Parameters for Starship Excavation

Ori waited until the hiss of pressure signaled his frame had sealed. He flexed, testing the uniweave undercoat, the sturdy pauldrons rolling with his lithe arms. He shook with a buzz. The static from the suit’s nerve integration was never not jarring.

To his left, Jun was undergoing a similar discomfort. Over her frame, she wrapped a brown cloth cloak about herself—really, it was more complex than that; she would first drape the end of it over her frame’s mask like a towel, reciting a Qehan ward against danger. She took the long end and coiled it around her neck and shoulders, once, twice, her soft voice coming over the frame comms as a melodic drone, until it had been shortened to about her middle back. With a silver clasp and a quick prayer gesture, she finished, cloak and hood secure.

Another hiss, louder, harsh. Kel had come in from outside. His frame smoldered where the downpour had left craters and pockmarks. He cranked a dial and de-fogged the mask’s visor.

“Check your suit integrity,” he said, breathless.

Ori and Jun nodded, despite their earlier triple-check, and went through again. They signaled the all-clear: three fingers pointed sideways. Kel nodded, and his crew approached the cave mouth.

The roughlands beyond, once dotted with trees, several species of lush grass, and springs, was obscured by a toxic mist, the heat of the continent’s bi-summer brewing a miasma from the acid rain deluge. Five hundred meters lay between the cave and their target, rising like a wave from the ashes of the grassland, its skeleton exposed and hull eaten through like rotten wood. One wing had fallen off, long ago, into a small basin that was now a pool of brine and poison.

Ori hated the roughlands. One couldn’t think straight in an acid storm. Mistakes could be made. Kel made the signal for them to approach, and the three left the safety of the cave.

Their frames enhanced their speed somewhat, but there was no avoiding the rain. Ori’s suit was cooking around him. He panted hard, leg muscles tight, tendons pulling taut and immobile between his calves and hamstrings. He strained against this. It was far better to pull a muscle in a powered frame than to slow down only to be overcome by the acid. Lightning arced above them, red under the bi-summer glare even in the storm.

The ancient ship loomed above them now. Ori and Jun saw their commander point upwards. They propelled themselves into the air. Ori checked the frame’s cyberkinetic propulsion system gauges with a glance—all clear. He would know if he was falling, anyway.

After another hundred vertical meters or so they landed on top of the carcass, the titan. A few durable birds, undisturbed by the acid, lifted off at their approach. Kel immediately scanned for an access panel. He moved quickly, his eyes darting back and forth even in the presence of neuro-enhanced brainsuit technology. His team followed him to a nearby panel. They dropped in silently in a pillar of dim light and acid rain. The drops echoed through the dust and silence of the ship.

“Lights on,” Kel said, and they activated their headbeams.

“Should we spread out?” asked Jun.

“Not yet. We should make it to the central communication center. Then we can split up.”

So they walked through ancient history, their headlights like beaming lines of sight in the void. Hallways within hallways crisscrossed the massive craft, hatches leading to tunnels leading to more hallways. Ori was somewhere between baffled and exuberant, in spite of the disaster outside. There was another thing, he thought. Whatever made this ship’s hull resistant to the continent’s frequent acid rain storms was unknown to their people, unknown to remembered science. Some said it was alien, others a relic. Ori found it convenient.

Kel crossed a low threshold first, followed by Jun and Ori, and beheld a large rotunda, thirty meters from door to door. In its center lay a command console facing all sides; dotting the walls were monitors, controllers, countless dials and buttons and levers.

“So it is,” said Kel. “We’re here. Ori, look for a working monitor. Maybe a ship log is still active. Jun, accompany me at least to the bridge. We need to find an abraxal indicator of some sort.”

Jun nodded. Ori waited until they had left to unclasp his frame’s mask. When not in use, it was limp and rubbery, its vaguely bovine appearance disappeared. He sighed and shook the sweat from his face and curly nest of brown hair. It was better to look around with his own eyes.

Long years had passed since Jun had studied the ancient forms and functions of human spacecraft. Maybe, if he looked hard enough, he could pinpoint the ship’s mass communication relay console here in the command center, or what Kel assumed to be the command center. Ori, pushing doubt from his mind, crossed the echoing floor to the middle of the room and turned around, scanning. He found the console a few meters from the far door.

