Starblood

previous disastrous encounters with the police…
    In the corridor, the eerie blue light preceded him, emanating softly and inexplicably from the walls. He was reminded of a funhouse in a carnival, one of those nightmare places where the public (most of them reasonably sane but in need of some fear in a world where daily life grew more and more comfortable and unadventurous) paid to be given the opportunity to find its way through a dark maze of passages where anything and everything might leap out to block the way at the most unexpected times, where there were ghosts, goblins, and ghouls who were nonetheless frightening for their plastic, and cardboard natures. But the comparison did nothing for his nerves, and he abandoned it before the submerged fear rose out of his mind again.
    In another twenty feet, the tubeway came to an abrupt end against a perfectly blank wall of burnished emerald metal similar to that which he had seen outside when he had first come upon the vast hull of the starship. He looked for a doorway, but there was none. He knew that he could not possibly have seen all the ship, even though he had traveled over two hundred feet since entering the portal part way along from the tubes of the rockets. For one thing, there had been no control room or observation deck. Indeed, those need have been only of a minimal nature, but there should have been something. And the crew quarters he had thus far seen, those small rooms off the main tubeway, could have slept no more than two dozen. Considering the microminiaturization of the ship, it would have been foolish to have built so huge a vessel for so few inhabitants. The theater alone had been large enough to seat a hundred. So, though this was the end—it
wasn't
the end. It was a barrier of some sort, a fake partition meant to conceal the heart of the great vessel.
    The Brethren had reached similar conclusions and had made several attempts to cut their way through the partition that denied them access to whatever further wonders might lie ahead. There was a powerful hand drill lying on the deck, a dozen broken bits scattered around it. Ti saw that one of the bits was an industrial diamond and that it had done no better than the bits which were tempered steel. There was a robot drilling device whose bit and arm were mangled into uselessness. It had apparently been applying maximum pressure when the bit broke, and the destruction had carried back along the heavy arm in the form of harsh vibrations. A second robot worker with a laser drill instead of the standard bit was scattered all over the end of the hallway in pieces no larger than a man's hand, indicating that it had been set to continue drilling no matter what—and that the energy of the pencil-thin light beam had carried back on itself to climax in an explosion of rather severe magnitude.
    But the wall was totally unmarked. It was as if gnats had been flying against it. There was not the slightest scratch or impression upon the alien alloy.
    Timothy flushed his psionic power through the partition and was able to distinguish the hollow areas of rooms, a good number of them, bisected by thin gray shadows which were walls. He could not see anything more than what an X-ray might reveal of a man's intestines, but it was enough to convince him of the necessity of conquering this barrier. The Brethren may have failed repeatedly at the task, but they were not as equipped as he was, did not have psi fingers to pry with, to rip, rend, and tear.
    He extended those insubstantial fingers now, with the same naturalness he had once had for the direction of his servo hands. He slid them between the terribly dense molecules of the emerald wall.
    When he felt that he had correctly ascertained the nature of the atomic patterns of the material, he spread his psionic digits in an attempt to rip apart the very fabric of the structure before him.
    Abruptly, his body expanded, exploding with a blinding white ball of flame, and flung itself apart in thousands of bloody pieces…

CHAPTER 15
    Blackness welled up like pooling blood, swallowing all traces of light and life.
    There was a sensation of falling, and the understanding that the fall would never end. There was no bottom to the well into which he had been dropped, for that well was eternity.
    He tried to breathe, but there was no air in this place. Just as there was no sound, light, color, odors, or sensations of a tactile nature. This was only nothingness.