The Space Between (43 page)

"This is almost like home," he said to
himself. He had spent a good part of his work gang apprenticeship
crawling through the ventilation ducts of Tab Cavern.

Making his way slowly forward, Keeble
emerged into a full sized room. He was looking at the biggest
engine he'd ever seen. Not that he'd seen many true engines. Rising
to his feet, he craned his neck to look at the top of the
monstrosity and took a moment to wonder at the size of the engines
in the larger starships.

He wondered about the room for a minute,
shining his light into nooks and crannies, trying to match what he
saw with parts he knew from planes and cars. Many of them were made
from stone, strong and perfect. He may well have stayed longer, but
the need to talk to someone, to bounce ideas off them and hear
theirs in return, reminded him of his companions waiting outside.
He doubted any of them would have worthwhile ideas, but they'd be
better than nobody at all. With one last, quick look around and a
pause to clean the dust away from a small, blank screen, Keeble
found a door and continued on.

But he discovered that the next room was a
workshop of some kind, with blank televisions and tools and
cabinets filled with parts. It was all he could do to drag himself
away. He hurried through the nearest door and paused at the base of
a set of narrow stairs. He didn't know where to go. He tried to
orient himself in his mind.

"I came up that way," he said, "and turned
that way." He spun about in the hallway as he spoke, gesturing to
push his thoughts in the right direction. "So that means that the
others are this way." He started to climb, trying to calculate
distances in his mind. If he added the height of the ladder he'd
climbed, to the distance between each floor... He climbed three
levels higher.

He stopped on a landing and shone his torch
through an open hatch and out into a hallway. After a moment of
thought, he went out for a better look. Keeble shone his light
around and examined everything for a moment before reining his
curiosity in once more. To his right, a passage led to a large
window. The window certainly hadn't been visible from outside. He
hurried along the passage and looked down into the hangar.

The first thing he saw was a human.

Keeble gasped as the man darted behind the
cover of a much smaller ship one hundred and seventeen meters away.
Another ran across the narrow strip of bare floor and hid. About
two dozen men were quartering the hangar, looking for any signs of
life. It wouldn't be long before they reached the larger ships and
found what they were after.

When he drew his attention away, Keeble saw
the scaffolding and his companions not far away in the opposite
direction. The window stopped right near them with the wall taken
up by what could only be a door. There was a wall blocking the
passage just beyond. There was a vehicle of some kind clamped to
the floor along the end wall and a row of cabinets, some of them
opened, lined the other.

When he went closer, Keeble could see three
buttons near the door. He tried them all, though he knew they
wouldn't work.

"No power."

Next, he examined the wall nearby. There was
an access panel. He pulled it open and was rewarded with the sight
of a metal wheel.

With a little smile, he gripped the wheel
with his good hand and turned.

Nothing happened. It didn't move. He grunted
and tried again. Putting all of his strength into it. It moved
slightly, but hardly enough to even measure.

If only he'd brought his tools, instead of
leaving them with Kim. He took a deep breath and tried again,
calculating the progress of the Americans across the hangar
outside.

Finally the wheel started to turn.

"I'll feel like a fool if this doesn't open
the door."

But even as he spoke, the door started to
slide open, half one way and half the other. When there were ten
centimeters between the two edges, big moai hands gripped from the
outside to help. Not long after, Meledrin slipped through sideways,
followed by Kim and Cuto when the gap had widened a little
more.

But there was still a long way to go before
Tuki would be through. Keeble continued to work at the grinding
wheel. Kim lent her strength to the task.

Shouts came from outside.

“
[Stop where you
are.]”

“
[Stop or we'll
shoot.]”

They continued to work, and Tuki squeezed
through a few seconds later.

Keeble started to work the wheel in the
other direction, but Cuto pushed him out of the way. The alien
worked quickly, big hands not slowing.

Gunshots rang out, bullets pinging off the
hull.

Keeble didn't know if they were warning
shots or not, but he willed Cuto to work faster.

Outside, the scaffolding started to rattle
and shake, but the wheel had been loosened by its journey in the
other direction, and the door was soon closed.

Keeble collapsed to the floor next to Kim.
He gave no thought to who he was sitting beside as he struggled for
air. He unstrapped his mechanical arm and threw it into a corner,
rubbing at his wrist as he tried to calm his heart.

Cuto, Tuki, and Meledrin were standing
silently, eyes closed.

"I don't know how much time that'll give
us," Kim said between gasps. Her face was flushed though she had
done little of the work. "There's all types of equipment out there.
They might be able to find something that will help."

"Nothing in
here
works, though,"
Keeble motioned vaguely. "Don't see why anything out there would.
Besides, the stuff is ancient, so they probably won't know how to
use it."

"And if this vessel does
not function, then what is the purpose of all that we have done?
And
it
is ancient
too, so even if it remains functional, who is to say Kim is capable
of operating it?"

Keeble hadn't thought of that. He figured he
could get it working anyway.

"I found the engine. I think there might be
more than one, actually."

Kim sighed. "Well, any ideas? The torch
batteries won't last forever. An hour, if we're extremely lucky.
What happens if we don't get the lights working?" She looked at
everyone.

Tuki cleared his throat. "The skyglass can
be used to see, though it is not very bright." To demonstrate, he
looked at the crystal ball and mumbled quietly.

Keeble watched as the ball started to glow,
giving off a soft radiance. It wasn't bright, but better than
nothing.

"Can you get the 'glass to just show a star,
Tuki? And zoom right in?"

"Possibly." He muttered again, and a moment
later the glass was filled with a bright yellow fire. Tuki
smiled.

"Well, you lot will just have to stay near
the windows," Keeble said. "I'll take the lights and see if I can
fix the engine."

