“You take one side here; I’ll take the other.” Enough force to tie a knot in a steel girder, but nothing happened. Jacque put his arm in up to the elbow, and quickly withdrew it.
“What do you think?” Jacque said. “I guess we could just walk through it.”
“Let me take a look first.” Carol put her head against the wall and pushed; her helmet disappeared up to the shoulders.
She tilted forward and disappeared.
Jacque leaped after her; slammed against the wall. He pushed hard. Nothing happened. Calming, he pressed his hand across the wall until he found the seam, then leaned into it.
Vertigo: a well-lit elevator shaft 50 stories high. Jacque staggered back.
Bracing himself against the “doors,” he peered through again. Carol was floating on the other side of the shaft. “Come on in,” she said. “No gravity here.” With one hand she held on to a metal rod that ran the length of the shaft, like a fireman’s pole.
Jacque eased through the slit, stepping over the inert L’vrai body. The entrance acted like a flexible gasket, sealing itself around his suit as he passed through, keeping the vacuum out.
He treaded air and drifted toward the metal pole, the suit’s magnetism puffing him. Carol moved her hand just in time to keep from getting pinned between him and the pole.
“What now?” he said. “Up or down?”
“Up’s closer.” The shaft ended some twenty meters over their heads. “I’m going to switch on again. This place frightens me.”
“Yeah. Any moment I expect an army of them to come pouring out of the wall.” They worked their way up the pole hand-over-hand. The grip they had to exert to overcome the force of their magnetic fields was so great that their fingers left indentations in the metal.
Almost to the top, Carol said “Try infrared.” Jacque did; the entrance slits suddenly were visible, slightly lighter than the surrounding wall.
“Well, now we have someplace to go. Question is-“
“Do we go there, or let them come to us?” Carol said. “I vote we stay here for a while.”
“I don’t know,” Jacque said. “Maybe we ought to keep the initiative.”
“And maybe they’ve set a trap. They’ve had time.”
Jacque thought for a moment. “Maybe we ought to burn our way through one. We should be able to do it at this distance, not get too close to them.”
“All right. You choose.”
Jacque aimed at the seam directly in front of him. With one short burst, it opened along its whole length and sagged- And the spear of energy continued through the room beyond, to an assembly of heavy machinery arranged along the opposite wall. Some delicate balance was disturbed; some false signal initiated:
The wall was a loading bay. It snapped open to empty space.
Jacque and Carol were buffeted by the hurricane force of air being sucked out of the ship. All up and down the corridor, seams dilated open. Several L’vrai slid into the shaft, writhing in death throes. One passed by them to tumble on into space. Then the wind died, for lack of air.
After a long while, Jacque said “Makes sense….”
“What?”
“The seams. They’re only rigid against vacuum from one direction. No natural disaster’s going to fill the corridor with vacuum without breaching the outer shell.”
“We’re an unnatural disaster, then?”
They watched an alien float by, inert and cooling. For ten days they divided their time between scouting the wreckage and anxiously keeping a lookout for other L’vrai ships. It seemed unlikely that the rest or the flotilla would be ignorant of the disaster that had befallen one of their number.
But ignoring it, Jacque argued, was consistent with the way they acted toward one another. Even toward themselves.
Jacque or Carol often ventured outside of the ship, trying to contact Tania. They never had any success.
When slingshot time approached, they gathered a selection of small artifacts and assumed the feet-on-shoulders position.
“Rape,” Jacque said. “Then pillage. Then burn.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Old joke.”
45 – Messenger
When Jacque and Carol appeared, there were a lot of people gathered under the dome that housed the crystal. Only one was looking at them, the controller.