Sanctuary (Jezebel's Ladder Book 3) (7 page)

Mercy woke alone and vomiting clear fluid. Her hair was
matted with something slimy. The experience would have terrified most people,
but the fractal spiraling pattern fascinated her as a mesh of micropores in the
floor slowly sucked down all the tinted glop. Kneeling in her granny underwear,
she decided that somehow this was
supposed
to happen. She was acting
like a drowning victim after CPR. A mist floated out of the nozzle above her,
helping to dissolve the detritus that clung to her like afterbirth.

She appeared to be in a kind of
shower tube with a translucent door that covered a quarter of the wall. There
were grip rails mounted both horizontally and vertically. Between her talent
and basic math, she determined that the gravity here was stronger than in the
landing bay, about one-tenth Earth standard.

The warm fog actually helped to
clear Mercy’s lungs. Breathing in deeply, she sat on a ledge two feet off the
floor as she coughed up gobbets of the decontamination gel. The seat shifted gradually
as it conformed to her behind. The intake pores were larger on the shelf and
had stronger suction. Soon she was able to stand and direct the spray to places
on her body that needed degumming. She had just begun to enjoy the shower when she
heard panicked thrashing from nearby.

Mercy pushed on the frosted glass
door, but it didn’t swing open. She pushed sideways, first one direction and
then the other. “Think!” she ordered herself. How were they supposed to leave the
pod in an emergency? She tapped the door three times, and the door slid into a
hidden pocket. No time for self-congratulation; she spun around the hallway to
locate the source of the distressed sounds. There were six identical tubes
surrounding her. Light from another room shone in from above.

There, the shadow of a shoulder
against the frosted glass.

Mercy tapped the glass three times,
and a hunched-over Yuki flopped out, clearly in distress. Mercy grabbed her
from behind, placed her thumbs under the ribs, and jerked. Fluid sprayed out.
Sobbing, Yuki splayed on the shower floor. Mercy climbed in with her and shut
the door, allowing the mist to resume. Stroking the Asian woman’s shoulders,
Mercy said, “It’s okay. Let it all out. Throw up if you need to. Breathe in the
mist, and cough out the decontamination glop.”

After a couple minutes, the heaving
stopped. Grasping the showerhead, Mercy tried a theory. The nozzle stretched
downward, connected by a long, flexible hose. “Just how I would have designed
it,” she mumbled.

Using the nozzle, Mercy rinsed her
team member’s hair. She stopped when she noticed the woman crying. “What’s
wrong?”

This only made the Asian woman weep
harder.

That’s when Mercy noticed the brown
matter swirling before gradually vanishing into the floor. “Yeah. The rest of
us didn’t eat much today. We were afraid of what the high g might do. It’s
okay; the floor absorbs anything. I think you sit on the ledge for the toilet
function. While you spray off, I can clean the shorts for you.”

Yuki looked horrified. Mercy said,
“Please, I had three younger sisters. You haven’t lived till you’ve cared for
three kids with stomach flu at the same time. At least this doesn’t smell. The
process must’ve killed all the bacteria. I’ll step outside, and you can hand
your bottoms to me.”

Hugging herself, Yuki replied, “No.
This is my mess. I can handle it.”

Mercy triple-tapped out. “If you
insist. I’ll wait for you before I head into the next room.” Pausing at the
door, she remembered how cruel school cliques could be. “Don’t worry. I won’t
tell anyone.”

In the tubular hall, she noted that
the five-centimeter disk above Yuki’s stall was pure black. Mercy’s still-open
door bore a silver disk. She closed her own stall door for safety and scanned
the area. The other doors had similar symbols; each disk was half silver and
half black. While she stood in the center, the floor continued to siphon water
from her dripping body. On impulse, she sat in a recess between doors on the
narrow ledge. The entire wall cradled her like the toilet had, reclaiming
liquid. Air pelted her from above and the sides to help dry her. She was in a
car wash without the car. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her hair
frizzing.

If only they had mirrors and
shampoo with conditioner.

Two of the spaces between cleansing
tubes were drying alcoves. Three were ladders leading up.

She couldn’t figure out the final curve
where a recess should be.

