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—in 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—like the rest of the age-old ship—it 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.

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.

“Let’s—” 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—her 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—including 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—the 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—melted 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—before 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.

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