Falling Dark by Tom Lloyd-Williams

Author:Tom Lloyd-Williams [Lloyd-Williams, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub

11

As I continue, the landscape of this dead and dark place evolves around me. Hidden in the shadows are flourishes absent from lower levels. A sculptor’s hand in corridors and walls, intricate symbols and flowing shapes. I feel traces of a caste system or other hierarchy reaching out like ghostly hands, brushing my awareness as I walk or float. It grows increasingly difficult to remember I’m inside a wrecked ship. The scale is simply staggering. It feels more like a vast necropolis where most are resting peacefully, but for a few glimpsed spirits frozen in uneasy limbo.

Time passes, slow and wearying. My Heads-Up Display has a mission clock tucked away in the corner of my visor. I don’t need to pay much attention to it, not yet, but it begins to prey on my mind so I switch off the view. I’ve been in here for almost four hours, but in the stillness that feels far longer. I’m not hungry or tired yet, I’ll happily walk all day long out on vacation with the family, but that’s also at the back of my mind. Terror will tire you faster and fatigue breeds mistakes. I’ve got a long way to travel before I reach the likely hazardous tear that killed this ship.

When I reach what seems to be a frozen lake, I begin to get the sense I’m not entirely alone. The lake seems to be part of some embedded ecosystem running through the ship, judging from the network of pipes and surrounding halo of what I guess is hydroponic chambers. I imagine them as the fossilised seeds of some vast flower, all connected to the lake in the centre. Now they’re just interlinked rooms choked with dust and dirt, maybe a few desiccated bones if we’re lucky.

I dare not go into any of those, but the scraps I can see in the darkness suggest a remarkable complexity. The lake itself is a murky, misshapen growth in a bowl-shaped chamber contained by airlocks. I walk through blast doors that have been ripped open, glide across the glittering, ancient ice. Like the round chamber I’ve dubbed the sports arena, there are viewing ports all over. The glow of one stasis field lends a sense of proportion to the place and it’s in one of the other windows I detect or imagine a faint movement in the shadows.

The drift of light, brief stutters of shapes. It gives me a jolt and my heart hammers loud in my ears, but then they’re gone. I can’t even tell if I’m imagining things. Everything returns to dark again, everything is still. If I’m going to lose my mind it’ll be somewhere like this, I remind myself.

I move faster, telling myself it’s only jitters. Leaving the lake behind I find a short shaft to climb, blank walls on either side. At the top it looks like I’m standing on house-sized building blocks, nine in all and assembled in a square. Unusually there are no hand-holds or exits that I can see, only smooth surfaces.

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