They climbed into a small compartment with a heavy bulkhead door that had been sealed with more red rope, wrapping around where the wheel once was. A talisman, as yellowed and decayed as the one on the floor above, was stuck in its place.

Suthers raised his wrist communicator. “I think we’ve found where that wheel came from.”

“The one outside?” Kurt’s voice came through the speaker.

“Yes. Permission to unseal?”

“Granted.”

Suthers removed a tool with a pistol grip and a canister from his harness and aimed it at one of the beams that held the door to the surrounding bulkhead. “You might want to get back for a minute.”

Alexa pushed her back into the corner in the small space, flicking a switch to tint the glass of her mask.

The device in Suthers’ hands sputtered out a pale green flame which met the old metal and sparked brightly, the plasma eating through it in seconds. The metal sputtered, sparks flying off of the beam, but the electromagnetic shroud around the tool caught it all, like a sparkler stream that was cut off after a certain distance. He did the same for each of the points around the door and then switched the burner off, leaving them in silence again. He grabbed the door and put his whole weight into pushing it.

The old rubber real, hardened and brittle, began to crack. The sound was like breaking ice, and Alexa found herself tensing for the inevitable pop.

It didn’t come. Instead, the rubber slowly gave way, crumbling in same the way goat’s cheese did, and the door swung open inwards to another space, as dry as the ship had been so far. Alexa stared through, at the darkness, and the very edges of her flashlight beam bounced off the back of a chair. The leather was split at the top as it went over the backrest, revealing the hard, compact foam inside. She stepped past Suthers, through the door, and found that it was the bridge.

The chairs were arranged in rows, curved around the captain’s seat in the middle, in a ring of hologram projectors that would supply real-time information from sensors and systems from around the vessels. She’d seen it in movies and documentaries, but here it was dead, abandoned by whoever had come before. She turned to the seat right by her, light reflecting off the seatbelt clasps that laid, connected, on the cracked, petrified leather cushion. Whoever sat there never got to unbuckle.

Suthers’ flashlight beam joined hers. “Where’s the body?”

“Maybe the three thousand-year-old monster ate it.”

“Wait, he told you that bullshit too?”

Alexa chuckled, and elected not to reply, moving around the console. Her light beam swept across the floor, past a thin veil of dust particles that had been disturbed for the first time in a long time, kicked up by the pressure change of Suthers opening the door. She grimaced, and crouched to get a better look at the floor. Watches of it were notably less caked in dust, and under some of that dust was more red. “Whoever that was upstairs was here too.”

“I can tell,” Suther said, using the module on his gun to scan around the other side of the room. “Lots of vague footprints.”

“And scratches.” She leaned into the back of the console, where a small scratch was present. Scaler than the one upstairs, and close to the ground. More like a claw, she thought. “Hey, do you have one of those dust wiping things?”

“...a cloth?”

“I’m not just gonna polish this off like a window. I mean one of those wand things that makes a static field.”

“Oh! This?” He pulled a small cylindrical device from his belt and held it out towards her. “Go behind me, I’m sweeping this counterclockwise. She took it from his hand, extended it to its full length of half a metre, and flipped the on switch. The wand lit up in segments, she held it above her arm, causing the hair to rise, moving it to and from her skin to estimate the range. Then she held it to the nearby wall of the bridge, and bit by bit, the dust began to peel off its patches, attracted to the wand.

At first it was only black, but the motion of the wand along the wall, picking up more of the dust, the solid colour became shapes cast against the grey of the hull. Many many thin shapes, crammed along each other, come in front of others. She held back a gasp.

They were people.

Alexa moved the wand up, revealing a higher part of the mural, this time a great oval above the crowd. The caked dust made it hard to see, but she saw pinpoints of something lighter, faded by this point, inside the shape, and directly under it, a figure bigger than the rest. “Oh my god.”

“What?” Suthers glanced over from the other side of the room, past one of the pillars for the loading mechanism.

Alexa marched over to the next wall along his path, and pulled the loose dust off of that one too. It was a starry sky, under which some kind of vague structure was. People had been drawn in the same fashion as the last, though smaller, underneath nondescript blobs that she saw as buildings - though some were floating off the ground. “I think someone painted every wall in this room.”

“Not just the wall.” Suthers completed his scan loop around the room, and pointed his weapon flashlight towards the captain’s chair. “Have you seen what’s under those projectors?”

