“Captain!”

  First Mate Laura Bouchard took a firm grip on Captain Balmar’s right shoulder, trying to shake him out of his paate.

  “Captain! e back to us!”

  There was no response from the rge Jerrassian.

  Bouchard, floating behind the captain’s back, grabbed his left shoulder as well in an attempt to rotate him around. As she did, she slowly turned in the opposite dire. Steadying herself against a protrudial beam, she finally came face-to-face with her frightened superior.

  When she looked into his bnk eyes, it was clear something within him was now missing. She tapped on his visor, but there was no visible response.

  She paused for a moment, sidering how to hahe situation without causing more panic. Relutly, she activated the crew inter.

  “This is First Mate Bouchard,” she said into her microphone. “Captain Balmar has been leading us for close to six hours now. He’s tired, and I think we all could do with some rest. I want you in the back to hurry up, and then we’ll tio the room ahead. Whe there, let’s take a half-hour break.”

  Around the bend in the corridor, she could now see the lights from the remaining crew pying over the woral panels of the opposite wall. A few mier, they were all there. She rotated to face the bow of the ship again, activated her maneuvering thrusters, and tio drift forward. Behihe six crew members followed in uneasy silence. With a firm grip around the captain’s waist, she slowly brought him along with her.

  The room they approached was mid-sized, perhaps eight by twelve meters. First Mate Bouchard guessed it had once served as some kind of feren—in the far er, a rge table was floatihe ceiling, and an assortment of narrow, tall chairs drifted about the chamber.

  Though dark and oppressive—like the rest of the age-old ship—it was as good a pce as any to stop a.

  “Alright, people,” she said when they had all gathered ihe room. “Take thirty minutes. If anyone o replenish their oxygen, do so now. Est-mar-kort has the spare isters, so talk to her if you o. Remember to drink, a some of your suit biscuits too, if you haven’t already. Ay your waste bins.”

  Most of the crew sat down, some on the floor or the walls, others ourned furniture. A couple of them floated around, peeking into the corridors and rooms outside. First Mate Bouchard glided over to the captain, now seated with his back against the wall in the er directly below the h fereable.

  “How are you feeling, Lok?” she asked, using the interpersonal setting.

  He looked up at her, still without saying a word.

  Good, she thought. At least he’s reag to my presenow. But his eyes were still bnk.

  She checked his suit's oxygen and water levels, careful not to scare him in the process. Everything looked good, at least for the moment.

  “You should try to drink something, Captain,” she prodded him. “We still have a long way to go.”

  Slowly, he nodded. It was the best she could hope for, Bouchard thought as she glided over to their Ker tech specialist to replenish her own oxygen supply.

  Thirty mier, it was time to leave the retive safety of the feren. With some trepidation, Bouchard started the roll call to prepare the crew for the part of their journey.

  “Suwannarat?”

  “Ready, ma’am.”

  “Captain Balmar?”

  “Yeah…” The voice was tired, but he was there. That was all she could hope fht now.

  “Murray?”

  There was no reply.

  “Tech Specialist Murray, please respond!”

  Still no reply. The dread she had been feeling before the break was now slowly creeping bato the recesses of her mind. First Mate Bouchard rotated around the room, letting her fshlight illuminate all its dark ers, trying to chase the shadows away. But Murray was o be found.

  “Alright, people,” she anded, knowing time might not be on their side. “Listen up. Pair up with your partners and fan out. Who saw her st?”

  There were a few seds of silence before Est-mar-kort spoke up. “She had some biscuits and then wao take a look at the room. That was… maybe ten minutes ago.”

  “She went alone?” First Mate Bouchard disapproved, but this wasn’t the military. The crew was generally free to do whatever they wanted, as long as it didn’t interfere with the job. Which, she thought darkly, might be exactly what Murray’s little excursion had dohis time.

  “She was just going to take a short peek,” Est-mar-kort expined, defending her colleague.

  “That’s alright, Est-mar-kort,” Bouchard said, trying to calm the young woman. It wasn’t her fault. In fact, the situation wasn’t anyone’s fault, really. It just was what it was, and now they had to deal with it.

  “Pv-tor-fel-mak, stay with the Captain. Suwannarat, you’re with me,” she said to the rge Terran. Together, they drifted into the room the tech specialist had indicated her colleague had goo explore.

  No one was there.

  The beams from their fshlights and lumen torches traced patterns of cold fire over the decrepit metal panels c the walls. Along the left side of the room, three rows of shelves stretched from one end of the chamber to the other. In the ers, broken pieetal had collected like high-tech dust bunnies. But there was no one alive in the room.

  “Let’s—” Mission Specialist Suwannarat’s voice trailed off as he drifted toward the right side of the gloomy space. “Hey, Bouchard, e take a look at this!” he tinued with some excitement.

  Adjusting her maneuvering thrusters, she slowly glided over to where he was h. When she pointed her fshlight in the dire he was fag, she uood what the otion was about.

  What they had thought was the opposite wall when they first ehe chamber turned out to be little more than a row of ets stretg aost of the width of the room. But at the far right of the row, the shadows and debris had hidden a passageway leading to another space further in.

  First Mate Bouchard resisted the urge to shout into the darkness. There was no air here—her voice wouldn’t carry farther on the radio just because she raised it. The system was digital; if the Reed-Solomon encoded audio packets could be recovered by Tech Specialist Murray’s receiver, the sound would py back with perfect crity, no matter the distance. If not, there would only be total sileo greet her lost crew member.

  Instead, she repeated her call in what she hoped was still a calm voice. “Tech Specialist Murray, this is First Mate Bouchard. Please respond.”

  Still, the only sound the ether returned was a deafening silence.

