Exhausted from their experiences on the 3rd level, Justine led the intrepid explorers back into the transportation tube and waited until each of them made it safely inside before closing the doors. Once they did, the young agent slid down the wall of the space elevator until she was sitting cross legged on the floor.

  “That was a slog.” Foster said as he also sat down on the floor beside Justine.

  “Please don’t remind me.” Joseph said with an upturned nose.

  The 3rd level should have been the easiest by far for the team to explore. After all, the level mainly consisted of nothing more than a few simple loading bays, hundreds of feet of walkway scaffolding and the entrance to a large, empty holding tank. The loading bays and walkways were easily checked by simply looking into them or at them.

  But the holding tank? No, the holding tank required a more detailed examination from them. An examination that left all three explorers standing at the bottom of the engineer’s empty tank. A tank long since dry of whatever watery mixture it held.

  A tank perfectly suited for an impromptu/ill-fated bathroom break.

  “We should have gone back for our coats,” Justine complained more to herself than to the others. “There’s no telling if we might need to use them later.”

  “Go back?” The last hour had been draining, especially on Foster. “After what we did to them… on them, I wouldn’t touch those coats again with a ten-foot pole.”

  “Please,” Justine grinned at the image of their coats lying on the bottom of that dirty, previously dried out tank. “So, you’re telling me that you’ve never peed in a pool before?”

  “Not an empty one, no! Especially not one I’m standing in at the time.”

  “Whine, whine, whine, you’re just lucky no one had a big breakfast this morning.” She smiled while stretching out her sore back. “Number twos in the field are always the worst.”

  “My god!” Pushing that disgusting image out of his head, Foster stood up and tapped on the elevator’s control panel. Instantly, the same wireframe diagram of the station’s layout appeared on the screen. “I thought women were supposed to be more prudish about that sort of thing.”

  Justine shot him a contemptuous look while she readjusted her ponytail. “Not this girl.”

  Rolling his eyes only slightly, Foster began to trace the path of the transport tube as it snaked along the outside hull of the space station. Manually, he counted the floors as he went. “Six,” he concluded. “This place is almost a mile, and a half long and only has six floors. I would have expected a number closer to a hundred.”

  From the floor, Justine squinted up at the station’s schematics. To her surprise, the fourth and fifth stops both emptied onto sections about one-eighth of the station’s total area. However, it was the fifth and final stop that really drew her attention. It accounted for half the entire station’s footprint. “There must be something massive up there.”

  “I don’t think the word massive would cover it, Agent Rushing.” Foster responded as his brain started chewing on another mystery. What could be so large that it would require over a half a mile of real estate to contain? The possibilities gnawed away at his proverbial soul.

  “I do have a question for you, Joseph.” He turned away from the panel and looked the alien straight in the eyes. “Why does this place look like an extra-terrestrial fixer-upper? None of the floors we’ve been to so far have any symmetry of construction.”

  The deputy also let his large frame slide down the wall into a tired mass of sweat and faint urine smell before answering. “The only thing I can think of is more than one race was involved in the construction.”

  “Was your race involved in its construction?” Justine asked.

  The question flowed through his massive collection of notebook memories. Slowly, he retraced the last few hours of their exploration. How shoddy the construction techniques were in some places, how out of date the materials appeared to be at every turn, and how rudimentary every design seemed to be.

  Hell, the only thing approaching state of the art was the Popper drive room. He shot Justine a contemptuous look. At least what was left of it was state of the art.

  “Don’t give me that look.” She said as soon as their eyes met.

  “No,” Joseph said, making sure to blatantly ignore her warning. “My people would have been more meticulous with the materials and more deliberate in their assembly. Half this place looks like it came out of a junkyard.”

  “Agreed.” Foster retreated against the smooth, clear outer hull of the transportation tube.