“No…” She parted from the mural, a tingling almost sinful in her face when it was exactly the thing she had hoped for. She had seen the red earlier, but this was brighter. Not exactly fresher, but their position under the rings around the command chair had spared them somewhat from settling dust. Even the fact that they were still that red told her this was a different ballpark than the murals. This was the same timeframe as the talismans and the red rope and the inhuman body stuck in the cargo lift, directly above them.

As more dust was pulled into the wand, runes came to light, hastily drawn in between radiating lines between the concentric circles. She didn’t need Aerin’s input to know they were a sort of proto-Xingram, and part of some sort of ward.

“Must have been a hell of a guy if they needed all of that.” Suthers shone his light onto the main char. It was as dried, crack, and burst like the rest of the ones around the room. But there was something else poking out of the shrivelled stuffing material, glinting in the light. “Oh, shiny?”

She got up from where she was crouched to use the want to sweep the floor, spotting the same object. “Whoa. Tweezers?”

He handed her a pair from his belt without another word.

She leaned in, using the fine tips to push aside from the desiccated foam and compacted cotton mix that once filled the chair, before lightly tapping against the shiny thing. It clinked. Not like metal, like glass. She pried more of the stuffing apart, taking another step to the side and avoiding the red lines on the ground, angling her light differently.

The object was flat and round, and a shivering breath escaped her throat. “I think it’s a crystal data disk.”

“No shot.” Suthers leaned in to look. “Holy shit, you’re right!”

“Federation pattern too, I think.”

“So not left by the crew then?”

“I don’t know yet.” She backed away, rubbing at the side of her face where the mask seal irritated her skin and hair. “A lot of this isn’t making sense. Even the earliest models of this kind of data disk are…three or four hundred years old.”

“They should last that long, right?”

“Probably,” she said offhandedly. “I’m just struggling to see how this all fits together.”

“Stop.”

“I’m not spiralling, I’m just-”

“No, stop moving.” His voice was terse as he pointed his gun towards another door in the wall, already open. There was the softest of clicks as he switched the safety off. “I think something just moved.”

Ice poured into her veins, and suddenly Alexa didn’t know what to do with herself. Her hands curled involuntarily.

“Stay still,” he whispered, gliding towards the open door, a flashlight beam sweeping in a way that filled every nook and cranny of the space beyond. She saw the top of another ladder leading further down, the hatch irreparably dented and smashed open. He aimed around inside the compartment, then sighed, fogging up his mask. “Fuck me. We’re safe.”

Alexa felt her heart thud in her chest, and took a deep long breath in an out to steady herself. “What is it?”

“Cloth. Or what used to be cloth. It’s like a banner?”

“A…banner?” She carefully stepped over the runes again, and got up to his side of the room.

“I don’t wanna touch it.” Suthers did a quick sweep with his scanning module and then stepped out of the ladder compartment, changing places with Alexa.

She could tell that it had been torn at the lower end, given the ragged, almost crispy looking bits of cloth that dangled from the rest of it. Worse, there was more red paint that was scribbled onto what was left, obscuring whatever the original design had been, which peeked out in darker shapes she couldn’t identify. “I’m starting to not like these raiders.”

“I’m more worried about what got them so scared.” Suthers nodded at the open hatch. “You’ve got no gloves on - do me a favour and just stick your hand out over that.”

Hesitantly, she reached out over the ladder. “Am I supposed to-” Alexa froze. “Wait, what was that?”

“You feel it, right?”

He was right. It was very slight, but the air had moved from below, past her hand. “Did that make the banner move?”

“Slightly.”

“The breach on the lower floors?”

He shook his head, “I really doubt that with how much was packed in here. Usually when air moves up like this it’s because of a heat below. These kinds ships are sealed all sorts of ways, and after this long, it’s-”

“The reactor,” they said in unison. Alexa quickly withdrew her hand. “Of course, this model is probably still fission.”

“With early fuel rods it’ll burn another thousand years if it needs. Probably heats and cools in waves if some of the reactor infrastructure is intact.”

“Is this from your marine days?”

“I’ve not boarded and taken many starships that still use fission primarily, but it’s my best guess. One time a guy tried to sabotage the reactor to flood the ship with rads, but our skin would be peeling off by now.” He smirked.

Alexa made a face, and massaged the hand she had volunteered. “Okay, do we need to worry about any radiation?”

