Lost Ark Ch. 01

Kyle continued. "I'll tell you why! It's Sanz's career. Look, it's been six months since Captain Fowler left on the Odysseus, leaving her in charge of the mission. In another year and a half, the Alliance brass will decide which new hotshot is coming on the next ship. Any autonomy Sanz has will dry up. This is her chance to make a name for herself, be the bold commander that dared to reach for Ark I's secrets. In two years, the next time Kaybe passes Ark I, she'll have someone else looking over her shoulder, taking any credit."

"Okay," Sloane said slowly. "But, it would be the same mission in two years anyway, right? Same shuttle, same four-day timetable, and the same choice of personnel."

"No, no, not at all," Kyle insisted. "Maybe after the rest of the dig is excavated they find proof that Ark I isn't even safe to visit. It's radioactive, or the life support system was permanently fried. Maybe it's infested with the carnivorous fish people of Zask!"

Sloane rolled her eyes, but let Kyle continue. The passion in his voice reminded her of some of the more enjoyable debates the two had shared.

"Also, one shuttle, Liss', one? Sheen's a great pilot, and she lives for this shit. But if something happens to the shuttle there's nothing, nothhhing," he drew the word out, "that anyone on the ground can do. We'll die up here."

"Okay, okay, shit!" Sloane let a touch of exasperation into her voice. Kyle wasn't wrong, but what was his point? "We'll have an hour at Ark I to make the call. If we don't think it's safe either one of us can call it off."

"Yeah?" Kyle asked. "Which one of us will do that? She's playing us off of each other. She knows we're not a couple anymore, Liss'. Sanz already threatened my career. Do you think I want to be the one to say 'no'? And she knows you're hot for the opportunity; you aren't going to call it off. I mean, it would have to be something super obvious, like the thing is on fire."

"Or the fish people."

Kyle allowed himself a smile. "They're highly territorial."

"Look, Kyle." Sloane took advantage of her former boyfriend's humor. "An hour. We'll have an hour to make sure it's safe. Yes, I want to see what happened, record the story, but not fucking die to have my name in the dedications section of someone's journal article."

"I'd like to thank Lissa Sloane for incinerating on Ark I so I would know about the fire traps."

"Exactly," Lissa said, glad for any truce between the two, no matter how fleeting. "Let's read that latest transmission from Carpenter."

***

-Kyle-

Hours later, hours even after first Kaybe's moons Feta and Cheddar, then Kaybe itself, shrank to specks in the firmament, Ark I appeared. First a speck itself, then a glimmer, and finally a hollow shell, it grew to fill their entire awareness.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Sheen cheerfully called out, "directly ahead of us you'll see the fabulous Ark I, ship of legend, and our first and final destination on today's flight." Then, breaking character, she added, "And it doesn't really look like much."

Sloane and Danton looked, first out of the shuttle windows, then at a more detailed image that Sheen captured and displayed on a screen at the front of the cabin.

"This doesn't look like Ark I," Lissa said.

Danton squinted at the image. "No, no it is, look. The frame. It's just empty." The image that Sanz had shared with them almost two days earlier had been of the Ark I fully loaded for its mission. "The scaffolding is just empty now. All of the containers we saw, all of the pods, were dropped to Kaybe four hundred years ago. All that's left is the engine cluster and the scaffolding itself."

"And the habitat ring, look." Lissa jabbed her finger toward the image. "That disc-shaped section just fore of the engines."

"One disc-shaped section coming up," Sheen said, immediately sending the shuttle into a twisting approach.

The forward section of the ship, taking up three-quarters of its overall length, was bare scaffolding, lit harshly by K2-136. Four surprisingly slim struts ran the full length, attached at intervals to each other, and to a thicker central shaft. Further aft a donut-shaped section, the habitat ring, circled the shaft just forward of the engine cluster. With nothing nearby to compare it to, it was impossible to determine the size of the ship, but as they drew nearer it became obvious that Ark I was enormous.

"The platform that Ark I was built on was modular," Lissa explained. Like Danton, she had been reading through the notes not just from the dig, but from historical archives she had uploaded to her datapad. "There is no record that it carried passengers, but did include something called a 'Research Package' adapted from a habitat module. I think that's what we're seeing."

