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 airpnes, others needing a magnifying gss to be spotted—thrown out into space during whatever cataclysmic event it had experieo protect Peretti's Legacy, Captain Balmar decided to park his ship over a kilometer out from the alien wred do a spacewalk to cross the distance.

  It was an inve 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 o 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-pliant dog port.

  The spacewalk wouldn’t be without its dangers, either. If the sharp pieces of brokeal in the viity posed a threat even to the Legacy, they were certainly more than capable of slig through the soft fabric of a spacesuit like a hot khrough butter. The crew would have to be vigint during the EVA.

  Fortunately, the risks involved didn’t seem to deter the crew. Finding volunteers for the first excursion into the alieurned out to be the easiest part of the mission. In fact, with the entire crew volunteering for the job, the biggest challenge was deg 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 sed crew member would have to stay on the Legacy. After much deliberation, his choice fell on Imrad Kol, the sed Jerrassian on the crew and the ship’s maintenangineer. She would be able to handle any teical 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 viity. As they he hull of the derelict, they could see it was littered with mieteoroid impacts, as if someone had used it as target practice figantic, old-fashioned shotgun. Not knowing the material the ship was made of, nor its structural iy properties, the amount of visible impacts didn’t tell them much about the vessel’s age—except to firm what they already suspected: the ship was old. Very old.

  Eventually, they reached one of the rge tears in the hull where they had decided to ehe wreck. Slowly, the seven women and men of Peretti's Legacy’s crew floated—one by oo the cavernous gloom of the derelict spacecraft, careful to avoid disturbing the debris ih 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 pact than night itself. From now on, the only light they would see until they returo the Legacy was from their fshlights a-mounted lumen torches.

  As they carefully floated into the narrow corridor, filled with tumbling debris, their eyes tracked the beams of light dang e-old metal panels, broken furniture, inprehensible alien maery. Here, ihe 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 evearians.

  Captain Balmar wasn’t a stist, but he took pride in trying to know a little bit about everything. He was aware of a much-debated axiom among xenoanthropologists tered oimeline for when civilizations in the Milky Way had reached teological maturity. The gaxy had existed for more or less fourteen billion years. Meanwhile, the time span from the first multicellur anism to the emergence of intelligent beings capable of spaceflight was just a few hundred million years. Thus, it seemed reasoo assume ielr civilizations would have emerged in the gaxy at vastly different points in time, separated by millions or even billions of years.

  Yet, that was not the reality the gaxy presehe Etarians, the Terrans, the Ker, and the Jerrassians had all reached teological maturity within the span of less than a thousand years of each other. The same was true for the species entered during the Sed Expansion. This was something of a puzzle. From what Captain Balmar uood, the current thinking was that this was—at least partially—ected to the timeframe of stelr evolution. Both teology and life itself needed heavy elements, atoms that did when the universe first sprang iehe primordial hydrogen and helium of the early Milky Way had to first be verted into heavier atoms in the nuclear furnaces of its first suns. But not even that first geion of stars was enough to produce the abundance of heavy elements needed for life to flourish—a succession of supernovas and stelr rebirths had to happen first before that ossible.

  This slow process put a limit on how early teologically advanced life could appear in the universe, a limit that seemed to have caused all known civilizations to show up fairly retly, withi millennium or so. Obviously, there must have been other factors at py as well—the timeline of stelr evolution alone would not be precise enough to enforce a limit as short as a thousand years—but, all in all, it was an accepted axiom that there had ed any civilizations in the Milky Way capable of spaceflight until the st millennium.

  That axiom was now proven irrefutably wrong.

  At first, Captain Balmar was surprised there wasn’t more dust c the a surfaces they glided past. They weren’t free of it, but there was much less grime here than he had expected. However, after some thought oter, he realized his expectations were based on terrestrial assumptions. Here, there had been no crew shedding skin fragments and no dirt blown in by the wind. There had been no air to oxidize the metals of the hull and no water to erode its surfaces. Mieteoroids and ic rays would certainly have pyed their part in shredding the old ship to dust, but only oside—here inside, shielded by the thick bulkheads of the craft, the abandoned corridors of the a vessel had been protected from even those forces of nature. That left only the slow work of thermal erosion to dismahe derelict—assuming the building materials it was made from were even susceptible to such decay.

