I swallowed a gulp, as Captain Quentin, Kyle, and I began to ascend the large spiraling stairs. Each time I lifted my foot from one stair step to another felt like I was stepping two normal stair steps, which was something that I really was not fond of since it was very unpractical for me. Apparently, Captain Quentin and Kyle also shared the same sentiment as I did since he scoffed about twice before we had descended for roughly no less than ten feet, while she also sighed three times.
Just after we had ascended around ten more feet, I noticed that there was another difference inside the mothership. It was the cold air that ran through my body and nearly made a chill ran down my backs, like an autumn wind. At first I had not realized it right away since I thought that it was just the cold winter air brought from outside through the emergency access where we had come into. However, as we ventured deeper into the mothership, I eventually realized that it did not originate from the air outside at all, since it would be already far from where we were to the access in the first place.
"You both felt that?" I asked them, as I continued ascending the stair steps in front of the two of them.
"You mean the cold autumn wind?" Kyle responded, "About time you ask me about it…"
"I bet that whatever this is, it is just their attempts in stabilizing the atmosphere inside against the air outside…" Captain Quentin suggested.
"Let us just hope it is not another one of their thermal sensors." I replied to them, "Because if it is, then that means they know we are inside. And that means we are in deep trouble…"
If anything, my response at least made Kyle back to raise her alerts up against her surroundings. I even began to think if the six of us should actually go together instead of splitting up like that. Nevertheless, it was already too late to change the plan and so I quickly brushed off that thought inside my head. We ascended for about thirty more feet before we arrived at what I believed to be the second floor of the mothership. According to my calculation, the height between the second and the first floor was roughly sixty feet, and I had never in my life before get inside the building where each floor was sixty feet apart.
"You seem to have calculated the distance from the first floor to this floor, have not you?" Captain Quentin said to me, as he rested his left hand on his waist right after he stepped his foot on the second floor.
"Sixty feet." I said, as I panted a little, "My rough estimation about the distance is sixty feet."
After that, I looked up towards the still endless towering spiral stairs, realizing that there was still so far of a distance that we had yet to cover if we were to get to the peak. I closed my eyes for a little while and sighed once before I opened them up again and suggested if we should take a look deeper inside what was on the second floor, since there seemed to be only two opened accesses on some distances right in front of us, and behind us. Both Captain Quentin and Kyle agreed on my suggestion.
"I am down. Anything than having to step that stairs right away…" Kyle said, as she shrugged.
"Well. What are we waiting for, then?" Captain Quentin responded, as he began to walk to the opened access in front of us.
With that in mind, the three of us began to get closer to the opened access, as I noticed that the corridor leading to the access was very much the same to the corridor towards the emergency access back at the first floor, only significantly less further from its end. Just when we approached the end of the corridor, I could feel a slight flash came right into my eyes before I could begin to see what was on the whole new area.
I could not decide on where my eyes should focus at first on the whole new sights that were extended as far as my eyes could reach. The only thing that I realized right away just as we entered the new area was that it indeed had a specific function. After a little while, I finally decided to focus at the completely unfamiliar things that were standing right in front of me.
To be honest, I was not even sure on how to describe those things as I had never seen it before in my entire life. However, as I tried to take a look at it in more details by bringing myself closer little by little, I could finally begin to determine what the things could be.
If one had ever at least seen a crater caused by either some sort of a meteorite impact or due to a volcanic activity in some time in the past, then they would see the things right in front of me similar to those craters, only it was on a much smaller scale. The unusual features were its tall seven-feet-height and its very small three-feet-diameter.
Aside from that, I also did not notice any sort of cracked surface around the craters, let alone at their walls, which led me to assume that they were not made after the mothership had been completely constructed, but rather built together with the whole mothership. I also realized that there were roughly fifty craters at the area, all lined up in ten rows, with the distance of each crater to the other around five feet. Somehow, I had the urge to take a look inside the crater. However I also felt like a signal inside my head suddenly kicked in and intruded my mind on not to peek inside for my own safety.
"You do not plan on taking a look?" Captain Quentin asked me from behind.
"I… changed my mind…" I responded to him, without turning to him.
"I guess your gut hold you back, huh?" he asked me again, as somehow he seemed to be relieved.
"More like a sudden instinctive signal, sir…" I answered him, as I turned my eyes to him slowly.
