0232: Into the Bowels
His eyes were confused by strange geometry dimly lit in weird colors from unintuitive angles. The deeper Lamont went, the more the ship's internal logic unraveled.
The steady thrum of engines grew louder as Lamont delved into the claustrophobic corridor, reverberating off countless metallic surfaces. The air tasted stale, metallic. He emerged into a sprawling chamber crisscrossed by pipes and bundles of conduit. Banks of complex machinery lined the walls.
He passed an alcove where a towering cylinder emitted a glow from swirling gasses within. A nearby cabinet sprouted gauges and dials, ticking away inexplicably. Further on, constellations of lights danced across steel panels studded with unmarked buttons and switches. The space was filled with machines whose functions eluded him. They exhibited the no-nonsense utility that he would expect to see in a place that was only ever seen by engineers, but he would have been hard-pressed to guess the purpose of any given unit, no matter familiar the individual shapes of meters, knobs, electrical transformers and indicator lights may have looked in isolation.
And then there were the other things. Surfaces were etched with intricate geometrical designs and glyphs that reminded Lamont of features he had seen in peripheral places of Mars, where the eons-old technology could still be seen. Delicate mechanisms suspended in webs of wire and glass hinted at unearthly science. His eyes were confused by strange geometry dimly lit in weird colors from unintuitive angles.
The deeper Lamont went, the more the ship's internal logic unraveled. Corridors doubled back, compartments he thought were adjacent appeared widely separated. He felt increasingly untethered in the tangle of pipelines and cable conduits. He began to find himself fighting a growing sense of panic as his sense of relation to the external shape of Westward became more and more disconnected. He was losing confidence that, were he to double back and retrace his steps, he would find himself back where he started. He felt a bead of sweat roll from his brow and into his eye.
“Bugger it,” he heard himself mutter. He had always scorned the primitive part of him that sought to fabricate ghouls and phantoms in the shadows, steeling himself with stern materialism. But where he would have braved a place that was merely macabre or menacing, he found himself daunted by the presence of the alien, the uncanny. It took all his effort not to turn on his heel.
And then he felt long, cool fingers wrap over his shoulder.
Lamont leapt forward, twisting around, his knee painfully colliding with the terminus of a pipe. Looming over him was, of course, the slender towering form of Phobos, his golden eyes shining weirdly in the gloom.