Free Cybersong by S. N. Lewitt Page A

craft. Her voice came through the helmet speakers and wasn’t as clear as the commbadge.
    But as soon as they left the shuttlecraft, Paris was too interested to notice his discomfort.
    The alien ship was amazing. He had thought it large when he had flown through the gash in her side. Now, standing in what he assumed had to have been a cargo or shuttlebay, he realized that his sense of scale had been wrong. It was not simply large, it was gigantic. These must have been a race of behemoths.
    “The alloy is related to steel, but there is a particle in the mixture that the tricorder can’t identify,” Kim said. Harry had the tricorder while Paris held a phaser in his hand. Not that there could be anything alive here, and the readings had confirmed that, but he felt better with it anyway. The place was so eerie that he wouldn’t have been surprised to see a colossal ghost.
    The captain didn’t linger in the bay. Whatever had been here—cargo, craft, repair supplies, a garden—was gone now, sucked out by the vacuum of space. Or expelled by the internal pressure of an atmosphere the ship no longer had.
    Janeway led them to a door that was sealed shut. Harry came over and pointed his tricorder at the complicated looking lock.
    “I think it’s an airlock, Captain,” Kim said, amazement in his voice.
    “Why would they have an inside airlock?”
    “Maybe this was a flight deck,” Tom Paris offered. “Then they could open the whole thing to space and pull out quickly in formation.”
    “Possible,” the captain agreed. “But maybe this is an early craft.
    Most spacegoing people build their first ships in segments with airlocks in between that can be isolated in case of a breech.”
    Tom Paris raised his phaser to blast open the lock. The captain raised her hand. “Let’s not damage this if we don’t have to. If it’s an early design, it should be fairly straightforward. And there’s a good chance it isn’t locked. Airlocks are for keeping atmosphere in, not interlopers out.”
    She stepped toward the lock and ran a gloved hand over a handle easily three times the size of anything Paris had ever seen before. She pushed at it from various angles. Finally, she struck it head on, trying to get the oversize thing to move at all.
    “If it’s that old, it could be jammed, Captain,” Harry started to say as a weak automatic light came on and the door heaved open.
    The three of them in their suits fit easily into the middle chamber of the airlock. The outer door shut and it was utterly black inside.
    “Really old design,” Kim said, impressed. “I’ve never even seen this technology before.”
    Then it was just dark and silent. Time ceased to mean anything, and Paris thought it could have been a minute or ten before the inner door came open onto a corridor where a few lights still made a feeble attempt to brighten the gloom.
    But the lights were embedded in the crystals that hung like icicles from the ceiling, and their flickering showed off an array of color that was as beautiful as it was mysterious. Under their feet the surface was smooth and polished between rows of up-thrust crystals that lined the walls.
    The projections weren’t regular at all. The colors varied and the size and shape of each of the projections was unique. Yet, overall they gave the impression of perfected nature. Like his mother’s cottage garden, Paris thought. Everything looked like it had been left to happy natural chance, but in fact it was carefully planned. He was impressed.
    “Are you getting all this, Mr. Kim?” the captain asked.
    Harry replied in the affirmative, turning constantly to capture yet another projection or get some recording of the effect of the whole.
    “Do you think we can take the suits off now, Captain?” Paris asked.
    Now that there was atmosphere, the thing was definitely miserable.
    “It’s still a hundred below zero in here,” Kim answered. “It’s amazing that anything at all works here. Unless they