SS Nomadic

Skaði VII

Looking like an insect next to the hull of the wrecked ship, the two person craft hovered over the ruins of the huge starliner below. A small metallic platform gently descended and Grace held on tightly as she passed through the shattered skylight where a great transparent dome had once sat above the ship’s ornate ballroom.

The temperature was around twenty Celsius below freezing and the ballroom with its fine faux oak furniture looked as if it had been taken directly from a Georgian manor house of old earth and covered in a gentle layer of snow.

The platform had a slight jolt as it reached its full length and came to an abrupt stop with a clunk. Gripping the handles tight enough to not be thrown off, Grace gently descended and put the boot of her environmental suit onto the ship’s deck.

When no immediate catastrophe befell her, she stepped down completely and breathed a sigh of relief.

She took a moment to catch her breath, which echoed around her helmet with every gasp.

“Watch out below!” came the call through her suit headset. She took a few steps forward and turned back to see Scott jump from a far greater height and land in the ballroom. She rolled her eyes. He even managed to look dashing in an environmental suit of all things.

“It’s amazing that any of these windows survived,” said Grace, looking out of the large windows. All that could be seen were the frozen ice shelves below.

“Oh, it’s machined to within an atom of its life. The surprise is that the skylight gave out at all,” Scott corrected her.

Despite most of the entertainment being played back over the ship sound system, there was still a grand piano in here, presumably kept for ceremonial occasions. Grace felt her boot trampling something and looked down, realising what it was. She jumped back in shock before turning to Scott to see if he was laughing at her embarrassment. Surprisingly, this time he wasn’t.

“It’s all right,” he reassured her, stepping over and putting his arm around her. The heavy suits made it difficult to notice the gesture, but she appreciated it. “We knew that there would be cadavers on board.”

She had been prepared for this, of course, but she was surprised at just how well-preserved they had been by the cold. By a small mercy, some almost looked as if they were sleeping.

“These are the ones who had given up entirely on escape and accepted their fate,” he said. “There’s probably worse between here and the engine room.”

She looked up at her ship hovering above them. The autopilot should be fine to manage for a good few hours and, fingers crossed, they wouldn’t need anywhere near that much time. She wished now she had paid out for the more expensive insurance. This trip was already a costly one. Would another ten thousand have made the difference at this point?

“I’m going down to the engine room,” Scott announced.

That made sense to Grace. They knew the quickest option would be to split up. They were unlikely to run into any trouble. The scans they’d taken on approach had come back with absolutely no lifeform readings. There wasn’t even a microbe in this freezer.

“Right, you want me to head to the bridge?” Grace replied.

“It’s up to you, But I don’t want you going alone if you don’t feel up to it,” he said it reassuringly, yet she still felt somewhat put down by the remark.

This whole excursion had been her idea after all, and she was the one who’d fronted the cash. “No, it’s fine. I’ll get the logs downloaded,” she told him sternly. “You just make sure you find what we’ve come all this way for,”

“Oh, if it’s here, I’ll find it,” he said. That boyish grin stretched across his whole face, and she wished it didn’t have an effect on her.

She tapped the panel on her environmental suit’s breastplate and called up the Heads-up Display. The blueprints of the ship were preloaded, after being logged with the stellar navigation authority a century before.

She saw directions around the ship overlaid on her view of the ballroom. The display was able to guide her to where she would find the bridge. Fortunately, the crash caused the large metallic doors of the ballroom to be jammed open. Having to find a way to manually unlock them would have greatly increased the time they would have needed to get this all done.

It had been over a century since the Nomadic went missing. Grace, although technically an archaeologist, she hadn’t considered herself a dedicated hunter of lost ships, it had almost happened by accident. She’d bought a collection of cheap deep space probes and sent them far and wide almost on a whim to break up the monotony of her desk job.

