The heavy transport elevator rattled and groaned as it plummeted into the underground area of the Bailly Crater.
Captain Jason stood at the front of the cage, his knuckles white as he gripped the vibrating rail, followed by the stern faced Dr. Roman, Chief Physicist Felix, and Vice-Captain Austin. The air inside the lift was frigid, carrying the sharp, sterile scent of crushed lunar rock and recycled oxygen.
"We have finalized the cultivation parameters for the initial crop cycle," Dr. Roman said, his voice straining to be heard over the mechanical whine of the descending lift. He held up a glowing datapad, displaying a simulation of a mutated, woody plant. "The decision is officially made, but I must remind you the biological risks Captain, we are injecting the seeds with the Perfect Element".
Jason glanced at the screen, his enhanced vision instantly processing the complex genetic readouts. "We have run the simulation, Doctor; does the modification hold?".
"It holds," Roman nodded, though his expression remained grim. "Standard rice is a herbaceous grass, fragile and easily killed by environmental flux, but this 'Super Rice'undergoes a radical transformation. It becomes a woody shrub with a thick, protective stalk and deep, aggressive roots capable of handling extreme temperature swings".
Roman tapped the screen to show a stress-test simulation. "More importantly, it is resilient; unlike conventional crops that perish instantly if a seal fails, this woody variant can survive a vacuum and sub-zero cold for a significant window. It provides a critical safety margin if the surface domes are breached".
"This alone justifies the risk," Jason replied, his voice flat and decisive. "If the glass domes crack under a meteor strike, we cannot afford to lose our entire harvest in a single heartbeat; we need a plant that fights for its life as hard as we do".
"Yes," Roman agreed, though a shadow of professional worry crossed his face. "But we are playing with evolutionary fire, we do not fully understand the mechanism of the Element's action. We are accelerating millions of years of natural selection into a few months; if we accidentally trigger the birth of super-bacteria or a biological monstrosity, we are trapped in this crater with it".
"We will maintain strict containment protocols," Jason said, his hard gaze fixed on the approaching floor. "But right now, mass starvation is the only monster that is actually at our door".
The elevator shuddered violently before coming to a dead stop. The massive, titanium-steel blast doors hissed open, venting a small cloud of atmospheric pressure into the void outside.
"We have arrived," Felix whispered, his voice hushed with a reverent awe.
They stepped out onto a narrow metal walkway suspended over a bottomless obsidian chasm. Floating in the black silence of the crater, illuminated by banks of powerful floodlights, was the Alien Ship.
It was a perfectly smooth sphere, nine miles in diameter. It did not look like a machine or a product of manufacturing; it looked like a celestial body, a massive silver shot put dropped by some ancient god into the lunar crust. The hull was a seamless expanse of silver-gray metallic substance that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it, appearing spotless and strangely shiny.
Jason walked to the very edge of the ship. He hesitated for a moment, then reached out and pressed his gloved hand against the hull. It felt ancient, cold, and impossibly hard.
"It has zero friction," Felix noted, stepping up beside him.
"Lunar dust cannot stick to it, and lasers simply slide off the surface without leaving a mark. When we scanned it with tunneling microscopes, we found no atomic grain, no electrons, no nuclei, it is a solid, dense existence that defies our understanding of chemistry".
Felix pointed toward the intricate network of scaffolding surrounding the sphere. "Because the friction is effectively zero, we cannot weld anchors or attach airlocks directly to the skin. We had to construct this entire external walkway system just to provide a stable path to the portals".
"The interface is this way," Felix directed, gesturing toward a shimmering, mirror-like object on the hull. "There are over two thousand of these portals scattered across the sphere's surface".
They moved along a hull that terminated abruptly at the silver wall. There was no visible hatch, no seam, and no mechanical lock. Instead, a vertical pool of liquid-like substance rippled against the solid metal. It looked like a hanging curtain of mercury, defying gravity and shivering as if disturbed by an invisible breeze.
"The Mercury Mirror," Felix explained. "It is a liquid interface, a space-folding gateway that serves as the only way inside".
Jason took a deep, steadying breath and checked the seals on his armor. "Let's go".
He stepped forward, pushing his chest into the silver liquid. There was no resistance, no pressure; it felt like walking through a wall of cool, weightless mist.
