“She looks lonely out there,” Rico said quietly, his dark eyes fixed on the small gray profile of Westward. “And fragile.”
“It must be some kind of screen or projection,” Ed speculated as the expedition party walked at a steady clip away from the central lift column and toward the point where, presumably, the obsidian surface of the floor met the view of open space that served as the wall. “I’d have trouble believing that this part of the tower could be made of something that is actually transparent from the inside.”
“It doesn’t behave like a screen, though,” Abigail pointed out, holding her radio box in front of her as she walked. “It behaves like a window.”
She was right. The effect of walking away from the center of the space was disconcerting to Lamont. He could see the lift column, its door closed now, becoming smaller with distance, but Westward did not appear to grow correspondingly larger. If they were looking at some fantastically large projection, like a movie screen, it should have. Instead, he could see new stars appearing at the bottom of their view, as if indeed their vertical field of vision were expanding as they approached the edge. It would have been interesting, he supposed, if one of them had stayed back at the lift column to compare perspectives. But in this strange environment, he was glad that he was not looking back at one of his companions becoming smaller against the expanse.
“We should be close now,” Rosemary said.
Lamont glanced at his chronometer and noted with some relief that time didn’t appear to be playing any tricks on them at the moment. They had been walking for nearly two minutes. If the tower followed the normal laws of physics then, being about 500 feet in diameter, it should take them only three minutes or so to span the distance between the center and the outside edge at walking pace. Especially here, where there were no obstructions or distractions.
“She looks lonely out there,” Rico said quietly, his dark eyes fixed on the small gray profile of Westward. “And fragile.”
“I wonder if we can see our sun from here,” Rosemary added.
“We might,” Ed confirmed. “But don’t ask me where. It wouldn’t stand out.”
The thought made Lamont’s heart tighten in his chest.
“What are you getting, Bishop?” Ed asked. “Anything from Westward?”
The navigator shook her head. “It’s just a wall of static.”
“Look at this, though,” Rosemary said, bolting ahead of the group and pointing downward. As they approached what must have been the edge of the floor, Lamont could see the silver outline of one of the four massive metallic globes arrayed from the tower about a mile beneath them. Reflected on the orb’s surface was the rusty streak of the tower, set against a somber blue glow of the gas giant far beneath them. “What is that?” She asked.
Ed shrugged, extending his hand in front of him to feel for the boundary of the room if, as he might suspect, he could not actually see it. “They could be antennae, or gravity manipulators, or anything. We just don’t know enough yet.”
Rosemary shook her head impatiently. “Oy, no,” she repeated. “What is that?”
Looking more closely, Lamont could now see that her pointed finger was tracing the path of a bright, blue-white point of light that flickered as it moved upward from the direction of the planet, apparently rising toward the tower.
Next: Blindsided