ã€ŠIf Bones Could Talkã€‹


 Chapter 1

    A Lords of the Stars Novella

    Mattias von Schantz

    <hr>

    October 18, 2567 AD, Inner Icy Bodies Belt, Gliese 556

    The end did not come swiftly.

    On the contrary, the data containing its discovery lay dormant on some astrophysicist''s solid-state memory for more than 30 years, gathering digital dust, before any human ever laid eyes on it. When they finally did, what they found there changed the fate of the Terran race forever.

    No one knew exactly when the primordial black hole had passed through the core of Solaris. No one even knew for certain if that was what had happened, but it was as plausible a theory as any. Something had disrupted the finely tuned fusion processes in the core of the star, and its energy output was no longer what it had been before. In essence, the engine of the sun had stopped running.

    From the outside, you wouldn¡¯t even notice the change¡ªthe outer layers were still glowing from the heat released by the thermonuclear fires millennia ago. Perhaps the summers on Mars had grown colder by a degree or two over the past century, but this was Mars, after all¡ªeven after centuries of terraforming, cold summers were still the norm. If you looked at the sun, it still seemed to be the same star that had once warmed the primordial seas of Old Earth, the same yellow light that, for eons, had greeted the dinosaurs, and the same disc that had risen in the east over the first empires of Man. Granted, during this time, it had slowly moved along the Hertzsprung¨CRussell diagram, but for all practical purposes, the sun had shone constantly for billions of years.

    It would not continue to do so.

    For the entirety of its existence, the outward push of the radiation released by the fusion processes in the sun¡¯s core had been equal to the inward pull of the star¡¯s immense gravity. But now, with the fusion engine no longer running at full speed, gravity had taken over, slowly collapsing it. The vast layer of hydrogen was now falling toward the center of the sun, increasing the pressure and temperature in the core every year. Eventually, the conditions would be hot enough for the fusion process to restart.

    To the untrained ear, that might have sounded like a good thing. It was anything but¡ªin fact, it was immeasurably worse than the sun just slowly growing cold. The day the core reignited, the fusion engine would not begin to burn slowly over the course of billions of years, as it had previously. Instead, a significant fraction of the hydrogen in the core would ignite all at once. The resulting thermonuclear explosion would throw off the outer layers of the sun into space, essentially swallowing the inner solar system. Mercury, Venus, Terra, and Mars¡ªall would be gone, the racial home of Mankind erased forever; all the places, artifacts, and history of humanity obliterated in the nuclear fire to come.The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

    It wouldn¡¯t be a supernova explosion, of course¡ªnothing so spectacular could ever happen to a simple G-class main-sequence star, not even with the help of a primordial black hole. The astrophysicists simply classified the event as a humble nova, albeit an irregular one. But even a nova is enough to sterilize a solar system, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it from happening. Within a few hundred years, the end would come, no matter what mankind did.

    For the second time in half a millennium, the Terran race faced an extinction event. But unlike the Fall of Old Earth, this time it was not a cataclysm of their own making, and now the race was on to move as much of the Terran people and their heritage to other stars before Nova Solaris eventually claimed the sun¡¯s children as its final victims.

    Some would say the Terran Federation had grown complacent during the centuries following the Fall. But Pax Lupi¡ªthree centuries of unbroken peace, guaranteed by the military might of the Sunguard¡ªhad brought with it a period of unprecedented prosperity. After the initial integration of the four races, the Federation had stopped its expansion 23 light-years from Solaris, content with the territory it already controlled. It had then turned its focus inward, improving and strengthening itself without having to spend time and manpower on colonizing the stars.

    Now, that was all about to change. In a mad scramble for resources and new worlds, the Armies of the Sunguard had been sent out on expeditions up to 50 light-years from Solaris, charting the often dangerous worlds orbiting distant stars. For the past century, the needs of the other three races had had to take a backseat, allowing the Terrans to grab as much territory as they could before it was too late.

    It hadn¡¯t been entirely without downsides, though. Despite its name, of the 70 billion people in the Federation, only 35% were actually Terran. Certain limitations on the way votes were conducted among the non-Terran members had been put into place to ensure the other races didn¡¯t interfere with the prioritized Terran expansion. It was all just temporary, of course. The home worlds of the other three races were still perfectly safe¡ªAlpha Centauri A and B, as well as Tau Ceti, would continue to burn for eons to come. Thus, the Etarians, the Kelar, and the Jerrassians could afford a few centuries of curbed rights¡ªthey had all the time in the galaxy to catch up once the whole Nova Solaris business was over. For now, the priority of the Terran Federation had to be the survival of the Terran people.

    Despite being Jerrassian himself, Captain Balmar Lok didn¡¯t really mind. What were a few lost civil rights when you had the opportunity to make more money in a year than your parents had been able to acquire in a lifetime? Disasters such as this tended to be virtual money-making machines if you knew how to properly take advantage of the situation.

    The Sunguard had sent their expeditions across space to discover new worlds to colonize. But once the colonization process was started, there was more work to be done than the military had the resources to provide. That¡¯s where civilian contractors such as the crew of Peretti''s Legacy came into play. Right now, their job was to survey the makeup of the icy bodies orbiting in the inner cometary belt of one of the recently colonized systems. No one claimed it was an exciting job¡ªjust days upon days of measuring the ratios of water, carbon dioxide, methane, and ammonia ice in the primordial comets here in the outer Gliese 556 system, 44 light-years from Solaris. The work wasn¡¯t glamorous, but it paid more than well.

 Chapter 2 - The Discovery

    ¡°Captain,¡± Peretti''s Legacy¡¯s intelligent computer said with a soft voice. ¡°I think I have something you might be interested in.¡±

    Captain Balmar stirred in his chair. ¡°What is it, Torque?¡± he asked, turning his head to look at the large screen to his left. It was filled with a myriad of dots and symbols, each representing an inactive comet they were charting. At the far end of the screen, one of the dots was blinking.

    ¡°I¡¯ve noticed an anomalous reading in the gravity field mapping,¡± the computer explained. ¡°Object 256709QED appears to be significantly denser than expected.¡±

    That was interesting indeed, Captain Balmar thought. The field generator onboard the Legacy wasn¡¯t just able to manipulate local gravity gradients; it could also detect how the existing gradients farther out interacted with the modified local gravity field, effectively turning it into a very precise gravity detector. This had been the crew''s main tool for the past four months to detect unknown cometary bodies out here in the belt. Even in this comparatively dense region of the star system, the mean distances between comets were still measured in millions of kilometers. If you simply looked out the window, you¡¯d never even know you were smack in the middle of a cometary belt. But to the computer controlling the field generator, the small masses of these tiny celestial bodies stood out against the flatter gravity gradient of interplanetary space like fireworks in the sky.

    Given that comets typically don¡¯t generate artificial gravity, these readings correlated directly to the mass of the objects they were surveying. If you knew the mass and volume, you could easily determine the density of the unknown object.

    The problem was, of course, they didn¡¯t know the volume.

    ¡°What makes you say that?¡± he asked, feeling both confused and excited at the same time.

    The computer responded without delay. ¡°I¡¯m mostly just guessing,¡± it admitted. ¡°Call it a gut feeling. But most of the comets in this part of the belt are fragments, typically less than half a kilometer in length. If I assume this object has a similar size, I can make an educated guess of its density. And it¡¯s way higher than I expected.¡±

    Captain Balmar mused on that for half a minute before speaking again. ¡°Either that, or the object is much larger than those we typically run into here,¡± he concluded.

    ¡°It might be,¡± Torque admitted. If it was offended by the captain questioning its reasoning, its voice didn¡¯t betray those feelings in the slightest. ¡°If it¡¯s that large, we might even be able to spot it visually.¡±

    ¡°Alright, here¡¯s what we¡¯ll do.¡± Balmar wasn¡¯t fully convinced this warranted their attention yet, but looking wouldn¡¯t cost them much. ¡°Retask the 80 cm Cassegrain to observe the object. If you can¡¯t see it with that, we¡¯ll take the ship in for a closer look.¡±

    ¡°Sounds like a good plan, Captain,¡± the computer said. ¡°I¡¯ll let you know what I see.¡±

    <hr>

    Thirty minutes later, Peretti''s Legacy was on the move. As the computer had expected, the object had remained invisible, proving it was small enough to make its comparatively large mass anomalous. In other words, whatever was out there was made of metal, not ice. And an object made of metal could only mean one thing: it was a ship. If it turned out to be abandoned, it could be salvaged, providing the crew with a much needed secondary source of income.

    As the Legacy drifted closer to the unknown ship, some of the crew started to gather in the observation lounge. At first, the telescope image on the screen showed nothing more than a dot of light, but as the distance decreased, details began to emerge. It was a large and elongated ship, perhaps half a kilometer from bow to stern. The damage it had sustained¡ªlarge parts of its side ripped open¡ªmade it clear it was indeed abandoned.

    ¡°There is no radio beacon active on the wreck,¡± Torque informed them after listening through the radio spectrum for several minutes. ¡°And I can¡¯t match the visual profile of the ship with any known models produced by the Terran Federation.¡±Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

    So it was alien, Captain Balmar thought. He wasn¡¯t exactly surprised. If the Sunguard or any other contractor working for it had lost such a large ship in this system, chances were they¡¯d have heard about it by now. The question was, which of the alien races in the vicinity had had a reason to visit the Gliese 556 system?

    ¡°Alright,¡± he commanded the computer. ¡°Extend the search to ships produced by all races encountered during the Second Expansion.¡±

    That would probably take some time, as those records weren¡¯t kept onboard. But the search should cover every known type of ship made within 50 light-years. If that didn''t come up with a match¡ªwell, then, this was big news indeed. And big news meant big money, if they played their cards right. Captain Balmar was starting to feel excited. Looking around at the gathered crew, he could see it was a feeling shared by the women and men he employed.

    Twenty minutes later, they had their answer.

    ¡°Sorry it took so long, Captain,¡± the intelligent computer said apologetically. ¡°The Sonmai database wasn¡¯t publicly available. I had to buy access first, and it took a little time to negotiate a reasonable price with the seller. Incidentally, I had to pay them with my own private funds, so I expect you¡¯ll reimburse me once we¡¯ve salvaged the ship, eh?¡±

    ¡°Sure, Torque,¡± Balmar answered absentmindedly. The added expense of a few terabytes of hyperspace database access was nothing compared to the money they were about to make here.

    ¡°Thank you, Captain,¡± Torque said, the relief audible in its voice.

    ¡°Well,¡± it continued, ¡°you¡¯ll be happy to know that I couldn¡¯t find a match to the ship¡¯s profile in any of the databases. It¡¯s not just alien¡ªit¡¯s from a civilization the Terran Federation hasn¡¯t yet encountered.¡±

    ¡°We need to report it,¡± his first mate interjected. She was a Terran woman in her early thirties, with short blond hair and gray eyes that missed nothing.

    ¡°Not yet,¡± Captain Balmar cautioned. ¡°If we report it now, the Sunguard will just waltz in here and take over, and we won¡¯t get more than a finder¡¯s fee. Maybe not even enough to cover our losses from delaying the survey mission. I¡¯m sure Special Agent Watanabe and his men will be all over the wreck in a matter of hours once we tell the Federation about it. That doesn¡¯t give us much time to remove artifacts from it before the military moves in. The longer we wait, the more parts we can sell off first.¡±

    He knew what he was talking about. In a previous career, he had made a killing selling cars he had¡­ acquired. And it had always been a better deal to chop them up and sell them in parts rather than just finding a single buyer for the whole vehicle. Captain Balmar was certain the same would be true here.

    By now, they were close enough to the alien ship to be able to see it with their own eyes. Captain Balmar noticed his ground sample specialist, an older Kelar male with shoulder length black hair, standing close to the large observation window, seemingly deep in thought.

    ¡°What is it, Plav-tor-fel-mak?¡± he asked. ¡°You¡¯re seeing something I don¡¯t?¡±

    The small, blue lizard turned around to face the hairy Jerrassian. There was a look on his scaly face that, at first, seemed like concern but upon closer inspection was more akin to contemplation.

    ¡°The ship is old, Captain, bless your fur,¡± Plav-tor-fel-mak said. ¡°See the shape of it? The curves? It¡¯s majestic. Beautiful.¡±

    Balmar wasn¡¯t surprised that was what the specialist had focused on. The Kelar had always had an eye for beauty. Captain Balmar imagined the tough little man was sitting in his cabin making clay sculptures of weeping children, or something like that, when he wasn¡¯t out roughing it with the rest of the crew. Balmar didn¡¯t mind that in the slightest¡ªhaving a crew member with an eye for the finer things had been to their benefit¡ªand to the Sunguard¡¯s detriment¡ªmore than once.

    ¡°But no one builds a beautiful ship for their first expedition into interstellar space. Or their second, for that matter,¡± Plav-tor-fel-mak continued. ¡°Just look at our own ships. We¡¯ve been flying between the stars for five hundred years now¡ªthe Etarians, bless their heads, a few centuries more than that, even¡ªand yet our ships are still ugly, functional monstrosities. Boxy or cylindrical, without any beauty to them at all. You don¡¯t spend the resources making your ships look aesthetically pleasing until you¡¯re confident you¡¯ve first mastered interstellar flight.¡±

    Captain Balmar turned his head to take a second look at the ship. Though not an artist himself, he could certainly see what the specialist meant. Despite the damage to the hull, it was clear whoever had built the alien ship had spent considerable effort on its looks. If this wasn¡¯t the result of an accident that had befallen an early expedition of theirs but rather a disaster striking a race that had been traveling between the stars for millennia, it could only mean one thing: the ship was old, and the race that had built it even older. In all likelihood, it predated all the known civilizations by a thousand years or more.

    It all made Captain Balmar even more certain he was right in his decision to explore the wreck before reporting it to the Terran Federation.

 Chapter 3 - The First Hours Inside

    Gaining access to the inside of the ship turned out to be easier said than done.

    Sharing the orbit of the derelict were millions of pieces of twisted metal¡ªsome the size of airplanes, others needing a magnifying glass to be spotted¡ªthrown out into space during whatever cataclysmic event it had experienced. To protect Peretti''s Legacy, Captain Balmar decided to park his ship over a kilometer out from the alien wreck and do a spacewalk to cross the distance.

    It was an inconvenient process and would take extra time, but even if they had been able to park just outside the derelict ship, they still wouldn¡¯t have been able to dock with it. No matter what, an EVA would have been needed to reach its interior. After all, it wasn¡¯t like whatever alien race had built it would have bothered to implement an FSO 82,001 standards-compliant docking port.

