Pilgrim (8 page)

She looked around at the monkeys again. The
majority of them were in the branches in front of her and to her
left, leaving the path behind and to her right mostly clear. She
decided to go with her gut and took a step to her right.

The monkeys didn’t move. Their eyes followed
her footsteps but they remained calm.

She walked to her right until she was out of
sight of the monkeys and then resumed her previous course. She
glanced to her left and saw that the troop was keeping pace with
her in the trees. They followed along beside her for a hundred
metres and then they stopped. They stayed in their trees and
watched her walk on.

She shivered at the feel of their eyes on
her back. Still, a troop of raging monkeys was better than the
psychotic children from the village. She made a note to check the
Cloud to see if that was normal primate behaviour.

Nova shrugged and kept on walking, staring
between the trees. Just as her legs were aching with the pain of
her hike, she spotted a glint of metal in the distance. She stepped
between a pair of trees and there it was again, a sparkle of
sunlight on steel.

She quickened her pace. As she drew closer,
the huge ship came into view. It had been a massive vessel, a
colonisation craft capable of carrying over two hundred passengers
when it crashed. The front end was buried deep into the forest
floor so only a small portion of the tail end was visible above
ground

She moved in closer until she stood behind
the last line of trees before the ship. The craft had multiple
trees and shrubs sprouting from it, making it blend even further
into the forest. The steel hull was mostly rusted over and the name
of the craft had long since faded away.

“Gotcha,” Nova said.

She walked right up to the ship and placed
her hand on its side. It had crashed nearly two hundred years ago,
she just hoped no one else had been here first to steal… Salvage,
she corrected herself… the valuables and the fuel.

“Cal, I’m sending through data, I’ve found
the crash site. I’m going in.”

She waited for Cal’s response but there was
only silence.

“Stupid robot.” She sighed and came to a
stop at the door to the ship. It hung open from a single hinge and
moved in the slight breeze.

The inside was dim but she could make out a
walkway and some chairs. There was no sign of habitation, not for a
long while anyway.

According to data logs Nova had found in the
Cloud, the ship was carrying enough equipment and resources to
colonise a new planet. That was a lot of tech gear to let go to
waste, even if it had been lying around for two hundred years.
Hell, that would have been right as the tech-bubble burst and
scientific advancement began to lag. The chances were pretty good
that whatever systems the ship had were just as good as any of
Crusader’s.

She marched to the doorway. With the tilt of
the ship, the base was up near her hip and she had to grip hold of
the rusted door to pull herself up. She swung into the ship and
landed with a soft thud. Crouching low on the tilted floor, she
waited for her eyes to adjust.

She wiped the rust from her hands onto her
trousers and listened. There was no noise except for the wind
rustling through the open doorway, and no sign that a forest animal
had made the ship home. Although she did notice large piles of dung
scattered amongst the rubbish and other debris of the ship.

The floor at Nova’s feet was covered with a
thick layer of leaves and dirt. The plant matter was also piled in
high drifts at the front wall where the room was at its lowest.

She walked downwards at a steep angle
between the chairs to the front wall and tried the door. As she
turned the knob the door fell open and hit the opposite wall below
her with a loud clang.

“Dammit!” she whispered, listening for any
approaching threat.

The forest and the ship remained silent. She
lowered herself down through the door and into the next room,
leaving the observation lounge behind and entering a dining
area.

As with most spacecraft, the furniture was
firmly attached to the floor and so the tables and chairs were
exactly where they had always been, albeit sitting at a steep
angle. Conversely, every glass, plate and knife was smashed against
the far wall. Shards of broken glass sparkled in the few rays of
sunlight which lit the room.

Nova glanced at the windows. Only the ones
closest to her let in any light, the rest were buried by dirt as
the nose of the ship went underground. She sidled down the steep
floor, going from chair to chair to keep her footing on the steep
incline.

The ship was incredible. The sheer size and
wasted space, let alone the windows, were unthinkable. It would
have taken an astronomical amount of power to get it moving and
keep it together. But then it was a colonisation ship, the people
on board were meant to stay for generations. They’d go mad if they
were cooped up in the close confines of an economic ship with zero
gravity and no walkways.

When she reached the next door, she cursed.
It opened inwards, or at the current angle of the ship, upwards.
She grabbed hold of the handle and pulled with all of her strength.
The door lifted a little and then slammed shut again.

“Grishnak!” Nova said, readjusting her
grip.

She lifted again, this time resting a foot
on the wall next to the door and using her whole body to pull
upwards. With great reluctance and a lot of squeaking, the door
lifted up. She pulled it all the way up and then let it fall the
rest of the way open so that it slammed against the wall.

The next room was completely black. No light
could get through the dirt-covered windows and the lights of the
ship had gone out long ago.

She fished around in her bag until she found
the small orb. She squeezed the soft sphere and it glowed, casting
a circle of light, as she clipped it to her belt.

A dim corridor stretched out in front of her
and every few metres there were doors leading off to either side.
She glanced into one such room and saw a simple bunk bed. These
were the sleeping quarters for the colonists.

“Creepy,” Nova said as she took in the
neatly folded clothes. On the top bunk was a fluffy teddy bear. It
lay on its side with its eyes looking straight at the door, right
at her. The stitched-on grin looked more like a grimace in the dim
light.

She shook her head and moved on. She needed
to get to the bridge of the ship, the best equipment and an
inventory of everything else on board was bound to be there,
including the warp converter. She tried to be grateful that with
the ship laying at such an angle, it was easy to tell which way she
had to go.

After the sleeping quarters, there was
another dining area, and after that a gym. She moved from room to
room with her small glowing orb.