Examining the circle above her
stall again, she discovered it had shifted to a similar mix of dark and light—like
the phases of the moon. The curved shadow of Earth occluded the glow of the
moon.

When Yuki emerged, stoic as ever, Mercy
asked, “How long were we floating in the pods?

Blinking, the young gravity-sensor
specialist said, “Four hours and five minutes.” When Mercy raised an eyebrow,
Yuki admitted, “I have a contact lens that shows me things when I close my
eyes. Why is this important?”

Mercy pointed to the moon dial. “I
think those are four-hour decontamination clocks. Watch. When I close yours it
will go from silver to half black.” A few seconds after she shut the cleansing
unit, the disk changed colors to a little less than half shaded.

“Are the others making faster
progress as the machines learn our biology?”

“Or for some reason, the others
climbed into their pods early.”

“Then that gives us two hours to
explore before the others arrive,” Yuki said with a mischievous grin.

“We should return here to help them
breathe again and show them how to work the equipment.”

“Of course, I’ll tell you when it’s
nearly time.”

The smile was contagious, and Mercy
asked, “Do you trust me?”

Nervously, the technician nodded.

“Then close your eyes and sit down
where I lead you.”

When she was done in the dryer
alcove, Yuki looked like she was fresh from a salon with no hair out of place.
It wasn’t fair. “I’m surprised there aren’t nine showers.”

Mercy shrugged. “Have you ever
arranged coins on your nightstand? Six circles pack most efficiently around a
central core of the same size. Sometimes, economy trumps numerology.”

Yuki nodded upward. “Enough time in
the bathroom. Let’s discover
important
things!”

The tunnel only extended three
meters before opening into a well-lit room above. Dangling from the lip of the
tunnel were gray fabric strips, of varying lengths, that waved in the micro
breeze like jellyfish tendrils.

Mercy grabbed the longest entangled
pair and tugged. The strap bore her full weight. “Where one strip bumps
another, they stick.” A pale-blue edge about two millimeters from the end wasn’t
sticky at all. Using this flap, she peeled the strips apart. Then she stuck one
strip to itself in a loop. “They don’t stick to my clothes, but they’re like
glue on the floor pads. What are they for?”

“Emergency air seals? Who cares?
Let’s scout. Race you.”

Yuki climbed the rungs set in the
wall between the cleansing tubes like a monkey.

Mercy took a different tactic to
win, launching herself upward with the same force she used to begin a swimming
race. Soon she passed the lip of the tube—and kept going. The next room had
no
gravity. “Whoa!” she pleaded as the ceiling of the saucer-shaped room sped
toward her. She threw her arms up to shield her head and thumped against a frosted
panel on the ceiling. A contraption ‘below’ her seemed like a giant snowflake
chandelier. Which way was supposed to be up? Before she could analyze more, she
was floating more slowly back the other direction. Unable to grab anything, the
second bounce sent her back into the center of the room.

Yuki somersaulted and landed feetfirst
against the ‘ceiling.’ Pushing off, she thrust her way back to the tube by
which they’d entered. Then the Asian woman grabbed a fabric strip. “I think I
know what these are for.” She wrapped each of her hands and feet with one of
the adhesive strips.

Floating lazily in the center of
the seven-meter-high room, Mercy said, “I think the longer ones are for around
your waist, for when you want to play helium balloon.”

Giggling, Yuki said, “I’ll tether
myself and pull you in.”

Waving her arms in circles, Mercy
tried without success to counter the slight spin she’d acquired. “I’m not going
anywhere.” Taking advantage of the lull, she studied her surroundings. The room
looked like a squashed, eight-sided, kid’s jack-o’-lantern, about fourteen
meters in diameter. Most of the walls had silver panels and a golden oval. Two
had ramps and full-wall doors like the airlock into the decontamination area. There
were convenient safety straps at each entry point to the room, but the color scheme
in this place was limited.

“I won’t tell anyone about your
problem, either,” Yuki said. After experimenting, she explained, “The gray
areas are cushioned, like gym floors. I can walk on them. The silver areas don’t
adhere.”

“Stay on the carpets, and keep off
the grass.”