    The spacewalk wouldn¡¯t be without its dangers, either. If the sharp pieces of broken metal in the vicinity posed a threat even to the Legacy, they were certainly more than capable of slicing through the soft fabric of a spacesuit like a hot knife through butter. The crew would have to be vigilant during the EVA.

    Fortunately, the risks involved didn¡¯t seem to deter the crew. Finding volunteers for the first excursion into the alien wreck turned out to be the easiest part of the mission. In fact, with the entire crew volunteering for the job, the biggest challenge was deciding who would be allowed to go and who would have to stay behind. Even though Torque certainly was capable of running the ship on its own, Captain Balmar didn¡¯t like leaving his ship in the hands of a single crew member. Unforeseen things could happen, and he didn¡¯t want to lose his ship to a situation that a little bit of redundancy could have avoided. In addition to Torque, a second crew member would have to stay on the Legacy. After much deliberation, his choice fell on Imrad Kol, the second Jerrassian on the crew and the ship¡¯s maintenance engineer. She would be able to handle any technical problems that might occur in his absence.

    The traverse took a little over twenty minutes as the team members slowly weaved through the debris field, mindful of any fast-moving pieces of the ship in their vicinity. As they neared the hull of the derelict, they could see it was littered with micrometeoroid impacts, as if someone had used it as target practice for a gigantic, old-fashioned shotgun. Not knowing the material the ship was made of, nor its structural integrity properties, the amount of visible impacts didn¡¯t tell them much about the vessel¡¯s age¡ªexcept to confirm what they already suspected: the ship was old. Very old.

    Eventually, they reached one of the large tears in the hull where they had decided to enter the wreck. Slowly, the seven women and men of Peretti''s Legacy¡¯s crew floated¡ªone by one¡ªinto the cavernous gloom of the derelict spacecraft, careful to avoid disturbing the debris inside with their maneuvering thrusters. As the shadow of the immense superstructure of the craft started to block the distant, faint sun, they stepped into a darkness more compact than night itself. From now on, the only light they would see until they returned to the Legacy was from their flashlights and helmet-mounted lumen torches.

    As they carefully floated into the narrow corridor, filled with tumbling debris, their eyes tracked the beams of light dancing over age-old metal panels, broken furniture, incomprehensible alien machinery. Here, inside the wreck, the profound nature of the discovery was beginning to sink in. If the ship was millennia old, as they now believed, its existence would predate even the Etarians.

    Captain Balmar wasn¡¯t a scientist, but he took pride in trying to know a little bit about everything. He was aware of a much-debated axiom among xenoanthropologists centered on the timeline for when civilizations in the Milky Way had reached technological maturity. The galaxy had existed for more or less fourteen billion years. Meanwhile, the time span from the first multicellular organism to the emergence of intelligent beings capable of spaceflight was just a few hundred million years. Thus, it seemed reasonable to assume interstellar civilizations would have emerged in the galaxy at vastly different points in time, separated by millions or even billions of years.

    Yet, that was not the reality the galaxy presented. The Etarians, the Terrans, the Kelar, and the Jerrassians had all reached technological maturity within the span of less than a thousand years of each other. The same was true for the species encountered during the Second Expansion. This was something of a puzzle. From what Captain Balmar understood, the current thinking was that this was¡ªat least partially¡ªconnected to the timeframe of stellar evolution. Both technology and life itself needed heavy elements, atoms that didn¡¯t exist when the universe first sprang into existence. The primordial hydrogen and helium of the early Milky Way had to first be converted into heavier atoms in the nuclear furnaces of its first suns. But not even that first generation of stars was enough to produce the abundance of heavy elements needed for life to flourish¡ªa succession of supernovas and stellar rebirths had to happen first before that was possible.If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

    This slow process put a limit on how early technologically advanced life could appear in the universe, a limit that seemed to have caused all known civilizations to show up fairly recently, within the last millennium or so. Obviously, there must have been other factors at play as well¡ªthe timeline of stellar evolution alone would not be precise enough to enforce a limit as short as a thousand years¡ªbut, all in all, it was an accepted axiom that there had not existed any civilizations in the Milky Way capable of spaceflight until the last millennium.

    That axiom was now proven irrefutably wrong.

    <hr>

    At first, Captain Balmar was surprised there wasn¡¯t more dust covering the ancient surfaces they glided past. They weren¡¯t free of it, but there was much less grime here than he had expected. However, after some thought on the matter, he realized his expectations were based on terrestrial assumptions. Here, there had been no crew shedding skin fragments and no dirt blown in by the wind. There had been no air to oxidize the metals of the hull and no water to erode its surfaces. Micrometeoroids and cosmic rays would certainly have played their part in shredding the old ship to dust, but only on the outside¡ªhere inside, shielded by the thick bulkheads of the craft, the abandoned corridors of the ancient vessel had been protected from even those forces of nature. That left only the slow work of thermal erosion to dismantle the derelict¡ªassuming the building materials it was made from were even susceptible to such decay.

    Even so, the corridors they floated through were anything but pristine. In the narrow beams of their flashlights, heavy pieces of broken metal¡ªbeams ripped from their support structures, large, nondescript storage containers thrown around like toys, and unidentifiable but clearly broken alien constructs made from alloys resembling silver or gold¡ªfloated everywhere they looked, and more often than he liked, blocked their way. To Balmar, the jagged pieces of metal ripped from their places looked like the drifting remains of some ancient monster, ready to strike at him from the darkness. Whether the large tears in the outer hull had been the cause of the ship¡¯s demise, or just a catastrophic collision with a cometary fragment that had happened long after the initial disaster, the effects of such a cataclysmic event were surely the reason for the majority of the debris they found.

    Those large beams and heavy containers were another area where he had to be careful not to let his terrestrial expectations make a fool of him. Just because the heavy objects were floating effortlessly through the vacuum of these age-old chambers didn¡¯t mean they were massless. Weightless, yes, but not massless¡ªa kilogram of metal remained a kilogram of mass, even in microgravity. Pushing them aside when they blocked the team¡¯s path still took a lot of effort¡ªand once on the move, you had to be careful to stay out of their way. A ton of metal moving at even a fraction of a meter per second would crush you just as easily in space as it would on the ground.

    The silence of the dead corridors tended to play with the mind. You kept expecting to hear a sound when two objects impacted each other or when a metal beam scraped against the floor tiles as it slowly drifted past you, but in the vacuum of the derelict ship, there was only silence. Silence, and the rasping sound of his own breath inside his helmet. It was an eerie feeling, unnatural despite being completely natural, and it made Captain Balmar uneasy. The darkness did nothing to help with that, either. Beyond the light sources the crew carried, there was only total, impenetrable blackness. Here, deep inside the wreck, there weren¡¯t even stars to light their way. Balmar tried not to think of what would happen if their light sources ran out of battery power.

    Well, the role of coward did not fit the captain of a starship, he thought. More for his own sake than for anything else, he decided to make a statement.

    ¡°Hold the fort, Bouchard,¡± he said to his first mate. ¡°I want to take a look at this passageway,¡± Balmar continued, indicating the narrow crawl space to their left. The opening wasn¡¯t wide enough to allow for more than one person to enter at a time, and in his bulky spacesuit, it took some time just to get into position. Eventually, he managed to heave himself into the dark hole in the wall. It was a tight fit, and as he squeezed through, he felt himself starting to panic upon realizing there wasn¡¯t enough space to move his arms. He bit his tongue in silence to avoid screaming in fear as he plunged into the night beyond.

    Once through, the passageway widened, allowing him to bring up his flashlight again. It didn¡¯t do much to illuminate the long tunnel that stretched out in the darkness in front of him. Here, there was less debris floating around, but the ceiling of the passageway was partially obscured by a dense metal framework blocking his view of the upper part of the room. What was up there in the shadows, he could not see.

    As he reached the end of the chamber, he found nothing more than a storage space. There were shelves upon shelves filled with sealed boxes, bags, and canisters¡ªlikely some sort of alien pantry, Balmar thought. Before he turned around to leave, he grabbed an assorted collection of items, none of them bearing anything resembling a label or any other form of identification. Several of them crumbled in his hands, disintegrating into tiny flakes of dust that floated away in the vacuum. Not wanting to leave empty-handed, he grabbed a few more containers, some of which held together when he picked them up. The science crew would probably find them irresistible, he mused.

    His hands full of alien foodstuffs, he could no longer hold his flashlight, and the head-mounted lumen torch did little to illuminate the space in front of him. In the darkness of the narrow crawl space, it was all too easy to imagine untold horrors lying in wait in the shadows beyond. He had to remind himself the wreck was dead and had been so for untold centuries. Other than the threat of panic, there was nothing here that could hurt him.

    But then there was that brief moment, just as he passed below the metal mesh in the ceiling, when the outside of the visor of his helmet suddenly fogged up, as if something unseen was breathing down on him from the darkness above.

    Captain Balmar shrugged. Obviously, in the vacuum of the derelict, that was impossible; he knew it was just his imagination playing tricks on him.

 Chapter 4 - 3 Hours Inside

    As he had expected, the science crew dove headfirst into analyzing the artifacts he had brought with him from the pantry.

    Obviously, the food inside the containers had decayed centuries¡ªperhaps millenia¡ªago. What was left in them was only desiccated residue in the form of dust and dry smears, too far gone to make it possible to even guess what they had originally contained. But atoms don¡¯t disappear. Even though the bonds that had brought them together into complex molecules¡ªultimately forming food¡ªhad broken down, the atoms themselves remained and could be analyzed.

    Captain Balmar floated in silence while he waited for the results of the tests. These were the first organic remains they had found onboard the ship, and that meant an opportunity for carbon dating. He was eager to learn exactly how old the ship really was. The older, the better¡ªfor his wallet, of course.

    Plav-tor-fel-mak looked in confusion at the screen of his portable mass spectrometer. ¡°Are you sure these were food containers, Captain, bless your eyes?¡± he asked cautiously, not wanting to question his superior, but also not seeing how the results of the tests could fit with the captain¡¯s description of the alien ¡°pantry.¡±

    ¡°There were no markings of any kind on any of the containers in that room,¡± Captain Balmar replied. ¡°But I know my way around a storage area. I can¡¯t see what else they¡¯d keep in a room like that. And you see the jars for yourself. They look just like any you¡¯d find in your grandmother¡¯s pantry. Just look at those tins¡ªthey even have built-in openers in their lids. I¡¯m sure they contained food.¡±

    The specialist held up one of the tins and inspected it in the light of his lumen torch. ¡°Yeah, I think you¡¯re right,¡± he said after some time. ¡°Maybe the containers are older than we thought, and the markings have worn off completely. They¡¯d be on the outside and would be the first to flake off from thermal erosion. But if that¡¯s true, and this one really did contain food at some point in time, the test results don¡¯t make any sense.¡±

    ¡°What¡¯s the problem?¡±

    ¡°There¡¯s no carbon in the containers,¡± the Kelar explained. ¡°None whatsoever. The material is more like¡­ fine sand, I¡¯d say. Just silicon dust, really.¡±

    Captain Balmar nodded slowly. Without any carbon residue left, there was nothing to use for carbon dating. Well, they¡¯d just have to find another way to figure out how old the ship was.

    ¡°All right,¡± he finally said. ¡°Maybe I was wrong, then. Perhaps this was just¡­ I don¡¯t know, a room for storing their asteroid samples.¡±

    ¡°Some of the canisters, yes,¡± Plav-tor-fel-mak replied. ¡°That¡¯s what I¡¯d use to store my samples, too. But the bags? They still make more sense for storing food.¡±

    Balmar paused to think over their options. ¡°Well, I guess that¡¯s it,¡± he concluded. ¡°Let¡¯s push deeper into the wreck. Maybe we can find something else to use for dating when we¡¯re further in. And don¡¯t forget to keep your eyes open for anything of value we can bring with us when we leave.¡±

    <hr>

    The state of the ship hadn¡¯t improved as they ventured deeper. Broken pieces of metal, slowly colliding with each other, still floated around the open spaces they glided through. The tear in the hull they had entered through had been close to the stern of the ship. The going had been slow, with all the debris blocking the corridors, but now, the crew of Peretti''s Legacy had penetrated almost one-third of the way toward the bow.

    After another hour of slowly navigating the decrepit corridors, the narrow passageway was suddenly replaced with a vast chamber. Gliding through the doorway, their lights failed to illuminate the opposing side of the room. As they slowly floated to the middle of it, the group watched the beams of their flashlights play over the debris tumbling in silence through the cavernous space, their silhouettes casting harsh shadows on the walls. The scene was all too easy to misinterpret in the darkness, like a shadow theater from hell.

    ¡°It¡¯s kind of creepy, isn¡¯t it, Captain?¡± Mission Specialist Suwannarat said, fear evident in his voice. He was a large, well-trained Terran with blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, the type of man who would walk into a Jerrassian bar and curse Kham without a second thought. But here, deep inside the carnage of the alien wreck, his size and training did nothing to keep his mind in check.This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

    ¡°Mmm,¡± Captain Balmar muttered, not wanting to fuel the crew¡¯s fear. He swept his flashlight around the dark space until it illuminated a large piece of machinery that happened to silently drift through its narrow beam. ¡°It¡¯s just some sort of machine garage,¡± he explained. ¡°See there? That looks like a load lifter.¡±

    It was all a fa?ade, of course. In truth, he had no idea what the alien machine¡¯s purpose might be. The oppressive dread of the place was crawling up his spine¡ªno different from what he knew the rest of the crew must be feeling. Still, he couldn¡¯t let it show. For their sake, he maintained the act, feigning confidence as if he knew exactly what he was talking about.

    Suddenly, Karl Sawhney, the Legacy¡¯s navigator, called out.

    ¡°I saw something!¡± he shouted.

    Slowly, the rest of the crew used their maneuvering thrusters to turn around, their flashlights now tracing paths in his general direction.

    ¡°What?¡± Captain Balmar barked, the anger in his voice covering the dread he was feeling. ¡°What did you see?¡±

    ¡°I swear it moved, Captain,¡± Sawhney explained, knowing how little that meant in a room filled with tumbling debris. Truth be told, when he thought about it, he wasn¡¯t sure what he had seen. He was starting to feel a little embarrassed now, realizing too late it was probably just his eyes playing tricks on him, seeing things that weren''t there in the complex interplay of shadows against the wall.

    The situation was quickly getting out of hand, Balmar thought. Any second now, the crew could start panicking. And here they were, deep inside the alien wreck, with over four hours of travel time before even reaching daylight, not to mention the additional time needed to traverse the virtual minefield of debris outside. Trying to take command of the situation, he ordered the crew to proceed further into the ship, hoping they would calm down once they¡¯d left the creepy chamber they were floating in now.

