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The first thing Trig thought as he passed through the wall was diu lei pokkai, I’m in a nebula.

The second was, where’s Salvo?

He tried to crane his neck to see her but when as soon as the action was attempted, his whole body started to spin, and instead of seeing his friend’s face, he saw swirls of green mist.

Hence the ‘diu lei pokkai, I’m in a nebula’ line.

‘Salv,’ he shouted, and was duly alarmed when the sounds came out quiet and raspy. Must be the nebula effect, he thought. Or whatever it was he was floating through.

Floating…

Not painful, but…

Strange.

Sensual even.

Like floating in a hot spring or, more, existing as a bank of pure formless mist.

A jolt of…something…ran through his body.

Refocused his senses.

He looked down and saw metal.

It was ground…no, floor…laid out in squares with the edges trimmed off. There was probably a name for the exact shape he was staring down at, maybe if he used his phone to look it up, he could-

His hand dropped and felt the emptiness in his jacket pocket. No phone. Fuck. Panic streamed in, drowning the sensible part of whatever cortex. However, that was short-lived as hissing air rushed back into the unfamiliar space and the weird greenness of the nebula realm rapidly dissipated.

The sudden return to gravity almost put him on the metal floor, but he caught his balance just in time and pivoted over towards the wall on the left.

Salvo crashed on the hard metal next to him, her eyes saying ‘the fuck?’ while her mouth pushed out a mumbled ‘nebula.’

‘You saw it too?’ asked Trig, somewhat redundantly.

‘Where the fuck are we? That was-…no way, not a nebula. I could breathe and I-…we walked through a wall. A physical, real wall. How? Are we sub-atomic now? What the hell is this?’

Keeping himself pinned to the side, Trig rotated his body at a sloth’s pace and started touching all the vital parts; limbs, neck, chest, gut etc. Everything seemed to be in the right place. No blood leaks.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Salvo, watching him grope himself. ‘You still in shock?’

‘No.’

‘Diu lei, your face looks like wood.’

‘I’m not-’

‘Have you been here before? Do you know this place?’

‘No.’

‘Then why the fuck aren’t you freaking out?’

Trig tilted his head, did a superficial scan of his friend’s retro Slazenger jacket, interrogated the accusation, attempted a sigh. ‘Why aren’t you?’

‘Me? I just did. I said random shit two seconds ago. You’re the one who’s…’

‘And now?’

‘…robotic. What?’ Salvo seemed confused by the question for a moment, then took a long, drawn out breath. And another one. And another. Then, muttering fucking alien fantasist shit just loud enough for Trig to catch, she looked around at their new environment.

The place they’d stumbled into resembled a narrow passage, the ceiling curved into a skewed triangle…skewed to the right with a little curve at the top. Design-wise it was bizarre, nonsensical. Utterly without engineering principle or reason. At least, none that they as non-engineers could think of.

Farther ahead to the left was a fork in the path; a facade in the middle with three green, diagonal slashes on its surface and two sloped walkways creeping round to both sides.

Behind them, supposedly the direction they had come in from, stood another wall, a hard-metal blockade with a patch of rock poking out like desert grass. No sign of the passage or portal. Though there was one thing, quite odd. Near the top of the blockade lay some kind of screen, a holographic image projected an inch from its surface.

Diu, it was them.

Not a mirror, a holographic picture.

Trig and Salvo glanced at each other, quickly saying, ‘you seeing this?’ then going back to the eerie simulacrum.

It was odd, their faces were different, happy, confident, like those old propaganda pics of workers in the rye field or soldiers murdering an enemy with a rusty bayonet.

Under their faces was a line of what could’ve been text, but it was no language they’d ever seen. It didn’t even look human. More like hieroglyphics or abstract Klingon.

‘Any guesses where we are?’ asked Salvo, finally pushing herself off the wall and running a slightly shaky hand through the hologram.

‘Not the maintenance tunnel.’

‘That’s not a guess.’

‘Sorry, I’m still processing.’

‘You think it’s military?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Mainland or US?’

‘Could be the cops.’

‘You think?’

Trig puffed out his cheeks, trying to reason it out in his head, but there were too many conditions.

‘Seems too elaborate for them,’ continued Salvo, answering for him. ‘They could just take us the station and…do whatever…right there.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Military’s more logical.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Underground base, secret shit at night.’

Trig checked the wall beside the holographic screen, discovering a few divots here and there but no evidence of a door or a way back out.

‘No stain?’

‘Can’t see any.’

‘Maybe the exit’s somewhere else.’

‘Must be.’

Salvo stroked invisible dust off her palms. ‘We should move forward, look around over there by that passage.’

‘Okay.’

Neither of them moved.

‘You mean me?’ asked Trig, half shifting a finger towards his stomach.

‘I don’t have my weapon anymore.’

‘Neither do I.’

‘And I’m still in shock. And you’re bigger. And-’

‘Fine, I’ll go. Wait here. Okay?’