  She looked at Suwannarat, who nodded iurn. Slowly, he maneuvered into the bck hole in the wall, careful not to rip his spacesuit on the protrudih of shredded metal littering the passageway. Bouchard followed, keeping her distance from the leading man but always making sure she stayed within visual range of him.

  The access tuhey glided through was narrow, restrig their movements, and had several sharp bends. At times, she was reminded of Captain Balmar’s experience when he was forced to face the darkness oher side of the twisted corridor. She reminded herself not to fall into the same trap he had. Evehe angles of the tunnel put them on opposite sides of the bends, she could still see Suwannarat’s fshlight dance across the narrow walls.

  “...is Tech Specialist Jodie Murray to the crew of Peretti's Legacy. e in.”

  The voice that suddenly burst through the system filled First Mate Bouchard with a warm sense of relief. Though the fear of abando was audible in Murray’s voice, she was alive. For now, that was all that mattered.

  “Jodie, you’re alright?” she asked.

  “Laura!” The apprehension in Murray’s voice was quickly repced with joy. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she tinued. “I just lost tact with you. It seems the walls in this room are built to shield it from radiation—including radio waves. I just wasn’t certain whitrance I had used to get here and didn’t want to risk getting lost further into the wreck by taking a wrong turn trying to get back to you. So I decided to stay and try to reestablish tact with you instead.”

  “That’s good thinking,” First Mate Bouchard ehe tech specialist. “Let’s get you back to the rest of the team now.”

  “I don’t think so,” Murray responded cryptically. When Suwannarat and Bouchard finally floated into the chamber where the tech specialist had disappeared, they both uood why.

  In the beams of their fshlights, the walls of the room glittered like luminous lifeforms on the walls of some alien cave. Everywhere they looked, gleaming pieces of gold- and bronze-colored metal were interspersed with a multitude of gray cables. The far side of the room had been ripped open to space, letting the pinpoints of faraway stars shihrough the rge gap in the hull. For the first time in hours, their eyes saw a light other than the lumen torches and fshlights they had brought with them. And in the middle of the chamber floated Tech Specialist Murray, alive and well.

  “It’s some sort of puter core,” Murray said. “I ’t say for sure yet, but there’s too much eleics gathered in the same pce for it to be a ce.”

  A puter core, First Mate Bouchard thought. An alien puter core, made by an unknown race so advahey had been flying across the stars for millennia. No matter what data it might tain, anything they could extrad bring with them before the Sunguard took over would be worth millions on the bck market. Billions, even.

  While Mission Specialist Suwannarat went back through the access tuo retrieve the rest of the crew, Murray and Bouchard stayed in the puter room, trying to identify the pos they found there. Most of them were either too alien or too damaged to uand. But among the myriad of uifiable eleics, there were also rows upon rows of identical bck boxes they felt fident were some kind of ste media, and the puter chips themselves looked eerily familiar in the alien enviro. If you wao build logic circuits using nanoscale transistors, Bouchard thought, there probably weren’t that many different ways to do it.

  When the rest of the team arrived, they all got busy tearing the pce apart, looking for the most valuable artifacts. All except for Captain Balmar, who hovered in silen the far er of the room, so as not to interfere with the crew’s work.

  Half an hour ter, Tech Specialist Murray drifted up to Bouchard with a look of disappoi on her face.

  “I ’t get any of them to work,” she said to the Peretti's Legacy’s first mate. “I mean, I ’t get them to work well enough to even begin probing their circuits. And if I ’t probe them, I ’t reverse-eheir ste protocols.”

  It was, First Mate Bouchard thought, a disastrous turn of events. Still, the circuits might be worth something on their own, even if they couldn’t retrieve any data from them. They had time enough—the spare oxygen would st for aen hive or take. She didn’t want to give up this opportunity at the first setback they entered.

  “Try again,” she enced the tech specialist. “We might still find some chips that aren’t damaged beyond repair. There must be thousands here.”

  “No,” Murray responded. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t clear. The transistors in the chips are all fused. Literally all of them.”

  “Some sort of electric surge that fried the circuits when whatever befell the ship happened?” Bouchard suggested.

  “If that were the case, we’d see a pattern to it—melted circuits he power ectors and less damage further away. But that’s not the case here. And they’re not melted, teically. They’re… fused. As if the atoms ihe chips have drifted apart, turning the sharp circuitry of the chips into a fuzzy mess. And it’s all uniform. Every single chip I’ve looked at through the portable siron microscope shows exactly the same defect.”

  While they talked, Pv-tor-fel-mak had drifted up to the two women huddling together.

  “You’re saying the transistors in the chips are uniformly fused?” he asked the tech specialist to firm what he had heard over the radio.

  “Yes,” Murray replied. “It’s like they’ve melted. But not from the inside. More like… imagine you took an intricate snowfke, fresh from the winter snow, and pared it under a microscope to ohat has been sitting out in the sun for a while. The rger structures would still be there, but all the fiails would have melted away.”

  Pv-tor-fel-mak was silent for a few seds while the two women looked at him.

  “You have an idea?” First Mate Bouchard asked the ground sample specialist.

  “Maybe,” he answered, after some hesitation. “There’s something I’ve been thinking about while we’ve been expl the wreck. Let me take a feles.”

  The small Ker mahe group a over to his equipment, which was floating in a pile he hull breach. Carefully, he scraped material from one of the salvaged puter chips and put it into his mass speeter.

  He hummed to himself when the first results started to show up otle s of the device. Mier, he had the full result of the analysis, aarted to punumbers into his ptop.

  After a while, Pv-tor-fel-mak paused and then did the same thing all ain. Too much was at stake here—before rep to the first mate, he had to be certain. But in the end, he had a result he was fident he could share with the rest of the crew.

  A result that would turhing they knew about the universe upside down.

  MvonStz