    As the narrow corridor closed in on them again, he started to wonder if he had made the wrong decision. Perhaps they should have just left and returned to Peretti''s Legacy? They could always come back later and continue their exploration of the ghost ship.

    That¡¯s it, he thought. Now I¡¯m thinking of the alien vessel as a ghost ship, too. There was no way of shaking the feeling of intense dread that was settling on the seven crew members as they delved deeper into the darkness, and now he was starting to fall victim to it as well.

    The corridor was no longer wide enough for the team to keep traveling in pairs. Instead, they became spaced out, seven women and men drifting in single file, the sight of the person in front of them now only a silhouette against the bleak lights of the lumen torches ahead, trying to keep the darkness at bay. Captain Balmar wished they had thought of bringing a rope with them so they could tie themselves together. Among the debris of the narrow passageway, it was all too easy for someone to get stuck until they could push past the tumbling rubble, slowing down everyone behind them and falling behind the crew in front. The longer they drifted through the corridor, the further they got separated from each other.

    When the passage suddenly made a sharp turn to the right, Captain Balmar found himself alone. He wasn¡¯t, of course¡ªthe rest of the crew would eventually catch up with him. But for now, he was the only one in this part of the corridor, visually cut off from the flashlight beams behind him by the sharp geometry of the ship¡¯s interior. The utter silence echoing through his mind made the hairs stand up on his back. Exposed to the vacuum of space, no sounds could travel through the ship to his ears, and now when he was alone, the unnatural quiet¡ªcombined with Sawhney''s earlier insistence he had seen something move in the darkness¡ªmade Balmar think of scenarios he wished he had never imagined.

    If someone¡ªor something¡ªwere to creep up on him from behind, he would never even know it. Some¡­ creature could be standing just a meter behind him at this very moment, ready to strike at him from the darkness, and he still wouldn¡¯t be able to hear it through the vacuum of the derelict alien vessel. The only way to know for sure would be to turn around and look for himself.

    It was all too much. The thought of slowly rotating to face the darkness behind him, only to raise his flashlight and reveal a snarling apparition ready to tear him apart, was more than he could bear. He clenched his fingers inside the gloves of his spacesuit, refusing to turn around to disprove the obsessive thoughts his brain was now feverishly playing with.

    Captain Balmar felt how he was starting to breathe faster and shallower, to keep up with his racing heart. The rasping sound of air flowing in and out of his lungs within the cramped space of his helmet only heightened the terror of the situation. The dead silence outside contrasted sharply with the hurricane of his own breath, now roaring in his ears.

    In the blackness of his personal horror show, Captain Balmar suddenly remembered how his visor had fogged up without reason in the other dark crawlspace where he had been alone earlier on his way out from the pantry.

    Something touched his right shoulder. Something eerily reminiscent of a human hand.

 Chapter 5 - 6 Hours Inside

    ¡°Captain!¡±

    First Mate Laura Bouchard took a firm grip on Captain Balmar¡¯s right shoulder, trying to shake him out of his panicked state.

    ¡°Captain! Come back to us!¡±

    There was no response from the large Jerrassian.

    Bouchard, floating behind the captain¡¯s back, grabbed his left shoulder as well in an attempt to rotate him around. As she did, she slowly turned in the opposite direction. Steadying herself against a protruding metal beam, she finally came face-to-face with her frightened superior.

    When she looked into his blank eyes, it was clear something within him was now missing. She tapped on his visor, but there was no visible response.

    She paused for a moment, considering how to handle the situation without causing more panic. Reluctantly, she activated the crew intercom.

    ¡°This is First Mate Bouchard,¡± she said into her microphone. ¡°Captain Balmar has been leading us for close to six hours now. He¡¯s tired, and I think we all could do with some rest. I want you in the back to hurry up, and then we¡¯ll continue into the next room ahead. When we get there, let¡¯s take a half-hour break.¡±

    Around the bend in the corridor, she could now see the lights from the remaining crew playing over the worn metal panels of the opposite wall. A few minutes later, they were all there. She rotated to face the bow of the ship again, activated her maneuvering thrusters, and continued to drift forward. Behind her, the six crew members followed in uneasy silence. With a firm grip around the captain¡¯s waist, she slowly brought him along with her.

    The room they approached was mid-sized, perhaps eight by twelve meters. First Mate Bouchard guessed it had once served as some kind of conference room¡ªin the far corner, a large table was floating near the ceiling, and an assortment of narrow, tall chairs drifted about the chamber.

    Though dark and oppressive¡ªlike the rest of the age-old ship¡ªit was as good a place as any to stop and rest.

    ¡°Alright, people,¡± she said when they had all gathered inside the room. ¡°Take thirty minutes. If anyone needs to replenish their oxygen, do so now. Est-mar-kort has the spare canisters, so talk to her if you need to. Remember to drink, and eat some of your suit biscuits too, if you haven¡¯t already. And empty your waste bins.¡±

    Most of the crew sat down, some on the floor or the walls, others on overturned furniture. A couple of them floated around, peeking into the corridors and rooms outside. First Mate Bouchard glided over to the captain, now seated with his back against the wall in the corner directly below the hovering conference table.

    ¡°How are you feeling, Lok?¡± she asked, using the interpersonal comm setting.

    He looked up at her, still without saying a word.

    Good, she thought. At least he¡¯s reacting to my presence now. But his eyes were still blank.

    She checked his suit''s oxygen and water levels, careful not to scare him in the process. Everything looked good, at least for the moment.

    ¡°You should try to drink something, Captain,¡± she prodded him. ¡°We still have a long way to go.¡±

    Slowly, he nodded. It was the best she could hope for, Bouchard thought as she glided over to their Kelar tech specialist to replenish her own oxygen supply.

    <hr>

    Thirty minutes later, it was time to leave the relative safety of the conference room. With some trepidation, Bouchard started the roll call to prepare the crew for the next part of their journey.

    ¡°Suwannarat?¡±

    ¡°Ready, ma¡¯am.¡±

    ¡°Captain Balmar?¡±

    ¡°Yeah¡­¡± The voice was tired, but he was there. That was all she could hope for right now.

    ¡°Murray?¡±

    There was no reply.

    ¡°Tech Specialist Murray, please respond!¡±

    Still no reply. The dread she had been feeling before the break was now slowly creeping back into the recesses of her mind. First Mate Bouchard rotated around the room, letting her flashlight illuminate all its dark corners, trying to chase the shadows away. But Murray was nowhere to be found.

    ¡°Alright, people,¡± she commanded, knowing time might not be on their side. ¡°Listen up. Pair up with your partners and fan out. Who saw her last?¡±

    There were a few seconds of silence before Est-mar-kort spoke up. ¡°She had some biscuits and then wanted to take a look at the next room. That was¡­ maybe ten minutes ago.¡±

    ¡°She went alone?¡± First Mate Bouchard disapproved, but this wasn¡¯t the military. The crew was generally free to do whatever they wanted, as long as it didn¡¯t interfere with the job. Which, she thought darkly, might be exactly what Murray¡¯s little excursion had done this time.

    ¡°She was just going to take a short peek,¡± Est-mar-kort explained, defending her colleague.

    ¡°That¡¯s alright, Est-mar-kort,¡± Bouchard said, trying to calm the young woman. It wasn¡¯t her fault. In fact, the situation wasn¡¯t anyone¡¯s fault, really. It just was what it was, and now they had to deal with it.

    ¡°Plav-tor-fel-mak, stay with the Captain. Suwannarat, you¡¯re with me,¡± she said to the large Terran. Together, they drifted into the room the tech specialist had indicated her colleague had gone to explore.

    No one was there.

    The beams from their flashlights and lumen torches traced patterns of cold fire over the decrepit metal panels covering the walls. Along the left side of the room, three rows of shelves stretched from one end of the chamber to the other. In the corners, broken pieces of metal had collected like high-tech dust bunnies. But there was no one alive in the room.You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

    ¡°Let¡¯s¡ª¡± Mission Specialist Suwannarat¡¯s voice trailed off as he drifted toward the right side of the gloomy space. ¡°Hey, Bouchard, come take a look at this!¡± he continued with some excitement.

    Adjusting her maneuvering thrusters, she slowly glided over to where he was hovering. When she pointed her flashlight in the direction he was facing, she understood what the commotion was about.

    What they had thought was the opposite wall when they first entered the chamber turned out to be little more than a row of cabinets stretching across most of the width of the room. But at the far right of the row, the shadows and debris had hidden a passageway leading to another space further in.

    First Mate Bouchard resisted the urge to shout into the darkness. There was no air here¡ªher voice wouldn¡¯t carry farther on the radio just because she raised it. The comm system was digital; if the Reed-Solomon encoded audio packets could be recovered by Tech Specialist Murray¡¯s receiver, the sound would play back with perfect clarity, no matter the distance. If not, there would only be total silence to greet her lost crew member.

    Instead, she repeated her call in what she hoped was still a calm voice. ¡°Tech Specialist Murray, this is First Mate Bouchard. Please respond.¡±

    Still, the only sound the ether returned was a deafening silence.

    She looked at Suwannarat, who nodded in return. Slowly, he maneuvered into the black hole in the wall, careful not to rip his spacesuit on the protruding teeth of shredded metal littering the passageway. Bouchard followed, keeping her distance from the leading man but always making sure she stayed within visual range of him.

    The access tunnel they glided through was narrow, restricting their movements, and had several sharp bends. At times, she was reminded of Captain Balmar¡¯s experience when he was forced to face the darkness on the other side of the twisted corridor. She reminded herself not to fall into the same trap he had. Even when the angles of the tunnel put them on opposite sides of the bends, she could still see Suwannarat¡¯s flashlight dance across the narrow walls.

    ¡°...is Tech Specialist Jodie Murray to the crew of Peretti''s Legacy. Come in.¡±

    The voice that suddenly burst through the comm system filled First Mate Bouchard with a warm sense of relief. Though the fear of abandonment was audible in Murray¡¯s voice, she was alive. For now, that was all that mattered.

    ¡°Jodie, you¡¯re alright?¡± she asked.

    ¡°Laura!¡± The apprehension in Murray¡¯s voice was quickly replaced with joy. ¡°Yeah, I¡¯m fine,¡± she continued. ¡°I just lost contact with you. It seems the walls in this room are built to shield it from radiation¡ªincluding radio waves. I just wasn¡¯t certain which entrance I had used to get here and didn¡¯t want to risk getting lost further into the wreck by taking a wrong turn trying to get back to you. So I decided to stay and try to reestablish contact with you instead.¡±

    ¡°That¡¯s good thinking,¡± First Mate Bouchard commended the tech specialist. ¡°Let¡¯s get you back to the rest of the team now.¡±

    ¡°I don¡¯t think so,¡± Murray responded cryptically. When Suwannarat and Bouchard finally floated into the chamber where the tech specialist had disappeared, they both understood why.

    In the beams of their flashlights, the walls of the room glittered like luminous lifeforms on the walls of some alien cave. Everywhere they looked, gleaming pieces of gold- and bronze-colored metal were interspersed with a multitude of gray cables. The far side of the room had been ripped open to space, letting the pinpoints of faraway stars shine through the large gap in the hull. For the first time in hours, their eyes saw a light other than the lumen torches and flashlights they had brought with them. And in the middle of the chamber floated Tech Specialist Murray, alive and well.

    ¡°It¡¯s some sort of computer core,¡± Murray said. ¡°I can¡¯t say for sure yet, but there¡¯s too much electronics gathered in the same place for it to be a coincidence.¡±

    A computer core, First Mate Bouchard thought. An alien computer core, made by an unknown race so advanced they had been flying across the stars for millennia. No matter what data it might contain, anything they could extract and bring with them before the Sunguard took over would be worth millions on the black market. Billions, even.

    While Mission Specialist Suwannarat went back through the access tunnel to retrieve the rest of the crew, Murray and Bouchard stayed in the computer room, trying to identify the components they found there. Most of them were either too alien or too damaged to understand. But among the myriad of unidentifiable electronics, there were also rows upon rows of identical black boxes they felt confident were some kind of storage media, and the computer chips themselves looked eerily familiar in the alien environment. If you wanted to build logic circuits using nanoscale transistors, Bouchard thought, there probably weren¡¯t that many different ways to do it.

    When the rest of the team arrived, they all got busy tearing the place apart, looking for the most valuable artifacts. All except for Captain Balmar, who hovered in silence in the far corner of the room, so as not to interfere with the crew¡¯s work.

    Half an hour later, Tech Specialist Murray drifted up to Bouchard with a look of disappointment on her face.

    ¡°I can¡¯t get any of them to work,¡± she said to the Peretti''s Legacy¡¯s first mate. ¡°I mean, I can¡¯t get them to work well enough to even begin probing their circuits. And if I can¡¯t probe them, I can¡¯t reverse-engineer their storage protocols.¡±

    It was, First Mate Bouchard thought, a disastrous turn of events. Still, the circuits might be worth something on their own, even if they couldn¡¯t retrieve any data from them. They had time enough¡ªthe spare oxygen would last for another ten hours, give or take. She didn¡¯t want to give up this opportunity at the first setback they encountered.

    ¡°Try again,¡± she encouraged the tech specialist. ¡°We might still find some chips that aren¡¯t damaged beyond repair. There must be thousands here.¡±

    ¡°No,¡± Murray responded. ¡°I¡¯m sorry. I wasn¡¯t clear. The transistors in the chips are all fused. Literally all of them.¡±

    ¡°Some sort of electric surge that fried the circuits when whatever befell the ship happened?¡± Bouchard suggested.

    ¡°If that were the case, we¡¯d see a pattern to it¡ªmelted circuits near the power connectors and less damage further away. But that¡¯s not the case here. And they¡¯re not melted, technically. They¡¯re¡­ fused. As if the atoms inside the chips have drifted apart, turning the sharp circuitry of the chips into a fuzzy mess. And it¡¯s all uniform. Every single chip I¡¯ve looked at through the portable scanning electron microscope shows exactly the same defect.¡±

    While they talked, Plav-tor-fel-mak had drifted up to the two women huddling together.

    ¡°You¡¯re saying the transistors in the chips are uniformly fused?¡± he asked the tech specialist to confirm what he had heard over the radio.

    ¡°Yes,¡± Murray replied. ¡°It¡¯s like they¡¯ve melted. But not from the inside. More like¡­ imagine you took an intricate snowflake, fresh from the winter snow, and compared it under a microscope to one that has been sitting out in the sun for a while. The larger structures would still be there, but all the fine details would have melted away.¡±

    Plav-tor-fel-mak was silent for a few seconds while the two women looked at him.

