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—some the size of airplanes, others needing a magnifying glass to be spotted—thrown 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—except 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—one by one—into 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—at least partially—connected 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—a succession of supernovas and stellar rebirths had to happen first before that was possible.

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—the timeline of stellar evolution alone would not be precise enough to enforce a limit as short as a thousand years—but, 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.

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—here 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—assuming 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—beams 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—floated 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—a 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—and 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—likely 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.

Author's Note

The story you're reading is one of many set in the Lords of the Stars universe I've been creating over the past 30 years, where familiar characters and places reappear, and new favorites await discovery. Check out my profile to explore more stories from this universe.

Visit the official Lords of the Stars blog for more information about this hard sci-fi universe: https://lordsofthestars.wordpress.com