So much dust had accumulated on the black screen it was a strain on his back to pry off the access panel. Within he found wires, the false nerves intrinsic to most of humanity’s early technology. Ori placed his receiver palm (origan in native Qehan, left) over the bundle and let the old systems crackle to a half-waking life. The software, silent for millennia, seemed to stretch its digital shoulders and slowly began streaming data into his frame’s computer.

Ori closed his eyes. He let himself sink. Now began the transfer: hands of pure data lowered his conscience into cool, serene water, a tranquil pool of insight.

Navigational charts, star maps, ship logs, engineering reports all poured through him, overrode his senses. Strangely, these numbers and codes and unknown characters formed patterns, some waves, some linear and plain. They flowed like water. To Ori, they lived and breathed.

For a few transcendent moments, he forgot the acid rain and Kel and Jun. He knelt in the dust and listened, felt, experienced knowledge from a thousand years ago.

Then, like a wingbeat, it was gone, and Ori had it. It flitted like a moth around the light of his mind, and the command center became something he could understand. He smiled to himself. He could really get to work now. Rising, Ori rolled his shoulders, flexed, feeling the fibers and cords of his frame stretching.

With a thought, he let the muscles and autonerves in his transmitter hand (eloen, right) sketch a diagram in the nearby dust. From the ship’s logs, it had been launched almost four thousand years ago from a distant planet, perhaps humanity’s original homeworld.

Ori stood back from his frame’s drawing. It was a series of concentric circles, not unlike his planet’s own system, only this dust model held one star instead of his two. Nine celestial bodies orbited silently around a sun in the communication center. They varied in size, a deepscan of nonuplets in utero.

Something about the third and fourth bodies from the star stood out. Symbols marked them. Were these Qehan? Basic? Perhaps an even older language?

A spark on his frame’s comm jolted Ori back into his own body.

“Ori,” panted Kel. “We need you down here, brother. Double-fast. Jun found the ship’s author.”

Kicking up dust, Ori sprang to his feet, hastily sealed his mask, and clambered through the narrow halls and passages leading to the ship’s bridge. The author! Valaramst! Such a discovery had never been made in his years, especially on a wasteland like the bi-summer continent.

He swung on a doorway through a narrow port into the bridge. It was a small cabin, cramped. Two loose, bodiless frames sat in eternal death throes at the helm, globular masks cracked, white chassis torn. Kel stood between them. He pointed left, through an engineering hatch in the wall. Ori followed, snaking his way down a suffocating tunnel—he felt his throat latch tight from claustrophobia—until he arrived in a small chamber bathed in red light.

Jun knelt in front of a ghost. Its existence was wavery, flickering, as if the air of the present were too toxic for its phantasmic presence. Ori couldn’t make out its shape—dodecahedron? Or simple pyramid? It shifted before his eyes. Jun turned, finally taking notice of her companion.

“It speaks in a language I do not know,” she said. She sounded breathless. “Something from beyond here, a real abraxas. I can make out a few words, terra and numilor, but nothing concrete. It sounds like our Qehan, but…”

“Suka nan vel terra ad vurust, syniman bal nan numilor ak.”

The ghost, the ship’s onboard author, twisted into another shape. Ori knelt with Jun. They stared into its computational glory. A working, speaking valaramst…

“Suka tun,” the author began. “Forn leni ikun mana. Suka nan vel terra ad vurust, syniman bal nan numilor ak.”

“It’s on a circuit,” Jun said. “Most authors were like this, in the event of a ship failure or other such sorrow. Maybe it’s a distress call. This word—terra—is one of the kalai, the Esoteric Scripts, from before our time.”

Kel appeared in the passageway and stayed there. The chamber couldn’t fit another man in a frame.

“Ori, can you beam this author’s knowledge to me?”

He nodded and transmitted the recovered data from the communication center to Kel. The author’s form warbled at this psylectric transmission for a moment.

“With the navigational reader, I can pinpoint our location,” mused Kel. “Here. This is the author chamber, under the bridge. If we go back through almost to the communication center, we can access an elevator that leads to a massive underdeck room.”

“Shall I stay with the author?” asked Jun.

