The Shadow of the Moon-Lydia's Tale

Chapter Twenty One

'This is a strange place, there is no one here. The whole thing's empty. I can feel no signs of life.' Faulke muttered, looking at tortured sculptures flickering past them as they sped swiftly along. 'It's like a ghastly display set out for no one to ever see. Where's the crew?' 

'The ships sensors detect nothing either,' muttered the Halout impatiently pushing the ship on. 'A ghost ship it appears, with no occupants.' 

'What about IT?' Lydia looked deep into the pitch black in front of them trying to sense what lay beyond the reach of the lights. 

'If it's here, it's giving out no detectable signal.' The Halout looked up, his face strangely oddly distorted by the glow of the console. 'I'm getting no signal from the Revenge either.' 

'I've lost touch with the fleet too.' Faulke tapped his halo to check it was working. 'We're on our own.' 

They traveled on deeper into the spherical monolith. At times Lydia felt the claustrophobic darkness clawing at her mind, trying to force her to forget what she had been through and give up to her baser instincts of fear and horror and to beg the Halout to turn the ship and run from whatever lay deep at the core waiting for her. But each time she felt herself slipping away she would turn her mind to the Nergalrhod and Milo and pull her mind back into the light. Around them unexpected walls shot up, floors suddenly fell away revealing limitless chasms impenetrable to the beams of their lights. Sheer cliffs would suddenly appear forcing the Halout to swing the ship around and track back the way they had come. For a while it seemed to her they were lost in an endless maze of boundless corridors within the alien ship- a Theseus seeking his Minotaur within the Labyrinth.

'We're close to the centre, I'd say - it's up ahead.' The Halout interrupted Lydia's thoughts. Above them the roof could no longer be seen. The walls raced away either side of them, the ship had entered an immeasurably large open space at the centre of the vessel.  

The Halout shrugged his shoulders and sat back. 'I can't tell how big this is or where we are. The ships instruments have failed, we could be flying around in circles for all I know.' 

'There - it looks like the base of this thing, a floor perhaps. Take us down' Faulke urged. 

Beneath them the floor revealed itself to the stark lights of the ship. For a moment the Halout held the ship over the surface- as far as they could see it stretched away from them, its surface covered in a million tiny white globes like white pebbles glistening in the water on a sun drenched beach.  

Lydia looked quizzically at Faulke who shrugged his shoulders and turned and tried to penetrate the darkness that hung like a heavy fog beyond the outer reaches of the Torq ships lights. 

The engines hummed and the ship accelerated until they were skimming quickly along, the shapes on the floor turning to a grey white blur beneath them. 

'What's that?' Ahead Lydia could make out a smudge of a shape looming out of the darkness.  

'Our reception, I should think. The air here is breathable and we're losing power. It looks like our host would have us stop here. I'll have to put her down.' 

'Well, this is it,' Faulke checked his blaster. 'Are we all ready? When we get on to the surface out there whatever happens we stick together. Agreed?' 

Lydia checked the Aephren. The Halout grinned and pulled his rusted blade from the cord around his waist. 'Unless a get a chance to use this of course.'

They clambered from the ship and clustered round in the reassuring pool of blue light in front of the silvered hull. Under Lydia's feet the surface crunched like gravel sending up wisps of pumice about her feet as she walked. She bent down and picked up two of the white round objects, each were desperately fragile, light in her hands and bone white.