After the gunfight ended, Garrett moved all of the bodies into one of the bunk rooms. The woman who was still alive was tied to one of the beds.
"How long do you think people have been down here?"
"I've never seen weapons like this. Their language wasn't anything I've heard before, although parts did sound like Inuit. I think these people and their descendents have been down here for a long time."
"I saw some books in one of the rooms. Do you think you can translate them?"
"I don't speak or read or write in Inuit, but I can scan the pages back in the camp and send them to have someone else translate them. Can you go get the books?"
"Okay."
Garrett followed Jackie to one of the rooms. There were several books in there. One of the books was out on the table, and it appeared that the woman that Garrett had removed from the room had been writing in it. When Garrett picked up the book, it appeared to be a logbook. Garrett flipped back through the pages and realized that this book went through several generations. There were more books like that which were on shelves on one side of the room. There were nineteen other books. Garrett took the two at the beginning of one of the rows, which had the least marking on the sides and therefore had the smallest numbers. He put these out with the other book that had been open.
"I still haven't seen the rest of this place."
Garrett picked up his Kalashnikov from the table and entered the basement of the building. There was a simple thermal generator here, which used the heat difference between the ground water and the air to generate wind in a turbine. Garrett found a panel containing several switches and began to push them in various directions. After pushing one of the switches up the lights brightened. Garrett went back upstairs and found that one of the switches which he had pressed had turned on exterior lights around the perimeter of the structure. With the better light, he was able to look into the back of the chamber through the scope of his rifle. The structure was not the only feature here. Several hundred feet farther into the chamber, protruding out of the darkness, was a ship several hundred feet wide. Garrett did not know for sure that it was a ship, but he could see several massive exhaust ports along what was apparently the wing of the ship.
Garrett walked toward the ship. He guessed that the wing was seven hundred feet wide and forty feet thick. There were exhaust ports on the trailing edge of the wing ten feet in diameter every fifty feet. Garrett continued to walk toward the ship, and was soon under the wing. There was no landing gear on it, and the wing and fuselage simply rested on the floor of the chamber. Garrett walked around the wing, and once it was only a few feet away Jackie, without a night vision scope on her gun, finally saw that there was something there. Garrett walked past the wing, and saw the rest of the ship. The ship was a large delta-wing aircraft. The entire vessel was about twelve hundred feet long. Garrett walked up to the side of the seventy-foot tall fuselage and looked for an entrance.
"What do you see?"
"I don't know. This is either a spacecraft or a damn big plane."
"How did it get down here?"
"My guess is that whenever it was brought here it was driven in through the underground aquifers. You can break through that limestone with just about anything, so a quarter mile long plane could make it through."
Garrett reached nearly the midsection of the plane and found what appeared to be a loose panel. He shoved it with his shoulder and the panel pushed back, folding up and exposing a door. Garrett then looked for a handle to open this door with. There was not a handle, but next to the door there was a glowing panel. This blue panel did not emit much light, but when Garrett touched it, the panel gave way. Garrett felt the door shake slightly and stepped back. The door slid into the side under the panel. There was no light inside. Garrett then turned on the flashlight and stepped inside. He walked down the hallway for about fifty feet and reached an intersection. There was a hallway which ran straight ahead to what appeared to be another exit door. There was also a hallway which continued ahead out of the range of the flashlight.
Garrett headed down the long hall until he reached a door at the end. There were also dozens of doors on each side of the hallway, but the panels next to these doors were not active and the doors did not open. However, the door at the end of the hallway was active. Garrett stepped through the opening door and found himself in what appeared to be the cockpit of the plane.