The explorers watched the clean edges of the tower’s outer shell, about eight inches thick, pass above the viewports. As soon as the pod had cleared the opening, it began to slide closed again. Lamont swallowed a lump in his throat.
As if to emphasize his point, the chief technician nudged the asteroid pod back toward the side of the tower and then lifted his hands away from the console. The small craft drifted slowly toward the rectangular opening, rotating slowly until the aperture was directly in front of them.
“It’s like we’re being pulled in by an invisible hand,” Abigail observed from her place in the cargo cabin. “I’ve never seen magnetic signatures like this.”
Once again, the cabin lights and instrument panels flickered unsettlingly. “It’s playing havoc with our circuit boards,” Ed frowned.
Lamont was suddenly overcome by a wave of nausea. He saw by the expressions of the others in the cockpit that he was not alone. Ed put one hand over his mouth and with the others quickly adjusted a dial on the console in front of him. A moment later, the feeling subsided.
“Competing gravity fields,” Ed noted. “This place has its own orientation toward the center of the moon, which makes sense. But it’s at least partially artificial.”
In the meantime, the pod had passed through the opening. The explorers watched the clean edges of the tower’s outer shell, about eight inches thick, pass above the viewports. As soon as the pod had cleared the opening, it began to slide closed again. Lamont swallowed a lump in his throat.
“The pod is designed to drill through metal asteroids,” Ed pointed out. “I think we could punch ourselves back out if we needed to.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Arthur grumbled.
The rest of the party was already distracted by the space into which they had descended. The pod’s spotlights, flickering intermittently, were illuminating a cavernous space that stretched easily 100 feet ahead of their field of view before terminating in some kind of a curved wall. Between them and that wall were at least one or two large objects that Lamont could not make out distinctly in the inconsistent light. All that changed a moment later. No sooner did they feel the pod come to rest on the floor of the interior space than the small craft’s systems returned to normal functionality. At the same time, the space outside was filled with a soft, uniform white light. Through the viewports, they could see that they were in a large chamber, the floors and walls of which were made of a single substance that was white, but with a metallic sheen that picked up the colors of the pod’s lights. The walls, a good distance off, curved upward toward a partially domed ceiling. Where the ceiling became flat, it emitted a uniform soft glow. Elsewhere on the floor of the chamber were large objects, at least as large as the asteroid pod itself. One was cigar-shaped, made of a purplish metal with an iridescent quality. The other was bony white and resembled nothing so much as a giant piece of coral.
“Are those…” Rosemary whispered, rising to her feet.
“Other ships of some kind?” Ed speculated. “Could be, Wells. It makes sense that this would be a landing bay.”
It doesn't strike them as worrisome that there are multiple different alien craft inside? They checked in but never checked out. Welcome to Hotel Memorial Tower, enjoy your stay. Stay. STAY.