The slow crawl through the debris-filled passageway turned out to be much less eventful than Bouchard had feared. The six crew members entered her alien body parts nor lurking monsters hiding in the dark. About half an hour after entering the work of interlocked girders, they emerged into a small chamber mostly devoid of floating wreckage. Like every other room they had seen on the ship, it was pletely bereft of markings; its floor, ceiling, and walls were posed of the same decrepit, dull, and brokeal ptes they had been gliding past for what felt like ay.

  And just as First Mate Bouchard had feared, the corridor leading out of the chamber was blocked, in the same way as the three hallways they had previously explored.

  In the narrow beam of her fshlight, it was difficult to get a clear view of the barricade, as it stretched out into the darkness. She floated along, trying to map it in her mind. It was too te to turn baow. If they did, they would have to retrace their steps through two juns, and they didn’t have enough oxygen to spare for that. Knowing what she now did, she strongly suspected that any other passageways they might find would also be blocked. Their progress toward the bridge was being deliberately hindered.

  A few minutes into examining the blockage, she realized that her earlier disappoi at seeing the other corridors closed off had led her to make assumptions she shouldn't have. In the far er of the room, where the barricade met the wall, there appeared to be an opening in the debris—or at least a less dense colle of metal beams and broken chairs. It wasn’t rge enough to allow the team to pass through safely, but it was a start. They would o remove any sharp pieetal stig out to ehing tore their spacesuits as they squeezed through. She g her watch. Thirty minutes, no more, she thought. We o get this done in thirty minutes.

  She grabbed one of the girders, testing how firmly it was wedged into the wreckage. It was about twenty timeters wide, made from a half-timeter-thick yer of metal curved into an I-shape, punctured by regurly spaced holes the size of her fingers, its surface dulled by millions of years of exposure to space.

  Her heart skipped a beat when the light from her head-mounted lumen torch suddenly reflected off a gleaming scrat the otherwise drab metal.

  Someone—or something—had passed through here retly, moving the debris to make a way through the barricade and scraping the beams in the process.

  The room was not wide enough to allow the entire crew to safely work on removing the sharp pieetal that blocked their way. Instead, First Mate Bouchard ordered the rger Terran team members to take turns clearing the barricade, making sure they didn’t exhaust themselves, while the two smaller Ker stayed at the back of the room. She didn’t even bother trying to get Captain Balmar to help with the work.

  Pv-tor-fel-mak, not keen on sitting idle while the clock ticked toward their death, decided to take a closer look at the hand Suwannarat had retrieved. The wreck’s immense age ehere would be nothing on the bridge that could offer a means to escape their impending doom. Still, having something to do kept his thoughts away from the tightening grip of their limited oxygen supply.

  Truth be told, he was somewhat offended by being sidelihis way. Strength scaled with the square of the muscle diameter, not with a person’s height; besides, Ker muscle fibers were strohan Terran ones anyway. In the cramped space they were w in, the smaller Ker would have been a better choice, he thought.

  But it was all futile. Everything they had been doing sihe destru of the Legacy had been a scam. Keeping morale up until the end was more important than being effit, so Pv-tor-fel-mak chose not to press the issue ao work examining the dry limb.

  The hand itself was not that different from what one would expect. It was longer and thinner, with more joints than even a Terran hand, but otherwise, its design retty standard. The uscle tissue was curious—it did not look like the flesh had rotted away, but as if it had never been there in the first pce. Apparently, motion had been provided solely by the strong ribbons of sinew crisscrossing the a bones. He uood why Suwannarat had found it horrifying when he first saw it illuminated by his fshlight. But here, Pv-tor-fel-mak thought, there was a certaiy to it, if you could ighe decay it had gohrough.

  He saw no feasible way of determining the limb’s age. If it was from the inal crew of the ship, it was at least eight million years old, mummified rather than fossilized by the freezing vacuum of deep space. Given the vast time spans involved, carbon dating would be useless—once all the carbon-14 in the sample had decayed into nitrogen, the natural radioactive clock would have stopped tig. Oher hand, perhaps the wreck had been visited before, by another crew trying to piece together its secrets. Another crew that had entered whatever had cut Sawhney into pieces.

  Absent-mindedly, he started to carve a few shavings from the desiccated hand, retrieved the portable mass speeter he always carried from his belt, and pced the fragments into its analysis slot.

  A couple of mier, when the first results started to show up on the s, the “sand” they had found in the alien pantry suddenly made perfect sense.

  Captain Balmar had been right all along. The tainers had indeed, in times long gone, tained food for the crew of the vessel. Over the eons, the food had decayed, desiccated, and succumbed to thermal erosion, redug it to nothing more than dust. But it had not been food in any sense he was aced to imagining.

