It was the biggest ship Thola had ever seen. As Trial by Service swept closer to the wreckage, the quiet murmurs on the construction ship's bridge got louder. Thola didn't blame them for whispering- if he hadn't been expected to set a better example he'd have been muttering to himself too. As it was, Thola kept his cranial fronds still from years of experience, watching with a dispassionate expression as the ruined dreadnought came closer.
"By the Tester." someone murmured, loud enough for Thola to hear.
A previous crew had already set up a magnetic tether system, allowing for the space-suited Lethans to maneuver all around the ship without fear of flying off, for which Thola was grateful. He couldn't imagine how time-consuming it would have been to be reattaching tethers every fifty meters on a ship over seven kilometers long. The Trial by Service slowed to a halt near the base camp that had been set up in the ruins of the battleship's topside observation deck. A docking umbilical had been set up, and Thola led his crew of technicians and engineers across.
A Ztrakpor engineer was waiting for him on the other side, antennae clicking. Polite greeting. it said, and Thola nodded his acknowledgement. "Polite greeting." He responded, as his translator converted the words into the combination of clicks and pheromones the Ztrakpor used for communication.
You are the head of the engineering team, Thola?
"Yes, that's me." Thola answered.
I'm Zrax, but you can call me— the translator made a garbled sound that reminded Thola of a starfighter engine that had sucked in a shovelful of gravel. -If that's easier. the translator finished.
"I'll stick with Zrax, thanks." Thola replied.
Very well. I'm the head of the construction department around here- we'll do all the heavy lifting so you eggheads can figure out how this damn thing works.
Thola glanced around, and saw that there were indeed dozens of other Ztrakpor scuttling about, many equipped with powered exoskeletons that had been screwed on to their, well, usual exoskeletons. "Glad to have you aboard." He replied to Zrax. "Did the previous crew leave any documentation on what they'd found?"
A little bit. Zrax made an odd movement that the translator equated to a shrug. Why don't I show you fellows to your quarters and we can get started?
"Lead on." Thola replied, and gestured at his team to follow as Zrax scuttled off.
The room appeared to have once been some sort of storeroom, but someone had set up a series of cloth dividers to create a series of smaller rooms, each with a bed, desk, and storage bin.
We've got a few basic schematics of this place set up Zrax informed him, handing Thola a datachip. We'll see that all your people get one, so they don't stray into the unpressurized areas.
"Thanks." Thola said, sliding the datachip into his tablet. A maze of corridors and rooms bloomed out of the holoprojector, and Thola stood back in surprise. "Wow, you've been busy."
Thankfully, the arrangement of each deck is not random. Zrax said. We've been using our ship's sensor arrays to map out the internal architecture, so a lot of what you're seeing's been scanned, even though no one's been there yet.
"Clever." Thola commented. "Give us twenty minutes to set up- we'll probably just watch your workstations for the rest of today, then start setting up our own base tomorrow."
It's a plan, then. I look forward to working with you.
"Likewise." Thola said, then turned back into the repurposed storeroom.
Nola, the team's active support specialist, came up behind Thola. "Friendly guy, huh?"
"Yeah." Thola said, still watching the retreating back of the Ztrakpor. "Tell the crew we've got five minutes to unpack, then I wanna talk to them."
"Yessir."
In traditional Lethan style, each being was capable of setting up his or her quarters in three and a half minutes if pressed. The engineers of the Trial by Service may not have been soldiers, but that was no reason to lack discipline. After five minutes, Thola looked into ten sets of eyes, standing in a neat row before him.
"Alright people, this is how it's going to be. This dreadnought was disabled by the Union's federation fleet, but because it's closest to Lethan territory, we've gotten the go-ahead to add it to our own line of battle. Some of the other federation members aren't so happy about that, so it's best to be on your guard. The best way for us to make sure we're the most qualified to run this ship is to know more about it than anybody else. I expect every one of you to regard that as your personal Trial from now until we're steering it back to Tremmell. Is that understood?"
Several head-fronds twitched at that statement. Thola, like all expedition commanders, had the authority to assign Trials to his subordinates— essentially marking a given objective as their sacred duty to be pursued before all else. It was generally reserved for dire circumstances- many seeming Lethan defeats had been reversed by such orders. To use it now meant that Lethan possession of the dreadnought was not an option, it was an inevitability.
"It will be done!" Nola said.
"Glad to hear it." Thola said. "Let's get to it."
The next weeks were exhausting. The ancient ship had been battered more than halfway into scrap by the federation fleet, and even the Ztrakpor's efforts to rebuild the damaged sections was moving at a snail's pace. The ship's own gravity was worsening the problem, as the mass of the hull pulled itself inward under its own weight.
