The door opened onto a large single space with a kitchen area and several seats set up like a lounge. The seats were embroidered with 1805 on the headrest, and had clearly been brought from Trafalgar.

They seemed to have everything required for a growing settlement, and Grace wanted to know why the colonists bailed. Sure, even by Trafalgar’s time, they wouldn’t have had any modern conveniences they were accustomed to, but they seemed to be able to feed themselves. Yet, with water and oxygen, and they had access to the ship, as evidenced because shuttles kept coming decades later, they should have thrived.

Grace looked around the makeshift house’s living area. On the shelves were photographs of a young officer. Grace spotted the markings on the uniform and cursed herself for not recognising them instantly. She knew she had looked at these in the last month when they were preparing to visit the Nomadic.

“Wokoma,” said Chase from inside. Grace hadn’t heard them walk in; Chase indicated the historian looked at what they had discovered. She pointed at a small metal bar in the photo.

“That rank pin indicates the lowest rank in the Navy’s command track. This was the ship’s pilot,” said Wokoma. “Pilot Maxwell was considered an up-and-coming star when he was at the Academy. After the Trafalgar disappeared, there was some blame in the media aimed at him, quite unfairly not that he would have ever been aware of it out here.”

Grace continued looking at the series of photos from throughout the man’s life. The one of him in uniform was taken before the Trafalgar’s launch when he was barely out of his teens; others had been taken here on a makeshift colony. Maxwell had lived a full life. As Grace looked across the shelves, the last showed him as an old man in his eighties. None of the later photos showed military uniforms.

She turned to Wokoma. “They appeared to have dropped all military protocol after they arrived,” she said.

“You’re jumping to a lot of conclusions,” corrected Wokoma. “There are no uniforms in these photos, sure, but we can’t necessarily know that what you’re assuming is correct. Which school did you go to?” she asked.

Grace sidestepped the issue.

“If you’ve been trapped, unable to get home, is that what you would do?”

Wokoma thought about this,

“Not while I thought that was a chance to continue my career,” she said.

Grace walked up a set of creaking wooden stairs. Not something they would have found on a warship; someone had crafted these by hand. There was a mezzanine level with a single bed. Again, the bed seemed to have been lifted from the Trafalgar.

On leaving the house and continued up the street. There were more personal belongings in the next dwelling. There were no obvious identification markers between the homes, the community so small that everyone knew who everyone was and where to find them. The idea of numbering the houses or marking residents probably didn’t even occur to them.

They found Dryden and Chase in a doorway further up the street.

“We believe this was the residence of Security Chief Cochran,” said Chase, “and we might know why Trafalgar won’t start,” added Dryden.

“What do you mean?” asked Wokoma. Grace had almost asked the same thing, but hadn’t wanted to give Dryden satisfaction.

“There must be a DNA lockout on some of the systems,” said Chase. “It’s possible that’s what’s stopping us from getting access and why the descendants had never been able to fly her.”

Dryden thought about this. “That doesn’t check out,” he replied, stepping down from the home’s mezzanine level.

Grace clocked whoever had lived here was of significant importance, as to warrant a double bed from the Trafalgar. Certainly something in short supply on a warship.

“I mean, yes,” said Dryden, “a lot of ships of the period were designed to only take input from their core crew, linking DNA as suggested happened, but it wouldn’t prevent a descendant from accessing the ship’s systems if that’s what the crew had wanted. You simply change the inputs of who is authorised; you launch a warship, you don’t keep the entire crew for its career, you swap them out as they come and go,” said Dryden.

“So, we’re no closer to finding out why,” said Chase.

“Have you noticed that the occupants of these houses seem to go up in rank the further we get along the street?” asked Wokoma.

Chase thought about this.

“It’s like they laid out the houses so the command crew were close together. We should probably go to the house at the far end next,” he suggested.

Wokoma nodded and led the way.

Grace had wondered if the final residence would be slightly larger if it had indeed been for Captain Wellesley, but it was identical to the two previous dwellings she had entered, except there was a computer terminal in the seating area. It also contained the captain’s chair, lifted from the Trafalgar’s bridge and awkwardly placed in this small dwelling. That had certainly been a choice. Chase sat down at the computer terminal and, with a bit of luck, managed to get the system up and running.

“Wokoma, have you got the security protocols there?” Chase called out. Wokoma, activating her tablet, walked over and entered the general authorisation code. The screen came to life.

“Pull up the final log entry,” Chase said.

A list of video files was displayed. Chase scrolled to the top; the date was about forty years before the shuttle they’d found had parked for the last time and twenty years after Trafalgar’s disappearance.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The screen changed over to a low-resolution video recording. It showed the same room they were currently in and focussed on an old man in a decorated old-style naval uniform. Chase checked the display; the man was sitting in the same chair that he was now standing next to.