  This material, unlike the material in the docking bay, didn’t require a command from Hoover to become transparent. Merely pressing a button on the control panel was enough to shift its state. When he pressed the switch, the effect left his body silhouetted by inky black space and tiny twinkling pinpoints of light.

  “Hoover,” Foster wiped the sweat from his brow. “Have you been able to retrieve any information on the prisoners yet?”

  Hoover was also frustrated by the things he had seen and not seen so far.

  “I’ve never seen a system like this before. Normally, with this level of technological sophistication, you would expect to find an advanced operating system running everything. But each floor we’ve been on seems to be a self-contained environment, except for a simple communication system linking them together. And considering we’re here alone, that’s not very useful.” Hoover paused. “I don’t know if us being here alone is lucky or unlucky.”

  “Lucky,” Joseph grunted from the floor. “The arbiters are an unforgiving race.”

  Foster and Justine shared looks of exasperation as the elevator climbed higher along the outside of the station’s superstructure. Both wanted that statement clarified further, but neither had the strength to ask.

  Soon, the floor shifted beneath their feet, and the tube began to slow for its arrival on level 4. Outside the window, near the lower left edge of the viewing area, a massive cable appeared, lurching back and forth on some invisible space wind. Foster was the first to lay eyes on the mysterious object, but Joseph was the first to acknowledge it.

  “Now there’s something you don’t see every day,” the deputy said, a little awestruck.

  “What?” Justine spun around in hopes of seeing a spaceship, a planet or something else her geeky sensibilities might find cool. “Is it another UFO?”

  “No… it’s not a spaceship.” Foster pressed his face up against the exposed side of the elevator. Attached to a portion of the station they couldn’t see, a massive support line swayed slightly back and forth like a ship’s mooring line at high tide.

  Disappearing into the darkness, the only thing that indicated its end point was an orange, pulsating glow which resembled the end of a sparkler on the Fourth of July. “But now I think I know why that Popper drive was so large.”

  A big fan of the space race, Justine immediately conjured up visions of the old Apollo program. Specifically, the old stock footage of the Saturn 1B rocket expelling its fuel lines before liftoff.

  “How big do you think that cable is?” Justine’s eyes, plump with avarice, couldn’t open any wider. “Ten feet?” She pressed her finger to the viewing port then traced the length of the cable, “Maybe fifteen feet in diameter?”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Foster did some quick calculations and came up with a figure closer to thirty. On the other hand, Joseph had real world, outer space experience in these matters. So, he knew precisely how thick the cable was.

  “What you’re seeing is a load bearing power conduit. My people construct a great many things for a great many species. In that construction, we employ similar gear for towing large, broken-down ships. Generally, most conduits are no larger than twenty-five feet.”

  He joined the others by the crowded viewing area. “But from the size of this station and its proximity to a black hole, I would have to guess it’s at least fifty feet thick.” Joseph leaned back and let his statement sink in. “But that’s just a guess. I’ve never seen a cable built to those specifications before.”

  “Really?” Justine grew more excited at the prospect of seeing something an alien hadn’t.

  “Yeah, and it’s really old.” Cocking his head to one side, Joseph pointed out specific places in the cable’s casing where warping and bulging were occurring. “And it’s bleeding off energy like a mother.” Small, blue electrical arcs leaped from the exposed cracks then spread across its surface like ants feasting on a piece of food. “Also, I don’t recognize any of those materials.”

  Behind them, the doors slid quietly open.

  Having seen such wonders before, Joseph motioned for them to follow. In response, they just waved their hands dismissively. Obviously, they preferred to stare at what was happening in space for a little longer.

  “Fine,” Joseph relented. “But there’s nothing special about that cable.”

  Exasperated, he turned away from the earthlings and found himself standing at the opening of another very strange corridor. Wider than it was long, this dimly lit chamber was beset on all sides by an eclectic array of damaged bulkhead doors. And above each of them was affixed a light built into the wall. A light which illuminated each piece perfectly.

  “Where did you guys come from?”