Sheen took them in, circling Ark I in a corkscrew motion which was near nausea-inducing, but yielded a thorough view of the ship and its remaining sections. Massive brackets which had once secured cargo modules stood empty, seeming to claw outward. Some featured heavily shielded cable clusters which must have carried power or thermal management to those pods in need of such. To Danton, the ship seemed sad, devoid of the purpose which had guided it across countless light-years. Even the engines were silent, their flared thruster cones as dark as space itself. Only the habitat ring remained.

Awe at the thing's scale flooded Danton. "The habitat is as big as the scaffolding would allow."

"Almost half a kilometer across," Sheen confirmed. "And still rotating."

"Whoever fled in that escape pod, I don't think they were stowaways." The two had discussed the idea that those killed in the escape pod crash had somehow hidden themselves onboard, perhaps shipyard workers hoping to join the colonists.

"Why not?" Lissa was gaping out the window as Sheen took them ever closer.

"It's rotating to produce gravity. What kind of space research requires gravity? Just do it on the ground in that case."

Sheen took them alongside the habitat, passing disconcertingly near one of the scaffolding spars in the process. Once next to the ring, she first matched its rotational speed, then nudged the throttle until they were just faster. Again Danton had to choke back nausea. The name 'Shell-Bauer' slid under them, stenciled on the ring in massive letters.

"The shipyard that built Ark I," Lissa reminded them.

"It was a family business?"

Lissa nodded without tearing her eyes from the close-up view of the habitat ring. "The Shell family owned the shipyard for three generations. Just prior to the Ark mission, they took on an investor, Bauer."

"Another shipbuilder?"

"No, he was in manufacturing, and I think some other businesses as well." She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, before abandoning the effort. "Sorry, I can't remember. Anyway, they were partners."

"I see two airlocks," Sheen broke in. "One we passed a second ago, right at the edge. You probably saw it. That one I'd be reluctant to dock with. I can match the rotational speed no problem, but as long as we're docked, the gravitational forces will be straining the coupling. I'm sure none of us want it to fail with you two inside."

"Uh, no," Danton confirmed. "What about the other one?"

"Nearer to the central shaft. The gravitational force up there will be minimal. I should be able to stay put long enough for you two lucky travelers to get a quick lay of the land."

"Well that one seems like a slam dunk," Lissa said. "You should have led with that one."

"Sure!" Sheen agreed, with a note of enthusiasm in her voice that Danton didn't find comforting. "The approach will be tricky, but suuure!"

"Oh god," Danton whispered.

Shrugging as if to say 'Let Sheen be Sheen', Lissa unpacked her pressure suit and began to wriggle into it. Danton did the same, ran the in-suit diagnostics, and patched into the shuttle's communication channel.

"Looks like you two are ready," Sheen said cheerfully. "Hold tight for juuust a sec."

The shuttle lurched before slowly beginning to edge up the disc toward the central shaft. Through the port side windows, the habitat was uncomfortably close. To starboard, the scaffolding spars flipped by endlessly. Danton couldn't decide which view was worse. He settled on closing his eyes until Sheen had them in position. The shuttle was equipped with an extensible airlock accessible from the aft cabin. Danton opened the access panel and, while Sheen kept the shuttle in place, deployed the airlock. Sensors at the end of the device located, then mated with, the door on the habitat ring. Danton crawled in, then closed the door at the shuttle end.

"Opening the habitat," he reported. The airlock, especially for a six-foot-tall man wearing a pressure suit, was prohibitively cramped. Acutely aware that they were already well into the single hour allotted, he pulled out the exterior handle and twisted open the hatch. Danton was greeted by stygian blackness, diluted only by the work light on his helmet. "Deploying sensor."

A tiny machine, it would have been an exaggeration to call it intelligent, scurried from Danton's hand into the habitat. Reporting back a steady stream of habitability metrics, it crawled its way as deep into the ring as possible. Oxygen levels, temperature, radioactivity, air particulate, and atmospheric toxins were all recorded. Danton monitored the data for three minutes before relaying what the sensor had found.

"Very little air circulation," he reported, "and plenty of particulate matter. I think the sensor is kicking up dust as it goes. Other than that, everything is fine. No radioactivity, Earth-equivalent air, and no known toxins. It's cold as fuck though."

