Just as the two Marines entered the tube, they thought-clicked and brought their retro-rocket controls to manual. The automated controls had positioned their flight well right at the center of the tube, but now as they entered the tube, the electronics was likely to fail which might make the rockets spin out of control. It was safer to use body movements to guide the retro rockets. Simultaneously the Marines shut down all the suits’ controls in the faint hope that some of it might survive the journey to the other side.
Pvt. Rankel da’ Lima was the first to enter tube, quickly followed by Pvt. Sha’ad al Masoom. Both had volunteered, and both had spent their childhood in harsh extremes of deserts in an ever-warming Earth, a legacy of excessive fossil fuel consumption in the previous centuries. They took pride in being able to be withstand higher temperature extremes compared to other Marines, and that claim was about to be tested.
The initial shock disoriented Rankel more than he had anticipated. Both the Marines had applied enough water to cake their hair with ice to the best extent possible, but they couldn’t cover their face in water and drown. So, the head was the least protected part compared to their body which was encrusted in ice. It was their head however that needed the most protection. Rankel’s head felt just as it did as a child after he had spun himself around hundreds of times on a dare.
His body convulsed, which threw his retro rockets which were still functioning out of whack, causing Rankel to bump into wall of the tube. Somehow, he could push himself away from the tube, only to bump on the other side. The only saving grace was the fact that the retro rockets being mechanical/chemical machinery kept functioning to ensure that Rankel didn’t lose too much momentum. The last meter through the tube felt like a crawl, and Rankel’s hand instinctively reached out to the rim of the tube to pull himself out.
In the zero G, he did not fall out of the tube, rather he kept going on to the transparent central axis tube floating, until he bumped into the sides of the transparent tube and almost came to a halt. Rankel dimly realized that his retro rockets were still operating, and that he had to shut them down if he was to stop bumping around inside the tube. There was however something even more critical for him to do if he wanted to stay alive, but Rankel couldn’t recall what it was. He could dimly recollect through the foggy recesses of his addled mind that he needed to do something urgently if wanted to stay alive, but it kept slipping his mind.
Rankel instinctively reached towards his retro rocket and shut it down. A Marine could do that in his sleep. Retro rocket navigation came to them as instinctively as walking. Just as he shut down his rockets, the scalding liquid on his body reminded him of that critical thing that he was supposed to do – he immediately pulled the urination bladder plug to let the water out. Since it was zero G, there was no preferred direction for the water to flow, so Rankel had to pump his suit with his hand and spin around to let most of the water out of his suit.
He felt immediate relief on discharge of the hot water, but it was still unbearably hot inside the suit. Rankel tried to switch on his suit to cool it down. It would not turn on, it was well and truly dead. Rankel was about to panic in the heat, before he realized that with a dead suit, very soon it would be the cold and not the heat he would have to worry about.
Having gotten hold of his senses reasonably, Rankel looked for his comrade. After a few seconds of looking around, Rankel located Sha’ad. He was still bouncing around the tube, his retro rockets still operational. The next bounce was taking Sha’ad right back into the radiation filled tube in moments! Rankel grabbed the central lighting axis rod and pushed himself towards Sha’ad. Pushing against something was faster than the retro rockets, and Rankel could grab and tackle the floating suit of Sha’ad in time to prevent him from slipping back into the radiation filled tube.
It was apparent that Sha’ad had passed out. Rankel grappled clumsily, but finally managed to shut his comrade’s suit retro rockets. That immediately gave Rankel the opportunity to be able steady Sha’ad so that he could locate his friend’s discharge plug and pull it. Rankel massaged Sha’ad’s suit to quickly discharge the hot water and help him shed heat.
It was not apparent from outside whether Sha’ad was breathing inside his suit, but if the condition inside Rankel’s suit was any indication, then it would be hot and stuffy inside. The suit’s circulation system had stopped working, fried along with all other electronics. It was not pleasant inside the suit. Although there was no immediate danger of Carbon dioxide build up, or running out of oxygen for at least fifteen more minutes inside the suit, Rankel realized that he would have to open his comrade’s suit to help him breathe.
Rankel decided to open his own helmet first. He would have felt guilty if he opened his friends helmet first in case the air was harmful and killed his friend instantly. The way he saw it, with his suit fried Rankel would have to open his helmet in any case, so what was the point in waiting a few more minutes to exhaust all the air inside his suit. If he had to die, he would die in either case, but Sha’ad didn’t have the luxury of waiting, he had to attend to him immediately. So Rankel quickly unscrewed the single bolt, and the dual adhesive fasteners that sealed the helmet to the suit.
It took a moment for Rankel to realize that he was involuntarily holding his breath. It took all his will power to force himself to take a deep breath. The first thing that he noticed was the stink. Lt. Sharma wasn’t joking about the fart and the rotten eggs part, if anything it was an understatement. It felt like Rankel had been put into the foulest smelling dumpster that could ever be, with decomposing meat, burning plastic and any other rotten smell that a human being could conceive. It took special effort on part of Rankel to not give in to the immediate urge to throw up.
