After about a week of careful examination, Kiernan reported that there were no booby traps in the donut. We made sure that we were as careful as possible when managing risk. Only one at a time, as we didn’t want to risk the team. One person was always on overwatch duty.

The main risk to the mission was of course, incapacitation for one of our EXODUS ships. The durable ships could, given time and the ability to set up our 3d printers, replace themselves. Breaking something critical, however, would put a wrench in our plans. If we didn’t have any printers, or if a set of crucial components got destroyed? We would just be stuck without a way to fix ourselves.

I then gave the order that we could have two probes examining. Mostly because Killmonger came back, and we held a meeting.

We moved onto the inner planet debrief: send Levi to make a closer pass. He came prepared to discuss the plan.

“You’re ready for this, Chief?” Kiernan asked.

“Yes, I think that the danger posed by the donut if ever there was is gone. So, I know you’re anxious to return to the donut, Levi, but take a look at what Killmonger has discovered,” I said.

“Yes,” Killmonger said. “Two stars, each orbiting each other, with a smaller third star even farther out. These two stars are orbiting each other at about 4 lengths of our sun and moon. And they’ve got a few small planetoids. One that seems to have an artificial satellite is nearest to us. I have no idea how long that planet’s path might be, but it orbits orthogonally to the stars in a large oval shape if my calculations are correct. That one is the most likely candidate.”

“An artificial satellite?” Levi mused. “What makes you think that?”

“The amount of light reflected off of it makes it seem a little clear—unless it’s a very shiny moon,” Killmonger replied.

“Well, that will be my first target,” Levi said. “I see the third star is a tiny white dwarf that is near the top star here.”

“Yes, it seems like it is caught between the two wells and rotating around both.”

Killmonger and I went into the donut together after he returned. It was his first time inside. It was time to break out the tiny, modified exploration drones. Levi spent his time on our journey re-designing a horrific spider drone that had between 6 and 14 legs depending on the need. The spiders had several features that made them exactly what we needed, and most of their bodies were cast from locally sourced debris metals. Then, he’s added a bit of a webbing rope to each spider as well as a very durable sticky gel to make a rough attachment for the webbing. Given enough time, he would have several weblines going around the habitat with the spiders automated to get further and further through layers of debris, taking the useful bits back to his probe where he’d print more useful parts.

His experience with the donut and wanting to learn more led us to making several decisions. When I say that our basic consciousness existed in virtual reality, and that we would be dropping into a smaller sandbox reality in order to design something, yeah I can imagine the head scratching. It was a VR inside of a VR. Interacting with things outside of the EXODUS probe meant that we had to have cameras, tactile feedback and most importantly, limbs.

Since we would be working in zero g, each foot was electromagnetic. It went without saying that we would be examining the metals used in the donut and lacking refined metals out here we would probably be feeding those into our 3d printers to make whatever we needed. Each foot also had a small amount of the webbing gel and two of the eight arms had a welding tool for once the titanium webs were in place. It was pretty common to find titanium in the debris and a lot of the station used it for doors.

Plus he’d invented a whole backstory about them, calling them ‘ the crypt spiders: keepers of the human legacy’ and all that. I didn’t buy it. Somewhere, an anthropologist was crying into an archaeologist's shoulder. Imagine someone attempting to falsify something, when it would just be as easy to leave a high definition recording of someone's experience for the future to examine.

We both picked likely spots to house some artifacts of these creatures. We were getting a sense of what they were.

“See this? I’m going to call it ‘integument.’”

“That sounds made up.”

“What else would you call a crest on top of a creature that doesn’t necessarily serve another function?”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

“There aren’t that many bodies for you to draw such a…”

“Stevie, look, we’ve found twelve so far. We don’t know how many slipped out after whatever happened here but before we arrived. These few? Of the few bodies that are intact, they are all short, featherless bipeds with heavy-looking crests flowing off the backs of their heads. Make me a better term.”

The crests resembled a mohawk but were solid rather than hair.

“Mohawks?”

“Integument.”

He might have made that up.

