Pop… pop… pop…
Justine narrowed her eyes on the dark, confining tunnel that lay ahead of her.
Pop… Pop… Pop…
In her hand rested the small, high-tech phone Foster had used to direct the circular orb of floating light. Why didn’t Foster still have it? Because she didn’t like the way he was controlling his little device. And twenty minutes of her backseat driving was more than enough reason for him to hand it over.
Pop… Pop… Pop…
“Dammit,” she cursed her thumb as it slipped off the display.
The 8-ball responded to her mistake by lurching upward before crashing unceremoniously into a low hanging bulkhead. Upon impact, the sphere sputtered wildly to the side then dropped a foot before its internal guidance stabilized. “Are you sure you guys don’t hear that popping sound? It’s driving me crazy.”
“No.” Foster said, repeating his previous two answers to that same question.
Tired from almost an hour of walking slightly bent over, he slumped up against one of the corridor’s grimy walls. Instantly, he felt pain radiate across his lower back. A pain that served as a reminder that those climbing cleats were littered everywhere around them. “Maybe you’re just getting paranoid.”
“Yeah…” Behind them, Joseph stopped to examine an open conduit panel. “We are in a dark alien tunnel after all. No one would blame you for being afraid.”
“How many times do I have to tell you guys… she lives for this kind of thing.” Hoover couldn’t see the look on Justine’s face because of the 8-balls’ position. But he was completely confident it was plastered with a smile. “Deny it.”
“I’m not denying anything.” Justine said as she managed to bring the orb back under control before the device got too far ahead of them. Suddenly, the lights refocused on their path and her senses sharpened at the sight of another large opening in the corridor.
“Hold,” she whispered a warning.
A warning that both men ignored. After all, they had already run into three such anomalies during their exploration. And each time, these anomalies turned out to be nothing more than a dome-like structure, steampunk themed, and crammed full of hundreds of manual switches and defunct readouts.
These Substations, as Joseph referred to them, were transfer nodes that controlled power regulation and distribution. An accurate assessment given the way everything still hummed along inside them. So, they were interesting, not dangerous.
Still, best to be sure, she thought as her thumb flicked forward. With only a minimal delay, the 8-ball mimicked her motion until it disappeared from their sight. After a tense second or two, she whispered, “Ping it, Hoover.”
The A.I. directed the orb to produce the now familiar chirping sound. “Nothing but another substation, Agent Rushing,” he reported once the sonar program performed as intended. “Does that disappoint you?”
“No,” she blurted out a little too quickly. “Not really.”
“Is that the truth?”
It wasn’t. Because the truth was, her imagination currently had her somewhere within the bowels of the Nostromo, crawling around with a flamethrower in one hand and motion tracker gripped tightly in the other. All the while, just waiting for an alien to launch themselves from some unseen recess in the wall.
In fact, this scene had been playing out in her head for a while now. And though it wasn’t exactly professional to do so, Justine was smiling from ear to ear. “But I do have to admit… all this is pretty cool.”
Never one to play make-believe, Foster just rolled his eyes but made sure to say nothing out loud to dissuade her enthusiasm. Instead, as a unit, all three of them hunched down and continued walking toward the room ahead. Five feet from the opening, Justine raised her hand and waited in silence for everyone to stop.
“This is probably just another station but let me go first to check it out.”
“I know we’re alone,” Foster caught her eye as he went unsteadily to one knee. “But try and be careful.”
“Yeah,” Hoover crackled over their earpieces. “Don’t do anything stupid like starting an interstellar war?”
“You guys are so needy.”
Tucking their warnings away, she methodically bridged the distance to the station with two small hops. The sphere, with the help of its location software, reached the apex of the room and was now illuminating every square inch for possible hiding places.
A deft move away from entering the newly discovered substation, those climbing cleats popped into her head. Carefully, she probed around the corridor’s precipice. Sure enough, the wedges were also here. A bad/awesome idea was beginning to form in her head.
“Going in,” she said to the others.
Then, like a kid dangling on the monkey bars, Justine swung outward until she reached the perfect position to land a few feet inside the room. Releasing her grip, her pink Nikes landed on the dirty floor with a thud. Without taking any time to look around, she pressed her body up against the nearest smooth surface.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
In position, Justine’s eyes darted around the circular ceiling in search of anything out of the ordinary. As before, the sphere’s light hit the various controls at odd angles, and the dancing shadows wavered like blades of grass in a summer breeze. This happy thought flickered away quickly when her gaze fell upon something that wasn’t present in the first three substations.
“Guys,” she called back down the now darkened corridor. “There’s something different about this one.”
“What do you mean something different?” Curiosity overtook the deputy’s instincts to hang back and fiddle. “What does it look like?”
Without waiting for an answer, Joseph jumped to his feet and sprinted forward. A second later, he emerged from the corridor slightly out of breath. Foster soon joined him, and together they scrutinized the weird thing Justine had been referring to.
“A porthole on a space station,” Foster pointed at the object of their scrutiny. “That’s weird.”
“Not really,” Joseph took three steps and found himself beneath a transparent opening fashioned right into the center of the ceiling with four large metal braces. Affixed by familiar looking rivets, these braces held back what looked like a river of silver lightning. “Energy can often appear normal, even when you measure it with a device like a voltmeter or a bolometer. That’s why sometimes you must give it the eye test.”
“Eye test,” Justine stood helpless under the strange porthole and its dancing streams of brightly glowing light. “What can you tell by looking at energy?”
