Astronomicon: Behemoth

Chapter 52 - Another Hangar

Aron had, to decide between scuttling sideways for better cover or rolling onto his side to see what his cannon shot had done. The decision was made for him when Ekono shouted, "You got it!!"

"Are you sure?" replied Aron, collapsing onto his back.

"You put a hole right through the window on the front and it's stopped moving."

"These things are too dangerous to take chances. I just want to be sure."

Ekono, already standing, moved across to Aron's position. "Give me the robot cannon and I will make sure."

"It's all yours!" Aron chuckled.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, the overloaded buggy powered along the curved corridor. Their quest to find Margaux was underway again. Aron was driving, with the two people they had found frozen squeezed in beside him in the passenger seat. Ekono and Obi were braced in the cargo area.

It had taken a while to communicate to their new friends that they should wear their equivalent of E.V.A. suits, and then it turned out that they already were. They just had to add helmets and gloves. The entire outfit was much lighter-weight and supple than the Arcadian suits.

Aron was mystified as to how their EVA suits worked without any visible life-support pack on the back. There had to be somewhere to store oxygen and some mechanism to process out waste cases.

They passed door after door on the right-hand side, not pausing to find out what mysteries lay behind them. The corridor ahead of them was just as dirty as the rest of it they had seen so far. Even as the floor rushed past in the headlamps, Aron could see wheel tracks and other signs of activity although, as before, it was impossible to tell how old they were.

Becoming mesmerised by the patterns on the floor as they passed through the headlamp beams and under the buggy, he nearly missed the next hangar door approaching in the left wall.

Ekono, brandishing the robot cannon, and Obi both climbed off the back of the buggy as soon as it slowed to a walking pace. The team's sense of urgency was overriding their sense of caution.

Ekono used Aron's extendable rod to activate the hangar door so Aron could drive the buggy directly into the airlock. They waited impatiently for the door mechanism to complete its sequence. Aron watched the figures displayed on his suit's external pressure gauge falling steadily, wondering if it would stop before reaching a vacuum state. It did, on a little below twenty percent of Earth pressure.

The gas monitor showed that the weak atmosphere around them was almost exclusively nitrogen. He did not see how that, as a largely inert gas, would be breathable by any lifeform.

Ekono, brandishing the robot cannon, stepped through the cascade of gel and was mostly obscured from view. Those waiting on the buggy could see little more than his suit lights. Moments later, he pushed back through the gelfall and signalled to the others to proceed. Aron drove the buggy cautiously towards the gel.

As soon as it was clear of the gel fall, Ekono clambered back onto the back and pointed at the brilliant red light source in, what he assumed was, the centre on the hangar. Aron adopted a curved approach path in case any detectors or defences were placed on the direct line from the hangar to the light source ahead.

It became quickly apparent that the alien vessel parked at the centre of the hangar was much smaller than he was expecting, at barely a third of the size of the cat people vessel and barely half as tall. He was not even sure it was a spacecraft. It looked more like a chassis of tubular steel rods awaiting an outer hull.