There was no need to get a nod in response, that was never Salvo’s style, so Trig edged along the wall towards the façade ahead, reaching the end after a comically slow minute and peeking his head round the corners of both passageways.

‘Anything new?’ asked Salvo, hands raised in half-assed defence.

‘Slopes.’

‘No signs? Clues?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Wait there, I’m coming over.’

Trig stifled a laugh and waited for Salvo to traverse the epic, six metre distance between herself and the façade. When she arrived, she tagged the arm of his jacket and asked if he still had his phone.

‘No.’

‘Me neither.’

‘I guess the same thing happened to Cav when he came here.’

‘Wah, Cav…I almost forgot.’ Salvo pointed up at the slope to the right. ‘You think he went up there?’

Trig didn’t want to but shrugged anyway.

‘Yeah, got it…you don’t know. But he must be somewhere around here, otherwise where else could he be? Back in Hong Kong? Or we’re in Hong Kong and he’s somewhere else? Like, the wall leads to different places at different times, shifting wormhole style. And we entered at a different time so…’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Diu lei.’ Salvo looked around again, shaking her head. ‘Where the hell is this?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Rhetorical, Trig.’

‘Sorry.’

To compensate, he looked at the plating on the ground, then the markings that sporadically appeared on the walls, trying to pick up more data.

There wasn’t much.

But wherever it was, the architects sure liked metal.  Deep, saturated, green metal that was so dark it was verging on black.

Almost everything appeared to be made of it.

The floor tiling, the walls [apart from occasional pockets of rock jutting out], the ceiling, the ceiling fans. If that’s what they were. They had the same basic shape but weren’t moving so, realistically, they could’ve been anything.

No sign of any doors, but they were probably metal too.

Windows?

Maybe a light version of metal, or the material they used in Star Trek. Something aluminum.

‘You still think this is some kind of military base?’ asked Trig, touching the façade surface but being careful not to put his fingers too close to the three green stripes.

‘Not sure.’

‘Me neither.’

‘The more I see of it…like, all the metal…the more it seems to resemble a space station. This is generally what they look like in films, right? Apart from the green stripes and the general corridor design.’

‘Which films?’

Salvo flinched, visibly annoyed at the pedantry. ‘I don’t know. Space ones. Kai zi. The ship is always made of metal, the corridors, the floor plating.’

‘Star Trek doesn’t have this kind of-’

‘Diu lei, I don’t watch that shit.’

‘It’s true though, they don’t. The ship corridors look more a hotel. Carpeted floors, random paintings on the walls, apple store lighting. Except for the communal area, that’s lit more like a jazz café or-’

‘We should go up one of the slopes,’ said Salvo, making a move to the right of the façade.

Trig abandoned the Star Trek vision and instinctively looked left. It wasn’t especially dark up there so there had to be some more lighting just out of view, but all the same, his hand was starting to feel very empty.

‘You’re not in shock anymore?’ he asked, pulling her back a bit by the jacket.

‘It’s passed.’

‘That was fast.’

‘I’m on raw adrenaline now. Stressed about Cav, what’s happened to him.’ Salvo leaned across, flicked at his elbow. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be scared again soon as we bump into someone.’

‘Great.’

‘Come on, you go up that one, I’ll try up here on the right.’

‘Don’t think it’s a good idea to split up.’ Trig looked back at the hologram show, trying to spot any covert panels hidden in the wall space underneath. ‘And we don’t have anything to defend ourselves with.’

‘Neither did Cav.’

‘That’s not a reassurance.’

‘I mean, he’s not down here, so he must’ve had the sense to go up there at some point. Right?’

Trig scratched his neck, not in the least bit itchy.

‘And if there is something up there, it could just as easily come down here and we’d be fucked anyway.’ She flicked him again, this time on the bicep. ‘Come on, Trig, where’s the fearless sociopath from two minutes ago? The one who didn’t shit himself after passing through a fucking nebula?’

‘I’m not scared, I’m just being cautious. Like in sci-fi movies. They find a new ship and they take their time, checking everything.’

Salvo opened her mouth to respond, probably to tell him to stop fucking around, Cav was in danger, but before she could spill it out, a beeping noise sounded somewhere above.

‘What was that?’ she whispered, putting hands up to cover her face.

‘Don’t know.’

‘A computer?’

The beeping noise sounded out seven more times then gave way to creepy silence. Nothing in the passageway appeared to change, there was no sudden rush of toxic gas from the ceiling, no charging security forces, so Salvo pulled her hands back down, straightened the sleeves of her retro Slazenger jacket and whispered, ‘right, we’re heading up.’

‘You think that beeping noise was a door opening?’ asked Trig, following her as she started up the slope, both of them sticking to the wall on the far right so they could see what was coming.

‘That or an alien microwave.’

