I shook my head. “No, from here on I think we’ll wait until the alien monster jumps out at us. Anyone armed, by the way?”

“I have my rapier wit,” Patrick replied.

“So that’s a no,” Nat said.

“Har dee har.”

Nat began moving up the corridor again, with Patrick and me following. In moments, we came to a T intersection. The cross corridor appeared to be circular and curved away from us in both directions.

“This must be the center of the ship—well, of this floor,” I said. I turned to the right and followed the corridor around until I circled back to Nat and Patrick.

The corridor surrounded a central cylindrical hub with two entrances on its outer circumference, on opposite sides of the cylinder. Each entrance had a single button to the right. One of the two entrances was more-or-less elevator-sized, but the other was a double-wide. Possibly a freight elevator? Corridors like the one we’d just come up led radially from the central space at regular intervals.

“They can’t all lead to airlocks, can they?” Nat said, pointing to one of the corridors.

“Not sure,” I said. “There are six corridors, looks like. That’s not really an unreasonable number.” I gestured to the central shaft. “So maybe six airlocks, each at the end of … ” My voice petered out as I stared down the corridor, perplexed.

“What?”

“I, uh … I measured the ship at about twenty feet in diameter, but this level is something like a hundred feet across.” I pointed at the central cylinder. “That section, on its own, is about twenty feet in diameter.”

“Maybe the ship gets bigger just out of your reach,” Nat suggested.

“But the landing pads fit into a circle twenty feet across. So the airlocks … ” I crossed my arms and looked into the distance as my voice trailed off.

“Weren’t within that circle, Jack. Maybe you’re just off in your estimate. One thing at a time, okay?”

I sighed and nodded to her. Then I pointed at one of the doors on the central cylinder. “These have a certain elevator feel to them. Wanna bet this is how you go up and down?”

Without waiting for discussion, Patrick pressed the button beside the closer door, the smaller of the two. Immediately, the door hissed open. Patrick turned to us. “Shall we?”

I leaned into the small room without stepping over the threshold. The interior was rectangular on the back and sides, with the front wall and door conforming to the curve of the corridor. On either side of the door were four buttons arranged in a vertical column. The second button from the bottom was lit.