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—in 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?”

“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—or 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.

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—more or less—where 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—one 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—the 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—apart from the gleaming gold of the ubiquitous alien alloys—was 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.

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