Once Rankel had been able to weather the immediate shock of the foul smell, he realized that the air wasn’t really that bad at all. In fact, he was breathing comfortably, and although the air felt cold with a distinctive chill in it, was probably no worse than the chill in the deserts of the Atacama. He felt no negative effects like an instant headache or buzz – symptoms he had been trained to lookout for as an early warning system that all spacefaring Marines need to be wary of when fighting in vacuum. The air was good enough, so he quickly opened up Sha’ad’s helmet and put his face next to his friend’s nose. His friends face took the shape of an eerie silhouette in the dull red lighting in this chamber.
In fact, this was the first time he became aware of the lighting or anything else in the chamber. He hadn’t even noticed the lighting, let alone anything else about the chamber till now! That could wait though, his priority was to make sure that Sha’ad was alright. Rankel had placed his face, the only exposed part of his body next to Sha’ad’s nose to try and feel his breath, but the tube had turbulent airflow within it, without it being windy. It was impossible to feel something as faint as a human breath.
Rankel pumped his friend and was about to start a mouth-to-mouth, when Sha’ad came to with a gasp. More than anything the chilly air had helped in cooling him down and bringing him back to his senses. Rankel spent a few more seconds ensuring that his friend was alright, and when convinced let him float in the position he was and recover on his own, while he turned his attention to surveying the compartment he had entered.
It immediately took his breath away! Rankel was amazed that he had failed to notice such an amazing vista, something he would only have dreamt about in his fantasy! As he floated near the middle of the transparent tube, and turned around its axis, he could see buildings far away in every direction like a mosaic painted on a distant cylindrical wall. There were square buildings and rectangular ones. Some were were squat and yet others tall as skyscrapers. Some of the tallest structures hugging the partition wall were just a few hundred meters from the central axis tube, just as they had been on the other side of the partition now devastated.
Yet it wasn’t the buildings that captivated Rankel’s imagination, it was the water! More precisely, it was the multitude of water bod
ies splattered around the entire inner surface of this Goliath ship that was beyond belief! In contrast with the buildings all the water bodies were irregularly shaped, perhaps deliberately so. Many were interconnected with other open water bodies by snaking canals. Just as Rankel thought that he couldn’t be surprised any more, he detected motion. He froze immediately and stopped his floating motion by grabbing on to the solid central core of the axis tube. It wasn’t a demon, but that didn’t give Rankel any reason for relief because what he saw was perhaps creepier.
Lining most of the water bodies and the canals was a thick patch of black, which Rankel had initially dismissed as asphalt or something else like a road or a promenade. There was gentle undulating motion on the entire black surface, but also specific sinusoidal motion faintly detectable on those black surfaces that formed patterns that seemed both natural and unnatural at the same time! On careful observation, Rankel realized that the black surface wasn’t black, but dark green that bordered on black. The red lighting of the huge compartment accentuated that blackness.
It took a few more moments before he realized what he was looking at – vegetation! Alien trees, grasses and mini forests! Although he couldn’t make out individual leaves or even trees, the undulating motion was eerily like the motion of grass in a grassland undulating under a gentle breeze. There was no way for Rankel to make out whether those were trees, or large fronds like giant ferns, grasslands or something so alien that humans wouldn’t even be able to conceive it as vegetation. What creeped out Rankel the most were the faint sinusoidal motion discernable on those black patches. Were they giant snakes? Were they huge flesh-eating trees moving their branched tentacles around? Before his imagination ran wild in panic, Rankel forced his eyes to move in another direction.
The Goliath ship was so huge and the vista he was watching so far away, that while he watched in any direction and observed the buildings and the water that appeared to be situated far in the horizon on another hill like in his native village in the Andes. At the same time, he got the illusion that anything “above” the horizon must be the sky, only to look up in that direction of the “sky” and find more buildings and water bodies, and the “sky” to have moved further up. It was disconcerting, exhilarating and scary all at the same time.
After he had finished a 360-degree scan around the entire axis of the tube, marveling at the constructions all along the inner surface of the ship, Rankel turned his attention along the axis of the tube towards the center of the ship. While he had been busy marveling at the structures on the surface of the demon ship, he had missed the most amazing structure right at the very heart of the ship.
Right at the center of the compartment was a dully shining sphere of unimaginable proportions! The sphere was so large that when one looked at it from where Rankel was floating, he couldn’t see the entirety of the structure. Now that he was concentrating on the sphere, it felt as if the sphere filled up this entire compartment of the ship, which was of course an illusion. When he roved his eyes over the circumference of the sphere, he could see that the sphere stopped about two hundred meters short of the inner surface of the ship in all directions along the circumference of the ship. It was buttressed in all directions with massive beams and trusses attached to various points on the inner surface of the ship.
The main beams were so massive, that they would easily have been thirty to forty meters in diameter. The massive arrangement of trusses and beams all around this compartment was holding the massive sphere in place right at the center of the compartment. The sphere spanned about eighty percent of the inner circumference of the ship at a point where the American football shaped ship’s circumference was the greatest, and the sphere by visual reckoning occupied about two third of the volume of this compartment.
