Chapter 10 - 13 Hours Inside

She could see it in their eyes. The crew no longer looked at her the same way they had before. It wasn’t quite the look of disappointment she had expected, but rather a loss of hope. She had promised to bring them to the bridge, and now they were no longer certain of that outcome.

First Mate Bouchard stood at the center of the dwindling crew of Peretti's Legacy, huddled together as they tried to reach a consensus on how to proceed. She no longer had the energy to take command of the situation. From now on, whatever they chose to do would be a group decision.

She had stayed hidden in the debris for what seemed like an eternity before slowly crawling back to the room where the rest of the crew was waiting. Now, they faced an impossible choice: stay in the room until their oxygen supply ran out, or move forward into the darkness beyond, where their teammate had just disappeared—and where they now knew their unknown assailant was waiting for them.

It was Plav-tor-fel-mak who broke the stalemate.

“If we stay, death is certain. We only have a couple of hours of oxygen left now,” he said, his voice filled with sorrow. “If we go forward, we…”

His voice quivered.

“If we go forward, we risk death at the hands of whatever is waiting for us out there,” he continued. “I don’t want to meet whatever it is that took Sawhney and Suwannarat. But if we go forward, we still have a chance to survive. And if we don’t, at least our deaths will be swift.”

The group talked it over for a few more minutes, but Plav-tor-fel-mak’s statement left a lasting impression, and in the end, the decision was unanimous: they would continue toward the bridge.

Crawling through the opening in the barricade, the five remaining crew members were consumed with dread. Ahead of them was only darkness—darkness, and their unseen enemy hiding within it. It seemed to them as if the strength of their flashlights had suddenly waned, as the shadows closed in on them from all directions.

When the entire team had exited on the other side, they took a moment to gather themselves before continuing down the corridor. Slowly, they turned around, letting the beams of their lights illuminate the dark corners of the passageway, searching for signs of trouble.

But there was no one there. And of Mission Specialist Suwannarat, they could find no trace.

Chances were, Bouchard thought, his mutilated body was crammed into some small shaft or tunnel, just like the one where they had previously found Sawhney.

Not wanting to delay the inevitable any longer, the group adjusted their maneuvering thrusters to drift in silence further along the corridor. The anticlimax of the uneventful journey was emotionally exhausting—after having spent the past half hour imagining the horrors that awaited them on the other side, finding none of them there allowed the team members, for the first time in hours, the luxury of feeling again.

And with those feelings came sorrow, hopelessness, and unrelenting fatigue. They had been exploring the derelict for close to fourteen hours. By now, most of the crew had been awake for over a day. Bouchard, her head pounding from a piercing headache, desperately wanted to give up and let the darkness claim her forever. But peer pressure kept her going, despite everything.

One by one, they passed an endless array of doors, openings to rooms whose purposes they could only imagine. None of them contained anything of value anymore. At one time, Bouchard thought, they might have been laboratories, medical clinics, or entertainment centers. In her imagination, she could hear the laughter of the original crew echoing between the dead walls. Now, all the rooms looked the same: dreary, decaying gray walls, choked with floating gray chairs, tables, cabinets, and jagged pieces of broken metal, all covered by a thin layer of gray dust. All in utter and complete silence.

Gray. Her entire world was colorless, until the relentless gray dissolved into black at the edge of her flashlight’s beam.

The scream shook her to her core, a piercing, almost inhuman shriek that filled her ears and heart with terror. It took Bouchard a second to realize she was the one screaming.

Inside one of the side rooms, among the shadows of the debris blocking the doorway, she had seen a face.

Someone bumped into her from behind, and her flashlight went spinning. Now, the only light she had left was the lumen torch on top of her helmet. She froze in place, incapable of turning toward the door to look for the apparition she had seen, while equally unable to rotate and turn her back on it.

“Laura…” Tech Specialist Murray said over the radio. “Sorry, you scared me. I didn’t mean to hit you that hard.”

“Here,” Est-mar-kort interjected and handed Bouchard back her lost flashlight. “What happened?”

First Mate Bouchard was still trying to compose herself. Then, with the flashlight back in her hand, she finally turned back toward the doorway.

“I saw something in there,” she said, her voice hoarse with dread. “Someone. I saw a face staring at me from in there,” she continued, indicating the darkness beyond the debris.

“Suwannarat?” Murray asked, a mix of hope and horror in her voice.