The video’s timestamp was dated much later than the flight of the Trafalgar; the uniform was ill-fitting, and clearly not worn in decades, much too tight in places, in others, far too loose. Even through the distorted recording, Grace could make out the captain’s rank bar on the right shoulder, next to a metallic necklace. Were men wearing jewellery back then? Grace wondered.

The captain began to speak. “This will be my last entry,” he said. “Things have come to a head with,” the dialogue cut out, the audio filled with static, the image pixelated. A moment later, his image reformed, even less clear than it had been a moment ago, and he continued, but no more audio was legible, and the video cut out.

Lieutenant Chase looked at Wokoma, who shrugged.

“I’ve got everything here backed up to my slate,” she said. “But the recording is corroded; it’s unlikely we’ll be able to restore it, at least not from Mary Rose,” she said. Chase nodded in understanding.

“Right, there isn’t much we can find here. Do we have an idea where the captain is buried?” he asked.

“There was a graveyard about a kilometre from here,” said Dryden. “I only spotted the one on the way in.” Lieutenant Chase nodded.

“We’ll check it out. Do you have an idea what we need to get the ship working?” Grace asked him.

“Perhaps,” said Chase. “I could be wrong, but it’s a hunch.”

They found the graveyard after a twenty-minute walk. Some graves had a rudimentary stone on the head, while others had markings on the ground. Presumably there were many more unmarked entirely.

“Damn,” said Chase. “I was hoping we might find something like an anchor or other naval paraphernalia to indicate which ones belong to our captain.”

“You’d be lucky,” replied Dryden.

There was a small shack on the edge of the graveyard; the lock had stopped working decades ago, and Dryden had no trouble getting the thin wooden door open. Inside he found a collection of shovels that he proceeded to hand out.

Grace started digging by the first headstone she found; it wasn’t the most logical reasoning, but they had to start somewhere. She was only a meter or so down when she made contact with something. She carefully lifted the dirt away to reveal a coffin. “I’ve got one,” she called out.

Chase and Wokoma stopped their digging, and came to have a look. The coffin was opened by Grace, she had become no stranger to cadavers on this trip, but this one was the first she had seen that had been in the ground for such a long time.

It was nowhere near as well-preserved as those on the Nomadic had been in their icy freezer. The skeleton was in quite good condition, but most of the gore had long since gone away. The person’s clothing, equally well-preserved, was not military.

Grace commented on this. “Do you think the clothes mean that whoever this was, they weren’t an officer?” she asked Wokoma, who thought on this for a moment before replying,

“Who knows? We would certainly expect an officer would be buried in a uniform and, under the circumstances, other crewmen are likely to, as well. It’s not like they had a tailor to provide anything specific for a funeral,” she said.

Chase agreed, “It’s also likely that this is a later generation, going by how close to the surface they were buried,” he said.

“That’s a good point,” said Wokoma. “Usually, we would expect to find them two or three times as deep as this.”

“But why not just extend the graveyard?” asked Grace.

“There’s no shortage of room,” said Wokoma.

“That’s true,” said Chase.

“I’ve got something,” called out Dryden, who hadn’t picked up a shovel of his own, instead spending his time working on his slate. “It’s possible to detect trace metals,” he said.

“How does that help us?” Grace asked.

“We are assuming anyone of officer rank would have been buried with some medals,” said Wokoma. “It’s not a hard and fast rule, of course; they might have felt compelled to give it to descendants, but it’ll point us in the right direction,” she added.

Dryden was at the far end of the graveyard, his tablet beeping the more he went to the far side. If he was right, they would have wasted days starting next to the shack and he enjoyed letting them know.

“Okay,” said Chase. “Let’s start digging down that end and see where it gets us.” Grace placed the coffin back in the ground and headed over, she started to dig by one of the larger stones.

“I’m not getting anything else at this end,” said Dryden. “Let’s focus on that end.”

Grace stared at his smug face. He hadn’t even made an effort and now acted like he’d done all the work. She wondered if she were to introduce her shovel to the back of his skull, how effective it would be, and how long she would have before someone else took her out. By the books, they were probably supposed to arrest her, but this was frontier justice after all. There were no guarantees and there were no guarantees that revenge for attempted murder would be punished. She shrugged it off; as angry as she was with him, it would have to wait.

They grouped up, focusing on one plot, trying to get it done as quickly as possible. About two meters down, Wokoma’s shovel made contact with something wooden.

“I’ve got something,” called Wokoma.

It was marked with a Captain’s rank bar scratched on the surface, and Chase popped the lid.

The box was empty.