Joseph sighed.
“Depends on the mix, but each engine’s power flow shows up as a different colored wavelength.” Almost as if the station wanted to punctuate this point, white streams of plasma coursed and arched against the glass. “From the looks of it, this station’s power source is putting out a massive amount of energy.”
“And you can tell that by the color of the energy stream?”
“Yes,” Joseph said without further explanation.
“Well,” Foster grabbed his tablet and began running some initial scans of the phenomenon. “Whatever it is. The scanners of the 8-ball can’t read it. The only detectable power sources here are some slight EM radiation signals coming off all these switches and gauges.”
“That’s a good thing.” Joseph laughed as he stared into the crudely fashioned porthole. “This type of reactor utilizes a form of energy which requires a shit load of shielding. If you were reading something other than that, we would most likely already be dead.”
Pop… Pop… Pop…
“I don’t care if you think I’m crazy.” Justine pried her eyes away from this beautiful discovery to begin searching around the alcove for the now much louder noise. “But something is making a popping noise. I’m sure of it.”
“No one thinks you’re crazy,” Foster said reassuringly. Although, for the first time since she started asking about the sound, he did notice some kind of noise rising above the normal din of the corridor. “This place is a bit overwhelming.”
“Speak for yourself.” Hoover had noticed the popping sounds around the same time as Justine. But he was having too much fun listening to her slowly descend into madness to mention it to the rest of the group. “I think she’s suffering from SPACE DEMENTIA!”
“Really? Well, I think you're suffering from SPACE ASSHOLENESS!”
“And exactly how would I be suffering from SPACE ASSHOLENESS? I don’t have an asshole.”
“You don’t have to have one to be one, Hoover.”
“That’s absolutely true, Agent Rushing,” Foster said offhandedly to the fighting couple. “But I wouldn’t describe his condition with the word ‘space’. After all, he was an asshole on earth too.”
“Hah!” Seeing an ally, Justine piled onto her digital foe. “Who’s suffering now?”
“We all are.” Joseph said slowly, with much regret.
Turning back to the porthole, his mired brain fought against their antics while somewhere buried in his memories lay an undeniable truth. He had seen this type of power setup before. “I haven’t read Book 83 for a while.”
“83?” They asked at the same time because neither one of them understood what he was referring to.
“Sorry. Like I said before, if I don’t go back and reread my journals every so often, the memories contained within them tend to get jumbled and lost.” Joseph pointed to a large bank of digital readouts that encircled the corridor directly behind them. Down the dark passageway, something was reflecting the 8-ball’s light back at them.
“This is the reactor’s main power filter. Output is routed here first. Then, once the energy has been deemed pure, it’s piped along to the smaller substations for final distribution.”
Foster closed out the programs running on his tablet. For the first time since entering the labyrinth, Justine’s faint popping sounds were now truly audible to his ears. “Is this energy originating from down that passageway?”
“I would think so,” Joseph turned away from the long corridor and began to head back toward the way they had just come.
“Wait a minute?” Justine said, her eyes glued to the far-off reflections of light. “Shouldn’t we finish checking everywhere?”
“Why?” Joseph turned around to answer her question. “There’s nothing worth seeing down there. We should get back to looking for the things we came here to find. You know? My body, your prisoners, and his proof.”
“But...” She started while looking at Foster with pleading eyes. Clearly wanting to fall down the rabbit hole just a little farther, he could make out her thoughts before she even had a chance to articulate them.
“No,” he snapped, hoping that decisiveness might win the day. “Joseph’s right. There’s no sense in wasting our time looking at an engine room. Don’t we have prisoners to rescue?”
The hardened agent looked like a small puppy being called by two owners at the same time. She knew the prisoners were important, but this was a chance to see an engine room, one responsible for holding a space station in orbit above a black hole. Could she even look in the mirror and call herself a sci-fi fan if she let this opportunity slip away?
“Didn’t Hoover say that this space station was empty right now?” Foster nodded at her opening salvo. “And you said that woman had been here for a long time before they sent her back to earth. Didn’t you?”
Again, her logic forced both Foster and the deputy to nod even though they both knew where all this wordplay was heading.
“Then I don’t see the harm in spending a couple more minutes here... in the engine room,” Justine said, glancing back over her shoulder toward the end of the passageway, trying to look as innocent as possible. “Finishing what we started.”
Not waiting for a negative response, she spun on her heels and took off down the corridor at a full sprint. The 8-ball, still linked to the phone in her hand, began to track with her movements and accelerated quickly to keep up.
Dumbfounded, Joseph and Foster quietly decided to follow the FBI’s version of Alice in Wonderland for a little while longer. “Is there really nothing worth seeing down there?”
“Nothing that would get me home?” Joseph said as he started down the corridor.
“And the prisoners?” Foster asked.
“I wouldn’t think so.” The deputy pointed back at the makeshift porthole and sighed. “But something about this place is off. So, I couldn’t promise anything.”
In the distance, over the soft popping sounds, they could hear Justine Rushing, a proud sci-fi fan, squealing like a kid on the opening day of a new Star Wars movie. “I wonder if this thing runs on Dilithium crystals!”
“Dilithium?!” At the very mention of that word, Joseph hung his head low and without breaking his stride, turned to Foster. “That show never got anything right about space travel. Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t” Foster pressed a finger to his lips as a warning. “But please, whatever you do…don’t tell her that.”
