Chapter 13 - The Final Hour Inside

Not long after the altercation, Plav-tor-fel-mak finally reached the bridge of the derelict. The last leg of the journey had gone quicker than he had anticipated, with the corridors in the bow of the ship being cleaner and containing less debris than those he had seen before.

With a smirk of irony, he glanced at Est-mar-kort’s oxygen canister in his hand. It seemed he hadn’t needed it after all. But he felt no regret for his actions—his conscience had departed with the loss of his soul.

When he reached the entrance, he could see it was barricaded from the inside—the same type of makeshift blockage they had encountered time and time again as they ventured through the ship. Using anything they could get their hands on, the original crew of the derelict had tried everything they could to block the way into the bridge.

Tried—and apparently failed. Parts of the barricade looked as if they had been thrown away by some unimaginably strong force, with pieces of it floating all around him in the room outside the bridge. Slowly, careful not to rip his suit, he entered the passageway this event had created through the debris, his flashlight scanning ahead of him for possible hints of danger.

Just like the rest of the ship, the bridge turned out to be dark and gray. Somehow, he had expected things to be different here, though he didn’t quite know why. There were no windows in the room—clearly, the original inhabitants must have depended on view screens instead, just like Peretti's Legacy had. Plav-tor-fel-mak felt certain there must be an observation lounge somewhere on the alien ship, but if there was one, they hadn’t found it. It didn’t matter, though. For navigational purposes, you didn’t want to depend on your own eyes anyway. Still, he had hoped to see the stars one more time before the end, and the lack of windows was disappointing.

Gliding through the floating pieces of broken metal and glass that filled the room, he desperately searched for anything—anything at all—that could offer him a way out of this death trap. But just as he had expected, there was nothing here that could help him. Every piece of technology was dead, rendered inert by entropy over immense timescales. If the crew had left some form of log behind to tell their story, decay had erased its content millions of years ago.

That the crew had once been here, he knew. Floating among the debris on the bridge, he counted at least five desiccated bodies, of the same type they had seen before on the ship: tall, thin, and skeletal. They had all been cut into pieces by their unknown assailant.

In the pale beam of his flashlight—now seemingly incapable of penetrating the compact darkness that enclosed him—their faces looked horrifying. The dry lips of the corpses had curled into grotesque grins, mocking him across the eons. Deep-set eyes, freeze-dried from exposure to the vacuum of space, seemed to stare back at him wherever he looked.

By now, he had little less than five minutes of air left—and perhaps an additional half hour if he used Est-mar-kort’s oxygen cylinder—and he intended to make the most of that time.

As he rummaged through the debris in the room, he started to get a feeling for what the bridge might have looked like long ago, when it was bustling with life. The chamber was quite large—fifteen by eight meters, he estimated—and inlaid in its walls were bands and patterns of gold and platinum. He could see no practical reason for their existence, leading him to believe they were just there for decoration. The gray walls, their pigments now eroded into dust, had probably once been painted in bright colors, he thought.

He had known it from the very first time he had laid eyes on the alien ship: its builders had valued beauty. The decrepit wreck the crew of Peretti's Legacy had encountered was nothing like what the ship would have looked like before the disaster. Whatever force had attacked it—and later his own team—had corrupted it, transforming beauty and life into decay, despair, and death.

Hidden in a corner of the room, deep inside a pile of broken metal sheets and razor-sharp shards of glass, he found a sixth body. Perhaps shielded by the debris in which it floated, it was somewhat less decayed than the previous corpses he had seen, and unlike the other bodies in the room, it had not been cut into pieces.

Shining his flashlight across its skeletal face, he could now behold again the beauty of the race that once upon a time had built the immense vessel. At first glance, they might seem grotesque—certainly not someone you’d like to meet in a dark alley—but the more he looked at the corpse, the more he came to appreciate the aesthetics of its anatomy.

There was no muscle tissue to be found at all. The body was, literally, just skin and bones, driven by powerful sinews. Its unblinking eyes, dark and all-seeing, were like deep holes into the alien creature’s soul. To Plav-tor-fel-mak, it was hauntingly beautiful. A silent voice at the back of his head begged him to worship the once-powerful being floating in front of him.

In the light of his lumen torch, the long, spidery fingers on its hands—all six ending in sharp claws—waved slowly back and forth as the corpse drifted in the microgravity of the bridge.

Had he been more alert, he would have realized something was very wrong with what he saw. All the other bone-dry bodies they had found had been frozen stiff.

Without warning, the being in front of him suddenly turned its head toward him, its eyes no longer vacantly staring into space, but instead looking at him with razor-sharp focus, malice radiating from its gaze. The creature’s thin lips curled back in a snarl, silent like death itself in the vacuum of the ship, revealing double rows of sharp, triangular teeth.

Plav-tor-fel-mak froze in fear, unable to react, incapable of even thinking about a response. The only thought in his mind was the baffling fact that the alien wasn’t wearing a spacesuit.

The being turned around to face him head-on, its movements quick and precise, as if perfectly accustomed to the microgravity of the ship. As it did so, it grabbed one of the metal beams floating next to it, hidden among the debris.

No, it wasn’t quite a metal beam, Plav-tor-fel-mak thought. It was almost two meters long, thin and flattened into something resembling a sword, polished and sharpened through the eons.

Suddenly, a clicking sound emerged from the speakers inside his helmet.

A voice followed, an age-old voice, filled with hatred and contempt.

“So we finally meet, beloved Child,” it snarled, the irony of the epithet contrasting sharply with the loathing in its voice.

“I thank you,” it continued, hatred evident in the words it spoke, “for letting me have this small measure of revenge on the Most High before the end.”

As it delivered its final, mocking words, it raised the sword and swung it in a wide arc with a strength far surpassing that of a man. The blade connected with Plav-tor-fel-mak’s waist, effortlessly separating it from his torso.

With eternal darkness encroaching on him, the last surviving member of the crew of Peretti's Legacy died with one final thought on his mind.

No one will ever know what happened to us here.

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.

Visit the official Lords of the Stars blog for more information about this hard sci-fi universe: https://lordsofthestars.wordpress.com