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—including herself—free 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—stay 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.”

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—with 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.

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—joints, 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—or something—was 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.

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—the 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—making 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—something she didn’t relish in their fragile state of mind—but 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.

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.

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