As he had expected, the sce crew dove headfirst into analyzing the artifacts he had brought with him from the pantry.

  Obviously, the food ihe tainers had decayed turies—perhaps millenia—ago. What was left in them was only desiccated residue in the form of dust and dry smears, tooo make it possible to even guess what they had inally tained. But atoms don’t disappear. Even though the bonds that had brought them together into plex molecules—ultimately f food—had broken down, the atoms themselves remained and could be analyzed.

  Captain Balmar floated in silence while he waited for the results of the tests. These were the first anic remains they had found onboard the ship, and that meant an opportunity for carbon dating. He was eager to learly how old the ship really was. The older, the better—for his wallet, of course.

  Pv-tor-fel-mak looked in fusion at the s of his portable mass speeter. “Are you sure these were food tainers, Captain, bless your eyes?” he asked cautiously, not wanting to question his superior, but also not seeing how the results of the tests could fit with the captain’s description of the alien “pantry.”

  “There were ns of any kind on any of the tainers in that room,” Captain Balmar replied. “But I know my way around a ste area. I ’t see what else they’d keep in a room like that. And you see the jars for yourself. They look just like any you’d find in yrandmother’s pantry. Just look at those tins—they even have built-in openers in their lids. I’m sure they tained food.”

  The specialist held up one of the tins and ied it in the light of his lumen torch. “Yeah, I think you’re right,” he said after some time. “Maybe the tainers are older thahought, and the markings have worn off pletely. They’d be oside and would be the first to fke off from thermal erosion. But if that’s true, and this one really did tain food at some point in time, the test results don’t make any sense.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “There’s no carbon in the tainers,” the Ker expined. “None whatsoever. The material is more like… fine sand, I’d say. Just sili dust, really.”

  Captain Balmar nodded slowly. Without any carbon residue left, there was nothing to use for carbon dating. Well, they’d just have to find another way to figure out how old the ship was.

  “All right,” he finally said. “Maybe I was wrong, then. Perhaps this was just… I don’t know, a room for st their asteroid samples.”

  “Some of the isters, yes,” Pv-tor-fel-mak replied. “That’s what I’d use to store my samples, too. But the bags? They still make more sense for st food.”

  Balmar paused to think over their options. “Well, I guess that’s it,” he cluded. “Let’s push deeper into the wreck. Maybe we find something else to use for dating when we’re further in. And don’t fet to keep your eyes open for anything of value we bring with us when we leave.”

  The state of the ship hadn’t improved as they ventured deeper. Broken pieetal, slowly colliding with each other, still floated around the open spaces they glided through. The tear in the hull they had ehrough had been close to the stern of the ship. The going had been slow, with all the debris blog the corridors, but now, the crew of Peretti's Legacy had peed almost ohird of the way toward the bow.

  After another hour of slowly navigating the decrepit corridors, the narrow passageway was suddenly repced with a vast chamber. Gliding through the doorway, their lights failed to illumihe opposing side of the room. As they slowly floated to the middle of it, the group watched the beams of their fshlights py over the debris tumbling in silehrough the cavernous space, their silhouettes casting harsh shadows on the walls. The se was all too easy to misinterpret in the darkness, like a shadow theater from hell.

  “It’s kind of creepy, isn’t it, Captain?” Mission Specialist Suwannarat said, fear evident in his voice. He was a rge, well-traierran with blonde hair and pierg blue eyes, the type of man who would walk into a Jerrassian bar and curse Kham without a sed thought. But here, deep ihe age of the alien wreck, his size and training did nothing to keep his mind in check.

  “Mmm,” Captain Balmar muttered, not wanting to fuel the crew’s fear. He swept his fshlight around the dark spatil it illuminated a rge pieaery that happeo silently drift through its narrow beam. “It’s just some sort of mae garage,” he expined. “See there? That looks like a load lifter.”