The third week found Thola, Nola, and a structural engineer named Lora poring over the expanded schematics of the ship. Nola was pointing out the long, cylindrical tubes that had been found deep in the center of the ship in the previous week. "I'm pretty sure those are the active support nodes for the hull. When they're on, they serve as the ship's spine, letting the whole thing keep its shape. If we can't get them online, this whole thing is just going to keep crumbling faster than we can repair it."
"We don't have control over the ship's power supply, though." Thola pointed out. "Even if we could find the controls to activate them, we'd need some way to power them."
"Use an external power source." Lora suggested quietly.
"What external power? We'd need—" Nola broke off. "Oh."
"The ship." Thola and Nola said at the same time.
Are you sure you want to do that? Zrax said. Construction ships aren't cheap, you know.
"It's fine." Thola said. "I've already notified my government; I'm taking full responsibility."
Zrax shrugged again. Your funeral, I guess. Where do you want the power leads hooked in?
"Nola will show you." Thola replied. "If you need any other assistance from my team, you have my comms. I'm going to be out for a while, but keep me in the loop."
I'll do that. Zrax promised. May I ask where you're headed?
"We're looking for the main control center again."
Best of luck, then. Stay safe. Zrax responded.
"Same." Thola answered, then clicked his helmet on. Three others of his team— Lora, Cole, and Floren— accompanied him to the airlock that had been set up midway down a corridor. They cycled through, and entered the unpressurized parts of the ship.
It was a different atmosphere entirely compared to the warm, well-lit areas above. The gravity was still on, but all else was cold and dead. Shattered light-strips ran across the ceiling, and piles of random garbage ranged from small annoyances to large obstacles.
"Tester preserve us." Cole breathed as they entered a chamber that had been dubbed "the atrium" by previous explorers. The room was easily big enough to house a dozen fighter wings, but instead was covered in row upon row of capacitors, all of which were routed to serve a single one of the phase disruptors. The ceiling vaulted overhead, various power cables and unidentifiable mechanisms dangling from the roof.
Thola's fronds twisted in involuntary agreement. Despite the incredible power and strength on display, the knowledge that the entire massive vessel was slowly collapsing in on itself made even the largest rooms feel claustrophobic.
As much to distract himself as anything else, Thola pulled up the schematic of the dreadnought and overlaid an exterior view. "So far, we've been assuming that the central computer was placed somewhere close enough to the surface, so it could be accessed easily in case something went wrong." he said, lighting up the potential spots on the diagram, then shading the ones that had previously been checked in red.
"So today we're going to try a different hypothesis. Let's assume that the makers either weren't concerned about accidents, or never planned to repair it in the first place. They'd want to put it as close to the center as possible, which would place the core around here." Thola placed a green dot near the center of the overlay, far away from previously explored territory.
"That's going to be a lot of climbing." Cole commented. "We'll want to take one of the elevator shafts down, but going back up is going to be a real treat."
"The Tester never meant for life to be easy." Floren grinned. The man had played larek-polo for all six years of college, and was a frequent sight in Trial by Service's small gymnasium. Cole, by contrast, considered walking to the preservative unit midway through a holo-game tournament to be exercise.
"Asshole." Cole replied.
"Are you two done?" Thola asked.
"Yeah, yeah." Floren said, turning back from Cole to start unspooling the climbing ropes from his pack. "Let's do this."
Thola's team elected to go down Elevator Fourteen, which had the advantage of several tears in its walls that served as resting points during the descent. It was a long way down- Lora had calculated it would be about two kilometers to reach the bottom.
"Whoa!" Floren exclaimed, about midway through the descent. Carabiners hissed as the rest of the expedition ground to a halt, mag-boots locking to the walls in case of a structural collapse.
"Look at the density readings on this thing!" Floren continued, passing Thola his hand scanner.
"thirty-five grams per cubic centimeter?" Thola asked. "Is this thing working?"
"Was when I left." Floren replied. "We can check on a piece of steel or something when we get to the bottom."
"Let's do that." Thola agreed. "If we're passing through a new layer of armor, we might be more on track than we thought."
Once more they resumed the descent, punctuated by Floren's occasional density measurements, which slowly increased from impossible to ludicrous as they reached the bottom.
"Seventy-five grams per cubic centimeter?" Thola asked as they approached the bottom. "Really?"
Floren attempted to shrug inside a spacesuit. "Hey man, I'm just taking the measurements. I don't make the rules."
"Try it out on something we know the density of." Thola told him. "Maybe the scanner's off."
Now on solid ground, Floren pulled off his steel carabiner and scanned it with the device. "Eight grams per cubic centimeter." he said. "It's not off at all."
They all stared at the dark metal walls with new respect. "This is way beyond our current science to understand." Thola said at last.
"All the more reason we need it." Lora commented.
Even here, in arguably the most durable bunker known to Lethan science, hundreds of light-years from the front, mention of the Purity chilled the room.
