A short time later found the team in the ready room. Although ‘room’ was wildly misleading. It was more like a cavern. A cavern of concrete and sound dampening materials to deal with all the echoing enabled by the concrete. On the end Dr. Zanna entered through was a regular size door, except for being a foot and a half thick with locks like she’d seen on movie submarines, the ones that made her think of a ship’s steering wheel. Sharing this end was an observation deck that looked down on the space from behind what had to be very thick safety glass. That would be mission control then, and only accessible from a doorway back in the hall. The far end of the huge space hosted a vehicle sized door, which also looked quite thick and managed to sound heavy as it slowly ground closed. That and beeps from roving carts and construction equipment and the occasional shouted instruction filled the air. The air which smelled filtered and sterile, with a chemical tang that stopped just short of bleach. Dr. Zanna sincerely hoped she would not have to spend much time in this ‘room’. Floodlights in corners and atop poles shone on people walking around with purpose, setting up lots of equipment the function of which Dr. Zanna could barely guess and checking lists. There seemed to be a lot of lists that people were checking very carefully. Or maybe they just didn’t want to stop looking at the- object?- in the center of the room.
With a soft sigh of joyful curiosity Dr. Zanna finally allowed her eyes to rest on the centerpiece of this entire enterprise. Spotlights, guns, a flamethrower, and implements she couldn’t identify were all pointed at it. Both because of its reflective metallic seeming surface and because of the concentration of light it seemed to glow with purple, blue, and bronze shimmers. Shimmers that moved in the faceplates and shields of the soldiers surrounding it although Zanna couldn’t discern any movement in the object itself. The overall effect was somewhat disorienting, almost nauseating, as her brain interpreted the object as staying still and moving at the same time.
Pushing past the discomfort, she continued to stare in awe. In shape it was an extended octagonal prism, or an octagonal hallway some 12 feet tall. It looked like a crystal or perhaps mineral growth. Geology was not Dr. Zanna’s strong suit, but she thought she’d seen something like this in a natural history museum at some point, although not in this shape exactly, and certainly not in this size. She walked around it a ways so she could see further inside. It was maybe 30 ft long and the edges were rough, even jagged at points. And the colors did move, not on the object itself, but in her eyes, like a kind of aftervideo. The patterns were indistinct and shifting, the movements put her in mind of the celestial spheres, the harmonics of the heavens. Of the vast and lonely emptiness between stars, between planets, between people. She shivered and walked over to the deployment zone, marked out in reflective tape, to join the team.
“Dr. Zanna?” Brennan asked.
“Yes?”
“Please keep both feet in the zone, nothing is happening right now, but the tape is there so that there’s clear lanes of fire in case something comes through.” Brennan gestured at the people with serious expressions and guns behind them.
Dr. Zanna moved so both feet were in the square, but realized that put her in direct view of the mouth of the device, or hallway. “Could someone or something come through?”
“Well yes. If we can go through then so could something else. I haven’t heard, but I’m sure that we’re working on a way to close it.” Brennan said with a shrug.
Johnston had joined them without Zanna noticing, something she was not entirely pleased about, added, “That’s some of the trouble with advanced communication technology, it goes both ways.”
Seeing Zanna’s reaction Brennan offered, “If this was sitting abandoned, or at least unused, for more than a thousand years on Mars then we’re probably not getting any visitors.”
“Yeah, but any that do come through will probably bring a ship, because no atmo on Mars. And that ship will probably rip through anything we have like tissue paper.” Johnston said calmly.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Oh.” Was the only response Zanna was able to come up with.
Brennan glared at him and the three lapsed into silence. This left Dr. Zanna with nothing to distract her from looking down the gaping maw of the device. She didn’t want to look at it, or were her eyes unwilling to rest their gaze on it? It was a fine distinction, and she refused to accept either. If she was going to be transported or de-atomized or whatever in it then she could look at it. And if she couldn’t look at it, then she shouldn’t go through it.