As she reached for the door out of the gym,
something fell to the floor behind her with an almighty crash. She
jumped and turned with her pistol drawn. The noise came from
outside of her circle of light and she couldn’t see anything. She
held her breath but there was no other noise in the room.

“I must have knocked something over,” she
reassured herself. To be sure, she held the glowing ball up high so
that the light reached all corners of the gym. Unused gym equipment
were the only ghosts in that room.

The next zone was a tech station. Learning
pods were lined up in ordered rows. Usually, they would be lit by a
welcoming blue light, but now they were just empty glass shells
with wires and tubing. Creeping forward, she put her hand on the
glass dome and gazed inside.

She drew back with a start. Inside the pod
was the skeleton of a small child; the grey-green bones stood out
against the white chair. The whole macabre scene was trapped inside
the glass learning pod. The child’s clothes were laid over the
bones and hung loosely from the thin limbs.

Nova shook her head. There were supposedly
survivors from this crash landing. Did they just leave the bodies
of their dead lying wherever they fell? She looked around but she
couldn’t see any other corpses in the tech station.

She hurried past the glass cubicles. A chill
went up her spine as she remembered the skeleton lying behind the
glass. The dark recesses where the eyes used to be stared up at
her.

She clenched her teeth and kept moving.
According to the ship’s data logs, the tech station was right
behind the pilot’s quarters. She was nearly there, she just had to
collect the valuables and then get out of the ghost ship.

The metal door leading out of the tech
station was different to the others, it didn’t have a knob.
Instead, there was a button pad with worn-down numbers and a blank
screen just above them. There was no clue as to what the code could
be.

She slammed her fist into the wall. A
percussive ding rang out through the tech lounge and bounced off of
the nearby learning pods. There was usually some kind of pattern to
these security keys, a way for everyone to remember.

Tapping her fingers against the doorframe,
she cast around for any kind of hint. As she looked up towards the
top of the door she saw it. A room number was stamped into the
metal of the frame. She punched the numbers into the pad and a
green light flashed on. The metal door slid away to reveal a dark
room beyond. One of the many benefits of colonisation ships;
self-contained and self-renewing power systems.

The door slid shut behind her as she lowered
herself into the next corridor. Her glowing sphere revealed buttons
and leavers to either side. Black screens were spaced every few
metres, completely blank.

She kept climbing until she felt a cool
draft hit her face from the left side. She stopped and spun with
her gun drawn. Up to that point, the air in the ship had been
completely still, dead.

The glowing ball only revealed so much and
past that there was more darkness. She took a step towards the side
of the ship, her gun raised. The breeze was gone but something had
caused it.

She kept walking. She expected to come up
against the ship’s side at any moment. Instead, her foot went from
hard metal to soft dirt.

“What the—” she said.

The glowing ball illuminated dirt at her
feet and to either side the jagged edges of the ship’s forward
door. The door itself was lying in a crumpled heap mere metres from
Nova’s feet.

Outside of the ship was a massive
underground cave, the size of a small moon. Somewhere in the
distance water was dripping, creating a constant percussive rhythm.
That was the only sound in the deep cave.

She turned left and crept along the side of
the ship with a hand resting on the metal. It would be too easy to
get lost in a place like this. Twenty metres from the door, the
ship disappeared into a wall of solid rock. The stone was cold and
smooth under her hand.

She unclipped the glowing ball from her hip
and held it up to the wall. The yellow light shone over the stones
and revealed not a random rock-face but a large carved mural.
Trees, animals and patterns were engraved into the rocks.

The carvings continued on down the wall. The
biggest figure was a statue of a woman. She looked human and
towered twenty times taller than any real woman Nova had ever seen.
She was made to look as if she was sitting back into the wall. The
lifelike features made the hairs on Nova’s neck stand on end.

“Cal, can you hear me?” Nova said.

The only response she got was static; the
signal was too weak to get this far underground.

“Dammit, Cal. What are you doing?” she said
under her breath. “Record log and send to Cal when signal
available.” The chip in her head began recording.

“Some evidence of an ancient culture. It
looks like this planet was colonised before this ship got here. I’m
exploring the first chamber; there are many statues and carvings.
Possible indications of faith and religion.”

She moved further into the cave and away
from the ship. The cavern was huge. Further in, it narrowed to a
single corridor.

“There is no evidence of candles or torches.
The tunnels have been widened artificially. No sign of life.” She
kept her voice low but it echoed back to her in the narrow tunnel.
Her gun remained cocked and held out in front of her.

“Possibility of hidden artefacts. I’m going
deeper into the caverns. At this stage, I have made no turns,
maintain mapping feature.”

She pushed forward, keeping an eye on the
ground at her feet in case it should suddenly fall away. The rest
of her focus was on the tunnel in front of her. There was no
guarantee that the people who had once lived in these caves weren’t
still here.

Further on, the tunnel split into two. The
left tunnel had a flower carved above it, the other had a
half-moon. She glanced down the tunnel with the half-moon. There
was a pile of random items stacked high. Pieces of clothing, bags,
spears and chunks of metal were all layered on top of each other to
create an imposing pile almost as high as her head. She decided to
ignore the stack for now; she could always raid it on her way
back.

“I’m taking the left hand path; the flower
above it could be a rose or some other unidentified species.”

The ground sloped downwards and the dripping
became louder. There was a chill in the air which made Nova’s skin
rise in bumps. She stopped for a moment and pulled on a thick
jacket from her bag, relishing in the warmth.

Two hundred metres after the fork, after
many twists and turns, the tunnel opened into another chamber. Her
eyes opened wide. The cavern was filled with brightly lit plants.
They clung to the walls and floor of the cave, casting a blue glow
over the whole scene. The glowing light at her hip barely made any
difference to the shining blue chamber.