"Going by what we've seen so far, the main core ought to be around here somewhere." Thola said, breaking the silence after a moment. "Floren, are you picking anything up?"
"I'm picking up lots of things, sir." Floren replied. "Lots of high-energy stuff going around here. We might be near a reactor, as well- I think this low-density bit over here might be a liquid coolant tank."
"Alright. Let's start there, follow the pipes and see where they lead." Thola decided. "Tester knows this might take a while."
They set out walking, and before long an access panel hung ajar. Floren pointed inside, and Thola shone his light inside. The room within was dominated by a single massive cylindrical tank, accompanied by a cluster of pumps, compressors, and linkages.
"Looks like a reactor setup all right." Cole said, looking it over. "It'd have to be something about as powerful as one of our planetary setups, but it's rigged for about that amount of waste heat. You think it runs on Betharian stone?"
"Not sure." Thola responded. "What kind of coolant, Floren?"
Floren squinted at his scanner. "Looks like liquid helium."
"Probably betharian stone, then." Thola said. "Nothing else would need a coolant that powerful."
The thick pipes led out from one side of the tank, through a pump, and into a wall. Without needing any prompting, Cole pulled out his cutting torch and started opening up the wall. It took some time, but the wall was fortunately not made of the same armor they had encountered earlier. A few minutes later, a square section of the wall fell outward into the room beyond, and Thola stepped through.
"Okay, that's not a reactor." he said.
The room beyond was almost as cavernous as the atrium, but lacked any of the massive capacitors. Instead, huge blocks of greenish crystal rose from the floor to the ceiling, at least twenty meters high by Thola's eye. The coolant pipes ran into the floor, circling around each crystal. Inside each one, Thola could see tiny pipes threaded through the translucent substance. A few of the massive crystals were broken, and small puddles of liquid helium pooled about them. Cole stepped in one by accident, and yelped as even the cold exterior of his spacesuit caused the liquid to vaporize.
"What are these things?" Floren asked, running his mass scanner over a nearby crystal. "They're some sort of silicon derivative, but nothing comes up in my database."
Thola looked around. "I think this might be what we're looking for."
"The computer core?" Cole asked. "I dunno- we've seen a lot of weird stuff so far, but I don't recognize anything about this."
"Maybe it's a different sort of energy bank?" Floren suggested. "It's pretty clear that these crystals have a lot of electricity running through them."
"Let's be honest, nobody has any real idea." Thola admitted. "But if the Tester set it in front of us, we have to try and figure it out. Let's start by going around the periphery; see if there are any control panels or something. The builders must have had some way to start this thing up."
It took longer than expected to search the room, as the sheer quantity of space involved, with multiple levels, balconies, and staircases making even a straight-line path difficult. At last, they were deep in the center of the complex, where a single, simple console stood. There appeared to be a cloth of some kind draped over it.
Thola moved closer to investigate, then recoiled in horror. "It's a body!" he exclaimed. Moving forward after a moment, he inspected it with a more clinical air. "Probably been here a long time."
"Did we even bring a bio expert?" Floren wondered.
"I think Mockla has a tertius qualification." Cole said, staying furthest from the alien corpse and trying not to look at it. "Why don't we leave this for her?"
"It's been dead for thousands of years, it won't hurt us."
"Its spirit might." Cole pointed out.
That got everyone's attention.
"I don't think so." Floren said after thinking about it for a moment. "After all, we haven't seen anything so far. Wouldn't an angry spirit mess with our equipment first, like the flashlights or something?"
"Not to mention we're not the ones who murdered him." Lora pointed out, studying the corpse some more. She pointed to a jagged, round hole carved in the back of the alien's triangular head.
"He was shot from behind?" Floren asked.
"Looks like. Why would they do that?"
"He was the engineer." Thola realized. When three sets of eyes turned to his, he explained. "It all makes sense. Whatever else this ship was, it was never designed for living beings to be aboard- there aren't any recreation rooms, bathrooms, or even airlocks. It was designed to be totally self-sufficient, without any way to get in or out. That's why they killed him- he was probably the only one who knew how the ship's programming worked. Without the engineer, no one would ever be able to get inside again- until we did."
"Kill the only guy who knows the trade secrets? That's messed up." Floren said.
"Makes sense, though." Cole said.
"As long as we're respectful of his achievements, I don't think his spirit will mind too much." Thola concluded. "We'll let Mockla do a full biopsy, but afterwards I think we'd better give him the rites of a grandmaster. He's certainly earned it."
This brought about a series of nods. Thola and Lora gripped the dead alien on either side, with Floren stabilizing the dried, crusted feet. Mummified by long exposure to vacuum, the corpse was easy to pry off the console and lay reverently to one side. Thola pulled the emergency sling from his pack and placed it over the dead alien.