    ¡°You have an idea?¡± First Mate Bouchard asked the ground sample specialist.

    ¡°Maybe,¡± he answered, after some hesitation. ¡°There¡¯s something I¡¯ve been thinking about while we¡¯ve been exploring the wreck. Let me take a few samples.¡±

    The small Kelar man left the group and went over to his equipment, which was floating in a pile near the hull breach. Carefully, he scraped material from one of the salvaged computer chips and put it into his mass spectrometer.

    He hummed to himself when the first results started to show up on the little screen of the device. Minutes later, he had the full result of the analysis, and he started to punch numbers into his laptop.

    After a while, Plav-tor-fel-mak paused and then did the same thing all over again. Too much was at stake here¡ªbefore reporting to the first mate, he had to be certain. But in the end, he had a result he was confident he could share with the rest of the crew.

    A result that would turn everything they knew about the universe upside down.

 Chapter 6 - 7 Hours Inside

    ¡°You know, those fused transistors¡­,¡± Ground Sample Specialist Plav-tor-fel-mak began when he returned to First Mate Bouchard. ¡°You said they were fuzzy,¡± he continued, nodding to indicate he was referring to Tech Specialist Murray¡¯s previous statement about the weird looking chips.

    ¡°It reminded me of something. There¡¯s a reason for the uniformity of the fuzziness you saw: entropy. Time, and entropy.

    ¡°The chips have been lying around for so long that quantum effects inside them have, over time, moved atoms tiny distances within the substrate. It¡¯s completely random and takes a lot of time, but the transistors themselves are only a few atoms wide, so it doesn¡¯t take much movement for them to stop working. Eventually, they will become ''smeared out,'' so to speak.¡±

    ¡°So you¡¯re saying the ship is older than we first thought?¡± Bouchard asked, curiosity and greed equally mixed in her voice.

    ¡°Yes,¡± Plav-tor-fel-mak replied. ¡°Much older. Which is why I did some sampling of the silicon substrates the chips are made from.

    ¡°So, the substrates are more or less like any we would make. You start with silicon¡ªin this case, the aliens have used pure silicon-28, to be exact. Then you dope it with certain elements like boron, arsenic, or germanium to enhance its properties. In fact, there¡¯s a long list of elements you can add to it to tweak the silicon to your needs. But you never add magnesium to it. It doesn¡¯t improve the chip substrates in any way. If you find magnesium in them, it¡¯s from contamination, not from deliberate doping.¡±

    ¡°I take it that¡¯s what you found, then?¡± the first mate asked, not really seeing what all the excitement was about.

    ¡°Yes, I did. Not a lot, but enough,¡± the ground sample specialist explained. ¡°And all of it is magnesium-26. Which is exactly what I expected to find, if the ship was old. Like, really, really old.¡±

    ¡°That can¡¯t be a coincidence,¡± Murray interjected, starting to see where Plav-tor-fel-mak was going with this. ¡°You¡¯re saying the ship is old enough to have undergone cosmic ray spallation?¡±

    ¡°That¡¯s right. When silicon-28 is exposed to cosmic rays,¡± he continued, indicating with his hand the missing wall of the computer room, ¡°some of those rays collide with the silicon atoms and knock away protons from them. A small part of the silicon in the chips have been converted into aluminum-26.¡±

    ¡°Yet you found magnesium, not aluminum,¡± First Mate Bouchard remarked.

    Tech Specialist Murray spoke up. ¡°Aluminum-26 is radioactive. Over time, it has decayed into magnesium-26,¡± she interjected.

    Plav-tor-fel-mak nodded.

    ¡°So if we sum up the aluminum-26 and magnesium-26 we find in the chip substrates, we can calculate how long they have been exposed to cosmic radiation,¡± he stated. ¡°Within a margin of error of a few million years or so.¡±

    Laura Bouchard hovered in astounded silence.

    ¡°The margin of error is a million years?¡± she finally asked.

    ¡°Indeed,¡± Plav-tor-fel-mak replied. ¡°The ship itself is at least eight million years old. Or the tear in the hull is,¡± he corrected himself. ¡°The room is radiation shielded, so before the hull was torn open, there wouldn¡¯t have been any cosmic ray spallation. But for the past eight million years, these chips have been exposed to deep space. How long the ship drifted out here before that, I can¡¯t even begin to guess.¡±

    ¡°That¡¯s¡­¡± Her mind raced. She didn¡¯t know what to say.

    Finally, she found her words again.

    ¡°I take it that means there¡¯s no chance of ever recovering any data from the ship?¡±

    ¡°I¡¯m afraid not,¡± Plav-tor-fel-mak confirmed. ¡°Not even a theoretical one. Entropy has long since erased everything they recorded here. The information has already been gone for millions of years. So no payday for us, eh?¡±This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

    ¡°Well, it¡¯s not like we were in this for the money anyway,¡± Bouchard said with a laugh, covering up her disappointment with forced joviality. It was a big setback to their plans, but not quite disastrous. They could still report their findings to the Terran Federation and hopefully collect some sort of finder¡¯s fee. But it was now doubtful that further exploration into the wreck would yield anything of value. It was one thing to expect to find artifacts to sell off when they thought the ship was a thousand years old, and another thing entirely when they were talking about eight million years¡ªor more. This was really archaeology on paleontological timescales.

    And as far as First Mate Bouchard knew, neither archaeologists nor paleontologists tended to have the means to live lives of luxury.

    <hr>

    As the team started to pack up their equipment in preparation for leaving the computer room, Bouchard swept her flashlight across the alien data center one final time. She didn¡¯t expect to find anything new that the team hadn¡¯t already discovered, but this was more about getting closure. They had invested so much emotion during their trek here, and now they had to return home empty-handed.

    The crew members took turns ferrying the equipment through the narrow access tube back to their staging area in the conference room. Gradually, the computer chamber was emptied, until she was the only one left. With a sense of reluctance, she positioned herself in the opening and started to drift forward, her mind transforming the long tunnel into a deep, dark chasm.

    Eventually, she reached the familiar conference room.

    ¡°You¡¯re the last one, ma¡¯am?¡± Yevgen Suwannarat asked as she entered through the doorway, concern evident in his voice. ¡°There¡¯s no one left behind you?¡±

    Bouchard shook her head inside her helmet, the action visible through the visor in the harsh light of the helmet-mounted lumen torch. She had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. Not again, she thought.

    ¡°We can¡¯t find Sawhney,¡± Suwannarat continued.

    ¡°He was right behind me when we entered the tunnel,¡± Est-mar-kort pointed out. ¡°Between me and the captain.¡±

    First Mate Bouchard turned around and drifted over to Captain Balmar, hovering in his usual corner of the room.

    ¡°Did you see anything?¡± she asked him.

    The captain stared back at her, his eyes vacant once again. There was no answer. Whatever he had seen in the shadows of the long corridor must have pushed his mind over the edge once more. Now, he was either unable or unwilling to communicate the experience with the rest of the crew.

    ¡°Alright,¡± she said, realizing Captain Balmar was less than useful in his current state. ¡°You know the drill, people.¡± She was exhausted from having to do the search-and-rescue maneuver again, and was sure the rest of the crew didn¡¯t like it any more than she did.

    Together with Mission Specialist Suwannarat, she again took point in the search. This time, they had one advantage over the last time a crew member had gone missing: they knew¡ªmore or less¡ªwhere Sawhney had gone astray. The long, dark access tunnel, with its many twists and turns, was something of a maze, but they knew he had entered it, and never emerged from it again. Meaning, finding him shouldn¡¯t be too difficult.

    About halfway down the shaft, they reached a junction point where two other access tunnels crossed the one they were using¡ªone going from left to right and the other from above to below their current level. Not that ¡°above¡± and ¡°below¡± really meant anything in the weightlessness of the wreck, Bouchard mused, but it was still easier to think in those terms when talking about directions relative to her own position. And besides, whoever had built the ship had clearly been using artificial gravity, and had designed the rooms and corridors of the vessel accordingly.

    As she floated into the middle of the junction, she called out to Sawhney on the radio, but once again, there was no response. Bouchard hadn¡¯t expected one¡ªthe tunnel walls had blocked radio communication with Murray when she had disappeared there earlier, and there was no reason to expect they wouldn¡¯t do the same thing this time. But it would still be irresponsible of her not to try.

    She waited in the junction for close to a minute, calling out to the missing navigator several more times. Every time, the result was the same: total and complete silence. Slowly, she turned around to let her flashlight shine into the dark crevices of the joining access tunnels. The one going from left to right seemed to be identical to the one she was in now. It was possible Sawhney could have entered it by mistake, and with the walls blocking radio signals, he would quickly have gotten lost in the darkness there.

    Deciding which direction to search was the harder question. There was always the danger she herself would become disoriented when leaving the area they were more familiar with. The shaft was narrow, dark, and looked identical in every direction.

    Not quite succeeding in making up her mind about where to go, the beam of her flashlight drifted to the access tunnel connecting from above. At first, she didn¡¯t notice anything out of the ordinary, but something begged her mind for attention as she swept the beam past the dark cavity in the ceiling. She doubled back to peer into it again.

    There was color inside the hole.

    Ever since they had first entered the wreck, the lack of color had been both a mystery and something of an oppressive presence that grew stronger and stronger the further into the gloomy depths of the wreck they had penetrated. With the discovery of the age of the ship, she now knew why everything inside it¡ªapart from the gleaming gold of the ubiquitous alien alloys¡ªwas either black or gray. Through the eons, every pigment onboard would have been broken down, leaving the ship and everything inside it a uniform gray color.

    But the color on the walls of the chasm in the ceiling was red. Blood red.

 Chapter 7 - 8 Hours Inside

    First Mate Bouchard maneuvered herself into position to better see inside the dark tunnel above while simultaneously calling for the attention of Mission Specialist Suwannarat. The narrow shaft made it difficult to position her eyes to see inside without blocking the tight beam of her flashlight. Dense, black shadows of her own body danced across the tunnel wall as she tried to get a clear view.

    Suddenly, a glint of something white caught her eye farther in. At first, her mind couldn¡¯t make sense of what she was looking at, but as she adjusted to the perspective, the horrific spectacle in front of her began to make sense.

    From seven meters inside the dark depths of the access shaft, hanging upside down, the frosted-over eyeballs of Navigator Karl Sawhney stared back at her with an accusing look. The glow from her flashlight glinted off his teeth, protruding from his skull in a macabre grin of death.

    Stuffed tightly inside the tunnel beside the severed head were his arms, legs, and torso, his intestines dangling weightlessly from his severed waist like a grotesque version of a child¡¯s balloon animal drifting in the wind. The entire gruesome scene was covered in crystallized, freeze-dried blood.

    What she couldn¡¯t find was his spacesuit.

    Bouchard''s head began to spin as her ears filled with the buzzing sound of an impending fainting spell. As she started salivating, she felt as if her tongue was swelling in her mouth. The darkness in the shaft seemed to close in on her vision, forming a tunnel of its own in her mind.

    From below, unseen arms grabbed at her feet, dragging her into the black pit. She tried to scream, but the only sound she could hear over the rushing hum of blood in her ears was the drumbeat of her racing heart, echoing inside the confines of her helmet. She attempted to kick her unseen assailant, but her legs refused to respond to her commands.

    Thirty seconds later, she blinked, staring into the lumen torch on top of Suwannarat¡¯s helmet. She shook her head, trying to clear it of the terror that had overtaken her.

    ¡°Are you there, Laura?¡± the mission specialist asked. ¡°For a second, I thought we¡¯d lost you.¡±

    ¡°I¡¯m fine,¡± Bouchard muttered, embarrassed now, knowing she had been on the verge of going down the same path as the captain had before.

    ¡°What did you see?¡±

    ¡°Sawhney,¡± she replied with a sigh. ¡°He¡¯s been¡­ cut into pieces. I can¡¯t describe it. It¡¯s like something butchered him just for the fun of it. And his spacesuit is missing. Whatever did that to him was smart enough to figure out how to undress him. Why would they even do that?¡±

    Mission Specialist Suwannarat grabbed the edges of the topside access shaft and slowly¡ªreluctantly¡ªmaneuvered himself into position to enter it. The scene that met him was just as Bouchard had described. Well, worse, actually, Suwannarat thought. He could understand why the first mate had avoided describing the details.

    He quickly backed out, returning down to the horizontal tunnel where the first mate was waiting, not wanting to leave her alone for longer than necessary.

    ¡°He¡¯s pretty well wedged in there, I think. He¡¯s not floating around. Someone¡ªor something¡ªstuffed him in there on purpose,¡± Suwannarat said. ¡°Getting him out isn¡¯t going to be easy.¡±

    ¡°Or safe,¡± Bouchard added. ¡°No, we¡¯re not retrieving the body. Not now, at least. It¡¯s not safe. The assumption we¡¯ve been operating under¡ªthat everything we thought we saw or felt was just a manifestation of our imaginations¡ªwas clearly wrong. We¡¯re not alone here, and I¡¯m not going to risk any more of the crew just to bring his body back. Let¡¯s mark the location and let the Sunguard deal with it later.¡±

    Suwannarat nodded inside his helmet. ¡°We¡¯re abandoning the expedition, then?¡± he said, relief evident in his voice.

    ¡°I see no other choice,¡± First Mate Bouchard replied. ¡°There¡¯s nothing here of value¡ªwe know that now. The data that was once here has been gone for millions of years, the machines we¡¯ve found are just high-tech fossils, and whoever built this ship didn¡¯t seem interested in collecting precious metals or other materials of value. There¡¯s nothing here for us to recover. Let¡¯s cut our losses and go home.¡±

    <hr>

    The remaining crew stared at her in silence through their helmet visors. What was there to say? Bouchard had explained their macabre find and her decision to leave the body of Navigator Sawhney behind.

    ¡°We will return to Peretti''s Legacy and report everything we¡¯ve found to the Terran Federation,¡± she told the waiting crew. ¡°I¡¯m sorry it came to this, but I see no other choice.¡±

    None of her team members voiced any opposition to her decision. Still, she glanced at Captain Balmar, hoping to get his support, but once again, he just stared back at her in total silence. She shrugged. The time for pretending the captain was in charge had passed. There was no longer any reason to try to protect his dignity by feigning deference to him. Now, the crew looked to her for leadership.

    ¡°I want to try to contact the Legacy as soon as possible,¡± she continued. ¡°If we return to the computer room, we can probably get a radio signal out through the hull breach there. That way, Torque can relay our findings to the Federation half a day earlier instead of having to wait for us to come onboard first. Knowing we¡¯re not alone here on the derelict, I think we all agree time is of the essence. While going back to the computer chamber first will cost us an additional hour, it will let the Sunguard get here much quicker. Best case scenario, they can even evacuate us directly through the hull breach there, sparing us the journey back through the wreck to reach the Legacy.¡±If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.