“Not too long, sister. Ori, come with me.” Kel was already crawling back up the tunnel.

Ori followed. Kel waited until he had reached the bridge to move towards their objective. Ori brushed past one of the ancient frames. It made him shudder under his suit.

Crawling back and forth through the catacombs of the derelict made Ori feel like a rat. The holographic author had shaken him, its ancient words stirring. His senses were clouded as Kel led him along a narrow passage to a ruined elevator shaft. It took very little concentration to lower himself down with the cybernetic propulsion. They landed in a blossom of dust, a few beacons of light streaming down from the ruined upper floor.

Kel and Ori gazed in wonder. For hundreds of meters in both directions lay metallic pods.

They walked as if between rows of trees in an orchard. None were more than two meters across. Some were shattered; Ori looked inside and found nothing but padded inner walls and foreign instruments. Others were still intact, slate and blank, eggs waiting to be hatched. Consoles stared at them as they passed, long dead, many shattered as if by force and others simply falling into ruin.

“Incredible,” said Kel. He stopped in front of a pod, running his receiver palm over its smooth surface. He shook his head. “Nothing. These pods are silent. Perhaps their power was cut off to the author, or some ancient encryption code has sealed away their contents to us.”

He glanced over his shoulder, as if expecting someone to clamber out of a pod, wearing a frame of dust. “Whatever these are meant for, they’re obscured to me.” Kel turned to Ori. “See if you can find a remote console. Maybe there are logs of this room.”

Ori nodded and began sifting through data until he found a recovered ship diagram. The frame mask helped him twitch his eyes slightly to enhance the large underdeck section. With a shudder, it enveloped him, and his senses dimmed to allow total visual immersion. He scrolled through the map, searching, changing parameters for control consoles. This was a delicate task. His eyes were keen, yes, but ancient vessels such as this yielded little in the way of clear information. He continued to scan…

There. Forty meters aft was a small hatch, probably leading to environmental controls.

He moved swiftly. Ori enhanced his lights until he found the hatch on the wall and pried it off. With his receiver palm he found temperature logs. This room had been kept much colder than the rest of the ship, almost freezing. What was this?

Hoping Kel could make sense of it, Ori beamed the data to him. There was a sharp whine over the comm, then a static crackle.

“I can’t discern this either, Ori. Try to locate timestamps or user registrations.”

Ori knelt and pushed his hand deeper into the circuitry. This required immense concentration.

Something moved. Ori whirled, charging an energy burst in his transmitter palm. Nothing on the lifeform scanner—but he had definitely heard something. He knew of few animals that could outsmart a frame.

He double checked, glancing back and forth, finding nothing. Ori turned back to the hatch when he heard it again.

He waited. Another movement, the patter of small feet, four, padded and deliberate.

It was directly behind him.

Ori had his energy burst on it in under a second. The charged, harsh light illuminated the strangest animal he had ever seen.

It was less than a half meter off the ground, quadrupedal, mammalian. Its long, flexible tail twirled as though it were wrapped around invisible branches, twin sensors on the tip twitching at hints of air currents and smells. Two long ears stood erect on its small head, opened in the same direction as its four jade eyes: directly at Ori. A pink tongue flicked out of its mouth, and it made a quiet beeping noise.

Ori relaxed. He kicked some dust at it to shoo it away. The creature remained motionless, save its snaking tail.

Shaking his head, Ori returned to work. He sifted through data, maps, looking for user logs—

The thing was next to him, standing perfectly still on the wall. Its head moved like an ancient animatronic puppet, vaguely unnatural but undeniably animal. Those paws must be adhesive, Ori thought as he picked it up, the animal showing no signs of protest, and placed it on the floor.

Almost instantly, it was on the other side of him, staring into the hatch like a larger animal would stare into a watering hole.

The creature flicked its tongue once before taking a wire and biting it.

Ori tried desperately to pull the beast from the wires and circuits to no avail. Its tiny jaws held a death grip on a particularly thick section of datacord.

Finally he wrenched the creature free, a bundle of wires in its mouth. Overcome, Ori fell to the ground. It was impossible to recover any sort of data now. The creature moved around in a loose circle around Ori, on the hunt for more to chew on and destroy. Wretched fiend, he thought.