‘Didn’t sound like a normal beeping noise. Had more of a squeal to it. Like it was someone hitting an animal…holding an electronic keyboard.’

‘I was joking.’

‘About what?’

‘It’s not an alien microwave.’

Trig made the softest ever tutting sound, scratching his neck again.

‘You’re probably right, it’s a door opening or something. That’s probably where Cav went. At the top of this slope there must be-’

‘A door to where though?’

Salvo bit her tongue, pointed at the slope ahead and kept walking. Another few metres and they passed a set of green slashes on both sides of the wall, and a particularly luminous green circle throbbing light pulses from the ceiling above.

‘Must be their version of lighting,’ muttered Trig.

‘Look,’ said Salvo, speeding forward and instantly making Trig’s heart triple in beat intensity. ‘A bigger space.’

‘Slow down a sec.’

‘More lighting too…and a machine. Look.’

‘A what?’

‘Get up here, Trig, quickly.’

Holding his chest as if that would actually do anything, Trig pushed off from the wall and ran up the slope. Part of him was embarrassed that he’d let Salvo go first and take all the risk, while another part of him was fucking choleric, screaming that the next seven times, he had to go first or he’d be nothing but a mouse-riding coward. A third, medieval Japanese part of him told him to picture the worst possible death and go back to it at least twice a day, that way he would no longer be afraid when something jumped down from above and clawed his guts out..

He imagined himself falling off a skyscraper and forced the scene to its end as he smashed against the concrete.

Okay, he thought, wiping nascent sweat off his forehead. Not that one.

Besides, he wasn’t a coward. He was the one who’d put his hand through the wall in the tunnel to come here. And he’d walked ahead of Salvo in Tsim Dong, when they were trying to rescue the Poly U guys.

It was just…he didn’t like charging blindly into things.

He was a Star Trek guy; go to a strange place, scan shit, panic a little then proceed.

‘Over here, ghost mouse,’ said Salvo, who was exactly where she’d said she was, standing next to some kind of machine, in the middle of a large, open space shaped like a snail’s head.

Trig walked forward, onto more metal tiling that was still sloped but at an miniscule degree. Apart from the machine, there wasn’t much else to see. The two snail antennae-like parts of the floor space were completely visible and had two, light green, triangular imprints on the floor next to the wall while the ceiling possessed the same skewed triangle motif as the passage below. Possibly technology of some sort, thought Trig, focusing on the triangles. Teleporters maybe. Or torture ports.

Still no sign of any doors.

‘Stop gawping and come and help,’ said Salvo, her tone shaved of all patience. ‘I think these dark patches are buttons, or some kind of swipe function, but I can’t get them to switch on.’

‘Maybe it’s voice operated,’ said Trig, walking over fake-casual and looking up at the oddball yet somehow comforting structure. Salvo was right, it was definitely a machine. It had to be. There were familiar, slightly dimmed white lights on the top part, and divots on the side that suggested it had been constructed.

‘Here, you try.’ Salvo grabbed Trig’s hand and placed it on the dark patches. It was a bit awkward as that part of the machine was vertical, but Trig let himself be guided. ‘Get your fingertips on.’

‘I am.’

‘They’re not straight, you’ve gotta bend your hand more.’

‘Maybe it doesn’t recognise us.’

‘Or try crouching down and doing it. Easier that way.’

Trig breathed out in slight annoyance and did as she said. It was easier, she was correct about that, but it didn’t make any difference. Neither did the back of his hand or his knuckles or his fingernails.

‘Why am I the one doing all this?’

‘Cos I already tried.’

‘Really, you did your fingernails?’

‘Yes, when you were daydreaming over there.’ She looked down at him, at his slightly hairy wrist pressed against the screen. If it was a screen. ‘Ah, you might as well get back up, it’s not working.’

‘We can look around the back,’ Trig suggested, standing up and trying to insert some football coach optimism into his voice. ‘Maybe we’re thinking about this in too much of a human way.’

‘Meh? What other way is there?’

‘Unorthodox. Alien.’

‘Example?’

‘I don’t know. Like, maybe we have to put our ears against the machine. Or gargle into a certain panel. Or do something at the bottom part, near the floor.’

‘Put our ears against it?’

‘Try it. You never know.’

Salvo responded by flicking one of the machine lights and muttering something aggressive in Russian. Then getting a second wind and saying it again louder.

‘Was that-…’

The rest of Trig’s question cut itself off as the lights changed from dim to not so dim and started to blink. A voice sounded out, forming things that may have been words.

‘Trig…’

‘You did it.’

‘What-…’

‘It’s working.’

‘I didn’t-…’

‘No idea how, but it’s working.’

Salvo stared at the tip of her own finger, then at the button she hadn’t touched, then opened her mouth and repeated the Russian phrase she’d said a few seconds ago out of pure reflex irritation.

‘… … … … …’ replied a voice from somewhere inside the machine, also in Russian.

‘Diu.’