    The last part sealed the deal for the crew. Not having to navigate the dark maze toward the stern of the ship again¡ªespecially with the knowledge their unseen assailants could be lying in wait in the shadows along the way¡ªmade them eager to return to the computer room, despite the need to pass through the junction where they had found Sawhney¡¯s broken body to get there.

    Trudging back through the dark access tunnel turned out to be both better and worse than she had expected. Knowing she had to go back into the shadows and float past the place where the navigator¡¯s remains were wedged into the ceiling almost made her body refuse to obey. But with the entire team in tow, it wasn¡¯t so bad once they got going.

    As she emerged from the narrow shaft into the computer chamber for the third time that day, her heart leaped with joy. Seeing the starry sky beyond the tear in the hull felt like a lifeline to her. Out there, among the pinpoints of light littering the blackness like diamonds on a velvet fabric, was all she had ever called home. The stars were a tangible connection to civilization, to rescue, and to safety.

    Not wanting to waste any time, she directed her maneuvering thrusters to move her through the breach, into space outside the derelict. Line of sight was needed to communicate with Peretti''s Legacy. The comm equipment inside her suit was not remotely strong enough to contact the Terran Federation directly, and even if it had been, sending a radio signal to the Sunguard base on Aurora, 39 AU sunward, would take more than five hours. The only possible way to get in touch with the outside world was through the Legacy, which could relay the message immediately through its hyperspace portal.

    But where was her ship? First Mate Bouchard turned around, not finding it in the expected position in the sky. A kilometer away, Peretti''s Legacy would be little more than the size of her thumb on an outstretched arm, but it should still be easy enough to spot against the background of space.

    She had almost turned a half circle when she suddenly saw it, moving across the sky from behind the rim of the derelict. It looked much larger than she had expected. What was Torque thinking, taking the ship this deep inside the debris field surrounding the wreck?

    Then she realized the Legacy was tumbling in a way that made it clear the intelligent computer was not in control of its motions. The port side of the ship was venting atmosphere, causing it to spin uncontrollably. If the ship was this deep within the debris field now, the initial damage to it must have happened while her team was out of radio contact with it during their hazardous trek through the maze of corridors inside the wreck. Chances were, the Legacy had been lost for hours, and they just didn¡¯t know until now. She was haunted by the thought of Kol suffocating to death, completely cut off from her friends and colleagues, alone in a ship that had turned into a metal coffin.

    In a moment that seared itself into her retinas, one of the larger pieces that had broken off from the derelict suddenly slammed into the bridge of Peretti''s Legacy, tearing it apart in a silent shower of broken metal. The following explosion hurled pieces of her ship across the void. And with the certainty only mathematics could provide, Newton¡¯s first law guaranteed the remains of it would forever be beyond their reach, as the ship disappeared into the interplanetary night.

    Not knowing what was happening or why, she still understood the implication: Without the Legacy, it was no longer possible to contact the outside world. With a sinking feeling, Bouchard realized they would never have the means to leave the derelict. Eventually, when their spare oxygen canisters ran out, the wreck would become their grave.

    ¡°What was that?¡± Mission Specialist Suwannarat¡¯s strong voice broke through her thoughts. ¡°What happened?¡±

    ¡°The Legacy¡­¡± she whispered into her microphone. ¡°Torque, and Kol. They¡¯re gone.¡±

    Only stunned silence met her in response.

    Finally, Suwannarat composed himself. ¡°What do you mean, gone?¡± he asked, despite knowing all too well what she had meant.

    ¡°It drifted too far inside the debris field,¡± Bouchard tried to explain, not quite knowing herself what had really happened. ¡°I don¡¯t know why. There was a collision, and it¡¯s¡­ it¡¯s just gone. They¡¯re both gone.¡±

    When she returned through the hull breach into the computer room, she could see on the faces of her crew that she wasn¡¯t the only one who had realized the implication of what had transpired. Fear, bordering on panic, was evident among the women and men of her team.

    ¡°What¡¯s the plan, ma¡¯am?¡± Plav-tor-fel-mak asked, his voice quivering as he spoke the words, as if afraid to hear her response.

    She stayed silent for a few seconds, composing herself before answering.

    ¡°We¡¯re not giving up,¡± she said. ¡°We¡¯ve only explored half the ship yet. Maybe there¡¯s something we can find closer to the bow we can use to help us escape. We saw the bridge in that direction from the outside, before we entered the wreck. Perhaps we can find some kind of communications equipment there, or maybe laser arrays we can jury-rig to contact the Sunguard directly with.¡±

    It was all a lie, of course. Aware of the age of the derelict now, she knew all too well any useful technology onboard had turned to dust millions of years ago.

    ¡°It¡¯s a good plan, ma¡¯am, bless your head,¡± the ground sample specialist responded. ¡°It¡¯s a big ship. I¡¯m sure we¡¯ll find what we need eventually.¡±

    Looking into the eyes of the small Kelar man, First Mate Bouchard knew he was merely sharing in her lie for the benefit of the rest of the crew. She nodded almost imperceptibly, silently thanking Plav-tor-fel-mak for his support. Even though all hope was now lost, there was no need for the crew to destroy themselves in a rage of panic. For now, keeping the rest of the team in the dark about the bleakness of their situation was the right way to go.

    Yes, everything onboard the ship had turned to dust millions of years ago, she thought. And yet, something was out there now, killing her crew.

 Chapter 8 - 9 Hours Inside

    Getting to the bridge of the derelict turned out to be much harder than expected. The midsection of the ship was more heavily damaged than the better-protected stern. After traveling for the better part of an hour, the team was confronted with an impassable mess of sharp, tangled metal beams interspersed with large pieces of furniture jammed between them. It was hard to fathom what kind of accident could have created such a perfectly blocked passageway. However, First Mate Bouchard knew that time and vibrations could craft structures so complex they seemed almost man-made.

    With their dwindling oxygen supply, she was reluctant to backtrack, but after twenty minutes of trying to remove enough material from the corridor to allow them to pass through, she gave up. The work was simply too slow in the microgravity of the ancient ship, the darkness and the dangers lurking in it too distracting, and the risk of one of her crew members ripping their suit too great. Bouchard realized going back was their only option.

    An hour later, the team was floating in the last junction they had passed through before going down the wrong path. This presented them with a problem: if the next corridor was also blocked, they might lose too much time to even have a chance of reaching the bridge before they ran out of oxygen. She was reluctant to do so, but under the circumstances, the safest way to move forward was to split up.

    The junction forked into four narrow passageways, one of which they had already explored. With the captain still in a near-catatonic state, he would be of no help surveying the corridors, and she didn¡¯t want to leave him alone in the darkness of the intersection. That meant someone on the team would have to stay with him, leaving four team members¡ªincluding herself¡ªfree to look for a passage they could use.

    Four crew members going down three corridors meant two of them would have to go alone into the tunnels.

    ¡°Est-mar-kort, I want you to stay with the captain,¡± she said.

    The young woman nodded with relief. ¡°Yes, ma¡¯am, bless your hair,¡± she acknowledged.

    ¡°I will go alone into the second passageway,¡± Bouchard continued. ¡°Suwannarat will take the third.¡±

    The mission specialist returned a somber nod, not feeling the need to say anything. He did not look forward to going alone into the shadows ahead.

    ¡°Plav-tor-fel-mak and Murray, you¡¯ll go together into the fourth entrance.¡±

    With the team members assigned to their respective tasks, the next problem was how to maintain communication.

    ¡°The walls of the corridors will block radio transmission between the teams,¡± she explained. ¡°We won¡¯t be able to talk once inside, so I want everyone back here in thirty minutes to report their findings. We¡¯ll then decide what to do next: either go down the most promising tunnel together or do another round of separate exploration. And most important of all¡ªstay safe. If you encounter any trouble, head back to the junction immediately. Once you return, there will be at least three of you waiting here together.¡±

    <hr>

    No, Mission Specialist Yevgen Suwannarat did not enjoy being alone in the dark tunnel. Fifty meters in, the passageway began to fill with debris again, making it increasingly difficult to navigate the farther he went. Briefly, he considered giving up and returning to the junction, but a quick glance at his watch told him he had only spent ten minutes traversing the passage. It wouldn¡¯t do to waste what little time they had left by giving up so easily.

    Luckily, the metal beams here weren¡¯t the razor-sharp kind that had littered the blockage in the first corridor. Crawling between them wasn¡¯t a recipe for a quick death. Well, perhaps crawling wasn¡¯t the right word in microgravity¡ªwith the flashlight held in a steady grip in his left hand, he used his right to grab the beam in front of him, propelling himself forward through the maze. Then he grabbed the next beam, and the next, repeating the process. But there were a lot of them, and time after time he could feel the beams scrape against his spacesuit as he squeezed his body between them, hoping the corridor on the other side would be less obstructed.

    The shadows from his flashlight, cast from one beam to the next, made the tangled web of metal bars seem like he was drifting through a dense forest at night. In the darkness beyond the flashlight¡¯s reach, he half expected to see a pair of eyes suddenly open, their retinas glowing from reflected light as they stared back at him with malice.If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

    It was almost twenty minutes into his journey when he suddenly realized something was very wrong.

    In his haste to move forward as far as possible within the time limit the first mate had set, he had stopped looking at the beams he was holding. There was always one or more within reach, and the process of extending his hand to grab one and then push forward had become almost routine.

    Only, what he now held onto with his right hand was not a metal beam.

    Through his spacesuit glove, the object felt as hard as metal, but the surface wasn¡¯t like the smoothly polished beams he had been gripping. Instead, his fingers sensed knotty protrusions¡ªjoints, maybe...

    Quickly, he withdrew his hand, the image of unseen alien claws reaching out to grab his wrist forcing itself into his mind. If someone¡ªor something¡ªwas out there, lying in wait in the shadows, ready to strike at him, and he had just alerted it to his presence by grabbing its limb, he would soon find out for himself what had mutilated Sawhney.

    Alone in the darkness of the narrow tunnel, he screamed at the top of his lungs. But no one would hear him. The dread of the moment was his and his alone, as his entire world began and ended with the flashlight he carried. Beyond it was only the night, and the unspoken terrors it held.

    Breathe, Yevgen, he thought. Just breathe.

    The moment, filled with horrors he could only imagine, stretched into seconds. And as the seconds accumulated, he realized he was still alive.

    Slowly, still fearing something might pounce on him from the darkness, he turned the flashlight toward the thing he had grabbed, half expecting to see the snarling face of an unseen monster staring back at him.

    What he found was almost as frightening.

    Hovering among the beams was an arm, its pale skin dry as parchment, with six elongated fingers that looked like spider legs from the underworld. Each digit was divided by four joints, and every one ended in a sharp claw. The arm, severed at the elbow, didn¡¯t appear to contain any muscle tissue. All he could see were fragments of desiccated skin stretched over dry sinew and bone.

    <hr>

    When Suwannarat returned to the junction, the two other teams were already there, waiting for him. Both teams had encountered impassable blockages in their corridors, just like the one they had found in the first passageway, and had decided to abandon their exploration early.

    The mummified hand the mission specialist had brought with him understandably caused some excitement among the crew. Plav-tor-fel-mak, in particular, took an interest in the find, but with their dwindling oxygen supply looming over them like a space-age noose, studying it would have to wait. For now, finding a way past the barriers was their top priority.

    The disappointing news from the scouting expeditions forced First Mate Bouchard to think hard about their options. They could double back even farther, hoping one of the other junctions they had previously passed would lead them around the blocked portions of the ship.

    She made a few quick calculations in her head. With no way of knowing the exact locations of the junctions or the difficulty of navigating the corridors, her estimates were little more than educated guesses. But she quickly realized that even the best-case scenario meant they¡¯d have, at most, an even chance of reaching the bridge while still breathing.

    That left Suwannarat¡¯s maze of metal beams as their only practical choice, but it was an option she was reluctant to take. The mission specialist hadn¡¯t managed to reach the end of the rubble before time had forced him to turn back, and there was no way to know what lay beyond it. Chances were, if the other three passageways were blocked, his would be too. Bouchard was starting to feel that the debris wedged into the other corridors hadn¡¯t collected there by chance. All three blockages were too neat¡ªthe large pieces of furniture interwoven too intricately with the metal framework, and the serrated beams wedged among them too closely resembling a chevaux-de-frise for her comfort. The piles of rubble looked more like beaver dams than detritus left by a passing storm.

    If the obstructions weren¡¯t natural, and all three corridors they had investigated so far were blocked, it wasn¡¯t unreasonable to guess that the fourth passageway would be cut off as well¡ªmaking it a huge gamble to proceed that way.

    Then there was the matter of the desiccated hand Suwannarat had found in the tunnel. Not only would crawling through the maze mean they might discover more body parts along the way¡ªsomething she didn¡¯t relish in their fragile state of mind¡ªbut she also understood the severed arm clearly hadn¡¯t ended up there by accident. The clean cut at the elbow made that much clear. The thought of encountering whatever had severed the alien limb inside the labyrinthine tangle of metal girders filled her with dread.

    Still, despite the myriad downsides, taking a chance on Suwannarat¡¯s tunnel was a better option than backtracking and risking death by suffocation before they even reached the bridge. Overwhelmed by fatigue and fear, she gathered the crew and, using the mission specialist¡¯s description for guidance, led them into the darkness of the maze ahead.

 Chapter 9 - 11 Hours Inside

    The slow crawl through the debris-filled passageway turned out to be much less eventful than Bouchard had feared. The six crew members encountered neither alien body parts nor lurking monsters hiding in the dark. About half an hour after entering the network of interlocked girders, they emerged into a small chamber mostly devoid of floating wreckage. Like every other room they had seen on the ship, it was completely bereft of markings; its floor, ceiling, and walls were composed of the same decrepit, dull, and broken metal plates they had been gliding past for what felt like an eternity.

    And just as First Mate Bouchard had feared, the corridor leading out of the chamber was blocked, in the same way as the three hallways they had previously explored.

    In the narrow beam of her flashlight, it was difficult to get a clear view of the barricade, as it stretched out into the darkness. She floated along, trying to map it in her mind. It was too late to turn back now. If they did, they would have to retrace their steps through two junctions, and they didn¡¯t have enough oxygen to spare for that. Knowing what she now did, she strongly suspected that any other passageways they might find would also be blocked. Their progress toward the bridge was being deliberately hindered.

