or so meters at the current angle of decline.
After three minutes they found a door in the corridor wall on the left. It had a knob as a handle. Boris shook it and tried to turn it, but the door was locked. To the left was a control panel that looked very similar to the one in the airlock. It had only one button, however.
“Do you notice something?” Jenna asked.
Yes, that I’m unbelievably happy to be here with you, Boris thought. Instead, he said, “What’s that?”
“The control unit doesn’t have any ice on it.”
“Why, you’re right. It must have its own heater.”
“But that means that the founders must’ve expected that the ship would have to be stationary for a long time.”
“Maybe, but does that help us somehow?”
“If they stored it here on purpose, then they should’ve also planned on someone using it again at some point,” Jenna explained. “That could mean they left behind some instructions on how to use the equipment.”
That made sense. But could someone deduce all that just from the fact that the panel wasn’t covered with ice? Maybe the heater was just there to protect it from moisture getting into the panel. But he didn’t want to contradict her. “That’d be great,” Boris said.
Then he pressed the button—and jumped backward when the door opened. Purely as a reflex, he pulled Jenna with him away from the door. She fell against his chest and started to lose her footing.
He held her steady by the shoulders. “Sorry... It just surprised me,” he said.
“Very heroic of you.” Jenna laughed, but it was a different laugh that he’d never heard from her before. Maybe she had been taken by surprise, too.
“Come on,” she said as she walked up to the door opening. “Let’s take a look.”
In front of them was a dark, rectangular hole that would require a leap of faith for him to enter. But as Jenna walked through the door frame, the lighting was automatically activated. They entered a large room, which reminded him of an auditorium. It had a rectangular layout. Only the wall through which they had entered was curved. The room was 5 meters high, 10 meters wide, and 20 meters deep.
The walls were lined from floor to ceiling with shelves holding countless boxes. There were only a few empty slots. Jenna tried to pull out one of the boxes. She succeeded only after pushing it inward first by accident. That design probably protected the boxes from moving all over the room in zero gravity.
She placed the box on the floor. It didn’t have a lid, so she could see its contents right away. “Bags. Lots of bags,” she said.
Jenna took one of them out and held it up against the light. The bag’s material was transparent. It contained a flaky, brown substance. “What is this stuff?” she asked.
Carefully she shook the bag so that its contents settled at the bottom, and then she tore it open at the top. With her gloved finger she reached in and took out a few flakes.
“Looks strange,” Boris said. “Some kind of food? Try it.”
Jenna pointed at her helmet. Of course, how unobservant of him.
“May I?” he asked, and she nodded.
He took her hand, scraped the flakes from her finger onto the outer skin of his lips, and then sucked the material through the semipermeable membrane into his mouth. His tongue touched the flakes. They tasted slightly sweet and dissolved in his mouth.
“Seems to be food...” he said, but then stopped suddenly in the middle of his sentence, reached for his chest, and then fell dramatically to the floor. He groaned briefly and then stopped moving.
“Boris, what are you doing?” Jenna said.
When he didn’t react, she knelt and felt for his pulse, which seemed to reassure her. Then she took something that looked like a giant syringe from her toolbelt. She turned him carefully onto his back, took the syringe in her right hand, and raised it into the air.
She isn’t going to jab that thing into my chest, is she? He wasn’t a vampire that needed a stake driven through his heart! He quickly rolled away.
Jenna laughed out loud. “Ha! Now who’s scared, huh?”
He joined in with her laughing. She had seen right through him and pl
ayed right along.
“Please don’t do that again,” she said. “I was really scared until I figured out you were faking.”
She was scared. How nice! She didn’t want to see him die. But he really shouldn’t read anything special into that. Who would be happy to see one of her colleagues die? Her reaction had been completely normal. She put her hand on his shoulder, and it felt like his skin was on fire. Don’t take it away, he thought.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get on with our mission.”
