Blake’s 7: Warship (8 page)

They angled their torches over the rock wall beside the ladder. The metal of the platform extended up one stretch of wall. A panel of old-fashioned switch-levers was set into it.

‘What do you think?’ Blake asked, walking over to the controls.

Cally wasn’t sure. ‘The lights?’

‘Or the self-destruct? Only one way to find out.’ He reached out, and pulled down every one of the levers.

Cally stumbled forward to stop him. ‘Blake!’

There was a crackle of electricity and a flash of light behind them. Blake tapped his finger on a notice next to the switches that read
Main Lighting
. His grinning face was lit by a growing illumination.

‘Interesting,’ said Cally. ‘The language of that label shows that this whole thing was constructed by humans.’

But she seemed to have lost Blake’s attention. Could he hear the same distant whispering that she could? ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

Blake wasn’t grinning any more. He stared over her shoulder, his jaw slack with amazement.

Cally turned to look. And found that she was lost for words, too.

‘I think this one might be better.’ Vila tugged at the sleeve of the hull suit. It stayed attached, which was a good sign, he decided. But then, it looked a bit battered.

Jenna glared at him. She had arrived in the airlock antechamber after Vila, but was already almost completely dressed in her own hull suit. She had seized the first one she saw, and tugged it on in double-quick time.

‘Is this suit the one I used last time?’ he asked her.

‘How would I know?’ she replied, and started to fit her gloves.

‘Only I thought that one might have had a faulty pressure seal. It sounded like it was leaking air.’

‘It’s when you can’t hear air hissing in your suit that you need to start worrying.’

Vila fingered the sleeve of suit that hung on the next peg along. ‘You can’t be too careful.’

Jenna rolled her eyes. ‘I think you’re making a very concerted effort to be too careful.’

‘This one, then.’

‘Oh come on, Vila!’ she snapped at him. ‘This is just displacement activity. You can’t put it off forever.’

‘I can try,’ he muttered.

Vila didn’t like hull-crawling. For the most part, it was unnecessary, because the auto-repair systems conveniently handled the day-to-day maintenance of the ship’s externals. Even after a major skirmish with Federation pursuit ships,
Liberator
seemed perfectly capable of reinstating any damaged sections without the need for human intervention. The automatics just got on with it, calmly returning systems to a perfectly restored condition, while Vila stayed safely inside restoring himself to a different kind of calm with a perfectly mixed drink.

That was all fine until the auto repair systems themselves needed repairing. Or if Avon needed them to calibrate the
Liberator
‘s equipment into a new configuration. Zen could be unhelpfully reluctant to facilitate any change other than the presumed factory defaults. And that was when the crew had to suit up and go out to handle the adjustments manually.

Perhaps, Vila thought to himself sourly, that was why there were so few safety features. No attachment lines, for example. He dreaded the prospect that he might be separated from the hull in mid-repair and float off into the void. Though even that might just be preferable to Avon’s brutal mockery if Vila had to be retrieved and brought back safely.

Jenna was completely ready, and Vila had only just stripped off his shoes and tunic. ‘Hurry up,’ she insisted. ‘We need to remove those things from the hull.’

‘They’re not going anywhere,’ he said.

‘Neither are we. Here…’ Jenna thrust the nearest hull suit into his hands. ‘Put this one on, or I’ll open the airlock and you can go out there in just your underwear.’

In the end, she helped him into the bulky suit. She clipped the helmet shut and, sure enough, he could hear the steady hiss as a cool stream of oxygen played over his face.

They stepped through the nearest door, and the antechamber door slid silently shut behind them. Vila knew it was foolish to feel claustrophobic in the small airlock, when he was already fully encased in his hull suit.

Jenna’s voice crackled over the comms in his helmet.
‘Ready, Vila?’

‘No,’ he replied.

‘Good. Here we go. Don’t forget your toolkit.’

The outer airlock door dropped away to one side, and the darkness of space beckoned them.

Jenna led them out. Vila attached the toolkit to his belt, and used both hands to haul himself out onto the hull.

