Alexa didn’t know what to expect, but unsurprisingly, the airlock that Kurt’s men had hacked open no longer functioned properly after three millennia. The space inside was longer than she expected, going in deeper than any normal airlock, and overhead were the limbs of some machine, folded along its own length, all the way through a second hermetic seal leading further into the ship. The door beneath its path was similar to the one outside, but the hardened glass had been shattered, laying in large, dusty chunks on the floor. From what little she knew of spaceship engineering, and she figured she was confident about the recency of the design, the force must have been tremendous. A crash on the way down, perhaps, which would explain the gash outside.

Suthers’ men switched on their guns’ flashlights, illuminating the space that now looked larger than it initially did. A series of clicks came from each of their weapons as they pointed them around at the surroundings.

Cameras. Alexa suddenly now realised that the long cuboids under the barrels were some sort of multipurpose module, and that included imaging tech. Kurt had made the dig sound like some public stunt or something to pad one’s portfolio with, but even she had to admit that it impressed her to be there in person. Even if Kurt was really doing it for publicity, there were worse ways to go about it. And Aerin…

“One sec, Miss Romilly.” Suthers gently moved her side and pointed his gun at the doorway they had just come through. “Just getting a scan.”

“A 3D scan?” she asked, taking a long step so she was next to Aerin.

“Yup. It’d be nice to have a full scan of the ship before we start taking stuff out of it, right?”

“Right.” It was a standard for archaeology, and one she knew well from her few months in the western continent, in the blazing desert with a professor she no longer had any contact with. History was about context after all, and she’d seen far too many instances of excitement getting the better of a student who wanted a good look at some artifact or other. Twice, she recalled, she had been scolded for almost making that same mistake, and rightfully at that.

“Are we done here?” Kurt asked, yawning behind his mask. Alexa couldn’t tell if it was a real one or not.

“We’re good.” Suthers raised his wrist-comm again, allowing the rough hologram to form above it of a ring-shaped structure. “Past this door it’s a loading deck. The middle is most likely some kind of cargo lift connected to this.” He pointed at the mechanism in the ceiling. “But there’s a passage that goes around it, possibly to other airlocks. We’ll take the right hand corridor and loop back around in a circle.”

“Sounds good,” Aerin said, nudging Alexa with her shoulder.

“If you want me to pause at any point, call it out. Watch your feet and your heads - the last thing I want is someone falling down a hole. We’re not expecting any serious structural compromises on this level just yet, and if it’s built like a real spaceship it’ll hold.”

Kurt touched his earpiece. “Bloom, divert external power to the inner airlock door.”

There was a moment of silence.

Alexa expected a hiss, having seen one too many space horror movies, but the inner door creaked open much like an old door hinge, its corroded steel shuddering as the unseen aged motors tried their best long after they had fallen out of disrepair. In the end it only opened halfway, prompting Suthers to order two of his men to manually vise them out the rest of the way.

“Any luck on the lights?" Kurt asked, and tilted his head to listen. “Okay you didn’t have to use a metaphor like that. We’ll make do.”

“Watch the glass.” Suthers angled his flashlight down, catching more bits of the reinforced glass lying in the space inside. “Let’s go.”

The armed men took turns entering, the first one holding the left corridor while the others went right, one hand on the shoulder of the man in front of them. Suthers motioned for the three of them to follow down the right way, and as Alexa finally stepped into the ship itself, she felt…dry.

It felt like walking into the wing of some abandoned building, with everything absolutely caked in dust. She avoided the broken bits of glass and grabbed at the side of her mask until she found a switch, then activated the mounted light. The beam cut into a gap in the wall, roughly the same width as the airlock had been, and the heavy-duty claw that was sitting on the overhead rail, blocking access to the room closer to the middle of the ship. She got on her tiptoes, trying to see past it, but the room beyond was dark and spacious.

“That’s definitely a cargo lift,” Kurt said, trying to peer beside her. “See, Eric’s done this before, you got nothing to worry about.”

“Marine?” Aerin asked.

“Ex-marine. And I got him cheap too.” Kurt turned back to the corridor. “There should be multiple loading airlocks. Maybe one of them isn’t blocked off.”

