My eyes gradually became accustomed to the darkness inside the lander. As they did, I realized that the sunlight reflected off the snow outside faded out as it touched the walls inside the doorway. It didn't offer any illumination and it was as if the walls just sucked the light in and absorbed it.
I carefully extended my arms and felt the surface of the inner walls. It was surprisingly smooth and must have been covered with some form of nano-coating. My hand slid on the wall easily as I inched forward, carefully moving my feet as I attempted not to run into or trip over anything. The others stayed where they were, just inside the entrance.
As I progressed deeper into the shadow, my eyes finally adjusted and I realized that there was a faint glow coming from directly ahead of me. I moved toward it and passed through a doorway. As I did, the interior lighted up with a faint bluish glow. It wasn't very bright, but it did offer enough illumination for me to be able to see where I was.
The surroundings were similar to the exterior of the lander. There were ropes and knots of organic-looking tubes and structures on the bulkheads and ceiling. The ceiling was low, barely offering me enough space to stand upright. The two guards would undoubtedly have to crouch in an uncomfortable position in here.
Just as I thought of them, Frank called to me to stop and wait for them. They groped their way in and then exclaimed as their eyes revealed the strange structures inside.
“Wow! This looks like something out of a movie I saw where those alien things killed everyone!” Ted exclaimed.
“Let's explore this place and look for something that looks kind of like an elevator door,” I instructed. I'd already extended my mental senses and found no sign of anything living in the interior. “It's probably safe enough, as long as you don't accidentally activate any controls or break anything.”
“OK, Mama!” Ted said, sneering at my caution.
“Knock it off!” the woman said and he shut his mouth with a snap. She certainly had the men under control. I assumed from this that the Warlord backed her implicitly.
“You know, you never told me your name,” I said to her.
“It's not important that you know, but just for convenience, you can call me 'Ms. Ní Mhaolagáin.'”
I stopped and turned towards her, “Despite my first name, I'm not good with Gaelic and that's too much of a mouthful to use in an emergency. What do your men call you?”
She blushed. The light was dim and blue and made it difficult to see, but I could distinctly make out the color change across her face.
“They call me 'Red' I guess,” she said quietly.
“That's not very flattering. Do you have a first name?”
“Yes,” she was thinking it over. I couldn't understand her reluctance to give it to me, but then I got a sense that she felt her first name made her vulnerable in some fashion.
“My Mother called me, 'Erin,'” she finally said, after some additional hesitation.
“I don't use it very often,” she added as an afterthought.
“With your permission, I think that's what I'd like to call you. I'm Declan, but you can call me 'Dec',” I smiled.
“Don't take this as permission to be familiar with me!” she warned. “I'm still in charge here!”
“You think!” I mentally added, but I didn't argue the point.
We moved on inside the lander. It seemed larger inside than outside. I guess the perspective of the surrounding mountain peaks had made it seem smaller.
We progressed through a short, curved hall and then came out into the central chamber of the thing. Some odd-shaped devices were attached to the floor. I presumed that I was looking at the engine system, but I couldn't really make much out of it. The lander was designed for one specific job and there wasn't any provision for passengers. The space was designed around the machines and it was filled with cases and equipment of unknown use.
We sidled around the outside edge of the room, sliding between the larger machines and the wall. The NFL players made hard going of it. They both out-weighed me by at least a hundred pounds and the available space didn't accommodate their thick girths.
I could sense a grinding vibration through the soles of my feet. The thing was still busily working to get at the ore deposit. I couldn't see why it didn't use the energy it was expending on drilling to activate the transporter, but then I remembered from the Ancient-One that the transporters required an improbable amount of energy to set up their first linkage. After that, they worked with almost no energy expenditure. It had to do somehow with establishing quantum entanglement, but I wasn't able to understand the memories that came through to me on that score.
We moved around the largest machine in the compartment and there was the transporter door. It was open. I inspected it in the dim light and suddenly realized that it didn't even have a door. It was just a bare frame that led into a small compartment in the body of the machine. I guessed that it was protected from accidental intrusion and the door wasn't actually required.
I turned to Erin and said, “This is the transporter that will link this lander to another planet. I believe that it will connect to Oberon.”
She looked puzzled and I hastily added, “That's a moon of Uranus and I think that's where the aliens are located.”
Frank let out a surprisingly high-pitched giggle and repeated inanely, “Uranus!” stressing the last syllable.
Ted laughed at the middle school humor but quickly became silent when Erin glanced at him.
She turned to me and asked, “How does it work?”
“I think that the machine is still in the powering up phase. That vibration we feel is it reaching out for the radioactive ore that's buried below us. Once it reaches the deposit, it will extract what it needs and then it will power up.” I was only half-guessing about the process.
“The interior is where the transportation takes place?” she asked, stepping through the frame and turning to face me through the opening.
“Yes,” I started to tell her that it might not be a good idea to stand inside the thing, but Frank suddenly shoved me and I stumbled into the opening also. The two guards came in right after me.
“It's too tight out there!” was Ted's comment.
Needless to say, the dratted machine chose that exact moment to power up. The grinding sound abruptly stopped and we looked at each other in dismayed surmise. Then there was a flash of blue lightening around the door and I felt the disorientation of the passage through space. It was a feeling that I'd hoped never to experience again.
The passage seemed to take longer than I remembered. There was a blur of lights that streaked by the front of the door and the air got quite thin in the compartment. When the lights stopped flashing, we were facing a closed door where there had been none before. From its sudden appearance, I knew we were at our destination.
Erin gasped and the two guards let fly with expletives simultaneously.
I pulled my Sig and faced the door in a shooting stance. As I did, Ted grabbed my arm, but before he could try to disarm me, Erin snapped, “Leave him alone!”
“Thanks – ” was all I got out before the door opened with a familiar punctilio.
We emerged in an empty space. There were no windows and the room's entrance was closed and locked. I tried my two-finger trick in the adjoining slot, but the lock was inactive, at least from our side. We were trapped!
“What are we going to do now?” Erin plaintively asked.
I looked at the inside of the transporter box. There was a single button there, but nothing happened when I pushed it. I thought that maybe our combined mass had exhausted the initial energy of the thing, but maybe it was just designed for a single trip before it required recharging.
I suspected that the transporter's arrival would have set off an alarm somewhere and figured that we'd shortly be up to our necks in Pugs or Pug-bears or both!
“You guys had better get ready for a fight! Now!” I commanded.
“Won't they be glad to see us?” Erin asked.
“They're not friendly at all. The Master you've got in Denver isn't one of this group. Anything that comes into this room is going to try and kill us,” I said, patiently.
In response, Frank and Ted drew their swords with their right hands. Frank pulled a pistol from his belt with his left hand, while Ted drew a long knife. Erin looked like she was in doubt about what I'd said for a moment, but then she pulled her own pistol.
“The pistols won't have much effect,” I said. I had drawn mine in the transporter because there just wasn't room enough for me to unsling my rifle. Now I re-holstered the Sig and pulled the long weapon off my shoulder, preparing to shoot when the door opened. It was anticlimactic. The door didn't open, so we waited.