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Despite the fact that every member of the crew understood the danger they were in, they all stopped when they reached the main hangar deck. Batta was the first to speak.
“My...my god. What happened here?”
The space before them dwarfed the compound on the surface. The lift brought them down next to the port in the cliff face. With it at their backs they looked out at kilometers of space, so much of it that the curvature of the small planet made seeing the far end impossible. This was, Batta thought, probably a blessing. Because as far as the eye could see was death in a myriad of horrible configurations.
Batta alone walked forward to the nearest body. It was large, at least two and a half meters tall, but sans any clothing or armor. Its finer features were lost to the unspeakable damage done to its form as it writhed in agony. Smears of carbonized flesh surrounded it in a grotesque sort of snow angel, chunks of skin and tissue pulled from the bone during its death throes.
Batta turned the passive sensors up to maximum, recording across the spectrum in every way the suit would allow without emitting any radiation.
“No real decomposition,” he said in a quiet voice. “He died slow. Or at least slow enough. How long ago did this happen?”
“At least seventy years,” Blue said somberly. “That was how long ago the Originators found this place. This was not their work.”
Jemison knelt beside the body and gingerly scraped a small amount of black char from the floor. Batta watched with forced detachment as she popped the sample into the field analyzer built into a small pod on her armored leg. He knew it was meant to test for chemical or biological contaminants, but in practice the device was no different from something in any ship-board biolab.
“Whoa,” she said after a few seconds. “This is seriously weird. No bacteria whatsoever. And what I can see of the cellular structure is...it’s just bizarre. This guy was hardy. His cells are encased in some kind of polymer. No wonder what’s left isn’t rotting.”
Batta stood and surveyed the deck once again. He had seen death before, had lost crewmen and nearly come to the end of his own race more than once. The injury to his brain had been the tallest hurdle he’d ever overcome, a process that would likely continue for years, but it hadn’t hurt him this way.
The bodies stretched out endlessly. Some were as larger or larger than the one before him. Many were slightly smaller—another gender, if this race followed evolutionary norms for bipeds—but at least half were tiny. The range there was much greater.
Children. So many dead children.
“It was a slaughter,” Batta muttered. He hadn’t bothered to turn off his external speaker. “What happened here?” He tried to turn his mind away from the images burned into his brain. None of the still forms in this charnel house had escaped torturous, burning death.
“I have collected samples,” Blue said simply. “We should go. The alien ship could activate the defenses at any time. I do not mean to sound insensitive, but I am far more concerned for the living.”
A hand settled on Batta’s shoulder so gently that the composite shells touching made only the barest whisper. “He’s right,” Grant said. “We need to go.”
Batta nodded. “Right. Of course. Uh, which way?”
There seemed little point in traipsing very far into the field of the dead; every ship here appeared to be identical. The nearest four or five dozen berths were empty. Batta noted this mechanically as the obvious sign it was that at least some fraction of the population here had lived through the massacre.
Try as he might, it was impossible not to look at the bodies strewn about as they walked. Blue led them to the nearest ship and jogged ahead to interface with it directly. Batta only peripherally noted the blurring of its smooth lines and the forming break in its crystalline skin as a doorway formed in it. His attention fell instead on a spot of color among the charred and blackened bodies.
Without considering his actions, he moved over to the body—or more accurately bodies, as they were a pair—and quickly knelt down.
“Batta!” Grant said loudly.
The larger of the two was barely injured compared to the absolute devastation around them. It was an adult, clearly male and tall for the species. It was as dead as everything else in the cavernous hangar but mostly intact. Fingers of burnt flesh traced up and around the hunched figure’s torso. He had died curled over something.
Batta flipped the body, not taking the time to be gentle. The scene was obvious; the adult had tried to smother the burning form of a child. The heat must have been intense enough to kill him in moments, as the scorched hole in his chest didn’t extend as far as the head. Batta met the dead eyes, perfectly preserved for decades and only barely desiccated.
“Batta!” Grant yelled again, this time much closer. He threw both arms around the body and hauled it onto his shoulder, ignoring the pieces of seared flesh and bone scraping off against his armor. He ran for the ship, momentarily heedless of the field that might have broken him into spare parts, and nearly toppled over despite the stabilization built into the armor. Apparently it didn’t do well with large, uneven loads changing the center of balance and moving chaotically.
He tossed the body on the deck and hunkered down next to it. The world around him dialed back to little more than background noise. The door sealing shut, Blue and Grant situating the crew and readying the ship to leave, even the first low whine of engines cycling up as if they hadn’t been sitting idle for seven decades—these things registered as points of reference. They created no impact in his mind. There was no fear or other emotional resonance. Every particle of that was reserved for the dead man in front of him.
Light brown skin. Five fingers. Familiar musculature. Batta flipped the body over and looked into that face again.
That human face.
Jemison and King happened to be jammed next to him in the small crew section of the ship, and both let out audible gasps.
“Okay,” Batta said. “So it’s not just me, then. This guy looks like us.”
“Just bigger,” King said. The soldier crouched down and ran an armored hand over the face, trying to turn the stiff form. “Look at that. Ears, nose, everything. They’re people.”
“I’ll try not to take offense at the idea that aliens aren’t people,” Fen said as she worked her way over. “This is too fucking weird. I didn’t think you guys got this large.”
Batta shook his head. “We don’t. Not in whole populations. Dex? You think this is something Threnody cooked up?”
Everyone was crowded around, standing in a tight circle. Dex shook his head. “Even if I thought they would bother, they don’t have the kind of tech we’ve seen around here. Also look at the language on all the signs and terminals. It doesn’t use characters from any human script I’ve ever seen.”
“Guys, we’re missing the fucking point here,” Spencer said, pointing down at the body. “If that’s a human being, we have got to go back out there. This raises about a thousand questions we can’t afford to leave unanswered.”
The ship filled with a too-even, low whine. Batta instinctively understood that the engines were tuned incredibly well. They'd sat for so long, probably decades, and were more whisper-quiet than any he'd ever heard. It was a level of engineering he had never even imagined, much less encountered.
“We’re not staying,” Grant said. The compartment was small enough that he couldn’t have missed the conversation blaring out of their external speakers. “Getting out with what we know is infinitely better than dying here trying to reach some arbitrary mission goal. I say we've done more than enough.”
And with that, the ship lifted off into a smooth hover. Batta could not help marveling at the casual use of insanely advanced tech to make that possible. The ship rushed forward with blasts from the atmospheric engines, yet the only way he knew they moved was the view on the main screen changing.
The discussion about their dead passenger paused as the interior of the ship appeared to go translucent—though it had to be an illusion. A projection allowing the passengers to see the outside world. This took everyone off guard, and he took a little glee in watching Spencer give a small jump at the sudden change.
The ever-present mist was gone as if it were a curtain whose rod had slipped to the ground. The artificial sunlight from the satellites in orbit bathed the rocky world into stark relief. The oily rainbow of the protective field stretched in all directions. How a single ship could produce such a large effect...
No. That wasn’t it at all. Hadn’t they seen the same thing used in the hallway? There were probably repeaters all over the—
“What the fuck?!” Grant shouted as a shrieking wail burst from the ship’s comm system. It was loud enough to overwhelm the sonic dampers built into their suits, making the metal hum in resonance.
Somehow, Batta knew. On some level they all did. The crashed ship had reached some unknown milestone and it was calling out. In warning or for help, he had no idea. Regardless, it probably wasn’t a good development.
“Get us into space right now,” he said, panic cracking the edges of his voice. For the first time since his injury, Batta didn’t have to bother thinking the sentence before he spoke it.