"Fair enough…" he said, as he nodded and smiled a bit.
I then looked at the next things that intrigued my eyes, which were none other than the pillar-things extruding out from the area floor to the area's ceilings in every two rows of the craters. The pillars were nothing sort of extreme strange, except that around one foot from the ground and one foot from the ceilings their diameters widened. Aside from that, the pillars also illuminated slowly-blinking purple lights, with the intensity similar to the lights back at the narwhal aircraft when it had been force-landed.
With everything in the area seemed to be have been examined, I came to notice next that there were two opened accesses, each at our right and left side with about thirty feet away from each of the nearest crater. At that time, I followed the signal inside my head again to go clockwise, and thus I suggested both Captain Quentin and Kyle to go to the opened access on our right side. As we approached the new area, yet other unfamiliar sights were shown right before my eyes.
The second area, unlike the first one, had much more familiar things to recognize, at least for me. The thing that I noticed instantly just as we entered the area was the large hologram screen-like things, standing straight like a thin wall right in the middle of the area. There were three screens, with one facing directly in front of the opened access we had just entered from, one facing to the wall, and one facing in front of the next opened access to the third area. All of the screens seemed to have similar sizes as well – ten feet of height by eighteen feet of width.
All of the screen themselves seemed to show some sort of countless unfamiliar alphabetical characters, running swiftly across the screens from their right side to left side. Each screens contained ten rows of characters, and the strange thing was, I was very sure that I could recognize some Greek, and even few normal alphabets scattered among the running characters. Nevertheless, I could also be mistaken as they were quickly gone from the screen.
"Maybe this is something like their information center area?" Kyle said, as she still had her eyes locked towards the screens.
"If there were some normal alphabets among those characters, I would say that it was more like their public dictionary…" Captain Quentin responded, implying that he also noticed few familiar alphabets.
Since there was nothing else of unusual left inside the second area, we proceeded to the third area. Somehow, just before we passed through the access, I picked up a faint smell of the outside air during a sunny summer day, which led me to think that the next area might have something to do with their techniques in solar energy harvesting.
The first thing that had stolen the attention of my eyes just as we had stepped our feet inside the third area was the sight of countless beam rifles being stored at some sort of cabinet. That being said, the cabinet seemed to also could function as the charging port for the rifles as well as their ammunition magazines, since each of the magazines were also stored right beside the rifles.
The next thing that I came to notice quickly was that the source of the ammunition for all of the rifles, were no other than our sun, the center of our solar system. At first, I did not notice it right away, however there was also a hologram screen right beside the cabinet, showing the schematics of all the charging cabinets connected to the octagonal pyramid peak of the mothership with a large circle presented above it, which extremely suggested that the source of the aliens' weapon ammunition was in fact, a concentrated solar power.
With that in mind, it would also mean that the pyramid peak of the mothership was the solar panel with the function to harvest the solar energy from the sun. Aside from that, apparently the harvested solar energy was also completely responsible in powering the whole mothership, as the hologram screen also showed that the pyramid peak was also connected to every floors.
As a side note, the display of the whole mothership powering system through the solar energy was very similar to the display of the condition of the narwhal aircraft, with the only difference was that the large circle right above the pyramid peak on the display was shown with a black color, referring to the absence of the sun since it was currently in the middle of the night. I had to admit, that if it were not for those sights, I would never realize that there were more features and the truth to the aliens' technologies.
Apparently, whenever the rifles were being charged, their big barrels would glow up, in an extremely similar manner whenever a light bulb or lamp received electrical power. The rifles were also not connected to any sort of cables whatsoever, and instead it appeared to only be literally put at the cabinet slot, before it would receive the solar energy. I soon realized that the magazines also glowed as well whenever they were charged, in the same manner like the barrels.
There was one more thing that still questioned my mind however, which was how they gave the harvested solar power a purple color. But then again, I immediately decided to just keep it in my own mind for the time being.
"So much for a nearly perfect efficiency in solar energy harvesting and these are what they used it for…" I said, as I scoffed with a little feeling of fury inside my stomach at the sights of the weapons, "Those imbeciles… what a waste…"
With three area of the second floor had been uncovered by us, there seemed to be one more area left judging by the layout of the areas so far. We did not waste any little time before we proceeded to the next area. I thought that there would be nothing of more surprising there, but I soon realized that I was very much mistaken having thought that way…