  By now, the Terran Federation had found life on literally hundreds of worlds. Most of them did not harbor any intelligent species, of course, but life was still life. Wherever stists looked—in the frozen wastes of subzero desert ps, above the hellish sulfur cloudscapes of pyrean worlds, deep in the os of ice-covered moons, and ihe gargantuan storms of gas giants—life was found. Wherever life could take hold—and even in pces where it seemingly shouldn’t—it found a way to appear.

  If, Pv-tor-fel-mak mused, the universe had—as some people believed—beeed by a higher power, that deity must surely have been a god of life, because life, and life in abundance, was everywhere to be found. Not that he or anyone else on the crew of Peretti's Legacy believed in such things, he thought with a dismissive smirk. Still, he was quite familiar with the cept of faith. More than one of his retives ba Ker had been priests of Nam-kal-kel-kul-el, The-One-Who-Is-and-Was-and-Always-Will-Be.

  In his mind, Pv-tor-fel-mak almost added, “bless His name,” but caught himself at the st moment. Even the bleakness of their future, trapped as they were in the shadows of the derelict ship, wasn’t enough to make him feign belief in something he didn’t truly hold. He was not that hypocritical.

  Never mind why life was everywhere, he thought, as he tinued his musings while he waited for the rest of the crew to clear the way through the debris. The important fact was this: life was always carbon-based. Always, and everywhere.

  Except the eight million—or more—year-old arm he was holding in his hands was sili-based.

  The history of life in the universe had just beeten.

  Thirty-five mier, the hole in the barricade had been opened wide enough to alloerson to get through. The work had been both slower and harder than First Mate Bouchard had wanted, wasting more of their precious time and oxygen than they could afford. Still, they didn’t have a choiless they simply wao give up and die where they were.

  Carrying his trusty fshlight, Mission Specialist Suwannarat was the first to ehe unknown space beyond the debris blog the corridor. After Captain Balmar, he was the rgest arained member of the crew, and Bouchard wao stack the odds in their favor. She couldn’t fet the scratch marks she had seen earlier—the telltale signs that the thing or person stalking them had been through here not long before they arrived. Letting their most physically impressive team member take point was the logical choice.

  She followed right behind him, keeping a close eye on him as he emerged from the path through the blockage. In the distance, she could see the flicker of his fshlight dang across the gray anels.

  “It’s just more of the same,” he said over the radio. “I don’t think this pce was chosen for any particur reason. For whoever blocked off this part of the ship, this pce must have just been as good a pce as any to do it.”

  “Yeah, I figured as much,” she responded. “It fits the pattern we’ve seen. The barriers are makeshift, made from whatever they found lying around. I don’t think they had much time to raise them, and eveime to make grand pns for where to pce them.”

  “There’s lots of debris ahead,” Suwannarat tinued. “But I don’t see any more blockages. I think it’s a viable path forward.”

  Forward, yes, but there’s no telling what we’ll enter before we reach the bridge, Bouchard thought. In the darkness, they could see no further than the reach of their fshlights.

  “There is some—”

  Mission Specialist Suwannarat did not finish the sentence. Instead, his st words turned into an agonized scream that filled the suit radios of the rest of the team, eg through their helmets with promises of untold horrors ahead.

  First Mate Bouchard quickly swept her fshlight in Suwannarat’s dire, trying to see what had happeo him. But no matter where she looked, she couldn’t see him.

  Her heart pounding in her chest, she turned off her fshlight and hunkered down within the debris, trying to make herself as small as possible. Whatever was out there was close now, but in the vacuum, she would never hear it. And as the perma night ihe derelict ship encased her like a co of death, she imagined Suwannarat’s assaint slowly creeping toward her, reag for her through the darkness, always just out of sight.

  She y there for several minutes, shaking like a leaf from the shock of adrenalierror coursed through her body like electricity, tighteniomato a Gordian knot she feared she would never untangle. Gradually, she became aware that she had not even called out for Suwannarat. Perhaps he was floating out there in the darkness right now, uo call for help, just waiting to hear her reassuring voiore time, to feel one final e to friends and colleagues before life ebbed out of him.

  And she had failed him.

  She took a deep breath in preparation for f herself to shout his name. But as the air filled the recesses of her lungs, she paused a out again.

  Finding herself uo offer him even her own voice as soce, she colpsed in despair and started to cry. It was the soft, silent whimper of a woman who had lost herself and, in doing so, betrayed those who had put their trust in her.

  MvonStz