Once Upon An Epoch...

Launch

Keokie was furious and his face felt flush, he took a deep breathe before he went down the flight of stairs and made his way down to the center of the launch pad towards the nautilus shaped POD, his strides tense and rushed.

The nerve of anyone questioning his loyalty to the NWO, he took another deep breathe. Mint was leaning on the POD's exterior with the cockpit open. Wires ran from the cockpit control panel to a portable console where he input Keokie's preliminary temporal jump figures and flight data which he read off the tablet Keokie had handed to him earlier.

Keokie made his way into the POD from the ramp in the rear as several techs exited the craft. These were the techs who had installed the metal holding cell in the POD's cargo compartment.

As he came upon the holding cell and observed it, he deduced the shape was a truncated rhombic dodecahedron, twelve flat hexagonal surfaces and six flat square surfaces in a spherical configuration.

He wondered how he was suppose to open it, he looked back to see if he could spot a tech but saw no one, then made his way forward to the cockpit and threw himself in his chair.

"I'm nearly finished here," Mint said from outside the open cockpit. "How did it go in the Control Center?"

"I would rather not say."

Mint looked up at Keokie who had his head cocked back and his eyes closed. He asked, "Are you feeling alright?"

Keokie exhaled again and waved the question away, then asked, "Did they explain to you how I am supposed to open the holding cell?"

"Sure," Mint said, shutting off his console. "Pull those wires out and meet me in the cargo bay."

Keokie pulled the wires out and handed them to Mint who took them and headed to the rear of the POD. Keokie made his way aft down the corridor to the cargo bay and he stood before the holding cell.

"I will relay what the techs told me," Mint explained as he made his way up the POD's ramp. "The forward facing square is a mutual capacitive user interface, just touch the surface to activate,"

Keokie touched the surface of the forward square and brightly illuminated jade green text materialized within the square's metal surface.

The etched text read:

Open Hatch

Initiate Field Inhibitors

Manifest Portholes

Additional Controls

Disengage User Interface

There were jade green rectangles etched around each of the five lines of text making the overall layout that of five large buttons.

"Select the field which reads 'Open Hatch' in order to open," Mint said as he came beside Keokie.

Keokie touched the first field.

Immediately the four forward facing hexagonal surfaces around the square interface protruded with a hiss, of these four the bottom hexagon lowered quietly and became a ramp while the left, right, and upper hexagonal surfaces retracted in a low rumble. The interface remained fixed to the right hexagonal surface, facing forward.

"And I guess that's it," Mint said as he stared inside.

The cells interior was completely white and the walls felt warm to the touch when Keokie put his bare hand on them, and they were soft and padded.

"It's empty," Mint said. "The tech said there was suppose to be a special weapon in here, or something."

Keokie wondered if Mint should be there as he observed the interior layout, then Keokie noticed something odd about the floor, there were unuasual rises in the center and on the sides which seemed very out of place. Upon closer examination Keokie realized the entire floor was a seat, two ends of the floor where arm rests and there were braces for the arms, wrists and feet.