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—perhaps millenia—ago. 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—ultimately forming food—had 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—for 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—they 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.”

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.

“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 façade, 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—no 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—the 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—combined with Sawhney's earlier insistence he had seen something move in the darkness—made Balmar think of scenarios he wished he had never imagined.

If someone—or something—were 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.

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