She could see it in their eyes. The crew no longer looked at her the same way they had before. It wasn’t quite the look of disappoi she had expected, but rather a loss of hope. She had promised t them to the bridge, and now they were no longer certain of that oute.

  First Mate Bouchard stood at the ter of the dwindling crew of Peretti's Legacy, huddled together as they tried to reach a sensus on how to proceed. She no longer had the energy to take and of the situation. From now on, whatever they chose to do would be a group decision.

  She had stayed hidden in the debris for what seemed like ay before slowly crawling back to the room where the rest of the creaiting. Now, they faced an impossible choice: stay in the room until their oxygen supply ran out, or move forward into the darkness beyond, where their teammate had just disappeared—and where they now kheir unknown assaint was waiting for them.

  It v-tor-fel-mak who broke the stalemate.

  “If we stay, death is certain. We only have a couple of hours of oxyge now,” he said, his voice filled with sorrow. “If we go forward, we…”

  His voice quivered.

  “If we go forward, we risk death at the hands of whatever is waiting for us out there,” he tinued. “I don’t want to meet whatever it is that took Sawhney and Suwannarat. But if we go forward, we still have a ce to survive. And if we don’t, at least our deaths will be swift.”

  The group talked it over for a few more minutes, but Pv-tor-fel-mak’s stateme a sting impression, and in the end, the decision was unanimous: they would tioward the bridge.

  Crawling through the opening in the barricade, the five remaining crew members were ed with dread. Ahead of them was only darkness—darkness, and their unseen enemy hiding within it. It seemed to them as if the strength of their fshlights had suddenly waned, as the shadows closed in on them from all dires.

  Wheire team had exited oher side, they took a moment to gather themselves before tinuing down the corridor. Slowly, they turned around, letting the beams of their lights illumihe dark ers of the passageway, searg fns of trouble.

  But there was no ohere. And of Mission Specialist Suwannarat, they could find no trace.

  ces were, Bouchard thought, his mutited body was crammed into some small shaft or tunnel, just like the one where they had previously found Sawhney.

  Not wanting to dey the iable any lohe group adjusted their maneuvering thrusters to drift in silence further along the corridor. The anticlimax of the uful journey was emotionally exhausting—after having spent the past half hour imagining the horrors that awaited them oher side, finding none of them there allowed the team members, for the first time in hours, the luxury of feeling again.

  And with those feelings came sorrow, hopelessness, and uing fatigue. They had been expl the derelict for close to fourteen hours. By now, most of the crew had been awake for over a day. Bouchard, her head pounding from a pierg headache, desperately wao give up ahe darkness cim her forever. But peer pressure kept her going, despite everything.

  One by ohey passed an endless array of doors, openings to rooms whose purposes they could only imagine. None of them tained anything of value anymore. At oime, Bouchard thought, they might have been boratories, medical ics, or eai ters. In her imagination, she could hear the ughter of the inal crew eg between the dead walls. Now, all the rooms looked the same: dreary, deg gray walls, choked with floating gray chairs, tables, ets, and jagged pieces of brokeal, all covered by a thin yer of gray dust. All in utter and plete silence.

  Gray. Her entire world was colorless, until the relentless gray dissolved into bck at the edge of her fshlight’s beam.

  The scream shook her to her core, a pierg, almost inhuman shriek that filled her ears a with terror. It took Bouchard a sed to realize she was the one screaming.

  Inside one of the side rooms, among the shadows of the debris blog the doorway, she had seen a face.

  Someone bumped into her from behind, and her fshlight went spinning. Now, the only light she had left was the lumen tor top of her helmet. She froze in pce, incapable of turning toward the door to look for the apparition she had seen, while equally uo rotate and turn her ba it.

  “Laura…” Tech Specialist Murray said over the radio. “Sorry, you scared me. I didn’t mean to hit you that hard.”

  “Here,” Est-mar-kort interjected and handed Bouchard back her lost fshlight. “What happened?”

  First Mate Bouchard was still trying to pose herself. Then, with the fshlight ba her hand, she finally turned back toward the doorway.

  “I saw something in there,” she said, her voice hoarse with dread. “Someone. I saw a face staring at me from in there,” she tinued, indig the darkness beyond the debris.

  “Suwannarat?” Murray asked, a mix of hope and horror in her voice.