“I don’t think that we need to argue the semantics of the naming conventions here. I’m willing to render this point to our resident scientist.”

“Thank you,” Levi said.

The views from the crypt spiders showed me a clearer picture of what he meant. The flesh of the bodies was preserved well in the cold vacuum, making me think about how xeno-archaeobiology could be a promising career for our potential grave robber.

Their integument—thanks, Levi— was otherwise uniform: no scales, no plumage, no fur. They did have large jaws and what appeared to be a mouth and eyes generally where humans would have had them. Two eyes in the front made us think that they were predators, but things might have worked differently in their evolutionary pathway.

“What about this writing? This species was space faring. They probably had developed the written word…”

“Boss lady, if you think that they could go to space without writing, we need to have a frank discussion. Of course they had writing… oh you’re making a joke. Ha Ha.”

I made sure to take down any script that was on any of the walls, anything resembling alien writing. There were a lot of strange lines, dot work and a few etchings in the walls that looked like either warning signs or directions.

I was sending everything over to Killmonger in a near real time live feed.

“Stevie,” Killmonger pinged me.

“Hey, what’s up?” I pinged back.

“Take a closer look at this one.” He sent over a still image of something I passed over. A door on a silvered wall, slightly ajar. There was a little script on the wall similar to the rest, but it seemed a little more intentional. I wanted to say that if the rest was in Times New Roman, this was in Bold Comic sans.

“Levi, can you hand me control of this drone?”

“Got you boss,” he said.

I transferred over. It only took a second to drop into the spider drone. I began switching to the drone’s live feed as I had FERMI take over the EXODUS vessels communications. The magnetic touchpads connected to the floor as I stepped towards the door. As I reached the door, one leg turned into an arm and pushed the door fully open.

Inside the door it was pitch black. I turned the front light on the drone to maximum. I quartered the door without thinking. There in the center floating was another corpse of the same species we found in the place. No, wait: this was a bit different. Sitting among rows of screens and input panels, the corpse was a different shade than all the others.

“Hey guys, uh…”

I advanced to take a closer look. It was a different shade because it was something else. Where we had seen organic matter previously, this corpse was made entirely of inorganic metals. Was it a corpse? Or a dead robot?

“I’m seeing it, Stevie. Sending a new group of crypt spiders over.”

“Oh this right here?” Eric said, “This is the find. This is the good shit that is going to put Team Owl on the map! I’m taking control of a spider and helping out on this one.”

“I think we’re going to need to look into this one. Levi, would you come join us? Kiernan might be missing out.”

We spent the better part of an hour exploring that room that I thereafter deemed the library because of the all-computer systems. It looked like a library without books. Reference shelves with physical media absent? That was unsettling.

Every time I tore something out of a wall, I expected to hear some alarm sound. But I doubted that the donut had any power left. Surely there must be an engineering area somewhere? A ship of this size should have a substantial engineering section. Finding it would be a godsend.

One piece caught my eye. Show a ring, it looked like a rough draft of a blueprint, or an artist’s interpretation at least. I grabbed that off the wall.

“Killmonger, are you seeing this?” I said.

“Oh, I’m ready for this!” he replied.

I tore off a few of the common access panels, and hoped I had a full system. I grabbed the robot as well and bundled that up. This I was going to examine. We would make some discoveries by the end of the day.

I went back into my notes. The thing about logistics that no one really bothers to think about is how the end product arrives where it needs to be. Sure we have things like the supply chain and all that back on earth, but out here? In the dark backwater of space?

There wasn't anything like that.

We had to bring everything we needed with us. Our probe was twice optimized for speed with our Greenstein engines running. It still took us a while to get to beta centauri.

You're probably wondering what I'm getting at here and yes I'll explain.

Large celestial bodies don't just appear. They have to come from somewhere. The same is true for whatever large donut we had just found.

If this didn't just get magicked into existence by the power of some coven of alien witches, then it had to be made somewhere.

More importantly it had to get here from there. I was willing to bet a lot that there was some alien technology that got it here.

And I was going to exploit the fuck out of it.