  It was all a fa?ade, of course. In truth, he had no idea what the alien mae’s purpose might be. The oppressive dread of the pce was crawling up his spine—no different from what he khe rest of the crew must be feeling. Still, he couldn’t let it show. For their sake, he maintaihe act, feigning fidence as if he kly what he was talking about.

  Suddenly, Karl Sawhhe Legacy’s navigator, called out.

  “I saw something!” he shouted.

  Slowly, the rest of the crew used their maneuvering thrusters to turn around, their fshlights now trag paths in his general dire.

  “What?” Captain Balmar barked, the anger in his voice c the dread he was feeling. “What did you see?”

  “I swear it moved, Captain,” Sawhney expined, knowing how little that meant in a room filled with tumbling debris. Truth be told, whehought about it, he wasn’t sure what he had seen. He was starting to feel a little embarrassed now, realizing too te it robably just his eyes pying tricks on him, seeing things that weren't there in the plex interpy of shadows against the wall.

  The situation was quickly getting out of hand, Balmar thought. Any sed now, the crew could start panig. Ahey were, deep ihe alien wreck, with over four hours of travel time before even reag daylight, not to mention the additional time o traverse the virtual minefield of debris outside. Trying to take and of the situation, he ordered the crew to proceed further into the ship, hoping they would calm down ohey’d left the creepy chamber they were floating in now.

  As the narrow corridor closed in on them agaiarted to wonder if he had made the wrong decision. Perhaps they should have just left auro Peretti's Legacy? They could always e back ter and tiheir exploration of the ghost ship.

  That’s it, he thought. Now I’m thinking of the alien vessel as a ghost ship, too. There was no way of shaking the feeling of intense dread that was settling on the seven crew members as they delved deeper into the darkness, and now he was starting to fall victim to it as well.

  The corridor was no longer wide enough for the team to keep traveling in pairs. Instead, they became spaced out, seven women and men drifting in single file, the sight of the person in front of them now only a silhouette against the bleak lights of the lumen torches ahead, trying to keep the darkness at bay. Captain Balmar wished they had thought ing a rope with them so they could tie themselves together. Among the debris of the narrow passageway, it was all too easy for someoo get stutil they could push past the tumbling rubble, slowing down everyone behind them and falling behind the crew in front. The lohey drifted through the corridor, the further they got separated from each other.

  When the passage suddenly made a sharp turn to the right, Captain Balmar found himself alone. He wasn’t, of course—the rest of the crew would eventually catch up with him. But for now, he was the only one in this part of the corridor, visually cut off from the fshlight beams behind him by the sharp geometry of the ship’s interior. The utter silence eg through his mind made the hairs stand up on his back. Exposed to the vacuum of spao sounds could travel through the ship to his ears, and now when he was alohe unnatural quiet—bined with Sawhney's earlier insistence he had seen something move in the darkness—made Balmar think of sarios he wished he had never imagined.

  If someone—or somethio creep up on him from behind, he would never even know it. Some… creature could be standing just a meter behind him at this very moment, ready to strike at him from the darkness, aill wouldn’t be able to hear it through the vacuum of the derelict alien vessel. The only way to know for sure would be to turn around and look for himself.

  It was all too much. The thought of slowly rotating to face the darkness behind him, only to raise his fshlight and reveal a snarling apparition ready to tear him apart, was more than he could bear. He ched his fingers ihe gloves of his spacesuit, refusing to turn around to disprove the obsessive thoughts his brain was now feverishly pying with.

  Captain Balmar felt how he was starting to breathe faster and shallower, to keep up with his rag heart. The rasping sound of air flowing in and out of his lungs within the cramped space of his helmet only heightehe terror of the situation. The dead sileside trasted sharply with the hurrie of his owh, now r in his ears.

  In the bess of his personal horror shotain Balmar suddenly remembered how his visor had fogged up without reason iher dark crawlspace where he had been alone earlier on his way out from the pantry.

  Something touched his right shoulder. Something eerily remi of a human hand.

  MvonStz