    A few minutes into examining the blockage, she realized that her earlier disappointment at seeing the other corridors closed off had led her to make assumptions she shouldn''t have. In the far corner of the room, where the barricade met the wall, there appeared to be an opening in the debris¡ªor at least a less dense collection of metal beams and broken chairs. It wasn¡¯t large enough to allow the team to pass through safely, but it was a start. They would need to remove any sharp pieces of metal sticking out to ensure nothing tore their spacesuits as they squeezed through. She glanced at her watch. Thirty minutes, no more, she thought. We need to get this done in thirty minutes.

    She grabbed one of the girders, testing how firmly it was wedged into the wreckage. It was about twenty centimeters wide, made from a half-centimeter-thick layer of metal curved into an I-shape, punctured by regularly spaced holes the size of her fingers, its surface dulled by millions of years of exposure to space.

    Her heart skipped a beat when the light from her head-mounted lumen torch suddenly reflected off a gleaming scratch on the otherwise drab metal.

    Someone¡ªor something¡ªhad passed through here recently, moving the debris to make a way through the barricade and scraping the beams in the process.

    <hr>

    The room was not wide enough to allow the entire crew to safely work on removing the sharp pieces of metal that blocked their way. Instead, First Mate Bouchard ordered the larger Terran team members to take turns clearing the barricade, making sure they didn¡¯t exhaust themselves, while the two smaller Kelar stayed at the back of the room. She didn¡¯t even bother trying to get Captain Balmar to help with the work.

    Plav-tor-fel-mak, not keen on sitting idle while the clock ticked toward their death, decided to take a closer look at the hand Suwannarat had retrieved. The wreck¡¯s immense age ensured there would be nothing on the bridge that could offer a means to escape their impending doom. Still, having something to do kept his thoughts away from the tightening grip of their limited oxygen supply.

    Truth be told, he was somewhat offended by being sidelined this way. Strength scaled with the square of the muscle diameter, not with a person¡¯s height; besides, Kelar muscle fibers were stronger than Terran ones anyway. In the cramped space they were working in, the smaller Kelar would have been a better choice, he thought.

    But it was all futile. Everything they had been doing since the destruction of the Legacy had been a scam. Keeping morale up until the end was more important than being efficient, so Plav-tor-fel-mak chose not to press the issue and went to work examining the dry limb.

    The hand itself was not that different from what one would expect. It was longer and thinner, with more joints than even a Terran hand, but otherwise, its design was pretty standard. The lack of muscle tissue was curious¡ªit did not look like the flesh had rotted away, but as if it had never been there in the first place. Apparently, motion had been provided solely by the strong ribbons of sinew crisscrossing the ancient bones. He understood why Suwannarat had found it horrifying when he first saw it illuminated by his flashlight. But here, Plav-tor-fel-mak thought, there was a certain beauty to it, if you could ignore the decay it had gone through.

    He saw no feasible way of determining the limb¡¯s age. If it was from the original crew of the ship, it was at least eight million years old, mummified rather than fossilized by the freezing vacuum of deep space. Given the vast time spans involved, carbon dating would be useless¡ªonce all the carbon-14 in the sample had decayed into nitrogen, the natural radioactive clock would have stopped ticking. On the other hand, perhaps the wreck had been visited before, by another crew trying to piece together its secrets. Another crew that had encountered whatever had cut Sawhney into pieces.

    Absent-mindedly, he started to carve a few shavings from the desiccated hand, retrieved the portable mass spectrometer he always carried from his belt, and placed the fragments into its analysis slot.If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

    A couple of minutes later, when the first results started to show up on the screen, the ¡°sand¡± they had found in the alien pantry suddenly made perfect sense.

    Captain Balmar had been right all along. The containers had indeed, in times long gone, contained food for the crew of the vessel. Over the eons, the food had decayed, desiccated, and succumbed to thermal erosion, reducing it to nothing more than dust. But it had not been food in any sense he was accustomed to imagining.

    By now, the Terran Federation had found life on literally hundreds of worlds. Most of them did not harbor any intelligent species, of course, but life was still life. Wherever scientists looked¡ªin the frozen wastes of subzero desert planets, above the hellish sulfur cloudscapes of pyrean worlds, deep in the oceans of ice-covered moons, and inside the gargantuan storms of gas giants¡ªlife was found. Wherever life could take hold¡ªand even in places where it seemingly shouldn¡¯t¡ªit found a way to appear.

    If, Plav-tor-fel-mak mused, the universe had¡ªas some people believed¡ªbeen created by a higher power, that deity must surely have been a god of life, because life, and life in abundance, was everywhere to be found. Not that he or anyone else on the crew of Peretti''s Legacy believed in such things, he thought with a dismissive smirk. Still, he was quite familiar with the concept of faith. More than one of his relatives back on Kelar had been priests of Nam-kal-kel-kul-el, The-One-Who-Is-and-Was-and-Always-Will-Be.

    In his mind, Plav-tor-fel-mak almost added, ¡°bless His name,¡± but caught himself at the last moment. Even the bleakness of their future, trapped as they were in the shadows of the derelict ship, wasn¡¯t enough to make him feign belief in something he didn¡¯t truly hold. He was not that hypocritical.

    Never mind why life was everywhere, he thought, as he continued his musings while he waited for the rest of the crew to clear the way through the debris. The important fact was this: life was always carbon-based. Always, and everywhere.

    Except the eight million¡ªor more¡ªyear-old arm he was holding in his hands was silicon-based.

    The history of life in the universe had just been rewritten.

    <hr>

    Thirty-five minutes later, the hole in the barricade had been opened wide enough to allow a person to get through. The work had been both slower and harder than First Mate Bouchard had wanted, wasting more of their precious time and oxygen than they could afford. Still, they didn¡¯t have a choice unless they simply wanted to give up and die where they were.

    Carrying his trusty flashlight, Mission Specialist Suwannarat was the first to enter the unknown space beyond the debris blocking the corridor. After Captain Balmar, he was the largest and best-trained member of the crew, and Bouchard wanted to stack the odds in their favor. She couldn¡¯t forget the scratch marks she had seen earlier¡ªthe telltale signs that the thing or person stalking them had been through here not long before they arrived. Letting their most physically impressive team member take point was the logical choice.

    She followed right behind him, keeping a close eye on him as he emerged from the path through the blockage. In the distance, she could see the flicker of his flashlight dancing across the gray wall panels.

    ¡°It¡¯s just more of the same,¡± he said over the radio. ¡°I don¡¯t think this place was chosen for any particular reason. For whoever blocked off this part of the ship, this place must have just been as good a place as any to do it.¡±

    ¡°Yeah, I figured as much,¡± she responded. ¡°It fits the pattern we¡¯ve seen. The barriers are makeshift, made from whatever they found lying around. I don¡¯t think they had much time to raise them, and even less time to make grand plans for where to place them.¡±

    ¡°There¡¯s lots of debris ahead,¡± Suwannarat continued. ¡°But I don¡¯t see any more blockages. I think it¡¯s a viable path forward.¡±

    Forward, yes, but there¡¯s no telling what we¡¯ll encounter before we reach the bridge, Bouchard thought. In the darkness, they could see no further than the reach of their flashlights.

    ¡°There is some¡ª¡±

    Mission Specialist Suwannarat did not finish the sentence. Instead, his last words turned into an agonized scream that filled the suit radios of the rest of the team, echoing through their helmets with promises of untold horrors ahead.

    First Mate Bouchard quickly swept her flashlight in Suwannarat¡¯s direction, trying to see what had happened to him. But no matter where she looked, she couldn¡¯t see him.

    Her heart pounding in her chest, she turned off her flashlight and hunkered down within the debris, trying to make herself as small as possible. Whatever was out there was close now, but in the vacuum, she would never hear it. And as the permanent night inside the derelict ship encased her like a cocoon of death, she imagined Suwannarat¡¯s assailant slowly creeping toward her, reaching for her through the darkness, always just out of sight.

    She lay there for several minutes, shaking like a leaf from the shock of adrenaline. Terror coursed through her body like electricity, tightening her stomach into a Gordian knot she feared she would never untangle. Gradually, she became aware that she had not even called out for Suwannarat. Perhaps he was floating out there in the darkness right now, unable to call for help, just waiting to hear her reassuring voice one more time, to feel one final connection to friends and colleagues before life ebbed out of him.

    And she had failed him.

    She took a deep breath in preparation for forcing herself to shout his name. But as the air filled the recesses of her lungs, she paused and let it out again.

    Finding herself unable to offer him even her own voice as solace, she collapsed in despair and started to cry. It was the soft, silent whimper of a woman who had lost herself and, in doing so, betrayed those who had put their trust in her.

 Chapter 10 - 13 Hours Inside

    She could see it in their eyes. The crew no longer looked at her the same way they had before. It wasn¡¯t quite the look of disappointment she had expected, but rather a loss of hope. She had promised to bring them to the bridge, and now they were no longer certain of that outcome.

    First Mate Bouchard stood at the center of the dwindling crew of Peretti''s Legacy, huddled together as they tried to reach a consensus on how to proceed. She no longer had the energy to take command of the situation. From now on, whatever they chose to do would be a group decision.

    She had stayed hidden in the debris for what seemed like an eternity before slowly crawling back to the room where the rest of the crew was waiting. Now, they faced an impossible choice: stay in the room until their oxygen supply ran out, or move forward into the darkness beyond, where their teammate had just disappeared¡ªand where they now knew their unknown assailant was waiting for them.

    It was Plav-tor-fel-mak who broke the stalemate.

    ¡°If we stay, death is certain. We only have a couple of hours of oxygen left now,¡± he said, his voice filled with sorrow. ¡°If we go forward, we¡­¡±

    His voice quivered.

    ¡°If we go forward, we risk death at the hands of whatever is waiting for us out there,¡± he continued. ¡°I don¡¯t want to meet whatever it is that took Sawhney and Suwannarat. But if we go forward, we still have a chance to survive. And if we don¡¯t, at least our deaths will be swift.¡±

    The group talked it over for a few more minutes, but Plav-tor-fel-mak¡¯s statement left a lasting impression, and in the end, the decision was unanimous: they would continue toward the bridge.

    Crawling through the opening in the barricade, the five remaining crew members were consumed with dread. Ahead of them was only darkness¡ªdarkness, and their unseen enemy hiding within it. It seemed to them as if the strength of their flashlights had suddenly waned, as the shadows closed in on them from all directions.

    When the entire team had exited on the other side, they took a moment to gather themselves before continuing down the corridor. Slowly, they turned around, letting the beams of their lights illuminate the dark corners of the passageway, searching for signs of trouble.

    But there was no one there. And of Mission Specialist Suwannarat, they could find no trace.

    Chances were, Bouchard thought, his mutilated body was crammed into some small shaft or tunnel, just like the one where they had previously found Sawhney.

    Not wanting to delay the inevitable any longer, the group adjusted their maneuvering thrusters to drift in silence further along the corridor. The anticlimax of the uneventful journey was emotionally exhausting¡ªafter having spent the past half hour imagining the horrors that awaited them on the other side, finding none of them there allowed the team members, for the first time in hours, the luxury of feeling again.

    And with those feelings came sorrow, hopelessness, and unrelenting fatigue. They had been exploring the derelict for close to fourteen hours. By now, most of the crew had been awake for over a day. Bouchard, her head pounding from a piercing headache, desperately wanted to give up and let the darkness claim her forever. But peer pressure kept her going, despite everything.

    One by one, they passed an endless array of doors, openings to rooms whose purposes they could only imagine. None of them contained anything of value anymore. At one time, Bouchard thought, they might have been laboratories, medical clinics, or entertainment centers. In her imagination, she could hear the laughter of the original crew echoing between the dead walls. Now, all the rooms looked the same: dreary, decaying gray walls, choked with floating gray chairs, tables, cabinets, and jagged pieces of broken metal, all covered by a thin layer of gray dust. All in utter and complete silence.

    Gray. Her entire world was colorless, until the relentless gray dissolved into black at the edge of her flashlight¡¯s beam.

    The scream shook her to her core, a piercing, almost inhuman shriek that filled her ears and heart with terror. It took Bouchard a second to realize she was the one screaming.

    Inside one of the side rooms, among the shadows of the debris blocking the doorway, she had seen a face.

    Someone bumped into her from behind, and her flashlight went spinning. Now, the only light she had left was the lumen torch on top of her helmet. She froze in place, incapable of turning toward the door to look for the apparition she had seen, while equally unable to rotate and turn her back on it.Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

    ¡°Laura¡­¡± Tech Specialist Murray said over the radio. ¡°Sorry, you scared me. I didn¡¯t mean to hit you that hard.¡±

    ¡°Here,¡± Est-mar-kort interjected and handed Bouchard back her lost flashlight. ¡°What happened?¡±

    First Mate Bouchard was still trying to compose herself. Then, with the flashlight back in her hand, she finally turned back toward the doorway.

    ¡°I saw something in there,¡± she said, her voice hoarse with dread. ¡°Someone. I saw a face staring at me from in there,¡± she continued, indicating the darkness beyond the debris.

    ¡°Suwannarat?¡± Murray asked, a mix of hope and horror in her voice.

    No, it had not been Yevgen, Bouchard thought. The face that had looked at her from the shadows had been white and skeletal, with an elongated head, dead eyes set in deep, dark sockets, and sharp teeth protruding from dry lips.

    ¡°No,¡± she replied. ¡°It was¡­¡±

    She paused as she searched the debris with her flashlight, steeling herself for fear of seeing the horrific face again.

    ¡°No,¡± she said, starting over in her attempt to explain what she had seen. ¡°I think it was one of the aliens, the same ones that left behind the arm.¡±

    That caught the attention of Plav-tor-fel-mak. Slowly, he drifted up to hover beside her, the beam of his flashlight joining hers as they searched the floating debris together.

    There it was again. Drifting inside the room, much further in than it had been when she first saw it, was a body. To Bouchard, it looked like a walking skeleton, its bones covered with pale white skin, without even a trace of muscles. It was tall, perhaps two or two and a half meters in length, and rotated slowly in the weightlessness of the derelict. Unblinking eyes set deep in its nightmarish face stared back at the crew from the shadows, like death itself gazing at them from the abyss.

    ¡°Yeah, it looks the same,¡± Plav-tor-fel-mak confirmed. Any other time, he would have insisted they clear the entrance of debris so they could investigate the corpse. With no recoverable technology to be found on the ship, studying the desiccated bodies its crew had left behind was now the only way they had of learning about the origins of the wreck.

    But time was running out. He glanced at his oxygen meter. Three hours and twenty minutes left to live. He guessed some of his teammates had even less time, as they were larger than him and had worked harder clearing the barricade.