"We can still help," Kim said.

Keeble grunted but knew better than to
argue.

30: Illumination

Kim hit one of the buttons by the chair.
"Engage," she said. "Make it so." Nothing happened.

The bridge was slightly more than half a
circle and housed in a dome at the very top of the ship. The seat
in which she sat was located at the very center of the complete
circle and raised above the others. It faced forward out toward a
huge, curving window and could only have been the pilot's chair.
Knowing that didn't help much.

There was another seat nearby, three steps
down and also facing forward. Other than that, there were three
other consoles and seats. Plus another seat encased in what was
almost a complete sphere. Only an empty doorway broke the
perfection of the single piece of clear, plastic-like material. The
seat was beside one of the consoles. So, six control stations all
together, in sets of two. She couldn't decipher any of those
controls either.

Between them all was a small amphitheater
with two rows of tiered seats set in a horseshoe.

Kim sighed and watched the American
serviceman who was standing on the ship's hull, looking like a
giant space bug splattered on the windscreen. "There's no wind in
space," Kim said. "That's a view port."

The soldier had been pounding on the view
port with a sledgehammer for the better part of ten minutes without
any sign of damage. As if he or his superior officers could have
expected otherwise. Keeble had wandered through the bridge a few
minutes earlier, taking a break from his exploring perhaps, and
laughed when he saw the man outside.

Kim was still watching half an hour later
when the Americans moved on to gas cutting equipment. The futility
was it all was very obvious, really. It had to be obvious to the
Americans as well.

"This ship came down from space, you moron,"
she said to the man on the view port as if it was all his idea. "It
can withstand more heat than your little oxy-torch."

But the man continued with his oxy and
another came along to take up the challenge of the sledge. When Kim
went closer to the view port, she could see others working with
similar tools.

"Oxy-morons." But she couldn't hear all the
pounding, so they certainly weren't going to hear her lame
jokes.

Of course, the officers probably thought the
exercise needed to be done anyway, just in case. And they were
probably right.

"There are two each of three different types
of engines."

Kim spun to look at Keeble.

"What?"

Keeble nodded his head in satisfaction as if
he'd put the engines there himself. "Well, one of the pairs may be
clocks. I can't really tell without investigating a bit more."

"What?" Kim said again.

Keeble carried on as if she hadn't said
anything at all. Perhaps the dwarf didn't really care if she was
there. "The matching ones can run at the same time, or separately.
The different sets are linked together, but only loosely. Two pairs
near the middle, along with a pair of huge batteries. Then there is
another pair of engines at the front, linked to those four antenna
things on the outside of the ship. Like the man said, backups for
everything."

"Which man? Do any of them work?"

Keeble shrugged. "I don't even know how to
try to start them to test. If you don't either, I'll need to keep
looking." He looked like he wanted to leave but was not going to
give up that quickly.

Kim sighed. "Shit." For a while, she'd been
down with the others trying to help, but when it came to fixing
things her expertise ended just after she opened the toolbox and
before she selected a tool. The lack of progress had started to
make her mad. "What else is down there?"

"You could go and look for yourself."

Kim couldn't argue with that. "It'd be
quicker if you told me now."

"There's a hold."

"Yeah? Anything in it?"

"Lots. Don't know what, though. Only just
managed to get the door open. Back up was broken."

"Excellent." There was something Kim could
handle. She was a backpacker by trade, so she could find useful
things almost anywhere. But that didn't help with the real
problem.

"So, can you work out how the engines work?
You said you learned about cars just by pulling them apart."

Keeble shook his head as if Kim didn't
understand anything. "I had books there, as well, that showed how
things were linked. No books here. And the engines are nothing like
a car engine. I can't find anything I recognize."

Kim sat up straighter.
"There
will
be
books, but they'll be on computer. The first thing we need to do is
find the power switch for this stupid machine."

"Power switch?"

"Yeah. There's got to be something like a
standby mode, or something." It sounded reasonable. "There are two
huge batteries, right? We need to find what they're linked to."

"They don't help. They're linked to
thousands of things. Without power I can't check anything to see
what's useful."

"Oh. I guess I'd better stop moping and help
then."

Keeble grunted. "Don't need help."

"Rubbish."

The only way down from the bridge with no
power was a spiral staircase. It ran round the side of a lift shaft
that was in the very center of the dome of the bridge, directly
beneath the captain's chair. And once she got to the floor below,
where there were a couple of offices, a boardroom, and a storeroom,
she followed Keeble and his torch to the next set of stairs. Level
two seemed to be exclusively sleeping quarters. On the third level,
they went to the dining area. There were rows of metallic tables
bolted to the floor and cabinets around the walls, all of which had
been opened and ransacked.

Tuki was watching his crystal ball as if its
light would tell him something. Meledrin was reading. At least, she
was looking at the book Kim had found out on the world. There were
another couple of books on the table.

Turning off the torch, Keeble stopped in the
center of the room, looking around as if disgusted by the mess the
search of the lockers had created. Despite its age, a lot of the
clutter seemed to be in remarkably good condition.

There was a lot of general, mixed stuff,
plus about a dozen strange looking yellow contraptions.

"What are those things?" Kim asked. They
were cylindrical, with hinged carrying handles and levers on the
side.

Keeble answered with a shrug. "Don't know.
They're everywhere though."

Kim picked one up and examined it. "Have you
tried the lever?"

Keeble hadn't, which Kim found surprising.
Perhaps he just had more important things on his mind.

"Well then."

"You can't just..."

Kim moved the lever, and a few seconds later
the top half of the cylinder started to glow. After about thirty
seconds there was enough light to reach all but the furthest
corners of the room.