“Lose the hat,” she said. “If we get killed down there, you’ll want to leave a good-looking corpse.”
“This hat isn’t going anywhere until I can get another.”
“Suit yourself.” Then she lowered herself down, using the corrugated side of the shaft for footholds, back braced against the opposite side. Below her it was black as night, and there was absolutely no indication of how far the tube descended.
She inched her way down by a classic counterforce technique and was soon swallowed in darkness. Looking up, she could see a single star, which gave her comfort. But even that vanished as she went deeper, and despite herself, she felt a primitive terror begin to well up from within. It was so black that swirls and shapes began to cross her field of vision. Was Watts right, and the shaft was getting narrower? It felt like it…but, she told herself, that had to be her rising panic.
She stopped. How deep was she? It seemed like she’d been lowering herself forever. Her muscles were trembling with the effort, her heart pounding. She wanted to call up, to hear a reassuring voice, but she didn’t dare chance alerting whoever was below. If anybody was below. God, what if the shaft dead-ended and she didn’t have the strength to ascend? What if it ended in a furnace? She tried to shut down her panic and focus on one movement at a time.
As she worked her way deeper, she became aware of a faint glow from below. Her sudden relief was quickly replaced by the uncertainty of what she might find—and who might be there.
She felt the tunnel branch into a horizontal T, and then her feet touched the bottom of the shaft. With vast relief she gingerly stood up to full height and recovered her breath. The dim light was coming in from the tunnel to her left.
She knelt and crawled along it. After a short distance, it ended in a flimsy louvered vent, set into a ceiling and overlooking a large, unlit room packed with blinking servers, the only sound the hum of air-conditioning. At the far door of the room was a man with a rifle, evidently standing guard. Eating french fries. Paying no attention to anything.
Corrie backed up, then climbed a few feet up the shaft. “Hey,” she said in a low tone. “Hey.”
Watts’s distant voice floated down softly. “Hey yourself.”
“It’s a way in. Come down. Brace yourself on opposite sides, feet on one, back and hands against the other. Keep up the tension or you’ll fall. And for God’s sake, be quiet.”
“Copy. We’re coming down.”
60
THE HANGAR WAS large—even by the standards of the sprawling underground complex. Along the reinforced walls, Nora saw a fantastic array of equipment: video cameras, computers, monitoring and recording devices, sensors, an array of large-diaphragm Neumann microphones. The ceiling was busy with cabling, studio spotlights, and dozens of small stainless steel devices that looked like industrial sprinklers.
But it was what lay directly before her, in the center of the huge space, that instantly caught and utterly dominated her attention.
A craft of some kind rested in a cradle made of a dull black material. The moment she set eyes on it she knew that the thing was not of this earth. Her lingering skepticism was instantly consumed in the face of this transfixing, irrefutable proof. The thing’s surface shimmered like liquid mercury, seemingly in motion beneath the lights, as if so many coats of lacquer had been applied that it appeared more like the surface of a limpid pool than a hull. She could not say exactly what color it was—it seemed somehow like all colors to her, or perhaps even a color that was entirely new. It was not especially large: roughly the size of the Apollo lunar module. But it couldn’t have looked more different from that ungainly craft. This had a sleek, flowing, organic shape, like a wingless bird hovering on a thermal. There were no sharp edges, no marks or insignia, no windows or portholes or projecting equipment except toward the nose, where an oval rent of some kind was visible, around which the metallic flow turned into something closer to a small whirlpool—she was reminded of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot—roiling uneasily in a sickly green color. Placed around, at some remove, were several tall, monolithic barriers or blast walls of what again appeared to be graphite, arranged in an offset pattern like the sound baffles in a music studio. The spacecraft was surrounded by rings painted on the floor: the outermost yellow, the next one orange, and then the final, inner one red. Various warnings and numbers were stenciled between the nested circles.
Spacecraft. The word had come to her mind instinctively, unconsciously. But in just the last sixty seconds, all lingering uncertainty had drained from her. It was impossible for human science to build, even simulate, a hull like that. Despite the gravity of their situation—the armed soldiers, the hostile underground base—she felt an unexpected relief as she realized she could stop fighting now. She could let all her cynicism, doubt, and scientific skepticism simply melt away like an unwanted weight…to be replaced by wonder.