    No, the alien body, seemingly perfectly preserved in the cold vacuum of the derelict¡ªand the scientific find of a lifetime¡ªwould have to wait.

    Slowly, the team moved on, their flashlight beams shaky from adrenaline as they searched the darkness ahead for unknown threats.

    <hr>

    He stared in silence at the alien machinery floating inside the room in front of him¡ªthe same type of broken machinery they had encountered throughout the ship, its constituent alloys gleaming like silver and gold in the beam of his flashlight.

    It wasn¡¯t fair, Plav-tor-fel-mak thought. The irony of it all was almost delicious in its depressing absurdity. Despite the deadline imposed by their dwindling oxygen supplies, he hadn¡¯t been able to stop himself from taking a few more samples along the way. And now he wished he never had.

    ¡°Laura,¡± he said to the first mate. ¡°Do you remember how we first decided to explore the wreck before reporting it to the Terran Federation, hoping we¡¯d find something of value here to sell off first?¡±

    In any other situation, the question would have been purely rhetorical. But to Plav-tor-fel-mak, it felt like an eternity since they had departed Peretti''s Legacy. Their experiences before entering the derelict were now part of another world, like memories belonging to a different reality. He had to actively remind himself that he had had a life before the eternal darkness of the wreck.

    Bouchard nodded but said nothing.

    ¡°We went deeper and deeper into the ship, trying to find something¡ªanything¡ªof value. But we found nothing. No technology or information to salvage. No valuable materials to sell on the black market. And now that search has sealed our fate.¡±

    Again, she nodded, too tired to even respond.

    ¡°And you know the broken machinery we¡¯ve seen everywhere? The ones made from the alien alloys that we¡¯ve strained to push past the entire time we¡¯ve been here?¡±

    ¡°Those alloys¡­ We were wrong about them,¡± he continued. ¡°They aren¡¯t just alloys¡ªthey¡¯re really gold. Chemically pure gold-197 and platinum-195. We¡¯ve been floating past thousands upon thousands of tons of precious metals since we first set foot inside the wreck.¡±

    Slowly, Laura Bouchard turned to face him, despair evident on her tired face. Still, she said nothing, and her expression betrayed no reaction to what Plav-tor-fel-mak had just told her.

    ¡°We were so focused on finding valuable ornaments or jewelry¡ªtrinkets we could plunder¡ªthat we ignored the mundane, never even imagining the aliens would use actual gold to build their machines.¡±

    Turning around to leave the treasure trove inside the room, they saw Captain Balmar had floated up to where they were hovering.

    ¡°Captain,¡± Plav-tor-fel-mak greeted him. ¡°How are you feeling?¡±

    The Jerrassian still didn¡¯t reply. His eyes were fixed on the gold inside the room, his motions slow, as if in a trance. When the two left the doorway to rejoin the rest of the crew, the captain stayed behind, unable to take his gaze off the riches in front of him.

    When the rest of the team departed from the area for yet another leap forward toward the bridge, none of them even bothered to go back to retrieve the husk of their former leader. The last anyone ever saw of Captain Balmar, he was hovering in the distance at the edge of their vision, alone in a room filled with more gold than he could ever have dreamed of, as the darkness of the derelict ship closed in on him.

 Chapter 11 - 15 Hours Inside

    They had drifted to the back of the line as the crew slowly made progress toward the bridge.

    ¡°You should have told us earlier,¡± First Mate Bouchard said to the small Kelar floating alongside her. ¡°If we had known, we¡¯d all be sitting on a beach somewhere now, sipping drinks in the sun instead of being trapped in this dark hell.¡±

    Plav-tor-fel-mak bristled at the accusation. He had observed her behavior toward the two Kelar crew members throughout the expedition. The sting of being overlooked when she assigned tasks at the barricade earlier still lingered in his mind.

    ¡°How could I have known?¡± he replied, angry at once again being singled out. She probably just doesn¡¯t like Kelar, he thought, despite knowing deep down it wasn¡¯t true. Yet Plav-tor-fel-mak felt the crew had always snickered behind his back, mocking his keen eye for detail and his appreciation of beauty.

    ¡°Maybe you did know and just didn¡¯t tell us,¡± Bouchard said. She knew the accusation wasn¡¯t true. She just didn¡¯t care.

    ¡°Perhaps you just wanted all the gold for yourself,¡± she concluded, savoring the power of putting the little lizard in his place. The deeper they ventured into the wreck, the more her control over the situation had slipped away. But now, she had discovered a way to reclaim some of that power, even if only for a fleeting moment.

    Bouchard had never had any problems with the Kelar ground sample specialist or any of her Kelar crew members, for that matter. She had always appreciated their eye for beauty in the finer things in life. But now, in the oppressive shadows of the ship, she was starting to see them in a different light, their dark eyes betraying thoughts she could not fully comprehend. Thinking back on the events of the past day, she couldn¡¯t really see how they had contributed to the expedition in any meaningful way. At the barricade earlier, Plav-tor-fel-mak hadn¡¯t helped at all¡ªhe had just stayed out of the way, letting the Terran crew do all the hard work.

    ¡°I don¡¯t know what¡ª¡± she started to say, but Plav-tor-fel-mak would never learn the end of the sentence, as the first mate¡¯s voice through the radio was replaced with a sickly gurgling sound that filled him with dread. In that moment, the terrors of the night had returned to claim their prize.

    It all happened so fast. From the shadows of an adjacent room, something had struck Bouchard. All Plav-tor-fel-mak had time to see was that it was tall, thin, and white, but beyond that, it was all a blur. With a single stroke, it had severed First Mate Bouchard in two, her head and torso now drifting away from her legs in the weightlessness of the wreck, blood bubbling from her waist as it simultaneously boiled and froze in the cold vacuum of the ship.

    Drifting three meters in front of them, Murray and Est-mar-kort had not noticed the attack. Plav-tor-fel-mak and Bouchard had been on their interpersonal comm circuit, and the darkness of the corridor and the isolating vacuum of space had shielded their teammates from the sounds and sights of the horrific spectacle that had occurred only meters behind their backs.

    Frantically, Plav-tor-fel-mak switched his radio to group comm, screaming into the dark void for his two crewmates to help. In his panicked state, it seemed as if they rotated in slow motion, limited as they were by their maneuvering thrusters. When they finally completed their turn, he could see the look of pure terror on their faces as they watched the two halves of their first mate drift apart in the pale beams of their flashlights, eventually disappearing into the shadows of the dead ship.

    Their screams made him wish the comm system had a mute mode. For safety reasons, it did not¡ªit operated either on group or interpersonal mode, the latter automatically switching targets based on proximity.

    ¡°Hurry! We need to get out of here!¡± he shouted at his teammates.

    Once again, turning around became a slow, laborious task, their urgent desire to distance themselves from the scene sharply contrasting with the constraints of moving in microgravity. Grabbing the shoulder of Est-mar-kort, he pushed her forward, trying to speed up their escape, but he miscalculated the physics involved, and she started to spin in the tunnel, the conservation of momentum sending him into a somersault in the process.

    It took the three crew members several frantic minutes to stabilize themselves again, minutes overshadowed by the omnipresent fear of another imminent attack. They felt as if the eyes of their unseen enemy were peering out at them from the darkness beyond their vision, coldly calculating its next move. Yet nothing happened to them while they regained their composure.

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    As they finally started to drift away from the place where First Mate Bouchard had been killed, into the dark tunnel ahead of them, Plav-tor-fel-mak had only a single, dreadful thought in his head.

    He could not help but wonder if the alien corpse they had seen floating in the room they had previously passed was still there.

    <hr>

    Thirty minutes later, still reeling from the sight of Bouchard¡¯s body split in two, her intestines slowly spilling out from her waist in a macabre, weightless dance of death, the three remaining crew members reached a collection of rooms organized in a circle, like spokes on a wheel around a central plaza.

    Describing it as a plaza might have been using the wrong word, Plav-tor-fel-mak thought grimly. The word brought with it connotations of large, open spaces filled with glorious sunlight. This place was nothing like that. It was dark and cramped, gray and decayed, its myriad wall panels on the verge of falling off¡ªjust like every other room on the ship. A rotunda of death, with satellite rooms hovering like round vultures around it, ready to pounce.

    Not many words had been spoken between them since they had lost Bouchard. The silence and monotony of the trek hung over them like a mountain, unrelenting and suffocating in its weight. Despite their journey bringing them closer and closer to their goal¡ªthe bridge of the alien ship¡ªthe approaching end brought no joy as they slowly floated down the corridors of the wreck.

    ¡°Est-mar-kort,¡± Murray said suddenly, her high-pitched voice breaking the silence. Plav-tor-fel-mak welcomed the intrusion, as it distracted him from his increasingly gloomy thoughts.

    ¡°I need a new oxygen canister,¡± Murray continued. ¡°I have maybe ten minutes left in this one.¡±

    The silence that followed rendered the past half-hour of quiet hiking a deafening cacophony by comparison.

    Eventually, Est-mar-kort answered. ¡°There is no more oxygen,¡± she said, her voice weak and uncertain. ¡°I¡¯m so sorry. I don¡¯t know what to do,¡± she added as an apology. Given the grave news she had just delivered to her companion, her words seemed utterly insignificant.

    Murray didn¡¯t reply, but the other two team members could hear, from the sound of her breathing, how fear and panic took hold of their teammate.

    It was an impossible situation, yet also one they had known for hours they would eventually face. Long before even learning of the disaster, they had been doomed ever since Peretti''s Legacy was first damaged. For the past day, the crew had, for all practical purposes, been dead women and men walking.

    ¡°I don¡¯t want to die,¡± Murray sniffled. ¡°Promise to tell my family what happened to me, if you reach the bridge,¡± she asked.

    ¡°Of course,¡± Plav-tor-fel-mak assured her, knowing full well there was nothing on the age-old bridge that could save them. The entire exercise of going there was futile and had been so from the start. Yet, despite the horrors they had endured during their journey, he still appreciated it. It was far better to have something to do to keep their minds occupied as they awaited the end than to spend their last hours sitting silently in contemplation, anticipating the slow death by suffocation that lay ahead of them.

    As the minutes ticked away toward zero, the two Kelar tried to keep Murray occupied with conversation. It was neither sophisticated nor related to their current predicament, but it was enough to distract her from the inevitable end. Only once did the topic of oxygen come up again, when Murray simply remarked that her canister was empty. Now, all she had left was the life-giving air inside her suit, which would quickly become contaminated with carbon dioxide as she took her last breaths.

    At first, there was little change. The air simply seemed a tiny bit denser than she was accustomed to, giving her slightly less nourishment than she needed. But with every breath she took, the sensation grew stronger, and she started to gasp. Her breaths quickened in a futile attempt to supply her starving brain with enough oxygenated blood. It was all in vain, of course.

    The suffocating blanket of carbon dioxide lay over her like a funeral shroud from hell, draining the life out of her. With the air inside her lungs turning to poison, her vision began to fade, and her head burned with the worst headache of her life.

    Est-mar-kort held Murray¡¯s hand as her gasps became more violent. Then, suddenly, they grew irregular and finally ceased altogether. Her body relaxed as death took hold of her, forever sending her away from the world of the living.

    They left her there, floating in the middle of the dark corridor. Eventually, the heat of her body, no longer replenished by the life-giving exothermic reactions that had sustained her for thirty-two years, would radiate away into her surroundings, fading away in the cold darkness like snowflakes swept away by the wind.

    In silence, Plav-tor-fel-mak and Est-mar-kort continued forward, contemplating what they had just witnessed, knowing that within a few hours, this would be their fate as well.

 Chapter 12 - 17 Hours Inside

    Time was running out.

    A quick glance at his oxygen meter told Plav-tor-fel-mak that he had a little less than an hour of air left. His smaller body and reptilian heritage made him use less air than his Terran colleagues¡ªformer colleagues, he corrected himself. Even so, it would not be enough. They were working their way through the bow of the ship now, but the bridge¡ªfrom what he had seen from the outside before they started their expedition¡ªwas still an hour away. The best he could hope for was seeing it in the distance before death and eternal darkness embraced him in their cold grip.

    ¡°What will you do when we get out of here?¡± Est-mar-kort asked, the lack of cheer in her voice betraying that the question was more for keeping morale up than actual curiosity.

    Plav-tor-fel-mak would have preferred not to answer, to be left alone with the dark thoughts echoing through his mind.

    ¡°Probably go back to Kelar,¡± he replied, not wanting to go into detail about a make-believe future that would never come to pass. ¡°I¡¯ve had enough of deep space for a lifetime.¡±

    ¡°I hear you,¡± Est-mar-kort said. After a short pause, she continued. ¡°I might resume my training for the priesthood when I get back,¡± she revealed.

    ¡°Priesthood?¡± Plav-tor-fel-mak¡¯s voice was steeped in surprise. ¡°I didn¡¯t know you were a believer. Were you an acolyte in the temple before joining the crew?¡±

    ¡°Yeah, it¡¯s not something I talk about much,¡± she admitted, her tone tinged with shyness. ¡°But you know how important faith is to our people. I never found it hard to believe.¡±

    Well, I did, Plav-tor-fel-mak thought, but didn¡¯t say anything of the sort.

    They continued in silence. Apparently, Est-mar-kort had picked up on his unwillingness to talk. The corridor ahead seemed endless, its shadows swallowing them whole, as if the ship itself sought to devour what remained of his life. The darkness seemed so tangible now, raw and physical, as if he was wading through black paint with every step he forced his tired body to take.

    In front of them, adjacent to the passageway, was a large room. Once upon a time, there had been a glass wall between it and the corridor. Now, most of the transparent panels were crushed, the crystals¡ªdull with dust¡ªfloating in the vacuum.

    Plav-tor-fel-mak paused for a second to peer into the room, letting the beam of his flashlight dance over the broken furniture inside. Est-mar-kort glided up beside him, lending him the assistance of her own light. He didn¡¯t know what he was looking for, but something compelled him to investigate.

    He was just about to give up his search and continue their journey when his flashlight suddenly illuminated something horrific.

    In the narrow beam, the face of First Mate Bouchard stared back at him, her face frozen in a scream of terror. Dead eyes, covered with ice crystals, seemed to watch him from inside the darkness.

    A shrill, shrieking sound found its way out of his throat before he bit his tongue. Screaming would not benefit anyone in their current situation.

    Looking at Est-mar-kort, the expression on her face told him she, too, had seen the gruesome remains of their first mate.

    No, she couldn¡¯t have¡ªthe woman was looking in the wrong direction. Yet, her face was twisted into a mask of horror. Slowly, Plav-tor-fel-mak positioned himself to see the scene from her perspective. What he saw inside the room made him wish he hadn¡¯t.

