I yelled for Lexis and Mo.
The room behind the door was packed full of stuff. In the dimness of the hold, I couldn’t possibly determine what any of it was. Wouldn’t have recognized it even if it were bright daylight, if I was honest.
Mo poked his head in. “What are you doing in there? It’s not safe, Noah. This thing is a disaster.”
“You need to see this,” I said. “There’s gotta be some stuff we can use here.”
I didn’t wait for Mo to clamber into the transport. This hold was full of things. The dust and small critters had taken a toll here as well, but there were large cubes of metal that looked intact. I ran my hands over the first one but couldn’t figure out how to open it.
“What did you find?” Mo stood in the open doorway. “Stars. They just left all this stuff?”
Dust swirled in the filtered light. “It was a door. I didn’t know how to open it, but I figured it out. The ‘Mites would have no idea what a door was. They would never figure out how to open one. It’s just not how they are.” Not how I was, either. But I was learning.
Lexis appeared behind Mo and together they crept into the hold.
“Some of these crates are still intact.” They pried at the boxes, but nothing would budge.
“A Digger could open them,” I suggested, but a Digger could never fit through the human-size door. How would these boxes have been unloaded? There must be some other entrance to this room, but before I could find it, Lexis said, “Oh, look! Tools!”
I didn’t know what any of the things were that she pulled off the wall, but she seemed to know what to do with them. She and Mo set to prying open the crates.
“Seeds,” she said. “Some of these might be useful if we ever get safe ground to plant them.”
Mo pulled out a long, heavy roll of some flat, thin material. “Solar panel. Shame there’s nothing to power anymore. No way anything that’s sat this long in these conditions would ever work. And nobody knows how to fix it even if we found stuff.”
A large crate in the back was painted with the same strange symbols that Kinni had shown me and sneered when I couldn’t read them. As I thought about it, those same kinds of symbols were painted on the outsides of these transports. I’d seen them all my life and never known they were writing.
“Embryo storage,” Mo said. “Well, that’s a darned shame.”
I had no idea what that was, and when Lexis tried to explain that it was meant to bring babies from the old planet to this one, I started to think she was probably just making things up. I knew how big babies were. Only ten or twelve would fit inside the crate, and even over the dust and pollen, I would have been able to smell if there were babies in the box.
The next box made her whistle. “Oh, yeah. Screws. Nuts and bolts.”
I looked to see giant boxes of the little metal tubes I had first seen when I put together the chair during the Ranking.
I didn’t know why she was so happy, but even I could tell that the next few boxes were the jackpot.
The material was foreign to me, like everything else in this transport. But the first thing I pulled out was a long, thin tube, as tall as I was, with three sharp points made of heavy metal on the end.
I held it up like a spear. “Hey, look! There’s a bunch of these!”
Mo and Lexis shuffled over.
“Pitchforks!” Mo shouted, and shoved me gently aside. He pulled out other similar tools. “Hoes and shovels. This is all farming equipment.” He handed me a shovel. It was heavy, and although the edges weren’t sharp, it would easily break the leg of an attacking Soldier. And the pitchforks . . .
“Imagine those spikes coated with Soldier venom,” I said, eyeing the tools.
Lexis grinned in the thick air. “It’s not what our ancestors intended. This stuff was all supposed to help us live in peace and work the land. We were supposed to be farmers, not warriors.”
I grabbed a long, thin blade attached to a smooth handle.
“Be careful with that,” Mo said. “It’s a machete.”
Waving it around felt right in my hand, and I tucked it into the waistband of my pants. “I’m taking this with me.”
Outside, the sounds of our Diggers trenching up the ground echoed between the crumpled metal hulls.
“None of this could possibly be what our ancestors intended,” I said. “And once we get our people free, we’ll have our chance to farm. We didn’t start this war, but one way or another, we’re going to end it.”