Chapter 56: The Log of the Dead
The sight of the shuttle's slightly ajar hatch sent a jolt of adrenaline through Alex, a feeling more potent than any fear. Someone survived the crash. Someone was here. He swam towards the shuttle, Maximus close behind him, a silent, grim shadow in the dark water.
They reached the smaller vessel. The hatch was indeed damaged, its edges slightly warped from the force of the impact, preventing it from sealing completely. The gap was just wide enough for a man to squeeze through. Alex looked at Maximus, his eyes wide with a question. The general nodded, his own expression one of stern, unwavering resolve. He would follow his emperor, even into the belly of a star-fallen god.
Alex took a deep breath from his air-bag, the taste of stale leather filling his lungs, and pushed himself through the narrow opening. He emerged from the water with a great, gasping heave, his body suddenly heavy as he half-fell, half-clambered into the interior.
He was in an airlock. A small, dark, cramped chamber. And it was dry. Miraculously, the shuttle's inner seal had held for millennia, preserving a pocket of ancient, alien atmosphere. The air was thin, stale, and carried a strange, sterile scent like ozone after a lightning strike, mixed with the faint, dusty smell of immense age.
Maximus squeezed through the gap behind him, landing with a soft thud on the metal deck. For a moment, they just stood there, breathing the thin, dead air, their lanterns cutting sharp, dancing beams through the darkness. They were inside.
A second, circular hatch stood before them. It opened with a soft hiss at Alex's touch, the mechanism still functional after two thousand years of silence. They stepped through and found themselves in the cockpit.
It was a small space, designed for a single pilot. There was no grand throne, no complex array of levers and dials. There was just a single, elegantly designed chair facing a smooth, black console that wrapped around the front of the cockpit. And in the chair, they found what was left of the pilot.
It was not a body. Any flesh and blood would have decayed into dust centuries ago. It was a skeleton, perfectly preserved in the dry, sterile environment. It was slumped in the pilot's chair, held in place by what looked like a series of safety restraints. The skeleton was humanoid, but Alex, with his 21st-century knowledge of anatomy, could immediately see the subtle differences. The limbs were slightly longer and more slender than a human's, the ribcage a different shape, and the skull was subtly but noticeably more elongated. This was not a human from his own time. This was something else.
The skeleton was clad in the tattered, rotted remains of a strange, form-fitting suit. The fabric, once likely as strong as steel, had mostly decayed, but patches of it remained, a silvery, fibrous material that seemed to shimmer faintly in their lantern light.
Alex's gaze was drawn to the console in front of the skeleton. There, resting where the pilot's hands would have been, was another device. It was a thin, black, perfectly smooth rectangle of the same material as the ship's hull, about the size of a large book. It looked like a more advanced, impossibly sleek version of his own laptop. A data slate. It was dark, seemingly as dead as its owner.