Jeff watched him in confusion. What was he doing?
Once the WSO had arrived at the gates at the far end of the room, he punched one of the squares on the wall. With a loud grinding sound, a thick metal door emerged from the ceiling and began to slide down, eventually hitting the ground with a crash. Castle did the same with the other gate. Then he came back to them. “Close the other doors as well. We need to close them all.”
Mac shrugged and climbed a short metal staircase to close an open door at the top.
Now Jeff understood what his shipmate was doing. He went back to the door through which they’d entered the room and closed it, trying to ignore the queasy feeling in his stomach. He hadn’t forgotten his encounter with the light alien, when he had been unable to open the door from the inside. But in any case, for now they didn’t want to go back, but forward, to the center of the ship.
“Will it work?” Joanne wondered.
“If it’s an airlock, it might be a safety mechanism,” Castle said, after they’d reconvened at the gate they wanted to pass through. “Maybe both sides can’t be opened at the same time.”
“You reckon the big gates will open now?” Owl looked doubtful.
“We’ll find out in a few seconds,” Castle said and headed for the closest of the big gates. His smile suggested that he was pretty sure it would work.
But nothing happened.
Castle turned around abruptly and scratched his chin. “I thought the gates…”
“You were wrong,” Mac snapped caustically.
“Psst,” Joanne hissed. “Do you hear that?”
Jeff and the others fell silent and listened. Yes, there was a noise. A low whistle, although Jeff wasn’t sure which direction it was coming from.
“What is that?” Shorty asked.
Suddenly Jeff’s ears popped.
Oh shit!
He realized immediately that they had made a dreadful mistake.
The color drained from Castle’s face. “Oh God, the pressure is falling. The air’s escaping.”
“There must be a vacuum on the other side,” Joanne screamed. “We’re going to suffocate.”
Owl ran to the nearest door and whacked the square on the wall in desperation. But nothing happened. They could no longer stop the process they’d started.
“Our suits!” Castle screamed. “We have to activate our suits!” Frantically, he fiddled around with the controls on the arm of his combat suit.
Jeff didn’t even try. The micro-reactors of their deactivated suits would take several minutes to power up. The life-support systems would take even longer before they started to supply any air. He cursed inwardly. They should have left their suits on standby the whole time, however uncomfortable that may have been. Now it was too late.
Jeff was already having trouble breathing. His pulse was racing and his chest felt tight.
Mac grabbed Castle by the collar. “You fucking asshole! You’ve killed us all!”
“Wait,” Joanne said. “It’s stopping. Do you feel it? It’s stopping.”
Jeff was struggling to keep calm. But then he also noticed the whistling had stopped.
“The air pressure has stopped falling,” Green announced. He had remained surprisingly calm throughout the ordeal and was now swiping around on his handheld. “The pressure is 600 hectopascals.”
“Shit,” Castle groaned. “I thought we were all going to bite the dust.”
“We nearly did,” Mac roared. “It’s an airlock, for Christ’s sake!”
“I’m sorry,” Castle said. “I wasn’t expecting a change of air pressure. I thought it was just an emergency safety measure integrated by the builders.
“Next time we talk things through first,” Jeff said, addressing the whole crew and not just Castle. “No rash decisions, is that clear?”
“Why is the pressure different on the other side?” Joanne asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”
A loud metallic grinding noise reverberated around the room—as if a huge, rusty bolt were being drawn. Then the left-hand gate slowly rose up in fits and starts and with an almost unbearable screeching noise. Jeff covered his ears.
A reddish light flooded the room. A gust of wind ruffled Jeff’s hair and the stench of rotten eggs filled his nose.
Joanne choked loudly.
The gate disappeared into the ceiling with a resounding boom. On the other side, Jeff saw a short corridor, no more than a dozen feet long, but with a very high ceiling. An open doorway at the end of the corridor led into a room that was bathed in a dark, ruby-red light.
Jeff moved forward hesitantly. The air was even warmer here than where they’d come from and far more humid, and immediately the sweat began to pour down his face. It was worse than the tropics. But worst of all was the revolting stench of rotten eggs.
Sulfur!
“Jesus, this is gross,” Shorty groaned.
Castle pointed into the room. “What’s that over there?”
They made their way forward tentatively, until they reached a platform. It was about the size of a small glider landing pad and was bounded by a railing along the front and sides. To the left was a kind of scaffolding that ended several feet above the platform. When Jeff looked up, he saw a reddish-gray sky… and a ruby-red sun.
A sun? Here?
It emitted a faint light that was mostly swallowed up by a hazy mist.
Jeff looked over the railing, and immediately got vertigo as he gazed into the endless depths.
“Where the hell are we?” asked Joanne, who had appeared at his side.
Jeff looked down at a hostile, craggy landscape that appeared to consist of nothing but black volcanic rock. Here and there were little pools and lakes, from which gray vapors rose into the air. The landscape lay far below them. In the distance, the horizon was shrouded in mist.
“Have we come out on a planet’s surface?” Shorty looked perplexed.
“Of course not,” Castle shot back. “This is the cavity we saw on the hologram map. It’s so big that the other end is shrouded in mist.”
“And why can’t we see the ceiling? How did they even get that sun up there?” Mac asked, wiping the sweat from his face.
“God, we’ve been so dumb,” Joanne blurted out.
“What do you mean?” Jeff asked.
“We underestimated the dimensions of the cavity. It’s so big, the illusion of being on the surface of planet is perfect.”
“A very grim planet…” Owl quipped.
Joanne ignored him. “The room is so high, it practically goes beyond the atmosphere. That’s why we can’t see the ceiling. The sun is probably an oversized floodlight, fed directly from a reactor. It also explains why the air pressure is different here.”
“Why?” Castle asked.
Joanne spread her arms wide. “We came out quite a few miles above the ground. No wonder the air is thinner here.”
Jeff nodded. It made sense. But only to an extent. “Why doesn’t the airlock lead directly to the bottom of the cavity?”
Joanne shrugged. “Maybe there are other airlocks. We may even have been lucky. Imagine if we’d come out six miles further up.”
“Then we’d be dead,” Owl said dryly.
Jeff turned around and looked up. The gates were embedded in a smooth, dark-gray metal wall, the top of which was lost from view somewhere in the haze.
“Maybe they lived here,” Castle speculated.
“Who?” Mac asked.
“The builders of the ship. Maybe they modeled these cavitys on their home planet so they would feel at home during their generations-long flight.”
“You reckon their planet looked like this?” Owl was dubious.
“It’s possible.”
“Looks worse than where I come from,” Mac muttered.
“It’s creepy. Really creepy.” Castle shuddered.