Chapter Seven

Lieutenant Commander Andrew Howe's pack weighed heavily against his back and hips, like a burden of guilt carried for years; he had been chopping at the tangled fronds of the yellowish jungle for over six hours when he reached the scar. The pale forest surrounded and penetrated the unswerving crease in the valley floor, but for five hundred meters to his left and three hundred meters to his right in a swath fifty meters wide the heavy vegetation could not conceal the furrow, as though made by a heavenly plough; at five meters deep and ten meters wide, its size was tremendous. Though erosion and encroaching forest made the age of the chasm difficult to determine quickly, its cause was not hard to find. A mound reaching ten meters toward the sky at the northeast end of the gap would not have told the story independently, but the twisted fragments of rusting, ferrous metal and scorch marks punctuating the furrow and the deformed steel skeleton protruding from the pile of soil made the tale obvious.

A ship had crashed here, and the occupants of that vessel had not been so lucky in their arrival as he.

The strewn remains of several structural components glinted redly in the sun as Andrew trudged toward the wreckage. The soil around the edges of the channel had been fused into glass by the heat of the impact, and Andrew stooped to collect a few of the irregular blue beads formed in the wake of the crash. The geiger counter at his waist began to bleep plaintively as he approached the hulk, signaling an increase in the local radioactivity. He paused to glance down at the reading, but the count was still in the safe range. Starting again, he kept swinging with his forceblade to clear a path through the finally thinning brush.

Andrew looked carefully at the wreck before him. The shape was vaguely familiar, not alien at all. He found himself assuming that this vessel had been constructed by Terrans.

As his long stride covered the last few meters to the base of the mound, the counter became more active. Andrew stopped, noting that the reading on the meter had crept up to the marginal range. He wouldn't be able to stay for more than a few hours without being at risk. He scanned the wreckage looming over his head, looking for a hatch or hull breach that he could enter; after a moment he located the opening he was searching for.

Clambering up to the entrance, a small hatchcover on the starboard side of the ship, Andrew turned on his flare and prepared to enter. He squeezed inside, avoiding the jagged edge of the rusted hatchcover. The interior was black and silent; the only light from his flare and the only sound from his footsteps. The floor of the airlock was thick with dust and littered with scrap. As he heaved on the interior hatch it groaned like the grave giving up her dead, rusty hinges flaking red dust to join the coating on the floor. It swung wide, despite the corrosion, revealing an interior passage leading fore and aft. The deck had buckled in places, leaving sharp edges every few meters. A tangle of cabling hung from the ceiling, loose ends jumbled like a nest of snakes. Andrew swung his light to the left, revealing a narrow passage barely wide enough for egress. To his right the passage sloped downward, continued for a few meters, then curved left around a corner. Judging that the going would be easier that way, he stepped into the corridor and headed forward.

The dust was thinner in the passageway, and Andrew was able to avoid cutting the soles of his boots on the knife-edged wrinkles where the twisted bulkhead and deck had ruptured. The smell of rust permeated the dank atmosphere, and it was cold inside the dark interior. Andrew pulled his coat out of his bag and put it on as he reached the corner. The light filtering in from the airlock behind him did not penetrate beyond the curve, so he pointed his light inward. The flare revealed a passage similar to the one he was in, punctuated by several doorways. A ladder recessed near the corner led upward and downward, presumably to other decks, and a gutted com panel swung from loose cabling when he brushed it. Andrew wiped the rust from his hands onto his thighs and put on his gloves to keep his fingers warm. From somewhere ahead down the corridor the sound of slowly dripping water echoed in his ears.

After a moment's rest to catch his breath, Andrew resumed his exploration. The first door on his right opened onto a small cubical. The outside bulkhead of the ship had ripped through to the ceiling here, exposing the room to a ray of light. Several shattered metal crates lay haphazardly about the cabin, their contents long since disintegrated. Andrew didn't go through the hatchway; there were no other entrances to the hold.

Rather than search the entire ship methodically, Andrew began looking for the bridge. There, if anywhere, he would find access to the data restrained within the ship's computer. He hoped that some of it had survived the crash and that he could find some answers to the questions that were growing in his mind.

Following the passages that led him toward the ship's bow, Andrew wandered the corridors of the derelict; The smell of rust faded as he groped forward into the bowels of the ship. The bulkheads and hardware had a less corroded and a more burned appearance as he traveled inward toward the core of the vessel. Tangles of cable appeared to have been torn from their conduits deliberately. There had been survivors of this wreck.

Finally, Andrew was able to read a directional placard pointing in the direction of the bridge. He quickly found an upward-leading tube and clambered up one deck. The tube exited into a toroid corridor, the outside perimeter of the command deck. At the sternmost apex of the accessway Howe found the entrance to the bridge. One of the twin pocket doors leading inward had been cut away from its mountings with a power blade, leaving a slightly jagged edge a few centimeters long where the last bit of door had been torn loose by its own weight.

The bridge of the ship was small by contemporary standards, but laid out well. All of the expected stations were in place and readily identifiable despite the fire and impact damage. And Andrew recognized the layout at once. The vessel was an early Warp-era Empire class starship. Five had been built in the late 2140s, and three had been lost within a year of commission due to accident or design flaw. The two remaining vessels had been decommissioned and scrapped not long after the third loss. Andrew knew from his initial service training that the wreckage of only one of the three lost vessels had ever been recovered. Now he was sure that this must be one of the other two.

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After a quick survey of the bridge, Andrew began trying to bring the main computer online; he hoped that he would be able to glean information on the fate of the crew. After much trial and error, he managed to jury-rig a power supply into the computer's crystalline memory. Connecting his pocket desk to the ship's computer with a universal EM adaptor, Andrew contrived a link.

The pocket computer's display filled with snow. Through the static Andrew picked out a few symbols, but the fault was severe. Despite his best efforts, he was unable to secure a clear datafield for several minutes. Then his pocket desk began the task of recovering all the intact data first; images flashed sporadically across the screen. Within fifteen minutes, Andrew's portable computer had accessed all the surviving information in the hulk's computer. Searching hurriedly through the surviving log entries the computer had recovered, Howe quickly learned the name of the vessel. It was the aptly-named Icarus. A frown creased his brow as he remembered to check his waist.

Andrew looked at his radiation meter; he needed to leave very soon to avoid overexposure. After a quick shutdown of both computers and rapid disconnection of hardware, he stuffed the cables and boxes hastily into his pack. In five minutes he was back in the warmth of the overcast sun.

Scrambling down the wreckage and jogging quickly down his trail to a safe distance, Andrew sat on a large rock just outside the furrow; propping his pocket desk on top of his pack, he examined the data he had obtained.

The Captain's log was fragmented, but the surviving entries gave him a clear picture of the disaster that had befallen the Icarus.

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"The Icarus has suffered irreparable damage. We are limited to a few thrusters and auxiliary life support. I don't know that we'll survive the landing."

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"Some of us think we should just split up after the base camp is finished and end our lives however."

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"We have established a base camp near the ocean at (insert latitude and longitude here). At first we thought that we'd be able to send for help; but with most of our machines destroyed and our energy cells largely depleted we lack the wherewithal to build a distress beacon. We've all suffered debilitating injuries from the explosion, crash or subsequent accidents. I do not believe we will survive if we await rescue; nor will we survive if we attempt to build a civilization here on this planet.

"But we haven't given up, either.

"The five of us are going to use the hibernation canisters we've fabricated to await rescue; I'm not sure how reliable the jury-rigged containers are going to be," said Chang. "But if someone finds us and they've failed, please return our bones, and the bones of the other crew, to Earth, where they belong."

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