“Or the controls. I’m coming up to
get you,” Yuki promised, leaping. The technician grabbed Mercy, but the
engineer didn’t grab back.

“Um . . . I’m not so sure this is
up anymore.” Mercy pointed to the light panels glowing on half the room. Each
of the eight sections on the ‘ceiling’ opposite the showers was divided in
two—a gray area for walking and the frosted glass panel. On one side of the
room, the panels were dark, and the other half provided bright light. However,
the panel she’d bumped into was now transparent, enabling her to see beyond.

“Trees,” mumbled Yuki.

“And grasses, and rivers and
lakes.” They could see a single mountain directly opposite the shower tubes.

“We’re in a control pod, hanging
above a forest. Where did the artifact take us? How?”

“Let’s climb . . . back where we
came from, and I’ll explain. Down is a bad word. How about lensward for the
side the bathrooms are on and mountainward for the other way.” When Mercy was
sufficiently wrapped, hand and foot, she said, “Picture an inflated latex
balloon. You know the neck where you tie it off? The little round leftover nozzle?
That represents the airlock and decontamination rooms. Now we’re inside the
balloon proper.”

“Inside?”

“The interior of this vessel is two
kilometers across. Zeiss’ doctoral thesis explained how windows let sunlight in
to feed the plants. It’s all been guesswork till now. I only found out bits and
pieces when I needed to change the shuttle design.”

“Why didn’t anyone see this biosphere
from outside?”

“In traditional gravity theory,
Einstein demonstrated how a heavy object like a bowling ball would bend a
rubber sheet downward, causing smaller objects to roll toward it.”

“I’ve seen the cartoon a few
times.”

“Yeah. Alien mathematics showed that
entire realms exist
under
this metaphorical sheet: faster-than-light
travel, pocket dimensions, and all manner of law-bending are possible in this
realm.”

Yuki’s eyes were still glazed and confused.

Mercy sighed. “In his paper, Z
compared this ship to a bathysphere . . . a submarine, with only the hatch
sticking up over the waves. His equations—”

Her companion held up a hand. “Let
me just enjoy the greenery.” When she could drag her eyes away from the vista,
she asked, “Are we near the neck of the balloon or the center?”

“I’m not sure. Since we have life
support, maybe this saucer can move. I think gravity is relative to the inside skin
of the balloon.”

“Centrifugal force in a spinning
cylinder is more likely. Perhaps they put the mountain at the opposite end
because it’s part of the spindle we’re rotating around.”

“Yuki, you don’t know me. Because
of my talents, I can see Icarus fields and gravity generators like heat
shimmers on the highway. There are hundreds of them just below the ground
here.”

“We thought our propulsion system
was advanced because we had four fields. How fast could this sphere go?”

“I don’t know. Red knows the math
better than anyone, but the fields are more than propulsion. I’m pretty sure
that the interconnected fields actually form the bubble we’re living in.”

“So if we accidentally break one of
them or turn it off?”

“That would be a
bad
thing.”

“Hmph. Let’s not touch the controls
yet. We can explore the other rooms connected to this one. I’m sure the luggage
room and closets won’t end life as we know it.”

“Probably not,” Mercy agreed.

****

Each of the small ovals doors led
to empty, pillow-shaped rooms with microgravity. Only one of them had storage
compartments and access to water. Yuki deduced, “This must be the dining hall.”
Each room had a band of short, oval, frosted windows at waist level to let in
light. “You were right when you compared this place to a submarine. Are the
other five bedrooms?”

“They could be labs, food storage,
or whatever else we want to use them for,” Mercy replied. Tapping above changed
a window from translucent to clear. The same action below a window turned it
opaque.

“That sleeps five couples. Where do
the rest of us stay?” Yuki asked.

“Couples. Yeah. Who can keep track
of all that?”

“The Zeiss and Herkemer families
are obvious. Auckland and the economist Pratibha are engaged, and the life-support
folks are exclusive.”

“My God, the food man is hairy,”
Mercy exclaimed. “His eyebrows, back, and arm hair make him look like a Muppet.
What could she see in him?”

“Hair isn’t always bad. Besides, Johnny
makes German-chocolate-flavored soft pretzels. I think Rachael’s addicted.”