A rhythmic pulse filled the air, deep and resonant. Bower knew the limits of human hearing extended from a mere twelve cycles per second up to twenty thousand hertz. Whatever this was, it only just reached the lower register. Each pulse was roughly thirty seconds apart, but with each pulse, Bower felt the alien craft push higher into the sky.
“Feels like we’re climbing a roller-coaster,” Elvis cried from somewhere ahead of her.
“Yeah,” she yelled, trying to compose her thoughts. “Did I ever tell you how much I hate roller-coasters?”
Although she couldn’t hear Elvis clearly, she was sure he was laughing. And in some ways that was good, that was what they both needed, to distract each other from all that was transpiring around them.
They emerged from the fleshy proboscis into the inside of a large dome towering hundreds of feet above them. It took Bower a few seconds to realize where they were. Whatever this creature was, they were in or on what seemed to equate to the head, but they were still inside the creature, inside the giant bladder providing buoyancy.
Stella’s companions let them down gently, rolling them over the top so they descended on their feet. Bower was relieved to find the ground was dry. She wiped the mucus from her trousers and hands, hoping she wasn’t breaching some alien protocol by wiping her hands on the warm, leathery ground.
“Home,” Stella said, coming before them, confirming for Bower that she had been guiding the others as they carried the two humans up from the warship.
Bower watched in awe as the tiny insects that comprised the heart of the three alien creatures abandoned their spiky red structures, leaving them standing to one side, inert. The insects swarmed across the uneven ground, moving toward the front of the massive floater. As Bower and Elvis walked forward, they saw a cavity before them filled with millions of the tiny creatures, spanning an area easily the size of a basketball court. What had been Stella, to their minds, mingled seamlessly with the sea of tiny creatures below them.
“Look at the turns and folds, the crevasses and channels,” Bower said, pointing at the living, pulsating mass before them. “There’s structure here, an interconnected network much like a human brain.”
Again, a pulse drove the floater higher. The pulses were coming more regularly now, every ten seconds or so. Bower found she had to watch her footing as each pulse drove so hard she had to fight from falling to the ground.
She could see through the semi-transparent membrane out across the indistinct ocean. Clouds dotted the horizon in the distance, but along with the sea they appeared tinted purple through the skin of the bladder. The muted shades reminded her of the view through a pair of designer sunglasses.
The floater was already well above a cluster of fluffy clouds drifting with the wind. Bower tried to recall the different types of clouds and the various heights at which they drifted, but all she could remember was that cumulus were white and puffy, like a pinch of cotton wool, while cirrus clouds looked like a streak of white paint daubed on the sky.
The craft passed through fine wisps of vapor, cirrus clouds barely visible as smudges against the darkening beyond. They had to be somewhere around twenty thousand feet up. To one side, the coast of Africa appeared as a long, jagged line on the horizon.
Elvis didn’t seem too bothered by the pulsing thrust of the alien spacecraft. Bower followed him as he walked around the sloping brain cavity to the front of the alien vessel. There, facing forward, was a set of seats.
“What the hell do you make of these, Doc?”
Bower blinked a couple of times at the sight, trying to process what she was seeing. The seats looked man-made. The sharp lines, repeating square shapes, and straight tubular frame were out of place within the organic structure. Bower wondered if they had been ripped from the fuselage of an aircraft. The dull grey frame supported a row of ten military cargo seats, seemingly identical to those in the Osprey.
Bower was struggling to walk, her knees were on the verge of buckling beneath the pulses. Every five seconds the craft surged higher.
Elvis examined the thin, canvas padding on the seat, the seatbelt and buckle.
“Looks new.”
“Looks deliberate,” Bower replied, dropping down into one of the seats, relieved to rest her legs as another pulse thrust the craft higher.
Elvis sat down, but he appeared more relaxed, intrigued perhaps.
“You think they got these from the Osprey?”
“The design, maybe,” Bower replied. “Stella must have figured we would think this was comfortable.”
“Damn,” Elvis replied. “We should have demanded an upgrade to First Class.”
Bower was struggling for breath now the floater pulsed every two to three seconds. Above them, they could see the massive bladder being drawn back into the body of the craft.
They were seated at the blunt end of the living alien vessel, with just a thin membrane in front of them. Cirrus clouds soared low beneath them. The curvature of Earth was apparent, as was the darkening sky.
“Just like the seats on a roller-coaster,” Elvis said.
“Yeah, just like a roller-coaster,” Bower replied, pulling the seatbelt harness over her shoulders. “Only this roller-coaster is passing through fifty thousand feet.”
Elvis laughed.
The pulsating thrust continued to increase in tempo, driving them on several times a second. Finally, the pulses merged, becoming indistinguishable and the thrust became continuous. Bower felt like an elephant was sitting on her chest. She took short breaths, trying not to hyperventilate. Her arms felt like lead weights beside her, while her neck and head were pushed back into the headrest.
Bower felt light-headed. She focused on clenching her arms and legs, trying to use her muscles to keep the blood from rushing away from her head.
She could feel her body being propelled onward, accelerating upward. Her face felt stretched, her cheeks pinned back, and still the alien vessel thrust them on.
Suddenly, the pulsating engines eased and Bower felt like she was going over the top of a roller-coaster and plunging down the far side. Her eyes were shut. She didn’t want to look. She had to look. She opened her eyes and saw Earth curving beneath her, stretching out as smooth as a bowling ball.
“Oh, dear God,” Elvis mumbled.
At first, Bower didn’t notice the physical change around her, but she was no longer anchored to the seat. She was so distracted by the sensation of falling that all other considerations faded. This was worse than jumping out of a plane with a parachute. She couldn’t even begin to tell herself everything was going to be all right. Bower felt as though she was plunging down an elevator shaft or falling from a skyscraper, falling in a dream, a nightmare from which she desperately wanted to wake. In the darkness of night, she kept waiting to hit the ground, but the ground never came.
Even in retrospect, Bower couldn’t identify whether the view around them changed smoothly or abruptly, all she knew was once there had been an alien spacecraft, now there was nothing, nothing between her and the dark void of space.
Elvis had his eyes shut, she remembered that, but the alien spacecraft had disappeared. Whereas before the alien membrane in front of their seats had given her a tinted view of reality, now she could see clearly.
The horizon ran in an arc before her, cutting through the darkness, separating the night below from the pitch black of space. It would take her some time to get used to having no fixed point of orientation, but initially she thought the planet was on an angle, sloping away steeply to her right. That she was slowly turning wasn’t apparent at first.