And then
SLAM.
Jason's magnetic boots hit the internal deck with a bone-jarring impact. His knees buckled under a sudden, crushing weight, and his stomach twisted with a violent wave of nausea. Outside, on the walkway, he had been floating in the Moon's one-sixth gravity, feeling light as a swallow.
Here, he felt heavy, terrifyingly heavy.
His combat armor pressed down on his shoulders with its true mass, and his superhuman heart began to pump at triple speed to fight the sudden pull.
"Gravity," Jason gasped, forcing his powerful leg muscles to straighten. He stomped his boot against the floor, and the sound was a solid, heavy thud that echoed through the bay.
"Welcome to Earth," Felix said, stepping through the mirror behind him with practiced ease. "Or the closest thing we have left to it".
Felix checked a readout on his wrist computer
["Internal Artificial Gravity: 1.0 G—equivalent to standard Earth acceleration".]
"The field strength varies depending on your vertical position within the sphere," Felix continued showing the map of the interior. "At the highest point, gravity is near zero; as you descend toward the equator, it stabilizes at 1G".
"But stay alert," Felix warned, pointing to the dark crimson area at the bottom of the map. "At the very bottom, the gravity spikes to 20 G, enough to crush a human spine or a heavy tank into scrap. We believe a mass source weighing hundreds of trillions of tons is anchored at the core to generate this field".
Jason looked around the massive bay, which was constructed of a strange, dull purple metal. Unlike the outer hull, this material was rough and had friction; it was a substance his boots could actually grip.
But it was the sheer scale of the space that took his breath away. The bay stretched out into the gloom, the distant walls lost in a murky, dark horizon.
"Felix," Jason asked, squinting his eyes as he looked into the distance. "This room... it is too large. If the ship is only nine miles wide, we should be able to see the curvature of the far wall from here".
Felix smiled, looking like a man who had finally mastered a magic trick.
"That is the secret, Captain; the ship cheats geometry. The internal space is folded".
"Outside, it measures as a sphere nine miles wide," Felix said, his voice trembling. "But inside? The horizontal diameter is a hundred and twenty miles, and the vertical height is forty miles. It is a massive, flattened ellipsoid with an internal volume thirteen times larger than its external dimensions".
Austin, standing behind Jason, gasped audibly. "It's bigger on the inside?".
"Much bigger," Felix confirmed. "But don't get excited about piloting it; we've searched every hexagonal cell. There is no cockpit, no power room, no crew quarters, and not a single engine".
"No engine?" Jason frowned deeply. "Then how did it ever get here?".
"I don't think it's meant to move," Felix said quietly. "We believe it isn't a ship at all but aContainer".
"A silver crate," Jason whispered, looking at the seemingly infinite expanse. "Dropped here to store the Perfect Element".
He looked deeper into the darkness, his enhanced pupils dilating to capture every stray photon. He saw the structure now: it wasn't just an empty void, but a massive honeycomb.
Thousands of self-contained hexagonal rooms, each miles wide and high, were stacked in perfect, silent order. A single one of these "rooms" could accommodate an entire mountain range.
"The atmosphere?" Jason asked, checking his helmet's internal sensors.
"Vacuum," Roman replied. "Aside from this pressurized laboratory we built thirty years ago, the rest of the ship is a dead zone, the aliens clearly didn't breathe oxygen.
To move the population in, we will need to seal these hexagonal cells one by one and pump in air from our scrubbers. We will have to build a new sky from scratch".
"We have the space," Jason said, the crushing weight of the logistics problem finally beginning to lift. "The Ship is already large enough that if we establish a complete biosphere with water and carbon cycles, humanity can survive here indefinitely".
"We evacuate the surface immediately," Jason ordered, his voice echoing through the vast, alien honeycomb. "We will move everyone down here".
He pointed towards the map. "We zone the top low-gravity areas and the middle 1G sectors for residential and industrial use; the high-gravity bottom remains a restricted zone".
"The surface will becomes our farm," Jason concluded, his eyes shining with a new, dangerous hope. "And this... this silver box is our new home".
"Let's go," he said, turning back toward the Mercury Mirror. "It is time to wake people up".