If Bones Could Talk

Chapter 3 - The First Hours Inside

Gaining access to the inside of the ship turned out to be easier said than done.

Sharing the orbit of the derelict were millions of pieces of twisted metal—some the size of airplanes, others needing a magnifying glass to be spotted—thrown out into space during whatever cataclysmic event it had experienced. To protect Peretti's Legacy, Captain Balmar decided to park his ship over a kilometer out from the alien wreck and do a spacewalk to cross the distance.

It was an inconvenient process and would take extra time, but even if they had been able to park just outside the derelict ship, they still wouldn't have been able to dock with it. No matter what, an EVA would have been needed to reach its interior. After all, it wasn't like whatever alien race had built it would have bothered to implement an FSO 82,001 standards-compliant docking port.

The spacewalk wouldn't be without its dangers, either. If the sharp pieces of broken metal in the vicinity posed a threat even to the Legacy, they were certainly more than capable of slicing through the soft fabric of a spacesuit like a hot knife through butter. The crew would have to be vigilant during the EVA.

Fortunately, the risks involved didn't seem to deter the crew. Finding volunteers for the first excursion into the alien wreck turned out to be the easiest part of the mission. In fact, with the entire crew volunteering for the job, the biggest challenge was deciding who would be allowed to go and who would have to stay behind. Even though Torque certainly was capable of running the ship on its own, Captain Balmar didn't like leaving his ship in the hands of a single crew member. Unforeseen things could happen, and he didn't want to lose his ship to a situation that a little bit of redundancy could have avoided. In addition to Torque, a second crew member would have to stay on the Legacy. After much deliberation, his choice fell on Imrad Kol, the second Jerrassian on the crew and the ship's maintenance engineer. She would be able to handle any technical problems that might occur in his absence.

The traverse took a little over twenty minutes as the team members slowly weaved through the debris field, mindful of any fast-moving pieces of the ship in their vicinity. As they neared the hull of the derelict, they could see it was littered with micrometeoroid impacts, as if someone had used it as target practice for a gigantic, old-fashioned shotgun. Not knowing the material the ship was made of, nor its structural integrity properties, the amount of visible impacts didn't tell them much about the vessel's age—except to confirm what they already suspected: the ship was old. Very old.

Eventually, they reached one of the large tears in the hull where they had decided to enter the wreck. Slowly, the seven women and men of Peretti's Legacy's crew floated—one by one—into the cavernous gloom of the derelict spacecraft, careful to avoid disturbing the debris inside with their maneuvering thrusters. As the shadow of the immense superstructure of the craft started to block the distant, faint sun, they stepped into a darkness more compact than night itself. From now on, the only light they would see until they returned to the Legacy was from their flashlights and helmet-mounted lumen torches.

As they carefully floated into the narrow corridor, filled with tumbling debris, their eyes tracked the beams of light dancing over age-old metal panels, broken furniture, incomprehensible alien machinery. Here, inside the wreck, the profound nature of the discovery was beginning to sink in. If the ship was millennia old, as they now believed, its existence would predate even the Etarians.

Captain Balmar wasn't a scientist, but he took pride in trying to know a little bit about everything. He was aware of a much-debated axiom among xenoanthropologists centered on the timeline for when civilizations in the Milky Way had reached technological maturity. The galaxy had existed for more or less fourteen billion years. Meanwhile, the time span from the first multicellular organism to the emergence of intelligent beings capable of spaceflight was just a few hundred million years. Thus, it seemed reasonable to assume interstellar civilizations would have emerged in the galaxy at vastly different points in time, separated by millions or even billions of years.