Alexa stepped past him, shining her helmet light along the path that the soldiers had already moved through and scanned. The walls were pristine and spartan, and at least for this section, there was nothing to say. She went ahead of Kurt and Aerin, sweeping her light from side to side to catch anything.

A dark patch presented itself near the floor and she crouched to get a closer look. In her illumination, it reflected a very dark brown, almost black. With that colour and the way it extended to the floor to pool, it was likely blood. She moved her light a little along the wall, finding another, wider stain higher up, and next to this one, a mark in the bulkhead. Something sharp had chipped at the metal. Perhaps the security team wasn’t so overly cautious after all. “How confident are you that the ship is three thousand years old?”

“Quite,” Kurt said, standing behind her. “Why?”

“If this is blood then it’s at most a couple hundred years old.” She moved out of the way. “I don’t care how well sealed this deck was, it would look like tar.”

Kurt squinted at the stains. “That’s…concerning. Maybe the crew survived up until then?”

“Got something here!” One of Suthers’ men shouted down the hall.

Alexa strode up towards him, to find his flashlight pointed down. There was something flat and rectangular almost flush against the steel. It was also brown, but in a different manner to the blood stain. This was paper and maybe ink, aged after centuries. Again, not millenia. To pick it up right now without the proper tools would surely cause it to disintegrate.

“That’s a talisman.”

“What?”

Alexa looked up to find Aerin digging through a small leather pouch. She produced a sheaf of small rectangular slips held by a little clip, all of them empty. “It’s a coalition thing. You treat the paper with something magically active, then you can imprint intent by writing spells on it.”

“How did a UCF talisman get here?”

“Well, it’s not exclusively theirs. People have been using this stuff even before the return of magic. Could be anybody.”

“Anybody in the past couple centuries,” Alexa said, standing up. “We’ll come back for it, maybe you can figure out what it does. Did,” she corrected herself, and then kept walking. Two of the soldiers were by another airlock, and this one wasn’t blocked  by a transport claw. They were looking at the top of the doorframe at something she couldn’t quite see until she was right up next to them.

A flash of red. She stepped through the doorway into the middle chamber, and turned around. A bit of braided rope hung from high up, dropping through a gap in the claw rail, retaining some of its colour through the fibres that had already decayed. She turned back to the room. Four pits, one for each loading airlock, led into the pitch black of the floor below. Her light only bounced off the worn yellow paint that had peeled off the separators on a conveyor in the pit wall. Between the pits though, there was more floor, surrounded by a guardrail, and what remained of a seat, the fabric and the cushion still mostly intact owing to their synthetic nature. The straps in the chair, meant to hold the occupant in, were decayed, hanging off the plastic backrest, their metal couplings on laying unceremoniously on the floor.

Kurt whistled as his flashlight lit up the mass of pipes and thick cables above the centre. “Zero G.”

“What?”

“I’ve seen loaders like this before. Sometimes it’s easier to put cargo in one end of a ship but store it at another. You know, like an airline. And sometimes you have to do it when there’s no gravity.”

“So it is a recent design. And not three thousand years old.”

“Ah. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Well I can’t tell you yet.”

Alexa leaned over the cargo control panel. There was something obscuring some of the buttons, and a mass that wrapped around a joystick. Ropes. The same colour as the one hanging above the door. Something else caught her eye, at the edges of the panel, hardened and translucent like amber, but with a more off-yellow, cream colour. “Aerin!”

Her friend slinked up beside her, frowning at the state of the controls. “What the hell?”

“Do you know what it’s supposed to be?”

“I’m not a hundred percent on this, but red ropes are used in binding. It’s a Tianlu, Koro thing. You usually light candles as part of it, I guess. Why would you bind a bunch of levers and buttons though?”

“Those control the lift,” Kurt said, peeking down another pit. “If you bind the controls you stall the lift and you limit access to this floor from below.”

Alexa’s head snapped towards him. “Are you on about some really old monster again?”

“Full disclosure, I said that just to mess with you. But I don’t know what the hell to make of that.” He pointed down, in the darkness.

Alexa crept closer to the edge, as if expecting something to lunge out of the dark and drag her down. The way her light beam meshed with Kurt’s made one of the U-shaped separators easy to see, but from his angle, she could see he was pointing past it, to another steel shape even further down.

