“Chandelier…?” Mal said uncertainly. Lee groped towards her and found a spiral arrangement of can-shaped objects hanging from a ceiling that turned out to be only six inches over her head. The things, whatever they were, came away in her hand, then clanked back into place with a magnetic tug. She could now perceive a little light, and she realized that it was coming from below—a dim silvery luminance glimmering from a strip that ran the length of the chamber. Feeling down, Lee found a crack in the floor, from whence the light came. For a moment she was terrified, sure the structure was unsound. Then she spotted that they were kneeling on the very faint outline of two double doors. Of course! Cargo had to come in somehow.

When she pressed an eye to the gap, she could just see that they were passing over a city spread out below them. It extended as far as her limited vantage showed her, a complex range of lit areas surrounded by darkness, linked by thoroughfares. It looked dull, as though someone had taken a human city and turned down the dimmer switch. There was movement on the broad roads between the various centres, though, and that meant the vehicles must be monolithically huge, given how high up they were.

There was nothing human in the organization of the lights though. She saw no sign of streets, grids or anything like that: the lit areas seemed to have sprung up as randomly as fungus. And, just as the dark between stars held only fainter stars, the more she looked, the more dim lamps she saw, until she realized there was nothing beneath her that was not city. Their conveyance coursed smoothly over a metropolis that showed no sign of ending or even changing, more splotches of light creeping into view in an endless urban progress.

“I don’t think we’re going fast enough to be in a plane,” she said slowly. “Could this be something else—their version of an airship?”

Mal might have shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Only…this might be paranoia, but what might you keep in a compartment like this? With doors that could flap open when you’re going over a city? And you’ve stored a whole load of magnetic objects, which would simply drop when you turned the magnets off…”

Mal digested that. “You’re saying the Nissa ported us into a bomb bay?”

“Just a thought.” Lee stood up and jangled another of the hanging assemblages, wincing. “Can we get out of here?”

“Dunno,” Mal said.