Frightened as he was of the prospect of another space walk, Vila had to admit that the view it afforded was beautiful. The last time he’d done this was to realign the rear sensor array. They had been in orbit around an uninhabited world. The force wall was deactivated at the time, and so there’d only been the transparent shell of Vila’s suit helmet between him and the swirling green surface of an unknown planet. When he had worked his way around the hull that time, and looked back out into space, the stars had glittered back at him from the pitch blackness with a clarity he had never before witnessed. Even the burnished orange-gold surface of
Liberator
‘s hull could look beautiful in the unfiltered illumination of a nearby sun.

Today was very different. Way off to the one side of the ship, the satellite grid shimmered behind the silent sparks of distant conflict. The other direction revealed an even more isolating view of their home galaxy, impossibly far away and yet looking like he could reach out and touch it with his glove. It was a giddy thought.

‘I don’t like this, Jenna. When I look up, all I can see are stars. Distant stars. They make me dizzy.’ His own voice reverberated in his helmet. He was conscious again of the air hiss. He looked at the stars again, and knew he was alone. ‘Jenna? Jenna! Where are you?’

‘I’m right beside you, Vila
.‘ Even over the comms, he could hear the exasperation in her voice.
‘Don’t shout. Just speak normally into your helmet microphone.’

Vila squinted at the device at the front of his helmet. ‘Oh. Yes, all right.’

‘And there’s a solution to the stars making you dizzy.’

‘It it drugs?’

‘No. Just stop looking at them. Keep your eyes on the hull.’

Vila adjusted his tool holder, and reached out for the next handhold. Jenna was right. If he just looked at the hull, it would be like a simple crawl along a corridor inside
Liberator
. He’d done that once or twice, depending on what sort of night he’d had.

Yes that was a helpful comparison. Only this was a very wide corridor. With a pronounced curvature to the floor. And no ceiling. The more he thought about this, decided Vila, the less encouraging the comparison became. And telling himself not to think about it wasn’t stopping him from thinking about it.

He focused on the surface in front of him. That was even less reassuring. He was appalled at what he saw.

The
Liberator
‘s hull no longer shone with a burnished brilliance. It had become dull, as if some huge flame had scorched across it. A trace of lines criss-crossed haphazardly, like slug trails over its surface. And everywhere, he could see the alien devices.

‘Can you see all those limpet mines?’
asked Jenna.

‘There are dozens of them,’ he replied. There was one at the end of each slug trail, where the devices must have dragged along and come to rest. ‘And that’s just on this section.’ Vila pushed himself up with both hands, to look further over the horizon of the hull. ‘There could be hundreds. We’ll be here forever!’

‘Then we’d better get started.’
Jenna was already moving further along, towards the nearest of the devices.

Vila hesitated. He was in no rush to follow her, and eyed the first of the alien mechanisms with suspicion. ‘What if they go off while we’re removing them?’

‘If they do,’
she told him,
‘you’ll be seeing a whole load of different stars.’
She beckoned to him urgently with one gloved hand.
‘Come on! Bring your equipment, and let’s get started.’

Blake blinked in astonishment as the lights flickered on. He hardly heard what Cally was saying, because his attention was focused on what was being revealed before his eyes.

After the darkness of the climb down from the hatch, his eyes had become accustomed to the low light of their torches. Even when he had taken his goggles off, he could barely see further than a hundred metres. But now this…

The last of the illumination rippled into life across the room. If ‘room’ was the right word for it.

‘This place is…’ Blake could hardly find the words. ‘It’s huge! It must go back… what, half a kilometre?’

‘Maybe further.’ Cally had turned to look now. The stark lighting revealed to Blake very clearly that she was as dumbfounded as he was.

It was a natural cavern below the surface, stretching further than he could see. A bowl-shaped floor was criss-crossed with metal gangways that connected islands of equipment. Closest to them, maybe a hundred metres from the platform, were control desks. Empty chairs were dotted around them in a random fashion, some lying on their sides as though knocked over in a rush.

