He flipped the controls off angrily and the crackle in his earpiece went dead.
A walkway led off around the circumference of the hall a little way off, with steps rising up its sheer sides to be lost in the lofty heights. Perhaps the higher levels might have sustained less damage, he thought to himself. He sighed, reaching for his rifle and checking it over.
He picked his way cautiously through the tangled metal towards the walkway, with no idea of what awaited him in the heart of that alien ship.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A DREAM WITHIN
Ryann reached the top of the walkway after a long and arduous climb. The floor of the shaft where he had crashed was now lost in the darkness far below. He stepped warily through a doorway and out into a darkened corridor. The floor was debris-strewn, and a profusion of wires and severed pipes hung down, disgorged from the torn-open ceiling.
All was still and silent, but there was a strange feeling of static electricity in the air, as though it were the moment preceding a thunder storm. He went to move, and then to his amazement, as he placed his foot upon one of the floor panels, he saw faint traceries of electricity snake outwards. They ran off along the corridor and played over the walls casting a brief glow before fading back to darkness. But it was the image that these lines of energy brought into a flickering temporal view that snatched Ryann’s breath away.
Each spark had momentarily illuminated a portion of the corridor as though it were new-built. For an instant, a vision played out of pristine white walls and floors, before the mirage faded away back to wreckage.
Ryann went on in cautious wonder. Each step he took was as though he were given a glimpse into another dimension, of a time when the Luminal ship had been fully-functional.
He paused, running his gloved hand over the wall, but the panels were blackened and twisted from a great fire that had swept the interior.
The further he went on, the more Ryann felt as though he were witnessing his own descent into madness. He watched with a curious detachment as another footfall sent out a pulse of pale blue phosphorescence.
But it did feel as though the illusion were solidifying about him, as though each step brought the fleeting images more readily into focus. And the stronger the images became, the longer they lingered, until he was witnessing some double-exposure of reality — one superimposed upon the other. He could clearly discern the undamaged lines of wall panels amongst the twisted wreckage. But when he attempted to touch them, the faint shapes would scatter in a wisp of blue light.
He went on as though he were inhabiting a dream. He walked endless corridors and burned-out hangar halls filled with the twisted husks of Luminal drone ships. He traversed precipitous gantries over galleries that disappeared off into the darkness. Dim shadows of mangled turbines and vast towers of machinery stood like silent monoliths.
He wandered aimlessly, lost in the sheer alien majesty of the ship’s scale. Even though the exterior hull of the Defiance was almost an exact replica, there was something about this vessel that was simultaneously awe-inspiring and deeply unsettling. The scale of the drive rooms he crossed felt less like familiar mechanisms and more like the innards of some gargantuan organic structure.
But even though he travelled without purpose, every step of his silent journey seemed to lead him upwards through level after wrecked level, towards the very apex of the towering structure almost a kilometre above the boiling surface of the broken moon.
And with every leaden step that took him closer, the sleeping ship seemed to awaken a little more.
The lines of phosphorescence played outwards from him in a continuous display now. He could clearly see the ghostly outlines of walls and machinery in the spaces they once inhabited before their destruction.
He paused, gazing out over a sheer precipice, casting his eye back down the way he had travelled. He gasped to see a perfect vision of the ship complete below him. For a second, everything was illuminated in that pale blue glow, and he made out the distant shapes of figures upon the walkways that criss-crossed the open shaft he now circumnavigated. He instinctively ducked down into a crouch as a stream of drone ships issue from the mouth of a tunnel far below. They streaked out into the shaft, curving sharply up towards him.
Ryann pressed himself further down behind the broken handrail that edged the narrow walkway. He looked about in fear for any more cover in which to hide, but he was hopelessly out in the open with no time to run.
He saw the growing illumination of the drone ships approaching and heard the mounting scream of their engines. He flattened himself to the ground as they tore past in a blur, shooting upwards into the impossible heights of the shaft.
He froze, wide-eyed in fear and confusion. As quickly as the vision had appeared, the scene suddenly collapsed back into darkness.
The drone ships exploded in a momentary cloud of glowing light before fading away like mute fireworks.
For many minutes, Ryann just lay there, barely daring to breath, his trembling hands gripping the rail until they ached.
The vision had seemed so unquestioningly real, and then in the next instant had been torn away. He had heard the wail of the drone ships’ engines, and had felt the walkway shudder with their passing. Yet none of it had been real. It was all some illusion, as though the memory of the dying ship played out in some strange refrain, and Ryann were its unwilling catalyst.
Eventually he found the strength from somewhere to carry on. He forced his leaden limbs into action, standing shakily, peering in disbelief once more over the edge.
All was once again a dark, shadow-filled
