Wiggins called from his right.
“Cap, you need to see this.”
Banks went over to where the private stood by the meters and gauges along the wall. The meter that had been down at zero on their last visit now hovered at a reading in the hundreds, and was definitely rising, albeit slowly.
“What the fuck is this shite, Cap?” Wiggins asked, but Banks didn’t have an answer for him. He didn’t have an answer for much of anything.
Hynd brought the rest of the squad back to join the others when it was obvious there was no sign of either the dead, or of any immediate threat, in the hangar.
“Somebody’s definitely screwing with us here,” Wiggins said.
“You think?” McCally replied. “It’s like a fucking bad horror movie.”
“Nah. I don’t see any lasses with huge knockers hanging out of their dresses.”
“Yet,” McCally replied.
“Stow that shite, lads. We’re on the clock here. So what now, Cap?” Hynd asked.
Banks looked back at the saucer. It seemed even more golden now. The glow from the floor markings was definitely intensifying, and the meter still rose.
If it’s this warm when the meter is only at the low levels, what the blazes will it be like when it gets fully charged?
He pushed the speculation away; he didn’t have enough information to form any conclusions — at least none that made any sense to him. He turned away from the gauges to talk to the sergeant.
“There’s only one other place those bodies could be,” he replied, and looked over the sarge’s shoulder at the still unblinking golden eye of the saucer.
Hynd saw where Banks was looking.
“In there? Don’t talk bollocks, Cap. There’s not enough room.”
Banks let out a harsh laugh.
“Maybe it’s bigger on the fucking inside.”
“Aye,” Hynd replied. “That’s all we need right now, fucking Daleks.”
“Can you see a door?” Wiggins said. “I cannae see any door in the bloody thing. How the fuck do we get inside?”
“If you’re so bloody keen, lad, then come with me and we’ll find out,” Banks said. He turned back to Hynd. “Watch the doors, and watch our backs. Any funny business, shout loud and we’ll get the fuck out of there fast. Understood?”
Nobody asked what he meant by ‘funny business,’ and he was glad of that, for he wasn’t quite sure himself. He only knew what his gut was telling him — shouting at him now — but he forced himself to take a step toward the saucer, then another.
Wiggins followed him, two steps behind.
Banks stopped when he reached the outer gold circle. He unzipped his parka and dropped back the hood — it was several degrees warmer again this close to the source of the heat, and he felt it rise in waves from the golden circles on the floor.
“Fucking Nazi under-floor heating,” Wiggins said. “The bastards thought of everything.”
Banks put a finger to his lips, and Wiggins went quiet. Across the chamber at the door, the rest of the squad stood watching them, apart from McCally, who’d gone over to watch the gauges and meters.
Banks stepped over the two concentric outer gold rings, but didn’t move inside yet, straddling the gold circles with a foot on either side. McCally immediately called out.
“The meter’s rising faster, Cap,”
“I thought it might,” Banks called back. “Something’s responding to our presence here. I think we’ve started something up. So if anything starts happening apart from the meter moving, shout. And shout loud, okay?”
McCally gave him an okay sign, and Banks stepped all the way inside the circles, taking care not to tread on any of the other golden lines and squiggles. He braced himself, not knowing if an attack was coming but prepared for one anyway, but there was only the steadily rising heat, with no indication that his presence in the circles had been noted in any way.
It was as warm as any British summer’s day now, the heat rising upward, like sun off hot sand at a beach, but Banks refused to shuck off his cold weather jacket — he had no guarantee that this warmth wouldn’t disappear as quickly as it had started.
He motioned to the private, and Wiggins stepped gingerly over the gold circles to join him. This time, something took note. As soon as the man was fully inside the circles, a crack then a creak echoed across the hangar, and when they looked at the saucer, it was to see a door-shaped seam on the surface just to their left ahead of them.
“Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in,” Wiggins muttered as Banks stepped forward.
Banks took off his gloves, unzipped his outer jacket, and stepped right up close to the saucer. He put a hand on what he hoped was the doorway. He’d expected the metal to be warm to the touch, but it felt cold, almost bitterly so, under his fingers.
He turned back to look at McCally. The corporal made a maybe yes, maybe no motion with his left hand. That wasn’t enough to stay Banks from his chosen course of action. He pushed on the metal, and it gave way under the pressure, sinking several inches inward before sliding aside to his right with a squealing creak that spoke of a mechanism that had not been used for many years.
Beyond the revealed entrance, the interior of the saucer lay in darkness and a cold breath of winter came out, accompanied by the smell of stale air and dust. There was still no hint of the stench of death, and Banks took that as a good sign. He pulled down his night-vision goggles and stepped up inside the craft.
The floor was cold underfoot. He felt it rise through the heavy rubber soles of his boots, and through the material of his trousers at his ankles and shins, feeling colder still after the relative warmth just feet away outside the door. He tensed, ready for action should any of the shifting shadows look to be getting closer to him, but there were no bodies inside the vessel, no life of any kind. Even more surprisingly, instrumentation, control mechanisms or means of propulsion, were all noticeable only by their absence — the saucer was little more than an empty shell of metal only an inch or so thick. Only a long window on the opposite side from the doorway broke the monotony of the blank walls. Despite the age that the documentation had intimated, there was no sign of any rust or degradation of the metal inside the saucer, and if he hadn’t known better, Banks might have thought the whole structure newly built sometime not long before they arrived.
As he stepped inside farther, the window across the saucer was letting in enough light that he could abandon the night goggles again and look around properly. Despite the rising heat out in the hangar, the floor and walls of the interior of the saucer had a thin covering of frost, and the cold was severe enough for Banks to zip up his parka again and pull the hood up over his ears.
There were no footprints on the floor save his own leading in from the doorway, and no sign that anyone had entered the vessel in the years since it had taken its position on the hangar floor. There was certainly no sign that the bodies of the dead had ever been stacked inside at any time, never mind in the past few hours.
And yet his gut shouted at him even louder now. Something was definitely off here, and it had him twitching. He almost jumped when Wiggins spoke behind him.
“Is it safe to come up inside, Cap?”
Banks motioned the other man forward, but stopped him from going further than he had gone himself. He heard his own confusion echoed back at him when Wiggins spoke again.