Extra-Vehicular Activity

by alamais

Humidity

Moving to the other side of the junction, you find the air vent into the central room adjacent to the airlock. The vent cover is missing, probably blown off in the fight years ago, and you edge over, peering out into the darkness. The yellow lights are still flashing in an annoying manner, but they at least give you a little bit of a view into the distance. The room—and what you can see beyond—appears to be empty.

You slip through the vent, and quickly duck around the upper frame of the inner airlock door, into the airlock itself. It's fairly clean, and there are several lockers where it looks like space suits would have been stored, but they're all empty now. Beyond, you get your first look into the ring.

The room beyond appears to function very similarly as an airlock, but that's about it for similarities. The ring's lighting seems to be working, but it casts only a very dim glow that doesn't even fully light the airlock, much less the space beyond. The ring's insides look entirely in keeping with its outsides—that is, creepy. If anything, it's worse inside, with structural supports having a ribbed look, as if you were inside a corpse, or maybe some giant beast's intestines.

You shake off that thought, and enter the ring's airlock.

As you pass through, you feel something settle over you, and you realize you're entering a gravity field. You look around with a huff, then softly flap back upward. A few taps on your PDA increases the grip of your hooves, and you firmly plant yourself upside down on the ceiling. You give silent thanks that your hoof grips are magical instead of the old magnetic ones, since you're not even sure the slightly squishy surface you're on would work with magnets.

Continuing into the ring, you peer beyond the airlock, into the main structure. A long, wide—almost wastefully wide, you think—corridor runs down axis of the ring. It's quite dark as far down as you can see, but there's enough light for you to pick out some other doorways. As you creep across the threshold into the ring proper, you're hit by a wave of warm humidity, which carries with it a smell that sends a shiver down your spine.

What is that? It's got the iron tang of rust, or blood, but there's something else. You take a deep breath, and the memory that springs to mind is the time you were flying through the Everfree—just the outskirts—on a hot day, just to stay in the shade on your way home from visiting Hoofington. You curved around a tree, and suddenly, your reactions far too slow, found yourself covered in spider webs…and spiders. With a shudder, you force that memory back down. You hadn't even noticed a smell that day as you were too busy freaking out, but apparently, here, now, you're smelling spiders.

Gritting your teeth, you move on towards the center of the corridor's ceiling. Your overlay flashes a few messages about the air, and it seems like ship's aliens might have been able to breathe in here without their suits. It's far closer to their ship's atmosphere than yours.

You mark the airlock in your overlay, then wander up and down the hall a bit, but you don't see any sign of aliens, monsters, or anything. With a shrug, you drop to the floor, enter the door nearest the airlock, and find…nothing much. It kinda gives you a vibe like a lab, pony or alien, but seems barren. There are little urns sitting on a table in one corner, but you know better than to go poking anything in a lab when you're just looking for some power cable.

Leaving that room, you look up and down the hall. So many doors. Your wings droop a bit, as you move on to the next one.

...

---

...

You rest your head against the side of a bench—one of the few flat, metallic surfaces on this horror show of a station. You've been through dozens of rooms. Nothing even vaguely cable-like has shown up. It's like these guys have some sort of wireless power thing going on, because even the obvious standalone bits of equipment don't have power cords. Though several of the rooms have been locked, with no obvious entry method, the open ones seem to be randomly arranged. Here's a place with food (scan: inedible). Oh hey, next to it one conveniently finds the lab where we keep horrible be-tentacled monstrosities! At least, some of them, since there's more down the hall, next to the room full of creepy overgrown plants covered in what look like eyeballs!

You're still heebeein' your jeebees after that one, even a half-hour later. Thankfully none of what you've found has been alive. You guess even the jungle-like humidity isn't enough to keep plants going for decades without food 'n stuff. Whatever eyeball-plants eat.

With a sigh, you push yourself back upright and leave this particular empty storage room. You're coming up on the center of the incomplete ring shape now, where the two long arms connect to a slightly thicker, straight section. If the ship were built logically, you'd expect this to be where engineering, support, and other basic systems were located, but at this point you don't know what to think. It could just end up being a big ice cream parlor.

Unnnh. Ice cream.

Your stomach growls, and you swallow some drool as you walk up to the next bulkhead. They've been spaced regularly along the corridor—all with pressure doors wide open, just like this one, but there is some difference here. The wall looks at least two, maybe even three times thicker, and there's a second bulkhead with a similarly thick wall only five meters away. The door in the second bulkhead appears to have been closed at some point, but it shows melting damage very similar to what you saw on the ship, except that the materials here seem to be a bit more resistant to the acid. You prod tentatively at the melted edges, but they're hard, the acid long gone.

You're passing through the half-meter thick door, noting a difference in the walls and the lighting, when a logo appears covering much of your overlay. One that is drilled into the head of any and all who enter the Equestrian space program, and that one then hopes to never see again. As you duck back into the door, the symbol shrinks to fill a smaller—but still obnoxiously large—portion of your field of view, and below it is red text.

PSA Class-A Material Detected: Antimatter

Comments

[Skulljack17]

Holy crapcakes, Antimatter...it's a small miracle that anything here is still intact. You can get through it RD!