Trinity's Fall by P A Vasey

Author:P A Vasey [Vasey, P A]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Published: 2019-12-07T22:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-FIVE

I traveled through the ship’s interior like a ghost, flying through walls and along endless corridors and vast open spaces the size of aircraft hangers. I glimpsed massive objects and alien machines, walls pulsing with plasma energy and lighting displays. I flew through pipes and tubes and struts and tresses the size of the biggest cables supporting bridges on Earth, all twisting and rotating as the ship moved and flexed.

When I exited the ship, dissolving through the hull, I gasped at the beauty of it. Hanging in space surrounded by the lights from billions of stars and planets it appeared an obsidian liquid metal, shapeshifting, looking like a teardrop or a jagged set of geometric angles almost at random. It appeared utterly seamless, with no outward means of propulsion or weaponry.

We were coming up on the moon. Unlike the usual small white object hanging in space this was a huge disc occupying ninety percent of the forward sky. I’d always thought of the moon as a lonely silver jeweled pearl keeping the earth company in the vastness of the cosmos, but the reality was a surface as grey as a corpse, pulverized and pockmarked by meteorites. The ship was descending fast, the approaching craters and mountain ranges coming into stark relief. The plain ahead flattened out rapidly and the low western sun cast long shadows over craters and hills. We appeared to be heading for a smooth rim corralling a debris field of rocks, all covered by a rough blanket of moon dust.

Then without warning I was back in my chair, sitting next to the woman.

She was still waving her hands at the light display, but gave me a sideways glance, and another smile twitched at the side of her mouth. “You see. You just need to think it, and you can enter electronic equipment, even when it is as complex as this vessel. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to manipulate it as easily as you can observe it.”

I gave a sour laugh. “Because humans don’t have the big brains, right?”

She nodded, seemingly ignoring my attempt at humor, and turned back to the display. “It’s not your fault. You have to make do with what you’ve got.”

Now was she trying to make a joke?

The forward holographic display came alive, images dancing in front of my face: a 3-D rotating representation of the lunar landscape with the ship looking like an enormous black needle sitting on its stern and pointing straight up into the heavens. The schematics in the display automatically morphed into English as they scrolled by, which I assumed was for my benefit.

We came to rest in the middle of a sizeable crater on the dark side of the moon called the Van de Graaff crater formation, one of the few surface features on this side not named after Soviet cities, scientists or space pioneers. There were a couple of craterlets visible on the southeast rim, and several small ones in the floor of Van de Graaff, close to us.

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