“Jeff, come here a sec.”
Jeff turned around and walked back over to Joanne.
“What do you make of this?” she asked.
There were now blue characters projected in the air above the cylinder. Sentences that appeared to run from top to bottom. When Joanne rotated a knob, the columns of letters changed color one by one.
“Some kind of menu?” He scratched his head. “But god knows how we’re supposed to encrypt the characters.”
“I’ll just select one of them. I think this is the confirmation button.” She touched the button and the projection vanished for a moment. Then new characters appeared. Joanne tried out the different columns, but all that was projected every time was writing.
“Unfortunately we don’t have a Rosetta Stone,” Castle said sarcastically.
“What’s a Rosetta Stone?” Shorty asked.
“He’s just trying to say we can’t translate what it says here,” Joanne answered, without taking her eyes off the console.
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Jeff said. “Go back to the star map and try something else.”
“Easier said than done,” Joanne grumbled, and pushed various buttons without anything happening.
“It’s no use,” Owl said in frustration. “Let’s go back to the airlock and get out of here. With a bit of luck we’ll be picked up by a rescue cruiser or a freighter.”
“We will not discuss this again,” Jeff said firmly. “And you know as well as I do, the chances of being picked up are about a million to one.”
“Hey,” Joanne blurted out, and Jeff looked back at the projection. The writing had disappeared. Instead of a star map, he was now looking at a blue, roughly spherical but irregularly shaped structure with many differently sized projections.
“That’s the ship!” Castle cried.
“Looks like an outside view,” Joanne said.
“What did you press?” Jeff asked.
Joanne pointed to a large square button on the top of the console. “Maybe those are pre-selector switches for different display modes.”
“Press the one next to it,” Jeff ordered.
When Joanne touched the button, the image of the ship disappeared and the projection was filled with writing, like before.
“No—go back.”
The image of ship reappeared in front of them.
“I’ll try the little buttons underneath,” Joanne said.
The blue sphere gradually became transparent and orange structures came into focus.
“You’re kidding me!” Castle said, stepping closer to the projection. “That’s a map of the interior of the ship!” He reached out a hand and moved it slowly through the hologram. Wherever he touched the fine lines, the projection became slightly blurry.
“Look,” Joanne said. “You can zoom in and out and move it round.”
“Now we need to find out where we are,” Finni said.
Joanne pressed another button and suddenly the whole upper half of the ship projection was cut off. It looked like a huge cross-section of an apple riddled with holes made by thousands of worms.
“With this you can create and control cross-sections.” Joanne turned the knob, and out of nowhere more levels of the “apple” appeared at the top of the projection.
“I’ll try this knob here.”
Now it was as if a camera had penetrated the interior of the ship. Lines and dots raced through the projection, and then the image came to a standstill again. Jeff could make out individual corridors and rooms. In the middle of the hologram was an orange rhombus.
“Is that where we are?” Finni asked.
Jeff recognized parts of the map. That was the gate with the long corridor. And all the narrow, zigzagging corridors that led toward the hull of the ship. Now Jeff tried operating the console and zoomed out again. There was the airlock through which they’d entered the ship. And those were their quarters—he could even count the ten bedrooms. “Yes, the rhombus marks our location,” Jeff confirmed.
He turned the knob farther until the entire circumference of the ship was visible again. From this perspective, the symbol showing their position was at the very edge of the ship. If they really wanted to make it to the center, they had a long way to go.
Jeff turned to Joanne. “How far are we from the outer shell?”
She shrugged. “My guess would be about six miles. As the crow flies.”
Owl burst out laughing. It was a desperate laugh. “Then it’s only three hundred miles to the heart of the ship. Just a stroll in the park.”
Mac laughed hollowly.
Jeff pursed his lips. Owl was right, of course. It was a very long way. Even if they didn’t have to take any detours and made good headway, he reckoned they would need at least a week and a half.
“Maybe there’s some means of transport that still works,” Joanne said hopefully. “An elevator or something.”
Jeff imagined an elevator that ran hundreds of miles into the depths of the ship. But he was determined—they had to give it a try. It was their only chance.
“OK, let’s use the map and try and work out a route to the core.” He looked at Joanne. “Plot it all on your computer. Then we’ll transfer the map to the other handhelds.”
Joanne nodded.
Jeff zoomed in further and moved the center of the hologram so that their position was now on the left edge of the projection. “First we can go down this long corridor. It leads directly toward the center.
“Pretty long…” Owl remarked.
Jeff nodded. “Yup, probably over sixty miles.”
“It ends at this weird, shaded area,” Joanne said.
“What is that?” Green wondered. “Looks like a giant ellipse that has been halved along the long axis.”
“Maybe we can rotate the view to get a different perspective,” said Jeff, trying out various knobs. Finally he was able to turn the image slightly and the cross-section changed. The outline of the large area remained, but the shading disappeared.
“Oh my God,” Owl whispered.
Jeff whistled through his teeth. It appeared to be a hollow chamber. And it was humongous.
“Is that what I think it is?” Joanne asked, hardly able to hide her disbelief.
Jeff nodded. “It seems to be a huge cavity. Deep inside the ship.”
“If it’s a cavity, then it’s the biggest one I’ve ever seen,” Shorty said.
“At least one hundred and twenty-five miles long. And almost as wide,” Finni said.
“The highest point of the roof is over forty-five miles high,” Jeff added.
“Holy shit!” Even Mac dropped his surly tone for a moment.
“Well, I wouldn’t mind taking a look at that,” Green said dryly.
“I’m happy to give it a miss,” Owl said. “Who knows what we’ll find there.”
“We’ll have to walk through part of it,” Joanne said. “It takes us to this corridor, which leads directly to the center.” She turned to Jeff. “Can you zoom out again?”
Jeff turned the knob.
“This corridor,” Joanne said, pointing.
“Maybe it isn’t a corridor, but an elevator,” Green speculated. “That’s possible, isn’t it?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Joanne said. “The main thing is, it takes us straight to the core.”
“Not quite,” Jeff said and turned the view slightly counterclockwise. “There’s another cavity. It’s about the same size as the first one. We need to pass through that one too, to get to the core.”
Finni frowned and peered more closely at the hologram. “What are those things? Huge warehouses, maybe?”
“I dunno, but they’re situated along the main corridors,” Joanne said. “That makes them easy to reach from anywhere on the ship.”
Jeff nodded. “Yes, the corridors only seem to have that fractal structure in the outer areas. Down there, it looks more like one of our ships or stations, with main axes leading from one section to all the others.”