Chapter 9 - 11 Hours Inside

The slow crawl through the debris-filled passageway turned out to be much less eventful than Bouchard had feared. The six crew members encountered neither alien body parts nor lurking monsters hiding in the dark. About half an hour after entering the network of interlocked girders, they emerged into a small chamber mostly devoid of floating wreckage. Like every other room they had seen on the ship, it was completely bereft of markings; its floor, ceiling, and walls were composed of the same decrepit, dull, and broken metal plates they had been gliding past for what felt like an eternity.

And just as First Mate Bouchard had feared, the corridor leading out of the chamber was blocked, in the same way as the three hallways they had previously explored.

In the narrow beam of her flashlight, it was difficult to get a clear view of the barricade, as it stretched out into the darkness. She floated along, trying to map it in her mind. It was too late to turn back now. If they did, they would have to retrace their steps through two junctions, and they didn’t have enough oxygen to spare for that. Knowing what she now did, she strongly suspected that any other passageways they might find would also be blocked. Their progress toward the bridge was being deliberately hindered.

A few minutes into examining the blockage, she realized that her earlier disappointment at seeing the other corridors closed off had led her to make assumptions she shouldn't have. In the far corner of the room, where the barricade met the wall, there appeared to be an opening in the debris—or at least a less dense collection of metal beams and broken chairs. It wasn’t large enough to allow the team to pass through safely, but it was a start. They would need to remove any sharp pieces of metal sticking out to ensure nothing tore their spacesuits as they squeezed through. She glanced at her watch. Thirty minutes, no more, she thought. We need to get this done in thirty minutes.

She grabbed one of the girders, testing how firmly it was wedged into the wreckage. It was about twenty centimeters wide, made from a half-centimeter-thick layer of metal curved into an I-shape, punctured by regularly spaced holes the size of her fingers, its surface dulled by millions of years of exposure to space.

Her heart skipped a beat when the light from her head-mounted lumen torch suddenly reflected off a gleaming scratch on the otherwise drab metal.

Someone—or something—had passed through here recently, moving the debris to make a way through the barricade and scraping the beams in the process.

The room was not wide enough to allow the entire crew to safely work on removing the sharp pieces of metal that blocked their way. Instead, First Mate Bouchard ordered the larger Terran team members to take turns clearing the barricade, making sure they didn’t exhaust themselves, while the two smaller Kelar stayed at the back of the room. She didn’t even bother trying to get Captain Balmar to help with the work.

Plav-tor-fel-mak, not keen on sitting idle while the clock ticked toward their death, decided to take a closer look at the hand Suwannarat had retrieved. The wreck’s immense age ensured there would be nothing on the bridge that could offer a means to escape their impending doom. Still, having something to do kept his thoughts away from the tightening grip of their limited oxygen supply.

Truth be told, he was somewhat offended by being sidelined this way. Strength scaled with the square of the muscle diameter, not with a person’s height; besides, Kelar muscle fibers were stronger than Terran ones anyway. In the cramped space they were working in, the smaller Kelar would have been a better choice, he thought.

But it was all futile. Everything they had been doing since the destruction of the Legacy had been a scam. Keeping morale up until the end was more important than being efficient, so Plav-tor-fel-mak chose not to press the issue and went to work examining the dry limb.

The hand itself was not that different from what one would expect. It was longer and thinner, with more joints than even a Terran hand, but otherwise, its design was pretty standard. The lack of muscle tissue was curious—it did not look like the flesh had rotted away, but as if it had never been there in the first place. Apparently, motion had been provided solely by the strong ribbons of sinew crisscrossing the ancient bones. He understood why Suwannarat had found it horrifying when he first saw it illuminated by his flashlight. But here, Plav-tor-fel-mak thought, there was a certain beauty to it, if you could ignore the decay it had gone through.

He saw no feasible way of determining the limb’s age. If it was from the original crew of the ship, it was at least eight million years old, mummified rather than fossilized by the freezing vacuum of deep space. Given the vast time spans involved, carbon dating would be useless—once all the carbon-14 in the sample had decayed into nitrogen, the natural radioactive clock would have stopped ticking. On the other hand, perhaps the wreck had been visited before, by another crew trying to piece together its secrets. Another crew that had encountered whatever had cut Sawhney into pieces.

Absent-mindedly, he started to carve a few shavings from the desiccated hand, retrieved the portable mass spectrometer he always carried from his belt, and placed the fragments into its analysis slot.

A couple of minutes later, when the first results started to show up on the screen, the “sand” they had found in the alien pantry suddenly made perfect sense.