Anyway, she hadn’t suggested going back up to the others, which would be logical if the command center was the most important goal.
He stood up again. They examined some other boxes, but they all appeared to contain food, or at least the essential ingredients to make food. Everything that was stored in this room was probably enough for at least 50 orbital periods. It just wouldn’t have tasted particularly good. In the 12 samples they tested they’d found only three different substances. Either the founders had no taste buds, or there was a machine somewhere that could magically transform the stuff in the bags into edible food.
They continued to make their way down. The next door they came across led into another storage room containing spare parts. Here, however, the shelves had many empty slots. Apparently the founders had unloaded everything that wasn’t usable for the ship. So why hadn’t he ever come across a box like these before? Probably they had all been recycled long ago for their metal.
The third storage room appeared to contain medical supplies. The few remaining boxes all had a red cross on a white background. They inspected only a few of the boxes and found first aid and other medical supplies in them. Could these rooms really be isolated from the rest of the ship? If yes, he and Anna could set up their living quarters here.
They reached the next door together. Jenna pressed the button, but it didn’t open. Boris examined the control panel, but he couldn’t understand the markings.
“Maybe there’s vacuum pressure behind the door,” he said.
“I doubt it,” Jenna said. “Then they wouldn’t have put a door here, but an airlock.”
That was true. There must be some other reason why the door remained closed. There was most likely something stored in there that wasn’t meant for everyone.
“I’m thinking weapons,” Jenna said.
She had the same thought as his own, which made Boris happy again. They decided to continue their search. It took them quite a while to reach the next door. They finally came upon an airlock in the inner wall maybe 20 meters lower.
“Look at this,” Jenna said.
The airlock worked the same way as the one through which they’d entered the ship. The green button let them enter. Jenna closed the outer door and Boris pressed the green button. The red lamp blinked and the breathable air was pumped out. Then the door on the opposite side was opened, and this time Jenna let him enter the room first. Scarcely had he entered when several ceiling lights switched on one after the other. The room was huge.
“Wow,” Boris said. “Not bad.”
The room was almost 20 meters high and appeared to extend across the entire cross-section of the ship. At its center, an approximately two-meter-thick pole ran from the floor to the ceiling. That had to be the connection to the propulsion engines in the rear. The room was empty, and the walls were free of ice. There had never been a breathable atmosphere in here. Probably one of the side walls could open to the outside. Whatever was stored here, it couldn’t have gotten out through the narrow airlock through which they had entered.
Jenna walked across the room. Her boots stirred up dust that had been undisturbed for a long time. Boris looked at the tracks that she left behind but couldn’t hear her footsteps. The low air pressure dampened any sound.
“This must’ve been where they transported the rover,” he said over the radio.
“And this was where they unloaded it,” Jenna said.
Boris walked to her. She was standing in front of a powerful lever that was part of a massive linkage mechanism.
“There’s another over there,” she said, pointing.
He went to the other side of the mechanism. The wall was barely curved here. They must be about in the center of the ship’s hull.
“On my mark,” she said.
Boris gripped the lever.
“One... two... three!”
He pressed the lever down as hard as he could. Jenna groaned from the effort. The mechanism finally creaked into motion, and the wall in front of them folded outward. They should have had a direct view of the patera, but they could only see gray fog. The room’s brightness illuminated Titan’s dense atmosphere and prevented them from seeing anything.
“That must be the side where the path leads back up,” Boris said.
The folded-down wall now lay in front of them like a kind of terrace. Jenna climbed onto it and slowly walked out to the edge. The metal wall bounced slightly with her steps.
“Be careful,” Boris said. “We don’t know how much that wall can support.”
Jenna knelt down and then stood up very quickly again. The thin metal on which she was standing barely moved.
“Seems safe to me,” she said. “Come out here!”
Boris hesitated. He didn’t trust the wall to hold them. It wouldn’t be sensible to put them both in danger. He’d nearly lost Anna already, because he hadn’t been careful enough. But he also couldn’t leave Jenna alone out there. He didn’t want her to think he was a scaredy-cat.