At first, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. There were two prongs, curved at each tip, attached to something dried and dark-coloured that was mostly obscured by the higher separator. The dried thing was pulled taut, like a vacuum bag, or-

The image of the mummy in the museum came to her.

Alexa took a step back from the edge. “What the fuck!”

“What?” Aerin asked, rushing over.

“That’s a hand!”

“Yeah, I thought it might have been.” He sat crouched at the edge of the pit. “Definitely not human though.”

“It’s not even that old,” Alexa said, drumming up the courage to walk up to it again. “Should just be bones by now.”

“I think I have a bit of an idea,” Aerin said, grimacing at the sight of that distant appendage. “Or like, a hunch.”

“Shoot,” Kurt said.

“The ship’s old, but someone or something else got in before us. I don’t know how because this thing was underground, but they know magic and they’re recent. And then they died, and maybe tried to ritually seal the ship or was in the process of doing it.”

“...okay, let’s take a step back, what?”

Aerin looked at both of them. “There was a talisman outside and red ropes on the console and a newer corpse than the ship is old. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

Alexa bit her lip. “Maybe a UCF team got here before us.”

“No fucking shot.” Kurt stood up, dusting his jacket off. “Trust me, if it was the UCF, this ship would have had a lot more damage.”

“Then what are you thinking?”

He struck a thoughtful pose. “I don’t think we’ll know until we get down there and have a look at the body.”

Alexa frowned. “Can we even extract it?”

Kurt touched his earpiece again. “Bloom, start finding a way to power up the cargo lifts. You might need some more guys in here after they’ve cleared the level.”

“The level is clear,” Eric interjected, stepping in. “It’s structurally sound, no dangers. There’s a ladder down.”

Kurt raised his eyebrow. “Really?”

“Hatch and a ladder. Reckon we could just shoot the lock off.”

"Show me."

Suthers nodded and walked off, everybody else trailing behind them. They rounded another curve towards the next airlock in the perimeter of the vessel, to where something protruded from the ground and the section of the wall next to it. A metal cover with a glass window, still in one piece. A lever poked out of the edge of it, covered in tatters of a rubber grip. “It’s stuck fast. Should I?” He motioned with his gun.

“You scanned it already?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s take a few steps back.” Kurt ushered the girl backwards, until they were protected the the curvature of the bulkhead. “Go ahead.”

Suthers’ gun went off once, accompanied by metal striking metal. It was suppressed, but the noise still made Alexa's ears ring in the enclosed space. He fired two more times before something heavy clattered to the ground.

They peeked out around the corner to find that the handle assembly had been blown off, and Suthers was in the process of lifting the hatch. Kurt slid his hands into the gap between it into the floor and helped him pull. The hinges practically screamed, causing Alexa to wince, and then it was up, resting against the wall.

Kurt dusted off his hands. “Well there you go!”

The ladder was stainless steel, and had dulled rather than degraded. It was dust-covered and disappointingly intact, inviting Alexa down. Nothing about this old wreck made any sense if she believed her own gut. But down below, where the crew would be, there was a story waiting to be told. Very likely the same narrative she’d been trying to make heads or tails of for years.

“I’ll go with you,” Suthers said quietly.

Her eyes widened, realising he’d seen the hesitation in her face. “You don’t have to.”

“No it’s for the best, I have a radio.” He tapped at his wrist-comm. “Besides, I have to scan everything, right?”

She looked to Kurt, who was smiling at her. “I’ll bring the rest of the crew in to work on this level. You go ahead.”

Alexa nodded at Suthers. “You first.”

The marine backed his legs down into the hole, and grabbed the stubby tops of the ladder to steady himself. Rung by rung, he climbed down until he was no longer visible from the top.

“I’ll be right behind you,” Aerin whispered in her ear, sending a tingle up Alexa’s spine.

Alexa focused on how practised Suthers had looked, and replicated his actions, firmly planting her steadier right foot on the second run, before placing her hands on the floor. Those hands then moved to the cold metal of the ladder as her left foot found the next rung, and then her right the next. On and on.

Down she went, into the unknown.