Captain Balmar had been right all along. The containers had indeed, in times long gone, contained food for the crew of the vessel. Over the eons, the food had decayed, desiccated, and succumbed to thermal erosion, reducing it to nothing more than dust. But it had not been food in any sense he was accustomed to imagining.

By now, the Terran Federation had found life on literally hundreds of worlds. Most of them did not harbor any intelligent species, of course, but life was still life. Wherever scientists looked—in the frozen wastes of subzero desert planets, above the hellish sulfur cloudscapes of pyrean worlds, deep in the oceans of ice-covered moons, and inside the gargantuan storms of gas giants—life was found. Wherever life could take hold—and even in places where it seemingly shouldn’t—it found a way to appear.

If, Plav-tor-fel-mak mused, the universe had—as some people believed—been created by a higher power, that deity must surely have been a god of life, because life, and life in abundance, was everywhere to be found. Not that he or anyone else on the crew of Peretti's Legacy believed in such things, he thought with a dismissive smirk. Still, he was quite familiar with the concept of faith. More than one of his relatives back on Kelar had been priests of Nam-kal-kel-kul-el, The-One-Who-Is-and-Was-and-Always-Will-Be.

In his mind, Plav-tor-fel-mak almost added, “bless His name,” but caught himself at the last moment. Even the bleakness of their future, trapped as they were in the shadows of the derelict ship, wasn’t enough to make him feign belief in something he didn’t truly hold. He was not that hypocritical.

Never mind why life was everywhere, he thought, as he continued his musings while he waited for the rest of the crew to clear the way through the debris. The important fact was this: life was always carbon-based. Always, and everywhere.

Except the eight million—or more—year-old arm he was holding in his hands was silicon-based.

The history of life in the universe had just been rewritten.

Thirty-five minutes later, the hole in the barricade had been opened wide enough to allow a person to get through. The work had been both slower and harder than First Mate Bouchard had wanted, wasting more of their precious time and oxygen than they could afford. Still, they didn’t have a choice unless they simply wanted to give up and die where they were.

Carrying his trusty flashlight, Mission Specialist Suwannarat was the first to enter the unknown space beyond the debris blocking the corridor. After Captain Balmar, he was the largest and best-trained member of the crew, and Bouchard wanted to stack the odds in their favor. She couldn’t forget the scratch marks she had seen earlier—the telltale signs that the thing or person stalking them had been through here not long before they arrived. Letting their most physically impressive team member take point was the logical choice.

She followed right behind him, keeping a close eye on him as he emerged from the path through the blockage. In the distance, she could see the flicker of his flashlight dancing across the gray wall panels.

“It’s just more of the same,” he said over the radio. “I don’t think this place was chosen for any particular reason. For whoever blocked off this part of the ship, this place must have just been as good a place as any to do it.”

“Yeah, I figured as much,” she responded. “It fits the pattern we’ve seen. The barriers are makeshift, made from whatever they found lying around. I don’t think they had much time to raise them, and even less time to make grand plans for where to place them.”

“There’s lots of debris ahead,” Suwannarat continued. “But I don’t see any more blockages. I think it’s a viable path forward.”

Forward, yes, but there’s no telling what we’ll encounter before we reach the bridge, Bouchard thought. In the darkness, they could see no further than the reach of their flashlights.

“There is some—”

Mission Specialist Suwannarat did not finish the sentence. Instead, his last words turned into an agonized scream that filled the suit radios of the rest of the team, echoing through their helmets with promises of untold horrors ahead.

First Mate Bouchard quickly swept her flashlight in Suwannarat’s direction, trying to see what had happened to him. But no matter where she looked, she couldn’t see him.

Her heart pounding in her chest, she turned off her flashlight and hunkered down within the debris, trying to make herself as small as possible. Whatever was out there was close now, but in the vacuum, she would never hear it. And as the permanent night inside the derelict ship encased her like a cocoon of death, she imagined Suwannarat’s assailant slowly creeping toward her, reaching for her through the darkness, always just out of sight.

She lay there for several minutes, shaking like a leaf from the shock of adrenaline. Terror coursed through her body like electricity, tightening her stomach into a Gordian knot she feared she would never untangle. Gradually, she became aware that she had not even called out for Suwannarat. Perhaps he was floating out there in the darkness right now, unable to call for help, just waiting to hear her reassuring voice one more time, to feel one final connection to friends and colleagues before life ebbed out of him.

And she had failed him.

She took a deep breath in preparation for forcing herself to shout his name. But as the air filled the recesses of her lungs, she paused and let it out again.

Finding herself unable to offer him even her own voice as solace, she collapsed in despair and started to cry. It was the soft, silent whimper of a woman who had lost herself and, in doing so, betrayed those who had put their trust in her.

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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