Then I saw the writing on the wall.
I could read it all. It was in Old Numerican, the original of what we all spoke, but I’d seen enough of it to get by. In rough strokes of dried blood, written across the back wall of the docking port, were three words.
“We rule now.”
And underneath was a crude cave art painting of an ape, like the ones who had attacked us, holding a torch in one hand. And a rifle in the other.
Chapter Forty-Three
Things started to happen fast from there. The clock was on fire, as they say. We began to get everyone across the gap from canyon wall to wreck of the alien starship. I checked my watch, going over the timetable of events. In three hours Dog and Ghost Platoons would start their hit on the bank. In three and thirty we’d pop out of the tube station and try to take our ship.
Margin for error: none.
Systems were smashed here inside the dark docking bay aboard the Crash. Even though it was alien, I was getting a very bad feeling about all of this. This felt…
“Sarge…” It was Punch, who’d been working with Jacks as we took a brief ten to get everyone ready to go deeper into the ship. They were working on a computer terminal that seemed to handle the maintenance for the bay. Pulling it apart and looking at its guts. Like I said, something about this was tickling the back of my scalp. Like it was familiar in some taunting memory of a song kind of way. But I’d never been on any kind of starship even remotely approaching this level of tech. Or size.
“System don’t work. But look at this…”
I crossed the bay, feeling and hearing the crunch of eons-old grit. Sand from the world. Broken glass and plastic fragments done to death by an unimaginable stellar impact. Like I said. Starships never survive crashes.
Why had this one?
Punch was pointing toward something near the terminal. Something that looked a lot like the battle boards we used. Except older and clunkier. A tablet of some kind. Like any starship crewman would use to perform duties.
“It don’t work. But look at what’s on the cover.”
He handed it over to me. I studied the cover and saw the outline of a ship that didn’t look anything like the one we were on. This was the silhouette of one of the old ring-drive warp ships that had been early colonization explorers. Fast ships using quantum destabilization to reach incredible speeds. Even by today’s standards. But that was the ship history nerd in me talking. Still, holding it was like holding a historical relic that had no place being where it was.
“That’s an old…” I was just about to say as the ancient Numerican printed across the back of the tablet organized itself in my mind and I was able to translate.
U.S.S. Enterprise.
Then…
Engineering something something protocols. Some of the old words had no modern translation.
I turned to the Monarch and held this out.
“What’s this mean?” As in, Why is this here?
The Enterprise was one of the most famous explorer ships from those early days of stellar exploration. I didn’t know much about it. Hadn’t interested me for some reason I couldn’t quite remember. But here it was. On board the most infamous wreck of alien origin in the galaxy.
There’re others. The Malkinar Hull on Hobart. The debris fields of Gnay. Others… Starships from undiscovered cultures that ruined themselves all over the face of some distant world during their arc of final descent. Often there was so little left of the ships as to be unrecognizable. But in the case of the Malkinar Hull you can still see much of it rising out of the stormy waves of that world. The sea and the salt have gutted the rest and carried it off into ocean canyons.
And we’ve never found the origin civilizations that built those ships. They must have come from far away across the galactic lens. Or even farther.
The Monarch crossed and took the battle board thing from me. Ran one of her slender hands over it like it was some sacred object. Some memory of a thing she hadn’t touched in years. An old photograph. A lost book found again. A memory. Yeah, I had those thoughts then as I watched her response to it.
She looked up and around, studying the structure of the ship.
“It’s starting to come together,” she said to herself. Almost a whispered mumble to no one else.
“What?” I asked her. “What’s starting to come together? Why is this important?”
She seemed to want to say something. Then didn’t. Then remembered who she was dealing with and decided it was best to give us something. Give me something.
She cleared her throat in the silence of the wreck.
“Enterprise was lost early on during the First Expansion. The official story is… she disappeared somewhere in the Orion Nebula. But knowing how we Monarchs do things, that was probably just the ‘truth’ we wanted known. I had suspected back then it was another ship that ultimately got used for the experiment, but… this pretty much confirms the Enterprise was the ship they used to go forward for Operation Zephyr. So…”
She stopped. I could see her eyes roving over data none of us could see. She must’ve had some kind of cloud operating system. She shifted her hand around like she was gesture-sifting through the data.
“None of that means anything to us,” I said. “So, from the top. Why is this important?”
I was tired of this. I wanted answers. Monarch or not, I was tired of the games. Even though I had a feeling this was everything but.
I felt the captain step close.
Over her shoulder, behind her and in my direct line of sight, Chief Cook raised