  Even so, the corridors they floated through were anything but pristine. In the narrow beams of their fshlights, heavy pieces of brokeal—beams ripped from their support structures, rge, nondescript ste taihrown around like toys, and uifiable but clearly broken alien structs made from alloys resembling silver old—floated everywhere they looked, and more often than he liked, blocked their way. To Balmar, the jagged pieetal ripped from their pces looked like the drifting remains of some a monster, ready to strike at him from the darkness. Whether the rge tears ier hull had been the cause of the ship’s demise, or just a catastrophic collision with a etary fragment that had happened long after the initial disaster, the effects of such a cataclysmic event were surely the reason for the majority of the debris they found.

  The beams and heavy tainers were another area where he had to be careful not to let his terrestrial expectations make a fool of him. Just because the heavy objects were floating effortlessly through the vacuum of these age-old chambers didn’t mean they were massless. Weightless, yes, but not massless—a kilogram of metal remained a kilogram of mass, even in microgravity. Pushing them aside when they blocked the team’s path still took a lot of effort—and on the move, you had to be careful to stay out of their way. A ton of metal moving at even a fra of a meter per sed would crush you just as easily in space as it would on the ground.

  The silence of the dead corridors teo py with the mind. You kept expeg to hear a sound when two objects impacted each other or when a metal beam scraped against the floor tiles as it slowly drifted past you, but in the vacuum of the derelict ship, there was only silence. Silence, and the rasping sound of his owh inside his helmet. It was an eerie feeling, unnatural despite being pletely natural, and it made Captain Balmar uneasy. The darkness did nothing to help with that, either. Beyond the light sources the crew carried, there was only total, imperable bess. Here, deep ihe wreck, there weren’t even stars to light their way. Balmar tried not to think of what would happen if their light sources ran out of battery power.

  Well, the role of coward did not fit the captain of a starship, he thought. More for his own sake than for anything else, he decided to make a statement.

  “Hold the fort, Bouchard,” he said to his first mate. “I want to take a look at this passageway,” Balmar tinued, indig the narrow crawl space to their left. The opening wasn’t wide enough to allow for more than one person to e a time, and in his bulky spacesuit, it took some time just to get into positioually, he mao heave himself into the dark hole in the wall. It was a tight fit, and as he squeezed through, he felt himself starting to panic upon realizing there wasn’t enough spaove his arms. He bit his tongue in sileo avoid screaming in fear as he plunged into the night beyond.

  Ohrough, the passageway widened, allowing him t up his fshlight again. It didn’t do much to illumihe long tuhat stretched out in the darkness in front of him. Here, there was less debris floating around, but the ceiling of the passageway artially obscured by a deal framework blog his view of the upper part of the room. What there in the shadows, he could not see.

  As he reached the end of the chamber, he found nothing more than a ste space. There were shelves upon shelves filled with sealed boxes, bags, and isters—likely some sort of alien pantry, Balmar thought. Before he turned around to leave, he grabbed an assorted colle of items, none of them bearing anything resembling a bel or any other form of identification. Several of them crumbled in his hands, disiing into tiny fkes of dust that floated away in the vacuum. Not wanting to leave empty-handed, he grabbed a few more tainers, some of which held together when he picked them up. The sce crew would probably find them irresistible, he mused.

  His hands full of alien foodstuffs, he could no longer hold his fshlight, and the head-mounted lumen torch did little to illumihe spa front of him. In the darkness of the narrow crawl space, it was all too easy to imagiold horrors lying in wait in the shadows beyond. He had to remind himself the wreck was dead and had been so for untold turies. Other thahreat of panic, there was nothihat could hurt him.

  But then there was that brief moment, just as he passed below the metal mesh in the ceiling, wheside of the visor of his helmet suddenly fogged up, as if something unseen was breathing down on him from the darkness above.

  Captain Balmar shrugged. Obviously, in the vacuum of the derelict, that was impossible; he k was just his imagination pying tricks on him.

  MvonStz