Krahe entered, and Rocinante followed after her. Beyond the door, there was a wide open living space, sothing entirely unfitting for a campsite in the open steppe, let alone an “escape pod.” Everything was wrought of the sa black material, joined to the floor or walls. Chairs, tables, couches, sofas, three distinct kinds of gaming tables, from pool to cards to sothing she didn’t recognize; everything was completely irremovable from its surface. She shifted a chair with nary a sound, but it wouldn’t lift, as if magnetized to the ground. There were showers, a kitchen, sleeping quarters, all designed to not permit for any loose objects. How the alloy-rock replicated a soft mattress she didn’t know, but it did. An entire section was dedicated to a gym, filled with nurous exercise machines of archaic design, especially weightlifting machines — no free weights, not a single one. It was, by now, clear that the designers had been terrified of objects floating around in zero-g, but what they could possibly damage in here, she couldn’t fathom.
The only things that deviated from this design language were the aforentioned foreign influences; the first was a giant doorway carved into the wall, in a style unlike the rest of the room, but Krahe left it for later. about the size of two vending machines put side to side, it was a tangle of brass tubing, glass tanks, and miscellaneous thaumatech that Krahe couldn’t make heads or tails of. It behaved like a vending machine, too. Coinage or liquid thaumine went in… And goo ca out, bring your own container. The machine sohow asured the internal volu of any given container and then demanded the exact paynt for that much gel, dispensing change in liquid thaumine. The dispensed fluid’s consistency was sowhat like sugar syrup, and it was pale orange in colour. This was one of the two practical reasons she had decided on this place as her first campsite. The substance was nutritionally complete no matter the consur, no matter their strange grafts or other needs, it always tasted the best it possibly could, and it never spoiled, at least inside the pod. Outside, it would turn into water within three days. Thus said the church records.
As for actually drinking it… She found it alright. The taste was that of ekarone juice, but the syrupy consistency ant that, to her, it just registered as ekarone-flavored high fructose corn syrup slop. A disappointnt, but at least an interesting one. It had been long enough since her first death that this reminder of dogshit liquid candy was a bit novel.
Her second practical reason to choose this place as a campsite was that despite all these apparent comforts, this place was not a popular campsite. It was out of the way, the password was tricky to pronounce correctly for native speakers of Neocalbian, and for an unknown reason, so people felt an intense discomfort when entering. Thus, the already tiny chance of encountering another traveler plumted to the realm of the astronomical.
When it ca to the final foreign influence on the structure, it was that strange doorway, recorded as “the Doorway into Nothing.” It was just that, a great rectangular doorway the size of a small building, carved about a ter deep into solid alloy-rock, with a second, shallow recess of a ter-wide circle at a height of around two ters. It was so six ters tall and about two-thirds as wide. Its outer border was outlined in abstract imagery of geotric lines and nodes, tangled and curved in ways that openly defied logical geotry to her eyes. These patterns continued inward, leaving the circle clear. In that circle was an insignia, depicting a rectangular shape of the sa proportions as the doorway, with a flower in the center. Below was alien script, and below that, the mysterious carver who had placed the password outside the door had rendered a translation.
“With a rose in hand,
chisel a single stone,
into a bridge,
to span infinity.”
Nonsense. A bridge goes both ways. This doesn’t.
Pray it doesn’t go off when you’re in here.
This interior is sterile for a reason.
-RA
Krahe wasn’t particularly worried. The door was open and there were no records of the doorway ever activating, although, she had to admit, if it just erased everything inside the pod, or perhaps swapped the contents with another region in space, then obviously nobody would co back to the church to tell the tale. There were no reports of anyone who used this rest stop disappearing, either. She didn’t like that she was coming to rely on church records as much as she was, but she had to give it to them, they were thorough in both collection and sorting.
The night passed without incident, besides Barzai refusing to co out and play cards with her on one of the ga tables.
“This place is wrong,” he said, and that was that.
After a morning workout, a prolonged shower, and breakfast of pan-seared at with Barzai despairingly croaking in her head, Krahe filled up a two-liter bottle with the structure’s nutrient gel and made for the exit.
“Ultima Thule,” she said, and the door opened just as before.
The sun was rising over the horizon, and already it was clear it would be a hot and dry day in the steppe. An animal akin to a wild hare hopped along through the grass, eating bugs; it had short ears and a fleshy mbrane along its spine that rose and fell with its breath. Its legs were like stilts from the knees down. It sighted Krahe, and, startled, jumped into the air. A scorpion on dragonfly wings rose from seemingly nowhere; it smashed headfirst into the rabbit-creature and went tumbling with it in its pincers into the underbrush, both of them emitting a cacophonous duet of screeching.
A faint breeze. From her back — from inside the pyramid. Rocinante sprinted out the door, its ironclad flank brushing past Krahe just as sharp ozone hit her nostrils. She turned back, at once expecting and hoping not to see the very thing she saw; the Doorway into Nothing aglow.
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