“Probably not on this floor, but below…I don’t think anybody would be in a hurry to tell you to go down there.”

She backed out of the compartment, sweeping the light through the bridge one more time. There was more wall, more floor, to uncover. “Did Kurt assign us a time limit?”

Suthers shook his head. “Didn’t hear anything about that.”

“So if there’s no real danger from the reactor surges, and this mask is refillable…maybe you should go report to Kurt. I’ll stay down here and look a bit more. Is that good?”

“He’ll want his guys down here once they’re done up top.”

“I promise not to jump down the potentially radioactive hole.”

He sighed. “Yeah, sure. You probably know better than me how not to mess up some of this stuff. I’ll send someone down just in case.”

“No need.” She reactivated the wand and headed for the next wall.

Whether or not he agreed on that, she didn’t know, because he wordlessly went to climb back up to the cargo deck.

Alexa pulled the dust off the next wall, and stood back. This one was different. There was no grand precession, no monuments, and no crowds. It was a single dark figure, clawed hands crossed over its chest, a pale mask placed on the face. But its eyes were open, pearl-like and reflective, staring into her soul. There were traces of greens and other vibrant colours under the dust, like an aura around the person what thing or whatever it was depicting, pierced by two sharp protrusions extending from the head. Her first thought was some kind of funerary rite…but for who?

Her phone buzzed.

She sighed, digging it out. Aerin. She held it to her ear. “Yes?”

“You need to come out.”

“Is the reactor thing an issue?”

“No, the inspector’s here. She’s pausing everything.”

“What…urgh.” She looked over at the three exposed murals, out of maybe six, not counting what was potentially on the floors and consoles. “Really?”

“It’s kinda serious. Kurt looks like he just got scolded by his mum or something.”

“Damn. Okay, I’ll come up.” She sighed again. Just as she was beginning to get an inkling of what had happened. It was the second time she’d be left hanging, as if the absence of replies about the special adhesive wasn’t enough.

Alexa reversed her path through the ancient ship, climbing the long ladder to the top floor and into the ring corridor, making sure to take the smaller arc she hadn’t seen on the way to the exit in case she had missed something. She hadn’t, and in minutes she was back under the blazing sun, fast approaching noon.

Aerin stood off to the side, her chipper attitude suppressed while a tall blonde woman who was half a head taller than Kurt stood at the bottom of a ramp they had pushed up to the airlock. Her face was blank, unreadable, but her eyes were on Alexa.

“You said she refused.”

“People change their minds,” Kurt said, a hint of pride in his voice. “But I get why you don’t believe in that stuff.”

“Miss Romilly,” the tall woman said. “I hope you haven't disturbed anything.”

Alexa took her mask off and held out a hand. “I only removed dust, very gently.”

The woman didn’t shake her hand, just stared at the electrostatic wand with the same ineffable expression. “You’re to vacate the area for today. I have to personally inspect the site.”

“When can I come back?”

“That will depend on what condition the site is in.”

She opened her mouth, and Kurt stepped between them. “Gear please.”

She handed him the mask and wand.

He dropped a handful of hexagonal chips into her palm. “I’ll call you when the situation changes. In the meantime. Let’s keep this quiet, alright?”

How old are you? she wanted to ask, but pushed it down. Alexa pocketed the cash, and took one more look at the woman, who simply tilted her head.

She strode past Kurt and met up with Aerin, who was getting onto the lift at the edge of the pit. “Stateship?”

“Yup.”

Alexa shook her head, and cast her gaze back at the airlock. She squinted. “What was that?”

“What?” Aerin peered too, at the opening. “I don’t see anything.”

Perhaps it was a trick of the light, or that her eyes were still adjusting to the light. For a second, she had seen a person standing in the entrance. “Nothing.”

On a particular hill under a particular tree, a man in a leather jacket lowered his sunglasses as his eyes followed a jumpcraft puttering its way through the sky over Hecate. He wanted it for a second, tracing its trajectory with his mind, and then looked down at the open map of the city in his lap.

He looked back up, confirming the direction it was moving in, and drew several lines from the dig site across the city. That morning, he had been on the opposite side of town, plotting the same route from a cafe.

Once it began to drop in altitude, he drew a large circle, encompassing several neighborhoods, between Via Apicus and the edge of the Palatine.

Gotcha.