He climbed over the threshold, which was a kind of hinge holding up the terrace that had just moments before been a solid wall, part of a rocket that had survived a trip from Earth to Saturn. He took two steps forward and then flexed his knees. The hinge held. If not, they might be in for a fall of at least 20 meters, which would probably be painful, even with Titan’s low gravity.
He could see Jenna’s silhouette as a gray shadow on a drab-dark background. He walked toward her and stopped on her right side, but a half step further away from the end of the platform than she. Jenna reached backward, found his left hand, and pulled him forward. They stood at the edge of the precipice, hand in hand, and Boris wasn’t sure why his heart was beating so quickly. Heights had never really bothered him, and now there wasn’t even really a view to be seen due to Titan’s thick air.
“I think I can see the rover down there,” Jenna said, “and the tank right next to it.”
“I can’t see anything at all.”
“You’ve got to use your goggles. Switch to infrared.”
Of course. He was acting as if he was the first person to be here. With his free right hand, he pushed his goggles over his eyes and looked for the rover. The washed-out spot down below might be it, if I use lots of imagination. Then the slight increase in temperature next to it would be the tank. He looked at the back of his hand. He’d have to go back in the tank in a few hours.
“We should go find the others,” he said.
Jenna turned toward him. He saw her face behind the visor. She almost looked a little disappointed, but he wasn’t about to ask.
“Let’s finish exploring the corridor to its end first,” she said. “Or don’t you want to?”
Do I want to continue exploring the ship with you? There isn’t anything I want to do more. “Yes, of course I do. If we don’t know what the ship already has, we’ll never be able to use it efficiently,” he said.
“Exactly the answer I was hoping for,” Jenna said, and her words sounded a little sarcastic, although he couldn’t quite say why. Anna sometimes talked to him that way, too, but Geralt never did.
“One... two... three!”
On Jenna’s signal they pushed the two levers up. The mechanism reacted and the wall closed again. Boris was relieved. He had feared they might have put the hinge out of alignment by walking on the folded-down wall.
“It looks like it closed up completely again,” he said. “That’s good. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to launch this t
hing.”
“I didn’t expect anything else. Did you see the scratch marks in the metal? Look here.” She illuminated the closed wall with her helmet lamp. “Those are really deep scratches. Maybe there were big, powerful animals here with huge claws scratching at the walls for years. But, I’d bet that the scratches were made when they unloaded vehicles out of this room.”
“You mean they brought them outside through the folded-down wall?”
“How else?”
“What about the height? We must still be almost 20 meters above the ground.”
“They used some kind of crane. Or a pulley.”
“Do you think those devices are still around here somewhere, Jenna?”
“Probably.”
“Then I’ve got an idea. We could use the crane to lift the tank here into this room. Then Anna and I would have somewhere to regenerate while we stay in the ship.”
“Agreed. You... Both of you need the tank regularly, yes?”
The way Jenna said it, it was as if she had just noticed that he was a Snarushi. He had to make sure that he didn’t get his hopes up.
Their continued search down the corridor revealed no more doors until they reached the very end. Then, a double door blocked their passage, and they discovered that the doors were locked. Boris shook them, but they definitely weren’t opening. “Maybe the doors can be opened from the command center,” he said.
Each door contained two circular panes of glass covered with a layer of ice. Jenna scraped the ice off one of them.
“That probably won’t help. I’m sure there’s ice on the other side, too,” he said.
“Oh, wow. This is quite a sight. Come look!”
Jenna stepped back from the window. He stepped into her place and almost jumped in surprise. Wow! He’d never seen so much green, and so many different shades. Such abundant life! They grew plants in their greenhouses, too, but they were kept well-arranged and in order.
The first thing he noticed was the sheer chaos. “Unbelievable,” he said, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“I’ve got to go in there,” Jenna said.
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