“What do you think?” Green asked.
“If that hologram was correct, the cavity will be nearly a hundred and thirty miles long. And forty-five miles high. The whole of Lake Almazan could fit inside it.”
“Lake what?”
“One of the biggest lakes on Astana. I went on vacation there once.”
“What are you trying to tell us?” Green asked.
Finni sighed. “I mean this cavity will be fucking huge.”
“If we ever find it,” Jeff responded, pointing to where the corridor forked about forty feet in front of them. One corridor went off at a ninety-degree angle to the left. The other at an acute angle to the right. “What direction is the cavity?” he asked.
Green tapped around on his handheld. “I’d say right.”
“This way, then,” Jeff said, and turned right. After just a few feet, the corridor ended in a big room. Jeff stepped through the open door and looked around.
“Well, that’s something new,” Finni said.
The room was about the size of a small gymnasium. On the opposite wall was a long, metal table. Behind it, shelves made out of some glassy material were attached to the wall. Above them was a brown symbol, vaguely reminiscent of a sun with stylized rays. The symbol was marbled, as if it had been made out of the finest mahogany.
Along the other walls were seats, big enough for a human to sit in comfortably. Vase-like structures as tall as a person and made out of a transparent material were distributed at regular intervals around the room like bizarre works of art.
“Shit, looks like the Hilton on Ceres,” Finni said.
Jeff nodded. He had never been to the asteroid, but the room really did look like a modern hotel lobby decorated by an abstract artist. Big open doorways led out of the hall on all four sides.
“What now?” Green asked.
Jeff looked around uncertainly. He had no idea which opening they needed to go through to reach the cavity. And they ran the risk of getting hopelessly lost. On the other hand, this was the first time they had come across a room of this kind—they might find something interesting. He walked over to the nearest wall and touched it with the antenna of his handheld.
“Owl? Shorty? Can you hear me?”
A few seconds passed, then Jeff heard Shorty’s basso voice. “We’re holding the fort. Everything OK?”
“Yup, we’re fine. Have you heard anything from the others?”
“Yeah, Joanne contacted us a few minutes ago. They were going down a long corridor that led directly toward the cavity. At least that’s what they thought.”
“But?”
“But after several hundred feet they came to a dead end. Now they’re in a parallel corridor.”
“OK. Thanks. We’ve found an interesting room. A kind of lobby. I’ll get back to you.”
“Maybe it’s some kind of transit area,” Finni murmured so quietly that Jeff could barely hear him.
“What do you mean?” Green asked.
Finni gazed around the unusual hall. “We know the cavity we’re looking for is huge; it’s no ordinary cavity. Maybe this is a kind of transit lounge leading to it.”
Jeff was silent for a moment, then nodded in agreement. Finni could be right. Access to the cavity may have been controlled by bulkheads. A bit like the gateway from the outer part of the ship to the central corridor. Maybe one of the passages led directly to the cavity. But which one?
Jeff made his way to the first doorway on his right.
“What are you going to do?” Green asked.
“We’ll see where they all lead. At least the first few feet.”
The first opening led into a narrow corridor, which turned off to the right after a few feet—in the direction from which they had come. Jeff doubted it would lead them to their goal. The next opening was right next to the long table. This one was wider and higher than the others. It led into a smaller room, at the other end of which was another door and a glass pane in the wall.
“Wait here,” Jeff ordered and stepped into the room. “I want to see what—” He stopped short when he heard a loud hissing noise behind him and whirled round—just in time to see a hatch come thundering down to the ground from the ceiling.
“Green!” Jeff screamed and raced to the door. His flashlight fell out of his hand and skittered across the floor. The beam of the flashlight on the ground immersed the room in a ghostly light. Jeff banged his fists against the metal and screamed the names of his shipmates. “Finni! Green!”
No answer. He took a step back and looked to see if there was some kind of opening mechanism. To the left of the door, a dark-gray rectangle was embedded in the wall. He touched it, but nothing happened. Jeff groaned. It must be a control panel for the door, considering it was right next to it. Some automatic mechanism must have caused it to close. But why didn’t the manual control work?
Frantically, Jeff took his handheld out of his pocket. He had to get Finni and Green to look for a control mechanism on their side. Maybe the one on this side was just broken. With trembling hands he held the antenna against the wall. “Green! Finni! Can you hear me? You have to—” There was a clinking sound as the antenna snapped off and fell to the ground.
Shit!
He had pressed the device too hard against the wall. Now he was completely cut off from the others.
After trying in vain to reattach the antenna, he banged his fist against the door, cursing loudly. But it was no use, it didn’t budge. He had to get a grip. Finni and Green would of course do everything in their power to open the door from their side.
Jeff tried to suppress the panic welling up inside him. What if they didn’t manage to get it open, and there was no other exit out of this and the surrounding rooms? Then he would starve to death in here.
Jeff tried to gather his wits and push those dark thoughts aside. He turned around, picked up his flashlight, and shone it around the room. It was completely bare, and not very big. Just a few feet lay between Jeff and the opposite wall, where there was another open door and a window. Maybe there was another way out that would lead him back to the lobby.
He walked toward the window, but all he could see was the bright reflection of his flashlight. Then he shone his flashlight through the open door. The room on the other side was bigger and higher than this one, as big as the gym at his old school on Luna. Behind the door were a few steps leading downward. Slowly, he let the beam of his flashlight wander round the room.
He gasped in surprise. At the end of three long rows of tables were machines of some kind. They were twice as high as a tall man and looked a bit like the old phone booths they used to have on Terra. They also reminded Jeff of the security controls at a civilian spaceport.
He stepped up to the first row of tables. They were covered with twisted and distorted metallic objects. He picked up one of them: a long tube that was bent in the middle, with a small black box at one end of it. Whatever it might have been, it had definitely been destroyed. He placed it back on the table and continued to look around. The hall was oblong in shape. On each of the two short sides there were two doors. The ones to his right were open, but led in a completely different direction from the way he had come into the room. The ones at the other end, behind the “phone booths,” were closed off by heavy bulkheads. He wondered if he should wait here, hoping that Finni and Green would be able to open the door, or if he should venture into one of the open passageways. Maybe it would lead him back toward the “lobby”… And anyway: if his shipmates hadn’t managed to open the hatch by now, they probably never would. Jeff picked up his handheld and checked that the inertial navigation was still working so that he wouldn’t get completely lost.
He turned to look at the openings. They were both narrow and high and had arch-shaped recesses at the top, like the portal of a church—or like a cross-section of the long corridor they had been walking down for the last few days. They appeared to lead into two parallel corridors. If he went down one of them, he had to make sure he took a right turn as soon as possible so he didn’t move too far away from the group.