No, it had not been Yevgen, Bouchard thought. The face that had looked at her from the shadows had been white and skeletal, with an elongated head, dead eyes set in deep, dark sockets, and sharp teeth protruding from dry lips.

“No,” she replied. “It was…”

She paused as she searched the debris with her flashlight, steeling herself for fear of seeing the horrific face again.

“No,” she said, starting over in her attempt to explain what she had seen. “I think it was one of the aliens, the same ones that left behind the arm.”

That caught the attention of Plav-tor-fel-mak. Slowly, he drifted up to hover beside her, the beam of his flashlight joining hers as they searched the floating debris together.

There it was again. Drifting inside the room, much further in than it had been when she first saw it, was a body. To Bouchard, it looked like a walking skeleton, its bones covered with pale white skin, without even a trace of muscles. It was tall, perhaps two or two and a half meters in length, and rotated slowly in the weightlessness of the derelict. Unblinking eyes set deep in its nightmarish face stared back at the crew from the shadows, like death itself gazing at them from the abyss.

“Yeah, it looks the same,” Plav-tor-fel-mak confirmed. Any other time, he would have insisted they clear the entrance of debris so they could investigate the corpse. With no recoverable technology to be found on the ship, studying the desiccated bodies its crew had left behind was now the only way they had of learning about the origins of the wreck.

But time was running out. He glanced at his oxygen meter. Three hours and twenty minutes left to live. He guessed some of his teammates had even less time, as they were larger than him and had worked harder clearing the barricade.

No, the alien body, seemingly perfectly preserved in the cold vacuum of the derelict—and the scientific find of a lifetime—would have to wait.

Slowly, the team moved on, their flashlight beams shaky from adrenaline as they searched the darkness ahead for unknown threats.

He stared in silence at the alien machinery floating inside the room in front of him—the same type of broken machinery they had encountered throughout the ship, its constituent alloys gleaming like silver and gold in the beam of his flashlight.

It wasn’t fair, Plav-tor-fel-mak thought. The irony of it all was almost delicious in its depressing absurdity. Despite the deadline imposed by their dwindling oxygen supplies, he hadn’t been able to stop himself from taking a few more samples along the way. And now he wished he never had.

“Laura,” he said to the first mate. “Do you remember how we first decided to explore the wreck before reporting it to the Terran Federation, hoping we’d find something of value here to sell off first?”

In any other situation, the question would have been purely rhetorical. But to Plav-tor-fel-mak, it felt like an eternity since they had departed Peretti's Legacy. Their experiences before entering the derelict were now part of another world, like memories belonging to a different reality. He had to actively remind himself that he had had a life before the eternal darkness of the wreck.

Bouchard nodded but said nothing.

“We went deeper and deeper into the ship, trying to find something—anything—of value. But we found nothing. No technology or information to salvage. No valuable materials to sell on the black market. And now that search has sealed our fate.”

Again, she nodded, too tired to even respond.

“And you know the broken machinery we’ve seen everywhere? The ones made from the alien alloys that we’ve strained to push past the entire time we’ve been here?”

“Those alloys… We were wrong about them,” he continued. “They aren’t just alloys—they’re really gold. Chemically pure gold-197 and platinum-195. We’ve been floating past thousands upon thousands of tons of precious metals since we first set foot inside the wreck.”

Slowly, Laura Bouchard turned to face him, despair evident on her tired face. Still, she said nothing, and her expression betrayed no reaction to what Plav-tor-fel-mak had just told her.

“We were so focused on finding valuable ornaments or jewelry—trinkets we could plunder—that we ignored the mundane, never even imagining the aliens would use actual gold to build their machines.”

Turning around to leave the treasure trove inside the room, they saw Captain Balmar had floated up to where they were hovering.

“Captain,” Plav-tor-fel-mak greeted him. “How are you feeling?”

The Jerrassian still didn’t reply. His eyes were fixed on the gold inside the room, his motions slow, as if in a trance. When the two left the doorway to rejoin the rest of the crew, the captain stayed behind, unable to take his gaze off the riches in front of him.

When the rest of the team departed from the area for yet another leap forward toward the bridge, none of them even bothered to go back to retrieve the husk of their former leader. The last anyone ever saw of Captain Balmar, he was hovering in the distance at the edge of their vision, alone in a room filled with more gold than he could ever have dreamed of, as the darkness of the derelict ship closed in on him.

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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