If Bones Could Talk

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.