7.
“We need to take a right here,” Castle said.
Jeff looked down at his handheld. “No,” he answered. “We need to keep going straight ahead.”
“Right,” Castle insisted, and carried on down the corridor without waiting for Jeff to respond.
Jeff sighed and rubbed his right temple. He had a hell of a headache—he’d woken up with it in the morning. He’d thought about asking Irons to get someone else to take his place, but didn’t want to look like a wimp. But the headache hadn’t got any better. On the contrary, he had the feeling his skull was about to explode. Jeff put it down to the extraordinary circumstances and the stress of the last few days. He just hoped he wouldn’t get seriously ill.
“Hang on a minute till we’ve worked it out!” he heard Joanne’s voice.
“Why? My device says we need to take a right,” Castle said grouchily. “If you can’t read yours properly, that’s your problem.”
Fields leaned against the wall of the corridor and grinned.
“Jeff!” Joanne appealed to him.
Will this bullshit never end?
“Castle! Would you please wait?” he said, trying not to sound harassed.
“I’ll wait for you at the next turning,” the weapon systems officer said curtly.
Whatever. I’m not in the mood for this shit.
Then he remembered his conversation with the major. It couldn’t go on like this. He took a deep breath. “You will wait until we’ve sorted this out, or…”
Castle turned around reluctantly. His surprise was clear to see. “Or what?” he asked and laughed softly. At least he’d stopped walking.
“My device also says straight ahead,” came Joanne’s voice.
“Let’s get an outsider opinion,” Jeff said, and held his handheld against the wall of the corridor. “Austin here, come in.”
“Mac here, we can hear you.”
“Where’s Green?” Jeff asked. It was the engineer’s turn to be on “radio” duty today.
“Irons sent him to bed. Migraine.”
“Migraine?” Jeff asked, surprised. He’d never known the smart-ass engineer to have a migraine.
“After he barfed all over the major’s boots, he was sent to bed.”
Jeff thought about his own headache. Hopefully they hadn’t caught a virus that was now making the rounds. There’d been a bit of a flu epidemic on Sigma-7 before they left on their mission. An incubation period of about a week… the timing was right. Luckily he didn’t feel nauseous. Could it have something to do with this ship? No, they’d analyzed the air.
“We’re standing at junction A11. Our handhelds aren’t in agreement about which way to go.”
“Hold on,” Mac said. Jeff could hear Irons’ voice in the background but couldn’t understand what he was saying. This was followed by several long seconds of silence.
“Can you hear me?” Mac asked.
“Yes, we’re still here.”
“Might be a synchronization error,” Irons said. “We’ll take a closer look when you’re back. In any case, you need to turn right and then keep going along the corridor. It’ll take you straight to the antechamber of the airlock.”
Jeff avoided catching Castle’s eye. It was enough to imagine the big grin on his face. “OK, let’s go.”
Castle went ahead with the flashlight, Field in the middle, Jeff and Joanne brought up the rear. The eerie silence was disturbed only by their footsteps, which were strangely muted, as if the floor were muffling all sound. When someone talked, there was no echo, which was strange considering the corridors were so long and their walls were made of metal.
Jeff kept turning around, thinking there was something behind him. But every time he looked, all he saw was blackness. He wished he had a flashlight, too, or could at least use the headlamp on his helmet, but Irons had ordered them to turn them on only in an emergency.
Once, Jeff thought he saw something twinkling in the distance. He stopped and turned all the way round. He listened but only heard the sounds of the other members of the group.
“What is it?” Joanne asked.
Jeff shook his head and kept walking. “Nothing,” he mumbled.
“You didn’t stop for nothing,” Joanne persisted.
“I thought I saw a flash of light. As if a light went on briefly in one of the other corridors.” He sighed. “But I guess I was wrong.”
“A flash of light?” Joanne asked. Jeff didn’t answer. “Could have been Cherenkov radiation,” Joanne suggested. “After all, we are nearing the outer shell.”
Trust Joanne to come up with a logical explanation. Cherenkov radiation was created by cosmic particles that penetrated the eye at almost the speed of light and gave off part of their energy as a short pulse of light, which then hit the optic nerve. The phenomenon had driven some of the early astronauts nearly out of their minds. But Jeff doubted her theory. The shadows of the corridor walls had been too clear to see. A more likely explanation was that the never-ending darkness of the corridors was playing tricks with his imagination. The only alternative was that there was someone—or something—sneaking through the corridors. But that couldn’t be. The ship was abandoned.
If only he could get rid of this sensation of being watched! He could almost feel the gaze of a sinister something on his back. Jeff exhaled slowly, resisting the impulse to turn around.
There’s nothing there. Don’t make a fool of yourself in front of the others!
They approached a turning and Jeff looked up. Suddenly he stumbled and almost fell over his own feet. He cursed inwardly. He should have remembered: this was the place where the vector of gravity had changed when they had first walked to their quarters. It wasn’t far now to the airlock.
“Made it!” Castle called out. He had stopped in front of the door and was waiting for the others.
“I didn’t remember it being so far,” Fields grumbled.
Jeff looked at his watch. “One-and-a-half hours. Yeah, that’s about right.”
“Then let’s go in,” Castle said and held his finger up to the white square next to the door. With a hissing noise, the door slid open.
Fields walked past Castle into the antechamber of the airlock. Jeff followed him. It was pitch black. If only they knew how to turn on the lights… but there were no controls on the walls as far as he could see. Jeff held his handheld to the wall. “Austin. We’re in the antechamber.”
“Keep us informed of every step,” Irons had taken over communication with the group.
“Understood.”
Jeff joined Fields, who was already standing by the door to the airlock scratching his head. The others followed him.
“Hm, and now what?” Fields asked.
“Well, how about opening the hatch to the airlock,” Castle said sarcastically.
“I get that, Lieutenant,” Fields quipped. “The question is how. There aren’t any controls here.”
Jeff saw his point. The walls around the hatch to the airlock were completely smooth. How the hell had the aliens opened this thing?
Castle stepped up to the hatch and tapped at regular intervals along the wall.
“What are you doing?” Joanne said, coming up behind them.
“Maybe the controls are embedded in the wall. We also have flaps on our ships that only open when you apply pressure.”
Fields had moved away from the group and was using his flashlight to light up the walls of the room. Jeff nodded. Maybe there was a control panel somewhere in here…
Jeff looked through the little window into the interior of the airlock, which was shrouded in darkness. “Maybe there isn’t even a vacuum in there, or the outer hatch is open…” Joanne mused.
“I can’t imagine it,” Castle retorted, and continued tapping along the wall.