Next along were rows of rectangular boxes arranged in semicircles around another, solitary desk. In the further distance were huge devices that stretched up towards the high roof. Blake thought he could make out thick power lines, and possibly some antiquated but industrial-scale transformers and circuit breakers. At the far side was what looked like a cooling tower. At this distance, it was impossible to see where it vented.

Above this, apparently inaccessible from the floor, were the lights than had sprung so reluctantly into life at his command. They were strung in serried ranks on looped metal cables that spanned the enormous width of the cave, casting a pitiless clarity on the massed equipment that sprawled in scattered sections across the floor space.

‘Can you hear that, Blake?’

‘What?’

Cally paused. ‘I thought it was distant voices.’

Blake listened for a moment. ‘The movement of air,’ he said. ‘This place can’t have been disturbed for years.’ He switched off his hood torch, and indicated for Cally to do the same. They stepped through the main archway entrance, and contemplated the extraordinary view.

At first, the whole place gave the illusion of being covered in thin reddish-brown veils. And then Blake noticed the faint scattering of dust that floated down from the lighting rigs. It had been disturbed when the lights had rattled into life, and was slowly falling from way above. The veil across the equipment in the room was, in reality, a thin patina of dust that had settled in a regular layer across it over… well, years. Decades, maybe. Centuries? Who knew.

Blake couldn’t remember seeing an underground facility like this since the time they’d tried to rendezvous with Avalon. But while the caves in the system on Kelvern had been extensive and interconnected, none of them had the scale of what they were looking at now.

And it was warmer here, too. He saw that Cally was already adjusting her thermal suit. He turned the dial on his own down to fifty percent, before he cooked. The heat had helped his injuries, mitigating the pain caused by any abrupt movements he’d made on the surface.

A walkway led from the arrival platform. Their progress down it kicked up whorls of dust that spilled and scattered over the edge and towards the cavern floor. At the end of the walkway, they crossed a cantilever bridge that led over the cavern floor to the first island of equipment.

Blake used one glove to brush the red-brown dust from the surface of the nearest apparatus. ‘Look at all this equipment!’ His gesture encompassed the whole of the cavern. He had seen stuff like this before. Back on Earth, the Aquitar project had a dedicated zone of fifteen sub-levels in the primary dome. But nothing this extensive. And he could tell it was still operational, from the droning background hum that permeated the chamber.

Cally was baffled by what she saw. ‘Does this mean anything to you, Blake?’

‘A little,’ he admitted. ‘Some of this equipment is really old.’ He flicked at some of the control switches, amused by Cally’s worried expression. ‘Don’t worry, if I see a button labelled
Self Destruct
then I promise not to press it.’

‘Orac said it could be weaponry.’

‘He also said it could be a storage facility,’ Blake reminded her. ‘This equipment has been here a very long time. I’d hate to think that we braved that ice storm just to break into a junkyard.’ He straightened one of the fallen stools, slapped the dust from its upper surface, and sat down on it beside the largest computer desk.

Cally made her way across the next bridge, towards an adjacent island of equipment. ‘Can you tell how old it is?

‘A lot of this stuff dates back to… well, it’s from long before my project work back on Earth.’

‘That is indeed a
very
long time.’

Blake smiled. ‘Thank you.’ He scrubbed the dust away from the side of one machine. This revealed an image of five arms forming a pentagon, each hand firmly grasping the wrist of the next. ‘Look at this,’ he called out to Cally. ‘It’s the original Federation insignia. If that was embossed on this machine, then it goes back at least a century.’ He noted that the indicator dials on the computer showed low-level activity, and its lights flickered sporadically. ‘The equipment is barely ticking over. But it is still going.’ He was about to tap on the control keys. Then he thought better of it, and tapped his fingers pensively against his lips instead. ‘I wonder what’s keeping it operational?’

‘Perhaps its operating personnel are doing that,’ said Cally from across the bridge.

Blake indicated the empty, overturned chairs around him. ‘Not that I can see.’

‘Then come and look at this,’ she called.

Something in her voice made Blake hurry across to join her. His boots clanged on the runway as he ran over the metal bridge.