"I can deal with cold," Lissa said. Following protocol, she nudged the rest of Danton's gear into the airlock, followed by her own. Danton pulled his way into the ring, stowed their gear, then helped pull Lissa through. He met her eyes, wide with wonder and uncertainty, her face lit by his work light. For a moment they were a sort of couple again, dependent on one another for survival in the vastness of the ancient ship.

Danton broke the spell first. "We're in," he said. "Closing the airlock on this end."

"Roger that," Sheen called back. "You've got thirty-six minutes until I have to bail."

This close to the center of the ring there was almost no gravity. Danton's case was slowly settling against the perforated floor next to the airlock, while Lissa grabbed a railing to stay clear. Danton opened the case and withdrew a light which he clamped onto the railing. When lit, it chased back the gloom, revealing them to be at the top of a stairway leading down toward the edge of the ring.

"This'll take a minute," Danton muttered, his hands tracing the outline of a panel. While Lissa had studied up on Ark mission history, Danton had assembled the gear he would need to interface with the ship's systems. Computers, robotics, and communications systems all had seen tremendous advancements in the four hundred years since the Ark I had been built. The kit Danton had put together should allow him to access and control the archaic systems on the habitat ring. Popping the panel loose, he plugged in a cable leading back to the case. A screen lit up, revealing a diagram that looked like a pie cut into three uneven pieces. To one side was a row of mostly green status indicators.

"What's that?"

"It's good news, bad news. The computer is online and appears to be functioning. Life support is on, but circulation and temperature control were shut off for some reason, or rather put in a sort of sleep mode. I think I can wake them up."

Lissa hooked her legs around the railing, allowing her to look over Danton's shoulder without drifting away. "What's the bad news?"

"The habitat ring has been partitioned. You see the three different sections here?"

"Yes. We're in the largest one, right? The one that is brighter on the display."

"Yes. That's fine I suppose, but it's completely cut off from the others. I can't see what their status is, can't even tell if we can reach them."

Lissa wrinkled her brow, a gesture impossible to miss even through the glass of her helmet. "You don't mean we should call it off, do you? There's a lot here to explore!"

"Chill," Danton said, shaking his head. "Chill. You'll get to tell your story, or at least some of it. Let me get things powered up."

Why was Lissa so on edge, he wondered, so impatient? Sanz's motivations to proceed with the reckless mission were clear enough, but not Lissa's. Was it really that important to her, or was Lissa still acting out whatever had driven her to break up with him? Shrugging away the question, Danton ran through the various systems, waking them from sleep, or running diagnostics.

"Emergency lighting on," Danton said as a thin strip of lights popped on, spiraling down the cramped stairwell. "The main lighting is online as well, but it looks like it's motion activated so we'll get it piecemeal.

"Taking environmental out of sleep now." Working with the interface kit, Danton restarted the air handlers and heating. "It'll take a while before we know how well that's working."

Next was water and sewage. "This will be telling," Danton said as he powered the system back on.

"Why?"

"The fact that there is a water system of any sort says a lot. It might be to support onboard experiments, but usually, research bundles like that are self-contained." Danton located and opened the water system diagram. "Yeah, yeah, look. This section has its own, entirely closed system. Water tanks, pumps, sewage recovery systems, even hot water, shit! This system was definitely designed for human habitation."

"How many people could have lived here?"

"There were four dead on the crashed pod, right?"

"Yes."

"This system was designed to support many more than that. At least twenty-five, provided they didn't all flush at the same time."

Sheen's voice chimed over the Shuttle comms. "Twenty minutes," she reminded them. "Also, what about cryo?"

The pilot meant systems for long-term cryogenic sleep. Danton glanced down at the few remaining indicators. "Fire suppression, communications, solar, and something called tanks. No cryo."

Lissa caught the implication. "That's strange, right? Even if there was some legitimate reason for people, colonists let's say, to be aboard, they'd want to sleep through most of the journey."

"Yeah," Danton said. Like Lissa, he had a hard time imagining why anyone would want to remain awake for two-plus years in a cramped habitat with only a few other people. He gave up and checked the environmental sensor.

"Okay, more good news. When the air handlers kicked in they stirred up some dust, but those levels are dropping. The filtration must be working. And the temperature is starting to edge up."

