Aside from the differences in color, she would have sworn that the two pieces of metal were identical.
That realization brought so many questions to her mind at once, but she couldn't force herself to digest the information completely; the implications were too frightening. Yet her subconscious pushed a train of thought to the fore, breaking off half finished before she could make a decision.
If the inhabitants of the ship were more of the same aliens they had fought at Charon, then why had they left the Earth unmolested? And, though the jets were similar to the Charon alien fighters, they were not exactly identical. Still the possible notion that three species of human-sized aliens had come into close contact randomly instigated objections in her scientific mind that refused to accept such a scenario as statistically feasible. But could it be a simple coincidence?
Suddenly Knightwood heard a scuffling noise and turned to her left to see the three missing cadets coming towards them.
Erik's animated face suggested that he had news.
"If you look from the side," he pointed in the direction they'd come from, "you can see the end of the cargo bay. It looks like there are some corridors leading off down at the end, and there's one wide passage off to the right a few hundred meters ahead."
"Should we get moving, Major?" Nathalie asked.
Watanabe nodded. What else could they do?
Though the team moved rapidly, twenty painfully slow minutes passed before they came across a corridor intersection leading to their right. Ho-ling Chen kept her head half-turned as she watched uncertainly for sudden movement; the others constantly turned their gazes from the left to straight ahead, and a few shot suspicious glances at the right hand wall. Katrin studied the hundred meter high ceiling with awe.
Knightwood marveled that Erin's pace did not waver; she appeared unperturbed by thoughts of attack or indecision. But Knightwood had begun to wonder why there had been no signs of life. That cargo bay held thousands of fighters, yet no one had been around to maintain them. And even she had noticed the abandoned feel to the atmosphere. Unknown to the others, Knightwood had activated her bio-sign sensor. She glanced down briefly as the team walked, but the thing had still to report any other living presence besides theirs. Suddenly, the group heard a rumbling amplified by someone's internal speaker, followed by a quick apology from Erik.
"Sorry, but this anxiety is making me hungry."
The others laughed mechanically. As they reached the intersection that branched right, Erin turned to the right without stopping or hesitating, prompting Knightwood to pull her back. Behind the two of them, the group leaders halted just a few meters short of the dark passageway with the cadets keeping a respectable distance back to allow them conference time.
"Well, what should we do now?" Knightwood directed her question to W and Zhdanov. "Splitting up might not be such a wise idea, but then, if we divide the group we could cover more area."
"Do you think we should try to search the place top to bottom, assuming we even can?" W shrugged. "If we don't intend to search everywhere possible, then I don't think it's necessary to separate anyone."
"And if we risk small groups we may be exposing ourselves and weaken our chances of making it back out alive." Zhdanov argued.
"Well all right." Knightwood threw up her hands in defeat. "We'll stay together. But how about this corridor? The cadet said there were some more large passageways further ahead. Maybe we ought to continue heading down this way until we reach them?"
"No," a voice interjected. "We should turn here." Erin Mathieson-Blair stepped between Knightwood and Zhdanov and then past them into the shadowed edges of the narrow corridor and disappeared.
Dammit, there she goes again, Zhdanov thought but outwardly only shrugged.
"Erin, where are you going?" Erik called out in alarm. Knightwood watched helplessly as he made his way from the group of cadets clustered behind them to the corridor and out of sight. Though Erik and the others had been waiting patiently during the group leaders' conversation, they had noticed Erin leaving their company a moment before and had watched her head recklessly into the passageway.
W threw her hands up at Erin's hasty action and took charge quickly.
"All right, I guess we're taking a right here, people. Turn on your uniform reflectors and body lights, please. It looks like we won't have to decide, after all," she smiled at Knightwood and Zhdanov, and the three of them headed towards the narrow opening on their right.
Meanwhile Erik had found Erin about twenty meters down the passage. He tried to stop her by snaking his arms across her neck, but she took another step and broke free.
She's stronger than I thought, Erik reflected, shocked. He had tried to pull her back with every ounce of energy that fear and adrenaline had given him. Could it be some alien force was empowering her? he thought, and stepped back slightly.
Suddenly Erin stopped of her own volition but remained silent and perfectly still. Erik edged up beside her and watched her face in the dim light of his helmet lamp and uniform reflectors as though seeing it for the first time. Erin's unblinking eyes had fixed in concentration forward, and she took no notice of him, almost as if she didn't even realize that he was there.
"What's the matter, Erin? Why on Earth did you go charging off like that? This place is dangerous!" Erik tried to sound more collected than he felt. He had a bizarre and alarming feeling that Erin would manage just fine by herself.
"Don't you hear it? Listen," Erin whispered a minute later without answering him.
"Hear what?" Erik stood still in imitation of Erin's stance, straining his ears for signs of movement.
"I don't hear anything," he concluded, disappointed—then he did hear something, the sound of footsteps behind him as the group approached and joined them.
"Cadet Mathieson-Blair, is there some reason we've called a halt here?" W queried nonchalantly, hoping to break Erin's trance and get moving.