But something caught his eye. A dim light pulsated slowly in the hatch. Rising to his feet slowly, Ori approached it. The source of the light was deep within the wall; the tight wires had obscured it before. He quickly wrenched off the surrounding panels, exposing the rest of the ship’s nerves. Ducking inside, he began to writhe his way among the wires, squeezing between two large data cores. The light grew brighter in its zenith, leaving the space around Ori oppressively dark when it pulsated off. It was a blue clearer than the sky, more electric than any storm. It gleamed off his matte frame. Ori was so close to it now.

He pulled a wire aside like a vine and saw it. The object itself was maybe fifteen centimeters in diameter, a flat disc, a few raised concentric circles along its edge. A glaring cerulean light pulsed in its center. Ori reached out to grab it and found it to be loose; no wire or motherboard connected to it. Someone had placed this here, thousands of years ago.

It sang to him. With the light came a dull hum, a drone that soothed him and lulled him to complacency, or compliance. He stared into the depth of the light.

Tentatively, he placed his receiver palm over the light.

Warmth flooded him and his spine flexed under his frame. Ori’s skull snapped back as his limbs stretched with the deluge of information pouring into his mind. He seemed to glow blue himself, seemed to float with the orchestra, the aria that now played within and without him. The bones of the ship were revealed to him, as were his own. For a second more he wavered in the brilliance of the device before going limp.

His head swam. He was still there, buried in the wires in the wall. The device in his hand was silent, sleeping or dead. Ori took a deep breath; only the armor of his frame had saved him from breaking his neck in the tight space.

The ship rumbled around him and he fell out of the wall. Kel’s voice came over the comm, panicked, full of static.

“Ori, report in—are you there? Something triggered a collapse, the ship’s coming apart—”

Ori stumbled to his feet as the floor shook. He tried to choose between decoding the information in his head and running—couldn’t think. He ran.

It struck him then, as he dodged falling beams and loose pods and sparking explosions, his frame’s agility saving his life, that this was once a colony ship, and this cold room was a cryochamber meant to house living travelers in stasis for centuries. Another thought struck him, suggesting that whatever transpired when he touched the light device had set off this chain reaction. Then something exploded behind him. Ori fell into nothingness.

-

“… doesn’t appear to be anything—wait, it picked up a signal just now.”

“Where? Let me see, show me. A meter this way…”

Lights and sounds made forms. Ori knew nothing but these basic shapes.

“He’s down here. We were right on top of him the whole time.”

“On three, brother—lift—”

Darkness gave way to brilliance. Radiance. Ori struggled to cover his eyes. His arm was pinned.

“Lift him up, come on.”

Three forms in frames. It was coming back. Ori winced, trying to flex his arm as the rescue crew pulled him from the smoldering wreckage. It was broken.

“Set him down easy,” said one. He knelt over Ori, unclasped his mask. Beyond his gray eyes, the sky had cleared. The acid storm had passed. Ships lifted off in the distance.

“Can you tell me your name?” he asked. “Are you Ori?”

Again, he tried to lift his arm. A look of understanding washed over his rescuer.

“Can you talk, at least?” asked another. The gray-eyed one shook his head.

“He’s vania.”

“What?”

“Speech impaired.”

Ori raised his left arm, found it wasn’t broken, signed in Qehan Verbal: I’m Ori. Where is my crew?

“Kel and Jun are safe. It’s you we’re worried about. Broken arm, two fractured ribs by a quick scan. Your frame kept you alive long enough to stave off a critical burn before it ignited. You’re lucky your friends sent out a distress signal for you when that ship came apart.”

I feel fine, signed Ori.

“Brave for such a young one, but you require medical attention. Come on.”

He hoisted Ori to his feet. The four set off for a small medical ship in the crisp grass beyond the further wreckage of the ancient ship. Colony ship, Ori reminded himself. Terra. Numilor. And what knowledge he had recovered! It reeled in his head like stars. They loaded his body, charred-paper frame and all, onto a medical stretcher. He fell back into sleep as the world lifted around them with the hum of the engines.

Ori managed to glance outside the port window. In the rapidly fading acid-eaten grass moved a small shape, probably less than a meter, a long tail and two large ears barely discernable still at this height.