"So I can do this?" Lissa asked. Before Danton could object, his ex-girlfriend popped loose the snaps securing her helmet and twisted it off. She grinned at him, her exhaled breath white with the cold. Spiky, platinum blonde hair stood highlighted in the harsh light.

"Shit, Liss'! All the readings aren't back yet."

"It's fine," she said, before wrinkling her nose. "Actually the air is super stale, but I can breathe it."

"Shit," Danton repeated. He was certain Lissa had taken off her helmet to force the issue, to prove they could survive. "Well if you inhale some unknown spores, maybe they'll name them after you posthumously."

Rather than spar with him, Lissa changed the subject. "Was everything powered off?"

Danton returned his attention to the display. "Nothing was totally turned off, just put into a low-power mode. I've brought all of those back up. The only system that was still running at full power was the one called tanks."

"What is that for, water?"

"No, water is its own closed system. I don't know what tanks is."

"This is Viv Air," Sheen called over the comm channel. "Boarding will begin in five minutes for an on-time departure in fifteen. Please remember to allow sufficient time to stow your carry-on items before takeoff."

Danton and Lissa made eye contact, she helmetless and committed, he still shielded. Lissa's hazel eyes bored into Danton's, daring him. He wanted to sigh, to roll his eyes, or in some other manner express his distaste for the mission, for the choice he was being asked to make. But the decision had been made for him. There had been nothing alarming in the systems check he had worked through. They might be cold for the first hour or two, but they could breathe the air. And with the rations stuffed into their packs, they wouldn't starve. Danton could either go along with the mission or turn back, sinking his career.

He began to give grumbling consent, but the more Danton thought on it, the more advantage he saw in presenting a positive attitude. Sheen would surely relay back the moods of the two explorers to Sanz. And if they did turn up some noteworthy finding, he might as well get credit for it as a team player, not someone Lissa had to drag along.

"Viv, I think we'll catch the next flight." Giving what he hoped was a sincere grin, Danton twisted his own helmet off.

The air was stale.

***

-Lissa-

"Another crate," Kyle called over his shoulder. "This one's marked, hold on... 'protein cartridge with hormone pack: age 12 to 16'."

The two had descended from the airlock to the next level. The gravitational effect of the spinning ring was more noticeable here, but still below what they were used to on Kaybe. The low gravity might explain why this level was used for storage. So far, most of what they had encountered were supplies that one would expect to find on a space mission. Sloane and Danton had uncovered food, spare parts, medicine, tools, toiletries, and even top-shelf alcohol. The level also contained much of the section's support systems, including a surprisingly large laundry facility. But just as many of the supplies, protein cartridges included, were more perplexing.

Lissa was peering at a crate which was labeled 'immersion bed support gel'. "A lot of what's in these crates seems like something you'd need for cryo." She had begun journaling using her datapad, stopping to take notes as they went.

"They do look like it," Kyle conceded. "But I don't think they are. Ships of this vintage used one of only two cryo systems available at the time. What we're seeing doesn't match with any of them. Plus, we saw that there didn't appear to be any cryo system aboard. Either way, I don't think we'll find any more answers here."

Nodding in mute agreement, Lissa led them back toward the central stairway. "I saw one other door as we came down. Let's check it out before we leave this level."

The unlocked door led to a compact personal quarters. There were two narrow bunks, unmade but with linens left neatly stacked at the ends, a lavatory, a sliver of a closet, and a desk with a built-in computer terminal. When Sloane touched the screen, a colorful interface greeted her. "Looks like we don't need your interface kit for this one," she said smugly. She didn't like having to rely on Kyle for navigating the ship's technology.

"I think it's a public terminal. Whatever we find here would have been accessible to anyone on board."

Sloane had already tuned Kyle out. Whereas he was interested in controlling the systems they found, she only wanted to learn what had happened. Anticipation dug at her over what could be the first real clue. She tapped on the screen where it said Project Channel, then at the first item, labeled Team Log: Day 5. A video filled the screen.

"Brave colonists of Kaybe, greetings to you wherever you are, and I suppose I should also say whenever you are!"

A small cluster of men and women were gathered in what looked like the common room of an upscale university dormitory. Some stood on the no-slip floor while others sat on overstuffed loungers. All were eclipsed by the man seated on a gleaming wood table, his legs swinging over the edge. He wasn't the most handsome man in the room, and certainly not the tallest, but his presence, his gaze, was compelling.