The dull shine of the sphere reflected the red light of central axis tube, making it glow blood red. The central axis tube that provided lighting and air filtration had been modified in this compartment to accommodate the sphere. From the point where Rankel was floating right next the compartment wall, till just over a hundred meters, the central axis tube continued straight in the direction of the sphere, until it reached the sphere.
There the tube split into two going in opposite directions around the sphere, providing lighting on either side of the sphere to the surface below. The tubes carried along the circumference of the sphere as far as Rankel’s eyes could see, presumably going all the way round to the other side, where it met the other end of the compartment in a radiation filled junction tube very similar to the one he was floating next to.
The sphere itself was featureless on the surface. Rankel tried hard to locate any pattern on the surface, but in every direction, it was just a dull shiny surface. While Rankel was inspecting the sphere, Sha’ad who had recovered enough came next to him and exclaimed. “Amazing, isn’t it? I cannot see individuals, they are too far away, but I can see masses of demons milling around down there at the surface.” Rankel turned and was glad to see his friend Sha’ad had recovered well.
Sha’ad had had poor eye sight when he had joined the Marines. When he volunteered for the enhanced Marines program, along with other enhancements, Sha’ad had opted for enhancement of his eyes as well. His retina had been grafted with retrovirus that gave his retina sensitivity to infrared light – something normal humans don’t have. It gave him natural night vision. It wasn’t as sensitive or sophisticated as that of the demons, but in this environment where a fair part of the lighting was in the infrared, it enabled him to see much more clearly than others. Along with his enhanced corneal lenses, Sha’ad could see further and better in this environment than Rankel ever could.
“Do you see any demons nearby? I can’t locate any, but you have better eye sight.” Rankel asked his friend the most existential question that needed answer immediately. Rest of his wonderment at the magnificence of this ship could wait.
Rankel nodded and Sha’ad opened his suit’s external pouch flap and took out an odd shaped twisted metal that he had picked up from the debris on the other side. He carefully aimed and threw it inside the radiation filled tube, and sent it floating along the way he had come. It was the agreed upon ‘all clear’ signal. Soon Marines started streaming out of the radiation filled tube one by one. Many of them had passed out like Sha’ad, but this time the Marines had help on the other side.
Rankel and Sha’ad would immediately catch them, pull their plug to release the hot water from their suit, and open their helmets for them to breathe properly. Most of the Marines recovered quickly. Soon there were twenty Marines inside the second compartment. Desmond started looking for a plan of attack the moment he had recovered his senses enough, while Lt. Sharma standing next to him was still visibly dazed. Lt. Sharma may have been an e-Marine, but his primary strength was his engineering knowledge, not physical robustness.
“I may have found something!” Pvt. Sha’ad’s voice floated from a long distance away. His voice sounded strange due to higher pressure of the atmosphere, but it was a lot louder than one would otherwise expect from a man standing well over a hundred meters away near the point where the central axis tube split into two and went around the giant sphere. Sound carried a lot further at higher air pressure. Pvt. Sha’ad was one of the scouts who had gingerly crept forward inside the central axis tube surveying the entire vista. Their task was to find a way out of the tube, inside which the Marines were sitting ducks, and to scout for interesting machinery or vulnerabilities that could be sabotaged or exploited.
On one hand the Marines had been overjoyed with their good fortune at not having been discovered so far, but on the other hand they felt extremely vulnerable because all their electronics had been fried crossing over to the second compartment. Their suits were nonfunctional, meaning that they would die if the demons sucked the air out of this com
partment. They had no instruments to scan this place, except for what they could eyeball in this terrible red light. Most critically they had no weapons except for the sharp blades and short grapples they had brought along, powered only by their muscle. The blades and grapples were a last-minute addition to the Marines’ armory based on feedback they had received from Earth about the fighting style of the demons. Most Marines didn’t actually expect to use it when they were issued those weapons. Now though it was their primary and only weapon.
When Desmond and a few of the officers reached the spot, and turned their gaze towards what Sha’ad pointing, they saw a manhole sized circular plate bolted on to the sphere at the same level as the central axis tube. It was between ten to fifteen meters away from them outside the tube. It covered flush a hole in the sphere. It had two weirdly shaped handles to pull it out, but was securely bolted with many big bolts. Although it might be able to provide an access inside the sphere, but it was clearly not something that the demons opened every day. It wasn’t a door with an easy mechanism to open and close it. It was more like a maintenance hatch that needed to be opened on very few occasions.
Other than that small feature, there was no other feature or kink on the entire surface of the massive sphere. Clearly whatever was inside that sphere needed to remain sealed most of the time. Logic dictated that this had to be their main reactor. If this was a power reactor, then it was truly a massive reactor, but then this ship was truly massive and would need massive power to propel it at the fantastic acceleration rates that have been observed of it. In addition, its antimatter weapons would also require incredible amount of power. Having a reactor of this size might not be an overkill as it might seem to the humans.