“Wow,” Nathan said in stunned and eloquent surprise. “That’s one big fucking fish.”
Perhaps it would be well to take a step back from a moment such as that and provide context. Reader, would it not be terrible to leave you confused? To force you to assemble context and meaning from bits and pieces doled out through character interaction and action? To make of reading this story a work of labor, rather than spoon-feeding you every piece of exposition?
Why, one might as easily provide a mechanism of progression which is unquantified. Madness!
Reader: it would not be terrible. But a step back will be taken nonetheless.
The side-excursion to unjam and close the hatch where the voidfish had lain dormant was an unfortunate necessity of the layout of the station. There had been a succession of chambers, each of which had the same basic layout—one large hexagonal prism with rounded faces after another, each of which had a subset of eight hatches. Some of those faces were covered in murals, or festooned with microscopic remnants of long-decayed fibers, succumbed in aeons past to what Nathan ludicrously assumed must have been neutrinos out of a completely misunderstood piece of popular “physics” understanding.
Others, however, had… hatches. Doors.
Airlocks.
Bubble 1-S-5-2 had been much like bubble 1-S-3-1, superficially. The earlier room—three rooms “out” in the Seeker’s direction on the first depth level, and then one room deosil—had been covered in scratches which hinted at, but did not bear, any meaning; and otherwise, it had been empty. The airlock leading down into space had been open, however, and the doors going out of the bubble were inoperable as a result.
That airlock had been jammed open by the mythril prybar which Nathan had recovered and kept, a prybar to which much of his felicitous survival owed a debt to. Once it had been closed, he had gone one deeper, one more deosil, and then one deeper again; and he had once more tackled an airlock that had been blocking his path, a rather more difficult project of one due to the combination of fused metamaterials fouling the controls and an ancient voidfish.
It had not been his only sidequest along the path to slowly closing in on the Ultra-Short Psionic Sensor Array, a path that he could sense through an itch in his desire to move in particular directions and which Saucer was completely unable to perceive. The itch had intensified as he’d fed a room full of broken-down recreational equipment and exercise machines to his suit, and had become more specific and gained a more direct sense of direction with every bubble that they’d crossed through.
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Most of the rooms—as opposed to the bubbles, that is, since each bubble was composed of multiple rooms; only the rare area such as the command center or a logistical operations center called for a fully un-subdivided bubble—had been utterly empty. Not simply abandoned, but meticulously stripped of every molecule beyond the surface of the station. The murals were still there, every surface of every room gorgeously painted in a riot of colors all perfectly attuned and in harmony in the performance of a perfected artform, but there wasn’t even the couch installations or the terminals of the command center.
Just empty space. Nothingness, scoured down to that which bore the surface-nature on an atomic level.
No amount of mere deterioration due to the ravages of time could have served to cause the devastation Nathan beheld, and well he knew it. Even if things had completely disintegrated, he knew there would be molecules, atoms at a minimum. What could have done such a thing?
Ah, but Nathan knew, in that way which a man who has read words upon a page knows. Reader: you would know this too, were you but paying attention.
Regardless, it had become clear to him that he would have no luck scavenging base matter from the furnishings and sundries of the space station. Instead, he would have to find the reserves which had been stored in specifically-shielded rooms, or repurpose those things which were buried and embedded in the walls themselves and mounted upon or through the hull. Since he was already investing time and energy into rerouting what little remaining functional wiring and metaconnective tissue there was in order to even get diagnostics of the bare minimum skeleton of systems, and since without those diagnostics he would be unable to even find the installations which might have survived the treatment that scoured the innards of the station, he was determined to find where there might be a store of materials he could make use of… or at least something he could use to repair the solar panels or restart an exotic matter reactor and start recharging Saucer.
And for that, he needed a map.
That quest had taken him through a dozen bubbles, going a mix of rimwards—warpwards, more precisely, but were they not one and the same?—and deosil from his starting point. It was a quest to find the psychic mapping station, but it also served as a way to begin mapping out the facility in general. The space suit, Saucer’s material substrate in the universe he’d come to, was well equipped with a variety of sensors, and as they moved through the echoing chambers and empty rooms a certain amount of information was gleaned by reflections and refractions, by the echoes and reverberations, by a hundred different factors that Nathan neither knew about nor felt it necessary that he learn while he had so many other things to distract himself with.
And indeed, he did have something to distract himself. A vast, vitally important thing. An all-consuming thing? Well, perhaps not. Because his destination, the fallen psychic beacon-whale which was the living map for the station, was before him. And it was big.