Chapter III

It took years, it felt, for the sensor cluster to conclude its imaging. As soon as it did, Ordin gave the order and the pilot skillfully maneuvered the Ir Miilas out of position, toward the ancient transport ship. Only as the derelict loomed ominously over them through the viewports, did they understand its true size. The ship did not rotate, but was tilted almost vertically upward. Ir Miilas cast some spotlights on the hull. The metal was old, badly decayed, almost dissolved by the relentless bursts of radiation from distant stellar phenomena. The hull was almost completely smooth, however... There had been no micrometeors this far out to hit it. After orbiting it for a few minutes, the ship stopped, all lights focused on a small patch on the hull, a place were the uninterrupted panels split around a square indentation. It was a door.

"We don't have the equipment to lock our beacon into the hull. Someone will have to go aboard to plant it." Ziir said, holding his creation. The device was a huge cylinder with domed edges, hardly any features but for a small control pad with green and blue switches.

Ordin tried to envision it... Being on board a three thousand year old transport ship... All the Hiigaran exiles within had no doubt died long ago. Oxygen leakage, food shortage, life support failure... They would have seen their destination pass below their eyes, and yet never been able to touch it as they drifted away, into the cold voids where no star existed. More likely, they had frozen to death, where absolute zero was not an unattainable goal. He shuddered.

"The Taiidani and the robot-man are the ideal choices, they'll be the least emotionally affected." said the Paktu engineer from behind.

Creta scowled, A'Kuul did not even recognize that he had been insulted. The engineer retreated.

"I'll go." Ordin said.

Ziir looked at him. "Uh... Commander, are you sure you're... Do you really want to go?"

Ordin nodded, showing no hesitation.

Creta thought for a moment. "I'll come."

The room fell silent., but there was no objection.

Ziir spoke. "I'll come, certainly. I need to set up the beacon." He braced himself against his chair as the ship shook from the docking.

 

* * *

Three figures in pressure suits stepped through the airlock, into the impenetrable darkness of the corridors of the relic. Ordin carried the heavy beacon that had just become much lighter in the diminished gravity. Ziir held the beam of a strong flashlight, and a small readout displaying a crude sensor map of the place.

"We'll set it up just up here..." his voice echoed through the intercom. He made his way slowly forward into the ship. The metal here was still shiny, and the beam cast strange shadows between the pipes and dead control panels lining the walls. When he had found the spot he wanted, he knelt down and planted the beacon on the grated floor. His fingers slipped, and the device dropped hard onto the metal, making a loud, unpleasant noise. Ziir was motionless.

"What? What is it?"

Ziir looked up. "There's air in here. If it were a vacuum, we wouldn't be able to hear anything." He examined the readout in his hand, pressed buttons, waved it around him like a fly-swatter. "Oxygen, Nitrogen, trace elements mixture... Pressure, one bar." He was astounded by this. "We should be able to breathe in here."

"What?"

Ziir shrugged and carefully removed his faceplate. He took a few deep breaths and concluded that the air was pure and clean, not even very cold. "I guess these things were well-built."

Even as her own faceplate raised up, and the old air filled her lungs, Creta was incredulous. "This ship maintained pure, heated air for three thousand years? How is that possible?"

Ziir started his work on the beacon's transmission program. "The Khar-Toba was a generational ship... It was designed to support the Hiigarans for a hundred years or more. I guess it just kept going. Also remember that it hasn't had anyone breathing here for a few millennia."

It could have been from the low temperatures in these unheated passages, but Ordin shivered. "As long as we can breathe here, maybe we should explore a little. We still have a few hours, and the next time we see this ship, it will be on its way back to Hiigara to be taken apart and studied by an army of historians. We might as well see what we can before that time."

Creta agreed, beginning to see this mission as her chance to be the first to do something, maybe even to earn her five minutes of fame on a galactic news broadcast. Behind all that was simple curiosity.

Ziir smiled noncommittally. "I should stay here and get this thing working. It will probably take half an hour. You go on without me." He handed the commander his mapping scanner. "Don't get lost."

The two of them began their exploration. Their boots made echoes on the floors as they disappeared into the darkness of the labyrinth... Gradually they lost sight of the airlock and entered an enlarged corridor that looked as if it went on for kilometers. The started in the direction of the front of the ship. They became less and less uptight about the place, as they had yet to encounter a corpse.

"This reminds me of my childhood..." Creta said, looking around the walls, like mirrors replicating her image. "My friends and I would play in the abandoned buildings on the edge of the city... The really old buildings from when-" she trailed off, and recovered her sentence. "The really old ones. The halls went underground, and there were metal panels... It was like the whole place was made of gold."

They came to the end of the long hallway, feeling that same delight of curiosity that Creta recalled from so long ago. There was a large door, like a freight transport hatch. The manual release was on the wall to its side, beckoning their touch. They paused, looked each other in the eye. Ordin extended his hand to hit the switch, but stopped himself, hearing something. A far-off noise... A distant murmur of what sounded almost like a humanoid voice. Or footsteps being amplified by the refractive plating. It was a sound, and it was not coming from either of the explorers. "What is that?" She asked, her voice hushed to a low whisper.

Ordin strained to hear it again, but the sound was gone. "Just metal fatigue. Nothing." He waited for the sound to return, but it did not, so he firmly grasped the switch and pulled it back. They heard the ancient locks disengage, the great door making a few subdued clicks and hums. Finally, the old, corroded motors went to work and started their rotations. The door pulled itself open with a loud whir and the sound of metal scraping against metal.

The two explorers leapt back, stunned, frightened by what they saw. As the doors opened, a tiny sliver of yellow light flew from beyond and made its way up the walls. The light expanded, stinging their eyes... A wave of sudden warmth washed over them, filling the edges of the helmets with condensation. Creta wanted to run, but her feet were melted into the plating beneath her. Both were forced to remain still as the doors opened fully, blasting them with the warm glow. Just on the other side of the great frame, the corridor was new, completely spotless. The walls were bright, clean, and covered with the illumination of the lights that hung over the halls. The control panels were on, active, alert, displaying a map of the entire ship and the status of all its systems. The hall was alive, new, as if it had never aged. Life support here was functioning, perfectly, completely. But the most stunning image of all was not that of this part of the ship itself, but rather that of a young Hiigaran man standing right there before them, dressed in strange clothes, holding an iron pole and displaying an expression of sheer terror.

The Hiigaran shouted something in a strange dialect and took off running as fast as he could away from them. Creta watched his bare feet on the metal, pounding, her world suddenly reduced to slow-motion. In a trance, overcome by awe, she followed him down the hall, between the golden walls, through one door and then another. And then the boy vanished around a bend, and she could see an even greater, purer light casting his elongated shadow on the floor. Ever so slowly, she turned the corner and found herself looking into the central area of the ship. She stood, her blood suddenly cold, at a small railing, elevated fifty meters above the ground level of the cavernous chamber. Before her, the artificial landscape stretched away...

And every part of it was filled with living, breathing Hiigarans.