Two Marines attached an atmospheric bubble to the airlock, then went to work with cutting torches.  If anything, the alien hull was less resistant than Ark Royal’s armour – although, to be fair, it was an internal airlock.  Charles watched the airlock come loose, then motioned for the first Marines to step into the interior of the ship.  A swarm of nanoprobes shot past them, racing deeper and deeper into the alien ship.  His HUD constantly updated as they mapped out the alien interior.

Inside, the atmosphere was misty.  Visibility was poor, something that puzzled him.  Surely the aliens would have wanted to see clearly onboard a starship?  But he recalled the sheer size of their eyes – and the speculation that they normally lived in water – and guessed that the aliens probably had far better eyesight than humans.  Besides, their helmet sensors could peer through the muck, although the IR sensors kept sounding false alarms.  The environment was hot enough to confuse them.

He took a glance at the updating map, then issued orders.  One team would advance towards where they thought the alien bridge was, another would head down to engineering.  The remaining Marines would expand through the ship, capturing or killing any aliens they encountered.  Charles had given serious thought to declining to take prisoners at all, but he’d eventually dismissed that thought.  No matter the dangers, he wasn't about to start committing atrocities against an alien race.  Particularly, as he’d pointed out to his subordinates, one that might still win the war.

The interior of the alien ship looked faintly distorted, oddly disconcerting to the eye.  Some of the passageways seemed normal, as if they could easily have been found on a human ship, others were oddly proportioned.  It took him a long moment to realise that the aliens didn't seem to have designed their interior to resemble something on the ground, with a definite floor and ceiling.  Indeed, were it not for the gravity field holding them down, he would have thought the aliens didn't bother to maintain an artificial gravity field at all.  He puzzled over it for a long moment, then realised that the aliens were born in water.  They would have an instinctive understanding of zero-gravity environments that only asteroid-born humans would be able to match.

“Curious wall decorations,” Sergeant Patterson noted.  He sounded faintly jumpy, clearly worried about what might spring up ahead of them.  “Do you think they can see at all?”