Astronomicon: Behemoth

Chapter 35 - Plans

"It's almost impossible to do any kind of threat assessment," Megan sighed. "We'll just have to assume that securing our hangar, finding some way to turn this place around and finding more supplies are all equally important."

"If this is a spacecraft, moving at the kind of velocity you estimate, it must have picked us up mid-flight. The relative velocities would have been colossal," said Aron to no-one in particular.

"How high?" Megan asked.

"I can't say with any precision, but if we were travelling in one direction at about fifteen percent of C, and this..."

"C?" asked Commander Gordon.

"C...the velocity of light," chuckled Aron as though not knowing was childish. "Where was I? Ah yes. This alien vessel is travelling at a higher velocity on an intercept path. Even taking into account time-dilation, we would pass each other in milliseconds. I don't see how any form of capture operation is feasible in that time frame. And that's not even the worst issue."

"There's a worse one?" asked Megan.

"Energy," he nodded. "In the form of momentum. How did they change our course to match theirs without pulverising the Arcadian and everything in it to atoms?"

"I suspect we'll just have to put that down to superior technology," Megan replied.

"Far superior. Crazily superior," Aron chuckled. "The engineering problems are, quite literally, astronomical."

"Now we know we're on a spacecraft, does that tell us anything useful about our surroundings?" asked Megan.

"Yeah," he chuckled. "I'm only just beginning to get my head around it."

"Do you want to take the floor and talk us through it, Aron?"

"I can, but it's only going to be some preliminary ideas."

"We're all looking at this in a whole new light anyway. Your perspective could start us off."

She gestured to him to stand up and he reluctantly complied. She took his seat as he moved close to the ladder and turned to face the others. Commander Gordon quietly moved to one of the unoccupied seats on the far left and sat down.

"I've been looking at the mapping data we've gathered so far," Aron began. "We've got enough of that curved corridor mapped out that I can extrapolate a full circle from it. I had no reason to assume it was a circle until we learned that this place is a spacecraft."

He paused for a moment to lean on the ladder to the deck above then continued, "You and Walter spoke about the possibility of twelve hangars on a deck. Well, dividing the circumference of the corridor by the distance we know between hangar doors, we very neatly get twelve hangars."

"So, we were right?" exclaimed Megan.

"Hard to say for sure until we've driven all the way around," he chuckled. "But it seems like too much of a coincidence otherwise."

"And twelve floors?" she asked.

"That's going to take more research but when we explored the shaft room, the mapper measured a drop greater than four-hundred metres. At the time, I assumed it was heading into the ground."

"But now it's more likely to imply more floors below us?" she asked.

Aron chuckled. He made some selections on the nearest wall-mounted screen and pulled up a simple diagram. Drawn in thin, black lines on a white background, it showed a squat cylinder much wider than it was tall. It was divided vertically into twelve floors.