“Brilliant,” Rosemary yawned, her eyes skeptically tracing the length of the perfectly symmetrical vessel. “Which end’s the front?”
Rosemary rolled her eyes, all but shoving Lamont aside as she stepped out into the landing bay. “You lads get distracted by the silliest things,” she sighed. “Can we just get one with it? I’m clammed.”
The shuttle’s threshold snapped silently shut as Ed followed Rosemary into the landing bay. Lamont found himself momentarily reeling at the scale of it all. Each bay occupied only a quarter of the tower’s circumference, and yet it was large enough to contain at least half a dozen inscrutably-shaped vessels, some of them twice as big as the asteroid pod, with plenty of space between them. The vessels were an eclectic mix of bulbous, angular and smooth shapes. Metallic surfaces glinted softly, juxtaposed with swaths of matte black composite. Some ships resembled abstract sculptures - collections of cubes, pyramids and spheres fused together in asymmetric configurations. Another had a long teardrop-shaped body sprouting an array of thin fins.
One vessel near the curved outer edge of the chamber stood out from the others. About forty feet long, it resembled nothing so much as an uncut cigar, its hull a nearly featureless metallic surface that looked purplish in the ubiquitous, opalescent glow of the bay. Clifford Ashton sat cross-legged beneath the ship, inspecting an open panel studded with crystals and filaments. Surrounding him was a collection of equipment that Lamont recognized as coming from Westward; tool boxes and instruments in cases or on wheels. He sprang to his feet as the group approached, nearly hitting his head on the underside of the ship.
"This one shows some familiar design principles," he explained eagerly. "There’s a definite electrical system, at any rate. It’s only a matter of time before we find a way to get into it."
“Brilliant,” Rosemary yawned, her eyes skeptically tracing the length of the perfectly symmetrical vessel. “Which end’s the front?”
Lamont gazed up at the monolithic walls enclosing them. "This tower is miles high," he mused. "It could hold thousands. Tens of thousands even."
He turned to Ed Spratt. "Why are we so certain this place is abandoned? We’ve seen so little of it, maybe it’s just a coincidence that we haven’t run into anybody. What if these ships still belong to someone? We could be stealing a vehicle that's still in use."
Ed shrugged. “We’ve been using everything from screwdrivers to welding torches on these things for hours. As advanced as they are, you’d think that if anybody cared about them, we would have had company by now.”
“Fair point,” Lamont agreed, looking at the weird artificial viscera that was hanging out of the panel Clark had managed to open in the side of the vessel. Their situation was desperate enough to warrant a bit of moral flexibility. Still, he hoped fervently that the tower's original builders were not somewhere nearby, watching this act of technological larceny unfold.
Nobody - er, no THING that arrived in -all- the other vehicles appears to have left. That fact hasn't seemed to strike our heroes yet. Maybe some have come and gone, but clearly staying (and abandoning the vehicles) is a mode. We can hope our cast is exceptional. And I'm frankly mystified as to why Mr. Big Pink Head with the evolved brain isn't more interested in the alien tech.