    Hanging next to First Mate Bouchard was the bloodied torso of Mission Specialist Suwannarat. Both Terrans were strung up on sharp, serrated metal beams, impaled with extraordinary force, resembling meat thrust onto skewers. The beams entered their torsos through their severed waists and exited them through their throats. Their arms were outstretched as if crucified, their hands pierced with metal shards to pin them to a second beam, strung horizontally behind their shoulders.

    Angling his flashlight downward, he could see the lower parts of their bodies impaled on the same beams as their torsos.

    No, he corrected himself. Not the same beams. Whoever had strung up their slaughtered teammates had exchanged Bouchard¡¯s lower body for Suwannarat¡¯s, and vice versa, like a paper doll flipbook of the damned.

    And neither of them was wearing their spacesuit.

    <hr>

    Leaving the gruesome scene, the dark thoughts Plav-tor-fel-mak had entertained for the past hour returned, stronger than ever. It was as if the shadows surrounding the horrific display of their colleagues had infected him, like black tendrils weaving their way through his nose and mouth into the deep recesses of his brain, whispering to him of forbidden deeds and tempting him with promises of riches, glory, and escape.

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    Shaking his head in an attempt to clear his mind, he decided to focus on an intellectual exercise in an attempt to silence the grim ideas he had been contemplating. Something had been bothering him about the exhibit of death they had just witnessed¡ªsomething more than just the grisly content of the scene.

    At first glance, it had almost looked ritualistic, like the work of a deranged serial killer or perhaps some murderous cult. Such things were not unheard of. But in his mind, he could see the anomalous details that told him such an explanation was much too na?ve.

    By now, Plav-tor-fel-mak was certain the desiccated alien body parts they had found belonged to the original crew of the vessel. Those, and the remains of his own teammates, were the only corpses they had discovered, and they had all been cut into pieces the same way¡ªa clean cut going through skin and bone alike.

    Whatever was out there hunting them was older than mankind, its patience stretching across more than eight million years between its first killing spree and its second. That kind of timeline didn¡¯t match the profile of any serial killer he¡¯d ever heard of. If this was a ritual, it was absurdly slow. And who was it for? Rituals were meant to serve the ones performing them, to offer meaning or power. But the arrangement of the bodies suggested they had been strung up more for the benefit of him and Est-mar-kort than for whoever had committed the gruesome acts.

    Then there was the issue of the missing spacesuits¡­

    No, he thought, the remains had not been placed at random around the ship. They had been carefully arranged in locations the perpetrator knew they would pass through, ensuring the crew would not miss the macabre exhibits. Even Sawhney¡¯s body, stuffed deep into that access shaft, seemed to have been placed there on purpose. Plav-tor-fel-mak remembered the blood smeared at the entrance to the shaft, making sure they would not miss the body packed in there when they floated by.

    And the spacesuits¡­ In his mind, he imagined the same scenes they had encountered, but with the bodies still inside their suits. While horrific, the displays would have had significantly less emotional impact on their viewers, the helmets hiding the agony on the victims¡¯ faces and the fabric of the suits covering their wounds.

    The facts, taken together, pointed to a single chilling conclusion: the grotesque displays were meant to terrorize them as they ventured deeper into the derelict. The crucified bodies of Bouchard and Suwannarat had been a message directed at him, clear and unmistakable. This is what awaits you at the end of your path.

    So be it, Plav-tor-fel-mak thought, but I¡¯m still alive¡ªand I plan to stay that way for as long as possible.

    And with that, the dark thoughts he had struggled to banish from the forefront of his mind surged back with relentless force.

    He glanced at his oxygen meter again. Thirty minutes, and no more than that, before he would share Murray¡¯s fate. With no additional spare canisters, it would not be enough.

    But his was not the only oxygen canister they had.

    With greedy eyes, he stared at Est-mar-kort¡¯s air cylinder, mounted at the back of her spacesuit, tempting him with its sweet, life-giving molecules. Like his, it was nearly empty, but together¡­ together, they would probably be enough.

    There was a good chance he would be able to reach the bridge.

    A quick movement of his left arm was all it took to seize her throat, preventing her from escaping. Grunting with the effort, he pulled her toward him, holding his colleague in a vice-like grip, while his right hand unlocked her oxygen canister.

    The entire thing took less than ten seconds. Ten seconds to condemn the young woman he had called a friend to death. Ten seconds to lose what little was left of his soul.

    At first, Est-mar-kort did not understand what had happened. Frantically, she reached behind her back, trying to reattach the missing air cylinder, but it was not there. As she turned around, she saw Plav-tor-fel-mak floating there, holding the last thirty minutes of her life in his hand, and she understood what had transpired.

    Panicking, she shouted into her microphone.

    ¡°Help me!¡± she screamed, her voice raw with desperation. ¡°I can¡¯t breathe! Please, give it back!¡± Her arms thrashed wildly, her legs kicking in the weightlessness, struggling to close the distance between them.

    It was all in vain, of course, and she knew it. Taking her oxygen cylinder had been a deliberate choice of his, not an accident. If she didn¡¯t get it back within the next half-minute, she would learn firsthand what Murray had previously experienced at the moment of her death.

    Plav-tor-fel-mak started to drift away, using his maneuvering thrusters to increase the distance between them.

    ¡°Come back!¡± she shouted. ¡°At least come back. You can have the canister. Just don¡¯t let me die alone!¡±

    But Plav-tor-fel-mak did not turn around.

    Est-mar-kort swallowed, feeling her life ebb out of her. Panic dissolved, replaced by a newfound resolve. This was the hardest thing she would ever say.

    "I¡­" She swallowed again, struggling to get the words past her dry throat. "I forgive you."

    The words gave her little peace, but that was not their purpose. Peace would come soon, anyway. No, she said them not for her own sake, but for his. She meant them, and saying them was the right thing to do.

    She coughed and started gasping for air as the last of the life-giving oxygen in her suit was replaced by carbon dioxide.

    In the distance, Plav-tor-fel-mak vanished into the darkness of the corridor ahead. For the second time that day, he wished the comm system had a mute function.

 Chapter 13 - The Final Hour Inside

    Not long after the altercation, Plav-tor-fel-mak finally reached the bridge of the derelict. The last leg of the journey had gone quicker than he had anticipated, with the corridors in the bow of the ship being cleaner and containing less debris than those he had seen before.

    With a smirk of irony, he glanced at Est-mar-kort¡¯s oxygen canister in his hand. It seemed he hadn¡¯t needed it after all. But he felt no regret for his actions¡ªhis conscience had departed with the loss of his soul.

    When he reached the entrance, he could see it was barricaded from the inside¡ªthe same type of makeshift blockage they had encountered time and time again as they ventured through the ship. Using anything they could get their hands on, the original crew of the derelict had tried everything they could to block the way into the bridge.

    Tried¡ªand apparently failed. Parts of the barricade looked as if they had been thrown away by some unimaginably strong force, with pieces of it floating all around him in the room outside the bridge. Slowly, careful not to rip his suit, he entered the passageway this event had created through the debris, his flashlight scanning ahead of him for possible hints of danger.

    Just like the rest of the ship, the bridge turned out to be dark and gray. Somehow, he had expected things to be different here, though he didn¡¯t quite know why. There were no windows in the room¡ªclearly, the original inhabitants must have depended on view screens instead, just like Peretti''s Legacy had. Plav-tor-fel-mak felt certain there must be an observation lounge somewhere on the alien ship, but if there was one, they hadn¡¯t found it. It didn¡¯t matter, though. For navigational purposes, you didn¡¯t want to depend on your own eyes anyway. Still, he had hoped to see the stars one more time before the end, and the lack of windows was disappointing.

    Gliding through the floating pieces of broken metal and glass that filled the room, he desperately searched for anything¡ªanything at all¡ªthat could offer him a way out of this death trap. But just as he had expected, there was nothing here that could help him. Every piece of technology was dead, rendered inert by entropy over immense timescales. If the crew had left some form of log behind to tell their story, decay had erased its content millions of years ago.

    That the crew had once been here, he knew. Floating among the debris on the bridge, he counted at least five desiccated bodies, of the same type they had seen before on the ship: tall, thin, and skeletal. They had all been cut into pieces by their unknown assailant.

    In the pale beam of his flashlight¡ªnow seemingly incapable of penetrating the compact darkness that enclosed him¡ªtheir faces looked horrifying. The dry lips of the corpses had curled into grotesque grins, mocking him across the eons. Deep-set eyes, freeze-dried from exposure to the vacuum of space, seemed to stare back at him wherever he looked.

    By now, he had little less than five minutes of air left¡ªand perhaps an additional half hour if he used Est-mar-kort¡¯s oxygen cylinder¡ªand he intended to make the most of that time.

    As he rummaged through the debris in the room, he started to get a feeling for what the bridge might have looked like long ago, when it was bustling with life. The chamber was quite large¡ªfifteen by eight meters, he estimated¡ªand inlaid in its walls were bands and patterns of gold and platinum. He could see no practical reason for their existence, leading him to believe they were just there for decoration. The gray walls, their pigments now eroded into dust, had probably once been painted in bright colors, he thought.

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    He had known it from the very first time he had laid eyes on the alien ship: its builders had valued beauty. The decrepit wreck the crew of Peretti''s Legacy had encountered was nothing like what the ship would have looked like before the disaster. Whatever force had attacked it¡ªand later his own team¡ªhad corrupted it, transforming beauty and life into decay, despair, and death.

    Hidden in a corner of the room, deep inside a pile of broken metal sheets and razor-sharp shards of glass, he found a sixth body. Perhaps shielded by the debris in which it floated, it was somewhat less decayed than the previous corpses he had seen, and unlike the other bodies in the room, it had not been cut into pieces.

    Shining his flashlight across its skeletal face, he could now behold again the beauty of the race that once upon a time had built the immense vessel. At first glance, they might seem grotesque¡ªcertainly not someone you¡¯d like to meet in a dark alley¡ªbut the more he looked at the corpse, the more he came to appreciate the aesthetics of its anatomy.

    There was no muscle tissue to be found at all. The body was, literally, just skin and bones, driven by powerful sinews. Its unblinking eyes, dark and all-seeing, were like deep holes into the alien creature¡¯s soul. To Plav-tor-fel-mak, it was hauntingly beautiful. A silent voice at the back of his head begged him to worship the once-powerful being floating in front of him.

    In the light of his lumen torch, the long, spidery fingers on its hands¡ªall six ending in sharp claws¡ªwaved slowly back and forth as the corpse drifted in the microgravity of the bridge.

    Had he been more alert, he would have realized something was very wrong with what he saw. All the other bone-dry bodies they had found had been frozen stiff.

    Without warning, the being in front of him suddenly turned its head toward him, its eyes no longer vacantly staring into space, but instead looking at him with razor-sharp focus, malice radiating from its gaze. The creature¡¯s thin lips curled back in a snarl, silent like death itself in the vacuum of the ship, revealing double rows of sharp, triangular teeth.

    Plav-tor-fel-mak froze in fear, unable to react, incapable of even thinking about a response. The only thought in his mind was the baffling fact that the alien wasn¡¯t wearing a spacesuit.

    The being turned around to face him head-on, its movements quick and precise, as if perfectly accustomed to the microgravity of the ship. As it did so, it grabbed one of the metal beams floating next to it, hidden among the debris.

    No, it wasn¡¯t quite a metal beam, Plav-tor-fel-mak thought. It was almost two meters long, thin and flattened into something resembling a sword, polished and sharpened through the eons.

    Suddenly, a clicking sound emerged from the speakers inside his helmet.

    A voice followed, an age-old voice, filled with hatred and contempt.

    ¡°So we finally meet, beloved Child,¡± it snarled, the irony of the epithet contrasting sharply with the loathing in its voice.

    ¡°I thank you,¡± it continued, hatred evident in the words it spoke, ¡°for letting me have this small measure of revenge on the Most High before the end.¡±

    As it delivered its final, mocking words, it raised the sword and swung it in a wide arc with a strength far surpassing that of a man. The blade connected with Plav-tor-fel-mak¡¯s waist, effortlessly separating it from his torso.

    With eternal darkness encroaching on him, the last surviving member of the crew of Peretti''s Legacy died with one final thought on his mind.

    No one will ever know what happened to us here.

 Chapter 14

    14,782,249 BC, Inner Icy Bodies Belt, Gliese 556

    ¡°To anyone finding this message: This is the final log of the Kai Exploration Directorate vessel Grace and Hope.¡±

    She was covered in dust and blood¡ªKaoaluamalai, a young woman of 402 years, with a thin, gray face and eyes set deep in their sockets, giving her head the appearance of a living skull. Her tall body was composed entirely of skin, bones, and sinew, without a hint of muscle; her ribs protruding through the skin of her hollow chest. As captain of the ship, she had overseen countless expeditions throughout the galaxy. In cooperation with Them, the Kai had mapped the worlds of the Great Spiral, charting the places where His will had allowed life to spring into existence, preparing and planning for the day when He would let intelligence rise on other worlds beyond Kai¡ªother, younger Children also made in His image. But here, on this day, the great adventure called Prelude would end, and she and her crew would enter Real Life, in the glorious world beyond.

    ¡°We reached the region of the Eastern Galactic Spur two days ago, and started surveying the stars located here,¡± she continued in a tired but firm voice. ¡°Unknown to us, an agent of the enemy sneaked onboard the ship and possessed one of our biots. It has killed the crew one by one. We who are left have barricaded ourselves on the bridge, hoping to delay the inevitable long enough to record this message for posterity.

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    ¡°Two of Their lieutenants have been visiting us during this time, counseling us but not being allowed to interfere. The job of slowing down the enemy agent has fallen on the crew, which has displayed great courage in resisting the onslaught.

    ¡°If you find this message, please relay it to the Exploration Directorate. It is imperative that more ships are sent to this region of space. This type of direct interference by the enemy is unheard of¡ªthey would not act this way unless they had a reason¡ªand we can think of no other than to oppose His will. If the enemy is actively opposing Him here, that means He must have a plan for one of the stars in the Eastern Galactic Spur. And whatever His plan is, it is the duty of the Kai to be present to support it.¡±

    Behind her, there was a loud crashing sound as the makeshift barrier was thrown apart. Smoke filled the room as the biot entered. Now, they had only seconds left. Suddenly, the room was filled with a warm light: They had come to visit one last time, to give the crew comfort before the very end.

    ¡°Lord of All, Savior of Your Children,¡± she prayed. ¡°My soul rests in Your grace.¡±

    A fountain of blood erupted from her body, as the blade in the biot¡¯s hands cut through her torso.

    She was finally at peace in the warm embrace of He Who Is.