Since the station was a giant Fuentes head, its door was placed in its mouth: a curtain of dark energy centered between the four huge mandibles. By "dark energy," I mean a field of silent blackness — an intangible thing that blocked off light, but didn’t register on any of the Bumbler’s sensors. When Festina reported the lack of readings, Li said, "Stupid machine. What good is it?"
"If it can’t be used as eyes," Festina said, "we’ll use it as a hat on a stick."
She pushed the Bumbler into the flat curtain of blackness (making sure to keep her fingers safely out of the field). She waited a moment, then pulled the little device back. "No apparent damage," she said after checking it over. "And it still works. Let’s hope that means we can pass through without our intestines exploding."
Festina stepped through the sheet of blackness. A moment later, Ubatu did the same with me in her arms. Immediately, I went blind.
I still had my normal vision. Light entered the building through two glassed-in domes overhead: the faceted Fuentes eyes high up on the station’s "face." The general glow was dim — outside, the sun hadn’t quite reached the horizon — but the tepid illumination showed we had entered a narrow corridor circling the edge of the building. The corridor’s interior wall was as smooth and white as an eggshell. It curved upward to join the outside walls a short distance below the spiked crown. The actual contents of the station (whatever they were) sat in a great white bowl inside the Fuentes head. This corridor ringed the middle of the bowl, in the gap between the inner and outer walls.
All this, I could see with my physical eyes. My sixth sense, however, stretched no farther than my skin. I could perceive everything inside my own body — millions of Balrog spores, and what little remained of my own tissues — but I could see nothing beyond… not even Ubatu’s life force, though she was pressed against me, still holding me in her arms.
A deep, abject blindness.
Within me, the Balrog stirred. Its life force wasn’t nervous or dismayed, but it was definitely disoriented. Disconnected. Its glow had shut down the moment we crossed the threshold — as if it was saving strength.
Ah. I understood.
The Balrog was a hive creature: each spore linked with all others, a gestalt spreading through the galaxy. The spores shared everything instantaneously — thoughts, strength, brainpower — which is why they could keep glowing, even inside my body. For normal creatures, producing light where no one could see was just wasting energy… but for Balrog spores, such squandered output would instantly be replenished from reserves in other spores. Probably, the Balrog had trillions of spores doing nothing but soaking up sun on well-lit planets, then feeding solar power to spores like the ones under my skin. The moss in my belly could draw upon huge amounts of energy as needed…
…until we’d entered this station. Which somehow cut off my spores from their fellows. Not only were they blind, devoid of their sixth sense; they were isolated. On their own.
I could almost imagine bits of moss snuggling up to my own cells for comfort. As soon as we passed through the station’s black entrance, the spores had ceased to be the Balrog. Now they were piteous orphans, not dominating me but depending on me.
From this point on, we could expect no help from the Balrog as a whole. As for the small supply of spores I carried in my body, I assumed they were there for a purpose, but I couldn’t imagine what. They had limited brainpower, limited energy, and probably limited abilities. There’d be no dramatic feats of telekinesis to save us from the station’s dangers. If I got injured, perhaps the spores wouldn’t even be able to keep me alive.
We humans — we Explorers — we champions — were finally on our own.
"What now?" Li asked behind me. He’d taken his time coming through the entrance’s energy field, but had finally gathered enough courage to join us.
"Now we look around," Festina said. "And before anyone wanders off, let’s use the Bumbler." She took a quick sensor scan. "No good," she reported. "We can’t see through the inner wall."
"How about the Stage One microbes inside you?" I asked. "I don’t suppose they decided to stay outside?"
Festina raised a questioning eyebrow. "The EMP clouds keep their distance from this station," I said. "It makes them nervous. Maybe the microbes that are trying to mutate you want to stay out too."
"Oh good," Festina muttered. "I love waltzing into places that terrify the locals." But she took more readings with the Bumbler and reported, "We still have our escort of microbes — around us and in our bloodstreams. They must be so eager to turn us into smoke, they don’t care if monsters live in this building."
"They’re microbes," Li said. "They’re too stupid to care about anything."
He had a point. The microbes weren’t pretas; they had no intelligence or emotions. They were just little wrecking machines, waiting for the signal to tear us apart. We could hope the signal wouldn’t pass through the station’s scan-proof walls… but that was just wishful thinking. The Fuentes would have done their best to make sure the signal blanketed the entire planet — especially into buildings like this one, which probably had a crew of maintenance personnel to make sure it worked when the time came.
"Let’s get going," Festina said, slinging the Bumbler over her shoulder. "We’ll circle this corridor once and see what there is to see."
We walked the circumference of the station and found two entrances into the central "bowl" — one on the north and one on the south, both curtained over with the same black energy that covered the front door. No noise came through either entrance; the building hung thick with absolute silence, as if the walls shut out every wayward sound. All we heard was our footsteps on the concrete floor… the rustling of our clothes… the beating of our hearts.
After our first circuit, we started around again. This time, Festina stopped in front of the first door we came to: the southern entrance, black, blank, revealing nothing. Once again, she pushed the Bumbler through to make sure the energy curtain was safe to enter; the machine came back unharmed. "Okay," she said. "Time to jump down the rabbit hole, Alice."
We stepped into a room brightening with dawn. I’d thought the roof of the station was opaque; it looked that way from the outside. From the inside, however, the room seemed open to the air: a sky of brightening gray, edging into cool, cloudless blue. The sun was too low to be seen, but its rays penetrated the walls, illuminating everything with a yellowed glow.
What was there to see? Ornate machinery: gleaming brass, shining steel, bits of copper and gold. The place reminded me of a Victorian astronomical observatory, with its open roof and collection of equipment below, bristling with gears, cranks, wheels, and levers. There was nothing so recognizable as a telescope, but numerous devices pointed skyward, some long and sharp like spears, others like bulbous cylinders or elongated pyramids. All of them made soft noises — one producing a hum, another a hiss, a third tick-tick-tick — filling the room with a background purr that suggested the station was still operational.
The equipment only covered the outer half of the chamber. The middle of the room was clear of clutter, with nothing but a low ash-gray dome set into the floor — the way humans might put a reflecting pool or a little garden plot in the heart of an open rotunda. But if the dome on the floor was supposed to add visual appeal, it didn’t succeed. It was simply a mound of gray, twenty paces across, not quite rising to knee height in the center… not what I’d call an attractive architectural feature, but the Fuentes might have had different aesthetic tastes.