“Hey,” Griffith rumbled. “What’d I tell you?”
“Right.” Jackin gave a firm nod. “Yes, sir.”
Rake gave Griffith a suspicious glare.
Jackin swept the controls and the floor shook. The SGL picked up speed, cruising toward the enormous triangular panel. At fifty meters out, the trecullis came to life. The small triangles outlining it began to glow, one by one.
“Stop here, Optio,” Mesa instructed, large eyes wide with awe. Jackin slowed the ship to a stop.
The shimmering continued, dragging heavily across the metal as if waking from an eternal sleep. The flashes accelerated, sweeping clockwise around the panel until the entire border gleamed. The triangle of light pulsed for a few brief moments before going dark.
Cavalon glanced at the others, who looked as unsure as he felt. Was that it? Had they been “scanned”？
The enormous bronze triangle glinted and split, trisecting into three equal pieces. Each panel recessed into the dark hull, revealing a gaping black entrance. No illumination came from within.
“Oh,” came Mesa’s soft, surprised voice. She looked down at the atlas in her hands. The grooves of the golden pyramid glowed with a subtle white light.
“That’s a good sign, right?” Jackin said, sounding like he maybe half believed himself. He looked from the pyramid to Rake with raised brows. Rake looked to Mesa. Mesa shrugged.
“If this … beacon is linked to the curanulta,” Mesa said, “then it may be acting as our access code.”
“And if it’s not?” Jackin asked.
“Well, if we did not pass the scan, it may incinerate our vessel.” Mesa gave a light scoff at herself. “Although, really, it would more than likely have already done that. It is unlikely the trecullis would allow us entry, only to destroy us, a task it could have easily accomplished already.”
“So … we’re okay?” Rake asked carefully, unblinking as she stared at Mesa.
Mesa pressed her lips together, considering for a moment, then gave a curt nod.
Rake sighed and turned back to the screen. “Okay, Jack. Go ahead.”
Jackin sat up straighter and slid forward on the controls, flying the SGL into the darkness.
Cavalon’s heart thrummed violently in his chest as they stood in silence, staring at the viewscreen in unsettled awe. They were literally headed into the abyss—willingly flying inside an unknown Viator structure. It was an awful idea.
As they crossed the threshold, Jackin swept the searchlight around in an arc, piercing through the black before them. But it revealed nothing. “Scanners aren’t getting a reading on the walls…” He drifted off as the blackness began to glow all around them.
From every direction, narrow bands of soft white light faded on, recessed in trench-like grooves running vertically up the length of the distant walls. Distant, as in kilometers. Kilometers and kilometers away. The view sent Cavalon’s stomach lurching until his brain could reconcile the scale. Simple, he told himself. Just a hollow shell. A seventy-two kilometer hollow shell. But “inside” simply couldn’t be this large. It didn’t compute.
Strip by strip, the lights faded up as they moved deeper into the perfectly spherical chamber, revealing concave walls curving up and away in each direction.
The inward-facing facade mirrored the overlaid slabs they’d seen on the outside—slowly merging into one surface as they curved around the inside of the sphere. Unlike the outside, however, a narrow band of gleaming, dark silver metal ringed the center of the sphere—a high-walled groove at least two kilometers wide.
Cavalon’s gaze fell on the only other anomaly in sight—a comparatively small bronze sphere hovering at the center of the smooth outward surface. Though too far away to judge the size properly, it couldn’t have been larger than a half kilometer in diameter.