Resolutely, she turned her eyes back down the center. At first her eyes just hurt. There was a distortion to the air, kind of like the heat waves on the asphalt outside, but bent inwards. Her eyes began to water and she wiped them and stared again, shifting over slightly for a different angle. She repeated this process a few times. Yes, the distortion was definitely bent inward, like a rotating 3-D spiral into the center. Sometimes there were sparks of light, and… anti-sparks? of darkness. Also, it was spherical, at the right angle she could see clearly past its borders to the octagonal hallway beyond. Also, she was developing a splitting headache.
With a last wipe of her eyes she turned away to find Johnston giving her an approving nod.
“Alright team, sorry about the delay. Scheduling shenanigans. Apparently this puppy takes enough juice and coolant that we can only use it every few hours.” Major Sykes and Makari had joined them. Sykes looked everyone over. “Ready?” He got the nod from each of them, a little slower in Dr. Zanna’s case as moving her head was painful. “Zanna, you good?”
“Yes sir!” As good as she was going to get anyway and the worst migraine in the world wouldn’t keep her from potentially meeting a second alien species today.
“Alright, that’s the enthusiasm I like to hear.” Sykes rubbed his hands together, gleeful as a child on Christmas morning. “I’ll take point, Lt Brennan you’re after me, then Dr. Zanna, Mac, and Johnston you’ll take the rear. We think we can send multiple people at a time, but no one has tested it and we’re not testing it now either. I might come out with Brennan’s arm or something.” He paused, as though waiting for laughter.
“Sir, a machine this advanced can almost certainly distinguish between separate living entities. We may be no different to it then the parts of the drone sent through and that came back just fine. Right?” That was Brennan, face earnest.
“It’s the ‘almost’ and ‘may be’ that get me, Lieutenant.” Sykes said, equally serious. “Let’s just not check today, alright?”
“Yes, sir.” Brennan acknowledged.
Makari’s mandible, or other thing near its face, Dr. Zanna realized she didn’t really know very much about spider or cyber arachnid anatomy, twitched and a chittering sound emerged before it said, in the most punctilious British accent, “And where am I to be in all this? I go with you, that is the arrangement.” Dr. Zanna imagined a tiny monocle being wiped to punctuate its tone of aggrieved party.
“You’re between the doc and Specialist Johnston.” Major Sykes said, looking down at Makari, brows furrowed in mild exasperation.
They did a final equipment check then Major Sykes voice rang out, “Alright squad, line up and move out!”
With shaky hands and a pounding heart Dr. Zanna found her place in line. Then, the ceremony apparently dispensed with, the line moved into the hallway. Dr. Zanna stared at the back of Lt Brennan’s head as she entered the passage. She felt a hum move up and down her body as she stepped over the threshold. It wasn’t painful, but it was definitely an odd sensation. Another step farther in and her veins caught fire. She’d once had medical ink injected for an MRI and this felt very similar, like lines and loops and whorls were being drawn or scanned throughout her insides. With the next step the sensation passed and her ears and sinuses ached instead. Each footfall sounded like a drum beat next to her head, a drum beat that echoed and reverberated up and down the octagonal space.
Sykes voice carried back to her, distorted from the chamber and the pounding pulse in her ears, “Thought you’d all like to know, somebody got permission to name this the Interstellar Heisenberg Oppenheimer Portal. We, however, will be referring to it as the Corridor.”
Brennan started to reply, but then let out a gasp instead. Dr. Zanna’s tongue felt too stiff and swollen to speak and she was having trouble coordinating with her muscles to keep walking. She stepped forward again, keeping focused on the back Brennan’s pixie cut, trying not to puke. Brennan moved forward and then shrank in her vision, falling, shrinking, collapsing into a single point, then nothing. Dr. Zanna felt more than heard a whimper escape her throat, the roaring in her ears coming from everywhere, within and without. Moving forward on inertia alone she felt a moment of vertigo so intense that she longed to scream, but realized she had no throat. She? Was she a she? What was a she? Close enough. She felt a hint of cold so absolute it passed through into burning, shattering, then nothing at all.