  No, it had not been Yevgen, Bouchard thought. The face that had looked at her from the shadows had been white and skeletal, with an elongated head, dead eyes set in deep, dark sockets, and sharp teeth protruding from dry lips.

  “No,” she replied. “It was…”

  She paused as she searched the debris with her fshlight, steeling herself for fear of seeing the horrific face again.

  “No,” she said, starting over itempt to expin what she had seen. “I think it was one of the aliens, the same ohat left behind the arm.”

  That caught the attention of Pv-tor-fel-mak. Slowly, he drifted up to hover beside her, the beam of his fshlight joining hers as they searched the floating debris together.

  There it was again. Drifting ihe room, much further in than it had been when she first saw it, was a body. To Bouchard, it looked like a walking skeleton, its bones covered with pale white skin, without even a trauscles. It was tall, perhaps two or two and a half meters ih, and rotated slowly in the weightlessness of the derelict. Unblinking eyes set deep in its nightmarish face stared back at the crew from the shadows, like death itself gazing at them from the abyss.

  “Yeah, it looks the same,” Pv-tor-fel-mak firmed. Any other time, he would have insisted they clear the entrance of debris so they could iigate the corpse. With no recoverable teology to be found on the ship, studying the desiccated bodies its crew had left behind was now the only way they had of learning about the ins of the wreck.

  But time was running out. He g his oxygeer. Three hours and twenty minutes left to live. He guessed some of his teammates had eveime, as they were rger than him and had worked harder clearing the barricade.

  No, the alien body, seemingly perfectly preserved in the cold vacuum of the derelid the stifid of a lifetime—would have to wait.

  Slowly, the team moved on, their fshlight beams shaky from adrenaline as they searched the darkness ahead for unknown threats.

  He stared in sile the alien maery floating ihe room in front of him—the same type of broken maery they had entered throughout the ship, its stituent alloys gleaming like silver and gold in the beam of his fshlight.

  It wasn’t fair, Pv-tor-fel-mak thought. The irony of it all was almost delicious in its depressing absurdity. Despite the deadline imposed by their dwindling oxygen supplies, he hadn’t been able to stop himself from taking a few more samples along the way. And now he wished he never had.

  “Laura,” he said to the first mate. “Do you remember how we first decided to explore the wreck before rep it to the Terran Federation, hoping we’d find something of value here to sell off first?”

  In any other situation, the question would have been purely rhetorical. But to Pv-tor-fel-mak, it felt like ay sihey had departed Peretti's Legacy. Their experiences before entering the derelict were now part of another world, like memories belonging to a differey. He had to actively remind himself that he had had a life before the eternal darkness of the wreck.

  Bouchard nodded but said nothing.

  “We went deeper and deeper into the ship, trying to find something—anything—of value. But we found nothing. No teology or information to salvage. No valuable materials to sell on the bck market. And now that search has sealed our fate.”

  Again, she oo tired to even respond.

  “And you know the broken maery we’ve seen everywhere? The ones made from the alien alloys that we’ve straio push past the eime we’ve been here?”

  “Those alloys… We were wrong about them,” he tinued. “They aren’t just alloys—they’re really gold. Chemically pure gold-197 and ptinum-195. We’ve been floating past thousands upon thousands of tons of preetals since we first set foot ihe wreck.”

  Slowly, Laura Bouchard turo face him, despair evident oired face. Still, she said nothing, and her expressiorayed ion to v-tor-fel-mak had just told her.

  “We were so focused on finding valuable ors or jewelry—tris we could pluhat we ighe mundane, never even imagining the aliens would use actual gold to build their maes.”

  Turning around to leave the treasure trove ihe room, they satain Balmar had floated up to where they were h.

  “Captain,” Pv-tor-fel-mak greeted him. “How are you feeling?”

  The Jerrassian still didn’t reply. His eyes were fixed on the gold ihe room, his motions slow, as if in a trance. Whewo left the doorway to rejoin the rest of the crew, the captain stayed behind, uo take his gaze off the riches in front of him.

  When the rest of the team departed from the area for yet another leap forward toward the bridge, none of them even bothered to go back to retrieve the husk of their former leader. The st anyone ever saw of Captain Balmar, he was h in the dista the edge of their vision, alone in a room filled with mold than he could ever have dreamed of, as the darkness of the derelict ship closed in on him.

  MvonStz