The team turned back to the console, whose screen was flecked with brown, long-dry blood. Thola scraped a decent portion of it off, then pressed a few likely keys. The screen flickered, then came to life, a jagged green alien script scrolling across its surface.
"Do we have a translation module for this?" Thola asked.
"We do, as it happens." Lora replied, pulling her own tablet out. Laying it over the screen, the tablet recorded the words beneath and re-displayed them in Scientific Lorall, the common language among the crew.
"Automated Dreadnought Seventeen, fatal damage suffered. Power cores offline. Computer cores offline. Disruptor arrays offline. Point-defense systems offline. Shields offline. Engines offline. Hyperdrive…"
Text continued to scroll, tallying up the tremendous damage done by the Union's fleet.
"Cole, the ball's in your court." Thola said. "How much can you figure out about the ship from this?"
Cole imitated cracking his knuckles through the space suit. "Let's find out." he said, stepping over to the console. He tapped at a key, recorded the reaction, then moved on. "This might take a while." he said over his shoulder. "We probably ought to start setting up a camp down here, to be quite honest. We'll get more done down here than we ever could up top."
"That sounds like a good idea." Thola agreed. "I don't think we should pressurize this area just yet, but we can certainly put in airlocks on a nearby room and start there."
"We're heading back up, then?" Floren asked.
"Yeah. we probably ought to see what progress Zrax has made pulling out the ship's reactor, too. He's not going to be pleased to here we've got even more work for him."
"And our deceased engineer?" Lora asked.
"We'll bring him with us. I'll take the first shift carrying."
Careful, careful Zrax chastised his workers as the huge, toroidal reactor swung on its rope, hitting the wall with a wince-inducing bang. The uneven sides of the elevator could just about accommodate the reactor, but it kept catching on dents and outcroppings that caused it to rattle against the sides of the shaft. Thola was the only member of his team not below, having elected to stay and watch the efforts at getting the reactor over to the computer core.
Out of everyone, Cole was the happiest, spending twelve hours every day poring over the computer core's console- as far as anyone could tell, it was the only one on the ship. Floren and Lora were helping him, while Nola and her team worked on the linguistics side of the issue. Thola's comlink buzzed, and he tapped the "answer" key on his tablet.
A hologram of Mockla's face popped out of the tablet. "Boss, we've got something strange going on here with the biopsy. You got a second?"
"On my way." Thola replied, ducking into an adjacent elevator shaft and rappelling to the bottom in a matter of minutes. He passed through the airlock, then ducked into the plastic-shrouded area that had been designated as the biolab. Mockla and her two assistants were inside, studying the alien corpse with puzzled expressions.
Thola donned a gown and mask from the rack at the door and unzipped the door to get in.
"What have we got?" he asked.
"Well, you were right about the murder hypothesis." Mockla said. "I'm no forensic specialist, but I'd say that's a pretty big hole in the cranium he's got there." She pointed to it with her scalpel. "The shape and burn marks inside are pretty consistent with some kind of energy weapon, but it's all so degraded I couldn't tell you what type."
She moved the scalpel over to the alien's mid-chest region. "We tried to take a few DNA samples, but it was all too old to get any real information out. We're pretty sure he was some sort of aquatic species though; there's a whole line of little organs on the outside of the rib structure that seem consistent with a sort of swim bladder arrangement. But what was inside the chest cavity is what I wanted to tell you about."
She turned to one of her assistants. "Alright, turn the rib spreaders back on."
Thola held his breakfast down as best he could as the pneumatic device pulled the alien's ribs apart with a nauseating sound. Inside, brown, mottled flesh hung limp against yellowed bones, and a pile of brownish-grey organs occupied the center. Ignoring Thola's discomfort, Malkah reached a polymer-gloved hand inside the chest cavity and spread open a slit that had been cut in one of the organs.
Thola squinted at the blob, feeling rather unmotivated to see what was inside. Mockla's fingers reached in, and she tugged at something inside. "If you want to reach in," she started, but glanced up and shook her head. "Never mind. Anyway, there's something metallic in here. I think I can work it out, but with all the time he's been dead and in vacuum, it might damage other parts if I try to force it."
"Something metal, you said?" Thola asked. "Yeah, pull it out. I think you've gotten all you could anyway."
There was a wet slurping sound, and Mockla's hand reemerged clutching a small gold-colored ornament. "Oh, Tester." Thola moaned, head-fronds waggling in a nauseated pattern.
"Oh, relax." Mockla said. "I'm just going to run a few scans on this, and we'll see what's what."
Cleaned from its biological covering of alien stomach juices, the device proved to be a gold-bronze colored object ten centimeters long. A glassy bead made up a short handle on one side, held in place by elaborate, filigree metal work.
"You know what it reminds me of?" Thola commented, looking at the patterned, irregular surface.
"Hmm?" Mockla asked.
"It almost looks like one of those things people used before electronic locks- a key, they were called."