Blake blinked in astonishment as the lights flickered on. He hardly heard what Cally was saying, because his attention was focused on what was being revealed before his eyes.
After the darkness of the climb down from the hatch, his eyes had become accustomed to the low light of their torches. Even when he had taken his goggles off, he could barely see further than a hundred metres. But now this…
The last of the illumination rippled into life across the room. If ‘room’ was the right word for it.
‘This place is…’ Blake could hardly find the words. ‘It’s huge! It must go back… what, half a kilometre?’
‘Maybe further.’ Cally had turned to look now. The stark lighting revealed to Blake very clearly that she was as dumbfounded as he was.
It was a natural cavern below the surface, stretching further than he could see. A bowl-shaped floor was criss-crossed with metal gangways that connected islands of equipment. Closest to them, maybe a hundred metres from the platform, were control desks. Empty chairs were dotted around them in a random fashion, some lying on their sides as though knocked over in a rush.
Next along were rows of rectangular boxes arranged in semicircles around another, solitary desk. In the further distance were huge devices that stretched up towards the high roof. Blake thought he could make out thick power lines, and possibly some antiquated but industrial-scale transformers and circuit breakers. At the far side was what looked like a cooling tower. At this distance, it was impossible to see where it vented.
Above this, apparently inaccessible from the floor, were the lights than had sprung so reluctantly into life at his command. They were strung in serried ranks on looped metal cables that spanned the enormous width of the cave, casting a pitiless clarity on the massed equipment that sprawled in scattered sections across the floor space.
‘Can you hear that, Blake?’
‘What?’
Cally paused. ‘I thought it was distant voices.’
Blake listened for a moment. ‘The movement of air,’ he said. ‘This place can’t have been disturbed for years.’ He switched off his hood torch, and indicated for Cally to do the same. They stepped through the main archway entrance, and contemplated the extraordinary view.
At first, the whole place gave the illusion of being covered in thin reddish-brown veils. And then Blake noticed the faint scattering of dust that floated down from the lighting rigs. It had been disturbed when the lights had rattled into life, and was slowly falling from way above. The veil across the equipment in the room was, in reality, a thin patina of dust that had settled in a regular layer across it over… well, years. Decades, maybe. Centuries? Who knew.
Blake couldn’t remember seeing an underground facility like this since the time they’d tried to rendezvous with Avalon. But while the caves in the system on Kelvern had been extensive and interconnected, none of them had the scale of what they were looking at now.
And it was warmer here, too. He saw that Cally was already adjusting her thermal suit. He turned the dial on his own down to fifty percent, before he cooked. The heat had helped his injuries, mitigating the pain caused by any abrupt movements he’d made on the surface.
A walkway led from the arrival platform. Their progress down it kicked up whorls of dust that spilled and scattered over the edge and towards the cavern floor. At the end of the walkway, they crossed a cantilever bridge that led over the cavern floor to the first island of equipment.
Blake used one glove to brush the red-brown dust from the surface of the nearest apparatus. ‘Look at all this equipment!’ His gesture encompassed the whole of the cavern. He had seen stuff like this before. Back on Earth, the Aquitar project had a dedicated zone of fifteen sub-levels in the primary dome. But nothing this extensive. And he could tell it was still operational, from the droning background hum that permeated the chamber.
Cally was baffled by what she saw. ‘Does this mean anything to you, Blake?’
‘A little,’ he admitted. ‘Some of this equipment is really old.’ He flicked at some of the control switches, amused by Cally’s worried expression. ‘Don’t worry, if I see a button labelled Self Destruct then I promise not to press it.’
‘Orac said it could be weaponry.’
‘He also said it could be a storage facility,’ Blake reminded her. ‘This equipment has been here a very long time. I’d hate to think that we braved that ice storm just to break into a junkyard.’ He straightened one of the fallen stools, slapped the dust from its upper surface, and sat down on it beside the largest computer desk.
Cally made her way across the next bridge, towards an adjacent island of equipment. ‘Can you tell how old it is?
‘A lot of this stuff dates back to… well, it’s from long before my project work back on Earth.’
‘That is indeed a very long time.’
Blake smiled. ‘Thank you.’ He scrubbed the dust away from the side of one machine. This revealed an image of five arms forming a pentagon, each hand firmly grasping the wrist of the next. ‘Look at this,’ he called out to Cally. ‘It’s the original Federation insignia. If that was embossed on this machine, then it goes back at least a century.’ He noted that the indicator dials on the computer showed low-level activity, and its lights flickered sporadically. ‘The equipment is barely ticking over. But it is still going.’ He was about to tap on the control keys. Then he thought better of it, and tapped his fingers pensively against his lips instead. ‘I wonder what’s keeping it operational?’
‘Perhaps its operating personnel are doing that,’ said Cally from across the bridge.
Blake indicated the empty, overturned chairs around him. ‘Not that I can see.’
‘Then come and look at this,’ she called.
Something in her voice made Blake hurry across to join her. His boots clanged on the runway as he ran over the metal bridge.
Cally sat at a control console within the semi-circle of oblong boxes. As Blake approached, she rose to show him what she’d found. She had scraped the dust from the nearest three boxes to reveal a glass partition on top of each of them.
Behind the glass of the first one was a human body. She had been a young woman with medium-length brown hair and pale skin. Paler still in death, thought Blake. Her sapphire eyes were glazed and unseeing. Protected from the dust, the woman’s purple uniform looked as pressed and clean as the moment she had first put it on. All the signs indicated that had been a very long time ago. The right-hand side of her tunic was emblazoned with the five-armed Federation logo.
The next box along contained the body of a young man, about the same age.
‘Corpses,’ Blake said. ‘Which would explain why they’re in coffins.’
Cally nodded at the boxes, and encouraged Blake to look again. ‘Are you sure?’
‘They’ve got commemorative plaques,’ he said. Each one had a neatly printed sign attached to it. ‘Maykel Coleman, Barni Stafford, Geraint Jones… and look, it shows the date they died.’ He scraped the dust off a fourth box to reveal an older man. ‘This one’s called Roshan Nichani.’
Cally pointed at the signs. ‘They are in adjacent cabinets…’
‘Coffins,’ Blake insisted.
‘All right, adjacent coffins. But their supposed dates of death are years apart. Decades, in some cases.’
Blake looked blankly at Cally.
She tutted at him. ‘They are dates of birth. And those are not coffins. They’re life-support cabinets.’