"Did you check to see if the hallway was clear or if it had breaks?" Erik turned his head to W and the others.
"Yes. No intersections or doorways." W coughed significantly. "Well what are we waiting for? Let's continue, people."
"Hey, there's some kind of line there in the wall, W," Hans interrupted from the left side of the corridor near the wall, his eyes peering closely at its surface. "I think you better come over and have a look."
"Well, whatever you do, Hans, don't touch anything yet." W replied, already moving towards him.
"Whoops, too late," Hans shrugged, and they heard the quick whoosh of sliding metal.
The crack slid apart in seconds into a perfect rectangular doorway.
W stepped across the entrance to the chamber, and the room she encountered was suddenly illuminated by a bright blue-white ceiling. W stood two meters inside the door, temporarily blinded while the others squeezed past her, shielding their eyes until they adjusted.
When Erik finally looked up, he noticed Erin staring around the room with the same unblinking gaze she'd given him, oblivious to the glare from above. As the minutes passed, the others gradually dared to squint into the light while Erin continued to stare. Then suddenly she blinked normally as though she'd finally come back to them.
Metal plates segmented into tall thin rectangular compartments lined all four walls of the room; a helmet that appeared to be of human size and shape lay strewn across the floor a foot from Knightwood, who had nearly tripped over it when she entered the room.
At a touch from Zhdanov, one of the lockers opened, the metal snapping back like shutter doors. Inside a bright blue piece of clothing hung suspended, another helmet identical to the one on the floor beside it, and at the bottom of the locker a pair of what looked like human-sized boots lay on a shelf composed of a clear, blue-tinted material.
Zhdanov hesitated before lifting the clothing and pressing it to his body; the arti
cle was most clearly some kind of uniform, silver blue with triangular metal panels and ornaments, undeniably of human size and shape, with long legs sealed at the foot and shorter sleeves that ended in five digit gloves.
In her heart, Knightwood wasn’t surprised, but she wasn't sure why.
Yet the cadets gasped—a few remained silent, paralyzed by shock.
“Those triangles look like cuneiform.” She commented. Others began to look around as if to deny that what had happened was possible. Several had trouble catching their breath.
Erin found she could not tear her eyes away from the triangular ornaments on the shoulders of the uniform. She imagined a young woman, who might have worn one similar to it, with long hair and gray skin.
Then Erin remembered sitting at a table—tapping the clear blue material with her cup. The same woman held her and continued to smile as she greedily reached for another piece of cake then stopped to speak words to a man and woman that brought more dishes to the table.
Erin blinked at once, trying to recapture her last thought; she had the unsettling feeling of one recently wakened, just as a dream is fading.
"We should have one of the cadets carry these things back for study," Knightwood suggested. "We need to keep moving, though."
Passing the helmet to Erik and the boots to Hans, W was bringing the uniform to Ho-ling when Erin rushed over to take it.
"Let me carry it please, W." Glancing at Erin's urgent face, W reluctantly let go of the clothing, confused by Erin's behavior but unable to stop and consider what it meant.
Erin clutched the uniform tightly. Fingering one of the ornaments, she felt raised lettering and bent her head to look over the alien script.
The harder she studied it, the more an unfamiliar region in her mind throbbed painfully, as it had the moment before the outer air lock opened for them. Now the company was leaving the room with Erin at the rear. She passed under the last of the light beyond the doorway just as the letters became intelligible.
"Fielikor... Kiel," her tongue fumbled over the name, and her dry throat ached. How many years had that name gone unspoken? she wondered.
“Don’t tell me you can read it!” laughed Erik.
“Knightwood’s right. It does look like hieroglyphics on the name plate there, and cuneiform triangles on the lapel,” Erin said. “Isn’t that odd?”
“What kind of language though,” said Knightwood. “Lord God, it can’t be hieroglyphics!” she said suddenly, and came over to see. “By Jove it does, you know!” She said. “That’s a falcon, I’m sure. The others are different though. Don’t tell me there’s a connection.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“I’m not an expert, but I know someone who is,” said Knightwood as they left the first cloak room. After leaving the first cloak room, the recon team came across many doorways to either side of the corridor. Some were sealed and would not budge no matter what methods they tried to open them, but they were able to explore roughly a third of the compartments.
Clear crystalloid cases filled the second room, containing vegetation unlike any they had ever seen; indigo and yellow plants with blue buds and fasciated blue-green leaves appeared to have been preserved in the cases, at the base of which a panel of lights blinked on and off in a continuous pulsating rhythm.
In the third room, dead, animal-like creatures, like bats, had been preserved in similar display cases. Knightwood wished she could somehow have removed them to bring back for study at the UESRC, but it was enough that they had brought micro-vidigital recorders to document their historic tour.
Of particular interest were the small mammal-like furry creatures like big mice, though she was also fascinated by the large, half reptilian, half bird-like creature that looked so much like a small microraptor with a heron’s smooth head, black avian eyes, and white leathery skin.