  Usually, identifying ship parts came easy for someone like Joseph. In his short time at the shipyards, he had assisted in the construction of over two hundred vessels for a wide variety of different species. In fact, there wasn’t much the Solon didn’t know about things that shot off into space.

  But these metallic slabs were something of a mystery.

  Why? Because each one seemed to be made from an unbendable metallic alloy. A metal that now lay twisted and bent into impossible shapes. On top of that, these large pieces of scrap weren’t even part of the room’s original design. They were just pieces of junk art welded onto the underlying hull to form a weirdly unsettling diorama of destruction.

  “Are you guys’ pieces of the same ship?” He wondered aloud to himself as his eyes roamed from bulkhead to bulkhead. Then, halfway through looking third piece of metal, he noticed slight variations in their designs, their color schemes. “Or different ships?”

  Spying a gap between the pieces, Joseph poked his hand inside and began to feel around for a clue to who might have created all this. After a minute of prodding, the only thing he managed to accomplish was to break off a piece of damaged and scorched metal.

  As the shard fell to the ground with a clang, Joseph couldn’t help but think back to his earlier conversation with Foster. How everything here didn’t belong, at least not together anyway.

  “Where’s the ship name?” He quietly asked as he searched further for any kind of stamp or identification mark. To his surprise, there was none to be found. Which was weird because every component that left his shipyard clearly had the ship’s name upon it. Although, from the amount of damage done to these slabs of metal, that outcome didn’t seem too far-fetched.

  Getting nowhere fast, Joseph turned his attention toward the end of the corridor and into a more expansive room. There, in the middle of a pristinely clean floor, sat four oddly placed stone benches. Twenty feet long, these pews were so simple in design that he couldn’t put his finger on who might have built them.

  Even stranger, the seats sat completely unsecured to the heavily plated floor. An oversight that never would have made it past his first yard foreman on Solon. He even remembered that tough bastard’s first words clear as day. “Never forget to bolt the seats down!”

  Facing a large, open circular door, the pews looked like they were waiting for a group of people to sit down. In fact, the whole setup reminded him of a church hall just before everyone showed up for Sunday mass. Not that church mattered that that much to him. After all, Joseph had always seen religion as an odd bit of self-indulgence.

  A point of view that hadn’t changed all that much even after dating a Lutheran.

  Still, he should have seen the possibility of eternal life quite appealing. Especially for a group of beings that only lived about two Earth years. But he didn’t. No. It was the things you left behind that mattered most to him. Not the things you hoped to take with you.

  “What the hell?” Positioned near the circular doorway was an object that had no business being on a space station. He maneuvered around the pews toward a simple stone pillar balancing an ornate pedestal. “Benches are one thing, but who puts pillars on a space station?”

  Made from a solid white piece of stone that looked like quartz, the column stood about waist high off the floor. Resting on top of the column was a pedestal about twelve inches wide and made from a single piece of charred, twisted metal. Arranged almost reverently, the pedestal reminded Joseph of a museum he once visited where pieces of art were displayed on similar pillars for everyone to admire and appreciate.

  “Book 12…” He said quietly to himself, “The Alien Collection.”

  Then, he noticed a series of bold symbols etched on the flat edge of the stone. Beneath the symbols were an impossibly long string of numbers that almost reached down to the bottom of the pillar. For a fleeting moment, he wondered if Hoover could decipher their meaning.

  After all, Foster’s digital friend had easily interfaced with the station’s systems.

  But as quickly as that thought appeared, another one hurriedly joined it. A memory that included him being shot multiple times by a ray gun during one of ‘their’ investigations. So, not surprisingly, the need to recover his body swiftly overpowered his curiosity about some probably useless symbols.

  “Come on, guys,” he yelled back to the others. “This place just keeps getting weirder and weirder.”