She didn't initially feel that excited when the report came back that someone had found the Nomadic. It was only when Scott pointed out that this was one of the few ships launched with one of the devices onboard that she decided to invest in this little excursion. She had scrounged, borrowed every spare credit she could acquire knowing that if they could find it then it would pay off one hundredfold.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Grace walked through the corridors, which thankfully were empty of people by the time the ship hit the atmosphere. The people who were getting in the escape pods had already departed, and those who were left would have given up trying. Instead, braced under a table or gathered in places such as the ballroom to wait for it to be over.

A quarter of an hour later, Grace had reached the forward-most section of the ruined ship. Had it been in one piece, she would have made it in about five minutes. But because of the damage and caution that the deck would hold, she wasn’t taking any chances. The amount of debris blocking her path was quite considerable, and she was of no mind to pay too close attention to exactly what much of it comprised.

Checking the Heads-up Display, she was aware the bridge should be directly ahead and one deck up. Laughably, the ship’s internal systems claimed that the express elevators were still working. Grace would not have been willing to trust them had they found the Nomadic in orbit rather than smashed into the surface, in their current state certainly not.

She found an access tube and removed the hatch, double-checking that there was nothing that would snag her suit as she went in. She carefully worked her way into the tight crawlspace and began the long climb up the metallic ladder which, because of the hull breach, had rusted over the years. she began her ascent. Carefully testing her weight before climbing, when it didn’t immediately collapse into dust.

The vertical push was faster than the rest of her journey through the ship had been. The hatchway on A deck easily slid off, and she found herself directly outside the main bridge. She was not alone. She counted five bodies outside the closed and sealed glass door. Fuck, she thought. “This just got a helluva lot harder.”

Whatever went down here, in the ships dying moments, it had many people panicked, and some of them had evidently tried to gain access to the main bridge. This was not good. Whoever was piloting the ship in its final minutes had used the emergency bulkhead to seal themselves in. She wouldn’t be able to make it past this. These people had died trying. What did she have that they didn’t?

But as she looked over her Heads-up Display, informing her she had reached the bridge, she realized that despite the panic setting in, all the money she had invested was wasted and she never had a chance of making it back.

There was one thing she had that none of these people a hundred years ago had: access to the system in her suit and the network it was part of.

“Computer,” she said, “Load up the company records. See if you can find the override codes to the emergency bridge bulkhead?” The system was slow to work. It would have to be sending the signal from her ship out to the nearest comms relay, which wasn’t in this system. Her eyes glanced at the icon indicating exactly how weak the signal was. She took a deep breath, grateful that it was from the supply in her sealed suit. Whatever the air in the ship, even if it was breathable, it must stink.

A report flashed up over the ship’s deck plans with a nine-digit code. Had that gamble actually worked?

She refused to believe it until she got the bulkhead open, but she made her way to the nearest computer terminal, pulling a power supply pack from the back of her belt and attaching it to the terminal. Something she wouldn’t ordinarily put conscious thought to, but working through her suit’s gloves made it a much more complicated matter. The terminal flashed into life, the readout was blurry, the image duplicating. She entered the code.

Although muffled by the suit, she could hear the loud clanging sound of the bulkhead’s mechanisms coming back into action. After all these years, the large, thick door began to move out from its closed position as the mechanisms groaned, followed by a clang as they stopped as suddenly as they started. She held her breath for a moment, hoping it was a momentary glitch, but no such luck. She looked at the display terminal, but an update wasn’t forthcoming.

The screen still displayed the code accepted message from a moment earlier. A line of static rolled down the display, distorting the readout momentarily. It was monochrome, which would have been outdated even when this ship was new.

She hit the panel with her gloved fist, not expecting it to do any good but to let out her frustration. She had to get to the bridge. The black box would give them what they needed to know, and the engine room would hopefully give them the tech they required.

Resigned to the fact she wasn’t getting in, she turned around and started heading back to their agreed meeting point in the ballroom. The next hatchway was already open, so she started to make her way through it when the groaning kicked back in.