When they finally came to an intersection of the passages, their sensors indicated that they had traveled almost two hundred meters from the outer air lock where they had entered. W waited for some suggestions but Knightwood and Zhdanov were discussing how they would make their report to the UESRC, and the cadets appeared content quietly gazing down the new passageways. In the end, only Erin Mathieson spoke up softly, but W was standing near enough to hear her words.
"I think we should—turn left here—find a way to the next level up," Erin spoke in short phrases, straining her ears, as if talking too loudly would drown out whatever she had been listening to.
W thought about her suggestion, remembering that W had written a memo to her regarding Erin's acuteness of hearing during hand-to-hand training.
W decided that they would go left but still wondered exactly what Erin had heard.
"Why left?" she asked placidly as Knightwood and Zhdanov's conversation came to an end, and the two scientists stopped to listen to Erin's explanation.
Erin shook her head. "I don't know," she said, looking confused. "It just came to me a minute ago." She shrugged.
"Did you hear something, Erin?"
"Huh? Not a thing. Why, did I miss something?" W and Knightwood began to scrutinize Erin's face. Clearly, she had forgotten what she had heard. Knightwood wondered suspiciously if Erin's suggestion hadn't been planted into her head by some other source—if it wasn't meant to ensnare them.
"Just stay close to us. Here, take my arm," W proffered her hand, which Erin took and clasped tightly.
Five minutes from the doorway the team came to a corridor that opened at W's touch into an elevation device. W reflected on the timing of the discovery, so soon after Erin had suggested that they try to find a way to the upper levels.
Once the team had entered, the doors slid together without warning, and the device began to whisk them upward. A minute of anxious silence passed in which no one moved.
Then abruptly the doors swished open again into another corridor. The corridor was dotted by doorways with faint rectangular light strip panels at even intervals. The panels marked each door and illuminated an identifying plaque of alien letters affixed to the wall on the right of every door. Checking his compass, Zhdanov announced that they were now 992 meters above ground level.
“Again, more hieroglyphics!” cried Knightwood.
The first doorway on the left opened into a cluster of rooms not so alien to their eyes.
As before, the ceiling of the room brightened with a merciless intensity of blue-white light. Before them a flat plane jutted from the wall covered by a thick transparent blue covering that had been pushed aside, and at the head a long raised strip of opaque blue appeared rumpled with a depression in the middle.
Strange furniture and chairs decorated the small room and a wall closet door had been left ajar with uniforms similar to those they had found near the cargo bay visible, hanging from shoulder hoops.
"Look there!" Nathalie Quinn pointed to a picture that graced the desk-like structure which was situated against the right wall of the room near another doorway. Knightwood went to retrieve the holopicture and held it up so that all of the disbelieving faces of the assembled company could view it.
The man in the holophoto appeared almost human—if it were possible for a human to have gray skin, pointy ears, and a strangely more bird-like head. Leaning propped against a tree, he stood before a cluster of distant, tall white buildings on the periphery of the image, but what exactly had brought the joy that illuminated his eyes and his healthy, broad smile remained a mystery never to be told.
“Holy shit,” said Erik. “He’s almost human!”
“Yeah but who knows what he is on the inside,” said Zhdanov.
In a state of shock and excitement, Knightwood carefully removed the holophoto from the picture frame, noting how dissimilar the paper was from their own photographs or video printouts, for it was not printed on paper or synthetic fibers at all but on a thin, rubbery square that afforded clearer definit
ion and a better three-dimensional illusion than even Knightwood's video printout monitors back at the UESRC.
No one commented yet upon the significance of the holophoto which showed the almost human that had likely inhabited the room. The shock was too great to examine at the moment; it had not really even set in yet.
Meanwhile, Erik, Hans, and Zhdanov explored the adjacent washroom on the left side of the room while the others headed into the small sitting room that completed the quarters just beyond the inner doorway on the right. Moments later, Zhdanov reported that the washroom was remarkably similar to the finest the UESRC had to offer, though he had not dared to press any of the many brightly lit buttons of variegated colors that lined the wall, sink, and sanitizing station.
In contrast none of the lights or instrumentation in the sitting room appeared to be working, and the close end of the room was only dimly lit by the light that cascaded in from the bedchamber through the open door.
Knightwood picked up what looked like a kind of book that was lying on the floor, though the orientation of the plants and trees which decorated the text indicated the book was read top to bottom, like an Earth computerized calendar panel facsimile. The pages in the book, though as thin as paper, were more like the photo Nathalie had found, pliable yet stiff.
Knightwood thought the print inside rather beautiful. She had no idea if the characters were phonetic or pictographic or some form of writing completely unlike any on the Earth, but the script itself was formed of intricate swirling curves and a few straight lines as well as half moon ovals and many triangles of varying sizes, like a different, alien kind of cuneiform, though, she noted.
Glancing at the pages as Knightwood passed the book to W, who passed it a minute later to Akira to hold, Erin felt that she should be able to read the words there, as illogical as the idea seemed to her conscious mind. Her thoughts sank a little into the subconscious depths where she felt more secure in imagining that the few words she had glimpsed could be sounded out and spoken: "elah-neh ee-sah noh sylenaia solynai..."