  Inside the tube, it took every ounce of willpower Justine had to pull herself away from that view. Black holes, abandoned space stations, alien tentacle creatures, every science fiction nerd dreamed of this very moment. And it’s not every day that a girl discovers an alien retrieval device that whisks them away to another world.

  Begrudgingly, she turned to look at Foster, who also seemed to be in a trance. “It’s beautiful… isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he returned her gaze and smiled slightly. “Yes, it is.”

  Unsure of what he was referring to, Justine asked, “Are you still pissed about me bringing you here without asking?”

  Foster’s face remained placid as he replied in a deadpan voice, “I peed on my coat.”

  “Technically, your coat fell on your pee.”

  “True.” Foster halfheartedly smiled. “But I was still wearing it at the time.”

  “It’s not my fault this place doesn’t have any bathrooms.”

  “No.” Foster remembered the inside of the engineer’s tank on level 3. How they decided to use the bathroom near a drainpipe just before the level’s gravity shifted midstream unexpectedly. And how they all ended up sliding across a filthy, freshly pee stained floor. “No, that’s the one thing that isn’t your fault.”

  “See,” Justine punched him playfully on the arm, then joined Joseph in the other room. “I knew you would forgive me.”

  “Acceptance is not forgiveness!” Foster retorted loudly. But instead of following out of the elevator, he lingered by the view port. Why? Because where Justine saw something wondrous and beautiful beyond the glass, he saw another mystery. And a foreboding one at that.

  Because as wondrous as this place was, an unfathomable amount of time and effort must have been brought to bear to build a place this size. And to be honest, that amount of time and devotion scared him.

  “You know,” Hoover said only to Foster. “The cables may not be all that special, but what’s at the end of them might be.”

  “Maybe,” he responded. “But that mystery will have to wait a little longer.”

  “Sure,” Hoover said, not believing his friend for one minute. “Still, something else is bothering you. Isn’t it?”

  “I just don’t understand. All this trouble to make a prison on another planet,” he quietly said to the voice in his head. “And what is this place? A transfer station for murderers? One that doesn’t require living guards, only the looming threat of a massive black hole. Why?”

  “If I had to guess,” Hoover responded like he did back at Wilson, when Foster needed a sounding board. “A failsafe device.”

  “You know,” Foster sighed and grimaced at the same time. “Of all the answers you could have given, that one scares me the most.”

  “Dude,” the AI’s tenor turned a little more serious. “Everything we’ve seen so far should have scared the shit out of you.”

  “Exactly,” Foster turned back toward the open elevator door. In the distance, he could see Justine standing on something that looked like a church pew. “Why go this far? Why expend time and resources on this kind of scale? Why would you need to send your prisoners so far away?”

  “Not enough information.” Hoover admitted. “Still, why aren’t you more freaked out?”

  “Have you ever got around to watching the movie, Alien?”

  “Not yet,” a slight buzzing sound came over the earpiece’s speaker followed by a dinging sound. “Ok. That was disgusting. What’s your point.”

  “My point is, do you remember John Hurt’s character?”

  “Of course I do. His name was Kane.”

  “Sorry,” Foster kept forgetting Hoover was an all-powerful AI, not just his friend. “Well, I’m like Kane.”

  “Excuse me? I don’t think I get the reference.”

  “Kane, Hoover. I’m like Kane standing over that gross, slime-covered alien egg.”

  “Again, your point?”

  “My point is... that everyone watching the movie knows something horrible is inside of it. Hell, even Kane probably knows. But that doesn’t stop him from standing over the thing like an idiot. That knowledge doesn’t override his need to know what’s inside the egg.”

  “That sounds stupid.” Hoover sighed. “Humans can be very stupid, Foster.”

  “Yes, we can. But even knowing that, I’m still going to blindly stand over that proverbial egg just to see what comes out.”

  Then, before his friend could respond to Foster’s asinine statement, another thought ran through his already frenzied mind.

  “Hoover?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How awful could their monsters have been to need an egg like this?”